One more thing

There's this thing I've noticed about Istanbul: Nose jobs are really popular. Most days, if I look closely, I can see a woman walking down the street with a bandage on her nose indicating that she's just come out of surgery. I call this badge the rhinoplaster. Sometimes I'll even see the recent recipients of nose jobs strolling in pairs. I learned that one of my friends has had a nose job. Very well done, I might add. Other forms of plastic surgery are also very much in demand, they tell me. I have it on good authority that every Turkish girl has a Brazilian wax. My limited experience does not refute the assertion.

Maybe this embrace of superficiality has something to do with Ataturk's project for Turkey: Out with the old, in with the new. That includes your nose, lady. In the light of the secularists' attempt to outlaw the AKP, the nose job assumes a new symbolic significance. More than a white flag raised to European conceptions of facial harmony, it becomes a badge of the project of modernization, the antithesis of the headscarf. In a battle between the rhinoplaster and the headscarf, who would win? Stay tuned. Maybe we'll find out this summer. It will be like a mudwrestling tournament with political significance.

Two for three

I like to throw things. I like to throw them far, for power, as when throwing a rock into a mountain gorge. I like to skip stones along the water for finesse. I especially like to throw small items across a room, as when throwing a crumpled sheet of paper into the trash. The last type of throwing is not done merely for finesse, but in a partially conscious attempt to assert mastery over my physical environment. I go through spells of accuracy and deviation, but being mocked for bad aim really gets to me--because my brain is used to associating the action with greater implications. Over the past few years, I've spent more time that I'd care to admit, usually with friends, flicking or tossing bottlecaps across the room at various targets. It got to the point where it was formalized into a game called Bolf (Bottlecap Golf), complete with its own obstacles, scoring system and handicaps. One of my fondest memories from my time in Zambia in fact involved an extended morning session on the linoleum fairway. Cherished memories!

The deeper connection I was referring to reminds me of something that I did a lot as a child, and which I still catch myself doing from time to time today. If there is a question hanging over me, most often a romantic one, I will attempt to resolve it by a trial of manual dexterity and coordination. As in: If I can make 7 out of 10 free throws, then she will agree to go out with me. Or: Making this Q-tip into the trash on the first try means I should go ahead and tell her how I feel. Damn! All right, maybe I can still think about doing it if I go two for three. Shit balls! Three for five then.

I'm interested by this stuff. Does anyone else do it? What does it mean?

Some Weather

My thought drifted to the weather as I walked on. It struck me that the weather was not only coloring my thoughts in a certain way, but was actually directing them. The specific play of wind and clouds and temperature seemed to make certain thoughts possible while precluding others. There was something to this. I began keeping a log of the weather, jotting down each day's particular combination of atmospheric elements, as well as the thoughts and moods that they entrained.

I could not let it go. There was a charette coming up at the journal, a deadline approaching on a translation, and my apartment was developing a nasty plumbing problem that had me wearing flipflops in the bathroom and pinching my nose. But I could not stop thinking about the weather. The days wore on, and infatuation tilted into obsession. I was not unaware of this greased gradient into folly, but I would not be persuaded that my obsession was anything less than fundamentally healthy, that mine was a solipsistic or irrelevant descent, or that my quest, if pursued with diligence, would not yield up a pearl stunning to behold--a pearl whose at once prismatic and cloudy surface would show its reverent beholders that their true evolutionary destiny lay in not in riding elevators to the tops of air conditioned skyscrapers, but in joining the ranks of homo sapiens meteorologicus.
I saw my hunch confirmed every time I looked out my window onto my wide view of sky and water: There really was something to the weather. More than a shifting background or a convenient foil to smalltalk, weather constituted the fundamental conditions of our daily experience. My conviction grew like a seed that had found purchase in good soil, and soon I thought that the world needed to know. And I already had the perfect forum. My swelling notes on the spiritual mechanics of meteorology could be turned into a running feature in Anatole. Some Weather, I would call it--The Vaporous Science of Meteorology.
Being a literary and cultural magazine, Anatole was perfectly suited to the topic. Any reader who stopped for just a minute to think about it would know that weather and literature were inseparable. Observations on the interplay of sun and wind and rain, or fictional admixtures of the same, seem to be sine qua non tools for the writer's art if it is to live up to its mandate to chart out limitless exemplary maps of the human experience.
As much by instinct as by read example, I knew that the body of human literature contained as many portentous thunderheads and blazing sunsets as did the history of man's tenure on the planet.
And with good reason, too. Weather not only frames the mood; it impels it onward in an incessant series of small adjustments, taps on the soul's steering wheel. Just as man's Enlighted understanding of the world cast fields as diverse as physics and history as dynamic, evolving, revisable, so any latterday holistic understanding of the human experience must cast mankind not as a blessed creature apart, but as a creature of the weathers. And, continuing in the Enlightenment tradition, the weather itself must be seen as an unremitting act of physical becoming which tows the receptive spirit closely in its wake. The examples in literature are as numerous as the storms that have fed and battered the earth thorugh the ages, and are too many to cite here. [But consider, if only for a moment, Defoe's publication of observations on the winter storm of 1703, when the lead roofing on Westminster Abbey scrolled up like parchment, and up to 8,000 souls came to grief at sea. Or the fact that poetry, regarded on the whole, is well and truly the result of meteorological measurements performed on the atmosphere of the poet's brain.]
If all this seemed obvious to me, it also seemed uncanny that no one had before thought to systematize the effects of weather on the soul. Indeed, there was a yawning gap at the very heart of the humanities. Who has ever undertaken a systematic examination, not only of weather's role in literature, but of its function as a barometer to the human spirit, and as the missing ingredient in nearly every attempt to chart the course of human history? That this failure stood in such sharp contrast to the hurtling progress being made on the apocalyptic meteorological problem of the age made it even more egregious. On a personal level, I also thought that such an exercise would be good for me, since it would help me understand my own moods and prejudices much more objectively. It might, for instance, help in parsing my own reactions to any future Braxator installments.
To answer this plaintive calling, then, I decided that I would continue making my daily notes on the weather, with consideration paid to its dynamic and dictatorial nature, while leaving open the possibility of asking important questions or drawing tentative conclusions as I saw fit. The idea was for this effort to function as a spur to reader contributions, since the experience of the weather was sure to be as diverse and enriching as the fertile field of humanity itself.
What were the questions I asked myself? Maybe, I thought, the experience of weather was genetically conditioned. Maybe there were people out there who were impervious to it, people whose spiritual constitutions were insusceptible to variations in temperature and sunlight by virtue of an ancestral bequest of storms and other extremes, and who as such were most qualified to lead institutions through times of turbulence and uncertainty: Icelandic helmsmen, the shepherds of the Caucasus, Bedouin. Or perhaps it was quite the opposite, that the centuries of storms running in their blood made them too volatile to be trusted at the helm? And what role did ancient weathers have as an ingredient in religion, in philosophy? Was it a coincidence that the cruelest and most impossible of the monotheisms was hatched in and then flourished across an unremitting desert? Did Siddhartha's upbringing in a lush Nepalese valley play a part in the detatched equanimity of his teachings? Might not the diversity and capriciousness of the Hindu deities have something to do with the subcontinent's endless succession of monsoon verdure and dire drought? And do the surviving pagan superstitions of Europe have anything to do with the cruelty of that continent's weather in prehistorical times? What about paleometeorology? Could ice cores and fossil records tell us something about the conditions that formed the crucible of human perception?
And what of the way the weather mirrors the human metabolism? Typical days start still and sluggish before progressing to a mid-afternoon peak of activity. Body and soul both ride the crest of this wave through the afternoon. But winds quiet again at dusk, the waves on the water die, giving way to a time of withdrawn reflection. The wind is still, the surface of the water reflects its calm. Might not the waves playing on the surface of the mind suddenly still in the same way? And if such waves do not settle at the approach of velvety dusk, is it not desirable that they should--that the proper condition of the human soul is to be receptive to and reflective of the weather, lest we miss an important message coded into the elements?
Finally, does it make a difference to the human metabolism that hyperborean twlights are more prolonged than in the middle latitudes? Do breaches of the diurnal cycle, whether by virture of dissoluteness or of nocturnal duty, impose a spiritual penalty? These were the things I wanted to find out.
So much for lofty thoughts. Here is what I eventually settled on for an opener to the weather serial:

Some Weather: The Vaporous Art of Meteorology

--"Wrap me in the weathers of the earth. I will be hard and hard. My face will turn rain like the stones."

