Live from Cairo

by Ian Bassingthwaighte

  Mustafa wouldn’t look at Hana or touch the money. “Please,” he said, more serious than he’d ever been in her presence. “Step away. I don’t want to run over your feet.”

  Hana abided, but not easily; no step had ever caused her more pain. Then Mustafa drove away in a hurry. Hana tried to throw money in the window, but missed. Banknotes flew everywhere. A few notes, caught in the invisible pull of the car, followed Mustafa for a short time before finally resting.

  7

  That night Charlie couldn’t sleep. Visions plagued him. He saw a sodden man in the water. He saw money amiss in the street. He saw himself bending over a thousand times to pick up every note, even though Hana was the one who had picked them. He saw those notes tendered as a diminutive, blood-covered payment to Geb. Didn’t he owe a boy, not a father? Plus, Charlie’s bed was too small for both him and Ruby. The dog had spread herself diagonally across the mattress. There was nowhere for Charlie to extend himself. He got up slowly so as not to wake the old pooch. He needed to borrow money. He should’ve borrowed money before, but lacked what every fool needed: a time machine. The only thing he could do was borrow money a little late. God willing, not too late. Geb, he thought, could live.

  It wasn’t that Charlie hadn’t thought to borrow money last week; he just hadn’t known whom to borrow from. No rich people were in Charlie’s life; not even any financially stable people. Aos, Sabah, and Michael would’ve been destitute without their jobs. Even with their jobs they were nearly broke almost all the time. There was nobody back home, either. Not that Charlie still knew. Much less still knew their phone numbers. And Tim had never crossed Charlie’s mind. Some combination of grief and ego must’ve blocked him out. The only thing that had changed was seeing in hindsight what his ego had done. Charlie imagined excising that ego and cutting it into little bits. He walked to the phone while that figment still meant something. To reach Tim, Charlie had to call Karen. Her number had arrived in a letter some years back. Love from your family back home. Your brother misses you. He’ll never tell you that. Write him, please. Will you? Please, for me. I’m asking. Call and I’ll give you the address. The phone rang the way tides oscillate. At a slow, reliable interval.

  “Hello?” Karen sounded confused and possibly upset. As if she knew it was Charlie even before he’d said anything.

  “Yeah, hi.” It unsettled Charlie to think she was prescient. Did she know he wanted money? Would she say how disgusting it was that he’d called after all this time for nothing more than a handout? “This is . . .”

  “. . . Charlie?”

  Maybe Karen just had caller ID. The sheer number of digits, beginning with +20, would’ve indicated the call was crossing a border. Probably even the ocean. How many people did Karen know that lived across the ocean besides her husband? Tim’s number, while similar in length, would’ve begun with +964. Karen would’ve known that. She would’ve seen his number hundreds of times over the course of his deployments. There was only one person +20 could be.

  “Yes, Charlie. I’m hoping you can connect me with Tim.”

  Despite everything, he tried to sound chipper. Charlie didn’t want the conversation to devolve into some kind of vaguely hostile catching up. Did you receive the letter I sent? Why didn’t you call? Why didn’t you write to your brother? Why did you treat him so badly at El Horreya after he’d traveled so far to see you? Yes, he told me! We’re married! We talk!

  “You want to talk with Tim?” said Karen, as if under no circumstances was that possible.

  “I owe him an apology. Look, it’s better late than never. Do you have a way of reaching him or not? It occurs to me that I don’t actually know how that works. The whole ‘keeping in touch’ thing. With a soldier. I guess it’s complicated.”

  Karen made an awful, protracted moaning sound. Charlie couldn’t help but think of the pig he’d once shot in the gut. It sickened him to remember the screaming and the terrified look in its eyes. When enough blood had seeped from the wound, the screaming stopped and the moaning started. Charlie remembered thinking at the time that it was almost human sounding. The evidence presented now was inescapable. It was human sounding. The pig had been afraid to die. Just as Karen was afraid of . . . what, exactly? She managed to comfort herself before Charlie could think of something to say. Karen did so by holding her breath. Some kind of breathing exercise, presumably. He imagined her counting to a predetermined number. Five, maybe. Or six. And while in that place—wherever she went while counting—telling herself that everything would be okay in the end. Whatever had gone wrong would go right again. Whatever had gone wrong would go right.

