A Hole In Your Heart

Egypt: Chapter 2

The boy had been told stories of a lemon tree. It had been the paramount fixture in the yard of his first home. A small house in Columbia, South Carolina. He could remember little of those years, but there was a vague reminiscence of a time when things were good and his universe was warm and sweet under the steaming southern sun. He remembered his swimming lessons at the community pool. He would chew mindlessly on the styrofoam padding of the vest that kept him afloat. He was told stories of his first cat. It would sleep in his crib with him. It died under the lemon tree.

When his mother told him about the tree her voice quivered and her eyes levitated. She spoke of it as if remembering an ecstatic dream. She would tell him about the August of his third year, when his ghedo came from Egypt and stayed with them in that humble house just outside the University campus where his father worked. Ghedo was fully overcome with adoration for the tree, and would sit for hours in its shade. The boy could recall nothing of this man or the tree, and when he saw him in the airport terminal he was just another stranger.

But not to his father. The boy saw an amaranthine mirror flash like sparks in the wind and redefine every feature on the man, who regressed for a fleeting lifetime back into boyhood. The boy recognized every tangled and intimate reaction to a lifetime of parental effect in his guardian. In the eight years since last seeing Ghedo, his father had managed to distance himself from his own father. He had done this methodically with reason by his own definition; self-sufficiency and annual obligatory phone calls; and his own unique wrath on his wife and children. He was a wiser, superincumbent, more rational being than the decrepit man that lumbered toward them now with the support of a wooden cane. But the boy, briefly insightful into his father’s emotional condition, recognized the resentful, passionate, compassionate cyclone that the man hid courageously behind a smile.

And Ghedo was all celebratory and affectionate. It was the way of all fathers, the boy understood, to only love the son when his own responsibility had been relieved. Where his father’s success had been an axiomatic victory over the frigid heart and selfish indifference of Ghedo, the elder took great pride in his triumph of producing a satisfactory heir. The boy’s father, crumpled inside by rage, loathed the thought that this man claimed any responsibility for his Americanized, successful son. But Ghedo was oblivious to his son’s contempt. He was a man who only had faith in his own emotions and unconsciously invalidated those feelings of everyone else. This trait the boy’s father would inherit, and the boy, as he grew into a man, would constantly resist the paternal curse of selfish indifference.

The boy watched his predecessors assume their roles effectively. They embraced briefly, spoke rapidly in Arabic in a way the boy recognized from long-distance phone calls he overheard at their current home in upstate New York. His father had not prepared him for the coming weeks of deafened obliviousness that is the result of a language barrier. His was an English-speaking household. His father had assured him that his Egyptian family spoke English, but if that were true it remained elusive to the boy, who would drown the entire trip in a realm of unknowing, unawareness, and blank stares.

Without acknowledging the boy, the elder generations gathered the bags and walked toward the exit. He hastily trailed behind them. A cab had been hired for them, and the driver was smoking a cigarette on the hood while they loaded the trunk. The boy was overcome as they stepped out into a cacophony of foreign smells, the oppressive desert air mingling with the pungent odors of Cairo: garbage, cigarettes, smog. It was two o’clock in the morning and brisk with desert chill. Standing outside the car, the boy stared at the sky beyond the city lights for a revolution of a new epoch in his life, absorbing stars he had never seen before. “Ahmed!” snapped his father. “Get in.”

The drive to Tanta was three hours on flat highways through barren dunes. The boy wanted desperately to sleep, but each time he began to drift off the motion of the taxi or the roaring as it sliced through sandy wind or the boisterous arabic of three opinionated Egyptians would block his entry into unconsciousness. There was an unfamiliar and estranged buoyancy in his father as he returned to his native tongue. The boy theorized that he had assumed the airs of the hero that transcended his slums. He had become an individual against the forces of third-world culture to which so many others had succumbed. He was American now (though unrecognizable to his son at this moment, so easily he was reabsorbed into his language.)

The highway disappeared in their tail lights and reappeared in the consumptive, silent darkness ahead. As the boy stared at the passing tundra of dunes he saw nothing. He was dumbfounded by the magnanimous nothing around him. Road trips in New York were adventures through Northern Appalachian ranges of dense, vibrant forests, brimming with unseen life hidden just beneath the bristling fauna. The skies were painted with tufts of white clouds, where hawks and gulls glided over the trees into vast expanses where more life flourished. But here, the boy had been taken into an expedition through such a vast nothing; a period at the end of a sentence; a well suffocating with sand; emphatic emptiness.

