Abandon (41 page)

The chapter he wrote now was on “Metaphor and Coincidence,” and it was about how, if you live far enough away from the world, everything you do is a symbol, because the person who is doing it is not the person who will die. You enter a mythic space of sorts—a place where there aren’t any clocks—and everything carries a resonance deeper than itself. You aren’t yourself, but something more, and so everything you do, everywhere you go, takes on a different meaning. An abandoned house becomes an emblem of a future of which you can make anything you choose. The desert becomes the place where there are no props or signs or coordinates and the only protectors are wind and silence and space. The person you love becomes a hope.

The chapters came quickly now, and for a moment he felt himself back in the very space that Rumi had admitted him to: the rarefied, charged space where a door means an opening, and the city walls speak for the defenses you’ve built up. Metaphor was critical to the Sufis, he found himself thinking, because it was itself a metaphor: it said that behind the things we see, behind the people who speak, there lies another dimension, and that other person sees even the things of the world in the light of the eternal. “The nature of growth—of love or faith or anything—is that the person who thinks in terms of appointments and plans and dates gives way to the person who thinks of something deeper. The literal world cedes to the allegorical, and the geometric box from the marketplace becomes an emblem of God.”

Occasionally, carried away by his chapter, he thought back to the first Persian poem he’d ever read—FitzGerald’s Omar Khayyám, the most popular translation in the English language other than the Bible, so they said—and tried to imagine how some unknown Victorian might take the sentiments of the Persians and organize them into tidy quatrains.

If, with the fire of love I burn,
Away, away, I hope you’ll turn,
And yet, when all the earth is scorched,
I’ll leave you with a single torch

A torch to light your slow, sad way,
A torch to turn the night to day;
A torch to guide you through the dark,
Until, unknowing, you embark

On boats that pass across the seas,
Sudden as lightning, not by degrees,
To a place you know as your deepest home,
Next to me, and my love, in a gold-blue dome.

When he finished, though, he realized that his efforts were poorer by far than hers, as if he wanted to box up what he cared about into jokes or crossword puzzles. Precisely the habit that had made him saddest of all in her: to pretend to be a smaller person than she was.

The English word “symbol,” he remembered, comes from the Greek
symbolon,
referring to one half of a knucklebone carried as a token of identity to someone who has the other half. Only when the two halves, the two people, are brought together does the whole have a meaning. “A metaphor is a species of symbol”—the words of Edward Hirsch jumped out at him from a book. “So is a lover.”

That night, the next night, every night of the week, she kept him company as he’d feared she would. In the bed, hair falling about her face, soft hands reaching down, grey eyes losing focus, turning smoky. Years of reading Sufis, and he’d turned into an adolescent. When he got up to steady himself by reading the poems, he found, as he might have known had he been more conscious, that they were exactly what he didn’t want to hear. He put them down as if he’d picked up burning metal.

Though he went to the library in the days—an uncontaminated space—she stole out towards him in the stacks, or suddenly appeared at the carrel where he’d been sitting the day after New Mexico, the morning of Kevin’s seminar. He picked up a book called
Farsi Verse
Forms,
and a piece of paper fell out from it: a picture of a tower, with a star above it, and a spiral staircase in its belly, going up and up to a figure with long hair falling to her waist. It looked like her—it looked like hers—but it might have been someone else, an accident playing on an overprepared mind. At the back of the book, he saw that it had been taken out from the library only two weeks before.

That night, “Johno” at his ears, her eyes fluttering as they did when her lips began to part. The feel of her mouth against his throat, her hair brushing his hips, and then the great gulps with which she’d cry, letting her face collapse into the vagueness that she feared.

A week or so later, the deadline still ticking away on his desk, everywhere he turned in the apartment, a letter arrived, the first one she’d ever sent him through the mail. The lettering was clear, as if she’d written it and written it beforehand; the postmark said “Los Angeles.”

“Dear Johno,” it began, and it was surprisingly free of crossings-out,

I won’t say I’m missing you because you’d rather that I didn’t. You don’t like me to be negative or to talk about what I don’t have when I do have so much to be thankful for. And I won’t say, either, that I haven’t thought of you—and thought of you and thought of you, till it all runs out in a wet mess. You said something about how what I called “love” was really “need.” But at the level where I feel it, the words don’t matter. It all hurts just the same.

I ask myself, when I’m feeling up to it, where did I go wrong? Did I make a mistake in loving you, or in not loving you enough? Was my mistake in admitting that I might miss you forever, or in acting as if I wouldn’t? Now you’ll say I’m sounding like a movie again, and maybe I am, because movies are about something real: much realer than those books you hide behind.

This is the part of the letter where I’m supposed to say something constructive. About everything I’ve learned, and how I’ve gained so much from loss. Just like your Sufis do. But I’m not you, and I don’t have your spirit of sweet hopefulness. I’d love to share it but I can’t. My experience doesn’t bear it out.

So now I’m sounding senseless, and you can tell yourself you’re well rid of someone so negative and self-pitying and crazy. And there’s nothing I can say to that—I never could see why you had any time for me. Once you said I was full of false confidence, and another time you said I was scared, and I don’t think you could see they came from the same place. Just different ways of making the same plea.

I sound like you, don’t I? Everyone says I do—at least I sound different since we began spending time together. Your marks are all over me, inside and out. Everywhere I turn in me, I find the residue of you. I’ll probably be in a new relationship by the time you get this, but you’ll know it’s not really me that’s in it.

So here I am writing you a letter that sounds like an accusation. Which is my point, I guess. Even my love letters to you sound like accusations.

Oh well, I hope you’re okay, and making up ground with your thesis. Maybe we can meet again when it’s all over. Then you can tell me what you think of my present.

Is it sunny where you are? You always did love the light.

