Abandon

by Iyer, Pico

  There were only a very few other people in attendance, filling up most of the first few rows of a group of chairs lined up at the front. Men, mostly formally dressed, with dark beards and expertly barbered hair. One or two women dressed from head to toe in black. All sitting in an expectant silence, as if getting themselves into a state of readiness—or, he suddenly realized, practicing a kind of prayer.

  “What is this?” he said, under his breath. “Where are we?”

  “You’ve got to wait.” She enjoyed being the one in charge for once, and he let himself go: “Live in the nowhere that you come from,” as his favorite poet wrote.

  A few minutes later—and he understood her dark, formal clothing now, even if the freed long blond hair gave her away—a man came to the front of the hall, serious and well dressed, and said something in a language he couldn’t follow: Turkish, perhaps, or a dialect of Arabic he’d never heard before. Nobody said anything; they hardly moved.

  Then, in silence, a few men proceeded in from a side door. They were dressed, all of them, in long blue cloaks, with loose white shirts. One man, all in black, took a position on the floor, on an ornate red carpet. Four or five, carrying musical instruments, took their places silently along the side.

  Then, without a word or prompt, one of the men, and then another, began to turn. A strange arrhythmic melody came up from the wings, and the men, as they turned, showed nothing on their faces: no joy, no emotion or possession. They simply turned. One hand extended towards the heavens, the other reaching down to earth. Not “whirled”—there was nothing furious about their movements; just something slow, hypnotic, almost inevitable.

  The man in black passed between them as if to control the trance, to make sure each one was poised between surrender and control, and the men, in their precise way, turned and turned, as if hardly responsible for their movements. So out of themselves they did not even choose to be dramatic or spectacular.

  Occasionally, someone began to move a little faster. The music sped up, and there was an intimation of being taken into something intense, like the final furious climaxes of a raga. But then the music would slow down again, fall into a pattern so narcotic that it threatened to pull you into another order of being, beneath the sea. The men’s faces were thrown back, and their eyes were closed or, if half open, impossible to read. Whatever mounting ecstasies they felt were inward.

  Then, as abruptly as it had begun, the whole performance ended. One moment, the dancers had been turning, the audience as much part of the pattern as the men who moved, and the next moment, they were separate again, and there was silence. The dancers walked away as they had come. The musicians packed away their instruments and followed them out. The onlookers got up—there was no chatter, no one said anything—and disappeared. By the time the two foreigners had made it to the parking lot, an old man was closing the doors behind them, and theirs was the only car in sight.

  They didn’t say anything as they walked towards her car, and she went over to his side to open his door before moving to her own. Around them, as they pulled onto the street nearby, there was still a banner saying “Happy Days” in front of one house, and lanterns picking out the driveway of another. New Year felt far away, but the decorations were still up outside many buildings, as if the celebrations were perpetual.

  “So what did you think?” she said at last.

  “Of the dancing? I don’t know. It was different.”

  “Different better or different worse?”

  “Different better, I think. Less dramatic. Less passionate than I expected.”

  “More mysterious,” she said, and he said, “Yes, that’s it exactly.”

  “I don’t think it’s something they put on for tourists.”

  “Nor do I. We were the only tourists there.”

  “I’ve been waiting and waiting to show you this. I know you must have seen things like this before—”

  “I haven’t. I’ve never wanted to.”

  “But you don’t mind?”

  “I don’t mind.”

  They’d come to a larger intersection now: traffic lights, and an intricate labyrinth of tunnels and freeways, going east, west, north, south.

  “How did you know about it?”

  “I know more than you think.” Then, as they passed onto the freeway, she said, “Now for Act Two.”

  “I know,” she said as they headed out into the desert, the lights falling away quickly, almost without warning, so that suddenly they were in a darkness broken up only by an occasional cluster of fast-food stores and gas stations. “I know you’ve got a million things to do: the lecture next week, the last four chapters, everything else. But you’ve got to give me one chance at least.”

  “I will.”

  “You’ve got to trust me; I won’t take you away forever.”

  The settlements were infrequent now, and the only other cars along the freeway were occasional trucks beginning the long trip cross-country, their boxes of lights shooting past into the dark. To drive away from the coast in California is to drive towards simplicity; with each few miles, the bright artifacts felt more and more like something that never existed, and they were in the presence of something ancient.

  “It’s like being in the Sahara. Or some postindustrial Sahara at least.”

  “Have you been to the Sahara?”

  “No. But close enough.” With Martine in the suq, the men chattering in the alleyways of Fez. She said nothing, and the weight of all the places she hadn’t been seemed to fill the front of the large vehicle, already cluttered in the back with old newspapers, books, plans she’d never complete.

  “Away from Babylon and towards the Holy Land,” he pronounced. A fatuous comment, but the longing for conversation had disappeared in the wake of the performance. It had left him feeling as open, as depthless, as in the dreamless moments after love.

