Authors: Pauls Toutonghi
Farid Rafiq: He was a big, potbellied man with a penchant for Aqua Velva. You could smell it from twenty yards. He kept a small bottle in his office, and he liked to dab it behind his ears at intervals throughout the day. Whenever he walked by, I couldn’t help it:
Aqua Velva
, I’d think.
Cools. Smoothes. Tones
. This afternoon he greeted me
with his customary
ahlan wa sahlan. Welcome, welcome!
With a particular gleam in the corner of his eye, he steered me toward the table farthest away from the kitchen.
“We’re all out of everything,” he said. “Maybe you should try Burger King next door?”
“I don’t think their Lebanese food is quite as good as yours,” I said. “My mother says hello,” I added, which—I have to admit—was more of a threat than a greeting.
“Tell her I’ll buy her
mulukhreja
recipe for a thousand dollars,” he said.
Even as he poured my water, he continued to insist that the kitchen was closed and that there was nothing on the menu that would even remotely interest me. I was doomed to be unsatisfied. “Why not go get a Whopper?” he suggested. “They are only a dollar ninety-nine. What a tremendous bargain, no? Nearly half a pound of flame-broiled beef!”
“Just think,” I said, “of the ecological devastation that occurred for each of those two-dollar burgers.”
After Rafiq finally let me order, I spent some time organizing the silverware. It needed to be perfectly aligned—organized, arranged, orchestrated—for the lunch to begin in earnest. Because how—how—could you eat if the tip of your fork and your napkin were out of alignment? It was an impossibility. It would be a travesty.
Somebody once told me: Reasons are the stories that you make up after you act. I understand this, I really do. I wish, I yearn, for the ability to give you my feelings, to simply transfer them to you at this moment, to cut a window into myself and display the substance, the grain and the character, of the images I saw. Because this cut would
relieve a pressure. In telling the story, the story would become easier to bear, to hold inside of me, where it is now, private and hidden and completely concealed. What I wanted to do was something spectacular. I wanted to call Natasha, to ask her to join me here, so I could reach over the table and kiss her, so I could press my lips against hers and run my fingers through her hair. She of course was not there. Any version of her would be a hallucination.
When the food came, it was delicious. Rafiq brought it to the table himself, repeating stock phrases about how I was his honored guest and always welcome,
inshallah
(God willing), at his restaurant. I idly wondered if he’d poisoned my meal. But the plates steamed and gave off the thick scent of chickpeas and coriander and saffron rice. He’d just baked the pita on the bread stone in his blazing wood-fired oven. He’d used a massive black-charred paddle. I do agree with M.F.K. Fisher, who said that
the smell of good bread baking is indescribable in its evocation of innocence and delight
.
I took my phone out of my pocket and turned it on again. Off/on, off/on. This time there was one message. I stopped chewing. I punched in my security code. Natasha’s voice expanded into the room—hesitant, tired-sounding, tentative. She needed time, she said, to think about everything. She was confused. It was a short, dispiriting message. Of course she was confused. I was confused, too, and hurt as well. But what did I expect? Let’s run away together and move to Tahiti? Let’s run away and join the circus or start a jug band or drive south to Mexico City? Let’s just—perhaps the most thrilling and terrifying of all possible ideas to me—let’s run away.
Rafiq lingered too close to the table while I was eating. He made
a great show of dusting and straightening and collecting menus. “You like it?” he finally said.
“It’s average,” I said.
Rafiq smiled. “Thank you,” he said. “How
is
your mother, anyway?”
I told him. His casual question turned into a ten-minute narrative of my problems.
“Oh dear,” Rafiq said when I’d finished. “You know, I never met your father. But he’s a legend in the community.”
“Exactly,” I said. “Legendary for lying. That’s what Mom says now. She says he’s not sick. She says there’s no way it’s true. She says he’s healthy as a horse.”
Rafiq glanced around the restaurant, perhaps to judge if the few other patrons were listening to us talk. He leaned forward and lowered his voice. “Why would he show up, then?” he said.
“I don’t know,” I said. “It’s strange. Maybe I’ll go to Egypt and track him down to ask him.”
At that, quite unexpectedly, Rafiq laughed. He laughed and laughed, laughed until tears came to his eyes.
“I could do it,” I said.
