It was another humid party in Sioufi, at a house with framed posters of Cairo in the 60s and Jana Traboulsi’s artwork. Lonely boy was tall and dark, with a beard that needed trimming. He wore trousers that seemed tailored like he came from a good family. I could be quite observant when I needed to be, watched him refill plastic cups of gin and vodka for everyone else. He smiled at the wall. He drank whisky without ice. When we both happened to be standing by the fridge, I shook his hands firmly.
‘Azza,’ I said.
‘Azza?’ he asked, confused. ‘Azza,’ he repeated.
My name moved him tremendously.
‘Anthony,’ he said after I gestured for his.
‘You do look like an Anthony.’
His little laugh was polite.
‘I’m not sure what that means,’ he said.
It means you appear Frenchie and forgettable, I would’ve said, but Anthony, though handsome and confused, did not strike me as ironic. I pointed instead at the crowd around us and wondered aloud who he knew. He’d met the host at a camping trip in Tannourine not long ago but just as he was about to veer into something potentially meaningful about nature, someone called my name, Azza! Azza!, and I walked off, garishly, to greet a friend I went to school with a decade ago.
I was bored and restless, and on a mission to forget. Early May and there was a density, a perpetual hum that stifled everyone who walked Beirut’s streets toward its yellow polluted sea. It was all the same: we woke up, we ate, we greeted each other with platitudes about how bad the situation was, then we went back to sleep. Once upon a time, May had been my favourite month. The jacarandas bloomed purple and pink throughout the city and the sky was perfectly blue.
In the bathroom queue, I stood behind Anthony and tapped his shoulder. He turned and gave me the same timid smile. I said there was a window in the bathroom, behind the sink, and it had a picturesque view of Achrafieh’s pink and yellow houses, the mountains behind.
‘Are you an artist?’
That was the first, and last, non-rhetorical question Anthony would ask me all night.
‘Far from it,’ I said. ‘I’m a therapist.’
Of course that was a lie. But my flatmate, who actually was a therapist, swore that all square men opened up about their internal tragedies soon after she’d announced her profession.
‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Nice,’ he said. Then he shrugged himself into the bathroom.
Another thing my flatmate said was I chased after big feelings all the time. It could be dangerous, she said. My flatmate was intelligent and practical. She regarded the world with distance. I envied her simplicity because it came from a place of wisdom. Me, I liked to poke, I wanted to touch everything with my hands. I was thinking of this as I flushed the toilet and fixed my fringe in the mirror. I looked through the sink cabinet and applied Vaseline to my lips, then gargled with the host’s near-empty mouthwash.
Anthony wasn’t waiting for me when I came out of the bathroom.
So I talked to different men and different women. We discussed the Israeli air raids in the South and whether there was such a thing as ethical porn. I drank gin and laughed. I watched Anthony hover around the room, still refilling people’s cups. I hoped he'd caught some of my more cynical takes but in general I felt quite happy, I was okay being in the world even though it was a terrible place. I joined the dance circle being formed to Ruby’s historical hits, and after the gin had officially kicked in and Warda reigned over the speakers as she often did at such a point of the night, I blended into some momentary feeling of universal amnesia.
Soon it was two a.m., and as the host had warned us, the generator turned off. The remaining guests scrambled in the dark for their phones and purses. And then Anthony asked, out of general courtesy, if anyone needed a ride home.
‘Oh, I do,’ I spoke coolly.
(Of course, my car was parked parallel to the building).
We walked down six flights of stairs with a drunken couple ahead, the flash from our phones creating geometrically entertaining shadows of our limbs.
In the car I kissed him and he was respectful enough to wait until the end of my short performance to announce he was married. I couldn’t hear well, the disappointment swooshed like white noise.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. He shrunk as he spoke. He sparked the engine of his car with little conviction. ‘I’m really sorry, maybe I should’ve mentioned earlier, it’s just–’
‘But you’re young!’ I squeaked.
‘Maybe.’
‘Maybe?’
‘I’m in my mid-thirties.’
‘Oh,’ I said. I was a decade younger, I wouldn’t have guessed. ‘Where’s your wife?’
‘In Canada. We’re waiting for my papers to be finished. I’m joining soon.’
I could’ve burst into savage tears, such was the intensity of the betrayal, but instead I straightened my spine and crossed my legs like any dignified mistress would.
‘Any day now,’ he said, ‘my papers should be finished.’
‘I live in Furn el Chebbak,’ I said curtly, after he’d driven out a small street in Achrafieh. ‘Near Hawa Chicken.’
It was a short drive, just under ten minutes, and the streets were dark and quiet and small. Soon after the Adlieh roundabout, Anthony parked near a sidewalk, opened the door, and vomited straight into the pavement. I watched him curiously, as though a harmless character in a television show. After he’d finished retching, he opened the glove compartment and took out fragrant wipes to clean his mouth with. He said he’d mixed too much alcohol though I observed he’d barely drank all night.
