The Names

The Mountain
6

The aircraft veered into position, halting. We waited for clearance. I looked out the window, trying to find something that might distract me from the meditative panic I always experience, the dream-rush before takeoff, all the week's measures of self-awareness in one charged moment. The pale sand stretched level in the distance. A figure was out there, a man in a flax robe. I watched him walk into nothing. Erased in chemical flame. The plane moved down the runway and I sat back, rigid, looking straight ahead.Words sounded incomplete to me. The starts and stops in people's voices came unexpectedly. I couldn't figure out the rhythm. But the writing flowed, of course. It seemed to have a movement top to bottom as well as right to left. If Greek or Latin characters are paving stones, Arabic is rain. I saw writing everywhere, the cursive beaded slant in tile, tapestry, brass and wood, in faience mosaics and on the white veils of women crowded in a horse-drawn cart. I looked up to see words turning corners, arranged geometrically on mud-brick walls, knotted and mazed, stuccoed, painted, inlaid, climbing gateways and minarets.I sat across the aisle from a dead man on a Yemen Airways flight from San'a to Dhahran. He died about fifteen minutes into the flight and the people traveling with him started wailing. They carried cloth-covered bundles and wailed. A man behind me remarked to his companion, "But credit extension isn't the issue here." I gripped the arm rests and looked straight ahead. We were over the Empty Quarter.I found myself studying doors, shutters, mosque lamps, carpets. Surfaces were dense and abstract. Where figural things were present they were rendered as nuances of line or curve, taken out of nature to the level of perfect repetition. Even writing was design, not meant to be read, as though part of some unbearable revelation. I didn't know the names of things.Forty men and women in immaculate white robes with close-fitting head-scarves filled the rear section of the plane, a Tunis Air flight, Cairo-Damascus. The women's hands were covered with small red marks, designs of some kind. At first I thought they were letters of the alphabet. Not that I knew which alphabet. Possibly the obscure language of some religious sect. Finally I decided the figures were crosses, although some might have been chevrons and others might have been variations of either of these. I couldn't tell whether the marks were ingrained or simply applied to the surface of the skin with cosmetic dye. The people had been on the plane when I boarded, all quietly in place, waiting. After we landed I looked back that way as I moved up the aisle toward the nose exit. They were still in their seats.Women's eyes glanced away, windows were false, shadows crossed the wall in dappled patterns, architectural planes receded, prayer niches were aligned with Mecca. This last fact supplied an axis to the vapor of fleeting shapes. So much that happened seemed to happen simultaneously. Animals everywhere. The cramped passages of the souk were the least secret places. Loud voices, hanging meat. The crowd was soft, however, floating in robes, sandaled, billowing, touched by the light that fell through broken places in the roof.I stood waiting at the baggage conveyor in the airport in Amman. The king would be arriving later that afternoon after seventeen days abroad. When the king returns to Jordan after a trip abroad, two camels and a bull are slaughtered at the airport. The drive to the palace follows.I was staying at the Inter-Con, which was near the palace and across the street from the U.S. embassy, a not uncommon Mideast cluster. I took the oversized map I'd bought in the lobby and spread it across the bed. There they were, as Owen had said, the anagrammatic place-names. Zarqa and Azraq. Between them, west of the midway point, the hilltop fortress of inscribed stones. Qasr Hallabat.It didn't mean anything. I'd only thought of checking the map for these places on my way up in the elevator. They were a curiosity, that was all. But I was interested to find that he hadn't invented them.

