The Tufla Syndrome

It seems a long time ago now as I often say. A reasonable amount of time although, there is this thing called confidentiality that must be mentioned. In this case, I think it is worthwhile to violate the confidentiality of the dead because in reality, they have none. They are there in the common ground of experience and serve as teachers, as guides. Some of them have names inscribed on headstones and some do not. Some are only infant girls buried in the sand. It is so with Tufla which only means infant girl, it isn’t really a name but something they call babies before they get a name.

Tufla came to me as so many of them did, on an ordinary day. It wasn’t particulary hot in the Arabian desert and not particularly cold nor dry nor wet. The noises around the hospital were the same as they always were, rising and falling at given intervals and in various locations outside of clinics or rooms, groaning and laughing, TVs on all the time and the constant sound of shoes hitting against the smooth polished floors. It was such a day.

The woman sat in a chair alongside several others and a man sat near her but not next to her. It looked as if they were strangers. She was wearing the usual Bedouin garb, dusty materials and tattered hemline. She was holding a batch of scarves in her arms as if they were very valuable to her in some way. I didn’t pay particular attention to them as they weren’t for me, they had no child with them nor a baby. I entered the semi circle filled with faces covered in black and heads covered in checkered red cloths and called out to my patient, Tufla so-and-so. Tufla so and so.

The man and woman got up and made as if to follow me into the back. Perhaps, I thought, the woman had not been treated for a facial deformity and now had finally found a way to get some surgery but because of her hijab I couldn’t really tell and would have to take her in an examination room to see what the particular problem might be. The chart only said, infant girl, cleft palate, 2 years old. As was the usual, I received all sorts of medical lies like that. Doctors in the nether regions would often make something up because they either didn’t know a diagnosis or wanted to conceal the terminal state of a patient they wanted to dump on our rather major institution in Riyadh.

When we finally made our way to the back halls and into the room, myself and the rag-tag couple, I asked the two of them to take a seat in one of the three chairs. The man once again took a seat leaving one in between his wife and himself. The wife kept holding her batch of tattered scarves as if they were the finest cloths a person could purchase at one of the many material shops in the souks where a person could buy silk, taffeta, chiffon, handmade laces, suedes, beaded and brocaded wonders to the eye, linens, buttons, snaps, wedding cloths and wools. I asked her what her problem was and to show me her face.

She remained covered and her husband only grunted with some type of dissatisfaction. She then handed me her bundle of scarves which weighed only a little over two kilos and contained something that felt like sticks. I laid the batch of scarves on the table and gently began unfolding them revealing a tiny bag of bones with no expression and listless movements that looked unlike breathing. The nose was covered with dried mucous and the face could have been the face of an octogenarian. Tufla then, was two years old. She weighed in smaller than most newborn babies. She was being starved to death.

As I started interviewing the parents (to whom I wish no disrespect as they are merely products of a given society at a given time on this planet with curiously definable features) the father started insulting his wife in the worst of ways calling her a cow, then calling her a dog. Obviously he thought it was his wife’s fault for having produced such a thing as little Tufla. I cautioned him not to do it in front of me or ever, that he was discussing his wife in her presence. Thankfully, he didn’t say another word.

If only they really knew, the two of them, whose fault this actually was. There is a myth in some remote parts of the world that a baby without a sealed palate will certainly die if it ever sucks from a bottle. So Tufla was never offered a teet, a breast or a nuk. Nothing but a tube that was inserted into her stomach via her nose every once in a while whenever the family could make it the 25 miles to a local Bedouin hospital in the north. No one ever told them how to insert the tube and no one asked if they had a car. No one told them that if that tube came out it had to be reinserted within a few hours for the next few ounces of milk to be given. Tufla apparently went for days without food. Perhaps weeks even. It is a wonder that she made it in wrapped in those scarves. Truly a wonder but I think that she must have wanted to meet me.

I convinced old Doc Sakati to admit Tufla to the hospital for a few days. She is the famous doctor who defined Sakati-Sanjad syndrome along with her long time associate Dr. Sanjad. A famous woman in her own right. It wasn’t the only syndrome she defined but one of many. A grouchy old maid with a heart of gold. But convincing her to give up a bed for such a hopeless case as Tufla's wasn’t easy.

Once Tufla and her mother were in their private room, it took exactly twelve and a half hours to teach Tufla how to suck from a bottle and swallow. She wasn’t too aggressive about her intake but who could blame her, she could barely move, exhausted and all alone in her starvation. I think she took two ounces on her first go and maybe three on her next, roughly the amount of a newborn only a few hours old. Her mother finally removed her face cover so that I could see her and I discovered that she was older than me. For some reason I thought she must be half my age but I found out that she was a tough old buzzard from the desert with a pack a day habit. She must have smelled cigarette smoke on me and immediately bummed a fag and a light. She thought I had worked a miracle but I assured her I had not. Of course, I didn’t tell her she had grounds for a malpractice suit if she had lived in North America because I knew that Arabs seldom sue, muslims are fatalists. They figure when it is your day, it is your day, quite literally and are wont to do anything to unnaturally prolong a human life. The irony of that is that once a muslim is on life support, on a ventilator, it is almost impossible to take them off because the muslims hate to interfere with God and God’s counterpart, Doctors.

Tufla stayed for a week or two and Dr. Sakati tried to discover a new syndrome to name in poor Tufla. Something grand like costo-vertebral-mandibular or perhaps a case of fronto-facial-cranial-dysplasia, but to no avail. Sweat tests and urine analysis, chromosome counts and MRIs, all of it came up absolutely normal save for an elevated BUN and creatinine from constant, prolonged dehydration. It was that Tufla was a boring case of neglect with the name of a nobody.

When Tufla left the hospital I helped her mother to pack a few supplies, some extra bottles and nipples, some diapers for the trip back into the dry desert from which she came. I truly thought I would never see them again and wished them well, hoping against hope that they would return for the appointments I had arranged for them with various services, nutrition, pediatrics, genetics, all the usual.

I waited and waited and waited. They skipped the first appointments so I made some more and contacted the hospital in the north to locate them and give them the information. Six months passed before they returned.

Tufla had gained only four or five hundred grams. She was nearly three years old by then but the same Tufla I had met before, listless and unaware. I knew I had to take her home. Just like a dog or a cat who has lost its way. I didn’t mention it right away to the father who had arrived with Tufla in her usual batch of worn-out scarves.

