December 17, 2013

Afribian Nights IV: Memoirs of a Concrete Pavement (Chapter 1)

I twisted the stub of my cigarette into the ground and watched the ashes turn from orange to grey in a split second. It was the third one I had absentmindedly consumed in that shadow of an hour, and minutes later I knew I would light my fourth. It had become a habit that was too difficult to break, just like everything else around which my mundane life seemed to be centered. Here I was, back strewn across a cracked wall with nothing but a few joints and the chirps of a cricket to keep me company. My childhood friends, Essam and Nazim, were around; corpses strewn across my backyard's floor, fast asleep under the influence of a sedative that had become too common for young men like ourselves. But it numbed the despair, and that compensated for its haram-ness. I tried not to think about it too much, or to lump my friends as sinners because I was not better myself. Had it not been for the fact that I promised my widowed mother I'd be more of a "righteous man"(whatever the hell that meant), I probably would have sipped myself drowsy to sleep, too.

Earlier that day, I was with Mona, the old college sweetheart I was indebted to for my last twenty boxes of Bringi cigarettes. We had quarreled about her own drinking habits, which seemed futile now. I don't know if I was mad at her ability to numb down her pitiful problems, or if I actually cared for her. Most things became hard to distinguish as life grew fuzzier these days. It had also been a while since I last heard coherent words echo off the walls of a lecture hall. A year ago this would have caused me heartaches induced by the back of a mind that could no longer grow. But now it was manageable. Anyways, nothing deserved my undivided attention and affection anymore; except maybe my mother and Osama, my autistic baby brother. For those two, the air my own lungs needed would become cheap at the cost of giving them a few more whiffs of life. I could not explain this idolatry relationship I shared with my fragmented family. I was not really emotional and I had spent half of my life in isolation. The other half went to waste on the street, selling things that no one really cared for. I did this ever since my father had passed away during Afribia's gold rush. That is the last I remember of my childhood days.

Your father was a good man. My mother had always told me. But as I grew older I found it harder, and harder to believe. Had it not been for my father's greed I would have become a doctor by now, was the only thought that ran parallel to the memory of my father. I could have been working on therapeutic methods to help autistic children—something I had wanted to do ever since the brother I waited so long to play with, threw a tantrum at the sight of a bouncing red ball. Anyways, I didn't have many thoughts to spare for the dead man. The streets grew to father me. Their code was my law, and to maintain a roof over my family's heads, I had to abide by the law.

"Montaser!" Osama called in a whimpering voice.

I shook my head of the bitterness that had filled it. I picked myself up and walked into the house, towards my brother's room.

"What's wrong ya batal (champ)?" I whispered, soothingly trying to pat him back to sleep.

"Osama s-saw bad things w-when he was asleep so he called you and y-you didn't come to save him. Why didn't you c-come?" Osama stuttered, looking down at his fingers while they nervously twisted and untwisted around the loose strings that hung off his blanket.

"I didn't come?! Are you sure? Laa! No, maybe I was just about to come when you woke up. See if you had been patient maybe you could have seen me come in and make the bad things go away." I replied, walking my index and middle fingers up Osama's bony little arm. He anticipated an attack on his ticklish armpit so he retreated as quick as he could, but giggled anyways.

"Oh! Sorry then. I-I just thought you didn't hear me. I'll try again, just come q-quickly okay. I won't call you twice this time."

I held back a chuckle, untied my brother's fingers from the blanket strings they held, and tucked him in. "Okay ya batal. Scoot over, I won't even leave your side."

Laying beside my younger brother, I allowed the subtle rise and fall of Osama's chest to knock me out of consciousness. I don't recall the things I dreamed of. But I do suppose it involved lab coats and better alternatives. Maybe short blissful intervals to the life I longed for, the life Afribia had deprived me of.

The next morning I woke up to the alarm of bullets, and my mother shaking me by the shoulders.

"What?! What's wrong, now?"

"Nayem leha shno?!(Why are you still asleep?!) Where is your brother? Waladi wein?! (Where's my son)" She cried, pounding on her chest with a miserable look on her face.

"What do you mean where is Osama?" I replied, quickly glancing at the empty space beside me, before I jumped out of bed and slipped into my ragged old shoes.

"The country is in flames! Be careful ya waladi!" My mother called, her trembling voice betraying the tears she was trying to hold back.

I rushed to the door and walked out to be greeted by a mass of faces, some I knew, and others I was seeing for the first time. I pushed through the crowd that chanted "Freedom! Peace! Justice!" and watched as tires rolled down the streets in flames. It was terrifying to imagine that my poor little brother, who was afraid of loud noises and the color red, was out here somewhere! I skipped over several shards of glass that were scattered at carelessly organized spots under their broken window frames. It was hard to understand what was going on or why the masses had assembled. I flipped my mind over for ideas as to how all this could have happened bein yom w leila (overnight). I remembered seeing similar sights two years ago at the death of Afribia's favorite singer, and then again at a feeble uprising of scattered revolts. But they were never this... this... loud! Could this be the real awaited revolution? Was Afribia finally tiptoeing out of the shade of tyranny?I was not sure, but none of it mattered as much as the whereabouts of my brother did.

