Reaction

by Seth M. Baker

  Amadeus turned on the exterior lights, put away his tools, and started the engines. They sounded good. The Pachyderm was in the air before Lilly woke up. When she did awake, they were several hundred meters off the ground. She looked out the window, screamed, then relaxed.

  “Jesus, I had forgotten where I was,” Lilly said. From her bag, she pulled out a black knitted cap. “It’s cold in here,” she said.

  “It’s cold outside. I guess fall is blowing in,” Amadeus said. He allowed the Pachyderm to hover as he checked the map for their next destination. He realized he didn’t know the next destination.

  “Did you learn anything?” Amadeus said.

  “Sorry, I fell asleep before I even read them. What is it, like five in the morning back in the States?”

  “Who knows? Would you like a city tour?”

  She smiled and Amadeus set off towards Prague. Flying without lights, he circled around Prague Castle, its lonely spires illuminated by yellow sodium lights. By this time, most visitors had left. Lilly pressed her face against the window to gaze at the complex below. Amadeus took the Pachyderm down until they were level with the top of the cathedral.

  “I wonder if any maidens were ever locked in the tower,” Amadeus said.

  “I know how they feel,” Lilly said. Below them, the red tile roofs had become shaded black by the night; only the streets were lit up like a circuit board.

  “What would he do if you didn’t go back? At least not when you were supposed to?” Amadeus asked.

  “The first thing he’d do is shut down the Pachyderm. You know he has a remote control device. After that, who knows? But we’d be stuck here.”

  “I didn’t realize he could do that.”

  “You think he’d just let some kid he kind of knows run off with his multi-million ego trip without a kill switch? You’re funny.”

  “Hmm,” Amadeus said. At that moment, something occurred to him: His father trusted Jones enough to send Amadeus to him, but what if his father didn’t know Jones as well as he had thought?

  *

  The morning was cool, and they went for one last stroll in town before heading to the airport. They arrived early at the airport and found a little table to have coffee.

  “If Grassal or I learn anything else, or you need to talk to us about what’s going on with my father, we’ll need to bypass any monitoring. Don’t use your main email account.” She handed him a slip of paper with a login and password. “Grassal, that clever boy, set up a chat channel on an anonymous server. You can use the Pachyderm flight computer to access it, but go through a proxy server. If there’s a big emergency, I’ll send you something in your main email and put the word ‘friend’ in the subject line. You hear that word, read deeper. Look for a subtext. Assume everything.”

  “Got it.” Thanks for bringing the parts.” Amadeus grasped her hands in his. She didn’t pull away. “It was good to see you.” She gave him an ironic smirk.

  “If you see that big black-eyed bastard, punch him for me. Can you do that?” Two hours and three cups of coffee later, Lilly was bound for America and Amadeus was in a cab headed southeast.

  36

  Back in his guesthouse, Amadeus stretched out on the bed and examined the document Jan had translated for him.

  The Brunmeier investments are a total loss. Eight months ago, he offered to buy me out for five million dollars. A pittance. At the time I chose to stay in. Maybe I shouldn’t have. Too late now, the offer was withdrawn. And after seeing what he created, with no hope of a return in sight, I have no choice but to stay in. To put my faith in a crazy man. Why do I do this? Because he is less crazy than Ross. The things Ross says...

  This is more than a business decision. This is a defense of humanity. Perhaps I can take a deduction for humanitarian work. Jokes aside, I must stay in this dire business to act as a counterweight to Ross. He is a very powerful man, but I have resources as well. Maybe Esther is more clever than I. She has, to use an English expression, risen above the fray. She refused to become involved. She said the less she knew, the better off she would be. I do not know if this worked. Sometimes I think ignorance is better! But no, I am always the curious cat.

  Ross desires to be the only investor in Brunmeier’s research. Fortunately Brunmeier made a clever contract and said no single person could have a majority stake; he created a balance of power. One consolation in an ocean of grief. Yet I feel the balance shifting.

