Live from Cairo

by Ian Bassingthwaighte

  By the time Omran arrived at the garage, his cheeks felt as if they were going to fall off from the wind’s bitterness. Wasn’t it a little late in the season for that kind of thing? Then again, it was Omran’s first spring at that latitude. He shoved open the heavy side door. The door was so heavy it swung shut by itself, even with the wind blowing in at what felt like gale force. Sounds of industry filled the garage. The hum of a healthy engine and the sputter of a busted one; a lug nut loosened under pressure of an impact wrench; the radio, almost drowned out. A red light, which flashed repeatedly every time the door opened, flashed now. Faisal, standing over a workbench in the far back, turned. “Salaam, habibi!” Faisal was pushing sixty and his stomach was pushing out. He used the bulge as an armrest. “I had a feeling you’d come. I’m glad I was right. Usually, about these things, I have a sense. I have a sharp mind. My son says I’m not so sharp in old age, but I say that I’m not as old as he thinks. I’m glad you’re here. I made tea.”

  Being so predictable depressed the hell out of Omran; it suggested his life was stuck on some infernal autopilot. He shook Faisal’s hand and kissed his cheek, a ritual performed every morning. Though something about the greeting must’ve struck Faisal as aberrant. He wore a concerned look.

  “You seem . . .” Faisal stepped back from Omran to see him better. “Distressed. What happened? Is it Dalia?”

  Omran meant to tell Faisal about the case, but thought suddenly that he couldn’t tell him. The truth was, mutually exclusive longings battled for control of his want: to stay, to go. To go would be to lose both a reliable income and an even more reliable friend. In Omran’s mind, a friend was someone you shared meals with and invited into your home regularly. What could he say to preserve the fondness that had grown from pain, time, music, and money? Come, my friend, to Cairo? Forget the revolution? Forget the cost? Please, visit me? Staying, meanwhile, would forgo his marriage. How could Omran possibly stay? Even if Dalia told him? She had no right to demand such a cruelty. To exile Omran in paradise. Or what she must’ve thought was paradise. It was Omran’s fault. He’d told her Boston was where their life would begin again. They would get by, start a family, be happy. He’d said that being happy started with being safe. One fact they both loved about Boston: it had been more than two centuries since that city had seen war.

  “Nothing happened.” Omran stepped back and tried to appear steady.

  “Ha ha. Tell you what. I’ll pretend like I can’t read you.”

  “You see things that aren’t—”

  “Ha ha,” said Faisal sadly.

  Omran failed to avoid eye contact. He lost the staring contest handily.

  “I don’t know what to do,” said Omran, giving up. He slung his coat over the back of a chair, then collapsed into it. The chair protested by emitting a pretty serious groan. “Her case has been rejected. What can I do?”

  Faisal wiped his hands on his knees, leaving oil marks. He stared at the marks as if someone else had caused them, with an annoyed look. “There’s no hope?”

  Omran recalled Charlie’s inane rambling, his voice both tired and sore. Wait! I just met with a woman who works at the UNHCR. A friend on the inside. It wasn’t like Charlie to flail blindly for something utterly beyond reach. The UNHCR wasn’t on Dalia’s side. The UNHCR had never been on her side. “Foolish hope,” said Omran.

  Faisal said he’d never heard of such a thing. He tried to wipe the oil off his pants with the backs of his hands. Why? He must’ve known the oil would never come out. He’d been working in the garage business and thus ruining his pants for decades. Maybe it never got any easier. “Are you going home then?” he asked after a long while.

  Omran wasn’t going home, was he? He wasn’t from Egypt and he certainly wasn’t going back to Iraq. “My home is blown up or squatted in,” he said, slightly miffed by the idea that he could return there without dying. “How can I go back?”

  “You forget what home means,” said Faisal, perking up slightly. The only thing he loved more than telling stories was giving advice. “Home isn’t the place you sleep. You can sleep anywhere. You can sleep in a trash can.”

  “What! A trash can!”

  Faisal pulled Omran out of his chair and led him in the direction of tea. “I hope you haven’t forgotten the story about my boy Salman.” That boy had grown up, gone to college, and gotten married. Calling him a “boy” was a little misleading.

  “There’s no trash can in that story.”

  “Ya Allah! Forget the can. I’m asking if you remember the story.”

  “Yes, I remember. You’ve told me before. You tell me every—”

  “Let me tell you again.” Faisal poured two cups of hot tea and forced one into Omran’s hands. “Stories are great weights unless told often.”

  Now wasn’t the time for a tale of woe. Or was it? Maybe disappearing in another man’s tragedy would do Omran some good. To know he wasn’t alone. That his was a shared suffering. “At least don’t punch me in on the clock until the story is—”

  Faisal punched him in on the clock. Faisal had said before that a good listener was a precious thing, but this was the first time he’d actually paid Omran to just sit there. It would be wrong to protest such kindness. The only thing Omran could do was turn down the radio. He did just that. Not off, but so low the music became white noise.

