she had no faculty for invention which perhaps, terrifying thought, she truly lacked, in which case… but we chose not to speculate. Iris spoke of plans.
'I'm going back to California.'
'Tired of New York?'
'No, hardly. But I met someone quite extraordinary out there, someone I think I should like to see again.' Her candor made it perfectly clear that her interest was not romantic. 'It's rather in line too with what we were talking about. I mean your Julian and all that. He's a kind of preacher.'
'That doesn't sound promising.' A goldfish made a popping sound as it captured a dragonfly on the pond's surface.
'But he isn't the usual sort of thing at all. He's completely different but I'm not sure just how.'
'An evangelist?' In those days loud men and women were still able to collect enormous crowds by ranging up and down the country roaring about that salvation which might be found in the bosom of the Lamb.
'No, his own sort of thing entirely. A little like the Vedanta teachers, only he's American, and young.'
'What does he teach?'
'I… I'm not sure. No, don't laugh. I only met him once. At a friend's house in Santa Monica. He talked very little but one had the feeling that, well, that it was something unusual.'
'It must have been if you can't recall what he said.' I revised my first estimate: it was romantic after all; a man who was young, fascinating… I was almost jealous as a matter of principle.
'I'm afraid I don't make much sense.' She gestured and the leaf fell into its own shadow on the grass. 'Perhaps it was the effect he had on the others that impressed me. They were clever people, worldly people yet they listened to him like children.'
'What does he do? does he preach? work?'
'I don't know that either. I met him the night before I left California and I haven't seen anyone who was there that evening since.'
'But now you think you want to go back to find out?'
'Yes. I've thought about him a great deal these last few weeks. You'd think one would forget such a thing, but I haven't.'
'What was his name?'
'Cave, I think. John Cave.'
'A pair of initials calculated to amaze the innocent.' Yet even while I invoked irony, I felt with a certain chill in the heat that this was to be Clarissa's plot, and for many days afterwards that name echoed in my memory, long after I had temporarily forgotten Iris's own name, had forgotten, as one does, the whole day, the peony in the boxwood, the leaf's fall and the catch of the goldfish; instants which now live again in the act of recreation, details which were to fade into a yellow-green blur of June and of the girl beside me in a garden and of that name spoken in my hearing for the first time, becoming in my imagination like some bare monolith awaiting the sculptor's chisel.
Two
1
I did not see Iris again for some months. Nor, for that matter, did I see Clarissa who, the day after our lunch, disappeared on one of her mysterious trips… this time to London, I think, since she usually got there for the season. Clarissa's comings and goings doubtless followed some pattern though I could never make much sense of them. I was very disappointed not to see her before she left because I had wanted to ask her about Iris and also…
It has been a difficult day. Shortly after I wrote the lines above, this morning, I heard the sound of an American voice on the street-side of the hotel; the first American voice I've heard in some years for, excepting me, none has been allowed in Upper Egypt for twenty years. The division of the world has been quite thorough, religiously and politically, and had not some official long ago guessed my identity it is doubtful that I should have been granted asylum even in this remote region.
I tried to continue with my writing but it was impossible: I could recall nothing. My attention would not focus on the past, on those wraiths which have lately begun to assume again such startling reality as I go about the work of memory… but the past was lost to me this morning. The doors shut and I was marooned in the meager present.
Who was this American who had come to Luxor? and why?
For a moment the serenity which I have so long practiced failed me and I feared for my life. The long-awaited assassins had finally come. But then that animal within who undoes us all with his fierce will to live, grew quiet, accepting again the discipline I have so long maintained over him, his obedience due less perhaps to my strong will than to his fatigue, for he is no longer given to those rages and terrors and exultations which once dominated me as the moon does the tide: his defeat being my old age's single victory, and a bitter one.
I took the pages that I had written and hid them in a wide crack in the marble-topped Victorian washstand. I then put on a tie and linen jacket and, cane in hand, my most bemused and guileless expression upon my face, I left the room and walked down the tall dim corridor to the lobby, limping perhaps a little more than was necessary, exaggerating my quiet genuine debility to suggest, if possible, an even greater helplessness. If they had come at last to kill me, I thought it best to go to them while I still held in check the creature terror. As I approached the lobby, I recalled Cicero's death and took courage from his example. He too had been old and tired, too exasperated at the last even to flee.
My assassin (if such he is and I still do not know) looks perfectly harmless: a red-faced American in a white suit crumpled from heat and travel. In atrocious Arabic he was addressing the manager who, though he speaks no English, is competent in French, is accustomed to speaking French to Occidentals. My compatriot, however, was obstinate and smothered with a loud voice the polite European cadences of the manager.
I moved slowly to the desk, tapping emphatically with my cane on the tile floor. Both turned; it was the moment which I have so long dreaded: the eyes of an American were turned upon me once again. Would he know?
'Oh!' the American stared at me stupidly for a moment (his face is able to suggest a marvelous range of incomprehension, as I have since discovered).
'My name is Richard Hudson,' I said, pronouncing carefully the name by which I am known in Egypt, the name with which I have lived so long that it sometimes seems as if all my life before was only a dream, a fantasy of a time which never was except in reveries, in those curious waking-dreams which I often have these days when I am tired, at sundown usually, when my mind often loses all control over itself and the memory grows confused with imaginings, and I behold worlds and splendors which I have never known yet which are vivid enough to haunt me even in the lucid mornings: I am dying, of course, and my brain is only letting up, releasing its images with a royal abandon, confusing everything like those surrealist works of art which had some vogue in my youth.
'Oh,' said the American again and then, having accepted my reality, he pushed a fat red hand toward me. 'The name is Butler, Bill Butler. Glad to meet you. Didn't expect to find another white… didn't expect to meet up with an American in these parts.' I shook the hand.
'Let me help you,' I said, letting go the hand quickly. 'The manager speaks no English.'
'I been studying Arabic,' said Butler with a certain sullenness. 'Just finished a year's course at Ottawa Center for this job. They don't speak it here like
