by Tod A
“Raj, my friend, I’m definitely turning into a dirty old man.”
He laughed. “Perhaps you should seek professional help.”
“What, shrinks? Meds? I tried all that.”
“No, brother—a good woman of ill repute.”
“Nah, not for me.”
“You’ve certainly come to the right place…”
“I know, but I’ve always felt weird about it. I mean, everybody’s got a right to make a living. I just find the whole financial aspect depressing.”
“I take your point,” he said. “But one gets used to it.”
“What?” I looked at him. “You?”
“Not often, and certainly not without regrets, however, at crucial moments in a man’s life, a real randi can be a lifesaver.”
Cooney’s dance partner was struggling to hold him up.
“Thanks, but I think I’ll skip it tonight,” I sighed. “We should probably get the captain back to the boat before he hits the deck right here.”
“Agreed. Let’s do the necessary.”
We paid our bar tab, then grabbed Cooney by his elbows and manhandled him toward the door.
“Come on, Captain, shore leave’s over.”
“Wo, wo, wo! Where we going so fast? I was just getting to know her!”
He wriggled from our grasp and stumbled headlong into a table of loggers, spilling their drinks all over them. They leapt up, not looking happy at all. One of them was the one-eared guy from the pier.
“So sorry, gentlemen,” Raj said. “As you can see, our friend has overindulged this evening. Please allow us to pay for your drinks. Mark, would you be so kind?”
They stood with clenched fists as I searched my pockets.
“In fact, let us buy you a few more rounds. Mark, please!”
I tossed a wad of bills on the table and we backed away.
“Sorry, guys. He’s just real drunk. Have a great night, huh?”
We beat our retreat to the sound of the band murdering Patsy Cline’s ‘Crazy’.
“I can’t believe we got out of there alive.”
“Indeed.”
Cooney kept up a garbled monologue interspersed with Cockney sing-along all the way back to the pier.
“Hey, I know! Let’s get some whiz. Anybody know where we can get some whiz? Just getting started. She is bloody hot, is she not? Hey, that rhymes! I do like to be beside the seaside, I do like to be beside the sea. There’s lots of girls I should like to be beside, beside the seaside, beside the sea. Where are you taking me? Fucking traitors. I thought you was my friends. I guess you never know, do you? Nazis. Foreign infiltrators is what you are. I’ve got a good mind to report you to the fucking authorities. I’ll make you pay, I will. Errrr, I think I’m gonna be sick.”
We held him up as his vomited into the gutter. I wondered if he knew he’d been dancing with a lady-boy.
Back at the boat, we hefted him into a hammock below deck. Thirty seconds later he was out cold.
Raj stretched out on the cushions, aft. I lay on the cabin roof, smoking and thinking. The lights of fishing boats glimmered in the darkness beyond the reef as I watched garlands of trash float in on the early morning tide.
{ 9 }
Upriver
Cooney shoved off as soon as it was light. He claimed his knees were bothering him, but I could tell he was stroppy that we’d curtailed his debauch the night before. Monty and Kubu planned to stay on for a few more days’ indulgence. Raj and I bought tickets for the first boat to Port Mino.
A crisp sea breeze swiftly blew most of the darker thoughts from my mind. Our vessel was a wood outrigger powered by an ancient outboard motor. There were only a few other passengers. The rest of the hull was stacked with cargo. In an hour or so we arrived at Mino, a mess of wood huts on stilts at the mouth of the muddy Mahabang, gateway to back-island.
An old man with a tubercular hack tied us off at the pier. The water stank of fish and fuel oil. Raj and I leapt out with our rucksacks as teenage boys ambled from the palm shadows to offload the cargo. We sat down at a flyblown restaurant to wait for the next boat heading up-river.
Raj ordered veggie rice, I ordered meat.
Skinny black chickens pecked in the dust.
The waiter brought our food. Raj tucked in. After several spoonfuls he noticed I wasn’t eating.
“Don’t you fancy yours?” he asked.
