Another pause. Another voice in the background, this time a child’s.
“Just kidding. You have a good night, Maya.”
“I’ll pick you up at eight-thirty. Sleep tight, Henry Tuhoe.”
~ * ~
The Lake That Fell Through
a Hole in the World
Maya arrives alone in her truck and taps the horn. He sees her through the kitchen window. He finishes his cup of Galadonian red tea, his third this morning, and puts it in the sink. He wonders if it’s caffeinated, then decides it doesn’t matter. He’s been up for hours. In fact, he’s fairly sure that he never went to sleep last night.
As they back out of the driveway, Henry notices Madison Ellison bending at the curb to pick up her daily nine-month-old paper. She glances up and waves at them with a level of enthusiasm that unnerves Henry, who responds with a cool nod of the head and a half-smile.
He wonders if Madison Ellison gets death threats too.
Maya turns right onto the dirt road outside USAVille and heads east across the valley and toward the river. The opposite direction, he discerns, from the call center.
Her hair is pulled back under a white woolen skullcap and she’s wearing a black sweater and dark blue jeans, making her look— besides adorable, he thinks—much younger and slightly smaller than she looks in business clothes.
He’s wearing dress-down Friday khakis, a red pinstriped Brooks Brothers shirt, and brown Top-Siders, which under the circumstances makes him look and feel about sixty-seven years old.
“So you are alive,” she declares, adjusting the rearview mirror.
“Yes. Quite. Though part of me is disappointed, because I’ve always wanted to be able to say that I survived not one but two assassination attempts.”
Maya smiles. The morning air is clear and bright with sunshine, and the road in front of them is devoid of vehicles and pedestrians and surrounded on both sides by browning autumn jute fields. “You’re quite funny.”
“Thank you.”
“Especially when it comes to dealing with the truth. The harsher the truth, it seems, the better the joke.”
“Which would make me the perfect date come the apocalypse.”
“But you use it as a shield, to deflect.”
“Actually, it makes a hell of a weapon too.”
She looks away from him and concentrates on the narrow, rutted road.
“Would you rather that I dealt with harsh truths with anger? Or bitterness? Or . . . what, despair?”
“No. But sometimes, to be taken seriously—”
He interrupts. “The more seriously someone wants to be taken, the more dangerous he is.”
“If I may, I’m saying this because I think that you have much to offer and you use your humor and your cynicism to protect what is essentially smothered idealism.”
For this he has no pithy comeback. He presses his face against the window glass and stares at mountains too large and sharply defined to be real.
After several minutes, still facing the window, he asks, “Where’s your friend today?”
Maya takes a breath, as if trying out several responses, before answering: “He’s working.”
They drive without speaking in the general direction of the river for a dozen miles. He’s sure now that they are traveling farther and farther from the call center, but he doesn’t care enough to ask. Maya doesn’t seem like someone to go off on a journey without a purpose.
With each mile the land becomes more barren. Colors fade, life evaporates under the rising sun. Blue pine forests give way to spent jute and sunflower fields, which give way to an empty land pocked and webbed with deepening crevasses. After more than an hour of rough driving, Maya pulls the truck off the road and comes to a stop at the edge of an empty lakebed whose shattered and fissured bottom looks as if it were used up and thrown down from the heavens.
He turns to her. “Odd venue for a meeting.”
She doesn’t smile. “This is where my family used to live. This is where we were sent when the political situation changed. At first it wasn’t so bad. Beautiful, even. Before the factories and the dam, it was seventy miles around. Fishing villages lined the shores. Everything else was rich farmland. On this road there was a constant line of carts filled with produce making their way to the river.”
“What happened?”
She shrugs. “Some people actually believed it all dried up because they insulted the gods by taking more fish than they needed. It happened so fast I guess I don’t blame them, because really, how could humans ruin so much so fast?”
“Where’d they go?”
“Most left to work on the dam and at the factories that had already ruined their lives. Of course, many simply died.” Without warning she opens the door, gets out, and begins walking onto the lakebed.
When he catches up to her, she turns to face him. “He’s not my man. Okay? He is my brother.”
He nods. Okay.
When she resumes walking, he is alongside her. “It’s going to get much worse here before it gets better. There is a rising opposition that is in direct proportion to the prince’s irrational ambition. My brother, if he could, would like to see the prince and anyone associated with him dead. And if the prince knew what my brother was up to, he would have him arrested and eventually killed. Just as he has with anyone who has dared to oppose him.”
“What about you?”
