Right of Thirst (23 page)

That night I lay on clean sheets, on the fifteenth floor, listening to the sounds of traffic far below. It was fifty degrees warmer. Crowds on the streets. Dark buildings. Headlights, shop lights, along the sidewalk. Only a few neon signs—electricity, even there, was in short supply. Many horns, the heat, wet and thick, the smell of rotting fruit and sewers and roasting lamb on spits, in glass boxes, weakly lit by yellow bulbs. The sound of a thousand small motorcycles, like standing next to a box of bees. We'd passed through it, on the way from the airport in the cab, with the windows down.

The glass was thick, the curtains heavy, and the air-conditioner flicked on and off. I couldn't sleep; I felt strong and completely exhausted at the same time. I was alone. Elise was a few doors down, and I'd put her room on my credit card, just as I'd done with everything else. It was the most expensive place in town, and they charged like the West they pretended they were. Neither of us had eaten, nor had we wanted to.

The hotel felt like a bottle of clean water from an artesian well. It was a window to another world. The glass lobby, the concierge in his blue suit, the icy air after the sudden heat of the city, a few men in coats and ties, talking on cellular phones, sitting on dark couches with their tea—and we had walked in, with our packs and
our boots, soaked in dust. They'd stared at us as if they belonged there and we did not.

After a while, showered and clean-shaven for the first time in more than a month, I got up, and reached for the phone. I didn't give any thought to time zones, to the fact that he was on the other side of the world, that it was daylight, and he was working. I just dialed, and listened to the ring, without a hint of static. The machine came on.

This is Eric. Leave a message.

And then a beep. I hesitated, like someone who finds himself unexpectedly required to make a public toast, after a cascade of spoons on half-empty glasses. But then, in the most normal tone I could manage, I said I was back in the city, and would be coming home early, that everything was fine, and I'd call him with details when I had them. I hung up the phone softly, even gently, and then wandered over to the minibar, where there were tiny bottles of imported whiskey.

I'd heard this message many times, and it always disappointed me. It was his slow, mannered, laconic tone that did it—deliberately indifferent, as if he could barely be bothered. It seemed both forced and unworthy of him, so unlike the friendly, excitable young man he was, and I suspected that he'd recorded it many times, with care. It revealed nothing of his true self. It was like his new tattoo, and his earring: it was studied, and just then I wondered what friends he had made, how many there were, and whether they had similar messages on their answering machines. I'd met only a few.

I drank the whiskey neat, because even there I didn't trust the ice. I pulled the curtains partly aside, and sat at the window on the executive chair, looking down at the street some fifty meters below. The hotel was the tallest building for miles, and I had a clear view of the city—the lights, the streaming cars on
the dark roads. It didn't shine—it wasn't quite luminous, like the skylines of the West. But it was a city nonetheless, a vast one, with millions stretching out in their apartment blocks, in their shantytowns. No stars were visible; I had a sense of high clouds up in the dark. Several times I heard the sound of aircraft through the thick glass—the airport was nearby. Even through the air-conditioner, it felt as though it might rain, and that the rain would be warm and soft. With my face close to the window, I could see people walking in the streets, going nowhere in particular. Just out, idly looking into shops, men walking hand in hand, boys, a few women, in what passed for the comfort of evening. I was thirteen hours ahead of him, in another day altogether, and we were at opposite ends of the earth.

I drank two of the little bottles, sitting there in the dark. I nearly drank a third, but when I stood to urinate in the bathroom, careful not to switch on the light, because I had no desire to see myself again in the mirrors over the sink, I realized that I was swaying. It was good whiskey, smooth and silky to the tongue.

I drew the curtains, and lay down on the bed. For a moment I considered turning on the television, with its satellite service. But right then I couldn't face them, those men and women, so full of whatever it was that had happened that day, or that week. I didn't care what had happened, and in any case I knew I'd find out soon enough, because I was in the antechamber of my own world, and I could feel the money everywhere again. I could feel it in the cotton sheets, in the blanket, in the firmness of the mattress. Had I closed the curtains tight, I might have been anywhere. Oddly, I missed the sound of the river—the background murmur, the white noise that had accompanied us for so long, and now was gone.