“I guess I’m not hungry.”
A man was butchering the carcass of an unidentified mammal in the road.
Raj pointed toward a new concrete pier on the far bank. “That must be the new KGV river station.”
Three prefab office trailers emblazoned with the Kejahat Global Ventures logo sat on blocks in the red dust, ringed by hurricane fencing. A pair of white Fiberglas speedboats with shiny outboards bobbed laconically in the foam.
The long-tail boat we’d hired proved less glamorous—more like an overgrown canoe. We watched the boys loading it with sacks of rice, crates of beer, jugs of coconut oil, barrels of petrol. Then we were on our way inland. A repurposed motorbike motor drove the propeller via a long shaft. We sputtered along through the maze of mangroves, past pigs rooting in the muck at water’s edge. There were no maps— the river’s course through the swamp was constantly changing. Only our boatman knew the way. He spent most of his time squinting at the current, but he seemed to find great amusement in Raj and me. Anything we did sent him into great fits of toothless laughter.
“How do you find life on the wagon?” Raj asked after a while. “Still giving it—what do you call it in the States—the ‘old college try’?”
“Yeah. Well, maybe not that,” I said. “I spent most of my college years hammered. That’s where I really developed a serious taste for the stuff. It helped take my mind off how much I hated everybody around me.”
“You know, I visited America after passing out from university.”
“You’ve never mentioned it.”
“Your country astonished me. I’d never been abroad before, never even left Gujarat. Truly, in America I saw such things as I never knew existed.”
“What—Grand Canyon? Niagara Falls?”
“Huntsville, Texas, if you can believe. My uncle managed a handful of motels. Even I had no conception as to what a motel might be. In those days, most of us in the educated classes still had no automobiles. In Texas I saw my first overpasses! Shopping malls! Eighteen-wheelers! Drive-through churches! I ate all-you-can-eat!”
“Must have been quite a shock.”
“Indeed it was. But there was one place I will never forget, a place where all things could be found beneath one colossal roof. One Saturday morning my uncle took me to Wal-Mart.”
I had to laugh.
“I tell you I was dumbstruck. Not thirty types of breakfast cereal, but one hundred!”
I pictured him cowering in his white suit below towering shelves of Cocoa Puffs.
“Wal-Mart,” I said. “The pinnacle of American achievement.”
“Perhaps not. But America is where I first discovered bourbon.”
“We all have our favorite poison.”
“At the time, I felt I had truly imbibed the nectar of the gods. A weakness for whiskey runs in my family. Maybe my Irish blood is to blame.”
Eventually the mangroves gave way to a tropical savanna of low scrub. Groves of palms and yellow acacias lined the banks. Beyond lay a wilderness of elephant grass and thorny succulent. We passed several small settlements tucked away in clearings hacked out of the bush—a few huts on wonky stilts, a pig or two, a spindly dock. We weren’t in rice country anymore: the staples here were coconuts and fish. Men plied nets on bamboo frames, while women did laundry and children bathed in the shallows.
I took out Buster’s Nikon and began shooting.
Raj lit two sk
inny cigars and passed one back to our pilot.
“The only real vice I’ve got left,” Raj said, exhaling.
“Except for the sex and the booze, of course.”
“Sex is no vice, Mark. What could be more natural?” he said. “But liquor? No, no, no. I’ve been sober for almost ten years now.”
“What? You?” I said, incredulous. “What about all those kupu-kupu’s you’re always sucking down?”
“Didn’t you know? Kupu-kupu means Butterfly in Madunese! A ladies’ drink, itself. Not a drop in them.”
“Well, you sly old bastard!” I said. “And all this time I just thought you could really hold your liquor.”
“No, you see, that was the problem. Whiskey was my weakness. It ended my marriage, and it damned near killed me. I had to put it away. I didn’t want to follow the reckless path my father took. So I enlisted in the AA army.”
“Wow, I had no idea they had Alcoholics Anonymous in India,” I said. “Well, good for you, my man. Whatever works.”
