there when he woke, his bedroom stagnant with late-morning airlessness. Restive and horny, he kicked off the tangled sheet, her kiss dragging off him still, squeezing him with frustration. Sleepwalking could not account for its lingering taste.
Annie and Rolf were sitting at the glass table, drinking coffee and eating dates.
“I wish you’d eat something substantial,” Gabriel said to Annie, sitting down.
“You look tired,” she said. “Didn’t you sleep? I thought you were taking pills.”
“I should leave. It’s not doing you any good, my being here.”
“You’re not here for my good, or yours. You’re here so that our parents don’t have to look at you all day long. Anyway, where would you go?”
“Africa, maybe? I’ve been thinking about volunteering for an aid agency.”
She snorted. The loving, tender Annie he’d always known was drifting farther into the distance. “You won’t find atonement in Africa looking after little children,” she said. “You won’t find it anywhere,” she added, more to herself than to him, and she sounded so aggrieved that a surge of despair rose in his gut.
He went into the kitchen, hoping to find at least a sense, if not a sighting, of their other guest. Though she might be nothing—a wisp, a non-dimensional fantasy working of its own accord on his sad little mind—he sought her out. The glass from which she had been drinking was no longer on the counter, but Annie could have moved it.
He sought her out again when they had left—Rolf to work, Annie to her villa—but this time he was looking for hard evidence, scrabbling around in search of shoes, toiletries, underwear, signs of a hidden life. There were none. Nothing. It came as a relief. It gave him ownership. Any signs of ordinary living on her part would mean that she was just another woman—and not a very nice one at that, if she conspired with Annie to toy with someone she didn’t even know. That would be a particularly nasty trick, one that became nastier with every showing, and he could not believe that Annie wished him such ill. That the woman should also be a mystery to Annie and Rolf was a far more attractive proposition, but the mystery made no sense. They had to see her. No one was damn well invisible.
The next time she came among them, he tried honesty.
“Listen, lads,” he said, with a glance toward the end of the room where she was actually sitting among the cushions her legs curled around her, gripping her ugly toes with her fingers, as if to hide them. “You should call this off, whatever it’s about. It isn’t very fair to her, or to me.”
Neither of them responded. It was as if he hadn’t spoken.
Perhaps he hadn’t.
All right, he thought. I’ll play along. They couldn’t ignore her forever. Poor girl would starve. Levity might work. “Don’t you think you should give the ghost some breakfast?” he asked.
“Oh, don’t start,” said Annie.
“You don’t want her going hungry, do you?”
Annie and Rolf glanced at one another. He hated the way they kept doing that but, undeterred, he kept up the banter. “At the very least a cup of coffee, no? Here, let me get her one.” He turned to speak to the woman, “Hi, I’m—Oh, shucks, gone again!”
“Gabriel . . .”
“Now, where the hell did she get to?” he asked, looking at them wide-eyed. “Darn it all if she doesn’t keep doing that!”
Rolf stood up, saying, “Non, non, she must be somewhere.” He looked under the table. “No one. Ah,” he stepped across the room and opened a closet, “she must be in here. . . . No again. What a mystery!” He poked his head into the corridor. “Perhaps she went through the wall?”
His antics made Annie smile. “Honestly, you two.”
Gabriel smiled also. If he could assuage Annie, engage her with talk of their wandering friend, that would do for now. “I swear to God,” he said, “there’s a woman in this house who loves apples.”
“Apples?”
“Yeah. Noticed your supply dwindling recently?”
“I eat apples,” said Rolf.
“Careful, Gabriel.” That flicker of a smile was still on Annie’s lips. “We don’t want the men in white coats coming to take you away, now, do we?”
For a moment they were there, back in their old relationship, when they had nothing between them beyond uncluttered affection. So their vanishing friend was at least serving a purpose, creating light relief, if nothing else.
When Rolf suggested, the following week, that he and Gabriel should take an excursion that Friday, Gabriel was torn. He wanted to see the country but he liked staying put too, enclosed behind the walls of the house, where he could take the air from his tiny stretch of roof, looking across Muttrah’s skyline. The town was laying claim to him, and he to it, as it became his quarter. Most mornings he wandered through the suq, acknowledging calls from traders who had come to know him, as he passed on his way to the Corniche, then walked out to old Muscat and back again, sidestepping cars and goats. As the district grew more familiar, so his surroundings embraced him.
Still, it was time to go farther afield and Rolf was restless, fed up with to-ing and fro-ing between town and their new villa, and desperate to get out to his waiting panoramas. Gabriel embodied a good excuse. So they set off early and headed up the coast. The mountains were reticent, as if shy of the very sea from which they had emerged.
“These are ophiolites.” Rolf waved at the craggy lumps that passed for hills along the road. They had a curious composition—tubes of rock compressed in and around one another.
“Looks like intestines,” said Gabriel.
“Well, yes. ‘Ophio’ is Greek for ‘snake,’ so this serpentine formation gives them their name. Oman is unique,” he went on, “in its geology. It used to be at the bottom of the sea. When the continental plates moved, the oceanic crust was pushed up and the land buckled, like a carpet rippling. So we have this extraordinary mountain range—the Hajar—and at the edge here, the Tethyan ophiolites.”
“Tethyan?”
“The Tethys Ocean separated Laurasia from Gondwanaland during the Triassic.”
“Gondwanaland and Laurasia?”
Rolf smiled. “Asia and Europe to you.”
They turned inland at Barka Fort and crossed the plain to reach the foothills. Children dallied by the roadside, sometimes waving, sometimes scowling, at the passing jeep, the girls in flowing patterned dresses, the boys big-eyed and curious.
“Where are we headed?”
“The Ghubrah Bowl. You’ll see. It’s quite amazing.”
The countryside dipped and humped as they made their way into a wadi—the Wadi Mistal—with foothills closing in until they were in a narrow gray gorge. Gabriel went
