Slow Fade (9 page)

WESLEY
stood up and folded the pages, putting them back in his pants pocket. Then he walked down the beach and slowly climbed the stone steps that wound their way up a steep hill to a clearing overlooking the entire coast. Wesley’s house was one of several in various stages of construction scattered about on the periphery of the clearing and mostly obscured by thick jungle foliage. The entire compound was the dream and obsession of Sam Colson, an ex-San Francisco restaurateur, sometime actor and movie impresario, who had bailed out of a potential business scandal by sinking all his funds and cash flow into a south-of-the-border real estate venture called Vivi la Viva. Wesley had known Senor Viva, as he was locally called, for over twenty years and had used the compound before when there was only Sam’s house and a guesthouse with a thatched roof and no running water. After he had separated from his third wife, Wesley had stayed for over five months, sleeping, drinking, and reading all of Conrad before going back to L.A. and doing everything all over again. But these days the compound had a more worldly vibration, being mostly inhabited by a loose mélange of high-class drug dealers, movie people, radical lawyers and their more infamous clients, well-heeled social drifters from L.A. and New York, and the odd surprise wandering in off the beach, all of whom Wesley preferred to avoid. Except for Sam, who lay watching him from a hammock as good as naked in a pair of bikini briefs barely visible among the folds of his ample stomach, a pair of round dark glasses perched on the end of his soft and fleshy nose. He offered Wesley a sip of his gin and tonic.

“You have to put in an elevator,” Wesley gasped, wiping his face with his shirt sleeve and taking the gin and tonic. “I can’t make the steps any more.”

“Forget the steps. I haven’t been down those steps in six months. Longer. When you get to be our age life has to become a series of well-arranged retreats.”

Wesley collapsed into a low-slung beach chair, staring up at Sam’s patriarchal presence. “My life is more a rout than a retreat.” Suddenly he felt irritated. “You read those pages?”

“Of course I read those pages. Evelyn had them Xeroxed and she gave them to me. How do you expect me not to read those pages? I know both your demented children. I even, if you recall, tried to have ingress with your daughter at a particularly precarious moment in my life.”

“So you did,” Wesley admitted.

“And as for Walker, no matter how twisted and deluded he might be, I’m sure he doesn’t expect you to go over to India and shoot some crappy mystical adventure story that involves your own kids.”

“Why not? It’s a good hook. It’s personal. Motivated.”

“You’ve never done anything personal in your life. And who knows where your motivations spring from. I speak to you as a friend. You should quit. Actually, you have quit. If you come back in the ring, you’re going to get your head knocked off.”

Wesley drained the rest of Sam’s drink. “I don’t really care about winning and losing any more. But I’m probably too compulsively theatrical and ignorant to do nothing.”

“Not theatrical,” Sam said, swinging his fat legs over the hammock and peering down at Wesley. “Too attached to all the bullshit.”

Sam refilled the glass with the gin from a thermos tucked into the rear of the hammock. Taking a drink, he handed the glass to Wesley and went on. “One option is to consciously bury yourself alive in a beautiful, incestuous patch of paradise such as this one. Although I strongly suspect that when you finally approach the angel of death all suntanned and distracted, you might find yourself in the coldest hell, such would be your accumulation of rage, fear, and remorse.”

“I’d make that deal,” Wesley said. “One moment being equal to another. Except that I’ve fouled all my nests, including this one.”

“What a pity. I was so looking forward to sabotaging our sunset years together.”

Sam pulled a black silk kimono around him and together the two old friends walked across the clearing down a soft and verdant path decorated on either side with Japanese rock and flower arrangements, a narrow plunging waterfall, and a shaded grotto used mostly for midday drugs and backgammon. They stopped in front of Wesley’s house, a wood and concrete cantilevered form sweeping out over a steep cliff facing the Pacific.

Wesley hesitated, not wanting to go inside. “I’m sliding,” he said and sat down on a curved stone bench. “I won’t be around this time next year.”

Sam let his bulk come to rest on the stone bench. “That’s entirely possible, although it could be your mind that’s on the slide.”

“It’s my heart, actually. And certain key pores in my skin which seem to leak energy and a certain, I don’t know, essential juice. I’m finished, Sam, and that’s not a bad thing to know. It’s a kind of relief.”

“If this is your way of saying that you’re going to India, then I agree with you.”

Wesley fumbled through his jacket pocket for a cigarette. “Not India, not Mexico, not L.A. ever again. In fact, why don’t you use the house on Mulholland and take a break from all this Shangri-La stuff? You’re as stuck in your fun as I am.”

