The Marriage Tree

by Christopher G. Moore

  “Someone who knew his deepest secrets,” said the Colonel.

  “Who does a Thai man tell his secrets to, Pratt?” asked Calvino.

  “His woman.”

  “In Jaruk’s case make that plural.”

  “When you go plural in the secrets business, you’re shortly out of that business,” said Colonel Pratt.

  FORTY-EIGHT

  DR. MARLEY SOLBERG sat on the floor in the lotus position, her eyes closed, her hands upturned, thumbs touching index fingers. She had calmly held the position on a bamboo mat for fifteen minutes. When Nagata had gone to answer the door, her mind had relaxed, been transported to another place and time—inside a place she didn’t recognize, a time outside memory. Beautiful mathematical equations with limitless possibilities appeared against a sky saturated with a granularity of blues she’d never seen. She felt her breath disappear into the sea with each heartbeat. The sound of ocean waves, chimes and a flute flowed from speakers. Nagata returned to find that Marley still hadn’t moved. Calvino crept into the room and stood, waiting.

  Marley appeared unaware of his presence. Nagata lit three incense sticks, placing them one by one in a narrow-necked bronze vase. He waied the vase and lowered himself onto a bamboo mat gently so as not to disturb Marley’s meditation. Gray smoke gathered in braids above the low-slung table. A large assortment of statuettes made of porcelain, bronze and gold was organized in a large half-circle—a gathering of the gods of many different religions. Calvino recognized the two faces of Janus, Buddha in the lotus position, right hand raised palm out, Shiva dancing inside a circle, Sisyphus slumped forward with a large round boulder on his shoulders, Zeus, the Greek god of law, order and fate, and Ganesh with a crown of gold, trunk decorated with ancient writing. A dozen other gods he couldn’t assign a name to.

  In a soft voice Nagata spoke: “To believe or not to believe is a false choice. Our beliefs and actions ripple through the lives of others. Most of the time we filter out what we see and hear. We don’t pay attention. Our ancestors looked to myths, faith and beliefs to explain the nature of the ripples they noticed. Our grandparents found meaning and understanding with these tools. Do you know what is the best part of mathematics?”

  Calvino watched Marley as she answered the question.

  “It organizes your attention. Like the right music, it deepens your understanding of what you attend to.”

  Nagata smiled.

  “A perfect answer. It doesn’t filter. Mathematics predicts the movement and outcome of all natural forces. We are a part of nature. All of our thoughts and actions are forces organized mathematically inside nature. Sometimes we forget that we are part of nature. We are prone to seeking equations as if we were gods existing outside the world, looking to bring order out of chaos. But we fall short. We always will as our nature shows how capable and quick we are to act with brutality and cruelty, out of love and compassion, out of deception and lies, and out of a love of truth and justice. The seeds of all choices are within each of us. None of us can ever resolve our conflicting nature. If we did so, we’d no longer be human.”

  Marley’s eyes opened and she shifted on the mat.

  “Just now I saw Ploy. She is happy, content. She has no pain, bitterness or regret. She is with the baby she carried. Mother and daughter bound together. Each with the radiant smile of someone at peace.”

  Nagata smiled, his white robes hanging loose. Seen from one angle, he might have been a hundred years old; from another angle he looked like a young man. Nagata glanced at Marley.

  “She has been waiting for you, Vincent.”

  Calvino removed his jacket, folded it and laid it on the wooden floor. He loosened his tie. Leaving behind his holster and handgun, he had changed into a white long-sleeve shirt and pressed gray trousers—his official face-making outfit—worn out of respect for Yoshi Nagata. He rolled up his sleeves.

  “I’ve been waiting for her,” he said. “For her to return my call.”

  “I’ve been meditating,” she said.

  “Jaruk is dead,” said Calvino.

  Marley tilted her head.

  “You located him?”

  Calvino nodded.

  “What was left of him.”

  Calvino eased himself down on the floor opposite Marley.

  “Pratt saw the body too.”

  The new age music swallowed up the silence as they looked at each other.

  “You’ve been difficult to contact,” said Calvino. “I guess you wanted it that way.”

  “I needed to speak with Professor Nagata.”

  “I thought you might be here. Your phone has been off for the last twelve hours.”

  She looked down at the floor. He sounded annoyed, upset. She didn’t want to enter that space. Not yet.

  “I asked her to turn off her phone,” said Nagata.

  “I came here to talk about what we’ve been doing for the Rohingya,” said Marley. “I had no idea something like this could happen. I was feeling lost. And If I don’t know what to do, what do I say to those I’ve asked to help me? I’ve found a way forward, but before I made a decision I wanted Professor Nagata’s opinion,” she said.

  “What kind of decision are you talking about?”

  “I want to expose not just Thanet but his friends and associates. I want their wives to know their husbands are buying and using women like Ploy.”

  “You don’t know the details. It might be true or it might not be,” said Calvino.

  “You’re defending them?”

  “It’s an observation,” said Calvino.

