The Hot Countries (5 page)

4

An Inactive Post

“Varney,” Rafferty says,
dropping his fork and scowling at the slop on his plate. “V-A-R-N-E-Y.”

“And
what
is it you want me to do?” Arthit says. The misunderstanding that divided the two friends during Rafferty's head-on collision with the lethal former soldier and freelance troublemaker Haskell Murphy has dissipated to the point where they can get exasperated with each other without giving offense.

“Hell, I don't know.” Rafferty pushes his chair away from the table to put a safe distance between himself and the food. They're sweltering in a badly air-conditioned restaurant near the station to which Arthit has been assigned by a superior whose ass Arthit pulled out of the fire and who is uncomfortable with the memory of his near humiliation, which he's erasing by banishing the person who witnessed it. Arthit claims that his boss chose this station because it's surrounded by the worst restaurants in the city.

“At any given point in time,” Arthit says, picking through his food as though he expects to find at least one insect, “the range of possible actions facing an individual, while quantifiable, can feel almost infinite. Rather than you sitting there while I try to eliminate the things you
don't
want me to do, why don't you narrow it down a little? So far you've communicated a name, ‘Varney,' which you thoughtfully spelled out for me, and a vague feeling of unease.” He looks up and gives Rafferty a smile that's more muscular than cheerful. “How, exactly, would you like me to abuse my powers to help you with whatever it is?”

Rafferty scrapes the surface of his tongue against his front teeth to scrub the grease off it, with no improvement. He swabs his sweating face with his shirtsleeve. “Since you put it that way, let's change the subject. The last thing I'd want to do is impose on a friend, and I
especially
wouldn't want to make work for a friend who has essentially been transferred to an inactive post—a concept that is uniquely Thai, by the way—and has probably fallen far behind with his report on how many paper clips, staples, and empty ballpoint pens his new police station has.” His irritation, which he's barely bothered to mask, bubbles all the way to the surface. “Forgive me for thinking you might actually want something to do during your workday.”

Arthit idly moves a mystery chunk from one side of his plate to the other and looks longingly out the window, as though he'd prefer to be outside, under the powder-gray sky. “You're in fine spirits today.”

“It's nothing. Well, no, it's something, obviously. This guy Varney—have I mentioned Varney?—is bothering me. There's something wrong with him, with the way he appeared at the bar. And, of course, then there's life. At home, Rose has stomachaches all the time, and her gums are swollen, and she pees every twenty minutes, has a bowel movement every four days, and wants a cigarette every other second. We're all living on yogurt. Miaow is studying the Delsarte method of acting, and she goes around with one hand pressed to her brow, emoting with an English accent. This food is wretched. I'm hot. It's going to rain until the end of time. And, goddamn it, we have to move.” He rocks his chair back until he's leaning against the wall, earning him an urgent
tsk-tsk-tsk
from the waitress, which he ignores. “I've been
happy
in that apartment. I've never been really happy anywhere else in my life, and now there are grape-jelly handprints in the elevator and the building is getting sticky and fly-paperish. It's haunted by decades-old cigarettes.”

Arthit passes a broad, dark hand over his mouth, literally wiping the smile from his face. He looks out the window again, assessing the day, which has grown alarmingly dark. “She's in the second trimester?”

“Well, you know, no host of angels barged in to sing the Annunciation, or if they did, I missed it. Near as she can figure, it's the thirteenth or fourteenth week.”

“Well, see this?” Arthit says. He holds up his left fist, clenched. “Your child is a little smaller than this.” He wiggles the fist back and forth. “He or she has fingernails. Here's something nice. The tail has disappeared.”

“The
tail
—”

“The embryo had a tail for a while. That's the main thing that whole ‘ontology recapitulates phylogeny' idea came from, the old theory that an embryo, as it develops, goes through the evolutionary stages that humans went through: fish, reptile, and so forth. There was the tail, and there were supposed to be gill slits—”

Rafferty brings his chair back down and says, “Since when are you an expert on pregnancy?”

