13. Cairo: The Hotel Raffles
He wakes up swathed in damp linen, on an iron-framed bed, fully dressed and baking in the dim, kaleidoscopic light filtered through a fretwork shutter, in the Hotel Raffles.
He doesn’t remember getting into bed. He doesn’t know how he got here. Although his mouth is dry, he isn’t hung over, and it takes him a while to recall the beer. Then he’s seized by a dank presentiment.
Kablooey.
There’s an unframed, speckled mirror on the wall he doesn’t remember. His bags aren’t where he left them. What’s more, he’s sure he recalls the bed being placed against the left wall. Now it’s against the right wall, and though it makes no medical sense, he interprets this as a sign of returning epilepsy, some glitch of hemispheric differentiation which means he’s thrown a seizure –
possibly grand mal –
in front of Her. Then blacked out and been carted here by paramedics.
No matter how many times he tells himself that didn’t happen, he continues being chilled and mortified by that seizure. He needs a doctor. He never wants anyone to look at him again. Somehow he has to get back to California without ever leaving this room.
He rolls to look under the bed for his bags, and spots first his copy of The Celestine Prophecy, the purple cover looking fissured and beaten, the spine broken deeply. That’s strange, too; it was pristine when he unpacked it. It’s as if he staggered back here (or was dumped off his stretcher here), sat right up and read 200 pages at a sitting.
And the bags aren’t there. Only his briefcase lies alone, the emptiness around it made horribly apparent by the white-tiled floor.
Now he feels the meaty drumming of hangover in his skull. Poum poum, it harps on. He flashes on the phrase: the last knockings.
Eddie baby, he tells himself, you can’t just hang here upside down all day waiting for your head to pop. A, you got better things to do. B, what do I know from B? B is for blah blah fucking blah.
He hangs there upside down.
She came back with him. For some unknown reason, she stayed up all night reading The Celestine Prophecy before ripping off his luggage.
Now she’s gone.
His heart writhes.
He dives to yank the case out. Now he has to ensure his passport is there, his traveler’s checks, his toothpaste, for Christ’s sake, which at this moment if he’s lost –
Cradling the briefcase in his lap, he works the tumblers feverishly. The combination’s easy: his birthday, 11 06 68. But when he’s got them lined up and pokes the catch, nothing. He re-aligns them, cursing the tickle of sweat that creeps down his brow. No, nothing. He tries 06 11 68, just in case: nothing nothing. And he’s trying 11 06 68 for the third time, dripping with fear, when she walks in.
She looks as startled as he is. She’s wearing a threadbare cotton bathrobe, carrying a plastic bag with a bar of soap in it, wet from the shower.
He says, “I’m just . . .” and shakes the briefcase. “I can’t get it to open for me, I don’t get it.”
She says, “21 21 21.”
“What? You changed the combination?”
She just frowns.
He begins to work the tumblers again, blushing now so he’s in all kinds of pain and heat and his fingers feel thick and tremble, and as he gets the numbers in their neat configurations at last, she says,
“What do you want in my briefcase?”
He freezes. Finally he says, “This is your briefcase?”
“Yes.”
“The – you’re reading The Celestine Prophecy?”
“Yes.”
“It’s crap.”
“I know.”
At that moment, from the mosque across the street, the call to prayer blares out, amplified to a rock-concert boom. Eddie busts out laughing. Leaning on the briefcase, out of breath, he belly-laughs, though it pounds up in his forehead. She is regarding him, very poised and unlaughing, with the air of someone politely hearing something out before objecting.
And as the din subsides, she’s saying, “Why are you trying to open my briefcase? I don’t understand.”
He catches his breath and says, “I’ve got one just like this. I mean, I just assumed this was my room.”
“Oh.” She puts one hand to her throat and takes a deep breath. When she lets it out, she’s smiling but wan. She says softly, “The old identical suitcases sketch.”
He blurts, “I don’t remember last night.”
