by Dave Eggers
—Why not, he said.
—Good! she said brightly, and took a few quick steps to the bathroom. The thunder of water into tub began. As it filled, she returned to the couch, picked up her drink and finished it.
—You plan to do any snorkeling, scuba, anything like that?
He said he hadn’t thought about it.
—It’s very good here. Very few people do it, so it’s unspoiled. I went a few weeks ago just off the KAEC beach. I wore a bikini, actually, but I shouldn’t have. After an hour a coast guard boat arrived. It was haram to be out there with so little on.
—So you were arrested, or…?
—No, they just told me that I needed to give them some warning next time. They’re very accommodating around Jeddah, you know, to Westerners. They look the other way in most cases, but they want to know where you’re doing whatever you’re doing. Mostly so they can be assured that other people don’t see you doing whatever you’re doing. Want more?
She poured more wine and then went to check the state of the tub.
—Looks ready.
And so they were naked, facing each other, neither of them with any idea of what to do next. She had undressed first, stepping gingerly into the bath, seeming not at all familiar with it. He watched her, thinking she was lovely, her shape generous, her skin pale, freckled, her back sunburned. He waited until she was occupied with some candles behind her head, and then rushed in before she could see the whole of him.
Soon they were sitting, their knees up, their wine in hand. Now he wanted much more than he had in his cup.
—Do you take a lot of baths? Alan managed.
—Not really, she said.
Hanne had tried to use dishwasher soap to create some bubbles, but the result was anemic and soon disappeared.
—Too hot? she asked.
—It’s good, he said, and meant it. He appreciated her, and admired her courage, and was fine with this whole situation, sitting in a comfortable tub with a new friend. But then again, he thought, What the fuck was he doing in this woman’s bathtub?
The problem was one of giving offense. He didn’t want to give offense, so he too often said yes to invitations like this. He had found himself at weddings, at christenings, with women who considered him more than a friend while insisting otherwise. He was an idiot.
There really must be something in that growth on his neck, he thought. The growth was too close to his spinal cord, and had altered the passage of signals from his brain to the rest of him. It would explain his inability to read all human signals.
She was now soaping his knee, softly, as if polishing a banister. He smiled at her. She frowned.
—I excite you that much, she said.
He wasn’t aroused, and he knew it was a matter of time before she felt insulted. If he hadn’t gotten into the tub in the first place he’d have been far better off. Then there would be no question of erections, how they reflected on this naked, affable Danish woman opposite him.
—No, no, he said. You’re gorgeous.
—Would you take offense if I tried?
She reached for his penis.
—I wouldn’t take offense, but I’d prefer if you didn’t.
She dropped her hands and collapsed on her side of the tub.
He tried to explain it to her, the ease of his life without, about the simple purity he felt, how life was altogether more streamlined now. Her face was twisted into a mask of horror.
—Why would you want that kind of simplicity?
—So says the woman who left Europe altogether.
—I didn’t leave all of humanity.
—I haven’t, either. I’m in a tub with you.
—But you live with these barriers. So many rules.
—One rule.
They sat in the quiet water for a moment.
—This is very frustrating to me, she said. I can’t place why.
Alan knew why. She’d thought she was doing him a favor tonight. And the other night. He wasn’t the most handsome man in the world, and she’d figured he was an easy catch. But now that he was not within reach, she was annoyed. He did not say any of this.
All he said was, —This has happened to me before.
She sat silent for a few seconds, then let out a short scream. It was more comic than primal, and seemed to bring her back to good humor.
—Then why come to dinner? she asked.
—Because I like you. Because we’re in the middle of nowhere.
—Because you’re lonely.
—That too.
—I think you’re absolutely hollow.
—I told you that myself.
—Maybe not hollow. More like defeated.
Alan shrugged.
—What made you that way? There’s no light in there. She leaned over to tap his temple with her finger. Her breasts rested, briefly, on his knee, and he felt a stir within.
