De Niro's Game Read Free

refused to go down to the shelter.
    I have lost too many loved ones, my mother said to me. Come down to the shelter.
    I did not go.
    TEN THOUSAND CIGARETTES had touched my lips, and a million sips of Turkish coffee had poured down my red throat. I was thinking of Nabila, of poker machines and of Roma. I was thinking of leaving this place. I lit the last candle, drank from the water bucket, opened the fridge, and closed it again. It was empty and melting from the inside. The kitchen was quiet; my mother’s radio was far away, buried down in the shelter, entertaining rats and crowded families. When the bombsfell, the shelter became a house, a candy castle and a camp for children to play in, a shrine, a kitchen and a café, a dark, cozy little place with a stove, foam mattresses, and games. But it was stuffy, and I’d rather die in the open air.
    A bomb fell in the next alley. I heard screams; a river of blood must be flowing by now. I waited; the rule was to wait for the second bomb. Bombs landed in twos, like Midwestern American tourists in Paris. The second bomb fell. I walked slowly out of the apartment. I walked down the stairs and through the back alleys, guided by screams and the smell of powder and scattered stones. I found the blood beside a little girl. Tony the gambler was already there, with his car ready to go. He was half-naked and stuttering, M-a-r-y mother of God, Mary m-o-t-h-e-r of God. He kept repeating this with difficulty, breathless and frozen. I carried the little girl. Her wailing mother was hysterical; she followed me to the back seat of the car. I took off my shirt and wrapped it around the girl’s bleeding ribs. Tony flew his car toward the hospital. He honked his siren. The streets were empty; the buildings looked hazy and unfamiliar. The girl’s blood dripped on my finger, down my thighs. I was bathing in blood. Blood is darker than red, smoother than silk; on your hand it is warm like warm water and soap. My shirt was turning a royal purple. I shouted and called the little girl by her name, but my shirt was sucking up her blood; I could have squeezed it and filled the Red Sea and plunged my body in it, claimed it, walked its shore and sat in its sun. My hands were pressing on the little girl’s open wound. She faded away; her pupils rolled over and disappeared into a white, soft, dreamy pillow. Her head was leaning toward her mother’s round breast. Hermother picked up Tony’s mantra and they both repeated, Mary mother of God, Mary mother of God. The little girl was leaving to go to Roma, I thought. She is going to Roma, lucky girl. Tony honked a farewell in a sad rhythm to the empty streets.
    THE NEXT MORNING I was meeting George down at the corner by Chahine the butcher’s. There was a line of women waiting for the meat. Inside, goats were hung, stripped of their skin. White and red meat fell from above, pieces were cut, crushed, banged, cut again, ground, put in paper bags, and handed to the women in line, women in black, with melodramatic, oil-painted faces, in churchgoer submissive positions, in Halloween horrors, in cannibal hunger for crucifix flesh, in menstrual cramps of virgin saints, in castrated hermetic positions, on their knees and at the mercy of knives and illiterate butchers. Red-headed flies strolled everywhere, there was animal blood on the floor, butchers’ knives paraded on stained yellow walls. The bombing had stopped, and women had come out from their holes to gather tender meat for their unemployed husbands to sink their nicotine-stained teeth into and seal their inflated bellies.
    George was walking down the street toward me. When I spotted him, he waved to me. A man in a green militia suit stopped him. They shook hands; George gave him three kisses on the cheek.
    As I waited, I watched the flies resting on the mosaic tiles, feasting on perfect round drops of blood.
    Who is that? I asked George.
    Khalil. He works with Abou-Nahra.
    Maybe