Heaven and Earth Meet Halfway

IT TAKES ONE FULL DAY OF TRAVEL BY BUS, PLANE, AND taxi to arrive at my next destination: a hostel near Tahrir Square, the major public space in downtown Cairo.

The hostel is located five stories up in a gritty building. Inside, the ground level looks like rubble, with broken stone, brick, and rubbish piled against the walls, which are decorated with spurts of graffiti. It looks like the place has been hit by artillery. The stairs are blocked by tape, so I’m forced to use the elevator, which looks to be about 150 years old. It’s a cage of black wrought iron, a rickety old thing that screeches as it moves. I close my eyes as I am slowly and loudly lifted to the proper floor.

The door of the hostel looks like a prop from a film noir, something more suited to a hard-boiled detective’s office. It’s a wooden half-light door with pebbled glass, but where it might say “Sam Spade” in gold letters, there is a sign with Arabic words. Underneath that, in black marker, is scrawled “HOTLE.”

Inside the door is a tall wooden desk, like that of a bank teller, manned by a plump guy in a brown robe. When I give my name, the man raises an eyebrow. My reservation is for two, but I’m clearly alone.

“My husband will be joining me later,” I say, and I thrill at the sound of those words. It’s been six long months since I’ve seen Jason, and I can’t remember the last time I used the phrase “my husband” to describe him. At this point, we’ve spent more of our marriage apart than together.

With some financial assistance from my family, Jason gathered enough money to visit me for Christmas, and we agreed upon Cairo for our rendezvous. As a teacher, he has almost two weeks off for the winter holidays. Minus flying time and a couple days for jet lag, we have just over one week together, and I’m ecstatic.

I reserved a room with a queen-sized bed, but when I unlock the door I see two twin beds.

I return to the front desk. “There must be a mistake,” I say, and the man in the robe follows me to the room.

“No, no mistake,” he says. “Two beds make queen.”

It’s not the same, I explain. “I haven’t seen my husband in many months.”

“Eh, I understand,” the man laughs lasciviously, then gives me a firm slap on the back. “You want … ,” he pauses, then makes a circle with the fingers of his left hand, which he penetrates with the index finger of his other hand. “Poke poke, yes?”

I roll my eyes, but my face burns red.

“No problem,” the man says, gesturing to the beds. “Push together.”

The man gums his cigarette while he pushes the two twin beds together, and ashes sprinkle down upon the thin maroon bedspreads. This situation dashes my hopes for a romantic reunion—cuddling in a big, luxurious bed, falling asleep with our limbs tangled together, waking in each other’s arms. Instead, Jason and I will be tucked in to separate spaces with separate sheets, a definitive line cutting our bed right down the middle. But it beats sleeping on the airport floor, like we did in Peru.

Once the man leaves, I have some time to look around. The walls of the room have been painted to resemble the inside of a pyramid. From the window, I have a good view of the city, which already looks far more chaotic than when I arrived. What was once four lanes of traffic has now become seven, all trying to merge together. The streets shoot off each other at bizarre angles, and they are crowded with street carts, people, cars, donkeys, and buses. It’s almost 7 p.m., and it seems like everyone in Cairo has someplace to be.

That includes me. I didn’t realize I was hungry until I look down and see a line of people purchasing freshly fried falafel from a street vendor. I rush to join them—holding my breath as the creaky elevator lowers me back to earth.

When I take a deep breath outside, the air is clogged and dirty and smells of burning tires. It is loud and messy, but also lively and exciting. I can’t squelch the feeling that something big is going to happen here.

IT IS JUST AFTER 4 A.M. WHEN I WAKE.

The sheet has been pulled away from my body, and a man skims his fingertips over me. It’s a light touch, like a butterfly wing or a feather, but the strangeness of it makes me stiffen.

“I’ve missed you,” Jason says; then he bends over to give me a kiss.

I don’t know how to react. It’s been six months since my lips have kissed someone back. Six months since I’ve savored the scent of a man’s neck. Six months since I’ve been held. Jason eases himself into the twin bed next to mine.

“I’m sorry about the bed,” I say. I feel nervous and shy, like we’ve just met. “I tried to …”

“Shhh,” Jason says. “I’m just happy to see you.”

He tugs on a lock of my hair and curls it around his finger. He’s just looking at me. I stare back, like I’m trying to interpret the hidden meaning of an abstract painting.

“Hi.” I can’t stop saying hi. I once heard that goldfish only have two-second memories, so they just swim around in their fishbowl, reintroducing themselves over and over again. I feel like that now.

