Villa Incognito

by Tom Robbins

  Although her sister was regarding her with disbelief, Pru continued. “It strikes me that if the way people celebrate work is by not working, then what they’re really celebrating is leisure. They’re admitting that they’d a whole lot rather be having fun day in and day out than have their nose to the fucking grindstone.”

  “Pru, if you really don’t want to pay your own way, then—”

  “You’re missing my point.” Pru zipped up her pants with a flourish. “It’s like celebrating Valentine’s Day by acting hateful and sending rude notes to your loved ones. Don’t you get it? Would you pour me another glass of tomato juice? Thanks. The fact is, I’m excited about today. I’m looking forward to it. But in general, workers do hate to go to work. That’s why so many heart attacks occur on Monday mornings—which, now that I think of it, may be why they decided to put Labor Day on a Monday.”

  Speechless in the teeth of such logic, Bootsey let a minute or two pass before saying, “Well, then, I guess we won’t be hearing anything today from San Francisco.”

  “Hardly!” Pru finished off her juice. “You know, Sis,” she said more quietly as she headed for the door, “I’ve been thinking that maybe we should go out and get Dern a lawyer. You know, some famous, high-profile defense attorney. There’s obviously something going on here besides a routine drug bust, something the feds want to keep hushed up, and a hot-shot attorney might take the case just for the publicity it would bring him.”

  Bootsey frowned. “Oh my. Colonel Thomas and those government agents wouldn’t like that one bit.”

  “Who cares if they like it or not? It might force the feds to treat Dern more fairly, more openly, and with a star like Johnnie Cochran hovering over ’em, they’ll think twice before pulling any strong-arm stuff on me and you. Anyway, let’s mull it over.” She took one last look at herself in the mirror and, satisfied, raised her voice. “Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, children of all ages! Hi ho! Prudence Victoria Foley is off to join the goddamn circus!”

  In Vientiane, Lisa Ko walked the broad old Indochine avenues in her jade green cheongsam, brooding, mumbling, gliding a tongue tip over the object—the event—in her mouth, stopping occasionally in the shade of one of the sandalwood trees (there was no Zen in the crumbling temples) to pray for guidance. She had a dilemma and wanted something more specific than her ancestral “it is what it is” routine.

  Lisa had canceled her original flight to the States. In the days since, she’d several times been on the verge of rebooking, only to change her mind in the middle of dialing the airline office.

  To be sure, she felt some urgency to hasten to Oregon to try to retrieve her troupe, yet when she prayed she kept hearing—or imagined she was hearing—a distant, very faint yet insistent voice that counseled against it. To whom did the voice belong? It was too masculine to come from Miho or Kazu or her mother, and it lacked the compassionate tone of a buddha. It had a slick, sly, oily quality; not precisely a hustler’s voice, a pimp’s voice, but there was something foxy about it.

  “The tanukis are fine, little darling,” she thought she heard the voice purr in her ear. “You’ve had your fun together, you and them, your fling in the illusory arena. Now allow them to be true animals again, free of hoops and the drug of applause. Let them do what they will in the New World, wild and free. It’s what Tanuki’s been needing. It may be what America needs, as well.”

  Oddly, Lisa was starting to become convinced that the voice was somehow correct. She was resigning herself to the possibility of life without her usual act. Letting go wasn’t easy, however. She’d come to regard those silly badgers almost as her surrogate children. But that shouldn’t matter anymore, should it? Now that she apparently was going to have a child of her own?

  You play the game incognito,

  You risk paying a very stiff price.

  You’ll bet the ranch on Number 13,

  Though that number is not on the dice.

  For several years, Dern, sometimes accompanied by Stubblefield, flew loaves of raw Hmong opium over the mountain range to a drop-off base operated by Thai smugglers. For that service, the three MIAs shared in the profits (Dickie was at that point reluctantly involved). Those profits were fairly modest, even after Stubblefield demanded and eventually received a higher price from the Thai. The boys soon learned that raw opium per se is a pretty crappy substance, naturally sullied by vegetable matter, gums, resins, and dirt, to which the Hmong might add powdered aspirin, molasses, tobacco chaff, and so forth to increase its weight on the buyer’s scales. The stuff was barely fit for a peasant’s pipe unless purified and turned into the paste called chandoo.

  “We’re a bunch of lugs shoveling ore while the ironmongers make all the money,” Stubblefield observed. “We’re going into the chandoo business.”

  By this time, thanks to the helicopter, the Americans had claimed squatters’ rights to the large house across the chasm, and in the midst of renovating the place, they set up a processing kitchen there where they removed the contaminants from the raw material and distilled a more valuable product. They began buying the opium themselves from the Hmong farmers, who were uninterested in any processing operation, and reselling it in Thailand. As cash flow increased, they purchased the helicopter from the farmers as well. (The chopper still bore the Pathet Lao insignia, so even when it was spotted, which was infrequently, it was never challenged. They christened it, incidentally, Smarty Pants II.)

  Now as anybody but a full-time cretin must know, smoking opium is to shooting heroin what figure skating is to Russian roulette. Yet for reasons that cast grave doubts on the mental and emotional stability of modern man, happy opium-smokers have all but disappeared from the planet while nihilistic junkies abound. Thus, while chandoo might be a more profitable commodity than raw poppy bricks, the big bucks were in the dangerous and stupid stuff.

