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Just think of the noise-level I was used to in Karachi. It’s all one big bub-hub.”
    â€œHubbub,” he corrected her.
    â€œYou know what I mean.”
    â€œLook, I was raised right next to the streetcar line in Chicago. My bedroom was right above the streetcar stop. And they went all night long. But I never remember being bothered. It’s just now, now that I’m getting older … ”
    â€œOh, you’re not getting ‘older,’” she said, “just ‘maturing.’ What’s the word in Spanish for, like, ‘aging’ wine?”
    â€œAñejo! That’s the trouble … you get enough añejo and you end up in the wine-cellars of eternity!”
    Which gave her the giggles.
    A little tabouli and homus into the pocket of one of the pocket-breads. She reminded him of a squirrel tucking away nuts.
    She was such a beautiful, perfect little thing.
    â€œWhat I’d like to do, in a way,” he said, ripping the other leg off the chicken, dipping it in the homus, “is to quit right now, retire, sixty-four, sixty-five. I keep asking myself ‘When have you been most ‘actualized’ in life?’ And the answer that keeps coming back is ‘Travelling, always something new.’ Like today. Just a little variation. If I could just make a million on a book, I’d get a little place in Paris, up by the Gare du Nord, someplace up in the hills, another place in New York so I could see Sarah and Itzak more, maybe even keep the place here …” this dream he had of total Zen actualization,
wir haben nur einmal, einmal, und nichts mehr, gewesen zu sein
… we only have once, once and not more TO BE, never feeling he really WAS, 50%, 60%, maybe right now, under these trees, in this brittle, dry luminous warmth on the edge of chill, up to 80%, at the moment of one of hisrare, agonizing orgasms maybe up to 90-95%, but he wanted more, and all the time, a continuous beyond-orgasm HIGH, even thinking that, yes, he should go back to Columbia, Chile, jungle, desert, join one of the psychedelic tribes like the Desaná, even the Kogi, step permanently through the psychedelic door into what he saw as Presence World where everything was sentient, alive, full of divine ‘presences,’ thinking that maybe what he really wanted was to simply go up like a kite and stay up forever, full-time, and never come down again.
    A little tabouli, the acrid vinegar-parsley combination practically speaking to him: “I am very good for you. You eat a lot of me and you will never die.”
    Then the homus, full of deserts and arabesques, veils and bells and flutes … remembering Cairo in winter, the cold, cutting winds that he’d never expected.
    She was all in black velour today, top, pants, black suede boots. Decompressing now, expanding out into the now. Her breasts still growing, waist “tightening,” with all her self-awareness, exercise … a slash of purple lipstick, just a smudge of eye shadow.
    Reaching over and ripping out half the chicken-breast, eating it almost like she was making love to it, tiny little sharp terrier teeth.
    â€œI’d like to leave Medicine, really … I know what you mean. I miss my family, Nilifer, my other sisters, brothers, nieces, nephews. Even Itzak and Sarah. We ought to see them more … if I’d had my own children … ”
    â€œIf you want to try one of those fertility clinics …” he suggested. The big mystery, even when his equipment was fullyalive and functioning, before the slow venereal shutdown, why hadn’t she gotten pregnant when everyone else in the family was as fertile as wombats?
    â€œNot now … if we just take care of what we’re taking care of.”
    Sally, who saw herself as Ms. Perfumerie, but who mainly lived in depressed fear, trying the whole pharmacopeia of anti-depressant drugs that didn’t seem able to touch the heart of darkness