12

in the morning! went looking for Owen Brademas. The piece of paper I’d been carrying since Bombay contained a set of directions rather than an address. The address Owen used was the Old Campus, Punjab University, strictly for receiving mail, Anand said. If I wanted to find him, I would have to look for a house with a closed wooden balcony roughly halfway between the Lohari Gate and the Kashmiri Gate in the old city.I made my way to the edge of the old city easily enough. From the street din of motorcycles and buses to the voices of the long bazaar. The thoroughfare narrowed as I passed through the Lohari Gate, a brickwork structure with a broad towerlike fortification on either side.Once inside I began to receive impressions, which is not the same as seeing things. I realized I was walking too fast, the pace of the traffic-filled streets I’d just left behind. I received impressions of narrowness and shadow, of brownness, the wood and brick, the hard earth of the streets. The air was centuries old, dead, heavy, rank. I received impressions of rawness and crowding, people in narrow spaces, men in a dozen kinds of dress, women gliding, women in full-length embroidered white veils, a mesh aperture at the eyes, hexagonal, to give them a view of the latticed world, the six-sided cage that adjusted itself to every step they took, every shift of the eyes. Donkeys carrying bricks, children squatting over open sewers. I glanced at my directions, made an uncertain turn. Copper and brassware. A cobbler working in the shadows. This was the lineal function of old cities, to maintain an unchanged form, let time hang with the leather goods and skeins of wool. Hand-skilled labor, rank smells and disease, the four-hundred-year-old faces. There were horses, sheep, donkeys, cows and oxen. I received impressions that I was being followed.Signs in Urdu, voices calling over my head from the wooden balconies. I wandered for half an hour, too closed in to be able to scan for landmarks, the minarets and domes of Badshahi, the great mosque at the northwest edge. Without a map I couldn’t even stop someone, point to an approximate destination. I moved into a maze of alleys beyond the shops and stalls. Intensely aware. American. Giving myself advice and directions. A woman stuck cow dung in oval disks on a low wall to dry.I turned to see who might be following. Two small boys, the older maybe ten. They held back for a moment. Then the younger said something, barefoot, a bright green cap on his head, and the other one pointed back the way I’d come and started to walk in that direction, looking to see if I would follow.They led me to the house Owen was in. One slender white man looking for the other, that boy had reasoned. What else would I be doing in those lost streets?The door to his room was open. He reclined on a wooden bench covered with pillows and old carpets. There were some books and papers in a copper serving tray on the floor. A water jug on a small chest of drawers. A plain chair for me. Not much else in the room. He kept it partially dark to reduce the effects of the April sun.He was reading when I entered and looked up to regard me in a speculative manner, trying to balance my physical make-up, my shape, proportions, form, with some memory he carried of a name and a life. A moment in which I seemed to hang between two points in time, a moment of silent urging. The house smelled of several things including the trickle of sewage just outside.Owen looked a little weary, a little more than weary, but his voice was warm and strong and he seemed ready to talk.

(It wasn’t until I’d put my hand to the marble tomb, the night before, that I knew I’d try to find him, talk to him one last time. Wasn’t that the image he’d wanted me to retain, a man in a room full of stones, a library of stones, tracing the shape of Greek letters with his country-rough hands?)

“I’ve been preparing for this all my life,” he said. “Not that I knew it. I didn’t know it until I walked into this room, out of the color and light, the red scarves worn as turbans, the food stalls out there, the ground chili and turmeric, the pans of indigo, the coloring for paint, those trays of brilliant powders and dyes. The mustard, bay leaf, pepper and cardamom. You see what I’ve done, don’t you, by coming into this room? Brought only the names. Pine nuts, walnuts, almonds, cashews. All I can tell you is that I’m not surprised to find myself here. The moment I stepped inside it seemed right, it seemed inevitable, the place I’ve been preparing for. The correct number of objects, the correct proportions. For sixty years I’ve been approaching this room.””Anand speaks of you.””He wrote. He told me you’d been there. I knew you’d come.””Did you?””But when you stood in the door I didn’t recognize you at all. I was surprised, James. I wondered who you were. You looked familiar—but in the damnedest way. I didn’t understand. I thought something was happening. Am I dying, I wondered. Is this who they send?””You took it calmly, if you thought I was a messenger from the other side.””Oh I’m ready,” he said laughing. “Ready as I’ll ever be. Counting the cracks in the wall.”There was a pale gray booklet in the copper tray. Kharoshthi Primer. I picked it up and turned the pages. Lesson number one, the alphabet. Lesson number two, medial vowels. There were seven lessons, a picture on the back cover of a stone Buddha with a halo inscription in Kharoshthi.”The ragged mob squats in the dust around the public storyteller,” he said. “Someone beats a drum, a boy wraps a snake around his neck. The storyteller begins to recite. Heads nod, heads wag, a child squats down to pee. The man tells his story at a rapid clip, spinning event after event, this one traditional, that one improvised. His small son passes through the audience with a wooden bowl for donations. When the storyteller interrupts his narrative to consider things, to weigh events and characters, to summarize for the latecomers, to examine methodically, the mob grows impatient, then angry, crying out together, ‘Show us their faces, tell us what they said!’‘

