Less

Less Moroccan

What does a camel love? I would guess nothing in the world. Not the sand that scours her, or the sun that bakes her, or the water she drinks like a teetotaler. Not sitting down, blinking her lashes like a starlet. Not standing up, moaning in indignant fury as she manages her adolescent limbs. Not her fellow camels, to whom she shows the disdain of an heiress forced to fly coach. Not the humans who have enslaved her. Not the oceanic monotony of the dunes. Not the flavorless grass she chews, then chews again, then again, in a sullen struggle of digestion. Not the hellish day. Not the heavenly night. Not sunset. Not sunrise. Not the sun or the moon or the stars. And surely not the heavy American, a few pounds overweight but not bad for his age, taller than most and top heavy, tipping from side to side as she carries this human, this Arthur Less, pointlessly across the Sahara.

Before her: Mohammed, a man in a long white djellaba and with a blue shesh wound around his head, leading her by a rope. Behind her: the eight other camels in her caravan, because nine people signed up to travel to this encampment, though only four of the camels have passengers. They have lost five people since Marrakech. They are soon to lose another.

Atop her: Arthur Less, in his own blue shesh, admiring the dunes, the little wind devils dancing on each crest, the sunset coloration of turquoise and gold, thinking at least he will not be alone for his birthday.

Days earlier—awakening from the Paris flight to find himself on the African continent: a bleary-eyed Arthur Less. Body still atingle with champagne and Javier’s caresses and a rather awkward window seat, he staggers across the tarmac beneath a dyed-indigo night sky, and into an immigration line that is beyond reason. The French, so stately at home, seem instantly to have lost their minds on the soil of their former colony; it is like the redoubled madness of seeing a lover you have wronged; they ignore the line, removing the ropes from the carefully ordered stanchions, and become a mob charging into Marrakech. The Moroccan officers, in the green and red of cocktail olives, stay calm; passports are examined, then stamped; Less imagines this happens all day, every day. He finds himself shouting “Madame! Madame!” at a Frenchwoman elbowing her way through the crowd. She pouts with a shrug (C’est la vie!) and keeps going. Is there an invasion he has not heard of? Is this the last plane out of France? If so: where is Ingrid Bergman?

So there is plenty of time, as he shuffles with the crowd (in which, though European, he still towers), to panic.

He could have remained in Paris, or at least have accepted yet another delay (and six hundred euros); he could have tossed this whole foolish adventure aside for one even more foolish. Arthur Less was supposed to go to Morocco, but he met a Spaniard in Paris, and no one has heard from him since! A rumor for Freddy to hear. But if he is anything, Arthur Less is a man who follows his plan. And so he is here. At least he will not be alone.

“Arthur! You’ve grown a beard!” His old friend Lewis, outside customs, joyous as ever. Tarnished-silver hair worn long over the ears and bristling white on his chin; plump faced and well clad in gray linen and cotton; capillaries spreading in a fertile delta across his nose; signs that Lewis Delacroix is, at nearly sixty, a stride ahead of Arthur Less.

Less smiles warily and touches his beard. “I…I thought I needed a change.”

Lewis holds him at a distance to study him. “It’s sexy. Let’s get you into some air-conditioning. There’s a heat wave on, and even these Marrakech nights have been hell. Sorry your flight was delayed; what a nightmare to wait a whole day! Did you manage to fall in love with fourteen hours in Paris?”

Less is startled and says he called up Alexander. He talks about the party and Alex not showing up. He doesn’t mention Javier.

Lewis turns to him and asks, “Do you want to talk about Freddy? Or do you not want to talk about Freddy?”

“Not talk.”

His friend nods. Lewis, whom he met for the first time on that long road trip after college, who offered his cheap apartment on Valencia Street, above the communist bookstore, who introduced him to acid and electronic music. Handsome Lewis Delacroix, who seemed so adult, so assured; he was thirty. A generation apart back then; now they are essentially contemporaries. And yet Lewis has always seemed so much steadier; with the same boyfriend for twenty years, he is the very model of love’s success. And glamorous: this trip, for instance, is exactly the kind of luxury that afforded Lewis’s fascinating stories. It is a birthday trip—not for Arthur Less. For some woman named Zohra, who is also turning fifty, and whom Less has never met.

“I’d say let’s get some sleep,” Lewis says as they find a taxi, “but nobody at the hotel is asleep. They’ve been drinking since noon. And who knows what else? I blame Zohra; well, you’ll meet Zohra.”

The actress is the first to go. Perhaps it is the pale Moroccan wine, poured glass after glass at dinner (on the roof of the rented house, the riad, with a view of that upraised pupil’s hand: the minaret of the Koutoubia Mosque); or perhaps the gin and tonics she requests after dinner, when she sheds her clothes (the two riad workers, both named Mustafa, say nothing) and slips into the courtyard pool, where turtles stare at her pale flesh, wishing they were still dinosaurs, the water rippling from her backstroke as the others continue to introduce themselves (Less is in here somewhere, struggling with a wine bottle between his thighs); or perhaps the tequila she discovers later, once the gin runs out, when someone has found a guitar and someone else a shrill local flute and she begins an improvisational dance with a lantern on her head before someone leads her out of the pool; or perhaps the whiskey later passed around; or the hashish; or the cigarettes; or the three loud claps of the riad’s neighbor, a princess: the sign they are up too late for Marrakech—but how will we ever know? All we know is that in the morning, she is unable to get out of bed; naked, she calls for a drink, and when someone brings her water she knocks the glass away and says, “I mean vodka!” and because she is unwilling to move, and because their ride to the Sahara leaves at noon, and because her last two movies were in dubious taste, and because nobody but the birthday girl even knows her, it is in the care of the two Mustafas that they leave her.

“Will she be okay?” Less asks Lewis.

“I’m so surprised she couldn’t hold her liquor,” Lewis says, turning to him with his enormous sunglasses; they make him look like a nocturnal primate. They are seated together in a small bus; a freak heat wave has made the world outside shimmer like a wok. The rest of the passengers lean wearily against the windows. “I thought actors were made from steel.”

