“I’ll come visit, don’t worry about that. But I know you—you can’t keep a good woman down or off the European continent. Believe me, you’ll be back.”
Relief washes over him when she lets it stand.
OF COURSE, THERE will be blood.
First though, a long night at the fleabag hotel in Imlil, no one getting much sleep. Alias, crashing with a friend nearby, comes back the next morning early, too early, to collect them for the hike. He avoids Mary’s eyes. Groggy farewells are bid to Leo in the hall outside the overflowing toilets, Leo in boxer shorts, his curls standing on end as though his fingers have been stuck in an electrical socket (Mary tries to memorize him), his elegant hands, decorated in henna symbols, waving at her and Sandor and even Kenneth as they make their way downstairs in hiking boots. By the time they return, he will be gone. The party makes instant coffee with boiled water, which Alias has procured from the hotel’s closed café, and drinks it black in water bottles that feel wobbly and warm from the coffee’s heat. Mary’s hair is unwashed and tied under a bandanna. She and Sandor walk arm in arm, both melancholy about Leo’s departure, while Alias and Kenneth walk slightly ahead, speaking French, occasionally laughing.
To head south would take them the way of true trekkers: Mount Toubkal. Instead they veer west out of the village of Imlil, heading for a less-challenging pass. Still, her going is slow. They pass through the village of Tamatert, chased by the usual adorable village children, and she catches her breath photographing two boys and a tiny girl with puffy hair and a dirty pink apron, sucking on oranges; she catches her breath, then loses it again with longing. The town behind them, they walk uphill for a small while, back down, maybe two miles in that fashion, and already she feels she has run a marathon. It’s only at about 2,400 meters that the real uphill begins.
Soon they are switchbacking. Back and forth, back and forth, the path isolated and narrow, no other tourists on their part of the mountain. Sometimes they have to scramble, the terrain littered with crumbly dirt-rocks and spectacularly fat black beetles—maybe it is a blessing Leo is not here. Here there are no trees, not even those squat things like the ones near the Kik Plateau. The breeze is still cool—Mary shivers under her long sleeves—though the morning is warming up.
On the switchbacks, she sees the ground below her rushing at her in the opposite direction, the way the ground seems to spin when you have just gotten off a carnival ride. When she stops walking, the ground on which she’s standing stops, too, but the ground below continues its rotation. This must be a lack of oxygen, even though they’re only around 2,800 meters. Or more by now? How high is that in feet? You’re supposed to multiply by three, she thinks, but her head can’t do the computation; nothing feels clear. She does not mention the rushing ground to anyone but stops now and then to cough, and Sandor keeps saying, “We don’t have to go all the way. Anytime you want, we can stop.” She doesn’t have the breath to waste on protest, but she sees Kenneth put a hand on Sandor’s arm and say, “Man, she knows what she can do and what she can’t. Lay off.”
Mary realizes she did not actually believe it would happen, but they finally reach the pass. Wait—if she did not think they would get here, then why is she on this mountain? What did she believe would happen instead? This, too, feels foggy. Down below is her destination: the cliff bottoms of Mykonos; the black sand beach of La Gomera; the oxygen machines and quarantined hospital room and gulping for air while her parents and Geoff look on with agonized pain in their eyes. From the pass, she, Kenneth, Sandor, and Alias look down into a valley, the town below them like crumbs at the bottom of a bowl. Surrounding them, mountain peaks form the bowl’s jagged teeth. They sit on the ground and look. In truth this view is less thrilling than the medinas, than Nawar’s house; a mountain is not specifically Moroccan or even African but could be anywhere. It has taken them a stupidly long time to get to this view, and now the day is hot. Alone, the three men could have made it in half the time. They have been walking at a pace so slow that surely it felt confining to their long, healthy legs. Mary rests her head on Kenneth’s day pack, gulping water. She’s still chilly, though she’s consumed the majority of the water they brought and cannot possibly be dehydrated. She coughs, and Sandor and Alias gape as she keeps trying again and again, hacking herself raw. “It won’t do anything,” she tries to explain. She’s clogged, so that her lungs won’t let in the air. She lies back down, gulping on her inhaler, then abruptly bolts upright again to cough violently into her hands.
