At last he could bear it no longer. “Look,” he said, “can we turn this thing off?”
This being the hotel inhouse pornographic movie which had been playing for the past half hour. Made in Taiwan, it had a kind of jolly slapstick crudity which he’d found mildly amusing in the beginning, but it was starting to get on his nerves. He didn’t understand how Jek and the girl could sit and conduct a conversation with various sexual acts being performed on TV, but apparently they could; Asian sexual prudery was a myth he’d discarded a long time ago. It was just another in a long series of cultural dislocations which he should have got used to by now after a year in Southeast Asia, but he hadn’t. Which was odd, because as a Chinese-American, switching between English in school and the Hong Kong Cantonese of his parents at home, he was used to feeling out-of-kilter, schizophrenic, an inhabitant of dual worlds that met only in his head. He’d thought that, by taking a year out from college to wander around Asia, he might resolve some of this irresolution, but he’d found only that he felt more American the further he strayed from upstate New York (and conscious, all the time, of a heretical, shame-faced, relieved thought: thank god my parents had the sense to leave their hometown/ province/ continent). And never had he felt more irredeemably foreign than here, in a sleazy hotel room in southern Thailand, in the company of Jek and the girl, both overseas Chinese like him, hut, unlike him, born and bred in Southeast Asia and at home in the accommodations and compromises which the culture of the region demanded and which he, with his straight-arrow American rectitude, found at best incomprehensible and at worst offensive. Or perhaps he was just using cultural differences as an excuse, and refusing to admit that the real cause of his irritability was the fact that he was certain—no, he knew—that Jek and the girl had once been lovers.
Jek and the girl looked at him. Jek reached out from the bed and turned off the TV, plunging the room—coffin-sized, claustrophobic with its drawn blinds—into a sudden silence in which the only sound was the asthmatic wheezing of the airconditioning. “Thank you,” he said, sounding, and intending to be, sarcastic.
There was a pause.
“So, Russell,” Jek said, “what’s your excuse?”
“My excuse?”
Jek leaned forward, giving Russell a good glimpse of how his Hakka genes had coalesced into a hateful, fortuitous combination of broad cheekbones and a wide, surprisingly delicate mouth. “Why are you here? Why aren’t you on Wall Street like the rest of your overachieving second generation Asian American peers?”
Jek had studied law for two years in London University before calling it quits. The Singapore government, which had awarded him a scholarship, had not been pleased. He was vague about what he’d done in the seven years since.
Russell said, lamely, “They’re all in Silicon Valley actually,” and heard the girl give a short laugh.
She said to Jek, “Isn’t it obvious?”
“What’s obvious?” said Jek, lighting up, though a sign on the wall said in English and Thai, No smoking in the rooms. There was a hint of boredom in his tone; he was, as Russell had already gathered, easily bored. There was a lounge lizard quality in Jek, though at other times he gave the impression of being a hyperactive kid. Russell had not taken to him from the moment that Jek had opened the door of his hotel room. One look at Jek’s long-limbed athleticism made Russell feel even more of the over-intellectualiscd, life-starved Asian studies postgraduate that he in fact was. I have to meet a friend, the girl had said. He’s supposed to pass me something. He’d been tired from tramping around the dusty, unlovely city, all cracked cement and trailing overhead telephone wires, with not a stick of greenery in sight. Without thinking, he’d agreed, ok. It hadn’t occurred to him to ask the usual questions; he was used by now to the imperatives which governed life with the girl, her Delphic silences, her unfathomable decisions. He knew only that he was in thrall to her, in a way he didn’t fully understand himself.
“He’s finding himself.”
Russell said, grimly, “Always glad to be a source of entertainment,” as they both grinned. Twin Cheshire cats.
He said, “Care to tell me what’s your excuse?”
He was surprised when the girl answered first. “I used to work in a bank. I used to drive to work, listening to Aimee Mann sing Driving Sideways on the radio.” She brushed an imaginary hair out of her eyes. “After that it was just downhill the rest of the day. So I began to think, what’s the point?” It was the longest speech he had ever heard her make. He looked at her in some surprise, trying to imagine her in a bank. Imagination failed.
“Life’s too short,” Jek agreed. They had a habit, Russell had already noticed, of finishing each other’s sentences. The knot of irritation in his neck began to pulse again.
“I don’t have an excuse,” Jek said. “Unless it’s die young, stay pretty.”
“Oh please,” Russell said. He felt depressed. He hadn’t travelled halfway round the world to find the same cheap pat alienation.
“What were you hoping for? Something more profound?” Jek seemed, if anything, genuinely curious. “People are the same everywhere. They’re shallow everywhere.” He said this, if anything, gently, as though he knew and understood Russell’s frustrated idealism.
“I need air,” Russell announced abruptly. He said to the girl, “Are you coming?” He half-expected her to say no, but to his surprise she nodded. She motioned, one minute. While she was in the bathroom, the two men soaked in a heavy silence. Russell was wondering whether it was politic to ask Jek about the girl, in particular his carnal knowledge of her, but was afraid it might sound too adolescent. As though sensing his thoughts, Jek said, politely, “You like her, don’t you?”
“Any problem?”
Jek waved the aggression away. “All that’s over.” Glumly, Russell noted the over and what it implied. Jek looked round for an ashtray, found none and stubbed his cigarette out on the dresser.
The girl emerged from the bathroom; Russell stood in relief. “See you around,” he said to Jek with patent insincerity. Jek raised a hand in farewell; the girl exited without a word.
It was only when they’d hit the traffic-snarled street that Russell thought to ask, “So what did he pass you?”
She glanced at him sideways, a stray, ghostly smile flitting across her face. He felt the familiar, helpless twist in the pit of his stomach. “Wild mushrooms,” she said.