I was tired of being lost, and I was tired of throwing still
more experiences onto the bonfire of my own confusion. It was bright enough already, and cast its light as far as I could see. I wanted to go home, and I didn't want to go home. I wanted the idea of home. I wanted an end to my loneliness, and I wanted to be left alone. I wanted my wife and my son again. I wanted to do something decent at last, and I wanted to be rewarded for my decency. I'd amputated a girl's leg to prove that I could, and though I'd done it well—better than I ever expected—it had hardly been a selfless act. It had been something I'd mistaken for selflessness, when all along it was something else, something darker and smaller, that only I could see. I should have simply opened my checkbook, as Elise had wanted, and called a helicopter. Then Ali, a man whom I hadn't in my heart felt anything for. Yes, I feel sorry for him; yes, his life is difficult. In the meantime, please make him stop stinking up the tent. It was that kind of pity. On some level, I'd gotten him killed. Had I not come, he'd be alive as ever, bobbing his head at someone else, and the image of my shirt, wrapped in that plastic bag, would not keep coming back to me.

No doubt I was being too hard on myself. I was no worse than most, and better than many. I knew that well enough. Why, after all, should any of it make sense? It was a wash of images, it was all just stumbling and wandering, perhaps with some decency and tenderness along the way. Maybe, somewhere, in the beatitudes, were those who found something as lovely as a bell at the end, but I was not one of those people, nor did I know anyone who was. It was all biology anyhow, all X and Y—my flashy early conversations with Rai, that rivalry and preening, or the tingle of a woman, and what came with her, near my arm. It was just the human story again, flowing through me as it did through everyone else, and I'd mistaken it as my own. There I was, digging away in the dark, intent on the task, and now that
the boiling lead had come raining down upon me I was astonished to find that my burrow looked exactly like the others. With one glance the professor could tell what species of ant I was.

Those were my thoughts. But after a while even they failed to keep me awake—the whiskey overtook them. There is only so much one can think, after all.

The phone rang loudly the next morning. I was already awake, lying in bed, a bit chilled under the blanket. I'd left the air conditioner on the highest setting, and the room felt both humid and cold despite the chinks of sunlight in the heavy drapes. The phone startled me, and my heart leapt—for a moment I thought it might be Eric. But then I realized that I had not left him the number of the hotel, or even the name.

It was Elise.

“Are you eating breakfast?” she asked. I said that I was, that I would meet her downstairs in the restaurant in thirty minutes.

I took a quick shower, shaved, then walked out on the carpet, wrapped in a towel. I was clean, but my clothes were not. They were full of dust and grime, smelling of kerosene and smoke, and I heaped them in a pile by the door, next to my stained pack. I called the front desk, and was told that they would be washed immediately. Then I picked through them, and dressed as cleanly as I could—a dark fleece shirt, like the one I'd given Ali, which hid the stains to some extent, and my spare nylon hiking pants, from a catalogue, which had been too thin for the cold. I shook them out as best I could. I combed my hair with my fingers, found the key on the nightstand and opened the heavy door, stepping out onto the
thick wine-red carpet of the empty hall. I was ten minutes early, alone in the elevator as it slid smoothly down to the lobby.

In broad daylight, the lobby was not as splendid as it had seemed the night before. The desk clerk's blue uniform, with its ridiculous epaulets, was several sizes too big for him, and his starched white collar was ragged at the edges and hung down below his brown neck. The varnished counter, which had shone like a mirror in the evening, needed another coat of varnish. He directed me to the restaurant with great servility.

The restaurant was a large room, with dozens of tables covered with white tablecloths, red napkins, and plastic floral centerpieces. The room was empty, but wide bay windows opened on a garden with a terrace, where more tables stood. Each of the tables had a large blue umbrella rising from the center, with the name of the hotel stenciled on it with elaborate gold letters—
Excelsior
.

