“…welcome you on our flight from Paris to Marrakech…”
The chimneys all looked like flowerpots.
There is a second call, this time from an unknown number, but we will never know what it contains, for no message is left, and the intended receiver is already deep in takeoff slumber, high above the continent of Europe, only seven days from fifty, headed now at last to Morocco.
Less Moroccan
What does a camel love? I would guess nothing in the world. Not the sand that scours her, or the sun that bakes her, or the water she drinks like a teetotaler. Not sitting down, blinking her lashes like a starlet. Not standing up, moaning in indignant fury as she manages her adolescent limbs. Not her fellow camels, to whom she shows the disdain of an heiress forced to fly coach. Not the humans who have enslaved her. Not the oceanic monotony of the dunes. Not the flavorless grass she chews, then chews again, then again, in a sullen struggle of digestion. Not the hellish day. Not the heavenly night. Not sunset. Not sunrise. Not the sun or the moon or the stars. And surely not the heavy American, a few pounds overweight but not bad for his age, taller than most and top heavy, tipping from side to side as she carries this human, this Arthur Less, pointlessly across the Sahara.
Before her: Mohammed, a man in a long white djellaba and with a blue shesh wound around his head, leading her by a rope. Behind her: the eight other camels in her caravan, because nine people signed up to travel to this encampment, though only four of the camels have passengers. They have lost five people since Marrakech. They are soon to lose another.
Atop her: Arthur Less, in his own blue shesh, admiring the dunes, the little wind devils dancing on each crest, the sunset coloration of turquoise and gold, thinking at least he will not be alone for his birthday.
Days earlier—awakening from the Paris flight to find himself on the African continent: a bleary-eyed Arthur Less. Body still atingle with champagne and Javier’s caresses and a rather awkward window seat, he staggers across the tarmac beneath a dyed-indigo night sky, and into an immigration line that is beyond reason. The French, so stately at home, seem instantly to have lost their minds on the soil of their former colony; it is like the redoubled madness of seeing a lover you have wronged; they ignore the line, removing the ropes from the carefully ordered stanchions, and become a mob charging into Marrakech. The Moroccan officers, in the green and red of cocktail olives, stay calm; passports are examined, then stamped; Less imagines this happens all day, every day. He finds himself shouting “Madame! Madame!” at a Frenchwoman elbowing her way through the crowd. She pouts with a shrug (C’est la vie!) and keeps going. Is there an invasion he has not heard of? Is this the last plane out of France? If so: where is Ingrid Bergman?
So there is plenty of time, as he shuffles with the crowd (in which, though European, he still towers), to panic.
He could have remained in Paris, or at least have accepted yet another delay (and six hundred euros); he could have tossed this whole foolish adventure aside for one even more foolish. Arthur Less was supposed to go to Morocco, but he met a Spaniard in Paris, and no one has heard from him since! A rumor for Freddy to hear. But if he is anything, Arthur Less is a man who follows his plan. And so he is here. At least he will not be alone.
“Arthur! You’ve grown a beard!” His old friend Lewis, outside customs, joyous as ever. Tarnished-silver hair worn long over the ears and bristling white on his chin; plump faced and well clad in gray linen and cotton; capillaries spreading in a fertile delta across his nose; signs that Lewis Delacroix is, at nearly sixty, a stride ahead of Arthur Less.
Less smiles warily and touches his beard. “I…I thought I needed a change.”
Lewis holds him at a distance to study him. “It’s sexy. Let’s get you into some air-conditioning. There’s a heat wave on, and even these Marrakech nights have been hell. Sorry your flight was delayed; what a nightmare to wait a whole day! Did you manage to fall in love with fourteen hours in Paris?”
Less is startled and says he called up Alexander. He talks about the party and Alex not showing up. He doesn’t mention Javier.
Lewis turns to him and asks, “Do you want to talk about Freddy? Or do you not want to talk about Freddy?”
“Not talk.”
His friend nods. Lewis, whom he met for the first time on that long road trip after college, who offered his cheap apartment on Valencia Street, above the communist bookstore, who introduced him to acid and electronic music. Handsome Lewis Delacroix, who seemed so adult, so assured; he was thirty. A generation apart back then; now they are essentially contemporaries. And yet Lewis has always seemed so much steadier; with the same boyfriend for twenty years, he is the very model of love’s success. And glamorous: this trip, for instance, is exactly the kind of luxury that afforded Lewis’s fascinating stories. It is a birthday trip—not for Arthur Less. For some woman named Zohra, who is also turning fifty, and whom Less has never met.
“I’d say let’s get some sleep,” Lewis says as they find a taxi, “but nobody at the hotel is asleep. They’ve been drinking since noon. And who knows what else? I blame Zohra; well, you’ll meet Zohra.”
The actress is the first to go. Perhaps it is the pale Moroccan wine, poured glass after glass at dinner (on the roof of the rented house, the riad, with a view of that upraised pupil’s hand: the minaret of the Koutoubia Mosque); or perhaps the gin and tonics she requests after dinner, when she sheds her clothes (the two riad workers, both named Mustafa, say nothing) and slips into the courtyard pool, where turtles stare at her pale flesh, wishing they were still dinosaurs, the water rippling from her backstroke as the others continue to introduce themselves (Less is in here somewhere, struggling with a wine bottle between his thighs); or perhaps the tequila she discovers later, once the gin runs out, when someone has found a guitar and someone else a shrill local flute and she begins an improvisational dance with a lantern on her head before someone leads her out of the pool; or perhaps the whiskey later passed around; or the hashish; or the cigarettes; or the three loud claps of the riad’s neighbor, a princess: the sign they are up too late for Marrakech—but how will we ever know? All we know is that in the morning, she is unable to get out of bed; naked, she calls for a drink, and when someone brings her water she knocks the glass away and says, “I mean vodka!” and because she is unwilling to move, and because their ride to the Sahara leaves at noon, and because her last two movies were in dubious taste, and because nobody but the birthday girl even knows her, it is in the care of the two Mustafas that they leave her.
“Will she be okay?” Less asks Lewis.
“I’m so surprised she couldn’t hold her liquor,” Lewis says, turning to him with his enormous sunglasses; they make him look like a nocturnal primate. They are seated together in a small bus; a freak heat wave has made the world outside shimmer like a wok. The rest of the passengers lean wearily against the windows. “I thought actors were made from steel.”
“Please to all!” says their guide into his microphone; this is Mohammed, their Moroccan guide, in a red polo shirt and jeans. “Here we pass through the Atlas Mountains. They are, we say, like snake. Tonight we arrive at [name garbled by microphone], where we spend the night. Tomorrow is the valley of palms.”