THE GOLDEN TRIANGLE

Thailand, the Golden Triangle, the dope-smuggling capital of the East. Angelo’s not coming with me. He’s sending his brother, Mario, instead. I’ve never met Mario, and won’t until we leave. “I’d feel better,” I say to Angelo, “if I knew I was going with you.”

We’re in the office, counting money. No, says Angelo. He can’t go. There are too many stamps on his passport. He shows me. It’s falling apart, every page covered with visas, yellow, red, green, black, blue: New York, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Bangkok, Los Angeles, Paris, Milan, Honolulu, Bali, Bangkok.

“A collector’s item,” I say softly. He’s been making these trips for years.

“Too long,” he says, rubbing his chin. He has to lie low awhile. He puts out a couple of lines.

“Okay then,” I say. “Me and Mario.”

No, he says, we need another mule to carry the dope. Do I know anyone we can trust? I know Kit would go, but someone has to stay behind to take care of the business and I guess it’ll have to be her. Oh, well. I can hear her moving in the kitchen, just outside the office door. She talks about a woman, another musician in an art band, who’s carried several times before, Amsterdam to New York. She’s not a regular user. This one smuggles just for the money. Mary her name is, Mary Motion.

She’s a big-boned woman, tall, with droopy dark-blond hair falling over her pear-shaped face. Her eyes are honest brown, her mouth thin, kind of serious. She looks perfectly normal and doesn’t ruffle easy. I hire her.

Angelo is happy, especially when I tell him the deal I get on our excursion-fare tickets, New York-Tokyo-Bangkok-Singapore-Tokyo-New York. Funny how this was the one thing I would never do; now I can’t wait to leave. It’s a dream come true: the best dope in the world at the lowest price. At last, after all these years sitting in this chair, I’m going straight to the source.

I buy a Southeast Asian guidebook, to study the local customs. Opium, it says, is growing in the hills. Watch out for tribal warfare. I feel my eyes shine.

Angelo says each of us can keep an ounce of the total we’ll carry. “Maybe you can sell some of mine,” Mary Motion proposes.

“Maybe,” I tell her, “but I think I’ll have my hands full.” I’m to hold two o-z’s for Angelo; the rest I’ll sell at the usual price. By now I owe him big, several thousand and climbing, more than this nickel-and-dime business can pay a woman with a family of four: Kit, myself, and our two growing habits.

Angelo peels the large bills from the roll I’ve given him, lays them on my desk in a stack. “For the tickets,” he says. I don’t count it.

The night before departure, we meet with Mario at Angelo’s East Side hotel. I tell them yes, I have the tickets, the itinerary. Where’s the money for the stuff? Mario smiles and pats his belly, shows me a moneybelt. It’s full. So is his belly. He’s a little on the plump side, this Mario, about thirty-five, round and jolly in the face, thin sandy hair brushing his ears, a few inches taller than me. His eyes are the lightest of blues. He bears no resemblance to the dark, ringlet-haired bantam who is Angelo. Hard to believe they’re brothers. Mario’s not even much of a doper. A schoolteacher, he says. Three kids at home.

I ask where we go to make the buy. Mario knows the way, but he seems a little dim; Angelo draws him a map. Mario keeps it with the cash. Like Mary, he’s doing this for the money, the easy money—the stuff there’s never any of. I need money, too, but for me this is more about the dope. We do a few lines for the road and I go home to pack. Angelo’s leaving town, too, leaving the country. He doesn’t say where. He’ll call me. He doesn’t say when.

It’s seventeen hours to Tokyo in a jumbo jet without a single unoccupied seat. Everyone but us is Japanese. Before the movie starts there’s a newsreel. The big news is a midair crash of a Japan Air Lines plane. There are a few survivors, somehow—I don’t get how, the broadcast’s in Japanese. Three of the survivors, a child and two young women, appear in interviews, heads bandaged, necks braced. Fire has left one badly burned. Our cabin is quiet. This is Japan Air Lines.

Seven hours into the first leg of the trip, I get dopesick in my seat. I’m choking on my tongue, can’t swallow. My skin feels loose on my skeleton, my eyes are running. So’s my nose. The fellow in the seat next to me offers a pack of Kleenex, asks if I want any help from the crew. No, no, I say, and head for the john. I can see Mary Motion sitting a few rows behind me, her eyes wide and wondering, and Mario on the other side of the plane, pretending he doesn’t know me.

In my bag I’ve got a couple of methadone biscuits, some Lomotil and codeine, but no dope. I’ve been too cautious. Didn’t want to travel with powder. What a jerk. What am I making this trip for, if not to carry? I stumble into the loo and bite off a piece of a meth biscuit, swallow a codeine. A minute later, it comes back up. My entire body retches, but nothing else is in it. I catch myself in the blue-green light of the tiny bathroom mirror. I have a sense there isn’t a drop of fluid left inside me, no bile, no blood. I don’t know how I can still be alive. If appearances mean anything, I’m not.

I swallow another piece of meth. Before I return to my seat, a stewardess brings me the sugar I ask for in little packets; down they go. I stare at her, eyes full of tears, I’m choking on my breath. “More sugar, please,” I gasp. She hesitates a moment, gets me another handful. Soon the hacking cough stops, but I’m far from feeling right. My arms seem a very long distance away, my hair feels false. Maybe this is normal, I think, as I notice the other passengers. They look green, too.

At the Tokyo airport, we change to a smaller jet for the trip to Bangkok, another five hours away. Everyone on this plane is Indian, they’re going to Kashmir. Three men dressed in flimsy white leggings and long flowing blouses, their heads wrapped in white turbans, their faces hidden by full graying beards, are the only passengers in the first-class seats. I’m at a window in coach. I don’t know why I feel resentful—this is their part of the world. White skin doesn’t always bestow privileges. I stare out the window. The sky’s black.

For dinner we get soba noodles, seaweed, and some kind of bean cake for the third time since the trip began. Breakfast, lunch, dinner, the menu’s always the same. So is the entertainment: the plane-crash news. Over the summer of 1985, there have been more crashes than at any one time in the history of commercial aviation. I try to sleep. No use.

It’s midnight when we arrive in Bangkok. Police are everywhere, soldiers too. There’s been a coup, the borders are closed. Our cab driver says, “It’s nothing.”

Many more sleepless hours pass in the hotel room I share with Mary, who falls out the minute we get inside. The thin carpet is red, the bedspread is red, the curtains are red. The walls appear to be yellow, I’m not sure. We haven’t bothered with the lights. The neon glow from the street outside provides all the illumination I can bear.

Mario spends the night in the hotel bar, chatting up a “sex-teen”-year-old girl, one of many. I stay in my room, chipping at the codeine. I’m trying to save the meth. We don’t know how long it’ll be before we can score—maybe hours, maybe days. I find more packets of sugar from the plane, eat them. I pull the thin bedsheet over my head. First I’m freezing, then I’m sweating. All night long I’m turning the air conditioner off and on, on and off, opening and closing the window. The air outside is rank. I listen for gunfire, hear nothing.

In the morning I force myself into the shower. The water rails against my skin like pellets of thin steel. I order coffee from room service. It arrives in a steaming pot. I drink all of it.

At the hotel travel agency, I buy our plane tickets north. We’re headed for Chiang Mai, a town in the hills near the Burmese border, popular with tourists. “It’s cooler there,” the ticket agent tells me. “May I arrange your hotel?” Angelo’s already given me the name of the place he wants us to stay. The agent reserves three rooms.

My hands are shaking so badly I can’t hold the tickets. I stuff them in my bag, approach the hotel dining room. A breakfast buffet is set up on the bar, staffed by men in olive-and-gold bus jackets, standing where the hookers had been the night before. The men are all short and all have the same haircut, styled, possibly, with an ax. They look pockmarked and sallow. I down another coffee, try to swallow a piece of fruit, settle for a few bites of sticky rice. Mario comes in, smiling, clean-shaven, wet from the shower. The girl was very nice, he says. It was fun in the bar last night. He had a nice massage. We should have come on down.

We still have a few hours to kill before plane time. In the narrow street outside the hotel, the air is so muggy and thick with smog I can hardly move my legs. Again I wish I’d brought something with me. Ridiculous, leaving all the dope at home. I’m much sicker than I ever expected, but I don’t want to take a chance on buying something here from a total stranger.

We hail a cab, because it’s air-conditioned. The driver wants to sell us a nickel bag of pot. I frown at this but Mario thinks it’s great. I try to convince him otherwise. Everyone knows cabdrivers are cops, and besides, marijuana’s not what we’re here for. When I’m not looking, he buys it anyway. “Everyone does it,” he whines.

“We’re not everybody,” I reply.

He looks dubious.

We drive along the Patpong Road, a main drag, strip joints mostly, a few jewelers. Bangkok’s a stinking place. Where are the temples of gold? Families are living in the street, tending their woks over fires in the gutter, cooking breakfast. The sickening smell of frying palm oil wafts through the trees. With the auto exhaust fumes and heavy humidity, the air’s nearly impossible to breathe. I bite off another piece of meth.

It’s only eleven a.m., but we head for a bar and knock back a few beers. I don’t taste them. My tongue feels bloody. I’m biting it. My eyes swim in my head. Mario wants a plate of French fries. They carry the stench of that sickening oil. I’ll kill him, I think, before this is over.

