“In your opinion,” said Helen, using her foot to bury the nest with sand, flustering the maggots and the ants alike. She, too, seemed to have surrendered to the influence of Mercury.
22
A Gas Station in the Desert
GAS STATION ATTENDANT: Yes ma’am, what can I do for you today?
VARLA: Just your job, squirrel. Fill it up!
Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!
BUT MICHELLE WAS UNABLE to convince her friend to stay. She knew that Helen might as well have been allergic to scenes like this, and as they said goodbye she tried to collectively explain her hysterical sobbing and her high spirits before that to an emotional state, a state produced by intense stress, suffering and joy. But Helen acted the way she always acted in such situations: coldly. What did she know about life? Would she ever know anything?
“I’d love to get together again,” said Michelle, while two other sentences drowned in sniffles. Helen wrestled herself free of her friend’s embrace, and as she did her gaze fell on a note stuck to the inside of the building’s door: Wherever you go, your destiny is waiting for you.
“Don’t get sentimental,” she mumbled.
“We’ve eaten people like you!” called a voice from the kitchen.
Michelle protested weepily, but Helen didn’t hear any more of the argument that ensued in the commune. She’d seen enough, her mission had been achieved.
She got in her car, breathed deeply and drove as fast as she could through the desert in the direction of her destiny, which at this point she assumed would be the hotel bar.
She bought two bottles of water at a gas station in the desert just outside Tindirma. She pulled a couple of coins out of her wallet and watched as a filthy eight-year-old smeared her windshield with brown soap suds. The station attendant filled the tank to the brim.
He took a twenty-dollar bill from Helen and while he disappeared into his shed to get change, a white VW bus with German license plates pulled slowly into the gas station and stopped on the other side of the pump with its engine still running. Yellow curtains in the windows, a young couple. Very young.
The driver took a quick look at Helen and looked away as soon as Helen met his gaze. He gripped the steering wheel with both hands. His girlfriend had spread a map out on the dashboard. She was clearly the more agile of the two, talked loudly, gestured while holding an open-faced sandwich, and honked the horn from the passenger seat in order to call the attendant. The eight-year-old had by now also smeared suds onto the side and back windows of Helen’s car. She got out and lit a cigarette.
There was garbage all around the gas station. An Arabic-looking man was staggering down a dune through the garbage toward the station. His face was petrified, his eyes bloodshot. When he had made it beyond the garbage, he sank knee-deep in the sand for a few steps, then, once the footing was solid again, he swerved as he walked. He wasn’t swerving like a drunk or someone lost in thought. It reminded Helen of lab rats at Princeton in an experiment where they kept trying to get at a reward even though they knew from extensive experience they would get an electric shock. The man lurched past the VW bus, circled the Honda uncertainly and then suddenly approached Helen determinedly. “Help, help,” he said hoarsely in English, bracing himself on the hood of the car. He was wearing a suit that was smeared with sand and black, sticky fluid. In the First World he’d be taken for a harmless vagabond, but in the middle of the Sahara he came across a little more threatening.
Helen pulled a coin out of her pocket and held it out to him. He didn’t look at the coin. Some muck from his sleeve had stuck to the hood and he bent over to wipe it clean with a corner of his jacket.
“Leave it be. Take this.”
“What?”
“Please, leave it.”
He nodded, straightened up, and repeated: “Help, help.”
“What do you want?”
“Take me with you.”
“Where?”
“Anywhere.”
“Sorry.”
The man refused the coin again, his face contorted in pain, and as he turned his head Helen saw the large wound on the back of his head, crusted over with sand and blood. His eyes scanned the horizon. The German couple in the VW bus, who had watched the entire scene, were getting restless. The driver shook his head and gestured out of the side window with both hands as if fending something off. The passenger frowned as she read instructions on a canister of tear gas.
The attendant reappeared and gave Helen her change without a word, then got to work on the gas cap of the VW bus.
“What’s going on?” Helen asked the wounded man.
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know what’s going on?”
“I need to get out of here. Please.”
“Do you believe in destiny or anything like that?”
“No.”
“Well, that’s something.” She looked pensively at the man for a while. Then she opened the passenger door for him.
The couple in the VW bus couldn’t contain themselves any longer. The man rolled down the window. “Attention, attention!” he yelled in bad English. “This is not Europe. No hitchhikers.”
“Danger, danger!” his girlfriend assisted.
“Danger, danger,” said Helen. “It doesn’t have shit to do with you.” And then to the man: “Come on.”
They got into the Honda. He symbolically swatted the sand-crusted legs of his pants, then quickly hopped into the passenger seat, closed the door and stared out of the windshield like a bunny until Helen started the engine.
“You needn’t be scared,” he said once they’d been on the road a few minutes.
Helen took a drag on her cigarette and took another long look at him. Her passenger was half a head shorter than she was and sat with trembling arms next to her. She put her own muscular arm next to his and made a fist.
