Saving Fish From Drowning (35 page)

Despite what had happened the night before, she was still good for sexual daydreams. His last girlfriend said it was abnormal and disgusting that he thought about sex every hour and with every woman he met. It must have been madness and too many martinis that led to his confessing that. He wouldn’t make that mistake with Marlena.

No relationship needed to be
that
honest. Keep some of the mystery, better for romance that way. At least the divinely mature Marlena would have no issues about popping out more babies. Talk of babies killed the lovey-dovey factor. Yet with the younger lady friends, the need to replicate themselves seemed to raise its ugly head at in2 4 5

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opportune times, usually once they had finished making love and when he was two seconds from becoming happily unconscious. This was despite the fact that he had culled only those women who said that having babies ranked well below seeing all the continents of the world. He had asked specifically: Which would you rather have, an eructing baby or a trip to Antarctica? They all opted for the ice floe.

But about three months into the affair, four at the maximum, the girlfriend would tease about having a “baby version” of Harry. They each used that
exact
imagery. Peculiar, wasn’t it? They loved him so much they wanted to
miniaturize
him, then watch him grow from itsy-bitsy babyhood to handsome young man, ready to change the world.

He fell for it—once—and as soon as she crossed the threshold as Mrs. Bailley, the campaign started for him to change. She demanded that he drink less, exercise more, stop telling the same jokes that

“weren’t funny the first time ’round,” and please curb his damn patronizing behavior. What behavior was that? And she would enumerate. What! She wanted him to stop being
himself
?

Harry was so perturbed remembering this that now he could not think of anything positive between him and Marlena. After all, he barely knew her. . . . But then he paused to reconsider. What is life without intimacy with another? What good was success if you could not share it with a beloved? Something felt right about Marlena. He no longer wanted an underling, he wanted an equal. What a surprising notion. What’s more, she was different from the rest. He knew human nature, and she was more secure, more content, and also more independent, not to mention financially secure. She would not look to him to fulfill her completely. She was already complete, save for the fun and jolly of being with him.

Granted, she was a bit standoffish at times, but in a way that made wooing her even more delicious. Her reticence was her mystery, he reasoned, a lovely conundrum, and he was the privileged man who 2 4 6

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would be allowed to unravel the complex and private package, to view her naked soul. And she would know this was the lure and the promise. Yes, he was now prepared to show her who he was, the insecurities, the loneliness, the occasional rash decision leading to shame—everything but the part about his thinking about sex all the time. All in all, he was not a complicated person. If anything, his greatest fault was being too hopeful. Disappointment had quashed him, but he always sprang back.

He hoped Marlena wouldn’t be the same as the others. He pictured her teasing him about last night’s fiasco, giggling like a schoolgirl, saying it would make for fond memories in the years to come.

He sighed happily.

But next he remembered her chiding his feeble attempts to douse the flames with her dress. How could he have known that slip of cloth was an expensive designer sheath? My God, she acted barking mad over that orange scrap. She didn’t yell; it was worse. She had stared at him with an implacable Asian face, unreadable, unreachable, unadaptable, like a cat’s. No wonder he liked dogs. When things went wrong, they were the best creatures to have around, forgiving, nonstop jolly, all let’s go play, waggy-wag, woofy-woof, scratch my belly, please. A sure thing, no insidious neuroses that might creep out and claw him on the nose.

When Harry awoke from a nap in the late afternoon, he was still alone except for the resort staff idling about. Perhaps the tour group had pushed on, to take in more museums, pagodas, and monasteries.

Not that he cared to poke around in such places, but he felt Walter should have at least warned him that he would miss out on a whole day’s activities (and without Marlena!) if he did not join them at that ungodly hour for a sunrise cruise. He glanced at his watch. They should be returning for dinner any minute now. “Back so soon?”

he would say in his most nonchalant voice, belying how tetchy he truly felt.

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It was not until the dinner hour that Harry finally saw Heinrich sauntering in. Harry ran up to the resort director to inquire what the group’s actual plans had been for the day. Heinrich looked at his watch and surveyed the dining hall, as if this were the first time he had noticed it was empty. “Tst, tst,” he said. “The guide said he would have them here for dinner.”

