Abandon (10 page)

“Eaargh,” he said, looking up at her.

“What is it?”

“I’m starting to like you more and more.”

“Somehow, I thought you would.”

She looked down again to kiss him lightly, and he thought of how California did this to you: suddenly the rules were changed, and you had something fragile in your arms, and you weren’t sure what to do with the weight of it.

“You grew up in an area like this?” he said, to retrieve his bearings.

“Except I was alone.”

“Not in your home.”

“Especially in my home. As soon as I opened my eyes.”

He kissed her quickly for consolation, and then reached for the gearstick, so she’d return to her side and he could start up the car and drive back into town. Whatever would come after this would only smudge what had come before.

The engine spluttered and juddered, and failed.

“The heater, it’s killed your battery.”

He got out into the angry wind—rising while they’d been in the car—and she climbed out of her side, and they were alone in a howling whirl, the lights of the town far below. Above, there were so many stars the road was bright, in ghostly light, and so they began walking, towards more dead brush and empty hills. A few minutes later, the wind roaring, and the trees shuddering and bending in the dark, they came to a house, built on a turn, a house of spirits, as it seemed, with a rusty old pickup and a VW parked in the dust beside it, and no lights on inside.

“Anybody home?” she called out. “Hello?”

There was no one, and they walked on, brought together at the point where they’d been planning to pull apart. Farther down the road, there was another house, built on a ledge, a ship waiting to take off towards the distant lights, and as they drew close to it, a pickup truck pulled out. They went up to it, explained the situation, and soon were riding in the back, the stars above them through the trees, absurdly like two orphans lost at camp.

“Usually,” she said, holding her arms around herself in the wind, “I mean often, I get freaked out just to be this close. But with you I’m safe, because you’re taken.”

“I hope so,” he said, as if picking up the habit of uncertainty from her.

When the truck dropped them off at a small illuminated phone booth, sitting implausibly in a parking lot in the middle of the mountains, a shuttered country store beside it, and a broken piano outside the door, he called the emergency rescue service, and was told to stay where he was, they’d be there in fifty minutes.

“Lost in the mountains like the guy in your story.”

“Except he was alone.”

“Not at the end,” she said, a mischievous light in her eyes. “What if they never find us?”

“They probably won’t. All I could tell them was, ‘We’re in the abandoned parking lot somewhere near the top of the Pass.’ ”

He picked out a simple prelude on the piano, and she sat down beside him, kissing his neck, blowing on his lobe, the cusp of his ear, as he played. He looked over at her, and her eyes were thrilled, awakened.

When the tow truck came, a short bull-necked man, not delighted to be called out into the hills at eleven o’clock on a windy Saturday night, asked him to sign, and then drove them, his truck laboring, back to the tree full of stars.

When he dropped her off at her car outside Follow Your Heart, no words came to mind.

“Thank you for a wonderful day,” she said.

“Thank you,” he said, recalling that his story had ended strangely.

The next day, when he came home from the library, there was a message on his machine. “Hi,” said the now familiar voice, curiously flushed, full up. “I hope you won’t get mad at me, though probably you will and won’t ever want to see me again. But I just wanted to thank you for a lovely day. I don’t have so many of those in my life.”

The abrupt lurch into something else, and the sadness she carried round with her like a coat. “You may think you’ve made the biggest mistake of your life, but I wrote you a poem. Here goes: please don’t laugh.

“We climb and climb,
And from the peaks we see
A space I might have called
Eternity.

The day winds down,
The skies unravel wide,
And where we are
Is somewhere deep inside

A home that never was,
A place that has no name:
Stillness in the dusk,
No face inside the frame.

“I don’t know what it means,” said the soft voice again, “but I think I was inspired by our walk. Our walks. If you never want to talk to me again, I’ll understand. Take care.”

“Mr. Macmillan.” It was Alex’s voice now, feigning distance. “I couldn’t observe you in the house last night. Were you unavoidably detained?” (It was Sefadhi’s euphemism for students who failed to show up for seminars.) “I know your Sufis are a jealous mistress.”