Volterra wore a battered field jacket. Paramilitary drab had always been his color, I realized. He had about two weeks' growth on his face and looked crafty and drawn. We embraced silently. He looked at me, nodding, his biblical gesture of friendship and memory and elapsed time. Then we went into the restaurant.It was an Indian place, empty except for us and two boys, the waiters, who took our orders and then stood motionless at the end of the long dark narrow room. We sat in tall chairs and talked about Kathryn. It was she who'd given him my number in Athens. When I told him I expected to be in Amman in three weeks' time he said he would try to meet me there. He was calling from Aqaba."I thought you had a traveling companion, Frank.”"She's in the room watching TV.”"Where are you staying?”"Small place near the fourth circle. You've been to Amman?”"First time.”"Transit cranes," he said. "Beeping taxi horns.”"You've spent all this time in Aqaba?”"On and off. It's our base. We make three-day trips into the Wadi Rum with a guide and a LandRover. We camp out, in our fashion. Then we go back to Aqaba to water-ski.”"I don't see you on water-skis.”"That's an abbreviation. 'Water-ski.' It's shorthand. It means everything in the world that doesn't involve looking for a bunch of crazy people in a barren waste with a guide whose true purpose is to lead us in circles.”"Why are you looking for them?”Frank laughed. "Is this an interview?”The boys pushed a large and elaborate serving table along the carpeted floor. On it were two cans of beer."Owen seemed to think the cult struck a romantic chord somewhere deep in your breast.”"When you put it that way, Jim, I don't think I'm obliged to discuss the matter further, friends or not.”"I take it back.”He poured the beer into his glass, watching me."I'm looking for something outside the range of expectations, you know? It's just a probe. The Wadi Rum's been filmed before, wide screen, soaring music. The place intrigues me in a totally different way. It has to be linked to this homicidal calculation. These small figures in the landscape. Brademas says these people are stalkers. They pick a victim and they watch. They wait for something. There's a particular logic.”"You've walked away from three or four projects, Kathryn told me.”"They were safe, " he said.Something came into his eyes, a cold light I recognized as the contempt he often summoned to respond to challenges."They weren't worth sticking with. They were exercises. I found myself getting interested in things because they presented a familiar theme or subject I thought I could handle differently, I thought I could give a sweet twist to. Genre crap. I was trying to force these ideas to deliver up riches they didn't contain.”His mood softened, one word to the next."I've been feeling the pressure. I admit it. People alighting in helicopters. Clapped-out producers. Lawyer-agents in Nazi sunglasses. They come down out of the sky. Nobody likes the way I work. I don't talk to anybody. I ban people from the set. Do you know what a dumb little napoleonic thing that is? But I do it. I like to do things in secret. I don't say a word to people who want to write about me. Two good films, made money. It happens I like doing deals. Today we do deals. You don't have to pretend money is dirty. Or a deal memo is too complicated for your sensibility. It's a Jewish science, movie-dealing, like psychoanalysis. Only what's the connection?”"I don't know.”"Intimacy. They involve intimate exchanges. The point is I was starting to hear things. I was reading things about myself, hearing footsteps. I was the man who walks off his own set, the man who closes down productions. I started getting the feeling that my downfall was being plotted in the major capitals of the world. Volterra's time had come, you know? They weren't even going to extend me the courtesy of a finished disaster. I was wasting away above the line. Let's cordon off the area and watch him die in relative privacy.”"What have you come across out there?”"Not a whole hell of a lot. First the desert patrol knows what I'm about. They don't like me sticking my head in every black tent in the area, asking questions. Second my guide is no help at all. Salim. He sees himself as a Swiss banker. Terrifically discreet and guarded. 'One does not speak of these things.' 'I cannot ask these people such a question.' Then there's Del, the traveling companion. She calls the Arabs rag-heads. Another big help. But there's something going on. These Bedouins talk to Salim, I see something passing between them that doesn't get translated. There's a rest station at a place called Ras en-Naqab. We went in there once on our way back to Aqaba. The place is on a hill and the wind comes out of the desert like a jet exhaust. Del wasn't with us that trip and Salim made right for the toilet, so I go in alone. There's only one person in the place, a white man. At first I figured he was Circassian. He's huddled over his food, eating with his fingers, right hand only, dressed in layers of loose shirts and tunics, bareheaded. I sit down, take a closer look at the guy, say to myself this guy is European. So I address him. I ask some harmless question. He says something to me in Arabic. I keep talking to him, he keeps eating. I went to get Salim that useless bastard to translate. When we got back the man was gone.”"A sighting.”"I think I made a sighting.”"Do Circassians speak Arabic?”"I asked Salim. Yes. But I still think I made a sighting.”"Are you sure it was Arabic you heard?”"First you interview me. Then you make an interrogation out of it.”"What do you do now?”"Brademas gave me a name at the Department of Antiquities. When we first got to Amman I went there. This is a very soft-spoken, very cultured man. Dr. Malik. He's working with a Dutch team that's surveying sites right outside the city. He tried to discourage me. All I could get from him was the general area where the murder took place.”I said, "It stands to reason they'd move on after killing someone.”"Brademas told me they stayed. They're somewhere in the Rum.”"He didn't tell me that.”"They changed locations but they're still there, he said. Dr. Malik told him they'd been spotted. But he wouldn't tell me that. I went to see him again this morning, soon as we arrived. He told me if I really want to learn something about the cult I have to go to Jerusalem. 