Here's what I remember about Egypt. I remember that the Egyptian pound was more colorful than the English version and pretending to actually read Arabic. I remember my brother telling me that if we entered the mummies' tomb there would be a curse on us... and I remember believing him and nightmares of severed limbs and dark silent deaths in vats of honey. I remember the belly dancer in that restaurant in a boat on the Nile and looking to my Dad to see if it was okay to look at her...a lot. I ate sugar cane on a raft and wondered if I would remember any of it the way I remembered things from my past that I can no longer recall. I remember trying to remember stuff when I was eight too, like when I fell out of our attic window when I was three. No one remembers that but me because I was too scared to say to anyone that it happened. Remembering memories themselves. I rolled off the roof and fell three stories. I remember the memory of it. How it took a very long time to hit the ground. VERY long.
You know how you can remember that you had an epiphany just before nodding off but that you can’t discern the content upon awakening? I'm falling asleep, I'm having a good idea, don't forget that good idea, I'm too tired to write it down, I'll remember it. Good morning. Oh no! I can't remember my idea, but I remember that I had one. That’s a collision of now and then language, to be sure.
It’s hot at Christmas. Sand, not snow. First time for this and/or that, he wrote, trying to choose a tense or point of view, but neither differentiating subject nor object. When is he going to take part of an Egyptian monument home with him? When did it already happen? Who is this child he’s narrating?
Darling, the difference between crocodiles and alligators is the way their teeth are arranged. Thanks, Mom, I feel better now. If fall in the water and a crocodile comes, he would not dare eat me because I'm poisonous and if I look him in the eye, he will know it so – I will convince him. I’ll make him sick.
The water is warm and I can swim to Banana Island, easily. I bet a lot of people died in this river over the last 4000 years – but then, this river has kept many alive. Nevermind. Wake up.
_______
________________________________________Six hundred hours, the sun’s up and it hot already. Where can I find some papyrus? Do they still make it? It's real paper papyer...us...papayrus. Paper inventors.
Later, I learned what etymology was and tried to find out how the word “etymology” came about. It was Greek, after the before fact.
I have learned to spell my name in hieroglyphs and the meaning of the scarab beetle while on the way to Thebes. My sister is throwing up again but my Mom is holding her like flowers. We give her Dramamine and Coke.
Thebes. With five mirrors the Sun is coaxed down the deep underground halls. There is a beam above our heads and our guide dips into his own mirror into it like a ladle to illuminate the Book of Gates on the walls. I learn it is very important to be dead sometimes. And have a mirror.
Tomorrow we go to the Pyramids at Giza. The real Pyramids. The Pyramids Miss Thompson told us about in 2nd Grade, four years after I fell from the attic, but the same day Bridget Cornwall got a bloody nose for no reason. OK, now WHAT day is it? Eventually, I will have leaned how to use “tenses”. But not for long…I will have had a bike accident that will have changed everything.
How will I know a mirage if I see it? Will it tell me? Clearly, nothing is obvious in this heat. Oh, sure, it’s DRY heat, but so is an oven, ya know.
We live in a kind of place for people who are staying a longer time than other places with their short staying people and after a week I can go on my own if I stay on the grounds. Eventually I can go for long walks outside with my brother. It doesn’t take long for me to turn brown or find my way to the street for a sugared ice. From the steps outside I’m kissed by the singing from the Mosques. There is no way to not hear it. I love my new sandals, because, see, if someone looks just at my feet he cannot tell if I am Egyptian or not. I want to be Egyptian now.
His Father had asked someone to give him a ride around the Pyramids in advance. But the child was completely taken by surprise when the Arabian stranger lifted him up from the dirty sand and offered him to his cloaked partner on the camel.
When you look down on people from a camel and they are wearing a hat you cannot see their face. So you cannot see them smile approvals. You cannot see that it is okay with your Dad, who is wearing a big hat.
Most camels look like they are in a bad mood to begin with and when camels are late they become very serious indeed. Maybe camels must never be late and that is why. Yes, that's it - there is no such thing as a late camel. They are fast enough to out race their own smell. They can lose their shadows. Wide flat pods rush to find the horizon. Nothing is out of range. Nothing, for a camel.
Before I know what is happening and as soon as I am handed to the rider he goes. Fast. With the wind at my ears and a strong arm around me I try to peek behind us but the rider’s clothes are full and thick like his laugh. His laughter is married to the bounce of his friend. Someone has seen us go or we are not alone, I hope, but I have no proof. I have been kidnapped. We slow down and I hear the camel’s heavy breath and the gentle voice of my guide relates an incomprehensible monologue as he loosens his hold. I am riding around the Pyramids on a camel in the lap of an Arab at Christmastime. It was nightmare for moments, now it is a dream. NO, I cannot even dream this, it is too incredible. Without credibility entirely.
My Dad, on another Camel, overtakes us, then my Mom and my Sister and my Brother. I have not been kidnapped, I had just not been warned. Now I will not have to escape.
The Sphinx is caged. The fragile monument sits within a fenced compound. I clearly remember the guard unlocking the metal gateway for us and only us. It was my father’s connections to the Egyptian Consulate got us in. I remember learning the word consulate and understanding my “passport”. I remember at first being fascinated by border-lines on maps and not much later becoming very saddened by them…for everyone, somehow. As we walked around the monument I could not resist tracing my hand along its contours, and when no one was looking, I took it, as small piece broke off in my hand. Yes, I put a piece of the Sphinx in my pocket. I wonder when I may put it back? I hope the passport that enabled my thievery, will not prevent my making it all right again. I dream of the rock’s return often. It comes and goes as a mission. You should smell it sometime, it has an interesting smell. Even though everything in the universe is essentially the same age, the rock smells older than most smellable things.
I'm in bed watching the fan spin on a spinning world - time to sleep - I'm so sleepy from today's sun. I should write down that this life and the people and things I have done are everything I never thought I always wanted, but I am a little boy, and have not learned to write down what I think might be important thoughts for later, if I get them right before I fall asleep, and I think that I will remember it in the morning anyway. Did I?
