Time on his hands

^{A short story by Sam Sackett}

 He looked at his watch and swore. The battery had run down, because the numerals gave the same message as they had half an hour ago, shortly after they had bribed the guards on both sides of the Thai-Myanmar border to let them through. About half an hour, to be more accurate, because he had no way now of knowing the exact time. The last time the watch had told him a time that he could count on, it said 5:42. And out here in the jungle there was no way of getting the battery replaced.

            “Can’t this thing to any faster?” he asked his driver. The interpreter translated the demand into Thai.

            “The jeep can go faster,” the translator told him that the driver replied, “but the road won’t let it.” As if to validate the observation, the jeep hit a rut and bucked so hard that Harrison’s teeth clicked together.

            There was nothing to do but grumble, and Harrison did it. The network had bought time on the satellite from nine to ten, local time, for him to send his interview to New York for editing, and now not only was he in danger of being too late for that window of opportunity, but also he had no way of knowing what time it was. And neither the interpreter nor the driver wore watches.

            It was growing dark. It was what passed for winter here in Southeast Asia, and the days were short, though not so short as in New York. The trees that surrounded the road were not anxious to let in whatever sunlight might have been available, and the gloom provided an accompaniment to Harrison’s mood. The temperature was cool by Southeast Asian standards, probably mid sixties Fahrenheit, but warm to someone who had just left New York in the days before Christmas.

            They had been going steadily uphill – if the jeep could be said to do anything steadily – since they crossed the border. The jeep continued lurching along the dirt road, which the vehicle’s headlights picked out dimly as it roared among the thickset trees. Road? It was two ruts, with a pathway of lush grass in the middle. The jungle didn’t look as Harrison expected it to; the trees were unfamiliar, and where were the lianas that Tarzan used to swing from in the movies?

            The jeep rounded a bend and skidded to a halt, confronted by four camouflage-clad armed men barring their progress.

            “Who the hell is that?” Harrison demanded of anyone who would listen to him.

            There was an extended conversation in Thai between the tallest of the men and the interpreter, while Harrison fumed silently in the back seat. When he could contain himself no longer, he interrupted to ask the interpreter, “What’s this all about?”

            The interpreter waved him to be quiet and continued the interchange with the soldier. The interpreter was leaning forward, gesturing vigorously, as if the message he was trying to convey was enormously important. Well, Harrison thought, if what he’s saying is that we have to go on so that I can do the interview with the general, it is important.

            Thinking that it would help if he showed his identification, Harrison reached for the card case in his shirt pocket, setting off a crisis. Immediately four guns were trained on him, and a flood of orders were barked at him in Thai. Harrison didn’t understand the language, but the meaning was unmistakable. He removed his hand from his pocket. The interpreter looked at him, and Harrison saw sweat beading on his forehead.

            In the silence that followed the orders, the translator said in a quivering voice, “I am trying to inform them why they should not kill us.”

            Harrison’s mouth suddenly became very dry. He considered reaching for his canteen but decided against it.

            Surprisingly, the tall soldier who had been talking with the interpreter spoke in English: “We wanted to make sure that you were the party we expected, Mr. Harrison. You may proceed, and we’ll accompany you.”

            The shock of being spoken to not only in English, but in the English of an educated Texan, and being called by name, blanked Harrison’s mind momentarily. When he recovered his senses, questions flooded into his mind, but before he could put any of them into words the driver started up the jeep again.

            The vehicle proceeded even more slowly than before, accommodating its speed to the pace of the soldiers who now walked along beside it, two on each side. Harrison took a deep breath. The window of opportunity had now obviously slammed shut.

            Harrison was frustrated at being prevented from accomplishing his assignment, frightened despite the soldier’s assurance, and curious as only a reporter can be curious. Curiosity won out. He raised his voice to shout over the racket of the jeep’s motor: “Where’d you learn English?”

            The soldier responded, “The University of Texas at Austin.” He raised the fist in which he was not carrying a gun, extended the fore and little fingers, shouted, “Go Longhorns!” and laughed.

            “Then what are you doing here?” Harrison asked.

            “The Thai Yai are my people,” he said. “I felt they needed my help.”

            Harrison thought that over. “Thai” he understood, but not “Yai.” “I don’t understand,” he confessed. “If you’re Thai, what are you doing here in Myanmar?”

            “The Thai Yai have always lived here,” the soldier answered. “But the Burmese have oppressed us because we’re a minority.”

            “My impression is that the present government of – you still call it Burma? They changed the name.”

            “Yes, we still call it Burma. They can’t hide what they are by changing the name.”

            “Well, my impression is that the present government will oppress anybody it can get its hands on.”

            “The present government, and the ones before that. But oppression isn’t the worst of it.”

            Harrison thought for a moment, wondering what might be worse than oppression. Not finding an answer to the question in his mind, he voiced it.

            The soldier said, “Your government was right in the resolution on Burma that it presented to the Security Council. The present government uses torture and rape as an instrument of policy.”

            Harrison remembered having read that, but the words, being abstractions, had made no impression on him at the time.

            The soldier continued, “I’ve seen what they did to prisoners that we’ve liberated. Some were so badly maimed and mutilated that they begged and pleaded with us to kill them to put them out of their suffering.”

            Harrison could summon no words to comment on that; all the reaction he could find was to shake his head.

            “And,” the soldier went on, “you and I can never know what it does to a woman to be violated ten or twenty times, one right after the other.”

            Harrison shook his head again and said, “You called that an instrument of policy.”

            “Yes. The policy is to get rid of us Thai Yai genetically so that the babies our women bear will be Burmese.”

            “But that’s insane!”

            “Of course. There are herbs women can use to have abortions. Sometimes they work. If they don’t, then we raise the children as Thai Yai; they learn our language and our culture and our” – he groped for a word – “hatred and contempt for the Burmese.”

            “So you’re rebelling against the Burmese.”

            The soldier nodded.

            “So are the Shan,” Harrison said. “Are you allied to the Shan?”

            “We are the Shan,” the soldier said. “That’s another name for us.”

            Harrison nodded, comprehending. “I came here to interview General Yawdserk of the Shan. My assignments editor read an article about the Shan rebellion and sent me to cover it.”

            “I report to General Yawdserk.”

            “I was going to have to send my interview between nine and ten tonight.” He waved at the generator, camera, and transmission equipment that rode beside him in the back seat. “What time is it now?”

            “I don’t know,” the soldier answered. “But you won’t send any interviews tonight. The Burmese launched a major offensive near Mawkmai, and General Yawdserk had to go to take personal command of our defense.”

            Harrison raised his eyebrows in defeat. He had hoped to get back to New York for Christmas; he and his girl friend, Alison – Alison with the fabulous figure, beautiful face, blonde hair, and blue eyes – had planned to attend a Christmas party. Now it looked as though he would be delayed for a time best described as indeterminate. Suddenly he realized that he did not know who the soldier was. “What’s your name?”

            “Colonel Ngeunzarng.”

            Harrison looked but saw nothing that he recognized as insignia of rank. “When will the general be back?”

            “I can’t answer that question. That depends on the Burmese.”

            “Your people in Chiang Rai told me there’d be no trouble.”

            Ngeunzarng shrugged. “The people in Chiang Rai don’t like to admit that they don’t know the answer to a question.”

            “They told me he would be willing to see me at seven o’clock this evening.”

            “They’re more imaginative than I thought they were.”

            The headlights told Harrison that they were coming to a clearing, in which he could discern a dozen or so makeshift structures made of poles and bark. A bon fire burned in the center.

            “This is our camp,” Ngeunzarng said.

            The jeep quivered to a halt.

            “You can get out now,” the colonel said, and said something in Thai to which the driver and interpreter responded by dejeeping. Harrison followed suit.

            “Are you hungry?” Ngeunzarng asked.

            “I think I would be if I weren’t so . . .” Harrison tried to find a word.

            “Exasperated?”

            “That’ll do.”

            “We were about to eat when we got word that you were coming. Come on and eat with us.”

            One of the makeshift structures was a lean-to with strips of bark slanting against bamboo poles. An elderly woman was presiding over two charcoal stoves with a pot on each one. One of the pots was lidded; she was stirring the other. Ngeunzarng began walking toward the lean-to, and Harrison fell in behind him. Before they reached it, one of the other soldiers came up to Ngeunzarng and said something to him. The colonel stopped and turned to Harrison.

            “He says he’d like to have your watch.”

            “He’s welcome to it,” the reporter said, working the expansion band over his hand, “but the battery’s run down and it doesn’t work.”

            “Oh, that’s all right, he doesn’t want it to tell time by. He just wants it for an ornament.”

