When I called Kim, she answered on the third ring and told me this wasn’t a good time. I asked if she had company. She was noncommittal, a sure sign that one of my colleagues, or one of hers, was lying in bed beside her. I said it was important, and she said, “Hang on.”
I pictured her slipping into a robe, soothing the ruffled sensibilities of her lover, and carrying the phone into the living room. When she spoke again, her tone was exasperated.
“You don’t call for three weeks, and now you just have to speak to me?” she said. “I got so worried I called Andy [my agent], and of course you’d called him. This is so typical of you.”
I apologized.
“Are you in trouble?” she asked. “Do you want to run off to Bali with some teenage nymph and jeopardize everything we’ve built together?”
“It’s not that.”
“Because if that’s the case, I’m sick and tired of having to coax you back. I’m ready to give you my blessing.”
“It’s not that! Okay? I want you to do me a favor. Andy was going to make copies of
“I don’t know. You have a package from him. I put it with the rest of your mail.”
“That’s probably it. Could you take a look?”
While she checked, my eyes returned to the barge. A number of women were kneeling on the foredeck, painting signs for a protest, and others had gathered in the bow, listening to a speaker who was talking into a hand-held megaphone, doing a bit of consciousness-raising. Now and then her high-pitched voice blatted out and there was a squeal of feedback.
“It’s here,” Kim said. “Do you want me to express it?”
“I want you to read it.”
“Thomas, I don’t have the time.”
“Please. Read it …as soon as possible. I can’t talk to you about what’s happening until you’ve read it.”
There was a silence, and then she said, “Andy told me you were developing some worrisome obsessions about the book.”
“You know I’m a …”
“Just a second.”
A man said something in the background; after that I heard nothing. When Kim came back on, she said with anger in her voice, “You have my undivided attention.”
“Sorry.”
“It’s not important. You were saying?”
I’d lost the thread, and it took me a second to pick it up.
“I’m not the kind of guy who’s likely to lose it,” I said. “You know that.”
“Are you doing a lot of drugs?”
“Did Andy say he thought I was?”
“Not in so many words, but …yeah.”
“Well, I’m not. There are some strange correspondences, very strange, between the book and what’s going on here. I need another point of view.”
“All right. I’ll read it Wednesday night. I can’t until then. Tomorrow’s a nightmare.”
A drop of sweat trickled into my eye, and I wiped it away. Not even eight-thirty, and the temperature was already into the nineties. I felt a sudden upsurge of emotion and realized how much I missed Kim. Though I had tried to throw my heart in a new direction, though Lucy was an interesting woman and, without doubt, more sexually adventurous than Kim, I was ready for some home cooking, and I asked Kim if she was planning to meet me in Saigon.
“If you still want me to,” she said.
We discussed when she would come, at which hotel she should stay, and spent some time repairing the rift in the relationship. I was so consoled by the familiarity of her voice, so excited by the predictable promise it conveyed, I suggested that we could marry in Saigon, a suggestion she did not reject out of hand, saying we should table the matter until she arrived. I thought we both had concluded that these adventures, these dalliances no longer served a purpose—they had become interruptions in our lives, and it was time we moved on. Yet when I hung up, it was as though I had cut myself off from her. I felt a total lack of connection and regretted having mentioned marriage. I went into the bow and asked Lan if we could head south in the morning. He sat facing the river and its farther shore, his legs dangling over the side of the houseboat, wearing a grease-stained pink T-shirt and shorts; he pushed a shock of gray hair from his eyes and peered up at me like an old turtle, blinking, craning his stiff neck.
“Anytime,” he said. “Need provisions.”
“Send Deng into town.”
He chuckled, showing his gapped yellow teeth. “Deng.”
“What’s so funny?” I asked.
“Gone. You scare him. He tells me you are a bad man. He says a bad man is unlucky for people around him.”
I thought Deng’s leaving probably had more to do with Lucy than with his perception of my character. “You don’t believe that, do you?”
“Maybe,” said Lan.
“Then why haven’t you deserted?”
“No reason.” He fixed his eyes on a barge loaded with crates chugging upstream, crapping an oil slick and black fumes. “Need provisions,” he said.
That afternoon, under an overcast sky, we visited a market on the outskirts of the city, a place where the pavement ended and green countryside could be seen off along the main road; the streets widened to form an open area—a square, if you will—of tapioca-colored dirt amid dilapidated buildings, none more than two stories tall. Infirm-looking, vertically compromised stalls of weathered wood were clumped alongside the buildings, pitched at eccentric angles. If you squinted and let your eyes slide out of focus, they resembled old, hobbling, gray-skirted women, some leaning together, who had paused for breath during a constitutional and never stirred again. The majority of the stalls were the offices of fortune-tellers, and this was the reason for our visit: Lucy’s favorite fortune-teller could be found there. Why she picked him out of all the fortune-tellers in Phnom Penh, I hadn’t a clue. He offered no complicated graphs and charts to demark your fate, as did many. His method was to rub dirt into her palm to make the lines stand out and mutter abstractions about her future until she was satisfied. Perhaps appearance played a part in her choice. Iron-gray hair hair fell in tangles over his chest and shoulders, and tattoos, faded to intricate blue scratchings, wrote an illegible legend on his arms, chest, neck, and forehead. He had a wispy goatee, wore a wraparound that covered his loins, and could usually be found smoking a cigar-sized spliff, which may have accounted for his benign gaze. His colleagues, most neatly dressed in western-style clothing, free of tattoos and spliffs, gave him a wide berth.
While Lucy consulted her wizard and Riel dawdled at a stall that sold cheap jewelry, I walked through thin crowds along one of the market streets leading off the square and, after a bout of token haggling, bought a U.S. army-issue Colt .45 and six clips of ammo from an arms dealer. Though old, the weapon appeared to be in good working order. The dealer encouraged me to test fire it, but I was afraid that I might be reported—I had no conception of the legalities attendant upon buying a gun. I tucked the pistol into my waist, beneath my shirt, and hustled back toward the square. A block along from the arms dealer, I stopped dead in my tracks. Standing in the doorway of a building on the corner was a bearded man dressed identically to me—shorts, sandals, a black T-shirt —and with an identical (as far as I could determine from a distance of forty feet) face and build. I imagined that we wore the identical stunned expression. We locked gazes for a moment, and as I hurried toward him, he ducked into the interior of the building. I raced after him, through the door and into the midst of twenty or thirty people slurping noodles at wooden tables, nearly knocking over a waitress who carried a load of dirty dishes. Her irritation gave way to confusion. She glanced toward the kitchen, then at me, and that told me all I needed to know. I ran through the kitchen and out onto the street behind the restaurant. There was scant pedestrian traffic—some kids kicking around a soccer ball, two women talking, a man looking under the hood of a beat-up yellow Toyota—and no sign of
