Evel Knievel Days (27 page)

“Me?” my mother said. “That I’ve caused? How is this possibly my fault?”

My father shook his head. “Agnes is furious. I’ve had to make up a dozen lies. She doesn’t like, as you might imagine, the idea of me stealing a bracelet from her to give to you as a bribe.”

My mother sighed again. “He’s going to be okay?” she said. Her voice quavered. “Isn’t he?”

“Yes,” my father said.

“How do you know?”

“We are going to the best hospital in the country.”

And it was. The Dar Al Fouad Hospital on the outskirts of Cairo was the Mayo Clinic of Egypt: modern, sanitary, orderly, entirely free of bribes. Did my mother try? I don’t know for certain, but probably not. Or at least I hope not.

The hospital, though, I can vouch for: Built in 1992, it was the first private hospital in Africa to perform a successful liver transplant. Its location in Sixth of October City, a Cairo suburb only ten miles from the pyramids, removed it a bit from the chaos of downtown’s labyrinthine streets. The Sixth of October Bridge, Sixth of October City: both named by Anwar Sadat in 1979, two years before his assassination (which occurred, ironically, on the sixth of October). Both the city and the bridge (and possibly the assassination) commemorated the start of the 1973 Yom Kippur War against Israel—a grisly reminder of the violence that hovered beneath the surface of life in this part of the world.

All of that aside, there could be no greater contrast than between the two hospitals. I had a glistening, well-appointed suite. A bevy of infectious disease specialists paraded through my room, all led by
my father and his personal physician—Dr. Arnyat—who was there at least sixteen hours a day. Dr. Arnyat would consult with the doctors on staff, an unusual arrangement but one that was apparently fairly common in the hospitals of Cairo. My father also flew in a tropical disease clinician from Budapest.

But I worsened.

For over a week, I lapsed in and out of consciousness. My mind has preserved some impossible images of those days: the sensation of a feeding tube in my abdomen, the raw burning pain of the infected IV site, the singing of birds through a nearby open window. It has also created the image of me submerged at the bottom of something, a body of liquid or semitransparent gas, a permeable membrane that allowed in sound. I could hear the things going on in my hospital room, but I couldn’t respond to them, couldn’t interact with the people I loved. Lost just beyond the edge of a vast emptiness, I was far enough to look back, to sense where I’d come from, but too far into it to communicate with the place I’d left. This place: It was a long, cold-lit sky opening out over a desiccated earth. It was a dark sky heavy with a firmament of motionless stars. It was a scouring sky moving across a barren, powdery, dust-carved desert.

My father wheeled in a portable cot. He slept there night after night, right beside my bed, a set of rosary beads in his hands, a series of bitter cups of coffee cooling on the floor between us. My mother told me that he sang to me, sang the songs that he’d sung when I was a baby in a bassinet. He would alternate between standing at my bedside and lying on the cot and ushering doctors through the room. He put cold compresses on my wan, waxy forehead. He carried my mother’s meals up from the cafeteria. He and Dr. Arnyat
double-checked every medication that the hospital fed into my arm. They asked a hundred questions a day, tireless.

His efforts on my part were nothing short of heroic. The nurses would cringe when they saw him coming. He supervised every single thing they did, constantly badgering them to wash their hands, to be more gentle with me, to change my clothes, which would soak through with sweat and then stick to my damp skin. He often stood at my bedside for hours, rotating the cold compresses on my forehead, keeping at least that part of me cool while the rest of me burned with fever.

And my mother? She doubted him. She fought his every suggestion. She refused to speak to Dr. Arnyat. Whenever my father talked to the nurses, she was there at his side.

“You have to translate,” she said. “You can’t be so high-handed about this.”

“But look where he was when you were in charge,” he said. “He would have died at that hospital in Zemalek.”

“You still have to tell me what’s happening. You aren’t the governor here. Our son, my son, is not part of your imperial fiat.”

