Less

Less Indian

For a seven-year-old boy, the boredom of sitting in an airport lounge is rivaled only by lying convalescent in bed. This particular boy, one-six-thousandth of whose life has already been squandered in this airport, has gone through every pocket of his mother’s purse and found nothing of interest but a keychain made of plastic crystals. He is considering the wastepaper basket—its swinging lid holds possibilities—when he notices, through the lounge’s window, the American. The boy has not seen one all day. He watches the American with the same detached, merciless fascination with which he has watched the robotic scorpions that circle the airport bathroom drain. Epically tall, brutally blond, the American stands in his beige wilted linen shirt and pants, smiling at the escalator-regulations sign. The sign, so scrupulously unabridged that it includes advice on pet safety, is longer than the escalator itself. This seems to amuse the American. The boy watches as the man pats every pocket on his person, then nods in satisfaction. He looks up at a closed-circuit television to follow the fleeting romances between flights and gates, then heads down to join a line. Though everyone has already passed through at least three checkpoints, a man at the head of the line has everyone take out their passport and boarding pass once more. This superfluous verification also seems to amuse the American. But it is warranted; at least three people are about to board the wrong flight. The American is one of them. Who knows what adventures awaited him in Hyderabad? We will never know, for he is shown to another gate: Thiruvananthapuram. He becomes absorbed in a notebook. Soon enough, a worker is rushing over to tap the American on the shoulder, and the foreigner pops up to rush for the flight that he is yet again about to miss. They disappear together down a foreshortened corridor. The boy, already attuned to comedy at his young age, presses his nose against the glass and awaits the inevitable. A moment later, the American springs back to grab the forgotten satchel and vanishes again, this time surely for good. The boy tilts his head as boredom begins to flood. His mother asks if he needs to wee, and he says yes, but only so he can see the scorpions again.

“Here are the black ants; they are your neighbors. Nearby there is Elizabeth, the yellow rat snake, who is the parson’s special friend, although he says he is happy to kill her if you want him to. But then there will be rats. Do not be afraid of the mongoose. Do not encourage the stray dogs—they are not our pets. Do not open the windows, because small bats will want to visit you, and possibly monkeys. And if you walk at night, stomp on the ground to scare off other animals.”

Less asks what other animals could there possibly be?

Rupali answers, quite solemnly: “Let us never know.”

A writer’s retreat on a hill above the Arabian Sea, on Carlos’s suggestion half a year ago—it has been a long journey, but Less has arrived at last. The dreaded birthday, the dreaded wedding, are both behind him now; ahead is the novel, and with an idea of how to go forward, he will finally have a chance to conquer it. Gone are the cares of Europe and Morocco; present still are the cares of the Delhi airport, the Chennai airport, and those of Thiruvananthapuram. In Thiruvananthapuram, he was met by a seemingly delighted woman, the manager Rupali, who graciously led him across a steaming parking lot to a white Tata driven, he was later to learn, by a relative. This driver was proud to show Less a TV set in the dashboard of his car; Less was alarmed. And off they went. Rupali, a slim and elegant woman with a neat black braid and the refined profile of a Caesar on a coin, tried to engage him with conversation about politics, literature, and art, but Less was too enchanted by the ride itself.

It was nothing like he expected, the sun flirting with him among the trees and houses; the driver speeding along a crumbling road alongside which trash was piled as if washed there (and what first looked like a beach beside a river turned out to be an accretion of a million plastic bags, as a coral reef is an accretion of a million tiny animals); the endless series of shops, as if made from one continuous concrete barrier, painted at intervals with different signs advertising chickens and medicine, coffins and telephones, pet fish and cigarettes, hot tea and “homely” food, Communism, mattresses, handicrafts, Chinese food, haircuts and dumbbells and gold by the ounce; the low, flat temples appearing at regular intervals like the colorful, elaborately frosted, but basically inedible sheet cakes displayed at Less’s childhood bakery; the women sitting roadside with baskets of shimmering silver fish, terrifying manta rays, and squid, with their cartoon eyes; the countless men standing at tea shops, variety stores, pharmacies, watching Less as he goes by; the driver dodging bicycles, motorcycles, lorries (but few cars), moving frenetically in and out of traffic, bringing Less back to the time at Disney World when his mother led him and his sister to a whimsical ride based on The Wind in the Willows—a ride that turned out to be a knuckle-whitening rattletrap wellspring of trauma. Nothing, nothing here, is what he expected.

Rupali leads him down a path of red dirt. The ends of her pink scarf float behind her.

“Here,” she says, gesturing to a purple flower, “is the ten o’clock. It opens at ten and closes at five.”

“Like the British Museum.”

“There is also a four o’clock,” Rupali counters. “And the drowsy tree, which opens at sunrise and closes at sunset. The plants here are more punctual than the people. You will see. And this plant is more alive.” She touches her chappal to a small fern, which instantly shrinks from her touch, folding in its leaves. Less is horrified. They arrive at a spot where the coconut trees part. “Here is a possibly inspiring view.”

It certainly is: a cliff overhanging a mangrove forest, at the edge of which the Arabian Sea flogs the coast as mercilessly as an Inquisitor, foaming up in white crests against the pale and impenitent sand. Beside him, at the cliffside, the coconut trees frame a view of birds and insects, as filled with living creatures as the waters of a coral shelf: eagles, red- and white-headed, floating in pairs high above, and covens of irritated crows massing on the treetops, and, nearby, yellow-black biplane dragonflies, buzzing around in a dogfight at the entrance of a little house.