He was a wanderer. He wandered by bus and train and walked a great deal, walked for six weeks at one point, rock-cut sanctuary to stone pillar, wherever there were inscriptions to look at, mainly ancient local languages in Brahmi script. Anand had offered to lend him a car but Owen was afraid to drive in India, afraid of the animals on the road, the people asleep at night, afraid of being stuck in traffic on some market street with crowds moving around the car, men pushing, no space, no air. The nightmarish force of people in groups, the power of religion—he connected the two. Masses of people suggested worship and delirium, obliteration of control, children trampled. He traveled second-class on crowded trains with wooden seats. He walked among the sleeping forms in railroad stations, saw people carry rented bedding onto the trains. He slept in hotels, bungalows, small cheap lodges near archaeological sites and places of pilgrimmage. Sometimes he stayed with friends of Anand, friends of other colleagues. He would reflect. A lifetime of colleagues with their worldwide system of names and addresses. Bless them.The rusty tin villages, the brick kilns, the water buffalo silvery with mud. His bus always seemed to sit between diesel trucks shooting smoke. Near Poona a dozen people sat under a banyan tree, all wearing pink-white gauze. In Surat he wandered down along the railroad tracks, finding a shadow city that stretched from, was part of the real city. The uncounted were here in shacks and tents and in the street. The streetcorner barber and eye doctor. The ear cleaner with his mustard oil and little spoon. The shaver of armpits. Life swarmed and brooded in the pall of smoke from a thousand cooking fires. Hindi graffiti in blue and red. Swastikas, horses, scenes from the life of Krishna. A man in an Ambassador picked him up on the road outside Mysore. The man drove with his hand on the horn, moving bullocks and people but at their own pace, in their own weary time. He was young, with a faint mustache, a ripe underlip, and wore a green shirt and sleeveless pink sweater.”You are from?””America.””And you are liking India?””Yes,” Owen said, “although I would have to say it goes beyond liking, in almost every direction.””And you are going exactly where at the present moment?””Just north. Eventually to Rajsamand. This is the major destination, I would say.”The man said nothing. The car was wedged for a ten-mile stretch between a pair of diesel trucks. horn ok please. A long line of trucks, a hundred trucks with turquoise grills and cabs full of trinkets and charms, stood along the road outside a gas station, tanks empty, pumps empty, waiting for days, drivers cooking over charcoal fires. Men in one village wore only white, women in a field in flared red skirts. The high-pitched voices, the characters engraved in stone. All over India he searched for the rock edicts of Ashoka. They marked the way to holy places or commemorated a local event in the life of Buddha. Near the border with Nepal he saw the fine-grained sandstone column that was the best preserved of the edicts, thirty-five feet tall, a lion seated atop a bell capital. In the countryside north of Madras he found an edict on forgiveness and nonviolence, translated for him two weeks later by one T. V. Coomeraswamy of the Archaeological Museum in Sarnath. To the study of Dharma, to the love of Dharma, to the inculcation of Dharma.The man took his hand off the horn.”Rajsamand is actually the name of a lake,” Owen said. “It’s somewhere in the barren country north of Udaipur. Do you know the place by any chance?”The man said nothing.”An artificial lake, I believe. Essential for irrigation.””Precisely!” the man said. “This is what they do, you see.””Marble embankments, I’ve been told. Inscriptions cut into the stone. Sanskrit. An enormous Sanskrit poem. More than one thousand verses.””That is precisely the place. Rajsamand.””Seventeenth century,” Owen said.”Correct!”The cows had painted horns. Blue horns in one part of the countryside, red or yellow or green in another. People who painted cows’ horns had something to say to him, Owen felt. There were cows with tricolor horns. There was a woman in a magenta sari who carried a brass water pot on her head, the garment and the container being the precise colors of the mingled bougainvillea that covered the wall behind her, the dark reddish purple, the tainted gold. He would reflect. These moments were a “control”—a design at the edge of the human surge. The white-clad men with black umbrellas, the women at the river beating clothes in accidental rhythms, hillsides of saris drying in the sun. The epic material had to refine itself in these delicate aquarelles. Or he needed to see it as such. The mind’s little infinite. India made him feel like a child. He was a child again, maneuvering for a window seat on the crowded bus. A dead camel, stiff legs jutting. Women in a road crew wearing wide cotton skirts, nose rings, hair ornaments, heavy jewelry dangling from their ears, repairing broken asphalt by hand. horn ok please. In the upper castes they calculated horoscopes precisely. He learned a few words of Tamil and Bengali and was able to ask for food and lodging in Hindi when necessary, and to read a bit and ask directions. The word for yesterday was the same as the word for tomorrow. Professor Coomeraswamy said that if he asked someone for details of his life, the man might automatically include details from the lives of dead relatives. Owen was taken by the beauty of this, of common memories drifting across the generations. He could only stare at the round face across the desk and wonder why the concept seemed somewhat familiar. Had he discussed it himself on one of those bright-skied nights with Kathryn and James?”White city, Udaipur. Pink city, Jaipur.”Whole cities as aspects of control. Astrology as control. The young man was delivering the car to a rental firm fifty kilometers away. This seemed to be his job, delivering cars, driving cars, and his strong hand on the horn indicated it was a job that nourished some private sense of imperium. His name was Bhajan Lai (B.L., thought Owen routinely, checking the map for names of towns in the area) and he was interested in talking about the approaching solar eclipse. It would happen in five days, being total in the south, and was very important from scientific, devotional and cosmic standpoints. His manner was remarkable for the element of reverence it contained, a stillness he hadn’t seemed to possess, and Owen looked out the window, wanting not to dwell on this cosmic event, the trampled bodies it would produce, the voices massed in chant. He was happy simply looking. The humped cattle turned at the bamboo pole, threshing stalks of rice.”We are having the moon come across the sun, which is much the larger body, but when they are in line we are seeing one is exactly the size of the other due to relative size and relative distance from the earth. People will bathe in holy places to correct their sins.”Divinities of increase. In the countryside he heard horns and drums and followed the sound to a temple of granite and marble set in a compound that included shrines and incense stalls, people squatting against the walls, beggars, touts, flower-sellers, those who watch over your shoes for a couple of weightless coins. Owen recognized a statue of the bull mount of Shiva and walked past the musicians and across a tiered porch into the temple vestibule. It was time for the sunset puja. A white-bearded pink-turbaned priest threw flowers toward the sanctum and these were immediately swept up by a man with a fly switch. There were people with marigold garlands, a man in an army greatcoat, two women chanting, figures bundled on the floor, half sleeping, with betel-stained mouths, one of them concealed behind a kettledrum. Owen tried intently to collect information, make sense of this. There were coconuts, monkeys, peacocks, burning charcoal. In the sanctum was a black marble image of Lord Shiva, four-faced, gleaming. Who were these people, more strange to him than the millennial dead? Why couldn’t he place them in some stable context? Precision was one of the raptures he allowed himself, the lyncean skill for selection and detail, the Greek gift, but here it was useless, overwhelmed by the powerful rush of things, the raw proximity and lack of common measure. Someone beat on hand drums, a green bird sailed across the porch. He was twenty-five miles from Rajsamand, in the Indian haze.Coomeraswamy said, “But what will you do after you’ve seen this Sanskrit ghat of yours? I think you’ll want to rest awhile, won’t you? Come back to Sarnath. You’ll be ready for a long rest by then.””I’m not sure what I’ll do. I don’t want to think about it.””Why don’t you want to think about it? Do you feel this is not an auspicious time to go to Rajsamand?”He had graying hair, an immense kindness in his eyes, a stab of light. As if he knew. Smoke hung over the plain. The soaring birds, the kites, turned slowly above the white horizon. Why didn’t he want to think about it? What was beyond Rajsamand, after the pure white embankment, the peaceful lake? He studied inscriptions not only in stone but in iron, gold, silver and bronze, on palm leaves and birch bark, on ivory sheets. Bhajan Lai told him that people had been gathering for weeks, living in tents or in the open, to prepare for the solar eclipse. He blew the horn at a tonga, at men on bicycles, at a small girl with a switch walking a dozen bullocks across the road. Beggars were assembling, holy men, those who will bathe in pools to seek their release. A million people were waiting at Kurukshetra, he said, to enter the tanks of water. Owen looked out the window, saw men reclined on charpoys outside spice stalls, white vultures hunched in trees. Bhajan Lai took a long-peaked cap from a pouch on his door, showed it to Owen.”You are