Born Slippy

by Tom Lutz

  George had handed Trog his binoculars, and he was scanning the white walls.

  “Looks like nobody’s home,” Trog said. “Guardhouse empty.” He made no sign he had heard Frank.

  OK. He walked over to the cab and opened the back door.

  “You’re not going to stay and help?” Dmitry’s mother asked him, as if she was hurt.

  “Trog’s your man,” Frank said. “He has experience with Muslims.”

  He turned to the odd septet. They kept staring at the house. He got in the cab and shut the door.

  “To the airport,” he said to the driver, his voice a bit wobbly.

  He was going to Taipei. As Quentin Compson. If he couldn’t have anything he really wanted, he was at least going to have his fucking boat.

  He tried sometimes, out on the open sea, to figure out what it all meant, why so much of it seemed to be scripted from things he had read, whether that meant that he had more to do with engineering the whole thing than he thought. Sometimes he replayed Dmitry’s last speech and thought, really? Could that possibly have happened?

  This story, this mess: he couldn’t see inside, he couldn’t see the bones — exactly what he loved about framing, the 2x4s all in a perfect line, all square and plumb, the joists arrayed against the heavens, the fresh fir rafters on their elegant angles, the doorways and windows with their jackstuds and headers, all leading nowhere and everywhere: he always felt like he was seeing into the mystery of human achievement, the animating design itself. So clean.

  But with this he couldn’t see any design. The beginning, the middle, the end — he wasn’t sure how they fit together.

  Every once in a while he thought about going home, back to the States, considered resuming some kind of normal life — no one is immune from homesickness, not even those who have no home — but he quickly abandoned the idea. He might be ceaselessly borne back into the past, but not that past. Once in a while he checked into some swank resort for a few days, one of the $3,000 a day joints that dot Southeast Asia, the kind of place he assumed Dmitry and Yuli and the boys stopped, where among the guests were undoubtedly a certain number of the arms buyers and arms dealers, the dictators and dictators’ henchmen he saw in Dmitry’s files. The people he met in such places were invariably boring, with their abortive elations and short-winded sorrows, ambassadors from a land he had left forever, a land where people care about status, accumulation, winning. He once did, but he didn’t anymore — easy as that was to say for him, what with the millions in the bank.

  In the Aman Resort on Phuket, watching cable in his room — his only contact with media was in these places; otherwise he stayed away from TV and computer screens, even newspapers and magazines, and did email only when he was paying his monthly bills — he saw on C-Span one of those bizarre fragments of media surrealism, a fancy banquet in Qatar, the guest of honor Al Gore, speaking to a bunch of Arabs and Westerners about alternative energy, and on the dais with the Emir and George Soros and George Clooney and King Abdullah II of Jordan and his lovely wife, Queen Rania, was, yes, none other than Dmitry Heald and his quite extraordinary, exquisite, lovely wife, Yuli Serang. The speakers were Gore, Clooney and Serang — Dmitry was the plus-one, it seemed. This sent Frank to the business center, where he googled Dmitry and found that he had re-emerged as “former financier” Dmitry Heald, now CFO of something called the Asian Energy Study Group, a corporation building major green energy projects — tidal installations many miles out on the continental shelf off the Philippines, wind generators in the Gobi desert, new-generation nuclear plants in South Africa and India, oil-spill and ocean plastic and greenhouse gas recovery technologies — and that the visionary founder and CEO of the company was Yuli Serang. Since Trump’s election, the rest of the world had embraced renewables like never before and AESG’s stock quadrupled in value in the six months after the company went public. Yuli served as an advisor to UN commissions and governments, and Google had an endless parade of grin-and-grip pictures of her with the heads of dozens of countries. He stared at them as if they might tell him, finally, the truth. Why? he asked himself and the eternally dumb photos, why?

  She would be easy to find, now. He resisted looking up AESG’s website, where they might have posted the next conference she would address. He could just show up. But again, why? Tracy had said to him, during one of their falling outs, they call it being partners because you’re supposed to be in it together — it’s not about feelings, it’s about life. But he had continued falling in love under the mistaken impression — and here he felt his books had steered him wrong, too — that his strength of feeling was the only measure of love, that and the torque of his lover’s emotions. It had worked with Isa until it didn’t. How odd that of all the couples in the world, this one — the peculiar union of the vile amoralist Dmitry Heald and the exquisite environmentalist Yuli Serang, perhaps evil and amoral too, but more likely a wonderful, well-meaning, open-minded pragmatist — showed him what partnership was. He had never been anyone’s partner. Even though Tracy had told him, all those years ago, what the score was, he’d never figured it out for himself, never figured out how not to be alone.

