Flimsy Little Plastic Miracles (23 page)

T
rue to the Bedouin custom of unflagging hospitality, Suleiman often invited me to share dinner with his family at their home, a mud-brick structure squatting gloomily amidst the dirt and broken rocks of the Sinai foothills. The invitation, however, was where many of the customs ended. His was a family of all women—a plight I could sympathize with, having grown up with three sisters in a house where even the cat and dog were female—and so, as Suleiman told me himself, even with a strange man in the house his wife and daughters had to appear at dinner, otherwise he and I would be dining alone. They ate not with their hands, but with a set of pearl-handled silverware given to Suleiman by a longtime client. The soles of bare feet were on constant display, both during the meal and afterward; the younger girls most flagrantly violated this normally sacrosanct rule, but did not once earn a rebuke for it from either of their parents. Suleiman's wife spoke openly and at length with me, smiled at my jokes, even ventured the occasional friendly grasp of my forearm. In these ways and others, Suleiman's was an extremely progressive household, by Bedouin standards. The fact that they had an actual household, rather than a tent, being yet another liberal deviation from custom.

One custom the family did observe, though, was an overwhelming interest in who I was, where I came from, what I did for a living, who I loved, etc. When asked these and other questions, I lied without hesitation. I started the ruse with a name: Henrik. This construct hailed from Minnesota, specifically that convergence of the Mississippi and Minnesota rivers known as St. Paul. He'd been a chef and sometime professional snowboarder, a detail which at first baffled the girls and then, once explained, fascinated them.

Lies all, of course. My name, obviously, was not Henrik; only in the Sinai could I, a swarthy Canuck of southern French descent, have used a Scandinavian handle and gotten away with it. I was from the Northeast, not the Midwest; in fact, I had never even set foot in Minnesota. And while I'd slung slop in more than a handful of kitchens before selling my first novel, I'd never been anything resembling what one thinks of as a chef.

The snowboarding? Please. I'd been tobogganing, two or three times, as a kid.

When the girls pressed me on the last question—who I loved—I formulated a lie to go with the others, but then this lie stuck in my throat. So instead, after a minute of obfuscation, I told them the truth about Emma. I figured, where's the harm? I laid it on pretty thick, too, and the girls were rapt, smiling and dreamy, adrift in pre- and mid-adolescent reveries of idealized romantic love. Their parents, side by side on cushions behind them, smiled indulgently beneath a cloud of smoke from Suleiman's cigarette.

For whatever reason I did not anticipate the obvious follow-up question: where on Earth was this Emma, light of my life, yin to my yang, the very purpose for which I'd been snatched from the black nothingness of pre-existence? How could I bear to be apart from her, if I loved her so?

I thought for a minute, gazed at the girls' expectant faces, their almond eyes intent and unwavering, and this time the lie came easily: She died, I told them.

The girls accepted this news with less sadness than I expected. But then, they'd seen two of their siblings go straight from their mother's womb into the stony ground; death here in the desert was neither surprising nor unbearable, even to children.

W
hen I was a kid, one of the only things my father and I did together on a regular basis was have our hair cut. An old Marine my grandfather's age ran a barbershop the size of a broom closet in our neighborhood. He always smelled of whiskey and had an actual working barber pole out front. My father had been going to him since he was a boy. We'd walk in together, and my father would sit down under the Marine's scissors first while I perused back issues of
Field and Stream
and listened to them talk about the things men talk about when their wives aren't around. The place had one mirror, adjacent to the barber's chair, and on the wall beneath the mirror was a shelf crammed with containers of strange blue fluid, where plastic combs and clipper attachments floated in stasis. The floor was always littered with multihued piles of clipped hair, no matter the time of day.

I was thinking about that barbershop one afternoon, maybe a week before my father died, as I sat in the living room with him watching television. His eyesight and hearing had begun to fail, which made him easy to observe for long moments without him noticing your gaze, and I considered him as he stared at the TV. I noticed suddenly how unkempt he was. He hadn't shaved for days, and the hair on his head, which had come back spottily after the chemo, shot up from his scalp in ugly, uneven tufts.

