Shooting the Sphinx (16 page)

“Roll camera,” said Ari.

“How is it?” asked Samir.

“Not great.” Don started the shot again, but it was already too late in the flight pattern to salvage the shot. “I can do better.”

“What about all the tourists staring up at us?” asked Samir.

“We don't care about them,” said Ari. “We can erase them digitally after we edit the film. Cut, cut, let's go again.”

“Still too high?” asked Samir.

“Yuh, reset,” said Ari with a blasé look of disappointment on his face.

Samir told the pilot, and he cut his pattern short, banking hard, pulling three Gs. Everyone grimaced as the horizon went vertical out the back. Ari could feel the strain on the rotors as their every thwack became a shake. The helicopter leveled off to descend to its starting point.

Samir argued with the pilot as he banked around to reset. The helicopter started the pattern again. Ari didn't bother to speak.

“Aren't you going to roll?” asked Don.

“There's no point.” Ari leaned back against a machine gun mount in the side of the ship. He was on strike. He wasn't going to look at the screen unless he thought it was worth it. “We're just wasting film. We've got to get low, really low, right down next to it, or the shot'll never get into the movie.”

“The pilot says he won't fly any lower.” Samir pointed at his headset.

Ari lashed out. “Did we come all the way here, go through everything that we went through, just to film something that's okay?” Ari was yelling now. “No, it's got to be great! It's got to be the best, or there's no point! We'll just wind up on the cutting room floor!”

Samir gazed back at Ari, furious, humiliated, for he internalized failure, blamed himself. This is the breaking point, thought Ari. Either he's going to push through to the other side or he's going to give up.

“
Inshallah
?” asked Ari sarcasticly.

Then something welled up inside of Samir—some determination to reverse the force of compromise, of moderation, of playing it safe and keeping to the rules. Ari knew he had cracked Samir open, cleaved off the lid on his mind.

Samir ripped into the pilot in Arabic. Arguing, then screaming at him. A lifetime of pent-up rage at the rusty machine of post-British colonial pan-Arab Socialist police state bureaucracy poured out of him.

“Yeah, yeah, that's right!” Ari goaded Samir on like a demon on his shoulder. “Tell him the whole world will see this shot! And that we will put his name in the credits at the end of the movie in every theater as the pilot who flew around the head of the Sphinx!”

Samir yelled and then yanked his headset plugs out of the jack on the bulkhead and pulled himself forward through the banking aircraft toward the cockpit. The censor and the crew chief tried to stop him, but they could only use one arm each to keep from tumbling over in the banking chopper. Samir plugged into a jack in the cockpit and resumed yelling. The pilots looked behind themselves at the maniac at their shoulders. More afraid of Samir than the consequences, the pilot pushed the stick forward and dove. They came in low, way down low by the head of the Sphinx.

“Oh yeah!” cried Ari. “That's what I'm talking about! Roll camera!”

Don started the shot as tight as possible, then pulled out. The head of the Sphinx filled the frame. They were right down beside it.

“Perfect … perfect. Steady on the Sphinx, now wider, wider. That's good, good.”

The shot was locked on the face of the Sphinx, as the helicopter arced, the background of stone and sand twirled behind the massive head. Ari knew that on a giant screen the effect would be dizzying, spellbinding, movie magic.

“Those people are running,” said Samir.

“Shhh!” Ari lashed out. “I need to focus. Okay, okay now … pull back, wider, wider. Right over the top of the pyramid, right over the top, tell him to fly right over the top!”

Samir yelled at the pilot, who flew right next to the top of the Great Pyramid.

“Awesome! Cut! That was perfect!” Ari high-fived Don and looked out the cargo bay door. Below, they had just hovered over fifty or sixty buses parked in rows by the entrance to the pyramids. Trapped between the buses, hundreds of tourists were running away from the rotor wash, an inverted mushroom cloud of dust that gushed down between the buses and shot little wind tunnels of sandstorm through each parked row, engulfing the tourists like escaping insects.

“Ari, look at those tourists down there!” cried Don.