She stops, pulls the band of the white cap higher on her forehead. “I don’t want to kill anyone. I’d just like some, you know, human progress. Some kind of ethical balance. But in a country that supposedly embraces balance, all that I see are extremes. Absolute spirituality or absolute greed, with not much wiggle room in between, all at the expense of contentment. We’re so concerned about losing our identity if we open up too fast to the world, which is fair enough, but what exactly is the identity we’re saving? Cloistered? Corrupt? Spiritually rich? Economically impoverished? What the prince is doing will absolutely have a devastating impact on our future. But if it somehow comes to pass that the opposition, that my brother and the cultural preservationists, defeat the prince and his modernity movement, I’m not so sure that life here will be any better. Just righteously corrupt versus morally corrupt. And they’d kill in the name of spirituality as quickly as the prince kills for greed.”
“Are you sure there’s not a clearly defined good or bad side? Because, you know, it would be so much easier if I could simply choose a side.” Henry smiles after he says it, but Maya doesn’t smile.
She smacks him.
He doesn’t touch his reddening cheek. He keeps his arms at his sides and stares at her wet, agitated eyes. The heat rises where her fingers landed, and a mountain breeze conjures a cloud of powdered, ruined earth.
“Listen,” he finally says, adding another melodramatic pause before continuing. “I know you think I don’t take life seriously, but everything I’ve ever taken seriously, I’ve lost.”
As Maya considers his words, he readies for an embrace, an apology, the solace of a friend and the understanding of someone more. He prepares for her to tell him that she knows he’s been through so much, that she knows that this has been an especially trying time for him and that he has handled it with uncommon dignity and fortitude. Perhaps even a kiss.
But instead Maya smacks him again. With the opposite hand. On the opposite cheek. Then she says, “Wrong answer, Henry. Here’s the deal. Nobody cares about your emotional crisis. About the difference between a vocation and a calling and—what did you say the other day? A finding! My goodness. I lost a child. My family lost everything. Our life expectancy is fifty-three point three years and our culture is being raped by a gang of logos and you’re afraid to take something seriously because it might not work out? Please. All things considered, Henry, I find your sentiments pathetic and incredibly offensive.”
~ * ~
Being smacked twice in the face by a woman who then tells you that what you had thought was a sincere, hear
tfelt, and difficult confession was in fact pathetic and incredibly offensive would normally mean that she’s just not into you. But Henry feels differently. After the face-smacking and moral condemnation, he feels a strange sort of release, accompanied by the feeling one experiences when given an unexpected, perfect gift.
In this instance, the gift is truth.
Giddy is how he feels.
As they resume their drive toward the river, following the shore of the phantom lake, he decides that if music were presently a part of his life, the playlist selection for this moment would be “Bling (Confessions of a King)” by the Killers. He begins singing the song in his head, but when Maya begins to talk, he instantly forgets the words, forgets the song ever existed.
Equally liberated by the physical release, Maya begins to narrate as she drives, assigning stories and insights to subtle changes in the landscape. The man walking bent over far out on the lakebed is a crazed diviner, a former monk who thinks that the lake fell through a hole in the world and that if he can simply find the exact spot, all will be well with his villagers. The empty cluster of cinder-block huts around a solitary well is a “cancer village,” where textile factory runoff polluted the groundwater and the irrigation channels that fed the farms, killing and deforming the villagers and finally driving the survivors away.
When Maya’s stories begin to appear one-sided, to sound like a biased diatribe against the crimes of the government in power, she switches positions and begins lambasting the old ways, the traditional practices of their supposedly tolerant, peaceable culture.
For instance, the fact that slavery was not abolished in this part of the country until 1979. Or that in the 1990s, tens of thousands of Nepali-speaking Hindus, many of whom had entered the country through a narrow pass to the north and had lived here for decades, were forcibly expelled, and hundreds were killed during pro-democracy demonstrations.
Closer to the river, the land begins to show signs of life. A man on an empty horse-pulled cart shares the road with them. An old woman in a straw hat plows a field of dark soil with yoked bullocks. A flock of black-necked cranes banks low above the valley floor and soars overhead, casting a shadow that passes through the road like an arrowhead.
As if sensing that Henry is taking pleasure in, or at least is less depressed by, the more favorable conditions, Maya counters with more words and stories. “At this small stone farmhouse on the left”—she points as she slows the truck—”the one with the frayed prayer flags near the kindling pile, a lifelong girlfriend of mine was bludgeoned to death with field stones by her in-laws, for the capital offense of bringing an insufficient dowry to her marriage.”
Henry stares at the farmhouse. Wood smoke discolors the sky from a tin elbow pipe punched through the roof.
“Her in-laws,” Maya adds, “still live there.”
“No wonder this place has such strict limits on tourism.”
“They claim it’s in order to protect our culture and our natural resources, but really it’s to keep outsiders from discovering the truth. And not just now. For decades. Every generation has an entirely new type of truth it wants to keep the outside world from discovering.”
Madison Ellison, he thinks, before adding, “Both absurd and brutal.”
And Maya answers, “Exactly.”
