The Wrong End of the Telescope Read online

  THE WRONG END of the TELESCOPE

  Also by Rabih Alameddine

  The Angel of History

  An Unnecessary Woman

  The Hakawati

  I, the Divine

  The Perv

  Koolaids

  THE WRONG END of the TELESCOPE

  RABIH ALAMEDDINE

  Grove Press

  New York

  Copyright © 2021 by Rabih Alameddine

  Jacket design and collage by Alison Forner

  Jacket art elements: leaf calligraphy © Josh Berer;

  photo of woman for reference © Nisian Hughes/Getty

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Scanning, uploading, and electronic distribution of this book or the facilitation of such without the permission of the publisher is prohibited. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated. Any member of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or anthology, should send inquiries to Grove Atlantic, 154 West 14th Street, New York, NY 10011 or [email protected].

  Sections of “How to Greet Your Brother” appeared in slightly altered form in the New Yorker online; “Over the Rainbow” and “How to Make Liberace Jealous” first appeared in an essay, “Hope and Home,” in Freeman’s; “All Hail the Mighty Harold” first appeared, in slightly altered form, in the book Bound to Last: 30 Writers on Their Most Cherished Book.

  Published simultaneously in Canada

  Printed in the United States of America

  First Grove Atlantic hardcover edition: September 2021

  The book is set in 12-pt. Cochin LT by Alpha Design & Composition of Pittsfield, NH.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available for this title.

  ISBN 978-0-8021-5780-5

  eISBN 978-0-8021-5782-9

  Grove Press

  an imprint of Grove Atlantic

  154 West 14th Street

  New York, NY 10011

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  groveatlantic.com

  For Makram and Carine, Jalal and Yasma

  Where

  And in what unknown depths his bones wander

  Seabirds alone can tell.

  —Glaukos of Nikopolis,

  “Epitaph for Erasippus”

  Round and Round We Go

  He was my people—he and I kneaded by the same hands. He was on the shorter side, my height, not in the greatest of shape. His hair had less gray than mine but was the same shade of dark. We had similar facial features. I would have recognized that he was from the Levant even without the Palestine Red Crescent Society vest he sported. The rest of us, the recently disembarked, were about twenty or so, a motley crew, various nationalities. You would probably say we looked like a painting from a time long past, the late cold light illuminating and shadowing our backs as we stood around the circular belt, a single here, a couple there, waiting for our bags, waiting and waiting. The Palestinian stood by himself to my left. He had a happy face, satiated, like what I would expect Bernini’s Saint Teresa to look like postcoitus, postecstasy.

  Farther east than Athens, the island of Lesbos was as close as I’d been to Lebanon in decades, yet I stood facing not the glorious Mediterranean but the chug, chug, chug of dirty black rubber, a wheel of time if ever there was one—a wheel of time with a few gashes patched with duct tape. The ceiling felt dark and oppressive. I looked for a seat, but there was none. All twenty passengers, with few places to sit, kept shifting their weight from one foot to the other, hips swaying like sluggish, arrhythmic pendulums. The air was nippy and smooth, like velvet.

  I texted Francine: Landed. Love you.

  I texted Mazen: Landed. Love you. Can’t wait to see you.

  A book, facedown, was the only object making the round along the carousel. It exited the stage on the far end and moments later entered by slipping under the rubber curtain to my right, the eternal return, each time a little wetter because of the drizzle. A bored-looking young man, Germanic in appearance and attitude, probably still on winter break from college, freshman or at most sophomore, picked up the book and glanced at it briefly before flipping it back onto the circulating belt. The discolored cover was faceup now, a Scandinavian novel of some sort, a murder mystery—a brooding, handsome man, a woman’s bare thigh, a pistol. A South Asian woman in a head scarf chatted with a Han Chinese in Malay, her eyes fixed on where her bags might one day appear. An African woman and a European, possibly Greek, both in Red Cross windbreakers and matching smartphones, looked the most at ease. The entire airport seemed to be on a coffee break. Time felt lethargic.

  The book reappeared once more, and it had been flipped. I thought it strange. On my left, the Palestinian looked around the room, caught my eye, raised a questioning eyebrow. I scrunched my face and shrugged. He grinned, turned the book faceup when it reached him. He and I watched it disappear again. He was biting at a hangnail. The book returned facedown once more. He gasped in glee and covered his mouth with a fleshy palm, including me in his delight. We had yet to exchange a word and we didn’t have to—Levantine nonverbal communication would appear psychic to the uninitiated eye, a brow furrowing or a slide of a lip was worth a thousand pictures, and that was before one included the hands.

  The Palestinian waited until the book reached him and turned it over again. All of us were now watching the book’s cycle, even the two American men who had conversed endlessly and loudly during the entire flight from Athens but hadn’t spoken a word since. The room felt energized. The book came back facedown again. Someone was bored, I thought. We waited for the Palestinian to do the honors. Like an actor performing onstage, hungry for attention, he gauged his audience, acknowledging us with his eyes, and flipped the paperback with a mild flourish. But this time, as soon as it disappeared, we heard the muffled ruckus of the luggage arriving behind the wall, the book returning as it left. Few passengers, yet the resulting commotion was boisterous, buzzing movements like aroused hornets around their hive.

