SHORT STORIES |
The
Dog Man of Paris
Random
Agenda, Spring 2005.
I will tell you about the Dog Man.
A married woman with whom I was having an affair— a dangerous
one I might add (her husband liked both knives and guns, and he
very much loved his wife)—was coming back from work one afternoon—on
her way to see me—when she suddenly shrieked and stopped
in the middle of the sidewalk: some ghost-like attack had just
sent a sharp thrust of pain through her buttocks.
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Kite
Hill
Blue
Penny Quarterly. Spring
1996.
There is a
documentary photographer in the agency who is American, the only
American. Sometimes, as a joke, a taunt, his colleagues call him
the ugly American. Ironically, he was born in Paris but his parents
took him to Los Angeles when he was three years old, because their
French had not been good enough to find well-paid work. His mother,
a metisse from South Africa, found a job teaching high school
English in Silverlake; his father, a light-skinned Palestinian
with black hair and blue eyes, became a construction foreman.
Benjamin Dingane Odidini Kanafani, whom his mother had always
called Dingane, grew up in Echo Park, but he hasn't set foot on
American soil in nearly ten years. He travels constantly out of
a desire, he says, to belong everywhere and nowhere at once, wanting
to experience every possible life. His images appear in magazines
and newspapers around the world, under a pseudonym that is familiar
to anyone who pays attention to the photo credits of major publications.
Kanafani, thirty years old now, has a horrible distrust of language
and imagination; he feels that language is dangerous because it
is something he does not entirely own. And his fear of the imagination
has become almost crippling.
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