“Please to all!” says their guide into his microphone; this is Mohammed, their Moroccan guide, in a red polo shirt and jeans. “Here we pass through the Atlas Mountains. They are, we say, like snake. Tonight we arrive at [name garbled by microphone], where we spend the night. Tomorrow is the valley of palms.”

“I thought tomorrow was the desert,” comes a British accent Less recognizes, from the night before, as that of the technology genius who retired at forty and now runs a nightclub in Shanghai.

“Oh yes, I promise the desert!” Mohammed is short, with long curly hair, probably in his forties. His smile is quick, but his English is slow. “I am sorry for the unpleasant surprise of the heat.”

From the back, a female voice, Korean: the violinist. “Can they turn up the air?”

Some words in Arabic, and the vents begin to blast warm air into the bus. “My friend said it was at top.” Mohammed smiles. “But we now know it was not at top.” The air does nothing to cool them. Beside them, on the road out of Marrakech, are groups of schoolchildren making their way home for lunch; they hold shirts or books over their faces to shield themselves from the merciless sun. Miles of adobe walls and, now and then, the oasis of a coffee shop where men stare at the bus as they pass. Here is a pizza joint. And here an uncompleted gas station: AFRIQUA. Someone has tied a donkey to a telephone pole in the middle of nowhere and left it there. The driver turns on music: the somehow-enchanting drone of Gnawa. Lewis seems to have fallen asleep; in those glasses, Less cannot tell.

Tahiti.

“I’ve always wanted to go to Tahiti,” Freddy told him once, at an afternoon rooftop gathering of his young friends. A few other, older men peppered the crowd, eyeing each other like fellow predators; Less did not know how to signal that in this crowd of gazelles, he was a vegetarian. My last boyfriend, he wanted to tell them, is now in his sixties. Did any of them, like him, prefer middle-aged men? He never found out; they avoided him as if magnetically repulsed. Eventually, at these parties, Freddy would float over with a weary expression, and they would spend the last hours just the two of them, chatting. And this time—perhaps it was the tequila and sunset—Freddy had brought up Tahiti.

“That sounds nice,” Less said. “But to me it seems so resorty. Like you’d never meet the locals. I want to go to India.”

Freddy gave a shrug. “Well, you’d definitely get to meet the locals in India. I hear there’s nothing but locals. But do you remember when we went to Paris? The Musée d’Orsay? Oh right, you were sick. Well. There was a room of carvings by Gauguin. And one said: Be mysterious. And the other one said: Be in love, you will be happy. In French, of course. Those really moved me, more than the paintings. He made the same carving for his house in Tahiti. I know I’m strange. I should want to go because of the beaches. But I want to see his house.”

Less was about to say something—but just then the sun, hidden behind Buena Vista, was glorifying a fog bank, and Freddy went straight to the railing to see it. They never talked about Tahiti again, so Less never gave it another thought. But clearly Freddy did.

Because that is where he must be now. On his honeymoon with Tom.

Be in love, you will be happy.

Tahiti.

It doesn’t take long to lose the next ones. The bus makes it to Ait Ben Haddou (with one lunch stop at a hallucinogenically tiled roadhouse), where they are led out of the bus. Ahead of him is a couple, both war reporters; the night before, they were regaling Less with stories of Beirut in the eighties, such as one about the bar whose cockatoo could imitate incoming bombs. A chic Frenchwoman with bobbed white hair and bright cotton slacks, a tall mustachioed German in a photojournalist jacket, they have come from Afghanistan to laugh, chain-smoke, and learn a new dialect of Arabic. The world seems to be theirs; nothing can take them down. Zohra, the birthday girl, comes over and walks beside him: “Arthur, I am so glad you came.” Not tall but definitely alluring, in a long-sleeved yellow dress that shows off her legs; she possesses a unique beauty, with the long nose and shining, oversized eyes of a Byzantine portrait of Mary. Every one of her movements—touching the back of a seat, brushing her hair from her face, smiling at one of her friends—is purposeful, and her gaze is direct and discerning. Her accent would be impossible to place—English? Mauritian? Basque? Hungarian?—except Less already knows, from Lewis, that she was born right here in Morocco but left as a child for England. This is her first trip home in a decade. He has watched her with her friends; she is always laughing, always smiling, but he sees, when she walks away, the shadow of some deep sadness. Glamorous, intelligent, resilient, bracingly direct, and prone to obscenities, Zohra seems like the kind of woman who would run an international spy ring. For all Less knows, this is exactly what she does.

Most of all: she does not look anywhere near fifty, or even forty. You would never know she drinks like a sailor, as well as swears like one, smokes one menthol after another. She certainly looks younger than lined and weary, old and broke and loveless Arthur Less.

Zohra fixes her dazzling eyes on him. “You know, I’m a big fan of your books.”

“Oh!” he says.

They are walking along beside a low wall of ancient bricks, and, below, a series of whitewashed houses rises from a river. “I really loved Kalipso. Really, really loved it. You motherfucker, you made me cry at the end.”

“I guess I’m glad to hear that.”

“It was so sad, Arthur. So fucking sad. What’s your next one?” She flips her hair over her shoulder, and it moves in a long fluid line.

He finds himself clenching his teeth. Below, two boys on horseback are moving slowly up the river shallows.

Zohra frowns. “I’m freaking you out. I shouldn’t have asked. None of my fucking business.”

“No, no,” Arthur says. “It’s okay. I wrote a new novel, and my publisher hates it.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, they turned it down. Declined to publish it. I remember when I sold my first book, the head of the publishing house sat me down in his office, and he gave me this long speech about how he knew they didn’t pay very much, but they were a family, and I was now part of that family, they were investing in me not for this book but for my entire career. That was only fifteen years ago. And bam—I’m out. Some family.”

“Sounds like my family. What was your new novel about?” Catching his expression, she quickly adds, “Arthur, I hope you know you can tell me to bugger off.”

He has a rule, which is never to describe his books until after they are published. People are so careless with their responses, and even a skeptical expression can feel akin to someone saying about your new lover: Don’t tell me you’re dating him? But for some reason, he trusts her.