  If only Laroux would come out of that malarial jungle one more time we could work something out with Brunmeier to push Ross out entirely. This would be the sweetest relief. The last meeting was a disaster. But all Laroux wants to do is build schools and remove land mines in Siem Reap, waiting for Brunmeier to finish his work. He believes in Brunmeier and his research, that Brunmeier will create a serious teleportation system. The idea is so intoxicating. Moving goods over vast distances without roads or trucks, only Brunmeier’s portal machines. But the finish time is so far away. And I think Brunmeier is distracted with this business about talking to dead people before they are dead. Talking to the past. I have always had my doubts, and I tried to tell them to focus on the important things, the transportation, it is practical. He must forget this spooky business and focus on the task at hand. But Laroux, when he does make his opinion known, says talking to the past is a wonderful idea. Does he not understand the grandfather paradox? What do I think? I think this is just a Frenchman’s guilt over his ancestors’ colonial adventures.

  Amadeus put the paper down and called Grassal.

  “What have you found on Laroux?” Amadeus said.

  “A couple old news articles in French. I translated them as best I could. Laroux used to be CEO of a French telecom. One day he just decided to resign and start working on development projects. Also, and I had to dig for this, I learned he gave a small fortune to a few charities. Some people accused him of embezzling the money from his old company but they found him innocent.”

  “Good. I mean, good that he wasn’t guilty. Is he in Cambodia now?”

  “As far as I know,” Grassal said. Amadeus explained what he had learned, making no mention of Lilly. “This is starting to come together. Did Ross killed Vesely?”

  “It makes sense. At least, Ross set it up, paid someone to do it for him. Whatever. Assuming our information is solid, we can assume it wasn’t Esther, and that this Laroux character, besides being in Cambodia, seems like a do-gooder.”

  “Unless that’s a cover,” Grassal said.

  “I can’t say why, but I doubt it. According to what Vesely wrote, Ross wanted complete control over the research. Vesely and my father kept that from happening. And since Ross couldn’t buy everyone out, he looked for a different way.” Overhead, the ceiling fan shuddered, making a repetitive clicking that made Amadeus think of Morse code, as if the fan were sending him a message.

  “Which means…” Grassal said, and understanding began to flood Amadeus’ brain.

  “Which means Ross killed my father,” Amadeus said. He smacked the bed. “How did I miss that?! Fuck!” His heart began to race and his fingernails dug into the synthetic leather of the chair. An animal moan escaped his lips.

  “Amadeus, buddy, calm down. Breathe.” Amadeus listened to his friend and took one deep breath, followed by another. He kept this up for half a minute. A sensation of control flowed over him, mingling with his rage, like the snakes of a caduceus wrapped around a staff.

  “Okay, thanks for that. I’m good now,” Amadeus said.

  “You sure?”

  “No.”

  “Thought so. There’s one more thing. Gravity sent me a cryptic voicemail yesterday. He said that he was trying to pull back the curtains and reveal the actors but he lacked the proper weights. Strange dude.”

  “Right. For now, just tell Jones that I’m going to Cambodia. I’m going to find Laroux. He’s the last one we need. Maybe we can learn some more about Ross. It’s falling together.”

  “Like an equation. But…
”

  “But the big picture is still out of focus, like a camera lens that’s a little off.”

  “And when you find Laroux?”

  “I’ll adjust the camera, maybe even define the missing variables.”

  “You’re starting to sound like Gravity. Good luck, brother.” Grassal shut the connection down, leaving Amadeus to imagine the ways he would murder Edward Maximilian Ross. After allowing several fantasies to play out, he changed his focus to the task at hand: Cambodia. He imagined a river running through a jungle, but that was all. On the flight computer he studied the two legacies of Cambodia: 1,000 year-old temples and a million unanswered questions.

  Amadeus developed a flight plan.

  37

  To recharge, he stopped first in Turkey, slept a little there. The next evening, before making the last leg of his flight, he found a landing and recharging site on a mountaintop near the Soon Valley in Pakistan. Red and white flowers covered the valley, swaying in the wind like the surface of the sea. He thought the flowers seemed familiar, but he wasn’t sure why. He crushed one in his hand. Sticky goo oozed out. Scrubby forests surrounded the field. According to the map, the nearest village lay eight kilometers away. He threw the tarp over the Pachyderm just in case, now that so much of the paint was missing. Covered, the Pachyderm just looked like a translucent shimmer of red, white, and green. Amadeus crawled inside and slept until sunrise.

