Flimsy Little Plastic Miracles (19 page)

R
oberto went back to bed. I slipped out to
la tienda
for rum, slugged from the bottle as the sun rose and the island woke up and the dogs and horses made their daily fuss. A few hours later Roberto found me drunk at his kitchen table, and he took the bottle away and dumped what was left in the sink. Then Roberto blessed me. At first I thought he did so in Spanish, but later, sober, remembering, I realized it was Latin, the language from the Masses of my childhood. He placed his hand on my forehead, shook salt on his finger and pressed it into my mouth, as though he were John the Baptist.
Accipe signum Crucis tam in fronte, quam in corde
, Roberto told me. He traced symbols on my face and chest with his thumb, symbols I remembered but could not name. Slumped and insensate, I accepted his blessing. I did not resist.

I
t turned out Roberto only knew one untrustworthy person, but that man knew the people I needed, being a fixer.

The fixer clearly hadn't seen Roberto for a while, but greeted him warmly, whatever bond they'd shared long ago spanning the years that had passed. Me the fixer was less sure of. Arms crossed, he eyed me with open skepticism while Roberto talked a streak of Spanish. But the fixer's dark, seamed face brightened considerably at what was, for him, a simple enough request to fulfill: one counterfeit passport.

The man extended a hand toward me, rowing his fingers back toward his palm to indicate payment was due at that moment.

I hesitated, looked to Roberto.

Quinientos
, he said to me, nodding his approval and assent. Almost a third of my money. But without the passport it didn't matter how much money I had. I counted off five hundred dollars and handed it over.

The fixer held the bills up to the overhead light, one by one. Then, satisfied, he removed a small silver camera from a desk drawer. I stopped him, explaining in Spanish that I needed to look different than I did now. He led me to the bathroom, where he produced clippers and sheared my face and head without asking permission, without a word. He left me with a safety razor and a can of Barbasol to finish the job myself, and when I emerged he took three pictures of me, shook Roberto's hand and clapped him on the shoulder, and bade us fuck off until
mañana
.

A
t Roberto's I took a long bath while my one set of clothes flapped on a line in the backyard. I sat there, submerged up to my chin, for a long time. As the water cooled around me my hands returned again and again to my face, bearded for so long, now bare, alien to both my touch and, as I stood for a minute gazing into the mirror, my sight. Not to mention the shaved head, lumpy and pale, spotted with blemishes. I realized that if I'd caught a glimpse of myself in a storefront window, I might for a moment see not my own reflection, but the presence of another person entirely on the other side of the glass. Which of course was the whole point.

B
efore my father took sick, but after he had a heart attack at fifty-two and retired, he and my mother moved from the house where they'd raised me and my sisters and into a prefab double-wide outside of town. The house sat on an acre of grass bordering a dairy farm, with a view of the river half-obscured by a stretch of oaks and white pines. At night, sometimes, they could hear coyotes howling.

This was to be a fresh start for them, after his near-death and long convalescence, and he took to retirement well, if in the usual fashion: spending a lot of time in his new garage, tilling a patch of the yard and planting a garden, joining cribbage and bowling leagues.

But there were unexpected things as well, things that hinted at a complexity to the man, and also a tenderness, that I had never suspected in twenty-five years of knowing him. In addition to the garden, the utility and sensibleness of food plants, he also tended flowers—rosebushes on the side of the house facing the road, rows of violets in front of the deck, a clutch of white turtleheads near the flagpole.

What he favored most, though, were a dozen cherry trees that he planted on either side of the driveway, over three hot summer days during which my mother worried that he would work himself into another heart attack. The trees were very young, far from bearing fruit, but this was a long-term project for my father—or so he imagined—and he shepherded the trees through the seasons for two years, watering and fertilizing, training them with shears and knife, staking them firmly to protect from the winter winds.

