Saving Fish From Drowning (7 page)

Though it was December, the weather was sunny and without

wind, which made everyone feel enlivened, unable to grieve with true despair. Those who had signed up for the ill-fated Burma Road trip were ambling in a cluster toward the rear. They were the ones I decided to join, listening at the back of their minds. As we were circling the concourse, Harry Bailley brought up the subject of canceling.

“What fun would it be without our Bibi?” he said in that rich baritone that I have always loved listening to on his television show.

“Who would tell us what to savor, what to see?” All very touching questions.

Marlena Chu was quick to agree. “It just wouldn’t be the same,”

she said in an elegant voice, tinged with an accent shaped by her Shanghainese birth, her childhood in São Paulo, her British teachers, and her studies at the Sorbonne. She came from a family of former vast wealth and power, who were reduced on their exodus to South America to becoming merely comfortably well-off. Marlena bought fine art as a professional curator for private collections and commissioned sculptural installations for corporations setting up their international headquarters in far-flung places. I also happened to 3 3

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know that she had a potential new client in Milan. She would have been relieved to have a legitimate reason to cancel the Burma trip.

However, her twelve-year-old daughter, Esmé, who dreamed of helping Burmese orphans and had bragged to her teacher and classmates of this noble cause, would have protested unceasingly had she been told they were now going to fashionable Italy instead.

How I knew all this, I had no notion at first, didn’t even wonder how I knew. But I sensed others as clearly as I sensed myself; their feelings became mine. I was privy to their secret thoughts: their motives and desires, guilt feelings and regrets, joys and fears, as well as the shades of truth within what they said, and what they refrained from saying. The thoughts swam about me like schools of colorful fish, and as people spoke, their true feelings dove through me in a flash. It was that shocking and effortless. The Mind of Others—

that’s what the Buddha would have called it.

Whatever the case, with this enlarged consciousness, I eavesdropped on my friends as they discussed the upcoming Burma trip.

“To tell the truth,” I heard Roxanne Scarangello say, “I’ve been asking myself why I even agreed to go to Burma.” This was a small jab at her husband, Dwight Massey, who had booked them on the trip without gaining her full enthusiasm. It could be argued that she had never said no, not absolutely. While she was busy with a critical part of her research, she told him to make the arrangements but said she wouldn’t mind another trip to the Galápagos, so she could further document ecological changes and their effects on the endemic species of the islands. That was the topic of her forthcoming book. She was an evolutionary biologist, a Darwin scholar, and a MacArthur fellow.

Her husband was a behavioral psychologist who had once been

her student; he was thirty-one, twelve years her junior. His specialization was the neurological differences between males and females,

“often erroneously referred to as differences in mean IQ,” Dwight would say, “rather than different fluencies in regional areas of the 3 4

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brain.” He was now assisting with the research project of another scientist, investigating the means by which squirrels were able to bury nuts in a hundred-some places, without any discernible pattern except a roughly circular one, and then months later find the nuts again. What strategies did females use to bury and find the nuts?

What strategies did the males use? Were they different? Which were more efficient? It was an interesting project, but it was not Dwight’s.

He was an underling. His career thus far had been determined more by the universities where Roxanne was sought.

Dwight had worshipped Roxanne unquestioningly when they first paired up—this was ten years back, shortly after she appeared in
Esquire
’s “Women We Love” issue. He was twenty-one, her brightest student. In recent times he more frequently competed with her intellectually, as well as physically. Both Roxanne and Dwight were appallingly athletic and loved very much to perspire. So they had much in common. But if you were to meet them for the first time, you might think, as I did, that they were an unlikely couple. She was muscular and stocky, round-faced and ruddy-complexioned, with a demeanor that was at once smart and friendly. He was lanky, had sharp-angled facial features that made him look roguish, and his manner seemed combative and arrogant. She evinced confidence, and he acted like the nippy underdog.

