Contraband

by George Foy

  Ela watched all this like a thriller movie, acutely aware she had never seen colors like these in Indiana.

  After the Aegean, all softness faded slowly from the earth. They flew over the massed gray cruelties of the Anatolian plateau, then southeast across Syria into the Arabian desert. Circular patches of irrigation by the coast only emphasized the featureless wastes inland. The sky took on the same ochre hue as the Rub ’al Khali and all the other empty quarters below.

  Ela’s body reacted violently to the dying of gentleness underneath her. She felt herself go soft and wet as if in one personal mind/Barthelin reflex she could reverse the desertification process; the overpopulation, the goats too thirsty to bleat, the corn dying in the ear, the children born to starve, the whole vicious cycle of dryness, overcultivation, erosion, and drought again.

  Night was falling. The plane entertained its humans with a 2-D movie about a forty-year-old lawyer from Bel Air who through some strange biological trick turned into a thirteen-year-old girl. The first symptom of this was a sudden addiction to Safety Volunteer Barbies, and motorized skateboarding in judges’ chambers. While everyone was watching and listening on headphones Ela pulled at the pilot’s sleeve and led him aft into one of the restrooms in the plane’s tailsection. This time they fucked braced against a tiny stainless-steel sink and dispensers of little flat soaps, surrounded by the great metallic roar of backwash from the jets. The ‘no smoking’ signs blinked in their eyes.

  He made love to her happily, his eyes hot, immediately turned on by her turn-on, and the mystery of how men managed that melded for her into the mystery of how a planet could hold so many new colors that blended into the question of why she had taken so god-darned long to find this out. When she came it was in swirled shades, like a sheen of bunker fuel on water; different hues with different meanings; a color for the pilot, and a color for what she felt for him, something silver/lavender, unresolved, potential; a color for the great confusion behind her (yellow), and strong burning orange for what she had set herself to do. The swirl, on aggregate, was a warm one, a great striped love for the planet starting inexorably to die under her, and she cried out ‘Shit!’ when the orgasm multiplied inside her, and ‘Fuck!’; words she’d never used, never thought it proper to use, never needed to use except now, to express her endless frustration at not being able to express herself better; telling also of her wonder and confusion that she was coming at all, only two days after she had last had an orgasm, but a good seventeen or eighteen months since she’d been able to achieve one with Roger.

  They made love again in the Thai Air baggage room in Karachi Airport, and again on the 737 to Islamabad. The pilot heard the loud noises of breaking chains in her lovemaking as well as her choice of places to make love, and did nothing to discourage her, though he knew they were moving deeper into Islam with every segment of trip accomplished. Karachi was OK – the more relaxed codes of the Industrial Qu’ran held sway there, as they might also in Lahore and Rawalpindi; but the farther away they got from the cities the farther they got from the subtleties of distinction, and attenuated canons.

  Every segment of flight now brought a smaller plane, and a rattier airport, a shorter hop, and more metal barriers slamming shut in the eyes of men, with attendant dangers for those who transgressed such barriers. In the deeper provinces of Pakistan, as in much of Central Asia, the crypto-fundamentalist diktats of the nineties remained largely unchallenged. Ela was married and he was not, so what they did, in the eyes of the Old Koran, was sin of a most technicolor degree.

  They bought Ela long dresses, scarves, and silks in the old bazaar of Peshawar, because in the stressed language of fundamentalism Ela’s jeans and paratrooper boots and above all her post-punk haircut translated directly into concepts like ‘prostitute’ and ‘adulteress.’

  And still she brought him out to make love bare-assed under the stars among the rotting bougainvillea’ed splendor of the Dean’s Hotel gardens, in great danger of being spotted by the patrols of Frontier Police and tribal levies.

  There were lots of such patrols, for the new Russian State Committee in Moscow was attempting to turn the local tribes against the Pakistanis, just as the Tzars had tried to do with the British before them, and thus the situation was tense in the entire Northwest Frontier Province.

