Tibetan Peach Pie: A True Account of an Imaginative Life (33 page)

As heavenly as the champagne was, and as well equipped to compensate for any tedium in our interaction, it proved no more necessary than lace on a lily or paint on a rose. Alexa explained that she used the tarot deck and its symbols, refined over centuries to trigger subtle responses in the collective unconscious, primarily as a focusing device. What she actually and actively did in a reading was to tune herself to a frequency that could register subtle signals from the client’s emotional and/or intellectual state, signals that were often as clear to her as if they emanated from a radio transmitter.

She’d had this gift since she was a teenager, she said. Certain other members of her family had it as well, though a little spooked by it, they’d chosen not to develop it, whereas Alexa had embraced it and learned to harness it during a long convalescence following a skiing accident. She took pains to point out that while her sensitivity to patterns of behavior allowed her readings to appear predictive, neither she nor any other psychic could “see” the future. In recent weeks, she’d begun to read my novels, and casually, matter-of-factly offered keen psychological insights into several of my characters, illuminating qualities and motives which I’d developed instinctively rather than analytically during the writing process. Her training as an actress may have contributed to her prowess as an analyst of character, but it didn’t matter: I was impressed. She was not only prettier than I expected, she was smarter.

After dinner, on the short walk from the restaurant to my house, we paused under a streetlamp and impulsively kissed. Instantly, the light blinked out. Scoff if you must but I’m willing to submit to a polygraph test. Once home, we kissed some more, and while these kisses were not as electrified, they were sweeter, deeper, positively nectariferous. At her lips I felt like a drunken bee at the open tap of an orchid. I suggested we take a soak in the hot tub.

The tub was kept clean and heated for my volleyball team. Following a tournament or games against a rival, the Fighting Vegetables would pick up some beer and gather at my house for a tub party. We were a coed team, the Fighting Vegetables, and though the female members all had boyfriends or husbands, those guys were not included. Naturally they weren’t pleased, but our girls, especially those whose mates were sports fans, appeared to get a kick out of this small show of defiance, and the exclusionary tradition persisted; though I should point out that while we were all buck naked, there was never any conspicuous hanky-panky. Bathing together proved great for team spirit, for camaraderie, although I don’t necessarily recommend it for your office staff, your marching band, or your Bible study group.

At any rate, Alexa concurred that getting in the hot tub, minus a gang of sweaty volleyballers, was a reasonable idea. And here, reader, good taste dictates that we fade to black.

The next morning, I took Alexa to breakfast at a Mount Vernon truck stop. Conditioned by my boyhood in economically contrastive Blowing Rock, I’ve always been attracted to both sides of the tracks, equally disposed to the high life and the low life. My date had handled the white-tablecloth dining, the Cristal champagne, with good-mannered aplomb; now I wanted to see how she dealt with biscuits-and-gravy, longneck Budweisers (no glasses), and a jukebox loaded with country music, some of it recorded before she was born. My motives for testing her? Damned if I knew. Fortunately, there was someone present who was privy to my subconscious intentions, and whatever my ulterior objective, she seemed as much at home in this Bubbaesque mise-en-scène as if she’d grown up in a trailer park somewhere south of Big Cherry Holler. It was
I
who behaved like a goon.

It might have been the first time the subject of the tarot had ever been broached in Crane’s Truck City, but as we waited for our second round of Buds I suggested rather nonchalantly that maybe Alexa ought to read the cards for me someday. She smiled. It was a small yet knowing smile. There was a cryptic light in her green eyes. “I already have,” she said quietly.

“Oh yeah?” I was curious but not overly so. I was mainly making small talk. “So what did they say?”

She smiled again. “They said,” she answered matter-of-factly, “they said you were going to lose your heart.”

I raised my eyebrows. I straightened my back. I might even have puffed out my chest a little. (Don’t you hate overconfidence in a man?) “Oh yeah?” I scoffed “
Really.
To whom?” At least my grammar was correct because otherwise . . . well, that’s how ridiculously cocky I was, how smugly inviolable in my reconfirmed bachelorhood. Alexa, still gently smiling, did not reply. She just looked at me and shook her head ever so slightly, as if to say, “You fool. You poor, silly fool. You don’t know what’s happening to you, do you?”

