"I don't mean to interrupt.”"I'm in no hurry," Owen said. "I'd just as soon put off the rest of it indefinitely.”"I want to hear it.”"I don't want to tell it. It becomes harder and harder. The closer we come to the end, the more I want to stop. I don't know if I can face all that again.”"I interrupted to ask about Singh's idea of the desert. Is there something clear and simple there?”Owen looked into the shadowed part of the room."Singh remarked to me once, his conspiratorial aspect, fixing those flat heavy eyes on me, 'Hell is the place we don't know we're in.' I wasn't sure how to take the remark. Was he saying that he and I were in hell or that everyone else was? Everyone in rooms, houses, chairs with armrests. Is hell a lack of awareness? Once you know you're there, is this your escape? Or is hell the One place in the world we don't see for what it is, the one place we can never know? Is that what he meant? Is hell what we say to each other or what we can't say, what is beyond our reach? The sentence defeated me. I was afraid of the desert but drawn to it, drawn to the contradiction. Men will come to fill this empty place. This place is empty in order that men may rush in to fill it.”The clear voice became a chant now, almost startling in its richness and stately pace. I want to call it a funeral pace."To penetrate the desert truly. To learn the geography and language, wear the aba and keffiyeh, go brown in the desert sun. To infiltrate Mecca. Imagine it, to enter the city with one and a half million pilgrims, cross the border within the border, make the hadj. What enormous fears would a man like me have to overcome, what lifelong inclinations toward solitude, toward the sanctity of a personal space in which to live and be. But think of it. To dress as a hadji in two pieces of seamless white cloth, every man there in two pieces of seamless white cloth, over a million of us. To make the seven circuits of the Ka'bah. The great cubical form draped in black, imagine it, with Koranic verses embroidered in gold script. For the first three circuits we are enjoined to move at a jogging pace. There are other times when great masses gather during the hadj, on the plain of Arafat and for three days at Míná, but it's the circuit of the Ka'bah that has haunted me ever since I first learned of it. The three running circuits, perhaps a hundred thousand people, a swirl of white-clad people running around the massive black cube, a whirlwind of human awe and submission. To be carried along, no gaps in the ranks, to move at a pace determined by the crowd itself, breathless, in and of them. This is what draws me to such things. Surrender. To burn away one's self in the sandstone hills. To become part of the chanting wave of men, the white cities, the tents that cover the plain, the vortex in the courtyard of the Grand Mosque.”"I thought it was one big bus jam, the hadj.”"But do you see what draws me to the running?”"To honor God, yes, I would run.”"There is no God," he whispered."Then you can't run, you mustn't run. There's no point, Is there? It's stupid and destructive. If you don't do it to honor God or imitate the Prophet, then it means nothing, it accomplishes nothing.”He withdrew into a silence, a deprived silence. He'd wanted to explore the matter further, the fearsome driving rapture of it, but my rejection was the type he could not contend with. He was like a child in this respect, that silence was a place to take his hurt and shame."What else did Singh have to tell you?”"He talked about the world.”"Then what happened?" I said.
He talked about the world."The world has become self-referring. You know this. This thing has seeped into the texture of the world. The world for thousands of years was our escape, was our refuge. Men hid from themselves in the world. We hid from God or death. The world was where we lived, the self was where we went mad and died. But now the world has made a self of its own. Why, how, never mind. What happens to us now that the world has a self? How do we say the simplest thing without falling into a trap? Where do we go, how do we live, who do we believe? This is my vision, a self-referring world, a world in which there is no escape.”His flesh was pebbled along the forehead and cheeks. He had long wrists and hands. Slowly the two stones began to take on a faintly tapered shape. He rubbed the stones for hours, then days. Bern was hallucinating. They heard her moan and chant. She crawled outside to urinate, positioned on all fours. Three of the men went looking for a stray goat to kill. Owen went to Bern's silo, not knowing why. The seal was in place, an earthen hatch-cover about three feet off the ground, held fast by a wooden bar inserted through a pair of sockets. He removed the cover and bent down to look into the silo. She sat in the dark. The floor was strewn with hay and bits of corn stalk. Her face swung toward him and she stared with no apparent recognition. He spoke softly to her, offering to get water, but there was no response. He told her how the smell of animal feed made him think of his childhood, the grain storage elevators and backyard windmills, the Here-fords in loading pens, the bent metal sign on the little brick building at the edge of town (he hadn't thought of this in thirty years): farmers bank. He remained outside the bin, watching her face float in the dead air. She looked at him.The desert town was like the land reshaped in blocks, some odd work of the wind as it transports sand. Singh cupped his hands to drink from an earthenware jug. One of the other men hunkered in the dust. From this distance the town was silent most of the time. Owen drank. When it was dark and a wind fell from the hills he watched the ashes stir and blow around the improvised spit. The night sky appeared, the scattershot of blazing worlds."Who is the man you're waiting for?”"What man?”"Emmerich said.”"Atcba. A crazy. Bonkers, you know? Wandering for years in these parts.”"Is he close to the town? How do you know he'll head that way?”Singh laughing. "He is bloody close, yes.”"How do you know?”"Just seen him. You just done ate his goat.”"An old man with a beard, more or less in rags?”"That him, mon. He keep walking. It don't do him no good to get no older. He on his last legs for sure. He have to sit down and wait for vulture. Vulture do the business of the desert.”"You're waiting, then, until he enters town.”"You know this. You're a member now.”"No, I'm not.”"Of course you're a member.”"No, I'm not.”"Damn fool. Of course you are.”
