In the Line

Nur Turkmani

I somehow managed to avoid Beirut’s fuel lines for a couple of weeks. Took my bike around the city instead, watched the cars queue outside gas stations with an air of ascendancy, pity even. But this afternoon I am resigned to our collective fate, my calendar a distasteful reminder of tomorrow’s meeting all the way in Kaslik. The nearest gas station from my office is on Hamra’s outskirts. On the way there I listen to Hadi ramble about the new trick he discovered to keep our washing machine on even though our generator only allows seven amperes. Alright, Amar, he concludes after two minutes and twenty-seven seconds. See you home soon?

The heat outside my car is oppressive, like being forced to drink soup under the sun, but I cannot risk turning the air conditioning on with the little fuel I have. Ahead of me two taxi drivers obnoxiously honk at each other and I roll the window down to catch one of them shout something incoherent about the fuel crisis. Fuel, the banter of our summer: How much is the price of gas today? Have the subsidies been officially lifted? Can you access black market fuel? We tilt our eyebrows upwards, shake our heads in disgust whenever we catch each other’s eyes, bodies in perpetual shrug. Collapse creates new social mannerisms, Jad suggested last week. His breath smelled of cold beer and caramel toffee, and I nodded, intimately, as though we’d arrived at the thought together.

I slow down where the traffic swells, my fingers drumming on the steering wheel. The line for Sanayeh’s station drags on like a decade; this one will take me over three hours. I drive along in hopes of finding a shorter one in Achrafieh, somewhere closer to home. Past the Ring Bridge and the glass buildings glittering under the sun, downhill to the left. I settle at the MedCo close to Gemmayze, promise myself an iced coffee from a cafe in Gouraud’s Street after I conquer the line.

And then the bee lands on my windshield.

With its crooked wing, the dorky look to its eyes. God, that same bee. The one that tried to reach me, almost a year ago, in the Chouf’s Barouk mountain.

It was in the middle of September, I remember well — over a month after the port blast, around the time Hadi and I had first moved in together. We’d hiked for hours through the pine trees, the yellow spring-like flowers clustered around them. I allowed myself to think of mama a lot that day. Where she was, if she could feel any of this from above. It might have been because of the month itself, which was her favorite, or the mountain’s stillness after a sleepless month of glass shards and apartment hunting and doomscrolling.

Hadi had wanted to sit by the shade of an oak tree, so we found one and stretched underneath. There was a delicate breeze, the sort that wants to put you to sleep, and he said something about doing this more often, leaving Beirut and the language that surrounds it, the heat and dread and politics. I was only half listening though, busy trailing a bee as it sniffed over a bunch of wildflowers close to us. Something about the way it moved — clumsily, self-assuredly — was intoxicating. It felt familiar in a way that nothing seemed to anymore.

As though it could trace my eyes from behind, the bee flew toward me before docking on my chest.

“Not now,” I mouthed so Hadi would not notice, and it fluttered away almost immediately. I watched until its wings looked like a particle of dust in sunlight.

The car behind me honks but I ignore the driver and inch closer to the windshield to take the bee in. Its delicate copper stripes, the papery wings and sticky-looking antennas. I had known, with a certainty in my bones — a certainty that did not belong to me — that the bee would come back.

Twelve years ago, when I was fourteen, I woke up in the middle of the night to pee and found my mother uncharacteristically smoking on the balcony. She was in her pink wool pajamas, the one with dancing bunnies. I loved those pajamas, how soft they felt on my hands, the way they made her look embarrassingly childish.

“Mama?”

“Nothing, nothing. A bad dream. Go back to sleep.”

The next morning, before heading off to school, I heard her on the phone with her sister Noura, relaying the details of the dream. (It would torment me years later, after trying shrooms for the first time, that she had shared the dream with my aunt and not me). A swarm of bees was trapped inside her throat and she tried to cough them out but she could not move her jaw or feel her tongue. A month later, she was diagnosed with laryngeal cancer, and a couple of years after, around the time I was graduating from high school, she died.

