“Then why all the fuss?” he said. “I already said yes. I know it’s the right thing to do. And isn’t this what you wanted, Jordy? To get yourself a baby? Pay me for her, if it’ll make you feel better. I could use the dough.”
I started pacing, suddenly unsure. “I don’t know, I don’t know! I love you. And I already love Paris, probably because I can see you and me when I look at her. But I don’t know if this is the right thing! Nadine’s in trouble, but you could be a good father! Can’t you just come home for a little while and give it a shot? You could live with me.”
Not that I had a place to live in anymore, I remembered suddenly. I was going to sublet the studio apartment in San Francisco until the end of August, and after that, what? Peter had the condo and all of my boxes were in my parents’ garage. Did I really want to move back in with my parents? If I didn’t, where would I go? I thought of David and Karin, then, and realized that I didn’t want to go back to the East coast at all.
“No,” Cam was saying. “That’s the one thing I won’t do.”
“Why not live together?” I pleaded. “We’d make a good team. We always have.”
Cam still wasn’t looking at me. His profile was sharp, an older man’s hollow cheeks. “There’s no way I can go back to the States until I know I’m clean for good,” he said.
“Clean? What do you mean?” I asked.
“Nadine and I were using together,” Cam said.
“Oh, so what?” I asked impatiently. “What’s a little pot?”
He laughed. “That’s what you think I was doing?”
“Weren’t you? You always did.”
“Yeah, well, then I stopped the pot and did heroin.”
I suppose that, on some level, I had known this, yet it was still a shock. I put a hand to my throat. “Oh, Cam. Why?”
He brushed away the question. “Once you try smack, I think the bigger question in your mind is why everybody isn’t using,” he said, laughing a ragged little laugh. “It’s bliss, Jordy. You feel this rush at the base of your spine that keeps moving up your body until it explodes like fireworks in your head. Then everything is better, even your dreams—colors, images, sensations. No more anxiety or fear, no guilt or other desire.”
“What made you stop?”
“I don’t know that I have, not entirely,” Cam said. “No, don’t look at me like that. It’s the truth. I quit partly because I was afraid of dying, I guess. On the other hand, even death seems like it could be a good trip when you’re high. Then I met Jon—he saw me lying on a street near the university—and he gave me a place to stay and kept me away from a particular circle of friends in Berkeley. He wanted me to engage in the world instead of sleepwalking through it, is how he put it.” He frowned. “You really didn’t know I was an addict?”
“Jon didn’t tell me any of this.”
“I thought you might have guessed by now.”
“No,” I said, struggling to breathe normally, to look at Cam as my brother, not as a stranger.
“Well. Now you do.” Cam’s smile was crooked, but it was there. “The thing is, Jon was an addict for years, back in New York City. He got away with Hep C and a determination to help other addicts. Domingo, Melody, Val, me: we all owe our lives to him. No methadone, no nothing. Just cold turkey. He locked all of us in our rooms at some point to keep us clean. And that’s why he didn’t want me anywhere near Nadine, because she was a user, too.”
“What about here in Nepal?”
“Heroin’s only available in Kathmandu, really,” Cam said. “Don’t worry.” He held up a hand when he saw the panic in my eyes. “I’m determined to stay in the village, help out in the nursery. That’s the main reason I didn’t go back to Kathmandu when I got sick. I had to be here, away from everything.”
All of it made sense, now: Cam’s lifestyle since college, his poverty. “All right,” I said. “Then I’m proud of you. It was the right decision for you. But what about Paris? I love her, but I’ve never been anybody’s mother. Do you really want me to have her? I might really mess up! I mean, don’t you ever wonder if Dad’s inside us? Have you ever asked yourself that?”
“Only about a million times,” Cam said. “I never like the answer.” He tugged a bandanna out of his pocket and coughed into it, his shoulders shuddering, then balled up the cloth in one fist and tossed it into a pile of dirty clothes across the room. “Remember Dad’s birthday cake?”
