getting away from my wife for a couple of weeks. His marriage seemed a kind of prison to him. His marriage seemed a deep pit in which he and Judy endlessly circled around Robbie’s unspoken death with knives in their hands.
Drink it down, drink it down.
Poole walked beneath a highway overpass and eventually came to a bridge over a little stream. On the far bank was a hodgepodge village of cardboard boxes, nests of newspaper and trash. This warren smelled much worse than the compound of gasoline, excrement, smoke, and dying air that filled the rest of the city. To Poole’s nose it stank of disease—it stank like an unclean wound. He stood on the quavery little bridge and peered into the paper slum. Through an opening in a large carton he saw a man lying in a squirrel’s nest of crumpled paper, staring out at nothing. A smudge of smoke curled up into the air from somewhere back in the litter of boxes, and a baby cried out. The baby squalled again—it was a cry of rage and terror—and the cry was abruptly cut off. Poole could all but see the hand covering the baby’s mouth. He wanted to wade through the stream and do medicine—he wanted to go in there and be a doctor.
His pampered, luxurious practice also felt like a confining pit. In the pit he patted heads, gave shots, took throat cultures, comforted children who would never really have anything wrong with them, and calmed down those mothers who took every symptom for a major illness. It was like living entirely on Heath Bar Crunch ice cream. That was why he would not let Stacy Talbot, whom he quite loved, disappear entirely into the care of other doctors: she brought him the real raw taste of doctoring. When he held her hand he confronted the human capacity for pain, and the stony questions beyond pain. That was the cutting edge. That was as far as you could go, and for a doctor it was a deep, humbling privilege to go there. Just now this unscientific notion was full of salt and savor, the real taste of things.
Then Poole caught again that cryptic exhalation from this human sewer, and knew that someone was dying, breathing in smoke and breathing out mortality, back in the rubble of packing cases and smudgy fires and bodies wrapped in newspapers. Some Robbie. The baby gasped and screamed, and the greasy smudge of smoke unraveled itself in the heat. Poole tightened his hands on the wooden railing. He had no medicine, no supplies, and this was neither his country nor his culture. He sent a feeble non-believer’s prayer for well-being toward the person dying in the pain and stink, knowing that any sort of well-being would be a miracle for him. This was not where he could help, and neither was Westerholm. Westerholm was an evasion of everything his poor feeble prayer was sent out against. Poole turned away from the world across the stream.
He could not stand finishing out his life in Westerholm. Judy could not stand his impatience with his practice, and he could not stand his practice.
Before Poole stepped off the bridge, he knew that his relationship to these matters had irrevocably changed. His inner compass had swung as if by itself, and he could no longer see his marriage or his medical practice as responsibilities given to him by a relentless deity. A worse treachery now than to Judy’s ideas of success—which were Westerholm’s—was treachery to himself.
He had decided something. The grip of his habitual life had loosened. It was to allow something like this, and to allow Judy to do what she might, that he had accepted Harry Beevers’ absurd offer to spend a couple of weeks wandering around places he didn’t know in search of a man he wasn’t sure he wanted to find. Well, he had seen an elephant in the streets, and he had decided something.
He had decided really to be himself in relationship to his old life, to his wife and his comfortable job. If really being himself put his old life at risk, the reality of his position made the risk bearable. He would let himself look in all directions. This was the best freedom, and the decision allowed him to feel very free.
Michael nearly turned around to recross the wobbly bridge and go back to the hotel and book the next day’s flight to New York. But he decided to continue wandering south for a time on the wide street that ran parallel to the river. He wanted to let everything, the strangeness of Bangkok and the strangeness of his new freedom, soak into him.
He had come upon a tiny, busy fair tucked behind a fence in a vacant lot between two tall buildings. From the street he had first seen the crown of a Ferris wheel, and heard its music competing with hurdy-gurdy music, childish squeaks of pleasure, and what sounded like the soundtrack of a horror movie played through a very poor sound system. Poole walked on a few paces and came to the opening in the fence that admitted people to the fair.
