Things You Do in September at a Certain Age - Fadi

The First Story


Ahmad’s Ass Looking at Velasquez Trying to Open a Tuna Can

A Painting by Salvador Dali

Riyadh, August 12, 2006



Here. Take this if you can.

I got a call yesterday at around 11:00 in the evening:

Fadi?
Yes
This is Abou Ahmad speaking..
Ya hala Abou Ahmad

Abou Ahmad is Ahmad’s father. Ahmad is a friend of a sort with whom I had a couple of conversations in different social occasions here in this city of sand. It was very strange that his father was calling me so relatively late in the evening. Such calls always carry bad news.

My son Ahmad needs to see you right away if you could…
Kheir, is he ok?
Actually he’s not. He’s in the hospital, if you could come over?
I will be there in a few minutes.

My relation with the man does not reach the level of his family calling me to come to the hospital for him, but what can you say to such a request? So I put my cloth on and drove to the hospital where he was. The family was there: Father, mother, his father’s third wife, his older sister, two baby brothers, his uncle and other people. I hardly knew those people and there I was in the hospital with them for their son!

What’s wrong Abou Ahmad? Is Ahmad hurt?
My son, there was an accident.
What sort of an accident?
Ahmad shot himself… in the ass.

He said this with a visible embarrassment, and he could see that I was making a very serious effort to conceal a very vivid smile that was actually an attenuation of a terrible need to burst into laughter.

Is he…?
He’s fine. But he will not talk to anyone. His mother was afraid. Then he said he would only talk to you.
Me?!
Yes. Please.

I could not make a man as old as my father beg me to speak to a son of his who was in distress, whatever the situation, so I went into the room.

The young man, who is my age, was lying on his stomach, his behind exposed to his visitors, with white patches stained with some blood and his ass red-brown from the Mercurochrome. It was really a strange site. If Dali had lived a little longer he might have made a painting of it (and called it something like “Ahmad’s Ass Looking at Velasquez Trying to Open a Tuna Can”). This man had shot himself in the ass, in the right cheek of his butt. He had held the gun laterally and tilting up, so the bullet went in and out, making two holes in his behind.

Why at the age of 25 would you shoot yourself in the ass? For Ahmad, it was a failed suicide attempt. He had planned to blow his brains out, seems to have lost courage or thought that he needed his brain, but he could not take the idea that he would leave himself unharmed, so he shot himself in the ass. I mean if you think about it, why didn’t he shoot himself in the foot? He would have also recovered from such an injury, and the ridicule would have been a little less.

Why did he want to commit suicide? He blabbed for around an hour about “Her”. How she was not replying to his messages, to his pleas, to his calls, how she did not even bother to worry when he called her in agony to tell her that he had shot himself… Who was “Her”? From his account, she must have been a Salomé of sorts: Vindictive, Cruel, of a magnificent beauty, etc… He had never seen her.

After laments and cries and the pains in his butt, he asked me for advice. I used to enjoy giving people advice; it was something like a prayer, an attempt at redemption, and at the same time an exercise in egoism and self -valuation. Now advising bores me. It was at this instant when I felt that I was wearing my boxer shorts in reverse…