The End of the Ends

Essay & Photographs By Jane Marchant

JORDAN

The taxi’s side mirror reflects the driver’s lit cigarette as he maneuvers through the night’s warm exhaust, dust, and sand. Yellow streetlights illuminate the concrete buildings and air conditioners flashing by. After checking into my hostel, I climb into a rickety bunk bed graffitied by past travelers. I am nervous. I am the only guest in the five-story building down a back alley off an alley somewhere in the haze of a city whose language I can neither read nor speak.

This is what I do not want to write, what I wish doesn’t have to be this story: It is the summer of 2014, I am twenty-six years old, and after a year of being single-yet-waiting-on-the-paperwork, I am officially divorced. I grew sad and small with my handsome white husband. My handsome white husband didn’t like that I had so many Facebook friends (had I slept with them all?), he didn’t let me sit on public toilet seats, he yelled and slammed door knobs through walls and felt emasculated when I brought home a vacuum cleaner, and he once walked off while we were drunk and I was bleeding in the subway. He never hit me, but toward the end I asked him, “Where else do you think this is leading?”

My mother saved me, in a way. In spiraling arguments, I told him to leave, but he didn’t believe me until she was there when I said it. She was visiting us in New York, where I’d just finished my first semester re-enrolled in a bachelor’s degree program. My mother drank coffee in the living room while he and I sat on the edge of our bed, and I stared into the layers of past residents’ hair varnished into our floor and told him I didn’t want children, I wasn’t going to change my mind. It was his deal breaker and it was true, but saying it aloud made all our fantasies translucent. I told him I was going on a walk with my mother and when we returned he should be gone—I was the one attending the university, it was my name on the apartment. That night, I watched my mother, an Amazon, as she lodged a dining room chair behind the front door. She’d learned from her mother.

And now I feel myself running to something. Or from something. Maybe away from people, which would explain why I chose to spend my summer traveling through Jordan and Lebanon when I know no Arabic.

I want to be alone.

Amman’s streets are sizzling and empty of women the next morning. It’s my first time out of the States in almost two years, and I’m unconfident in my actions. I tug the high collar of my long-sleeved blouse. It’s that odd early heat—bright, slanted light which foretells later immobility. I love heat. I love how all-encompassing it can feel, how it loosens to the bone, how its air becomes a physical being. The first time I lived in it, I had just turned twenty and dropped out of college to travel; I landed alone in Istanbul and felt the world open. Buses rumbled me along coastal roads and mountains split into the valley of Olympos, where hand-built treehouses and huts and ancient Lycian ruins beckoned, and I got a job in the local bar; every day, my co-workers and I lounged on .ardaks, smoking cigarettes, drinking tea or Efes beer, and playing backgammon as they taught me Turkish, because that was all we had energy for, the heat our excuse, our friend. At night after our shifts, I swam naked in the phosphorescent sea. Water crackled and sparkled around me, and I dried my body on the pebble beach.

Over the next few years, I flew on airplanes where passengers were first weighed and was run over by a moped on a hot, sticky side street in Indonesia. I got myself lost in cities and I loved the feeling of complete isolation. I landed in Darwin, a shore city humid with lightning and ocean crocodiles, and hitched a ride across the outback to Sydney with two German boys over a summer Christmas. I was fearless, drinking Bundaberg Rum and learning to shift a stick in the red night desert as kangaroos flashed in and out of the headlights. We lay on the ground, high on shrooms, as clouds rolled over us and the universe parted open. I saw different constellations in the Southern Hemisphere, eucalyptus trees in the stars.

In each country, I took lovers: German, French, Dutch, British, and Australian white boys became mine, or I became theirs, in a kind of performance where I showed them the parts of myself that would most excite. My father is white and British, and my mother Black, white, and Mexican-American, and this thrilled the lovers in a way I didn’t then fully understand, and they each in turn disappointed me. I was ambiguous to locals, blending in as an Americanized version of themselves: Isn’t that why you came here? they asked, as if curiosity couldn’t be a strong enough motivation for travel and I must have familial ties to their land. I was curious, filled with a desire to see all I could of the world, but they were right, there was something deeper behind my motivations, something I didn’t yet understand enough to share with strangers. I took pride in my disregard of fear. I swam in the Nile and snorkeled alone in Egypt’s Red Sea while lionfish swam menacingly by. Then I met my handsome white exhusband on a train. I’d run out of hitchhiking options on my way up from Munich, where I was living at the time, gave up on a final ride, and boarded the last train to Amsterdam. He sat across from me. I smelled. He was beautiful. Thick hair and thick thighs. Long. He had two master’s degrees when I didn’t even have a bachelor’s. He took me to his white-walled studio and into his white sheets. His tongue rolled over my body and I felt exotic as he roared out in pleasure. It was supposed to be a one-night stand.

I want to re-become the kind of woman I was before I met him; I want to reverse into the unafraid version of myself that he took from me.

A wild jasmine vine blooms in Amman’s parched earth, and I press a flower into my notebook. In the eastern halls of the Roman Theater, several women sit in the entryway of the Museum of Popular Traditions, chatting as I look at Jordanian and Palestinian heritage exhibits labeled “Traditional Weavings,” “Daily Utensils,” and “Bedouin Jewelry.” Red corals are sculpted into beads, long gowns protect from intense sun. Goat skins sewn into water gourds and shibriyeh daggers are tools to survive desert landscapes. The women near the entryway let out a collective laugh as they fan their faces. I peer down at an exhibit labeled “Bedouin Stones.”

