Authors: Pauls Toutonghi
We waited a little longer.
“We can still go back to the hotel,” I said. “There’s still time.”
“I’m waiting right here,” my mother said.
And then Agnes Mouri appeared on the grand staircase, wearing a form-fitting black dress and, this time, no shawl.
“Oh God,” my mother said. “Goddammit, she’s really beautiful.”
Then she was across the room and standing in front of us. My mother and I rose awkwardly to our feet.
“Please,” Agnes Mouri said. “Before you say anything more, I want you to know: I do not believe you.” She held up a single finger
in an angry, insistent gesture. “Or rather, I trust Akram, and Akram is insisting that you are a liar and a fake.” She adjusted the hem of her shirt. “But maybe that’s what you came here today to tell me. Maybe that is why you left so suddenly three days ago.”
“Mom,” I said. “This is Agnes Mouri. Agnes, this is my mother, Amy Clark-Saqr.”
My mother pointed toward me. “A liar and a fake?” she said, raising one eyebrow. “Khosi? I can assure you, madam, that my son is neither of those things.”
“Oh, really,” Agnes Mouri said. “Your son? Ah, I see. To extend the lie, to make the lie more believable. It’s all quite clear to me.”
Her accent was precise and almost English. It was also barely perceptible.
In 1835 Phineas Taylor Barnum moved to New York City. He began selling tickets to see Joice Heath, an elderly black woman whom he billed as George Washington’s 161-year-old nurse. Even though Heath was a hoax, her popularity gave him the money to start the American Museum, where, over two decades, he exhibited taxidermied tigers and waxwork politicians and watery mermaids and Siamese twins and Charles S. Stratton, the twenty-five-inch-tall midget who went by the stage name of General Tom Thumb. This was the beginning of something, its genesis, the soil in which something grew—the fertilizer-rich, nitrogen-blessed topsoil for the past 150 years of lion tamers and trapeze artists and clowns in tiny cars and various and sundry swindlers like my father. He was a member of the Direct Lineage of the American Charlatan. It didn’t matter where on earth he’d been born.
“And what did Akram tell you,” my mother said, “about me?”
“I don’t know who you are. But the woman you say you are, I’ve been assured, has been rotting in a coffin for twenty years.”
My mother ignored this. “I’m Akram’s first wife,” she said. “As far as I know, his first wife. Maybe not. Maybe he had a dozen before me. Even so, I have important things to tell you.”
I thought that, confronted by the same thing that had confronted me, confronted by the magnitude of my father’s lies, my mother would back away, retreat, like I had. I was wrong.
“Look,” she added, “I brought this with me. To show you.”
She took a cardstock document from her purse and unfolded it. She smoothed the creases flat on one thigh and handed it over. I looked over Agnes Mouri’s shoulder.
Certificate of Marriage
, I read.
State of Nevada, County of Clark. This is to certify that the undersigned, J. Aakre, Esq., did on the 9
th
day of May, A.D. 1980, join in lawful wedlock Akram Saqr of Cairo, state of Egypt, and Amy Marion Clark of Butte, state of Montana, with their mutual consent, in the presence of Rhonda Spencer and Wada Kinrabouz, who were witnesses
.
Agnes Mouri scanned the document. She swallowed once; I could tell that she was nervous. “A forgery,” she said.
“Why would I do that?” my mother said.
“I don’t know,” Agnes Mouri said. “All I know is that I’m supposed to get married—and now the heavens have opened.”
“There’s a reason for that,” my mother said. “It’s the man you’re marrying.”
Agnes Mouri shook her head. “
Mishmumkin
,” she said. “Impossible. Akram has been here for the past two days. You can’t imagine how upset he is.”
“It’s an act,” my mother said.
“Wait, wait,” I said. I sat down next to Agnes Mouri. “I left here the other day,” I said to her, “because I couldn’t imagine what you must be going through, and I felt guilty. I felt responsible. I felt like it was my fault. Now I see that it’s not. It’s Akram. It’s my father. My mom is right. It’s him.”
My mother began to enumerate the ways that my father had disappointed her. The list was long and specific; I’d heard much of it before. In fact, I’d grown up with the list as the background music to my childhood, the litany of complaints about the man she’d once loved, whose life she’d carried on even after he left, in a part of her that was isolated and inaccessible and dark. What I heard was the sadness, the abandonment, the brittle sorrow. But there was something else. And I couldn’t really hope to unravel the mystery of that interior space. Also, my head was pounding, and sweat had broken out on my body. I needed to find a momentary refuge so I could take a few deep, calming breaths.