  Outside, fog lay over the field. He shook dew from the tarp when something caught his attention. A group of eight black silhouettes stood on the edge of the field, watching, motionless. They had no shape, no outline. Amadeus squinted. The silhouettes were women in burkas. He waved; he couldn’t help himself. They didn’t wave back, didn’t react, didn’t move, only stared, black statues standing sentinel. Amadeus kept the women in his peripheral vision as he finished his exterior inspection. Back in the Pachyderm, he started the turbofans. Just as he did, a little boy popped out from behind one of the women and began to jump up and down, waving both his arms as if trying to shoo a swarm of insects. As Amadeus took off, the boy bounded towards where the Pachyderm had been. Even from the air, Amadeus could see the smile on his face.

  That day, he passed over India, Bangladesh, Myanmar, and Thailand. When he crossed over into Myanmar, raindrops streaked across the windshield. The wind battered the Pachyderm, rocking it back and forth, arrhythmic like a sputtering engine. As much as he could do so safely, he read up on his destination: Cambodia. At Siem Reap, millennia-old temples stood as evidence of the once-great Khmer empire, an empire eventually beaten back like an unruly bear by the Thais. As Vesely had noted, the French had colonized the country, and according to what he read, the legacy of the French lingered like a carving on an ancient tree. If the French legacy was like a carving on a tree, then the Khmer Rouge was the lightning that struck the tree and destroyed over half of it: forced relocation, reeducation, slave labor, famine, killing fields, the genocide. His stomach turned. Ideology taken to the extreme. He knew about the holocaust and, given recent events, he could personally attest to the barbarity of man, but this surprised him; he had never learned about it in school. As if some genocides were more important than others. The worst part: Pol Pot died under house arrest, in his own bed, and not at the hands of those whose lives he destroyed.

  Justice, he thought, should never be left to chance or committees.

  For a landing site, he found an uninhabited area called O Ta Yu less than twenty-five kilometers out of town. As he had done in Prague, he would land, cover the Pachyderm, and walk to the nearest road in the hopes of catching a ride. He scrounged through the supply box for an umbrella. Grassal had said he had packed one, but Amadeus couldn’t find it. He did find a waterproof bag, which he filled with extra clothes and money. He put his phone into yet a second waterproof case, just in case.

  While he was tempted to drop below the clouds and get an aerial view of the temples, he knew the rain wouldn’t stop the sightseers. People would see the Pachyderm. The last thing he needed was some pictures of the Pachyderm hovering over Angkor Wat ending up on the internet. So he stayed high until he reached O Ta Yu. There he dropped below clouds, confirmed that the area looked uninhabited, and made a vertical landing, going down fairly fast, as he was sure the air here was clear enough to see for at least ten kilometers, despite the rain. Looking at the ground below, he found a little clearing beside a stream, partially covered by vegetation. The Pachyderm sat down easy enough, but the ground below was uneven. Amadeus found himself leaning, though not enough to tip over. As before, he threw the tarp over the Pachyderm and set out towards the road.

  The jungle was thick with green humidity. The rain felt like small weights slapping against his body. Amadeus had never seen or felt anything like it. The heat, rain, the writhing vegetation enveloped his body like a damp sleeping bag. Within five minutes, he was dripping wet, thankful he had brought a waterproof bag.

  Every few meters he made a mark in a tree with his field knife. In Czech, he had been thankful for the markings he had left, even if he hadn’t really needed them. Maybe they were training for this. Of course, he had had no idea he would end up hacking his way through a steamy Cambodian jungle in a ruthless rain. But who could know the future, who could foresee such things as betrayal, murder, and traveling around the world? Certainly, Amadeus thought, not me. No, I’m just the poor schmuck who has to run around and fix problems and atone for other peoples’ sins. What if the right thing, though, wasn’t really the right thing? What if all this was a mistake? Amadeus pushed these thoughts out of his head. What happened, happened. Thinking about it would not change it. He had no way to go but forward, out of this jungle, out of this predicament, and onto what he hoped could be a normal life, a life without warrants, assassins, and demons.

