Butterfly Stories

~ ~ ~

He was not inhibited by mechanical rules or by metaphysical thinking. . To follow rules would have have been to court sure disaster.

N. Sanmugathasan, General Secretary,

Ceylon Communist Party,

Enver Hoxha Refuted (1981)

One night his wife did come into bed with him, in the middle of night, when the attentions of his dreams had already been fixed on pink flowers at the tips of outspread fronds, like some Pat Pong beauty's painted fingertips; waking, rolling away from her even as he woke, he found his eyes flying open in the darkness as fast as someone falling, and his chest already ached with dread of this woman whom he considered his old wife. Not yet having the courage to tell her that he was leaving her (well, perhaps that's unfair; let's say he just didn't want to be hasty), but meanwhile knowing that he probably would leave her, he hesitated to transmit any signals of intimacy; he couldn't! — but he couldn't stand to be cruel, either, so he found himself adopting a position of polite distance; when she came into bed the next night he gave her a pillow without saying anything; when she thrashed sleeplessly he said: If you wake me up one more time I'm going to ask you to leave. -

Thank God there was no mirror to terrify him with his own harsh mask. - For a long time he lay beside her, listening to what he construed to be her bitter breathing. She breathed rapidly and shallowly, as if she were trying to suppress a tremendous anger. Had he been less eager to establish his own doctrine, he might have admitted that she could equally well have been terrified. He lay rigid with his own heart thumping hatefully. There was an unpleasant taste in his mouth. He closed his eyes, trying to get back among the fresh wet air, the unpreaching leafy stalks straining and drinking with all the greed of shortlived things. There had been jungle like that in Battam-bang, but only in patches. It thickened, he supposed, beyond the tame battlefield. When he got up to go to the bathroom she got up, too, thinking that she'd failed and he was moving to the other bedroom; his mouth was full of mouthwash so he couldn't explain it to her right away, so he put his hand on her shoulder and held her until he could spit the mouthwash out. She did not try to pull away. It felt very strange to be touching this woman. His emotion was not loathing, but something less familiar. - It's OK, he said to her at last. You can stay, if you want to. - He led her back to the bedroom and he deduced from her quick submissive steps that she was very happy and grateful not to be sent away, and he felt revolted at himself, that he couldn't be nicer; and it made him sad but also grimly triumphant that before their discussion she would hardly have been grateful; she needed him and had only now realized it after so many years; she'd never been so sweet to him before! Needless to say, if he gave in and decided to stay, she'd go back to being herself. She'd have to!

In the night she woke up and said: I had a nightmare.

He stroked her face. - What was it about? he said wearily.

They — they were trying to chase me in a car, when I was driving. .

OK, he said. Go to sleep.

In her sleep she started whimpering, and he wanted to kill himself.

He called all the magazines and newspapers he knew. - I've got to get back to Cambodia fast! he said desperately. Things are changing there; now's the time to see it all happen. .

In the last two years we've done three pieces on Cambodia, an editor said. Our foreign desk is overbooked. It won't go through; I can't even try. I'm afraid I'll have to steer you elsewhere.

I just don't think it'll wash, an editor said. So you were the first American journalist to interview Pol Pot's brother. Big deal. So I was the first American journalist to piss green.

He had a dream that his wife was in charge of a massive jumping-off-skyscrapers competition. Lofty as some saint of parthenogenesis, she bustled about smiling. Unlike many dreams, this one was entirely accurate in its characterization: his wife loved to tell others what to do. In the dream she didn't jump off buildings herself, but yelled and pushed the contestants until they did. She was an MC. The contest was being conducted on the roof of a broad tower level with many other towers. Representatives of each television station were there; and crowds watched from other highrises. The first two contestants were led by his wife to the edge and they leaped into the shaft of shade between buildings. Let it be said that they were PROFESSIONALS in brightly colored technical jumping gear; they didn't have to be forced! He stood beside his wife watching them dwindle speedily into darkness, and then they vanished forever. They'd won. Now his wife was digging her fingernails into his arm, screaming at him. He was on the edge, and then he saw a way to let himself down gently by his fingertips into a carpeted hallway between offices. Once he'd done that he felt guilty that he hadn't jumped. She couldn't see him. If she had, she would certainly have screeched. - Maybe I'll jump from the next floor down, he said to himself. - He took the elevator. At the next floor he still didn't feel ready, so he took the stairs. That was how he eased his way safely down. May I inform you that his wife caught up with him breathlessly? She approved of him now. All the ones who jumped had never been heard from again. So he was the winner after all, the men after him emulating his sane descent. .

Now that the lust for a new wife had spread through him like viremia, we can't really call him the journalist anymore, so we'll call him the husband. As soon as he had the money he'd be back in Cambodia to claim his prostitute bride in some happy morning of green leaves all around the windows, although the English teacher who couldn't speak English had said to him, in a sudden amazing gush which had obviously cost him dictionary hours: Do you want to get marry? Or you want to be still single forever? I think you are old enough to get marry. Or you want to be taxi boy? Carefully, please! You know AID? It's a bad kind of sickness. You can die by it. I'm afraid it. Therefore I never sleep with a girl at all. So I only want to get marry with a pretty girl. But I'm poor and she's rich… — Too bad, thought the husband. Through all his assignments Cambodia lurked and waited, moistening in his memories like a fungus, like an obscene orange orchid-bowl rotting between compound leaves that tapered like paintbrushes; and thinking of Vanna (whose face he could no longer see quite as readily as if she'd been tattooed on the insides of his eyelids) his heart butterflied as it did when he waited to go on studio, the second hand of left clock and right clock clicking like synchronized eyelashes, the green nipple on the wooden breast not yet glowing so that the husband could ignore life's tests yet a little longer, afloat and irrelevant like his styrofoam cup on the blue felt. - Do not consider what you may do (thus Claudius Claudianus), but what it will become you to have done, and let the sense of honor subdue your mind. - But the grammar of his particular shoulds and oughts was beyond him. Not finding answers, he asked himself the same questions; no need to know whether he lived on the left clock or the right; being in either case a second hand, he clicked round fruitlessly. Life's dreary stretch and trickle was making him forget Vanna month by month; sometimes it seemed that he remembered far more vividly the Chinese porcelain-faced girl with her head down in the darkness offering her round maggot-pale cheek so dreamily to her glass, as if she were listening, while another pallid lady who wore an ice-blue butterfly bow elongated her silver braceleted arm out toward the Chinese porcelain-faced girl in the darkness; a lady with an ice-pink artificial flower in her hair got to the husband first, grinning cautiously downward with her lip lifted from her upper teeth. - Vanna, Vanna! he shouted.

He dreamed that he was cutting his wife up with a saw, and she never cried out, not when he cut her ankles off, not when he severed her knees; but when he began to saw her heart out she wept very very quietly.

Why should we send you to Cambodia? yawned the editor. You've already been, right? And you didn't get what you went for?

Well, it's just that it's such an exciting time there, the husband blabbered, they're just now getting reliable electricity again, and soon the import-export businesses will be going; history's being made and I want to be there when it happens. .

You know what? said the editor. I really don't think I'm interested.

There was a famous writer named Ned who had been invited to read at what is called an "event" because nothing happens there; they permitted the husband to be the warmup act. The whole time he made his appeal, he thought he saw Prince Sihanouk smiling at him from the back row. Everyone else was yawning. He stopped in the middle of a sentence and two or three people clapped politely; Ned leaped up on the stage and began to crow and snort and fart while everyone shouted for laughter, and when he was through the audience was on its feet shouting madly: NED! NED! NED! NED! and Ned came back and gave them another raspberry.

No, I just don't see how we can send you to Cambodia, said the editor, a magnificent lady who was very vague. - If we made money off you it would be one thing, but you know that hardly a soul reads you. And then there are the budget cuts. That office is a minefield right now. It just wouldn't be safe to bring you up. If I did, you might lose everything. .

Well, but what should I do? asked the husband with such pathos that she couldn't duck him with brightness.

There's always Ned, she replied. You might learn a little about writing from Ned. Ned's very generous with lesser writers.

The next time he was on stage with Ned, the husband watched his act very carefully. The husband was up next. His attention hovered like a butterfly over a pool. Doing what Ned did would be pulling down his pants in public. It would be giving head. It would be doing what Vanna did.

His turn came. Tentatively, into the horn of the audience's deepening embarrassed silence, the husband began to crow.

Hello, Sien?

Yes.

This is the journalist. Any news?

No news. Not yet.

That's not too good. You think anything is wrong?

I think maybe I wait one two more week, then I send another letter. Early next month. I have backup copy.

I can see you know how to do business, the husband flattered him.

Sir, I do my best.

You think everything's OK with her?

I think maybe I send a letter soon.

He'd heard that every now and then, capriciously, the government cracked down, and the prostitutes were put in a place where there wasn't enough to eat.

His worry about her was no less than anguish; he loved her, his dear new wife as narrow-waisted as a fresh-tied bundle of light-green rice. .

After two weeks he called Sien, who said: I learn nothing sir no news of her I try again maybe one week.

