Ransom (16 page)

More than an hour later, the driver still hadn't managed to get the car running. Ransom and Annette had waited with Ian as the sun dropped through the cloudless sky toward the jagged ridge of mountains to the west. Ransom could feel the dry rasp of high-altitude sunlight on his face even as he was slapping his arms and chest for warmth. Annette said she was freezing to death. Ian said they shouldn't bother to wait.

“I've been thinking,” Ransom said. “Why don't you stick around another day, get a fresh start tomorrow?” To him the signs did not seem auspicious—the near-riot in the bazaar, the sick blond girl, the taxi breaking down. He was not eager to see Ian go.

“I'd hate to lose a day,” said Ian, whose augury did not recognize ill omens. He acted as if he believed that he had been born under a fortunate sign, and that his luck would hold.

Ian went to talk to the driver, who had just climbed in behind the wheel of the cab. The engine turned over and sputtered back to life. Ian jumped into the trunk of the taxi. He waved as the car pulled forward. Ransom put one arm around Annette and waved with the other as the taxi disappeared into the dust.

* * *

Annette and Ransom were staying in a fortified house on the hillside just off the main road. Surrounded by high walls for protection against bandits, it looked like a two-storey pillbox. Ian had arranged for them to stay there; the family, he said, was on a pilgrimage to Mecca. The heavy wooden door on the ground floor opened into a dark space rank with the smell of animals, the quarters of the family sheep. A stairway led to the second level, where the small, vertical windows, suitable for returning rifle fire, admitted little light. There was no escaping the residual odor of the animals.
“Le château des pourceaux,”
Annette said, holding her nose, when they first surveyed the place.

Things had gone sour after the incident in the bazaar. Annette had seen all she cared to see of Landi Kotal and wanted to move on. She began to talk about Katmandu, where she and Ransom had first met. Ransom didn't want to be reminded of Katmandu. They had spent a month together there, Ransom having just arrived in Asia, looking for freedom in the homeland of fatalism, looking for he didn't know what—but something more vital than the pallid choice of career. He had never met anyone like Annette, unless it was Ian, so profligate with her energy, staying up all night talking, racing from city to city, friend to friend—the kind of person who seemed too expansive to gather all of her affection into a package and present it to one other human being. Ransom instinctively admired this abundance; and the more he admired it, the more important it became for him to have it all to himself. He had never wanted anyone so much, and his wanting made him awkward and jealous. Annette had gone off one night with an Italian, and Ransom hadn't seen her again until
she showed up one day in Goa, three months later, hundreds of miles from where she had ditched him.

Fed up with Landi Kotal, with more reason than she usually had for wanting to move on to a new place, Annette spoke wistfully now of their month in Katmandu, of the pastel-colored temples and the tall, crooked houses with hex eyes painted on the lintels.

“And the monkeys,” Ransom said absently. “Don't forget the monkeys.” The two of them were lying on a single pallet inside the fortress house. Ian had been gone three days.

“I hate the monkeys,” she said. “Nasty, ugly things. I hate them.”

“Sorry,” Ransom said. There was no telling when some little thing would set her off. He didn't remember any special antipathy toward monkeys. He turned onto his side and looked at her. Her face was rigid. He stroked her shoulder; she pushed his hand away.

“It smells like pig in here.”

“Sheep. It's sheep.”

“Pig. Pig pig pig. Big-time, big-deal businessmen. They make a big deal and they stay in a pig house. Pig time. Pig deal. Pig guys.”

“Annette.”

“Pig!”

Ransom leaned over and kissed her neck. “Once we finish this we'll have lots of money. Then we can go anywhere.”

“We go now.”

“We have to wait for Ian.”

“Ian. Always Ian. Ian Ian Ian Ian—”

Ransom clapped a hand over her mouth and she bit him.

She resumed the chant, her voice rising until she lashed out at Ransom with her arms and legs. When Ransom tried to cram the blanket into her mouth, she kneed him.

He got a handful of her hair and rolled her off the pallet. He thumped her head, hard, against the wooden floor. She stopped struggling and began to cry.

