The mortar pounding falls off, its rounds expended. The two of you lie side by side, silent in the gulf that climax creates. Returned, you need to know. To ask her where she was just now, since she wasn't here with you.
Where was I? The question maddens her. She will not be bullied. East Moline, she tells you. How's that? I was in East Moline. With?
With fifteen dollars. Burning a hole in my pocket.
To see?
To see a man about a dog.
Even her kindness is arch, deflecting. Nothing like a little more nuzzling to shut a man up. You have no choice but to honor her offer. You slide her toward you, prelude to your coming together again. But just as suddenly, she stiffens.
You ask her what's wrong. What you've done this time.
/ don't like being moved. You're too much bigger than I am.
You throw your hands in the air. Affection is over for the evening. But your bodies stay close, flush, frayed, afraid to move away from each other into the wider chasm.
/ would love to see you happy, you tell her. I would do anything to see you at peace.
You hear the false note, even as you make it. Love, that placating condescension. Aren't we past that yet, so late in this distance run?
Look. Gwen. Trying for softness. Trying for balance, for some good-faith connection. I came into this relationship pretty easygoing. You wouldn't know it; I'm really very generous by nature. But you are slowly turning me into exactly the controlling, manipulative male that you're afraid I am.
I don't think you're controlling, she states. / don't think you're manipulative. She dares you to call it a concession.
The world is all militias, you want to tell her. All power, factions, and revenge. There is no place else but the one place we can make.
Everything bloody and dead, except the two of us. But even that much would be begging.
I don't think I should have to second-guess myself every time I need… something from you.
I don't think you should have to, either.
You hear it again, her arms curling up in a defensive clinch. The bitter readiness to stay at war forever.
Truce, sweetie? White hankies? Halfway out between the trenches?
She detonates. It's never enough for you, Tai. I am meeting you halfway. You don't want me halfway. You want me ten feet past you on the other side.
Look. Pointless syllable, buying time until you stop shaking. Look. Just tell me. Do you want to be with me? Make a life? Is it worth all this
endless…?
A silence. Finally, she will be wide, will return, in kind, the surrender you want to give her. Finally she will leap free, meet you for that smallest mutual swap of sovereignty, the first exchange of trust you both so badly desire.
Well. Of course it's worth… But you make it sound like it's my—
Just say. Just say you love me. Once. Without countering.
Tai. What…? How…?
The rage courses through you again, as powerfully as when she spoke these words to you for real. Oh to hell with you. Why don't you just pack your fucking antiseptic overnight bag and… You swing your hand around to point at the window, or where the window would be, if it weren't sheet metal. This sealed aperture, twisted around in mental geography to align with your old southern exposure, the true-to-life direction of… go home.
Oh God. She falls away from you, cowering, as from the silenced mortar. Her voice goes spectral. Spooky. On the edge of an ocean you don't want to imagine. You were going to hit me.
All night long and into the following day, you redirect the scene. You adjust the mistaken angle of your backhand. You alter the words, change the pacing, fix the crooked gesture. Pay the penance of replay, summon up all the correction that editing can offer. Do everything in explanation's power to heal the misunderstanding. You reshoot everything for hours, trying to convince her, convince yourself, that the blow she ducked would never have been possible. That the anger you were feeling and the anger she saw were not the same.
Someone knocks on your door. You rise to open it, amazed to find her standing in the dingy, unguarded corridor. She has come back, in tears, wanting some better last word. You rush out to meet her. But the speed of your advance scares her, and she turns to run.
You rush after her, to prove that you can't hurt her. No guards stop you; it happens too quickly. She flees your attempted comfort, terrified. She stops, cowering, her arms above her head. You take her arms gently, to lower them from her face once and forever. She stiffens, and you pull harder.
In the flash of an instant, the tug escalates into the full contest. Now you could truly hurt her, slap her hard, to stop her struggle, to carry her back into the room's safety before the larger insanity finds you out here. And in that moment of violence, you are everything she has feared in you, everything she always knew was knocking around inside you, awaiting only this awfulness to be born.
She disappears. Throughout that dry season, she will not come back. But she leaves behind something more useful than remorse. For in that impulse chase, she has taught you how to spring from this prison down to the street below.
You pace yourself. You draw out the exercise in stages. You work up the block of Lincoln Park immediately outside your building. The goal is largesse, weight, a map on the scale of an inch to an inch. You stand still until every contiguous brick and block of concrete reconvenes. No gaps: you refuse to step down the street until every fuzzed foot fills out with casements and moldings.
Seventeen doors on your side of the street. Twelve, plus two shops and a parking garage on the other. Four stories of apartments, shoulder to shoulder, each one occupied with lives scavenging for scraps of love, scrambling to keep current, scrabbling to survive on the crust of the world's collapsing infrastructures. You move through this staggering set, a denser network than your eye ever made out when you actually lived there. Half a residential block lays out a universe so nauseatingly profuse that you need the safety of your cell even to consider it. Your Qur'an is right: the God of Creation is as close as your own jugular. And as far.
Your cell sits inside a similar hive, the hive in its own warren, the warren in a neighborhood as dense as the one you reconstruct. You try to walk abroad here, too, but every attempt fails. You can no longer resolve the school, or the faces of your students. For all the weeks that you lived there, your Beirut compound now stands locked to you. You can't even say what floor you now inhabit, let alone the size of this building. From the sound of traffic, the street lies no more than two flights below you. You try to fall quietly to this pavement, but can't. You open the door and take the stairs, but the city waiting at the bottom of the stairwell is never this one.
Lives swarm on all sides of you, through these walls, across the gully of street that the sun must surely warm and expand. Other lives live out their existences not a hundred feet from you: other Westerners, bargaining chips in a game the point of which even the principal players no longer remember. You hear their scrapings, their muffled back talk to the guards. You savor the evidence of their hurried ablutions as you rush through your own bathroom runs. But you can't see them, can't
make them out.
A hundred meters farther out, two hundred, half a kilometer: your throw nets tear under the haul. Hundreds of thousands of Lebanese of all denominations live locked away in holes that bless yours by comparison, with no world superpower, however impotent, to demand accounting for their treatment. You put yourself in these streets, but they vanish beneath your feet. You've learned the ability to venture forth at will. Full-color, high-resolution. But always only Chicago. Always the near North Side, life before lifelessness found you out.