CHAPTER

28

AMANI STOOD STILL. Her eyes filled with night. “Daleel!” She looked in the direction where she’d last seen her guide and hurried that way for a few minutes, calling to him. Then she stopped, suddenly uncertain. Wasn’t the tent just behind her? The starlight seemed to reach only halfway down the rock towers; the desert was erased, unlit as an ocean floor. She cried, “Hello? Anyone?” The wind on the sand made a continual oceanic boom and it was hard to hear her own voice. She took several more steps and stopped again. She could barely see her hand in front of her face. “Daleel?” She called. She felt a tremor in her chest. Her heart rate sped up. Now she shouted, “Daleel! Hey. Where are you?” Her voice bounced back in blurry echoes. “Oh, for God’s sake,” she cried, somehow both frightened and exasperated. The words came back to her: Oh . . . God’s . . . sake . . .

She thought she heard a man’s voice calling, first in one direction, then another—it, too, repeated, seeming to ricochet off the rock walls. It was surprisingly far away.

She headed toward the voice, its last location, jogging, trying to catch up to it, her feet digging into the sand. After several minutes, she stopped again, hands on her hips, breathing heavily, then called out. She could see nothing. No sign of the tent anywhere. Again, she seemed to hear a scrap of voice, this time behind her. She inhaled deeply, squinting, looking around. The guide must have realized she wasn’t there and started looking for her, but now she wasn’t sure where he’d left her. Which, she realized, was stupid of her—wasn’t that the first rule for children, if they lose track of their minder—to stay still? She tried to reassure herself that certainly he would know where to look. This sort of thing must happen out here all the time. At any moment, she’d hear him calling—though she could hear almost nothing over the sand rumble. He would come tap her on the shoulder. Wouldn’t he? She could just imagine the relief of it. She smiled at herself, though it didn’t feel quite convincing. She shouted again.

She stayed still for a few minutes, waiting. She waited longer. She kept calling out. He would come. She waited until she thought twenty minutes had passed. Maybe longer.

He’d walked off in this direction; she was certain. Maybe she would take just a few more steps . . . this way. He was just over here. She called out. For a moment she thought she heard a car engine, then a flash of a high beam or search light in the dark. She cupped her mouth, crying out as loudly as she could but the light extinguished as quickly as it had appeared.

The wind seemed to have picked up; she swayed a bit, feeling vertiginous. The desert horizon beyond the great rocks seemed to stretch, following the curve of the Earth. She stared and waited and after a while it felt as if she were becoming aware of the surface of the planet, its existence as a minuscule object hanging in space. It seemed like a good idea then to sit down, so she did, though then she felt gusts of crystalline sand, hissing against her skin. She pulled the cloak more tightly around her shoulders and over her head, shielding herself from the sand.

Amani thought about her father and the others, their worry when they realized she wasn’t in the visitor’s center. Would they start to look for her right away? And where? She and Daleel had driven at least thirty minutes into the desert. It would be bad for her father—not knowing what had happened to her. At least she knew where she was. She managed to smirk at this. When the guide had pulled up in his jeep, he was in such a rush, there’d been no time to consider. She’d seen how warily the other guides had looked at her when they first arrived: they were outsiders. Daleel had taken a risk in bringing her here—perhaps just as much as she had in going along with him. And she’d gotten distracted and wandered off all on her own and now she was going to die the stupidest death imaginable. For a moment, her vision blurred with tears. She lifted a hand, but the wind had already dried her eyes. Now she laughed out loud at this self-pity. Daleel was only a few steps away, she was certain. Pretty sure. She started to shiver. Using one hand, she stood again and looked around more determinedly. She was too cold to be lost. “I’m too cold to be lost,” she said out loud. She thought she heard something, a kind of hiss or shush, and held still for a moment, listening.

“Hello!” she shouted. “Anyone?” There was nothing. She tried clapping. As her eyes adapted, she picked out the contours of tire tracks in the sand and felt a surge of hope. She began following them, clapping and singing. She would just get on with it—she was certain the track would lead to Daleel’s jeep. Or to one of the guides, or their camp. There were Bedouins out here—she’d seen tents and lanterns as they’d driven past. If she kept following the tracks, eventually she’d find them.

Amani walked and shouted, then walked in silence. After a long while, she stopped and hunched, hands balled into fists at her sides: she shouted very loudly, as loud as she could, realizing as she did she could hardly hear herself over the wind. She walked and sang some more, losing her sense of time. Her voice began to scrape; her throat felt raw. She banged a couple of rocks together, but one of the rocks shattered after a few strikes. Bending to pick up a white rock, she saw something race out, glossy in the starlight: two outstretched claws and a curving tail. Amani shrieked and dropped the rocks.

