The new boss with the laptop had his hands on everything. I used to call him “du-ma-nhieu” behind his back. He had a mobile cellphone and partners on every continent. He would find somebody for you as far away as Alaska. But I didn’t want to find my mother and father any more. I told him that. I was finished with that long ago. You should see our crew of monks, orange-gowned and macerated, we moved like a dust cloud. But we had uzis and palm pilots. We controlled the unofficial refugee trade from Malaysia and Thailand to China and out; we hacked into offshore bank accounts. Of course, other residuals and commodities came our way. Use your imagination. We exported the I Ching for idiots and took a shared interest in pirated Thoughts of Mao Tse-tung and replicas of Michael Jackson’s Thriller album. In our dim corner of the world we unravelled languages while we traded in everything from plastic hair combs to liberated Ford Broncos from New York. You may not understand this, but the world came to us and we ate.
The monk with the laptop was a dangerous man until he fell in love with the girl sewing tongues into Brooks high tops. When he looked at her ravaged fingers, it became personal. We blew up a factory, and the girl dropped him for ruining her life. She had the police hunting us down because we made it political. It’s all right when the economic wheels are turning—theft is nothing—but turning principled is another matter. You have to know how to run your life, you have to take the highs with the lows. Never get used to an easy life—it’ll slip out from under you any time. Years, years we spent living well, under the radar, then he goes and does this thing. So I had to find another way; it was getting ideological. I didn’t want to make it into the newspapers any more. I stole the laptop and the cellular and cut out on a boat to Fushen. Hopped a freighter and ended up on the Pacific coast of Canada with some teenaged girls heading for the tenderloin district of San Fransisco. I’m doomed to boats.
You want to know how I felt? Did I grow, did I believe, was I hopeful, was this a journey to start a new life? How could I have betrayed the new boss, how could I steal from him, am I redeemable? Did I have a moment of revelation? Can I turn my life around? You’re better at that.
For some of us, the world is never forgiving. And anyway, we don’t believe in such things, these ideas of forgiveness, redemption—it’s useless. That high-tech monk is probably dead by now and has figured out another incarnation.
The ship ran aground in the Juan de Fuca Strait. I bailed out. Me and some others hit land before the Coast Guard came. The laptop and the cellular were wrapped in oilskin. I knew they would be my collateral. “The danger of the sky is that we cannot climb up into it; the danger of the earth is the mountains, rivers, and hills—constant pitfalls—seek and you gain a little.”
By now the monk was a blade of grass, but he had kept files. There were correspondences on the laptop, letters from and letters to. Some woman had been sending letters to the new boss for years, searching for a boy. There was a network of middlemen and pharmacists, payoffs and bribes that the monk had a hand in. Someone was searching for their sister, someone else for a grandfather. “For the weak at the outset, good luck is a matter of following along.” How was the monk supposed to find them? Boys would not be boys any more, this sister not a sister, this grandfather is a pile of dust. But they kept writing, and the monk kept taking, and sending hope from Klong Toey. Sometimes he may have found someone, but they had to pay too. Hitchhiking the Trans-Canada Highway, I knew the laptop was my capital.
My body keeps moving out of wilfulness. What is physical is uncontrollable. If I didn’t have to take a piss, the Mounties would never have caught me. There’s my face again in the cameras of the world. This time I’m ducking, shielding it with my handcuffed wrists. Looking better, looking better, though. Only biding time. They gave us orange overalls. The men and the girls. I suppose it’s a blankness of another kind. I suppose it’s the same picture as at Pulau Bidong those many years ago. But I can’t complain. There’s something to anonymity, stereotype, being part of the hordes. It can be a camouflage. Let others try to escape it.
Let them complain. I’ll slip into it and disappear. Did I tell the Amnesty people who I was? Who I’d been? No. What for? To complicate things? Let them have their picture, I say. Yes, I’m innocent of all things. Yes, I’m guilty of all things.
When they relaxed the detention rules, I took off with two girls worth eighteen thousand dollars apiece. Thirty-six thousand on delivery to Margaret Yao in Toronto. I searched quickly for the laptop, which had been confiscated. One of the girls found it, while the other one chatted up a guard. Then, waiting for early-morning changeover, we ran off.
There were fears and figures and dates in that computer and then there were those stories which I must confess I found seductive. The transactions that the monk made in identity. Everything is mystery. As cold as those dealings were, the way he wrote those stories was poetry. I suspect he and I were brothers beyond what we told each other. But perhaps not. He was sentimental, after all. Look how he got caught up in that factory girl’s life. When