“It was…,” he starts, stumbling on a rock in the path, then starts again: “It was about a middle-aged gay man walking around San Francisco. And, you know, his…his sorrows…” Her face has begun to fold inward in a dubious expression, and he finds himself trailing off. From the front of the group, the journalists are shouting in Arabic.

Zohra asks, “Is it a white middle-aged man?”

“Yes.”

“A white middle-aged American man walking around with his white middle-aged American sorrows?”

“Jesus, I guess so.”

“Arthur. Sorry to tell you this. It’s a little hard to feel sorry for a guy like that.”

“Even gay?”

“Even gay.”

“Bugger off.” He did not know he was going to say this.

She stops walking, points at his chest, and grins. “Good for you,” she says.

And then he notices, before them, a crenellated castle on a hill. It seems to be made of sun-baked mud. It seems impossible. Why did he not expect this? Why did he not expect Jericho?

“This,” Mohammed announces, “is the ancient walled city of the tribe of Haddou. Ait means a Berber tribe, Ben means “from,” and Haddou is the family. And so, Ait Ben Haddou. There are eight families still living within the walls of the city.”

Why did he not expect Nineveh, Sidon, Tyre?

“I’m sorry,” says the tech-whiz nightclub owner. “You say there are eight families? Or Ait families?”

“Ait families.”

“The number eight?”

“Once it was a village, but now only a few families remain. Eight.”

Babylon? Ur?

“Once again. The number eight? Or the name Ait?”

“Yes, Ait families. Ait Ben Haddou.”

It is at this point that the female war reporter leans over the ancient wall and commences vomiting. The miracle before them is forgotten; her husband runs to her side and holds back her beautiful hair. The setting sun puts the adobe scene in blue shadows, and somehow Less is taken back to the color scheme of his childhood home, when his mother went mad for the Southwest. From across the river, a cry comes up like an air raid siren: the evening call to prayer. The castle, or ksar, Ait Ben Haddou rises, unfeeling, before them. The husband tries, at first, a furious exchange in German with the guide, then one in Arabic with the driver, followed by French, ending in an incomprehensible tirade meant only for the gods. His command of English curses goes untested. His wife clutches her head and tries to stand but collapses into the driver’s arms, and they are all taken quickly back to the bus. “Migraine,” Lewis whispers to him. “Booze, the altitude. I bet she’s down for the count.” Less takes one last look at the ancient castle of mud and straw, remade every year or so as the rains erode the walls, plastered and replastered so that nothing remains of the old ksar except its former pattern. Something like a living creature of which not a cell is left of the original. Something like an Arthur Less. And what is the plan? Will they just keep rebuilding forever? Or one day will someone say, Hey, what the hell? Let it fall, bugger off. And that will be the end of Ait Ben Haddou. Less feels on the verge of an understanding about life and death and the passage of time, an ancient and perfectly obvious understanding, when a British voice intervenes:

“Okay, sorry to be a bother, just want to make sure. Once again. It’s Ait…”

“Prayer is better than sleep,” comes the morning cry from the mosque, but travel is better than prayer, for as the muezzin chants, they are all already packed into the bus and waiting for the guide to return with the war reporters. Their hotel—a dark stone labyrinth at night—reveals itself, at sunrise, to be a palace in a valley of lush palms. By the front door, two little boys giggle over a chick they hold in their hands. Colored a bright orange (either artificially or supernaturally), the chick chirps at them ceaselessly, furiously, indignantly, but they only laugh and show the creature to luggage-burdened Arthur Less. On the bus, he seats himself beside the Korean violinist and her male-model boyfriend; the young man looks over at Less with a blank blue stare. What does a male model love? Lewis and Zohra sit together, laughing. The guide returns; the war reporters are still recovering, he reports, and will join them on a later camel. So the bus guffaws to life. Good to know there is always a later camel.

The rest is a Dramamine nightmare: a drunkard’s route up the mountain, at every switchback the miraculous gleam of geodes set out for sale, a young boy jumping at the bus’s approach, rushing quickly to the roadside, holding out a violet-dyed geode, only to be covered in a cloud of dust as they depart. Here and there a casbah with fireclay walls and a great green wooden door (the donkey door, Mohammed explains), with a small door set inside (the people door), but never a sign of either donkeys or people. Just the arid acacia mountainside. The passengers are sleeping or staring out the window and chatting quietly. The violinist and the male model are whispering intensely, and so Less makes his way back, where he finds Zohra staring out a window. She motions, and he sits beside her.

“You know what I’ve decided,” she says sternly, as if calling a meeting to order. “About turning fifty. Two things. The first is: fuck love.”

“I don’t know what that means.”

“It means, give it up. Fuck it. I gave up smoking, and I can give up love.” He eyes the pack of menthols in her purse. “What? I’ve given it up several times! Romance isn’t safe at our age.”

“So Lewis told you I’m also turning fifty?”

“Yes! Happy birthday, darling! We’re going down the shitter together.” She’s nothing short of delighted to have learned that her birthday is the day before his.

“Okay, no romance at our age. Actually, that’s a huge relief. I might get more writing done. What’s the second?”

“It’s related to the first one.”

“Okay.”

“Get fat.”

“Huh.”

“Fuck love and just get fat. Like Lewis.”

Lewis turns his head. “Who, me?”

“You!” Zohra says. “Look how fucking fat you’ve gotten!”

“Zohra!” Less says.

But Lewis just chuckles. With two hands, he pats the mound of his belly. “You know, I think it’s a hoot? I look in the mirror every morning and laugh and laugh and laugh. Me! Skinny little Lewis Delacroix!”

“So that’s the plan, Arthur. Are you in?” Zohra asks.

“But I don’t want to get fat,” Less says. “I know that sounds stupid and vain, but I don’t.”

Lewis leans in closer. “Arthur, you’re going to have to figure something out. You see all these men over fifty, these skinny men with mustaches. Imagine all the dieting and exercise and effort of fitting into your suits from when you were thirty! And then what? You’re still a dried-up old man. Screw that. Clark always says you can be thin or you can be happy, and, Arthur, I have already tried thin.”

