Growing bored after a while, though, and allowing that she wouldn’t have minded if he’d said a word or two, or even simply moved a finger, she wandered into the room he used as an office. He had been particularly voracious for his opium that day when she had arrived, and smoked a pipe as soon as she had handed him the black viscous package. In his haste he had forgotten to turn off his laptop, the screen of which was now swimming with a particularly banal screen saver. A mere jog of the mouse, though, took her directly into the much-vaunted secret world, for he had forgotten to turn off his Internet connection, too.
Which turned out to be as boring as the screen saver. An apparently mindless chatter of international gossip came through on the incessant e-mail: American woman almost raped in Durbar Square in Kathmandu; gang of teenage American cannabis traffickers caught in Singapore; China cracking down on American businessman because he was making too much profit, now accused of being a spy (actually he was spying, the e-mail confided), State Department outrage recommended. Tip-off for the DEA: big shipment of heroin believed to be moving out of the Golden Triangle, down to Udon Thani. Obviously headed for Bangkok.
Interested now, she traced the sequence of messages back through time. Relay teams of CIA, FBI, DEA, Thai customs, and Thai drug enforcement police were chuckling while they secretly followed the shipment from northern Laos, across the border into Thailand; like a snowball it collected more perps the more it rolled. The plan was to wait until it reached Bangkok, so the kingpin would be revealed. As she watched, they lost the shipment, however. Somehow on the outskirts of Krung Thep the van, surreptitiously followed by a great motorcade (of Japanese four-by-fours, so beloved of foreign government agencies), disappeared. Sighs, groans, and moans over the instant messaging. The Americans suspected the Thais of pulling a fast one. So did most of the Thais, who salivated at the probable size of the bribe someone had extorted.
“We think it’s General Zinna again,” one of the real-time dialogues revealed.
“Really?”
“Yeah really.”
“You really think it was him?”
“Yeah, that’s what I think, that it was him, yeah.”
“Well, you don’t know it was him?”
“No, I don’t.”
“It could have been someone else.”
“Yes, it could. But it wasn’t.”
“How do you know that?”
“I don’t know that. I just know it.”
“Like a hunch or something?”
“Like a hunch, but not really a hunch. A kind of-”
“What?”
“A kind of faux hunch.”
“What’s a faux hunch?”
“Like a hunch but it’s not? I get them from time to time.”
“I’ve never heard of a faux hunch before. I have a conceptual problem with that.”
“I understand that.”
“But cutting to the chase, you’ve got one now?”
“Yeah. Right now. That it was him, yes.”
“Zinna?”
“Yeah. Zinna.”
“I’m bored out of my friggin’ mind. You?”
“If I wasn’t, like, catatonic with boredom I wouldn’t be talking to you like this. You’re my last link with humanity. It’s like, I’m that spaceship captain in that David Bowie song from way back? Thousands of years ago they launched me into cyberspace, and this is all I’ve known-if it wasn’t for this dim, tenuous link with you, I’d be like a cipher by now-a shade. I guess that’s all I am. I’m like those Japanese kids who can only communicate via computers.”
“You need to get laid.”
“Or smoke some dope.”
“Yeah. That’s kind of funny.”
Chanya saw an intermittent cure for boredom in the future: there was something homely and warm about this faceless American conversation-it reminded her of those people in the States who had been good to her. It so happened that Mitch was slowly coming out of his trance, although still a long way from sobriety. He glanced up at her as she entered the bedroom, but his eyes immediately switched back to the ceiling. “Marge, I saw it, Marge.”
Chanya, doing her very best Marge Simpson impersonation: “Saw what, Homer?”
Ecstatically: “I saw the beginning of the world, Marge.”
“Really?”
“Yeah.” Crestfallen: “Then I saw the end of it.”
“Did the Company send messages again?”
“Yeah. That’s how I saw the beginning and the end of the world, Marge. The Company knows everything.”
“Homer, honey, remind me again of the secret code for accessing encrypted messages from the Company over the Net.”
“AQ82860136574X-Halifax nineteen [lowercase] Oklahoma twenty-2 BLUE WHALE [all uppercase] Amerika stop 783.”
48
After Chanya left him that day, she thought about the heroin shipment that had disappeared, and Zinna. In no time at all, she fashioned a plan. She bought a large calculator that coped with more than twenty digits on the screen, but it didn’t come close to telling her how dramatically her karma was about to be improved.
Not enough zeros in the world. Chanya going to the stars this time.
She could hardly believe the brilliance of her idea, or the great waves of relief that were rolling over her. She felt cleansed already, and during the journey she experienced repeated pleasurable shudders, the very shudders that the books associate with the first true experience of samadhi-your mind just cannot comprehend the relief: at first it has enormous difficulty admitting that life, finally, is an ecstatic experience, contrary to all news reports so far received.
She covered her mouth to stifle laughs of joy, kept grinning inappropriately, and sometimes could not resist a sob. This was salvation, big-time. This was exactly what the Buddha taught: you acted with total selflessness, even putting your life on the line, certain that you were following the Path exactly as it presented itself to you in the context of your karma, grabbing at opportunities to liberate all living beings from the chains of existence. She understood that famous Buddha anecdote as if it were happening to her right now: wild strawberries had never tasted so good. She offered a vow that even though she was not yet a nun, she would continue, lifetime after lifetime, to the very end of time, to return to help and heal. Especially to heal. Like Joan of Arc she was a girl suddenly certain of her link with Up There. The only problem: finding the right jao por to whom to sell her plan.
As often happens, though, with grandiose plots to dramatically improve one’s karma, the idea soon began to diminish in her mind. She wondered if she had not spent too much time alone with that madman Mitch: how could an insignificant girl, a whore, hope to pull off something like that?
Her devastation at the manner of his death, though, caused a seismic shift in her state of mind. She and Mitch had already been naked, about to make love, when Ishy burst in with that huge military knife, his face distorted with an insane jealousy. It happened so quickly. She was still lying next to the American when Ishy jumped him, plunged the knife into his guts, tore upward with the blade, then made her watch while he severed the penis, held it in her face, then chucked it on the bedside table. Ishy the artist had been totally eclipsed by Ishy the monster. There was even a righteousness in the tattooist’s rage: a face bursting with self-justification as he held up the severed member. Here was a tortured mind that had given up the last shred of resistance to its demon. Here indeed was the demon in purest form. Her face expressed total revulsion: she was not afraid to die. Clearly Ishy had misunderstood. For her, this could never be an expression of love. Further enraged, he grabbed the telephone and stretched the cable until it was close enough for her to use. Go on then, call the cops, his expression said.