The Angel of History Read Free Page A

thrush, the white stains that attacked your innocent tongue, looked like the snowy down on old strawberries, we couldn’t get rid of it, and you hated it and I hated it and you wanted it over. When, to make you feel better, I joked that the furry fungus matched your white lab coat, you turned apoplectic, wanted to strangle me, I still regret that, I thought it was funny at the time.
    You’ve been gone for decades, you hid deep in my lakes, why now, why infect my dreams now? What flood is this? Once as I was buying groceries in a store where a young third-worlder mopped the floor, back and forth, back and forth, around a yellow sign that announced Piso Mojado, the mephitic aroma of disinfectant assaulted my senses, and you jumped the levee of my memory. Proust had his mnemonic madeleine, but bleach was all ours, Doc, all ours. The tomatoes didn’t look too good and I just went home. I’d been a coward, I was scared, do notice I said scared and not frightened, you taught me the difference, you said, Children get scared, men might feel afraid, might even feel terror, but men don’t get scared. I’d been so lonely since you died, you left me roofless in a downpour. You gripped the bedrail when you took your final breath and I had to pry open your fingers one by one to free you, it took seventeenminutes because my hands were shaking so much. Even in death you were stronger than I, and more obstinate, the mortician told me it took forever to burn you, thrice he had to put you in the incinerator, you refused to turn to ash. You sincerely believed that the distance between you and me would one day disappear. You told me I was not my mother and you were not my father, but how could we not be, how could we not be, the stones over her cenotaph still felt so very heavy. You held out your arms and said, Join me, but I couldn’t, and you said, Let me love you, and I couldn’t because you wanted to be so close. You held out the fireman’s net and said, Jump, and I couldn’t, I felt the fall was much too great, I chose to go back into the fire. You said, I like it when you doze on my chest, but I said, The hair on your chest irritates my cheeks and makes it difficult to sleep. I could hardly bear the beauty of you.
    You were gone for so long and I moved along and everyone told me I was alive, but that night, in my bed, each time my ear touched the single pillow I heard your heartbeat once more, once more, once more, once more.
    My heart is restless until it rests in thee.
The Congenital Immigrant
    I’m the congenital immigrant, Doc, think about it. I left parts of me everywhere. I was born homeless, countryless, raceless, didn’t belong to either my father’s family or my mother’s, no one could claim me, or wanted to. I was a rug-burn baby, a Persian rug burn—my father, all of fourteen at the time, fucked my not-much-older mother right there onthe Mahi from Tabriz while sunbeams played hide-and-seek amid the furniture. Both pairs of knees chafed since they stole each other’s virginity canine-style and my mother could admire the exquisite deep blue rosettes surrounded by gold lancet leaves repeating all around her, her body on all fours right above the carpet’s main medallion, which looked like a fish rising to the surface of a pond at midnight to admire the reflection of the moon. I’ve never seen the carpet, not once did my eyes fall upon that masterwork, or the penthouse apartment in Beirut’s Achrafieh neighborhood, yet my mind’s eye rewove the century-old treasure thread by silk thread since my mother never tired of describing it to me when I was a child. In luxury I came to be, she used to tell me, in remarkable beauty I was conceived, deep blue water, gold, cobalt violet toothed leaves that represented the scales of the fish, repeating patterns, ogees and swoops and arabesque arcs, over and over and over. When his parents—I can’t call them my grandparents, Doc, I just can’t—saw me beginning to form in