Flagged Victor (36 page)

The amount he’d saved from each of the jobs was wrapped in plastic and stuck in one of the four barrels that kept the dock afloat.

The money allowed me to escape. The money bought me freedom. The money saved whatever was worth saving of my goddamn miserable life.

I
took a ferry to the island where I knew Rivers and Leah had been. I sat on the iron deck with my backpack propped beside me, gifted with a bit of shade from a paint-flaked gunnel.
There were others like me on the deck, all backpackers, young, unshaven or unkempt, dressed like hippies with colourful troubadour clothes, multiple piercings, and sandalled feet. I had already exchanged my old clothes for this kind of outfit, but I didn’t go all the way with the colour and the flamboyance, which made me stand out and look more serious. We gained a cheap kind of camaraderie as a group, stuck together in the same circumstances, on the way to the same island. A woman started talking about a temple she had visited in India, and how hot it had been there. A man mentioned a volcano he had climbed in Indonesia, and the difficulties of gaining access to the area because of local unrest. More stories got traded. I noticed that this happened whenever a group of backpackers were forced to spend time together for some reason. I thought of them as road tales. They reminded me of the way Chris, in his prison letter to me, had described inmates trading details about their lives. You knew the stories weren’t the complete truth, that they were shaped and constructed for various reasons, to garner credibility, for instance, to justify a choice. This kind of casual and unverifiable lying suited me just fine.

When the ferry docked and the assault of touts met us on the shore, we disbanded (an urgency about us, a hastening in our step) and set off in separate directions. It was as if we never wanted to see each other again.

Those were my kind of people.

I
did not find Rivers on the first island or the second. But I did read
The Unbearable Lightness of Being.
Beyond the discussion of
weight and light, and the ramifications of existential choices, the passages I read most closely, with the most recognition, were the ones about interrogation.

The hero, a surgeon named Tomas, is the epitome of lightness, but under interrogation, he finds his inner weight, refusing to collaborate, to name names, to recant his personal views, even though this means sacrificing his career in medicine.

I felt that Kundera had a special understanding into what happens when you are being questioned. Even so, it seemed a fictional stretch to me that Tomas could be so stalwart and fearless in refusing to sign a trumped-up confession, despite having so much to lose.

But because it is a novel, this is what happens, and Tomas still gets laid.

I
kept looking. More islands, more beaches. I came to a beach that was so difficult to access, it made me hopeful. You needed to hitchhike to the far side of the island and hire a fisherman in a pontoon boat to take you around the coast to a sheltered cove, bordered with unclimbable rocks and a dense coconut palm forest. It was the kind of place you might go if you wanted to avoid being found.

The pontoon boat brought me to within twenty feet of the beach and then lodged on something shallow. The fisherman, his flat and ancient feet straddling the gunwale for balance, leaned on a long bamboo pole to steady the boat and allow me to get out. The water came up to my waist, and I lifted my
backpack above my head and waded to shore, like a marine carrying his rifle.

I put my backpack down when I reached the open-air restaurant with a palm frond–covered bar. It was lunchtime, or thereabouts, and a few travellers were seated at tables in their bathing suits and sarongs, eating salads, drinking lassis or water, playing backgammon or reading. They did not look up. One of them looked a bit like Leah, in her bikini, from long ago.

I sat at an open table. I was very tired and not feeling well, perhaps a little dehydrated. A boy around thirteen in bare feet and bare chest asked if I wanted anything. I told him I wanted a bottle of water and a hut. He came back with the bottle of water.

I must have fallen asleep. When I opened my eyes, the restaurant was empty, and it was later in the afternoon. I sat up. I saw a Thai woman behind the bar. She was older, perhaps forty, and she was putting away glasses. When she saw me, she walked over.

Her name was Sunny. She was the owner. I asked her for a hut, and she led me along a meandering path past coconut trees and clumps of tall grass to a place I could rent for three dollars a night. It felt good to slip my backpack off again. It had never seemed so heavy. I felt as if I’d been holding myself together, and now I was coming apart.