            Harrison handed the watch to the soldier, who made the wai gesture, like praying hands, said, “Kap khun mak kap [thank you very much],” and accepted it.

            As Ngeunzarng approached the old woman, she greeted him with a quasi-toothless smile and a wai, a gesture like praying hands. The colonel returned the wai as the woman removed the lid from the first pot, ladled out on a tin plate a substantial spoonful of white rice, and then, using a wire mesh strainer with a handle, dumped a portion of the contents of the other pot over the rice. From the smell, Harrison divined it was fish. She put a tin fork and spoon on the side of the plate. Ngeunzarng said something to her in Thai – Harrison caught the word farang [foreigner] – and she delivered a similar plate and utensils to the reporter.

            Ngeunzarng then walked over to a nearby tree and gracefully sat down crosslegged, leaning against the tree. The plate was balanced in his lap. Harrison sat beside him awkwardly.

            “Careful of the bones,” the colonel warned him. “This fish has a lot of them.”

            “Thanks for telling me.” He watched the colonel use the fork and spoon to scrape meat off the fish, fill the spoon with a mixture of fish and rice, and eat. He followed suit and nearly spat out the first mouthful. “Wow!” he said. “This stuff is hot!”

            Ngeunzarng smiled. “In Texas they said that Mexican food was hot. They didn’t know what ‘hot’ was. Thai food is really hot. It hides the taste of the fish.”

            They ate in silence for a few minutes, and then Harrison’s curiosity came to the fore again. “How’d you end up in Texas?” he asked.

            “I was born in a refugee camp on the other side of the Thai border,” Ngeunzarng said. “I suppose biologically I must have had a father, but I never knew who he was. My mother died when I was three. One of the UNHCR [United Nations High Commision for Refugees] ladies took a shine to me and took me under her wing. Her tour of duty ended when I was six, and she took me back to Texas with her and adopted me. She gave me the name Felix, which means ‘happy’ in Latin. Felix Armstrong. We lived in Plano, which is a suburb of Dallas, and Mom was active in doing all kinds of things to help the Mexicans survive in the US. She died while I was a junior at TU.”

            “What did you study at the university?”

            “I was a chemistry major. It makes me useful around explosives.”

            Harrison nodded. “So how come do you know Thai so well?”

            “Mom thought since I was Thai I ought to know the culture I came from. As soon as we hit Plano, she started teaching me English, but we also spent half an hour a day speaking Thai with each other, so that I wouldn’t forget it. She’d learned Thai so that she could talk to the refugees. Of course, the Thai Yai have their own dialect, and she’d learned Bangkok Thai, but after working in the camp among Thai Yai for so long she had that down too.” Ngeunzarng smiled. “You know, I never thought I’d be sitting here eating fish with Sam Harrison. I used to watch you on television. You look just like . . . just like yourself.”

            They laughed together.

            “So,” Harrison said, “tell me about General Yawdserk. The impression we get in the West is that he’s just a power-hungry warlord. But this article my assignments editor read made him think there might be more to him.”

            “There might be,” Ngeurnzarng agreed. “I’m gambling that there is. He’s a strong personality. You know, for thousands of years Thai society was built around kings and peasants. The kings amassed riches, and the peasants grew rice, gave it to the kings, and fought for the kings in their wars. The king was wealthy because he controlled trade and because he took everything that was captured in a war. If a peasant needed anything, he asked the king for it, and the king gave it to him. I think that if Yawdserk had been alive three hundred years ago, he’d have been a king.” The colonel yawned. “It’s been a busy day. I’m going to turn in.”

            He laid down his empty plate, stretched out on the ground, and prepared to sleep.

            Harrison blinked. “Aren’t you going to set a guard over me so that I won’t run away?”

            Stifling a yawn, Ngeunzarng said, “Where would you go? You don’t know where you are. If you followed the road back to where you came from, we’d pick you up before you got very far. And if you didn’t follow the road, you’d get lost in the jungle. In fact, if you got very far from our fire, the tigers would probably get you.”

            As if to confirm the colonel’s words, a distant roar sounded.

            “I won’t run away,” Harrison said.

            But the colonel’s eyes were closed. His regular breathing suggested that he was already asleep.

*

            Harrison did not sleep well that night. The ground was hard and uncomfortable, and while his clothing was adequate for daytime wear, the night seemed chilly even to the New Yorker. He froze awake one time when he heard bootsteps approach him, but it was only a soldier collecting the plates and tinware for washing. The principal reason for his insomnia, however, was the recurring review of his situation which circled through his mind again and again. And the occasional roars, distant and infrequent though they were, did nothing to lull him.

            He had finally dozed off when the sounds of men awakened him. He looked at his bare wrist to see what time it was and then remembered that he had donated his watch to a soldier who admired it for its decorative, not its chronographic, features.

            The old woman was back in her lean-to, stirring a pot, and one by one the soldiers were going over to get a ladlefull of whatever she was cooking. Harrison turned over to look at Ngeunzarng, only to find that the colonel was not there. He yawned and sat up. Ngeunzarmg was nowhere to be seen.

            The reporter stood up and went over to the lean-to. The old woman gave him a broad smile, a wai, a tin bowl filled with watery rice soup, and a tin spoon to eat it with.

            Harrison returned to the tree, sat leaning against it, and began to eat. He had never had anything so completely tasteless in his entire life. But he steeled himself and continued to spoon the gruel into his mouth.

            Ngeunzarng came out of the forest into the clearing. “Maisoong kha,” he greeted him, giving the wai gesture. “How do you like kow tum [rice soup]?”

            “Is that what this is called? I think it’s the first thing I’ve ever eaten that was completely and entirely without any flavor at all.”

            The colonel nodded. “It sustains life,” he said. “And it’s done it for Thais for thousands of years, so there must be something to it. Hurry up and finish it. There’s a stream over there” – jerking his thumb toward the forest – “where you can wash up. And then we’re moving out.”

            “Where are we going?”

            “You and I are going to a village where you’ll be safe and sound for a while.”

            “That’s reassuring. Tell me about the Shan.”

            “There are only ten to twenty thousand of us in this sector, and we can’t confront the Burmese in a pitched battle, so we fight by hit and run. We’ll never get a military victory out of it, but we hope we’ll be such a nuisance that the generals will finally get fed up with us and say, ‘Oh, go ahead and have your stupid country if you want to.’”

            “So you attack only soldiers, not civilians?”

            “We’re not terrorists. We don’t attack unarmed civilians just for the fun of it, like the insurgents do in the south of Thailand.”

            “Yes, you seem quite civilized by comparison. You say there are between ten and twenty thousand of you. Don’t you know how many you are?”

            “At any time there are ten thousand of what you might call professional soldiers among the Shan in this sector. But there are many Thai Yai who support us, and any time the men aren’t busy with their farming or other occupations, they may come and join us for a while. So the number fluctuates.”

            “I see. But I thought you told me the Burmese had launched a major offensive.”

            “That’s southwest of here, closer to the border, where they’re strong enough to give us some real trouble. Since they’ve moved their capital north to Pyinmana, they’ve been pressing us harder. We can put a lot of men into that sector when we need to. And of course they have much more equipment than we do, because the Chinese are supporting them, so we have to be smarter than they are. Apparently we are, because we’ve survived. But finish your kow tum, because we need to get going.”

            Harrison laid down his bowl. “I think I’ve had enough. You say there’s a stream over there where I can wash up?”

            “It’s not far. Walk a little ways out of camp, and you can hear it.”

            The colonel was correct. Harrison was only about ten meters from the camp when he heard the sound of water tumbling over rocks. It was a soft sound, only a murmur; he would never have heard it against the ambient noise in the Big Apple, and that made him conscious of how quiet it was here in the jungle, where the noisiest thing was a bird call. He followed the sound, and there was a perfectly delightful stream, perhaps half a meter wide, flowing down the hillside over a scattering of yellowish stones. He knelt and washed his hands and face, feeling the stubble of beard starting to form on his chin and cheeks, and wishing that he had soap and a razor.

            As he retraced his steps, he paid more attention to the rain forest itself. American forests tended to be evergreens with needles; these trees had broad leaves, though they were probably not deciduous, since few tropical trees were. The ground he walked on was carpeted with ragged grass. The air was filled with the sounds of birds, none of which he recognized.

            In the clearing, he found Ngeunzarng at the steering wheel of the jeep, with the interpreter in the passenger seat.

            “What happened to the driver?” Harrison asked.

            “He decided to join us,” the colonel replied. “He’s enlisted.”

