Evel Knievel Days (26 page)

The Souq al-Goma’a was the Friday Market, the open-air bazaar where the poorest residents of Cairo went to sell anything they could get their hands on, including their own personal possessions. I knew about it, but I’d never been there. And the
ashwaiyyat
—they were essentially the slums. Or rather, the poorer settlements, many of them squats, where over half of Cairo’s seventeen million inhabitants lived. Moqattan Hills was an impoverished Coptic district. The
zabaleen
, the city’s informal trash collectors, lived there by the thousands, sorting trash in their living rooms.

“No,” I said. “I’ve never been there. I’ve only been in Cairo for a few days. Almost a week.”

“But you are a Christian?” he said.

“What is he asking you?” my mother said.

“Hang on a second, Mom,” I said. And then: “Sure. My grandparents certainly were. But why should that matter? What did you find?” Even as I was talking to the doctor, I was starting to feel better. The headache, the awful headache that had descended upon me like a noxious fog, was starting to lessen.

“We found yellow fever antibodies. And in those places there have been yellow fever outbreaks over the past few months.”

“I see,” I said. I looked at my mother. “Yellow fever. They think it’s yellow fever.”

“Jesus Christ,” she said.

“Did He get yellow fever?” I said.

“Very funny,” she said.

I looked up at the doctor. “Okay, what does that mean? Will I recover? You know,” I added, “I feel a little better.”

“It’s the initial remission phase,” the doctor said. “That’s common with this disease.”

“I see,” I said. “Aren’t you just the life of the party?” This colloquial American phrase didn’t translate well into Arabic.
Are you not alive at the gathering?
is what I actually said, which didn’t have quite the same resonance as the original.

“I don’t understand,” the doctor said.

“Never mind,” I said. “What can I do?”

“Nothing,” the doctor said. “We wait a while here and see what happens.”

We talked a little longer, my translations of my mother’s questions and the doctor’s terse, frustrated answers. “We have to wait and see,” he said, and simply walked out of the room.

We waited. We waited for five, six hours. My intellect: entirely useless. I was bored. Bored and healthy. For those few hours, those few hours in that fetid hospital room, I have to admit that I appreciated my health, my pain-free head, my ability to breathe. These were all things that I’d taken for granted my whole life. I hadn’t considered how wonderful it was not to have a debilitating headache, hadn’t considered the miracle that is the body, intact.

Isn’t this just going splendidly?
I thought. I thought of Natasha, how she’d always wanted us to travel together: Missoula, Cheyenne, Des Moines.
Wouldn’t she be proud of me now?
Actually, I realized, lying there on my back, the drained IV still not replaced, hanging lifeless above me: She’d be horrified. I knew that if she could see this wreck of a hospital, this bed, this frantic wreck of a mother, Natasha would be on the next plane to Egypt. She’d be at my bedside in hours. Calvin Stuckey didn’t matter. I knew that for certain. I was filled with a deep longing to be near her, to be at the Berkeley Pit Yacht Club with her, drinking Miller High Life (The Champagne of Beers™), debating whether Ernest Tubb’s early records outshone those of a young Hank Williams (they did). That felt like a lost life, irredeemable in the wash of the past. I missed her, though, desperately missed her. I imagined Natasha’s smile, I imagined her laughter filling the air around my filthy hospital bed.

That was when I felt it. To say that the disease rushed back would be inadequate. To say that it flattened me and butchered me and eviscerated me and seared me: That would perhaps be closer to the feeling. I felt like I was being flayed, like the tissue of my brain was liquefying and leaking out. My mother confirmed later that this was a distinct possibility. At one point during that week of hell, I bled
from my eyes. When that happened, my skin was waxy yellow—a color not far from the color of a legal pad—and I cried blood tears. Blood tears? There’s a point at which gallows humor breaks down and fails to raise your spirits.

And that point—that point is the gallows.