(Sien, like Ned, was only doing his job; the husband reminded himself of this. Sien was doing his job as the clerks did theirs in the post office on that street in Bangkok where gems and fossils and hill tribe silverwork were sold, the placid postal clerks stamping rows and rows of little papers, and on the walls white reliefs of unknown grand gentlemen, serration-bordered like stamps. They'd done their jobs, too.)

Finally he got some post-Hungarian magazine to send him to the Arctic for a couple of weeks — lots of work and morose nose-blowing and maybe eight hundred bucks at the end of it; well, her passport out of Cambodia alone would cost two grand so he'd better start somewhere. - It's the recession, you see, the editor said. We just don't have the advertising. All the magazines are skinnier these days.

The ice's bumpy snow massaged his feet through the kamik-soles with tiny tingles, the orange sun one sun's length above the blue. Dogs wagged tails over old polar bear tracks. The low cliff-sweep of Signal Hill was already waiting for the darkness to get darker, the hill-edge closer to night than the sky, everything going storm-blue or death-blue; and the lights of the village only increased the dreariness. Thinking about his new wife, he had the usual feeling of anxious despair; hour by hour the bond between them was dissolving. She was getting AIDS. She was moving to another disco. She was in the re-education camp. She was giving up prostitution. She would never give up prostitution. She was forgetting him. The way he should have felt was exultant, because the eight hundred dollars was the first step back to her. Instead, it seemed to him that everywhere he went just got him more lost.

There was a children's Halloween party. Probably the post-Hungarians would want him to cover it. But who knew what they wanted? Children were always good for a paragraph. Honking their noisemakers, faces corpsened with pale paint, wearing tinsel on their skeleton-heads, they dashed about, their parents lurking shy. Paper and plastic pumpkins hung orange and absurd from the ceiling; what the hell were pumpkins doing in the Arctic? Swirly white paper bones and skeletons kissed their hair. They danced and ate treats loaded on styrofoam plates. Ladies with faces painted pink and green and white flounced around in Arctic boots, sneakers, kamiks. The principal wore a black witch's gown and a pointed hat covered with orange stars. A lady trudged, her baby quietly eating a cupcake in the armauti. The husband thought: Nothing belongs anywhere anymore. All the cats have been let out of all the bags, and they've gotten mixed up.

The husband did not illuminate himself in the same harsh checkpoint light that other minds would have cast. Oh, he deprecated himself, all right, but only for the highest reasons. He wouldn't have graduated from the College of National Smiles! His somberness was sometimes misunderstood; they thought him harder on himself than he actually was. To his thinking, the sin (now fortunately no more present than an echo) had been the vacillation between two wives. It had reflected badly on his self-knowledge, impaired his efficiency, and, worst of all, made the opposed women into playthings (he remembered a hairdresser's sign in Phnom Penh: two curly permed ladies like in the movies) — not even his playthings, since he wasn't in command of himself, but the playthings of his impulses, which in turn were controlled by random happenings. When he made the decisive break with his old wife, he continued to feel guilty, of course; now he'd hurt her more than ever, probably for life. (If you believe you've done a kindness, you've probably done an injury. If you believe you've done an injury, you've probably done an injury.) Yes, the husband was quite sorry about that. On the other hand, if he'd stayed with her he would have been as unhappy as he'd made her (so he reasoned), and Vanna of course would have been waiting and wondering. It was true that he'd been married for eleven years, and had known Vanna for less than two weeks, but the patent truth which gleamed before him like a gold-painted gate with gold lions was that he'd been miserable for eleven years. He'd only been miserable with Vanna for two weeks — much more promising. As for all the whoring he'd done, before and after meeting Vanna, if someone had raised that as a character flaw he wouldn't have been surprised, since prostitution was so generally disapproved of that one could take it for granted that the questioner was probably infected with the usual prejudices, enough said! If, however, the interlocutor could have been skilful enough to thrust past the husband's guard, persuading him that in fact the issue was one of fidelity, then he might have faltered for a moment, but he had the answer there, too: Fidelity was another very relative and hence misunderstood term. (He scarcely thought about Oy, Noi, Nan, Marina and Pukki anymore.) There was nothing wrong with sleeping around if you loved everybody; you could be faithful to a hundred wives. -But how much can you really love them (our interlocutor might have said) if one is as good as another? More to the point, are you happy and are they happy? — As it happened, there was an answer for that, too. The husband loved Vanna the best. He'd keep being promiscuous only until he had her forever. Then he wouldn't need anyone but her. And if it turned out then that he was still unfaithful after all, surely a whore would be used to it.

Those of you who frown on such a strategy will now be cruelly gratified by learning its results. The first challenge to his constancy (if once more we ignore Oy, Noi, Nan, Marina and Pukki) had occurred on his return from Cambodia, when he'd encountered his companion of eleven years. That test he'd passed honorably, as we know, by filing for divorce. The second challenge, far more formidable, put its claw upon his shoulder in the Arctic. It's customary for a new wife to be a phagocyte, devouring all the foreign bodies that precede her in the husband's psyche, so that only she is left to shine. Poor Vanna's problem was that she was not the newest, for within the husband's cuckoo-dipping mind another presence now inserted itself, as he'd feared it would; that had been the real reason for his lack of enthusiasm about going back to the Arctic; there was somebody up there whom he'd once almost married. It was not that he wanted to marry her now; no, he was not like the pigeon that nods so quickly when eating crumbs; he was Vanna's husband now. But as soon as he came back in sight of the Thule ruins (skeleton of whale ribs over a snow-filled pit, the wind blowing. .), he remembered again what the Inuit had always said, that to gain more wisdom than others one must do abnormal things. The Inuit had done it by going off into the ice alone until animal spirits came. The husband would do it through promiscuity.

Somehow, the knowledge that he sought was the same as being one with Vanna. He knew that, although he didn't know how he knew it. And while fucking the whores in Bangkok had taken him farther away from her, fucking from now on would bring him closer. What had changed? — Only this, that he sought her faithfully. Now every thrust of his penis would be like an Olympic swimmer's stroke, drawing him closer to the end of the humming blueness. - Was that really true? — He knew that it was not. But here he was so far away from Vanna that she faded from the inner walls of his eyelids faster than ever! How did it go in Dante? In the forest journey of our life I lost my way. Something like that. Whenever that came to him he remembered the jungle beyond the tame battlefield at Battam-bang, and although he had not particularly noticed the jungle at the time because the interpreter and the commune leader and the Chief of Protocol kept him so busy looking at shell-holes, it became ever more lushly menacing in his memories. Plant-phalli towered, so well leaf-scaled that nothing of their underlying structure or origin could be seen; they were studded with pale blue flowers. This was the jungle of his life where he had lost his way, and it was also Vanna's jungle, so he should have loved it, but it terrified him. Sometimes it seemed to him that in divorcing his other wife he'd thrown away his compass, and the Inuk woman whom he'd almost married was his last unlikely chance not to be lost -

At the Bay store when he went to give some acquaintances a present after not having seen them for years, they greeted him most cordially but only stopped for a dozen eyeblinks from their work of cross-checking the register tapes so that he soon felt dismissed even though they invited him down for dinner any time, "any time" being less the perfect generosity that it appeared than a courteous tautology whose complete form was: "you are invited any time we invite you" — of course that wasn't fair, because in the north people really don't mind if you drop in; nonetheless he knew that he was not going to drop in, knew it already as he zipped up his parka, burrowed his wrists into the big mitts, and worked his face mask back up from around his neck; then he turned to say goodbye and saw them so young and fine together, he a white man born and raised in Indian country, hardy in his ways, at ease with boats and guns and heavy loads, sunny and steady, she a full-blood Inuk of such striking loveliness that men meeting her for the first time couldn't look away because her traditional topknot of blueblack hair seemed to concentrate all the snow-shadows which spilled down to cool her elegant forehead; her long-lashed eyes were usually half-closed, but when she looked directly at anyone there came a stunning flash of liquid black purity; her nose was Egyptian like a sphinx's; as for her lips, to see them was to long to kiss them. . and most beautiful of all about both of them was that they wanted no one but each other, he cherishing and protecting her with his strength while she loved and gladdened him; so they went on doing the accounts together, a self-sufficient couple, and barely acknowledged his goodbye; they had work to do. -He thought: Is this how my new wife and I will be together, so happily hiding under the sheets? — And that seemed good to him. He decided not to talk to others about Vanna anymore, to pare away all the world except her. .

Of course, he wouldn't be able to talk with her, either.

