“You’re visualizing new branches growing on Ballard’s Bodhi Tree, Vinny.”
She had him dead to rights. He wasn’t going to lie and deny it. He felt himself inside not so much a room but a mind space, and it seemed to generate an infinite number of maps in forms and shapes that never stayed stable. To examine one was to change some feature or detail, zooming in or out, as his attention followed a river, a fjord or a chain of mountains. Yoshi, hands unfolded, worked the electronic panel on the vacated chair, and Ballard’s literary preferences appeared on the screen.
“When Ballard decided he wanted to escape, he turned to what he knew from a book he’d read in college, Catch-22,” said Yoshi.
“Orr kept getting himself shot down over water so he could learn to escape.”
Yoshi nodded.
“Orr was that exceptional mind who saw a way from the sea back to the river. He looked for a way to reverse his destiny. Everyone thought he was unlucky or crazy or both, but Orr was smarter than all of them. He’d found a way to avoid death. He came up with an escape plan that didn’t look like one. He played the unlucky man well. Sound familiar?”
“Does it sound like Ballard?” asked Marley.
“So he pulled it off,” said Calvino. “He found a way to tunnel out of the deep state, out of the forest. That was what he was running away from. Not the exhibition in New York. He was running from this grotesque forest like a fire warden who’s seen an out-of-control blaze on the horizon.”
“Letting the trees burn to save the forest is an old idea,” said Marley. “Ballard wanted out.”
“Before I thank you for getting the two agents from the embassy off my back, Marley, I have a question,” said Calvino. “Did you know that they were setting me up? Ballard and I weren’t exactly close. I hardly knew the guy. He showed up, disappeared, was dead, then wasn’t dead. If he’s alive in Madagascar and drinking Champagne with Osborne, it means I was set up to get sucker-punched from the day he walked into my condo.”
“I couldn’t be sure, Vinny. Ballard’s path accidentally crossed mine when Christina Tangier photographed him. I found out who he really was, and he certainly wasn’t one of the ‘one percent.’ I asked Christina to include him after I found and read his field reports about meeting you and Pratt in Bali. You have to trust me that I was doing what I thought was the right thing. I had no idea he’d come to Bangkok later.”
It was the sort of defining moment with another person when one is called upon either to trust them or to double up on the arsenal of doubt and suspicion to defend oneself against attack.
“Okay, you didn’t know,” said Calvino. “Ballard isn’t the first person to disappoint me, and he probably won’t be the last. It’s happened before and will happen again, unless I decide to stay out of the ring.”
“The ring is an interesting metaphor. There’s another map I’d like to show you before you decide whether you will be in or out of the ring.”
Marley curled a long finger at Calvino.
“Follow me.”
She didn’t wait for an answer and walked ahead, weaving through one maze of temporary walls after another until they were deep into the interior of the room. When they arrived, Yoshi was already there, waiting. Calvino shook his head. He couldn’t explain how the pair of them coordinated their appearances and disappearances. A mathematical shortcut; it had to be, thought Calvino.
On the screen was a map of the world with two sets of lines—one Oxford blue and one blood red—connecting cities, big and small, famous and obscure: New York, Big Sur, London, Barcelona, Madrid, Paris, Rangoon, Motihari, Mandalay, Berlin, Moscow and Rome. Bangkok, off in a bottom corner of the digital map, had neither a blue nor red connecting line. The map legend showed Henry Miller’s picture wearing a hat cocked to the side, staring out. The red line was his—New York, Paris, Cyprus and Big Sur. George Orwell’s blue line connected cities in Europe and Asia.
“In Rangoon, you had a crisis,” said Yoshi.
“I admit, I lost something,” said Calvino. “I’ve been trying to find my way back ever since to figure out what went missing there.”
“Nothing went missing. You woke up in Rangoon, Vinny,” said Marley. “And I believe you still haven’t realized what that means.”