She shakes her head. “Look, as you’ve got the briefcase, would you mind fishing my towel out? I forgot it when I went to shower.”
“It’s in here?”
“Everything’s in there,” she says. “That’s my home, you know.”
He shoves the catch and the case opens to a sloppy assembly of clothes, on top of which, indeed, is a small hotel towel. And on top of that a photograph: a standard 8-by-10 glossy, loose in a clear plastic report folder.
It’s the portrait of a handsome young Army officer, leaning against a palm trunk in bright, intrusive sunlight. The sky is bleached; the light settings must have been slightly out. Eddie knows it well; he has the same snap on his bedroom wall at home.
He looks up at her, trembling deeply in all his joints. It takes a long time before he trusts himself to speak.
“Why do you have a picture of my father in your briefcase?”
She ducks in an impulse of surprise, steps back. The seconds that pass then are painfully long, as if each has to fall a long distance. She is smiling a taut, unnatural smile. She says: “It came with the frame.”
Book Report: The Celestine Prophecy
In the book The Celestine Prophecy, an American man goes to Peru in search of a mysterious twelfth-century manuscript, unearthed there by archaeologists. It contains nine “inspirations” of such a revolutionary nature that the Peruvian government and church are bent on murder to suppress it. On his journey, knowledgeable strangers meet our hero and reveal to him, one by one, the inspirations of the Prophecies.
The first inspiration has to do with the meaning of coincidences. The new vision of the world predicted in the manuscript commences when people begin to take note of the coincidences in their lives. By becoming more aware, they create a situation in which these coincidences become more frequent.
The second inspiration is a rather loose New Age reinterpretation of history.
The third inspiration I forget.
And so on until we come to the one where you see vague auras around trees and you put the book down angrily, thinking Richard Bach was bad enough.
I read it in the Starbuck’s café at Borders, spending untold cappuccino money in my mulish refusal to pay for a copy.
Eddie’s and Deesey’s copies are still in Egypt somewhere, probably with the dog-eared Jackie Collinses and Red Octobers in the “traveler’s library” at Dahab, the Red Sea village where they split for good.
“You Can’t Go Home Again In My Room, I Have To Sleep There”
1Ralph recognized me instantly, though he had never really seen me before.
1.1When I was absent, he pictured me as very blonde.
1.2He considered me a saving grace of the new job.
1.3Later I imagined these to be the first pale sprouts of love.
2–4The night he made me green spaghetti, Ralph kept touching me. He would brush against my shoulder, reaching to fetch a pot or spoon. Once, too, he moved me aside with his hand.
“Excuse me – excuse me – excuse me,” Ralph said.
I wouldn’t say it was all right for fear of sounding eager.
He was telling the story of his daredevil sister.
5She and Ralph had not grown up together, but only met in Kathmandu when he was twelve and she was fourteen. Immediately she spirited young Ralph away to the Himalayas, stealing 10,000 dollars from her father for this purpose. The same winter, she eloped with a dashing con artist, who later bled to death in her arms, gunned down by shadowy villains. That brought her up to eighteen y
ears old.
6I would find my own con artist: I would go to those mountains.
6.1I would brave enemy lines to deliver the needed ambulance.
6.2I would strap myself to the crown of a sequoia, defying the lumber interests.
6.3Time was running out: I was going to be 30.
7When I was thinking this, I was convinced spitefully Ralph was no more illuminated than a dishcloth (there was a dishcloth lying on the sink, looking very inanimate). It even occurred to me that I could trump his sister by becoming enlightened. This might be less of a wrench, I thought, given my fear of strangers.
8Ralph talked for about ten minutes. Washing up the plates, he fell silent.
8.1Then I muttered something like “Excuse me,” and went to bed.
9In bed, it occurred to me Ralph’s stories might not be true.
9.1He might be embroidering, to impress a girl.
9.2Ralph-guru might have invented them for me as a test.
