Khalil sat facing his silhouette reflected in the black screen. His hair — thin, receding, and increasingly wispy — was pitiable, but it had valiantly resisted every dose of chemotherapy. He raised his hand in a salute of bulging green veins and perspiration to the band of brave soldiers who appeared as the opening scene of Mission Impossible 2 wiped his face from the screen.
Once again the sound of gunfire filled the air and dead bodies were strewn everywhere for the dawn angels to wade through. This was the tenth movie Mu’az and Khalil had watched in the last fifteen hours. Mu’az was sitting at the top of the stairs, resting against the bare mud wall, which had been warmed by the sandstorm wind. He looked at Khalil’s profile: it was growing longer and thinner, like the nose of an airplane waiting until air resistance was at its lowest to take off. Khalil was sitting in his permanent spot on a sponge mattress on the bare floor of the roof, facing the TV. It had been two weeks since his last chemo session; the doctors had halted his treatment and sent him home to die.
“We can’t ignore this low white blood cell count any more. His body can’t take the treatment; it’s doing him more harm than good …” That was their way of saying nothing was working. “The shortness of breath you’re experiencing isn’t just a side effect of the chemotherapy,” they explained. “The cancer has spread to your lungs and is now moving toward your heart, which, as you know, is already in critical condition.” Theirs was less a diagnosis than the description of a battle in which the massed ranks of cancer advanced on his heart and no counterattack was in the offing.
“How can you send someone away to die alone?” The thought weighed on Mu’az. What recitation could keep him company in his loneliness? He wanted Khalil to recite the Surah of Sovereignty but he didn’t dare suggest it, so he got into the habit of sitting a short distance away and reciting under his breath and blowing the words toward Khalil while he was engrossed in cinematic bloodshed. The flames of the Surah of Sovereignty battled with the explosions and amplified Hollywood sound effects; Mu’az stumbled sometimes but he continued reciting. Khalil looked over at him and noticed his twitching lips.
“It’s no big deal,” he tried to reassure him. “It’s just like bringing a child into the world … Its very first breath is the beginning of a countdown that always ends in death.”
The cancer had filled the void left by the loss of al-Lababidi’s house, which had removed him from the scene. Mu’az and Khalil had formed a front so tight that the cancer could have probably continued its spread from Khalil’s liver straight over to Mu’az’s. With the determination of the early mujahideen, Mu’az neglected his photography so he could devote all his time to fighting the war. When Khalil decided he was too tired to visit the hospital three times a week — once for chemotherapy and twice for serum — Mu’az learned how to administer the subcutaneous injections so he could do them himself.
When the pain got too much for Khalil, he would lie stiffly on the mattress staring at unending scenes of compulsive violence on TV. The Surah of Sovereignty would sink, with heavy sadness, into Mu’az’s heart, as he muttered it, sneaking looks at Khalil who was growing thinner by the second. He couldn’t keep a morsel of food down, and the poison of the chemotherapy, which had sapped the strength from his muscles and joints, left his movements sluggish and clumsy. He’d begun to appreciate science fiction more, though, and he watched the action movie that was playing out on the screen of his body with pleasure, wearing a smile of happiness and nausea.
“Imagine if Ramziya were here now.” He always came back to Ramziya and her faith. During their one short week of marriage, she hadn’t given up. She’d spread herself all over him as though she were a miracle fertilizer that could revive his dead sperm to create a child. Maybe that was what scared him: she had challenged his love of self-destruction, which he’d begun cultivating with his first death, when at the age of twenty he encountered those science fiction liquids—5FU, MVAC, CMV — for the first time. They were like strange weapons out of Star Wars that the doctors dripped, infused, and pumped into his blood, where they remained for hours, days, months, transmuting him and exterminating his sperm … He was nearly fifty now and the invading creatures had lost interest and flown away in their spaceships; there was nothing left in him worth destroying.
“What does a person do when modern science gives up on them?!” The question he posed to Mu’az tugged at his own heart as well. This “modern science” they talked about was like a present-day god who’d turned his back on Khalil and denied him his miracles. The storyline chattered away incessantly inside his head: “They said go and die. But Ramziya’s faith said, ‘Be patient and you shall see those same doctors drop dead before the cancer ever reaches your heart.’ You’re a cancer old-timer now, I might add … Death can’t stand to live inside you!”
Mu’az stuck to Khalil’s conviction that he’d make it through, picking out the Quran’s miracle verses to strengthen his hope that a miracle would land on the roof of the Arab League to rescue Khalil. The imam’s son clung for dear life to Khalil, the last of the heroes of his lost paradise: he snuck up to the roof of the Arab League every day to sit there with one eye following the movie and the other watching Khalil’s breaths for fear they might suddenly stop while he wasn’t paying attention. The cancer might penetrate Khalil’s ribs and leave him rotting up there in the heat … Khalil put up with Mu’az because he brought with him his flashlight smile, his cunning way of looking at life, his faith that images were a worthy substitute for reality. The two shared that sinful faith in the image as a path to resurrection.
Sometimes Khalil was silent for hours, each second an age during which he directed all his senses to the pain, following the cancer’s rapid progress and the decisive moment when it penetrated an organ. It passed from kidney to liver and liver to stomach, and then it broke through his diaphragm decisively. He felt his fragile lungs quaking as it advanced, felt the suppurations at the base of his trachea anticipating the final surrender of his heart at any moment. It was times like that that Khalil would go blind and deaf and lose his ability to concentrate; a feverish pallor would come over his skin, as if all of the supply train of life had been cut off. At times like that, nothing could get through to him except jokes about Ramziya and violent action movies. Mu’az realized that the violence answered some deep need in Khalil, so he began feeding him those movies to keep him going. He came by in the morning to pick up two hundred riyals and returned in the evening with a dozen videotapes at fifteen riyals each, old and brand-new releases alike: X-Men: The Last Stand, The Bourne Ultimatum, 300, Spider-Man 3, Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End and Dead Man’s Chest, Transformers, Miami Vice, Poseidon, BloodRayne, Underworld: Evolution, Second in Command, The Guardian, Road House 2, Living & Dying, Cut Off, Snakes on a Plane, The Detonator, The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift, Hellboy: Sword of Storms, Fearless, Bon Cop, Bad Cop, Undisputed 2, Connors’ War, Machine, Lord of the Rings, Ocean’s 11, 12, and 13, The Matrix 1 and 2 … After a while the titles and actors became irrelevant, sunset and darkness followed sunrise and still Khalil’s eyes were glued to the 45-inch plasma screen. He scarcely noticed when one movie ended and another began: the main thing was to keep the scenes of war coming, to stab the enemy inside him with every heroic move or brave martyrdom performed by a character in his stead. The movies grew into one endless reel, starring Khalil’s own cells.