I pointed at vomit on his shirt. He rubbed his chest with fresh wipes.
‘I’m really sorry,’ he said, as if marriage and vomit were one and the same.
‘Maybe you’re just nervous around me,’ I said.
He shrugged. Then he spoke, quite seriously, ‘You and your friends are smart. You discuss philosophy at parties. You use English words like picturesque.’
I was honoured. I’d intimidated him. The streets suddenly felt larger. I connected my phone to his car to play a wistful song by Abdel Halim Hafez that would frame this moment of triumphs and misalignment. I wanted to impress him with my unbearably youthful nostalgia.
‘It’s strange,’ he said, lowering the volume.
‘You’re disrespecting Baligh Hamdi,’ I said, raising the volume.
‘Who?’ he said, raising his voice.
‘Nothing.’ I lowered the volume. ‘What’s strange?’
‘I thought I couldn’t wait to leave this place but now that it’s actually happening, I don’t know if I want to.’
After the explosion, everyone had wanted to leave but my flatmate and I, we’d made a pact that we wouldn’t leave until there was no other option. It was quite silly, even a bit sickening, but it felt real in a way only a few things did.
‘Well,’ Anthony continued, ‘I spent all of last week in Tannourine–I took the Nahr el Joz trail, do you, well you probably know it?’
‘I don’t hike.’
‘It was really green. It was really nice. It’s home, you know? I don’t know, even this house party, the people in it–you, for instance, your friends, I mean–I thought I’d met everyone there was to meet in this country, but right before I leave, it feels as though there’s more. Want to know something else strange?’ he muttered. ‘My wife’s called Azza.’
‘Oh that is strange. Do you miss Azza?’
‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘I don’t know,’ he said.
We drove past Mar Nohra church. His lashes were long, especially in the dark. He had broad shoulders and a narrow mouth. Even after he’d vomited, he smelled clean like the deep end of an ocean.
‘Why does your marriage no longer feel the same?’ I asked after he’d parked underneath my building and was waiting for me to leave him alone.
‘You’re a good therapist,’ he said in a resigned voice.
‘My patients would agree.’
‘I think…’ He paused. He was in deep thought. ‘I think she’s bored of me. Every time I speak to her, she says she’s happy to be away from Lebanon. I don’t know. I guess it happens. You marry someone, there’s mystery, and then you realise what you thought was mystery was not really mystery. Sorry–I said mystery three times. Now four!’ He laughed uncomfortably and I felt sorry for him. ‘I didn’t sleep yesterday if I’m being honest. We had a huge fight, my wife and me. I’m not well. I think she no longer likes me. Things are different, they’ve been different for some time now. But I don’t want to bore you too. You must be sick of people complaining every day.’
‘Want to come upstairs?’ I asked. The house had been empty and warm when I left it–my flatmate was in Bekaa picking cherries, or some other fruit, with her boyfriend and his family.
‘We can smoke and drink,’ I said to Anthony. ‘We don’t have to do anything. We can just talk. I’m not bored. Talking is good. You’re a friend; not a patient.’
After we’d stepped in, Anthony walked immediately toward my flatmate’s record collection. I was suddenly aware of our apartment, its bare walls and the mismatched vintage furniture we’d bought from Ouzai. Even the small wooden table, the only slightly charming item in our apartment, was a mess. I’d left my master kit sprawled all over it, the rolling papers and filters and the brown ball of hash. I imagined Anthony’s house to be a large one, somewhere proper, like Rabieh, with a balcony that opened to a view of cypresses in the dark and Aznavour singing somewhere in the background.
‘Oh, wow,’ he said, sifting through Nas and Biggie and Tupac. His voice was full of youthful approval. ‘I thought Marcel Khalife was as far as it got for you.’
‘Ha,’ I said. He was funnier than I’d given him credit. It was hard to place him. ‘So you like rap?’ I asked.
He nodded. He said music was the only art he enjoyed. He looked at me apologetically, like he knew I judged him for not liking cinema or poetry. I felt very powerful. I went into the kitchen and took out two bowls from the cabinet, rinsing them quickly in the sink. I filled one with janarik and another with sunflower seeds. I opened a bottle of cheap rosé wine and poured it into two glasses.
In the living room, the windows had been left open. It was drizzling and the wind had picked up with a sort of calm intensity. The curtains fluttered. The weak plants rustled. The room smelled sweet and fresh like spring, and I felt it in my skin, the endless possibilities a night in May could offer.
Anthony was seated on the far end of the couch. I turned off the main light and lit up two of my flatmate’s fancy candles. We looked more ethereal in their flicker and I sat on the floor to rearrange the contents of the table.
