Goodbye, Stranger

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