            Harrison raised his eyebrows but got into the back seat beside his equipment.

            “That’s an interesting collection of gear,” Ngeunzarng commented, as he turned the key in the ignition. “I’ll see that no harm comes to it.”

            Harrison did not know what to say to this, so he remained silent.

            The drive to the village, continuously uphill, was not very long. Harrison kept looking habitually at his bare wrist to determine the time and swearing to himself when he saw nothing on it.

            He estimated that there were visible about fifteen or twenty thatched houses on stilts, with stairs leading up to their verandas; there might be others screened by the trees. Before each house there was a much smaller house – like a doll house, Harrison thought – on stilts a meter or so high; each doll house was decorated with orchids, which he had seen growing wild in the jungle, fruit, and smoking incense sticks. In addition to the houses there was a larger building, more substantially built, with a Thai-style curved roof. Near it were three structures that Harrison would have called huts. The thatched and stilted houses were surrounded by garden plots, here and there were pens in which hogs resided, reddish brown chickens were running wild, and there was a large field in the center.

            “What are they growing here?” Harrison asked as Ngeunzarng slowed the jeep to a halt.

            “They raise enough rice and other food to feed themselves, but the cash crop is opium.”

            “Opium!” Seasoned reporter though he was, Harrison was shocked both by the information and by the matter-of-fact tone in which Ngeunzarng transmitted it.

            “Sure. It takes money to run even the low-budget war we’re waging, and we can get more money per rai by raising opium than any other crop.”

            “Doesn’t it bother you that you’re destroying people’s lives?”

            “Listen,” Ngeunzarng said sternly. “We don’t force anybody to take heroin. If we could get paid more money for anything else, we’d raise it instead. But there’s a demand, and somebody’s going to supply it. Didn’t they teach you that in your economics class? If we didn’t supply it, somebody else would, and we need the money.” His voice softened. “Actually, the demand is drying up. People in the Western countries are moving from heroin to methamphetamines, and that’s cutting into our income. We’ve just completed a meth factory that I was involved in planning. Given the sensibilities of some Westerners, I designed it so thjat it would be convertible to producing medicines. But out here we’re still raising opium.”

            “I see,” Harrison said, although he didn’t.

            “Don’t worry about it. We won’t turn you into a drug addict.”

            “Thanks,” Harrison said sarcastically.

            “And there’s nothing you can do about it, so don’t worry about it.”

            “It seems to me there’s a lot of things right now that I can’t do anything about.”

            Ngeunzarng nodded and climbed out of the jeep. To the interpreter he said, “Wait here.” To Harrison he said, “Let me show you to your quarters.”

            Harrison followed the colonel to one of the houses.

            Standing at the foot of the stairs, Ngeunzarng called out, “Maisoong kha!”

            A woman appeared in the doorway of the house. She looked to be somewhere between thirty and fifty; Harrison found it difficult to judge the ages of Thai women. She was dressed in a long skirt, woven in an attractive multicolored pattern, and a shiny green jacket. When she saw it was Ngeunzarng who had called out, her face broke into a grin from which only two teeth were missing. “Maisoong kha, Khun Ngeunzarng,” she called back. “Chern kha [welcome].”

            Ngeunzarng kicked off his shoes; Harrison, whose attention had been elsewhere since his jeep had been stopped by the Shan soldiers, noticed for the first time that the colonel was wearing sandals and was otherwise barefoot. The reporter hesitated, then told himself, “When in Rome . . . ,” and knelt to untie his shoes and remove them.

            As he followed Ngeunzarng up the stairway, the colonel was telling him, “Mae Mamuang’s husband was killed fighting the Burmese, so she could use a man around the house. You’ll do, at least temporarily.”

            Not quite sure how to take the last sentence, Harrison said nothing. The treads of the stairs were hard under his stockinged feet.

            On the veranda, Ngeunzarng spoke in Thai to the woman, who looked at Harrison occasionally; the reporter deduced from that that he was being explained. She responded and turned to go into the house; Ngeunzarng followed her, and Harrison followed Ngeunzarng.

            The house was dim inside; the only illumination was the daylight from several windows; these also would provide the only air conditioning, though it was a pleasant day and no additional cooling was necessary. The dimness did not prevent Harrison from noticing the other inhabitant of the room, a girl who might have been any age from fifteen to twenty-five. She was sitting on a mat in a corner, wrapped from armpit to ankle in what Harrison would have called a sarong.

            In another corner of the room was a wooden machine that Harrison recognized as a loom. He deduced that Mae Mamuang wove her own and the girl’s clothing; from the attractive patterns of her skirt, he deduced further that she was good at it. The remaining corner contained a shelf on which sat a gilded Buddha figure, somewhat like the ones he had seen in souvenir shops in Chiang Rai, surrounded by orchids and smoking incense sticks; the latter gave the room a pungent odor.

            They sat on the floor. The discussion between Ngeunzarng and Mae Mamuang continued for a while, and then the colonel turned to Harrison and said, “What I’ve arranged is that you’re to stay here until General Yawdserk has time to do the interview. So Mae Mamuang will provide you with food and shelter. In exchange, you’ll do some chores around the house, work in the garden, go fishing, and so on – the normal activities of a Thai man. Any questions?”

            “Yes. I’ve never done any farm work.”

            “Don’t worry about that. It’s easy. You’ll pick it up in no time.”

            “How do I communicate? I don’t speak Thai.”

            “Nong Lek will teach you.”

            “Who’s Nong Lek?”

            Ngeunzarng smiled. “The young lady over there in the corner. She doesn’t know any English, but she’s been assigned to go with you wherever you go and teach you any words and expressions you need.”

            “Wherever I go?” Harrison was thinking of the necessary excretory functions.

            “Within limits.” Ngeunzarng smiled again. “Any other questions?”

            “Yes. What are you going to do with my equipment?”

            “I’ll take good care of it. I’m planning to put it in a place where it won’t be damaged by the weather or be a temptation to anybody who might think they could sell it.”

            “What are you going to do with Direk?” Harrison asked, naming his interpreter.

            “I think we can use him. It’ll be the general’s decision, but I think we need a go-between to keep in touch with your network and let them know what’s going on.”

            The colonel rose to go. As he reached the door, he turned to look at Harrison. “If you think about trying to go anywhere, remember the tigers.” He directed wai gestures toward the women, who returned them, and went out the door.

            After he had left, Harrison looked at his bare wrist, wondering what time it was. He glanced around the room. There were no clocks on the walls.

*

            Harrison awoke the next morning to an unfamiliar sound. There were three rooms in the house, one large room that occupied the front half of it and two smaller rooms in back; Mae Mamuang and Nong Lek occupied one of them, and Harrison was assigned the other, which had been empty, and given a mat to sleep on. There was no kitchen; Mae Mamuang cooked in a roofed area on the veranda at the back of the house. Harrison crossed the front room to the doorway and looked out to see what the sound was.

            Three men in reddish orange robes were standing at the foot of the stairs, one of them carrying a large wooden bowl, and a boy accompanying them was beating on a smaller wooden bowl with a wooden spoon. Harrison recognized them as Buddhist monks from pictures he’d seen. As Harrison stood watching, Mae Mamuang came around the corner of the veranda, carrying a bowl. She walked carefully down the stairs and put the contents of her bowl into the large one, which already held some food. The monks moved on toward the next house.

            Returning up the stairs, Mae Mamuang saw Harrison and smiled at him. She motioned for him to return to the front room and sit down; he followed her instructions, and then she disappeared, only to reappear shortly with a bowl and spoon, which she gave him. Harrison recognized kow tum and steeled himself for its tastelessness; but he was pleasantly surprised. This had something in it; it was unfamiliar, but from the color, texture, and taste he guessed it was shredded dried pork.

            He had nearly finished the meal when Nong Lek arrived from her room and sat beside him. After greeting him, “Kow,” she said, pointing to the white grains. “Moo,” she said, reaching into his bowl and withdrawing, between thumb and forefinger, one of the non-rice items. “Kin kow,” she said, using her hands to pantomime scooping something from a bowl and bringing it to her mouth. His Thai lessons had begun.

            Out in the sunlight he got a better look at Lek. He still could not determine her age, but she was exceptionally beautiful – especially when she smiled, which was frequently. Looking at her, he could see that Mae Mamuang had looked like that when she was Lek’s age, though years of toil and trouble had weathered the older woman’s features. Lek laughed easily and often, and when she was laughing at his clumsy attempts to imitate her pronunciation, it did not seem to him that she was ridiculing him; instead, her laugh was catching, and he found himself joining her and laughing at himself.

