Evel Knievel Days (25 page)

The consensus was to go to the Maadi Central Franco-American Hospital in Zemalek. I was an American, so apparently this was the logical place to take me. My poor mother just nodded. She trailed along, holding the end of my pant leg, walking behind the processional. They jostled me along the city streets, up and over the Nile on the sidewalk of the Sixth of October Bridge, a spectacle for the city’s drivers, many of whom showed their appreciation, or possibly wished us luck, by honking resolutely as they passed us. The sound of the horns rose and became a melody, and though it’s probably not true I’d like to believe that I began, at that moment, composing this in my subconscious:

The Maadi Central Franco-American Hospital in Zemalek, despite being in the best neighborhood in the city, was a rotting hulk of a building. It had been founded in the early twentieth century by American Lutheran missionaries. Over a hundred years old, it seemed to sag beneath the weight of its own facade. The paint that had once adorned the frames of its windows had chapped and peeled to bare gray. Cracks ran through the stucco walls like air veins through a wall of ice. It was easily more terrifying than the American Motordrome Wall of Death. This was, it seemed, an actual wall of death. No Evel Knievel Days required.

They carried me—these three angelic strangers carried me—to the front door, and they managed to somehow requisition a wheelchair into which they deposited me. Then they left. One of them lingered for a few minutes, to make sure we were situated, but he, too, soon left, slipping back into the regular routine of his day. I imagined the conversation at home:
What did you do today, dear? Not
much. Went to work, got some lunch, carried a feverish American across the Nile. Filed some paperwork. You know: the usual
.

As in every hospital I’d ever been to, access to the ward was guarded by a swath of sentries. Secured behind their identical desks, they triaged and admitted patients. The severely ill were funneled off immediately to some care facility. Those who looked like they were not in imminent danger of death were given paperwork and charged a bit of money up front. I did not seem like I was in imminent danger of death. Ill but not dying. Or so it seemed. At that moment.

My mother tried to find someone who spoke English. She had no luck.

“Call Agnes Mouri,” I said, chills tumbling along the sides of my spine like rolling pins.

“Are you kidding me?” my mother said. “You want to go to jail in Egypt, sick as a dog?”

An admissions secretary with an enormous mole on her chin took me on as her patient. By
took me on
I mean
shook us down for a bribe
.

“Good treatment?” she said.

“Are you asking,” my mother said, “if we want good treatment here at the hospital?” I was slumped in one of the two folding chairs that sat, stiff and cushionless, in front of the woman’s desk. My mother scowled.

“Extra,” the woman said. “You pay here. You pay me.”

My mother shook her head and reached into her purse. She dug through her wallet and pulled out a plastic card. “Blue Cross?” she said, then repeated it more slowly: “Blue Cross?”

It seemed like my mother was referencing a sad religious cult.

If our administrator had ever heard of health insurance, she didn’t let on. “Small gratuity,” she insisted. “For me.
Bakshish
.”

“Mom?” I said.

“Khosi, hush,” she said. “I’ve never in my life seen such an egregious violation of the Hippocratic Oath.”

Our attendant continued smiling. She had not taken the Hippocratic Oath.

My mother was incensed. “I will not stoop to such a level. As recipients of medical care, we are part of an unbroken chain—a chain that extends to the ancient Greeks and Egyptians and the cradle of civilization here in the Middle East. It is a long, proud tradition.”

I turned and vomited into the wastebasket.

“Okay,” my mom said. “But just a few Egyptian pounds.”

That became the key to my medical care over the next few days. Cash was king. Need to see a doctor? Just a few Egyptian pounds. Need IV medication? Just a few Egyptian pounds. Need some blankets or a pillow? No variation on the theme. My mother bought me a room at the back of the hospital, a room that had a view of an alleyway and a series of resolute iron bars on the windows. There was no way to escape it: It stank of urine. On the far wall, some unfortunate patient had sprayed blood in an arc across the sterile white paint. There were no paper towels. No supplies of any kind.

