by Jeff Long
Once Lewis was gone, Rachel stretched her long swan neck. She breathed out. “This is our grand reunion. Lewis really wanted it to be that for us. The way it was.”
“I know.”
“It’s no good, of course. We grew up, some of us anyway. And Annie’s gone.”
Hugh aimed for the high road. “Lewis always was one for the past. It’s one of the things I love about him. He wants utopia so badly, and he wants us all right there with him.”
“Have you ever tried driving forward while you’re looking in the rearview mirror? That’s life with Lewis.” She sighed. “Lewis.”
“And Rachel?” said Hugh.
He wasn’t sure where to begin with her. She had grown up. Grown away. Her perfume was perfectly stated, not a whiff of her heady musk of yore. Her laugh lines were smooth, the almond eyes younger than ever. She had an excellent surgeon, and stylist. Her waist-length mane had been cut to a shag, feathered and highlighted. Her nails were bright as plastic.
The changes were all her doing, Hugh decided. Lewis had always been an earthy man. He liked hippie girls’ armpits. Without him, or despite him, Rachel had gone beyond that. She had turned herself into a trophy wife. Hugh couldn’t help but admire her conviction. She knew her beauty, and had chased it.
“And Annie,” Rachel said. There was going to be no avoiding Annie.
“Hayati,” Hugh said. “That’s what I used to call her. It’s an Arab endearment. My life.”
“Mine, too.” Rachel took his hand in her cool hands. “She was my best friend. Even after you took her off to those places.”
Those places. The desert surged in his mind. The wadis and wastelands and infinite sunsets. The dunes. He stanched it.
“Did you know we tried to come to the funeral? But the Saudis wouldn’t issue us visas.”
“They’re tough about that,” Hugh said. “Anyway, there was no funeral. The sand took care of that. I let her go.”
“You know what I mean, we wanted to be there for you. I don’t know how you survived the whole ordeal.”
“You walk on,” he said. The wind had altered the dunes. Even the Bedouin trackers had given up. God’s will, they’d said.
“We never thought she’d last as long as she did over there,” Rachel said.
Hugh grew very still. “Why do you say that?”
“She hated it so much, the heat, the submission, the compound life.”
“Is that all she told you about?”
“ ‘Like a bird in a cage,’ she wrote me. Arrogant expatriates. Arrogant Saudis. More than anything, she hated the hatreds. The wars. After Desert Storm, she said that was it. But she stayed. I could never figure that out.”
“Did she tell you about the wedding we went to?”
“The one with the twelve-year-old girl?”
“Yeah, I know,” said Hugh. “And Annie almost refused to go. But it turned out to be the beginning of something big for her, like a secret garden. It was an old-fashioned wedding. The women had their own tent, a black Bedouin bait sha’r, a house of hair. They sang and danced, and when Annie showed them a few modern moves, she was like a long-lost sister. They begged her to teach them.”
“She said something about dance lessons.”
“It was more than that. The dance was just a cover. She was their window on the world. They adored her, and vice versa. She taught them things. They taught her things. Henna patterns. How to pluck her eyebrows with a loop of thread, one hair at a time. How to belly dance. And make coffee from scratch. Green coffee.”
“She was surviving, Hugh. It was just a way to keep her sanity.”
“Her sanity?”
“Yes, while you were gone looking for oil and climbing mountains. Did you know I told her to leave you? To come home? I told her you would follow.”
“Yes, we talked,” said Hugh. “But there was nothing for me here. My job was there. And this will sound old-fashioned, but she was my wife.”
“Don’t put it that way,” Rachel chided him. “Marriage wouldn’t have stopped her from coming home. Love, yes. The wifey thing, not a chance. Not the Annie I knew.”
“The Annie you knew was only the Annie she let you know,” Hugh said.
“We had no secrets.”
“Everyone has secrets, Rachel.”
“Not us.”
Hugh could have let it die there. But he was tired of hiding the truth. He was tired of the pity and the whispers. “Did she ever say anything to you about her Swiss cheese?”
