“Speaking off the record . . . if I were you, I would be very selective about what you reveal about things that happened in the desert. The Moroccans have made it easy for you. They have provided an official version of events on which you have signed off. Silence on everything else might be a wise strategy.”
I agreed with her reasoning. But by the time I saw Dr. Hart—only seventy-two hours after this conversation—I still had ongoing flashbacks of the rape and of reaching for the jerry can. In relentless slow motion, I relived the moment I grabbed the lighter from his accomplice’s hand and tossed it on his gasoline-drenched body. And how—I’ll admit this now—a huge sense of furious vindication came over me as I watched him ignite and writhe and scream in agony.
Ben Hassan might be a bloated moral black hole of a man—but he did touch a very exposed nerve when he pointed out that, like him, I had killed to stay alive.
The thought was hardly comforting. It was stalking me day and night. Especially the night. In fact, all night.
Over the next week I endured an entire battery of tests. I got lucky on several fronts. No parasites parading through my system. No sexually transmitted diseases. The gynecological exam showed nearly full recovery from internal trauma. I did not have a burst eardrum but had suffered a sort of concussion to the ear canal, which would subside in a few more weeks. A CAT scan did not point up damage to my left cheekbone. Nor did I have a dreaded “zygomatic fracture” of the eye socket (as the specialist called it), even though I still had a dark ring beneath my left eye. The dermatologist whom I saw next said that, though the facial scarring would largely heal, there might be some subtle but potentially discernible reminders of the damage done to my legs.
When my friend Ruth flew up to Buffalo the weekend after I returned, I put her up on the sofa bed in the living room of my hotel suite. I told her just about everything that had happened in Morocco, leaving out that one crucial violent detail. She listened wide-eyed and horrified, amazed by my fortuitous rescue and survival. When I mentioned that sleep was now an issue, she said, “You’re back in the land of pharmapsychology. And you need to sleep. So ask your doctor to prescribe some pills. If I may say so, you should also consider talking to somebody professionally who can help you—”
“What? Find a degree of acceptance about what happened? Closure? I know that talking to a shrink can more than help. It’s just—”
I broke off, not wanting to complete the sentence. Because what I would have said was, I am not going to sit in a therapist’s office and somehow fail to mention that I burned my rapist alive and, in the moments before his accomplice kicked me in the head, I felt a frightening sense of avenging triumph. Still, I did accept Dr. Hart’s offer of an antidepressant that also served as a sleep aid. She told me it might take a week for its efficacy to be felt. Actually it took ten days, during which that ongoing sense of foreboding stalked me. There were the flashbulblike memories that popped into my consciousness without warning, and left me seriously skewed.
But then sleep finally took hold.
I threw myself into work. Twelve- and thirteen-hour days. A rigor and a determination to function and cope and keep moving forward that saw me land a big corporate account—a chain of upstate New York hardware stores—the month after my return. After six weeks at the hotel, I moved back home. But it took another ten days before I finally walked into Paul’s studio. On the drafting table where he worked was the package that I had sent back to my office from Casablanca. Morton had brought it with him to the airport on the night I arrived back, and I had tossed it into the studio when I got home. Now, all these weeks later, I finally opened it, staring down at the notebook he’d left at Chez Fouad, forcing myself to open it and turn the pages, looking at his accomplished, intricate take on Essaouira and la vie marocaine. Seeing them all again slammed home the loss, the betrayal, the guilt, the horror of his disappearance, the horror of what was visited on me there, the fact that I was alone in our house, ruing so much, trying to keep the ongoing trepidation and rage and sadness at bay, and now, I broke down and cried for a good half an hour, the accumulated grief rushing forth.
When the tears finally stopped, I went into the bathroom and threw some cold water on my face and looked at myself in the mirror. I knew that, though the physical and emotional wounds might always be there, my work was to somehow achieve, in time, a degree of acceptance.
An hour later, nursing a glass of wine, I went online and found a cottage for rent deep in the Adirondack Mountains, on the shores of Upper Saranac Lake. It was available as of the next day—and the owner lived in nearby Lake Placid and said he could have the place cleaned and ready for my arrival by nightfall. He told me that the place lacked Wi-Fi and that cell phone coverage was, at best, spotty.
“Fine by me”—and we then agreed on a price for one month’s rental. Negotiations completed, I packed one duffel bag with clothes, another one with a dozen books from around the house that I’d promised myself to read over the years. My last piece of business before I fell into bed was to send an email to Morton.
Sorry to drop another bombshell on you, but I have decided this evening to disappear to somewhere rural and hidden for four weeks. I will drive to a café with Wi-Fi every few days to see if there’s anything urgent to deal with at the office. Otherwise I am going to be out of touch. Are you okay with this?
His reply arrived moments later.
Stay out of touch—and don’t look at your email or cell phone for the next month. You need this time away for all sorts of obvious reasons. Go hide and think.
Hide I did. The cottage was simple, clean, idyllic. And isolated. It was located at the end of a half-paved road with no neighbors in sight. The nearest village—to which I drove twice a week for supplies—was ten miles away. I slept. I read. I cooked. I listened to classical music and jazz on the radio. I didn’t open a computer or touch my cell phone for an entire month. There was a narrow walking trail just steps away from the cottage that followed the lakefront. Every day I did a three-hour hike along its shoreline. I also spent a lot of time thinking. About a certain rigidity that, prior to Morocco, had made me frequently look at life as a giant balance sheet, on which I was endlessly obsessing about reversing the loss column. And how I was always wanting to put things right. And how my wonderful, maddening father cast a shadow over so much. And how rational, hyperorganized me chose men whom I thought I could rescue from the impulse to self-destruct . . . which I was unable to stop my dad from doing.
The search for love—especially when it’s been withheld by one parent—can lead you into all sorts of tricky rationalizations. Did I always go through life expecting to be, on some level, betrayed? And why, when it came to marriage, did I pick individuals whom I always secretly doubted would be able to give me the stability denied me as a child?
Life can change on a dime was one of my father’s favorite epigrams. Because he was always hoping that the dime would finally come his way. Life changed utterly for me in the Sahara. It sent me to the darkest places imaginable, the absolute limits of endurance. But I did just that: I endured. I will never admit to anyone that I killed in order to live. That secret will stay with me forever. Along with a newfound knowledge that so much is surmountable if you choose to survive. The only way forward after great pain is fortitude.
So, in those weeks alone by the lake, there was a slow ebbing of that dark presence that had hovered over me from the moment I was free of danger in Casablanca. He wasn’t knocking repeatedly on my psychic door as he had done so vehemently in the first months after my return. Which, in turn, gave me the space to examine that most telling and thorny of questions: What do you want?
And I began to formulate an answer.
When I finally returned to Buffalo, among the vast number of emails awaiting me, there was one that completely delighted me. It was from Aatif. Written in simple French, it arrived with a photo attached.
Hi Robin! Just wanted you to see a picture of my wedding and of the h
ouse we now live in. I will always be so eternally grateful to you. I even have a cell phone and an email address. Allah ybarek feek wal ’ayyam al-kadima.
The photos showed Aatif and a petite young woman who—if the snapshot was anything to go by—was clearly outgoing and spirited. They were both in formal Muslim wedding attire in front of a simple squat one-story house: concrete, painted that wondrous Moroccan aquamarine blue. I noted that laundry was already hanging on the line outside.
I wrote back an immediate reply: Happiness is a wonderful thing, Aatif—and it is splendid to see you and your wife so happy.
As I glanced once more at the photo of the proverbial happy couple, I couldn’t help but feel a stab of loneliness and the sense that I was flying solo, but with a phantom still in the adjoining room.
There was also an email from Assistant Consul Conway in Casablanca. As promised, Alison was keeping me abreast about the ongoing search for my husband, and told me that the Royal Moroccan Army had recently been doing military exercises within the vicinity of the desert where Paul was last seen hiking into nowhere. They’d been conducting a comprehensive sweep of the area as part of their maneuvers and had found no body.
She also said, with regret, that the search for Jabalah and his family had turned up nothing. But now I had a means by which to make contact with them—and immediately sent her back an email with Aatif’s coordinates, explaining that he knew the family and might be able to assist with their whereabouts. I then shot Aatif a second email, letting him know that he might hear from a woman at the US Consulate in Casablanca about trying to locate my saviors as she had a sum of money from me for them, and if he could help her locate them I would be hugely grateful.
Weeks went by, then out of nowhere, a further email arrived from Alison. She had finally heard back from Aatif. He told her he was heading to the oasis in a week’s time—so, yes, he could deliver the cash to Jabalah and his family. The money had been dispatched by registered post to his home and she had received confirmation from the postal service that it had been received and signed for.
A month or so later I got a one-line email from Aatif:
Money delivered!
There was a photo attached of Maika and Aicha and Naima—the girl and her mother laughing and waving at the camera, Maika as stone-faced as ever. I printed the photo immediately and put it alongside the photo I’d pasted near my computer of Aatif and his wife. The only family I now had.
When I reached the six-month anniversary of my return home I had a second HIV test. Negative. Dr. Hart also did repeat swabs for all other potential STDs: all negative.
“You’re in the clear,” she told me.
On one level this was true. The discoloration around my left eye was now a thing of the past. And the facial scars had reduced to a point where you would have to study me closely to truly discern them. Still, the door to Paul’s study at home remained closed. And the house had gradually lost some of its hushed eeriness—but there were still moments when I could feel Paul’s presence.
Still, my determination to push through the worst of the post-traumatic stress paid off to the extent that I weaned myself off the pharmaceuticals, finding the one and only Chinese herbalist at work in Buffalo and switching to a strongly effective tea to help me sleep. At first, after I went off the prescription pills, there were moments of deeply unsettled regression and five days of insane insomnia. But eventually the herbal formulas kicked in. I could function professionally. I could sleep. A few weeks later, on a morning noteworthy for its cold clarity, I presented myself at a fertility clinic attached to the State University for a psychological evaluation. The interview and series of tests lasted over an hour. I was just a little nervous in the run-up to this crucial hurdle. Think of it as an audit, I told myself. Much to my surprise, I passed the evaluation. A few days later I returned for a series of examinations to determine whether, now approaching my forty-second year, I would be able to carry a pregnancy to full term. Again I was approved—though the doctor at the clinic with whom I subsequently spoke did inform me that, at my age, the chance of a miscarriage or other problems did exist. He warned me that, once I chose a donor, it could take at least three to five tries before I became pregnant.
The donor. I spent a good two weeks going through the one thousand or so possibilities on file, reading up on their family and educational backgrounds, their professions, their hobbies and interests. It was so surreal, delving into the personal profiles of these men who had all masturbated into a sterilized cup and were now potential fathers for my much-wanted child.
Eventually I narrowed the selection down to four candidates—and scanned all their details to Ruth. Her pick was the same as mine: a thirty-three-year-old man listed as Michael P. An academic with an undergraduate and doctoral degree from the University of Chicago. A published writer. Athletic. His interests included classical music, cinema, and chess.
“I worry about the ‘chess’ part,” Ruth told me. “Chess freaks tend to be obsessive-compulsive.”
“It’s rather absurd, isn’t it, choosing a potential father the way you choose food at a Chinese restaurant: this attribute from Column A, another from Column B.”
“And if you get pregnant you get a fortune cookie.”
“If I get pregnant it will be a miracle.”
“You’ve had one miracle already this year,” Ruth said. “You got out of the Sahara alive.”
“So why should the gods smile on me again?”
But they did—on the third try.
Trust me, it’s a deeply lonely experience, having your legs up in the stirrups of a doctor’s examination table, watching a nurse approach you with a tube filled with the sperm of the donor you’ve chosen. Lonely and so modern. No need to establish a rapport; to dance around each other at the outset, deciding whether to cross the frontier into sex; working out whether there is the hope for something more promising; the decision to set up house together (or not); the decision to reproduce (or not). Indeed, there will never be the memory of the intimate coupling that led to this conception. But I had no doubt whatsoever about the fact that I was making the right decision. Too much emotional debris in my past. Too much trepidation about trying to get involved with anyone right now. Maybe, in time, that would change. Maybe there would be a point in the future when I wouldn’t be so closed off to that possibility. But for now . . .
The first artificial insemination didn’t take. Four weeks later I was back for round two. When my period arrived two weeks later, my disappointment and despair were acute. But, dogged as ever, I returned fourteen days later for round three.
This time . . . bingo.
When my period was one day late, I bought a pregnancy test. At home that night I peed onto its chemically treated strip . . . and watched as it gradually turned blue.
So there it was: positive proof I was pregnant. But, being ever conscious of checks and balances, I ran a second test five days later. When it turned blue again, I called Dr. Hart. A week later she gave me the official confirmation—and hugged me at the end of our consultation.
“I know this has been your dream for so long.”
And most dreams can only be fulfilled by yourself. It’s a bit like happiness: you can never depend on someone else for that elusive state of being. In the end we are all directly responsible for our own happiness . . . or lack thereof.
I told nobody but Ruth for the first three months of my pregnancy, reading up extensively on everything and anything to do with baby and child care. When twelve weeks passed, I decided that the time had come to inform Morton and Kathy that I was expecting a child. And that after the birth I was planning to take a year off. Because, perhaps for the first time in my life, I wouldn’t be flying solo anymore.
But I forestalled that announcement for a few days, as I suddenly had urgent business in New York. Business to do with my missing-presumed-dead husband. A week previously his gallerist, Jasper Pirnie, got in touch with me, telling me he had read about Paul’
s disappearance and regretted not contacting me before.
“I won’t give you any sort of mealy-mouthed excuse about being too busy,” he said. “It was bad form on my part, and you have my apologies for only contacting you all these many months later. But the reason I’m calling you now is because I have some interesting news for you.”
The news was that one of Jasper’s clients—a wealthy Korean industrialist—had, while in Manhattan, paid a visit to the gallery and spied one of Paul’s early drawings (a Maine seascape, shaded by omnipresent clouds) that he immediately loved.
“So he asked me what I would want for it, and when I said twenty thousand he agreed on the spot. So, congratulations—you’ll be receiving fifty percent of that.”
As if reading my thoughts, he added, “Or, at least, Paul’s estate will be receiving that. But here’s the thing—this gentleman is quite the collector. Since returning to Seoul he’s shown off the drawing to several of his high-spending colleagues. There is now a market for Paul Leuen’s drawings. So my question to you is . . .”
Now it was my turn to jump in, and I told him about the sketchbook of Paul’s final work that he left behind just before his disappearance, and how the thirty or so drawings were, in my opinion, absolutely extraordinary.
By the time I finished my spiel, I could almost hear Jasper palpitating, the way a smart agent reacts when the prospect of something significant and lucrative is about to land on his desk.
“Might you be able to FedEx the sketchbook to me overnight?” he asked.
It went out that afternoon. By the time he got back to me thirty-six hours later, Morton and I had already put into action a plan we had devised some months earlier for dealing with any possible sales of Paul’s future work: a trust in his name that would legally revert to me in five years and a handful of months—i.e., after the seven-year time frame, at which point he could be declared legally dead. At the time, when Morton brought this up, we thought that maybe a few thousand dollars might trickle in over the years for his remaining work. But now . . .
The Blue Hour Page 33
