Shooting the Sphinx

by Avram Noble Ludwig

  Don sat on the deck of the cargo bay behind the camera control console.

  “I’m set.” Don gave Ari the thumbs-up.

  Samir’s cell phone rang again. Ari froze.

  “It’s Beth,” said Samir, examining his phone.

  “Don’t answer,” insisted Ari.

  “But she must approve this budget.” Samir held up his copy in the clear plastic folder.

  “Don’t answer the phone! I’m telling you, she’ll hold us up. She’ll stop us.”

  “But without her approval, how can I know if I will get the payment for this flight?” asked Samir.

  “I’ll get you your money,” Ari promised. “But I can’t talk to her now.”

  “Why not?” Samir was mystified. “This is not the correct way. I gave her my word.”

  “I need to believe what I’m saying, don’t you understand? I need to have confidence when I talk to her.”

  “Confidence?” asked Samir. “Confidence in what?”

  “That we got the shot. Then I can sell it. Then I can sell anyone on anything, as long as I know that the shot’s in the can. Hang up!”

  Samir shook his head in a tremor of resentful tics. He could not serve two masters. “I do not like this.”

  “Trust me.” Ari pointed at the ringing phone. “I know what I’m doing.”

  Samir denied the call. Ari reached into a case and pulled out two sets of aviation headphones. He put one around his neck and passed the other to Samir.

  “So you can hear the pilot over the engines and the rotor going round.”

  Ari walked to the chopper. He had a mercurial look in his eyes, a hyperawareness that subdued Samir.

  “Let’s get in,” commanded Ari.

  Ari and Samir climbed into the cargo bay next to Don. The crew chief ran over to Samir, speaking into his ear over the rotor sound.

  “What’s wrong?” asked Ari.

  “The pilot says that the camera ball is too big. It is only one inch above the runway. As we taxi it will hit the ground and break.”

  “No, no, it’ll be fine.” Ari got in and plugged his headset into a jack.

  “Tell him that once the rotor spools up the aircraft will rise on the landing gear about five or six inches off the ground. That will be enough to taxi.”

  The crew chief shook his head.

  “He says no.”

  “Tell him it’s my personal camera. Tell him I own it. If we break it it’s my responsibility.”

  Samir balked. “But that is not the truth.”

  “So what? Tell him!” insisted Ari.

  Samir shouted a few words over the growing rotor noise and pointed at Ari. The crew chief nodded, then hopped into the cargo bay, taking his position in front of the bay door. The military censor climbed in and found a place behind Don where he could watch the screen. Ari looked at the censor, then jumped up.

  “I’ll be back in a second.”

  Ari hopped off the chopper. Ran to his bag and grabbed his own little digital camera. He slipped it into his pocket.

  “We have a clearance to fly!” Samir yelled at him from the chopper as it started to roll forward onto the taxiway.

  “I’m coming! I’m coming! Don’t wait for me!” Ari ran back and jumped aboard as the chopper lifted off the ground. The rotors made a heavier thwacking sound, biting more air. The black tarmac on the sand dropped away under them.

  Ari looked at his crew. “Samir, I think you’re blushing.”

  “You were right,” Samir admitted. “This is the coolest.”

  “Now, it’s my turn to give you a date with the Sphinx you will always remember,” said Ari, panting hard from the run to get his camera.

  Chapter 33

  From up in the air, Egypt makes geographical sense. The Nile runs north within a narrow band of green stretching down into the desert. However, Cairo is the place where the longest river in the world fans out into an enormous delta. Some twenty million people live on that vast triangle, starting with Giza, then the city of Cairo, as the river grows wider and wider, into a verdant martini glass shape.

  “Look down there.” Samir pointed out of the cargo bay door. “That fast boat on the Nile.”

  Ari craned his neck out into the downdraft from the thwacking rotors above. On the broad river across their path was one of the most incongruous sights he had ever seen. A speedboat splayed out a white vector behind it. Within and without the V, a water-skier slalomed back and forth, expertly jumping the wake. Never would Ari have expected to see waterskiing on the Nile, let alone find that the skier was a woman in a full black burka with a veil and gloves.

