by Jeff Long
After that, he pursued an archaeological survey of the old palace. He paced off measurements, gained an overlook of the grounds from the upper windows, collected oral histories. He came to treat it as his long-lost dissertation. His exploration quickly became magical for the lepers, too. They gave him paper and ink for his drawings. He gave them wings.
He hired one of the lepers, a cobbler, to sew his pages together into a book. It was comprised of a hodgepodge of paper. Some were pieces of rice paper, some linen or pulped wood, and some were empty end pages recycled from other books. A few were even made of papyrus or soft vellum. In all there were over three hundred pages bound together in a cover taken from a nineteenth-century botany compendium entitled Flora of the Greater Himalaya, by George Bogle, a potato specialist. The book was as beautiful as it was strange. It weighed five pounds in his hands. It even smelled rare and enticing. His archaeological notes and stories-in-progress occupied the first 183 pages. The rest was blank, waiting for his pen and paintbrush. Each morning, Nathan Lee rose at this same hour to fill in a little more.
Now he adjusted the tin lantern, and by its orange glow resumed his fairytale of the monster in the tower. She was so small down there among that crowd. I wondered, Who could she be? What did she think, seeing my faraway face?
He left the rest of that page blank for a watercolor portrait of a little girl. It would consume him for days. Of late, he found himself confusing Grace with images of other girls and women. The lepers had shown him antique studio pictures of their wives and daughters, and their faces intruded on him. He had glued the snapshot of Grace to the inside cover, but it was nearly ruined from water and sun exposure. Time was against him and he knew it. She was growing up. Her fifth birthday was coming soon.
He’d sent dozens of letters, wishfully picturing Lydia reading them to Grace, and yet knowing better. Not so much as a postcard came back. Maybe Grace believed her daddy had perished in the Himalayas, a colorful excuse for her preschool friends. Just as likely, she’d been told he was an animal rotting in a faraway cage.
Nathan Lee closed the book. It was time to start a fire in the clay pit in the floor. He tucked the book in his jhola, a haversack made of coarse wool. The book fit perfectly, leaving just enough space for his pens and the little watercolor kit. The jhola never left his side.
As he was backing from the window, the fog suddenly parted and Nathan Lee saw something he’d never seen. Thirty feet away, at his same height, there was a monkey in the guard tower. It was perched on its haunches. The monkey saw him at the same moment. They regarded each other, then the monkey resumed eating a piece of fruit from some neighborhood altar.
Nathan Lee waited. There had to be some mistake. The guards were gone.
He sniffed for the smoke of their bidis. He threw a pebble at the tower. The monkey bared its teeth and turned its rump to him and vanished into the fog. Now the guard tower stood completely empty.
What could this mean? he wondered. All winter, Kathmandu’s power supply had been slowly dying. For the last several weeks there had been no electricity at all. The prison’s loudspeakers no longer blared childlike Hindi songs. At night the rusty lightbulbs didn’t light. The blackout spawned all kinds of theories. Some claimed it was evidence of a change in government. Others thought the rivers had run low. The country bumpkins blamed a dearth of lightning bolts the preceding summer.
Nathan Lee took off his glasses and carefully wiped them. He was thorough. He rubbed his eyes and replaced the glasses, and it was the same. The tower was empty.
There should have been two or three guards out there in the tower. They had gotten used to Nathan Lee sitting in his window with the orange candle flame. One fellow had made a morning ritual of aiming his rifle at the American cannibal. Nathan Lee would press his palms together in greeting, a wordless namaste. The guard would smile behind his iron sights. Not this morning. All were gone.
Nathan Lee swung his legs down and stood on the clay floor. His limbs ached. He slung his jhola on one shoulder. He didn’t wake the lepers. The fire could wait. Barefoot, he stole down the wooden staircase.
The leper building had only one entrance. He paused in the low doorway. Going out without permission was forbidden. But who would see him in this mist?
He took the chance and stepped from the building. No one cried out. He headed uphill, hopping wide across the ditch with grey water. Two posts marked the volleyball court. He limped across a million footprints pounded into the dirt. The blue air smelled of ash and curry and urine.
