The Monk of Mokha

by Dave Eggers

  “I’m fine,” Mokhtar said. It has to be tonight, he thought.

  So Sayed drove, and all the way down Highway 101 they reflected on the generosity evident that night, and Mokhtar thought how good it felt to conjure an idea and see it realized. He thought, too, about what it would be like to have a law degree, to be the first of the Alkhanshalis in America with a JD. How eventually he’d graduate and represent asylum seekers, other Arab Americans with immigration issues. Maybe someday run for office.

  Halfway to Santa Clara, Mokhtar was overcome with exhaustion. Getting the event together had taken weeks; now his body wanted rest. He set his head against the window. “Just closing my eyes,” he said.

  When he woke, they were parked in the lot of the Santa Clara mosque. Sayed shook his shoulder. “Get up,” he said. Prayers were beginning in a few minutes.

  Mokhtar got out of the car, half-asleep. They grabbed the rooh afza out of the trunk and hustled into the mosque.

  It was only after prayers that Mokhtar realized he’d left the satchel outside. On the ground, next to the car. He’d left the satchel, containing the three thousand dollars and his new eleven-hundred-dollar laptop, in the parking lot, at midnight.

  He ran to the car. The satchel was gone.

  They searched the parking lot. Nothing.

  No one in the mosque had seen anything. Mokhtar and Sayed searched all night. Mokhtar didn’t sleep. Sayed went home in the morning. Mokhtar stayed in Santa Clara.

  It made no sense to stay, but going home was impossible.

  He called Jeremy. “I lost the satchel. I lost three thousand dollars and a laptop because of that damned pink milk. What do I tell people?”

  Mokhtar couldn’t tell the hundreds of people who had donated to Somali famine relief that their money was gone. He couldn’t tell Miriam. He didn’t want to think of what she’d paid for the satchel, what she would think of him—losing all that he had, all at once. He couldn’t tell his parents. He couldn’t tell Wallead that they’d be paying off eleven hundred dollars for a laptop Mokhtar would never use.

  The second day after he lost the satchel, another friend of Mokhtar’s, Ibrahim Ahmed Ibrahim, was flying to Egypt, to see what had become of the Arab Spring. Mokhtar caught a ride with him to the airport—it was halfway back to his parents’ house. Ibrahim was finishing at UC Berkeley; he’d have his degree in months. He didn’t know what to say to Mokhtar. Don’t worry didn’t seem sufficient. He disappeared in the security line and flew to Cairo.

  Mokhtar settled into one of the black leather chairs in the atrium of the airport, and sat for hours. He watched the people go. The families leaving and coming home. The businesspeople with their portfolios and plans. In the International Terminal, a monument to movement, he sat, vibrating, going nowhere.

  CHAPTER II

  DOORMAN AT THE INFINITY

  MOKHTAR BECAME A DOORMAN. No. Lobby Ambassador. That was the term they preferred at the Infinity. Which meant Mokhtar was a doorman. Mokhtar Alkhanshali, firstborn son of Faisal and Bushra Alkhanshali, oldest brother to Wallead, Sabah, Khaled, Afrah, Fowaz and Mohamed, grandson of Hamood al-Khanshali Zafaran al-Eshmali, lion of Ibb, scion of the al-Shanan tribe, principal branch of the Bakeel tribal confederation, was a doorman.

  The Infinity was a group of four residential buildings, each with commanding views of the San Francisco Bay, of the sun-bleached city and the East Bay hills. In the Infinity towers dwelled doctors, tech millionaires, professional athletes and wealthy retirees. They all came and went through the gleaming Infinity lobby, and Mokhtar held the doors open so they could pass without undue exertion.

  City College was no longer an option. After losing the satchel, Mokhtar had to get a full-time job. Omar Ghazali, a family friend, had loaned him the three thousand dollars to make the donation to Islamic Relief. But he needed to pay Omar back, and between that and the eleven hundred dollars he owed Wallead, college would have to wait indefinitely.

  Wallead helped him get the doorman job; it was the same position he’d had a few years before. Wallead had been making $22 an hour, and now Mokhtar, his older brother, was making $18. When Wallead had the job, the Infinity had been unionized, but the union was gone now and the building was managed by a polished Peruvian named Maria, who clicked across the gleaming floors in high heels. She’d liked Mokhtar’s clean-cut style and offered him a job. He couldn’t complain, making $18 an hour when the California minimum wage was $8.25.

