Abandon

by Iyer, Pico

  “And, of course,” said Sefadhi, a slight edge in his voice, “for the true Sufi, the looking is the key. Even if you don’t know what you’re looking for.” Then, sensing that he’d gone too far, he stopped himself and said, “Questions: I’m sure what John has said has given you much to think about.”

  “It has,” said Alex, and there was a faint stirring around the table that John’s best friend should be the first one to challenge him. “You talk about this dissolution of self ”—his eyes met his friend’s—“as if it were water going down a drain.” There was a scattering of laughter. “But how does it happen exactly? A poem, a meeting, and then you disappear?” The laughter became more generalized.

  “Hardly. It isn’t anything you can plan for. You just have to leave yourself open, the way you might leave your door open in case a friend drops by.” He’d lost the battle already, he realized; he was sounding priggish and defensive.

  “So it’s more a kind of ‘follow your bliss’ thing?” said Debra, who could be relied upon to complicate the simple.

  “It’s more a question of knowing that you don’t always know where your bliss may lie. Sometimes it may be in the most unexpected places.” He was talking—he was thinking—in circles. “The Sufis often say that God is a hidden treasure who created the world so He could be discovered. They aren’t solitaries: Rumi could never have come to an understanding of his better nature without the mysterious appearance of the wandering dervish Shams.”

  “There are no monasteries in Islam,” Sefadhi summarized succinctly, and then there was more talk, of how “the bee thirsts for the honey that thirsts for him” and how his student had “translated the sweetest nectar of the East into a cordial for the West.”

  The object of the compliments was lost, however, far away; he’d let the tradition down, he knew. Somewhere, he’d lost the sense of compassion.

  The minute Sefadhi was finished, there was a vivid, if discreet, movement towards the door, and a couple of classmates stopped by to offer thanks, congratulations. Dick wanted to know if he’d be free for their usual game of tennis—Thursdays at seven o’clock—and Alex asked him if he’d like a drink. Getting up and straightening his papers, happy never to have to look at them again, he heard someone hovering behind him and looked up to see a woman he hadn’t registered before. She’d been sitting, he now recalled, in one of the seats against the wall reserved for members of the community with “special interests.”

  “Thank you for your candor,” she said, and offered him a small smile.

  “Thank you,” he said, not sure what she was saying.

  She looked at him for a moment, a trace of amusement in her blue eyes. For all the foreign elegance—the tumble of long dark hair, the ruby earrings—she had something familiar about her.

  “I think you know my sister,” she went on, and when he failed to respond, she extended a manicured hand. “Kristina Jensen. You helped me with a favor.”

  “Oh yes, of course. How are you? Very nice to meet you.” Though by now, of course, it was too late. She seemed, in her worldly confidence, to belong to a different continent from her fair-haired sister.

  “I’ll let Camilla know I saw you,” she said, in her faintly ironic way. “Thank you for the gift.”

  “Thank you,” he said again, and then, as she walked away, realized that he didn’t know if she’d been referring to the presentation he’d just given, or to the present he’d delivered.

  Campus was more than ever like some sketch that nobody had troubled to fill in during the lazy days of summer, and as they walked among the buildings, the grassy courtyards set among high towers, no sound came up to them except, at moments, the massed, far-off chant of cheerleaders here to practice affirmations. Houlihan’s, when they got there, was almost empty and when he claimed his usual place in the corner, Alex went off to get some drinks. He put the books down on the floor and thought: nine months from now, all this will be over.

  “To new lives,” said his friend, raising his glass after he’d sat down. “And undiscovered selves.”

  “To finished theses,” he replied, and sat back against the wall. On the system, U2 were racing through the desert, in search of light, a lost redemption; they still hadn’t found what they were looking for. At the bar, a girl pulled back her shoulder strap to show her companion a tattoo she’d just acquired beside her collarbone.

  “That woman at the end,” said Alex, trying not to seem too interested, as he cupped his lighter’s flame in his elegant Recoleta way. “You’ve known her long?”

  “I’ve never seen her before in my life.”

  “But she said something about a sister, someone you’d helped out?”

  “I brought her something from Damascus. I met her sister once— no, twice.”

  “Only twice?” said Alex, squinting as he let a draft of smoke out. His enemies in the department—and they were never in short supply— held that Alex asked questions of others as a way of not asking them of himself; knowledge, for him, was a kind of power, they said, which was why he always tried to know more about others than they could know about him. Together with his air of imported sardonicism, it could have made him insufferable, except for the sense that this too was a cover, the disguise behind which he pursued his own interests: the rumor had it that he was completing a thesis on Castaneda—the first half would argue that all the stories of Don Juan were a fiction; the second half would argue that they were nonetheless essential works of mysticism.

  “And you?” he said, to avoid his friend’s cross-questioning. “You never tell me anything.”

  “What is there to tell?” Alex shrugged. “I labor like a medieval monk and hear students ask me if Borges was a Buddhist.”

  “Was he?”

  Alex looked at him as if to say, “What do you think?” Then, “I thought you’d come here to get away from all that.”

