The dawn burst a halo of light around the city, a thick, orange glow
slowly warming its patchwork architecture, a puzzle of ancient cut stone and
gleaming metalwork rambling out around me in every direction. From where I
was standing, on the balcony of my parent's modern twenty-sixth floor
apartment, I could see men in long white tunics and head scarfs herding
squalling goats from their daily drink of the Nile, the animals pressing on through
four lanes of hysterical, shrieking traffic, their heroic journey to end only in a cramped, makeshift
holding pen in the Bulaq slum.
Other men hung on the riverbank
swinging fishing poles fashioned from broom handles, angling these to
catch whatever now survived in those polluted depths that
was to become their family's only meal that day. Some of these same men
spent nights moonlighting as animal control officers for the city,
rounding up the least cunning of the city's burgeoning population of
stray dogs and spraying them with bullets in a concrete-walled yard beside my parent's building. And so it is that I know for certain that the memory of a sound can be infinitely worse than the memory of something seen, more visceral and gut-level, its reverberation finally clawing right
into your bones and imprinting its anguish there forever.
To my left, the spiral of a minaret shot up into the sky, and in the
night I often woke to the muffled sound of a man's voice bellowing the
call to prayer from its canopy — a rough, alien lullaby. To my right,
across the Nile and into the desert, the Great Pyramid's peak flared,
gloriously alight with morning sun. Behind me, the door that would
let me back into the safety and air conditioned comfort of my family
home. Before me, an unlived life, an unwritten book, chance, opportunity, and always, fear.
