He has no right to her. He isn’t trying to believe he has a right.
She keeps saying she doesn’t want her husband here, but Kenneth knows this is just her own pretty lie—her fear talking. As long as the husband isn’t here, she can keep some core of bravado up, some face she needs to keep in place to get through this, but the minute she sees him, the minute he walks in the room, Kenneth knows she’ll fall. He’s got no illusions about this. She’s got no kids; if she had wanted to walk out on her marriage, she would’ve done it. She loves the man: simple as that. She loves him enough to have fought every impulse she had, to have beaten herself up every time she couldn’t win. She loves him enough that even though she was going to have to lie anyway about Kenneth being on the goddamn continent with her—about the fact that he existed at all—she still wouldn’t fuck him the moment it became something more than a game, more than a same-time-next-year thrill. And that kind of love is dangerous. She’ll see the man and she’ll fall apart, she will become abject regret and naked fear and then the morphine will come and Kenneth will be on a plane by then, so who knows, who knows?
She’s so quiet.
There’s so little left in her now that it takes a while to notice what’s going on. Takes a while to notice that she’s not talking anymore, that her bedclothes are covered in red. Maybe she was trying to scream but no sound, no air came. He and Sandor cry out and all at once there is a frenzy of activity: they rush the room, these dark nurses in their starched white uniforms, they shout to one another in French and when Kenneth and Sandor get too close they’re shooed away. Christ, how much is one body supposed to take? Where is all this blood even coming from? He kicks the wall, but it is centuries-old stone, and there is no crash, only pain.
The last thing he sees before they pull the curtain is her mouth clutched against her own blood like a kiss, as a nurse strides and snatches Boutell’s phone from her hand, snapping it shut.
SHE’S TOO SICK to operate on now. Her fever’s still raging after twenty-four hours, the antibiotics ineffectual, like so much water flowing into her veins. They cannot cauterize and so it’s just back to more blood clotters through her central line. Even the cough suppressant would depress her breathing too much now to risk it. The scenario in Kenneth’s mind revises itself: No medevac. This is her final destination. Now there is nothing to do but wait it out.
“DO YOU EVER think about Joshua?” she says. She is sitting elevated to help her breathe, her face so white there is no contrast between her skin and her pillows except for the blood still dried on her lips. She stares beyond him at the curtains, pale and stark like nothing else in this country, nothing like the blues of Asilah and Essaouira, as if those colors no longer exist.
“No,” he says.
He’s never before realized how boldly he’s felt entitled to air.
“Will you think about me?”
“Not if I can help it, darlin’.”
Her small laugh is a wheeze; it takes her time to recover. Soon, an hour, maybe less, she will start the alternation of chills and burning again, the cycle she’s riding between pushing off her bedclothes and begging for more blankets, between lying limp and sweating on her bed and shaking so much that they thought at one point she was having a seizure. “Now’s the time to start lying to me,” she instructs, putting her hennaed hand on his, always the teacher.
He regards the winding lines, faded from black to brown and leading nowhere except back into one another like a labyrinth. How fitting it turned out to be that Nawar decorated her hands and those of her brother for her own funeral.
“That was me lying,” he tells her, but this time he earns no laugh. Her eyes are already closed.
BEHIND THE CURTAINS, she says she sees people moving: a rippling in the fabric; the darting of a face into the morphine shadows. “I know they aren’t there,” she assures him and Sandor gently, “but I hear them talking behind the walls.”
IS THERE A GOD, and does it matter, when he will not save them now?