Plummeting through the night, the boy began to understand the nature of his present location. The arid climate outside mingled with his senses when the driver lowered the window to smoke incessantly. The interior of the backseat was putrid, mangled leather. It was so dark the boy could not see his feet. Next to him, his father spoke profusely with his ghedo, who sat in the passenger seat, trying to overpower the rushing volume of the highway. The boy began to recognize this place of offensive smells and foreign words spoken loudly and so much sand as “The Homeland”. Born in America to a first generation Irish-American and an Egyptian immigrant, he had three confusing places of origin, and therefore he never fully belonged to any nation. But his father had lived here for the first half of his life. The sand and prayers and cigarette smoke were hereditary in the boy. This began to feel like the strange place where his identity was conceived.

And the boy was perplexed by this. He struggled in his ten years with the imperative of locations. His hometown had become the small place along the Mohawk river where he attended school and had made all his friends. When his father moved the family north up the Atlantic coast from Columbia, it had been in August of 2001, and the subsequent tragedy that they witnessed from their temporary apartment in Brooklyn (where they had stayed before moving into the house further north) had redefined the boy’s character. He developed, in the years that followed, a victimized solidarity with New Yorkers. At the same time, he would be outcast as a result of his Islamic heritage, despite his father’s profound atheism and mother’s evangelical Protestantism. When he left upstate New York after High School, for five years he would abandon various cities in America, trying to find a home- Monterey, California and Washington D.C. consumed four of those years. He would not feel identified until he finally settled in New York City. But that would not happen for nearly a decade and a half. At this moment, he felt he had returned to the fatherland, the “Old Country”. And to him it was equally as wondrous as it was unsettling and unclean.

They made Tanta in excellent time. As they entered the city they departed a glorious golden ocean of sunrise that repurposed the sand dunes into freshly baked challah loaves. They passed drab slum buildings, mountain ranges of garbage. The merchants of produce stands were the only pedestrians. The streets were plagued with stray cats. The boy had never seen so many cats. Their fur was matted and filthy with the street that clung to it. They were emaciated, feral creatures but the boy adored them. His parents had always kept cats at home.

His ghedo’s apartment was on the busiest, six-lane road in the city. There was no crosswalk where the cab driver let them out on the opposite side of the street. The trek across the lanes was nothing short of exhilarating. With suitcases, they climbed an echoing, dusty staircase to the fifth floor. The boy could barely keep his eyes open. In the apartment, they ate dry pita with salty Egyptian cheese and drank strong, muddy Turkish coffee. The grinds coated the boy's tongue but the coffee was sweet and helped him to swallow the food. Within minutes, he was asleep on the sofa, unflinching to the flies that landed on his eyelids or the overpowering noise of the cars outside on the busy street.

--

Ahmed was revived by the phenomenon of thirst. Looking out the glass doors of the airport, he saw it was light. He checked his watch and figured he had slept about six hours. He sat up and his body felt like a sand timer being turned over. The taste of parched throat and metabolized whiskey was potent and bitter in his mouth, and his head was pounding. He looked for his suitcase in the area around the bench but quickly surrendered that it was lost. Standing up, he saw the darting black dots in his periphery and wobbled on unfaithful legs. He sat back down. The airport was nearly deserted. A man in military uniform with an assault rifle guarded the automatic sliding doors and stared at him. He slapped his face a few times, slung his backpack over his shoulder, and stood up once more.

Stumbling into the bathroom, Ahmed made it to the sink and drank long from the grimy faucet. He washed his face and went into a stall. The toilet was a horror, coated with dried urine on the seat and stained by fecal matter. He reached into his backpack and took out one of a dozen pill bottles. The sound of popping the cap triggered blood flow to his temples as he shook three oxycontin tablets into his hand and chewed them. The intense bitter taste of the opiate replaced the whiskey breath and soon his hangover would be a bad dream. All the pill bottles, with labels of various commonplace, harmless medicines (fluoxetine, acetaminophen, amoxicillin, prednisone, etc.), were filled with opiates. When he could not find authentic oxycontin on the streets of New York anymore, he had continued to stock up on the more easily purchased home-pressed fentanyl pills, which were distinguished with a black dot on the bottom of the bottle. He had managed not to take any pills in Ireland, to keep his drunk pure and save his supply for Egypt, where alcohol was shunned by muslim culture. He was grateful beyond expression that pure luck had spirited him through customs in two international airports with no trouble over the pills.

He recalled his original plan. He was supposed to meet his aunt Salma at her home in Tanta today. It was the first stop on his pilgrimage. His phone was dead, he still had not learned Arabic, and he could not remember a single street in Cairo, nevermind the geography of the country. He remembered very little of the Egypt he saw as a child. Anyway, the world was made unrecognizable to that past, and Egypt had been no exception. There had been a revolution, two succeeding regimes, economic turmoil, and pandemic. Ahmed knew nothing of Egypt at present. All he commanded were vague memories of restaurants and hotels and the pompous laughter of smoke-filled men. And, of course, the sinister and unforgettable smile.

