Like a nightmarish tale that has upended modern living, Covid-19 has caused a rip in space and time, pulling us back into the 1920s and the epoch of the Spanish flu, even into 14th-century Europe and the plague that Boccaccio confronted through storytelling in The Decameron. Requiring lockdowns and threatening our food supply and access to water, the pandemic conjured up the experience of war in the Middle East thereby allowing us to tie in the study of conflict in the region and its effect on daily lives and human psyche to the new state of emergency playing out on the global stage. Exploring confinement anxieties, in this talk I revisit Lebanon’s civil war (1975-90) and analyze the ways in which access to water and questions of hygiene become a stage for an embodied experience that reconfigures the boundaries of the subject. Moving from my work on leaks and porosity discussed in the context of digital media, I turn in this talk to the porosity of the subject of confinement as a way of exploring a comparative framework that connects different temporalities and geographies on the one hand, and different literary and cultural traditions. Specifically, the talk engages water distribution in war-torn Beirut by constructing a genealogy of water representation involving the figure of the cupbearer in Greek and Arab mythologies, baptisms and miracles, and Gérard de Nerval’s description of Istanbul’s water boutiques in his Voyage en Orient (1851). It shows how water distribution is a way to manage fluids, losing and regaining control of lives and bodies, containment and leaks. The circulation of water in plastic containers in times of pandemic and war just like that of oxygen in blood cells reveals the workings of memory, an intellectual process, and an affective reading practice that initiates dialogues across fields and disciplines including Middle Eastern studies.