by Iyer, Pico
Sefadhi was as much responsible, legally, for the thesis as he; and yet more powerless as he saw it slipping further and further behind. “I am tempted to wish you had found those manuscripts now,” he said, handing him a tray of pistachios and shooting his cuffs. He would never lose hold of himself in public, at least no more than he had done that evening on the beach: his discipline had taught him that much. And yet his anxiety, his disappointment showed in the way he turned away from his student after the handshake, looked down towards his calendar as if to take stock of how many weeks were left before the summer.
“I thought I was losing you to a spy novel before: a novel written by an Englishman.” The English still being the root of all evil in Persia, a euphemism for “infidel,” though it was something they had agreed to ignore till now.
“Instead you lost me to”—he corrected himself in time—“an emptiness.”
“Is there anything I can do to help?”
“No. I think this one I’d better conquer alone.”
“Numbers will be crunched. Figures will be counted up.”
“I’ll try to get something done. I’ve lost the thread somehow.”
“I realize that. I try to tell them that.”
His voice dropped, to something gentler. “Just give me something. Anything I can work with.”
“Give me two more months.”
“University regulations decree that I give you two more months.
They further decree that I give you no more than that. Find a new translation of Eckhart, The Cloud of Unknowing, use it as a flashlight to train on Rumi. Write on Peter Brook’s transmutation of Attar, his carrying of The Conference to the farmworkers of California. Write on anything, just so I have something I can give my colleagues, my superiors.
“Just give me something.”
Out in the corridor he bumped into a familiar figure, hurrying away in another direction, and realized that he hadn’t spoken to Alex since the surprise meeting in the parking lot. It had been a long time since they’d gone so many weeks without talking.
Alex looked as startled as he did, but he was never one to duck a confrontation. “You have time for a coffee?”
“I’d like nothing more. Let’s go.”
They talked of deadlines and fellowships and summer plans, everything but what they were thinking about, as they made their way to the café beside the lagoon. On the terrace the light was munificent, coming in off the sea and across the water between the eucalyptus trees so it seemed to wash over them like a private blessing. The reason they’d both come here, in a way, all around them: the smell of the sea, the sporadic gulls, the sense of long horizons.
“Sophie’s gone home, I take it?” It was as good a way as any of moving towards what concerned them.
“For her studies. She’s young.”
“I’m sure she likes it here.”
“She loves it.” He smiled, to be using the word he usually danced away from.
“And Ixtlán?”
“It prospers. It grows and expands and builds new towers. No place that is nonexistent ever seems to go into decline.”
It wasn’t true, but he sipped at his coffee and said nothing.
“You? The deadline comes this summer, no?” It wasn’t like him to be so tentative.
“Unless I get an extension. A lifeline to save me from the deadline.” He was sounding like her, he realized, hiding out from truths behind words.
“You sound strange these days.”
“How so?”
“The more time you spend with the Sufis, the more you sound like a Hollywood wise man. Speaking in riddles like the mysterious stranger from the East.”
“It’s probably her influence, too.”
“You think so?” He had clearly been waiting for the question for weeks; his answers had been well prepared.
“What happened between you?”
“Nothing.” Was Alex for once trying to be kind? “It was nasty, brutish and short.”
“You never met her parents?”
“Never. We saw one another a few times, three weeks, maybe four; and then no more.”
“What happened?”
“I saw her house one day, I thought about where she came from, and I realized it was hopeless.”
“Like all the rest.”
“So she said. I told her that in B.A. we have ghosts and bad dreams already. We don’t need to come to California to meet more.”
“And she said what?”
“She looked sad. She didn’t say anything.”
It sounded true, like everything she’d told him.
“Brutal as ever, eh?”
“Brutal is better than sweet.” A softness, almost a solicitude, came into his friend’s voice. “You know that, don’t you, John? Giving someone like that hope is a kind of cruelty.”
The talk with Sefadhi should have been the prompt for him to go quickly through the ritual movements and get his thesis over and done with: it was only a formality, a kind of ceremony in the church of scholarship, and no more was required than that he come in, kneel before the altar, and then be gone. But to do any of that seemed obscene when she was in the next room, crying out for help. Four months from now, the poems would be behind him, and he’d be looking for a job. But she, wherever she was, would be somewhere very close.
He got up and looked in on her as she slept, and thought again how it was only when she was truly calm that she could begin to acknowledge that she was haunted; only when she felt encircled that she could face the “demons” she talked about. Paradise is truly lost, he thought, as soon as a subtext snakes beneath every sentence.
He went to fetch her morning juice, and when she reached out for him reflexively, eyes closed, he said, “I’ve been thinking. . . .”
Instantly she was on full alert, her eyes looking straight at his.
“No, not like that. Something you’d be happy about.” She closed her eyes again, as if it had been just a dream, and he thought that it must be like living in Beirut: always waiting for the next explosion.
“Mmm,” she said, stroking his chest from where she lay, as if to get him to stop talking.