I called the social worker and then my husband. It took longer to convince the social worker than it did my husband, a man not prone to take in strays. But he did agree. He said I could have Tufla if I could get her away from her parents. Abdullah, the kindly social worker who also had a baby with a cleft palate agreed to help me convince the father but expressed that he really doubted the parents would agree to such a request. I only wanted to have her for six months I said. I could do it in six months. I could save this life. I knew I could. I could take a bit of vacation here and there, could teach my maid Yolie to help me. Yolie would agree because Yolie missed her own baby son in the Philippines. Anyway, Yolie and I agreed on everything from the supper menu down to the time she would have to leave my employ because of 9/11. Yoly was experienced in the hardships of the world and a good Catholic. I could even pay her more if I had to. I really felt I needed Tufla.

I returned to the room I had left the father in, telling him to wait that I had some arrangements to make. He immediately jumped out of his chair when I returned and entered the room. He told me in Arabic that he had something very important to ask me. I could hardly imagine what could be more important than the drastic and dreadful thing I was about to ask of him myself, to give his own child to me for safekeeping for a while.

I let him go first. I knew my question was going to put him into shock, perhaps even frighten him away. Then he asked me.

“Could you keep Tufla here in Riyadh for a few months?” In Arabic.

I was speechless. Completely speechless. I said yes. Absolutely. I called Abdullah right away from the telephone outside of the examination room where Tufla and her father were. When I returned to the room to ask him to accompany me to Abdullah’s office, I saw that his expression had faded from before. He looked defeated. Absolutely.

His wife, who had been waiting in a house near the hospital where the couple had spent the night with some distant relatives, would not agree to leave her Tufla in my care. I never saw them again. I saw Tufla’s name appear on my schedule of visits and waited for them to show up, watching her name come and go. At least they were arranging their own visits even though they never came in for them. Three months, six months, nine months. After nine months though, the name didn’t appear again on my computer lists.

I went to Abdullah. I knew but really, I had to hear it myself. I had to let go of that idea once and for all, just like you have to let go of the idea of a stray dog you see on the highway in the rain.

Abdullah dialed. He nodded and said a few things in Arabic to the person on the other end but all I could hear was meht, meht. The Tufla syndrome was finally over.

The Beginning To The End

Part One

Ruby woke up from a short nap startled, she didn't know where she was or how she came to be there. Simple as that, it happens to people all the time, particularly in their forties. They lie down and find themselves in the borderlands of sleep and wakefulness, a cat near their thigh or not, trying to avoid going too far one way or the other, trying to linger just a while in the tender wasteland that is superficial dream, superficial sleep, lingering in the conciousness that serves to protect visions from escaping into the vast darkness of sleep or dissipate in the bright sun bearing down from a bedroom window like a light suddenly turned on in a dimmed room. Awakening to an uncertain time and the smell of burning food in the kitchen, the steady stream of a car alarm outside on the street. The undeclared wars outside have been raging for years yet all that is available to the intellect is a thin stream of thought or an idea of a certain color attached to a pleasing sentiment or some strange mathematical equation which lacks a rational answer.

As Ruby had drifted off for what was supposed to be her usual late afternoon nap, she had been trying to remember and dream a pale spring afternoon, the kind where rain has dictated to the sky a lavendar shade, a shade perfectly suited to memories and the containment of them with the foreground the best green color the mind can endeavor; a green which signifies all that is kept untouched by the purplish light of the dying sun through breaking clouds. A fully saturated light, the kind photographers wait hours on end to capture on film and retain as if they had painted the colors on themselves and were somehow responsible for the glory. Ruby breathed carefully in and out, remembering the sounds of the canyon in late April, just one week after she had married. Quiet sounds of cars passing at 5 pm, tugging their weight up the steep road through the small mountainous town where she'd grown up. A dog was barking intermittently, it echoed against the copper doors of the judicial building just across from the wooden miner's shack she'd called home just weeks before she'd agreed to marry a foreign man. A child was on a swing in the house across the landing of the long, winding stairs which cascaded in tiers through the small mining town like farmlands in mountainous countries in geography books. The little girl whistled a pure and uneven tune. Ruby remembered the sound of birds flocking towards the night in the giant cottonwood trees outside which created the illusion of percussion, of flight. Two lovers walked down the stairs hand in hand, laughing quietly as if not at all. The silence was punctuated by a complex suffering in her soul which she felt at that moment, between her dream and waking, to acutely exist as if it had been retrieved or had returned from a hard journey. She never woke up in the same way again. After that peculiar and inconspicuous moment in time it was as if no one did, or ever would. The world had absolutely changed forever and Ruby lay still, heard the beat of her own heart as her hair scraped out a time signal against her pillow. She opted to stop trying. It was her birthday and there were gifts waiting on the dining room table, her children were on their way home from their foreign school and her husband Sol was wasting his time in an office less than a two kilometers away. He was discussing more plans for business, always more plans, more opportunities with a man who looked like so many others, all of whom had the same sort of plans which inevitably led to immense power and wealth. The two men were just parting at that moment, shaking hands and laughing slightly, deliberately. A horrendous conspiracy of hopeful and entirely anticipated failure animated their laughing faces as they bared their teeth to one another. It was happening all over the city that way, one could almost hear the din of it if it weren't for the constant sound of planes taking off, cars speeding over miles and the constant wind which pelted the Levant from spring to summer.

This is where it seemed to begin but the early chapters of her life impacted her like the percussion of her hair on the pillow and the wings of the birds so long ago, as one day led to another and another and soon it was a collection of years which steadily increased their hold on her mind until the demands of fusion held sway over the usual needs provoked by the demands of life. It was increasingly difficult for her to explain how she managed to be in any particular place at any given time and sometimes, she noticed with a certain embarrassment, she lost her way even though she was walking down her own stairs or driving the familiar roads that led to the second home she had helped her husband's family to build, the one in South Lebanon with a view into the thorn-studded rocky terrain where Jesus Christ himself had once walked, shoulder to shoulder with his disciples. A town that resembled her own town far away because of the hills inside which it rested. It was a house that would have remained unfinished if it had not been for Ruby's steady resolve, the resolve of a Catholic minding the second commandment while remembering the first, reminding her husband as well. Honor thy mother and thy father. She'd forgotten the other eight.