  “Marley wishes to reinvent the world,” said Nagata.

  He was protective of her and at the same time saw that what was passing between Calvino and Marley was more than an intellectual conflict. A deeper meaning contained in their words suggested an emotional high tide was rolling in, breaking onto the shore.

  “Wisdom is accepting the world as it is,” said Nagata, “but the knowledge of my limitations doesn’t stop me from helping to free those in slavery. However, I can’t change the world to one that is slavery-free.”

  “We have the technology to change the world,” said Marley. “I have the data for all of them. It could be a game changer. If you had a chance to stop the Rwanda genocide by exposing a few high-level people’s infidelity, would you say, ‘Don’t do it’? Would you allow the slaughter to go on and on?”

  “I have my doubts that your interventions would make any difference,” said Nagata. “It is one thing to target a person you know to be a human rights violator, and another to target everyone around him. That’s not targeting; that’s saturation bombing. You take out a whole neighborhood or city because of your personal assessment of someone’s friends? Put all Canadian Japanese in a concentration camp because we don’t have to go to the trouble of finding whether any one of them is a traitor? We’ve come a long way with the new technology to collect information, analyze it and track people, but it hasn’t made us gods.”

  “Professor Nagata, please understand. This is a rational, practical and effective extension of our technology,” said Marley. “It’s what we should do.”

  “There is no higher moral value, any more than there is a highest mathematical truth,” he said.

  “What value is higher than truth, Yoshi?”

  “Trust.”

  “But if trust is based on lies and deception, it is meaningless,” Marley replied.

  “Truth works only if it is consensual. It is never absolute. Destroy trust and truth breaks down. You want to expose Thanet’s lies and hypocrisy. You also believe his friends are guilty. What happened to the presumption of innocence?”

  “A relic of the past. Disrupted by technology. Horse and buggy thinking. All of these come to mind,” said Marley. “The old rules are broken. They’re gone.”

  Calvino found his opening.

  “The problem’s not Thanet’s friends. The problem is you, the person who appoints herself to exercise the power to destroy. That�
�s a hard problem. Professor Nagata is right; you want to play god and make your own rules.”

  Nagata picked up the statue of Sisyphus and handed it to her.

  “Sisyphus wished to cheat death for immortality. You wish to expose all cheaters in the name of eternal harmony and happiness. The punishment of Sisyphus fell on the shoulders of one person. Without trust, each day we’d push the boulder up the side of the mountain only to find that the gravity of mistrust sent it crashing back to the ground. Do you wish for a world where you can trust no one with personal information; where all channels to send personal, private information are open source for all? Trust no neighbor, associate or official—assume they will, in time, betray your confidences? Assume all large political systems are collecting, storing and analyzing your private communications and will use information to violate your person and life? Assume that anything you say can and will be used against you at any time?”

  The incense sticks had burnt to thin, ghostly ash, crooked and gray, ready to fall on the heads of the gods around the bronze vase. Calvino rose to his feet.

  “I’m a small picture guy. I’ve never understood the big picture. But I know this much—there’s no statute of limitations that protects you against predators who believe that you have a dangerous idea or plan. Once that happens, and they can lock down your life and decide your future, you’re on your own. Maybe that’s the way it’s always been, and our idea that we have privacy and rights is just a shared illusion. But that way of thinking is above my pay grade. I’ve helped find some justice for many people who were murdered. Little people with a small lives, people who got involved in situations without appreciating they were in something over their heads. They were found dead or had gone missing. Their families or friends asked me to help. That’s the size of the picture that’s good enough for me.”

  FORTY-NINE

  LATER THAT FRIDAY evening, having returned to Calvino’s condo, they lay together in bed, shoulders touching. The lights of Bangkok shone beyond the lake. Colonel Pratt’s CD from the Java Jazz Festival played in the bedroom. Marley asked him for his thoughts.

  “I was thinking of the Crusades,” he said, “and how our ability to control what people do or think isn’t much different from a thousand years ago. ”

  She touched his face with the back of her hand.

  “I’m letting it go, Vinny,” she said.

  In the half-darkness she saw him smile.

  “How’s it feel to let go?” he said.

  “Different than I thought. Not like falling. More like being at peace.”

  “That’s what Pratt said when I asked him about leaving the police department.”

  “What about Ratana? Do you think she’s at peace?” asked Marley.

  “Yeah, she’s in that space too.”

  “As we were leaving tonight, Yoshi gave his blessing, and you looked at peace tonight too. It showed,” she said.

  “I haven’t told you about Jaruk’s body. I’m not certain I should.”

  “Tell me.”

  “He’d been killed with a knife or a sword. The killer had slit him open from chest to groin. What does that tell you?”

  “Fear, anger, hatred,” she said.

  “Atrocities are hard to understand. Mutilating a body isn’t something a professional killer does. Fanatics and crazies cross that boundary. During the time of the Crusades people slaughtered others like animals. That’s why I was thinking about the Crusaders. How strong convictions distort everything they touch. The person who killed Jaruk can never turn back and return home. His bridges are burnt. The soles of his feet are sticky with blood. Wherever he goes, you won’t need a computer to track his footsteps.”

