Wanderlust (17 page)

The forces that fuzz the edges between cultures had left Kashgar relatively untouched. The highest mountains in the world lay to the south, to the west was the international border with Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, and to the north and east there were vast plains. The
clocks captured the strangeness of the place: There was no local consensus on time. Officially the whole country operated on Beijing time, but by the rotation of the earth we were several time zones away from the capital. So if you were observing national time in Kashgar, it would seem, for instance, like the sun came up much too late in the morning. Some establishments solved this problem by running two clocks side by side, labeled “Beijing” and “Kashgar.”

We checked into a hotel that seemed to be independent of the government, a sloppy warren of rooms in an apartment block. Stu had started to feel better almost as soon as we left Tashkurgan, and after a nap, at nightfall we went out to the nearest square, which had filled up with food vendors, and ate our way from stall to stall: sizzling kebabs, spicy noodles, and bread rolls the size, shape, and consistency of bagels. The faces looked Eurasian; the people were Uighur. The men wore embroidered skull caps. The women were present, pushing bicycles along and exposing their ankles and faces. They had fused fashion in the most jarring possible way. A typical outfit included trousers in a traditional multicolored
ikat
cloth, a black lace dress, a drab blue blazer, and a red chiffon scarf. Calf-length sequined skirts were popular, as were brown polyester head scarves.

Here we met the China travelers: Swedes and Britons and Australians who had backpacked the length of the country, on trains and buses, and had the stories and scars to prove it: flights of rapture over the Terra Cotta Warriors, food one-upmanship that always ended with fried insects, public humiliations involving diarrhea and the language barrier, and always, when they learned that Stu and I were headed back south to Pakistan, the earnest insistence that we had to see the rest of the Middle Kingdom. How sweet it would be, I thought, to change plans like that on a whim, but we had plane tickets, and diminishing funds, and I had a nagging last few credits
at school. I didn't think of what my degree was
for
anymore. I'd eschewed diplomacy, but didn't know what to do next.

The young foreigners at the western end of China were the toughest of travelers, and they were proud but easygoing; the whiners had been weeded out a thousand miles back. They were thin after many months on rice, stubbled if male, and they knew which of the Chinese fire waters were drinkable and which to avoid. They had plans—travelers always had plans—to go on to Central Asia or up to Urumqi or eventually Mongolia. None were headed for Pakistan.

We rented bicycles and rode out to the edge of the town under a late summer sun, leaving behind a muddy riverbank and continuing on a poplar-lined road. We came to a mosque tiled entirely in shades of blue. With its glinting domes it looked like its cousins in Isfahan and Istanbul and Damascus, and I reflected that we'd come to the far northeast edge of Islam, beyond which different gods prevailed. A muezzin in a white turban came to call the faithful to prayer, and Stu and I got out of his way but watched him from a distance. He positioned himself in an archway leading into the mosque and, without benefit of a microphone, raised one hand to his mouth and began. He chanted not in Chinese or Uighur but in Arabic, the language in which the angel Gabriel was supposed to have transmitted the Quran to Mohammed. I felt the soothing presence of the familiar, a touch of comforting continuity in this land of sequined dresses and Chinese bagels and government
diktats
about time. He chanted: “God is great. God is great. There is no God but God, and Mohammed is the prophet of God.” His voice rose on the breeze and mingled with the rustle of the trees. No one came to pray.

We spent a few days wandering around the Kashgar market, where you could have riding boots cobbled in front of you, or buy a snow leopard pelt. And then, the day before we were to leave, we
gathered in the late morning at an outdoor restaurant table with David and Nirit and some of our new friends from the hotel. There was a Swedish couple, Lars and Annie, both tall and bespectacled; a Torontonian who spoke very good Mandarin; and a gaunt but chipper Englishman with a shaved head named Nick. He had a Balinese silver bracelet like Stu's, and wore a Maori bone carving, like the one Graham had given me, at his neck. We thought we were iconoclasts at the far edge of the world, but here we were in uniform, like members of any clique. Breakfast rolled into lunch, which rolled into beers, which rolled into wondering what the dish that claimed on the menu to be spaghetti might be like. It was my twenty-second birthday.

When I told everyone, we decided it was a fine excuse to start trying the liquors. Stu poured us both thimblefuls and we toasted. It felt like a burning fuse had hit my throat, but I made myself swallow and smile. We told stories about our trip, making my haggling in Chitral now sound funny. Somewhere along the way we'd become a couple who finished each other's sentences.

Everyone was talking about other countries they'd been to, name-dropping like social climbers. I mentioned that I'd backpacked around the Middle East. Lars and Annie had traveled through Central America and climbed the pyramids at Tikal. The Canadian began talking about spiders in the Outback. We were pleased with ourselves. We'd gone the farthest. There was nowhere farther or weirder than Kashgar.

“Australia,” Nick said, rolling his eyes. “It's all about sex and lager.” We laughed, impressed with our own sophistication. We weren't like that.

I didn't say it, but I suddenly wanted to go to Australia immediately. I was tired. Tired of catcalls and menace, beggars and bureaucrats,
men with guns. Tired of proving I was tough enough. I wanted police officers, if there were any, to be concerned for my safety. I wanted to be in a place of freedom and ease, where chasing boys and beer, or not chasing them, was a matter of personal choice. Nick's words lodged themselves in my mind. I wanted sex and lager.