'You must ask for Vosdanik,' he said.”Volterra liked to show skepticism by tilting his head to cast sidelong glances at the figure opposite him. Now he described his talk at the Department of Antiquities, repeating the aggrieved and disbelieving looks he'd communicated to Dr. Malik.He was told to go to the old city, the Armenian quarter. He must ask for Vosdanik. This man has three names, four names. Vosdanik is apparently the first name of one of these three or four full names. He is a guide in the old city. This was the absolute limit of Dr. Malik's knowledge.Frank liked doing accents.He asked Dr. Malik to give him some names here in Jordan. He didn't want to go to Jerusalem. He didn't want to get involved with another guide. He was told Vosdanik knew about the cult.He would be easy to find. He was Armenian. He lived in the Armenian quarter. Frank asked for more information on the Wadi Rum. There'd been a murder, after all. More than one in fact. Dr. Malik said, "It is best we do not speak of these things. “Volterra let his gesturing hand drop out of the air. The boys brought our food, then stood in the dimness at the end of the room. No one else came in."I can't surrender myself to places," Frank said. "I'm always separate. I'm always working at myself. I never understood the lure of fabulous places. Or the idea of losing yourself in a place. The desert down there is stunning at times. Shapes and tones. But I could never be affected by it in a deeply personal way, I could never see it as an aspect of myself or vice versa. I need it for something, I want it as a frame and a background. I can't see myself letting it overwhelm me. I would never give myself up to the place or to any other place. I'm the place. I guess that's the reason. I'm the only place I need.”He wanted to know about my travels. I told him I was a traveler only in the sense that I covered distances. I traveled between places, never in them.Rowser had sent me out to these jurisdictions to perform various good works, to fill in here, do a review there, restructure some offices, see to sagging morale. It was a season of small promise. Our Iranian control was dead, shot by two men in the street. Our associate for Syria-Iraq was sending cryptic telexes from Cyprus. Kabul was tense. Ankara lacked home heating, families were moving to hotels. Throughout Turkey people could not vote unless they had their fingers dyed. This was to keep them from voting more than once. Our associate for the Emirates woke up to find a corpse in his garden. The Emirates were overbanked. Egypt had religious tensions. Foreign executives in Libya were coming home from the office to find their houses occupied by workers. It was the winter the hostages were taken in Tehran and Rowser put the entire region on duplicate. This meant all records had to be copied and sent to Athens. One of our vice-presidents, visiting Beirut, came out of his hotel to find his car being disassembled by militiamen. I opened an office in North Yemen.Frank ordered two more beers. We talked about Kathryn. When we finished dinner we wandered around for an hour. Taxis followed us, beeping. We were in a residential area, empty, no one else on foot. A man in uniform came out of the darkness and said something we didn't understand. Another figure appeared twenty yards along the sidewalk, holding an automatic rifle. The first man pointed across the street. We were to continue our walk over there, "Something tells me we've come upon the palace," Frank said. "The king is at home.”

It took two days to get permits for the trip to Jerusalem. When we reached the Jordanian security area, Volterra and our driver took all the documents inside. I leaned against a post under the corrugated roof, watching Del Nearing blow on the lenses of her sunglasses and wipe them in circular motions with a soft cloth."There's an Arabic letter called jim," she said."What does it look like?”"Don't recall. I gave the language about an hour's study.”"It could be important," I said. "It could tell me everything I need to know.”She looked up, smiling, a slight figure with a finely drawn face, her dark hair short and slicked back. She'd spent the fifty-minute drive ministering to herself, catching up on the precautions travelers take against the environment. The coating of hands. The moistening of face and neck. The delicate release of eye drops from a squat bottle. She went about these tasks apart from them, deep in thought. She gave the impression she was always behind schedule, accustomed to doing things in layers. These moments of sealed-in physical busyness were meant mainly to be spent in reflection."I have a disembodied feeling about this whole trip," she said. "I've been floating, like. I didn't know we were going to Jerusalem until we got into the taxi and went to pick you up. I thought we were going to the airport. He claims he told me last night. I don't use drugs anymore. Frank helped me with that. But I am disembodied, regardless. I miss my apartment, my cat. I never thought I'd miss my apartment. That must be where my body is.”Volterra came out."Look at her. Those oversized glasses. With her thin face and that short hair. All wrong. She looks like a science-fiction insect.”"Suck a rock, Jojo.”We got on a bus with a group of Baptists from Louisiana and rode across the river to the Israeli compound. Elaborate procedures. Del came out of the booth where women were searched and joined us at passport control, scanning the area."Look how they lean on those M-16s. I thought they'd be different from the Arabs and Turks. They're sloppy-looking, aren't they? And