“Yes.”
“He was very much in love with her?”
“They lived together. And yes, he loved her.”
“How terrible. To lose someone like that, I mean.”
I didn’t reply. Marthe in the moonlight noticed my silence, and surprised me again by saying, “I don’t believe in suffering, in severe grief or regret. I don’t even believe in memory. In time, everything is forgotten, even old loves. Our despairs should be vague and we should bear them with one deep sigh and move on.’” I looked over, amused and intrigued. “So Niles has you reading Camus?”
“We exchanged a short list of our favorites.”
“And what did you give him?”
She smiled a bit differently than before, and in response to my question answered, “Pablo Neruda. A bit of poetry,” she said.
I returned to the bar and waded through a pile of requests written across napkins left on the piano bench, choosing Kate Bush’s “Watching You Without Me,” which required a few alterations to the techno-pop melody to make the piece work as a solo. It didn’t take long before I was running one arrangement into the next, playing “Shame on Us,” “The Big Sky,” “Hot House,” and “Break Your Heart” by Barenaked Ladies, hoping to lose myself again in the music, though I’d even less success this time than before.
Niles arrived just after eleven and went to the bar where he waited for me to finish my final set. He ordered a beer, listened to me play a bluesy send-up of “Madman Across the Water,” before I picked up my tip jar and joined him. “So,” I couldn’t resist and immediately asked, “what’s this I hear about you having a girlfriend?”
“My what?”
“Come on, tell me.”
“If you mean Marthe.”
“So it’s true.”
“We’re friends, that’s all.”
“She says you’re friendly.”
“We have coffee. She comes by the bookstore now and then.”
“And?”
“We talk.”
“And?”
“It’s not what you think.”
“Why not?”
Niles took a drink from his beer while I went around and poured myself a whiskey. The bar began to empty just after midnight and busboys anxious to finish their work and get home began clearing the plates and glasses. I waited a moment to see if Niles would say something more about Marthe, and was caught off guard when he mentioned instead L.C. Timbal. “I’ve been thinking you should go and find him.”
“What?”
“I think you should try.”
“You must be kidding.”
“And,” he said, adding a new twist, “I want to go with you. I want to see Algiers.”
I could tell he was serious and this confused me all the more. “Where is this coming from?”
“I have my passport and you have yours,” he continued. “You were going to be with Liz all summer, now you can travel with me,” his face was set in the same odd expression he had that afternoon, only there was a measure of anxious anticipation in his eyes, a confessing of resolutions made for reasons I didn’t yet understand. I sipped from my drink, laughed a bit if only to encourage Niles to tell me he was joking, but he insisted, “I want to do this. I want to get away for a while. I speak the language well enough and there’s no real risk in travel despite what you read about the region’s civil unrest. I’m not going to put us in the wrong place. You’ll see, we’ll be fine.”
“What about your condition? Your nocturnal two-step, the somnambulistic shuffle?”
“You’ll be with me,” Niles gave this as his answer, then qualified his response with, “I’m going to go with or without you. It’ll do me good to get away.”
I shook my head, pictured the series of old scars and bruises beneath Niles’ clothes: the purple and yellow contusion on his left shoulder, a swollen knot in the center of his chest, cuts and carvings down his legs and an egg-shaped lump on his left elbow. His right thigh had the aftereffect of a gash, the butterfly stitches used to close the wound leaving the flesh a pasty pink, and unsettled I asked him to tell me, “Why do you really want to go?”
“I want you to find Timbal.”
“And?”
“I’d like to see where Camus was born. I’d like to explore the same streets Mersault walked in A Happy Death.”
“Jesus, Niles.”
“And Dr. Rieux and The Stranger’s faceless man.”
“All uplifting works.”
“I think if I go, maybe I can reach some sort of peace,” he admitted this much to me, and to further support his claim recited from memory a quote from André Gide: “Anyone wishing to discover new lands must be willing to first lose sight of familiar shores.” This he followed with a line from the essay “Death in the Soul,” and what Camus wrote about travel: “Inside unfamiliar cities, the curtain of habits, the comfortable loom of words and gestures in which the heart drowses, slowly rises, finally to reveal anxiety’s pallid visage.”
I listened closely, doing what I could to pull everything together, interpreting the quotes Niles offered enough to say, “So that’s it? You think flying to North Africa is going to help resolve your condition?”
“I want to go, yes.”
“And do what? Await an epiphany?”
“Something like that.”
“In Algiers?”
“I can’t explain it any more than it feels right.”
“And going doesn’t seem a bit desperate to you?”
“Compared to what? Staying here and tying myself into bed at night?”
I rolled my eyes and set my hands down flat atop the bar. “You realize you’re not suffering from anxiety’s pallid visage,” I said. “Your affliction’s a bit more serious than that. You slice yourself up in the middle of your sleep for Christ’s sake.”
“All the more reason to go.”
“But you haven’t even tried to get help here.”
“That’s because what I need isn’t in Renton.”
“You’re talking in riddles.”
“I’m answering you the best I can.”
