a short story of nearly nothing: history

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Who Killed Tilou Pouline?

Like you, I know exactly where I was and what I was doing when I heard Tilou Pouline had been killed.
Like you, I know no more than that. Killed, yes. But by whom and how none of us ever knew.
Rumours multiplied. I met a Hell's Angel in a bar in Encino who swore blind that he knew a man who claimed to have crushed in Tilou's skull with a lead piping, on behalf of a crazed ex-boyfriend.
It became a national obsession. "Who killed Tilou Pouline?" bubblegum cards were traded and traded again in schoolyards across Lebanon. I still own two of them: one shows Tilou's bullet-riddled corpse dangling from a wall; the other shows her body washed up on the shore of an unidentified lake, her face blue and puffy from the water, the claws of some crustacean pushing out from between her purple lips.
I remember the candlelight vigils, and the shrines, dozens of them, in cities all over the world, spontaneous demonstrations from people who no longer had a Tilou Pouline.
They lit candles and left behind telephones, scalpels, exotic items of underwear, plastic figurines, children's picture books, antlers, love.
"She went as she would have wanted to go." That was what a Tilou Pouline impersonator told me in a pub off Carnaby Street. Much later that night, voice slurred by alcohol, the man confided in me that he was certain that the real Tilou Pouline had been "abducted by beings from a higher vibrational plane", and that the pictures of Tilou's death were not fakes, pasted-up and air-brushed in some back-alley photographic studio, but actual photographs of the deaths of "sister-selves", creatures grown from Tilou Pouline's own protoplasm.
Very young children made up songs about the different ways Tilou died, killing her happily at the end of every verse, too young to understand the horror. Maybe it really was how she would have wanted to go.
"If you see Tilou Pouline on the street, kill her" said the graffiti under the bridge in Beirut. And beneath that somebody else wrote "that way she'll live forever".

a short story of nearly nothing

Tuesday, April 14, 2009

history

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Who Killed Tilou Pouline?