Hurry,” I told the taxi driver as we wound our way through the village of Giza.
He turned around to look at me. “Hurry?” he said, imitating the word with an Arabic accent. Obviously he didn’t understand.
“Yes, hurry. Fast,” I said, making a quick, sweeping gesture with my hand.
“Oh.” He nodded in recognition. “Quickly!”
It had been a strange experience, spending the last three weeks in countries where few people spoke English and my best French was a “Bon soir, Pierre” that sounded as if I was parroting a cheap learn-to-speak-French tape. I turned around for a final look at the pyramids. Lit for the night shows, they glowed mystically on the desert skyline. I sank down into the seat and closed my eyes. Now, my driver was dutifully hurrying. I couldn’t look. Cairo is a city with sixteen million people crammed into an area that would house a quarter of a million people in the United States. Riding in a car there is comparable to driving the 405 freeway in Los Angeles with no marked lanes and no highway patrol officers with quotas.
Many events and situations no longer surprise us, but we still don’t become used to them. That’s how I felt about the driving in the Middle East. It no longer surprised me, but I wasn’t used to it. I felt relieved when we pulled into the parking lot at the Cairo Airport. I was a step closer to home. Just as I had felt convinced I was to come on this trip, despite the State Department’s travel advisory warning against it, I was now equally convinced it was time to leave. I had felt almost panicky as I checked out of my hotel, then hailed a cab to the village of Giza to say good-bye to Essam before heading for the airport.
I had planned to stay here for several more weeks. I could tell Essam felt disappointed that I was leaving so soon. But he had respected my decision to leave, voicing no objections and asking only a few questions. Upon my arrival in Cairo, he had taught me the meaning of the Arabic phrase “Insha’a Allah.”
He explained it to me one evening when I told his sister and aunt good-bye and they said they felt saddened to see me leave.
“Don’t worry,” I said. “I will be back soon. I promise.”
“Don’t say that,” Essam corrected me. “Never say ‘I will do this.’ Instead say, ‘I will do this Insha’a Allah.’”
“What does that mean?” I asked.
“If God wills it,” he said.
My time in the Middle East had been a dream vacation—well, more like a codependent’s dream vacation. But the same vortex that had propelled me here had taken me each place I needed to go to research this book. By now, researching the book had come to mean researching a part of me and my life that needed to heal. There were times it felt more like an initiation than research.
It’s a strange thing when we’re in the middle of a vortex. Outside a vortex, we watch and judge. Sometimes we don’t even see or feel it. But the closer we get, the more we’re drawn into it. Its power begins pulling on us as we get closer and closer. Then we’re sucked into the middle of the experience with a chaotic rush of emotions until at the very center we find pure, absolute peace—although if we’re conscious, we know we’re in a vortex. We know we’re in the midst of something, learning something. Then, suddenly, it’s time to leave. The energy weakens. We begin to get thrust out—pushed out—but it’s still necessary to pass through the whirling centrifugal force. Sometimes it spits us out; sometimes we extricate ourselves. But it’s always a centrifugal, almost magnetic, push and pull. It’s vortex energy. It’s the way the forces of the universe work lately—Dorothy showed us this a long time ago in The Wizard of Oz.
Vortexes don’t just destroy, the way tornadoes sometimes do. Vortexes don’t just suck us down under, like eddies in the sea. They heal, energize, teach, empower, cleanse, enlighten, and transpose. They lift us up and set us down in a new place. They bring new energy in. They discharge the old. We’re never the same again after a vortex experience.
That’s the way this trip had been. Each place the vortex had set me down—from the museums in Paris, to the casbah in Rabat, to the terrorist-infested hills of Algiers—had held a lesson, an important one. Each experience I’d been through had brought me closer to the missing piece I was searching for: stumbling, my thigh-high stockings bunched around my ankles, through the crowded Cairo souk at two in the morning; riding a donkey through the village of Giza; galloping on horseback across the desert to meditate inside a pyramid.
And just as elephants tummy-rumble, calling to each other about the mysteries of life, the people I met and learned from had called to me—Fateh and Nazil in Algiers, the women “locked in the box” in Cairo, and my new friend, Essam.
But now the vortex was spitting me out. It was time to go.
As we made our way to the airport, a quiet thought haunted me. It’s not over yet. I ignored it. I wanted out; I wanted to go home.
I reached the entrance to the airport. At the Cairo terminal, the first security check is at the door. I put my luggage on the conveyor belt and walked into the building. Three young men scurried to pull my suitcases off the belt. I thanked them. Each young man then stood with his hand out, waiting for a gratuity. I shoved a few Egyptian pounds in each palm, loaded my luggage on a cart, and started pushing the cart across the terminal. A fourth man rushed up to me.
“Me too,” he said, grabbing money out of my pocket.
“Stop that. You’re disgusting,” I screamed under my breath, the way we scream when we’re out in public and we don’t want anyone to know we’re screaming. “You didn’t even touch my luggage. Now get away.”
I relaxed when I reached the next security check a few moments later. I had originally planned to fly to Greece, then fly home from there. Because of my sudden change in plans, I had rerouted through Tel Aviv. My flight to Tel Aviv didn’t leave for half an hour; the line ahead moved quickly. I relaxed. I was on my way.
Suddenly a man and a young woman with long dark hair and piercing eyes, probably in her late twenties, appeared by my side. They both wore uniforms.
“Come with us, please,” the dark-haired woman said.
They led me to a table in an area of the room removed from the hubbub of the terminal. They placed my suitcases on the table. The man stepped back. The woman did all the talking.
It began slowly, then built in intensity. “Why are you flying to Tel Aviv? Did you know the plane had been delayed? Why did you change your plans?”
The woman looked similar to someone you might see working as a receptionist or walking around a college campus. But she didn’t act that way. She looked right through me into some space behind me that only she could see. Each question led to the next. Her vacant look and lack of emotions—either in her questions or to my responses—felt like a passive disguise for trained savagery.
To each of my responses, she replied simply, “I see.” She did with words what most people can only do with knives or guns. She’s good, I thought. Real good. I could have learned a few things from her about ferreting out the truth from people, especially those years I’d been married to an alcoholic. The man didn’t speak to me, but occasionally she would turn to him and they’d discuss something in a language I couldn’t understand. Once, I tried to turn the conversation around.
“It feels good to talk to someone so fluent in English,” I said. “You speak the language well. Have you lived in America?” She replied quickly, without emotion or explanation, that she had spent time in Canada, then she resumed her questioning.
“It says on your tickets that you purchased them shortly before your departure from the United States. Why would you decide to take a trip of this magnitude on such short notice?” the woman asked. “Why would you travel alone to all the places you did? What were you doing in these countries?”
I didn’t completely understand the maelstrom that had whirled me across this subterranean land. I didn’t understand what was happening to me right now. But I began to unravel the mystery for her as best I could.