“You should go and hear the music,” she said. “Try not to think about everything so much.”
He nodded. Across the pool, there was a waiter in a white jacket and a white fez clearing glasses from one of the empty tables. Anita smiled, touching his bare ankle with her wet hand.
“It’s just for one day,” she said. “Not even a whole day. Everything’s going to be fine.”
He had never felt like this. Jealousy, fear, hopeless antici- pation — these were familiar feelings, but he had never felt them with such claustrophobic intensity. It made his pulse thick and prolonged, worse the more he tried not to think about it. Everything he didn’t want to believe about himself was once again suddenly, explicitly true. Could he go for one day — not even a whole day — knowing that she was out of his control? It was like deciding that nothing between them had ever mattered.
An hour later, she and the others were in a tiny carpet shop owned by a man named Hassan, sampling different kinds of hash while they listened to Moroccan music on the radio. The walls were an even, vibrant blue that made it difficult to remember what time of day it was. Keith leaned back against the wall on a pile of carpets, his eyes closed. She was curled up beside him, her arm entwined with his. She wore white boots, her legs bare and tan, and beneath her straight blond hair she had a feather boa wrapped tightly around her neck like a scarf. Mick and Marianne and Robert Fraser were on their right, looking at a book of Arabic calligraphy. As usual, someone was taking pictures, and so the last hour had been full of vivid reactions to minor events, canny smiles and thoughtful stares and a minimum of talk.
“It’s better now, isn’t it?” she said.
“Yes. It’s always good to have a smoke.”
“I want to go for a walk later in the market. I want to buy something for Brian. Something to cheer him up.” Her smile was the smile of someone who never felt any difference between acting and being herself. “Don’t be solemn,” she said.
“I wouldn’t dream of being solemn.”
“We’re all friends. It’s a simple idea, but no one seems to understand it anymore.”
“We are friends.”
“Not if everyone’s going to be so solemn about it.”
Someone took their picture. Keith closed his eyes, nodding off slightly to the music. It was trancelike and insistent, a syncopated weave of oboes and violins backed by drums. Each note pointed to a shape without making it too obvious, each note a surprise but also a logical next step. It was like looking at a dark sky and gradually making out constellations in what had been a scrim of random stars.
Her hand felt embarrassingly alive in his. It was long and firm with a pair of rings beneath the first knuckle of her middle finger. He knew that the rings had nothing to do with him and that her hand in his meant nothing, but it made him not care about Brian, or about the band, or about the possibility of spending ten years in jail. It made him want to see what would happen. He kept noticing the faint, greenish bruise on the edge of her cheekbone.
Above the big open square called the Jemaa el Fna, the sun was starting to open up a gap in the mild cloud cover. It lit up the long folding counters of the food stands, where plates of raw ground lamb, diced tomatoes, olives, rice, sausages, and kebabs sat atop thick beds of wilting greens. Brian was just coming out of the darkness of the clothing souks with Tom Keylock when the light on the buildings changed from a muddy brown to a bright pink, all of it suffused with a saffron yellow that was like a second dawn in the middle of the afternoon.
“The acid’s starting to come on,” he said.
“Yes.”
“There’s that sort of humming you always feel in your teeth.”
“We have money. Cigarettes. Nothing can go too badly for us now.”
There was a persistent drone of horns. From the food stalls came the bitter smell of burning charcoal and the dry, organ-meat smell of grilled lamb. A thin man in chef’s whites and a toque was ladling a brown liqueur over a wide pan full of stone-colored snails.
“You knew, didn’t you?” said Brian.
“Knew what?” Keylock took him by the arm and guided him out of the way of a man walking by with a stack of crates on a dolly. Keylock was tall and round-shouldered with sideburns and horn-rimmed glasses. “It’s too much to talk about,” he said.
“It doesn’t matter,” said Brian. “I should have finished with that bitch a long time ago. It’s really starting to kick in, isn’t it?”
“Yes. We’ll just need to cool out for a while somewhere.”
There were three old men in brilliantly colored robes standing on the other side of the square. Their shoulders were slung with leather pouches and several strings of bells and brass cups. Their hats were like enormous tasseled lampshades woven from brightly colored yarn, reds and blues and yellows and greens.
“Perfect,” Brian said. “They’re brilliant, right?”
“Those men? Yes, fine, they’re brilliant.”
“I may take some more in a little while. I’d like to buy some of those hats. Or maybe just buy the men themselves, take them back to England.”
A man in a dark sport coat and a dingy woolen vest approached them, whispering something in French and fanning out some tattered business cards. Keylock brushed him aside with a rise of his chin. He turned to Brian, steadying him again with a hand placed lightly on his shoulder.
“Now you see what I was talking about,” he said, and suddenly each moment was so densely packed with situations that Brian couldn’t begin to take them all in. Bicycles and animals and carts moved in strange diagonals through the alleyways at the corners of the square. The sunlight gleamed on the hundreds of numbered plaques above the food tables, turning them into row after row of toylike moons. A group of men in white robes and turbans were dancing in a crowd, rattling a set of square metal tambourines in their hands. Translucent doves fled from the folds of their clothes.
When they got back to the hotel, they were all so high that each moment arrived in its own frame, like a set of projected slides — the revolving glass doors, the tiled lobby, the carved rosewood screens behind the fountain, the bellman in his white jacket and fez. The sun had come out, so they decided to spend the rest of the afternoon by the pool. Anita went upstairs to change, still feeling the bluster she always felt when she was with Keith. Walking back through the medina, he had been so stoned that he could hardly move his feet, his white fur coat slung over his back like a dead dog. Packs of boys had hovered around them, solemn and staring, only the youngest ones daring to come up close. One of them, about eight years old, followed them up a set of stone steps, his hands laced behind his back, as suspicious as an old man, mimicking every one of Keith’s clumsy movements as if learning the steps to a dance.
It was only when she got upstairs to the tenth floor and opened the door to her room that she remembered what was really happening that day. There were all the clothes scattered on the beds and the chairs and the tiled floor: Brian’s clothes and her clothes, all of them mixed together, just like at their flat in Earl’s Court.
In the bathroom, she picked up a book she’d been reading called The Sephiroth. She opened it at random to a page somewhere near the middle.
Speak to me of desire. Of the endless, coiling desire of the Self. Of how the Self, goaded by desire, becomes like an animal, compelled by need, caught in its sway. Now speak to me of the Soul, whom we see only in glimpses of others, in the blur of music, in the senselessness of dreams. Not who we are or what we believe, but the blinding shimmer from the void.