She was right. I was a fool. A stubborn goon of a fool. And I had only the dimmest notion that something significant might be happening to me. But something was. And I lost my heart, all right; lost it so completely that after twenty-six years and counting, I’ve yet to get it back. From that weekend forward, Alexa and I have been virtually inseparable, at one another’s side day and night, to Timbuktu and back. Literally.

39

the curse of timbuktu

“Where is Timbuktu?” I’ve posed that question to a good many people over quite a few years, and the most common response -- I’d say 95 percent of the time -- has been “Timbuktu? Is that a real place?” Even after Islamic jihadists invaded the city in 2012, setting fire to its treasure trove of ancient manuscripts and bouncing Timbuktu night after night onto the evening news, most of the people I’ve queried have had no idea where -- or even if -- the place actually exists.

Once a center of caravan trade (gold, salt, ivory, slaves) and learning both sacred and secular, it has become through the centuries such a metaphor for “the middle of nowhere” that metaphor has overtaken and supplanted reality. Veiled in sandy layers of fable and mystery, Timbuktu is the farthest of which there is no farther this side of Shangri-la and Mars, it’s our global absolute elsewhere. Is it any wonder then that it was to burn like a danger-scented candle in the daydreams of a romantic such as I?

For most of my life I was content to let Timbuktu glimmer in the recesses of my imagination: after all, few if any of the poets and lyricists who’ve rhapsodized about the moon have actually expressed a desire to board a space shuttle and go up there. In 1991, however, I was practically picked up and swept to Timbuktu by a confluence of esoteric facts and literary ideas, a juncture where, in my mind, the ongoing worldwide disappearance of frogs coincided with and mirrored a simultaneous dwindling of the middle class; amphibious frogs being a living bridge between water and land, between fish and reptiles, and maybe, if the lore of Dogon and Bozo tribes, whose villages lie just to the south of Timbuktu, can be believed, between planet Earth and the stars; much as the middle class, despite its addiction to flaccid jolly ho-ho bourgeois inanities, constitutes a vital bridge between scarcity and abundance, between the pampered lives of the rich and the miserable lives of the poor. One thing every totalitarian state has in common is the absence of a middle class, one thing all of the world’s arid landscapes (whether due to industrial pollution or natural forces) have in common is an absence of frogs.

There are things for which science has no explanation. One such mystery is how the Dogon and Bozo peoples of northwestern Africa were able, with naked eyes, to determine that Sirius is a binary star system, and did so some five hundred years before European astronomers confirmed it with the invention of the telescope. Furthermore, the lensless Dogon went so far as to accurately describe the size, length, and shape of the Sirius sister star’s orbit, which lends a perplexing air of credibility to Dogon cosmology, based as it is on a chronicled visitation from a planet in the Sirius system by a party of amphibious humanoids. (Do I hear the tinkling notes of
Twilight Zone
?)

The Dogon experience, inexplicable as it is, seems to dovetail (or frog-leg) intriguingly with the commonly ignored fact that we land-stranded primates are essentially, ultimately (from the primordial soup to the waters of the womb) aquatic, a detail upon which I riff from time to time in the novel that resulted from the aforementioned confluence of weird data and creative ideas; its title,
Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas,
referring to the current state of human development as we oh so slowly proceed along our evolutionary path.

I elected to set
Frog Pajamas,
perhaps my most ambitious book, against a backdrop of the financial markets, a configuration of smoke and mirrors that if deconstructed makes scarcely more sense than a tradition based on a social call by amphibians from outer space. So how does Timbuktu fit into the picture? First, as I’ve said, Timbuktu is so close to Dogon and Bozo territory -- which research for my novel demanded I visit -- that it would have been unthinkable not to include it in my itinerary. Then there is this comparison, this projection: Timbuktu, once (primarily between in the twelfth through sixteen centuries) a wheeling and dealing center of enormous wealth, is now impoverished, suffering from depopulation, and is gradually being buried beneath the advancing Sahara Desert. One need not be a visionary to conclude that in time Wall Street, too, will be desolate and wasted, victim of a failed system, covered not by sand but by water as a poisoned, overheated ocean steals in to bear us oxygen junkies back to “the cradle we all rocked out of.”

There was one other reason, a bonus enticement, for going to Timbuktu: Alexa and I had been warned -- twice -- by the U.S. State Department not to go there, almost always a good indication that a destination will prove lively enough to suit the tastes of those who haven’t confused travel with tourism or adventure with shopping.

