Evel Knievel Days (23 page)

I looked over at the ghost. He was standing from his bar stool.

“I’ll see you in a few days, chief,” he said.

“I’m not a chief of any kind,” I said. And then: “Wait. In a few days? What do you mean?”

I felt a vacancy, an absence, a cold breath of air, and then—nothing. I looked around. The Ghost of William Andrews Clark was gone.

WILLIAM ANDREWS CLARK’S ONE & ONLY SKIRLIE

W
HEN
I
GOT BACK TO
the room, I took the bracelet from the bedside drawer. My mother was asleep in the other queen-size bed, a sleep mask pulled down over her eyes.

I lay down and held the thing aloft. Here it was, the jeweled object, the material substance, the incontrovertible and eternal element. It had outlasted dozens upon dozens of generations of humanity. It was streaked with oxidation. Thousands of years had worn down its luster. Still it had the power to awe. It was solid. I let it sink down and rest on my forehead. My headache was getting worse and worse and now I was shivering.

I sank gradually into a shallow, fitful sleep. I dreamed that I was sitting at the kitchen table in Butte. My mother was at the stove, cooking dinner. I stood up and went over to her and reached out and touched her face, even though that was something I’d never do in real life. I reached out and brushed my fingertips against her face, and the feel of her skin left me shuddering and cold. But I didn’t want
to pull my hand away. It was soothing somehow. It was peaceful. I awoke to my mother’s voice: “Come on,” she said, reaching underneath the covers and tickling the soles of my feet, “we have a lot to do today.”

Momentarily panicked, I felt around beneath the covers for the bracelet, my hands searching until they found it. Only then did I open my eyes. “How about the Egyptian Museum?” I said.

“Not exactly the Egyptian Museum,” my mother said. “I’m thinking of something a little different.”

“Tea at the Mena Park Hotel,” I suggested. “A trip on a ferry boat down the Nile.”

“Nope,” she said. “Guess. No, no, wait: You’ll never guess. Which shirt do you want?”

When my mother opened my closet, she was confronted by a devastating and pure order. Spectacular. I’d arranged them by color—along the colors of the visible spectrum—carefully aligning the shirts on hangers and making sure they were positioned just so, just perfectly, tip to tip to tip.

“Whatever,” I said. “I don’t care.”

She looked at me in mock amazement.

“Fine,” I said. “Bring me the blue oxford.”

“Which one?” my mother said. It was a valid question, since there were three of them.

“The lightest of the three,” I said. “The light blue one. It’s on the left.” I cleared my throat. “Not that you asked, but I’ve arranged them in ascending order according to depth of blue.”

“That’s subjective,” she said, “depth of blue.”

“No, it’s not,” I said.

“Okay, then,” she said, and brought me the wrong shirt. I put it on anyway.

Morning light had illuminated the room. It slashed across the furniture, the drapes, the bureau, the carpeting, igniting half of everything into an effulgent glow.

“Before I came here,” my mother said, “I was doing a little research with Wada.” She could barely contain her enthusiasm. “Well,” she continued, “
research
isn’t really the right word.
Snooping
is more like it.”

“Okay,” I said.

“Wada and I—we just got some very interesting information about your father. Very interesting, indeed. Get dressed,” she added. “Get ready to go.”

She was my mother, and I owed her a certain fealty. It was pleasant just to be pulled forward by the force of her personality; if she had handed me a trowel and proposed we strip the entire country of its onions, I wouldn’t have objected. Also, my throat was feeling raw and the headache I’d had the previous day had not abated. And I was preoccupied by the idea of what to do with the bracelet.

“Look,” I said before we left the room. “We should talk about this.” I tossed the bracelet on the bedspread. “Why didn’t you tell me the truth?”

My mother held her hand to her forehead. She rolled her eyes. She looked physically uncomfortable, deeply physically uncomfortable. “Khosi,” she said, “think about it: What does that bracelet represent? What, exactly, does it stand for?” She sighed. “It was a gesture. And I didn’t want any part of it.”

“So you admit it,” I said. “It was for you.”

“Of course it was for me.” She paused. She pinched the bridge of her nose with two fingers. “Your father said it was worth ten times what he owed me. I don’t believe him. Or, I mean, I don’t really care. Because even if it was worth that much money, how on earth could I possibly sell it?”

“I met some guys yesterday,” I said. “I’m sure I could set you up.”

My mother ignored this. “Even so,” she said, “I reject the notion that he owes me anything. Because that would imply that the ledger isn’t balanced. And darling, the ledger is balanced. Entirely balanced. I’m done with him completely.” She shook her head. “Let’s get going. Hurry up.”

We went down the elevator and through the lobby and out past the security guards. The doorman requisitioned us a taxi, and without any warning, there we were in the city. My mother handed the driver a slip of paper. “Tell him to go to that address,” she said to me. Then she exclaimed, “What an adventure!” and settled down in the cracked leather seat.

I should have paid a little more attention at this point. Her glee was uncharacteristic. I should have checked her medicine case. I passed along the instructions. The driver nodded. He smiled. “Yes, yes,” he said in English. “Very fast. Very, very fast.”

