“What are you doing, Ali?”

  Mona’s voice startled me.

  “Nothing that concerns you.” I hurt my back by straightening up too fast. “I thought I was alone.”

  “It looks like you’re praying.” Her hip jutted out like the curve of a question mark.

  “I am.” My wounded pride forced my eyes down. “What of it?”

  “You don’t need to do it in a mosque with a running fountain?” she asked.

  “My faith doesn’t require plumbing. I can find God with my hands in the dirt as easily as you can find it in a church with a domed ceiling.”

  “Then I envy you,” she said. “I wish I could feel things that way myself. Plain and simple.”

  “Do you?”

  The sun was in my eyes and my heart was shriveling up in my chest as I spoke to her. She really didn’t have a clue about how I felt.

  “It’s all gotten so complicated,” she said wistfully.

  I gathered two fistfuls of sand, dimly aware that there was something else she wanted to tell me. But I had started on another journey, and I wasn’t looking back.

  “What do you want from me, Mona?”

  She put her feet together, remembering her duty. “Mr. DeMille wants to start filming on one of the lower ledges before the sun gets too strong. He asked me to help find everyone in the crew.”

  “Except I’m no longer in the crew. He fired me last night.”

  “He did? I had no idea.”

  “Of course not. You were busy. In your tent.”

  “Oh no.” She folded an arm across her chest, as if I’d wounded her. “What happened?”

  “It’s what I told you. These people are not what they pretend to be.”

  “I’ll speak to Mr. DeMille about taking you back,” she said hastily. “I think he likes me.”

  “I’m sure he does,” I replied. “You’ve found favor with the others, haven’t you?”

  “You make it sound like this is my fault, Ali.” She stepped back, stumbling over a stone. “I’m trying to help you.”

  “I don’t need your help. I need you to leave me alone.”

  The arm she’d had stretched across her chest dropped to her midsection. It was the first time in my life that I had brought tears to a woman’s eyes. I regretted my words immediately, but in the rising desert heat they seemed to hang in the air for a very long time.

  “I should go get the others,” she said. “Tell Raymond that Mr. DeMille is looking for him as well.”

  I watched her turn and walk away as the sun sharpened its exacting blades. I threw away the fists of dirt I’d been holding and looked for a place to wipe my hands. I was disgusted with her but more disgusted with myself. I needed to clean up and start over. To be the unbowed and untainted warrior that my cousin had challenged me to be. But how? I needed a sign of Providence, a direction to take.

  Just then, I swear, something ran over one of my feet. I looked down and saw a homely little porcupine scurrying away, quills bristling as it dodged through a gap in two boulders. I was wondering how it had managed to climb so high when I heard scuffling and groaning sounds from the other side, distinctly human.

  I went over to peer between the stones and found Raymond lying on a flat outcropping with his camera in his hands.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” I asked.

  He didn’t even bother taking his eye from the viewfinder. “Getting an establishing shot.”

  “Establishing what?”

  There was nothing below. Just miles and miles of endless Sinai emptiness. Hard-packed desert—brown sugar and coffee grounds—with just occasional scrubby vegetation. The only signs of life were the man-made caves in some of the surrounding cliffsides. I could almost picture dissident cults hiding in these warrens back in ancient times, feverishly writing alternative gospels and secret histories of man and God on papyrus scrolls. Except the caves looked as if they’d been carved with modern tools.

  “What are you filming here, anyway?” I crept up behind him with a tingle in my hamstrings. “It looks like another ridiculous waste of good film stock.”

  He looked back over his shoulder again. “Why don’t you let me worry about that? But in the meantime, would you mind holding my ankles? I seem to have gone out a little farther than I realized, and I don’t want to have the camera slip from my hands,” he said, not sounding so suave or seductive anymore.

  Just beyond the precipice, there was a single spindly branch and then a steep drop of at least sixty feet. If he fell, he would be smashed on jagged boulders, and his shattered bloody remains would drip down the mountainside.

  It occurred to me that this was the sign I had just asked for. My rival laid out before me, twelve inches from the edge of the precipice. Just a little nudge would send him plummeting. But I needed one more sign to give me the confidence.

  A single white cloud drifted like a lost lamb over the neighboring mountain ranges, and a bluebottle fly harassed one of my ears.

  “Take your shot,” I said. “I have you.”

  I noticed he was wearing black silk socks with his cowhide desert boots. How frivolous and hedonistic, this man. Spending money on clothing that no one would see.

  “Could you at least try to get a better grip?” he asked. “I feel myself slipping a little.”

  “Your wish is my command,” I said, like the genie in one of those Hollywood Oriental movies I’d once loved.

  I gripped him more tightly, giving him the confidence to push himself out a little more. His elbows were less than six inches from the edge now. My foot slipped, kicking loose a handful of gravel that rolled out into the abyss. The little stones made loud pock sounds for several seconds as they echoed down into the void.

  “Watch yourself,” he said. “I don’t want you going over the side here yourself.”

  “It’s okay. I’m on more solid ground.”

