The Names

The Desert
11

In this vast space, which seems like nothing so much as a container for emptiness, we sit with our documents always ready, wondering if someone will appear and demand to know who we are, someone in authority, and to be unprepared is to risk serious things.The terminal at each end is full of categories of inspection to which we must submit, impelling us toward a sense of inwardness, a sense of smallness, a self-exposure we are never prepared for no matter how often we take this journey, the buried journey through categories and definitions and foreign languages, not the other, the sunlit trip to the east which we thought we'd decided to make. The decision we'd unwittingly arrived at is the one that brings us through passport control, through the security check and customs, the one that presents to us the magnetic metal detector, the baggage x-ray machine, the currency declaration, the customs declaration, the cards for embarkation and disembarkation, the flight number, the seat number, the times of departure and arrival.It does no good to say, as I've done a hundred times, it's just another plane trip, I've made a hundred. It's just another terminal, another country, the same floating seats, the documents of admission, the proofs and identifications.Air travel reminds us who we are. It's the means by which we recognize ourselves as modern. The process removes us from the world and sets us apart from each other. We wander in the ambient noise, checking one more time for the flight coupon, the boarding pass, the visa. The process convinces us that at any moment we may have to submit to the force that is implied in all this, the unknown authority behind it, behind the categories, the languages we don't understand. This vast terminal has been erected to examine souls.It is not surprising, therefore, to see men with submachine guns, to see vultures squatting on the baggage vehicles set at the end of the tarmac in the airport in Bombay when one arrives after a night flight from Athens.All of this we choose to forget. We devise a counter-system of elaborate forgetfulness. We agree on this together. And out in the street we see how easy it is, once we're immersed in the thick crowded paint of things, the bright clothes and massed brown faces. But the experience is no less deep because we've agreed to forget it.Late in the day I walked with Anand Dass in the streets near my hotel. He looked heavier, moving through the soft air in a Michigan State t-shirt and faded jeans. He kept taking my arm as we crossed streets and I wondered why this seemed so curiously apt. Could these drivers be worse than Greeks? I was woozy from lack of sleep, that was all, and it probably showed."Seeing to details. Mainly interviewing people. My boss has already set things in motion.”"So this is new territory," he said."South Asia and so on. This will be a regional headquarters, separate from Athens once we get it going.”"But you're not coming out permanently.”"Do you need a listener? Someone to talk to about the life and travels of Owen Brademas?”"This is precisely the fact." Clutching my forearm and laughing. "The man inspires comment, you know.”"How many times did you see him?”"He stayed with us. Three days. And three letters since. I didn't know I cared for the man. But I read his letters again and again. My wife was fascinated by him. The worst field director in my experience. This is Owen. He digs like an amateur.”Under a movie billboard we passed a group of North Americans in saffron robes and running shoes, their heads shaved. They stood by a sound truck handing out booklets. What could I say? They looked deeply surprised in their baldness and blotched skin, amazed to be who they were, to be real and here. The loudspeaker carried flute music and chanting voices through the noise and fumes of the yellow-top taxis."What are you teaching?”"I am teaching the Greeks. I am looking at Hellenistic and Roman influences on Indian sculpture. Not a large subject but interesting. Figures of Buddha. I am getting very interested in figures of Buddha. I want to go to Kabul to see the Buddha of the Great Miracle.”"You don't want to go to Kabul, Anand.”"It's a transitional Buddha.”"You know who you sound like.”"Owen is in Lahore now. I sound just like him, don't I? Do you go there at all?”"I go everywhere twice. Once to get the wrong impression, once to strengthen it.”"Do you want to see him? I'll give you an address.”"No. It will only depress me.”"Let me give you an address. He went to Lahore to learn Kharoshthi script.”I tried to think of something funny to say. Anand laughed and grabbed my arm and we hurried across the street toward the Gateway of India, where people were gathering as night fell, street musicians, beggars, vendors of fruit drinks and sweets."Do you have plans then?”"I find I'm ready to go almost anywhere and just as ready to stay where I am.”"This is a strange profession. Risk analysis. Your local man will be kept very busy. Believe it.”"I like the idea of someone saying to me, West Africa.' Not that I'd necessarily accept. But I like the immensity of it. The immensity of landscape, of possibility. It's bizarre, how opened up my life has become. 'Think about it,' they'll say. But there's nothing to think about. That's what's odd.”We walked through one of the archways and stood above the sea steps. A small girl followed with a baby in her arms. The crowd slowly grew."You should spend more time in India.”"No. Four days. That's enough.”"Tomorrow you'll come to dinner. Rajiv will want to hear about Tap. He received a letter, you know. Written in Ob.”The soft air made me sad."And we'll talk, you and I, about Owen.”Soft and moist, a hanging heat. People still came, talking, looking out to sea. They stood around the horn player, the man with the hand drums. There were sellers of invisible commodities, names whispered in the dark. Children kept appearing from the edges, silently crossing some margin or dividing line, cradling the shriveled infants. People drifted toward the Gateway from the street along the sea wall, from the inner streets, the edges, to stand in the warm night together and wait for a breeze. The sound of bicycle bells stuck briefly to the air.Everything clings.