they wave those guns around, they don't care who's standing in front of them. I don't know what I expected. Neater people.”"It's going to rain," Frank said. "I want it to rain.”"Why?”"So you'll take those glasses off.”"I don't know what I expected," she said."So we'll get drenched walking in the old city. So you'll catch another cold to match Istanbul. So I'll know the disaster is complete.”We shared an eight-seat taxi with Russian Orthodox nuns. The sun broke through heavy cloud as we neared Jerusalem, half gold on the tawny hills, on the limestone buildings and Ottoman ramparts. Our hotel was north of the old city. Volterra lingered at the desk to make inquiries.We entered through the Damascus Gate and were caught at once in the polyglot surge. I felt crowded by languages, surprised and jostled as much as by donkeys loaded with produce, by running boys. Soldiers wore yarmulkas, a man lugged an eight-foot cross. Volterra spoke Italian to some people who asked directions. Merchants loaded bolts of scarlet cloth, sacks of potatoes onto wooden carts which boys would use to batter through the crowds. Coptic priests in blue, Ethiopian monks in gray, the White Father in his spotless soutane. Was religion the point or language? Or was it costume? Nuns in white, in black, full habits, somber hoods, flamboyant winglike bonnets. Beggars folded in cloaks, sitting motionless. Radios played, walkie-talkies barked and hissed. The call to prayer was an amplified chant that I could separate from the other sounds only briefly. Then it was part of the tumult and pulse, the single living voice, as though fallen from the sky.Del was the first to wander off, disappearing down a twisted alley being torn up by workmen. Then Volterra muttered something about the Armenian quarter. We made vague plans to meet at the Western Wall.I found a café and sat outside to sip Turkish coffee and watch shopkeepers in idle talk. Their windows were full of religious souvenirs, rows of mass-produced objects. I found this presence a bolstering force. All the crippled pilgrims in the Via Dolorosa, the black-hatted Hasidim, the Greek priests, Armenian monks, the men at prayer on patterned carpets in the mosques-these streams of belief made me uneasy. It was all a reproach to my ardent skepticism. It crowded me, it pressured and shoved. So I tended to look with a small ironic measure of appreciation at the trashy objects in the shop windows. The olivewood, glass and plastic. They counteracted to some extent the impact of those larger figures who milled in the streets, coming from worship.I saw Del talking to an old man leaning on a cane outside a spice stall. He was white-bearded, wearing a knitted cap and sweater, a robe with a black sash, and there was an aura of stillness about him that was a form of beauty. His eyes were soft, a half-dreaming gaze, and in his face, which looked like a desert face, was an age of memory and light. It occurred to me that she was telling him something very much like this. I barely knew her, of course, but it was a thing she would do, I thought. Approach an old man in the street and tell him that she liked his face.She saw me and came over, making her way past a group whose leader carried a banner with the letter sigma on it. Del had propped the sunglasses on her forehead and was peeling a green orange. There was an element of street flash about her, a winsome toughness. She moved like a shambling kid in a school corridor, raggy and sullen. I hadn't seen till now how good-looking she was. The face was proportioned and cool, eyes disregarding, a moody curve to the mouth. She gave me a slice of orange and sat down."I don't think he understood me.”"What were you telling him?”"How nice he looked, standing there. What beautiful eyes. That's what I'll remember. The faces. Even those macho faggots in Turkey. You see incredible faces. How long are we staying here?”"I leave in the morning. I have an afternoon flight out of Amman. I don't know about you two. You'll have to check the permits.”"Why are we here?”"I'm sightseeing. You're looking for an Armenian.”"I like that jacket. That jacket's loaded with character.”"It used to be tweed.”"I love old stuff.”"It's been worn down by erosion. You can have it.”"Too big but thanks. Frank says you're lonely.”"Frank and I don't always understand each other. Our friendship depended largely on Kathryn. When he and I were alone together, even then, the subject was Kathryn, the missing link was Kathryn.”"Can't you get laid in Athens?”"I've developed a preoccupied air. Women think I want to take them to museums.”"I don't like museums. Men always follow me in museums. What is it about places like that? Every time I turn there's a figure watching me.”"I love Frank. It's not that I don't love him. But we don't really live in the same world anymore. I love the times we had. We were in our twenties, learning important things. But it was Kathryn, really, who made the whole thing work.”I was expecting Del to ask if he'd slept with Kathryn. She had a way of looking through one's remarks, waiting for them to end so she could get to what she thought was the point. Her voice didn't quite match the blankish face. It had a sultry little disturbance in it, an early morning scratch. We looked at each other. She asked about lunch instead.Later we waited for Volterra in a light rain. Men washing at the fountain outside el-Aqsa, arrayed barefoot at the taps. Men swaying at the Wall, beneath the long courses of masonry, moon-scarred limestone with finely chiseled margins, with rock-dwelling plants cascading out of the cracks. We stood near a fence adorned with stylized branch candlesticks. When he showed up finally, jacket collar raised against the chill, he took Del off to one side, where they had a brief unhappy exchange. He seemed to want her to go to the Wall, the section reserved for women. She looked away, her hands deep in the pockets of a nylon parka.On the way back to the hotel he told me he'd found Vosdanik.