“And here is your little house.”

The cottage, like the other buildings, is made in the South Indian style: all brick, with a tile roof over an open wooden lattice that lets in the air. But the cottage is pentagonal, and, curiously, rather than leave the space whole, the architects have divided it, like a nautilus shell, into smaller and smaller “rooms,” until it reaches the end of its ingenuity at a tiny desk and an inlaid portrait of the Last Supper. Less stares at this curiously for a moment.

The paper trail has been lost, so it is hard to know whether, in his haste, Less missed a crucial piece of information, or whether it was delicately withheld by Carlos Pelu, but it turns out that, rather than a typical artist residency at which to finish a novel, a place full of art, providing three vegetarian meals a day, a yoga mat, and Ayurvedic tea, Arthur Less has booked himself into a Christian retreat center. He has nothing personal against Christ; though raised Unitarian—with its glaring omission of Jesus and a hymnal so unorthodox that it was years before Less understood “Accentuate the Positive” was not in the Book of Common Prayer—Less is technically Christian. There is really no other word for someone who celebrates Christmas and Easter, even if only as craft projects. And yet he is somehow deflated. To travel to the other side of the world—only to be offered a brand he could so easily buy at home.

“Services are Sunday morning, of course,” Rupali tells him, gesturing to a small gray church that, in the midst of these lively outbuildings, sits as humorless as a recess monitor. So here he will rewrite his novel. With God’s happiness.

“And a note arrived for you.” An envelope on the miniature desk, below the image of Judas. Less opens it and reads: Arthur, contact me once you arrive, I’ll be at the resort, I hope you arrived in one piece. It is on business stationery, signed: Your friend, Carlos.

After Rupali leaves, Less takes out his famous rubber bands.

“Have you noticed,” Rupali asks him a few mornings later, at breakfast, in the low brick main building, a kind of fortress above the ocean, “how the morning sounds so much sweeter than the evening?” She is talking about the birds, awakening in harmony and bedding down in discord. But Less can think only of that racket particular to India: the spiritual battle of the bands.

It seems to begin before dawn with the Muslims, when a mosque at the edge of the mangrove forest softly announces, in a lullaby voice, the morning call to prayer. Not to be outdone, the local Christians soon crank up pop-sounding hymns that last anywhere from one to three hours. This is followed by a cheerful, though overamplified, kazoo-like refrain from the Hindu temple that reminds Less of the ice cream truck from his childhood. Then comes a later call to prayer. Then the Christians decide to ring some bronze bells. And so on. There are sermons and live singers and thunderous drum performances. In this way, the faiths alternate throughout the day, as at a music festival, growing louder and louder until, during the outright cacophony of sunset, the Muslims, who began the whole thing, declare victory by projecting not only the evening call to prayer but the prayer itself in its entirety. After that, the jungle falls to silence. Perhaps this is the Buddhists’ sole contribution. Every morning, it starts again.

“You must let me know,” Rupali says, “what we can do to help with your writing. You are our first writer.”

“I could use a freestanding desk,” Less suggests, hoping to liberate himself from writing in the heart of his nautilus. “And a tailor. I tore my suit in Morocco, and I seem to have lost my sewing needle.”

“We will take care of these. The pastor will know a good tailor.”

The pastor. “And peace and quiet. I need that above all.”

“Of course of course of course,” she insists, shaking her head, and her gold earrings sway from side to side.

A writer’s retreat on a hill above the Arabian Sea. Here, he will kill his old novel, tear out the flesh that he wants, stitch it to all-new material, electrocute it with inspiration, and make it rise from the slab and stumble toward Cormorant Publishing. Here, in this little room. There is so much to inspire him: the gray-green river flows below him among the coconuts and mangroves. On the other bank, Less can make out a black bull in the sun, sleek and glorious, with two white markings like socks on its hind legs, more like a person transformed into a bull than an actual bull. Nearby, white smoke rises from a jungle blaze. So much. He is remembering (falsely) something Robert once told him: Boredom is the only real tragedy for a writer; everything else is material. Robert never said anything of the sort. Boredom is essential for writers; it is the only time they get to write.

Looking around for inspiration, Less’s eyes fall upon his torn blue suit hanging in the closet, and he decides this is the priority. The novel is set aside.

The pastor turns out to be a tanned and miniature Groucho Marx in a cassock that buttons at one shoulder like a fast food uniform, friendly and eager, as Rupali mentioned, to kill his friend the snake. He also possesses a genius for invention adults only have in children’s books: a house with rain collectors and bamboo pipes, bringing water to a common cistern, and a way to turn food waste into cooking gas, with a hose that leads directly into his stove. And there is his three-year-old daughter, who runs around wearing nothing but a rhinestone necklace (who wouldn’t, if they could?). She is able to count, in English, methodically as a cart climbing uphill, up to the number fourteen—and then the wheels come off: “Twenty-one!” she screams in delight. “Eighteen! Forty-three! Eleventy! Twine!”

“Mr. Arthur, you are a writer,” the pastor says to him as they stand outside his house. “I want you to ask, Why? Everything that seems strange here, or foolish, ask, Why? For instance, motorcycle helmets.”

“Motorcycle helmets,” Less repeats.

