Once the sun sets it gets dark immediately. Benign by daylight, the enshadowed jungle wakes a sense of primal horror; Kern leaves the road and looks for a place to spend the night by the faint glow of his cell. He finds a shallow cavity under a fallen tree trunk; it looks like it was dug out deliberately, but a long time ago, and nothing lives there now, so he scrapes up a nest from fallen leaves and branches and gets in.
He tells himself it’s just like a squat, but better, because the whole jungle is squat, with no guards or owners to get mad or chase you away. If there are patrols, they aren’t really looking for him, and anyway they probably can’t see him unless they have infrared. He wishes he had a gun, or some way to close up his cave.
He wakes, later, to birds calling in the night. Sleep is gone so he wakes his old phone and looks up articles on Kuan Lon. There’s one by Summer Scanlon, Ph.D., who is an urban sociologist, whatever that is, and it’s about how Kuan Lon is a physical manifestation of the regional psychopathology, and the historical irony of a People’s Path of Glorious Revolution militant drinking next to a colonel in the New China Army. More interesting by far is a tourist guide from decades ago, from before the fighting started, which tells him about the animals in the forest—there are grainy nocturnal videos of white owls and big grey cats moving among the trees—and of the tribes that used to live there; they were animists, which means they thought everything had a soul. He wonders what the tribesmen would have made of San Francisco, where cars, buildings, even coffeemakers have wills of their own. The mountains, he reads, had been gods, and he can see that; he remembers their snowless peaks above the trees, and it’s easy to imagine them conferring quietly in the twilight. He prays to them for protection, then, though he’s never prayed before, for he feels his death is near, gliding silkily through the trees, less malicious than playful, interested, endlessly patient. He considers going off into the jungle to meet his demon but there’s still Kuan Lon and the ring.
He wakes at dawn and sits for a while just breathing the cool air. A wave of homesickness buckles him, almost bringing him to tears, but Kuan Lon shines in his mind like a black star and he sets out, as Lares would have said, into the great dark forward.
* * *
That afternoon the road hits a clearing where there’s a checkpoint. He’s going to try to just slip away but the Thai officer, crisp in his air-conditioned power armor, sees him and beckons him over; the sweating, armorless enlisted men stare at him dully from the shade of a strangler fig. He thinks of running but of course they have guns. One of the foot soldiers is tinkering with some kind of military robot, its jungle-camo back a solid mass of missile pods, most of which are carbonized and empty—it looks a little like a mechanical mule with a horrible case of boils.
The officer says something in Thai, his voice emanating from the speakers in the armor’s shoulders, and Kern looks up at him blankly. They’re nervous about something, he thinks, and, whatever it is, I’m not it, and they know it, but they’re still curious about me. The armor says something in Chinese, then some other language, and then finally the tinny synthetic voice says, “Stop. You are entering a restricted area. What is your business here?”
“I’m going to Kuan Lon,” he says, immediately realizing it was stupid to tell the truth, but cops make him nervous. He reminds himself to use simple sentences, or the translation program won’t work.
“This is a restricted area,” the armor squawks. “You must have a special visa to enter this area.”
“I’m a boxer. Muay thai. I’m going there to fight,” he says, making boxing fists, his hands pitiful beside the suit’s enormous metal paws. He wonders what Thai jails are like—probably worse, much worse than American ones. He takes his wad of money out of his pocket, offers it up.
The officer looks down at him, then smiles and says something that the translator renders as “The cool heart leads to victory.” He bows, slightly, the armor groaning and stinking of burning oil as it moves, and says something that might have been a blessing but comes out as a disconnected string of static, and waves him on.
* * *
They fight by torchlight in Kuan Lon. He sees a boxer fall with blood pouring from his mouth, get rolled out of the ring and left at the edge of the jungle. They fight without gloves—the red firelight glints on the ground glass on the fighters’ hand-wraps. He sees a skinny Thai boy, younger than he is, die in the ring; he’s close enough to see the boy’s fixed, dilated pupils, his slack mouth as the doctor, a Japanese whose short-sleeved shirt reveals track marks, pushes on his chest in vain under the watchful eyes of the victor in his corner. He sees knife matches, the crowd silent as the blades test the distance, flickering over isoclines of commitment and dread, like serpents tasting the air, and finally the explosive attack, the arc of arterial blood. He hears bets made in Chinese, German, Japanese, English and Thai. He sees winners paid in yuan, yen, dollars, euro, bags of cocaine, bricks of heroine, fuel cells, ancient mosaics, Buddhas, Garudas, missiles, guns.