Outside the airport, Ahmed stood where the taxis were lined along the semicircle curb and lit a cigarette. He immediately recognized the smell of Cairo. It was like remembering a song he had forgotten for a decade. Subtly, the opiate took effect. He felt the voiding of his blood, that had carried pain across the avenues and alleys of his anatomy his entire life. From sickness, pain, discomfort his body departed. Now there was a resounding death against his nerve endings. Now he was neither warm nor cold, for the sun had not risen fully yet and he was numb to the desert chill. Now, underneath the skin of his face was silk that had been warmed by steam. His eyelids were heavier and his lips felt ripe with sweet juice. Paramount was silence that replaced his screeching headache.

Healed and recollected, Ahmed could now decide what to do. He could only think of one place to go: the Hilton Ramses. He had reserved a room, however, for the last leg of the trip, and was not expected for three days. He decided now to confront the haunted room at once. He simply could not wait. He entered a taxi and told the driver his destination. He was grateful the man had no intention to converse. As the driver himself smoked, Ahmed took liberty to light his own cigarette in the back seat. He smiled, remembering countless incidents when New York taxi drivers evicted him from their vehicles after he lit a cigarette in his drunkenness. He was in a different world here.

The static raged in his mind as the taxi entered the expressway into Cairo. Here, people drove as if they were combatants. There was no accepted speed limits. The cab would storm forward with prodigious speed and then- as if meeting a wall- jerk to a stop inches from another vehicle. Ahmed was unconcerned. He recognized a few of the prominent buildings in the skyline as they neared the city. He identified the Hilton Ramses, and in the cruel dawn over Giza the smile stretched broadly. He was not properly prepared to return to the Ramses. He was terrified. Suddenly, it overcame his opiates and his daily ration of sanity. No. That place is an ending. You have an evocation still, before you are entombed there. The family awaited him, knowing nothing of the man he had become, separated by an ocean and a religion and a language.

He was an American to them. But to himself he had not yet decided his nationality. He was driven to find this family that had been forever in the homeland. They knew his father as the bombastic pilgrim who had returned every other year with tremendous American gifts of technology and vanity. He was their idol, for he had become thoroughly western, but remained a proud, affluent Egyptian. With his death, Ahmed feared they expected some glory from him as his father had displayed.

No. He could not go to the Ramses yet, but they neared it now.

Ahmed instructed the driver to change their destination in English. He repeated, “Train! Train!” and the man comprehended. The train station was also named Ramses. He paid the driver and left. He recognized a restaurant with tremendous relief. It was the place his father took him when they first arrived in Cairo. It served koshery, which filled your gut like cement and rejected any traces of malnourishment. The restaurant was adjacent to the train station. Ahmed entered and sat at a table along the wall where he could charge his phone. He connected to the free internet and read his messages. Safia had missed him at the airport. She was the only cousin left in Tanta and was supposed to pick him up last night. She had messaged him the address of the family apartment in Tanta and wished him well, hoping that they would see him soon.

Ahmed remembered the ferocity in Safia when she was a teenager and he was only ten years old. She would argue emphatically with her father and uncle about politics in Arabic of which Ahmed knew nothing. She was beautiful and fiery and she cared unconditionally. Now, she owned two of the family’s pharmacies. She had a son and was a quiet, dutiful wife to her husband. She accepted the old customs and devoted herself to a penitent life.

Ahmed finished the koshery and drank the carafe of spring water. He was sustained now to proceed. The food had been a tenacious, heartfelt production. Lentils, rice, and fried onions filled the most space in a large stainless-steel bowl. Spices, a red sauce, and ground lamb were added. It was hefty and wholesome. He had told his mother he was traveling for culinary research. He sold his ownership of the bistro in Manhattan to fund this trip. His mother told him it was a manic episode, but she did not realize just how meticulously Ahmed had planned the trip. He had sobered up, gone to rehab, finalized the divorce, and liquidated his assets. All this had happened in the six months after his father’s death. And now he was free to do what must be done. He had come for finality. He needed a proper ending. He had come to the desert and smoke to understand. To understand why; to banish the smile.

In the restroom of the koshery restaurant, he crushed two pills on the toilet seat with his lighter and sniffed the powder through a rolled bill. At the train station, he purchased a ticket to Tanta. He messaged Safia, asking her to meet him at the station when he arrived. The train was clean and quiet. He was content to watch the dunes tumble away in the air-conditioned car.