What’s better, a book or a tree? A tree, of course. Books mostly die, and those that live on are very few, even if they do tend to accumulate over the course of a few centuries. God, why am I not a tree? Why am I not a tree? Why am I not a tree? I’m waiting for an answer, God. Sentences float in my head like filth in a clogged sink; they spill through my fingers and my hands … That’s actually a sentence I’ve written before, and though I have died, it is still alive, lodged underneath my tongue.

The calendar says it’s Wednesday. Yes, the calendar speaks, even if it’s asked to be quiet. I don’t like Wednesdays; Lazarus rose on a Saturday. Lazarus, who was from Bayt Aniya, which means “the house of misery and tribulation” in Aramaic. The whole world is Bayt Aniya. I feel sweat running down my scalp, even though it isn’t hot and the sun isn’t burning. At least I’ve kept my spirits up for a little while by washing my face and hands. I wiped them on the white towel that has some small rust spots in the right corner; spots that move, when I turn the towel over, to the left side. I look at both sides every time I use this towel, then I hang it back up next to the bathroom sink. It’s my favorite of the towels here because I can tell it apart from the others, which are identical to it in every other respect. It comes and goes, though, this towel; it vanishes out of circulation once in a while, hiding who knows where, only to reappear suddenly, as though nothing had happened, as though it hadn’t been eluding me for weeks. The most disgusting things in the world are similarity and repetition, I think. Towels are like faces, which you also can’t tell apart: circles with five holes—or seven, if we count the ears. The Arabic word for towel comes from the verb “to dry.” There’s nothing better than bringing language back to its roots. Language everywhere is starting to drift away from where it began.

I get up from my bed every day like someone picking himself off the field of battle, rising from the slaughter and destruction. The first thing I do is draw my net out of the water of sleep and gather the images, the bodies, and the ideas that are caught within it, that sloughed off of me in slumber and which I’ve left behind. Having caught them, I throw them down on paper, and then I throw the paper into the bathroom wastebasket before returning once more to set up my net and wait until night—as it does with such terrible consistency—falls at last. This night that comes to visit me every night … and the night is salt.

The night is salt … Whose line is that, I wonder? I’m pretty sure it’s not mine—I’m not a writer anymore—but where did it come from? There’s a cloud in my head. And wind. And cotton. How I loved words in the old days! All the clean, clear, light, graceful words. I loved being able to line up the three consonants like backgammon pieces: milh, hulm, lahm, hamal, lamah, lahh, hall, mall, hamm, muhh. I loved whatever was short and sweet, or short and not sweet, or sweet and not short. How I wish I could bring speech back to its origins! If only I could raise it from its grave, like Lazarus, and bring it back to the light. O Lord, asked Lazarus, is all that talking on my account? Why did you bring me back to the night to face what I have done?

Whenever I’m not paying attention, my room fills up with the words I’ve spent my day shooing away from my face like flies. If I doze off for a few moments, they begin seeping from my ears, my eyes, and my nostrils, like I’ve hemorrhaged inside, quietly and without warning … Out they come, little devils dragging along all their little sins, their pointy teeth, their tongues that are themselves the heads of snakes … They scream, scratch, and hiss before being driven off by the good light shining through my window. At first, like everyone else, I didn’t know what I was doing. I went out of my way to place my own head among the snakeheads of language, never once realizing that words were my enemy, wanting only to sneak into my mouth and leave poison under my tongue. And there’s no remedy, no antidote, no vaccine. Words are everywhere, they’re the atoms in the air, vibrations rising from the ground; they fall from the sky. An epidemic. You write a word: it rises from nothingness, puts on clothes, acquires a body and a face. Then people come up and greet it and act like it’s the one in charge! Oh, and sometimes that well-dressed word forms a gang, and that gang starts roving around and knocking people to the ground, sometimes beating them to death …

That’s what happened to me. I wrote a name. Then the name rose off the paper and became a man …