Hello,” he said. Collin glanced at his watch. “What time is it there?” he asked his sister. He’d been trying for an hour to get a cell connection to the States.
He’d taken a nap at the American Hospital and had a frighte-ning dream about Los Angeles, about his sister, about all the pregnant women living in that city and their babies waiting to be born. It was as if he were living inside a daydream that at moments turned to a nightmare.
In his waking dream, he was in a hospital. He was dressed in his clinician’s coat, but the buttons were missing and he was swearing because he couldn’t button his coat. He stopped to ask a nurse what kind of hospital this was, if he couldn’t even button his coat.
The hallways were lined with seated young smiling mothers-to-be. It was midday and very bright, and then the hallway turned dark suddenly. All at once the women started to give birth, their babies protruding from their bloody legs. He was helpless and alone, the nurse having disappeared.
“Three-fifteen,” his sister said. “Where are you? Did you come home?”
“Mexico City.” He was sitting in his apartment now.
“Oh . . . I thought maybe you’d gone home. How are you?” She sounded disappointed. He heard a television playing in the background.
“Good,” he said.
They hadn’t spoken since he’d been home for Thanksgiving. His sister had emailed him, asking why he wouldn’t come home to the States to practice. She told him, in a nice sisterly way, that he was throwing his life away. She wasn’t writing because their father had asked her to, but because she was truly concerned for him. She didn’t understand why he didn’t want to have a real life. She equated a real life with a life in the United States and everything that implied, as if the rest of the world weren’t really living. Despite her education—she’d been to Stanford and studied art history—his sister was mindlessly chauvinistic. It surprised him; he’d always thought she was bigger than that. But she wasn’t, and he had to face it. It was as if she hadn’t been educated at all.
“How’s the mother-to-be?” he asked, trying to change the subject.
“This call is going to cost you a fortune,” she said. His sister had always been very practical.
“Is it? I’ll have to charge more next time I take out a kidney or something extra. That’s what I do if I’m getting low; I do some-thing extra,” he joked.
“I’m okay. We’re due next week. It’s getting hard to walk, so I was watching Oprah. I’m an expert on a variety of subjects now. Especially everything Tom Cruisean,” she said.
“I liked him in Collateral,” he said. He stood up and walked to the window with a view of the boulevard. It was raining.
“Didn’t see it. Collin, why are you calling me in the middle of the day? It’s not like you.”
“I wanted to hear your voice,” he said.
“Did you get my email?”
“Yes.”
“Why didn’t you answer me?”
“I thought I’d call instead.”
“Thanksgiving was awful. It can’t go on like this, Collin. Dad has been acting crazy. Really crazy. He’s built this huge practice and he did it for you. Mom is talking about flying down to see you. She isn’t even going to tell Dad because he’ll want to come, too. She thinks you’re in love with someone down there, and that’s what this is all about. I’ve had to talk her out of it twice already.”
“Me? It’s too late; I’ve married. And she left me already. We had three kids and they’re all brown as berries. I’m bringing them up for Christmas,” he said.
“See, you think it’s a big joke, but it’s not, Collin. They’re hurt. I mean, what are you doing there? No one understands why you don’t just come home and have a normal life. You can’t save the world. You’re just working part-time, treating American tourists with the runs. We could all understand it when you were in Africa. I understood that, but now? I don’t understand. I really don’t. Are you trying to ruin your life, Collin?”
“No,” he said.
“Bob said that a nurse practitioner could do what you’re doing.” His sister had married a doctor—a plastic surgeon. He was just out of school and eager to build a profitable practice in the “City of Angles,” doing facelifts. His brother-in-law’s father had been a factory worker in Detroit; he saw medicine as a free pass into the middle class, and he wanted it all. They’d moved to L.A. because he’d read in Doctors Are Entrepreneurs that L.A. had more cosmetic surgeries performed per day than any other city in the world, except for Moscow and Saõ Paulo. If he could have been allowed to trade stocks and operate at the same time, he would have.
“How is he—Bob?” he asked. He didn’t like his sister’s husband. Something about him was profoundly unctuous. It seemed unnatural for such a young man to be so preternaturally materialistic.
“He’s opened up a new office. I never see him, but that’s okay. We’re doing okay, and most young doctors aren’t these days. We’ve bought a beautiful place. I want you to see it,” his sister said. “I’m sorry for asking you all those questions. I’m not quite right, either. I feel and look like a balloon, and I wish Bob were here more than he is. I hope he doesn’t miss everything . . . you know, the way Dad did.”
“Why don’t you have the baby in the Bay Area, so Dad can look in?” It was the reason for his call. He wanted to convince his sister to leave L.A.—without telling her what he was afraid of, of course.
“Go home?”
