Evel Knievel Days (30 page)

My mother returned in the late afternoon. She did indeed look composed and presentable, with a new haircut and a shirt that I didn’t recognize. She edged her way into my room, flanked by yet another doctor in a white lab coat. I’ve always wondered why doctors wear the white coat. Why not some other color? Why not taupe or lilac or cerulean? My mother moved slowly toward me, holding me steadily in the center of her gaze. I almost felt transfixed.

“This is Dr. Mdesi,” my mother said. “He has something he wants to discuss with us.”

Dr. Mdesi was a straight-backed post of a man, a man with posture so perfect, he could have been the marshal of a parade. He had dense white hair and luminescent dark black skin. His English was accented with the cadence of sub-Saharan Africa. Perhaps he, too, had once been a stranger to this country, this city.

I nodded. “Okay. My schedule is wide open.”

“Now, Khosi,” he said, “I want you to know that we are liver specialists here at Dar Al Fouad.”

“That’s nice,” I said, feeling the way the skin of my face was pulled taut against my cheekbones. “Do you serve it in the cafeteria as well?”

“I see that your sense of humor,” the doctor said, “has survived the illness intact.”

“He’s always like this,” my mother said. “It’s a permanent condition.”

“That’s fine,” Dr. Mdesi said, sitting on one of the chairs beside
my bed. “However, I’m afraid I have something serious to discuss with you. It’s about your most recent blood work.”

These are never words that you want to hear a doctor say. Invariably, they don’t tell you: “It’s very serious. Seriously
awesome
, that is! Kick-ass numbers on the blood work, old chap. You’re in great shape.”

I must have blanched. I glanced over at my mother. She was as pale as the doctor’s lab coat.

“There are some irregularities with your liver enzymes,” Dr. Mdesi said. He listed a range of numbers, rattling off a dense vocabulary of terms that seemed oddly familiar. They’d discovered these irregularities, he told me, while doing routine tests related to the yellow fever. And then he asked me one somewhat disarming question. “Any hallucinations at all?” he said. “Seeing anything unusual that you can’t explain? Any unusually strong feelings that manifest themselves in the world? A hallucination isn’t always visual. That’s a common misconception.”

“No,” I said. “No hallucinations.”

“None at all?” he said.

“Nope,” I said.

“Are you certain?” he said.

“Absolutely,” I said. “Completely certain.”

“Good,” he said. “Otherwise, we’d be more concerned.”

My mother was standing at my bedside and stroking my hair, pulling it out of my eyes, tucking it behind my ear. She was smiling down at me. It was a soft smile, a look of empathy, of empathetic understanding. “I’m not really here,” she said.

“Very funny, Mom,” I answered.

Then came the part that astonished me: Dr. Mdesi telling me that, given my family history and certain inherited propensities of the Egyptian people, it was fairly likely that I was a not yet fully symptomatic carrier of Wilson’s disease.

“It’s an autosomal recessive genetic disorder,” he said, “caused by a mutation of the ATP7B gene.”

“I know,” I said, “exactly what it is. You’ve got to be joking. I’ve been tested.”

“Although we’re sequencing the genome,” Dr. Mdesi said, “these things still aren’t completely understood. They can have a rapid onset.”

“It’s going to be fine, darling,” my mother said. “Think of it like I do: The world is just beginning to awake. It’s beginning to awake, and here we are, awakening with it. Besides, I’ve got you covered. I brought extra pills.”

She had brought me a single dose of her medication: four small brightly colored pills, pills the size of aspirin. Dr. Mdesi nodded, and she put them on the bedside table. I stared down at them. They looked like the eggs of some exotic hummingbird, nestled in a little paper cup.

“Officially,” the doctor said, “I never saw this happen.”

That was that. Dr. Mdesi told me that they’d like to see me on an outpatient basis while I remained in Egypt. My liver enzymes were elevated, but nothing was indicative—yet—of a full-scale, systemic collapse. That, I suppose, was the good news. The doctor left with my mother, both of them exiting through the half-pulled drapes. I could hear the murmur of their conversation as it traveled down
the hall. I picked up the container of medication. I took out a Cuprimine and let it rest on my palm.