~ * ~
Several minutes before noon they reach the river. Maya stops the truck at a small, seemingly uninhabited village. But as soon as they open the truck doors, brindle mutts waddle from behind tin-roofed shacks to greet them. Mountains hover on the other side of the tar-black water, larger than anything he’s ever seen. Beneath them the living world is diminished, reduced to a humbling dollhouse size.
Noting his astonishment, Maya lifts her chin toward the peaks. “The only way to live in a place like this,” she offers, “is to trust them, respect them, and then hopefully forget about them. Otherwise you would become completely intimidated. Overcome by feelings of insignificance compared to something so enormous, and paralyzed with fear that one day they will smash down and crush you.”
“Does that actually help?”
She smiles. “Oh, no. We are merely specks compared to them, and eventually they may come down and crush us either way.”
“I see.”
“But at least until then we will have been able to live in relative peace.”
~ * ~
They walk to a rectangular slab of granite that forms a natural bench and sit facing the river. When the dogs see that they have no food scraps to hand out, they skulk away. Three wooden dories in various stages of disrepair are flipped over on the gravel low-tide bank, and a row of iron chains looped through iron hooks embedded in anchor stones indicate that perhaps a dozen working boats are out on the water. At an eddy at the water’s edge, foaming clumps of waste float like cotton, piling high and swirling with the ebb against a rotting piling.
Maya points at the toxic cluster. “Cyanide, arsenic, and factory lye. On the rare occasion that the water in the river appears clear, it’s a sure sign that there are going to be inspections from some global watchdog. Amnesty. UNICEF. Or, more importantly, a visit from a corporate dignitary. For them, they shut down the factories far in advance. Same thing with the highways. Days before this next conference, they’ll pull all the cars off the roads to the capital and douse the stacks and everyone will leave impressed with the quirks of our magical, spiritual mountain kingdom.”
As Maya is speaking, children appear. Many of them know her. One by one they approach, smile and bow at Maya, then give Henry a tentative, skeptical nod. One, a boy often wearing American blue jeans and a rugby-style shirt, kisses her cheek. His face is blotched burgundy with chemical burn and the visible skin on his forearms bulges with more gray tumors than Henry can count.
“This is my nephew Sanjay,” Maya explains. “My brother’s son.” After Henry shakes the boy’s hand, Maya stands and for several minutes speaks rapidly in Galadonian to the group. The children listen intently, and when she is done they all laugh before scrambling back to the small shacks along the dirt path. “I told them we’re hungry,” she says.
“Don’t they go to school?”
Maya laughs. “In the new Galado they boast that health care and education are free! But the reality is, they are almost completely unattainable, particularly in rural areas, where there is rampant illness and illiteracy.”
~ * ~
While lunch is being prepared, Henry gets up to watch the children. They are playing a makeshift game of cricket on the hardscrabble lot near the river. At one point Maya’s nephew calls something to her. “He wants to know if you want to play,” she tells Henry.
He shakes his head. “Tell him I don’t know how.” He takes the level swing of a baseball player. “Tell him my game is baseball.”
After relaying this to her nephew, she says, “He wants you to teach him.”
Henry smiles and starts to walk toward the boy. Sanjay holds out the handmade bat, made not of willow but of plywood. Looking at the bat’s warped striking face and rough edges, Henry pauses. He looks at the other children, then back at Maya. “I have a better idea.” As he speaks he points at the bat, at Sanjay, and then at himself. “Why doesn’t Sanjay . . .” Here he takes an intentionally pathetic downward cricket swing with a phantom bat, which already has the children laughing. “Why doesn’t Sanjay teach me?”
~ * ~
After he makes a fool of himself to the delight of the children for fifteen minutes, Maya says that lunch is ready. When he sits down beside her, she passes him her cup of butter tea. He senses that she is pleased with him, but she won’t say it. Instead she says, “While we eat, how would you like to hear my thoughts on a possible agenda?”
He shrugs, nods, still looking at the mountains, thinking how strange it is that talking shop in a place like this can feel like the most normal thing in the world, still not quite grasping how a seemingly random transfer from a parity job in Underarm Research could possibly have bro
ught him here. “An agenda for Pat and Audrey’s visit?”
“Uh-huh,” Maya says. Then she extends her right arm and waves her hand over the foaming river, up the base of the humbling mountains, then back toward the leaning shacks, the hungry dogs, and the toxic children, as if issuing a blessing, a decree. “And for this too.”
~ * ~
Divining Purpose
Henry listens.
He eats. Good stuff. Chile-spiced rice, some kind of fried taro patty. He thanks the kids and shakes their hands and even pets the goddamn brindle dogs, and then brings food to his mouth with the same hands, without Purell, without fear of catching rabies or fleas or whatever horrible condition Sanjay has. This, he realizes, has nothing whatsoever to do with personal growth, or selfless bravery, or resurgent nihilism. It has nothing to do with anything and much to do with Maya.
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