For the first time Sam looked at his friend with real concern. “I might do that. But you’ll need a foxhole. You can’t just hang out at resorts and film festivals.”

“I still have my father’s place. Or at least I think I do. Off the coast of Labrador.”

“What about Evelyn?”

“I don’t know about Evelyn these days,” Wesley said. “But I would hope she’d come with me. She’s from up there. The north anyway.”

Sam started to leave, then turned back toward Wesley and said: “I say fuck ’em all; your kids, your wife, whatever’s left of your career, even your friends. You want to leave, go ahead. You want to pull the plug on yourself, do yourself in, that’s okay. Take what you have left to do and do it. No one cares anyway.”

Then he continued down the path and Wesley went inside.

Closing the door, Wesley moved toward the distant sound of the Beach Boys singing “Good Vibrations.” He stopped at the end of the
entrada
, looking at the blue tiles on the floor of the clean white living room and through the open glass doors to the wooden deck, where Evelyn lay naked on a towel. A thin bearded man, also naked, was slowly rubbing suntan oil onto her back. He had shut his eyes as if willing all his energy to the ends of his fingers. There was something about the harsh light bouncing off the white walls and Evelyn lying so boldly on her stomach with her thighs slightly parted that reminded Wesley of another scene. Perhaps it was Godard’s
Contempt
, with Brigitte Bardot stretched out on a stone parapet, her body silhouetted against the warm blue of the Mediterranean. Or was it an image from one of his own films of a floating daydream? Fritz Lang, at the end of his life, had played himself in Godard’s film; an old director, burdened with too much cynical wisdom, trying to promote one last project. Other directors had turned an occasional trick, John Huston had acted, as had Von Stroheim and Welles and Nick Ray. But their performances embarrassed him because he could never do it.

He watched the hand on Evelyn’s back work its way upward, pausing briefly on top of her head before wandering gently toward the cheeks of her ass. Resting there, a middle finger slid slowly down and probed deeper. As Evelyn shifted her rump to welcome the invasion, Wesley walked forward and the bearded man raised his head, his eyes a startling blue. Wesley moved slowly, giving the man time to stand up, while Evelyn, sneaking a look beneath her arm, preferred to remain as she was.

“Good afternoon, Mr. Hardin,” the man said, reaching for his bathing trunks. He had a soft pouting face and curly blond hair; Wesley marked him for an actor or beach hustler.

Wesley stepped up to him, eyes narrowed. “It’s like Texas down here in the sense that no one cares much if a man kills another man for porking around with his wife.”

The man tried hard to be charming: “I am French and unaware of such rules.”

Wesley slapped him on the side of the head with an open palm.

He hadn’t hit a man in forty years and the sudden violence shocked him. The Frenchman seemed more embarrassed than hurt, even somewhat concerned, as if Wesley had made himself vulnerable to a stroke.

He stepped backwards, watching Wesley. “It was a small hedonistic interlude, Mr. Hardin, nothing more.”

“I’m sure,” Wesley said and turned to face the sea.

“He didn’t mean anything serious,” Evelyn said after the man had left. “He works in the French consulate in Mexico City and comes down here to fish.”

“I don’t care about any of that,” Wesley said. “I was reacting to something else.”

Evelyn sat up and wrapped her arms around her knees while Wesley took off his shirt and sat down next to her on an aluminum beach chair. His skin was shockingly pale next to hers, hanging loose and old from his ribs, never to be firm again.

“I might go to New York,” he said, looking out over the railing toward the parallel line of the horizon. “There’s private financing available for the Indian film, at least according to my agent. Perhaps you want to stay here or go on a trip. Maybe Yucatán or Guatemala. You haven’t seen any of the Aztec stuff. “

“You don’t want me with you,” she said flatly.

He avoided her eyes and she stood up and walked over to the edge of the deck. Then she bent down and picked up the tape deck where the Beach Boys were singing “Fun, fun, fun ’til her daddy takes the T-bird away!” and hurled it over the cliff where it shattered on the rocks below. When she turned to face him, her eyes were openly angry. He had never seen her lose control this way and he watched her closely, grateful for the small rush of anxiety that had awakened inside him, for the hint, however slight, that the wall surrounding his heart might have a few expanding cracks in it.

“I don’t want you involved in my internal melodramas,” he said, trying to provoke her even more.

But she didn’t back down. “You use dead or alive like a club. Maybe there’s something simple that you’ve forgotten.”

