by Maggie Downs
Ali gives me a hug. “Old people have to die to make room for the young people to get old. It’s better this way.”
We sit this way for a long time: Me, body crumpled, eyes closed. Him, a thirteen-year-old kid draped around my shoulders. The night is quiet except for waves slapping against the coast. The sky is crammed with stars and billows of smoke.
My head is heavy with thought and soggy with uncried tears. I can’t even articulate if I am sad or angry or confused or fatigued. I am a mix of things. I am furiously sad. I am angrily exhausted.
As a newspaper reporter, I was acquainted with destruction. I’ve seen bodies twisted in metal and shards of wreckage. I’ve watched the arduous process of pulling a decomposing body from the Ohio River. I’ve witnessed morticians draining fluids, sewing mouths closed, and pasting rough contact lenses over lifeless eyeballs to snag the eyelids and keep them shut. I’ve seen enough death to know that a body is not a person. It is a life edited down to a pocketful of words: Heide-Marie Downs, born August 30, 1940, died January 12, 2011.
I know what is happening to my mom’s body now. I know that what I loved was long gone. I know she descended into dementia while I was still an awful person doing regrettable things, and she will never enjoy the person I’ve become, because death is so frustrating and final. I know I feel something for the first time in years, and I am desperate to stop this ferocious emptiness.
Ali breaks the silence.
“Hey, you got any weed?” he says.
That’s when I begin to cry, abruptly injected into my own story again: Rocked by the skinny but heavy arms of a boy. The sound of wild dogs crushing chicken bones. A night sky so close it suffocates me.
THE DRIVER PICKS ME UP AROUND 3 A.M.
Abdullah is confident and lifts my duffel bag without asking if I want him to carry it. He walks purposefully, a quick apparition through the cobblestone streets, forcing me to move faster to keep pace. The grubby drunks wilting against stairwells and low-slung doorways wave hello, and Abdullah responds with an economical nod of the head.
The lanky Bedouin wears a long galabeya robe topped by a leather bomber jacket to ward off the slithery Red Sea wind. A gold-and-ivory shemagh wraps his head like a coiled snake.
There is no apprehension in my step as I follow him into the dark alleys. He is a friend of Dakini Runningbear’s Bedouin boyfriend, and I know he will take care of me. They say Bedouins are loyal, and I’ve seen nothing to disprove that. I also know that Abdullah is charming—Dakini once said he could steal the mascara off a woman’s eyes—but I don’t wear mascara, so there is nothing to steal.
Inside the car, Abdullah blasts the heat, then fiddles with a cheap knockoff MP3 player called a yPod. He switches between Akon and the Eagles.
“Which you need?” he says gently.
I shake my head. I don’t want either. He settles on the Eagles, the song where you can check out anytime you like but you can never leave.
“Drink?” he says, handing me a sweating box of guava juice. I take it from him, grateful. I am drained and thirsty.
I had wrestled with the idea of flying home for the funeral, and I came up with a hundred reasons why I shouldn’t. My mom was in Ohio. I was on the other side of the world. My family said I shouldn’t come. It was expensive. It wasn’t practical. I lost her many years ago. Funerals aren’t important. There was no point. She is dead. She is dead. She is dead. I made peace with my decision to stay in Egypt.
But I couldn’t shake the tug to go. My mom would never know I was there, but I would. After a couple of clicks at the internet café and one call to my travel insurance, I had a hastily packed duffel bag and a plane ticket to Columbus, Ohio.
I purposely kept my big blue backpack at the yoga camp to give myself a reason to return eventually. I know myself well, and I know how easy it would be to fold under my grief, become complacent, stay home. I need to keep going with whatever this trip is—I think that’s what my mom would have wanted. The only possible way to move on is to keep moving.
Just a handful of hours later, I am in Abdullah’s car, barreling through an inky desert to the airport in Sharm el-Sheikh.
We arrive far too early. It is near four in the morning, and my flight doesn’t leave until seven. I can’t even check in for two more hours. I imagine my short-term future will involve bumming cigarettes off strangers and shivering in front of the terminal.