We’ve all lost interest in a tour of the city’s canals recommended in my guidebook. Klongs, they call them. “King Klongs,” I say to Mary, who looks as glum as I feel. We walk back to the hotel.

It’s almost noon and the equatorial heat has steeply escalated. All along the sidewalk, food vendors sitting under striped umbrellas display edibles we can’t identify. Never have I seen food like this: strange shapes, unnatural colors, horrid odors. Shops advertise silk and linen suits made to order in a day. Men and women in thin polyester clothing rush to jobs. What about that coup? No sign of an army anywhere. I buy an English-language newspaper. The coup was a failure, but a couple of English journalists were killed and the borders are still closed. There’s an article about the Thai Queen’s visit to the Paris collections. A woman in low-heeled leather pumps passes by. Everyone else wears flip-flops.

The Bangkok airport looks different in daylight, clean and not too busy. The only activity on the tarmac surrounds a Vietnamese plane loading cargo. The terminal’s metal detector buzzes as I pass. Two attendants approach, and a nearby guard. They want to search my bag. At the bottom of an inside pouch, I have a small plastic paper-cutter with a retractable blade. It doesn’t look any more threatening than the prize in a Cracker Jack box. The blade is barely a half-inch long but it’s sharp enough to cut a piece from a solid rock of dope—or a face. There’s a small pocketknife in there, too, and a prescription bottle with my various pills. The guard seems more interested in my Polaroid. I waste a picture on him, and he lets me pass.

The trip north takes less than an hour. A man holding a sign with the name of our hotel takes us to a van, where a perky young woman is waiting, all smiles. I notice her skin—not a line, not a wrinkle—her cheeks are naturally rosy. She wears her hair short, cut in a subtle flip. Her dark eyes dance into mine. I haven’t seen anyone like her since high school.

She says her name is Taffy. This makes me laugh and she takes me for a jolly person. I laugh again. She’s a student at a nearby college and she’s very congenial. How long will we be staying in Chiang Mai? she asks, very cheerful, never losing the smile. Where are we from? Would we like to take a tour of the temples?

Sure, I say. Temples? Sure. She hands me a four-color brochure. It describes several different excursions, some whole-day, some half-day, some two-day. I pick the first one scheduled for the morning, a half-day. Taffy seems happy at this. Her cheeriness is contagious. Could she be stoned? No, I don’t think she’s ever smelled dope in her life.

I thumb through the rest of the brochure. There are thirty-six temples within the walls of Chiang Mai, eighty more in the country around it. Taffy says if we stay another day, we can take in a few mountain villages, too. In one all they make is umbrellas. In another, silks. Which, I wonder to myself, is the one where they make the heroin?

At the hotel we drop our bags and go outside to get the lay. Mario says it’s too early to check in with the connection. I didn’t know we had an appointment. They have hours, he tells me. I give out an involuntary sigh. It’s the same all over, isn’t it?

The streets of Chiang Mai are deserted. Though it’s late afternoon, there’s hardly a shadow. The sky’s blue-on-blue, not a cloud, the air so hot and pink and quiet it feels like a dream. I keep thinking the road’s unpaved but it isn’t—some kind of dusty illusion. The whole town seems built on straw. A high fence of loosely tied wooden poles runs down one side of the street, shielding the jumble of rickety houses behind it. On the other is a low line of stuccoed shops, most of them shuttered against the sun. A skinny Caucasian fellow lurches toward us with that telltale junkie buckle to his knees. His hair is long and stringy, his black jeans torn at the seat and dusty as the street. He hasn’t had a bath or a meal in a while. His skin is just this side of human, his eyes have rolled back in his head. Mary makes a sound. “Well,” she smirks. “We’ve come to the right place.”

We’re going to carry the dope in our intestines, packed tight in knotted condoms. We need to find a drugstore right away. The hotel concierge has told us there’s one just down the road. There is. Poking through the crowded shelves, we look for laxatives and lubricants, condoms, and tuberculin spikes. Behind the counter, a middle-aged Thai man and woman, husband and wife, serve us without comment or question. No Taffy here. No “Where are you from? Do you like our town? Will you stay long?” None of that. They don’t ask if we’re related or what brought us. They know.

I stay many minutes at the shelves, as absorbed in the colorful boxes and shapely bottles as I was as a kid in the old courthouse that was my hometown library. George Washington had slept there; it had atmosphere. Intoxicated by the smell of polished wood and library paste, lulled by the metronomic ticks of a grandfather clock in the reading room, I lost myself then, as now, in a world of the senses, ruled by a habit of mind. But here products come from China, Egypt, Vietnam, and Germany—George Washington never saw anything like this.

My hand reaches for a small Chinese box with blue lettering. I feel a shallow breath behind my ear. “You don’t want that,” says a voice. The Thai man is standing at my shoulder, gesturing at the box. “That’s not for you,” he says.

Really? I want to know what it is. The man is loath to say. I have to be careful. I don’t want to make a scene. I replace the box and pick up a tube of toothpaste. The man smiles then, trades glances with his wife; we’re all very friendly. Mary Motion and I buy a tube of K-Y jelly each, several boxes of condoms, some strong laxative tabs, a couple of clean gimmicks. I pretend this is business-as-usual. In Chiang Mai, maybe it is.

Back on the street it’s like a sauna, hot but dry, better than the muggy air of Bangkok, anyway. In the heat even the distant hills look pooped. In the hotel parking lot, pedicab drivers in native costume nap in the passenger seats. We stop in the hotel bar, take a table. The tourists are all out with Taffy or one of the other guides; we’re the only customers, one waiter, one barmaid. Mary wonders if they know why we’re here. She’s too paranoid. “We’re tourists,” I say. “We’re seeing the world.”

Mario checks his watch, downs his drink. “Time to go,” he says in his thin, reedy voice, forever jovial. Everything to him is a yuk. I don’t trust him but he’s the one with the directions, which he doesn’t share with us. Orders from Angelo, he smiles. I don’t.

“Don’t forget to bring back a sample,” I growl. He gives me a high-sign and a gap-toothed grin. When he’s gone I tell Mary we should follow him.

“Not me,” she says, looking around uncomfortably. “I’ll wait here.” We’re sitting near a large picture window, just out of the sun. I watch Mario climb into a pedicab and go off. We order another round.

I can’t get drunk enough. I ate my last meth biscuit hours ago, it’s wearing off. After the long journey, the stultifying heat and sleepless nights, after the vodka I’ve consumed, I’m in a state of semi-withdrawal. Forty hours ago I was buckling my seat-belt at JFK. Now I’m staring into a glass, wishing it didn’t have a bottom.

Mary and I wait for Mario and drink. We talk about New York, about the free time we’ll have for shopping in Singapore, whether or not we should “lose” our passports there. Singapore is our vacation cover. The Thailand stamps dated only days apart might look funny at customs. Well, we can always get new ones. Mary says you just drop the passport in a mailbox somewhere and tell the consul it’s been stolen. People steal American passports all the time.

“I wouldn’t mind spending an extra day in Singapore,” she giggles. “Maybe we could have some suits made.” I wonder how she has the strength to laugh. I want to have cocktails on the veranda at Raffles, the hotel where Somerset Maugham used to stay. Nothing but tourists we are, after all. Taffy will never know the difference, anyway.

Other people are in the bar now, the sun’s beginning to drop. We order another round. Suddenly Mario’s standing by the table, again with the silly grin. Without a word we troop through the lobby to the elevators. I’m very drunk and a little stooped but at least I’m not noticeably sick. On the wall behind the check-in desk a line of clocks shows the time in every major city in the world. In New York it’s about the same time as it is here, but not the same day. We’ve lost one or gained one, I can’t remember.

In my room upstairs Mario explains that the deal is done but we’ve arrived too late to make the pickup. Tomorrow, he says. Two p.m.

Shit. I was hoping we’d be gone by then. Now we’ll have to take Taffy’s eight a.m. tour. She’s going to call the room at seven.

I ask about the sample. Mario hands me a red condom balloon, its bottom heavy with perfect white powder. I dive into my bag for the pieces of aluminum foil I took from the hotel breakfast bar in Bangkok. I roll up a straw, untie the balloon, smooth out another piece of the foil. I lay down a clump of powder, light it easily. Smoke it. In a second it’s gone. In a minute I can feel my eyes sparkle, my back straighten up. “I can walk!” I cry. “I can walk!” I’m suddenly in a party mood, but the other two are busy.

Mario’s got a hit in his cooker, a bottlecap from a beer. He’s tying off, looking anxious. Mary snorts a line off her compact mirror.

The Golden Triangle, I think, eyeing the mirror, the foil, the cooker. The Golden Triangle. We made it.

Mario boots. Couldn’t I have guessed? He’s down on the floor with the needle in his arm.

“Oh shit,” says Mary.

Mario’s going out.

“Let’s get him on his feet,” I say with a sigh, thinking, Here we go again. Damn.

She doesn’t move. I give her a look. She’s fucking stoned. Mary’s no junkie, just a mule, and now she’s stoned. Fucking A.