I raised my voice while revisiting old arguments, insisted Niles go see a doctor or try some specific form of treatment beyond the rope run between our two rooms if he really wanted to be healed, but such pleading was in vain. “Algiers is different,” he said. “You’ll just have to trust me. I bought two tickets this evening. I’m leaving two days after you give your final exam. With or without you.”
I got up and returned to the piano where I banged out an up-tempo rendition of Cole Porter’s “All Through the Night.” The bar was empty then. Mark “Bozo” Farell, the manager at Dungee’s, stepped out of his office with the days deposit tucked inside a blue zippered bag and headed toward the door. (Bozo’s nickname came from his huge mop of orange hair, the whole of his head looking as if the fibrous entrails of a pumpkin exploded.) “Lock up when you leave OK, Professor?” Bozo made sure I had my keys. Niles moved to a table as I got up from the piano and joined him. “What if you go and things don’t work out?” I began pressing the issue anew. “What if nothing improves? What if there’s an incident and you can’t get anyone to help you? Think about the hospitals there, Niles. Shit. What if I try and can’t find Timbal? What if he isn’t even there? What if the trip turns out to be an unmitigated disaster?”
“What if? What if? What if?” Niles smiled in a way which reminded me all too much of Elizabeth, and frustrated, I squirmed in my chair.
“Come with me,” Niles said.
“No.”
“I’m going. If you’re concerned about me, come along. Besides,” he mentioned Elizabeth traveling so near to Algiers, how her itinerary put her in Spain, near Vasqueze and the beaches of Zahara de los Atunes, “a person could easily cross the Strait of Gibraltar and find her there if he wanted.”
“Liz has nothing to do with any of this,” I reached for my whiskey and finished it off.
“All the same. Come with me.”<
br />
“Forget it.”
“Come on.”
“You’re chasing ghosts.”
“Maybe,” he tugged on the cuff of his sweater.
“I’m not going,” I repeated.
“Find your Timbal.”
“He’s not mine.”
“Surprise everyone.”
“Why should I?”
“I’m leaving.”
“Fuck, Niles.”
“It’s your call. Stay or go.”
“I can’t. Shit.”
“One or the other, Bailey. It’s up to you.”
BOOK II
ALONG THE WAY
CHAPTER 8
IN PREPARATION
“All right then,” Emmitt adjusts his glasses. “Let’s move on. Tell me whatever you like.”
I’ve been trying to keep things in order, to follow a certain progression, but it’s not always easy to avoid skipping around. “Not that it matters,” I say to Emmitt. “There’s no order to memory after all, is there? I mean, once something happens, it’s there in your head with all the rest.”
Emmitt raises his eyes, letting me know he’s intrigued by my statement. “If you’d like to keep some sort of chronology, Bailey, that’s fine,” he says. “However you’re comfortable. If you prefer going straight on through until the end.”
“But that’s impossible,” I don’t know if I’m being purposely difficult or have somehow hit upon an unexpected truth. “Nothing ends,” I insist. “It’s why I’m here. If things simply came to an end, I wouldn’t have to talk with you now.”
“But they do end, don’t they?” he counters. “It’s the conflict between what ends and our need to continue that causes trauma.”
“What continues, it’s true,” I hear only this, and remind Emmitt, “That’s what I’m saying. Everything goes on and on forever, even what’s buried and dead.”
Tyler stood by the window as the day’s first light appeared. He expected the morning to be a flurry of activity, of time passing quickly with no chance to think, but here he was confronted by gaps inside of which time ran on forever, thick and eternal with anticipation, like gazing after a stone as it sank deeper and deeper into the sea.
Oz came in after removing several more plastic bags from the apartment and walked back to his bedroom, surveying the space for any forgotten items he didn’t want to leave behind. (The bed was stripped and the sheets disposed of, the mattress sprayed with Lysol to mask any sweat or other traceable fluids that might have seeped into the surface.) He went from the bedroom into the kitchen and scanned the counter, unplugged the coffeemaker and tossed it into yet another plastic bag. From there he returned to the front room where he knelt in order to offer the morning’s prayer.
Tyler watched in the reflection of the window as Oz rolled out his prayer rug and began his ritualistic hum. Any other morning and the drone would not have bothered him, but today such prayer seemed absurd. He went to the kitchen where he stood staring up at the space where Oz had removed the clock from the wall. The queer history of their alliance—what brought them from Hamburg to Renton and now to this—seemed a mystery, though the chronology was easy enough to trace. A mix of restiveness, uncertainty, and curiosity, all contributed to Tyler’s coming to the Band of Forbearance night after night. In time he began volunteering his services, offering the use of the Berchup Brothers’ truck to deliver food and other staples, making repairs at the Band’s office, at Muslim homes and businesses in and around town.
“If you’re after leniency on your grades,” Osmah challenged the American’s motivation, was wary in his acceptance and stingy with his thanks. In class, he did not let on that the American sergeant was now a regular downtown and how they often spent long hours together. Twice that winter, and twice again the following summer, during breaks from school and work, Tyler volunteered to accompany members of the Band to Bosnia and Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan, and subsequently to a half dozen other Muslim states where his brawn was a welcome addition to the many physical demands. Oz went as the coordinating officer—it amused Tyler how even a charity such as the Band of Forbearance used military titles and procedures—and in the course of these trips Oz tried to educate Tyler further on the history of Islam and its conflict with the West. He encouraged the sergeant to read in translation editorials in the Al Ahram by Ibrahim Nafie, who denounced Americas policies throughout the Middle East. “Desert Storm. Desert Shield and now once more Iraq. The attempt to westernize every Islamic nation. The very fact your country exists is a threat to us.”