  Faisal said his boy was made in Rafah, but not born there. The boy had no ties to his country, his history, or his language. Not even things Faisal thought his son must intrinsically love, such as the sea. Or his mother. Faisal never dared give Salman’s mother a name; he feared remembering her death too clearly. “She died of terminal homesickness,” Faisal said as if that fact still swallowed him. He said he’d failed to make her happy and was solely to blame for her death. They’d escaped Rafah during the first Intifada by smuggling themselves in wooden crates across the Egyptian border. She’d vomited the whole time and shit on herself, and he’d shit on himself the same way. They’d made it to Cairo by the skin of their teeth. Then to America after several months of paperwork. By then, Faisal’s wife was so pregnant she could barely stand up. Though no joy came from their escape. How could Faisal and his wife—with no family, no mosque, no kofta, and no access to the sea—lead any kind of recognizable life? A few months after Salman was born, in the dead of winter—“Colorado was very beautiful, but very cold,” said Faisal—his wife wandered into the snow. In the morning, he followed her footprints and found her frozen body wrapped in her frozen robe. The robe, which had been soaked in water, had fused to her skin. Her face was like a death mask covered in silver flakes. Faisal dreamed for years that if he’d only peeled the flakes off, he would’ve found his wife alive.

  Faisal never discussed the police questioning except to say that he was shocked by its nakedness. Did you kill your wife? Come on, did you kill her? Nor did he discuss the funeral except to say that he and baby Salman were the only guests. His story jumped to Boston, where Faisal moved shortly after the police inquiry had determined there was no probable cause. He moved to escape the house, the solitude, the creative neighbors who reported hearing a struggle the night his wife died. “They heard what they wanted to hear,” said Faisal. “They never liked us.” In Boston, Salman became a city boy. He grew up without prayer or even Arabic. It was Faisal’s fault for not teaching him. Hoping his son would assimilate and thus find school to be more pleasant, Faisal had spoken exclusively in English until realizing, too late, his grave error. Salman barely knew the language in which his father thought and dreamed and prayed. By then, Salman was a teenager with gangly arms and terrible acne. Faisal tried enrolling him in language classes, but Salman refused to go. He claimed there was no reason. Plus, the alphabet, besides having too many letters, looked like scribbling. The fight took a turn for the worse when Salman said English was his native language. Hearing that caused Faisal to whack Salman. Not because of what he said, but because of how he said it. With no sense of regret. The boy bled from h
is lip, but didn’t run. He sat on the floor and cried, but didn’t run. Faisal turned red not from rage but from embarrassment. He marched around the house looking for Band-Aids. “I can’t find the Band-Aids!” he shouted. Faisal loved telling the part of the story where Salman said, “You can’t put a Band-Aid in my mouth. It won’t stick.” Faisal lifted his son off the ground and nearly smothered him in an embrace. “I miss your mother,” he said by way of explanation and perhaps apology. “I miss the place you were made.”

  What did the boy say, so young and apparently beyond his years? He asked, with a lisp induced by the swelling: “What do sad people have in common?”

  Suddenly, Faisal knew his son had read the book he’d given him. Faisal was overcome with relief and joy and pride and love for his son. “You read the book! Hafez of Shiraz, the greatest poet ever born! Sure, he’s Persian. But I don’t hold that against him. It’s not his fault.” Salman asked again, “What do sad people have in common?” A reference to page 183 in Faisal’s shabby edition. The hard cover had become soft from being held so tightly for so long. “It seems they have all built a shrine to the past and often go there and do a strange wail and worship.”

  Faisal couldn’t help but laugh. “Are you trying to teach your father a lesson? I read that poem to your mother on a beach in a war. I know what Hafez of Shiraz said, and, more importantly, what he intended.”

  Salman scoffed, pulled away from Faisal, and didn’t hug him again for a week. When he did finally hug his father—the week had passed in uneasy quietude—he said, “I forgive you, but I don’t want to learn Arabic. It’s not my language. I’ve never been to Palestine. It’s not even a real country. I’m sorry, but it’s not. Maybe one day. Not that it would be my home even if that happened. Home isn’t a place. Home is the feeling you get with certain people.”

  It pained Omran to hear that line again. Home is the feeling you get . . . Not one he’d gotten in a long while; he could barely remember it. How terrifying to know his good memories were being gouged out. To make room for what? Nightmares? Omran sprang from his chair to escape the spiral of pondering. He needed to work. He needed to do something with his hands. A ten-point inspection, for example. “I’m sorry,” said Omran as he shoved his head under a car hood. “It’s just . . .” There was no polite way to say he was done listening.

  “Are you . . . checking the oil?”

  “I am.”

  “Don’t you think that can wait?”

  Omran pulled the dipstick out of the engine and held it up to the light. The oil should’ve been changed months ago. It was full of particulates. “This oil needs to be changed immediately.”

  “My friend, come back. It seems you’ve forgotten how the story ends.”

