The Last Rectangle Page 2

  Each session had its different chief editor whose task was simply to be the moderator, the stringer of pearls, the welder, the merger. I was chosen to be the first chief editor and I could not have fallen on a more oblique day. Everyone had something prepared which they threw down like cards on the table.

  The first piece I saw chronicled the collection mania of two brothers. They collected a piece of glass from every building whose window panes were shattered by the bombing. They collected shrapnel. They had one issue and only one from each militia magazine. As I sifted the small notes around, I found myself engrossed in one that had small paragraphs. It was about a group of middle aged men each balding or fat or graying or with ulcer. They met once a month in an empty flat that belonged to the cousin of one of them. There, they kept a full rock band kit: drums, electric guitars, amps and mikes. Once a month, they took off their skin and went back 25 years to play the pop tunes of their time.

  I slid that paper under the rest and started reading the next without knowing what was to come: 3 young friends went around the town looking for ways that the Beirutis had generated to communicate with one another about severe issues in the war. The hose on top of the petrol pump to signify the station is out of petrol. The telephone number on the wall of a blown up store advertising stainless steel shop shutters. The story went on to list several such signs, mostly indicating shortages or warning of dangers to come.

  The last note I read was about a potential suicide who had placed a contract killer on his own head and then regretted it and could not reverse the order.

  I was not getting anywhere and they knew that, so we automatically switched method. Rather than worry about how to start the novel, we placed a quote from Neruda right in the middle and started to build the novel to and from it:

  “The bishop raised his arm,

  He burned the book in the plaza

  In the name of his little God

  Turning to smoke the old leaves

  Worn by obscure time.

  And the smoke does not return from the sky.”

  That proved propitious. There were enough objects to develop. God was there too and religion and books. This excited everyone. They all left laughing loudly. Months went by as the snake grew from its center outwards always coiling, always bending and slithering. We worked by instinct and without argument. We did not need to justify the choice of sentences that we threw in. They just had to work or be discarded.

  At night, Nassib would reread the novel to himself and try to translate it to see where the universality was being betrayed but that was just an exercise.

  One day, we met and waited for Labib to show up before starting to work. He did not. We tried to call him or trace his whereabouts. No such luck. Later that week, Nassib saw him in Hamra and asked him why he had not joined us. He received vague mumblings. He stopped coming altogether which threw us out of balance with such strength that we decided to rewrite the whole novel removing Labib’s contributions. Sadly, these were impossible to identify. Another suggestion was to replace Labib by another friend. But this was not a string quintet where you can ask another cellist to sit in for an absent one. The smoke had gone too far up the sky to be stopped. We agreed to publish the novel as it was and started searching for a publisher. No one would take the novel. Each damned publisher wanted to meet the author.

  One day Labib showed up with a mischievous look on his face. He had been to one of these publishers and had recited the whole novel by heart thereby claiming authorship. We had two choices. Either we jump on Labib and throttle him, forcing him in the process to retract his actions or to join hands once more and attempt to complete the novel letting it get published under any name, Labib or whomever, as long as it gets published. Labib motioned for quiet and to markedly increase the tension, he poured himself some red wine, slowly swirling the glass around with one hand as he poured with the other. The publisher was supplying an ending.

  The Crab

  I am a man of options. I am not constrained by anything. I know no corners, only walls. If there’s too much traffic on one road, I take another. I make my own life by beating it to its possible choices. I force it to present me with situations where at least two alternatives exist. I have no memory of the last time I had unwillingly taken an only choice. My cynical friends fall into 3 groups. One group neutralizes my ways by saying that if I am a man whose every situation has more than one option, then I am forced to the only choice of always having more than one choice. But can’t I just do nothing when faced with a single path, hence always provide my single prong with one more exit?

  Another group says that I deceive myself and pretend to accept choices that others would not take only to provide myself with extra options. A choice not taken because it is not wanted is not a choice. This is like the definition of a crisis or a dilemma where no choice is acceptable but one always emerges from the dilemma having taken one outlet out of more than one possibility.

  A third group clamps my slippery argument between the points of birth and death saying that I had to be born and I have to die. True, but being born is a zero choice: not my own. Dying is not a choice of mine either and I will not even be there. At that moment when all my logic will self-destruct I will be an experience for you and not for me and therefore death in itself is again a zero choice. But if they prefer another defense, then death is my second option at any time in my life since I can always choose to die and hence I will always have at least one option.

  Dead Cars

  In a war like this, our government takes great concern to ward off any danger to our country. In its efforts, it often introduces measures that keep the citizens guessing, but such is the trust we have in our leaders that we always proceed silently to implement the decreed steps without questioning. Each war brings its own decrees. More: each phase of the war has the government rallying new methods.

