My wife calls me a mule. I call her Forty Acres. Together we’re the perfect couple, a dream of emancipation running across oceans of color, creed, and common sense. Last week, Sinai came between us, as it always does. Forty Acres got in her car and drove all the way to the coast. Mule stayed at home, watching television and making phone calls to the Bronx.
Frankie was trying to reassure me. I should see a therapist in Milan, he said. “Remember Claudio? No, not the one found hanging from the bridge. The fella we used to run into at Bar del Fico . The one who made a scene when Marcello slapped him. Remember now? I remembered, but the last thing I needed was a trip abroad. In my condition, I wasn’t even sure I’d make it back.
I was going to stay home, rearrange my medicine cabinet, and simplify my life. What if I throw all the pills together in one jar and just take them randomly? The pressure of looking at labels was perhaps what messed me up. Too many bottles and God knows what’s in them.
I went to the kitchen and put all the pills in a plastic jar next to the candies. I am not throwing them away, not yet. Perhaps little Mickey from the third floor would come knocking at the door. His mother had told me not to give him more candies, his teeth and all. The pills look pretty much like candies, once you’ve shaken them a few times, like this. I can’t let little Micky go empty handed.
It was at that point that the television stations began to call, first from Cairo and then from London and Cyprus. “I am really fine. I’ll be leaving soon for Milan, I lied to Ahmad from Al Arabiya. Apparently I was talking to his station last week, so there was no point in explaining that people in my line of business don’t talk to the media. “But do you know anyone in Dahab? he asked. He didn’t even know I was ill. All he wanted was contacts, hotel owners, police generals, anyone who was there when the bombings happened.
The day you learn of bombings from a newsman is the day when you know you’ve lost touch. Today was the day. Bombings in Dahab? I felt like an idiot. I lived in Dahab on and off for the past decade. I even own a half-finished house there. And someone went and bombed Dahab in my absence. And Forty Acres was in a car heading there, all Texan and blonde and on her own. I gave Ahmad one contact and sat down. At some point, the jars of candies and pills had traveled from the kitchen and sat on my lap. The TV was on, and I was gazing at a map of Dahab, the bomb sites marked all wrong.
By the time Hossam had called from the BBC and Hassan from the AFP, my mind was spinning. It cannot be true, but Khaled, Mohammad, and Emad all confirmed it, one on the phone and two on the screen. Dahab has been bombed, blanket bombed, as if it were London in WWII, but without sirens and bomb shelters for the populace.
Don’t get me wrong. I believe in war. I don’t condone it but wars will happen. This wasn’t a war. I have a lexicon of violence, a bible of mayhem, a list of public enemies, and this wasn’t in any of them.
All my faith was gone now. And I do have a faith, however twisted and unconventional. I believe in conflict followed by peace followed by conflict. That’s human nature. People kill out of rage, in a dispute, and to avenge a grievance. People don’t kill as a hobby or a way of self-improvement.
I show people how to use guns, but none of my underlings has ever shot a gun at random. They aim first. The idea of war is to aim. Without aim, war is nothing, man is nothing. Even animals select their prey. You know who kills randomly? Nature does. Only nature does. In holy books, God often claims responsibility for earthquakes and tsunamis, epidemics and floods. But even then, He links the mayhem to a misdeed committed by an ancient tribe. Even God, the only one entitled to have mysterious ways, feels compelled to explain.
On the phone, came the comforting voice of Forty Acres. She was fine and in comfortable lodgings north of Nuweiba. “Don’t go to the parking lot or the cafeteria. These bombings often happen in a row. For the next four or five hours, stay in your room, I was trying to establish a pattern from previous incidents, and guessing wrong.
Forty hours later, two more bombings up north in the same peninsula. Forty Acres sent me a phone message saying, “no imagination, huh? I had no idea what she meant. But then again, I’ve lost my touch.