There was no sign of anyone. The tracks seemed to vanish in places, but then she’d pick them up again. She wondered if she should turn back. She wondered if she should stay in one place and wait to be found—was that the wisest course? But waiting passively as the night drew on seemed unbearable. She told herself, This doesn’t actually happen in real life. People don’t die in the desert anymore. This is something from the movies. Like wandering into quicksand. Then she remembered she was in another country where she wasn’t sure of the rules.

She went on. Her running shoes filled with sand. She took plodding half steps, sinking slightly with each on. At first, she stopped to empty her sneakers; after a while she realized there was no point. Panic shot across her skin, but as long as she kept walking she found she could push the panic to the outside. She berated herself: look what she’d done. In what way had she helped Musa, dragging him from his cave, getting herself lost in the desert? She couldn’t let herself cry—she had to preserve every drop of fluid. She knew that much. The moon and stars had shifted in the sky. Her legs became heavy and the back of her neck hurt. It occurred to her that she hadn’t had anything to eat or drink since the bottle of water and sandwich in the car. She was thirsty, her lips desiccated, and she could feel the start of a headache. Her fingertips, even the palms of her hands felt stiff and dry. Her face was stiff. She stopped, shaking with doubt. She started walking again; there was no turning back.

Her right shoulder had started to ache and she realized her small canvas purse was full of sand, its strap weighing down the side of her neck. She dumped it out and considered leaving it behind—the mobile was useless here, as was her wallet. But deliberately leaving her bag felt too much like surrender. Instead, she took out her wallet and every twenty or forty feet or so she left a piece of identification behind, like a trail of crumbs—her library card, business card, school ID, insurance card—placing a stone on top of each, hoping someone might come across her leavings. She kept her driver’s license for some means of identification, but eventually she dropped her wallet too, just a few dinars inside.

There were no Bedu, no camps, no lanterns. Sometimes she heard chittering or unearthly warbling sounds; she thought she saw something like mice scrabbling over the sand. But the longer she walked, the quieter the earth became; gradually, she heard only a continuous whisk of sand over sand. The darkness was total, like a concentration of night, and even the massing rock formations in the distance disappeared. She began to slow down. She had no idea how far she’d walked. She wouldn’t think about her mother. But then she remembered her mother’s principle of things: Don’t struggle against the tide, let it carry you. Reaching a long, flat piece of rock, Amani sank to her knees then onto her heels in the sand beside it. She was still. She would be carried. At some point earlier in the night her fear had lifted. Now she only felt how absurd she was for being here. She could see the pale vapor of her breath, but she didn’t feel cold. I’m sorry, she thought. The words formed in her mind like a written message. I’m sorry. Please forgive me. She tried to write some of this with a stick in the sand, which was immediately blown away. Then she started trying to form words with rocks, but remembered the hidden scorpion. What use was writing anything? The stars had pulled farther back into the pitch-black, just a few glinted as if through layers of transparencies. Gazing toward the darkest band over the horizon, she thought about the onionskin envelope, all those fragments of her grandmother’s voice—a record of interruption. There hadn’t been time to show it to her father. She hoped he would find it. Then she pushed away this thought, which made it seem as if she were already dead.

IT WASN’T SLEEP but a softening. The moon turned into a white haze and cast tiny shadows. Her consciousness seemed to shiver, like a shuddering old film reel. She focused on her breath, the thread of her pulse. She waited, listening. When at last the sky lifted with a touch of gray, Amani slowly pushed herself upright, then back to her feet. She could feel the cold easing. Her throat felt swollen. It occurred to her that she had to find some kind of shelter or shade before the sun was fully risen.

She tried to continue in the same direction, but there were no markers to guide her. Predawn sifted into the sky as the landscape came into relief, gradually revealing a featureless plain. She thought she heard birdsong, though she couldn’t see birds or any trees. There appeared to be a rock ridge but it was so far away she might have been dreaming. She tried to remember how mirages worked, but she couldn’t hold on to thoughts very well. They ran through her body like minnows.

The sun edged over the earth, pinkening the sky, turning the earth a vivid garnet color. Amani lifted her forearm and bent her head before a sheet of dawn light. At first, she walked lightly, following the dashes that remained of the tire treads, energized by the brief rest. And by hope: she was tired yet she’d made it through the night. The air was softer and easier and she was making progress. But was there such a thing as progress when you didn’t know where you were going? She tried not to return to the thought that she didn’t have food or water. As she walked, she noticed a large, hull-shaped rock emerging in the middle distance. Its substance seemed reassuring and solid on the glowing sand.