“I’m sorry,” I said in Arabic. “Could I use your restroom?”
Agnes Mouri nodded and pointed down the hallway. “Second door on your left,” she said. She was distracted by listening to my mother. She seemed coiled, ready to leap, to attack. I wandered down the hall a little ways. I opened a door—what I thought was the second door—but I was in a different room, a room with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, shelves containing a number of carefully spotlit items. I left the door slightly ajar and crept over to the display cases. These were the antiquities missing from the front room. I stared in wonder at it all, at the jeweled knives and shards of pottery and stone slabs with hieroglyphic writing.
It’s a hell of a bathroom
, I thought.
Then I realized:
This is what I’m here to do
. This was what I had to do with the bracelet: restore it to Agnes Mouri. I took the copper object out of my pocket. I would slip it in among the other treasures.
I wavered. I couldn’t quite bring myself to put it back. Everything seemed to slip in and out of focus. Everything was gauzy and distant, as if I were standing on the bank of the river in my dream. I seemed to see it in front of me, the tumbling nameless expanse of water. It shone as it moved past, glittering with a thousand individual, changeable crenellations. Beyond the river, at a certain point, the rolling dun-colored hills became a flat tapestry, a solid drape of color. Wasn’t that a pine tree—
right there?
—a pine that had been devoured by a clutch of pine beetles? They can kill a tree in a year, pine beetles. They bore under its skin and lay their eggs, and then the larvae hatch and eat their way out, feasting on the soft, nutrient-rich bark. A tree usually doesn’t know it’s diseased until it’s too late.
I scratched my arm.
Wait a minute
, I thought.
A pine tree in Cairo?
I shook my head. The room surged back into focus, surged out of the hallucination. I looked down; I’d dropped the bracelet on the parquet floor. I heard footsteps in the hallway. I turned around in time to see Agnes Mouri batter her way into the room.
“You dirty little thief,” she said, as if confirming some basic fact. “I knew I couldn’t trust you.” Her breath caught in her throat. She knelt on the floor. “My bracelet,” she said. “My bracelet.”
“What’s going on?” my mother said from the hall. Now
she
was standing in the doorway. “Khosi,” she said. “What are you doing?” She turned to Agnes Mouri. “I’m sure there’s a perfectly rational explanation.”
“He’s a liar and a thief,” Agnes Mouri said, brandishing the artifact. “And you—you are his accomplice.”
“Oh dear,” my mother said.
I pushed my way past her. “I don’t feel so well,” I said.
“I’m calling the police,” Agnes Mouri said.
“I think,” I called back over my shoulder, “that we should leave.”
“We should leave,” my mother said, and nodded.
That’s pretty much all I remember. I know we left the Mouri household, dodging past Ibrahim and stumbling into the street. And then we walked, wildly and without direction, really. It was almost like I was floating above myself in some dissociative state, watching my knees fold and my equilibrium disappear entirely. At some point, I was aware of falling, of my falling body. And then I hit the ground with my shoulder, hit it hard and rolled into darkness. Voices stretched around me and wavered and disappeared. They disappeared. They disappeared.
I nearly died. I can say that now that the
nearly
is appended to the statement, now that I have a few years between myself and the illness that crashed over me on the streets of Cairo. In retrospect, it had been building for days: the persistent headache, the night sweats, the chills. I was brewing a foul and insistent pestilence inside of me.
It was the mosquito. Epidemiologists will tell you that an individual’s illness is difficult to trace, that the provenance of disease is almost never a certainty, that even Patient Zero is often only a guess. But I know it was the mosquito from that first day on the Cairene
street. I feel this with confidence. I can feel it in my blood. And what a mosquito it was:
Aedes aegypti
, an entire species named after Egypt. The primary transmitter of yellow fever. They live in discarded tires and oil drums and planters and any small amount of standing water. They’ve adapted to thrive in urban settings.
