I don’t miss the old woman in Marrakech, the Resistance survivor, who was fabricated. We were alone in that bar, and nothing happened. Nothing much happens in bars, and we will not make that mistake again.
I miss the time in Riga when we watched the street performers, two young dancers, no older than eight, do some kind of samba on the street, in the dead of winter. We gave them about $100.
I miss the time, on the flight from Dakar to Casablanca, when a pair of siblings, sitting next to me—Will was on the other side of the aisle—asked to borrow my walkman, which I lent to them. They were wealthy, each studying English in Morocco, and they loved my CDs: Air and Tricky, but not Reverend Horton Heat, which the woman described with a twirl of her finger around her ear. I didn’t know they did that in Africa, too. At some point, while her brother closed his eyes while wearing my headphones, I had this conversation with the woman, who was young and allowed me to flirt with her.
“Where are you from?” I asked.
“Kinshasa Congo. You know where this is?”
“Of course,” I said.
The woman was still smiling. Her teeth were startlingly white and without flaws or gaps.
“Your teeth,” I said, “they are remarkable.”
She thanked me.
“Did you ever hear,” I said, “about Mobuto, how he wanted to export an ‘all-natural toothpaste’ because the Congolese teeth were so superior to the rest of the world?”
She had heard this. She was a fan of Mobuto, which was disconcerting, so I changed the subject. She asked if I was married, and I said no. She asked if she could buy my walkman from me, and I said yes. Which she did, after customs, and after I kissed her cheek, which smelled like simple powder.
A few small corrections:
MO AND THOR: There were twin girls in Will’s life, but they were babies when this trip took place—no more than two years old. Did he mention them on this trip? He didn’t once. Did he write notes or postcards to anyone? He didn’t. When we were traveling, he was entirely there, in Africa, in Latvia, because there was little time to think backward, to think of anyone at home. That’s the simple and unvarnished truth. I would venture to say that even if Will had kids himself, a wife and twin daughters he’d nicknamed Mo and Thor, or Thor and Odin, for this one week his mind would be seeing, doing and seeing, and might not rest upon them more than once or twice. This is the truth, and it’s either unromantic or infinitely more romantic than you can imagine.
RAYMOND: His name was Sean.
$80: When Abass asked for $80 after accompanying us to Saly, we gave him the $80, and we thought it was too bad, because we wanted to give him more. I didn’t want to give him anything. As he walked away, though, Will chased after him and gave him another $500 or so. “You can’t penalize him for being unsubtle,” he said.
YOU SHALL KNOW OUR VELOCITY: I really loathe that title, and that’s why I’ve changed it. I’m sure Will didn’t come up with it, because his notebooks weren’t labeled as such. I’ve retitled the book in accordance with a theory that I will lay down as soon as I get a chance.
Good people, everywhere we went our plans were compromised. We were limited to our access to Will’s money by the banks and their hours, by what we could and couldn’t travel with on planes, by our own fatigue. At the same time, our urges were sometimes the wrong urges. Driving between Casablanca and Marrakech, we wanted more than anything to pull off the highway and explore the red city of Benguérir, and we did pull off, momentarily. The place hadn’t changed in a thousand years, it seemed, and we really thought we’d be seeing something new there; we’d be swallowed up in a good way. We sat at the roadside, watching as a man selling asparagus was about two hundred yards ahead of us, on the gravelly shoulder. We had a few minutes to debate, because the man was walking toward us, and would soon enough be upon us, wanting us to buy his rancid asparagus or something. I was in the driver’s seat.
“I want to go into the city,” I said.
“Like, walk around and everything?” Will said.
“Yeah, walk around, meet people, get invited into someone’s house for dinner, sleep on someone’s floor in exchange for some pens and batteries. Something like that.”
“But then it’ll be a day before we get to Marrakech. Two days till we leave Morocco—”
You know where this conversation went. I just peeled and drove into Marrakech, where eventually Will has his most pronounced breakdown, on the floor of the Djemaa el-Fna, which did not happen, unless he did it while I was watching this one monkey-performer steal hats from members of the audience. People like us just don’t emote in the way he describes. I have never seen Will cry, though I know he has, and I have never been near him when he’s done anything like this, and if there were ever someone who would not bawl in public, on the ground, in front of strangers—especially not in front of strangers, for it was their judgment he worried about most—it was Will.