‘Isn’t the wind beautiful?’ I asked. It was hard work, rolling my joint while looking him in the eye.
‘I hadn’t thought about it before,’ he said.
‘Don’t you want to drink?’ I asked.
‘I probably shouldn’t,’ he said.
‘You should be more open to life,’ I said thoughtfully.
He grimaced at his stomach to remind me he’d quite recently vomited. Around us the wind howled like an animal. What a strange night. I held a glass in each hand and clinked them together to make him laugh.
‘Cheers to the wind,’ I said.
‘Cheers,’ he nodded.
I drank down the wine and placed my elbows on the table, then my face above my palms. I wasn’t sleepy but my eyes were heavy. I wanted to close them.
‘When we were children,’ I said, ‘my sister had an irrational fear of the wind. She’d sniff a storm on its way and begin to panic. She thought it was a spirit. She couldn’t understand how something could blow through us, disrupting everything in its path, and still we couldn’t really see it.’
I realised I’d never told my flatmate this story.
‘Sometimes,’ I continued, ‘my sister would hide in my arms until the storm had passed.’
He looked around the room as though searching for something. Then he said, ‘My wife has a phobia of mirrors. She can’t look at them. Or at puddles and spoons. It has a scientific name. Eisoptrophobia. You must’ve had some patients with it.’
I nodded wisely. I said it had to do with self-image.
He took the joint from me, inhaled professionally. It was the first time I saw him display any form of confidence. He said one of the things Azza hated most was how much weed he smoked. He said he’d smoked every morning and night in her absence and never felt better. He said she made him feel ashamed of his needs, that she wanted everything to always be in control and couldn’t understand how, for him, smoking was not an act of rebellion but of presence. He said he felt present with me. Well, those weren’t the precise sentences he used but the meaning was implied. This had always been my theory, you could ask my flatmate; I believed the best communication happened outside the confines of language. I drank more wine, rolled us another joint. I wasn’t sure what the time was–we’d left our phones on top of the shoe cabinet in the entrance–but I sensed the sun would rise in an hour, maybe two. I was beginning to feel restless again.
‘Is she ugly?’ I asked. I thought of my flatmate’s boyfriend, and whether he could be described as objectively ugly.
‘Who?’
‘Azza.’
‘No. She’s beautiful.’
I asked for something more specific.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘she’s tall and has long hair.’
‘Surely there are better ways of describing a woman.’ My flatmate always said one of the main problems in relationships was the fear of not being seen, and I imagined Azza in Canada, very tall and with cascading hair, her details visible to everyone but Anthony.
‘I never know how to describe things,’ Anthony shrugged.
‘But you love rap,’ I said. ‘And rap is poetry.’
‘Ah,’ he said, ‘Well, I guess you’re right. But somehow, even when it’s Kendrick singing, I don’t seem to hear the words. It’s more…it’s more the beat. The feeling the beat gives me.’
We were at that point of the night where the hash had us synced–it was as though we were gliding past each other, almost touching. This feeling was real as the wind, like I could step into his mind if I wanted. I got up from the floor to stretch. I sat on the right side of the couch. There was a deadly quiet energy to the room like we were in the middle of nowhere, above the trees, somewhere in the dark mountains. I was quite stoned.
Here was another thing my flatmate often said in response to my theory–there were two types of patients in this world: those who could use language to their benefit, and those who were prisoners of it. She said most of her job, really, was trying to help people find the words to describe what happened inside.
Well, she was right. I wanted Anthony to find words. Yes, it was difficult for me to accept silence. It made me feel untidy, like I’d lost the plot.
‘What are you thinking of?’ I croaked.
He took a while to respond and then said, ‘I don’t know. It’s just that my head hurts.’
‘I feel it,’ I said.
‘What?’
‘Your head, the pressure in it. I feel you.’
‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Maybe.’
It wasn’t sudden but it did feel that way. He was warmer than I’d expected, arms rough like sand. It had been a good kiss earlier in his car, the sort where you lost sense of your face, but now we couldn’t look at each other. We couldn’t look past each other. And so our intimacy felt slow and rushed at once: a weak, short-lived storm. I couldn’t focus. Images and words flashed through my head: subconscious and plastic and the Mediterranean and death. As for Anthony, he was making incoherent sounds. Little grunts of pleasure. As soon as he’d finished, I wanted him off me.
‘I hope you came,’ he sighed.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Yes.’
When I came out of the bathroom, he was smoking a cigarette, shirtless. He really was a beautiful man. The sort you’d want to photograph: brown hair, broad shoulders, benign eyes. I smiled at him. I wanted him to feel welcome in my apartment.
‘Hey,’ he said, in a tender voice. ‘Are you okay? You have tears in your eyes.’
‘Oh,’ I said. I rubbed my face. ‘It’s my contact lenses,’ I said. ‘They’re fucked up.’
