Southern Legitimacy Statement: Born in Dallas, Texas, as the son of a businessman, M.B. Effendi spent his childhood under the noisy skies of Beirut. He moved to the States with his family after political tensions rendered peace impossible. Now he studies political science at the University of Rhode Island.
Across the Desert : Town and City : Occupation
Across the Desert
You’re fleeing across the desert. You don’t know how you got there; you don’t know where you’re going. You’ve been fleeing across the desert for so long that you begin to wonder if you’ll collapse the next second, if your body will give out, if you’ll go flying over the curved ridge of a dune, tumbling down its slope with a trailing cloud of sand as you lie there under the blaze of the sun. There, you become yet another fixture of the desert for the armored convoys filled with proud soldiers to parade by and liberate from ancient backwardness.
Beyond the head of every dune you climb you behold an unchanging landscape. Sand unravels in all directions, striated with a sea of dunes. Knots of dead grass litter the feet of cacti, windswept palm trees. Tawny crags protrude from the twinkling grains of sand like shards of a broken bottle, the backs of fellow wanderers absently shimmer in the distance, vultures circle overhead, and walls of concrete barbed with wire reach the heavens and enclose the desert on all sides.
Head over heels, you’re tumbling down a dune when you realize something: you’ve climbed a million dunes, tumbled down a million slopes, you’ve sighed away a million breaths, lost all breath to sigh more and, after all, you still keep hoping to find home behind the dunes you climb, even if you reach the edge of the desert and remember home to be among the people you left behind?
—
Town and City
There was but a gate between the town and the city. A gate was like a border back in those days. And, surely, every gate needs a gatekeeper, so the city installed one between themselves and the town.
Through the gate bars one could clearly see the cityscape and its settlers scurrying like blurry ants down the streets, through the doorways of streetside banks and bars and brothels, circumambulating the glass skyscrapers that spiraled endlessly upward into the clouds. Beetle-black sedans zipped both ways down the newly paved streets. Pedestrians speed-walked down the sidewalk in all directions. Bidirectional traffic lights at every intersection, every crosswalk, every crossroad, indeed every road, was always stuck on green so that every street witnessed a torrent of automobiles flying out all at once. Since all were deserted of human forms, pigeons sat on the steel benches, gazing around at the infinitely continuous bustle of humans in the city.
The city folk ignored the collateral eventuality of their existences—that being, um, death!—just like a jaywalker who sees a rickety truck hurtling toward the crosswalk and nevertheless puts his foot down in the street to cross to the other side, even though he knows he will stain its bumper with his guts if he walks out now.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the gate bars, the sleepy town made as much commotion as sufficed itssettlers. Potholed roads snaked between bungalows that squatted on a sprawling tundra of sand. Tumbleweed constituted much of the pedestrian traffic during the day. Only rarely would one see a woman in an abaya swaying under the intensity of the desert sun and strolling alone in the streets. Even more rare a sight was a man outside his home.
A handful of mosques spiraled up from the deteriorating buildings of the town; but their minarets, golden domes, even their grand facades, once made of crystal-white marble that dazzled the eyes of a bedouin blind in the sunlight, were now riddled with cracks and craters and, having lost their mystic luster, they kept yellowing and yellowing with the unchecked passage of the days. Some old man sounded athan through the staticky speakers that carried his frail, tremulous voice over the rusting arched roofs of the bungalows. No man left his home to answer the call for prayer. In fact, the only time the men left their homes was when they went strolling alone over the striated dunes, past the palm trees, and under a flinty sky charted with dying stars that spelled a fate more ominous and unknown than the fate of the young bedouins who went into the city in hopes of reversing the especially precarious turn their people had taken.
It was rumored that the respected sheik prayed alone in the mosque with the orphans. They had nowhere else to go. And, frankly, they owned nothing, had nothing to their names but his mercy.
One day, the gatekeeper was passing a sluggish afternoon in his booth when one such orphan approached the gate. At first, he thought the orphan was an optical illusion. He’d materialized as a tiny black dot in a pane of the fly-bespeckled window. But as the gatekeeper kept helplessly staring at it—what else was he supposed to do?—he registered that the dot was in fact a scrawny boy who kept coming closer and closer to the booth till he stood right outside its doorway.
The gatekeeper got off his chair, stepping up to the orphan.
“Age?” the gatekeeper asked, looking up from the notepad and pen in his hands. “Twelve.”
“Last name?”
“Lake.”
“Where were you born?”
“In the town.”
“Where are you going?”
“To the city.”
The gatekeeper sighed.
He pocketed the notepad. Shaking his head, the gatekeeper placed his hands on his hips. He just stared at the orphan.
“Why are you going to the city, son?”
“I must. We have no food, water. The war has pushed us to the edge of the desert, and if we stay here and do nothing we’ll all starve and die.”
“So your father sent you, of all his sons, to the city?”
“I have no father, sir. I’m an orphan.”
“We all have fathers. You just don’t know yours.”
“Fair enough,” the orphan conceded. “Now, will you let me in the city?”
“What use do we have for this town?” the gatekeeper asked himself more than the orphan. “Seriously. It’s old, dusty. Its buildings need renovation. Only a handful of families live here, I think. And—well, you said it yourself—those who are living here are starving, thirsty, in need. What the hell… I’ve told the governor a million times: just raze it to the ground and expand the city.” He sighed. “They don’t know. Never listen… That’s why the advice of a wise man is like an echo that’s heard only after he’s been laid to rest in his grave.”
“You don’t think I know that, sir?” said the orphan. “You don’t think I know the town’s on its deathbed? True, our buildings are ancient, maybe even archaic. Our roads are in disrepair. Famine has left fathers without sons, sons without fathers; wives, widowed; daughters alone; and husbands, at home. I know many families that have already migrated far, far away from this town.
“But this town is all we know. It’s all I know. Many of us will spend the entirety of our lives between its walls: eating, sleeping, dying here. And that’s best for us… best for them. But not best for every bedouin who must go to the city. I will come back. That’s a promise. And when I do I’ll have a name, bounties to this name, and bounties to lavish upon this town so that it can one day have a name.
“Don’t forget me, sir. I—I can see your mind’s elsewhere already. All right, then. Open this gate and let me go on my way.”
—
Occupation
A truck purrs down the street on a quiet, rainy midnight. I hear it purring from the comfort of my bed. High beams flash the curtainless windows, tires squeal to a stop in the driveway. Why is the truck so loud? Why is it parked outside my house? And why does it idle closely below my bedroom window as if it waits for me to come hurrying to the windowsill so that it can serenade me? I don’t dare answer my own questions: for surely there is an uncertainty in knowing that is greater than the certainty in not knowing.
