by Evans, Jon
I tried to line up the dates in my mind. I remembered, because it had irritated me greatly, that the latest Africa - The South edition had come out just after I had left that area. That meant the June deaths mentioned therein had occurred while I was in Africa. In fact they had occurred while I was in Cameroon. In fact they must have occurred within a couple of weeks of Laura's murder, because we had found her body on the night of June 15.
Which, first of all, made the whole serial-killer theory hard to swallow. Mozambique to Malawi to Cameroon? Three murders, in three very distant and undeveloped African countries, within the span of two weeks? Possible but very hard to believe. And, much to my relief, the timing made a more specific theory, that it had been someone on the truck, completely impossible. Nobody on the truck had left Cameroon before the end of June, of that I was certain. Which cleared the three candidates I had had in the back of my mind.
Maybe there was no serial killer. Maybe The Bull was just a rumour after all. Maybe it was all just an awful coincidence and I was overwrought because I had had the terrible bad luck of discovering two dead bodies in two years. I told myself that that was probably the case. I told myself again and again. I was still telling myself that on the flight back to California.
Part 2
California
Chapter 8 Slave To The Grind
The return to the real world is always traumatic. When traveling every day is fraught with intensity, every meal and bus trip and squalid hostel room an adventure, every new place a fresh assault on the mind and senses; whereas in the real world you can go weeks without raising your head from whatever rut you have dug for yourself. I called the transition from one to the other 'decompression'. In this case, moving from two months in high-intensity South Asia back to low-intensity San Francisco. And like decompression from scuba diving, if I didn't do it carefully, I just might get the bends.
Still, it was nice to see my old haunts again, even if they were coupled with the bewildering did-the-last-two-months-really-happen? sense that absolutely nothing had changed since I had gone, that my two months of Asian travel equated to a single California day. It was good to eat breakfast at the Pork Store, to have coffee and play chess at the Horseshoe Cafe, to wander aimlessly up and down the west-coast beach, to lie back in my own bed and listen to my favourite music, to cycle across the Golden Gate Bridge into the hills of Marin. And San Francisco is a beautiful city, a wonderful place to return to, even if it had been overrun of late by too much money and too many people and dot-com dreams of avarice.
Thankfully that particular house of cards was in mid-collapse when I returned. "This town needs a recession," I had snorted more than once in the previous year, and it looked like I was getting my wish. Many of the hundreds of dot-com companies in the area had been founded on little more than a wing and a prayer and an astonishingly stupid idea, and every day more of them shut their doors or laid off half their staff. While in Asia I had received a half-dozen emails from friends or acquaintances informing me, often with curious jubilation, that they were newly unemployed. And while apartment prices weren't yet descending from the stratosphere, they were in a holding pattern for the first time in years.
I wasn't worried about my job, even though I was a programmer for an Internet consulting company. I knew times were going to get leaner as the dot-coms that had flung ridiculous sums of money at us for the last year were winnowed out, but we had a pretty good portfolio of real customers as well, and I was very good at what I did. Even if all fell apart I had a pretty good nest egg saved up thanks to my decision to accept a cash bonus in lieu of stock options during the previous year, a decision that was much-mocked by my friends at the time but seemed prescient now that the company's stock had dropped 80% in six months. The lease on my pleasant Cole Valley apartment expired in three months and the landlord had already let me know that I could renew it if I wanted to. Life was comfortable.
Comfortable. Not the same thing as good. I can't say that life was good, or that I was happy. I had friends in the city, but no close friends. My work was diverting and paid ridiculously well, but I didn't really enjoy it. More and more I got the feeling that life was somehow drifting away from me just as I should be ready, in my late twenties and established at last, to reach out and grab it.
The truth was that I traveled so much, that I insisted my employers give me four months unpaid leave a year, because even though on paper I was one of the most fortunate people on this earth, healthy and wealthy and privileged, I was unhappy in the real world, and I did not know how to make myself happy. The truth was that the last time I was happy, really happy, was in Africa.
* * *
Two and a half years before I went to Asia I joined an overland truck trip with the audacious goal of driving all the way from Morocco to Kenya in five months. We went a long way, we went across the Sahara and along the Gold Coast to Cameroon, but we did not drive all the way across Africa. This was in part because a large war broke out in the Congo, and in part because one of our number was murdered on a black sand beach in Cameroon. Laura Mason. My girl.
Until then it was a weird and wonderful experience. There were twenty of us on the truck, all of us complete strangers traveling independently. It was no catered, guided tour. The company had hired a driver, a mechanic, and a courier to go with us, but within a few weeks they too were just part of the group. Everybody cooked, everybody cleaned, everybody went to the local markets for supplies, everybody worked, everybody got filthy digging the battered old truck out when it got stuck in soft sand and mud, which happened more than I care to remember. We met in Morocco, which is a tourist trap in a good way, and after a few giddy drunken get-to-know-you weeks there, we went south, where nobody goes. And we drove across the Sahara Desert.
