A Life in Men: A Novel (48 page)

“Funny,” Leo muses. “If this were my last day on earth, I’d be careful. I wouldn’t go pissing people off. I wouldn’t make out with some inconsequential child even if he does have eyes to die for. I wouldn’t betray Sandor or tell my lover truths that were only sure to hurt him, even if the guy was kind of an asshole. I’d only be that reckless and selfish if I had a long, long time to make amends and repair the damage. I think you’ve got things backward.”

“Yep.” She flicks a bug off the window with her hennaed fingers, and together they lean off the bed’s edge and watch the bloated thing floundering on its back. “Step on it,” Mary commands. “You have shoes on, you’re the boy!”

And Leo does. He jumps off the bed and lands on the bug with a crunch, picks up his foot and stares at the mess.

“This is,” he says, “the absolute most disgusting place on earth. It is a crime against nature to spend your birthday here. When you get to Paris or Madrid or whenever I see you next, I’m going to take you out for an amazing dinner and we’ll get completely shit-faced drunk and wear inappropriately fancy clothes and celebrate properly.”

“I don’t know,” Mary says. “We’ll probably have to do that in boring New England. I doubt Geoff will really come to Madrid, so I’m probably going home.”

“Oh,” Leo says, “you’ll be back.”

“I really don’t think I will, sweetie. You have to come visit me now.”

Her face right then looks just like it does in the painting that will hang in the Spanish museum, haunted and hollow: the painting he wants her to see, and also never wants her to see. Her dismembered head surrounded by all their heads: their father, Daniel; her other father, the just-dead Paul; himself; Geoff; even Kenneth the way he looked that night at Mulligan’s two years ago, hair straggly and eyes hard. The view is from above, heads arranged in a cavernous bowl like so many pieces of fruit piled atop one another, sideways and upside down with Mary’s in the middle, alight with a glow, like the old paintings of saints.
Still Life, with Men,
he called it. He did not dare paint Sandor then—he wasn’t yet sure he’d be around long enough and didn’t want to be humiliated if their friends saw the piece at Merel’s gallery. For Mary’s lovers whose faces he couldn’t approximate, he painted heads in profile or from the back, to create the appearance of clutter. “You said
still,
” Merel pronounced at the time, “but this looks like a parade.” Leo hadn’t meant the word that way, though. He didn’t mean not moving. He meant
for now
. Mary’s hair falls in yellow strands over some of the faces, electric the way he remembers it in his garden the first day they met. The fruit bowl is lined in satin, with handles like a casket.

“I’ll come visit, don’t worry about that. But I know you—you can’t keep a good woman down
or
off the European continent. Believe me, you’ll be back.”

Relief washes over him when she lets it stand.

O
F COURSE, THERE
will be blood.

First though, a long night at the fleabag hotel in Imlil, no one getting much sleep. Alias, crashing with a friend nearby, comes back the next morning early, too early, to collect them for the hike. He avoids Mary’s eyes. Groggy farewells are bid to Leo in the hall outside the overflowing toilets, Leo in boxer shorts, his curls standing on end as though his fingers have been stuck in an electrical socket (Mary tries to memorize him), his elegant hands, decorated in henna symbols, waving at her and Sandor and even Kenneth as they make their way downstairs in hiking boots. By the time they return, he will be gone. The party makes instant coffee with boiled water, which Alias has procured from the hotel’s closed café, and drinks it black in water bottles that feel wobbly and warm from the coffee’s heat. Mary’s hair is unwashed and tied under a bandanna. She and Sandor walk arm in arm, both melancholy about Leo’s departure, while Alias and Kenneth walk slightly ahead, speaking French, occasionally laughing.

To head south would take them the way of true trekkers: Mount Toubkal. Instead they veer west out of the village of Imlil, heading for a less-challenging pass. Still, her going is slow. They pass through the village of Tamatert, chased by the usual adorable village children, and she catches her breath photographing two boys and a tiny girl with puffy hair and a dirty pink apron, sucking on oranges; she catches her breath, then loses it again with longing. The town behind them, they walk uphill for a small while, back down, maybe two miles in that fashion, and already she feels she has run a marathon. It’s only at about 2,400 meters that the
real
uphill begins.

Soon they are switchbacking. Back and forth, back and forth, the path isolated and narrow, no other tourists on their part of the mountain. Sometimes they have to scramble, the terrain littered with crumbly dirt-rocks and spectacularly fat black beetles—maybe it is a blessing Leo is not here. Here there are no trees, not even those squat things like the ones near the Kik Plateau. The breeze is still cool—Mary shivers under her long sleeves—though the morning is warming up.