“They're running away!” realized Ari. “From us. Oh, they're getting sandblasted. Tell the pilot to climb once we get near the pyramids or we'll ruin those people's day.”

“That is what I was trying to tell you,” said Samir. “Reset?”

Ari looked out the back of the ship. A tan cloud described their path.

“Uh, we kicked up too much dust all over the place,” Ari admitted. “You can't even see the head of the Sphinx anymore. It looks like a sandstorm hit.”

Samir talked on the headset with the pilot.

“He wants to know should we fly over the desert for a few minutes to let the dust settle down?”

“No, let's go back to base and reload. We got it. We got the shot. Whatever happens now is just gravy.”

“Just gravy?” asked Samir.

“Extra. A bonus.”

The helicopter leveled out and headed back over the city, back to base.

 

Chapter 34

The ride back from the Sphinx in the helicopter held a sublime satisfaction. The engine noise, the thwack of the rotors faded away into a quiet that only comes when you touch the face of the impossible and the extraordinary. The team basked silently in the achievement borne of their own determination until Ari noticed Samir muttering to himself.

“What is it?” Ari prompted him.

“I was looking right into the eyes of the Sphinx.”

“Yeah?”

“You do not know what that means to an Egyptian.”

Don looked at his monitor at something in the city below. “What's that?”

On the screen, a mass of people was moving down a boulevard beneath them. Ari looked out the bay door. Protesters marched along the avenue into a large circular square from every direction, some holding signs and banners. Ari looked back at the protesters on the screen, thousands of little dots all moving in unison.

“Don, roll me a few seconds of that.” Don turned on the camera, but Ari thought better of giving the studio something else to worry about. “No, wait. Cut. Don, that's a lot of … how many people would you say that is?”

“It's got to be four, maybe five thousand.”

“Five thousand, as many as that?”

Ari was spooked by the size of the crowd. This wasn't just a few college kids anymore. This was something to pay attention to. I've got to go and see this for myself, he thought, as soon as possible.

The chopper landed and taxied onto the ramp. Charley met them and opened the ball, downloading the film, threading a new magazine into the camera. The fuel truck pulled up as the jet engines wound down.

Samir and Ari hopped off. The crew chief snapped a photo of them behind the censor's back.

“Going up again?” asked Charley.

“Sure, but we got it,” said Don.

“We got it good!” Ari high-fived Charley and Don, and he lifted Samir's hand and high-fived him as well. Samir's cell phone rang.

“It's Elizabeth.” Samir looked at the screen. “Should I…?”

“Sure,” said Ari with ease. “I'm ready now. Answer it.”

“Hello, Elizabeth,” said Samir into his cell before passing the phone. “He's right here.”

“Hey, babe!” said Ari cheerfully.

Beth's voice came through the line with a slight delay.

“Did you see the budget—?”

Ari overwhelmed her with a joyful tirade. “We got it! It's amazing, fantastic, perfect! Frank's going to love it! Did I see what…?”

“That budget!” She was almost yelling over the phone.

“Yes, I saw the budget. So what…?”

“Are you high?”

Ari laughed—high on life, he thought. “The studio doesn't understand it yet. They don't know what I know. Look, this is going to be the signature shot of the movie! It'll be the poster! It'll be the commercial! It'll be the trailer! It will be why people go to buy a ticket in the first place…!”

“But it's a quarter of a million dollars!” She was yelling now. “Twice the bid!”

“I know it's double, but what are you going to do?” He didn't care. He wore a manic set of armor impervious to her anger. “You've got to come here to shoot the end of the movie. We've got to get the SpaceCam back out of Egypt. We've got to get the film out. You've just got to pay. What choice do you have?”

“You fucked me, Ari!”

“Babe, babe, calm down, we're reloaded here.” He had fucked her in the way that she meant, and he had to admit to himself that he enjoyed it. He had broken with her in the way a child keeps testing and testing adults until one day he sees that their real power over him is really quite limited by his own resolve.

The pilots jumped out of the cockpit and embraced Samir, kissing him on the cheek, Samir who had been screaming at them barely minutes ago.