L
IKE
I
SAID BEFORE
, E
GYPTIAN
cooking is folk magic. Here is the perfect example: the baklava that I credit for my recovery. My aunts called it Christian-Muslim Cooperation Baklava. Each had a secret ingredient that she added to the recipe at a prearranged time. Kebi Merit orchestrated and supervised the addition of these ingredients. She was as scrupulous as a UN peacekeeper enforcing the tenets of an international treaty. Christian-Muslim Cooperation Baklava is also at the center of
The Life and Times of Akram Saqr and Amy Clark, My One and Only Parents, as Told by Me, My Mother’s One and Only Son, Fruit of Her Womb, 100 Percent Maculate Conception, Part Three (Insensate Remix)
.

Acute yellow fever—15 percent of patients get it. You can bleed, as I did, from your mouth or your eyes or your ears. Your kidneys or your liver can fail. You can die. A significant portion of patients with acute yellow fever do die. It is a fatal malady. In my case, it was the luckiest thing that ever happened to me.

When confronted by a potentially dying son in a country you’ve
never been to where you don’t speak the language and you are isolated from any understanding of the culture: What do you do? My mother went outside into the street, leaving me in my hospital room, unconscious. She went to the bank. She took out two hundred Egyptian pounds. She came back to the hospital. But immediately before she did that, she bought herself a cup of tea.

It came from a tea vendor in an alley beside the hospital; Cairo is a city of alleys, of crowded alleys in which you’ll find tea stalls and doctors’ offices and tailors and tiny grocery stores. She bought a cup of spiced milky tea in a small plastic container. She thanked the vendor and gave him a ten-pound tip, the equivalent of a week’s salary. Then she went back into the hospital, walked over to the attendant who’d admitted us, and seized the woman’s phone. She handed over, wordlessly, another ten-pound note. Then she called Wada in Butte. After ten rings, Wada answered, sounding groggy.

My mother brought her up to speed. It was a worst-case scenario, she said. She told her she’d thought at first that she could handle it. She didn’t want to ask anyone for help. But she needed someone, my mother confessed, who could help her deal with the doctors. “I think I might be needlessly bribing them,” she said. She added, “Should I call Akram?”

“Should you call Akram?” Wada said.

“That’s what I asked you,” my mother said.

“I know that’s what you asked me,” Wada said. “Do you have his number?”

“I have his address.”

“Then why on earth haven’t you had someone look him up in the phone book?”

During all of this, I slept in my hospital bed. Although
slept
sounds luxurious. Actually, I rotted. I rotted slowly and with resolute feverish abandon.

Voices will move you back and forth through time. With the slightest word, the slightest intonation, you’re transported to a past that you might—or might not—want to reimagine. When my mother called the number she’d secured for her ex-husband, she braced herself for a displacement of titanic proportions.

“
Aiwa meen
,” he said. His voice was steely and confident and cut immediately through the sound of the ringer. “Akram Saqr.”

Egyptians are well known for the way they say hello. Any encounter can begin five or six times, with variations on a greeting, with slightly different colloquialisms that alter only slightly the tone of what’s being said. They will inquire about families and weather and health and almost anything else you can imagine. Often just starting a conversation can take five or ten minutes. This, however, was not one of those occasions.

“Hello, Akram,” my mother said.

Another pause.

“Amy?”

“Yes,” she said. “It’s Amy.”

A third—and final—lengthy pause.

“You know, the police are looking for you. I leave messages at Khosi’s hotel, and he doesn’t return them. The desk clerks say they haven’t seen him. I’m concerned.”

“Not as concerned as you should be,” my mother said. She shifted the receiver on her shoulder. “You have no idea.”

“I’m sorry?” my father said.

A word here about my father’s accent when he spoke English. It was a downy accent. Soft and feathery and plush like a pillow. You sank into it, listening to him shape vowels and consonants in a way that seemed to ease toward you. The pronunciation seemed to be mostly French, though the timbre of his voice wasn’t nasal. It was throaty Arabic and prep-school English. He talked like all of the characters from the cast of
Casablanca
mixed together, including Ingrid Bergman.