After the Rangoon murders something had shifted inside Calvino’s consciousness. The direction and force and depth of the violent deaths had stripped him of his certainty about how he understood the world and himself. It was as if a stranger had taken up residence in his mind. If life really was a river, as Yoshi said, then his river had lost any hope of reaching the sea. When he’d first met Yoshi and Marley, he was still struggling with it. It was his most vulnerable time, and these two new figures in his life had found something in him they thought worth salvaging. They had rallied in his corner of the ring and given him the strength to finish the fight, and they were still rallying around him.
“You are walking knee deep in a political river,” Yoshi said, “and the current is swift, carrying people away. And you’re wondering…”
“Am I going under?” asked Calvino.
“How will I survive? How can I escape?” asked Marley. “Those are reasonable questions to ask. And when you sleep, the questions find you again, when your defenses are down.”
“Henry Miller questions,” said Calvino.
“When Henry Miller set off for France,” said Yoshi, “he felt an emotional release. Call it freedom. Miller thought that he’d disconnected from all of the ties that bound him to America. You know that moment, Vincent. All expats experience it. When you learn that the truth of life isn’t exactly what you thought it to be.
“He also realized at the end of his Paris days that he’d traded one set of boundaries for another. Falling in love with another culture and place is like finding a new woman after a messy divorce. At first she seems unbounded in her love and purity, but after a few years the traveler realizes that all relationships, at the end of the day, pretty much end up the same. Henry Miller returned to America. One of Miller’s Paris friends once wrote that Miller never looked back on his Paris days.”
“He went home. But I’ve never left Bangkok,” said Calvino.
“Have you ever wondered whether the exchange of New York boundaries for Thai ones was a fair trade?” said Yoshi.
“You don’t move forward looking in the rearview mirror.”
“Or maybe you’re closer to Orwell, the most famous of literary boundary crossers in fiction and non-fiction. He emptied his elephant gun. When the smoke cleared, Orwell saw that people always long for a man in uniform to raise his gun and fire a deadly round to show his power. The deep state has flourished because the mob wants it.”
“Orwell was a political man,” said Marley. “Only a political man would think it was possible to wean the mob from their tyrants. What do you believe, Vinny?”
“ ‘Forget it, Jake. It’s Orwell,’ ” said Calvino.
“Orwell is Chinatown,” said Marley. “Always has been the guide to how powerlessness feels and fear works.”
“It’s ‘Forget it, Jake. It’s Henry Miller’s world and his world was definitely not Chinatown.’ ”
Marley nodded.
“No, nothing evil ever happens in Miller’s world.”
“The Black Cat would be alive if she’d followed Henry Miller,” said Calvino. “All she had to do was accept that the deep state is also inside each of us, and no matter how we try, it can never be defeated. The deep state is always underneath. We only detect it from the endless cycles of violence and injustice that follow power plays. We only catch a glimpse of it as it runs between the shadows.”
“If the choice is between the American Henry Miller, an escape artist, hustler, and sensualist, or the Englishman George Orwell, a Barcelona street fighter, champion of the underdog and British colonial official, who would you choose?” said Marley.
“I want to be both,” said Calvino.
“You can’t be the Irrawaddy and
the Mekong rivers at the same time,” said Marley. “And what if both Miller and Orwell were mapmakers who are now sixty years out of date,” she asked, “and they’ve missed rivers we’ve discovered since then, and uncharted rivers, too?”
Yoshi smiled patiently as Calvino drifted into thought.
“What Marley means is we are always moving to a place that can’t be mapped,” he said.
“What’s the name of this place? What are these uncharted rivers?” asked Calvino. “Are they guarded by dragons?”
“It’s a place that isn’t a place. A river that is all rivers.”
“We don’t live in that world,” said Calvino.
“That’s where you’re wrong. We are part of that world, even though we don’t understand it. It connects to us and we connect to it.”
“Vincent, do you remember Anaïs Nin?” said Marley. “She helped Miller understand the mental neighborhoods of Paris. She gave him a magical passkey to open the mystery of its ways to him. What more love can a woman show to a man than to give him that gift? George Orwell had no Anaïs Nin in his life. Political men don’t need such a woman. But a sensual man needs an Anaïs Nin or he’ll be lost in confused thoughts, sitting at the end of the bar.”