  “I have,” he said. “I don’t have time for complications.”

  “So you’re not going to see the sister again.”

  “I can’t. I told her I was taken.”

  “Ah,” said Alejandro, with a private smile. “The mysterious Englishman. Ashamed of nothing but his tender heart.”

  Around them the place was beginning to pick up. Amidst the smoke and noise, a hand placed just too high upon a leg; a laugh a little too loud. “I know this amazing place in the hills from where you can see the fires.” “I have an audition coming up next week.”

  “You wouldn’t want to lose your focus,” said Alex.

  “No,” he said. “I wouldn’t.”

  When he cycled back along the cliffs, many hours later, there was almost no movement along the street. He saw a police car parked outside his house, red light turning, and for a curious instant a foreign impulse flared up in him. Then he looked farther along, to the beach, and saw where a group of distant figures had built a bonfire at the point. It licked and spluttered between them.

  When he got into the house—locking the door behind him—he could hear nothing but the sound of Jewel next door, singing of “foolish games”: the surfer, no doubt, getting his partner in the mood. Going to the desk, he took down the books he’d be returning to the library in the morning. For the first time in months, he had an unobstructed view of the sea.

  The next night, he got back late from the library—he couldn’t afford a break with the deadline coming up so soon—and, walking into the terrace, saw a piece of paper curling out from the fax machine. He hadn’t had any faxes for weeks, so he took it out, to find what looked to be a column, from the L.A. Times, sent, as far as he could tell, by someone in Westwood or Beverly Hills.

  “NEW ‘SCRIPTURES’ UNEARTHED,” said the headline, and underneath it, a subhead said, “Scholars ask, ‘What does this say about “gospel truth”?’”

  It was a two-column story, clearly buried in the back pages of the A section.

  He put the paper down again on the desk, and looked at it more closely, to see if there had been any
greeting or further message erased, or written so faintly that it hadn’t come through. But there was nothing. He dialed the number printed at the top, but, as he feared, heard in response only the whine of another fax machine.

  A little later, work finished for the day, he poured himself a glass of wine and took a seat in his armchair: with the seminar behind him, he could treat himself to a small celebration. He’d been waiting for some time to take a look at the spiritual diary composed by Rumi’s father, the mystic whose visions, some said, had laid the groundwork for his famous son’s transformation. As he read through them— trying to recall what he’d read about how the word “desert” came from the Latin “deserere,” meaning “to abandon,” and then thinking back to John of the Cross’s fear that man had been abandoned by his God—he started as the phone on the desk began to ring.

  Reflexively, he checked his watch: eleven-forty-three.

  He picked the instrument up, bracing for late-night news, and heard nothing at the other end. “Hello,” he said again, and again there was nothing—or only what might have been the sound of someone trying to be quiet as he put the receiver down. He returned to the armchair, and picked the same book up. Then, as he settled into it, the phone began ringing again—eleven-forty-five—and he hurried to pick it up, as if to catch the phantom caller by surprise. Nothing once again: only the sound of muffled breath, as of someone trying not to be heard.

  When the phone rang once more—six minutes later, according to his watch—he let it ring and ring and took himself off to the living room so the machine could answer for him. He heard a click, his automated voice announcing he wasn’t there, and then, to his surprise, he heard another voice come on just after. “Hi. I’m really sorry to be calling so late. It’s just, I was thinking about our drive, and I guess I was wondering . . .”

  “Hello.” He was back in the study at the phone.

  “Hi. You’re there!”

  “I usually am, close to midnight.”

  “Great,” she said, as if she hadn’t caught the hint. “Because I’m going to be driving up north this weekend, and I guess, I was thinking, if you had the time . . .”

  “I probably have an hour or two,” he said, thinking that, if he didn’t say that, there’d be another call like this a week from now, next month. “But I’m feeling rather pressed at the moment, what with the deadline coming up.”

  “I understand,” she said solemnly, and then waited for him to say more.

  “I met your sister.”

  “Yes,” she said. “She told me. Thank you.”

  “Thank you” for what? Somehow she seemed always to be presuming a connection he wasn’t sure they’d made.

  “I didn’t know she was interested in Sufism.”

  “Sometimes, I guess.”

  “And you must be back in L.A. now.”

  “For now.” As if to tell him that the more he asked, the less she’d say.

  “So, if it would work for you, let’s meet at three p.m.—at Follow Your Heart.”

  “The health-food store?” she said, and then, when he said yes, said, “See you then.”

  He pulled into the small parking lot a few minutes before three o’clock the following Saturday, but the white tank he remembered from the driveway was nowhere to be seen. He imagined her steering through weekend traffic, pushing back a strand of hair as she looked down at the clock that wouldn’t be working, reaching in the glove compartment for a map that wouldn’t be there.

