The crowd shifts, gradually condensing until he accepts the pressure of flesh on all sides, the taste in the air of breath. The foreign stink elates him, he shuts his eyes to hear their language. This is fucking strange, he could be anywhere. For a moment he falls asleep on his feet and dreams that he’s asleep on his feet in a crowd of tired Egyptians. They’re in a bleak airport. There’s an unexplained delay. But I’m not really there, he realizes in the dream –
and wakes in a crowd of tired Egyptians, dropping his briefcase. He mutters Sorry, bending to retrieve it, then lingers in his hunched posture, staring at the grime spirographed on the tiles. He’s not really there. He can feel it, the lack of himself where it’s numb. Which is maybe just tired, or maybe, the beginning of some creeping epileptic death where your brain fizzles out bit by bit. He stands up trying to remember how to think, and sees –
some shoulders away, in an unpeopled pocket like a clearing, a white girl. She has long dark hair and a wan Pre-Raphaelite face. Meeting his eye, she doesn’t smile but lets the gaze be, factual with exhaustion. She wears a yellow Santa Cruz T-shirt, decorated with a sketch of palm trees. He wants to tell her Santa Cruz is fifteen minutes from his house. In the pale flash of desire he feels, Eddie returns to himself, immediate and hot.
His restored being is a restive dollop of who knows. Floating above it, Eddie pictures a trumpet: loopy, canary yellow. From the round bell grows a sheaf of grain: he knows in that instant that the plant is called benelia.
There is a music you can only play on his, Eddie’s, horn. When Eddie dies, the wholesome benelia bread will be no more. (He has a quick flash of a long file of disappointed pilgrims, come with their ailing children to eat of the benelia: alas, there is no hope for little Rosa’s crippled leg – the pilgrims wail, and
Then he’s freed and barges greedily, fighting his way to the immigration post.
•Cairo rules.
•He thinks he will live here for the rest of his life.
•This place is totally all the answers to his problems.
And he winds up at the Hotel Raffles, where the arched windows have no glass but only fretwork shutters; slumps on the iron-framed bed, pulls out his airplane book, Martina’s copy of The Celestine Prophecy, of which he’d said, “You’re reading this garbage?” then borrowed it:
in the front, she’s written her address in Finland.
Real linen sheets, a ceiling fan that wags in an eternal game of tag with flies
and in the morning he is up at six and drinking sugarcane juice for breakfast from a fly-besieged stall
another taxi
to the pyramids of Giza
And he wades up a dune blind; skis down and falls. As he kneels in the sand, a shadow passes over him. He thinks of a massive, sun-blotting hawk, is startled,
opens his eyes
There she and the Sphinx are, and nothing else at all.
12. The Sphinx
Neat
A girl in a Santa Cruz T-shirt; long dark hair tied back from a pale face; long legs. She has dark eyes, like his, and the same narrow jaw, the same quizzically peaked frown like a spaniel’s. They might be brother and sister.
But she’s beautiful.
It’s unsettling to what degree the stranger is beautiful: in this dun, monotonous waste.
“Hello,” she says. “I remember you from the airport. But why are you kneeling in the middle of the desert?”
The sun blinds him and he looks down at her abbreviated shadow, whose hair blows and waves banner-fashion on the sand.
“Yeah . . . I guess I’m having a kind of dehydration episode?”
“Oh.” She waggles a can of Fanta before his eyes, crouches. “How neat. It’s like . . . a terrible advert.”
He takes the can and drinks. It’s hot like tea.
Her T-shirt has wet patches at the armpits and in a blaze on her chest. She’s older than he first thought – older than him. When he notices the yellow stains shadowing her index and middle fingers, the mark of a heavy smoker, he’s gripped by a strange remorse, a tug so violent it gives him a déjà vu of early childhood, when it’s okay to feel this strongly.
She says, “Now all your problems vanish.”