“And that’s why you brought me here? To let me know that you’ve appointed yourself my Anaïs Nin?”
“Henry Miller would never have been Henry Miller without her,” Marley said. “He needed a partner, even though he never acknowledged her as one.”
“Anaïs Nin gave Miller a choice,” Calvino said.
“You have the free will to send me away.”
Calvino looked around, wondering how to respond. He had no idea how the three of them had got to this panel or even the direction of the door they had entered from. Whatever elements made up freedom, he wasn’t feeling them inside this space.
“I need to get back.”
Yoshi and Marley smiled, and Marley leaned over and hugged Calvino.
“That’s the point of this room. We all want to find our way back. To decode our lives as we live them. That’s why I’ve brought you to Bletchley Park: to understand that Turing’s work was never finished.”
“You’ve decided to finish it?”
“To make a contribution,” she said.
“Where do I come in, Marley?”
Marley slipped her hand into his.
“In your great-grandfather’s painting, where is the man running to? Was he running toward something or away from someone? The New Year celebration had started. What was his hurry, when everyone else was standing still as if waiting? He left us with those questions. Maybe there is no answer, and we can only imagine what was inside the runner’s mind.”
“Have you ever gone to a racetrack?” Calvino asked. “Stood in the stands and watched the horses before a race? You watch the horses prancing in front of the starting gate, each one filled with spirit, adrenaline pumping through their veins. You feel the tension working through their muscles and guts. They’re gonna run the way they’re gonna run. No one goes to the racetrack just to watch. You place a bet on the winner. How they run and how you bet on them are two different things that a lot of people confuse in their minds. You’ve put a bet on the runner and on me. So if you don’t mind my asking, what’s your take on the runner?”
“That he’s free of the illusion. He understands there’s no finish line to cross. He’s not watching from the stands. He’s in the race. He’s saying, catch me if you can. The painting is a prophecy about freedom. You can choose your race, but you can never know how it will run.”
“You like betting on long shots?” asked Calvino.
She nodded.
“As with your great-grandfather, Galileo Chini, it’s a race you’ve been running your entire life. I’m betting you’ll never stop. How many more times do you need to experience it before the message sinks in?”
Calvino ran. His chest pounded as he skirted around the partitions, through the manifold colored screens, the ancient paintings and the concentric circles on the ceiling dome changing overhead. The smell of cordite, dank water and death mixed into a suffocating brew. He stopped to catch his breath, leaning against a chair, his hands pressed against the headrest. He looked around. Neither Marley nor Yoshi had followed. He circled through the maze for what seemed like hours and never found the entrance. Somewhere there had to be a map of maps, a map of this room. He ran from partition to partition until he was exhausted. When he could go no farther, he cried out, “I’m lost!”
There was no answer. Calvino shouted Marley’s name. He saw the face of every man he’d ever killed, the eyes of every woman he’d ever loved, and heard the voice of every friend who’d ever called his name. When he turned around, he saw the door he’d come through with Yoshi. He pulled it open and it was a clear, bright day outside, the sky blue, the grass green, and there was Munny holding the baseball. He tossed it to Calvino, who caught it with one hand.
“It’s good to be free,” Munny said.
When Calvino opened his eyes, he sat up in his bed. Outside his window the sunrays touched the surface of Lake Ratchada. Early morning joggers were tiny figures on the track around the lake. He rolled out of bed and walked into the sitting area, breathing naturally, slowly, and looking at the framed map that Marley had given him.
He looked at it through Ballard’s eyes. Then he saw it through Fah’s eyes, and those of Osborne and Yoshi and Marley. He ran through the roll call—Rob Osborne, the Black Cat, Munny, McPhail, Pratt, Ratana and Manee, each one embedded as a different mystery inside the same enclosed territory. Through all of those eyes, he stared at the map as if seeing it the first time. Marley’s gift, a kind of Bodhi Tree, alive and growing in his sitting room.