He first saw her in Koh Phangan, walking across the hot shimmering sand to the sea. She wore a white bikini and black sunglasses, her black hair coiled in a careless, unravelling knot on top of her head. She walked a little unsteadily, arms held slightly away from the body, as though she were, ever so gently, biplaning. An adolescent’s body, all slender bones and not a superfluous ounce of flesh anywhere. A memory of desire stirred in him; he put down his book and watched as she waded into the water and struck out for the open sea, swimming with precise, powerful strokes. She swam a good way out; at one point he lost sight of her, in the haze of heat over the horizon, and he sat up worriedly. Then he saw the flash of her bare arms and relaxed. She was, he estimated, about half a kilometre from the shore. It was high noon. Time for lunch, but he had no appetite. Watching the girl swim, thinking of the energy she’d expended, left him exhausted.
When she drifted back to shore, floating on her back in the shallows with her dark glasses still on and her hair spread about her like a rock-chick Ophelia, he turned back to his book, not wanting to be seen to be staring. He continued to pretend to read even when she stood over him, her small shadow darkening the pages. He had no choice but to look up.
“You’ve been watching me.” She said it as a statement of fact, recorded for posterity. She spoke in English, in an accent he had come to recognise as Malaysian or Singaporean.
He said, mock-boisterously, “Hey, it’s not a crime looking at a pretty woman.”
She ignored this. Nodding at his book: “Is that interesting?”
He had to admit, “Not particularly.” His intention of combining some worthy reading on the polluting effects of globalisation with bumming around Thailand had been scuppered by beach torpor; he felt a twinge of embarrassment at the graduate-school earnestness of his reading matter.
She’d been ringed by sun, casting her in shadow. As she moved out of the shadow, he saw that she was older than he’d imagined, older than he was, her skin lacking the fresh suppleness of youth. Saw, too, that the trunk of her body was stippled by a faint constellation of coffee-coloured spots, just discernible under her tan. Again, he tried not to stare.
“Café au lait,” he thought he heard her say.
“What?”
“They’re called café au lait spots. I have mild neurofibromatosis.”
He had no idea what she was talking about. She stood bundling up her hair, one foot drawing circles in the sand just inches from his face. A particularly dark spot ringed her ankle like a tattoo. Without thinking, he began to trace its outline; she looked down at him, consideringly. He felt sun-drunk, his mouth dry. He got, slowly, to his feet. She came up only to his chin, but her smallness had the density of rock.
She was alone, as he’d guessed; she radiated the self-sufficiency of a cat. In her rented hut down the beach, she tossed her keys on the camp bed and shod her bikini nonchalantly and turned to face him. He could smell the sea on her still. Her directness disconcerted him; desire for him, was at its keenest when the object of desire was just out of reach. Anticipation, he’d discovered, was always preferable to fulfilment. Sensing this, she said, with infinite contempt, “It’s all right, we don’t have to do anything,” and instead of feeling his manhood impugned, he felt only a surge of relief.
“It’s not that I’m not attracted to you,” he began, in his circumlocutions American way. She rolled her eyes.
It was odd, how he felt he’d known her forever, even though they’d just met. He lay propped on one elbow, wedged against her on the tiny campbed. The ceiling fan whirred creakily, barely stirring the warm afternoon air. He bent to kiss a spot on her shoulder. “Don’t,” she said. They went to sleep.
He woke to find the light fading fast, night drawing in rapidly. The fan continued its lopsided whirr; he felt a chill across his bare skin. The girl was propped up in bed, watching him. While he was sleeping, she’d got dressed: tie-dyed boxer shorts and a white t-shirt. Her hair was plaited and she wore a pair of black-rimmed, rather severe-looking spectacles; he remembered her unsteady, shortsighted walk down the beach. She looked like a bookish schoolgirl. Her backpack stood, squat as a troll, on the floor.
“Let’s go,” she said.
In the next town, he developed a raging fever. He woke one morning, his throat dry and raspy, and fell back on the bed with a groan. Shivering, he allowed himself to be piloted by the girl to the nearest doctor, a man who spoke no English and prescribed him an array of primary-coloured pills that caused his eyes to puff out like ganglions an hour later.
“You must be allergic to something.”
“Penicillin.”
“You should have said so.”
“I have no idea what the hell you and the quack were talking about.” He’d sat in the clinic, tame as a lapdog, while the girl conversed in fluent Thai with the doctor; they could have been conspiring to poison him for all he knew. He was aware of a querulous note in his tone; illness had been rare in his healthy American life and it was not his best state. The girl sat with her chin uplifted in thought, training on him the cool, detached stare which he imagined assassins wore. He guessed she would have no compunction about shooting him like a dog and leaving him by the side of the road.
She said, as though she hadn’t heard, “You’d better rest. I’ll get lunch.”
It began to rain soon after she left. It rained as though the heavens meant to deluge the earth. He had to close the casement windows; the stuffy room immediately became stuffier. With exquisite timing, the air-conditioning also failed. He cursed and thought with longing of the beach at Koh Phangan, its bone-white brilliance. Their itinerary since then—was it really only a week?—had been dictated by her: waking up each morning in yet another fleabag backpacker’s hotel, she would announce that they were heading for such and such a place, and he would just nod, a willing captive. Time with the girl had a fluid, amnesiac quality: minutes turned into days and the days swallowed up memory, leaving him born anew each morning. Home seemed increasingly unreal, like the fakely upbeat American sitcoms that populated cable television wherever he went; the only reality was the girl. He wondered if this was what Stockholm’s syndrome was like. Their mad perambulation interrupted momentarily by his fever, he thought to wonder for the first time what he was doing here. What he was doing with her.
Back at Columbia, there’d been a girl, quicksilver-bright, raven-haired. They’d met at a sit-in to protest World Bank policies. Besides global economics, they’d shared a mutual interest in Miles Davis and Chinese history. His parents were not thrilled: Ellen, they told him, was the wrong colour, while he tried to persuade them of the absurdity of their bigotry in the land of the free. His parents needn’t have feared. He and Ellen eventually drifted apart; she complained that he seemed to be experiencing life through a pane of glass. He worried that she was right. He hadn’t thought himself capable of a coup de foudre; he hadn’t thought himself capable of a lot of things.