“ ‘Swiss cheese’?”
“I didn’t think so,” he said. “It was our little code for the holes in her memory. The little lapses that started turning into big ones. Her spells.”
The slightest storm appeared on Rachel’s taut forehead.
“She did her best to hide it,” Hugh continued. “For a while we thought it was just the summer heat or maybe a bacteria in the air-conditioning. Or menopause. That was the great hope, that it would get better. She quit drinking alcohol, then coffee and her Diet Cokes, thinking, you know, it might be the artificial sweeteners or the caffeine.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I came home one day and she was sitting in front of the TV. But it was off. I touched the set and it wasn’t even warm. She’d been there all day. Watching nothing.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I didn’t either, not for the longest time. She was too young. It crept up on both of us, and then it was too late.”
“What, Hugh?”
“Alzheimer’s.”
“Annie?” said Rachel.
“We stopped going to parties because there would be these lapses. She would fumble little shared moments, or get a friend’s name wrong. It got worse. She did everything to keep up appearances, even in front of me, but we both saw what was happening. The pounds just fell off of her. She’d forget to eat during the day. The expat wives all wore gold bangles from the medina, just like the Arab women. But Annie’s wrists got so thin the bangles dropped like rain. I’d find them on the floor. One day I stepped on her wedding ring, by the front door.”
“I had no idea.” Rachel was in shock.
“While it still mattered to her, she didn’t want anyone to know. By the last year, she didn’t know herself.”
“This is so…I thought she shared everything with me.”
“She felt like a leper. She dropped from sight.”
“How long did this go on?”
“In retrospect, years. Like I said, at first it seemed just a lapse here and there.”
“How did you manage?”
“You mean the doctors? We tried them all. I took her to Switzerland. They all said the same thing. A losing battle. They didn’t use those words, but that’s what they meant. It was just a matter of waiting for the end.”
She squeezed his hand. “I’m talking about you. How did you manage?”
“I didn’t want it to be true either. I was in denial just as much as she was. But then one afternoon, there was a knock on my door. It was the mutawaeen, the religious police. Holier than holy. They roam the streets with camel switches, looking for vice, stuff like a woman’s hair poking from her head scarf, or nail polish on their toes.”
“She wrote about them. Vicious fanatics.”
“Some are good men, some are very bad,” Hugh said. “But Annie was right. She was a bird in a cage. There are so many rules to follow over there, especially for the women. There’s the dress code and the head scarf. And every guest worker has to carry an ID card. Married women have to carry a copy of their husband’s identification or they’ll arrest you. This can get very serious. The mutawaeen take Sudanese or Ethiopian women, black women, into the desert and rape them, and leave them to die.”
Rachel looked stunned. “And they came to your house?”
“That day I answered the door, and there were two mutawaeen. They had Annie with them. That was bad enough. She had wandered out of the compound in shorts, and with no head s
carf, and no I.D. She didn’t know her own name. They could have disappeared her. Instead they made inquiries and were returning her to me. It was the most terrifying moment in my life.”
“Because she had wandered away?”
“Because they were so kind about it. Because they could see what I had been refusing to see. They have a word for the insane, majnoona.”
“She wasn’t insane, Hugh. Alzheimer’s is a disease.”
“It’s just a matter of which century you live in. Majnoona. It means possessed. Possessed by jinns.”
“Genies?” Rachel scoffed. “Like in a lamp?”
“That’s the American version, sanitized. Among the Arabs, they’re beings from a parallel universe, created before Adam. Some are like devils, but some can be like archangels who watch over you. The Arabs believe they live in deserts and the ruins of cities and graveyards and empty wells, even in toilets. Scholars debate why Allah made them. The Koran talks about them in ‘Surah Al-A’raf,’ the Heights. They have powers. They can inhabit people, or animals, even trees.”
“You’re serious,” she said.