“Of course.” My face was wet, but I didn’t know when I’d started crying. Cam and I were seated across from one another, cross-legged, the way we’d always done on the floor of my bedroom closet whenever Dad was drinking. Maybe that’s what had made Cam mention it, because we’d sat just this way inside my closet, hiding after Dad’s birthday dinner all those years ago.
Dad had come home from work via the Town Tavern. Mom had made his favorite dinner, roast beef and Yorkshire pudding. But Dad was too drunk to manage himself at the table. He sent his dinner plate skidding onto the floor and only laughed at the muck splashed on the rug, the table legs, his knit pants. Mom made us sing anyway as she brought in his birthday cake.
Then Dad blew out the candles. As he did, the candles sputtered and he threw up onto the rich swirls of frosting.
My mother had tossed out not just the cake, but the crystal plate it was on, too, snapping the plate in half against the kitchen counter before tenderly wrapping it in a brown paper bag. “So the garbage men won’t cut themselves on the glass,” she’d explained, adding that the plate had been a wedding present from her mother.
“On that birthday, Dad was the same age I am now,” I said. “Isn’t that a weird thought?”
Cam looked at me blearily, his forehead suddenly beaded with sweat. His fever must be on the rise again. “Dad might have been your age then, but he never evolved past junior high. Want to know why I dropped out of college?”
I nodded and pulled a clean bandana out of my pocket for him. “I figured it had something to do with your girlfriend. You slid off the family radar screen right when you two broke up.”
“Right.” Cam mopped his forehead. “That day I had my last blow-out party at home? The one with the band? That girlfriend was trying to get it on with Dad in the garage. Had him up against the wall, doing some squirrely dance in her coin skirt.”
“What!” I rocked back on my heels.
“Yeah,” he said. “She’d gotten her hands on some acid, then all that booze. She was the one who took my hand and led me into the thorny woods of pleasure chemicals, come to think of it. Anyway, I made the mistake of telling her she was acting just like my old man on a bender, so she decided to get back at me. Birds of a feather should fuck together, is what she said when I found them.”
“But that doesn’t explain why you were so pissed off at Dad,” I said.
“Doesn’t make sense to me now either,” Cam said. “I guess I was ticked off that Dad didn’t try to stop her. Just stood there like an old ram tangled in a thorn bush.”
“Dad probably didn’t know what the hell to do,” I said, before realizing that Cam had broken down. The tears came fast, but without a sound. “Oh, no,” I said softly. “Here I am defending him again instead of you, huh?”
“Doesn’t matter,” he said, wiping his face on the back of one arm. “Not your fault that I’m cracking up, Jordy.” He wiped his face again. “I still don’t feel right. I’d better lie down again. Here. Give me the papers. Let’s take care of business so I can catch some sleep.”
“You sure?”
“Absolutely.” Cam blew his nose on the bandana and took a deep breath.
I slid the papers out of the plastic pouch in my backpack and handed them to him, biting my lip as Cam signed his name without bothering to read anything first. “We can always tear these up later if you change your mind,” I said, as Cam handed the papers back to me with his tiny scrawled signature.
“No way. If I die up here, I don’t want anyone raising my kid but you.”
&nb
sp; “Jesus, Cam. Don’t say that, not even as a joke!” I stood up and supported his shoulders as he eased himself to the floor again. “You need a blanket? Anything else?”
My brother shook his head, curling his body so that his bony knees nearly touched his chin. I could see the ridges of Cam’s spine beneath the thin t-shirt. Soon his breath was regular, punctuated only by a slight, wheezing cough.
“Don’t you dare die,” I whispered, folding the papers and putting them in the plastic pouch for safekeeping. “Not when I just found you again.”
I sat beside him until I was certain Cam’s fever was going to stay down. We would talk again this afternoon, I decided. If he was so hell bent on staying in Nepal, I’d have to convince him to accompany me to Pokhara for blood tests. If I got Cam as far as Pokhara, he might even talk to Mom on the phone. Could she persuade Cam to come home with me? Surely we could find a rehab program that would be better than going cold turkey here in the Himalayas.
