hundred and fifty into a read-later folder and worked my way through the most recent. The project I had been working on, which had been 'almost complete' when I had left, was still in beta testing. They wanted me to add a small collection of new features which wouldn't take long. There was another project 'almost out of the sales pipeline' and once the specs were written I would be its lead developer. And there was a patronizing buzzword- laden email from the CEO, dated last week, informing us that he keenly regretted laying off twenty people but had great faith in the company's vision and execution. Also, the company was embarking on a cost-cutting plan and cans of Mountain Dew would now cost fifty cents instead of nothing. Snapple, seventy-five cents.
'Paul!' Rob McNeil said, clapping me on the shoulder, and I brightened up almost immediately. He had that effect on people. 'You're back! How was your trip, man?'
'Yeah,' I said. 'Pretty good. How's things here?'
'Interesting question, cogently put. Read the Principal's email?'
'Yeah. Can you loan me seventy-five cents for a Snapple?'
'First sign of the apocalypse, boyo. Twenty down, four hundred to go. This is official Resume Burnishing Week for everyone in the office. Mark my words, forty percent of today's web traffic will be to Monster. com.' He sat down and shook his head ruefully. 'You know, I don't really mind that management has made more incredibly stupid decisions than fleas on a St. Bernard. It goes with the tie, you know? Lack of oxygen to the brain. What I mind is that they think we're even stupider. He writes like he's writing to fucking children.'
'But they think we are children,' I said. 'Idiot savants anyways. Me know language of magic machines, you draw pretty pictures. Daddy, can I have a Snapple? Mommy, you promised me my stock options would vest today!'
He grinned. 'That's right. And I don't know about you, but I'm thinking about taking my toys and going home.'
The first thing I did, after working through my e-mail and meeting with my manager Kevin, was go back to the Lonely Planet site and see what the word on the Thorn Tree was. I had avoided checking it since my return to California. I wasn't quite sure why. I supposed it was at least in part because I had been trying to get the whole subject out of my mind and avoid obsessing about it on an hourly basis. But now that I was back at work it somehow seemed safe, as if the banality of my job could neutralize any dangerous thoughts or emotions.
Rakesh219 10/29 19:03
I am Nepali and I say you are a liar. Our police are good people and would not do these things. I always liked people from Canada but now I think that you are liars. I think maybe you murdred this person yourself. Go home to Canada if you think Nepalis are so bad. People like you are always coming here who think they can tell us what to do because we are poor. I think you white people make us poor so can come here and do bad things to people and our temples. Everybody knows that you are weak and all your women are whores and all you men sex each other. I hope more of you come here and get killed.
JenBelvar 10/30 11:15
Folks, please don't think the guy above (Rakesh219) is representative. Nepalis are the nicest, friendliest people in all of Asia, if not the world. I guess there's one in every crowd, especially on the Net.
The Kathmandu Post had an article on Mr. Goebel today. They said he was a suicide. I don't know what happened but it sounds awful and my heart goes out to his family and to the people who found him.
Anonymous 10/31 01:42
I met Stanley Goebel in Pokhara just a couple weeks ago, before he went trekking. We had a beer together and he was a great guy. I can't believe some sick fuck killed him. But I sure can buy the coverup. Yeah, the Nepalis are great, but everyone knows their government is massively corrupt.
Anonymous 10/31 08:51
The Bull was just a rumour, people ask about it all the time in the Africa trail, and there weren't any more murders after the ones in the book. And before everyone gets paranoid let me just remind you all that the number 1 killer of backpackers, by a really huge margin, is traffic. Worry about crazy drivers not crazy serial killers. Especially in South Africa — those taxi drivers are nuts!
GavinChait 11/01 11:03
I'm the South African that Paul Wood mentions, who found the body with him, and I'd like to verify for the record that everything he wrote is true. I'm in Pokhara for the next two days and staying at the Gurkha Hotel if anyone there knows anything or wants to know more.
Inga 11/02 05:07
I met the girl who was killed in Malawi a couple of years ago just before she died. People there were totally freaked about The Bull, and a lot of people said they'd heard about other people killed who weren't officially murdered. It sounds just like the story here and it's scary. Sure, there weren't any more deaths after the Lonely Planet book came out, but what if that's just because the guy (OK, or girl, equal opportunity mayhem here) read the book and decided to cool it down and move somewhere else? I think maybe there's some sickhead out there who goes traveling to kill people.
Anonymous 11/02 18:06
Hey, everybody needs a hobby.
That night I met most of my San Francisco friends for an unofficial reunion dinner. Rob and Mike and Kelley and Ian and Tina, people I worked with, and Ron and Toby, who like me hailed from Toronto and like me had been brain-drained down here by the almighty American dollar. We ate at Tu Lan, a hole in the wall in the worst area of the city that serves the best Vietnamese food on the planet.
Everyone talked about layoffs, recession, the collapse of the stock market, and the hubris of last year's paper multimillionaires, mostly with a relieved sense of schadenfreude. We had spent the last two years in an environment where the subtext was that you were a total failure as a human being if you weren't a millionaire by age 30, and I think everyone was grateful to have that kind of pressure off their shoulders.
They didn't ask about my travels other than vague 'how was the trip?' questions. I answered equally vaguely. I had learned over the years that almost nobody wants to know. Nobody wants to know the war stories, nobody wants to hear about the irritations and frustrations of travel, or about the madnesses and cultural events you've witnessed, and they really don't want to know about the wonderful experiences that you had and they did not. Experienced travelers want to know, and close friends want to hear you tell it, but these were neither. Of course they would have listened to the story of Murdered Man's Body Found On Trail, but I couldn't bring myself to do that, couldn't reduce him to an anecdote. Not yet anyways.
We ate, we drank, we smoked, we talked, we laughed, we exchanged catty comments about mutual acquaintances and friends at work, we speculated about whether our waiter was gay, we had a good time. I had a good time. I really did. I enjoyed it. But I kept looking around and wondering why these people were my friends. Was it just by default? Just because we happened to have met some day at school or work, and found each other's company acceptable, and met each other again often enough that we grew comfortable in each other's presence, and now we called that friendship? They were good people, all of them, and I enjoyed their company. But was it any real mystery why none of them were close friends? Were any of them really my tribe?
Did I even have a tribe? I pondered that as I sat on the N-Judah subway/streetcar back home. My family, never close, had fragmented around the continent. I could not remember the last time my sisters and my brother and my parents and I had all been in the same room. I had had close friends in high school, and they still lived back in Canada, and when I visited there we all acted like we were still a band of brothers. But of course we knew we weren't. Time and distance had worked their inevitable decay, and I had grown apart from them, and they from me. We called each other friends only to honour the memory of the friendship we once had.
There was my Africa tribe, the tribe of the truck. But they were almost all Brits and Aussies and Kiwis, mostly living in London, and a tribe six thousand miles away is in many ways worse than no tribe at all. And I'd seen them only once after Cameroon. I'd felt then that our bond was unchanged, even stronger, that Laura's tragedy had in some way sealed us together. But was that really true? Was I just romanticizing? And if they were my tribe, why wasn't I in London right this very minute?
Maybe I belonged to the tribe of people that have no tribe. Maybe I would stay in that tribe forever. And maybe almost everybody I knew belonged to that tribe too, and we all spent half our social energy hiding it from