            That day he worked in the garden. Ngeunzarng had said farm work was easy; it was easy to learn, certainly, but he found it was hard to do. He pulled weeds after Lek instructed him as to which were weeds and which were pok [vegetables]. He also wielded a hoe, much like an American hoe only heavier, and learned the difficulties posed by a Thai shovel. Since from times immemorial Thai did not wear shoes, the blades on a Western-style shovel, on which Occidental diggers placed their shod feet to delve into the earth, would have been impractical; hence the Thai developed their own shovels, little half-tubes of metal attached to long handles, which were raised high and then plunged down into the dirt by hand.

            As he worked, every once in a while he glanced at his wrist, as if it could tell him what time it was; but his wrist was uncommunicative. When he was tired, he rested, and Lek sat down beside him, smiling. Although he had left his work undone, the weeding or hoeing or digging or whatever task he was doing at the time, she made no effort to urge him back to work. It seemed strange to be working without the pressure of a boss pushing him.

            From time to time other men of the village came by, and Lek spoke to them, apparently explaining who he was. The men were bare-chested and wore long, beautifully woven skirts. He caught the word farang many times and assumed that that referred to him. After Lek’s explanation, the men always smiled at him and made the wai gesture, which he figured out he was supposed to return. Some of them also said, “Chok dee [good luck],” which he decided was well meant.

            As the day wore on, Lek asked him from time to time whether he was hungry; she rubbed her stomach and made the gesture of feeding herself with a spoon. The first two times he shook his head, but by the third time he felt as though he could use some food, so he nodded and rubbed his own stomach in reply. She left and went up the stairs to the house. Harrison remained sitting on the ground, hugging his knees, hoping that she would return with a bowl of food. She did.

            Mae Mamuang, he discovered, was a good cook. The food was hot, but delicious – alloy, Lek taught him to say. The staple was rice, but over it, swimming in a tasty sauce, were vegetables, a few of which Harrison recognized, and little chunks of stir-fried chicken. It was the first time he had eaten cooked cucumbers.

            Although it was late in December, the day became hot as it went along, and Harrison removed his shirt. By day’s end his hands were blistered, his arms were stiff and sore, and his legs ached as he climbed the stairs to the house. Lek lanced his blisters with a thorn from some tropical plant and then had him lie down on his stomach while she kneaded his shoulders, upper arms, thighs, and calves; the massage felt wonderful.

            Mae Mamuang had prepared a kind of noodle soup in a heavy brown broth. Harrison did not consider it especially alloy [delicious], but after the hardest day’s work he could remember ever having performed, he ate it esgarly. After the meal Lek and Mae Mamuang knelt facing the Buddha shelf and made three wai gestures above their heads, following which they prostrated themselves on the floor. Harrison watched carefully and decided he would participate the next time. By now it was dark, and he lay on his mat and fell asleep instantly.

            If he had thought that his muscles were sore when he finished the day, that was nothing compared to what they were when he was awakened by the spoon-on-bowl alarm clock the next morning. He sat up groggily, and it took a few minutes before he realized where he was. When he did, he balled his fists in anger at having fallen into a situation where he was so completely helpless. But then, as he achingly stood up, he considered that things could have been a lot worse. General Yawdserk would probably show up in a few days, after all. And maybe the adventure could be turned into a book, or perhaps an hour special. Remembering that Robinson Crusoe kept track of the time by making a mark for every day that he had been shipwrecked, Harrison used one of the keys on his chain to scratch a mark in the wall of his room before he left it in search of the inevitable kow tum.

*

            But it was more than a few days that he had to remain in the village. The days stretched into weeks, the weeks into months. He found himself losing track; he would forget to scratch the day mark on the wall for a day or two or three and then would try to remember how many days he had missed, and finally he gave up on the day marks completely. He was aware of the passage of time largely because of his consciousness that as the sun moved daily uphill in its progress across the sky – he assumed uphill was north – the days were getting longer and the weather was gradually warming. His pants were becoming uncomfortable, and he cut the legs off them. He found it convenient to go barefoot, and, though at first the ground hurt his soles, gradually they toughened. Like the other men, he took to wearing one of the hats woven by the women from strips of banana leaves.

            His hair and beard continued to grow. He thought longingly of the scissors and razor in his travel kit in the hotel room in Chiang Rai. He discovered that Thai men had sparser facial hair than he and plucked out the hairs of their beards with tweezers as the hairs appeared. This was not practical with as heavy a beard as his, and so he let it grow. On the other hand, Mae Mamuang had a pair of scissors and cut his hair and trimmed his beard once every new moon.

            He was brought forcibly to an awareness of the source of food that he had been accustomed to buy from a refrigerated case in a supermarket. He heard the squawking of chickens before Mae Mamuang cut off their heads. And he was invited to wield the knife when it came time to slit a hog’s throat and cut it up; he declined the honor, but the villagers, instead of treating him scornfully as he had feared, simply nodded understandingly and passed he knife to another man.

            Now and again a party of village men went to Mong Hsat, the nearest town, a day’s journey there and back by foot, to sell produce – including opium – and return with manufactured goods which could not be made in the village. On some of these journeys, when either they had an exceptionally large amount of produce or they expected to purchase something exceptionally large or heavy, they drove an ox cart to go along with them. Harrison thought it would be a mistake for him to join them, since he might be captured by the Burmese.

            At first he was a source of unending wonderment to the children. They marveled at the paleness of his skin – though as time wore on he tanned, he never became as dark as the Thai men – the blueness of his eyes, and the brownness of his hair and beard. But eventually his novelty faded, and the children crowded around him less and less often; eventually they left him completely alone.

            The villagers were attuned to the phases of the moon, for they gathered at the little temple every new and full moon. But there were no services, as Harrison understood church services, and there was no set time for the gathering. The villagers came when they felt it was time for them to come; while the monks sat chanting, the villagers knelt, lit candles and incense sticks, made three wai gestures to the image of the Buddha which sat at the far end of the temple’s only room, and left offerings of food, money, or anything else.

            The monks also kept track of time in the same way, for they reminded the villagers when it was time for a celebration, and the celebrations also took place according to lunar phases. The first of these took place on a full moon after Harrison had been in the village long enough to understand Lek’s explanation. It was Makha Bucha Day, marking the occasion when 1,250 disciples of the Buddha, from many places near and far, simultaneously and without mutual communication, converged on his retreat to hear him. Nobody worked on that day; even the women prepared enough food the day before that they didn’t have to cook. Everybody went to the temple, the offerings were larger and more elaborate than usual, and friends and relatives visited each other during the day. In the evening there were fireworks, and Harrison was surprised at the sophistication of the displays.

            Then, after three more new-full-new moon phases, came Songkran, the traditional Thai New Year, which lasted for three days. Harrison thought these must be the three hottest days of the year. On the first day younger Thais visited their elders bearing bowls of water in which fragrant blossoms floated. They knelt before the older Thai and ceremoniously washed their hands. Lek bore her most serious expression as she washed Harrison’s hands. The other two days were devoted to frolic, as each villager attempted to catch every other villager unaware and splash water on him or her. Harrison participated fully and had a wonderful time.

            The last of the celebrations that Harrison experienced, only a few days before he was rescued – if “rescue” is the right word – was Visaka Bucha Day, about three more full-new-full moon phases after Songkran. It commemorated, Lek explained to Harrison, the day of the Buddha’s birth; his enlightenment, which occurred on the anniversary of his birth; and his death, which also occurred on the same anniversary. The activities were similar to those of Makha Bucha Day.

            Harrison was interested in the villagers’ religious activities, because as a nominal Christian – meaning that he checked off a box on a form whenever his religion was called for, though it was years since he had been in a church – he had not often been around people who took their religion as seriously as these Buddhists did.

            Once he had a good enough grasp of the language, he made friends with one of the monks, Phra Sun, who for some unconscious reason appealed to him more than the other two who lived in the huts by the temple. Phra Sun was the tallest of the three, with a thin, expressive face, and Harrison talked with him from time to time about Buddhism, which seemed to him a very orderly and methodical religion, with its Four Noble Truths, its Eightfold Path, and its Five Precepts. But the content of the religion was to him less striking than the personality of Phra Sun himself. Whatever Phra Sun might have been looking for before he became a monk, he radiated the relaxed, serene confidence that in the monkhood he had found it. Harrison found himself wishing that he could somehow, somewhere, sometime be as much at ease with himself as Phra Sun was.