1. Milk bead encourages lactation in nursing mothers

2. Creamy bead ensures a wife’s sole inheritance

3. Cubic green stone protecting childbirth and conception

4. Pale green half-domed stone for liver ailments

5. Love beads of polished dark green stone

6. Lustrous brown stone wards off headaches

Later, as I explore Jordan’s Eastern Desert and Wadi Rum, I’ll come to understand how precious these stones are in the barren red sands. In a desert that was once sea, I’ll pull a white shell from the flats. A woman in the entryway sings out and some of her companions close their eyes, others hum along. One of the women catches me watching and I wave my hands in front of my face to tell her that I, too, feel the day’s heat.

Downtown, I search for Hashem Restaurant, recommended by my hostel’s front desk as a restaurant so good, King Abdullah II, ruler of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, is rumored to eat there. In a wide alley between buildings, a server sits me at a table under a canopy of awnings and brings out freshly baked pita bread, flat bowls of creamy hummus, hot tea with mint, and burning, fleshy balls of falafel with spiced centers. All around me tables are covered with food and surrounded by families or friends with eager hands. I fold my anthology of Best American Travel Writing open using one of my plates and read as I eat. I’ve justified my trip as a self-curated semester abroad. When I was still with my ex-husband, I’d returned to university to finish my bachelor’s degree in creative writing, but he didn’t like losing me to school or the strength I gained, and we broke up after my first semester. I was free to stay in the library as long as I wanted. I can go anywhere and write about anything I want.

Full of a meal meant for sharing, I pant up steep residential hills, passing graffiti sprayed onto concrete buildings: a girl sails alone on a ship out at sea, a bus driver’s face is blackened by smog. Children stream from staircases and alleyways and beckon me, the lost tourist, to follow them. Inside the citadel’s skeleton of ancient protection, two boys launch a kite into beige wind. A fine, taupe powder drifts over our shoes and hands. Sweat is dried lines of salt along my forehead. Amman’s urban magnitude sprawls before me. The world is beyond me.

Between Amman and Aqaba is Wadi Musa—or Petra, to Westerners—and between the main tourist entrance of Petra and the open desert is the Seven Wonders Bedouin Camp, where I stay for five days. There are more employees than tourists, and they are eager to be my guides. They are young men, barely-not-boys; some are refugees from Syria, others from Palestine, taken under the wing of Atef—a man raised in Wadi Musa, who runs the camp—and they bring me to see the goats, horses, and view of the camp from the rock face above it. As I drink the hot goat milk I helped to express, I feel more guest than tourist, older sister to playful brothers.

One day, Atef rumbles us down the camp’s dirt road in his dusty, black GMC Yukon from the late 1990s, built for this landscape but falling apart all the same. He pulls into the parking lot at the humble entrance of Little Petra.

“It’s like a suburb to the city,” he explains, “same architecture, just smaller.”

I get out of the car and he drives off.

Caves, pillars, doorways, stairs, and pediments are chiseled into rock layered like ochre Fruit Stripe gum. A little way in, a woman sits with a teapot over a brushfire flame, two men beside her, one gray-haired with milky blue irises that blend into his sclerae and the other younger, maybe thirty-five, and they gesture for me to join them on the sand. The younger man tells me his name is Mahmoud and he translates for us, so distilled we all feel like bullet points, as the woman pours heavily sugared tea and we swat flies from our faces and cups. The older man is her husband and listens quietly while everyone else speaks. The woman is worried I’m traveling alone.

“All alone?” Mahmoud translates, her question in his voice. I get the impression they assume this is not of my own volition.

She asks if I would like to join their family. They need more wives, she says.

Her invitation feels hasty—why does she think they could spend their lives with me as family? She knows nothing of my independence, temper, or humor, and I’m certain we’d all be miserable if we were so entwined—but it also feels kind, as if she thinks I am alone in this world, without family, and so she is offering hers to me. So much is lost to translation.

“No, thank you,” I say. “Shukran. I have a husband.”

I touch the silver ring my father gave me years ago, mailed for my birthday when I was living in Munich and inscribed with the commandment, protect this woman. I’d moved it to my left ring finger as my plane took off at the beginning of the summer so I could have something to point to as a shield, a barricade to flirtation, a defense of my solitude: I do not want romance and I do not want to be saved. I do not feel guilty for my lie. But I sense the family sitting with me does not believe it.

Mahmoud asks if I want to walk with him—he can take me to an outcropping with a beautiful view of the desert.

“No, la, thank you,” I say. “I’d like to go alone.”

My need for solitude feels ill-mannered, disrespectful, but I want to walk through the rocks at my own speed; I want to sit, write, and photograph without worrying about another’s presence. And I do not want to be led into the unknown with an unknown man. I want to be in total control.

“Nice man,” the woman says in English, nodding to Mahmoud.

I look into her eyes. Since childhood, my mother’s said to put my trust in women. We finish our tea and I head into the rocks with the man named Mahmoud.