“Are you telling me to shit or get off the pot?”

“I’m telling you that when you married me you didn’t know whether you could go on. That’s what you said then; that you had had this heart attack, that you were burned out and had outlived yourself. I thought you took me with you because you knew I would help you when your time came.”

She watched him now, because she had never talked to him like this. She expected him to turn away and he did, but then he turned back to her, his eyes strangely moist and alive.

“What was in the deal for you when you took up with me?” he asked.

“I would have taken any deal to get out of Labrador, not that you’re just any deal. I was thirty and I thought I was in my slot forever. The most I could hope for was a trip to St. John’s or Labrador City. I never told you I was going to marry someone else. Way before you found me. When you asked me to go with you I had to go. He understood, but if he had run into you he would have killed you. You know how those boys from Goose Bay are.”

“Do you have regrets?” he asked.

“Not too many, most of the time. He married someone else and went to Sudbury to work in the mines. I thought I loved him. That’s something else I learned I don’t know anything about.”

“Would you come to Labrador with me?”

“Probably.”

“Because you owe me?”

“I suppose.”

He sighed. His legs hurt and his feet were cold and he was very tired. Evelyn leaned over and rested her head on his lap.

“Did you read Walker’s script?” he asked.

“Yes, and then I gave it to Sam and he read it. He says Walker’s off the deep end and you’re crazy to indulge him.”

“What do you think?”

“I’d like to know what comes next.”

He shut his eyes, but before he could fall asleep she had helped him into the bedroom. Lying naked on the bed, he felt her lips wander softly over his weary and aching body and then her fingers massaged the soles of his feet until he slept. She lay beside him for a long time before she dressed and took a taxi into town, where she spent the afternoon shopping for a new tape deck and finishing what she had begun with the Frenchman from Mexico City.

AFTER A.D.
had dressed Walker’s wound and they had gotten stoned enough to sleep for a few hours, they drove down off the high mountain plateau in the early morning light and headed north toward Salt Lake City, where they stopped at a Holiday Inn on the outside of town. A.D. ordered a few drinks from room service and checked Walker’s wound again, bathing and hovering over him like an anxious nurse, so much so that Walker finally yelled that he wanted to sleep. A.D. sighed, tucking him in once more before he went outside for a walk alongside the state highway that shot like a smoky arrow into the heart of the city. He was filled with terror that he might have been trying to kill Walker. He had always managed to abuse or self-destruct his own ambitions as if a stubborn force inside him was determined not to let him ever switch tracks or hustle a new deal. Walking around the front of a newly built supermarket, he knelt down on the asphalt behind several produce trucks and vowed then and there not to blow this opportunity or betray himself, no matter what. When he returned to the motel Walker was awake, sitting on the edge of the bed fully dressed.

“Let’s head for Nevada,” Walker said. “We have a few thousand to play with. Maybe we’ll get lucky and walk away from movieland.”

“No way,” A.D. said with sudden vehemence. “The only way you’re going to walk away from movieland is when we complete the deal.”

“Let’s just get to Nevada,” Walker repeated, hobbling for the door.

In three hours they had crossed through the shimmering white hallucinations of the Great Salt Lake Desert and pulled into the parking lot of the Red Garter Casino, a few hundred yards across the state line. After they had checked into a room, they went directly to the tables. They played steadily and morosely, oblivious of time, occasionally passing each other without expression as they changed tables or took a break in the brightly lit twenty-four-hour luncheonette. Once Walker stepped outside to smell the cool desert air. It was night and above him a hundred-and-fifty-foot red, white, and blue cowboy pointed a finger toward the action, signaling “This Is the Place” to a convoy of four Mack trucks groaning in from the desert. The parking lot was alive with cowboys and Indians and Winnebagos from every state. Walker felt an urge to join a herd of tourists filing into a Greyhound bus after an hour’s pit stop in front of the slot machines. He had enough money. He could get off after a few hundred miles, maybe in Oregon. Rent a little house, phone it in to the old man simple and straight, just the facts about Clem. But of course he went back inside. He lost steadily and when he was down to his last two hundred dollars he went back to the room and tried to sleep.