            From Phra Sun he also learned that the monks were allowed to eat only one meal a day, when the sun was not quite at its zenith overhead; they accumulated the provender that had been donated to them by the villagers that morning, divided it among themselves, and ate. The monk explained that the three wai gestures directed to the Buddha were to gain the protection of first, the Buddha; second, the dharma, or doctrines which the Buddha taught; and third, the sangha, the collegiality to which all Buddhist monks belonged.

            Lek told Harrison that what he thought of as doll houses, in front of each house in the village, were sanphraphum, the abodes of the spirits of the land, who were propitiated with fresh flowers, fruit, and incense so that they would dispel danger and promote prosperity for the inhabitants.

            As Harrison examined his own mental state, he was surprised at his reaction to going day after day after day without knowing what was going to happen to him. At first he felt anxiety, then anger, and then anxiety again – had something happened to Ngeunzarng? – but as time went on he discovered that he thought about that aspect of his situation less and less. He found himself actually enjoying himself. As his muscles became accustomed to the work, he realized that there was satisfaction in seeing plants sprout from seeds he himself had planted and in eating food from plants he himself had tended.

            He was surprised by the reaction of the villagers to him; at first, as he had anticipated, they were curious, but after that initial curiosity he felt more completely and totally accepted than he had ever felt before. He didn’t have to prove himself to them; he could just be himself, and however he was, that was all right with them.

            His mastery of Thai grew, since he was totally immersed in the Thai-speaking environment, and with it the strength of his relationship with Lek. She was just so absolutely nice. She was, of course, exceptionally beautiful, but she herself made so little of her beauty that it was easy for him to ignore that and relax with her as she delighted in everything around her, including him. He wondered how old she was, and though he didn’t know the correct Thai words to ask her, one day he inquired, “How many years do you have?”

            She smiled – she was always smiling – but her eyes were puzzled. “I don’t know,” she said. “Mai pen lai kah [it doesn’t matter]. Why do you want to know?”

            He shrugged.. He didn’t know why he was curious about her age, and even if he had known he didn’t have enough mastery of Thai to be able to explain it to her.

            The village was located near a river, which swelled into a pond as it bumped up against a rock outcrop through which it had forced a narrow outlet. The villagers bathed in the pond, the men on one day and the women on another. The men also went fishing, for the pond was virtually filled with a kind of fish Harrison was unfamiliar with. The men walked out into it – at its deepest point it came to Harrison’s armpits, which were at a greater elevation than those of the Thai – and caught fish by hand, putting the catch into wicker baskets which they carried. The women had made the baskets by weaving strips of banana leaves.

            Harrison was fascinated to watch this mode of angling and, encouraged by Lek, decided to try it. His first catch got away from him, wriggling and slipping out of his hand, as he was taken aback by the unfamiliar and unexpected feel. But, with a smile at his own failure, and urged on by Lek’s good-natured laughter, the second time he grasped harder, and the fish ended up in his wicker basket. When two more fish joined the first one, he waded out of the pond, and he and Lek took the fish to Mae Mamuang to cook.

            But while Lek and Mamuang ate their fish as if they were accustomed to do so, as of course they were, Harrison was disconcerted to find that Mamuang had not skinned the fish or removed is head, and it lay in his bowl staring up at him. Observing how his tablemates dealt with the fish, he attempted to follow their lead, but he ate only a little part of the uppermost side.

            “Don’t you like it?” Mamuang asked.

            Harrison was afraid of hurting her feelings, so he said, as best he could in limping Thai, that he was accustomed to ocean fish, and that had a different taste.

            She nodded, smiling.

            More and more frequently, as his command of the language improved, he and Lek took to strolling along beside the river, talking or merely communing silently. He was attracted to her beauty, but even more to her cheerfulness and optimistic outlook. Once, as he slipped and nearly fell into the water, she grabbed his hand in hers to steady him, and he had to admit to himself that it felt good. He did not release her hand, and they continued walking hand-in-hand, silently, for a while thereafter.

            After that incident Harrison took stock of his feelings about Lek and compared her to Alison, the girl he had left behind in New York. Both were physically attractive, though in different ways. Lek was – he groped for the right word – unspoiled. Alison, though perhaps not spoiled, was a product of New York, with all the advantages and disadvantages that that entailed. He had thought that he was in love with Alison and that sooner or later they would be married. Was he in love with Lek? Or had he focused on her only because he was isolated with her for so long?

            He told himself sternly that it would be possible in these circumstances for him to take advantage of the girl, and he had better back off. He avoided any physical contact and even went out of his way to maintain a distance between them.

            But Lek noticed this, and he observed that she began to look at him with a puzzled crease between her eyebrows. At last she asked him, “Why do you keep yourself so far from me?”

            They were at the time once again walking beside the river.

            He did not reply at once. He first had to put his own thoughts into order, and then to find the words in an unfamiliar language to express them to her.

            She repeated her question.

            He said, slowly, “I’m afraid I may come to like you too much.”

            She laughed. “How can anybody like anybody else too much?”

            He said, even more haltingly, “I am a man, and you are a woman.”

            She laughed and nodded.

            He continued, “If I came to like you too much, we might . . . we might . . .” His Thai evaporated.

            She laughed again but then became serious. “Chan lak khun mak mak [I like you very much]. I don’t think that’s bad. Do you think it’s bad?”

            He thought for a moment before answering. “Not bad, no, not bad. I’m happy that you like me. But . . . what will happen if we like each other very much? I don’t know how long I will be here. And I don’t want to hurt you.”

            Lek did not laugh this time, but she smiled. “Mai pen lai kah,” she said. Raising her hand to his cheek, she stroked his beard.

            Impulsively he embraced her, pressing her to him. Her arms encircled him.

            He thought: I don’t know how old she is. Maybe for what I’m about to do I could be arrested in New York.

            But then that thought was drowned in a flood of desire.

*

            The string beans of Southeast Asia are many times longer than those of Europe and the Americas, and the vines are trained to grow up tripods of bamboo poles to keep the beans out of the dirt. Harrison was hoeing weeds from around the tripods in Mae Mamuang’s family plot – the rice and opium fields were tended communally, and nobody had objected when Harrison, feeling queasy about it, had refused to assist in growing opium – when he heard a sound which he considered vaguely familiar, but it took him a few minutes before he recognized it. It was a jeep engine.

            He looked up to see a jeep, presumably the same one he had left Chiang Rai in, growling along the dirt road by which he had entered the village. Colonel Ngeunzarng, he saw as it came closer, was at the wheel.

            He leaned his hoe against the nearest tripod and walked to the edge of the plot to await Ngeunzarng’s arrival.

            Without leaving the jeep, the colonel said, “Did you think we’d forgotten about you? Get your shirt and shoes on. You’re going home.”

            Harrison blinked. English sounded strange to him after months of hearing nothing but Thai, and it took a few seconds for the meaning of the words to register.

            Silently he walked back to the house. He felt numb. It was so sudden, so unexpected. When he was first brought to the village, he had thought that the news he was leaving would bring him elation, exhilaration. Now, after however many months, he was instead ambivalent. There were problems here in the village, for instance his Thai was still clumsy and halting, but on the whole he had come to feel at home here. He had come to feel that he fit in to the timeless culture of the Thai. And of course there was Lek. He really, really, really didn’t want to leave Lek.

            He walked up the stairs to find Mamuang and Lek sitting in the front room, waiting for him. They had heard the jeep motor as well. They looked at him wordlessly, and he looked back without finding any words to say to them.

            He put on his shirt, to which he had grown unaccustomed, and tried to get into his shoes and socks. The socks were not a problem, but his feet had somehow grown during his months in the village, and getting his feet into the shoes was an ordeal; he surrendered and ended up carrying them in his left hand.

            Mamuang and Lek were still waiting when he came out of his room.

            “When will you be back?” Lek asked.

            “I don’t know.” He wished that he could say that he would phone or write, but there was no phone in the village and he couldn’t write, only speak, Thai. “I hope soon.”

            “I hope so too,” Lek said.

            He felt Mamuang’s eyes on him appraisingly, and he smiled at her and gave a thumb’s-up gesture with his right hand.

            Then he went to Lek, took her hand in his, and pulled her to a standing position. He put his right arm around her and pulled her to him. They hugged, and he kissed her hair. “Poom lak khun,” he said. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Mae Mamuang smiling.

            And then he went downstairs to where Ngeunzarng was waiting for him. At the foot of the stairs he paused and turned to look back. Lek was standing on the porch. They made the wai to each other, and he said, “Maisoong kha.” Her cheeks were glistening.

            When he got to the jeep, he told Ngeunzarng, “I really don’t want to go. I want to stay here.”

            “Listen,” the colonel said, “we’ve made all the arrangements for you to do your interview, and we promised your network you’d be going back, so you don’t have a choice. I’m going to deliver you dead or alive.”