My blood was the host for the ailment, my own blood poisoning me, the yellow fever pulled through the muscle of my heavy heart, through its clench and release, funneled out into the whole of my body. I could imagine, I did imagine, that single vector of disease, that single perforation of my skin, while I was innocently walking down the street. It was probably because earlier that day, I’d eaten a plate of chicken livers. The revenge of the chicken:
You eat my liver, I will slaughter you with a vicious pathogen
.
There’s a vaccine for yellow fever. It’s easy to get. Any travel medicine specialist will give it to you over the course of a few months. It provides protection to 95 percent of the people who get it. I just didn’t do it. I didn’t have the patience.
I opened my eyes to my mother pinching my cheeks and saying my name over and over again. “Khosi? Baby boy?”
“Where am I?” I asked, opening my eyes. “It’s freezing in here.”
“We’re outside, sweetheart. It’s a hundred degrees, at least.”
My mother half lifted me to my feet. Here was the strange thing: If you’d told me that she would someday end up in a foreign country, sick and in need of a doctor but unsure how to find one, I wouldn’t have been surprised. It was her sort of thing, the unplanned trip, the disregard for consequences. But how had it happened to me?
To me?
I’d once labeled my underwear according to the days of the week. I liked to measure and regularize the distance between the containers
in the refrigerator. I’d once parked and reparked a car fifteen times to achieve the perfect angle in the parking lot.
“A clinic,” I said to my mom, even though my knees were shaking. “I need a clinic.”
My mother went up to a man on the street corner and asked if he knew directions to the hospital. He didn’t speak English. But as I watched, as I propped myself against the wall and held my aching stomach, shivering, he escorted her down the street to the nearest café. This was typical of Egyptians whom we met in Cairo. Almost without exception, they were kind and friendly and ready to help complete strangers.
Within two minutes, three young men were rushing toward us, three young men neither of us had ever met, and they surrounded us and helped move me down to a little wooden table at a café at the end of the street. I remember all of this quite clearly. They brought me a glass of water that I couldn’t drink. And then everyone seemed to be on a cell phone at once, calling different friends or relatives or government bureaus. It was hard to focus on anything other than my body, which felt like it had been plunged in ice; and now someone was slicing out my backbone with a paring knife. There seemed to be an argument going on. One of the men, a stocky, bearded fellow, appeared to be suggesting that they take me to his house.
“It is a nice house,” he said. “It is very clean.”
“Take half of me to one place,” I said quietly, “and half to the other.”
Nobody laughed.
“Who speaks English?” my mother said. “English?” she repeated, as if stripping the sentence of everything but its noun would prompt
a different response. What it did was transform our cadre of helpers into a Greek chorus, a harmony of uniform agreement.
“No English,” they said, seemingly all at once. “No English, no English.” Which was
some
English, after all.
I closed my eyes and leaned my head against my mother’s shoulder for the second time in as many days. It felt like a revolution, an amazement, a curiosity, an impossibility. Maybe this was what I wanted so badly, what I’d dreamed of having for so many years: a reliable parent, a source of comfort in times of need. Too bad I appeared to be dying in order to get it. Then I thought about my perfect-attendance awards and scrupulously clean toiletries and persistent weekly doing of laundry. My mother had never felt like she had to be anything other than what she was: disorder, chaos, disintegration. This was it: the dream of my life when I want what I have and have what I want. All it turned out to be was my mom’s shoulder, proffered at a moment of need.
“We have to call an ambulance,” she said. “You can’t walk.” She squeezed my hand. “How do you say
ambulance
?” She turned to the half-circle of men. “Ambulance?” she suggested.
“
El is’aef
,” I said.
“
El is’aef!
” she said. “
El is’aef?
”
This prompted another chorus, this time of laughter. I slumped farther down on the tabletop. The man closest to me tapped me on the shoulder. “Tell your mother we’ll carry you there more quickly,” he said. “By the time the ambulance arrives, you’ll already be dead.”
For some reason, I didn’t feel like translating this entire sentence. “They’ll carry me,” I said to her, and closed my eyes to rest.
Everything that happened over the next few hours happened
to
me. I was there, in that I occupied space within my body. I was unquestionably alive; my auditory nerves recorded the things going on around me; I felt the sensation of hands lifting me up, of shoulders supporting me, of the hot Cairene air against my skin. But my ability to communicate, to interact, to let my feelings be known: That dissipated. I was a slab of tissue. A butcher’s delight.