Kismet
She’s named Denise, but she prefers to be called Deesey. She’s from Britain, but has lived all over. Now she’s “just” on holiday.
He tells her his name is Jack, and she cocks her head.
“Jack what?”
They are picking their way back toward the Pyramids, barefoot in deep, baking sand, and when he says “Moffat,” she stops.
“Jack Moffat?” she queries, with that spaniel frown.
He takes a deep breath. He has been using his father’s name. “Yeah, why?”
“I don’t know. I think it sounds like someone famous.” She shrugs, and continues walking thoughtfully as if trying to place the name.
She’s staying at the same hotel; a coincidence. They agree that the showers are surprisingly clean. In an aside, she comments, “Well, Jack’s staying at the Hotel Raffles!”
Then they go on in silence; it’s understood they’ll spend the day together.
And when they come out of the long slog of sand to the road, there is a taxi idling by the now open drinks stall. He says, on an impulse,
“Kismet.”
She balks: “What do you mean?”
She has her sandals twined on one hand. They are spindly, chestnut leather; a bad match for her cheap cotton shorts. She stands pigeon-toed and her bare feet writhe with the heat of the road, her whole stance is this discomfort.
“Why don’t you put your shoes on?” he says.
But she laughs, unfooled, and states: “He refused to tell her what Kismet means.”
Morphic Resonance
The taxi ride is taking a long time. The heat has silenced them, and they are each draped out of an open window, eyes shut in the speed breeze. In that darkness, in which the whole world is warm and blows in on you generously, dirty and maternal, Eddie has fallen in love. He has decided he has fallen in love. Now that I’ve fallen in love, and How can I have fallen in love so fast, and, proudly, Love at first sight.
And then out of the blue, out of the turbulent warm darkness, her voice pipes courteously: “Did you know that the Sphinx was once under water? It’s older than the pyramids.”
She has leaned her head against the frame of the car window. It shakes slightly with the bumps, that passivity making her look sleepy. She’s smoking her third cigarette of the drive, poking the end out to let the wind strip the ash.
She’s still beautiful. It’s just, fucking relentless.
He says, “Did you know the first use of the Sphinx was as a four-star restaurant? They’ve found seating for a hundred on the lower level.”
The joke surprises him as it comes. He remembers that he’s funny, and sits back, relieved.
But she just smokes, shakes her head, deadpan:
“What’s amazing is that someone told me that same thing about the Tower of Pisa last month. Do you know Rusty? Blond, American, with a sailboat?”
“No.”
There is a long pause. She leans back again, shutting her eyes, and her passivity strikes Eddie now as indifference.
He says, “Maybe it’s going around.”
She says from behind her shut eyes, “It’s morphic resonance.”
“Morphic resonance?”
“Mmm.”
“Well, tell me. Now I gotta know.”
“It’s some New Age mumbo jumbo about how everything is really one,” she says, and her manner refers angrily to some third party, who has stubbornly adhered to morphic resonance, in the face of all her efforts to disprove it.
Lucky
They’ve gone for fiteer, the local pastry-bottomed pizza, in a low-ceilinged cellar where the chef has to bend his knees to make room to toss the dough. Until the beer comes, neither of them speaks.
And he is so in love. And he is so in love.
He is in love. Love at first sight.
The radio plays soggy Ya Habibi Arab pop. She puffs a Cleopatra cigarette in time. He keeps being drawn to watch the chef tossing pizza dough – but she isn’t, doesn’t glance, so he is shamed and tries to resist the cheap spectacle. Arriving with the beer, the waiter places paper doilies on the table to receive the glasses, and the fans’ wind tugs them instantly; Eddie and Deesey have to pin them down until the glasses land.
Then the moisture roots them.
He remembers all these details, years later. The table tops were gray pretend marble. He was not hungry in a particular way that he would never not be hungry again, without her. When he turned his head, his sunburnt neck crinkled sensuously.
