The glued wing

The glued wing

He used to pronounce the letter s as a t; for example, he would call my uncle “Tayyid” instead of “Sayid,” and just now said “Tiniorita” instead of “Siniorita.” I don’t remember in what context. And if you asked him his name, he would answer: “Tarek.”

His overhanging eyebrows gave strangers the impression of perpetual astonishment. His lower lip receded behind the upper one, its bluish tint overtaken by a thin pink line that glistened faintly at the edge, drooping in a way that seemed either deliberate or entirely beyond his control. My uncle attributed his appearance to the aftermath of a stroke, then fell silent, as though the explanation itself could go no further.

No sooner had Tarek ordered us to sit than, before our bodies could fully settle into the cold plastic chairs, he had already taken a deep drag from his once upon a time jar, and now a shisha. Then came the usual coughing fit. Despite the obvious pain etched across his face, he seemed to relish every hack that stabbed at his chest. He coughed while laughing, while yawning, even while talking; it was as though he were constantly suppressing another cough. His complexion mirrored the dark hue of the karak tea my older brother always favored. With every cough, the veins in his face bulged, his features expanding and contracting in rhythmic cadence: a violent cough followed by a weaker one, then a fainter one still, like an echo dying out, as though he were coughing up whatever remained of his soul.

We watched him with eyes stripped of pity, as though this scene had long ceased to deserve a response. From deep within his chest, he coughed up a thick mass of phlegm, as though his body were purging another piece of his soul. The wet smack of his spit echoed through the room, yet it failed to startle the birds outside the window; they seemed entirely accustomed to it. After the third spit, the neighbor’s window slid shut with deliberate, quiet finality.

For us, Tarek’s house was a sanctuary—a place where we could be ourselves, laughing and hurting in total comfort. It was from Tarek that I learned how to brew coffee, a craft that had earned him a legendary reputation as a master barista back in the seventies. His instructions were explicit, backed by reasons that felt convincing even when they defied logic. “Stir the blend of coffee and sugar over a thread of water,” he would say. You had to do it patiently; in those fleeting seconds, I used to imagine the coffee and sugar getting to know each other. “Next, leave an empty space for the unknown, just the size of a newborn’s earlobe. Then place it over the lowest flame on the smallest burner.” Between stirs, your task was to fill the water bottles. After the second bottle, you gave it one final stir, then watched as the mixture came alive in the form of coffee. That was his way. The coffee always came out with a rich froth, curved like a child’s smile, sparking pure joy with every sip.

If I ever rushed the process by turning up the heat halfway, he would know instantly from the scorched hue of the beans. He would accuse me of burning the coffee and ruining the courtship between beans and sugar. He was a titan among local coffee masters. Before his retirement, regular customers—whom he called friends by the dozens on ordinary days and by the hundreds during special occasions—would stream in just to drink tea, or more precisely, a cup of his meticulously crafted coffee. His house was our refuge from pain; there was no room for pity, inside its walls, we mocked our sorrows until they dissolved into laughter.

Mahmoud would sometimes seek refuge on Tarek’s rooftop. The roof was on the fifth floor, and with every flight of stairs he climbed, the stairwell light grew dimmer until it vanished completely by the fourth. Enveloped in the dark, he lit a cigarette; the amber glow of burning tobacco briefly shattered the imposing shadows before they pressed in again.

When he reached the rooftop, a cold breeze brushed his face. He looked up at the night sky—bare, stripped of its usual adornments, the stars absent and the moon buried behind clouds. He stared at it for a long time, as though trying to carve the view into his memory, a keepsake for sorrows still to come. He had always kept his grief contained, subdued enough to avoid attention. Still, he would falter whenever he imagined the empty benches watching his lonely shadow.

He flicked the ash from his cigarette with his thumb, closing his eyes until the world stopped spinning. Bit by bit, stillness seeped in with each breath of cold air. He thought that when a man becomes something he never intended, he must redefine his goals to fit his new scale, the diminished stature that defeat forces upon him.

They were three abandoned men, each in a different register of disappearance.

First, him—she had just told him over the phone that she could not go on. He responded:

“Imagine my eyes. Look through them at me, and then say it. You won’t be able to.”

“You’re right, I can’t,” she said. “Please take care—”

Before she could finish, before her voice could dissolve into an apology or self-pity, a rush of blood flooded his face. On the television in the background, an actor mocked his friend’s body, pointing at his stomach as he changed into gym clothes: “show them your shame.” He felt he should not show his either. He ended the call.

Then his uncle, who was picking at a blemish hidden in his unkempt beard. His wife was waiting at home for him, though intimacy had long since withdrawn from their marriage.

And finally Tarek—their friend—in whose house they were lost in smoke. He had woken up one morning to find that his wife of thirteen years had vanished without a single word of goodbye..