Before Sunny left, I asked her my question.

Have you seen a man with one arm and one leg? He was with a beautiful young woman.

She looked at me as though I was joking or crazy.

I kicked off my sandals and lay on the bed. A breeze came
in through the window above. I could hear the rustling of palm leaves outside, and I swear I saw a monkey peek in to check on me.

I
slept so heavily I did not know who I was. When I woke, it was night. I was so thirsty I walked to the restaurant, my feet uncertain on the sand. It seemed as though everyone else was asleep now, and I wondered if I’d slept through the entire evening.

Rivers was the only one still at the restaurant. He sat at a table by himself, before a bottle of Mekhong whiskey. He was reading a book. There were two glasses. I did not recognize him at first because he had both arms and legs.

Hi, I said.

You don’t look so good, he offered.

This coming from him.

I’ve been better.

He poured me a drink. I would have preferred water, but I clinked glasses with him.

Where’s Leah? I asked.

It was an abrupt question, and it sounded accusatory.

She got restless, he said. She’s not tired enough to be here yet. She has a beautiful soul.

I know, I said. I had a feeling that Leah had been the strongest of us all, the most capable of living. I missed her.

Where did she go?

He waved his hand toward the ocean. Malaysia. Singapore. Indonesia. She wanted to see the world. I’m happy here, he added. So I stayed.

It seems like a great place to write.

It probably is. But not for me. I’m not writing anymore.

What do you mean? I asked.

You’ve seen what writing did to me. It demanded too much.

I did not know what to say. I wanted to protest: But you told me that writing was a life-threatening activity!

He read my thoughts.

I heard you lived through your own firing squad, he said.

I looked down at the book and saw that he was reading my copy of
Lord Jim.

I thought it would make me a better writer, I said.

He smiled, gently, mockingly, sadly. Wherever did you get that idea?

I felt the stillness of the air and the stillness of the stars and the stillness of the sea. The entire universe was still. The only weight within it was me.

When I looked up, he was gone, and the things I wanted to say to him went unsaid. Like Jim, I might have unburdened myself, unleashed the torment of my soul, if only he had been there to listen.

I wanted him to be my Marlow.

Eventually, I understood. He was telling me I needed to be my own Marlow.

I
spent a week in my hut recovering. I don’t know what illness had come over me, but whenever I thought about Chris and Susan and Rivers, I felt ill again. When I woke up at the beginning of the second week, I was healthy enough to walk to the
restaurant. Sunny and a few of the regulars who were sitting around a collection of tables applauded my appearance.

By the end of the second week, I was swimming every day. I swam short distances at first, and I rested frequently. Then I got stronger until I could swim all the way across the cove and back without stopping. I joined the daily beach volleyball game.

One night, after everyone had gone to sleep, I remembered that I wanted to be a writer and why. I remembered Chris telling me it was time. I thought about Rivers and Marlow and firing squads and floating docks. There was a full moon rising above the cove. I walked into the water and swam toward it. I swam as hard as I could as far as I could and rolled over on my back, breathing shallow breaths, and stared up at that moon until I calmed down. I’d almost swum too far to return.

I
unpacked my typewriter and set it up in my hut. I tried to write about Chris but I couldn’t. There was a hole in my story, a darkness I couldn’t jump into or explore.

So I wrote about something else instead, a tale of a couple who backpack through Asia robbing other backpackers to keep travelling, and I threw into it everything I understood at that point in my life about morality and consequence and the lightness of being and the relief of a reckless fuck.

I worked feverishly. I went out for meals or to swim across the cove, but I did not like to leave my room. If Chris was confined to his prison cell, then I would be confined to this hut. I did push-ups and sit-ups and jumping jacks to keep myself going. I meditated afterwards, my breath slowing. I paced off the area of
the room and realized it was the exact dimensions of Chris’s cell as he’d described it to me.