Years later, he does not remember: the frightening possibility of not really loving her, censored time and again. How he anticipated love’s euphoria each time he was going to look at her. How sometimes it took concentration and patience to pinpoint the detail of her that would yield the rush. He triggered it greedily, seeking to maximize it, like a man eating too many corn chips in search of the perfect one.
He had to make her love him back, at all costs.
He was about to drink beer for the first time, too ashamed to tell her why he shouldn’t. Sitting in front of the full glass, he watched the foam subside with a superstitious thrill. His mind parroted one beer, one joint, kablooey.
“Well,’’ she said, “to Kismet.”
“To Kismet.”
The glasses met in a graceless side-swipe that made him want to try again. That urge haunted him as he sipped with show relish. Somehow he had known ahead of time its gruff metallic taste.
She said:
“But do you know what Kismet means?”
Distracted by his sense of looming tipsiness, he bought time. “In what way? What it means.”
“Just, do you know what it means?”
He took a deep swig. Going down, the liquid numbed his throat.
She said harshly, “I’m serious.”
He smiled helplessly. Already the beer was turning him into a retard. His mind prattled, recurrence, grand mal seizures, chthonic-clonic.
“Look,” she said, “I’m not meaning to be heavy, it’s just something that happened to me recently, when we were in Australia.”
“Who’s we?”
“Just we. That doesn’t matter. We were in Australia. And we had an Australian friend, a girl, Jessie. We were at her flat, drinking, and we started talking about all the poisonous spiders they have in Australia. And Jessie told us a story about a friend of hers, also named Jessie. This friend Jessie was with a few tourists, like us, in her flat, telling them about the dangerous spiders. And suddenly she got up and went to the middle of the carpet and said, My God, there’s a funnel-web spider right there, and pointed. And the spider jumped up into the air and bit her on the end of her finger.”
Eddie laughed. Deesey said, “Exactly.”
“Exactly,” he echoed.
“So she told us this, and we looked around the carpet then. And she got up, laughing, and began to prowl about, you know, hunting spiders. And then she said, My God, there is one, I don’t believe it. And we yelled out, don’t point at it for God’s sakes, and she laughed and pointed at it to wind us up, and the spider leapt into the air and bit her on the end of her finger.
“We just ran and dialed the ambulance, and we were slicing her finger open and whatnot, sucking it, and they gave her a shot. But she was in hospital for a week.”
“Jesus Christ.”
“Well. The funnel-web spider.”
She shook her head and then very definitely turned away, turned her frown on the pizza chef, tossing his eternal dough. Eddie followed her gaze and for some moments they sat mesmerized by that deft swoop and catch and stretch. At last the chef winked at them, without missing a beat, and Eddie said, “So. What do you make of that?”
“I was hoping,” she said, “you might hazard a guess.” She shot him a fleeting scowl of reproach.
In the joshing, affectionate tone meant to enforce warmth, Eddie said, “That’s so totally unfair.”
She winced as if he’d sworn at her. She said, “It’s not that it’s unfair. It’s that I’m fucking desperate.”
Stung, he blathered, “Well, I’m not just saying this to fuck you up, the spiders were in league? Cause I was reading in the Washington Post on the plane, they did a study at MIT and spiders are actually highly intelligent, like dolphins. They have a sophisticated language that’s related to Basque, only much smaller. So that’s a possibility at least, but otherwise, I really hope you don’t hate me for saying this, but, for all I know, Kismet is just a Broadway musical.”
“Point taken.”
The pizza arrived then, ending it.
Over food, she mellowed and was again gracious.
As they got up to leave, he said, “I only know I’m lucky to be here with you, that’s all I know.”
She smiled and said softly, “That’s not enough.”
9. Perspective: Turkey (10 days previously)
1Recently Denise had found the corpse of her murdered father.
1.1In the fetal position in the hotel parking lot, Dad sprawled in his lost blood.
1.2Seeing him, she hurried her step. It was 5:00 A.M.