having a hat with you?””I left it somewhere.””It was what kind of hat precisely?””A round hat with a loose brim. A sun hat.””This is for eclipse!” the young man said.A man in a dhoti walked toward him in furious contemplation, hands behind his back. Owen smiled. Among the brown hills were fields of sugarcane, the thick stems ending in wispy flower-heads. There were no cars or trucks on the road. He walked into a barren valley. Men with yellow turbans here, cows with tricolor horns. He saw the hilltop fortress that stood above Rajsamand. The kites turned in the burning sky. How quiet here, the day of eclipse, no trucks, no buses. Past the wheat fields, the clumps of pencil cactus. Bells rang lightly, a boy on an ox-drawn cart. Owen smiled again, thinking how in the midst of this wandering among Jains, Muslims, Sikhs, the Buddhist students in Sarnath, stunned time and again by the fairytale dynamics of Hindu cosmology, he had begun to think of himself once more as a Christian, simply by way of fundamental identification, by way of linking himself to the everyday medley he found around him. When people asked, this is what he said. Christian. How strange it sounded. And how curiously strong a word it seemed, after all these years, to be applied to himself, full of doleful comfort.He came to the town that was set below the fortress and walked down the main street, where water buffalo lay in shallow ditches. Stalls and shops were closed, day of eclipse, and pregnant women stayed indoors, or so the driver had advised him. A disabled truck blocked the end of the street, front tires and rims gone, body pitched forward, down like a Mausered rhino. A woman sheeted in white stood by a door, a gauzy pink cloth fixed over her mouth. Owen edged past the truck and approached a gate in a yellow wall some yards from the edge of town. On the other side of the wall was the Sanskrit pavilion, as he’d come to call it, a marble-stepped embankment stretching about four city blocks along Rajsamand Lake. He judged there were fifty steps down to the water, a descent that was suspended at intervals by platforms, jutting pavilions, several decorative arches. A miraculous space in the dullish brown distemper of the countryside, cool, white and open, an offering to the royal lake. And miraculous as well for what it was not—a ghat swarming with bathers, pundits under sunshades, those who sit erect and see nothing, the mendicant, the diseased, the soon-to-be-turned-to-ashes. There were two women at the lowermost step, beating clothes, far to Owen’s left, and a boy with a melodious face, approaching. That was all. Owen walked down to the nearest pavilion, entering to stand in the shade awhile, noting the elaborately sculptured columns, the dense surfaces. Set into a platform nearby was a slate panel on which he could faintly make out a block of text about forty lines long. The boy followed him along the embankment, up and down steps, across platforms, under the arches, in and out of the three pavilions. In time Owen counted twenty-five panels encased in ornamental marble, the epic poem he’d come to see and to read, one thousand and seventeen lines in classical Sanskrit, the pure, the well-formed, the refined.The panels were accompanied, as almost everything seemed to be, almost everywhere, by carved images of elephants, horses, dancers, warriors, lovers. Everything in India was a list. Nothing was alone, itself, unattended by images from the pantheon. The boy did not speak to him until Owen by a simple shift of the head indicated he was ready to step outside his studious bearing, the contained exaltation of this first short hour on the embankment. The women pounded clothes on the bottom step, the sound fading toward mid-lake, mid-sky, renewed before a silence could obtain.”This is a poem of the Mewar kingdom,” the boy said. “It is the early history of Mewar. It is the longest Sanskrit writing in India today. This lake is circumference twelve miles. This marble is from Kankroli. The full cost is more than thirty lakhs of rupees. You are from?””America.””Where is your suitcase?””It’s just a canvas pack and I left it under a tree up there.””It must already be stolen.”He wore short pants, sandals, high socks, a short-sleeved shirt buttoned to the top. His eyes were serious and bright, showing an interest in the wanderer that would not be satisfied without an earnest dialogue. He inspected the man openly. Sunburnt, dusty, wide-eyed, bald on top. A shirt with a dangling button.”Is there a place I can spend the night?”A watch with a cracked band.”You must go back out to the road. I will show you.””Good.””How long will you stay?””Three days, I think. What do you think?””Do you read Sanskrit?””I will try to,” Owen said. “I’ve been teaching myself for almost a year. And this is a place I’ve wanted to see all that time and longer. Mainly I will study the letters. It’s a handsome script.””I think three days is very long.””But it’s beautiful here, and peaceful. You’re lucky, living near a place like this.””Where will you go next?”The women were in red and parrot green, beating in a single motion. Where would he go next? The repeated stroke reminded him of something, the Greek fisherman he’d seen a dozen times walloping an octopus on a rock to make the flesh tender. A stroke that denoted endless toil, the upthrust arm, the regulated violence of the blow. What else did it remind him of? Not something he’d seen. Something else, something he’d kept at the predawn edge. The boy was watching him, smooth face tilted in an air of inquiry, a manner that seemed laden with mature concern. As if he knew. The women started up the steps, the washwork in baskets on their heads. The boy’s hair gleamed nearly blue. He climbed to the top of the embankment, pointed with a smile toward the tree where Owen had left his rucksack. Still there.Owen used the pack as a cushion, sitting cross-legged before a panel set into the nearest platform. The boy stood behind him and to the right, able to see the text over Owen’s shoulder.The letters, attached to top-strokes, were solid, firmly stanced.It was as though the sky and not the earth offered ultimate support, the only purchase that mattered. He studied the shapes. What was it about the letter-shapes that struck his soul with the force of a tribal mystery? The looped bands, scything curves, the sense of a sacred architecture. What did he almost understand? The mystery of alphabets, the contact with death and oneself, one’s other self, all made stonebound with a mallet and chisel. A geography, a gesture of the prayerful hand. He saw the madness, even, the scriptural rage that was present in the lettering, the madness of priests who ruled that members of the menial caste were to have their ears filled with molten lead if they listened to a recitation of the Vedas. It was in those shapes, the secret aspect, the priestly, the aloof, the cruel.The boy spoke several lines aloud in a beautiful musical pitch but said he wasn’t sure he had it right.The letters were not proportioned and spaced with the care the Romans put into monumental capitals, which were frameworked in squares, half squares, fitted circles, then sketched and painted and carved in graded widths. This was a thousand lines. This was the childlike history of Mewar, terrible and fierce, and the text fairly sang of sages, maidens, caliph invaders. It seemed childlike at any rate to Owen, the child again, made to learn a language, to think in lists.He wondered at which end of the embankment the poem began, how he could tell, whether it mattered. He could not help imagining that all this marble had been quarried, cut, laid in place, the pavilions built, arches raised, the lake made, to provide a setting for the words.Together they read aloud, slowly, the man deferring to the music of the boy, pitching his voice below the other’s. It was in the sound, how old this was, strange, distant, other, but also almost known, almost striking through to him from some uncycled memory where the nightmares lay, the ones in which he could not speak as others did, could not understand what they were saying.Then the boy was gone. Owen felt the light become dim, felt it, sensed it. A wind swept down the embankment. Birds veered across the lake, crying hoarsely, crows, hurrying. An arch cast multiple shadows. Midafternoon. Empty, pale and hushed. A cock began to crow.In Kurukshetra they would be swarming toward the tanks. Bhajan Lai had said a million people. Futile to imagine. The ash-painted men, the men fixed in one position, those with sect marks, those anointed with sandalwood paste. Owen climbed toward the trees, then turned and sat on the top step. The women gathering their skirts above their knees as they enter the water. The genealogists recording the names of pilgrims, the dates of ritual baths. The holy men in rings of glowing coals. There would be mud fireplaces, the heavy smoke of burning dung. Children with begging bowls, blind men and lepers, people dying under black umbrellas. Saved by the water, released to the water. Miracles share the landscape with death.It was one more list, wasn’t it? All he could do, all he could make. His own primitive control. The sadhus sit naked, heads raised, eyes opened wide to the sun. The contortionists bend themselves into topological knots. The chanting begins, the blowing of conch shells. They go dragging through the shallow water, arms raised, multitudes, a solid body, too many to see.Trampled, drowned. In his fear of things that took place on such a rampant scale, was there an element of desperate envy? Was it enviable? Did they possess a grace, a beauty, as his friend Kathryn believed? Was it a grace to be there, to lose oneself in the mortal crowd, surrendering, giving oneself over to mass awe, to disappearance in others?He crossed his arms to clutch himself against the chill. In three days he would walk into the desert.