Really, why do we disguise these true things, why do we take the actual events of a life, which I would expect to be transcribed with art but without fabrication, and distort and dilute and obscure them? Why this blurry fiction? I don’t, I should say, find his book blurry, or even vague—for it tells the plain truth eighty-five percent of the time, day to day, of what we did. But when pressed to explain just what about the trip made it so worthy of transcription and dissemination, instead of breathing life into the story, he simply diverted attention, threw in random cookie-cutter background tragedy, and embellished. I find the technique kind of cheap. And given Will’s enormous sense of urgency, his awkward but buoyant spirit, that he fell back on this is, to my eyes, a shame, and an uncourageous way to leave this earth. I realize how difficult the world makes it for those who want to lead and talk about unusual lives in a candid way, in a first-person way. I understand that to sublimate a life in fictions, to spread the ashes of one’s life over a number of stories and books, is considerably better-accepted, and protects one greatly from certain perils—notably, the rousing of the anger or scorn of all the bitches of the world (more often male than female). But then again, I don’t know—maybe he wasn’t afraid of that sort of thing. Maybe he just wanted to fictionalize for his own entertainment. Maybe he found it artful. I don’t know. But I do know that while we traveled, his idea was this would be an experiment and would make its way onto the page unadorned.
That was why we didn’t sleep! We were, goddamnit, trying to live a week that would be worth documenting, worth writing down, minute by minute, so for him to embellish is counter to our aims, and I think a great betrayal of what might have been a great thing. The idea we came up with, well before we left, was something we coined Performance Literature. Excuse the use of that second word, because I realize it’s presumptuous. Also, excuse the first word, and the term in general. I know better than you how fatuous it is. But it is accurate, and concise, in that what we had planned was a book conceived, then acted out, then transcribed, then ostensibly made into art. Thus, our actions in Africa and onward were predetermined to be transferred to the page, and we were therefore actors performing in a book not yet written. And we found this to be a new sort of concept. I can’t guarantee that it hasn’t been done a hundred times before, but I haven’t personally seen it.
But then again, there are a number of ways one can take personal experience and make it into nonfiction. (For now we’ll ignore the semi-autobiographical stuff.) The first is to decide, years after the lived life, to write it down. If I am eighty and decide to write about a summer when I was sixty, that’s what I’m talking about. It’s far after the fact, and not premeditated. Second is the travelogue, where one goes somewhere, intending to take notes, to later write something coherent about a place. But in this case, the observer is, more often than not, passive, writing chiefly about his or her surroundings, and the people he or she meets. The writer reacts, instead of acts. Well, I suppose they do act, in that they have to do the traveling, choose the destinations, and so forth, but again, larg
ely they are observant cargo, being shuttled from place to place, notebook in hand.
We weren’t passive observers, we were active characters. It was our motivations that drove the story. It was our actions that would be of equal or greater interest than our surroundings, and the two would no doubt play off each other constantly, essentially. And lest you think that doing so, traveling and interacting with the intent to write it down, would, via Heisenberg, necessarily influence the very interactions we were documenting, well, then you’re missing the point. Here’s why: Because we had the stated intent of documenting our trip, and because our minute-to-minute motivations were to act in a way that would deserve documenting, it’s therefore not accidental but essential that our presence influence the outcome of events, and that our knowledge of such so-called perils were at the forefront of our minds, not buried within.
That said, we didn’t think as often as we’d expected to about the transferability to the page of what we were doing. We tried to be exciting, but knowing what’s interesting while you’re doing it is sometimes very difficult, and in the event that you find yourself hours from anyone or anything, in the middle of the Latvian countryside, for example, you have no choice but to do something stupid, like driving with your tongue. Which we did on more than one occasion.
