An excerpt from I’ll Tell You When I’m Home by Hala Alyan
Month Four
By the end of the fourth month of pregnancy, the baby is roughly the size of an orange or avocado. Her skin is still mostly translucent, so you might be able to see her blood vessels.
Autumn comes suddenly, abrupt and welcome after the endless heat. The trees costume themselves in fiery red and orange, and the days shorten. I’m hungry for the dark. I walk the early dusks through Williamsburg, under the bridge, toward the water, toward the park. There is often the smell of something ashy, like a faint burning. It smells of adventure, newness, something about to happen. There is a particular smell of fire—rubber and garbage—that reminds me of youth, of trouble, the fire of protests, the fire that arrives as a warning, the first sign of danger. Once upon a time, this was the season of destruction. Once upon a time, this was the season of blackouts, one-night stands, remorse.
When I first met Johnny, he asked if alcohol made me uncomfortable. “Not at all,” I said. “I don’t mind.” It was the truth. I’d been intentional about remaining close to alcohol. The first three months after I quit, I lied to everyone about why I wasn’t drinking. “I’m on these dumb antibiotics,” I kept reciting. This meant I kept going to nightclubs, bars, house parties. I became inured to its presence, the ah of a popped beer bottle, the clank of ice against glass. It wouldn’t rule my life, I swore. I would heal myself. I wouldn’t be someone who made my sobriety its own kind of addiction. I was twenty-four.
Our first year dating was a whirlwind: travel, bar after bar after bar, in Spain, in Manhattan, in Boston and Providence and Oakland. I was finishing up my doctoral degree in clinical psychology and he was learning how to code. We stayed up like teenagers, slept past noon, woke bleary-eyed and disoriented.
In twelve-step meetings, there’s the same saying of alcoholics and co-dependents: They don’t have relationships, they take hostages. What is addiction but wanting gone awry? What is the story of addiction but the story of a longing you have to disavow? Leaving when you want to stay. Stopping when you want more. The addiction to the substance can become the addiction to another person. The continued thump of another heart. To burn yourself at the altar of the other, and to call the burning love. In Arabic, my favorite expression is: What is coming is better than what is gone. All addiction is the same in this way: the delusion of a better tomorrow, the delicious waiting for that turn. You wait because there is the promise of what will come, that kryptonic hope. Whether it’s the next hit, the next drink, the next lover—the addict is the quintessential archetype of the hopeful.
I’d always sought out drinkers, even after I stopped. But Johnny was different. I drank to destroy. He drank medicinally—like a chemist, not a gambler. His drinking was a constant and so it was like background noise. I poured whiskey into cut glasses. I lingered at the mezcals in the store. By the time I met him, I never drank. I never touched it. It didn’t have to be my lips touching alcohol, just so long as there were lips on it. There was a proxy delight in his drinking, the adventure without the consequence, my nervous system relaxing with his, the long exhale I felt at his eased body, the rush of serotonin. I loved his hangovers, the way I entered them like a room. Like this I found a way to keep drinking without drinking, a way to cheat the years.
Waiting can be an inherently hopeful act. You wait because you believe—even on the faintest level—that something is arriving. There is something to wait for. Against all odds, Penelope genuinely believed Ulysses would return.
For years, I rarely thought of drinking myself. If I did, I envisioned it like visiting a faraway land that I used to live in. I wanted to see if things had been rearranged. I wanted to check in on the gardens.
There was and how much there was. Kan yama kan. How many narrators. How many endings. When there is deep trauma. When that trauma has taken root. A technique in narrative therapy: asking the client to tell the story in third person.
In Beirut, she never knew mornings. Instead, she’d sleep past noon, stay up until sickly sunrises. She sucked her stomach in. She threw up in the bathroom. She lied. The city felt like a playground. Then a prison. The city grew around her like a tree. She drank. She sloshed around like liquid in a dirty glass, she spilled into booths and taxi cabs, she rolled around in beds with strangers, she woke up in unfamiliar places, her neck hurting and her mouth dry. She visited emergency rooms: the time she cracked her head, the time she woke her friends hyperventilating from too many drugs, the numerous alcohol poisonings. Afternoons spent flirting with the cute doctors as they unsnaked IVs for fluids and antiemetics. The dreaded hours of solitude: the hangover, heart palpitations, nothing to armor against the truth. Every day she seemed to get farther and farther from herself. A self built from bluster and duct tape: You try too hard. She tried too hard. She drank too much. She ate too much. She wanted and wanted and wanted and the bottom would never bottom out.
The first time she drank, she was sixteen and visiting her cousin in Amman. Studies show that an indicator of later alcoholism is whether someone’s first experience involves inebriation. She blacked out for five hours. She cried on the hood of a stranger’s car and told stories about love and nonexistent breakups. That was the thing with her and alcohol. Other people got drunk and told the truth; she drank and lied. She lied and blacked out and forgot the lies. The second time she drank, it was at her friend’s house in Lebanon. They drank Bailey’s straight from the bottle, and she remembers how the air in her room seemed to vibrate, the carpet, the electric tingles in her fingertips, all that unbridled potential. It was a feeling she’d chase for the next eight years: the promise of something happening. She could imagine small revolts, her crush appearing at the house, taking a flight to Paris. Never mind it was two in the morning. Never mind they were high-schoolers. When you were drunk anything could happen.
“A blackout doesn’t sting, or stab, or leave a scar when it robs you. Close your eyes and open them again. That’s what a blackout feels like,” Sarah Hepola writes. I’d found the best way to disappear. A blackout is the most spectacular magic trick of all. You erase yourself without anyone knowing it. You are absent only to yourself; to everyone else, you are still laughing, still moving, your mouth opening and closing, words fall out like stones. You still order another beer, tug a body against yours. You are a marionette, a hijacked engine, possessed. I never knew who took over when I blacked out. Maybe it was a stranger. Or maybe it was me, the actual me, the truest one.
What is addiction but wanting gone awry?