  Ela’s excitement appeared immune to the danger of discovery, but the pilot grew more nervous, checking around them constantly as they made love, assuming the role of jigger-man, jumping at shadows as they sweated and ground against each other. However, despite the dangers he was still excited by her excitement, and so the net effect was the same. The lovemaking brought down emotional defenses between them at the same time as it demolished physical barriers, to reveal the final balance of her; proportions of face, counterweight of movement, stasis, and change in the harmonics of vocal chords; the rushing asymmetry of her new curiosity.

  This was the secret to the new side of her, he believed – a curiosity that had been buried alive for all of her bare quarter-century. The curiosity seemed to have blossomed outward, in response to geography, the way a stunted shrub responded to repotting. Her eyes were never still anymore, and now she seemed to need less sleep than any of them. She asked questions none of them could answer.

  Flights to Chitral were canceled because of bad weather in the mountains. In their dingy room in what had once been barracks for Bengal Lancer officers at Dean’s, the ceiling fan slowly redistributed the same dun shadows around the peeling walls. The pilot set up the ECM-pak, put on the half-sucker and did a careful security scan of the radio environment. He was surprised, and rendered somewhat thoughtful, by what he found: a lot of encrypted radio traffic between the Air Force base, and transmitters in the direction of the Khyber Pass, running codes used by Inter-Services Intelligence, the Pakistani secret police; a source in University Town the program labeled as an American Defense Intelligence Agency cypher; and far more radar than he would have expected coming from small tactical posts as well as a theatre-surveillance aircraft over Quetta.

  The traffic made sense, he thought. After all, this segment of the Great Silk Road was one of the oldest smuggling routes in the world. Also, the Pashtun tribesmen living in the NWFP supplied a third of the smack going into the US and it would be odd if American agencies did not have a presence here. But the hiss of security traffic amplified the buzz of adrenaline in his gut. All of a sudden, standing still felt wrong, and dangerous.

  He checked them out of Dean’s the next morning. They hired a couple of motorized rickshaws to get them to the bus station, where they boarded an ancient, crowded, intricately painted British Bedford, heading north.

  He watched Ela’s face as they rode, seeing her once again absorb the changes in scenery, the different trees, flat crocodile-dry plain lined with bazaars and colonial roads, the endless convoys of artillery and surface-to-surface missiles. The sudden rise into hills. He knew he was infatuated with her, because of the warmth in his chest, because he was beginning to need the specifics of her, actually need the way she led him on in hopes of a joke. Within that he needed to watch her lift one corner of her mouth in the start of a smile, and within that the first hint of lightness in stance or voice. All were necessary to life, like clear water on a hot day.

  And all the time, underneath that need, he saw the shadow that still hung behind her eyes, and the pull-back that lay behind the light touch of her fingers, soft though it was, strong though the forward movement had become in her.

  ‘It’s a boa constrictor,’ he murmured, ‘digesting an elephant,’ only half-meaning for her to hear – though the code would be obvious, if she did.

  ‘No, it’s a hat,’ she replied, quoting The Little Prince in turn, smiling gently but not looking at him from behind the lavender shimmer of her shawl.

  The awareness of barriers in her scared him. There had been barriers in Carmelita, too. Thus behind the warmth of his affection lay a gentle but constant colic, as of indigestion, or impending los
s.

  In Dir they learned the pass into Chitral Valley was closed to all traffic but jeeps. They hired a jeep and driver. The driver was a young Pashtun tribesman named Jamal. He smiled a lot to make up for his lack of English. He drove like a repressed fighter jock. In common with all the other Pashtun he carried an AK-47 assault rifle the way a Wall Street commuter would carry a laptop computer, like a Tenth Avenue prostitute would carry her pack of Trojans, or an artist his sketch pad. To complete the martial effect he wore on his belt a curved, ivory-handled dagger.

