A Day of Rage

Six months out of the year, it doesn’t rain at all here. Then one day to your astonishment, heavy drops begin to fall. First only one, then another. You hold your breath in reality-check mode as if that’s all it takes to silence the world. Two more hit the ground, so hard they almost shake the earth—footsteps of a dinosaur upon catching your pheromones all the way from a chapter not yet written, the chapter about you.

So much is a matter of time and place in the Lebanon. For example, after a fiery, cloudless summer, when the rain appears, imagine finding yourself in a ruined temple with a long-gone roof (of which there are many scattered about the landscape atop unvisited hills). Suddenly, you’re tackled by what falls from the sky. You have no choice but to turn yourself over to its embrace. Romantic, n’est-ce pas? An odd lesson in love and hate. You may even tear off your clothes, allow it to dominate you, as you might the first time you get freaky with a lover.

Today, when disbelief (of pretty much everything) turns into passion over the first rain of the season, your hand moves up to undo a button of your shirt but it freezes in place. You’re in a Saint Rita Street, not in an abandoned, roofless temple, and this is a Muslim country and today has been declared “A Day of Rage,” by the Hezbollah man who interrupts your Arabic soap opera on TV to scare the daylights out of everyone. No, now isn’t exactly the time to let your free-spirited, Californian ways go and stir the pot. You keep your shirt on.

It’s October 20^, 2023 when the sky opens up for the first time since May. Two years ago, you make Lebanon your home. “The Mediterranean rules,” you tell your friends and ex-colleagues from the airline. “The Mare Nostrum is like no other.”

And generally speaking, Lebanese people rule, too, in their chilled-out, old soul way. You settle into an historic Beiruti neighborhood called Bourg Hammoud. Late at night, the small empty streets near your apartment resemble the silent, inanimate set of a play on a stage, the corner where the action is about to begin, lit low by streetlamps, as an audience files in, silently as a caterpillar, suspended in a what-am-I-about-to-witness? moment. It’s only make-believe, a facade like most things, just actors.

Fiction or not, the human spectator expects an account, a sermon, a moral, an answer, a monologue from which to borrow snippets of wisdom, something worded just right to take home and patch up the hole in the armor.

That’s what draws you outside, despite this: The US State Department called upon its citizens not to travel to Lebanon, further asking them to leave. It also advised US citizens who choose to stay in Lebanon to be prepared to leave in the event of any emergency.

Different friends send you a screenshot of the bulletin via WhatsApp. They know you’re not coming back, they know you don’t scare easily.

Few of them, however, are aware of the CDC’s changes to their rules about traveling with dogs from countries at “high risk” for rabies. You don't like to think about it. The process now involves a three-month waiting period after obtaining the positive result of a blood titers test done by an especially expensive laboratory in Brussels.

Easily spooked or not, no one’s going anywhere in the foreseeable future, not without the black Belgian Malinois you rescued after he ran away from the police station in search of something beyond sniffing bombs and being ordered around like an object by not-chill Lebanese policemen. Lebanese policemen are about as difficult to bond with as bombs themselves. You know because you dated one.

The policeman: “It’s me or the dog.”

You: “You hear that, Big Puppy? Together forever."

Veterinary records in Lebanon are in French, you take note of this as you put Zain’s booklet back into the drawer. Vacciné contre la rage. Vaccinated against rage. You and your fugitive will be just fine.

Besides, you’ve spent a lifetime grabbing your passport and leaving. Travel makes you nervous. It didn’t when you were a flight attendant but it does now.

In the street, it’s pouring and loud with the sounds of water crashing against the macadam. Soaked, the only place to hide is a tunnel-like underpass, lined at the top with a bevy of pigeons making staccato pigeon noises. Under the supports of the bridge, they await further instructions from God.

You climb up a ramp-thing made of stones and concrete a way’s up under the bridge. You’re halfway to the height of the birds. It’s dry there and dirty. You sit down anyway. And then, as if unusual announcements, empty srreets and sheets of water aren’t unbelievable enough, what appears to be a faun walks out of the storm and underneath the bridge. He stops just below you, folds his umbrella and leans on it. He’s wearing a black hoodie. Water drips around his hooves from the reddish fur covering his legs.

“What the…” you whisper to yourself. You crane over the ledge, admire his stoicism, the little beard, the horns—small and scrolled-up tightly, the pointed ears sticking out.

He has a face like Khamzat Chimaev too, battle-scarred like his, with a grand torso to match. You think back to your martials arts phase, training at five AM as many days as the flight attendant gig permitted, watching UFC religiously, forcing it on people in the middle of dinner parties, a large part of the magic being the face-to-face stare down at weigh-in on the eve of the fight.

Even though the faun stands like Khamzat at weigh-in, he’s without any visible opponent. He's ready for anything. The world takes shelter somewhere else. It’s just you, the pigeons in their recesses above and the Khamzat faun, inside an odd Beiruti bubble.