Then. The blood.
Bright, unexpected mouthfuls in her hennaed hands, obscuring the intricate design. No sooner do the three men all jump to standing than there is another upheaval, the coughs convulsive, not voluntary now, and each lurching up more red liquid, thick like lava with blood’s unmistakable smell. She is screaming but not screaming, the scream stuck in her lungs and drowned, and when the men rush to her, there is a small pause amid her drowning—a pause in which both Sandor and Alias are obviously afraid to touch her, so that suddenly Kenneth has her face in his hands, trying to lift her chin as though maybe there is an injury, an actual injury somehow undetected. As though he lacks the memory that this is exactly where they began. Mary’s body spasms again, blood flying onto him as though she is the girl from The Exorcist, as though her head will spin. He is covered down his front with the color and smell of her.
He barks at the others, “Jesus Christ, we have to get her down!”
This has all happened in maybe forty-five seconds. In less than a minute, everything can change.
There is nothing wrong with her legs, but she cannot walk. She is a drowning animal, frantic and gasping, and Sandor rushes forward and grabs one of her arms, too, his hands slippery with sweat. Even this, though, doesn’t work. The switchbacks aren’t wide enough for them to walk this way: three people linked horizontally, her body convulsing like a fish. They are shouting back and forth to one another, but saying nothing that can help: What the fuck? What the fuck? Kenneth lifts her like a parcel and Alias shouts that he will run ahead, run back to the village to procure a car so that they can get her to a hospital —there isn’t one here, Mary knows, nothing for miles, and if any is closer than Marrakech, it is nowhere you’d want to be. It is maybe three hours to the city, more, given how long it will take to even get her into town.
She will die here on the mountain—it is inevitable—and yes, this is what she expected, then; this is why she is here. Oh God, oh Mom, oh Geoff.
Alias hesitates, perhaps uncertain whether there is any point in rushing for help, or whether it will only brand him a coward not to have stayed with the others while she dies. Sandor pushes Alias so hard he nearly falls backward, shouts, “Hurry! Run!”
In Imlil, her cough suppressant is tucked away with her other medical paraphernalia. Along with the written CF protocol from Laxmi, because Dr. Fox, her specialist in New Hampshire, disapproved so strongly of this trip that Mary was afraid to ask her for the necessary paperwork and had Laxmi fax it instead. His instructions came with a handwritten note proclaiming I am not happy about this, which could have been for her or for Geoff, Mary didn’t know. The note says to administer Cyklokapron by IV to clot her blood should she have a massive hemoptysis.
Whether there would even be fucking Cyklokapron in Morocco, Mary knew, was anyone’s guess. Your suicidal mission, Geoff had said. She could not pretend to believe that Africa had ever been equipped to catch her fall.
Against Kenneth’s body, her limbs thrash as she sputters blood. “Don’t kill us,” he says to her, and somewhere under the gush and panic she hears: She has to stop squirming so he won’t slip, so they won’t both plummet to their deaths. She has to be still so he does not become her casualty, too. Blood rushes. She can’t control her limbs.
Then all at once it is over. Over. Her lungs’ convulsions cease and she collapses in Kenneth’s arms, spent, blood already drying sticky on her skin and clothes. All at once she is blinking dizzily and breathing again, lu
ngs no longer full of molten liquid choking her. She starts trying to wipe blood from Kenneth’s face, but her hands feel blind, fuzzy. He catches them in his and stills them.
Sandor murmurs, “Thank God, thank God,” his voice transfixed.
They stare at one another, all three dazed. She is not dead.
Now what are they supposed to do?
