walls.'
'They can own the house,' Karen said. 'But they should let us live here. And we keep the manuscript and we keep the pictures.'
Scott leaned toward her to sing a bit of old Beatles, a line about carrying pictures of Chairman Mao.
Then he sat in the attic alone through the rainy morning, hunched over the lightbox, making notes.
He had the secret of Bill's real name.
He had the photographs, the great work of describing and cataloguing.
He had the manuscript of Bill's new novel, the entire house filled with pages, pages spilling into the shed that abutted the back of the house, a whole basement containing pages.
The manuscript would sit. He might talk to Charles Everson, just a word concerning the fact that it was finished. The manuscript would sit, and word would get out, and the manuscript would not go anywhere. After a time he might take the photographs to New York and meet with Brita and choose the pictures that would appear. But the manuscript would sit, and word would travel, and the pictures would appear, a small and deft selection, one time only, and word would build and spread, and the novel would stay right here, collecting aura and force, deepening old Bill's legend, undyingly.
The nice thing about life is that it's filled with second chances. Quoting Bill.
IN BEIRUT
Her driver tells her three stories. First one, people are burning tires. In the midst of car bombs and street skirmishes and the smash of long-range field guns and buildings coming down and whole areas lost in smoke, people are burning tires to drive away mosquitoes and flies.
Second, a pair of local militias are firing at portraits of each other's leader. These are large photographs pasted to walls or hanging from awning poles in the vegetable souks and they are shot up and ripped apart, some pictures large enough to swing from a wire strung over the street, and they are shot up and quickly replaced and then ripped apart again. There is a new exuberance in these particular streets, based on this latest form of fighting.
Last, they are making bombs that contain flooring nails and roofing nails. The police are finding quantities of common nails, nails sprayed and dashed and driven into the bodies of victims of random blasts.
Brita waits for the point of story number three. Isn't there supposed to be an irony, some grim humor, some sense of the peculiar human insistence on seeing past the larger madness into small and skewed practicalities, into off-shaded moments that help us consider a narrow hope? This business about the nails doesn't do a thing for her. And she's not so crazy about the other stones either. She has come here already tired of these stories, including the ones she has never heard. They're all the same and all true and it is sad that they are necessary. And they almost always exasperate her, especially the stories about terror groups that issue press credentials.
They are driving past the rubble of the racetrack's arched facade. Then they are going the wrong way down a one-way street but it doesn't matter. All the streets are right and wrong. She sees cars burnt skinless, water flying gloriously from broken mains. Street life as well, vendors, wooden carts, a man selling radios and shoes from the hood of his car. There are balconies dangling vertically from shelled buildings. Then they are going into the slums near the refugee camps. Cars wrapped in posters of Khomeini, whole cars postered except for a space on the driver's side of the windshield. Sandbagged shops and mounds of un-collected garbage. She sees a street vendor's little homemade city of Marlboro cartons, the neat stacks of cigarettes a wistful urban grid of order and deployment.
Brita is on assignment for a German magazine, here to photograph a local leader named Abu Rashid. He is hidden somewhere deep in these shot-up streets where weeds and wild hibiscus crowd out of alleyways and the women wear headscarves and stand on line, long lines everywhere for food, drinking water, bedding, clothing.
Her driver is a man about sixty who pronounces the second b in bomb. He has used the word about eleven times and she waits for it now, softly repeating it after him. The bomb. The bombing. People in Lebanon must talk about nothing but Lebanon and in Beirut it is clearly all Beirut.
A beggar approaches the car, chanting, one eye shut, chicken feathers stapled to his shirt. The driver blows the horn at a guy who carries a bayonet in an alligator scabbard and the horn plays the opening bars of 'California Here I Come.'
The streets run with images. They cover walls and clothing-pictures of martyrs, clerics, fighting men, holidays in Tahiti. There is a human skull nailed to a stucco wall and then there are pictures of skulls, there is skull writing, there are boys wearing T-shirts with illustrated skulls, serial grids of blue skulls. The driver translates the wall writing and it is about the Father of Skulls, the Blood Skulls of Hollywood U.S.A., Arafat Go Home, the Skull Maker Was Here. The Arabic script is gorgeous even in hasty spray paint. It is about Suicide Sam the Car Bomb Man. It says Ali 21. It says Here I Am Again Courtesy Ali 21. The car moves slowly through narrow streets and up into dirt alleys and Brita thinks this place is a millennial image mill. There are movie posters everywhere but no sign of anything resembling a theater. Posters of bare-chested men with oversized weapons, grenades lashed to their belts and cities burning in the background. She looks through shell holes in a building wall and sees another ruined building with an exposed room containing three stoned men sitting on a brand-new sofa. There are boys tattooed with skulls who work the checkpoints wearing pieces of Syrian, American, Lebanese, French and Israeli uniforms and toting automatic rifles with banana clips.
The driver shows Brita's press card and the boys look in at her. One of them says something in German and she has to resist the totally stupid impulse to offer him money for his cap. He wears a great-looking cap with a bent blue peak that she would love to give to a friend in New York.
The car moves on.
She does not photograph writers anymore. It stopped making sense. She takes assignments now, does the interesting things, barely watched wars, children running in the dust. Writers stopped one day. She doesn't know how it happened but they came to a quiet end. They stopped being the project she would follow forever.
Now there are signs for a new soft drink, Coke II, signs slapped on cement-block walls, and she has the crazy idea that these advertising placards herald the presence of the Maoist group. Because the lettering is so intensely red. The placards get bigger as the car moves into deeply cramped spaces, into many offending smells, open sewers, rubber burning, a dog all ribs and tongue and lying still and gleaming with green flies, and the signs are clustered now, covering almost all the wall space, with added graffiti that are hard to make out, overlapping swirls, a rage in crayon and paint, and Brita gets another crazy idea, that these are like the big character posters of the Cultural Revolution in China-warnings and threats, calls for self-correction. Because there is a certain physical resemblance. The placards are stacked ten high in some places, up past the second storey, and they crowd each other, they edge over and proclaim, thousands of Arabic words weaving between the letters and Roman numerals of the Coke II logo.
A man is standing in a devastated square. The car comes to a stop and Brita slings her equipment bag over a shoulder and gets out. The driver hands her the press credentials. It is clear she is supposed to follow the other man. He is older than the driver and she notes that he is missing half his right ear. He wears slippers and carries a plastic water bottle. There are people living in the ruins among powdery hills of gypsum. Where there are cars at all, parked snug to walls, they either have no plates or are cleanly stripped, going brown in the sun like fruit rinds. She sees a family living in a vehicle that is a cross between a wagon and a pickup but without wheels, sunk to the axle in dust. Her guide carries the water bottle tucked up near his armpit and leads her without a word directly into a collapsed building. She lowers her head and follows in the dimness over fallen masonry. Wires dangle everywhere and the dust smells sour. They exit through the remains of a butcher shop and cross an alley to the next building, which may have been a small factory once. It seems intact except for shell scars and broken windows and they enter through a large steel door complete with cross-bracing.
There are two hooded boys standing watch on the stairs with photographs of a gray-haired man pinned to their shirts. On the second floor the guide stands at a door and waits for Brita to enter. Inside, two men are eating spaghetti with pita bread and diet cola. The guide slips away and one of the eating men gets up and says he is the interpreter. Brita looks at the other man, who is easily in his sixties and wears clean khakis with shirtsleeves rolled neatly to the elbows. He has gray hair and a slightly darker mustache and his flesh is a ruddy desert bronze. He is bony-handed, maybe slightly infirm, and has gold-rimmed glasses and a couple of gold fillings.