“There’s some water in that jug.” “Here,” I said. “Take some.” “Is it safe?”Owen was gravitationally bound to the cult, as an object to a neutron star, pulled toward its collapsed mass, its density. The image is both trivial and necessary. What could he say about the attraction? Nothing that did not take the form of an example from the physical world, preferably a remote and not easily observed part of it, to suggest the edge of perception.The dead sun was not an image. It hung over the cactus and scrub, the sand hills of this desolate western reach of the Thar, the Great Indian Desert, not far from the Pakistan border. He followed camel trails and ate a thick bread made with coarse barley. The well water was brackish, the camels wore bells, people made frequent reference to snakebite. He came across two villages in four days on foot and in buses. The villagers lived in beehive huts with thatched roofs, walls of mud and dry grass.His mother used to tell him, “Try to be more impressive.”He stood on a broken asphalt road in a white silence, waiting for a bus. The people he’d seen some miles back had worn a type of cotton robe and the women had gathered branches from small thorny trees to use in making fires. He would have to learn the names of things.He watched a man come hobbling toward him out of the hills. He led a goat on a rope and wore a ragged turban and the cleft white beard of the old Rajput warriors. He began talking on the other side of the road and in what appeared to be the middle of a sentence, as though continuing a conversation the two men had started some years earlier, and he told Owen about the nomadic tribes in the area, about snake charmers and wandering minstrels. The English he spoke sounded like a minor dialect of Rajasthani. He said he was a teacher and guide and he called Owen sir.”Guide to what? There’s nothing here.”He said a number of things Owen could not understand. Then he showed him a filthy length of cloth embossed with some kind of symbol. This seemed to give him official government status as a guide.”But what is there to see that requires a guide?””For a feesir.””How much?””As you wish.””All I want to do is get a bus going that way, to Hawa Mandir.”No buses on this road. “You will be going to Hawa Mandir, you will need to see a lorry.””When?””After certain days.””How many days are certain days?”The man thought about this.”I am interested in knowing what you will guide me to if I pay your guide fee.””Pay as you wishsir.””But what will you show me? We’re somewhere between Jaisalmer and the Pakistan border.””Jaisalmer, Jaisalmer.” He made a happy chant of it.”And the Pakistan border,” Owen said.The man looked at him. The word for yesterday was the same as the word for tomorrow. The hawks turned in the empty sky.”If there is no bus and if I have to wait indefinitely for another vehicle, I’ll walk to Hawa Mandir.””You will be walking into the Thar but you will never walk outsir.””You said you were a teacher. What do you teach?”The man tried to remember. He began a monologue that seemed to be about his early days as an acrobat and juggler, wandering between the fortress cities. The two men hunkered in the dust, the Indian talking endlessly, his right hand floating in a mesmeric gesture, his left hand clutching the rope that was fastened around the goat’s neck. Owen was barely aware of his departure. He remained squatting close to the ground, leaning slightly forward, body weight supported by his calves. When the sun was white and rippling he took a dried vegetable preparation out of his pack and ate it. He wanted water but allowed himself only a token amount, trying to preserve most of what was left until the next day, midmorning, when he would look for rest and shade after five hours on foot. It was suddenly dark. He reclined on his side like the gypsy in the Rousseau painting, safe in a mystical sleep.He was barely awake, thinking of the morning’s long haul, when a small caravan of brass-studded iron carts approached, bullock-drawn, heading the same way he was. Blacksmiths and their families, the women wearing bright veils and silver trinkets. They took him to Hawa Mandir.It was a fifteenth-century town slowly being assimilated by the desert, so much the color of the desert that Owen did not see it until they were nearly at the gates. It was being received and combined, sinking into the land, crumbling, worn away in stages. Even the dogs that sulked along the outskirts were yellowish brown and passive and barely visible. He walked through the streets and alleys. The houses were sandstone, with carved facades and flat roofs, auspicious signs on many walls. There was one long building embellished with domes and kiosks and lacy stonework balconies. There was little activity, most of it involving water. A man washed down a camel, another fastened water containers to a two-wheeled wooden cart. In minutes Owen had made his way to the edge of town. Sand began to blow.The stone houses gave way to huts of mud and brick. Many of these were ruined, lapped in sand. Children watched him drink from his canteen. Goats moved in and out of inhabited huts. He stood on a ruined wall and scanned the horizon. There were earthen bins out there, sand-colored, conical, one or two with thatched roofs. He’d seen these elsewhere, receptacles for food and grain, the taller ones seven or eight feet high, usually set on the immediate edge of a village, men with tools, livestock tethered nearby. These bins were stark, a half dozen of them, about three hundred yards from the last of the huts. He set out in that direction.Sand was blowing across the tawny ruins. A rough path led through gorse and thorn to the cluster of small buildings. Sandstone hills rose in regulated layers in the distance. He passed a woman and child with a gaunt cow. The child followed close to the animal, gathering dung as it fell to the ground, folding it, patting it briskly. The woman screamed something at her, lashing the air with a stick. This sound carried briefly on the wind.History. The man who stands outside it.He could barely see by the time he approached the bins. The sand stung his face and he walked with his arm crooked in front of him, opening his eyes only long enough to glimpse the way. Something startled him, a man standing at the head of the path, dark-skinned, his hair ringleted and wild, his face uncovered despite the blowing sand. Shadows around the flat eyes, a danger in his bearing. But he was also oddly calm, waiting, wrapped in garments from neck to ankles, hands hidden, head and feet bare, and he was saying something to Owen. Was it a question? They looked right at each other. When the man repeated the words, Owen realized the language was Sanskrit and he knew at once what the man had said, although he made no conscious attempt to translate.The man had said, “How many languages do you speak?”

