Thea shuddered. “How much is enough water?”
“Eight liters per person per day,” he replied. “Without water, you become confused very quickly and then you make bad decisions, like leaving the car or thinking you’ll be able to see something from the top of that dune over there, or the next, and then you turn around and you see a thousand dunes and you don’t know which one is hiding the 4x4. It turns out that your only defining landmark doesn’t define anything at all, and by then it’s too late. Even if you know what to do, which is to stay with the vehicle, but you don’t have enough water, you’re still fucked, because you won’t behave rationally once dehydration sets in. Delirium comes quickly. And if you stay in the car, you’ll basically cook. It happens every year to some unfortunate wretch.”
“What a ghastly way to die.”
“Not the way I’d choose,” said Kim, “if I had a choice.”
“Nor me,” said Gabriel.
“What would you choose?” she asked him.
“I wouldn’t fry, that’s for sure. If I got lost out there, without water, I’d throw the jeep over the rim of a dune. It’s pretty easy to roll a 4x4 if you know how.”
“You’ve thought about it, then,” said Kim.
“You don’t go deep into the desert without thinking about it.”
“What if the roll didn’t kill you?” Thea asked.
He smiled. “Then I’d fry.”
“I’d be reaching for the pills,” Kim said, with a sigh. “I never really get the way some people can be proactive about killing themselves—throwing themselves in front of a train or off buildings. It’d be like jumping out of a plane without a parachute.”
“I understand why people jump,” Gabriel said. “Leaping into the void. That makes sense to me.”
This man, Thea thought; the grimness of him. When he smiled, flecks of light flickered in his eyes, but mostly he walked about with a dull shadow; and the shadow of the shadow spread to those around him. Kim, for instance: she’d become darker since they’d met him, preoccupied by genies and ghosts, by women who were, and women who weren’t, and now, prodding him about death and dying and how best to suicide.
“Have you ever got into difficulty in the Omani wilderness?” she was asking.
“I’ve got caught in storms, fierce bloody winds blowing up without warning. Zero visibility. A kind of blindness. Scary, but I quite liked it.”
“Well, you would,” said Kim. “Invisibility again.”
Thea looked out. Muscat looked in. Nice town. Easy town. Earlier that afternoon, they had walked through the suq, along modernized alleys under a high roof, where they had bought scarfs and trinkets, and stopped while a boy lit charcoal in a small burner, then broke frankincense and myrrh over it until a faint flicker of aromatic smoke flavored the air.
“I think you mean Umm al-Samim,” Gabriel was saying. “The Mother of all Poisons. I don’t know about sheep, but cars do sink into it. Although it isn’t sand—they’re salt flats, a crust of salt, gypsum, and sand on top of mud. Sludge, basically.”
“Yes, that’s it! That’s what I read about.”
“Water sometimes flows down from the Hajar, so old hands know you should never drive across it after rain, unless you have ramps in the car, because the water permeates beneath the crispy salt into the gunk underneath—that’s the stuff that swallows things, but slowly. It isn’t quick.”
“Another fun way to die!” Thea quipped. “Stay in the car and wait for the goo to get you.”
“Only then you’d die of thirst, as in example A,” Gabriel said flatly. “It’d take a jeep several days to go down. Plenty of time to get out. Umm al-Samim prefers to eat 4x4s rather than people.”
“Taking back some of its oil, perhaps.”
Kim wasn’t satisfied. “So much for being sucked into oblivion by whirlpools of dry sand, like in the movies!”
“In Umm al-Samim, it’d be more like drowning. In black ink.”
“Jesus,” said Thea, “you two really have gone over to the dark side.”
“Some people live their entire lives on the dark side,” said Gabriel.
“People like you,” Kim glanced at her watch, “and all because some lover ditched you. Was she really worth it?”
“My love life interests you a lot,” he remarked drily.
“Jinn interest me. Especially since we learned, this evening, that they’re partial to bones and feces and live around outhouses.”
“And you wonder why I’m so sure my lover was not a jinniya?”
“But where did she come from? And, more to the point, where did she go? Because, frankly,” Kim said, exasperated, “it isn’t credible that you’ve spent over twenty years mourning a woman you knew for all of two months. There has to be more to it.”
“There is.”
At just that point, Abid arrived to take Kim to the airport.
“Tell me,” she urged him. “Otherwise, I’ll have to make it up!”
Instead, Gabriel curved back, twisting slightly to greet Abid over his shoulder. There was something alluring in his every move, Thea thought, even though he wore his past like a carapace.
Kim pressed her Dictaphone into Thea’s purse. “Go to the desert,” she hissed. “Find out what you can. I’ll give you a share of the profits.”
Thea grasped her hand. “When am I going to see you again?”
“Let’s leave that to the angels. Or the jinn.”
They embraced. “I’m so glad you weren’t Sachiv.”
“Me too. Old lovers,” Kim glanced at Gabriel, “only ever disappoint.” She leaned toward him to shake hands. “Goodbye, Gabriel.”
“I look forward to reading about myself in a supernatural thriller.”
Abid said to Thea, “I will come back to take you to your hotel.”
“No need.” Gabriel said. “I’ll take her.”
Thea watched Kim go, weaving through the tables to the door, then emerging beyond the vast window, where she turned and waved one last time.
With a deep, satisfied sigh, Gabriel said, “Let’s go home.”
His house in Muttrah was not far from where the boy had been burning incense earlier that day. He led her into a narrow alley
