• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

“What were you doing in Michigan?”

“I worked at a gas station. When they hear the bombs,” he confides, wiggling his brows toward the other patients, “they do get frightened. I’ve been here twenty days. I’m new here. Matter of fact, I almost don’t belong here. My father is old-fashioned. He brought me in here. He tricked me because I stopped taking my medicine. I felt more normal without it.”

He doesn’t believe he’s seen a doctor since June 12. Today is August 4.

The other patients’ wariness melts, and they begin to shout.

“Why are you here?” one of them demands. “Go to your own country!”

“We are with Hezbollah!” another yells.

“Who’s crazy?” somebody hollers. “Us or them?”

The former gas station attendant breathes through the bars, “Write this down, write this down.” He whispers a telephone number in Beirut and watches me write the digits. “Call my mother,” he says intensely. “Tell her to get me out of here.”

“Hush,” calls Hossam.

“They’re getting too excited,” he tells me.

We walk into the waiting room, where a mounted television blasts and flashes in the stillness like a tiny contained storm. Like everybody else in south Lebanon, the staff is watching al Manar. This is Hezbollah’s station and they have constant war coverage, even a reporter who is embedded with the guerrillas. I look out the window into the afternoon of bombs and yellow, yellow sunlight. Here we are a small island of people. The rest of the day is empty of people. They have gone into hiding.

Everything is moving too fast. I stand there on the white floor and try to think for just one minute. You are in the middle of an insane asylum. You are in the middle of a war. You are under bombardment. You can get killed driving out of here. Maybe you will. Don’t think it can’t happen, because it can. Take some of that realness, and ingest it.

We are walking back out, through the pines and butterflies. One foot before the next, down to the main building, but all the time the words won’t stop. This war around me now doesn’t feel like a dream. That’s the problem: I have been dreaming ever since Afghanistan. I let myself get tougher and smaller, pulled myself back, back, back, behind my face, behind the interviews, behind the stories. The uglier it got, the harder it got, the more I drew myself in, the more I distracted myself with colorful myths. I am a foreign correspondent. I am covering the story of our times. I am covering the wars. It all matters. It is worth everything. You turn yourself into something separate, something absent. There and not there. It works, putting thick glass between you and the world. You can be anywhere if you’re not really there. You can walk into any room, drive down any road, ask any question, write about anybody’s pain. You tell yourself you are unscathed. You stand smooth and count yourself unaffected. And basically, it’s true—compared with the people around you, the civilians and soldiers, you are unscathed and unaffected. That works fine until all of a sudden it doesn’t work at all. It occurs to me now that maybe this is the most American trait of all, the trademark of these wars. To be there and be gone all at once, to tell ourselves it just happened, we did what we did but we had no control over the consequences.

Now, on this day in Lebanon, it doesn’t work: there is no divider, no case around me, no audience and no costumes. I am just me, and I am wholly here. I feel like I sleepwalked out onto the interstate and opened my eyes just in time to see the trucks blocking out the sky, groaning down. I said yes, yes, yes. I went along every time. If you want to succeed in journalism, you should say yes, yes, yes. Yes, I’ll go. Yes, I’ll stay. Yes, I’ll write it. Yes, I’ll rewrite it. Yes, of course I’d like to go back. You should never say no.

There is an ancient belief that salamanders can live in fire without getting burned. Zelda Fitzgerald, languishing in an asylum, drew a picture of a salamander and wrote: “I believed I was a salamander, and it seems I am nothing