“Do you want to take a trip?”
Again she opened her eyes and looked at him, everything in her apprehension. Maybe this was his way—his roundabout way—of trying to get rid of her? Maybe he was planning to introduce her to somebody else? What was the small print she couldn’t see?
“What kind of trip?”
“Nothing very dramatic or exotic. But I’ve got to do some research” (it wasn’t true, but it would put her at ease), “and I thought maybe you’d like to come along. I told you we’d go somewhere together one day.”
“You mean it? Really and truly?” When she was young, she’d told him, her mother liked to give her presents. But if ever she really seemed to be enjoying one, her mother would wrest it back from her, as if to say, “Fooled again!”
“Really. You’re always talking about the places you’d like to go.”
“When do we leave? For how long? Where?”
“The where part is a secret; the when part could be tomorrow. Soon, in any case; my deadline’s coming up.”
“What should I bring? Would the black dress be right? Or that one I wore for Christmas? Will I need candles? Have you seen my Calling All Angels tape?”
It was touching, always, to see how ready she was to try again: it was the California he’d imagined from afar, eager for the next possibility—though when he’d imagined it he’d never thought that possibility could be just a way of stepping around reality.
“It’s only a few days, though I wish it could be longer. But it’s a simple place: just bring yourself.”
She kissed him quickly, then began to get her things together—the lack of emphasis from him was itself a reassurance—and as she did, she said, to show him she was happy, “I think I have a few days. Would the rest of my life be long enough?”
Next morning, she woke
up early and started moving things into his car. It was like a military operation—a packed bag, a carry-on, a shopping bag bursting with books, so many contingencies and possibilities that she couldn’t use them all in a month. As if she were staking everything on this. He looked around, and saw that the chaos of her car was now all over his; even the map was buried under a pile of old magazines, a scatter of cellophane bags, a blue swimsuit, and a pack of cards and some goggles.
They got in and started driving, and he saw in the mirror dresses banging against the back window: the cocktail dress she said she’d wear for a special occasion, a nightdress she’d bought for some long-ago romance—“peach satin,” as she called it—the black dress she’d worn for the dervishes, all stacked on hangers in the back like the characters she might play for him. In England, he thought, people have costumes, but no chance for changing their roles; disappointment is hardly possible.
They drove east, off the freeway, on small country roads that ran through avenues of trees, the signs on the sides of the road, handwritten on cardboard, offering strawberries, melons, avocados for 99 cents or 25 cents each. The pickup trucks parked by the fields, the smallness of the shops and roads all taking them back to another country, farther south, where everything moved to a slower rhythm. Then the small road leaked into the interstate, and they began driving through the desert on a long empty stretch that led all the way to the Carolinas. Nothing but tract houses, laid out in occasional rows, like the flimsiest of hopes, inviting people to try new lives for themselves in the emptiness. Or sudden oases of coffee shops and gas stations, and then long stretches of just nothing.
He always had a sense of hopefulness when he was driving with her—the illusion, at least, of breaking through—and all he had to do, he thought, was turn flight into quest: make sure the place they were driving towards was better than the one they left. When they crossed the state line into Nevada, an hour or so after the place where a Sufi was building a circle of mud domes in the desert, suddenly the signs all spoke of new fortunes, windfalls of tumbling coins. Put your savings in the slot, they said, and a whole gush of gold pieces would make a new life for you. In Arizona, a few hours later, the motels were shaped like teepees, or Conestoga wagons, as on a children’s mini-golf course, and people could fancy themselves someone else for a night. Escape, the open spaces said: make yourself new.
They drove into the parking lot of a listless two-story motel—it could have been anywhere—and after securing their anonymous space, they walked out into the late-afternoon glare. A long straight road, with fast-food signs and coffee shops, stretched into the nothingness beyond it. Teenagers drove by in trucks, and after they’d gone past, everything was silent. For as far as they could see, a kind of vacancy.
The next morning, they left early, before the heat could grow stifling, and the skies became distinctive, the cars and settlements looking scrappier than ever, so that it felt as if the heavens were the only imperial presence here. In the sharp-edged light it was hard to tell if they were driving into autumn or into spring.
“Where are you taking me?”
“You’ll see soon enough. It’s a secret.”
“But it’s scary, going into all this emptiness.”
“You’ll like it when we get there. You have to trust me.” Around them, nothing but long road, deserted mesas, and light.
“Can we play a game?”
“What kind of game?” It would never be the dangerous kind, the kind where you ask another person what he most dislikes in you, or what he most wants to tell you but can’t; it would be a game that tried to magic reality away.
It was. “We choose words, and then we make them into something else. And the closer they are to us, the more relevant they are to what we’re doing, the more points you get.”
“Points from whom?”
“Points from the referee who isn’t here.” She was changing “could be” into “is,” he thought, and “never again” into “occasionally.”
“Okay. You start, so I can see what’s going on.”
