Shadow Man: A Novel

by Jeffrey Fleishman

  Once, she says, I was mugged late one Saturday night on my way back home with the Sunday paper, still warm with news, like bread from the oven. One man pulled a gun, another a knife. The man with the knife hit me and stabbed my shoulder, but my coat was thick and the knife only pricked a muscle. The one with the gun grabbed my wallet and they both ran, but the man with the gun was not paying attention and was hit by a taxi when he crossed the street. My wallet went flying out of his hand, business and credit cards fluttering in the night. The man was not dead. He rose from the pavement and limped away, his pants torn and bloody. The taxi driver checked his hood. I picked up my wallet and went home with the paper and the lady put alcohol on my cut. It stung and we made love because I was alive.

  “After all the wars you’d covered, James, to die in a mugging would have been cruel.”

  She sips her wine.

  “Actually, it would have been the kind of story you would’ve liked to have written.”

  She stands and walks to the bathroom. I hear water and the scrape of shower curtain rings. I stand and go to the window. I try to open it, but it is painted shut and I get my coat and hat and walk out of the room. I don’t know where I’m going, but I want to be outside.

  I follow the long corridor to the red EXIT sign and push open the door, go down a flight of outside stairs, and find myself on the boardwalk. There’s nowhere really to go; it’s black and lonely out here, but I don’t mind. I walk and listen to the sea. The wind is strong. I gulp cold air and my eyes water and I feel happy, but I don’t know why. I have no details out of which to make happiness. I have one stretch of memory, that’s it, and although most of that stretch is good, the ending is not, but I’m on this boardwalk in the night feeling happy and not knowing why. Instinct. Maybe the body remembers things the mind forgets. I don’t know. I just want to be joyous at this moment, careless as a blank and windblown page.

  The boardwalk disappears and I am in the dunes, the sounds of tall grass and wind rattle and whistle in my ears. In the fleeting sense that I know myself, I feel like an explorer in uncharted country, eyes in the black looking at me from the sea, and from way down the beach, a pier lit to its bones by a moon as intricate as a face. I feel as if I’m in a soothing tumult, so much going on at the edges, but inside, a quiet, like a cave in a forest storm or after those stickball games with Kurt, when he and I sat on the stoop while the other boys walked home, a dispersing army of banter and jokes. I sit in the sand and look at the black sea and its thread-like curls of white. I feel tears on my face, loping down my cheeks and off my chin. Where they’re coming from, I don’t know. Memory has taken my stories; how can I have tears? But they’re there, sticky as salt air. I let them be. I sit, but I don’t know for how long; waves are not good for keeping time, they all look the same, unless I am tricked and I’m only seeing one wave over and over again. A voice.

  “James. James!”

  I see nothing.

  “James!”

  It comes closer.

  “James.”

  A lady in a white bathrobe carrying a blanket comes around a dune toward me. Her hair is aslant in the wind, but she walks steady in the sand. She seems to float. She drops on her knees before me, puts a hand to my cheek, and I think this has happened before but I can’t be sure. Her hand is warm; her thumbs rim my eyes, and she is collecting my tears.

  “James. I’m Eva. Where have you been? You left the room, James. You can’t do that. You can’t wander off. What if I couldn’t find you? Don’t do that again, please. I was sick. I thought you drowned. No more walking off. Promise.”

  I feel like a child.

  “I went in the bathroom to take a shower. Just for a second. Were you scared? Did you feel alone?”

  “No. I am watching waves.”

  She kneels behind me, wraps her arms around me, and puts her head on my shoulder.

  “Don’t wander again please, James.”

  The air is still.

  “I’ve told you all our stories but one, James. Would you like to hear it here on the beach? It’s cold, but I have this blanket and if we sit together, we’ll be warm.”

  “Let’s stay.”