My life long, I have heard people complain about the weatherman. The usual charge is that his forecasts are inaccurate. Some even suspect him of duplicity aimed at clearing the golf course or the beach of impediments to his view. But we all know full well that he has no greater hand in the forecasts than we ourselves do, determined as it it by complex computer models and weather satellites. I do share the plaintiffs' general sense of grievance against the weatherman, and have always found him to be possessed of a sorely deficient character. But my gripe has nothing to do with the accuracy of the forecast. I am always filled with quiet pleasure when computer models are disproved by the weather's true complexity. Another relatively common complaint is that the weatherman is boring, which is closer to my own assessment. For me the problem is that the weatherman as we know him is too trifling a character to address his topic with the gravity it deserves. To the average weatherman/woman, weather is like traffic, or the day's lottery draw. To prove how completely he has failed in addressing himself to his task, let us ask ourselves a leading question: Is there anyone more vapid than the weatherman?
No. Nobody is more vapid than the weatherman. But why? This question is best answered by way of another: What is more profound and inscrutable and sublime and awesome than the weather? The answer is nothing. The weatherman is vapid because he fails to live up to the weather's profundity. Of course, the weatherman's inadequacy to his task should hardly be surprising. The weatherman is employed by and panders to the same people as the newscaster, after all; and to weather the news requires exactly the same gravitas, integrative critical ability and wicked humor required to announce the weather.
It is a very sad fact indeed that the marks of a good weatherman are limited to a smooth delivery, an upbeat attitude, and a pleasant sweeping motion.
But what would a man truly worthy of the weathers do in our banal weatherman's stead? What improvements would he undertake in the realm of weathermanhood? We'll start with what he would look like. For my ideal weatherman I envision a man with a salt-and-pepper beard, elderly but vital, with a glint in his eye that could be interpreted as either sprightly or malicious. For his garb I see a simple tunic or kurta, perhaps a Nehru shirt, and for the understory baggy pantaloons and unpretentious thong sandals. This would be the foundation, and a sage one at that. Over this he would place accessories appropriate to his forecast: A yellow fisherman's slicker and galoshes to cover the sandals in the event of rain; a panama hat and a wristband for a hot day with strong sun; and a walrus pelt parka fitted with an ermine collar for days with temperatures below 0 degrees Fahrenheit--and maybe a hat of otter fur thrown in for the truly frigid days.
More than just a mark of good taste, appropriate dress would be a touchstone for appropriate behavior. Which is to say that the weatherman's style and mood of presentation would be as variable as the weather itself. Meteorology affects us all more than we know, and it would affect him the most. It would be the ideal weatherman's task to heave open the floodgates and abandon himself to what we'll call the total meteorological experience. He would not embarrass himself, as today's weathermen do, by simply relaying satellite pixellations while actually contemplating his next round of golf or his next assignation with the woman unfortunate enough to be the mistress of the weatherman. My weatherman would not put the weather out of mind as soon as the studio door shut behind him. The forecast-watching public deserves more!
This man, this Utopian weatherman, would live the weather. His waking mind would be bent on it, his dream life would be populated by fantastic and freakish weather phenomena, and his home would be all portholes and skylights and aneroid barometers. He would go for long meteorological walks every morning and afternoon, often with friends and disciples, not to trump the information about storm fronts and pressure systems provided by satellites, for that is impossible, but to subject it to a more relevant, you might say spiritual, human exegesis. I am not afraid to say it: My ideal weatherman would be a philosopher, and it would be a sign of his very profundity that he has taken what is commonly held to be such a banal topic for the object of his philosophy. Like certain poets, his trick would be to access the numinous and the sublime in the ordinary, the everyday--though of course weather's everydayness is not as much a fact as it is a mark of our own calcified perception and growing intellectual poverty.
His philosophy would be transcendental-epicurean. Which is to say that, while able to meet the buffets of stormy weather not only with equanimity, but with a keen view to its philosophical lessons, he would also take childlike delight in the blessings of fine weather--the enthusiasm would be infectious. Such a weatherman would never be caught dead moaning and groaning about snow or rain or cold in the fashion of our base and childish crop of modern weathermen. He would delight in the extremes that serve convincing reminders to sensitive souls that they are alive.
The philosopher weatherman would be sensitive but never lachrymose, reflective but above brooding, wonderstruck yet not easily mystified. For instance, when discussing snow, he might take a moment to discuss the wonder of seeing water in a different phase, the beauty of crystal structures, and the bittersweet melancholy that attends the certainty of their transience. He would pay homage to snow's knack for blunting the edge of hibernal darkness, and cite the role of snowmelt in the coming regeneration of life. The current vapid manner of talking about cloud formations and atmospheric fronts would be completely revolutionized. Cloudmasses would be infused with the spirits that they eminently represent. A thunderhead would be cast not only as a source of inconvenience and destructive potential, but as a stormy disturbance fast approaching the percussive skin of the collective soul. Generally, clouds would receive a great deal of attention. Like snow that is sure to melt, clouds are a convincing reductio of life's frail transience, but also of its heartrending beauty. My ideal weatherman, then, would be a serious connoisseur of clouds. He would encourage his readers to take as their ideal a life floating among the clouds. His segments might feature footage of clouds taken from the ground, from buildings, from airplanes, from space. On certain days he might invite viewers to call in to pick out the shapes of faces or animals or other things that sometimes flicker through passing cloud formations, awarding some meteorologically relevant trinket to the most imaginative caller. He might also sponsor contests in which viewers made competing predictions about how long it would take lone clouds passing over a great desert to expire.
Furthermore, there would be no mention of Canadian-born cold fronts without concomitant mention of the clarity of the faculty of reason that cold weather never fails to inspire. Finally, in those cases when weather causes loss of property or of life, the weatherman-as-philosopher would firmly spurn the usual platitudes about tragedy and calamity (on which the health of the modern economy and system of governance is anyways predicated), preferring instead to look on such events as a lamentable but nonetheless bracing and healthy expression of the human condition's frailty. And he would instantly terminate and maybe even rough up any acolyte weatherman with the gall to film a "why did this happen to us" segment in the wake of a natural disaster.
Rather than as a predictable broadcast of anticipated annoyance or pleasure, how much more uplifting to see the weather report forecast in detail what is about to transpire in the viewer's soul! It goes without saying that to pull this off, you need experience. The ideal weatherman must be elderly, or at least seasoned. To fix matters somewhat more precisely, I think the bare minimum should be a lifetime experience of 200 seasons, or 618 moons.
Of course, like most good philosophers and spiritual people, my ideal weatherman would also host public forums for discussing pressing weather-related issues. He would invite friends both serious-minded and frivolous, personages both esteemed and despised, to participate in panel discussions on weather-related issues. This charged atmosphere of debate, this serious-mindedness, would go some way toward rehabilitating the weather as a subject for earnest people. The obvious topic, of course, is global warming. It is worth asking how the ideal weatherman would approach it. To begin, he would not be content to ignore the issue in the fashion of the stooges and fools who now pretend to be weathermen on television. His would not be a tightly scripted refusal to entertain the notion that the weather has a spectral and even apocalyptic dimension. He would not shy from the issue that the weather nearly always carries whispers of an approaching calamity. I suspect that the ideal weatherman would be fundamentally sympathetic to concerns about environmental stewardship. At the same time, however, he would be wildly intolerant of the common class of fanatics who use the mantle of environmentalism as a foil for misanthropy and nihilism. No, our philosopher-weatherman would be too smart to reject the legacy of the Enlightenment and whatever Utopian traces it might contain. In short, his attitude to global warming would be one of restrained alarm. While refusing to shy from the plight of the poor African villagers hounded by desertification, he would punctiliously tack away from the siren call of defeatism. And if he could find an economical way to do it, the old sage might even put a cap on his own carbon emissions.
Is it really a secret that weather is inseparable from the world of the spirit? Am I alone in thinking it deserves such attention? Hardly. Through the ages, writers of every stripe could not have done more to corroborate my thesis. Open a novel and see how many pages pass before there is mention of rain or snow or sun or wind. If you look at it honestly and without preconception, you will glimpse clearly and without reservation that literature and meteorology are inseparable. Better put: You cannot have literature without meteorology, and while you can have meteorology without literature, why the devil would you want to? The link is fundamental. Weather is not cited in literature as an empty flourish of convention. It is strummed on with such frequency because weather is both the legend for decoding our lived experience and the surreptitious boot that spurs us to think and act as we do. More than that, it is the soundtrack without which nothing in the movie makes sense. Depending on our circumstances, stormy weather provokes either the desperation of exposure or the cozy comfort of interiority. A day of merciless sun is a cipher for the fragility of human endeavor, of nature's implacable indifference. And who will raise his head to disagree with me that the description of a storm at sea is the language of brute terror itself? There is a very good reason that, on recollection, these events nearly always seems portentous: Nothing happens in the atmosphere without its immediate complement in the heart.
But just as the philosopher-cum-weatherman does not yet exist, nor does the transcending humanist compiler of weathers. Yet instead of lamenting their refusal to be born, I will step into the breach. I will put my money where my mouth is. I will give birth to the ideal weatherman, with this publication as my midwife. In a grotesque turn of the metaphor, the ideal weatherman to whom I give birth will initially be myself. Yet it is my deeply held hope that he will go forth and multiply so that, before long, many of my readers will have converted to the gospel of said ideal weatherman. That said, I will leave the birthing of the transcending humanist compiler of weathers to someone else--I do not feel it to be my place, as I do not hold an endowed academic chair, which would be a distinctly more comfortable perch for such a lofty undertaking.
Here's what's happening, folks: Beginning with the next issue, I am going to put out a weekly weather report. As befits a text that aims to be philosophical, far from being a forecast aimed at minimizing inconvenience and helping you make money, my report will be a reprise of weather that has already occurred, and will tend to celebrate nasty weather wherever I find it. Nor does it lay claim to comprehensiveness: There may be some weeks when I report on the weather on seven out of seven days as a tribute to the weather's joyful motleyness, but others whose vapidity leaves me cold and with nothing to say. Also, in the interest of leaving enough space for Anatole's readers to file their own weather reports, I will try to keep my philosophical points as pithy as possible, with nothing approaching the magnitude of the above excursions.
By way of reader encouragement I would like to note that each of the following may be thought of as weather phenomena in the holistic way we like to see things at Anatole:

1. The way the setting sun gilds the top of a hill.
2. The way colors grow richer and more profound the closer they come to their final shuddering surrender to darkness. Witness the blue of the sky opening hallucinogenically into the infinitude of space. Witness the color of grass flaring into an impossible green at the threshold of dusk winking into night.
3. The way clouds or fog can inspire you with a feeling of interiority, making you feel, even when you are outside, that you are in a low room with a ceiling made of plush white cushions.

Readers, knock yourselves out!

~

This is what the three sets of meteorological observations I felt compelled to make the following week looked like:


1

Returning from town along the highway by bus the vehicle entered a drift of thick fog. I wondered if it might be coal pollution, but the thickness of it told me we would all soon be dead if it were. Most remarkable were the floodlit banking skyscrapers lining the highway. One of them looked particularly eerie. Spectral. The building panels were the color of alabaster. It was a white building ducking in and out of thickest white fog, its alternate appearance and occlusion like a tentative act of will faltering its way through tendrils of mist. In the topographical bowl of my neighborhood the fog had massed so thick that not even the bottom of my hill was visible, let alone the blotted currents of the strait beyond. It made my apartment feel even more like a ship's cabin. It also, more suggestively, made me feel that the things that happened that day would have no bearing on the events of any other day. It was a day encapsulated by fog, to which no other day could have any relation.

2

It was a day with the inscrutability and remove of a black and white photograph. The Bosporus was still, but the clouds overhead fled mistily westward along the backs of the hills. Most remarkable was the dramatically narrowed color spectrum. Almost all the blues and greens seemed gone from the usually vaguely florid water, and what blues were there were so profound as to be nearly undetectable, so that the water presented a palette ranging from turgid slate to marine cobalt. The aspect of the day seemed unfinished, as if it had somehow not yet come into its own, as if its painter had denied it a final touch or two of color before walking off. Yet this poverty of painterly detail somehow made its perspective deeper. I felt my vision liberated, as if my gaze could range up the seaway as far as distant Odessa.

3

The sky I saw when I peaked my head out the mudroom window in the morning looked like what the chief of Asterix's village used to see before he declared that the sky was falling. It was cold when I left the house. The rain was not steady. It came flicking down in spurts like the dangled prospect of punishment, a hint of sadism that its brandisher never quite applied. I felt that the sky and its particular pressure were filling me with malevolence.

Recently...

Oh
Can't anybody see
We've got a war to fight
-Portishead

As ever, there is a lot to say. It is just a matter of how to express it, how to get at the order of things, how to qualify them, how to sift the banal from the real, or, even especially, how to give up the distinction without seeming to have capitulated.

~

Recently I was in the Baltic. I lied about wanting to settle there, of course. Not much to report from that time and place. Nice to see my cousin, of course. While I was there we learned that the child his wife is pregnant with is going to be a girl. With long arms, it seems.

~

Recently I was in Greece. Having come from the bland and blanched north, the savoir vivre of the Mediterranean immediately stood out. A number of other things there also made a strong impression on me.