  The airport claimed the mighty name of Mytilene International but had only five usable carts that we could see. I would have to lug my luggage. I’d checked a bag for the first time in over ten years, usually traveled with only a carry-on, but I thought it would be a good idea to come with extra winter clothes to donate to refugees: socks, sweaters, long johns, fleece jackets, and woolen skirts that would not fit anyone with my waist size because the discount store had colorful summer ones in abundance but cold-weather skirts only in petite.

  My bag was the last to come out, of course. I had bowed the handle with a thin red ribbon to distinguish it, but it turned out I didn’t need to since it’s an old Samsonite, a model not seen since the 1980s, not produced since the 1970s. I had no intention of returning with it. I began to wonder, not for the first time, what I was doing there. The Americans grabbed their bags and rushed to stand first in line at the Hertz counter, tapping the service call bell a couple of times. I arrived behind them. The stall was hardly the size of a closet, yet its two yellow signs splashed us with jaundice.

  The clerk, under the outside awning, heard us, saw us through the glass doors, dropped his cigarette, and pulled his pants up by the belt. He took a long, exaggerated breath a
nd sighed. Behind him was a small open-air parking lot, a rain-slick coastal road, and the aforementioned Mediterranean, yes, glorious. Or was this the Aegean, which Aegeus threw himself into when he thought his son Theseus had failed against the Minotaur? The clouds were such that both the asphalt and the water had the same color, a bluish slate, the color of oxidization on copper with a tinge of periwinkle violet. Off-season on the island, no cars on the road, no boats in the water, purple hills in the distance, east, Turkey in all likelihood, close and not, an hour by ferry if you had the right passport. In the parking lot, a gray van screeched to a stop in front of the Palestinian, and out rushed two women wearing the same white-and-orange vest he was. They hugged him with such fierceness I thought he was going to tumble over, and without releasing him, they began to jump up and down like pudgy kids on one pogo stick, evidently not minding getting a little wet. I looked around to see if anyone else was watching, but the Americans were in some kind of philosophical discussion with the Hertz clerk, making sure to insist that they were not the kind of men who would be cheated.

  If those purple hills were Turkey, then the itsy-bitsy, teeny-weeny bikini of a country, Lebanon, was a few degrees south. I had not been back there in almost forty years, and it was highly unlikely that I ever would. My brother Mazen constantly invited me to visit—come back, come back, he’d say—and I resisted. The dream of my return had died decades ago. He was the only family member I cared about. When I informed him that I was coming to Lesbos, his first response was that I should come to Beirut, which was next door. How could I be in his part of the world and not see him? I explained that I wasn’t going to take more time off and he should be the one to come to Lesbos. He argued for a bit, telling me that he would love to see me in my hometown, that I needed to be in Beirut, but we both knew that I had him, that I would win, that I’d always win with him.

  The automatic doors yawned open; cold air and the Palestinian came in.

  “Would you like a ride?” he asked in Arabic. Blotchy, circular cheeks were most of his face, along with lips—the delicate full lips of a gourmet. Everything about him was round. I pointed to the yellow sign, smiled. “Well, if you wanted to save some money, and you know,” he said before briefly pursing those lips, “there’s no threat to your honor with me, absolutely safe.” He looked about to burst from anticipation, waiting for what kind of reply, a boy hoping I would join his game.

  “I’d be more worried about your honor, my dear.”

  He laughed loudly enough that both Americans glared as they scurried out the door with their bags.

  “I misplaced mine back in Jerusalem,” he said, now in full camp, arms akimbo, both hands clamped around his waist.

  The clerk fake coughed, which led to a fit of real ones lasting a full ten seconds. I should have taken out my stethoscope, but I only handed him my license and passport, told him I had a reservation, a small car for the week I was to spend on Lesbos.

  The Palestinian introduced himself as Rasheed. He was with a group of Jerusalemite nurses and first aid workers, asked me who I was with and where I was going.

  I told him my name and that I was meeting a friend with a Swedish NGO. “I simply want to see what’s happening here,” I said. “My brother is joining me in two days. We’ll help wherever we’re needed.”

  “Come help us,” he said, writing his local cell number on a card. “We can use you. Anyone who speaks Arabic is good. Well, there are a number of Arabic speakers but few who understand the culture. There’s nothing happening in Skala Sikamineas. No boats are landing there anymore. All the refugees used to in the beginning of the crisis, but now they’re landing down here, on these beaches and a little farther south.”

  The van honked twice; the clerk shook the car keys.

  “Call me, please. I’ll explain what we do.” He walked off toward the parking lot. The door slid closed behind him, but he turned around and came back in. “I know all the secrets of this island,” he said. “If you call me, I’ll tell you more.” His eyebrows rose teasingly. “You must call to find out.” He exited, then turned around once more. “What do you do for work, Madam Mina?”

  “It’s Dr. Mina,” I said in a false huff.

  “Oh, come on,” he said. “You’re not serious. You can really help us. Please, I’m willing to go down on my knees and beg.”