On impulse, I asked if he wanted me to clean him up a bit. We'd gotten used to his bad hearing, and I knew that the first time I asked he would only hear that I was talking to him, but not the particulars of what I said, so I waited for him to turn his head and ask, What? I repeated myself, forming the words carefully, and smiled in a way I hoped was encouraging rather than condescending. He thought for a minute—everything with him was so slow now—and then, as if realizing suddenly that he still occupied a world in which people cut their hair and shaved and felt good about it, he nodded with all the vigor he could manage, gratitude splashed across his face like some kind of abstract art.

I draped a towel around his shoulders, tucked it tight into the neck of his shirt. I oiled the clipper blades and set them to his scalp. I used my free hand to turn and tilt his head gently, this way and that, and for a few minutes we talked about the things men talk about when their wives aren't around.

I
n a moment of bold inappropriateness that even in Suleiman's progressive household would have earned her severe punishment, his oldest daughter Noora came to me alone in the yard post-dinner, while I stood gazing into the hills and smoking.

She was sixteen. I was a grown man, no relative to her, and a Westerner to boot. We stood without chaperone in the near-dark. I wondered frantically at Noora's intentions, felt the sudden suffocating danger when a girl is still young enough that everything is play, but old enough that she's eager to play with people instead of toys.

Emma is not dead, Noora said. She smiled and pressed a hand to my shoulder, a gesture so unspeakably improper that it sent a reflexive thrill of excitement through me. I don't know why you lied, but you lied. She is alive somewhere.

Then Noora was gone as quickly as she came. And I was left with concurrent waves of fear, one receding, the other cresting: that Noora meant to seduce me, and that she would somehow find me out.

A
round the time my suicide note was going viral, Emma attended a fund-raising reception for Planned Parenthood of Maine on an August evening thick with humidity and, it would turn out, fate.

She stood in the ballroom at the Hilton drinking rum and tonic, draped in a thin black cotton dress that clung where indicated and flowed where indicated and dropped away in the back to showcase her strong, elegant shoulders, a dress that I can to this day close my eyes and conjure a dulcet vision of. I can hold that vision as long as I like, as though the image in my mind were in actuality a photograph in my hand. I do so more often than is probably good for me.

And on that evening, another man shared my appreciation of this image.

But because playing pick-up artist at a Planned Parenthood fund-raiser was bad form, and because Peter Cash was quite shy besides, he did not approach Emma directly, or send a waiter over with a drink. Instead he situated himself near where Emma stood among colleagues from her office, and made sure he had a line of sight to her.

Emma was easily distracted—when we ate dinner she always sat facing the wall so as not to have her attention sapped by compulsive people-watching—and her eyes wandered the room as she talked. Eventually they settled on Peter Cash, who had been waiting for just such a moment, and he held her gaze for as long as his bashful nature would allow, which was about two seconds.

The moment repeated itself several minutes later, and again Peter held her gaze, for a bit longer this time.

Emma, who'd been repelling the overtures of bolder men for months, but who'd by now had three drinks and found herself amused by Peter Cash's timidity, sought him deliberately the third time.

I know how he must have felt when those eyes, full of intent, fell on him.

Much later, Emma herself would tell me that though Peter didn't remember it, or even necessarily realize he'd done it, the thing that really grabbed her the third time their eyes met was the way that, now suddenly emboldened, he smiled and cocked his head to the side in slight inquiry, reminding her of the hundreds of times she'd seen me do the very same thing.

M
any believe the Singularity will take place when the Internet becomes self-aware. Some even think that the Internet already possesses a version of what we think of as consciousness: the ability to store, process, remember, and convey information with a degree of autonomy.

If you're skeptical about what the Internet will do in the future, though, consider what it could accomplish even back then, while I was erased in the Sinai and, as simply as the universe itself began one day, Emma met a shy but kind man named Peter Cash: it took an obscure American novelist, a writer whose level of fame lay somewhere between that of the shortstop for the single-A Hickory Crawdads and the Rotato Express Potato Peeler, and based on the dissemination of a mere five thousand words or so of his writing made his name more recognizable among certain demographics than that of the current U.S. president.