“NEXT GAS 91 MILES,” said the sign they passed. Occasional names in the emptiness Indian or whimsical or meaning nothing at all.
She looked out at what wasn’t there, and he could all but see her spinning letters in her head. Then, extended as if it were a gift, she said, “ ‘Rain.’ And ‘Iran.’ ”
It didn’t seem a great triumph, and he wondered what she was really thinking of. “You know that ‘rain’ is a word for grace in their tradition? It’s what they most pray for?”
“Of course I do. It’s a desert,” and, not for the first time recently, he was reminded of how much he underestimated her. She knew at least as much as he did about the Middle East.
“It’s your turn.”
He let his mind wander as he drove. He saw her bright face as she took him to the dervishes, and then through country as desolate as the one around them now. He saw her sobbing, and backing away from him, the dark spirit in her dream, even when she hadn’t dreamed it, at her side.
“ ‘Rumi,’ ” he said slowly, choosing the very first word that came to him. “And ‘Muir.’ John Muir must have been here once.”
“Lame,” she pronounced, as it was, but he could tell she didn’t want to stop. “It hardly has anything to do with us.” He heard the “hardly” and saw again how she was beginning to wear his colors, his cadences: she sounded more European the longer they spent time together, and he wondered if finally she’d become so close to him that all the novelty and difference would be gone. The problem with actresses is that one never knows—maybe they never know—when their parts are chosen ones.
She said nothing, as if she were trying to push as close to him in her mind as she could, and then at last she announced, “ ‘Eden’ and ‘need.’ ”
It was a dangerous choice, both of them knew; it all but dared him to think of the things about her that were most unsettling.
“Well, the ‘Eden’ part at least is relevant. I don’t know about the other.”
“Now you.”
“You’re too good at this.”
“You can’t give up so soon.”
“Okay, let me see if I can come up with one more pair.” The light across the far mountains was more than ever like something in some old allegorical painting, about heavens and the fight with earth.
“You’re going to laugh.”
“I won’t.”
“Okay. ‘Sufi’ and ‘if us.’ ”
“That’s awful,” she protested. “It means nothing. It’s terrible. And it’s two words. You can’t do that.”
“You never told me the full rules before. Anyway, it’s relevant.”
“Just barely. It doesn’t mean anything at all.”
“Shall we stop?”
“One more. A last one.” And very quickly, as if she’d been planning it all along, she said, “ ‘Sacred.’ And ‘scared.’ ”
He looked over to see what lay behind the choice, but there was so much in her face, of delight and apprehension, and the wish to put herself on his side, that he said nothing. “You’re too good. I give up.” The long, straight road stretched on before them.
The game had beguiled a few hours, and the afternoon was moving on by the time they came to a small road in what seemed to be a blank nowhere: a narrow, two-lane path between high mountains and the occasional adobe house along a thin dirt road. The sky was throwing its punctual late-afternoon fit of pique, and the skies around were turbulent and visionary. He pulled onto an unmarked trail, and the car began jouncing and juddering over potholes and bumps. The path was unpaved, and the car found itself hurtled into puddles, and propelled this way and that across the rough ground.
“This can’t be right.”
“I think it is.”
“You really know where you’re going?”
“I think so. I hope so. This must be the right road—there aren’t any others for miles.”
As they bounced and bumped from side
to side, the heavens turned jet-black above them, and suddenly, from what had not long before been a cloudless sky, a furious, penitential rain came down, as if announcing the end of the world. Hailstones beat against the front of the car, the windshield, the windows, and the roof, and as he drove into what seemed to be a downpour of small rocks, the car careened to one side of the road, and he stopped underneath a tree.
Pebbles continued beating against them, as if flung by angry children on every side, and when they abated the rain came angrily down, so strong they couldn’t see a thing. The road ahead, the road behind, invisible.
“It’s scary,” she said. “I feel like we’re in the Old Testament.”
“We seem to be drawn to clouds. We’re always in a storm.” And she said nothing.
Then, again, “You sure this is the right road?”
“Absolutely. They don’t have signs where we’re on our way to. That’s one reason people go there.”
Then, as suddenly as it had come on, the rain desisted, and the storm moved over the mountains far away. He started up the car again, and they began to proceed once more towards their unknown destination, the puddles wider than before, and deeper, the car more buried then ever, the skies above all a furious radiance.
“You’ve never been here before?”
“I came close once. I was here to look in on the Penitentes, during the crucifixions they stage at Easter.”
“In the Sangre de Cristos.”
“Yes.”
“And was it what you’d hoped it’d be?”
“I never got there. They aren’t so keen on scholars coming to see them, as you know. But I got to know the area a little, and I heard about this place.”
“How come you never came?”
“I wanted to keep it in reserve. For sometime special.”
She said nothing, and the silence in the car grew richer.
“I thought that if ever I needed to think about something, in peace and quiet, this would be the place.”
As he drove, he saw tears gathering at the corners of her eyes. As they often did, but with a brimming fullness now.
