And then he notices, before them, a crenellated castle on a hill. It seems to be made of sun-baked mud. It seems impossible. Why did he not expect this? Why did he not expect Jericho?
“This,” Mohammed announces, “is the ancient walled city of the tribe of Haddou. Ait means a Berber tribe, Ben means “from,” and Haddou is the family. And so, Ait Ben Haddou. There are eight families still living within the walls of the city.”
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 camel: “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.
The silence lasts as long as it takes a camel to summit a dune. Lewis notes aloud that today is his twentieth anniversary, but of course his phone won’t work out here, so he’ll have to call Clark when they get to Fez.
Mohammed turns back and says, “Oh, but there is Wi-Fi in the desert.”
“There is?” Lewis asks.
“Oh, of course, everywhere,” Mohammed says, nodding.
“Oh good.”
Mohammed holds up one finger. “The problem is the password.”
Up and down the line the Bedouin chuckle.
“That’s the second time I’ve fallen for that one,” Lewis says, then looks back at Less and points.
There on the dune, beside the table, one of the camel boys has his arm around the other, and they sit there like that as they watch the sun. The dunes are turning the same shades of adobe and aqua as the buildings of Marrakech. Two boys, arms around each other. To Less, it seems so foreign. It makes him sad. In his world, he never sees straight men doing this. Just as a gay couple cannot walk hand in hand down the streets of Marrakech, he thinks, two men, best friends, cannot walk hand in hand down the streets of Chicago. They cannot sit on a dune like these teenagers and watch a sunset in each other’s embrace. This Tom Sawyer love for Huck Finn.
The encampment is a dream. Begin in the middle: a fire pit laden with gnarled acacia branches, surrounded by pillows, from which eight carpeted paths lead to eight plain canvas tents, each of which—outwardly no more than a smallish revival tent—opens onto a wonderland: a brass bed whose coverlet is sewn with tiny mirrors, nightstands and bedside lamps in beaten metal, a washbasin and coy little toilet behind a carved screen, and a vanity and full-length mirror. Less steps in and wonders: Who polished that mirror? Who filled the basin and cleaned the toilet? For that matter: who brought out these brass beds for spoiled creatures such as he, who brought the pillows and carpets, who said: “They will probably like the coverlet with the little mirrors”? On the nightstand: a dozen books in English, including a Peabody novel and books by three god-awful American writers who, as at an exclusive party at which one is destined to run into the most banal acquaintance, dispelling not only the notion of the party’s elegance but of one’s own, seem to turn to Less and say, “Oh, they let you in too?” And there among them: the latest from Finley Dwyer. Here in the Sahara, beside his big brass bed. Thanks, life!
From the north: a camel bellowing to spite the dusk.
From the south: Lewis screaming that there is a scorpion in his bed.
From the west: the tinkle of flatware as the Bedouin set their dinner table.
From the south again: Lewis shouting not to worry, it was just a paper clip.
From the east: the British technology-whiz-cum-nightclub-owner saying: “Guys? I don’t feel so great.”
Who remains? Just four of them at dinner: Less, Lewis, Zohra, and Mohammed. They finish the white wine by the fire and stare at one another across the flames; Mohammed quietly smokes a cigarette. Is it a cigarette? Zohra stands and says she’s going to bed so she can be beautiful for her birthday, good night, all, and look at all the stars! Mohammed vanishes into the darkness, and it is just Lewis and Less who remain.
“Arthur,” Lewis says in the crackling quiet, reclining on his pillows. “I’m glad you came.”
Less sighs and breathes in the night. Above them, the Milky Way rises in a plume of smoke. He turns to his friend in the firelight. “Happy anniversary, Lewis.”
“Thank you. Clark and I are divorcing.”
Less sits straight up on his cushion. “What?”
Lewis shrugs. “We decided a few months ago. I have been waiting to tell you.”
“Wait wait wait, what? What’s going on?”
“Shh, you’ll wake Zohra. And what’s-his-name.” He moves closer to Less, picking up his wineglass. “Well, you know when I met Clark. Back in New York, at the art gallery. And we did that cross-country dating for a while, and finally I asked him to move to San Francisco. We were in the back room of the Art Bar—you remember, where you used to be able to buy coke—on the couches, and Clark said, ‘All right, I’ll move to San Francisco. I’ll live with you. But only for ten years. After ten years, I’ll leave you.’”
Less looks around, but of course there is no one to share his disbelief. “You never told me that!”