My mother watched. She watched with suspicion. She practiced breathing techniques from her yoga classes. She took her medicines. She had a necklace, a necklace with a pendant of Evel Knievel, and she turned it over again and again in her hands, worrying it like her own version of the rosary. Even she had to admit that the things my father was doing on my behalf were impressive. They gave him a short respite, gave him a moment’s grace, there at my side, there at her side. She struggled to keep calm while occupying a room with him. She adopted a variety of calming maneuvers. She imagined, for
example, a wide, grassy field, the verdant opposite of my scouring, barren sky. A life-giving sky, a gentle rain over lush vegetation.

“I didn’t know you were a praying man,” she said to my father sometime in the middle of the ordeal, on the fifth or sixth or seventh day, one of the days that blended into all the other days at the hospital. The hospital with its perpetual fluorescent lights. The hospital with its never-night. The hospital with its endless vigilance and vigilant exhaustion.

“The rosaries?” he said.

“The rosaries,” she said.

“Normally, I’m not,” he said.

“I know,” she said. “It’s too gentle for you, prayer. You never prayed when you lived in Montana, anyway.”

“Are you sure?” he said.

“I know you didn’t want to come to church with me,” she said.

“Maybe I came to church and sat in the back where you wouldn’t see me.”

“Why would you do that?” she said.

“Because,
habibti
,” he said, “maybe I believed in the privacy of religious belief.”

My mother crossed her arms. She’d bought a Cadbury Flake at the hospital cafeteria. In Sixth of October City, Egpyt—at the cafeteria of the Dar Al Fouad Hospital—the Cadbury Flake was imported directly from England and wrapped in beautiful foil packaging. She unwrapped it in a leisurely way, sniffing at the package, licking a dot of chocolate off of her fingertip. The candy bar distracted her for a moment. If my father remembered her dietary restrictions, he showed no signs.

“I very much doubt that you believe in anything, Akram,” she said as she chewed.

My father frowned. “Why would you say that? You know that’s painful to me.”

“Painful to you? Painful to you? Are you really telling me about what’s painful to you? I gave you years, years of my life. I spent years learning how to cook the food that you were raised eating—a lot of which, I’ll have you know, I am not supposed to eat.”

“But you always did,” he said.

“Because of how I felt about you,” my mother said. “Well, that and it was delicious.”

My father looked at the glass panel that divided the room from the rest of the ICU. Unlike the rooms in the other wards of the hospital, the rooms here fed onto the nurse’s station. The nurses needed to be able to see their patients at all times. As a result, it felt a little like the proscenium of a sadist’s playhouse. The nurses sat there in judgment, an audience to your recovery or your decline.

My father lowered his voice. “I’m sorry.”

My mother grimaced. “I don’t care,” she said. “You know, the whole reason he’s here is you. The reason he’s in Egypt. The reason he’s sick. The responsibility’s all yours.”

“I really don’t think that’s fair,” he said.

I floated. I floated far away. I floated in a dry distant space.

“You abandoned us. You left us. And this is the consequence of your actions.”

Her voice—strident, vituperative, strong, clear—was marvelous in what it wasn’t, in what it didn’t have, in its lacks. In its lack of disconnection,
its lack of gauziness, its lack of disorientation. She continued, “You’ve done your part, you know. You can go now.”

“Go where?”

“Don’t you have a wedding to attend? Don’t you have another fortune to plunder? What was it this time, Akram? Blackjack? Roulette? Horses?”

Here she lost all composure. She’d been holding herself together almost literally, her palms pressed flat against her temples. Her eyes must have felt like they might fissure, like they might cave inward or shatter outward—one or the other—and then tears were sliding down her cheeks and she was wiping her mouth and her nose with the back of her hand. A kind of spasm was shaking her body. She sighed deeply, her lower lip trembling.

“Oh, Akram,” she finally said. “Leave. Go get married. Disappear again. But this time don’t have any kids. And don’t ever come back to Montana.”