So where is Timbuktu? Geographically, it’s located in the upper reaches of Mali, a nation in northwestern Africa, that vast continent that Sarah Palin thought was a country. Even today, the town is not particularly easy to get to: were it more readily accessible it wouldn’t be Timbuktu. Alexa and I had to fly first to Paris (not exactly a hardship) and wait a few days (loving every minute of the delay) for an Air France flight to Bamako, the capital of Mali. Paris in the morning, Bamako in the afternoon: talk about culture shock. Bamako’s earth was red and dense, it’s air smoky, humid, and thick; and with its slow-moving jitneys, its sprawl of single-story shacks bursting with produce and cheap goods, the city seemed weighted down beneath a heritage of juju. When we deplaned, we’d had to be cleared by security. The Bamako airport had an X-ray machine, and although it was broken and inoperative, we’d been made to load our bags onto its conveyor belt and run them through anyway. Was that senseless protocol -- or was it juju? Who needed X-rays or telescopes? Welcome to Mali.

From our hotel, I booked, by phone, reservations on one of Air Mali’s twice-weekly flights to the city of Gao, a transaction conducted entirely in French, a language I cannot profess to actually speak. (Gao-bound flights, I learned, would land briefly in Mopti or Timbuktu if there happened to be passengers aboard so inclined.) Our plane, Russian built and rather decrepit, flew at an altitude of no more than a thousand feet, which seemed okay because the land beneath us was one giant sandbox, flat except for the occasional dune. The plane’s interior had been painted with a green household enamel, and I mean all of it: the cabin walls, the ceiling, the floor, even the seats; every square inch (I wondered about the instrument panel), green, green, green. It could have been Muammar Gaddafi’s private jet. Our fellow passengers included four or five Tuareg males, each, as is customary among these non-negroid nomads, with a full-length sword in his sash. Swords apparently don’t set off alarms in juju security.

Upon landing in Timbuktu, I saw through our conveniently unpainted window dozens of eager-seeming men (not Taureg but black Malians) lined up against the wire fence that separated the terminal area from the tarmac. I’d been in Mali long enough to know that each and every one of them wished to be hired as our guide, and that we’d be practically pulled limb from limb as they competed in a near frenzy for our business. What I didn’t know was that ten tourists had been killed in Timbuktu in December (it was now February), caught in cross fire between Malian government troops and separatist Tauregs (which would have explained the State Department warning), or that for the next eight days we would be the only Westerners, which is to say the only source of income, in the city.

At any rate, I told Alexa that we’d be wise to choose a particular guide even before we left the tarmac, zero in on one guy and walk straight up to him as if it had been prearranged. She agreed, and surveying the throng, I settled on a twentysomething individual, selecting him because he looked exactly like Magic Johnson: shorter, to be sure, but with the same happy eyes and a grin so wide and so bright it could have turned a night shift in a lead mine into a three-week vacation. Now, as a Seattle Sonics fan I despised the Los Angeles Lakers, but I wanted this Magic look-alike on my team, loyalty be damned, and as it turned out, Pasquale was to serve us splendidly, above and beyond the call of duty.

Tawny, low, and organic; hermetic, bare, crumbling in places, Timbuktu seemed made of cookie dough and starlight; rising like rough ginger popovers out of the magmatic ovens of the underworld, open only to the incandescent carousel of the whirly night, a city simultaneously earthy and unearthly. Antique races had fashioned it from the very desert they’d dreamed upon, enriched it with gold and salt, elevated it with wisdom (holy and astronomic) from near and far -- and now must look on silently from beyond the grave as the desert takes it back.

Down narrow, unmarked, sandy streets, devoid of neon or billboards; past closed doors and shuttered windows, past an outdoor community oven whose bread, never entirely free of sand, crackless -- and sometimes sparks -- when bitten into, Pasquale and his entourage of teenage boys led Alexa and me to a Western-style, single-story hotel. Clean and comfortable (which is not to say it wasn’t sandy), the hotel had forty rooms, thirty-nine of which would remain unoccupied throughout our stay.