“You have noticed everybody wears them; it is the law. But nobody fastens the strap. Yes?”

“I haven’t been out much—”

“They won’t fasten it, and what’s the point? Why wear it if it will fly off? Foolish, yes? It looks typically Indian, typically absurd. But ask, Why?”

Less can’t resist: “Why?”

“Because there is a reason. It’s not foolishness. It’s because a man can’t make a phone call if it’s fastened. During his two-, three-hour trip home. And you’re thinking, why talk while driving? Why not just stop on the side of the road? Foolish, yes? Mr. Less. Look at the road. Look.” Less sees a line of women, all in saris of bright-colored cloth edged in gold thread, some carrying purses, some metal bins on their heads, making their way through the rocks and weeds beside the crumbled asphalt. The pastor spreads his arms wide: “There is no side of the road.”

From the pastor, he learns the way to the tailor, whom he finds asleep beside his treadle, smelling distinctly of Signature whiskey. Less deliberates whether to wake him, but then a stray dog trots by, black-and-white, and barks at them both, and the man awakens of his own accord. Automatically, the tailor picks up a stone and throws it at the dog, who vanishes. Why? Then he notices Less. His smile tilts up toward our protagonist. He explains his unshaven chin by pointing to Less’s own: “Money comes in, we will shave.” Less says yes, possibly, and shows him the suit. The man waves his hand at the ease of the repair. “Come back this time tomorrow,” he says, and he and the famous suit disappear into the shop. Less feels the brief pang of separation, then takes a deep breath and aims himself downhill toward town. He means to meander for fifteen minutes or so and then get straight back to work.

When he passes the shop again, two hours later, he has sweated through his shirt, and his face is aglow. His hair is clipped quite short, and his beard is gone. The tailor grins, pointing to his own chin; he has indeed himself purchased a shave. Less nods and nods and trudges up the hill. He is stopped multiple times by neighbors trying out their English, offering him tea, or a visit to their home, or a ride to church. Once back in his room, recalling there is no shower, he wearily fills the red plastic bucket, disrobes, and drenches himself in cold water. He dries himself, dresses, and sits down to write.

“Hello!” comes a call from outside his cottage. “I am here to measure you for your desk!”

“To what?” Less yells.

“To measure you for your desk.”

When he emerges, in damp linen, there is indeed a portly bald man with a teenager’s faint mustache, smiling and holding out a length of cloth tape. He has Less sit in the rattan porch chair as he takes his measurements; then he bows and departs. Why? Next comes a teenager with a grown man’s mustache, who announces, “I will take your chair. There is a new chair in half an hour.” Less wonders what is at work here; surely some misunderstanding, and some difficulty for the boy. But he cannot puzzle it out, so he smiles and says of course. The boy approaches the chair with the caution of a lion tamer, then grabs it and takes it away. Less watches the sea as he leans against a coconut palm. When he looks back at the house, the black-and-white dog is at the entrance, hunched over and about to excrete. It looks at Less. It takes a shit anyway. “Hey!” Less yells, and it bounds away. Deskless, he is of course unable to compose, so he watches the entertainment provided: the sea. In exactly half an hour, the boy returns…with an identical chair. He sets it on the porch with pride, and Less accepts it with bewilderment. “Be careful,” the boy says earnestly. “It is a new chair. A new chair.” Less nods, and the boy departs. He looks at the chair. Cautiously, he sits himself down, and it creaks as it takes his weight. It feels fine. He watches three yellow birds battling it out on a nearby roof, cackling and squawking and so involved in their tussle that, in a moment of unexpected slapstick, they fall together off the roof and onto the grass. Less laughs aloud—AH ah ah! He has never seen a bird fall before. He stands up; the chair comes up with him. It is indeed new, and the lacquer, in this climate, has not yet managed to dry.

“…and when I had finally settled down to write, I think maybe the church let out. Because all these people started gathering around my little house. They spread out blankets, they brought out food, they had a good old picnic all around.” He is talking to Rupali. It is nighttime, after dinner; the view from the window is utterly black, one fluorescent bulb lights the room, and the scents of coconut and curry leaf still ornament the air. He does not add that the ruckus on his porch was unbearable, a party going on outside his windows. He could not concentrate for a moment on this new version of his book. Less was frustrated, so furious, he even considered checking into a local hotel. But he stood there in his little Keralan house, with its view of the ocean and the Last Supper, and pictured himself walking up to Rupali and saying the most absurd sentence of his life: I am going to check myself into an Ayurvedic retreat unless the picnicking stops!

Rupali listens to his story about the picnic, nodding. “Yes, this is something that happens.”

He remembers the pastor’s advice. “Why?”

“Oh, the people here, they like to come up and look at the view. This is a good place for the church families.”

“But it’s a retreat…” He stops himself, then asks again: “Why?”

“Here, this special view of the sea.”

“Why?”

“It is—” She pauses, looking down shyly. “It is the only place. The only place the Christians can go.”

Less has gotten to the root of it at last, but again it touches something he cannot understand. “Well, I hope they had a good time. The food smelled delicious. And tonight’s dinner was delicious.” Less has realized that there is no refrigerator at the retreat center, so everything has been bought today at the street market or picked from Rupali’s garden; everything is fresh simply because it must be. Even the coconut has been hand shredded by a congregant named Mary, an old woman in a sari who smiles at him every morning and brings his tea. Unless the picnicking stops! What an ass he is, everywhere he goes.

