A Life in Men: A Novel (49 page)

“Attacked?” Kenneth says blankly. “You got a car, by any chance?”

They all stare at him. One of the men nods: Yes, a car. Down below, in Imlil.

Sandor says, “We need to get her to a hospital.”

Cystic murmurs from a few feet away, “Alias will be here before they could get down there and back with a car.”

“We don’t know what that guy’s gonna do,” Kenneth says coolly. “Could be he wants nothing to do with this and we’ll never see him again.”

Cystic shakes her head, eyes closed. He knows she wants to protest and it makes him dig his heels in. “Sandor, go with them and get the car and I’ll stay here with her.”

Sandor stands, ready to go.

“Wait a second,” the Asian girl says. She is startlingly pretty, angelic looking, her skin poreless. “We need our car.” Her voice is rising, panicked. “You can’t just go take it. We have to
return
that car—we’ll be held responsible for it. What if you just run off with it? Do you think we have the money to pay for a whole car? We’d be arrested!”

“We’re not car thieves!” Sandor protests. “Come with us if you like—we’re trying to get a sick woman to the hospital!”

“We can’t all fit in one car together,” the Asian girl protests sensibly. “There’s no hospital around here anyway—I mean, I’m sorry your friend got hurt, but I don’t see what we can do to help. We can’t take you all the way back to Marra
kech
.”

Kenneth feels his hands balling into fists at the girl’s whine. The villagers are still standing around openly staring, and though they don’t speak English, conflict is palpable in any language. Kenneth’s eyes dart toward Cystic, and the rage in him feels like venom. He could kill this girl, this beautiful girl and her pigtailed friend and the two assholes with them. He could kill them with his bare hands for not caring, not trusting, even though
he
doesn’t trust Alias, who knows Cystic better than these kids do, who has kissed her. Even though he’s not the least bit convinced Alias hasn’t just left them here hanging. The four travelers look at one another uncertainly, but not one speaks up to contradict, to offer up the car, and Kenneth thought only Americans were this full of righteous entitlement, this kind of callousness, but no: it is the whole world, the whole modern world, and the only way to escape it is to live in some godforsaken remote village where you share your house with sheep. Though he is not fool enough to think that in the Old World it would be any different—that fresh-baked bread and a roof to shield you from the hottest few hours of the sun and the way Nawar bent lovingly over Cystic’s damaged hands means nobility—as if he doesn’t know that those villagers would sell their daughters to the first bastard who came round with a buck, and that these women with their bowls of water and rags probably expect to be paid. The world is shit and he is part of it. He should never have let himself lose sight of that. But he would like to wrap his hands around this beautiful Canadian’s throat until she, too, coughs blood, because the woman who
made
him lose sight of the world’s ugliness is nothing to them, just an animal left on the side of the road to die: just a story they will tell back in North America over beers. He moves closer to the dark man, the beautiful girl’s man, intending to punch him, to tell him his girlfriend is a heartless piece of trash, but no release will come.

“We’ll go down to Imlil,” the white boy interjects, stepping between them. “We can’t give you our car but we’ll go down and find you another one at a hotel.”

“We’re waiting for someone,” Cystic says. Her voice is louder than it has been since the coughing began. “He’s on his way back. We were just stopping to rest.” She stands, and Sandor rushes to her side. She takes a few steps forward, pupils dilated like a junkie’s and some flame inside her glowing, so that her face looks not pale but
white
. Sandor puts an arm around her and ushers her down the road, and at last Kenneth snaps back to himself and rushes with them, too, puts his arm around her body from the other side, so that he and Sandor are almost embracing, and like this they are about to walk on when Alias comes rushing down the road calling to them, car in the distance and, as they can see as they get closer, insanely, all her belongings loaded inside.

“What the fuck?” Kenneth shouts at him. “You spent your time pulling shit out of her room? She could have been bleeding to death up here!”

Alias blinks, out of breath, clearly terrified. “But her medicines,” he falters. “Maybe she needs them?”

And it is the heat and the water Cystic drank so fast that there was none left for the rest of them and the fact that he is too clean, just too damn clean for this day to be happening, that makes Kenneth sway on his feet, head knocking against the frame of the car, so that Sandor almost has to help him in, too, as from the edge of the road the four travelers in the distance, the matter settled in their minds, move on.