A.D., on the other hand, was on a roll. He had moved around the room, stopping here and there, shooting a little craps, dropping a hundred, winning two, not doing anything at roulette, breaking even at blackjack. Then he got reckless and bored at roulette and hit a couple of straight numbers and he was a grand up. He changed from five- to twenty-five- to fifty-dollar chips and kept on playing. He lost and then he won and won again, big, twenty one-hundred-dollar chips on number twenty-three. It was as if the hand of God had reached down and dropped a gold chip on his lap. He was up fourteen grand. He decided to keep four for himself and give the rest to Walker as payment for the next installment of the script, making himself the producer. He would have Walker sign a paper saying all three of them owned the script equally. This was his move. He would have half a script credit along with the producer’s credit, and if Wesley pulled out they could take it to a younger director more able to deal with action. Because if there was one thing A.D. felt the script needed it was action. Or another character. If there was another person along, another girl perhaps, a friend of Lacey’s that Jim could fall in love with, then sex would be better and more complicated and there would be more angles. Later he would deal with all of that. For now he would just shine it on.

He cashed in his chips, except for a hundred dollars’ worth of ones, and put Walker’s ten grand into a separate pocket in a sealed envelope. Then he went over to the blackjack table and spent the next several hours neither winning nor losing.

Meanwhile, Walker, who hadn’t been able to sleep, was trying to wear himself out by returning to the script. He had been working off and on, occasionally watching the action in the casino for a few minutes, but mostly hanging around the desk while the scene built up inside him and he felt himself pulled back to that long traumatic journey by train up the length of India to New Delhi. It was the smoky evening light in the Madras train station that he remembered first and then the babble of thousands of voices
. . . .

EXTERIOR — MIDDAY
. . .
Coming in over the scene with a crane shot of Jim and Lacey following two porters bent double under twelve pieces of luggage as they make their way through a chaos of travelers, beggars, and food vendors. The exotic anarchy of the scene has drawn them closer together. They certainly look more cooled out than they did a few days ago, wearing white cotton kurtas that hang loosely over their waists and newly bought leather sandals. As the porters place their luggage in their first-class compartment, Jim whispers to Lacey in a broad imitation of an Indian accent, “It doesn’t matter if all of India is outside wanting to come in. I mean, does it now? We are inside and being inside is all that matters when one experiences the outside in such an aggressive worldly manner. I don’t know if that is properly philosophical, young lady, but I’m very much fatigued, not just physically, but in my own spiritual body as well and as we know, weariness admits to its own demands.”
. . .
This while sliding a hand under her flowing kurta
. . .
the porters have laid out their bedrolls, accepted a tip, and left. The train picks up speed as it pulls out of the station. Through the window scenes of rural India: endlessly parched fields, smoke from a thousand cooking fires, cardboard and tin shacks outside of ancient mud villages where oxen push waterwheels and hollow-eyed children stare blankly at the passing train
. . . .

THESE SCENES INTERCUT
. . .
with Jim and Lacey cozy and intimate inside their protective cocoon, playing cassettes on their tape deck, drinking wine and eating sandwiches from a straw basket the hotel provided, making love
. . . .
Within the rhythm of the montage night arrives, then the first streaks of morning light across the flat dusty landscape
. . . .
The train stops at the crowded station of a small city. It’s hot. They have an hour’s wait and decide to stretch their legs on the platform outside where entire families live and sleep in the midst of the usual food vendors and comings and goings
. . . .