One evening in Athens my companion and I were walking to get dinner. It was around ten. The evening was warm and quiet and fragrant and elegiac. It was a long weekend, and with many residents having decamped to the islands or the villages, the streets were all but deserted. We may not have taken the main thoroughfares, but on a 20 minute walk through the seedy heart of a 4 million person city, we encountered hardly a soul. Barring my friend's assurances, I would have thought something was amiss. This background of desolation underscored the people populating the telephone booths. We may have encountered no one strolling, no one simply hanging around, but in every single every phone booth we passed--and there were many--there was a person huddled or hunched, speaking or listening, stuttering or summoning the courage to say something. They were speaking quietly, privately, even intimately. I remember thinking that the scene was worth noting, that it was a memory worth forming and then exploring. Every caller we passed added to a gathering sense of vaporous rapture. If there was something weird about it, something uncanny, there was also something touching. I imagined that we were walking through a city in the final stages of abandonment, that these were the last people left, and that they were pausing to say goodbye--to the city itself?--before leaving everything behind. After some time we ended up in a restaurant full of diners, but the scene of the callers tethered to the phone booths, those refugees tarrying for a final second by a cherished friend or memory before lighting out for whatever territories--that scene stayed with me.

The next day we went to a pet shop. We needed to buy formula for an abandoned newborn kitten whose life we were trying to save. The shop was in a very seedy part of Athens, which is a seedy town to begin with. To get there we had to walk some way along a road that led downhill. At the top of the hill was a Pakistani/Arab neighborhood with sidewalks lined and trafficked exclusively by men. They tracked our downward progress with noncommital interest. Betel nut was being chewed, Qawwali played, merchandise bargained over and sold, food prepared and rung up and eaten. By the time we had got to the bottom of the hill where the pet shop stood, we had passed through a gradient along which Pakistanis and Egyptians had given way almost entirely to greasy and muttering drug addicts on the prowl, either coasting or coming down, whose gazes, when they did manage to land on us, were much keener and more appraising than those that had lingered on us at the top of the hill. I surveyed the scene outside and followed my companion into the store. She reached into the basket we had been carrying and presented the kitten to the owner for inspection. He gave it a practiced once-over as the two of them launched into a conversation about his prospects in Greek. I drifted off to have a look at the puppies and the kittens, the ferrets and the hamsters, the fish and the snakes. As I peered into the cages from the inside, junkies were passing by and leering into them through the shop windows, eyes vacant or crazed or both. At one point a pair of them passed to survey a particularly cute and helpless-looking puppy, exchanging views on what they saw. Once we'd bought the formula for our little foundling to nurse on, my friend said the shop owner was a nice guy, and related for me parts of the conversation she'd had with him. When the two junkies had been talking about the puppy (it went something like "Boy he looks dumb!" / "You think you're any smarter, buddy? Think again. You're the dumbest animal I know."), the owner turned to my friend and said "You see what I have to go through every day?" Something about the atmosphere of this pet shop down in the seedy bowels of Athens (a city which, in spite of everything, is still presided over by the [disappointed?] Attic sky that witnessed and spawned all the heroic accomplishments of Antiquity) captured my imagination. I immediately thought it would make a good central setting for a movie or a book or a story. It could be a cheap movie, too. The kitten pulled through, by the way, and is living happily now.

~

Recently I read a book on the Arab conquests in the first century of Islam by Hugh Kennedy. He quotes the writing of one Tu Huan, a Chinese man held captive for nine years in the court of the Abbasid caliphate at Baghdad, following a battle won by a Muslim army against a Chinese one in central Asia (the only recorded conflict between these opponents). Tu writes: "The entire land has been transformed; the people follow the tenets of Islam like a river in its channel." I found this to be a stirring metaphor, and an incisive one, to the extent that it reveals the unity of man's need to tame watercourses with his desire to conquer fellow men and to reshape the channels their lives run through. 1300 years have done nothing to diminish its relevance. In the modern age, the two projects are intimately and flagrantly linked: From the World Bank's many and monstrous hydroelectric projects to the Three Gorges Dam, power over water and power over people are never far apart.

~

Recently I read a devastatingly powerful book that attempts an integrative critique of the world-historical processes of modernity and the modernist art conceived in response to those upheavals. All That Is Solid Melts Into Air, by Marshall Berman, is a herculean effort to capture modern experience and modernist art whose scope sweeps across 200 years. "To be modern," he begins, "is to find ourselves in an environment that promises us adventure, power, joy, growth, transformation of ourselves and the world--and, at the same time, that threatens to destroy everything we have, everything we know, everything we are. Modern environments and experiences cut across all boundaries of geography and ethnicity, of class and nationality, or religion and ideology: in this sense, modernity can be said to unite all mankind. But it is a paradoxical unity, a unity of disunity: it pours us all into a maelstrom of perpetual disintegration and renewal, of struggle and contradiction, of ambiguity and anguish. To be modern is to be part of a universe in which, as Marx said, 'all that is solid melts into air.'" I recommend this book with all my heart and mind. For me, the act of reading it not only recapitulated the modern maelstrom of my own experience, but allowed me to establish a deep, newly illuminated spiritual connection with the most notable artistic responses to the threats and possibilities of modernity: Goethe's Faust, Baudelaire's simultaneous exaltation and vituperation of the modern types he saw haunting the streets of Paris, the phantasmagoric Petersburg literary tradition from Gogol to Dostoevsky to Biely.

Below I have compiled a series of quotes from the book itself, or which were in turn cited in the book:

From Rousseau's The New Eloise:
"I'm beginning to feel the drunkenness that this agitated, tumultuous life plunges you into. With such a multitude of objects passing before my eyes, I'm getting dizzy. Of all the things that strike me, there is none that holds my heart, yet all of them together disturb my feelings, so that I forget what I am and who I belong to."

Marx: The atmosphere in which we live weighs upon everyone with a 20,000 pound force, but do you feel it?

Marx: There is one great fact, characteristic of this our nineteenth century, a fact which no party dares deny. On the one hand, there have started into life industrial and scientific forces which no epoch of human history had ever suspected. On the other hand, there exist symptoms of decay, far surpassing the horrors of the latter times of the Roman Empire. In our days everything seems pregnant with its contrary. Machinery, gifted with the wonderful power of shortening and fructifying human labor, we behold starving and overworking it. The new-fangled sources of wealth, by some weird spell, are turned into sources of want. The victories of art seem bought by the loss of character. At the same pace that mankind masters nature, man seems to become enslaved to other men or to his own infamy. Even the pure light of science seems unable to shine but on the dark background of ignorance. All our invention and progress seem to result in endowing material forces with intellectual life, and stultifying human life into a material force.

Nietzsche: We moderns, we half-barbarians. We are in the midst of our bliss only when we are most in danger. The only stimulus that tickles us is the infinite, the immeasurable.

Berman, on the abandonment of the positive side of the dialectic by Foucault:
'Foucault reserves his most savage contempt for people who think it is possible for modern mankind to be free. Do we think we feel a spontaneous rush of sexual desire? We are merely being moved by "the modern technologies of power that take life as their object," driven by the "deployment of sexuality by power in its grip on bodies and their materiality, their forces, their energies, sensations and pleasures. Do we act politically, overthrow tyrannies, make revolutions, create constitutions to establish and protect human rights? Mere "juridical regression" from the feudal ages, because constitutions and bills of rights are merely "the forms that [make] an essentially normalizing power acceptable. Do we use our minds to unmask oppression--as Foucault appears to be trying to do? Forget it, because all forms of inquiry into the human conditions "merely refer individuals from one disciplinary authority to another," and hence only add to the triumphant "discourse of power." Any criticism rings hollow, because the critic himself or herself is "in the panoptic machine, invested by its effects of power, which we bring to ourselves, since we are part of its mechanism.'

Mephistopheles:
I am the spirit that negates all!
And rightly so, for all that comes to be
Deserves to perish wretchedly...

Berman, on the promise of modern adventure: Body and soul are to be exploited for a maximum return--not, however, in money, but in experience, intesity, felt life, action, creativity...Universally modern, too, are the Faustian pressures to use every part of ourselves, and of everybody else, to push ourselves and others as far as we can go.

Berman, on Faust, in his incarnation as a developer, in which he has Philemon and Baucis, the old couple who will not give up their land for development in exchange for a cash settlement, murdered: "It appears that the very process of development, even as it transforms a wasteland into a thriving physical and social space, recreates the wasteland inside the developer himself. This is how the tragedy of development works."

Berman, p. 95: 'Our lives are controlled by a ruling class with vested interests not merely in change but in crisis and chaos. "Uninterrupted disturbance, everlasting uncertainty and agitation," instead of subverting this society, actually serve the strengthen it. Catastophes are transformed into lucrative opportunities for redevelopment and renewal; disintegration works as a mobilizing and hence an integrating force. The only specter that really haunts the modern ruling class, and that really endangers the world it has created in its image, is the one that traditional elites (and, for that matter, traditional masses) have always yearned for: prolonged solid stability. In this world, stability can only mean entropy, slow death, while our sense of progress and growth is our only way of knowing for sure that we are alive. To say that our society is falling apart is only to say that it is alive and well.' Consider that this was written in 1981.

Baudelaire: I leave aside the question of whether, by continually refining humanity in proportion to the new enjoyments it offers, indefinite progress might not be its most cruel and ingenious torture; whether proceeding as it does by a negation of itself, it would not turn out to be a perpetually renewed form of suicide, and whether, shut up in the fiery circle of divine logic, it would not be like the scorpion that stings itself with its own tail--progress, that eternal desideratum that is its own eternal despair!

Berman on Benjamin's Parisian writings: "His heart and sensibility draw him irresistably toward the city's bright lights, beautiful women, fashion, luxury, its play of dazzling surfaces and radiant scenes, meanwhile his Marxist conscience wrenches his insistently awat from these temptations, instructs him that this whole glittering world is decadent, hollow, vicious, spiritually empty, oppressive to the proletariat, condemned by history."

Dostoevsky's Underground Man: "I was terribly afraid of being seen, of being met, of being recognized. I already had the underground in my soul."

The radical Khazov, in a pamphlet written in 1877, just before before his exile to Siberia: "Russia is led along the road to political freedom not by the liberals but by dreamers who organize ridiculous and childish demonstrations; by men who dare to break the law, who are beaten, sentenced, and reviled."

Dostoevsky, in his Winter Notes on Summer Impressions, addressing the great works of engineering he has seen over in Europe:
"Man loves to create and build roads, that is beyond dispute. But...may it not be that...he is instinctively afraid of attaining his goal and completing the edifice he is constructing? How do you know, perhaps he only likes that edifice from a distance and not at close range, perhaps he only likes to build it, and does not want to live in it."

Berman: "...the nihilism of modern revolutionaries is a pale shadow of the nihilism of the forces of order."

