How to Guide a Boy into Becoming a Man with Cognac

My insomnia courted cognac. I sipped Rémy Martin from the bathroom sink glass, which made my drinking at that hour seem wrong somehow, more illicit. My father used to say that cognac was the best remedy for insomnia, not that it would help you sleep, but rather it would make you enjoy being awake quite a bit more. I surprised myself still by how much I missed him. We were unable to understand each other, and he would not approve of the choices I made, but unlike my mother, he was a decent human being and would have wanted the best for me, whatever that meant.

I was eleven when my parents decided to have that horror of a talk with me. I sat on their bedroom taboret facing them on the edge of the bed, the vanity mirror at my back. They should have been able to see my front and back, to see me whole, to see my truth, so to speak. I was only able see their fronts, since as every religion tells us, demons have no back, only what they wish to present to us, false fear or beguiling dazzle. To this day, I can still picture the bedroom in my head as if I saw it yesterday, all cherry and blond pine, the vanity, the nightstands, the headboard. My mother’s bed was always tightly made, of course. Nothing out of place, the room assaultingly neat and ordered. A flyswatter crucified on a small hook on the wall on her side of the bed, above a box of tissues and a stack of gossip magazines, both foreign and domestic, which I was not allowed to touch. There used to be an imaginary police cordon beginning at the bottom edge of the bed, beyond which we children were not allowed. The bottom of the bed was the limit. We couldn’t go farther. What crimes were committed we couldn’t investigate.

I sat on the taboret facing my mother and father. She, tight and mute, cleaved to his side, her face pinched. I must become a man, he said in a weighty tone. Did I want everyone to know what I was? Did I? I wanted to ask what I was, but I felt something shatter inside my head. I would spend my nights staring at an ocean of palpable darkness, wondering if anyone knew who I was, if anyone could see me.

My father, in a kind yet unequivocal tone, proceeded to trace the borders I was not to cross. In private, when I got older, I could do what I wanted, but discreetly, he said. In private, eat according to your taste, but in public, behave according to the public’s. It was his fault, my father said. He wasn’t spending enough time with me. I was learning the wrong lessons. Boys like me needed guidance to grow into men like him—guidance and direction and a clear map. Until I matured and learned, I must watch my behavior and he would watch me.

Well, he didn’t for long. In the blink of an eye—or after an eternity had passed—I grew older and found myself elsewhere, in a land where sunrises were more solid and people less so, a world made of paper and shadows, away from him, from her, from them, cast out of the Garden.

Yes, I was older now. I was doing what I wanted, which was to drink cognac at two in the morning. I had an inexplicable fondness for minibars and their mini bottles. I didn’t dare turn my laptop on and disturb the darkness. Mazen treasured his sleep. I had to do everything quietly. I would have loved to go for a walk in the black of night, air out my musty anxieties, but I didn’t think I could get dressed without waking my brother. I couldn’t begrudge his making the offer to the newlyweds, but I did wish he were in his own room. My thoughts could spread out, loiter, and loll much more easily when I was alone.

“You can’t sleep?” I heard him say in a sleepy voice.

“I am asleep,” I said. “You’re dreaming.”

Once more, he laughed at an unfunny joke we’d had going for over fifty years. His laughter delighted me. Mine followed suit. Cackle, cackle. He was the wave and I its spray.

“Well, I’m up now,” he said.

“Go back to sleep.”

He was definitely awake now. I didn’t know anyone who could leap from the innocence of sleep to wakefulness as quickly as he.

The window rattled softly, anticipating another storm. The fake creeping fig next to it quivered in its pot, plastic leaves rustling. I tried closing the window more firmly but was unable to make it budge.

“Have you decided when you’re going to do it?” he asked.

“She decided,” I said. “Tomorrow morning, or this morning.”

I took another sip of cognac, which warmed me, releasing tension stuck in my neck muscles. A second sip melted the tangle of emotions caught in my throat, or in my heart.

“Do you have everything you need?” he said. “Do you have to get anything?”

“No, everything is already there.”

“Really?”

“Yes,” I said. “It’s all about the heating pad.”

I gulped down the last of my cognac, returned to the indentation on my side of the bed, and was out soon after. I slept like the dead.