“Opening up the country to trade and light industry, to the Internet and more outside visitors, if done gradually and moderated carefully, I think is a good thing. Breaking down every wall and law without regard to our land or culture, creating a Las Vegas—style sensibility with Western trinkets with total disregard for the consequences, is the sociological equivalent of giving alcohol and guns and smallpox-tainted blankets to your American Indians.”
“I don’t mean to sound rude, but how did you learn to speak English so well? How’d you get such a balanced view of the world?”
This time she doesn’t hide the wince. “Whether you mean to or not, and I believe you do, what you say sounds and is rude. I was allowed to go abroad for my education because at one time I was part of the in crowd at the palace, and because I was the oldest daughter of well-connected and enlightened parents. I went to Princeton. Majored in economics, with a minor in philosophy. I liked your country very much, but despite the present situation, I love it here in Galado.”
“How does the prince get away with it?”
Before answering, Maya waits until the waiter finishes placing before them two more dishes—chile-spiced pig’s feet and buckwheat dumplings with bok choy and poppy seeds. “You mean, how does the essence of a physical place, built upon pillars of spirituality and peace, become a breeding ground for greed and power? Money and brilliant timing is how he gets away with it. For a while, at first, there was so much coming in, from China, Europe, and the U.S., that he was able simply to buy people’s compliance. Including, in a way, mine. A year ago I was teaching English one day a week in the palace school. Now I make more than my parents, brothers, and sisters combined. And of course the short-term result of his changes is that the economy, or, more importantly, our standard of living, did get better. Until recently, anyway. There were more jobs for people like me, more money for schools. But now he is panicking because he feels the economic momentum slowing, and he is willing to try anything. And again, at what cost?”
Henry swallows. In a perverse way, the chile heat appeals to him. “What’s your threshold?”
“Excuse me?”
“At what point would you refuse to do something because it compromises your ideals?”
Maya doesn’t immediately answer. With the end of the chopsticks that doesn’t touch her mouth, she transfers red rice from a bamboo bowl onto her plate. “Look at the flaming stacks in the valley, from factories burning coal to feed the Chinese machine. Look at the prayer flags alongside the factories, on the tops of our mountains, asking the gods for peace, compassion, and wisdom. Think about your spa, your lodge, where Westerners come and switch philosophies the way a diva makes wardrobe changes. Wealthy people served by the previously impoverished. Win-win or obscenely wrong? And what about our company and our jobs, selling something that can be gotten for free from a sink, a stream, or a cloud in the sky for billions of dollars? It all comes down to what it is you’re compromising. It’s complicated.”
“It is,” Henry agrees. “But there are a lot more despicable things one can do than create jobs selling bottled water.”
“We’ll see. What you need to understand is that right now Gal-ado is a petri dish in a grand experiment being conducted by a madman. A double-blind experiment, where neither the individuals nor the researchers know who belongs to the control group and the experimental group. Every act has implications and consequences. In any place, especially in a country this small, at such a critical time, our presence, even at this table, has a significant and possibly irreversible social impact.”
Maya’s nephew reappears as she finishes speaking and asks if they would like more wine. Henry begins to say yes, then catches himself. He looks at Maya. “Why do I feel like whatever answer I give will cause irreparable damage to all mankind?”
~ * ~
After the third glass of rice-barley wine, the topic switches from bottled water and Galadonian politics to their personal lives. “Why did you come here?” Maya asks.
“Circumstances pointed me here. It was a choice, but a choice based on a passive rationale.”
“You were forced?”
“Not really.”
“You chose?”
He shakes his head as she stares at him.
“You don’t know why you’re here, do you?”
“I’ve had an interesting time of it lately.
Maya sips her wine while she decides whether she wants to know more.
“For starters, my wife threw me out the day I lost my position at work, because, in part, I falsified my vasectomy.”
“Okay.”
When he sees that she hasn’t winced, he decides to continue. He tells her about the first time he met Rachel and their move to the country, their adventures in conception, the debacle of Meat Night, and even about the pagan spell that was cast on him this evening, moments before he left for dinner. He has to recite the chronicle of his falsified vasectomy a second time before she understands what he is talking about.
“You have had an interesting time of it lately.”
“As you said,” he reminds her, “it’s complicated. Every act has implications and consequences.”
“You know,” she answers, “you are the first American I have met who is so . . . forthcoming about his. . .”
“Shortcomings.”
“Yes.” Maya laughs, and for the first time Henry thinks of her as a fully realized person instead of as a businesswoman or a threat or an ideologue. He’s not proud of this. But when you meet so many people every day in meetings and hallways, on conference calls and through e-mail and text and tweets, there is little time for the personal, the human.
“So then,” she continues, “you came here to escape?”