A soft clapping noise came from behind. He stopped. It was only a prisoner in the distance, the slap-slap of his thongs fading out. Nathan Lee went on, heading straight for the front gate. Regular prisoners lived for the gate. It was their eventual exit. Through its bars, they visited their lawyers, business associates, and loved ones. None of that applied to him, so he had avoided it. Until now.
The mouth of a tunnel yawned just ahead. Nathan Lee tried to remember what lay inside. When they’d brought him here, he was almost catatonic with despair. He remembered the clatter of chains being dropped and the heavy gate screeching on its hinges and an interval of darkness. His heart was racing. He entered.
The tunnel ran thirty feet, but seemed much longer. It was pitch black inside, the arched walls greasy with human passage. Nathan Lee reached the entrance. The gate hung open. Its iron straps were pitted with rust. The chains lay at his feet like dead serpents. He stopped.
Just ahead lay the world. It was almost too much to believe. The fog was thinning. He could see buildings hanging in the distance. Little shapes—people, dogs, cows?—roamed through the far mist. There was not a guard in sight.
He hesitated. Was this a trap? A dream? It seemed so close to one of his fairytales about a city that suddenly evaporated around a lone traveler.
Closing his eyes, Nathan Lee planted one bare foot outside the walls. There was no gunfire, no alarm. Mobs did not assemble. Thunder did not crack the sky. He let out a breath. For months he had contemplated all sorts of harrowing escapes. Now all he had to do was walk away? The moment was surreal. He began walking.
For the first few minutes, he didn’t dare look over his shoulder, afraid a single glance might sweep him backwards into jail. With every step he wanted to run through the streets, shout, throw his arms in the air. He kept his arms close. The jhola with his book rapped against his hipbone. He had no other possession in the world except the rags on his back.
A human figure surfaced to his left, giving him a start. It was a goddess, her shrine built into the red brick wall. Vermilion and ghee smeared her face and shoulders. While he stood looking at the stone idol, a woman and her daughter approached.
Nathan Lee drew his elbows tighter to his ribs. He was caught. Surely they would cry out. But the woman didn’t waste a glance on him. She was businesslike in her devotion, tossing a bit of rice, murmuring a prayer. The little girl stared at him with huge black eyes. Nathan Lee lowered his head and moved away.
His previous escapes had been nothing but wild, mindless gallops. This time, he vowed, would be different. He wanted to bolt from the city. But for the moment, his best ruse would be to mingle with other Westerners in the tourist district. Even there, Nathan Lee knew he would stick out. In jail, he’d weighed himself by the hook scale used for sacks of rice. He had shrunk to forty-six kilos. At six feet two, he weighed less than Miss America.
In the fabled hippie days, world travelers used to show up looking much like he did now, thin as skeletons, draped with rags, unwashed, impure, hair long. That was then. Nowadays tourists came sporting North Face and Nike brands, with designer sunglasses and thousand-dollar video cameras. Perhaps they would mistake him for a saddhu and give him some money. That would be a start. He could beg for clothes. Shoes were a priority. And socks. And food. And a backpack. His thoughts tumbled. Maybe some climbers would take him in. Maybe he could even arrange a passport. For the time being, the American embassy was out, however. The police
would surely be watching it for him soon.
The mist bled pink, then burned to white. Nathan Lee felt like a vampire, desperate to get off the streets. Clutching his jhola, he reached the main road, Kanti Path, and it was strangely silent. By now there should have been a stream of traffic with honking horns and the jingle of bicycle bells. Instead, two farmers were trying to push a cart piled with grass between scores of taxis and autorickshaws and buses…all of them abandoned. Some stood parked in the middle of the street, others had pulled onto the sidewalk. Judging by the flat tires and missing seats, they had been sitting here for weeks or months.
Astonished, he spoke to the two farmers. “Why are the cars like this?” he asked in Nepali.
“Bhote,” one said to the other, indicating Nathan Lee. With his bad accent and dumb question, they took him for a mountain yokel.
“Do you think a car uses water?” the other said to Nathan Lee.
