The Black Screen on the White Horse

In the beginning I wasn’t Faris’s wife as much as I was the wife of the twenty-two-inch plasma screen, radiant of brow, broad shouldered, smooth to the touch, with its shiny black frame—the screen of my dreams! The black screen on the white horse, more handsome than all the men in the world, magnificent as a magic crystal, brimming with thousands of worlds capable of smuggling me out of my reality, immersing me in images, and images of images, granting to me many and varied lives, without basements or ghosts or the slapping of sandals on my thigh or hands forcing food into my mouth. As if life hadn’t boarded its train and left.

In the days following my wedding, I felt the blood rush to my head, hot and excited, as I stood where the great explorers stood, to discover—with tremendous confusion and an open mouth—a satellite channel called MBC2, just for films, that showed movies around the clock, like an impossible grandmother who doesn’t die.

“This channel only shows movies?” I asked Faris, who was fidgety and restless from my refusal to leave the suite all morning.

“MBC2?” he said derisively.

“Yes.”

“You’ve never heard of this channel?”

“How can they show films twenty-four hours a day?”

“What’s so strange about that?”

“Are there that many films in the world that they can show them constantly, seven days a week, thirty days a month, three hundred and sixty-five days a year?”

Faris laughed.

I wasn’t hurt. I just wanted answers. I asked again: “How long have people been making films?”

“I don’t know! Since Charlie Chaplin?”

“Who?”

“How could you not know about this channel?”

“Oh well, you know, things like this happen.”

Yes. They do.

People become orphans. Childhoods are kidnapped. You can be imprisoned in a basement, kept out of school, your love for life can be stolen, your books burned, your poems drowned in a bucketful of tears. You can be dragged outside your poem, hands pulling you by the hair, wetting yourself from the fear. Anything can happen, except for a satellite channel that shows films around the clock.

“The television in our house was encrypted.”

I said it as an explanation, not an apology, then turned away from him to continue watching the movie with my full attention. Television, my master, my first husband. I keep him turned on all the time, even when I leave the room, even when sleeping or while reading. The background noise tells me I am no longer in the basement.

Throughout our marriage Faris complained, Is the television in this house ever off?

No, it isn’t. If I turn it off, the fear will reach me, the silence will descend, and the loneliness will gobble me up. The ghosts will return, the poisoned apple, the devils that nest in the dark mirrors. The cockroaches will come back, and the rats, and the many hands that fall from the heights of their tyranny onto my body. If I turn off the television everything will disappear and I will return—a time traveler—to that hell set aside just for me. I will feel I am there, hurled into the filthy hell that came when I lost my mother and father, in the basement tomb. If we sat at the dinner table and the television was off, I’d get up and turn it on. If we wanted to go to bed and the television was off, I’d get up and turn it on. If we wanted to go out and the television was off, I’d turn it on before locking the apartment door twice with the key, so the place wouldn’t fill with the demons of the past. I will always turn it on, all the time. If possible, I wanted to be buried with it, just like the pharaohs.