Alan had been pondering the same question for the better part of a decade. After the divorce he’d been angry for years, but at the same time he was alive. He’d laughed, he’d dated, he’d enjoyed the things he was expected to enjoy. But now he was something else. He stood in the same spot where he once would have taken great pleasure with something — a cousin singing an Irish folksong at a bar, a friend’s young daughter demonstrating some trick on her scooter — and he smiled in a way that he hoped would be seen as warm. But he felt no warmth. He wanted only to go home. He wanted to be alone. He wanted to watch his Red Sox DVDs while drinking Hanne’s moonshine.
—There are those who would theorize that you haven’t gotten past your ex-wife. That you’re frozen in stasis.
Alan was uninterested in theories, and he told Hanne so.
—Will you touch me at least? she asked.
Alan looked at Hanne, whose eyes were steady.
—Sure, he said.
She stood up in the tub, turned around, and sat down again, her back to his front. She leaned into him, her weight feeling not unlike a dentist’s lead bib. His hand dropped between her wet legs, her fingers guiding his.
—Can you reach? she asked.
—Not quite, he said.
She inched up.
—That better?
—Yup.
She leaned back again.
He pinched her clitoris. A quick intake of breath. Then a moan. He had just begun but her noise grew louder. Her sounds were beautiful and guttural and strange, and again he felt stirred. He wondered if he would find arousal. He felt a twinge, but the moment passed.
She directed his fingers in a circle. Then in a figure eight. Her eyes closed, and he knew she was far away, in a teenage bedroom or a beach, and in her mind he was someone else — a stronger, younger man. A vital man, an available man. He continued to circle and pinch and oscillate. Her breath grew erratic and loud and her body grew heavier against him.
He had just read some magazine full of futurists’ predictions, which had included the certainty that soon we would have computers in our contact lenses and would be able to access all the world’s information with our eyes alone. That we would engineer better organs, that nanotechnology would allow us to create cancer-killing agents within our bodies, that we would live to two hundred. People worried about our passing over into some robotic state, but we were so much like robots already, programmed and easy to manipulate. We had buttons, we had circuits, and it could all be mapped and explained, reprogrammed and calibrated. The utter mechanical simplicity of being able to move this oddity, the clitoris, up and down and around, to provoke the greatest pleasure, seemed laughably easy. And so we did it, because it created happiness of some kind. We push the buttons that provide the rewards. Again the greatest use of a human was to be useful. Not to consume, not to watch, but to do something for someone else that improved their life, even for a few minutes.
—Now faster, she hissed, her accent suddenly more pronounced.
He moved faster. He strummed and circled, and her breathing grew more labored. Her han
d gripped his, her other hand grabbed her nipples, one and then the other. His strokes grew longer and she nearly screamed. Years ago, he had had some skill in this. Ruby’s mad orgasms, the way she shook her head back and forth, a blur of defiant Nos, her hair flagellating him with each furious turn of her head.
Soon Hanne was bucking, a series of Yeses, Fasters. The water over-topped the tub. Her back arched and she was there and then was done.
She turned to him, touched his cheek, his lips. She looked in his eyes, feverishly, for some sign that she had broken through, that she had changed him. Not finding it, she turned back again, her face to the tiled wall. She pressed her back against him and laughed. There would be a time when the world created people stronger than them. When all of this got worked out. But until then there would be women and men like Hanne and Alan, who were imperfect and had no path toward perfection.
XXIII.
IT WAS THE SAUDI weekend and such an unstructured expanse was not good for Alan. There was too much time and nothing to do. He watched TV for most of the morning and then went to the gym. He sat on three machines, pushing and pulling, feeling numb, and was back in his room within thirty minutes. The afternoon arrived before he’d had a meal, so he ordered an omelet and grapefruit. He ate on the bright balcony, watching the tiny men fish at the pier far below.
