That overpowering weakness, that helpless sense of the inertia of the universe finally getting the best of me had happened once before in Lebanon, on my first trip to the country a year earlier. After my first stint at Baalbak, the Roman ruins, I took a white van to a little wine city called Zahle. I got off on the main drag, Rue Brazil, and went out to one of the few local clubs in the city. I had a few drinks, but nothing to do major damage, and woke up with a feeling like the world was breaking to pieces around me. I’d come to the town to hit up the famous wineries for some tasting, but there was no way I could drink that day and probably the next, so I sucked it up and caught another anonymous white van back to Beirut. When I got back to the city I went over to Hamra, (though it would be another year before I was aware of all the excellent watering holes that existed there) because I’d heard they had some decent mid-range hotels.
I checked into one and as soon as I got into my room I popped. I threw up and then immediately tried to sleep it off, but before I could fall asleep my body was lurched with an attack from the other end. I spent the next 12 hours existing in a hell that consisted entirely of vomiting and diarrhea. I called room service and had them bring up some giant bottles of water, and though nowhere near hungry I knew I had to put something in my system so I ordered a breakfast spread. The only thing I could touch was the toast. After 18 hours in the hotel, unable to move further than the toilet, unable to eat or hold anything down, barely able to even move the breakfast tray off the bed when a column of ants appeared from nowhere to devour it, I had to admit that this was probably not caused by a half dozen vodka and red bulls. Sometime around midnight I tried to drink as much water as I could and summon up the energy to take a shower and change clothes. I went down to the front desk and asked them to call me a taxi for the hospital.
The cab dropped me off at the nearby American University Hospital and I shambled in. Every muscle ached, my head throbbed, and I probably couldn’t have lifted a folding chair if I wanted to. I was in the hospital alone, after midnight and the hallways were nearly deserted. Some guards finally pointed me in the direction of the reception desk, and I began to fill out forms, but I was having trouble focusing enough to even read what they said. I think I was lucky though, because after the forms were filled out there was no line and they took me straight into a bed in triage. A rather attractive doctor lady came over and I described my symptoms and she asked me about what I’d been eating etc…
I was too laid up to think of even the obvious cause of food poison in the last day. Then, talking to another human being for the first time in about 24 hours it dawned on me. The water. You might not remember it because it happened about 20 pages ago, but a few days before a cabbie had driven me to a mountain village, poured out my bottle of water, and filled it up at that “famous mountain spring.” “The water,” I told the doctor.
The doctor looked at me with a mix of curiosity and pity and it occurred to me that I might have stopped talking about five minutes ago, that my brain was moving at glacial speeds, and I just blurted something out completely out of context. “I drank the spring water in Bcharre.”
The pretty lady doctor hooked me up to an IV of saline and took some blood to run a test. I was left in the quiet, empty triage room for a while as I watched my body soak up the saline like a desert plant. After about ten minutes the entire IV bag was drained and lacking anything going in, blood started going in the other direction, up the tube toward the bag. Knowing absolutely nothing about medicine this seemed to me like a bad thing. I called out, but probably in a weak voice, for someone to come do something authoritative and medical as my horror rose with every centimeter the blood moved up the tube. A male doctor opened the curtain and looking at it actually said, “Damn, that was fast.”
He immediately hooked up a new bag. This one lasted a little longer, but also drained in less than a half hour, and they hooked up a third. I had had no idea how badly dehydrated my bouts of toilet explosions had made me. I don’t know how long it was before the lady doctor came back in and told me that I had Giardia. An intestinal parasite had climbed down that god damn mountain and lodged itself into my intestines with that stupid spring water. After I’d been re-hydrated they gave me a few medicines they said would help the symptoms but other than that they said that I had to just “wait it out.”