As we scale boulders into the muffled wilderness, I compare our bodies. I am taller, bigger-boned, heavier. I stay behind him to track his movements. My water bottle sloshes in my backpack. I keep my eyes out for exits in the fissures as we hike into Little Petra’s towering stone walls. We shimmy up siqs and pull ourselves through a crevice and out onto a platform overlooking mountainous vermillion.

This is what Mars is like, I think as I sit—vast, empty plains of sand then sudden bulbous hills, everything brushed with rusty shades of red.

“There is sadness in your eyes,” Mahmoud tells me. “You must release it from your hold.”

He tells me to wait and edges around the cliff’s corner.

I am transparent. For all my posturing, I am vulnerable in ways certain men have the power to see.

A month or so after my ex-husband left, I met another handsome white man. I told him I was still married, the paperwork had been filed, but I didn’t want a relationship, I wanted only joy and sex. He didn’t believe me. Perhaps he thought all women secretly wanted passionate declarations and fairytale endings. Couldn’t I give him just one more hour? His insistence on persuasion unnerved me. He found out one of my favorite candies was bright-yellow Banana Runts, went to a store, picked out a huge glass jar of them, and buried a note inside, telling me he loved me. The intensity of his feelings was meant to impress, but it terrified me how confidently a man like that honed in on me. His love felt near violence; it reminded me of how my ex-husband had loved me from the beginning, and I realized there was a sadness, beauty, and fire in me some men wished to claim. I no longer trust my choices in men and need to better protect myself.

I need to be alone.

Mahmoud returns with an herb of white flowers on a furry stem. He crushes it in his palms and holds the petals to my nose. I do not want to be rude. I do not want to be rude and trapped on a cliff with an unknown man.

“Breathe in,” Mahmoud says.

I inhale the plant’s sage-like fragrance.

“Another,” he says.

I grow dizzy.

Paranoia is a deep hole and at its bottom lies my distrust of men.

I take slow breaths. I am strong enough to defend myself. Some of the rock formations seem splashed with paint. I am stoned on paranoia and he is behind me, massaging my shoulders and singing to me. I am ashamed I allowed myself into this position. His voice is beautiful. It echoes around me, curves like the swollen rocks’ saffrons, siennas, and mauves. He asks if I want to lay down so he can massage my temples.

“No, thank you,” I say. “La. Shukran.”

He sings as I look out at Mars.

“I want to kiss you,” Mahmoud tells me.

He moves to my side and stares into my eyes. He says he won’t kiss me if I don’t want him to. He will respect my decision. If I don’t want to, he won’t.

“But I want to kiss you,” he says.

“I don’t want to kiss you,” I say.

“I won’t if you tell me not to.” His face is inches from mine.

“I want to go back.”

He offers his hand to help me stand.

We hike a different path through a valley of trees, past a man selling kohl eyeliner from a kiosk carved into the rock, and squeeze through a steep siq. Mahmoud shows me the cave he sometimes sleeps in. A mat and blanket are tidily unrolled on its floor. When we reach the main path through Little Petra, I empty my lungs of air, say thank you and goodbye.

Rather than taking the longer road from the parking lot to the main road, I cut across the desert. It seems flat, direct. The terrain crumbles beneath me. Miniscule canyons, hidden from a distance, appear in the heat-hazed air. I stumble at a crack in the earth. I land in a prickly bush, spines pierce my finger, and it swells. I suck my fingertip, attempting to nurse it. Barely 200 meters from the road, a voice calls out.

“Wait!” it seems to say. “Wait for me!”

I want to do this all by myself. But he is fast in this landscape.

“I didn’t want you to get lost,” Mahmoud says.

I look at the desert around me and feel small. I am already lost. Why would I be doing this if I wasn’t?

He continues with me across the uneven ground. I keep my finger in my mouth, removing it every few minutes to examine its swelling. We hit the blazing asphalt and walk to the dirt road leading off to the Seven Wonders Bedouin Camp.

“Thank you,” I say.

I place my right hand in the air between us and Mahmoud takes it to shake. I look into his eyes, then turn and walk up the dirt road alone.

His voice, singing “Habibti, habibti,” follows me.

I enter Big Petra three ways.

The first is at night through the main tourist entrance; the canyon contracts into the Siq, with walls up to seventy meters high, and opens upon the candlelit Treasury, where the building glows and tourists crowd around me.

The second time, Atef drives me over the desert and drops me off near a nondescript hill.

“The path starts down there,” he says, pointing in a general direction. “You’ll reach the Monastery in less than an hour, just follow the stairs.”

Out of the desert, a path forms into rocky stairs, narrows, and I wind across a mountain which seems to have fallen out of the desert. Nearby peaks are a jagged, charred black; beyond them is a sand flat that was once sea. The sky is bright blue, the moon half-full, the mountains high and lifeless. I hike the loose-rock cliff, choosing my steps carefully, bending my body into the mountainside. If I fall, my body may never be found. Why did Atef trust me to do this on my own? He seemed so cavalier of its risks and certain of my abilities.