S
ANDOR GRIPS THE
passenger’s door handle, white knuckled. Alias is speeding like they’re in a Hollywood chase scene, though he’s probably never had a formal driving class. In the backseat, Kenneth holds Mary in his lap. She’s slugging cough syrup, the prescription kind, and Kenneth takes it from her hand, saying, “Baby, you weigh about fifty pounds, you’re on the petite protocol,” but Mary’s head just lolls against his shoulder. Every moment on the road without the appearance of more blood feels a miracle. Sandor keeps an eye on his watch.

She is almost unconscious when it starts again, as somehow Sandor knew it would. Her body jerks despite her closed, drugged eyes, blood spurting out with a life of its own, immense and terrible. Sandor puts his head between his knees, muttering “Sterkte” under his breath like a prayer. In his peripheral vision, he sees Kenneth pull out his knife and start slashing open the carpet they bought in Essaouira—a lifetime ago—wrapping the stiff thing around Mary’s body so that her blood convulses right over it. Kenneth has his arms around the carpet; he’s murmuring to her—
what,
Sandor can’t hear. It almost hurts to look at them; he feels an intruder on a private scene, intimate and vulgar at once.

Then it is over again, just as suddenly as it started. That nightmare slips back inside some fissure in the universe and she’s breathing again, the gurgling sound of her air filling the shell-shocked car.

“Sandor,” she says, and he turns full on to hear, Alias still driving like mad and shouting, “We’re almost there, we’re almost there!” though they are nowhere near. Sandor thinks of what Leo would do and climbs over the seat, large gaps of vacant space on either side of the bundle that is Mary and Kenneth. He puts his arms around Mary’s carpeted shoulders, too, so that he and Kenneth are holding each other by proxy.

“When Geoff asks what happened,” she rasps, “say I passed out right away. Tell him I had no idea what was going on.”

Sandor sobs. Christ, why didn’t he force Leo to take her back to Europe—why didn’t he stand his ground? This is un-fucking-believable. This cannot be happening. He holds her shaking shoulders inside the blanket and weeps. She pushes at him with her hands.

“Tell him I loved the trip. Tell him I missed him but I understood. Why he couldn’t. I . . .” She fades for a moment, as though she is asleep, and Sandor makes an involuntary noise and shakes her to see if she’s dead. “Tell him I understood why I wasn’t mad,” she says, and he knows what she means but the incoherence is terrifying. He looks at Kenneth, who turns his face to the window as though trying not to witness. But when Sandor says, “Stop this talking, you are going to be fine, they’ll fix you up and you can tell him yourself anything you like,” Kenneth looks back at the huddle inside the carpet, her blood on his face, and says clearly, “He hears. He’ll remember what you said.”

She is unconscious when they reach the hospital. There follows a frenzy of activity, only the basics of which Sandor understands. Blood clotters, an IV antibiotic. Mary wakes, incoherent, belligerent, tries to get out of bed over the protests of nurses. She seems to recognize no one. She’s lugging her IV line behind her when the blood starts again, though by now, Sandor no longer feels faint at the sight of it. He can touch her without recoiling, the way Kenneth did from the first. Perhaps it is not so much old hat as that he assumes its
temporary
nature. She will bleed to death, and when she is dead, then the blood will stop.

She is drowning. Spitting blood into cups faster than the nurses can hand them her way. She leans against a sink filled with red. Her skin is the color of the graying porcelain. When they try to get a nasal cannula on her, the blood spurts toward it like a geyser; Sandor lies down on the floor, hyperventilating a little. Then they are
both
lying there, her head in the crook of his numb arm, the flow of her having stopped again as inexplicably as the last two times. Other than her raspy breath she could be a corpse, she’s so cold.

The doctor, Boutell, is French, but Kenneth doesn’t know French medical terms, so he switches to English, and the words Sandor hears could stop his heart:
bronchoscopy, emergency surgery, cauterization.
Kenneth has dug through her bag for the letters from her physician at home. When she is too groggy to sign consent forms, Sandor blurts out, “I am her brother, I will sign.” All blonds look alike. They pass him the forms.

She sleeps. She’s on oxygen, on morphine, IVs sticking out. When she wakes, she groans, “Don’t tell Geoff until it’s all over.” She begs, “Don’t let him see me this way.” Other times she seems to have no idea they are in the room.