The year I graduate high school, my family moves to Qatar, a neat bit of luck that means I’m the rarest of creatures in Beirut: a single young woman, still a teenager, living in her own apartment, with her own roommate, without curfews. Beirut is fourteen years out of its civil war, an era that partitioned the city, brimmed the country with sectarian ties and violence. People rarely speak of it, and when they do, it’s like something of a bygone era. I start drinking right away: at the orientation event at university, with friends after classes. It begins like something fun, a little naughty, an adventure that never ends in a city that seems boundless. In this way, what I knew of Beirut I knew of drinking—I became fluent in the city at night, its alleyways and tiny bars and the sea glittering under the moon. The drink and Beirut became similar things, magical and terrible at turns. I became the confidante of taxi drivers. I befriended middle-aged bartenders who’d tell me to go home. I danced on boats, beaches, tabletops. One night, my friend nearly got taken by Hezbollah men—we’d drunkenly wandered into their tents in Beirut’s downtown square—and I, plastered, flirtatiously begged the man in Arabic to leave my friend alone. Take your Americans and go, the man had finally said, hesitating before adding, not unkindly, and sober up, sister.
Whatever I do tonight, I write in a bad poem during this time, will be outdone by tomorrow.
The truth is I lived in Lebanon for nearly a decade with only a hazy grasp of its history. I was a tween, then a teenager, then a college student. I parroted what I heard adults say during dinner parties, and drank my way through a political science degree. I chose the major because I couldn’t think of a better one, but my brain was always unable to hold all the dates and politicians. By the time I moved to New York for graduate school, I could barely explain anything. It was like trying to explain grammatical rules of Arabic, my first language, the first I knew of this world, but didn’t learn to read or write until age twelve. It meant I understood the sinews of it, the syntax, intuitively, but had no way to explain why. In America, Lebanon was seen as safer ground: the refugee camps, the Sabra and Shatila massacres, the oligarchical politicians, the corruption were overlooked. The West loved to tut over Lebanon. Creased brows. A country of French speakers. A country of bikini-clad women with dark eyebrows on postcards. The Paris of the Middle East, did I know they used to call her that?
I don’t send a voice recording to the avocado-slash-orange baby that week. Or the next. Or the next. Instead, I wait until I’m alone in the house, and rant to my grandmother’s photograph. She’s looking more solemn these days, more tired, a little older. I can almost make out her mmms. My soliloquies are becoming more deranged. She was right. I should’ve never stayed in America. I’d married America. Did she know that? I’d married it and I’d missed her death and I’d never forgive myself. And anyway, what was the point of leaving a place, when that place became a euphemism for every other place, when it became the reference point, when it superimposed itself on everything?
One morning in Beirut, I’d woken hungover.
“Get up,” my friend Karam said when he called me. “Let’s go somewhere.”
“I think I might be dead.”
“It’s Valentine’s Day. You can die after.”
We decide to go to Saida with another friend. It’s the third largest city in Lebanon, on the Mediterranean coast in the southern part of the country. In the days of the Phoenicians it was a major trading port. That day, we take a bus and I’m the only girl, flanked by my two friends. We walk through the cobblestone streets, the ruins and their distorted reflections in the sea, the streets filled with people and hawkers. The day is unseasonably warm, the air smelling of salt. We buy ice cream, then argue about which restaurant to go to. There are small stores everywhere, with men inside them: electronics, fruit, nightgowns.
There is a way that air rearranges itself in disaster. The ruins remain still. The water keeps lapping at the coastline. The people get in and out of their cars, the traffic worsens. But the voices start to seem louder. One man calls to another from across the street. A woman hurries by with a child. A man plants both his hands on the hood of a car, bracing himself, his head bent.
“Did you see?” one shopkeeper yells. Nobody responds. “Are you seeing?” We peer into his store, where the television is blaring. This is the scene I will return to in fiction, in poetry: Arab men hunched over television screens, learning about their cities, their dictators, their young men, the catastrophes that have befallen them. The dream my brother and I would share for decades before speaking it aloud: the light across a face, the story of a crisis.
We keep walking. “Something’s wrong,” Karam says, but we don’t respond. A woman is crying on the phone. We walk faster. I suddenly feel young, and my first thought is to call my father, my second is that he will want to know why I’m not on campus, why I’m wandering a strange town with two boys.
A crowd begins to gather on the street, mostly men, their voices laid atop one another’s, gesturing toward the sky, toward the sea. They are arguing, they are explaining. Something is wrong. Karam gestures toward the nearest shop, and we step inside. The man is my grandfather’s age, shaking his head at the screen. There is smoke, a fire, people gathering. The shot is aerial, then close up. The newscaster is speaking in formal Arabic, and neither of us can keep up.
“Uncle?” Karam begins. “What’s happened?”
He turns to face us, his eyes heavy and red-rimmed. I am startled. I am always surprised to see men cry, especially older men, especially older men who then speak gruffly. “What do you think happened? They killed him. They burned him alive.” He turns back to the television screen, the man’s face on it: Hariri. The prime minister. He has been assassinated. His car blown up near the sea in Beirut, a site that will be honored for years with a counting clock marking the time since the explosion.
Men gather on the street in Saida that afternoon. It is sunny. I am afraid, but excited too, my friends and I exchanging raised eyebrows, mouthing What the fuck as the voices gather, a fire starts, cars honk. They are burning tires, they are shouting. A man catches my eye as he jogs past and slows down. He grabs Karam’s sleeve. You should go, he tells him simply, before it gets bad. We are in the prime minister’s hometown, these men are his kin, they are furious. It takes us several tries to hail a cab. The smell of gasoline, already everywhere.
We take the cab north to Beirut, the sea blurring outside the window, the cab driver listening and cursing at the radio the whole time. The cab driver drops us off downtown, because Karam wants to see where the explosion had happened. We can’t get close and so we wander through the empty streets, a ghost town, the stores closed, the eerie sense of children without supervision, a city without adults.
Seventeen years later, it is October in Brooklyn. Seventeen years later, our block is transformed for Halloween. Windows alight with orange blinking fairy lights, child-drawn witches and ghosts, or for the more ambitious, a full murder scene, a towering Frankenstein, a cloaked woman that cackles when you walk by. I watch the mothers pushing their children past the decorations in strollers.
“A cat,” they tell them. “Is that a cat? Do you see the cat? What color is the cat?”
One summer in Beirut, your father takes you to the balcony one afternoon and tells you the drinking is a problem.
