The Last Rectangle Read online

  The Man with Difficulties

  He was not an easy man. It had nothing to do with how others dealt with him or how he dealt with himself. He was always encumbered in everything he did. But it was not his fault he was that way.

  If he were crossing the street and going to the other side, as soon as he reached the pavement, trouble would start. Even though the pavement would be no more than 20 cm high, when he raised his foot to step onto the pavement, the stones on the edge would suddenly rise. His foot would hit the stone and he would be thrown backwards onto the street.

  Going into doorways was not easier. He would approach a door as anyone else would. He would grab the handle, turn it and pull it towards him, always respecting the Push / Pull instructions religiously. Suddenly, he would feel a tension the likes of which he’d never felt before. The door would open slightly giving him false hope but as he pulled it towards him, it would feel as if there were a massive coil attaching the door to a wall on the other side. Thinking he should be pulling instead of pushing, he would try the latter only to find the door stubbornly closed.

  Carrying bags was something he needed to do. How else could he get his shopping done? But try as he might, each time he tried a different method to lift the bag the bag would do its utmost not to get lifted. Grabbing a plastic bag by the oval holes in the top edges resulted in stretching the thin edge to the point of breaking while the bag stayed heavily on the ground. Trying to lift a paper bag by holding it from its bottom would result in the bag turning over no matter how well he tried to balance it. Using a sports bag with straps was more cumbersome. Having tried the oval holes in plastic bags, he would avoid using the straps. Instead, he would push his hand through the straps and try to hug the bag by threading his arm around its middle. The bag would sag on both sides and prove difficult to carry.

  Driving a car, taking photographs with a camera, using any simple tool like a drill or a water tap were activities he longed to do. But they had far too many dimensions of difficulty. Cameras would start behaving in a manner only possible with intransigent robots. Shutters would shut when he was focusing. Functions would switch so that zooming to enlarge an image would result in getting the image to lose its color and appear in shaded greys. He often felt such equipment were fighting back and refusing cooperation. But were they really different than edges of pavements or paper bags?

  Of course, you could ask, why not get treated? Medical doctors could not do anything about his difficulties and refused to think of the cause as physiological. After all, he passed all checks and tests for every possible physiological anomaly. Psychiatrists said that such problems had nothing to do with the mind. After all, he had every good intention of dealing with the intransigent objects. It was the objects that had to be treated for anomalies. Engineers were brought in after every mêlée. Nothing was found wrong with the pavements, doors, bags or cameras. Others experts were approached: historians, anthropologists and firemen. One literary critic even suggested it could be a literary device but immediately withdrew his comment when his colleagues criticized him for assuming everything was a narrative. A philosopher questioned his religious leanings. He felt that maybe he was considering everything as having a shadow agent or maybe all of them having one agent. But empiricists soon quieted him down saying that reality follows strict natural laws and what the man was facing was possibly a set of unknown but natural forces. One self-indulgent spiritualist brought back the cause to cosmic auras and quantum entanglement but soon recanted when skeptics raised the question of why this does not happen to others.

  But none of his difficulties drove him into desperation. He was not the one who consulted with these experts. They simply found his case interesting and washed their hands as soon as they got nowhere. It was also not a matter of having gotten used to the difficulties either. He had an internal acceptance of these difficulties. He could not imagine the world otherwise. To him, this was nature, this was reality. It was others that were anomalous. Did he find ways around these difficulties? No he did not. Things did not behave the same way all the time. Did he eventually use windows instead of doors? Windows would prove more difficult. Did he start ordering goods by phone to avoid carrying shopping bags? Phones would also prove more difficult.

  But was anything simple for him? Nothing really. If anything were simple at one time, it would be difficult the next. He lived in a world which became more and more complex as time went by.

  It was really one of the wonders of his life that he did not have to place himself in his coffin the day he died.

  The Prince Who Danced

  We had been fighting for weeks when it became clear that we had pushed them into a corner. Their back was to the mouth of a large valley that fanned outwards towards where our hordes were charging. At last, there was a break in the continuous spell of push and repel. The plain was marked with footprints going both ways.

  Our Prince was valiant, always in front of us all no matter how the tide of the fighting fell. The soldiers looked up to him and his countenance became the measure of our success. Now our enemy had nowhere to go but to the small ravines and streams that descended from the mountains. Time was on our side. Time was in the afternoon. A few hours later, we paused the fighting. They stopped too. They had nowhere to go so we might as well rest. We can resume in the morning.

  Our Prince walked around, inspecting losses, checking injuries, talking to the fighters. Every now and then he would recognize a shrub of herbs and would pull a few leaves, mash them between his fingers, hold them close to his nose and then take a deep smell. In most cases, pleasure shone on his face. The noise of the troops diminished with the descending night. We all slept well having fought fiercely throughout the day.