  “Don, roll a few feet on that woman waterskiing. That’ll wake them up in the editing room.”

  Don zoomed in on her with his three-hundred-millimeter lens and turned on the camera for a few seconds.

  “Have you ever seen that before?” Ari asked Samir.

  “No.”

  With the water and the wind, the black fabric clung, wet, to every curve of her body.

  “Man, she’s an excellent skier. That wet burka, that’s not hiding her figure at all. She looks really…” Ari caught himself.

  “Go ahead,” urged Samir. “You can say it.”

  “Sexy. She knows what she’s doing to all the men for miles. She’s got to know.”

  “She must be a Saudi,” said Samir.

  “A Saudi feminist. Cut! Cut the camera, Don. That’s enough film of that. Look, all the cars on the bridge are slowing down to watch her. If she doesn’t keep going upstream, there’s going to be a traffic jam.”

  “If she doesn’t disappear down the Nile,” said Samir, “all the men in Cairo will go swimming.”

  “Samir the Hammer, you made a joke!”

  “Look.” Samir grew serious and pointed toward the pyramids out the cargo bay door. “The Necropolis. Are we ready to shoot?”

  “Yup,” said Ari.

  The military censor was busy watching the woman skiing, so Ari pulled out his camera and snapped a picture of Samir behind the censor’s back. Samir’s smile had emerged. It was as if he’d become a different person, boyish, excited; his smoldering had vanished somehow. Ari felt a warm sentimental wave of affection for him. The pyramids on the plateau of Giza loomed in the distance.

  “Look.” Samir pointed excitedly. “The Necropolis. Should I tell the pilots to start?”

  “We’re set,” said Don.

  “Remember, Don, we shouldn’t know it’s the Sphinx until we pull back,” said Ari.

  “Right, boss.”

  The pilot banked around past the top of the Great Pyramid and dropped down into the little valley underneath the Plateau of Giza. The ship lined up abeam to the Sphinx.

  “Ready and … roll camera,” said Ari.

  The pilot flew in a perfect arc around the Sphinx’s head, corkscrewing back up and past the top of the Great Pyramid. Don zoomed in tight on the top of the head of the massive statue, but not tight enough. Ari could still tell it was the Sphinx, even from the beginning of the shot. That was not what he wanted.

  “Cut, cut, cut!” said Ari. “Reset.”

  “How was that?” asked Samir.

  “No good. We’re up too high. We’ve got to fly lower.”

  Samir translated into his headset.

  Ari looked out the back of the banking helicopter as the horizon of the desert tilted vertically to one side and then all the way to the other. He could see over the ramp that made a tailgate at the back of the aircraft; it was like the back of a pickup truck, the only difference was size. You could drive a pickup truck up that ramp inside this helicopter, he thought. The horizon leveled off. Then the chopper started on its course again.

  “Roll camera,” said Ari.

  “How is it?” asked Samir.

  “Not great.” Don started the shot again, but it was already too late in the flight pattern to salvage the shot. “I can do better.”

  “What about all the tourists staring up at us?” asked Samir.
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  “We don’t care about them,” said Ari. “We can erase them digitally after we edit the film. Cut, cut, let’s go again.”

  “Still too high?” asked Samir.

  “Yuh, reset,” said Ari with a blasé look of disappointment on his face.

  Samir told the pilot, and he cut his pattern short, banking hard, pulling three Gs. Everyone grimaced as the horizon went vertical out the back. Ari could feel the strain on the rotors as their every thwack became a shake. The helicopter leveled off to descend to its starting point.

  Samir argued with the pilot as he banked around to reset. The helicopter started the pattern again. Ari didn’t bother to speak.

  “Aren’t you going to roll?” asked Don.

  “There’s no point.” Ari leaned back against a machine gun mount in the side of the ship. He was on strike. He wasn’t going to look at the screen unless he thought it was worth it. “We’re just wasting film. We’ve got to get low, really low, right down next to it, or the shot’ll never get into the movie.”

  “The pilot says he won’t fly any lower.” Samir pointed at his headset.

