Tree of Smoke (78 page)

The warden said, “I am a Christian too. An Anglican. I pray for Benny. He’s a bit psychotic. Depressed. But he’s more cheerful the last few weeks.”

Sands bowed his head, almost touching his brow to Storm’s, and hit him with an uppercut below the sternum. Storm’s legs gave in and a lot of tadpoles raced around his field of vision. He said, “Yow, daddy.”

Shaffee helped to hold him upright. “Are you sick? What is the problem sir?”

Neither the prisoner nor the visitor bothered replying.

The pause in communication seemed hard on Shaffee. He had to talk. “The Red Cross gave us the kind of report I would call useful. Yes, we have areas in this prison to be improved. Hygiene, diet, I appreciated their suggestions. But not the Amnesty International! For instance we have Chinese gangs. If we don’t lock up the members without bail, they’ll be out where they can reach the witnesses. The people making the report for Amnesty International didn’t understand this. They gave us a very bad report. So you see why we don’t want reports. Why should we allow it? We don’t want you if you are a humanitarian,” he said. “We don’t want you if you are a journalist. You are not a Christian. I know what a Christian looks like because I myself am already a Christian.” This speech had given him strength. “Get out!” he cried. He turned to the guard: “Yes! This man is not permitted here!”

Thirty minutes later Storm was eating a rib-eye steak in a place with bamboo décor but with an Anglo name—Planter’s Inn Pub—listening to a wrenchingly beautiful lament played on native flutes which slowly became recognizable in its sadness as an old Moody Blues tune: “Nights in White Satin.”

He’d already tried Phangan, the low-rent druggy island resort east of Thailand—but that one flopped. A lot of retrograde hippies with melted eyes, rip-off Indian ganja freaks, various bits of psychedelic European burn-off. Airheads. Just air. He couldn’t deal with them.

This after his escape from the Barnstable County Jail in Massachusetts: one day a door had simply stood open—surely the Agency’s doing, and likely the colonel’s—and he’d walked away.

This after the great sea battle, the only firefight of his life, in which the Coast Guard had sunk his boat and many tons of Colombian ganja, and shot one and drowned another of his crew of three Colombians.

In Bangkok he’d heard the colonel might be buying and processing raw opium in the region. He moved down from Bangkok where the whores were friendly and zoned on chemicals to Kuala Lumpur where the whores performed with the bloodless efficiency of automatic shoeshine machines. Kuala Lumpur, a name somehow connoting limpness and no warmth, like Cold Lump. A decaffeinated town, clear, acrylic brains, the precise opposite of Phangan. Air-conditioning that could reasonably be described as brutal, everybody seemed to have a respiratory condition. Very Western, very modern, kind of an Asian Akron, Ohio, with cut-rate prices, tropical fruit, and everybody driving on the left…He’d seen the photo of William Benét in the
New Straits Times
and had realized that along the way a sort of psychic and spiritual gravitation had guided his every footstep and that he had bested the Assassin, survived the Smugglers, transcended the Prison, wandered among the Fools, and that he would confront the Hanged Man or the Betrayer—Sands would be revealed for what he was—and that the colonel was now possible.

Storm stayed in Kuala Lumpur long enough to get a tattoo and make sure Sands really did hang. He stayed at a spittoon for humanity in Little India called the Bombay, just over a money changer’s. They gave him a small blue electric fan and a white towel but no soap. He could listen to seven radios at once through the quarter-inch plywood walls.

The cheap hotels were short. You were always close to the street in these places, almost down in it. The whistles and exclamations, the baby-voiced horns.

The hallways of the Bombay reeked thickly but not unpleasantly of curry and Nag Champa incense. In the dawns after first prayer call he could smell bread baking on the still air. Then the diesel smoke overpowered everything, rising with the urban noise. Each cycle held another cycle. You could not break out of the machine.

He spent the mornings reading from a Bible defiled by some Muslim with a Magic Marker. Or listening to the radio. In his speeches the prime minister stressed emotional tranquillity.

Or he wrote in his notebook. Efforts in verse. He admired the poet Gregory Corso, a man who spewed out genius by the ream. As for himself, a line now and then. You can’t extort the Muses.