Rupali says: “I have a funny story about the dinner! This is the meal I used to bring to work when I taught French in the city. Every day, I took the train, and, you know, it is so hot! One day, there are no seats. So what do I do? I sit in on the stairs by the open doorway. Oh, it was so refreshing! Why did I not do this before? That was when I dropped my handbag right out the door!” She laughs, covering her mouth. “It was terrible! It had my school identification, my money, my lunch, everything. Disaster. Of course, the train could not stop, so I got out at the next station, and I hired a rickshaw to take me back. We were there for so long, searching for it on the train tracks! Then a policeman came out of a hut. I told him what had happened. He asked me to describe the contents. I said, ‘Sir, my identification, my wallet, my phone, my clean blouse, sir.’ He looked at me for a moment. Then he asked, ‘And fish curry?’ He showed me the handbag.” She laughs again in delight. “It was all covered inside with fish curry!”

Her laughter is so lovely; he cannot bear to tell her that this is no place to write. The noise, the creatures, the heat, the workers, the picnickers—it will be impossible to write his book here.

“And you, Arthur, you had a good day?” Rupali asks.

“Oh yes.” He has left out details of the barbershop he visited, in which he was shown to a windowless room behind a red curtain, where a short man in the pastor’s same shirt quickly dispensed with his beard (unasked) and the hair on the side of Less’s head, leaving only the blond wisp at the top, and then asked: “Massage?” This turned out to be a series of thumpings and slaps, a general pummeling, as if to extract military secrets, ending with four resounding wallops across the face. Why?

Rupali smiles and asks what else she can do for him.

“What I could really use is a drink.”

Her face darkens. “Oh, there is no alcohol allowed on church premises.”

“I’m just kidding, Rupali,” he says. “Where the heck would we get the ice?”

We will never know if she gets the joke, for at that moment, the lights go out.

The outage, like most partings, is not absolute; every few minutes, the power returns, only to be lost a moment later. What follows is one of those college theatrical productions in which the lights come up spasmodically, revealing the characters in various unexpected tableaux: Rupali clutching the arms of her chair, her lips pursed in concern like a surgeonfish; Arthur Less about to step into nirvana, mistaking a window for a door; Rupali openmouthed in a scream as she touches some paper fallen on her head that surely feels like a giant fruit bat; Arthur Less, having stepped through the correct portal this time, blindly fitting his toes into Rupali’s sandals; Rupali kneeling on the floor in prayer; Arthur Less out in the night, catching sight of a brand-new horror in the moonlight: the black-and-white dog trotting toward Less’s cottage, carrying in its mouth a long piece of medium blue fabric.

“My suit!” Less yells, stumbling downhill and kicking off the sandals. “My suit!”

He makes his way down toward the dog, and the lights go out again—revealing, nestled in the grass, a breathtaking constellation of glowworms ready for love—so Less can only feel his way into his own cottage, cursing, carelessly stepping barefoot across the tiles, and that is when he finds his sewing needle.

I recall Arthur Less, at a rooftop party, telling me his recurring dream:

“A parable, really,” he said, holding his beer to his chest. “I’m walking through a dark wood, like Dante, and an old woman comes up to me and says, ‘Lucky you, you’ve left it all behind you. You’re finished with love. Think of how much time you’ll have for more important things!’ And she leaves me, and I go on—I think I’m usually riding a horse at this point; it’s a very medieval dream. You aren’t in it, by the way, in case you’re getting bored.”

I replied I had my own dreams.

“And I keep riding through this dark wood and come out onto a large white plain with a mountain in the distance. And a farmer is there, and he waves at me, and he says sort of the same thing. ‘More important things ahead for you!’ And I ride up the mountain. I can tell you’re not listening. It gets really good. I ride up the mountain, and at the top is a cave and a priest—you know, like in a cartoon. And I say I’m ready. And he says for what? And I say to think about more important things. And he asks, ‘More important than what?’ ‘More important than love.’ And he looks at me like I’m crazy and says, ‘What could be more important than love?’”

We stood quietly as a cloud went over the sun and sent a chill across the roof. Less looked over the railing at the street below.

“Well, that’s my dream.”

Less opens his eyes to an image from a war movie—an army-green airplane propeller chopping briskly at the air—no, not a propeller. Ceiling fan. The whispering in the corner is, however, indeed Malayalam. Shadows are moving on the ceiling in a puppet play of life. And now they are speaking English. Bits of his dream are still glistening on the edges of everything, dew lit, evaporating. Hospital room.

He remembers his scream in the night, and the pastor running in (wearing only a dhoti and carrying his daughter), the kind man arranging for a church member to drive Less to the hospital in Thiruvananthapuram, Rupali’s worried good-bye, the long painful hours in the waiting room, whose only solace was a supernatural vending machine that produced, in change, more than it took in, the casting call of nurses—from seen-it-all-before battle-axes to pretty ingenues—before Less was allowed an X-ray of his right foot (beautiful archipelago of bones), which confirmed, alas, a fractured ankle and, buried deep in the pad of his foot, one half of a needle, at which point he received his first procedure—done by a female doctor with collagen lips who called his injury “bullshit” (“Why does this man have a sewing needle?”) and was unable to retrieve the object—and, that having failed, his foot now in a temporary splint, Less was assigned a hospital room, a chamber he shared with an elderly laborer who had spent twenty years in Vallejo, California, and had Spanish but not English, then was prepared for the next morning’s surgery, requiring a variety of gurney changes and anesthetic injections until he was finally thrust into a pristine operating theater whose motile X-ray machine allowed the surgeon (an affable man with a Hercule Poirot mustache) to produce for Less, within five minutes, and with the additional use of a pocket magnet, the trifling source of his injury (held before his eyes with tweezers), after which his foot was fitted into a bootlike splint and our protagonist was given a strong painkiller, which put him almost instantly into an exhausted sleep.

