A Walking Guide by Alan S. Cowell

Author:Alan S. Cowell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

TEL AVIV. AUGUST 2000

She saw him, but waited for him to notice her, to establish that he was traveling alone. She could not guess what this sudden attention meant: he had sought her out in the Balkans so that she could type for him, hold him in some seedy hotel with cigarette burns and less easily identified stains on the carpet. He had called from some place in Middle America, giving his flight plans down to the arrival time. It made no sense—not after nine months of silence in which she had tired of the bullring, tired of the endless, searing highs of her coke habit and the brittle, snappy dawns when the chemicals released her, dropped her back, cruel and abrupt, down to the hard, cold earth.

—

He glanced around to see if he was being observed before crabbing towards her through the crowd at Ben Gurion, leaning heavily on his telescopic walking pole that had become the unwanted badge of his condition. No one made way, of course. This was the Middle East where everyone labored under the burden of their original innocence, too busy tending their own pain to see beyond it to a world that really did not need this unending blight. She moved toward him, different than when they had first met in these parts, of course—older, slightly haggard as if the years had sculpted her, pared her flesh down to an irreducible core of fierce angles and big, vulnerable eyes that had seen more than they should have. The pit of his stomach churned. He recognized the quality of passion that had bound them. There is a difference between calculable love and the fire of destiny, between affection that can be explained and the inexplicable magnetism of like souls. A sudden fear seized him: would she acknowledge him again as she had in the Balkans, or had that been a one-off, a curiosity: come see the geek, the gimp? Would she see the past beneath the skein of damaged nerves and muscles? Was there such a thing as an essence of him that transcended his physical state, his condition? Another inner voice said: they should not be meeting. They should not permit the illusion of being together. There was peril where their fates crossed, a hazard like the striking of flint on stone that produced fire, indifferent to what it consumed. His breath caught, not just from the conscious effort of movement or of carrying his Kevlar vest and laptop, his supplies of Scotch and cigarettes, notebooks and expensive pens. She had come to meet him. She had responded where he had no rights of expectation, no rights of anything at all.

—

He had worsened. Sweat ran across his face. His body seemed hinged at the waist, the legs stiff, uncooperative and the trunk canted forward, the bad arm hanging as he wrestled to keep his tote bag over his right shoulder while he manipulated his walking pole with his right arm. Once she had called

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