“…and when I had finally settled down to write, I think maybe the church let out. Because all these people started gathering around my little house. They spread out blankets, they brought out food, they had a good old picnic all around.” He is talking to Rupali. It is nighttime, after dinner; the view from the window is utterly black, one fluorescent bulb lights the room, and the scents of coconut and curry leaf still ornament the air. He does not add that the ruckus on his porch was unbearable, a party going on outside his windows. He could not concentrate for a moment on this new version of his book. Less was frustrated, so furious, he even considered checking into a local hotel. But he stood there in his little Keralan house, with its view of the ocean and the Last Supper, and pictured himself walking up to Rupali and saying the most absurd sentence of his life: I am going to check myself into an Ayurvedic retreat unless the picnicking stops!
Rupali listens to his story about the picnic, nodding. “Yes, this is something that happens.”
He remembers the pastor’s advice. “Why?”
“Oh, the people here, they like to come up and look at the view. This is a good place for the church families.”
“But it’s a retreat…” He stops himself, then asks again: “Why?”
“Here, this special view of the sea.”
“Why?”
“It is—” She pauses, looking down shyly. “It is the only place. The only place the Christians can go.”
Less has gotten to the root of it at last, but again it touches something he cannot understand. “Well, I hope they had a good time. The food smelled delicious. And tonight’s dinner was delicious.” Less has realized that there is no refrigerator at the retreat center, so everything has been bought today at the street market or picked from Rupali’s garden; everything is fresh simply because it must be. Even the coconut has been hand shredded by a congregant named Mary, an old woman in a sari who smiles at him every morning and brings his tea. Unless the picnicking stops! What an ass he is, everywhere he goes.
Rupali says: “I have a funny story about the dinner! This is the meal I used to bring to work when I taught French in the city. Every day, I took the train, and, you know, it is so hot! One day, there are no seats. So what do I do? I sit in on the stairs by the open doorway. Oh, it was so refreshing! Why did I not do this before? That was when I dropped my handbag right out the door!” She laughs, covering her mouth. “It was terrible! It had my school identification, my money, my lunch, everything. Disaster. Of course, the train could not stop, so I got out at the next station, and I hired a rickshaw to take me back. We were there for so long, searching for it on the train tracks! Then a policeman came out of a hut. I told him what had happened. He asked me to describe the contents. I said, ‘Sir, my identification, my wallet, my phone, my clean blouse, sir.’ He looked at me for a moment. Then he asked, ‘And fish curry?’ He showed me the handbag.” She laughs again in delight. “It was all covered inside with fish curry!”
Her laughter is so lovely; he cannot bear to tell her that this is no place to write. The noise, the creatures, the heat, the workers, the picnickers—it will be impossible to write his book here.
“And you, Arthur, you had a good day?” Rupali asks.
“Oh yes.” He has left out details of the barbershop he visited, in which he was shown to a windowless room behind a red curtain, where a short man in the pastor’s same shirt quickly dispensed with his beard (unasked) and the hair on the side of Less’s head, leaving only the blond wisp at the top, and then asked: “Massage?” This turned out to be a series of thumpings and slaps, a general pummeling, as if to extract military secrets, ending with four resounding wallops across the face. Why?
Rupali smiles and asks what else she can do for him.
“What I could really use is a drink.”
Her face darkens. “Oh, there is no alcohol allowed on church premises.”
“I’m just kidding, Rupali,” he says. “Where the heck would we get the ice?”
We will never know if she gets the joke, for at that moment, the lights go out.
The outage, like most partings, is not absolute; every few minutes, the power returns, only to be lost a moment later. What follows is one of those college theatrical productions in which the lights come up spasmodically, revealing the characters in various unexpected tableaux: Rupali clutching the arms of her chair, her lips pursed in concern like a surgeonfish; Arthur Less about to step into nirvana, mistaking a window for a door; Rupali openmouthed in a scream as she touches some paper fallen on her head that surely feels like a giant fruit bat; Arthur Less, having stepped through the correct portal this time, blindly fitting his toes into Rupali’s sandals; Rupali kneeling on the floor in prayer; Arthur Less out in the night, catching sight of a brand-new horror in the moonlight: the black-and-white dog trotting toward Less’s cottage, carrying in its mouth a long piece of medium blue fabric.
“My suit!” Less yells, stumbling downhill and kicking off the sandals. “My suit!”
He makes his way down toward the dog, and the lights go out again—revealing, nestled in the grass, a breathtaking constellation of glowworms ready for love—so Less can only feel his way into his own cottage, cursing, carelessly stepping barefoot across the tiles, and that is when he finds his sewing needle.
I recall Arthur Less, at a rooftop party, telling me his recurring dream:
“A parable, really,” he said, holding his beer to his chest. “I’m walking through a dark wood, like Dante, and an old woman comes up to me and says, ‘Lucky you, you’ve left it all behind you. You’re finished with love. Think of how much time you’ll have for more important things!’ And she leaves me, and I go on—I think I’m usually riding a horse at this point; it’s a very medieval dream. You aren’t in it, by the way, in case you’re getting bored.”