Inside the Narwhal, a man was laying down strips of a silver substance in the hallway, painting them with solvent which some teenager would probably want to sniff, and a man sat reading and smoking a cigar by the pool table and the hanging plants grew, but the wind kept blowing and the ceiling kept thumping and creaking. Outside, snow blew in thin puffs and streamers across the snow-packed road and parking lot that were the same blue as snow-shadows because it was only a bit past sunrise, the orange still a long narrow triangular intrusion in the sky (nested in it, a flag on one of the airport buildings, straining like a horse's thirsty head, the flagpole bending fantastically but always straightening), and now the sky had lightened to a calm cold blue but the moon hung on, half gone, thickly yellow-white around the edge, the rest so distinctly mottled that it almost seemed possible to make out individual mountains and craters, and because the moon was pretty and far away the husband couldn't believe that it would be a more difficult place than Resolute. Meanwhile the snow-dust continued its empty rushing, not just in stripes as before but also in discrete fog-clumps which rose as high as the power wires, skating across the blue snow with the frictionless insatiability of spotlight beams. The crisscrossed tracks and treads on the snow reminded him of the dance floor in the community hall at Pond Inlet, a scratched slab of dull gleam in the warm darkness whose loud scratchy music made his ears ache; little kids in boots and parkas ran across the floor while the high school students whose dance it supposedly was sat shyly on wall benches, girls with girls, boys with boys, waiting for midnight or some even more impressive hour when things would happen; he danced with a girl once and then she wouldn't dance with him again. Maybe at one o'clock something would happen. It was for that something that people were drinking home brew, potent but thin, at a house in Clyde River, telling the same old polar bear stories, making plans to get rich, talking about ladies and dogs and distances, eating black hunks of barbecued caribou, dipping into smoked char and roasted char with onions, getting louder and more insistent about their own greatness until one of the quietly smiling Inuk women, having drunk a glass, began screaming obscenities and smashing things and then everyone had to leave. The husband imagined marrying her and getting her drunk, knowing that she wouldn't remember what she did; she'd stab him and hit him; when she came out of it she'd be amazed and tenderly concerned, unable to believe she'd done it; so he'd offer her another drink and watch the complicity in her eyes as she swallowed eagerly, knowing she was going to be transformed… At the dance one woman was already leaving, a beautiful young mother in a white parka, the baby in the armauti, and she walked white and silent through the white silent streets, brightening and fading in accordance with the laws of streetlamps, and a little girl opened the orange square of light, leaned out and cried: heüo, hello! and a skidoo went by and the mother passed the last streetlight, turned snow-blue and vanished. Once she was gone, the husband began to ache with longing. He believed that if only he could have convinced her to love him, then he might have advanced a step away from his old errors. Now, although he might love other women, and although he had utter faith that soon he'd be with Vanna, he would never learn whatever it was that the woman in the white parka might have taught him.

He wondered about the girl he'd almost married. She'd worn a parka of blue duffel. . Was she well and happy? If he'd married her, would he be closer to where he wanted to be as Vanna's husband? If he married her now, could he marry her and Vanna at the same time? Suppose they all lived together, the husband with all his wives (even the one he'd put off could come back then), all loving one another like the inmates of a monastery, walled off from sadness because none would ever have to go away…? This ideal city of wives might well be the answer, or at least part of the answer. Certainly it wouldn't be a shortcut to his ultimate union, but it might be a flowering from it. It was so simple! If he could keep them all with him, then he could make them all happy!

There was a Peruvian lady who was working with the flying court while her divorce pended (the notion of a flying court always made the husband think of red-buttocked gibbous judges leaping through rings of fire, landing perilously on legal tightropes which they clenched between their hairy toes to pivot their bodies three hundred and sixty degrees through the air, to the accompaniment of stormy cheers; from this conception it was an easy progression to imagining sexual trapeze acts with the court stenographers, which the Peruvian lady was), and just for amusement's sake he started calling her his wife. She was warm and plump; how good it would be to snuggle her while the wind slavered outside. .

But I am married! she cried in indignation.

Exactly, he said. To me.

Everyone else laughed, and she pretended to pout. - Eh, what will you give me, if I am to be your wife?

He still had oodles of Cambodian money, which he carried around with him everywhere. He started swirling the almost worthless notes down around her by the handfuls, and everyone had a good time. .

On the day he had to leave he went into her room to say goodbye and she said: Wait! I have no clothes! I am undressed for the shower!

Well, that's perfect, he said.

She laughed, but kept the door closed until she'd put her dress on.

Can I kiss you goodbye?

Kiss me where?

On the mouth.

Her roommate came in just then, and the Peruvian lady said: He wants to kiss me on the mouth!

Pig! laughed the other girl.

Okay, okay, just one time on the mouth. You sure you don't have herpes?

I'm sure.

They kissed a few times. The husband was really enjoying himself.

But you know I am really married, said the Peruvian girl. I am not yet divorced. And you?

The same.

Why is it no good with your wife? I think you are very intelligent. Is that true?

I guess so.

And your wife, is she intelligent?

Very intelligent.

Ah, then that is why. You are intelligent, so you need a stupid girl.

Maybe you're right, said the husband thoughtfully. Maybe that's what I need.

I think so — husband, she laughed.

Well, wife, you're always right.

And now I must get undressed again. No, you can't stay. But here is my telephone number in Jeune-Lorette. Call me sometime. . when my husband isn't around.

At the co-op hotel in Grise Fiord he met a white man who was almost bald; what hair he had left was bluish-white like the snow outside. The man said little at dinner, but from what he did say the husband began to understand that he was wise and good. The husband believed in wise men because he had to. He was desperate for someone to explain to him what he should do, and why. Having advanced beyond any picayune hopes of those paid mirrors, psychiatrists, he'd been torturing his friends with questions for years every time any of them showed signs of wisdom. (That was when he still allowed himself to mention Vanna directly to others; now the most he could do would be to mention the Inuk girl.) A year or two ago, he'd nerved himself up to go to a priest, thinking that if he could only be made to BELIEVE he'd gladly COMMIT or RENOUNCE; he was with his other wife then and they were so unhappy together because he'd done everything possible and she'd done the same and they'd both given until they were exhausted and couldn't give anymore and were screaming at each other hating each other so much; these arguments had always come out of the blue, so at first he'd been stunned by them, and then after awhile he was continually waiting for them — oh, how he needed wise men! — maybe the priest could help… but just as he walked into the church he saw a newsletter with photos of the priest's henchmen blockading abortion clinics, and he came to his senses. After that he'd given up on wise men for awhile. But as he spoke with the old man, he began to feel a thrilling sense that this had been meant to happen, that this person had been sent to him to help him, if he had the courage and intelligence to ask the right questions. Once he'd told a French-Canadian friend how he'd been lost and hallucinating in the snow and had seen angels and the woman said: Mon Dieu! and he said: But I think they were all one angel who was meant to help me; I think maybe I saw my guardian angel, because she told me what to do and I did it and I lived! — and she said in a low voice of utter belief: Yes, I think so. - This wise man, then, was his guardian angel. The husband knew it. And he knew that this time he'd not be tested cruelly beyond his faith; the answers he'd receive would make sense in and of themselves.

The wise man said that he had an Inuk wife who was twenty years younger than he. They were ecstatic together. She was the granddaughter of one of Baffin Island's last shamans. The shaman had never said anything against his enemies, and never seemed to do anything against them, but by some coincidence they all came to horrible ends. The wise man's wife had inherited some of his power. Whenever the wise man started thinking about how he was ready for a cigarette or a cup of coffee, before he'd even said anything or started to move, his dear wife would be handing it to him. One night he was dreaming beside her and he felt her somewhere very near and when he opened his eyes he was speaking Inuktitut to her even though he didn't know that language. Another time he was dreaming of sailing and his wife shook him awake quite angrily and said: Get out of my dreams! and he said: What was I dreaming of? and she said: Sailing. . and he shivered because she was so very special and strange. Whenever he went anywhere on a trip, the phone would be ringing when he walked into the hotel; somehow she'd know that he had just arrived and would be calling to say she loved him.

I almost married an Inuk girl, too, the husband said. But she kept sniffing too much gasoline. It never would have worked.

The wise man smiled gently and said to him in the voice of truth: You made a mistake.

After that he was on assignment in Hall Beach — which is to say eight million frozen tussocks away from the wise man — and it was exactly as cold as Phnom Penh had been hot and his friend Jeremy started swearing because the pilot light had gone off; they felt the winter instantly even through the triple thick walls. They sat drinking Scotch. Jeremy said that the first time he'd been unfaithful to his Inuk wife he'd gone to a dance and picked up a Greenlandic girl, a friend of his wife's. He'd done it with her once and then she called him and so he did it with her again. Then she called him a second time, and he said he wasn't interested. Jeremy told the husband proudly that he'd never enjoyed it, had only done it for revenge against his wife; therefore he'd been extremely moral. The husband nodded and drank his Scotch.

Well, Jeremy, what was the reason you did it?

My wife, you see — I still don't like to talk about it. I'd moved in with her, aye? And we were getting married; everything looked good. Then I found this letter she'd been hiding. Something about it, just the way those hooks and symbols lay on the page, well, I didn't like the look of it. So I got it translated. And it was a love letter. It talked about all the things he did with her. And I'd been drinking with the bastard the same night! I went over to his house and he was asleep. I told him that I was going to kill him. I smashed a few things in there and whacked him a couple of times, and then he apologized, aye? But I never could quite make up with the wife. She's such a witch sometimes! That was around the time she'd started getting cold to me, you know what I mean? At night she always brought one of the kids into bed between us so she wouldn't have to do anything. That was when I started screwing around. And I've done it with ten or twenty girls now — some real young ones, too, I'll tell you! — and I am proud to tell you that I've never enjoyed it once! I'm a man of principle! But I don't know what to do about this new AIDS business. .