The lot, no more than half a block square, was a jumble of noise, color, and activity. Booths and tables had been set up everywhere. Men grilled meat on skewers and passed them to children, candy makers handed out paper cups of sticky candy, other men sold comic books, toys, badges, magic tricks. At the back of the lot children and adults stood in line to get on the Ferris wheel. At the far right of the lot, other children howled with pleasure or froze in terror atop wooden horses on a carousel. On the lot’s far left had been constructed the gigantic plasterboard front of a castle, painted to resemble black stone and decorated with little barred windows. They suddenly reminded Michael of those in St. Bartholomew’s Hospital; the whole false front of the funhouse reminded Michael of St. Bartholomew’s. Looking up, he could identify the window behind which Dr. Sam Stein sat plotting, the one to the room in which Stacy Talbot lay reading
The huge grey hungry face of a vampire, red-lipped mouth open to expose sharp fangs, had been painted across one side of the plasterboard facade. Bursts of cackling laughter and eerie music came from behind the plasterboard. Horror’s conventions were the same everywhere. Within the funhouse, skeletons jumped out of dark corners and mad leering faces gave the young a reason to put their arms around each other. Warty-nosed witches, sadistic capering devils, and malignant ghosts parodied disease, death, insanity, and ordinary colorless human cruelty. You laughed and screamed and came out on the other end into the carnival, where all the real fears and horrors lived.
After the war, Koko had decided it was too scary out there, and had ducked back inside the funhouse with the ghosts and the demons.
Across the fairground Poole saw another towering Westerner, a blonde woman who must have been wearing high heels to reach her height of about six feet—her hair was rapidly going grey, and had been tied into a braid at the nape of her neck. Then Poole took in the breadth of the shoulders and knew that the person across the fairground was a man. Of course. From the grey in his hair, from his loose embroidered linen shirt and long braid, Poole gathered that this was a hippie who had wandered east and never returned home. He had stayed in the funhouse too.
When the man turned to inspect something on a table Poole saw that he was a little older than himself. The hippie’s hair had receded from his crown, and a grey-blond beard covered the lower part of his face. Oblivious to the alarm bells ringing throughout his nervous system, Poole continued to watch the man as if aimlessly—he noticed the deep lines in the tall man’s forehead, the creases dragging at his wasted cheeks. Poole thought only that the man looked oddly familiar: he thought he must have been someone he’d met briefly during the war. They had met inside the funhouse, and the man was a Vietnam veteran; Poole’s old radar told him that much. Then sensations of both pain and joy jostled within him, and the tall, weathered man across the fairground raised the object he had been examining to within a foot of his face. It was a rubber mask of a demon’s catlike face. The man answered its grimace with a smile. Michael Poole finally realized that he was looking at Tim Underhill.
2
Poole wanted to raise his hand and shout out Underhill’s name, but he made himself keep standing quietly between the vendor of grilled meat and the line of teenagers waiting to get inside the funhouse. Poole finally felt his heart beating. He took in several deep slow breaths to calm down. Until this moment he had not really been certain that Underhill was still alive. Underhill’s face was of a lifeless whiteness that made it clear the man spent very little time in the sun. Yet he looked fit. His shirt was brilliantly clean, his hair was combed, his beard had been trimmed. Like all survivors, he looked wary. He had lost a good deal of weight, and Poole guessed that he’d also lost a lot of teeth. But the doctor in Poole thought that the most visible fact about the man across the fairground was that he was recovering from a good many self-inflicted wounds.
Underhill paid for the rubber mask and rolled it up and slid it into his back pocket. Poole was not yet ready to be seen, and he moved backward into the shadow of the funhouse. Underhill began moving slowly through the crowd, now and then pausing to inspect the toys and books arrayed on the tables. After he had admired and purchased a little metal robot, he gave a last satisfied, amused look at the diversions around him, and then turned