“It’s the ethics that bother me,“ Roxanne now said. “If you go to Burma, it’s in some ways a financial collusion with a corrupt regime.”

Marlena stepped in: “Roxanne makes a very good point. When we signed up, it seemed that the regime was improving matters. They were on the verge of some kind of rapprochement with that woman, the Nobel Peace Prize winner—”

“Aung San Suu Kyi,” said Dwight.

“—and to go,” Marlena continued, “when many are honoring the boycott, well, it’s similar to crossing a picket line, I think—”

Dwight cut her off again. “You know what kind of people blindly 3 5

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follow boycotts? Same ones who say that eating hamburgers means you approve of torturing cows. It’s a form of liberal fascism. Boycotts don’t help anyone, not real people. It just makes the do-gooders feel good. . . .” Wherever he really stood on the matter of boycotts, Dwight keenly wanted to make this trip because he had learned only a year before that his great-great-grandfather on his mother’s side had gone to Burma in 1883, leaving his wife and seven children in Huddersfield, a city of industry in Yorkshire. He took a job with a British timber company, and, as the story was reported in the family, he was ambushed by natives on the banks of the Irrawaddy in 1885, the year before the British officially took over old Burmah. Dwight felt an uncanny affinity toward his ancestor, as though some genetic memory were driving him to that part of the world. As a behavioral psychologist, he knew that wasn’t scientifically possible, yet he was intrigued by it, and lately, obsessed.

“What is the point of
not
doing something?” he went on arguing. “Don’t eat beef, feel good about saving cows. Boycott Burma, feel good about not going. But what good have you really done?

Whom have you saved? You’ve chosen to vacation in fucking Bali instead. . . .”

“Can we discuss this more rationally?” Vera said. My dear friend despised hearing people use sexual expletives for emphasis. Invoke religion instead, she’d say to those in her organization—use the

“damn” and “God Almighty” that show strength of conviction. Use the f-word for what it was intended, the deep-down guttural pleasure of sex. And don’t bring it into arguments where hearts and brains should prevail. She was known to have kicked people off projects at work for lesser linguistic offenses. She observed that Dwight was smart and abrasive, and this combination was worse than being simply stupid and annoying. It made people want to pummel him to bits, though they might have agreed with some of what he had to say.

“Sanctions worked in South Africa—” Marlena began.

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“Because the oppressors were white, and rich enough to feel the pinch,” Dwight finished. “The U.S. sanctions in Burma are pretty ineffectual. Burma does most of its trade with other Asian countries.

Why should they care if we disapprove of them? Come on, what’s the incentive?”

“We could reroute to Nepal,” another from our little group said.

That would be Moff, an old friend of Harry’s from boarding school days at École Monte Rosa in Switzerland, which they had attended while their diplomat fathers were assigned to countries without English-speaking schools. Moff was interested in Nepal because he owned a bamboo farm near Salinas, and, as it happened, he had been doing research on harvestable wood products in the Nepal lowlands and the possibility of living there six months out of the year.

His name was actually Mark Moffett, but he’d been known as

Moff since Harry started calling him that in boyhood. The two friends were now in their forties and divorced. For the last four years they had made a ritual of traveling together during winter holidays.

Moff figured that his fifteen-year-old son, Rupert, would love Katmandu as much as he had at that age. But his ex-wife would no doubt throw his Nepalese singing bowls at his balls if he took their son to that “hippie place.” In the custody battle for Rupert, she had accused Moff of being a drug addict, as if he had been smoking crack ’round the clock rather than just taking a few friendly tokes of weed every now and then. It had been a battle to get her to let Rupert go with him to China and Burma for the holidays.

Vera cleared her throat to get everyone’s attention. “My dear fellow travelers, I hate to tell you this, but to change or cancel anything now means forfeiting the entire deposit, which, by the way, is one hundred percent of the cost since we are now just days from our departure date.”

“Good Lord, that’s outrageous!” Harry exclaimed.