And how are you getting on with your wife now?

Pour you another shot?

Sure.

Well, just recently she started coming on to me again, but she's getting older and doesn't attract me quite so much, aye? And now she's having some kind of mid life crisis. Suddenly she wants to be Inuk more than ever. She insists on eating walrus meat, which she always hated before and which I hate because it's a putrid jelly. It really stinks up the house. But that doesn't matter; she has to do it. And then there's the matter of striking the kids. That's what burns me up. I think it's a good idea to discipline the kids a little. Hell, the rest of the world does it. Maybe those Inuks should realize that if everybody else does it, maybe there's a reason. Maybe they could learn something, aye? Look how fucked up all the kids are up here! But no, the wife won't have it. One time she wanted some caribou from the freezer to boil for dinner, so I said to our eldest, Cecily, I says, go and get your mother some caribou. And she had the cheek to refuse! Well, I said, if you don't do as your mother wants you'll have nothing to eat tonight. - I was defending my wife! — And my wife turned on me and said: Don't you dare threaten your children!

So you think you made a mistake to marry her?

Damned right I did! Just last night she struck me again with the hairbrush; tell me if you don't see the mark!

What about Stuart and his wife? They don't have problems, do they?

Oh, yes, Stu has problems.

Well, what about Roger and Annie? the husband said in triumph. Roger and Annie were the couple at the Bay store, the perfect ones who had told him to drop in for dinner.

Oh, but they're young yet, eh? — A grim and monitory laugh. - Only in their twenties. I'd like to uhh! her! But give her ten years, and she'll be just like my wife.

What about me?

What about you?

That Inuk girl I had that crush on -

Easy enough to get a crush, now, isn't it?

So you really think it would be a mistake to marry her?

Oh definitely, said Jeremy, pouring himself another drink, it would be a mistake.

I feel like I have a spirit inside me like a flame, his friend Ben once said. And I have to sleep with my spirit. If someone gives me something that I think is too good for me to accept, then 1 try to get up my courage to get my spirit to accept it. Because my spirit deserves the best. But my spirit isn't the only thing inside me. There are a lot of different souls.

The husband listened to all the different souls clamoring inside him, his fears piercing the sky with their sharp and dusty backbones. .

The two whores stood in the parking garage, eating the husband's fortune cookies and smiling. Light harshened their teeth and wrapped their bodies in glittering sheets. The husband's whore put the money into her shoe. The photographer's whore put her money into her pants. The husband's whore kept hugging herself. She was a little cold. The garage attendant kept popping out of his office and saying: How long you will be here?

Shut the fuck up, you dirty A-rab, said the husband's whore. You're gonna get paid, too.

How long you will be here?

Not much longer, said the husband. This is such a sentimental spot for us. We're just standing here with our wives remembering the old times. Would you believe we first met here, on a double date?

Okay, okay, said the attendant. How long you will be here?

Shut the fuck up, ya dirty A-rab, said the whore.

She stood fat and beaming with her hands behind her back. The other had her hands in front of her, leaning into a quick and wary smile. .

Doing this I get the strangest feeling, said the whore. Her upper arms were the size of pumpkins. She had to be over two hundred and fifty pounds. She smelled so bad the husband had to breathe through his mouth.

You must have strange feelings too sometimes, said the whore, cupping a cigarette in a freckled hand whose puffy flesh reminded him of a cod's or a haddock's, and the match ignited and showered light over her freckles; her hand seemed to glow with its own blood; yawning, she dug her dirty black fingernail under the lacy black bra strap to scratch at her freckled shoulders which quivered with dimples so soft and deep and greasy she didn't really need a cunt; tilting her cigarette-end upward the whore said: I mean, don't you feel strange right now?

I always feel strange, said the husband.

Well, what are you looking for?

Love, I guess. A new wife.

But does it feel STRANGE?

It feels strange to me that I'm here with you because I don't love you and you don't love me and all I'm here for is some clue.

I'll show ya what you're here for, crooned the fat whore, suddenly becoming a heavy meaty bomb in action; stinking of urine she streaked for him, the neckless freckled seal-head hurtling for his fly, which she unzipped expertly with her teeth — hey, that was part of the SERVICE! — and now she was pulling him forward by his zipper; she was barefoot against the wall with her head uplifted for the blowjob, coughing and jerking like a red-haired bird; I have no patience, she mumbled, her belly jigging with all this effort; I just wanna make you feel strange is what I think.

After awhile she got up and spat. - You like my hair this way, Ginny? she said to the other whore. I decided to wear it this way just today.

You don't have any kids? said the other whore after a long pause.

Ten minutes later, when they were in the cab rolling down the brick-flickers, smell of piss in the back, the husband said to himself: Vanna is not this erythrismic whore, that's all I know. . but I have to love this whore, too, because she tried to be there for me. . No, I can't love her. I want to, but I can't. She makes me feel lost. Can Vanna be there for me? She's so far away… — and the husband's mind kept flying on steady fever-wings past the replicated squares and Xs of bridge-struts; he flew with a sunny nausea past hot palm trees and low warehouses. There went a nice convention of whores on the corner, in big black boots, bare thighs; one in red rolled her mouth into a kiss -

Hello, Sien? Yes.

Do you know who this is? Yes.

Any news for me from Cambodia? Not yet.

Do you think everything's all right? I don't think so, sir.

Coming back from Battambang they'd stopped for a piss break by one of the half-ruined bridges and he picked a yellow-calyxed white flower, its leaves half eaten by insects; it was studded beneath its bloom with a cluster of pointed buds like bullets. He took it with him when they got back in the car, holding it in his hand and thinking that it might be Vanna. Two ants came out of it, then two flies. Within ten minutes it wilted.

Lights whirled around the CAMPUS marquee. Dirty ragged men leaned in the darkness. A troll in a skullcap squatted in a doorway on Turk Street.

Uh no you have to go down Hyde, said the transvestite with the pale made-up face. I'll tell you when to turn right. Not this right but the next right.

Not this wife, but the next wife, said the husband.

The transvestite wasn't listening. That was fine with him; he didn't care, either. - I got beat up just last week but I'm too depressed to talk about it, she said.

The high heel twitched. The voice was soulful and whispering like a dead grandmother's.

I couldn't go out for a week, I was so scared, she said.

Water dripped steadily into the fish tank. Blue eyelids, cheek lines. Lips a sideways heart, she blinked disgustedly in the mirror.

I'm not forcing you, he said quickly.

If I'm being forced to that's wrong. But you're not forcing me. You like me, don't you? You don't have to love me. Ready? OK.

Zipper sounds in the sudden dark. And the husband thought: this creature is as strangely and fearfully specialized as a hymenopteran.

The kitten jumped on them in the dark. .

Stop it, cat! she shouted. I'm sorry about the cat. He's only a baby.

I'll give you a ride back anyhow, he said. You want to go?

Oh it's OK I'll walk.

You don't trust me?

It's not that.

Turning on the light, he saw that she was shaking. She must need her fix.

The TV went on and on. He thought of the different Buddhas made by hand, the faces of Buddha of all sexes, the biggest one with the wheel of enlightenment, six-colored, then the big Buddha standing, the lower Buddha lying on his side dying peacefully, the two Buddhas standing to give birth to a message. She was the Buddha twitching the wig nicely down.

Are we done yet? she said. Please please.

You're really good. You've done this stuff before.

Yes I have. I have. We're done. Please.

Round the corner, blinking square lights. A thin girl with thin legs twinkled away. A motorcycle cop shone his flashlight into a car. Not as much fun as Phnom Penh. A blonde stood crossing her legs, holding a white purse like some signal while she smoothed her hair. Slowly wandering up the street on tiptoe, she lowered her head, clasping her hands behind her phosphorescent butt. Long lean stockinged legs rubbed against each other. She waggled her cigarette so that the bright pink tip, possibly erogenous, swung through a wide arc of night. She was so perfect at what she did that it seemed inconceivable that someday she would be annihilated, probably not by pickaxe, bulldozer, poison injection or crocodile, but quite likely by some means equally hideous, given how the world regarded her. As he stood watching her from across the street, the husband wondered for a moment why he couldn't simply marry her instead of Vanna. It would be cheaper, in the short run at least, and it would be a lot more convenient. But it gave him joy to acknowledge that his deductions had now marched in single file almost into the grave called transcendent conclusions. He was not lost at all. He had proved to himself that he still loved his new wife, only his new wife. He had divorced his old wife. He had not called the Inuk girl whom he had once considered marrying. He had not called the Peruvian girl, although it is true that he had kissed her. He had disbarred the pronouncements of the wise man and Jeremy from all relevance. He had not been tempted by the fat whore. He had not tried to get to know the transvestite. So he watched the blonde from the shadows, smiling. She jounced her hip at each passing car, flashing her earring, turning her head, doing a quick split, pacing, leaning against cars and streetlights, brushing her hair back until the car stopped. It had a little mobile just above the dashboard, and it had stopped so recently that the mobile was still shaking. The blonde leaned up against the passenger window, negotiating. Finally she opened the back door. Other cars pulled past. The car put on its turn signal and went around the block. After one circuit the man dropped her off. He wouldn't pay enough. She drifted back sadly, brushing her hair, looking both ways. She pulled down her white skirt, her tight skirt; then she pulled it up again like possibilities erumpent. She turned her head smartly, flinging her hair so that she could straighten it. She tap danced and rubbed her crotch. She jiggled her white purse like an instrument, mooning cars with that lovely ass. When the cops drove by, she brushed her hair very seriously.