We walked in the dark to a restaurant near the Jaffa Gate. He didn't say why Del wasn't coming with us. It was misty and cold, we were a long time finding the place.Vosdanik walked in, a small dark man wearing an undersized fedora. He removed the hat and coat, offered us cigarettes, remarked that stuffed pigeon was the specialty here. There was a note of serious business in his manner, a modulated note, softest when he greeted people passing near our table. We drank arak and asked him questions.He spoke seven languages. His father had walked across the Syrian desert as a boy, a forced march, the Turks, 1916. His brother's business was rubble in Beirut. He told us his life story as a matter of course. He seemed to think we expected it.Before he was a guide he'd worked as interpreter for a team of archaeologists at a site near the Sea of Galilee. Crews had been excavating for decades. Twenty levels were eventually uncovered, almost four thousand years of settlement. A vast cataloguing of fragments."They made temples that will face the east. In Egypt at that time they call the east God's land. Ta-netjer. The west is death, the setting sun. You will bury the dead on the west bank. The west is the city of the dead. The east is cockcrow, the rising sun.This is where you will live, on the east bank. Put the house in the east, put the tomb in the west. Between there will be the river.”He went at the pigeon seriously, rice spilling off his fork. His remarks were well spaced, pauses for effect, for mouthfuls of food, gestures of greeting and good will as people entered.He was the guide as storyteller. Even incidents from his own life he recounted with a degree of awe, as if he were pointing out the workmanship in a polychrome tile. There was a bump on the bridge of his nose. All his clothes looked shrunken.At the excavation he first heard of a group, a cult, apparently nameless. An archaeologist spoke of it, a Frenchman named Texier. In the beginning Vosdanik thought the references were to an ancient cult whose members had lived in this region. It was a land of cults and sects and desert monks and stylites. Every settled group produced a scatter of rival cells. From these a man or men broke off, working toward a purer vision."Wherever you will find empty land, there are men who try to get closer to God. They will be poor, they will take little food, they will go away from women. They will be Christian monks, they will be Sufis who dress with wool shirts, who repeat the holy words from the Koran, who dance and spin. Visions are real. God is involved with living men. When Mohammed was, there still were men who went away from him. Closer to God, always in their mind to remember God. Dhikr allab. There were Sufis in Palestine, Greek monks in the Sinai. Always some men go away.”This man Texier, himself half starved and a little distant, offered clarification, sitting in the evenings under a swaying bulb beneath the excavation roof. A note pad and briar pipe. He was working backward through curves of time, arc after arc of fragments set on the ground around his chair. At intervals he spoke softly in the general direction of Vosdanik, shadowed on a wall ten yards away, beyond the shards, a man unaccustomed to listening.The cult was not ancient as far as Texier knew. The cult was living. The members had last been seen, a handful of men, in a cliffside village some miles north of Damascus-a Christian settlement where the people at times still spoke Aramaic (or Western Aramaic or Syriac), which happened to be the language of Jesus.Wait, wait, go slow, we said.He ate twice as fast as we did, spoke a thousand words to every one of ours. It was his job, telling stories, supplying names and dates, sorting through the layered calamities of his city, the alleys and crypts where profound things had taken place.It was not one of Vosdanik's seven languages, Aramaic, but he had heard it in the Christmas liturgy. The cult lived in two caves above the village. They were elusive men, rarely seen, except for one of them who occasionally came down into the streets and talked to the children. The language of the streets and schools was Arabic. But this man made efforts to speak Aramaic, amusing the children. Good reason why the others stayed above the town. They were keeping a watch, waiting for someone or something."They follow you like a crooked shadow," he said.After they'd left, the body of a man was found in one of the caves, a villager, his chest full of slashes and puncture wounds, blood everywhere. The cultists were thought at first to be Druze, blondish, some of them blue-eyed-a Muslim sect living in the mountains in the southern part of the country. A murder based on religious differences, it seemed. But arising out of nothing. There'd been no trouble, no provocation. And why were the initials of the victim cut into the blade of the crude iron tool used to kill him?Vosdanik paused, his sad face hanging in