And now he is looking around the room and considering his situation. His paper gown is green as the Statue of Liberty’s, and his fracture is safe in its black plastic boot. His blue suit is presumably lining the den of some feral dog family. A portly nurse is busying herself with some paperwork in the corner, her bifocals giving her the appearance of the four-eyed fish (Anableps anableps) that can see both above and below water. He must have made noise; her head turns, and she shouts in Malayalam. Impressively, the result is that his mustachioed surgeon appears through the door, white coat swinging, smiling and gesturing at Less’s foot as a plumber might at a repaired kitchen sink.

“Mr. Less, you are awake! So now you will no longer set off the metal detectors, bing bing bing! We are all curious,” the doctor asks, leaning down. “Why does a man have a sewing needle?”

“To mend things. To put on missing buttons.”

“This is a great hazard in your profession?”

“Apparently a needle is a greater one.” Less feels he does not even sound like himself anymore. “When can I go back to the retreat, Doctor?”

“Oh!” he says, searching his pockets and producing an envelope. “The retreat has sent this for you.”

On the envelope is written: Very sorry. Less opens it, and out flutters a scrap of bright-blue fabric. Lost forever, then. Without the suit, there is no Arthur Less.

The doctor goes on: “The retreat has contacted your friend, who will come and pick you up momentarily.”

Less asks if this is Rupali or, perhaps, the pastor.

“Search me!” the doctor says, this Americanese standing out in his otherwise British English. “But you cannot return to the retreat, a place like that. Stairs! Climbing a hill! No, no, stay off the foot for three weeks at least. Your friend has accommodations. None of that American jogging!”

Cannot return? But—his book! A knock at the door as Less puzzles over where these new accommodations might be, but the answer is instantly provided as the door opens.

It is entirely possible that Less is in one of those Russian-doll dreams in which one awakens and yawns and gets out of one’s childhood bunk bed, and pets one’s long-dead dog, and greets one’s long-dead mother, only to realize it is yet another layer of dreaming, yet another wooden nightmare, and one must go through the heroic task of awakening all over again.

Because standing in the doorway can only be an image from a dream.

“Hello, Arthur. I’m here to take care of you.”

Or no, he must be dead. He is being taken from this drab-green purgatory to the special pit they have waiting for him. A little cottage above a flaming sea: the Artist Residency in Hell. The face retains its smile. And Arthur slowly, sadly, with growing acceptance of the divine comedy of his life, says the name you can by now well guess.

The driver works the horn like an outlaw at a gunfight. Stray dogs and goats leap from the road wearing guilty expressions, and people leap aside wearing innocent ones. Children stand by the roadside by the dozens, in matching red-checkered uniforms, some of them hanging from the limbs of banyan trees; school must have just gotten out. They stare at the sight of Less passing by. And all the time, he is listening to the constant bleating of the horn, the English pop music oozing like treacle from the speakers, and the soft voice of Carlos Pelu:

“…should have called me when you got here, lucky they found my note, and I said of course I’d take you in…”

Arthur Less, entranced by destiny, finds himself staring at that face he has known so well over the years. The particular Roman rudder of that nose, which used to be seen turning and turning in parties as it sought out this scrap of conversation, that eye across the room, those people leaving for a better party, the nose of Carlos Pelu, so striking in youth, unforgettable, and here in the car still holding up as perfectly as the carved teak figurehead of a ship that has been otherwise overhauled. His body has gone from sturdy youth to ample, august middle age. Not plump or chubby, not fat in the way Zohra proposed to grow fat, the carefree body that has at last been allowed to breathe; not happily, sexily, fuck-the-world fat. But majestically, powerfully, Pantagruelianally fat. A giant, a colossus: Carlos the Great.

Arthur, you know my son was never right for you.

“God, it’s good to see you!” Carlos squeezes his arm and gives him a grin full of childish mischief: “I hear you had a young man singing beneath your window in Berlin.”

“Where are we going?” Less asks.

“And did you have an affair? With a prince? Did you flee Italy under the cover of darkness? Tell me you were the Casanova of the Sahara.”

“Don’t be silly.”

“Maybe it was Turin, where a boy sang under your balcony. Hopelessly in love with you.”

“No one has ever been hopelessly in love with me.”

“No,” Carlos says. “You always gave them hope, didn’t you?” The bulky frame of their car vanishes momentarily, and they are standing with glasses of white wine on somebody’s lawn, young again. Wanting to dance with somebody. “I’ll tell you where we’re going. We’re headed to the resort. I told you it was close by.”