I walked out of the hospital not feeling much better than when I went in, and managed to hail a lone cab a few blocks away. I slept for a while and then shambled out to an internet café to find a cheaper hotel to “wait it out” in. I wrote down a few names and addresses and phone numbers, checked out of my hotel and put my giant, now incredibly heavy backpack in the trunk of a cab, and told him where to go. He had no idea where to go. I got out of the cab and closed the door and the cabbie took off down the road…with my bag in the trunk. I could barely walk when I got into the cab but somewhere in me I found the adrenaline to go into a full sprint for three blocks before the cab was finally slowed down by traffic and I hammered the trunk with all the force I could muster before he opened it up. I grabbed my bag and started screaming at him but he looked more indifferent than shamed or angry. People in the nearby cafes starting staring, I had completely lost my cool, and when the traffic eased he simply drove off. The expense of all that energy that I didn’t have to spare took its toll immediately, all I wanted to do was pass out for a month. The backpack felt like it was filled with cement when I finally got it back on, and I walked. I walked, and I asked for directions, and I walked, and I asked for directions and I walked. The cheap hotel, across from the American University of Beirut was close, only ten or fifteen blocks at most, but it took at least an hour to get there. By the time I checked in and got into the small elevator my sense of space and time had become so distorted that I might as well have been floating into space, and not the third floor.
The room was surprisingly large, had a little couch and table area and two beds. The bathroom was small but clean, and the TV had about a dozen channels and two or three were English language. This was home for the foreseeable future. I was asleep before my head hit the pillow.
When I woke up it was dark out. While the last 48 hours had simply been a grind from one awful moment to the next I finally had to take stock of my situation. I was absolutely and completely alone, in a country that was alien to me, a city I didn’t know very well, with a language I didn’t speak, bed-ridden with an intestinal parasite that would keep me that way for god knows how long, not nauseous anymore but still plagued with diarrhea every hour, with a splitting headache, no computer, no internet, and a phone without any numbers in it. I would consider this a rather low point in my travels.
There was a McDonald’s next to the hotel, but even the word Mcdonald’s turned my stomach. There was a convenience store about 50 feet from the hotel. That is the farthest I would move for five days. In the prison of my hotel room I would drink water and Gatorade and eat crackers and bread. Then I would shit all of it out and start over again. I would sleep whenever sleep came and shower a couple of times a day. I read Foucalt’s Pendulum and watched bad action movies on TV. To those of you who know me well, this may mean more, but for a week in that room I didn’t even have the energy to pace. I was still in many ways lucky though. The hotel was cheap and my bank account was flushed with cash anyway. I still had another week of vacation before I had to get anywhere near my job, and I bought a few books in the days before. I didn’t have malaria, I didn’t have dysentery or dengue fever, the doctors seemed fairly convinced this little bastard wouldn’t do much permanent damage, still, I was a little bit upset with Lebanon for fucking poisoning me and I vowed never to drink spring water again.
I wish I could say that this bout of sedentary suffering brought me to some kind of spiritual clarity, some mind-altering revelation in the bliss of inner solitude, but when I look back at my notebooks there is simply a dead space. I wasn’t dying, there was no love affair with a nurse, and there were no great flashes of inspiration. It was just a waste of time. It was an absence from a world that wasn’t particularly missing me at the moment, because I’d already been gone so long. The vast majority of people I know didn’t know where I was, probably didn’t know what country I was living in, let alone where I was sick on vacation. If I was Sartre or Camus this void might have had profound implications, but I am not nor will I ever be blessed as they were to turn the pangs of boredom into labyrinths of philosophy. If you’ve even managed to get this far into the drunken haze of these travels I’d count you a saint. And so it was that I woke up during the day or night, with equal meaninglessness as the clocks of the world continued to peel away the flesh of time. And on the fifth day all was right again. It was September 11th.
I woke up early in the morning and felt good enough for a walk. I strolled down to the Corniche, breathing the air of the Mediterranean like it was fused with narcotics. I was not feeling particularly adventurous so I walked into the hard rock café and devoured two full, massive American sized meals one after the other. As I coasted back to the hotel I noticed a hubbub on Hamra street. It was the last day a street festival, the first time they’ve held it since before the last Israeli incursion a few years ago. After five days of not seeing or talking to another human being it was refreshing being surrounded by so many, selling art or shirts or home-made foods of some kind or other. I wandered from one end of the festival to the other, at one side there was Arab rap, somewhere in the middle Arab indie rock, and at the other end a young male American Idolesque pop act. This was the same night that I had tickets to see Above and Beyond though.
As night fell I took a cab to the edge of the city to the Forum de Beyrouth and almost danced into the VIP line where I was quickly ushered to the upper floor. On the ninth anniversary of the Trade Center I stood in the middle of the darkness as the first notes of a British Trance act wafted over a crowd of Christian and Muslim Arabs drinking vodka and rolling on ecstasy. It was a good night.