I replied I had my own dreams.
“And I keep riding through this dark wood and come out onto a large white plain with a mountain in the distance. And a farmer is there, and he waves at me, and he says sort of the same thing. ‘More important things ahead for you!’ And I ride up the mountain. I can tell you’re not listening. It gets really good. I ride up the mountain, and at the top is a cave and a priest—you know, like in a cartoon. And I say I’m ready. And he says for what? And I say to think about more important things. And he asks, ‘More important than what?’ ‘More important than love.’ And he looks at me like I’m crazy and says, ‘What could be more important than love?’”
We stood quietly as a cloud went over the sun and sent a chill across the roof. Less looked over the railing at the street below.
“Well, that’s my dream.”
Less opens his eyes to an image from a war movie—an army-green airplane propeller chopping briskly at the air—no, not a propeller. Ceiling fan. The whispering in the corner is, however, indeed Malayalam. Shadows are moving on the ceiling in a puppet play of life. And now they are speaking English. Bits of his dream are still glistening on the edges of everything, dew lit, evaporating. Hospital room.
He remembers his scream in the night, and the pastor running in (wearing only a dhoti and carrying his daughter), the kind man arranging for a church member to drive Less to the hospital in Thiruvananthapuram, Rupali’s worried good-bye, the long painful hours in the waiting room, whose only solace was a supernatural vending machine that produced, in change, more than it took in, the casting call of nurses—from seen-it-all-before battle-axes to pretty ingenues—before Less was allowed an X-ray of his right foot (beautiful archipelago of bones), which confirmed, alas, a fractured ankle and, buried deep in the pad of his foot, one half of a needle, at which point he received his first procedure—done by a female doctor with collagen lips who called his injury “bullshit” (“Why does this man have a sewing needle?”) and was unable to retrieve the object—and, that having failed, his foot now in a temporary splint, Less was assigned a hospital room, a chamber he shared with an elderly laborer who had spent twenty years in Vallejo, C
alifornia, and had Spanish but not English, then was prepared for the next morning’s surgery, requiring a variety of gurney changes and anesthetic injections until he was finally thrust into a pristine operating theater whose motile X-ray machine allowed the surgeon (an affable man with a Hercule Poirot mustache) to produce for Less, within five minutes, and with the additional use of a pocket magnet, the trifling source of his injury (held before his eyes with tweezers), after which his foot was fitted into a bootlike splint and our protagonist was given a strong painkiller, which put him almost instantly into an exhausted sleep.
And now he is looking around the room and considering his situation. His paper gown is green as the Statue of Liberty’s, and his fracture is safe in its black plastic boot. His blue suit is presumably lining the den of some feral dog family. A portly nurse is busying herself with some paperwork in the corner, her bifocals giving her the appearance of the four-eyed fish (Anableps anableps) that can see both above and below water. He must have made noise; her head turns, and she shouts in Malayalam. Impressively, the result is that his mustachioed surgeon appears through the door, white coat swinging, smiling and gesturing at Less’s foot as a plumber might at a repaired kitchen sink.
“Mr. Less, you are awake! So now you will no longer set off the metal detectors, bing bing bing! We are all curious,” the doctor asks, leaning down. “Why does a man have a sewing needle?”
“To mend things. To put on missing buttons.”
“This is a great hazard in your profession?”
“Apparently a needle is a greater one.” Less feels he does not even sound like himself anymore. “When can I go back to the retreat, Doctor?”
“Oh!” he says, searching his pockets and producing an envelope. “The retreat has sent this for you.”
On the envelope is written: Very sorry. Less opens it, and out flutters a scrap of bright-blue fabric. Lost forever, then. Without the suit, there is no Arthur Less.
The doctor goes on: “The retreat has contacted your friend, who will come and pick you up momentarily.”
Less asks if this is Rupali or, perhaps, the pastor.
“Search me!” the doctor says, this Americanese standing out in his otherwise British English. “But you cannot return to the retreat, a place like that. Stairs! Climbing a hill! No, no, stay off the foot for three weeks at least. Your friend has accommodations. None of that American jogging!”
Cannot return? But—his book! A knock at the door as Less puzzles over where these new accommodations might be, but the answer is instantly provided as the door opens.
It is entirely possible that Less is in one of those Russian-doll dreams in which one awakens and yawns and gets out of one’s childhood bunk bed, and pets one’s long-dead dog, and greets one’s long-dead mother, only to realize it is yet another layer of dreaming, yet another wooden nightmare, and one must go through the heroic task of awakening all over again.
Because standing in the doorway can only be an image from a dream.
“Hello, Arthur. I’m here to take care of you.”
Or no, he must be dead. He is being taken from this drab-green purgatory to the special pit they have waiting for him. A little cottage above a flaming sea: the Artist Residency in Hell. The face retains its smile. And Arthur slowly, sadly, with growing acceptance of the divine comedy of his life, says the name you can by now well guess.