She came at me with the potato peeler, wearing my L.L. Bean chamois cloth shirt, forest green, with long tuck-in tails. I stood there half embarrassed. It was in her face, absolutely, that she would kill me. A rage that will astonish me forever. I evaded the lunge, then stood thoughtfully against the cabinet, my hands tucked into my pants, thumbs showing, like a quarterback on a cold day, waiting to rehuddle.

Ann and Lindsay came down the steps of the British Council, carrying sacks of apples and books. I hailed them from a parkside table in the square. We ordered coffee and watched stooped-over people call their destinations into the windows of passing cabs.Lindsay carried fiction, Ann biography. I lifted an apple from one of the bags and took a lusty bite. It made them smile and I wondered if they interpreted the act as I'd instinctively meant it, meant it in a totally unformed way. To be back again among familiar things and people, alive to the levels of friendship a man enjoys with married women of a certain kind, the wives he is half in love with. Somewhere in the theft and biting of an apple there are elements of innocent erotic wishfulness and other things hard to name."There's a new wall slogan I've been seeing," Lindsay said. "With a date attached?”"Greece is risen," Ann said. "And the date is the date the colonels took power. Sometime in sixty-seven.”"Four twenty-one. Or twenty-one four, as they do it here.”"Then there's the other side of the argument. Was it three weeks ago? Someone killed the head of the riot police.”"I must have missed that," I said."They killed his driver too. Another date. Charles said the assassins left a calling card. November seventeen. Students against the dictatorship. That was seventy-three, I think.”"David's in Turkey again.”This distracted remark, a remark that seemed to drift away from us, so softly spoken and bare, a remark that Lindsay made as an automatic response to talk of violence, prompted us to change the subject. I told them about a letter I'd received from Tap. He liked the sound the water made in the shower when it hit the plastic lining of the shower curtain. That was the letter.Lindsay said David's kids sent videotapes. She also said she had a class to teach and hurried off after the first cup of coffee.We knew what we wanted to discuss but waited a long moment, allowing Lindsay's departure to become complete. A crouched man jogged alongside a taxi, answering the driver's hand-twisting gesture with the name of some district to the north."I saw him yesterday," Ann said. "He called and we had a drink.”"I knew he'd get in touch.”"He's been away. Tried to call me apparently. He was in London.”"See? Business. That's all.”"Yes. They're moving there. The whole region apparently.”"I thought it might be that.”"So I suppose that will be the end of that. A relief actually. Doubly so.”"Also a reversal.”"Yes, I'm the one who's supposed to be dragged off to yet another distant posting. Torn from the arms of love. I'm almost overwhelmed by relief. Go to London, go to Sydney. What a surprise it is, to feel this way. Why is it I have to discover these things as I go along? As events wheel about me like buzzards? Why don't I know, in advance, just once, how I'll feel about a certain thing? I hate surprises. I'm too old. I want to wear a housecoat for the rest of my life.”"It'll take more than that.”"Shut up.”"You'll need to thicken your ankles and wear slippers without backs or sides. You'll need to be blowzy. Thirty pounds heavier. A little bloated, a little unkempt.”"My inner nature," she said. "Wearing flip-flops. It's perfect.”"Standing around ruddy-faced, all your weight on one leg, your hip jutting out.”"Don't look at my hands. I have old fingers.”"It was all conversation. That's all. He's a decent man. His flaws are part of a moral seriousness. Even when he was being completely unreasonable, I had to admire him for it and like him for it. Maybe he had some private suspicions he wanted cleared up. That's all. Talk. His true mission in life.”"Did you tell Charles about us?”"Yes.”"I thought you might have.”"It wasn't an easy position I was in. It never has been. I wanted to shock him a little. Make it real to him, dispel the fog he was disappearing into. I didn't like knowing something he didn't know about his own wife.”"Anyway, that's that.”"We need Lindsay to help us understand all this. She wouldn't have to comment. Only sit and gaze.”"Already I begin to see what an odd match we were.”"Happens all the time.”" 'What do they see in each other?' “"But isn't there something rich and living in all these entanglements, the way we've mingled our lives, all of us, chaotically or not?”"Thank God for books," she said.Biography. It was time I was getting to the office. We said goodbye at the corner, taking each other's hands in the way people do who want to press gladness into the flesh at the end of an uncertain time. Then I crossed the street and headed west.Silent. The rotor wash. The rippling trees. Dust spinning around them. Their hair and clothes blowing. The frenzy.

