The Names

The aircraft veered into position, halting. We waited for clearance. I looked out the window, trying to find something that might distract me from the meditative panic I always experience, the dream-rush before takeoff, all the week's measures of self-awareness in one charged moment. The pale sand stretched level in the distance. A figure was out there, a man in a flax robe. I watched him walk into nothing. Erased in chemical flame. The plane moved down the runway and I sat back, rigid, looking straight ahead.Words sounded incomplete to me. The starts and stops in people's voices came unexpectedly. I couldn't figure out the rhythm. But the writing flowed, of course. It seemed to have a movement top to bottom as well as right to left. If Greek or Latin characters are paving stones, Arabic is rain. I saw writing everywhere, the cursive beaded slant in tile, tapestry, brass and wood, in faience mosaics and on the white veils of women crowded in a horse-drawn cart. I looked up to see words turning corners, arranged geometrically on mud-brick walls, knotted and mazed, stuccoed, painted, inlaid, climbing gateways and minarets.I sat across the aisle from a dead man on a Yemen Airways flight from San'a to Dhahran. He died about fifteen minutes into the flight and the people traveling with him started wailing. They carried cloth-covered bundles and wailed. A man behind me remarked to his companion, "But credit extension isn't the issue here." I gripped the arm rests and looked straight ahead. We were over the Empty Quarter.I found myself studying doors, shutters, mosque lamps, carpets. Surfaces were dense and abstract. Where figural things were present they were rendered as nuances of line or curve, taken out of nature to the level of perfect repetition. Even writing was design, not meant to be read, as though part of some unbearable revelation. I didn't know the names of things.Forty men and women in immaculate white robes with close-fitting head-scarves filled the rear section of the plane, a Tunis Air flight, Cairo-Damascus. The women's hands were covered with small red marks, designs of some kind. At first I thought they were letters of the alphabet. Not that I knew which alphabet. Possibly the obscure language of some religious sect. Finally I decided the figures were crosses, although some might have been chevrons and others might have been variations of either of these. I couldn't tell whether the marks were ingrained or simply applied to the surface of the skin with cosmetic dye. The people had been on the plane when I boarded, all quietly in place, waiting. After we landed I looked back that way as I moved up the aisle toward the nose exit. They were still in their seats.Women's eyes glanced away, windows were false, shadows crossed the wall in dappled patterns, architectural planes receded, prayer niches were aligned with Mecca. This last fact supplied an axis to the vapor of fleeting shapes. So much that happened seemed to happen simultaneously. Animals everywhere. The cramped passages of the souk were the least secret places. Loud voices, hanging meat. The crowd was soft, however, floating in robes, sandaled, billowing, touched by the light that fell through broken places in the roof.I stood waiting at the baggage conveyor in the airport in Amman. The king would be arriving later that afternoon after seventeen days abroad. When the king returns to Jordan after a trip abroad, two camels and a bull are slaughtered at the airport. The drive to the palace follows.I was staying at the Inter-Con, which was near the palace and across the street from the U.S. embassy, a not uncommon Mideast cluster. I took the oversized map I'd bought in the lobby and spread it across the bed. There they were, as Owen had said, the anagrammatic place-names. Zarqa and Azraq. Between them, west of the midway point, the hilltop fortress of inscribed stones. Qasr Hallabat.It didn't mean anything. I'd only thought of checking the map for these places on my way up in the elevator. They were a curiosity, that was all. But I was interested to find that he hadn't invented them.