Inevitable

on together in another cab to the medieval town,

Islamic Cairo, where

in a minaret of the Mosque of al-Muayyad

high above the pellmell in clean air

he kisses her

and she lets him cling and taste her tongue’s gruff metal

stroke her bare, wet neck

they part to view

tiny on Cairo’s roofs

chicken runs, laundry lines, heaps of refuse, sheep, men

working in the open

“This is very very uncool.”

And what he most remembers is their walk through the mosque of Al-Hakim. There was nothing about that mosque, but it was dark, the incongruous chandeliers unlit, and they walked there under the eye of some dour Shi’ia divine, never daring even to touch hands, for eons, it was electrifying.

And that night Eddie got drunk for the first time, matching her beer for beer in legendary Groppi’s, which has faded in his memory to a single frame of white ice cream, in two balls still stiff from the scoop

and a fountain which may or may not have had water