This scared me, but I had more pressing matters. “Can you share with me,” I asked my mother, “where we might be going?”

“You don’t want to guess?” she said.

“I don’t want to guess,” I said.

“Fine,” she said. “If you don’t want to play along.” She paused. “We’re going to meet your father’s fiancée.”

My mother turned to me, and her face was silhouetted in the
bright light of smoggy midday Cairo. The planes of her cheekbones made her face look almost oval, positioned in the window of the taxi, a round geometry set against a plane of glass. Her lips were bright red, and she seemed to be wearing lipstick—something I had no memory of her wearing on
any
occasion, formal or otherwise. This was what I realized at that moment about my mother: She had a face framed for victory. Indeed, she looked triumphant—but then I undercut her triumph.

“Agnes Mouri,” I said.

She blanched. “Now, that’s a surprise,” she said.

“I’ve met her,” I said.

“And you didn’t tell me,” she said.

I sighed. “It’s a long story.”

“But I
just
got the address.” She paused. “Did you gouge out her eyes—you know, for your poor jilted mother?”

“That’s enough murder jokes, Mom,” I said. “There’s a point at which they get creepy. I doubt they’ll let us in the door, anyway, after my display earlier this week.”

“What happened?”

“A lot of things,” I said.

“What did
you
say?”

“A lot of things as well.”

“Come on,” she said. “Give me something.”

“Okay,” I said. “Let’s go back to the hotel and we can discuss it there. This is a needless gesture. I’ve already done everything we can do.”

“She knows everything?” my mother said.

“I don’t know what you mean by that,” I said.

She inhaled deeply. “I don’t, either.”

I began to recognize the neighborhood. The taxi had indeed brought us there very, very fast. Panic flooded me. I realized that I’d been too busy over the past couple of days to perform my morning rituals, to keep myself from utter disaster. I also knew clearly that I’d made the wrong decision—backing out of Agnes Mouri’s apartment.

“We need to have a better plan,” I said.

“I just want to meet her,” my mother said.

“Yeah, right,” I said.

“It’s true!” my mother protested. “You know: Her father was a famous shipping magnate.”

I turned the phrase over in my mind. It conjured images of the Suez Canal to me. There, there was a litany of facts you could really sink your teeth into. The building of the canal was, in my mind, one of the great stories of the modern world, full of intrigue, international espionage, and double and triple crosses. My brain
begged
to think about these, to sink into the comfort of the names: the Compagnie Universelle du Canal Maritime de Suez and Sa’id Pasha, the Egyptian viceroy, and the French architects fighting a duel on the steps of the parliament building over differing approaches to the blueprints. Or the Suez Crisis of 1956, which nearly led to a global nuclear war. But I was hurtling through Cairo in a taxi with my mother on the way to possibly assault my father’s second wife-to-be. The air was a bit acrid through the open window of the taxi. The billboards promised
highest quality
and
most delicious
and
fastest service
and
largest coverage area
.

Everywhere I went, I imagined Evel Knievel. His spirit was in
everything, in the dusty billboards, in the advertising that rose from nearly every surface and clamored for your attention. Satellite television, billboard advertising, it was a modern phenomenon, it wanted you to look, desperately wanted you to look, wanted it more than anything else. There was my imagined Knievel, soaring over the pyramids and the Nile; he was a perfect fit for a tourist-based economy.

The taxi came to a halt.

“She’s going to kick your ass,” I said.

“I’ll think of something,” my mother said. She smiled and looked intently at me. “You have to admit: I always do think of something.”

“You and Dad both,” I said.

We got out of the taxi. I paid the driver. He smiled and nodded and took the money and gave me no change and darted back into traffic, honking his horn to say goodbye. I’d had that headache all morning. As we approached the front door, it seemed to be getting worse and worse. Even the strange Egyptian aspirin I’d taken had done nothing to quiet the pain.

“Dad might be here,” I said. “You’re charging blindly into this situation because of your unresolved feelings from the past. It’s dangerous.”

She just said, “Hush.” She knocked on the door.

Within seconds, we heard the beep of someone disarming an alarm system, and then Ibrahim appeared. He was wearing a charcoal-colored suit. “
As-salamu alaikum
,” he said. “Hello again, sir. Ms. Mouri has been expecting you.”

My mother, who had been standing to the left of me, sort of shrank down and partly hid behind my shoulder.

“Please wait in the hall,” Ibrahim said in formal Arabic that almost matched mine.

Someone had added a glass bowl full of lemons to the marble-topped buffet table. My mother sat quietly on a chaise longue, glancing up at the hallway’s vaulted ceiling. She was calm. She seemed almost timorous, isolated and small on the single piece of comfortable furniture in this austere but elegant room.

“I could use a cigarette,” I said.

“I didn’t know you smoked,” she said.

“I don’t,” I said.

My head was pulsing with tendrils of pain; chills swept along my spine; they weakened my knees. I wobbled. We waited quite a long time there, saying nothing, looking at the plain walls. Around the corner, I knew, was an equally neutral-colored room. After my strange display three days ago, I was surprised when Ibrahim returned and ushered us in there. “She will be downstairs in a moment,” he said softly. He did not offer us tea.