  We heard the announcement on the radio in the morning. Tonight, one in each ten citizens will drive his or her car to the square behind the Cinema Plaza to receive instructions. Each car is free to carry as many passengers as the owner cares. Knowing our traditional lack of punctuality, the government requested each owner to arrive at a time of his choosing between midnight and 2 in the morning.

  The early announcement gave us the necessary time to organize meetings, ten in each, to select the one in ten car owners to drive to the appointed place. All day long along the sides of the streets, we saw groups in families, pairs or single individuals in circles surrounding one or two persons who had selected their own method of singling out the one in ten.

  Groups disbanded without fuss. The one in ten car owner inevitably drove to a car wash to have the car cleaned.

  During the afternoon, there was a hush. Those selected to be the one in ten did not have the desire to move around in their cars. The rest felt an oppressive silence the nature of which one only feels when there is a war in the distance, unheard but distinctly near. It felt like the end of a hot weekend.

  The exact opposite took place around 8 in the evening when people, selected or not, became restless and began to roam the streets in their cars. Cars were full. Buses were full. Cinemas were empty. Restaurants that gave on the street were full of people: not eating, simply sipping coffee and watching the streets. Every now and then a military vehicle would pass. No one dared imagine whether these vehicles were selected or not.

  Gradually, men with similar clothes began descending from some of the cars and taking positions on the corners of streets. They talked very little to others, but very casually. There was a rumble in the distance that made them look over their shoulders briefly and then return to examine the streets with shifty quizzical eyes.

  By eleven or so, traffic dropped until it died down to a trickle just before midnight. We then saw the cars, the selected clean cars carrying one, two or more persons, aim at Cinema Plaza. With calm, the men in similar clothes ushered
the traffic towards the square. We ran along the street to follow the cars and then cautiously strolled by the men with similar clothes feigning an air of ignorance hoping they will not stop us. They did not. We walked on to the square. More men in similar clothes. In the square, cars were being screened, the drivers given small forms to fill.

  Then the cars moved on through the now only open exit of the square. We ran or stumbled across pavements and garbage cans to see where the selected cars were going.

  Traffic was being directed up the long street leading from the square to the textile stores. Cars wound their way into a side street and all along the back streets to reach the Corniche. There the cars were being directed and were advancing more slowly than the swarms of pedestrians, but all in the same direction: the Pigeon Rocks.

  We ran ahead where a mock bridge was set-up. It was more like a roller coaster track, leading from the street, over the pavement, then to the right and over the slope that reaches down to the coast, steep, the coaster, very steep, then bending right again and then up a little with the last few planks leading to an emptiness around 15 meters above the water of the bay south of the Pigeon Rocks.

  But on the street, right before the mock bridge, men in similar clothes had stopped the cars and were requesting all those inside to get out except the driver. Each driver had to pull the hand brake up, open the driver’s window and get out of the car and stand by and just outside the door.

  Further back, everyone was being asked to turn their lights off. A small man with a megaphone issued the same commands to the throngs on the balconies facing the little bay.

  People clamored over, under and by the mock bridge. All the cliffs around the bay were loaded with citizens. Thirty minutes after midnight, the first command was issued. The first owner reached into the window of his car and gently released the hand brake and gave the car a gentle push. He then left the grounds. As the first car rolled down and around the mock bridge, the next driver was asked to do the same. The third rolled up to the entrance and having seen the example of those before him, proceeded to do the same without further instructions.

  The first car sped down the track and then rose upwards and into the air. It dove into the water making a large splash which made everyone gasp relieving the tension built up through the day. The second car drew less noise from the glass-eyed crowd. The third went down without a sound. This went on for 3 hours with only the sound of the splashes and an occasional dull metallic thud as cars crashed into one another in the depth of the bay.

  We woke up next morning with the fresh air of confidence that we always feel when we are given the chance to see the mechanisms of our government as it maneuvers ways and means to protect us.

  The Last Wish

  As the judge read his final speech, I was too hazy to distinguish between the verdict and the option that I may have a last wish. In my cell, the proceedings of the trial seemed like a figment of the past so much so that it was all so irrelevant. I was here and I was tired so I slept and had no dreams.

  I will ask the guards for a last wish in any case, they cannot refuse it.

  The law says that I can have a last wish but it is ambiguous on this issue. As our mind is constantly generating wishes and needs, does this mean that we can only have our very last wish, the one before execution and can have no other wish or that we can have one more wish than what we normally would have had had we not been sentenced to death? The law has a primitive understanding of human psychology and always assumes that human beings have stock patterns of behavior and will hence have stock reactions.