            Harrison hesitated but got into the jeep; Ngeunzarng started it up, and they drove off.

            “Where’s my equipment?” Harrison asked.

            “We’ve got it and will return it.”

            “When do I go back?”

            “As soon as you’ ve finished your interview.”

            “So I’m going to meet Yawdserk after all?”

            The colonel shook his head. “He’s got so many irons in the fire that he just couldn’t spring loose. But we got to feeling that we had to do something about you, because we’d kept you waiting so long, so we arranged for you to interview General Khamzarng. He’s high enough in the organization to be able to make official comments, and he operates in this sector. By the way, I want to warn you.”

            “About what?”

            “Your interpreter has been watching too much television. He made up quite a story to explain to your network why you were gone so long.”

            “What story?”

            “You’ll find out when you get home.”

            That gave Harrison something to think about, and he also was trying to get his mind around some questions to ask his interviewee. But another matter kept intruding itself into his thoughts: What if Lek were pregnant?

            Ngeunzarng drove to Mong Hsat in ten minutes; it took the villagers almost half a day. Mong Hsat was a small town like many others in northern Myanmar, consisting of one street with three-story buildings on each side; each building contained shops on the ground floor and living quarters upstairs. There were also houses scattered here and there in no apparent order.

            Ngeunzarng stopped the jeep in front of one of the buildings in which the ground-floor shop was shuttered closed with an overhead door like an American garage. He got out and motioned for Harrison to follow. The colonel stood at the door and said something Harrison did not understand.

            The door raised and Ngeunzarng entered, again motioning for Harrison.

            The room was, to Harrison’s amazement, arranged like the kind of office setup that was used in television studios. Behind a desk, backed by an impressive looking bookcase, sat a man in an officer’s uniform with a small microphone pinned to his shirt collar. General Khamzarng was, like most Thai, short and slender; at first glance Harrison had no impression of his personality. The three television cameras Harrison had brought with him were mounted on the three tripods and attached to the three videotape recorders that he had also brought with him. The cameras were arranged so that one focused on General Khamzarng, the second on the chair across the desk from him – Harrison assumed he was to sit there – and the third at the side of the room for a long shot to include both men from the side. The transmitter he had brought was in one corner of the room. Half a dozen armed men in camouflage suits were present, as well as Harrison’s interpreter; the interpreter had a microphone in one hand and an audiotape recorder in the other.

            “Maisoong kha,” said the general, giving the wai gesture. “Welcome to Shanland.” The last sentence was heavily accented, and Harrison had the impression that Khamzarng had memorized an English expression he had been taught.

            Harrison returned both the gesture and the greeting.

            Ngeunzarng said, “Sit down.”

            Harrison sat. Three of the armed men took positions at the cameras.

            Ngeunzarng said, “The way we’ll do it is this. You ask a question, your interpreter will translate it into Thai, the general will answer, and your interpreter will translate it into English. We’ll record the whole thing, and your network will edit it. Do you have your questions ready?”

            “I had them in my mind when I left Chiang Rai, but I haven’t been thinking about the interview much since then.”

            “Then wing it.”

            “I’ll have to.” He was a professional, he told himself, and a professional should be ready to perform at the drop of a hat, with or without preparation.

            Ngeunzarng smiled. “Lights – camera – action!” he said.

            The lights were already on, but Harrison heard the click of the cameras being started – how often he had heard that sound! – and tried to get his thoughts together. He cleared his throat and began: “General Khamzarng, what is it that you hope to accomplish with this rebellion?”

            The general smiled. His voice was surprisingly resonant, given the slightness of his build, as he said, “Our aspiration is much the same as that of you Americans in seventeen seventy-six. We want an independent nation for our people. We Thai Yai are an oppressed minority in Burma, and as long as we are a part of Burma, we will continue to be exploited.”

            This guy is smooth, Harrison thought. “But is the Shan state large enough to be an independent nation?”

            “Let me begin by saying that the Shan State is like your State of Texas, which was once the Republic of Texas. The Shan State was a separate territory under the British until it joined with Burma in 1947 under the Treaty of Panglong to fight for independence. Under that treaty we were an autonomous state. But when Burma adopted the Constitution of 1974, we lost our autonomy. The Shan State comprises about twenty percent of the land area of Burma. In this part of the world there are many small nations. We are about the same size as Kampuchea.”

            “Why do you think you would be economically viable? You are completely landlocked.”

            “And so is Laos,” the general responded. “In our mountains are some of the largest teak forests in the world. In Thailand they made the mistake of clearing the forests for the wood, and the result was that they have a problem with flooding. We will clear selected areas carefully, so as to preserve the ecology, and the land is suitable for many crops, just as the hilly areas in northern Thailand are.”

            “Speaking of crops, I think the world knows you chiefly for the production of opium.”

            The general nodded, unperturbed, and smiled. Harrison recognized that smile; it was the one politicians use to gain the time to think when they are asked a question they don’t want to be asked. “There is much opium produced in this part of the world. Specifically in Burma it is produced by the Burmese government, the Wa Army, and ourselves. For all of us, the reason we produce it is that it makes money for us because there is a demand for it in Europe and the United States. I can’t speak for the others, but the Shan don’t exist in order to grow opium; we grow opium in order to exist. If you in America and the European nations would control the demand, we wouldn’t continue to produce it. The Burmese government controls the media in Burma, and when it burns one of our opium fields, or one of those controlled by the Wa Army, it announces to the world that is destroying opium production. It doesn’t say anything about the opium fields that it controls. And whenever we can,” he said smiling again, “we burn one of theirs as well. But we have studied the success of Thailand in substituting other crops for opium, for instance oranges and strawberries and apples, and once we take control we will study what alternate crops would be suitable for our climate, which is somewhat cooler than Thailand’s.”

            “What about mining and manufacturing?”

            “Our mountains have never been explored for their possible availability for mining. And of course we would welcome any company that would want to put a manufacturing plant in our territory, which is centrally located for both the Chinese and Indian markets.”

            “What kind of government do you visualize?”

            “That decision is not mine to make. But as for myself, I would prefer a democratic government for Shanland.”

            “Then do you support Aung San Suu Kyi?”

            “Certainly. If we remain a part of Burma, we would certainly prefer her party to be in control. In fact, in the 1990 elections, in which her party came in first, our party was second. But we Thai Yai are a distinct linguistic and ethnic group. We would prefer not to remain a part of Burma, because we are a minority, and the Burmese governments may at times have been more or less oppressive of us, but they have always been oppressive.”

            “You refer to yourselves as Thai Yai. What would you say about joining Thailand?”

            Khamzarng shrugged. “It’s a possibility, but a remote one. The name Thai Yai means ‘the greater Thai.’ Thailand was settled thousands of years ago, at the same time we came to what is now Burma, by the Thai that we call ‘the lesser Thai.’ We were related but separate peoples. From that time to this our histories and cultures have been separate. Although we share a language in its basic vocabulary and structure, over the centuries it has become different enough that we understand each other only with difficulty.”

            Harrison wracked his brain but could think of no more questions. “Thank you very much, General,” he said.

            “And thank you, Mr. Harrison. We have long wanted to catch the ear of people in the United States who might be interested in our case, and we appreciate this opportunity.”

            Smooth, smooth, smooth, Harrison thought. If this guy was in the United States, he’d make a hell of a politician.

*

            The Shan people in Chiang Rai had arranged for his hotel to hold his luggage for him. Now he waited for it to circulate far enough around the carousel at JFK for him to retrieve it. Although he was occupationally accustomed to airline travel, the flight from Chiang Rai to Bangkok to Berlin to New York had seemed surrealistic, it was so distant from his experience of the last few months. He had bought a watch in Chiang Rai before he left – it kept good time, though it cost only 350 baht – but he kept forgetting to look at it and almost missed the connection at Tempelhof.

            The bags arrived. He survived the security check and the passage through customs and rode the escalator – thinking of the steps to Mae Manuang’s house – to the madhouse where nontravelers awaited to greet arrivals. It would have been hard for him to miss his welcoming committee, standing under a banner that read, “WELCOME HOME SAM HARRISON.” And here was Art Slawsen, his producer, pushing through assorted people to grab his hand and say, “Good to see you, B.S.,” using the initials that was a joke between them. Harrison had been named for his ancestor, Benjamin S. Harrison, 23^rd president of the U.S., but preferred to go by his middle name; the nameplate on his office door read, “B. Samuel Harrison.”