“Well, where are they?”

“Ah yes, where, indeed? It’s the habit of people on holiday to be late,” Heinrich said in an offhand way. But I could sense that his eyes were evasive, his back rigid and his shoulders tight. It seemed to me he was not conveying the true concern he felt. He leaned over a table and straightened silverware that was already perfectly aligned.

“Have patience, and please,
do
have your dinner. We’re serving an excellent prawn dish tonight. Pity if no one tasted it.”

Harry skipped dinner and had four bottles of Burmese beer, which he drank while pacing the dock, scanning the dimming landscape, the darkening lake. The busboys, now dressed as waiters, stood at attention in the bar, hands clasped behind their backs. When Heinrich strolled up for his fifth whiskey sour, Harry cornered him.

“We must talk.”

“Oh dear, still fretting, I see.” Heinrich tapped his cigarette on an enameled bowl, then sat back heavily in a rattan chair, inhaled deeply, and surveyed the night.

Harry remained standing. “Look, I’m beginning to think they’ve gotten themselves into some sort of trouble.”

Heinrich gave forth a small cough and a laugh. “Oh, I doubt that very much.” His tone was clearly dishonest, and I could still feel his tension, his duplicity. He was hoping that he would not have to report this to the authorities, at least not yet. But why? He was protecting his hide, I sensed that much. The particulars remained obscure to me.

He waved his cigarette in circles as he thought of what to say to 2 4 8

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Harry. “Well, perhaps they’re having a very small trouble.” He made a pinching gesture with his thumb and forefinger. “Small. Could be a problem with the motors, or maybe they’ve been waylaid by a military blockade across the lake. It’s happened before. Bombastic figure arrives from the capital, wants to take a boat ride out to see his pretty little mistress. So the police cease all other passage—for the sake of security, they say, but everyone knows it’s really to impress the hell out of the lady. I believe your American presidents do the same when touching down at public airports. Nearly the whole city shuts down.

Am I right? So you see, that sort of thing is common everywhere.

Damned annoying, but nothing we can do about it.”

“Nonetheless,” Harry said, “we must notify the authorities to be on the lookout for them.”

Heinrich grunted. “Have the military police
pursue
your friends?

Is that it? Not wise, no, not wise at all. Has it ever occurred to you that this is precisely the sort of thing that could really get them into trouble?”

“Look, have you got a telephone?”

“To be honest, the wiring for our telephones went down in the last monsoon—bloody dreadful rain we had in the summer—and we

haven’t gotten around to rewiring. Hard to get the parts out here.

But it helps to give the aura of a secluded resort, don’t you agree?”

He winked at Harry.

“No
telephone
?” Harry retracted his head like a repulsed tortoise.

Heinrich’s answer sounded suspicious. “How the hell do you ever get bookings if you never answer the telephone?”

Heinrich gave a placid smile. “It’s all booked by the tourism agency in Yangon. Assigned, you might say. We get a weekly update, sent to us by a messenger. Your group was a last-minute fill-in, as you know. Luckily, we had room.”

Harry was incredulous. “So you’ve done without a phone for all these months?”

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“Well, for emergencies, I do have my own satellite phone, of course.”

“Brilliant. We can use that to call around to people in the area.”

“My dear man, I hardly know everyone. The lake is fourteen miles long. And it would be frightfully expensive to use a satellite phone to ring up various people on the off chance . . . Well, it’s hardly an emergency, is it? Ringing up the neighbors might raise an unnecessary alarm.” Heinrich saw that Harry was not to be dissuaded. How much could it possibly cost to make a few social phone calls? He would soon lance Harry for two hundred dollars to cover the

damage to his cottage. Why not simply make it two hundred fifty?

Heinrich rubbed his chin. “I suppose I could ring my colleagues at the Golden Island Cottages, a few other places as well. How would that be?”

“Excellent! Thanks so much.”

