The Names

Through Istanbul the long cabs passed in the gloom, Olds 88s, Buick Roadmasters, Chrysler limousines, DeSotos with busted mufflers, the Detroit overstocks of the decades, a city of dead cars. From the air all the cities looked like brown storms collecting, traps of heat and dust. Rowser sent me to Cairo for one day to finish an update for the local associate, a man who'd suffered a stroke in the lobby of the Sheraton. Cairo the radarless airport, Cairo the flocks of red-dyed sheep crossing downtown streets, the roofless buses, people hanging over the sides. In Karachi there was barbed wire, broken glass cemented to the tops of walls, trucks carrying trees in burlap sacking. Military governments always plant trees. It shows their gentle side.In the Istanbul Hilton I ran into a man named Lane, a lawyer who did work for the Mainland Bank. The day before he'd run into Walid Hassan, one of David Keller's credit officers, at the Inter-Con in Amman. I'd last seen Hassan in Lahore, the Hilton, where we'd run into each other at the front desk, each of us signing a document allowing us to have a drink in the bar that lay behind an unmarked door off the lobby. In the bar we ran into a man named Case, who was Lane's boss.Case had come from Nairobi with a one-sentence story. When Kampala fell to the Tanzanian forces, people greeted them with flowers and fruit and beat their own captured troops to death in the street.All these places were one-sentence stories to us. Someone would turn up, utter a sentence about foot-long lizards in his hotel room in Niamey, and this became the solid matter of the place, the means we used to fix it in our minds. The sentence was effective, overshadowing deeper fears, hesitancies, a rife disquiet. There was around us almost nothing we knew as familiar and safe. Only our hotels rising from the lees of perennial renovation. The sense of things was different in such a way that we could only register the edges of some elaborate secret. It seemed we'd lost our capacity to select, to ferret out particularity and trace it to some center which our minds could relocate in knowable surroundings. There was no equivalent core. The forces were different, the orders of response eluded us. Tenses and inflections. Truth was different, the spoken universe, and men with guns were everywhere.The one-sentence stories dealt with our passing grievances or small embarrassments. This was the humor of hidden fear.