I stayed in the shower for a half hour the next morning, my version of all the ritual washing that religions go in for. I once saw a Muslim prayer room at an airport, where there was a spigot for ablutions. In the steam of the shower when I came out, I didn’t want to look in the mirror either. I hoped black coffee would help, and maybe it did.
I had a hangover all day, a bad one, and I kept thinking about Adinah, how she had every right to go to Mecca or wherever the hell she wanted, I’d known that all along. There wasn’t enough mercy in the world. Let her go, let her be one of those pilgrims in the baking sun. It was entirely like her to want such a thing. And millions of people went to Mecca every year and came home fine. Every year.
But I put off writing to her that I’d had a change of heart. I walked around with my heart as it was, unsightly and hidden. I had to work my butt off and run all over the city as usual, aiming my camera at suspects holding their jackets over their heads and lawyers acting earnest. All of this made me more infuriated with Adinah. She always thought she was above all this crap, too good to go near it. But she wanted a handout from me anyway, extra bucks for her voyage into the sky, which she couldn’t even afford.
I slept, I ate, I seeped into stoniness. It wasn’t so bad either. Frances ignored me. I didn’t care what she thought. I didn’t care about anything. My email had no more messages from Adinah — I was glad of that — but Becky wrote. Mom doesn’t even ask for anything and she’s saved all her money for this. What’s the matter with you? and I didn’t answer.
I might’ve walked around like that forever, not bothering with anything, but I stopped being good at it. I forgot one day when I walked onto a subway platform with Frances, and the ancient, loudmouth bum who hadn’t been there for a while was yelling, “Help the winos! Support your local wino! Remember the winos of New York!” This cracked me up, despite the many times I’d heard it before, and I saw that I missed being human. The bum said, “Hah, got a smile out of you,” a sentence I have always hated, and I didn’t even mind.
Okay, okay, I wrote to Adinah. Sorry for the delay.
Only Muslims are allowed to enter Mecca and Medina. Adinah had a paper from the imam of her mosque saying she was a real one, and a travel agent got her the visa. She’d never even had a passport before! And here she was, heading for Saudi Arabia, a pink-skinned middle-aged white lady who spoke nothing but English. She was training for the rigors, she said, by running a mile or so every day; dog-walking was good exercise but not that good. Becky reported her buying things to wear — a bunch of white cotton caftans and head scarves for the ritual walking, and a few blue ones (she always liked blue) for the rest of the time, since women had to be covered in public in Saudi Arabia. “She looks so weird in her abaya,” Becky said. “I can’t believe it’s Mom. Don’t tell her I said that.”
She was studying the prayers. Adinah said to me, “I’m so excited I can’t stand it.”
Hadn’t she had other excitements? What about the time we cracked the headboard during delirious, athletic sex? What about when Becky was born and Adinah couldn’t get over her really, really being our own girl? What about the day she thought I was dead in the World Trade Center and then I wasn’t?
Frances said, “It’s the whole city of God versus the city of man thing.”
The what?
“Oh, you know. Saint Augustine thought history was a running battle between the two. Heavenly beauty of purpose versus earthly preoccupations. Guess which was going to win in the end?”
“You’d think a person could live in both,” I said.
“Augie didn’t think so,” she said.
Frances knew quite a bit about saints, if you got her going, though she wasn’t a believer. She was temperamentally like me, nose to the grindstone of the here-and-now. How sensible we were, compared to that nut job Adinah.
And Becky, who had a perfectly good job assisting the editor of a knitting magazine, was going to take a two-week leave from it so she could walk one pack of dogs after another up and down the steep hills of San Francisco. Her mother (who hardly had a dime to her name) had to leave for the hajj free of debts and with her financial responsibilities covered. So her devoted daughter had to pick up dog poop while Adinah in her white robes glided off into the desert? Was that the way of it?
It was. I might have bought a ticket to California and just walked the dogs myself — I liked dogs, actually, and when I was a kid, my father was always going to get me one — or I might have paid someone to take Becky’s place — I could handle the amount, whatever it was, and wouldn’t that be financially handsome of me? I thought about both these things. Frances would’ve been horrified if I’d done either of them, but that wasn’t what stopped me. What stopped me was that it wasn’t like me. Skipping out on my job to lurch through the streets with a leash of panting mutts, mailing a large, unasked-for check to a woman I hadn’t slept with for more than two decades: not what I did.
I vowed that I would phone Becky often, to make sure she was okay and to get any news of Adinah. But I was in the middle of shooting a series about security guards in city schools, and I lost track of when the whole Mecca thing was, until I noticed stuff on the video monitors at work. Al Jazeera was broadcasting in English. “That’s my wife!” I said.
The whole room turned around to look at me. What we were watching, viewed from above, was a speckled mass, flecked white and gray, that was actually a sea of people, circling and pulsating around the giant black cube that was the Kaaba, the sacred site within the mosque. The spots of dark and light kept changing as the sea that was people kept moving, slow as a dream, stately, terrifying, constant.
My coworkers watching the monitor kept looking back at me to see if I was a Muslim and they’d never noticed. “She’s not really my wife,” I said.
They were ready to make wisecracks but I had scared them. I was busy thinking, Let her be okay. I had to wonder then who I was asking. The TV cut to an outside shot of the mosque, domes and minarets of gleaming pale stone, with more fields of humans pouring in. I stayed to watch, I had a horse in this race.
It occurred to me that the people winding around the Kaaba at the moment were really quite ordinary people. No better than I was, probably. But right now they were better. On TV a cheerful Punjabi pilgrim was showing the two pieces of regulation white cloth all the men wore — and what a pain it was to keep the top piece wrapped over your shoulder so you weren’t bare-chested. I would certainly look like a total idiot in that getup. I realized I was imagining myself in it.
In what life could I have ended up as a pilgrim? When could I have been someone who walked all that far, miles and miles, to visit innocence in the form of a place? Alongside me now by the video monitor the guys at work were yukking it up about the pilgrims’ white cloths. Easy to clean but not good for the office. I had the oddest feeling then — I was entirely glad that I’d known Adinah. As if I could wave to her from my side of the TV screen, Hi, girl. As if we were parts of the same body, as married couples dream of being, one shadow of us in the desert, another shadow in the newsroom. It was a very airy idea I had — and not one I could hold on to very long — but I kept it with me while I went about my business, while I did the job I knew how to do, I kept it all day and it was mine.