“Then I know why you’re here.”
“I’m not hiding it,” I said. “Would you like a drink?”
He looked at the label of the bottle I had brought. Mars Single Malt.
“What in hell is that?”
“It’s Japanese whiskey. A friend sends it to me from Yokohama.”
“I’ll be damned.”
“Is that a yes?”
“Sure in hell it’s a yes.”
I poured and it was pax between two old men.
When he had sipped it, he rolled his eyes.
“Damn, that’s good. Better than Famous Grouse.”
“Is that what you drink here, Famous Grouse?”
“In Niland where’s you can get it.”
“Well, banzai and all that.”
“Funny thing,” he said, “I was at the Battle of Midway, back in ’42.”
“Then double banzai to you, old-timer,” I said, raising my cup.
“Thanks for the drink. You already know my name, I reckon. And yours?”
I told him and he took a second, longer sip.
“I want to know about the ashes,” I said.
“I don’t know much about it. I went down to collect them when word got around that Paul had died in Mexico. I had a feeling the night before he went off. He said he was going to work on a yacht for his boss. They had come out looking for people to man the yacht. They wanted down-and-outers.”
“A strange thing to want.”
“No, not strange. The bosses are like that. They want people who’ll keep quiet and do what they’re told. Who’ll disappear afterward and who’ll do anything they ask. It’s not strange.”
“But he hadn’t gone before.”
“Maybe he had. He never told me. But that time he went and it was good money. He went and never came back.”
“I came here because—well, I wanted to say sorry.”
“What for?”
“For not finding him.”
He looked at me with complete coldness.
“Were you looking for him?”
“In a way I was. I did find his money, though. I figured it was yours.”
I set the suitcase down next to him, but he didn’t look at it.
“I was asleep in my trailer,” he continued, “and I woke up and I saw my long-dead father came to me and told me he was dead, and that they were going to cremate him in the morning. That’s what he told me. So I got dressed and drove down to the police station in El Centro and asked them where the cremation was happening. And sure enough, the old man didn’t lie to me. It wasn’t a dream.”
“Did you take the ashes?”
“They let me take them. I couldn’t prove nothing. But they let me take them.”
“Where are they now?”
He lifted his eyes to the blue haze of the smoke trees in the middle distance. Cholla cactus shimmered gold around them.
“I took him out there,” he said, pointing to the desert. “It seemed the best.”
I emptied the cup and filled it again. We drank for a while without a further word and I let the sun penetrate deep into my chest. So I had been in the wrong place all along. Far out in the plain that rose toward the candy-colored mountains a dust twister rose up and moved against the light like something seen by Ezekiel, and for all I knew it could have been his ashes disturbed by a movement from the spirit world. Then the dust settled and we sat there for a long time, declining to disturb the moment or to add a single word to what had already been left unsaid.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
To step into the mind of another writer is always a perilous presumption, but perhaps not as perilous as stepping into the mind of one of his characters. Nevertheless, I have tried to stay within the bounds of Marlowe’s fictional biography. His date of birth was always vague. As Bill Henkin, the Chandler scholar, once wrote, Marlowe had been born in “that time out of time that allowed him to be thirty-three in 1933, forty-two in 1953, and forty-three and a half in 1958.” In a letter of 1951, Chandler himself put his detective’s age as thirty-eight. This yields a presumptive date of birth anywhere between 1903 (since The Big Sleep was set in 1936) and 1915. I have opted to assume the latest of these possible birth dates, then added a year for the sake of poetic license.
I hardly need mention that many later reincarnations of the Marlowe character—for example, Robert Altman’s 1973 version of Marlowe in The Long Goodbye—were the result of even greater licenses being taken. Elliott Gould in Altman’s masterpiece is a man in his thirties rolling through 1970s Hollywood and Mexico. It was only after I had finished this manuscript, incidentally, that I realized that Altman also ends his interpretation of that novel on the streets of Tepoztlán—a coincidence so heavy-handed that it needs to be either disavowed or simply pointed out.
I have tried to stay faithful to the bewilderingly dreamlike plots of Chandler because it has always seemed to me that they incarnate the qualities of both fairy tale and nightmare to which he aspired. The plot of The Big Sleep was so occult that even William Faulkner, one of the screenwriters, was unable to follow it; and when Howard Hawks finally consulted Chandler to find out who killed the minor character Owen Taylor, the author had to admit that he himself also had no idea. And of course it doesn’t matter.
As has been often pointed out, Marlowe’s original name in early stories was Mallory in honor of Sir Thomas Malory, the fifteenth-century author of Le Morte d’Arthur. Accordingly, Marlowe always possesses the curious and melancholy purpose of a knight-errant. Yet Chandler also once wrote, in a letter to his friend Maurice Guinness, “I see Marlowe always in a lonely street, in lonely rooms, puzzled but never quite defeated.” It is that single sentence, for reasons unknown, which has guided me in my own attempt to create yet another Marlowe after so many illustrious precedents. A character who is an exaggeration, as his creator used to say, of the possible.
LAWRENCE OSBORNE
Bangkok, March 2018
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to thank Ed Victor, Graham C. Greene, and Charlotte Horton for bringing this proposition to my door. Without them, I would never have made so bold as to try to inhabit the shade of Raymond Chandler, a writer I have idolized since I was a child.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Lawrence Osborne was born in England but has traveled and lived all over the world. He is the author of the critically acclaimed novels The Forgiven, The Ballad of a Small Player, Hunters in the Dark, and Beautiful Animals. He is the third writer, after John Banville and Robert B. Parker, to be asked by the Raymond Chandler estate to write a new Philip Marlowe novel. In Only to Sleep, Osborne draws from his time working as a reporter on the Mexican border in the early 1990s. His nonfiction includes Bangkok Days and The Wet and the Dry. His short story “Volcano” was selected for Best American Short Stories 2012, and he has written for The New York Times Magazine, Condé Nast Traveler, The New Yorker, Forbes, Harper’s, and other publications. He currently lives in Bangkok.
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Only to Sleep: A Philip Marlowe Novel Page 21