“Wait till you see the shot,” Ari told Beth. “It was worth it.”

The ground crew hooked up the fuel hose from the truck and started refueling the aircraft. Beth lashed into him. She knew that something had changed. He had lost his fear of her and this enraged her even more.

“Ari, you're going to write me an e-mail right now, that you went ahead without my approval—”

“Beth, I've got to go flying again. You're just wasting your breath. Are you on set?”

“Yes, but you're going to put it in writing that you went around behind my back—”

“Are you near camera. Are you near Frank…?”

She breathed heavily for a moment. “Yes.”

“Then pass him the phone.”

Ari heard some whispering on the line, then Frank's voice.

“Hey, buddy,” said Frank. “Did you get it?”

“I shot the Sphinx! It's
awesome
! You're going to love it!”

“Good job,” said Frank. “Got to get back to work here.”

“Hey, Frank, are you still on schedule to arrive on Friday…?”

“Yes, Ari, we'll be wrapped in New York by the end of tomorrow.”

“See you when you get here.…” Ari heard the phone jostle as it was passed back over to Beth.

“I'm totally serious about that e-mail, Ari!” she whisper-yelled at him.

“Beth, Beth, calm down! Didn't you hear me? I shot the Sphinx! I just shot the Sphinx!”

Ari hung up the phone and handed it to Samir, who embraced him and kissed Ari three times on the cheeks.

“Whoa!” said Ari surprised.

Ari laughed, giddy with glee. He kissed Samir back, and then the pilots were there and he kissed them on the cheeks, too. A jeep zoomed right up to them with a screeching halt. The squadron commander, Major Horus, hopped out spitting mad.

“Oh-oh.” Ari backed away. The two pilots sheepishly walked over to their commander, who started yelling at them for flying too low.

“Hamed?” Ari looked around. “Where's Hamed? I've got to go.”

Don was stunned. “We're not flying another mission?”

“Of course,” said Ari. “You guys do it.” Ari pointed to Major Horus chewing out his pilots. “Look, they're going to have no asses left in a minute. You'll never get that low again.” Ari started to walk off toward Hamed's car.

“Where the hell are you going?” demanded Don.

“Yes,” added Samir, offended. “Where are you going?”

“We got the shot, guys. We got the shot,” said Ari over his shoulder to a very confused Samir, Don, and Charley. Ari jumped in Hamed's car and drove away.

 

PART FIVE

The black and white days are coming, there is no grey.

—Tweeted by Gsquare86, Gigi Ibrahim, Tahrir Square, Cairo

 

Chapter 35

Traffic snarled to a standstill near Tahrir, so Ari grabbed his camera and hopped out of the car. He made his way through the traffic onto the sidewalk. A lot of young people were out, but there were older people, too. Everyone wandered around aware of everyone else. They glanced around at each other with searching looks, for what? Permission to simply be there together? Excited curiosity flickered about from young face to old face to shopkeeper to taxi driver to those who ambled toward the growing din or walked there with purpose. Ari snapped their photos.

They even glanced at Ari for answers. Could this really be happening, such an improbable thing, an unnameable thing? Dare I look upon this greatest of obscenity in my own personal dictatorship, in the police state inside my mind? were the questions on everyone's faces as Ari caught them looking into his camera lens.

Ari could hear music and singing echoing in the square ahead. Singing in unison, clapping in rhythm, thousands in angry jubilation.

When he entered the square, it was a party, and Ari took its smiling picture: people milling about in groups sharing bread and hummus, some clustered around happy impromptu leaders chanting, some with paint, paper, and bedsheets making banners and signs; others stood off alone, confused or embarrassed by the collective transgression all around them.

Ari could see a small stage at one side with a band on it setting up their instruments and Rami with his acoustic guitar waiting to sing. Ari scanned the densely packed crowd near the stage for sight of Farah.

A very handsome man with strong chiseled features, surveying the scene as if he had just arrived, walked in front of Ari.

“Khaled Nahkti?” asked Ari in disbelief.

“Yes?” said one of Egypt's biggest movie stars, wondering at the Westerner who had hailed him.