Leo knows nothing; Geoff knows nothing; Mary’s widowed mother at home remains uncalled. Sandor stands at the hallway phone box. The hospital corridor is full of cats. He does not want to have this conversation—he does not, but if he fails to call, there is a chance Leo will never forgive him. He rests his forehead against the cool wall tiles, cats rubbing up against his legs as if they’re in one of Leo’s psychedelic paintings.

This hospital is mainly normal. Wealthy Moroccans, tourists, expats. Sure, there are these scrawny feral things roaming around as though they have the run of an abandoned building, but otherwise things seem all right here. Mary is in a private room even. Kenneth says her copious bleeding must have scared the hell out of them—they must not have wanted her anywhere near the other patients—but maybe it’s merely a sign of civilization? She did not die on the mountain, after all. Tomorrow she will have surgery. Maybe it is as simple as that. Crisis averted.

Sandor feels drunk, dizzy. He can’t remember exactly when he last ate. These cats remind him of the film
Betty Blue,
when at the end the male lead has euthanized his girlfriend and sits at home in their kitchen conversing to the cat as though she is the dead lover. The
unreal
seems, here, as though it could be real, and Mary seems as though she could be a dream. How has she possibly come back into his life after all those years? How has she come and with her arrival given him a window to Leo and changed everything? It has all been one elaborate hallucination. The real girl who played Nicole in the film of Arthog House (whose name really
is
Nicole, of course) is somewhere else entirely, and he will never see her again. Leo Becker is not his lover, just a man he desperately wants to fuck, whose work, the first time he saw it, struck him as the love child of Salvador Dalí and Francis Bacon, full of hyperprecision and dream and beautiful perversion. Leo is no one whose body he has tasted, no one who claims to love him, and this sick girl is not his Nicole and did not facilitate it. Sandor has done more crying today than in the past fifteen years. He has cried himself dry.

He does not pick up the phone. Instead he goes with Alias and Kenneth to get something to eat. Hunger and fear make them stagger. They are complicit. Out on the streets, people stare at Kenneth, cluck and hiss at him about his bloodstains.

“I will go to my place and fetch fresh clothes,” Alias says, leaving them at a café. Everything Sandor and Kenneth own is still in Imlil; they will never see those things again. Even after Alias has proved a genie on this trip, pulling vehicles and functional medical facilities and race-car driving out of his firm little ass, Sandor wonders if they will ever see
him
again either. Kenneth voices the same, but half an hour later Alias is back with fresh-smelling powder-blue shirts, one for each of them, and trousers for Kenneth that fit in the waist but are too short. Cats prowl the café, too; they seem inescapable. Sandor tosses them scraps of bread, though Alias tells him not to and the cats don’t appear interested.

Back at the hospital, visiting hours are over. They are told Mary is “resting comfortably.” In the morning she will be cauterized. This sounds official.

“It’ll stop the bleeding and we’ll load her on a plane and go home,” Sandor tells Kenneth, who has fallen silent as a stone. Sandor isn’t sure what “home” entails. Leo will be there somehow, and Geoff, too, and definitely not Kenneth or the emaciated cats.

Kenneth paces the hospital corridor. Sandor wants to leave, wants it perhaps more desperately than he has ever wanted anything in his life, but can’t admit it in the face of the damn Yankee’s vigil. He steps outside for a smoke and sobs a bit more, then curses himself until self-anger replaces the tears. On his return, Kenneth is sleeping standing up against a wall. Sandor prods him with a foot until he jerks alert. On the street, walking to Alias’s apartment, Kenneth starts tossing out titles for their predicament. “The Unbearable Lightness of Breathing,” he says. “Death and the Maiden,” Sandor counters. They riff. “Got My Invitation to a Beheading,” concludes Kenneth, which doesn’t quite make sense to Sandor. Still, they laugh, punch drunk, and have to stop walking. Then the rest of the way they can’t look at each other.

The sky is black. It seems impossible that at Jemaa el-Fna tourists are scarfing down food, musicians playing. That in the little rooms above courtyards, couples are fighting, having sex. Alias lives in one bare room with a small kitchenette. His girlfriend does not live there; Sandor had automatically assumed she did. They crash on Alias’s floor in borrowed clothing, the sleep of the just or the dead. No one even mentions a phone.