Evel Knievel Days (8 page)

She didn’t answer.

“I can’t talk about this now,” she said again. And then she said, “No, no, I can. I can. It’s fascinating, in a way. You just have no idea. None. You don’t know what it’s like to wake up every morning missing someone for a month, for a year, for a decade. It’s embarrassing.”

As my mother talked, I took a few steps over toward the glass of the living room window. I stared up into the darkness. Even though we were in the center of town, I could have counted hundreds, if not thousands, of stars. The night sky in Butte opens up unlike any other sky I’ve seen. The stars form a canopy, bright and full and overflowing.

I heard the legs of my mother’s chair scrape against the floor. “I loved him,” she was saying, “but he didn’t care about anyone but himself.” I heard her walk across the room to where I was standing. I could sense her body, visceral, solid in the room behind me. I turned
around. I swiveled, really, right into her open arms. She hugged me then, no, she clutched me—that was the only verb that would adequately describe the strength of her embrace—she clutched me and then held me away from her, looking straight into my eyes.

“You don’t know this man,” she said. “You think you want to meet him, but you don’t. The best day of my life was the day he disappeared.”

“I know, Mom,” I said. “I know.”

Of course I didn’t know. Or at least I didn’t believe her, not really. She’d said it to me a dozen times, that very sentence, a sentence she’d memorized, that she believed. And then I realized something—I saw the man from the museum again. He reappeared in front of me with the coat and his graying good looks.
My father?
I wondered.
Come to visit?

“Did he ask to see me?” I said.

I could feel her pull away from me, could feel some part of her reorient, could feel her strain toward some distant magnetic pole. “I told him,” she said, “that if he went near you, I’d kill him.”

“Okay,” I said. “That’s friendly.”

“I needed to protect you somehow, my dear,” she said. “I told him I’d shoot him, or possibly stab him, or—perhaps even poison him. You know: with a dart gun. Like a Russian secret agent.”

“And are you going to kill him if
I
do the approaching?”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” she said. She walked over to the dark mahogany built-in. She reached up and opened the leaded glass of its door. She pulled a pack of Marlboros and a book of matches from a concealed alcove. She lit one. “Don’t say a word,” she said. “I know they’re not good for me. What I really want is a Butterfinger.”

“You can’t have a Butterfinger,” I said almost reflexively. I shook my head. “You’ve got to know where he’s staying.”

“He’s gone.”

“You’re lying,” I said. “Where is he: Econo Lodge? Holiday Inn? Is he staying with Wada?”

“He left, Khosi,” she said. “He got his paperwork and left. He’s in the air somewhere, flirting with a stewardess.”

I walked over to our big writing desk. I pulled out the Yellow Pages. I dropped it on the leather-padded surface. I looked up
hotels
.

“I’m going to call every single one,” I said. “I’ll start with A. Anaconda Best Western. It has a heated pool.”

“You don’t understand,” my mother said.

“Or here we go,” I said. “Anaconda Hampton Inn. They have a continental breakfast and free HBO.”

“Your father,” my mother said, and here she rubbed the bridge of her nose, pressed in on it, lingering there with her head tilted and the tendons of her neck firing like pistons. “Your father told me he was dying.” She looked up and made eye contact. “And that he had to get back to Cairo to see some kind of specialist. I drove him to the airport. I watched him leave myself. He’s not here.”

“Oh my God.” I said. “That’s terrible.”

“Oh, please,” she said. She finished her cigarette. She pulled a second one from the pack. She looked at it, turning over the cylinder in her fingers. I watched the tips of her fingernails negotiate the white seam of the paper. She blew her nose on her sleeve and exhaled. “Damn these sinuses,” she said. And then: “Listen, darling. It’s just not true. That man is perfectly healthy. He’s not dying. I have
no idea why he waited twenty years to have me sign the papers, but it’s not because he’s ill.”

I turned away from my mother. I filled my head with as many good things about her as I could imagine. For some reason, I thought of one thing—of playing Yahtzee with her for hours on winter nights, right here at the dining room table, the fireplace hissing and spitting, steady snow falling outside, accumulating on the roads despite the work of the snowplows.

“What,” I said, “did he tell you he had?”

“I didn’t ask specifics,” she said. She lit the second cigarette.

“You could have told me,” I said.

“Khosi,” she said. “Don’t.”

“You could have mentioned something: ‘Oh, your father’s here, by the way, and he says he’s dying, maybe you’d like to meet him?’ ”

“Khosi: He’s not dying.”

“You can’t be sure of that,” I said. “You just can’t.” In a fit of frustration, I turned and went upstairs, leaving my mother to her candles. This is where the important parts of life occur, I think, in the damp interstitial moments, in the transitions that rise from darkness. We could say something, but we don’t. Instead, I brushed my teeth aggressively. While I was brushing them, the phone rang. It was Natasha. I decided not to answer. Instead, I turned the phone off completely.

I tried to get some sleep. At three or four in the morning, when the nervous twitching in my neck had subsided somewhat, I did manage to finally close my eyes. There was no
Jeopardy!
dream, no lifelike imitation of Alex Trebek, just darkness and uncomfortable heat and damp covers. I awoke and seemed to see snakes coiling out
of the pocket of my jeans, coiling out of the denim and slithering up to hang from the ceiling. They writhed in a luminous and variegated coil. “Khosi,” they hissed at me with their sibilant voices. “Khosi, we’re waiting for you. We love you. We miss you.”

Descartes said that in your dreams you’re accustomed to seeing the same things that lunatics see during daylight, and by morning I would’ve had a hard time arguing with his theory. At six
A.M
. I got up and padded to the bathroom and took a shower. I stayed in the shower until the water ran cold. Then I got out, my fingers shriveled to tiny prunes.