PART TWO

—Talking Heads, “Once in a Lifetime”

chapter thirteen

T
he little house was ataTin the road,
where Palatine met Northwest Forty-first. Palatine came down the hill from Forty-second, and we joked that an out-of-control car might barrel into the living room one day. The neighborhood was up-andcoming. From the back deck we had a view across the channel to Queen Anne Hill, and with a pair of binoculars we identified the house where we had met a year before. “A single metaphor can give birth to love,” Kundera wrote in
The Unbearable Lightness of Being,
and under Stu's tutelage, I began to see metaphors everywhere. Seeing that house across the channel confirmed that the universe meant for us to be together.

If you stood on the edge of our bathtub and looked out a small window, and the day was clear, you could see the white peak of Mount Rainier in the distance. The house itself was cramped and ugly. On a whim, with no sense of consequence, I painted the tiny bathroom teal and fuchsia. It was a poor choice, but we figured we wouldn't be looking at it for long. We had plans to make the place beautiful.

We often made love early in the morning, as the gray wet light came up and before I took the bus to work, and my memory of that hot happy secret carried me through to the afternoon. Surely a half hour of pleasure before the day began was partly the point of life.
This was important, because most of the rest of my life bewildered me—the tedium of my new job, the fact that I lived in Seattle. I'd answered an ad in the newspaper looking for a “customer service representative” for an export shipping company, a person that in an earlier era would have been called a clerk. It sounded international and so possibly exciting; maybe, I thought, it would involve travel. But instead I answered phones and photocopied bills of lading at a frantic pace, until seven o'clock at night, just in time to FedEx them to Hong Kong or Le Havre or wherever, so that they would be there when someone on the other side went to pick up the cargo. We were a sort of travel agency for stuff. Eventually they hired a new girl to do my job and promoted me, making me the chief booker for South America and Australia–New Zealand. I took pride in having my own two regions, and was also embarrassed by my pride, so distant did my job seem from whatever it was I was supposed to have been doing. I couldn't remember what my ambitions had been. It felt like I'd misplaced the manual for postcollegiate success, and, after sixteen straight years of education, had lost all sense of what I wanted to do. The business of creating an adult life was difficult to think about, so I preferred things that distracted me or, ideally, overwhelmed me. Anything to push thought aside. Stu overwhelmed me with his constant presence and his seeming confidence—confidence about me, his next building project, his ability to transform our house, and our plan to sail around the world. I wasn't really sure about the sailing plan and whether I had signed on to it or not, but I didn't need to think things through thoroughly, because he was sure enough of everything for two.

Stu had unnatural certainty. At twenty-five he was still learning how to use this trait to his advantage, but it gave him the ability to convince almost anyone to do almost anything. His size confirmed
him as a dominant force: He was six foot four with broad shoulders, like other college rowers. But unlike them, he'd dropped out of the university, unable to pay. His parents, who were just twenty years older than he was, had declared their responsibilities over when Stu and his sister finished high school, and when I met him they'd just moved to Delaware, from where they planned to start their own trip around the world. But Stu still had a tightly knit family nearby: On his mother's side his grandparents, uncles, aunt, and cousins all lived in the Seattle suburb of Kent, while his paternal grandparents lived in the southwest corner of the state. Stu was firmly rooted in place. Among my extended family only my parents lived in my hometown, which my brother and I had now both left. My mother's kin were still in Oregon, and my father's two siblings and their children had scattered. Both of my parents had settled far from home, in another country, with no family around.

When Stu and I talked about buying a house and remodeling it, the idea seemed exciting. My parents helped with a down payment, and at the age of twenty-two I cruised heedlessly into home ownership. Around the same time, one night on the couch after we'd been out to dinner with friends, Stu asked me to marry him and I said yes. This seemed exciting too. I explained my new situation to myself and others in rational terms: He was a builder, and while we were a little young, we would soon be married, an assertion that suggested solidity. If I was honest with myself, though, which was not all that often, the appeal of buying a house with Stu was not that it was sensible, but just the opposite: There was something manic about the headlong rush, and that was what made it so compelling. Through the traveler's mind-set of being open to experience, I grabbed more and more and more of it.

Like a distant rumble, it crossed my mind that I was closing
doors. But it was hard to take seriously the idea that anything was irreversible. I'd been raised so that I would have every opportunity, and now, even if I didn't know what to do with my choices, I believed that they were all still available.

Upon moving in, we ripped up decades-old carpet to reveal a hardwood floor. We accepted donations and gifts from relatives—a couch, dishes, even a crystal cake platter as a Christmas present from my aunt. It would never be used, but it amused us. The cake platter underscored my sense that I was performing a charade. I was quite sure I would never be the kind of person who needed a cake platter, and yet I gave a convincing impression of someone who would. We displayed our treasures from Pakistan, like a brass water pipe and a
tabla
drum, on our black particle board shelves from Ikea. The carpets we'd bought in Peshawar covered our floor, next to the sturdy brown couch from my parents. The souvenirs were the first items we pointed out to any friend who came over, which only happened occasionally, so comfortable were we as just two.

Sometimes I tried to write, usually little stories set in Egypt, but on weekends we always had projects to do. We had to clean out the basement and take loads of building debris to the dump. We would spend an hour or two in Home Depot. On our return trips we drove all over the city in Stu's pickup truck, stopping to look at houses we liked, homes that could inspire our own. I hadn't spent a lot of time thinking about houses before, and now Stu's taste became mine. He liked clean lines, fine woodwork, and unusual surfaces like dyed concrete and weathered metal. Once we got home there was no time left to write. This bothered me a little. But in the bigger picture I didn't worry that much about time, which seemed to be in great supply. We were rich with it and could afford to throw it recklessly around.