So time swallowed itself, until at last her pink rainbow blinked. Thus came the emphatic closing of a car door behind a happy whore. The happy couple sped around the corner. .

Still smiling, the husband wished her prosperity. Although she'd tempted him, he'd been faithful to his new wife. He was a little closer to the orchid, a little farther past the dead grey fronds that hung down in piecemeal walls like tattered birchbark -

He dreamed that his former wife had announced that they must move, and he didn't want to move but there was no way around it. They were on the freeway. They came to a shopping mall and she went in while he waited in the car. She never came out. He called her there once and she said she was busy. Finally he decided to drive around the mall and find her. He started the car and made the first turn but that caught him up in a current of speeding traffic that sucked him back on the freeway in the opposite direction and he was getting farther away all the time and there were so many other malls like the one his wife had gone into that he would never find her again.

He called an immigration lawyer and she said: How can I help you?

I want to marry a Cambodian girl and bring her back to the States.

Well, that's going to be difficult. Anything else I need to know? Any special skills your fiancée has?

She can't read or write.

I don't think that helps us very much. What does she do?

She's a prostitute.

A former prostitute, I take it. If it's been more than ten years there's no problem with the waiver. .

No, she's a prostitute now.

Hmm. Are you sure you want to marry this person?

How much are your services going to cost me? the husband said. I just want to know if I can do it, is all. It's two thousand just for her passport out of Cambodia, and another two thousand for the baby. . How much will the whole thing cost me? Can I do it for under ten grand?

I can't tell you how long the waiting period's going to be. I recently did something similar for a gentleman who married someone from the Philippines, but she qualified for the waiver. That made it less expensive. Far less expensive. Immigration's going to drag this one out. A minimum of nine months after they get her application. Possibly two years or longer -

I guess I can always take her to Mexico, the husband said. I can live with her there for a couple of years. .

When he got to England with all the English girls as multitudinous as English birds (curlews and corncrakes and olivaceous gallinules, water-rails and pratincoles and dunlins and stints), he sat waiting upstairs for his friend Bob in the sitting room's well-lit multicolored grins of book-toothed shelves, book pyramids on the threadbare rug, Bob's folders and manuscripts on the smaller table and the floor about it, his list of Egyptian slides, his atlases, the filecard boxes: CHURCHES DONE, CHURCHES TO DO, CHURCHES NOT USED, then the round table with its pebbles and scissors and pens, and he was so very tired from all the senseless wandering he'd done. Thirty-nine hundred dollars he'd saved up for Vanna now. He sat waiting for Bob with half-closed eyes. Esther was downstairs line-editing a manuscript on Ba'thi Iraq; he heard the manual typewriter's emphatic clicks. Bob was at this moment rattling home in the Tube which went under ever so many English bookshops that looked almost the same as American bookshops except that there was a black and white photo on the cover of The Temple of the Golden Pavilion instead of the color drawing, and the paperback of Pound's Cantos had a very nice sketch which the husband had never seen before; Bob, who'd lived in England many years now, couldn't care less. The husband sat looking at Bob's art books. It was better than reading the paper, though he'd been quite absorbed by the article about the old man who killed his young Filipina wife for messing around, cut her into pieces, fried her in her own fat and fed her to the cat. (Before half finishing that article, Sherlock Husband had said to himself: I bet she'd been a whore. I smell whores all over that marriage. And sure enough, when he read the fine print, he had cause for deductive self-satisfaction.) As soon as the front door opened and closed, Esther's typewriter stopped, and then Bob came up the stairs and the next thing Bob and the husband were drinking up Bob's whiskey in delight. - Oh, no, that's not the worst hotel in northern France, Bob was saying. I've found a worse one than that. It has a painting of a very dangerous sunset, a quite explosive sunset… — You could mention a book to Bob, and chances were that he'd not only read it but had it and could lend it to you immediately; his shelves were like the magic wallet of food in the Saxon fairytale; at that moment the husband was reading The Wonderful Adventures of Nils, which he'd never finished as a butterfly boy because the girls from whom he'd borrowed it had moved away, and when he asked Bob if he knew anything about that other book Lagerlöf had written, the one for adults, what was it, Gösta Berling's Saga, it just so happened that Bob had a copy, not that he'd been exactly amazed by it even though it had won the Nobel Prize, but after more whiskey, beer, wine and whiskey the husband descended to the privacy of the guest boudoir, spread the covers coaxingly open, and began to make love to it with his eyes while Bob, sighing, took the dog out and in, then returned upstairs to grade a thesis on meaning and metaphor in the sewers of Kensington, Bob shaking his head over the student's blandishments and saying: Now isn't that amazing? after which he poured himself and the husband more whiskey. Scenting this divine beverage, the husband took respite from his honeymoon to pay another visit to Bob's observatory of book-space, Bob's disco of book-wives. The husband loved Bob and believed that he was a wise man. But Bob did not want to be considered wise. He dispensed advice only with the most enfrictioned reluctance. So the husband confined himself to showing him some color prints of Vanna which the photographer had given him as a gift; he took them everywhere now because it became increasingly difficult to visualize her, and Bob said mmm as he flicked through the photos dreamily. Esther, who was also wise, and this evening had made a wonderful dinner of cabbage and lamb's neck stew while the husband and Bob drank down their potations like magnificent drones, would occasionally give advice upon request, but she had long since gone to bed by the time that Gösta Berling was saved from committing suicide in a snowdrift; God knows how long poor Bob's light bulbs glowed over the next thesis, about public space and private space in the seventeenth-century garden, but Gösta Berling had gone to the ball by then to undo a friend's girl's engagement to a nasty rich man and by one of life's weird card tricks ended up wooing her himself while the wolves howled around the carriage, and the husband, so desperate to assemble his own wedding kit that he didn't know how to believe in coincidences anymore, was certain that there must be a providential reason why the book had come into his hands, so he was unable to desist from making love to the words like swarming white beads of pollen within red flower-lips; and Gösta Berling jilted the girl and took up with the mad broom-seller, whom he told he'd marry; then he forgot all about her on account of a melancholy Countess, and the broom-seller put sunflowers in her cunt and killed herself in the woods. The Countess didn't even know about it. She was gliding through the disco searching for gold, and when the husband searched for her, leaving his broom-seller wife to be hunted for by others who'd never thought her any better than crazy and wouldn't care when they found her at the bottom of the ravine, he found his way blocked by a Cambodian militiaman who was dancing with his fingers spread at eye-level, as if he were calmly clawing at darkness's eyes; the militiaman's eyes were hypnotized; his mouth spread into the tiniest smile of longing and bewilderment. The girl he was dancing with had a red silk flower in her hair. Her hands parted the thick air around her waist as she watched him alertly. Her thighs were as soft as snails. Between her legs was a huge sagging orange-colored blossom, glossy and slimy. When the husband tried to go around her, she gripped his shoulders until the dead broom-seller could claim him, swallowing him up in her desperate Chinese porcelain face. The husband couldn't sleep anymore. He lay in the bed that Esther had made so nicely for him, turning pages in the midnight silence to learn what happened when the Devil went to church, while the cat slept on the husband's sweater, lovely and indifferent to a far from flattering conversation which the husband and Bob had had about her after the husband related to Bob a story that an old Inuk lady in Resolute had told him about a couple in the old days that couldn't get children, so they found a polar bear cub and kept it and treated it like their dear child. Years went by along their wide and wriggly river between snow-ridges; there was usually snow on its flat muddy banks. The bear grew up, and then a child came. Whenever they had to go away hunting, the bear would babysit and play with the infant. - The old lady said this had happened in her own family less than a hundred years ago. - The husband didn't know what to believe. Bob couldn't believe it. As evidence Bob adduced that the cat had been very affectionate as a kitten, and when she'd been hit by a car and had broken her pelvis Bob had nursed her as tenderly as he could because the vet said that she might not live; and that tenderness caught her like the Royal Palace by night (almost deserted; white columns of kindness deliciously carved, unknown figures leaping out of whiteness, their faces enriched by dark shadows); in Bob's heart the cat glimpsed a huge-eyed face half hidden among the floral works; the topmost layer of a white wedding cake stark against the hot black sky, which was why whenever Bob came in to see her she lifted her head and purred, happy behind her big green eyes, but as soon as she was well she became ALIENATED. So Bob thought that the polar bear would have become ALIENATED, too. Raising himself up on his elbows, the husband watched the cat sleeping and twitching her whiskers and wondered what the key to affection was; behind his weary eyelids there stretched a mathematical sequence of terms which he still couldn't lock into equivalence; the cat was to Bob as the polar bear was to the Inuk child as Gösta Berling was to the Countess as he the husband was to — whom? — He remembered how on the flight to Bangkok the Korean stewardesses in grey skirts and burgundy vests would often pat each other's hips when they went by. They could give love. The polar bear could give love (suddenly he believed that story again). - At around three in the morning, just as he'd gotten to the part about how the saints marched out of the river, dripping and weedy and dull-dark like old dominoes, for they refused to allow the Countess's husband to evict them from the church, there was a faint noise and the cat opened her eyes and he heard Esther coming downstairs, insomniac; she opened the oven door to warm herself at the gas flames while she took her sleeping pill, and the husband dressed and went out to visit her.