For several months before returning like this to some kind of central theme which she found running through her up-to-then turbulent life, Ruby found herself driving past the scene of a car accident, her own and wondering what had gone wrong that day. But she couldn't find the right place, the exact spot where she had actually seen time standing still for one brilliant moment, the moment she saw the trajectory itself, of her car speeding towards a thin aluminum pole with thin shafts of sunlight emerging from around the edges of what appeared to be a two dimensional object. She had let go of the wheel, given up. Talked herself into a kind of certainty, the certainty called, life passing before one's eyes at the final moment, when that is in all actuality, ludicrous. The moment when one knows intuitively that they should either be there or not be there, that events add up to exactly that particular thing at that particular place in time.

She'd speed up and slow down on the autostrat, checking for signs of her collision that day although her hopes diminished that any traces would remain after so much time had passed over the spot, as days went by. Motorscooter riders and deaf old men sullied the sacred pole with urine, this much was certain. How many times had she seen one of them drop their pants in full view and urinate, not caring whether or not a woman was watching or a child or a police officer, the few of them that there were in Beirut, the post war city. The grand expectations that accompany the moral adventure called war, a perilous illusion. Amazing that one of the affects of war is a certain kind of lawlessness that attracts more of the same and more until finally, even the police give up their perusal of events leading to more of the same and more. Just cycling around like that in a futile attempt to just get by, just relieve oneself of the order imposed by chaos. Urinating on poles all around the city, beside the road into bushes, in front of schools.

She'd been having a few problems with civilization. All of it. From the mundane on through to the complex. Everything had taken on a grave significance and her moods swung with the tides of the day. Noisy mornings full of honking and jets and back down into the deep slumbers of the night when she would sit for hours looking out the kitchen window wondering why a red light on the pavement outside looked the same anywhere in the world as it reflected motor oil and human refuse collected in the hands of the wind and dropped down right where anyone could see it. Why was anything like it is? Certainly, it was the reason she held the wheel with just enough pressure to allow it to touch off the cornerstone of an immense garbage truck and send her into the gaping-wide, open infinity of the sunlight behind the aluminum pole. A tiny detail so small that the witnesses that gave their testimony swore by Allah that it was the truck driver who had committed the offense by trying to pass her in a most illegal way. That was true but there was this tiny pressure from her side and she fought to find where she had left that effort.

As she gradually gained something called consciousness, and really, those few seconds were enveloped in a lack of pure reason and thought and what could be called will, Ruby pulled herself out of the car which was bleeding gas and water into the dirt, by ripping the cartilage near her left knee, severing it from it's source as if, had she failed, her leg would have been cut off completely from the rest of her body and she wouldn't have noticed the difference. Nearly a superhuman effort and without pain. Music was still coming out of the radio, Miss Sarajevo, but it had transformed into a kind of nonsense, the way foreign music sounds to the non foreign ear. The way Indian music sounds in the back seat of a taxi cab travelling down the main streets of somewhere called Riyadh. Not even music anymore. It just blaired on through the instants of reawakening like that and she pulled herself into an upright position. Her necklace was hanging from it's torn chains and the windshield was entirely in shards on the ground where she couldn't see them nor piece them together again.

At least two hundred men and not one woman, that she could remember, stood gaping open mouthed at the incident they had just witnessed. Some of her friends passed by in the other direction on the autostrat with their children in their cars, each of them commenting on the sadness of dying in an accident like that, not knowing that it was Ruby in the wreckage. Or that she was alive. Her own children were waiting at the school, getting nervous as they listened to sirens in the distance. All the other children already gone home, some of them already eating a late lunch with busy mothers huddled over them, feeding them by hand like little birds with the false kind of integrity Arab women have when forced to it by their tribal principles. Whatever that may be. Mostly male principles born from the heads of men who were fed in the same manner, like little birds, never questioning the source, the idea of feeding themselves, a kind of dictatorial relationship between what is necessary and what is expected.

A thing much like childbirth itself, one has no choice and what goes into the body, into the child comes out in various ways.

*******************


Her first child had been a somewhat untimely accident. Like most things. A happy one after the finances had been reckoned with, after the abortion clinic had been aborted to protestors outside, after a midwife had been selected to deliver Ruby's first born into the world inside a dingy apartment in the University section of the city in which she and Sol lived when they were very young. A city called Phoenix but no one knows why. To rephrase that, no one including Ruby knows why the word Phoenix should figure into the naming of a city. After all, cities rise up and stay that way, don't they? Just like eggs are fertilized and grow into human beings inside of a woman's uterus. Just like her own first child was scheduled to be born on a hot summer day sometime in June, sometime near the publication of Bonfire of the Vanities, just short of Huey Lewis and the News. A nonsensical kind of relationship between geography and human life. Clot to cradle, clot to cradle, cradle to coffin and then, nothing or something better, something worse, but never, the same thing twice. Like lightning.

Sol was studying the building of buildings at the state university there and Ruby was trying to study photography. Between night shifts at a coffee shop and obstetrical visits. Between fights with Sol and bouts of incredible loneliness. Her father died then, on his own birthday, just a short while before her daughter was visible to the naked eye which was a sadness that could not be ammended save for the short visits he paid to Ruby in her dreams. Her mother used to tell her about MJ as he was called by the other miners, that Ruby was "the apple of his eye" and "that happened before you were a twinkle." A kind of tribal time frame that was clear to anyone from that part of the country in Ruby's part of the world. A world that defined all places by the first letter of their respective names: New Guinea, New Hampshire, New South Wales, Newfoundland. Paris, Polynesia, Prague. Liberia, Lebanon, Libya. The way she was taught to recognize things of a certain order, by their first letters. The way she thought everyone learned anything of any importance and only, in two languages, Spanish and English. The Ottoman Empire was mentioned exactly once in her eleventh grade history course and then, no more. It was as if it had never even happened at all. At least to Ruby or, least of all, to Ruby.

She had taken measures to insure the birth of her daughter at a given time by ingesting grape Kool Aid laced with exactly four fluid ounces of castor oil. An old wive's tale this and on the second go after horrendous dry heaves between the spoonfuls she forced Sol to ladle into her mouth, Ruby finally went into a three day labor of love. She was on a tight schedule and was paying for the delivery with coins she had saved from waiting tables at the coffee shop and had she gone a couple more days, she and Sol would have been forced to pay for a real delivery, the hospital kind. She walked up and down the streets of Phoenix in order to dilate her cervix just like the midwife and all the books had told her to do. She went shopping as the time grew nearer at her favorite five & dime and when the most powerful contraction hit her there between her pelvis and the Toblerone, the midwife slipped her into an employee's restroom and shoved her hand between Ruby's legs to check out the progress of "things". Time to go home. Time to deliver what it was that had to be delivered.