  Ari lashed out. “Did we come all the way here, go through everything that we went through, just to film something that’s okay?” Ari was yelling now. “No, it’s got to be great! It’s got to be the best, or there’s no point! We’ll just wind up on the cutting room floor!”

  Samir gazed back at Ari, furious, humiliated, for he internalized failure, blamed himself. This is the breaking point, thought Ari. Either he’s going to push through to the other side or he’s going to give up.

  “Inshallah?” asked Ari sarcasticly.

  Then something welled up inside of Samir—some determination to reverse the force of compromise, of moderation, of playing it safe and keeping to the rules. Ari knew he had cracked Samir open, cleaved off the lid on his mind.

  Samir ripped into the pilot in Arabic. Arguing, then screaming at him. A lifetime of pent-up rage at the rusty machine of post-British colonial pan-Arab Socialist police state bureaucracy poured out of him.

  “Yeah, yeah, that’s right!” Ari goaded Samir on like a demon on his shoulder. “Tell him the whole world will see this shot! And that we will put his name in the credits at the end of the movie in every theater as the pilot who flew around the head of the Sphinx!”

  Samir yelled and then yanked his headset plugs out of the jack on the bulkhead and pulled himself forward through the banking aircraft toward the cockpit. The censor and the crew chief tried to stop him, but they could only use one arm each to keep from tumbling over in the banking chopper. Samir plugged into a jack in the cockpit and resumed yelling. The pilots looked behind themselves at the maniac at their shoulders. More afraid of Samir than the consequences, the pilot pushed the stick forward and dove. They came in low, way down low by the head of the Sphinx.

  “Oh yeah!” cried Ari. “That’s what I’m talking about! Roll camera!”

  Don started the shot as tight as possible, then pulled out. The head of the Sphinx filled the frame. They were right down beside it.

  “Perfect … perfect. Steady on the Sphinx, now wider, wider. That’s good, good.”

  The shot was locked on the face of the Sphinx, as the helicopter arced, the background of stone and sand twirled behind the massive head. Ari knew that on a giant screen the effect would be dizzying, spellbinding, movie magic.

  “Those people are running,” said Samir.

  “Shhh!” Ari lashed out. “I need to focus. Okay, okay now … pull back, wider, wider. Right over the top of the pyramid, right over the top, tell him to fly right over the top!”

  Samir yelled at the pilot, who flew right next to the top of the Great Pyramid.

  “Awesome! Cut! That was perfect!” Ari high-fived Don and looked out the cargo bay door. Below, they had just hovered over fifty or sixty buses parked in rows by the entrance to the pyramids. Trapped between the buses, hundreds of tourists were running away from the rotor wash, an inverted mushroom cloud of dust that gushed down between the buses and shot little wind tunnels of sandstorm through each parked row, engulfing the tourists like escaping insects.

  “Ari, look at those tourists down there!” cried Don.

  “They’re running away!” realized Ari. “From us. Oh, they’re getting sandblasted. Tell the pilot to climb once we get near the pyramids or we’ll ruin those people’s day.”

  “That is what I was trying to tell you,” said Samir. “Reset?”

  Ari looked out the back of the ship. A tan cloud described their path.

  “Uh, we kicked up too much dust all over the place,” Ari admitted. “You can’t even see the head of the Sphinx anymore. It looks like a sandstorm hit.”

  Samir talked on the headset with the pilot.

  “He wants to know should we fly over the desert for a few minutes to let the dust settle down?”

  “No, let’s go back to base and reload. We got it. We got the shot. Whatever happens now is just gravy.”

  “Just gravy?” asked Samir.

  “Extra. A bonus.”

  The helicopter leveled out and headed back over the city, back to base.

  Chapter 34

  The ride back from the Sphinx in the helicopter held a sublime satisfaction. The engine noise, the thwack of the rotors faded away into a quiet that only comes when you touch the face of the impossible and the extraordinary. The team basked silently in the achievement borne of their own determination until Ari noticed Samir muttering to himself.

  “What is it?” Ari prompted him.

  “I was looking right into the eyes of the Sphinx.”

  “Yeah?”