Slightly cheered by this possibility, I traipsed downstairs with my towel and kit. I’d just finished brushing my teeth with tiny squirts of purified water from my own bottle when Didi approached. She took my arm and gestured, speaking too quickly for me to understand the words. She wanted me to follow her.
We walked past stone houses with flat roofs stacked high with firewood. After a few minutes, the houses thinned out and we were in the fields, following a muddy track along the river. The mountains stretched flat against the bright blue sky, tufts of snow swirling upwards from the peaks like gauzy white scarves.
What did the world look like from that height? I would be invisible from the peak of one of those mountains. Visible or not, I was aware of my insignificance to the future of the mountains, the trees, the rocks, the villagers I saw. That thought was oddly liberating.
I slowed my pace and took big gulps of air. Didi turned around and gave me a shy smile, her teeth flashing white and square against her brown skin in a way that reminded me of Karin.
God, what I wouldn’t give to talk to Karin or David right now. Even my mother! I’d never felt so isolated. Strange, since I’d just spent the past three nights sleeping in the same room as my brother. On the other hand, I knew from my relationship with Peter that the loneliest days are the ones where you keep company with someone you love who can’t hear you.
After a few minutes, Didi stopped and pointed. I caught my breath. We were on a slight rise, overlooking some sort of shrine. Buddhist flags fluttered white from every branch of every tree, the sound of cloth like the wings of a thousand birds taking flight. Stone cairns were stacked along the paths. The waist-high, hand-built rock towers overlooked the water like soldiers of faith.
A few women were washing clothes along the river, which from this distance looked like a lazy snake covered with bright insects. On the opposite side, women worked the terraced rice fields, using water buffalo to draw heavy wooden plows and following them to drop seeds in the furrows.
Didi headed down the river bank and stopped just above the water’s frothy edge, pointing out a pool formed by a semi-circle of stones. The half-circle reached a radius of fifteen feet or so from the river bank.
“Taato,” she said eagerly, still pointing. I recognized the word: hot. This must be one of the hot springs. I raised the towel, and she grinned and nodded before leaving me to bathe.
At David’s suggestion, I had brought along a bar of biodegradable soap. I took it out of my kit, stripped off my clothes and draped them over the branches of the nearest bush. Then I made my way gingerly down the stony river bank and slid into the pool.
The air was hot, but the water was much hotter. It smelled of salt and metal. Beyond the pool’s rocky perimeter, the river crashed and sang, rising in angry tufts above the larger rocks. Those must be boulders brought down by avalanches from the mountains, I decided, since they were so much larger than any of the others.
I settled into the water and rested my head against a rock. When I was seated on the pool’s silt bottom, the water bubbled at chest height. My limbs relaxed, buoyed by the salty water. An enormous crow cried out above me and tumbled through the air on the warm breeze. I followed the bird’s progress for a moment, then plunged my head beneath the hot, swirling water.
The minerals stung my eyes and nostrils, but I stayed beneath the water’s surface, letting myself go limp and floating to the surface on my stomach. The pool was deepest at its center, about three feet. I let the river’s current toss me about, face down, twisting my head now and then to grab another breath before plunging my face back into the warmth. It felt so good not to think, not to do, just to be.
Eventually, I sat up again and watched a flock of crows scribbling the sky above the river. The birds’ cries were harsh, anguished.
I heard footsteps behind me, then Jon’s voice. “Isn’t it amazing that the Nepalese even have a crow god? They call him Kag Basundi.”
“Do you mind?” I sank lower into the water and crossed my arms over my breasts.
“Mind what?” There was a smile in his voice. “Mind that there’s a crow god? Of course not. I think there should be a god for every thing, not a God for all things.”
Jon walked around the pool to the rocks separating it from the river and balanced there above the frothing water. He wore the same singlet and shorts he’d worn out of Kathmandu.
He shed his clothes, tossing them onto the riverbank, and slipped into the water to sit cross-legged in front of me. The fine hairs of his torso glinted silver against his brown skin.
No tan lines, I noted, and Jon was nearly as thin as Cam. Yet, his slender frame looked strong. I tried not to look at his penis, or at him, but that would mean turning my head away and admitting that Jon had once again succeeded in unnerving me. And so I glared, noting the swing of his stiff penis in the water, the long tendons in his muscular legs, the sinewy arms.