  She whispers in my ear. It was in Egypt. I had come from covering the war in Iraq and we met in Cairo and flew to Luxor. We were to take a boat down the Nile, through the desert and the Delta, all the way to Alexandria where the river opened to the sea. It was her idea. In Poland, when she was a child, her favorite book was a book of maps, and her favorite map was of the great river running snake-like past pyramids and cities of the dead.

  We boarded a thirty-foot wooden sailboat, an old, sturdy thing with bleached wood and sails that were once white but had turned to the color of dust. The captain wore a turban and tunic. He walked barefoot on the deck, his face dark and wrinkled but brightened by a spray of white stubble. His son was second mate, a chubby, round-faced boy with cut hands and rope burns on his wrists. He made tea on the stern and blew flies off sugar cubes.

  We left, gliding north in October. The sails filled. The boat moved slowly and she and I sat on the deck in ball caps and sunglasses, legs stretched out reading books and watching farmers and women in colorful tunics balance stacked bread and jugs on their veiled heads on the shore. I told her about the war, but not much, just a few stories of firefights and the craters and bloodied markets left by suicide bombers, and the way, after one explosion, hundreds of watermelons burst open like a garden of wet, pink flowers in the sun.

  She had flown over from our apartment in New York. The Nile trip was to be an adventure before I began another book. Apparently, I’ve written books. How can this be? No memory of all those words.

  She says we’d lie on the deck and feel the sun, which was strong but not too hot, and listen to the boy’s propane flame and to the captain string sails, and along the shore we’d hear the call to prayer from villages, and she’d close her eyes and pretend she was Cleopatra; that’s how ancient it seemed with the wooden boat creaking through the slow current.

  “Don’t you remember that, James? That feeling. That sense of timelessness that we never felt in Europe.”

  At night we made love in our cabin, still, moving only when a breeze ruffled the sails. We were as quiet as spirits, holding each other and listening to the captain and his son on deck speaking their language beneath the stars. One of the best things about us was how we made love, and how, no matter where we were, we found a way.

  The captain brought the boat to shore in the mornings, and we’d eat round bread and eggs and wander into villages. Children danced around us, women looked down, and men smiled on their way to the fields, staring at Eva’s unveiled hair and the skin on her arms beneath her pushed-up sleeves. We sailed around the bend at Qena and past El Manshah and Asyut, where the Eastern Desert stretched toward the Sinai, and seashells millions of years old shone like curled pearls in the sand. One morning we walked through a canyon, dry, the colors of parchment and bone, and climbed a cliff to the rim of blue sky, where we sat and drank wine — a very bad Egyptian one — in the shade of a crevice as if we were hiding from the world. The wind through the crevice made the rocks speak, or so we imagined. We sat there for hours, kissing and talking, perhaps a little drunk, looking through the ragged gash of rock to the cloudless sky. We were tan and started to smell of the desert and the marshes, and for the first time in a long while we were free.

  “Life quieted, James.”

  She read Rumi and other Sufi poets and she would quote verse in the dusk as we sailed north.

  “I wish you could remember. How can you forget that buried desert room we wandered into painted with hieroglyphs and owls and scorpions? Walls of stories, James. You were amazed. You ran your fingers over all those tiny, etched pictures. You copied some in your notebook. We were explorers.”

  The lady whispers in my ear; I don’t remember, but I listen. We stopped near Zawyet el Amway late one afternoon. The captain took on supplies and said we’d spend the night on sh
ore. He gave us an old canvas tent and some food and pointed us down a dirt road that after about two miles stopped at an oasis. Nobody was there. The desert air was cooling so we collected wood and brush and made a fire. The wood burned hot but quickly, needing to be fed for an hour until a bed of embers glowed in the circled rocks. We put the tent up; there was no wind and when night came, the stars laid out white across the sky. We drank wine and ate chocolate and sat close against the chill.

  She says the conversation went like this:

  “Are you scared?”

  “No.”

  “It’s black and empty.”

  “We’re Bedouins. We have a tent and a fire.”

  “It’s all we need, isn’t it?”

