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vast numbers, at a cost so small as to be almost nothing, and he held it on his palm and discovered to
his surprise that it was no heavier than a feather.
• • •
WHEN NADIA WALKED AWAY from their shanty, she and Saeed did not communicate for the rest of the
day, nor on the day that followed. It was the longest cessation of contact between them since they had
left the city of their birth. On the evening of their second day apart Saeed called her to ask how she
was doing, to inquire if she was safe, and also to hear her voice, and the voice he heard was familiar
and strange, and as they spoke he wanted to see her, but he withstood this, and they hung up without
arranging a meeting. She called him the following evening, again a brief call, and after that they
messaged or spoke to one another on most days, and while their first weekend apart passed
separately, on the second weekend they agreed to meet for a walk by the ocean, and they walked to
the sound of the wind and the crashing waves and in the hiss of the spray.
They met again for a walk the weekend after that, and again the weekend after that, and there was a
sadness to these meetings, for they missed each other, and they were lonely and somewhat adrift in
this new place. Sometimes after they met Nadia would feel part of herself torn inside, and sometime
Saeed would feel this, and both teetered on the cusp of making some physical gesture that would bind
them each to the other again, but both in the end managed to resist.
The ritual of their weekly walk was interrupted, as such connections are, by the strengthening of
other pulls on their time, the pull of the cook on Nadia, of the preacher’s daughter on Saeed, and of
new acquaintances. While the first shared weekend walk that they skipped was noticed sharply by
them both, the second was not so much, and the third almost not at all, and soon they were meeting
only once a month or so, and several days would pass in between a message or a call.
They lingered in this state of tangential connection as winter gave way to spring—though seasons
in Marin seemed sometimes to last only for a small portion of a day, to change in the time that one
took off one’s jacket or put on one’s sweater—and they lingered still in this state as a warm spring
gave way to a cool summer. Neither much enjoyed catching unexpected glimpses of their former
lover’s new existence online, and so they distanced themselves from each other on social networks,
and while they wished to look out for each other, and to keep tabs on each other, staying in touch took
a toll on them, serving as an unsettling reminder of a life not lived, and also they grew less worried
each for the other, less worried that the other would need them to be happy, and eventually a month
went by without any contact, and then a year, and then a lifetime.
• • •
OUTSIDE MARRAKESH, in the hills, overlooking the palatial home of a man who might once have been
called a prince and a woman who might once have been called a foreigner, there was a maid in an
emptying village who could not speak and, perhaps for this reason, could not imagine leaving. She
worked in the great house below, a house that had fewer servants now than it did in the year before,
and fewer then than in the year before that, its retainers having gradually fled, or moved, but not the
maid, who rode to work each morning on a bus, and who survived by virtue of her salary.
The maid was not old, but her husband and daughter were gone, her husband not long after their
marriage, to Europe, from which he had not returned, and from which he had eventually stopped
sending money. The maid’s mother had said it was because she could not speak and because she had