  But he was not in college, had no clear path to college now. He spent his days in the lobby of Infinity Tower B, opening doors for residents and the various members of the service economy who kept the residents fed and massaged, the people who walked the tiny dogs, who cleaned the apartments and installed new chandeliers. Mokhtar always brought a book—he was trying Das Kapital again—but reading was close to impossible for a Lobby Ambassador. The interruptions were constant, the noise aggravating. The lobby was at street level, and the neighborhood was changing, a new building going up every month, turning South of Market into a kind of mini-Manhattan. The construction rattle was arrhythmic and unsettled his nerves.

  The noise was one thing, but the primary impediment to getting any reading, or thinking, done was the door itself. The lobby was a glass box, a transparent hexagon, and the Lobby Ambassador had to be alert to any human coming from any angle and toward the street-facing double doors. Most of the people approaching were people he knew—residents, Infinity maintenance workers, delivery people—but there were irregular visitors, too. Guests, trainers, realtors, therapists, repairmen. Anyone coming toward that door, Mokhtar had to be ready to leap.

  If it was a delivery, Mokhtar could get up, smile, open the door, no rush. But if it was a resident, Mokhtar had a second or two to leap from his seat behind the desk, rush to the door (without seeming to be desperately rushing), open it, smile and let that person in. If their hand touched the door before his, that was not good. He had to be there first, the door swinging open, his smile wide, a question ready and spoken brightly and without guile: How was your run, Ms. Agarwal?

  All this was new. This was Maria’s doing. When the building was union and Wallead was a Lobby Ambassador, the job was called a sitting position, meaning the Lobby Ambassador didn’t have to get up every time someone went in or out. But Maria’s arrival had changed that. Now the job required constant vigilance, the ability to leap up and across the lobby with elegance and alacrity.

  Never mind that anyone could easily open the door themselves. That wasn’t the point. The point was the personal touch. Having a smiling man in a tidy blue suit opening the door spoke of both luxury and simple consideration. It told the residents that this was a building of a certain distinction, that this well-groomed and attentive man in the lobby not only received their packages and ensured that their guests were welcomed and that unexpected visitors were vetted or thwarted, but he also cared enough to open the door for them, to say Good morning, Good afternoon, Good evening, Looks like rain, Stay warm, Enjoy the game, Enjoy the concert, Have a nice walk. This charming man would say hello to their dog, hello to their grandchildren, hello to their new girlfriend, hello to the guest harpist hired to play while they ate dinner.

  That was a real thing. That was a real person. There was a real harpist, and he operated a company called I Left My Harp in San Francisco. Mokhtar got to know him well. For a few hundred dollars he would come with his harp and play while people ate, while people drank. A certain couple living high in the building hired him once a month. He was friendly. So was the chandelier repairman—he was Bulgarian and often stopped to talk to Mokhtar. The pet nutritionist was an affable woman with blue-streaked hair and an arm full of silver jangly jewelry. Each day a kaleidoscopic parade passed through those doors. Personal trainers, a dozen or so of those, and Mokhtar had to know them all, which among them was improving the health and longevity of which resident. There were the art consultants, the personal shoppers, the nannies, the carpenters, the concierge doctors. There were
the Chinese-food people on their bikes, the pizza people in their cars, the dry-cleaning people on foot.

  But primarily there were the package-delivery people. The FedEx person, the UPS person, the DHL person, bringing boxes from Zappos, Bodybuilding.com, diapers.com. Some liked to talk, some were on the clock, always late, needing just a quick signature, thanks buddy. Some knew Mokhtar’s name, some didn’t care. Some liked to chat, complain, gossip. But the volume of packages that came through that door—it was hard to believe.

  What do we have today? Mokhtar would ask.

  We have some cashews from Oregon, the delivery guy would say.

  We have some steaks from Nebraska; these should get refrigerated soon.

  We have some shirts from London.

  Mokhtar signed the clipboards and brought the packages into the storeroom behind the desk, and when the resident walked through the lobby, Mokhtar raised a finger and a happy eyebrow and announced that a package had arrived. The delight was mutual. One time one of the older residents, James Blackburn, opened a box and showed Mokhtar a pair of new Montblanc pens.