“Yes, he said, ‘After ten years, I’ll leave you.’ And I said, ‘Oh, ten years, that seems like plenty!’ That was all we ever talked about it. He never worried about quitting his job or leaving his rent-controlled place, he never bugged me about whose pots we got to keep or whose we got to throw away. He just moved into my place and set up his life. Just like that.”
“I didn’t know any of this. I just thought you guys were together forever.”
“Of course you did. I mean, I did too, honestly.”
“Sorry, I’m just so surprised.”
“Well, after ten years he said, ‘Let’s take a trip to New York.’ So we went to New York. I’d forgotten all about the deal, really. Things were going so well, we were, you know, very very happy together. We had a hotel in SoHo above a Chinese lamp store. And he said, ‘Let’s go to the Art Bar.’ So we took a taxi, and we went to the back room, and we had a drink, and he said, ‘Well, the ten years are up, Lewis.’”
“This is Clark? Checking your expiration date?”
“I know, he’s hopeless. He’ll drink any old carton of milk. But it’s true. He said the ten years are up. And I said, ‘Are you fucking serious? Are you leaving me, Clark?’ And he said no. He wanted to stay.”
“Thank God for that.”
“For ten more years.”
“That’s crazy, Lewis. It’s like a timer. Like he’s checking to see if it’s done. You should have smacked him across the face. Or was he just messing with you? Were you guys high?”
“No, no, maybe you’ve never seen this side of him? He’s so sloppy, I know, he leaves his underwear in the bathroom right where he took it off. But, you know, Clark has another side that’s very practical. He installed the solar panels.”
“I think of Clark as so easygoing. And this is—this is neurotic.”
“I think he’d say it’s practical. Or forward thinking. Anyway, we’re in the Art Bar, and I said, ‘Well, okay. I love you too, let’s get some champagne,’ and I didn’t think about it again.”
“Then ten years later—”
“A few months ago. We were in New York, and he said, ‘Let’s go to the Art Bar.’ You know it’s changed. It’s not seedy or anything anymore; they moved the old mural of the Last Supper, and you can’t even get coke there. I guess thank God, right? And we sat in the back. We ordered champagne. And he said, ‘Lewis.’ I knew what was coming. I said, ‘It’s been ten years.’ And he said, ‘What do you think?’ We sat there for a long time, drinking. And I said, ‘Honey, I think it’s time.’”
“Lewis. Lewis.”
“And he said, ‘I think so too.’ And we hugged, there on the cushions in the back of the Art Bar.”
“Were things not working out? You never told me.”
“No, things have been really good.”
“Well then, why say ‘It’s time’? Why give up?”
“Because a few years ago, you remember I had a job down in Texas? Texas, Arthur! But it was good money, and Clark said, ‘I support you, this is important, let’s drive down together, I’ve never seen Texas.’ And we got in the car and drove down—it was a good four days of driving—and we each got to make one rule about the roa
d trip. Mine was that we could only sleep in places with a neon sign. His was that wherever we went, we had to eat the special. If they didn’t have a special, we had to find another place. Oh my God, Arthur, the things I ate! One time the special was crab casserole. In Texas.”
“I know, I know, you told me about it. That trip sounded great.”
“It was maybe the best road trip we’ve ever taken; we just laughed and laughed the whole way. Looking for neon signs. And then we got to Texas and he kissed me good-bye and got on a plane back home, and there I was for four months. And I thought, Well, that was nice.”
“I don’t understand. That sounds like you guys being happy.”
“Yes. And I was happy in my little house in Texas, going to work. And I thought, Well, that was nice. That was a nice marriage.”
“But you broke up with him. Something’s wrong. Something failed.”
“No! No, Arthur, no, it’s the opposite! I’m saying it’s a success. Twenty years of joy and support and friendship, that’s a success. Twenty years of anything with another person is a success. If a band stays together twenty years, it’s a miracle. If a comedy duo stays together twenty years, they’re a triumph. Is this night a failure because it will end in an hour? Is the sun a failure because it’s going to end in a billion years? No, it’s the fucking sun. Why does a marriage not count? It isn’t in us, it isn’t in human beings, to be tied to one person forever. Siamese twins are a tragedy. Twenty years and one last happy road trip. And I thought, Well, that was nice. Let’s end on success.”
“You can’t do this, Lewis. You’re Lewis and Clark. Lewis and fucking Clark, Lewis. It’s my only hope out there that gay men can last.”
“Oh, Arthur. This is lasting. Twenty years is lasting! And this has nothing to do with you.”
“I just think it’s a mistake. You’re going to go out there on your own and find out there’s nobody as good as Clark. And he’s going to find the same thing.”
“He’s getting married in June.”
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