You know what it was about that suicide note? The reason why millions were compelled to post it in chat rooms and on message boards, to put it up on Facebook and MySpace and Tumblr and reddit, to email it to their parents and brothers and sisters and girlfriends and aunts and coworkers and yes, more ominously, to old lovers who'd jilted them, to film themselves talking about it and post the videos on YouTube, to hyperlink, to blog, to hashtag, to tweet and tweet and retweet ad nauseam? The reason why my suicide note not only persisted but thrived in the face of competition from cute animal pictures, videos of skateboarders snapping their forearms and people being mauled by sharks, the Twitter feeds of basketball players and reality television bimbos, the minutiae of friends' lives updated by the nanosecond, the massively multiplayer online games, the virtual tours of the Louvre?

Simple, to my mind. Of course it seemed simple only in retrospect, after I spent a lot of time thinking about it, marveling in a sort of nauseated way, and then reaching this conclusion: what people found so compelling about the note was its naked, abject honesty.

Because I'd jammed more earnestness into a single line of that note than existed in the whole of my first book. And in a world where people daily put on false indifference along with their deodorant and makeup, where they girded themselves in irony between sips of coffee, where the morning newscasters winked at them while relaying the latest news, where their politicians did the same while telling them what they wanted to hear, where they told friends their babies were beautiful when in fact they were sort of nauseating to look at, where they told spouses they loved them when they no longer did, where they pretended not to know that the sun would one day expand and consume the Earth, where they smiled brightly at people they loathed, where they took Dexedrine to begin the day and Xanax to end it, where they ate when they were tired and fucked when they were hungry and slept when they were horny, where they willfully believed in television characters as a panacea for their loneliness, where they preferred this loneliness to the vulnerability that could relieve it, where they felt with their brains and thought with their hearts, where they seethed and feigned calm, where they feared and feigned courage, where they hungered and feigned satiety, where they almost never said how they really felt for fear of being perceived as strange or weak or plain crazy, where they each and every one continued to perpetrate this massive, ravenous lie upon themselves, they each and every one felt themselves, moment to moment, trembling for something true.

And I was no better. Like everybody else, I had trembled my whole life for something true. I had hidden, and called it living. In my suicide note, at last, I'd finally stopped hiding. And this, to my mind, is the reason why that archaic thing, words on paper, in the form of my suicide note, carved out a section of the Internet's burgeoning consciousness all to itself.

E
ver more alarmingly reckless, Noora took to sneaking away from her father's house after dark to visit my hut on the beach. She stole into Habiba Village silent and shoeless, her feet tough from years of passing unshod over dust and rock. The first time she came, I woke from a dead sleep to find her hovering over me like an assassin, her hand on my cheek, and for a moment, in my confusion, I thought she was Emma, waking me in the bed on the island, tracing the scars and bruises on my face, demanding to know what had happened to me.

I told her, that first night, that I would not tolerate her touching me again.

What will you do? she asked, grinning impishly. Tell my father?

Just don't do it, I said.

You should shave your beard, she said. I want to see your face.

Her head uncovered, immodest child. Her hair long and dark and slightly kinky, shining in the moonlight outside my hut.

I folded my arms over my chest. Stared across the water at the Kingdom's bumpy silhouette. Said nothing.

N
oora obeyed my wishes, did not venture to touch me again. But every time she came to my hut she wore a little less clothing. Never anything racy by Western standards, certainly, but nonetheless. She went from the traditional
thobe
—a garment that resembles nothing so much as a tent—to jeans and loose long-sleeved blouses, to T-shirts that clung to her new breasts, to chino shorts that revealed strong brown legs and dusty ankles.

Couldn't you be stoned to death, I asked, for dressing like that?

She laughed, and I shushed her, terrified someone would hear and come to investigate. Her eyes: shining, obsidian, mischievous. The plain facts of her body revealed in nightly increments, the Bedouin equivalent of a striptease. It moved me, and she knew it. I bobbed in the Red Sea while she sat on the beach, waiting, my one blanket folded in her lap.