Live from Cairo

by Ian Bassingthwaighte

  “This isn’t working,” said Dalia. “You both need to leave. Right now. Please go.” Standing was made burdensome by the depth she’d sunk into her laundry. She rocked back; she rocked forward. The momentum made it easier. “I’m sorry you’ve come all this way for no reason.” The tea, thought Dalia, would go to waste. A pity. Or the tea would go down the shower drain. God willing, that would help unclog it.

  Hana practically jumped to her feet, but Charlie rose more reluctantly. “I want you to know something,” he said. Apparently that “something” was more complicated than he’d initially thought. He kept saying um and well, only to conclude, as each pause hung on for dear life, that he ought not to say that. Charlie finally settled on something vague and therefore more or less appropriate. “I won’t give up. Not now, not ever. Emily Dickinson said the heart wants . . . well, something. Mine wants to drive you to the airport.”

  Dalia found this to be an aggravating sentiment. “It’s not up to you. The same way it’s not up to me.” That left just one person to whom the decision belonged. Dalia couldn’t look at her anymore. Not without crying or possibly lashing out. She wouldn’t give Hana the satisfaction of knowing the power she bore by beholding the sorrow she’d wrought. That sorrow was Dalia’s obscure companion. An eidolon in the shape of Omran hiding in the umbra of her heart.

  6

  Charlie leaned back against the gray brick wall under a tube of white light outside Dalia’s apartment. The rough surface of the brick pressed into his skin. Hard enough to feel, but not hard enough to hurt. He leaned with more pressure. Should he explain to Hana what was supposed to have happened? What Dalia should’ve said? That she did, per her testimony, get raped? That she saw no other way to free her husband? That her rape meant everything? And meant more now that it was, or should’ve been, rendered in minute detail? A line in Dalia’s letter described the cleric’s hands as rocks. That was all she’d written, but Charlie knew there were more horrors to tell. If only she would’ve told them! Then Hana would know! And knowing would’ve changed . . . something! Should he remind Hana that the length Dalia went to secure Omran’s release was so far beyond kindness and love that no word could describe what she must’ve felt for him? And how that indescribable feeling was admirable and infectious? And must be preserved at any cost? Should he argue that logic, math, and policy no longer applied? That his heart was beating so fast that, medically speaking, he should die? Or should’ve died months ago when it started?

  Charlie recalled one time that he and Dalia had, entirely by accident, touched. Her hand fell on his arm when, without looking, she’d reached for something. A pen, maybe. Or perhaps Charlie’s arm in her peripheral vision had looked the same as Omran’s. And Dalia, in want of the man she loved, had reached for him. The damp, incidental, and frightening contact—Dalia’s horror-stricken face declared immense embarrassment—had struck Charlie at the time as really sad for them both. Remembering the moment made him similarly wistful. In such a state, Charlie was prone to reimagining the circumstances. He imagined asking to kiss Dalia after every string connecting her to her past life had been severed. By war, by jihadists, by politicians. The politicians were the worst. They started wars in which they didn’t fight and for which they weren’t punished. The same wars that fueled the anger jihadists used to recruit. The strings connecting Dalia to her past life thus severed by the scourge of the Earth, Charlie imagined asking to kiss her. Or imagined nearly asking. The question, like a timid bird, would never fly from his lips. Instead it would nest there and torment him with its presence. The idea almost made Charlie laugh. It was absurd. He lacked the courage to speak openly even in the imagined world he’d created for himself.

  “A few years ago I attended a dinner party that turned out to be a murder mystery,” said Hana. Her calmness rattled Charlie the same way deep water rattled him. What lurked was past knowing. “The revelation was obvious, disappointing, almost offensive in its simplicity. Just like tonight. It’s uncanny.”

  “By revelation, you mean . . .”

  “Why you brought me here.”

  Charlie’s shirt had tangled in the rough surface of the bricks. Shifting his weight felt like peeling a sticker. “I didn’t mean to hide my reason. Dalia still needs a yellow card. It’s just a piece of paper. It must cost five cents.” He couldn’t say what the other reasons were. That he’d just wanted to see Dalia. That she’d had no reason to visit his office since before her interview. That it had been weeks. That he missed her. It would be a breach of duty to say that. Maybe it was a breach of duty just to feel it. Although, did it matter? Given that Charlie had scorned every lawyer’s oath he’d ever taken? I will maintain the respect due to courts of justice and judicial officers! I will employ for the purpose of maintaining the causes confided to me such means only as are consistent with truth and honor! I do solemnly swear to abide by and uphold the law! How could he uphold the law when that law upheld injustice?

