The School of How Can I Live by Jared Joseph

Let’s take a deep dive, she says to me. i don’t know into what. i know she owns a pool, but i know the pool is shallow. She takes me to her home, where her shallow pool is. We walk alongside the pool in her backyard and patio with the lamps lit and the chlorine waft makes me choke. Something in my throat becomes a flake of flint. I found my family, she says. You have a family, i say. I found my family in Lebanon, she says. How did you find them, i say. I had these photos, she says, and she pulls out old sepia photos of her grandparents, great grandparents, standing generally in dust. Some are smiling, most are not smiling. You smile for money. You don’t smile for time. It’s more powerful to stare vacantly, which is to say pregnantly, for posterity, for what will be your family, but that’s what’s strange about family, a family you come from eventually, a thousand years away, contains a nucleus of you. That’s the feeling anyway, you search for yourself in their pregnant eyes. What do you find? Whatever you want to find. It isn’t what you need to find. You need to find water sometimes. Where do they live exactly, i say, and she says They live at the border of Lebanon and Syria. Are those precarious living conditions, i say; living in one war-torn country, bordering another in civil war, i say. i make a motion of my hands, i clap them together, i explode them apart, to emulate a bomb. This is my way of showing i don’t know ASL. She stares at me like i am what i am, an idiot. No, she says. War is in Beirut, in the south of Lebanon. When the borders are bombed they bomb the south. What patrols their border with Syria where they live is Israel. The drones. They called them the drones of the Yechud. I don’t know if it’s pejorative, she says, I don’t know when it is. I think it’s like English, i say, when you call someone Jewish, that’s descriptive, when you call someone Jew, or even A Jew, that’s where it gets worse. It’s tone, I think, I bet it’s the same there, it’s tone, the tone is racist or the tone isn’t. The tone is Republican or Democrat. The tone is maybe always liberal. The tone underreports its taxes, the tone raises an American flag on its lawn, the tone is the lawn. i don’t say most of this. Israel tells them when they’re going to bomb them, she says, but it’s always the south. It’s like when you hear there’s a school shooting in Texas; it’s a school shooting in a small place in a large state far from you. I asked them the same thing, though, at first, she says, I said Are you afraid to live here, and they said Are you afraid of going to school? Are you afraid of going to the mall? Are you afraid of going to the grocery store? Yes to all, she says. And they’re not afraid to go to those places, she says. How did you find them? i say. Those people wouldn’t spit in a bowl, she says, not one of them has a bowl in their house they’d spit in. They’re not doing 23 & Me, she says. I sent the mayor of every city in Lebanon copies of these pictures. One of them finally got back to me. The biggest thing, she says, is my dad speaks full-blown Arabic. What? i say. We flew there, and when we landed they said Ahlan wa Sahlan. Welcome, i say. How did you know that, she says. i shrug. It means more than welcome, she says. It says, through connotation, through word roots and things, you’re one of the people. You’re no stranger. You’re like family, or you are family. And this is where you belong. This is a place of the people. The second word contains the first. It’s redundant, like family is. The dominant and the recessive both. By the people of the people for the people. He broke down and cried, she said. But how old was he when he left Lebanon, i say. He was 2, she says, he came here with my grandmother. i’m surprised she doesn’t say His mother. I think it means something she says My grandmother, and not His mother. But the fact that i think this means something, which i do, but the fact that i must observe this, i wonder, i wonder at how much i wonder, it means i don’t know. It means there’s nothing i know. What are you here for, i say, what do you want to learn from me today, or what do you want to me to teach you, today, or what do you need, i say. Because i don’t know. She knows more than i know. He broke down and cried, she says. They said Ahlan wa Sahlan, and he got to his knees and cried. He wept. He didn’t sob. I’d never seen him cry before, like that, only once, when I told him my daughter Vera, who was not yet born, would have problems. When the doctor told me and I told him that she would have problems, that she would be born with problems, he wept then, too. That’s the only other time I’ve seen him cry, she says. Did you cry? i say. I tried to, she says. I tried complaining, she says, to my husband. You don’t seem like someone who complains, i say. No, she says, but I tried complaining to Jonny, my husband. What did he say? i say. He said What are you doing? What are you doing? he said. Why are you complaining? he said. Are you weak? he said. i think of earlier in the day. Julie has read a poem to another classmate. It’s Julie’s poem. The poem is called The 4^th of Julie. The other student is Ruth, she’s 82, she turned 82 this month. Were you born the 4^th of July? Ruth says. I was supposed to be, Julie says. That’s so funny, says Michael, who i remember now was also there. What does that even mean? Michael says. I don’t know, Julie says, and laughs. This part is funny, says Ruth, I like it. I like that this part is funny. But the part where you say I was supposed to be born the 4^th of Julie, says Michael, is sad. It shows that you hate yourself, he says. I’m reading a book in the back of the class about a snail. Two snails, actually, but we haven’t gotten to the other snail yet. You guys are so observant, says Julie, and laughs. Why did he cry? says the woman, the deep dive woman with the shallow pool. Her name Jamie. Which time? i say. What? she says. Which time? i say. What do you mean? says Jamie. I mean which time are you wondering about, why he cried, i say. Which time are you wondering why he cried about, i say, but that’s barely a sentence. About which time are you wondering as to why he cried, i say, but that’s barely a sentence, too. He cried twice, so which time are you wondering about, i say, and this one seems almost okay, but why can’t i form this question right? Why is it so hard to form this question? He cried twice, Jamie says. She looks at me, a new look in her face that delivers me nothing. i can’t make anything out in it. Two times he cried, Jamie says, not one. Not three, she says.

Jared Joseph is boring.

16 August 2024