But then the doctor told him he had cancer, and the trees went neglected, though I did my best to keep the aphids at bay and prune away signs of blight. The next spring, my father's last, the rosebushes grew wild. The garden never progressed beyond an incongruous patch of dirt surrounded by bluegrass, a glaring vacancy that hardened and split when summer came. Two of the cherry trees died of something called silver leaf, and a third came loose from its stakes in a violent thunderstorm and snapped halfway down its slender, delicate trunk.

After he was gone, my mother spent three years trying to wrest herself away from that house, which they'd come to live in only because he'd had a heart attack, and in which they had experienced little other than his illness and death. One of the reasons she gave for continuing to torture herself by living there was the trees. He loved those trees, she told me. He wanted to watch them mature. He used to talk about making cherry pies, she said.

U
nderstand, again, that when I left the island for the Sinai I was not interested in assuming a different identity. I did not intend to become another person. There was never a moment when the thought even crossed my mind, in fact. Changing my appearance was not a reinvention—it was an erasure.

So when I bought a bus ticket out of Cairo, then sat for eight hours watching the infinite sameness of the desert as it approached and receded all at once, I had no intention of learning Arabic, or doing anything other than subsistence work, or making new friends, or rock climbing, or finding God, or any of the other things people do to cobble together what is usually thought of as a full life. There was no life to fill, and no need to clutter up purgatory with aimless activity or self-improvement.

I knew that I'd made the right decision to disappear when I realized, as the bus inched through a sandstorm so dense the road was obscured almost entirely, that for the first time since faking my death I genuinely had no feelings whatsoever about my unfinished novel. I was blank about it. Utterly so. A corpse, after all, has no use for books, any more than it does for eyes, those unseeing things.

I slouched off the bus in a hamlet halfway down the Red Sea coastline. I'd been there years before, while staying in Cyprus with a friend as I wrote what would become my first book, and I'd fallen in love with the gorgeous desolation of the place. The Holy Land's moonscape and my insides had matched like a pair of socks, and I felt this recognition thrum in me again as the bus pulled away and I stared out beyond the road, where the desert brooded behind red cliffs that rose up out of the sand like titanic sentries.

Not that I was allowed to ruminate on the sense of coming home for long. In short order a dozen men descended, demanding that I buy a soda, henna tattoos, or a ride to the few ramshackle buildings that made up the town, a mile back in the direction I'd come from on the bus.

I pointed to one of the men at random and mimed turning a steering wheel back and forth. He nodded eagerly and hurried away, reappearing a minute later in a battered old Datsun.

We sped off in a burst of combustion and rising dust, and here was something I remembered from my first time in the desert: things didn't move much, but when they did there was always something frantic about it, as though the object in motion were in pursuit of something, or else being pursued.

The driver assumed I was looking for a room, and dropped me at Habiba Village, a loose collection of thatch huts and wooden shacks abutting the languid Red Sea. This place, like everything aside from the bus depot, seemed deserted. I made my way through the huts to the water as the driver went inside the office to negotiate a finder's fee for delivering what he must have thought was an American tourist with bottomless pockets.

On the beach I found a metal cage atop a post. Inside the cage was a small monkey, baring sharp canines as I approached. The cage was full of candy wrappers and cigarette butts. Across the water, a few miles distant, lay the coast of Saudi Arabia. I imagined that someone standing there looking back toward me would see a mirror image of what I stood gazing at: brown, flat, featureless, endless nothing.

A thin Arab in khakis and a cream-colored polo shirt appeared beside me. You need a room, sir? he asked.

I need a job, I told him.

T
he Singularity, of course, will mark not just the end of death, but the end of suffering as well.

First, we will merge with our technology through a process called wireheading, in which the pleasure centers of the brain are stimulated remotely. This will not merely fabricate pleasure, but more important, eliminate all physical and psychological discomfort.

Alternately, those who still appreciate the analog human experience may opt, at the end of the day, to upload onto a computer any moment that was painful or boring or otherwise not good, in the same manner, and with the same ease, that one uploads a photograph from a camera today.