Why Pasquale had a posse was never explained. Perhaps the teenagers were apprentices of a sort, interns trying to learn the guide business; perhaps they were just attracted to the older fellow’s knowledge, his cheery personality. Or maybe it was because he had us in tow and we were the only action in town. In any case, the boys were intelligent, sweet, and thoughtful. They followed us everywhere we went and helped protect us from the constant --
constant
-- onslaught of ambulatory entrepreneurs (mostly Tuareg) trying to sell us “ancient” artifacts that I suspected (and Pasquale, with some embarrassment, confirmed) had been made no earlier than the day before yesterday. Like Pasquale, the boys spoke -- in addition to French (Mali’s official tongue) and native Koyra Chiini -- a fair amount of English, as well as a smattering of Italian, Spanish, German, and even Japanese. They’d become multilingual not in school but at the movies.

The Timbuktu cinema, we soon discovered, was a thirty-six-inch TV set that rested atop a table in the sandy (obviously) courtyard of a private residence. The owner charged patrons a small fee to sit on wooden benches before the set, which had no antenna, no satellite dish: broadcast signals didn’t know the way to Timbuktu. What it did boast was a VCR player, and its owner had a connection in Bamako who had a connection in Paris, so periodically a rented batch of taped films in various languages would make its way there via Air Mali to be exchanged for an earlier batch that, by the time of the exchange, had been watched multiple times by our boys, picking up foreign words and phrases all the while.

Cinema’s influence on one of our boys was both amusing and touching: he was known to everyone in town by his preferred name, “John Travolta.” Slight and black, he looked nothing at all like his actor namesake, but he did own a leather jacket with the skyline of New York City painted on its back. He wore that heavy jacket all day, every day despite temperatures that routinely reached 110 degrees, a heat so dry it could cause the body to lose two quarts of water just sitting still in the shade. This “John Travolta’s” ambition was to go to medical school and I love to think he might have made it.

Despite the December gunfight in Timbuktu, despite being the only people in town genetically disposed to sunstroke, we felt safe enough with Pasquale, “John Travolta” (who, had he any inclination toward Scientology, must have expressed it in Koyra Chiini), and the gang as we trudged slowly from ancient mosque to ancient library; and one day to the bank, where the manager, once he’d reluctantly agreed to redeem my traveler’s check, opened a cabinet loaded with shoes and tried hard to sell Alexa a pair of sandals. On our last full day, however, something occurred that put the lot of us to the test.

In the relative cool of morning, Alexa and I had expressed casual interest in an offer of a camel ride to a Tuareg encampment a mile or two beyond the town. The nomadic Tuareg, who are related to Berbers, do not reside in Timbuktu or any other city, but from their temporary camps out in the desert, certain members will not hesitate to venture into town on matters of financial interest. Well, as the day progressed and the heat intensified; we came to realize that if the Tuareg got us two pigeons in their sun-broiled camp, we would not be let go until they’d plucked every last one of our feathers: we’d be charged for the camel ride, for food, water, entertainment (dancing girls), and every week-old “ancient” artifact they could foist upon us. So, as we heated up and wised up, we changed our minds. The Tuareg camel wrangler, however, had taken our offhand interest as a binding contract. When he returned later in the day with an extra camel, only to be spurned, he became furious.

Tuareg men wear blue veils, a unique fashion statement that adds considerably to their mystique (their women go unveiled, though are rarely seen in public), and this gentleman was so worked up that his veil was fluttering like the spastic wing of a dying jay. Finally, to shut him up, I just paid him the price of a camel ride. He took the money and stomped away, only to come back a second time as we were finishing our hotel dining room supper of Niger River perch and sand-crackly bread, and this time his anger had been jacked up so high all four legs were off the ground. Though it was growing dark, he was insisting, demanding, that we accompany him to his camp. Alarmed, we sent for Pasquale.

As indicated, perhaps, by which sex wears the veils, the animistic Tuareg, alone in that part of the world where three aggressively patriarchal religions were born, are a matriarchal society, and Pasquale’s assessment was that when our emissary returned to camp a second time without the two rich infidels in tow (for the fleecing of which the women had been preparing all afternoon), the ladies had promised to deprive him of certain rights and maybe cut his balls off if he didn’t go back and fetch us. Whatever the threat, it left an impression, because the fellow remained outside of our hotel room all night long -- all night! -- ranting and raving (in French and Hassaniya Arabic), pacing back and forth and brandishing his long sword. There were several pieces of heavy old French colonial furniture in our room, and we used them to barricade our door.