Finally she reaches over and we pull Mario to his feet. He’s heavy. I curse him, take the needle from his arm. He wobbles, down he goes again, but the dope’s made us powerful and we pull him up. Mario giggles. His face is scarlet. He’s enjoying this! I’m yelling at Mary to wash out the spike, go down to the restaurant, steal some salt. I’m screaming at Mario; “You dumb asshole! Talk to me! Say something!” But all he can do is smile. That lazy, soporific honeymoon smile. I want to wring his neck.

Ten minutes later, Mary returns with the salt. “Forget that,” I say. “Help me walk him.”

It’s another hour or so before we get him looking regular again. Those light eyes of his could give us away in a second. I’m so pissed I could spit. Hungry, too. I want to get some food, but while the others are taking showers I chase a little dragon instead. “I’m holding the sample from now on,” I tell them. “We can’t have anything like this happen again.” They don’t argue, I’ve put myself in charge. From now on, whatever I say goes.

The dead streets of daytime Chiang Mai have become a teeming river of human bodies drifting through the night. Bright paper lanterns float on the breeze, lighting the portals to windowless storefronts. Their doorways are crowded with carved wooden fetishes, some five or six feet tall. All manner of brass orientalia shines from within. Bamboo and straw mats hang everywhere. Flimsy card tables sit edge to edge on the sidewalk, laden with knockoffs of every sort of Western fashion, bending under the weight of Siamese collectibles, ivory and black lead elephants, tiny Buddhas and princesses, scores of beads and lacquerware, some pottery. Hawkers stand before every shop, their eyes shifting over the crowds thronging the street like a mall. Kung-fu music blares from loudspeakers wired to overhanging roofs. Even with all the noise and color, something’s missing. It takes me a while to figure out what. It’s light. There aren’t any signs, no neon, no hanging shingles. None of the shops have names. Even movie houses are marked only by comic-book murals painted on the walls of corner buildings.

According to Taffy, the big draw in Chiang Mai after dark is the Night Market. It’s set in a couple of large, two-story rough plank buildings, stall after stall of vegetables and dry goods of every description, fabrics, more elephants, T-shirts, shoes, statues. Each of us buys a few trinkets and a couple of cheap linen shirts.

Someone’s watching us now—a sun-browned skinny Thai, a guy about thirty, unusually tall. We can call him “Joe,” he says. He speaks a slangy English I imagine he picked up from American soldiers during the Vietnam War, very Burger King with a hard-on. He must have done real well in the 1960s, a street-smart kid pandering to the GIs, showing them a good time in the brothels. We try several times to shake him, but every time we turn around, he’s there.

He wants to sell us pot. “Thai stick,” he says. “You know Thai stick?” He puffs out his bony chest, full of pride and confidence. His teeth are chipped, his eyes hop. I think he wants to fuck me. I look at Mary. It’s obvious she thinks he does, too. Mario, his eyes still lit by the dope, seems to find this amusing. Joe lets a hand hover over his cock, which I can make out pretty well through his chinos. I’m feeling good now, but not that good. I don’t want him in my hotel room. I decline the pot, but Joe doesn’t let up. He looks me in the eye. “I know what you want,” he says.

“What do I want?”

“Powder,” he says, whispering. “You want white powder.”

Mario slides an eyeball my way. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I say, looking at Joe.

“No? Okay, I show you.”

“Where?” Mario asks.

“Not far, just outside town,” says Joe. “Ten miles. You married?” he asks, pointing at me and Mario, Mario and Mary.

“Yeah,” we all say together. “No,” we say then. Joe makes a face. He asks which hotel we’re in, how long we’re staying, where we’re from. I can see his mind work; he’s a hustler. If he gets his hooks into us, we’ll be spending all our available cash paying for his silence.

A lot of Thais, Mario has told us, will get real friendly, take your money, even turn you on to a major source, then turn you in to the border guards just as you’re leaving the country. We might have to bribe our way out. We’ve talked about what it takes to buy a general—anywhere from two to ten thousand dollars, maybe more, and then that might not be the end of it, not till we land in jail.

Joe’s too cunning not to play every angle. He knows we’re no kind of tourists. Mario, stoned as he is, knows this too, but Joe knows a place where the girls are the most beautiful girls in the land and the heroin’s the best in the world. Cheap, too, he adds. “Very good price, okay?”

“See you around,” I say.

“No, wait!” he calls out, alarmed. “I’m Joe! Joe is A-OK. Ask anybody.” He gestures vaguely at the street. “Come on, we have a blast.”

“What is this place, exactly?” I ask.

A massage parlor. I might have guessed. They’re mentioned everywhere in the guidebook. Massage parlors seem to be this country’s main source of income, not including you-know-what. Mario says he really needs a massage. He rubs his ass. He bruised himself falling down earlier.

“It’s a trap,” I tell him, out of Joe’s hearing. “This Joe-guy’s full of it.”

“I don’t know …”

“We can’t do this,” I say.

“Maybe we should check it out,” Mario decides. “We don’t have to buy anything. We can just get a massage.”

Mary Motion shrugs. “Maybe he’s harmless,” she says.

“Aren’t these places just for men?” I ask Joe. Now I’m certain he means to turn us in, that he has to be an informer.

“No, no,” he says, his thin hands parting the air. “Massage for women, too. You like this massage,” he insists. “You ever have Thai massage?” I shake my head slowly, no. “Ah! Thai massage very special, you like it. Make you feel good. Very relax. You have a good time,” he enthuses. “I show you. Okay?”

“Joe’s gonna show us a good time,” I say to Mary.

She laughs. “I’m done shopping,” she tells me. “Might as well see a little of the country.”

“Beautiful scenery,” Joe agrees.

“What can we see at night?” I ask.

“Much more to see in the night than the day,” he tells me. “I show you.”

I don’t want to go. I’m hungry again, and tired, edgy. Mary says she is, too, but now we’re afraid to eat. Our stomachs have to be empty when we pick up the dope. When you’re carrying fifty thousand dollars worth of heroin up your ass, you don’t want to have to stop and take a shit.

Joe says we can eat at this place in the woods if we want to. It’s a private club. Generals go there. Politicians. “Food good, too,” he says, rubbing his belly. “Everything good at this place. Everything A-OK.”

“I don’t like it,” I say.

Joe looks at me in mock horror. “You still don’t trust me? But I am your friend, I am Joe. Practically American. Joe is A-O-Kay! Ask anyone, they tell you. Everything good with me, everything okay.”

“He’s okay,” says Mario. “This is Okay Joe.” He gives the guy a brotherly pat on the back. Mario’s truly an innocent, I think. He comes from a little town in northern Italy where all he knows is pasta and sunshine—all he ever needs to know. “How long will it take to get there?” he says.

I shake my head. It’s Angelo I’m running this trip for and I can’t let his only brother go off in the woods alone, not the way he is, stoned, a stupid child. Joe says again it’s okay, everything we do with him is okay. “Okay, lady?” he asks. “This is a happy place—check it out.”

I don’t know what to say. All I can think is, Generals go there.

“What’s your name?” Joe asks me.

“Evelyn,” I tell him.

He can’t pronounce it. “This is Judy,” I say, pointing to Mary. “She’s Judy and I’m Evelyn and this is Joe.”

Mario looks at me and laughs. Joe laughs, too. “Ho, Joe! Everything okay, now. Everything way okay.” He says he’ll get the car.

Okay Joe’s “car” turns out to be whatever passing tuk-tuk will stop to take us on. The only one that will is a little three-HP truck, hardly more than a glorified scooter with a cab over the tiny front wheels. A roofed-in pickup affair is attached to the rear with two hard benches along its sides. A piece of thin pink fabric hangs where a window might be between the cab and the back. It’s a Thai-sized version of the contraption Anthony Quinn and Giulietta Massina live in in La Strada.

“I love that movie,” Mario tells me. He hops into the truck.

Our driver motions the rest of us inside. His wife and two small children cram into the front seat, three more remain in back with us. The rear end is open to the street. Vehicles similar to ours stretch beyond as far as I can see, their headlights inching along in the traffic with pedicabs, scooters, public shuttle buses, and bicycles. People on foot are everywhere. “It’s the evacuation of Saigon,” I say.

Joe looks at me quizzically. His hands are in his lap. “You can sit here,” he offers. I’m happy where I am. Not really.

I’m sweating again. So is Mario, profusely. Mary can’t get comfortable, either. She tries talking to the children, but they don’t speak English. Joe talks to the driver, shouting over the noise of the traffic, the grinding of gears. In ten minutes, we move about a hundred yards.

Another ten minutes pass and we don’t move at all. Horns are honking like crazy. Joe keeps up his rap—how great the Thai pot is, how fine the Thai massage, how private the club, how cool the woods, how expert the girls, how young and beautiful, how lucky we are to have met him. “I’ve gotta get some air,” I say and climb out of the truck. Mario and Mary leave with me. We don’t look back.

When we reach the Night Market, Joe’s there waiting. “Hey, Ef-leen,” he says. “Why’d you go?” He tugs at my elbow and pulls me toward an alley between the buildings. He has something to show me. Still holding my arm, he reaches in a trash can and removes a rolled-up newspaper. A spray of flowers shows at the top. “You like?” he asks. He tells me to look inside the paper. Under the flower stems I see the marijuana. “I don’t think so,” I tell him. He’s exasperated. Mario gives a yawn.