Abdullah pulls his car off the road, within sight of the airport but too far to walk, and puts the vehicle into park. Terror jolts through me. An instinct. My muscles tense to a point of trembling.
“Stay,” Abdullah says, a voice as rough as shrapnel.
He yanks the handle on the side of my seat, causing it to snap backward. Abdullah leans close, and I am intimate with his fleshy, musky cologne. The car feels small. He is practically crouched on top of me as he works to slip the bomber jacket off his shoulders. I am too frightened to move. We are alone. Screaming would be pointless. I have let my guard down, and I have no idea what the consequences will be.
Abdullah wads his jacket into a ball, then gingerly slips his hand behind my head to lift it and places the jacket softly like a pillow.
“It’s not time yet,” he whispers, returning to his seat on the driver’s side. “First you must sleep.”
My muscles soften and ooze back into place. I realize he already knows why I am in his car and why I’m headed to the airport. Abdullah twists all the air vents toward me for optimum heat, then turns down the yPod and selects a slow song. When it begins to play, he clears his throat and warbles along.
This Bedouin is a Celine Dion fan. This fact is made clear over the next two hours as I drift in and out of sleep to a soundtrack of her biggest hits, accompanied by Abdullah’s smoky accent. It envelops me, surprisingly soothing and comforting, even though I am no fan.
When it is time, Abdullah nudges me awake. “Miss Maggie, you must go home,” he says.
It doesn’t take long to trudge through security lines and board my flight. The plane lifts into the air, the aircraft squeezing out from under the blanched, overcast sky into the space where morning is born again. Out the window I watch as the sun splits open, a runny egg spilling over the clouds, the wing, my face.
LIFE
God it’s great to be alive
Takes the skin right off my hide
To think I’ll have to give it all up someday.
—DANIEL JOHNSTON
A Revolution Begins
“JUST A QUICK PHONE CALL,” MY DAD SAID, AND HE HANDED me a folded twenty-dollar bill to purchase an international calling card. His forehead was furrowed with worry, his wispy hair more gray than it had ever been before. “Just to let me know you’re safe.”
Those were his parting words to me when I left Ohio, one week after my mom’s funeral. Now I’ve landed in Cairo, and my only mission is to call home.
In the airline terminal, I walk past a bank of pay phones, all of them unused. I stuff my hand in my pocket and feel for the plastic calling card I bought at JFK during my layover. With it in hand, I stop at one of the phones. When I pick it up, the line is dead. I shift to the next phone and pick up the receiver. That one is dead too. Same with the next. And the one after that. All the phones, dead.
I know there’s an internet café in the airport, so I head that direction. If I can’t call, at least I can Skype or send my family an email. My dad is at home alone with a weak and sad heart, still unmoored and mourning, and I know he’s waiting to hear that I’ve arrived here safely. I want to ease his worry as much as I can. Without my mom at the nursing home, I am his focus now.
Clusters of people push past, a collection of black and gray hijabs, swishy caftans, sandals that whisper “ship-ship-ship” with each step. Nobody seems to understand the gravity of my situation; everybody looks to the space beyond me.
The internet café is closed, a handwritten Arabic note on the locked door. I can’t read it, but I assume it’s a routine down-for
-maintenance kind of message. This country has the worst internet.
At the information desk in the airport’s main lobby, I ask if there’s another place to hop online. The woman working at the desk sets her mouth in a line.
“No,” she says. “Bad day for internet.”
“So all the internet is down?”
“Yes,” she says. “Bad day.”
When I turn away from the desk, it’s the first time I notice the men stationed in the windows. The entrance of the Cairo airport is all light and glass, like facets of a gemstone, with windows that begin halfway up the wall and soar to the ceiling. The men are in uniform, long-sleeve black shirts and pants, perched on the windowsills, holding automatic weapons. The way they are positioned—arms locked, legs wide, weapons at the ready—they look like toys, like plastic army men arranged in a row.