The other term we coined was Conceptual Life, which I guess isn’t all that different from Performance Literature, with the one chief distinction being that Conceptual Life doesn’t depend on the participants planning to write about the experience afterward. The liver of a Conceptual Life sets forward, ahead of time, certain goals and a framework within which he or she will live. Much like the artist who pledges to spend a month on a platform atop a telephone pole, for one example. The act of living, of eating and sleeping and defecating, is all included in the larger concept set forward—in this case, of living an elevated and observed life. As long as the liver doesn’t leave the pole, all of his actions are still small marks upon the canvas he’s sized and stretched.
Now I’ll stop. I’ve been drinking vodka and Orangina, trying to put myself to sleep, and now it’s working. I guess the last thing I’ll say on this subject is that whatever you take away from this book, his text and mine—and I have no idea what you’re taking away—please take away this one thing about the trip:
It happened, and it was good. It was good because it happened.
FRIDAY
Today was a day without rain and I walked out onto the deck at dawn and it was magnificent. The sun popped whole at seven and kept rising, faster than I could track. At about noon, after I read some local paper on the deck, feet up and face tanning slowly, I heard a voice, a woman’s. I turned to see a woman with a bountiful head of hair, colored somewhere between blond and ivory, racing away from a face that looked familiar in the way that classically beautiful faces look. You feel you’ve seen them before, but what seems familiar is the demonstration of perfect symmetry. She was talking but I had missed the first few sentences and so gambled.
“Hello!” I roared, to make up with enthusiasm any error I’d made in response. Had she asked to borrow a rake or bag of rice? It didn’t matter. A hearty hello would break through and at least color me friendly, if hard of hearing.
“Hello yourself,” she said. And then I noticed that she was holding a hose. “Is this yours?”
I looked at the hose. I had never seen it before. It was brown.
“I have no idea,” I said.
She owned the house next door, or rather she and her husband did, but she frankly didn’t know where her husband was. Were they divorced? No, she laughed. Separated? No, no, she said. But he is a strange man. He disappears for many months at a time, she said.
She was lovely. Lovely is a word I usually use when commenting on my nieces, dressed as bridesmaids or for proms—it’s a word for a young flower, or a view of rolling hills gauzed with mist. But I looked over at Sonje—that was her name, and I was thrilled that I’d caught it and pocketed it in time to lock it—and I thought of the word lovely. She was about forty, wearing overalls and a gardening hat of straw, and had those kneepads on, for enthusiastic gardeners with bad knees. Everything she wore was blue, except for a scarf around her neck, the color of margarine.
I explained my presence, going a little vague on the details, calling myself a researcher working on a very demanding project, due in two weeks. She was intrigued but respectful of my privacy. That, or she was bored silly and was glad to leave the details alone. She smiled at me in a way I hadn’t been smiled upon a while. It was a sympathetic smile, which I’ll take in a pinch.
“How long are you out at the house this time?”
“Just a few days,” she said. “I have work back in the city. I have to get back late Sunday.”
“To Auckland?”
“Yes.”
I was trying to get a grip on her accent. It was not British, but it sounded more British than it did New Zealand … ish.
“What day is it today?” I asked, and hated myself for asking.
“Thursday. Don’t tell me you’re one of those.”
What did that mean? I didn’t know. I said:
“If I was, I wouldn’t tell you,” and confused myself more. I didn’t know what she’d meant, and I have no idea what I meant in response. It was a wash, and we moved on. When the sun had appeared today I felt awake again, felt locked in battle with the sun, and felt good about that. I’d felt strong, and when I’d seen Sonje I felt so much stronger, but what was coming out of my mouth?
“Have you seen that thing out there?” I said, pointing to the black shape on the beach. Sonje was lovely, but already I was back to the shape. I couldn’t help it. She turned and cupped her hand over her eyes.
“I thought it was a log, but I suppose you know better,” she said.
She brought to mind English actresses. She had a straight back, was thin without being shapeless, and had a nose that I associate with aristocracy in film—straight, small, but strong. Her voice projected like an actress’s, an actress who was also a wit, who could tell stories, who could make a group of children laugh but who also knew dozens of filthy limericks.