Henry tries without success to locate the peaks in the darkened sky. He thinks of Meredith and the Eliot poem. Escape. Finally he says, “Escape implies that some planning, some actual thought, went into it. It takes a certain amount of passion or nerve to escape from something. The truth is, I came here because it was the next thing that life told me to do.”
For several minutes neither speaks, but it is a comfortable silence. Now that the monks have finished their sutras, Henry considers their absence, the way the absence of a thing can make it feel more powerful than an abundance of it.
“You know,” she says, “I really did not like you.”
He shrugs. “These days I’m not exactly in love with myself either. So how come you’re no longer rolling with the royal posse?”
After a lag, Maya quietly says, “I had a child. She died when she was sixteen months old. I grew up near the palace. My father was an intellectual and a teacher who had the blessings of the king. That is where I learned English and received an education that few in Gal-ado are fortunate enough to have access to—America, Princeton, travel—and why I am not working in a field today. Five years ago, soon after I became pregnant, the prince began to undermine his father, and to institute decrees against intellectuals of a certain type, artists and cultural hardliners. By that time the king was already losing his senses. We were among many who were ostracized, and in a way we were lucky, because my father had known the king since they were little boys. Others were sent to prison or killed. But my father, who in grammar school had taught the prince to read poetry, to understand the philosophers of the West, was permitted to move out here with our relatives in the country and work in the taro fields.”
He listens, more transfixed by her story than he’s ever been by his own. She drinks the rest of her wine, her fourth glass to his two, before resuming. “When my father fell into disfavor, my husband, who had a clerical job in the palace, told me that he could not abide my presence if he were to have a career. We were a distraction. He didn’t know that I was expecting a child. I was so young I barely knew myself. She died from diphtheria. From, you’ll be interested to know, tainted water. Had we lived near the palace, she could have been treated and perhaps saved, but the roads were impassable because of
the monsoon rains, and at her age she passed quickly.”
“What happened to your father?”
“He died in a taro field. Heart attack, I imagine. A person raised as an intellectual can’t be expected to survive as a peasant field-worker at the age of seventy-two. It’s no matter, because the prince built a dam that dried up the rivers, and the fields died soon after that.”
“I don’t know what to say, Maya.”
She signals for the bill. “You know, the way you spoke about your wife, I don’t think that is how you truly feel about her. Maybe you are no longer in love, and maybe you were not meant to be married, but you should respect her. The desire for a child, the loss of a child . . . you can’t begin to fathom.”
~ * ~
Continuous Partial Attention
Two nights later, after ten on a Sunday, Madden is in Henry’s room, sitting on Henry’s bed, drinking Irish whiskey out of the bottle, when Henry returns from a late dinner alone in the spa restaurant, followed by a garden stroll.
Madden’s presence doesn’t startle him. Already he’s reached the point where nothing in Galado surprises him.
“I thought I told room service not to bring me the drunken Aussie until after eleven.”
Madden smiles, toasts Henry with the half-consumed bottle of Jameson. “Well, according to the concierge, you’re a flaming homosexual, so I thought I’d stop by and give you a proper buggering.”
Standing at his desk, Henry checks the messages on his laptop. He’s been away for only two and a half hours, but there are more than a dozen, including several apiece from Giffler and Rachel, plus one with a video attachment from Norman. But he has neither the curiosity nor the desire to open any of them.
“You realize,” Madden says, “that anything that goes through their network is being deconstructed and analyzed by no less than a dozen security hacks back at the palace. The prince may indeed like you, but the truth is, he’s put you here, just as he’s put dozens before you here, because it makes you that much easier to keep an eye on.”
“What will they make of your late-night presence?”
Madden stands and stretches. His fingertips and the bottle top reach the ceiling. Henry had forgotten how large the man was. “They’ll scratch their heads a bit over it, but ultimately they’ll think it’s a good thing. Back at the palace, anyway. They don’t entirely trust me, but I’m a rainmaker, and these days the prince gives rainmakers special privileges.”
For the hell of it, Henry calls up his iTunes library on the laptop and pushes Party Shuffle. “No Fun,” a dance song by Vitalic, begins to pulse. He’s not particularly fond of the song, but he downloaded it anyway, because he read that the front man claimed to be a part-time gigolo as well as a Ukrainian trubka player from a family of sea otter fur traders. For a moment he thinks of sharing this backstory with Madden, but Madden speaks first.
“So are you ready for a bit of an adventure?”
Henry waves at his room, toward the foreign darkness outside his window. “I hung with a prince. I had dinner on a cliff. I’m staying at a holistic whorehouse. Don’t you think I’m already sort of engaged in one?”
Madden laughs derisively. “This? Come on, mate. Grab a jacket. Let’s take a ride. I’ve got some business to tend to in the hinterlands.”
Henry looks at his watch, which is still running on New York time. “Now? It’s got to be pretty late here, right?”
“Why not? Unless you’ve got some young massage boy scheduled for a midnight quickie.”