In short: Everything was horrendously disorganized.

The sink lacked soap or even a functioning faucet. And nothing had been changed: The sheets and the pillowcases bore broad yellow stains.
Perhaps this is the source of the odor?
I thought idly. I didn’t
say anything. I was busy drifting in and out of consciousness, waking up periodically to be sick. I felt like I was vomiting out my stomach lining; each breath made my insides burn.

Fever dreams are notorious for their vivid imagery and extravagant narratives. I suppose I could have dreamed anything. I could have dreamed I was a camel, wandering with a Bedouin tribe through the Arabian deserts, going from freshwater well to freshwater well, beset by febrile thirst. I could have dreamed that I was a tiny Yassir Arafat. I could have dreamed I was in the afterlife with the Ghost of William Andrews Clark and Ozymandias. But I didn’t. I dreamed I was home in Montana, in the office at the museum.

It was no ordinary day at the museum. No, something was wrong. Something insidious and dastardly. I looked around me. Everything was crooked. Every picture leaned a little bit to the left or the right. Every pencil was a half inch out of alignment. All of the receipts had been shuffled so that they no longer were in chronological order. What a catastrophe. This was the obsessive-compulsive’s worst fear: the world infinitesimally askew.
The horror, the horror
. I started straightening, feverishly straightening everything, but by the time I finished, all my work had been undone. Everything had returned to its state of disarray.

I would never be able to put it right.

I woke up screaming.

“Khosi,” my mom said. She was at my bedside, holding my hand. “It’s okay. Calm down.”

“It was terrible, Mom,” I said. “Do you have any water?” I was conscious of the fact that it was a hundred degrees in the room. “Why is it so hot?”

“The air conditioner’s broken,” my mother said. “I’ve been unable to talk to anyone about it.”

“What time is it?” I asked. The alley outside the window was dark.

“Five in the morning,” she said. “You’ve been asleep for almost eighteen hours.”

“Eighteen hours,” I said. My voice sounded flat and free of affect. I was too exhausted to express surprise.

My mother nodded. She crept closer to me. “It’s disgusting in here,” she said. “More important, I have to bribe everyone. For everything.”

As if to illustrate the point, a nurse appeared in the doorway. She hovered. My mother automatically handed over a five-pound note. This was roughly the equivalent of a dollar.

“I think of it as a tip,” my mother said in English.

“I’m here to mark your leg,” the nurse said to me in Arabic.

I squinted up at her. I couldn’t figure out what she meant—
mark your leg
—so I didn’t translate.

“I’m almost out of cash,” my mother said. “Is she asking for cash? Do you have any in your wallet?”

I didn’t respond to this, either. The nurse brought out a bright red permanent marker from the pouch of her gown. She pulled down the bedsheets. Her touch was not gentle. What is the opposite of gentle? Aggressive? Belligerent? Bellicose? She seized my left leg in a bellicose manner and drew a bright red X on it, just above the knee.

“What is she doing?” my mother asked.

“Experimental treatment,” I said. My mother didn’t laugh. The nurse turned to go.

“Khosi,” my mother said, “ask her what they’re doing.”

I complied. The nurse stopped in the doorway. For a moment I thought she was going to ask for more money. I saw then that she was just tired. Dense black circles looked like they were pinned beneath her eyes. “For your operation,” she said. “We mark the leg so they know which one to cut.”

Even in my diminished state, I must have looked alarmed, because my mother immediately stood up and clutched her chest. “What? What did she say?”

“Wait one second,” I said. I turned to the nurse. “Operation? For my fever?”

The nurse squinted. “Are you not Mr. Anwas? Mr. Zahid Anwas?”

“I hate to tell you this,” I said, “but I am not Mr. Zahid Anwas.”

She paused on the cusp of either leaving or investigating the matter further. Then she advanced to my bed and lifted the chart that dangled from a loop of string. She flipped through the pages, tracing lines of information with the tip of her finger. She cocked her hip to one side, submerged in thought. Finally, she shook her head and looked at me. “Room Eleven, not Room Ten. My apologies.” She added this quietly, as if it actually pained her to say it. Then she was gone.