9.3Responding with puerile envy, I’d revealed my inner meanness.
9.4“C’est la vie,” I said aloud, in a carefree sophisticate’s alto,
10. BY THE WAY
to the Jackson Pollock hanging over my bed.
This Jackson Pollock was the real article, a big canvas in oils. Once it had been the centerpiece of our parlor. It was blue and black and grand beyond question, even the contractors liked it, we as children liked it. It was worth about 50,000 dollars, even then.
When Eddie was fourteen, he’d painted a mustache over the abstract streamers and blots. He used fingernail polish, then panicked and attempted to remove it with fingernail polish remover. We hid it under my bed: I was fourteen too and kept clutching my heart, saying, “Mom is so gonna slaughter you, or what?”
Well, that was 50,000 dollars down the drain.
Mom was initially crazy, as you would expect. She screamed and ran downstairs to get her tequila from the fridge. Then she ran back up with the bottle in her hand and stood there fiddling with the bottle cap, staring at the big gorgeous painting on the floor with its weird scrubbed central mustache.
At last she opened the tequila and handed the bottle cap to Eddie. She took a mighty swig and said, “C’est la vie, Jack!” in the voice above described.
A
The next morning I walked upright to my mother’s office, aiming to type mailing lists sitting up in a chair with the computer on the desk. Moving the monitor and keyboard, I was energized. I would soon be applying for editorial jobs and meeting new people. I would converse in bars, nibbling the free cheddar goldfish, which I happily pictured in their red plastic “baskets.”
I’d dressed up – fresh jeans and a polo shirt. I had initially put on sandals, but I hadn’t worn shoes in so long they felt like skates or unwieldy hooves. I’d had to take them off.
Now I sat down to work.
My thoughts took an unhelpful turn.
I began to speak to Ralph in my head.
I will give you the con artist and the Himalayas, I told him, but the spaceship sounds like something that isn’t true.
ALIEN SPACECRAFT SECTION
Self-explanatory: only one
SYNOPSIS: Denise Aimee Cadwallader
1The light comes down her face and then the shadow focuses.
1.1She is five years old, standing on a highway alone.
1.2It must be when they lived in California: this must be that desert.
1.3Though it is slithering and skipping on the dull ground, Deesey knows the beacon has found her.
1.4She can’t move her feet.
2When she was five years old, Denise was kidnapped by aliens.
2.1The spaceship was a radiant and mobile lozenge.
2.2When it zoomed her, she went so fast the stars tailed.
2.3She fell into the creatures’ overwhelming hearth of love.
2.4Then her memory goes out.
3In hypnosis as an adult, Deesey still remembered nothing.
3.1She tends to the hypothesis that the aliens were a false recollection, a Freudian screen memory meant to shield her from the actual memory of her mother’s death from cancer.
3.2“It doesn’t doesn’t matter, is my absolute bottom line. It utterly has not been let to change my life.”
B
By the time Ralph appeared, I was lying on my side on the floor of my mother’s office, playing with my toes. I let him come in: I just carried on. Brazen it out, I told myself; you are “taking a break from work as many another might.”
For a long time he just stood there, casting his absolutely motionless shadow. Then he said in his cool carrying voice:
“This little piggy went to market.”
I whispered indignantly: “I’m trying to grieve!” to my and his surprise.
C
Ralph said, “What?”
“I didn’t say anything.” Then I sat up blinking as if waked from sleep.
He had a grimy badminton racket in one hand. He came in and sat in my mother’s chair that I was supposed to sit in if I had been able to do mailing lists. I instantly felt deflated: now my work day was ruined.
“If you’re interested in stopping being miserable,” Ralph said, “I wanted to say, I think there’s a simple trick to it anyone can learn.”
“Thank you very much, but I think I have to be miserable, for ethical reasons.”
He said: “Bollocks.”