  Hana leaned on the wall next to Charlie. Now she was close enough to strangle him. “You’re really going to go through with this?”

  “God willing.” Charlie’s fight-or-flight response sent mixed messages. “Not that I believe in God. I don’t know why I keep saying that. Maybe because the phrase is so ubiquitous. God willing, Mubarak goes to jail. God willing, Mubarak dies in jail. God willing, nobody puts up a Mubarak statue. Protesters say these things like God might actually will them.”

  It occurred to Charlie that Dalia might be watching them through the eyehole. If he were Dalia, he’d be watching. They must’ve looked stupid through the fisheye lens and sounded even stupider through the wood, like mumbling idiots. He approached the door and peered through the eyehole the wrong way. The only thing he could see was the reflection of his pupil split by cracks in the glass. Or was that Dalia’s beautiful brown eye? She had two beautiful brown eyes, but Charlie supposed in that context he would only be seeing one of them. He stepped out of what he assumed was the eyehole’s viewable angle, then took a few more steps just to be safe. “Can we talk over here? Or maybe down there would be better.” Charlie gestured to the stairs, but meant the landing: the essentially private area between floors where all mention of their small crime, plotted for good reason, would be irretrievably lost in the dimness of a single yellow bulb hung from a tiny metal string. He descended a step hoping that Hana would follow him.

  “You haven’t told Dalia your plan, have you?” said Hana, who’d not moved so much as an inch. “Is that why you’re running away?”

  “I’m not running!” hissed Charlie. He lowered his voice slightly. “I’m barely even walking. And, no, I haven’t told her. Not yet. Not until it’s absolutely necessary. Ignorance is Dalia’s only armor. She can’t be held liable for something she didn’t do or even know about.” The sound logic only applied in a just court. But now wasn’t the time for Charlie to divulge his opinion on the Egyptian judicial system. It would undermine his argument to say the judicial system was a total joke. That joke was altogether terrifying. That joke let people rot in jail for years without charge or access to counsel. That joke permitted and thus sanctioned “enhanced” interrogation techniques such as choking, beating, sleep deprivation, and induced vomiting by means of oil, salt, washing powder, and just enough water to make the cocktail fit to drink. It was thus of the utmost importance that every aspect of Charlie’s plan be executed perfectly.

  “You’re going to get everyone thrown in jail,” said Hana. “You, Dalia, and me just for being here. I haven’t even done anything.” To Charlie, it sounded less like an outrage than a lament. Her job, like her purpose on Earth, was purely theoretical.

  “The police are busy torturing protesters in the basement of the museum. They don’t have time to arrest Americans. Nor do they need the public relations nightmare. Don’t forget that our taxes pay for their army! Or that the Clintons recently called Mubarak a ‘family friend’! Can you believe that? A family friend? Someone you know. Someone you trust. Someone you
trust to do your bidding, maybe.” Charlie hated the cynic that lived within him, but didn’t know how to exile or execute the dark part of his heart. It caused him to say the wrong things to the wrong people at the wrong volume. “What I mean to say is—”

  Suddenly a door creaked opened at the far end of the hall. A man tentatively peered out. He seemed to really look at them. It was almost as if he needed glasses. “Ah!” said the man after the longest five seconds in Charlie’s life. “Really? Is that you? Charlie?” The man smiled as widely as a man could without looking clownish. When he finally stepped into the hall, Charlie’s stomach dropped. Was it Ali? Could it be? The man rushed over and shook hands so vigorously that Charlie thought his arm would fall off. Yes, it was Ali! The man from weeks ago who’d stormed the office with four passports in his back pocket, who’d held a knife against his neck. “Please, I need to leave,” he’d said that day. “I have no money. I have no job. My children don’t attend school. How can I put them in school? Even if they were allowed, I couldn’t buy the uniform. Or pay the school fees. I want to pay the fees! I want to work!” Charlie had failed to convince Ali to put down his knife, to come in, to begin the long application process. Ali had fled in a wretched state after calling the application a sham. Charlie was beyond ecstatic to see him again. To know that Ali had not cut his throat. Charlie didn’t realize until now how much not knowing had bothered him. A lot, apparently. Charlie whooped as if he’d won something. And wept from the solace he took in finding Ali alive. Charlie grabbed him by the arms and hugged him. “Thank God, you’re alive.”