The room with its stone hearth, marble font, its ferns and fan palms and village rugs was devised by Lindsay to make her husband feel he had put behind him, at least for a time, all airports and travel. At regular intervals she apologized for the size of the place. The marble balustrade on the terrace, the glass wall producing a sunset, the ship painting from Hydra still unhung in a corner. Too large, she'd say, letting her hands swing out. Too long, too tall, too grand. Not one of life's pressing dilemmas, we reply. But we have to remember that queasiness of this kind has always been a form of middle-class grace, especially when it arises from a feeling of privilege that is binding, privilege that does not allow easy denial, and Lindsay had arrived here, the new young wife, some weeks after David found the apartment. The place made her uneasy. It made her feel, among other things, that whatever risks David ran in places like Lebanon and Turkey were connected to the size of this room.He was playing his collection of Pacific Jazz records, a nice relic of the fifties with their original cover paintings, the odd cello and flute. Roy Hardeman showed up, here for two days of meetings and wearing new glasses, oversized and squarish. We decided we'd have one more drink and go to dinner. An early night, Lindsay said. We needed an early night.Hardeman's attitude, as uninvited guest, was one of temporary deference, a studious waiting for the host, the hostess, the good friend to approach some topic that might give him a chance to reason and speak competitively. He didn't have to wait long.David said, "I keep reading about tribes or hordes or peoples who came sweeping out of Central Asia. What is it about Central Asia that makes us want to say that people came sweeping out of it?”"I don't know," I said."Why don't we say the Macedonians came sweeping out of Europe? They did. Alexander in particular. But we don't say that. Or the Romans or the Crusaders.”"Do you think it's a racist term?" Hardeman said."White people established empires. Dark people came sweeping out of Central Asia.”"What about the Aryans?" Hardeman said. "We don't say the Aryans came sweeping out of Central Asia. They filtered down, they migrated or they simply arrived.”"Exactly. This is because the Aryans were light-skinned. Light-skinned people filter down. Dark people come sweeping out. The Turks came sweeping out. The Mongols. The Bactrians. They came in waves. Wave after wave.”"All right. But your original premise is that Central Asia is a place out of which people come sweeping. Now is it only dark people who come sweeping out of Central Asia or is it simply that Central Asia is a place out of which people of any color might come sweeping, with the exception of the Aryans? Are we talking about race, language or geography?”"I think there's something about Central Asia that makes us want to say that people came sweeping out of it but there is also the fact that these people tend to be dark-skinned. You can't separate the two things.”"We've separated the Aryans," Hardeman said. "And what about the Huns? Certainly the Huns came sweeping out of Central Asia.”"What color were the Huns?" David said."They weren't light, they weren't dark.”"I should have had this conversation with someone else.”"Sorry.”"I felt I'd perceived something important and interesting, all on my own, you son of a bitch.”"Well you probably did. I'm not sure of my facts really.”"Yes you are.”"Actually I am.”"Of course you are.”"But it's an interesting premise," Hardeman said."Fuck you.”We went to dinner in an old mansion near the U.S. embassy. Hardeman was inhaling short Scotches. The perfect part in his hair, the geometric glasses and three-piece suit seemed the achievements of a systematic self-knowledge. This was the finished thing. He was physically compact, worked neatly into well-cut clothes, and nothing attached to him that had not been the subject of meticulous inner testing."Karen was saying-listen to this, Lindsay-that you both have to come and stay with us in London, soon as we're settled.”"Good. In the spring.”"In the fall would be better. We have to find a nanny.”"But you don't have children," she said."My original kids.”"I didn't know you had original kids.”"My first marriage.”"I didn't know," she said."They'll spend the summer. Karen's looking forward to finding a nanny.”David sat quietly, surrounding a beer, still unhappy over the earlier conversation."I saw Andreas not too long ago," I said. "We had a dinner of brains and lower organs.”"A good man," Hardeman said. "Bright, analytical.”"What does he do for the firm?”"Sales rep. A hard worker. They love him in Bremen. Speaks German well. They tried very hard to talk him into staying.”I let a silence fall over this last remark. We ordered beer all around. When the food came we examined each