American sanctions were a particular bone of contention for Oz, who was quick to quote the number of Pakistani and Afghan, Iraqi and Iranian children who died as a consequence of the West s invisible assault. (“You Americans have a great capacity for living with ignorance and exonerating yourselves from all sense of blame, but your hands are bloody and your souls are weak.”) Tyler tried to argue in turn, citing the Lebanese civil war, the tribal battles in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and the eighty-year conflict between Iraq and Iran as proof that America was not entirely to blame for the region’s discord. He recited what information he remembered from the little reading he’d done, and noted, “America isn’t the one blowing up hotels in Yemen or embassies in Kenya. Hell, America gave stinger missiles to the mujahedeen and sent millions of dollars to Pakistan, and what did those fuckers do but funnel the cash through Kabul to anti-Western extremists.”
All of which caused Oz to shrug indifferently, and rejecting Tyler’s assertion that much of the medicines and foods, equipment and gas, clothes and supplies brought to the Band of Forbearance came from America—“It’s political posturing at best”—he waved a crooked finger, and snapped, “So what’s your point?”
That spring, Oz took a leave from his position as an instructor at the Hamburg Technical University and disappeared from Germany for nine months. He told Tyler he was traveling to raise funds for the Band of Forbearance, that he’d be in London for a time, and then stop in Saudi Arabia to see his family, but his morning flight took him straight to Afghanistan where he carried a letter from his imam, Ahmed Emam, to Shayh Said.
Tyler finished the semester before deciding to leave school as well. (There seemed no point in clogging his head with further material when the work he did for Berchup Brothers required little more than what he already knew.) He continued volunteering at the Band of Forbearance, delivering food, taking on electrical projects, providing drywall and carpentry, and whatever other handiwork had to be done. In July he met the sister of Mustafa Al-Bar, one of the other volunteers, and they began to date. Shari Al-Bar was a salesclerk at a ladies dress shop on the east side of Hamburg, an attractive girl with long black hair and deep Mediterranean skin, the daughter of Egyptian parents both educated in the States and owners of a consulting firm in Cairo. Shari came to Germany with her brother as he studied politics at the university, and joked to Tyler the first time they met, “My, my, but are all Americans so big?”
Sleeping with Shari was a welcome experience for Tyler. Though she was hardly virginal and no more a Muslim really than any of the other Westernized girls in Hamburg, he found himself behaving with a certain caution, as if he was a guest in a house he was surprised to be invited. Their relationship wasn’t serious, yet people on the street seemed compelled to treat their involvement as something more than a harmless curiosity. Looks of judgement were extended, cruel and telling glances. American soldiers found Tyler’s keeping company with a Muslim girl offensive—they pronounced the word “Musss-liimm” like a hissing snake—while local teens were equally vocal, following after them as they came from a restaurant or went to a club, shouting, “Hey, American! What are you doing with the darkie? Muslim mamma, you want a piece of white meat, do ya? Third-world cunt!” Twice there were scuffles and once a well-muscled boy with a rock found out firsthand that lunging at Tyler was a mistake.
Mustafa stepped in and presented his concern. “Germany isn’t America, my friend.
It is not even London. Please, enough is enough.” Shari agreed and said, “It isn’t worth the trouble. Just forget it. I’m sorry,” and did not return his calls.
Two weeks later, Tyler learned the office space the Band of Forbearance had leased for the last ten years was being bought by an American conglomerate and a GAP was set to open on the spot. “You see?” Oz said upon his return. “Here’s what happens, inch by inch and brick by brick.” He was standing in the bathroom of his apartment, having invited Tyler over with some news he had to share. In his time away he’d grown his beard quite long, the hairs jutting out dark and unruly from his otherwise sunken cheeks, and picking up a pair of scissors, he began clipping back his whiskers in preparation to shave. When asked, he provided only scant detail about his trip, saying he met with some success in the raising of funds, that he traveled “here and there” and “back and forth,” though in mentioning his journey home to see his family, he became annoyed describing the changes and how the entire city was annexed by the West. “I may as well have been visiting New York for all the American restaurants and hotels, bars and banks my own father helped build.”
He finished with his shave, and stepping into the front room, surprised Tyler with, “I feel as if I’m howling into the wind. Nothing’s going to change this way. I’m trying to get the attention of a people who don’t even know I exist and here I am waving my hands a million miles off shore. I need to go to America, to open an office for the Band of Forbearance and raise opposition to America’s interference with Muslim nations from within the eye of the storm. America needs to know it isn’t impervious to protest and this can only be done in their backyard. I’ve obtained a visa and made arrangements through the help of Ziad Shehhi, an old friend of one of my professors who says he can find work for me in Renton.”
The Weight of Nothing Page 9
