Shadow Man: A Novel (23 page)

We left, gliding north in October. The sails filled. The boat moved slowly and she and I sat on the deck in ball caps and sunglasses, legs stretched out reading books and watching farmers and women in colorful tunics balance stacked bread and jugs on their veiled heads on the shore. I told her about the war, but not much, just a few stories of firefights and the craters and bloodied markets left by suicide bombers, and the way, after one explosion, hundreds of watermelons burst open like a garden of wet, pink flowers in the sun.

She had flown over from our apartment in New York. The Nile trip was to be an adventure before I began another book. Apparently, I’ve written books. How can this be? No memory of all those words.

She says we’d lie on the deck and feel the sun, which was strong but not too hot, and listen to the boy’s propane flame and to the captain string sails, and along the shore we’d hear the call to prayer from villages, and she’d close her eyes and pretend she was Cleopatra; that’s how ancient it seemed with the wooden boat creaking through the slow current.

“Don’t you remember that, James? That feeling. That sense of timelessness that we never felt in Europe.”

At night we made love in our cabin, still, moving only when a breeze ruffled the sails. We were as quiet as spirits, holding each other and listening to the captain and his son on deck speaking their language beneath the stars. One of the best things about us was how we made love, and how, no matter where we were, we found a way.

The captain brought the boat to shore in the mornings, and we’d eat round bread and eggs and wander into villages. Children danced around us, women looked down, and men smiled on their way to the fields, staring at Eva’s unveiled hair and the skin on her arms beneath her pushed-up sleeves. We sailed around the bend at Qena and past El Manshah and Asyut, where the Eastern Desert stretched toward the Sinai, and seashells millions of years old shone like curled pearls in the sand. One morning we walked through a canyon, dry, the colors of parchment and bone, and climbed a cliff to the rim of blue sky, where we sat and drank wine — a very bad Egyptian one — in the shade of a crevice as if we were hiding from the world. The wind through the crevice made the rocks speak, or so we imagined. We sat there for hours, kissing and talking, perhaps a little drunk, looking through the ragged gash of rock to the cloudless sky. We were tan and started to smell of the desert and the marshes, and for the first time in a long while we were free.

“Life quieted, James.”

She read Rumi and other Sufi poets and she would quote verse in the dusk as we sailed north.

“I wish you could remember. How can you forget that buried desert room we wandered into painted with hieroglyphs and owls and scorpions? Walls of stories, James. You were amazed. You ran your fingers over all those tiny, etched pictures. You copied some in your notebook. We were explorers.”

The lady whispers in my ear; I don’t remember, but I listen. We stopped near Zawyet el Amway late one afternoon. The captain took on supplies and said we’d spend the night on shore. He gave us an
old canvas tent and some food and pointed us down a dirt road that after about two miles stopped at an oasis. Nobody was there. The desert air was cooling so we collected wood and brush and made a fire. The wood burned hot but quickly, needing to be fed for an hour until a bed of embers glowed in the circled rocks. We put the tent up; there was no wind and when night came, the stars laid out white across the sky. We drank wine and ate chocolate and sat close against the chill.

She says the conversation went like this:

“Are you scared?”

“No.”

“It’s black and empty.”

“We’re Bedouins. We have a tent and a fire.”

“It’s all we need, isn’t it?”

“And that extra bottle of wine.”

“Kiss me.”

“Let’s never go back. Let’s just live by this oasis.”

“Could we do that?”

“I think we could.”

“Can you farm?”

“I’m more of a shepherd.”

The lady says we heard footsteps in the night; soft, sandals through sand. A man appeared at the edge of the fire. He wore a tunic with a thick-spun blue scarf around his neck and shoulders. He had a drawn, brown face and a gray-black beard that spilled over the scarf; his hair was cut short and he wore a white skullcap. He bent and dipped his hands in the water and washed his face. He slipped off his sandals and splashed his feet. He unspooled his scarf and dried himself. He laid the scarf in the sand and knelt prostrate. He prayed. It was soothing, like a strange, delicate insect singing. He finished and stood. He coiled the scarf around himself and walked closer to the fire and sat. An ember popped and sparks flew around
him like fireflies and he seemed like a man who had wandered in from centuries ago.