“Since you told me about Rose. I didn't know anything about it before, but Anna has a son, and she's walked me through Rose's pregnancy a week at a time.”

“You guys
talk
about this?” Rafferty is surprised at how touched he is. “When we're not around?”

“You have no idea,” Arthit says. “I've been shown charts and graphs. Ultrasounds on YouTube. You're the second person today to tell me that your wife is constipated.”

Rafferty says, “Gosh.”

Arthit reaches across the table and taps the back of Rafferty's hand with his index finger. “I've wanted to say this for months. Becoming
 . . .
well, friends with Rose has meant a lot to Anna. Even though they're at different—excuse me—social levels.”

“It's not just different,” Rafferty says. “It's a gulf.” Anna was
born into an old, if not rich, family, while Rose is the daughter of an impoverished farmer in the northeast, and she moved even further down the scale when she became, for a year and a half, a sex worker.

“But they're reaching across it, to some extent,” Arthit says, “and it's made a difference to Anna. The deafness sealed her off from people. Her husband's family took the child and threw her away. Now she feels like her world is bigger. There's Rose, you, the kids at Father Bill's. There's Treasure.” He opens his mouth to say something, closes it again, and—it seems to Rafferty—says something else instead. “It's
 . . .
it's
 . . .
well, it's been good to see.” He sniffs in an aggressively masculine fashion that no one could mistake for the sniffle of someone who feels a little misty. Picking up a fork, he spears something with it, puts it into his mouth, and then takes it out with his thumb and forefinger and puts it back on his plate. “This is
awful
,” he says.

“So you can't help me out with Arthur Varney.”

Arthit pushes his plate to the center of the table and drinks some creamy-looking iced coffee. “If I wanted to, which I don't, I could probably go to immigration and find out what his birthday is, where he comes from, and what occupation he lists on his passport. But it wouldn't be worth the effort it would take and the favors I'd owe. Especially since, as we both know, there are passports and there are passports.”

“Why do countries have to be so official?” Rafferty says. “Why can't they be more like high schools or book clubs? You've got a question, you figure out who to ask, and you ask it.”

Arthit flips his heavy watch on its too-big band so that it's faceup, and he looks at it. “You don't actually want me to answer that, do you? I mean, even
your
time is worth something.”

Rafferty sits back and lets his shoulders slump. “I guess.”

“And I don't understand what all the agitation is about. A guy you instinctively dislike knew your name and seems to have asked about you—a bit obscurely, if you want my opinion—when you weren't around. Maybe he really
is
interested in writers. Maybe he's secretly a fan. You must have some fans
somewhere
. And a bar girl looks at you on Patpong. Looking at men is their job.”

“It was the
way
she looked at me.”

“Maybe she was trying to figure out what you are. Thais like to know who we're dealing with, and you're kind of confusing. Thanks to your mother's Filipina blood, you could almost be Asian, but you could also be
farang
. It's like you're wearing two different uniforms—let's say police and army—at the same time. Everybody asks themselves, ‘What the hell
is
he?'”

“I've gotten those stares for years,” Rafferty says. “This was different.” The light in the restaurant goes even dimmer, and he
looks out the window to see a world submerged in a yellowish gloom. The passersby have picked up the pace, many of them glancing at the sky. “Listen, we'd better hurry or we're going to get soaked.”

“I need to talk to you about something,” Arthit says. He takes a breath and then blows it out and shakes his head. “But it'll wait.”

“Until when? Is it important?”

“It is to me. But I don't want to discuss it with someone who's disappointed with the world. It's a topic that requires optimism. Go home, look at your wife and daughter for a while. Think about the baby. When you've stopped feeling sorry for yourself, call me, and we'll set a time.”

“Why not now? Look, I'm all cheered up.”

