Poole had no intention of honoring that pledge, but he nodded.
The conga player began singing “Do you know the way to Bras Basah Park?” and Poole left the room.
6
The next morning, half an hour’s walk brought Poole to within sight of a small green triangle of ground set between Orchard Road and Bras Basah Road. He was alone—Conor was too weak from whatever bug had attacked him to have walked the three miles to the park, and Beevers, who had appeared in the coffee shop with bags under his eyes and a red scratch above his right eyebrow, had claimed to think it better for Michael to “feel out” the singer by himself.
Poole understood why Lola had chosen Bras Basah Park for their meeting. It was probably the most public park he had ever seen. Nothing that happened there would be hidden from the buildings on the other sides of the two wide roads, or from the drivers of the cars that ceaselessly swept past. Bras Basah Park was about as private as a traffic island.
Three broad, curving paths of amber brick intersected it and converged at the park’s narrow eastern end, where a wider walkway circled an abstract bronze sculpture and led out past a wooden sign.
Poole walked along Orchard Road until he reached the stoplight that would allow him to cross into the empty park. It was five minutes to eleven.
When he sat down on one of the benches on the path nearest Orchard Road, he looked around, wondering where Lola was now, and if he was watching him from one of the windows facing the park. He knew the singer would make him wait, and wished that he had thought of carrying a book with him.
Poole sat on the wooden bench in the warm sun. An old man tottered by on a stick, and took an amazingly long time to pass before Poole. Poole watched him take his tiny steps past all the benches, past the sculpture, past the sign, and finally out into the middle of Orchard Road. Twenty-five minutes had gone by.
Here he was, sitting alone on a bench on a glorified traffic island in Singapore. He felt, all at once, monumentally alone. He considered the possibility—no, the likelihood—that if he were never to go back to Westerholm the person who would miss him most would be a little girl for whom he could do nothing but buy books.
That was okay. That was all right. He’d miss Stacy too, just as much, if she were to die while he was gone. It was funny, Poole thought: in medical school you learned one hell of a lot about matters of life and death, but you didn’t learn beans about mourning. They didn’t teach you anything about grief. These days, grief seemed one of the absolutely essential human emotions to Dr. Michael Poole. Grief was right up there with love.
Poole remembered standing alone in a hotel room in Washington, watching as a gaudy van crunched in the front end of a dusty little car, remembered walking in brisk cold air alongside whiskery veterans accompanied by Dengler’s double and the ghost of Tim Underhill. He remembered Thomas Strack.
He saw fat ladies waving banners and cold clouds scudding through grey air. He remembered how the names had walked right out of the black wall, and his mouth flooded with the bitter, essential taste of mortality. “Dwight T. Pouncefoot,” he said, and heard the glorious absurdity of that name. His eyes blurred, and he began to giggle uncontrollably.
For some time he went on laughing and crying at once. An extraordinary mixture of feelings had come steaming up through his chest, filling every crevice, leaping every synapse. He laughed and cried, filled with the taste of mortality and grief, which was both bitter and joyous. When the emotion began to fade, he yanked his handkerchief from his pocket, wiped his eyes, and saw beside him on the bench a scrawny middle-aged man who looked like a Chinese Roddy McDowall. The man was watching him with mingled curiosity and impatience. He was one of those men who look like teenagers into their mid-forties, and then suddenly wrinkle into aged boy-men.
Michael took in the man’s brown trousers and pink shirt with its collar carefully folded over the collar of the brown plaid sports jacket, the carefully flattened-down hair, and only then realized that this was Lola in his civilian clothes and out of his makeup.
“I suppose you’re crazy too,” Lola said in a flat accentless voice. His face twitched into a complicated pattern of chips and wrinkles as he smiled. “Makes sense, if you’re a friend of Underhill’s.”
“I was just thinking that only a really terrible war would kill a guy named Dwight T. Pouncefoot. Don’t you agree?” The name brought on another spasm of those radically contradictory feelings, and Poole closed his mouth against an onslaught of mad giggling laughter.
“Sure,” Lola said. Poole let his hands fall into his lap and saw, with a little shock of relief and surprise, that Lola was almost entirely unaffected by his outburst. He had seen worse. “You were in Vietnam with Underhill?”
Poole nodded. He supposed that was all the explanation Lola needed.
“You were close friends?”
Poole said, “He saved a lot of lives in a place called Dragon Valley, just by keeping everybody calm. I guess he was a great soldier. He liked the excitement of combat, he liked being on patrol, he liked that adrenaline rush. He was smart, too.”
“You have not seen him since the war?”
Poole shook his head.
“You know what I think?” Lola asked, and answered his own question as Poole waited. “I think you can’t help Tim Underhill.” He glanced at Poole, then looked away.
“Where did you meet Underhill?”
Lola looked straight at Poole again, his mouth working as if to locate and expel an irritating seed. “At the Orient Song. It’s completely different now—they have tour groups, and a few of the Bugis Street people are paid a few dollars to sit in the back and look dissipated.”
“I was there,” Poole said, remembering the Jaunty Jasmines.
“I know you were there. I know every place you went. I know everything you and your friends did. Many people called me. I even thought that I knew who you were.”
Poole just kept silent.
“He used to talk about the war. He used to talk about you. Michael Poole, right?” When Poole nodded, Lola said, “I think you might be interested in what he used to say about you. He said that you were destined to become a good doctor, marry a perfect bitch, and live in the suburbs.”
Poole met Lola’s grin with his own.
“He said you’d eventually begin to hate the job, the wife, and the place where you lived. He said he was interested in how long it would take you to get there, and what you would do after that. He also said he admired you.”
Poole must have looked startled, because Lola said, “Underhill told me you had the strength to tolerate a second-rate destiny for a long time. He admired that—because he could not, he had to find a tenth-rate destiny, or a twelfth-rate, or a hundredth-rate. After his writing stopped working for him, your friend went in search of the bottom. And people who seek the bottom always find it. Because it’s always there, isn’t it?”
What sent him there, Poole wanted to ask, but Lola went on talking—fast. “Let me tell you about the Americans who came here during Vietnam. These people could not adjust to life in their own country. They felt more comfortable in the East. A lot of them liked Asian women. Or Asian boys, like your friend.” A bitter smile. “A lot of them wanted to be where they thought drugs were plentiful. Most of the Americans who felt that way went to Bangkok, some bought bars in Patpong or Chiang Mai, others got into the drug trade.” He glanced at Poole again.
“What did Underhill do?”
Lola’s face broke into a wilderness of wrinkles. “Underhill was happy with his work. He lived in a tiny room in the old Chinese section, put his typewriter up on a box. Little record player—he spent his money on records, books, Bugis Street, and drugs. But he was a sick person. He loved destruction. You said he was a good soldier. What do you think makes a good soldier? Creativity?”
“But he was a creative person—nobody could say he wasn’t. He even wrote his best books here.”
“He wrote his first book in his head in Vietnam,” Lola said. “He only had to put it down. He sat in his little room, typed, went out to Bugis Street, picked up boys, did whatever he did, took whatever he took, the next morning typed some more. Everything was easy. You think I don’t know? I know—I was there. When his book was finished, he had a big party in the Floating Dragon. That’s when a man I know, a friend of mine named Ong Pin, met
