Holy Water

by James P. Othmer

“That doesn’t mean something good won’t come of it. I mean, were you really happy doing . . .”

  He shakes his head. “No. I mean, what have I ever done? All I do is what someone else tells me. I mean, every day it made me feel less like—”

  “Hence the poker night, cigar night.”

  “Meat Night.”

  “The reluctance to have your testicles sliced with a knife.”

  “Snipped.”

  “Snipped from the gang. From tradition. From a chance to prove yourself beyond a valuable conference report.” She looks at Warren and Norman. “The definition of manhood is going through a major transition, Henry.” Then she looks down at the top of her breasts. “Women, on the other hand, have never been more confident.”

  “Is it because we’re not used to being so afraid? Because terror has marginalized us? The economy?”

  Meredith shakes her head. “It’s because we’ve gone from a manufacturing- to a technology-based economy. It’s harder for a man to find a place to display physical strength now—it’s no longer socially or professionally rewarded. And men haven’t figured out how to deal with that. How to remasculate.”

  “I’m going to try.”

  “Good. I hope you really tear it up over there, Henry. Wherever it is. I really do.”

  Finally a song he recognizes. “How We Operate,” by Gomez. He listens to the words, finishes his beer, and stares at Meredith. Meredith the wise. Meredith the compassionate. Meredith the enormously buxom. His eyes betray his thoughts.

  “Not a chance, mister.”

  ~ * ~

  II

  ~ * ~

  The New Oil

  In the book 1000 Places to See Before You Die, which Giffler had given Henry as a going-away present, the imperial palace in the Kingdom of Galado is listed as number 998.

  And now, in-country less than eight hours, Henry is already inside the royal gates, smack in the middle of an after-party for a business conference he didn’t attend, surrounded by people who seem much more important than him, even if he is a VP of global water, investor relations for Happy Mountain Springs.

  “The world is parched,” this brute of an Aussie named Madden is telling Henry, presumably because he noticed Henry’s name-tag title. “Parched not like a bloke in a beer advertisement who’s just played a homoerotic touch football game with a bunch of handsome, scruffy young lads. It’s parched like a severely dehydrated, lost soul in the midday sun in some unforgiving desert. Deranged and naked, on trembling hands and knees, tongue wagging in the blistering heat, hallucinating, clutching its stomach, praying for something that can facilitate a more forgiving form of death before its organs shrivel and its heart explodes. That kind of parched. So congratulations—you’re in the right bleedin’ business then, mate.”

  Henry nods, and for a second he wonders, If the palace is listed as the nine hundred and ninety-eighth place to see before you die, could Madden’s face be the nine hundred and ninety-ninth? The last? “Well, then,” he finally replies, raising his mineral water without bacteria-laden ice, “I guess I’ll drink to that.”

  He scans the room for possible asylum. Scores of white men in dark suits and locals in burnt-orange ghos with finely decorated sashes. In the opposite end of the great hall, small beings in what appear to be clown masks—children? dwarfs? robots?—are performing some kind of interpretive dance to the dull throb of indigenous drums. Shug, his official guide and interpreter, stands beside a giant golden urn against the near wall, watching Henry but not acknowledging him, disinclined to guide or interpret.

  “So what do you reckon to accomplish here, Tuhoe?” asks Madden.

  Henry considers this giant sunburned man who is what, his coworker? Competitor? Colleague? Employer? Mate? He hasn’t a clue. Nor does he have a clue about what he wants to accomplish. Saying First of all, I’d like to forget about the last five years of my life, with a heavy emphasis on the last twenty four months, seems a little too forthcoming under the circumstances. “Well, I guess it’s our job,” Henry hears himself saying and asking, “to somehow, not necessarily quench, I guess, but alleviate that thirst?”

  “Our job?” Madden laughs and snorts at the suggestion. “Ours? Hardly my responsibility, Tuhoe. I will say this about your product, though: someday very soon nations will go to war not over oil but over water. And it will tear the planet asunder. So where do they have you staying, then?”

  Henry removes a slip of paper from his pants pocket. “It’s supposed to be a simple place near my office just outside the city. Something Djong. Didn’t actually get to see it yet.”

  More laughter from Madden, who smells of sweet booze and a smoke residue not unlike marijuana. Hashish? Henry doesn’t know what to make of any of this, but he is willing to blame it all on a monster case of jet lag. He was unable to sleep at all on his JFK-to-Bangkok flight (during which he watched three in-flight movies and read two Graham Greene novels) or, after a six-hour layover in the Jetsons-like Suvarnabhumi Airport, on the four-hour connecting flight to Galado. After landing soon after dawn and waiting almost three hours to clear customs and for the last piece of his luggage to be found, he was informed by his chaperone, Shug, that there had been a late change of plans: his presence had been requested at the Royal Palace by His Most Serene Majesty the prince of Galado.

  Even though Henry was weak and exhausted to the point where he was having trouble standing, let alone keeping his eyes open, he thought, Why not? This was the new beginning you sought, right? The much-needed adventure. The first day of the rest of your up-until-now pathetic life.