KENNETH PASSES HIS pack to Sandor, puts Cystic on his back in its place. He thinks she’ll protest but instead she clings to him and they start down the mountain. It will be hours before they reach even the minuscule little village of Tamatert, much less Imlil, where Alias could possibly snag a car. “Better walk behind me, buddy,” he tells Sandor, and Sandor falls in line, the plan unspoken between them: if Kenneth falls, Sandor will catch the girl from his back. The dirt-rocks under their feet scatter and crumble; the switchbacks are steep. This will never work. It will never work. Kenneth can see Alias occasionally beneath them, zigzagging, moving fast. His youth, his strength and speed—suddenly it all seems obscene.
After a while he’s got to stop, switch Cystic onto Sandor’s back. She’s not coughing anymore but seems to be doing little else either. It is understood that her walking is impossible, but Kenneth can’t feel his body. Though the blood seems to have shed the last of what passed for substance in her weight, it was a matter, simply, of her starting to slip, of his legs buckling. There is no pain, no soreness, no exhaustion. Just the inability to go on with the load.
Thirty-five-year-old Sandor shoulders his passenger as though she is nothing, picks up the pace like the girl’s nothing more than a day pack. Now it is Kenneth’s turn to walk behind, though Sandor doesn’t seem to need him.
Down, down, an hour this way, maybe longer. At one point she says she can walk and they let her try, but she is slower on her own than Sandor is carrying her, so they resume their positions. She is weepy, and Sandor glances back at Kenneth, his pace slowing, apparently unsure whether they should stop to comfort her. Kenneth barks, “Stop crying, you’re gonna get everything flowing again!” and she gulps and buries her face in Sandor’s neck, and Sandor says nothing, walks on.
Alias isn’t in Tamatert, but at the edge of the village people are gathered, waiting for them—the kid must have actually tipped them off. In a town this small, most people speak no French, but Kenneth’s able to communicate with a couple of the men. Their “guide” has gone ahead to Imlil, he is told, for a car. The women have bowls of water and rags to wash the blood, which Alias must have warned them about. Women approach Cystic as though blood is not a dangerous thing, begin bathing her still fully dressed. They think, it is clear, that she has been in some kind of hiking accident. They look for the wound.
It is then that Kenneth notices them. The four travelers he and Cystic first saw in the Tanger Inn: the dark, exotic couple and the white hippies. They are walking up the road, cameras round their necks, day packs on their backs, oblivious to the blinding heat, to their poor choice of hour in making this trip. They chat in their loud tourist voices, one of the girls proclaiming how cute the village children are just as Cystic did earlier this morning. “I’d just love to take a few of them home with me!” exclaims the pigtailed traveler, and Kenneth sees she has a Canadian maple leaf on her pack. They approach and there is Cystic, rust-colored water running from her listless body. The four travelers stop in their tracks. “My God!” shouts the pigtailed girl—a woman really, small lines already around her eyes. “What happened to her? Were you attacked?”
“Attacked?” Kenneth says blankly. “You got a car, by any chance?”
They all stare at him. One of the men nods: Yes, a car. Down below, in Imlil.
Sandor says, “We need to get her to a hospital.”
Cystic murmurs from a few feet away, “Alias will be here before they could get down there and back with a car.”
“We don’t know what that guy’s gonna do,” Kenneth says coolly. “Could be he wants nothing to do with this and we’ll never see him again.”
Cystic shakes her head, eyes closed. He knows she wants to protest and it makes him dig his heels in. “Sandor, go with them and get the car and I’ll stay here with her.”
Sandor stands, ready to go.
“Wait a second,” the Asian girl says. She is startlingly pretty, angelic looking, her skin poreless. “We need our car.” Her voice is rising, panicked. “You can’t just go take it. We have to return that car—we’ll be held responsible for it. What if you just run off with it? Do you think we have the money to pay for a whole car? We’d be arrested!”
“We’re not car thieves!” Sandor protests. “Come with us if you like—we’re trying to get a sick woman to the hospital!”
“We can’t all fit in one car together,” the Asian girl protests sensibly. “There’s no hospital around here anyway—I mean, I’m sorry your friend got hurt, but I don’t see what we can do to help. We can’t take you all the way back to Marrakech.”