the smoke."You will want to hurt your enemy, it is in history to destroy his name. The Egyptians made pottery that the names of their enemies were engraved with sharp reeds. They will smash the bowls, great harm to the enemies. The same harm that if you cut his throat.”None of this was easy for us to follow. Vosdanik was involved in the textures of place, in histories, rituals, dialects, eye and skin color, bearing and stance, endless sets of identifying traits. We leaned forward, straining to hear, to understand.He ordered more arak. I poured a scant measure of water, watching the arak cloud, a sedimentary stir. His narrative worked back to the dig, the overshadowing background, whispers of Islam, occult rabbinical doctrine, the vast embroidered mist of precepts and dreams. Shining icons, strands of hair from the Prophet's beard. He believed it all.Slow, we told him. Go slow, give us a chance to get it straight.He was taken back by the intensity of Volterra's questioning. It was clear he had few answers. He hadn't thought about these things and there was no reason he should have. The cult was just another mystery in the landscape. They were unremarkable to him, these men, considering where he lived, what he knew about the dark places, assassins in cloaks, the dead who walked. He told us of two other cult murders, one we knew about, the Wadi Rum, although the version he'd heard was different in some ways.He went after the last traces of food with a thoroughness almost cleansed of pleasure and zest. To an Arab at the next table he said something that sounded like "German shepherd." A boy came with arak."With sweet words you make them naked," Vosdanik said to us."Who?”"The Arabs. You will be soft with them you get what you want.”He offered us cigarettes. A man with half his face covered by a scarf came out of the toilet, wearing black and carrying a stick. Smoke collected near the ceiling."Where are they now?" Frank said."I hear nothing.”"Do you think there is one group, two?”"I hear three murders, I see one pair of blue eyes.”"Were the initials on the knife in Aramaic?”"This I don't know.”"Is there an Aramaic alphabet, or what?”Shrugging. "No one can write it anymore. It is only sounds. It traveled in history with the Jews. It was used by itself, it was mixed with other languages. Dog-Aramaic. It was carried by religion and now it fades because of religion, because of Islam, Arabic. It is religion that carries a language. The river of language is God.”And this."The alphabet is male and female. If you will know the correct order of letters, you make a world, you make creation. This is why they will hide the order. If you will know the combinations, you make all life and death.”He lit another cigarette, leaving one in the pack."Food for tomorrow," he said. A shy smile.Tomorrow he would show us an Aramaic inscription on the wall of the Syrian church if we were interested. He would take us to Bethlehem, to Jericho. The columns in el-Aqsa are Crusader columns, he said. Mohammed flew to heaven from the Dome of the Rock.

After he left we stayed behind, drinking and talking, and when we hit the street we had a little trouble finding the way to our hotel."Let me get this straight," I said. "There was someone Texier.”"He's not important.”"Slow down. We should have left when Vosdanik left. Always leave with the guide. These alleys are full of religious fanatics.”"The archaeologist. Forget him.”"All right. We're with the cult. Where were they?”"Somewhere in Syria," Frank said."What is a Druze?”"What were the other words for the language?" he said. "Shit, did I ask about hammers?”"I thought he spoke Hebrew.”"Who?”"Jesus.”"He's not important. Forget him, forget what he spoke. I'm trying to concentrate on essentials. Did I ask about the victim's health?”"He was dead, Frank.”"Before they killed him. Did they choose an imbecile, a cancer victim?”"His health was not good. This is one of the qualities we associate with death. In all seriousness, where are we? We should have gone out the gate and found a cab.”"I thought the walk would clear our heads.”He started laughing."I don't think I'm drunk," I said. "It's the effect of the smoke, that's all, and then coming outside. That was a smoky place.”He thought this was very funny. He stopped walking in order to laugh, doubling up."What did he say?”"Who?" I said."I don't know what he said. Vosdanik. Maybe it was the smoke. It was a smoky place.”He was talking and laughing at the same time. He had to lean against a wall to laugh."Did you pay him?”"Damn right I paid him. We haggled. The little bastard.”"How much did you pay him?”"Never mind. Just tell me what he said.”He crossed his arms on his midsection, bent against the wall laughing. It was a staccato laugh, building on itself, broadening in the end to a breathless gasp, the laughter that marks a pause in the progress of the world, the laughter we hear once in twenty years. I went into an alley to vomit.