  “Tim was injured in an explosion,” said Karen. She made the moaning sound again, though it was less pronounced the second time. Charlie still didn’t know what to say. He didn’t know what to feel, either. He wanted to feel something. Anything. A strong emotion of any kind. Something that proved he was still human and not just humanoid. Karen breathed as if there weren’t enough air in the room. Then three letters leaked out of her mouth: “IED.” A buzzer went off in Charlie’s brain. He saw an armored vehicle rolling by a lump in the dirt. He saw a bright white light engulfed not in fire but in dust. Finally, he saw a dour soldier playing a bugle in the rain. Taps, of course. At dusk. In a cemetery.

  “Is he . . . ?” Charlie couldn’t bring himself to say dead or dying or even possibly dying. He’d read somewhere that saying things, believing things, even just imagining them for long enough, could actually change the chemistry of the universe and alter the course of events. Charlie had tried not to take the article seriously, but for some reason it had stuck with him.

  “The doctors are optimistic.”

  The way Karen said that word—as if optimism were listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders—made Charlie sick. He retched, but nothing substantial came up. Just some bile and the smell of whiskey he’d drunk earlier that night at the party in his kitchen. The party had been just a few hours before, though it seemed much longer. Ages. His entire life. All of time.

  “Are you okay?” asked Karen.

  “Yes. Are you?”

  Karen laughed a little. Then cried so hard she had to hang up. “I’m sorry. I have to go. I have to pick up the boys from day care. The boys are . . . well, they’re fine. I haven’t told them yet. I don’t know what to say.”

  How could Charlie ask Karen to wait? How could he beg money from a woman who might need it soon? “Tell Tim I said . . . well, if he ever . . .” But Karen had already hung up. The dial tone foretold at least one more death. If not Tim’s, then Geb’s. Charlie had nobody else to call and thus no money to borrow. He mourned by waking Ruby. The old pooch, reluctant to sit up, made a whining sound.

  * * *

  Charlie went to work at the first hint of a new day: when the call to prayer disturbed the chickens in the alley, which disturbed the cats. The office provided respite from the memory of that truly awful sound. The hallway inside was musty and cool and dark. Charlie hit the light switch several times before conceding the damn thing didn’t work. He looked out the window and saw the streetlights were off, too. They must’ve turned off just a few seconds before. The Supreme Council was having a fine time fucking with people. Charlie felt his way into the kitchen, where a street-facing window stole light from passing cars. He saw shapes when those cars sped by with their headlights shining. A long box was the counter. A tall box was the fridge. Charlie approached what looked like a snake bowing over an abyss. He scrubbed the sticky feeling off his face. Tears, sweat, Ruby’s drool. Then he blindly drank the tepid coffee someone had left in the pot. Just to exile the last of the whiskey still floating around in his blood. He needed a clear mind. He needed to wake up. “Wake up!” shouted Charlie. He rubbed more water on his face. Then he found his desk, burned a candle, and began writing the fake testimony he would present later that morning to Hana and Aos. He’d demanded—voice shaking even more than his hands—that they come at sunup. Hana and Aos
had shared bewildered looks before finally nodding.

  Since there was no electricity, Charlie wrote the testimony on a legal pad. The oblong yellow paper turned orange in the candle’s light. Crushed orange balls of the same paper were the only proof that time was passing. Each failed iteration of the testimony tore up Charlie’s heart. That it had come to this. Tears slipped off his chin until morning crept through the window. At last, he’d achieved a draft. It was a wretched, beautiful thing. A kind of love letter to a woman who would never know. Charlie stared at it while waiting impatiently for the screen door to swing open. His heart raced when, after what felt like ten years, the hinges finally whined. Why was he afraid when he knew it was either Hana or Aos? He told himself to stop being so afraid all the time. It wasn’t becoming. “Stop it,” whispered Charlie so quietly he couldn’t even hear himself; the words were just vibrations in his throat. The police hadn’t come to arrest him; the army hadn’t come to execute him quietly. Nobody would miss the soldier who’d disappeared. Not in a revolution full of injury, havoc, betrayal, and abduction. Wouldn’t the army presume that some among them would die? Wasn’t that the inherent price of their crimes against the people of Egypt? And the refugees stuck in their midst? Charlie had paid a price, too, in fighting back. The price was his conscience. What did his conscience matter in the scheme of things? In a world full of people who’d done much worse for lesser reasons?