"OSAMA! OSAMA! WHERE ARE YOU YA BATAL?! IT'LL BE OKAY, JUST TELL ME WHERE YOU ARE. IT'S MONTASER, OSAMA! CAN YOU HEAR ME? YAKHWANA I'M LOOKING FOR MY LITTLE BROTHER, HAVE YOU SEEN HIM?" I yelled out again and again, sometimes louder than the crowd, other times in muffled streaks that only I could hear.


Just then, smoke filled the air and people began to disperse. Salty drops of tears began to form, involuntarily, at the edges of my eyes. Where there were ten people around me with footsteps echoing my own, there had now been two unconscious bodies. One of which seemed oddly smaller. My eyesight was cloudy, but I could have sworn it looked like Osama. Confusion, agony, pain, and drowsiness rushed through my body all at once. Then, without any forewarnings my knees buckled. Did I tell them they needed to fall to get a closer look? If I did what were my eyelids doing weighing down on my sight?

"Osama?" I called, as I peeked through my drooping eyelids at the corpse in front of me. "Osama... it's Montaser... I'm... I'm here... it'll be okay." I whispered as I exhaustedly edged my hand closer to cup my brother's face. The last thing I could remember was the shock of a damp sticky fluid that oozed down Osama's chin and onto my fingers.

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I woke up to the pinch of sharp needle piercing into my arm.

"Finally, you're awake. We're in Soba Hospital. The tear gas knocked you out for a while." Said a tall, bouldering female figure in the most matter-of-fact tone. "Hold still. We need to take some blood."

"Where is Osama?" I remembers asking. "The young boy who was next to me, my brother, where is he?"

"Asbet! Hold still!" She repeated. I looked up at her dark face with scrutiny. Her bold features had an intense look of concentration strewn across them. I examined her dusty white uniform, and shoes that might have once been white. She flicked the ends of her sky-blue scarf over her shoulders and looked up to hold my gaze for a split second. I saw that she was trying to muffle some emotion. Frustration? Sympathy? Nervousness? It was hard to tell, she probably masked her emotions quite often at this tired old hospital.

"Yakh asma'eeni, (listen) did the boy I was holding come with me? Do you have him here?" I felt a pang that must have been purposely orchestrated by the nurse to get her point across. "Yakh, Why are you taking my blood, anyways?"

The nurse continued to ignore me while her needle filled up with my dark red fluids. As soon as she was satisfied she turned around to leave, when I grabbed her arm.

"Please! Do you know anything about the boy?! Osama?" I pleaded.

"The doctor will come to talk to you in a while." She replied, yanking her arm from underneath my grasp. "Don't exhaust yourself."

As I watched her back disappear around a corner at the end of the hallway, I reached out for my IV tubes and yanked them out forcefully. This was the second time I had dozed off while my brother was, God-knows-where. If anything happened to him, I would have no one but myself to blame.

"Excuse me! What do you think you're doing?!" Yelled nurse "asbet" from the farther end of the room. "Stay where you are, you're in no position to be moving around. Listen, ma tghalebni! (don't trouble me) There are hundreds of others I need to attend to, so just stay in your..."

But I would not listen, I was already tying my shoe laces. I had to find Osama.

"He's in the operating room." She blurted, flatly.

There it was—my worst nightmare in its most vicious forms, reenacting itself at that very moment.

"What?!" I bellowed

"I'm sorry. He was shot. That was what the blood was for..." She replied, almost sympathetically. "Now can you please stay where you are. The doctor will tell you the details. Just stay for a few minutes."

I looked down at my feet, begging them to move. But they would not budge. I did not know how long I held that frozen position. I imagined the grief and disappointment that would shatter my mom's heart. How was I going to tell her that her youngest son was shot, while her eldest was asleep? How would I live with myself? More importantly, how could I live without my brother?"

"Ya ibni? Ya ibni. Son? Son, can you hear me?" A balding man repeated, as he shook me by the shoulder. "Son I need you to listen to me. Are you okay? Do you know where you are? I need you to talk to me."

"Is he okay?" I managed

A few minutes seemingly dragged themselves into an endless silence, and as I looked up at the doctor's face I understood.

"I'm so sorry, son"

"Where is he?"
"The shot was aimed directly at his head, and we did everything..."
"'Everything we could, but we still couldn't save him? This is God's will? You're so sorry?'" I furiously mimicked, "Listen, I know you have patients to attend to, just cut the crap and tell me where he is."

"They want you at the morgue to identify the..."

I dashed past the doctor and followed the signs to where the morgue had to be. I could not cry, I could not yell, I could not breathe. I was numb, broken, and very much confused. As I walked towards the room that reeked with the stench of soulless bodies, a man in a blue and black army suit nudged me to a halt. I looked down at the butt of the Kalashnikov on my chest, then up at the man who was holding it there to stop me.

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