  He crawled out a little farther, so that his torso was at almost a forty-five-degree angle, with most of the strain on his abdomen.

  “This is amazing.” He turned the silver crank and raised the camera to his eye again. “If you can, try to take a look over my shoulder.”

  I forced myself to rise into a half crouch, my stomach dropping as my eyes found nothing but open air. Suddenly I had vertigo, after a childhood spent running up and down pyramids with my cousin.

  On the ledge twenty yards below us, two full-grown rams were facing each other. I could see their flanks going in and out rapidly as they breathed. On some predetermined animal signal, they ran straight at each other and collided head-on. Their horns made a hollow knocking sound that resonated in the pit of my stomach.

  “That’s one way to settle differences,” Raymond said.

  The rams backed off and prepared to charge again.

  It would have been easy enough just to let go of Raymond’s ankles and let gravity have its way. But what if he managed to grab a ledge or a branch and hang on? Would I have the nerve to stand over him and grind down on his knuckles with my heel, like the villain in a Hitchcock movie?

  “Mr. Hassan, are you all right?” He chanced another look over his shoulder. “It feels like your grip has loosened a little the last few seconds.”

  “Don’t worry. I’m not going to let you go. I owe you, don’t I? You saved me in front of everyone.”

  “Do I detect a note of resentment?”

  He tried to push back and replant his elbows.

  “Not at all.” I put my knee behind the sole of one of his boots.

  “Then what’s eating you?”

  “What’s ‘eating’ me is what should be eating you, Raymond.”

  “Which is?”

  “That we were involved in a terrible thing.”

  “We’re talking about the accident again?” I could hear him sucking his teeth as he looked down.

  “We’ve barely talked about it at all. In fact, we’ve done everything possible to avoid taking any responsibility.”

  “Ali, let me remind you of something.” It was the first time he had addressed me in this more familiar way. “We were surrounded by a mob that was trying to kill us. We did what we had to do. In America, it would be justified as self-defense.”

  “But we’re not in America now.”

  “Thank you. I noticed.”

  “Tell me something.” I turned to wipe my sweating face on my shoulder. “Does this seem right to you? That some of us keep going along, living the good life, making movies, and chasing women like it doesn’t matter?”

  “Is that what this is about?” He took another quick look back, his normally pale face turning salmon colored. “A woman?”

  “Not at all.”

  “Look, my good man, I would be happy to have a philosophical conversation with you under almost any other circumstances.” He was straining to sound calm. “But right now, I’m asking you to just get a better grip. Okay? It would not be good for your career or mine if you let me fall.”

  I pulled him back a little as the rams collided again.

  “I don’t have a career anymore, Raymond. Mr. DeMille fired me.”

  “Well, he’s damn well not going to hire you back, if you drop me off the cliff when I’m trying to make the documentary Nasser wants,” he said.

  “You’re the one who chose to go out this far, Raymond.”

  “Understood.”

  I could do it now. I could just lift his ankles a few inches and tip him forward. He would lose his balance like an overloaded wheelbarrow and disappear over the side.

  “Do you believe in God, Raymond?”

  “What?”

  “Do you believe in the God who sees our actions and gives us consequences?”

  According to Sherif, I would be more than justified in letting him fall. This man was more than my romantic rival. He was a Jew, an infidel, a representative of the greater enemy. Killing him would be my first real act as a jihadi. Maybe the first real thing I’d ever done in my life.

  “No, I do not,” he said in a steely tone through gritted teeth. “And I will gladly tell you why another time.”

  “Then what do you think holds you up, if you don’t believe in God?”

  “I thought you were holding me,” he said. “But right now, I’m not that sure. If you’re not going to get a more solid grip, can you please pull me back a little so I can get this shot without falling.”

  I could have done it then. I had the right anger. But God did not grant me the sign I was asking for. Instead, I looked over Raymond’s shoulder and saw the two rams walking past each other, as if they’d lost interest in continuing their fight or had just finished airing their differences.

  I pulled Raymond back half a foot so he could wind his camera.

  “That’s more like it,” he said, pressing the button to get his shot.

  Then I dragged him back another yard, making sure to scrape his elbows and chest. He got up and brushed himself off nonchalantly as if he were getting dressed after a massage. But for all his sangfroid, he was still a little ashen faced from being so close to the edge.

  “Thank you,” he said. “By the way, I didn’t know the woman was anything special to you.”

  “Never mind.” I wiped my hands on my shirt and started to turn away. “Just remember: we’re even now.”

  December 23, 2014

  To: Asur@protonmail.com

  From: GrandpaAli71@aol.com

  Alex,

  It’s been quite some time since I’ve heard from you. Is everything all right?

  Please drop your aged grandfather a line. Even if it’s just to say you’ve stopped reading. I don’t mind. I only want to know that you’re okay.

  Love,

  Grandpa

  11

  I did not tell my father that I had been fired from the picture. After I got back to Cairo, I just kept getting up every day before dawn, as if I still had the job. I would comb the pomade into my hair and iron my shirts as if I were going to pick up Cecil B. DeMille from the brand-new apartment house where he was staying by the Nile and take him to the set. Every night, I would come home late and tired, so I didn’t have to answer too many questions.

