“Don’t you love her?”

“Leave me alone! What are you trying to do to me?” he said, and walked off into the jungle, but in the opposite direction to Caroline.

So the triangle had effectively broken up. Nobody was with anybody. The three points were single lines again, parallel, not touching.

Oops. My fault.

I didn’t witness the scene later that day between Terry and Caroline, but I saw Caroline afterward, walking as if tranquilized. “Are you OK?” I called out. Every now and then she’d stop and pound her head with her fists. “Caroline!” I called out again. She looked up at me with desperate eyes. Then Terry wandered past my window, looking bulldozed. He informed me that we were going back to Bangkok in the morning. At last, good news. I wondered if Terry’s curiosity about the terrible event to take place in Eddie’s house had been satisfied by the explosion of the triangle. Either way, I couldn’t wait to leave, nor could I spend the rest of the day in that house. I had to get out.

With no other option, I went with Eddie in his car as he went on his rounds. He seemed glad of the company and eagerly delivered a creepy monologue that compared doctors with gods. We visited a few farmers he’d finally discovered had chronic illnesses. After his consultations, to my disgust, he hit on their daughters right in front of the parents, girls who couldn’t be older than sixteen. Not knowing enough about the culture, I wasn’t sure of the perils of Eddie carrying on in this fashion, but it was hair-raising the way he went about trying to seduce, intimidate, and buy these poor girls. I couldn’t find his redeeming features anymore. The man I had grown up with was gone. As we left, he made up words about these girls, “fuckalicious” and “fuck-worthy” being the most common. Every word and gesture of his seemed saturated in frustration and fury. Back on the road, I thought: This man is a grenade waiting to detonate, and I hope I’m not around to see it.

Then he detonated.

I was around to see it.

My forehead was pressed against the car window, and I was wishing that the jungle around us was in fact the interior of a lavish, jungle-themed hotel and any time I liked I could go upstairs to my room and crawl between clean sheets and order room service and take an overdose of sleeping pills. I would have liked nothing better.

“What’s this?” Eddie said, breaking my reverie.

It was a girl of about fifteen running down the road waving her arms, signaling us to stop. Here’s trouble, I thought.

Eddie pulled over and we both got out of the car. She was motioning for Eddie to follow her. From what I could gather, her father was sick. Very sick. She was in a panic. She wanted Eddie to come right away. Eddie summoned his most professional posture. He translated for me, repeated the symptoms as she described them: fever, vomiting, powerful abdominal cramps, delirium, and lack of feeling in the legs and arms. Eddie grunted and sighed at the same time. Then he shook his head obstinately. The girl started shouting in a pleading voice.

What was he up to?

She turned and grabbed my arm. “Please, please.”

“Eddie, what’s going on?”

“I really don’t think I can make it today. Maybe tomorrow, if I have a minute.”

“No you understand?” she said in English. “My father. He is dying!”

“Eddie,” I said, “what are you doing?”

“Jasper, can you go for a little walk?”

It didn’t take a genius to figure out that I was about to be an accomplice in the dirtiest piece of blackmail possible.

“I’m not leaving,” I said.

Eddie looked at me with crushing, concentrated hatred. It was a showdown. “Jasper,” he said behind clenched teeth, “I’m telling you to get the fuck out of here.”

“No way.”

Eddie went ballistic, ranting at me with the full extent of his lung capacity. He tried everything to get me to shove off and leave him alone to rape and pillage. I wouldn’t budge. This is it, I thought. My first physical confrontation with evil. I was eager to triumph.

I didn’t.

He pushed me. I pushed back. He pushed me again. It was getting tedious. I took a swing. Eddie ducked it. Then he took a swing at me. I tried ducking too, but instead of socking me in the jaw, his fist connected with my forehead. I staggered backward a little, and taking advantage of my wobbling, he let fly an unexpected kick that got me in the throat. I fell back and hit my head on the dirt. I heard the car door slam, and by the time I got to my feet, I couldn’t do anything but watch the car drive off.

Eddie, that disgusting bastard! That oily, rancid, horny bandit! I felt guilty for my failure to protect that poor girl, but if someone you’ve known since childhood is so determined to commit a crime he’s willing to kick you in the throat, what can you do? Anyway, it was too late now. That fiend had made away with the girl and left me stranded in the middle of nowhere. And where the hell was I, anyway, other than the exact place where all the heat in Thailand gathered for a meeting?

I walked for several hours. Swarms of overexcited mosquitos pursued me assiduously. There was no one in sight, no sign of human life. It was easy to imagine that I was the only one in existence, and it didn’t make me feel lonely at all. It’s exhilarating to imagine every human dead, to have it in your power to start a new civilization or not. I thought I’d choose not. Who wants the humiliation of being father to the human race? Not me. I could see myself as the ant king, or the figurehead of a crab society- but Eddie had seriously turned me off humans altogether. One person can do that.

I walked on, oozing from the humidity but more or less content in my last-man-on-earth fantasy. I didn’t even mind so much that I was utterly lost in the jungle. How many times would this happen in my life? A lot, I predicted. This time it’s the jungle, next time it will be the ocean, then a department store parking lot, until finally I will be irretrievably lost in outer space. Mark my words.

But my solitude was short-lived. I heard the chattering of voices coming from the bottom of a hill. I went over the slope and could see a group of maybe twenty people, farmers mostly, in a circle next to a police van. There was nothing in this scene to suggest it had anything to do with me, but something told me not to go down there. I suppose this is what happens when you feel guilty all the time for no reason.

I stood up on my tiptoes to get a better view. As I did, I saw a shadow creeping up on me. I spun around. A middle-aged woman holding a basket of apples was staring at me. No, she wasn’t. She was stealing dark glances at the amulet around my neck.

“Stay down. Don’t let them see you,” she said in an accent as thick as the jungle around us.

She pushed me to the ground with her long, muscular arms. We lay side by side on the grassy slope.

“I know you.”

“Do you?”

“You’re the doctor’s friend, aren’t you?” she asked.

“What’s going on?”

“He’s in trouble,” she said.

So they knew he’d blackmailed the poor girl into sleeping with him. Well, good. I couldn’t care less if they threw him in jail so that he could be sodomized for the rest of his life. He deserved it.

“They dug up the bodies,” she said.

What bodies was she talking about?

“What bodies are you talking about?”

“The old doctor, and the young one too.”

“They dug them up? What made them do a creepy thing like that?”

“They thought it might be a plague of some new virus. A couple of years ago, we had an outbreak of chicken flu. Now there is much vigilance when it comes to multiple deaths of uncertain causes.”

Interesting, but what has this got to do with blackmail and rape? I wondered.

“And?”

“They did an autopsy. And I suppose you know what they found.”

“A hideous mess of decomposing organs?”