The Names

"I don't mean to interrupt.”"I'm in no hurry," Owen said. "I'd just as soon put off the rest of it indefinitely.”"I want to hear it.”"I don't want to tell it. It becomes harder and harder. The closer we come to the end, the more I want to stop. I don't know if I can face all that again.”"I interrupted to ask about Singh's idea of the desert. Is there something clear and simple there?”Owen looked into the shadowed part of the room."Singh remarked to me once, his conspiratorial aspect, fixing those flat heavy eyes on me, 'Hell is the place we don't know we're in.' I wasn't sure how to take the remark. Was he saying that he and I were in hell or that everyone else was? Everyone in rooms, houses, chairs with armrests. Is hell a lack of awareness? Once you know you're there, is this your escape? Or is hell the One place in the world we don't see for what it is, the one place we can never know? Is that what he meant? Is hell what we say to each other or what we can't say, what is beyond our reach? The sentence defeated me. I was afraid of the desert but drawn to it, drawn to the contradiction. Men will come to fill this empty place. This place is empty in order that men may rush in to fill it.”The clear voice became a chant now, almost startling in its richness and stately pace. I want to call it a funeral pace."To penetrate the desert truly. To learn the geography and language, wear the aba and keffiyeh, go brown in the desert sun. To infiltrate Mecca. Imagine it, to enter the city with one and a half million pilgrims, cross the border within the border, make the hadj. What enormous fears would a man like me have to overcome, what lifelong inclinations toward solitude, toward the sanctity of a personal space in which to live and be. But think of it. To dress as a hadji in two pieces of seamless white cloth, every man there in two pieces of seamless white cloth, over a million of us. To make the seven circuits of the Ka'bah. The great cubical form draped in black, imagine it, with Koranic verses embroidered in gold script. For the first three circuits we are enjoined to move at a jogging pace. There are other times when great masses gather during the hadj, on the plain of Arafat and for three days at Míná, but it's the circuit of the Ka'bah that has haunted me ever since I first learned of it. The three running circuits, perhaps a hundred thousand people, a swirl of white-clad people running around the massive black cube, a whirlwind of human awe and submission. To be carried along, no gaps in the ranks, to move at a pace determined by the crowd itself, breathless, in and of them. This is what draws me to such things. Surrender. To burn away one's self in the sandstone hills. To become part of the chanting wave of men, the white cities, the tents that cover the plain, the vortex in the courtyard of the Grand Mosque.”"I thought it was one big bus jam, the hadj.”"But do you see what draws me to the running?”"To honor God, yes, I would run.”"There is no God," he whispered."Then you can't run, you mustn't run. There's no point, Is there? It's stupid and destructive. If you don't do it to honor God or imitate the Prophet, then it means nothing, it accomplishes nothing.”He withdrew into a silence, a deprived silence. He'd wanted to explore the matter further, the fearsome driving rapture of it, but my rejection was the type he could not contend with. He was like a child in this respect, that silence was a place to take his hurt and shame."What else did Singh have to tell you?”"He talked about the world.”"Then what happened?" I said.