  Best pens in the world, Mr. Blackburn said.

  Mokhtar, always polite, admired the pens, and asked a question or two about them. A few months later, at Christmastime, he found a present on his desk, and when he unwrapped it, he found the same pen. A gift from Mr. Blackburn.

  For the most part the residents’ money was new, and they were getting used to Infinity life. If they wanted a more formal relationship, Mokhtar could accommodate that. If they wanted to talk, he talked, and every so often there was the time and the will to have a conversation. Maybe they were in the lobby waiting for a car. Mokhtar had to be up and near the door, ready when the car arrived, so there would be those awkward few minutes, when they were both staring out into the street.

  Busy today? a resident might ask.

  Not so busy, Mokhtar would say. It was important never to seem flustered. A Lobby Ambassador had to project an air of calm competence.

  Did you hear that new Giants pitcher moved into Tower B? the resident would say, the car would arrive, and that would be that.

  But sometimes they would go deeper. With James Blackburn it went deeper. Even before the Montblanc pen, he’d shown an interest in Mokhtar. You’re a smart guy, Mokhtar. What are your plans?

  Mokhtar felt for him. James, a retired white man in his sixties, was a decent man, and the encounters were awkward for him, too. If he assumed Mokhtar wanted better things than working the desk and the door, that would be diminishing his current job, which for all he knew was, for Mokhtar, a personal pinnacle. On the other hand, if he assumed this was Mokhtar’s personal pinnacle, that brought with it a more troubling set of assumptions.

  Most residents didn’t ask. They didn’t want to know. The job, Mokhtar’s existence there, was a reminder that there were those who lived in glass towers, and those who opened doors for them. Had the residents seen him reading The Wretched of the Earth? Maybe. He didn’t hide his reading material. Had they seen him in the news, occasionally joining in or leading a protest demanding better relations between the police and San Francisco’s Arab and Muslim American community? Mokhtar had been in the public eye here and there, and sometimes he thought he had a future in organizing, in representing Arabs and Muslims on some more elevated stage. City supervisor? Mayor? Some Infinity residents knew his work as a young activist, and for most he was an uncomfortable enigma. Mokhtar knew they wanted their doormen slightly more docile, slightly less interesting.

  But then there was James Blackburn. Where’d you grow up? he’d ask. You from out here originally?

  CHAPTER III

  THE KID WHO STOLE BOOKS

  MOKHTAR’S EARLIEST MEMORY OF San Francisco was of a man defecating on a Mercedes. This was on his family’s first day in the Tenderloin. Mokhtar was eight, the oldest of what were then five kids. For years the family had lived in Brooklyn’s Bed-Stuy neighborhood, where his father Faisal ran Mike’s Candy and Grocery—a bodega owned by Mokhtar’s grandfather Hamood. But Faisal didn’t want to sell liquor, had never been comfortable selling it. After years of planning and anguished deliberation, finally Faisal and his wife Bushra broke free. They moved to California, where Faisal had been promised a janitorial job. He’d rather be broke and start over than be under his father’s thumb, peddling booze.

  They found an apartment in the Tenderloin district, considered the city’s most troubled and poor. The day they got to the city, Mokhtar was in the backseat with his siblings when they stopped at a traffic light. He looked over to see a white Mercedes next to them, and just as Mokhtar was taking notice of the car, its immaculate paint and gleaming chrome, a man in ragged clothes jumped onto its hood, pulled down his pants and defecated. This was a block from where they were going to live.

  They went from a spacious apartment in Brooklyn, from a lifestyle that Mokhtar remembered as being without want—where the kids had their own room, full of toys—to a one-bedroom apartment at 1036 Polk Street, situated between two porn stores. Mokhtar and five siblings slept in the bedroom and his parents slept in the living room. All night sirens screamed. Addicts wailed. Mokhtar’s mother, Bushra, was afraid to walk alone in the neighborhood and sent Mokhtar to the store on Larkin Street for groceries. On one of his first errands, someone threw a bottle in his direction, glass crashing on the wall above his head.

