The Moment Before

by Jason Makansi

  “Sounds interesting. But don’t feel obligated. I can see it on my own.”

  “I don’t feel obligated about anything,” Holly retorted with an intensity in her voice she hadn’t intended.

  The park was only a few minutes away. She was pretty sure the place would be mostly deserted, a few families maybe, some men night fishing.

  When she parked the car, she reached into the backseat and pulled out an old blanket.

  Stuart looked around. “Is this safe?” There were no lights, and after seeing more of the inhabitants and burned out buildings during his daytime investigation, he was wary. No one knew he was here.

  “Perfectly.” She took his hand and pulled him along, but after only a few steps, she squeezed his hand and said, “Shit, I forgot something. Stay here. Find a spot for the blanket. I’ll be right back.”

  “Shit is right,” Stuart whispered when Holly disappeared into the dark.

  Holly chuckled to herself. He probably thinks I’m going to get a prophylactic. She opened the passenger door, then the glove compartment, and pulled out her pistol. She checked to make sure it was loaded and the safety was on, then shoved it into her large carry-all bag. This guy was a stranger. Hell he could be a serial killer for all she knew, although she doubted it. But still, this was Cairo.

  Holly settled onto the blanket to the right of Stuart and sat her bag close, making sure she could reach in quickly with her right hand, if needed. “All set,” she said. “Can never have too much protection.” Leave him to wonder what that meant, she thought as she scooted closer.

  They sat admiring the moonlight reflecting on the water, sometimes commenting on the headlights of the cars traveling over the bridge. Eventually, he put his arm around her. She let him. He turned to her and leaned over, intending to kiss her—and she would’ve kissed him back—but he moved too fast as he reached to pull her toward him and fell backward slightly. He caught himself with his left hand on her right breast. She gently returned his hand to his lap.

  “We’re going a bit too fast, don’t you think? You’re not going to go home with a story about how you plugged a stripper in Cairo, Illinois.”

  “I don’t think like that, Holly.”

  “Here,” she said, “feel this instead.” She lifted her purse and placed it between them. “Go ahead. It won’t bite.” She doubted Stuart could see her grin.

  Stuart looked at her, reached into the bag, then jerked his hand out. “Shit.” He looked around to see if anyone was near. “You’ve got a gun in there!”

  Holly picked up her purse and plopped it again to her right. “Just so you know. I’m armed, but I’m not dangerous.”

  Stuart hardly knew what to say, but in thinking where he was, and that this woman owned a bar in Cairo, Illinois, and probably dealt with some pretty rough characters on a daily basis, he was less surprised. “I thought—”

  “That I was getting a different kind of protection?” Holly patted Stuart’s leg. “That’s okay. You’re cute. I like you. But contrary to what you may think, I don’t invite people I’ve just met for a quickie in a public park. Not that I’m not attracted to you. In fact, I think you’re pretty hot in a buttoned-up kind of way. But that’s not why I brought you out here.”

  “Which is?”

  Holly figured, government employee or no, she held all the cards at this moment. He couldn’t very well go back and tell his superiors he picked up a woman at a bar who plied him with drinks, took him to a public park, and showed him her gun when he tried to put the moves on her.

  “I need to figure out what all this means—you, the government. I need to get out of this town, and with some of my investment intact. If the Feds build something here, maybe I can stay around a bit longer and then leave with more than if I just cut my losses now.”

  Stuart looked at her like he wanted her to leave with something, too. For some reason just then, he cared. He cared about what happened to her and he cared what she thought of him. She seemed smart. Likable. Industrious, someone who deserved a break.

  “Unfortunately, I have no idea what the government plans to do,” he said. “What they may be thinking about is some sort of internment camp for terrorists and terror suspects, Middle Easterners, Muslims, Islamic radicals, and those who support them. If there are all these sleeper cells in the country already, once we round them up, we’ve got to put them somewhere. My mission is to narrow the scope, to evaluate potential sites.”