Everyone, it seemed, was eating their breakfast outside. The garden alone was immaculate—perhaps a half acre of perfectly mown green grass, red and yellow flowers in planters along poured concrete walkways. I asked to be seated there, with the others.

The hotel seemed both empty and overstaffed, with waiters and bellboys hovering in corners, ready to leap. And the shabbiness of the city had crept in, just a little. It could not be escaped completely. The scratched teacup, or the spots on my water glass in the sun. The desk clerk's collar, starched over and over again—I suspected that the shirt was his own, and that the uniform was not.

There was a Westerner as well—a pale bald man in a business suit, who sat a few tables away with a folder of papers, absently taking long sips of tea as he turned the pages. A contract, I imagined. He looked distinctly European, but somehow periph
erally so—a Dane, maybe, or a Belgian. The rest of the men on the terrace were clearly members of the ruling class. I didn't look at them closely. I knew who they were. Had I stood and asked who among them knew General Said, I'm certain there would have been a show of hands. I could picture him there perfectly, throwing his head back in laughter, moving from table to table, greeting his friends.

“Can I help you, sir?” The waiter stood at attention before me.

“A menu, please,” I replied. “And tea. Someone will be joining me.”

“Of course, sir,” he said. I hardly even looked at him. I only had an impression—thin, white shirt, pressed dark pants, a black tie.

It was pleasant and warm in the garden, looking out over the grass, the potted flowers—hibiscus, I thought, and marigolds, and red poppies. There were perhaps a dozen tables on the terrace, two-thirds of them full. There were a few bees, moving from pot to pot. I watched them reeling, pausing, reeling again.

The waiter returned with my tea, in a heavy white china pot. He poured it with a flourish, as if it were wine, and I thanked him absently, then added the milk, and the sugar, and took a sip. It was good, and dark, and I began to feel better.

Elise wore sunglasses, and, to my surprise, a long yellow dress. She walked through the dining room toward me, her pale arms bare from the shoulders, her hair shining in the sun. I'd expected something else, the kind of thing I was wearing. But she'd transformed herself entirely. When she stepped out onto the terrace, I caught the ripple in the men around her, like a stone into a pool. She was, after all, a pretty young woman, with very white skin, radiating otherness. The Dane, as I thought of him, barely glanced up from his papers. But the others, those
entitled, powerful men, with their suits and mustaches, their strong profiles and uncoiling cigarettes, assuredly did. And so did I. Despite myself, I thought of Scott Coles.

I stood up. A day earlier it wouldn't have crossed my mind. I could feel their eyes on us as I pulled out her chair. Perhaps they thought she was my daughter.

“Thank you,” she said, giving me a smile.

Up close, her dress was not nearly so glamorous. It was light cotton, made for traveling, the kind of thing young women take on warm foreign vacations, with their backpacks, in the summer.

“Where did you get that dress?”

“Everything else is dirty,” she replied. “I bring this for when it is hot.”

“Well,” I said. “You look lovely.”

She blushed.

“Stop,” she said.

“Why?”

She gestured toward the other tables.

“Those men,” she said. “I do not like walking in front of them, you know?”

“Then have some tea,” I said, pouring her a cup.

We ate what passed for an English breakfast—eggs, toast, melons, tea—and looked out at the green grass and the flowers. We were in our own world again, I suppose, or what passed for it. For an instant I imagined the soldier, and the boy, still walking.

A gardener had made his way out onto the lawn a few feet from us. He was barefoot, wearing a kind of loincloth, and a rough brown cotton shirt. He crouched on his haunches, his back to us, and began cutting the grass with a tiny hand scythe. I don't think the others even saw him. He was perfectly in the background for them, I'm sure, but he fascinated me, as he cut a
few blades at a time with delicate, practiced strokes. The scythe sounded like a whisk, and every so often he'd roll from foot to foot, moving a few inches, and continue. He was an expert at it. I realized that he cut the entire half acre in this way. The men on the terrace ate, and spoke to one another, and I wondered what on earth they were talking about. I wondered what they dreamed of, there at the top of their house of cards—was it only to continue, to keep on as they were? Rai's dreams were clear enough. But those men—what they hoped for, and what sustained them, was far more difficult to see.

