He Was Beginning to Wonder

“No more pain. Wake no more. Nobody owns.”

—James Joyce, Ulysses

The taxi pulled up to the curb, a dented small yellow sedan, hubcaps long gone and wooden Muslim prayer beads looped from the rearview mirror; the late afternoon was warm and sunny if maybe a little dusty, yet entirely pleasant nevertheless.

He paid the driver in dinar bills and took the silver change in his palm, giving all the larger coins back to this slim, polite young man in a crisp T-shirt, the driver, who sat at the wheel and nodded, thanking him. That the currency was in dinars, and even—or more so—that there were those prayer beads strung from the oval of the rearview mirror—itself tarnished and somewhat purple-and-gold iridescent, like old silverware left in a drawer too long—gave him an appreciated anchoring.

If he could not be exactly sure where he was, he was quite sure he was in an Arab country, or more specifically what seemed an inland town in a country like this.

The driver had told him there were three hotels. First he looked at one from outside, black nylon-fabric suitcase in hand, and then he walked the few blocks and into a nest of side streets to look at the next from outside, which he decided seemed more suitable. He almost headed directly in. And it would have been easy to just stop his hotel search here and book a room, get settled at the end of what had been a full day of travel. Actually, the walk itself from one hotel to another had already left him a bit spent, and, to be honest, he was not all that long recovered from the terrible fever and hospitalization; never mind a vague tiredness in his arms and legs now returning, merely the pressure of the loop handles of the sturdy bag on his closed fist when walking was enough that he had to set the bag down every several steps in the course of finding this second hotel according to the driver’s directions. Still, something lingered in the back of his mind, a mix of doubt and the minor guilt of responsibility telling him that he really should check all three places before he decided on one—he shouldn’t accept what at this point offered itself as requiring the least effort, as he had done on many things too often in life, or too often lately.

He was wearing loose slacks, a blue-striped dress shirt with the collar open and sleeves rolled to the elbow, casual, and comfortable brown leather loafers. He stood on the side street. He flexed his fists a few times—each of them now, as he had been shifting the bag from hand to hand in his walking—and out of habit he leaned over and checked the zippers on the bag’s many side pockets, making sure they were tugged tight and secure; he straightened up, gripped the adjoining two loops of the handle, and lifted the suitcase again.

He backtracked some and then went down another side street, all of which seemed to coincide with the driver’s instructions, clear and most helpful, as it turned out, because the driver had told him that regarding the third hotel there was an old jewelry shop right across the street. And he didn’t have to walk the whole length of the street to see if the hotel was there, because from the top corner of it he could already see the green neon sign for the shop, glowing like an illuminated emerald indeed in the dimness of the narrow street, then across from that an oval sign of block letters that simply announced: HOTEL.

He headed that way.

Not very large, the hotel rose three stories, light blue masonry with slatted louver shutters of bright white for the French-style ceiling-to-floor windows. While there were seven windows across each lower floor, the configuration differed on the top floor: those farthest down didn’t just have brightly enameled pots of red flowers lined before...