Be careful, I hear my mother say as slats of rock slip into nothingness; in my head, I hear the fragility she believes me to have, the danger she thinks comes with my sex. Before I left, our conversation turned to shouting as she told me I needed to email or call every three days so she knew where I was. What if I was kidnapped, or bombed? Who would know? How would she find me? She looked at a map and blurred Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, and Iraq into one continuous and expanding conflict zone—hadn’t I been reading the news?—and I remembered when she phoned me at the bar I worked at in Turkey, distressed over a bombing some 1,500 kilometers to my east, her imagination assuming the worst. When I was twenty and traveling in Indonesia, she didn’t hear from me for several days, so she called the British and American embassies, trying to report me as missing. She is my mother and she made me; what she calls love I feel as control. And what remains unsaid is that I hadn’t been able to save myself before and I’ll never know if I would have been able to get rid of that handsome white ex-husband if she hadn’t been there.

“I’m not going to call or email you,” I told my mother before I left. “And don’t you dare, under any circumstance, contact an embassy on my behalf.”

My life was going in directions of my choosing.

“If I was a man,” I said, “would you act this way?”

I slide on the mountain and catch myself. I could turn back, but I know—as does Atef, who met me mere days ago—that I will not. I am a woman who needs to prove I can do anything a man would do on his own.

After nearly two hours of hiking, the trail bends around a turret and el-Deir, the Monastery, rises from the rocks, littered with tourists who’d climbed the roughly 850 stairs cut directly up from Petra’s valley floor. The Monastery’s façade spreads forty-seven meters wide and forty-eight meters high. The lip to its entrance is taller than me. Time passes abruptly and I hurry back along the cliff trail because Atef told me he’d pick me up at four and I’m already late; if I slip I will die, but if I miss him I will be alone in the desert with no road, phone, or compass, and I’ve drunk all my water. The desert is inhospitable to the unprepared.

As I near the end of the trail, Atef comes into view.

“I thought I’d lost you,” he says. “What were you doing?”

“That trail was a lot harder than you made it out to be,” I say to excuse my tardiness as a result of his poor communication, not my weakness.

“But you did it,” he says, almost dismissively.

Driving back across the desert, Atef says he has an errand to run in the Bedouin Village. Do I mind stopping?

Of course not. Take me anywhere. I want to see everything. What’s the Bedouin Village?

Atef tells me that when Petra was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1985, the government built a village in town and moved all the Bedouin out of their homes, caves, and tents in Petra and into the village. I imagine a town like the camp and Atef says no, the Bedouin Village is all rebar and concrete walls, ceilings, and stairs.

He parks at a building that clings to the hill; he just needs to make a brief appearance at the wedding. I look down at my auburn and amber encrusted white linen pants and follow Atef inside. He leaves me with a group of women and we nod hello; I stand among them awkwardly, ashamed to be filthy when they are dressed so formally. One of them holds a sweet, round baby, and I smile at the woman I assume is the mother. Before I say anything, she hands me the baby, smiles back reassuringly, then walks off to chat with another woman. I bounce the baby, cooing gently, grateful for something to turn my attention to, until Atef finds me, tells me it’s time to go, and hands the baby to another woman.

The third time I enter Petra is through the main entrance, but just before the road slopes into the Siq, it crosses a bridge and dam, which I clamber off and into a side-siq, constructed to divert flash floods away from the Nabataean Empire’s Treasury and capital city. I disappear through a ninety-meter tunnel and emerge in a ravine, slipping over river pebbles as I obey directions from Atef: walk through this side-siq, and it will let you out at what the tourists call the Flintstone Village; from there you can walk around to Petra’s main tourist area.

Bushes like pink oleander grow from the dry riverbed. Stones shift beneath me, the siq constricts, and I lower myself through millennia of rock. I wedge around a massive boulder and on its other side is a little boy’s bare butt, squatting to poop as an older woman holds his arm for balance. We are all equally surprised.

The woman pulls up the boy’s pants and we smile hello. There are several small piles of poop among the stones, and she seems confused why I came through the side-siq. I put my hand to my brow and scan the horizon, then make hiking motions with my hands. I point to my camera and mime taking pictures. She points to herself and the little boy, then gestures to the canyon walls looming above us.

We nod and smile.

“Shay?” she says. “Shay?”

“Aywa,” I say. “Tea, yes. Shukran.”

The woman waves toward herself before walking away. After a few steps she looks back to make sure I’m coming.

Their cave is a square cut out of rock with a rectangular door. She ushers me to a mat on its floor, gathers kindling, and starts a fire outside. The little boy disappears. In the cool of the cave, the woman and I drink tea saturated with sugar, relaxed in each other’s silences. The hot tea draws my body’s warmth to the core of my belly, loosens the grip of the day’s heat from my head, and settles me. Because we cannot understand each other’s words, we seem to exude our thoughts and emotions as palpable energies, hesitant but hopeful the other will find in them some form of communication. As she pours me a second cup from her burnt-metal teapot, the little boy returns with a man.

He can translate for us, the man says.

My body shifts as he enters the cave. I’m frustrated at his intrusion, even though I’m a guest of the woman’s and he says she’s his aunt. We had a conversation without words and it feels like he took it from us. I don’t want to make small talk. I have excuses to leave.

“My husband is waiting for me in the valley,” I tell the man.

“Your husband lets you wander off alone?” he says.

“Yes.”