~

Recently I immersed myself full tilt in the television series Prison Break. By "full tilt" I mean that by the time I had finished the 22 episodes of the first season, I had worked up such an appetite for the second that I worked through the next 22 in 24 hours flat. Like the show 24--and like scenes constructed by Dostoevsky, or for that matter like the spectacle of current events broadcasting live from the centers of power--Prison Break's rhythm is defined by endless crises, by staggering crescendos of quasi-climax after quasi-climax, by folds within intrigues within Matruyoshka subplots that make the viewer simultaneously beg for resolution and wish that the titillation would never end. To be fair, I would rather watch Prison Break than CNN, no matter the crisis they happen to be selling. The experience of watching the show is a little bit like taking a drug, or playing a video game. It is a wild ride, but in the end the viewer (I at least) feels hollowed out, betrayed--as if the product hadn't quite lived up to its promise. This emotional crash must result from two circumstances. The first is the formal circumstance of the medium in which the story is told. Television needs to keep its users coming back for more, and over the years they've learned to do a damn good job of it. Prison Break is an entertainment product--and if we are disappointed by it, in some sense we have only ourselves to blame: Like a drug, or like any commodity, it seems to be invested with a certain fetishistic aura that it can never live up to, and which we ourselves are complicit in maintaining.

The second fact that breeds my sense of betrayal has to do with the content of the show (which cannot be fully separated from the form of its narration, in the sense that the need to attract advertisers and a mass audience imposes certain restrictions on content, i.e. in some sense the betrayal is the result of conflict between artistic vision and commercial reality). It is the show's content I have been thinking about most. At the risk of coming off a bit dramatically, I would say that the show manages to 'imprison' viewers in an atmosphere of despair and nihilism, while promising them an ultimate redemption from that despair in an imagined final episode where, by transcending both themselves and the small cabal of corrupt officials that rules the country, Scofield and Burrows "make everything right." Until that time, viewers are left to muddle along and make do with whatever hope and meaning they can find in the savage dialectic of violence and vengeance that the show will continue to serve up until the imagined day of redemption. The show imprisons its viewers not only by vividly bringing the grim realities of doing hard time home to the screen during the run-up to the brothers' escape, but then, after the escape, by painting an equally convincing picture of the outside world as a vast 'panoptic' prison from which escape is just as impossible, and which is just as inimical to life as life in a tangible cage--and in which, most importantly, the viewer can easily situate himself. So far, so good: We all know that we are as powerless as gnats against the state's vast resources, against its monopoly on awesome violence, and we can all easily imagine being on the wrong end of the barrel.

The problem is that the show never makes the qualitative leap that true resolution (of the problem of atomized man versus nebulous omnipresent state) would require. In short, there is never anything close to a cathartic moment of solidarity that would transcend parochial ties. Even though the brothers' plight and the dizzying cycles of state violence that trail in the wake of their escape eminently call for mass action against the state, Prison Break inhabits a post-Thatcherite world, and that alternative is not on offer. There is no society: There is only Michael Scofield and Lincoln Burrows (and the other inmates and their families). Thus their only hope, once out, is either to disappear completely, or to get the state to wipe the slate clean by blackmailing the WASP mafia at its head.

For a taste of the nihilistic dimension of the violence that the show serves up as we wait in vain for a redemption that is forever deferred, look no further than the character of Theodore "T-Bag" Bagwell. A Faulknerian mutant, Bagwell is the eloquent and murderous offspring of an incestuous tryst who, while obsessed with the elimination of his own bloodline, seeks to redeem his own nightmarish childhood by abducting a family and getting them to act out a pastoral set piece for his benefit. Along the way and after the failure of his project, he savagely murders a number of men and women for our viewing pleasure. There is something immorally intoxicating about the portrayal of Bagwell's violence: The long shots of him licking his lips before striking, the semi-learned and wholly deranged speeches he gives to his victims before murdering them--at heart a cat and mouse game in which the viewer is clearly cast as the cat, firmly rooted in the august American tradition of pornographic violence.

Not only does the show make the viewer identify with the experience of prison and the feeling of entrapment at large. It also builds an ideological prison the viewer, and then "throws away the key." The show's masterful dramatization and depiction of the dark side of power is a hermetic world. There is no way out, no iota of light beyond the nostrums of brotherly love and a vague faith in an ultimate justice that will be served up once the existing system is somehow "purged" (the parallel with the Stalinist/Maoist purges is a stretch, but the idea is the same: If we recapture the pure kernel of our society, all will be well. Until then, savage violence is the name of the game). The show (partially correctly) depicts modern America as a police state ruled by a shadowy corporate mafia where to oppose the state is to be faced with savage violence, yet it fails to hold out any hope for redemption beyond running away or getting lucky and somehow nailing the big boss at the top. The characters all tacitly to believe in the fairytale of an American paradise lost, and that all will be well with the country if truth is spoken to the right person, and the structure of injustice implodes like a house of cards. If Scofield and Burrows can unmask the truth, democracy will be restored, and the government will be run in service of the people, just like it says in the constitution.

The prison system, however grimly it is portrayed, is never problematized in itself. Nor are the vast resources of violence at the state's disposal. Nor is the immediate willingness of every random civilian in the show to capitulate to the state's orgiastic displays of violence. We are to believe, as the characters must, that if truth is spoken, and if the WASP mafia is brought down, then the vast resources of repression and apprehension and correction will be deployed to serve the people.

The character of Michael Scofield is very interesting. His struggles of conscience and his need to clean up the mess he makes in springing his brother have an eschatological dimension. Not only is he his brother's savior: He has been put onto the TV screen to redeem America for its sins, a wunderkind able to bear the world's entire weight. Scofield is obsessed not only with the escape itself, but with the 'immaculate' dimension of the escape--he wants people to understand the justice of what he has done, and is obsessed with removing any incidental traces of blood on his hands, even at the expense of the very success of the escape. Witness his crusade to put Bagwell back behind bars. The show's religious references and motifs are interesting when refracted through the prism of the show's Thatcherite/libertarian ideology. The foil of God allows the societal factors complicit in criminality to be sluiced off at a stroke, and firmly situates the problem of crime within the culpable self. Not that the show's writers necessarily do this consciously: I imagine the religious motifs to be an apt reflection of the role that religion plays within the walls of real prisons and in the hearts of those real men and women who add a theological dimension to the violence they have already wreaked and been made to suffer.

Of course, I'd be fooling myself and you if I didn't admit that these idle reflections on Prison Break were partly inspired by a sense of moral guilt at having spent so much time transfixed by the DVDs over the past few days. I'm trying to rehabilitate the banality of my experience, if you like. And maybe the show does have some value beyond pure diversion from and postponement of my "real life," if considered deeply. It is also true that I have only watched through season two. In a few days I will head down to a DVD burning warren I know downtown to buy season three. Who knows? Maybe there will be a redemptive catharsis waiting at the end of the tunnel. I won't hold my breath. Until then, I will contunue to think that the world of Prison Break was conjured from the crumbling bones of Michel Foucault.

Also, since my imagination is so inflamed by the prison and the possibilities and technicalities of escape from it, I think I may set my next piece of writing in one. Maybe it could be an epistolary work with my prisoner carrying on a correspondence with the outside world. Maybe, the better to reflect myself, he could leave the letters unsent.

~

Recently I acted on my wish to come back to America for a little while. I will be coming to New York on June 12.

JACK ME BACK INTO TIME: PARELLEL AMPLITUDES

Earlier today, calmly awaiting my flight from Istanbul to Riga, Latvia, where I intend to settle, I sat reading a book of essays and exhortations by Mao. Where at first I had read his powerful summons and denunciations with some enthusiasm (I'll admit that I thrill, however briefly, to those who appear to have answers, particularly if they are radical), soon I began to tire of the tedious dogmatic classifications of concepts that for me have no substance, dialectical terms like 'the particularity of contradiction' and 'the universality of contradiction,' etc., etc., and bla-bla-bla. Just before boarding I looked up from my book with its red jacket and hammer-and-sickle to see a portly Russian gentleman conversing volubly with a buddy. He looked like he would be into the Russian equivalent of brats and beer and ballgames, which I suppose in Russia amounts to vodka, vodka, and vodka. My eyes drifted from his face to his chest, where, as if to underscore what the apparently metastasizing meaninglessness of all communication, they encountered these words:

JACK ME BACK INTO TIME
PARALLEL AMPLITUDES

Sure, buddy.

Crowds

Walking. Stepping off the tram and getting onto the bridge I had to navigate through a heavy throng. Everyone jostling and pressing relentlessly without surcease. There was no regard for my being, much less my space; I felt accosted from all sides. I intuited a ravening pitiless purpose and hunger pent in and dammed up in these bodies hurrying along next to mine, and somehow felt keenly for the first time that I might easily be delivered to the tender mercies of a thousand tromping treads at the slightest slip or misstep. You might even say that at that moment, as I felt myself being shuttled along by the throng's remorseless systole and diastole, I had an honest to goodness philosophical thought. To see the social nature of humanity, I thought, look no further than at the milling crowd of people interacting anonyomusly without restraining relation to one other. How to they behave? They clamor shamelessly, men and women alike, devoid of all decency. They cut and bump and shove, they trip and tangle and tussle. They would fain make war on each other were it not for the looming threat of violence done by mob and police and penitentiary. In the crowd, the rule of all is the rule of each. No individual may flirt with the notion of relaxing his own vigilance, his own ruthlessness, lest he be cut and trampled in the automatic reflex that is weakness's due. There is no alternative. Taken to its logical extreme, a fire panic, the clamoring crowd is society's most absolute and merciless normative political institution: All against all, with a double-speedy death to the deviant. The ultimate crucible for the fostering of sociopathic reactionary behavior. Each will take what he can--this includes killing another on a lark--and give only what he must. It doesn't matter if you are a student, a doctor, a housewife, a priest or a whore. In the crowd each is a cretin in equal measure, revealed at last in all his despicable humanity. It is a valuable lesson for absorption by any would-be reformist and lover of man.

Bum Cuisine, Part Deux

And now, back by popular demand, Bum Cuisine, Instalment Deux.

What to do when life gives you yams? Make yam fries.
-Anonymous

A few mornings ago I woke up feeling like shit. Recent visitors had left me not only with some honey and coasters and other things from Syria, but with a nasty cold, and I was camped down in the immunological trenches. I went to the refrigerator feeling hungry. When I saw what was inside, hunger gave way to hunger laced with dismay, which is worse than plain old hunger. All I saw inside were milk, carrots, a few eggs, and a boomerang-shaped yam. I proceeded to the window to contemplate the morning and my options. The day seemed welcoming enough, and the slush and snow left by the recent storm seemed to have evanesced off the steps enough to enable a safe descent. I thought about going down to the store on the road for bread and maybe some oranges. But then I caught sight of a pair of gypsy ragpickers out on a trawl through my hillside neighborhood. I withdrew behind my apartment's purdah to observe them through a crack. They were two women, neither of whom could have been older than 30. But grime and grease and the rags they wore had grizzled them to an indeterminate age that might best be described as 'adult.' One of them carried a baby strapped against her back with a shawl, as African women do. They did not appear to have found much of value on their trawl so far, and I did not want to go out and signal an invitation to beg with my clean clothes and blond hair. No, I could not possibly go down the hill while the ragpickers were working it. Returning to the refrigerator, I decided to convert obstacle to inspiration using the alchemy that has only one name: Bum Cuisine. I would make a yam omelette with a side of yam fries, a la gypsie.

