Shug clicks his tongue. “Not today. Today a bad day to fly.” They drive on toward the palace, the early evening Shangri-La cruise on the river.
“You know,” Henry says as the blurred shapes of royal towers appear like black ghosts in the filthy sky, “when I got here, I didn’t care much about the job, the so-called mission, certainly not the fate of the people of Galado. But I changed. Once I got to know her, I did. I tried. And not just because of her. Because of the way she changed me. I did want to help.”
Even though they are on the highway, Shug slows the Range Rover almost to a stop. He doesn’t speak until Henry caves and looks at him. “You still can help, you know.”
~ * ~
Fahrenheit 212
Here are 193 people gathered on the banks of a poisoned river affixing laminated name tags, waiting for permission to revel.
Hello! My name is Greed.
Hello! My name is Excess.
Hello! My name is the Opposite of Shangri-Fucking-La.
Here’s a plastic flute of Moët & Chandon for the preboarding toast and a reminder to pick up your royal swag bag when the cruise is over.
Here’s Henry, signing in, concerned that perhaps they’ve already found out about the fate of his mission here and crossed him off the list. But there’s his name. Here’s his tag and complimentary bubbly. If the people at the welcome desk know his secret, they don’t seem to care. As he says good-bye to Shug and approaches the gangway, he thinks it is hard not to notice this about his hosts and fellow capitalists, about this event: there is a pervasive, collective, and absolute vibe of not giving a shit.
Hello! My name is Fuck It!
He takes stock of the surrounding guests. Mostly corporate refugees whose home offices have ignored their pleas for permission to return home, their warnings that this country is on the verge of disaster, that the seed money is gone, that the business opportunity has evaporated, that the king is dying if not already dead, and that the prince’s grasp of reality diminishes with every tick of the Shangri-La clock. These are the first to ask for refills. Henry recognizes a first-term congressman from Idaho last seen shouting down a bank official on CNBC and is surprised at how small and powerless he now seems, leaning against the starboard rail, alternately staring at his BlackBerry and glaring at the substantially larger fuss being made over the head of the Walmart delegation, who for some reason has decided to ride this thing out to the end.
Henry takes a breath of low-tide river air and steps on board. The boat is a double-decker, tricked-out ferry. White lights laced along the rails of both tiers shine in the graying dusk. A string quartet is playing jazz in the back of the boat, so he heads toward the front, where he recognizes and tries to avoid eye contact with two American beer distributors and a guy who claims to be an advance textile scout from the Gap.
Hello! My name is Francis.
“I didn’t know you had a first name.”
Madden tries to smile, but it comes off more as a grimace. He’s not wearing a suit or anything close to business casual. He’s in camouflage cargo pants and a sleeveless wrinkled white T-shirt stained with sweat and a spray pattern of blood. He raises an unlikely flute of champagne and taps glasses with Henry. “Thanks for getting me in on this. I was running out of places to hide.”
After Madden guzzles his champagne, Henry hands over his glass as if it were expected and Madden drinks that as well. “What’s going on?”
“What’s going on,” Madden replies, “is I’m done here. I took some calculated risks that didn’t quite work out, and right now some people are fixing to bring me down. Did you come through the capital?”
Henry shakes his head. “We came from the country. Why?”
“Fucking chaos in the streets. Smashing storefronts. Banging on the palace gates. I heard demonstrators took over the airport today.”
Henry thinks of Shug’s warning about flying today. A horn blows twice and the boat begins to drift away from its slip. “You all right?”
For the first time in the conversation Madden makes eye contact with him. “I lost everything, mate. I’ve got nothing.”
A waitress with a tray of champagne approaches and they each grab a flute. Near the far rail Henry thinks that he sees. . . yes, it’s Audrey. For some reason she’s decided to fulfill her obligation to represent the same nonexistent company as he does. She smiles wanly at Henry and raises her glass. He asks Madden, “Why’d you come to this thing, then?”
“A few days ago I thought I could do some business here, try to change my fortunes, but now it’s flat-out asylum. My half-assed ties with the prince are pretty much all I’ve got, and those’re dwindling by the second.”
“I heard the king died.”
Madden looks right and left as he thinks about this. His hands are trembling as they touch his cheek, his eyes. Finally he lights a cigarette and says, after exhaling, “That makes sense. That explains a lot.”
“I imagine this is why he’s not here.”
Madden laughs. “Here? I’d be surprised if the little bugger is still in the country.”
“What will happen to him?”
“They’re Buddhists. If he loses the military and there is a coup, they will ask him to leave peacefully. And if he doesn’t do that or hasn’t already fled, I imagine they’ll bloody well kill him.”
Henry looks out at the river. As the sun drops behind the western peaks, the purple smog cluster in the surrounding sky deepens like a bruise. “I got fired a few hours ago.”
“Congratulations. That makes your presence here more confounding than mine. Where’s Maya?”
