The Names

I joined David, ru

The Desert

11

In this vast space, which seems like nothing so much as a container for emptiness, we sit with our documents always ready, wondering if someone will appear and demand to know who we are, someone in authority, and to be unprepared is to risk serious things.The terminal at each end is full of categories of inspection to which we must submit, impelling us toward a sense of inwardness, a sense of smallness, a self-exposure we are never prepared for no matter how often we take this journey, the buried journey through categories and definitions and foreign languages, not the other, the sunlit trip to the east which we thought we'd decided to make. The decision we'd unwittingly arrived at is the one that brings us through passport control, through the security check and customs, the one that presents to us the magnetic metal detector, the baggage x-ray machine, the currency declaration, the customs declaration, the cards for embarkation and disembarkation, the flight number, the seat number, the times of departure and arrival.It does no good to say, as I've done a hundred times, it's just another plane trip, I've made a hundred. It's just another terminal, another country, the same floating seats, the documents of admission, the proofs and identifications.Air travel reminds us who we are. It's the means by which we recognize ourselves as modern. The process removes us from the world and sets us apart from each other. We wander in the ambient noise, checking one more time for the flight coupon, the boarding pass, the visa. The process convinces us that at any moment we may have to submit to the force that is implied in all this, the unknown authority behind it, behind the categories, the languages we don't understand. This vast terminal has been erected to examine souls.It is not surprising, therefore, to see men with submachine guns, to see vultures squatting on the baggage vehicles set at the end of the tarmac in the airport in Bombay when one arrives after a night flight from Athens.All of this we choose to forget. We devise a counter-system of elaborate forgetfulness. We agree on this together. And out in the street we see how easy it is, once we're immersed in the thick crowded paint of things, the bright clothes and massed brown faces. But the experience is no less deep because we've agreed to forget it.Late in the day I walked with Anand Dass in the streets near my hotel. He looked heavier, moving through the soft air in a Michigan State t-shirt and faded jeans. He kept taking my arm as we crossed streets and I wondered why this seemed so curiously apt. Could these drivers be worse than Greeks? I was woozy from lack of sleep, that was all, and it probably showed."Seeing to details. Mainly interviewing people. My boss has already set things in motion.”"So this is new territory," he said."South Asia and so on. This will be a regional headquarters, separate from Athens once we get it going.”"But you're not coming out permanently.”"Do you need a listener? Someone to talk to about the life and travels of Owen Brademas?”"This is precisely the fact." Clutching my forearm and laughing. "The man inspires comment, you know.”"How many times did you see him?”"He stayed with us. Three days. And three letters since. I didn't know I cared for the man. But I read his letters again and again. My wife was fascinated by him. The worst field director in my experience. This is Owen. He digs like an amateur.”Under a movie billboard we passed a group of North Americans in saffron robes and ru

She came at me with the potato peeler, wearing my L.L. Bean chamois cloth shirt, forest green, with long tuck-in tails. I stood there half embarrassed. It was in her face, absolutely, that she would kill me. A rage that will astonish me forever. I evaded the lunge, then stood thoughtfully against the cabinet, my hands tucked into my pants, thumbs showing, like a quarterback on a cold day, waiting to rehuddle.