On the last morning of my second trip to Lebanon I woke up early for once, and caught a cab to one of the tourist sites I’d missed my first time in the country, missed again while sleeping in after a night out with the best man, and determined to get to if it was the last thing I did (and it was) in Lebanon. The cabbie was a bit rotund, exceptionally pushy, and jovial. I also discovered that Lebanese national treasures were not the best places to visit during Lebanese national holidays…and that day some god damned saint was recognized for something or other. The Jeita Grotto, a series of massive limestone caves, was located in a valley about 40 minutes from the center of Beirut. We crested a mountain where a gigantic my buddy Jesus statue was built (think the one you constantly see pictures of above Rio de Janeiro) and began moving down toward the parking lot. Cars were parked on both sides of the narrow mountain road for at least three miles from the entrance. There must have been 50 tour buses parked at the gate, and I was surprised when the cabbie got out of the car and expected to tour the site with me. I was even more surprised when he asked that I pay for his ticket, but a little less surprised that the only reason I got a ticket was because he put his head down and charged headlong into the line, pushing people out of the way in a bull rush.
He disappeared into the mass of people and ten minutes later popped out with two tickets, which was probably worth the few extra bucks for his entrance. We then moved up a hill dotted with small statues and bizarre little animal cages filled with garden variety farm animals. The mountains stared down with their particularly Lebanese sense of majesty mixed with disappointment and five minutes into our climb my cabbie/guide needed a break to catch his breath. In English our conversation was limited to him yelling, “Steve wait,” or after he stopped me, “Steve look.” However, the man was a natural conversationalist in Arabic as I think he engaged almost every human being in the park in conversation and pinched the cheek or kissed the foreheads of more babies than a long shot Republican contender for public office. When we got to the upper grotto I was introduced to a half dozen Iraqis by the cab driver, and as the conversation almost always inevitably does our talk took about thirty seconds to devolve into discussing brands of whiskey.
The upper grotto was an absolutely stunning and magnificent cave system, elaborately lit, with impressive and even safe walkways throughout. I remain firm in my belief though that there is no location, moment, or image nature has ever created that cannot be destroyed or diminished by being viewed along with too many other people. The Arab notion of “inside voices” is also wildly different from our own. After the upper grotto we waited on another line at the lower grotto. After we got inside we waited on another line, to get onto a boat.
On the boat line my guide had ample time to make friends, but I was on a bit of a deadline as I had to be on a plane in a few hours and the delay was beginning to irk me. I suspect it began to irk others as well. There were apparently rival groups of teenagers or twenty-somethings or whatever age Lebanese boys are imbued with more testosterone than brains and some kind of screaming, demonstrative argument broke out between bunches of guys about 50 feet apart in the line. I was excited because the group directly in front of me looked like they were ready to climb the rails and attack the group behind me, and I’d move up in the line a bit. A group of older men seemed to embarrass them into shutting up a while later and that was that. It had a bit of a Jets vs. Sharks feel to it and I wish someone could have explained to me what it was about, but I have no idea whether this was a high school rivalry, Shia/Sunni/Christian rivalry, mountain people/sea people rivalry, or a crips/bloods thing, but nobody got sliced and we finally got on the god damn stupid little boat a half hour later.
The natural opulence of the chamber we floated through was absolutely breathtaking. The rock formations, shaved to their spindles by dripping water for millions of years created incredibly complex geometric sculptures everywhere. Our necks craned skyward and for about a minute and a half nobody said anything. It was a wonderful blissful moment of peace after the crash of humanity in the hours before. It was of course broken, as everything around Beirut usually is, by excited conversation. Boats passed each other, people hollered, some sang soccer songs, and I figured fuck it, so I started singing to. I started singing the Willy Wonka acid trip boat song…”No one knows where we’re going, or where the oars are rowing,” and to my surprise they were all so mystified by it that they stopped what they were doing to listen to me. I was staring up the whole time and when I looked back down the dozen people in the boat were all staring at me. My cabbie punched my arm, “Steve, what song is that?”
I thought for a second, knowing and explanation would be impossible, and said, “The Rolling Stones.”
The whole boat nodded in unison as if they now recognized the song. Soon after my frees-style, cave-karaoke boat ride was over. I got back in the cab and waited on the hill in traffic for an hour. Cutting loose of the interminable tourists was like reaching escape velocity from the corona of a black hole, but it was smooth sailing back to my host’s apartment after that.
