Every day a lone old Bedouin woman unfurled a blanket full of jewelry on the sidewalk in front of the Hilton. She sat cross-legged and hunched, all but her eyes and desiccated hands hidden under a black thobe and matching veil. Normally the women’s veils bore strings of coins, the quality and quantity of which indicated their relative level of wealth within the Bedouin community. This old woman’s veil, however, had no coins at all.
From what I was able to see on my walks to and from the Hilton, the few people who stayed there rarely strayed beyond its all-inclusive walls, and those who did pass by the woman were usually safely ensconced behind the privacy glass of SUVs that ferried tourists back and forth from the airport and Mount Sinai. Only a handful of times did I ever see anyone examining the woman’s wares, and I never witnessed an actual purchase.
I made the mistake of walking past her once. She leaned forward beseechingly at my approach. She held her hands, trembling with age, up over the array of trinkets, a pitiable attempt at salesmanship. She made pleading sounds as tears seeped from her eyes. Her veil fell open, revealing a face ravaged by some ancient injury—it looked as though someone had thrown acid on her, and for all I knew, in this dry and holy place, someone had.
And not even for this woman, as wretched an example of humanity as I have encountered before or since, could I muster anything resembling fellow feeling, or feeling of any kind. I did not stop and at least pretend to consider buying one of her brooches or necklaces. I continued on, even as she reached up to clutch at my hand with her own. I pulled myself away, and I never walked that close to her again.
Asif, to his credit, never asked me who I was, why I’d come there, what I was running from. I sensed that this was not a lack of interest on his part—we talked often, if briefly, throughout the day, as he dirtied pots and I scrubbed them—but more an intuitive understanding that if I’d wanted to discuss who I was, I would have brought it up myself. Thoughtful, kind Asif, doting father of three, devout Sunni, quietly tireless laborer: it never would have occurred to him to pry.
Instead we discussed post-Mubarak Egypt, the barracudas he’d seen while guiding several guests on a snorkeling trip, Zamalek soccer club’s chances in the CAF championships (which I knew nothing about, but nodded politely where it seemed indicated, as the topic was one of few about which Asif actually became somewhat animated).
For three years we had these little discussions every day, and not once did Asif ask my real name, though he had to know the name I’d given him, back there on the beach when I’d first arrived, was a counterfeit.
Despite my reticence about who I was, though, Asif considered me a friend. The way I first came to know this, really know it, was through the monkey imprisoned by the water.
Every day on my funereal beach walks, I passed by the monkey in its tiny, refuse-filled cage. And though it had an invariably nasty disposition, baring those yellowed canines, thrashing the side of the cage in a futile attempt to get at me, I actually liked the thing. I felt something when I saw it—miracle of miracles—though at first I didn’t realize this, mistaking the dull hum of emotion as a stomach soured by Asif’s fiery shakshouka, maybe, or else just tightness in the muscles between my ribs. After I did recognize the sensation as a feeling, I was still hard-pressed to identify precisely what I felt. I wandered past the shopkeepers, deaf to their pleadings, and grasped at this emotion as it receded, trying to recognize it. Was it regret? Pity? Or just unadorned sadness, plain as the dollops of Greek yogurt Asif spooned onto guests’ breakfast plates?
Whatever its name, I did not enjoy the feeling—either the fact of it, or its quality. And so after months of enduring these emotional spasms each day, I went to Asif and asked him to let the monkey go.
It would not survive, he told me. It doesn’t belong in the desert.
I considered this. Nodded minutely, a tic I’d absorbed, as through osmosis, from seeing Asif do it countless times.
All the same, I said to him. Better to die in the open air than to live in a cage. Especially a cage people use as a garbage can.
Asif tilted his head to the side and pursed his lips, eyebrows arching, a silent concession to the sensibility of my argument.
I went to my hut. For the first time since arriving in the Sinai I could not sleep, an unpleasant throwback to earlier years, when wakefulness had been a constant companion that I battled with liquor and willful forgetting. I lay under the net with my eyes open, listening to a squadron of mosquitos buzz their frustration at being unable to get to me. I wished for any sort of distraction. I wished I had a book to read, though I hadn’t read a word since coming here. I wished, God help me, for a television to stare at.
I thought of Emma for the first time in months, the faint warmth of her breath on my neck, the weight of her leg resting across my thighs as she dozed, the way her presence had banished a lifetime of insomnia.
Eventually I fell into something resembling unconsciousness, more a tense void than restful sleep. I woke bleary the next morning and stumbled to the kitchen, where Asif, always there before me no matter how early I arrived, was busy preparing breakfast. We barely spoke. Habiba Village had enjoyed increased business in the wake of a Hamas cease-fire, and as the Israeli tourists began to reappear in large numbers we often found ourselves with too much work to allow for real conversation.
A couple of hours later, with the tables cleared and the last of the dishes washed and stowed, I stepped through the back door and set out. This portion of my walk, the minute or so before I cleared the huts and set eyes on the cage, had started to instill a tension in me, and of late I’d even considered forgoing the walk altogether. That day I fought through my anxiety. Right foot, left foot, gritting grimly in the sand. I came around the side of the last hut with my head down, reluctant to look at the monkey, but when I didn’t hear it growl and spit I glanced up to discover the cage was now vacant—monkey gone, garbage gone.