other's dishes. After some discussion Lindsay and I traded plates."Have they told you," Hardeman said, "how Karen used to spend her evenings?”I said I wasn't sure. Karen used to spend her evenings sitting on a stool near the right-field line in Fulton County Stadium, Atlanta, Georgia, running down foul balls hit that way by National League stalwarts. She was sixteen years old, a golden girl on grassy turf, hair reaching her waist. He met her six years later in a revolving restaurant."I thought it was the left-field line," David said."Right-field.”"She told me left.”"Couldn't have been left. It was left-handed hitters she feared most. Who was active then? You're the expert. Give us some names.”David went back to his curry. When we finished the beer, Hardeman ordered another scotch. And when he asked where the men's room was, I said I was heading that way myself.The only water was cold. We stood with our backs to each other. I held my hands under the tap, talking over my shoulder to Hardeman, who was at the urinal."Did I understand you to say that Andreas is leaving the firm?”"Correct.”"I thought I understood he was moving on to London with other key people in the region.”"Not so.”"He wants to stay in Athens then.”"I don't know what he wants.”"Is he looking for a job, do you know? Has he said anything to you at all?”"Why would he? We don't interact at that level. I'm in manufacturing.”"I'd be interested in finding out what his plans are. It would only take a phone call.”"Make it," he said."I wonder if you'd do it for me. Not to Andreas. Someone in the sales department or personnel.”He was finished at the urinal and slowly wheeled in my direction. I turned my head toward the blank wall in front of me."Why should I?" he said."I'd like to know why he left, who he plans to work for. If he doesn't have plans for a new job, I'd be interested in knowing why. I'd also like to know if he intends to remain in Athens." I paused, letting the water run over my hands. "It could be important.”"Who do you work for?" Hardeman said."I'm sure David's told you.”"Does he know?”"Of course he knows. Look, I can't go into details. I'll only say Andreas may have a sideline. He may be connected to something besides air cooling systems in Bremen.”"Andreas was a valuable member of the firm. Why should I involve myself in an unauthorized read-out? We work for the same people. And if he's chosen to leave, he may also choose to return someday.”"What do you know about him that may not be in his personnel file? Anything at all. One thing.”"It's not his identity I have doubts about.”"Very funny.”"I don't mean it to be. Sure, David's mentioned political risk insurance. He's also mentioned the scrambled telexes he occasionally sends your way, unscrambled, which I told him I thought was unconscionable, regardless of content, regardless of friendship. I may not know anything about Andreas' private life or his politics but I know the firm he's worked for these last three or four years. What do I know about you?”What could I say, we were fellow Americans? I felt foolish, staring at the wall, my hands turning in the stream of water. My attempt to learn something was less useful than the dumbest amateur's because this is what an amateur enjoys, a men's room meeting with clipped dialogue. I wasn't even good at clipped dialogue.He was waiting to wash his hands.The news that Andreas was not going to London would lurk vaguely in my mind in the days to come like the knowledge of some unpleasantness whose exact nature will not surface when one tries to recall it. Maybe London was his clumsy way of ending the affair with Ann, inventing a distance between them. Maybe the story revolved around her. It was all part of the same thing, that rapt entanglement I'd spoken to her about a couple of days earlier (only to be made fun of). The world is here, the world is where I want to be."We promised ourselves an early night," Lindsay said.Hardeman ordered another drink. He described the house he was renting in Mayfair. He spoke slowly but very clearly and his sentences began to extend into an elaborate and self-conscious correctness, a latticework of clauses, pure grammar. Drunk.He and I shared the back seat in David's car. We hadn't gone two blocks when he dropped off to sleep. It was like the death of a machine-tooled part. At a red light David looked at me in the rearview mirror."I have an idea. Are you ready for this? Because it's one of the great ideas of my career. Maybe the greatest. I started thinking about it during dinner when I saw how much he was drinking. It came to me then. And it's developing, refining itself even as we sit here waiting for the light to change. I think we can bring it off, boy, if we're cunning enough, if we really want to do it.”"We're cunning enough," Lindsay said, "but we don't want to do it.”The idea