Ransom

by Jay McInerney

  “He underestimates the intelligence of the American public and they pay him handsomely for it.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “He works in television.”

  “Is he rich?”

  “Apparently not rich enough to be happy.”

  “You are angry with him.”

  “Maybe so.”

  “Why?”

  Ransom stopped. “Have you ever watched American television? What am I saying? Everyone in the world watches American television.” He started up the steps again. “It’s more than that. I hate his cynicism. He turned his back on things he used to believe in, and now he likes to bad-mouth those things and pretend they don’t exist. Everybody has a price, as he’s so fond of saying.”

  He stopped, wondering why he was suddenly confiding in this woman. They mounted toward the exit. The last few couples, in various stages of dishevelment, were emerging from their stationary hot rods.

  “We better split up here,” Marilyn said, at the top of he steps. “He has a lot of friends around here who would recognize me.”

  “Just like in the movies,” Ransom said. “Give me your phone number.”

  She shook her head. “He answers. I’ll call you.”

  “I’m going away for a few days with Miles. Are you going to be all right?”

  She frowned, her face narrowing with disapproval. “Going away? Where are you going?”

  “Japan Alps. Just for a few days. Do you want me to call it off?”

  “Would you?”

  “If you want me to. If you’re worried.”

  She took a deep, whistling breath, as if trying to summon courage. To Ransom it sometimes seemed that she was imitating emotions instead of feeling them. She had a very dramatic sense of gesture.

  “Really,” he said. “I’ll stay here. Why don’t I do that?”

  Marilyn shook her head. She said she would be fine. She might even be better off with Ransom and Ryder out of town.

  He lingered after she left. A kid in a white linen suit, his hair tinted red, flashed him the peace sign.

  Ransom left the theater, approaching all corners wide, checking the street behind and in front. He felt conspicuous, a tall man in a short country.

  14

  They took the bullet train to Nagoya, then the express to Matsumoto. It was dark by the time they reached Matsumoto, so they missed the scenery on the cab ride to their inn; but Ransom could feel the mountains out there, their brooding gravity, as the car slalomed the valley road.

  “Are we the fox or the hare?” Ryder said, after being thrown against Ransom for the third time. “This guy drives like you ski.”

  “As if his life depended on it,” Ransom said, smiling. “I admire that in a man.”

  “I admire a cabbie who thinks about my fucking life.”

  Akiko had packed lunches for them—rice balls, smoked fish and fruit, neatly compartmented in wooden boxes—but Ransom was hungry again and hoped they wouldn’t arrive too late for supper.

  The proprietor and his wife greeted them elaborately at the door. They were honored to have the gaijin-san return to their negligible inn. The couple appeared to be in their fifties, both gray and permanently stooped with arthritis or labor, broad faces creased and folded. They seemed to remember that Ryder was the fluent one, or the funny one, directing their welcome to him, and he obliged by saying something in dialect which pleased them immensely.

  Dinner had been kept warm. After carrying their bags up to the bedrooms, they came down to find two places set at the long, knee-high table in the main room. In a far corner, the grandfather sat in front of the television. Ryder and Ransom appeared to be the only guests, this being off-season. A kerosene heater glowed in the middle of the room, dispelling the chill of the house. As the hostesss began to serve up the dishes of rice and the mountain vegetables that Ransom had never seen elsewhere in the country, their host filled the shallow sake cups from small flagons heated in a pan of steaming water on top of the stove, urging them to drink, which Ransom did, feeling that one could be too fastidious and not wanting to be rude. By the time the woman brought out the post-prandial buckwheat noodles, a speciality of the region, they had killed the better part of a two-liter bottle.

  Inhaling a mouthful of noodles, Ryder said, “Does this taste better than any food you’ve ever eaten in your entire life, or am I just a cheap date?” He rephrased and translated this remark for the woman, who blushed and deprecated her cooking.

  It’s the mountain air, she said.

