by Denyse Woods
On the way out to the car, they heard the unusual cry of a bird hidden in the dusk. “What bird is that?” Thea asked.
“Ah,” said Salim, “we call that the jinn bird.”
“You know,” said Fatima, as they drove away, “you should look up ‘jinn’ in the dictionary. The root of the word—janna—means to hide, conceal, to fall into darkness. Jinaan, that means garden, like a secret place, hidden, Paradise even. Junna . . . protection, like, um, a wall, a shield.” The list of words rolled off her tongue in an absent-minded way. Kim pinged her recorder. Thea looked out at the remains of a highway that had been lifted and carried off by the floods. “Janaan for the heart, the soul. Istajanna—to become covered, concealed. Junna—to become possessed, crazy, because that is hidden, also. It is on the inside, you see?”
“Al junoun funoun,” said Salim. “Madness shows itself in many different ways.”
Gabriel took them to an Indian restaurant, vast and circular, with a panoramic view of the city—car lights filing along highways, minarets glowing under spotlights; suburbs rising and falling over unseen hills, like Chinese lanterns floating on a swell.
It was a curious evening, what with Kim trying to seduce Gabriel into revelations, while he tried to seduce Thea, addressing his answers to her, his arm stretched across the table so that his hand was almost on her elbow.
“So, a successful trip?” he asked Kim.
“Mostly. But I wish we’d got out to see those quicksands.”
“Which ones?”
“The ones that eat up flocks of sheep. I asked Abid, but he didn’t seem to know what I was talking about. He told us about a European couple getting lost last year and dying in their car, but they didn’t sink, so it can’t have been the same place.”
“They died in their car?” Thea asked, aghast.
“It happens all the time,” Gabriel said. “People die from exposure and stupidity.”
“Tourists?”
“Ill-prepared tourists and foreign workers. Guys out at the oilfields. They figure they can take a shortcut across the sands because they know where they’re going, but they don’t consider the monotony of the landscape—the same features for miles around, and they don’t have enough water because they think they won’t be long.”
Thea shuddered. “How much is enough water?”
“Eight liters per person per day,” he replied. “Without water, you become confused very quickly and then you make bad decisions, like leaving the car or thinking you’ll be able to see something from the top of that dune over there, or the next, and then you turn around and you see a thousand dunes and you don’t know which one is hiding the 4x4. It turns out that your only defining landmark doesn’t define anything at all, and by then it’s too late. Even if you know what to do, which is to stay with the vehicle, but you don’t have enough water, you’re still fucked, because you won’t behave rationally once dehydration sets in. Delirium comes quickly. And if you stay in the car, you’ll basically cook. It happens every year to some unfortunate wretch.”
“What a ghastly way to die.”
“Not the way I’d choose,” said Kim, “if I had a choice.”
“Nor me,” said Gabriel.
“What would you choose?” she asked him.
“I wouldn’t fry, that’s for sure. If I got lost out there, without water, I’d throw the jeep over the rim of a dune. It’s pretty easy to roll a 4x4 if you know how.”
“You’ve thought about it, then,” said Kim.
“You don’t go deep into the desert without thinking about it.”
“What if the roll didn’t kill you?” Thea asked.
He smiled. “Then I’d fry.”
“I’d be reaching for the pills,” Kim said, with a sigh. “I never really get the way some people can be proactive about killing themselves—throwing themselves in front of a train or off buildings. It’d be like jumping out of a plane without a parachute.”
“I understand why people jump,” Gabriel said. “Leaping into the void. That makes sense to me.”
This man, Thea thought; the grimness of him. When he smiled, flecks of light flickered in his eyes, but mostly he walked about with a dull shadow; and the shadow of the shadow spread to those around him. Kim, for instance: she’d become darker since they’d met him, preoccupied by genies and ghosts, by women who were, and women who weren’t, and now, prodding him about death and dying and how best to suicide.
“Have you ever got into difficulty in the Omani wilderness?” she was asking.
“I’ve got caught in storms, fierce bloody winds blowing up without warning. Zero visibility. A kind of blindness. Scary, but I quite liked it.”
“Well, you would,” said Kim. “Invisibility again.”
