September 18, 2001
When I left the United States to live in Egypt, my friends warned me to watch out for terrorism. Some of them were kidding; some of them appeared to think The Middle East was a single country riddled with bomb craters.
I heard that sort of warning from some of my friends in New York, too. I visited them during a farewell tour this summer; drove my rental car through the tunnel from Brooklyn to Manhattan; ate Italian with my uncle and his family; watched a cheesy, open-air staging of "Pirates of Penzance" in the harbor. The twin World Trade Center skyscrapers were in the background, but I didn't really bother looking at them, since they'd been there forever and would be there forever.
I slept in my uncle's condo down the street, an address on Liberty Street, or rather, tried to sleep, while my teen-age cousin played basketball on the next floor up. I left that place, where the cost of gourmet coffee was a more pressing concern than abstractions of international affairs like the war between Israelis and Palestinians, and landed in a sweaty place where the Palestinian conflict is local news.
A week later, I was watching the World Trade Center burn and bury people. Fear scooped my guts out like nothing since the gasping, claustrophobic nightmares of childhood.
It would have been hard enough to comprehend if I were standing on the street in Manhattan, looking straight up at the avalanche of concrete, the tidal wave of smoke. Instead, I was in Cairo, watching the video replay on a fuzzy over-the-air TV broadcast. The dislocation has made it harder for me to absorb the reality of what happened over there. It's been harder to work through the feelings because the disaster is not a shared community experience here like it is in the U.S. At the same time, it's been easier to regain sanity and a normal life, because I'm not surrounded by the discussion like my friends' e-mails tell me they are.
The distance has also given me clarity to see dangerous lack of understanding between my old countrymen and my new Arab neighbors.
When the smoke and concrete fell on Liberty Street, my uncle and his wife were here, in Cairo, on business. But my cousin, their son, was back in Manhattan, unaccounted for. With international phone lines jammed, we relayed information over the Internet -- my uncle phoning me from his hotel, my girlfriend using her laptop computer to send instant electronic messages to a friend in New York who could call the boy's school. "All the kids and teachers are fine," the friend replied by instant message. "There was no one in the high school hurt." I moved the phone line from the laptop to the phone and called my uncle back. Since their apartment was in the disaster zone, my cousin would need somewhere else to sleep that night. My uncle had me e-mail a friend to make arrangements.
We slumped on the couch watching the video replays. In the next 48 hours, I would watch the replay on Web sites repeatedly. Each time, I found that the viewing hadn't taken; I still was unable to accept what I saw. The data wouldn't stick -- in my upper consciousness.
On a deep level, I had understood immediately the message being transmitted by the plane hitting the skyscraper, had received it clearly despite the distance and fuzzy video reception, heard it as clearly as people in the U.S. did: A Gorgon had blasted away the gates. Americans were exposed, vulnerable, with nowhere to run, just like people in those faraway places we used to watch on TV. Kosovo. Gaza.
The walls of our fortress had been made of tissue paper. Terrorists' message received.
The personal irony -- that I had physically moved closer to a hub of terrorism, only to see the reality of terrorism rocket in the opposite direction -- did nothing to ease my mind in the days after the attacks.
When Nile TV signed off that night, I laid in bed. The image of the colossal buildings falling over kept playing in my head. I tried to understand it. I summoned the image; it came on its own anyway.
Several people noted in the aftermath that the image seemed too huge to occur in anything but big-budget special effects movies, like "Independence Day," with its spaceship vaporizing the White House. It reminded me reading "Fantastic Four" comics as a kid and feeling dread when the hundred-foot-tall destroyer of worlds, Galactus, stood next to a New York skyscraper and set up his Earth-eating machine. He took his time because he knew no one could stop him.
Inside me, the surreality of the image unlatched a cage door and released fears without logic. I admit: In the following days, I was harried by thoughts that I was a target in Egypt. I know those thoughts were as based in ignorance as were the warnings my friends had given me before I left.
When schoolboys saw my white skin as a chance to practice their English ("HALLO!"), I wondered if there was hostility behind it. As I lay in bed and heard chanting and shouting down the street, I wondered if a mob had formed to avenge a U.S. counterstrike. On the balcony, I listened more closely: It was just a party of rowdy Brits singing.
The day after the attack, I avoided going out, emerging to get groceries. I wore dark clothes in a quiet show of mourning. Shopkeepers expressed their condolences when I raised the topic. But I detected nonchalance in the guy at the hardware store. He shrugged: "Always war everywhere." Like, sorry your people died. Now you know what it's like. Welcome to the modern world.
That night, I devoured news on the TV and over the Internet, trying to make it real, staying up late and starting to feel crazy. I awoke feeling burnt out. Riding the Metro, some riders saw me writing in my journal while standing; they offered me one of those seats that folds out from the wall, communicating with gestures. The show of civility surprised me; I crumpled inside a little and averted my eyes as I sat.
By now the initial horror has congealed into a normalcy that will never be normal again.
As I start a second time to make myself part of the life of Cairo, I have one ear on my people in the U.S., one on my new acquaintances here. I feel a little like I'm at a street corner as two cars hurdle toward the intersection, and I'm the only one that can see that the collision is about to occur. It's a crossroads with enough ignorance to go around.
Egyptians have shown warmth and sympathy, but I sense that people here don't realize that this is more than the latest development in the story of terrorism. If they could read the e-mails I'm seeing from home, they'd see that the American mindset has hardened overnight. They'd sense a wounded beast ready to lash out.
An e-mail from one friend: "The underlying feelings of anger are building towards a retaliation that will affect the Arab world."
From another: "We are a targeted society. Act accordingly over there. ... Make no mistake, bro. This is war."
Arab people also should know that their reactions matter to people in the U.S. Several people repeated to me a media report that the terror attacks were cheered in "Cairo cafes." And the image of Palestinian children celebrating in the streets registered indelibly with Americans. One of my uncles, who's on a teaching assignment in the United Arab Emirates, sent the family an e-mail asking God to protect innocent Arabs. A cousin's angry response: " And the rest of those 'brainwashed' psycho children that were dancing and celebrating in the streets? Guess what? They are the next bin-Laden, the next Hussein. ... What does your 'God' have planned for the mini-terrorists that are being conditioned to kill and enjoy it?"
There's a deep disconnection. A day later, on the Metro platform, an older, kindly seeming man noted I was an American, smiled and pulled me aside. He expressed his condolences. Then he got to his main point.
"You know, it is clear who was behind it," the man said, matter-of-factly. "The Mossad. The complexity -- only they could do this."
Thank you, sir, but we already had enough paranoia to go around. If Egyptians thought that the United States was an arrogant bully in the Middle East before, I don't think they're going to like how the U.S. acts now that the American public is enraged and fully engaged. The mistrust and lack of understanding between Arabs and the U.S. is going to deepen. Nothing short of a concerted cultural exchange can minimize the damage.