In the valley basin, I walk houses and tombs carved into rose-red rock, imagining the man watching me from a distance, waiting for my imaginary husband to appear. It wasn’t his fault—the little boy probably thought he was helping, or the man’s aunt sent for him—but I feel a masculine control over me I am powerless to free myself of. I want to make my own decisions; I want to choose. Petra’s World Heritage Property measures 261.72 square kilometers, and the other tourists, men and women, walk it in pairs or clusters. On the Colonnaded Street, columns have fallen and their slices have been removed, taken by past people and recycled into exhibits or buildings or wheels. Remnants of ceramic water pipes line the wall of the Siq. Aqueducts, reservoirs, and underground cisterns once supported an estimated 30,000 Nabataeans living in Petra. Some archeologists think fountains, ponds, canals, and gardens covered the vibrant, trade-rich city, an overindulgent waste of water in desert. I had wanted to come to Jordan for a summer science course my university offered, but my dean, a white man, said, “Don’t do that, you’ll go crazy being herded around in a school group. Go by yourself.”

Another white man, a handsome military veteran, told me, “You’ll be far from any conflict zones, you can totally do it alone.”

I want them to be right. I want to prove I can do anything a white man can do. Or that I can be fearless like a white man, have as much control and bodily autonomy as a white man. Or, in a single-dimensioned present, absent of history and culpability: I want the freedom of a white man.

Pressurized sediment creates lines in the massif’s buildings, history visible as striped façades which change as they move inward through the rock in horizontal layers. Every time it rains, grains of sand and rock work to bury Petra. Rangers tell tourists, We don’t know how deep the city goes, or what more could be beneath us. Memories, lives, Earth, and the universe are not flat planes but multidimensional fluids we turn into ideas we believe to be still and solid.

In Aqaba, on Jordan’s Red Sea coast, I rent a car because I want to see the nature reserves I cannot access by public bus, and I want to stop where I want, when I want. The men at the Avis car rental refuse to give me the small car I reserved online and instead lead me to a silver SUV, insisting I also rent a GPS.

I drive the Jordan Valley Highway and accelerate up arid precipices and roads blocked by goats, towards the Dana Biosphere Reserve, a preserve of Phoenician juniper, Nubian ibex, and spiny-tailed lizards. Daylight shifts to night and my headlights flash the landscape I descend: a cliff, brief twists of pavement, singular shrubs. The road flattens into a small village, where a man stands in the archway of a stone building covered in a genus of jasmine I’ve never seen, its scent resonating through the night; I have a reservation and he’s been watching my headlights lurch down the mountain. He takes me to the guest house’s roof to show me the bats swooping through the lone street light. I drive to the Mujib Biosphere Reserve and float alone in the Dead Sea at sunset. Minerals sting my chafed skin. My ex-husband would have made me shower, so I leave the salt on as I fall asleep. In the morning, a park ranger gives me a heavy-duty life jacket to wear as I canyon up Wadi Mujib’s gorge. I stumble on loose pebbles in the fast, shallow current. Sunlight breaks the siq in shards and the rock face looks like glazed pottery. I pull myself up ropes and metal handles bolted into rock, headed to the waterfall at its end, the river thundering around me. Water pours through my pants and I lean into its pressure. I do not feel beautiful. My wet hair is matted to my head, my linen pants stick to my flesh, and I work to pull my legs apart with each step. A group of tall, broad-shouldered men appear around a bend in the siq. They look Dutch, like my ex-husband, and their voices confirm their language. Their life jackets hang loosely off their muscular arms or dangle behind them, bare chests glistening as they jump off rocks into pooled water. I move out of their way because it’s clear they do not see me, these men who have the auras of false gods who rule the world. I am disappointed to be invisible to the white men, who have so often validated my existence, but I am more so relieved.

I crisscross the country in inefficient routes because my GPS does not show elevation and I want to see everything. Waterfall oases spill from rocky overhangs. Desert plateaus lead to new sets of mountains. As I enter one town, my bladder is so full it hurts. I park and don’t see restaurants, just stores without public toilets, and I can’t find a woman, so finally I ask a man at a counter, quietly, if they have a WC.

“I’m sorry,” I say, trying to express my embarrassment and urgency.

He looks worried, then tells me to come with him. We exit the shop into a back staircase and wind down floors upon floors until he opens the door to a small apartment. Everything inside is pink. A woman enters from another room and they speak in hushed tones. She takes me to her bathroom, smiles, and closes the door. Her home is such a home it hurts; I can see the care she takes in every inch of it, the faux-flowers, the color schemes, the matching hand towels, and I feel an immense guilt and shame to have intruded upon it—me, this lone tourist desperate to drive around Jordan by myself, this selfish young woman who appeared in her home; of course she could not say no, I was already there, and after I wash my hands I say, No, la, la, shukran, I can’t stay for tea, shukran, I really have to go, thank you so much.

Road signs warn me to use low gear. The Jordan Valley Highway stretches north towards the Sea of Galilee, where banana orchards grow, and I eat a blood-red tomato with windows wide open, its flesh firm like a peach. At military and police checkpoints along the borders of the West Bank and Israel, I’m asked: Why are you here? Why are you here? I travel on my British passport but my accent is American, and across Jordan’s northern and eastern borders, Bashar al-Assad just claimed victory in Syria’s presidential election, ISIS has taken Mosul and Tikrit, and Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is about to stand in Mosul’s al-Nuri Grand Mosque and announce himself leader of a caliphate stretching across Syria and Iraq—the checkpoint guards assume I’m in the CIA, Jordanian men tell me over tea. No one will harm me. They are afraid of me and my big SUV.