There are more uniformed men on the ground. They wear crisp white outfits, like sea captains.
I pivot toward the information desk and ask the woman, “What’s happening?” She shrugs.
My eye catches a TV playing BBC News. The headline flashes bold red letters on the screen: “EGYPT IN CRISIS!”
I gasp when I see the chyron, and I half expect someone to pop out on the screen and say it’s all a joke. How can Egypt be in crisis? I’ve only been gone less than two weeks.
All I want is to return to the same Egypt that supported me when I suffered, the same Egypt where I discovered arms to hold me at a yoga camp, the Egypt of ancient ruins and fresh kindness.
Except it isn’t the same place.
My intention was to stay in Cairo for a few days and grieve here. I had hoped to return to the tombs in Giza, where I could mourn my mom among the long dead, the people who believed death was only a temporary interruption to life. Instead I find turmoil greater than what I am feeling internally, and I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what’s happening, and I don’t feel equipped to make any decisions.
I should go directly to my hostel in Tahrir Square, I think. But on my way out the door of the airport, a guard yanks me by the shoulder and stops me.
“Don’t stay in Cairo,” he says. “It’s better to go.”
There’s a grave quality to his voice, and it’s enough to turn me around. I need a safe and orderly place—I thought that’s what I was doing by returning to Cairo—but if the universe has proven anything over the past month, it has disabused me of the illusion of control.
I buy a ticket to Sharm el-Sheikh to make my way back to Dahab, back to my friends at the yoga camp, and back to the place where I stashed my backpack. Within a couple of hours, I’m on board another plane. I don’t know what waits for me in Dahab or how dangerous the situation might become. I have no choice but to find out.
Take the Hash
THE ARAB SPRING IGNITES QUICKLY AND FIERCELY. PROTESTORS throughout the country demand the resignation of President Hosni Mubarak, and the air is restless. I am restless.
The government has shut off the internet, and phone access is limited. The lack of information unravels me. I know my family must be frantic. I still haven’t been able to contact them. I pace the streets of Dahab, a zoo animal caged in the wrong habitat. I start running again, just to burn off my stress.
Within just a couple of days, all the ATMs in town run dry. I try to use them anyway. Jason has access to all of my bank information, and I hope my account will show every attempt to use a bank machine. An attempt means I am alive.
A week later Dahab is feeling the effects from shortages of food, drinking water, and fuel, and I am skeptical about my chances of getting out of the country if the situation escalates. Will the situation escalate? Without news or internet, it’s hard to gauge. I focus on my stockpile of granola bars and instant-oatmeal packets, too anxious about my own life to grieve my mother’s death.
Dakini Runningbear believes there is only one way to steady our trembling spirits—more yoga, more stretches, more deep breaths into the places that hurt.
She asks us to set an intention for nurturing and growth, for peace to blossom in between the cracks of the cement in Cairo. We practice yoga outside in the sun for hours upon hours, executing our postures to a soundtrack of “Rock the Casbah” and the Beatles’ “Revolution.” There’s an Egyptian heavy metal band staying at the camp now too, unable to return to Cairo during the chaos, and they join us in the yoga classes.
“Let your muscles release healing energy into the world,” Dakini says brightly, and that is what I try to do.
For the first time since I started doing yoga, my tree pose falters. My leg is wobbly, my body unsteady, and I tip over, bruising my hand when I try to catch myself. I’m neither strong nor stable. There’s no way I can withstand a revolution; I can’t even stand.
When I try to buy a bus ticket out of town, I’m told there are no buses running. Try again in a week. My friends at the yoga camp tell me to relax, and I find that impossible. It might be different if I could contact my family, but the lack of communication makes me frantic. My anxiety is at an all-time high. Who knows how long the revolution will last?
I count my dwindling stash of granola bars and instant-oatmeal packets. I don’t have much food left. A week’s worth, maybe. With the lack of grocery deliveries to the Sinai Peninsula, the situation feels like it could turn bad fast. My friends have stockpiled some food as well, mostly sacks of flatbread and canned beans, but they are confident the situation will resolve soon, and they are not worried. They encourage me to stay. They say we are safer together. My friends are prepared to weather this storm, to stay and fight. I have no fight left to give.
