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.