  What did I do with the rest of my day?

  I walked the streets, looking for new direction. I tried to get a job with the government work crews changing the street signs from the names of old kings to dates of the revolution. I went to Cairo Station and watched the trains come and go, wishing I could afford a ticket to get on one and go somewhere, anywhere, and never come back. I sat on benches beside the Nile, reading the Koran and watching the river flow. I hoped no one I knew would see me and ask what I was doing. Then I waited until after sunset to go home and make up gossip to tell my father about my friendly American bosses and how important I was to them.

  We were still under the same roof, but I was living in isolation, becoming a stranger to him. I was not just lost but lonely and pining. I missed Mona. I missed having a little money to go to the movies and an evening meal or two at Café Riche, with leftovers I could bring home to my father. And most of all, I missed the fragile hopes that had sustained me, that wonderful faith I’d had that the curtain was just drawing back and the grand epic of my life story was about to begin.

  After a week of this, my cousin showed up at the house. He arrived just before sunrise and pretended for my father’s sake that he was going to give me a ride to the set fifteen miles outside Cairo, near a quarry village called Beni Youssef.

  Ironically—no, preposterously—Sherif still had his job working on The Ten Commandments after I had been so unceremoniously sacked. Instead of taking me to the set, he took me to an old Mameluke-era mosque that I’d never been to before, near the Brothers’ headquarters in Helmiya. It had threadbare red carpets, mold on its columns, and gold paint peeling from its grand vaulted ceiling.

  Some of the men made a place for me among them in the front row near the mihrab, the rounded niche in the wall that faces Mecca, where our true faith lies.

  They all knew I’d been driving the king’s car that day. Yet they nodded and touched their hands to their hearts, like they were happy to have me there. Then I realized that the four very young boys at the back, who were being given special attention by the older men, were special guests as well.

  “Those are Sheikh Sirgani’s sons,” my cousin murmured. “He had two daughters as well.”

  “Oh my God. What are they doing here?”

  It wasn’t even the mosque where their father normally preached.

  “They wanted to see you.”

  “Why?” As in the prophecy, the two sides of my rib cage began to close in on me. “Do they want to kill me?”

  “I wouldn’t think so. Look at them.”

  I glanced over my shoulder. Not a one of them was older than ten. The imam must have started fatherhood late in life.

  “Listen.” My cousin rested a hand on my arm. “Our God is a benevolent God. And our religion believes in forgiveness for those who pray.”

  The smallest of them, a pie-faced boy who wore glasses like his father’s, gave me a shy wave.

  “What’s going to become of them?” I faced forward again.

  “We’re collecting money. And looking for a new husband for his widow. Now come on. Say the words.”

  I tried to regain my composure and remember the fajr. From disuse, the old gestures and words had turned into fragments of dry parchment on my tongue. But then I stood upright and looked toward the shrine of al-Ka’bah in Mecca, the most sacred site in Islam, placing my right hand atop my left hand on my chest and acknowledging Allah is greatest and there is no god but God.

  The imam this day was a man not much older than myself, with a weak voice and a beard like seaweed clinging to his chin. But as I began my rakats, I was reminded, Alex, that there is no compulsion in our religion. There is joy. When I knelt and prostrated myself with the others, asking Allah to take me back onto the straight path and not the one that had led me astray, something began to unfold within me. A road through the moral chaos, a sense of clarity that had eluded me when I had foundered in the wilderness.

  This was not some abstraction or hollow routine dressed up in velvet robes and ancient forgotten languages. It was true focused engagement, as real as the stone floor beneath the carpet I knelt on or the steering wheel that had been in my hands when that terrible accident happened. Faith, of the kind my cousin had, was alive and real: a cause to fight for and defend, a place to stand tall and be fully in the world.

  “Subhanaka allahumma wa bi hamdika wa tabara kasmuka wa ta’ala jadduka wa la ilaha ghairuka.”

  I melded my voice with the others rendering praise to God and acknowledging no other was worthy of worship, a little stream joining the greater tributaries that led to the wider river of faith. I began to feel more substantial, like there might be a way for my life to be worth living again.

  “A’udhu billahi minash shaitnir rajim.”

  I sought refuge from Satan, the accursed. Then I made a silent addition, asking forgiveness for my transgressions and asking God to show me the true steps toward redemption. Sheikh Sirgani’s sons all lined up to shake my hand afterward. When the small one who had given me the shy wave reached up and put his arms around my neck, I started to faint and fall on top of him.

  The next day, Sherif took me for a short run after prayer services and before he had to drive to the set. My wind was pathetic and my legs were gelatinous, but it was good to start moving again. After we were done, I drank water until my bladder threatened to burst.

  The day after, I could run a little farther without needing to stop and squat to catch my breath every quarter mile.

  On the third day, Sherif suggested that we try to re-create the old pyramid races we used to run as boys.