They arranged some of their bedding in a kind of awning to shade me from the sun. I spent the day slipping in and out of consciousness in the wind. Cloud shadows came and went on the iron loophole of the keep. I was given some tea to which the goatskin water had imparted a nauseating smell. My mule gave me a fright when she snuffled beneath my head for my toiletries.
I woke to a fire and twilight, and an even more bitter cold. Ismail’s eyes wandered from my face to my extra bedding, and he made no effort at conversation. Aziz beside him gazed at my aluminum water bottle. When able to speak I offered it to him, and he seemed alarmed and said he wouldn’t think of depriving me.
By morning the awning was down and I could see the sky. My companions’ expressions were full of pity and they kept fanning the flies from my face. Where had the flies come from? And on what at this altitude did they live? The sun every so often managed to erase everything from my sight. I remembered myself on the train to San Remo dreaming of owning a little shop somewhere in a Near Eastern town, for its possibilities for observation and meditation. I remembered myself at sixteen, dressed for a dinner party and murmuring that what I should really have liked was to have been pretty.
The wind seemed to have subsided and round us the white rock grew unbearable in the afternoon heat. Ismail pressed my temples between his palms with a slowly increasing pressure I found to be amazingly restful.
The August before I first set foot on that Lebanese dock, our mother had taken my sister on another holiday, this time to the seashore at Varazze, and there Vera had had her miscarriage and developed septicemia. My mother and I had sat at her bedside for the five weeks she suffered. The night before she died, I told her I couldn’t help but believe that if she wanted life more, she could hold on to it, and she reassured me that in her time alone with our mother and Mario she had developed certain resources and that she’d been far from only miserable. She had become bright enough through her reading, for example, that he had never grown bored with her. “All you do is weep,” she complained with some weariness and anger later that night. “Aren’t you ever happy to be with me?”
A family friend at the funeral confided he’d been so appalled at the news of the marriage that he’d refused my mother’s request to use his villa for the reception. Her own eulogy asserted that she and Vera had grown so close that when they were reunited in the next world she doubted Saint Peter would be able to determine one from the other. When I was packed and ready to leave for the station, Mario remarked that my mother and I had only barely spoken and hardly looked at each other. My mother responded at the piano by commencing Berlioz’s “Le Dépit de la bergère.”
When her note arrived in Brummana deploring my decision to abandon her so soon after our loss, I wrote back that Vera had died bowing to the agendas of others. In response, after some months, she sent the letter from London in which I’d informed Vera that I could not take her in.
Reading it once more, I recalled another letter to my sister in which I’d enthused about the way my notebooks, with a single word, could save an experience from oblivion, and her response, in which she expressed a lack of surprise that I’d choose the notebook over the diary, since in the former one’s emotions were largely omitted in favor of their causes.
In those last few nights with her, I spent what time we had left trying to recover the irrecoverable with only my presence. I wanted to believe that nothing had been lost of what we had shared so many years before. But we look on everyone’s transformations as fluid except our own. “Dress them up as you like, but they will always run away,” the King of Naples is reported to have said of his inadequate soldiers. The mother I trusted, the Vera I loved, the woman I imagined myself to be: all of those phantoms have clip-clopped away into limbo.
I told my mother the last time I wrote her that no crime short of murder was comparable to destroying in another the capacity to love. Her silence in response constituted yet another instance of her having behaved with more honor than her surviving daughter had achieved.
The main thing the traveler carries about with her is herself. There’s my home, and then the world: the sea is much stronger than the anchor. I’ve acted wherever I’ve alighted like a guest for life, or, when at my best, as in that line from the Purgatorio: “We are pilgrims, as you are.”
Over the horizon to the east, the weather that’s heading toward us lies in a dark line at the end of the world. Ismail washes my face with water from the goatskin while Aziz attends to the mules straying in the dusk. “I have more with which to pay you, once we return,” I manage to tell them. Ismail makes a brief gesture as if to clarify that it needn’t be discussed. “God give you strength,” he murmurs as we exchange smiles: fellow travelers. Aziz appears beside him. My eyes close under the weight of so much sadness and gratitude. And out of courtesy we say goodnight to one another with our hands upon our breasts.
In Cretaceous Seas
Dip your foot in the water and here’s what you’re playing with: Xiphactinus, all angry underbite and knitting-needle teeth, with heads oddly humped and eyes enraged with accusation, and ribboned bodies so muscular they fracture coral heads when surging through to bust in on insufficiently alert pods of juvenile Clidastes, who spin around to face an oncoming maw that’s in a perpetual state of homicidal resentment. The smaller Xiphactinus are three times your length and swallow their prey whole. They’re gill-to-gill with Cretoxyrhina, great white sharks fifty feet long with heads the size of Mini Coopers and twelve-inch nightmare triangles of teeth. Mosasaurs big and small, the runts weighing in at two tons and the alphas like tylosaur a stupefying sixty feet. Under the surface, they’re U-boats with crocodiles’ heads. Pliosaurs in their hunting echelons, competing to see who’s the more viciously ill-tempered. Kronosaurs whose jaws provide the kind of leverage that can snap whales’ spines. Thalassomedons, the biggest of the elasmosaurs, with twenty-foot watersnake necks that allow the Venus-flytrap teeth to be everywhere at once. Dakosaurs gliding through the murk of fish parts spewed by their initial thrashing attacks.
And rising out of the blue gloom like the ridged bottom itself easing up to meet you, Lipleurodon, holdover from the Jurassic, the biggest predator that ever lived. Families could live in its skull. On the move it’s like the continental shelf taking a trip. It feeds everywhere, even in shallow water with the surf breaking over it like a sandbar. Its earth-moving front flippers keep it from stranding. If some of the bigger land predators stand around the shallows trolling for what floats in, that’s their mistake. It takes them off their feet like fruit off a tree.
This is the Tethys Ocean, huge, shallow, and warmed by its position locked between the world’s two giant supercontinents. This is the place where the prey could kill a sperm whale. This is all this one guy’s bed. This guy — we’ll call him Conroy, because that’s his fucking name — whose insomnia every night is beyond debilitating, teeming, epic with hostile energy, oceanic. What’s his problem? Well, where to begin? Kick your feet and watch something else surface from below. He’s been a crappy son, a shitty brother, a lousy father, a lazy helpmate, a wreck of a husband. As a pet owner he’s gotten two dogs and a parakeet killed. Some turtles and two other dogs died without his help.