“I’m just saying,” said the man.
“I’m going to Targat. I’ll take you to the hospital there.”
“I don’t want to go to the hospital.”
“Then to the doctor.”
“Not to the doctor!”
“Why not?”
For a long time there was no answer. Finally he said uncertainly: “I don’t know,” and Helen let up on the gas and let the car coast.
“No!” the man screamed immediately. “Please! Please!”
“You don’t know where you want to go. You don’t know why you want to go somewhere. You need a doctor but don’t want to go—and you don’t know why. Come on. What do you know?”
Given the fact that he didn’t know much, his explanation took a long time. Helen kept having to ask questions. The man spoke haltingly, painstakingly. Some words didn’t want to come out, his upper body cringed. But he willingly expanded upon and corrected his statements, got upset at the inaccuracies that slipped in, tapped anxiously on his forehead, and kept spilling more and more details. Attic, case of money, Poseidon. Nothing that he said made sense, but this, as much as anything else, convinced Helen in the end that her strange passenger was telling the truth. Or at least trying to.
He left out just one detail. Despite all the composure and poise exuded by the American tourist behind the wheel, a man who’d been hit by a pulley block was perhaps one clue too many for an afternoon excursion into the desert. By contrast, he tried at length and mostly out loud to reconstruct the conversation he’d overheard the four men having, their unintelligible speech, their unintelligible rage, their unintelligible final sentence.
“If he’s a decoy for Klein, if he employs the design, if he delays the pipeline… I can’t figure it out.”
“If he destroys the mine,” said Helen, flicking the cigarette butt out of the window.
The two camels appeared in front of them, kissing across the road. The smell of wood fires and bunker fuel wafted over from Targat. The sky in the west was red and black.
23
Mercurochrome
If a thief is found
breaking in and is struck so that he dies, there shall be no bloodguilt for him.
EXODUS 22: 1–2
THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD fell across a double bed in bars caused by the shades, parallel stripes of light. A second window stood open, the whoosh of the ocean and the smell of salt and iodine. The waves steady like breathing. He tossed and turned and saw a tuft of blonde hair an arm’s length away from him.
He had gulped down four tablets, he knew that, and the rest of the tablets were sitting next to him on the nightstand in front of a glass of water. He knew that, too. His brow was covered in cold sweat. It was dark. He fought his way through a complicated labyrinth in order to be able to peer into a telescope. He was looking into the muzzle of a small-caliber gun, and a man with a trident was rushing at him. He gazed into his own face and heard a diesel engine. 581d. Attentively he followed as the mirror-image of a woman put a bandage on him. A vial of mercurochrome in her hand. How she held him under the shower. How he couldn’t stand.
He gripped the sink with both hands while she disinfected the wound. He heard himself screaming in pain, a red blob on white porcelain. How she calmed him down. How she held him by the shoulders in front of her and drew a line on the sheets with the side of her hand: your half, my half. I’m putting tablets here. Do you see? Put your hands down. Breathe.
The parallel stripes of light shifted from the bed down to the floor and slid up the wall. He opened his eyes again and again through the course of the night and saw the stripes sometimes another half-meter away, sometimes in the same spot as before, without his sense of time ever seeming to keep up. Finally he got up and crept to the bathroom in the dark. Out of the corner of his eye he noticed that both halves of the bed were empty, but this did not particularly trouble him. The bathroom was full of sand. Beyond the largest pile of sand was a hole dug in the ground being watched over by an animal with two heads. One head in front, one in back. One dead, one living. The living head was sucking fluid out of the hole in the ground with a straw, a horrid bubbling noise. Telegraph poles began to move, upright yellow and blue bars flew past. He kept trying to get away from the bars of the cage, they kept surrounding him, before the calming sensation of yellow and blue striped wallpaper slowly supplanted them. This was no nightmare. Or at least only the nightmare of reality. A tourist bungalow early in the morning.
He was afraid to turn over in bed, afraid of the unexpected, and as he turned over he saw a kitchen. In front of the kitchen sink a naked woman. She was making coffee. The bubbling transformed into a fizzle.
With a look on his face as if he were staring at the sun he said: “We know each other from yesterday.”
“Correct,” answered the naked woman. She had perfectly polished fingernails. With her thumb and forefinger she swung a coffee filter into the sink.
“Your name is Helen,” he said uncertainly.
“Yes. And if you don’t know who you are, don’t worry. You didn’t know yesterday, either. Milk or sugar?”
But he didn’t want milk or sugar. He didn’t want to have breakfast. Just thinking about it made him feel sick, and he closed his eyes. When he next awoke the room was swathed in partial darkness. A shadow fell across the corner of the bed nearest him and dabbed his face with a wet cloth. Steam came from a porcelain bowl, voices trailed off out on the street, the woman popped a pill into his mouth. She was wearing a white dress with openwork arms now.