  The shadows were packed with eyes as they moved out of Dir. Shots rang out; somewhere a bomb went off. They were stopped at a roadblock. A militiaman warned them to keep their heads down. The Oraksai clan were warring with the Yusufsai this week, an old enmity based on women, or the split of profits from opium traffic, or water rights, or something else. No one seemed to be sure, or care. Blood feuds, fought with mountain howitzers and rocket-propelled grenades, were common as weeds in this region, Jamal told them as they pulled away from the roadblock. They must watch out as well for ambushes set by Afghan agents for Nooristani separatists. Dacoits, or highwaymen, also thrived on the road to Chitral. He touched his rifle as he said all this, and smiled with honest pleasure.

  The trail climbed swiftly north of town. Snow began to fall, lightly. It grew arctic cold. For this stage of the trip PC sat with Ela in the cab of the old Willys. Twisted sideways, shivering, he watched the snowflakes fan and swoop hypnotically in the arc of slipstream over the jeep’s hood. He looked at Ela beside him. Even under the shawl, the sweater, the army jacket, and red silks draped over her body, even sitting in the front seat of a jeep, she managed to convey a feeling of slimness and grace.

  PC was silent. He seldom talked now. In itself this was a form of communication, a flag flown upside down. It was no longer because of Ela. The rush of infatuation had passed, as it always did, blown out partly by the fact that she obviously had fallen for the pilot instead of him, and partly because his own infatuation had waned. What shut him up now was a cliché, a truism, something he’d always known but like everyone else had never really believed; namely, that he could not escape the iron parameters of his old life simply by jettisoning the outer shell. Travel might erase the signs others drew on you, but it only etched deeper what was written inside. He had canned his job, and opted out of the party circuit; but love remained, for him, something that faded, even in places where no one spoke English; and indifference came back, unconquerable as time, omnipotent in gray, deadly and cold as cancer, even among mountains as strange and bare as these.

  He had come to feel the cold touch of that indifference was poisoning the rest of his life. The indifference – and its symptoms, the gaps in his conversation – were only the sign of a far deeper rot that had gnawed at the green pith of his undramatic childhood outside Philly. The rot, he believed, was contentment, and a certain deficiency in drama. His father had been gentle and supportive, his mother had loved him without excess. He had the largest collection of baseball cards in grammar school. He broke his arm at twelve years of age, lost his virginity at seventeen, and went seamlessly from high school to Williams to Wharton to a position in Webware sales that netted him 280 grand a year. He had often wondered as he clicked off the required mileage if you had to be unhappy and fucked up to become interesting, and if so, was it worth the pain?

  What was so unacceptable now, of course, was that even the lack of pain had begun to hurt. His dearth of interests had finally created an indifference in his life that was so huge it bored even himself, so that now he had nothing left but his own disgust, and a certain cynical humor that was basically as funny as a hand sticking out of a frozen lake.

  So he stared glumly through the windshield as the jeep ground fast as Jamal could push it up the washed-out trail, wheels regularly slamming from bump to bump, the left-hand side bumps often a lousy two inches maximum from three-hundred-foot drops as they climbed the approach road to Lohairi Pass. Barely responding when Ela chattered beside him.

  ‘I keep thinking,’ she said once, ‘this is so like The Wizard of Oz. I must have seen that film a hundred times when I was a kid, and it all seems so familiar, in some ways. I mean, like, I get sick, you know? And I get a fever, and all of a sudden it’s like a whirlwind – here I am with the Tin Man, and the Scarecrow, and the Lion.’

  ‘Humph,’ PC grunted.

  ‘No lion,’ Jamal said cheerfully, grinning, holding the wheel with one finger as the jeep skidded around a switchback turn, pointing with the other hand toward a glacier cutting high above them. ‘No lion – snow leopard.’

  ‘It’s a story, Jamal,’ Ela told him. ‘See,’ she continued, to PC, ‘the Tin Man is Rocketman. He’s worried ’cause he thinks he doesn’t have a heart. He’s never told me what it is, but I think something happened once, to, like, make him feel he doesn’t deserve to love, or be loved anymore. And the Lion – that’s the pilot. He’s constantly looking for the guts to face what his parents did to him, after his brother died. Only he doesn’t realize that he’s had the guts, all his life, just by surviving; he doesn’t realize that his parents can’t do any more to him than they’ve already done.