Fuel, he meant. There was no fuel. Now Nathan Lee saw the strangle weeds growing everywhere from cracks in the asphalt. He looked around, and the post office was in similar condition, its doors lolling open, creepers growing up the concrete. Telephone cables hung down the sides, slit open for their wires. Wood smoke came from broken windows. Squatters had taken residence in there. No fuel, no postal service, no police, no electricity, no phone. The infrastructure had vanished. “What happened?” asked Nathan Lee.
“Mahakala,” one farmer responded. Mahakala was a wrathful deity. He was black and ferocious, with a sword of flames to cut down the demons of ignorance.
“The world is coming to an end,” said the other farmer.
“Was there a war?” asked Nathan Lee.
“No, I just told you. It just is so.” The man shrugged. “Ke garne?” What to do?
They returned to pushing their cart. The morning fog opened wider. Sunlight glinted on Swayambunath, the hilltop temple to the west. People surfaced from their homes. Freshly painted tikas on their foreheads were bright and precise like bullseyes. Men wore tiny devotional flower petals in their hair. Shopkeepers opened their shutters and peasants laid their winter vegetables in neat rows for sale. As if the odor of raw meat weren’t enough, bright orange goat heads—rubbed with tumeric to keep away flies—advertised a butcher shop. Chinese bicycles, deathless clunkers, clattered back and forth, bells jingling.
And no one paid the slightest attention to him! Penniless, weak, and bewildered, he began to relax. Maybe this was a dream, after all. Maybe he was still lying asleep on his straw mat.
Kathmandu had always been a vortex of centuries swirling upon themselves, the medieval and the modern. Electric lines threaded among thirteen-tiered temples. Ancient stone gods peered up from shafts in the asphalt. What he saw this morning was mostly the medieval. Video and fax shops, Indian boutiques, carpet and thangka stores: all were closed, their signs ripped away. The air was rich with spices, smoke, dung, meat, wood shavings, incense…everything but the city’s infamous smog. The dinosaur blaring of taxi horns was extinguished. Time had slowed down. The world had slipped a cog.
Nathan Lee couldn’t shake the feeling of fantasia. His stomach rumbled. Kathmandu was huge. Its temples loomed. What really threw him was the shift in human scale. Nepalis had always seemed to him slight and undernourished. But this morning everyone looked lush and muscular. His norm had become emaciated prisoners.
The plaza of Durbar Marg was packed so tightly with cars and buses that it looked like solid metal. Vehicles had been pushed from the narrow streets into this rusting junkpile among serene pagodas. He kept moving, letting the tangle of streets guide him. He had escaped into a city moving backward in time. Now he had to figure a way to escape time itself.
At the time of his arrest, political parties had been waging street warfare with posters and paint. Now all the political graffiti had been whitewashed to extinction, replaced by images of their god-king, a young caudillo in sunglasses and a pencil moustache. Had he decreed a return to traditional ways? That might explain it.
The street wound back and forth. The city was so quiet! No radios, no horns, no engine roar. Here and there little courtyards opened in the walls like separate worlds. People circled shrines, ringing little temple bells. Soothsayers and ayurvedic doctors and professional ear cleaners plied their trades on steps beneath temple eaves.
He reached Thamel, the tourist district. His little expedition with Ochs had started here at the Tibet Guesthouse, a favorite of mountaineers. It was closed, the metal gates wired together. He meandered deeper into tourist territory, his stomach pinched with hunger. This should have been his sanctuary, a place among fellow Americans, brothers of the rope, sympathizers. But there were no climbers prowling for one-night stands, no adventure-travelers with StairMaster thighs, no package tourists, no money changers, shoeshine boys, or professional beggars. Trekking shops and bookstores stood shuttered. Gaudy Christmas tree lights in restaurant windows were dead on the vine. Led Zeppelin was nowhere in the air. The whole scene had gone belly-up.
Then he glimpsed a man and woman at the far end of the block. They were dressed in New Age gypsy clothing. Her hair was blonde. The man was pushing a sturdy, green mountain bike. Westerners!