was to put Hardeman on a plane to some distant city. There was a flight at 3:50 a.m. to Tehran, for instance, on KLM. He wouldn't need a visa to get on the plane. He would only need a visa to get out of the terminal once he was there. This was beyond our purview, David said. All we wanted to do was send him somewhere. We'd need his passport, which David was certain he'd be carrying, and a ticket, which David would purchase with one of his credit cards.We passed my building. A moment or two later we passed their building. Lindsay stared into the window on her side."Once we have the ticket," David said, "we come back out to the car and get him on his feet and walk him between us into the terminal. We get him a seat in the nonsmoking area, which I'm sure he'll appreciate upon reflection, and then we face our biggest problem, which is how to get him through passport control.”Lindsay began to laugh, a little warily."By this time he is probably semiconscious. He can walk but can't think. If we stick the boarding pass, ticket and passport in his fist, it's possible he can make it past the booth through habit alone. But what happens then? We can't follow him through passport control. It's too much to expect that he'll look at the boarding pass and walk automatically to the right gate.”I told him there was a simple solution. We were on the airport road, doing a hundred kilometers, and he looked at me in the mirror, briefly, to make sure I was serious."Breathtakingly simple," I said. "All we have to do is buy two tickets. One of us takes him through the entire process, right to his seat on the plane.”Lindsay thought this was very funny. It could work after all. There was a huskiness in her laugh, the slightly surprised dawning of the idea that she was mean enough to want it to work."Then the one who accompanies him simply turns around and goes down the ramp and gets back on the shuttle bus, feigning illness. They'll cancel the ticket. It won't cost a dime.”David whispered, "Of course, of course.”I felt all along we wouldn't do it. It was too grand, too powerful. And as many times as I'd traveled with a visa, I didn't know whether he was right about that. I thought they examined visas at the airline counter before issuing boarding passes. But David kept on driving, kept on talking, and Lindsay began to sag in her seat as if to hide from the enormity of it all. Tehran. They would think he'd come to hold a service for the hostages.In the end we couldn't even get him out of the car. He kept hitting his head, falling away from us, limbs floppy. It was interesting to see the concentration in David's face. He viewed the formless Hardeman as a problem in surfaces, how and where to grip. He tugged at him, he wrestled. The door-opening was small and oddly shaped and David's considerable bulk was a problem in itself. He tried kneeling on the front seat and scooping Hardeman out to me. He tried a number of things. He was completely involved in the idea, the vision. He wanted to send this man to another place.

The figure appeared in a blizzard, moving toward the house from the other side of the park, a skier in bright banded colors coming in diagonal stride, the only clear shape in that dead-even light, a world without shadow, a winter's worth of snow on the streets and cars and laid over the park benches and the bird bath in the yard, the skier digging in, working across that dreamlike space, red-hooded, masked.You can't walk down Bay Street and pick out the Americans from the Canadians. They are alien beings in our midst, waiting for a signal. This is the science-fiction theme (SF for semi-facetious). They're in the schools, teaching our children, subtly and even unintentionally promoting their own values- values they assume we share. The theme of the corruption of the innocent. Their crime families have footholds in our cities -drugs, pornography, legitimate businesses-and their pimps from Buffalo and Detroit work both sides of the border, keeping the girls in motion. The theme of expansionism, of organized criminal infiltration. They own the corporations, the processing plants, the mineral rights, a huge share of the Canadian earth. The colonialist theme, the theme of exploitation, of greatest possible utilization. They are right next to us, sending their contaminants, their pollutants, their noxious industrial waste into our rivers, lakes and air. The theme of power's ignorance and blindness and contempt. We are in the path of their television programs, their movies and music, the whole enormous rot and glut and blare of their culture. The theme of cancer and its spread.I stood in the window as she removed the skis and carried them up the steps. The sight of her cutting through that blown snow, appearing out of the invisible city around us, the craft and mystery of it filled me with deep delight.