On the switchbacks, she sees the ground below her rushing at her in the opposite direction, the way the ground seems to spin when you have just gotten off a carnival ride. When she stops walking, the ground on which she’s standing stops, too, but the ground below continues its rotation. This must be a lack of oxygen, even though they’re only around 2,800 meters. Or more by now? How high is that in feet? You’re supposed to multiply by three, she thinks, but her head can’t do the computation; nothing feels clear. She does not mention the rushing ground to anyone but stops now and then to cough, and Sandor keeps saying, “We don’t have to go all the way. Anytime you want, we can stop.” She doesn’t have the breath to waste on protest, but she sees Kenneth put a hand on Sandor’s arm and say, “Man, she knows what she can do and what she can’t. Lay off.”

Mary realizes she did not actually believe it would happen, but they finally reach the pass. Wait—if she did not think they would get here, then why is she on this mountain? What did she believe would happen
instead
? This, too, feels foggy. Down below is her destination: the cliff bottoms of Mykonos; the black sand beach of La Gomera; the oxygen machines and quarantined hospital room and gulping for air while her parents and Geoff look on with agonized pain in their eyes. From the pass, she, Kenneth, Sandor, and Alias look down into a valley, the town below them like crumbs at the bottom of a bowl. Surrounding them, mountain peaks form the bowl’s jagged teeth. They sit on the ground and look. In truth this view is less thrilling than the medinas, than Nawar’s house; a mountain is not specifically Moroccan or even
African
but could be anywhere. It has taken them a stupidly long time to get to this view, and now the day is hot. Alone, the three men could have made it in half the time. They have been walking at a pace so slow that surely it felt confining to their long, healthy legs. Mary rests her head on Kenneth’s day pack, gulping water. She’s still chilly, though she’s consumed the majority of the water they brought and cannot possibly be dehydrated. She coughs, and Sandor and Alias gape as she keeps trying again and again, hacking herself raw. “It won’t
do
anything,” she tries to explain. She’s clogged, so that her lungs won’t let in the air. She lies back down, gulping on her inhaler, then abruptly bolts upright again to cough violently into her hands.

Then. The blood.

Bright, unexpected mouthfuls in her hennaed hands, obscuring the intricate design. No sooner do the three men all jump to standing than there is another upheaval, the coughs convulsive, not voluntary now, and each lurching up more red liquid, thick like lava with blood’s unmistakable smell. She is screaming but not screaming, the scream stuck in her lungs and drowned, and when the men rush to her, there is a small pause amid her drowning—a pause in which both Sandor and Alias are obviously afraid to touch her, so that suddenly Kenneth has her face in his hands, trying to lift her chin as though maybe there is an injury, an actual
injury
somehow undetected. As though he lacks the memory that this is exactly where they began. Mary’s body spasms again, blood flying onto him as though she is the girl from
The Exorcist,
as though her head will spin. He is covered down his front with the color and smell of her.

He barks at the others, “Jesus Christ, we have to get her down!”

This has all happened in maybe forty-five seconds. In less than a minute, everything can change.

There is nothing wrong with her legs, but she cannot walk. She is a drowning animal, frantic and gasping, and Sandor rushes forward and grabs one of her arms, too, his hands slippery with sweat. Even this, though, doesn’t work. The switchbacks aren’t wide enough for them to walk this way: three people linked horizontally, her body convulsing like a fish. They are shouting back and forth to one another, but saying nothing that can help:
What the fuck? What the fuck?
Kenneth lifts her like a parcel and Alias shouts that he will run ahead, run back to the village to procure a car so that they can get her to a hospital —there isn’t one
here,
Mary knows, nothing for miles, and if any is closer than Marrakech, it is nowhere you’d want to be. It is maybe three hours to the city, more, given how long it will take to even get her into town.

She will die here on the mountain—it is inevitable—and yes,
this
is what she expected, then;
this
is why she is here.
Oh God, oh Mom, oh Geoff
.

Alias hesitates, perhaps uncertain whether there is any point in rushing for help, or whether it will only brand him a coward not to have stayed with the others while she dies. Sandor pushes Alias so hard he nearly falls backward, shouts, “Hurry! Run!”