Half the room was filled with light. He sat up, a little unsteady in his movements. I don’t think I’d fully realized how exhausted and ill he was. The only strength was in his voice.”That’s a question I always dread being asked,” I said. “It’s a question that seems to be waiting for me wherever I go in the Mideast. I don’t know why it carries such force.””It’s a terrible question in a way, isn’t it?””But why?””I don’t know,” he said.”Why do I think it exposes some terrible weakness or failing?””I don’t know.””You can answer it. Five, six.””Counting Sanskrit. Which comes pretty close to outright cheating. In my own defense I’d have to say there was never anyone I could speak it with, except that boy on the embankment. They’re teaching it again in the schools.””Did you speak it with them?””On and off.””How did you know they were there? From the group in the Mani?””They said there was a cell in India. They’d gone there from somewhere in Iran. I was to look for a place called Hawa Mandir.””You took your time looking.””It was my view, my sentiment that India would cure me of the fascination. Is there more water?””The jug is empty.””You have to fill it in the street. There’s a tap two houses down.”When I returned he was asleep, sitting up, his arm dangling over the side of the bench. I woke him without hesitation.

The man’s name was Avtar Singh. Owen suspected this was a pseudonym and was never able to convince himself that Singh was an Indian. The man was not only an impressive mimic but seemed to look different every time Owen saw him. An ascetic, streetcorner preacher, a subway bedlamite. His physiognomy changed, his features as aspect and character. Intelligent, vain, obsequious, cruel. He’d look lean and severe one day, a mystic in shabby robes; puffy the next, physically bloated, eyes heavy and drugged.The Greek cell had broken up and two of the members were here, recent arrivals. Emmerich was one, a man with an austere head and tight beard. The other was the woman, Bern, thick-lipped, broad, utterly silent for weeks now. She spent almost all her time sealed in one of the thatched silos.There were two other men but Owen had little contact with them. All he knew was that they’d been with Singh in Iran, that one of them was suffering frequent cycles of chills and high fever and that they were evidently Europeans. They did not speak Sanskrit as the others did, or tried to do, and it was this as much as the group’s predominant mood which indicated to Owen that the cult was nearly dead.One day he squatted in the dust with Emmerich. They talked about Sanskrit, speaking the language itself as well as several others. Emmerich had the look of an intelligent convict, someone in for life, for murder, self-taught, self-willed, an expert on the tradecraft of a confined life, contemptuous of people who want to know what it is like—contemptuous even as he agrees to enlighten them. He is well settled in his life term, this kind of man. His crime, the largeness of it, furnishes endless material for speculation and self-knowledge. Everything he reads and learns is made to serve as a personal philosophy, an explanation, an enlargement of that brilliant single moment, a moment he has reworked, re-explained to himself, made use of. The murder has by this time become part of the dream pool of his self-analysis. The victim and the act are theory now. They form the philosophical base he relies on for his sense of self. They are what he uses to live.”The Sanskrit word for knot,” Emmerich said, “eventually took on the meaning of ‘book.’ Grantha. This is because of the manuscripts. The birch-bark and palm-leaf manuscripts were bound by a cord drawn through two holes and knotted.”An austere head, Owen kept saying to himself. His father used to laugh at the oversized straw hat he wore with his bib overalls. Passing the crossroads store. The canopy and Coca-Cola sign. The wood posts sunk in cinder block. His mother used to say, “I don’t know more’n a monkey what you’re talking about.”Emmerich’s head was smallish, with eyes that maintained a grim distance, closely cut hair and beard. The two men squatted at angles to each other, as though delivering their remarks out into the desert.”What is a book?” Emmerich said. “It’s a box that you open. You know this, I think.””What is inside the box?””The Greek word puxos. Box-tree. This suggests wood, of course, and it’s interesting that the word ‘book’ in English can be traced to the Middle Dutch boek, or beech, and to the Germanic boko, a beech staff on which runes were carved. What do we have? Book, box, alphabetic symbols incised in wood. The wooden ax shaft or knife handle on which was carved the owner’s name in runic letters.””Is this history?” Owen said.”This is not history. This is precisely the opposite of history.An alphabet of utter stillness. We track static letters when we read. This is a logical paradox.”Bern appeared, walking once around the bin, re-entering. The bin, silo or granary. Owen would have to learn the local name. This he made his first task in new places, always.”She will try to kill herself,” Emmerich said. “She will starve herself. Already she’s starting. Three, four days. It came to her like a sacred revelation. This is the perfect way. Starvation. Drawn-out, silent, losing the functions one by one. What is better in a place like India than starvation?””Is this the end of it? Is there another group somewhere?””To my knowledge this is the end of it. There are no more cells outside of this one. Maybe two or three individuals left, possibly in contact with each other, possibly not.””Will you all die here?””I don’t think Singh will die. He will outfox it, out-talk it. Bern will die. The other two will probably die. I don’t think I will die. I’ve learned too much about myself.””Isn’t this why people kill themselves?” Owen said.”Because they’ve discovered who they are? I admit I’ve never thought of that. And you. Who are you?””No one.””What do you mean ‘no one’?””No one.”They squatted like Indians, close to the ground, arms draped over their knees.”For a long time nothing happens,” Emmerich said. “We begin to think we barely exist. People wander off, people die. Many differences appear among us. We lose purpose, suffer setbacks. There are differences in meaning, differences in words.””She won’t eat. Will she take water?””So far she has taken it. This is to draw it out, to extend the silence. You know this. She is very doctrinaire. For such people, dying is a methodology.””In Greece she was reluctant to talk to me.””You aren’t a member. It was only your training as an epigraphist that made you more or less welcome, your digs and travels. We saw you could be trusted. This was a quiet and scholarly and deeply intense interest. But not Bern. She didn’t care. Things began to irk her in Greece. Someone stole her boots.””What happened to the others who were with you?””Scattered.”These bins were made of dung and earth. There were figures in the distant fields, stooped, moving. A dusty snake curved through the weeds. The one color. Formed and ordered. The high white sun.”But there is still the program,” Emmerich said. “Singh has found a man. We are waiting for him to approach Hawa Mandir. Let’s face it, the most interesting thing we do is kill. Only a death can complete the program. You know this. It goes deep, this recognition. Beyond words.”These were not kites but sparrow hawks, he decided. No chaos, no waste.”Sometimes I ask myself,” Emmerich said. “What is the function of a murderer? Is he the person you go to in order to confess?”

“He was wrong,” I said, surprised at my own abruptness. “You weren’t there to confess anything.””Unless it was to acknowledge my likeness to them.””Everybody is like everybody else.””You can’t mean that.””Not exactly. Not stated exactly so.””We overlap. Is that what you mean?””I’m not sure what I mean.”His voice grew soft. He was careful not to accuse, not to hurt.”What do you see when you look at me?” he said. “You see yourself in twenty years’ time. A damn sobering sight. It’s true, isn’t it? Our likeness is a kind of leap, a condition you can’t help but foresee. You used to oppose almost everything I said. Less so of late. As though you’ve begun to hedge your bets. You see yourself, James, don’t you?”Alone, weak-willed, defenseless, taking the stairs two at a time. Was this true, was he right? I would never completely understand Owen, know his reasons, know the inner shapes and themes. This only made the likeness more plausible.

Feet flat on the ground, weight on the calves, arms draped over the knees. They hunkered in one of the bins. Singh rubbed two long stones against each other, rough-shaping them as he talked. He was a talking machine. He moved from Hindi to English to Sanskrit in the space of a single long remark. Owen was afraid of him. He was too clearly on the maniacal edge. He looked mad, spoke in a jumble of tongues, fell into cruel and sweeping laughter, eyes shut, mouth wide open, full of rotting teeth. Owen listened to him talk for much of a long afternoon and through the pale desert vespers and into the night. He was mercurial and deft, sometimes intimidating, sometimes appearing to seek favor. Not a true games-player, not an observer of the rules, Owen thought, astonished at the stupidity of this reflection. Singh was electric, messianic, crazy, the coarsely grained face set in a mass of dusty ringlets. He stopped rubbing the stones only long enough to raise his fingers in the air, indicating quotation marks around a word he used ironically or with a double meaning.”Thar. This is a contraction of marust ‘hali. Abode of death. Let me tell you what I like about the desert. The desert is a solution. Simple, inevitable. It’s like a mathematical solution applied to the affairs of the planet. Oceans are the subconscious of the world. Deserts are the waking awareness, the simple and clear solution. My mind works better in the desert. My mind is a razed tablet out here. Everything counts in the desert. The simplest word has enormous power. This is fitting because it’s part of the Indian tradition. The word in India has enormous power. Not what people mean but what they say. Intended meaning is beside the point. The word itself is all that matters. The Hindu woman tries to avoid speaking her husband’s name. Every utterance of his name brings him closer to death. You know this. I’m not telling you something you don’t know, or am I? Indian literature has been eaten by white ants. The bark and leaf manuscripts, nibbled, gnawed, consumed. You know this. India doesn’t need a literature anyway. Superfluous. India is the right brain of the world. Dancing Shiva, you know? Pure motion baby. What I’d like to do when we leave this place is go to northern Iraq and study Yezidi cryptic. You have to see this alphabet to believe it. A little Hebrew-looking, a little Persian, a little Arabic, a little Martian. This thing is cryptic because the Yezidis live among Muslims and can’t stand the mothers. Total mutual loathing, right? If a Yezidi hears a Muslim in prayer he either kills the poor bugger or kills himself. That’s according to the book anyway. There are other alphabets to study in that area. I could go to the marshes. I’d take the woman except she’s serious about starving herself. I’d like to fuck her everywhichway to Sunday or whatever the phrase. She’s the kind you fuck with a vengeance, am I right? Each sound has one sign only. This is the genius of the alphabet. Simple, inevitable. No wonder it happened in the desert.”