Of all the gin joints in all the world. “That’s kind of you, but maybe I should check into an Ayurvedic—”

“Don’t be silly. It’s an entire staffed resort, totally empty. We’re not opening for a month. You’ll love it—there’s an elephant!” Arthur thinks he means at the resort, but he follows Carlos’s gaze, and his heart stops. There, just ahead of them, so age spotted and dusty it seems at first to be a cartload of white rubber made from local trees, until they lift up, the ears, like the unfolding of feathers or membranes for flight, and it is unmistakably an elephant, sauntering down the street with a bushel of green bamboo in its trunk, tail lashing, turning now to stare, with its small unfathomable eyes, at those who are staring at it—Less recognizes the stare—as if to say: I’m not so strange as you.

“Oh my God!”

“Bigger temples keep one. We can get around him,” Carlos says, and, honking noisily, they do. Less turns his head to see the creature disappearing through the rear window, turning its head back and forth, lifting its burden, clearly aware of the commotion it is making and taking not a little joy in it. Then a crowd of men with limp Communist flags comes out of a building, smoking, and the unearthly vision is blocked.

“Listen, Arthur, I have an idea—ah, we’ve arrived,” Carlos says abruptly, and Less can feel more than see their sharp descent toward the ocean. “Before we say good-bye, I have two quick questions. Easy questions.” They pass through a gate; Less finds it hard to believe the driver is still honking.

“We’re saying good-bye?”

“Arthur, stop being so sentimental. At our age! I’ll be back in a few weeks, and we’ll celebrate your recovery. I have business. It’s a miracle we get this time together. The first is, you still have your letters from Robert?”

“My letters?” The honking stops, and the car comes to a halt. A young man in a green uniform approaches Less’s side.

“Come on, Arthur, do you or don’t you? I have a plane to catch.”

“I think so.”

“Bravo. And the other question is, have you heard from Freddy?”

Less feels the rush of hot air as the car door opens beside him. He looks and sees a handsome porter standing there, holding his aluminum crutches. He turns back to Carlos.

“Why would I hear from Freddy?”

“No reason. Keep yourself busy with your book until I get back, Arthur.”

“Is everything okay?”

Carlos gestures good-bye, and then Less is outside watching the grand white Ambassador toil its way uphill into the palms until nothing is left but the constant goosing of its horn.

He can hear the sea and the voice of the porter: “Mr. Less, some of your bags have arrived. They are already in your room.” But he is still staring at the palms in the wind.

Strange. It was said so casually that Less almost missed it. Sitting in the corner of the car and asking that simple question. It did not show in his face—Carlos kept the same expression of placid impatience as always—but Less could see him playing with a ring, turning and turning a lion-headed ring on his finger as his eye focused on wounded, aging, helpless Arthur Less. Less understands that the entire conversation was illusion, maya, chimera, and that Carlos’s real purpose was otherwise. But he cannot decode it. He shakes his head and smiles at the porter, taking his crutches and looking up at his new white prison. Something in the way his old friend asked it, some hidden track that only a careful listener, or one who has listened for so many years, would notice, and that no one would ever suspect of Carlos: Fear.

For a fifty-year-old man, the boredom of lying convalescent in bed is rivaled only by sitting in church. Less is given the Raja Suite and set up in the comfortable bed with a view of the ocean marred only by a thick beekeeper’s veil of mosquito net hanging from the ceiling. It is elegant, cool, well staffed, and stiflingly dull. How Less misses the mongoose. He misses Rupali and the picnickers, the battle of the bands, the pastor and the tailor and Elizabeth the yellow snake; he even misses Jesus Christ Our Savior. His only intrigue is with the porter, Vincent, who stops by every day to check in on our invalid: a clean-shaven tapered face and topaz eyes, the kind of bashful handsome man who has no idea he is handsome, and whenever Vincent pays a visit, Less prays for Jesus Christ Our Savior to extinguish his libido; the last thing he needs is a convalescent crush.

So the weeks pass in blank tedium, which turns out—finally—to be the perfect situation for Less, at last, to try to write.

It is like pouring water from an old leaking bucket into a shining new one; it feels almost suspiciously easy. He simply takes a gloomy event in the plot—say, a market owner dying of cancer—and inverts it, having Swift, out of pity, accept seven fragrant rounds of cheese, which he will then have to carry around San Francisco, growing more rank, throughout the rest of the chapter. In the sordid scene in which Swift takes a bag of cocaine to the hotel bathroom, cutting out a line on the counter, Less merely adds a motion-activated hand dryer and—whirr! A blizzard of indignity! All it takes is a pail thrown out a window, an open manhole, a banana peel. “Are we losers?” Swift asks of his lover at the end of their ruined vacation, and Less gleefully adds the response: “Well, baby, we sure ain’t winners.” With a joy bordering on sadism, he degloves every humiliation to show its risible lining. What sport! If only one could do this with life!

He finds himself awakening at dawn, when the sea is brightening but the sun still struggles in its bedclothes, and sits down to lash his protagonist a few more times with his authorial whip. And somehow, a bittersweet longing starts to appear in the novel that was never there before. It changes, grows kinder. Less, as with a repentant worshipper, begins again to love his subject, and at last, one morning, after an hour sitting with his chin in his hand, watching birds cross the gray haze of the horizon, our benevolent god grants his character the brief benediction of joy.

