She was either adored or loathed; everyone, it seemed, had an opinion, and there was no middle ground. I knew that Emma being Emma, neither extreme could suit her in the least. Her instinct was to be anonymous except among friends and family; before the book, an Internet search of her name would have revealed exactly three items pertaining to her, and each of those related to her work and had nothing whatsoever to do with her personal life.
Images of her were numerous now, of course. At first I resisted looking, then decided who was I trying to kid, and not only looked but pored: Emma in her car, Emma pushing a cart through the produce section at Whole Foods, Emma striding into a movie theatre. I clicked through to enlarge the photos, then studied each one for long moments. How can I explain it to you? If you’ve never been this inexplicably moved by a set of eyes, or the dainty dual points of a woman’s upper lip, then it won’t make any sense. It will seem like hyperbole, or the ramblings of the delusional. But I’m telling you, the only conclusion that makes sense is that my love for her is encoded in both of us at the genetic level: hers the signal, mine the receiver. And you can’t fight that, brother. I gave up trying a long time ago.
In the end, in my greed, I perused one too many images, coming across a shot of Emma walking arm in arm with a man down a Manhattan avenue, and when I clicked through to the webpage—Star magazine, it turned out—I was greeted with this caption, in a large, bold font:
Emma Zielinski leaving a SoHo coffeehouse with fiancé Peter Cash.
What do YOU think of Emma’s impending nuptials? Should she stay faithful to the memory of Ron Currie? Or should she get on with her life? Make your opinion heard in the comments section below!
I don’t know what I’d expected. It’d been four years, after all.
Still, I just sat there for a while with my hands in my lap, and when the attendant came and asked in warped English if I wanted more tea, he had to repeat himself three times before I looked up.
Asif insisted I had to resurrect myself and go back to the States.
We stood in his kitchen post-lunch, eating leftover rice and thin-sliced flank steak straight from buffet pans.
I thought he was going to take Roberto’s tack, tell me I couldn’t let Emma get away, that love was all, the Alpha and Omega, trumping every other consideration.
But it turned out Asif didn’t really give a toss about romantic love. Ever practical, his concerns lay elsewhere.
He used two fingers to scoop rice from the pan, asking me, Did you leave a will?
A will? You’re joking, right?
Of course not. I am serious.
No, Asif. I was too busy faking my death to worry much about estate planning and power of attorney.
He cocked his head, stared at me quizzically.
Never mind, I said. No will.
Then you must go back, he said.
Why?
You have a family, yes?
I don’t have a family. Not in the way that you mean.
But you have family. Parents. Brothers and sisters, nieces and nephews.
All of that, sure.
How many nieces and nephews?
I thought for a minute. Ten, all told, I said. I think.
Asif stared, exasperated that whatever obvious truth he offered continued to elude me. Then you must go back, he said, holding his hands out, a plea for reason. You have no choice.
Can you explain to me why, exactly, I have no choice?
Your family. You must take care of them.
I wasn’t exactly taking care of anyone before. What makes you think I will now?
Listen, Asif said, sitting in the chair he normally used only when peeling vegetables over the trash can. This book of yours, it is selling very much, yes? Making a lot of money?
Certainly seems that way.
And that money is going somewhere. But where? You have no will. So who takes the money? Not your mother. Not your nieces and nephews. Who?
This was a question that I hadn’t considered. Who was getting all that money? I had no idea how such things worked.
They won’t get it if I go back, Asif, I said. It’ll go to me.
Yes, yes, he said, but then you control it. You decide where it goes, now and after you really are gone. You could give it to them yourself, if you don’t want it. But you must take care of your family. It is most important. More important than books. More important than you. How you treat and care for your family. This is the thing.
I nodded. Difficult logic to argue with, though I still was not entirely convinced.
I see that you have never even thought about this, Asif said, and now his voice was tinged with reluctant accusation. In his view, a man who did not take care of his family was no man at all.
I felt my cheeks go hot.
It makes me sorry to learn this about you, Asif said.
One thing I didn’t learn during my long narcissistic cruise on the Internet was that Hankie had died. Killed, finally, by the narcolepsy that had stalked him for years. I found out from Dwayne, who picked me up in Boston on my return to the States. This was after the Egyptian authorities deported me and the U.S. authorities questioned me for five hours, determining that while in faking my death I’d certainly done something odd and probably heinous, I had not, in fact, done anything illegal.
We’ll get to that in a minute.
But so Dwayne waited for me just outside the secure area at Logan Airport, along with half a dozen reporters and what seemed like a thousand of my new fans, many of whom held copies of Emma’s novel. This crush was held back by grim-faced state troopers, who created a cordon for me to walk through. Behatted, sunglassed, head down, listening to my name being called from twenty directions at once and feeling my whole body vibrate with the unwelcome energy of these supplicants, I no longer wanted to be famous in the least. I wanted to be nameless. I wanted to be erased, again. I wanted to be on my back in the Red Sea, naked beneath that twinkling emptiness.