I think the recipe here goes without saying, but I'll set it down anyway, pro forma.

Ingredients:
1 yam
Frying oil
2 eggs
Some of the ultrapasteurized Turkish milk that keeps for a year at room temperature (unopened)
Salt

Preparation time:
20 minutes

Instructions:
1. Wash the yam, then peel
2. Cut the yam in two, then section into strips, as you would for french fries
3. Heat 1 cup of vegetable oil (my brand features a sunflower, but the label translates as 'moon-flower') nearly to smoking
4. As the oil heats, peel and dice a few cloves of garlic
5. Shovel the yam strips into the frying medium, using a spatula to keep the pieces from sticking to one another
6. Two minutes into the frying sequence, remove a few of the fries to be, transferring them to a pan for integration into the omelette to be
7. As the yams continue to fry, sautee the yam strips and the garlic
8. Once the garlic has browned, remove the sautee substrate
9. Whisk two eggs together with a dash of milk in a bowl
10. Add the sautee substrate, pour into pan, and cook over low heat
11. Once the yam fries are adequately brown, remove from oil and salt
12. With a little luck (or practice), the fries and the omelette should be ready at around the same time

Enjoy!

Note: Once the yam fries are done, you can fry the yam peels for a tasty (and above all cheap) afternoon snack!

The Nyika Plateau

Back in June, when I was loitering in Ndola (Zambia), I got myself invited to a braii being put on by some of Arthur's friends. If I am not mistaken, the owner of the house was also named Markus, albeit 'Marcus.' It was after this carnivorous occasion that my friends and I were shepherded to the local precinct by machinegun-toting officers for being foolish enough to prowl the streets as defenseless wzungu after 11 at night, and then witnessed a bit of violence as the police allowed the victim of a screwdriver attack to avenge himself on his assailant--which you may recall reading about in this space at the time. I recall writing about the mood of that night at some length: Sheets of smoke wreathing the air, a pack of lean dogs lying in wait for us at the crossroads, an otherworldly gibbous moon like a orange skull leering at us through the smog.

There was something else of interest that happened that night that I did not write about at the time, and which only began to register much later. At some point during the braii I followed Arthur into the kitchen. I talked to him and Katie (whom he was making embarrassingly clumsy efforts to hit on), then to Arthur's wife, then to a little Indian fellow in a tracksuit called Dynamite, who liked to race cars. All the while people were piling into the kitchen for dibs on the appetizers being turned out by the women. The crowd eventually wedged me between the stove and the kitchen table, where I fell into conversation with a colored guy (this means 'mixed-race' in southern Africa) whose name may or may not have been Marvin. I don't remember what Marvin did, he was probably involved with mines or transport in keeping with most of the men in attendance. I do remember telling him about my novel set down in an African copper mine (Down in a Deep Dark Hole, we'll call it) and being nonplussed by his reaction. That does not sound like a good kind of novel, he said. A mine, eksay? That is no place for a novel.
So where was a good place for a novel then? Marvin's eyes glazed over with reverence as he told me: The Nyika Pleateau. The Nyika is a stunning region in neighboring Malawi with vegetation like you might find on a Scottish heath and elevations approaching 9,000 feet. This is what you should write, Marvin began, tippling for inspiration: The novel begins with your character looking out from atop the Nyika. He surveys the plains below as he might survey his life. Down there among the people and heat, he sees the scene of his failure, of the successive losses that make up his life. He is all alone on top of the plateau (the Nyika is almost unpopulated, and they say that the villages at the foot of it live in terror of it). He is stuck, he cannot descend. His life now is empty and cold, and he is doomed forever to contemplate what was by looking out over the plain furling out below...

Time and inexact recollection have forced me to embellish what Marvin said, but that was the gist of it. At the time I was eager to dismiss his vision, but that same intercession of time has made it seem compelling. It is a nice frame, don't you think? A few months after my conversation with Marvin I read a powerful book by Laurens van der Post about the Nyika and came away with the impression that it was replete (as of the time of writing in the 1950's at least) with the kind of magic that whites go poking about for in Africa. It is at the top of my list when I make my return.

Bum Cuisine

I have thought recently about making my own modest addition to the literature of the cookery. "A Bum's Cuisine," I would call it: "Impecuneous Inspirations." Actually it's not that I'm all that poor--I just need to economize on sustenance to offset losses incurred elsewhere. I also get very bound to my apartment on occasion, and will refuse to go out to buy the staples that would go a long way toward making my next meal more tolerable. But the reading public need not be indulged with such piddling justifications: I would exploit the hell out of my perceived poverty as a sales gimmick, and the book would move off the shelves like rationed bread.

The important thing for the purposes of the project is that I have been cooking as if I were poor. Let me thrill you with a sample entry as an amuse-gueule:

Crapfish delite

On some afternoons, I can be found haunting the Bosporus shore, fishing rod in hand. My line has multiple hooks for multiple fish. A good cast will result in five or six wriggling silvery forms pulled from the water. I wrest these from their hooks, dump them in a jug of water, and continue fishing. The fish are exceedingly small, about the size of a thumb. Perhaps they are anchovies. I have no idea. At any rate they stream through the Bosphorus in their millions, and are almost entirely without taste. Crapfish. It usually takes an afternoon to fill the jug with enough fish for a meal, about a pound's worth. Once this is accomplished, I trudge up my hill and begin work on the evening meal.

First you must gut the fish and remove their heads. Because they are so small, it requires an expert touch to avoid pulling the fish apart and wasting precious protein. The guts and heads can be given to the neighborhood cats, who, like you, lack the means to purchase a better meal. Next heat vegetable oil to sizzling in a pan. Feel free to reuse the oil you used to prepare the morning's mineral fries. The oil is ready when it is just beginning to smoke. Now dump the gutted fish into the oil and add a spoonful of salt. Fry for five minutes, or until the fish have turned into a uniform gray mass. Adding mayonnaise and parsley flakes, mix the fried fish into a mash. Use the mash to form patties, then bread them. The patties can then be fried a pleasant shade of golden brown in the same oil, and then either eaten whole or tucked into mustard-slathered buns.

Note that if you do not have an entire afternoon to devote to fishing, it is always possible to purchase an entire kilogram of such fish from one of the local Balikcilar for about 85 cents. Because of its high protein and fat content, this dish can be regarded as an end-of-week treat, and will be a more than welcome departure from the lentil soup variations you have been slurping up all week.

Bon appetit!

I have actually made the above dish, and several others along the same lines. The next creation that I plan to feature is: When you're down to almost nothing: Yogurt Noodle Soup.

A Belgian in Africa (story--exclusive preview)

It might have been around the time I quit my position at the organization--it seemed oddly pressing to focus on the accumulated loose ends of my life at the time, though now it's hard to say whether I made any headway along that path at all--but it could have been around that time that I started thinking about the Belgian again. The Belgian in Africa, I should say, since there are other Belgians that I think of from time to time, as one does.

He and I had met all of once. Not even properly at that. We were both camped at the Blue Nile Sailing Club in Khartoum, a best-of-the-worst kind of overlanders' haunt set on the eponymous river about a mile shy of the confluence. It was morning, he was doing maintenance on his engine. Absolved of my duties at the organization, free to cast my glance over any shade of my life's palette, I might have remembered him standing there. In the astonishing golden light of a sun hardly risen above the trees, yet whose heat was already accomplished, the sallow half-wasted figurine of his body winked with the waxen dullness of the unliving. His belly sagged, the fleshy folds of it washing off the trunk in glacially suspended lipid cascades, earthbound, as if there might be formations within him, tendencies, that were eager to enter that ground for whatever semipermanent dissolution, and get on with it. Someone said we all carry within us a body of death I think. And maybe so.

Stooped over his engine, he wore a pair of filthy shorts and nothing more, and would look up occasionally to snap a command at the grouping of inert Arabs congregated close by in spotless jellabiyyas. I watched him as he stood up to wipe his brow. He looked over at our vehicle, then approached. We were also traveling up through Africa, there were three of us. He wanted a wrench and my friend lent him one. And that constituted my meeting with him, such as it was.

I said nothing to him in hope that his eye would not drift across my face, that it would not occur to him to engage me in conversation. The eye, too, had that same inertness, as if the it marked a forbidden border, as if the external world could not enter and continue past that aperture. The wind was blowing, I remembered. I had trouble seeing across the river for the dust eddying up off the building sites that convulsed the city. The Belgian had fallen into brief conversation with my traveling companions. Road conditions, fuel prices, the petty dramas of our respective visa debacles. I might have indicated that I found his personage contemptible by the set of my chin, by addressing what little I could bring myself to say to my traveling companions only. I couldn't recall. The point, my dear friends, is that he was no more than a Belgian in Africa to me--with all the sordid things that entails.

Later, as we pulled out of the Sailing Club to head up the road, I saw a pastylooking woman emerge from the side of the camper unit mounted on the back of the Belgian's white Land Cruiser. She wore a floppy white hat and a sour expression.

We had made it about 100 miles up the road by nightfall. Carlos pulled the vehicle in off the road once we could see no vehicles in either direction. We camped on a boulder-pocked strip between the half-completed highway and a glistening fleet of transmission towers that marched up into the hazy distance where the horizon was awash in a confused palette of red and purple, evanescent inks congealing into a brevity of impossible cobalt. Soon it was black and starry. Having taken my meal with the others, I wandered off parallel to the road in the direction of a hazy string of lights. Walking, I found I was thinking about the Belgian. Annoyed, I tried concentrating on the journey ahead, but he had ingrained himself in my mind like some cognitive tick. And I had been thinking about him on the road, for almost the entire way since we'd left behind the dusty hue and cry of Khartoum.

The string of lights resolved into a roadbuilders' camp. There were several shipping container offices, and white tents for the mess and lounge. The men were mostly Sudanese. Among their number were some Chinese engineers, an Egyptian foreman. The engineers seemed happy enough to see me wandering in off the wadi, and motioned for me to join them in their canvas social tent. Making the rounds inside were a bottle of whiskey and a few issues of German smut.

The wind tore through the interstices of the boulders piled up next to the tent. I couldn't help listening to the sad dry sigh of it when one of the men leaned over with an issue to feature a glossy and stained picture of a man with a face like a block ejaculating onto a wincing girl's chest. Which is an act that I find sad to begin with, though sadder still when the girl in question cannot muster the flagellatory enthusiasm that sets the stars of porn apart from mere dayjobbers not meant for the dirty pictures they pose in. I played along with the manly session of show and sip and tell. The whiskey passed from mouth to mouth, and the smut from eye to eye in a frottage of arousal and degradation. They asked what I was doing. I said I was headed up the road to Egypt with friends. And they, I asked. What were they doing? We are building your road! said a Chinese engineer. To Egypt! At which we all laughed. I asked if they saw a lot of my kind come through. A few a week, said the Egyptian foreman, usually in the early part. He said they found that some of us passed us too quickly when they had men on the road, men pushing rubble, spraying tar, measuring geometries, painting stripes. I responded that surely many Sudanese drove by at speeds that would have to be considered too fast. To me a Sudanese man behind the wheel of a car was to be regarded as a kind of diabolical reaper.