Finally, one afternoon, Vincent arrives and asks, “Please, how is your foot?” Less says he can now walk around without crutches. “Good,” Vincent says. “And now, please, Arthur, get ready for an exceptional outing.” Less asks, teasingly, where are they going together? Perhaps Vincent is at last going to show him some of India. But no; the man blushes and replies: “I, alas, am not going together.” He says they are offering this exceptional outing to guests when the resort opens. A buzzing outside; he looks out the window to see a speedboat, helmed by two expressionless teens, approaching the dock. Vincent helps as Less limps to the boat and shakily boards. The engine starts with a tiger’s roar.

The boat ride is half an hour, during which Less sees leaping dolphins and flying fish skipping like stones over the water, as well as the floating mane of a jellyfish. He recalls an aquarium he visited as a boy, where, after enjoying a sea turtle that swam breaststroke like a dotty old aunt, he encountered a jellyfish, a pink frothing brainless negligeed monster pulsing in the water, and thought with a sob: We are not in this together. They arrive, at last, at an island of white sand no bigger than a city block, with two coconut palms and small purple flowers. Less steps ashore gingerly and makes his way to the shade. More dolphins leap in a darkening ocean. An airplane underlines the moon. It is unmistakably paradise—until Less turns around to see the boat departing. Castaway. Is it possible this is some final plot of Carlos’s? To imprison him in a room for weeks and only now, when he is one chapter away from finishing his novel, abandon him on a desert island? It is a New Yorker cartoon fate. Less appeals to the setting sun: He gave up Freddy! He gave him up willingly; he even stayed away from the wedding. He has suffered enough, all on his own; he is crippled, uniplegic, forsaken, and bereft of his magic suit. He has nothing left to take away, our gay Job. He drops to his knees in the sand.

A nagging hum from behind him. When he looks around, he sees another speedboat headed his way.

“Arthur, I have an idea,” Carlos tells him after dinner. Carlos’s assistants have made a quick campfire and grilled them two harlequined fish they speared along the reef, and Less and Carlos are sitting down among cushions to share a bottle of cold champagne.

Carlos reclines on one of the spangled cushions; he is wearing a white caftan. “When you get home, I want you to find all your correspondence about the Russian River School. From all the men we knew. The important ones, Robert and Ross and Franklin in particular.”

Less, caught awkwardly between two pillows, struggles to right himself and wonders, Why?

“I want to buy them from you.”

Above the slow washing-machine sound of the surf comes a series of plops that must be a fish. The moon is high overhead, wrapped in a haze, casting a gauzy glow over everything and spoiling the view of the stars.

Carlos stares intently at Less in the firelight. “Everything you’ve got. How many do you think there are?”

“I’ve…I don’t know. I’d have to look. Dozens, you know. But they’re personal.”

“I want personal. I’m building a collection. They’re back in style now, that whole era. There are college courses all about it. And we knew them. We were part of history, Arthur.”

“I’m not sure we were part of history.”

“I want to get everything together in a collection, the Carlos Pelu Collection. I have a university interested; they can maybe name a room in the library after me. Did Robert write you any poems?”

“The Carlos Pelu Collection.”

“You like the sound of it? You’d make the collection complete. A love poem of Robert’s for you.”

“He didn’t write that way.”

“Or that painting by Woodhouse. I know you need money,” Carlos says quietly.

And so here is the plan: for Carlos to take everything. To take his pride, to take his health and his sanity, to take Freddy, and now, at last, to take even his memories, his souvenirs, away. There will be nothing left of Arthur Less.

“I’m doing okay.”

The fire, made of coconut shells, finds a particularly delicious morsel and flames up in delight, lighting both of their faces. They are not young, not at all; there is nothing left of the boys they used to be. Why not sell his letters, his keepsakes, his paintings, his books? Why not burn them? Why not give up on the whole business of life?

“Do you remember that afternoon on the beach? You were still seeing that Italian…,” Carlos says.

“Marco.”

He laughs. “Oh my God, Marco! He was afraid of the rocks and made us go sit with the straight people. Remember?”

“Of course I remember. That’s when I met Robert.”

“I think about that day a lot. Of course, we didn’t know it was a big storm out in the Pacific, that we were out of our minds to be on the beach! It was incredibly dangerous. But we were young and stupid, weren’t we?”

“That we can agree on.”

“Sometimes I think about all the men we knew on that beach.”

Little parts of the memory light up now in Less’s brain, including Carlos standing on a rock and staring at the sky, his trim and muscled body doubled in the tide pool below. The fire crackles, throwing helicoids of sparks into the air. Other than the fire and the sea, there is no other sound.

“I never hated you, Arthur,” Carlos says.

Less stares into the fire.

“It was always envy. I hope you understand that.”

A mob of tiny translucent crabs crosses the sand, making a break for the water.

“Arthur, I’ve got a theory. Now, hear me out. It’s that our lives are half comedy and half tragedy. And for some people, it just works out that the first entire half of their lives is tragedy and then the second half is comedy. Me, for example. Look at my shitty youth. A poor kid come to the big city—maybe you never knew, but, God, it was hard for me. I just wanted to get somewhere. Thank God I met Donald, but him getting sick, and dying—and then suddenly I had a son on my hands. The ass-kicking work it took to turn his business into what I’ve got. Forty years of serious, serious stuff.