He woke in the late afternoon. He was puzzled; he didn’t remember falling asleep. Experimentally, he sat up; the fever had broken and the swelling around his eyes had subsided, but he was aware of a gnawing hunger. He had not eaten all day. The girl, he remembered, was supposed to have bought lunch. She had left in the morning and had not returned. Her knapsack was gone.
He rushed down to the reception; no, they hadn’t seen anybody leave. He bought a sandwich from the cafe and went back to the room, which looked more desolate than ever. Down the corridor, he heard squeals of laughter, the sound of clinking glass. He waited an hour. Two. At some point, he slept again. When he next woke, it was dark.
Travelling alone had a different dynamic from travelling with someone. Travelling alone, you answered to no-one but yourself. Travelling with someone else, you developed a viscous, vicious dependence on the other person. At least, he had; he didn’t deceive himself that she was with him on anything other than a whim. He began a feverish crawl through the town, ducking into stalls, shops, bars. The town had seemed drab by day, but at night it took on a mysterious life. Winking coloured lights decorated the meanest stall and scooters carrying crazily heaped human cargo zipped along the pavements. He heard a great deal of laughter, which he couldn’t account for, unless it was just one of the phantasmogoric effects of travelling alone, to imagine that everyone else was having a never-ending party from which he was excluded. The laughter, the coloured lights, all seemed vaguely sinister; he grew clumsy in his movements, began bumping into people and backing off with exaggerated apologies. Someone shoved him from behind, shouted, “Farang!” Foreigner. He whirled round; shadows flitted past him in the dark. He’d been mad ever to think he could blend in. He started to run.
She was waiting for him in the hotel room. Propped up in bed against the pillows like a doll, reading a Thai newspaper.
“Where have you been?”
“I got detained.”
“What detained you?”
“Business.”
“Yes, tell me, what do you do?” This wasn’t her first disappearance on business by any means, but it was the longest.
“I’m a middleman,” she said. “I make deals. I get commissions.” She paid for everything, he’d noticed, in cash. She had wads of it, fished airily out of the pouch she wore around her waist like rabbits pulled out of a hat: the supply seemed inexhaustible, inexplicable. Whereas he lived from one American Express traveller’s cheque, cashed carefully every week, to another and drawn from a dwindling scholarship fund.
“Wild mushrooms,” he suggested, bitingly.
A smile lurked in the corners of her determinedly straight mouth: “Yes.”
“Bullshit.”
She said, coldly, “What do you want me to say?”
He tore the paper away, raged at her. The violence he felt in himself surprised, then frightened him: he was enjoying his rage, enjoying the thought of what he could do to that small, stippled body of hers. She watched him with narrowed, interested eyes. Then he was suddenly exhausted, anger spent.
He said, curious now, “Why did you come back?” and worked it out, slowly: “I’m useful to you in some way.”
In answer, she pulled him down. In her hair, her clothes, he could smell the freeze-dried, smoky air of some bar; he tried not to think where she could have gone. Her lips tasted of rain. He closed his eyes. With an effort, he held her off: “Did you really work in a bank?” An absurd non-sequitur, given what she was doing with her tongue in his mouth. But he felt, rightly or wrongly, that it held the clue to who she was.
(She spun lies, figments, as easily as a pious child recites his prayers. At times, he found himself almost enjoying trying to detect when she was lying, and when she was inadvertently telling the truth. His questions were asked mainly for the pleasure of seeing her concoct.)
She stopped long enough to say yes. But he had already lost interest in the answer.
Where are we going?”
She named a town on the Thai-Malaysian border. “Right. Where are we really going?”
“Where I was born,” she said.
He did not like the country—prosperous, humourless, a toenail on the slender foot of Malaysia—where she was born. When he was there, the papers had been filled with a fretful anxiety about being left behind in the race towards globalisation. Which was ironic because he had never seen a people that embraced economic colonisation by Western multinationals with such fervour.
“Why don’t we just take the train?”
She looked at him, as though to say, don’t be so anal. He didn’t ask again.
It was a hot day, the sun slung high in the sky, the light spearing down pitilessly. There was no escape. At the border, a long queue shuffled towards Malaysia. Backpackers, mostly Westerners, pickled red by the sun; lorry drivers ferrying goods; an army of motorcycles spewing choking black smoke. Thai immigration officials waved them on, looking smart and sinister and vaguely Latin American in gold-rimmed sunshades and military-style uniforms. The delay was on the Malaysian side. Craning his neck, Russell could see Malaysian customs turning luggage inside out with a zeal that seemed positively criminal in this heat. Popping gum, Russell tried to stifle the instinctive unease that border crossings roused in him. He couldn’t account for it, this irrational fear that he or his papers would somehow be found wanting and he’d be held back, left in limbo, stateless. Put it down to a family history of ancestors being smuggled across borders too numerous to mention, always fearful of being caught and repatriated. Or perhaps he’d watched one political thriller too many (the righteous man fleeing injustice in his own country—fake passport—his face on a wanted poster at the border crossing post, the close-up of the immigration official looking from passport to fugitive—the slow, reluctant descent of the official stamp onto the forged papers...).
He hadn’t given a thought to the girl, shuffling alongside him, until she had her fit. He heard the man behind him exclaim look out just as they stepped up to Malaysian customs. Her eyes rolled back into her head; she turned blue and keeled sideways, with the straightness of line of a felled tree; it might almost have been comical if he hadn’t been so scared. He caught her just before she hit the ground. A thin line of froth trickled from the side of her mouth. He was trying to remember his first aid—something about a bit between the teeth and the victim biting off his own tongue—when he found himself being shoved aside by two customs officials, who lifted the girl without ceremony and carried her round the main building to a side door. “Hey,” he said, “hey—”
He found himself in a small, air-conditioned office reeking of cigarette smoke. They’d laid the girl down on a sagging sofa, and a woman official was undoing the top button of her t-shirt. “Hey,” he said, “she needs help, she’s sick—”
The woman official, an Indian Tamil, stood, blocked his way. “She’s all right, understand? The fit has passed. She’s sleeping now. She’ll probably sleep for an hour. I’ve seen this before.” She spoke clearly, slowly in English, as if he were an imbecile or a foreigner who didn’t understand English. He felt a bubble of hysterical laughter rising in his throat. I’m American, don’t you understand?