Ruby's sister was waiting, staring contentedly at the small color TV Ruby had received from her parents a couple years before on her seventeenth birthday. Days of Our Lives still running strong like sands through the hourglass. When Ruby entered through the living room door with her Jewish midwife in tow, Ann knew it was time to get down to business. Ann was all business. She was a nurse who made it her personal duty to attend homebirths as if she was a pioneer out on the range. It was a matter of principle but this time it was her kid sister, a bit more than principle. And she didn't trust the midwife to do what would be needed to be done and that would be, prevent catastrophe. As it turned out, Ruby wasn't quite ready so instead the midwife asked her if she wanted an enema to which Ruby replied, "I guess so." The two women laid her out on the floor between the bathroom and the delivery room (where the baby had been conceived) and inserted the bottle of Fleets without incident. Ruby got up with incredible difficulty and made her way into the bathroom and evacuated her distended bowels already sore from the ill-advised castor oil and returned to her own bed to rest before the triathalon's final heat. Ingrid, the midwife, studied Ruby's face hard and felt she'd have plenty of time to sew a little skull cap for the baby and perhaps, have a bite to eat with Ruby's sister, get some of her self confidence back from the woman who obviously knew more than she did about pioneer living. Ann had made that perfectly clear months ago at the restaurant where the three of them had met to discuss the plans, the emergency equipment and the like, eat whole grain muffins.

Ruby tried to go to sleep but it was no use. The pain just kept interupting her every time she closed her eyes long enough to relax. She could hear laughter in the other room. Everyone had been called and arrived one after another. Her midwife had been only partially certified so that required an advanced practitioner to be present. Then a medical student asked if she could attend. Ruby asked her sister-in-law who was married to Sol's brother to be her labor coach knowing that Sol was somehow ill-prepared for such a thing even though he had often watched his grandfather deliver animals of their load. Ruby's mother had arrived and was sleeping in the adjoining bedroom, too old to get too excited about anything anymore prior to resting-up a bit first. In all, ten people were present to participate in some way, in the birth of yet another human being. It was years later when Ruby had herself graduated from nursing school that she recognized the face of the medical student on the neurological floor where she was working and exclaimed, "You were there! Remember me?" To which the doctor replied, "I think so." How one person can forget what is important to another is one of the mysteries of life. Ruby thought to herself about all the stories along the way that mattered She seldom forgot any of them. Or maybe it was that the connections she recognized along the way were too deeply ingrained because of the way she noticed things slightly out of the ordinary. Perhaps she too had forgotten the ordinary stories all along, the way a car bumps into another and you assume what you assume about it due to the distance you are standing away from it when you see it.

The End

Those who have reached this conclusion have done so for free and the joke is on all of us. Life is an elaborate illusion in which there are many conclusions proposed. Why me? Well,I don't know, why not? It is the final last line which renders everything simple, everything that could be said in a book or in a life, why not? We'll never really know until we touch base with a moment in time. A moment in the chaotic universe that we can call our own. Some call it death and others, call it life.

The problem is with the story and the life, it can stop on a dime. Even though you'd like it to go on just a little further.

Nescafe For Refugees

So, like I was saying...I was just out of the urologist's office yesterday. A crisp Beirut morning. I'd tell you all about the urologist visit, his urologist's eyes (they all have that look of having spent too much time at the microscope gazing at uric acid crystals, peering into the future and the past at the same time), but that's not what I want to say. It's more about the parking lot and what happened there. If not for the old dog caretaker in the urologist's building, I would never have ended up there, drinking a Nescafe prepared by a handsome blue eyed Syrian. I tried to drive my car down the narrow way beside the building and into the parking lot behind it but the fool wouldn't let me. Of course, he knew I wasn't going to a urologist...no, people who see urologists are invariably smelly old men like himself. Up the way though, there was a lot and I scraped together six 250 lira coins to pay for a space, leaving exactly four more for a coffee after my visit. At least I wouldn't be giving away any of my husband's hard earned cash to beggars today, unless of course a gypsy stopped me before I reached the Nescafe trolley.

What more to say about urologists than above. This one, referred to me by a Russian 'lady's doctor' was trained in Romania...hmm. Like, my idea of Romania is Dickens at his best. Orphanages and environmental pollution. I have to say though, his hands were warm and office clean, a brand new laptop taking precedence on his too organized desk..another urology fetish. After my visit, after assuring him that I thought he was peachy keen (mentally organizing my self for a first opinion and opting for his as a second), I waited for the delapidated elevator for too long to take me down one flight of stairs, gave up and carefully avoided brushing the oil soaked walls on the way down the marble staircase, avoiding the old codger in the lobby, avoiding his crooked stigmatic stare and noting that he looked a bit prostatish himself and must be grappling with some horrid 'man problem'.

The weather outside had turned wet again, a light rain started and stopped just as fast. It's as if this time of year, the air is made of water and breathing can cause a person to drown. The Syrian at the Nescafe trolley was busy cooking up some tea, 'woosah' or dirty, black, for some local shop keeper and promised me to be back in a hurry after delivering the sixty cent drink half a block away to one of his regulars. A young man showed up and looked me askance, I suppose he thought I should brew him a cup myself, but after establishing that I was slightly better dressed than the average trolley vendor, he waited for the Syrian to return and promptly took his turn before me, in usual Arab style. No ladies first here.

I watched as the water gushed from a cystern kept hot by a kerosene warmer...what do you call those things? A samovar. For sixty cents, an instant coffee from a samovar tastes about as good as a Frappacino from Starbucks over on the Corniche (four dollars worth anyway). He filled the brown plastic cup with Nestles sweetened condensed then, half more with steaming water hot enough to heat the sticky milk to the perfect temperature and ladled a healthy spoon of the sugary brown powder Nestles calls coffee. The Syrian ushered me over to his one plastic table to sit in one of the three plastic chairs under this particular old tree that must have been there for at least fifty years if not more.