I had been to a few AA meetings in my time—dragged along by newly-sober friends—and it only seemed to bring me down. AA disciples reveled in telling the old war stories, re-living their glory days of excess. But there was something deeply depressing about their need to convince themselves that their best years weren’t already behind them.
I didn’t want to be one of those people—a reformed alcoholic, a former drinker.
“AA has never worked for me,” I said. “All that talk of drinking always makes me feel like having a beer. I mean, I have no problem admitting I have a problem. But if I’m going to be addicted to something, I’ll take beer over meetings any day.”
“Maybe the real problem is that you’re just not ready. You haven’t yet hit bottom,” he said. “You’ll know when the time is right.”
“No, the real problem I have with AA is that you’re supposed to call upon a ‘higher power’. And I just don’t get what you people mean by all that jazz. The World Court? ESP?”
“No,” he laughed, “A spiritual power—something greater than yourself.”
“Why don’t you just admit it? You’re talking about God.”
“Perhaps—but not necessarily. I speak with my higher power every day, good days and bad.”
“Well, if it is God, I’m in trouble. We’re not on speaking terms anymore.”
“You have never prayed?”
“In my darkest moments, maybe. The response has always been a deafening silence.”
The old man barked, pointing at the river ahead. Three large fins broke the surface—freshwater dolphins. He aimed an imaginary pistol and fired, then rubbed his belly, cackling.
“Were you earnest in your petitions—or simply desperate?”
“Desperate, of course. You send out an SOS when the ship is sinking.”
The river’s banks grew steeper as low hills began to rise on both sides. Erosion revealed a layer cake of volcanic ash. Knots of driftwood hung in the tree branches—the high water mark of the monsoon flood.
The current grew swifter. Children fought against it as a game—the smaller and weaker ones losing the battle, shrieking and splashing as they were swept downstream.
A memory flashed in my head of swimming with Buster in the brook behind his house. When you looked straight ahead, the passing current created the illusion of forward motion. But if you looked away, you soon realized you were drifting inexorably backward.
“It’s not the fact that God has never helped me personally that bugs me,” I said. “I just can’t put much faith in the guy that invented cancer, the fucker who sat on his ass while the Nazis exterminated the gypsies and the Jews. If there was ever a perfect moment for divine intervention, the Holocaust was it. Where was God then?”
“Perhaps you’re cemented to a Christian conception of the divine. I was raised a Christian myself, but I lost faith in my teens. It wasn’t until I re-discovered the ancient religion of my people that I was able to lick my addiction.”
“But you’re such a sharp guy, Raj. How can you stomach all that bunk?”
“Hinduism is flexible, Mark. It’s personal—the Wal-Mart of religions, if you will. If Ganesh is not to your liking, why not try Durga? Or Lakshmi? And if not these, then Hanuman, or Shiva. And there are 300 million more, besides!”
“I’m sorry, man. I just can’t believe in any of it. I am a card-carrying atheist, and have been for quite some time. I don’t believe that Christ is our Savior. I don’t believe that there is one God and Muhammad his prophet. I don’t buy that the Buddha is the path to enlightenment or that Brahman is the origin and end of all things. You might as well believe in the fucking Tooth Fairy. Seriously? There’s this invisible force and it does nice things for you, as long as you pray to it? In my experience it hasn’t, so I don’t bother.”
“Look, a kingfisher!” he whispered.
I turned in time to see a blur of orange and metallic blue.
“Pretty. I’ve only ever seen them on Indian beer labels.”
“God is where you find him, Mark. But your eyes must be open.”
“Oh, save that stuff for the babes at the bar, will you?”
He looked hurt. “Well, my prayers are with you.”
“Sorry,” I said. “I appreciate it, man, I really do. But unfortunately that approach doesn’t work either. It was in the New York Times. There was an experiment using alcoholics in rehab—had people pray for them. The control group—the people that didn’t know they were being prayed for—weren’t any likelier to fall off the wagon. But the people who knew they were being prayed for actually did worse.”