AND THEN ALL at once it’s so clear. So clear he can’t believe he didn’t see it before. It is not because he ceased to be a game that the girl refused to let him inside; that’s too easy, when what’s been between them was never a game, when playing was never what they were doing. But he sees, as she lies here slowly dying, that despite all the noise she made about how long this trip would last, about buying souvenirs for home, there was only ever one way this could have played out. She came here to die, plain and simple—kept pushing beyond her endurance, overmedicating like her brother said, mingling with germs, inhaling smoke and exhaust, ascending altitudes and tempting fate until something was bound to crack. Whether she knows it or not, whether she can admit it to herself or not, she couldn’t stand the thought of fading away in New England on her country lane, life’s walls shrinking in on her bit by bit until she became somebody else, until she needed an oxygen tank just to take a shower like she said would happen someday. So she came out here for one last hoorah, one big bang, and look, as usual, the girl got what she wanted. It’s so simple he can’t believe he didn’t figure it out in Tangier, call her on it to her face. Maybe if the words had been spoken aloud, she’d have seen it for all its absurdity and stopped, just stopped. Now, instead, the absurdity has taken on a life of its own.
It’s so easy. She wouldn’t fuck him this time because she wanted her husband to be her last.
ALIAS HAS PREPARED tea in his small kitchenette in anticipation of Kenneth’s arrival. They sit and Kenneth makes his stomach accept the liquid, wills it not to rebel. Alias is shirtless and virile, wearing only his trousers, and for a brief and fractured moment Kenneth thinks about either pulling out his knife and stabbing the boy through the heart or fucking him. He puts his head into his hands as Alias talks about the gig he had at La Mamounia that day, the family of tourists he had to cart around. “I had to put on my guide face,” he says, “but I don’t feel like smiling.”
Kenneth gulps his tea without waiting for it to cool, lets the scorching pain ground him.
“I came to ask you something,” he says, cutting off the kid’s complaints, his testimony of compassionate involvement. “You know a place I can score some heroin?”
Alias’s face freezes. In the dim room, the black of his eyes blends in with the night outside. After a moment he puts on a smile, holds up his hands. “This is not a part of my job at La Mamounia,” he explains calmly. “Sometimes, yes, people want to smoke some hashish and I hook them up, sure. But not this.”
“You’ve lived here your whole life,” Kenneth says quietly. “You see things. I’m not asking you to come with me, man. I could wander the streets looking for it and we both know I’d find it eventually—that’s the nature of the city, every city in the world’s the same like that. But I wanna get back to the hospital tonight. I need this done fast.”
Alias stands. He begins to clear away the teapot, though he himself has not finished. He does not, it is clear, want Kenneth touching his glasses anymore, touching the place where he lives, and Kenneth feels relief: Maybe Alias will not show up at the hospital tomorrow. Maybe this will be the end of him. Kenneth steels himself for a night of wandering and thinks of the Tangier whore—how much he would like to see her marred face right now, how stupid he was to spend an entire night with her when he could have been with Cystic. He moves to leave and Alias puts out a hand to stop him, though the hand does not actually make contact.
“Sure,” Alias says, his voice the same agreeable calm as before. “I don’t do this myself but . . .” He shrugs. “It’s like you say. I know this city, everything about it, good and bad.” He begins to nod and in his face Kenneth sees barely concealed disdain and better-concealed sadness. “So of course, yes. I know a place like that.”
LEO’S PLANE HAS been delayed. Sandor talked to him just a few hours ago while he was still at CMN. Leo had hooked up with Geoff and the mother and they were all waiting for their flight into Marrakech, so Sandor went to RAK in a r
ental car at the designated time to collect them, but the flight had not landed. In a panic he rang Geoff’s phone but got no answer. He has been assured they are en route in the air. It is a short flight; they will be here soon. He waits.
Leo, of course, left his cell phone in Paris at the apartment of a friend before leaving for Madrid the day before yesterday, and there it lies still, uncharged. Sandor heard from him only when Leo took it upon himself to ring Sandor’s own cell from his Madrid hotel, voice bright (though Sandor noted his trying to make it less so, perhaps fearing Sandor’s envy over the exhibition—oh, how far away that all seems now), saying, “I’m just calling to check in!” And so Sandor had to tell him the truth. It surprised him: how close he almost came to lying, even though there was no way he could get away with it, even though he knew what withholding information from Geoff had cost. It was just that he couldn’t bear to reach the moment, the one in which Leo’s voice lost all its happy timbre and collapsed on itself—the moment of listening to Leo’s sobs on the phone.