One of the men said, “Sit down.”
The interrogation began. Was she his wife? No. Girlfriend? He started to say no, because his relationship with the girl was nothing like any of his previous relationships, then checked himself in time. This was not the place for hairsplitting. Yes. Was this the first time she’d had a fit? Did she have a history of fits? What did he mean, he didn’t know whether she was prone to fits? Wasn’t she his girlfriend? Had she been tested? Tested? His mind slow, fumbling, unable to grasp immediately what they wanted to know. One of them pointed to a sign on the wall. It was in a foreign language, but he saw the letters HIV. Understanding dawned; he was used, by now, to the reflexive hostility he’d encountered in the region about the disease. No, the girl did not have Aids. She was not HIV positive. She had (the word came back to him in a rush) neurofibromatosis. A neural disorder. Fits were one of the symptoms. It was not contagious. (He hoped to God this was true.) He’d recovered himself. Remembered the role he was supposed to play. Ugly American, ever ready to assert his rights. Making sure he wasn’t getting railroaded in some developing country where (he saw another poster on the wall) they hanged drug traffickers. Forgetting, momentarily, that his own country still had the death penalty (yes, but only for murder, murmured his pedagogic, inner voice). He was sweating, despite the blast of cold air from the air-conditioner.
Where was he from? America. Chinese-American? What was he doing here? (The same old dreary question. It was because of his skin colour, he knew. Asians found it hard to believe that fellow Asians would take time out to bum around. If you were white, they couldn’t care less.) Yes. Is she American? No, Singaporean. He saw their interest drop. She was almost one of them, and therefore uninteresting. They stared at him, fixedly, for a minute that seemed like an eternity, then turned away; they seemed almost disappointed. Relief flooded him. He asked whether the girl could rest in the office until she woke. Grudgingly, the men nodded and clumped out. The woman official settled herself behind the desk. There were no spare chairs. Russell leaned against the wall.
The woman official was speaking to him. He leant forward. She wanted to know which university he was from.
“Columbia.”
“It’s a good school, right?”
“The best,” he said, immodestly.
“Do you know how my nephew can get in?”
He was furious, but not surprised, to find Jek waiting for them outside Malaysian customs. In a battered blue Toyota, a car you wouldn’t have given a second glance and in fact he hadn’t, until the girl said, “That’s Jek.” Said it so that Russell knew she’d been expecting him, that they’d planned this all along and that he was the biggest stooge they’d ever encountered bar none. The sensation that he was being taken for a ride had been growing ever since the girl had walked calmly out of the immigration shed after waking from her Sleeping Beauty stupor, shouldering her heavy backpack with the expert, military heave of a little sabra. (What was in that rucksack? Why was it so damn heavy and why wouldn’t she let him help her carry it?). No explanation from her, no questions as to how she’d ended up in that office. She seemed as devoid of curiosity as an android.
“You took your time,” Jek said. “I need a drink, man.” He cut the engine. “Hello, Russell.”
They were in an emporium near the border. Emporium, Russell had learnt, carried a different meaning in Southeast Asia. It meant a Chinese-style, bargain price department store, stocking specialist Chinese food items and vaguely kitschy examples of chinoiserie. Jek and the girl were leaning over a glass, metal-rimmed case of a type Russell hadn’t seen at home since the early ‘70s. Looking at rows of sweets. “Wow, haven’t seen these for a long, long time.” “Hacks!” (A type of sweet, apparently.) “Coconut flavour!” “I used to love them in school.”
Russell said, “Anybody care to tell me what the hell is going on?”
His voice was louder than he’d intended. The security guard standing by the cashier looked their way. Jek and the girl stopped flirting with nostalgia long enough to give Russell wordless, reproving looks. They moved towards the entrance, Jek swigging the mineral water he’d come in to buy. They moved like two people who’d walked side by side countless times and knew the body rhythms and pace of the other by heart. He was surprised by the rush of heat, or anger, or jealousy (he wasn’t sure which) spreading across his chest. This wasn’t love, not even desire, more a paralysing compulsion than anything else.
So following her outside into the afternoon heat was not an act of will but of predestination, though he much preferred to stay in the air-conditioned, muzak-filled air of the emporium. (He was tired of the relentless heat, the humidity that soaked his t-shirt through in an hour, the sun. The sun. He found himself at times dreaming about winter, snowfalls that muffled sound and cold that stung.)
Outside, Jek and the girl were regarding him as if he were a persistent, rather amusing stray that refused to go away. And he realised that was his trump card with them: he refused to go away. He stood planted on the pavement before them, blocking the sun, blocking their path.
Jek said, “Shall we tell him?”
The girl had her arms crossed over her chest, each hand gripping the opposite shoulder, as though she were cold, or shivering, or hugging herself, or all three. “Why not?” He couldn’t understand what he was looking at at first. Six square plastic packets of a white powder. Like flour. No, not flour.
He said, “You gotta be kidding.”
He had smoked the odd joint back home of course. It had always been a post-supper kind of thing (like mints, he thought inconsequentially), the pasta dishes cleared, the scented candles flickering, the wine making everyone sleepy and mellow anyway. He never knew who brought the stuff, and he’d smoked it mostly to be polite. He had never seen hard drugs. Until now.
“Why?” the girl said.
She sat cross-legged on the bed watching him, the plastic packets spread before her like wares. Wearing her unflattering glasses, which somehow made her look younger than ever. The bed yet another hotel bed, the hotel another featureless backpacker’s lodging which Jek had led them to in this featureless border town. The same dusty blinds drawn against the sun, the same harsh fluorescent lighting, the same air-conditioner wheezing and leaking tiny plops of water onto the concrete floor. Déjà vu. A simulacrum of hell.
“Don’t they hang people for this in this part of the world?”
“Only if you get caught,” Jek said. He was sprawled on his front on the bed, looking up at Russell like a big, lovable puppy. Oh, how they wanted him to love them, to understand what they were doing! He could feel the emanations from them, powerful as magnetic rays.
