A Hole In Your Heart

Egypt: Chapter 1

Part 1- Egypt

“Estragon: (giving up again). Nothing to be done.

Vladimir: I'm beginning to come round to that opinion. All my life I've tried to put it from me, saying Vladimir, be reasonable, you haven't yet tried everything. And I resumed the struggle.”

-Samuel Beckett, Waiting For Godot

1

The boy was reading a book he could not understand, despite a rather valiant effort. Inside a metal cylinder that feigned comfort and security, he slipped through the folds in the sky thousands of feet above the Atlantic, invalidating his simple logic. The plane rescinded its legs within itself- like a bird- and left the rain-stained, glossy tarmac at John F Kennedy Airport approximately six hours ago. After the first two hours, the ten-year-old had grown weary of staring blankly at the scalps of cotton cumulus clouds beneath his window. They reminded him of snow banks along the streets in winter. At that time, he had ambitiously attempted to decipher Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse.

He felt naturally inclined to fight above his weight class in literature. Though his grades never reflected a strong work ethic, his teachers all agreed he was a very enlightened child. His mother, no longer practicing habits of self-education, held a Bachelor’s Degree in English from the University of South Carolina. More recently, she filled her days with Evangelical preachers on television. The boy would sit on the cool concrete floor of their cellar for hours, examining his mother’s bookshelves twice his height. He would scan the titles on aged and dusty spines, rifling through pages of classic literature that had grown brittle and browned like late-Autumn leaves. Often, when they were alone in the house, he would interrogate his mother about Faulkner, Eliot, Twain- those writers whose entire anthologies his mother possessed- and she would respond with vague comments, such as, “Oh, I love his work,” or, “He was too stark for my liking,” of Steinbeck, haphazardly attempting to conceal the gaps in her memory.

In the airplane, the boy felt imprisoned, as if his body were contained in a vacuum inside the larger vault of the craft’s skeleton. The roaring drone in the plane became a new invention of silence that made him feel always like he had returned to the womb. Next to him his father slept, producing soft, moist snores that sounded like bubbles blown through a straw into a glass of water. A plastic cup half-full of beer sat on the collapsable plastic tray before him. His protruding gut undulated in and out of him steadily as he breathed deeply. The boy checked his digital watch.

Four more hours.

He could not sleep on planes, in cars, on trains. He could never find comfort. He set the book down on his lap and observed the other passengers. The crowd was evenly mixed. At least half were native Egyptian; caramel-skinned men with dark wavy hair or gray and bearded, and women protected by fashionable afghans around their head according to their religious custom. Then there were the American tourists, pale, whimsical, different from the American boy. His father was undefined. He had the accent and hue of his native brothers but the clothing and attitudes of his adopted American countrymen. The boy felt displaced among them.

In the pair of seats behind them, a duet of Spanish-speaking men in their twenties were developing a riotous drunk together. As their buzz progressed their conversation grew in excitement and rapidity, as though they were racing toward an unachievable conclusion of two simultaneous soliloquies. The boy flinched his eyes in bouts of irritation, as the pair’s raucous made the already insoluble literature impossible. He glared, in dedication, at the daunting words on the page. His stomach had begun to wake and demand, his neck was sore from bending for hours, and his legs grew restless and bounced in place.

But he was trapped. He could not dare to awaken his father, even to use the bathroom- a need that had suddenly arisen. He would dutifully wait until his father naturally stirred into consciousness. He was almost grateful for the rising volume of the festivities behind them, because he imagined he could- with an emanating force of primal necessity- will these men to ever-increase their noise. His right leg was bouncing off its heel viscously now.

His father’s leg, extended into the narrow aisle, was inelegantly jostled by a passenger, oblivious, walking toward the lavatory. As if this had been divined by him alone, the boy sighed with relief as his father grunted and gradually blinked his eyes awake. Saying nothing, and with great caution, the boy wedged his way past his father’s legs into the aisle, having picked up the beer then gingerly setting it back down in the exact spot where it had been on the tray. His father looked at him in his consequential way.

Oh, that look that fathers alone could master! It existed in the eyes, the furrowed brow, the motionless straight lines of his face. At first glance it simply expressed irritation. But the boy had become too familiar with it. He saw the primordial truth within those off-white orbs encompassing tar-black pits. Beneath the frustration- even anger- a foundational disappointment in what his son was becoming was cultivated. He was frivolous with this countenance, but it pained the boy just the same each time. The boy whispered, “Sorry, Dad,” without looking upon the face. He made his way, contrite, toward the far end of the cabin with his head lowered.