The car honks again. I open the window before driving forward and the bee flies in dutifully, lands on my shoulder. It nods and I laugh with relief. Thank you, God, I think. Thank you.

“What song shall we put on?” I ask the bee almost immediately. It moves from my shoulder and I watch it stop on the steering wheel before it hovers over the center console’s different buttons. I cannot stop smiling. The bee doesn’t respond, settles on the edge of the glove compartment as though familiar with the internal decor of cars. Without realizing I’ve been pressing the car accelerator, I am suddenly in the MedCo gas queue behind the other drivers.

I navigate a list of my mother’s favorite musicians in my head. Iggy Pop, David Bowie. The Cranberries, Joni Mitchell. Towards the end of her life, she listened to a lot of Asmahan. See, she’d tell baba in her hoarse voice, eyes twinkling as she mimed her songs from their bed or the living room’s armchair, you’ve finally converted me. They always argued about music, my parents. Baba only listened to tarab — Farid el Atrash and Mohamad Abdel Wahab and Warda — and he ridiculed mama’s westernized taste to no end. Growing up I’d watch them squabble about whose turn it was with the car radio and the living room stereo.

I type Bowie’s name into Spotify and settle on a remaster of The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust.

“There you go,” I tell the bee. “This one’s for you.” The giggle that comes out its mouth surprises me. Slightly girlish, unfamiliar, nothing like mama’s deep chortle. We sit in silence. I prefer not to look at the bee too much, as if memorizing its details will make it disappear, so I stare outside the window and identify a beautiful lyric from one of Bowie’s songs — Look out over the town / Think about / All of the strange things / Circulating round — and it murmurs “that’s nice” or “ah, a powerful line!” Its voice is soft and squeaky and there is a slight fuzz to its consonants.

I cannot tell whether the bee even knows Bowie and I don’t ask, but it seems — from the bob of its head, the verve in its eyes — that it enjoys the album. Though I hated Bowie in my childhood, finding his voice lazy and his music difficult to connect with, I took it as a duty over the years to learn the intricacies of his personas and performances, until he eventually grew on me.

A lot of time must have passed because the playlist has already replayed twice when I reach my turn. I signal to the pump attendant that I want only 30,000 liras worth of gas. He gestures back that they can completely fill it up, but I shake my head. I am being stupid. Very few stations are filling tanks, but I have a feeling the bee is routinic, that it will only show up when I wait in the line.

Before I drive off, I open the window to my right and the bee flies out, fluttering slightly close to my window. I picture mama in the doorway of my childhood bedroom, tall and gawky in her tennis shoes, asking me to get out of bed.

“Thank you,” I whisper and it nods, almost professionally, before disappearing.

The traffic in Gouraud is not terrible but I park my car at the street’s entrance to walk all the way home. The sun has gone down, the air is cool, and my body burns like a fever. I count at least six familiar shops — boarded up, with signs for sale, or simply left alone. Last week Hadi told me that his aunt’s salon in Bourj Hammoud grew legs overnight, fucked off somewhere unknown. His aunt was still trying to find her shop. I laughed at the story. His aunt has cropped orange-ish hair and stout legs and speaks in a pompous nasal voice, but now I think of what it means to live in a city where a shop leaves its owner in the middle of the night. It annoys me, it really does. What does my mother know of what our city has seen since she left it?

My phone vibrates. A call from Hadi.

He’d love to hear about my interaction with the bee, would ask me to recount word by word the little we discussed, how it laughed, its mannerisms and etiquette. I can see it, how his green eyes would widen if I told him my theory about it being a reincarnation of mama. How many times over the past six years we’ve known each other, even before we started dating or living together, had Hadi wanted me to talk about my mother? During my birthdays, on graduation, after long nights out. You repress too much, Amar, he would say. I’m here if you need to talk about your loss, and I’d feel a terrifying urge to slam a door in his face.

