The Clothesline Swing. Ahmad Danny Ramadan
I reminisce. We used to call hash “Sawsan”—like the name of an innocent sister or a young child. “Bring Sawsan and come over,” I would say to a friend over the phone, worried that the government monitored my number. “Sawsan is tired today; maybe she will come tomorrow,” the friend might say, sending a disappointing wave over me and the visitors to my home in Damascus.
“Marijuana was never available,” I point out to Death as I take another puff. Rumour has it that Hezbollah, the extremist group in neighbouring Lebanon, ruled the drug market in Syria and financed some of its work through its hash sale. “They left the good stuff for export,” I joke. Death laughs.
Like an old song I’ve heard a billion times before, the smoke fills my head with old memories of times past. I can never let go of things that I’ve done. The moments that linger are always the shameful ones. A constant memory of mine is the moment I was discovered reading files in the manager’s office of a tourism centre I worked for as a boy. I was fourteen.
During summers in Syria, when children are not in school, many parents find their children temporary jobs. After I escaped my mother’s home, my father spent two nights looking for me in the cold streets of Damascus until he found me sleeping on a long chair in al-Sibki Garden, hungry, surrounded by stray cats and sad gazes. He carried me to my grandmother’s home. He left me there and rarely came to visit, except when I became old enough for a summer job.
He asked me to wear my best shirt and pants, and took me on a twenty-minute ride to Arnous Street. I thought he was taking me to Damer, the delicious ice cream shop there. I thought he wanted to buy me something sweet to eat, or have a conversation about my return to my mother’s home. We ended up in an office, meeting a friend of his. My services as a busboy were offered. They were accepted. I cleaned dishes and made coffee and tea for guests in the tourism centre. One day, while cleaning the manager’s office, I saw files written in English.
I was learning the basics of the language at the time; I was still reading Russian literature and Greek mythology translated into Arabic. I couldn’t make sense of the sentences I was reading in those files. I didn’t understand many of the words, but I was curious. I wanted to know that language.
Alaa, a man the size of an elephant and with a similar sense of humour, walked in. He screamed at me, called me names and pushed me around. I was seriously sorry; I really did not mean to read the secrets of the company. I didn’t want to make coffee either, but that’s beside the point.
I was fired that day. The moment when I was told I was fired for the very first time in my life stayed with me. That silly, small memory of a momentary shame that should have been forgotten the next day still reaches into my mind every now and then. It reminds me of my very first failure. Every time I want to start anew, that memory swims to the surface of my consciousness, explaining how I will be publicly shamed in front of eight giants, women with tall legs and fancy handbags and men with well-groomed moustaches.
Death, listening to my thoughts, leans toward me and smiles while smoke pours of his eye sockets, and hands me the joint. I tap on his cold fingers as I take it. If the souls of the stoned taste like blueberries, a joint smoked with Death himself should taste like heaven.
“You know,” he says, “you don’t change. I’ve skinned pieces of your soul from your body once or twice before. Yet, deep within, you’re still a child hoping for acceptance and curious for more. Throughout your life, you’ve fought against your own destiny over and over again; you want to be the stronger one, the harsher. You want to take control and never let go. You see yourself as incomplete, and you see all around you as perfect. The only way for you to feel complete is to be the strongest.” Death stops for a second, catching a breath; I pull a puff from my joint. “What you never seem to understand when you look at yourself: you always see only your own failings.”
Death speaks to me through the clouds of green smoke. “You’re a reversed version of Dorian Gray: hidden within you, there is a picture of yourself coloured with your fears and insecurities, and it prevents you from seeing the real you.” He takes the joint from me. “Deep at night, when you’re lonely and scared, while he is sleeping after a story, where do you hide from your fears?”
“I hide behind the smoke,” I say. Seconds later, we are both giggling.
I should tell Death the truth. At the end of the day, he knows it already. Since that day I ran from my mother’s house, I have never stopped running. They tell you that when faced with a dangerous situation, mankind has the tendency to fight or flight. I guess I started my flight into a safer place, but never found a moment of peace to actually acknowledge that I have reached it.
“You overcomplicate things,” Death says. “The truth is simple; you have built a kingdom of peace within your own imagination.” He explains that in reality, there is a third option to that fight-or-flight dilemma. “You can freeze,” he says. “You can pause the world around you like you pause movies on your old VCR, and just slip into your own safe kingdom.”
The weed has played its games with my mind. I see myself as a child carrying a wooden Damascene sword in the face of a bee; but my shadow is that of an Arabian knight carrying the sword stolen from Ali Baba’s cave, anticipating the fierce attack of the giant roc.
“Whenever the world dims my lights,” I murmur, “I escape to my land of shadows.”
Silence fills the office. Death and I hear your footsteps as you walk around the house, intentionally avoiding my office. You know I’m smoking my second joint of the day and the smell bothers you. It makes you twinkle your nose and mumble words of disapproval before you disappear back into your own thoughts.
“Tell me a story,” says Death, lazing back into the rocking chair he favours in my office. “You tell all the good ones to him. Tell me my own story.” I smile.
“Once upon a time,” I say, “I was stoned in the streets of Beirut. It was dark, but I managed.”
Death, while listening, continues to swing in that rocking chair.
Stoned as fuck, you walk down the street you know well. The lights of the street lamps, and those of the cars, mesmerize you, shining up in the sky like little suns. You know how it goes; relax, let your body lead you in the right direction, slowly now.
There are three homeless women on the sidewalk of the road where you live. When you moved here eighteen months ago, there was only the one, that one sitting on the left-hand side of the road, begging passersby for a dollar, while attempting to control her two-year-old child, who was running around in the busy street. Syrians too! You can tell from their accent when they ask you for change. They gradually raise their voices as you come closer, in a broken-record manner, repeating prayers wishing that your mother may live forever and that your work will be fruitful and blessed. As you walk farther, their voices fade away.
Your hand is putting slight pressure on an envelope you’re carrying, leaving sweaty blackish fingerprints on both sides. Inside, there are two concert tickets. The music from the shop next door is too loud; its Arabian tune is played on the oud, stereotypically heard in the restaurants of Beirut. You need a Red Bull, relax, ask for one, pay money, hold the blue and silver can with your other hand—This is complicated! Take a sip. It tastes stale, yet fizzy.
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