Our tired motor carried us patiently upriver. The old man gave it more juice as the banks converged and the current quickened. A pair of hornbills, flushed by the engine noise, swooped off across the water, their huge beaks defying gravity.
We passed dry stream beds strewn with boulders of black basalt, framed by weeping bamboo. Beyond rose the first of the tall trees, flecked with the pastel blooms of wild orchids, where monkeys hooted from their hidden perches, high in the canopy.
“The Higher Power doesn’t have to be God,” Raj said. “It can be anything—just something bigger than yourself.”
“What, like Mount Kebakaran?” I asked, stretching my arms out toward the volcano. “‘Please, Mount Kebakaran, help me say no to that next Oh-Cha!’ Somehow, I can’t see it working.”
“It’s not so ridiculous. Many cultures venerate holy mountains.”
“No, not ridiculous at all. Maybe I could call on aliens to help me quit drinking. I mean, the existence of aliens actually has some statistical probability behind it.”
“So you you’re not willing to believe in the existence of God, yet you believe in little green men?”
“No—believing in little green men without any evidence would be faith. I believe in the possibility of little green men. In an infinite universe, anything is possible—even God. I think the existence of alien life forms in the universe is a hell of a lot more probable than a supreme being that gives a flying fuck about you or me. Wouldn’t a supreme being have bigger things to worry about?”
He didn’t answer. A breath of cool air caressed our skin as we finally fell under the shadow of the great hardwoods. We fell silent as the massive trunks rose up like the pillars of some primeval temple. Noting our interest, the boatman recited their names: teak and taun, ramin and yang, kapur and kempas and terentang. These trees had outlived generations of humans, endured earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. It begged a certain respect.
“I read an interesting article in The Economist last month,” Raj said, finally. “About a new study on the placebo effect.”
“That’s when the doctor gives you a sugar pill, and you think it actually does something?”
“Yes, well, it does do something. As long as you believe strongly e
nough that you will be cured by a drug, then you will be. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. It’s not the sugar pill that helps you, it’s your brain’s belief in the pill’s effectiveness. That’s faith, is it not?”
“Faith. Self-delusion. What’s the difference?”
“What does it matter as long as it is working?” he said.
Branches and wandering vines closed in overhead as the long-tail chugged upriver. Soon the hull began to scrape bottom. Raj leaned over the prow, prodding for depth with his walking stick. Often we were forced to jump overboard to coax the boat over some submerged obstacle—a sodden log or a hump of silt. Clambering back in, soaked to the armpits, we’d pluck the leeches from our flesh. The old man just cackled.
“I’ve read about people of different faiths undergoing brain scans while praying or meditating,” Raj said. “All of them—Hindus, Buddhists, Jews, Christians—were using the same region of the brain.”
“Sure. The gullible part.”
“No, listen, this is most interesting. It was the same part of the brain that is active when you believe strongly in anything—including a placebo.”
“So they proved that prayer is just a placebo,” I said. “I could have told you that.”
“In fact, just the opposite. It means that if you believe in something enough—anything—your brain can cure itself.”
“Faith healing.”
“Exactly,” he said. “The Madunese practice a form of it called Kewarasan. I’ve seen it work many times.”
“Know any local witch doctors? I’ll book an appointment.”
“I tell you, Mark, there are a million ways to keep up drinking. But there is only one way to finish. You must believe in yourself.”
I burst out laughing.
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
We rounded a bend in the river onto a scene of desecration. Hardwood stumps stood like tombstones on a hillside stained red with sawdust. The forest had been reduced to stacks of logs and piles of ash. Black-winged butterflies drifted across the scarred expanse like lost souls over a battlefield. Below the logging camp, a multicolored slag-heap of trash spilled down the slope to a sign by the water’s edge: KGV Palm Oil Development Project. From off in the foothills came the smoke and whine of chainsaws.