Evel Knievel Days (21 page)

“You stay,” the man said. That didn’t seem like an invitation. He indicated the only other chair in the room. “Sit,” he said. “Wait.” He left the room.

I sat and waited. I sat and waited for much longer than five minutes. Twenty-five minutes, actually. At fifteen minutes, I stood up and tried to leave. The door was locked. I hadn’t heard him lock it on the way out, but locked it was. And the room was hot. It kept getting hotter and hotter. There were no windows for me to escape through, just solid cinder-block paneling. Finally, I heard footsteps. Two sets of footsteps.

The Burly Man was accompanied by an Even Burlier Man, who loomed over me like a nightclub bouncer. Each of his biceps was the size of a Christmas ham.

“You are a messenger for Akram Saqr?” he said.

I nodded. This might be a bad time, I figured, to mention that I was his son.

“And you brought his payment for us,” he said.

I nodded again.

The Even Burlier Man reached into his pocket and took out a very large, very wicked-looking knife. A knife with a glinting curved tip. A tip that was almost definitely intended to yank out internal organs. The knife was conscious of its wicked nature.
Hello, my young victim
, it was saying.
I am ready to disembowel you
.

“This is late,” said the Even Burlier Man, waving the neoprene pouch in the air. “Maybe I should take an interest charge.” He put
the tip of the knife against my neck. “Maybe I should take some flesh as well, to pay me for my time.”

“Please don’t,” I said.

Thinking back on it, I wish I’d said something witty, something full of cinematic bravado, something like
Go ahead and try
. Or
I eat thugs like you for breakfast
. Both of these could have gotten me killed. Maybe I would have run into another problem with my formal Arabic:
For me, a morning meal, the large man of your stature
. Sometimes, sometimes when I’m telling the story after a few drinks, this can be exactly what I said.

The Even Burlier Man spat on the ground. He cursed in a dialect of Arabic that I didn’t understand. Then he swung open the spring-loaded door. “Run,” he suggested.

I ran. For the second time in three days, I ran for my life. I was getting some excellent cardiovascular conditioning.

It wasn’t more than half a mile to the stables, where I found my father still waiting, half concealed in an empty horse stall. He seemed happy to see me. I wanted to hit him, to swing at him, to slug him, to swipe at him. I felt my muscles clench. I felt my fingers draw together, curl into fists. If this feeling, this surge of emotion, had been missing before—MIA, uncataloged, absent, omitted, gone, lacking, ghostly, vaporous, vanishing—all I can say is: Of course. Of course it had.

“Ah,” he said, noticing my condition. “You had some trouble in there.”

“Those weren’t club dues,” I said.

“No,” he said. “Did they threaten you?”

“Did they threaten me?” I said. “You asshole. You just made me risk my life for you.”

“Khosi, please,” he said. “That’s an exaggeration. And I’m your father. You can’t call me names like that.”

“Asshole,” I said. I looked over my shoulder. “You fucking asshole.”

“Take a deep breath,” he said. “It couldn’t have been that bad.”

“I’m leaving right now,” I said. “There’s no way I’m letting those goons follow me. And the minute I leave, I’m never talking to you, ever again.”

“Calm down,” he said. “I had no idea they’d be so angry.”

“I was nearly killed,” I said. I sighed and wiped the sweat off my forehead. “You’re not any different than you ever were.”

He stiffened. “Of course I am,” he said. “That’s all I am: different. Nothing like I used to be.”

“You said you got in trouble with the mob in Montana.”

My father nodded.

“Who were those men, then?” I said. “The Heliopolis Schoolteachers’ Auxiliary? The Association of Egyptian Librarians? The Rotary Club, Cairo Branch?”

“Khosi.”

“Those men were criminals,” I said.

“Please,” he said. “I can explain.”

I was on the edge of tears. “His knife wanted to eat me,” I said.

When I made the decision to leave, it was easy; it was quick; I turned in place and walked out through the stables, retracing our path along the chalked playing fields. “Khosi!” my father called
from the space behind me, his voice somehow both insistent and hushed. “Khosi, wait! Where are you going? Khosi!” I didn’t turn around or explain myself or tell him what I was doing. I disappeared. I tried to hurt him like he’d hurt me.