At the end of the cordon stood Dwayne. I reached him, and he took my bag without a word. The bulk of the state troopers held the throng inside the terminal while a pair accompanied the two of us out to the parking garage. I kept waiting for Dwayne to speak, but he remained silent and so I kept my mouth shut, too, not having the faintest idea what one says to friends when one returns from the dead.
We paused outside Dwayne’s car, and suddenly he turned and hit me square on the mouth, the same spot where the caballeros had relieved me of my teeth years before. I went to one knee as the troopers fell on Dwayne. They pinned him against a concrete support with his arm twisted behind him at an impossible angle, the offending fist clenched between his shoulder blades.
It’s alright, I said to the cops, wiping blood from a cut on my lower lip. I deserved that. Let him go.
Not your call, one of the troopers told me as he fastened a cuff around Dwayne’s wrist. He’s going in for that.
I stood up. Fellas, come on, I said. That wasn’t assault. That was business between friends.
The troopers looked at me, then at each other, while Dwayne breathed hard with his face mashed against the support beam. Finally they relented, after a bit more posturing and a few awkward moments of uniform straightening during which no one really seemed to know what to do.
On the ride north we didn’t talk much. There wasn’t any need. It had been a while since we’d shared the sort of common experience that inspires easy conversation. Aside from that, I couldn’t explain what I’d done or why, and Dwayne (like most people who had known and loved me, it would turn out) had no real interest in an explanation regardless.
He broke the silence, finally, as we crossed the lazy green arch of the Piscataqua River Bridge into Maine.
Hankie’s dead, he said. In case you didn’t know. Really, in actua
lity, dead.
An ignoble if unsurprising end for Hankie, and painfully ironic, too, I thought as I sat there in the passenger seat and listened to Dwayne, ironic because here was the one guy I knew in his thirties who occupied his life with ease and grace and comfort, who took unqualified satisfaction in both his work and his family, who loved his wife more than he had when they were married, who would lay down in traffic for his son and daughter, but who also had fun where he found it and slept soundly each night and through the tectonic changes of marriage and fatherhood had nevertheless remained the happy cooler-than-thou spike-haired punk he’d always been, inveterate smart-ass with a big tender heart, a guy who quite simply liked his life and wanted it to continue. And now he was gone.
He’d fallen asleep at the wheel of his pickup, driving home from watching the Sox game with Dwayne. Clipped a deer—it had dragged its shattered hind end into the grass, where the police found it dead the next morning—then careened into an old maple on the roadside. He hit the tree driver’s-door first, sixty miles per hour of force negated with great violence on the very spot where he sat.
As my high school physics teacher used to say, it’s not the speed that gets you, it’s the rate of deceleration.
This was a bit that Hankie himself would have found endlessly funny, not in spite of the fact that the joke was on him, but because of it.
I sat there in the car, the news of Hankie’s demise having been transmitted and the two of us silent again, and it occurred to me that Asif had been right, but now I had several families to take care of: mine, and Suleiman’s, and now Hankie’s.
So I’ve told you that my father and I shared a name. I am, or was, a junior. Which raises a question I’ve wondered about since he died but haven’t yet found an answer for: does one continue to be a junior after the elder shuffles off? The distinction, at that point, seems to lose its utility. And then there’s what I know from having published in England, where they removed the suffix from my books altogether, explaining that the British audience wouldn’t understand what it meant. One imagines that the British make a habit of naming children after themselves just as we do, and given that, one wonders how they distinguish between the father and the son.
Sharing a name with my father presented a minor inconvenience at times throughout my life—my overdue phone bill would show up on his credit report, for example, and we each could rely on occasionally receiving the other’s mail. This was harmless, for the most part, and occasionally funny, as when a copy of his AARP magazine came sliding through my mail slot in my twenty-eighth year.
After he died, though, it was no longer funny. It was, on occasion, like having a ghost brush up against me. A nice woman from Ford ESP Premium Care called to ask if I was happy with the extended warranty service on the car my parents bought right before my father died. The state wrote to inform me that I owed payroll taxes for the last two years that my father’s lawn care business existed. Golf magazine address-corrected and sent me nearly a year’s worth of issues before I finally called and told a customer service rep who bore no responsibility for my grief that my father, being dead, no longer played golf and, further and besides, in my estimation golf was a grotesque, elitist waste of real estate, thereby making their publication a grotesque, elitist waste of trees.