I watch them point, their children’s rapt, solemn gazes. I try to imagine doing the same, try to record myself describing the neighborhood to the baby. There’s a couple that lives two doors down, the woman’s pregnant. They have this dog, he’s kind of the worst? He’s always jumping up on you, then running around himself in circles. And he almost knocked the pregnant woman down the other day, and she automatically put her hand on her stomach and laughed. I sort of hated both of them for a moment? I don’t know. There’s a witch hanging from their stoop.
When the port exploded in Beirut in 2020, many first thought it was an Israeli attack. Some thought it was a foreign entity. The betrayal, the true betrayal, was learning it was your own. Your own politicians. Your own government. It was a self, cannibalized. It was a match, lit, and then tossed back into the room you were standing in.
All month, my friend texts me from Beirut. The port explosion caused billions of dollars in damages. Hospitals were destroyed. In the year since, the economy has fallen. The revolution has faltered. People are starving, Hala, my friend writes. There is a circulated video of a woman with a shawl half-wrapped around her face, storming a bank in Beirut at gunpoint. She is robbing the bank for her own money. I just want my money! she is heard shrieking. The manager looks wan. The banks have been limiting withdrawals. It’s mine! she cries when the man tries to calm her. Give me what is mine!
Later, it is revealed the gun was fake. A plastic toy. The woman got her money. It was for her mother’s treatment. I rewatch the video dozens of times. I am disturbed by her. I want to be like her. Taking what is mine. The shawl falling. My face visible throughout. Not bothering to hide.
When I remember my drinking, I see it refracted through places. Beirut is a city without curfews or oversight, a place where things can be bought off, where things can be erased if you have wasta, know the right people, accent the correct vowels. It is a city where neighbors slaughtered each other for fifteen years, where entire areas are Shi‘ite or Sunni or Maronite, where people rarely speak of the war. For years, it was the backdrop of my drinking, my mistakes, my unease, my attempts to recover, a place of music and trash and bougainvillea, traffic that ate up entire afternoons, stunning views from house party balconies. A few weeks before I graduated college, Hezbollah took brief control over several neighborhoods in west Beirut, including my own. More than gunshots or my mother’s frantic voice checking in daily during that week, I remember ice clinking in glasses, my friend’s rooftop, how every night we topped off each other’s drinks and listened to the upcoming summer hits.
There are dreams I have that are more like muscle memory: it is always night, the streets are always empty, I am walking through Centreville with its glowing mosque, I am in the backseat of a car driving up the mountains, to my grandmother, to Meimei where I weep on a couch while she strokes my hair.
I don’t think you understand, I told her in Arabic, how bad I can be.
What I’ve done.
She shushed me. There’s nothing you’ve done that the morning can’t fix. But it was already morning. Dawn had broken and I’d woken her, and I kept telling her things, whisper-crying things as she hushed me, things I’d forget by the time I woke up, things I could never bring myself to ask her to remind me.
If there is any night in my life I wish I could take back, it’s this one.
Another technique in narrative therapy: you ask the client to tell the story in second person.
One summer in Beirut, your father takes you to the balcony one afternoon and tells you the drinking is a problem. Only he doesn’t say drinking. He says what you’re doing. He is unable to even name the damage. Unable to speak it into the air. He says your siblings and cousins look up to you, this can’t continue. You say nothing. It will continue. It will continue for a long time. You’d come home the night before at four in the morning. You are twenty or nineteen, and your knees are still bleeding through the Band-Aids from where you skinned them jumping a fence the night before. You don’t remember the fence. You don’t remember the blood. You don’t remember shouting into the empty street: God, I’m so bored right after, then starting to cry. Your father ashes his cigarettes and waits. You don’t say drinking either. You just tell him okay.
During my doctoral program, I moved into a shitty apartment with roommates across from Penn Station. It was chaos. Take-out containers and dirty laundry. The muggy endless summer. House parties on Saturdays, spilling onto the outdoor patio, the arguments, the crying.
Someone was always crying. I took to making recordings while drunk, little anthropological notes, heartbreaking moments caught on tape. I’d plead with myself on the recordings. Talk about how bad it was. How I needed to remember. There was a bar downstairs and it was ruining my life and when I said that to my mother, she said I was ruining my own life, but my mother was thousands of miles away, in Doha where it was sunny all year round, and the houses were in compounds with swimming pools and gyms and palm trees. Not here. Not on this piss-smelling corner in front of that terrible bar, smoking a cigarette, watching the Madison Square Garden clock. Every time I came outside to smoke, the clock had sped forward. It wasn’t fair. It was a Tuesday. I had work the next day. I was supposed to be at school at nine a.m. and it was already two in the morning. I’d record my quavering voice, watching the lights of Penn Station. It was bleak magic.
The next morning I’d hear the slurred, heart-punching messages: Hala, please, please stop. Hala, please, please, please.
My friend who lives in Beirut texts: The hospital has four more days of fuel.
There was a brothel in Beirut. There was a man who ran that brothel. I would go there just to drink sometimes. One night, the man asked me to leave. A girl like you shouldn’t be here. I turned mean. What did he know about a girl like me, what was he saying about the other girls, I slurred, waving my arms at the working women, but they barely turned at my voice. He insisted, his voice turning low: Please, this isn’t right. We argued until he capitulated, exhausted, pouring me another drink, my victory feeling heavy in my chest. I wanted to keep arguing. I wanted to tell him I was no Midwestern apartment complex, no hardworking mother, no table manners, no prayers, nothing. I wanted him to understand just how bad I was, how much worse I could be. I wanted to tell him that about the latent thing in me. I wanted to tell him that, my God, it had woken up and I couldn’t put it back to sleep. But I could hear him mutter to himself as he turned away, But what’s happened to her that’s she’s here?
There is no story of the drinking without the story of the Bad Boyfriend. There is no story of the Bad Boyfriend without the story of the lies.
I can’t tell you that story yet, I tell the avocado-sized baby during a walk.