A seriously handsome old man was standing on the other side of the wall where the table stood, seemingly waiting for me to take my place. Of course, I knew it was highly unusual (let's say inappropriate) for a green eyed red head to be sitting out there in a parking lot run by gypsies in the middle of a Beirut neighborhood that boasted of being on the green line at one time not so long ago. There's not much left that betrays this green line fact except the collective memory of the residents and a few of the pox marked buildings.

As soon as I lit a cigarette, the old man started speaking in a brilliant English, right away telling me he could also speak Russian, French, Hebrew and English. His eyes though, showed a glint of senility and I felt it best to humor him, to spend some time that I didn't have, drinking my Nescafe leisurely and listening. He wanted to tell me that his life was good. He told me he came from Jaffa. He had five children but all of them were married now and that at sixty years of age he was forced into retirement from the United Nations.

Ah, I thought to myself. A real live specimen from Jaffa. I asked him when he had left Jaffa and he returned quickly "In 1948." Bingo! There must be a story in this. Something to carry to someone else, some bit of wisdom, tragedy or joy. As hard as I tried however, I couldn't get him to admit to much of anything except that he was a Christian and that there was a French lady who sometimes sat here at the Nescafe trolley and fancied him quite a bit. He showed me his UN identification and his resident card for Lebanon with a picture on it of a much younger man, as handsome as one can be on a resident card. Obviously, these two documents were his and his alone and he carried them everywhere. I suppose one could gather that a refugee from Palestine would be very attached to anything officially recognizing their right to exist but the old man didn't relate that at all. Just a beaming pride over his UN card and the fact that he was Eastern Orthodox and lived in Mar Elias. Now, Mar Elias isn't where you'd expect to find a refugee but rather, an original Beirut aristocrat.

Just as I was investigating him for a sign of pathos, a death in the raids on Jaffa, he was investigating me. Perhaps like he liked to do with the French woman whom he confessed to have scorned. Maybe she was after his money I thought to myself. Although he was a charming old guy, he was still an old guy. He asked about my children, my work, my nationality. As usual, I am mistaken for a Russian as they are more plentiful around these parts than girls from Bisbee, Arizona.

I finished my Nescafe and butted out my cigarette on the pavement and barely caught his words, "..if you were to take a walk with me."

Ohhh, now I see. He assured me his family wouldn't catch us. Then, as I got up to leave he pleaded, "You are happy with your husband? You don't sleep with anyone else?"

I guess the moral of this story is to not get your hopes up too high when finding a real live refugee from Jaffa from 1948...because, after all, life goes on. You get referred by a Russian to a Romanian and end up being rebuffed by a crossed-eyed doorman, blessed and loved by a senile UN employee. It's all about Beirut you know.

Lou's Nirvana

A dream shattered the locomotive like sleep of the pale figure which lay face down sucking her thumb. The woman let out a faint sigh and came to her feet automatically in one continuous action, like a soldier being mustered at daybreak.

All was gray metal with paths leading through unnaturally lit tunnels. Tens of identical looking strangers milled about on either side looking at the figure darting quickly from wall to wall, trying to find a way out of the maze-like enclosure. All of them seemed to know what she was looking for as she had been warned by each of them in low whispers, ‘who to look out for’. During the harrowing days of captivity, she tried her best to avoid finding the stranger, to avoid meeting his stare. When at last he’d come upon her, unaware, while she was trying to undo the lock on the vault door, the same one through which she’d unwittingly entered the foreign prison, he smiled at her with a look of apathetic victory. The tired woman knelt quietly at his feet to wait for her certain elimination.

Lou felt the relief of consciousness and pushed her feet into her slippers, noticing the empty place in the bed where her husband had been when they’d fallen to sleep the night before and felt her way through the dark hall and into the bathroom. The chill of the morning was uncomfortable and exacerbated by the white porcelain fixtures and icy water dripping from the faucet she had left slightly open for the two fine looking cats to drink from. The musky smell of her urine tantalized the two calicoes as it rose from the limestone encrusted bowl. After lapping slowly at the tap Peach, the elder of the two, returned to the tattered bathroom rug and her daughter Lacy leapt onto the back of the toilet and stared blankly into the brownish fluid escaping to parts unknown. Something of her own self worth played havoc with Lou, between the chill of the seat and the strong odor of the concentrated morning urine, and she lingered a few moments savoring her own smell. The private world of her bathroom fled with her out the door and into the kitchen where she lit her first cigarette and stood impatiently by the microwave heating water for instant coffee. Time was critical and the coffee maker smelled of burnt grounds and uselessness. Why bother she mulled, he’ll just wake up in two hours and complain about the taste. "I'll save the last scoops of real coffee for him, do the dishes and get a shower early, maybe," talking to herself in a low voice, knowing she would be called into action by her husband’s restlessness in a matter of hours. Weekends were a trial, Sundays like this the worst. His lack of interests plagued her on Sundays more than all the other days when she could stay home all day alone, days when the only demands placed on her would be to vacuum and shower before Maher stepped through the door, preceded by the loud, startling sound of his keys in the lock. Something about Sunday made him mean or pushy, something about the demands of recreation in his overworked mind caused him to inflict a preordained amount of stress on her at regular intervals, starting mid afternoon on Saturday. After twenty years of marriage the few hours she could spend alone, smoking and drinking instant coffee at four a.m., were her salvation. It would also allow her to fall helplessly to sleep at eight p.m. without having tucked the children in to sleep or checking to see if they had brushed their teeth. Maher would do that and complain about her lack of talents during the next argument, whether or not it was about the children, whether or not she actually made them brush their teeth as she usually did every morning like an automated bank machine telling them to collect a receipt.

Thoughts gathered in her head as she peered through the darkness of the living room to the other end trying to determine whether Maher was still asleep on the overstuffed couch that the two of them had named the 'Black Hole'. Lou heard his rhythmic breathing and struggled to see the face of her watch in the light of the small space heater she had just turned on. Outside, she could hear the dull roar of the Mediterranean and the gentle howl of the last winds remaining from the fierce winter storm Beirut had been experiencing for three days. It was four-forty a.m. in the small apartment on a steep hill just a kilometer away from the tarmac of Beirut International Airport, two-forty p.m. in Arizona and five-forty in the evening in Miami. Calculating time was something she did habitually, having lived in so many places so far away from her small town in Arizona. The actual time didn’t matter though, as she had come to the conclusion that time was a variable, as much as love or truth. It could be wasted as she had become accustomed to doing in the dawn of her middle age, having achieved what could be expected of any full grown woman, that is, three children, a nursing career and a trail of disloyal friends; or time could be treated as a commodity, an asset or a loss. At four-forty a.m. however, time seemed a mortal enemy.