  Thank God it was just Aos. He appeared and stood at an angle in the doorway. Like the legal pad, he looked orange in the light from the candle. Charlie saw that he’d showered, changed his clothes, and combed his hair. Though Aos still managed to look disheveled. It was more his demeanor than his dress: a bowed head, a slack body. Neither man was able or willing to speak. It was as if each feared what the other might say. They were only spared a painful moment by the lights, which flicked on suddenly. The refrigerator made a humming sound. The ceiling fan started to click. And hot, blank paper inexplicably spewed from the printer. For some reason that always happened after the power went and came back. Nobody understood why and thus couldn’t stop it from happening.

  “A gift from the overlords,” said Charlie, nodding to the lights. He was glad to have something boring to talk about. The Supreme Council was only boring because it was so predictably unjust. He grabbed the blank paper the printer had spewed out. “In ten minutes this will be a testimony.” Charlie shoved the pages back in the tray, turned on his computer, then set about typing what he’d scribbled on the legal pad. He pounded the keys the same way Bach once beat his piano. As if it wasn’t his choice, but his calling. Or his compulsion. Or his curse.

  “I couldn’t stop hitting him.” Aos took a chair from the desk next to Charlie’s. “Even when I saw his eyes had rolled back in his head. The whites had become a pink color.”

  Charlie didn’t stop typing or turn to look at his friend. He dreaded where the conversation would take them. Just thinking about it made him type faster. It was impractical at that point to consult the legal pad. Charlie wrote by memory, accursed by rage. He pressed the keys so hard sometimes the letters appeared twice. “Damn it!” he shouted at the delete key. Soon the printer spewed hot paper covered in black ink. Charlie thrust the pages into Aos’ hands. The pages were still hot. They were so hot they were still a bit sticky. “I want you to be the first to read this. I want you to know what we’ve done.” Hadn’t they done their jobs? Hadn’t they done them well?

  Aos held but didn’t read the pages. “I should’ve stopped hitting him. I could’ve stopped if I’d really wanted to. He was knocked out. He might’ve already been dead. But I kept hitting him. I remember thinking he wasn’t dead enough.”

  What if Aos had stopped? What if he’d stopped and the soldier wasn’t dead? Just injured and pissed? And got hold of his rifle? And gunned them down? And used his radio to call more soldiers to keep gunning them until their bodies were spread down the block?

  “If a man deserves a dent in his head, I say give him one.” Charlie tried to believe what he’d said so that Aos might also believe it. This required rejiggering Charlie’s principles. To that end, he reimagined the day he’d shot the pig. He saw the pig as a wild boar. He saw the boar had long tusks. He saw the long tusks coming straight at him. In this reimagining, Charlie was forced to shoot without restraint until the boar was gone. Bang! Bang! Bang! Not out of vengeance, but out of fear. To protect himself. It was a relief to know he felt nothing when the boar fell.

  “I gave him twenty!” cried Aos. “Or was it more? Oh my God, was it more?”

  No anguish was worse than watching Aos try to count how many times he’d whacked the soldier. Charlie reached out to touch Aos’ arm. Charlie wanted to tell Aos how he viewed him. As his true brother. Didn’t that mean Aos’ crime was committed in defense of his family? Hadn’t God addressed such crimes in the Qur’an? Hadn’t Muhammad addressed them in the hadiths? “Aos, you’re my true—”

  “I could’ve stopped.”

  “He deserved it!” said Charlie, exasperated. “That almost never happens. People deserving their fate.”