I put up a pumpkin-orange wreath in Brooklyn. The lines in front of gas stations in Lebanon are hours long. Someone gets shot over petrol. Then another. Then another. There aren’t antibiotics in the pharmacies. The country defaults on its loans to the World Bank, and the economy collapses. Whenever I think of my grandfather, his grave next to Meimei’s, the grief is so sharp it must be dodged. So I call upon my old trick: I pretend he is alive. Sometimes I can pull this off, the blessing of ghorbeh, the distance, that tentpole of diaspora. Death can be ignored, so long as the Atlantic stays where it is, the miles in the thousands. Like this my grandfather continues to live in a building overlooking the sea. Like this he breakfasts every morning on pita and za’atar, Sundays on ka’ak and knafeh. Like this he drowns it in syrup, like this he spends his afternoons reading articles on his computer, like this he tells the neighbors bint binti is a writer in another country, that I’ll be coming home soon, maybe even this winter. The same logic works for the entire country: like this Lebanon can live in its former iterations. The gas shortage, the exploded hospitals, the gunfights in traffic jams, I don’t need to grieve them because they aren’t happening. This is my shameful luck, my lucky shame.
In Brooklyn, I google Halloween costumes. In Brooklyn, I read about what a womb does in one month, two, five. I wake one morning to a Johnny that won’t speak. He moves from room to room, red-eyed. He is silent in the living room. He is silent in the kitchen.
Please, I say. Just tell me what it is. You’re scaring me.
He turns to fill his glass with water. Something about the moment feels familiar: turning away, the clink of the ice machine, slow motion until I realize that his back is crumpling. His shoulders shake. The glass nearly drops, but my body has moved to his body without realizing it, two bodies that have known each other for years now. Two bodies now clutching each other. I walk him to the couch and for the first time in months—for the first time since the sesame seed turned into an orange, an avocado—he pulls me to him and sobs. He sobs into my hair, my neck, my shoulder. Outside the window, the trees are orange and red, blurring fiery in the wind. For a quick, disjointed second, I miss my mother, her smell of leather and flowers, the silver box of jewelry she had in Oklahoma, the inside blue velvet, soft as a cat’s tongue. I used to want to sleep inside that box as a child, two inches tall, resting my head against the amber of her necklace.
“What kind of father,” he begins. He talks. He tells a story I’ve heard before, but it’s the first time I hear it on this couch, in this month, where somewhere, a baby with his eyebrows and my ears is turning in amniotic fluid. Even with all those letters, long as an afternoon, the story unfurls in front of me as though for the first time.
What happens to a story when you hear it? The touching it makes it yours, changes its shape. But some stories aren’t yours, no matter how long you live inside them, analyze them, remember them. I could write a thousand poems about this story, and it still wouldn’t be mine.
One night I go to Dave & Busters with my brother and cousin Omar and their girlfriends. We are bored and nobody can come up with a better idea. Children ping around the space like comets, the persistent lights and bells of the machines soothing. While everyone is getting drinks, my brother’s then-girlfriend, Yara, and I try the claw machine. She wants to know about the surrogate and I tell her everything.
“She has daughters,” I say. “She always texts me during the doctor’s appointments.”
For our birthdays that year, Yara and I had gotten tattoos: a small matchstick on the inside of my right forearm, a technicolor red heart on her shoulder. I’d had a whole thesis about the matchstick: it could mean destruction or warmth, a reminder that the same thing can do both things, depending on how you held it, how you used it. When I asked her about the heart, she shrugged. “I think it’ll look pretty.” It did. “I’ve only told Johnny so far,” I say impulsively. “But I did find out the gender.”
She squeals. “Tell me, tell me, tell me!”
I tell her and she cries and laughs and jumps up and down. I snap a picture. The photograph is blurred, the absurd candy lights streaking her face, her expression animated with joy. It is the first real joy I feel in a long time, a response to hers: this moment, someone unabashed with their excitement. Unwilling to apologize for it.
In this story, there is a boy who lives in Massachusetts. He has a father and mother and brother. He goes to a private school, lives in a three-story house, summers in Maine and ski trips in Aspen. There are no bombs in this story. There are no prime ministers being assassinated, no evacuation ships, no passports being hidden in the bottom of a suitcase. There are no food stamps, no immigration officers mispronouncing a name. There is a father who disappears into himself for days at a time. There is a mother who adores that father. There is a boy, the youngest, who is bright and talented and loved and punished for those things in equal measure. There is a boy who is given one medication, then another, then another. There is a boy who drinks for the first time at thirteen, and never stops. For years, he dreams of leaving that house, the snow, the people who love and punish him in equal measure. Then one day, he does. He gets on an airplane and goes to country after country, with a dusty backpack and worn-out sandals, places with names he beats his tongue against until he gets it right, until he says them perfectly, until he can ask for water and bathrooms and then explain his thoughts, the texture of his dreams, in another language. He goes from city to city, living on the beach, eating fruit from tree branches, spending hours under the sun. He decides not to die.
My final year in Beirut, I meet a man named Daniel. He is Irish and Egyptian, and speaks in lilting, musical tones. He drinks as much as I do. His mother is dying in Dublin, and we spend nights closing down bars, then kissing in the street. I once forget a necklace at his house, and he carries it around for weeks before we see each other again.
The boy travels for years. He goes to Seville and Costa Rica and Mexico and Chile. He gets a job doing it. He takes other boys and girls on trips, even though he is barely twenty, twenty-one, he takes teenagers to cities across a different continent, scolds them to listen to the local guides, laughs at their jokes, does head counts before excursions. One trip, in a new group of kids, the boy meets another boy, a few years younger. His name is Taylor. They play guitar together. The years between them feel like a chasm, but really they are both children. They both need protecting from what’s to come.
Every time Daniel offers me affection, I flinch. I cancel dates. I pretend I don’t care when he dates a Lebanese bartender. One night, we spin on a dance floor and then he asks me to look at him, just for one second, love, without looking away. I can’t do it. My eyes dart like fish. I leave Beirut. His mother dies. The worst nights in Manhattan, the ones that are the coldest, when the drink seeps into me like possession, when I can’t stand for more than a minute, when I can’t speak a full sentence, he’s the name I whisper against dive bar bathroom sinks, as though I could invoke him.