He played the message over again, and listened to her odd poem: as much Emily Dickinson as the Beach Boys, he thought, and not at all the simpler kind of lyric he’d expected.

He picked up the phone to thank her—it had been a long time since anyone had written a poem for him, let alone dared to read it into his machine—and then he remembered he didn’t have her number. He could call Kristina, of course, but that felt like a violation of trust somehow. Besides, Kristina seemed involved with everything else in his life, Khalil and Sefadhi and the men calling from Westwood.

The only thing to do was wait. By the phone if necessary, with this new life set to one side of the desk beside the ancient poets.

He got up early on the twenty-eighth, and drove through Santa Barbara to the south. There were campers, boogie-boarders, German sightseers along the coastal highway, and on the strip south of Oxnard there was still an air of happy improvisation, as if no one had really settled down there yet and the beach still belonged to rock and sea. A few hardy souls were camping out in tents beside the waves, and occasionally figures would emerge from the beach down below and walk along the road, swathed in black, or bare-chested, as if they were characters from the Chumash caves. The impulse, always in California, backwards, away from established forms, towards whatever is primeval.

Now, besides, as he pulled into Los Angeles, all the ancient cultures of the world were streaming into the bright, forgetful city, bringing their runes, their songs and superstitions. There were more Druze here than in Lebanon, it was said; more Zoroastrians than in Iran. When he turned off Wilshire and drove towards Olympic, he found himself in what could have been a suq, selling homesick dreams; “Mexanesian” restaurants under palm trees, and Spanish pawn shops with their signs in Hangul script. So many different cultures crowded into the small space beside the desert that it looked as if the wind would blow and all of them would be scattered again, to the far corners of the earth.

On Westwood itself, the numbers went down slowly, past a long, half-broken line of places selling passports, immigration advice, dusty deserted restaurants offering what was billed as “Royal Persian Cuisine.” From the windows of the stores old torch singers, from a generation ago, and a world away, looked back at him; pictures of the central mosque in Isfahan, amidst guitars and children’s baubles. Old men sat on the sidewalk with their Farsi newspapers, sugar cubes set beside their glasses of tea, and on one side street an ancient man, in faded jacket and tie, was helping his wife across the road, her head scarf, her blond hair, the expensive leather bag she carried all speaking of other lives, far away, in the shadow of the ChampsÉlysées.

The place marked 9763 looked hardly different from its neighbors, and when he went in, it was to be greeted by the smell of scented cardamom tea and only a few men in the aisles, browsing through magazines and books. The characters of Farsi rose and broke around him like waves in a foreign desert. Behind the counter, a man in a greying ponytail was conducting an argument on a phone—or just a Farsi conversation—and one or two of the men, some in suits, one even in dark glasses, looked up to see who had come to join them.

“Can I help you?” said the man from behind the counter, suddenly by his side, and looking piqued.

“I’m John Macmillan. I have an appointment with the owner.”

“Is he expecting you?”

“I think so. His son’s the one who told me to come here.”

The man looked back at him in open disbelief, and then began walking towards the back of the store with the rolling gait of a wrestler. When they’d got halfway there, another man, well tailored, came to take the stranger over.

“Mr. Macmillan. Thank you for your time. It’s good of you to visit us.” The smooth voice from the phone, all Belgravia polish.

The newcomer muttered something quickly to the ponytailed cashier, and the man went back heavily to his post.

“My father’s waiting for you,” said the smooth young man.

They walked back through the narrow aisles to a small office in the rear where a man in a jacket and tie—a professor in an earlier life, perhaps—was paging through a large book. When they came in, he looked up from what he was doing, and the young man went over to stand by his side, as if to serve as a translator.

“My father wanted you to see this.”

The old man opened the desk in front of him, and pulled out a large May Company box, about the size of a formal shirt. Then he extended it across the desk to the visitor.

