“We’re going up into the mountains,” he said. “You must come with us, man. We’ll catch the sunrise, bring along the Kodaks.”
Brian grabbed Anita roughly by the shoulder of her jacket. “We have to leave,” he said.
“Brian, don’t.”
“I’m not fucking around. Let’s go.”
The film on the wall showed people in strange costumes drinking from long silver chalices. Then a woman in fishnet stockings removed an African mask from her face and started laughing.
Anita walked away, out of the room.
“Cool it,” said Keith.
“Let go of my arm.”
“If you want to blow it, this is the way, man,” said Keith. “Follow her, and it’s just going to make it a million times worse.”
Brian looked at him blankly, then watched the door close behind her.
On the wall, a blond man in red boots was being clawed at by several hands with painted fingernails. He fell to the ground in a swoon that seemed equal parts pleasure and pain.
“You’re a cunt, Brian,” she said flatly. “I’m taking a sleeping pill and going to bed. You can do whatever you please.”
She held her palms out by her waist. Then she looked at him impatiently, shaking her head. “I don’t think we can talk right now, do you? Or do you want to just hit me? Is that what you want? Or do you just want to leave?”
“I want you to think about what you’re doing,” he said, raising his chin. “This is really it.”
She closed her eyes, disgusted. He couldn’t look at her after that. He heard her sorting through the luggage, rattling the plastic bottles of pills. He was remembering that afternoon in the Jemaa el Fna, the sight of the water sellers, standing there in their tasseled colored hats. He was remembering how in that place where everything was foreign and brightly colored, his life had suddenly seemed benignly distant and unreal.
She got into bed and covered her face with the pillows, and he stood there in the flickering beige light of the candles, looking at the shapes in the walls.
In the Jemaa el Fna, the girl stood beside him against a wall in the darkness and counted out the foreign money he offered her in his clumsy opened hands. There were lanterns set up on the tables, kerosene torches lighting up the food stalls. There were young, blank-faced men scanning the crowd, cigarettes cupped in their hands. There were fire-eaters and musicians, and there was a man in a black robe and a black headdress who gesticulated with a pair of painted sticks, his eyes hidden by mirrored sunglasses.
On the street, Brian raised his chin at the first cabdriver he made eye contact with, his hand on the girl’s shoulder. The drivers were all clustered beside their cars, smoking or eating food from the stalls. In his mind, they had become an admiring audience whose stares he now ignored, helping the girl into the cab.
He imagined Anita in the souks, picking out the necklace of teeth, Keith at her side, his fingers moving from her back to her shoulder and down the length of her feather boa. Then he saw an image of himself in the Jemaa el Fna with Tom Keylock, his hand lingering at midchest before his scraggly shirt with a dangling, forgotten cigarette.
There was no point in talking now. He should have known that from the moment in the bathroom, when she’d looked at him and wanted to laugh.
Back in the elevator of the hotel, his lips were tight with determination, like a priest with some difficult truth to impart. The girl beside him looked straight ahead at the sandalwood screen above the panel of buttons. She wore a striped cape and a headscarf and had a tattoo on her chin like a stylized trident. Everything was luridly bright, as if on display.
There were no more hooves in the walls. There was no more imaginary man behind him. In the hallway, there was the clarity of rectangular doorways and hotel carpeting beneath artificial light.
“Anita,” he said.
She rolled over in bed to see the two figures in the darkness. He switched on the lamp and stood in the yellow light, raising his chin, the necklace of teeth hanging from his neck. He was taking off his long velvet coat, shaking the hair out of his eyes, and she could feel the adrenaline coming off him like a wall.
“What’s going on?” she said.
“A little surprise.”
He gestured toward the girl, who was standing by the door, leaning her head on her shoulder like a sleepy child.
“Come on now,” he said. “Who do you think I am? Did you think I was just going to disappear? That I’m just some tosspot with no balls?”
He snapped his fingers and moved toward the bed. Then he grabbed her arm, just above the biceps. She jerked her body backward and fell sideways, clutching the pillows to her chest.
“Get up,” he said.
Diamond-shaped patterns of blue and red bloomed behind her eyes. She could feel the light in the room radiating into her skull like a sun. She dove for the foot of the bed, but he grabbed her by the ankle and she fell onto the floor. She put her hands over her face, covering her eyes, but he was on top of her then.
On the wall of the room next door, the Hindu gods Shiva and Kali were laughing beneath superimposed flames. It was the second time they had played the film, and no one was watching it anymore. They had ordered food that sat untouched on the dressers and the tables: couscous and ground lamb and a large pie made of phyllo dough covered in cinnamon and powdered sugar.
Green-faced Shiva brought his hands together in blessing, raising his joined fingertips to his lips, saluting the goddess Kali. Then there was an overlay of orange above a yellow Egyptian eye inside a triangle. Then the single word “End” appeared in gold letters on a saturated black background.
Brian was on the balcony, looking down at the pool, remembering a dream he’d had in the hospital in France. In the dream, he’d been walking through a kind of rice paddy, a pool full of tall green reeds that he pushed aside with the tips of his fingers. He had waded in up to his chest before he realized that there were hundreds of spotted deer on either side of him, almost submerged, raising their snouts just barely above the surface.
He could see now that she had been right all along and that none of it had had to matter. He had chosen to make it matter. He could see that clearly, now that it was over and she had no reason not to leave him.
When he came back inside, the girl was sitting on the bed, her hands clasped over her closed knees, looking at the mess of clothes on the floor without interest or intent. He lit a cigarette and it fell out of his mouth, then all the cigarettes came shaking out of the box and he picked the lit one off the floor and rose up out of his crouch with it smoking between his lips.
He saw the necklace on the floor, the beads and bits of mirror and human teeth. He saw his long blue coat with the fake ermine collar.
He sat down on the bed beside the girl and told her to lie down. Her legs were smooth and thin and gleamed as if they’d been rubbed in oil. He lay on top of her and closed his eyes and felt her face and lips against his throat. He held her like a limp thing in his arms and started coughing.
Anita was in the bathroom, holding a warm wet towel to her face, her chest heaving with some desolate mix of sobbing and mortified laughter. When she closed her eyes, green stars pulsed through her eyes back into her skull, where they swelled to a searing brightness. The pain ran from her shoulder up her neck, then twisted like a screw through the long ridge of her jaw. She sat on the floor and wiped the mucus from her nose. She was thinking that she couldn’t leave the bathroom, she couldn’t let them see her like this.