The boy takes the group of teenagers to a small town in Mexico, where there are trees and hills and a group of Mexican children. This is part of the trip, rich American teenagers playing with Mexican children, hide-and-seek and tag. Taylor is the first one to start a game, the children giggling around him. He tells them to chase him. He disappears between the trees.
There are two ways to tell the story that is not my story. There is the story of the children, who chase after Taylor, this boy with parents and an older brother, this boy who lives a thousand miles from here, who plays guitar and piano, who will graduate in a year. It is a hot day in July. The children chase after him, they watch him run on his long legs, watch him turn back, give a broad smile, then jump behind a large tree.
I was two years into Manhattan. We kept missing each other: when I was in Beirut, Daniel would’ve left the week earlier. Daniel was in London, but I’d just flown back to New York. It was early August when we messaged each other. He was coming to New York later that month. He had a birthday party. He turned twenty-five in Dublin. It was a warm night. He was smoking. He sat on a windowsill. He leaned or he tipped. It was the first birthday he’d have without his mother. There is no other way to tell this story. He never came to New York. He fell. He fell and fell and fell.
The other way to tell the story that is not my story: the boy. The boy who grew up with snow and money. The boy who left and decided not to die. The boy who is a few years older than Taylor, who has played guitar with him, talked about his future, the colleges he will go to, the music he loves. The boy hears screaming and then the children are running back, not being chased, they are running alone, crying out, Se cayó! Se cayó! and the boy is confused, shouting in English, then Spanish: Who fell? Who fell? But he already knows the answer, is already running to the tree, to the well that was hidden behind the tree, the impossible drop, the dark that will take days to mine, days to find the bottom, but before that there is the earth beneath the boy, his knees hitting it, his voice cracking as he begins to scream a name.
Tell me what you fear and I will tell you what has happened to you, Winnicott wrote.
It is October in Brooklyn. The avocado-sized daughter is four hundred miles away. The boy who fell to his knees in Pozos, Mexico, is panting against my neck.
“What kind of father,” he says. The first thing he did after the falling was call Taylor’s parents. He was twenty-two. He told a mother and father that their son had fallen. That they didn’t know how far. They didn’t know if he was still alive. For days, he spoke to police officers and journalists and medics. For days, he sat with a mother and father who waited for news, and when the news came, he was there. There was a father and he turned to the boy and asked, Will we ever recover from this. Here is the crux, where two stories meet like rivers: two bodies in October, crying, two bodies that each fell in love with a person, with their history, the mirror they became. It took me years to realize we’d both loved boys who fell, then years to understand we’d learned different things from the fallings. About love, about grief, about the inevitability of one into the other. Here is the crux of our story: I wanted a child. He didn’t. His reasons are as plentiful and vivid as mine. We came to each other with a wounding that wasn’t ours, a wounding we gave each other nonetheless.
For the first time, pressed against his familiar salt and forest smell, I think: She’s going to be half me, and half him.
When people ask why I stopped drinking, I always say, Because I knew I’d die otherwise. I list the ways: I would fall out of a window while leaning to wave at someone. I would hitchhike with the wrong group of guys. I’d wake up not only to a strange man, but to him holding a knife to my throat. I talk about all the ways I had tried to die. This is the truth, but there is another one, one that I never talk about, which has just as much to do with love.
My brother quit drinking in his twenties, too. Once, overhearing us talk about it, my father grumbled, I don’t know where you all get this from. Nobody drank in his family, a lineage sprawling back to Gaza, to the villages that were dispossessed in 1948, generations upon generations living off the land, the sea, each other. All Muslim. Nobody drank, but there were stories of great-uncles, a wayward aunt, someone’s grandfather who gambled everything away, a man who became so angry that he’d stopped another’s heart. People who didn’t know when to stop. People who wanted and paid for that wanting.
What story can be built from a blacked-out memory? For years, I had fragments. Everything else would be a lie, conjecture, an attempt at guessing a life. Instead, I lived in montages: two days at the house of a stranger, who’d wake me just to give me more vodka, then watch me sleep. My finger tapping drunkenly against my own thigh. A gate I tried to scale. The meeting with the dean where I almost lost my scholarship. The mornings, always late, always guilty, always trying to remember: what had I said, to whom, where had I gone, why was my thigh bruised, to whom did I owe an apology. The night I showed up drunk at my friend Michael’s house. What happened to you? he asked. I apparently replied, Me. I happened to me.
What story can be built from a blacked-out memory? For years, I had fragments.
I once went to a fortune-teller in Jordan. She was famous among the locals. I met with her for an hour and she told me I’d one day choose between two men. That’s mostly what I remember. She said other things: that there would be planes and oceans I’d have to cross, lovers I’d have to choose between. She recorded the whole thing and gave me the tape; your guess is as good as mine as to where it is now. There was one other thing: she said I’d been a witch in a past life. She told me I’d died from either thirst or fire. That I’d burned myself up. She told me I was here now to make different choices. I was sixteen.
The night of my twenty-second birthday, the last I’d celebrate in Beirut, I got so drunk I fell face-first on the pavement. My final months in Beirut had a manic quality to them. I did not know how to leave, and so the leaving had to become necessary. I destroyed everything I could. I slept with the wrong people. I said terrible things. I fought. I saw the Bad Boyfriend again. I ripped clothing, I vomited inside cabs. I was making Beirut unreturnable for myself. For years, since the Bad Boyfriend, I spent most of my time with American boys. They were safe, disposable, always leaving, always drinking. The shifting tide of expats: the constant arrivals, how well it lent itself to longing, the constant going-away parties, the group shifting to make room. We drank ourselves incoherent on rooftops, balconies that overlooked bullet-riddled buildings. They didn’t care about the messes they made, in bars, in taxis, on the street: it wasn’t their city. I could hide under their cloak. In this way I was both inside and out, a local remade into an outsider.
That night, I turned twenty-two. My hair was dyed pink. I fell so hard against a friend’s sink she heard it two rooms away. I ended the night cutting my friends’ hair, and they cut mine. We did it like children at a sleepover, fondly, carefully. More, I kept telling them, more.
Obsession is an illness of repetition. This was the task of drinking— an endless arithmetic. The hand outreached for a drink, once, twice, a thousand times, a loop.