~ * ~
In the passenger’s seat of Madden’s Range Rover, careering around a winding, guardrail-free mountain road, Henry declines yet another offer to hit off the bottle of Jameson.
“Here, then,” Madden says, rising off the seat to reach in his pocket. “Grab the wheel for a sec, will ya?”
The truck is going straight toward the edge of a cliff and certain death while the road ahead veers sharply to the right. Henry lunges across the seat and gives the wheel a yank. “What the hell?”
Madden retakes the wheel. He mumbles, “Nicely done,” because he now has a small metal pipe clenched in his mouth. “I knew you were a man of action.”
“Is that a crack pipe?”
“Not crack. Hashish, mate.” Using his thigh to control the wheel, Madden flicks a butane lighter and puffs the pipe’s contents to life. After he’s taken a second hit, he offers it to Henry. “Galado doesn’t have much to offer in the way of nightlife, but it may well have the very best hashish on this planet.”
Henry says no, but when Madden waves it closer, he takes the pipe. As he’s inhaling his first hit, Madden says, “Of course, if you’re caught with it on your person here, it’s punishable by death.”
When he stops coughing, Henry looks at Madden to see if this is true.
Madden shrugs.
“What kind of business are you doing up here?”
“Timber.”
Henry tilts his head. “I thought there were strict rules regarding timber. Special permission from the king to fell a tree. Et cetera.”
“This is true. But many of these rules are about to be tossed out the palace window. When this happens, some people are going to get very rich. Might as well be me and my constituents.”
Henry accepts the pipe again. He thinks about his recent conversation with Maya about every action impacting something. “What about the people? They spent centuries trying to preserve their culture, then it’s all gonna change overnight?”
“It’s my opinion that people spend way too much time trying to preserve their so-called ways. If they’re worth a damn, they’ll preserve themselves.” Madden takes his foot off the gas and stares at Henry. “For instance, you Americans get your underpants all up in a bunch when someone tries to pirate your culture, but it’s really not about preserving your culture. It’s about protecting your right to shove it down someone else’s throat for a healthy profit. You just shook your head.”
“I did.”
“Oh, please.” He raises the whiskey bottle to his lips and takes a gulp. “Get off your high horse, Mister Bottled Water in the Land of Poisoned Rivers and Dried-up Wells. The fact is that every successful modern country polluted its way to prosperity, only to worry about the environmental consequences later. Now that the U.S., Japan, and the UK are obscenely wealthy, they suddenly want to get all green with their rules, which basically will ensure that no one else will.”
“I just wonder if globalizing a place—”
Madden interrupts. “Oh, horseshit. We are the opposite of a global village. We live in a global kingdom. With the select few in the castle, and those who serve them comfortably living in the kingdom, and everyone else flailing in the muck and pestilence outside the walls, hating them, suffering them, warring with and dreaming of destroying them.”
“What I meant,” Henry responds, “is that introducing commerce and technology to a place shouldn’t mean it has to abandon its traditions. It’s just a disconnect that such a spiritual people would be forced to change so—”
Madden interrupts again. “My spiritual belief is a grand unified theory of pragmatism. I believe that God lives in our synapses, in the last chemical link before action is taken. They whine about losing a species like a blind overfish, but it’s a fair trade for the untold billions to be made in development. Soon many other two-and-a-half-world countries will be forced to make similar decisions. We’ll choose who prospers and who lives in poverty. Which species will thrive and which will not make the cut. Darwinian economics.”
“By ‘we,’ I’m assuming you mean people like you and a steroid-taking prince whom you have called, if I’m not mistaken, a sociopath.”
“That is correct. One man’s liberty is another’s control. You think the answer is to democratize them. To Americanize them.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“But no one gives a shit about that,” Madden says, smashing his right hand on the dashboard. “They sure as hell don’t
. I don’t. And the people at your company, they don’t. We just want them to want our shit. Our Walmarts.”
“Our Big Macs.”
“Our bottled water, but without the water.”
“Our domains.”
~ * ~
At an abandoned roadside shack Madden slows the truck and turns onto a one-lane dirt track that slices across a small valley in the ridge between two peaks. Henry, stoned and disoriented, thinks of the forbidden peak that Maya pointed out earlier in the week and can’t help but feel that right now he and Madden are disturbing all kinds of spirits.
Madden fills another bowl and begins talking, unprompted, about his marriage. He’s been married fourteen years and separated for the last three. “The day our marriage was officially over was the day that we started telling each other the bald truth. About our bodies, our friends, and our lovemaking skills. The irony is that this was a relationship that transcended love in its intimacy and purity. Because only people in love would never say those things. They would only think them. The final straw came when I found out that she had lost most of our savings playing online poker. I thought from her behavior that she was having an affair. After she told me the truth, I would have preferred it to be a fucking affair.”
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