  All in all, he knew he shouldn’t complain. His life was full of marvels. Thousands of pristine islands managed to glide by his days. As he tacked against the current, salt spray from the open sea painted his cheeks like sweet tears. Sometimes he docked and had a driver take him inland to sit surrounded by the august ruins of Angkor Wat, or let the booming gongs and clashing cymbals of Gamelan fill his ears in Ubud. A couple months ago he leased a slip for God Sees Everything amongst the junks in Halong Bay and took the slow, light gauge overnight train from Hanoi, up the lazy Red River, with its fishermen in conical straw hats poling their thin boats in the early morning haze, to the frontier town of Lao Cai on the Chinese border. He rented a rugged jeep and drove it up into the Tonkingese Alps, high amid the stone-terraced rice fields and little mountain towns and the Hmong and Dao and Dai tribes with their elaborate dress and embroidery and bangles, all living close to the dirt and rice-giving mud. He arranged to spend the night in a house a mile or so off the road, in a small Red Dai village, a big indoor cooking pit releasing some of its thick woodsmoke out a hole in the peak of the roof, the man of the house toking on enormous spliff after enormous spliff.

  He joined the man at some point in the evening, and after countless hits, unidentifiable beasts appeared for moments in startling reality, and then vanished. He stayed a second day, smoked for breakfast and entered a Carlos Castaneda-like alternate universe, striding the glowing mountain trails, hopping rivers in unconscionable leaps, sitting improvised Zazen for hours, sharing meals and smiles with his momentary family, and then, for a transitory, enchanted moment he knew, knew that he had had revealed to him everything. Everything. These tribes had not changed for two thousand years, not changed their dress, not changed their agriculture, not changed their lives since long before there was a Vietnam. They never blew up each other’s buildings. They never embezzled each other’s funds. They never strove beyond the deep labor of bringing in rice and firewood. They adorned themselves into works of art. They held the secret. They had never lost their capacity for wonder.

  It took a week or more to return to some sanity and realize that all of that was, again, easy for him to say, that few of the Hmong would not trade their dirt floors for his yacht and his bloated, excessive disposable income, his limitless freedom from want (minus one). And, yes, he knew they had to be, on average, as corruptible as anyone else. Probably some of them had taken more than their share of the communal milk. Probably some of them had slept with each other’s husbands and wives. Their dreams took them, as all of our dreams take us, dictated by the nature of human yearning, to somewhere not exactly home.

  Never careful about what he wished for, Frank found himself living a dream that had once been his, catching glimpses of his receding orgiastic future in the blue trees of Laotian jungles, in Ratchaburi’s floating markets, in th
e stilted fishing villages of Kukup, in the peek he still managed to get, now and then, into the life he might have made.

  If he learned anything from his odd, misshapen triangle, from his consternating decade and a half with Dmitry and devastating year falling for Yuli, it was simply this — that the heart is a cruel organ and there is nothing to be done about the past except sigh it all comically, all tragically away.

  Oh, and if pressed, he’d admit that he learned a few other things as well. He learned that if you don’t like the way people eat you better not come to the table, that you needn’t worry about the first note since you never know when the last note will sound, that an even chance is one thing you never get, and that one day you just have to accept that no matter how far you sail across the water, you are still in it, and that no matter how badly you want it to be otherwise, the sea will never be entirely empty and blue and serene again. Never.

  Repeater Books

  is dedicated to the creation of a new reality. The landscape of twenty-first-century arts and letters is faded and inert, riven by fashionable cynicism, egotistical self-reference and a nostalgia for the recent past. Repeater intends to add its voice to those movements that wish to enter history and assert control over its currents, gathering together scattered and isolated voices with those who have already called for an escape from Capitalist Realism. Our desire is to publish in every sphere and genre, combining vigorous dissent and a pragmatic willingness to succeed where messianic abstraction and quiescent co-option have stalled: abstention is not an option: we are alive and we don’t agree.