  Aos leaned forward and rested his head on the desk. Each second of silence begged the next, endlessly. Charlie watched the flies by the window. They bounced off the glass again and again, kiss-kiss-kiss, as if the best solution to the problem in front of them was to smash against it.

  8

  On the ride to the Refugee Relief Project, Hana’s taxi driver—a nice man, but not Mustafa—had told her Zamalek, of the Egyptian Premier League, would be playing Haras El Hodood in football later that day. And to please pray for Zamalek to win. Hana must’ve seemed rude for not responding and ruder still for not making eye contact at the end of the journey when she reached forward to pay. The exchange had been merely transactional. Not because she disliked the driver, but because he wasn’t the one that she missed. Hana took her time walking from the curb, through the gate, across the yard, into the office. She wasn’t sure if she was going to throw up or not. By the time she made it inside, Charlie had fallen asleep and Aos was in a kind of trance by the wall. He stood by the world map, staring at a tiny speck in the South Atlantic Ocean. “Where could I go and be happy?” said Aos. Either he was talking to himself or he’d heard the whine of the hinges. Hana thought someone should oil them. They were horrendously loud. “Should I need to flee?”

  Hana had also thought about fleeing. In the dark of her apartment, she’d stripped naked and stepped into the shower while it was still cold. She’d scrubbed the red pigment from her skin. Her blood and the soldier’s blood had inextricably mixed in the shower drain. Hana still hadn’t felt clean. Not after the water had become transparent again. Not even after the brand-new bar of soap had become half its original thickness. (So long and harsh was the scrubbing.) It was as if Hana couldn’t get the soldier off her body. He was stuck under her nails, in her hair, deep inside her sinus cavities. The swelling had trapped both the smell of his unwashed uniform and the much worse smell of his breath. Hana had tried closing her eyes to forget him. She’d told herself to think about something else. Such as the water coursing down her back. She’d told herself to come up with five words to describe the feeling. But Hana hadn’t been able to think of even one word. Instead she’d thought of the soldier’s hands clopping the pavement as he rolled by himself toward the river. (He was smiling. He was laughing at her. He kept saying, “You’ll remember this for the rest of your life.”) Hana had cried and hit the wall with the showerhead until the apparatus had fallen apart in her hands. That had brought an abrupt end to her cleansing. She’d gotten out and tried not to look in the mirror, which had made it even harder not to look. She’d stolen a quick glance, then run from what had become of her face. To her bedroom, where she’d thrown on her clothes. To her office, where she’d grabbed her passport. To her living room, where she’d called her mother. Hana had asked Ishtar if she could come home. The question had been “hypothetical” so as not to frighten her. Ishtar had been so exc
ited that she’d not inquired after the cause of such a “blessed change of heart.” (Her words, not Hana’s.) Ishtar had said only that Hana would be welcome and her room would be ready. It had taken all of Hana’s will not to go directly to the airport. Wasn’t there a Delta flight from Cairo to New York? Didn’t it leave daily at like . . . 1:30 a.m.? Might there still be a seat available? Hana had gotten so far as to start packing before she’d talked herself down from that ledge. The ledge was just a guilty feeling, which lessened of its own accord as the Tylenol began to wear off. Hana was left with nothing but the pain in her face. For some reason it settled her to feel what the soldier had done. What else might’ve he done had Aos not clobbered him?

  “There’s nowhere to go!” shouted Aos at the map. “That’s what I’ve learned. That’s what the map has taught me.”

  “How long have you been standing there?” asked Hana.

  Aos pulled the map off the wall and crumpled it into a giant ball.

  “A while then,” she said.

  Behind the map was a clean spot on the wall. Aos seemed drawn to the color. He put his hand against the paint. “The whole office used to look like this. Not even that long ago. I don’t understand how it went to shit so quickly.”

  Hana couldn’t watch Aos anymore without shaking him. She turned her attention to Charlie instead. “Is he . . . ?” She gestured to what looked like a wax statue awkwardly flopped on the desk.

  “Asleep?” said Aos, finally turning away from the wall. “Yes. I think so. I don’t understand how it’s . . .”