Triumphant Sun, Pt. 15

Much delayed, I'm afraid. I'm outlining the plot for the next few installments - rest assured great things shall happen. But I want it to really be good, so I'm taking my time crafting that part.

***

Billowing clouds of off-white smoke obscured the street from the entrance of Evan’s building. He peered into the haze and perceived the shape of an old pickup truck, spewing out clouds of some mosquito repellent. Probably DDT, he reflected ruefully. Beams of sunlight filtered through the air, refracted into twisting edges of light. He seemed trapped in a bubble – unable to see beyond the corner of the street, the sounds of the city muffled and distant.

For a moment, he paused, watching the mist swirl, then pushed through, holding his breath, to clearer air down the street. Tendrils of white curled around the trees and fences, snaking under the cars and casting the whole scene in a kind of impressionist fog. A soldier leaned, head bent in the act of lighting a cigarette, against his wooden post. Evan took a deep breath, and coughed slightly. An ache in his side reminded him that he still hadn't eaten yet, and he headed for the corner.

A small crowd had queued in front of the compact pastry stall, crouched at the corner of two dilapidated colonial buildings, run by a Saidi named Hamid. His ashy, charcoal skin and oddly square, professorial spectacles gave him the demeanour of a tenured professor of African Literature. He had an aversion to smoking that relaxed only long enough for him to share his clientele with the ahwa across the street, but he chewed packs of imported gum with a singular ferocity.

"Sabah al-khayr," called Evan as he reached the stall.

"Sabah al-nour, sabah al-fuul, replied Hamid effusively, playing the old Egyptian game of topping another's greeting with one's own, more dramatic reply. Thus, 'morning of goodness' gave way to 'morning of light' - and, oddly, of chickpeas. Uncontrolled, it could swing back and forth until someone dropped a game-stopping 'Morning of Allah,' which, for obvious reasons, could not really be topped.

"Just a couple with honey, Hamid." Evan's stomach rumbled as he watched the man expertly flip circles of flat, light pastry dough onto a griddle and pour honey from a rusty iron bowl. The result was a flaky, sweet meal that was good just as long as it remained hot.

Drinkwater's Cambridge

Gary Drinkwater looks the part of a seasoned veteran of Boston's menswear scene. With a grey beard that brings to mind Ernest Hemingway and an elegant, understated style, he fits in perfectly at his Porter Square store, Drinkwater's of Cambridge.

The quirky, studio-sized retail space is the result of four years of what Mr. Drinkwater calls “bootstrapping” - he built the business with his savings and turned it into a profitable enterprise with the sweat of his own brow. He runs the store without employees and relies on a loyal, “quietly affluent” customer base.

A heavy antique table dominates the center of the showroom, covered in a glittering array of 4-fold ties from makers like Robert Talbott and shirtings from Hilditch & Key. In fact, the store has a partnership with the antique shop “Room With A View,” so if you need to buy a 19th century French armoire or a gilded lamp when you pick up your suit, Drinkwater's is prepared. Despite this, the prices are affordable – Mr. Drinkwater says he's appealing to people who want to move up from brands like Banana Republic and Bennetton while staying beneath the stratospheric expense of a Louis Boston or Ermenegildo Zegna.

A local company from Lawrence, Southwick Clothing, cuts all of the suits and odd jackets for the store. Most of them are from a fairly conservative but sleek 3-button profile called Nicola, although Mr. Drinkwater's fondness for checks and Prince of Wales patterns is displayed in the window. Indeed, dressing and arranging mannequins is where he got his start in the clothing business over 25 years ago, and his experience in the area shows. One of the suits will run you between $700 and $1300, while a sportcoat goes for $600 to $900.

The other half of the store holds the streetwear lines from new brands like Engineered Garments and European companies such as Wellansteyn. Again, the emphasis is on quality construction and reasonable, although not cheap, prices. All the bases are covered – you could build your entire wardrobe here. Shoes come from Paraboot, a French company that became famous making boots for paratroopers, and there is even a selection of pocket squares in silk and Irish linen($18). Details are important, and a well-folded pocket square or proper cufflinks can set clothes apart.

But the greatest attraction is Mr. Drinkwater's personal attention to detail and encyclopaedic knowledge of men's clothing. From Louis Boston to the now-defunct Stonestreet's in Harvard Square, he's seen most of what there is to see in Boston's sartorial world.

Behind the register where he hand-writes credit-card charge slips, a pair of patched, frayed, hippy-era bell-bottom jeans hangs on the wall. They are a reminder of his younger days as an art student, a partly ironic and partly nostalgic symbol of another era of clothing.

Work, Work, Work...

One of my jobs just launched a blog, and as part of the cycle of incestuous web references, I felt that I should drop a link to it. It's one of my two jobs - the other being Libretto - and it's a great place to work. Basically we work with kids one-on-one, tutoring them in how to write essays, research papers, letters, pretty much anything that uses words.

Obviously those who know me have probably heard plenty of stories, and I'd be willing to bet most of you reading already know me! I won't go into the gory details, but it's a good place that I think is doing pretty important work. So that's always good.