He fell in love with a youthful Spanish flight attendant while he waited for the previous occupant to vacate the lavatory. She spoke briskly in accented English to her co-worker, a middle-aged and wrinkled caucasion woman. With opulent hand gestures and green eyes ablaze, she was discussing a topic of which the boy was unknowledgeable. He heard nothing, but watched her glistening, plum lips part again and again. His insides were lifted like a helium balloon. The door hit him directly on his forehead as it was recklessly thrust open. A cruel-eyed, gaunt, old Egyptian man grimaced at him and pushed past him to return to his seat, and, in his entire proceeding life, the boy would never think of that woman again, nor would he ever again feel like a helium balloon.

Inside, the bathroom was a dim, fluorescent-lit coffin. The boy could see just above his shoulders in the stained and scratched mirror over the pathetic hand-sink. The stainless steel toilet bowl exuded a sweet odor of the blue disinfectant released when it was flushed. The boy wondered if all the urine and feces was released from the belly of the plane to plummet down onto the earth, careless as birds are. He pulled down his blue jeans and sat on the frigid plastic seat to urinate. When he was finished, curiously, with lascivious gentility, he performed a s*x act upon himself while he conjured in his mind a certain American actress. He had only discovered this activity a few months earlier. He did not understand it, or that it was a recreation for the purpose of physical release, but he knew doubtlessly it was supposed to be done. It was, to him, a practice in the art of maturity. Nothing spectacular ever happened, but when he decided to stop, he always felt as though he had severely transgressed. The thrill of sinning made him sick with excitement. He felt similarly when he lit small fires in the forest near his home or when he shoplifted worthless items from stores. He never thought about the Christain God his mother imposed upon him when he violated these little laws. There was a disconnect in his soul between God and those actions that made him feel good.

They would be landing in Cairo in three hours.

--

Ahmed stumbled through the expanding, carpeted corridor that led from the door of the airplane into the terminal at Cairo International Airport. In his stupor he felt as if he were walking on foot through a deserted Lincoln Tunnel. The roar of Dublin still resounded in his body, turning his insides over on themselves, deafening and exhausting. He had repurposed his week of Ireland into a bender disproportionate to any previous binges. He extended it into the flight, drinking scotch and soda all through the red-eye. He could not remember the last time he ate, nor the bulk of what transpired in his mother’s country of origin.

He had planned to reconnect with distant cousins that owned a dairy farm in County Clare, but had never made it out of the capitol. He drank Guinness and Jameson in pubs, sang Danny Boy with strangers, stood before a statue of Oscar Wilde, and thought deeply about James Joyce with little comprehension; he had misunderstood the culture. Now, tripping over his own gait, his thoughts muffled by the radio-static of malnutrition, dehydration, and intoxication, he entered the Fatherland. He was unaware of his stench, reminiscent of those isopropyl towelettes nurses rub on the skin before the stab of the needle.

He had made an itinerary, albeit loosely and vaguely structured, but now he was thoroughly wayward, without understanding the language, unable to collect himself into cogency. Somehow, with an encounter that would not be stored in his memory, he passed unobstructed through customs. There were no restaurants or stores in the tremendous, vaulted lobby of the airport, and he desperately needed water and black coffee.

He entered the bathroom, grateful for simplified pictures designating facilities that accompanied the arabic text. Cupping his hands into a bowl, he drank water from the sink. It tasted like copper and had a faint umber tint, and it made his stomach disgruntled. He washed his face with hand soap and dried with paper towels. Looking in the mirror, he observed a haggard man. His eyes receded within heavy, black concaves. He needed a shave. His face was bone-pale and perspiring. He needed to eat. He drank more of the tainted water and left the bathroom. His backpack was slung over one shoulder and weighed his right side into a precarious lean as he walked.

He exchanged his Euros for Egyptian pounds and withdrew more cash with his credit card. Stepping out into the cool, arid nighttime, he began to realize just how incapacitated be was. He was supposed to take a taxi somewhere, he thought, to meet someone. He should have a suitcase with him and could not cite the past hour to locate it. He smoked a cigarette and his head became a rapid merry-go-round so that he had to brace himself against the side of the building.

Eventually, he reentered the airport and found a wooden bench next to the bathrooms. Using his backpack as a pillow, he slipped into a dreamless, abysmal unconsciousness. In the ethereal black, the smile burst like gunshots. The smile Ahmed had tried to put away from him for fifteen years. He had succeeded for a long while, but, upon entering the Aerlingus plane bound for Cairo, it had been resurrected. The whiskey could not put it away from him. The yellowed teeth and the encompassing pale, cracked lips had returned for a fresh haunting as he rocketed toward the desert