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Could she have faked it?
Hector was lost. He studied the woman cushioned on his right arm. Her breaths were deep, the pulse on her neck was regular on his biceps, a cherubic smile flickered on her lips. Once in a while, her stomach gurgled: He felt it against his kidney.
They were one flesh.
He moved his arm, and she snored. He readjusted the pillow to make her snores go away.
He stood naked by the window. Outside, Pulau was rowdy. Post-50th-Jubilee hangover. He looked back inside. On the nightstand beside the bed, the dancing god winked at him—this harbinger of revelations to come.
This destroyer of old life.
* * *
Hector sank in the yellow velvet sofa in the hall. His headache wouldn’t revisit him. He knocked his knuckles on his bruised temple. Nothing. Not even annoyance. A soft current of wellbeing washed over him. He was accursedly alert and thoughtful.
He went through to the kitchen and fixed himself a blue-cheese sandwich with rye toast. He took two bites, then laid it down and reexamined the contents of the fridge. It was chock-full of pleasures, and everything was labeled and dated. He headed back to the bedroom, careful not to make any noise. He opened the great purpleheart wardrobe. An umbrella, fur jackets (seriously?), silk robes of different colors and sizes, a brown leather cigar case, a gentleman’s accessory bag, a tiered Sephora makeup toolbox, all sealed and labeled with the following tongue-in-cheek remark in Shakespearean English:
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The whispers art true, mine lief cousin. I am a free gift from the George Bay Sands. Feeleth free to taketh me with thee wherever thee wend!
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The suite had two spacious washrooms. One was adjoined to the bedroom, which he and Yubi had showered in, and the other stood behind the golden dragon statue in the hall. Hector hadn’t found anything significant in the former, so he made for the latter.
In the hall, he smirked at the beast. “What can you tell me, my angry friend?”
He entered the washroom. The floor was slip-resistant, so spotlessly white that Hector was momentarily snow blind. Blinking and squinting, he made out a sink with a mirror cabinet, a toilet, a bidet, a shower with a thick blanket, then a tub that reclined under a portrait—some generic acrylic thing—of a naked damsel in a thick Germanic forest.
He inspected the cabinet first. Other than the usual shaving and toothbrushing gear, nothing stood out. All were untouched, stickered, so well arranged they didn’t look to have been touched in eons. The sink was dry and it smelled of a detergent with a citrus note. The toilet and bidet were also clear. The tub, though, had been recently drained: He knew that when he inserted his index finger down its hole and it came out wet. Now whole genres of scenarios reeled in Hector’s head. Most of them told him he was reading way too much into a wet drain.
So he examined the shower and the curtain. Dry both. And the curtain was double-layered, made of some synthetic fiber that didn’t feel like plastic.
He was about to give up, pat himself on the back for the effort, when his fingertip sensed something on the curtain. Some aberration there. A discontinuity. He stepped inside the shower and drew the curtain, then he gave the curtain a diligent reexamination. What his finger had snagged on was a half-inch perforation in the inside layer. The white polyester batting was popping out. But Hector’s eyes took a special interest in the edge of this perforation: It was serrated and dark brown.
He was looking at a cigarette burn hole.
Like an Indian tracker, Hector dropped to the shower’s base to examine it. Dry—typical—yet the drain matched the tub’s: His fingertip came out sheeny.
This shower complex was a unique one. The showerhead was molded in the shape of a fanged dragon. The base was the dragon’s wings. In the wall was a two-by-three sliding window that overlooked the pool in the lower deck. Hector flipped the latch and opened the window. The ledge was clear, not even a mote of dust. Yet his eyes caught something down there—a rod of dirt on the hedge.
So he stormed down to see.
* * *
Hector leveled the half-smoked joint to his eyes. He sniffed the stuff. Bona-fide Afghani hashish. He’d spent many an hour smoking this very stuff with someone he thought he knew.
Someone he thought was his friend.
Hector wanted to feel angry, but what he felt instead was commiseration. Perhaps also wistfulness. To distract himself, he went back up to the bedroom—he avoided looking at his cheating wife—and soundlessly as he could removed the cigar case from the wardrobe. The case came with a lighter, a golden boy kicking a soccer ball. He took the lighter down to the poolside, and gently put the remainder of the joint to use.
He reclined in the chaise lounge and looked up at the clear skies. He saw it all now:
Room service, sir. Can we come in?
W-w-w-what? No! I’m having a shower.
The little prince opens the shower window and tosses his contraband with a flick of his finger. He gargles some mouthwash, brushes his teeth, then takes a deep breath and opens the door—to meet his captors.
Hector blew out the dope into the haze-free sky. A helicopter zoomed by, its rotor too loud. He realized he was a thousand feet above the rest of humanity: on top of the world. Stars were reachable now, the truth—O Lord of the Dance!—at arm’s length.
After a while he found himself weeping. A moment later, he was chuckling. He sprang up and spread his arms and howled, “I’m Hectorata, god of the dupes! I’m light of the world!” He flung the lighter over the hedge. “I was born once, but I’ll die so many!”
The helicopter’s sound was in his chest, in his head. He wanted to take refuge.
He dropped—facedown—into the pool.
* * *
The pool wasn’t precisely T-shaped, but more of an arrow, its lateral expansion curvy, anchor-like. The edge was made of a special alloy of acrylic plastic. King George’s gills—for that was what the expansion corresponded to in the great octopus—enjoyed a bird’s eye view of Mermaid City, from coast to coast, strait to strait.
Hector crawled along the edge, gliding under the surface every now and again, or clutching the wall, to look down at civilization. Teardrop island. Its northern notch pointed at Vietnam. Its left convexity lay parallel to the Malaysian state of Pahang across the tense strait. Its fat bottom faced the island of Batam across another strait. And its right double curvature harbored two South China Sea recesses: George Bay (& Port) and the Disraeli river.