You break the ice out of impulse, jumping down next to him. “Am I the only one in love with rain?” Innocuous enough, you tell yourself, hoping for a warm response as you would from a human stranger to whom you feel a certain attraction or sudden fascination. But half of him is wild, you know, and slow to trust.

“What you are dying to say to me,” says the faun, not looking at you, “and if I heard you correctly earlier, is ‘what the fuck?’ Am I right?” His gazed is fixed ahead. “Let it be known that I’m in no mood for what the fucks today or any Halloween BS. I never am, but today especially not.”

“Whoa,” you say. “I just asked a simple question. The kind you might ask any stranger, like a waiter in a donut shop.”

“Or Keanu Reeves, if he were minding his own business at an airport.”

He’s a difficult faun. He knows things you don’t.

“I only want to talk to you because you’re, well, kind of a legend. I’ve never seen a faun before.” You say this with ease because a) fauns don’t exist and b) a wayward rocket might lodge itself underneath the bridge and explode at any moment here on the Day of Rage, so why be stingy with the compliments, even if he doesn’t require any, the same way Khamzat and Keanu don’t.

“I have no account of myself to render,” he says. “I am a faun without accounts. And besides, this is not your real question.”

“How is that?”

“Because it is so. Just like so much else is so. Like you are so….”

“Like I am so what?”

“Readable. You don’t like questions but you expect answers from others.”

“You’re readable too, bro,” you tell him. “And what’s with the attitude? Ever take a glance at A Midsummer Night’s Dream? That’s pretty much all anybody needs to know about your lot.”

“Watch the Halloween language. My ‘lot,’” he says and laughs. “Such a numerous bunch we are. Too self-absorbed to ever form an army.”

“A man just asked me what time it was,” you tell him. “Had you arrived only moments earlier, you would have heard me answer a question: Eleven forty-five.”

“Time has made a liar of you,” says the faun, checking his watch. “It’s noon. Besides which no numbers are ever the answer to anything."

“Okay, fine. Let’s just shut up.”

You stand with the faun beside you and a long time passes and the rain roars all around the underpass that it drowns out the Day of Rage and you wonder if it’s heavy enough to put out the fire set to the American Embassy by rioters this morning.

The faun turns and looks at you for the first time. “Shakespeare,” he says, “was a man of accounts. All of them imaginary, all an invention. Humans must write things down in order to understand them. Would you believe I’ve never held a pen?”

“I am having trouble believing anything right now. Me, I’m famous for keeping a diary.”

“No faun has ever held a pen. We live in an illiterate bliss, guided by instinct. However, I have spent my life making mental lists of all that I am not and I can recite my entire list from memory should I ever need to explain what I am by listing all that I am not.”

“Know thyself by process of elimination.”

“For example, I am not a ‘centaur’—people are always calling me that. Nor am I a ‘goat,’ ‘devil,’ ‘Pan,’ or anything so special. I’m just a faun on the way to his forest in Switzerland after a dismal spin through the universe. Look.” He removes his hoodie. Underneath it he has on a white T-shirt that says I ♡ GENEVA.

“Everyone’s disoriented right now,” you tell him. “Myself included. So you’re not alone. In fact, it is why I left the house today. To not feel so alone.”

The faun scratches a horn against the brick wall.

“It rained a beautiful rain and I met a faun, two entirely unexpected things. Good ones, mind you, on such a day. Things the US State Department couldn’t even conceive of happening when they drafted their warning.”

“It rained and you met a faun,” he says, mockingly. “And let me guess… everything happens for a reason.”

“I’d like to think so.”

“Crikey. Do you have a cigarette? Travel makes me terribly nervous.”

“Yes.” You pass him a Kent and your lighter.

“Light it for me, would you? I don’t like fire. Light it in your mouth and put it in mine.”

You do as he asks.

“Nobody understands anything outside the forest.”

“What makes you say that?”

“I am not a rude faun, but I’m a blunt one. Head-butting has made me blunt. But not dull or dumb. You humans are all a little dumb. Just look at the last week.”

“Agreed,” you say. “I stay out of politics. I don’t support wars of any kind.”

“Two for your list of what you are not.” He stamps out the cigarette with a hoof. “Please excuse me. I wish to ride out the rainstorm under this bridge in silence. Any further banter or nonsense will disturb my concentration and may throw my compass from its kilter. I am in need of my compass in order to find Switzerland.”

In the distance is the sound of War. You can hear it over the rain in tiny blasts, waking up from slumber. You feel ashamed in advance of any potential compass damage that might be sustained at the hands of dumb humans. You wish the faun a safe return to his habitat. You envision a meeting again someday there, when he's in a better mood.

War stands all the way up and remembers where she left off in everyone's story. The rain stops and through a crack in its parting curtains comes a distant bang but a louder one. The pigeons fly from under the bridge, out through a hole in the universe. Then there’s another bang. And another, then bangs of machine guns all strung together.

At this, the faun snaps his umbrella open, leaves your side and walks into empty Saint Rita Street. “I am out of my time and place,” he calls back. “So are you. Go home and hug your dog.”