Through the night I kept waking up. Scenes from the restaurant, patches of Vosdanik's monologues. His face came back to me as a composed image, movie-lit, bronzed and shaded. The prominent nose, the indentations on either side of the forehead, the crooked fingers lifting a cigarette from the pack of Montanas, the little smile at the end. He seemed a wise and sympathetic figure in this dawn projection, super-lifelike. The third or fourth time I woke up I thought of the dead man's initials cut into the weapon. Old westerns. If one of those bullets has your name on it, Cody, there's not a goldarned thing you can do about it. Spitting in the dust. Montana daybreak. Is this what I wanted to isolate from everything else he'd said, is this what I was driving up out of sleep to tell myself to remember? Initials. It was the only thing he'd said that seemed to mean something. I knew something. There was something at the edge of all this. If I could stay awake and concentrate, if I could think clearly, if I could be sure whether I was awake or asleep, if I could either snap awake completely or fall into deep and peaceful sleep, then I might begin to understand.

I sat with Del Nearing in the back of the long Mercedes, waiting for Volterra. A camel stood near the hotel entrance and the Baptists from Louisiana took turns mounting and dismounting, photographing each other."Frank has crazed eyes this morning. It's a look he gets now and then. The blood drains out of his eyes. Deadly.”"Where were you last night?”"Watching TV.”"You missed the guide, the linguist.”"Not interested.”"We drank too much.”"It's not that," she said. "It's the old disease. The one that science hasn't noticed yet. He's obsessed.”The camel driver posed with a woman named Brenda."Why was he annoyed at you yesterday?”"He has this sentimental idea. I'm part Jewish somewhere back on my mother's side and he expects me to think I'm coming home. I'm an idiot because I don't explore my background, I don't pay more attention to the Jewish ruins. I come mostly from the Midwest. We moved a lot. We lived in a trailer court when I was little. I got into trouble a lot, I ran away two or three times, I went sort of crazy in the Haight. I was way too young to know what was going on. Frank says if it wasn't for the Jewish underpinning I'd be a total Oklahoma drifter. He's stupid about that. I'd be a motorcycle moll, a dancer in a lounge. Everything between the coasts is Oklahoma to him. Big, dusty, lonesome.”"He makes movies there.”"He makes movies. I love his movies. See, on one level he's fascinated by the pure American thing. The aimlessness, the drifting. That's fascinating to him, it lends itself somehow. Motels, mobile homes, whatever. But he'd dump me in a minute if I'd never mentioned being part Jewish. Now that's worthwhile. That's something to respect yourself for. A Jew.”Frank had nothing to say until we were across the river, sitting under the corrugated roof in the Jordanian area, past the gun emplacements, waiting for our original driver to show up."Do we have to go to Amman?”The question was addressed to himself, if anyone. He wore dark glasses and kept biting skin from the edge of his thumb. The driver appeared, in jeans and elevated heels, extending his pack of cigarettes.Amman is set on seven hills. In Arabic the word for hill or mountain is jebel. When we were fifteen minutes outside the city I told the driver to take us to Jebel Amman, where the Inter-Continental is located. I would pick up the suitcase I'd left there and then go with Frank and Del to the airport, where I'd catch my plane to Athens, they'd catch theirs to Aqaba, a thirty-minute flight."Do we have to go to Aqaba?" Del said.Most of their clothes were there, two cameras were there, a tape recorder and other equipment in two suitcases and a canvas bag.Five minutes later Volterra spoke for the second time."I have it all figured out. Once this collapses. Once the entire career goes down the tubes. I know exactly what I'll do for the rest of my life. I've been planning it since the very beginning. Because I've always known. I've known since the beginning, I've been planning since the beginning. Once the dust clears from the last failure. Once they've stopped talking about me in the tones they reserve for the once promising beginners who overextended, who burned out, who miscalculated, who didn't deliver, who ran out of luck. The tone of tepid regret, you know? The knowing tone that says those early successes were obviously accidents anyway. I know where I'll go when this happens, what I'll do." He dropped his hand from the side of his mouth. "I'll open a same-day dry-cleaning service. With the money I