What’s it like to be the child of an immigrant? I know and I don’t know, both. I have a family tree somewhere, but I don’t know where, and it’s probably in Arabic, or possibly French, or possibly both. The past, the history of my family, is a strange and hybrid beast. On the one side: exhaustively documented. I live and work in its midst. But on the other side: nothing. No body, no clothes, no cane, no toupee, no set of dentures, no artifacts whatsoever. Only a vocabulary that vanishes as soon as it’s fashioned into language. Only the vocabulary of exile and disappearance.

I
GUESS BY NOW IT’S
clear that I’ve been avoiding it. I’ve been a little distracted, I have to admit, but here it is:
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 One, the Meeting
.

Nineteen seventy-seven was not the best year for fashion. Anyone’s family photographs will illustrate this point: pant legs like cone collars on a pet, buttons the size of silver dollars, fabric derived entirely from petroleum. My dad—in the few pictures my mother saved—looks a bit like a carnival clown. White shoes, big sideburns, thick Coke-bottle glasses. It’s interesting. My mother didn’t keep any of the close-ups. No portraiture, nothing to illustrate the deep character of the man. Only crowd shots, images busy with people, with life going on elsewhere.

But 1977—who remembers the siege of three federal buildings in Washington, D.C., by Hanafi Muslims and the Nation of Islam? The country was riveted as gunmen seized control of a section of
the capital and issued a list of demands to the media. Or the controversy surrounding the bloody movie
Mohammed, Messenger of God
, the first Hollywood film to be made about the life of Islam’s central prophet? Or the Taksim Square massacre in Turkey, one of a dozen mass killings in the Islamic world that year, almost all of which were extensively reported by the national media? Though they didn’t linger for decades, all of these stories had a significant impact in their time: Being an Arab in America in 1977 meant that you were a mistrusted outsider, just like being an Arab in America today, over thirty years later.

When I said that copper was the curse of my family, I only partly meant my mustachioed ancestors and my temperamentally problematic mother. Copper was also my father’s skin color, a faded soft copper color, copper cut with a slight blanching agent—he was marked by otherness, by his facial features and his skin and his accent. He looked and sounded like an Arab. There was no escaping it.

There was a certain kind of young American—a certain Jimmy Carter–voting, city-living, blues-listening, Woody Allen film–watching demographic—who was drawn to all things Middle Eastern. My young, independently wealthy mother was firmly a part of that demographic. She was intrigued by everything that the mainstream seemed to fear or reject.

My parents met at the apartment of a mutual friend, the woman I now know as Tante Wada. Tante Wada was a chunky, cheerful Egyptian-American woman—one of a new breed of Arab-American women who insisted on taking advantage of the social freedoms offered by late-seventies American culture. Both of her parents had
come to Montana in the 1940s, following the war, when she was a little girl. Back then—in 1977—she was getting a master’s at Montana Tech, which was where she’d met my father.

When she met him—when my mother met him—Akram Saqr was a short, thin man with a full black beard and those same thick bifocals. He’d come to America to get an MA in engineering administration. He’d ended up at Montana Tech mostly by accident. He liked the name of the state and the fact that it was close to Canada, a country that he associated with skiing and glaciers and massive, marauding polar bears. He liked the idea of winter; he’d never seen snow. All of this information I gathered surreptitiously, piecemeal, over the course of two decades. I listened whenever anyone told stories about my dad, and I tended to write them down in my journal as soon as I got home.

Matchmaking is, I think, every Egyptian’s favorite hobby. One night in November 1977, my mother and father found themselves invited to Wada’s apartment for
koubeiba
. The three of them cooked the meal together. My father loved to cook Egyptian food; he was in an ebullient mood; he told stories of going to the horse races in Cairo as a boy, of climbing wrought-iron fences to steal mangoes off of giant mango trees, of the city under Nasser, of his early memories of going to the Dar el-Obra el-Masreyya, the Cairo Opera House on Gezira Island.

Thinking of that night they met, I imagined the scent of the sizzling lamb. The rich taste of the pine nuts. I’d eaten that meal fifty times, and yet there was always something so elusive about it, an aftertaste of mystery and pure longing. I imagined my mother making the filling, imagined her hands curling around the long handles
of Wada’s cast-iron cookware. I imagined the sound of Wada tenderizing the lamb, stripping it off the bone with a carving knife and then pounding it with a square meat mallet, holding it up to the light to see if the membrane of the muscle had become translucent, just like I’d seen her do a hundred times myself. Then I could hear her turning the handle of the meat grinder.

Koubeiba
is like a lot of the dishes of the Middle East: claimed by every culture, lauded by every society as the food of its own people, of its own masses, of the Syrian or Egyptian or Algerian street. The Lebanese will tell you that their
koubeiba
is the real
koubeiba
, that Beirut is in fact where the dish originated, and that it should really be called
kibbe
—which is its proper name. Cypriots will educate you about the ancient way to make
koubes
, and will tell you how that dish voyaged from their small island out into the world long before the days of the Mediterranean empires, before the Phoenicians or the Achaemenids or the Greeks or even the Romans. And a Turk? Never ask a Turk who invented
içli köfte
. You are disparaging his honor by even thinking of the question.

My mother did something that was almost unbelievable. Immediately before they made the fritters, she looked at the mixture and smelled it. Then she dipped a finger into the raw ground meat. And she tasted it. And then she turned to my father and Wada and said: “Star anise. Maybe half a teaspoon.”

“My heart,” Wada said, clutching her chest and staggering backward. “It is broken.”

“You’ve broken her heart,” my father echoed, eyes full of mock indignation. “I can see its pieces there, on the floor.”

“I cannot breathe,” Tante Wada said.

“Breathe, Wada, breathe,” my father said. “She may need CPR! Wada? Do you need CPR?”