After a while she said, “Do you love me?”

Ransom said that he did.

“Do you love me more than Ian?”

“Do I sleep with Ian?”

“Maybe,” she said.

He wondered if she really believed this, then decided that it was shorthand for her jealousy of Ransom's friendship with Ian. They had known each other in college, not close friends, Ian being two classes ahead of him, but Ransom had admired Ian's reckless vitality, feeling himself to be far more cautious than he wished to be. While most of his classmates prepared for gainful employ, Ian seemed to be training for adventure. Ian took his junior year off to travel Asia, and though Ransom never told him so, it was his example and the articles he sent back to the college paper that inspired Ransom to do the same thing. They had run into each other, a year after Ransom graduated, at a pie shop on Pig Alley in Katmandu, and after Annette ditched Ransom they had started to hang out together, eventually travelling south through India to Goa, where they rented a beach hut for the winter. Annette had reappeared—everybody showed up for Christmas in Goa. In Annette's version of Katmandu, Ransom had cruelly abandoned her, and when she moved in with them
she made him promise he would never run out on her again. For a few weeks everything was fine. Ian liked Annette and Annette liked Ian, to the point that Ransom felt almost like the third party, their dispositions curiously complementary: Ian believing in the power of his own will to shape the world to his needs, and in the inherent value of his own desires; Annette profoundly fatalistic, what Ransom later saw as a junkie mentality, acting as if nothing she did mattered, and therefore she might as well do anything she pleased. They shared a belief in the primacy of their inclinations. At first, Ransom considered them kindred spirits, but then Annette had turned petulant and jealous of Ian, quizzing Ransom with hypothetical situations in which he had to choose between the two of them.

Now Ian was somewhere on the other side of the Hindu Kush trying to score some dope, and Ransom said to Annette, “lan's not my type.”

“What is your type?” she demanded.

“French, female, blond and manic.”

“What's manic?
C'est manie?
”

“Sexy. It means very sexy.”

The next day Annette stayed in bed complaining of cramps. Ransom went to Peshawar to check on bus schedules. When he got back Annette was high. He could see it in the way she greeted him, giddy and languorous, and in the slight drop in register in her voice. She'd had a habit for two months in Goa, and he knew the signs.

“Where did you get the stuff?”

“Come hold me,” she said.

“Where did you get it?” Even as he asked, he didn't
know why he bothered. The point was, she had it. But he couldn't think of anything else to say.

“Only a little bit,” she said. “To make the sickness go away.” This was her way, calling the disease the cure.

She nodded off before sundown. He stayed with her through the next morning. By noon she was sweating and trembling. He held out until three, when he could no longer stand to watch her. She told him she'd bought the stuff from the Pathan who'd helped them that day. Ransom went to find him, and returned an hour later with her fix. There would be time to straighten her out when this business was all over.

Ransom went outside the moment she started to tie off. He bought it, but he would not watch her put the needle in her arm. He looked out over the barren gray peaks. The afternoon sun cast crisp, angular shadows. There was no vegetation in sight. To the west, the road threaded its way between the jaws of the pass. Three eastbound vehicles crawled like beetles toward the bright mosaic of the town. Possibly Ian was in one of them. Ransom wanted to think so. But he felt that a landscape like this didn't have anything very encouraging to say about the fate of individuals.

“Your Cheating Heart” was on the jukebox and Miles Ryder sang along, sitting on the bar displaying his new boots, when Ransom came in.

“This weather is getting me down,” Miles said.

“It's bound to get worse.”

“I don't think I can take another rainy season.” Miles raised his leg, hooked his ankle over his knee, and brushed repeatedly at his boot heel, although it was clean. “The baby isn't born yet and the house already feels crowded. Akiko never complains, but just looking at her makes me uncomfortable.” He let go of his foot; the boot banged loudly against the bar. “You coming from practice?”

“Yessir.”