This time it was Owen who interrupted, breaking off the narrative to reach down for the booklet I'd left propped against the copper tray, the primer on Kharoshthi. He returned it to its place in the tray. Gradations of brown and gray. Light retreating toward the far wall. A certain number of objects, a certain placing. He sat looking into his hands."What does Singh mean by 'the world'?" I said."Everything, everybody, whatever is said or can be said. Although not these exactly. The thing that encompasses these. Maybe that's it.”"What happened next?”"I'm tired, James.”"Try to go on.”"It's important to get it right, to tell it correctly. Being precise is all that's left. But I don't think I can manage it now.”"You were with them. Did you learn their name?”He looked up."This knowledge has managed to elude me, although I tried my damnedest to pry it out of them, wheedle it out by whatever means. Even after Singh told me I was a member, he wouldn't tell me the name of the cult.”"He was taunting.”"Yes, he began to seek me out to amuse himself, fortify himself. I was their strength in an odd way and also their observer and tacit critic, the first they'd ever had, which was another indication they were near the end.”I told Owen about the time I'd spent in the Mani, my meeting with Andahl. I told him about the massive rock on which two words had been painted, then tarred over. Andahl had painted the words, I said. It was his way of breaking clear. I told Owen I thought these words were the cult's name."What words were they?”"TaOnómata.”Looking at me with curious wonder. "Damn it. Damn it, James." Beginning to laugh. "You may be right. I think you could be right. It makes an eerie kind of sense, doesn't it? The Names.”"I've been consistently right about the cult. Andahl, the name, the pattern. And I found them almost as soon as I entered the Mani, although I didn't know it at first. It scares hell out of me, Owen. My life is going by and I can't get a grip on it. It eludes me, it defeats me. My family is on the other side of the world. Nothing adds up. The cult is the only thing I seem to connect with. It's the only thing I've been right about.”"Are you a serious man?”The question stopped me cold. I told him I didn't understand what he meant."I'm not a serious man," he said. "If you wanted to compose a mighty Homeric text on my life and fortunes, I might suggest a suitable first line. 'This is the story of a man who was not serious.' “"You're the most serious man I know.”He laughed at me and made a gesture of dismissal. But I wasn't ready to let it go just yet."What do you mean then? Do you think I'm not serious because I've written insignificant things, miscellaneous things, because I work for a sprawling corporation?”"You know that's not what I mean.”"It's important for me to have an ordinary job. Paperwork. A desk and daily tasks. In my curious way I try to cling to people and to work. I try to assert a basic right or need.”"Of course," he said. "I didn't mean the question as a challenge. I'm sorry. Forgive me, James.”We fell into a silence."Do you realize what we're doing?" I said finally. "We're submerging your narrative in commentary. We're spending more time on the interruptions than on the story.”He poured water from the jug."I feel like someone in that mob of yours," I told him. "The mob that grows impatient with the professional teller of tales. Let's go on with it. Where are the people in the story?”"It gets harder as we approach the end. I want to delay. I don't want to get on with it at all.”"Show us their faces, tell us what they said.”
Emmerich was tracking the victim. He reported that the old man's wanderings were sometimes predictable. He tended to head west for part of the day, then northeast, then west again, then southeast. Was he describing an hourglass in the sand? At other times he roamed the hills, lived for a day or two with camel herders or one of the wandering tribes, beyond all roads. In sandstorms he sat still, as Emmerich did if he was in the area, his face covered in a head-scarf as the sun paled, the sky vanished, the wind began to keen. The man was very old, his range limited. Time, weather, his faltering gait suggested he would approach Hawa Mandir in less than two days, goatless, hungry, muttering.Bern was vomiting blood. Three or four times a day Owen removed the hatch-cover and spoke to her. She was beyond hunger, he assumed, drifting into a spiral of irreversible attrition. He spoke softly and easily. He always had something to say. Something came to mind the moment he bent to the opening. He was visiting, he was actually chatting. He wanted to soothe her, to bathe her in his human voice. He believed she understood, although there was no sign. He brought her water once a day. She could no longer hold down water but he continued to bring it, easing through the opening and trying to get her to drink from his cupped hands. Her eyes grew daily in their sockets, her face began to fold into her skull. He sat across from her, letting his mind wander. His mind had begun to wander all the time.Singh rubbed the stones together."Lovely day, what? Coolish, or would you say warmish? Depends, doesn't it?”He made quote marks in the air, raising the index and middle finger of each hand to set off the words coolish and warmish. He studied one of the stones.