Every Man in This Village Is a Liar_ An Education in War - Megan K. Stack [121]
The car lurches and tears along empty, sun-blasted roads, through the popping yellow silence of a summer afternoon. I can’t remember what day it is anymore. Daylight rolls into darkness and then blasts back again. Schedules, school buses, markets: none of these things have any meaning left. They are empty. The way the body senses the physical presence of another person in a dark room, by magnetic field or gravity or the secret stirring of air—with that same instinctive, physical knowing, I feel the steel bombing machines above us, circling like great mute sharks in the cloudless blue. I am too nervous to talk. I am jumping out of my skin. Except for interviews, I can hardly stand to interact with people anymore. Conversation demands a calm I have lost. I can summon the manic focus of journalism, or I am adrift on nerves. I put headphones in my ears and stare out the window, breathing in and out. We have no illusion of safety. We keep quiet and follow the road map. Deaf and lost are the children, Radiohead whispers in my ears.
Heat shimmers around the man at the psychiatric hospital gate, and the steady, urgent stream of Hezbollah’s wartime news pours out from a transistor radio at his feet. His plastic chair is nested in a flame of hibiscus and rose. He holds a rope in his hands that pulls the gate down or slackens to let it up. As we approach, he snaps off a taut salute.
We are journalists, we say. We would like to visit some of the patients.
“I’m a patient,” he says in a strange, high voice. “I’ve got family problems.”
He smiles up at us, rubs at his thinning crew cut, and fidgets his fingers. “I am a schizophrenic,” he says.
So what are you doing with your days? we ask.
“I wake up, have some breakfast. Then I sit down and listen to the radio. What can I do?” he says. “I’m in charge of the gate.”
Where are the doctors?
They ran away.
The other staff?
“Because of the war,” he sighs. “Nobody comes.”
“It’s because of the grass,” he adds.
Aren’t you afraid?
“There’s no human that isn’t afraid. Everyone is afraid.”
He looks at us, and pronounces the next two words blissfully:
“It’s normal.”
On an ordinary day, in regular life, I would be anxious, walking into a mental institution. A place like that cuts too close to the nerve: its medicine smells and white rooms and trees hang in imagination as the collapse of time and logic, the ultimate swoon of surrender, the end of trying. It is said that people are afraid of heights because they secretly fear they might jump. That is the feeling I get when I think of psychiatric hospitals.
But every place is horrible now, and so it doesn’t matter anymore. A morgue or a mental institution is better, in a way. There is no engrained expectation that it will be pleasant—abnormality feels normal, and normal feels good. Thick, spicy pine groves huddle around the buildings. Orange butterflies flicker in the flower beds. Bars slice the windows, but a clean breeze breathes through, cooling the quiet corridors.
Only two members of the medical staff remain. This nurse’s name is Hossam Moustapha. He is twenty-six years old and dipping into the anxiety medications. “We get depressed, man.”
The pills are running low and the patients are now on half doses, which may or may not be enough to keep them in control of themselves. There isn’t enough food left. And every night, the bombs come.
The men’s ward is dim and vast and barred off like a jail cell. Patients loom over picnic tables and smoke cigarettes into the gray air. We look at them through the bars. A few of them stride over and stare back at us, mouths hanging open, grinning or puckering their faces in scowls.
A haggard,