3

I left the office and walked down the corridor to the stairs, passing the photographs that hung on the walls, photographs I loved with an ardour that stung. I’d recognized them all on my way in, of course. There were prints by Linde Waidhofer to taunt me, including one from her Stone & Silence series. A Waidhofer can be a nature photographer of the Wild West but a Sheikh must be a war photographer of the Wild East! He must wow the world not with the assurance of grace. He must wow the world with the assurance of horror.

I wound my way slowly through prints from Ansel Adams’s
Yosemite series – it was the wrong moment to view Bridalveil Fall, the sheer force of the torrent almost making me weep, and I found myself wishing, childishly, if only the drop weren’t so steep – before halting, finally, at Golden Gate Bridge from Baker Beach.

The coincidence hadn’t hit me on my way into the interview
but it hit me now, as my eye swooped down from the whiteness of the clouds to admit the whiteness of the surf breaking on the shore. I was meeting Farhana on Baker Beach in one hour. It had been her idea, and she’d been very specific about where on the beach I’d find her. I stared at the photograph, surprised at the fluttering in my breast. It astonished me that I was hoping to find her on the exact same length of shore depicted in the frame. Worse, I believed that once there, perhaps without her knowing it, I’d look up and see the bridge from exactly the same perspective as I was seeing it now.

Did I want the picture to be a sign? Possibly. It happens this way when you have just been tossed down a roaring cataract. You grope for a raft, anywhere. You even tell yourself that you have found it.

An hour later, I walked barefoot in the sand, expecting to see a girl of Farhana’s description – ‘Look for a long braid, the longest on the beach, black, of course’ – waiting at the edge of the sea as per her instructions, her back to me (showing off the braid), with Golden Gate Bridge looming to her right. Instead, I wound up in a volleyball game, with all the players entirely in the nude.

Was she among them? How was I to know?

There was a player with a dark braid, though she had two braids, not one, neither as long as I’d been led to believe. Leaping for the ball, she made a full-frontal turn, and my God, how astonishingly she was built! I gawked at the hair between her legs, wondering if this were a cruel joke. (Granted, not entirely cruel.) Matthew must have arranged it, getting ‘Farhana’ to lure me here. He was probably watching, laughing till he hurt. Nice little Pakistani girl. Funny, Matthew, funny. I stared at the volleyball player one last time –
no, that couldn’t be Farhana, please let it not be Farhana! Please let it be Farhana! – and turned to my right to scan the bathers on
the shore.

Almost all naked, mostly men. Obscenely overdressed, I jogged
in mild panic toward a cluster of rocks on the far side of a thick cypress grove. Along the way, I tried to hunt discreetly for a long braid slithering down a shapely back, but many figures lay on their backs, some on their hair. I could see the rocks now. She wasn’t there. Two naked men were, one walking out to the water, hand on hip. Long cock, wide grin. I waded into the sea, my back safely to him, but the water was too cold for my taste. After a few minutes, I trundled closer to the boulders, trying to look-not-look.

She was sitting there, smiling. Her braid was pulled to the side, draping her left shoulder, and she waved it at me like a flag.

‘We must have just missed each other!’

‘I thought you told me to wait on the beach?’

‘I’m sorry. I got late.’