  “I wonder if sex is this good up here,” Ryder said. He asked the old woman if it was also the mountain air that made the people so friendly and hospitable. Their host beamed and filled their cups again, while the old woman went to the kitchen to see what she had to offer by way of evening the score on compliments. In his corner, the silent grandfather changed channels.

  “The mountain air does good things for this sake,” Ransom said. Thinking to steal some of Ryder’s thunder he told the host that it was the best sake he’d ever had.

  Ryder told the man that while Ransom wouldn’t know good sake from vinegar, in this case he was right.

  The host explained that it was a Kamikochi brand, made just a few kilometers down the road. He was not a man who had travelled widely but in his estimation the local product was pretty fair. Of course, he might be prejudiced. So saying, he opened another bottle and filled the battery of miniature flagons, then immersed them in the hot water.

  Ryder lay back with his elbows on the tatami and belched—the polite thing to do.

  Ransom spread his legs out in front of him. He could feel his skin glowing from the combustion of food and drink within him and on his back the cold night air beyond the circle of heat from the stove.

  “The mountain air,” said Ransom.

  “I could sleep right here,” Ryder said.

  “I could sleep forever.”

  “My needs are simple. Food, drink and sex. How did I ever get such a complicated life?”

  The woman asked if they were ready for their bath. Ryder answered that a hot bath would be the crowning touch on one of the finest evenings he had ever spent. To Ransom he said, “The altitude must be getting to me. Our hostess is starting to look good.”

  The man led them to a big, steaming cedar tub in a chilly room at the back of the house. They undressed and washed with hot water in the chilly room, then eased into the scalding tub. Submerged to his neck, facing Ryder, Ransom said, “Wet and dry. Hot and cold. I like these perfect dichotomies.”

  “Sometimes you’re hot and sometimes you’re not.”

  “Sometimes you’re drunk.”

  “It’s the mountain air.”

  “The mountaineers.”

  “Mountains don’t have ears. They’re just there. That’s why we like them. That’s why we climb them.”

  “Because they’re there.”

  “Exactly, Mr. Ransom.”

  “Why do we ski on them?”

  “Because they have chairlifts.”

  Ransom propped his head back against the rim of the tub and closed his eyes.

  “All we need now are some mountain girls,” Ryder said.

  Ransom looked up. “You’ve got a wife, for Christsake, Miles. Why do you have to be such a pig?”

  Ryder eyed him warily through the steam. “What is it with you, man? What makes you such a righteous guy?”

  Ransom suddenly felt sober. “I don’t know. I guess I should mind my own damn business.”

  “I don’t even know how you can stand to be around me.” Miles’s voice was booming and echoing within the walls. “I’m such a bad guy.” Miles stirred the surface of the water with his hand, watching the eddies and ripples. “I came to Japan to get away, and one morning I wake up all fenced in again.”

  “Nobody made you get married.”

  “Thanks for the compassion, padre. You’re absolutely the weirdest guy I know, Ransom, and here you are telling me how to live my life
. Who made you the fucking Pope?”

  “You have to take responsiblity for your actions.”

  Miles looked at him sympathetically, as if Ransom were the actual subject of the conversation.

  “I’m sounding like an asshole,” Ransom said. “I guess I’m drunk. Let’s drop it.” Miles continued to look at him. Ransom said, “My old man ran around on my mom, and I guess that’s not something you forget.”

  “Mine did, too. I used to tell myself I’d never be like that.” Miles shook his head. “I wonder what happened.”

  Ransom liked spring skiing best, the combination of cold nights and warm days. The spring snow was the distilled essence of all the snow that had fallen through the winter, hard and granular, but soft enough to slice under an edge. The cold nights preserved it and the sun softened it up. They had almost waited too long. Only the highest runs were still skiable. But they didn’t have to share them with the entire population of Tokyo.

