“What about you, Mister Christopher? Mi-Hi always talk about you.”
“That depends,” the Englishman says, calling after Ray. “Mr. Moneybags! Are you paying for our dances too?”
Ray continues toward the dance floor without looking back, using the hand that isn’t attached to Sunny to acquaint the Englishman with his middle finger. “I take that as a no,” says the Englishman.
“Next time,” says Miss Suzie.
“Except for the tragic-looking guy!” Ray yells back from the dance floor. “He gets whatever he wants!”
Miss Suzie turns to me. “He mean you?”
“No, not me.”
“What kind of girl you like?”
“Right now? I don’t know if I like girls at all right now.” She squints at me with a professional eye.
“No. You like girls. Just wrong girls. Wrong girl.”
“Impressive.”
“I know,” she says, holding my stare. “Don’t worry. You find right girl. Maybe you dance with me tonight?”
“I’m flattered,” I say. “In America, the men have to ask the women.”
“So ask me, then. Go on. Your friend say it okay.”
“Ask me after I’ve had another few of these,” I say, raising my cup of yellow. She winks at me and moves on to another table. The Englishman, struck by a fit of acid-induced chattering, spends the next twenty minutes listing the pros and cons of maintaining intimate relations with three different women in three different countries. There seem to be a lot more cons, and I tell him so.
“You may be right,” he says. “But we’re men.
What choice do we really have?”
Ray returns to the table once to drop off his belt pack and toss back an orange. The rest of the time, he and Sunny are the king and queen of this debaucherous prom. The Steve Winwood song on the speakers feels totally out of place, but that doesn’t stop Ray from doing his Saturday Night Fever thing, lifting Sunny off the ground and spinning her around his shoulders. The soldiers applaud. Gene and the English-man are too busily engaged in conversation to notice, a heated discussion over a secret worldwide conspiracy involving something called the Bilderberg Group.
Janie’s busy too, rooting through Ray’s belt pack.
“What the fuck are you doing?” I ask.
Janie leaps back like I’ve slapped her. “Just, you know, looking. I’m sorry. I’m nosy.”
“Did you take my wallet?”
“No.” I examine Janie’s face for signs of guilt.
She stares back at me with LSD eyes, twin lumps of charcoal, burnt out and extinguished, a sarcastic reminder of K.’s radioactive blues.
We manage to finish the yellow and the orange and, after a mock parliamentary debate over the merits of each, order and drain another orange. We are thoroughly smashed, although to be honest, the three acid-trippers are handling their booze a lot better than Ray and me.
Ray finally staggers back to the table, a clearly delighted Sunny in tow. “Let’s blow this clambake!”
he yells. We’re rising to our feet to go when the music screeches to a complete stop.
Conversations are abandoned mid-sentence.
Someone draws thick black curtains over the plateglass windows.
“What’s going on?” I whisper to Janie.
“Military police,” she whispers back.
“I thought this was all legal.”
“American military. There’s a curfew or something.” I look over at the table of soldiers, currently subdued but ready to explode at any moment into laughter, violence, or both. A nervous glance at the Motorola tells me it’s four in the morning: My return flight departs in only five hours. I mouth a silent prayer. I do not want to be detained.
Please God, let me make that flight.
The patrol passes without further incident. The curtains reopen and the sound system springs back to life. Our momentum toward the door resumes as well. Ray hands a large wad of bills to Miss Suzie, who smiles at me on the way out.
“Maybe next time,” she says.
I nod, too drunk to come up with anything clever.
We empty into the street. The rain has let up, but the streets still glisten. The air feels cleaner. The roads are nearly empty, save for a few scattered men passed out over the handlebars of their motor scooters, survivors of the drinking circles I’d witnessed earlier.
We move like a pack of wolves. Gene and the Englishman are the advance scouts, chasing each other down the streets with an energy verging on sexual, at least for Gene. Ray and Sunny are the alpha dogs, king and queen, still dancing down the street. Ray serenades her with an old song I half recognize. Sunny, thank you for the truth you let me see/Sunny, thank you for the facts from A to Z…. Sunny, a stranger to our alphabet, basks in the attention. Janie and I make up the rear. At some point she loops her arm around mine. I don’t stop her.
Gene breaks from his scouting and does a sort of jig in front of Ray and Sunny. He’s grinning like a madman. “Am I going to see you two do some fuck-ing?”
“No you will fucking not, you goddamn fairy,” replies Ray.
Gene giggles. “Maybe I’ll trade beds with Chris.
That way I’ll be riiight beneath you.”
I sense a shift in Ray’s mood. “Back off, Gene,” I say. “Mr. Moneybags doesn’t have to rub elbows or any other parts of his body with our sorry asses.
He’s staying at the Four Seasons.”
Ray stops as quickly as if he’d been punched in the gut. “Fuck.”
“You’re not staying at the Four Seasons?”
“Devi told me to cancel my room. ’Cause I’d be staying with her, right? Why waste all that money when I could be supporting some family of six in Nepal? Enough cow dung to last two winters …
That fucking bitch!”
We idle for a while until the news settles in. The English-man finally breaks the silence. “Bollocks,” he says solemnly to Ray. “I guess Gene’s going to get to see you fuck after all.”
Sunny’s face clouds with confusion, her disposition, for the first time tonight, at odds with her name. “How much farther is this place, anyway?” Ray barks at no one. “I’m getting a fucking cab.” He drags Sunny toward an intersection with a higher concentration of motor traffic.
The Englishman catches up to them. “In all seriousness, mate, you’re not going to bring her back to the hostel.”
“Why not?” demands Ray.
“It’s against the rules.”
Ray reaches the intersection and flags a passing cab. “Fuck the rules.” He guides Sunny into the car and looks at me. “Hurry up.”
My arm is still intertwined with Janie’s. I could let go and sprint toward the cab, were I that kind of asshole. Instead, I split the difference, half-jogging as fast as her little legs will allow. Gene and the Englishman interpret my drunken chivalry as an open invitation. They race toward the cab, piling in before we can.
The cabdriver glares skeptically at the six figures crammed in his backseat. He’s even more concerned when we tell him we’re going to the Superior Guesthouse. “You ditch fare,” the driver says, his voice clearly singed by experience.
Ray searches for his wallet — no easy task, given the increasingly confused Korean hooker on his lap. “Seriously,” the Englishman says. “Let Sunny out of the cab.”
Gene, who’d beaten the Englishman into the car and earned the right to sit nearly on top of Ray, sounds his