Last week we had come back early from a house gathering, a forced night of exhausting talk about how exhausting Beirut had become and how exhausted our parents’ parents were and how exhaustible our energies always felt. Jad wasn’t there and it annoyed me how often I scanned the room for his oval head or gray sandals only to feel the disappointment ooze like egg yolk.

Hadi and I took our masks and bags off at the doorway, rushed to our apartment’s two bathrooms. I watched him double-lock the doors when we got out, a new habit over the past couple of months after two of our friends had gotten mugged. In the dim light of our doorway, his green eyes looked so gentle, and I felt a sudden, not unfamiliar, surge of appreciation for this man, our curated homeliness during a year of collapse. 

“Hashish?”

“But you’re rolling.”

Later on, after we’d shared a joint, he pecked my nose and I relented, kissing him back.

“Amar,” he whispered. He gripped my rib cage and sloped forward on our uncomfortably cushioned palette. His knees pressed on my thighs like shiny doorknobs. The hash made my mouth so dry the kiss was like eating ghazel-el-banet — itchy, strained.

“You’re not feeling it,” he said ten minutes in. His tone was scratchy, a mixture of anger and understanding. I slipped backwards, shoulders grazing the wooden edge like rubber.

“It’s the hash,” I said.

“Since when was hash a problem?”

“It’s just,” I tried to swallow, “it’s been tough.”

“What has?”

“Living. Living here,” I mumbled pathetically.

“In this house, you mean, with me?”

“No, I mean this sense of constantly waiting.”

“Waiting for?” His voice grew restless and I shrugged, felt my face take on a coldness. He continued, “I know your mother’s death anniversary was this week, Amar.”

When I didn’t say anything, he slid his legs under the coffee table and took the bag of weed out of the Etel Adnan book, Of Cities & Women (Letters to Fawaz), where we hid it from the cleaner, to roll another joint. All the while glancing at me, cautiously, he placed the weed in the grinder and opened the blue metallic case to take out one of the papers. Folded the edges of the roach into an M-shape. With his left hand, he drizzled the weed and tobacco into a little boat, pinching the paper with his thumb and left index until he reached the sticky part of the cigarette. The silence stood between us like a culprit. How many times had I watched Hadi do this? Lick the edge of the joint with his tongue, tap the roach on the table like a button.

“Do you want to talk about it?”

After he went to bed I opened the window of our balcony to gaze out. The city was so dark, a landscape of endless darkness, and I envied it, envied anything that could just be.

“Ah,” I welcome the bee with a wink. 

It enters the car and closes its wings, looks out the window while I shuffle through a new Bowie playlist. I mention I recently watched the 1996 film Basquiat, with Bowie acting as Andy Warhol. I notice the bee’s smile through the rearview mirror, detached and kind.

“He wore an original Andy Warhol wig,” I carry on. “Not necessarily the best acting, actually quite terrible — he was more Bowie than Warhol, but it was still a fun watch. You would’ve enjoyed it a lot.” The bee looks out the window and I bite the skin underneath my index nail.

“How old are you now?” I ask as Bowie purrs, Can't take my eyes from the great salvation of bullshit faith. That same giggle — slightly annoying, refreshingly alive.

“It depends. A hundred million years old if you trace my lineage from wasps. Or a couple of years, if you take things as they are.”

“You’re a queen bee, aren’t you?”

“I am, yes.”

“Head of the colony, mother of all in the beehive!”

“Mhm.”

“You live the longest, right? Ah, I have so many questions.” I feel like a child, cannot recognize the voice skipping outside of me. “Like, what does royal jelly taste like? How many eggs do you lay per day?”

“What do these questions matter?”

“I’m sorry,” I say, taken aback. “I just wanted to know more about you.”