  “Like Cairo.”

  “Yes.”

  “Strange how someone like you might profit from something like that.”

  “Strange how someone like you would be involved in something like this.” Stuart waved an all-encompassing arm.

  “Life throws all of us a curve now and again.” They sat in silence a few moments, and then she laughed. “Well, one thing’s for sure. They won’t have to change the name of the region.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “This area, Southern Illinois, is called Little Egypt. This town is Cairo. A lake about fifty miles north is called Lake of Egypt. There’s a town called Palestine, mascots for the Southern Illinois University are called Salukis. What irony, huh? The perfect place for Middle Eastern terrorists.”

  “I read it was the first stopping place for slaves on the Underground Railroad,” Stuart said.

  “So, how could the Feds say no to this place? The irony is too perfect.”

  Cairo couldn’t be more perfect, she thought. The confluence of two rivers, the Mississippi and the Ohio acting as natural barriers. And unlike other slow moving rivers, the water here looked more sinister than inviting. The bridges—one connecting to Kentucky, the other to Missouri—could be guarded from both sides. No escape without detection. The current population is desperate for investment, including her.

  “Can you really imagine this place as an internment camp?” Holly asked.

  Stuart had spent the day driving around, exploring country roads and doing research at the library. The place already seemed like a last stop for so many. “It’s hard to imagine it as anything else.”

  “They once rounded up people like you for no reason,” she said softly.

  “They might round up people like you for no good reason, too,” Stuart said. “That’s why we have to be just as vigilant about protecting our civil liberties as we are about putting the bad guys away.”

  She led them slowly back toward her car, both of them probably thinking about possibilities—personal and political. As they approached, two black men appeared out of the shadows, walking toward them from the other direction. Holly reached inside her purse, wrapped her fingers around her pistol, and flipped the safety.

  “This doesn’t look good, even for a big city boy.”

  Stuart glanced sidelong at her, keeping his eye on the two men, who bid them ‘good evening’ and harmlessly kept on walking.

  Stuart exhaled. “Sometimes I run in Rock Creek Park and come across a situation like this one. Every damn time, I feel bad about feeling nervous, suspicious. I’m supposed to be the liberal Jew, immune to stereotypes.”

  “No one is immune to stereotypes,” Holly said.

  “Doesn’t make it right.”

  “No, it doesn’t. There’s a lot in the world that’s not right.”

  They walked in silence until they arrived at the car. Holly unlocked the door and climbed in. Stuart got in and started to put on his seatbelt. He turned to her and said, “Ironic, huh? Small town girl with big city boy, and it’s the girl who carries the gun. And knows how to use it.”

  She turned the ignition. “No dad, mom a cop. Me, barely five feet tall, an ex-exotic dancer, and I own a tavern in the guts of a burned-out town filled with people with no good options.”

  “Still doesn’t explain it.”

  “Maybe not in your world.” And maybe not in mine either, Holly thought.

  Interlude

  Ya abi,

  The second saddest day of my life has passed, Papa, and I regret t
o write to you that Mother has died. She was diagnosed with very late stage ovarian cancer, too late for an operation or chemotherapy. It was serious enough, Papa, that she took her own life in the hospital. Nobody is talking about that, though.

  I made excuses for staying away, procrastinated, and let my pride get the better of me, and so, I was not able to share any last words with her. I could never forgive her refusal to help find you. I could have forgiven all of her other flaws, and perhaps served as a source of comfort during her final days. But I did not. Since the funeral, Papa, even the music we love does not soften the razor-edged attitude I displayed toward my own mother.

  I may as well write it here, since I’m not going to talk about this to anyone else. I may be partly responsible for her death. If I had not carried my resentment for so long, maybe we could have reconciled. Maybe I could have been there for her. Maybe she would have gone to the doctor earlier and been diagnosed earlier. Maybe she wouldn’t have killed herself. Maybe we could have had a few good moments together before the end. But I didn’t, and now I must live with that.