Thea looked out. Muscat looked in. Nice town. Easy town. Earlier that afternoon, they had walked through the suq, along modernized alleys under a high roof, where they had bought scarfs and trinkets, and stopped while a boy lit charcoal in a small burner, then broke frankincense and myrrh over it until a faint flicker of aromatic smoke flavored the air.
“I think you mean Umm al-Samim,” Gabriel was saying. “The Mother of all Poisons. I don’t know about sheep, but cars do sink into it. Although it isn’t sand—they’re salt flats, a crust of salt, gypsum, and sand on top of mud. Sludge, basically.”
“Yes, that’s it! That’s what I read about.”
“Water sometimes flows down from the Hajar, so old hands know you should never drive across it after rain, unless you have ramps in the car, because the water permeates beneath the crispy salt into the gunk underneath—that’s the stuff that swallows things, but slowly. It isn’t quick.”
“Another fun way to die!” Thea quipped. “Stay in the car and wait for the goo to get you.”
“Only then you’d die of thirst, as in example A,” Gabriel said flatly. “It’d take a jeep several days to go down. Plenty of time to get out. Umm al-Samim prefers to eat 4x4s rather than people.”
“Taking back some of its oil, perhaps.”
Kim wasn’t satisfied. “So much for being sucked into oblivion by whirlpools of dry sand, like in the movies!”
“In Umm al-Samim, it’d be more like drowning. In black ink.”
“Jesus,” said Thea, “you two really have gone over to the dark side.”
“Some people live their entire lives on the dark side,” said Gabriel.
“People like you,” Kim glanced at her watch, “and all because some lover ditched you. Was she really worth it?”
“My love life interests you a lot,” he remarked drily.
“Jinn interest me. Especially since we learned, this evening, that they’re partial to bones and feces and live around outhouses.”
“And you wonder why I’m so sure my lover was not a jinniya?”
“But where did she come from? And, more to the point, where did she go? Because, frankly,” Kim said, exasperated, “it isn’t credible that you’ve spent over twenty years mourning a woman you knew for all of two months. There has to be more to it.”
“There is.”
At just that point, Abid arrived to take Kim to the airport.
“Tell me,” she urged him. “Otherwise, I’ll have to make it up!”
Instead, Gabriel curved back, twisting slightly to greet Abid over his shoulder. There was something alluring in his every move, Thea thought, even though he wore his past like a carapace.
Kim pressed her Dictaphone into Thea’s purse. “Go to the desert,” she hissed. “Find out what you can. I’ll give you a share of the profits.”
Thea grasped her hand. “When am I going to see you again?”
“Let’s leave that to the angels. Or the jinn.”
They embraced. “I’m so glad you weren’t Sachiv.”
“Me too. Old lovers,” Kim glanced at Gabriel, “only ever disappoint.” She leaned toward him to shake hands. “Goodbye, Gabriel.”
“I look forward to reading about myself in a supernatural thril
ler.”
Abid said to Thea, “I will come back to take you to your hotel.”
“No need.” Gabriel said. “I’ll take her.”
Thea watched Kim go, weaving through the tables to the door, then emerging beyond the vast window, where she turned and waved one last time.
With a deep, satisfied sigh, Gabriel said, “Let’s go home.”
His house in Muttrah was not far from where the boy had been burning incense earlier that day. He led her into a narrow alley that curved to the left, up some steps, and around to the left again, until he stopped before a low door.
“You’ve lived here all this time?”
“Yeah. Usually they don’t like foreigners to stay more than ten or twelve years at a stretch, no matter who’s sponsoring them, but somehow my visa has always been renewed.” He clicked his tongue. “It’s my Irish charm.”
The door to his home opened onto a white sitting room, with a cement bench running along two sides, draped in blue and green cushions. On the far side, an opening led into a kitchen and another onto a dark hall. Thea could feel Gabriel watching, waiting for a reaction, but she was watchful also, prepared to experience some hint of recognition, a flash of déjà vu.
A framed print on the wall behind the seating drew her across the room. “Wow.” In the photograph, a beam of blue light was shooting across a vast cave from a sun-bright hole in the roof. “Where is that?”