The Night Market’s closing now, it’s ten p.m. We’re starving. Like wolves we prowl the now-quiet streets, looking for a restaurant that will seat us. The best ones have already stopped serving. A man in the street tells us about an Italian place. We go there. I plead with the owner to stay open a few minutes more. I can’t imagine eating Italian food in a place like Chiang Mai, but the thought of Thai food, everything fried, everything riced, disagrees with me more. No matter, the restaurant refuses to stay open.

“But we’re from New York,” I protest. It makes no impression; clearly, this isn’t Italy. Calling the town as many names as we can think of, we walk back to the hotel, back to the bar, to the vodka. We buy a bottle and sit at the one empty table. The restaurant’s full up now. There’s a band playing, a lounge act with a girl singer doing American pop tunes in three languages. She sings a honking version of “Fever” in English, and “I Left My Heart in San Francisco” in Thai. I set aside my glass and drink from the bottle.

“I’ll wake you at seven,” I say to Mario when it’s done.

“Don’t bother,” he tells me. “I like sleeping late.”

Alone in my room I smoke another line from the sample. It’s good stuff, all right. The best.

Taffy’s call comes at seven exactly. She’s down in the lobby, waiting. “Will there be three of you?”

“No,” I say, thinking of Mario. “One of us has a hangover.”

Mary and I stumble down the stairs a few minutes later, find Taffy standing by a long table dressed with a pink linen cloth, a silver coffee urn, a pyramid of china cups, and a basket of hard rolls. “I’ll bet you two ladies want a bagel,” she says.

“Maybe later,” I tell her, and knock back two quick ones, nice thick dark espressos. They get the dope going, too. I ask Mary if she wants a hit before we take off, but she declines. She needs a little time. Okay by me.

Smiling, chatty, Taffy hurries us to the van parked outside, the same wood-paneled station-wagon affair that brought us in from the airport. “We’re running a little late,” she explains. I look at my watch. It’s three minutes past eight.

We meet the others on the tour: a retired couple from Brunei, two Chinese girls just out of high school, and a Japanese boy, a college student. Do other people find smuggling this absurd?

I wonder.

There’s no sun this morning; it drizzles a little. This worries Taffy. She hopes it won’t last. Some of the roads are unpaved, she tells us, and we’ll have to do some walking. The van winds through the quiet streets as Taffy points out her favorite buildings, mostly temples and movie theaters. It’s a pretty place, Chiang Mai, a rainbow of pastels. They call it the “Rose of the North.”

All the shops are closed at this hour; only street sweepers move about. In every neighborhood, there are small temples—wats—their upper reaches a cross between a minaret and a pagoda. They dot the sky same as the church spires in any provincial American town. “If you listen closely,” Taffy says, “you can hear the monks chanting.” All we hear is the car engine. We look at Taffy. “I so love that sound,” she murmurs. “So steady.”

We start up the mountain. Teak forests surround us and a lot more fresh air than I’ve breathed in an age. “Teak is plentiful here,” Taffy reports. “It’s our major natural resource.” Mary and I exchange knowing glances.

The road, a two-lane blacktop, ropes the mountain like a lasso around a restless bull, riding up, curving, twisting, falling back. At one point we have a view of the valley below, of Chiang Mai in the distance and a few surrounding villages. Again I wonder how many are refining opium, if that’s where it’s done. Mary must be thinking the same thing. “So this is the Golden Triangle?” she asks.

Taffy nods and twists in her jump seat. “Some people call it that.”

A half hour later we’re stopped at a roadside grocery where we change to a four-wheel-drive pickup. It’s the same kind of truck we were in last night with Okay Joe, but roomier. These benches are set from one side to the other in rows. Taffy sits up front with the driver. Mary and I make small talk with the retired couple, who sit facing us. They’ve been all over the world, they say, everywhere but New York. In a few months they’ll be in the city, where a son is engaged in business. “Where is Brunei?” I ask. I’ve never heard of it before.

“It’s very rich,” they tell me. “Oil.”

“Our money is rich, too,” the old man says. He pulls out his wallet to show me one of the native bills. “Isn’t it beautiful?”

I study the note. It’s about the same size as a dollar in a Monopoly game, maybe a little smaller. The face side, engraved in blue, features a head shot of the mustachioed sultan in a fezlike cap. The flip side is mauve and shows a picture of the sultan’s palace, a glorious place. “Very beautiful,” I say, handing back the bill.

“Please keep it,” the man says, closing my fingers over it. “A souvenir.”

I thank him.

He asks where in New York we live.

“Downtown,” I say.

“Is it far from Broadway?” he asks. He wants to see Cats. He’s already seen it in London, but he wants to see it again in New York.

“Not far in miles,” I tell him. “But another world.” I light a cigarette. New York is not what I want on my mind. The old lady smiles shyly. “Our son does very well there,” she tells me in halting English. “He lives on Fifth Avenue.” She adds a few syllables to “avenue.” Mary gives me a nudge. The road in front of us narrows. No other cars pass, the woods are silent. The air thins. All I can see are clouds.

I can’t believe I never knew about Brunei. There’s a lot I don’t know, I suppose; this is just the tip of the iceberg. I wonder why I still feel bored. At a break in the trees I look down into … nothing. A vast open space, filled with fog. This is about as far from home as I’ve ever been, but I’m enveloped in something so familiar it feels like I’m home in bed. Except there’s no phone ringing, and no sad junkies filling my ear with how much they hate their husbands or wish their girlfriends were dead.

The truck slows. It’s having trouble making it up a hill. “We’re almost there,” Taffy tells us. Then the road comes to an end.

We’re in a gravel parking lot at the bottom of a mountain shrouded in mist. Rising up its side, a half-mile length of stone steps (two hundred and ninety, Taffy says) has been cut through a sloping parkside dotted with fragrant flowers. It looks for all the world like the stairway to heaven. Busloads of tourists, mostly Asian families, mill around us, coming and going. Mary walks ahead of me and I watch her disappear into the ether, mingle with the crowd. Four painted stone dragons about twenty feet tall line both sides of the base of the steps, their tongues curled, their bodies a mosaic of blue and gold. The mist drops over us like a net. It makes me shiver. I can taste the dope in my throat. I feel fine.

When I catch up with Mary, we walk the temple grounds, discovering life-size stone statues painted pink, blue, and white, their arms akimbo, their hands clasped in joy, or gratitude, or pleading, in a number of ornate peak-roofed enclosures. Several small stucco chapels surround a single big one, where they keep holy relics of the Buddha. On the roof of the structure, a gold filigreed canopy reaches through the clouds in graduated measures.

“I could kiss the sky,” Mary says, staring upward.

“That tower is pure gold,” Taffy says, sliding up behind us.

“It’s pretty amazing,” says Mary.

“It’s all really gold?” I ask. “Not plating?”

“Gold, through and through.” Taffy laughs. “There’s a lot of gold here,” she adds and drifts away. I wish I could get interested.

A few steps in front of us, squat pails filled with small gold self-stick paper squares are set around each of the painted figures that mark the pathway crossings. We watch as the Asian visitors walk up, kiss the papers, and paste them on the totems. They’re prayers for good luck, we hear. I reach into a bucket and take a handful of the papers. “Can’t hurt,” I say, pressing them onto the statue. I don’t know any prayers. I say, “Hello.”

A gentle rain has started. Taffy looks at the sky, concern again crossing her dewy face. “This is really too bad,” she tells me. “On a clear day you can see into Laos, almost to the Mekong River.” She looks out to a point in the distance invisible to us and gives another of her sweetheart smiles. The Mekong Delta—the name always seemed so exotic to me before. Now it’s empty space.

“We’ll be moving on soon,” Taffy says, checking her watch again. “Ten minutes okay?” She’ll be waiting at the pickup.

Mary and I walk along a path by the main temple, enfeebled by the meditative hush. A row of heavy ancient bells, each about a foot long, runs the entire length of the temple wall. They hang from a pole affixed to the wall like dancers stretching at a ballet barre. They look about ten centuries old. If we don’t get out of here soon, so will I.

Back in the pickup, we start up a pebbly one-lane road, in the opposite direction from town. “Where to now?” I ask, wishing we’d brought some coffee. I’ve got the red balloon hidden behind a tampon in my vagina. I feel it sweat.

“A high-mountain village,” Taffy says. “You can do a little shopping there, if you like.”

“Sounds great,” I tell her, but all I really want to see is the inside of our hotel. Mary Motion sits quietly beside me, her hands twisting in her lap. “Now I wish I’d taken a little of that sample from you this morning,” she whispers in my ear. I nod in sympathy and watch the road.

“The hill people are simple but very gracious,” Taffy informs us. “They might offer you a cup of opium tea.” Mary presses an elbow to my ribs. “You don’t have to drink it,” Taffy assures us. “But it’s best to be polite.”

I put on my most innocent expression. “Is there opium here?” I do sound awed.

“Thai people are very polite,” says the woman from Brunei. “Everywhere you go. Everyone is so nice.”

“And,” her husband adds, “the women are all very beautiful.”

“Thank you,” Taffy says, her eyes twinkling.