His husband, Clark. Yes, they are Lewis and Clark. They still find it hilarious. Hilarious!

Zohra leans forward and puts a hand on his arm. “Come on, Arthur. Do it. Get fat with us. The best is yet to come.”

There is noise at the front of the bus; the violinist is talking in hushed tones with Mohammed. From one of the window seats, they can now hear the male model’s moans.

“Oh no, not another,” Zohra says.

“You know,” Lewis says, “I thought he would have gone sooner.”

So there are only four laden camels moving across the Sahara. The male model, sick beyond all measure, has been left with the bus in M’Hamid, the last town before the desert, and the violinist has stayed with him. “He will join us on a later camel,” Mohammed assures them as they board their camels and are tipped like teapots as the creatures struggle to rise. Four with humans and five without, all in a line, making shadows in the sand, and, looking at the damned creatures, with their hand-puppet heads and their hay-bale bodies, their scrawny little legs, Less thinks, Look at them! Who could ever believe in a god? It is three days until his birthday; Zohra’s is in two.

“This isn’t a birthday,” Less yells to Lewis as they bob toward the sunset. “It’s an Agatha Christie novel!”

“Let’s bet on who goes next. I’m betting me. Right now. On this camel.”

“I’m betting on Josh.” The British tech whiz.

Lewis asks: “Would you like to talk about Freddy now?”

“Not really. I heard the wedding was very pretty.”

“I heard that the night before, Freddy—”

Zohra’s voice comes loudly from her camel: “Shut the fuck up! Enjoy the fucking sunset on your fucking camels! Jesus!”

It is, after all, almost a miracle they are here. Not because they’ve survived the booze, the hashish, the migraines. Not that at all. It’s that they’ve survived everything in life, humiliations and disappointments and heartaches and missed opportunities, bad dads and bad jobs and bad sex and bad drugs, all the trips and mistakes and face-plants of life, to have made it to fifty and to have made it here: to this frosted-cake landscape, these mountains of gold, the little table they can now see sitting on the dune, set with olives and pita and glasses and wine chilling on ice, with the sun waiting more patiently than any camel for their arrival. So, yes. As with almost every sunset, but with this one in particular: shut the fuck up.

The silence lasts as long as it takes a camel to summit a dune. Lewis notes aloud that today is his twentieth anniversary, but of course his phone won’t work out here, so he’ll have to call Clark when they get to Fez.

Mohammed turns back and says, “Oh, but there is Wi-Fi in the desert.”

“There is?” Lewis asks.

“Oh, of course, everywhere,” Mohammed says, nodding.

“Oh good.”

Mohammed holds up one finger. “The problem is the password.”

Up and down the line the Bedouin chuckle.

“That’s the second time I’ve fallen for that one,” Lewis says, then looks back at Less and points.

There on the dune, beside the table, one of the camel boys has his arm around the other, and they sit there like that as they watch the sun. The dunes are turning the same shades of adobe and aqua as the buildings of Marrakech. Two boys, arms around each other. To Less, it seems so foreign. It makes him sad. In his world, he never sees straight men doing this. Just as a gay couple cannot walk hand in hand down the streets of Marrakech, he thinks, two men, best friends, cannot walk hand in hand down the streets of Chicago. They cannot sit on a dune like these teenagers and watch a sunset in each other’s embrace. This Tom Sawyer love for Huck Finn.

The encampment is a dream. Begin in the middle: a fire pit laden with gnarled acacia branches, surrounded by pillows, from which eight carpeted paths lead to eight plain canvas tents, each of which—outwardly no more than a smallish revival tent—opens onto a wonderland: a brass bed whose coverlet is sewn with tiny mirrors, nightstands and bedside lamps in beaten metal, a washbasin and coy little toilet behind a carved screen, and a vanity and full-length mirror. Less steps in and wonders: Who polished that mirror? Who filled the basin and cleaned the toilet? For that matter: who brought out these brass beds for spoiled creatures such as he, who brought the pillows and carpets, who said: “They will probably like the coverlet with the little mirrors”? On the nightstand: a dozen books in English, including a Peabody novel and books by three god-awful American writers who, as at an exclusive party at which one is destined to run into the most banal acquaintance, dispelling not only the notion of the party’s elegance but of one’s own, seem to turn to Less and say, “Oh, they let you in too?” And there among them: the latest from Finley Dwyer. Here in the Sahara, beside his big brass bed. Thanks, life!

From the north: a camel bellowing to spite the dusk.

From the south: Lewis screaming that there is a scorpion in his bed.

From the west: the tinkle of flatware as the Bedouin set their dinner table.

From the south again: Lewis shouting not to worry, it was just a paper clip.

From the east: the British technology-whiz-cum-nightclub-owner saying: “Guys? I don’t feel so great.”

Who remains? Just four of them at dinner: Less, Lewis, Zohra, and Mohammed. They finish the white wine by the fire and stare at one another across the flames; Mohammed quietly smokes a cigarette. Is it a cigarette? Zohra stands and says she’s going to bed so she can be beautiful for her birthday, good night, all, and look at all the stars! Mohammed vanishes into the darkness, and it is just Lewis and Less who remain.

“Arthur,” Lewis says in the crackling quiet, reclining on his pillows. “I’m glad you came.”

Less sighs and breathes in the night. Above them, the Milky Way rises in a plume of smoke. He turns to his friend in the firelight. “Happy anniversary, Lewis.”

“Thank you. Clark and I are divorcing.”

Less sits straight up on his cushion. “What?”

Lewis shrugs. “We decided a few months ago. I have been waiting to tell you.”

“Wait wait wait, what? What’s going on?”

“Shh, you’ll wake Zohra. And what’s-his-name.” He moves closer to Less, picking up his wineglass. “Well, you know when I met Clark. Back in New York, at the art gallery. And we did that cross-country dating for a while, and finally I asked him to move to San Francisco. We were in the back room of the Art Bar—you remember, where you used to be able to buy coke—on the couches, and Clark said, ‘All right, I’ll move to San Francisco. I’ll live with you. But only for ten years. After ten years, I’ll leave you.’”