Esther said: But you've got to stop fucking around!

and he hung his head and said: I can't help it.

and she said: You don't mean that you have AIDS?

and he said: I don't think so, but I'll probably keep on until I get it.

The cool white girl's body had turned away from him, sleeping in his hotel bed, shoulders drawn up like frail bony wings, swellings of breath at her delicious salty armpits (her neck and face smelled like soap) — the Virgin sleeping, too, on a leather thong around her neck (the white girl had said that whenever she fucked, the Virgin turned her back, huddling sadly into the medallion), dark hair on the pillow, thick dark hair between her legs, richer and fleecier and more odorous than the Asian girls'. Something about the way her eyes were closed made the vision-crevices wider and more massive, the darkness within glistening like her eyeball. She'd only let him do her once. But all night she stroked him tenderly. He hugged her, kissed the needlemarks on her veins. In the morning she jerked him off. He lay secure and triumphant against her with the wordless animal happiness which defeated past and future, a new lover to his credit; an hour after he'd left her, he called her on the phone and she said to him: sweetheart.

Instantaneously the disease of love broke out again with all its hideous purpuric spots.

He tried to remember everything about her, everything she'd said and done to him.

Do you want to meet me at the hotel? he'd said.

That would be cool, she'd said.

Do you want to come up?

I don't mind.

Do you want to stay over?

I don't mind.

Do you want to do it?

I don't mind.

When they were done she'd laughed proudly and said: Don't I have a tight cunt?

When she was giving him the hand job she'd said: See how he dances!

In the studio, when he was supposed to be working, he sat thinking about her strange little breasts that he could easily cup in half a palm. She'd always wanted to be a boy, she'd said.

Then suddenly he remembered his new wife and something had imploded so that it was almost impossible to see her when he recalled her; with great effort he dragged out of darkness the rainbow hem of her gauzy dress as she sat enfluffed and red-belted just under the breasts with one hand in her lap, fingers curled against her cheek, her cheekbone very sharp as she sat spilling hair-darkness down the back of her chair in Phnom Penh, her eyebrows plucked into inverted Vs.

He felt cold, and he was trembling. He felt that he was going somewhere now, doing something that the necessity of his being nudged him toward (no matter that he must pass through vine-hairs hanging and curling between the knees of roots), so that was good and right, but what was it? It was something secret and spiritual that he could hardly understand yet; he knew only that it must be good; it was the way that he must go.

He remembered a passage he'd read in the memoirs of that German pilot, Hanna Reitsch: The object was to learn, by repeatedly carrying them out in imagination, how to make the correct movements to control the plane absolutely automatically and without thinking, like a form of reflex action, in order to tide over the dangerous moment when the pilot is uncertain or afraid or for any other reason incapable of swift and lucid thought.

That was undoubtedly the method. Once he had a definite application for the method, his imagination could go ahead of him, leading him safely to love or death. .

He was on the # 24 bus on his way to Bob and Esther's for dinner, the Christmas trees already out and lit on the second level of Heal & Son, a baby roaring with unknown anguish, shrilling like an alarm — that irritated him; everything made him tense, in fact: — the red traffic lights that glowed like measles, the start-and-stop of the bus over the pavement whose texture he thought he could feel even through wheels, shocks, floor and seat (the baby cried on); he bore with the nausea as they turned another roundabout like the same old samsara; a blonde with a punk haircut got on just then, and the Op Art herringbone pattern on her sidebag almost made him upchuck; slowly they approached smolder-orange-windowed housing towers ghastly in the drizzly sky and the baby wept NO! NO! and they passed SOLICITORS and CARPETLAND, the streets more crowded with shops now, which soothed him; maybe there'd be something he could buy… — You gotta shu' up! the baby's mother kept saying. He looked out at the people skating soundlessly over the bright tiles of the Underground station. .

Better not to try anything than to be wicked! — That's how most people acted, and they were probably right, dying their lumpish lives without collecting more than their share of the general blame; but he'd do whatever he was called to do. .

He hadn't drunk enough whiskey at Bob and Esther's. His throat still hurt. The pub down the street was out of onion crisps. And the BBC was going to move him out of his hotel room (this small square grave with diamond-patterned carpet, an adjoining marble tomb of a bathroom on whose black floor he slipped and nearly brained himself every time; the double bed took up most of the room; he lay in it enjoying surcease from his fever and fiddled with the cigarette hole that the white girl had made in the coverlet) because they'd made a mistake putting him there in the first place; it was too good for him or not good enough or something — most likely too good for him; once they moved him out, the white girl wouldn't be able to find him; so he called even though she said she'd probably be out, and he got her mother, who wanted to know who he was, what number he was calling from, how he'd met her daughter, what they'd done together; he told her to have the girl call in the morning. At eleven in the morning he had to go to work and she hadn't called, so when they let him out for lunch at 1:00 he went back to his half made-up room but there was no message from her and he wondered if maybe the desk flunkeys hadn't brought it up yet but he didn't feel like going to see; maybe she didn't want to call him; he tried to call her, but the hotel had closed the line and it was too much effort to make them open it. So he ducked into the pub across the street and had a half pint of Sam Smith's, not the stout but the pale apple-flavored kind. The fat barman reached across every minute to munch peanuts. Muzak played grandiosely; a serious drinker leaned on a crutch; the husband was going to be late to the studio and he felt so sad and rejected that the white girl hadn't called him that he didn't care.

Munching on some cheese crisps (TRADITIONAL FLAVOVR), he wandered into the canteen where the producer was supposed to meet him, but the producer wasn't there, so he went down the long hot fire-doored hallways to the studio where the producer was frowning over the script, and he said to the producer: I thought you were going to meet me in the canteen.

I was there, said the producer. But then I had to work. Some people have to work.

The producer's friend started to introduce herself, but the producer interrupted and said to him: You mustn't eat crisps. No, I'm serious. They'll dry your voice out.

There are only a few crumbs left, the husband said. He finished the crisps and went into the other room, which was nicely soundproofed, the producer and technicians now secured in an aquarium where they could frown and gesture and grimace in happy silence behind their window, leaving him free to listen to the second hand going round.

The green light came on. - OK, the producer said. Stand by for Seal Hunt III.

The next morning he had a fever and a sore throat and remembered how the white girl had coughed once or twice; it was 5:00 when he woke up lonely and got up to drink some water but could barely swallow. He lay there until 7:30. Furry bedclothes gnawed at him throughout that long night of sickness. When it started getting light he put on an eyeshade but it seemed to press against his eyes and he could not stop seeing ferocious white dots against the blackness, so he removed the eyeshade, and slowly the albino ants decayed into static. The flicker of his eyelashes, irritatingly magnified, merged with his headache like wet and rusty ferns woven into an unending basketwork of decay. At eight he thought about calling the white girl, but decided to have breakfast first. Maybe the hot tea would help him.

In the Brasserie (why they had to call it that he didn't know) he untwisted his urine-sample-sized jar of breakfast marmalade (NO ADDED COLOUR) and munched his toast, listening to the waitress's shoes squeaking on the parquet floor. The marmalade was good. At long last one other guest came in, a man in a red tie and corduroy suit. Without seeming to see the husband, the man saw him and sat on the other side of the room.

It was 8:20. He got Reception to give him an outside line; then, dreading the thought that he might reach her mother, he called the white girl. The phone rang four times. Hello? said the white girl's mother very anxiously. - Is Samantha there? he said. - No, said the mother, not angrily, not even wearily, only sadly, with such calm and final sadness as to constitute implacability. The mother understood that he and the daughter had done or were doing something that was being kept from her. The mother was never going to pass on his messages or let him see her.

Georgette Heyer in uniform green jackets, multiple copies of Cortâzar (grey), Céline (black) and some unknown faraway writer whose jackets were metallic white like the wrappers of those Belgian chocolates with the horse picture; these almost subsumed him, but he kept believing there must be some other category he longed for but couldn't think of, some special kind of book that was entirely unfamiliar but very very good… — Yeah, here's fiction, a lady said. The sound of the escalator was maddening. A wave of fever drenched him. He swayed and did not open Mayersberg.

