Less(48)
“Me? I think maybe I’ll go it on my own. Maybe I’m better that way. Maybe I was always better that way and it was just that when I was young, I was so scared, and now I’m not scared. I’ll still have Clark. I can still always call Clark and ask his advice.”
“Even after everything?”
“Yes, Arthur.”
They talk a bit longer, and the sky shifts above them until it is quite late. “Arthur,” Lewis says at one point, “did you hear that Freddy locked himself in the bathroom the night before the wedding?” But Less is not listening; he is thinking about how he used to visit Lewis and Clark over the years, about the dinner parties and Halloweens and times he slept on their couch, too tipsy to get home. “Good night, Arthur.” Lewis gives his old friend a salute and heads into the darkness, so Less is left alone by the dying fire. A brightness catches his eye: Mohammed’s cigarette as he moves from tent to tent, buttoning the flaps like he is tucking in sleeping children for the night. From the furthermost tent, the tech whiz moans from his bed. From somewhere, a camel complains, followed by a young man’s voice soothing it—do they sleep beside the creatures? Do they sleep under this most excellent canopy, this majestical roof, this amazing mirrored coverlet, the stars? Look, you: there are enough stars for everyone tonight, and among them shine the satellites, those counterfeit coins. He reaches for, but does not catch, a falling star. Less, at last, goes to bed. But he cannot stop thinking of what Lewis has told him. Not the story about the ten years, but the idea of being alone. He realizes that, even after Robert, he never truly let himself be alone. Even here, on this trip: first Bastian, then Javier. Why this endless need for a man as a mirror? To see the Arthur Less reflected there? He is grieving, for sure—the loss of his lover, his career, his novel, his youth—so why not cover the mirrors, rend the fabric over his heart, and just let himself mourn? Perhaps he should try alone.
He chuckles to himself in the moments before sleep. Alone: impossible to imagine. That life seems as terrifying, as un-Lessian, as that of a castaway on a desert island.
The sandstorm does not start until dawn.
As Less lies sleepless in bed, his novel appears in his mind. Swift. What a title. What a mess. Swift. Where is his editor when he needs her? His editrix, as he used to call her: Leona Flowers. Traded years ago in the card game of publishing to some other house, but Less recalls how she took his first novels, shaggy with magniloquent prose, and made them into books. So clever, so artful, so good at persuading him of what to cut. “This paragraph is so beautiful, so special,” she might say, pressing her French-manicured hands to her chest, “that I’m keeping it all to myself!” Where is Leona now? High in some tower with some new favorite author, trying her same old lines: “I think the chapter’s absence will echo throughout the novel.” What would she tell him? More likable, make Swift more likable. That’s what everyone’s saying; nobody cares what this character suffers. But how do you do it? It’s like making oneself more likable. And at fifty, Less muses drowsily, you’re as likable as you’re going to get.
The sandstorm. So many months of planning, so much travel, so much expense, and here they are: trapped inside as the wind whips their tents like a man with a mule. They are gathered, the three of them (Zohra, Lewis, Less) in the large dining tent, hot as a camel ride and just as smelly, with its heavy horsehair sand door that has not been washed and three visitors who have not been, either. Only Mohammed seems fresh and cheerful, though he tells Less he was awakened at dawn by the sandstorm and had to run for shelter (for he has, indeed, slept out of doors). “Well”—Lewis announcing over coffee and honeyed flatbreads—“we are being given an opportunity for a different experience than the one we were expecting.” Zohra greets this with a raised butter knife; tomorrow is her birthday. But they must submit to the sand. They spend the rest of the day drinking beer and playing cards, and Zohra fleeces them both.
“I’ll get my revenge,” Lewis threatens, and they go to bed to find, in the morning, that, like a bad houseguest, the storm has no intention of leaving and, moreover, that Lewis has proved prophetic: he has been afflicted as well. He lies on his mirrored bed, sweating, moaning “Kill me, kill me,” as the wind shakes his tent. Mohammed appears, swathed in indigo and violet, full of regret. “The sandstorm is only in these dunes. We drive out of the desert, it is gone.” He suggests they pile Lewis and Josh into the jeeps and head back to M’Hamid, where at least there is a hotel and a bar with a television, where the others, the war reporters, the violinist, the male model, are waiting. Zohra, only her eyes showing in the folds of her bright-green shesh, blinks silently. “No,” she says finally, and turns to Less, ripping off her veil. “No, it’s my birthday, goddamn it! Dump the others in M’Hamid. But we’re going somewhere, Arthur! Mohammed? Where can you drive us that we wouldn’t believe?”
Would you believe Morocco has a Swiss ski town? For that is where Mohammed has taken them, driving them out of the sandstorm and through deep canyons where hotels are carved into the rock and Germans, ignoring the hotels, camp beside the river in beat-up Westfalias; past villages that, as in a folktale, seem inhabited only by sheep; past waterfalls and weirs, madrassas and mosques, casbahs and ksars, and one small town (a lunch stop) where the next-door wood-carver is visited by a woman all in teal who borrows his shavings to sprinkle them on her doorstep, where, it seems, her cat has peed, and where boys are gathered in what at first seems to be an outdoor school and later (when the cheering starts) turns out to be a televised football match; through limestone plateaus; up the spiraling ziggurat roads of the Middle Atlas until the vegetation changes from fronds to needles, where, passing through a chilly pine forest, Mohammed says, “Look out for beasts,” and at first there is nothing, until Zohra screams and points to where sits, on a wooden platform and turning as if interrupted at tea (or déjeuner sur l’herbe), a troop of poker-faced Barbary macaques, or, as she puts it: “Monkeys!” Their own troop is now far away, in M’Hamid, and Less and Zohra are alone, seated in the dark scented bar of the alpine resort, in leather club chairs with glasses of local marc, below a crystal chandelier and before a crystal panorama. They have eaten pigeon pie. Mohammed sits at the bar, drinking an energy drink. Gone is his desert costume; he has changed back into a polo shirt and jeans. It is Zohra’s birthday; it will be Less’s at midnight, in about two hours’ time. Satisfaction has arrived, indeed, on a later camel.