After his last cough subsided, Tarek handed me the shisha hose. Having taken my first deep draw, I blew the smoke toward the ceiling, avoiding his eyes. “Tarek… I saw your wife.”

I passed the hose to my uncle. He opened his mouth as if to speak, but thought better of it and simply drew a deep breath from the pipe.

I told the truth exactly as I had seen it, stripped of embellishment. Painting over the truth only turns it into a different kind of lie, and the glitter of falsehood can blind you to the rot it conceals. Yet, the duties of friendship sometimes demand that the truth be paid in full.

Tarek stared at the television weather presenter with hollow eyes. “There is no place for me in this world,” he whispered. “There are other false hopes out there, better suited for it than I am. Their nothingness carries a weight my existence simply cannot match.”

The agony in his voice doubled his stutter. Every few words, he tried to swallow a rising cough just to finish his sentence, but failed. My uncle passed the hose back to Tarek, then set about preparing another round. He drew on it long and hard, until a sudden coughing fit ambushed him, and he surrendered to it completely. I handed him a glass of water.

“Don’t you want to ask me where I saw her?” I pushed.

“No,” he replied firmly.

“Doesn’t curiosity gnaw at you? To know if she was happy?”

“I know everything,” Tarek said.

“Two years ago, a friend of mine spotted her. She was carrying a child in her arms.”

Then, asking a question he already knew the answer to, he muttered, “Is it my ugliness that drove her away? The loneliness has hollowed me out… even my fingertips ache.”

“If ugliness were the reason, then she was right,” I said. “Lucky for you that you didn’t live in the second century AD. Back then, they used to offer their ugliest citizens as sacrifices to the gods, hoping to lift the plagues from themselves.”

Tarek offered a faint, ghostly smile. “I think my ruined lungs would make me a defective offering. The gods wouldn’t be pleased.”

My uncle chimed in, offering his own grim brand of consolation. “Remember, you’re not the only outcast in this room,” he said. “We’re just garbage. Once something stops working, it gets thrown away.”

I stared down at an upturned fly on the floorboards, its left wing glued to a dried drop of tea, flailing its legs uselessly. “I don’t think we even rise to that rank. No one is rushing to recycle us.” The fly was still there, pulling at the air with one useless wing. I wondered silently to myself: If I really am trash, why does no one want to salvage me?

A fleeting glimmer of hope flickered in Tarek’s eyes. “Perhaps that just means our expiration date hasn’t come yet.”

“Your wife might disagree,” my uncle countered. Mahmoud laughed, but the smoke caught in his throat, sending him into a violent hacking fit. Tarek handed him the remaining half-glass of water, but he waved it away.

Then, a soft knock rattled the door—a tender, rhythmic tapping. The sound was instantly familiar to Tarek.

“It’s her,” he whispered, with a childlike vulnerability that didn’t belong to a man his age.

I moved toward the door, but my uncle clamped a heavy hand down on my wrist, his eyes forbidding me to move. Tarek stood up himself and pulled the door open.

There was no one there. Only a letter left by absence on the threshold.

My uncle picked it up and read it in a low mumble, intentionally obscuring the harsher words, but the gist was clear:

“Tarek, my dear husband… I say husband only because I hear you haven’t divorced me yet. Life is better without you. I saw Mahmoud while I was out walking with my little girl. I used to love you, It wasn’t enough that you beat me, you even went as far as selling our house. Then you got sick, and I simply couldn’t go on. I know you’ve suffered deeply because of my disappearance. Sometimes I think of you, alone in your pain, and I don’t know why your suffering brings me comfort. How do you manage now, preferring to go thirsty all day rather than ask someone to open a water bottle because your weak fingers can no longer twist the cap? I apologize to you, Tarek… and I forgive you, too. I want you to free yourself from the monsters of your memory. Erase my existence by forgetting me completely, because I no longer think of you much at all. After this final consolation, nothing becomes us but farewell.”

Tarek didn’t need to hear this final goodbye.

My uncle paused heavily at the phrase: “I apologize to you… and I forgive you, Tarek.” Then he raised his head.

“That’s not all of it, is it?” Tarek asked.

My uncle did not answer with the whole truth. The duties of friendship in such moments demand that the truth be paid in installments. After a long silence, he said, “She says… she loved you.”

My uncle ripped the letter into pieces and dropped it into the toilet bowl. We stood in silence, watching the ink swirl away into nothingness. Tarek didn’t object; he trusted him blindly.

Against the backdrop of our silence, a street cleaner whistled outside, perfectly in time with the scraping rhythm of his broom. When the whistle ended and the sound faded into the night, so did our gathering. We called it a day, and went home.