“Not at all.” Heinrich walked to his lodgings behind the Great Hall. A few minutes later, he returned with marching steps and an angry frown. “The satellite phone’s been
stolen
.” He slammed the heel of his hand on the table, making a busboy jump. “This is too much! The generator was one thing, but this—they’ve gone too far!”

“Who’s gone too far?” Harry said. “Does this have anything to do with—”

Heinrich waved impatiently and barked orders in Burmese to a couple of men who had peered from the kitchen. They nodded and went running out of the building. Then he turned back to Harry.

“We’ve been having trouble with thefts—not the belongings of our guests, never fear—but our equipment is disappearing like sand out of an hourglass. And now my own satellite phone—Lord, I paid a fortune in Swiss francs.” There was no more arguing over what to do.

They would have to wait until morning, at which time they could dispatch a boat and a search party for the missing guests.

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During the long night, Harry stayed awake, waiting for his replacement sentry to report for duty. At last the man glided up, late but ready to serve—the drunken fisherman, who let go with a wail that sounded to Harry as if it could knock the starry teeth from the heavenly firmament. To the strains of that caterwaul, Harry closed his eyes and fell into dreams that Marlena had come back to him, only now he was a tree and she was a monkey. It was I who planted this image in the slippery banks of his brain, where dreams oozed and fell out. Harry felt Marlena crawl up his trunk and curl against him, pressing her breasts to his back. And then she dug in her fingernails to hang on, dug until they pierced him in the heart. But he could bear the pain. The pain was necessary. Love made it so.

WHEN I LAST reported on our intrepid and hungry travelers, they were tramping over vine and brush to reach No Name Place, where they believed their designated Christmas lunch spot lay. As they navigated the forest, they passed by many No Name Things, creatures they failed to see. Instead, they were dumbly occupied with where to place their feet while sidestepping fallen trees and matted vines.

They twisted their upper bodies to avoid prickly branches and fronds that might contain insects that were genetically designed, Heidi believed, to implant them with encephalitis and jungle fever.

But I could see the details of the world they passed through. Now that I had the gifts of the Buddha, I could flow unimpeded by safety concerns, and the hidden forms of life revealed themselves: a harmless snake with iridescent stripes, myriad fungi, flowering parasites of colors and shapes that suggested sexual turgidity—a wealth of waxy flora and moist fauna endemic to this hidden spot of the earth, as yet undiscovered by humans, or at least those who assigned taxonomic labels. I realized then that we miss so much of life while we are 2 5 1

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part of it. We fail to see ninety-nine percent of the glories of nature, for to do so would require vision that is simultaneously telescopic and microscopic.

My friends pressed ahead, accompanied by the orchestral sounds of snapping twigs, whistling birds, and the nasal buzz of a male tree frog broadcasting his desire to hop onto a female. Bennie was breathing heavily. Every now and then he tripped. His face was splotchy pink with exertion and rosacea. In an adventure travel guide, he groused to himself, this trek would have been rated as “extremely difficult, experts only,” five out of five hiking staffs to warn people off. But to that I say bosh. It was not that challenging, and Vera was proof of that. Had it been more arduous, she simply would have stopped walking and announced, “You go on ahead and send me a postcard when you’re recovering in intensive care.” That was what she said when we were climbing the path to Taktsang monastery in Bhutan a few years back. Several times she said that, then refused to go beyond the coffeehouse. But here she trudged on with the rest.

It was odd, however, that she was reciting French:
“Je tombe de la
montagne, tu tombes de la montagne . . .”

For nearly an hour, the group stumbled forward. When they came upon another fallen teak tree, Bennie yelled to the Burmese men ahead, “Hey, guys! Can we stop for a rest?”

Black Spot and Grease turned around. “No worries,” Black Spot called back, using that same vacuous promise that had followed us from China. He and Grease held a private powwow. “You go ahead and let everyone know we are coming,” Black Spot told his cousin. A few moments later, Grease raced ahead, while Black Spot returned to the travelers, who were now in various positions of repose on the large fallen tree with its enormous network of roots. Underneath it were small crushed trees, their branches rising at angles like broken arms.