  “And that extra bottle of wine.”

  “Kiss me.”

  “Let’s never go back. Let’s just live by this oasis.”

  “Could we do that?”

  “I think we could.”

  “Can you farm?”

  “I’m more of a shepherd.”

  The lady says we heard footsteps in the night; soft, sandals through sand. A man appeared at the edge of the fire. He wore a tunic with a thick-spun blue scarf around his neck and shoulders. He had a drawn, brown face and a gray-black beard that spilled over the scarf; his hair was cut short and he wore a white skullcap. He bent and dipped his hands in the water and washed his face. He slipped off his sandals and splashed his feet. He unspooled his scarf and dried himself. He laid the scarf in the sand and knelt prostrate. He prayed. It was soothing, like a strange, delicate insect singing. He finished and stood. He coiled the scarf around himself and walked closer to the fire and sat. An ember popped and sparks flew around him like fireflies and he seemed like a man who had wandered in from centuries ago.

  “A good fire. You will be warm through the night.”

  “I hope so. It’s too dark to find any more wood.”

  “Are you traveling?”

  “I am on a pilgrimage.”

  “To Mecca?”

  “A private pilgrimage. A quiet one.”

  “We’re on something similar.”

  “To be alone in the world.”

  “Are you Egyptian?”

  “I was born farther south near Sudan.”

  “Are you a cleric?”

  “Just a man with his God. I am Mahmoud. May I rest by your fire?”

  “Please.”

  The man closed his eyes and opened his palms to the embers, smiling as the heat went through him. He was from a tribal family, but he left when he was young, urged and financed by a rich cousin from Tunisia to study in religious schools in Cairo and Alexandria. He memorized the Bible and the Koran and traveled through Europe, hitchhiking and sleeping in mosques and basements of Arab booksellers in Geneva and Berlin. He wasn’t on a spiritual journey, although he said he was moved by the German romantics and their philosophies on nature, so different from the teachings of Islam, which had turned to God because the desert gave little repose. He thought about that, how landscape, the earth, makes our God. His journey opened a door; he didn’t call it a revelation, but he learned something about himself, the way a serial killer or a chess master realizes early on that the voice within is slightly askew.

  He woke one day with a gift. He could see into people’s lives, not just what had happened, but what was to come. Every person he met was a character with their story written on their skin and in their eyes, invisible to everyone but him. He knew when they were born, when and how they would die; he knew them like bugs suspended on pins, and he could see all this with only a glance. How they took, how they loved, and what things they kept hidden.

  He felt like a voyeur or a mad scientist peeking into diaries, but he wasn’t peeking, and sometimes he would turn away, but when he looked back, the scroll spun again and the hidden things, the things nobody should know about another, become known to him, as if angels and demons whispered in his ears from white and black books. We listened to the man, both of us thinking it was an intricate pitch to tell our fortunes for money.

  “It was the perfect setting, James. We were two miles from the boat with our tent and fire in the desert. We even thought this man Mahmoud was a relative of the captain’s and that’s why the captain had sent us to the oasis, so we could be entranced in the night and pay — not much, it’s never really too much — to have stories told beneath the stars. Oh, James, we thought, without saying a word to each other, what a great seduction it was. Even his voice, don’t you remember that slow, ancient rasp?”

  He did not like the comparison to a fortune-teller. He had seen, like he did with us, suspicion in the eyes of people he confided in, and he grew to accept this after thinking one day how odd his gift must sound to those without it. He stopped confiding. He stopped wanting to know people’s stories; he sought quiet and blank pages. Secrets, he said, were a burden, a dreary weight. He returned to the desert and found peace amid the bone-rock and sand. He kept to himself; he used the analogy of John the Baptist wandering with grasshoppers and honey on the fringes among the stones. Those he did meet were villagers or Bedouins whose hidden things were little different from the things they openly carried. There were a few tourists who glowed with angst and hidden things, huddled in their encampments until daybreak when jeeps carried them to the next spot on the map.