  ‘And you, PC; you’re the Scarecrow. You’ve lost your brain. You’ve got a good brain, obviously, but you’ve never had to really use it. You’ve never really had to do anything, and since you’re basically lazy, like me, like most people, you’ve never made the effort to really think.’

  ‘This is what I think,’ PC growled, ‘I think The Wizard of Oz is just, you know, a symbol for America being basically immature—’ knowing he was talking about himself, nevertheless, he gritted his teeth and continued ‘—always looking for a Hoffa, or a Pastor Johnson, or a Hawkley to save us from our responsibilities. Always wanting to click our heels three times and go home to Auntie Em and her big soft cozy hermeneutic titties and, and to hell with the Munchkins and their problems.’

  Ela stared at him.

  ‘I don’t understand you,’ Ela said. ‘I don’t understand why you’re here.’

  ‘I don’t understand either,’ PC said. ‘I thought it was because I was in love with you. I was wrong. But I’m glad you brought up Oz. Because that’s what this is – fantasy. An escape. For me, you, all of us. It’s bullshit.’

  ‘You’re wrong,’ Ela told him. ‘Not all of us are escaping. Some of us are looking for something . . .’

  PC ignored her.

  ‘I mean, I knew you couldn’t change yourself,’ he said, ‘just by going somewhere new, but I thought I could find new info, you know? Just data. But it doesn’t make any difference.’

  ‘There’s such a thing as ruts,’ Ela said, watching the track, which was full of them.

  ‘I’ve made up my mind,’ PC told her. ‘I’m going back. I don’t know what I’m doing in this crazy place, in these crazy mountains, you know, with machine guns and bandits and snow leopards and no one takes universal credit cards. I’m going to turn around tomorrow. I’m going back to New York.’

  ‘I don’t know why that makes me sad,’ Ela told him, ‘but it does.’

  They stopped at a chai house on the near side of the pass. It was a dark wooden structure built around a large adobe fireplace. Guests could stay for tea or the night on woven rope beds grouped around the central hearth. They drank strong sweet tea in tiny Chinese cups, and ate potato stew on an unleavened Afghan bread called nan.

  Rocketman observed PC and Ela. He would have given a lot to know what PC had been saying to the girl in the jeep. He hoped he was not trying to turn Ela against him. He liked Ela, but he did not trust her, no matter where she came from. There was no purity in her – no purity to any woman, he had to admit to himself, compared to those whose obsession led them past the stratosphere, past the Van Allen belt, into the cold darkness of space. Compared to Judy Resnick.

  Jamal had loaned them wool blankets to keep warm in the back of his jeep. Rocketman drew the blanket around his shoulders. In the bazaar
where Ela got her silks he had bought Pakistani clothes, the ubiquitous shalwar kameez, the baggy pyjamas and long shirt, but they were of light cotton and not as warm as his American gear. It was cold and getting colder. He looked at the pilot, who was shivering as close to the earthen hearth of the chai hut as he could get without knocking over the cook. The pilot held his hands in such a way that Rocketman knew he was giving his rat warmth. Rocketman felt a sudden rush of protective feeling for the pilot. Here was a guy who in his own way was so naive he should not be let out alone without little clips on his mittens, so he wouldn’t lose them.

  Rocketman looked down the valley they had climbed. The pilot had not noticed, for example, the pair of headlights that stayed with them, never coming too close, never dropping too far back, as someone shadowed their jeep the entire way from Dir.

  Bulldozers from a Scottish engineering firm had swept away most of the snow toward the crest of the pass. The pilot’s eyes lingered on a massive grader parked by the roadside, and he searched the machine for what had caught his attention, finding at last, on the side of the diesel housing, a silver ‘T’ crossed with a golden lightning bolt that was as familiar to him as the roof of his own apartment. ‘MacAndrew’s Ltd’ was printed above the logo, and ‘a subsidiary of TransCom International.’

  The pilot shook his head. It was not so strange to find that logo here, he told himself. TransCom was bigger than a lot of independent nations, and it had interests in every corner of the planet.

  The grader had done its job well; the road was even at this point, and clear of potholes . . .