The moonlight illuminates his smile, and my insides go warm. The line the beds make between us is definitive, but the distance is not insurmountable.

IT TAKES A FEW DAYS FOR MY BODY TO REGAIN THE MUSCLE memory of Jason, but when I do, it’s like we haven’t spent any time apart.

We make a small loop around the country, starting with Cairo, where we wander the long, rambling hallways of the Egyptian Museum. There are few information cards posted with the exhibitions; sometimes there’s just a yellowed index card with a typewritten name or date. Some of the pieces have no display at all. We lose ourselves among tables of unidentified mummies, stone panels of hieroglyphs on the floor, broken statues shoved in the corner. Wooden cargo boxes are stacked high nearby. It makes me feel like I’m an Egyptologist in the 1920s, sifting through these artifacts for the first time. Clouds of dust make me sneeze.

I run my finger along a stone carving made by someone thousands of years ago, and I recall the first time I learned that Egypt was a real place: when I was a child in church.

My mom has always been a devout Lutheran, and she carried a fancy study Bible, the kind with a pebbled leather cover, embossed gold words, and thumb indexes for each chapter. Her Bible also contained a maps insert with a 30,000-foot aerial view of biblical lands, the terrain filled with arrows depicting possible routes where Moses traveled and Jesus walked, annotated with Bible verses.

Those were stories, though, and I’d heard plenty of stories. A talking snake. A burning bush. People raised from the dead.

But the photographs in the insert were real. That included an image of the pyramids of Giza—a backdrop of barren, gold desert; colossal, perfectly symmetrical pyramids rising toward the pale sky; camels in the foreground, small dots in comparison to the monuments. I had many questions.

“They’re the Great Pyramids, and they’re a wonder of the world,” my mom explained. “I’ll take you there someday.”

When Jason and I spend a day in Giza, I know I’m doing something my mother wanted to do—and wanted to do with me.

Giza, however, unsettles me. The pyramids themselves are grand, arranged on a carpet of the finest sand. They were built to withstand time, and that’s what they’ve done, though the structures look incongruous surrounded by urban development and modern litter.

It strikes me as strange to honor my mother by walking through enormous tombs. That’s why the pyramids were created, after all. The pharaohs expected to become gods in the afterlife, and they erected massive tombs that contained everything they needed to rule. And here I am, paying to walk around in their necropolis.

What I can appreciate is the shape of the pyramid itself, supposed to represent the physical body leaving earth and ascending toward the sun. I don’t even know if I believe in an afterlife, but I like the continuity that exists within that idea, the concept that the spirit will be engaged in something mightier than this realm.

When I first moved to California, I got a life coach. She was a gray-haired grandmotherly type, as likely to send me off with a linty butterscotch candy from her pocket as a piece of quartz and a bundle of sage. She believed life was as pliable as Play-Doh, and it was a person’s responsibility to sculpt his or her life into what he or she wanted. During our sessions, I told her how my mom’s suffering was making me suffer, how badly I wanted her pain to end.

“It’s time,” the coach said. “It’s time for your mom to go, but she doesn’t realize it yet. Her body is lingering on this plane because she has no clear path out. You have to be the one to tell her. She needs your permission to leave. Tell her it’s okay to go.”

She insisted that these words needed to be whispered in my mom’s ear, and that they would inspire her spirit to move forward to the next phase.

“Only when this pain ends will you be your most authentic self,” the life coach said.

It would be months before I was back in Ohio, and my authentic self couldn’t wait that long. I called my sister and told her exactly what the life coach said. The idea was that these words would slice through the disease and connect with Mom’s spirit. I imagined her like a cicada, shedding this unnecessary shell and taking flight. My sister agreed that she would say the words to our mom the next time she was at the nursing home.

“It’s time to go,” my sister told Mom. “It’s okay. We’ll be fine. You can go.”

My mom didn’t answer. That was four years ago, and only the life coach has departed my realm, because I fired her.

Inside the pyramids, Jason and I scramble through narrow corridors and airless rooms. It is hot. So cramped. To see the Sphinx, the famed monument with the head of a pharaoh on the body of a lion, we walk past lines of vendors shoving postcards and souvenirs in our faces. We are offered twenty-seven camel rides. Policemen speak to us in whispers—they can take us into the closed pyramids for a special price. Just five dollars to climb all over these priceless structures. For ten dollars, they will take our picture.