ANOTHER ANGLE
. . .
From inside a nearly empty restaurant an American couple, whom we know by their adopted Indian names of Sita and Bodhi, sip tea and silently watch Jim and Lacey as they stroll down the platform. They have been on the trail for a very long time and look utterly wasted in their torn and grease-stained lungis and kurtas, faded prayer beads made of tulsi wood draped around their necks, their jaundiced faces sunken and empty-eyed. As Jim and Lacey reach the end of the platform and turn back toward the train, three lepers appear like apparitions from a grotesque dream, waving their open sores as they ask for alms. An old woman with half her nose missing tries to rub a hideous dripping arm across Lacey’s shoulder. Lacey screams. Reaching into her purse, she throws a handful of bills at the lepers, who crawl on their hands and knees after more money than they’ve ever seen
. . . .
As they make their way back to the train, Bodhi steps outside the restaurant and intercepts them. He is a dark-haired young man with a long matted beard and small oval eyes that seem too slow and controlled. “Those were lepers,” he says to Lacey. “You’ll have to get rid of your shirt.” Lacey, on the edge of hysteria, starts to cry but Bodhi puts his hand gently on her arm. “Don’t worry. Happens all the time. Come on in and have a cup of tea.”
. . .
Numbly they follow him inside, sitting down next to Sita, who is blond and perilously thin. “Put this on,” she says to Lacey, taking a wadded-up orange kurta out of her handbag and handing it to her
. . . .
“They never actually touched me,” Lacey says
. . . .
“I know what I’m talking about,” Sita says, her pale blue eyes insistent
. . . .
Obediently Lacey changes into the torn and soiled kurta that makes her look as freaked as she feels. “I have been inside that rag a long long time,” Sita says softly. “It carries my vibrations, and if you open up to them you’ll relax.” Lacey nods, not wanting to pursue it any further. On the platform in front of them an old man in a dhoti starts to play a srangi (Indian violin). He is blind, and is helped by a young girl, who sings along in a high tender voice. A few people drop coins in front of him
. . . .
“Going north, are you?” Bodhi asks
. . . .
“New Delhi,” Jim answers and then Bodhi gets right to it. “Listen, brother, can you spare enough change for two poor pilgrims to get on the train? We’re going up to Rishikesh and we sort of lost it. I picked up malaria in Cochin and both of us went through the hepatitis trip. Any way you cut it, we’re busted.”
. . .
Jim offers him a wad of rupees. With great deliberation, Bodhi counts out what is needed and hands the rest to him. “Blessings on you for a pure and compassionate act.” He calls out for two orders of dumplings and kurds, then turns to stare at a young boy in a white Rolling Stones T-shirt trying to hustle a pack of Camels. “Hold on. Just wait right there. I see an old friend.” He turns to Jim. “If you can front me three hundred more rups I can absolutely guarantee you a serene and expansive ride all the way up to the city of your choice, Nue-va Del-hi.”
. . .
Jim hands him the rupees and he walks quickly outside where he and the boy begin a transaction, obviously not for cigarettes
. . . .
Sita sighs. “He was beautiful in Mysore. He was very open, like a baby when we saw the Puri Baba. He cried and kissed his feet. It was a holy moment.” She stares off across the tracks as they sit in the hot oppressive silence waiting for the train
. . . .