The next morning, I dragged myself to a friend’s house for a miserable brunch. Halfway through I went to a bedroom alone. My face was scraped raw from where I’d fallen. My hair looked terrible. After ten minutes or so, the door opened. It was one of the expats, a few years older and from Massachusetts. His face was impossibly gentle.
“Can I sit?”
We sat at the edge of the bed in silence for a while. I knew it was over. My time in Beirut. The summer. My college years.
“You’re lucky you have a pretty face,” he said, and the tension broke. We both laughed, until mine caught in my throat. He put his hand on my shoulder, awkwardly, palm-first, and I knew he was trying to think of what to say. There were bad men, but there were other ones too. The other ones were always trying to think of what to say to me. They tried to cut me off, wrestled me into cabs, poured me water. He and our friend Michael had taken me to the ER once. They convinced the doctors not to call my parents. He’d forced me to go home the night before my GRE. I can see our reflection in the mirror, mostly out of view: my scraped face, the tufts of pink, his hand against my shoulder, his somber face. I’ll remember this, I suddenly thought. That, among the violence, there was so much tenderness.
A place teaches you how to love. How to grieve. How to destroy. I never got to live in Palestine. I got the Midwest, a year in Maine, the desert, a near-decade in Beirut. When I left Beirut, I didn’t just leave a city. I left what it had done to me. What its men had taught me, what they’d taken. What I’d given.
I left Beirut for New York a skittish, cigarette-prone girl with no radar for danger and nobody I knew around for miles. I found an apartment two blocks from the Columbia campus, lived with two other graduate students. The first month, I spend the darkening days going from bar to bar, drinking the way I’d done in Beirut, dye my hair a purplish red, wear the same men’s gray hoodie everywhere. I am here to study psychology, but instead I skip classes, sleep until the afternoon, dream of Beirut every night. I miss the traffic, the unlocked doors, the chaos. I’d left the city like I was fleeing it, but I couldn’t sleep without its noise.
A few weeks into Manhattan, I go out alone to a Columbia bar. I meet a woman, a sculptor or something. There are two men, tourists. There is a couple. I keep flitting outside to devour cigarettes. I haven’t washed my hair in days. I might be depressed, I text my friend Dalea, who lives in Florida and keeps telling me to move. When I finally visit, I can’t believe we’re in the same country: her enormous apartment, the unrelenting sun, the flip-flops and tank tops she wears to class. In Manhattan, the weeks blur into endless flights of stairs in subway stations, slushy crosswalks, missed 1 trains, psychology professors who speak about happiness unironically. I argue with one of the men in the bar about Palestine. The woman tells me I have interesting eyes, as though it’s a fashion choice, but that I need to learn to put on eyeliner properly. I have one white wine, then another, then a third. I start feeling dizzy.
“I think I need to sit down,” I tell the woman. Behind her, the couple are kissing. The bar is hot and the way the light is hitting the bar top is making me anxious. “Can I sit?”
That’s the last thing I remember. It is a tampered tape, an erasure poem. I watch strangers kiss and then—shapes, blinking lights, my eyelids making sense of sun. There is a white ceiling. There is a scratchy blanket under my chin. I am alone in a bed. It takes me minutes to be able to sit up; I feel like I am upside down, moving through water. There are strange marks on my arms and thighs: rainbow-colored, dots in different colors, pen or paint. It will take weeks for them to fully disappear. There is someone else in the apartment, a bathroom out of sight, the sound of water running. My instinct is to grab my phone, my hoodie, my shoes, dash down the long hallway, into a grimy stairwell. I walk down two, three flights of stairs, then a glass door, then pavement, then sunlight. I run down one block, then another, then cannot take another step. Something glitches in my brain, something shimmering and strangely colorful, and I realize that the line on the pavement is moving, or sparking. Two sanitation workers watch me. “Late night?” one of them asks.
“Do you see this?” I mumble. It is the first thing I’ve said since waking and my tongue feels funny.
“What’s that, sweetie?” “She okay?”
“Just fucked up.” He snaps his finger near me. “You need water or something?”
I shake my head. It takes a minute, but they eventually keep working. I call the first person I think of, my friend Andre. It is mid-morning, a weekday. He is in his apartment in D.C., his voice booming and familiar in my ear. I talk frantically about sidewalks and holes and shimmering lights.
“Hala,” he says firmly. “I need you to look up. Look for the nearest street. What street are you on?”
I’m in the Bronx. I’ve never been in this neighborhood before. I realize my hands are shaking. I’m suddenly afraid I didn’t run far enough, that someone is going to find me. But who? I remember the woman, the tourists, the couple. I hear him clicking on his laptop. He is finding directions. He’s going to get me home. He promises.
“But the sidewalk. I don’t think I can step on it.”
“So maybe there’s something wrong with the ground,” he says amiably. “Or maybe there isn’t. What we’re going to do is assume that it’s going to be like every other time you’ve taken a step, okay? The ground has been there. We’re just going to remember that.” He sounds conversational, casual. “So let’s take a single step, okay? Can you do that for me?” I take one step. The ground holds. I take another. He tells me what train to take and to call him when I get out. It is the 1 train. It is crowded, people headed to work, teenagers to school. There is a woman wearing a baby in a sling. She looks away when she sees me watching. The numbers blur by. I get out at 116th Street and call Andre back. He tells me where to turn, until I’m at the university health center.
There is a kind doctor, a litany of questions, and then she asks, “Is there anyone I can call?”
I open my mouth. I tell her about Andre in D.C. and Dalea in Florida.
She takes a breath. “Not your friends, honey. Is there a parent I can call? A family member?”
There is nobody nearby, I tell her. My parents are in the desert. My siblings too. My cousins, my aunt, my grandparents—Beirut. Everyone is thousands of miles away. It is the first time I really understand this and I start crying so hard she has to call in a nurse to help calm me down.
“Poor kid,” I hear one of them say, and cry harder. I’m not a kid, I want to say, but I’m too busy wiping snot with my hoodie sleeve. There is a hushed conversation between them, another doctor who comes in and asks me a couple of questions, about sex, about if I’m feeling any pelvic pain, questions that make me cry harder. The three of them face me. “We think someone put something in your drink,” the first doctor says gently. “And we need you to go to the emergency room.”