The foreman considered my statement for a moment. Then he tipped the bottle back and allowed its amber contents to gurgle out the neck and down his throat. It is the look in their eyes, he declared. The statement admitted of no response. Outside the tent, the wind had picked up and begun to howl and hoot as it caught the rocks at the precise pitch and speed needed for that particular pitch of forlornness.

The men in the tent were watching a satellite channel with a program on African predators when at length I left them for my camp, and a sleep in which I would stalk visions of the women I had seen in their smut, dreaming of them in the attitudes of real desire. They seemed not to notice when I slipped off.

The next day my traveling companions and I drove on to the toppled remnants of the Nubian pyramids at Marawi. I told them about my evening with the men who were building the road we were driving on and occasionally alongside of. Carlos, the vehicle’s owner and driver, said that I was crazy to wander off in the night to pursue unknown lights on an unknown desert. I countered that we had to be crazy to be where we were in the first place. And had we not, I recall thinking to myself, in some sense lost the power to pronounce a verdict of insanity on other members of our generation and culture? We did not know what sanity was, so what prerogative to identify its opposite? We could point out what was wrong and corrupt--and with some assurance--but never what was true and whole. I think it goes without saying that you need both in order to arrive at a valid verdict of insanity. I will not be called crazy, and I told Carlos so.

~

After we left, the Belgian tinkered on with his truck. His wife had just flown into Khartoum from Brussels laden with spares for the vehicle, among them several bearings and cables, as well as a turbocharger to replace the one he had worn through while whirlwinding through East Africa. He finished at 3 in the afternoon, and when he revved the engine, its throaty whine was much to his satisfaction. If you had been watching him then, you could have seen him walk to the bathroom and wipe himself clean. But you would have struggled in vain to see him don a shirt over sagging torso; and if you had kept on and been very clever about it, you could have seen him sneaking a slug of whiskey through a windowcrack of his bedmounted camper at the sounding of the sunset prayer.

That evening he and his wife had a dinner of fish and steak at the Khartoum Hilton, a Sudanese surf and turf as you might have commented if you'd been watching. Again you would have struggled in vain, had your object been to hear the two of them conversing about anything beyond the quotidian things that might have been hard work to leave unsaid, the ‘how is your foods’ and ‘shall we get the checks’ and ‘I think this is a nice view of the Nile, don’t you’ of this life. The highlight of their conversation, such as it was, came when the Belgian started talking about how he imagined his next transafrica trip. Enough, he declared, with all the planes, trains and automobiles. That was no way to really see the continent, to encounter its people--to sniff its heady scents for God’s sake! His usual flintmade reserve, but of course not his superciliousness, had given way to gesticulations that his wife thought were slightly delirious. She found herself wondering if maybe he had caught some bug while driving around in Africa.

She did not want to agitate him any further by disagreeing, so she said that yes, they were spending an awful lot of time shut up in the car the way they were going. Delicate diplomacy was her greatest skill. It was true of course--most of the Africa she was seeing was what happened to be on offer through the dusty and bugsplattered perspective of the windscreen. She got the feeling that their converted Land Cruiser had become a roving fortress from which they dared venture less and less. The turbocharger certainly had something military about it, which she suspected was the reason he chose it. Of course, they were in the Sudan, a godforsaken place best speeded through. And speed they did.

But to return to their conversation: The Belgian's point was that the next trans-Africa journey he took be by donkeycart. She threw up her hands, but he insisted he was serious. Fully. What better way to experience the melancholy of the continent's vast expanses? What could be more local and down to earth? More environmentally sound, socially just, spiritually rejuvenating? Best of all, it made economic sense--they would spend nothing but what was needed for the donkey, cart, and veterinary kit, and if their donkey died or was confiscated at a border crossing, they could bring bolts of cloth and bowls of metal to use as bargaining chips in bartering for a replacement ass. Just as they would burn no fuel, needing only what fodder they found by the side of the track, neither would they bring any currency, and would contribute the labor of their hands where what they had brought in the way of barter would not do. They would be the only whites on the continent other than the stray few who had gone native who weren’t perverting the local agrarian subsistence economies with cash. And as if all that weren't enough, my dear--that is what he said--the ass would assure their carbon neutrality. And meanwhile--the Belgian was beaming feverishly--their prudent investments at home would be prudently maturing, bearing prudent fruit. He could even write a book about it for the adventure-thirsty (anglophone) masses: Africa on Assback.

The wife took a long and bracing sip of wine, saying nothing. They were 55 years old. He was mostly gray, but the grizzled look of the African adventurer managed to highlight a certain youthfulness. She was having a harder time keeping up her end of the charade. Her clothes were never quite as clean as she wanted them to be, and each morning she found that more dust and grit had accumulated on her mirror and inside (somehow) her bottles and tubes of tinctures and lotions. And there was no covering, cream or unguent that could adequately shield her already battered northerner’s skin from the corrosive sun. Nor had her legs and midriff been spared by what foul and unseen small life flew and crawled at these intemperate latitudes. Why could she never be the one to pick where they would go next? Why not a string of restorative spas in the Swiss alps instead of the rigors of Patagonia, mention of which her husband seemed unable to omit from any conversation, be it about the weather, their money, or the chances that their daughter Annelie would finish university before she became ineligible for renewal of her study stipend. Which were slim. And now this business about a donkeycart. She wished she had the nerve to tell him that she could ride the cart with him pulling, ass that he was.

I personally have thought several times about making a significant journey by donkeycart. Las Vegas to Omaha, for one. Or Duluth to Dayton: From the San Francisco of the North to the site of the Great Accord--on a donkeycart. Of course, in these places I would probably soon be locked up by some hellbelt sheriff, so maybe the Belgian had the right idea pick Africa for his setting. Be it noted that I would not presume to ask a woman to accompany me on such a journey.

The Belgian couple left Khartoum the next morning, taking the road we had. The Belgian drove fast. I hope you will not mind if I just call the Belgian 'M.' from now on, to avoid bringing up the entire nation when I want to cite the man (though M. is not his real initial, not even close). Cars and trucks with their windows or roofs open heard a sound similar to that of a cruising jet engine as he passed them. M. said they needed to cross the country quickly, and every country afterwards for that matter, if they were to get home with enough time to source cart and draft animal, and then make it to at least the Mediterranean before the snows started falling. It was June. Their air conditioner had broken, and the heat was almost too much to bear. It was certainly not possible to talk and think and bear the heat all at once. She knew better than to ask if they could find some shade for the hottest hours.

M. slowed neither for the roadworks nor the frontage road diversions, and least of all for the roadworkers themselves. M.’s wife--let me refer to her as M.W. occasionally, in the name of simplicity--thought she could see the men glowering at them through the dustclotted glass. She had never known M. to drive like this in Belgium. She thought she could see the men shaking dim fists and hurling invisible objects into their billowing dust contrail in the side mirror. It occurred to me that one of these anonymous and embodied curses may have been hurled by the Egyptian foreman with whom I had tippled and gazed at semen-glossed breasts the evening before. If so, I wondered what look he might have discerned in M.’s eyes at that moment.

That day my traveling companions had wakened at 6 in the morning and begun to drive. Not quickly, but consistently. We also had a 100 mile headstart on M. I mention this merely as a benchmark when I mention that we were passed by M. on the road an hour before sunset. In the moment of overtaking I could see that he wore no shirt, and was allowing the desert sun to slow-roast his torso through the windscreen. He extended a large hand in greeting as he roared past. We pulled by to camp soon afterwards.

M. drove into the dark hours. At some point sealed road gave way to corrugated dust. M. drove on. To make sure he would be on the first pontoon to cross in the morning, M. wanted to camp just outside the town with the ferry that crossed this portion of the Nile. About two hours after full dark, as they jangled along the corrugations shaped by harmonics, but were themselves far from harmonious, there was a sign announcing their entry into the village of Karima. Not that there was any reason to pause for the sign at all, much less to puzzle over its script. In fact, for them the dirt track itself was no more than a convention, a formality, for their movements were guided and tracked by a handheld Global Positioning Satellite unit. This contraption not only heralded their arrival at Karima, but also told them exactly how many meters remained between them and the coordinates given for the ferry landing, well in advance and tocking down by 50 meter blocks. 500, 450, 400, 350...

M. had decided to go see the landing that evening before pulling back to the outskirts to camp. He wanted to make sure there was nothing hazardous about the configuration. But just as old Ahab’s sextant told him where he was, and not where he would be, so M.’s handheld GPS unit, which could tell him just how many meters remained between him and his target, gave no intelligence in the way of the things that could and would happen between where he was and where he wanted to be. Nor did it make any pronouncements on the sagacity of his chosen route. For instance, even if it had been one of those advanced models that provide topographical relief--and I had nothing to indicate that it was--it would hardly have been able to alert M., the operator dwelling in the security of his device, to the existence of a well in his path. And it could not possibly have forecast that, owing to the hallowed and healing nature of this well and its water, there would be dozens of suffering sleepers clustered around it in hope of a cure to what ailed them at that hour. Nor could the device conceivably provide any intelligence or forewarning regarding the camouflaging effect of windblown desert sand sweeping across a uniformly clad and dustcovered throng of recumbent humanity featuring in the headlights of an approaching vehicle by night.

If the GPS unit had nothing to say on this score, it was even less loquacious on the subject of how the sleeping gaggle of the suffering would react when, in the sudden space of a turbocharged second, their tribulations were multiplied unbearably on themselves. When the moment came, M. was holding the GPS unit, eyes flicking between screen, dials and windscreen. He was traveling at perhaps 45 mph when he had to swerve out of the way of a jellabiyyah-clad wanderer whose form flashed djinnlike in the dust. The swerve that M. executed to avoid an accident delivered him into the maw of calamity. When they hit the sleeping throng it was easy for a moment to think that they had run afoul of scattered sacks of grain, an impromptu depot awaiting transfer to the mill. Or perhaps a circle of sleeping animals. But screams and groans parted the illusion like a scythe. It was all very quick. After the rapid and violent thump-thump-thump, they found themselves stalled out in the center of a bloodbath. The wellhead had come off the sacred fount and the jet of holy water it splurted into the night flared prismatically in the harsh sodium headlight glare before raining down to mingle with the spilled crimson life of the maimed and dying. Those still able dragged themselves off with arms and legs broken, gargling blood and trailing phosphoric green spittle. Others lay in grotesque attitudes of agony, their sundered heads or ribbaskets or groincradles flattened or opened or simply spread along the sand in baleful red articulation. One man staggered around the hood and stood in the moteblown stream of the headlights, his jellabiyyah blooming with blood from where the shoulder had been staved. He raised his good arm as if to address a congregation, but the oration could not progress beyond a long and burbling sanguinary groan before he sank to his knees and toppled lifeless onto the sand.