Less looks around, but of course there is no one to share his disbelief. “You never told me that!”

“Yes, he said, ‘After ten years, I’ll leave you.’ And I said, ‘Oh, ten years, that seems like plenty!’ That was all we ever talked about it. He never worried about quitting his job or leaving his rent-controlled place, he never bugged me about whose pots we got to keep or whose we got to throw away. He just moved into my place and set up his life. Just like that.”

“I didn’t know any of this. I just thought you guys were together forever.”

“Of course you did. I mean, I did too, honestly.”

“Sorry, I’m just so surprised.”

“Well, after ten years he said, ‘Let’s take a trip to New York.’ So we went to New York. I’d forgotten all about the deal, really. Things were going so well, we were, you know, very very happy together. We had a hotel in SoHo above a Chinese lamp store. And he said, ‘Let’s go to the Art Bar.’ So we took a taxi, and we went to the back room, and we had a drink, and he said, ‘Well, the ten years are up, Lewis.’”

“This is Clark? Checking your expiration date?”

“I know, he’s hopeless. He’ll drink any old carton of milk. But it’s true. He said the ten years are up. And I said, ‘Are you fucking serious? Are you leaving me, Clark?’ And he said no. He wanted to stay.”

“Thank God for that.”

“For ten more years.”

“That’s crazy, Lewis. It’s like a timer. Like he’s checking to see if it’s done. You should have smacked him across the face. Or was he just messing with you? Were you guys high?”

“No, no, maybe you’ve never seen this side of him? He’s so sloppy, I know, he leaves his underwear in the bathroom right where he took it off. But, you know, Clark has another side that’s very practical. He installed the solar panels.”

“I think of Clark as so easygoing. And this is—this is neurotic.”

“I think he’d say it’s practical. Or forward thinking. Anyway, we’re in the Art Bar, and I said, ‘Well, okay. I love you too, let’s get some champagne,’ and I didn’t think about it again.”

“Then ten years later—”

“A few months ago. We were in New York, and he said, ‘Let’s go to the Art Bar.’ You know it’s changed. It’s not seedy or anything anymore; they moved the old mural of the Last Supper, and you can’t even get coke there. I guess thank God, right? And we sat in the back. We ordered champagne. And he said, ‘Lewis.’ I knew what was coming. I said, ‘It’s been ten years.’ And he said, ‘What do you think?’ We sat there for a long time, drinking. And I said, ‘Honey, I think it’s time.’”

“Lewis. Lewis.”

“And he said, ‘I think so too.’ And we hugged, there on the cushions in the back of the Art Bar.”

“Were things not working out? You never told me.”

“No, things have been really good.”

“Well then, why say ‘It’s time’? Why give up?”

“Because a few years ago, you remember I had a job down in Texas? Texas, Arthur! But it was good money, and Clark said, ‘I support you, this is important, let’s drive down together, I’ve never seen Texas.’ And we got in the car and drove down—it was a good four days of driving—and we each got to make one rule about the road trip. Mine was that we could only sleep in places with a neon sign. His was that wherever we went, we had to eat the special. If they didn’t have a special, we had to find another place. Oh my God, Arthur, the things I ate! One time the special was crab casserole. In Texas.”

“I know, I know, you told me about it. That trip sounded great.”

“It was maybe the best road trip we’ve ever taken; we just laughed and laughed the whole way. Looking for neon signs. And then we got to Texas and he kissed me good-bye and got on a plane back home, and there I was for four months. And I thought, Well, that was nice.”

“I don’t understand. That sounds like you guys being happy.”

“Yes. And I was happy in my little house in Texas, going to work. And I thought, Well, that was nice. That was a nice marriage.”

“But you broke up with him. Something’s wrong. Something failed.”

“No! No, Arthur, no, it’s the opposite! I’m saying it’s a success. Twenty years of joy and support and friendship, that’s a success. Twenty years of anything with another person is a success. If a band stays together twenty years, it’s a miracle. If a comedy duo stays together twenty years, they’re a triumph. Is this night a failure because it will end in an hour? Is the sun a failure because it’s going to end in a billion years? No, it’s the fucking sun. Why does a marriage not count? It isn’t in us, it isn’t in human beings, to be tied to one person forever. Siamese twins are a tragedy. Twenty years and one last happy road trip. And I thought, Well, that was nice. Let’s end on success.”

“You can’t do this, Lewis. You’re Lewis and Clark. Lewis and fucking Clark, Lewis. It’s my only hope out there that gay men can last.”

“Oh, Arthur. This is lasting. Twenty years is lasting! And this has nothing to do with you.”

“I just think it’s a mistake. You’re going to go out there on your own and find out there’s nobody as good as Clark. And he’s going to find the same thing.”

“He’s getting married in June.”

“For fuck’s sake.”

“I’ll tell you the truth, it was on that road trip we met a nice young man in Texas. A painter down in Marfa. We met him together, and they kept in touch, and now Clark’s going to marry him. He’s lovely. He’s wonderful.”

“You’re going to the wedding, apparently.”

“I’m reading a poem at the wedding.”

“You are out of your mind. I’m sorry things didn’t work out with Clark. I’m heartbroken. But I know it’s not about me. I want you to be happy. But you’re deluded! You can’t go to his wedding! You can’t think it’s all fine, it’s all great! You’re just in a phase of denial. You’re divorcing your partner of twenty years. And that’s sad. It’s okay to be sad, Lewis.”

“It’s true things can go on till you die. And people use the same old table, even though it’s falling apart and it’s been repaired and repaired, just because it was their grandmother’s. That’s how towns become ghost towns. It’s how houses become junk stores. And I think it’s how people get old.”

“Have you met someone?”

“Me? I think maybe I’ll go it on my own. Maybe I’m better that way. Maybe I was always better that way and it was just that when I was young, I was so scared, and now I’m not scared. I’ll still have Clark. I can still always call Clark and ask his advice.”

