15. Dahab: seven days, seven nights

1     She only had one change of clothes: K-mart-caliber shorts and T-shirt. Her ragged bathing suit had to be safety-pinned on.

1.1   When he said she was gorgeous, she said, “Plastic surgery.”

1.2   She washed her hair with soap.

2     The bars of soap were hotel minis:

       •  Radisson, Istanbul

       •  Hotel Benot, Monte Carlo

       •  one in Chinese

2.1   She lit her cigarettes with bronze-tipped matches from the Ritz.

2.2   British Airways socks: Lufthansa pen: Flightbookers wallet.

3     “I don’t have to work because . . . I inherited money.” “Really? Who from?”

“Relatives.”

3.1   She’d never seen that movie. She didn’t know the band. The name Henry Kissinger rang a bell, but.

3.2   When he talked about school days, she didn’t.

4     “If I say you don’t want to hear, I am not not not speaking just to hear the sound of my voice.”

5     She was a high-class prostitute in flight from her sordid past.

5.1   Her affluent husband beat her; his agents were on her tail.

5.2   In the false bottom of her briefcase she ferried

        •  heroin

        •  uncut diamonds

        •  footage of rutting statesmen

5.3   She was a suburban housewife who wanted to appear mysterious.

6     The idea of making love to her never left him.

6.1   She was something held and naked and ecstatically pierced, even when she was sitting across from him munching pie.

6.2   Four times a night – they had welts, they scabbed.

6.3   It would never end. There was nothing else in life. Dark hair was food and God and the end of days. Skin hot with fresh tan was. Sweat was and her faint, infantine cries, her struggling.

7     In the mornings, Haisim treats everyone to tea. It’s served in an open shelter on the beach. Weathered rugs make a floor: the kettle perches on a blackened iron stand over a twig fire. Tea leaves and mint leaves lie in Ziploc bags to one side. The guests from all the cabins share their provisions: bread, watery yogurt, an occasional prized tomato.

7.1   Every day The Fighting Kangaroo and its pie. Every day beer: Eddie, still afraid, enjoys the secret that he’s risking his life for her. They swim, they sun themselves. Then there’s the reef.