Inside the Jordan Natural History Museum at Yarmouk University, taxidermied sea turtles and Arabian gazelles twist into brittle positions. A female lion’s head bares her teeth as an eagle-owl takes flight. The life cycle of a Saturnia pyri moth is pinned to white foam. The museum docent slides open a glass door and hands me a crisp snake; I am gracious with his generosity.

On the highway outside Irbid, a sign for Pirelli tires claims: “Power is nothing without control.”

LEBANON

At a bar in Beirut, a young Lebanese man with still-boyish eyes leans in and says, “A stray bullet killed someone last night.”

We are in B 018, an underground bunker built as a nightclub on land said to have once been a camp for Kurdish, Palestinian, and Armenian refugees, before the camp and its inhabitants were burnt to the ground in 1976, the early days of the Lebanese Civil War. Now, the bunker’s roof slides open and David Guetta and Sia’s “Titanium” blasts from the DJ’s speakers.

A Germany fan was celebrating a World Cup match outcome, the young man says, and shooting bullets all over. “It’s really stupid to die because another country wins.”

My response is silence because a bilious unease has rested in my stomach since arriving last week. On my final days in Jordan, I sat in a hostel as ISIS took over Mosul, and reality expanded, a sudden cloud, my wants trivializing as I watched the news unfold. Of course I was still going to Lebanon, I said to another American woman watching with me. But now that I’m here, I feel like an intruder.

The young man continues, “You get to a point where you can’t do anything about it, so you just live with it.”

I turn to the young Lebanese woman standing with us, who’s also been quiet, and ask what she feels about it.

“Nothing.”

Even the ground is humid.

After a long silence she says, still not looking at me, “No. Of course I feel something.”

Lebanon’s Mediterranean Sea is dependent on currents and winds. One day it is full of tiny plastic, a rainbow soup which sticks to my skin in colorful scales. One day the sea is clear, viscous, and calm. I lower my head and am supported in weightless space. Seawater fizzes and pops. The mass of the entire aquatic world holds me in its dark blue womb, until something internal pulls me up for air.

“You’re not Lebanese?” people ask me.

“But where is your mother from?”

“Then why are you here?”

I am tense and uncertain. Men shadow me on the Corniche, corner me in souks and tell me to turn around, I am not welcome here. In Jordan I wanted to be alone but rarely was; here I am surrounded by people but lonely. Car bombs are frequent. An army general is kidnapped near the northern border. In hushed voices, people say: IS. ISIL. ISIS. At a bar in the cobblestoned port city of Jbeil, a team of Navy SEALs buy me drinks. They say they’re training the Lebanese army—they cannot tell me more, they shouldn’t have told me that.

These SEALs are the kinds of white men who want me, their flirtations familiar routines. They are big strong men who say chivalry isn’t dead.

“Are you part Lebanese?” they ask. “You look a little exotic.”

I tell the SEALs that my mother is Black, white, and Mexican American, and their eyes alight in the way so many white men’s eyes do when they discover they’re right, I am some form of exotic. It reminds me of the summer between my freshman and sophomore years of high school, when I went with a white friend to visit her mother’s hometown in Virginia. Before we arrived, her mother let her friends know she was bringing a Mexican with them, and when I was alone with the white boys, I leaned in and whispered that I was also part Black. They twitched with excitement and I knew I’d turned them on by sharing this secret. What else did I hide? How could they see it? It was a power I held over the white boys, a strength, a lure, but it took me too long to realize I was the one caught on the hook. My mother’s family is filled with strong, sensual women who radiated their beauty as their greatest worth—and I learned mine was mine. My value was in how pleasing I could be to white men. And I’d tried to be pleasing, to shut up and be sexy; I laughed at their jokes, played cool girl, and drank alongside them; I sniffed speed off of bicycle seats and let them inside me while they still had their girlfriends. I covered myself in whipped cream and waited too long for my white man to come home. I gave my forgiveness to the whitest of lies and stayed with him because he was so beautiful, every woman wanted to fuck him, didn’t I know? He had chosen me and I would be a fool to let them have him. But I did, I divorced him, and after the Banana Runt white man, I vowed to remain alert and keep white men at safer emotional distances.

I watch the SEALs’ interests rise, can almost see their twitching. We drink too much. Conversation turns to past deployments. One SEAL puts his head in his hands. I lead him down an unlit alley, where he cries into my neck.

“Don’t tell the others,” he says.

I can tell he wants to kiss me, but I want to observe him, tease him, learn how to say no to him.

The SEALs, drunk and invincible in their power, give me a ride in their enormous, black SUV to the cinder block bungalow compound where I’m staying, perched on a cliff overlooking the sea. They pull up to the simple camping sign and the one who cried says, “This place? Really?”

I walk up the driveway alone.

“Why are you here?” people ask.

“We would do anything to leave,” a young woman says. “Why would you come here?”

“I just wanted to see Lebanon,” I shrug. “I heard it has beautiful cedars, seasides, and caves.”

It feels as trivial as window-shopping.

I plan a trip south from Jbeil to Lebanon’s Jeita Grotto, an expansive system of limestone caves with an aquamarine river and lake, and hail a minibus from the side of the Jounieh-Beirut Highway.