  “For your information,” Madden begins, “the Ayurved Djong and Spa is a five-star, hilltop, multiculti eco-lodge perfect for the searching of the soul and its libidinous depths. Far from a simple place, it is a spiritual retreat of the highest order. That is, if you like your Eastern spirituality backed by Western money and served up alongside vintage wine tastings, seaweed wraps, and a mind-blowing selection of in-room . . . let’s call them diversions.”

  Not knowing how to respond, Henry decides to pretend he didn’t hear Madden. He looks to his surroundings for diversion. The palace is much as he had imagined a royal residence in this part of the world might be—high paneled walls and coffered ceilings lavishly decorated with intricate Chinese- and Indian-influenced scrollwork in vivid blues and reds and yellows. Ornately carved dark-wood chairs and servers. Pink marble floors. Twelve-foot windows looking out on terraced fields, a glimpse of a river. But what he hadn’t expected were the movie posters, some from contemporary Hollywood, but most for lavish musicals from India, hanging where in past centuries there were surely gorgeous framed paintings or frescoes or tapestries.

  “Nice, eh?” Madden again. “You can thank the prince for that. The bloody loon. Obsessed with the pictures, with Bollywood, he is, almost as much as he’s obsessed with money, which plays into our hands quite conveniently, what with his father, the once saintly king, losing his own set of marbles in some faraway corner of the kingdom.”

  “How long have you been here?” Henry asks.

  “Long enough to know that it’s about to blow wide fucking open. This is a country that has just met its steroid dealer, Tuhoe. Hungry to grow, no matter how fast or unnaturally. They try to fill us all up with this magical-little-kingdom shit, but if anything, it’s a corrupt, filthy, environmentally bankrupt fucking kleptocracy.”

  Henry fumbles with the minibottle of Purell in his pocket, thinking, as he tries to undo the cap, of Lady Macbeth’s damned spot, Mary’s typhoid, Dorothy’s heels trying to click, the cocked hammer of a pistol.

  “It’s more like San Marino without the human rights,” Madden continues. “Bhutan without the commitment to gross national happiness. So what exactly will you be doing in the water business here? Ultra-filtration membranes? Desalinization? Rural wells?”

  “No,” answers Henry. “None of that.”

  “The LifeStraw?”

  Henry shakes his head, thinking of his orig
inal conversation on the subject with Giffler. “Bottled water, actually.”

  “Really? Distribution center? Treatment plant? Because while there is plenty of water here, most of it is—”

  “Actually, it’s more back-office stuff.”

  “Pardon?”

  “Back-office. You know, like a call center. Customer relations for Happy Mountain Springs in Vermont.”

  Madden takes a step back and allows Henry’s reply to register before laughter overtakes him. “You’re going to run a goddamn call center for a water company here? In a country where for all intents and purposes the majority of the people are without potable water, you’re going to have employees spend their day talking about crystal-clear water from the springs of. . . where did you say?”

  “Vermont.”

  “From the lush mountains of bloody Vur-mont. They’ll spend their days talking in Galado-tinged English about its crystalline purity and their nights fretting about where they can get a few clean drops for their own parched families. Did you know, Tuhoe, that every day diarrhea kills hundreds in this happy little country? Most under the age of five?”

  “Actually, no.”

  “Or that one in three people here—and that’s a conservative estimate—has no access to safe drinking water?”

  Another shake of the head.

  “Good Christ, this is so wrong it’s almost beautiful.”

  “Well, then,” Henry offers. “I’m sort of just getting up to speed, but perhaps I can bring this to the attention of management back in the States and figure out some way to help. A donation. Funding some wells. Distributing some . . . what did you say they were again?”

  “LifeStraws. A three-dollar water purifier that lasts up to a month, with seven filters, a membrane basically with holes as fine as six microns, plus resin treated with iodine and activated carbon.”

  “Wow. The LifeStraw.”

  “Ninety-nine point nine percent effective for parasites and bacteria.”

  “For just three dollars. Are you involved with the inventors?”

  Madden laughs again. “Shit, no.”

  “Are you with a human rights organization or a regional distributor?”

  “Hah!”

  “Do you mind if I ask what business you’re in?”

  “I’m in the business of business.”

  “For instance?”

  “For instance, if someone wanted to get into the LifeStraw business here, I could facilitate that. Also, most recently, I’ve become quite the domainer.”

  Henry blinks, shakes his head.

  “Internet domains. I hold the rights to Galado dot-com, dot-net, dot-org, plus every suffix variation on dot-Galado. Once this country opens its doors and officially embraces the Internet, these domains will be worth countless millions. A colleague of mine recently sold the domain rights to a Polynesian island nation for mid-seven figures. Right now I get money just from people typing anything Galadonian and getting the ads on the land pages. Wanna buy shares in it?”

  “What else do you do?”

  Madden raises his hand to his chin. “Here? Well, I’m also in the carbon-management business. Basically that means I can broker a deal that will let your company or country pollute more by paying other countries or companies to assume your carbon debt. Unlike a Realtor, I collect fees from buyers and sellers, and of course more often than not I’m the person who opens and owns those ‘other,’ environmentally aware companies.”