Once he saw her leave the bungalow in a bikini, carrying a beach bag over her shoulder. Once he heard her talking on the phone with the CIA. Once she had two heads. She came back from the hotel with two clumsy styrofoam trays. Both of them were wrapped in aluminum foil and when she took the foil off steam rose from the food as if it had come straight out of the oven. He couldn’t eat.
“What have I told you?” he asked.
“Do you not know, or are you just not sure?”
“Not sure.”
“You woke up in the attic of a building in the desert. You have cuts on your head, someone probably bashed your head in. You don’t want to go to the police or the hospital. I’m Helen. I gave you a ride. This is my bungalow.”
He looked at the woman and groaned. A face like something out of an American fashion magazine. He found it difficult to meet her gaze. He pulled the bedcovers over his head.
“Why don’t I want to go to the police?” he asked with a muffled voice.
“You believe you have committed a capital offense.”
That’s what he had said.
“Supposedly you killed someone with a pulley block. Which I doubt.”
He didn’t ask why she doubted this. He remained under the covers, and the images came flooding back. The animal with the bubbling straw. He heard the woman talking on the phone and speaking about cosmetics. She went shopping, brought him drinks, sat on the edge of the bed and was gone again, a friendly hallucination. Then he was lying in the dark and heard no noise. No whoosh of the ocean. No breathing. Panic came and went in waves. He slept.
24
Swallows
PARSONS: The art of fighting without fighting? Show me some of it.
LEE: Later.
Enter the Dragon
WHEN HE OPENED HIS EYES it was dawn. Beside him a rumpled bedcover, he was alone. A nightstand full of glasses and bottles. Two pictures on the wall. His body still felt weak. He could feel sweat on his back and brow, but it was more of a receding heat, the calming, slack feeling of the convalescent. Just a mild pain on the back of the head. He tried to stand up and managed to grope his way a few steps from the bed. Beyond the kitchen was another room.
“Helen?”
There were plates and utensils on the table, the door to the terrace was open.
He stepped hesitantly out into the morning air, braced himself on the stone balustrade and looked out at the sea and sky. Copper-colored pine trees clung to the long slope below. A light fog hovered over the ocean, and the swells sent parallel lines up the beach. To the right, stone steps led down to a second, lower terrace, and from there an ocher path wound down to the water. Helen was on the second terrace. Looking out at the ocean, her legs apart, her arms stretched out to either side, her platinum-blonde hair pulled back in a ponytail. For a few seconds she remained still, then her arms moved as if slowly pushing the air to the side. An arm rotated slowly forward, her knees slowly bent, and her upper body made a slow turn to the left. Her hands circled as if they were being dragged through thick honey. A floating step to the side, a shifting sideways of the body axis, a Kung Fu film in super-slow motion.
He looked up to the sky just to be sure, and two swallows flew by at normal speed. It wasn’t his brain. She really was moving slowly. Somewhat relieved, he leaned on the balustrade and watched, not without emotion, her unathletic gymnastics.
Helen was wearing white sneakers and light-blue sweatpants. The elastic band cut deeply into her flesh and let a little bulge of naked skin stick out at her waistline. A sleeveless T-shirt, wet along the spine, clung to her upper body. He felt a peculiar feeling for this woman well up inside him, a possibly inappropriate and misdirected feeling, he told himself. She was the one who had saved him, she had put a roof over his head and taken care of him, she was his lifeline in a hopelessly sinking world. It wasn’t gratitude. It was something else. It made his throat tight.
When she had been standing still for a while, he went down the stairs silently and wrapped his arms around her from behind. The heat, the moisture. He put his head on her sweaty back, felt her pulse on his cheek and looked out at the horizon.
She froze.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“Don’t worry about it,” said Helen, freeing herself from his embrace and heading up the stairs.
25
Swimming
And he took a piece of broken pottery with which to scrape himself while he sat in the ashes.
JOB 2: 8
EVEN THOUGH HE STILL felt weak on his feet, he joined her when she went to the beach. She ha
d eaten breakfast but he hadn’t eaten anything more than half an apple.
The sun, still low in the sky, colored the path down to the ocean orange. Bare-breasted women sat in a small group of Europeans and it must have been thanks to the influence of the group, the authority of the hotel facility, or hidden security guards that there were at most two or three stray djellabas in the tops of the surrounding trees. Helen spread two blankets out on the sand. He fell to his back like a beetle, stayed prone and mutely refused the suncream she offered. The fatigue returned immediately.
“Nothing has come back to you?”
“No.”
“But you can remember what ocean that is?”
“Yes.”
“And also the name of this place here and of the country where we are?”
“Yes.”
“Your English is quite decent. French I can’t judge. Can you speak Arabic?”
“Yes.”
“What language do you think in?”
“French.”
“Can you swim?”
While Helen walked across the sand and into the ocean, he gathered the towel beneath his head so he could watch her while lying down. The sun was almost directly above her. Glistening light made her contours dissolve in silhouette, her waist shrank to nothing.
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