To Be a Friend Is Fatal (3 page)

The plant heap leached thorium from ore for use in gasoline lanterns; the radioactive material gave mantles their glow. The process created a mountain of tailings, so once a month, the gates would swing open to the citizens of West Chicago, who lined up with wheelbarrows for free dirt for their gardens. Radioactivity spread by our own nurturing hands and hoes, our tomatoes and tulips sprouted in toxic soil.

The Lindsay Light Company, which was subsumed into another corporation
named Kerr-McGee Chemical Corporation, played its own contaminating role in our little play, dumping thorium, radium, and uranium tailings in Reed-Keppler Park near the public swimming pool, Kress Creek, the sewage treatment plant, and the DuPage River, which ran a silted chocolate color through our backyard. My dad taught us to fish in the shade of the small fishing hole overlooking the river. He hacked it clear each spring and set out little chairs for his three boys, and we reeled in catfish and carp with fat night crawlers on Snoopy poles. When I asked him why we always threw back the fish, he shook his head and said, “Kerr-McGee.”

In the early 1990s, my hometown organized itself against the plant and fought for help. The Thorium Action Group was founded and organized rallies where we chanted “Hell no! We won't glow!” The governor landed his helicopter on our high school's football field and promised to rid the town of thorium, which accumulated in our bones and lymph nodes and spurred lung, lymphatic, and pancreatic cancer in our citizens.

Men from the Environmental Protection Agency appeared, tiptoeing with wands and gauges over front yards, backyards, sidewalks, and parks, measuring alpha, beta, and gamma radiation. Some of my friends lost their entire front yards in an afternoon as yellow Caterpillar bulldozers scooped the thorium-laced soil into nearby Dumpsters. Bright orange plastic fencing was put up around the ten-foot-deep craters to keep children from falling in.

Railroad tracks were laid to the Ann Street plant, upon which hopper cars trundled away our contamination—twenty-one million cubic feet in all—to a government storage facility in the mountains of Utah. The town's opera house, an anomaly in our blue-collar burg, a half block from the Tastee-Freez, had once been a laboratory for Kerr-McGee; after repeated attempts to rid it of radiation, its foundation gave in. The building was demolished, and the rubble was piled onto the westbound train.

West Chicago obtained Superfund classification and the pitiable designation as one of the most radioactive cities in America. My parents were involved in the effort. In the midst of the struggle, my dad threw in his name for state representative and won, and when I was eleven, he began commuting to Springfield to represent his district.

In the early 1890s, in the town of Skanninge, southwest of Stockholm, my Swedish great-great-grandfather was making plans to bring his family to America. He laid bricks when it was warm, and when winter came, he threshed wheat, pounding grain in the barn out back. He worked hard, enough to own a home with six apple trees and a gooseberry bush in the front yard, but the work claimed him when his heart gave out in his early forties. Burial was impossible that winter, so my great-great-grandmother had him laid out on a bale of hay until the thaw. The next summer, on May 6, 1893, my eleven-year-old great-grandmother and her sister were put on the
City of Berlin
, which churned from Gothenburg across the North Sea, with a stop in Liverpool before crossing the Atlantic. She had the words
Rockford
and
Illinois
written in a notebook; there she picked strawberries and tomatoes for a few years until she became a servant girl in the homes of rich Chicagoans.

Another great-grandfather came from the northern Dutch farmlands of Groningen in 1913, carried in upon one of the last great waves of immigration. Like the other Dutch in America, he worked in the garbage business, hauling ash and cinder from the belching factories of Chicago. His sons took over the business, which boomed in the worst of times; such is the nature of trash. Shortly after my grandpa Bernie met Henrietta, my grandmother, he began to save for a luxury usually limited to the upper class: a good-looking smile. The dentist yanked his crooked twenty-year-old teeth from his young jaws and inserted a shining pair of dentures just in time for the wedding.