“Jeita Grotto?” I ask as I board.

“Aywa, aywa.”

I sit up front so the driver doesn’t forget my stop. As we drive down the coastal highway, he honks at everyone we pass, and when he pulls over at a tunnel marked “Vallée Historique de Nahr el-Kalb” and points to me, I am confused—my guidebook said the exit to Jeita Grotto was a town with taxis waiting to transport riders to the grotto. Another rider translates: I have to go under the highway and up the parallel road. There’ll be a turnoff up into the mountains. I can walk.

On the other side of the underpass, an emerald valley opens before me. Reeds stretch out of the riverbed. I don’t dare pull out my guidebook. One should never look lost. I walk up the road parallel to the highway and, beneath my ankle-length skirt, my thighs rub together. A minibus pulls onto the highway’s shoulder and out of the corner of my eye, I watch a gray-haired man get off and step over the guardrail into the parallel road. A cinder block-retaining wall rises to my right. Then the man is beside me, walking too close in the dieselfilled air, and he is leaning in to ask me something, or say something, and his tone feels lustful and presumptive; my gut constricts up my neck and into my inner ears.

“I don’t speak Arabic,” I smile, though nauseous at the immediacy of his arrival. “La Arabic.”

More words spill from his mouth, words with no meaning to me besides the way I see too much of his tongue, and then his hands are on my body. They are on my arms, thighs, and buttocks, and the world goes gray and colorless, like the fog that wrapped my childhood home in California and kept me safe at night; everything within inches of me is crystal clear, but the things farther away, the things not happening to me, are blank.

I push him away.

His hand is on my hip and he smiles as his fingers squeeze me.

I grab his shoulder with my left hand and I hit his face and sticky, sweaty neck hard with my right hand. His eyes shift, surprised.

“Hey!”

The shout is mine, but it took so long to come I don’t trust it. My voice drifts between us, suspended mid-air. He turns and saunters down the empty road to the underpass.

Traffic on the highway pours by. A car pulls through the underpass, then maybe another, and I step, waving, into the street.

“Wait!” I yell. They keep driving.

Another car comes to a stop and the driver rolls down his window.

As he says hello, I gush, “I, um, do you know where Jeita Grotto is?”

The man inside the bug-like, black car replies—I hear him say he’s in the Lebanese army but my words keep shaking out—“I’m sorry—just—I was—attacked by a man back there.”

Then I am in his passenger seat, telling him please don’t turn around to catch that man, it’s OK, I’m OK, I just want to go to Jeita Grotto.

I smiled at him. I absolved him. I let him go free.

As the army man drives me up a winding mountain road, I feel foolish to have immediately gotten into a car with an unknown man, but my decision was primal, a chemical reaction—and what else was I supposed to do, stay on the side of the highway? Walk up this mountain road, alert for that gray man behind me? But my paranoia surges, and as the army man drives, I work to keep our conversation going, telling him I love caves, and he responds, but there are two conversations, one verbal and one in my head. This is stupid, I think; he could do the same thing, he could do worse. Jane, you are trapped in this man’s car and he’s driving you into the mountains and your map was wrong and you know nothing and you are being so stupid, get out of this stranger’s car. Is this stupid? Jane, get the fuck out of the car. But before I take action, we’re in the parking lot of Jeita Grotto, he’s giving me his phone number and makes me promise to call when I’m done so he can give me a ride back to Jbeil.

I shut the car door and notice I’m still holding my right arm and hand away from my body, palm up.

I have to find the toilets.

I lean over the sink and scrub up my forearms with soap to remove the gray man’s sweat from my skin.

Inside the grotto, stalagmites and stalactites form giant squids in the dark. Some are over twenty-six meters tall, a sign reads. The gray man’s touch is a banal event. I am not hurt. Men have touched me this way before. A strange man once shoved a feather duster up my skirt at a Halloween parade and my first white boyfriend told me to calm down. A white German boyfriend stuck a candle inside me without my consent. Did it hurt? Not physically. Things like this happen to women all the time. There is nothing to do but keep going. The river and lake flow beneath me, visible through a hole in the cavern’s floor. Boats drift past as water drips on my neck. When I exit the grotto, the army man is in the parking lot. He waited for me. Can he take me to dinner? No, la, shukran, I’m tired, I say.

The next morning, I find that into the wall of my cinder block bungalow, someone has scratched:

S+R
4 EVER & EVER
TILL
THE END
OF THE ENDS

I trace the letters. I exist because air moves in and out of my lungs. I walk out of the bungalow compound and turn left. The road leads past a cliffside cafe serving manousheh—thin, warm flatbread with minced lamb and cheese. It’s all I’ve been eating, for breakfast with Arabic coffee and cigarettes, for dinner with Almaza beer and cigarettes, because it’s the only thing I know on the menu. I walk the sea road. I turn a bend. I twist my ankle. I fall to the pavement and cut open my hand. A car drives by and does not slow. Melancholy sinks into my ventricles and stays. The cracked asphalt and white Styrofoam floating in the sea are more isolating than anywhere I’ve ever been. No person knows where I am in this moment. Not my mother, not my exes, not the embassy. I am a woman on my own and I can do anything a man can do.