  They got a late start, waking under huge goose-down quilts with their breath hanging in the room, Ransom acutely hungover. Once they got moving the hangover seemed almost benign, making him receptive to discrete sensations: the temperature and smell of the air, the amazing bulk of the mountain peaks against the cloudless sky. Their fellow passengers on the bus trip to the slopes were two student mountaineers in tweed knickers and waffle stompers and a changing cast of old women with indigo scarves on their heads and bundles on their backs.

  After renting skis, they rode to the top of the first chairlift and were still below the snowline. On the second lift the run beneath them was punctuated with patches of dirt and rock, but otherwise promising. At the top they stood in their skis and looked out at the mountain peaks: the sky was clear in all directions, except for the indolent puffs of smoke and steam above the barren cone of the semi-active Mt. Yake.

  “How much do you want to wager on this first run?” Miles asked. Miles was not a great skier, but he was fearless. Somewhere he had picked up the idea that getting to the bottom as quickly as possible was the sole object of the sport.

  “Let’s make it interesting, as long as you think you’re going to cut a handsome figure on crutches.”

  “That’s the whole point of a wager. To make it interesting.”

  “I’m talking big.”

  “How big?”

  “Let’s say you won’t so much as speak to any female save your wife for—well, let’s start with a month. I mean not even a friendly chat.”

  “Good Christ.” Ryder dug his pole into the snow and worked the basket back and forth. “Not even Marilyn?”

  “Especially not even Marilyn.”

  “What do I get?”

  “Make me a counter-offer.”

  Miles tugged at his crotch and looked out over the valley. “A binge in Tokyo, paid for by you. We stay at the Otani, and you match me drink for drink. No restrictions, plenty of girls.”

  “Deal.”

  Ryder hesitated. “Wait a minute, I’ve got a better one. If I win, you tell me the story of those two markers you put in the little graveyard down in the valley last year.”

  It was Ransom’s turn to pause. Miles’s eyes were on him like surgical tweezers. “Why do you want to know that?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe because you don’t want to tell me. Maybe because I’m your friend. Maybe because it would be good for you to lose this bet.”

  Ransom assessed the ribbon of snow beyond his ski tips.

  “You wanted to make it interesting,” Miles said.

  “All right,” Ransom said. “Two months on your end, though.”

  “A monk for life. Are you ready?”

  Miles corralled a nearby skier to count off the start, and jumped between three and go—a Texas head start. The open bowl near the top of the lift narrowed into a trail between rock outcroppings a hundred yards below, and Ransom couldn’t get past Ryder’s flailing poles. The patches of rock and dirt and the other skiers on the trail prevented either one of them from schussing straight down. You had to stay on your edges. Miles narrowly missed a rock and wobbled dangerously as he tried to regain balance. Ransom cut inside, and beat him to a narrow chute between tree stumps; behind him he heard Ryder’s edges clatter over rock. Ransom narrowly threaded two skiers doing snow-plows, and dropped into a racing tuck as the trail opened up again. Ryder was screaming “Banzai!” right behind him, as the trail narrowed again; with his weight advantage he could easily catch up.

  Miles was a ski length ahead when he turned to taunt Ransom, caught an edge, and went down in a windmill of limbs and skis.

  At the bottom of the slope, shaking the snow out of his hair, Ryder said, “Two goddamn months?”

  “You got it.”

  “Well, the joke’s on you. I haven’t seen Marilyn in two weeks.”

  Ransom decided to leave it at that.

  They were returning on the afternoon of the third day. That morning, Ransom told Miles that he was going to Hotaka alone, but Ryder insisted on coming. The innkeeper drove them in his van. The serpentine valley eventually spilled into a broad cirque, where, on a rise, the Alpine Lodge was situated above a huge parking lot. Behind the lodge, the long ridge of Hotaka extended across the sky like a rusted saw blade.

  Ransom bought two bottles of sake in the lodge. Ryder bought one for himself. “You want me to wait here?” he asked.

  “You can come if you want.”