Abdullah, my Celine Dion–loving driver, offers to bring me to the port town of Nuweiba, where I can safely flee Egypt. I say yes. His Bedouin status means we can leave after dark, long past the government-imposed evening curfew, and we leave that night.
We travel in a white Jeep, the only speck of lightness on a black desert road. Whenever we encounter police checkpoints, Abdullah hands them juice boxes and cigarettes. They smile and wave us on.
We stop at a Bedouin camp on the seashore just outside of Nuweiba. It is late, and I am disoriented. The air is briny, the night wind howling. This is where Abdullah will leave me with Hakeem, his friend who owns the camp, a chain-smoking man with the face of a prune.
We sit cross-legged around a bonfire near the sea, propped up on soggy pillows. Abdullah spreads out dinner—bread shaped like hot dog buns, processed cheese cubes in foil, a snack-sized bag of potato chips, and canned fruit cocktail. Before we eat, Abdullah smiles and says, “Baynana aish wamilah.” Between us, bread and salt.
He says this is a popular proverb in Egypt, and it means that if I have broken bread with you, I trust you. We have nourished ourselves at the same table. Therefore, there can be no fighting, no animosity between us. There will only be goodness.
When we are done eating, we watch the moon, ripe and tangerine, paint silky ripples of water. The wind has calmed, and the night is clear. On the other side of the sea is a city where I will hopefully be tomorrow, and the lights glitter like jewels on a chain. Somewhere there I’ll buy a cell phone and stack it full of minutes and hear the relief in my dad’s voice. I’ll call my husband and tell him I love him. Such a simple dream, but it feels like a distant one.
Abdullah leaves to boil water for drinking. Hakeem speaks to me for the first time all night.
“May I ask you a question?” he says.
“Of course.”
“What is a period?”
“It is a dot at the end of a sentence,” I say. “It means that something has come to an end.”
“No, no,” he corrects me. “Woman period. What is woman period?”
How do you describe your body to a stranger?
I got my period for the first time when I was thirteen, visiting my sister who at the time lived in Minot, North Dakota. We were supposed to visit the missile fields to tour a nuclear silo, crammed with warheads. Instead I went to the restroom that
morning and found blood on my underwear.
My family thought it would be best for me to stay behind, so my mom, my dad, my sister, and her husband left without me. I stayed on the couch, alternating between swells of pride and terror at what my body could do, the things my body could contain—something as miraculous as it was devastating. It was life made very real.
“Some people call it ‘moon time,’” I say. “They say this is a sacred time for women, when we release our old energy and prepare to reconnect with our fertile power.”
Hakeem contemplates this for a moment and then says he doesn’t understand, which of course he doesn’t. I was saying words but not explaining anything at all. I look to the Red Sea and stifle a laugh. This sounds like the setup for a terrible joke.
“Sometimes, um … women … bleed. Here,” I wave my hand in a circle above my abdomen.
“Ah, yes,” Hakeem nods. “This is why women are eaten by sharks.”
I grab a cigarette from Hakeem’s pack and disguise the awkward silence with quick puffs of smoke.
Hakeem, however, won’t let the conversation rest. He makes ugly declarations about women. “Men don’t bleed unless they are injured,” he says. “This period is proof God hates women. He makes women weak and pitiful. Women get what they deserve. You are just blood.”
His face is distorted by the bonfire flames. In the flickering shadows, his hairy, wrinkly face looks half-man, half-testicle. I toss the rest of my cigarette into the fire and watch it burn.
I think about how I rearranged the parts of my life for this moment. How I quit my job to venture around the world. How I flew 8,000 miles to be with my broken family. How I left my mom in the hard, January earth and continued wandering the world, in search of something I can’t yet articulate. I thought I had a clear reason for making this journey, but now that my mom is gone, I’m not sure anymore.