  Ali appeared upbeat. He was a new man. “It’s true, then? The rumor? The tickets? You’re giving them away at the office? That’s why you’re here? To tell us? I heard from a friend, who said he’d heard the rumor; I told him not to believe what couldn’t possibly be true. I said, ‘It’s not true. You’re stupid for believing it.’ Thank God I’m wrong! Thank God you’re here! You’re telling people!” Ali rubbed his hands together as if he were about to eat. His whole family was at the table. He loved them. He loved feeding them. He loved giving them life. “There are two more floors and half a third floor on the west end of the building. Please don’t forget the people living at the very top. Tell them, too! About the rumor! Tell them it’s not a rumor! It’s true!” Charlie, still gripping Ali with all his might, wasn’t listening. How beautiful to see him again. How beautiful to find him alive. “I’m going now,” said Ali. “I will see you again soon at the office!” He peeled away from Charlie’s grip and fled the building. His long legs meant there was no stopping him.

  7

  Hana watched the color drain from Charlie’s face.

  “Did he say . . . rumor?” asked Charlie.

  “Yes. Apparently you’re giving away—”

  “Plane tickets?”

  “Yes.”

  Charlie punched the air. “He said that? Tickets? Are you sure?”

  By now, Hana wasn’t sure of much. Her power to observe without prejudice, fatally wounded by the smell of Dalia’s shower drain—not to mention the abominable look on her face after they’d, and with such rudeness, barged in—was in its death throes. But Hana couldn’t admit that in present company. If she told Charlie that she was feeling literally anything, he would find some way to take advantage. Some way to draw a line between right and wrong such that Hana fell on the bad side, where the devil and Hitler and Ivan the Terrible lived in sorrow and eternal regret. “Yes,” said Hana. “Were you not listening? Did that guy not shout in your ear?”

  Charlie made the sorriest face she’d ever seen. He ran down the stairs yelling, “Ali! Come back! Don’t believe the rumor! It’s not true! There are no tickets!”

  All of a sudden it was quiet. The solitude Hana had been trying to avoid all day finally caught her. Therein appeared ghosts of the dead. Somar and Leilah—him a numbness, her a yearning—whispered in Hana’s ears. Why’d you ditch your mother? and Why’d you let me leave? Every eyehole drilled through every door bore further judgment. Hana felt as if she were being watched by every person who’d ever died in or run from a conflict zone. Their cumulative weight was almost as staggering as Hana’s inability to reincarnate the dead or reunite the separated, despite a yet-more-staggering desire to do both immediately. She ran down the stairs. Not in pursuit of Charlie, albeit technically after him. The curved edges were more precarious on the way down than the way up, though she made it all the way outside before falling. Even then it wasn’t the stairs’ fault. The man lying across the stairs, who’d once held a Coke bottle but had since finished whatever had been inside—now the bottle contained cigarette butts and spit enough to snuff them—said, “I’m like a river going under a bridge.” He spoke right when Hana stepped over him. His voice startled her even though she knew he was there. Or maybe what startled her was the idea that he was a river. That a man who couldn’t move had to imagine himself as something that moved no matter what. Even a dammed river evaporated. Hana saw him evaporating into the pollution that hung over the city and falling later wherever he wanted to go. Seeing this, even inside her head, drew her eyes to the sky. She lost her balance. She fell in the sitting position to avoid falling down the steps headlong and more than likely breaking her neck. The man grunted when Hana sat on him. “Oh, God,” she said, standing up as quickly as possible. “I’m sorry. Really, I didn’t mean . . .” The man was utterly disinterested in Hana’s guilt complex, which only made it worse. She couldn’t be absolved of an offense that hadn’t been rendered. The man just rubbed his stomach and said he wasn’t hurt.

  “Please, a cab!” shouted Charlie from the sidewalk, gesticulating wildly at the heavens. “God willing! It must be so easy for you! Just snap your fingers! Snap them, damn it!” It was totally delusional behavior. What taxi driver would roam Imbaba at night when he could cruise other neighborhoods for richer fares? Hana, knowing this, or intuiting what locals knew and must’ve hated about their locality, called Mustafa. As the phone rang, she considered whether to share the ride with Charlie or abandon him. She thought it would feel sugar sweet to leave him behind—revenge for his presumptuous deception, for his guilt trip, for his high horse—but knew she’d regret her decision after making it. Charlie needed to find Ali before Ali spread a rumor that wasn’t true. It would be cruel to delay that just cause for petty vengeance. She yelled that Charlie could share the ride if he wanted, but he better not talk now or when the car came or even when they were sitting quietly inside as Mustafa took corners at an unreasonable speed. No more appeals to emotion. No more smart remarks.