“Can't now,” Arthit says, getting up. “I have to get back, but more urgently than that, I need the toilet. The guys at the station call this place the ‘Magic Restaurant,' because you always seem to get rid of more than you eat.”

“It wasn't
that
bad,” Rafferty calls after him, although it had been. Seen from behind, Arthit has love handles, something Rafferty has never noticed before. His friend—the closest friend of his adult life—is putting on weight, bad restaurants notwithstanding. Anna, Rafferty guesses, must be feeding him pretty good.

He's eating
, Rafferty thinks gratefully. And then he thinks,
He must be happy
.

5

The Closet of Wonders

He dawdles over
dinner, hoping Rose and Miaow will call an evening's time-out in the Brit Twit Marathon, but they're already anticipating a comeuppance for Mr. Slope, the hypocritical clergyman who blots the nostalgic Eden of Anthony Trollope's Barsetshire. Rafferty could spoil it for them, since he's read the novel twice, but what would he get out of it? They'd just hate him for a few minutes and then decide he's got it wrong and watch it anyway.

Still, he stretches out the chitchat, and for a while he thinks he's snagged Rose's interest as he tells her how Arthit and Anna are following her pregnancy. She's got her chin on her knuckles, her long fingers curved under her palm, her elbow propped next to the bowl of yogurt with orange slices in it, her enthusiasm for yogurt having been supplemented with a craving for oranges that borders on druggy. What he's saying even gets Miaow to look up from the spicy noodles with crisp pork and chilies he picked up for the two of them on the way home.

Miaow says, “
How
big?”

Rafferty says, “Make a fist,” and when Miaow does, he says, “Say hello to your little sister.”

“Or brother,” Rose says.

Looking at her fist, Miaow says, “Hard to believe I was that little.”

“Your body was,” Rose says in Thai. “Your spirit was the same size it is now.”

“You think?” Miaow says.

“Of course.” Rose uses a big spoon to dredge an orange section from the bowl and lifts it to study its color. “Your spirit never changes. In one lifetime after another, your spirit is the light you're wrapped around.”

“So,” Rafferty says, at a loss. He feels unqualified to participate when they discuss spirit; his parents' generic, workday Protestantism didn't give him the vocabulary for it. “According to Arthit, that's what you're toting around this month. Something that big.”

Rose says, with a glance in his direction that's so quick he's not even sure he saw it, “Could be two.” She puts the orange into her mouth.

Rafferty says, “Excuse me?”

Rose shrugs, straight-faced, but he sees the flicker in her eyes. “It runs in my family,” she says around the piece of orange, as though they've talked about it for weeks. “My father was a twin, and so was my mother's father.”

Miaow, who not too long ago had hated the idea of even one new child coming into the family, says, “Cool.”

Rafferty says, “This is nothing you thought was worth bringing up before?”

“It never seemed like the right time.” She's still speaking Thai. “How are your noodles?”

“Who cares about my noodles? How can you tell? We should find out. What about, you know, whatever it is, where they take a picture of it with—”

“Ultrasound,” Rose says. “I don't want one. I want to be surprised.” She picks up her napkin and folds it in half, then passes the crease between her fingernails to sharpen it. In English she says, “Don't you
want
two?”

“Well,” Rafferty says, “I mean, sure, two sounds fine, I mean, it sounds like
 . . .
”

Rose uses the folded napkin to blot her lips, although she's not wearing lipstick. “Like?”

“Like a lot of babies,” Rafferty says. He holds up a hand. “Wait. Just wait. You can't just tell a guy that he's suddenly got armfuls of children when—”

“There are triplets on my mother's side,” Rose says.

Miaow laughs a mouthful of noodles onto her plate.

“Right,”
Rafferty says. “Why not quints? Why not nine? We could have a baseball team.”

“The twins aren't a joke,” Rose says. “I might have twins.”

“Well,” Rafferty says.

Now they're both looking at him.

“Sounds exciting,” he says. “Really. Honest.”