If you go to Cairo, you’ll regret it
, my mom had said, and now I thought I understood why. I wandered back through the streets of the metropolis. My head ached. It was just before dusk, and the lights of the Kewayis Marriott seemed artificial and jarring. The mess with my father could be ignored for now, for tonight, when I was this exhausted. I closed my eyes in the mirrored elevator to my floor, not willing to look at my reflection or the reflections of others. I opened the door to my room with a sigh, sliding the key in the lock and preparing to take a shower. Maybe I would burrow into my room, refusing to come out. Maybe I’d just ignore the family of Nasrallah Saqr. Maybe I’d spend the remainder of my time here watching
MTV Lebanon
.

I closed the door behind me. Immediately, I noticed that something was wrong. I smelled the scent of roasted garlic and cumin and baked pastry. I walked around the corner and encountered a luxuriant spread of food: pita bread and small dishes of hummus and tightly rolled, stuffed grape leaves, all of it arranged on the bed. And there, sitting beside the food, was my mother—neatly dressed, wearing her blue rhinestone-rimmed eyeglasses. She smiled broadly. “Oh, thank God,” she said, beaming at me from her overstuffed chair. “I was starting to think I had the wrong room.”

“Mom,” I said. “What are you doing here?”

“Hi, darling,” she said. She stood and walked over to me. “Inabi?” she added, offering me a stuffed grape leaf from one of the little rectangular containers. “I brought the lamb in an ice chest.”

“I can’t believe it,” I said.

“I know: I got through security without a hitch. The lamb kept for the entire trip. And you can’t imagine how nice the desk clerk was once I explained my situation to him. He loves my cooking.” She frowned. “He asked me to become one of his wives. I think he was only joking, though.” She began to peel off the lids of the flotilla of little Tupperware containers.

“This is crazy,” I said.

My mother came over and put her hand on my shoulder. “Taste this—I’m not sure it’s right. You know, I went by Rafiq’s the day you left, but he was at Burger King getting a Whopper. I stole his falafel recipe while he was out.”

I walked over and collapsed into one of the chairs beside her. “You just wouldn’t believe what I’ve been through,” I said. I looked over at my mother. She was wearing plaid polyester trousers, the kind with pleats that would last, unironed, until the end of time.

She looked down and started smoothing out those pleats with her palms. “I’m planning on bringing you back home right away,” she said, “before you find your wretch of a father.”

“Too late,” I said.

“What do you mean?” she said.

“Exactly that. Too late: I found him.”

“Oh dear,” she said.

“I found him at his house,” I said. “He introduced me to the family.”

My mom’s pleats, apparently, had reached an optimum level of smoothness. Her hands froze in place. She stared at the patterned polyester. She shook her head. “You know, for years I dreamed of meeting his father and his mother,” she said. “Your grandparents.”

“Well,” I said, “they’re dead. So: That’s not happening.”

“How awful,” she said. “Not that I’m surprised, but—how awful.”

“I wasn’t on the family tree,” I choked. “You’re not on there, either—but none of the wives are. I checked. The genealogy arises from the men. Even the daughters are only a footnote.”

“I could have told you that,” my mother said.

“It wouldn’t have mattered,” I said.

“You know, Khosi, you have no idea what it was like: being utterly solitary, left to care for a three-year-old son, all alone, in debt to my parents forever. I just don’t have words.” She sighed. “Here, have some
ful
. It’s much better than talking about 1988.”

“Mom,” I said, “you really are breathtaking.”

“For what?” she said. “For cooking you dinner?”

“Yes,” I said. “For cooking me dinner—six thousand miles from home. I have to admit, even from you, I never expected it.”

I stood and walked over and picked up the telephone receiver. The message light was blinking. I had four messages, all of them from my father, each of them apologizing for whatever had happened in those offices. As I listened to my father’s anxious voice, I watched my mother stand up, walk across the room, and retrieve her carry-on suitcase. She placed it on the second mattress and began unpacking. Her pill container was the first thing she removed. She placed it prominently on the table between the two beds.

“So,” I said, hanging up. “I guess you’re moving in.”

“Who were those messages from?” she asked.

“President Mubarak,” I said. “He wants to have coffee later.”

“Well,” my mother said, looking at me carefully, “I’m glad you’re making friends.” She continued unpacking. “I just have a few things,” she said. She placed a small framed photograph of the Butte skyline on the bedside table. When I stared at it, she smiled at me and said, “To remind us of home.”

