The neighborhood gets poorer yet. Down one alley he can see the tower of the Sheraton, so he is no longer lost and all at once he pays real attention to what lies around him.

The street is flanked by four-story concrete tenements.

Doors are open to the night breeze.

Inside, oil lamps flicker over mattresses on the floor.

A stove.

Each family or clan has one room.

Ten faces in a doorway, eyes bright.

Other families sleep on the sidewalks outside.

Their clothing is sand-colored. A torn caftan hood.

You live here, too.

A man in a cardboard box lifts a little girl for Jim’s inspection.

Jim retreats. He thinks again, returns, hands the man a five-pound note. Five pounds. And he retreats. Off into the narrow alleys, he’s lost sight of the Sheraton and can’t recall where it was. Arms are extended out of piles of darkness, the cupped palms light in the gloom, the eyeballs part of the walls. It’s all palpably real, and he is there, he is right there in it. He picks up the pace, hurries past with his head held up, past the hands, all the hands.

He makes it to the Sheraton. But past the guards, in the big lobby, which could be the lobby of any luxury hotel anywhere, he experiences a shiver of revulsion. The opulence is dropped on the neighborhood like a spaceship on an anthill. “There are people out there,” he says to no one. With a shock he recalls the title of Fugard’s play: People Are Living Here. So that’s what he meant.…

He leaves, forces himself to return to the street of beggars. He forces himself to look at the people there. This, he thinks. This man, this woman, this infant. This is the world. This is the real world. He scuffs hard at the sidewalk, feels his breath go ragged. He doesn’t know what he’s feeling; he’s never felt it before. He just watches.

Faces in the open doors, people sitting on the floor. Looking back at him.

This moment seems never to end—this moment does not end—but has its existence afterward inside Jim, in a little pattern of neurons, synapses, axons. Strange how that works.

Next morning he says, “Let’s leave. I don’t like it here.”

Chapter 45

45

So they fly to Crete, another of Jim’s ideas. “We’ll give you one more chance, Jimbo.…” They land at Heraklion, eat at Jack-in-the-Box, rent a Nissan at the Avis counter. Off to Knossos, a gaily painted reconstruction of a Minoan palace. It’s quite crowded, and just the slightest bit reminiscent of the Pyramids.

Jim is disappointed, frustrated. “Damn it,” he says, “give me that map.”