The ablest of the survivors groped for stones and bottles, instinctively hurling them at their pale devastator. Side panels dented under fire. One hit the windscreen, its transparency exploding into a dazzling reticulum. M., who still wore no shirt and hadn't the faintest idea of what to do, yelled 'fuck' and ‘sorry’ a few times in English in an attempt to pacify the clawing crowd, but when a rock shattered the driver’s window and narrowly missed M.’s skull, the sorry gave way to Godverdomme as he opened the throttle and pulped whatever human forms still caught beneath the treads as they strove for purchase. The tires found their grip amid the screams and sent the vehicle headlong into the sandblasted night. The wail of the turbocharger was like a banshee trailing after them, thought M.W.

Struck dumb until then, she screamed, What in God's name has happened? What are we going to do? Then, her voice dropping as the broken screams and gurgles issuing from the medieval horror behind them abated into a vacant and accusatory silence of wind: What have you done? Oh God, what have you done?

M. had made his decision. To stop was to die. And they’d fare no better resorting to the police. They had to escape. He drove furiously for ten minutes or so, retracing the way they had come, headlights off. He was panting when he skidded to a halt to confer with his wife. They would have to flee the country, he began. By car. There was no way they could ditch it and fly out. The authorities would match the passports with the carnet and the customs declaration. And there was no telling what might happen to them if they were caught. Perhaps they discussed the possibility of somehow sinking the vehicle in the Nile. Or that could simply have been something I would consider as a way of getting the blood off. But if they did raise it as a possibility, they must have dismissed it just as quickly. One thing was in their favor: Being on the west side of the river opened up the entire desert continent beyond, and all its lonely avenues of escape. But they had to avoid towns and roads and being seen at all costs until they were deep in the desert, hopefully across one of Sudan's invisible borders. They had several jerrycans of diesel, and with luck they would be able to cross unseen into Libya or Chad within a week. M. also had his clutch of unexpired backup passports. M.'s wife considered asking at this point if she could just be dropped off--under the circumstances the authorities might have mercy on a foreign woman claiming abandonment by a husband recognized as a remorseless killer--but she knew too well that he would have little chance of making it through the desert without her. She stayed on.

They drove west through the night, picking a route over the pans and among the rubble and down the frosty needlepoints of the wheeling constellations of the zodiac. They were still driving when the sun rose behind them. She could see a gilded chevron of nameless foreign fowl flying north high above them. Did birds ever feel frightened flying so high above the ground? Could there have been some legend among them that they might be sucked into the blackness of space if they flew too high? Her teeth clenched, she thought that this was quite a way to experience the melancholy of the continent's vast expanses. What greater banishment than to be put to flight across these lunar scarps, into a desolation that grew always greater. They drove through the day, too, stopping only once to void bladders and to check the engine oil and tire pressure. Just like the night before, the GPS unit told them precisely where they were, and spread the world out before them on a grid of points where they might be--M. had picked an intersection of latitude and longitude in the southeastern Libyan desert--but it told them nothing of their pursuers, if there were any, and indicated neither what they'd been through nor what was to come. They simply drove, passing the device from hand to hand, bloodcracked eyes riveted to a blurred and vacant horizon.

Day ending, M. guided his tired vehicle along a low escarpment rising feebly through the haze. He tucked the vehicle in among a pair of columnar boulders with dimensions almost perfectly suited to the task to which they were now posted. The last of the light failed. M. cut the engine. Eyes were trained on the windshield, he continued to stare rigidly ahead, deep into an invisible void, as his wife considered him. The lost light brought out the essential contours and ridges: The chin was weak, the nose small and almost girlish. The eyes were a northern seaside teal in the light, but in the dark all she could see of them were their frames of dusty crows' feet beneath an anguished brow. The domelight came on and she saw the eyes, contracting pupils set within sclera bloodshot from that day and thousands of other earlier days spent hunched over figures and charts so that what balance they carried would throw off enough to let them pull up stakes and roam about the world at liberty. Like this.

That evening they resumed the regular rhythms of travel, heating tins of vegetables and spaghetti and meatballs. I believed they had about 50 liters of treated water in jugs left at that point. M. built a small fire with palm wood bought in Khartoum. As she wrote in her journal about what was happening to them, M. looked to the flames and lamented the lack of the most rudimentary public safety measures in countries like these. He muttered about guard rails and phosphorescent vests and luminescent road markings, the foolishness of sleeping so hard by the town's only thoroughfare.

She was quiet, but she was thinking about the flesh, its frailty, the illusion of it. How the only certain thing about it is its disintegration. She did not think the situation they were in had much to do with public safety measures. The last thing she saw out the window from her bunk before sleep was her husband through the tendrils of woodsmoke, raising a full bottle of amber whiskey to his lips. The T-shirt he wore had been a gift from their daughter after a trip to Mexico's Pacific coast. The emblazoning read: 'One tequila, two tequila, three tequila, floor.'

They woke early and drove on without breakfast. There was no road now, no corrugated track or braid of furrows to follow. But the rocky pans and sandy gulches gave traction and were conducting them north toward Libya. The occasional long-abandoned hulk of a Bedford or a Leyland truck gave them the half-comfort of knowing that others had at least attempted the route. Early in the afternoon they came upon a newish Mitsubishi truck that had drifted into a deep rut and overturned, sentry to a senseless occurrence appointed to the distinction of permanence. Scattered amid the scree in the direction of the truck's tipping were dozens of smashed 19" television sets, a mortuary of black plastic panels and bunches of garishly colored wire and nests of jagged shards gleaming with malevolent spectra.

M. decided to stop for lunch. They ate bread, a tin of sunheated sauerkraut, another of hot corn, and half a crumbling block of Belgian cheese. Sweat furrowed their cheeks and bloomed on the fabrics they wore. She had heaved one of the 25 L water jugs down onto the shaded sand in the light-lee ahead of the rear left tire, where she tipped it with confidence to refill her 2 L bottle. Heat and distraction combined to put the jug out of her mind as they left. Nor had M. marked it, so that as they pulled away, the tire rose up onto the jug and burst it. The sand drank what spilled immediately. They could salvage no more than a liter or so from the tatters of PET that remained--their inventory had been reduced to something like 24 liters at a stroke. As they pulled away, deeper into the desert, the field of glass shards glinted with indifferently, adamantly. It looked like a signal, but she did not want to decipher it.

At the end of the next day they were down to 15 liters of water and two 20 liter jerrycans of diesel. Around sunset they saw a splotch of what might have been greenery on a flaming horizon. Its location corresponded pretty well to an oasis marked by a palm tree on the map. A watering holes discovered by the old slave caravans. The green was still there in the morning, equal parts opportunity and threat. M. said they had to avoid it. They were still in the Sudan.

~
***
I'd be lying if I failed to admit that M. became much more to me than just another Belgian in Africa. I guess you could say I took an interest in him. We were still in the Sudan when we heard about his terrible accident and subsequent flight from a French couple traveling up the same road. I somehow knew it had been M. before they said that the authorities were searching for a Belgian. The survivors must have had the wherewithal to pick out the EU "B" on his plate. We met the couple at the Dongola ferry crossing a few days after setting out from Khartoum. The first thing I noticed as we started talking was their tired eyes. But they were plainly relieved to be talking to us, and their animation grew as they told their story. They were driving in a white Land Cruiser that bore some resemblance to the Belgian's, and the authorities had pulled them over for a protracted and unpleasant interrogation.

***
As the questioning began, they admitted to having met the Belgian on the road in Ethiopia. But their repeated assertions that M.'s vehicle differed from theirs in that it had a camper mounted on the back were unhelpful. In fact, they were nearly disastrous, since their prior acquaintance with M. raised suspicions that they might have been accomplices to the road killings, which the authorities were now treating as a case of mass murder. The police had threatened them with all kinds of odious treatment in a clumsy attempt to extract a confession, but the lack of any blood or gristle on their vehicle was enough to convince them in the end.

Some of the officers, they said, had wanted to confiscate their truck for forensic analysis, but a frantic call to the French embassy in Khartoum had brought about a chain of events that resulted in the police chief's decision being overruled from Khartoum. So the vehicle was swabbed, and the couple was released with the understanding that they would be detained at the border if the results indicated that they should.
***
We decided to travel with the French couple as far as the ferry across Lake Nasser. It was obvious they could benefit from the moral support, and if the police decided to question us as well, their contacts and testimony might be of use. We were right: When we were detained at the next roadblock and questioned about 12 Sudanese men murdered in their sleep, the French couple speeded things considerably by demanding that the station lieutenant put a call in to the officer who had been in charge of their questioning. As we left, the lieutenant apologized to us with offers of tea and hospitality.

That evening around an acacia fire, the couple told us what they knew about the Belgian. Within five minutes of their meeting, they said, he had begun boasting about his clever system for cheating on his wife with "women of quality" while away in Africa. It was done using Internet dating forums. Whenever he emerged from the bush into a town with a connection, he would log on and invite francophone or Dutchspeaking women to fly down and share the romance of an African road journey with him. By his own admission, he had so far been able to lure down 5 women for an average stay of 2 weeks. Evidently the average stay was a statistic worthy of mention. He had told the couple that his wife would be flying to meet him in Khartoum on the very day he would bid adieu to his fling du jour--a matronly specimen, in the couple's phrase. But the pasty woman I'd seen emerging from his camper in Khartoum must have been his wife.

We were all able to exit the Sudan without too much hassle about a week later. By 'without too much hassle,' I mean that when we were detained by the Wadi Halfa border police, it had nothing to do with the fugitive Belgian. Some tourists had been reported pilfering pieces of pyramids and other antiquities, and now the border posts were under orders to search the vehicles of transiting tourists. It shames me to admit that I had in fact snatched a piece of a Nubian pyramid for myself and secreted it in a niche along the bottom of our chassis. But it pleases me to report that they did not find it. The search was over in a little over twenty minutes, and was followed by the usual apologies and offers of tea and comradery. The only juncture that actually worried me was when the captain was flipping through my journal, which contained, in addition to the extensive notes I had by then compiled on the facts and legends surrounding the Belgian, the outline of a satirical piece on my experience of the Sudan modeled on a CIA field report. But the captain was unable to read the Latin script, and had just been making the show of things that officers' decorum demanded.