I knew none of these ancestors except for my grandmother Henrietta, who lived next door. She grew up in Dutch Chicago on Ashland Avenue just southwest of the Loop, the daughter of a world-class alcoholic who beat my great-grandmother and in a drunken rage struck one of his sons so hard he went deaf in one ear. Henrietta's mother was paralyzed by fear during her father's benders, so my ten-year-old grandmother became a grown-up, locking him out, calling her mother's parents, gathering the siblings' clothing and schoolbooks, and herding the whole family away from Jake. The last anyone heard of my great-grandfather, sometime in the 1940s, he was living in what was then Chicago's skid row, on Lower
Wacker Drive. No one knows where this failed root of the family tree is buried, and no one in our family names their kids Jake.

Henrietta married Bernie, a teetotaler, managed the books for Van Der Molen Disposal, and left Chicago for the western suburbs, where she had six kids. When Bernie died of a heart attack in his early fifties, he left behind a garbage hauling empire that stretched throughout Chicagoland.

When my grammie, a devout Evangelical Christian, was widowed at fifty without great financial worries, she looked to how she could help others. She was fiercely pro-life, and opened her home to forty-six pregnant women whose boyfriends had skittered off or whose families had kicked them out of the house. She fed them, paid their bills, and held their hands while they delivered. When I was little, I thought that only pregnant women were babysitters.

Henrietta then became involved in helping refugees, opening her home to twenty-seven Russians, Ukrainians, and Hmong from Southeast Asia. I never wandered next door without hearing a new language.

Having missed out on the kind of sheltered and burden-free childhood that led others to college, my grammie valued travel over any other form of education. She and Bernie had blazed through the world, snapping pictures of Abu Simbel and Upper Egypt in the fifties before Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser built the dam; Baghdad and Tehran in the sixties; Addis Ababa in the seventies—nearly eighty countries in all.

After my grandpa died, she continued her travels, with a plan to take each of her grandchildren somewhere in the world. When my oldest brother, Soren, was fifteen, she brought him to the Soviet Union. Upon his return, he enrolled in a Russian language class at the nearby community College of DuPage and then went off to pursue a degree in Russian studies in college. My other brother, Derek, started studying Spanish after a trip to Guatemala and Ecuador.

While the sound of Russian instruction tapes blared from Soren's room, I lay on my bed and stared up at a poster of Michael Jordan affixed to the ceiling. By junior high, I had only one dream in life: to go pro and play in the National Basketball Association. I spent hours each afternoon practicing free throws, running lines, praying to Jesus to make
me taller, quicker, and stronger. I wore out shoes each summer, attended Crusader Basketball Camp at nearby Wheaton College, blew my allowance on basketball cards, and wallpapered my room with blurry posters from Kmart that shouted Barkley and Shaq in massive block letters.

Only I was short, pudgy, and slow. But with God on my side, though, I'd work around these deficiencies, so I practiced my jump shot at the hoop by the barn while Joe the horse grazed.

The eighth-grade coach cut me. Even Jordan was cut once, I figured, and spent the summer before high school practicing with maniacal intensity, fantasizing about my jersey number. A few weeks into high school, Coach Adamczyk cut me from the freshman team. When Kevin Brewer saw his name on the cut list, he shook and then erupted into a spasm of tears so intense that Coach A said, “Okay, okay, Kevin!” and added him to the roster.

I waited until I was back in my room to cry, and tore down the posters, boxed up the basketball cards, and threw out the Chicago Bulls T-shirts. A few nights later, I sat down my parents in the living room and announced that I was renouncing my ambitions to go pro. I didn't know where my plans would take me, I said, but I knew my future no longer included basketball. They mustered a serious-enough “Well, okay then, Kirk, we'll stand behind you no matter what you end up doing.” Years later, they confessed to laughing once I was safely out of earshot.

I found myself exiled into an unfamiliar landscape: no hoops, no trading card stores, no new Air Jordans to save up for, no interest in stats or trades or play-offs or buzzer beaters. The river of worthless shit for which I once pined pooled off into cartons and trash cans and ran dry.

I turned sullen. My patient mother bore the brunt of my angst while Dad was in session down in Springfield. On occasion, I'd ride with him and serve as a page, fetching ham-and-cheese sandwiches for other members and for his office mate, a Democrat named Rod Blagojevich, but they were mostly lousy tippers. Across the rotunda, Barack Obama was also starting out as a state senator.