“Gone,” Henry answers. “She deserves better than me.”
Madden stares at him. “I spoke to some people about your plan with the straws. UNICEF. Soda people. There might be something there for you.”
“Thanks. What about you, then? Is there still something here for you?”
Madden looks at him, then, before heading inside for another drink, he shakes his head and says, “I did some things, my friend.”
~ * ~
On a video monitor mounted beneath the overhang for the second deck, a message from the prince and king begins to play. While the prince offers greetings in French, English, German, Spanish, and Galadonian, the first in a series of explosions sounds on shore, from the direction of the capital. Fireballs rise in the southern sky, and small-arms tracers arc through the darkness closer to shore.
“It is a royal fireworks display,” explains one of the organizing hosts, even though no one asked for an explanation. Now the king is onscreen, seemingly talking to camera, seemingly holding a tennis racket, seemingly alive. But Henry knows better. They all know better. The more the host talks, it seems, the more the group drinks. Someone—is it the Walmart guy?—has begun to pass around a hashish pipe.
Now the host is saying something to Henry’s group about the king, something about his extraordinary vitality and athletic ability. But no one is listening. They are all looking at a bend in the water upstream, where the river is burning down. Or is it up? More than a hundred feet up.
The host is talking faster, making less sense with every word, as they’re drawn closer to the flames. The engines ease and the boat slows as it approaches a village illuminated by great waterborne tongues of fire.
~ * ~
It should come as a surprise when a man in a red hood rounds the corner from the starboard side and smashes the host in the back of the head with the blunt face of a machete, toppling him, mid-lie. But it doesn’t.
Hello! My name is Potentially Bloody Insurrection!
Before the man hits the deck, Henry looks back at the monitor. The familiar montage of the deceptively active king is playing. The flash of a bomb strobes against the base of the mountains upstream. Before the sound registers, Henry raises his champagne flute, drains it, and lets it drop onto the deck. Three more men in red bandannas appear, holding machetes. One turns and smashes the TV monitor with the blade, bringing to an early close the dead
king’s fabricated hunting trip.
The quartet, for some reason, continues to play, Titanic-like. The boat briefly slows and then reverses the engines. New captain, Henry thinks. New itinerary.
They are herded into a group at the front of the boat. A separate group that presumably includes Madden and Audrey is contained on the stern. One of their captors tells them that no one will get hurt as long as they cooperate. “There is a coup going on in the capital. The king has been dead, perhaps for days, and the prince, who chose to withhold this information from his people—well, he is gone. Seeking asylum in a land of excess.”
The congressman steps forward. “What are you going to do with us? Do you know who is on this boat?”
“We know exactly who is on this boat. Corporate criminals. Enemies of culture. And a minor politician who needed a runoff to win his election and whom no one would miss should tragedy befall him on this river.”
~ * ~
They begin to circle in a slow-motion holding pattern between the flames and the river village. Two men with machetes stand in front of them, saying nothing, letting them drink and smoke and talk among themselves. Henry separates himself from the others as much as his captors will allow and watches the burning river and the agitated villagers.
The flaming water reminds him of the flawed chemistry of his former backyard pool. Maybe some things need to be set on fire before they can be made right. He wonders if setting the pool on fire would have gotten Rachel’s attention. Or his.
“I’m not gonna stand for this!” It’s the Walmart guy. Drunk. Stoned. Used to getting his way. “I want to talk to your manager immediately.” After they strike the Walmart guy with the blunt side of a machete, Henry is fairly certain they are going to kill them all, but then again, if that were the case, they probably would have used the blade.
His phone vibrates. Service on a flaming river in a third world country during a coup. Someone should make a commercial. It’s Giffler. No shit. “Are you all right?”
Henry watches two men drag the Walmart guy into the cabin. Along the river’s edge flames lap at the interior upholstery of a late-model Toyota Prius. “Oh, I’m doing just fine, Giff. Why do you ask?”
“Hey, it was not my call. But you know, you should have seen the writing on the wall.”
“You are right. I should have seen the writing on the wall of my nonexistent office.”
“What you need is a nice tour of Bangkok’s red-light district before coming home. I’ll make sure T&E pushes it through.”
“Thanks, Giff.”
“And if, you know, you need any references or anything moving forward, you know I’ll always be here for you.”
“That is so good to know. Thank you again, Giff.”
~ * ~
Out of curiosity, as they continue to circle the flaming river, he checks his messages. Why not? Rachel heard about the fate of Happy Mountain Springs on the business news and wants to know what kind of package he got, how this will affect his standing in the profit-sharing plan. Warren in Bangalore sends his professional condolences and urges Henry to visit him in Mumbai before going home “to find yourself.”