“I’m just telling you what they believe. It’s a different world over there. And however you want to explain, after the mutawaeen came, I couldn’t deny we had a problem. Annie was not Annie anymore. They might have returned her to me, but she wasn’t ever coming back again.”
“Hugh, this is awful.”
“I resigned myself. It was like the end of my life. But it was going to be a very long ending, possibly decades. I thought about putting her in an institution. But she would have hated that, so I kept her at home. I hired help. We took a few trips into the desert. She used to love that open sky. Then I screwed up. Our last trip, I lost her.”
“I thought she wandered away.”
“I don’t know how it happened. I left her in camp, and when I returned, she was gone. Vanished. It was almost like the jinns really had kidnapped her.”
“So she did wander away.”
“I should never have taken her into the desert. But I did, and now I have to live with that.”
He waited to see what Rachel said. She touched away a tear that threatened her mascara. “Poor Annie, my God.”
They had gone deep enough. He backed off. “I didn’t mean to surprise you with this. All I’m saying is that it wasn’t all peaches and cream. But it was our life together, hayati and me.”
“I’m so sorry,” Rachel said. “It was your life together. And I’m one to talk. Look at the mess Lewis and I have made of ours.”
“He’s a good man,” Hugh said.
She didn’t contradict him. Her mind was made up. Lewis was history. Hugh understood. There comes a time.
She turned Hugh’s hand in hers, palm up, then down. She touched the lines and callouses and knuckles and hairs and pale scars. Long, long ago she used to read their palms.
“What’s it like now, Hugh? What kind of life do you go back to?”
“Without kids, less and less, to be honest,” he said. “I’ve got a Hobie out in the bay. I swim and take my vacations in the mountains wherever, Nepal, Africa, Europe, South America. Other than that, security’s so tight these days, we rarely leave the compound. The walls keep getting higher, literally. Big concrete walls. They won’t keep the madness out. It’s only a matter of time before someone breaches the fortress and kills more of us.”
“You could leave,” she said.
“I think about that. They’d love to retire me. But then where would I go?”
She turned his hand again.
“I remember this,” she said. “How you go up whole and come back skinned and raw and starving. It made sense back then. Both of you needed to see the emptiness for yourselves. You’ve been there, though. You’ve seen what there is to see. Why go tilting at windmills when you know they’re just windmills?”
Hugh started to say that Lewis was out to show his women—his wife and daughters—that he was still their knight in shining armor. But she had basically just said as much.
“It’s not going to work,” she said. “He wants to win me back. El Cap figured so large in our romance, and in yours. Bless him, he thinks we can still be saved, even Annie, somehow. But my mind is made up.”
“I know,” Hugh said.
She glanced at him. “It’s that obvious?”
“No.”
“He doesn’t know.”
“I know that, too. I can tell.”
She took a sip of wine. “At first I blamed Lewis. Then I blamed myself. I thought it might be the big M, or boredom. All I can say is, we reached a fork in the road. I want to see the world, Hugh. I waited until the girls went off. Now it’s my turn. Do you understand? El Cap is useless.”
“Then why bother coming to Yosemite at all?” he asked.
“Because, Hugh. I’m tired of missed opportunities.”
Hugh was stunned. She had come for him?
He looked at her face, and this time he saw the desperation. She was holding his hand for dear life. She wanted to be rescued from her decision.
He was tempted. She was beautiful. He was lonely. He could catch her hand and pull her to firm ground. They could be perfect together. It might even last.
But there was El Cap.
Quickly, before Rachel could speak to his desires or build more secrets between them, before she pulled him into her, he rejected her. He let go of her hands. He didn’t draw away, nor did she. But she let go, too.
“Maybe I’m still shaking off the sand,” he murmured.
Rachel didn’t even blink. Probably she had expected nothing from him. “This should be easy then,” she said.
“What’s that?”
“While you’re up there, slaying your dragons together, will you do me a favor?”
Hugh knew what she was going to ask.
“Make him understand,” she said.