“I don’t mean to interrupt.””I’m in no hurry,” Owen said. “I’d just as soon put off the rest of it indefinitely.””I want to hear it.””I don’t want to tell it. It becomes harder and harder. The closer we come to the end, the more I want to stop. I don’t know if I can face all that again.””I interrupted to ask about Singh’s idea of the desert. Is there something clear and simple there?”Owen looked into the shadowed part of the room.”Singh remarked to me once, his conspiratorial aspect, fixing those flat heavy eyes on me, ‘Hell is the place we don’t know we’re in.’ I wasn’t sure how to take the remark. Was he saying that he and I were in hell or that everyone else was? Everyone in rooms, houses, chairs with armrests. Is hell a lack of awareness? Once you know you’re there, is this your escape? Or is hell the One place in the world we don’t see for what it is, the one place we can never know? Is that what he meant? Is hell what we say to each other or what we can’t say, what is beyond our reach? The sentence defeated me. I was afraid of the desert but drawn to it, drawn to the contradiction. Men will come to fill this empty place. This place is empty in order that men may rush in to fill it.”The clear voice became a chant now, almost startling in its richness and stately pace. I want to call it a funeral pace.”To penetrate the desert truly. To learn the geography and language, wear the aba and keffiyeh, go brown in the desert sun. To infiltrate Mecca. Imagine it, to enter the city with one and a half million pilgrims, cross the border within the border, make the hadj. What enormous fears would a man like me have to overcome, what lifelong inclinations toward solitude, toward the sanctity of a personal space in which to live and be. But think of it. To dress as a hadji in two pieces of seamless white cloth, every man there in two pieces of seamless white cloth, over a million of us. To make the seven circuits of the Ka’bah. The great cubical form draped in black, imagine it, with Koranic verses embroidered in gold script. For the first three circuits we are enjoined to move at a jogging pace. There are other times when great masses gather during the hadj, on the plain of Arafat and for three days at Míná, but it’s the circuit of the Ka’bah that has haunted me ever since I first learned of it. The three running circuits, perhaps a hundred thousand people, a swirl of white-clad people running around the massive black cube, a whirlwind of human awe and submission. To be carried along, no gaps in the ranks, to move at a pace determined by the crowd itself, breathless, in and of them. This is what draws me to such things. Surrender. To burn away one’s self in the sandstone hills. To become part of the chanting wave of men, the white cities, the tents that cover the plain, the vortex in the courtyard of the Grand Mosque.””I thought it was one big bus jam, the hadj.””But do you see what draws me to the running?””To honor God, yes, I would run.””There is no God,” he whispered.”Then you can’t run, you mustn’t run. There’s no point, Is there? It’s stupid and destructive. If you don’t do it to honor God or imitate the Prophet, then it means nothing, it accomplishes nothing.”He withdrew into a silence, a deprived silence. He’d wanted to explore the matter further, the fearsome driving rapture of it, but my rejection was the type he could not contend with. He was like a child in this respect, that silence was a place to take his hurt and shame.”What else did Singh have to tell you?””He talked about the world.””Then what happened?” I said.

He talked about the world.”The world has become self-referring. You know this. This thing has seeped into the texture of the world. The world for thousands of years was our escape, was our refuge. Men hid from themselves in the world. We hid from God or death. The world was where we lived, the self was where we went mad and died. But now the world has made a self of its own. Why, how, never mind. What happens to us now that the world has a self? How do we say the simplest thing without falling into a trap? Where do we go, how do we live, who do we believe? This is my vision, a self-referring world, a world in which there is no escape.”His flesh was pebbled along the forehead and cheeks. He had long wrists and hands. Slowly the two stones began to take on a faintly tapered shape. He rubbed the stones for hours, then days. Bern was hallucinating. They heard her moan and chant. She crawled outside to urinate, positioned on all fours. Three of the men went looking for a stray goat to kill. Owen went to Bern’s silo, not knowing why. The seal was in place, an earthen hatch-cover about three feet off the ground, held fast by a wooden bar inserted through a pair of sockets. He removed the cover and bent down to look into the silo. She sat in the dark. The floor was strewn with hay and bits of corn stalk. Her face swung toward him and she stared with no apparent recognition. He spoke softly to her, offering to get water, but there was no response. He told her how the smell of animal feed made him think of his childhood, the grain storage elevators and backyard windmills, the Here-fords in loading pens, the bent metal sign on the little brick building at the edge of town (he hadn’t thought of this in thirty years): farmers bank. He remained outside the bin, watching her face float in the dead air. She looked at him.The desert town was like the land reshaped in blocks, some odd work of the wind as it transports sand. Singh cupped his hands to drink from an earthenware jug. One of the other men hunkered in the dust. From this distance the town was silent most of the time. Owen drank. When it was dark and a wind fell from the hills he watched the ashes stir and blow around the improvised spit. The night sky appeared, the scattershot of blazing worlds.”Who is the man you’re waiting for?””What man?””Emmerich said.”“Atcba. A crazy. Bonkers, you know? Wandering for years in these parts.””Is he close to the town? How do you know he’ll head that way?”Singh laughing. “He is bloody close, yes.””How do you know?””Just seen him. You just done ate his goat.””An old man with a beard, more or less in rags?””That him, mon. He keep walking. It don’t do him no good to get no older. He on his last legs for sure. He have to sit down and wait for vulture. Vulture do the business of the desert.””You’re waiting, then, until he enters town.””You know this. You’re a member now.””No, I’m not.””Of course you’re a member.””No, I’m not.””Damn fool. Of course you are.”

This time it was Owen who interrupted, breaking off the narrative to reach down for the booklet I’d left propped against the copper tray, the primer on Kharoshthi. He returned it to its place in the tray. Gradations of brown and gray. Light retreating toward the far wall. A certain number of objects, a certain placing. He sat looking into his hands.”What does Singh mean by ‘the world’?” I said.”Everything, everybody, whatever is said or can be said. Although not these exactly. The thing that encompasses these. Maybe that’s it.””What happened next?””I’m tired, James.””Try to go on.””It’s important to get it right, to tell it correctly. Being precise is all that’s left. But I don’t think I can manage it now.””You were with them. Did you learn their name?”He looked up.”This knowledge has managed to elude me, although I tried my damnedest to pry it out of them, wheedle it out by whatever means. Even after Singh told me I was a member, he wouldn’t tell me the name of the cult.””He was taunting.””Yes, he began to seek me out to amuse himself, fortify himself. I was their strength in an odd way and also their observer and tacit critic, the first they’d ever had, which was another indication they were near the end.”I told Owen about the time I’d spent in the Mani, my meeting with Andahl. I told him about the massive rock on which two words had been painted, then tarred over. Andahl had painted the words, I said. It was his way of breaking clear. I told Owen I thought these words were the cult’s name.”What words were they?”“Ta Onómata.”Looking at me with curious wonder. “Damn it. Damn it, James.” Beginning to laugh. “You may be right. I think you could be right. It makes an eerie kind of sense, doesn’t it? The Names.””I’ve been consistently right about the cult. Andahl, the name, the pattern. And I found them almost as soon as I entered the Mani, although I didn’t know it at first. It scares hell out of me, Owen. My life is going by and I can’t get a grip on it. It eludes me, it defeats me. My family is on the other side of the world. Nothing adds up. The cult is the only thing I seem to connect with. It’s the only thing I’ve been right about.””Are you a serious man?”The question stopped me cold. I told him I didn’t understand what he meant.”I’m not a serious man,” he said. “If you wanted to compose a mighty Homeric text on my life and fortunes, I might suggest a suitable first line. ‘This is the story of a man who was not serious.’ “”You’re the most serious man I know.”He laughed at me and made a gesture of dismissal. But I wasn’t ready to let it go just yet.”What do you mean then? Do you think I’m not serious because I’ve written insignificant things, miscellaneous things, because I work for a sprawling corporation?””You know that’s not what I mean.””It’s important for me to have an ordinary job. Paperwork. A desk and daily tasks. In my curious way I try to cling to people and to work. I try to assert a basic right or need.””Of course,” he said. “I didn’t mean the question as a challenge. I’m sorry. Forgive me, James.”We fell into a silence.”Do you realize what we’re doing?” I said finally. “We’re submerging your narrative in commentary. We’re spending more time on the interruptions than on the story.”He poured water from the jug.”I feel like someone in that mob of yours,” I told him. “The mob that grows impatient with the professional teller of tales. Let’s go on with it. Where are the people in the story?””It gets harder as we approach the end. I want to delay. I don’t want to get on with it at all.””Show us their faces, tell us what they said.”