CUT TO
. . .
four small black balls of opium in the palm of Bodhi’s hand; in the background, through the train window, the setting sun sinks over bleak rolling hills. Bodhi passes everyone a ball. “The best, most efficient way is to shove it up your ass. But if you can’t handle that you can swallow it.”
. . .
He and Sita proceed to execute the first option. Jim swallows his but Lacey hesitates. “I’ve never done anything like this,” she says with an awkward giggle
. . . .
“No one’s forcing you,” Bodhi says. “It just smooths and grooves a boring trip. Takes you off the clock.”
. . .
Jim puts an arm around Lacey, pulls her to him. “C’mon, sweetheart, it’s like a Perc or Valium.”
. . .
Closing her eyes, she swallows the opium with a sip of wine
. . . .
Sita pours more wine into a copper offering bowl that rests on a makeshift altar set up underneath the train window; it’s created from a yellow silk cloth laid cross the width of one of Jim’s suitcases. She and Bodhi have made themselves at home, having claimed the upper two bunks for themselves. At the rear of the altar, on either side of a burning candle, are a smoking incense stick and an ancient skull bowl. A many-colored paper cutout of a mandala rests in front of the altar next to a bell and a sickle-shaped bone knife. On the window they’ve taped two photographs: a reproduction of the goddess Kali, her blue four-armed body standing triumphant over two headless corpses, and a black-and-white photograph of a ferocious smooth-skinned yogi covered with ash sitting naked underneath a banyan tree, his pupils raised upward so that only the whites of his eyes are visible
. . . .
Bodhi lies back on a lower bunk, his hands locked behind his neck, very relaxed and satisfied with the way things are going. “Sita and I might do a little puja. Jump the energy level. Sanctify the space and pacify the demons.”
. . .
“Well sure,” Jim says. “Whatever it takes.”
. . .
Sita, seated in a half lotus in front of the altar, nods and clasps the palms of her hands together, bowing slightly. Then she touches the top of her head and intones: “Om Hum Hrim Siva Saktibyham Svaha.”
. . .
Lacey curls up inside Jim’s embrace as they lie on the opposite bunk. She can’t stop giggling. “This is all a little theatrical, don’t you think? A little bit hippie-dippy.”
. . .
Sita turns to stare at her, a slow sad smile on her thin lips
. . . .
“I didn’t mean anything,” Lacey says. “I just don’t know what’s going on.”
. . .
After a long pause, Bodhi says: “It’s theatrical, all right. If you know that, you’ll come through the dreams okay.”
. . .
“Come through what dreams?” Jim asks, struggling to make sense through faculties that are spinning away from him
. . . .
“Whatever dreams Mother India has in store for you,” Bodhi replies. “This country doesn’t work, you understand. It doesn’t want to work. It’s in a time switch. Everything that’s repressed back home is on the street here. The outside becomes the inside or is it the other way around? Certain things become available. Our guru teaches us not to shrink from the senses but to conquer them through experience. He says perfection can be attained by satisfying all desires. Take it right to the street, he says. Every event is sacred. That’s our Baba’s special message for you this evening. Just watch and accept. Every rip-off, betrayal, slimy surprise; they’re all opportunities to jump your level.”
. . .
“What’s he saying?” Lacey whispers to Jim. She is beginning to feel stoned and paranoid
. . . .
“Something occult, no doubt,” he says. As if from a great distance they watch Sita ring a little brass bell, softly repeating a mantra: “Om Jaya vijaya vijaya.”
. . .
Lacey tries to sit up but falls back on the bunk. “Oh, God,” she moans. “What’s happening to me?”
. . .
“You’re on hold,” Bodhi explains, standing up and smiling down at them. “We dipped your opium into a little elixir of snake juice. Copped it from an old jungle Baba back at Goa. You’ll be paralyzed for a few hours, nothing more than that.” They watch him, unable to move or speak as he systematically goes through their luggage, emptying out Lacey’s purse and Jim’s wallet and trying on Jim’s clothes. Sita remains absorbed in meditation, her eyes half closed, the mantra a whisper through her lips
. . . .
“You’re observers now,” Bodhi goes on. “Tantric TV watchers. Pranayama is a great yoga. Very pure. Watching your breath and your thoughts and your money and possessions come and go.”
. . .
He tries on one of Jim’s white linen jackets, admiring himself in a hand-held mirror. Impatiently, Sita tells him to get on with it
. . . .
Bodhi sighs, folding up the jacket and putting it with the rest of his chosen wardrobe. “We have to complete the puja. We’re on the sixth day of a seven-day puja devoted to getting Sita knocked up. We’re neophytes, you understand, and a lot can go wrong when you’re working the kundalini up the spinal column and touching base with all the chakras. That old inner woman can cause you grief if you don’t stay on the point. So we have to perform when the moon tells us to perform. Tomorrow will be the fertile time for a god-child to be conceived. Now we store the energy, hold back the sperm until the auspicious moment, and then let the saki unite with Siva.”
. . .
“Please,” Sita implores
. . . .
“All right then,” Bodhi says, turning back to Jim and Lacey for one final word. “Don’t worry about your passports. We just want to meet our needs, nothing more. A few clothes, your money, tape deck, stuff you can easily replace. You’re loaded, after all. Hey, we’re not out to do anyone in. Although, as our Baba says, we occupy the places of the gross. But in his infinite compassion he gave us the tools to process it.”
. . .
All this while he’s quickly removing his clothes and joining Sita, who is sitting naked on a bedroll in front of the altar. They stare into each other’s eyes with great seriousness, intoning “Hrim, Shrim, Kleem,” as Lacey and Jim lie pinned to the bunk unable not to look
. . . .
Sita’s fingers slowly circle the tip of his cock . His breathing becomes rapid as he squeezes Sita’s nipples. For a moment they have to pull back, shutting their eyes as they regain control
. . . .
“We need music,” he suggest
s. . . .
Sita looks at him impatiently. “Don’t be an asshole. Concentrate on the gap between breaths. Abandon yourself to those gaps. You remember what Baba says.”
. . .
“I’m not keeping the Atma in mind,” Bodhi says. “All I feel like doing is fucking your brains out
. . . .
” She looks at him with disgust. “If you shoot your filthy load into me I’ll never forgive you.”
. . .
“No danger in that,” he says, looking at his wilted cock
. . . .
“It’s five minutes to twelve,” Sita reminds him. “We’ve come too far to throw it away
. . . .
” She bends down to give him an efficient blow job. As he becomes erect she pulls away and slowly lowers herself toward him. But before she can settle herself over him, he ejaculates in short spasmodic bursts. “You creep,” she cries out. “You’ve ruined everything.” She turns away and bursts into tears
. . . .
A few hours later the train pulls into a dark and nearly deserted station. Jim and Lacey sleep the dreamless sleep of the drugged while Sita and Bodhi prepare to leave the compartment, looking resplendent in white linen suit and clinging silk dress, a gang of porters carrying all their bags except two, which they have left behind as a gesture of goodwill.