“I could understand if you were going to use it. On DeVito-san, say.” He jumped down from the bar to answer the phone. Ransom ordered a cup of tea. When Miles came back, Ransom asked him if he was faithfully adhering to the terms of their skiing wager.

“Didn't you see the sign over the door:
Ladies not welcome
? I catch one whiff of gardenia cologne and I run in the other direction. Why are you looking at me like that? Whatever happened to trust?”

“Good question. You haven't seen Marilyn?”

Miles shook his head. “I don't know, maybe it's my breath.” He took off his hat and stroked the feather in the band, then looked toward the door. “Here comes our favorite satori hound,” he said.

“Greetings,” Brad Russell said, as he took the seat beside Ransom. “The old hangout hasn't changed much.” He looked around with the air of a man returning to the hometown after ascendant years in the city, although Ransom was certain it was a matter of weeks at most since he had last seen Russell here.

“Been away?” Ransom asked.

“I've been on a
seishin
.”

“Isn't that one of those sex tours,” Miles said, “where the Jap businessmen do all the whorehouses from Seoul to Taipei?”

“It's a Zen retreat, you idiot,” Russell sputtered. “We went to a small temple in the mountains outside Arashiyama for ten days. Woke up every morning at four and went outside to sit zazen for twelve hours. Twelve hours! The roshi walked around with a stick and if your posture was bad he clubbed you until you straightened out. My knees and my back are killing me.”

“What did you do at night?” Miles said.

“We slept on the floor in our clothes. It was freezing.”

“Sounds like big fun,” Miles said. “Serious craziness.”

“I really feel like I made a breakthrough out there,” Russell said. “How about you?” he said to Ransom. “Still a follower of the martial way?”

“Ransom follows the Way of the Tourist.”

“Funny.”

“I'm serious. It's his own school. You've never heard him lecture on the subject?”

Russell was trying to determine whether he was being taken for a ride.

“Tell him, Ransom sensei. Speak to him of the Tao of the Tourist.”

“You tell him.”

“The disciple will attempt to convey the teachings of the master. The Way of the Tourist consists in not letting yourself sink into the swamp of familiarity. It's not a vacation but an arduous way of life, requiring constant vigilance. Objects and people will try to attach themselves to you and become intimate. Rooms in which you take shelter and rest will ask you to call them
home
. Habits will try to impose themselves. And when that happens, you stop seeing and thinking altogether. Am I in error, Ransom-sensei?”

Ransom nodded his approval.

“The Tao of the Tourist cannot have a headquarters, but Japan is a suitable country in which to practice it, for those of us who weren't born here, because we will always be gaijin to the Japanese and because just when you think you've got the place figured out something happens and you're on strange terrain again.
Home on the strange
is the motto of the Way. The Way of the Tourist can't have a headquarters, but Kyoto is a good provisional encampment because it's a genuine tourist town. All these old temples and shrines, busloads of part-time tourists being herded through every day. These last, of course, cannot be considered true followers of the Way.”

“You're a real jerk, Ryder,” Russell said.

“Hey! Do they teach you that kind of language at your Zen school?”

“You're going to lose most of your customers this way,” Ransom said, after Russell had stalked off.

“He's already lost, and he doesn't drink. You're the only nondrinker I can stand.”

They watched the band setting up onstage.

“Maybe I should go home early tonight,” Miles said. “See how the wife and fetus are doing.” He showed no inclination to pursue this plan.

Ransom stayed to hear the band's first set, Kano pulling high lonesome notes out of his big hollow-body Gibson, singing against all odds with feeling, scrupulously reproducing lyrics that were casual and occasionally incomprehensible in the original, reaching a peak of frenzy in a version of Robert Johnson's “Hellhound on My Trail.”

I got to keep moving, got to keep moving
Blues falling down like hail, falling down like hail
I can't keep no money, Hellhound on my trail.

The set over, Ransom was thinking of leaving when Yamada came in, jovial with drink. He joined Ransom and ordered Suntory.

I hoped you would be here
, Yamada said.

You look happy
, Ransom said.

Not really
. Yamada drank off half the whiskey.
How old are you?