Triumphant Sun, Pt. 14

A bent, old man whose face was covered in fine wrinkles set down her coffee and her shisha with a gaptoothed grin and retreated to his permanent post before the flickering television which flashed back and forth between grey and color images. The first sip burnt her lips and she barely avoided spilling the coffee in surprise. She turned her chair so that the flash of the TV no longer hovered at the edge of her vision and puffed thoughtfully on the pipe, watching the cars tracing their chaotic paths across the square.

She'd begun to realize that she really had no leads for the story she wanted to write – no idea who owned the grand houses in Zamalek and in the wealthy suburbs. Once, her father would have known all the owners, her mother would have been to parties at each of them, but now they were as mysterious to her as any tourist. Most of them wouldn't appreciate a journalist poking into them either – they'd send her packing in an instant.

She sipped the coffee again, now cool enough to drink. The taste rolled around on her tongue, at once sweet, bitter and slightly gritty from the fine grounds. Good, but far from the best she'd had. Even in London, there had been a Lebanese cafe down the street from her office where she'd had cup after cup of coffee while trying to finish her deadlines. She fished in her bag for a notebook and her insulin and opened it on the metal table.

Swearing under her breath, she realised she'd forgotten her meter, and paused a moment before simply guessing at the number and dialing in a few units. She earned a few strange glances from the ahwa's denizens as she slipped the needle under the hem of her blouse and injected herself. By this point, she'd grown accustomed to the stares of strangers confused by the operations of her disease. Still, it felt unusually awkward on a street corner in Cairo.

Triumphant Sun, Pt. 13.5

The heavy smell of shisha tobacco lured her towards an ahwa squatting at the corner of an intersection, somewhat less squalid than its brethren. She'd forsworn smoking, but she couldn't help ordering a pipe along with her coffee as she sat down – it was different somehow, cultural rather than addictive. She drew a few strange glances from the men in the cafe, but they bounced off of her long experience ignoring the prying looks of men.

She sketched idly in her notebook as she waited, curving English and Arabic doodles into each other like a shadowplay of calligraphy. Its blankness oppressed her, in a way – she had no story, no lead, no real contacts. Yet her nationality made her feel compelled to deliver something really arresting, a real hard-hitting news piece.

At the same time, reporters in Egypt could barely operate. She was unlikely to land some kind of Woodward & Bernstein scoop – partly because of restrictions, and partly because that kind of venal, institutionalized corruption wasn't so much a news story as a fact of daily business.

What Twisted Mind...

...created this monstrosity?:

This is "Clocky, the Alarm Clock," and he (she? it?) is pure satanic evil incarnate. The lovely folks over at MoMA - a museum with a $40 or $50 admit fee - have brought this to you in their infinite and malevolent wisdom.

What is it? Apparently, it's –

Now available in a chrome finish, Clocky is the alarm clock that can jump down from up to 3 feet and run away and hide if one does not get out of bed on time. After one snooze cycle, Clocky will roll and move around the room with randomly patterned alarm beeps –

That sounds...unspeakable. Nobody likes their alarm clock. I've broken a few myself, tossed my fair share off the dresser and on several occasions simply unplugged it and left it to die a slow and painful death. Man has been at odds with the alarm clock since its genesis.

But to put wheels on it? To let it run away? I have visions of this thing being subjected to brutal and repeated blows with a baseball bat, or in the more 'red-state' areas of the country simply being drilled repeatedly with a 9mm pistol.

Let me be perfectly clear here - buying this thing is an act of unspeakable masochism. Buying it as a present may actually be banned by the Geneva Convention.

So if there's anyone you really, really, really hate, and whose soul you would like to slowly erode - buy them Clocky, Alarm Clock of Death.

Because some things should never have been created.

Triumphant Sun, Pt. 13

Samira's head felt full of sand and cotton wool as she levered herself out of sleep. Her tongue had the thick, tingling sensation that meant something was wrong with her blood sugar, and she moaned quietly to herself and shuffled across the room to her desk, sheets still looped loosely around her naked body, trailing on the carpet. The first jab of the lancet failed to draw blood, but the second jabbed too deep and bled profusely.

The glowing numbers popped out in the gloom and Samira hung her head. At 251, no wonder she felt the dragging, sickly sensation. She dialed a moderate dose of insulin and injected it roughly into her thigh, a tiny dot of blood welling up there as well. Though there was no way the drug could act that fast, a sense of relief bloomed through her limbs – a trick of the mind, to be sure, but a reassuring one.

She dialed up the water to its hottest setting and climbed into the cramped shower, shivering as the spray shifted from mildly chilling to almost scalding. The heat blasted her skin, almost burning away the sensation of sickness and lethargy. Head tilted and eyes closed into the scouring flow, she stood motionless for a while.

Her mind wandered – to her empty flat in London, dust gathering on the photographs and newspaper clippings; to her father's empty house, decaying in the middle of the ravenous city; to the quiet house in Greenwich that they had occupied after their personal exodus, with the Egyptian tapestries on the walls and the English records on the stereo, the twin scents of her mother's Dunhill cigarettes and roast lamb filling the house.

She dressed and walked down to the sprawling lobby of the hotel, a confusing sprawl filled with American Express branches and tacky shops hawking fake Pharaonic memorabilia. A vague, irritating sense of nationalism reminded her that the historical souvenirs always managed to conveniently forget the intervening millennium and a half of Islamic rule.

A glance at the absurd prices at the hotel cafés made her laugh in derision as she wound her way out onto the street to start her first true day back in the city.