Then, from Meredith, the announcement that she is using her severance to go to India to have breast reduction surgery, because it’s much more affordable there and because, well, Warren is there, and he is really happy, and they are going to give it a go. Fucking Warren, Henry thinks, looking for stars through the thickening smoke. Warren with his fulfilling job and his unflappable ideals and now the company of a T. S. Eliot-quoting one-time big-boob web mistress who might be the most authentic person he has ever met. Good for him. Good for them.
The last message is a day-old video attachment from Norman that Henry never got around to watching. Titled The Weight of Make-Believe Water, it opens on a group of malnourished, impoverished kids straight out of a Save the Children commercial squatting on a sunbaked desert floor somewhere in Darfur. But as the camera pulls back we see superimposed just beyond them two impeccably dressed Western businessmen and a businesswoman laughing and standing around a five-gallon Happy Mountain Springs water-cooler. Just as one of the children turns to look at them, they flicker and vanish, cooler and all. The next vignette shows a battered well bucket being raised on a rope in a dusty African village. But when the bucket appears, it isn’t filled with well water, it’s filled with a half-dozen superimposed icy cold one-liter bottles of Happy Mountain Springs water, all of which flicker and disappear just before a desperate mother’s hand can grasp them. The same appearing/disappearing sequence plays out as fifty-foot bottles of Happy Mountain Springs water and HMS coolers and logos flicker on desert floors, in crowded refugee camps, at the edge of a foaming, chemically fouled river not unlike the one on which Henry is precariously floating. The sound track is Massive Attack’s instrumental “Two Rocks and a Cup of Water.” After the final sequence, which culminates with the powerful and sentimental propaganda of a match dissolve from a drop of HMS cooler water to the teardrop in a parched child’s eye, Henry closes the screen and stares at his captors. He raises a finger and gets the attention of the leader. The young man waves him forward.
“Really, what are you going to do with us?”
“Hold you captive until we get our way.”
“And if you don’t?”
The man shrugs, looks at his machete.
Henry stares at him for a moment and smiles.
“What?”
“I have an idea. Are you the leader?”
He begins to nod yes, then says, “No.”
~ * ~
Upstairs in the pilothouse, the view is even more dramatic, because it provides a 360-degree panorama of the pyrotechnics. His suggestion for the three men gathered is simple:
“If you kill us, you will turn the world against you and no one will want to do business with you, let alone give you an ounce of aid. If you make an example of us by showing us the door, by escorting us out of your country for excessive greed, for an assault on your culture, your purity, the world will listen. Kick our asses out and make a show of it—film the fucking thing. Tell us to come back with a more humane and culturally sensitive business plan. If you do that. . . well, besides the fact that I would remain alive, it would be a lot better.”
He watches them look at each other. He feels good, relieved even, because it seems to have registered to some degree. One of the men, presumably the leader, glances at one of the guards and gestures toward the door. As the guard steps forward, Henry realizes that he has seen him before. It is Maya’s friend. Her brother. Small world. Smaller country. As he nears, Henry smiles and begins to raise a hand to say hello, perhaps to shake, but his once and former girlfriend’s brother swings the butt end of his machete handle against Henry’s temple.
~ * ~
Last Drop
An hour and a half later, two rust-pocked school buses appear at the boat slip at the edge of the village. A dozen men in red bandannas lead the fallen front men and women of industry down the gangway and onto the idling vehicles. Henry takes a window seat in the back of the first bus and looks out the window. The river is still burning, but with less intensity. He hasn’t seen the flash of explosives or tracers for a while. Some of the villagers are shouting and banging on the side of their buses, but most are more intent on boarding and looting the royal ferry. He watches Madison Ellison and then Audrey stumble past, both sobbing, both, thankfully, headed toward the other bus. And there is Madden, his face bruised and matted with blood that wasn’t there when he came on board. Two men hold him by the arms and a third walks behind him with a half-cocked riot stick. Madden looks up at Henry’s somber face as he passes, and winks.
~ * ~
On the black empty road to wherever they’re taking them, he closes his eyes, thinks of a song, “Step Right Up” by Tom Waits, and sleeps.
~ * ~
Bright lights, a film crew, and several thousand angry Galadonians greet the buses at the airport. As he walks a gauntl
et of red-clad guards, he is shoved and tripped and spat upon. Lying on the concrete sidewalk, waiting to crawl into the terminal, he is frightened yet exhilarated. Certain that this is all for and because of him. The spectacle. The sparing of questionable lives. The public banishment of the greedy interlopers, chronicled for posterity.
Inside the airport it is silent. The demonstrators are kept outside, and only a few dozen rebels stand guard as the soon-to-be-released hostages shuffle toward the terminal’s lone gate. They stop and form a line, waiting to be processed at a makeshift customs desk. He notices Maya’s brother standing guard several spots ahead of him.
“Excuse me.”
Her brother looks to see who is watching, then approaches him. “What?”
“What happened to the Australian?”
Holy Water Page 29