He was meant to open it up, he guessed, and when he did so, he had to stop himself from saying anything. It was beautiful, so beautiful he wanted to take it away and lock it up inside his desk forever. It felt like the reason he’d begun studying these distant poets all those years ago, love song and prayer all at once.

The cover itself, clearly old, was heavy and green, with gold calligraphy across it, not far from the imperial style; when he opened it up, very carefully—the owners’ eyes on him at every moment—it was to see poems written on every page, great swirls of racing dots and dashes, as urgently from the heart as if they were verses from the Quran (they weren’t, his Farsi told him). Along the margins of each page were golden arabesques, as if to keep the meanings hidden, or safe. He thought, for no reason he could fathom, of the golden bars on the shrine in Damascus, the weeping women at its grille.

“It’s beautiful,” he said, aware that they were watching for his reaction. It didn’t matter what he said, he realized; the purpose of the summons was to see how he responded to the book.

“We thought you might be interested in it,” said the silky young man, who seemed accustomed to acting as an intermediary.

“Interested, of course. I’d give anything to have this in my possession. Even for a few weeks. But I’m not a collector. You understand that?” As long as you can’t tell someone’s motives, you’re always a few steps behind him.

“We know that. We also know that you are a scholar. You have spent years with Javad Sefadhi. You’ve been to Syria.”

He looked back at them to try to gauge what was going on. Clearly, they were testing him in some way, toying with him; he remembered how, with Khalil, he’d gone in with questions of his own and come out with the professor’s errands.

“I hardly have enough money to buy my own textbooks.”

The young man said something quick and rough to the older man, under his breath, and then looked back at him with a smile.

“If I had a chance to spend some weeks with this, a month or two, I could tell you something. But I’m not sure I have the time or”—he might as well speak their language—“you have the money. Anyway, there are a million people who know more about this kind of thing. Even in Los Angeles.”

“They are not pure,” the man said simply. “They know too much.”

“Not poor, either. I’m sorry: I don’t know what to say. It’s beautiful, and in the right hands it could give someone a lot of pleasure.” He’d keep things on the aesthetic level. “That’s all I can say.”

It was not an easy thing to put the book down: holding it even for a moment had felt like walking into a private room where something you’ve been looking for indefinitely awaits you. To have the prospect of new verses in his hands, to see them in a context that no one known to him had seen before—the scholar is a materialist in a different vein. He put it down, and looked to see what would follow.

“We are grateful for your time,” said his urbane host, “very grateful,” as another, still younger man came in with a tray on which had been placed three glasses of tea. “Maybe, if you are interested later, if you know someone who is interested, you can come back. You have our address.”

He took the glass he was given, uncertain about why they were performing the formalities after the discussion, not before, and sipped. “How did you find me?” he asked. “I’m not the most obvious person to consult in such a situation.” Men who spoke like characters from a second-rate thriller, an actress on a mountaintop at midnight: it wasn’t so much that California lacked mystery, he thought, as that it wrapped it in the forms we know too well from movies.

The young man didn’t say anything immediately, but opened a thin black leather wallet and pulled out a card, heavy and embossed. “It means a lot to us that you are interested in our culture.” Then he led him back towards the door. “We are grateful, deeply grateful, for your interest.” Thanking him for what he hadn’t done—as, he realized with a start, Camilla often did.

Out in the street, abruptly exiled from the mystery, he felt at odds, restless and defeated: two hundred miles just to be caught inside one of the diaspora’s intricate designs. He looked at his watch—it was still early—and he thought of Camilla, hiding out somewhere inside the grey sprawl. She’d taken care, he’d noticed, never to tell him anything about the specifics of her life—where she lived, what phone number would reach her, what she did with what seemed to be her free time. But he’d caught sight of an address, on the top right-hand corner of her address book, when she’d pulled it out to write down his telephone number, and even if it led to a parent’s house or just a place where she’d once lived, it could only bring him closer to a sense of who she was.