“Even after everything?”

“Yes, Arthur.”

They talk a bit longer, and the sky shifts above them until it is quite late. “Arthur,” Lewis says at one point, “did you hear that Freddy locked himself in the bathroom the night before the wedding?” But Less is not listening; he is thinking about how he used to visit Lewis and Clark over the years, about the dinner parties and Halloweens and times he slept on their couch, too tipsy to get home. “Good night, Arthur.” Lewis gives his old friend a salute and heads into the darkness, so Less is left alone by the dying fire. A brightness catches his eye: Mohammed’s cigarette as he moves from tent to tent, buttoning the flaps like he is tucking in sleeping children for the night. From the furthermost tent, the tech whiz moans from his bed. From somewhere, a camel complains, followed by a young man’s voice soothing it—do they sleep beside the creatures? Do they sleep under this most excellent canopy, this majestical roof, this amazing mirrored coverlet, the stars? Look, you: there are enough stars for everyone tonight, and among them shine the satellites, those counterfeit coins. He reaches for, but does not catch, a falling star. Less, at last, goes to bed. But he cannot stop thinking of what Lewis has told him. Not the story about the ten years, but the idea of being alone. He realizes that, even after Robert, he never truly let himself be alone. Even here, on this trip: first Bastian, then Javier. Why this endless need for a man as a mirror? To see the Arthur Less reflected there? He is grieving, for sure—the loss of his lover, his career, his novel, his youth—so why not cover the mirrors, rend the fabric over his heart, and just let himself mourn? Perhaps he should try alone.

He chuckles to himself in the moments before sleep. Alone: impossible to imagine. That life seems as terrifying, as un-Lessian, as that of a castaway on a desert island.

The sandstorm does not start until dawn.

As Less lies sleepless in bed, his novel appears in his mind. Swift. What a title. What a mess. Swift. Where is his editor when he needs her? His editrix, as he used to call her: Leona Flowers. Traded years ago in the card game of publishing to some other house, but Less recalls how she took his first novels, shaggy with magniloquent prose, and made them into books. So clever, so artful, so good at persuading him of what to cut. “This paragraph is so beautiful, so special,” she might say, pressing her French-manicured hands to her chest, “that I’m keeping it all to myself!” Where is Leona now? High in some tower with some new favorite author, trying her same old lines: “I think the chapter’s absence will echo throughout the novel.” What would she tell him? More likable, make Swift more likable. That’s what everyone’s saying; nobody cares what this character suffers. But how do you do it? It’s like making oneself more likable. And at fifty, Less muses drowsily, you’re as likable as you’re going to get.

The sandstorm. So many months of planning, so much travel, so much expense, and here they are: trapped inside as the wind whips their tents like a man with a mule. They are gathered, the three of them (Zohra, Lewis, Less) in the large dining tent, hot as a camel ride and just as smelly, with its heavy horsehair sand door that has not been washed and three visitors who have not been, either. Only Mohammed seems fresh and cheerful, though he tells Less he was awakened at dawn by the sandstorm and had to run for shelter (for he has, indeed, slept out of doors). “Well”—Lewis announcing over coffee and honeyed flatbreads—“we are being given an opportunity for a different experience than the one we were expecting.” Zohra greets this with a raised butter knife; tomorrow is her birthday. But they must submit to the sand. They spend the rest of the day drinking beer and playing cards, and Zohra fleeces them both.

“I’ll get my revenge,” Lewis threatens, and they go to bed to find, in the morning, that, like a bad houseguest, the storm has no intention of leaving and, moreover, that Lewis has proved prophetic: he has been afflicted as well. He lies on his mirrored bed, sweating, moaning “Kill me, kill me,” as the wind shakes his tent. Mohammed appears, swathed in indigo and violet, full of regret. “The sandstorm is only in these dunes. We drive out of the desert, it is gone.” He suggests they pile Lewis and Josh into the jeeps and head back to M’Hamid, where at least there is a hotel and a bar with a television, where the others, the war reporters, the violinist, the male model, are waiting. Zohra, only her eyes showing in the folds of her bright-green shesh, blinks silently. “No,” she says finally, and turns to Less, ripping off her veil. “No, it’s my birthday, goddamn it! Dump the others in M’Hamid. But we’re going somewhere, Arthur! Mohammed? Where can you drive us that we wouldn’t believe?”

Would you believe Morocco has a Swiss ski town? For that is where Mohammed has taken them, driving them out of the sandstorm and through deep canyons where hotels are carved into the rock and Germans, ignoring the hotels, camp beside the river in beat-up Westfalias; past villages that, as in a folktale, seem inhabited only by sheep; past waterfalls and weirs, madrassas and mosques, casbahs and ksars, and one small town (a lunch stop) where the next-door wood-carver is visited by a woman all in teal who borrows his shavings to sprinkle them on her doorstep, where, it seems, her cat has peed, and where boys are gathered in what at first seems to be an outdoor school and later (when the cheering starts) turns out to be a televised football match; through limestone plateaus; up the spiraling ziggurat roads of the Middle Atlas until the vegetation changes from fronds to needles, where, passing through a chilly pine forest, Mohammed says, “Look out for beasts,” and at first there is nothing, until Zohra screams and points to where sits, on a wooden platform and turning as if interrupted at tea (or déjeuner sur l’herbe), a troop of poker-faced Barbary macaques, or, as she puts it: “Monkeys!” Their own troop is now far away, in M’Hamid, and Less and Zohra are alone, seated in the dark scented bar of the alpine resort, in leather club chairs with glasses of local marc, below a crystal chandelier and before a crystal panorama. They have eaten pigeon pie. Mohammed sits at the bar, drinking an energy drink. Gone is his desert costume; he has changed back into a polo shirt and jeans. It is Zohra’s birthday; it will be Less’s at midnight, in about two hours’ time. Satisfaction has arrived, indeed, on a later camel.

“And all this,” Zohra is saying, brushing her hair out of her face, “all this travel, Arthur, just to miss your boyfriend’s wedding?”

