provided many sweet foods for his friend to enjoy—sugared almonds, honeyed dates, candied oranges—but he could not sweeten his friend’s bitter mood, and Romi remained ignorant of its cause. For his part, all that evening Eyad felt his eyes shifting from the upturned corners of Romi’s smile to the satisfyingly smooth cheek of Romi’s pleasant wife.
qAfter Eyad went home, full of bitter satisfaction, a knock came on his door. A holy man, an imam, stood there and said he was aware of Eyad’s devotion to the faith. “You are a man of action,” he said. “There is an American woman who wears an amulet. She is coming to Egypt; her husband was an astrophysicist. The amulet is a piece for a computer; it contains blasphemous information about life beyond the stars.”
“The Quran speaks of no such evidence,” Eyad answered.
“People are easily misled. It is never for us to know the mind of God, blessed be his holy name. The truth is everlasting. There is no God but God, and Muhammad is his prophet.”
To these statements, Eyad nodded assent.
“Our resources are immense,” the imam went on. “We watch many people who interest us. You are one of them. We have a mission for you.”
“In whose name do you speak?”
“Perpetuity.”
“Give me a sign,” Eyad asked, but joy coursed through his body like a river that knows its origin and its destination.
With the tip of his finger, the visitor traced a smile on his own cheek, but he did not smile.
Eyad could not resist telling his old friend Romi, the master of English, that he had been chosen as a protector of the faith, in perpetuity.
“I have no quarrel with the other religions,” Romi said.
“You don’t understand. It is in concert with the Jews and even the Christians that we will act.”
“Almost I wish that you had not told me,” Romi said, but he put his arm affectionately around the shoulder of his second-best friend.
PASSAGE TO EGYPT
IN THE THREE years following my husband’s death, I never slid Thom’s memory stick into my computer, but I kept the memento as a tangible object, a pendant hanging on the black silk cord between my breasts. Although I promptly turned over Thom’s briefcase and printouts to the scientists, their work using spectroscopy to locate extraterrestrial life scarcely progressed after his death. As Thom and I had agreed in those last moments we spent together, I kept to myself not only his words to me, writ large on the face of the universe, but also the existence of the small red dot—that collapsed valentine, that drop of Thom’s blood.
In those years while the nations warred in the Middle East and parts of Asia, I lived in a depression, a deep crevice. Certainly I received no sign from within my own gloom or from the state of the nations that I should reveal the secret of extraterrestrial life. The idea of that distant life seemed unreal, the emblem of a trauma I needed to bury. Yet I always wore the memory stick.
After Thom’s death, I moved from Iowa City to New York City to a new position as an art therapist. When I was with my clients, my attention was absorbed to a great extent by the patients’ paintings and sculptures—their work as a whole and all its parts. I rejoiced in their achievements. That they could create—begin, develop, and finish something! Wasn’t that the very template of sanity? At least of continuity, which was one of the hallmarks of sanity.
Only once in the presence of a patient did I have a mental lapse: of a patient’s white-and-gray rendering of the hospital cafeteria, I had involuntarily thought, “The Garden of Grief,” and I said, “It’s a wonderful garden,” when I had intended to say it was a wonderful painting. Rendered in neutral tones of ash and char, the painting had been the opposite of a wonderful, colorful garden, but I found consoling beauty in its vision. Another time—not with the patients—at a bookstore near Lincoln Center, I had looked at the array of appealing book covers and said, “What beautiful flowers.” Was displacement what I was after? A displacement from extended grief? Moving my work from Iowa City to New York had helped me leave some portion of sorrow behind. Not enough.
A new international symposium—in Egypt—had been organized to honor Thom, and I agreed to travel to Cairo to greet the group. I was glad to go, glad to have a mission, a new direction, a small but