Nathan Lee didn’t call out. After so many months spent among the whispering lepers, he had become an untouchable in his own mind. He hurried to catch them. His knee ached. The missing toes forced a rocking, hitched gimp. He even walked like a leper now.
The woman was draped with half a dozen scarves flowing in the sunbeams. Their pace was casual. Her laughter sparkled. She was smoking a mint bidi. What for Nathan Lee was a painful, life-and-death pursuit amounted to nothing but a morning stroll for them.
His pursuit slowed. He was weak. He lost them. Then he spied a bidi in the gutter still venting mint tendrils. Spurred on, he found the man’s bicycle resting against the wall. Nathan Lee smelled food. It was a restaurant of sorts, an old-fashioned, no-nonsense bhaati that probably served nothing but tea, rice and lentils with chicken parts on the bone. He descended the few steps and bent to enter a room lit with two candles. It could have been an opium den.
As his eyes adjusted to the dimness, Nathan Lee saw the man and woman. They were the only customers. He went toward them and stopped, keeping a respectful distance. He didn’t speak.
Finally the woman said, “Ooo are yoo?” She was French. She had rings on her thumbs and fingers. Her eyes were rimmed with kohl, her ears fringed with gold earrings. Exotic was her middle name. The man wore red puja threads around his throat. His left hand was wrapped with prayer beads. His eyes were golden with jaundice. Dharma bums. Nathan Lee read them in an instant. They had cast themselves loose from their homeland. They would be dogmatic about not being dogmatic. Mankind was their landscape. Once upon a time they might have been his parents.
Nathan Lee was afraid to tell the woman his name. “I need your help,” he said.
She moved a candle towards his face. “Why is that? Look at me.” She moved the candle back and forth. “Have you forgotten yourself?”
Nathan Lee blinked at the flame. Was this some mystical riddle? The question was very concerning to her. He didn’t know what answer would satisfy her, so he said nothing.
The woman could not make up her mind about him. She set the candle back on the table and spoke to her companion. “Maybe, maybe not,” she said. “I can’t tell. They say it doesn’t always show.”
“How did you come here?” the man asked him. “And speak louder so we can hear.”
“I followed you,” Nathan Lee confessed.
“No, no. Where do you come from before this?”
“America,” Nathan Lee said tentatively.
The man tsk’ed at his dull answer. Of course he was an American. The woman was more patient. She tried again. “Did you come from the south? Or from the north, down from Tibet?” Tea-bit, she pronounced it.
Nathan Lee saw no choice but to trust them. “I was in jail.”
“You see, Monique?” The man
backed from Nathan Lee. “The stories are true. They are locking them up at the border.”
Locking who up? wondered Nathan Lee. What border? “They let me go,” Nathan Lee quickly assured them. “This morning. One hour ago.”
“Here?” said the man. “In Kathmandu?” Kotmawn-doo?
“Let him sit,” said Monique. “Look at him. He can barely stand. Have you eaten? Where are your things?”
Among the lepers he had quit feeling impoverished. At least he had all his flesh, or most of it. And he had his book.
The owner’s wife brought food. “Sit,” said Monique, and she slid her tea in front of Nathan Lee. He wrapped both hands around the hot glass and brought it to his lips. The rich taste of milk and sugar and tea dust took his breath away.
“Monique,” her companion complained in French. “We have little enough. And what if he came up from India? He could mean the end of us all.”
“The end is coming,” she answered serenely. “It’s only a matter of time. We agreed.”
Nathan Lee had no idea what they were talking about. Monique pushed across a tin plate heaped with rice and lentil gravy. “Merci,” he said.
Monique’s partner was not pacified. He turned to Nathan Lee. “Tell us the truth. Are you infected?”
Suddenly Nathan Lee realized their concern. It was his toes. They thought he was a leper. He smiled. “Don’t worry. I lost those to the mountains.”
It was their turn to be confused. “Now he talks nonsense,” said the man.
Nathan Lee held out his foot. “Frostbite,” he amplified. “Not leprosy.”
The man tsk’ed again. Stupid American. “Leprosy, what is that? I’m talking about the plague.”
“Plague?” The rice was so fat, the spices so rich!
“He treats us like fools,” the man snorted in French.