That only made him laugh more. He snorted. “Khosi Saqr, Butte’s best-known hermit.”
“I’m really quite social,” I said.
“Oh,” he said. “I am indeed sorry. It’s just so amusing. The thought of you dropping everything and flying around the world to look for your father.”
“A number of commercial airlines fly to Cairo,” I said.
Rafiq kept laughing. “It’s just so impossible,” he said. “It would
never happen. You, of all people. Your mother, she once told me that as a boy, you sorted your crayons according to their length.”
I blushed. “So that I’d know which colors I was using too much. Ease up on the indigo and choose cornflower blue, for example. It’s a smart strategy; the crayons last longer.”
“Egypt would eat you alive,” Rafiq said.
“No, it wouldn’t.”
I couldn’t stop blushing. I could feel the heat of it rising through me. I could feel it filling my cheeks with a steady burn. Embarrassment tumbled through my body, and my senses all felt alive and sharp, despite the lack of air coming into my lungs, and I could hear the clatter of forks and knives and, a few feet away, the single elderly man who slurped at his cup of sweetened mint tea. Behind the wall of the kitchen, Farid Rafiq’s sous chef stood poised over a large-mouthed cauldron of soup, a pinch of salt in his left hand, waiting for a moment to add the last bit of flavor to the broth, the broth that had come to a rolling boil, that teemed with heat, its surface tension bursting with pockets of hot expanding air. Beyond that, beyond the exterior wall of this building, and the exterior wall of the next building over, was another room with another set of lives, an insurance agency—depending on the direction you went—or a sporting goods store. And there, sitting at a desk and looking at an actuarial table or standing in an aisle and looking at a price tag or talking softly with someone about things that I could never imagine, were strangers, complete strangers, strangers who lived their lives so close to mine, so close but also utterly separate, and distant, and irredeemably lost to me. If you followed along from house to house, working your way outward through the downtown commercial
core, knocking through walls and rendering them invisible, disappearing and reappearing, smoke-floating like a wayward spirit, looking in on people from the city of Butte, and then the country of America, and then outward in an ever expanding geometric intimacy, spanning the whole globe, the entirety of our world, you’d find only a few people who knew me—Khosi Saqr—a handful of people whose recognition of my face would trigger a burst of light in their minds, a brief happy synaptic impulse deep within their memories, the bit of lightning that’s prompted by the recognition of someone you know. What a miracle they are, these pictures of us, these evidences of our bodies, carried around in the minds of human beings, human beings who, in my case, were thousands of lonely miles from here—who were encased in the darkness of night even as I sat here and ate lunch by myself on a sunlit summer day. There was an ache in me for them, an ache that was low and dark and alluvial and undid the sheltering sky.
“Rafiq,” I said. “Bring me the check.”
And so that—that—is how I decided to go to Cairo, Egypt, and track down my erstwhile father. There were a number of intervening steps. There was my teary departure from the mansion, and Ms. Vogel’s odd, hurried advice behind the closed door of her office. (“There’s a masseuse you should look up if you get to Tangier. He was a friend of Paul Bowles, and he’s very discreet and has incredibly strong hands.”) There was a hasty doctor’s appointment where my family physician, Dr. Scott, told me that it was wrong to leave without at least two months’ worth of immunizations. How could I
explain the deep and compelling pressure, the urgency, of the trip? I had two weeks, I told him. No more, no less.
“We’ll do what we can,” he said, his face starched taut and white as a funeral collar. “Are you sure you want to do this? You of all people.”
I shook my head. “What does that mean?” I said.
“I’m just pointing out,” he said, “that you got a tetanus booster last year because you picked up a rusty wrench.”
“Flakes,” I said. “Tetanus flakes. They could have penetrated the exterior layer of my skin.”
Dr. Scott frowned. “And,” he said, “last year you had me remove a freckle.”
“It had a slight discoloration,” I said.
“It was a freckle,” he said.
“It could have been melanoma,” I protested.
He turned and reached for the examination room door, still shaking his head. “The nurse will be in with your first doses shortly,” he said, and disappeared with a flourish of his lab coat.
There were also a number of startling conversations with my mother.