He had never heard Leo weep before. For a man whose eyes fill with tears every time they watch a film (even a sentimental American television commercial can do him in!), what Leo passes off as “crying” generally has little staying power, as though he loses the will for it barely out of the gate. Early in their time together Sandor mocked Leo for this, saying his tears were all about appearances, just like the fresh flowers Leo insists on buying every other day, and the way he won’t set foot in the Albert Heijn and frequents only the small, picturesque corner markets for groceries. The way that, in the beginning, Leo knew how to take off his clothes and moan at just the right moments, but his eyes were far away, so that Sandor wondered whether he had really only made love to a shell and Leo was somewhere else entirely. But now, the sound of Leo’s choked sobs is like being kicked in the stomach—he would do anything to stop it, say anything. When Leo spoke to him on Geoff’s phone from Casablanca, he was crying still. Geoff’s voice when he regained the phone was impatient, and Sandor knew he must think that he is entitled to all the grief and that Leo is just some upstart who arrived too late in the game to have any genuine claims on Mary.
But who owns grief? Leo longed his entire life for a family, and these past two years, in his sister, he has found it. Geoff was not there to see the way Leo prepared for her infrequent arrivals in Amsterdam—the way he grew sleepless leading up to the day. It was not Geoff who saw the exorbitant international phone bills from Leo’s calls to New Hampshire, or walked in on Leo writing her an eleven-page letter when he’d spoken to her only the day before. No: Mary adores Leo, Sandor knows that, but she has a family. What she has meant to Leo cannot be contained within two years, and Sandor finds his body restless, unable to keep still, waiting for Leo’s arrival so he can go to him and hold him tight. He does not care who is looking, does not care what Geoff or the mother or every fucking rule-abiding Muslim in the entirety of this country thinks. He cares only for taking the edge off Leo’s ache, of cupping his face in his hands and promising, I’m here, I will always be here, you cannot scare me away, go on, try. For the first time since arriving in Marrakech he does not feel like vomiting. He feels a sense of sadness and dread and the hole that begins to open up inside, making space for loss, but he is not frightened anymore. He feels steady, strong.
This, then, is love.
Though Sandor will not voice it for many months, it is at this moment that the first kernel of his desire to have a child with Leo is born. He has never thought of a child as something for parents to share, to bond over; his parents lived in different countries, after all. But there in the airport, waiting for the sky to return Leo to him, he thinks of what it means to stake something and declare it your own, to never run again. To turn yourself over to the eternal in the face of life’s transience: giving and taking, growth and decline, again and again. Mary was adopted. It will be in homage to her, the woman who brought them together, linking their fates in a single, preposterous sweep. He thinks briefly of women, both lesbian and hetero, who might be approached and asked to borrow a womb, but no, this is a private matter between him and Leo. Somewhere there will be a baby born, a baby with a past in its cells already and yet also wholly theirs, his and Leo’s alone. He decides it there and then: they will not ask some woman they know, for the only woman with whom they would gladly have formed such a happy little baby-sharing commune is Mary. Now that thread will be broken; it will be just the two of them. And love is not free. No, his love for Leo has proved both exclusive and costly. It has cost his carefree youth; it has cost him every ounce of envy and agitation he has to spare; it has cost him a world of sexual variety; it has cost him the leap from hating his father and all the fathers of the world to desperately longing to become one.
All he wants is to pay and pay and pay some more.
A DYING WOMAN lies in a hospital. The tubes and wires snaking from her body notwithstanding, she takes up very little of the bed, and the man in the room with her stands up from his chair, gathers the IVs and monitors in his hand, and moves them aside, lies down next to her. The woman puts her head on his shoulder, but her oxygen mask digs into her flesh; she tries to adjust the mask but fails, takes it off. The man does not question her, though all common sense would indicate that he should. They lie there, waiting for the call. Sandor will alert them the moment her family’s flight lands, and then the man will have to leave and not come back. Airports and hospitals are places where beginnings and endings are cheap. As Sandor kills time at RAK, contemplating fatherhood, Mary and Kenneth prepare to say good-bye.