“Not a boyfriend. And more to avoid the confusion,” Less answers, feeling himself blushing. They are the only guests in the bar. The bartenders—two men in striped vaudeville vests—seem to be deciding on a cigarette break with the frantic whispered patter of a comedy routine. He has been telling Zohra about his trip, and somehow the champagne has let his tongue get away from him.

Zohra wears a gold pantsuit and diamond earrings; they have checked into the hotel, showered, and changed, and she smells of perfume. Surely, when she packed for her birthday trip, she picked these things for someone other than Less. But he is who she has. He wears, of course, his blue suit.

“You know what?” Zohra says, holding out the glass and staring at it. “This hooch reminds me of my grandmother in Georgia. The republic, not the state. She used to make something just like this.”

“It just seemed better,” Less continues, still on Freddy, “to get away. And bring this novel back to life.”

Zohra sips her marc and stares at the view, such as it is at this hour. “Mine left me too,” she says.

Less sits quietly for a moment, then says suddenly: “Oh! Oh no, he didn’t leave me—”

“Janet was supposed to be here.” Zohra closes her eyes. “Arthur, you’re here because there was an empty space and Lewis said he had a friend; that’s why you’re here. It’s lovely to have you. I mean, you’re all that’s left. Everybody else is so fucking weak. What happened to everybody? I’m glad you’re here. But I’ll be honest with you. I’d rather have her.”

For some reason, it never occurred to Less that she was a lesbian. Perhaps he is a bad gay, after all.

“What happened?” he asks.

“What else?” Zohra says, sipping from the little glass. “She fell in love. She lost her mind.”

Less murmurs his sympathy, but Zohra is lost in herself. At the bar, the taller man seems to have won and heads out in long strides to the balcony. The short man, bald on top except for a single oasis, stares after his friend with unconcealed longing. Outside: a view perhaps of Gstaad or St. Moritz. The dark rolling forests of sleeping macaques, the Romanesque steeple of a skating rink, the cold black sky.

“She told me she met the love of her life,” Zohra says at last, still staring out the window. “You read poems about it, you hear stories about it, you hear Sicilians talk about being struck by lightning. We know there’s no love of your life. Love isn’t terrifying like that. It’s walking the fucking dog so the other one can sleep in, it’s doing taxes, it’s cleaning the bathroom without hard feelings. It’s having an ally in life. It’s not fire, it’s not lightning. It’s what she always had with me. Isn’t it? But what if she’s right, Arthur? What if the Sicilians are right? That it’s this earth-shattering thing she felt? Something I’ve never felt. Have you?”

Less begins to breath unevenly.

She turns to him: “What if one day you meet someone, Arthur, and it feels like it could never be anyone else? Not because other people are less attractive, or drink too much, or have issues in bed, or have to alphabetize every fucking book or organize the dishwasher in some way you just can’t live with. It’s because they aren’t this person. This woman Janet met. Maybe you can go through your whole life and never meet them, and think love is all these other things, but if you do meet them, God help you! Because then: ka-blam! You’re screwed. The way Janet is. She ruined our life for it! But what if that’s real?” She is gripping the chair now.

“Zohra, I’m so sorry.”

“Is it like that with this Freddy?”

“I…I…”

“The brain is so wrong, all the time,” she says, turning to the dark landscape again. “Wrong about what time it is, and who people are, and where home is: wrong wrong wrong. The lying brain.”

This insanity, the insanity of her lover, has her bewildered and hurt and incandescent. And yet what she has said—the lying brain—this is familiar; this has happened to him. Not exactly like this, not utter terrifying madness, but he knows his brain has told him things he has traveled around the world to forget. That the mind cannot be trusted is a certainty.

“What is love, Arthur? What is it?” she asks him. “Is it the good dear thing I had with Janet for eight years? Is it the good dear thing? Or is it the lightning bolt? The destructive madness that hit my girl?”

“It doesn’t sound happy” is all he can say.

She shakes her head. “Arthur, happiness is bullshit. That is the wisdom I give you from my twenty-two hours of being fifty. That is the wisdom from my love life. You’ll understand at midnight.” It is clear she is drunk. Outside, the shivering bartender smokes like he means it. She sniffs the glass of marc and says, “My Georgian grandmother used to make booze just like this.”

It keeps ringing in his ears: Is it the good dear thing? Is it the good dear thing?

“Yes.” She smiles at the memory and sniffs the glass. “It smells just like my grandmother’s cha-cha!”

The cha-cha proves too much for the birthday girl, and by eleven thirty, he and Mohammed are leading her up to her room as she smiles and thanks them. He puts her, happily drunk, to bed. She is speaking French to Mohammed, who comforts her in the same language and then again in English. As Less tucks her in, she says, “Well, that was ridiculous, Arthur, I’m sorry.” As he closes her door, he realizes that he will spend his fiftieth birthday alone.

He turns; not alone.

“Mohammed, how many languages do you speak?”

“Seven!” he says brightly, striding to the elevator. “I learn from school. They make fun of my Arabic when I come to the city, it is old-fashioned, I learned in Berber school, so I work more hard. And from tourists! Sorry, still learning English. And you, Arthur?”

“Seven! My God!” The elevator is completely mirrored, and as the doors close, Less is confronted by a vision: infinite Mohammeds in red polo shirts beside infinite versions of his father at fifty, which is to say himself. “I…I speak English and German—”

“Ich auch!” says Mohammed. The following is translated from the German: “I lived for two years in Berlin! Such boring music!”

“I have been coming from there! Is excellent your German!”

“And yours is good. Here we are, you first, Arthur. Are you ready for your birthday?”

“I am fear of the age.”

“Don’t be frightened. Fifty is nothing. You’re a handsome man, and healthy, and rich.”

He wants to say he is not rich but stops himself. “How many year have you?”

“I’m fifty-three. You see, it’s nothing. Nothing at all. Let’s get you a glass of champagne.”

“I am fear of the old, I am fear of the lonely.”

