Less(51)
Indeed: even Less can’t feel bad for Swift anymore. Like a wintertime swimmer too numb to feel cold, Arthur Less is too sad to feel pity. For Robert, yes, breathing through an oxygen tube up in Sonoma. For Marian, nursing a broken hip that might ground her forever. For Javier in his marriage, and even for Bastian’s tragic sports teams. For Zohra and Janet. For his fellow writer Mohammed. Around the world his pity flies, its wingspan as wide as an albatross’s. But he can no more feel sorry for Swift—now become a gorgon of Caucasian male ego, snake headed, pacing through his novel and turning each sentence to stone—than Arthur Less can feel sorry for himself.
He hears the balcony door open beside him and sees the short waiter, returned from his smoke break. The man points to a cuckoo on the railing and speaks to him in perfectly understandable French (if only he understood French).
Laughable.
Arthur Less—he suddenly stands very still, as one does when about to swat a fly. Don’t let it go. Distractions are pulling at his mind—Robert, Freddy, fifty, Tahiti, flowers, the waiter gesturing at Less’s coat sleeve—but he will not look at them. Don’t let it escape. Laughable. His mind is converging on one point of light. What if it isn’t a poignant, wistful novel at all? What if it isn’t the story of a sad middle-aged man on a tour of his hometown, remembering the past and fearing the future; a peripateticism of humiliation and regret; the erosion of a single male soul? What if it isn’t even sad? For a moment, his entire novel reveals itself to him like those shimmering castles that appear to men crawling through deserts…
It vanishes. The balcony door slams shut; the sleeve of the blue suit remains snagged on a cuckoo’s beak (a tear lies seconds in the future). But Less does not notice; he is clinging to the one thought that remains. AH ah ah ah! comes the Lessian laugh.
His Swift isn’t a hero. He’s a fool.
“Well,” he whispers to the night air, “happy birthday, Arthur Less.”
Just for the record: happiness is not bullshit.
Less Indian
For a seven-year-old boy, the boredom of sitting in an airport lounge is rivaled only by lying convalescent in bed. This particular boy, one-six-thousandth of whose life has already been squandered in this airport, has gone through every pocket of his mother’s purse and found nothing of interest but a keychain made of plastic crystals. He is considering the wastepaper basket—its swinging lid holds possibilities—when he notices, through the lounge’s window, the American. The boy has not seen one all day. He watches the American with the same detached, merciless fascination with which he has watched the robotic scorpions that circle the airport bathroom drain. Epically tall, brutally blond, the American stands in his beige wilted linen shirt and pants, smiling at the escalator-regulations sign. The sign, so scrupulously unabridged that it includes advice on pet safety, is longer than the escalator itself. This seems to amuse the American. The boy watches as the man pats every pocket on his person, then nods in satisfaction. He looks up at a closed-circuit television to follow the fleeting romances between flights and gates, then heads down to join a line. Though everyone has already passed through at least three checkpoints, a man at the head of the line has everyone take out their passport and boarding pass once more. This superfluous verification also seems to amuse the American. But it is warranted; at least three people are about to board the wrong flight. The American is one of them. Who knows what adventures awaited him in Hyderabad? We will never know, for he is shown to another gate: Thiruvananthapuram. He becomes absorbed in a notebook. Soon enough, a worker is rushing over to tap the American on the shoulder, and the foreigner pops up to rush for the flight that he is yet again about to miss. They disappear together down a foreshortened corridor. The boy, already attuned to comedy at his young age, presses his nose against the glass and awaits the inevitable. A moment later, the American springs back to grab the forgotten satchel and vanishes again, this time surely for good. The boy tilts his head as boredom begins to flood. His mother asks if he needs to wee, and he says yes, but only so he can see the scorpions again.
“Here are the black ants; they are your neighbors. Nearby there is Elizabeth, the yellow rat snake, who is the parson’s special friend, although he says he is happy to kill her if you want him to. But then there will be rats. Do not be afraid of the mongoose. Do not encourage the stray dogs—they are not our pets. Do not open the windows, because small bats will want to visit you, and possibly monkeys. And if you walk at night, stomp on the ground to scare off other animals.”
Less asks what other animals could there possibly be?
Rupali answers, quite solemnly: “Let us never know.”
A writer’s retreat on a hill above the Arabian Sea, on Carlos’s suggestion half a year ago—it has been a long journey, but Less has arrived at last. The dreaded birthday, the dreaded wedding, are both behind him now; ahead is the novel, and with an idea of how to go forward, he will finally have a chance to conquer it. Gone are the cares of Europe and Morocco; present still are the cares of the Delhi airport, the Chennai airport, and those of Thiruvananthapuram. In Thiruvananthapuram, he was met by a seemingly delighted woman, the manager Rupali, who graciously led him across a steaming parking lot to a white Tata driven, he was later to learn, by a relative. This driver was proud to show Less a TV set in the dashboard of his car; Less was alarmed. And off they went. Rupali, a slim and elegant woman with a neat black braid and the refined profile of a Caesar on a coin, tried to engage him with conversation about politics, literature, and art, but Less was too enchanted by the ride itself.