On the last ride to the airport my host points to the left, “that is the Palestinian camp (Shatila) over there, the one where the Phalange and the Israelis had the massacre in 1982.”
And at that I wonder how long it takes the remnants of gore to become a history worthy of remembrance. At what point does the majesty of a crusader castle engulf the atrocities associated with the life around and within its now quiet walls. The life the people of Lebanon lead is hard to imagine for me, and that probably holds true for any time in their past.
My host smiles again as he says this, just playing the tour guide, and I’m transported back to his balcony, staring at a circular hole in the plaster that was made by a stray round from a machine gun and has never been patched, maybe on purpose. In Beirut if something looks like a bullet hole, it is. I see the hallways in his apartment where he says they slept, to be away from the windows through the gunfire and mortar blasts. Everywhere in this country are the shrapnel of man and the shrapnel of time, each chipping away the chance for peace.
Days before one of my Christian, mountain guides drove me through the manicured roads of the new downtown, a place where the city was so damaged that it simply melted away. He bemoans the loss of a Christian haven, rebuilt by Hariri’s monolithic construction company, a Lebanese Haliburton, gerrymandering a whole swath of cityscape under Muslim control. In a mixture of grief and pride are population statistics spoken by Christians. There are twelve million Lebanese living outside of Lebanon, and four million within the borders. The country would be sixty percent Christian if all were to return, and without them it is sixty percent Muslim inside the border. In the next breath he will move to how successful the Lebanese are abroad, how they blessed the world with its beauty in the form of Shakira and Selma Hayek and the less famous but just as beautiful cross-strains of their lovely DNA. Their loss is our gain, and if you Google Lebanese restaurants, regardless of what city in the world you call home, there’s probably one not far away.
I spent a lot of time drinking with a Muslim bartender who took shots of Absinthe from a bottle with a picture of Van Gogh on the label, discussing American culture, Lebanese life and the invisible enemy of hate. One night at the Boston bar a TV tuned to the fashion channel silently droned a commercial full of bikini-clad beauties and ended with a plea to visit Tel Aviv from the Israeli Ministry of Tourism. It would be the equivalent of Osama bin Laden urging citizens to Jihad in a commercial during the Superbowl.
There is a precarious balance on the individual level that incorporates every possible kind of contradiction. Beirut is like a Middle Eastern autoclave spinning these disparate pieces of humanity together at speeds that defy reason and logic in a furious attempt to manufacture a vaccine against its own history. The country ripples with the energy of a patient emerging from a hospital after cheating certain death, re-energized. The construction is everywhere, from the sleepy mountain towns to the blasted center of the capital.
Lebanon is nationalized motion. A place where you not only learn, but you feel, to the core, that compromise is not a synonym for weakness, but one for progress. In Lebanon the capacity for love and hatred of your neighbors is sometimes dimmed and muted by their proximity, and sometimes amplified and accelerated by their ferocity, but in the end all sides strike a peculiar balance. This small country has its own system of tectonics, plates of religion and class and ethnicity and history that grind into the viscous volcanism of war, and divide into an aquamarine abyss where music and vision dance out to the starry perimeters. There is no sense of moderation in the movements of its past or the lives of its people. There is simply an eternal high-wire act between the extremes.
When I came back to Saudi and looked through my notebook I saw a page that I didn’t remember writing, it was scribbled in sometime during the last night of my Hamra bender by the Fresh Prince, and it stands like an epithet to the journey:
“If you’re gonna wright about the truth, wright about the truth that’s afraid to be told as the truth, that really is the truth, that’s lied about the truth to the truthful people, and to the people who seek the truth, know that they need to be mature enough to realize that there is no true truth.”
This story may contain only the ramblings of a traveler impressed with a place that in a decade I could never hope to truly understand, but the ultimate truth, that there is no universal truth should be qualified with one parting shot against the chaos. The truth is something we believe because it’s something we make. We are all hoarders of our own collections of truth, we love because of it, we kill because of it, we carry it with us to the grave where it is lost forever, its strands collected in the people we’ve touched, its shards reconstituted, re-formed in the crucible of our struggles to understand that which we cannot see.
A Palestinian author, Elias Khoury, once quipped that, “Memory is the process of organizing what to forget.” So I sit here, struggling against the inertia of memory, thinking that the search for the truth is simply the process of endlessly asking yourself why you remember.
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