I went over to the window. The lights of the city glimmered in the darkened glass.

“So,” my mother said, “how’s your dad?”

“You know,” I said after some time, “you deserved better.”

She nodded. “I did,” she said.

“But you didn’t know that at the time,” I said.

“No,” she said. “No, I didn’t.”

I paused. “Why’d you let him hide the marriage from his family?”

My mother exhaled—a great, gray, voluminous breath. “There were a number of reasons,” she said. “I was young and naive.”

“So you let him trick you,” I said.

“Not exactly,” she said. “But I couldn’t
make
him do anything.”

“You agreed to it. You had to. And look what happened. You passed it on to me. And now half of my family doesn’t know I exist. Not that this is the worst thing in the world, but still.”

“It was supposed to be temporary,” she said. “Then we got a divorce, and it just didn’t seem to matter. I was young. I made a mistake.”

“Apparently,” I said, “one with far-reaching repercussions.”

“But look at you,” she said. “You’re a strange and wondrous being. You’re the vein of blood beneath a bird’s wing. You’re the sound the
ocean makes when it’s asleep. You’re my baby, my darling baby boy. A miracle. I grew you.”

I stared out the window. Cairo unfolded outside of this room, a city of seventeen million—but to me, it was suddenly vacant, a cipher. My body, too, was meaningless; unloved by its father, it was missing half of itself. It would never be whole. There could be no restoration.

“I don’t feel like a vein of blood under a bird’s wing,” I said.

“Oh, Khosi.”

“I don’t feel like the sound the ocean makes when it’s asleep.”

“Sweetheart.”

“I don’t feel elaborate or special or unique or beautiful or anything but dumb.”

And then I was across the room and sitting on the bed beside my mother, flattening out on the mattress, atop the newly made sheets, near the microwaveable containers of food. I hadn’t cried in years, not since I could remember, but there I was, breaking down, retreating inside of myself, raw body and ribs and lungs, ragged lungs, lungs that wouldn’t work to fill themselves with air. “I’m sorry,” I said, though I wasn’t sure if my voice was audible or even understandable. “I’m so sorry,” I said again.

“Oh, Khosi,” my mother said. “My sweet, darling Khosi. There’s nothing to be sorry for. What on earth could you be sorry about?”

“I didn’t listen to you,” I said, blowing my nose in my sleeve. “I should have listened to you. I’ve learned something, anyway.”

My mother said nothing.

“Go ahead,” I said. “Ask me what I’ve learned.”

“What have you learned, my darling?”

“Always pack your own liquor,” I said.

“Very profound, sweetheart.”

“It’s true,” I said.

From the refrigerated minibar, I took out a small plastic bottle of Glenfiddich whiskey. I snapped open the top. “Especially if you’re traveling in the Middle East,” I said. “This is eleven dollars.” And then: “I think Dad wants to stay lost.”

“That’s okay with me,” she said.

“To us. To you. To his past, to America. He doesn’t want that to be a part of who he is. He made me use a fake name at the house.”

“You’re joking,” my mother said.

“He made me pretend to be the son of a friend.”

“And he didn’t introduce you as his child,” she said.

“I was the son of his friend Malik,” I said. “It was a bad scene.”

“Somehow,” my mother said, “it just doesn’t surprise me.”

I continued looking out at the city. A city tells us more than anything else what our destiny and our substance is: Replicable, we build our homes in clusters—generation following sequential generation. Our urban centers are palimpsests; they carry the trace of the forgotten and the nameless in their edifices, in their streets and alleys and bright singular parkways. I turned around and told my mother about the stables—a slightly edited version, one that didn’t include the weapons. That skipped the little matter of the Cairene fiancée. Even so, she was furious.

“Dammit,” she said. “
You
deserved better, not just me. We
both
deserved better.”

“I know,” I said. I drained the rest of the liquor. I took two more bottles from the minibar—one for myself and one for her.

“It’s an outrage,” she said, accepting her bottle with a nod. “Just give me the go-ahead, and I’ll go to his house and kill him.”

“No,” I said. “The plan is not to commit a murder in a foreign country.”

My mother shrugged. “You have to admit,” she said, “there’s an upside to the murder idea. Just imagine him. Imagine your philandering, uncaring, good-for-nothing carcass of a father. Now imagine him as an actual carcass.”