Once they’re up on the back of the flatbed, which, coincidentally, is filled with recently felled cedar timber, Henry reaches under the back of his jacket and takes the pistol out of his pants. Holding it by the barrel, he offers it to Madden.
Madden considers Henry for a moment before grasping the gun handle and slipping his forefinger onto the trigger. Before putting the pistol inside his coat pocket, he says, “I was wondering how long you were gonna hold on to the bloody thing, mate.”
“And I was wondering, if you go to the trouble of carrying it, why didn’t you use it?”
“Because it was in the backseat. Because I got complacent. Which, as it turns out, is a good thing. Last thing I need is to explain a bunch of bodies on the roadside to the authorities in this hellhole.”
~ * ~
A small crowd is gathered in the pandanus- and bougainvillea-lined driveway outside the Ayurved Djong and Spa. Shug, Ratu, Maya, even Lacy the masseuse, are standing with arms folded as the timber truck lurches to a stop. With stops and engine trouble it had taken the truck more than four hours to make the drive. As the idling diesel engine rattles and coughs black smoke into the early afternoon air, Henry and Madden rise and stretch, then notice the others.
“Looks like you’ve been missed, mate,” Madden growls, before tapping Henry good-bye on the shoulder and hopping off the other side of the truck.
“You are late, Mister Tuhoe,” Shug admonishes after Henry has climbed off the truck’s left sideboard.
“Well, as you can see, I ran into a few complications.”
Shug shakes his head and begins to answer, but Henry steps forward, placing his face within inches of the older man’s face. “Your job is to take me where I want to go and to translate what I ask you to translate. If I’m not mistaken, your job is not to shake your head with disgust, or to judge, or to scold. If I’ve gotten any part of this wrong, please tell me. Otherwise I’m politely asking you to stay out of the way and keep your mouth shut.”
Shug takes a step back. Henry turns to Ratu, the concierge.
“And your job is to satisfy my requests, not share my itinerary with any stranger handing out Western gifts. Agreed?”
Ratu steps back and looks at Shug. “Agreed.”
“I appreciate the prince’s hospitality, but as soon as possible I’ll be checking out and moving into the lodgings I was originally booked into.”
Shug turns to Maya and raises his eyebrows. “USAVille?”
Maya shrugs. “We’ll look into availabilities as soon as possible.” After Henry turns and begins walking up the stairs toward his room, Maya calls after him, “I was wondering, will you be joining us at the call center this afternoon?”
He laughs, but can’t bring himself to turn around.
~ * ~
For Tonight’s Performance,
Playing the Role of the
Disgruntled Caller Is the Man
Playing the Role of Henry Tuhoe
He spends the night and the entire next day holed up in the room he demanded to leave. Sleeping, mostly, even though he thinks he has a concussion, but also doing some work and talking to the States. Rachel calls and texts him dozens of times in a period of hours. He doesn’t pick up. Doesn’t respond. But he does read and listen to them all. Some are pure rage: How dare you? I hope you catch swine flu. You know, Vegas wasn’t the first time I’ve cheated on you. Others are pure sadness. I’m afraid. How could you leave me all alone? If I were married to me, I wouldn’t have gotten snipped either. And others are pure craziness. Which makes him sadder. He calls Rachel’s younger sister and then her mother to ask them to check on her. But her sister tells him to fuck off and her mother says, Where were you two yuppies when I needed you?
The only person who agrees to check in on Rachel, to call and if necessary take a train up to the house, is Meredith.
~ * ~
Late in the afternoon of the second day, while he is staring out his window at clouds gathering at the top of a distant peak, a note is slipped under his door:
I’m sorry to impose upon you like this. But your presence would be most helpful back at the call center. Our protocol liaison has arrived two days early from Kashmir and is awaiting your instructions. If you will not be in the office tomorrow, please advise.
—Maya
~ * ~
“Hello, Happy Mountain Springs, where purity is our passion, how may I help you?”
“Again!”
“Hello, Happy Mountain Springs, where purity is our passion, how may I help you?”
When the group finishes, the man standing before them, a dark, thin twenty-five-year-old in Levi’s, red Chuck Taylor Converse sneakers, a Los Angeles Dodgers cap, and a black Sean John sweatshirt, claps his hands together and says, “Wah-TER! WahTER! Sell those rrrr’s! Again!”
Henry stops at the door, reluctant to enter. He’s been gone three days, but it feels as if he’s never been here. “How long have they been doing this?”
“Hours,” a woman tells him and Maya. “Since ten a.m. at least.”
“Have they read through any of the caller scenarios?”
“Oh, no,” the woman answers. “He says they’re not nearly ready for that. He tells us a lot of stories about how he did it in India. How his team sounds more American than Americans.”