  They went out through the parking lot, past families snapping pictures of the peaks, and followed a footpath into the woods. Ryder asked if he remembered the way, and Ransom nodded his head. After ten minutes they came to the clearing. It looked just the same: some forty stones huddled together in a small meadow, each one engraved with a name, memorial gifts of sake and flowers placed beside many. An informal shrine commemorating climbers who had died in the mountains, it was started and maintained by their families and friends. The bodies were elsewhere; some had never been found. At the edge of the clearing were two newer stones. One said Ian, the other Annette. A local artisan had done the engraving.

  Ransom placed a bottle of sake beside each stone. He ran his eyes across the letters, trying to separate each chiselled character from the others in the vague hope that the familiar names would yield some new meaning, finally looking up at the face of the mountain, and at the pale sky. “Okay,” he said to Ryder, who was standing back in the trees, and started back up the path.

  That afternoon they took the train back to Kyoto.

  15

  North-West Frontier Province, Pakistan, March 1975

  “And where is your beautiful wife this fine day?” the Pathan said, when Ransom found him at his stall in the bazaar. The woman in question was not Ransom’s wife, and by his lights it was not much of a day: no wind, the sun a degree higher in the sky and hotter than it had been the day before, and still no sign of Ian. The Pathan’s question had an ironic spin, as if the man understood all of this and found it slightly amusing. But then he always sounded that way to Ransom. He replied that Annette was back at the fort where she was relatively safe from lecherous Pathans. He meant this as a joke, but the anxiety of waiting two weeks in a place where he didn’t want to be put a sharper edge on the words than he’d intended.

  The Pathan’s thin smile faded.

  Something bumped Ransom’s thigh. He looked down and found a sheep nosing at his jeans. The sheep turned and waddled off down the bazaar, poking into the stalls as if shopping.

  Ransom had insulted the Pathan, a stupid thing to do. Pathan tribesmen with Enfield rifles strapped over their shoulders and bandoliers of ammunition around their baggy shirts strutted past the stall. The man Ransom was talking to had a revolver holstered on his hip.

  “You have heard from your friend?” he said after a minute.

  Ransom shook his head, relieved that his indiscretion had been passed over.

  “He was not Australian?”

  “American.”

  “Ah.” The Pathan nodded. “There is an Aust
ralian passport for sale.”

  It took Ransom a minute to sort this out, and to construe the warning. He thought he knew where the passport had come from. A few days earlier, in the bazaar, he had met an Australian who had mined opals in the Outback for two years. He had dry, brick-red skin against which his green eyes and the gaudy opal pendant on his chest glistened. A man who had lived alone in a trailer in the desert, seventy miles from the nearest settlement, he showed the tentative volubility of the rescued castaway who is not quite certain if language still works. Over kebabs in the bazaar he told Ransom, who hadn’t asked, about his plan. He was in Landi Kotal to score hash oil. He was going to swallow it, in condoms, when he flew out of Karachi, and shit out a small fortune when he got back to Sydney. That was it. When he had finished talking, he beamed as if he were the first person to have penetrated the mystery of supply and demand. Ransom felt obliged to tell him that it was an old trick, and people had died that way; any residual alcohol that hadn’t been boiled off in the processing of the oil would eat through the condoms, and once that happened it was permanent deep-space. But the Australian smiled and rubbed the opal to his chest. “My lucky amulet,” he said. Ransom left the Australian licking chili sauce from his cracked lips and that was the last he saw of him. Yesterday he’d seen the opal pendant for sale at a stall not five yards from where he stood. He felt awful then, thinking of what might have happened, thinking he might have been more sympathetic, or at least more persistent.

  It was an object lesson, Ransom thought. The Pathan was reminding him of what could happen.

  “Excuse me,” he said to the Pathan. “My humor was crude.”

  The Pathan nodded. “Your wife. She is still sick?”

  Ransom nodded. A convention of their transactions was that Annette was sick and that the junk was a temporary analgesic. This was, in fact, the way Annette viewed her habit.

  “There is anything else I can do for you?” the Pathan asked, after they’d made the usual exchange.

  “How about a fifth of scotch?”

  “I am sorry. You know I am a devout man.”