  Also, Maya Hammond came to the funeral. I have never written about what Maya Hammond did to me on the night of my high school graduation. I could not even write about it to you. I could not tell it to anyone. It was a rape, plain and simple, but who would believe that a high school senior girl would rape one of her best friends while she was passed out? How, people would probably ask, can one girl rape another? But that’s what it felt like. That’s what it was. Minutes afterwards, she was the first person I pulled my gun on, though thankfully, I only threatened her. I was so angry and hurt and embarrassed that I wanted to kill her, but I didn’t pull the trigger. I stormed out and told her I never wanted to see her again.

  So many secrets. So much hate.

  I have spent twelve years hating Maya for what she did. I’ve threaded it through the smallest opening of a needle, inspected the contours of that evening as if peering through a microscope at my own life. I have blamed myself for whatever I did to cause Maya to get the wrong idea about me, excoriated myself for the wave of physical sensation and pleasure I should not have felt. I couldn’t explain that evening in a lifetime of therapy.

  What I do know is hate is more painful, Papa, and now I hate myself for wasting time hating her while her life deteriorated into a living hell. You remember how she loved our backyard picnics with your shish kabob and baklava. Then her parents divorced after they moved from the neighborhood. She was a star athlete in high school but she did too many drugs. After we graduated, she left home and followed her brother Craig into the pits of the rural meth trade. Craig died in a fiery accident during a raid by federal authorities. Maya was convicted as an accessory but the accident did things to her head; she’ll never be right again. Yet she found something inside herself to come to Mother’s funeral so many years later, to seek some kind of redemption and reconciliation. She proved to be the better person. And I must live with that, too.

  Now I have happier news. Remember when we used to dream about having a piano like the one you heard back home in Aleppo? Every time we listened to one of the famous pianists play on the tapes in your taxi we’d look at each other and say, One day we will have a piano. One day, another day in paradise!

  You told me the story so many times, how you stayed with your father and brother at an inn with a large piano in the lobby. You had only seen such an instrument at your school on the stage but it was used rarely. At this inn, you heard a woman sit down and play, the first time you had heard music not typically the music from Syria, the classical music from Europe and America.

  For many years, I saved my money in a special account at the bank. I started when I was a teenager with a large jar I kept in the top shelf of my closet.

  I found an old full-size Steinway grand but of the smaller variety, five feet six inches long, built in 1906.

  I fell in love with the mahogany finish. I didn’t know much about the condition of it or the sound, but I could imagine it in a dusty courtyard in a faraway place, a young boy crawling around underneath it, trying to figure out how it made such wonderful sound. I asked the lady to play it for me, as if I could discern its sound from another.

  While she was playing, I noticed the deep scratchings in the finish above each key, the markings of the hours, the work, the anguish, the labor, this woman, and others, transferred to the wood through her fingernails.

  Some of the marks, like above middle C, were almost divots. I didn’t care what it sounded like. I fell in love with the markings. So I bought it.

  I have made one of your dreams come true, Papa. We have a piano! And your other dream, that I would learn how to play, will be true soon. It is like the secret in the baklava. Wonderful secrets. Clues about the past. The energy and will to create are etched into this piano.

  —Yom tani fil jannah bin tak

  18

  September, 2004

  Holly guided Penndel’s wheelchair down the sidewalk, pushing it with purpose, jerking it around as if no one was sitting in it. The rubber wheels crinkled and stalled against shards of broken glass and rusting metal, along with pieces of red brick, the hallmark of St. Louis construction. Resilient weeds emerged from the cracks in the sidewalk. The sun had disappeared hours ago. Only a few streetlights illuminated their path.