Rose is watching him closely, as though, after all these years, Mr. Hyde is finally beginning to emerge. “You don't
want
two babies, do you?”

“Sure I do,” Rafferty says. “I just thought we'd have them one at a time, like other people.”

“Will they be identical?” Miaow asks. “You know, like a set?”

Rose says, “My mother's father looks just like his brother.”

“My, my, my,” Rafferty says. “Isn't life
interesting
?”

Miaow snickers in a way she knows he finds irritating.

Rose has lowered her eyes, closing him out, as she fishes in the bowl for another bit of orange. “Are you going back to that bar tonight?”

Even
this
is safer ground. “Depends. Are you going to watch
Barchester Towers
?”

“Sure,” Miaow says.

Rose says, “I like the bad priest.”

Rafferty says, “Then I guess I'll go hang with my posse.”

“It was inevitable,” Varney is saying, waving the hand with the beer in it, “that people back then would have created the Delsarte method, or something like it.” He's picked up a shred of conversation Rafferty fumbled, and he seems dead set on carrying it all the way to the end zone. “It's acting
pre
-psychology.
Pre-Freud, pre-Jung. It was the age of phrenology, when a head doctor analyzed character by the bumps on the outside of the skull. The
outside
.”

“Outside,” Hofstedler responds politely, but the glance he gives Rafferty isn't a grateful one. The men in here can relate to the hot countries; nineteenth-century acting isn't even on their horizon.

Thanks to the downpour, the bar is almost empty—no guy whose name might be Ron, no Growing Younger Man, none of the occasionals: just Rafferty, Campeau, Hofstedler, Varney, and Toots. The rain is hammering down outside, the night-market vendors perched on their molded plastic chairs beneath the blue tarp, blowing smoke into the rain and peering down the deserted street.

Varney says, “People knew
how
their friends and enemies behaved, but not
why
, right? No complexes, no subconscious, no past trauma. People were defined from the outside, by their roles in life: noble, peasant, servant, merchant, mother, soldier. You acted on a stage by doing an imitation. The very word ‘act' suggests imitation, not insight. Put the character on like a costume. The Friar's robes. Lear's crown. The villain's mustache,” he says, tugging on one end of his own. “If you're a boy in Shakespeare's company, Juliet's gown.”

Rafferty says to Hofstedler, not making much of an effort to lower his voice, “How's Wallace?”

“Not good,” Hofstedler says, sotto voce, politely keeping his eyes on Varney. “Forgets where he lives, yes? Talks always about some girl from sixty years ago. Name is Jah. Jah, Jah, Jah.”

Varney says, “Sorry?”

“I was agreeing only,” Hofstedler explains. “I say,
‘Ja, ja.'
”

“'Cause, I mean, I'd hate to bore you.” Varney shows his big yellow teeth in a smile that demonstrates how much he'd hate to bore them.

“Nein,”
Hofstedler says. He gets more German when someone opposes him. “Acting from two hundred years ago, very interesting. Yes, something I wonder about frequently.”

The door opens, letting in the rattle of rain and a tiny climate of hot, wet air, and everyone in the bar turns to see a small boy drip his way in. He's eight or nine, hunger thin, wearing a sopping, too-big T-shirt that makes his neck look even frailer than it is. His amateur buzz cut, possibly self-inflicted, is all different lengths and sparkles with drops of water. He gives the room a quick glance, goes straight to Rafferty, and lifts himself on tiptoe to slap something down on the bar. A second later the door closes behind him.

“Your birthday?” Campeau says.

“It's not
just
from two hundred years ago,” Varney says, as though there's been no interruption. He's responding to Hofstedler, but his eyes are on Poke. “It was the way the Greeks acted their plays. It's the style you see in silent movies. It's Noh, it's Kabuki, it's the style of temple dance, all over Asia.”

Rafferty tries to open the envelope in the conventional way, peeling back the flap, but the paper is too cheap, and the whole thing pulls apart in his hands. He has to worry it away from the folded sheet, thicker and heavier, inside.