“We’ll have to investigate it together,” she said and I almost flew. I was so shaky in the head that I blurted something about dinner and she accepted, as long, she said, as we ate early, around five in fact, because she was expecting a phone call, from Amsterdam, at eight. Then she went back to her hose, and waved, though I hadn’t moved.
I went back inside, determined to get as much down as possible, in the five hours before I’d knock on her door and we’d drive around the bay, and through the twenty or so turns, all coastal, to Whitianga—the closest town for a good dinner out. And now I’m here, and what I want to talk about is the idea of the sacrament. I want to explain why I’ve retitled this formerly mistitled book, and the explanation starts in Copenhagen, at the airport chapel.
There was a priest there, an Episcopal priest, heavy-set, with a neat beard of black and grey, and wire-rimmed glasses. Around him were a group of travelers, mostly businessmen, and one family of six, all Indian. Will and I walked in, having time to kill; neither of us had ever been to an airport chapel. The priest, who was American for no apparent reason, was talking to them about the useless-ness of what he was doing. He was noting, and I paraphrase: “What I’m doing here, and what the church is doing here, and to some degree what you’re doing here, is not of much utility. But you do not need me to tell you, while here, what to do. You are doing what your soul tells you to do, without my help or the help of God. The Bible, in some part, is a handbook for those who might forget our obligations to each other. And those obligations are obvious, and constant, even though they become more obvious, more pronounced and more urgent and immediate at a time such as this. [His voice carried, and was a beautiful voice, I should add. It was obvious that he was a singer of some kind, and one who sang from deep in his chest, his core.] What we are doing is much like the sacrament I will be hand
ing to you shortly. For what is the sacrament? It is not in itself nourishment; it is, rather, an outward symbolic act of an inward grace. It is the external, social demonstration of how we feel within. It is not practical and without it we would feel the same way; it is a reminder only, and a relatively unnecessary one at that. But that does not mean it is dispensable, nor does it mean it is unbeautiful.”
This was the first time I’d ever heard this word, unbeautiful, though since hearing it I have stolen it and now it is mine. It was clear he was a theologian, a scholar, but one with a taste for the irreverent. Will and I knew, with a brief glance out of the corners of our eyes, that our own Catholic priests wouldn’t agree with his assessment of this particular sacrament as in some way unnecessary, but we liked his style. We always loved going to the Presbyterian church Youth Night, wherein we were given the run of the church basement, full of pool tables, Ping-Pong, pinball machines and couches, in exchange for listening to twenty minutes of the minister’s thoughts, which were, we always had to admit, a lot more applicable and comprehensible than what we got at our own church. And as I was listening to the airport priest, I was loving the notion of the sacrament, or rather was quickly forming my own version of it, a secular version of the sacrament, because the only way I ever could make it through any Mass, or any Youth Night, was to take whatever message they were sending and bend it, sometimes beyond reason, to give some holy weight to the things I was already doing or already believed. In that airport chapel, I nudged Will, and he smiled. I want to think he knew what I was thinking about, but we never had a chance, afterward, to talk about it, because he was late for his flight to Mexico City, and afterward all we had a chance to do was shake hands and say good-bye. (He nodded a few times at me, like he was taking my picture, mapping my body, and then backed away. It was the last time we saw each other.) But what I was doing was connecting the idea of the sacrament to what we were doing that week, on the road, with those strangers. First, what we did was intensely ritualistic, in that the procedure was very similar each time, and involved the observance of certain rules, namely that the recipients should seem needing of the funds, and that, whenever possible, they should be asked for directions, given them, or should have helped to take us along our journey. Second, the exchange of the money was much, if I may be so bold, like the exchange of the Holy Eucharist, in that in each case it is preceded by a brief and seldom-changing dialogue. In the case of the Holy Eucharist, the recipient is told of the symbolism of the communion wafer, and accepts this symbolism and reinforces his or her Catholic faith, by ingesting the wafer. In our case, we asked directions, and were pointed where we were already headed, and the recipient, by acknowledging the significance of the funds, accepts the symbolism of the money, and the symbolism of our giving it to them, and perhaps even reinforces his or her faith a little, too, in this case a humanistic faith, which I personally find even more difficult to keep …