Inside, Alan checked his voicemail, dropping another $100 to learn that Jim Wong, to whom he owed $45k, was consulting with a lawyer.
—Just a precaution, Jim said. I know you’re good for it, but I just want to know my options.
That was the first message. The second was worse.
Kit had decided to spend the fall working at a food co-op in Jamaica Plain. She didn’t even want to go back to school now, she said.
Like hell, Alan thought.
Annette, Charlie Fallon’s widow, left a message, asking for copies of any letters Alan might have received from him. How could he tell her he’d thrown them away? I thought the man was losing his mind, Alan could tell her. No, he would not tell her that.
He checked his email and found that the young people from Reliant had gone to Riyadh. Hope that’s okay with you!!! Rachel wrote in her message. We wanted to take a look around this crazy place!! Brad wrote in his.
Soon enough Alan looked at the clock and it gave him good news: it was six, and it was okay to open his siddiqi. Hanne had replenished his supply, and he thought fondly of her as he retrieved a new glass from the bathroom and poured the first inch.
He sipped, and the concoction went down easily. Days earlier it had tasted acrid, offensive, but now it was almost smooth, whispering kindly to him, my friend, my friend, as he finished the first dose.
He stood and found that already his head was lighter, his limbs heavier. This was stronger than the last batch. Hanne had warned him as they said goodbye, his hair still wet, on her porch.
—See you around campus, she’d said.
Alan poured another splash and took it to the bathroom. He downed half the glass and took off the bandage Dr. Hakem had applied. The wound felt raw, inflamed, and he had the sudden realization that the doctor was probably wrong. They were often wrong about such things, weren’t they? A doctor would look at a freckle, a bump, and say it was nothing, but then it would fester and grow and darken, and death and lawsuits would ensue.
Alan finished the siddiqi and poured himself another. It was this second glass that always felt best. This was takeoff. This was weightlessness. Now things were moving. Now things were happening. He went back to the balcony, feeling tipsy, feeling wonderful.
Charlie Fallon was cracking up, Alan had been sure of it. Putting transcendental pages in his mailbox? It was the work of a nut. All of it, the letters and clippings, the copies, were about God, oneness with nature. That was the stuff Charlie was moved by. Grandeur, grandeur — that was the word he liked. Grandeur and awe and holiness, communion, communion with the outside world. ‘Alan, all the answers are in the air, the trees, the water!’ he’d written in the margins of this or that Brook Farm manifesto. And then he’d walked into a freezing lake and let it kill him. Was that his idea of communion, his idea of oneness?
Charlie had two daughters, Fiona and the other one; Alan couldn’t conjure the name. They were both older than Kit, too old to have played together. Their hair was straight, their eyes wide-set, and each held her head out in front, low, like a hat hung on a hook.
There had been that one time with Fiona, that strange fire in the tree. That afternoon was dark, a light rain accompanied by small but hysterical winds. Alan was driving home early when he saw Fiona standing on the street, looking up. She was about sixteen then. He stopped his car and rolled down the window.
—You’re brave to be out here, he said. She had her cellphone in her hand, its face pointing skyward. You doing some kind of science experiment?
She smiled. —Hi Mr. Clay. That tree’s on fire, she said, pointing to a tall oak across the street.
Alan got out of his car and saw a very small fire flickering in the nook of the tree, about twenty feet up. The fire was the size of a squirrel and was similarly situated.
—Electric pole went down, she said.
Beside the tree, the pole had been cracked in half. In the process a cable had been severed, left naked, and a spark had ignited a small pile of dead leaves.
She had already called the fire department, so the two of them just stood, watching the fire glow white with each small gust of wind.
A faint siren. Help was on its way.
—Well, that’s that, she said. See you later, Mr. Clay.
They were both adults now, Fiona and the other one. Where were they? Alan had seen them at the funeral, looking much the same, looking too young. But they were old enough. They’d had a father, he’d held out long enough. Fatherhood kills fathers. Someone said it in jest once, during a round of golf. But he did enough, Charlie had. That’s all that matters. They had a father, they’d grown up strong, and now he was gone. It all seemed fair enough. Or maybe not.