I pick myself up and keep walking. I walk past tanks filled with oil and gas. I walk along the corniche to a small fishing port. The air is gelatinous, I am heat-stoned, and sweat soaks through my shirt. I walk until my Keds blister my ankles and toes. I walk until the skin between my thighs chafes then bleeds.

This June, I’ll have been single for ten years.

I take lovers nonexclusively. I no longer want to re-become the Jane I was before I met my ex-husband. I can’t go back to being unafraid because I now understand how wholly that young woman existed in relation to the white male gaze. I remain vigilant.

When I was twenty and made the decision to drop out of university to travel, I thought a lot about my maternal grandmother. She was raised in 1930s Chicago—her white father left her Black mother because of race and racism, and so my grandmother and her two siblings were raised by a single mother. I heard story fragments, like how when my grandmother walked to school, first the Black children and then the white children threw rocks at her and her siblings. But growing up, I was taught to not talk about race—it made people uncomfortable, it was nobody’s business—and I was never supposed to bring it up to my grandmother. In simple terms, her skin was light enough to, and so she chose to pass.

Another story I knew about my grandmother was that she grew up dreaming of becoming a ballerina and traveling the world; she got married to a man who told her he was sterile, and had her first baby at eighteen. I was nineteen when she died. My first white boyfriend wanted to marry me and raise a large Catholic family, and I was stunned by the loss of my grandmother, but also by the reality of my own life. My mother told me I had no choice but to finish college. I felt like I was on someone else’s conveyer belt. What did I want? I knew I did not want children, and I wanted to see everything my grandmother didn’t. I broke up with my first white boyfriend, turned twenty, packed a backpack, and boarded a plane. But the approval of white men still haunted me, because so much of what my grandmother experienced, and the limitations placed upon her, yes, were from having children, but more so from white men and the world white men tend. At nineteen, I couldn’t see what I see now: in wanting to live like a white man, I wanted to free my grandmother and myself of their control. It’s a challenge I am still working to complete. There are so many intergenerational memories and behaviors to untangle, I don’t know if I’ll ever be done, but I haven’t stopped yet.

My memory frequently flashes back to that summer in Jordan and Lebanon: bats flapping in and out of the street light in Dana, scuba diving to a sunken Russian tank off the coast of Aqaba, watching the World Cup in a family’s living room in Jbeil. I remember the woman’s pink house in the mountains and still feel guilty for not accepting her tea. Most often, I remember a day with joy so surprising it still makes me laugh. I was driving north toward Ajloun and olive groves sprouted before my eyes. I wanted to visit a castle.

My GPS directed me onto a road which ended in a construction site. I reversed and followed directions down the next road only to find I’d looped back to where I started. The next GPS-approved road was a busy shopping street which narrowed and narrowed, bursting with yellow balloons, sparkling dresses, and soccer jerseys, and then I was inside a souk full of fruit, nuts, strings of chilies, herbs, and men men men.

As I crawled my big silver SUV forward, vendors moved crates of pistachios or cherries or barrels of olives and tables of scarves out from my vehicle’s expansive path, and in my mirrors I watched the vendors return wares into place. Then the street ended. I was blocked by a deep and deliberate drainage ditch, then a building. My navigation told me to continue straight. I banged my head on the steering wheel.

A few men came up to my window, then multiplied, until men surrounded my vehicle, talking and pointing as I cracked my window.

“Turn around,” the men said. “The road ends.”

I could see that. I could not, however, see where I was supposed to turn around. I was inside the market. A handsome man with kind eyes stepped forward as leader—he told me to get out, he could make the U-turn for me.

“I can do it,” I said.

“Inshallah,” he smiled.

I balanced on the edge of the drainage ditch, reversed between multicolored bouncy balls, plastic mirrors, abayas, and rubber sandals, advanced into lightbulbs and disembodied mannequin torsos and legs, advanced and reversed, advanced and reversed, and what felt like all the men and boys in town rushed out to help direct my thirty-point-turn between the stalls, smiling and joking as they moved and replaced goods in my way—a teapot here, a sack of beans there, a few bars of soap—and I rolled open all my windows to hear their instructions, a little more, la, la, stop, all of us chuckling at the absurdity—and when I finally faced the opposite direction, the men and boys erupted in cheers. They crowded around and passed handfuls of the souk’s bright red cherries, roasted nuts, dried apricots, and bundles of fresh mint through each of my open windows.

“To remember us by!” they laughed.

We laughed to our bones.

I asked if I could take their picture. “To remember you by.”

As I leaned back to fit a group of them into the frame, I imagined we were the story they tell for years: Remember when that American woman got stuck in our souk in her big silver car? And then she drove back through the souk and off to the castle! American women! Yallah!

I sucked spent pits as I drove up new hillsides.

They were so sweet, the cherries.

About the Author:

Jane Marchant is a writer and photographer whose interdisciplinary narratives have appeared in ZYZZYVA, Guernica, Apogee, Catapult, Columbia Journal, and elsewhere. She’s a Lucas Artists Fellow at Montalvo Arts Center, and has received support from the Diamonstein-Spielvogel Foundation, Tin House’s First Book Residency, Headlands Center for the Arts, Ucross Foundation, and Oak Spring Garden Foundation, among others. Formerly the PEN America Literary Awards Program Director, Jane holds a BA and MFA in nonfiction writing from Columbia University.