“Thank you,” says the man. He puts his hands on his knees to steady himself. His wife gives him a look. The road’s getting rougher.

We’re in the trees, climbing yet another mountain, up and up. Again the fog and the emptiness, and the beauty. I sit very still and stare into the mist. Opium. It’s out there somewhere.

The road turns to mud as we pull into the village, a collection of small thatched-roof shacks lining a rutted path that winds gently up a hill, then turns away once or twice.

“God,” says Mary, with an expression of disbelief. “It looks just like Belize in the seventies!” She used to run cocaine out of there, she tells me. She was farming marijuana, too. “It rained a lot in Belize,” she adds. “Every day, for a year.”

“It’s letting up now,” Taffy chirps from the front seat. “Shall we walk?”

As we make our way up the muddy lane, I see the shacks are actually stalls for local vendors selling gemstones, textile prints, wall hangings, incense, and snacks. The whole village has a sodden carnival midway feel. Some of the vendors are dressed in traditional native peasant gear; the rest wear Western trousers and light shirts. “It’s like the Burma Road,” I say, stepping over the ruts.

“We’re not very far from the Burmese border”—Taffy nods—“many of the people here cross over every day to work in the fields or sell their wares. It’s illegal, of course,” she says, keeping her voice low. “But it’s the only way these people can eat. Most of the gem dealers are fakes,” she lets on. “Later I’ll take you to the ones selling genuine stones. Anyone who tries to sell you stones in the street is taking you for a ride.”

Even as she says this, a twenty-something boy in a plaid shirt approaches, several strings of beads slung from his arm. He shows us a tin paintbox in his hand. Inside are a number of tiny stones—rubies, sapphires, diamonds, emeralds, pearls. He insists they’re real and that they’re not stolen, says we can trust him. He quotes a few prices, neither high nor low. Over the boy’s shoulder I see Taffy wave us away.

Soon we’re standing before a house at the top of the hill. It has a decrepit fence around it, and sits awkwardly on a rise just above the road. It appears to be sinking in our direction. Two chickens pace the yard; two roosters scratch the ground nearby. Loosely woven baskets are perched like hats on the weather-beaten stakes of the fence. A couple of paper lanterns dangle from the roof. Taffy brings us around the far side, where a woman who could be thirty or fifty is sitting on a porch step. According to my guidebook, she’s wearing a traditional Meo-tribe hat over her black blouse and embroidered black skirt. We watch as she paints a piece of linen with a quill-type brush, making rows of delicate symbols. Several children surround her. Taffy makes small talk, then motions us inside.

“What are we doing?” I ask her.

“I thought you might like to see how the people here live.”

“Okay,” I say. But it isn’t.

It takes a minute to adjust to the gloom inside, one room on a dirt floor. Smoldering wood sits in a hole dug in the middle of the room, under a makeshift stove. A large, heavily encrusted wok sits over the heat on a piece of thin metal. A few pots and a couple of enamel bowls lie on a sad wooden counter beside it. “This is the kitchen,” Taffy says as if we were visiting the Grand Palais. “Feel free to look around.”

I want to run out the door. It’s embarrassing, gawking at the poor woman this way. What can we say? “Oh, how clever”? “How lovely”? “How delicious”? There’s primitive plumbing in a corner by a rusting sink and, behind a hanging blanket, a couple of mats for beds. Long drapes of thin cotton plaid hang over the windows. Maybe there’s glass there but I don’t think so. There’s no place to sit, except on the ground, and nothing to do about any of it.

Mary and I slip back outside while the others examine the even darker corners of the room. “It’s really exactly like Belize,” she says. “I can’t get over it.”

Behind the shack, we spot a chimney sort of structure in the ground. It might be a kiln, or an incinerator. It might be an opium refinery, too. I bend and take a sniff, hoping to catch the familiar odor, but all I find is mud and a few fallen leaves. Not the season, I guess. I pick up a twig and poke through the leaves. Mary watches me with amusement. “Anything in there?” she asks.

“I can’t tell,” I admit. “I don’t think so.” I glance down the hill toward the village. In one of these rude huts, someone is refining heroin and I want to know where. I just want to … know.

We go back and join the others. They’re waiting on the porch, wondering what we’ve been up to. “Just looking around,” I say.

We thank the peasant woman and saunter down the road past two groups of German tourists. Taffy shepherds us into the shelter of a gem dealer she says is genuine. In a minute my hands are filled with tiny pink rubies. I stare at them. So tiny. They look like candy but better, harder. I put them back on the dealer’s table, where small pieces of raw jade, emeralds, and other stones are on display. I notice the scale. It’s exactly like mine. It gets me thinking about the border guards again. I can’t spend money here … and I can’t walk away empty-handed. I pick out a couple of unpolished black star sapphires. The dealer weighs them in the scale—twenty dollars, she says. I buy them. Taffy approves, though she wonders why I don’t take a few rubies, too. She points out larger examples. I see she’s something of a shill for these people. I wonder if she takes kickbacks.

I find Mary in the next stall, considering the heft and price of a lacquered human skull in her hand. It’s speckled brown, like a quail’s egg. There’s a brass hinge at the nape of the neck, where it must have been torn off. She plunks down a hundred and twenty dollars, American. The skull drops in her bag with a thud. “This is a sacred object here,” she tells me as we merge back into the muddy road. “It’s very precious.” Actually, she says, it’s sort of illegal to remove. She’ll have to smuggle it out.

Great. Dope up the ass, Thai stamp on the passport, skull in the bag. “How are you going to get that past customs?” I ask.

“Oh,” she says, “maybe this’ll distract them—from the other thing.”

The sun’s shining now, it’s almost too bright. I ask to see the skull. It’s heavy as a bowling ball. “How old d’you think this is?” I’m curious.

“Old,” she says. “I’ll make some money on it when I get back home. There’s a nice market in New York for antique skulls.” A born smuggler, this Mary Motion. I can learn a thing or two from her.

Mario is just waking up when we get back to the hotel. He wants a snort from the sample. “No needles,” I say, “no problem.”

“No problem,” he replies, dusting off his eyes. I go in the bathroom to retrieve the balloon. I dangle it in Mario’s face. “Breakfast,” he says with a grin.

“Buon appetito.” I smile.

Just before two p.m., Mario cinches up the moneybelt and heads out in the pedicab. Mary and I pack our bags and walk around town looking for something to eat, something small and easy to digest. It’s cloudy again, this is no fun. In a few more hours we’ll be back in the pukable miasma of Bangkok. I hope the borders are open.

“Let’s not stay in Bangkok,” I say. “Let’s go straight to Singapore.”

“Okay by me,” Mary says.

We step into a fluorescent-lit Formica place that resembles a McDonald’s but more plastic, if that’s possible. Maybe four other people are there, one Caucasian hippie couple. It’s raining again. Everyone looks out the windows at the rain. We order by pointing to pictures on the wall. Who took these pictures? How long ago? They don’t look very new. What does that say about the food? I’ve been living on chocolate milk, heroin, cigarettes, vodka, and coffee for over a year. What do I care about freshness? I wish Kit was here. What am I doing with these people?

The food comes fast; it seems warmed over. I try the Thai noodles but I don’t swallow well. Mary Motion can’t eat her rice either. Maybe when we’re in Singapore, we say. Maybe then we’ll eat. We watch the rain.

Later, Mario says he’s paid for the stuff but he has to go back at six for the pickup. He wants me with him this time. A secret smile sneaks across my face—my private face, the one I never show the world, the one I keep under the skin, where this life can never betray it.

At five-thirty I’m in the pedicab with Mario. The driver knows where to go. I worry about that, but Mario, of course, says not to. He’s paid off the driver, whose name is Chuck. We pedal onto a wide concrete bridge that crosses the River Ping. Chuck stops by a roadhouse sitting on the riverbank. Graceful trees hang low over water that appears still and glimmering in the late afternoon sun. “Wait for me here,” Mario says. “I won’t be long.”

I’m the only customer in the bar, a rustic barnlike room with a few scattered picnic tables. The whole place is varnished knotty pine. It reminds me of the one Catskill Mountain hotel I ever went to, when I was fourteen, but without the Ping-Pong. The slight Thai barman is setting up for the evening, washing glasses, polishing the bar. I ask for a beer and go out on the back deck to wait. To pass the time I watch the traffic on the opposite shore, study the sun going down. I wish I knew where Mario was. “Three or four houses up the road,” he said when he left. I wish I could see which one, but the trees—

I wish it were me making the pickup. I want to see who these people are, how they do it. Mario says it’s a family and that they’re very organized, very professional. Someday, I reflect, I might want to make this trip on my own. No, what am I thinking? I never want to come this way again. I want to get my dope, make my money, and get the hell out of this business, if there is a getting out. At the moment, it seems impractical.

Mario hasn’t returned when I finish the beer. I’m restless. It must look strange, me sitting here drinking by the river, a white girl in black clothes, alone. I stare at my sneakers. I look to see where the barman is. He’s watching me through a window. I light a cigarette, signal for another beer.