In the front of the room, the man yells, “Again!”
“Anything new on getting an actual working phone system?”
Maya shakes her head. “I called the minister of communication again this morning, but his voice mail wasn’t picking up.”
Henry rubs the back of his skull. “I don’t know if I can deal with this right now.”
Maya turns and considers him. “Deal with what? Your job? Life? I need to know exactly what you can and cannot deal with, because we have work to do here, and in addition to your employer, these people are depending on you.”
He stares at her. When she is angry, he thinks, she is terrifying, and when she isn’t, she’s beautiful. Right now she is both. “Okay, “ he answers. “You’re right. Let’s get to work.”
“Come,” she says, signaling Henry to follow her to a kitchenette in the back of the center. “In our effort to make you feel more at home, we have purchased a coffee machine. Starbucks.”
He’s a tea guy but takes a black coffee anyway. He rubs the back of his head again. Pain bursts with pulsing regularity from his brain stem to the sockets of both eyes.
“What happened to your head?”
“I think the answer to that question, and any additional questions about that night, have to be tabled until I have a few tall glasses of ara.”
“This is what you get for doing business with a man like that.”
“Madden? I wasn’t doing business with him. He asked me if I wanted to go for a ride. I shouldn’t have but did. Is he that bad?”
Maya sets her jaw and looks at the man in the front of the room. He is telling the others a story about a cousin who drove a taxi in Los Angeles for three months.
“What do you think of our American expert?”
It’s hard to understand exactly what he’s saying, but Henry is fairly sure he hears the name Keanu Reeves invoked, to silence. The Matrix gets a similarly blank response.
“I think,” Henry says, “that Happy Mountain Springs is in deep shit.”
“He comes highly recommended.”
“He’s from Kashmir. I thought all of the outsource call centers were supposed to be in Bangalore and Mumbai.”
Maya shrugs. “Do you really want to move out of the spa?”
He almost forgot. “Sure. I mean, yes.”
“Okay, good. I can make this happen this afternoon.”
~ * ~
During a break, Mahesh Singh, the cultural liaison, introduces himself to Henry. Henry asks Mahesh if there is anything that he needs. Mahesh removes his Dodgers hat and pushes back his long black bangs. “Actually, it would be very helpful if corporal discipline were permitted.”
<
br /> “Physical punishment?”
“Only for the most extreme cases. One simple act can work wonders among an entire group.”
At a loss for words, Henry turns to Maya and then back to Mahesh, who suddenly breaks out into a smile and holds up his hands. “Just joshing, brother, okay?”
Henry half nods and says, “Okay,” but he’s not sure he believes the part about the joshing. “Anything else?”
“Well, seriously, yes. Since you are an authentic American, I wonder if this once you could help me in a simple role-playing scenario for the sake of the trainees.”
Henry wonders if it is possible to role-play when one is already fully immersed in a much more demanding long-term version of the game.
Mahesh picks up a nonexistent phone receiver. “Hello, Happy Mountain Springs, where purity is our passion, how may I help you?” He is sitting on a metal folding chair on one side of a small desk.
On the other side sits Henry. “Yes, I’m—”
Mahesh interrupts. “Please,” he says. “The receiver.”
Henry picks up a nonexistent receiver. “Would you like me to dial and make a ringing sound?”
“This will not be necessary.” Mahesh picks his invisible receiver back up. “Hello, Happy Mountain Springs, where purity is our passion, Ryan speaking, how may I help you?”
“Ryan?”
“Yes. We must not reveal our Hindu—I mean, our Galadonian given names. It undermines the aura of neighborliness. Ryan speaking, how may I help you?”
“Hello, I’m calling from Aurora, Illinois. I recently had a dozen five-gallon jugs delivered for home use, and to tell you the truth, the water in this first jug tastes sort of, well, funky.”
The smile on Mahesh’s face vanishes. He pulls the invisible phone away from his face and stares at Henry. “What exactly do you mean by funky?”
They decide to switch roles. For some reason Mahesh insists that this includes switching seats. When Henry rises, a wave of nausea and dizziness washes down, from head to belly to legs. He braces himself against the desk and manages to move to the other seat.
“Ring ring . . .”
Henry answers. “Hello, Happy Mountain Springs, where purity is our, er, passion. Henry speaking. How may I help you?”
“Your water tastes like yak piss, dude.”
“Excuse me?”
“What, do you have dog cum in your ears? Your water, it tastes disgusting. Like it was strained through a month-old feminine napkin. My whole family is fucking sick with the typhoid.”
Henry looks at Mahesh to see if he is serious. Not only does Mahesh seem serious, he seems genuinely angry and a bit dangerous.
Henry finds Maya in the group and forces himself to focus on her face when the room flashes red and his knees buckle.