We never spoke of it, Asif and I. For all I know he took the monkey and, instead of releasing it to suffer a lingering death in the desert, killed it himself with the cleaver he used to rend legs of lamb. In any event, I didn’t have to see it anymore. I resumed my days of utter blankness, and at night slept like the dead, as unperturbed again by emotion as on the day I’d arrived.
In my four years in the Sinai, I did not drink even once. This was holy land, and outside the walls of the Hilton, at least, abstention was strictly observed. Even if I’d wanted a drink, and could find it, Asif would not have tolerated this vile habit of Westerners on the grounds of Habiba Village. Not even in me, the friend whose name he did not know.
I engaged in nothing that was not essentially functional. I breathed. I ate with all the enthusiasm of a man filling the gas tank in his car. I drank water each day, more in the summer, when emerging from the kitchen felt like stepping into a blast furnace. I slept when the day ended and the only lights to be seen were a few winking pinpoints across the water in Saudi Arabia. I worked and walked because bodies are built to move, to manipulate objects and mark their environment.
The only indulgence I allowed myself was the occasional Silk Cut cigarette, produced by Asif after particularly grueling shifts, when we found ourselves overrun by tour groups returning from the Colored Canyon. And these I smoked not because I wanted them, not because I took any pleasure in the act, but simply because Asif offered, and the proper thing to do, when given a gift by a friend, is to accept.
It turns out, though, that even the dead grow restless. Vacant as I was, I nevertheless came slowly to resent Sinai’s beauty and quiet. In my time outside Asif’s kitchen I stared at the cliffs guarding the desert and longed for a 7-Eleven in their place. I drank tea and tasted scotch. I lay on my mat, listening to God’s breath rustle the thatch roof, and wished for the rush and fade of passing cars, and the blunt, stupid sounds of drunks arguing in the street. I dreamed
of pavement and neon, ten-cent wings and late-night cable television. Pithy desk calendars. Air-conditioned hotel rooms. Emma’s hips, her hair.
Waking from one such dream, in desperation I stole the paddleboat of a man who sold kebabs down the beach and set out for Saudi Arabia. I had no idea what I was doing, really. God knows what I would have told the Saudi military if they’d met me on the other side. I thought I was just borrowing the boat until waves began to slosh over the plastic bow. Moonlight shimmered on the water like barracuda skin. The front of the boat started to sink. I tried to turn back but the rudder had risen behind me and now cut uselessly through the air. The water in the bow reached critical mass and the boat dove below the waves, leaving me adrift three hundred yards from shore.
I swam back, huddled sopping and exhausted beneath my blanket, and slept better than I had in a month.
At daybreak, though, the anxiety returned, and I knew I had to leave, if only for a few days.
It was summer. The village had been at capacity for weeks, and Asif could not afford to lose me. But he studied my face for a moment, nodded as if satisfied with what he saw there, and said, This is fine. I’ll have my wife’s brother help while you’re gone. He can use to learn what honest work is, anyway.
With the improvement in business Asif had insisted on paying me a salary in addition to room and board. I used this money to hire a nearly toothless Bedouin named Suleiman, who looked sixty but was closer to forty. He wanted to take me into the mountains—this was where most tourists went, he explained, because the terrain offered beautiful views and there were mud-brick huts along the route for us to shelter in. The desert, he said, was just that—desert. Nothing to see. Flat, lifeless, dangerous, the fact that his people had been thriving there for millennia notwithstanding.
I told Suleiman that was exactly what I wanted. I had no interest in watching the sun rise from Mount Sinai, or visiting St. Catherine’s Monastery, or trekking through the Colored Canyon, or any of the other activities his usual clientele enjoyed. I wanted to be in the desert. I might only need two nights, or maybe three.
Suleiman, whose English was impeccable owing to years of guiding Westerners through the Sinai, nodded and laughed and said, Okay then. If we get in trouble, I guess we can always eat one of the camels.
The night my father died, I learned that real-life miracles do happen, and also that they’re small and quiet and don’t change anything. After I helped him trade in his truck because he couldn’t drive it anymore, after I brought him to a store to find a recliner that had a machine inside it to help him stand up, after I heard his final confession, after I sat beside his bed and chafed his hand between mine during the last hours of his life, after I kissed his cold forehead and said good-bye, after the undertaker came and expressed regret and did his job and drove away, after my sisters and I stood for a while beneath the overhead light in the kitchen, staring at the floor and not talking while our mother wept on the sofa in the living room, I excused myself and got in my car to drive home. When I turned the ignition and backed out of the driveway that a few hours earlier had belonged to both my parents and now belonged just to my mother, the opening strains of ‘Maggie May’ came on the radio. Which wouldn’t have seemed all that momentous, except that a couple of years earlier my father had, quite uncharacteristically, revealed a bit of his younger self to me that had everything to do with that song, and now it was playing as though someone had cued it up just for me.