            Harrison’s hand was wrung by a score of people – anchors, copywriters, fellow reporters – and then there was Alison in a teal blue suit, arms spread wide, saying, “Darling!” He dropped his bags and surrounded her.

            Afterwards there was Slawsen, saying, “We want to hear all about it. Why did the Burmese want to kill you? What kind of prison did they keep you in? How did the Shan find out you were there so they could rescue you? And all that.”

            Harrison blinked. So that was the story that Direk had invented, that Colonel Ngeunzarng had warned him about.

            Slawsen went on, “But it can wait until tomorrow. We know you’re tired and want to get back to your apartment. We rented a bus to get you there, so you won’t have to fight for a taxi.”

            In the bus Slawsen sat next to him. Patting him on the knee, the producer said, “I think we can get an hour special out of this. We got a lot of mileage out of you; you were a big story, front page of the Times and all that. We can talk about all that tomorrow.”

            “Sure,” Harrison said, remembering what Slawsen had said in the airport and wondering what Direk had told the network. All I wanted to be was a reporter, he thought, but it looks like I’m going to have to be a fiction writer, too.

            “Look,” Slawsen said, “I know you’ve been through a lot. Maybe you want to take a couple of days off. Maybe tomorrow’s too early for you to come to the office.”

            “No,” Harrison said, “I think I’m up to it.”

            “But don’t think you have to be there at nine and stay till five. Just come in when you feel like it.”

            “Thanks,” Harrison said.

            “You’re looking good,” one of his fellow reporters, sitting across from him, said. “Whatever you’ve been through, it seems to have agreed with you.”

            “Thanks,” Harrison repeated.

            When at last they reached his apartment building, Alison got out with him, and the copywriter who had taken charge of his bags accompanied them to the ninth floor. Harrison wondered whether his key would still work; it did. The copywriter set down the bags in the bedroom, then shook Harrison’s hand and departed, leaving him and Alison standing in the living room looking at each other.

            “I thought we could have dinner together at that Italian restaurant around the corner,” Alison said. “And then,” she winked, “I want to give you a homecoming present.”

            He sat down. “I’m sorry, Honey,” he said, “I don’t think I’m up to it tonight. It’s been a tough day and a half from Thailand.”

            She hesitated, then said, “Sure, I understand. We’ll take a rain check on the present, OK?”

            “OK,” he said, wondering whether he was lying.

            “But I hope you’re not too tired for ravioli and spaghetti.”

            “No, I think I can manage that.” How long had it been since he’d had Italian food?

            She looked at him closely. “You’ve changed,” she said.

            He knew she was not referring to the facts that he had lost weight and gained a tan and that the shaved lower part of his face was whiter than the browned upper part. “Yes,” he said noncommitally, “I suppose I have.”

            In the restaurant she talked brightly, telling him all the gossip about all the people they had known. He ate silently, enjoying his food and the lambrusco that went with it, trying to assess how he felt about this woman that he had once believed that he loved. Did he still? It was so confusing.

            As they finished the meal with spumoni, she said, “Daddy wants to have a welcome-home party for you tomorrow night. We’ve already invited a lot of people. Do you think you’ll be up to it?”

            “I think so.”

            “Good. I’ll let him know.” The waiter brought the bill. “Here,” she said, “let this be my treat.”

            The minute he closed his apartment door behind Alison, the question that had nagged him all the way from Thailand popped up in his mind like an unwanted advertisement on an Internet page: What if Lek were pregnant?

*

            He got to the network about eleven-thirty. Slawsen was on the phone, extremely agitated, but waved him to a chair across the desk. The producer slammed down the receiver and then smiled at Harrison, who had forgotten how rapidly the man’s moods could change.

            “I wish you’d gotten here earlier,” Slawsen said; “I have a lunch date that I can’t break. We took care of a lot of things for you while you were gone, but of course you’d already arranged for your salary to be direct deposited into your account and your rent and bills to be paid automatically. The money’s been piling up in your account, so you’re a wealthy man now.”

            “Thanks,” Harrison said, thinking that he ought to find out how much money he did have.

            “But let’s talk about that hour special we’re going to do on you. Let’s start with the Burmese. How did it happen that they captured you?”

            Harrison blinked. How should he handle this? He remembered that he’d read that Mark Twain once said something like, “When all else fails, try the truth.” He said, “Actually, that never happened.”

            “What?” Slawsen’s eyes were exclamation points.

            “My interpreter made up that story to try to explain why it took so long for me to report. Actually it turned out that the general I wanted to interview was always too busy to talk to me, so that’s why I ended up interviewing the other general.”

            “Son of a bitch!” Slawsen said, slamming the palm of his hand on the mahogany desk.

            “The Shan stopped me on the road and – I guess you’d say, held me for a while.”

            “So what kind of prison did they keep you in?”

            Harrison shook his head. “It wasn’t a prison at all. They took me to a village in a clearing in the jungle, and I lived there with the people.” He noticed that instead of looking at him, Slawsen kept looking over his head.

            “No locks? No bars? Why didn’t you escape?”

            “I had no idea where I was, so I had no idea where to go. And the jungle has tigers in it.”

            Slawsen nodded, but his eyebrows scowled.

            “They’re very nice people,” Harrison added.

            Slawsen drummed his fingers. He was still looking over Harrison’s head. “Well,” the producer said at last, “that knocks the special in the head.”

            “I’m sorry,” Harrison said.

            “It would have been hell to shoot, anyway,” Slawsen said consolingly. “Look, B.S., I’ve got to get ready for that lunch date. You never saw the broadcast of your interview with the general, did you?”

            “No, I didn’t.”

            “You did excellent work. I told Ronnie to dub a DVD of it for you to take home and watch. You can pick it up as you go out.”

            “Thanks,” Harrison said as he rose to go. At the door he looked back to see what Slawsen had been looking at over his head. It was a gigantic clock.

*

            They had done a great job of editing the interview into three minutes of air time, Harrison admitted to himself after watching it. They had intercut his face into the interview four times, and he looked thoughtful and receptive, though a little skeptical – just the right look for a reporter. His beard looked good; he thought he should grow it back. He flicked off the DVD player and the television set and started to get ready for the party at Alison’s apartment.

            After the meeting with Slawsen he had had a pastrami sandwich – something they don’t have in Shanland, he told himself as he savored it – at the lunchroom on the ground floor of the network building and spent much of the rest of the afternoon at his bank, sorting out his financial affairs with the help of a vice president. Slawsen had said he was a wealthy man. Well, that depended on how you defined it, but his bank account now held a little over three hundred thousand dollars. The rest of the time he had wandered the streets of Manhattan, bewildered now by the confusion and noise that in the past he had not noticed because he had grown accustomed to it over the years.

            Harrison clad himself in what he presumed would be appropriate for a party given by Alison’s father: a shimmering royal blue Thai silk suit that he had had made by a tailor in Chiang Rai just before leaving to come back to the States, set off with a yellow Thai silk tie that he had bought in Jim Thompson’s store in Bangkok before he set out for his interview. Alison’s father was a giant in the construction industry and owned the loyalty of the mayor, the governor, one senator, and two representatives; Harrison assumed many of these would be at the party,.

            He descended to the street, exchanging nods with the concierge of his building as he crossed the lobby, and hailed a cab. Alison’s father lived in an apartment building, one he had built himself, on Central Park West, and even the jaded taxi driver looked impressed when Harrison gave the address.

            It occurred to Harrison that for as many years as he had lived in New York, he had never taken a cab ride through Central Park. Leaning forward from the back seat, he told the driver that on the way he would like to ride around in the Park for a while.

            “Sure thing,” the driver responded.

            It was good, Harrison thought as he looked out at the Park through the taxi window, that the New Yorkers had allowed this large area, which seemed even larger to him now that he was riding through it, to continue to exist. Surely in the past some real estate developers must have cast greedy eyes on the land, but somehow they had been fended off. Like most New Yorkers, Harrison had thought that the Park was Nature, but now he knew differently; where he had been in Shanland was Nature, and the mowed lawns of Central Park most certainly were not. But it was the closest thing to Nature that could have existed in the heart of a great metropolis, and New York was to be praised for having preserved and maintained it. He saw couples playing tennis, he saw bicycle riders, he saw the statues of Alice in Wonderland characters, he saw the trees, and he saw the bridges over the brooks; he enjoyed it all. So it was with a feeling of loss that he observed that his cab was leaving the Park and entering the stream of traffic that would take him to Alison’s party.

            She answered the door of the apartment with “Where have you been?” If the question had contained sibilants, she would have hissed it.

            “I went for a ride in the Park,” he told her.