In Imlil, her cough suppressant is tucked away with her other medical paraphernalia. Along with the written CF protocol from Laxmi, because Dr. Fox, her specialist in New Hampshire, disapproved so strongly of this trip that Mary was afraid to ask her for the necessary paperwork and had Laxmi fax it instead. His instructions came with a handwritten note proclaiming
I am not happy about this,
which could have been for her or for Geoff, Mary didn’t know. The note says to administer Cyklokapron by IV to clot her blood should she have a massive hemoptysis.

Whether there would even be fucking Cyklokapron in Morocco, Mary knew, was anyone’s guess.
Your suicidal mission,
Geoff had said. She could not pretend to believe that Africa had ever been equipped to catch her fall.

Against Kenneth’s body, her limbs thrash as she sputters blood. “Don’t kill us,” he says to her, and somewhere under the gush and panic she hears: She has to stop squirming so he won’t slip, so they won’t
both
plummet to their deaths. She has to be still so he does not become her casualty, too. Blood rushes. She can’t control her limbs.

Then all at once it is over. Over. Her lungs’ convulsions cease and she collapses in Kenneth’s arms, spent, blood already drying sticky on her skin and clothes. All at once she is blinking dizzily and breathing again, lungs no longer full of molten liquid choking her. She starts trying to wipe blood from Kenneth’s face, but her hands feel blind, fuzzy. He catches them in his and stills them.

Sandor murmurs, “Thank God, thank God,” his voice transfixed.

They stare at one another, all three dazed. She is not dead.

Now what are they supposed to do?

K
ENNETH PASSES HIS
pack to Sandor, puts Cystic on his back in its place. He thinks she’ll protest but instead she clings to him and they start down the mountain. It will be hours before they reach even the minuscule little village of Tamatert, much less Imlil, where Alias could possibly snag a car. “Better walk behind me, buddy,” he tells Sandor, and Sandor falls in line, the plan unspoken between them: if Kenneth falls, Sandor will catch the girl from his back. The dirt-rocks under their feet scatter and crumble; the switchbacks are steep. This will never work. It will never work. Kenneth can see Alias occasionally beneath them, zigzagging, moving fast. His youth, his strength and speed—suddenly it all seems obscene.

After a while he’s got to stop, switch Cystic onto Sandor’s back. She’s not coughing anymore but seems to be doing little else either. It is understood that her walking is impossible, but Kenneth can’t feel his body. Though the blood seems to have shed the last of what passed for substance in her weight, it was a matter, simply, of her starting to slip, of his legs buckling. There is no pain, no soreness, no exhaustion. Just the inability to go on with the load.

Thirty-five-year-old Sandor shoulders his passenger as though she is nothing, picks up the pace like the girl’s nothing more than a day pack. Now it is Kenneth’s turn to walk behind, though Sandor doesn’t seem to need him.

Down, down, an hour this way, maybe longer. At one point she says she can walk and they let her try, but she is slower on her own than Sandor is carrying her, so they resume their positions. She is weepy, and Sandor glances back at Kenneth, his pace slowing, apparently unsure whether they should stop to comfort her. Kenneth barks, “Stop crying, you’re gonna get everything flowing again!” and she gulps and buries her face in Sandor’s neck, and Sandor says nothing, walks on.

Alias isn’t in Tamatert, but at the edge of the village people are gathered, waiting for them—the kid must have actually tipped them off. In a town this small, most people speak no French, but Kenneth’s able to communicate with a couple of the men. Their “guide” has gone ahead to Imlil, he is told, for a car. The women have bowls of water and rags to wash the blood, which Alias must have warned them about. Women approach Cystic as though blood is not a dangerous thing, begin bathing her still fully dressed. They think, it is clear, that she has been in some kind of hiking accident. They look for the wound.

It is then that Kenneth notices them. The four travelers he and Cystic first saw in the Tanger Inn: the dark, exotic couple and the white hippies. They are walking up the road, cameras round their necks, day packs on their backs, oblivious to the blinding heat, to their poor choice of hour in making this trip. They chat in their loud tourist voices, one of the girls proclaiming how cute the village children are just as Cystic did earlier this morning. “I’d just love to take a few of them home with me!” exclaims the pigtailed traveler, and Kenneth sees she has a Canadian maple leaf on her pack. They approach and there is Cystic, rust-colored water running from her listless body. The four travelers stop in their tracks. “My God!” shouts the pigtailed girl—a woman really, small lines already around her eyes. “What happened to her? Were you attacked?”