Ken Kesey - Demon Box

Marag introduces me to his wife, a tiny woman with one of the milked-over eyes so frequently seen in the Egyptian poor. Also to Mister Ahmed, Missy Shera, Mister Foo-Foo, all younger than Sami.

Marag takes a pillow from the bed and places it on the floor next to the wall and bids me sit. The kids squat in a semicircle and stare at me while Marag helps his wife pump a little white gas burner to hissing flame. I blow my harmonica for the kids and let them play with my compass. The wife begins to prepare tea for us in a little copper kettle.

I ask Sami how he got a crescent scar on his forehead. Grinning, he points toward the pyramid and pantomimes a tumble with his hands.

"It was a bad fall," Marag says. "But maybe it convince him the spirits want him to be an educated, not a pyramid goat. He can read and count and draw pictures now, Mister Sami can." He beams at the boy in unabashed wonder. "He can write ."

From the foot of the top bunk he takes down a notebook to show me, the very one that donated a page for that map. He proudly points out the pictures and words.

"Mr. Deb-ree is an artist and doctor, Sami. Maybe he draw for you a picture while I go on an errand."

After Marag leaves with my five-pound note, Sami and I exchange drawings. I do a Mickey Mouse and Sami does the pyramid. I tell him it looks too steep and he turns to the back page. Taped to the inside cover with electrician's tape is a dollar bill. It's taped Great Seal side up, and written beneath it, first in Arabic, then English, in the careful and patient hand of any good grade-school teacher in any language, is the translation of the two Latin slogans: new order of ages and allah has prospered our beginnings.

"Did your daddy give you this the other night?"

Yes, he nods, frowning at the page to remember what else his teacher has told him. "It is Roman lira pound?"

"No," I tell him; "it is Yankee dollar, American simoleon buck." Marag is gone a long time. The wife puts Missy Shera and Mister Ahmed to bed. It must be past midnight but they're still wide-eyed and excited, staring at me from their bunks.

She takes up little Mister Foo-Foo and sits on the edge of the bed and drops one shoulder of her smock. In the dim light she looks withered way beyond her years. But all the kids are healthy, plumper than most of the pyramid pack I've seen. Maybe that's why she's withered.

Foo-Foo roots in. Mom closes her one good eye and rocks gently to and fro on the edge of the bed, humming a monotonous nasal lullaby. Foo-Foo watches me unblinking as he sucks and rocks.

A scrawny turkey chick wanders in the open door and Sami shoos it back outside. In a corner of the yard I see a very old woman milking a goat. She grins at Sami shooing the chick and calls something in Arabic.

"Mother-my-father," he explains. "Is right?"

"Grandmother, we say. Sami's grandmother." After she finishes she rubs the goat's bag with oil from a jar and brings the bucket of milk in. She doesn't acknowledge me at all. She pours half the milk into the copper kettle on the cold gas burner and covers the rest with a cloth over the top of the bucket. She unties a long stalk of sugarcane from the bundle in the corner. She takes up her half bucket and shuffles out. The stalk brushes the bulb and the shadows rock back and forth. The humming never stops and all the little eyes are still wide in the dreamy light swinging, watching me, even the goat's square pupils in the yard outside, glowing yellow at me as she chomps the cane…

Back at the cabana. I fell asleep on Marag's floor and had a hell of a dream, that the village had been struck by a sandstorm. I couldn't see. In despair I tried to call but sand filled my throat. All I could make out was the rising din of thousands of impatient horns.

When Marag returned and woke me I was sweating and panting. So was he, after his run. But this time he had only one little taped cartridge to show for his hours of effort. He handed it to me, apologizing. It lay in my hand in the dim light and both of us felt very sad.

As he guided me from his house through the tiny thoroughfares to Sphinx Street, he continued to apologize and promise to make things good. I told him the deal was cool and not to worry over it! It was just a little burn.

"The deal is not cool!" he insisted. "Is a bad burn. I bring the rest of the deal tonight, eight o'clock at Mena House – guaranteed!"

He kept on and on about it in a distracted tirade. I finally got him off the subject by telling him what a nice family he had.

"You are kind saying so. What about Sami, you like Sami? Is smart boy, my Mister Sami?"

I told him yeah, I liked Sami, he was plenty smart.

"Smart enough to catch up in one of your modern schools?"

"Sure. He's a bright kid. Personable and alert and bright, like his daddy. I bet he would be up with the other kids in a matter of weeks."

"I bet, too," he said, pleased.

I told him good night at the Sphinx. I was over the hill and nearing the hotel before I finally put it together. Marag hadn't been promoting himself – it was Sami. Like any father he has his dream: the son is taken back to the Land of Opportunity by some gentleman, raised in a modern home, sent to a modern United States school. The kids get a chance to break into the twentieth century; the gentleman gets a permanent liaison with the past…"A friend always at the pyramid." Not a bad scam. No wonder you were so upset about that hash; you had bigger deals wheeling. For all your light touch and soft sell, Marag, you're a stone hustler…

October 29. Twenty-first Sunday after Pentecost, 300th day. Slept till Muldoon and Jacky wake me just in time to see the sun going down. They push me into the shower and send a pool boy to bring a pot of coffee. Jacky has reservations at the Auberge to see Zizi Mustafa, the most famous dancer of them all, and Muldoon has news of a hot archeological find in Ethiopia.

"An abdomen that ought to be put in the Louvre!" Jacky promises.

"A human skull that pushes us millions of years back further than Leakey's find!" says Muldoon. "And no monkey business about it; this cranium is human! Darwin was full of crap!"

"Maybe," says Jacky, always a little reluctant to reorient his thinking or his anatomical focus. "On the other hand, maybe his evolutionary theory was right but his time scale was slightly off. That we still come from monkeys only it took us longer."

"That's not the question, Jacky." I'm out of the cold shower and hot into the discussion. "The question is did we or did we not fall!" As we are walking through the lobby I suddenly remember Marag's resolve to meet me at eight with the rest of my purchase.

"Eight in Egyptian means somewhere between nine and midnight," Jacky translates. "That's if he shows up at all."

I leave word at the desk to have Marag go on down to my cabana if he shows up before I return. I go back and unlock the door just in case and leave the hookah on the nightstand.

After we eat the elaborate Auberge supper we find that the dancer doesn't come on until nine. At ten they say midnight. Muldoon says he's in the middle of exams and can't wait any longer. I talk Jacky into coming back out to the Mena House with me; we can check out Marag and still make it back for the dancer. We get a cab, drop Muldoon at his place, and head back to Giza. By the time we get to the Mena House it is after eleven and no sign of Marag. The door to my cabana is ajar but nothing is waiting for me on the nightstand. We walk out to the street while Jacky regales me with some Arabic wisdom regarding gullibility. The doorman signals for a cab, then asks in a hazy afterthought, "By the way, sir, are you not Mister Deb-ree?"

I tell him I am called so by some.