Or he read from his copy of
Zohar: the Book of Splendor
. He’d picked it up in an English bookshop years ago, in Saigon, before the fates had renamed it Ho Chi Minh City—

—read until his focus loosened and the lines of text divided into duplicates and floated on the page.

Half awake, he dreams himself coming to the colonel at the end: and the colonel says: You know there is a cycle of imagining and desire, desire and death, death and birth, birth and imagining. And we have been tempted into its mouth. And it has swallowed us.

He imagined the look in the colonel’s eyes as he witnessed Storm breaking a cycle just for the curiosity of breaking it.

He traveled the city not allowing himself to desire the women—their silk touching past him in tight aisles, on buses, in cafés.

On his fourth visit to Rajik, the Hindu gave Storm his answer, speaking again with an immense gentleness. “You cannot be healed. You are forbidden to hope for it. You cannot be saved.”

Four days after the hanging Storm took a deluxe bus with air-conditioning and even TV to the end of the line, the end of the highway itself, in Gerik, a sizable, complicated town of wooden structures and dirt streets. It was nighttime when he disembarked. He walked among the vendors’ tables in the square where the buses stopped.

Sands had been right: immediately Ju-shuan accosted him. A squat, heavy man. He wore shorts, a large T-shirt. Walked crab-footed in his zoris.

“Hey, I’m glad you came. Call me Mr. John, okay?”

“Mr. John okay.”

“Want mas-sage? Want woman?”

Storm said, “Do you have boy massage?”

“Boy massage? Hah! Yes. You want boy?”

“Is that too twisted for you, Johnny?”

“Boy, girl, fine. Anything.”

“Girl is fine.”

“Girl massage, fine. You gonna stay at my hotel, okay? Two blocks. You are American? Germany? Canada? Everybody stays at my place.”

“Let me get some food.”

“I got food in my café.”

“I’m gonna get some fruit.”

Storm went among the vendors’ tables. He bought a couple star fruits. A mango. Johnny followed him.

“You want coconut?”

“I’m done.”

“Then you can have some dinner, and then whatever you want. I get you the lady for the mas-sage.”

“Dinner later. Woman first,” Storm told him.

As they went into Johnny’s, he pointed out to Storm the establishment next door. “Don’t stay in that place,” he said. “Don’t go there. It’s a bad place.” It looked pretty much the same as Johnny’s.

Johnny put him in a room with a straw tatami on its wooden floor and a Muslim toilet with a rubber hose. “Wait one half hour,” Johnny told him.

“Don’t bring me one that doesn’t smile.”

Johnny brought the girl in twenty minutes. “Smile,” he told her in English.

“I think I know your friend,” he said to the girl when Johnny was gone.

“Mr. John is my friend.”

“I think his name is Ju-shuan.”

“I don’t know Ju-shuan. I never heard Ju-shuan.”

She too was Chinese. Thick of flesh and friendly. She smelled of the joss-house, of incense. Possibly on the way over she’d stopped to pray, or to contribute. Not, he hoped, to consult the monks as to some ailment.

“You seem sad,” he said.

“Sad? No. Not sad.”

“Then why don’t you smile?”

She gave him a brief, sad smile.

Later Storm ate out front of Johnny’s hotel at a small wooden table under an awning, on the street itself, under a paper lantern, in a storm of moths and winged termites.

He shared the table with a Malaysian man who tried to talk to him in English.

“Don’t bother me now, Maestro.”

“Whatever you say. I’m all yours!”

Except for the small lantern over their heads and a few dim-lit doorways, all around them was darkness—damp, warm, stinking like breath.

Out of it materialized a skinny European, a young man with an angularity both boyish and plainly British, coming at them like a horror-film mummy, his belt cinched and his khakis puckered at the waist, the crown of his head wrapped in dirty bandages.

He sat down at the table and said, “Good evening. How can I get served?”

Johnny joined them and introduced himself and ordered food for the traveler and conversed in Malay with the other man until, after a while, the other man finished his tea and left. “He doesn’t know English. He is a relative from my wife,” Johnny explained. He urged on them more bowls of rice mixed with a green lemony weed and bits of shellfish, or crisp pork, Storm couldn’t tell which. “What happened to your head?” Johnny asked his new guest. “You’re okay now, I hope.”