“Yeah. Why not? There’s that Bernstein guy, that OB-GYN in Dad’s building. He’s good. And they’ve been good friends for years. You could stay in Mill Valley, show off the baby to your high school chums. You wouldn’t have to cook when you got back with the baby. I’ll come up and see the little mite. It can be old home week. I’ll take you to the movies the way we used to—remember, at the Sequoia? I’ll buy you popcorn.”
“And what about my husband? Do I just roll him up in a carpet and take him with me?”
“Not a bad idea,” Collin said.
“Very funny. That’s a sweet idea, but I can’t. I’ve got a good doctor here.”
“What if I asked you to?”
There was a long pause then.
“Collin, are you all right? Really. I mean it. Do you think you might have a psychological problem? It’s okay, you know. If you did. I’d still love you. You could tell me. Are you gay or something? Is that it? Is there something you can’t tell us?”
“No. I was gay last week. Would you do it as a favor for me? Have the baby in the Bay Area. I worry.”
She burst out laughing.
“Oh, my god. You are crazy. God, I knew it. I told Bob you were crazy. He said you had to be crazy to go to one of the best medical schools in the country, graduate at the top of your class, and then be a diarrhea doctor.”
“Is that what he calls me? That’s funny.” Collin had gone to the window. It was glazed with rain. He smiled. For a moment he felt better; Bob probably didn’t like him either, and he didn’t have to feel guilty anymore.
“Yes. But you can’t blame him. He’s jealous. Your father was a doctor, and you have a practice you can walk right into and take over any time you want. He has to build one, or go work for an HMO and see fifty patients a day. Anyway, he’s jealous of everyone. Believe me,” she said. “I love him, but he is.”
Then she had to go, because her husband was calling on her cell. She barely said goodbye. He heard the doorbell with its awful buzzing sound as he folded up his phone.
Dolores stood in front of the doctor’s door for a moment as people passed her on the street. She was drenched from the rain and looked like the countless street people who plied the area around the Zócalo, begging. She’d stopped bleeding from her nose, but her dress was stained and torn.
She thought for a moment that she should call them and have them pick her up, and stop this drift towards the doctor. The beating had nothing to do with her revenge, but she couldn’t do it. It wasn’t that she was angry with them; she just couldn’t be with those types of people anymore. They were so empty, so full of death and hatred.
She stepped up to the door and rang the buzzer.
She didn’t want to do it anymore. She didn’t want to be a martyr. The beating had broken her anger somehow. She’d been somnambulistic for months, oddly mindless. Now she felt awake for the first time since she’d walked out on the horrible scene on the street that day. She was awake and terrified. The blows had brought her back to life and out of the dream.
The door opened and Collin looked at her, horrified.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t know where else to go.”
“Jesus.”
He brought her inside and closed the door. She started to cry. At first it was slow, and the doctor watched as the water dripped off her. Then she put her arms around him and began to sob. He just let her cry, not understanding. He finally asked her what had happened, but she wouldn’t answer him.
• • •
“God is good,” he said. “He’s brought us the package from heaven.”
It was a tailor shop. The office was dark and very long and narrow. Women in the front of the store ran the pressing machines. Every few moments they would hear the hiss of the machines as they put something in and brought the top down on it.
There were three men in the messy tailor’s office. Boxes and boxes of fabric lined the walls. The package sat on the floor, surrounded by boxes of fabric so it looked like just any parcel in the shop.
The men had planned for this for two years. Now that it was here, they were excited.
“What is it? I mean, what is it exactly? Inside?” the tailor asked.
“I don’t know,” Hafiz said. He didn’t know. All he knew was that it was some kind of bomb, and it was powerful. He didn’t even understand the word “dirty” the way the scientists understood it, but he’d heard the term, and he wondered if it wasn’t that kind of bomb.
The fact that it was a ruse to help confuse the Americans had been kept from them. The cell they belonged to in fact did not belong to al Qaeda, but to the Muslim Brotherhood’s network. The Brotherhood’s leaders in Egypt were very experienced, and knew that sometimes they had to lie even to their own.
“But you must send it on. Let the boy take it for now,” Hafiz said. “I’ve probably been followed.”
“But I thought. . . ?” the tailor said. He was excited, but he was very scared, too. He had a big family and a profitable business. He was taking a big risk, more for his family than for himself.
“Not here. It can’t stay here. Not after Madani’s arrest,” the tailor said.
The tailor and the young man knew about Madani. He’d been their cell’s fourth member. No cell had more than four men in it, and Madani had been the fourth and all-important “contact” man.
“I think they will arrest me,” Hafiz said. “They must know.”
“God be with us,” the tailor said.
“Yes. May God be with us,” Hafiz said. He looked at his watch. He’d only been inside the shop for a few minutes. “Now I must go.”
The young Palestinian boy watched the two leave the office together. Then he waited. He heard the hiss of the press, then bent down, picked up the box and carried it out the back door into the alley. He strapped it to his motorcycle and pulled out into the traffic.