“Look at them,” Elise said, gesturing toward the men around us on the terrace. “It is disgusting.”

“We're here also,” I said.

“It is not the same.”

“I'm not sure,” I said.

And I wasn't. I felt like an owner of plantations, troubled by the foreman's lash, who looks away over the green fields. Each day they woke up, and crouched down, and rolled from foot to foot with their little scythes, back and forth, tirelessly. And those at their feet, those millions of blades of grass, did nothing, and were no more worthy for it. Homa's brutal mother, for example—it was hard to imagine her as the victim of anything, though of course she was. Nonetheless, hers was the heartlessness of poverty, which, it seemed to me, is different from the heartlessness of wealth. Not that I forgave her, because I did not. I had nothing but contempt for her, and if it weren't for Homa I would never have given her a dime.

The waiter came with another pot of tea.

“Those people were like skeletons,” she said. “They were starving.”

“They're almost down,” I replied. “It's only a few more days for them.”

“Do you think they were refugees from the earthquake? Or was it something else?”

“Does it matter?” I asked.

“Of course it matters,” she replied, looking out again at the men on the terrace. “They must not have known where to go,” she said, shaking her head.

As she spoke, I wondered how many other bands were up there, struggling out of the high country without any help at all, and who they had been required to leave behind. I thought of the old man with the bad heart, and Homa, and then, suddenly, it all seemed too much to consider, or discuss, and I didn't want to think about them anymore.

“Sanjit said he would come this morning,” I said after a while. “Do you think he will?”

“Why would he not come?”

“I don't know,” I said. “He might be ashamed.”

She shook her head.

“If he doesn't come, we will need to find him,” she said. “We must make him help us with Homa.”

I nodded.

As our breakfast came to an end, I did finally ask her the question that I'd put off since our return.

“When are you leaving?” I asked. “What are your plans?”

She looked down into her cup.

“I am not sure,” she said. “At first, I think I will just go home. I do not have enough time left for the research. But now I am thinking of traveling.”

“Where would you go?”

“I don't know. I think maybe Thailand. Or Cambodia. I have not been there. I would like to see those places.”

“You'd go by yourself?”

“Of course,” she said, then looked at me and smiled. “Unless
you would like to come with me as my friend.”

My heart leapt. For a moment the temptation was nearly overwhelming. But I was worn out, more or less completely, and she was simply tired. Soon she'd wake up feeling strong and good again, full of curiosity—she'd want to hop on trains, or the tops of crowded buses, and eat exotic foods, and rent bicycles for forty-mile trips through the rainforest. I could see it very clearly. She was young, after all, she couldn't help herself, and the world was full of wonders. But there I'd be, struggling to catch up, tagging along, like a schoolboy, or something worse. I reached out and took her hand, without thinking.

“You should go,” I said.

“You are not coming?” She was smiling.

“It would be hard for me, Elise. I need to go home.”

“Why? We will have fun, maybe. After this…” She let her words trail off.

“Thank you,” I said, releasing her hand. “But I need to see my son.”

Perhaps, after a few days' rest, I might have recovered. But I could not escape myself in the end. Would I lie there, at night, wherever we found ourselves, thinking of her in the next room, hoping she would give in again? Would I try to get her a little drunk, would I ask her to walk with me down the beach in the evening? It wasn't something I could face. And those we were sure to meet along the way—other travelers, full of adventure, full of physical things—they would have been too much for me as well. Seeing her talk to others her own age, or leaping into the sea off the green coasts—I couldn't picture myself there at all. Or perhaps I could. I was the ridiculous figure on the beach chair, with a book, watching.