Lacy sat a few feet away warming herself near the neon orange glow of the little heater as a light rain started pelting the window glass, and she plopped to the ground suddenly with a thump and rolled over to expose her belly to the heat. Peach followed her about the house hoping for an early breakfast but Lou was too busy ruminating and ignored the cat completely. She wandered into the hallway and turned on the light to peruse the three bookshelves hoping to find something that would interest her and move her tedious thoughts further away. For some reason, she’d revived a memory as she took one long, last drag on her third cigarette, a memory which caused her unending shame and embarrassment. It wasn't the type of memory one likes to keep company with in the early hours of the morning nor was it confined to itself. It entailed an entire epoch, a Precambrian Age and possessed tentacles of unending length, spanning miles of ocean floor and light years of space. It wasn't the type of memory that could be dissipated through confessing it to friends, discussing it over coffee and muffins made from poppy seeds or bananas. It had special tangents and spoke with a mean and boisterous voice, as rough as his hands had been on that day as they groped between her legs spread open slightly in the back of a taxi traveling through the unkempt streets of Riyadh.

It wasn't that she had wanted it to happen but it certainly had. A man she didn’t even know or like the smell of, had touched her, had explored her with a sinful familiarity. Sometimes she felt that it was only a fantasy, an open mouth catching her unaware and as willing as a teenage girl. At other times, it was a demon that knew where she lived and courted her in her dreams, taking revenge for her failure to follow through.

Maher stirred slightly and breathed, interrupting a deep snore that comforted her in the most sublime way. Her safety was assured for another hour, perhaps two. She wondered if he knew?

They had met in college, just five weeks after her first abortion and she told Maher she'd be unable to have sex with him for at least one more week as they stood outside the community college dorm where she had agreed to meet the handsome foreign student who had arrived to the United States only a few months before with his younger brother in tow. Lou thought they were French. Obviously, anyone not from Winslow must be French. Maher's brother recognized her from the admissions office where the two of them had become locked in one of those deep loving stares strangers indulge in at nineteen.

After a few moments listening to the two of them make small talk, Mohamed walked away from the two of them, his hands shoved into his pockets and head down, and she could hear him whistling a random tune in the distance, a tune that was more like disinterest than actual music. Lou liked that memory because she and Mo had become the best of friends over the years. He was less than a year younger than Maher and completely different from his older brother in every way. Perhaps she had loved him in the wrong way at one time, in the admissions office, but at forty she knew it was kinship, as if he had known right away her fate was sealed and had grieved for the loss of a good Catholic girl. Mo was like that, he often flirted with the idea of becoming one himself, a good Catholic or Born Again. Twenty years later, he emailed her once in a while from his brief stops at public libraries across America on his journey with the Ice Capades, selling souvenirs. He'd spent the previous year in Lebanon with his family, drinking beer that he kept hidden from his mother and taking antidepressants but he'd finally given up hopes of staying and disappeared on a night flight to Phoenix amidst angry protests from his entire family. "What will you do over there? It's dangerous now for an Arab!" His mother wept for weeks, in short bursts and without warning, claiming between tears and while pulling theatrically at her chest, that one day, "he'll change."

Maher hadn't reacted much to her confession of having aborted her unborn child and looking back on it, Lou realized he probably didn't know what an abortion was. She wasn’t sure who the father of the baby was as she had been sleeping with a variety of young men and divorcees around Winslow after her first relationship with a much older man had ended. A few neighborhood bars and another just outside of the city limits allowed her few choices and even less anonymity but in her semi-psychotic state back then, it didn’t seem to matter. The disorientation she had felt led her to seek company for the first time in her life, as if she had just left for college as opposed to ending a love affair defined legally as statutory rape.

It never even occurred to her to withhold the highly personal information about her abortion from her new acquaintance, let alone postpone having sex with Maher until at least they’d gone out to dinner once or twice. Six weeks later, the two of them married in front of the oldest judge in Winslow, Arizona at five-twenty in the afternoon, secretly, without any of her family present. Her parents met Maher a few weeks later and liked him well enough. Her mother baked a chocolate cake and covered it with pink frosting and store bought candy letters that spelled out, Congratulations.

Lou had learned so much in the intervening years about what Maher was at that point in time and what he had become over twenty years in relation to her. Maher was a 'village boy' as opposed to a Beiruti, and now, he was a slightly balding middle- aged business man who still mispronounced a few words in English, but knew what every single one of them meant. He bristled if she quizzed him, "What do you mean, tantamount?" Lou smiled at his admission of having nothing to read as a child, at his lack of resources. She imagined the thin, lousy boy he must have been, walking through the unpaved streets of his tiny village which she now knew so well, imagined him picking up stray pieces of newsprint and wind blown fragments of Lebanese gossip magazines, just to get something to read. She thought of the first time her lover had shown her Last Tango in Paris which she still didn't understand. Afterall, it was a foreign movie to her, as foreign as that sort of thing is to a small town girl prone to believing Morocco was one big elephant that wore tassles.

The key to Lou was buried in the Veteran’s graveyard outside Phoenix. She knew it was there, between the bones of her mother and the ashes of her father, even if she couldn't describe the contours of the actual relic. She had visited the gravesite once and come away feeling devastatingly alone. Her mother was a good Catholic, having converted after searching through a number of others at the age of 32 and had decided after long deliberation that it was good enough for her. She had a three year old son when she’d met Jesse Lempke, just after his honorable discharge from the United States Army in 1948 and never confessed to anyone that she hadn’t actually been married when she got pregnant. She told everyone that Lonnie’s father had died in the war. Lou's mother carried that cross on her back until she died. It grew heavier and heavier until it finally crushed her as she lay abandoned in a nursing home in Cochise County. It was Lou who finally discovered that her mother had been scorned by the father of her bastard son Lonnie. She had to laugh when she remembered her mother’s words, “There are no illegitimate children, just illegitimate parents.” She found a slim paper box at the bottom of a carpenter’s trunk and opened the carefully folded GI ration toilet paper on which her mother’s dismissal had been written. She was alone with her three small children in her mother’s old house trying to sort out her mother’s possessions, preparing bottles, changing her baby’s diapers, and stopping to sob uncontrollably at regular intervals. The louse had said something about how “a guy can’t marry a girl like you,” and even knew Lonnie already had a name. Lou's rapist had stood near the toilet when he refused to marry her as she had always believed he would. It was there but she just couldn't figure out what it looked like nor which variables belonged in which drawers, hidden and so safe.