George Rowser stepped out of the elevator at the Hilton in Lahore, looking pale and rumpled. He put his briefcase down, setting it between his feet, then used both hands to adjust his glasses, raising the hands toward his face, fingers extended, palms turned toward each other, in a gesture that started out as a blessing of multitudes. When he saw me in a lobby chair he walked toward the coffee shop, pigeon-toed. We ordered Kipling burgers and fresh fruit juice. Gatherings of more than six people were forbidden."Why am I here, George?”"Where were you?”"Islamabad.”"So I wanted to talk. It's not as though you were on the other side of the world.”"Couldn't we talk on the phone?”"Be smart," he said. "In addition to which, this city has architecture. Go look at the public buildings. What would you call this architecture? Gothic, Victorian-what else, Punjabi? Why do I have the impression you know things like this?”"Maybe it's Moghul. Or Moghul-influenced. I don't know really.”"Whatever, it's a nice blend. A very happy blend. Who were the Moghuls?”"They came sweeping out of Central Asia.”Four or five ballpoint pens stuck out of the breast pocket of his suit coat. His briefcase was under the table, upright, wedged between his calves. I waited for him to tell me what he wanted to talk about."I'm getting a remote ignition device put in my car. They stick a thing on the trunk. I can start the car while I'm in the kitchen boiling an egg." He looked out into the lobby. "If it blows up, the egg tastes that much better.”"Nice. What about tear gas ducts?”"I do defensive measures only. Are you kidding? The parent would be upset if they found out I was loading a vehicle with incapacitators. Not that it matters anymore.”"What do you mean?”"I'm seriously thinking I may resign, Jim.”The fact that he used my name seemed almost as important as the statement that preceded it. Was he saying one thing or two?"Choice? Or are they forcing you out?”"There are pressures," he said. "Developments no one could have foreseen. Never mind details. I think it may be time, that's all. I need a change. We all need a change now and then.”"What kind of pressures? From the parent?”A little bored. "The parent is a collector. They acquire companies, they adjust, they seek a balance. We're one of the companies, that's all. They look at the profit curve. That's all they know from.”"What do they see when they look at this curve?”"What they lose one year in insurance they gain in consumer products or manufacturing. They diversify to minimize risk. You and I work at risk but not in the same sense the parent knows the word. The parent knows the word in a limited sense.”"What did Iran do to us?”"Limited coverage. Plus reinsurance. But we got hurt like everybody else. Who could predict? I don't know anyone who predicted. A haunting failure. They're still straggling onto the beach in Greece. Like the Lebanon thing earlier. We picked the right place for our headquarters. That's one thing we did.”Hamburgers for dinner. This was Rowserlike. Skip lunch, bolt dinner, go to bed, remembering to secure all systems."What's happening in your life, George, outside the Northeast Group?”"I have to wear white socks. My doctor says I'm allergic to dye.”"Tension. You ought to change your wardrobe completely. You look like an assistant principal of the 1950s in a high school on the wrong side of town. Get one of those knee-length shirts the men wear here. And some loose trousers.”"They're throwing away their London suits to wear traditional things. You know what that means, don't you?”"Our lives are in danger.”"How's your burger?" he said.He suggested we get a car and driver and take a ride before dark. There was a mausoleum he wanted to see. I watched him go to the desk to make arrangements. He walked in a block of heavy air, a personal zone in which movement was difficult, breathing slightly labored. Every space he inhabited seemed enclosed. There was a basic containment or frustration. His compulsive secrecy, the taking of endless precautions would explain some of this, of course. Then there were his numbers, the data he collected and sorted and studied endlessly. This took up the rest of his space.The Mall in Lahore is a broad avenue running roughly east and west, built by, named by the British. Vehicles rush into it with the cartoonish verve of objects possessing human traits, so individualistic, so seemingly intent on playing merry hell with the boulevard's stately pretensions. Cycle rickshaws, horse-drawn taxis, minicabs painted pink, fuchsia, peacock blue, trucks and cars and scooters, bicycles weaving in and out of bullock carts, vendors wheeling massive arrangements of nuts, fruits and vegetables, buses leaning under the rooftop weight of trussed-up bundles, furniture and other objects.What we see, Owen Brademas might say, is the grand ordering imperial vision as it is overrun by the surge and pelt of daily life.Then there was the guard at the entrance to the local office of the Mainland Bank. An elderly turbaned fellow with enormous drooping mustache, a tunic and pajama pants, a curved dagger in his sash and a pair of pointed slippers. A relative of the doorman at the Hilton. The outfit seemed intended to register in people's minds the hopeful truth that colonialism was a tourist ornament now, utterly safe