“And you don’t plan to. Get caught.”
“No,” Jek said. “We’ve always been lucky. We plan to continue lucky.”
We. “You picked me up in Koh Phangan,” Russell said to the girl.
She smiled. “You had the look.”
“You think I’m a fool,” he said, bitterly.
“No, no,” Jek reassured him. “You look trustworthy. You look exactly what you are. A hardworking postgraduate student taking a summer break. You know how rare that is or not?”
“And that’s why you needed me? For my face?”
“You lent—what’s the word?”
“Verisimilitude,” the girl said.
“The customs people like that,” Jek said.
“Was that real?” Russell wanted to know. “That fit?” He couldn’t absorb it: the fact of the girl lying on the sofa in that immigration shed, the contraband just a few feet away in her backpack. (And he couldn’t help but think perhaps this was punishment for what he’d been thinking back in that shed: what it would be like to make love to a comatose woman. He’d seen himself maneouvring until he was propped on his elbows just above her, but without touching her. Kissing her on those lips that only minutes ago had been tinged with blue, and finding it almost creepily enjoyable until the woman official had started scratching in a file with a pen and he’d snapped out of his necrophiliac fantasy with a pounding heart.)
“Of course.” She said it without heat.
“Why don’t I believe you?”
She shrugged.
“Why,” Russell wanted to know. It wasn’t even a question.
Jek said, “It beats nine-to-five.”
Russell was outraged. “Hell. What do you know about nine to five? When was the last time you did an honest day’s work?”
Jek stared at him; hurst out laughing. “You’re serious. You’re shocked. Russell, you’re so sweet.”
The girl laughed too. She reached out to touch Russell’s hand hut he recoiled, instinctively. Even then, he had time to think: not in front of Jek.
“Don’t fucking patronise me. If you want to be some lousy drug dealer, for God’s sake just be a lousy drug dealer. Don’t wrap it up in some pathetic existentialist crap that would disgrace a sixteen-year-old.”
“Actually,” Jek said, “when I was sixteen all I wanted was to be a lawyer. I was going to get a Mercedes. Live in a bungalow. Buy some koi fish.”
In Jek’s drawling voice, Russell could hear the various telltale inflections: the broad a that was a relic of the British colonial legacy in Southeast Asia, the slurring gonna that spoke of the pervasiveness of American popular culture, all darting through the flat intonation of Jek’s own local accent. Russell thought: I’m looking at the ur-product of globalisation. It didn’t look pretty.
“OK. I’m sorry. You’re a case of arrested development. You’re having your adolescent crisis now.”
“I don’t think you’re in a position to judge, Russell. What are you, twenty-four?”
“Twenty-five.”
“Right. And you’ve never worked a day in your life. You’re the eternal graduate student. In ten years time you’ll still be writing that thesis that seemed such a great idea when you were twenty but now you’re not so sure. Personally, I agree with Pink Floyd. We don’t need no education. But, hey, who am I to judge?”
“Fuck you. I’m not the one breaking the law here.” Aware, even as he spoke, that he was losing it—the argument, the upper hand. He fell into vulgarities only when he felt vulnerable. They were older then he was, Russell had to remind himself, he was the kid brother here. Reproving, censorious beyond his years. He felt—was meant to feel—ridiculous. Which itself was ridiculous.
“Admit it,” Jek said. “It’s a rush. Knowing you didn’t get caught.”
“And that’s why you do it. For the rush.”
“And the money of course.” Jek swung off the bed, began punching numbers on his mobile phone. He sounded bored.
As though the girl had sensed Russell’s thoughts, she said, “Several hundred thousand U.S. dollars. That’s the street value. If we get it back home.”
He said, humouring her, “And I get a cut.”
She looked at him, narrowly. “If you’re in.”
If you’re in. He was, perversely, flattered: he’d always suffered the shy person’s need for any kind of social inclusion.
“And if I’m not?”
“We kill you now and stuff your body in the longkang outside,” Jek said. He snapped shut his mobile phone and sprang on the bed, making it bounce. “You’re not going to the police, are you, Russell? You wouldn’t betray us, would you?”
“Think of the service I’d be doing to society. One drug dealer less on the face of the earth. There’s got to be something to be said for it.”
“But, Russell, you don’t give a shit about the wasted youth, do you? Russell? The victims of the unwinnable war on drugs? You’re not that much of a hypocrite. Are you?”
“You like to talk, don’t you, Jek? Why didn’t you ever graduate? Find your true calling as a morally bankrupt lawyer?”
“The law bored me. Life bored me. I never thought I’d live to be thirty years old, but I have and it’s killing me. Every day I hope to God I manage to do something self-destructive enough to finish me off but somehow self-preservation always kicks in at the last moment, so here I am. Yes, I despise myself and I’m filled with self-loathing, so now you know. Why,” Jek demanded of the girl, “are we wasting time on him?”
“It’s not the money,” Russell said to the girl, “is it?”
Strange, how she’d suddenly become the centre of power within the room, the deity to whom they made their supplications.
“No,” she said, “it’s the power.” And before either he or Jek knew what was happening, she’d produced a penknife out of nowhere and nicked a clean hole in one of the packets and was sanding the floor with it. A cloud of powder rose in the air.
Jek swore, something in the Hokkien dialect which Russell didn’t understand but understood to be vulgar, and lunged at the girl. She held the penknife to his face, at the same time as Russell unleashed a long-forgotten football tackle and wound one arm around Jek’s throat. He was surprised at how easily Jek choked and collapsed on the floor; that athletic frame was deceptive.
The girl sheathed the penknife and grimaced. In the sudden silence, Russell heard the continued drip drip of the water from the air-conditioning unit. He stared at the mess on the floor. Money counted in grains of white. He felt a kind of awe at the prodigious waste. And a twinge of fear as well, not of Jek, not of the girl, but of himself, because, although they were callous people—callous above all about themselves—he was beginning to see the seductiveness of their philosophy.
