6:08
Re-Living the Beirut Blast of August 4
WARNING: GRAPHIC LANGUAGE.
The Beirut port explosion of August 4 is a crime and a tragedy of inconceivable scale. There was life before the blast, and there is life after it. It has become the only mile-marker of any relevance.
I frantically messaged my friends at 6:08 pm when my building began to shake before stepping back and crouching under the kitchen island away from the windows. From my vantage point, I could only see the wall across from the windows on the other side of the room. A few seconds passed. Nothing happened. I began lifting myself when the room exploded, rocking the building back and forth and knocking me back down. A tornado of dust, glass, and wood crashed into the wall beside me and ricocheted in all directions, swirling again and again around the room. The aluminum window frames, having dislodged from their place, came apart into several pieces and hurled above me like spears. A fog of dust was left suspended in the air when the shaking stopped. It was warm and acidic against my lungs.
My body was paralyzed, still crouching where it was. I recall vividly the sensation of my eyelids stretched painfully to their extreme.
I stayed down a while longer, a few seconds or minutes. It’s hard to remember. A stream of a hot liquid trickled down my face. I looked down to see red droplets falling one after the other on the floor.
Thinking it was an air strike, I braced for a second blast.
I regained my focus to the jarring alarms, sirens, and cries that filled the room through the missing wall in my apartment, now a gaping hole before a five-story drop to the street. Using the edge of the kitchen island for support, I rose from the ground, disoriented as though having stepped off of a roller-coaster. Wires hung down from the caved-in ceiling. A carpet of shattered glass covered the floor and pock-marked the walls, shredding the paintings hanging on it.
Stepping over the glass with bare feet, I shut off the power to the apartment and the gas tank attached to the stove where I had been preparing dinner. That is when I was struck by the sight of a thick puddle of blood on top of the kitchen island dripping down in a stream. I did not know where all of this blood came from nor how it came to be above the kitchen island as I was crouched beneath it during the blast. There was blood all around me. From where was it coming? A heavy dread, debilitating and nauseating, consumed me.
Creeping into the bathroom, I sat down, unsure what to do next.
I sent my mom a message, more to reassure myself than to reassure her, and checked in on friends who were in Beirut.
There were no more excuses to avoid doing what I knew needed to be done. The bathroom was dark but for the evening twilight that cast dimly from the living room and scatted through the dust cloud. My hands clutched at the sink shaking uncontrollably. I turned up to find an unrecognizable face staring back. How unsettling it is to look into the mirror and not recognize what you see. I cleared specks of glass and wiped away the blood from my face, then physically inspected my head and neck. I swept my hands down to my shoulders, then to my chest, torso, and legs, each time looking down at my hands to uncover the source of the bleeding. I found no serious wounds, only small cuts.
I threw on socks and shoes over my cut-up feet, grabbed my first aid kit, and left the house, passing the front door which had blown off its frame.
After checking on my neighbors, I ran down the stairs, not knowing what to expect outside. Every apartment door on my way down was burst open. Water sprang from ruptured pipes into the stairwell. In the lobby, the front gate lay flat on its back. What overwhelming force is needed to knock a giant iron gate off its hinges, I thought.
Beyond the gate was raw carnage. The street from one side to the other was covered in debris: broken tree branches, pulverized concrete, and shattered glass. Cars had caved in on themselves. A thick dust enveloped everything and everyone. The car alarms and sirens blared at different intervals from near and far.
Every car and motorbike that day became an ambulance as friendly strangers hauled the wounded to hospitals. These anonymous heroes saved hundreds of lives that day.
I continued towards Wardieh hospital across the street, passing the walking wounded who shuffled aimlessly like zombies, holding their wounds and covered in grime.
The hospital was in shambles. In the courtyard, a man was lying on his back in a pool of blood, holding his left arm up in the air, blood shooting intermittently from where his sliced off fingers used to be. I yelled for a nurse, but none responded — the medical staff were in disarray, themselves victims of the blast. The only feeling more frightening than inspecting yourself for life-threatening injuries is inspecting another person for them and becoming responsible for their well-being.