Infuriatingly, Jon grinned. “Don’t worry, Jordan. Just because a man has an erection doesn’t mean you’re obligated to do something about it. Though it would certainly be my pleasure to help you enjoy your time in Nepal.” He stretched one leg out in the water and brushed his foot against my calf. “How are you? You look like you’ve lost weight. Haven’t been sick, have you?”
I shook my head. “Cam has, though. Oh, I forgot. You knew that already. You knew Cam was sick when you left him sweltering away upstairs alone in that smoky lodge. You even knew that Cam was using heroin in Berkeley.”
“Hey, I helped your brother make the choice to get clean. And when he got sick here, I offered to bring him down the mountain when I went to Kathmandu. It was his choice to stay. I honored it.”
“You almost honored him dying up here in the mountains,” I said, exasperated.
Jon shrugged. “That would have been Cam’s choice, too.”
I lashed out at him with one foot, but Jon was too quick for me, grabbing my ankle before I connected with his ribs. “You idiot!” I said furiously. “You don’t just let people die!”
“Even when that’s what they want, more than anything else in the world?” Jon cocked his head at me. “Let’s just agree to disagree. Anyway, the truth is that I’ve seen people in much, much worse shape than your brother. Cam wasn’t in any real danger. And he didn’t just have me here to look after him. He had Domingo and Melody.”
“Domingo and Melody? Sure. They’re about as helpful as my fourth grade students.”
Jon leaned his head back against the boulders separating the pool from the river, his Adam’s apple bobbing in his thin neck. “You’re right. A shame those two have gotten so lost inside themselves. I didn’t expect that. But you never know what will happen to people over time. Will they regress? Progress? Flip out completely?”
“How can you be so dispassionate?” My fury was abating, possibly because the hot bubbling water was making me feel limp. “You talk like people are rats in a very tricky maze. An experiment that you’ve designed just to see what they’ll do to get themselves out of a corner.
”
He laughed. “Believe me, if I thought I could do that, I would.”
This was a pointless conversation, I realized suddenly. What made me think I could possibly understand how Jon strung his thoughts together? And why should I care?
I stopped talking—a relief, now that my brain, too, seemed to be soaking in hot water—and tipped my head back against the rock again, my arms still crossed to protect my breasts from view. Thick clouds were beginning to gather around the mountain peaks.
After a few minutes, though, I couldn’t help it: I had to ask him more questions. Really, why did someone like Jon make the choices he did?
“I just want to know why you convinced Domingo, Cam, and Melody to follow you here to the end of the earth, if you were only going to abandon them? I mean, why not just leave them in Berkeley with Val? Would’ve been a whole lot cheaper. I’m assuming you paid their way.”
“Not all of them. Melody has a trust fund.” Jon slid into the deeper water and floated on his back. “I didn’t convince them to come,” he said. “That’s not the point of anything I do. I presented the opportunity to do volunteer work and they followed their own intentions, with my support. Cam came here to get clean before he faced the fact that he’s a father. Melody and Domingo chose to follow us after hearing me talk about the inner peace and beauty here. There’s no hiding from nature in Nepal.”
That much we could agree on. In the past few days, I’d gotten used to going outdoors at all hours to wash or relieve myself beneath an expanse of sky. Last night, the sky had been clear enough for me to see a glittering net of stars thrown over the world as I stepped gingerly around the stone wall to pee. This morning, the sunrise was an orange ribbon laid flat along the horizon. I went out to fetch water and was stopped by the sight of mist rising over the valley.
As the damp air had cleared, a sudden ray of sunlight angled out of the clouds and lit up the small figure of a woman making her way down the steep hillside below the lodge. The woman’s hair was done up in braids trimmed in red wool, and she was herding a small flock of goats into the valley, singing to them as the animals darted around the rocks. An emotion had come over me that had left me nearly in tears. It was only later, back in that hot, humid room next to Cam, that I could name it: wonder.
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