haven't pissed away on exploring the world for subjects, I'll go to a quiet place somewhere, one of those well-planned communities with crescent streets and picturesque lampposts, a series of town-house developments although there's no town, they've forgotten the town. A modest place. Elderly couples. Divorced women with anxious kids. Unassuming. My same-day dry-cleaning store will be in the shopping mall along with the boutique, the supermarket, the radio and TV repair, the three-in-one movie theater, the fast-food places, the travel agent, all of it. It's a community where no one knows the names of film directors. People just go to the movies, you know? That's where I'll hide out for the rest of my life. Frank's Same Day Dry Cleaning. The fucking clothes'll come whipping along on these huge fucking conveyors, a thousand pairs of tartan slacks, a thousand tennis dresses, all wrapped in shimmering plastic. You want your tartan slacks, all I do is press a button behind the counter and these serpentine conveyors go into motion, shooting the garment toward the desk in twisty looping figures. Pink sales slips flutter from the moving garments. The plastic rustles, it clings. It clings to everything-clothes, car seats, metal, human flesh. I'm behind the counter, happy to be there. People call me Frank, I call them Mr. Mitchell, Mrs. Green. 'Hi, Mr. Mitchell, think we got that piña colada stain off your tartan slacks.' I live in the back of the shop. I have a hotplate, a little Sony TV, my pornographic magazines, my wheat germ and honey shampoo, the one luxury in my life, because I fear baldness more than death. But there is one person who knows my identity, who has managed to find out. An ex-New Yorker, what else? A film society pervert who recognizes me from old photos in his collection of film journals. Word gets around. People start saying, 'He was famous for ten minutes in the seventies.' 'Who was he?' 'An actor, a gangster, I forget.' They forget. In the end they forget even the erroneous things they've been told about me. How beautiful. It's why I'm there, after all.”At the Inter-Con I found out my flight had been delayed for five or six hours. I went out to the car and stuck my head in the window. He sat with one arm around her, still in kís dark glasses, his army surplus jacket, unshaven. Del seemed to be asleep."Come to Athens," I said."I don't know.”"What other possibilities?”"I have to think about it. California maybe. Do nothing for a while.”"They know you in California. Come to Athens. I have a spare bedroom.”"I don't know, Jim.”"What about the cult?”"I have to think about it.”"You're crazy," I said. "Forget it.”He looked straight ahead, his hand curled over her shoulder, and he spoke quietly in a tone that found fault with me for dealing in self-evident things."Don't tell me I'm crazy. I fucking know I'm crazy. Tell me I'm a little brave, a little determined. I want to hear someone say I follow things to the end.”When they were gone I went back to the desk, got the map out of my overnight bag and headed out into the city. From the spaces and heights of Jebel Amman it was a long walk down to the crowds around the taxi ranks near the Roman theater. The sun was warm. Men folded their robes under them, climbing into the shared cabs. I went past the columns and walked slowly up to the top of the theater. On the far side two men sat several rows apart, reading newspapers. No one else was here. The stone ran sandy white, curves lengthening in the climb. I sat one row down from the top. Traffic was a remote noise, another city. I felt solitude begin to return, a sense of elements gathering, first things. A long time passed. This theater, open to the city, was at the same time detached from it, a mental space, a park made of nothing but steps. Perfect. My mind was clear. I felt empty, alert. I took out the map and unfolded it. One of the men on the second tier unfolded his newspaper to turn a page. On the reverse side of the map of Jordan was a detailed map of Amman. I looked for a way back to the hotel that would not involve retracing my route. But I found something else. Something came to me. I didn't have to concentrate or direct my thoughts. As if I'd known all along. As if my interrupted sleep of the night before had been a mechanism of clarifying thought. Initials, names, places. In the emptiness of these moments, in the reason and ease of these sweeping curves, I realized I'd been approaching this point all morning long. I folded the map and put it back in my jacket pocket. One of the men, the higher of the two, got to his feet and walked slowly down the steps. Soft noise from the distant city. Jebel Amman / James Axton.