Lewis had made Hugh his messenger. Now she was making him hers, using Lewis’s very words. Hugh started to protest. “Rachel…”
“You know what it’s like to lose a wife,” she said. “You’ll have the right words for him.”
Abruptly, she released him. There was one more sip in her wineglass. “I should warn you,” she said, too cheerful, “it’s been a long day, and four is early. I’m going to look like holy crap in the morning.”
Hugh started to stand to guide her to her husband’s room.
She pressed his shoulder, making him sit. “Oh, Hugh,” she said, as if his chivalry was the silliest thing.
SIX
Hugh stood outside the front lobby in the darkness. It was colder than he’d expected, near freezing. He could tell by the fog off the Merced River. It could seem like whole parishes of souls when that mist smoked up and marched across the meadows. Sometimes people got lost just getting back to their tents.
He bent and hefted his rucksack, which contained next to nothing. The little pack was a vintage Mammut made of indestructible canvas and leather. He’d had it since high school, when he and Lewis had first started daring each other up the crags.
He looked for the sky, and there were no stars, no moon, no sign of any rim. The night felt deep. He faced the bully line of trees crowded up against the asphalt. Behind him, the lobby was well lit and warm, with a Mr. Coffee machine in one corner. But that would be the end of him, Hugh knew. If he took one step away from this cold post, he’d be gone.
Somewhere beyond the park’s boundaries there was bound to be a breakfast shop with a booth by a window. He could watch the sun come up. It had been decades since his last visit to SanFrancisco. Drive down the coast and he could lose himself in a thousand coves. Head north and he wouldn’t have to stop until the Arctic Sea. Why repeat himself on El Cap? He could take Rachel and go off into the world, armed with a Visa card and a map.
He kept his back to the lobby. He passed his hand through the mist, opening and closing his fingers. By turns it was a young hand, then an old one.
The parking lots were largel
y empty. It was another California October full of Armageddon. There’d been an earthquake along the coast, more fires, more floods. And terrorism weighed heavily on everyone he’d met since returning. They had been a traveling people, Americans, but now he found them bunkered in their homes and neighborhoods, with their cities under siege. Airlines were going bankrupt. The tourist industry was in near collapse.
Just beyond the reach of the light, night animals were scavenging the joint, rustling about, hunting down every human remnant. He could conjure up their feast: the crumbs from trail snacks, the cigarette butts, chewed gum and Band-Aids with XMen and Disney creatures, the backing peeled off new bumper stickers declaring “Yosemite—The Best of the West” and “Go Climb a Rock,” and dropped yen notes, and even the salt off discarded hiking sticks. That reminded him of Joshua.
Where are Lewis and Rachel?
He crossed his arms. The sleeves of his fancy new all-weather shell crackled and whisked. He uncrossed his arms, self-conscious, and saw the Nike trail hikers with their royal purple ankle sleeves. Should have stuck with the old gear, he thought. Things that showed pedigree and the violence of high places, like his rucksack. Instead he’d gone shopping.
An animal squealed suddenly, a tiny, piping shrill. Hugh held his breath and listened. The piping rose and fell, then ebbed to silence. He imagined fur being ripped open.
He felt impaled.
Dawn would break the spell, of course. The crystal forest always thawed. The mist burned off. The birds sang again.
A pair of headlights materialized. Hugh picked up his rucksack. He half-expected Lewis to be hanging from the passenger window like a bird dog, but the window was shut. When Hugh opened the back door, the signal went ding-ding-ding.
Rachel was driving. She didn’t greet him. Lewis twisted to give him a smile, but by the green dash light he looked weary and awful, as if he had not slept for nights.
They left behind the few lights of civilization. The fog opened in rags. Hugh peered through the window and found stars blinking like sniper fire.
They took a bend in the road. A vast darkness blocked the lower two-thirds of the night sky. That would be El Cap’s shoulder. More trees swooped in, blotting it out. But Hugh could feel it, like a magnetic force, a great northern presence hanging above them.