Why did he not expect Nineveh, Sidon, Tyre?
“I’m sorry,” says the tech-whiz nightclub owner. “You say there are eight families? Or Ait families?”
“Ait families.”
“The number eight?”
“Once it was a village, but now only a few families remain. Eight.”
Babylon? Ur?
“Once again. The number eight? Or the name Ait?”
“Yes, Ait families. Ait Ben Haddou.”
It is at this point that the female war reporter leans over the ancient wall and commences vomiting. The miracle before them is forgotten; her husband runs to her side and holds back her beautiful hair. The setting sun puts the adobe scene in blue shadows, and somehow Less is taken back to the color scheme of his childhood home, when his mother went mad for the Southwest. From across the river, a cry comes up like an air raid siren: the evening call to prayer. The castle, or ksar, Ait Ben Haddou rises, unfeeling, before them. The husband tries, at first, a furious exchange in German with the guide, then one in Arabic with the driver, followed by French, ending in an incomprehensible tirade meant only for the gods. His command of English curses goes untested. His wife clutches her head and tries to stand but collapses into the driver’s arms, and they are all taken quickly back to the bus. “Migraine,” Lewis whispers to him. “Booze, the altitude. I bet she’s down for the count.” Less takes one last look at the ancient castle of mud and straw, remade every year or so as the rains erode the walls, plastered and replastered so that nothing remains of the old ksar except its former pattern. Something like a living creature of which not a cell is left of the original. Something like an Arthur Less. And what is the plan? Will they just keep rebuilding forever? Or one day will someone say, Hey, what the hell? Let it fall, bugger off. And that will be the end of Ait Ben Haddou. Less feels on the verge of an understanding about life and death and the passage of time, an ancient and perfectly obvious understanding, when a British voice intervenes:
“Okay, sorry to be a bother, just want to make sure. Once again. It’s Ait…”
“Prayer is better than sleep,” comes the morning cry from the mosque, but travel is better than prayer, for as the muezzin chants, they are all already packed into the bus and waiting for the guide to return with the war reporters. Their hotel—a dark stone labyrinth at night—reveals itself, at sunrise, to be a palace in a valley of lush palms. By the front door, two little boys giggle over a chick they hold in their hands. Colored a bright orange (either artificially or supernaturally), the chick chirps at them ceaselessly, furiously, indignantly, but they only laugh and show the creature to luggage-burdened Arthur Less. On the bus, he seats himself beside the Korean violinist and her male-model boyfriend; the young man looks over at Less with a blank blue stare. What does a male model love? Lewis and Zohra sit together, laughing. The guide returns; the war reporters are still recovering, he reports, and will join them on a later camel. So the bus guffaws to life. Good to know there is always a later camel.
The rest is a Dramamine nightmare: a drunkard’s route up the mountain, at every switchback the miraculous gleam of geodes set out for sale, a young boy jumping at the bus’s approach, rushing quickly to the roadside, holding out a violet-dyed geode, only to be covered in a cloud of dust as they depart. Here and there a casbah with fireclay walls and a great green wooden door (the donkey door, Mohammed explains), with a small door set inside (the people door), but never a sign of either donkeys or people. Just the arid acacia mountainside. The passengers are sleeping or staring out the window and chatting quietly. The violinist and the male model are whispering intensely, and so Less makes his way back, where he finds Zohra staring out a window. She motions, and he sits beside her.
“You know what I’ve decided,” she says sternly, as if calling a meeting to order. “About turning fifty. Two things. The first is: fuck love.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
“It means, give it up. Fuck it. I gave up smoking, and I can give up love.” He eyes the pack of menthols in her purse. “What? I’ve given it up several times! Romance isn’t safe at our age.”
“So Lewis told you I’m also turning fifty?”
“Yes! Happy birthday, darling! We’re going down the shitter together.” She’s nothing short of delighted to have learned that her birthday is the day before his.
“Okay, no romance at our age. Actually, that’s a huge relief. I might get more writing done. What’s the second?”
“It’s related to the first one.”
“Okay.”
“Get fat.”
“Huh.”
“Fuck love and just get fat. Like Lewis.”
Lewis turns his head. “Who, me?”
“You!” Zohra says. “Look how fucking fat you’ve gotten!”
“Zohra!” Less says.
But Lewis just chuckles. With two hands, he pats the mound of his belly. “You know, I think it’s a hoot? I look in the mirror every morning and laugh and laugh and laugh. Me! Skinny little Lewis Delacroix!”
“So that’s the plan, Arthur. Are you in?” Zohra asks.
“But I don’t want to get fat,” Less says. “I know that sounds stupid and vain, but I don’t.”
Lewis leans in closer. “Arthur, you’re going to have to figure something out. You see all these men over fifty, these skinny men with mustaches. Imagine all the dieting and exercise and effort of fitting into your suits from when you were thirty! And then what? You’re still a dried-up old man. Screw that. Clark always says you can be thin or you can be happy, and, Arthur, I have already tried thin.”
His husband, Clark. Yes, they are Lewis and Clark. They still find it hilarious. Hilarious!
Zohra leans forward and puts a hand on his arm. “Come on, Arthur. Do it. Get fat with us. The best is yet to come.”
There is noise at the front of the bus; the violinist is talking in hushed tones with Mohammed. From one of the window seats, they can now hear the male model’s moans.
“Oh no, not another,” Zohra says.
“You know,” Lewis says, “I thought he would have gone sooner.”
So there are only four laden camels moving across the Sahara. The male model, sick beyond all measure, has been left with the bus in M’Hamid, the last town before the desert, and the violinist has stayed with him. “He will join us on a later camel,” Mohammed assures them as they board their camels and are tipped like teapots as the creatures struggle to rise. Four with humans and five without, all in a line, making shadows in the sand, and, looking at the damned creatures, with their hand-puppet heads and their hay-bale bodies, their scrawny little legs, Less thinks, Look at them! Who could ever believe in a god? It is three days until his birthday; Zohra’s is in two.
“This isn’t a birthday,” Less yells to Lewis as they bob toward the sunset. “It’s an Agatha Christie novel!”
“Let’s bet on who goes next. I’m betting me. Right now. On this camel.”
“I’m betting on Josh.” The British tech whiz.
Lewis asks: “Would you like to talk about Freddy now?”
“Not really. I heard the wedding was very pretty.”
“I heard that the night before, Freddy—”
Zohra’s voice comes loudly from her cameclass="underline" “Shut the fuck up! Enjoy the fucking sunset on your fucking camels! Jesus!”
It is, after all, almost a miracle they are here. Not because they’ve survived the booze, the hashish, the migraines. Not that at all. It’s that they’ve survived everything in life, humiliations and disappointments and heartaches and missed opportunities, bad dads and bad jobs and bad sex and bad drugs, all the trips and mistakes and face-plants of life, to have made it to fifty and to have made it here: to this frosted-cake landscape, these mountains of gold, the little table they can now see sitting on the dune, set with olives and pita and glasses and wine chilling on ice, with the sun waiting more patiently than any camel for their arrival. So, yes. As with almost every sunset, but with this one in particular: shut the fuck up.