The driver works the horn like an outlaw at a gunfight. Stray dogs and goats leap from the road wearing guilty expressions, and people leap aside wearing innocent ones. Children stand by the roadside by the dozens, in matching red-checkered uniforms, some of them hanging from the limbs of banyan trees; school must have just gotten out. They stare at the sight of Less passing by. And all the time, he is listening to the constant bleating of the horn, the English pop music oozing like treacle from the speakers, and the soft voice of Carlos Pelu:
“…should have called me when you got here, lucky they found my note, and I said of course I’d take you in…”
Arthur Less, entranced by destiny, finds himself staring at that face he has known so well over the years. The particular Roman rudder of that nose, which used to be seen turning and turning in parties as it sought out this scrap of conversation, that eye across the room, those people leaving for a better party, the nose of Carlos Pelu, so striking in youth, unforgettable, and here in the car still holding up as perfectly as the carved teak figurehead of a ship that has been otherwise overhauled. His body has gone from sturdy youth to ample, august middle age. Not plump or chubby, not fat in the way Zohra proposed to grow fat, the carefree body that has at last been allowed to breathe; not happily, sexily, fuck-the-world fat. But majestically, powerfully, Pantagruelianally fat. A giant, a colossus: Carlos the Great.
Arthur, you know my son was never right for you.
“God, it’s good to see you!” Carlos squeezes his arm and gives him a grin full of childish mischief: “I hear you had a young man singing beneath your window in Berlin.”
“Where are we going?” Less asks.
“And did you have an affair? With a prince? Did you flee Italy under the cover of darkness? Tell me you were the Casanova of the Sahara.”
“Don’t be silly.”
“Maybe it was Turin, where a boy sang under your balcony. Hopelessly in love with you.”
“No one has ever been hopelessly in love with me.”
“No,” Carlos says. “You always gave them hope, didn’t you?” The bulky frame of their car vanishes momentarily, and they are standing with glasses of white wine on somebody’s lawn, young again. Wanting to dance with somebody. “I’ll tell you where we’re going. We’re headed to the resort. I told you it was close by.”
Of all the gin joints in all the world. “That’s kind of you, but maybe I should check into an Ayurvedic—”
“Don’t be silly. It’s an entire staffed resort, totally empty. We’re not opening for a month. You’ll love it—there’s an elephant!” Arthur thinks he means at the resort, but he follows Carlos’s gaze, and his heart stops. There, just ahead of them, so age spotted and dusty it seems at first to be a cartload of white rubber made from local trees, until they lift up, the ears, like the unfolding of feathers or membranes for flight, and it is unmistakably an elephant, sauntering down the street with a bushel of green bamboo in its trunk, tail lashing, turning now to stare, with its small unfathomable eyes, at those who are staring at it—Less recognizes the stare—as if to say: I’m not so strange as you.
“Oh my God!”
“Bigger temples keep one. We can get around him,” Carlos says, and, honking noisily, they do. Less turns his head to see the creature disappearing through the rear window, turning its head back and forth, lifting its burden, clearly aware of the commotion it is making and taking not a little joy in it. Then a crowd of men with limp Communist flags comes out of a building, smoking, and the unearthly vision is blocked.
“Listen, Arthur, I have an idea—ah, we’ve arrived,” Carlos says abruptly, and Less can feel more than see their sharp descent toward the ocean. “Before we say good-bye, I have two quick questions. Easy questions.” They pass through a gate; Less finds it hard to believe the driver is still honking.
“We’re saying good-bye?”
“Arthur, stop being so sentimental. At our age! I’ll be back in a few weeks, and we’ll celebrate your recovery. I have business. It’s a miracle we get this time together. The first is, you still have your letters from Robert?”
“My letters?” The honking stops, and the car comes to a halt. A young man in a green uniform approaches Less’s side.
“Come on, Arthur, do you or don’t you? I have a plane to catch.”
“I think so.”
“Bravo. And the other question is, have you heard from Freddy?”
Less feels the rush of hot air as the car door opens beside him. He looks and sees a handsome porter standing there, holding his aluminum crutches. He turns back to Carlos.
“Why would I
hear from Freddy?”
“No reason. Keep yourself busy with your book until I get back, Arthur.”
“Is everything okay?”
Carlos gestures good-bye, and then Less is outside watching the grand white Ambassador toil its way uphill into the palms until nothing is left but the constant goosing of its horn.
He can hear the sea and the voice of the porter: “Mr. Less, some of your bags have arrived. They are already in your room.” But he is still staring at the palms in the wind.
Strange. It was said so casually that Less almost missed it. Sitting in the corner of the car and asking that simple question. It did not show in his face—Carlos kept the same expression of placid impatience as always—but Less could see him playing with a ring, turning and turning a lion-headed ring on his finger as his eye focused on wounded, aging, helpless Arthur Less. Less understands that the entire conversation was illusion, maya, chimera, and that Carlos’s real purpose was otherwise. But he cannot decode it. He shakes his head and smiles at the porter, taking his crutches and looking up at his new white prison. Something in the way his old friend asked it, some hidden track that only a careful listener, or one who has listened for so many years, would notice, and that no one would ever suspect of Carlos: Fear.
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