Later, Russell would wince at the memory of how, snapping out of his state of suspension, he’d grabbed the girl and bundled her out of Jek’s room, kicking the door shut behind them; of how he’d said to her, with low, missionary urgency, You don’t need to do this. Come away with me, and realising how patronising it sounded. Her smile was contemptuous. Are we going to get married and have babies?
He wasn’t sure but he thought he heard a muffled laugh from behind the door of Jek’s room. He had a vision of Jek, whom he’d left doubled up on the floor, lying now prone on his back and listening with malicious pleasure through the flimsy walls. It brought Russell up short. What was he thinking of? That he could reform her? Save her from herself? It was his country’s perennial folly—to think that the rest of the world wanted to be led into the light.
He took her face between her hands and rubbed his thumb, slowly, along the line of her jaw. Below her left eye he could see the faint smear of another cafe au lait mark. He kissed the mark, then her mouth—all scarily soft, deceptively yielding sweetness—then bolted. There was no other word for it. He bolted. He tore down the corridor of that shabby, slovenly hotel as though fire were licking his heels. If she’d called him by his name—which, it struck him now, she had never used—he would have turned round even then, but she never did.
Jek told him a story about the girl.
He had met her on his first visit home after dropping out of law school. Home had been a frosty place since his decision not to graduate, but his brother had just got married and it seemed like a good time to repair the breach. The girl was in the queue ahead of him at the moneychanger’s. She was wearing (he grinned at the memory) a pearl-grey office suit, her hair up in a bun. She looked desexed, packaged. He had known. Just known. He’d followed her out and she’d tried to shake him off, walking faster, then slower, at one point darting into the post-office. Then she’d stopped and confronted him. What do you want?—You. In plain view of dozens of office-workers, she slapped him; he received the slap stoically. Waited just long enough for her to scribble her address down for him on a slip of paper fished out from her Prada bag.
He wasn’t sure if she’d open the door to him, but she did. Away from work, she’d changed into shorts and t-shirt and let down her hair, and she looked about twelve, a serious, unsmiling child. Stepping inside, he thought, Oh shit. She was married. She wore no ring, and he saw no wedding photos about the very ordinary apartment, but he knew he was right, he could sniff this sort of thing a mile off. Coupledom, domesticity, filled him with horror, and he was in the thick of it: the cosy chats on the sofa in front of the TV, the dinners for two whipped up in the dinky little kitchen. But where was the husband? She said, Away on a business trip. She was making no attempt to be a good hostess—she hadn’t even offered him a drink—and he was thinking whether to go, whether to tap on the decency that lay buried in him like the basalt in the earth’s crust when she took his hand and pulled it under her t-shirt.
He met her every night for a week until she said that her husband was coming back. Coincidentally, it was also the day his brother was returning from Bangkok. (His brother was in the foreign service). He was a little relieved; he needed to come up for air. And he had family obligations: dinner at his parents’ place with his brother and sister-in-law. He had not seen his brother in years. They were not close; they were too different, his brother having spent his life doing exactly what was expected of him. Nothing wrong with that, but it severely limited conversation between him and Jek. Still, Jek was fond of him, as he would have been fond of an old family dog. He was in his parents’ sitting-room when the bell rang that evening. He sprang to open the door.
Imagine, said Jek, his befuddlement when the girl walked through the door. She reacted quicker than he did. “Hi,” she said, “I’m Jun Leng,” squeezing his hand with a painful, warning pressure that belied her size. His brother was a second or two behind, snapping shut an umbrella against the drizzle. “Jek!” he said. He gave Jek a bear hug, the sort of thing his brother would do. “Shao,” Jek said, wanly.
Somehow, he and the girl got through dinner. Of course it was over, sexually, between them the moment she walked in; he was capable of a lot of things, but he wasn’t capable of knowingly sleeping with his brother’s wife. She left his brother the very next day with nothing more than one suitcase and a note (typewritten) pinned to the pillow. I’m so sorry. The mistake was all mine. Never had he seen a man more crazed than his brother after the girl’s departure. He wept; he stormed; he raised hell in the police station where he made his missing person’s report, demanding that they find her immediately while the policemen shook their heads sadly and didn’t have the heart to disabuse him, though privately they were all thinking the same thing. Runaway wife—how many times had they seen this before?
Jek couldn’t tell Shao that the girl was holed up in his hotel room, where she lay in bed with the covers drawn to her nose, watching cable television. He left her alone, knowing she was still in shock. At night, she slept huddled against him for warmth, and he held her as he would have something maimed: gingerly, without daring to breathe. After a week of this, when he was beginning to wonder what he’d taken on, whether he wouldn’t be better off just foisting her back on Shao, she got out of bed and turned to him. What happens now? The pinched, devastated look had left her face, and he knew she’d renounced her previous life as completely as a nun entering the convent. He approved of what, to someone else, would have appeared as callousness. Too many people led cluttered lives. You could never know who you really were until you were stripped down to nothing. Had nothing. That was purity, that was zen. Of course, it was only in a metaphorical sense that the girl had nothing, because she actually had about fifty thousand dollars in savings, earned through five years of hundred hour work weeks. Which (he had to admit) was a help, because he was running low on reserves at that point.
He’d been waiting for this moment. The thing about drug running was that you quickly developed a sense for who was game and who was not, because your life depended on it. The girl didn’t seem surprised when he told her what he did for a living; he had the impression she was not so much amoral as completely neutral in her moral judgments. He had a delivery to make that day at an apartment that he suspected was being staked by the police. The girl was his lookout. Within a minute, she spotted the police sitting in their unmarked car in the grounds. Went up to them, pretended to be a property buyer wanting more details of the development. She could, when she chose, simulate a kind of childlike innocence that was heartbreaking. She was a natural. He made the delivery, paid her her share.
They were a team. A team. (Stressed this, so that Russell saw that, oddly enough, this meant something to Jek, the natural loner who went scuba-diving, did middle-distance running, any activity that didn’t require other people. The kind of guy you never wanted to have on your team, because he didn’t see the sense in being a cog in a seamless powerful machine.) She never looked back. Someday she would cut him off too, as cleanly as she’d struck his brother from her life. He knew this with the certainty of someone who’d read the tea leaves. Knew, too, that it was useless to cavil at this. It was what made her what she was.
