The morning of the last day of October of the last year of the second millennium started out brimming with excitement. The previous morning we said goodbye to Inna’s sister and drove from her home in Atlanta to Fort Lauderdale, a town on the east coast of Florida. The plan which has been gestating for the past three years was finally tangibly moving forward. Having sold our Chicago flat, with cash in hand, we came here to buy a sailboat to live on. We left our two cats and most of our remaining belongings in Atlanta, less than a day’s drive, with plans to come back and fetch them once we have sorted out our new living arrangements.

This trip was also meant to be our deferred honeymoon. Inna and I got married in Chicago two and a half months earlier in a small ceremony, attended only by our immediate family and a couple of friends, but until now have been too busy with the preparations to have a proper honeymoon. Besides that, it did not make much sense to do it so close to our departure for what was promising to be one long honeymoon. We felt almost euphoric with the anticipation of what’s to come, but we were not the only ones standing at the threshold of a new life.

In the late 60’s my mother spent several months in Egypt as part of the Soviet engineering team building the Aswan dam. Father and I had to remain in Leningrad, as it was customary to hold family members of those traveling abroad as hostages to ensure that they do not contemplate extending their sojourn indefinitely. After her return mother could not stop talking about her time in Egypt, what a stunning country it was. I suspect that the drastic contrast with the late 60’s Leningrad played a large part in it, and the fog of years, which tends to strip our memories down to the dominant impressions, but ever since then she always wanted to return and bring father with her.

My father turned sixty five the day after our wedding and retired soon afterwards. Mother, being six years younger, took an early retirement to be with him and together they planned to spend some time traveling. She insisted that Egypt would be their first destination abroad and after waiting for thirty years her wish was finally about to come true. That morning, just as we were leaving Atlanta, they took off for New York and after spending a day seeing old friends in the city boarded a red eye flight to Cairo.

The morning greeted us with bright tropical sun and clear blue sky. Fort Lauderdale boat show, the biggest one in the US, was commencing this morning and we had a full day planned ahead of us. Too excited to sleep, I got up early, brushed my teeth and started my morning exercises, letting Inna sleep in. I had the TV turned to a news channel, the sound barely audible in the background so it doesn’t wake my sleeping beauty. The eight o’clock news brief had just ended and the screen switched to what looked like a calm ocean surface. Right away that struck me as strange. Intrigued, I picked up the remote, turned up the sound and started to listen to what’s going on as I continued with my exercises.

I was only half paying attention and little by little the picture began to emerge. The announcer was talking about a passenger plane crashing into the Atlantic Ocean overnight. My curiosity satisfied, I was just about to turn down the volume, but the next thing I heard made me instead listen more intently. The announcer reported that the plane took off from Kennedy, the airport my parents were also flying from. I put down the remote, stretched out on the shaggy carpet and began a set of sit-ups while keeping an eye on the news.

The announcer’s dispassionate voice continued filling in the details: when the plane was last seen on the radar, when it took off, that it was heading to Cairo... That last bit sent a jolt of electricity through my body and suddenly I felt nauseous. “Of course this is all just a coincidence”, I tried to calm myself, “there must be a dozen daily flights from Kennedy to Cairo”, all the while feeling like the ground was sliding from under me and I was beginning to slowly get sucked into a quicksand, a funnel of inevitability, from which there is no return.