Jason is overwhelmed by the aggressiveness, the way the touts look at us and see money, how people follow us and beg. I try to make it easier on him, and when I see vendors approach, I give them a firm “No.” Sometimes it works.

I buy our bus tickets, haggle at the market, hail taxis, navigate the Metro. I locate food, figure out directions, quickly calculate currency conversions in my head.

Jason is amazed. “Where did you learn to do this?” he says. “I’ve never seen you so in control.”

I shrug, but I’m secretly proud. These six months have made me more confident and assertive. If my mom were still aware of the world around her, and if she passed me on the street, what would she think?

Jason and I take the night train to Luxor in a private compartment with bunk beds. When we wake in the morning, we notice a small bullet hole in our window. The cracks that radiate from it make a beautiful pattern, an intricate spiderweb.

“Do you think we’re in danger?” Jason asks. He’s read too many travel books with warnings about attacks on American tourists.

I’m not concerned. If there was any danger, we’ve long ago passed it in the night. “Just pretend this is an Agatha Christie novel,” I say.

Over the course of a few days, we sightsee our way down the Nile—Luxor, Esna, Edfu, Aswan, Abu Simbel. Finally, on Christmas, we catch a short flight to Sharm el-Sheikh, then take a taxi to Dahab, a sleepy village on the Red Sea.

It is only once we reach Dahab that I truly relax into Jason again, rediscovering the part of my identity that is his partner, not just a tour guide. We hold hands the way we used to, and once again it feels comfortable to have someone by my side. It’s taken a few days, but we are no longer strangers.

Dahab is a hippie town, located on a small crescent of the Sinai Peninsula, where the desert mountains run out of momentum and give way to sand. The blue water is lit up with teal swaths of coral reef, and the weather is warm almost all year long.

“I’m already happy here,” Jason says.

“Me too.” I give his hand a squeeze.

Though some are dressed modestly, most are not. Many men are in shorts and T-shirts, while the women wear swimsuits, sarongs, or gauzy sundresses. This is the first place in Egypt where I feel comfortable removing the head scarf I’ve worn since Cairo.

Signs on the beach prohibit camels and horses, though I see both on the boardwalk nearby. Ladies in brightly colored bikinis tan themselves on sun-bleached blankets and cushions. Groups of scuba divers, about eight to twelve in each pack, waddle from dive shops into the sea and disappear into its depths. A few strings of tinsel are the only visual nods to the holiday.

Christmas was always a big deal for my mom, who threw herself into the preparations with the enthusiasm and dedication of a military commander. I, however, had to be coerced to help. Arranging the branches on the artificial tree made me itchy, the ornaments were ugly and old, the treetop angel was losing her hair. And the bane of my childhood existence? Strands of silver icicles that my mom wanted placed on the tree, one by one.

Then we decorated the house. There were ribbons and candles, nativity scenes and Advent calendars, holly-shaped candy dishes and special tablecloths trimmed in red and green. The centerpiece involved enormous pinecones that my mom collected and adorned with glitter. She sprayed the windowpanes with fake snow. She thought it was fun; I thought it was tacky.

She was happiest on Christmas Eve, and my most vivid holiday memories live in that space, contained in a snow globe of time. Every year we attended church together, the late service, just her and me. Each congregant was given a small, unlit candle, about the size of a dry-erase marker, which we held on to throughout the entire service in a darkened sanctuary. Then during the final hymn, “Silent Night,” the pastor plucked a candle from the altar and used it to light the candle of someone in the front row. That person used his or her candle to light another, and so on, until the entire church pulsed with flickering light.

I can shake that snow globe and see that moment fall into place again and again: My mom bending toward me, soft cheeks and red lips radiant and illuminated, gently tipping her candle to avoid spilling wax. I hold my breath. Her fire ignites mine. She tells me to wait until my flame is strong before I pass it on.

In Dahab, Jason and I settle into a small café with a wooden patio overlooking the water, where we prop ourselves up on fat pillows. The waiter welcomes us with a hearty “Merry Christmas!” followed up with something that sounds like a dyslexic Santa, “Oh oh oh!” He brings us pita bread, hummus, falafel, slices of cucumber, and squat mugs of coffee. A stray cat, orange and scrawny, settles at my feet. I sneak him pieces of pita bread, and he purrs so forcefully that my legs vibrate.