  Henry stares at Madden. “And I was letting you make me feel shitty about my corporate mission.”

  “I was just reveling in the irony of the situation. Truth is, the only problem I have with your mission, mate, is that it’s for corporate rather than individual gain. I like to see individuals make a go of it.”

  “Even if it means exploiting a third world nation?”

  “No one’s breaking any laws that I’m aware of. Plus, screw the third world. It’s in the second world, between extreme poverty and extreme excess, that the real heat is. The real opportunities. And this place is a royal heartbeat away from joining the second world.”

  Henry scans the room. People are bowing and shaking hands, heading for the way out. Not much longer, he thinks.

  “So what’s your plan for setting up the call centers?”

  He stares at a pretty Galadonian woman in a Western business suit, jacket and slacks, wide-collared blue silk shirt, as he answers. “From what I understand, we have office space out near the spa, a small classroom building. While tech people are looking into the IT infrastructure, I’m to start training educated locals who can speak some English.”

  “The Bangalore model.”

  “Yeah. I guess that’s right. In fact, an Indian consultant is to join me in a few days to show me how they did it.”

  Madden laughs.

  “More irony?”

  “An Indian teaching an American how to teach Galadonians to act like the Indians he taught to act like Americans.”

  Henry nods, allows a smile. “I guess that’s right. Any pointers?”

  On hearing the question, Madden stops smiling and rests a long, heavy arm upon Henry’s shoulder. “Obviously you’ve been around the block a bit, Tuhoe, or they wouldn’t have sent you to the likes of this place. Even so, I will give you two pieces of advice. One, do not get involved with the locals. The peasants’ struggle and all that shit. Make your fortune and keep your conscience and your libido stowed in your briefcase, because it is fruitless to try to get in the way of the unstoppable momentum of money rolling downhill.”

  “And the second?” Henry asks.

  “The second? Well, actually, in your capacity, you don’t have to worry about the second. Oh, look. Here comes your man, Tuhoe. Your ‘official translator.’ And don’t you believe a bloody word he tells you.”

  “That’s the second ?”

  Madden sighs, then lowers his voice. “The second piece of advice—and this is mostly for heads of state, ambassadors, and C-suite execs, not blokes like you and me, whom he could care less about—is to avoid the prince. At all costs. Not only is he bonkers, he’s a bloody sociopath.”

  Shug is alongside them now. He half bows at Madden, who responds with a heel click and a sort of hand-twirling salute. Henry suspects that each just told the other to fuck off without opening their mouths.

  “I was just telling Mr. Tuhoe about the many pleasures of your magical little kingdom,” Madden says.

  Shug’s brow crunches as if he’s translating Madden’s words for an unseen dignitary. “Yes,” he says. “We have much to be thankful for in Galado, Mr. Madden. Now, if you’ll please excuse us, we must be going.”

  Shug escorts Henry toward the doors to the great hall. “Interesting man, that Mr. Madden,” Henry says.

  Shug considers Henry as he attempts to proffer a reply, then decides not to respond at all.

  In the vestibule outside the great hall they stop by another large set of windows. Shug wanders away and begins an animated conversation with a Galadonian official. Henry pulls out his small container of hand sanitizer and gives himself an unobstructed squirt. It is not raining outside, but the sky is dark for two p.m., the sun obscured by a low-hanging, unnatural blue haze. To his right, across the dull surface of the river, just behind a long procession of factories with idle smokestacks, is the escarpment of a city that does not look even remotely magical.

  When Shug returns, Henry points to a squall of black flakes swirling over the meticulously terraced royal jute fields that lead to this side of the river’s edge. “Is that ash?”

  Shug shakes his head and says, unconvincingly, “No. That is snow. Himalayan snow.”

  “Really? In September? So where are we off to, Shug?”

  Shug walks and Henry follows. When he catches up, Henry can see that the small, dour man has now miraculously shifted into an even lower gear of seriousness, and for the first time his smug exterior seems to have been shaken. “Shug?”

  Shug stops, takes a breath
. “We are going to see the prince,” he finally says. “I have been told that the prince has specifically requested your presence.”

  ~ * ~

  His Royal Smallness

  After Henry is frisked for a second time, an aide instructs him to “please be seated until the prince has completed his fitness regimen.” He sits and looks out upon the enormous ancient hall, which has been transformed into a glistening modern fitness center. At the far end of the hall, silhouetted against a row of floor-to-ceiling windows, Henry can detect some kind of movement, the bends and twists of distant bodies. Presumably the prince, but it is so far away Henry cannot be sure.

  Dozens of large plasma monitors are mounted every ten feet or so, including a row directly in Henry’s line of vision. He expected some combination of the BBC, CNN, Al Jazeera, a Tokyo business report, and Good Day Galado, but instead it is all movies, some American—The Dark Knight, Iron Man, The Hangover, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button—but mostly, he presumes, Indian. Musicals and thrillers, fantasies and love stories, playing to the overdone bass of the house music pulsing through the room.