This created a surprisingly pleasant atmosphere. We laughed. It occurred to me that now I would have a friend in the house. This was so novel and frightening I instantly thought very loudly, Oh, don’t be stupid, Chrysa! Of course you won’t have any friends!
He suggested: “Maybe I’ll stop you suffering without asking your permission.”
I said, “Oh, that would be nice. Thank you.”
He displayed the badminton racket: “I found these yesterday, when I was looking for a hose.”
“Oh, did you find the hose?” I said, feigning interest.
“No,” he said in a bored voice. “Do you fancy a game? That’s what I’m asking.”
“Oh! Jesus Christ!” I said in total dismay.
We both laughed again, it was strange. I said, “Is this part of your cure?”
He boinged the racket against his knuckles enigmatically: “Perhaps.”
Following him down to the garage to get the net, I came up with a flurry of reasons to play badminton. It was an assertion of will over my disorder, which would thereby be enfeebled. This might be another guru test of my worth. More endorphins had to be a good thing.
Also, if I was going to be eating spaghetti et cetera, I’d better exercise. In this phase of my life, I could be athletic. It was hard to see it leading anywhere, however: I was too old already to compete in the Olympic Games.
All the while of course I knew I couldn’t play badminton. The idea was insane! He might as well have been taking me to defuse an atomic bomb! But I carried on, pluckily, daring the unknown. If I even played one volley, it went without saying that the order of things would change and I would be freed.
Ralph got the net and rackets so I only had to carry the birdies. We had just gotten the poles rooted in the lawn when the timed sprinkler system came on, and we had to relocate to an unsprinklering bit of lawn. There the turf wasn’t as soft. Plus us being wet: by the time we had the net set up, I was shaking.
We took our positions. I held the birdie up.
A black chasm opened between me and that first motion. Toss the damn birdie! I was thinking. Toss the birdie!
But I waned and hugged the racket to my chest.
“I really don’t feel good, I mean authentically,” I said. “Maybe we could play later?”
“Oh, all right. Brilliant,” Ralph said. “Off you go, then.”
But we just stood there.
I have never so keenly wanted to be alone. The cold grass made my bare feet ache. It was like a horror movie. Ralph looked devastated.
At last he shook his head. “What about
this, I’ll take you out for dinner?”
“Oh!” I said politely. “That’s a good idea. Thank you.”
THE WHOLE POINT
1Men don’t find me attractive.
1.1This is not my neurotic imagining.
1.2Men don’t don’t find me attractive.
2Though they are small, the breasts look down.
2.1“Where’s your ass?” a boy once jeered. “Steamroller accident?”
2.2A stocky pygmy, I shop in the children’s section.
2.3Like a child, I swell at the waist.
3Round as a bowl, my face is still fat when I am thin.
3.1The features are puny and lost in a plain of cheek.
3.2Women tell me I have beautiful eyes.
4I’m cute like a guinea pig.
4.1Torrid sex doesn’t spring to mind.
5Among the Yanomamo, I might be a belle.
5.1I would make anyone do, I was not proud, I slept with Heinrich.
5.2Once, after watching the babe lifeguard pull his trunks up, tensing his ass to settle the testicles, I had to go hide in the ladies’ room and cry.
5.3I am not above blaming my unpopularity on racism.
D
We went to a Chinese restaurant in Cupertino. It was coyly named “Ping Pong,” which I found disturbing, in such close proximity to badminton. I paranoiacally hunted through the menu for squash dishes.
We were seated comfortably in a velveteen booth, in semi-darkness. The table was high, so that I the runt was hidden up to the shoulders. A swift relief stole through my mind. Dinner might work.
I realized that, as long as I was looking at the menu, no one would expect me to speak. Therefore I pored doggedly, long after any normal person would have chosen a meal. Repeatedly I attempted to read the text, out of a sense of duty, but the very headings – “Seafood Dishes,” “Chef Recommends” – blinded me with loathing. Seafood Dishes! As if it matters!
The Only Good Thing Anyone Has Ever Done Page 8