‘I’m sorry.’
I laid next to him, parallel to the large window. The tears continued to fall and I kept my face turned away. Anthony stroked my thumb gently and I watched the city strip into a silver blue.
‘It’s a new day,’ I said.
Anthony soon began to murmur and his sentences were gentle, meaningful even. He wondered whether it was ridiculous to stay in Lebanon in order to be near his dead dog. He said his dog was buried in Tannourine and he’d like to take me there one day, and I thought maybe men simply needed to orgasm in order to find a voice.
‘You know what your sister said, about the wind being a spirit? I’d like to imagine the wind being my dog. Something like that. I mean, I don’t know if I believe in this sort of stuff but I’d like to.’
‘How did he die?’ I asked.
‘He was hit by a car. I heard him die. It was a guttural sound. It came from somewhere very deep inside.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I said.
‘My wife and I suffered but she never wanted to talk about it. She said I couldn’t understand what she felt. So we’d sit in different rooms, she in the bedroom, and I in the living room. Canada was meant to be a new start.’
He looked outside the window. ‘I’ve never been so confused in my life,’ he said. He kissed me. We had sour breath but in the morning light, I felt soft and warm again like a pet.
‘Thank you,’ he said, his eyelids closing.
‘For what?’ I enquired gently. I wanted to be told I was beautiful. I wanted to be looked at like I was a tragedy.
‘You have a way of making a person speak,’ he whispered. ‘Imagine being stuck in an apartment with you? You’d make me confess everything. You’re a good therapist.’
I said nothing. I slipped my underwear on and stood up after he fell asleep. His breathing was heavy and gentle. Alone on the couch, he looked like a child with long legs; the idea of being stuck in an apartment with him was horrifying.
My flatmate and I had been stuck together, in this very living room, only a couple years ago. It was in the early stages of the pandemic and we spent it smoking hash and eating pasta. We let our armpit hair grow. Wore the same t-shirts every day.
It was the first time I experienced her as anxious, uneasy. She was like an erratic train passenger who couldn’t find her seat. She’d walk around the living room and repeat: it’s the apocalypse, it’s the apocalypse! Oh, it was a lovely time. We watched terrible television shows. We argued about music. We spoke about our periods in excruciating detail.
One evening, she suggested we enact a Sufi dhikr in our living room. We wanted to transcend our egos and remember God: the pandemic had been a spiritual turning point in our lives. So we pulled out cushions and placed them in front of each other, then began to sing the shahada, closely following a Sufi sheikh we’d found on Youtube. La illaha ila lah, la illaha ila lah. Fifteen minutes in, I burst out laughing–if you repeat one sentence many times, it begins to sound like nonsense. I opened my eyes to tell her this and she smiled, a sort of wistful mystical smile, then propped her knees over the pillow. And she kissed me. On the lips. It was out of nowhere. It was so brief, so inconclusive, sometimes I wondered if I’d made it up.
I never went to a real dhikr. I barely knew a poem by Rumi. But not long ago, I read in an article somewhere that some Sufis believed the word Allah to mean The Nothing. Al, lah. Real Sufism, the article said, was about surrendering to utter nothingness. That the only truth, the only God, was nothingness. Only if we surrendered to this nothingness could love be real. I didn’t send the article to my flatmate, as I often did with anything I found remotely interesting or absurd, because it felt too close to that night–and we’d never spoken about it again of course.
I stood outside her room now. It was slightly smaller than mine, with an armchair and a small desk. She was so neat it broke my heart.
How to describe it? She made me feel small and large at once. Sometimes I wondered if she saw me. My biggest fear was that she secretly found me tiring. My biggest fear was that she would find her boyfriend’s parents fun, the sort of in-laws she could have around for the rest of her life.
Suddenly I had an urge to unfold her clothes and fold them again. Tomorrow, I thought, when she comes back from the Bekaa, I’ll make her pasta with cherry tomatoes and chopped garlic, how she likes it. She’ll roll her eyes when she hears about Anthony, how he vomited and slept on our couch. When I talk about the wind, how it inhabits our apartment like a kindred spirit, she’ll ask me questions, wise and non-rhetorical ones.
I shut the door to her bedroom and walked toward the living room. Anthony was asleep, his lips parted. Behind him the window and the city now awake. A woman was opening her red shutters. So many red shutters and beige buildings and hanging wires, what a stupid place to be in.
I glared at the dawn and did what I often do when confronted with light: take a breath and start from the beginning, again.
Nur Turkmani is a researcher and writer in Beirut. She researches displacement, social movements, and agriculture. Her fiction and poetry have been published in West Branch, Poetry London, The Adroit Journal, The Offing, and others. She's an editor-at-large at Rusted Radishes: Beirut's Art and Literary Journal and studied creative writing at Oxford University.