Speak Malay! the green book shouted. A saleslady led him to an English-Eskimo Eskimo-English dictionary; he looked on his own for something Khmer but couldn't find anything closer than Speak Indonesian! He stared dull-eyed, open-mouthed, at Spoken Thai, a Gilbertese-English dictionary, Da Kine Talk. .

Climbing up insecticide-smelling stairs, looking through a window into another window set among sooty bricks, he saw other windows with books behind them. Books walled themselves off from him like the Alaskan cemetery fenced with whalebones. Whether they were books or something else didn't even matter anymore. He remembered the Polish market in Omaha with its glass coffin filled with sausage, dried smoked sausage on top, pickled sausage all around bulkheaded by bags of beef jerky; one of those sausages and only one was the right choice, but he hadn't made it. Maybe the English-Eskimo Eskimo-English dictionary was the right choice. He was starting not to think so, but it would definitely have been the wrong choice not to buy it. That's how it would have been with the white girl, too; if he hadn't made love with her he never would have known that she wasn't going to pull off her white mask to be his wife. He was sweating like a mountain-climber. He thought: I suppose this will be how it is when I get AIDS. -Then he thought: Maybe I do have AIDS.

The marquee said Cameron Red's Hypnotic Show and he thought: Well, I don't believe hypnotism is the answer, but who knows? Maybe it'll make all my problems go away.

In the poster, the hypnotist smiled innocuously in black and white like someone on an old record album. But his white fingers reached and clutched; there was a terrifyingly hysterical and concentrated brilliancy in his irises.

The hypnotist was smoking a cigarette under a water-stained ceiling in a room wallpapered with a pattern of scarlet orchids shaped like praying mantises. It was evidently his dressing room, since the far door opened directly onto the wings of a stage where chorus girls were rehearsing, stretching their legs upward like soaring tree-ferns even though nobody watched or cared. There was a welding kit under the hypnotist's bed, then the hall to the bathroom door which was stuffed with paper where somebody had kicked or smashed a hole in it (the shower pull was broken off and you had to flush the toilet three times and even then it might not work). The husband said to himself: How do I know that about the toilet? How do I know there's a welding kit under the bed? Why does this place seem so familiar? — and then the hypnotist's eyes bulged out toward him a little more and he got dizzy, the tides of fever carrying him nowhere, only working him back and forth; but for a moment, only for a moment, he was able to remember that this room and hallway and bathroom had existed in the Arctic, which meant that it couldn't exist here, which meant… — but now the hypnotist's eyeballs clanged over his own. Just as a sleeping pill's effects begin within the quarter-hour, with numbness behind the eyes, followed by a heaviness in the fingers, these zones of deadness expanding rapidly, so now the hypnotist's thrusts of light oozed down his sore throat until he couldn't feel it anymore; then light curved around and round inside his skull like a turd too big for the toilet bowl, pressing down on his brain, blinking out blood vessels like city lights at curfew, and he forgot everything.

To remember her you MUST forget, said the hypnotist.

He said: I'm searching for something, and I still don't know what it is.

You must FORGET, said the hypnotist.

He said: I married someone, and I don't know who she is.

You must FORGET, said the hypnotist.

He said: I betrayed someone, and I don't know where I am.

The hypnotist said: What about the how and why? You forgot those. Those are the five questions that a good journalist is supposed to ask. Who, what, where, how and why.

You told me to forget.

That's no excuse. What's her name?

Vanna.

What's her name?

Vanna.

What's her name?

I–I forget -

You must FORGET, said the hypnotist. What's her name?

Who? What's my name? I don't remember my name.

You must FORGET, FORGET, FORGET, FORGET. .

He said: I feel that my breast is a closed iron door that I'm standing breast to breast with, and I have to smash it open with my breast or with my head because my heart or my love's heart lies inside.

Something touched him. He didn't know what it was. It was fishy and silverwhite and crewcut-soft like sealskin kamiks.

The hypnotist had brought him out of himself, as when a brook carves rock between scaly trees, slipping ever deeper into its own crack until it can rill out into desire, which is sun and space, white light, then GONE into the bowl of green trees below, sided by rock wall looming and leaning and bending, articulated at its reddish lizard-ledges, cradling that suicidal miracle of a desert waterfall; and it seemed he was going down wide white stairs that led into a lake; and now the lukewarm waters were lapping at his ankles; now they were at his knees and he felt slimy weeds rub against him coolly; now he'd gone waist-deep and his testicles contracted with the cold; the water was getting colder and darker by the time his chest went under and the stairs weren't white anymore; they were black; the hypnotist's pale hand took his and pulled him down three more steps so that the water was at his throat and there was an animal smell; the wife he'd divorced was drowned and rotting there; the hypnotist dragged him down deeper and his face went in, only his hair still floating in that bygone world of breath; he would have floated helplessly but for the iron-dark stairs that clung like leeches to the soles of his feet and sucked the buoyancy out of him as the hypnotist pulled him down; it was all very murky and ripply and bubbly but something was going round him now in nasty circles like a chained mongoose at a snake charmer's and the hypnotist's erection was in his mouth; it was a pink mesa over which hung blue-bellied storm clouds with flickering narrow strings of lightning, and from the hot plateau far away he could see other clouds with stems of rain connecting them to the ground. Then he was speeding through the warm drafty bathroom-tiled vaults of the Tube, seeing lots of slender black-leotarded legs, and the hypnotist was whispering in his ear: When you awake you'll forget all this. You'll FORGET. - He was choking and the hypnotist was suffocating him and chuckling and saying: That's right; now drink your milk. .

Once he'd paid the price, once he'd done what Vanna was paid to do, then he crossed over and saw her better and more completely than ever before: Vanna not quite smiling in a spangle of darkness, Vanna with her lip-red fingernail glossy against her apple-red lip, looking at him big-eyed with her pupils perfect circles of pure light in her black eyes; yes, she was smiling at him, a slow sad cautious smile out of darkness; there was a glitter of moisture at the corner of her mouth just beyond her finger; he wanted to lick it and get AIDS; Vanna with her shimmering skin gazed smiling gently, accepting him no matter what he did; her chin almost rested on her knuckle but there was darkness in between, the darkness of sunray eyelashes from his strange doomed new wife whom he'd married once and would probably never see again — his wife, his wife, his wife! — he knew now that no answering letter from her would ever come, but if he went back to Cambodia and found her in the disco or in some anonymous rice field whose corpse-mud and bone fragments oozed between her toes, then she'd smile at him in just the same way, so gently and lovingly and trustingly and sadly; and if he went away or didn't come in the first place she'd never think about him again. He saw Vanna striding away with ultraviolet footfalls outside a hotel room. .

Everything jolly now? said the hypnotist, sitting calm, skinny and brown-skinned beneath the blue dentist's sign with the giant glistening stylized three-pronged tooth, beside which a set of pink-lidded jaws smiled in a light blue circle; quite a sign, really. - Yes, thank you, the husband said. He went out past all the faces smiling politely, smooth, brown-skinned. A green army truck hooted down the street. A lady sat spoonfeeding custard to her little boy and girl. Two cyclists towed a trailer filled with dark green packages. Another cyclist had dozens of live chickens bundled under him. On the sidewalk in front of her kids a lady was splitting firewood with a cleaver. She had a Chinese-porcelain face. Past her stretched an ocher tunnel of bamboo stalks leaning into one another over a brown creek, and at the far end of its darkness was the place where Vanna was waiting for him after she'd left the hotel room.

Everything jolly now? said the hypnotist. Outside the snow-ledged window, voraciously seeking replication upon the walls of the Quonset huts, the sunrise reflected itself in blackish-yellow necroses of that palest lavender blue sky, and the snow was one shade paler than that, the morning being yellow like the low yellow tunnel with the ladder and then the snow on top; the runway beacons were steady; purple steam moved east. Men in dark coveralls roamed around the terminal, drinking coffee, waiting for more freight on this Sunday morning. Just outside the other window, the master beacon flashed subtly. It flashed on a metal knob and a green door, making the former white, the latter a brilliant greenish-yellow. Sirhan Sirhan, that Kennedy assassin, had insisted in his insanity defense that it was precisely this meaningless winking which triggered his soul's evil trances; so he had no need to employ hypnotists to achieve his desire. The husband saw Sirhan Sirhan on the summit of a mountain of dirty snow; Sirhan Sirhan was the retarded boy whose reddish-purple face was armed with yellow teeth; he turned his hunched head in a series of unblinking spasms, shrieking like a bird. - I'm not afraid of you anymore, the husband said. Because I have someone whose life means more to me than mine. - The. fire extinguisher and the two pay phones remained ready to preserve homeostasis, letting people live as if cold and loneliness didn't exist. The orange shimmer of sunlight mounted higher on the dark buildings outside; snowy snow-roofs sprouted confusions of pipes and wires like measures of music. Beyond the work camp lay ice, and more ice, and at the end of the ice the Inuk girl he'd almost married was waiting, and he knew now that she was Vanna.