What is a story in hindsight? Conjecture, a guess. I don’t remember how I got to the emergency room, just that there was a girl my age with me, a volunteer for a crisis center. I don’t remember what tests they ran, just that the doctor said I could make a police report, but I’d have to get a rape test first. I don’t remember the volunteer’s name or the color of the doctor’s hair or the color of the hospital gown, but I remember saying no to the rape test, even though they asked more than once. I said no each time. I feel fine, I said, and now, fifteen years later, I can’t remember what the truth was. Only that, whatever the answer was, I didn’t want to know.
In the hospital lobby, the volunteer held my hand. We’d been together for hours. I never wanted to see her again.
“None of this is your fault,” she says. “The thing is . . . it’s not fair but . . . we have to watch out for ourselves. Girls, I mean. You can totally drink.” She says this in a rush, so it sounds like one word. Youcantotallydrink. “But it just might mean that, like? Bad things are more likely to happen.”
I smile at her. She is my age, maybe a year younger, but I feel decades older. She has shiny hair, a pretty coat. She wants to help. She is spending her free time doing this, meeting crying girls in hospitals, holding their hands, telling them it isn’t their fault.
“Totally,” I tell the volunteer. “Yeah. I’ll stop maybe.” She hugs me outside the hospital.
I don’t stop. The following year, I move to the shitty Penn Station apartment above a bar. It is named after a Shakespearean play. The bartender has long, sandy hair and reminds me of Dave Grohl, which reminds me of the Bad Boyfriend, but this one has kind eyes. I flirt with him and he wants nothing to do with me, except for one night when I black out and couldn’t tell you what happened. This happens more and more, the blacking out.
One night, a homeless man blocks my building door. He tells me to look at him. Something is going to happen to you, he says when I finally do. He means bad. He means something bad. But something already has. For years, I waited for things to happen, and then they did, and now I couldn’t stop the happening.
Every night. Every single night I tried not to drink. Every single night I failed.
What kind of mother?
And now? It is October in Brooklyn. Johnny’s face buried in my neck. His own question: What kind of father. The grief between us cracks open and in that overture something in me revs to life. Here is the thrum I move easiest to: the excitement of misery, the somber hit of a crisis. I become obsessed with help. For two weeks I research therapists.
I calculate costs in a spreadsheet. I call ketamine clinics, rehab centers, addiction psychiatrists. I feel Johnny’s unhappiness in my bones, as my own. I call between patients, on my way to errands, with the same rush of a first sip. I will fix it. I will fix everything. I imagine us in the waiting room of a swanky rehab, drinking orange juice in a beautiful courtyard in Arizona or Wyoming. We would talk about our lives. Our miscalculations. We would talk about our drinking. We’d spread our mistakes out between us like a picnic. We’d finally understand. The receptionists are confused when I call. There are long holds. Who is the patient? Who am I calling for again?
One of the psychiatrists listens as I breathlessly speak for an hour. I’ve gone ahead and scheduled an appointment. I’m in his stuffy office, only I’m telling Johnny’s story. I talk about his childhood. His father. The boy who died. I talk about the pills, the drinking, dropping thirty-eight years at the doctor’s feet. Help him, I say at the end. Please.
The doctor grimaces. I can see something on his face. My stomach drops. It’s worse than I thought.
“And you?” he asks.
“I’m . . .” I look around, confused. Had I misunderstood something. “I’m sorry?”
“Okay.” He scoots his chair forward. “Has your husband said he wants to get help?”
I feel my shoulders tense. “Not yet, but I think—”
“Mm,” he talks over me. “And do you think—I mean really think— that it’s something he’s ready to do right now?”
His question is a blade. I think of Johnny saying, “You’re still trying to change me,” think of everything he’s told me. I feel myself shrink into the couch. My voice comes out small. “No.”
He sighs. He says he’s going to tell me something. I hate when people announce their announcements. I wait.
There is a kindness in how he looks at me. Solemnly. “If you’re not careful, then this,” he says slowly, waving vaguely at the room, the city, the man somewhere in that city, my own frenetic body, “is going to cost you your sobriety.”
The last night I was alone with Daniel, we went drinking at a bar in Gemmayzeh. Its sign was neon and red. A drunk British woman kept saying we looked in love. We laughed her off. My stomach flipped. She was outing me in a way that sex hadn’t. But Daniel was drunk and so was I, and we kept drinking, and we looked at each other and for a second everything slowed down. We didn’t say a word. His mouth softened and I knew he was about to speak, about to say everything. I looked away, ordered another drink. The moment broke. After he died, I thought of that night. How nobody on the planet would know about it. That lady. That rush of mezcal. How it was just me and my memory of it. Nobody could fact-check me. Just me and my memory, growing larger and unrulier and more different every passing year.
The night after the psychiatrist I go to bed spent. I have lists and nobody to give them to. I think about the doctor and the fortune-teller. I think about the meetings. The slogans. An avocado. The attempt to control is just an attempt to protect. But we hurt anyway. Trying to control the hurt only makes it hurt worse.
In the morning, I wake with a fever.
There are doctors. An urgent-care visit. My urine is clean. The ultrasound is clear. My lower back aches. The fever rages. My breath catches. The second doctor refers me to a third doctor and the third doctor tells me sternly to go to the ER. The IV bag reminds me of Beirut, alcohol poisoning, unimpressed doctors. I have this sickness, I once wrote in a journal. Everything reminds me of something else.
A fever is its own kind of intoxication. I am fuzzy with heat. I cry from pain when I pee. I fall asleep nauseated, then wake craving my grandmother’s lentil soup. I’m convinced she is in the other room. Johnny orders some for me, but it isn’t what I want, and I weep as I eat it. The Styrofoam container, the plastic spoon clicking against my teeth. I watch a television show about a woman with a daughter, then half-dream that I’m talking to my own. The fever maddens me, wrecks me, ices my bones then sears them. I have spent myself like a bad check and there is nothing left but this tired fire.
I have a cyst on my ovary. It has happened before. After the last miscarriage, I had grown one. I liked this language. My ovary grew the cyst like a rose, like I’d planted it there on purpose. It ached when I coughed or moved too quickly. My third trip to the emergency room, the new doctor takes inventory of my symptoms: back pain, breathlessness, urinary symptoms. Blood work clean. The fever is the outlier, she says. But she has a question.