  In the early morning, the din of waking soldiers started spreading around. We could feel the weight of our enemy watching us and who were not too happy about it. Our Prince drank his dark coffee and walked around again, spirits high, injecting his army with the energy it needed to complete the battle. Suddenly, he buckled back with a force that could have snapped his neck. As he lay on the ground, we rushed to hold him up only to find a serious looking spider crawling away, fast. He had been bitten by one of the deadliest pests in the valley. Shouts were heard and the medicine man rushed over pushing everyone away. “He must breathe, give way and stand back!” He examined the bite without changing manner. Then he moved his head back. It was clear he was desperate. We all waited for his decision as the Prince started turning pale.

  He looked our Prince straight in the eye and said, “Prince, it is not good. The poison will go straight to your heart and then it will be over. There is only one thing you can do, which may delay the concentration on your heart long enough for your body to fight it and maybe win its battle. You need to dance, sir, dance with all the strength of your sword and as you do, the poison will be diluted spreading fast all over your body even if it all passes through your heart. We can then bleed your arteries to remove the poison.” At first, the Prince looked on with calm disbelief. He soon came around. “Take me to a spot on a high hill. I want my soldiers to see me”. We carried him on a stretcher, hurtling as fast as we could up a hill in the middle of the plain. Our enemy, who had not slept the night for fear of our surprise attack, was also watching. They were scattered in the various nooks around the valley.

  Our Prince leaned on his right arm and started to stand up, pushing away the many hands that offered to support him. He stood up, tall and solemn. He wrapped one arm around the back of his head. He pointed the other with his open palm straight to the horizon where we came from, away from the valley. Our Prince started turning around, slowly speeding up. No music was heard. “Faster”, said the medicine man. He went on whirling keeping his arms in the same position. As our Prince’s feet shifted with grace, the medicine man crept on all fours and with quick darts, lacerated his calves and thighs with a sharp dagger. He had between his fingers the paste of freshly crushe
d herbs. He smeared them over the little wounds. Green blood spurted from our Prince’s legs and streamed down to his feet. This went on for one hour or so, all of us watching. His color was getting back to its normal hue, tanned and rugged.

  Soon, he sat down, crossed his legs and stared straight at our enemy. “Let us retreat”.

  Eight Variations on No Theme

  The Day When the Sky Fell Down in Front of our House

  I was barely six years old. We were in Baaqline, spending Easter with my grandmother. We had gone to bed by the small wrought iron stove in the sitting room. I still remember the drone of conversation around us: my mother, father and grandmother. Later on, someone must have carried me and my sister to our beds.

  In the morning, I woke up to noises. A lot of people were outside in the garden. Someone was shouting: wake the children up. They must see this. Then someone rushed into our room, carried my sister and me, together, in our pajamas and went outside. It was a cold and dry morning early in March. I felt the rush of the cold air on my face as we reached the western yard. There it was. The sky had fallen all in one piece all around. It covered the trees and the huts. The sky could not cover large houses without stretching, so it got ripped leaving one flat segment on the roof and the rest falling down on the ground exposing the vertical sides of the houses and trees. The sky was made of a spongy material, like thick jelly, smooth and not very porous. It looked like a large opaque blue mattress and with the same thickness.

  My father watched with excitement. As soon as he saw us, he snatched us both from whoever was carrying us and put us on our feet. He held me by his left hand and my sister by his right. He walked around with excitement, all the while stepping over the sky in the garden. Wherever he stepped, he punched a hole with his shoes, just like walking on newly formed snow. In a few days, the sky evaporated and no one talked about it anymore.

  The Day the Sky Opened its Door

  I woke up in the middle of the night with the wind rustling the curtains on the other side of my room. There was nothing between my bed and the window so I could see the whole plain beyond shadowed by the rising mountains. The moon must have been somewhere far and low in the sky because I could see its beams coming into my room, heavily slanted. I could not see the moon itself. The beams came through the window and streamed right down to the foot of my bed. I got up and tip toed onto the beams. I could walk on them. It felt like sliding on an electric escalator. Soon, I was out of the window and the beams were gone but I was rising in the sky. Higher and higher, all the plain and mountains were under me but I still could not see the moon. Very soon, I saw something emerge from the distance. It was a large block and it had very clear edges. I could not tell what it was. As I rose up through space, I came nearer to the block. Soon it would start showing its color, grey with black striations. As I neared, I could see it was a stone door, a door in the sky, hanging without support. It was slightly open, as it was not flat in front of me. Its shadow fell on the empty sky below me. I touched the heavy grey stones and stroked the black striations. I reached over and grabbed the edge of the door and pulled it towards me and it opened. I expected it to creak but it didn’t. I could see the mountains and plains beyond it.