I wish I could like what I’m doing. It’s not so bad, really, I guess. I’m having a vacation, I’m out of New York. I smoke and drink the beer, watch the sun, the lilies floating on the water, the bicycles gliding slowly across the bridge. It looks like the Pont Neuf in Paris. I sit in the twilight, still as a Buddha. I feel calm inside, pleased I’ve been handed this good dope, this good day, this good hour. I’m on a mission, that’s what it is, this is important. I’m hauling back pleasure for a lot of worried people who need me.

No, it’s not a mission, it’s just a job. I have a business and I’m doing my job. I’m doing the right thing—I’m lucky. I’m lucky to be here. Not everyone gets opportunities like this. For a fleeting moment, I remember my life, a tiny speck on the floor of my imagination. I don’t know where I am or what comes next, maybe never did. All I ever wanted was to feel swallowed whole. But in my dreams, I was always suffocating.

Even as a child I was afraid of my dreams. My parents would tuck me in bed and turn out the light, and when the door closed I’d lie there and wait for sleep and push it away when it came. When I was five, my Uncle Jack died in a car crash, killed in an instant. I began having a recurrent dream. It was a Humpty Dumpty sort of dream that began at a mortared stone wall.

My great-uncle Willie was there with me, leaning on his cane. He was my mother’s uncle, but she looked to him as a parent because her parents had both died young. He was old enough to be her father but, unlike my mother, he seemed young enough to be my friend.

With Uncle Jack dead, Uncle Willie became my favorite relative. He was my favorite because we shared a secret. Whenever my family visited him and my parents went out, we stayed up late together and watched wrestling matches on TV. We didn’t have a TV yet in our house. Commercial TV was only about as old as I was then and most people didn’t have it. My great-aunt and -uncle had TV but no children—not counting my mother, who had been born to my great-aunt’s twin sister, probably a suicide. I don’t know that for sure, because my mother never told anyone how my grandmother died. “Of a broken heart” was all she ever said. “At least,” I told her once, in a fit of anger, “at least she had a heart that could be broken.”

This great-uncle was a believer in physical culture. When he ran from the Nazis at the outbreak of World War II, he got out of Germany and went to England, where he worked in a cousin’s gymnasium. He taught swimming and weight lifting, and every day he shaved his head. He left a few hairs on top, which he would carefully comb and position with Brylcreem. At the gym he coached the wrestlers. He didn’t wrestle himself, because he’d come to England with a head injury. He also acquired a cane. I never knew why; his injuries were never apparent. A lot of the time he just let the cane hang over his arm, but he didn’t go anywhere without it.

Under his mattress Uncle Willie kept a silver flask that was always filled with brandy. When we stayed up to watch wrestling on TV, we drank from the flask. That was our secret. We stayed up after hours and took nips of brandy, he from the mouth of the flask, me from the cap. Then I’d fall asleep.

In my dream we stood before this high crumbling wall passing the flask. On one side of the wall thousands—thousands—of people were crowded together in the shadows, screaming for release from a pit behind the wall. They were badly dressed and many had crutches, like my great-aunt, who had a broken hip. Everyone was pushing against the wall, as if they could topple it with the sound of their screams and the weight of their agony—as if they could simply push it away, as I did the arrival of sleep.

My uncle, because he needed a cane, couldn’t scramble over the wall. Also, he was too short. I, a child of five, was even shorter, but I had get-up-and-go. Also, because this was my dream, I could do anything that seemed like the right thing.

I was able to boost my uncle to the top of the wall, and I, finding toeholds between the old stones, could lift myself up after him, above the screaming minions. Whenever we reached the top and knew we could jump over, I woke up, breathing hard. I had to sing myself back to sleep. I sang a lullaby to the crippled souls imprisoned behind the wall.

Many years later, many, but before I found drugs, Uncle Willie was living in a home for the aged in the Bronx. Every now and then I’d hop a D train in the Village and go to see him. One of the last times I went, Uncle Willie wasn’t in his room. My aunt was dead by then and I knew he often wandered the halls of the home talking to the ladies. They all seemed to have a crush on him. One of them was his new girlfriend. They were both in their middle seventies.

I went down the hall to the girlfriend’s room to see if he was in there. She hadn’t seen him since the morning. She wasn’t feeling well that day. I left her alone, went into the cafeteria and then out into the garden. No uncle. Finally I went to the desk in the lobby to look for a nurse. She disappeared a moment and returned with an administrator. The administrator told me my uncle’s rent had not been paid that month and what could I do about it? My uncle’s expenses were usually paid by checks that came from the German government—war reparations. If they hadn’t come, there wasn’t anything I could do about it. All I had was a token for the D train. I didn’t tell the woman about the token. I asked where my uncle was, but she didn’t know. She looked at the nurse. The nurse then said my uncle had gone out for a walk and hadn’t returned for lunch.

A social worker appeared from an inner office. “Are you a relative of Mr. Winter’s?” she asked. I told her, Yes, I’m his niece. “Your uncle had an accident,” she said. “They just called from the V.A. hospital up the road. They have him over there. Someone found him collapsed in the street. They may not let you in, but maybe you should go on up there.”

The V.A. hospital was at the top of a steep hill a few blocks away. It was an old building that smelled of urine and floor wax and antiseptic. As I walked down a hall past wards of up to forty beds, I saw men without legs or teeth or eyes, lying on cots or sitting limply in wheelchairs, coughing, grunting, or staring. A lump formed in my throat and stayed there.

I found my uncle in a room with six other men lying quiet in their beds. This was the cardiac intensive care unit; they thought he’d had a heart attack. His face was red with the effort of staying alive. The stubble on his head was visible. My first thought was, If he could see that, he would have a heart attack.

As I sat down by his bed, a young East Indian doctor approached. They couldn’t really keep my uncle in the V.A. hospital, he explained, because my uncle was not a veteran. But, he said, they were afraid to move him. They were waiting for the home to decide if it would pay his expenses. I explained that my uncle received a hefty check from Germany every month and I was certain it would pay his expenses. Well, said the doctor, they wanted to perform a spinal tap, but they needed a family member’s written permission. Would I sign the form? I had just turned twenty-one. I could sign the form, but I didn’t want to. I’d never heard of a spinal tap. I called my mother.

Her response was just short of hysterical. I told her not to worry, Uncle Willie seemed safe and comfortable, and maybe the spinal tap wasn’t necessary. We decided to wait. When I returned from the phone, my uncle looked frightened. He squeezed my hand. He wanted to go back to the home. Would I take him? He was sure he could walk. The doctor warned me against moving him. I told Uncle Willie to sit tight, I’d be back the following day.

Next day I was on the D train again, and by the time I reached my uncle, he was just this side of conscious. I still didn’t know what was wrong. The doctor handed me the permission form and I signed it. My uncle’s face was still flushed and his temples visibly pounded. I was scared. I knew we were back at the wall and I couldn’t help him over it. I went home.

The next morning they called me to say he was dead. Would I pick up his things, sign a few more papers? First I went to the V.A. hospital. They handed me his cane. At the home they gave me his wallet and a receipt for the reparation check, which they said had finally arrived. My father was coming to get the rest of his belongings, which were collected in a few slender cartons. The silver flask was on top, so I took it. It was empty.

At the funeral, my mother sat next to me. When the service ended, she gripped my arm. “There’s no one left,” she said.

“I’m here,” I whispered.

“That’s not what I meant,” she said.

Two years later, she died, too. According to Jewish ritual, a family member has to identify the body. A mortician took me to her casket. In the hospital, she’d been just skin and bones, her back riddled with tumors. I could hardly look at her then. Here, I simply stared.

“Is this woman your mother?” the mortician asked. It was cold in the room and I shivered. It wasn’t the mother I’d known. Her face had been round and ruddy, eyes green. Her hair had once been wavy, on the thin side, sometimes dark, sometimes fair. There had been a slight furrow to her brow, a look of concern, or dread, or expectation, I never knew exactly. Her hands had seldom been at rest. Now they were folded on her chest, frozen in an attitude she never had. Her hair was bouffant, a rusty orange, her skin had a yellow cast. The furrow in her brow was filled with putty.

“Is this your mother?” the mortician said again. I nodded, furious, a cramp forming in my belly. The mortician closed the casket.

I’m the only one left, I thought at her funeral, though I kept the thought to myself. My father was there and so was my brother and a number of my mother’s friends, many of whom were weeping. They looked like the shadow people cowered at the wall in my dream. They kept calling me by my mother’s name. I left them standing there, and built a wall out of drugs, drugs to keep agony at arm’s length. Whenever I looked back, as I did, as I had to, those people were huddled there still, the same expressions on their faces, expectant and sad, but they had drug names and drug bodies, and when I looked back again, I saw them once more, unmoving and unmoved, in a place I couldn’t change or fill. Now here I sit, expectant and sad, where the river drifts in silence and my blood travels thick in my veins, pooling as it reaches the wall.

A voice breaks my high. It’s Mario. “Hello,” he says, a Thai-style smile lifting his cheeks. He’s standing near the rail of the deck, two brown paper shopping bags in hand. My God, how much are we carrying? These bags are enormous, almost the size of the ones you get at Bloomingdale’s when you buy a full-length down coat. Mario’s eyes are twinkling. I’m not even halfway through my second beer. He walks toward me and casts an eye at the road-house windows. I move off the deck to a dirt path that runs along the embankment, and he slips one of the bags in my hand. I look down. “Don’t look yet,” he says, but I’ve already seen it—about a dozen red condoms sitting unconcealed in the bottom. They’re solid, stuffed with heroin packed tight into rocks. They look exactly like votive candles with little knots where the wicks would be.

