The Bigness of the World

by Lori Ostlund

  “I love you!” the boy calls out to them in a deep, unformed voice, and they do not realize at first that he is speaking English. “I love you!” He begins to dance then, frantically, while the men behind him cheer and clap their hands in some vague semblance of rhythm. Even as the bus pulls out of the market, the boy is still dancing; he pulls off his shirt, either in response to the heat or the coaxing of the men, and dances, and their last glimpse of him is of a large white mound twisting and writhing, the final, energetic gasps of a fish set down in the desert.

  They do not speak until the bus is well outside of town, allowing the dexterity of the henchman, who hangs from the bus with one hand, to command their attention. “I was just so … so … taken back,” Sheila says at last, weakly, testing this position aloud, sensing that their claim to indignation on the retarded boy’s behalf is compromised by the fact that everyone had witnessed their repulsion.

  “An odd place,” Bernadette agrees, feeling safest with small, inconsequential commentary, and then they are quiet again, aware of the continuing stares of their fellow passengers and the increasingly tortuous nature of the road.

  Perhaps an hour later, although they are seemingly in the middle of nowhere, the bus stops, and a family climbs on board, the parents, plodding and silent, accompanied by three children of varying heights but with a uniformly androgynous appearance — dull, sunken eyes and shaven heads covered with scabs and even a number of open sores to which red slashes of Mercurochrome have been applied, giving them the appearance of strange, colorful warriors from some remote tribe that is not in the habit of taking the bus. The parents settle heavily into the seat in front of the women, the only empty seat, while the children pause mutely in the aisle until the father makes a gesture, a downward slice with his hand, and the children drop obediently to their knees and crawl beneath the seats, the two youngest curling together under the parents’ seat like twins waiting side by side to be born, while the other, the tallest of the three, huddles beneath the women’s seat.

  Before the family’s arrival, the women were quite aware of being the oddest thing that the other riders had expected to encounter on this trip, but now they are fairly sure that they have acquired competition, a fact that relieves them greatly, for it is a tiring thing already, this trip through winding mountain roads in 115-degree heat with the smell of diesel fuel and vomit everywhere. An occasional, vomit-ripe plastic bag rolls past their feet on inclines, like a water balloon in search of a target, but most of the other riders have given up on bags and are simply emptying their stomachs directly onto the floor. At several particularly curvy points, Sheila thinks that she might be forced to join them, but she concentrates on restraint, mindful of the attention that her particular nausea is sure to attract. Each time the bus begins a steep climb, Sheila and Bernadette pull their feet up quickly, holding them off the floor while vomit flows beneath them like an incoming tide, and then again on the downward grade as the tide goes out. They have only daypacks with them, which they early on had removed from the space beneath their seats, cradling them in their laps instead. It is this vacated space which the boy occupies, for, though still unsure of his gender, that is how they have decided to think of him — as a boy, or more specifically, and purely for ease of reference, as a pronoun: he.

  “What do you think he’s doing down there?” Sheila asks.

  “Nothing, I imagine. He’s probably just staring at our ankles.” For some reason, this thought — of the small, strange boy fixated for hours on their ankles — unsettles both of them, and they begin to fidget, keeping their legs in restless motion.

  “What if he bites us?” asks Sheila, who has unusually fleshy calves.

  “Why would he bite us?” Bernadette responds, but sharply, in a way that suggests that she too has entertained such thoughts.

  “It must be so hot down there,” Sheila says eventually. “And they’ll be covered with vomit.”

  “Well,” says Bernadette, whose practical nature often gets misread as apathetic. “What can we do really?” She looks out the window, finding the barrenness consoling. Many of the other passengers are still watching them, some turned fully around in their seats, apparently unconcerned about the havoc that this may wreak on their already compromised stomachs. It is too soon to tell whether their interest has shifted to this strange family, three-fifths of which has taken up quarters under the seats, or whether people simply wish to see how the two women will respond to them.

  “Why does everybody feel the need to stare at us?” complains Sheila. “Why don’t they say something if they think it’s so awful?”

  “Maybe they don’t think it’s so awful,” says Bernadette reflexively.

  “Then why are they staring like that?”

  “Like what?” Bernadette asks, more loudly than necessary despite the breeze from the open windows, which she knows she will later blame for her elevated tone. Her voice contains a surprising level of irritation, and their immediate neighbors look quickly at Sheila, expecting a response, the way that spectators follow a tennis ball that has been sent, with some force, back into an opponent’s court.

  “Like they’re just waiting for us to do something,” Sheila says.

  “You know what I think?” Bernadette says tiredly. “I think they’re just testing us. I don’t think that anyone really cares whether something gets done or not. I think they’re just wondering what we think about it all, whether we find it wrong or important or” — and here she pauses, searching for one last adjective — “or worthy,” she says at last, unconvinced and disappointed by the vagueness of these options.