Kenneth feels his hands balling into fists at the girl’s whine. The villagers are still standing around openly staring, and though they don’t speak English, conflict is palpable in any language. Kenneth’s eyes dart toward Cystic, and the rage in him feels like venom. He could kill this girl, this beautiful girl and her pigtailed friend and the two assholes with them. He could kill them with his bare hands for not caring, not trusting, even though he doesn’t trust Alias, who knows Cystic better than these kids do, who has kissed her. Even though he’s not the least bit convinced Alias hasn’t just left them here hanging. The four travelers look at one another uncertainly, but not one speaks up to contradict, to offer up the car, and Kenneth thought only Americans were this full of righteous entitlement, this kind of callousness, but no: it is the whole world, the whole modern world, and the only way to escape it is to live in some godforsaken remote village where you share your house with sheep. Though he is not fool enough to think that in the Old World it would be any different—that fresh-baked bread and a roof to shield you from the hottest few hours of the sun and the way Nawar bent lovingly over Cystic’s damaged hands means nobility—as if he doesn’t know that those villagers would sell their daughters to the first bastard who came round with a buck, and that these women with their bowls of water and rags probably expect to be paid. The world is shit and he is part of it. He should never have let himself lose sight of that. But he would like to wrap his hands around this beautiful Canadian’s throat until she, too, coughs blood, because the woman who made him lose sight of the world’s ugliness is nothing to them, just an animal left on the side of the road to die: just a story they will tell back in North America over beers. He moves closer to the dark man, the beautiful girl’s man, intending to punch him, to tell him his girlfriend is a heartless piece of trash, but no release will come.
“We’ll go down to Imlil,” the white boy interjects, stepping between them. “We can’t give you our car but we’ll go down and find you another one at a hotel.”
“We’re waiting for someone,” Cystic says. Her voice is louder than it has been since the coughing began. “He’s on his way back. We were just stopping to rest.” She stands, and Sandor rushes to her side. She takes a few steps forward, pupils dilated like a junkie’s and some flame inside her glowing, so that her face looks not pale but white. Sandor puts an arm around her and ushers her down the road, and at last Kenneth snaps back to himself and rushes with them, too, puts his arm around her body from the other side, so that he and Sandor are almost embracing, and like this they are about to walk on when Alias comes rushing down the road calling to them, car in the distance and, as they can see as they get closer, insanely, all her belongings loaded inside.
“What the fuck?” Kenneth shouts at him. “You spent your time pulling shit out of her room? She could have been bleeding to death up here!”
Alias blinks, out of breath, clearly terrified. “But her medicines,” he falters. “Maybe she needs them?”
And it is the heat and the water Cystic drank so fast th
at there was none left for the rest of them and the fact that he is too clean, just too damn clean for this day to be happening, that makes Kenneth sway on his feet, head knocking against the frame of the car, so that Sandor almost has to help him in, too, as from the edge of the road the four travelers in the distance, the matter settled in their minds, move on.
SANDOR GRIPS THE passenger’s door handle, white knuckled. Alias is speeding like they’re in a Hollywood chase scene, though he’s probably never had a formal driving class. In the backseat, Kenneth holds Mary in his lap. She’s slugging cough syrup, the prescription kind, and Kenneth takes it from her hand, saying, “Baby, you weigh about fifty pounds, you’re on the petite protocol,” but Mary’s head just lolls against his shoulder. Every moment on the road without the appearance of more blood feels a miracle. Sandor keeps an eye on his watch.
She is almost unconscious when it starts again, as somehow Sandor knew it would. Her body jerks despite her closed, drugged eyes, blood spurting out with a life of its own, immense and terrible. Sandor puts his head between his knees, muttering “Sterkte” under his breath like a prayer. In his peripheral vision, he sees Kenneth pull out his knife and start slashing open the carpet they bought in Essaouira—a lifetime ago—wrapping the stiff thing around Mary’s body so that her blood convulses right over it. Kenneth has his arms around the carpet; he’s murmuring to her—what, Sandor can’t hear. It almost hurts to look at them; he feels an intruder on a private scene, intimate and vulgar at once.
A Life in Men: A Novel Page 40