“I said: You have no idea,” she repeated. Then she told him where I was, and what I was suffering from, and that my fever currently was 104.

Within thirty minutes, my father walked through the door of the hospital. He wore a black suit—a rich, supple fabric with a shiny weave—along with a white shirt and a maroon tie. These were the colors of the Egyptian flag. He also wore cuff links: diamond-studded cufflinks that glimmered against the woolen fabric. And he carried with him pajamas. “That was the amazing thing,” my mother later told me. “The two pairs of pajamas draped over the arm of his suit.”

My mother met him in the doorway. She met him under the sign, the bright white neon sign that said F
RANCO-
A
MERICAN
H
OSPITAL
, Z
EMALEK
.

“Where is he?” my father said. “We need to get him out of here immediately. Why didn’t you call me earlier?”

“Calling you,” she said, “is the last thing I wanted to do.”

“You should have taken him to a Muslim Brotherhood hospital, at the very least,” he said.

She said nothing. Wordlessly, she turned and walked him toward the ICU.

The discharge paperwork was signed within ten minutes. I was moaning, my mother told me later, moaning the whole time they wheeled me back toward the lobby and out the front door. While they were preparing the paperwork, my father was on the phone at the nurse’s station. Now my mother saw why. In the hospital loading zone, we were greeted by a flotilla of cars: four identical long black sedans with mirrored windows. If she could’ve read Arabic, she would’ve translated the signs emblazoned on each of the vehicles.

P
RESIDENTIAL
M
OTORCADE
, they read. It was also written on each of the tinted windows and in looping Arabic script on each trunk.

“Impressive,” my mother said.

“This,” my father said, “is the fastest way to go from one point to another in Cairo.”

“And you can rent it?” she said.

“For a price,” he said. “It’s the way Mubarak gets anywhere.”

“Does it come with Mubarak?”

“For a price,” he said.

“Seriously,” she said, “are these his actual cars?”

“Get in,” my father said.

They loaded us into the main sedan, laying me on the carpeted floor, wrapping me in blankets that they’d brought with them. My skin had started to jaundice; my liver had been taxed by the flotilla of toxins in my blood. My father had managed to procure me a new bag of IV fluids. He’d also procured—remarkably—his own doctor, a man impressively dressed in a pin-striped lab coat. My parents sat on the seat opposite me. Though I’d been given magnesium sulfate and a sedative, I do have one image, one single brief flare
of a memory: opening my eyes and seeing their legs—my mother’s and father’s—framed against black leather upholstery. The four sedans made their way into traffic. It turned out the fake presidential motorcade
was
much faster than a taxi. Traffic parted. Roadways opened up.

“I remember holding him in my lap,” my mother said as the car sped through the city. “I remember holding him when he could fit in both hands. When he was six pounds and smelled like butter.”

My father looked down at me. “I held him, too,” he said.

“You know, Akram,” my mother said as she settled into her seat, “you really are a son of a bitch.” She ran one hand over my sweaty forehead, smoothing the wet hair back and out of my eyes. The physician continued kneeling on the floor of the car, listening to my lungs, checking my pulse. “You’re getting remarried. That’s why you needed the papers. To cover your ass.”

“There is certainly no need for vulgarity,” my father said, adjusting his cuff links.

“You’re not sick at all, are you?”

“Technically,” he said, “I did have the flu. Not long ago. A few months ago. It was a terrible case of the flu. And there’s been bird flu here, so the doctors were concerned.”

My mother frowned at him.

“No,” he finally said, “I’m perfectly healthy,
el hamdillah
.”

“I knew it. I could always tell when you were lying.”

“No, you couldn’t. Jesus, Amy, could you just calm down for one moment. You have no idea the problems you’ve caused for me these past few days.”