pass through, opens in the left gate. On the other side of the door stands a short, slender, dark-complected man in a pale yellow shirt and triple-pleated, salmon-colored golf slacks.
“Please,” he says in English, “come in, come in.”
The door in the gate clangs closed, and the slender man in the bright clothes climbs into a little white electric golf cart that has been remodeled to look like a very large and steroidal swan. One wing is improbably upraised to shade the passengers. All that Rafferty can see as the cart whirs into motion is greenery, thickly tangled and thorny, a second wall. At the wheel of the cart, the slender man says, without turning to Rafferty, “I am Dr. Ravi.”
“I recognized your voice from the phone,” Rafferty says. Dr. Ravi’s receding hair makes his noteworthy nose seem even larger. His entire face points forward, like a 1950s hood ornament.
“I’m often told I have a distinctive voice,” Dr. Ravi says. “I think it’s the influence of Cambridge.”
Arthit also went to school in England, but his linguistic suitcase isn’t packed with such plummy vowels and half-chewed consonants.
“Sounds like you were there for years.”
He gets a quick glance, but the wall of foliage is upon them. Dr. Ravi slows the cart, slides a hand into his pocket, and brings out a slim remote, which he points at the green barrier. A portion of it detaches itself and begins to swing inward.
Rafferty says, “ Lot of protection.”
“Human nature,” Dr. Ravi announces gravely, “is to want.”
“I’ve noticed.”
The paved track they’re following describes a slow turn through the tangle of scrub, and the view widens suddenly. Rafferty stifles the urge to gasp.
They are entering the Garden of Eden.
The cart passes through a flaming gate, from the top of which a gigantic hand points a single finger outward. The flames are made of gold, beaten thin and curled into phantasmagorical shapes. Large red stones glow at the base of the flames, simulating coals. On the far side of the gate are green, gentle hills, pools complete with swans, ferns, and willows, and, in the center of the garden, an artificial apple tree hung with glistening red and green fruit. A gleaming silver snake curls around the trunk of the tree. It has a red apple in its jaws.
Rafferty says, “Um.”
“The first paradise,” Dr. Ravi says.
From several hundred possible questions, Rafferty randomly chooses one. “How did he get the apples to glow like that?”
“That’s what everyone asks,” says Dr. Ravi smugly. “The red ones are covered in tiny rubies, thirteen or fourteen hundred on each. The green ones are made with emeralds.”
“It’s like a fundamentalist theme park,” Rafferty says maliciously. “Faith World.”
Dr. Ravi says, “Hardly,” in a voice like a pair of tin snips.
A brace of peacocks wander by, the males wasting their time trying to dazzle each other.
“I didn’t know there were unicorns in the Garden of Eden.”
“Obviously there weren’t,” Dr. Ravi says. He’s still offended. “Or they’d exist today, wouldn’t they? One assumes that God works in first drafts and doesn’t revise, or there wouldn’t have been such a flap about evolution. But this is Khun Pan’s Eden, and he wanted unicorns.”
Rafferty watches the apple tree recede. The bed of deep green moss that surrounds it looks like it was created to be reclined upon. “Is Eve home?”
Pursed lips and a pause. “On occasion.”
“I’d like to see that.”
“I rather doubt that you will.”
The narrow road they are navigating is so smooth and the cart so silent that Rafferty has the illusion of being towed over ice. “Why Mesopotamia? Why Eden? Why not something Thai?”
The pursed lips again. “If you had done any research this morning, you would know that Khun Pan enjoys annoying certain people. Spending this kind of money to re-create the Judeo-Christian paradise in a Buddhist society…well, it…it-”
“It pisses people off.”
“And occasionally he opens the grounds for a charity event. Tonight, for example. It’ll draw movie stars, television crews, newspapers, and pour more salt into the wounds of the wellborn. All of this did not come cheap,” Dr. Ravi says. He allows the corners of his mouth to lift, revealing unexpected dimples. “If it doesn’t upset people repeatedly, it’s not cost-effective.”
For the second time, Rafferty catches a whiff of something that is quite distinctly not the perfume of paradise. “What am I smelling?”
The smile, such as it is, reappears. “That’s the
“I’m not expecting a corsage.”
“He seems to regret the entire evening. And especially you.”
“Oh, fuck him,” Rafferty says, and Dr. Ravi’s startled sideways glance makes the cart swerve. “I’ll give him whatever he gives me. And something really stinks. It smells like-”
The furrows in Dr. Ravi’s brow are so pronounced that he looks like a basset hound. “I’m quite serious. He’s not at his best this morning. I would avoid offending him.”
“Or what?” Rafferty says. “That’s the question of the day. Or what?”
Dr. Ravi says, “Oh, dear.”
“What do you care? I suppose you have to put up with him, but that’s not my problem. And you know what? You don’t actually have to put up with him. There are lots of jobs for a broad-voweled Oxford graduate like you.”
“ Cambridge.”
“Just checking.”
“You really are a disastrous choice. I don’t know what he was thinking.” The cart crests the hill, and Dr. Ravi says, “There it is. Your other creation myth.”
At the foot of the gradual downslope before them gleams a white marble mansion, a Parthenon of twenty or twenty-five rooms, marble columns and all. In front of it is a small, rickety, blow-the-house-down northeastern farm village: four raggedy stilt houses and a rice paddy half the size of an Olympic swimming pool. A bamboo fence surrounds a churned-up sea of filth in which five mammoth pigs wallow. From the sheer volume of the stink, rich enough to thicken the air to an unwholesome syrup, it’s clear that the pen has not been mucked out in some time. During Rafferty’s weeks in Rose’s village, he has become familiar with pigsties.
“It’s not usually this bad,” Dr. Ravi says, averting his face from the smell without taking his eyes off the road. The paved track, Rafferty sees, will take them past the pigsty before delivering them to the classical pretension of the front porch. “As I said, he’s got an event tonight, an antimalaria fund-raiser, and lots of the big folks will come. He likes to let it all ripen when they’re here.”
“My wife says he rubs their noses in it, but I didn’t know she meant literally.”
“Your wife is Thai?”
“As Thai as tom yum kung.” Tom yum kung is the national soup, eaten everywhere.
“Was she poor?”
Rafferty glances over at Dr. Ravi, but he seems to be giving all his attention to the task of steering the cart. “Very.”
“Then she’ll appreciate this,” he says as the stench envelops them. “The pigs are named after our last five prime ministers.”
After the scrambled symbolism of the grounds, the house is just another ordinary Greek Revival mansion roughly the size of the Taj Mahal. Rafferty follows Dr. Ravi across gleaming marble floors until they reach the big, closed double doors at the back of the house.