  The kind thing, clearly, would be to sit in his car as if he’d just arrived. He reached for the book of poems he’d brought along with him—just in case—and read the usual Sufi injunctions. “Sell your cleverness. Buy bewilderment.” By the time his watch had reached three-thirty, though, he realized he was taking in not a thing: all he could register was the car that wasn’t arriving. He saw a pay phone outside the store, and went across to dial his own number. When it answered, he heard, as he’d expected, his own voice, closely followed by her own. “Hi. I’m really sorry. I’ll be there soon. I was going to be on time, and then something came up.” Her voice almost cracked. “Please don’t give up on me. Please?”

  He put down the phone and took a long walk around the block. When he came back, though, there was still no sign of the oversized car made for family vacations. He went into Follow Your Heart and bought some dates—the treat, she’d said, her sister always brought back for her from trips to the Middle East.

  Back in the car, he picked up the book again, and turned the pages without reading them. Then at last, a few minutes after four, he heard a thump, and saw the car that he remembered bump into the lot. There was fresh mud on its fenders, and its left-hand indicator was winking for a right-hand turn. It lurched into the small space and then paused, as if searching for a space that would be big enough. Then she eased it into a spot and for a few long moments there was nothing.

  When she got out at last, he saw no one he could recognize. It was as if a pale facsimile of her had come up here, with all the spirit absent. “I’m so sorry,” she said, as soon as she caught sight of him. “I was hoping and hoping I wouldn’t screw this up.”

  “That’s all right. You’re here now. It’s still light.”

  “It is,” she said. “Thank you.” And a little color came back to her face. “Thank you for not giving up on me.” She took a deep breath. “Can we still go on that drive?”

  “If you’d like.”

  “I’d really like. That road we went on before?”

  She got into the car, and placed a blue overnight case at her feet. Then, as he began driving along the hills, she said, “Are you mad?” and jammed a tape into his system as if to drown out the answer. By the time he turned off the main road, and onto the narrow one that curls around the mountains—bare golden hills above them, and the city half lost in a haze below—Bing Crosby was singing about tropical sunsets and girls with flowers in their hair. Someone else, with an old voice that made him think of Fred Astaire, was hymning the Southern Seas, and the moon over Burma; there was a song about a cruise, a shipboard romance, the sadness as the port came into view.

  She looked out the window, alert, expectant as a visitor.

  “All these songs about traveling?” The traffic had thinned out now; Santa Barbara was a greyish blur in the distance.

  “When I was young, I always thought I’d travel.”

  “And in fact?”

  “In fact, I haven’t.” The trace of anger that lay just behind the eagerness.

  “Well, you can make up for it now,” he said brightly, and then realized that what he’d said could be taken in the wrong way.

  “I will,” she said. “I am.” The light slowly returning to her voice.

  The sky looked guiltless as they crossed the Pass, and each curve brought them some new outline of a house, barricaded behind gates and rebuking the ash-filled slopes all around. “Like phoenixes,” she said, and he thought that she was right: they were indeed like mythical creatures of a kind, living far above the city, in a place where they were sure nothing bad could happen to them.

  A man was jogging along the narrow, steep road, a dog bounding beside him, and the sea far below. Though it was a Saturday in summer, few other cars were to be seen, and, high above, the tumult of the town far away, it was easier to believe that you were in some previous California, before anyone had thought to call it Eden. The smell of wild anise, and the sky sharp over the lake to the north; an absolute emptiness across the classic Western landscape of ridges and orchards and valleys: California, before it had a name.

  In the car, meanwhile, the men bowed in black ties and the ladies’ dresses swirled around a dance floor off at sea. Lovers met under tropical moons, and reality was nothing that couldn’t be wished away. He thought of his coming trip to Spain, and then, catching sight of her looking out towards the town and ocean, bit the truant thought back.

  “You still wish you could travel.”

  “Of course,” she said, w
ith more conviction than the question had deserved. “I wish I could do many things.”

  “You can, can’t you? That’s what California is about.”

  “For some people, I guess.” The wistful tone softened the traces of bitterness. “I believed all that once upon a time—”

  “Now?”

  “Now I don’t know.”

  As they turned onto Painted Cave Road, an ancient canyon on one side, poison oak, thick trees, a gurgling stream at the bottom, they were taken farther from the world than ever, the road closing in on them on both sides and the rocks above enforcing a kind of sovereignty. The switchbacks were harsh, and up above, when they stopped beside the canyon, the markings in the Chumash cave showed scorpions, circles, snakes. Whatever you might believe about California was here, on this shaded road: the ancient signs, the open bright sky. Farther up, nothing but rolling hills and mountains in the distance, Cachuma Lake blue in the sultry afternoon.

  “Can we walk a little?” she said as they went up higher, and her manner was so uncertain, so far from the local presumption, that he was touched; the way she asked for favors carried with it the tremor of an expected refusal. He parked the car under a tree and followed her, scrambling, up to a rough, dusty path that cut a thin trail towards a farther hill. They walked and walked, thirty minutes or more, everything falling away from them, and then the trail ended at what seemed to lie at the terminus of every mountain path here: a ruined house. Once upon a time, someone had tried to build a Roman villa here, it seemed, commanding the valley below, and so far from the city that no rules applied; now they could see broken bottles, torn condom wrappers, a few uneven stones poking out of the worn grass.