The young man had been going at his meal seriously, surrounded by whirling bugs. He stopped long enough to say, “Last week I was in Bangkok, just passing through, and I stepped into an open sewer.”

He went back to his eating. He ate everything. They always did. In the Colombian mountains Storm had once seen a Brit eat cattle tripe tenderized in kerosene, eat it like a starving man.

“Pitch-black. Walking along. Right into a concrete ditch. There wasn’t a lot of wonderful stuff in there, I might as well tell you. I’ve been monitoring my symptoms ever since.” He spoke mainly to Storm. “I fainted right in the guck, with an open gash in my head. At this minute I picture an invading horde of microbes assaulting my skull. I took myself to the nearest surgery in a cab and the young nurse told me, You should carry a small light with you wherever you go wandering. A small light. She told me when I came, and again when I left with a head full of stitches. Wherever you go wandering, take a small light. Sounds rather like a line from a musical play.”

Johnny said, “I can meet you to a healer. A woman. Mas-sage. To heal you.”

“I like the Asians,” the Brit said. “As a general thing I find I like them quite a lot. They don’t play games the way we do. Of course, I mean, they do the same things we do, but they aren’t games. They’re simply there. They’re simply actions.”

“This your first visit?”

“But not my last. And you?”

“I’ve been in and out since the sixties.”

“Really. Impressive. In Malaysia, then?”

“Yeah. The general region.”

“What about Borneo? Have you been?”

“Borneo is not good,” Johnny said. “Don’t go there. It’s ridiculous.”

“I’ve got a torch now, you can bet. And it’s no small light. Look here.” He dug a small but hefty-looking flashlight from the pocket of his pants. “Bore a hole in your flesh.” He pointed it playfully at a little child hovering at the edge of the dark. “Bore a hole in your flesh with this one!”

“Please don’t give him any coins,” Johnny said.

“No, I wouldn’t,” the Brit assured him. “I’ve got too many friends in this town as it is.”

“You have a lot of friends here?” Johnny said.

“I’m just playing a game,” the young man said. To Storm he remarked, “You see? Mr. John doesn’t play games.”

Johnny asked, “Are you a sightseer?”

“I am when I haven’t got thirty stitches in my head.”

“You are a sightseer. I can get you a guide to the forest tomorrow.”

“Give me a rest. Two days and I’m ready for Kilimanjaro.”

“What about you?” Storm asked Johnny. “Do you hire out as a guide?”

“Sure, if you want,” Johnny said. “But we’ll go slow, and I can’t climb the mountain. Just to visit the caves at the Jelai River. I’ll show you the caves, and that’s all.”

“That might work out.”

“There is one small mountain we must pass.”

“I’ll think about it.”

“The mountain is nothing. It’s just more of the same thing—up, up, up. Are you a sightseer? Maybe we’ll see an elephant.”

“I said I’ll think about it.”

The young man with stitches in his head said: “I met a missionary in Bangkok. He told me to go by Psalm 121—‘I lift mine eyes unto the hills.’ I told him I’m a pagan. He insisted I read Psalm 121 every day while I’m traveling. So. Was he playing a game? Why tell me something like that?” He filled his bowl once more. Storm watched him eat.

“Because it was a message.”

“A message, indeed. But who was the message for?”

Storm didn’t tell him who the message was for.

Johnny said, “I don’t like talking about religious things. It makes two people unfriendly.”

“No, Mr. John,” the Brit said, “we’re not going to argue, not about religion. It’s too boring.”

“What about a woman for you tonight? What about a mas-sage?”

The Brit looked disturbed by this talk and said, “We’ll mention it later, all right?”

The next day Storm engaged Johnny to guide him into the government-owned forest. Three blocks from Johnny’s hotel they stepped into an open twenty-foot motorboat and were piloted up the Jelai River through a light rain by a man draped in several clear plastic bags.

“This man is from the primitives,” Johnny said. “But he is living in the city now, with us. We’ll meet his relatives, his clan. The government supports them. They live like a thousand years ago.”

They traveled upstream. The river flat, sinewed, brown. They said nothing. The outboard engine’s small clatter. Stink of its smoke. The town receded. At first, some occasional dwellings alongside their progress, then none.

Many miles upriver the two passengers stepped from the boat onto a wooden pier that seemed to serve no nearby village or any habitation at all.