Create successful ePaper yourself
Turn your PDF publications into a flip-book with our unique Google optimized e-Paper software.
speck into something a bit more than a speck, and a bit more preposterous. The ancients<br />
could never have envisioned the scale of the world as it is now, and I’m glad for it. The only<br />
way to make a place in it, to make sense of the magnitude of time and the space and span of<br />
humanity on earth is to grasp onto the one thing that gives you a clear look. To me it seems<br />
the most natural course possible. Oh, there are moments, to be sure, when I feel a bit<br />
differently.<br />
My wife Helen used to send me a bit of correspondence for the first few years after<br />
our separation. Sometimes she’d include a picture of our daughter in various stages of<br />
growth. It’s an uneasy thing to see your child grow up in scattered pictures; a few years apart<br />
the transformations are radical and frightening. When Zenobia was nine I got a picture of<br />
her in her soccer uniform, and for the next two years, until Helen sent me another, I thought<br />
of her eternally in that uniform, sleeping in it, wearing it every day. It was all I had to go on.<br />
Those are small bits of time I would gladly gather around me like shining monuments if I<br />
had the chance again.<br />
They both came to visit me in Cairo one summer when Zenobia was fourteen.<br />
Helen didn’t give up on it easily; I have to give her credit for that. I don’t know why she<br />
even bothered, as I rarely answered her letters. And she was very civil most of the time,<br />
until our last few days together.<br />
It started when we were at the beach, which Helen and Zenobia always loved. They<br />
both had beautiful golden skin, like baked brick, and liked to swim in the ocean. For three<br />
days we went to the beach, different beaches each time. The beaches in Egypt are truly vast,<br />
most of them almost completely unknown. So I picked out some nice places that were<br />
remote and clean. However, each day, at each site, we would place our chairs and towels on<br />
the sand with no one else within three hundred yards of us, and after about twenty minutes a<br />
man would come walking out of the dunes, a different man each day, and slowly make his<br />
way toward us. They looked just like any other regular Egyptian man, middle aged and<br />
decently dressed. They would stop about fifteen yards away, a respectful distance, sit down<br />
in the sand and looking furtively at my wife and daughter begin to masturbate vigorously.<br />
On the third day Helen insisted we get a cop and tell them. It was easy enough<br />
because they usually followed us back through the dunes and into town, always remaining at<br />
a safe distance. I told the constable, a huge black fellow in a sharply pressed uniform, and<br />
pointed out the guy, still cowering behind us in the crowded street. Without a word the<br />
constable signaled two officers who grabbed the man, and taking out his nightstick the<br />
constable walked to where they held him on his knees in the street and proceeded to shatter<br />
the man’s face with repeated blows. The streets were full of people and nobody looked or<br />
said anything.<br />
Back at the hotel, Helen held Zenobia on the edge of the bed, both of them<br />
weeping, and called me a bastard for the first time. Throughout all of it, she always said she<br />
believed in me and wouldn’t give up. Maybe that is what I was relying on.<br />
This is the only part, she said, rocking our daughter in her arms, the only part of this<br />
15