“Why do we need these huge bags?” I ask.

Mario says he doesn’t know. “I wish you could have seen how they do this,” he says, still smiling.

“Me, too,” I say.

“Very professional operation,” he muses. “Very professional.”

“Shouldn’t we get a cab?” I remind him. They must have given him a snort, I think. That’s why he took so long. Figures.

“Let’s walk,” he says.

Now he’s dreaming. “Walk? With these? I don’t think so.” I’m not about to parade around the streets of Chiang Mai with a big bag of heroin knocking at my side. My eyes shift around in my head, searching for cops and possible informers. I don’t see anyone, but it’s dark now and this isn’t my country. I don’t know what to look for or where.

“They want us to get the nine-o’clock bus to Bangkok,” Mario tells me.

“Bus? We’re taking a bus?” I’m mystified. “What’s wrong with the plane?”

Mario shrugs. The movement makes a sound in his bag as his bundles shift. “They gave me the bus tickets,” he says, patting the pocket of his linen shirt. “All paid for,” he smiles, pleased. “They say it’s safer than the airport.” He takes my hand and we stroll along on the banks of the Ping, just two romantics of no special interest, tourists with shopping bags, hunting for bargains.

“I’m not going on any bus,” I tell him. “That’s crazy. What do they care how we leave?”

Mario shoots me the darkest look I’ve seen on him yet. “I think we better do what they say,” he tells me.

“How much is here?” I ask then.

“Fifteen ounces,” he whispers.

Fifteen ounces? At seven to ten thousand dollars each, they’re going to turn a pretty penny in New York. It’s four hundred an ounce here, less than what I get for a gram, twenty-eight to the ounce. Not bad, I think. Maybe I could do this again. “Okay,” I say. “We’ll take the bus.”

We go to my hotel room, where Mary Motion is waiting with the K-Y and the luggage. “Fifteen ounces,” she says. “Three of us. We’ll divide it.” We wrap the bundles in double layers of condoms, then separate to insert them.

For years, I’ve been hearing about this. They say once you push the stuff in far enough, the bundles travel naturally into your small intestines, where you can’t feel them, safe from the stomach acids that kill cocaine swallowers, virtually undetectable by the Feds. Customs inspectors have probes, of course, but they don’t reach up that high, and even if they x-ray the stomach, no one sees a thing. When we get to New York, all we have to do is take the laxatives we bought, and the loot will come tumbling down. These laxatives are German, much stronger than what we can get in the States. Even so, it could take a few days, or a week, even two, to bring it all back home.

In the bathroom I discover the packing to be not so different than putting in any other suppository, except these are bigger, really like wearing a candle in your ass. When the first two are in, I realize I’m going to have trouble with the rest. I apply a generous portion of the K-Y jelly, and the third ounce goes in, but no matter what I do, I can’t get the fourth to stay. It looks like I’m going to need help. I don’t know what to do. I can’t exactly ask Mario or Mary Motion to bugger me; that would really be too weird. After I struggle a few minutes more, I pull on my jeans and knock on Mary Motion’s door.

“How you makin’ out?” I ask.

“I’m ready,” she says, opening the door. “You?”

“I can only get three to stay in,” I confess. “What do you think I should do?”

“Want me to help you?”

“Uh,” is all I can say.

She offers to try to take one of my bundles inside her. We rewrap an ounce and she goes in the bathroom to try it. “Nope,” she calls out a minute later. “Sorry. I’m full up.”

Very businesslike then, she demonstrates a position that should help accommodate me to the process. I wish I hadn’t tried to eat; I really could use a little more room. I go back in the bathroom and start again. I have to relax, I tell myself. I’m too tense. I finger myself for a while, hoping to lubricate myself naturally, but I’m too stressed to make it work. Finally, after a lot of pushing and grunting and praying, I get the fourth ounce up inside but I know there’s no hope for the last.

Mario knocks on the door, says we have to get going or we’ll miss the bus. In desperation, I jam the last ounce up my ass but it doesn’t go in very far. I can feel it hanging, fucking turd. Well, it’s not visible. I watch myself walk around in the bedroom mirror. I know I look stiff but so do a lot of tourists. There’s nothing so unusual about me.

In the lobby we pay our bill and walk to the bus stop. It’s not very far. Darkness has fallen and Chiang Mai is gearing up for another night of shopping. We walk close to the houses that line the road. We’re afraid of running into Okay Joe. As we near the bus stop, we spot the back of a man who looks just like him. Oh, no, I think. Oh no.

But this man’s Caucasian, an undernourished hippie with stringy brown hair and an unkempt goatee. How long has he been in this part of the world? To my surprise, Mario waves at him. They’d seen each other earlier, copping at the house by the river. This guy was coming out as Mario was going in. I ask where he’s from. “North America,” he says. Mario tells me he’s Canadian, but I think he’s really from Australia. We’re trying to be cool and not ask questions, but Mario says the guy has made this trip many times before, and there are things I want to know. “How long is it to Bangkok?” I ask, for starters.

“About ten hours,” he says.

Ten hours? Ten hours in a Thai bus with five ounces of heroin hanging out my ass? The thought stones me to silence.

The bus pulls up nearly full, no foreigners. The locals eye us suspiciously as we make our way to the rear. Mary Motion and I take seats together; Mario drops into another on the opposite side of the aisle, in front of the Canadian, who settles himself by a window and watches the street. The seats are covered in plastic, the kind you see in houses where the furniture’s not paid for. They’re built for Thai comfort, too short and narrow for any of us.

As we pull away from the curb, an expressionless stewardess in tight saffron cotton slacks and a drab yellow blouse starts passing out trays with “dinner”—a fried chicken leg that must have been cooked about a decade ago, a sprig of parsley, a carrot stick, and a hard, very hard, roll. “Guess we got on the no-frills run,” Mary surmises. I wave the stewardess past. She seems to take this as a personal affront. She has none of Taffy’s robust flair; she could be one of my customers after a bad day on the street. She could be one of us, a little farther down the road.

A few minutes later she lurches down the aisle with a tray of drinks: orange juice in plastic containers. To soften her up, I take one but don’t drink it. “Good thing we ate before we came,” I say to Mary.

She looks pale. Her mouth twists. She says, “I don’t think I’ll ever like food again.”

The driver turns on a TV monitor attached by a chain to the ceiling at the top of the aisle. “Oh, good,” Mary says. “Entertainment.”

A kung-fu movie begins. It has Thai subtitles and consists of almost constant shouts, grunts, and screams at earsplitting volume. The villains all appear to be women. Women who die early in the film show up again later, in different costume, only to get killed again, more brutally, but still they won’t stay dead. When this movie ends another begins, all the same people, same plot, new weapons. This one’s even louder and more vicious than the first. Blood flows every few frames. I can’t believe no one else minds, but a number of our fellow travelers are dead asleep. I try to read but it’s hopeless, I can’t tune out the sound of mortal combat. I look past Mary out the window. Can’t see a thing. I shift in my seat; my arms stick to the plastic, and I’m cold—the air-conditioning’s on full. Then the bus slows and pulls off the road into an outdoor camp kitchen set under a large and splintery teakwood pavilion. The driver turns off the TV and shouts something in Thai. We have to get off. From the window we can see waiting military police. Has there been another coup, or are we in a lot of bad trouble? I look at Mario, who’s staring wide-eyed at the Canadian. “Just a rest stop,” he says. “Have some tea.”

I pull myself together, suck in my abdomen, tighten my ass. I don’t want to have any accidents. Outside, the driver and the hostess direct us to long picnic tables, where the other passengers are already sitting down to bowls of steamed rice and green tea. The air is almost as sticky as the plastic seats in the bus but now I don’t care; at least my goosebumps are disappearing. We file silently past the soldiers, who board the bus as soon as we’re all at the tables. We pantomime gratitude for the meal. They’re watching us, everyone is. We stick out like sore thumbs. There’s only one reason Westerners like us would put themselves through this torture, and everyone knows what it is. “How on earth could anyone think this is the safe way out?” I ask Mario. He can’t even speak, he’s so scared. “Really,” says Mary Motion.

Fifteen minutes pass before the soldiers emerge from the bus. Now they’re checking over the baggage compartment. I look for a bathroom. It’s an outdoor latrine. In total darkness I push the last ounce back up inside me but it still doesn’t go very far. I want a cup of coffee pretty bad but I don’t dare have one. When I leave the latrine, the others are already seated in the bus.

I ask the driver if he’ll turn down the volume, I want to get some shut-eye. He nods and closes the door. We’ve taken on new passengers here; there isn’t a single empty seat. I sink miserably back into mine. Mary says she’s so tired she thinks she can fall asleep. “Me, too,” I say, and a few minutes later I start to drift off, but suddenly the sound-track volume increases again and soon it’s back to the level it had been before. I catch the Canadian’s eye. “How much farther is it?” I ask.

“Relax,” he says. “We’re not even halfway there.”