  When he reached the road, it appeared to float in a sea of jungle, a straight, flat surgical cut through the green, like someone had unrolled a great spool of tape, crushing everything underneath it. No signs, driveways, or cars disturbed the silent stretch. He stood sodden beside the road, waiting for someone, hoping chance would send him a ride. Chance did not abide. He started south, towards town, following the route he had studied before landing, watching raindrops assault the road, for a split second upon impact mingling with the standing water, then exploding upward like an unfortunate trekker stepping on a mine.

  After half an hour of walking, a strange contraption rolled towards him: an old motorcycle pulling a little red-and-blue trailer behind it. The trailer was painted with loud colors. The drenched driver wore no helmet, no glasses, just a purple shirt and hair slicked back from rain and wind. Under the canopy, two bench seats facing each other. In one sat a young man with a backpack. Amadeus thought he looked Indian, but he couldn’t be sure.

  “You look like you need a ride, my friend,” the young man said, definitely Indian. “You are going to town?” Amadeus nodded. “Ponleak, do you mind if we add another passenger?” Ponleak was the driver.

  “Is okay, but you pay little extra. Fuel very expensive,” he said.

  The young man nodded, then to Amadeus, he said “my tuktuk driver is an obstinate dude, always telling me how expensive fuel is, that if I want to go anywhere extra, I pay extra. So it goes. Do you mind to pitch in on our fare?” Amadeus said that was fine as he climbed in, glad to be out of the rain, even if shelter had become meaningless by this point. Amadeus thanked the young man for the ride and introduced himself as Wesley Oliver.

  “Hello Wesley Oliver. I’m Salaman, but just call me Sal, like Sal Paradise,” he said.

  “Who’s Sal Paradise?” Amadeus asked.

  “Who’s Sal Paradise?” Salaman asked, looking offended. Amadeus started to apologize but Sal cut him off. “You’re joking, right? You travel to Cambodia and you ask me who Sal Paradise is? You’ve heard of On the Road, right?”

  “I’ve heard of it,” Amadeus said, sounding unsure.

  “Look, Wesley, we must fix this egregious gap in your app
reciation of the spiritual journey. At my guesthouse, I actually have a copy I keep with me, I like to re-read sections now and again, but for you, the strange, soaked, and please take no offense, sadly ill-read, American, I assume you are American, that I find walking down a lonely stretch of highway, I think that is the perfect opportunity to give my copy away as a Gideon would give away a bible, for I do consider On the Road my bible. Do you take offense? I do hope not, for I want you to experience the joys of such a wonderful book…and by one of your countrymen, you are ignorant of! Oh no, this is an oversight that must be rectified.”

  Amadeus nodded. He had seen On the Road in his father’s collection of books, and his father had even once recommended it to him, but Amadeus had never read it.

  “And if I may ask, what were you doing in the jungle, anyway?” Sal asked. Amadeus shifted in his seat.

  “Hiking,” Amadeus said. “I set out from Siem Reap this morning, but lost my map along the way.”

  “Hiking? Alone? In this jungle? You are a crazy man. You are lucky you did not find yourself blown to small pieces. There are still landmines. I hope you stayed on the paths.

  “I was careful,” Amadeus said.

  “A crazy man is never careful, only lucky. And you are a crazy lucky man.”

  “I don’t feel lucky,” Amadeus said, telling the truth. “I feel…hungry.”

  “Then we shall eat dinner together. I know a wonderful place. You can go to your guesthouse for dry clothes then we can meet for dinner. Where are you staying.”

  “Um…downtown.In the backpacker ghetto.”

  “Which one?”

  “I forget,” Amadeus said. “It was on my map.”

  “Are you near the night market?”

  “That’s right.

  Sal yelled at Ponleak. He turned around, a cigarette hanging out of his mouth. The tuktuk veered a little to the right. “Drop this gentleman off at the night market.” Ponleak nodded as he turned around, righting the direction of the tuktuk, narrowly missing a Lexus SUV barreling down the rutted road.