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He said this book was about a Christian Lebanon. Our village was not in it because it was not Christian. All the villages in the book were Christian. I didn’t understand.
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    I just can’t stand watching another TV movie about AIDS. Can’t they fucking get a gay man to write one of those, as opposed to the constant crap we have to be subjected to? Jesus Christ. Those writers have no idea.
    I ask you. Did you see An Early Frost? If that doesn’t get your blood boiling, I don’t know what will. In that stupid film, we see how AIDS affects the guy’s mother, father, sister, brother-in-law, and grandmother. There is no consideration given to the fact all this is happening to him, not them. Fuck.
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    Mr. Suleiman was driving the car. His wife was sitting next to him. His two sons, sixteen and fourteen, as well as his four-year-old daughter, were in the back. They were driving back home. It was seven o’clock, already dark. There was no one else on the road. The electricity was out as usual. On the road past Damour, they encountered two men in military fatigues, carrying machine guns. They directed the car to the side. A flying checkpoint. They ordered Mr. Suleiman out of his car. They could not have been older than his sons. They asked him to open the trunk. He did. The younger of the two opened fire on Mr. Suleiman. Sixteen bullets killed him. He fell into the trunk. They pushed his legs into the trunk and calmly locked it.
    They walked into the night chatting boisterously. His wife wailed inside the car. His children sat in shock. Another car passed the noisy car. It was spared. The flying checkpoint was moving.
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    In one of his short stories, Coover takes the reader into an old village. Slowly, he brings the various characters into view, except they are all the same character. We see a funeral procession. The dead man in the casket looks exactly like the six pallbearers, exactly like the priest and his assistants, and exactly like the mourning women. They take the casket to the cemetery, interring it into its plot. We hear scratching and clawing. The dead man comes out of the ground. We see the people flee. The dead man runs after them. We notice him entering one of the houses in the village. He sees the dress and scarf of one the mourners. He puts it on. He becomes one of the mourners. Another man puts on the priest outfit, and others the pallbearers’ outfits. We have the funeral procession starting again with a new, but the same, dead man. We see the cycle begin all over again.
    I wish I could write short stories like that. I could describe the human condition so eloquently and succinctly.
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    December 18th, 1995
    Dear Diary,
    I called Samir today. He sounded strange so I asked him what was wrong. He tried to assure me everything was fine, but I knew. I figured out he was crying. When I asked him what made him cry, he admitted he was cleaning out his phone book. It brought tears to my eyes. What have we done to deserve all this? He said he had to erase out the names of a number of friends who have died. I cried as well. Both for him and me. I have done the same thing so many times. In the eighties, I would go through my phone book every year. So many friends died, so many simply moved away, emigrated. The war took a terrible toll.
    He reminded me that I taught him to write only in pencil in the address book. I told him people move, and you have to keep erasing. They do move. He still has the same black leather address book I gave him when he left here. I bought two of them, one for him and one for me. I still carry mine. We have that in common.
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    I met Mohammad through Scott. I had seen him a couple of times before, but did not really meet him until I started dating Scott. Scott and I had been talking, typing to be exact, for a couple of months before we actually met face-to-face. We were both using a computer bulletin board, a BBS, called Queer Bee. I met many