~ * ~
USAVille
It’s morning in America, or a reasonable facsimile thereof.
Outside, a rolled-up newspaper lands with a thud in the middle of Henry’s driveway. Or the driveway of wherever he happens to be. He gets out of bed and looks out his second-floor window in time to see the newspaper boy turning around his bike (is that a Schwinn?) and slowly pedaling away. There’s a mailbox at the end of the driveway, and on the other side of the street a clumsy necklace of two-story raised ranch homes is strung out in both directions. None of the neighboring houses have lawns or plantings of any kind. None of the other houses have vehicles in the driveway or flags on their porches or toys in the front yard.
Except for the fast-vanishing newspaper boy, the scene is devoid of life.
It’s seemingly morning, but he has no recollection of the night. Or how he got here.
He lies back down, stares at the slowly spinning ceiling fan above him, and attempts to place himself by taking an inventory of recent events. The inventory, if true and not the imagined drivel of a damaged mind, frightens him. It also does not answer the question looped on his internal PA system: Where the hell am I?
A second look out the window reveals either a recently abandoned or a nearly completed mall at the end of the cul-de-sac, replete with half a set of golden arches and a box store with a giant red K on its incomplete exterior. This scene of ghostly mall, silent streets, and empty driveways could be anywhere back in the America of credit crises, bank failures, and economic doom. But with the Himalayas looming in the background behind the inadequate arches, he realizes that he is in some kind of alternate, experimental, unfinished America.
Retrieving the paper, which he has no desire to read, seems the natural thing to do. He pulls on his jeans and sneakers, which he has no recollection of removing, and makes his way downstairs. The house is sparsely furnished and randomly decorated. There is a kitchen table and chairs but no window curtains or wall coverings. A glance toward the living room reveals a leather couch, an easy chair, and a fifty-seven-inch flat-screen monitor hanging on the wall above the unused fireplace, but there are no books or DVDs on the shelves, knickknacks or magazines on the end tables, or any sign that other humans may have once inhabited this space.
At the end of the driveway, he bends and picks up the paper. He is impressed to see that it is the New York Times, then less so when he sees vaguely familiar headlines and a nine-month-old publication date. Lifting his arms overhead, he stretches from the waist, left and right, down and up, before straightening back upright and tilting his head toward the presumably rising sun and closing his eyes.
“Howdy, neighbor.”
He opens his eyes. To his right in the next driveway stands a tall black woman in a black pants suit, with a black leather knapsack draped over her shoulder.
“Morning.”
She takes a step toward him. “You know, I was here when you arrived last night. On a gurney.”
“How unlike me. That’s usually how I depart from a place.”
His reply draws her a step closer. “Maya asked me to stick around and keep an eye on you this morning.”
Henry slowly nods. “Thanks. I have no recollection of. . .”
“They knocked you out, gave you a couple of somethings to settle you down. Maya spent the night, making sure you were all right, but she had to go home this morning to take care of some personal matters.”
He doesn’t know how to respond to this, other than to nod.
The woman crosses the small patch of thin lawn between the lots and extends her hand. She’s tall, more than six feet. “Madison,” she says. “Madison Ellison.”
“Nice name.”
“I created it. The names of my favorite avenue and my favorite writer. Anyway, welcome to the tentatively titled USAVille. I’m the only other person dumb enough to live in this botched sociological experiment, but at least I have an excuse: I have to. Or at least I’m being handsomely paid to.” After he releases her hand-, she places it on his shoulder and steers him toward her house. “Come, I made breakfast.”
Henry follows, as if doing so is as normal as following Marcus and Gerard and Victor across a tiki-lit patio on Meat Night.
~ * ~
Unlike the house he just stumbled out of, Madison Ellison’s house is thoroughly and beautifully decorated with a warm and colorful mix of African and Galadonian art and furnishings.
“It ought to be,” she explains, sliding a spatula-sized portion of omelet onto a plate. “I’ve been here for six months, and the prince was very generous with my lifestyle budget. The idea, I imagine, was for my place to be a sort of model home that others like you could visit and better imagine the possibilities.”
He sits slump-shouldered at the head of her kitchen table as annoying boy-band music plays in the background. If he had to guess, he’d say Jonas Brothers. Unless Hanson has made a comeback. “I saw what appeared to be a shopping center at the end of the street. And one golden arch.”
She retrieves two pieces of browned wheat bread from the toaster. Keeping one for herself, she places the other on his plate. “The second arch is supposedly en route,” she explains. “Their ambit
ious intention, in case you haven’t noticed, is to create a Western, distinctly American community here, with authentic American amenities to put at ease homesick corporate types like yourself who do not want to go the native Galadonian route.”
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