We stop two more times during the night. The other roadside rests aren’t as grand as the first—one is barely more than an oversize shack—and all they serve is tea. As day breaks I begin to see road signs to Bangkok. Still the TV blares kung-fu. I can’t wait to get off. I can’t wait. When we pull into the city, twelve hours have gone by, it’s nine a.m. I think only of the sample nesting in my cunt.

The Bangkok air hits us like a wall of mud. This has got to be the most inhospitable place in the world; New York is a cool mountain stream by comparison. We get our bags and tumble into a waiting cab, move out into the worst rush-hour traffic I’ve ever seen. The world could easily be coming to an end. And we still have to get out of the country.

An hour later we’re no nearer our hotel than when we started. We seem to be driving in circles. The driver says he’s looking for the quickest route. Eventually, he finds one.

At the hotel we book rooms for half a day and go upstairs to pull ourselves together. The second the door closes behind me I’m reaching for the sample. In no time I have powder in my nose. I leave the hotel refreshed.

The airport terminal now resembles a department-store bargain basement on a luggage-sale day, teeming with people as anxious to leave as we are. Bags lie all over the floor in long snaking lines. We sit on ours and wait for an inspector to check them through.

The agent at the customs desk checks the passports of two English boys in front of me and gives them a careful once-over. He tells them to remove their sunglasses. Uh-oh. I hadn’t intended to get high before plane time, but that bus trip … that air … the perspiring crowds. I take off my shades and hold my breath. If Uncle Willie could get out of Nazi Germany, I reason, I ought to get through a Thai airport. It’s in my genes.

The agent questions the English boys about where they’ve been and what they’ve been doing. With some reluctance, he lets them pass—providing they never return in his lifetime. I hand over my passport. The agent doesn’t even look at the date. He barely looks at me. In a minute, I’m on my way to the gate. Mario and Mary are right behind me.

At the gate the buzzer sounds again, and again I have to empty my bag, let the inspectors examine the penknife. They judge it to be harmless. But as we enter the boarding area, an airline official pulls us aside and my heart moves into my throat. “Excuse me,” he says, “but can you wait here a minute? There seems to be a mixup on the tickets.” He moves away, our boarding passes clutched in his hand.

“This is nerve-racking, isn’t it?” I say.

“I wish you’d get rid of that knife,” Mary pouts.

I insist I need it for the dope. She doesn’t answer. We’re pretty tired of each other by now, and we still have ten thousand miles to go.

Two minutes before takeoff the airline attendant returns and hands us new tickets. We’ve been moved from coach to first-class. “Sorry for the delay,” he says.

It doesn’t take long to figure out what the problem was. This is a British-owned airline, a class-conscious company if ever one was. Everyone in coach is Indian or Pakistani or Chinese; with few exceptions, everyone holding first-class tickets is Caucasian. It’s a rotten situation to be party to. On the other hand, it’s nice to have a comfy seat and eat on china with heavy silver service. We eat with gusto. We’re going to be in Singapore two days, time enough to shit and put all the stuff back where it came from. I drink two cups of coffee and smile all the way down to the ground.

The Singapore airport is the world’s easiest place for a smuggler. They seem really glad to have you in their country. They don’t look at your bags or your passport, they wave you on through. And Singapore itself looks a lot like Beverly Hills without the Spanish influence. The hotel our travel agent picked for us is a four-star job on a hill covered in oleander, jasmine, honeysuckle, and palm. After Bangkok, this is truly Shangri-la.

Mary Motion and I share a room again. It’s enormous, with a fully stocked bar and a view of half the island. I don’t feel the least bit tired now. I smoke a few lines and climb into the tub for a soak, first removing two of the ounces. The other three are deep within the recesses of my body, and I try to push these two up to meet them, but no go.

“Yo, Mario!” I call through the door. We have connecting rooms. When the door swings back I hold out one of the ounces, put an inquiring look on my face.

“No problem,” he says. More service with a smile. I hate that grin of his, that honeymoon leer, I envy it, and I don’t know what I’d do without it. The other ounce I poke back wherever it’ll ride and we go out in search of the Hotel Raffles.

Somehow, we never get out of the cab. This has less to do with the effects of the junk than it does the neighborhood, which has gone to seed. Raffles’ striped awnings sag, its rattan porch furniture looks ragged. I figure we’ll come back in the evening when the place is sure to have a little more romance. Right now it looks abandoned. I ask the cabdriver to circle it. I wonder which of these chairs was Mr. Maugham’s? Did he sit there, night after night, his Singapore Sling perched on the rattan arm, listening to the characters who would people his stories of the East? We circle again. Was he here with Noël Coward? The conversation must have dazzled. Or were they just cruising the boys drifting by, eating lotus flowers? No one is as interested in this as I am. “But what about the Singapore Slings?” I point out. “We can’t leave without having at least one.”

“I’m tired,” Mario says. “We can come back later.”

“Yeah.” Mary nods. “Let’s get the shopping in before the stores close.”

We drive aimlessly around town awhile, marveling at the clean streets and the neon-lit vertical malls. Eventually we go inside one, where I buy a duty-free camera and some film. I haven’t been using the Polaroid much. The only pictures I’ve taken feature landscapes and statues, not us. I’m not keeping a diary or sending postcards, either. I don’t want anyone knowing we’ve been here. I realize I’m happiest staying in my room, smoking my dope, pouring my drinks, and taking in the view. I can just about see Raffles from the hotel window, if I lean out far enough. I stretch out on the chaise. Finally, finally: I’m on vacation. At last, I’m away from my life.

I sleep ten hours, dead to the world. When I’m up, we get together to discuss: should we let the passports go? Mario thinks it’s stupid but I want to cover my tracks. It’s not so bad staying here. On the other hand, I really want to go. We go. Out comes the K-Y and in go the ounces one more time. I’m better at this now, they slide right up. Before I think about them again, we’re in Tokyo.

There seem to be thousands of people waiting at the Tokyo quarantine. We have to get a health stamp before we can change planes. We stay in line two hours, then wander through the terminal. That evil ounce is threatening to escape me again. On the plane I have to go into the head to fix it half a dozen times.

The flight east is shorter, but long enough for me to think up a few stories to tell customs. I’m nervous about my passport. I’m nervous about the dope. When the stewardess announces our approach to JFK, I go in the bathroom one last time.

We go through separate lines at customs. As I set my bags on the counter, I see Mary Motion and Mario sail out the door to waiting taxis. A female agent looks carefully through the pages of my passport. I smile at her. She doesn’t smile back. “You’ve been in Bangkok?” she inquires.

“Yes,” I say, ready for what comes next. “Dreadful place it is, too.”

“I see you were only in Bangkok a few days. May I ask why you were there?”

“Vacation,” I say. Just be yourself, I think. Be honest and they won’t see through you.

“That’s a long way to go for a few days’ vacation,” she says.

“Well, it wasn’t just a vacation,” I admit. The agent is searching my face. “I’m a writer,” I tell her. “I had this idea to write a guidebook for women traveling alone. A lot of women do, you know. Bangkok was my first stop.”

“Why Bangkok?”

“I got a deal on the ticket,” I explain. “See?” I show her the price. “They were having a sale.”

“Do you often travel alone?”

“Not always. Well, yeah. I guess so.”

“That’s a pretty useful idea,” the woman says. “A guide for women travelers.”

“Well, it’s a big world out there. There are lots of places to see.”

She pages through my passport again. “I hear Bangkok is, well, a pretty wild place, if you know what I mean.”

“It’s horrid,” I say. “Not wild. Unless you mean environmentally. The air stinks, the food stinks, and the hotels are completely awful.” Isn’t this enough now? Can’t I go?

“Did you go anywhere in Thailand other than Bangkok?”

“No, I hated it too much. It made me sick. The food made me sick, the air made me sick, and frankly, some of the people made me sick, too. It’s really not a place for women,” I conclude. “It’s all sleazy sex clubs, massage parlors, and cheap cheap clothes. I couldn’t wait to get out of there.”

“I believe you.” She puts the passport down. “Did you acquire anything while you were in Thailand?”

“Just a few trinkets,” I say. “Nothing of value.”

“Open your bags, please.”

She shuffles through them, looks at the passport again. I can see she’s thinking pretty hard, but I go on explaining what everything is, the lead elephants and the linen shirts. I keep the sapphires hidden but show her the camera and the receipt.

“You seem kind of nervous,” she says. “Why are you nervous?”

“I’m not nervous,” I say, forcing a laugh. “I just have to go to the bathroom.”

She raises an eyebrow and seems to catch the eye of someone behind me, someone in uniform no doubt. “Is there a publisher for your book?”

“Not yet,” I say, “but soon.”

“How do you pay for trips like this?”

I’m not prepared for this question. “This one was a gift from my dad,” I say.

“Sorry your trip didn’t work out the way you wanted,” she says then. “Welcome home.”

I could expel the ounce right there. “Good to be back!” I say happily and fly out the door.

From the cab the city skyline looks like the cradle of love, but it fills me with dread. I haven’t told Kit when to expect me. I thought it would be safer if she didn’t know. “Call you from the airport,” I’d said, but there hasn’t been time. I find myself hoping she won’t be home when I get there. I have a feeling I won’t want to stay.