I mean, imagine it.

Next will come genetic engineering on a scale, and with a precision, that will make Dolly the sheep look like something out of a nerdy kid's science kit. A whole prototypical generation whose genomes are programmed to render unhappiness in any form biologically impossible. And before you dismiss this as some sort of Stepfordian nightmare, consider: If there weren't something fundamentally wrong with the way we're wired by nature, would there be such a tremendous sum of suffering in the world? And if we agree on a fundamental wrongness, what, then, is the objection to correcting it?

You loathe the thought, I know. You tremble and ululate, clutch misery to your chest, guard it tooth and claw. You are as attached to suffering as a child is to its blankie. But not me. Not anymore. Take my memories of Emma and cast them into a pit deep enough to feed the five thousand. Take the image of my father's dead sunken face from my mind's eye, load it onto a flash drive, and watch me crush it under my heel screaming
baruch sheptarani
, because even though I am a gentile I am also a son of the world and of humanity; I belong to every language and so I will speak in whatever language suits the moment.

T
he thin Arab, whose name was Asif, put me to work in the kitchen of Habiba Village's small restaurant. He couldn't afford to pay me, but in exchange for busing tables (the ‘tables' being ground-level platforms surrounded by cushions in beachside cabanas) and washing dishes twice a day, I was fed and given a small thatch hut, complete with bed mat and mosquito netting.

I would have felt guilty for taking a hut that Asif could otherwise be renting, but he always had multiple vacancies. In fact, there were rarely more than three or four guests at a time in the village. Asif told me that until recently business had been good—especially in summer, tourists had flocked to the Red Sea from Cairo and Israel—but then two bombs had detonated in Sharm El-Sheikh, the glimmering tourist mecca at the tip of the peninsula, and the Israelis in particular stayed home in droves after that.

Thus the sense I'd had, on arrival, that the place was deserted. And with the dearth of tourists, a current of desperation ran through those trying to make a living near Habiba Village, a desperation I felt every time I strode through the gauntlet of jewelry tables and kebab stands that ran the length of the beach between my hut and a polished, incongruous Hilton resort at the other end. Almost always on these daily walks I was the only person other than the shopkeepers themselves, and as I passed by they called to me from behind rickety folding tables, waved their arms wildly to get my attention, sometimes walked out onto the pathway and grabbed me by the upper arm in their anxiety to sell me something, anything.

And because I wanted nothing, had interest in nothing, I never stopped to consider the handmade necklaces, never sat for an application of henna, never even spoke a word, in fact. I walked with my eyes on my feet, not turning my head to either side. When the vendors touched me I shrugged their hands off gently, and did not break stride.

And when I reached the gleaming white walls of the Hilton, I turned around and traced the same path back to Habiba Village, and again the shopkeepers hollered and harassed, as though they'd never seen me before.

I
t turned out, though, that I did register with at least one of the shopkeepers. During one afternoon walk—I had been in the Sinai for at least a month, but certainly less than two—I was confronted by a dark, stringy-muscled Arab, who moved from behind the folding table on which he offered tea and Coca-Cola, stepped directly into my path, and put his hands on my shoulders to halt me.

Every day you walk through here, he said. Twice a day. And not buy anything. You pretend we are not here. But we are here.

I looked him in the eyes and saw a gentle dignity there that was hard not to respond to, especially when he'd been able to preserve that dignity in the face of what had to be a difficult life. But I couldn't bring myself to explain that I was not what he imagined me to be. I was not a rich American (Americans, in the Egyptian mind, always being rich). I was not a tourist. And I was not trying to be rude. I was simply
not there
. But I didn't have the language to convey this to him, and even if I had, I doubt he would have understood.

You don't have to buy, the man continued. But you do have to see we are here.

Without a word I stepped carefully to the side, and when he didn't move to block me again I continued on, head down, watching my feet kick up little clouds of dust.