  “Well,” replies Sheila after a moment, “maybe you’re right. Maybe we should just close our eyes right now and go to sleep, and when we wake up everybody else will be sleeping also.” Sheila is calling her bluff. Bernadette understands this, just as she understands that she has put herself in a position to have it called.

  “And we just leave them under there like little caged animals?” she asks, underscoring her words with an outrage that she does not really feel. Logic, for which she possesses a great and natural capacity, has deserted her; she notes its absence distantly, by attempting to catalog the things that have replaced it — the heat, of course, and the stench of diesel, which has created a ringing in her ears. “Well,” she says dully, “there are probably worse things than riding under the seat of a bus.”

  “Of course there are worse things,” Sheila explodes. “What are you suggesting? That we determine the absolute worst thing in the world and fix only that?”

  As this discussion is taking place, the parents of the children have begun to devour a packet of fried fish, dropping the heads and bones onto the floor between their legs. They eat without speaking, though both are unusually loud chewers, and without offering anything to their children, who must surely be watching the steady rain of scraps. At last one of the children pops up between them, fish bones and greasy smudges of breading across the left side of his forehead, and extends his hand, urchin style, but the father pushes him back beneath the seat with a greasy hand of his own. A man leans over and says something to the parents in Arabic, something loud and unmistakably angry, and then another man adds to it, gesturing to the children beneath the seat for emphasis. The parents continue to eat without acknowledging any of them, and finally a third man rises and calls out to the driver, who pulls obediently to the side of the road. He and the henchman come back and stand in the aisle while various passengers offer statements, and in the end, it is the couple’s passivity — they continue to eat without showing any interest in the proceedings against them — even more than their actions that seems to turn everyone against them. The henchman kneels and extricates the children, and because there are still no seats available, the three of them crouch together in the aisle, lined up like tiny members of a chain gang.

  They settle in at the only decent hotel in Tafraoute, a clean, unusually quiet place run by a graceful man in his sixties who never leaves
the premises, relying, he explains, on a nephew to bring him everything he needs. They have seen the nephew only once, the first evening, when they arrived so exhausted from the trip that Bernadette had been unable to carry her backpack the half mile from the market, where the bus had left them, to the hotel. Instead, much to her embarrassment, she had been obliged to pay a boy to carry the pack for her, and he had served as their guide also, leading them through the dark streets with a backpack slung over each shoulder, for he had insisted on carrying Sheila’s as well. When they arrived at the hotel, however, the boy had refused to accompany them inside, and they had paused just outside the door to hand him four dirhams and, for good measure, a handful of coins that they were tired of carrying. He held the door for them, and even as it swung closed, they could hear him running away in the darkness — bare feet thudding, coins clinking reassuringly in his pocket.

  “Welcome,” the hotelier cried out warmly when they stepped into the foyer, rising effortlessly to greet them from where he knelt in front of an extremely hairy man who was seated, trouser legs rolled, bare feet soaking in a basin of water. “Rest your bags,” said the hotelier, as though the bags were the ones exhausted from the trip, but they set their backpacks down and then stood awkwardly nearby as the hotelier knelt once again and continued with his task, washing the hairy man’s feet, which were also hairy and looked like two spiders resting in the basin of water.

  The hairy man was in his forties perhaps, though his excessive hairiness had a way of obscuring his age, making him appear older at first glance and then, perhaps because hair suggested a certain vitality, younger. In any case, he was a good deal younger than the hotelier, and he smoked with elaborate disinterest as the hotelier lifted his feet from the basin and dried them tenderly with a white towel that hung down from his shoulder, handling them as one would delicate china at the end of a very long dinner party. As he worked, the hotelier asked the women polite questions about where they were from and whether they had become ill on the bus, and he chuckled pleasantly at their descriptions of people vomiting all around them.

  “My nephew,” he said suddenly in the midst of this discussion, indicating the hairy man with an elegant inclination of his head, and they had both stared at the nephew, waiting, for it had seemed as though the hotelier had been planning to tell them something, perhaps about the nephew and vomiting, but after a lengthy silence it occurred to them that the hotelier had simply been introducing his nephew, and he, coming to the same realization, grunted belatedly in their direction.

  Later, once they had filled in the register, shown their passports, and paid for the night, the hotelier escorted them to their room, gliding along ahead of them in his ghostly white djellaba. The nephew had not moved from his chair as the three of them completed the paperwork, though he did rise as they left the room, in what they had imagined was a gentlemanly gesture, but in fact, he had simply been moving himself nearer the desk, upon which sat a bell that he began to tap impatiently even as they made their way down the hallway to their room. Each time they admired some aspect of their room — the tightness with which the sheets had been tucked, the coolness of the tiles, the way that sparseness translated into beauty — the hotelier bowed slightly in their direction while the bell punctuated their comments like a series of exclamation marks, lending urgency and falseness to everything they said.

  “My nephew,” the hotelier said at last. “He requires my assistance.” And with a final bow, he was gone.