In the afternoon, Jason and I visit an internet café to call our families over Skype. Today my dad is at my sister’s house, where her husband sets up the computer so the whole family can see me. My college-aged nephews stand in the background, and my brother-in-law offers a quick wave. My sister and I catch up; she’s jealous of my Egyptian tan. Finally, my dad pulls an armchair up to the computer.

My dad doesn’t know how to operate the camera on his computer, so even though I’ve talked to him over the phone, this is the first time I’ve seen his face in months. His eyes are hooded, and his cheeks are sunken and drawn. I am alarmed.

He says he’s okay, but his flat, dull tone belies his own words. He reports that my mom is fine and that she had a nice holiday in the nursing home. It’s not long before he excuses himself and I’m left staring at a blank, black screen.

That night, before I fall asleep, my side feels pinched, and my breath is strained. I can’t shake the nagging feeling something isn’t right.

I HAVE ONLY TWO HOURS OF SLEEP BEFORE JASON SHAKES me awake to board an unmarked van. We barrel through the desert in this chilly vehicle full of strangers, until it stops at the base of a mountain. Our trek to the top of Mount Sinai begins at 1 a.m., led by a Bedouin guide.

There are two routes to the summit. We take the camel path, a wide trail that snakes its way to the summit at a more gentle, gradual pace than the alternative, the steep 3,750 Steps of Penitence.

We walk for hours through the inky blackness of night, and it feels good. Hiking is where Jason and I hit our most comfortable stride, our feet moving across the ground one step at a time, slowly making our way forward. When his foot slides on loose rock, my arm instinctively juts out to steady him. When my lungs feel weak, he rests with me.

Together we pass Bedouin men, sprawled out on woven rugs, selling lanterns. A chain of camels follows behind us, some of them wearing brass bells that cut through the desert silence. We stop for several minutes in a small shelter, a cave carved like a deep trough into the gray mountain, where an old woman sells hot tea. It is cold, and the woman wraps us in donkey blankets as we thaw our fingers around the hot mugs.

The final push to the summit consists of 700 stone steps. There are many other hikers and pilgrims around us now. The old and weak dismount camels and then take the stairs slowly, lingering over each one. The young lean against boulders. Other than wheezy gasps for air, everyone is silent.

Jason and I make it to the top and find a flat place to sit. It has taken more than three hours to climb about three miles up this mountain—the second highest in Egypt—with an elevation gain of approximately 2,500 feet. The air is frigid, and we wrap our arms around each other. The sky is navy, and my breath forms little clouds.

When I was a little girl and attended church with my mom, I wrote letters to God during the service on prayer-request slips. But I didn’t hand these prayers over with the offering plate, like everyone else did. To me, nature felt like a more direct line to God. So I tucked my letters away and only handed them over later, when I was in my backyard or at the creek that gurgled through our neighborhood. I hid my prayers under stones; I tucked them into trees. I asked God to find my letters and answer me.

Now I’m at the peak of Sinai, the place where Moses is said to have received the tablets containing the Ten Commandments. If there is any place in the world where my words will reach God, this is it. I fold my hands together, and I wait.

This peak is where I silently pray—I ask for love and compassion, I ask for my family’s good health, I ask for my mom to be at peace. And then I express my gratitude: For this sacred night on a mountain with the man I love. For the people I’ve met along my journey and the radical acts of kindness I’ve received. For this earth that makes a full rotation every day and somehow always finds the sun again.

Dawn comes like a slash in the sky, as if a knife sliced right through a yard of dark fabric. As the rip of sky widens, revealing pastel orange, pink, and finally yellow, a deep hum begins, a sound both warm and resonant.

There is a small stone mosque and a Greek Orthodox church near the flat rock where Jason and I sit. The Muslim call to prayer and the Christian hymns begin simultaneously, creating a chorus of praise in an otherworldly harmony. It is an appropriate soundtrack to the morning, as the sun paints the desolate desert landscape below a dramatic pink.

I wouldn’t call myself religious, but I do say I’m spiritual, and watching the dark earth unfolding into a rich, vibrant world is something as close to transcendent as I’ve ever witnessed. No wonder Moses and God used this as their meeting point. This place feels like a bridge across time, a span between two worlds.

Jason and I continue to hold each other. My head rests against his chest, and he strokes my hair. I don’t know why I begin to cry.

A part of me must already know that when I travel back down the mountain, I will have left this sacred place perched at the edge of the sky—this pause between heaven and earth—to face cold reality. By the time I reach the lower desert again, I will have just two more days with my husband, my father will have sent terrible news, and nothing will ever be the same again.