'So what's not obvious?'
'Cookies,' I said, navigating through the Windows directory tree.
'Come again?'
'Cookies,' I repeated. 'I don't know who named them that. Some developer who watched too much Sesame Street I guess. They're files that your browser writes to your machine if sites request it.'
'Wait a minute. When you go to a web site it can put files on your computer?'
'Not exactly. It asks your browser to store certain information in a safe location on your drive. It can't put a virus on your machine or anything. You can tell your browser not to save them, but that's generally a bad idea.'
'Sounds like a pretty good idea to me,' she said. 'What's the point of these… cookies?'
'Basically they get around the problem that HTTP is a stateless protocol.'
'Paul. English.'
'Well. Basically there's no way of telling when you look at a page if you've looked at it, or other pages on the same site, any time recently, without using cookies. For example if you've already logged in or not. There's ways around this by messing with the URL… sorry, the page address… but cookies are basically easier.'
'Easier for who?'
'Easier for people like me who build web sites.'
'And of course they're the ones who really matter,' she said with heavy sarcasm. 'So did Mr. Jackson leave any interesting cookies on this machine?'
'Can't tell from here,' I said, examining the cookies directory. 'There's some that were modified while he was here, but I'll need time and a real connection to see if they're anything interesting.' The phone lines were back up, so I didn't have to write all the information down, I just zipped up the relevant cookie files and uploaded them to my Yahoo Briefcase repository.
'We're done,' I said.
'That's it? That's what we came for?'
'That's it.'
'Paul,' she said, 'I would just like to remind you that thanks to that ride up here I have taken not one, not two, but three mud baths, and my entire ass feels like a giant oozing blister, and now we are about to ride back down that same road. My point being that if you don't find something useful in those I will punish you severely.'
'Is that a promise?' I asked mock-eagerly, and she cracked a smile despite herself.
'I'd be happy to put it in writing. Now let's get moving. There's a warm bed waiting for me in Mataran, and if you're very good I'll let you sleep in the gutter outside.'
It was the Hotel Zihar, same one I had stayed in what felt like ages ago. We slept there, and in the morning we went to the port and hired a speedboat that took us back to Bali. It was a glorious morning ride. The sun had replaced yesterday's storm, and the sea was surprisingly calm, and the salt air made me feel alive. Everything made me feel alive after the last few days of dancing with death. Overcome with good feeling I turned to Talena when we were halfway there and gave her a bear hug and kissed her on the cheek. She laughed and pulled away… but not, I was pleased to notice, until after a few moments of returning the embrace, and not without pink cheeks. We didn't talk, but we exchanged smiles for the rest of the ride.
In Denpasar we both managed to change our flights to that day, but I was flying Garuda Airlines, and she was flying Cathay Pacific. My flight left first. We hugged quick goodbyes and promised each other we'd meet the next night at the Horseshoe, and I boarded the plane. While Indonesia is a wonderful place I have never been quite so relieved to leave a country.
Part 4
Chapter 18 A Letter From The Man
My second homecoming in the space of two weeks, and this one felt a lot better. I was unemployed, but this made me happy. It helped that I was financially secure for a good six months at least. I had a woman in my life again. OK, nothing had happened between us, and realistically probably nothing was going to happen, but the thought of soon seeing Talena again put a spring in my step. Most importantly, I had nearly died on this most recent trip and every sight, sound, smell, and experience resonated with a new you're-so-lucky-to-be-here-for-this sweetness. I wanted to skip down Haight Street telling everyone I passed 'You're lucky to be alive! We're all so fucking lucky! ' I highly recommend the feeling. Though I can't recommend what I went through in order to feel it.
I ought to market this, I thought to myself. Near-death experiences, preferably in an exotic location and at the hands of a violent madman, culminating in a rescue by a beautiful woman, as a cure for depression. Form a company that specialized in setting this all up, like that Michael Douglas movie, The Game.
Physically I was fine. The bruise behind my knee where Morgan had kicked me was an ugly purple colour but no longer hampered my mobility. Fighting the ocean had been exhausting, but marathon runners go through worse. The Annapurna Circuit had left me in the best shape of my life, and I was recovering in a hurry.
The only fly in my ointment was my memory of what I had thought was my last moment. When I had cringed and whimpered like a whipped dog, instead of fighting, or at least standing coolly up to what I had thought would be the final stroke of Morgan's parang, using my last breath to spit in his face. All my life I'd thought of myself as — well, maybe not a hero, but at least somebody with backbone, with courage. I'd seen a lot of the world, gotten into a lot of dicey situations, and until now I'd felt I'd handled them with sangfroid. But that moment, when for the first time I had thought I wasn't just going to die, I was going to be killed, slaughtered like an animal… I'd crumbled. There was no other way to put it. I had been tested, and I was a coward. In a way it was that which had saved me, and that was something; I had recovered and escaped, and that was something; but still, every time I thought about that moment, I grunted and twitched with shame.
Fortunately it was pretty easy not to think about it. Or to treat it like a bad dream. My week in Indonesia had been so sudden and brief and hyperintense it seemed to exist on a whole different level than all my other memories, to have been detached from the rest of my life, as if it somehow didn't really count.
From Denpasar to Los Angeles I traveled not merely in space but also in time; I left Denpasar at 2:30 PM and got to L.A. at 12:45 PM on the same day. The miracle of time zones and the International Date Line. When I got back to my apartment it was only 3:00 and I felt drained. My system still hadn't adjusted to Indonesia time when I left, and here I was messing it up again. But I had a crepe and a double espresso at Crepes On Cole and went up to my apartment surfing on a caffeine high.
My reflexive desire upon walking in was to check my e-mail, but my employers had repossessed my laptop, so I went to the Cole Valley Copy Shop to use their public terminals instead. Lots of email, most of it spam. I filtered it down to five messages I actually wanted to read; a FuckedCompany sporadic update, chatty e-mail updates from Rick and Michelle, news of a contract job from the only recruiter I trusted, and most interesting of all:
Date: 11/15 14:03 EDT
From: aturner@interpol. org
To: PaulWood@yahoo. com
Subject: Case file opened
Mr. Wood,
Your e-mail of 11/07 was forwarded to me as of 11/09 and I found it credible and deserving of further investigation. On 11/11 while researching our internal infobase I discovered a recently opened South African case file related to the same subject. I have been in contact with Renier de Vries of the Cape Town police, who is