“Khosi?” my mother said.

“Don’t worry, Mom,” I said. “They’re just tagging me. Like a wild animal.” And then I fell back asleep.

The second dream was more vivid than the first. I was in Montana again. In Montana, for years and years, my dreams were of
the Middle East. Once I was in the Middle East, I dreamed of Montana.

In this dream I’d broken through the EPA fencing that surrounded the Berkeley Pit. I stood on the boat launch that jutted out across its toxic surface. I could smell it. The scent of the water, unmistakable and saline, a brine that hung in the air along with a faint dampness. Then the thick scent of processed coal, a smell almost like licorice, sweet and full of the odor of earth. Somewhere a smelter was firing, firing deep into the belly of the bulk of the night.

I was preparing to dive into the pool. In the late 1990s, researchers found little animals in the Berkeley Pit: strange algae, quirky protozoans, tiny fungae, multitudinous bacteria. They were extremophiles—beings that lived in conditions that killed other forms of life. I was about to dissolve myself into them, in my dream, to sacrifice my large cellular span for a smaller, more resilient one. Or was I already an extremophile—traveling on this fool’s errand to Cairo, searching in this ancient city for my own link to the ancient past? I saw my body splitting into its atomic constituents. I saw my self disintegrating and diminishing and dying away.

I awoke again to find my mother pacing back and forth beside the bed. My lips were chapped. I needed, desperately needed, Chapstick.

“Mom,” I said.

She turned as if pinned on an axis. “I’ve got a doctor,” she said. “One minute.” She disappeared past the ragged curtain and into the body of the hospital.

And so, after twenty-four hours, after the filthy room and the near operation and the fever dreams and the persistent vomiting of
bile and the myriad miserable symptoms, the first doctor arrived. Or, rather, was led to my room by my mother, who physically held him by his coat. I was surprised she didn’t lasso him by his stethoscope. He introduced himself to me, seemingly relieved that I spoke Arabic. I shivered beneath my pile of blankets. I looked to my left. I now had an IV site—that was good news. The bad news was that the site had started to itch. The IV bag itself had deflated to an empty shell.

My doctor assessed the situation. He looked at my mother and me. He glanced over my chart. He frowned. He took a moment to officiously adjust the tie that he wore beneath his white lab coat. “She is a problem,” he said, to me, gesturing to my mother.

At that moment something changed for me. I felt like I’d used that exact word to describe my mom’s behavior before. But to hear this doctor say it—to hear a stranger disparage her without the weight of love behind his words—I felt myself twitching, felt my muscles involuntarily clench and release with anger. It hurt me. Your parents, I had discovered, are proprietary. They might not know it, and you might not know it, but they’re yours. And the things you say about them, they are balanced by a weight of equal, unsaid things, a weight of memory, that is heavy and broad and almost tactile.

“What has she done?” I said. I glanced at her. She smiled sweetly at me. The presence of the doctor had eased some of the lines of worry—lines that had etched themselves across her face.

“She has been constantly bribing the medical personnel,” the doctor said.

“I see,” I said. I struggled to clear my throat. “I think there’s been a misunderstanding.”

“It’s distracting,” the doctor said.

“I think she just wants the best for me.”

The doctor flushed. He dropped my clipboard. It clattered against the metal frame of the bed. He turned to my mother.
“Parlez-vous français?”
he said to her. She shook her head.
“Spreken Sie Deutsche?”
Another headshake.
“¿Habla español?”
A sad, distant look.

“Just English,” she said.

“Ah, English,” he said to me in Arabic. “The language of colonial oppression.” He turned more fully toward me. “Tell her we’ve tested your blood,” he said, “and we’ve found something troubling. Have you been to Souq al-Goma’a? Or any of the
ashwaiyyat
? Maybe Moqattan Hills?”