“We’ll check, of course. But. Are you sure you’re not pregnant?”
I don’t mean to laugh. I laugh so hard a nurse pokes her head in. I laugh so hard I start to cry a little. The orange. The avocado. The crying hardens. I think of the hours I’ve spent making the wrong lists. Not cribs or names, but doctors and rehabs. Wanting to fix someone that hadn’t asked for it. Someone that had asked only for an afternoon, to be held while he cried. The pregnancy test they run is negative, of course. But later, I google the symptoms and she’s right. I have all the symptoms of someone in their fourth month of pregnancy.
They never find out the cause of the fever. Fever of unknown origins, the medical records read. HCG negative. The MRIs come back clean, the tests, the blood work. They can’t find anything. The carved pumpkins rot slowly on the neighborhood stoops. I keep rewatching the same episodes of television. On the show, the daughter saves the mother. The mother saves the daughter.
What got me sober wasn’t the concept of my own death, but Daniel’s. In his death, in the ensuing grief, I could see my own. The falling that happened for years. Because I knew I’d die otherwise. He was drunk. He leaned or he jumped and twelve hours later my friends Sarah and Dana called me and asked me to sit down. I was in Manhattan then, that shitty apartment near Penn Station.
My professors, the clients at the substance use clinic I interned at, my second year of the doctoral program. Nobody knew. Nobody knew, as I talked about breathalyzers and harm reduction and explained stages of change, that I was in the trenches with them. “It must be hard,” I’d say, but mean It is hard. I know it feels like you might not be able to change. Am I going to be able to change? The sessions were marvelous, disorienting places to be: I spoke to two people at once. I listened attentively to the patients’ insights: what worked for them, what didn’t, what they wrote on Post-its to look at each morning, their reminders for the people they wanted to be.
The fever breaks as suddenly as it came. A good fire purifies, licks things down to their bone. The fever cleans me out. On Halloween, I stand under the moon with a glass of water. I leave it outside, because that’s what the spell books say, because I don’t know what I believe anymore, because I’m thirsty right then and there, because I want what I’m already holding in my two good hands.
In the movement to decolonize mental health, the goal is true cultural humility—in giving power away, in collaborating, in naming hierarchies to try to dismantle them. In meeting people where we are, too. But before I learned this language, I felt it in my body: how my suffering was no different than their suffering. How my graduate classes and DSM codes were useful, but how people needed to find their own language, their own system of meaning. I had patients that relapsed and never returned. I had patients that were forced to come in through ultimatums: a furious partner, an adult child. They didn’t often last long. People needed to want the change, or at least needed to be curious about it. People needed to have hope, even if it was the slightest ember of it, for a different version of themselves. Future Them needed to flicker in form, the slightest glow. We built our future selves from our present selves, I started to understand. Every day I didn’t drink was another day I learned I was capable of not drinking. Every day I didn’t drink was another grace for my future self. I never told anyone I was getting sober that year. I administered drug tests. I read breathalyzers. I asked people how much they’d drunk the week before. I asked them what it would be like to have a different life. I asked them if they were willing to have a terrible hour, a terrible day, a terrible week, in service of that different life. I took notes for their files. I took notes for my life.
It was my mother I called after my last blackout. In that same shitty Penn Station apartment. I’d gone a month without drinking after Daniel. I cried like a lunatic in Washington Square Park, on the 1 train, in the back of classrooms. I went to open mics and read bad poetry. I went to churches, a Buddhist temple. When I prayed, I prayed that his falling had felt, briefly, like flying. Then I went to a party and had one drink, then another. Then another. I went on a three-day bender. At the end of those ugly, telescoped days was me: waking naked and shivering in my own bed at noon. I was alone. I couldn’t tell if someone else had been there. I didn’t want to know. I shivered my way through the hangover, my one, simple task hovering above me like a moon: make it until the evening.
Evening came. I was in my bed, the Christmas lights I’d hung the only light. I dialed my mother’s number from instinct; she was visiting my brother in San Francisco from Qatar. We spoke about her trip, about the weather, and I burned in shame at the last few days, the memory-fragments that flung at me like spears.
“Your voice sounds strange,” my mother said. She sounded suspicious at first. We’d always had a difficult time of it, she and I. Long, terrible years. Arguments that would erupt from nowhere. Too much alike or too much different, never sure which.
“Does it?” I’d never noticed before, but some of the lights were flickering a little; it made them look like flames. I thought of all the things I’d tried: the phone reminders to stop after three drinks, the pacts with friends, my broken, recorded voice begging me to stop, stop now. I suddenly knew what to do. There was a moment of enormous, shattering defeat that fell over me, which felt suspiciously like relief.
“Actually,” I said. “I think I need to stop drinking.” I was twenty-four.
She didn’t ask why. She didn’t lecture me. Speaking the words aloud invoked them, like naming a jinn. My mother didn’t gloat. She got quiet. My mother. My body had belonged to her before it had belonged to me. My pain had always been an unbearable thing, even when I wanted her to bear it. She spoke as though she was in the next room, as though she was in this room, as though her hand was in my hair, my hair in her lap as it had been in my grandmother’s that night. My mother said yes, yes, I should try, I could always change my mind, but who knew, it might make everything better.
A decade later, I walk across the East River after the last pregnancy scan, the one where the doctor tells me there is no longer a heartbeat. It is February, months before I meet the surrogate, before the poppy seed that turns into an almond that turns into an orange. It is February, and cold, and the water dances under the sun. I call my mother first. My mother, from whom I had learned the lists, the frantic urge to fix.
“I have to tell you something,” I say.
My mother. From whom I learned to fix men, to leave cities, to have a temper, to have faith. I hear her take a deep breath, like an engine revving, with advice, with instructions to pray better, to keep hoping, with offerings of prayers and advice, then the breath hisses out. Not this time. “I’m sorry,” she says instead, her voice breaking. “Hala, Hala. I’m so sorry.”
It is everything I need. She lets my pain land in her hand like a bird.
She catches it. She holds it. It stays as long as it needs.