Unbeknownst to me, of course, as I set out into the desert with Suleiman for the first time, my unfinished book, Emma’s book, the last thing I’d written, that elephant man of a novel, was being shipped in huge quantities all over America. Booksellers were under strict orders—orders that carried the threat of legal action if violated—not to peddle a single copy until the ordained date. The first printing, an even 300,000 copies, was expected to be gone within a month or two. This of course did not take into account e-book and audio sales, themselves slated to be huge.
By way of comparison, the book I’d published while I was alive had sold fewer than ten thousand copies in hardcover. My baby. Staid, weighty, droll, ignored thing.
Emma’s book would soon appear in over twenty other countries. A film version—adapted by Aaron Sorkin, directed by Sofia Coppola, bankrolled by Paramount—was in production and scheduled for release the following summer.
I would come to learn, eventually, that Emma’s book had been sold (helped along by my suicide and the events surrounding it) as the tragicomic love story of our time. And its hero, a man whose circumstances, manner of thought, and big dumb heart all bore striking similarities to my own, stood as the contemporary answer to Goethe’s young Werther.
And would be played, in the film adaptation, by a sulky Leonardo DiCaprio.
No delirious shamanic revelations or Earth-mother cleansings took place out in the desert, either on my first trip or the dozen or so subsequent ones. Which was fine, seeing as how that wasn’t what I was after.
Suleiman’s camels plodded. I got sunburned. At night we camped wherever we found ourselves, and I listened to the wind scour the desert while Suleiman cooked single-pot meals over fires made with dead acacia boughs, fires he stoked through the night to discourage the attentions of curious leopards.
I slept easily and without dreams. Sand gritted between my teeth for an hour after I woke, sticking fast even after water and a cup of Suleiman’s strong, bitter coffee, which he brewed over the remnants of the previous night’s blaze.
Suleiman, like most Bedouins I’d met, had an intense attachment to his family. They were all he talked about—and he rarely stopped talking. In the hail of syllables he explained at some point that this was the way he kept from missing his family too painfully while he was away—talking about them comforted him, especially in the long, black desert nights.
Sometimes he even sang about them, always after sunset, his voice high and sorrowful, drowning out the wind. His singing brought tears to my eyes. It did exactly the opposite of what I’d come out into the desert for: it made me feel. I wanted him to stop, but couldn’t bring myself to ask. Then, on the fourth night, a curious thing: I no longer felt myself stirred by his singing. And this was how I came to discover a barometer for gauging whether my insides had gone still again. When Suleiman’s singing no longer made me cry, I’d been in the desert long enough.
I told Suleiman the next morning over coffee, and he turned us back in the direction of the sea.
I will confess, there are moments when even a corpse grows curious about how the lives of those he loved have developed in his wake.
And if I’m being honest, a flicker of vanity persisted in me, and there were times when I found myself wondering idly, over a sink of greasy dishwater, how my friends had eulogized me, and what, if anything, had been written about me and my book.
Because it could be argued that people only really understand and express how they feel about you after you’re fertilizer.
And maybe I allowed myself to hope that I was remembered fondly.
And maybe I wished, from time to time, that my first book would be read now by more people, and perhaps in a different light.
And maybe, in ugly little moments I’m almost too ashamed to confess to (and this should give you an idea of the quality of this shame, considering everything that I’ve confessed already), I hoped there were quiet moments in Emma’s day when her thoughts wandered to me unbidden, and she felt the fact and finality of my absence.
I hoped, in other words, that she was in pain. I hoped that she grieved.
This is perhaps the least palatable facet of suicide: the fucking sour grapes.
Again, I’m not exactly swelling with pride when I tell you this, understand.
And when these thoughts came on me I went to Suleiman, and he brought me into the desert, and we wandered for
three days, five, however long it took.
Toward the end of my father’s life, he sat in his easy chair in the living room for days on end. He stared at the television without really watching. He stared at the walls, through them. We asked if he wanted the curtains drawn so he could look out the window, and mostly he didn’t answer us, but we drew them anyway. Sometimes he would gaze at the snow outside in the yard, and the icy road beyond, and sometimes he wouldn’t. He refused to go to bed. It was almost impossible for him to walk to the bedroom and he found it difficult to breathe lying down and was afraid he wouldn’t wake up. So he sat in the chair. He smelled bad, because he didn’t shower, and also because a sick, dying body gives off a subtle but indescribably bad smell. The smell of creeping terror, maybe, or of futility. So he sat in the chair, exuding that smell, staring at everything.
Then one evening he asked me, completely out of the blue, to take him to see a movie. My relief at his sudden desire to get out in the world nearly overwhelmed me, and I said yes, maybe a bit too eagerly.
We drove in silence, twenty minutes to the Flagship Cinemas in town, and I parked the car in a handicapped spot near the doors and went around to help him out of his seat, took small shuffling steps at his side as he struggled along with his walker.
In the lobby we stood together looking up at the list of films. It was late fall, a wasteland in terms of movie releases, and there wasn’t much I had any interest in sacrificing two hours of my life for. But given that, at least in theory, I had a hell of a lot more hours left in reserve than my father, I decided to let him make the call.