  The Day I Built a Bridge to Space

  My first project in the agency was to build a multi-brick space ladder. They wanted to prove that they can reengineer their methods and do the same things they had done before but at a much lower cost. Furthermore, compared with the traditional mode of launching rockets to place satellites in orbit, this method would result in a more reliable and permanent vehicle. I was promised all the resources I needed. As my project was unusual, I was assigned a workspace in the very back of one of the warehouses, un-ceremonial and far from the reach of the media.

  I had to start somewhere. The height of the steps would have to be between 160 to 320 kilometers. This is the height of the orbits of most satellites. Once the ladder gets built, workers would be able to walk up the steps and deliver the goods to be constructed in situ. I decided to use bricks with a height of 20 and a length of 40 and a width of 10 centimeters. Each step would have a height of 20 cm and we would therefore need 800,000 steps to get to a height of 160 kilometers.

  We had to find a country not far off the equator with a plain long enough to host the 160 km steps. No choice was better than Sudan, south of Egypt. We laid the first level of bricks in two long rails, around 2 meters apart and for 320 km running southward. We then covered the two rails with 2 meter wide planks. We now had a flat road, flat but very long. To prepare for the second step, we laid another two long rails on top of the first row, but offset at the beginning by 20 centimeters. This went on, building row upon row till we reached an altitude of 160 kilometers.

  I was not the first person to reach the top step, 160 kilometers up in the sky. This feat was reserved for the head of the agency. In his eagerness to be covered by the media, he had forgotten that his walk would have to be 320 kilometers long while climbing to a height of 160 kilometers. But the pull of the media was stronger and he did it.

  After that I was moved to another less ambitious project.

  The Day My Courage Went Bad

  I used to pride myself on being courageous. When I thought of something, I would gauge all its angles and would find myself capable of facing it without fear. Those angles that I had not considered were probably of low risk and I did not expect to be afraid of them. I did what I wanted to do without regard for any consequences. You see the clue here was the thinking. As soon as you think of something, it then becomes a word somewhere and words were not scary. Words were between me and the things that should have scared me and they erected a wall that isolated and protected me.

  Recently, I found myself falling into little thought holes. I would be talking to a friend whose wife was pretty. While he would be talking, I would feel an internal pressure building up and directing me to tell him something that would shatter the conversation to an end unforeseen. What if I said, will you let me sleep with your wife? At first, I started finding this funny and daring. In time, I became afraid that my body would actually trick me and manipulate my mouth to ask the question. If a thought became a word, then what was to stop the word emerging from my mouth without my control? Words can stay dormant a long time before they become actions, but they can become actions quite quickly. I did not know what to press to stop words from doing that. At other times I would be in traffic. An asshole would be blowing his horn right behind me. Don’t get me wrong, what I am about to say is not due to road rage. I simply felt that it would be wonderful if I could just stop the car, put it into reverse and slam it into his front. Again, the more I thought of that, the more I worried that I would one day do it. Somewhere inside me was a little engine that I could not control. It was running and was about to lock gears with my arms, mouth and other organs that communicate with the outside world.

  I became more and more aware that there was a reality totally outside me but totally linked through an invisible boundary to the words inside me. I started becoming scared. What if the boundary broke down and the words got converted into actions I did not want to carry out such as slap the manager of a bank I was about to sign a contract with. Or suddenly throw a flowerpot from the 12th floor onto a parked car full of people. I sunk into a depression. The more I thought of those whorls the more hypothetical situations were created and the less courageous I became.

  One day, I tried to subvert the boundary. I said to myself, I cannot be the only one thinking of this. What if without any reason the words of the grocery boy delivering the shopping turned into action and he poured all the vegetables in the bags over me? My words suddenly disappeared. Gone was the worry about the boundary and I became courageous again.

  The Day I Enumerated Everything

  Had I not gone to college that day, I would have sat down and enumerated all the facts that I already knew: red is a color, my car is red, my house i
s red and my house is in Dubai, this road takes you to the supermarket, a bird flew by 1.5 minutes ago. All this and other facts are isolated germs, meaningless but with a forceful existence. There is no relativity: everyone knows the clock tower. Then you go to the state owned library and sit down there for a few weeks and register all facts known to you under your own name, including all the facts about you sitting down to enumerate the facts. Some silly librarian would give you an ID number and it would go into your file. What happens after you leave the library is dark and gloomy. Now you know all that you know so your mind will fix on differentiating anything that you already know from new things you have not known but will. As you walk away, you get torn. Shall I go back to the library and pull out my file just to register that there was a deviation in the traffic that I now know and that I had not known before? Will the librarian throw me out? I looked around me and found a lot of people returning to the library. They must be observing the proper code of conduct and returning to register every new fact they’ve learnt, after all, what were libraries for? But then it occurred to me that people would compete over most of the things they have or do. So why was there no competition? I did not even know how many facts I knew so I could not even compete with others. No one asked me how many facts I knew nor did I hear others asking each other. What should have been natural human competitiveness turned out to be a sedate process.