Gabriel leaned against the doorjamb next to the picture. “In the hills behind Qalhat. It was discovered by an American geologist not long after I came to Oman and was thought then to be the second-largest cave in the world, but now it’s ranked about fifth. You could park several 747s in there.”
Whirls of limestone strata surrounded the gap through which shone the dart of light. “Looks like the eye of a hurricane.”
He pointed at a blob hanging in the middle of the light beam. “That’s me.”
“Seriously?” She looked closer. “You went down there? On a rope?”
“The elevator wasn’t working.”
She thumped him lightly.
“I’d never climbed before, but when I heard about this, I made it my business to learn. You have to abseil down and then climb back up the rope—which can take an hour. You need to be fit, very strong. There are three openings. One is a narrow slit and you scramble down easily enough through the rocks until suddenly—nothing. Space. Terrifying, the first time. I didn’t have enough experience to handle the shock of being so exposed—like being thrown out into the universe—but I had to do it.”
“Why?”
“It asked me to.”
Thea nodded. “When I was nineteen, my brother took me to Skye and I climbed the Inaccessible Pinnacle for the same reason. Because it asked me to.”
“So you’ve climbed? We should go there.” He looked at the photo. “It’s called Majlis al-Jinn. Meeting place of the spirits.”
She stared at his figure, dangling in the void.
“It’s like being inside the earth’s womb,” he said quietly.
On their way up the stone staircase, Thea could feel his desire coming up behind her, spreading across her shoulders. On a broad landing, the house opened into spaciousness. There were rooms off, bedrooms, probably a bathroom. Wool rugs on the white floor. Recognition stirred. She could smell her own daydream.
“Familiar?” he asked.
“Why would it be?”
He raised an eyebrow.
“You’re either very house-proud or you have a housekeeper.”
“Wifaq. I’ve been her personal responsibility for fifteen years. We’re growing old together. When I’m sick, she looks after me. When I sleep in, she wakes me. When I can’t sleep, she talks to me across the roofs. Come on up.”
The roof was a small, walled space, with room only for a table and two chairs.
“It must make for a lonely life, all this waiting?”
Gabriel glanced around the roofs, the aerials and satellite dishes. “I have friends, good friends, but ultimately, yeah, I come back to an empty house. After office hours, I live a somewhat eremitic life.”
“Surely you could have moved on by now.”
“I did try.” He put his hands on the wall behind him. “But every relationship foundered for one reason or another. Prudence is a hard act to follow.”
“I’m not surprised, with a name like that.”
“But now,” he went on, “it seems all my waiting has been worthwhile.”
“You’d do better to believe in your own fable than to pin your hopes on me. I am not her. She was not me.” And yet this place, this place . . .
“Let’s go to the desert,” Gabriel said. “You want to go and I want to take you. I’ll show you dunes the like of which you’ll never forget.”
The roar of a plane heading out across the Gulf drew Thea’s eyes to its flashing red lights, where the dim yellow line that hinted at its cabin brought her right up, and in, to where the passengers were belted into the flat acceptance of the long hours ahead. Thea felt no longing to be up there, heading home. “You’ve been so predatory.”
“Predatory?”
“Yes.” She looked at him.
“Look,” he said. “You’re married. And whatever I might want, or even long for, I don’t inflict harm. Not anymore.”
On swirling roads, he lifted her up and dropped her down. On the heights, he perched her on dizzying promontories with a God’s-eye view of precipices and canyons and the orange-gray ridges of the eastern Hajar; he pointed out Snake Gorge, a dark, zigzag gash in the gunmetal rock, and stopped by a black hill with bright copper seams winding around it, like tinsel on a Christmas tree. Looping down, she considered the rigid peaks, admired blocky villages nurtured by banana trees in the green pubes of the wadis, and laughed at a football pitch that lay across a road.
Gabriel was a happy man. His business forgotten, his appointments set aside, he delighted in taking her to a wilderness that would kill if you traveled one bottle of water short. Thea was giddy with her own folly—heading into the unknown with an unknown quantity, a man with crazed notions and suspect history. But a man, also, who amused and riveted her, and looked like the archangel of her childhood. She liked to drop her gaze on his wrists and watch him drive. It had been too long since she had been on a mad caper like this. Alex knew she was on a trip with an Irish tour operator and, indeed, had been relieved to know she wouldn’t be twiddling her thumbs for three days, alone in Muscat.