“Nineteenth-century ballet, opera—it's all Delsarte,” Varney says, apparently armed with a month's worth of material. “Classical painting and sculpture. The
Pietà.
The pose is everything.”

Rafferty recognizes the heavy piece of paper as coated stock, meaning it has a slightly shiny layer of clay on one side of it, which allows colors to be printed brilliantly but turns into a kind of stickum when it gets wet. While it's still folded, Rafferty can see that whatever is written on the other side is in black and seems to be a single word in reasonably large type. Varney's voice drones on, something about the vocabulary of emotion and how so many of the expressions we still use—“stiff with fear”
is the one Rafferty catches—are external descriptions of internal processes.

He pries the paper open, a bit at a time, until he's looking at the type. It says:

$3,840,000

A sort of high-blood-pressure hiss fills his ears, drowning out both Varney's voice and some quarrelsome interjection from Campeau, who's been acting increasingly fed up. The number is a sum Rafferty has thought about a hundred, two hundred times since the night a house belonging to a man named Haskell Murphy caught fire and blew up. A house that had contained plastic explosives, three-dimensional models of well-planned atrocities to advance some obscure political agenda, a brutally abused child, and six hard-sided military briefcases, battlefield rated and practically indestructible, each stuffed full of tightly banded hundred-dollar bills. The cases had been stacked tidily on the floor of a closet, next to a cache of explosives wrapped in some kind of rubberized sheet.

The number on the sheet of paper is Rafferty's estimate of the total in the six cases, based on the one briefcase he'd taken with him, which had contained exactly $640,000.

The cases had all been packed identically, the band around each stack of hundreds helpfully announcing the total as $10,000. He's found himself doing this multiplication in the middle of the night, while making coffee, walking on a sidewalk, having a conversation. It always comes out the same.

He sits back from the bar, looking not at the number but the paper. The fold is precise, letter style, creating equal thirds. The numbers are centered on the page.

The
numbers
—

Campeau says to Varney, “Jesus, you got a lot of crap in your head.” It doesn't sound like a compliment.

“Guilty,” Varney says cheerfully. “It's a curse, I suppose.”

“Buncha useless fucking knickknacks,” Campeau grumbles.

—the numbers are very black. They have the resolute unambiguity of a computer printout, which is what they are. They read three million, eight hundred and forty thousand dollars, and nothing else. Three million, eight—

Hofstedler says, “You are saying what, Poke?”

“Sorry,” Poke says. “Nothing.” He folds the paper, watching his hands shake and trying to still them.

Varney is saying, “
 . . .
like the old cabinet of curiosities, just a room full of stuff, not categorized, not classified, something feathery here, something shiny there—”

“The
Kunstkammer
,” Hofstedler offers. “The closet of wonders. The paw of a monkey, a map of hell, a footprint from a million years ago, books, clockworks, paintings, the twisted horn of a narwhal—”

“That's it,” Varney is saying. “The museum before there were museums. Odds and ends, this and that. Facts, ideas, fantasies. Rocks and bottles.”

Rafferty is half listening and half back in that night of flood and death and flames, the battered girl Treasure running into Murphy's burning house, reflected upside down in the black water until the moment it breathed in for the last time and blew, pieces thrown a hundred feet into the air, fire raining down around him.

When he had finally clawed his way out of there that night, away from the heat and smoke, he had that one briefcase in the trunk of his car. The money, most of it, is still hidden in a hundred places in the apartment he shares with Rose and Miaow. He had thought it was over.

He had been wrong.

“Having a bag full of facts,” Campeau says. His voice sounds like the scratch of a striking match. “What's it mean? It ain't the same as wisdom.”

“No,
Bob
, it's not the same,” Varney says. “Facts are just things—any kind of thing: could be a handful of cards, a couple pieces of metal, a wad of cotton, some black powder.”