  You Made Me Do It

  You suggested I write this. You, the writer, couldn’t. You tried writing the refugee story. Many times, many different ways. You failed. And failed again. Maybe failed better. Still you couldn’t. More than two years after you and I met in Lesbos, you were still trying. You tackled it from one direction, then another, to no avail. You were too involved, unable to disentangle yourself from the tale. You said that you couldn’t calibrate the correct distance. You weren’t able to find the right words even after numerous sessions on your psychiatrist’s couch.

  I should write this thing, you told me. You called it a thing, flicking your hand with a dismissive Levantine gesture. Every idiot thinks they’re a writer; they’re not. Every dullard thinks they have a tale to tell; they don’t. But I should. I have a good one. You insisted I write the refugee story, as well as your story and mine. This thing.

  I told you I wasn’t a writer. I could form sentences, present ideas and so forth, but not write a memoir or a book that anyone would necessarily want to read. Who said anything about publishing, you said. I should write my story; no one has to read it. There are enough books out there, you said. Why add more? I should write to make sense of my world, to grasp my story. Writing simplifies life, you said, forces coherence on discordant narratives, unless it doesn’t, and most of the time it doesn’t, because really, how can one make sense of the senseless? One puts a story in a linear order, posits cause and effect, and then thinks one has arrived. Writing one’s story narcotizes it. Literature today is an opiate.

  You contradict yourself all the time. You know that, right?

  I know, I know. You are large, like Whitman. You contain multitudes.

  If writing my story will not simplify my life, will not make more sense of my narrative, if I can’t publish and become a gazillionaire, why should I do it?

  Memory is a wound, you said. And some things are released only by the act of writing. Unless I go in with my scalpel and suction to excavate, to clean, to bring into light, that wound festers, and the gangrene of decay will eat me alive.

  And whatever you do, you said, don’t fucking call it A Lebanese Lesbian in Lesbos, just don’t.

  I’m writing now. I’ll tell your tale and mine.

  I’ll write your story for you.

  I plunge.

  Driving a Stick, Flying a Broom

  It was a small Opel, dark blue, with six figures on its odometer and, remarkably, a stick shift. I hadn’t driven a nonautomatic in about forty years, since Lebanon. Hertz had only a manual transmission, which proved not to be a problem. When I started the car, instinct took over. The clutch turned into an extension of my left foot.

  Night descended, and I was enveloped in darkness as soon as I passed the little town of Mytilene. The Opel’s high beams tilted at a slight angle. I cocked my head to adjust, couldn’t help myself. Slow showers had accompanied me since the airport. I hadn’t taken off my coat or my overworn Shetland pullover. Everything before me, everything around me, was blued and grayed, pale shapes shifting effortlessly, all ethereal and illusory, as if I were about to plummet into an old memory. The easterly wind was viciously active. I could see tiny specks of luminescence from the whitecaps out on the sea to my right. For the first time in about twenty minutes, another vehicle shared my road, a light truck driving in the opposite direction with sheep in its cargo bed. In the rearview mirror, once it passed, I saw orange sparks, hundreds, splashing from its tailgate before disappearing in the rain. My twisted brain made me think of roast lamb, and my stomach growled in protest. The car’s tires tur
ned and turned. Only my breath and the erratic squeak of rubber on windshield scratched the silence of the drive.

  The last time I was on as skinny a road was four years ago in Tuscany while Francine and I were vacationing. Her mother had had a stroke back in Chicago; her sister asked us to return quickly. We were needed. I drove in darkness, in silence, until we reached the airport in Florence. She always seemed about to say something during the drive, would open her mouth, take a breath to speak but then exhale, nothing. I knew she didn’t want me to talk, to say anything. She needed her space, needed to marshal her resources for what was to come. When she was melancholic or suffering, I was to be there for support only. I should be seen and not heard, speak only when spoken to. She had to train me to be quiet. A long time ago, before we moved in together, she insisted we attend couples therapy because I didn’t listen to her, didn’t know how, always wanted to fix everything. That was me, the surgeon. Our friends mocked us for going to therapy before we were a couple, early even by lesbian standards. She would be at work now, already eleven in the morning in Chicago, already with clients.

  About a year ago, Francine’s twelve-year-old niece changed the direction-giving voice on my phone to Bugs Bunny. I thought it amusing at the time, and I didn’t correct it, not that I could have without her help. On this unfamiliar rainy road, however, I found Bugs butchering Greek names and saying things like “Turn left on Mitilinis–Thermis, Doc” incredibly annoying.

  An hour later, no light, no moon, no lampposts, Skala Sikamineas hunkered at the bottom of a hill, down a steep, relentlessly snakelike road without guardrails or tiger-eye road studs. I had a surge of fear as I contemplated the deep decline, but when I made my first turn and my tire sank into a wet pothole, uneasiness turned into elation. Sure, it had been thirty-six years since I set foot in Lebanon, a lot longer since I drove down dark mountain roads, let alone in a stick, but this—this felt ever familiar. I had no problems using the high beams to cut up winding, aphotic asphalt. By the time I encountered another car coming up the hill and we communicated by blinking high and low beams—you go ahead, no please, you first—I was shivering with glee. I was sixteen again, sure of my world.