What makes you. She figured the reasons. Counted them up, syllo-gistically aloof. The pictures. Like some Central American grotto of gra-cias to the Virgin.
Oh, he called back. That. Step back.
It took her a moment to process. She stepped back. Yes?
Nothing? Step back again. Keep going.
She stepped back as far as she could, all the way to the opposite wall. She looked up again at memory's pastiche. Suddenly each individual picture — each discrete pattern of light and dark — diffused into the dithered dots of a newspaper halftone. Where there had been hundreds of images, there now was just one: a single, gaping composite of a female face. But exactly whose face, the composite lacked the resolution to disclose.
Something moved to the left of the illusion. She looked away. Karl had come back into room, watching her discovery. When he spoke, it was as if all life's ballots were already counted.
I had a box of photos lying around. Most of them were of her. And I had this idea. I don't get that many of them these days. It was just an experiment.
Art made nothing happen. Nothing but what had to.
By the way, he added, she loved your show.
33
I need more to read," you tell Sayid.
He can't grasp the request. They've already brought you a book. What have you done with it? What is this more?
"I've read this one. Finished. Many, many times. I know every word in it No surprises left."
He takes the book away. No new volumes come to replace it.
You must work on Muhammad. He is the only possibility, among the guards. Sayid has a soul capable of sympathy. But he is a simple man, a Bekaa peasant from a poor cotton-farming family, ending up with the Partisans more for the twenty-five dollars a month than out of any strong conviction. In his world, books are not even a luxury. They are an obscene irrelevance.
Ali is even less use. He has gotten bad again, these last two months. He'll come sit in your cell in the evenings, unrolling long campfire tales of who he is and where he came from. Practicing his English, like one of your innocent students. An eager, swaggering boy weaving a valiant epic out of his life.
"You know what my home is?" he says one night. "My home is Shatila." The massacred camp. Another night he claims, "You know Souq al Gharb? I live in Souq al Gharb. All Lebanese live in Souq al Gharb. Americans bomb shit from Souq al Gharb. Shit-scared, from a boat, out in the water! Because they know we will kill them dead if they come to us on the land."
"Souq al Gharb is not my fault," you tell him, behind the blindfold. But softly. You do not want to be beaten. You love your limbs. You may even use them again, in another life.
Ali unloads his story, in bits and pieces — embroidered, enlarged, but now and then, almost by accident, consistent.
"When I was a little boy, I love the Palestinians. Everyone hurts them. They are my hero. Then the Palestinians burn my village. Why do they do this? No reason. Then I am thinking: The Israelis are coming. They are finding these people who kill my father and my father's sister and my mother's brothers, and they are going to kill them. But what do the Israelis do? What do they do?"
He deals you a quick kick in the loins.
"I don't know."
"You don't know? They burn my village down again. Better than before. Why do they do that? Why?"
You tense yourself. "No reason?"
"Big reason!" he shrieks. Someone calls in Arabic outside the door. Ali reassures them.
You hear him advance on you. "They are not good people," you blurt, ready to scramble.
"They are bad people. Evil people." Agreement is as violent as argument. "Then the Syrian soldiers come in. I think, Now a real army will tell the Israelis a lesson. But he fails me, Syria. He stops before he reaches the south. He does nothing. He does shit."
You wade through this brief primer of recent history, trying to remember what really happened. The real chronology lies infinitely far away, political science, a dull, distant abstraction. You can never hope to understand what has happened here. But you must understand Ali.
"Then you Americans invade. You know something? It's OK. I am fine with America. Because maybe now someone is going to end things. Too many years of dying. Too many crazy people. But what does America do? Bomb shit from Souq al Gharb. From a boat, like a shit-scared girl."
A long silence, and you wonder if lessons are over again for the evening. But your teacher simply shifts from history to philosophy.
"No. No. The world wants us dead. Good; fine. The whole world is our Karbala. Too bad for the world. For every violence, we will give a violence. You kill, we kill. You play a trick on us, we bomb your embassy. You bomb our village, we kill your Marines. You think you are hurting us? You are doing good for us. You make us strong. You let Israel destroy Shatila? We kill you on that airplane. You bomb us at Tripoli? We kill three hostages just like you."
He falls silent, the spilled secret flapping in the air between you. One slip kills, in an instant, all your willed ignorance. Your tenacious denial in the teeth of the evidence.
Now you will pay for his error, his accidental confession. "Why me?" you rush out, to switch the game back to the abstract. Distract him with a new philosophical conundrum.
"Look," he says, his voice cold with whatever he imagines to be compassion, "America is not your fault." You've taught him a new word. "But you are America's fault."
You decide not to bring up the subject of more reading matter with Ali.
But Muhammad: he is this local cadre's thinking man. The neighborhood Zuama, the Zaim, the reigning brains. The Chef.
The request only annoys him. "We just gave you a book. You read too fast. You must make it last."
"Muhammad. I'm dying by seconds here. By tenths of a second. Milliseconds. Nanoseconds. My mind…"
He exhales, a single stale laugh. "What is it that you need to read so badly?"
You deliberately misinterpret. "Oh, a nice, fat novel would be fantastic. The fatter the better. Something meaty. Something nineteenth-century. Moby Dick. War and Peace. Bleak House. Whatever you can dig up. I'm not fussy. I'll read anything. Canterbury Tales. Pilgrim's—" "Do not play the fool."
Something stiffens in you. Ready to go to war. You will not apologize for wrongs committed against you. This room is where your life will likely end. Safety means nothing anymore. You feel no need for a softer, later death.
"If you're only going to dribble out one title every time I break down and grovel, at least give me something I can read again and again. Something with some real estate to it."
"You do not know how most of the world lives." "Muhammad, a book costs nothing. I'll pay you back with interest, after you release me."
He flashes at your taunt. "You want us to give you presents." "Look. Look around you. See my luxury suite. See the presents you have given me." It makes you giddy, this flirting with destruction. This parading in front of the beast that will kill you without the slightest accounting.
His voice leans in to you, falling. "This is not your country. This is not a pretty hotel on the beach for rich, white foreigners. You are here for a reason."
You feel your hands fly up toward the sound and snap its neck. The speed of this rage, its easy closeness, scares you worse than the worst they have done to you. It comes out of you. You tear it off like a crust of bread. Press your thumbs into his Adam's apple until it crumples: all over for you, the eternal boredom, the annihilation, the endless, empty lull of self-loathing.