1 Ralph’s mother had died of an overdose in Kathmandu
• in a dirt parking lot, a roan mud around her thighs where the last vein used had bled for some time unstanched.
• Ralph found her. He lifted her, to walk her back and forth like in the movies. It was easy she was that light. Then her legs would not unbend, she was the only cold thing on that summer day.
• Peter Cadwallader was summoned to dispose of her: Irene had him on her flight documents as Next of Kin.
2 He brought his daughter
• and at the airport, while Peter made the rote condoling remarks, Denise stood grinning. Her horsy face was sweet. She told Ralph, “Well, we’ve come to get you, finally.”
• He was wearing his old school uniform. Dipankar had cleaned and pressed it, but it looked chapped where the moths had been. The jacket cut him in the armpits, outgrown. “I can’t leave,” Ralph said. “I’ve got a job here. It isn’t only Mum, why I’m here.”
• “Of course we’re not going to make Ralph do anything he doesn’t want to do.” Peter cleared his throat.
• Denise looked at her father with a minutely composed scorn. She held it on him like a flashlight, exposing him, for a count of three, then wearily:
3 “You don’t have to come, Peter.”
3.1 She was polite the day she went with Ralph to the pottery.
3.2 Meeting her, the boss looked at Ralph reproachfully – as if, up to now, Ralph had concealed the fact that he was English.
4 Within three days it was out of control, Denise overwhelmed any other thing in his life.
4.1 The cakes she brought him, the gifts of bundled rupees. Though she hardly spoke, she kept him up all night, he would sit beside her watching her foot dig thoughtfully in the street grit. When she said, “Oh, dear, this is fate,” his head spun, he was mortally afraid and joyous.
4.2 Under her sway, he stole 10,000 dollars from Peter’s briefcase.
4.3 They fled to Pokhara, a ten-hour bus ride to the high Himalaya.
5 (On the way, standing in a sweaty knot of travelers, whose bags and livestock shifted noisily underfoot, Denise confessed to Ralph that she’d been stolen by aliens; since when, she was very very lucky – she bore down on lucky ironically, but wouldn’t clarify, just repeating: very lucky –
and changed the subject, subdued:
“I am sorry about your mum.”
She looked through the massed people then, the other travelers dim with their patience, at the brown huge slopes jiggling in the windows. Tears welled in her eyes.
“Well, you didn’t kill her,” Ralph said, angry.)
6 Pokhara: a white cat stood at the roadside. As Ralph and Deesey disembarked, the cat meowed vehemently.
6.1 “Oh! I see: we follow the cat now.”
6.2 An hour later, it had become serious. The road led up. Their feet ached from the ride, they were dizzy. If they stopped, the cat hissed and crouched.
6.3 Ralph suddenly guessed. The cat leapt up and vanished into the sky’s jagged hem. He leapt after.
6.4 The mountains swam in the deeps of the earth. Rhododendrons poured and grew. The clouds and their mother lakes entered the powerful stone, the grass drank them with its heels. Oceans swayed in the waist of the grass. This knowing was participation in its seamless play. It was a gladdened, headlong, adamantine life.
6.5 Ralph saw himself stagger, a wet scrap below and Denise wheeled and saw him pass.
6.6 He woke in a dusty tea shop, remembering that he’d forgotten –
6.7 He couldn’t stop crying in front of her.
6.8 In a frenzy, he gave all the money away. The beggar children swarmed round. They screamed to alert their friends. Denise came out and helped him: she couldn’t stop laughing. She cried, throwing money: “Hooray! Hooray! Free for all!”
“Jesus H. Christ!” said Eddie. “No. That’s too far! Didn’t they just tear you limb from limb and eat the flesh?”
“No, people in Nepal are surprisingly polite.”
“I gotta say, you didn’t tell me, when I employed you for the guru service, actually you hid from me you’d had this God thing.”
Ralph frowned then and shifted: “What would it take –”
They both stopped dead. The mood became cautious.
Eddie finally:
“Yeah, dude, I’m hurt, though, you can’t tell I care.”
Ralph got to his feet. He said quietly, “I think I’m in love with your sister.”
“Excuse me? Cause . . . cause, sorry, I’m back with the space invasion topic. Nix on the . . . Japanese game-show topics.”
“No . . . I thought I should talk to you –”
“Not funny.” Eddie scrambled to his feet.
Ralph repeated, “I’m in love with your sister.”
“NO. No, I’m in love with your sister. Keep it straight! Or is this some tit-for-tat vengeance deal I do not want?”
“No,” said Ralph. He shook his head. “Look, forget it.”
“No – my sister? You go ahead, fuck her, what do I care. Only, take my advice and use a condom. Cause, thing about Chrysa is, she was a major slut? Before the crack-up thing, she slept with anything. Men, women, plague rats, spores, dead bodies. Shit, I even fucked her a couple times.”
“Okay, I think I’ve had enough.”
“In fact, that was her who gave me crabs, the second time? Big as mice, you could hear them! So . . . I can’t believe how you totally just mind-fucked me. And I noticed you didn’t tell me what I need to know, so.”
Eddie’s mobile phone began to ring. He blinked in surprise, swatting at it under his jacket. Fumbling it out, he poked buttons at random. “Shit. It never did that before.”
“Can you take that outside, please?”
“Look, man!” Eddie shook the phone at Ralph. “This baby’s ornamental. It can’t ring!”
“Out. Please.”
“Just, help me, where’s the OFF?”
“Out.”
“Off!”
“Eddie, don’t make me –”