Мазен Мааруф - Jokes for the Gunmen

Hossam’s absolutely worst dream was when he saw himself as a piece of dog shit on the pavement. He couldn’t do anything about it. ‘I couldn’t jump off somewhere or even crawl. I was firmly stuck to the ground. And I was sweating. I must have been a fresh piece of shit, a piece of shit that had just come out. But from where I was, I couldn’t see a dog nearby. I thought I would never get out of this dream and would spend the rest of my life as a piece of shit on the pavement. A few minutes later war broke out, and it was a vicious war, with RPGs and machine guns. There was an invasion, with armed men taking up their positions.’

While he was looking for the dream director, who wasn’t visible anywhere, Hossam saw an army boot, which landed on him and lifted him up off the pavement. ‘Hey, man, imagine you’re the piece of shit that’s stuck to the boot of a gunman during what appears to be an attack. While his comrades move forward according to the plan, the gunman stops and tries to get you off his boot because the smell’s interfering with his concentration. He rubs you against the pavement and starts cursing the guts that produced you. Moments later he realizes that he’s a target. No one’s covering him and his comrades have moved ahead, either because the smell is so strong or for strategic reasons determined by how long the attack is expected to last. Then he starts shooting to protect himself. He’s scraping his boot to get the shit off and firing his rifle at the same time. At random, of course. Except he took a bullet or two in his leg, and then in his hip. Blood flowed, soaked his combat trousers, ran down into his boot and then touched me. Because of the blood, I fell off the boot, but I was still wet with that gunman’s blood.’

Not all his dreams were frightening. Once he saw himself as a kiss. Hossam wasn’t the lips that shared the kiss. ‘I was the kiss itself. I don’t know how to explain that. I was just a feeling in the dream.’

The people who took on the role of film director in his dreams might be Hossam’s neighbours, or sometimes members of his family. Even his former wife. I had spoken to some of them at the police station or the hospital. They assured me that, to their surprise, what Hossam said about their dreams was one hundred per cent true. Some people were going to file a complaint against Hossam in court – they didn’t want Hossam holding them responsible for their dreams.

All Hossam could do was wait for the main character in his dream to wake up and open their eyes. At that point Hossam would wake up too, shaking off the blanket irritably and cursing the person in whose dream he’d found himself. He would put on his dressing gown and his sandals and, straight out of bed, without washing or even combing his hair, he’d head over to his neighbour’s. He’d knock on the door. The neighbour was caught off guard when Hossam jumped in with his question: ‘Can you tell me what you dreamed about last night?’

Hossam wasn’t on close terms with any of his neighbours. His relationship with them was distant. So it was odd for him to ask them directly about their dream when he had never had a proper conversation with them. They wouldn’t talk about their dream, so Hossam told them his version. They were surprised. Hossam took advantage of their surprise to lay into them with his fists, shouting, ‘This is a violation of privacy. This is a violation of privacy.’ Sometimes he would take the day off work and go by bus to settle a score with some dreamer.

He tried all kinds of ways to avoid other people’s dreams, but none of them worked. In the end he joined a shooting club, in the hope that he might transfer his new skills to other people’s dreams and kill them by mistake. ‘Mistakes do happen, even in dreams, don’t they?’ he said.

Although he didn’t yet have a gun licence, he managed to buy a Colt revolver and he carried it around with him wherever he went, to the supermarket or to work. Even when he went to bed, he stuffed it behind his back in the hope that it would go into his dream with him. ‘Do you sleep with the revolver on your hip?’ I asked him. When he said yes, I was dismayed. I was worried he might use it against one of the people he dreamed about.

When he couldn’t recognize the person in whose dream he was, he’d call me in a nervous state. He started having suspicions about everyone, including me. ‘Why isn’t the dreamer someone I know? Why not you, for example?’

‘Me?’ I said in a panic, glancing at the glint of the silver revolver. ‘Definitely not. Not me. Upon my honour. I’ve never seen you in any of my dreams. What’s come over you? Aren’t we friends?’

In his room you could find rough sketches of the people who’d dreamed about Hossam and whom he’d never seen in real life. He became obsessed with hunting them down, even if it took him the rest of his life. ‘Why do people you don’t know, that you’ve never seen, drag you into their dreams? What do they want from you?’ he asked.

His mental state was deteriorating and I couldn’t do anything to help him. It bothered me. I became frightened of him. What if Hossam appeared in a minor role in one of my dreams, without me being able to tell? I knew he was counting on me to give him the main role in one of my dreams. At least in one dream. But he never said that overtly.

I avoided seeing him or keeping in touch with him. I didn’t want to risk it. What if I had dreamed about him and I couldn’t remember? And when I mistreated something in a dream, I worried that the thing might in fact be Hossam. I was tense, and he would ask me enthusiastically, ‘So tell me, are you suffering from other-people’s-dreams syndrome too?’

‘No. Not yet,’ I said.

Then the end came when he found himself in a dream about a boy with a mental disability. He was the son of some neighbours, an old couple who hadn’t had any other children. His mind had stopped developing when he was three years old. Now he was as old as an adult but he had the mind of a child. His parents grew older. Hossam had never imagined he would end up in this boy’s dream, but that’s what happened.

The boy was sitting in the dream director’s chair. He was giving instructions, none of which Hossam understood, but he did allow Hossam to bring his revolver with him. Hossam was chasing his ex-wife in front of the boy. His wife hadn’t had any children. Hossam fired at her but didn’t hit her. What happened was that the bullet hit the boy by mistake, near his waist. Hossam woke up in a panic and called me immediately. ‘I’ve shot the disabled boy and killed him,’ he said, ‘but it happened by accident.’ He was speaking as though this had really happened. I calmed him down and we agreed to meet for a coffee in a cafe. I waited for Hossam for about thirty minutes before he finally came. It wasn’t his practice to be late. On the contrary, after every bad dream he’d had, I’d usually find that he had beaten me to the coffee shop and was sitting there nervously. When he finally arrived, his face had turned yellow, as if someone had urinated on him. ‘What’s up now?’ I asked him, as if I were asking a spoiled child. ‘The boy really has died. I heard his parents weeping. He woke up with horrible pains in his kidneys and was groaning loudly, and the parents, who move slowly because of their age, couldn’t do anything for him. He soon died. He died because I shot him. In the dream the bullet lodged near his waist.’

I tried to convince him that this was impossible. A bullet he had fired in a dream couldn’t lead to the boy really dying. Then he handed himself in at the police station, but they didn’t take a statement from him. Instead, they referred him to a hospital that specializes in mental and nervous disorders. I had to escort him and sign the papers for his admission and tell them how long he planned to stay.