The bee is unperturbed. It jumps up and down in the car’s cup-holder, its feet stained with leftover coffee from yesterday. After some time, it flies closer to me, hovering above my nose and says, lightly, “I understand.”

There is a chilling weight to the words. They settle like common sense, the word understand becoming an ecosystem I am a part of. The bee understands. Outside I can vaguely make sense of the cars moving. A motorcyclist swerves between the cars and hands out bottles of water. Volunteers have been doing that across the country, some restaurants even delivering food to drivers and passengers stuck in line. An inadequate attempt at normalizing our daily humility. How I crave a lesson, something to uproot me. I open the window to accept a bottle, my smile forced but intentional. I take a gulp and think of Jad’s teeth — a sloping row, oddly charming in the way big noses are. The water is lukewarm. Last week, I ran into him at a cafe near his house. He was reading a biography on Carl Jung but had put it away swiftly when he saw me. Our conversation was brief. I made fun of him for reading biographies. Do people still do that? I asked. Then we laughed at the absurdity of something the prime minister-designate had recently said, and discussed a friend’s desperate decision to move to Saudi Arabia for a consultancy position. He didn’t ask about Hadi. Right before I left, something in his eyes beckoned. An awareness: I can tell you find me attractive. I let him have that moment. On the way back home to Hadi, I tried to swallow my guilt.

“I’m sorry,” I say to the bee.

“For what?”

The water dribbles down my chin and onto the car seat. I wipe it off with the back of my hands and turn toward the bee then realize I do not know what I am apologizing for.

“Don’t be,” it says. “I am happy to be here, Amar.” This is the first time the bee says my name.

“Mama,” I said. “My name sucks. Couldn’t you have chosen a different one?” My parents had recently moved me to an international school in Ras Beirut and the coolest girls in class all seemed to have short stylish names: Kris, Carine, Michelle. My closest friend in class, Fatima, and I had agreed during break-time that once we could, we’d transform our names. Mine to Emma, and hers to Tima.

I was sitting on the bar stool in the kitchen, picking at the loubye b’zeit Khalto Noura had left over. Even before the sickness, Mama hated to cook. Her sisters had looked down on her for feeding baba and me jambon sandwiches for lunch. They often passed by in the afternoons with Tupperware filled with kousa, mjadra, djej w batata. But I loved her sandwiches, how she layered the jambon with mustard and paprika and pickles.

Her back was turned to me, but I could see her reflection in the mirror. She was washing the dishes and her pale hands moved wearily. I worried that her thin fingers were going to fall off, that they’d be washed down the sink with the foam. At this point, the sickness had started to show. She stayed in bed into the afternoon on her bad days, and every time I came home from school, she would call me in and ask me to recount what we’d learnt in class. But that day, she had been feeling better and sat with me in the kitchen while I did my homework.

“Don’t think I named you Amar only after your grandmother,” she responded, looking at me through the mirror. “I named you Amar because the moon is the biggest teacher. It dances around the earth throughout the month, it plays with the sun’s light. And from below, we, I mean me and you, we observe it in phases: when it is new, when it is a crescent, when it is full. The same way all of this is changing.” For some reason, then, she pointed to the plates on the drying rack. “And you, what are you even talking about? We could have named you after your father’s mother instead. And I can’t be as creative with Samira.”

We both laughed. That was my mama. Funny and poetic, edgy and goofy. Never did I believe, in those hours, even when all her hair had fallen out, even when I watched her throwing up in the bathroom, even after her voice had become inaudible, that she could die. She was meant to live forever, to point out the sight of the moon in the sky. When it was sliced like a frown, full as a face.

“Amar is a soft name,” she continued. “Like you.”

I rolled my eyes and took another bite of the green beans. But something about what she’d said sunk in the way the bee’s “I understand” did. As though I knew this moment, here in the kitchen, would always come back to me, like my memory would have it imprinted for as long as I needed it to.