“A good fire. You will be warm through the night.”

“I hope so. It’s too dark to find any more wood.”

“Are you traveling?”

“I am on a pilgrimage.”

“To Mecca?”

“A private pilgrimage. A quiet one.”

“We’re on something similar.”

“To be alone in the world.”

“Are you Egyptian?”

“I was born farther south near Sudan.”

“Are you a cleric?”

“Just a man with his God. I am Mahmoud. May I rest by your fire?”

“Please.”

The man closed his eyes and opened his palms to the embers, smiling as the heat went through him. He was from a tribal family, but he left when he was young, urged and financed by a rich cousin from Tunisia to study in religious schools in Cairo and Alexandria. He memorized the Bible and the Koran and traveled through Europe, hitchhiking and sleeping in mosques and basements of Arab booksellers in Geneva and Berlin. He wasn’t on a spiritual journey, although he said he was moved by the German romantics and their philosophies on nature, so different from the teachings of Islam, which had turned to God because the desert gave little repose. He thought about that, how landscape, the earth, makes our God. His journey opened a door; he didn’t call it a revelation, but he learned something about himself, the way a serial killer or a chess master realizes early on that the voice within is slightly askew.

He woke one day with a gift. He could see into people’s lives, not just what had happened, but what was to come. Every person he met
was a character with their story written on their skin and in their eyes, invisible to everyone but him. He knew when they were born, when and how they would die; he knew them like bugs suspended on pins, and he could see all this with only a glance. How they took, how they loved, and what things they kept hidden.

He felt like a voyeur or a mad scientist peeking into diaries, but he wasn’t peeking, and sometimes he would turn away, but when he looked back, the scroll spun again and the hidden things, the things nobody should know about another, become known to him, as if angels and demons whispered in his ears from white and black books. We listened to the man, both of us thinking it was an intricate pitch to tell our fortunes for money.

“It was the perfect setting, James. We were two miles from the boat with our tent and fire in the desert. We even thought this man Mahmoud was a relative of the captain’s and that’s why the captain had sent us to the oasis, so we could be entranced in the night and pay — not much, it’s never really too much — to have stories told beneath the stars. Oh, James, we thought, without saying a word to each other, what a great seduction it was. Even his voice, don’t you remember that slow, ancient rasp?”

He did not like the comparison to a fortune-teller. He had seen, like he did with us, suspicion in the eyes of people he confided in, and he grew to accept this after thinking one day how odd his gift must sound to those without it. He stopped confiding. He stopped wanting to know people’s stories; he sought quiet and blank pages. Secrets, he said, were a burden, a dreary weight. He returned to the desert and found peace amid the bone-rock and sand. He kept to himself; he used the analogy of John the Baptist wandering with grasshoppers and honey on the fringes among the stones. Those he did meet were villagers or Bedouins whose hidden things were little different from the things they openly carried. There were a few tourists who glowed with angst and hidden things, huddled in their
encampments until daybreak when jeeps carried them to the next spot on the map.

“Imagine,” said the man, “standing in line at Burger King and knowing what the man before you would order even before he knew. You’d be surprised at how many people, right to the moment they step to the silver counter, are wrestling between a single or double cheeseburger. The torment.”

He laughed at this story.

“What intrigued me most,” said Mahmoud, “was the Catholic act of confession. In that little wooden box is where hidden things are to be revealed and forgiven. But hidden things are only halfway told. Even there, with the priest behind his scrim, people can’t utter who they are. They can’t tell their wives, their husbands, their children. It made me sad. We do not know anybody. We are all icebergs. The gist of us buried.”

“But knowing those stories, could you have helped?”

“I am not a healer. I am a cipher.”

The lady and I played along with Mahmoud, indulging him around the fire.

“But a man who would commit suicide,” said the lady. “A child running in front of a car. A boy going off to war to be killed. Did you even want to stop that? To intervene? To misplace a second or a minute in someone’s life, diverting them in another direction, away from dangers or pain.”

“That would make me God. I am not Him.”

“But you have power to see.”

“It is a burden, not a power.”

“Is there goodness?”

“Yes. All that’s hidden is not bad.”

“Can you read your own story?”