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“What about our trip insurance?” Marlena said. “That would

cover it. Unexpected death.”

“I’m sorry to report Bibi didn’t buy any.” Why was Vera
apologizing
for my sake? As everyone murmured varying degrees of shock, dismay, and disgust, I shouted and pounded my fist into my palm to make my point. But no one could hear me, of course, except Poochini, who perked his ears, raised his nose, and yelped as he tried to sniff me out.

“Shush,” Harry said, and when Poochini was quiet for five seconds, Harry stuffed another piece of desiccated liver into my darling’s mouth.

For the record, let me clarify the facts. While I ultimately did not buy the insurance, I most certainly brought the subject up, at least twice. I remember specifically that I went over how much extra per person it was for the insurance, to which Harry had responded with his usual “Good Lord, that’s outrageous.” What did he mean by

“outrageous”? Did he want me to buy the damn insurance or not? I’m not some dog he can train by saying, “Good, Bibi. Shush, Bibi,” until I know what he wants me to do. I then went on to detail the cost for various plans, from simple trip cancellation, through emergency medical evacuation in a helicopter and transfer to a Western hospital.

I explained the variations in policies on preexisting conditions, and whether, for example, a broken bone or a bite from a possibly rabid dog would qualify for evacuation. And who was listening? Nobody except Roxanne’s half sister, Heidi Stark, who worries about
everything
. “Bibi, is there malaria at that time of year?” “Bibi, should we bring anti-venom for snakes?” “Bibi, I read about a woman who got epilepsy from being bitten by a monkey in Madagascar.” On and on she went, until Harry put his hand on her shoulder and said, “Heidi, love, you needn’t be so grim. Why not anticipate an excellent time?”

The trouble was, they
all
anticipated an excellent time. What was grim was forgotten; the encephalitic monkeys were shooed away, as 3 8

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was the need for insurance—that is, until my funeral. Then it became
my
fault that they could not anticipate an excellent time,
my
fault that they could not cancel the trip. How quickly they turned into petulant creatures, as whiny as children following their mother on a hot day of errands.

The hearse rolled, the band marched, and my friends trudged

along the eucalyptus-lined lane, past throngs of gaping people spilling out of the California Academy of Sciences building, the toddlers clinging to their rubber replicas of dinosaurs and shouting with glee to see this unexpected parade.

“Woof-woof! Love your show!” some voices called out.

Harry nodded to his fans. “Quite embarrassing,” he said in a low but pleased voice. With his television smile still affixed, he turned back to our group and, now infused with bravado by public worship, said heroically: “Well, what to do? The deed is done, the die is cast, best to make a go of it, I say. To Burma.”

Vera nodded. “No one could be as wonderful as our Bibi, but

there’s the practical matter of finding another tour leader. That’s the simple imperative.”

“Someone knowledgeable about Burma,” Marlena added. “Someone who’s been many times. That Asian art expert, Dr. Wu, perhaps.

I hear he’s fantastic.”

“Top-notch,” Harry agreed.

“Whoever we get for a tour leader,” Dwight added, “we should have them cut out half of the cultural-museum shit and add in more bicycling or trekking activities instead.”

Heidi chimed in: “I also think we should each research something about Burma, like its history, politics, or culture. Bibi knew so much.”

One by one they acquiesced, but not before offering amendments and disagreements, then even more complicated refinements and caveats—an omen of things to come.

By the time we reached John F. Kennedy Drive, the band was play3 9

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ing a squeaky version of “Amazing Grace” on the two-stringed
erhu
, and I had been forgiven by the group for not having bought trip cancellation insurance. As two motorcycle police held traffic at bay, the hearse sped off, and I bid my body a silent adieu. Then Harry asked the rest of the travelers to join him in a circle for a team high five, intoning, “May Bibi join us in spirit.”

So that was how it came about. They hoped that I would go. How could I not?

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