  “You do not know what that means to an Egyptian.”

  Don looked at his monitor at something in the city below. “What’s that?”

  On the screen, a mass of people was moving down a boulevard beneath them. Ari looked out the bay door. Protesters marched along the avenue into a large circular square from every direction, some holding signs and banners. Ari looked back at the protesters on the screen, thousands of little dots all moving in unison.

  “Don, roll me a few seconds of that.” Don turned on the camera, but Ari thought better of giving the studio something else to worry about. “No, wait. Cut. Don, that’s a lot of … how many people would you say that is?”

  “It’s got to be four, maybe five thousand.”

  “Five thousand, as many as that?”

  Ari was spooked by the size of the crowd. This wasn’t just a few college kids anymore. This was something to pay attention to. I’ve got to go and see this for myself, he thought, as soon as possible.

  The chopper landed and taxied onto the ramp. Charley met them and opened the ball, downloading the film, threading a new magazine into the camera. The fuel truck pulled up as the jet engines wound down.

  Samir and Ari hopped off. The crew chief snapped a photo of them behind the censor’s back.

  “Going up again?” asked Charley.

  “Sure, but we got it,” said Don.

  “We got it good!” Ari high-fived Charley and Don, and he lifted Samir’s hand and high-fived him as well. Samir’s cell phone rang.

  “It’s Elizabeth.” Samir looked at the screen. “Should I…?”

  “Sure,” said Ari with ease. “I’m ready now. Answer it.”

  “Hello, Elizabeth,” said Samir into his cell before passing the phone. “He’s right here.”

  “Hey, babe!” said Ari cheerfully.

  Beth’s voice came through the line with a slight delay.

  “Did you see the budget—?”

  Ari overwhelmed her with a joyful tirade. “We got it! It’s amazing, fantastic, perfect! Frank’s going to love it! Did I see what…?”

  “That budget!” She was almost yelling over the phone.

  “Yes, I saw the budget. So what…?”

  “Are you high?”

  Ari laughed—high on life, he thought. “The studio doesn’t understand it yet. They don’t know what I
know. Look, this is going to be the signature shot of the movie! It’ll be the poster! It’ll be the commercial! It’ll be the trailer! It will be why people go to buy a ticket in the first place…!”

  “But it’s a quarter of a million dollars!” She was yelling now. “Twice the bid!”

  “I know it’s double, but what are you going to do?” He didn’t care. He wore a manic set of armor impervious to her anger. “You’ve got to come here to shoot the end of the movie. We’ve got to get the SpaceCam back out of Egypt. We’ve got to get the film out. You’ve just got to pay. What choice do you have?”

  “You fucked me, Ari!”

  “Babe, babe, calm down, we’re reloaded here.” He had fucked her in the way that she meant, and he had to admit to himself that he enjoyed it. He had broken with her in the way a child keeps testing and testing adults until one day he sees that their real power over him is really quite limited by his own resolve.

  The pilots jumped out of the cockpit and embraced Samir, kissing him on the cheek, Samir who had been screaming at them barely minutes ago.

  “Wait till you see the shot,” Ari told Beth. “It was worth it.”

  The ground crew hooked up the fuel hose from the truck and started refueling the aircraft. Beth lashed into him. She knew that something had changed. He had lost his fear of her and this enraged her even more.

  “Ari, you’re going to write me an e-mail right now, that you went ahead without my approval—”

  “Beth, I’ve got to go flying again. You’re just wasting your breath. Are you on set?”

  “Yes, but you’re going to put it in writing that you went around behind my back—”

  “Are you near camera. Are you near Frank…?”

  She breathed heavily for a moment. “Yes.”

  “Then pass him the phone.”

  Ari heard some whispering on the line, then Frank’s voice.

  “Hey, buddy,” said Frank. “Did you get it?”

  “I shot the Sphinx! It’s awesome! You’re going to love it!”

  “Good job,” said Frank. “Got to get back to work here.”

  “Hey, Frank, are you still on schedule to arrive on Friday…?”

  “Yes, Ari, we’ll be wrapped in New York by the end of tomorrow.”