And then I heard the sound of hooves. Hooves and the neighing of a horse, disembodied and floating just outside the window. I turned toward the sound, and there he was, striding resolutely through the glass: the Ghost of William Andrews Clark. He tripped over the trash can.

“How can a ghost be clumsy?” I said.

“Khosi, my friend,” he said, “you live to a hundred and sixty-six, then tell me how graceful you feel.”

“Odds are against one-sixty-six,” I said, raising the cup of pills.

He frowned. “Cuprimine,” he said. “Cyprine. Zinc acetate. Ah, I know them well.” He shifted his weight from one boot to the other. “Well, damn,” he said. “I guess you’ll be just fine without me, though. Yes, sir. You ain’t no acorn calf.”

“Acorn calf?” I said.

“Greenhorn, newbie, angel-foot, soft-hide, milkmaid, Mississippi gunboat.”

“I get it,” I said.

“Just offering some synonyms,” he said. “You’re a good egg. You’ll be just fine without me.”

“I guess this is goodbye, then,” I said.

He reached out and ruffled my hair. His touch was soft, like you’d imagine the touch of a ghost, almost like a breath of air from some distant open doorway.

“You know,” said the Ghost of William Andrews Clark, “there’s nothin’ funnier than a giraffe in a bow tie.”

“That’s not comprehensible,” I said.

“I’m just happy that you’re pulling through. You’ve got a lot to do here. I was worried about you, hoss. You’re not exactly the most adaptable fellow in the entire United States of America.”

“I’m not in the United States of America,” I said.

“I was worried you’d have a total psychological breakdown,” he continued. “You’re fragile, Khosi. But you’re also stubborn as hell.”

“That stubbornness,” I said, “is a good thing.”

“It is,” said the Ghost of William Andrews Clark, “and it isn’t.”

There was talk in the hallway of a dust storm. I overheard the scrap of conversation, the Arabic words floating back to me, and I imagined how the city might look in a haze of pulverized sand. The dust would mix evenly with the air, an emulsion. It would slip into the house, despite every door being shut, and layer over everything in a sticky covering. The hospital would have to take a series of measures to cope. I drifted into this thought, and the Ghost of William Andrews Clark drifted with me. He became a dusty wind, rising up off the surface of the desert.

“Whoa, there,” he said, snapping back into focus. “You’re not getting off the hook that easily. I don’t know if you can tell, but pretty much everyone spends their days worrying about you.”

“That can’t be true,” I said.

“Of course they do. You’re wildly compulsive, son. You don’t act right. You know that, though. You know it, and you’re going to fix it.”

“I give myself three-to-one odds,” I said. “At best.”

“You’ll do fine,” he said. “First of all, you stop these here hallucinations.”

“I’ll miss you,” I said. I heard footsteps coming down the hall.

“I hitched Nugget out front,” said the Ghost of William Andrews Clark. “I hope she doesn’t get a ticket.”

“Can they ticket a ghost horse?” I said.

He was already starting to fade away.

“Wait,” I said. “Is there anything else? Anything, you know, from the Great Beyond?”

“Shucks, cowpoke,” he said as he flickered and diminished into the dust of a thousand lonesome prairies. “If you feel like dancin’, there ain’t no need for an orchestra.”

And then he disappeared.

I
F YOU’RE A FOREIGN TOURIST
and you happen to be in a hotel—the Mena Park, for example, or the Fairmont Nile, or even the Cairo Kewayis Marriott—and you see a wedding, ask for an invitation. You won’t be turned down. Why would you be? There’s food to be eaten, after all, and the band will play as long as anyone is left standing. Heaven, for an Egyptian family, is an endless marriage party. It staggers with the rhythm of the
zaffa
—the ceremonial procession—with its irresistible and hypnotic beat. How can we hope to understand love, as human beings? How can we measure the iridescent, obdurate truth, the fact that we’re powerless before love’s compulsions in the same way that we’re powerless before the mop of the dark sky with its lashes of stars? How? With the help of Taheya Karioka, the famous Cairene belly dancer, and Um Khaltoum, singing a soft melody in her smoky operatic alto.