  Close to midnight—they’d been driving for two or three hours at least—they rounded a turn and saw a sudden flood of lights in the distance, much farther than they seemed, but as they drove on and on, the lights never seemed to come any closer. More than an hour had passed by the time she pulled off onto a smaller road and started to thread her way through a grid of straight and sleeping streets.

  “You know where you’re going?”

  “I think so. They gave me the directions somewhere.”

  Surrender to whatever is greater than you, he thought, and something comes forth in you you haven’t seen before.

  She pulled into the back of a lot behind a low, deserted building, and they stopped.

  When first he’d arrived in California, he’d felt as if he were walking into an ancient version of Spain, done up again, brand-new. The names of the streets, the mellifluous sounds, the citrus trees, the white buildings and red roofs, all spoke of a far-off place that had left its jewels draped over the hills and scattered along the beaches. He’d come to take it all for granted then, until she started taking him round Santa Barbara, showing him the Moorish spirits that hid out behind the muscle cars. The tiles and designs on the Courthouse, the downtown cinema built in the thirties to resemble a courtyard in Spain, with whitewashed balconies along the sides, lavish dressing rooms, even a twinkling star or two set up on the roof, so that people watching movies could fancy themselves in Andalusia.

  Once, driving a few miles down the coast, they’d suddenly come upon a large Moorish palace sleeping by the ocean, and when they’d made their way past the gatehouse speaker, through the gates, to the real-estate man presiding over the estate (three-piece suit on a Sunday afternoon), they’d stepped into another life: tiled courtyard, indoor swimming pool, archways out of Córdoba. Now a twenties-era fantasy that could, as the man in the suit said, “make a great fixer-upper for the well-to-do family with kids.”

  Now, as they stepped into the low white building, they stepped into Morocco. The man at the front desk offered them mint tea, in decorated glasses, and the room they entered was all white, with divans by a
terrace, and kaftans instead of bathrobes. Lights all around, when he pulled back the curtains, and the sound of water, endlessly falling, as from a courtyard.

  “It’s like the place you always dream about,” he said.

  “That’s what California’s good for. Dreaming of other places.”

  “It’s completely—completely unexpected.”

  The adjective was so weak she kissed him on the cheek. “You’re sleepy. You should rest.”

  “Sorry. It’s been a long day.”

  “Don’t apologize. I like you when you’re sleepy. You’re most touching when you’re vague.”

  He reached towards her where she lay, and she put a finger to his lips.

  “No. I’m the boss tonight. Relax.”

  By the time they woke up, the temperature was already close to three figures, and the sun was screaming through the flimsy curtains. They ordered breakfast in the room, and savored the freedom from telephones, from books.

  “It’s funny,” she said, breaking a croissant between her fingers, and licking the butter from her fingertips, “you never talk about your past. Almost like you think you could erase it.”

  “That’s what people come to California for.”

  “But then they find that Californians have lots of pasts. Even if they can’t always remember them.”

  She sipped at her orange juice, hair wet from the shower.

  “You, too,” he said. “You tell me about the ways you escaped from things when you were very young, but the rest . . .”

  “Is what I’m trying to escape from now. That’s why I love being with you. You give me the chance to be something different.”

  “But you can’t pretend the past doesn’t exist.”

  “That’s what I was saying to you just now.”

  She looked away, at the terrace in the sun, the white houses with their expensive cars, the tiled fountains and their ageless music. She was speaking in innocence, and he not.

  “What would you like to do today?”

  “Find out what you’ve done.” He didn’t know why he said it, but clearly the previous days had not been entirely forgotten.

  “What do you mean? This is your birthday.”

  “I know. That’s why I can do anything—including asking you anything I want.”

  “One question—and then we’ll go.”

  “Okay. My question is”—he paused—“what happened with Alex?”

  She looked at him, and looked at him, and then it looked as if she were falling. Her eyes filling up with what could only be frustration.

  “Why do you want to know?”

  “Only curiosity.”

  She paused for a long, long moment, as if to collect herself. Then, continuing with a change in her voice, “The same thing that always happens. He got tired of me, and ran away. He wouldn’t even take my calls any more.”

  “Why not?”

  “Ask him. Why do they ever get fed up? Maybe I wasn’t interesting enough, or exotic enough, or strong enough. Maybe I didn’t match his idea of the perfect woman. He always liked me well enough when he could look over the table and admire me, as he called it. ‘Mirar es admirar’—something like that. He liked me when he could show me off to the world. But soon he didn’t like me in any other way.”

  “But you didn’t think to tell me any of this?”

  “Why should I? It’s got nothing to do with you and me. That’s what I was saying. You and me are different. That’s why it gives me hope.”

  She was on the edge, he saw, of tearing up everything she’d hazarded, and going off forever.

  “If you’d told me, we wouldn’t be talking like this. On the one chance we have to get away from it.”

  “I’m sorry. Really I am.” She looked terrified, like someone at the top of a cliff who feels the stones falling down into the emptiness below, and sees that soon she’ll be falling, too. “I met him through my sister, and he seemed funny and mysterious and intelligent, and now, I’m sure, he never thinks of me at all.”