  They fell into silence, listening to Colonel Pratt’s saxophone. Calvino saw his medieval warriors with their shields and swords, mounted on horses in long columns. Their Crusades had been launched in the belief that naked force and faith in a god had the capacity to change the world of men. But to win battles was never sufficient to secure the victory of the Crusade, and that is what doomed the winners as much as the losers. Through strength and endurance a warrior might survive in battle, but nothing would allow them to survive once the hearts and minds of man changed against them.

  Calvino broke the silence as the saxophone played.

  “Like I said at Yoshi’s, I have a simple outlook. I search for missing people. Someone is willing to pay me to find that person. That matters because many people go missing and no one cares. Caring about someone is as rare as an orchid in a Brooklyn flowerpot. I don’t try to save the world or to find everyone who is lost. I take a case from someone who cares enough to find one person.”

  “You nurture people who care,” she said. “Not many people do that.”

  He rolled onto his side and tried to find her eyes in the refracted light from the sky above the city.

  “I don’t put much trust in the world of ideas.”

  “Why are you against ideas?”

  “I’m not against them. I’m afraid they’ll make decisions about who we are, how we should live and how we control our emotions. They are too abstract. When you make a decision based on an abstraction, you are a step away from turning a human being into something abstract, and when you do that, the results look like what I found in Jaruk’s room.”

  One thing Calvino had learned over the years was that every woman wants to know about other women in a man’s life, and Marley was no exception. Calvino had mentioned the Burmese singer to Yoshi Nagata. Marley had been surprised to hear of Mya and wanted to know more about this Burmese woman who had a hold on Calvino.

  “Mya. What was it about her that attracted you?”

  “We thought alike,” said Calvino.

  “You processed patterns in the same way,” said Marley.

  He looked at Marley, smiling.

  “That’s the point. We shared the same language about things and life, and it never occurred to her that she was processing patterns. She thought, she performed, she acted, she desired. She thought of Henry Miller as a kind of role model. I understood her. I’m an ordinary guy like Henry Miller. We came from the same background, same kind of upbringing, which never prepared us for life in the world beyond New York. We were taught to avoid big ideas. Because living for big ideas means you stop thinking, seeing and caring about the people closest to you, understanding their world and finding your place inside their world. I prefer to find those who are lost and bring them back to their world.”

  “You’ve made a career of finding the lost souls,” she said.

  “Finding the lost person is a task that is near and small. Inside that dimension I can handle life.”

  “I was lost and you found me,” said Marley.

  Calvino raised his head from the pillow. She saw him smiling.

  “You’ve always known where you were, who you are, that you would come out on top no matter what. That’s good. I’m happy for you. But inside my world people know they can never come out on top without a fight. It’s that world that sends those in the square world running to hide. What are they hiding from? You live in the other world, the place that launches crusades. I’m a go-between. People in your world hire me to go inside, find someone and bring them out, if they want out. But to convert them to your way of thinking, I never try to do that.”

  “I want a better world,” she said. “People shouldn’t have to drop out and disappear.”

  “I don’t know how to make it better. But most of the time I can find someone who is lost and restore that person to someone who has missed them. I have no idea if that makes it a better world. So it doesn’t matter.

  He saw a vision of Mya. This time she came not as a hallucination but as a vivid memory of that last night in Bangkok before she died.

  “Mya got lost inside Henry Miller’s dream—the one Miller preached that he used to invent his own reality. Mya connected her reality with music, and the audiences loved her because they could feel that she had made herself whole
and real and had overcome doubt and fear. She took from Miller that we are guided by flesh and blood, by our instincts, which flow through us like an electrical current. They light us up like a skyline. What an artist like Mya does is dig deep and learn to channel that flow. Think about it too much and it disappears. Whatever you are, no matter how old you are, how educated or screwed up, you find answers by living among the gangsters, whores, pimps, crazies, discontents and artists. These people have a weird kind of freedom that is lost to others.”

  “I want freedom for the Rohingya who are living in slavery.”

  “Funny thing is, you can’t give someone freedom. They have to learn to take it. This I know. I am one of the last of the free men. And when you are next to me, like tonight, I forget that equations can turn into vampires sucking the freedom out of life. It won’t be new ideas that change the world; it will be the same old ideas but with powerful numbers behind them. The opportunity to live free is diminishing. The belief in its place in our lives will soon end.”

  Marley touched his cheek with the back of her hand.

  “I like that you are free.”

  “Are you?”

  “Free?”

  He nodded as her hand travelled below the sheet, her fingertips riding the slope down his belly and exploring the region below.

  “If you went missing, I’d hire someone to find you. Because I care.”

  She had his number. Once she had that, it was simply a matter of speed dialing, and it wouldn’t take long before he answered. He felt a strange mixture of feelings. He knew that there was no shortage of women who would take care of him for a price, but that price never included the deep caring that cost them something.