2She went down on her knees, and there was no one on this planet left who had ever claimed to love Denise; with this death, her beloved were dead, to the very last; with this, death had licked her plate clean.
2.1She lay down in the grit and cradled, spoon-fashion like a wife:
•a winter log, too wet for the fire
•a thing numbingly, tangibly gone
•Dad, made of cold
2.2In my arms there is nothing left.
2.3She didn’t cry at the time.
2.4In her turn she was found, and the police alerted.
3When she arrived at the police station, there was the killer. A passerby had witnessed him throwing away a knife, his sleeve soaked red. He’d been arrested before the body was found. He was skinny, nondescript: a mugger who had never meant this. When he found out who Denise was, he held his cuffed hands out to her, sobbing and saying nothing.
4The next morning, Deesey caught a flight to Cairo.
4.1She left without making any funeral arrangements, simply ditching the corpse of her murdered father.
4.2Nonetheless, sometimes during her romance with Eddie, Deesey would drift off, imagining the Turkish morgue, the eventual trench or furnace.
4.3Eddie had no idea of this at the time.
Inevitable
on together in another cab to the medieval town,
Islamic Cairo, where
in a minaret of the Mosque of al-Muayyad
high above the pellmell in clean air
he kisses her
and she lets him cling and taste her tongue’s gruff metal
stroke her bare, wet neck
they part to view
tiny on Cairo’s roofs
chicken runs, laundry lines, heaps of refuse, sheep, men
working in the open
“This is very very uncool.”
And what he most remembers is their walk through the mosque of Al-Hakim. There was nothing about that mosque, but it was dark, the incongruous chandeliers unlit, and they walked there under the eye of some dour Shi’ia divine, never daring even to touch hands, for eons, it was electrifying.
And that night Eddie got drunk for the first time, matching her beer for beer in legendary Groppi’s, which has faded in his memory to a single frame of white ice cream, in two balls still stiff from the scoop
and a fountain which may or may not have had water
Facts for Tourists: The Mosque of Al-Hakim
1Built in 1010 by the mad Caliph, Al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah.
1.1When he was a boy, Al-Hakim’s tutor nicknamed him “Lizard” for his off-putting grimaces and manners.
1.2He was eleven when he took the throne.
1.3That tutor was then murdered.
1.4The mosque was once used as a prison for Crusaders.
2One of Al-Hakim’s generals dared come in on him unannounced.
2.1The general had just returned from a victory; hence the rash gesture.
2.2He found the Caliph standing over the corpse of a disemboweled boy.
2.3The general was beheaded.
2.4Salah al-Din stabled his horses in Al-Hakim’s mosque.
3Al-Hakim patrolled the city streets on his donkey, Moon.
3.1He had a special hatred of dishonest merchants.
3.2Anyone found cheating was sodomized on the spot, by a huge black servant accompanying Al-Hakim for this purpose.
3.3Napoleon stored foodstuffs in Al-Hakim’s mosque.
4He hated dogs: he had all the dogs of Cairo slaughtered.
4.1He hated women: for seven years, by his decree, they remained indoors.
4.2To ensure this, a moratorium was declared on the manufacture of women’s shoes.
4.3Nasser opened a school for boys in Al-Hakim’s mosque.
5Finally, Al-Hakim proclaimed himself divine.
5.1Three followers entered the Mosque of Amr at Friday prayers to substitute his name for that of Allah.
5.2Enraged, the congregation murdered them on the spot.
5.3Hakim had troops raze and loot the city in retaliation.
5.4Soon thereafter, he vanished on a solitary jaunt with Moon.
5.5His body was never found; one, at least, of his followers, saw in this proof of divinity, and went on to preach his worship in Syria.
5.6This is the origin of the Druze sect.
5.7Most recently, the mosque of Al-Hakim served as a madhouse.
The Only Good Thing Anyone Has Ever Done Page 7
