1001 Nights Cast

She. My love. She. Dead, we were certain. Bullets hit her. I saw it. They hurried me away, got me out of there.

They put me in this room, me and the little girl, Katya. They were upset too. The guy my wife used to be married to, in that other life, he was crying. The guys in suits were sombre, trying to be nice to me, nice to the little girl, the living.

They knew I wrote, so they told me to write. They suggested poetry would tide me over. Write some poetry, they suggested. They gave me a pen and some paper.

There’s a crack on the wall, that’s poetry, that’s real. A Poet I knew said, Poetry is all about truth! But he was wrong. He said, Poetry is the truth of the self! That’s what he said, he was always wrong and always shouting, that Poet. Always on stage giving a reading to five other Poets, even when he was drunk in the back of a car I was driving.

Why should I write their poetry? These people who don’t want peace and put everything into the hands of fate. These people who pay obeisance to the Lords Of War, and weep real tears even though they in effect killed her.

If I did write it would be something like this:

She is dead and so I am dead. My hand is shaking with death. Death is making my cheeks sweat with the pain of death. My conversation suffers from rigor mortis. Reassurances are only eulogies. It has a clammy hand, it pushes its hand into my chest, conducting an autopsy on me, death. It has stopped up my brain activity and stopped up my need to breathe. Now that I am dead I can rest in pain and horror and grief at last. Now that I am dead I can stop returning phone calls. Sympathy cards arrive, parents come and go, and this room is my uncomfortable coffin and I am dead tired and dead shirty and dead unapproachable. She is dead and so therefore ergo QED I am dead. I writhe in peace. I dream the dreams of the dead, where the living long to join us and laugh their pretend laughs and swear their pretend swearing and cry their illusionary tears and pretend to fuck and eat and dream themselves, pretending to pretend that they’re not dead. That death hasn’t already taken them. That the world hasn’t ended and we didn’t miss it. Death took her and they tell me it’s a rumour, but I know the power of rumours. Death is a rumour no one can be sure about. All we know of death is it starts with D, like dead and dream and desire and darling. My darling I am dead like you.

* * *

Someone comes in and laughs. It’s like being drowned to hear that laugh. And then they say it: she isn’t dead, they say, in English to me, in Russian to little Katya.

She isn’t dead. Not dead. Alive. ‘Okay.’ In a hospital in Haifa, somewhere I can’t see her. Injured but no longer critical. Breathing, sitting up, talking, but not to me, I can’t talk to her. Laughing, wincing, but not with me beside her. Katya reaches out and holds my hand. Katya didn’t cry—I don’t think she’s cried since I’ve known her—but she is laughing now, and speaking her faltering few words of English. ‘Okay’, says the little girl. ‘Okay.’ She is holding my hand which means I’m not dead. And my darling is not dead either.

Now is the time for poetry, bad poetry, doggerel of the soul. Now is the time for greeting cards and rude playground rhymes. Now I could gladly die. But I won’t die, not this time.

For now is the time to make demands and reorder the universe my way.

I want to go home. And I want the good guys to go home with me. All the good guys. My wife, the little girl. Me.

Now is the time to haul it bloody screaming dripping out of the womb of fate and slap its arse and make it breathe. Now is the time to conduct its APGAR test.

Now is the time to go back home, get her away from the hospital that is the rest of the world. Now is the time for safety and family and love and goats and fences and simple lives, to glue the broken bits together and put them on a sturdy mantelpiece.

All I have to do is make the bastards give me back the broken bits of my family.

I could fucking kiss someone.