Emmerich was tracking the victim. He reported that the old man’s wanderings were sometimes predictable. He tended to head west for part of the day, then northeast, then west again, then southeast. Was he describing an hourglass in the sand? At other times he roamed the hills, lived for a day or two with camel herders or one of the wandering tribes, beyond all roads. In sandstorms he sat still, as Emmerich did if he was in the area, his face covered in a head-scarf as the sun paled, the sky vanished, the wind began to keen. The man was very old, his range limited. Time, weather, his faltering gait suggested he would approach Hawa Mandir in less than two days, goatless, hungry, muttering.Bern was vomiting blood. Three or four times a day Owen removed the hatch-cover and spoke to her. She was beyond hunger, he assumed, drifting into a spiral of irreversible attrition. He spoke softly and easily. He always had something to say. Something came to mind the moment he bent to the opening. He was visiting, he was actually chatting. He wanted to soothe her, to bathe her in his human voice. He believed she understood, although there was no sign. He brought her water once a day. She could no longer hold down water but he continued to bring it, easing through the opening and trying to get her to drink from his cupped hands. Her eyes grew daily in their sockets, her face began to fold into her skull. He sat across from her, letting his mind wander. His mind had begun to wander all the time.Singh rubbed the stones together.”Lovely day, what? Coolish, or would you say warmish? Depends, doesn’t it?”He made quote marks in the air, raising the index and middle finger of each hand to set off the words coolish and warmish. He studied one of the stones. Atcha. Okay.”What is his name?” Owen said.”Hamir Mazmudar.””Does it mean anything?”Singh laughed wildly, pounding the stones together. When Emmerich arrived he was gray with blown sand. He looked at Singh and pointed toward the distant fields. A figure came out of the millet, moving slowly toward town. Large birds turned in the darkening sky. Owen watched the pale moon rise. The moon was his proper body, sad and dashed.”But he’s not so far gone.””Sick man,” Emmerich said.”Not so sick. He walks for days on end.””His memory is gone.””It was all we could do,” Singh said, “to find out the bloke’s proper name.””Once your memory goes, you’re an empty body.””There’s no point anymore, is there?””You’re a receptacle for your own waste,” Emmerich said. “From the sigmoid flexure to the anal canal.””You know the program. You know how it has to end.””You recognize.””You see the rightness of it,” Singh said.”It reaches you, doesn’t it?””It’s valid.””It’s true to the premise, isn’t it? It follows logically upon the premise.””It’s clean, you know? Nothing clings to the act. No hovering stuff.””It’s a blunt recital of the facts,” Emmerich said. “We can put it that way if you like.””What would you like?””It’s sound, it’s binding.””It’s utterly bloody right. I mean we’re bloody ‘ere, ain’t we? No use ‘anging about, is there? Time we nipped into town, i’n it?”Emmerich stripped, poured water from a brass pot over his face and body, then put on a coarse shirt, loose drawstring pants, an old tribal surcoat and round felt cap. Singh came out of his silo. The smoke of cooking fires hung over the town. He went with Emmerich to the bin where the other two men were enclosed. He did not look at Owen or speak to him. English was the binding tongue of the subcontinent. The ancient Arabs wrote on bones. Singh emerged in clothes that belonged to the others, a striped robe and dark sash under a military tunic. He looked princely and insane. Emmerich followed him toward the darkening town, the one color, formed and ordered. Hakara is the name of the Sanskrit h. Makara is the m.Owen entered one of the silos and sat in the dark. It was the smallest of the structures, five feet high, and he watched the night sky rapidly deepen, stars pinching through the haze. That was the universe tonight, a rectangle two and a half feet high, three feet long. At the lower edge of the opening he could see a narrow band of earth losing its texture to the night. Council Grove and Shawnee. The old storage elevators were frame construction until they switched to silos, see the Greek, a pit for storing grain, about the mid-1920s he thought it was. Lord the machines were wonderful, the combines and tractors, those stark contraptions flailing and bumping through the bluestem grass. He was lonely for machines. The boxy little Fords and Chevrolets. The dry goods delivery truck. The cross-country buses, a hundred and twenty horsepower. horn ok please. He was a waterboy in the fields with a straw hat, that’s what they wore, and sturdy overalls. It is necessary to remember correctly. This is the earth we dream and childishly color. The spaces. The solitary church standing in weeds. The men in overalls, with wind-beaten faces, clear-eyed, gathered outside a feed store. We want to get it right.An enclosed wooden stairway juts out from the side of the feed store. Someone peers up. Beyond a line of raked cirrus come the towering brown combers of a midsummer rain, flat-based mounds of cloud with multiple summits. There’s an element of suspense in the air. The air is charged and dense. The men in overalls stand watching. There’s always a period of curious fear between the first sweet-smelling breeze and the time when the rain comes cracking down.It is Owen who is peering skyward. He moves away from the cluster of silent men. Late again. They would be waiting at home. On the porch of an old frame house the woman sits in an arrow-back chair as the first heavy drops hit the street, raising dust in gauzy mare’s-tails. Poker-faced, retaining a grudging faith in the life beyond. The life beyond would not be easy or pleasurable as she saw it. These things were not part of her system of beliefs.But it would be just, it would be consistent with moral right, it would offer a recompense for these days and years of getting by, scraping together, finding and losing homes. She limped, his mother, and he never knew why.The man comes out to wait, just washed, clean-shirted, a rubbing of earth, nonetheless, plainly evident in the seams of his face and hands, hard earth, irremovable. He stands looking toward the noise of the storm, one shoulder higher than the other, a way of standing and walking, common enough among men who plowed and stooped and carried posts and dug post-holes. Owen thought it was related in some way to his mother’s limp.In his memory he was a character in a story, a colored light. The bin was perfect, containing that part of his existence, enclosing it whole. There was recompense in memories too. Recall the bewilderment and ache, the longing for a thing that’s out of reach, and you can begin to repair your present condition. Owen believed that memory was the faculty of absolution. Men developed memories to ease their disquiet over things they did as men. The deep past is the only innocence and therefore necessary to retain. The boy in the sorghum fields, the boy learning names of animals and plants. He would recall exactingly. He would work the details of that particular day.The church is fifteen miles out of town. The only structure visible. Seeing it from a distance he doesn’t react the way he would to a farmhouse, say, with its sprung cluster of trees set against the open sky. Small groupings of objects, breaking the deep plane of the land, this house and barn, these cottonwoods and sheds and stone walls, seem to beat against the distances, the endless dusty winds, resourceful and brave. The church is different, a lone building with a decaying gray facade, pitched roof, steeple without a bell. There are no boundaries, no trees or stream. It has no telling effect. It is lost in the sky behind it.A couple of old motorcars sit in the weeds, World War I vintage, skimpy, with treadless tires. In time the Pontiac hearse comes off the dirt road, jouncing, four-door, a once grand but now mud-spattered vehicle, gravely dented, too ramshackle and complaining to transport the dead. Rain is gunning down on the fenders and roof. (In his memory he is at the church, waiting, as well as inside the car, crammed between the door and a woman who smells of sour milk.) The doors open and people begin edging out, including the mother, father and the boy, the squinting boy of ten or so, already growing out of his clothes, growing toward the world unwillingly. He stands by the car door, waits for the lady and an old man to emerge, then shuts the door and turns toward the church, pausing in the rain before he follows the others in.The benches are old, the altar a plain table partly stripped of varnish. A woman holds an infant, facing out, against her breasts. There is an imprint on the wall that marks the absent upright piano. The man who will preach today is young and dark-haired and has about him a hard-set radiance. He is here to determine things, to get these people right with God. Even if he were dressed in farm clothes and seated on one of the benches, it would be easy to tell him apart from the others. The marginal farmers, the migrant workers, the odd-jobs men, the invalids, the half-breeds, the widowed, the silent, the blank. Less than thirty people present today, some of them having come on foot. They seem the off-lineage of some abrupt severance or dispossession. There is something emptied-out and loose-jointed about them. Owen notices the undiscerning gazes and draws a simple moral. Hardship makes the world obscure.These early memories were a fiction in the sense that he could separate himself from the character, maintain the distance that lent a pureness to his affection. How else could men love themselves but in memory, knowing what they know? But it was necessary to get the details right. His innocence depended on this, on the shapes and colors of this device he was building, this child’s model of a rainy day in Kansas. He had to remember correctly.The resolute young man strokes the air as he speaks, then cuts it with emphatic gestures. In this room of bare wood and dying light he is a power, a stalking force. They are here to wrestle with each other, he says. They will get right, see the light and yield, not to him but to the Spirit. When we talk about the fallen wonder of the world, we don’t mean the forests and the plains and the animals. We don’t mean the scenery, do we? He tells them they will talk as from the womb, as from the sweet soul before birth, before blood and corruption.There are many silences in his discourse. All the promises are spaced. He is building a suspense, an expectancy. Gusts of rain are washing through the wheatfields of the high plains. Let me hear that beautiful babbling brook, he says. And he watches them, urging silently now. Someone mumbles something, a man in the front row. Sky is opened, the preacher says. Rain is coming down.He moves among them, touching a shoulder here, a head there, touching roughly, reminding them of something they’d forgotten or chosen to disregard. There is a Spirit lurking here. Show me the scripture that says we have to speak English to know the joy of talking freely to God. Ridiculous, we say. There’s no such document. Paul to the Corinthians said men can speak with the tongues of angels. In our time we can do the same.Do whatever your tongue finds to do. Seal the old language and loose the new.The boy is spellbound by the young man’s intensity and vigor. It is startling, compelling. He listens to the clear voice, watches the man roll up his shirt-sleeves and shoot a hand in this and that direction, touching people, squeezing their flesh, shaking them hard. Owen’s mother is saying Jesus Jesus Jesus, softly, in her seat, in awe, exalted. There is a stirring up front, an arm flying into the air. The preacher turns, walking toward the altar, talking along with the man, exhorting. He does not rush, he does not raise his voice. The noise and hurry are in Owen’s mind. The preacher turns again to face the congregation, watches the man in the front row get to his feet. Owen’s father gets to his feet.Get wet, the preacher says. Let me hear that babbling brook. What am I talking about but freedom? Be yourself, that’s all it is. Be free in the Spirit. Let the Spirit knock you free. You start, the Spirit takes over. Easiest thing in the world. That’s all it is. Jump in, get wet. I can hear the Spirit in you, I can hear the Spirit driving. Let it move and shake you. Get ready, it’s round the bend, it’s turning the corner, it’s running the rapids, it’s coming like nobody’s business. I want to hear that beautiful babbling brook.A silence. The sense of expectation is tremendous. The boy is chilled. Time seems to pause whenever the preacher does. When he speaks, everything starts again, everything moves and jumps and lives. Only his voice can drive the meeting forward.Time to get wet, he says. Get wet time.In the bin, the inverted lunar urn, he wondered about the uses of ecstasy, see the Greek, a displacing, a coming out of stasis. That’s all it was. A freedom, an escape from the condition of ideal balance. Normal understanding is surpassed, the self and its machinery obliterated. Is this what innocence is? Is it the language of innocence those people spoke, words flying out of them like spat stones? The deep past of men, the transparent word. Is this what they longed for with that terrible holy gibberish they carried through the world? To be the children of the race? Sleep. The sleep of tired children, the great white-sheeted wave. It began to fold over him. He was exhausted, he closed his eyes. A little more, a little longer. It was necessary to remember, to dream the pristine earth.His father stands erect, eyes closed, the noise running out of him, strangely calm and measured. Owen sees the preacher come close. His eyes are bright and queer. He has powerful forearms, high-veined, dark-veined. There are voices and rejoicing, a rash of voices, movement here and there. This speech is beautiful in its way, inverted, indivisible, absent. It is not quite there. It passes over and through. There are occasional prompting comments by the preacher, his reflections on what he sees and hears. He speaks conversationally of these tremendous things.Those were plain and forthright people, thought the man crouched in the dark. Those were people who deserved better. All they had to reconcile them to exhaustion and defeat was that meager place in the wind. Those were honest people, struggling to make a way, full of the heart’s own goodness and love.The clouds are neon-edged. The light is metallic, falling across the rangeland, the plainweave fields, the old towns in their scrupulous ruin. Bless them.”Bless them.”He sat in the small room, motionless, looking toward a wall. The eyes were still involved in that old and recollected business, the head tilted toward his right shoulder. There was a strange radiance in his face, the slightest separation of the man from his condition, the full acceptance, the crushing belief that nothing can be done. Motionless. The telling had merged with the event. I had to think a moment to remember where we were.”You stayed in the silo through the night.””Yes, of course. Why would I come out, to watch them kill him? These killings mock us. They mock our need to structure and classify, to build a system against the terror in our souls. They make the system equal to the terror. The means to contend with death has become death. Did I always know this? It took the desert to make it clear to me. Clear and simple, to answer the question you asked earlier. All questions are answered today.””Is this what the cult intended all the time, this mockery?””Of course not. They intended nothing, they meant nothing. They only matched the letters. What beautiful names. Hawa Mandir. Hamir Mazmudar.”The twig broom. The muted colors of the pillows and rugs. The angles of arranged objects. The floorboard seams. The seam of light and shade. The muted colors of the water jug and wooden chest. The muted colors of the walls.We sat watching the room go dark. I judged the amount of time that had to pass before he would be ready to recite the ending, before the stillness would yield. This is what I was learning from the objects in the room and the spaces between them, from the conscious solace he was devising in things. I was learning when to speak, in what manner.”Try to finish,” I said softly.

