Instead, he put his hands in his pockets and trudged onward. The card Ulli had given him was there, sharp-edged and practical. He clutched it for reassurance, but he was determined not to use it. And so he kept walking, looking straight ahead, ignoring their calls, ignoring the tugging at his sleeve. At one point he felt a crowd gathering around him, but he kept walking, feeling the crowd move with him. He felt as if he were walking through waist-high water, through streets thick with floating garbage—plastic bags and bottles, pineapples, a mattress, newspaper—somewhere he had never been before. It weighed against his chest and flooded his lungs. He had never understood why so many people loved the smell of rain and talked about how it cleansed the air, how they could breathe more freely after it had fallen.
The crowd of merchants drew nearer, encircling him, pulling him this way and that, grabbing at his clothes, hammering him like a summer downpour. He counted slowly, following each breath. His doctor had taught him to do this. He said it was a form of meditation, but Isaac did not think of it as such. It was purely a method to keep breathing, to be conscious of the act of breathing. There was no other goal, no desire to clear the mind, to focus on peace or understanding or nothingness. It was all about breathing. Yet it was the thought of collapsing there in the medina and everyone coming to his aid—carrying him into one of the shops, opening his shirt, listening to his heart—more than the counting that kept him moving forward, kept his lungs sucking in the thick smells of cigarettes and cheap leather and male sweat. And then he found himself catapulted out of the covered lanes of the medina and into the shocking brightness of the plaza. He could feel his pupils contracting from the light, his lungs expanding. He did not dare to look back, but he knew they had not followed him. If they were laughing, it did not matter. He had made it to the safe zone. He had emerged, as Ulli had told him he would, from the Middle Ages.
Isaac arrived back at the Hotel Atlas tired but with no desire to rest. “Isaac,” Ulli said, “look at you.” And she was right. His shirt was drenched in sweat, his hair disheveled, his shoes covered with dust.
Isaac held up the slippers. “For you,” he said.
Ulli opened the bag carefully. She held them up. “Thank you, Isaac,” she said.
“They are not of good quality,” he apologized.
“No,” she said, “but I will wear them with pleasure.”
He said he would take a shower, and then they would have a late lunch together in the garden. “Nothing heavy,” Ulli promised. Before his retirement, Isaac had not been in the habit of eating lunch at all. He fortified himself with a good breakfast—yogurt, fruit, kasha, or a thick slice of bread—and then he was set for an uninterrupted day in the library or in class. Sometimes he would get light-headed from hunger by three or four, but he always knew it would pass, and then he could sail on until dinner at seven or eight.
He lingered under the hot water of the shower longer than he had planned. He had almost forgotten the pleasure of cleaning up after physical activity. He lay down on the bed. There was an almost imperceptible breeze passing through the room. He would not have noticed it if he had dried off. He did not want to keep Ulli waiting, but he was so tired that he did not have the strength to rise from the bed. He would rest for just a while. Ulli would not mind.
He was awakened by a knock at the door. Ulli’s voice. He knew that he was awake, that she was knocking and calling to him, but he could not answer. He tried to get up, but his eyes were closing on him. When he awoke the next time, it was almost dark. Someone had covered him with a light cotton blanket. He was shivering. But it was so hot before in the market. He felt that there was someone in the room, someone sitting next to him on the bed, touching his forehead, his lips, or was that just his imagination?
The next time he awakened, he was alone. He was bothered, briefly, by a flickering light from a sign across the street. He heard people talking, the sound of water. For some reason he was worried about fire. If there’s a fire, I won’t be able to get up from the bed, he thought. He pondered going to the window to see how high up he was, to see whether jumping was a possibility, but the idea of placing his feet on the floor, of walking to the window, of parting the curtains made him weary. Before he fell asleep again, he wondered if this was what dying felt like.
For the past year or so, he had been worried about not waking up. His doctor told him that this was a fairly common fear for the elderly. His doctor often informed him that what he was feeling—aches in his limbs or itchy eyes or dizziness when he got up from his reading chair—was all “fairly common for the elderly.” This did not comfort him. He did not like the term the elderly. He did not mind elderly as an adjective, but the noun, he felt, was patronizing. He did not tell his doctor any of this. His doctor did not think of language in this way. For him it was a tool, like the light he shined into his patients’ eyes or his stethoscope. His doctor had insisted that it was not healthy to harp on the end of life—he never used the word death—but here Isaac was, despite the doctor’s orders, thinking about it once again.
“It is not a topic I choose to think about,” Isaac had explained to the doctor. “It is simply there, waiting for me when I have time to think, which is almost always. I feel as if I am back in my adolescence. There was a period from when I was maybe fourteen until seventeen or eighteen, until we left Europe, during which I would lie awake at night getting myself worked into a state about my eventual nonexistence. One day, I would not know that I had existed or that I no longer existed. My consciousness would simply be deleted from the world.”
“I don’t think of it that way at all,” the doctor told him. “I think of being reunited with the earth, and I feel at peace.”
“But I did not come from the earth, so how can it be a reunion?” Isaac asked, and the doctor thought for a moment and then said, “It is a manner of speaking.”
He wanted to tell Ulli about the doctor. He knew there was a phone by the bed. He could lift the phone and dial zero for the front desk, but he could not make his arm move. He tried. He grew angry with himself for not being able to pick up a phone. How feeble can one be? he thought. How ridiculous that Ulli must be the one to find me.
Sunstroke
Ulli felt responsible for Isaac’s sunstroke, for letting him go out by himself at the hottest time of the day, especially after such a long and tiring journey. She knew all too well how grueling that train ride was. When she first came to Morocco, before she bought the old Mercedes, she often had to travel to Rabat by train—always with a bagful of cash to pay the hefty bribes to ensure that the necessary paperwork for the hotel was processed and submitted to the proper officials. She should have gone with him to the medina. She had her trusted staff to handle things while she was gone, but she was not ready yet to have him so near. Isaac didn’t seem frail. He did not have the stoop of an old man. He was old, of course, as she was, his reddish hair gone thin and gray, yet he stood as he always had—tall, still tall. She did not easily admit to the limitations of age. The older she got, the closer to death (for that was what getting old meant, and tiptoeing around it certainly wouldn’t make it come any more slowly), the more she felt like an adolescent. Though it seemed irrational, she could feel, all in the same moment, a tremendous impatience to get things done, along with a conviction that she still had all the time in the world to do them.
Isaac was certainly not the first guest to have succumbed to the powers of the sun. Every summer, despite her warnings, there was at least one. She had learned that a doctor was not necessary, that plenty of fluids and rest were all that was required, which was how she handled Isaac. She stayed by his bed, made sure that he drank water whenever he awoke, kept his face cool with a washcloth soaked in ice water.
But why had he come? Her first thought when he walked through the door was, of course, that something had happened to the girls. As he said their names, her