Back in her sleeping bag, she became prey to her own bantering consciousness. Awake, completely. Spectacularly awake, not a wisp of drowsiness within reach. There seemed no safe direction in which she could cast her mind: all led her along unsavory passages. Where there had been certainty—Gabriel was spinning a yarn—now there was doubt. Perhaps he was not? Had she, like him, got too close? With a fragile lengthening of her imagination, she sensed a presence, outside, that was not Gabriel’s. An angry jinn such as his could cause havoc where it willed.
But this was not her religion, not her folklore.
Rolling over in her sleeping bag, she felt an ill-placed stone dig into her hip.
The piano—the closed Steinway concert grand—came firmly behind her eyes and would not be nudged aside. She could not have an opinion about Gabriel until she formed one about this. It was, in fact, quite a middle-class story—not a real horror, or even a real tragedy, just a boozy disgusting night gone badly wrong, and a talented family thrown into disarray. Even Gabriel’s lover was no longer mysterious. Prudence had been, no doubt, a by-product in the mind of a young man, guilty, perturbed, and vilified. The other lads, no doubt, had got off without much censure; to do it to a friend was one thing, to your brother—unspeakable.
She turned over again. The stones digging into her seemed to be multiplying. Were they all jinn?
He had given up a glittering career because he loved his brother so much. On a dark night with drink on board, the poison of that decision had come out, as it was bound to do. Gabriel was the one buried inside a piano.
She had handled it well, his full confession. Come morning, he would be refreshed, a little cured even, having spoken about the events that had exiled him to a place of such deep remorse that he seemed unable to quit it. When a place calls, Abid had said, you should go, because it holds something for you. Perhaps she had been called to help Gabriel, to move him along to brighter things, and this was at the source of their deeply felt connection.
That connection had its paws all over her. Had she not learned? A light flirtation was no stroll in the park: it was a teeter on the rim of Snake Gorge. Pretend it can go nowhere and your flirtation will arrive somewhere else, unhindered, as it had before, and was doing again. Gabriel. Under her skin. Feelers becoming roots. The tingle in her ribcage.
On the back of these thoughts, sleep shimmied toward her.
They were in Eden. Pale sunlight made the water bubble and sparkle; black mountains in the distance were like the Gates of Mordor; and a red goat, standing downriver on a rock, watched Thea emerge from her tent. Gabriel was lying in the shallow water, his head on a rock. How many people, she wondered, loved him?
“Morning,” he called.
“Morning.” After sending the family a text, describing her surroundings, she paddled over to him. He reached up to take her hand as she hobbled toward a rock and sat down. Still holding her fingers, he said, “What am I to do about you?”
“You could give me back my hand.”
He squeezed her fingers. “I wouldn’t ask for much.”
“Don’t ask for anything. You’d only be disappointed again.”
“Are you sure?”
She took her hand away.
“That’s what I thought,” he said.
Gooseflesh across his ribcage; nipples erect in the cold water; red board-shorts flopping about in the current.
“If I could see you, once a year, twice,” he said, sitting up, “that would be worth ten lifetimes to me.”
He had it all worked out: she would come to Oman for a few weeks every year, or they could meet elsewhere. Damascus. Venice. He didn’t care. He didn’t want to wreck any marriage—she could hang on to all that, but only come to him enough to help him breathe. “It’s you,” he said, “or no one.”
“Really? What about her?”
“Look, I never really thought you were her; more that she was you. Sometimes we see the future before we get there.”
“Time in a tombola?”
“Why not? Maybe we were both—”
“Ahead of our time?” she quipped.
“Seems like it.”
Her feet and calves were cold. She drew in her breath, let out the prodding night. “You might have killed him.”
“Yes.”
“Took his music, everything, from him.”
“I didn’t mean to.”
“You’re defending it.”
Water trickled down his arm. “I don’t defend it, ever.” His voice was tight, locked in his throat. “Look, with respect, you don’t really know—”
“You buried him. That’s what I know.”
Gabriel’s eyes flashed at her.
“What is it?”
“That’s what she said. Word for word.”
“Who?”
“The other you.”
They were almost in the desert when they saw the camel, standing on a ridge, high above the road. They were driving between steep, stark hills, the road curving downward toward the plain, when Thea saw him—a fine figure silhouetted against the sky, his head raised, his posture arrogant, yet searching. He was looking about, across the desert, as if waiting for someone.
“That’s very rare,” Gabriel said. “Camels don’t like hills. They climb only if they have to. They never do it alone.”
“So what’s he doing up there?”
He glanced up again. “Maybe he’s searching for a mate.”
“He looks bereft.” Thea twisted in her seat to catch a final glimpse of the magnificent, forlorn beast, memories of the caravan by Lake Razzaza soaking through her. No photos, she thought. Not then, not now.
Hours later—many long hours spent crossing an inhospitable landscape that nonetheless attracted her, like an ugly man with charm—Gabriel pulled over to let down the tires and they set off again.
It had been a long day’s driving, as he had warned her it would be, and at an apparently arbitrary point he turned off the road and headed fast across the plain until the swell of sands sucked them in, as into the belly folds of