One thing Davenport had said still troubled him. He’d said Philip Marlowe wouldn’t have lasted a day working in Bangkok today. That time was over. He knew that if it hadn’t been for Dr. Marley Solberg watching his back, he’d have been caught in the ropes of life by now and pulled under. They’d tried to break him from Marley. It hadn’t worked. She remained, despite their efforts, a daily presence in his life. What had been the bond? He’d been a fool not to see how she’d done it. Only then did it come to Calvino. It was the map. He’d caught Ballard staring at it, asking questions. Maybe he knew something he wasn’t at liberty to discuss. Maybe he was a quiet American.
Calvino pulled the frame from the wall. He crossed the room, opened a drawer, then another drawer until he found a box cutter. He returned to the frame, flipped it over and used the box cutter to carefully slice through the back fabric. He removed it, exposing the back mat. It wasn’t made from the usual wood pulp. He tapped it with his knuckle. Silicon. Next he slowly removed the map, set it on the table and turned to extracting the mat board that had fit flush against the glazing. Like the back mat, the mat board was constructed from layers of silicon.
He took it to the balcony and held it up to catch the sunlight, illuminating an infinite number of pinpricks across the surface. When he placed the back mat and mat board together, he saw how they’d been connected by a series of sensors the size of a nail head. The tiny transponder nodes had remotely relayed real-time information. But it was more than a relay; it had gone deep into his sleeping mind. Marley had constructed a sky bridge to his dream state. She’d designed an Alan Turing Enigma machine, one equipped to decode his thoughts in wakefulness and sleep. A mind hack, a direct feed, a communication technology so skillfully conceived, designed and implanted that it was undetectable. DARPA had wanted that network. No matter how many rabbit holes they went down looking for Marley, she was always someplace else. From a dozen other places she watched them poking about like slow children in their confusion, anger and need. They would never find her.
Whose company had he been keeping? Calvino wondered. He smiled as he realized that the ones who had come to his dreams had been wise. The old Thai saying about thugs and wise men had its exception, which went like this: wise men sometimes fail. In oth
er words, no one could guarantee that the wise would succeed, even if the thugs were sidelined.
Calvino agreed with what Munny had said just as he woke up from his dream, that it was good to feel free. But to be awake in a world of tracking apps, sensors, databases, algorithms, nanotechnology and super-intelligent enhancements was to enter another kind of dream, one where being free to choose, like the certainty of the wise man’s judgment, lost its core meaning. For Calvino, freedom, like wisdom, had only been a feeling, an illusion that coiled around what appeared to be real, and in the cold light of day he’d been revealed to be no more than any other river on its way to the sea.
The struggle was less about free will versus choice than a lesson in resilience to the hardships of the journey. Getting up after falling down—that took courage. Accepting that the best of us can fail—that took wisdom. It was hard to admit that the world’s most experienced runners were still learning to walk, taking baby steps while pretending to be sprinters. Calvino had stayed on as their audience. Like Turing’s teddy bear, he had once been a wise person’s exclusive audience.
The teddy bear’s journey from private wise man’s quarters to a museum to the conceptual art world had delivered a personal message—the best of all runners never had enough time or ability to explore anything more than a fraction of the hidden rivers and mountains. They always came up short of a finished map. It took a teddy bear to tell that story, to teach that lesson. Calvino stood on his balcony looking out at the city. When he glanced down at the white Chinese slippers with red dragons on his feet, Calvino smiled. Dragonflies, he thought. Even after a hundred years the Bangkok skyline was still lit once a year by Chinese fireworks, and it was forever New Year on the runner’s personal map of the world. And Calvino, a one-man audience, breathed in the hot tropical air and began a new day.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Over the many drafts of Crackdown, a number of people have provided me with useful and insightful comments and suggestions: Michaela Striewski, Mike Herrin, Charles McHugh, and Chad Evans. They dedicated many hours reading an earlier draft and their contribution assisted me greatly.
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