One afternoon, Sunny appeared in my window. She was angry about my typing. The exploding keys.

Bang bang bang! she yelled.

I must have looked half crazy, desperate, and perhaps dangerous to her, because she did not make me leave the complex. Instead, she moved me farther away from the beach to an older area, deeper in the forest, that must have been abandoned. Six huts in a circle, shrouded by palm trees. A few of the huts were sagging or half-collapsed, one cleaved in two by a fallen palm tree. Only one of the huts was remotely livable. We cleaned it up together, scrubbing on our hands and knees, and we hammered mosquito netting across the windows, and she brought me a good mattress. Later, she sent over a girl to give me a free massage.

I was alone in the jungle writing. But I saw, after a day, that the other huts weren’t entirely empty. They were occupied at different times by a troop of monkeys. I noticed that they had stolen things from the huts and restaurant where the other travellers were staying. I saw sunglasses. A bottle of suntan lotion. A bikini top. A clench of brightly coloured panties. There were even a few books, including my own copy of
The Unbearable Lightness of Being.
I had not realized it was missing. I retrieved it from the scattered pile of ill-gotten treasures, chastened to discover that such a precious belonging had been forced to magically find me again.

The book I was working on changed after that, the angle tilting in a new direction. One of my main characters, slowly, and
against his will, under the influence of the full moon and the tropical heat, became a monkey. This meant he could do whatever the fuck he wanted whenever he wanted but that he was also graced with a deep and abiding understanding of the universe. Being a monkey meant being light and heavy all at once.

My
book ended up being twelve hundred pages long. It was the
Moby-Dick
of travel novels. I put within it everything that could be said about travel, and those who did it, and what it allowed them to do, and what it turned them into. It made me famous and lots of money.

Ha ha.

I told myself there was more glory and honour in having written it, and remaining unknown, than there would have been if it had been made into a movie starring Leonardo DiCaprio.

I rush now through many years, knowing this story has a
hole in the middle that must be filled.

I travelled for several of those years, writing in many huts and many hotel rooms as I made my way through Southeast Asia. When my stash ran out, I moved to Japan for more of those years, where money was easy and who I was didn’t matter. Then, as emotional attachments formed, I fled to Eastern Europe and found myself in the same city that Kundera had grown up in. It didn’t matter that he’d gotten the fuck out as soon as he was able—I was from someplace like that too.

Chris joked that he wore through his address book, erasing my old addresses and pencilling in new ones. His address remained unchanged.

In his letters, he told me about life inside, the insanity and comedy, the setbacks and low times. He never complained or despaired. Indeed, he was certain that he would have a more meaningful and fulfilling life once he got out because of the things he had learned about himself. I collected it all as research for the great prison novel I would write someday, the
Moby-Dick
of crime and punishment. In return, I wrote him embellished stories about the women I had been with and the crazy things I had seen and done.

Through it all, one quiet miracle: we remained friends.

Compared to Chris’s seriousness of purpose—his goal to create a better future for himself, his dedication to self-improvement, and personal responsibility—I was feckless. I had no commitments, except to myself. I made money easily, but it flowed away without notice. I could not maintain a long-term relationship. I went from party to party, job to job, country to country without leaving a mark.

Finally, the light one had become heavy, the heavy of us light.

The only thing I took remotely seriously was my writing, and this I toiled on diligently, but my curse, my gypsy curse, was that writing did not take me seriously in return. Or at least, the guardians to the kingdom of publication did not see fit to allow me entrance. I continued to send out the
Moby-Dick
of travel novels to agents and publishers, revising and cutting like an expert sashimi chef after each rejection. I wrote stories in between, sending them to magazines around the world, hoping for one bright spark to kindle an enormous fire. I started other novels too, about other mes, but nothing I worked on seemed to flow or even matter. I was haunted by the life I still couldn’t write about.