In the weeks that pass — June making way for July — Beirut descends into semi-darkness. The government only provides a couple of hours of electricity per day, the generators are running out of fuel, the prices triple. I try to see the bee as much as possible. When I am with it, time suspends and our back-and-forth becomes a little secret I hold on to like a pocket watch. We try out the city’s different stations for fun. We explore the ones with the longest lines and angriest owners, where it is most likely for fistfights to erupt, those with a view of the sea or mountains. We watch cars and motorcycles and people whizz by, laugh hysterically at a pair of boys frantically pushing what we’d imagined was a stolen car to the station right before it ran out of fuel. The less the bee talks, the more breathless I become. The bee’s assured silence sits right next to Hadi’s relentlessness, his constant need to search through my pockets.

On Monday, I wake up to find him sitting on the white tiles of our bedroom. “Is it someone else?” he asks for the third time in twenty-four hours. My laughter bounces in the dark of our bedroom before it plops. I know Hadi is probably picturing something with Jad, but I think of how the bee sat on my right collarbone dutifully last week, how we waited for hours like school friends on the bus. It annoys me, it really does, Hadi’s stubborn refusal to leave things unaddressed. Our relationship since we moved in together feels robbed of mystery.

“It’s not funny, Amar.”

His expression is painful. It makes me think of that evening in fall, four years ago now. After our graduate sociology seminar, while the other students were piling up to leave the classroom. He stood right by my desk, in his white Obama sweater, waiting for me to close the laptop bag and straighten my papers. I took more time than usual. And then he spoke for thirty minutes, until the campus had turned pitch black, about when he’d started to have feelings for me; the different ways I’d led him on over the years; and how, if I felt the same, we could try this out slowly, step by step. I stopped showing up to the seminar, avoided him like a pothole. His openness terrified me, made me want to crawl into bed, become the duvet. A man so fluent in emotions put me off, made me feel small and masculine. A year later I wrote him a long email about Ibn Kindi and my experience with shrooms and asked for forgiveness in a P.S. underneath my name. We met for coffee in Hamra and kissed for hours afterwards in the garage where he’d parked. I wonder where that woman is, the one who held him furiously.

I walk over Hadi’s legs to boil water in the kitchen. I look at the bubbles in the water, want to dip my finger into the burn. I miss waking up to electricity, the privilege of a kettle. It is unrealistic — tremendously unjust — to walk away from my best friend in the middle of all this. And where will I go. Who can find a studio in this real estate market. Who will be waiting for me at the top of the stairs during electricity cuts with an ice bucket as a joke.

Later in the afternoon, while in the line with a nearly full tank, I spill these thoughts out to the bee. I tell it that I feel trapped in one scene with Hadi, that the audience has long left. I discuss how every time I’ve thought of leaving, my throat constricts.

“Surely the fear is some sort of indication of why I should stay, no?” I ask. When it doesn’t respond, I snap, “Aren’t you supposed to give me words of wisdom?”

“Why would I?” it asks, genuinely curious. I sigh angrily and the mood sours; I taste it in my tongue like underripe fruit. We drive toward the Tarik Jdideh Station and I pause Iggy Pop’s song “Candy.” It is out of place. Beirut isn’t a big city, there is no rain.

“Humans make me laugh,” the bee finally says after the pump attendant fills the car. I turn to look at its face. “What a deep fear you have of death.” Its hair is wispy and golden and I want to pull them out.

“What does this have to do with death?”

“It has everything to do with death. You and your friend are scared to die, and so you want to somehow hold onto this idea that you’ll make the relationship work against all odds. Instead of letting go of something that has become sick, you’ll stay.”

“Why didn’t you stay?” My heart is inflating, the car a box I am suddenly too big for.

“Stay where?”

I drum on the steering wheel to block her voice out, I look out the window, the cars around us are shoes I want to throw into the sea.

“In the bee colony, you mean?” it continues. “We become worthless when we can no longer mate. I wanted to explore new habitats.”