  The guards refused to talk to me so I placed my request in a pristine and clear manner. No one can ignore an iron-clad argument. My last wish is that I have my last wish now, out of sequence.

  I could tell by the shifting outside the door that they were taking turns to stare at me through the peeping hole as if I had just transpired and as if before that my cell had been empty.

  Another span of silence passed when I presumed that each guard was going over my wish in his head, drawing further conclusions from my unbeatable logic. But they did not and I knew to what abysses my argument can unfold. You see, the way I stated it already confused them. If that were my wish, to have my wish now, then am I allowed to have another wish, now, or is that wish, to have my wish now, the only wish I can have? But if they were to grant me that wish, then they would have to grant me another by virtue of what it states.

  If they had taken time to think further instead of suddenly breaking into a furious knocking spree on my door, they would have discovered that my iron-clad argument is not so tight after all. For supposing my wish had been that I wanted 2 wishes, can they refuse me that? And what would I do with these two wishes? Well, I would wish with the first one what I really wanted and with the second, I would wish for another 2 wishes and so on. Where will it end?

  But I think that the strength of the first wish hit them so hard that they could only knock more furiously on my door, in itself the most illogical of requests, for a knock is a request, a wish that can only be answered by someone who can open the door and I could not, so I was already well on the way of reversing our roles.

  But then one has to strip the logic of last wishes to its bare bones and then be able to realize that a last wish is not unlimited else it would defeat the purpose of putting someone in prison and giving him a sentence, for then what would forbid him from requesting that his last wish would be to have his sentence annulled? So where are we? Is it true that there are such restrictions, or is it my own logic that makes me believe so strongly in such a finality that I would remove such a request from the space of possible requests? Or maybe I was only extending the argument along tracks delineated by them without resorting to a trial? Has anyone tried it before? No! Therefore, no one can annul his sentence by merely wishing this to be his last wish.

  So now it was my turn to alternate between staring through the peeping hole and knocking furiously on the door. I was running out of time and I realized that they may be waiting for me to voice that request which I had earlier requested immediately. Alternatively, they could have imagined that my knocking is signaling the first prisoner in the history of mankind who will request his sentence to be voided.

  Whatever they were expecting, I did not know, so when they opened the door I found myself voicing a last request that had not been played in this masquerade of if’s and then’s.

  I wished to postpone my wish till tomorrow noon. Was that my wish or was my wish to be voiced tomorrow noon? Surely, if they gave me the chance to postpone my wish, I would have had my wish which would be that I have my wish tomorrow. They can say no, which they did, you are not allowed to postpone your wish, another one of those restrictions on last wishes that are unstated and definitely untried. But I did postpone my wish. What can they do?

  Next day, I gave them my request: I wished to have the size of my cell expanded. There was absolutely no reason for this wish and a wish without a reason defeats the needs and desires inside the man who wishes it and hence is no wish at all. I told them that I really had no reason for that wish and therefore it does not really qualify as a wish. They were left with the inescapable task of expanding my cell and exempting me from counting this as a wish, let alone a last wish.

  (Incomplete)

  Interrogation 1

  He wished to see the face of his interrogator, maybe it would add sense to the questions posed to him. It did not help him either when the current interrogator would recede back into the circle of darkness surrounding him only to be replaced by another, seemingly different but equally faceless. His hope would swell, maybe the tone of the voice, the pace of the questions or even the use of some special words would provide the hold he was after.

  But each time the figures shuffled around, the voices and questions grew the same, a harping beat, a multiple vision that slowly weakened his memory. Interrogators became isolated
questions, strings of words without any sense.

  The bright light did not help either. Every now and then he tried to move his head sideways, maybe the new position would allow him a partial view of the face he was trying to reconstruct. A hand, no doubt belonging to a previous face, would dig its fingers into his scalp and position his head where it was required to be while another two on his shoulders would firmly place him in his seat.

  A while back he did utter a few responses, he had forgotten what, but he did remember them having no effect on his interlocutors. It awed him to realize that the laws of language and discourse which are meant to uphold the truth, query it and seek it, always assumed the interrogated to be lying. But he was not.

  Now he was not responding. He waited for that change of style in his interrogators that would replace the long wished for look in their faces. It did not arrive. Instead, the pace quickened. Same questions reappeared clothed in different garb. He could no more differentiate between questions, allegations and demands for admission. Little flashes in his mind seemed to remind him only of the last few uttered words. As they interleaved with silhouettes, hands and bright circles, the interrogation became a continuous buzz, a bright white noise, no change, no sense.

  The light was getting brighter, hurtling into his face, his eyes straining under the dual pressure of intense brilliance and a pounding redness.