Twenty perfect strangers, thrown together in a gruelling and hyperintense situation. We had a major breakdown in the middle of a minefield in the no-man's-land between Morocco and Mauritania. We huddled together on the floor of the truck as we drove through forests of trees bristling with razor-sharp eight-inch thorns in southern Mauritania, clawing at us through the open sides of the truck like that scene from the Wizard Of Oz. We watched all of our tents and possessions pounded flat by a freak near-hurricane in Mali and spent two days recovering what we could. We suffered the attentions of Bamako's street hustlers. We trekked through Dogon Country just as it was hit by a heat wave, carrying our packs twenty kilometers a day in 130-degree heat. We endured through the eight hours and seven different inspections of the Nigerian border crossing, dealt politely but firmly with the drunken men with guns who demanded outrageous bribes. We took three days to travel the forty kilometers of the Ekok-Mamfe road, a swamp of mud with potholes as large as our truck.
Everyone got sick. Everyone got fed up, everyone got angry, everyone snapped. And we spent every waking hour together whether we liked it or not. And I know it doesn't sound it, but looking back, it was fantastic. We were either going to fragment into screaming hostility or gel into one tight group, and, miraculously, we gelled. We had our squabbles, had our screaming matches; had our irritable black sheep; but somehow we became a kind of family.
And then one of our sisters was killed.
* * *
I returned to California on a Thursday and returned to work on the following Monday. Long experience had taught me to give myself a few days to deal with the jet lag, and the decompression. The bends, like I said. I'd gotten them in a big way when I had come back from Africa to Toronto and gone to work the next day. After two hours in the office I had quit my job on the spot.
I swiped my security card at the door and walked into work, past vaguely familiar faces, and sat down at my desk in the hipper-than-thou, open-floor-plan office. It was a good desk, near to the fridge and foozball table. I felt like I had never left, like my entire trip had been a Sunday night's dream.
I sat down before my laptop and cleared the screensaver. The to-do-before-travel list I had left open two months previous
ly was still on the screen. I had 743 new e-mail messages in my work inbox. I dumped the first six hundred and fifty into a read-later folder and worked my way through the most recent. The project I had been working on, which had been "almost complete" when I had left, was still in beta testing. They wanted me to add a small collection of new features which wouldn't take long. There was another project "almost out of the sales pipeline" and once the specs were written I would be its lead developer. And there was a patronizing buzzword-laden email from the CEO, dated last week, informing us that he keenly regretted laying off twenty people but had great faith in the company's vision and execution. Also, the company was embarking on a cost-cutting plan and cans of Mountain Dew would now cost fifty cents instead of nothing. Snapple, seventy-five cents.
"Paul!" Rob McNeil said, clapping me on the shoulder, and I brightened up almost immediately. He had that effect on people. "You're back! How was your trip, man?"
"Yeah," I said. "Pretty good. How's things here?"
"Interesting question, cogently put. Read the Principal's email?"
"Yeah. Can you loan me seventy-five cents for a Snapple?"
"First sign of the apocalypse, boyo. Twenty down, four hundred to go. This is official Resume Burnishing Week for everyone in the office. Mark my words, forty percent of today's web traffic will be to Monster.com." He sat down and shook his head ruefully. "You know, I don't really mind that management has made more incredibly stupid decisions than fleas on a St. Bernard. It goes with the tie, you know? Lack of oxygen to the brain. What I mind is that they think we're even stupider. He writes like he's writing to fucking children."
"But they think we are children," I said. "Idiot savants anyways. Me know language of magic machines, you draw pretty pictures. Daddy, can I have a Snapple? Mommy, you promised me my stock options would vest today!"
He grinned. "That's right. And I don't know about you, but I'm thinking about taking my toys and going home."
* * *
The first thing I did, after working through my e-mail and meeting with my manager Kevin, was go back to the Lonely Planet site and see what the word on the Thorn Tree was. I had avoided checking it since my return to California. I wasn't quite sure why. I supposed it was at least in part because I had been trying to get the whole subject out of my mind and avoid obsessing about it on an hourly basis. But now that I was back at work it somehow seemed safe, as if the banality of my job could neutralize any dangerous thoughts or emotions.
Rakesh219 10/29 19:03
I am Nepali and I say you are a liar. Our police are good people and would not do these things. I always liked people from Canada but now I think that you are liars. I think maybe you murdred this person yourself. Go home to Canada if you think Nepalis are so bad. People like you are always coming here who think they can tell us what to do because we are poor. I think you white people make us poor so can come here and do bad things to people and our temples. Everybody knows that you are weak and all your women are whores and all you men sex each other. I hope more of you come here and get killed.
JenBelvar 10/30 11:15
Folks, please don't think the guy above (Rakesh219) is representative. Nepalis are the nicest, friendliest people in all of Asia, if not the world. I guess there's one in every crowd, especially on the Net.