  Mokhtar got used to the drug dealing, which was done out in open air, all day and all night. He got used to the smells—human feces, urine, weed. To the howling of men and women and babies. He got used to stepping over needles and vomit. Older men and younger men having sex in the alley. A woman in her sixties shooting up. A homeless family panhandling. An elderly junkie standing in the middle of traffic.

  The assumption in San Francisco was that the police considered the Tenderloin the city’s illegal-activity containment zone—that just as the city designated Fisherman’s Wharf as a quarantine for tourists, they’d designated the Tenderloin’s thirty-one blocks as the city’s go-zone for crack, meth, prostitution, petty crime and public defecation. Even its name, the Tenderloin, had a nefarious provenance: in the early part of the twentieth century, local police and politicians were bribed so well in the neighborhood that they ate only the finest cuts of beef.

  But there was real community in the Tenderloin, too. It was one of the city’s most affordable neighborhoods, and it had for decades attracted families newly arrived from Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, the Middle East. Among them were Yemenis—a few hundred of them in the Tenderloin, most of them working as janitors. Among the patchwork legions who left their countries of origin to come to the United States, the Yemenis were late arrivals emigrating in significant numbers in the 1960s, finding work primarily in the farms of California’s San Joaquin Valley and in the automotive factories of Detroit. At first almost all Yemeni immigrants were men, most from Ibb province, an agricultural region. They came to California to pick fruit, but in the 1970s, hundreds of Yemenis who had been working in the fields began to come to San Francisco to work as janitors. The pay was better and there were benefits. Eventually Yemenis made up 20 percent of the janitors’ union, Local 87, headquartered in the Tenderloin.

  —

  This was Faisal’s plan, too: to work in the janitorial sector, or at least start there. He got a job, but didn’t last long. His supervisor, accustomed to talking down to immigrant employees—most of them from Nicaragua and China, most of them undocumented—was disrespectful. Mokhtar’s father was proud and knew his rights, so he quit and got a job as a security guard at the Sequoias, a residential high-rise, on the swing shift. This was the work he did throughout Mokhtar’s first years in San Francisco. His father worked odd hours, sometimes eighteen hours a day.

  Which left Mokhtar free to roam. He could look in the windows of one of the adult video stores, could ignore the shirtless man screaming obscenities across the street. He could stop at one of the Yemeni markets—the Yemenis ran half the local markets, e
ven the one called Amigo’s. He could swing by Sergeant John Macauley Park, a tiny playground across from the New Century Strip Club. Up the street, on O’Farrell and Polk, there was a mural on the side of a building, an underwater scene of whales and sharks and turtles. For years, Mokhtar assumed the building was an aquarium of some kind, and only later realized it was the Mitchell Brothers O’Farrell Theatre, one of America’s oldest and most notorious strip clubs—purportedly the originator of close-contact lap dances. The neighborhood had thirty-one liquor stores and few safe places for children to play, but there were thousands of kids in those desperate blocks, and they grew up quick.

  By middle school, Mokhtar had become a fast learner, a fast talker, a corner-cutter, and a friend to an array of kids who also were fast talkers and corner-cutters. In the Tenderloin they dodged the junkies and hustlers and, when they could, they ventured out, knowing that a few blocks in any direction was an entirely different world. Just north was Nob Hill, one of the most expensive neighborhoods in the United States, home to the Fairmont and Mark Hopkins Hotels. A few blocks east was Union Square with its pricey shopping, the cable cars and jewelry stores.

  Everywhere there were tourists, and with tourists there was always diversion. Mokhtar and his friends would go to Fisherman’s Wharf and give unintelligible directions to European visitors. Or they’d ask nonsensical directions. They’d find a tourist and ask, Do you know the way to Meow Meow? No? What about Ackakakakaka? They’d walk by the window of any restaurant, some place they couldn’t afford in their dreams, and push their naked asses against the glass. When they needed a few dollars, they’d go to the fountain in Ghirardelli Square and steal underwater coins.

  Mokhtar knew his family was poor, but there were solutions to certain deprivations. He knew they couldn’t afford a Nintendo 64—he’d asked for one year after year for birthdays and finally stopped bothering—but the Circuit City was only four blocks from their apartment, and that place was busy and chaotic enough that he and his friends could pretend to be potential shoppers trying out a game. Usually they could get in an hour of Mario Kart before they were chased off.