I slipped on latex gloves and cut open his drenched shirt with my trauma shears. The man was conscious but hemorrhaging. I helped him press several gauze pads into his wounds to stop the bleeding and hurriedly bandaged him up, my hands quivering with fear and self-doubt. I reassured him that he was going to be OK, but I was not sure he would be. To this day, I don’t know if he survived, and I do not have the courage to walk around the portraits of the victims in downtown Beirut for fear of seeing his face hanging there, staring at me.
The next few hours were spent much the same way as more of the injured converted on the wrecked hospital to be bandaged. All that was missing were doctors, nurses, and medical supplies.
The second wave of casualties was exclusively the critically wounded or deceased. The courtyard became a makeshift emergency room and morgue.
In my mind, I see flashes of two limp bodies laying unattended on stretchers, one with his arm hanging down the side. I consider approaching. Is there anything I can even do to help? People walk around them nonchalantly; do they see them? Are they dead? What were their names?
Then a group of men spring out of a nearby building carrying an unconscious boy wrapped in a rug. I see panic on their faces. Above, a family shouts and waves for help from the hospital balcony but there is no one to respond. Beside me, a mother runs out into the street pleading for help in that shriek that only mothers in distress over their children’s safety can produce.
My recollection of that final hour at the hospital is composed of scattered scenes like these. I can’t recall the order that they occurred nor exactly what I was doing at the time. Did I help carry one of the bodies off the road? I imagine vividly that I did, I can feel his skin against my fingers, but then why do I doubt my memory? Could I have merely watched others doing it? These memories live in separate compartments of my mind as a collection of random sights and sounds like different movies that I watched long ago but only half remember. Adrenaline and the staggering number of gruesome injuries overwhelm the senses, creating a sort of emotional immunity and, I imagine, repressing the memory afterwards so that one is able to forget.
When I could do no more, I made my way from ground zero to the main road. My friend Mahmoud picked me up, and we drove south, away from the city. The sirens grew faint behind us. The sky darkened. The adrenaline began to wane.
That night, I discovered a two-inch gash down to the bone just beside my knee. It was a perfectly clean and painless slice. To prevent the wound from closing overnight and becoming infected, I packed the inside of it with gauze until I could get it stitched in the morning. The next day, Mahmoud drove me to Sahel Hospital in the southern suburbs of Beirut where his dad and his colleagues stitched me up. Having the hair over an open wound shaved with a razor is truly agonizing, as were the layers of stitching I needed. After a few weeks of limping and showering with a trash bag taped to my leg, I made a full recovery.
Did I do enough? Why did I take cover when others didn’t? What force drew me away from the windows? Why were others not so fortunate? In reality, the harder one searches for meaning in tragedy, the less he finds, until finally, there is nothing left, and the world moves on.
Epilogue
It’s been a year since the blast.
While my injuries have healed, for many others, they never will. It is a surreal thing, to feel guilty that your wound was not just a little bit deeper, at least then to be worthy in their eyes of the pain that you feel. While I have tried my best to compose a story that does justice to their experience that day, it is simply not possible. You either were there, or you weren’t. You either lost someone, or you didn’t.
Very few days pass when we don’t re-live the blast in some way. The moment does not pass but merely stretches into the weeks and months after and, I’m afraid, much longer than that. Whether it’s in our apathy, our scars, the painful absence of a loved one, or rage at the injustice. A fragment of it is contained in every moment of joy, knowing it is a joy that more than two hundred people and their families will never know again. But the only thing more terrifying then re-living the trauma every day is to one day forget it altogether, while those responsible live on as if nothing happened.
The lack of closure has made all other feelings give way to a rage that burns like hot embers. All we have been offered is empty slogans and fake empathy.
How can we ever know peace before justice is done.
Photos from the Following Days