“No. I find that funny. Very curious, actually. I know the lives and hidden things of all but my own. That is God’s way, I suppose;
one gift denies another. I meditate. I pray before Him, hoping to gather myself and see my identity in His mystery. But it doesn’t come. There is a wall. My life’s work now is to break that wall.”

“Do you see our stories across the fire.”

“Yes.”

“Are we happy?”

“You know you are.”

Mahmoud curled by the fire that night and when we awoke, he was gone, and for a moment we thought he had been a dream, but he had left his blue scarf coiled by the circled rocks and ash. We didn’t know what to think, she says. Was he a talisman, a trick of the desert? When we asked the boat captain later, he shrugged with the slice of a smile as if he knew but wouldn’t say.

I started to forget things in the months after we left Egypt, little annoying things: keys, leaving hot water running, losing places in books, looking confused in the morning, walking away from a laptop in an airport lounge. We joked that I would forget my nose if it wasn’t attached. It got worse. I’d wander off, and once I rode the subway all day and ended up in a Brooklyn church sitting in a confessional with no priest. The organist asked for my wallet and called the lady to bring me home. There were many stories like this and one day the lady gave me a bracelet engraved with our address and phone number. I misplaced it.

It is dark, but there is light far off. The lady in the bathrobe talks in my ear, her arms holding me from behind; we sit in the sand, watching the thread of waves. The air is unstirred, cold. Her words, her breath, warm my skin. It is a good place to be, sitting with this lady, whom I don’t know, but who keeps talking as if we are one. She means no harm; her stories live inside me, briefly, then blow away. I know enough to know this. She tells me about a man, Mahmoud, and how the Nile begins in Rwanda and flows north, absorbing tributaries and canals, widening in the delta, turning the desert fertile
before spilling into the sea. The lady rises and stands before me. She holds out her hands, so white in the night.

“C’mon, James. It will be dawn in a few hours. We need to sleep before I take you back.”

I grab her hands and rise. We walk between two dunes and to the boardwalk. Her robe is bright against the darkness. We enter a hotel, a slight man in a green jacket with gold buttons tips his head and smiles. Down a hall, into a room. The bathroom light is on, but the rest of the room is dark. I stand at the bed looking out the window. I see a reflection. A lady’s hands come and take off my jacket, my shirt, my pants, and the colors in the reflection fade to the pale of a naked man who seems to be looking in from the beach, but his hands move when mine do, and the lady takes off her robe and stands in front of me; her back reflected in the window. She holds me and we ease into the bed. The lady doesn’t speak; she lies beside me, and I feel her finger move over my forehead, down my nose, across my lips, over my chin.

“I am tracing you, James.”

I have been here before, but I can’t say when. Her touch, this light between night and dawn, I know them, the picture of the schooner on the wall, the desk beneath the mirror. I know them, but from where and when? The lady traces and kisses me. I close my eyes. She breathes into my ear, kisses my neck; she moves on top of me and I feel how light she is. She reaches down. I am inside of her. Warm. Like home. But I have only one home, years and years behind; I suppose it exists no longer and I don’t know where home is now, maybe this room; I don’t know. The lady sits up; she is warm but like a statue, not moving; she pulls my hands to her breasts and then up to her face; her face is in my hands; she is not moving; she is a statue, but so warm, the lightness of her being centered on me. I feel her love, but I don’t know her name. The lady. She is like a statue, yes, but like a bird, too, perched, waiting.

“James.”

I am James.

“Come back.”

The statue moves. The bird aflight. I watch her; a shadow, a moving shadow taking color, white, an amber white, gathering in the dying darkness. I can’t make her out, her hair is swaying, blocking her face, then revealing it, then disguising it again; she is older than Alice, Alice with the flowers, a room full of flowers at the beach, but the lady is not Alice; she is older like me, but I see, I think I see, how she must have looked younger; I think I saw this lady years ago, somewhere in the snow, perhaps on a city street, maybe I passed her in a city a lifetime ago, but where? To what cities have I been? I know her. She is making love to me. One doesn’t make love with strangers, but I don’t know anymore, what is strange and what is not, I just lie here, watching her over me, as if she wants to capture me and bring me back to some place in the light, and the light is filling the room, and all the blurry things are taking shape, except for me and this lady; we are in the light, but she is unknown to me, although I hear her say: