5

people were always giving her shirts. Their own in most cases. She looked good in everything; everything fit. If a shirt was too loose, too big, the context would widen with the material and this became the point, this was the fit. The shirt would sag fetchingly, showing the girl, the sunny tomboy buried in hand-me-down gear. She used to snatch things off hangers in Yonge Street basements, the kind of shapeless stuff men wore north. These were stores with hunting knives in faded scabbards in the window, huge khaki anoraks with fur-lined hoods, and she’d grab a pair of twelve-dollar corduroys that became immediately hers, setting off her litheness, the close-skinned physical sense she expressed even sprawled across an armchair, reading. Her body had efficient lines that took odd clothing best, the weathered, the shrunken, the dull. People were pleased to see her in their work-shirts, old sweaters. She was not a friend who asked many favors or required of others a steadfastly sympathetic nature. They were flattered, really, when she took a shirt.

I stood watching from the deck. In the west the sun was banded, fading down a hazy slate horizon. We moved along the rocky coast and came booming in heavy gusts around the point. The village danced in light. As we approached there was a momentary lull, landward. Things seemed to pause to let the flesh tone seep in. Contours were defined, white walls massed around the belltower. Everything was clear and deep.The ship passed into a silence. Protected now. Old men came out to catch the hawsers.I saw her walk with Tap into the square. The shirt she wore was identifiable from a distance. Long, straight, tan, with brass studs and red-rimmed epaulets. She wore it outside her jeans. A carabiniere shirt. Long sleeves, sturdy fabric. The nights were getting cool.I hadn’t seen the shirt in years but easily recalled who had given it to her.She asked about Cairo. I left my bag at the hotel desk. Up the cobbled streets, jasmine and donkey shit, the conversational shriek of older women. Tap walked on ahead, knowing she had something to tell me.”We had a strange visit. A figure from the past. Out of absolutely nowhere.””Everyone is from the past.””Not everyone is a figure,” she said. “This person qualifies as a figure.”We were taking unnaturally long strides on the broad steps. Some girls sang a song that began with the words one two three.“Volterra,” I said.She glanced.”You’re wearing his shirt. Practically an announcement. Not only that. The moment you started talking I knew you were going to say something about him. I realized the shirt meant more than the season is starting to change.””That’s amazing. Because the funny thing is I didn’t even know I had the bloody shirt. Frank left three days ago. I found the shirt this morning. I’d totally forgotten the thing existed.””A mock heirloom as I recall. Those were the days when he wasn’t sure what he wanted to look and sound like to others. The young man obsessed by film. What was he doing here? Slow down, I hate this climb.””He was passing through. What else? He drops in, he passes through. That’s the way Volterra operates.””True enough.””He’d been in Turkey. He thought he’d drop in. Brought along his current lady. She kept saying, ‘People with cancer always want to kiss me on the mouth.’ Where does he find them?””Too bad. I’d like to have seen him. He was coming here, I was going there.””You’re claiming foreknowledge. You knew I was going to say something about him.””The old psychic motor is still running. When I saw you in the shirt I thought of him right away. Then Tap walked on ahead in his half-downcast all-knowing manner. You started to say something and it hit me: she’s heard from Frank. How did he know you were here?””I wrote once or twice.””So he knew we’d separated.””He knew.””Do you think that’s why he dropped in?””Ass.””How is he? Does he still sit with his back to the wall in restaurants?”A man and his small sons were mending a net. Kathryn stopped to exchange greetings in the set manner, the simple questions that brought such satisfying replies, the ceremony of well-being. I stepped between the gathers of yellow mesh and with an effort caught up to Tap.

Volterra came out of an old textile town in New England, a place with a dime store, one or two handsome public buildings in decline. A man in trail boots jerked the lever on a cigarette machine in the entranceway of a diner. Women drove station wagons, sometimes just sitting at the wheel, parked, trying to remember something. It was the last generation of station wagons. His father did odd jobs, the movie theater closed. But there were falls, the sound of rushing water. It was a northern sound, it smelled of the north. There was something pure in it.His mother had mental problems. Frank was the youngest of four. She was thirty-seven when he was born and she seemed now to be longing for senility. She wanted to sit in a warm corner and let the past fall slowly over her. Confused recollection was a state she felt was earned. It was a gratifying punishment, a sinking away from the life struggle. Her situation was exemplary. Let the children see how God does these things to people.The dark brick mill ran skeleton shifts, was always on the verge of shutting down. Men wore trail boots, wilderness boots, insulated hunting shoes.In New York he went to a school for private detectives, working in the stock rooms at Macy’s during the day. The school, called an academy, was located off the lobby of a hotel full of West Indians. It was a crazy and money-wasting idea, he said, but it marked his freedom, it meant New York. You were a stranger and could do these things. Two months later he enrolled in film school at NYU.He cut news footage for a network affiliate in Providence. After writing a number of unfinished scripts he headed west to do technical films for companies with names like Signetics and Intersil. California was full of technocratic amaze. That’s where the visionaries were, developing an argot, playing galactic war games on the display screens in computer research centers. Kathryn and I lived in Palo Alto then, happily on the fringe of things, sanding our secondhand chairs. She worked for Stanford University, the Center for Information Processing, where she helped students and faculty use computers in their research and course work. I was turning out the usual run of low-paying freelance work, most of it for high technology firms in the area.I wrote a script for a film that Volterra directed. He was fast and inventive with an offhand manner toward the work and many ideas about film, the state of film, the meaning of film, the language of film. He spent a lot of time with us. We went to the movies and marched against the war. The two things were connected. The flag-tailored kids were connected, the streets were connected, the music, the marijuana. I stopped smoking grass when the war ran down.He was full of comic sorrows, self-dramatizing impulses, wasted-looking in a way that marked a style more than a set of depressing circumstances, and he seemed most content with himself cursing the chill mist that blew across the hills. He had a narrow face and the feral eyes of a boy absorbed in the task of surviving. The style, the psychological intrigues were elements he played off this deeper thing. When he filled out, later, and grew the second or third of a number of experimental beards, I thought I was still able to detect that early fearfulness of his, the schemer’s flexible logic, whatever it takes to get the edge.He started a filmmaking collective in San Francisco. The group shared all tasks, did two documentaries. The first concerned war protests and the police. The second was a story of the love affair, outside marriage, of a middle-aged woman well known in Hillsborough society. The movie became notorious locally for this reason and well-known on a wider basis for a forty-minute segment detailing an afternoon of sex and conversation. For legal reasons the movie had only fitful distribution and eventually none at all, but people talked about it and wrote about it and there were private screenings for months on both coasts. The running time was two hours, the woman’s lover was Volterra.Film. This is what there was, to shoot film, cut film, screen it, talk about it.The collective fell apart when a conglomerate bought rights to the second documentary, changed the title, changed the names, hired stars and reshot the whole thing as a feature, using a veteran director and four writers. It was one of those strange transferences in which people conspire to lose sight of a central reality. But what was the reality in this case? There were a dozen questions about ethics, manipulation, the woman’s motives. The documentary was edged in politics and hate. Frank was a name in the business.He would go on to features himself, of course, dropping from sight for long periods, insisting on closed sets when he worked. Long before that he was a force in our lives. He made us think about our modest expectations. His drive to make movies was so powerful we couldn’t help feeling anxious hopes on his behalf. We were involved with Volterra. We wanted to defend him, explain him, make allowances for his obsessions, believe in his ideas for uncompromising films. He provided an occasion for reckless loyalties.When we told him Kathryn was pregnant he showed an emotion deep enough to confirm our own awe, the remarkableness of what we’d commonly made, this almond curve, detailed and living. We didn’t know we were ready for a child until Frank’s reaction showed us how beside the point readiness can seem to be.Parenthood eventually deepened our sense of moderation, our not-wanting. It was Frank who left us wondering at this way of life but ultimately confirmed in it. This is one of the balances of a stimulating friendship.There’s no denying his effect on Kathryn. He stood outside her measures of a person’s worth. He made her laugh, she sparked to him. The sweet mean narrow face, the uncombed hair. He was a genuine talent, a commitment, the one person whose excesses and personas she needed to indulge. It was bracing to have one’s principles challenged. It clarified her vision of things, to be able to defend him to herself, this man who would sit with her in a restaurant on a redwood deck and recount in earnest deadpan detail the methods and bents, the hand-grips, of some woman he’d lately spent a night with. The exception was valid if it was large enough. He had the charm of a vast and innocent ego.This was before the film about the woman from Hillsborough. Kathryn would refuse to see it.He liked to turn up unexpectedly and made it hard for people to reach him when they wanted to. He lived in borrowed apartments much of the time. Already he was building tunnels in and out. Our feelings for him were sometimes deflected because of this. Long periods went by. We’d hear he was out of the country, underground, back east. Then he’d show up, hunched against the night, moving through the door in a half prowl, nodding, touched to see us looking much the same.A glancing love.”There’s more,” Kathryn said. “He talked with Owen.”Star fields, ruined time. Nearby a man with a flashlight and donkey hauling garbage in black bags. The hill was empty depth against the streaming night, the medieval sky in Arabic and Greek. We drank dark wine from Paros, too full of night and sky to use the candles.”I only listened to bits and pieces. It was mostly about the cult. Owen is less vague about them now. They’re a cult pure and simple. They qualify. I don’t like listening to that.””I know.””He makes an exercise of it. All that speculation. He knows I’m tired of it but in this case I can’t really blame him for going on at such length. Frank was absolutely fascinated. He prompted, he questioned Owen endlessly. They spent seven or eight solid hours talking about the cult. One night here, one at the dig house.””Why was Frank in Turkey? Is he doing a movie?””He’s hiding from a movie. He left the set, the location, whichever it was. He didn’t say where they were shooting but I know it’s the fourth straight project he’s abandoned. The second one to reach the shooting stage.””Where is he now?””I don’t know. He took the Rhodes steamer. It stops at two or three islands along the way.””Did you see his last film?””It was wonderful. Just a great piece of work. All Frank’s. No one else could have done it. It had his tension in it. Do you know? His way of cutting short extravagant things. Oh I loved it.””That was about the time we were getting set to wind it up.””I went to that revival house on Roncesvalles. I walked. How many miles?””Past Bathurst.””Past Dufferin.””Going to the movies. What was I doing?””It felt so good to go to a movie alone. Do you know?””I think I must have been watching television. What a crucial difference.””You were working on your list,” she said.”Your list.””I’ve never organized your so-called depravities in my mind. That was your game.””True, all true. How broken I must have been, to be watching television. There you were, striding past Dufferin in your boots and padded clothes like some dyke in a modern children’s story.””Thank you.””To the movies.””It felt so good to walk.””Not just any movie either.””Remember the argument over the car?””The squirrel in the basement. That one tree that flamed in the autumn.””How strange to be nostalgic about the end of a marriage.”I saw him before I heard him, Owen Brademas (his shape) advancing softly up the stairs, knees high as he climbed, heedful, long-limbed, trailing the glow from his flashlight.”But you’re sitting in the dark.”I said, “Why were you pointing your light down behind you?”We spoke almost simultaneously.”Was I? Didn’t realize. I know the way so well.””Darkness makes us sentimental.”Kathryn brought a glass, I poured some wine. He switched off the light and settled into a chair, stretching.The storytelling voice.”I realize finally what the secret is. All these months I’ve wondered what it was I couldn’t quite identify in my feelings about this place. The deep-reaching quality of things. Rock shapes, wind. Things seen against the sky. The clear light before sundown that just about breaks my heart.” Laughing. “Then I realized. These are all things I seem to remember. But where do I remember them from? I’ve been to Greece before, yes, but never here, never to a place so isolated, never these particular sights and colors and silences. Ever since I got to the island I’ve been remembering. The experience is familiar, although that’s not the right way to put it. There are times you do the simplest thing and it reaches you in a way you didn’t think possible, in a way you’d once known but have long since forgotten. You eat a fig and there is something higher about this fig. The first fig. The prototype. The dawn of figs.” Laughing out. “I feel I’ve known the particular clarity of this air and water, I’ve climbed these stony paths into the hills. It’s eerie, this sense. Metempsychosis. It’s what I’ve been feeling all along. But I didn’t know it until now.””There’s a generic quality, an absoluteness,” I said. “The bare hills, a figure in the distance.””Yes, and it seems to be a remembered experience. If you play with the word ‘metempsychosis’ long enough I think you find not only transfer-of-soul but you reach the Indo-European root to breathe. That seems correct to me. We are breathing it again. There’s some quality in the experience that goes deeper than the sensory apparatus will allow. Spirit, soul. The experience is tied up with self-perception somehow. I think you feel it only in certain places. This is my place perhaps, this island. Greece contains this mysterious absolute, yes. But maybe you have to wander to find yourself in it.””An Indian concept,” Kathryn said. “Or is it? Metempsychosis.””A Greek word,” he said. “Look straight up, the universe is pure possibility. James says the air is full of words. Maybe it’s full of perceptions too, feelings, memories. Is it someone else’s memories we sometimes have? The laws of physics don’t distinguish between past and future. We are always in contact. There is random interaction. The patterns repeat. Worlds, star clusters, even memories perhaps.””Turn on the lights,” I said.Again he laughed.”Am I growing soft-headed? Could be. I’ve reached an age.””We all have. But I wish you’d stayed with figs. I understood that.”He rarely supported his arguments or views. The first sound of contention sent him into deep retreat. Kathryn knew this, of course, and moved protectively to other subjects, always ready to attend to his well-being.Terror. This is the subject she chose. In Europe they attack their own institutions, their police, journalists, industrialists, judges, academics, legislators. In the Middle East they attack Americans. What does it mean? She wanted to know if the risk analyst had an opinion.”Bank loans, arms credits, goods, technology. Technicians are the infiltrators of ancient societies. They speak a secret language. They bring new kinds of death with them. New uses for death. New ways to think about death. All the banking and technology and oil money create an uneasy flow through the region, a complex set of dependencies and fears. Everyone is there, of course. Not just Americans. They’re all there. But the others lack a certain mythical quality that terrorists find attractive.””Good, keep going.””America is the world’s living myth. There’s no sense of wrong when you kill an American or blame America for some local disaster. This is our function, to be character types, to embody recurring themes that people can use to comfort themselves, justify themselves and so on. We’re here to accommodate. Whatever people need, we provide. A myth is a useful thing. People expect us to absorb the impact of their grievances. Interesting, when I talk to a Mideastern businessman who expresses affection and respect for the U.S., I automatically assume he’s either a fool or a liar. The sense of grievance affects all of us, one way or another.””What percentage of these grievances is justified?”I pretended to calculate.”Of course we’re a military presence in some of these places,” I said. “Another reason to be targeted.””You’re a presence almost everywhere. You have influence everywhere. But you’re only being shot at in selected locales.””I think I hear a wistful note. Canada. Is that what you mean? Where we operate with impunity.””Certainly you’re there,” she said. “Two-thirds of the largest corporations.””They’re a developed country. They have no moral edge. The people who have technology and bring technology are the death-dealers. Everyone else is innocent. These Mideast societies are at a particular pitch right now. There’s no doubt or ambiguity. They burn with a clear vision. There must be times when a society feels the purest virtue lies in killing.”Talking with my wife on a starry night in the Greek archipelago.”Canadians are stricken by inevitability,” she said. “Not that I defend the capitulation. That’s what it is. Pathetic surrender.””We do the wrong kind of killing in America. It’s a form of consumerism. It’s the logical extension of consumer fantasy. People shooting from overpasses, barricaded houses. Pure image.””Now you’re the one who sounds wistful.””No connection to the earth.””Some truth in that, I guess. A little.””I like a little truth. A little truth is all I ever hope for. Do you know what I mean, Owen? Where are you? Make a noise. I like to stumble upon things.”I knocked over a glass, enjoying the sound it made rolling on coarse wood. Kathryn snatched it at the edge of the table.”Talk about stumble,” she said.”The worst thing about this wine is that you can get to like it.”A light high on the hill. We waited through a silence.”Why is the language of destruction so beautiful?” Owen said.I didn’t know what he meant. Did he mean ordinary hardware —stun grenades, parabellum ammo? Or what a terrorist might carry, some soft-eyed boy from Adana, slung over his shoulder, Kalashnikov, sweet whisper in the dark, with a flash suppressor and folding stock. He sat quietly, Owen did, working out an answer. The way was open to interpretation, broader landscapes. Wehrmacht, Panzer, Blitzkrieg. He would have a patient theory to submit on the adductive force of such sounds, how they stir the chemistry of the early brain. Or did he mean the language of the mathematics of war, nuclear game theory, that bone country of tech data and little clicking words.”Perhaps they fear disorder,” he said. “I’ve been trying to understand them, imagine how their minds work. The old man, Michaeli, may have been a victim of some ordering instinct. They may have felt they were moving toward a static perfection of some kind. Cults tend to be closed-in, of course. Inwardness is very much the point. One mind, one madness. To be part of some unified vision. Clustered, dense. Safe from chaos and life.”Kathryn said, “I have one point to make, only one. I thought of it after James and I talked about the finds in central Crete, human sacrifice, the Minoan site. Is it possible these people are carrying out some latter-day version? You remember the Pylos tablet, Owen. Linear B. A plea for divine intercession. A list of sacrifices that included ten humans. Could this murder be a latter-day plea to the gods? Maybe they’re a doomsday cult.””Interesting. But something keeps me from thinking they would accept a higher being. I saw them and talked to them. They weren’t god-haunted people, somehow I know this, and if they believed some final catastrophe was imminent they were waiting for it, not trying to prevent it, not trying to calm the gods or petition them. Definitely waiting. I came away with a sense that they were enormously patient. And where’s the ritual in their sacrifice? Old man hammered to death. No sign of ritual. What god could they invent who might accept such a sacrifice, the death of a mental defective? A street mugging in effect.””Maybe their god is a mental defective.””I talked to them, Kathryn. They wanted to hear about ancient alphabets. We discussed the evolution of letters. The praying-man shape of the Sinai. The ox pictograph. Aleph, alpha. From nature, you see. The ox, the house, the camel, the palm of hand, the water, the fish. From the external world. What men saw, the simplest things. Everyday objects, animals, parts of the body. It’s interesting to me, how these marks, these signs that appear so pure and abstract to us, began as objects in the world, living things in many cases.” A long pause. “Your husband thinks all this is bookish drool.”Our voices in the dark. Kathryn reassures, James issues mild denials. But he wasn’t far wrong. I had trouble enough getting Greek characters straight; picturesque desert alphabets were a little too remote to keep me interested. I didn’t want to become an adversary, however. He’d probably withheld some things, misled us slightly, but I didn’t think these were pieces of strategy so much as instances of personal confusion. And in his present silence I thought I sensed a dreaminess, a drift into memory. Owen’s silences were problems to be worked out. Night is continuous, he’d said. The lulls, the measured respites were part of conversation.”It’s possible they’ve killed another person,” he said after a while. “Not here, Kathryn. Not anywhere in Greece.”His turn to reassure. This was considerate, his quickness to ease her fears for Tap’s safety. I could imagine from that point on she would no longer feel so protective and affectionate. He was the friend who brought the bad news.”I received a letter from a colleague in Jordan. He’s with the Department of Antiquities there. He knows about the cult, I’d written him. He tells me there was a murder two or three months ago which resembles this one in several respects. The victim was an old woman, near death, lingering for some time. She lived in a village at the edge of the Wadi Rum, the great sandstone desert in the southern part of the country.”Kathryn stood against the white wall. She wanted a cigarette. Twice a year since she’d given them up she wanted a cigarette. I always knew. Moments of helpless tension, an imbalance in the world. They broke the rules, so will I. She used to go through the house groping in dark closets for a lone Salem left faded in some coat pocket.”They found her outside the mud-brick house where she lived with relatives. She’d been killed with a hammer. I don’t know whether it was a standard claw hammer like the one used here.”I said, “Is this what you and Frank Volterra talked about for two nights?””Partly. Yes, he wanted to talk. To talk and listen.””Is that where he’s gone?””I don’t know. He seemed to be considering it. Something about the place excited him. I made the trip myself once, some years ago; there are inscriptions, simple graffiti mostly, camel drivers scratching their names on rocks. I described it to him. We talked about it at some length, the idea of these people, this mad scene being played out in a vast beautiful silent place. The man almost frightened me with his attentiveness. To be listened to so closely can be disconcerting. It implies an obligation on the speaker’s part.””Frank’s not your everyday tourist. Did you tell him about Donoussa?””I don’t know anything about it. Only that a young girl was killed. My assistant heard it from someone.””Also a hammer,” I said.”Yes. A year ago.”A claw hammer. Is this what he’d meant when he talked about the language of destruction? Simple hand tool of iron and wood. He liked the sound of the words apparently, or the look of them, the way they were bonded perhaps, their compact joinder, like the tool itself, the iron and wood.If you think the name of the weapon is beautiful, are you implicated in the crime?I poured more wine, suddenly tired, feeling drumheaded and dumb. It didn’t seem logical, the hangover preceding the drunk, or concurrent with it. Owen said something about madness or sadness. I tried to listen, realizing Kathryn was gone, inside somewhere, sitting in the dark or in bed already, wanting us to take these murders somewhere else. I would go down the hill with him in the small beam of his flashlight, watch him ride off on the undersized machine, legs crowding the handlebars. Then to my hotel, one flight up, the room at the end of the hall.Owen was talking again.”In this century the writer has carried on a conversation with madness. We might almost say of the twentieth-century writer that he aspires to madness. Some have made it, of course, and they hold special places in our regard. To a writer, madness is a final distillation of self, a final editing down. It’s the drowning out of false voices.”

The custom in warm weather is to hang curtains in doorways. The solid finish of the village yields to human needs. Surface shapes are engagingly disturbed. The wind blows, houses open to the passerby. There’s no clear feeling of mysterious invitation. Only of stillness moved inside, stillness darkened, the grain of the inner day.The rooms are plain and square, immediate, without entranceways or intervening spaces, set at street level, so close to us as we walk in the narrow passage that we feel uneasy about intruding. The Greek in conversation crowds his listener and here we find the same unboundaried exercise of life. Families. People clustered, children everywhere, old women in black sitting motionless, rough hands folded in sleep. The bright and vast and deep are everywhere, sun-cut clarity, the open sea. These modest rooms mark out a refuge from eternal things. This is the impression we have, Tap and I, a sense of modesty, of nondescriptness, only glimpsing as we pass, careful not to appear too curious.Above the stepped streets there were occasional open spaces, stronger wind. I followed Tap past a large well with a conical iron cap. A woman with an open umbrella sat on a mule, waiting. Cats moved along the walls, watched from roof ledges, cankerous, lame, mangy, some of them minute, the size of a woolen glove.Climbing. The sea appeared, the ruined windmill to the east. We paused to catch our breath, looking down on a church with an openwork belfry of some patchy rose-pink hue, a rude and pretty touch in all the layered white. A single small church might press together half a dozen surfaces in unexpected ways, sea-waved, domed, straight-edged, barrel-vaulted, a sensuous economy of shapes and arrangements and cross-influences. We heard the hoarse roar of a donkey, an outsized violent sound. The heat felt good.I showed Tap a postcard my father had sent. It had a picture on it of the Ranchman’s Café in Ponder, Texas. My father had never been to Texas as far as I knew. He lived in a small house in Ohio with a woman named Murph.Tap had received the same kind of postcard. In fact almost all my father’s communications for two or three years had been in the form of postcards showing the Ranchman’s Café.The message on his card, Tap said, was the same as the message on mine. He didn’t seem surprised by this.A distant lazy drone. Cicadas. We’d seen them come whirring out of olive trees to sail into walls, dropping in a dry stunned rustle. The wind began to gather force.Tap led me to an unpaved area of houses with courtyards, the upper limit of the village. There were tall gateways here, some of them located a fair distance in front of the houses to which they belonged. Seen from certain angles these gateways framed a barren hilltop or the empty sky. They were artless arrangements, free of the texts they put before us, material cleanly broken from the world.We climbed a rock path that worked around a shoulder of land and curled out of sight of the village. A whitewashed chapel across a defile, abrupt in brown earth. We were high up now, in the sweep of the wind and sea, stopping frequently to find fresh perspectives. I sat at the edge of a narrow stand of pine, wishing we’d brought water. Tap wandered into a rocky field just below. The wind came across the defile with a sound that changed levels as the current increased in speed and reached the trees, rushing, from a pure swift surge of air to something like a voice, an urgent emotion. Tap looked up at me.Ten minutes later I got to my feet and walked out into the sun. The wind had died. I saw him standing fifty yards away in the steep field. He was absolutely still. I called to him, he didn’t move. I walked that way, asking what was wrong, calling the words out across the immense silence around us, the drop-off into distances. He stood with his knees slightly flexed, one foot forward, head down, his hands at belt level, held slightly out from his body. Arrested motion. I saw them right away, lustrous black bees, enormous, maybe a dozen, bobbing in the air around him. At twenty yards I heard the buzzing.I told him not to worry, they wouldn’t sting. I moved in slowly, as much to reassure Tap as to keep the bees from getting riled. Burnished, black-enameled. They rose to eye level, dropped away, humming in the sun. I put my arm around him. I told him it was all right to move. I told him we would move slowly up toward the path. I felt him tense up even more. His way of saying no, of course. He was afraid even to speak. I told him it was safe, they wouldn’t sting. They hadn’t stung me and I’d walked right through them. All we had to do was move slowly up the slope. They were beautiful, I said. I’d never seen bees this size or color. They gleamed, I told him. They were grand, fantastic.Raising his head now, turning. Did I expect relief, chagrin? As I held him close he gave me a look that spoke some final disappointment. As if I could convince him, stung twice before. As if I could take him out of his fear, a thing so large and deep as fear, by prattling on about the beauty of these things. As if I could tell him anything at all, fake father, liar.We held that inept stance a moment longer. Then I took his arm and led him through the field.

Kathryn and I had dinner on the harborfront with Anand Dass. She knew what was in the kitchen and gave our orders to a boy who stood with his arms crossed on his chest, nodding as she listed the items. The food and supply boat was docked nearby, a single-masted broad-beamed vessel with mystical eyes painted on the bow. No one wanted to talk about the cult.”It was flawless. A perfect flight. I mean it, those Japanese, they impress me. When I learned they have their own security at the Athens airport, I knew I would send him JAL.””You go to the States soon,” I said.”The whole family, we converge, what an event,” he said. “Even my sister is coming.””Do you come back in the spring?””Here? No. The University of Pennsylvania takes over the whole operation. I’ll be back in India by then.”Kathryn passed the bread around.”In any case I’m not interested in underwater work,” he said. “Outside my frame.””What do you mean?” I said.He looked at Kathryn. She said to me, “They’re going to concentrate on the submerged ruins. They’ll alternate. Next season, underwater work. Following year, back to the trenches.””This is new,” I said.”Yes.””But I don’t think we’ll ever alternate,” Anand said. “I think we’re finished for the season, the decade, the century, whatever.”He had a strong laugh. People stood along the quay, talking in last light. I leaned back in the chair and watched Kathryn eat.The argument was long and detailed, with natural pauses, and moved from the street to the terrace, into the house, finally up onto the roof. It was full of pettiness and spite, the domestic forms of assault, the agreed-upon reductions. This seemed the point, to reduce each other and everything else. What marriage is for, according to her. Our rage was immense but all we could show for it, all we could utter, were these gibes and rejoinders. And that we did poorly. We weren’t able to take advantage of the clear openings. It didn’t seem to matter who got the better of it. The argument had an inner life, a force distinct from the issues. There were surges, hesitations, loud voices, laughter, mimicry, moments in which we tried to remember what we wanted to say next, a pace, a range. After a while this became our only motive, to extend the argument to its natural end.It began on the way up to the house.”Bitch. You knew.””I’ve been trying to find an alternative.””This means no England.””We could still go to England.””I know you.””What do you know?””You want to dig.””I didn’t want to tell you the plan had broken down until I had some kind of alternative.””When will you tell me about the alternative? When the alternative breaks down?””Shut up, ass.””I know what this means.””I don’t know what it means. How could you?””I know how you think.””What does it mean? I don’t know what it means.””You won’t go to England.””Good. We won’t go to England.””That whole thing was based on your coming back here.””We could go anyway. We could work out a plan for the summer while we’re there.””But you won’t.””Why won’t we?””Because you won’t. It’s too obvious and simple. It lacks in-trepidness. It was intrepid when you came up with it originally. It is now obvious and simple and dull.””You want to see the Elgin marbles.””It’s a fallback. You hate that.””You’re a fallback.””What are you?””You want to see the Elgin marbles but you won’t go to the Acropolis. You want to see the rip-off, the imperialist swag in its proper surroundings.””Hopeless. How the hell did I ever imagine I could come here?””Swag. I got that from Tap.””I hate this climb.””You keep saying.””I’m not the man—never mind.””You never were. You’re not the man you never were.”The argument had resonance. It had levels, memories. It referred to other arguments, to cities, houses, rooms, those wasted lessons, our history in words. In a way, our special way, we were discussing matters close to the center of what it meant to be a couple, to share that risk and distance. The pain of separation, the fore-memory of death. Moments of remembering her, Kathryn dead, odd meditations, pity the sad survivor. Everything we said denied this. We were intent on being petty. But it was there, a desperate love, the conscious hovering sum of things. It was part of the argument. It was the argument.We walked the rest of the way in silence and she went in to check on Tap, who was sleeping. Then we sat on the terrace and began immediately to whisper at each other.”Where will he go to school?””Back on that, are we?””Back on that, back on that.””He’s way ahead of them. He can start a little later if necessary. But it won’t be necessary. We’ll work it out.””He’s not so way ahead. I don’t think he’s way ahead.””You distrust his writing. Something in you recoils from that. You think he ought to be diagramming sentences.””You’re crazy, you know that? I’m beginning to see.””Admit it.””Why did it take me so long to see what you are.””What am I?””What are you.””You enjoy telling me that you know how I think. How do I think? What am I?””What are you.””I feel things. I have self-respect. I love my son.””Where does that come from? Who asked? You feel things. You feel things when they’re in your interest. You feel things when they further your drive, your will to do something.””Ass of the universe.””Pure will. Where’s the heart?””Where’s the liver?” she said.”I don’t know why I came here. It was crazy, thinking something might come of it. Did I forget who you are, how you consider the simplest things people say and do an affront to your destiny? You have that, you know. A sense of personal destiny, like some German in the movies.””What’s that mean?””I don’t know.””What movie, ass?””Come to my room. Come on, let’s go to the hotel, right now.””Whisper,” she said.”Don’t make me hate myself, Kathryn.””You’ll wake him up. Whisper.””I’m fucking pissed off. How can I whisper?””We’ve had that argument.” Bored.”You make me hate us both.””That’s an old tired argument.” Bored. The worst remarks were bored ones. The best weapons. Bored sarcasm, bored wit, bored tones.”But what about Frank? We haven’t had that argument in a while, have we? How is it he just happened to drop by? Did he want to talk over old times?”She was laughing. What was she laughing at?”What a pair, you two. The ragged self-regarding artist, the secretly well-to-do young woman. How many intimate little lunches did you and Frank have while I was doing my booklets and pamphlets? All those diminutive things I was so good at. That minor status you hated so much and still hate in me. What sexy currents passed in the air? Buddy-buddy. Did he ask you up to one of those dreary flats he was always holed up in? He spent half his life looking for bottle openers in other people’s kitchens. Did that make it sleazier, sexier? Did you talk about your father’s money? No, that would have made him hate you. That would have made him want to fuck you in all the wrong ways, so to speak. And what about Owen, the way you look out for his interests, his curious interests, that half-flirtish thing that comes over you.” I went into my female voice routine, a tactic I hadn’t used since the recitation of the 27 Depravities. “Are you sure, Owen honey, you never wrote a single line of poetry when you were a lonely farmboy under that big prairie sky?””Fobuck yobou.””That’s right.””You stupid.””That’s right. Bilingual.””You’re just shit.””Whisper, whisper.”She went inside. I decided to follow, feeling my way in the dark. Soft noise, a light around the corner. She was in the bathroom, pants down, seated, when I moved into the doorway. She tried to kick at the door, one arm flailing, but her legs were caught in the jeans and the arm wasn’t long enough. Water music. Too urgent to be contained.”What were you laughing at before?””Out.””I want to know.””If you don’t get out.””Say it in Ob.””You bastard.””Would you like a magazine?””If you don’t go. If you don’t get out.”The argument worked in such a way that we kept losing the sequence. It moved backwards at times, then advanced abruptly, passing over subjects. There were frequent changes in mood. Moods lasted only seconds. Bored, self-righteous, injured. These injured moments were so sadly gratifying that we tried to prolong them. The argument was full of satisfactions, the major one being that we did not have to examine what we said.”It lacks intrepidness.””Get out.””You’ll build a reed boat.””James, son of a bitch, I want you out of here.””You’ll live in a gas balloon that circles the earth. A seven-story balloon with ferns in the lobby.””I’m serious now. If you don’t get out. I really mean this.””You’ll take him to the Museum of Holes. So he’ll have a better understanding of your life work. Dirt holes, mud holes, tall holes, short holes.””You bastard, I’ll get you for this.””Pee pee pee pee pee pee pee.””You stupid.””Don’t you realize that as long as you have to sit down to pee, you’ll never be a dominant force in the world? You’ll never be a convincing technocrat or middle manager. Because people will know. She’s in there sitting down. “I stayed on the terrace for a while. Then I climbed the short stairway to the roof. Flashing lights in the harbor. He was awake, I could hear them talking and laughing. What were they laughing at? She came up, tossed me a sweater and sat on the ledge.”Your son’s afraid you might frobeeze.””What?””Frobeeze tobo dobeobath.” Amused.”I wish you’d stop doing that. Both of you.””Issue a formal order.””Why did you come up here?”Amused. “He sent me.””I want to see him. Wherever you two end up. You’ll send him.””Issue a command. We’ll route it through the system.””Bitch. You knew.””How do you think I feel? I wanted to come back here.””To dig.””You make me insane sometimes.””Good.””Shut up.””You shut up.””You’re afraid of your own son. It disturbs you, that there’ll always be a connection.””What connection?””We find things. We learn.””What do you learn?””I never minded what you did. I know you’ve always arranged your life around things you couldn’t possibly fear losing. The snag in this plan is your family. What do you do about us? But I never minded what you wrote. It’s your present occupation I despise. I would hate your life. I would hate doing what you do. That awful man.”A high-pitched voice. “That awful man.””The travel alone would drive me crazy. I don’t know how you stand it. And the job.””We’ve heard all this.” Bored.”What am I, who am I, what do I want, who do I love. A Harlequin romance.””Make sense.””Make sense. If only you knew. But you’re so small and whining.””I’m the ass of the universe. That implies a certain scope, a dimension.””You’ll be an alcoholic. That’s what you’ll be. I give you a year. Especially if you don’t go back to North America. You’ll drift into it here. You’ll find yourself packing a flask to take to Saudi Arabia. If you’re better off without it, you’re an alcoholic. Remember that.””That’s your father’s line.””That’s right. But he wasn’t better off without it. He was a dead soul either way. You’re different.””I like what I’m doing. Why can’t I make you understand that? You don’t listen. Your view is the only view. If you don’t like something, how could anyone like it? If you’re better off without it, he’d say, pouring another bourbon. And I like his writing. I think it’s fantastic. I’ve told him that. I’ve encouraged him. You’re not the only one who encourages him. You’re not the sole support. And I’ll tell you how you think. I’ll tell you exactly. You need things to be committed to. You need belief. Tap is the world you’ve created and you can believe in that. It’s yours, no one can take it from you. Your archaeology is yours. You’re a wonderful amateur. I mean it, the best. You make the professionals seem like so many half-ass triflers. They just dabble, they putter. It’s your world now. Pure, fine, radiant. He’d pour another bourbon. If you’re better off without it. He liked his bourbon all right. What was the name of that boat, where we talked? The fisherman pounding the octopus. Boats are either saints or women, except when they’re places.”I put the sweater on.”You know how it is with Canadians,” she said. “We love to be disappointed. Everything we do ends up disappointingly. We know this, we expect this, so we’ve made disappointment part of the inner requirement of our lives. Disappointment is our native emotion. It’s our guiding spirit. We arrange things to make disappointment inevitable. This is how we feed ourselves in winter.”She seemed to be accusing me of something.

The terrace was L-shaped. From the longer of the segments, the east, where I sat doing a pronoun exercise in my book on modern Greek, I saw a familiar figure in red shorts and t-shirt go running across the street and along the restaurant wall, where he passed quickly from sight, the first of two familiar figures I would see that day.It was David Keller, toning up. I put down the book, delighted to have an excuse to do so. Then I went outside and headed up through a small dusty park toward the pine woods that form a band around Lycabettus Hill. As I walked through the opening in the fence I heard my name called. Lindsay was behind me, also tracking the runner.We walked into the woods and found a path that looked as though it might suit someone running, being set at less of a lateral slant than the others. The pine floor was dry and pale. There were no shrubs or bushes and it was possible to see a fair distance up into the woods.”Why does he come all the way up here to run?””He likes the woods. Someone told him it’s better to run on rough terrain.””A milder heart attack.””He was serious about sports. He needs to hear himself breathe, he says. He was football, basketball crazy.””The dogs will get him in here.””Dogs like him,” she said.She walked lazily, swaying, hands clasped behind her. From an opening in the trees we saw part of the sprawl toward Hymettus, white buildings, a white city in this September sun. She seemed often to be thinking some amusing thought, perhaps something so nearly inseparable from a private perception she could not share it easily. She was shy with people but eager to receive, never wary or distrustful. Her eyes were full of humor, fond remembering. Her favorite stories concerned men making fools of themselves heroically.”I like it here. It’s so still.””He has a kind of shagginess. As far as dogs.””They really do. They follow him.”We saw him coming back this way, pounding crookedly on the narrow path, dancing over tree roots and stones. We stepped out of the way. He went past grunting, breath blasting, his face twisted and stretched, looking unfinished. We found a crude bench in the sun.”How long will you stay?” she said.”Awhile. Until I begin to feel I know it here. Until I begin to feel responsible. New places are a kind of artificial life.””I’m not sure I know what you mean. But I think that’s a Charles Maitland type remark. A little weary. I also think people save up remarks like that, waiting for me to come into range.””It’s your own doing.””Sure. I’m so innocent.””How are your storefront English lessons going?””It’s not exactly a storefront and I think I’m learning more Greek than they’re learning English but aside from that it’s going well.””It’s not that we think we see innocence. We see generosity and calm. Someone who’ll sympathize with us over our mistakes and bad luck. That’s where all these observations come from. Mistakes in life. We try to make pointed remarks out of the messes we’ve created. A second chance. A well-turned life after all.”Below us two dobermans ranged along a draw. The woods were marked with shallow draws and deeper man-made channels to carry off winter rains. We heard David approach again. The dogs went taut, looking up this way. He passed just above us, blowing, and Lindsay turned to flip a pebble at him. A girl in a school smock said something to the dogs.”When will we get to meet Tap?””They’re still on the island. They’re laying plans.””You make it sound sinister.””They’re sitting in the sunlit kitchen, avoiding mention of my name.””We haven’t had dinner in a while,” she said.”Let’s have dinner.””I’ll call the Bordens.””I’ll call the Maitlands.””Who else is in town?””Walk around the Hilton pool,” I told her.The three of us went slowly down toward the street. David talked in short bursts.”Happen to have a canteen? What kind of friend?””What are you in training for?””Night drop into Iran. The bank’s determined to be the first ones back in. I’ll be leading a small elite group. Credit officers with blackened faces.””I’m glad we’re here instead of there,” Lindsay said. “I don’t think I’d want to be there even after the trouble ends.””It ain’t ending real soon. That’s why I’m doing this commando stuff.”An old man with a setter walked along an intersecting path. Lindsay stooped over the dog, murmuring to it, a little English, a little Greek. David and I kept walking, turning into a path that ran parallel to the street, twenty feet above it. A woman walked below us, headed in the opposite direction, carrying pastry in a white box. David’s breathing leveled off.”Dresses with thin shoulder straps,” he said. “A puckered bodice, you know. The kind of dress where the strap keeps slipping off and she doesn’t notice for two or three strides and then she puts it back up there casually like brushing a curl off her forehead. That’s all. The strap slips off. She keeps walking. We have a momentary naked shoulder.””A puckered bodice.””I want you to get to know Lindsay. She’s terrific.””I see that.””But you don’t know her. She likes you, Jim.””I like her.””But you don’t know her.””We talk now and then.””Listen, you have to come with us to the islands.””Great.””We want to do the islands. I want you to get to know her.””David, I know her.””You don’t know her.””And I like her. Honest.””She likes you.””We all like each other.””Bastard. I want us to do the islands.””Summer’s ending.””There’s winter,” he said.His probing looks disarmed me. It was a practice of his to search people’s faces, determined to find a response to his vehement feelings. Then he’d show his big tired western smile, his character actor’s smile. It was interesting, the esteem in which he held Lindsay, the half reverence. He wanted everyone to know her. It would help us understand how she’d changed his life.She caught up to us now.”Everyone’s so nice,” she said. “If you speak a few words of the language, they want to take you home to dinner. That’s one of the things about living abroad. It takes a while to find out who the madmen are.”Near the spear leaves of a blue-green agave she turned to speak to David, her left ear translucent in the sun.

Later that afternoon, near a kiosk where I often bought the newspaper, I saw Andreas Eliades in a car with another man and a woman. The car had stopped for a light and I’d glanced that way. He was alone in the rear seat. It was one of those low-skirted broad-visored Citroëns, medieval, with slash headlights and heavy trim, a battering contraption for sieges. Above the full black beard his dark eyes were set on me. We nodded to each other, smiled politely. The car moved off.

Sherding. Crouched in the pungent earth, soft forms all about her, pink-ridged, curled, writhing, here in B zone, below the black decay. She is scraping down the square. Right-angled corners, straight sides. Her sweat is a rank reminder, the only one, that she exists, that she is separate from the things that surround her. Troweling around a stone. She remembers someone telling her that stones gradually sink through humus and loam. Clip the roots, leave the stones in place. Part of a hearth, perhaps, or wall. An incised design. A glimpse of political life. Rodents, earthworms turn the soil. She senses the completeness of the trench. It is her size, it fits. She rarely looks over the rim. The trench is enough. A five-foot block of time abstracted from the system. Sequence, order, information. All she needs of herself. Nothing more, nothing less. In its limits the trench enables her to see what’s really there. It’s a test device for the senses. New sight, new touch. She loves the feel of workable earth, the musky raw aroma. The trench is her medium by now. It is more than the island as the island is more than the world.I was helpless, overwhelmed. The bare fact of it disheartened me. I couldn’t see what the work signified or represented to her. Was it the struggle that counted, a sense of test or mission? What was the metaphor, exactly?I was compelled in the end to take her literally. She was digging to find things, to learn. Objects themselves. Tools, weapons, coins. Maybe objects are consoling. Old ones in particular, earth-textured, made by otherminded men. Objects are what we aren’t, what we can’t extend ourselves to be. Do people make things to define the boundaries of the self? Objects are the limits we desperately need. They show us where we end. They dispel our sadness, temporarily.She called that night to say she’d taken a job with the British Columbia Provincial Museum. She spoke haltingly, her voice full of concern. I could almost believe someone close to me had died. The British Columbia Provincial Museum. I told her that was fine, fine. I said it sounded like a wonderful museum. We were polite, accommodating. We spoke softly, moved to a gentleness we clearly felt we owed each other. Owen had helped arrange the job, through contacts. The museum was in Victoria and specialized in the culture of the Northwest Coast Indians. The museum sponsored occasional field schools. Fine, fine. We were warm to each other, considerate. I wanted her to be certain the job was good enough, what she wanted, although she wasn’t sure at this point exactly what she’d be doing. She apologized for having to take Tap so far away and promised we would work out visits despite the distance. Work out meetings, trips together, long talks, father and son. Her voice was dense, chambered, the telephone a sign and instrument of familiar distance, this condition of being apart. All the tender feelings passed between us that I’d sought in recent months to revive by some jumbled luck of character, will and indirection, carried now in the static of our voices, undersea. There were many silences. We said goodnight, dark, sorry, making plans to meet in Piraeus for the trip to the airport. After that we would talk again, talk often, keep each other informed, stay in the closest possible touch. Ashes.

In the painted evening they walk past the windmill. He points out to sea, about a hundred yards, to the place where dolphins breached, a week ago, in a softfall of violet light. It is one of those imprinted moments, part of him now, contained in island time. A fishing boat approaches in the calm that settles in at this hour. It is blood red, the Katerina, a life ring fixed to the mast. She smiles as he makes out the name. The motor leaves a cadenced noise.The small Cretan rugs. The plank floors. The old lamp with its sepia shade. The donkey bag on the wall. The flowers in rusty cans on the roof, the steps, the window ledges. Tap’s handprint on a mirror. The cane chair in a rectangle of light.In the morning they leave. From the top deck of the boat they see the white village rocking in the mist. How brave and affecting it is, houses clustered on a windy rock, news and reassurance. They eat the food she has packed, sitting low in their slatted bench, out of the wind. He asks her the names of things, ship parts, equipment, and later they walk across the lower deck to trace the system of ropes and anchor chains.The sun is obscured in dense ascending cloud. Soon the island is a silhouette, a conjecture or mood of light, scant and pale on the iron sea.

The Mountain

6

the aircraft veered into position, halting. We waited for clearance. I looked out the window, trying to find something that might distract me from the meditative panic I always experience, the dream-rush before takeoff, all the week’s measures of self-awareness in one charged moment. The pale sand stretched level in the distance. A figure was out there, a man in a flax robe. I watched him walk into nothing. Erased in chemical flame. The plane moved down the runway and I sat back, rigid, looking straight ahead.Words sounded incomplete to me. The starts and stops in people’s voices came unexpectedly. I couldn’t figure out the rhythm. But the writing flowed, of course. It seemed to have a movement top to bottom as well as right to left. If Greek or Latin characters are paving stones, Arabic is rain. I saw writing everywhere, the cursive beaded slant in tile, tapestry, brass and wood, in faience mosaics and on the white veils of women crowded in a horse-drawn cart. I looked up to see words turning corners, arranged geometrically on mud-brick walls, knotted and mazed, stuccoed, painted, inlaid, climbing gateways and minarets.I sat across the aisle from a dead man on a Yemen Airways flight from San’a to Dhahran. He died about fifteen minutes into the flight and the people traveling with him started wailing. They carried cloth-covered bundles and wailed. A man behind me remarked to his companion, “But credit extension isn’t the issue here.” I gripped the arm rests and looked straight ahead. We were over the Empty Quarter.I found myself studying doors, shutters, mosque lamps, carpets. Surfaces were dense and abstract. Where figural things were present they were rendered as nuances of line or curve, taken out of nature to the level of perfect repetition. Even writing was design, not meant to be read, as though part of some unbearable revelation. I didn’t know the names of things.Forty men and women in immaculate white robes with close-fitting head-scarves filled the rear section of the plane, a Tunis Air flight, Cairo-Damascus. The women’s hands were covered with small red marks, designs of some kind. At first I thought they were letters of the alphabet. Not that I knew which alphabet. Possibly the obscure language of some religious sect. Finally I decided the figures were crosses, although some might have been chevrons and others might have been variations of either of these. I couldn’t tell whether the marks were ingrained or simply applied to the surface of the skin with cosmetic dye. The people had been on the plane when I boarded, all quietly in place, waiting. After we landed I looked back that way as I moved up the aisle toward the nose exit. They were still in their seats.Women’s eyes glanced away, windows were false, shadows crossed the wall in dappled patterns, architectural planes receded, prayer niches were aligned with Mecca. This last fact supplied an axis to the vapor of fleeting shapes. So much that happened seemed to happen simultaneously. Animals everywhere. The cramped passages of the souk were the least secret places. Loud voices, hanging meat. The crowd was soft, however, floating in robes, sandaled, billowing, touched by the light that fell through broken places in the roof.I stood waiting at the baggage conveyor in the airport in Amman. The king would be arriving later that afternoon after seventeen days abroad. When the king returns to Jordan after a trip abroad, two camels and a bull are slaughtered at the airport. The drive to the palace follows.I was staying at the Inter-Con, which was near the palace and across the street from the U.S. embassy, a not uncommon Mideast cluster. I took the oversized map I’d bought in the lobby and spread it across the bed. There they were, as Owen had said, the anagrammatic place-names. Zarqa and Azraq. Between them, west of the midway point, the hilltop fortress of inscribed stones. Qasr Hallabat.It didn’t mean anything. I’d only thought of checking the map for these places on my way up in the elevator. They were a curiosity, that was all. But I was interested to find that he hadn’t invented them.

Volterra wore a battered field jacket. Paramilitary drab had always been his color, I realized. He had about two weeks’ growth on his face and looked crafty and drawn. We embraced silently. He looked at me, nodding, his biblical gesture of friendship and memory and elapsed time. Then we went into the restaurant.It was an Indian place, empty except for us and two boys, the waiters, who took our orders and then stood motionless at the end of the long dark narrow room. We sat in tall chairs and talked about Kathryn. It was she who’d given him my number in Athens. When I told him I expected to be in Amman in three weeks’ time he said he would try to meet me there. He was calling from Aqaba.”I thought you had a traveling companion, Frank.””She’s in the room watching TV.””Where are you staying?””Small place near the fourth circle. You’ve been to Amman?””First time.””Transit cranes,” he said. “Beeping taxi horns.””You’ve spent all this time in Aqaba?””On and off. It’s our base. We make three-day trips into the Wadi Rum with a guide and a LandRover. We camp out, in our fashion. Then we go back to Aqaba to water-ski.””I don’t see you on water-skis.””That’s an abbreviation. ‘Water-ski.’ It’s shorthand. It means everything in the world that doesn’t involve looking for a bunch of crazy people in a barren waste with a guide whose true purpose is to lead us in circles.””Why are you looking for them?”Frank laughed. “Is this an interview?”The boys pushed a large and elaborate serving table along the carpeted floor. On it were two cans of beer.”Owen seemed to think the cult struck a romantic chord somewhere deep in your breast.””When you put it that way, Jim, I don’t think I’m obliged to discuss the matter further, friends or not.””I take it back.”He poured the beer into his glass, watching me.”I’m looking for something outside the range of expectations, you know? It’s just a probe. The Wadi Rum’s been filmed before, wide screen, soaring music. The place intrigues me in a totally different way. It has to be linked to this homicidal calculation. These small figures in the landscape. Brademas says these people are stalkers. They pick a victim and they watch. They wait for something. There’s a particular logic.””You’ve walked away from three or four projects, Kathryn told me.””They were safe, ” he said.Something came into his eyes, a cold light I recognized as the contempt he often summoned to respond to challenges.”They weren’t worth sticking with. They were exercises. I found myself getting interested in things because they presented a familiar theme or subject I thought I could handle differently, I thought I could give a sweet twist to. Genre crap. I was trying to force these ideas to deliver up riches they didn’t contain.”His mood softened, one word to the next.”I’ve been feeling the pressure. I admit it. People alighting in helicopters. Clapped-out producers. Lawyer-agents in Nazi sunglasses. They come down out of the sky. Nobody likes the way I work. I don’t talk to anybody. I ban people from the set. Do you know what a dumb little napoleonic thing that is? But I do it. I like to do things in secret. I don’t say a word to people who want to write about me. Two good films, made money. It happens I like doing deals. Today we do deals. You don’t have to pretend money is dirty. Or a deal memo is too complicated for your sensibility. It’s a Jewish science, movie-dealing, like psychoanalysis. Only what’s the connection?””I don’t know.””Intimacy. They involve intimate exchanges. The point is I was starting to hear things. I was reading things about myself, hearing footsteps. I was the man who walks off his own set, the man who closes down productions. I started getting the feeling that my downfall was being plotted in the major capitals of the world. Volterra’s time had come, you know? They weren’t even going to extend me the courtesy of a finished disaster. I was wasting away above the line. Let’s cordon off the area and watch him die in relative privacy.””What have you come across out there?””Not a whole hell of a lot. First the desert patrol knows what I’m about. They don’t like me sticking my head in every black tent in the area, asking questions. Second my guide is no help at all. Salim. He sees himself as a Swiss banker. Terrifically discreet and guarded. ‘One does not speak of these things.’ ‘I cannot ask these people such a question.’ Then there’s Del, the traveling companion. She calls the Arabs rag-heads. Another big help. But there’s something going on. These Bedouins talk to Salim, I see something passing between them that doesn’t get translated. There’s a rest station at a place called Ras en-Naqab. We went in there once on our way back to Aqaba. The place is on a hill and the wind comes out of the desert like a jet exhaust. Del wasn’t with us that trip and Salim made right for the toilet, so I go in alone. There’s only one person in the place, a white man. At first I figured he was Circassian. He’s huddled over his food, eating with his fingers, right hand only, dressed in layers of loose shirts and tunics, bareheaded. I sit down, take a closer look at the guy, say to myself this guy is European. So I address him. I ask some harmless question. He says something to me in Arabic. I keep talking to him, he keeps eating. I went to get Salim that useless bastard to translate. When we got back the man was gone.””A sighting.””I think I made a sighting.””Do Circassians speak Arabic?””I asked Salim. Yes. But I still think I made a sighting.””Are you sure it was Arabic you heard?””First you interview me. Then you make an interrogation out of it.””What do you do now?””Brademas gave me a name at the Department of Antiquities. When we first got to Amman I went there. This is a very soft-spoken, very cultured man. Dr. Malik. He’s working with a Dutch team that’s surveying sites right outside the city. He tried to discourage me. All I could get from him was the general area where the murder took place.”I said, “It stands to reason they’d move on after killing someone.””Brademas told me they stayed. They’re somewhere in the Rum.””He didn’t tell me that.””They changed locations but they’re still there, he said. Dr. Malik told him they’d been spotted. But he wouldn’t tell me that. I went to see him again this morning, soon as we arrived. He told me if I really want to learn something about the cult I have to go to Jerusalem. ‘You must ask for Vosdanik,’ he said.”Volterra liked to show skepticism by tilting his head to cast sidelong glances at the figure opposite him. Now he described his talk at the Department of Antiquities, repeating the aggrieved and disbelieving looks he’d communicated to Dr. Malik.He was told to go to the old city, the Armenian quarter. He must ask for Vosdanik. This man has three names, four names. Vosdanik is apparently the first name of one of these three or four full names. He is a guide in the old city. This was the absolute limit of Dr. Malik’s knowledge.Frank liked doing accents.He asked Dr. Malik to give him some names here in Jordan. He didn’t want to go to Jerusalem. He didn’t want to get involved with another guide. He was told Vosdanik knew about the cult.He would be easy to find. He was Armenian. He lived in the Armenian quarter. Frank asked for more information on the Wadi Rum. There’d been a murder, after all. More than one in fact. Dr. Malik said, “It is best we do not speak of these things. “Volterra let his gesturing hand drop out of the air. The boys brought our food, then stood in the dimness at the end of the room. No one else came in.”I can’t surrender myself to places,” Frank said. “I’m always separate. I’m always working at myself. I never understood the lure of fabulous places. Or the idea of losing yourself in a place. The desert down there is stunning at times. Shapes and tones. But I could never be affected by it in a deeply personal way, I could never see it as an aspect of myself or vice versa. I need it for something, I want it as a frame and a background. I can’t see myself letting it overwhelm me. I would never give myself up to the place or to any other place. I’m the place. I guess that’s the reason. I’m the only place I need.”He wanted to know about my travels. I told him I was a traveler only in the sense that I covered distances. I traveled between places, never in them.Rowser had sent me out to these jurisdictions to perform various good works, to fill in here, do a review there, restructure some offices, see to sagging morale. It was a season of small promise. Our Iranian control was dead, shot by two men in the street. Our associate for Syria-Iraq was sending cryptic telexes from Cyprus. Kabul was tense. Ankara lacked home heating, families were moving to hotels. Throughout Turkey people could not vote unless they had their fingers dyed. This was to keep them from voting more than once. Our associate for the Emirates woke up to find a corpse in his garden. The Emirates were overbanked. Egypt had religious tensions. Foreign executives in Libya were coming home from the office to find their houses occupied by workers. It was the winter the hostages were taken in Tehran and Rowser put the entire region on duplicate. This meant all records had to be copied and sent to Athens. One of our vice-presidents, visiting Beirut, came out of his hotel to find his car being disassembled by militiamen. I opened an office in North Yemen.Frank ordered two more beers. We talked about Kathryn. When we finished dinner we wandered around for an hour. Taxis followed us, beeping. We were in a residential area, empty, no one else on foot. A man in uniform came out of the darkness and said something we didn’t understand. Another figure appeared twenty yards along the sidewalk, holding an automatic rifle. The first man pointed across the street. We were to continue our walk over there, “Something tells me we’ve come upon the palace,” Frank said. “The king is at home.”

It took two days to get permits for the trip to Jerusalem. When we reached the Jordanian security area, Volterra and our driver took all the documents inside. I leaned against a post under the corrugated roof, watching Del Nearing blow on the lenses of her sunglasses and wipe them in circular motions with a soft cloth.”There’s an Arabic letter called jim,” she said.”What does it look like?””Don’t recall. I gave the language about an hour’s study.””It could be important,” I said. “It could tell me everything I need to know.”She looked up, smiling, a slight figure with a finely drawn face, her dark hair short and slicked back. She’d spent the fifty-minute drive ministering to herself, catching up on the precautions travelers take against the environment. The coating of hands. The moistening of face and neck. The delicate release of eye drops from a squat bottle. She went about these tasks apart from them, deep in thought. She gave the impression she was always behind schedule, accustomed to doing things in layers. These moments of sealed-in physical busyness were meant mainly to be spent in reflection.”I have a disembodied feeling about this whole trip,” she said. “I’ve been floating, like. I didn’t know we were going to Jerusalem until we got into the taxi and went to pick you up. I thought we were going to the airport. He claims he told me last night. I don’t use drugs anymore. Frank helped me with that. But I am disembodied, regardless. I miss my apartment, my cat. I never thought I’d miss my apartment. That must be where my body is.”Volterra came out.”Look at her. Those oversized glasses. With her thin face and that short hair. All wrong. She looks like a science-fiction insect.””Suck a rock, Jojo.”We got on a bus with a group of Baptists from Louisiana and rode across the river to the Israeli compound. Elaborate procedures. Del came out of the booth where women were searched and joined us at passport control, scanning the area.”Look how they lean on those M-16s. I thought they’d be different from the Arabs and Turks. They’re sloppy-looking, aren’t they? And they wave those guns around, they don’t care who’s standing in front of them. I don’t know what I expected. Neater people.””It’s going to rain,” Frank said. “I want it to rain.””Why?””So you’ll take those glasses off.””I don’t know what I expected,” she said.”So we’ll get drenched walking in the old city. So you’ll catch another cold to match Istanbul. So I’ll know the disaster is complete.”We shared an eight-seat taxi with Russian Orthodox nuns. The sun broke through heavy cloud as we neared Jerusalem, half gold on the tawny hills, on the limestone buildings and Ottoman ramparts. Our hotel was north of the old city. Volterra lingered at the desk to make inquiries.We entered through the Damascus Gate and were caught at once in the polyglot surge. I felt crowded by languages, surprised and jostled as much as by donkeys loaded with produce, by running boys. Soldiers wore yarmulkas, a man lugged an eight-foot cross. Volterra spoke Italian to some people who asked directions. Merchants loaded bolts of scarlet cloth, sacks of potatoes onto wooden carts which boys would use to batter through the crowds. Coptic priests in blue, Ethiopian monks in gray, the White Father in his spotless soutane. Was religion the point or language? Or was it costume? Nuns in white, in black, full habits, somber hoods, flamboyant winglike bonnets. Beggars folded in cloaks, sitting motionless. Radios played, walkie-talkies barked and hissed. The call to prayer was an amplified chant that I could separate from the other sounds only briefly. Then it was part of the tumult and pulse, the single living voice, as though fallen from the sky.Del was the first to wander off, disappearing down a twisted alley being torn up by workmen. Then Volterra muttered something about the Armenian quarter. We made vague plans to meet at the Western Wall.I found a café and sat outside to sip Turkish coffee and watch shopkeepers in idle talk. Their windows were full of religious souvenirs, rows of mass-produced objects. I found this presence a bolstering force. All the crippled pilgrims in the Via Dolorosa, the black-hatted Hasidim, the Greek priests, Armenian monks, the men at prayer on patterned carpets in the mosques—these streams of belief made me uneasy. It was all a reproach to my ardent skepticism. It crowded me, it pressured and shoved. So I tended to look with a small ironic measure of appreciation at the trashy objects in the shop windows. The olivewood, glass and plastic. They counteracted to some extent the impact of those larger figures who milled in the streets, coming from worship.I saw Del talking to an old man leaning on a cane outside a spice stall. He was white-bearded, wearing a knitted cap and sweater, a robe with a black sash, and there was an aura of stillness about him that was a form of beauty. His eyes were soft, a half-dreaming gaze, and in his face, which looked like a desert face, was an age of memory and light. It occurred to me that she was telling him something very much like this. I barely knew her, of course, but it was a thing she would do, I thought. Approach an old man in the street and tell him that she liked his face.She saw me and came over, making her way past a group whose leader carried a banner with the letter sigma on it. Del had propped the sunglasses on her forehead and was peeling a green orange. There was an element of street flash about her, a winsome toughness. She moved like a shambling kid in a school corridor, raggy and sullen. I hadn’t seen till now how good-looking she was. The face was proportioned and cool, eyes disregarding, a moody curve to the mouth. She gave me a slice of orange and sat down.”I don’t think he understood me.””What were you telling him?””How nice he looked, standing there. What beautiful eyes. That’s what I’ll remember. The faces. Even those macho faggots in Turkey. You see incredible faces. How long are we staying here?””I leave in the morning. I have an afternoon flight out of Amman. I don’t know about you two. You’ll have to check the permits.””Why are we here?””I’m sightseeing. You’re looking for an Armenian.””I like that jacket. That jacket’s loaded with character.””It used to be tweed.””I love old stuff.””It’s been worn down by erosion. You can have it.””Too big but thanks. Frank says you’re lonely.””Frank and I don’t always understand each other. Our friendship depended largely on Kathryn. When he and I were alone together, even then, the subject was Kathryn, the missing link was Kathryn.””Can’t you get laid in Athens?””I’ve developed a preoccupied air. Women think I want to take them to museums.””I don’t like museums. Men always follow me in museums. What is it about places like that? Every time I turn there’s a figure watching me.””I love Frank. It’s not that I don’t love him. But we don’t really live in the same world anymore. I love the times we had. We were in our twenties, learning important things. But it was Kathryn, really, who made the whole thing work.”I was expecting Del to ask if he’d slept with Kathryn. She had a way of looking through one’s remarks, waiting for them to end so she could get to what she thought was the point. Her voice didn’t quite match the blankish face. It had a sultry little disturbance in it, an early morning scratch. We looked at each other. She asked about lunch instead.Later we waited for Volterra in a light rain. Men washing at the fountain outside el-Aqsa, arrayed barefoot at the taps. Men swaying at the Wall, beneath the long courses of masonry, moon-scarred limestone with finely chiseled margins, with rock-dwelling plants cascading out of the cracks. We stood near a fence adorned with stylized branch candlesticks. When he showed up finally, jacket collar raised against the chill, he took Del off to one side, where they had a brief unhappy exchange. He seemed to want her to go to the Wall, the section reserved for women. She looked away, her hands deep in the pockets of a nylon parka.On the way back to the hotel he told me he’d found Vosdanik.

We walked in the dark to a restaurant near the Jaffa Gate. He didn’t say why Del wasn’t coming with us. It was misty and cold, we were a long time finding the place.Vosdanik walked in, a small dark man wearing an undersized fedora. He removed the hat and coat, offered us cigarettes, remarked that stuffed pigeon was the specialty here. There was a note of serious business in his manner, a modulated note, softest when he greeted people passing near our table. We drank arak and asked him questions.He spoke seven languages. His father had walked across the Syrian desert as a boy, a forced march, the Turks, 1916. His brother’s business was rubble in Beirut. He told us his life story as a matter of course. He seemed to think we expected it.Before he was a guide he’d worked as interpreter for a team of archaeologists at a site near the Sea of Galilee. Crews had been excavating for decades. Twenty levels were eventually uncovered, almost four thousand years of settlement. A vast cataloguing of fragments.”They made temples that will face the east. In Egypt at that time they call the east God’s land. Ta-netjer. The west is death, the setting sun. You will bury the dead on the west bank. The west is the city of the dead. The east is cockcrow, the rising sun.This is where you will live, on the east bank. Put the house in the east, put the tomb in the west. Between there will be the river.”He went at the pigeon seriously, rice spilling off his fork. His remarks were well spaced, pauses for effect, for mouthfuls of food, gestures of greeting and good will as people entered.He was the guide as storyteller. Even incidents from his own life he recounted with a degree of awe, as if he were pointing out the workmanship in a polychrome tile. There was a bump on the bridge of his nose. All his clothes looked shrunken.At the excavation he first heard of a group, a cult, apparently nameless. An archaeologist spoke of it, a Frenchman named Texier. In the beginning Vosdanik thought the references were to an ancient cult whose members had lived in this region. It was a land of cults and sects and desert monks and stylites. Every settled group produced a scatter of rival cells. From these a man or men broke off, working toward a purer vision.”Wherever you will find empty land, there are men who try to get closer to God. They will be poor, they will take little food, they will go away from women. They will be Christian monks, they will be Sufis who dress with wool shirts, who repeat the holy words from the Koran, who dance and spin. Visions are real. God is involved with living men. When Mohammed was, there still were men who went away from him. Closer to God, always in their mind to remember God. Dhikr allab. There were Sufis in Palestine, Greek monks in the Sinai. Always some men go away.”This man Texier, himself half starved and a little distant, offered clarification, sitting in the evenings under a swaying bulb beneath the excavation roof. A note pad and briar pipe. He was working backward through curves of time, arc after arc of fragments set on the ground around his chair. At intervals he spoke softly in the general direction of Vosdanik, shadowed on a wall ten yards away, beyond the shards, a man unaccustomed to listening.The cult was not ancient as far as Texier knew. The cult was living. The members had last been seen, a handful of men, in a cliffside village some miles north of Damascus—a Christian settlement where the people at times still spoke Aramaic (or Western Aramaic or Syriac), which happened to be the language of Jesus.Wait, wait, go slow, we said.He ate twice as fast as we did, spoke a thousand words to every one of ours. It was his job, telling stories, supplying names and dates, sorting through the layered calamities of his city, the alleys and crypts where profound things had taken place.It was not one of Vosdanik’s seven languages, Aramaic, but he had heard it in the Christmas liturgy. The cult lived in two caves above the village. They were elusive men, rarely seen, except for one of them who occasionally came down into the streets and talked to the children. The language of the streets and schools was Arabic. But this man made efforts to speak Aramaic, amusing the children. Good reason why the others stayed above the town. They were keeping a watch, waiting for someone or something.”They follow you like a crooked shadow,” he said.After they’d left, the body of a man was found in one of the caves, a villager, his chest full of slashes and puncture wounds, blood everywhere. The cultists were thought at first to be Druze, blondish, some of them blue-eyed—a Muslim sect living in the mountains in the southern part of the country. A murder based on religious differences, it seemed. But arising out of nothing. There’d been no trouble, no provocation. And why were the initials of the victim cut into the blade of the crude iron tool used to kill him?Vosdanik paused, his sad face hanging in the smoke.”You will want to hurt your enemy, it is in history to destroy his name. The Egyptians made pottery that the names of their enemies were engraved with sharp reeds. They will smash the bowls, great harm to the enemies. The same harm that if you cut his throat.”None of this was easy for us to follow. Vosdanik was involved in the textures of place, in histories, rituals, dialects, eye and skin color, bearing and stance, endless sets of identifying traits. We leaned forward, straining to hear, to understand.He ordered more arak. I poured a scant measure of water, watching the arak cloud, a sedimentary stir. His narrative worked back to the dig, the overshadowing background, whispers of Islam, occult rabbinical doctrine, the vast embroidered mist of precepts and dreams. Shining icons, strands of hair from the Prophet’s beard. He believed it all.Slow, we told him. Go slow, give us a chance to get it straight.He was taken back by the intensity of Volterra’s questioning. It was clear he had few answers. He hadn’t thought about these things and there was no reason he should have. The cult was just another mystery in the landscape. They were unremarkable to him, these men, considering where he lived, what he knew about the dark places, assassins in cloaks, the dead who walked. He told us of two other cult murders, one we knew about, the Wadi Rum, although the version he’d heard was different in some ways.He went after the last traces of food with a thoroughness almost cleansed of pleasure and zest. To an Arab at the next table he said something that sounded like “German shepherd.” A boy came with arak.”With sweet words you make them naked,” Vosdanik said to us.”Who?””The Arabs. You will be soft with them you get what you want.”He offered us cigarettes. A man with half his face covered by a scarf came out of the toilet, wearing black and carrying a stick. Smoke collected near the ceiling.”Where are they now?” Frank said.”I hear nothing.””Do you think there is one group, two?””I hear three murders, I see one pair of blue eyes.””Were the initials on the knife in Aramaic?””This I don’t know.””Is there an Aramaic alphabet, or what?”Shrugging. “No one can write it anymore. It is only sounds. It traveled in history with the Jews. It was used by itself, it was mixed with other languages. Dog-Aramaic. It was carried by religion and now it fades because of religion, because of Islam, Arabic. It is religion that carries a language. The river of language is God.”And this.”The alphabet is male and female. If you will know the correct order of letters, you make a world, you make creation. This is why they will hide the order. If you will know the combinations, you make all life and death.”He lit another cigarette, leaving one in the pack.”Food for tomorrow,” he said. A shy smile.Tomorrow he would show us an Aramaic inscription on the wall of the Syrian church if we were interested. He would take us to Bethlehem, to Jericho. The columns in el-Aqsa are Crusader columns, he said. Mohammed flew to heaven from the Dome of the Rock.

After he left we stayed behind, drinking and talking, and when we hit the street we had a little trouble finding the way to our hotel.”Let me get this straight,” I said. “There was someone Texier.””He’s not important.””Slow down. We should have left when Vosdanik left. Always leave with the guide. These alleys are full of religious fanatics.””The archaeologist. Forget him.””All right. We’re with the cult. Where were they?””Somewhere in Syria,” Frank said.”What is a Druze?””What were the other words for the language?” he said. “Shit, did I ask about hammers?””I thought he spoke Hebrew.””Who?””Jesus.””He’s not important. Forget him, forget what he spoke. I’m trying to concentrate on essentials. Did I ask about the victim’s health?””He was dead, Frank.””Before they killed him. Did they choose an imbecile, a cancer victim?””His health was not good. This is one of the qualities we associate with death. In all seriousness, where are we? We should have gone out the gate and found a cab.””I thought the walk would clear our heads.”He started laughing.”I don’t think I’m drunk,” I said. “It’s the effect of the smoke, that’s all, and then coming outside. That was a smoky place.”He thought this was very funny. He stopped walking in order to laugh, doubling up.”What did he say?””Who?” I said.”I don’t know what he said. Vosdanik. Maybe it was the smoke. It was a smoky place.”He was talking and laughing at the same time. He had to lean against a wall to laugh.”Did you pay him?””Damn right I paid him. We haggled. The little bastard.””How much did you pay him?””Never mind. Just tell me what he said.”He crossed his arms on his midsection, bent against the wall laughing. It was a staccato laugh, building on itself, broadening in the end to a breathless gasp, the laughter that marks a pause in the progress of the world, the laughter we hear once in twenty years. I went into an alley to vomit.

Through the night I kept waking up. Scenes from the restaurant, patches of Vosdanik’s monologues. His face came back to me as a composed image, movie-lit, bronzed and shaded. The prominent nose, the indentations on either side of the forehead, the crooked fingers lifting a cigarette from the pack of Montanas, the little smile at the end. He seemed a wise and sympathetic figure in this dawn projection, super-lifelike. The third or fourth time I woke up I thought of the dead man’s initials cut into the weapon. Old westerns. If one of those bullets has your name on it, Cody, there’s not a goldarned thing you can do about it. Spitting in the dust. Montana daybreak. Is this what I wanted to isolate from everything else he’d said, is this what I was driving up out of sleep to tell myself to remember? Initials. It was the only thing he’d said that seemed to mean something. I knew something. There was something at the edge of all this. If I could stay awake and concentrate, if I could think clearly, if I could be sure whether I was awake or asleep, if I could either snap awake completely or fall into deep and peaceful sleep, then I might begin to understand.

I sat with Del Nearing in the back of the long Mercedes, waiting for Volterra. A camel stood near the hotel entrance and the Baptists from Louisiana took turns mounting and dismounting, photographing each other.”Frank has crazed eyes this morning. It’s a look he gets now and then. The blood drains out of his eyes. Deadly.””Where were you last night?””Watching TV.””You missed the guide, the linguist.””Not interested.””We drank too much.””It’s not that,” she said. “It’s the old disease. The one that science hasn’t noticed yet. He’s obsessed.”The camel driver posed with a woman named Brenda.”Why was he annoyed at you yesterday?””He has this sentimental idea. I’m part Jewish somewhere back on my mother’s side and he expects me to think I’m coming home. I’m an idiot because I don’t explore my background, I don’t pay more attention to the Jewish ruins. I come mostly from the Midwest. We moved a lot. We lived in a trailer court when I was little. I got into trouble a lot, I ran away two or three times, I went sort of crazy in the Haight. I was way too young to know what was going on. Frank says if it wasn’t for the Jewish underpinning I’d be a total Oklahoma drifter. He’s stupid about that. I’d be a motorcycle moll, a dancer in a lounge. Everything between the coasts is Oklahoma to him. Big, dusty, lonesome.””He makes movies there.””He makes movies. I love his movies. See, on one level he’s fascinated by the pure American thing. The aimlessness, the drifting. That’s fascinating to him, it lends itself somehow. Motels, mobile homes, whatever. But he’d dump me in a minute if I’d never mentioned being part Jewish. Now that’s worthwhile. That’s something to respect yourself for. A Jew.”Frank had nothing to say until we were across the river, sitting under the corrugated roof in the Jordanian area, past the gun emplacements, waiting for our original driver to show up.”Do we have to go to Amman?”The question was addressed to himself, if anyone. He wore dark glasses and kept biting skin from the edge of his thumb. The driver appeared, in jeans and elevated heels, extending his pack of cigarettes.Amman is set on seven hills. In Arabic the word for hill or mountain is jebel. When we were fifteen minutes outside the city I told the driver to take us to Jebel Amman, where the Inter-Continental is located. I would pick up the suitcase I’d left there and then go with Frank and Del to the airport, where I’d catch my plane to Athens, they’d catch theirs to Aqaba, a thirty-minute flight.”Do we have to go to Aqaba?” Del said.Most of their clothes were there, two cameras were there, a tape recorder and other equipment in two suitcases and a canvas bag.Five minutes later Volterra spoke for the second time.”I have it all figured out. Once this collapses. Once the entire career goes down the tubes. I know exactly what I’ll do for the rest of my life. I’ve been planning it since the very beginning. Because I’ve always known. I’ve known since the beginning, I’ve been planning since the beginning. Once the dust clears from the last failure. Once they’ve stopped talking about me in the tones they reserve for the once promising beginners who overextended, who burned out, who miscalculated, who didn’t deliver, who ran out of luck. The tone of tepid regret, you know? The knowing tone that says those early successes were obviously accidents anyway. I know where I’ll go when this happens, what I’ll do.” He dropped his hand from the side of his mouth. “I’ll open a same-day dry-cleaning service. With the money I haven’t pissed away on exploring the world for subjects, I’ll go to a quiet place somewhere, one of those well-planned communities with crescent streets and picturesque lampposts, a series of town-house developments although there’s no town, they’ve forgotten the town. A modest place. Elderly couples. Divorced women with anxious kids. Unassuming. My same-day dry-cleaning store will be in the shopping mall along with the boutique, the supermarket, the radio and TV repair, the three-in-one movie theater, the fast-food places, the travel agent, all of it. It’s a community where no one knows the names of film directors. People just go to the movies, you know? That’s where I’ll hide out for the rest of my life. Frank’s Same Day Dry Cleaning. The fucking clothes’ll come whipping along on these huge fucking conveyors, a thousand pairs of tartan slacks, a thousand tennis dresses, all wrapped in shimmering plastic. You want your tartan slacks, all I do is press a button behind the counter and these serpentine conveyors go into motion, shooting the garment toward the desk in twisty looping figures. Pink sales slips flutter from the moving garments. The plastic rustles, it clings. It clings to everything—clothes, car seats, metal, human flesh. I’m behind the counter, happy to be there. People call me Frank, I call them Mr. Mitchell, Mrs. Green. ‘Hi, Mr. Mitchell, think we got that piña colada stain off your tartan slacks.’ I live in the back of the shop. I have a hotplate, a little Sony TV, my pornographic magazines, my wheat germ and honey shampoo, the one luxury in my life, because I fear baldness more than death. But there is one person who knows my identity, who has managed to find out. An ex-New Yorker, what else? A film society pervert who recognizes me from old photos in his collection of film journals. Word gets around. People start saying, ‘He was famous for ten minutes in the seventies.’ ‘Who was he?’ ‘An actor, a gangster, I forget.’ They forget. In the end they forget even the erroneous things they’ve been told about me. How beautiful. It’s why I’m there, after all.”At the Inter-Con I found out my flight had been delayed for five or six hours. I went out to the car and stuck my head in the window. He sat with one arm around her, still in kís dark glasses, his army surplus jacket, unshaven. Del seemed to be asleep.”Come to Athens,” I said.”I don’t know.””What other possibilities?””I have to think about it. California maybe. Do nothing for a while.””They know you in California. Come to Athens. I have a spare bedroom.””I don’t know, Jim.””What about the cult?””I have to think about it.””You’re crazy,” I said. “Forget it.”He looked straight ahead, his hand curled over her shoulder, and he spoke quietly in a tone that found fault with me for dealing in self-evident things.”Don’t tell me I’m crazy. I fucking know I’m crazy. Tell me I’m a little brave, a little determined. I want to hear someone say I follow things to the end.”When they were gone I went back to the desk, got the map out of my overnight bag and headed out into the city. From the spaces and heights of Jebel Amman it was a long walk down to the crowds around the taxi ranks near the Roman theater. The sun was warm. Men folded their robes under them, climbing into the shared cabs. I went past the columns and walked slowly up to the top of the theater. On the far side two men sat several rows apart, reading newspapers. No one else was here. The stone ran sandy white, curves lengthening in the climb. I sat one row down from the top. Traffic was a remote noise, another city. I felt solitude begin to return, a sense of elements gathering, first things. A long time passed. This theater, open to the city, was at the same time detached from it, a mental space, a park made of nothing but steps. Perfect. My mind was clear. I felt empty, alert. I took out the map and unfolded it. One of the men on the second tier unfolded his newspaper to turn a page. On the reverse side of the map of Jordan was a detailed map of Amman. I looked for a way back to the hotel that would not involve retracing my route. But I found something else. Something came to me. I didn’t have to concentrate or direct my thoughts. As if I’d known all along. As if my interrupted sleep of the night before had been a mechanism of clarifying thought. Initials, names, places. In the emptiness of these moments, in the reason and ease of these sweeping curves, I realized I’d been approaching this point all morning long. I folded the map and put it back in my jacket pocket. One of the men, the higher of the two, got to his feet and walked slowly down the steps. Soft noise from the distant city. Jebel Amman / James Axton.

7

I met her in a café in Kolonaki Square, a place where all Athenians who feel they are worth seeing eventually show up to be seen, where the women have pouty ultraviolet mouths, the uniform is leather, the chains are gold, the futuristic object parked at the corner is a De Tomaso Pantera, the command car of idle fantasy, and the slender bearded men shift in their chairs, behind dark glasses, wearing sweaters draped over their shoulders.Ann, approaching, tilted her head to catch my eye. The warm smile held an edge of reproof.”Where have you been? Said she accusingly.””Making the rounds. The Gulf and points north. Many wonders.””You might have mentioned it, you beast.””It was chaos, honest. I had barely enough time to arrange visas.””You wanted us to worry,” she said.”Ridiculous.””You wanted us to think you’d simply run off, run away, given it all up, given us up.””Did you call my secretary?””Charlie did.””Then you knew.””Eventually,” she said, using the word to indicate I was taking this more seriously than I was supposed to.The main cafes and their auxiliaries were crowded into a noisy slanted space that included a small park, traffic melees, three or four kiosks layered and seamed in bright magazines. The first mild day after a grim spell. The canopies were furled to let in light, the tables extended across the sidewalks. Celebration and release. An old woman turned the crank of a barrel organ while her husband moved among the tables collecting coins. People had the happy air of survivors eager to talk of their common ordeal. Waiters moved sideways. The lottery man stood at the edge of things, bearing his notched stave.”How nice to be back,” I said. “I want to do nothing, go nowhere. A sunny winter. That’s what I want. Orange trees on every street. Women in self-important boots.””Wait until the wind starts blowing. You’re high enough on Lycabettus to get the full effect.””I want to pass time. Sit in places like this, talk about nothing.””I have to confess I find it hard to pass time in the heart of the city. I need a seascape or vista.””I could easily fall into this,” I said. “Laze my way through life. Coffee here, wine there. You can channel significant things into the commonplace. Or you can avoid them completely.””I wouldn’t have thought you were a café wastrel.””We all are. It’s just a matter of realizing it. I’m preparing myself for the bleak years ahead. A lonely sad expatriate. Wifeless. Stumbling through seedy cafés. A friend of mine imagined a similar fate only yesterday. It involved dry cleaning. What does it all mean?””I don’t know. Self-depreciation is a language I don’t think I understand. It’s so often a form of ego, isn’t it, a form of aggression, a wanting to be noticed even for one’s flaws. I don’t know these modern languages. In fact I may be the person in your fantasy. The sad expatriate. The real one.”Men stood before the kiosks reading displays of the day’s papers. The waiter opened a half bottle of wine. I smiled at Ann, turning my head, making it a look of measurement, evaluation. A look of the left eye.”Is it possible, love affairs as functions of geography?”She looked back, showing amused interest.”Possibly you want to deepen the experience of a place. A place you know you will have to leave some day, most likely not by choice.””That hadn’t occurred to me,” she said. “Adulterous sex as a function of geography. Do I have such obscure motives?””The loss of Kenya, the loss of Cyprus. You want to keep something for yourself that isn’t a tribal mask or figurine. A private Cyprus, a meditation. How does a woman make these places hers as well as her husband’s when after all it’s his job that determines where they go, and when they go, and when they leave.””A function of memory. I might buy that. Some women have a way of planning their memories.””Isn’t there a connection? Geography and memory?””You’re drifting away from me.””You’re a plain girl from a mill town. I know.””Of course there is sheer sense pleasure. Are we allowed to take that into account? Excitement.””That’s another subject. I don’t find that subject agreeable.””You want to maintain a certain decorum.””A certain level. I don’t want to succumb to jealousy. A man has jealous thoughts about a woman he’s never loved, a woman who’s simply a friend. He doesn’t want to hear about sense pleasures. He’s interested in her affairs as themes, motifs in her life.””Just the conversation,” she said, “for Kolonaki Square.””You don’t have to hate a man to enjoy his bad luck. True? And you don’t have to love a woman to feel possessive toward her or resentful of her affairs.””I don’t know how serious you are. Are you serious?””Of course I’m serious.””Well how nice. I think.””I hadn’t thought of it as nice or not nice.””Or do I make a mistake in regarding myself as specially favored?””Probably you make a mistake. I have a history of pathological envy.”She laughed.”You have too much time to think, James. You’re alone too much, aren’t you?””And you?””Wherever we’ve been I’ve managed to find things to do. Not much but enough. English lessons in the beginning. Of course I was a full-time mother and housekeeper for quite a few years. I do occasional work for the British Council here. Translation mainly. It does make a difference. I need to feel that I’m building little blocks of time. That’s why the café life will never claim me.””Have you ever thought being alone might be in some way a fullness, a completion?””No, absolutely.””I believe deeply in the idea of two. Two people. It’s the only sanity. The only richness.””Of course.””Yesterday I was in Amman, sitting in the Roman theater, and I had an odd sensation. I don’t know if I can describe it but I think I perceived solitude as a collection of things rather than an absence of things. Being alone has components. I felt I was being put together out of these nameless things. This was new to me. Of course I’d been traveling, running around. This was the first quiet moment I’d had. Maybe that’s all it was. But I felt I was being put together. I was alone and absolutely myself.””Terrifying. Not that I know what you’re talking about,” she said.A young man fell into the chair next to Ann’s, crossed his legs, folded his arms and eased into the slouch of a ten-hour wait, the slouch of cancelled flights, half-sleep in vast rooms.This was Peter, her son, a pointed face, curly reddish hair, wireframe specs. He wore a checked sport coat that was a couple of sizes too large, a country gentleman’s outfit with pockets for shotgun shells or corn cobs to toss to the pigs. He wanted to see a menu.”In modern travel there are no artists—only critics,” he told me.”You’re tired,” Ann said.”On the one hand there’s nothing new to make of all this. On the other there’s so much to dismiss as overrated or plain rotten. My critical sense has been given a confident charge these past weeks. It does something for a person’s self-esteem when he is able to judge entire land masses as second-rate.”The Far East, from which direction Peter had come, put him in a particular mood of censure. There was a great deal of energy in his observations and it seemed to hang above the fallen body like a posthumous glow.”Incidentally the phone rang as I was walking out the door. Athens is evidently a place where you pick up a ringing phone and it keeps ringing.”I asked him what kind of mathematics he did. He couldn’t decide whether or not to tell me. He did mention that at Berkeley he was in a favorable position to study two of the esoteric wonders of our time, subjects only an adept might begin to penetrate. Pure mathematics and the state of California. There were no analogies from the real world that might help him explain either of these. He began to disappear beneath the table.”Who was it?” she said.”What.””Who was on the telephone?””Well when I realized it wouldn’t stop ringing I put it down. But he rang back. Greek fellow. Wrong number.”She tilted the wine bottle to read the label.”It’s a way of life, wrong numbers,” I said. “Telephones constantly change hands. People buy them, inherit them. I learn more Greek talking to people who’ve dialed the wrong number—”Finally Charles showed up, returning us briefly to our careless pace. He talked about recent arrivals and departures, local politics, Swahili curses and obscenities, growling these last into the hand that clutched his cigarette. The single oddness he conveyed, a man staying strong as he wears away, an appearance of robust corrosion, was always more apparent when I hadn’t seen him for a time.”Your son won’t tell me what sort of mathematics he does. If you explain that I used to do technical writing now and then, he may consider speaking to me.””Technical writing. He deals in truth and beauty. That’s the wrong thing to say, James. Technical writing.””I only mean I’m familiar with some of the nomenclature. I may be able to distinguish one discipline from another.””He’s not impressed,” Charles said. “Look at him.””Unimpressed. What can I do to prove myself? Give me a test.”Ann was in conversation with someone at the next table. We were all passing time.”There is no test,” Charles said. “The only test is mathematics. You’ve got to know the secrets. Look at him. He speaks to no one. He says he’s not able to talk about it. There are certain things he can’t discuss with his professors. It’s too bloody rarefied. It makes no sense if you don’t know the secrets, the codes. It means nothing, says nothing, refers to nothing, is in fact absolutely useless.”Peter Maitland ate his lunch.”It doesn’t bear on human experience, human progress, ordinary human language,” Charles said. “It must be a form of zoology. It’s a branch of zoology. The great ape branch. That’s why men are teaching apes to communicate. So we can discuss mathematics with them.” They’d been through this before. “It’s interesting in itself, you see. It refers to itself and only itself. It’s the pure exercise of the mind. It’s Rosicrucianism, druids in hoods. The formal balances, that’s what counts. The patterns, the structures. It’s the inner consistencies we have to search for. The symmetries, the harmonies, the mysteries, the whisperies. Good Christ, Axton, you can’t expect the man to talk about these things.”Peter said to his mother across a forkful of spinach pie, “Is he doing one of his comic bits, do you think? Will he juggle oranges next?”She wasn’t listening.”How happy he is to be wrong,” Peter said. “It’s his special provenance. He loves to return to it. Of course he knows how deeply he misconstrues. This is part of the joy of the thing. The whole point is to pretend not to know. As some people protect their inexperience or fear, this man protects his knowledge of the true situation. It’s a way of spreading guilt. His innocence, other people’s guilt. There’s a proportional relation. This is the theme of his life, pretending not to know. Keeps him going, absolutely.”He was addressing himself to me. Charles gazed past the traffic as though none of this had anything to do with him or was at worst an extension of the discourse on mathematics.”I look forward to their retirement. They want to live in California, you know. We’ll see each other on American holidays. Charlie will drink Miller Lite and watch the Super Bowl. We’ll have cranberry sauce on Thanksgiving. My dear mother will finally get her tour of movie stars’ homes. All the stars she’s ever heard of are long dead, of course, whether she knows it or not. While she was in the jungles, the marshes and the hill stations, all the neon lights went out, one by one.”They were feeling happy again. Peter took a sip of his mother’s wine, then directed another look my way, a different one, quizzical, mock angry.”Who are you anyway,” he said, “that I should tell you our secrets?”While we laughed I wondered if I would ever see these two people in quite the same way. Peter had altered them not only by what he’d said but by a simple physical extension of the local figure they made. He was the apex, the revelation of full effect. He knew his mother’s affairs, his father’s weaknesses, and I felt in a sense he’d stolen these things from me. I wanted to forget him, the jut of his face, its curious outdatedness, the voice with its self-referring note of complaint. I was afraid my romance with Ann Maitland would end, my word-romance, the pleasant distant speculative longing.Ann and Peter decided to go for a walk. We watched them cross to the small park, where they waited for a break in traffic.”There they go,” Charles said. “The twenty-four hours of my life. A.M. and P.M.””Has he ever told you what he’s doing?””In mathematics? Something awesome, I gather. He expects to be burnt out by the time he’s twenty-five. We’ll see how he adapts to that.”There was an antique air of celibacy about Peter. It had the stubborn force of some vow a boy might make when he is fourteen, high-minded, his life suddenly come to a powerful hesitancy —a pledge which the man in his scrupulous carved space might well decide to honor. I had one of my sentimental thoughts. He would meet a woman one day soon and be immediately transformed. The apparatus of complaint would fall away. His cleverness would be shamed by the power of love.

My secretary, Mrs. Helen, had glazed yellow hair and the overpolite manner of someone who wishes the atmosphere was a little less casual. A delicate scent of dusting powder hung about her comings and goings. She liked to fuss over tea and Greek verbs, which she was helping me with, and had a fondness for anything British, near British or aspiring to British.She thought Owen Brademas was one of these. He’d been in the office earlier looking for me and although she’d invited him to wait he said he had some things to do and would return.I read the telexes and made check marks in the appropriate boxes on several option memos. Mrs. Helen described her infant grandson’s tiny hands. She called me Mr. Oxtone.She was versed in the total range of social codes and usages. She advised me on the correct replies in Greek to everyday greetings or to inquiries about my health and she suggested phrases I might utter to someone celebrating his name day, someone else who was ill. On food and drink she was firm, insisting there was a proper order in which I might consume the coffee, the water and the crystal of rich preserves I was likely to be offered in someone’s home. There was even a correct place to set the spoon once I’d finished using it.She practiced a demon neatness around the office. She was twice divorced, once widowed, and referred to these separate events with roughly equal good humor.When Owen showed up I saw why she thought he might be British or might at least aspire to that station. He wore a wide-brimmed velour hat, a wool scarf looped twice around the neck and trailed over one shoulder, a belted corduroy jacket, worn shiny, with elbow patches and leather buttons. He resembled, if not a Briton per se, then a British actor working down to the level of his character, a jaded expatriate in a nameless country.”Just the man I want to see.””Couldn’t pass through town without saying hello, James.””I need to have a theory confirmed.”We went to an ouzerí nearby, an old crowded smoky room with a high ceiling and posters on the columns and walls advertising English tea biscuits and Scotch whiskey. We drank and talked for three hours.”Where have you been?””I stayed on the island for a time. Then I traveled in the Peloponnese. Took buses, walked, caught colds.””Where exactly?””The southern Peloponnese. The middle tit.””The Mani.””Do you know it?””Only by reputation,” I said. “What are you doing in Athens?””I want to take another look at the epigraphic collection in the National Museum. A place that interests me. It’s a library of stones in effect. A huge room with shelves down both long walls, shelves down the middle, four levels high.””Shelves full of stones.””Many hundreds of stones, numbered. Parts of columns, walls, tablets, memorial reliefs. All inscribed, of course. A few letters in some cases are all that remain. Others with words, longer fragments. The Greeks made an art of the alphabet. They gave their letters a symmetry and a sense that something final had been made out of the stick figures of various early forms. Modern. The stones come in many sizes and shapes. No one is ever there. The caretaker follows me at a tactful distance. There is a table and a lamp. You take a stone from the shelf, put it on the table, then sit down and read what is inscribed, study the shapes.”He smiled, tipping his chair back against a column. I felt this was the picture he wanted to leave with me. A man in a room full of stones, reading.”I went to Jerusalem with Volterra,” I said.”Jerusalem.””Did you know that?””No, I didn’t.””I came back with some questions for you.””Fine,” he said. “Do my best.””They don’t concern the trip. They concern what I think I learned there, what I heard.””This is the theory you want me to confirm.””That’s right.””Fine,” he said.”First the old man on the island.””The murder.””The mentally deficient old man. His body wasn’t found in the village where he lived. It was found in another village on another part of the island.””This is correct.””Do you happen to know the old man’s name? I don’t.””He was called Michaeli. I kept hearing the name all that week.””What was his last name?”We were looking at each other. His face showed a melancholy easement, a deliverance almost. The noise of conversation grew around us.”His full name was Michaelis Kalliambetsos.””We both know the name of the village,” I said. “Mikro Kamini.””This is correct.””What does all this mean?””I wouldn’t look for meaning, James.””They found a man whose initials matched the first letter of each word in a particular place-name. They either led him to this place or waited for him to wander there on his own. Then they killed him.””Yes. This seems to be what happened.””Why?””The letters matched.””That’s no answer.””I wouldn’t look for answers,” he said.”What would you look for, Owen? You said once you were trying to understand how their minds work. Pattern, order, some sort of unifying light. Is this what we’re supposed to come away with?”He stared up at the unused loft, still tipped in his chair, holding the whiskey glass against his chest.”What about the other island?” I said. “And there was the woman in the Wadi Rum.””I don’t know the details of these crimes. Hammers. This is all I know.””There was a murder in a Christian village in Syria. Some men lived in caves nearby. One of them tried to speak Aramaic. The initials of the victim were cut into the knife they used to slash him to death. Do you know anything about this?””I don’t know the victim’s name but I think I can tell you that his first and last names began with the same letter, and it was an M.”“How do you know this?””The village is called Malula. It lies below vast protrusions of bedrock. I was there thirty years ago. There are inscriptions in the caves.””You’ve been keeping up to date. Been talking to them, haven’t you? What else do you know?””James, why attack me? Don’t you know helplessness when you see it? Look at the man who’s long since given up on himself. The man who hands himself over to the nearest mob. For what, I’m not certain.””Someone has to show an anger.””Consider that you’ve done the job. What else do I know aboutt the cult? Basically what you know.””Do we assume these initials on the knife were in Aramaic?The cult seems to be intent on using the local language. I gather no one writes Aramaic these days.””I’m sure they used whatever older script they knew about or were able to find. The Aramaic M of eight hundred b.c. was a jagged letter, a forked lightning bolt, say. By the fourth century it had resolved itself into a graceful curve, bringing to mind the Arabic form, although this was still a long way off. Whatever version they engraved on the weapon, it was an M or double M. “”Why did they use a knife, not a hammer?””A different unit or group. Possibly the weapon is irrelevant. They use what they can find. I don’t know.””No one has ever mentioned victims’ initials on the hammers that were found.””A different group, different practices.”A silence. I kept waiting for him to say something about my discovery. I’d been elated, after all, when the notion came to me in that Roman theater of some alphabetic link between the victim’s name and the place where he or she was killed. A terrible elation. A knowledge bounded by emptiness and fear. What did I expect, congratulations?I told Owen about Vosdanik, his references to holy men, myth and history; to the ancient custom of scratching an enemy’s name on a piece of pottery, then smashing it; to the excavation where he’d first heard of the cult; to religious visions and the language Jesus spoke.”Nothing applies,” Owen said.He knew about the vast excavation near the Sea of Galilee. It was at Megiddo, he said, which is thought to have been the biblical Armageddon. Allusive, suggestive. (I am alpha and omega.) Almost everything Vosdanik had said, almost any referential clue you might follow to the cult’s origin or purpose would seem to signify something, to have a sense, a content. Owen dismissed it all. They weren’t repeating ancient customs, they weren’t influenced by the symbolism of holy books or barren places, they weren’t making a plea to Egyptian or Minoan gods, or a sacrifice, or a gesture to prevent catastrophe.But they weren’t the products of their own reveries either, the mass murderers we’ve come to know so well, the mass communicators, working outward from some private screen, conscious of an audience they might agreeably excite.”We thought we knew this setting. The mass killer in his furnished room, in his century, feeding Gaines-burgers to a German shepherd. The news is full of settings, isn’t it, James? You said it yourself one night. Men firing from highway overpasses, attic rooms. Unconnected to the earth. By which I think you meant nonpolitical in the broad sense. Murders that drift away from us. What waste.”We know those gaunt families whose night scoutings remind us so much of our childhood games. We know the stocking strangler, the gunman with sleepy eyes, the killer of women, the killer of vagrant old men, the killer of blacks, the sniper, the slasher in tight leather, the rooftop sodomist who hurls children into the narrow alley below. These things are in the literature, along with the screams of victims in some cases, which their murderers have thought instructive to put on tape.Here, he said, we have a set of crimes that take us beyond all this. There is a different signature here, a deeper and austere calculation. The murders are so striking in design that we tend to overlook the physical act itself, the repeated pounding and gouging of a claw hammer, the blood mess washing out. We barely consider the victims except as elements in the pattern.There is nothing in the literature, there is nothing in the folklore. And what a remarkable use for their humane impulses these cultists have found. Dispatching the feeble-minded outcast, the soon-to-die-anyway. Or is their choice of victims meant to be a statement that these acts are committed outside the accepted social structure, outside the easeful routines we ourselves inhabit, and should be paid scant mind. What has been lost? Think of it as an experiment in what the solitary mind does with its honed devices.But this isn’t human nature as we might study it in some prowling boy found living alone in the jungle. The cult is made up of people who were educated at some point in their lives. They read, they converse with each other. They’re not totally cut off, are they?So we talked, so we argued, taking roles, discarding them, the social theorist, the interrogator, the criminologist.He reset his chair squarely on the floor as though to demonstrate something (I’m imagining this), demonstrate what it was we were trying to do in all this talk, set a premise for the act, put it at some fixed level with regard to the earth. But the next thing he said came out of nowhere or out of the waveforms of another occasion. Past moments had a way of surfacing in his face, in delayed recognitions, and he simply entered the spoken thought.”I’ve always believed I could see things other people couldn’t. Elements falling into place. A design. A shape in the chaos of things. I suppose I find these moments precious and reassuring because they take place outside me, outside the silent grid, because they suggest an outer state that works somewhat the way my mind does but without the relentlessness, the predeterminative quality. I feel I’m safe from myself as long as there’s an accidental pattern to observe in the physical world.”I asked him whether he had been feeling this need for a very long time, the need to be safe from himself. The question surprised him. He seemed to believe everyone felt it, all the time. When he was a boy, he said, the safe place was church, by a river, among cottonwoods, in the shade of the long afternoons. The choir loft extended across the back wall, the pews were narrow and hard. The minister gestured, sang and orated in the open promotional manner of a civic leader, sweat-stained and pink, a large man with white hair, booming by the river. Light fell across the pews with the mysterious softness of some remembered blessing, some serious happy glimpse of another world. It was a memory of light, a memory you could see in the present moment, feel in the warmth on your hands, it was light too dense to be an immediate account of things, it carried history in it, it was light filtered through dusty time. Christ Jesus was the double-edged name, half militant, half loving, that made people feel so good. The minister’s wife talked to him often, a narrow woman with freckled hands.When things went bad and they moved to the tallgrass prairie, his parents joined a pentecostal church. There was nothing safe about this church. It was old, plain, set in the middle of nowhere, it leaked in wet weather, let in everything but light. A congregation of poor people and most of them spoke in tongues. This was an awesome thing to see and hear. His father fell away to some distant place, his mother clapped and wept. People’s voices variously hummed and racketed, a hobbling chant, a search for melody and breath, bodies rising, attempts to heal a brokenness. Closed eyes, nodding heads. Standers and kneelers. The inside-outness of this sound, the tumbling out of found words, the arms raised, the tremble. What a strangeness to the boy in his lonely wanting, his need for safety and twice-seen light.”Did you speak also?” I said.His eyes in their familiar startledness, their soft awe, grew attentive now, as though he’d stopped to analyze what he was feeling and what it meant. No, he hadn’t spoken. He’d never spoken. He didn’t know the experience. Not that it was an experience confined to some narrow category, the rural poor, the dispossessed. Many kinds of people knew the experience. Dallas executives spoke in tongues in gospel meetings in the shimmering tinfoil Hyatt. Catholics knew the experience, and middle-class blacks of the charismatic renewal, and fellowships of Christian dentists. Imagine their surprise, these tax-paying people, he said, these veterans of patio barbecues, when they learned they were carriers of ecstasy.But there was no reason it had to be carried out in a religious context. It was a neutral experience. You learn it, he said, or fail to learn it. It is learned behavior, fabricated speech, meaningless speech. It is a life focus for depressed people, according to the clinical psychologists.He measured what he was saying like a man determined to be objective, someone utterly convinced of the soundness of a proposition but wondering in a distant way (or trying to remember) . whether anything has been left out.”What is left, Owen?””Ah. I ask myself.””Where are you staying?””Colleagues have given me a room at the American School. Do you know it?””I live up the street.””Then we’ll see each other again. Good. I’ll be here a week. Then I leave for Bombay, by freighter.””So India is next.””India.””You told us once.””India.””Sanskrit.””Sanskrit, Pali, Tamil, Oriya, Bengali, Telugu. It’s crazy, James. Rock edicts in ancient languages. I’ll see what I can before the money runs out or the rains come. When do the rains come?””Another thing you told us, on one of those island nights. They’re on the mainland. They’re in the Peloponnese.””A supposition.””On some level you want other people involved in this, don’t you? I’m not sure you’re even conscious of it but you don’t want to be alone in this. With Kathryn there was no chance—she was firm about keeping a distance. In my case there was only a token interest, conversation for its own sake. But with Volterra you found a willing listener, a willing participant in a sense. He showed no reluctance, no scruples about what they did. This is a man whose interest in things can be almost deadly. He wanted to know more, he wanted to find them. So you pointed him in a certain direction. I’m not sure it was the best or simplest direction. I suspect you wanted to keep the local group to yourself. You didn’t exactly mislead Frank. You told him the truth, the partial truth. You sent him after a second or third group, whatever the correct number. What is the correct number?””Most likely three. No more than four.””One is in Greece.””You’re supposing,” he said.”One is in Jordan. One was in Syria—I don’t know how long ago. Vosdanik mentioned Syria, he mentioned Jordan, he also told us about a cult murder in northern Iran. But it wasn’t clear how many groups he was talking about.””Forget it,” Owen said.”That’s what I told Frank. Forget it.”They are engaged in a painstaking denial. We can see them as people intent on ritualizing a denial of our elemental nature. To eat, to expel waste, to sense things, to survive. To do what is necessary, to satisfy what is animal in us, to be organic, meat-eating, all blood-sense and digestion.Why would a denial of these things have to end in murder?We know we will die. This is our saving grace in a sense. No animal knows this but us. It is one of the things that sets us apart. It is our special sadness, this knowledge, and therefore a richness, a sanctification. The final denial of our base reality, in this schematic, is to produce a death. Here is the stark drama of our separateness. A needless death. A death by system, by machine-intellect.So we talked, so we argued, the anthropologist, the storyteller, the mad logician. Strange that when we saw each other again it would not be that week, in Athens, with only half a city block between us. Maybe all the talking had brought us closer to an understanding, a complicity, than we wanted to be.

In the light of a lowering sky the city is immediate and sculptured. None of summer’s white palls, its failures of distance and perspective. There are shadow-angles, highlighted surfaces, areas of grayish arcs and washes. Laundry blows on rooftops and balconies. Against an urgent sky, with dull thunder pounding over the gulf, this washwork streaming in the wind can be an emblematic and touching thing. Always the laundry, always the lone old woman in black who keeps to a corner of the elevator, the bent woman in endless mourning. She disturbs the composure of the modern building with its intercom and carpeted lobby, its marble veneer.Some nights the wind never stops, beginning in a clean shrill pitch that broadens and deepens to a careless and suspenseful force, rattling shutters, knocking things off the balconies, creating a pause in one’s mind, a waiting-for-the-full-force-to-hit. Inside the apartment, closet doors swing open, creak shut. The next day it’s there again, a clatter in the alleys.A single cloud, low-lying, serpentine, clings to the long ridge of Hymettus. The mountain seems to collect weather, to give it a structure, an aspect beyond the physical, weather’s menace, say, or the inner light of things. The sun and moon rise behind the mountain and in the last moments of certain days a lovely dying appears in the heights, a delivering into violet, burnt rose. The cloud is there now, a shaped thing, dense and white, concealing the radar that faces east.Girls wear toggle coats. In heavy rain there is flooding, people die. A certain kind of old man is seen in a black beret, hands folded behind him as he walks.Charles Maitland paid a visit, making a number of sound effects as he got out of his rubberized slicker. He walked to an armchair and sat down.”Time for my midnight cup of cocoa.”It was seven o’clock and he wanted a beer.”Where are your rugs?” he said.”I don’t have any.””Everyone in the area has rugs. We all have rugs. It’s what we do, James. Buy rugs.””I’m not interested in rugs. I’m not a rug person, as the Bordens would say.””I was over there yesterday. They have some Turkomans and Baluchis, fresh from customs. Very nice indeed.””Means nothing to me.””Weaving districts are becoming inaccessible. Whole countries in fact. It’s almost too late to go to the source. It is too late in many cases. They seem to go together, carpet-weaving and political instability.”We thought about this.”Or martial law and pregnant women,” I said.”Yes,” he said slowly, looking at me. “Or gooey desserts and queues for petrol.””Plastic sandals and public beheadings.””Pious concern for the future of the Bedouins. What does that go with?”He sat forward now, turning the pages of a magazine on the coffee table. A sound of rain on the terrace rail.”Who is it, do you think?” I said. “Is it the Greek? Eliades?”He looked at me sharply.”Just a guess,” I said. “I noticed them at dinner that night.””You noticed nothing. She would never give anyone cause to notice. Whatever she’s doing, I promise you it’s not being noticed.””I know I shouldn’t be bringing it up. I’ve no right. But it’s been hanging in the air. Even your son makes reference. I don’t want us to have to adopt a cryptic language or a way of avoiding each other’s eyes.””What Greek?” he said.”Eliades. The night David and Lindsay took their famous swim. Intense man, black beard.””Who was he with?””The German. There was a German. He was there to meet someone who never showed up. Someone David knows. Refrigeration systems.””You saw nothing. I could never believe she gave anyone cause to notice.””It’s not what I saw. It’s what I heard. She spoke to him in Greek.”I waited for him to tell me how stupid it was to believe this meant something. I felt stupid, saying it. But the sound of her voice, the way it fell, the way it became a sharing, a trust, drawing them away from the rest of us, the way it shaded toward a murmur—the moment haunted me, I think.Charles didn’t tell me I was stupid. He sat quietly turning the pages, possibly thinking back to that night, trying to recollect. There were so many dinners, friends, transients, so many names and accents. I could see him try to construct a summer night around that single image, Lindsay standing on the beach, in half light, laughing. He couldn’t connect it. One more sadness at the middle of things.”I went clean off the rails in Port Harcourt. She left me, you know.””I know.””There was no one else. Just left.””She was lonely. What do you expect?””The Greek,” he said, like a name mislaid. “Was it in Tunis I met him? Did we see each other later at the airport, come back to Athens together? I took him home for a drink. We all sat around and talked. An acceptable scenario, wouldn’t you say? I didn’t see him again until the night you describe.”We went to a movie together, went to dinner, saw a man so fat he had to move sideways down a flight of steps. The wind kept me up that night until two or three, a steady noise, a rustling in the walls.When I walked into the lobby the next evening Niko was at the desk with his coffee cup and newspaper. His small daughter was in his lap and he had to keep shifting her to read the paper.Cold.Cold, I said.Rain.Small rain.I talked to the girl briefly, waiting for the elevator to descend. I said she had two shoes. One, two. I said her eyes were brown, her hair was brown. She knocked the empty coffee cup into the saucer. The concierge’s wife came out, a broad woman in house slippers.Cold.Cold.Very cold.Later my father called.”What time is it there?” he said.We talked about the time, the weather. He’d received a letter from Tap and a card from Kathryn. Printed at the bottom of the card, he said, was the following sentence: No trees were destroyed to make this card. This annoyed him. Typical Kathryn, he said. Most of his anger came from TV. All that violence, crime, political cowardice, government deception, all that appeasement, that official faintheartedness. It rankled, it curled him into a furious ball, a fetus of pure rage. The six o’clock news, the seven o’clock news, the eleven o’clock news. He sat there collecting it, doubled up with his tapioca pudding. The TV set was a rage-making machine, working at him all the time, giving him direction and scope, enlarging him in a sense, filling him with a world rage, a great stalking soreness and rancor.”Do they have exact-change lanes?” he shouted out to me. “What about goat cheese, Murph wants to know. In case we might visit, which I seriously doubt.”When the violet light seeps into Hymettus, when the sky suddenly fills with birds, tall wavering spiral columns, I sometimes want to turn away. These birdforms mingle, flash, soar, change color light to dark, revolve and shimmer, silk scarves turning in the wind. Bands of light pour out of cloud massifs. The mountain is a glowing coal. How is it the city keeps on functioning, buses plowing through the dusk, while these forces converge in the air, natural radiances and laws, this coded flight of birds, a winter’s day? (Kathryn would know what kind of birds they are.) Sometimes I think I’m the only one who sees it. Sometimes, too, I go back to whatever I was doing, to my magazine, my English-Greek vocabulary. I come in off the terrace and sit with my back to the sliding door.You don’t allow yourself the full pleasure of things.A white-armed traffic cop stands in the dark, gesturing, beckoning to the gathered shapes. I hear the cadenced wail of an ambulance stuck in traffic. How hard it is to find the lyrical mode we’ve devised to accompany our cities to their nostalgic doom. An evolution of seeing. The sensibility that enables us to see a ruined beauty in these places can’t easily be adapted to Athens, where the surface of things is mostly new, where the ruin is differently managed, the demise indistinguishable from the literal building-up and building-out. What happens when a city can’t fade longingly toward its end, can’t be abandoned piece by piece to its damaged truth, its layered ages of brick and iron? When it contains only the tension and paralysis of the superficial new? Paralysis. This is what the city teaches us to fear.The ambulance stands fast, wailing in the night. The kiosks are lighted now.