Hanging Out
Over the years, an abandoned house on top of Aley has become a hang-out for kids in the neighborhood. It's a hybrid building with an identity crisis: one third fortified castle, one third modernist building, and one third traditional Lebanese house.
Each seems to have written his name on the wall. "Ayoub was here," though he didn't leave his phone number. Signs of rebellion, swastikas, and the names of hard rock bands dot the walls. Someone wrote "Thug Style" on one wall, perhaps an attempt at gangster rap bling bling. And of course, there's sex. "Let's make sexx...oh come on say yes....'' Just whom is the thug stylist trying to woo?
In the field outside, amid the broken beer bottles and empty gun cartridges, an application for the TOEFL examination - an English-language test for foreign students applying to American universities - lies in the grass. A few feet below, there's a letter from the financial aid office of the Lebanese American University.
An explosive diary
On the road beside the derelict Beirut-Damascus train tunnel, I find what looks like a diary, thirty-odd pages of notes lying in another random dump. I read the first page.
You come to me, I hold you, comfort you. I take care of you. If you had a quarter of my problems, you wouldn't be alive. But it's okay. I love you. I will always love you .
And further down...
I open the cabinet and pull out the scalpel that I keep taped under the shelf. I climb into the bathtub and close the curtains.
The pages are some kind of memoir, perhaps fantasy perhaps not, of a gay fifteen year-old boy, who suffers from fits of violence. He describes the rape of his friend.
He looks beautiful with nothing on. I pull off my boxers, and cream myself up.
It's hard to believe this text is lying here, outside of Sofar in the Lebanese mountain. The handwriting is American, the names are American and even the story takes place in the US. Yet the ruling of the notebook paper isn't American; there's an Arab girl's name scribbled in a margin marked with a heart, and a Lebanese mobile phone at the bottom of a page. I'm tempted to call.
Ce serait pas mal de scanner un passage du texte |