I am describing not only Egyptian weddings but one particular Egyptian wedding: the Egyptian wedding of my father, which happened on Sunday, September 7, 2008, just as he’d said it would. This
was quite the surprise. It had taken quite a bit of apologetic maneuvering on my father’s part. An even larger surprise was what my mother offered to do: the conversation that we had on the day I was released from the hospital. We were sitting together—momentarily alone together—in the kitchen at Talaat Harb, drinking cups of sweetened mint tea.

“Khosi,” she said. “I have something I want to run by you before I bring it out into the world at large.”

My mom floated a proposition. How would I feel, she wondered, if she offered to cook the entire wedding meal for my father and his new wife and all of the assembled wedding guests?

“I think it’s a mistake,” I said.

She frowned. The kitchen counter behind her, I noticed, was chipped along its rim. The tiles looked dilapidated but somehow austere. They’d worn down to a patchwork of interlaced white and yellow.

“I don’t know, Mom. I do, however,” and here I lifted my small glass cup, “love mint tea.”

My mother shook her head. “You know,” she said, “your father battled an addiction for many years.”

“Come on,” I said. “You can’t possibly believe that. That’s nonsense. He was selfish; he might still be selfish. Who knows if people can change.”

“It’s not nonsense,” she said. “And you didn’t see him at the hospital. He slept next to you for almost two weeks. If I didn’t see it before, I see it now: He regrets his mistakes. I don’t forgive them. But he knows they were mistakes.”

“He wouldn’t admit that directly,” I said.

“Of course not,” my mother said. She looked down into the steam from her tea. She let the steam rise up and wrap around her. “But we’ve been talking for days. It’s all a process of negotiation.”

I shook my head. Over the hum of the air conditioner, I heard the sound of the afternoon call to prayer. “I don’t know,” I said.

“It’s probably not a good idea,” my mother said quickly. “Not at all. But you know: The beauty of life is that it’s yours.” She cleared her throat. “And besides,” she went on quietly, “this might help me deal with the part of myself that’s still in love with him.” She paused. “His sisters have also promised to give me all of their recipes. So it’s a win-win proposition, really.” When I didn’t say anything more, she added, “I wish I could explain it to you. I really do.”

The days passed and turned into weeks, and then it was the day of the wedding. The only objection to my mother’s gesture was raised by Kebi Merit, who felt that all ex-wives wanted to murder their husbands. She felt that it was an American tradition. “I have seen the stories about it on the television program
Dynasty
,” she said, and there was no amount of dissuading that would do the trick.

I was still a bit of a wreck. My arms felt leaden. They rested in my lap as I sat at the table in the kitchen and watched my mother guide the preparations. She was at the center of a foreign city that was at the center of a foreign country and a foreign culture. I thought of the hub of a wheel, which stays stationary even as the exterior turns. Even under these circumstances, she was undoubtedly the hub. She directed a fleet of vegetable choppers and lamb mincers and general, all-purpose amateur sous chefs. I remembered a damp, quiet intimacy to early mornings in the kitchens of my
childhood; this was a dry, frantic, loud intimacy. An intimacy with a lot of shouting in Arabic.

At ten o’clock, my mother stepped out for an hour. When she returned, she strode dramatically into the kitchen.
Strode
was the only verb to describe the way she walked. She bore a big wicker basket in each hand. Each basket had a blanket tucked over it. The blankets were soft, fuzzy wool. She placed them in the center of the table, just a few feet from me.

“I went to the
khan
,” she said, a note of triumph in her voice. “It really wasn’t as hard as I’d imagined.”

I translated this into Arabic for Kebi Merit.

“Was it a good price?” Kebi Merit said. I translated this. She scowled suspiciously at my mother. “Let’s see them, you clever American hussy.” This, I didn’t translate.

My mother pulled off the blankets and revealed the contents of the baskets: pigeons. At least a hundred dead, feathery pigeons, arranged carefully in the blankets, lying atop one another, tucked under one another’s wings, almost as if they were asleep. Except for the eyes. Many of their eyes were open and fixed and unblinking. They looked like the eyes of dolls.
Hamam mahshy:
Arguably the national dish of Egypt, a staple of many Egyptian weddings.