            “A ride in the Park!” she repeated angrily. “We’ve been waiting for you. All the guests are here, and we’ve had to hold dinner for you. I’d even thought of calling the police to find out whether you’d been mugged on the way,”

            “Well,” he said, “I’m glad you didn’t do that.”

            “Don’t you have a watch?” she demanded, looking at his wrist.

            He looked where she was looking, and both saw that indeed he had a watch. He realized that this was the first time he had looked at it since he arrived at the network building that morning. Once a habit has died, he thought, it resuscitates very slowly.

            He followed her through the hallway into the large living room, with its window overlooking the Park. Some twenty or so people were standing chatting in the room, holding glasses, and Harrison recognized the senator and the mayor before Alison’s father came over and enveloped Harrison’s hand in his. He was a bluff, hearty man who had raised himself to eminence by hard work and shrewdness.

            “Good to see you,” he said in his loud, gravelly voice. “We’ve been waiting for you. Come along with me.” Releasing Harrison’s hand, he led the way to the dining room. “Soup’s on,” he informed the other guests.

            There were placecards on the table, and Harrison found himself seated to the host’s right, across from Alison, next to the senator. The dinner, though Alison said it had been “held” and therefore might have been warmed over, was excellent: roast duck with orange sauce, new potatoes, and mixed vegetables including snow peas (the one concession to the Orient), lubricated with an excellent white wine, and followed by blueberry cheese cake (something else he hadn’t had in Shanland, Harrison told himself). He found himself discussing with the senator the situation in North Korea, which he knew little about but which evidently was what the senator knew most about related to Asia, throughout the meal.

            When the plates were cleared away, Alison’s father dinged his fork on his water glass for silence, rose, and said, “I suppose you know why we’re here, to welcome Sam Harrison back home from his harrowing experiences in southeast Asia.” Polite applause. Looking directly at Harrison, he continued, “Sam, we’re all on the edge of our seats to know all about what you were doing those months you were held a captive. So sing for your supper.”

            As the older man sat, Harrison rose and, after a polite pattering of applause died down, began to speak. “I don’t think my experiences were all that harrowing,” he said, smiling, “but I’ll be glad to tell you what happened to me.” And then he launched into his narrative, trying to tread a line between necessary detail and tedious prolixity, telling honestly but concisely what had happened to him, and concealing nothing. He did not look directly at Alison while he was describing his relationship with Lek, but if he had, he would have noticed that her eyes were emitting stilettos.

            At the end he paused to see whether there were any questions. Noting that some of his auditors were glancing at their watches, he began to sit down when one of the congressmen across the table from him asked, “Did you believe everything that general told you?”

            “I don’t know,” Harrison answered. “I believe he was sincere and trying to tell me the truth, while at the same time he was trying to put the best face on it that he could. But I also feel that he doesn’t make all the decisions for the Shan Army, and if the Shan ever achieved independence, Shanland might not be exactly the way he predicted.”

            “The Shan State is on the border with China,” the congressman went on. “Did you see any indication of Chinese influence?”

            “No, I didn’t,” Harrison said, “but in my situation I wouldn’t have had an opportunity to. I don’t think it’s likely that China would support the Shan, because I understand that China is propping up the ruling junta.”

            Then the conversation became general, and Harrison sat back down.

            The guests began to rise, leave the table, and drift away, several looking at their watches as if to establish that they were leaving only because they had important engagements to go to, and finally Harrison was left alone with Alison and her parents. “We enjoyed it so much,” her mother said.

            “Thank you.”

            “Yes,” her father said, “we appreciate you coming and telling us all about it.”

            “I was glad to do it. Thanks for inviting me.”

            Alison accompanied him to the door. “I suppose you fell in love with that Oriental slut,” she said bitterly. She put her left hand on her hip, curved her right arm with her hand above her head, swayed her hips provocatively, and said in a husky voice, “I am Tondalayo,”: referring to the character, played by Dorothy Lamour, in an old movie that they had watched together and laughed at on the Late Show last fall.

            Thoughts surged through Harrison’s mind. He could have defended Lek, but in the first place Al;ison wouldn’t have believed him, and in the second place he really didn’t want to get into an argument. The thought occurred to him, not for the first time, that women were strange beings; when they thought they were in danger of losing a man, they immediately started saying and doing things that made it more likely that they would lose him. He said, “Goodbye, Alison,” closed her mouth by kissing it, and went to the elevator. He had been afraid she would follow him, but she didn’t.

            The doorman found him a taxi, and as he rode home he tried to sort out his feelings about Alison and about Lek. He kept coming back to one thing: Suppose he was the father of Lek’s child.

*

            The next days were busy. Not wanting to face Slawsen again, Harrison e-mailed his resignation. He spent more time with the bank vice-president, arranging a method of getting wire transfers from his bank in New York to a bank in Chiang Rai, once he had opened an account in one. He spent some time at the Lufthansa office, trying to finagle the earliest possible flight to

Bangkok, from which he could easily get a connecting flight to Chiang Rai. He arranged with his landlord to break his lease, which was easier than expected because housing was in short supply in New York, and the landlord had a waiting list. He arranged with the Salvation Army to take all his furniture, clothes, and other possessions.

            Did he want to go back because he believed in the Shan and wanted to support their fight for independence? he asked himself. Not really, came his answer. They might very well be good people who deserved support, but he found himself uninterested in that aspect of the situation.

            Did he want to go back because he was deeply in love with Lek and could not stand to be apart from her? Again he replied to himself, not really. She was a nice girl, he supposed what he felt for her was love, and he could envision himself living a long married life with her happily. But that was not his overpowering motivation.

            Did he want to go back because of the possibility that Lek was pregnant and he wanted to take the responsibility of fatherhood? That was important, surely. But, he confessed to himself, that wasn’t the deciding factor. If that was what took him back and he found Lek was not pregnant, what would he do then?

            He just wanted to get back to the village and resume a kind of life he had come to love.

            He wished there were some way he could get word to Mae Mamuang and Nong Lek that he was coming back, but there was no telephone or telegraph in their village. Mail was out of the question; he couldn’t write Thai, they couldn’t read English, he had never seen a letter delivered there in all those months, and it was inconceivable that the Myanmar postal service would deliver mail to a village that deep in Shan territory. He knew they would be surprised to see him again; he hoped they would be glad.

            There remained the question of what to do about Alison. He couldn’t get up the nerve to see her in person; he remembered an old song by Don McLean about a man asking a friend to “tell it to her plain” because he couldn’t face the girl. She hadn’t called him, and he didn’t want to break off their relationship over the phone. An e-mail would be even more impersonal, more insulting, than a phone call. He sat at his Dell computer, which soon would grace the Salvation Army’s showroom, to write a letter. A letter produced by HP would be almost as impersonal as an e-mail, but because of long practice he composed more easily on a computer; and he could recopy the letter by hand after he had thought it all out.

            Dearest – he began, then backspaced to replace that with Dear – Alison,

            It was very perceptive of you to remark that I have changed. It is not that I have stopped loving you. I love you still and always will. He stopped and looked at those two sentences. Were they true? Nobody can predict the future, he thought, and for the present, at least, they were. He considered inserting believe that I before always but decided that would be too scrupulous. The man I used to be could have been very happy married to you for the rest of his life. But the man I am now – he paused to think carefully how he could put that – is no longer suited for the – he stopped and thought, then backspaced and wrote cannot any longer live the kind of life that I had before. He wondered whether he should mention Lek but decided against it; Lek was part of the reason he was going back, but not all of it – not even the biggest part. Alison would probably think she was. Let her think that if she wanted to.

            Everyone – he backspaced and replaced that with Most people reach a point – he stopped there and replaced it with Many people reach a point in their lives where the direction in which they have been going is no longer the direction they really want to go. I have had a taste of a kind of life which at first was strange to me, but which I have come – he backspaced and replaced that with came to prefer. I am going back to Shanland to live that kind of life. For me – he wondered whether she would catch the double meaning – it’s about time.

^-End-

-----------------

Comments:

------------------

Dear Grandpa Sam,
     I have just finished reading the first installation of your story, and I find it very fascinating; even the part about the Thai-Texan meshes well with the story.  When I ever finish writing a story I'll show it to you, but I still haven't done it yet.  I really look forward to reading the rest of the story.
 
     Love,
       Robert 

**************

 

Thanks, Sam, for sending along your story.  I read the first chapter and liked it.  We are leaving Thursday for 32 days at sea from SF around South America and return from Rio.  We have limited computer access, so I will be reserving my reading of your continuing story until January.  But do keep me on your list and keep those chapters coming!

Ciao, Robyn


**************