Muhammad Abi Samra - Beirut Noir

My body — which is no longer separate from me, keeping me outside of it — is unprotected, with no claws or a back; I’m a worm, naked and slimy. It ejects me like bodies eject refuse through their excrement, because it’s become too much for them and has consumed them. Often my own body grows large. Its survival, despite its absence, is the reason for my confusion, since sometimes it flourishes and I don’t know if I’ve passed out or I’m sleeping or if I’m a dream that thinks itself awake.

Tumescent cities spread out within the folds of the miniature red veins which embroider the eye; half-flawed cities, whose buildings all around me are crumbling one wall at a time. Who could say if this rubble was a window to yesterday? Strange-tasting, bloated cities launch a metallic wail that cuts the veins of the eye and relegate its vision to blackness. Bathing in destruction. Penetrating a handful of sand. Darkness, complacency, and silence. Speechless stars. Extinguished explosions that don’t shatter or fly away, but come together. They shrink. They atrophy. They decay. Black holes floating in the darkness of the universe. That is me. Or in this way I imagine myself, trivialized, so I can find a way to understand. If not, where do I imagine I am right now, and what does the person speaking inside me purport to say?

I am Mr. Kaaaaaaa and I am an eye.

Only a few things sit with me in the first level of my field of vision. If I rub it, moving the pupil from all the way on the right to all the way on the left, I see a ceramic vase my wife made in one of the strange educational classes she took following my return from “the years of my absence,” as she used to refer to that period. Killing time, I think. Developing her true talent, she thinks, and professes openly. A ceramic vase of a confused shape, which is still in the process of maturing. It remained the color of clay, decorated with a yellow chrysanthemum. The comment on its yellowness did not appeal to its creator, leading to her face turning yellow and her right ear red — indicating a fit of anger. This is in contrast to her left ear, whose redness alerts me that I must make love with her right then, immediately.

That’s what my wife is like — or what she was like — she would erupt for the most trivial of reasons. She’s like a child. She has short black hair, wide honey-colored gazelle eyes, and a full mouth, which hides two front teeth that make her look like an aristocratic rabbit with lipstick whenever she laughs. Beautiful Jamilah excited attention with her full, taut body and its perfect proportions. Her unrelenting elegance and her mysterious femininity mobilized battalions of bottles, perfumes, and powders, filling drawers and tables if not cabinets and warehouses. Such a feminine woman is like a prairie — you think it is open and relaxed, hiding no surprises, danger, or deception, and then there you are in the middle of the outdoors, captivated, surrounded, closed in. But sometimes I wonder if she wasn’t right, if the yellow color wasn’t actually that of a chrysanthemum and if she didn’t actually possess a true, unappreciated talent, which she never realized because of her bad luck marrying me.

Like a ball in a game whose name I can no longer recall, it’s not enough for the earth to be grassy and buoyant, full of holes and flags, it needs a favorable wind, flexible arms, and an eye able to estimate distances. One tiny straw and the ball would deviate from its path, away from the holes. Since I lost my limbs and turned into a seeing eye, I became the stumbling block to my wife’s talent that designed, drew, painted, embroidered, and stitched; her marvelous small hands cultivated yellow chrysanthemums on paintings, curtains, cloth, utensils, small tables, and dishes.

“You put different elements in conversation with each other and harmonize them!” she commented proudly while pondering the decor of the corner where she decided to put me. I didn’t understand in the beginning if this was revenge — though that was the furthest thing from her sensitive, delicate temperament, which would generate streams of tears at the least emotion — or if it was a sign that she now saw me as flaccid, fragile, and weak like a chrysanthemum, yellow and waxlike.

My wife put me in front of the television the vast majority of the time. Sometimes she put me in the bedroom when she had guests over. When they came, she didn’t like them to see me as a wide-open eye — a wandering, brazen, exhausted, sunken eye — forced into being a proxy, playing roles it can’t handle in the absence of its fellow senses. In the end, she started not having people over, preferring to go out. This was less taxing on her and I didn’t care one way or the other. But I wondered what compelled my wife to put me in these particular spots so I would be visible from every corner of the house, even from the outside and the balconies across from us and next to us, lying on the old red sofa, the lone remnant from all her late parents’ furniture.

“The two of them died, one a few hours after the other,” she would say, staring at me grave-faced. I see her look at me like she did her father who’d been half paralyzed, unable to speak or move. I’m sure he was behind her kindness toward me, her sympathy for me, and her accepting my presence in the house that she inherited and furnished, fully and completely, so that I didn’t have even the least contribution to make to it. I believe she chose this corner for me thinking, gratefully, that I was an eye needing vision exercises. So she put me across from things with different dimensions to look at, thinking that I had a narrow sight line only a few steps from the balcony adjoining the neighbors’ balcony and part of their washroom, adding on a respectable amount of the street. This street was shaded by two cinchona trees, the last of their kind, I believe, in all of Gemmayzeh, if not in all the surrounding areas too, indeed perhaps even in all Beirut. And not-negligible patches of the blue sky penetrated their greenness, certainly enough to activate the muscles of this last organ which remained alive and raging in me.

A fly announced its entrance into my field of vision, buzzing at my left side. It circled around a little, confused, before leaving quickly. I heard my wife moving behind me. She was wearing her red shoes with the high heels that she keeps in a cloth bag and only takes out for special occasions. The clock on the wall indicated ten minutes past four o’clock. This isn’t the usual time for parties. The fly returned once more, on my right side this time, before landing on one of the yellow chrysanthemums. A random idea came to me: Do bees recognize the taste of all different flowers, or do they just haphazardly taste the ones where they land?

My wife moved around the house with a nervousness not appropriate to the mood of half past four in the afternoon. The fly too was dismayed to discover that the field of chrysanthemums tasted like cloth and cold glass. My wife then appeared in my range of vision. She calmed down after taking off her shoes with the noisy heels. She came over and kissed the eye. I could only see the space between her breasts and the embroidery on her red bra. They’re color-coordinated. The bra and the shoes.

My wife picked up the eye and dragged it to the bathroom. She put it in the bathtub and started rubbing it with soap and water. She rinsed it with warm water and then did the same again. She said that its smell has become a stench. The eye could only smell expensive perfume mixed with the sweat between her breasts. My wife took off her dress and kept on her camisole. The heat — flames of hot water and the fire of her movements — was making her feel suffocated. Her red bra rose up and made her quavering breasts dangle before they calmed down and stared at the eye.