A nice man, a sweet man, a frozen man on the muddy banks of a lake, surrounded by people in uniforms attempting to revive him.
Alan went inside and got out a piece of paper.
‘Kit, Live long enough and you’ll disappoint everyone. People think you’re able to help them and usually you can’t. And so it becomes a process of choosing the one or two people you try hardest not to disappoint. The person in my life I am determined not to disappoint is you.’
No, no. Stupid. Shit. He downed another inch of moonshine and started again.
‘Kit. When I traveled a lot, sometimes I would get home after you had gone to bed, and I knew I would be gone in the morning before you were awake. This was when you were about three. We were in Greenville, Mississippi. You loved it there for a while. We had a big spread. Ten acres. Your mother hated it. My God she hated Mississippi. But I would come home late. The factory was a mess. The workers had no idea what they were doing. We’d moved all of Schwinn down there and it was a disaster. You were still in diapers, though maybe you shouldn’t have been. But there would be times when you’d wake up, wet, and I would get up to change you. I would make sure your mother allowed me to, and I would change you, and though I didn’t want you to wake up, to startle, I hoped you would open your eyes long enough to know it was me. I wasn’t around enough then, and I wanted you to see me. Just open your eyes, I would think. Just enough to know it’s me. This is what I would think. Just open your eyes long enough to know it’s me.
No, no. Probably unhelpful. All of it. But that’s enough for tonight, Alan thought, and rewarded himself with a long pull.
Soon he was content, so content with siddiqi’s glow. Grandeur, he thought. This is grandeur. He arranged himself on the bed, found an old Red Sox game on cable, and was out cold by nine.
In the morning, he finally got Yousef on the phone and asked if he wanted to come for a meal. No, can’t, Yousef said. Not for a while. He was hiding in a cousin’s ho
use, afraid to leave. The texts from the husband and his henchmen had hit a new level of menace.
Alan ate his lunch in the hotel restaurant, reading the Arab News and watching a group of businessmen, European and Saudi, at the table across the way. He heard a loud trilling laugh and looked around. A pair of women, Western, were talking to the concierge. They were wearing scarves on their heads but the rest of their clothing was uncompromising — tight pants and high heels. Their voices were too loud, bursts of cackling laughter. They were asking about beaches.
In the afternoon he went to the gym and spent an hour there, pretending at various machines, and rewarded himself with a tri-tip and the rest of the moonshine.
When he was feeling good, free of self-censor, he tried for coherence with Kit. He tried to address her concerns, her complaints, one by one. He typed madly away.
‘Kit, in your letter you mention the thing with the dog.’
Kit was six. The three of them had just left church, and the woman was walking by, led by her dog, a beagle. Ruby asked if the dog was friendly, and the woman said yes, and right then the dog went straight for Kit’s face and bit her chin. What the hell! Alan had yelled, within earshot of the priest, the congregation. He’d shooed away the dog, who was cowering, whimpering, as if it knew both his crime and his fate.
‘There was blood soaking your mouth and your blue dress and you were screaming in front of hundreds of people. Yes, your mother said “That dog will be dead by Wednesday.” I was there. I heard it, too. And the dog was indeed put down that week. I know you think it was some sign of her coldness or sadism, but…’
Alan paused. He had another long pull.
There was a terrible, clinical precision to how she said it, wasn’t there? But a dog lashes out like that, bites a girl, they put it to sleep. What was Ruby’s crime? Being correct?
Alan recalled the venom of those words. That dog will be dead by Wednesday. To have the presence of mind! In the seconds after the bite, Alan was panicking, scrambling, wondering if he should run Kit the twelve blocks to the hospital, or call 911, or put her in the car and drive her there. But Ruby was already sentencing the animal to death. That kind of calculation!