Her slowing happened so incrementally she barely noticed anything more than a slight shift in the shadows on the ground. Then she began to feel the warmth. The change was subtle at first, slowly intensifying. All the freshness dried out of the air; the birdsong evaporated. Her throat began to ache with thirst and the headache came back, banging in her temples, rocking her vision. There was a thickening sensation all around, as if the sky were starting to gel.

As the morning advanced, her legs became increasingly heavy, laden with a kind of dream weight. She felt she was churning through mud. The bottoms of her feet were hot and she wondered if she had started to wear through the soles of her running shoes. She kept putting one foot in front of the other, but it seemed maddeningly as if she weren’t moving. The hull-shaped rock didn’t appear to get any closer; at times it actually seemed to sink away from her. The more she walked, the more it seemed to recede.

She tied the guide’s long cloak over her head: its weight was smothering, but it blocked the sun. Rivulets of sweat crept through her hair and evaporated before reaching her face. She wasn’t sweating as much as yesterday—was that a sign of something? Heat stroke?

There were no borders and no limitations here. Her body would break down, fall away, into the murmuring. Hello, I’m back. She understood, perhaps for the first time, that no one knew where she was. No one was coming.

The heat became too much then. She didn’t raise her eyes for fear of burning them. The sun boiled overhead, cutting through everything. Heat waves warped the air. She heard a harsh buzz or rustle, like that of insects, but drier, as if the sand itself were rattling. Her vision swam and she wouldn’t let herself think, for she was afraid that even the energy of thought might impede her in some way. She had to stay in her body now, in the lifting of one foot, then the other, then the other, then the other.

Still, the air became progressively heavier, more turbulent. She began to hear a thrumming behind her: sand brushed past her in sharp whirls, lifting and bouncing. When she turned to look back, she saw a vaporous orange curtain rolling toward her. The wind rose, lifting the clothes on her body. She hacked. Her lungs felt gritty. Amani moved the wrapper so it covered her head and face and she peered through its weave. The drumming sound intensified, becoming thunderous, booming. The remnants of the tire trail were swept clean. She wanted to crouch, to cinch into a knot. But some instinct drove her forward, a certainty that stopping would be obliteration, and she hadn’t accepted that. Through the wrapper, she seemed to see the sand floor rise, crumpling around her, as if some great hand had reached under the earth, seizing and ruffling its surface like a carpet. Sand levitated straight into the air and she was in the thick of the storm.

It howled in her ears; there was sand in her lashes and mouth, but she didn’t stop. Sand crusted between her teeth: that sensation of grit made her feel somehow stronger, as if she were deriving some kind of energy from the storm itself. She dragged each foot, one after the other, as wind spun around her, sometimes propelling her forward, sometimes knocking her sideways. She could see nothing but the orange haze and felt nothing but stinging sand, the ground sliding and wobbling beneath her. Just when she’d decided that she wouldn’t make it to the rock, that it was just some vision that she’d conjured, she realized she was getting closer. It rose directly out of the flat ground, prehistoric, jagged, pounded by wind currents. She reached toward it and felt how her body was trembling, how she seemed to be falling forward. Her palm made contact, the rock grainy and hot.

Struggling against the wind, hair uncovered, whipping fiercely, she managed to snag the wrap’s weave on the rough rock face and extend the rest of it to the ground, scraping up handfuls of stone to hold it in place. She sat huddled against the rock while the shawl bellowed with the winds, snapping against her body, the wind screeching and demonic. She would have wept, but her eyes produced no tears.

Her lids closed: for long minutes she saw flashing lights, faces, broken pieces of memories and poetry. She supposed she was hallucinating. She curled into herself. She’d failed them—she saw it now. I am done, Natalia. She’d failed to risk herself, to take the sort of leaps her grandmother had taken, to love so deeply, the way her grandmother had loved her family—especially Musa—to risk releasing that which she loved the most. Amani had tried to keep herself locked up: she’d made herself so small, a cipher—to others and to herself. She thought then of kissing Eduardo, the sweetness of the memory filling her, and she realized that one kiss had moved her more than the years she’d spent in her marriage. If only she had let herself feel it. It was possible, she thought, that she loved him. The wrapper surged with wind and nearly tore loose; if it did, she decided she would let it go. Even in the roaring sand and the night, she felt how much she loved this world, how it had waited inside her all along, to break her open.

Her lips were crusted together. Even closed, her eyes burned.

Time dissolved away. She gave herself up to it. To the beautiful dissolving.