Jek told him a story about the girl and he listened because he was still stunned by his defection from her and hungered for mention of her name like an addict for his fix and because he had an hour to kill anyway before the bus to Penang for the flight back home. Leaving her, his one coherent thought was how he needed to get out of this country, this region, as fast as mechanical means could transport him. The airline he chose had just suffered its worst crash in history but the fare was a song, so he took it. Emerging from the travel office, he saw what appeared to be a tourist class hotel across the street and knew that what he needed right then was hard liquor to addle the brain fast and good. From experience, he guessed there would be a bar—the town was not overtly Muslim and the Malay women he had seen had their heads uncovered—and he was right.
Jek was at the bar. Russell hesitated, then strode up grimly. It would have seemed childish, churlish to walk away. Not to mention cowardly, though he knew he had nothing to fear from Jek in person. Contract killings were more Jek’s style than personal violence.
“Russell,” Jek said, meditatively. He looked none the worse for wear.
“Listen,” Russell told him. “I’m not in the mood.”
“I was going to buy you a drink.” You left her. It hung in the air between them, loudly unsaid.
It was only after the vodka arrived that Russell thought to mumble, “Thanks.”
Jek lifted his glass. “To the wasted youth.”
Sitting in the nocturnal gloom of the bar, Russell had a fantasy. In ten years’ time, he will meet Jek again in another bar, probably in another town in southern Thailand. Jek will look wasted and it will be obvious to Russell that Jek has broken the first rule of drug-dealing—never sample your wares. The girl is out of the picture. That much is clear too.
This time, Russell will offer to buy him a drink. Jek is still able to talk—in his emaciated, deracinated state, it is something he can still do. What Jek talks about is the girl. Talks a streak, eyes glinting and feverish, that lopsided smile even now getting glances from bystanders who don’t know better. Russell lets him talk. He bears Jek no ill-will, after all this time. And he is curious about the girl. The memory of her is still something incendiary, untamed, capable of bursting into awkward life at all the wrong moments and making him sweat.
He ends up sitting at the counter with Jek until closing time. Bides his time, waiting, with increasing impatience, to ask his question. What happened to her?
“She died,” Jek says. “Of Aids.”
Russell is horrified. “I didn’t know—”
“She had neurofibromatosis. You knew, didn’t you? There was a tumour. She needed a blood transfusion and the blood was contaminated.”
He suddenly wants to get away. Sordidness is infectious. Which is why he has never gone off the rails like Jek or the girl. They were too hubristic, thinking they could maintain their sanity and youth and wit amidst the effluvium. He knows it isn’t possible. That’s why phrases such as taking time out, discovering yourself and getting away from corporate America infuriate him. Russell is now an investment banker, flying first-class in the air and staying five-star on the ground. (He has escaped the fate prophesised for him by Jek—the eternal student—and the satisfaction of proving Jek wrong is not the least of the motives that drives him.) His one quirk is frequenting squalid little bars that his colleagues are too squeamish to enter.
He says, as diffidently as he can manage, “Need money, Jek?”
He reads Jek’s bright, thin smile (taut as a wire) correctly. Together with the generous tip he leaves for the bartender on the counter, he places a thick, separate wad and fishtails out the door so that he doesn’t have to see Jek pocket the cash.
It was a satisfyingly sick revenge fantasy. Russell played several variations of it in his head over the next few hours, played it even as the plane was preparing to land for its transit stop in Singapore and the captain made his usual deadpan announcement about drug trafficking inviting the death penalty. Played it even as the plane landed and disgorged him into Changi Airport; it served to quell the panicky, agoraphobic feeling that was wont to seize him now that he’d emerged from his subterranean existence with the girl. He’d just closed his eyes to stem another wave of giddiness when two uniformed men came up to him and said, “Russell Liu?” “Yes,” he said, yielding up his identity unthinkingly, stupidly.
“Come with us please.”
Alarm bells pealed in his head. “No, wait—”
They took him to a room with a table and three metal chairs. The first thing he noticed was the sniffer dog, an Alsatian, straining at its leash to get at the table and barking madly. He stared at the table, across which were scattered the contents of his backpack, his sole check-in luggage. It was a meagre, typical backpacker’s display: water-bottle; bedroll; hopelessly worn t-shirts, everything faded to a dull grey; his tome on globalisation and a cheap thriller, picked up in a Vietnamese guesthouse in desperation for something to read; a packet of (he winced) ribbed condoms. Then he saw it. A white plastic packet that he’d last seen lying on the bed of Jek’s hotel room.
He thought wildly. He’d left his backpack in the lobby of Jek’s hotel when he rushed into the town to look for the nearest travel agency. It would have been the easiest thing in the world for Jek or the girl to slip in the packet, place an anonymous call to Singapore customs and incriminate him. Hang him as surely as though he’d hung the rope around his own self-deceiving neck. It had to be Jek. Even in the midst of the incredible fear that tore through him—a fear that he hadn’t thought possible, it was as acute, as terrifyingly real in its every pang as a heart attack—he clung to this thought. It had to be Jek. Not the girl. Above all else, he didn’t want it to be her. His faith in the universe depended on it.
One of the officers picked up the packet and threw it in his direction. He was too stupefied to duck; it struck him full in the chest.
“What’s that?”
They were, he realised, more contemptuous about his stupidity than anything else.
“Listen,” he said, “I can explain—”
A mistake. An innocent man would have simulated outrage, demanded to know what was going on. The sniffer dog, hearing his voice, lunged at him and he lurched back against the wall. In any event, he was brought up short by the looks of polite incredulity on the officers’ faces. They were young, younger than he was and shorter (in Asia, his American-fed physique towered uncomfortably over everyone), clean-shaven, acne-scarred. They looked like twins. They must have heard dozens of tall stories by now, the concoctions spun by desperate couriers twisting like reeds in the wind to avoid the gallows. The gallows! Even then, he could think, irrelevantly, about the quaintness of the expression, its archaic flavour. And how it was cheaper than electrocution or lethal injection, though he didn’t suppose that was the reason for its continued usage. He faced it: they didn’t believe in quick, easy deaths here.