It was the first time she and Maher had been separated by an ocean since they’d been married. He’d returned to Riyadh right after her mother’s funeral, apologizing to her as he threw his suitcase into the rental car and telling her to take good care of the children. It almost seemed as if he was in a hurry or afraid of what Lou might find amongst her mother's possessions. He didn't really want to know, this much she was sure of.

Like calculating time zones, Lou often compared Maher to her friend's husbands, extrapolating behaviors and analyzing him in perfect subjective ways, offering her friends advice on how to handle one situation or another with their Arab husbands. It was this condescending, advice-giving pattern of hers that led to the persistent disloyalty she found amongst them. These were the only kinds of women she knew in Riyadh; women like her married to foreign men, women who moved to far away places to raise yellowish-brown children and who tried their best to prepare lemon-soaked meals in ill-equipped kitchens. One after another they all deserted Lou. The last one, a girl from Ohio named Daisy, accused Lou of abandoning her in Riyadh because of marital distress. She said the move to Beirut was about Maher as opposed to the potential threat of terrorism. Actually, Lou wasn't convinced Daisy had been mistaken even though she had never told a soul, including her closest friend Daisy about the incident in the cab or about the violent arguments she’d had with Maher before leaving the shrinking community of expatriates with whom they had socialized and played softball. She was, however, convinced of Daisy's stupidity. That is, she knew how valuable her friendship should have been to Daisy and felt completely betrayed when she insisted that Lou had ‘covered’, taken Islamic dress, "for the wrong reasons." Bang, gone. Lou considered herself intelligent and in possession of a supernatural intuitiveness and knew just about everything there is to know about Arab men. She also understood her religion quite well, or so she thought. Her conversion to Islam a few years after her sudden marriage to Maher was a natural evolution of thought, an intellectual process. Lou had mentored Daisy in her own image after Daisy met an Arab at one of the parties frequented by the single nurses imported to Riyadh like some exotic harem of medical white slaves, offering her tips and commenting on things like money and sexual conduct. When Daisy converted to Islam herself before marrying Abdullah, Lou kept to herself the thought that the action was premature. Lou had been at it for so many years and had so much to offer a girl like Daisy. Daisy’s daring accusation that Lou’s marriage was in trouble was just more than she could take. Above all, Lou insisted on loyalty and Daisy had failed miserably and taken everything out of context. She'd played with one too many of Lou's variables.

Maher raised his head up out of the Black Hole, which consumed so much of their interest since it had been reupholstered, replacing the cool pastel patent leather with a comfy Tartan velour, and made his usual sound indicating that he was awake and ready for fresh, hot coffee. Lou winced imperceptibly and muttered, "You slept on the couch again, that's not fair," knowing that really, it was better for both of them that way. She could wake up at one and smoke half a long brown menthol and return to bed, sure that her chronic bronchitis wouldn't disturb him as he tended towards light sleeping. It wasn't really light so much as it was watchful. It was as if he sensed something might go wrong in the night with the children or with the marriage and he would jump up violently in a response that seemed more in line with a personal infraction having been suffered as opposed to a small cough emanating from his dearly beloved wife.

It was this same person who had taken her across Riyadh to her first appointment with her therapist, rather, her "social psychologist" as Lou noted when looking through a list of available mental health specialists in the Handbook for Americans Living Abroad, (Riyadh, 1994 edition). Two out of the four listed had moved, leaving a British sociologist who kept a variety of self-help books on hand and the only other available therapist was a good friend of Maher’s, a clinical psychologist whom they had dined with at more than a few embassy dinners attended more for the alcohol than the entertainment or the company. A person takes what they can get in Riyadh in terms of emotional well being and Lou dialed up the British sociologist. The drive out to the compound where the woman lived was silent and traumatic for both of them though less traumatic than Maher had felt when he’d found his wife in a near coma on the bathroom floor a few days before, a vial in one hand and needle in the other. Maher dropped her off at the gate like a courteous stranger, and asked her to call a cab to get back home when she was finished so that he could get back to his office which was tucked into a half-finished, already decaying shopping mall in the center of the city, far away from the therapist’s on the very edge of the Arabian Desert where Riyadh melts into sand and imaginary lakes. Like the abortion, he either didn't know what therapy was or wanted nothing to do with it. Inside the compound, Lou sat down on the curb outside the therapist's door, arriving early enough to locate the private, luxurious villa, smoke several menthols and drink a Diet Coke. The therapist must have noticed her sitting out front, certainly, she must have seen so many just like her on their first visit to her cozy little office nestled in a den just to the right of her foyer. After all, Riyadh was loaded with distressed western women married to Arab men, Lou contemplated, still not knowing whether she belonged there or whether the problem could be cured with something as simple as a trip to America for the summer-the usual cure for women like her stranded in desert climes like Yemen or Oman, Tunisia even. As it turned out, the therapist seemed to know before she ever started to cry uncontrollably half way through the initial visit, what the problem actually was but the difference between her knowing and Lou knowing mandated several more visits, as well as a career change to take her away from the ICU and her dear friend, ketamine, the potent and deadly anesthetic Lou had been injecting several times a day for the better part of that year leaving bruises on her thighs and tiny holes in her antecubital spaces.

"You..." the therapist stated, after how many sessions of listening to Lou list her crimes: her long walks enveloped in ketamine trances through deserted Riyadh shopping malls talking to herself in foreign tongues; her appointments with Chinese Bone Throwers (as she called them) she had kept by looking up strange topics in the Encyclopedia Britannica that she and Maher had bought for the children, topics like Mesmerism or Clairvoyance. She told the woman every crazy thing except the one that might save her life, everything except. "You are afraid to question your husband's authority," as she handed Lou a prescription for Prozac. It was in the end, that simple. Bells rang and the people cheered and Lou got into a cab on her way home for the last time from that luxurious villa tended lovingly by that therapist, only to relive the incident which had precipitated so much turmoil in her life, once again, and over and over until one particular moment on a Sunday at dawn.