  Each morning when they go out, the hotelier waves at them from the courtyard, where he can always be found hanging sheets and towels to dry, and when they return in the afternoon, he insists in his gently assertive way that they drink tea with him in his quarters, which they do, the three of them stumbling along in French while he shows them, day after day, the same collection of six or seven magazine photographs of Richard Chamberlain, whose face he strokes absentmindedly with his thumb as they converse. Beyond these photographs, there is nothing about his room that suggests an individual presence, but it is beautiful nonetheless, with a bed in one corner, prayer mat tucked beneath it, and a living area to the other side, which is where they drink their tea, sitting close together on cushions made from old saddlebags around a brass table, round like an oversized plate, with spindly wooden legs that hold it several feet off the ground.

  “Please stay tomorrow,” the hotelier urges them each day as they are backing toward the door, having finished their sweet mint tea, finished looking at the photos of Richard Chamberlain and discussing his performance in The Thorn Birds, which neither woman has seen and the hotelier has seen only in English, a language he does not understand. And they do stay. They had planned to spend just two days in Tafraoute, two days in which to view the Belgian’s rocks and the pink homes, but they have been here seven, a full week, and still they have no plan to leave. It is not the hotelier’s daily invitation that holds them but an overwhelming lethargy unlike anything they have ever experienced and to which both women have succumbed, blaming it on the bus trip with its endless curves and vomiting. But they both know that it is more than that.

  They stay even though they have run out of tourist activities — or perhaps because they have run out of them. Sometimes, they begin a game of dominoes with their breakfast and play through the morning until lunchtime, looking around the café in wonder to realize that hours have passed, that customers have come and gone, that bread and jam have given way to brochettes and soup. Other days, lying side by side on the twin beds in their room, they read books that the hotelier has given them, no doubt to keep them here, books left behind by other travelers, the sorts of books that they privately scoffed at their colleagues for reading back home, books about espionage and romance and mystery novels that pulled one along out of a simple need to know who had committed the murder and why — neatly answerable questions that did not beget other questions, which meant that once the book was finished, it stayed finished. They read quickly, skimming the pages for relevant facts, though neither of them has ever read in this way before, without regard to style or details, to the nuances of description. They finish two or three books a day, but after several days of this, they find themselves shocked at how easily they have been drawn back into a routine, as though routine were an addiction that their bodies held fast to even as their minds plotted an escape.

  When they return to the hotel on the eighth afternoon, the hotelier is not waiting for them with tea, and though they have made a point to complain to each other about his presumptuousness and the sickly sweetness of the tea, they feel strangely offended by his absence, offended and disappointed. When he still has not made an appearance by the time they return from dinner, they are worried as well, for he can always be found washing out the bathroom sinks or rinsing down the foyer tiles or, once these tasks are completed, sitting quietly at his window seat, watching the world outside, the world from which he has exiled himself. Bernadette and Sheila have wondered aloud what it is he thinks as he sits here — whether he is thinking regretfully about his decision to leave the world or feeling vindicated by it. Never has it occurred to them that he still considers himself a part of it, considers himself the one whose job it is to sit and watch.

  Because they have grown to expect his presence, they do not know how to respond to his absence, and they stand uncertainly in the foyer for several minutes, talking more loudly than usual in hopes that he will hear them and appear, but finally they decide that they had better check on him, so they rap quietly at the door to his quarters, quietly because they are from Minnesota and this act goes against all they believe in. They can hear activity inside — the swish of fabric and voices, low and urgent — but when the hotelier finally comes to the door and peers out, they see that he is crying, and neither of them knows what to say.

  “Yes?” he asks finally, and Sheila blurts out something about missing their afternoon tea. He studies them impassively for a moment and says, “Fine, I shall make tea. Please wait in the foyer.”
Though they both try to explain that that is not what Sheila had meant, he closes the door, and they have no choice but to go to the foyer and wait. When he enters carrying a tray and bends to place it on the table in front of them, they see first that he has brought only two cups and then that his right eye, which he had made an effort to turn away from them before, is puffy with the first traces of bruising.

  “What happened to your eye?” asks Bernadette before she can think better of it.

  “Please do not study my eye,” replies the hotelier, and neither woman can decide whether he has used the word “study” accidentally, because his French is limited, or intentionally, a purposeful attempt to infuse the conversation with a formality that would preclude further discussion. In any case, it achieves the latter effect, and the two sit drinking their tea, which is so sweet that their teeth and tongues thicken with sugar and feel too large for their mouths. As they walk down the hallway to their room, they pause beside the hotelier, who has settled in at his window seat, and though they call out a mumbled good evening, he does not return their greeting, does not even turn toward them, and once they are back in their room and changing into their nightshirts, they do not discuss the hotelier because they are both too overcome by sadness.

  They awaken early the next morning, and though they have slept well, the sadness has only intensified, has become so powerful that each woman feels the room cannot accommodate the two of them and it, and so they dress quickly and, without speaking about it first, pack their bags and set them by the door.