The first one happened that evening, after I worked the Bitterroot Savings Bank annual shareholders’ dinner at the Copper King Mansion. It was a lavish affair for which the catering staff had to wear its nineteenth-century period costumes. Though the Clark Mansion was one of the first in the world to have fully electrical lights—with much of the copper wiring drawn from Clark’s own Anaconda Mine—guests who selected the nineteenth-century theme
often wanted their evenings to be candlelit. Predictably, the staff hated it. We stumbled everywhere, and the wool of the uniforms itched insatiably.
But the guests seemed to have a good time. Senator Crenshaw was there, as well as former governor Mark Racicot. They were both easy to spot; they both wore Stetson hats. Crenshaw had grown up on a cattle ranch, so he never went to any formal occasion without his Stetson. Somehow this was a guarantee of authenticity in Montana high society. The more formal the dinner, the more likely you were to find a Stetson or two.
I came home exhausted. My collar had chafed a red ring around my neck. My feet ached from the stiff arches of my formal shoes. I found my mother in the kitchen, blender in hand, a suspicious green bottle labeled N
UTRITIVE
K
ELP
on the counter beside her. “Would you care for a green-algae smoothie?” she said by way of greeting. “They regenerate muscle tissue and help build neural sheathing.”
I told her that my neural sheathing was, as far as I could tell, adequate.
“Suit yourself,” she said. “It tastes just like the ocean.”
Whether or not this was a positive attribute, she didn’t say, so we took her kelp smoothie and walked into the living room and sat on the couch. We needed to talk, I told her. She agreed. I guess I illustrated to her how I’d felt about things. As we talked, the conversation seemed inevitable, it seemed like the conclusion of something that had started forty-eight hours ago with the two of us digging through the ruins of our vegetable garden, stripping it of all its vegetation.
I don’t know how other people make decisions. From what I understand, not everyone makes decisions like I just had. But it was clear to me then: I needed to find my dad. I needed to track down this missing part of my story, this vanished and fugitive sector of my genealogy, this dim adumbration of my family’s lost past.
A quick surprise: When I told her, she surprised me with a gesture. She stood up and walked over to where I was sitting and took me in her arms and hugged me close against her.
I don’t remember going up to my room. I was that exhausted. Breakfast felt like a continuation of the previous night with my mother. The bright green smoothie made a reappearance. My mom, however, was a little less comforting. This time she said without any segue: “If you go, you need to know this: Marrying Akram Saqr was the single greatest mistake I ever made.”
I paused. “Okay,” I said.
“Nothing I have done,” she continued, “before or since, has been such an error.”
I wanted to point out to her that I knew this, that I knew it as certainly as I knew anything else—that I blamed him, in large part, for the manifestation of the genetic disease that had so characterized my childhood. Anxiety has a physiological effect on the body. My mother had spent years submerged in the anxiety of losing her husband. I wanted to tell her that I did blame him for so many different things, including the currently stripped and vegetationless garden. I wanted to tell her that I harbored no delusions about my father’s role in my mother’s life. But I couldn’t figure out how to say it, not all of it at once.
“I hope I remember to take my pills when you’re gone,” she said.
“Is that a threat?” I said.
“Oh, Khosi,” my mother said. “If you go, you’re going to regret it. You will regret this, I promise you.”
“When have I ever done anything,” I said, “that I regret?”
“This will be first and foremost,” she said.
“You can’t be sure of that,” I said.
“Of course I can,” she said. “I lived it.”
“I refuse to accept that,” I said.
“You can refuse all you want,” she said, “but it won’t change the incontrovertible fact.”
“I have faith in myself,” I said.
“Of course you do,” she said. “I have faith in you, too.”
“Just not now?”
“Not with this man,” she said. “You have no idea.”
On my last night in Butte, I went to the Yacht Club. I squinted as I walked through the door, adjusting to the lack of light. It was busy. Natasha and I, one night earlier in the summer, had searched the whole bar for a light source other than a neon beer sign. No luck. I suppose it was kind of a rough place. It was also the only place I knew of with off-track betting. I settled in at the bar. A blanket of cigarette smoke enveloped me, rising and tumbling through the air, almost a solid mass. Chuck Wilson removed a rack of pint glasses from the dishwasher. He placed them on the counter in front of him. Before I could say anything, he brought me a double bourbon, neat, and a Miller Lite.