to display in public. The foreign bank he guarded was a co-survivor of the picturesque past, exerting no more influence than the man himself. The man had a single task, David told me once. To lower the steel shutters at the first sign of a demonstration.We passed some of the buildings Rowser had referred to, the high court, the museum, and headed north."Tanker loadings at Kharg are down to two a week.”"Maintenance.”"The fields are looking pretty grim. Only five rigs in action, I hear from Abadan.”"Parts," I said."Plus which the telex and telephone are down between Abadan and Tehran.”"But you still hear.”"I hear a little.”"The bankers call it a black hole. Iran.”"Have you seen the mosques? Isfahan is the place to go. I mean gorgeous. You have to spend time in the courtyards. Spend time, relax, check the tilework. I'd give anything to get up close to one of those domes. There's a dome in Isfahan"-he shaped it with his hands.We were stopped by traffic on the road around the old city. A man came through the fortified gate and stood at the car window looking in at us, a man with a bamboo stick, wearing a rag wrapped around his head, a military jacket with copper medals, a dozen bead necklaces, a filthy white robe, oversized army boots without laces, beads around his ankles and wrists. He had hair dyed red and carried live chickens. Rowser asked the driver what he wanted. Hundreds of people congregated near the gate. I tried to look past them into the old city. The driver said he didn't know."I think I'm in New York," Rowser said."That reminds me. I want to ask you about taking three or four weeks in early summer. I want to spend time with my son in North America.”"I don't have any problem with that.”Rowser never said yes. He said, "I don't have any problem with that." Or, "I don't see how it could hurt.”"Will you still be with the firm?”"No," he said."It's imminent then.”"I don't see any reason to hang around the halls. When the time comes, you have to have the grace to disappear." We were moving again. "Did you ever remarry?" he said. "I never got divorced. I'm only separated, George." "That's a crazy way to live. Separated. Divorce teaches us things. You never learn anything being separated." "I don't want to learn anything. Leave me alone." "I'm only saying do one thing or do the other." "I don't want a divorce. It's boring, it's trite." "In these matters it's best to terminate officially. That way you forget. File the papers in your steel cabinet.”We crossed a river and pulled up in front of a tall gateway, locked for the night. Rowser spoke to the driver, who went to look for the watchman, returning in ten minutes with a man chewing betel leaf. We entered a vast garden with fountains and paved watercourses. At the far end was the tomb of Jehangir, a low red sandstone structure with a minaret at each corner. The minarets were octagonal, coming to full height in white marble cupolas. Rowser said something to our driver, who spoke to the watchman. The watchman took a socket wrench out of his back pocket and inserted it in an opening in the pavement, turning full circle. The fountains began to play.We walked slowly toward the central chamber, hearing the sunset call to prayer from somewhere beyond the walls. A breeze blew Rowser's tie over his shoulder."We all need a change now and then. This is basic to anyone's sense of perspective. The type person I am, which is to say a plodder, go it slow, work the angles, worry it, piss blood over it, even this type person has to start over now and then. But maybe this type less than others. I personally hired you, Jim. This makes me responsible to a degree. I'm your sole contact with the parent. You'll have a new man in the region. He'll be hired directly by the parent or sent over from one of their other interests, other arms. It could be an uncomfortable arrangement. We're identified with each other, you and I, in people's minds. That's all I'm saying. Give it some thought.”We stood on a platform at the main arched opening, which jutted from a series of eight other archways. The exterior walls were inset with designs in white marble."I'm told there are better examples," Rowser said, "but this is a basic Moghul tomb, except it doesn't have a dome.”He gestured with his free hand, indicating a dome. We went inside and stood a moment, waiting for the watchman to turn on a light. The sarcophagus stood under a vaulted ceiling. I circled it slowly, running my hand over the surface. Rowser set the briefcase between his feet."Take my advice," he said. "Resign, find a job somewhere in the States, invest in real estate, start a retirement plan, get a divorce.”The white marble surface was inlaid with semiprecious stones in seamless floral designs and in chaste calligraphy, shaped stones, jeweled stones, delicate and free-figured. The surface ran cool and smooth. Traceries of black Koranic letters covered the longer sides of the tomb with a smaller grouping on top. My hand moved slowly over the words, feeling for breaks between the inlay and marble, not to fault the craftsmen, of course, but only to find the human labor, the individual, in the wholeness and beauty of the tomb.It wasn't until we were walking back through the garden that I asked our driver what the words represented. They were the ninety-nine names of God.