Two blood-covered stones were found near the body on the outskirts of the fifteenth-century town, at first light, by a woman fetching water or by boys on their way to the fields. By this time three men would be trekking west, leaving behind a comatose woman and two other men, one dead, one merely sitting still. Eventually a constable would make his way along the rough path to the storage bins, and then a subdivisional officer, to question the one conscious person. He would be sitting in the dust, blue-eyed and sparsely bearded, without documents or money, and he would probably try to speak to them in some dialect of northwest Iran.The trekkers dispersed without a word in the wild country before the border. The one in Western clothes, carrying a small pack, had imprinted in his passport a visa which would not expire for some months. It included the stamp of the second secretary, Embassy of Pakistan, Athens, Greece, and carried above the stamp an example of this gentleman’s handsomely scripted initials.

It was interesting how he’d chosen to finish, impersonally, gazing as if from a distance on these unknowable people, these figures we distinguish by their clothing. There would be no further commentary and reflection. This was fitting. I had no trouble accepting this. I didn’t want to reflect further, with or without Owen. It was enough to see him sit there, owl-eyed, in the room he’d been arranging all his life.The alleys were full of people and noise. Bare bulbs were arrayed on strings over tiers of nuts and spices. I paused every few feet to see what was here, nutmeg and scarlet mace, burlap bags of coriander seeds and chilies, rock salt in crude chunks. I lingered at the trays of dyestuffs and ground spices, heaped in pyramids, colors I’d never seen, brilliances, worlds, until finally it was time to go.I came away from the old city feeling I’d been engaged in a contest of some singular and gratifying kind. Whatever he’d lost in life-strength, this is what I’d won.