Small thou art, but mighty.
Made of light and secrets.
A nodal point for contending world impulses.
* * *
So unlike defeated, history-ridden Cairo.
* * *
Gliding twenty feet under, staring at the Playboy logo glowing in the deep, Hector thought about his dead son.
His wife’s affair must have started shortly after his death. Yubi had never been a whole person since. Even her late conversion to Buddhism—all these meditations—didn’t so much help her.
Wayne had died on the same day the Coptic Orthodox Pope Shenouda III had passed away: March 17, 2012. He was eight months old, the pope eighty-eight. Coincidence? A sign? A cosmic pattern? Hector couldn’t care less. For him, whatever the reason, his baby hadn’t had a fair shot at life. And however cruel it was, life was absolutely worth living.
At first, Wayne had watery diarrhea. They took him to Afanasy, who prescribed an oral solution. It was a “light illness,” Afanasy said, so he would abstain from adding the usual antibiotic injections.
Overnight, the baby got a little bit better. But in the morning he began crying again. Yubi checked his diaper and saw blood therein. So they took him to a real doctor, a university professor in Doqqi. Kero knew him in person, so they got to skip the booking and go right in. He was a genial fifty-ish man. He palpated Wayne’s bloated belly and took an X-ray. Then he sadly communicated the diagnosis. “Intussusception,” he said, which was “a telescoping of the bowel.” Part of the intestine, Ostaz Hector, moved faster than the rest, went inside the next segment and got jammed. We’ll try an air enema. If it doesn’t work, surgery is needed.
Kero’s availability was both a good and a horrible happenstance. Since September, he’d been living downstairs to them in the Zamalek hostel. This was the year he got accepted into AIMES’s prestigious Bin Hakam Fellowship for Arab Leadership on the strength of his highly popularized profile in the Egyptian Revolution—and thanks to Hector’s approval. Kero was a former student of Yubi’s from her brief stint as English tutor at St Mark’s Cathedral. Despite being atheist, Kero had gone to the cathedral to benefit from the cheap courses. He needed a high TOEFL score to stand any chance of admission to AIMES.
Now this church business was brought up by Kero, just after baby Wayne had been declared dead. The enema reduction had failed, and the baby didn’t live long enough to be prepared for surgery.
Yubi was shrieking about wanting to hold her baby, when Kero said, “He will go to heaven. Come on, Yubi, don’t cry. I feel so bad for you. I like you as a friend very much. Isn’t he baptized?”
“He was always sick. We never had the time,” Yubi wailed.
“I’ll pray for him, then,” said Kero the atheist. “Today is a blessed day. Even the Pope is dead.”
Yubi collapsed on the clinic’s floor. Hector carried her to one of the beds, and a nurse took her blood pressure and was about to insert an intravenous line into her wrist, when Yubi came to.
She sat up with eerie energy. She’d had an epiphany. She would take her dead son to the cathedral, to the Pope’s funeral. “I want my baby to be with Jesus and the angels in heaven, Hector,” she said. “We did this to him. He should have been baptized!”
“Honey, that’s so wrong,” Hector tried to reason. “I’m sure he’s in a better place now. Don’t listen to crazy people.” Hector looked at the sticky Kero.
“I want my baby!” she shrieked. “Get me my baby!”
“I’ll go get the baby,” Kero volunteered.
Hector barged out to get the doctor. But when he came back, Yubi, Kero, and Wayne’s body were all missing.
* * *
Yubi had mentioned what had taken place there only once, following her return with Wayne’s stiffened corpse, after three a.m.
“It was horrible, Hector. A nightmare. Millions. Millions of millions of desperate people. And they all jostled and hit one another, and me. I saw someone die there, I walked over him. Oh, it’s so terrible I feel so guilty of everything. And, hey, this pope, he was so yellow. The soldiers were up there protecting his body in the casket. And he’s so yellow and old. Ernest came there too, and he took me to the front row and I raised the baby over the dead man’s body.” She sobbed heavily. “So atrocious, I can’t get it out of my head. They were both dead, Wayne and the pope. And Wayne is kinda grayish, and this guy’s yellow. I hate myself, I can’t do this anymore. I wanted to drop my baby in a garbage box. But Ernest carried it all the way. So horrible, Hector. Oh my God. I can’t have children anymore.”
That was when she made him sleep on the couch.
They had weird fights. His socks were too stinky, he was spending too much, he was away, he wasn’t working out enough, or he spent too much time at the gym. What are we doing in Cairo, when is this Revolution ever going to end. She hates Muslims, she hates Christians, she wants to move to Greece(?).
“Why aren’t you spying?” she asked him one day, utterly serious. “At least you would make me more excited about you. You’re a lazy troglodyte now.”
On another day: “Baby, you’re so pale and skinny. Let me cook for you, baby.”
On a third: “Hector... are we really gonna die?”
She invited Ernest to their apartment a few times without him being notified. Husband comes in, wife is dressed in a side-slit skirt, her bosom peeking through a dusty pink surplice blouse. Ernest is lighting wife’s chocolate-flavored cigarette.
“Hector,” she says loudly, “Ernest sweetie was talking about his thesis. You’ll approve it, baby, right? It’s about China or something. Right, Ernest? He was asking me about my family history. Oh, you’re so nice, Ernest. Hector, baby, where have you been? I texted you about groceries. The fridge is pretty much empty. Go buy some mortadella and cheese and come back. No, Ernest will stay here with me. Your students won’t slave away for you. Ha ha. Go! Go!”