He abandoned the attempt to explain. “I want a lawyer.”
They seemed amused. One of them snorted, “Americans!” The other interjected, more gently, “It’s not part of the procedure here.” Tweedledum and Tweedledee. It was just his luck.
“What happens now?”
“You wait.”
He was taken to a remand prison to wait. There was nobody else in the cell, which was warm and fetid-smelling but otherwise unremarkable. The wait was the longest of his life, longer than the wait he’d endured as a nine year-old at the dentist to have an aching tooth pulled out and hearing the howls of the kid who’d gone in before him, longer than the wait he had suffered at twenty for Mary Beth Jablonski, his first girlfriend at college, to return from her date with a former boyfriend and knowing, just knowing, that she wasn’t going to. Time froze, congealed. He was going to suffocate in its abundance. In this surfeit of time, his mind kept sliding, like a man rolling helplessly towards the edge of a precipice, towards a mental image of a noose freeze-framed against a grey sky, at which point he’d spring up from his wooden bench and hurl himself dementedly against the bars, yelling fit to burst. After an hour of this, a middle-aged officer trotted over and looked at him weightily. That was it. Time resumed its slow, interminable progress.
Sunshine. The sweet roar of traffic down a four-lane highway. Old, matured trees unfurling their branches across the highway and creating a natural canopy. He had no idea where he was but it was all beautiful. Beautiful. Even the grey remand prison from which he’d just been released in what was clearly monumental disgust. “What’s happening?” he’d kept saying, as two men unlocked the door of his cell and frogmarched him down the corridor. Jeez, were they going to hang him now? Without benefit of a trial? Without the appearance of a trial? What kind of country was this anyway?
“What the hell is going on?”
That got their attention. They stopped rubber-stamping a pile of forms long enough to look at him properly for the first time. Apparently, they didn’t like what they saw, because they returned to rubber-stamping with renewed fury. “Think you’re smart, don’t you?” he thought he heard one of them say.
The next minute, he was standing in the parking lot of the remand prison with his backpack dumped rudely at his feet. Late afternoon sunshine poured from a yellow sky.
Did that count as a near-death experience? Russell decided it did. He’d been given a new lease of life, and he meant to enjoy it, dammit. He was going to celebrate the first day of the rest of his life by blowing his travellers’ cheques on a one-night stay at the Ritz-Carlton while waiting for the next flight back. The Ritz-Carlton, the cab driver who drove him there assured him, was the swankiest hotel in Singapore, and Russell wasn’t about to argue with him.
The luxury of a bath in a genuine bathtub with little wrapped bars of soap on a porcelain side-dish and little jars of shampoo and lotion! The old Russell would have scorned these Lilliputian mementoes of a five-star hotel, but the new Russell revelled in them. To hell with roughing it and the whole bullshit about authenticity. He wanted creature comforts, manufactured experiences, mass tourism. He wanted theme parks! To hell with reflexive guilt about coming from the richest nation on earth. To hell with worrying about globalisation, the consumer culture and the End of History. He didn’t want the weight of the world on his shoulders any more. He wanted to eat a burger whenever he felt like it (something he’d avoided religiously for months and now felt a ravenous craving for) and let someone else worry about the rainforests. To hell with unearthing your roots; in the new global order, ethnicity meant as much or as little as the shade of your briefcase. To hell with—
The phone rang. “Mr Liu? Someone’s waiting for you in the lobby. Sorry, I don’t have a name.”
He was not thinking of the girl. He was most resolutely not thinking of her, and it was working. It worked up to the point that he stepped out of the lift into the lobby and saw her sitting in one of those sunken sofa chairs that swallowed you up whole and left only a severed head bobbing above the armrest. He saw her head, her profile, that neat, uplifted chin, before she turned and saw him. He had a second to decide whether to stay or flee. He hesitated.
She was wearing a slip-dress that seemed to be all straps and filmy material and slingback sandals that barely covered her feet. He’d never seen her in a dress before. He swallowed.
He said, in a voice that didn’t sound like his own, “That was a cute trick you pulled.” Of course he’d figured by now it was her.
“You walked out on me,” she pointed out.
In the warped logic in which she dealt, this seemed perfectly reasonable. In spite of himself, he found himself nodding. “I got scared.”
“I know.”
He couldn’t take his eyes off her; he imagined that the hungry, adolescent quality of his gaze was apparent to anyone looking at them and, though more fully clothed than she was, he was the one who felt naked, exposed.
“So tell me,” he said, “why’d they let me go?”
There was the glimmer of a smile. “Probably because they couldn’t analyse enough heroin to hang you.”
His brain worked slowly, too slowly, for her. “You mean—?”
Impatiently, “It was baking soda.”
But the sniffer dog was going nuts, he wanted to say, but didn’t. Hell, maybe the dog just didn’t like him. He said, wryly, “So I guess you made your delivery safely.”
“You don’t have to like my job. You just have to like me.
“And to hell with the wasted youth.”
“They’re everywhere,” she pointed out. “You can’t save everyone. I don’t create the demand. I just feed it.”
Somewhere the argument was flawed, but he didn’t know where to begin. He wasn’t sure he wanted to begin. Moral ambiguity was a landscape she painted in pastel, soothing colours; it was a pure line of melody, light as a plume of smoke, from an unseen saxophonist in the park on a Sunday afternoon.
He tried to summon up his indignation—he almost got hanged, he was lucky not to get a coronary—but indignation was having a hard time muscling through the fog of kinkiness and hapless desire that was his usual state of mind with her. He wanted to put his hands around that slender neck of hers and squeeze the life out of her, he wanted so badly to taste her he was getting dizzy just thinking about it.
“So what happens now?” he wanted to know.
She shrugged and started to walk away. In a minute, she would be swallowed up in the mass of people milling by the hotel entrance. He waited. He always liked waiting until the last moment; it gave him the comforting illusion he had a choice. When she disappeared, he broke into a run.