Everything jolly now? said the hypnotist, joining him in holy matrimony to the parking garage whore, the transvestite whore, the streetcorner whore, the English girl whose mother kept crying, and they were all Vanna like dead brown fern leaves on a pillar, like a school of sardines all salted and dried at once, like a grove of trees hung with long brown aerial roots that dangled down like hairs, thick and musty and chocolate colored; he'd reached the end of the tunnel now where a titanic bone-fan of bamboo rose rusty green in the fog. A few stalks had fallen across the creek to spear the other bank, forming high skinny bridges. The vines were like giant guitar strings. She stood in a grove of "textbook" leaves whose veins caught attention as if engraved for beginning students; she picked one and touched her lips to it and gave it to him and then the veins began to crawl and change, first forming his old wife's name, then a semblance of a skull, then an eye, a bullet, a crocodile (the Khmer Rouge had thrown her uncle to the crocodiles).

On the whole (not remembering any of this), he was more inclined to trust a pint of Murphy's and some vegetable soup, so he went to the nearest pub. - Cheers. - (The ponytailed old bartender stationed at the taps said that he personally never drank any but bottled beer.) With every swig, the red velvet couch he sat on became more restful. He looked at absurd marine engravings and liked them. - Hey! a regular shouted to himself. I love the sound of broken gloss! — The white taphandles promised unknown flavors more plausible than unknown books or girls because to the husband they really were known; viS'à'Vis English beverages he was an ignoramus. The last bit of smog-colored foam traveled deliciously down his throat.

When you get AIDS, the first thing that happens is you come down with the flu, said one of his wise friends. Then the flu goes away and you think you're fine. And you are, for awhile. It's just that you have AIDS.

So when his fever died after so many days the lucidity was a refreshment as delectable as lemon ice. What a shame to become habituated to that pleasure until it was normalcy, like being addicted to some drug. . I feel fine, he said to himself. Of course I don't have AIDS.

He stood at the hotel window, looking out between grey ledgestones and tiles at the corner pub's compounded and frosted windows half smoothed by rubbery light, and people's heels struck the pavement like hammers until he thought his ears would bleed. The cold air made him cough. But he stood looking on as if he'd never see those sights again. Certainly he'd never see the white girl again. Two men and a woman stopped in front of the pub for a moment. Then one of the men raised his arm sharply and they went on. Car light flowed across their shoulders. From the Underground he heard a mother say: Keep still. Keep still, will yer. Oi, d'you wa' a smack? — A man and a woman strode across the husband's field of vision and vanished. He'd never see them again. The BBC would pay him any day now. They'd said he'd get the check before he left England, but now that didn't look promising. The husband was a pretty small fish. But they would pay him soon, and once they did he'd have enough to go back to Cambodia for his wife. He was too tired to be properly excited. The right side of his head felt as if it were about to split open. Fluid oozed from his ear. His throat was so swollen that he could barely swallow. Every meaningless detail pierced the senses unbearably, but left no memory. The hypnotist had done that. He stared for a long time at the illuminated orange and blue logos on the Asiana Airlines terminal, a shape between hexagon and oval, comprised of parallelogram tiles of varying luminosities; he couldn't quite parse the shape in his mind, and wondered if the mind must redraw what it sees to comprehend it; closing his eyes he saw plenty of images which his mind was too weary to flush; their vividness reminded him of his childhood; he'd gradually lost the ability to visualize at will as he'd grown older. Korea had seemed to be in dawn time when he came, in keeping with the meaning of its real name, Han-Guk, the Land of the Morning Calm, but then it got dark while he sat in the transit lounge trying to ignore a cartoon starring a growling jellybean and he could now see the whiteness of some of the Asiana tiles; the alien mountains faded into darkness — anyhow, they weren't so alien since he'd seen mountains before but the more one travels the more alien everything is. - Then back in Bangkok: another little table stacked with plates; he had some cow's head or whatever it was, the man pulling it out of the stewpot and chopping it on the half-meter-thick block; the husband didn't ask how much or why; they brought him rice; he uttered Sprite over the dull double-heartbeat of the chopper. . Then Cambodia again, slopping over him like the cold wetness on your belly when you bushwhack up a rainy jungle hillside; he went to the disco, sank knee-deep into the carpet of girl-ferns because the tables were closer together than ever before, trapping him in narrow sharp-edged lanes down which the other prostitutes hunted him, seizing his hand, pulling him down to sticky chairs beside them where he had to buy them a Tiger beer, the darkness hotter and louder as the music blared so pervasively and unintelligibly that he had to breathe it in like all the smoke from the other men's cigarettes that rose in great pillared trunks flanged with leaves that stuck out like shelf-fungus; now the photographer's girl captured him and started screaming at him to buy her for the photographer; then the Chinese-porcelain-faced one clamored silently for his favor, devouring the light before it could reach his eyes so that he couldn't see if Vanna was among the dancers; knowing his poor vision, however, the photographer had printed up a hundred copies of her picture for him to pass out, so he awarded one to the photographer's girl, who began wailing like a mother whose children have been tortured, and he gave one to the Chinese-porcelain girl, who tore it into shreds, smiling, drifting closer and closer like the queen of nightmare pleasures; cautiously he bought her a Sprite, slipped her five hundred riels, but she still wouldn't leave; her arms grew tight about him like skinny lichen-spotted trees; Vanna wasn't there! She wasn't there! He blundered among the dancers, trying to smell her sickly-sweet face powder, hoping for the sheen of her triangular face, but she wasn't there. He went to the temples and the kids crowded around staring, one with a plastic sword, one smiling, one blinking, one leaning, one almost naked, all bashful; they looked down at their sandaled feet as they asked him for money; he was in Wat Korgue — let's see, some Khmer Rouge damage although the altar had retained its stone flower-nipples and concentric curvy polygons like nested frogs' tongues repeated row to row. There were two glazed figurines. One was a woman in lotus position, with only her lips and eyeballs painted. Not Vanna. The other was a man elaborately colored. The husband took out Vanna's photograph and showed it to the kids but they looked blank. He went on to the Wat Svay Popter. . When he'd been to every temple in Cambodia, he set out for every rice field and she wasn't there though he ducked under every dark ceiling, scanning every hammock and bicycle wheel, studying every pair of sandals on the dirt floor to see if one might be hers, while faces peered in; he searched out whole villages of such houses: displaced people, with chickens underneath (a half-coconut on the platform, a sarong); there was a little boy whose head was shaved to bluish fuzz; the boy held his monkey on a chain so that it wouldn't hurt Vanna's picture and then the boy said: She escaped from place Pol Pot shelled with heavy guns. First time Pol Pot came and attacked her village. Then they shelled with heavy guns for three-four days. She die here malaria. We very sorry, sir. - He thought: If she's dead then maybe she's living on Sailing Boat Mountain. - All he knew about Sailing Boat Mountain was that the Khmer Rouge had killed a few thousand people there, which was all he needed to know. Quite possibly she was the earth-spirit hovering round atrocities, lurking like moisture in the palm trees at the base of that great green rock (they'd thrown the victims off); so he rode up the muddy jungle road, over barely repaired bridges (the driver flashed his gold tooth in the mirror), past abandoned houses and tree trunks so saturated with wet that he could squeeze them like sponges, past fringed green leaf-awnings slung with cartridge-belts of nuts the reddish hue of a baboon's anus; so he arrived at the white stairs (some garnished with giant snailshells) that the murdered ones had been compelled to climb, their hands already tied behind their backs with wire, and he ascended those green-clad cave-cooled cliffs into the rainy sky; she wasn't there. For an instant he remembered the book he'd seen long ago when he was the little butterfly boy, the book about the five unkillable Chinese brothers, and there was one who was pushed off a precipice and smiled in the air as he fell. - Vanna, Vanna! — He said to himself: Well, no skulls screamed from this mound of jungle over rock despite my dreams when I was sleeping with my other wife; maybe my other wife was warping and torturing my dreams so I couldn't find her but she couldn't have made me dream a dream of perfect untruth; maybe Vanna's sick with malaria in the hospital. - Voilà, another set of yellow concrete buildings chessboard-floored like his foolish ruinous life, the white cross wall-inset (maybe once red plexiglass), fire in the courtyard, smell of jasmine. A girl lay on the bed almost naked, sleeping. Not her. A lady was sweeping the floor very slowly. Some of the tiles were grey; a few were still white. Pale light bled through the blinds, losing itself among the dingy dark wooden cribs, darkness and concrete. A girl's brown feet stuck out from under a blanket. Not her. Three girls lay huddled in colored sheets; ladies stood over the dirty cribs; a dark-skinned woman attached to the intravenous snakes smiled whitely (not her), a nurse put her hand in front of the dark-skinned woman's face; one brown baby began to cry when another cried; a soldier sat beside his child, his feet fidgeting in the sandals; a lady waved a palm-woven fan very gently over her baby; the nurse took her hand away from the dark-skinned woman's face and it was Vanna after all. He rushed to her, bent over her. . She nodded a little and closed her eyes.