Mary watched Sandor leaving. He, too, would not be seeing Kenneth again. These two men, once casual enemies at Arthog House, stood in the doorway of her room as accidental allies. The room in which they have put her is in the corner of the building, where she is shielded from the other patients (or rather they are shielded from her). Sunlight does not fall on her end of the hall, and the view of the corridor from her bed is shrouded in gray. From there she observed their embrace. She watched their tall bodies holding each other, the light from her room’s window not reaching them quite but illuminating the room, so that their forms appeared half-lit. It would have made a beautiful photograph: their matched height and thinness, the way they embraced like broken warriors, the last ones standing in a stadium. There was no space between their bodies, so that they could have been brothers, lovers. She watched from the distance, and then Sandor was gone, though she hadn’t seen him walk away. Then it was only Kenneth coming back to her bedside chair and wiping his eyes. Then it was only the two of them and his hard bones next to her in the bed, both no comfort and a comfort she needs more than air.
“I’m scared,” she whispers. “I’ve never been so scared.”
His arms cannot get all the way around her because of the tubes. He puts one over her, his own body trembling the way hers has been shaking with fever, so that they knock into each other slightly, the respective tremors of their bodies ill timed.
There has been more blood, and when it came, a blackness claimed her and then there was nothing else, just the memory of air and the flooding, blind terror. She wants to want the blood to just keep on, to finish this, but she is not strong enough; she cannot want it. And so she still fights.
Between her legs is the catheter tube. Coming from her chest are the IVs, antibiotics past the hope of kicking in, now just for show. The oxygen mask hides her face; she is not human anymore. She is an animal that has crawled under the stairs to die, but they won’t even let her go in peace.
“I’m going to tell you something,” he whispers to her. “Are you with me, can you understand what I’m saying to you right now?”
She nods.
“Last night,” he says, “I went out and bought enough H to kill myself.” Her head jerks up, and with his hand he continues to stroke her hair, says, “Shhh, no, I’m still here.” She tries to say something and he cuts her off. “I was gonna do it once they came, once I had to go, but the pl
an’s changed.” He lets the words sink in, feels her struggling to try to face him, to see his eyes. “You want it,” he says, “it’s yours.”
“My God.” But what flicks on like a switch behind her glassy eyes is hope.
He continues, forges on before she fades, before he loses his nerve. “This shit’s so simple it’s ridiculous. I go cook in the bathroom. Then I take the heart monitor off you and put it on myself. I shoot you up. When it’s over I put the monitor back on your finger. By the time they get the flatline and get all the way over here from their station, I’m gone. You’ve got a ‘do not resuscitate’ order.” He permits himself a small laugh. “You’re scaring the shit outta them, so I’m guessing they’ll be all too happy to oblige. But it won’t matter either way. I bought enough for me. You’ve never used—all the morphine in your system and how small you are, even a quarter of that and it’ll be too late.”
Her teeth clack in excitement, in fever, in fear. “What if they catch you?”
“Baby, they don’t even know my last name. They think fucking Sandor is an American Jew named Leo Becker. I go straight to the airport, fly wherever the hell you can get from Marrakech—Paris, I bet. From there I go home.”
“Atlanta,” she says. “You’re really going?”
He nods. Kisses her forehead. She gasps a little and holds the mask on her face, huffing the air, and right away her eyelids get heavy. He pulls the mask back a little. “Wait,” he says. “Please.” He has no idea when he last used that word: please. “I promise. If I weren’t going home to see my boy, I’d have kept this for myself and you’d have been on your own. Don’t fade on me, baby, please. You’ve gotta tell me what you want me to do.”
A Life in Men: A Novel Page 42