Love,
your faithful Camel

(or should I say, “Need, your faithful Camel”?)

The present! Absentmindedness is a sign of transport, the Sufis said; Rumi longed to be absentminded. But in his case, it felt only as if he’d caught the local attention span. He opened the closet door, and there it sat in the corner, in its shining paper of silver and gold, as sad as a Valentine at a funeral. He closed the closet door, and the package filled the room (as the unknown manuscripts of Rumi, once he heard about them, instantly effaced all the manuscripts he had). Every door you didn’t open—he thought of their early nights together—becomes a potency, infused with magic.

That night, of course, he couldn’t sleep. He walked through alleyways of argument, cul-de-sac leading to dead end, and then a small opening leading to another, and then a cul-de-sac. The “we” she’d mentioned that night—referring to him or to someone else? The gold necklace from an “old boyfriend”—meaning Alejandro, or someone he didn’t know about? The package itself in the closet: had she meant it to be a farewell, or was it her last, desperate chance to try to start again? If it was something personal, it would only sting; and if it wasn’t, it would sting more.

What if he couldn’t sleep without her ever again?

As soon as it was light, he pulled back the closet door and picked up the package, as heavy as the book he was sure it contained. He bounced it up and down a few times, and then brought it to the light. He slipped the pink ribbons off as once he had slipped off other straps in just this light. On the gift card she had written, only, “From your shadow.”

Then, no longer patient, he tore the gold-and-silver wrapping off and found, as he’d suspected, a box of the kind in which people keep photo albums or scrapbooks. Maybe she’d given him a register of their times together; maybe an accounting of her life.

It was neither. When he pulled the cover off the box he found a book, a thick book, its cover the color of night, with a heart, in gold, inscribed at its center. Here and there, across the dark-blue background, flecks of gold like desert stars.

Inside, on the first page, as if it were a formal volume from the Ottoman court, was an inscription, though not in Turkish or Arabic, but classic Farsi. “Be wise, be generous, keep secrets close.” At the very bottom of the page, where in imperial documents there would be a title, another epigraph in Persian: “The love of fire, the fire of love.”

Farther inside, as he carefully pulled back the pages, were poems: poems on every page, facing one another like mirrors on opposite sides of a long corridor. Nearly all the poems were of the same short length, and each was laid out at the center of the page, as if the text were from the Quran. Around them, as in a holy book again, avenues, tendrils of gold, containing the poems like a frame; but where in a Quran it would be the word for “Allah” that would be written in gold, here it was the word for “love.”

Clearly the manuscript wasn’t “authentic,” in the sense of being old. Its pages weren’t worn, and it honored the traditional conventions just enough to take liberties with them. Yet that in no way detracted from its value, material or otherwise. Someone had copied and copied the poems, as a copyist of old would laboriously inscribe the verses of a master poet, taking up residence in the poet’s house over the months he reserved for the task. At the very end of the book, where again an imperial title would belong, this one read, in Farsi, “This Heart I give to the Beloved. All that goes in it, all that goes with it, belongs to the Eternal Friend. This is my only will and testament. All I have to give is everything.”

He paged back and forth through the volume, careful about how he turned the pages. He thought of the Bibles he had seen at college, written out by candlelight in a cold dark cell, the very act of writing an act of worship, personal and impersonal. The calligraphy was of a kind no amateur could fake. At the very bottom of the last page, whoever had written the poems out had inscribed, “There is no god but God.”

He thought back to the books like this he had seen in museums and at exhibitions; he thought back to Westwood and even to Hussein’s musty library in Jaipur. To someone who hadn’t worked with the texts, all these books would be similar. And yet the verses in this one were mysterious: they were not from the Quran, of course; nor did they all seem to come from Rumi, or some other classic poet.

He carried the whole book, wrapped in a towel, to his desk, and closed the curtains and lit a candle, as if daylight would damage the gold lettering. He tried to minimize the number of times he turned the pages, though he knew he had to rough out a translation before he could put the whole thing away.

He pulled his dictionary out of the desk, and, by the flickering candle, began to write.

Woozy, we drain the glass.
Again; then again; again.
“We’re not ourselves,” you say.
“We never were,” I answer.

Subject, object of this sentence:
Does it matter?
The drummer drums.
We turn.

A secret turning in us,
And the world turns and turns.
Head is unconscious of Foot,
Foot of Head. Who cares?
They turn and turn.

The last one, he knew, was Rumi, a verse known to every school-child in Iran. The others were like cousins of the same, outlines, though whether they were by disciples, taught to write in the same spirit, or whether they were poems by the master that he didn’t know, he couldn’t say.

Outside, a few tourists sat beside their hampers, and an occasional surfboard could be seen at the point. He started down the steps and then turned back. He could no more walk away from the poems than from his own shadow.

Why flail with sounds,
When something else has taken light inside you?

The translations muddied the issue, of course, placing a cloudy light over the poems, rendering them perishable, as it curiously seemed. And yet the meaning pressed through the syllables nonetheless. As when—why think of this?—her eyes suddenly filled with tears, on the rough road to the monastery, and he could imagine her a tent lit up in the fiery late-afternoon light.

Were they code, of some kind? A present, and if so, from whom? Were they a message, written in a hidden script, or just some souvenir she’d picked up in L.A.? The only person who could tell him was the person he’d asked to leave.

He ran through the map he kept in his head: Talmacz was too far away, and too closely implicated, in any case; Sefadhi was already “away on business,” adding fuel to the rumors that he dealt in antiquities on the side—and, besides, he would hardly rejoice at a glittering new distraction one month before the deadline. He thought of Alex, Mowbray, Pauline, and found himself in a maze again: it wasn’t even clear whether the book came from the Islamic world or the diaspora.