His hands were calloused and his breath stunk. Like most of the Pakistanis that drive cabs in Riyadh, his clothes smelled of pureed lentils and just smoked cigarettes. His teeth were rotting except for one pearly incisor and his armpit was visible through a tear in the poorly tailored white collared shirt. He smiled as he slid his hand under her thin abaya and past her knees. She closed her eyes and the crazed driver stopped the taxi just past the old graveyard down in the Wadi Darwish. It was an isolated spot and Heather almost started to scream but somehow nothing came out. Everything seemed to just stop; a bird flew through the bright, midmorning sky and cast a shadow on her hand where it rested on the handle of the back door.

Maher entered the kitchen yawning, at six-twenty insisting that next time, Lou should buy American coffee. "This stuff stinks," he said, tossing half a cup down the drain only to pour another for himself. "And don't put Coffee Mate in it next time," as he waited for her usual comeback, knowing himself he'd never finish a cup of black coffee. He just liked to think that he drank it black, and Lou said so, once again, at six twenty four in the morning. Maher put his arms around her and kissed her on the forehead as tenderly as if nothing had ever happened, ever. It was his resilience that attracted her most, his ability to keep his temper in check sometimes when she was going "berserk" as he liked to say. Berserk. Lou hated that word. Wishy-washy, she hated that one too. There was nothing wishy-washy, berserk about her. She was as deliberate as a wrecking ball. When she had written back to her friend Daisy in Riyadh, she reminded her of her husband Abdullah's impotence. She knew exactly how many more times she would speak to Daisy.

"Let's go to the mountains today," Maher looked across the living room where he had moved to sit and drink his black coffee as he narrowed his eyes slightly. He was checking her for a mutiny and worried about her isolated status in the house all week. Although he seldom said it, he knew all about her private life, knew where she kept her scraps of poetry and knew when she was becoming dangerous to herself and the children. He just chose not to do anything about it. It was as if the entire marriage was the same as his laundry or a stack of dirty dishes, and he had complete confidence in her ability to manage several loads and sinkfuls a day as long as she was carefully supervised and monitored and reminded. Maher also knew she didn't want to go skiing. She never did and always seemed more content to just roam about the house, cleaning corners and mopping up spilled juice, smoking after each completed task and reheating the same cup of sweet coffee that followed her from room to room. It puzzled him that the house wasn’t cleaner.

"My back's hurting you know and the cold makes it worse Maher. You know that," reaching around and grasping the spot where she had been injected with Xylocaine and Morphine the week before. It had been a long few weeks since the tumor had been spotted and only a few days since she'd been freed from her worries altogether. The urologist inserted a fiber optic tube into her bladder and when she awoke from the Versed that the kind anesthesiologist had given her, Dr. Fahed announced to her "no tumor." Lou wasn't sure if this was good news or bad. She'd enjoyed being sick, enjoyed the thought of being tended like a delicate flower and worst of all, enjoyed the thought of dying. Her depression wasn't just any kind, it was self immolation in slow motion. It was an invisible friend, a friend who helped her to extend her precious isolation. It was the courier in her dreams that led her, without being seen on furious night journeys and woke her night after night with a potent lustrous voice.

Maher told her a story once, a story about a tragedy in the small, Lebanese village where he’d spent the first twelve years of his life, a village just like Winslow, Arizona in a curious sort of way. He'd told her so many of those over the years, stories of Biblical proportions, unconsciously feeding her complex type of madness. One though, stood out.

There was a woman, a vain and beautiful young girl married to her own cousin at the age of seventeen. Her husband was known around the village for being a flirt and dressed in outrageous Italian suits, uncommon at that time in their poverty prone part of the world. He made his money in West Africa the easy way. He'd opened a shoe store and found it hard to make all the payments and bribes required of foreign businessmen in the wild frontier of Monrovia. A friend of his suggested that he burn down the shoe store and collect the insurance. They all did it. So he did. The shoe salesman and his wife returned to the village secure in their lavish success and she bragged to all the families anxious for word of the profits to be found in Monrovia, relating to the enthusiastic villagers what a keen businessman her husband actually was. In truth, he was illiterate and his family still hosted an entire herd of sheep in the bottom floor of the family home. The couple bought the first television set in the village and the people flocked to their windows trying to get a look. They built a three story house that looked like a Roman Temple and furnished it with maroon couches and brocade drapes. It is still there, empty, and the room where she burned to death is locked. The dust inside still contains dark particles of her skin. Rumor had it that the couple had gone bankrupt and in a fit of unabating rage the wife doused herself in kerosene and lit herself on fire. The truth was, her husband returned to Africa to recoup the fortune the couple had squandered on brocade and trips abroad and found himself a new wife, a young Liberian girl who cleaned house and prepared meals for the half dozen businessmen who lived in a shabby villa on Benson Street. All he wanted was a wife who didn't demand a private tailor to make her dresses, so many she couldn’t wear. A wife who made him a little less lonely in the jungles on the Ivory Coast. Everyone in the village knew the truth, but few of them bothered to tell it.

That night, having spent the entire day on Jebel Amal knee deep in snow, Lou stood on the balcony wondering if there really were Black Holes out in the vacuum of space. It seemed to her that if she was seeing things in reverse, then she too, was a billion light years old and being seen in reverse by someone else. Perhaps, the sun which had just set in front of her was actually just a giant, grainy timepiece. Lou turned and walked over to the Black Hole and lay down next to her half asleep husband. He moved in enough to cradle her head against his chest and allowed her legs to rest between his own. Forgive and forget, she thought, forgive and forget. Sundays are for miracles.

It wasn't anyone’s fault that the tangents leading to this point were unfortunate and random. Daisy's marriage to an impotent man, Lou's first injection of ketamine after work, the deployment of Peach and Lacy on that flight out of Riyadh. So much happens in the world Lou thought, on weekdays, watching wildlife programming on cable in Beirut. A frog's tongue reaches out and snaps a fly out of mid air. A drop of water causes an epidemic in Suriname. A cab driver's hands spread an internal disease leading to the discovery of something else. Children brush their teeth, or they don't and middle aged couples struggle along, hoping one day not to wake the other in the middle of a long and painful dream, pleading with just one star for something to come along, a meteor or a comet. Hoping for some kind of sign.