Riddles by the Pool

The air conditioning in room 412 had died three hours ago, or perhaps I had simply stopped noticing the hum. Elena was gone again—down at the pool, she'd said, though the way she'd packed her tote bag suggested something more permanent than a morning swim.

I stood on the balcony of the Luxor Marriott, staring at the Great Pyramid rising from the desert haze like some ancient middle finger to mortality. Behind me, the room held the accumulated debris of fifteen years: her jewelry scattered across the dresser like fallen stars, my paperback with its broken spine, the concave indentation on my pillow where her head should rest.

We'd come to Egypt to save us, or to bury us. Neither of us could say which anymore.

Down at the pool, I found her exactly where I'd known she would be—floating on her back in the center, her black swimsuit slick against the water like an oil slick. She was swimming, yes, but with the languid purposelessness of someone marking time until execution. Her arms moved in slow arcs, stirring the chlorinated water into small whirlpools that caught and held the merciless Egyptian sun.

I sat in a lounge chair, ordering gin from a waiter who looked at me with professional pity. The Sphinx watched from the nearby tourist overlook, its worn face asking the same riddle it had asked for five thousand years: What walks on four legs in the morning, two at noon, three in the evening? But the real riddle was simpler, harder: What dies before it's buried?

Elena climbed out of the pool, water streaming from her like she was dissolving. She wrapped herself in a towel and sat beside me, not quite touching, close enough that I could smell the chlorine and the expensive perfume she'd bought in the Cairo airport.

"I can't bear it anymore," she said softly, staring at the pyramid. "The hotel, the tourists, the pretending."

"Us," I said. It wasn't a question.

"Us." She turned to me, and her eyes held that particular devastation that only comes when love has curdled into obligation. "The riddle's answer, David. The thing that dies before it's buried—it's hope."

The waiter brought my gin. I drank it in one swallow, feeling the alcohol spread through me like forgiveness I didn't deserve. Somewhere in the distance, a call to prayer began to spiral upward, beautiful and incomprehensible.

"Let's go home," I said, and she nodded, and we both understood that home no longer meant the same place for either of us.