Incantation

Helen, I’ve said it out loud today several times—sounding to myself like a devout Muslim at his call to prayer.

“Fatuh Malek. Fatuh Malek. Fatuh Malek.” I fairly chanted it while I was on the exercise bicycle this morning. I said it in the car on my way to work this morning. I repeated it while I was pumping gas at the On the Run Station on Jefferson Davis Highway. I’m on my lunch break now, and I again uttered it softly just now from behind my closed office door. I’ll keep it up at intervals throughout this day, at least.

I know I’m pronouncing and spelling it right, because you were very particular in those details when we spoke at 1:30 this morning. In fact, it had been a long time since I’d heard your voice so strong and clear. When I last saw you at the nursing home a few weeks ago, you’d just gotten back from a lengthy hospital stay for pneumonia, and your speech still was raspy and weak. But you were all crispness and clarity this morning, with an overtone of insistence. In fact, some of your first words to me were, “This is no joke.” I wondered if someone was holding the phone to your ear, because even your “good” hand—the one your MS hasn’t rendered completely useless—tends not to be up to the task of grasping the receiver for as long as we spoke last night—a good five minutes.

Lynn had picked up the phone. You’d greeted her by name and asked for me. The story you told me frankly didn’t make much sense, but at no time did I think it a joke. You were dead serious. Your tone quickly shook me awake and made me ask you questions, trying to shape a coherent whole out of what you were telling me.

You’d just been out in front of Rodman’s, you said—that crazy, cramped, two-level emporium of beer and wine and international canned goods and Marzipan and cleaning products and produce and greeting cards and toiletries and pharmaceuticals on upper Wisconsin Avenue NW where I’d picked up prescriptions for you many times when you were still living at The Towers on Cathedral Avenue near American University. It seemed unlikely to me that you’d really been at Rodman’s, given that you must be lifted out of your bed to go anywhere. But that was your story and you stuck to it.

A crowd of people had been in front of the store, you said, and they’d shouted words that promised good luck, good fortune, a brighter future to those uttering them. I was still clearing the sleep from my head, so I misheard you a couple of times. I kept asking what those transformative words had been. Matah? No, you said. Fatah? Yes—F as in Frank, you confirmed. But not with two “a”s—just one. And a “u.” F-A-T-U-H, you spelled out. You’re typically quite impatient on the phone, but this time you weren’t. It was important to you that I get it right. I sensed that you didn’t want to fluster me.

What was the rest of it, then? Malik? Should that be pronounced Mal-EEK? No. M-A-L-E-K, you said. As in Fred Malek, I thought—the rich guy who’d been a buddy of Richard Nixon’s and later was an unsuccessful bidder for ownership of the Washington Nationals when Major League Baseball moved the Montreal Expos to DC in 2005. But you clearly weren’t talking about mundane multimillionaire Fred Malek, so I saw no point in bringing him up. Your implication was that “Fatuh Malek”—the words captured on the junk-mail envelope I’m looking at right now, on which I’d jotted them down in the kitchen at about 1:33 this morning—was an incantation, not a name.

You told me to listen to all-news radio station WTOP later in the morning for more about the big crowd scene at Rodman’s. I said I would. You seemed pleased. You said you’d been permitted just one phone call—by whom, you didn’t specify—and that I was the one you’d wanted to tell. Just to clarify, I asked, since you seemed poised to hang up by that point, was I supposed to call Rodman’s and ask someone there about Fatuh Malek? Was I to share the words Fatuh Malek with friends, family, strangers? Was there some protocol to unleashing these words’ power? Was a degree of evangelization necessary for this thing to work?

“Just say the words out loud,” you told me. “That’s all you have to do. It might help.”

“I will,” I responded. "Good," you replied, and hung up. I handed the phone back to Lynn and said, “She’s crazy.” I meant you.

But that wasn’t quite right. I hope you’ll forgive me. That was middle-of-the-night shorthand for a jumble of thoughts that were running through my head. I wondered if you’d called me from somewhere deep inside a dream you’d been having. It did strike me as possible, if not likely, that you’d had a vision that had touched on some great truth. I thought of chain letters and chain e-mails, and how one breaks the string only at one’s potential peril.

It occurred to me, too, that your surprisingly powerful voice might have been a particularly resonant last gasp. That, like the script from some old Twilight Zone episode, I might later reconstruct with the help of nursing home staff the fact that you’d died—weakened by years of cancer and MS—sometime in the wee hours of March 22, 2011, a telephone receiver in your hand.

The first thing I did after powering up my office PC this morning, I want you to know, Helen, was look up “Rodman’s” and “Fatuh Malek” on both WTOP.com and WashingtonPost.com. The WTOP searches yielded absolutely nothing. The newspaper site turned up old Valentine’s Day wine recommendations from Rodman’s.

A subsequent Google search informed me that one Fatih Malik Mimaroglu, of Istanbul, is on Facebook.

I found no mention anywhere on the World Wide Web of Fatuh Malek, some mystical pass-phrase to prosperity that had been group-chanted in Friendship Heights DC sometime last night or early this morning—let alone any notation of the surprise presence in the crowd of a wasted, nearly immobile nursing home resident in her late 70s who was making her first appearance at Rodman’s in 25 or 30 years.

Regardless, though, I’ve been saying Fatuh Malek out loud all day long, just as you instructed me to do. Not just to bring myself good luck and good fortune, but in hopes of conferring it upon you, too. Whatever “good fortune” might mean in your context, even if only the curtailment of suffering.

I can’t speak for Lynn, but I don’t mind in the least that you woke me up, Helen. To the contrary, I want to thank you for making me your one phone call. It feels like an honor.

Fatuh Malek, my friend. I’m saying it loud and I’m saying it proud. Not in public spaces, perhaps, but still. Here’s hoping it helps.