Delicious, delightful, was the pool where they swam. Thea lay, floating, happy. Three thousand miles from an Irish January, from open fires and black evenings, she felt not the slightest twinge of homesickness. This was fine, perfect; sun and swimming, and no demands pulling her hither and thither. And this country! Sachiv, during those late-night calls, had spoken a lot of boy-friendly Muscat, where he and his pals had gone fishing in the port in homemade boats, of eating watermelon in its dusty lanes, and of the great mountainous peaks—of rock and sand—that made Oman the country he most loved. He had not overstated its beauty.
She paddled a little to keep afloat, her ears plugged with water. The river was nudging her, as if she were a piece of driftwood caught up in twigs that needed release. It was a relief to go with it, and a relief to have come—for which she was grateful to both Kim and Sachiv since it was they, directly and indirectly, who had got her onto that plane to Muscat. She rolled into swimming. It wasn’t too late, it transpired, for her inner grasshopper to find that leather-bound journal.
They made camp by a watercourse somewhere in Wadi Bani Awf when the black night was sinking to earth. While Gabriel lit a fire, Thea stepped away to pee behind a rock, her head clamoring with unwelcome jinn lore, such as their propensity for living in deserted places and their ability to turn into stones, and wolves. In some places, people were afraid to step on jinn—invisible beneath their feet—because they would then be tormented by them. Like chewing gum from the pavement, Thea thought, sticking to your hee
l. She began to believe. She could feel them watching and suddenly wished herself in Ireland—on a tributary of the Lee, in harmless countryside, where the only sound besides the river would be the moo and munch of cattle behind a hedgerow. . . . But even there the unseen were feared and avoided; she knew of buildings, remote and abandoned, where no one ever set foot because they were reputed to house the walking dead.
Over tea and cookies, they talked of Glandore and Skibbereen, Allihies and Inchydoney. Gabriel asked if the old hotel was still on the headland between the beaches.
“God, no. That was knocked down and replaced by a great big spa hotel. You’d hate it, probably.”
“Probably.”
“Won’t you ever go back?”
He held his plastic mug to his mouth. “Unlikely,” he said, and drank.
“Isn’t exile a stiff price to pay for a youthful mistake?”
He threw out his chin in a dismissive way, his elbow resting on the rock behind him. “If this is exile, exile is no hard place to be.”
“Why did you do it?”
Gabriel flashed his eyes at her, then cleared his throat. He often did so before speaking, as if giving himself a chance to pull back. “No reason. No reason at all.”
She waited.
“As best man, I had certain responsibilities.”
“Like getting the groom manky drunk?”
A low nod. “A particular challenge in Max’s case. Such a sober type. But there were expectations, conventions to be upheld.”
Thea sat still, conscious of an unseen audience around them, oval faces outlined in white, like chalk figures on a blackboard, with O-shaped mouths, lines of them, hanging on the next scene. “So get him drunk you did.”
“Spectacularly.”
The river seemed to slow down, to hush its gurgle.
“Where did you happen upon a grand piano?”
“The School of Music. After the pub, we wandered down that way, about seven of us, drunk as newts, and suddenly Max insisted on going in. ‘I have a class,’ he kept saying—we were both teaching there at the time—so we all bundled up the steps. The night porter, Frank, let us in. He was fond of Max, so he indulged us, said we looked like we needed coffee and went off to make it. ‘I must play,’ Max was saying, ‘must play,’ and we followed him into the hall. The grand was center-stage. Max sat, hanging over the keys, whining about how much he loved his piano, couldn’t bear to live without it, wanted to marry it, sleep with it. We said—I said—sleeping with it might be difficult, but sleeping in it could be arranged. . . . He was sniggering when we got hold of him, but then he slumped—I had him by the armpits—passed out, so we heaved him in, like a sack. Strings snapped and cracked, but even that didn’t . . . alert us. We put down the lid and took off.”