  “Imagine,” said the man, “standing in line at Burger King and knowing what the man before you would order even before he knew. You’d be surprised at how many people, right to the moment they step to the silver counter, are wrestling between a single or double cheeseburger. The torment.”

  He laughed at this story.

  “What intrigued me most,” said Mahmoud, “was the Catholic act of confession. In that little wooden box is where hidden things are to be revealed and forgiven. But hidden things are only halfway told. Even there, with the priest behind his scrim, people can’t utter who they are. They can’t tell their wives, their husbands, their children. It made me sad. We do not know anybody. We are all icebergs. The gist of us buried.”

  “But knowing those stories, could you have helped?”

  “I am not a healer. I am a cipher.”

  The lady and I played along with Mahmoud, indulging him around the fire.

  “But a man who would commit suicide,” said the lady. “A child running in front of a car. A boy going off to war to be killed. Did you even want to stop that? To intervene? To misplace a second or a minute in someone’s life, diverting them in another direction, away from dangers or pain.”

  “That would make me God. I am not Him.”

  “But you have power to see.”

  “It is a burden, not a power.”

  “Is there goodness?”

  “Yes. All that’s hidden is not bad.”

  “Can you read your own story?”

  “No. I find that funny. Very curious, actually. I know the lives and hidden things of all but my own. That is God’s way, I suppose; one gift denies another. I meditate. I pray before Him, hoping to gather myself and see my identity in His mystery. But it doesn’t come. There is a wall. My life’s work now is to break that wall.”

  “Do you see our stories across the fire.”

  “Yes.”

  “Are we happy?”

  “You know you are.”

  Mahmoud curled by the fire that night and when we awoke, he was gone, and for a moment we thought he had been a dream, but he had left his blue scarf coiled by the circled rocks and ash. We didn’t know what to think, she says. Was he a talisman, a trick of the desert? When we asked the boat captain later, he shrugged with the slice of a smile as if he knew but wouldn’t say.

  I started to forget things in the months after we left Egypt, little annoying things: keys, leaving hot water running, losing places in books, looking confused in the morning, walking away from a laptop in an airport lounge. We joked that I would forget my nose if it wasn’t attached. It got worse. I’d wander off, and once I rode the subway all day and ended
up in a Brooklyn church sitting in a confessional with no priest. The organist asked for my wallet and called the lady to bring me home. There were many stories like this and one day the lady gave me a bracelet engraved with our address and phone number. I misplaced it.

  It is dark, but there is light far off. The lady in the bathrobe talks in my ear, her arms holding me from behind; we sit in the sand, watching the thread of waves. The air is unstirred, cold. Her words, her breath, warm my skin. It is a good place to be, sitting with this lady, whom I don’t know, but who keeps talking as if we are one. She means no harm; her stories live inside me, briefly, then blow away. I know enough to know this. She tells me about a man, Mahmoud, and how the Nile begins in Rwanda and flows north, absorbing tributaries and canals, widening in the delta, turning the desert fertile before spilling into the sea. The lady rises and stands before me. She holds out her hands, so white in the night.

  “C’mon, James. It will be dawn in a few hours. We need to sleep before I take you back.”

  I grab her hands and rise. We walk between two dunes and to the boardwalk. Her robe is bright against the darkness. We enter a hotel, a slight man in a green jacket with gold buttons tips his head and smiles. Down a hall, into a room. The bathroom light is on, but the rest of the room is dark. I stand at the bed looking out the window. I see a reflection. A lady’s hands come and take off my jacket, my shirt, my pants, and the colors in the reflection fade to the pale of a naked man who seems to be looking in from the beach, but his hands move when mine do, and the lady takes off her robe and stands in front of me; her back reflected in the window. She holds me and we ease into the bed. The lady doesn’t speak; she lies beside me, and I feel her finger move over my forehead, down my nose, across my lips, over my chin.