  Mustafa didn’t answer his phone until it went to voice mail. Hana thought she was recording a message when she was actually having a conversation. “What?” Mustafa sounded confused. “What is that you’re saying?” Hana repeated herself. She tried not to laugh or cry. Mustafa said yes, he was free, or would be once the disgruntled passenger in his backseat stopped groaning about the price and finally paid him. “Pay what you owe!” he shouted in Arabic. Then in English: “I’m coming in ten minutes, God willing. Remember, don’t lean on the door. Please, it’s still broken. I don’t want you to fall out.” Hana wondered if Mustafa would ever fix the door or if it would stay broken so he could collect absurd tips from her indefinitely. Wondering that felt the same as accusing him, which felt lousy. Especially considering how Mustafa only accepted absurd tips when Hana tricked him. Usually he handed them back. “See you soon,” said Hana. “All my thanks.”

  Twenty minutes passed while Charlie and Hana guarded each other against nothing tangible, only the uncanny feeling of being watched on a dark street in a poor quarter. The man on the stairs sat up and started watching them. As a result, the uncanniness increased. When Mustafa finally rolled up, he did so in a style unlike his old self. Normally his humor disguised his lethargy. The look—weary eyes and a wide smile—reminded Hana that he drove all day and not just when she needed him. But that night he looked unhinged, as if something odd and upsetting had happened. Ma
ybe the last fare had run off without paying. “Get in!” said Mustafa. His arm, protruding from the window, beckoned them. “Hurry up! A bored soldier whistled at me on the next street! And waved his radio! I drove away! I saw him running!”

  Hana jumped in the front seat while Charlie jumped in the back. She looked past him out the rear window. The bored soldier, flying around the bend at a fevered speed, had become almost rabid. “Go!” cried Hana. “He’s right there!” Mustafa floored it, but the soldier refused to give up. He ran like a mad dog after a desert hare. That is, until catching whiff of a better scent. He stopped short in front of Dalia’s building and turned to the man on the stairs. Perhaps to collect a bribe; perhaps to commence a whupping. The man on the stairs stood up and grudgingly backed away. The soldier made as if he were going to follow him, but tarried once the man—at last, surrendering his pride—turned to flee. That seemed to thrill the soldier. Hana couldn’t see his face from the distance between him and the car, ever increasing, but his strut said he loved scaring people. There was no recourse; no way to complain. He couldn’t be touched, beaten, robbed, or held accountable for his behavior. Not while the Supreme Council was in power. He was beyond the law. He was even beyond the dangers of a dark neighborhood aligned against him. He was the real danger. His radio could turn one soldier into a truckload.

  * * *

  The dark maze of Imbaba became the bright lights of Mohandessin, a middle-class neighborhood known more for its shopping than its mosques. The faster route downtown would’ve been to go east across the Imbaba Bridge, but that would’ve required circling the block and driving once more past the soldier. “I think it’s better if we go . . . ,” Mustafa had said, turning south. He promised to make the detour short by driving faster. Streetlamps whipped by at odd angles. Hana had come to trust Mustafa’s skill, judgment, and luck, so felt no need to pray for safe passage. Instead she prayed for advice: What should I do about Charlie? What would Leilah do in my position? Upon asking the latter question, Hana realized she wasn’t praying to God so much as attempting to contact the dead. Admitting that freed her to get on with it. Leilah! Are you there? Should I help Charlie? He isn’t really the point so much as the vector, I guess; through him I can help Dalia. Isn’t my job designed to help people like her? Isn’t the design flawed on some fundamental level? Might my task on Earth be to change that in some small way? Hana had been considering her task on Earth ever since Leilah, at the age of eleven, had won a gold medal at a horse camp meant for teenagers. Jealousy had forced Hana, beginning at such a young age, to consider her own future. What was she good at? What could she be? Not an equestrian, since Leilah had already locked that down. A baseball player? A movie star? A famous painter? Ishtar had said, “Why not help people? Even one person. If you can improve one life by the time you die, you’ve completed God’s task.” Hana thought she’d be deemed a failure if she died now. Or anytime soon, for that matter. Especially compared to her family, which had nearly been snuffed out by selflessness. Her father had perished on his way to beseech God for a cease-fire. That his country might know peace! Her sister had perished in the very church her father had been trying to visit. To know him better, to fill up on history, to force what she’d learned on the world. That her country was not lost! Hana’s mother had perished, at least on the inside, from the frantic need to stay faithful. That she might relentlessly pray for the dead! What sacrifice had Hana ever made to earn her place in such a family? Leilah! Are you there? Please, I need to talk to you! I need to know what you think!