They’ve never cleared out the jungle—he guesses they didn’t want satellites seeing in—so you can never see far and it always seems to be dusk; flashlights glow through the jungle’s constriction, and, during the day, parallelograms of sun. He haunts the tracks worn through the undergrowth between the tents, the retrofitted shipping containers, the quonset huts that were surplus from a few wars back; everyone ignores him, except the bar girls, who call out invitations and snatch at his wrist as he passes them by. There’s a market where geckos scamper over piles of damp Gucci tote bags, sparkling crystal bottles of cologne, mildewed jeans; there are cardboard boxes brimming with plastic bags of coarse yellow opium, tied shut with a twist of wire. He sees a Karon tribesman showing his eight-year-old son how to analyze opium with a portable mass spectrometer, which is oddly comforting, because it’s the same model used back home by the more upmarket dealers. Burmese gunmen bargain quietly over jackets of French kevlar; big white Americans with army haircuts and oversized watches sit at cafe tables, drinking rice liquor, smoking hash and watching the girls go by. At night strings of red and white Christmas lights burn in the trees and show him the way to the ring.
He watches every fight but doesn’t try to get in the ring, though he has little money left. He sleeps on a thin mat in the woods, in a waste space where fragments of torn cloth flutter in the branches and the pale remnants of old plastic bags make the copse look like a burial ground. There’s a girl, whose name might be Lily—she speaks no English—who came to him, one night, of her own accord, and in the grey corpse-light filtering through the trees he marvels at the contours of her body, how an object of desire can be composed of these abstract curves and swells of tissue—the dark pucker of a nipple, the pores and hairs on the olive skin; running his hand over her stomach, he finds he’s become an anatomist, and knows where pressure would bring pain. Sometimes he talks to her in English, as he caresses her, and that helps, a little, but then he forgets words and there’s just the release, then the slight rankness of her, the stones pressing into their bodies through the mat, and her skin against his, which seems to be thawing something.
One morning he wakes alone—the copse is quiet, and the girl is gone, along with the last of his money. He lies there awhile, trying to find some lingering trace of her warmth, then goes into town to look for her. He can’t find her but in a bar housed in a shipping container there’s a girl with burgundy lipstick and a matching sheath dress who looks at the girl’s picture on his phone and says, “That’s Lily. Lily gone home. You want a new friend?”
He’s at the ring when the Christmas lights come on; he’s hungry, but that will have to wait. He finds the promoter, a small Thai with a laptop and decaying cargo shorts that show the boxer’s scars on his shins, and says, “How do you get on the card here?”
The promoter takes him in, shakes his head and in an Aussie voice says, “Sorry, mate, we’re full up, try another night,” and turns back to his laptop.
“So make some room,” he says, his voice almost cracking. “How about I bust up some of your boys, here, get the clutter off the card.”
The promoter regards him from under raised brows, then calls out something in Thai. A fighter with brown, snaggled teeth and a mass of scar tissue on his eyebrows laughs, shrugs, says something back; the promoter says, “All right then. You and young Chaksenedra here are now our prelim card, and may the experience live up entirely to your expectations.”
An old man beckons him over to a table by the ring and wraps his hands in strands of coarse hemp so tightly it hurts. The wrap finished, the old man takes a tube out of his pocket, smears Kern’s knuckles with glue and presses them into a plastic tub full of ground glass. He examines Kern’s glittering knuckles critically, says, “Dry two minutes,” in thickly accented English, smiles toothlessly and moves on to the next fighter.
He tries to warm up but his body seems to have no mass, his hands flickering through the air as though they’re weightless, empty shells, as harmless as smoke. The light is failing and a crowd has gathered, the white lights in the trees stellate through the billows of cigarette smoke and ganja. Someone lights the torches and the reek of kerosene fills the clearing. He knows they’re watching him, that the local wireless is buzzing with wagers on the events of his victory, defeat, death. He wants to run but beyond the torches and constellations of electric lights there’s just the jungle darkness, and he feels his death is waiting for him there. He remembers his discipline, starts stretching like he does before every training.
Before he is ready (but you’ve been waiting for this a long time, a voice says) the promoter takes his arm and ushers him toward the ring. He and the Thai with the bad teeth and scars climb in, and when the bell rings he’s still oppressed by lightness, feeling as ineffectual as a dream. He sees that Scars is dancing a little, intending to play with him, so he kicks him in the leg and closes; the openings are obvious, and for a moment he suspects the fight’s been rigged, but no, there’s the pain and the disbelief in Scars’s face as he eats punch after punch and he never sees the knee that finally breaks his jaw. Kern steps back, not even sweating yet, not believing it’s over, makes a point of not looking into the flash of the cell phones from the crowd.