Rawi Hage - Carnival

When the traffic light turned green and replaced the red reflection, I accelerated slowly, not wanting to deprive anyone of a romantic touch under a spectrum of colours and the delight of the full moon. The moon should be colonized, I thought. Mankind should seek a happier beginning, and humans should be free to stroll hand in hand regardless of their weight and orientation. The ultimate weightless existence of a species, effortless in an environment where everything floats. Floating lips, floating sighs, floating shoes, and knees and stockings floating above the dashboard, around the mirror and the seats. Life in space, I thought, should be modelled on the current situation inside my car as we speak, what a great model, what a great premise with which to experiment with the loss of gravity: the elevation of the superwoman. And as I drove with all the windows shut, everything started to levitate: I witnessed the rising of toes, the upward flowing of hair, the inflation of chests. And I heard a howl rise towards the moon.

We reached the address they’d given me and I announced our arrival at the requested destination. Immediately two heads reappeared above the back seat. They stopped, took deep breaths, fastened their clothes, looked at each other, and giggled. And then Ecstasy opened her purse while Ecstasy fixed her hair. Ten dollars and sixty-five cents, I said. The first woman gave me the exact change and said, You got your tip, didn’t you? And she winked at me.

Now, as I get older, I prefer money to watching other people’s flights and pleasures. I would like to amass enough to one day play dead, or clown around on a beach full of ballplayers, divers, and bouncers, a beach of women happily and horizontally suspended under large umbrellas, in strings parting their luscious moons, a bit of sand on both sides of the shore, with topless skies above and the cheers of the waves and the clapping of clams.

Once I picked up a professional clown dressed as a giraffe. He told me he was late for a kids’ show, where by now, we both laughed and assumed, the audience would be filled with sweets and drinks, awaiting the performance. His face came out of the middle of the giraffe’s long neck. He opened the window and stretched the giraffe’s head outside. I drove him fast and he held the animal’s head steady and it stretched above my car roof and towards the sky.

We laughed, but I knew how sad a kept creature could be. A giraffe is a sad thing, I said. Yes, I know, he said, it doesn’t fit into low-ceilinged houses or basements. Always bowing its head, always feeling big and small.

You should live on the roof if your basement is getting too small, I told him. You should eat meat if leaves are scarce. You should be fighting for those kids instead of trying to heal them with balloons and laughter. You’ve wasted your life, and you could have been tall and above everything, I said.

Drive, the giraffe said to me, drive. Look ahead and not at the car’s roof. You are a lousy traveller. All you do is think, talk, and go around and around in circles. You are as poor and as miserable as any of us kept animals. You are a prisoner of your own windows and point of view.

I was raised by clowns, buffoons, comedians, and cannon fodder and they are the saddest creatures I’ve ever met, I said to him.

Don’t forget the sons of freaks like you, he added, and held his head more tightly against the wind. If your father had loved you, you wouldn’t have felt sadness around laughter and the wonder of kids’ joy.

Here, he said, as we arrived, here is your fare and a lollipop, which will keep your mouth shut. He yanked his long neck inside and opened the door and bounced down the sidewalk and towards the house, where a few kids with painted cats’ moustaches and dogs’ ears waited for him to blow balloons and shape them into birds and mice and little kangaroos.

SALLY

THE DRUG DEALER left a message on my phone. The fucker never says anything but Yeah, we are on tonight, same, same, and he hangs up.

I waited for him at eight at the usual place. We drove around and checked on a few dealers of his. He shook and slapped a few hands, and then he wanted to stop at a strip club for some business, as he put it. Wait here, I’ll be back in an hour, he said. Park in the back alley, I’ll tell the bouncer that you’re with me. Just keep cool, I’ll be back.

I waited and watched as the dancing girls arrived. They carried their bags on their shoulders and waited for the bouncer to open the door and let them in. Neither acknowledged the other.

I knew a dancer named Sally once; I used to wait for her every Thursday and drive her home late, after her shift was over. She was smart, well-read, she was studying French literature at the local university, and we hit it off. First we talked about books, because she saw a book lying on the dashboard of my car. I believe I was reading Jean Genet at the time, Our Lady of the Flowers . And when she saw it her eyes brightened. A reader, she said, and smiled.

Sally grabbed the book, flipped through it, and said, Listen, I have nothing against masturbation, but don’t you think the act is a bit overdone in this novel?

What else is there to do when you have a free spirit and you are confined to a small world of jailers and walls? I said. What else is there to do but to summon the world and lament and masturbate beneath your jailer’s nose, and break his keys and his chains?

Sure, I guess, whatever keeps you sane, said Sally. It’s a masterpiece in its lyricism, but it gets suffocating, claustrophobic. I can’t imagine being kept in a cell, I’d die.

And then she asked me about my working hours. I said, I have no particular shift. My hours are flexible. I work here and there for as long as necessary to cover the car rent and the gas, and so that I will be left with a little change.

Are you hungry? she asked.

A little, but I would love to see your bookshelf first, I said. Unless you prefer to see mine.

I have a feeling that your collection would be a bit intense for me tonight. The last thing I need is another image of a metal bar. I danced around one all night. Is pasta okay?

Yes, I said, and we talked about our lives some more. She wanted to be a professor of literature. She’d never believed in loans and debt, so to support herself and pay her tuition, she worked Thursdays as a dancer and a couple of nights a week as an escort. She was strong and had rules: she never kissed her clients on the mouth, she made it clear that they should not touch her neck or her face, and she always made sure they took a shower before her eyes, even if they assured her they’d already had one.

In time we became good friends. And every Thursday I would wait for her in my car. We occasionally slept together. There was friendship between us and no love in the romantic sense; well, at least that was what we agreed upon. She would tell me what had happened that night, her meetings with her clients, like the story about the man dressed as a clown who ejaculated as soon as she came through the door. Once, a friend of her father’s turned out to be the client. She promised not to tell his wife, he promised not to tell her father, and that settled it. But as she was leaving, he stood at the door and tried to touch her face. Listen, she said, I haven’t talked to my father in years. I can afford that, but can you afford your wife’s alimony?

At the end of every month, Sally would take a car with two work colleagues and drive to the south shore, to a meat-packing town where men worked in slaughterhouses for low wages. She and two prostitute friends would rent a couple of rooms in a cheap motel and host these workers, charging less than half the usual price. Charity work, Sally called it, and she explained it as a religious gesture, pointing out that Mary Magdalene had been a prostitute before and after meeting Jesus. Certainly after, she said, and giggled. The girl who’d initiated the project was named Maggie, short for Magdalena, and that is why they called themselves the Magdalena girls and were known by the slaughterhouse workers as the Magdalenas.