“You have nothing to fear.” He turns to a woman who has taken over the station behind the bar, easily his height with her hair in a ponytail, and speaks to her in the Moroccan dialect of Arabic. Perhaps he is asking for champagne for the American, who has just turned fifty. The bartender beams at Less, raises her eyebrows, and says something. Mohammed laughs; Less just stands with his idiot’s grin. “Happy birthday, sir,” she says in English, pouring out a glass of French champagne. “This is my treat.”

Less offers to buy Mohammed a drink, but the man will indulge only in energy drinks. Not because of Islam, he explains; he is agnostic. “Because alcohol makes me crazy. Crazy! But I smoke hashish. Would you like?”

“No, no, not tonight. It makes me crazy. Mohammed, are you really a tour guide?”

“I must to make a living,” Mohammed says, suddenly shy in his English. “But in truth, I am writer. Like you.”

How does Less get the world so wrong? Over and over again? Where is the exit from moments like this? Where is the donkey door out?

“Mohammed, I am honored to be with you tonight.”

“I am very great fan of Kalipso. Of course, I read not the English but the French. I am honored to be with you. And happy birthday, Arthur Less.”

Probably now Tom and Freddy are packing their bags; they are many hours ahead, after all, and in Tahiti it is midday. Surely the sun is already hammering the beach like a tinsmith. The grooms are folding their linen shirts, their linen pants and jackets, or surely Freddy is folding them. He recalls Freddy was always the packer, while Less lounged on the hotel sofa. “You’re too fast and sloppy,” Freddy said that last morning in Paris. “And everything comes out wrinkled—see, watch this.” He spread out the jackets and shirts on the bed like they were clothes for a great paper doll, placed the pants and sweaters on top, and folded the whole thing up in a bundle. Hands on his hips, he smiled in triumph (by the way, everyone is completely naked in this scene). “And now what?” Less asked. Freddy shrugged: “Now we just put it in the luggage.” But of course this bolus was too large for the luggage to swallow, no matter how Freddy coaxed it, and after many tries of sitting and pressing, he eventually remade it into two packages, which he fit neatly into two bags. Victorious, he looked smugly at Less. Framed in the window, with that lean silhouette from his early forties, the spring Paris rain dotting the window behind him, Freddy’s former lover nodded and asked, “Mr. Pelu, you’ve packed everything; now what are we going to wear?” Freddy attacked him in a fury, and for the next half an hour, they wore nothing at all.

Yes, surely Mr. Pelu is folding.

Surely this is why he never calls to wish Less a happy birthday.

And now Less stands on the balcony of the Swiss hotel, looking out over the frozen town. The railing is carved, absurdly, with cuckoos, each with a sharp protruding beak. In his glass: the last coin of champagne. Now he is off to India. To work on his novel, on what was supposed to be a mere final glaze and now appears to be breaking the whole novel to shards and starting again. To work on the tedious, self-centered, pitiable, laughable character Swift. The one nobody feels bad for. Now he is fifty.

We all recognize grief in moments that should be celebrations; it is the salt in the pudding. Didn’t Roman generals hire slaves to march beside them in a triumphant parade and remind them that they too would die? Even your narrator, one morning after what should have been a happy occasion, was found shivering at the end of the bed (spouse: “I really wish you weren’t crying right now”). Don’t little children, awakened one morning and told, “Now you’re five!”—don’t they wail at the universe’s descent into chaos? The sun slowly dying, the spiral arm spreading, the molecules drifting apart second by second toward our inevitable heat death—shouldn’t we all wail to the stars?

But some people do take it a little too hard. It’s just a birthday, after all.

There is an old Arabic story about a man who hears Death is coming for him, so he sneaks away to Samarra. And when he gets there, he finds Death in the market, and Death says, “You know, I just felt like going on vacation to Samarra. I was going to skip you today, but how lucky you showed up to find me!” And the man is taken after all. Arthur Less has traveled halfway around the world in a cat’s cradle of junkets, changing flights and fleeing from a sandstorm into the Atlas Mountains like someone erasing his trail or outfoxing a hunter—and yet Time has been waiting here all along. In a snowy alpine resort. With cuckoos. Of course Time would turn out to be Swiss. He tosses back the champagne. He thinks: Hard to feel bad for a middle-aged white man.

Indeed: even Less can’t feel bad for Swift anymore. Like a wintertime swimmer too numb to feel cold, Arthur Less is too sad to feel pity. For Robert, yes, breathing through an oxygen tube up in Sonoma. For Marian, nursing a broken hip that might ground her forever. For Javier in his marriage, and even for Bastian’s tragic sports teams. For Zohra and Janet. For his fellow writer Mohammed. Around the world his pity flies, its wingspan as wide as an albatross’s. But he can no more feel sorry for Swift—now become a gorgon of Caucasian male ego, snake headed, pacing through his novel and turning each sentence to stone—than Arthur Less can feel sorry for himself.

He hears the balcony door open beside him and sees the short waiter, returned from his smoke break. The man points to a cuckoo on the railing and speaks to him in perfectly understandable French (if only he understood French).

Laughable.

Arthur Less—he suddenly stands very still, as one does when about to swat a fly. Don’t let it go. Distractions are pulling at his mind—Robert, Freddy, fifty, Tahiti, flowers, the waiter gesturing at Less’s coat sleeve—but he will not look at them. Don’t let it escape. Laughable. His mind is converging on one point of light. What if it isn’t a poignant, wistful novel at all? What if it isn’t the story of a sad middle-aged man on a tour of his hometown, remembering the past and fearing the future; a peripateticism of humiliation and regret; the erosion of a single male soul? What if it isn’t even sad? For a moment, his entire novel reveals itself to him like those shimmering castles that appear to men crawling through deserts…

It vanishes. The balcony door slams shut; the sleeve of the blue suit remains snagged on a cuckoo’s beak (a tear lies seconds in the future). But Less does not notice; he is clinging to the one thought that remains. AH ah ah ah! comes the Lessian laugh.

His Swift isn’t a hero. He’s a fool.

“Well,” he whispers to the night air, “happy birthday, Arthur Less.”

Just for the record: happiness is not bullshit.