I know this fact, I do. That when there is a new queen in the colony, worker bees cluster around the older one until it overheats and dies. So I respond sharply, “That means you are scared of death too. You left your colony because you didn’t want to be killed.”

“Let it go.”

“Not if you don’t admit it.”

“Admit what?”

“That you’re scared of death too.”

It giggles as though we are in the middle of a silly conversation, and I shudder, roll the window down and mutter, “I think you should leave.”

Right before flying out, it looks at me and sighs, “You know, they warned me this would happen.”

Hadi moves out of our apartment in the middle of August. The first two nights I am alone, I tremble in bed. Feverish, always a step away from puking. I dream of oxygen machines and wonder how cancer patients in the country are faring without electricity. I dream that Jad comes over and we climb up to the rooftop so I can show him the moon. He laughs, sings obnoxiously the Melhem Barakat song about the two moons: one in the sky and another as a lover, and I tell him over and again: Jad, no, this isn’t it, you’re not getting the point.

After the tenth night, I wake up, shower, and get into my car. I haven’t gone out since he left. Before starting the car, I try to breathe slowly, calm the clatter in my chest. The smell of my shampoo, a mixture of olive oil and pears, drifts in the car. Focus on your senses, I think, the lessons of a corporate mindfulness webinar Hadi and I once attended as a joke returning to me. Count the number of dangling wires in your street. Notice the birds perched on them. Look at your neighbor’s tired faces. Listen to the sound of the generators, the anthem of this fucking city.

I start the engine and drive off. It is nearing the end of September and my car has very little fuel. Mama’s favorite month. One year since Barouk, since locking eyes with the bee. In an old journal of hers, mama wrote clumsily:

September always feels so forgiving to me. Is it simply because of the seasonal transition, or is there a particular childhood memory from September stuck in my unconscious mind? If there is one, I must’ve forgotten it. Ah, how I wish I could remember all the details to my life!

From Achrafieh to Jnah, I pass by at least twelve gas stations without stopping at any. MOBIL, MEDCO, TOTAL, HYPCO, CORAL, WARDIEH. They feel like friends, I almost want to wave at them in recognition. For some reason, stations are either closed or fuel lines are relatively short. I wonder if something happened during my hermit phase. Whether ships have offloaded fuel or it is just a good day to be a driver in Beirut. My tank blinks rapidly, a warning that I need to fill it as soon as possible, and I wonder if the bee is somewhere, waiting for me to get behind a queue. There is a TOTAL station with a considerable queue ahead of me, but I bypass it. I take a sudden left without much thinking, as though someone decided on my behalf that I should get back on the seaside road to head east. The roads are emptier than usual. I speed through them like a truth. 

I stop by the sea and park my car right outside the American University, where Hadi and I met years ago. I lean on one of the palm trees for a minute and imagine what would happen if I ran out of gas here in Manara. The thought thrills me. I imagine running into Hadi here. His piercing green eyes. The way he looks when angry, how his nose scrunches and fingers twitch. I imagine kissing Jad on the mouth: full and eager and hopeless.

The candy and corn sellers trudge through the corniche. In all my years walking the corniche, I never once bought cotton candy from the sellers. So I stop the cart and pay the old man for a stick, move towards one of the tiled benches to sit. My mouth welcomes the sweet. The cotton candy is the first thing I’ve eaten all day.

It all appears in front of me. The sky, the palm trees dash-dotting the street, the sticky feel of the candy in my fingers. Maybe corporate mindfulness is onto something. I watch the groups of men by the water, swimming and fishing and climbing the rocks. I look up at the sky again and it is slightly gray, buzzing with static. The sky must be full of bees fleeing like us. It crosses my mind that I never once asked the bee for its name.

The bee is not my mother. My mother died six years ago and I love her and I will never be able to ask her questions again and right now that is fine.

I want to laugh. I want it to rain.