He nodded. He stood. For a moment she thought he might do it. That he might just disappear again, this time at her request. But he walked back over to the bed and put his hand on my hand. I swear that I can remember the pressure of his hand, the way it felt there above mine, thick and meaty and solid. In 1858—together with his friend the illustrator Henry Vandyke Carter—Henry Gray published
Gray’s Anatomy of the Human Body
. Gray was a part of the Victorian passion for quantification, for the mechanical aspects of the human form, for the easily organized part of our selves. God, I would have been an excellent Victorian. Gray’s book had 363 illustrations. Here is one of them. This is, after all, my own Book of the Dead:

That’s where my father placed his hand. Right there. Specifically there. Exactly there. Partially over the lunate bone, partly over the navicular, his fingertips brushing—the faintest pressure—against my flexor tendon, my flexor carpi radialis. I felt it. I know I felt it. I remember it.

“I don’t have anywhere to be,” he said. “I postponed the wedding.”

My mom came to the other side of my bed. “You postponed your marriage,” she said, “for the son of your friend Malik?”

“Ah,” he said. “Khosi told you about that.”

“He’s not in the habit of concealing things, unlike you. Without you there to raise him, he only learned honesty.”

“I thought maybe some things were genetic,” my father said with a wry smile.

My mother took a paper towel from the dispenser over the sink. She blew her nose. “Oh, Akram,” she said. “Why would you postpone the wedding?”

He put his hand to his forehead. “To be quite honest, it wasn’t my decision.”

My mother looked at him. “Not your decision? I see.”

“I think it was probably a shock for her: After I deny everything, you show up in her house, and then—you trap me into telling the truth.”

“Someone else’s fault,” my mother said. “As usual.”

“There was no other way out,” he said. “I did what I had to do. For my recovery.”

My mother snorted. “Is that what you’ve been doing these past twenty years? Recovering?”

“You know,” my father said, “it wasn’t perfect. It’s not like I left our perfect marriage, like I disappeared in the middle of bliss. We had our problems.”

“You know what, Akram?” my mother said. “I don’t remember anymore. We could have had this conversation fifteen years ago—ten years ago, even—and maybe I would have remembered. But now I don’t.”

My father walked back over to the chair and sat down. He brushed his hair back and into place, assembling it perfectly on his head, in
gray-black alignment, in waves. “I’m sorry,” he said. “For what I did to you. And to Khosi.”

My mother exhaled. It was a long, deep exhalation. She breathed in deeply and out again. In and out. The sterile hospital air smelled a bit like earth, like her garden, like uprooted Egyptian walking onions.

“I’m here now,” he said. “I’m here, apologizing to you. You want to know the truth? The truth is that I was an addict.”

My mother uncrossed her arms. I can imagine her doing this very thing—standing at the stove, a pot of something boiling on the gas burners in front of her, the faint scent of gas in the air, along with the scents of cumin or fenugreek or clove or cardamom. Blue-lit.

“Go on,” she said.

“Although,
habibti
, that word is a little bit troubling. It is a word that I find to be artificial,” he said. “It is an American way of looking at a thing.”

“Looking at what?” she said.

“At my gambling hobby. Problem. No, problem. That is a better word. A destructive problem.”

“I have to admit,” my mother said, “this is fascinating.”

“Everything, you see, is so new to me. I am trying to take responsibility for my actions. I have admitted that I’m powerless before gambling—and that my life has become unmanageable. I’ve been going to Gamblers Anonymous meetings. This is Step Nine: ‘Apologize and make amends for your mistakes, wherever possible.’ I have been free of gambling for 204 days.”

“Are you joking?” she said. “Because if you’re not—then I’d like my hundred thousand dollars back.”

“I wouldn’t joke about something like this. It’s a group. A lifeline. We meet on Monday nights at nine, at Kasr El Maadi Hospital.”

“I didn’t ask you where you meet,” she said.

“I thought you were expressing disbelief,” he said.