  “And that time at McCarthy’s lecture?”

  “I never expected to see him there. I told you: I was there for Krissie.”

  “Who’s always away when it counts.”

  “Don’t I know it!” She’d finally conjured hope, and instantly—so it might seem—it had been pulled away again. Her demons could say, “I told you so.”

  “Look,” she said, and he could see she was fighting more strongly for them than she’d ever seemed to do before, “if you really want to throw me over because I knew Alejandro before I had the chance to know you, you might as well drive home right now.”

  “It’s stupid, I know. Give me time to think about this.”

  He secured his bathrobe tight around him and walked out of the room, to the pool. Then, through a narrow corridor, into the parking lot: a slap of desert heat, the blinding glare coming down onto fenders, hubcaps. When he touched the door to her car, his hand pulled back as if it had been burned. Birdsong is a way of reminding us that Heaven is all around us, the Arabs say. But it’s only we who can find the ears with which to hear it.

  “Shall we see what else there is to look at round here?” he said, going back into the bright room.

  They talked very little as they drove back in the evening, passing the industrial fields, the muffled lights of Ontario. If it really meant so much to him, he thought, then he could have asked her any number of questions, months before; clearly he was hiding from something, too. Why punish her for something he’d almost asked her not to divulge: like Greg, or whatever it was she did when he wasn’t around?

  As the road dwindled into twin lanes just before they came into Santa Barbara, there was a sense of coming to a forking of the paths.

  “Do you want to stay?” he asked as they drove towards the university, the red lights of the airport, his home nearby.

  “I think I should go. I have stuff to do tomorrow, in L.A.”

  “ ‘Stuff’ meaning auditions? Rehearsals? A trip to the doctor, or your parents’?”

  “Stuff. The usual mystery.”

  “But I’ll see you before the lecture?”

  “You’d see me every day if you wanted to.”

  “Thank you,” he said, as they turned off the freeway, and onto the small road that ran along the sea. “Thank you for a wonderful escape.”

  “My pleasure,” she said, leaning over to kiss him, but not turning off the engine, as if it was she, now, who had to look after him, walking into a house where the red light was winking furiously.

  For a while, after he returned to his desk, everything that had come free on the long and unexpected excursion—the dance, the drive across the desert, the confrontation at last, the silence that had come after it—flowed through him, and he felt as if the poems on his desk were opening to his touch. As if he’d come to know his way around them now, the pressure points, the places where they were soft—the back of her neck, the area between her right breast and her throat— and when he pushed them now, they broke open, and he walked into a field of light. Don’t even look where you’re going, they said, and you end up somewhere truer.

  The pages of the thesis came freely now, as if they were writing him, not he them, and when he went out onto the beach in the crystal light, it was as if the place he’d sought had come into sharpest focus: the aluminum glinting on the bicycles, the light flashing from Storke Tower in the distance, the sun catching the patches of tar left over on the beach from the oil spill years ago. The place was chaos and sadness and confusion, a vague idea no one had ever bothered to clear up, or even to work up into an argument; and yet all the spaces around it, within, above, across, were like nothing he’d ever seen at home. The only abiding sadness of California, its daily ache, was that it could always be something better.

  When she came down again for the lecture, he felt the restlessness in her as strongly as in himself. She was tossing and turning even when she was lying still. She asked about his thesis, he talked abo
ut the deadline, she said something about how time was running out, and now and then they turned off the lights and he heard and felt and touched someone he couldn’t analyze away.

  “The body is dark”—it had once been his favorite line from Rumi. “The heart is shining bright.”

  The next afternoon—it was one day before the lecture now—she said, “Can I ask you for a favor? And you have to say yes, because I gave you a treat last week.”

  “What is it?”

  “Our house. In the hills. Can we go there again?”

  “Of course. When would you like?”

  “Tonight. After dark.” They still had one place that was unblemished; nothing bad had ever happened to them there. “It’s like the place you described to me the first time we went up to the hills,” she said, and he was touched, because she’d remembered—and caught the implication.

  They got into his car after nightfall, and drove up into the hills. The old road they’d come to think of as their own had acquired even more pieces of debris since their last visit, and the potholes after the winter storms were so deep the car shook and shouted as they drove. The transmission groaned, and the axles banged against loose rocks as if the car were crying out against the ascent.

  Above them, far above, the satellite dish, as ever, on top of one of the mountains, sending unintelligible signals off into the heavens, and receiving them back. The road so clear under the full moon that it looked like a thin ribbon of grey thread unspooled around the hills to take their measure.

  It wasn’t hard to follow the turns in the strong light, and when they came within sight of the house, he thought he saw a shadow moving in one of the windows, an outline against a screen. Then put the thought away: surfaces were deceptive when the moon was full. But he had a sense of the hillside’s being in motion and alive around them; when they stopped, and got out of the car, on the silent ridge, there were stirrings in the bushes, as if something other than themselves was going about its business.