Why? Guilty favorite or something? Was he so hot with foliage?
Adie didn't explain. Her need had nothing to do with the man's technique. She needed to see the colors behind that grimly named panorama, its name as long as the painting itself: Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?
They did Gauguin, blessedly not all that convincing. I've seen better Gauguin imitations on cruise-line brochures.
Sue brayed. Tell me about it. We wrote this great filter. But we didnt know who in the hell it looked like.
Marc, Adie declared. Franz Marc.
You're the expert. Sue pulled up à Ñ shell and jiggled the label of the offending menu. Gauguin became Marc, even more easily than he had in real life.
You want to write a decent Gauguin? We can start with this one and monkey with the parameters.
You mean to tell me I can be anyone? That every conceivable style…? That everyone's hand in the history of Western…?
Princess. Chill. Whatever we can describe, we can reproduce.
They played out the remainder of their reserved time slot, until Sybil Stance's climate modeling group came and kicked them out. By the time Klarpol and Loque left the Cavern, their laurel had become the spitting image of that bouquet just behind the sofa in Rousseau's Dream. A bouquet that never existed, until they plucked it and placed it there.
7
The staff at school exudes a nervous optimism that no one will jinx by speaking. They give you the guided tour prepared for all new hires. They leave the school driver to orient you, although all parties tastefully avoid that verb.
"I take you anywhere, Mr. Martin. You tell me, I drive." He brings you down a newly broadened thoroughfare. On all sides of your closed car, life returns to trade. You pass the financial district and the open-air suqs, once more breathing with people. The anti-Ottoman statues in Martyrs' Square seem almost crater-free, from a distance. You hook around the Corniche along the Riviera, avoiding the checkpoints.
Here and there, steel girders tear loose from the sides of blasted buildings, dragging along sprays of concrete veil. Balconies crumble off high-rises like so many dried wasp nests. Freshly scrubbed laundry hangs from those that remain, blinding white flags flapping in the Levant sun.
Here is the Paris of the East, the once-chic orchid of the eastern Med. You speed along the shredded Rue des Banques to a palm-lined plaza, down by the turquoise bay. Fifteen minutes after setting out, the chauffeur spreads his hands in the air, palms up, disarmed. You see? Things are calming down. Returning to livable. "Where does that street lead? No, this one here." "Ha. Don't worry, Mr. Martin. Very boring. Very nothing." "Can we head down this way? I'd just like a quick peek." "Later, maybe. Inshallah." God willing. As if healing required hiding the wounds.
No matter; you see it already. The thing your friends back home saw, even before you left. The thing you've half wished away, half sought out. Just behind the ivory facing, just beneath the glinting amethyst, this world is still shelling itself down to rubble.
You can't help but hear it, rumbling off in the direction of the Metn foothills. A shell barrels overhead, close enough to break your guide's composure. This war is not over. This war will never end. Yet this rumble is no more than cartoon thunder. It growls like linen scraped over a plywood drum. The bursts come no closer to hurting you than score-board fireworks. They detonate impotently, softer than the explosions of your recent American bug-out.
In fact, living on a powder keg has much to recommend it, providing one's driver knows a safe way back to the impregnable compound. A city's self-inflicted scars offer the prospect of unlimited further diversions.
The following week treats you to your first real teeth-rattling blast. The panic passes, leaving you more alive than you've felt in months. An artillery plume rises on the horizon — an old movie's Indian smoke signals. Your life is not yet over, whatever the last two years have insisted. Thirty-three is still young. The future remains your dominant tense. You're alive, unhit. Anything can still happen.
Simply being here proves that. You couldn't have scripted such a trip. Six years in Chicago, explaining your inexplicable country to Japanese businessmen, riding the emotional Tilt-a-Whirl with a miserable woman, keeping body and soul together on a largely ceremonial salary. Now living like a sultan, on hazard pay, in a place even more desperate than that woman.
There is a harsh humor to it: nailing the job interview because of your Muslim mother. Because you don't currently drink, no matter the historical reason. Because they mistake you for one who understands the Faithful. Because tenacious Lebanese need the same English your Japanese businessmen did.
You like them, these violence-inured twenty-year-olds raised along the Green Line's furrow. They possess an intensity you've never seen in any classroom. Pitching one's tent under the mortar's arc does wonders for a student's motivation.
"Why do you want to improve your English?" you ask them, on the first day of your new tenure. The diagnostic icebreaker, cheap but to
the point.
It helps with trade, Phoenicia's descendants inform you. It's the world's second tongue, say the refugees of Sidon and Tyre.
A smiling, bearded Nawaf in the front of the room summarizes. "America bosses the world around in English. We need English, just to tell America to go to hell."
The whole class laughs. When learning another language, comprehension always outstrips production. It's true, the class agrees. Americans speak nothing and own everything. The world needs to learn English, just to talk back to its owner.
Your very existence astonishes them. "How can an American have your first name?"
"How can you let yourself be coming from such a place?"
The ones you like best explain the delusions you've been living under. "Black people in your country are killed like sheep here for the end of Ramadan."
"Americans pay forty million dollars to one man for putting a ball in a ring. Instead they could buy hamburgers for forty million starving people."
They offer these earnest indictments of Sodom for your own good. But greater forces attract them to this evil. Their interest reveals itself in dribs and drabs over your first two weeks. "This Rocky, sir? You think he fights so good? He doesn't last five minutes against my cousin with mujahideen."
"This Terminator? He's not so great. Take away the big gun…"
"The Terminator is Austrian," you tell them. "He's not our fault."
"Mr. Martin? What means this? 'I am leaving the material world, and I am immaterial girl'?"
"We'll work on that one next term," you promise.
Ardent children of civil war still bathed in first innocence, they seem strangely unhardened, even by the odds against survival. They might sit basking in the afternoon, out by the marina under the St. George, if that neighborhood still existed. But they stay on, by choice or compulsion, after a million of their countrymen have thought better and bailed. Each of them is too long trained by collapse to continue hoping, yet too angry to give it up. All of them are hungry to learn the true size of the world beyond this city: a world of glossy fictions, stable, rich, progressing, theirs to glimpse only through the shadow boxes of bootlegged videotape.
You are their model, their messenger from the outside world. Your job: to chat them up for hours at a shot, training them to survive the force of their imaginations. You work to hold them to the rules of polite conversation, in a city trying to believe again in the existence of rules. It is, by any measure, the perfect job description — the ticket you've been trying to write yourself for years. A golden existence. All that's missing is someone a little brave, someone just a little kind to share it with.