But the ghost of my namesake was and is inside of me, as well. In traffic, I drum my index and middle fingers on the dashboard exactly as he did, and will do this for several moments before I catch myself and my fingers freeze in the air above the textured leather. When I clear my throat, sometimes I hear my father instead of myself. Likewise when I yawn, or whistle. It’s always sublinguistic sounds, nonsense noises. And I’ve become convinced that this is not me aping my father, not subconsciously mimicking behaviors I saw him exhibit a thousand times or more, but something deeper and more fundamental than that—something genetic, in all likelihood. My father’s ghost, imprinted on the simple proteins of each cell in my body, as well as on every piece of mail I’ll ever receive for the rest of my life.
So: how I came to be deported from Egypt.
I’ve got a few regrets here and there, but none greater than this.
Because I chose to ignore what Asif told me, chose to believe I could not return home, chose to insist on remaining dead, and I went to Suleiman that afternoon and told him I had to be in the desert right away, and that it might take a long time, longer than ever before, but I was asking him as his friend, not as his client, to do this for me.
Suleiman, whose wife was hugely pregnant by now, looked at me for a long moment, and beneath the wispy graying beard his mouth was set in a line that bespoke both obligation and anticipated regret.
And I saw this, but I could not find a way to set myself aside and let him and his family be, let him welcome his son into the world. The next morning we set out.
God pinching our behinds, again: Suleiman himself had cautioned me, over and over, that Egypt held more unexploded land mines in its deserts than any other country on Earth, many going as far back as World War II, when the British and the Germans were Rochambeauing each other across North Africa. This comprehensive blanketing was supplemented years later by the Egyptians and Israelis, who laid down thousands of toe-poppers over the course of several wars. The minefields were mapped and mapped again, Suleiman told me, but the problem, and the danger even to experienced Bedouins like him, was that the mines refused to stay put. They migrated in the loose sand as though seeking victims, and occasionally they found one. Suleiman’s own nephew, a young man in his teens who had just begun guiding tourists in the mountains, was lucky to have survived after being relieved of his left leg by an ancient Nazi mine.
We’d been in the desert for a week, and nothing was working, nothing could still my longing—not the heat, not the infinite featureless horizon, not the omnipresent crunch of sand in my mouth, that previously reliable flavor of nothingness. I still felt everything. I still wanted everything. At night when the camels bedded down and we sat Indian-style before the fire, Suleiman sang with an intensity and feeling I had not heard before on any of our excursions, the plain and plaintive sound of a man who fears he will miss the most important event in his life, a man who prays that this will not be so. While he sang I turned my face away from the flames and swiped tears from my cheeks. And in those moments I knew it was over, knew that I could not empty myself out any more, that I could keep Suleiman away from his family for a year and it would make no difference, on the 365th night I would still be wiping tears away as he wailed—in short, I knew that I would be full to bursting, again, from now until the end.
Still, I couldn’t admit this to myself, and so each morning when Suleiman asked me if it was time to return I told him no, onward, and we trudged farther north, toward a horizon that refused to draw any closer no matter how much ground we covered.
Suleiman’s camel tromped on the mine near sundown on the eighth day. The desert was so quiet that evening that we could hear the whisper of the camel’s hooves in the sand. In the stillness I had begun for the first time to feel more calm, however temporarily. And then that calm exploded around me, and when I looked up from where I’d landed, facedown in a dune, I saw the sand stained with the mingled blood of Suleiman and his camel, and then I saw Suleiman himself, halved cleanly by the blast. His eyes were closed, and below them his face was cratered, tattered and crimson, the lower jaw obliterated. My first confused thought was that no plaintive sounds would ever come from his mouth again, and this, initially, was what saddened me. Not the fact of Suleiman’s death, but its consequence: his now-endless silence.
If the mine had been of the anti-personnel variety, Suleiman may have lived to meet his son. But this mine, like many in the Sinai, was designed to stop a Soviet T-62 tank, one among millions of gifts of high explosives from the United States to Israel. It could blow a hole through an inch and a half of steel and still reta
in enough force to kill everything on the other side. A man and his camel didn’t stand a chance.
I lay there through the night. Though not badly hurt, I likely would have died; even if I’d found the motivation to rise and move on, I could not have navigated back to Habiba Village. But the next morning a half-dozen Bedouin men arrived astride camels, the wind flattening their white robes in folds against their bodies, curved knives at their waists and bandoliers slung across their shoulders. They’d heard the blast from miles away and come to investigate. Without a word they took in the scene and collected what remained of Suleiman, loaded us on the animals and headed south. They asked questions I didn’t understand, and in response I told them, over and over, where we had come from. Which was where, after four days of steady, direct riding in fair weather, they deposited me and Suleiman and his remaining camel.
At Suleiman’s home I stayed outside for three days while his wife wailed, first in grief, then in labor. I was in the midst of digging a grave when her cries ceased, and that peculiar desert silence marked the birth of Suleiman’s son.
The pickaxe recoiled from stony soil, throwing sparks with each swing. The spade handle cracked, then snapped in half. A full day and night passed before I had a hole deep and broad enough to bury what was left of my friend.