  Penndel’s building and his fire-breathing, computer-melting smelter was located several blocks from Grand Avenue. The humidity, even in September, clung to their clothes like steam to a shower curtain. They’d been to dinner with a couple, new to the neighborhood, who had completed the conversion of a twelfth floor penthouse loft space with a small balcony area large enough for a table and eight chairs.

  “You know we’ve become a third world nation when the city tries to save money by cutting electricity use for streetlights,” Penndel said, making small talk.

  The distance they had to go was enough for a relaxing walk, short enough to be embarrassing in taking a car, except the six blocks were mostly abandoned. Once they left the Grand Center entertainment district, the remaining pedestrians and street life dwindled to zero.

  Across one street was the Fox Theatre and Powell Hall, bookended by two restaurants, mostly empty when the theatre crowd wasn’t around. As they passed the theatre and musical icons, Holly wished she’d had the money to buy season tickets to the symphony. Farther down the boulevard, a jazz club harkened back to a speakeasy of the Roaring Twenties, and filled the street with woeful blues.

  Still, the entertainment district of Grand Avenue felt grossly underutilized once performances concluded. Suburbanites filed into secure parking lots for eight to fifteen dollars or more, saw their show, then beat a path for the Interstate, leaving behind the homeless, the drunk, the drugged, and the well-to-do SLU students, plus a few urban pioneers like Penndel.

  Holly didn’t speak until they reached the entrance to the building. The conversation at dinner hadn’t gone well.

  “Girl, you shut down back there like someone choking on an insult stuck in their windpipe,” Penndel said.

  Holly responded like dry tinder baking on the forest floor, just waiting for a flicked cigarette from a negligent camper. She stepped in front of the wheelchair, placed her hands on the arms, and leaned in toward Penndel. “Don’t ever, ever mention my heritage without my permission.”

  Penndel lifted himself up partially. “What? What did I say?”

  “I don’t want some fucking charitable attitude toward me, nor an inhospitable one because of where my parents might have been born. And I don’t want people looking at me funny because they don’t know the difference between Syria and cereal, except one is somehow linked in their minds to 9/11, and every other geopolitical incident in the Middle East.”

  “Well, given our host’s world view, I doubt we’ll be seeing them again anytime soon, anyway.”

  Holly leaned into his face. “That’s not the point, Penndel.” She knelt down so they were eye to eye. “The point is that the c
onnection I have to Syria is that my father left that country to come here and make a better life.”

  “Man, where were you when the ethnic pride was handed out?”

  “Fending for myself without it, thank you very much.”

  They faced off in the darkened entranceway to his building. The front of the limestone block church down the street, abandoned years earlier, glowed from the brightly lit underground club next door.

  “Holly, your father is from Syria. You are part Syrian. Don’t you think at some point you have to acknowledge that? Quit running away from your gene pool.”

  “What the fuck do you know about my gene pool?”

  Penndel looked at her, bewildered.

  “Penndel, your gene pool is irrelevant to things happening in the world. Mine has been ‘relevant’, not by choice, by virtue of birth. Not just relevant. Strong enough to elicit reactions I don’t even grasp, ancient embedded religious beliefs, Christians and their apocalypse at the end of of the world, the birthright of the Jews, the divisions between Shi’a and Sunni, the stories they’ve told themselves for two thousand years, even the damn oil we extract from there to run our cars and our military here. The damn place has been the birthright of Anglo and European colonists for centuries, and I’ve had it up to here with the assumptions that come with mentioning that damn country and the whole fucking region!”

  They rode the old freight elevator up to the loft, where Holly flicked the light switch like it was wired to a bomb she wanted to set off.

  19

  September, 2006

  Astory in the Post-Dispatch about the local elections for the Illinois Assembly caught Holly’s eye while she and Penndel lingered over breakfast coffee. A name more than vaguely familiar jumped out.

  “John Veranda,” she murmured out loud, as if highlighting it with a yellow marker in her mind.

  “Sounds like a plantation Confederate about to take up arms against the Yankees from the comfort of his front porch.”