“But look at me now—comedy! Fat! Rich! Ridiculous! Look at how I’m dressed—in a caftan! I was such an angry young man—I had so much to prove; now there’s money and laughter. It’s wonderful. Let’s open the other bottle. But you. You had comedy in your youth. You were the ridiculous one then, the one everyone laughed at. You just walked into everything, like someone blindfolded. I’ve known you longer than most of your friends, and I’ve certainly watched you more closely. I am the world’s leading expert on Arthur Less. I remember when we met. You were so skinny, all clavicle and hip bone! And innocent. The rest of us were so far from being innocent, I don’t think we even thought about pretending. You were different. I think everybody wanted to touch that innocence, maybe ruin it. Your way of going through the world, unaware of danger. Clumsy and naive. Of course I envied you. Because I could never be that; I’d stopped being that when I was a kid. If you’d asked me a year ago, six months ago, I would have said, yes, Arthur, the first half of your life was comedy. But you’re deep into the tragic half now.”

Carlos picks up the champagne bottle to refill Less’s glass. “What’s that?” Less asks. “The tragic—”

“But I’ve changed my mind.” Carlos plows on. “You know Freddy does an imitation of you? You’ve never seen it? Oh, you’ll like it.” Carlos has to get up for this one—an elaborate movement requiring him to brace himself against the palm. It is possible he is drunk. Even as he does this, he retains the same regal hauteur as when he used to pace a swimming pool like a panther. And in one nimble movement, he becomes Arthur Less: tall, awkward, bug eyed, knock kneed, and wearing a terrified grin; even his hair seems to be brushed up in that comic-book-sidekick hairstyle Less has always worn. He speaks in a loud, slightly hysterical voice:

“I got this suit in Vietnam! It’s summer-weight wool. I wanted linen, but the lady said no, it’ll wrinkle, what you want is summer-weight wool, and you know what? She was right!”

Less sits there for a moment and then chuckles in astonishment. “Well,” he says, “summer-weight wool. At least Freddy was listening.”

Carlos laughs, loses the pose, and becomes his old self again, leaning against a palm, and it flashes across his face again, briefly, the expression Less noticed in the car. Fear. Desperation. About something other than these “letters.” “So what do you say, Arthur? Sell them to me.”

“No, Carlos. No.”

Carlos turns from the fire, cursing his son.

Less says, “Freddy has nothing to do with this.”

Carlos looks out at the moonlight on the water. “You know, Arthur, my son’s not like me. Once I asked him why he was so lazy. I asked him what the hell he wanted. He couldn’t tell me. So I decided for him.”

“Let’s back up a minute.”

Carlos turns to look down at Less. “You really haven’t heard?” It must be the moonlight—that couldn’t be tenderness in his face.

“What was that about the tragic half?” Less asks.

Carlos smiles as if he has decided something. “Arthur, I changed my mind. You have the luck of a comedian. Bad luck in things that don’t matter. Good luck in things that do. I think—you probably won’t agree with this—but I think your whole life is a comedy. Not just the first part. The whole thing. You are the most absurd person I’ve ever met. You’ve bumbled through every moment and been a fool; you’ve misunderstood and misspoken and tripped over absolutely everything and everyone in your path, and you’ve won. And you don’t even realize it.”

“Carlos.” He doesn’t feel victorious; he feels defeated. “My life, my life over the past year—”

“Arthur Less,” Carlos interrupts, shaking his head. “You have the best life of anyone I know.”

This is nonsense to Less.

Carlos looks into the fire, then tosses back the rest of his champagne. “I’m heading back to shore; I’ve got to leave early tomorrow. Make sure you give Vincent your flight details. To Japan, right? Kyoto? We want to make sure you get home safe. I’ll see you in the morning.” And with that, he strides off across the island to where his boat waits in moonlight.

But Less does not see Carlos in the morning. His own boat takes him back to the resort, where he stays up late looking at the stars, recalling the lawn outside his cottage and how it shimmered with glowworms, and he sees one particular constellation that looks like the stuffed squirrel named Michael he had as a boy, who was left behind in a Florida hotel room. Hello, Michael! He goes to bed very late, and when he does get up, he finds that Carlos has already left. He wonders what it is he is meant to have won.

For a seven-year-old boy, the boredom of sitting in church is rivaled only by sitting in an airport lounge. This particular boy has been sitting with his Sunday-school book in his lap—a set of Bible stories with wildly inconsistent illustration styles—and staring at a picture of Daniel’s lion. How he wishes it were a dragon. How he wishes his mother had not confiscated his pen. It is a long stone room with a white wood ceiling; perhaps two hundred sandals are arrayed outside on the grass. Everyone is in their best clothes; his are exquisitely hot. Fans above nod back and forth, spectators at the tennis match of God and Satan. The boy hears the parson talking; he can think only of the parson’s daughter who, while only three, has completely captured his heart. He looks over, and she is on her mother’s lap; she looks back and blinks. But even more interesting is the window behind her, opening onto the road, where a white Tata is stuck in traffic, and there, clearly visible in its open window: the American!

How incredible, he wants to tell everybody, but of course he’s forbidden to speak; it is driving him as mad as the parson’s temptress daughter. The American, the one from the airport, in the same beige linen as before. All around him, vendors are walking from car to car with hot food wrapped in paper, water, and sodas, and everywhere horns are musically honking. It feels like a parade. The American leans his head out the window, presumably to check the traffic, and then, for one, brief moment, his eyes meet those of the boy. What is contained in that blue gaze, the boy cannot comprehend. They are the eyes of a castaway. Headed to Japan. Then the invisible obstacle is removed, traffic begins to move forward, the American pulls himself back into the shadow of the car, and he is gone.