The Kathmandu Post had an article on Mr. Goebel today. They said he was a suicide. I don't know what happened but it sounds awful and my heart goes out to his family and to the people who found him.
Anonymous 10/31 01:42
I met Stanley Goebel in Pokhara just a couple weeks ago, before he went trekking. We had a beer together and he was a great guy. I can't believe some sick fuck killed him. But I sure can buy the coverup. Yeah, the Nepalis are great, but everyone knows their government is massively corrupt.
Anonymous 10/31 08:51
The Bull was just a rumour, people ask about it all the time in the Africa trail, and there weren't any more murders after the ones in the book. And before everyone gets paranoid let me just remind you all that the number 1 killer of backpackers, by a really huge margin, is traffic. Worry about crazy drivers not crazy serial killers. Especially in South Africa - those taxi drivers are nuts!
GavinChait 11/01 11:03
I'm the South African that Paul Wood mentions, who found the body with him, and I'd like to verify for the record that everything he wrote is true. I'm in Pokhara for the next two days and staying at the Gurkha Hotel if anyone there knows anything or wants to know more.
Inga 11/02 05:07
I met the girl who was killed in Malawi a couple of years ago just before she died. People there were totally freaked about The Bull, and a lot of people said they'd heard about other people killed who weren't officially murdered. It sounds just like the story here and it's scary. Sure, there weren't any more deaths after the Lonely Planet book came out, but what if that's just because the guy (OK, or girl, equal opportunity mayhem here) read the book and decided to cool it down and move somewhere else? I think maybe there's some sickhead out there who goes traveling to kill people.
Anonymous 11/02 18:06
Hey, everybody needs a hobby.
* * *
That night I met most of my San Francisco friends for an unofficial reunion dinner. Rob and Mike and Kelley and Ian and Tina, people I worked with, and Ron and Toby, who like me hailed from Toronto and like me had been brain-drained down here by the almighty American dollar. We ate at Tu Lan, a hole in the wall in the worst area of the city that serves the best Vietnamese food on the planet.
Everyone talked about layoffs, recession, the collapse of the stock market, and the hubris of last year's paper multimillionaires, mostly with a relieved sense of schadenfreude. We had spent the last two years in an environment where the subtext was that you were a total failure as a human being if you weren't a millionaire by age 30, and I think everyone was grateful to have that kind of pressure off their shoulders.
They didn't ask about my travels other than vague "how was the trip?" questions. I answered equally vaguely. I had learned over the years that almost nobody wants to know. Nobody wants to know the war stories, nobody wants to hear about the irritations and frustrations of travel, or about the madnesses and cultural events you've witnessed, and they really don't want to know about the wonderful experiences that you had and they did not. Experienced travelers want to know, and close friends want to hear you tell it, but these were neither. Of course they would have listened to the story of Murdered Man's Body Found On Trail, but I couldn't bring myself to do that, couldn't reduce him to an anecdote. Not yet anyways.
We ate, we drank, we smoked, we talked, we laughed, we exchanged catty comments about mutual acquaintances and friends at work, we speculated about whether our waiter was gay, we had a good time. I had a good time. I really did. I enjoyed it. But I kept looking around and wondering why these people were my friends. Was it just by default? Just because we happened to have met some day at school or work, and found each other's company acceptable, and met each other again often enough that we grew comfortable in each other's presence, and now we called that friendship? They were good people, all of them, and I enjoyed their company. But was it any real mystery why none of them were close friends? Were any of them really my tribe?
Did I even have a tribe? I pondered that as I sat on the N-Judah subway/streetcar back home. My family, never close, had fragmented around the continent. I could not remember the last time my sisters and my brother and my parents and I had all been in the same room. I had had close friends in high school, and they still lived back in Canada, and when I visited there we all acted like we were still a band of brothers. But of course we knew we weren't. Time and distance had worked their inevitable decay, and I had grown apart from them, and they from me. We called each other friends only to honour the memory of the friendship we once had.
There was my Africa tribe, the tribe of the truck. But they were almost all Brits and Aussies and Kiwis, mostly living in London, and a
tribe six thousand miles away is in many ways worse than no tribe at all. And I'd seen them only once after Cameroon. I'd felt then that our bond was unchanged, even stronger, that Laura's tragedy had in some way sealed us together. But was that really true? Was I just romanticizing? And if they were my tribe, why wasn't I in London right this very minute?
Maybe I belonged to the tribe of people that have no tribe. Maybe I would stay in that tribe forever. And maybe almost everybody I knew belonged to that tribe too, and we all spent half our social energy hiding it from one another.
I fell asleep desperately wishing for Laura.
* * *
I started falling for Laura, or more accurately started admitting to myself that I had fallen for her the moment I saw her, the day both of us nearly died for chocolate-chip cookies. A day that didn't take place in any country on this earth. It said so right in my passport. The French- and Arabic-language stamps reported that I left Morocco on April 14 and entered Mauritania on April 16. It was the day between, the fifteenth of April 1998, that we afterwards called Cookies To Die For Day.