Into this haze of adolescent defeat sailed my grammie, who pulled her tiny Buick Century into the driveway and honked.

“Got a proposal for you, guy. Howja like to go to Egypt with me this Christmas?”

I shrieked
yes
and ran inside to tell my brothers.

I marked down the days until the TWA flight direct to Cairo on December 20 and memorized the itinerary. After exploring Cairo and Giza, we could cruise up the Nile toward Upper Egypt, stopping at the ruins of Edfu, Esna, Luxor, Karnak, and Abu Simbel.

Within days of arriving, I forgot about basketball. I was entranced by the sound and appearance of Arabic. I constructed a new image of myself as an archaeologist, expert in techniques of construction and burial, hieroglyphs, and the brutal mythology of Osiris, Isis, Horus, and the villain Set, transcribed by the ibis-headed Thoth. I went weak-kneed at the National Museum of Antiquities in Cairo's Tahrir Square.

Grammie and I returned to West Chicago in the dead of winter. On the ride home from the airport, I excitedly asked my parents if I could start studying Arabic and Egyptology. I wasn't old enough to drive but would soon have a learner's permit, so I called up the University of Chicago's Oriental Institute, which agreed to let me sit in on Egyptology classes the coming summer. At the nearby community College of DuPage, where Soren began his Russian studies, I found a listing for a night course in beginner's Arabic.

When my mom picked me up from the first Arabic class, I was near tears. Only one other person had signed up, and college policy set the minimum enrollment at three. Unless someone else enrolled by the following week, the course would be canceled.

The next day, my mom enrolled. I was still adolescent enough to be embarrassed to sit next to her in class, so I sat behind her and beamed as the teacher began to demystify the Arabic script. Although she paid for the spot, my mom never came to class after that. Even though she has more degrees than I do, she still jokes about being a community college dropout. When I exhausted the community college's offerings in the fall of my junior year, I started taking the train two nights a week into Chicago, where I studied with a tutor my mom had found at the Egyptian consulate general.

School changed for me. I traded less in the nervous stock market of popularity and felt as though I had a separate life that none of my
classmates understood. The basketball team posted some of the worst records in the school's history. The summer before my senior year, I applied to study at the Arabic Language Institute at the American University in Cairo and skipped my high school graduation ceremony to board a plane back to Cairo for intensive studies. I was seventeen.

Abu Khaizaran is a smuggler. Three men, Abu Qais, Marwan, and Assad, are stagnating in a Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon, and have paid him to secrete them into Kuwait, where they heard there is work. Abu Khaizaran drives a water tanker. He drains the tank and loads his human freight into the back. They drive through Iraq toward the Shatt al-Arab, where the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers meet for a brief moment before tumbling into the gulf. While the truck idles in the inferno of summer, the Kuwaiti border guards give Abu Khaizaran a stack of forms to complete. The paperwork seems endless. Afterward, he sprints back to his truck, worried about his human cargo, and drives down the road into Kuwait before unlatching the seal to the tank. With great effort, he dumps their extinguished bodies alongside an empty stretch of the highway and tries to comfort himself with a thought:
If I leave them here, someone will find them in the morning
. As he climbs back into his truck, his remorse hardens into anger and blame:
Why didn't they knock? Why didn't they call out? Why?

I had never read a book so closely in my life. The task of translating Ghassan Kanafani's
Rijal fi'il-shams,
or
Men in the Sun
, was the culmination of my Arabic studies at the University of Chicago under Farouk Mustafa, a renowned translator of Arabic fiction. His voice was graveled from decades of Marlboros but still boomed with satisfaction or disapproval over the choices we made with words.

I devoured the university's Arabic courses while working on a degree in Near Eastern studies, the antiquated term used by British imperialists when discussing what we now call the Middle East. I spent the summer before my senior year studying the Syrian dialect in Damascus, and when I returned home, I hadn't yet finished unpacking on the morning of 9/11.

When I returned to campus, it seemed as though everyone was
carrying a first-year Arabic textbook. Before the attacks, the typical introductory course had maybe twelve students. Now the university was struggling to accommodate more than a hundred new registrants. Within months of the attacks, the Central Intelligence Agency and National Security Agency sent recruiters to campus.