Jim Shepard - You Think That's Bad

She hasn’t left yet, which surprises me , let me tell you. The waitress is showing some alarm at Carly’s distress and I’ve got a hand on her back. She accepts a little rubbing and then has to pull away. “I gotta get out of here,” she goes.

“That girl is not happy,” Celestine says after she’s gone.

“Does she even know about your kid?” Kenny asks.

The waitress asks if there’s going to be a third round.

“What’d you do that for?” I ask him.

“What’d I do that for?” Kenny asks.

Celestine leans into him. “Can we go ?” she asks. “Will you take me back to the room ?”

“So are you going after her?” Kenny asks.

“Yeah,” I tell him.

“Just not right now?” Kenny goes.

I’d told Carly about the first time I noticed him. I’d heard about this guy in design in a sister program who’d raised a stink about housing the designers next to the production floor so there’d be on-the-spot back-and-forth about problems as they developed. He was twenty-seven at that point. I’d heard that he was so good at aerodynamics that his co-workers claimed he could see air. As he moved up we had more dealings with him at Minotaur. He had zero patience for the corporate side, and when the programs rolled out their annual reports on performance and everyone did their song-and-dance with charts and graphs, when his turn came he’d walk to the blackboard and write two numbers. He’d point to the first and go “That’s how many we presold,” and point to the second and go “That’s how much we made,” and then toss the chalk on the ledge and announce he was going back to work. He wanted to pick my brain about how I hid budgetary items on Minotaur and invited me over to his house and served hard liquor and martini olives. His wife hadn’t come out of the bedroom. After an hour I asked if they had any crackers and he said no.

That last time I saw him, it was like he’d had me over just to watch him fight with his wife. When I got there, he handed me a Jose Cuervo and went after her. “What put a bug in your ass?” she finally shouted. And after he’d gone to pour us some more Cuervo, she said, “Would you please get outta here? Because you’re not helping at all.” So I followed him into the kitchen to tell him I was hitting the road, but it was like he’d disappeared in his own house.

On the drive home I’d pieced together, in my groping-in-the-dark way, that he was better at this whole lockdown-on-everybody-near-you deal than I was. And worse at it. He fell into it easier, and was more wrecked by it than I would ever be.

I told Carly as much when I got home, and she said, “Anyone’s more wrecked by everything than you’ll ever be.”

And she’d asked me right then if I thought I was worth the work that was going to be involved in my renovation. By which she meant, she explained, that she needed to know if I was going to put in the work. Because she didn’t intend to be in this alone. I was definitely willing to put in the work, I told her. And because of that she said that so was she.

She couldn’t have done anything more for me than that. Meaning she’s that amazing, and I’m that far gone. Because there’s one thing I could tell her that I haven’t told anybody else, including Kenny. At Penn my old classics professor had been a big-time pacifist — he always went on about having been in Chicago in ’68—and on the last day of Dike, Eros, and Arete he announced to the class that one of our number had signed up with the military. I thought to myself: Fuck you. I can do whatever I want . I was already the odd man out in that class, the one whose comments made everyone look away and then move on. A pretty girl who I’d asked out shot me a look and then gave herself a pursed-lips little smile and checked her daily planner.

“So wish him luck,” my old prof said, “as he commends himself over to the god of chaos.” I remember somebody called out, “Good luck!” And I remember being enraged that I might be turning colors. “About whom,” the prof went on, “Homer wrote, ‘Whose wrath is relentless. Who, tiny at first, grows until her head plows through heaven as she strides the Earth. Who hurls down bitterness. Who breeds suspicion and divides. And who, everywhere she goes, makes our pain proliferate.’ ”

My mother liked to remind me that at the age of four I left a garden party one rainy afternoon with my toothbrush in my fist, fully intending a life of exploration, only to be returned later that afternoon by the postman. Her version of the story emphasized the boundaries that her daughter refused to accept. Mine was about the emancipation I felt when I closed the gate latch behind me and left everyone in my wake, and the world came to meet me like a wave.

On April 1, 1930, the first night of my newest expedition, I had a walled garden, overarched by thick trees, all to myself, and still was unable to sleep. I considered rousing my muleteer early but summoned just enough self-discipline to let him rest.

Orion wheeled slowly over the village roofs, and the wind stirred the wraith of a dust storm. I lay listening to the soft and granulating sound of the fall of fine particles. In the starlight I could see the mica in the sand as it gathered on my palms.

My traveler’s notebook has on its oilskin cover in English, Arabic, and Persian my name, Freya Stark , and my mother’s name and address in Asolo, and the promise of a reward should the notebook be returned. Atop the first page, I inscribed an Arab proverb that I’ve adopted as one of my life philosophies: The wise man sits by the river, but the fool gets across barefoot .

The river in this particular case is perhaps the remotest area in the entire Middle East: the Persian mountains west of the Caspian Sea. This is country that has hardly been explored and never surveyed. The only map I had encompassed fourteen thousand square miles and featured three dotted lines and a centered X marking a seasonal encampment for one of the region’s nomadic tribes. The rest was blank.

I’m accompanied by a guide, Ismail, and our muleteer, Aziz. The former looks like a convict, ties his trousers with string, and reeks of stale cheese. The latter has none of the former’s dignity and seems perpetually gloomy, mostly because his colleague has informed him that he’s almost certain to be killed. Both have long since given way to despair at the prospect of protecting a British woman traveling alone.

My plan was to locate the ruins of the mountain citadel of the Assassins, that sinister and ancient sect that for two hundred years held the entire East in its reign of terror. Their impregnable fortress, somewhere in a lost valley of the Alamut, is described by Marco Polo at length in his Travels . And because Schliemann discovered Troy by continually rereading the Iliad while he searched, I brought along my copy of the Travels , marked with the annotations of twenty-two years. Besides my aluminum water-bottle, when filled, Polo’s account was the heaviest object in my saddlebag.

I no sooner had stepped onto a Lebanese dock before confronting the questions I’d be asked for the next three years: Why was I there? Why was I there alone? What did I intend to accomplish? Upon offering unsatisfactory answers to all three enquiries, I became a master of wrinkling customs officials’ brows with perplexity and concern.

I was thirty-four and so thin from my physical travails and my sister’s death that other passengers on the cargo ship began to save and wrap foodstuffs for the next time I might happen by. I was a bereaved Englishwoman who’d grown up in Italy and had only just torn free of the octopus of my mother’s demands, a child of privilege who’d lived mostly hand-to-mouth, a lover of erudition who’d been mostly self-taught, and a solitary and fierce believer in independence who was prone to fixations on others. I owed everything to an aunt who’d given me a copy of Arabian Nights for my ninth birthday, a kind-hearted Syrian missionary who’d lived down the hill, a sister who had never lost faith in me, and those long months of illness that had left me the time to negotiate the labyrinths of Arabic and then Persian. Once I was stronger I walked an hour to the station three times a week to take the train to San Remo, where for seven years I furthered my progress with Arabic verbs in the company of an old Capuchin monk who’d lived for half his life in Beirut.