We exited, as I said above. In the weeks that followed, my traveling companions and I saw the Valley of the Kings, the great pyramidal deathchambers, scattered relics of lapsed civilizations. But I was finding it difficult to focus on the sights. It seemed like so much rubble, and all I could think about was the Belgian. I kept reviewing what little I had seen of him, of his vehicle, the man and the machine behind the infamous, inadvertent deed, and how they had fused into that fatal and sandblown moment in which the white Land Cruiser ended 12 lives in the dark. But none of the overland tourists I met could tell me anything about him that I hadn't been first in hearing. When we reached Cairo I lit out on my own for a few days to forget the Belgian. The idea was to lose myself in the city. On my second day I wandered all afternoon through neighborhoods sublime one moment and squalid the next. I walked, my shadow contracting and reforming to mark the sun's passage. I saw the great and recently restored Hakim mosque and the spectral and sordid everydayness of the City of the Dead. The gray onset of the hour of Solomon saw me strolling under the fragrant awnings of the Khan-el-Khalili market. There I tried my hand at a few robust rounds of haggling, though none of it was any use. All I could think about was the Belgian. I took a taxi downtown and stopped at the Hurriyyah bar for a few rounds of an Egyptian lager. Anything but robust. Ceiling fans buzzed. Depending on the fluctuations of my Weltschmerz, patrons' cries could seem jovial or desperate. Before long I fell to talking with a hardened group of German travelers who had just washed up in Cairo from an epic, dangerous journey through the center of the Sahara.

They talked about where they had been, what they had been through. We drank, told some jokes, eyed some women. But inevitably, I brought up the only subject I was fit to discuss. I talked about what the Belgian had done, how he had disappeared, what he looked like, what route I imagined he might have taken through the desert. That there had been no news of him since his disappearance. I mentioned that the French had made the divergence of M.'s white camper-converted mid-90's Land Cruiser from their own truck the basis of their defense. One of the Germans asked me to repeat my description of the Belgian's truck. I did. He tipped his beer, regarding me down the barrel of the bottle with eyes that were drunk, slightly wild. They had seen a vehicle parked on a dune in southeast Libya about a week earlier, he said, which fit my description exactly. There couldn't have been another vehicle matching that description within a thousand miles in any direction, I thought. I asked what they had done. Nothing much, the German replied blankly. The vehicle had been parked. Their guide had a nervous feeling, and he warned them off. They had idled for a few minutes about a kilometer away. When after ten minutes there had been no signal for help, or to get lost, they had driven on, and hadn't really thought about the incident again until now.

My mind flew off in a frenzy of speculation. Why had they not investigated further? Or had the slightly reeling German been lying to me? But what possible reason could he have for deceiving me, given that he had been the one to bring up seeing the vehicle in the first place? Maybe he had had a closer look and had seen something he'd rather not remember. But really, even if they had looted the vehicle, they had almost certainly left the things I was after untouched. Someone, I believe, has said that no one is as stupid about the essentials as a German, nor as astute about inessentials.

They seemed content to dismiss the sighting as an interesting coincidence. Naturally, I would not let it go. I wanted their exact itinerary. I wanted GPS points, landscape pictures, and anything else they could remember. I wanted to find that fucking Belgian. I confessed my fixation: I asked them to pity me. They were clearly put off by my oddly allocated singlemindednes, but they had no cause to deny me the help due to a fellow traveler. Slightly drunk myself, I accompanied them back to their Cairene fleapit--though to be fair these were fleas who recognized that there was no God by God, and that Muhammed was his prophet. There I was free to copy down the GPS points that I hoped would let me draw a bead on where they had sighted the vehicle. I also downloaded some of their pictures onto my memory stick. As I ducked into the fervid night, I could hear them discussing my case. One of the words I could make out was "verwirrt," meaning confused, tangled.

I'll allow that what I did next must seem an extravagance undertaken without hope of reward. And it might well have been. But at the time it was terribly important to me. Everything depended on it, I felt. Even now I feel strongly that I could not have allowed the tale of the Belgian to fade into sandy irresolution. My traveling companions thought me crazy when I told them I would be interrupting my journey with them so to outfit and undertake an expedition into the Libyan desert to search for the missing Belgian. They tried to dissuade me, and I broke off contact with them. I will not tolerate being called crazy, as I have said.

It took only a few days to get organized, and by week's end I was in Tripoli with all the permits I needed, a rented Land Cruiser and the guide required by the Libyan authorities. One morning we set out. The journey was long and hard. 1,200 miles of sand and rock, of which I will spare you the tedium of a description. We got there, we began the search, and we continued the search. After a bleared string of nearly identical days spent driving in circles around the GPS points the Germans had given me, I began to despair. My guide, besides being an utter cretin, was costing me 100 Euros a day, and I was ready to give up. No amount of patient explication could convince him as to the purpose of my journey. He was a tediously and self-righteously practical man. After a week, it was tacitly apparent that he took me for a madman. After two his demeanor lapsed into open contempt. In the evenings I could hear him laughing on the satellite phone.

It was on the very morning I had resolved to leave and get shut of the whole sad affair that I saw it, first as a vague blotch through my binoculars, then distinctly. It was the Belgian's vehicle, parked on a dune as the Germans had said. I drove up to it at full speed. Everything had prepared me for what I saw when I opened the side door to the camper. There they lay, desiccated and half gone to dust. The Belgian's mouth was opened into a brittle and agonized rictus. His wife's face in death wore no expression. Her hand was resting on his, though, in token that their pact would somehow continue. The cabin, though musty, did not smell of rot. I surveyed their repose for only a moment. Then I started poking around the cabin, emptying cabinets and overturning boxes. At first it seemed I would find no record of their flight apart from the grim screed written on the lifeless bodies themselves. The digital camera contained no pictures taken after Khartoum. Perhaps they had viewed later pictures as evidence and destroyed them. On the floor I found a sheet of paper with some numbers on it, distances I thought, but they did not tell a story. I was preparing to leave their deathchamber when it occurred to me to check the bodies themselves. I put out a reluctant foot to prod at them with my boot. They yielded like pinata dummies. There was nothing on M.'s sere person. Beneath one of his wife's legs, though, was a book bound in black leather. It was a detailed log of their entire journey.

All of it was there. The misgivings she felt as she stepped aboard the plane in Brussels; her anger when he begrudged her a visit to the mahdi's tomb in Omdurman; the horror of the bloodsoaked moment when their lives were shunted onto the fatal trajectory into the desert; the delirious enlightenments that poured forth from her pen as on the final waterless days. The journal was unlined, a simple number bound in quality leather, its sheets filled edge to edge with handwriting as regular as a typeface. Her sentences were complete, considered, the product of an ordered mind that I could almost feel straining against the bars clapped around it by her marriage as I turned the pages. Her thoughts did not trail into the gibberish you'd expect from the end of terminal thirst. Or if there was gibberish, it was set against the foil of a disturbing lucidity. Very interesting stuff, I thought. I was just getting to the good stuff when my guide started pestering me to leave. I told him to go fuck himself.

Here is what happened to them in their final week: Once they'd lost the water jug to the Land Cruiser's unsparing tread, their path was indiscernible from the trajectory of those errant European wanderers who have been vanishing in the desert since the fabled search for the fabled Timbuktu. They drove until their progress was halted by a sandstorm lasting three days and three nights. On the morning after it cleared, M. staggered from the camper to take a GPS reading. The batteries had failed. They had no compass, no knowledge of how to navigate by the firmament. They had achieved their goal of making it across the border into Libya. Rather, they had escaped the Sudan into a place from which there was no escape. Any trace of their passage had been obliterated by the storm, and by M.'s reckoning they were over 500 crowsflight miles away from any marked road. Or, in her phrase, as the vulture flies. They were down to 4 liters of water and a half tank of diesel. As they set off on their doomed final drive across the hot gray rocks toward the ever-receding band of shimmer on the north horizon, M. noted quietly that the truck could benefit from a smaller, less thirsty engine. M.W. said nothing.

They had made perhaps 200 miles by nightfall and had seen no tracks, no vehicles, no relief. It was as empty as the brown of the map. Just as an orange and predatory crescent moon loomed up to their right, the engine gave a sickly burble and died. M. put on his headlamp and poured a bottle of vodka into the tank. Afterwards, the engine would not start.

They remained in that spot, sand on a slight rise, otherwise without feature. In such heat and without water, the span between full vitality and death was, by my calculation, somewhere between five and seven days. At some point on the second day of the wait, M. burst out of the camper and tried with scrabbling heaves to force the vehicle back to life. It was the hottest part of the day, and it did not take long for him to collapse. It took a considerable volume of her spousal oratory to coax him back into the camper. He took up his spot on the bed, and did not move for several hours. Around nightfall he remembered the store of wine he had laid up, two full cases. She noted that he could have boiled the spirit off to make it slaking, but did not, and used it to ease his transition into the inevitable instead. The final days passed in a logorrhetic rant, drunk and desiccated, against the backwardness of Africans and Muslims. At the bottom of a particularly adamant bottle, he claim that he would grind them all into the sand if he could. 'The sand,' he groaned as he smashed the bottle against the sink. 'Into the sand!'

I've been relying on M.W.'s written testimony almost from the beginning, so what could be more appropriate than to close with a few selections from her journal? They are very interesting, but because they raise many more questions than they answer, I should preface the selections by writing that, just as Ahab's sextant could not tell him where he would be, and just as M.'s GPS unit could not predict his perdition, the journal she left behind told me nothing about the fathomless infinity that awaited her after the last word was written.


To begin:

_________ (M. ) passed out drunk last night when I tried kissing him for what I thought might be the last time. May I be forgiven for suggesting that he was faking it. In his sleep he twittered forth the names of women unknown to me. I nipped on some of the wine myself as he dozed. Out the window I thought I could see two sets of twinned and hovering amber orbs. How many lost wayfarers like us must it take to sustain these jackals?

To continue:

This act of writing. Usually it comes in an idle moment with nothing happening but the writing. The words are the moment's attraction. But they bend on something outside of the moment. Something past or future, something in the world of spirits. On things that do not exist. Now everything has contracted into this moment. This is all that exists. The writing is the same as the thirst, the thirst one with the writing. The words bleed off like life's vital vapor. What are past and future when I can no longer see the words for the thirst shrouding everything in mists of pulsing black? I don't wish it on you. He didn't mean to run those people over. He couldn't slow down, never could. To drink wine when you are thirsting to death is excruciating, your skin burns with every sip. Better by far to feel it dry and let it run to sand.

I have always thought that someone thirsting to death in the desert should be keen to dignify her lot by leaving some trace of her suffering behind, some sublime nugget of insight snatched from death's maw as she--to borrow a phrase from Poe--approached the unknown slopes of the night. She snatched the nugget; the Belgian did not.

To conclude:

She sees the earth begin to fragment before her, crust, mantle and core sloughing off into thousands of sundered planetoids, and as she sees the blue of the sky vanish traceless into the black void of the world-naught--the woman puts on her jacket.

What is to be said of that sentence? I do not think that a writer who spent his entire lifetime crafting a single sentence could ever come close. There were a few more half-entries. Disjointed prophesies, streams of names and places and smells that were the framework for a lifetime of experience, but which meant nothing to me.