  Maybe Omran had forgotten. Not what happened, but how it felt to hear what happened. He reluctantly pulled his head out from under the hood of the car, allowing the story to continue without further hindrance. Of course Salman would go on to change his mind about Arabic. He would grow up, go to college, study abroad, learn a few language skills. Very few, as it happened. He would return home desperately frustrated. He would move back in with his father to finally collect what he called “my inheritance.” They would live together for a number of years with one non-negotiable, stress-inducing rule: only Arabic was allowed in the house. For the first few months there was a lot of contentious gesturing. A kind of switch would flip after that. Salman would realize he was too old to absorb language and would have to work hard to acquire it. The flash cards, the books, the formidable computer program—these were just symptoms of a larger change in Salman’s nature. In time, he would learn what Faisal had neglected to teach him when he was still young and spongelike. A language so packed with idiom it was like their own lonely code. That code would prove both a pleasure and a burden to speak. It made strangers nervous. Sometimes hostile. “We speak English in this country,” they’d say as if it were their duty as patriots. It would take a while for Salman to grow armor, to be proud. But Faisal had never been so glad as the day he’d heard his boy, ablaze with pride, speak up to spite them.

  Omran shoved his head back under the car hood. There was, after all that, some relief in hearing Faisal had eventually gotten what he wanted, but that relief was more or less canceled out by the distress of hearing how long it had taken and what he’d lost on the way. Maybe that was Faisal’s point. Maybe he just wanted to assure Omran that it was possible to survive unfathomable tragedy. That there might be some joy to be had in the end.

  Faisal set to work on the car next to Omran. Sounds of industry precluded the awkward silence that might otherwise have resulted. “It’s your day to choose the music,” said Faisal, nodding at the stereo.

  “Billie Holiday,” said Omran, his voice a little tinny from bouncing around the guts of a car. He didn’t have to think about it for long. Since coming to America, the Billie Holiday tape had become his favorite. “If you don’t mind . . .”

  The relaxed pace at which she sang matched the slow pace at which Omran worked. His monocular vision affected his depth perception in a way he hadn’t quite figured out, which impeded tasks such as plunging the dipstick back into the engine pipe. Though going slow had its advantages. It gave Omran the chance to practice focusing. It also gave him time to think. Returning the dipstick whence it had come was thus almost meditative; he’d made countless discoveries about himself while trying to aim it properly. For example, that he read Rumi to his wife for many (thought not all) of the reasons Salman read Hafez to his father. It wasn’t just because the Persians had learned, hundreds of years before the rest of the world, how to cure a dark heart. (“By loving recklessly!” Faisal had said when he gave Omran the book. “This is Rumi, second best to Hafez. I’m sorry. I don’t have any Hafez left. Salman took my only copy.”) Some other intangible power was at work. Some inkling that told Omran not to read the book by himself.

  Omran hoped for more insight as he tried once again to plunge the dipstick into the engine pipe. He missed so many times he thought some insight must come of it. Alas, Omran didn’t learn anything he didn’t already know. He needed to leave. The only home he’d ever had was waiting for him. But the dipstick didn’t entirely fail to be of use. It gave Omran somewhere to hide as he wept, hunched under the hood of an old-fashioned and oft-used Pontiac. The abyss of dirt, soot, and shadow hid all evidence of his unwinding until he regained control and wound himself up again. He had work to do. There were still nine things left to inspect.

  2

  Charlie had been in love once before. With Karen, weirdly. Before she’d married Tim. Not that it had been much of a competition. Charlie had never told her how he felt. At least, not in plain terms. He’d tried once to convey his love in a gesture. On Karen’s twenty-fifth birthday, he shot a pig on her behalf. Regrettably, he struck the gut. He chased the squeal, the smell of the pig’s bile, the trail winding in the grass. He had to shoot the pig a second time to end its misery.

  Tim, who’d always had ripe timing, who’d heard the shots from afar, found Charlie crying into the pig as he gutted it. “What’s the pig for? And why are you . . . ?”

  “The party.”

  “The party tonight? Karen’s party?”

  “I buried coals. I wanted to cook the pig that way. I wanted it to be special.”

  “Uh . . . why are you . . . ?”

  Charlie wasn’t able to explain why the pig’s misery affected him. Especially not to Tim, who was the sort of hunter who liked a clean kill but didn’t insist. That night Charlie’s gift was the most shared, most talked about, most savored. The pig had been cooked to perfection. The coals had imbued the meat with a tenderness its death had lacked. Everyone ate, drank, and danced freely until someone caught Karen kissing Tim. The subsequent and wild cheering surprised Charlie and, soon thereafter, banished him from the party; the only thing worse than seeing Karen bestow her affection on Tim was hearing how happy that made everyone. Charlie ran from what remained of his pig, hid
in his brother’s car, and drank himself into oblivion. That faint place beyond feeling. Later that night he drove Tim home. Less by choice than by strong suggestion. “Are you drunk?” Tim had asked, giving the keys before receiving an answer. “You don’t look drunk.” The high beams poured through the passing trees like a zoetrope. Charlie imagined ink deer jumping ink brooks. His eyes were so fixed on the trees that, when the road turned, he drove into them.