  “We’re a pack of lowly ironmongers,” said Stubblefield, “while the steelworkers make all the money. No, no, we’re not going to start manufacturing smack, but our end of the stick is destined to be as short as the Hmong’s if we refuse to take the next step.”

  The next step was the refinement of the chandoo paste into a powder that was a hop and a skip away from morphine, morphine being a jump away from heroin. When Stubblefield and Foley voted to take that step, Dickie, with a heart like a fallen grape beneath a satyr’s hoof, moved out of Villa Incognito and, there being no alternative, navigated hand over hand the high wire that now crossed the gorge, his palms bloody, fingers blistered, shoulders throbbing, head spinning, flip-flops falling off and fluttering into the abyss, arms almost pulled from their sockets, and—when he finally reached the opposite side—spewing breakfast like a gargoyle in a Gothic fountain.

  Although he wouldn’t try to stop him, Stubblefield was by no means pleased to see Dickie go. He found the sunny Carolina boy a refreshing counterpoint to the moody, often sardonic Dern; and as his erudition and confidence grew, Dickie had contributed more and more to the wide-ranging, roughhouse discussions that dominated social life at the villa. The conversation just prior to Dickie’s exodus, however, was less boisterous than tense.

  “What you’re about to do now is criminal.”

  “Goldwire, everything we’ve been doing for years is criminal! We’re deserters. Our very presence here is a crime.”

  “Okay, then, immoral.”

  “From a semantic standpoint, ‘immoral’ is probably a more accurate word. From the standpoint of ethics, however, it’s a sanctimonious exaggeration and a prejudicial judgment.”

  “It’s not either one. You’re going to be pushing morphine, for God’s sake!”

  Wearily, Stubblefield shook his big head. “Ah, Goldwire, you do carry that Southern Baptist gene for inflammatory rhetoric. We’re not pushing anything. There’s a demand so great that the pittance we can supply wouldn’t begin to fulfill a finite fraction of it. Moreover, we’re not, strictly speaking, making morphine. Yeah, yeah, I know, that’s a technicality—bu
t what if we were selling morphine? Morphine, in its proper place, is humanity’s friend.”

  “It’s named after Morpheus, the Greek god of dreams,” Dern Foley quietly interjected.

  “Foley’s right. Many a poor soul racked with disease has gotten a blessed night’s sleep thanks to—”

  “Come on, Stub! A bunch of Filipino quacks are gonna be turning your . . . your semi-morphine, your virtual morphine, into heroin!”

  Stubblefield made a show of clucking his long tongue. “My goodness, Goldwire. With what power your righteous hysteria invests that simple word.” He clucked some more, like a myopic hen scolding an omelet. “Heroin. The chemical archdemon. The crystalline Satan. A drug equally as addictive and almost as dangerous as nicotine.”

  “Nicotine,” mused Foley. “Named after Jacques Nicot, the French god of lung cancer.” The man knew his deities.

  “That’s sophistry,” charged Dickie. “You can’t compare them.”

  “No,” Stubblefield conceded. “I suppose not. Were we supplying the Filipino ‘quacks’ with nicotine instead of our opiate, I’d be as uneasy as you in the morality department. Of course, there’s scant medical benefit to be derived from Monsieur Nicot’s lethal namesake. Whereas our criminal elixir, our immoral tonic . . . well, let me shush before I wax unseemingly altruistic. Profit is an issue here, after all. It’s going to take a fair amount of moolah to restore this old house to grandeur.”

  Stubblefield’s defense was not by any means a total rationalization. Heroin, we must note, is by far the most effective analgesic known to medical science. It has the unique capacity to relieve the pain that even morphine cannot dull; the relentless, excruciating torture that is many a cancer victim’s fate. Over the decades, numerous compassionate American physicians have petitioned for permission to administer heroin to their terminally ill patients, only to be curtly dismissed by politicians, on grounds of the drug’s addictiveness. Why it would matter one iota whether or not a doomed patient with only weeks to live became addicted, the wise men have never explained. A few congressmen have cited concern that if heroin was present in hospitals, it might be stolen and sold on the street or else secretly used by nurses and staff (such is Washington’s conviction of the white powder’s irresistible allure); while others fret that it would set a bad example for children, the logic of that excuse being beyond the comprehension of the ordinary mind.

  Whatever the politicians’ real reasons—pressure from the Mafia, perhaps, in whose financial interest it is to keep drugs illegal and therefore expensive; or pressure from religious conservatives, whose rabid superstitions cancel out any tenderness they might harbor in their “Christian” breasts—thousands of terminally ill human beings are made to spend their last days in wrenching agony, when relief, dignity, and a meaningful parting from their loved ones, is only a syringe away.

  In any case, toward the end of the 1970s, a laboratory on the outskirts of Manila began refining medical-grade heroin from unlicensed opiate sources (U.S. authorities have never hesitated to impose their puritanical values on other, less uptight, cultures) and providing it to a clandestine clinic in the Philippines and two others in India. At those clinics—hospices, actually—moribund patients were given the injections necessary to ease their great suffering, and many died smiling when they would have died screaming. By 2001, there were thirteen such facilities operating secretly in Asia, Latin America, and the South Pacific.

  The Manila lab remained a principal supplier for the Asian hospices. A buyer from that lab, a biochemist scouting for new sources, happened to arrive at the Thai outpost just as Smarty Pants II was landing there with a cargo of chandoo. Stubblefield and Foley struck up a conversation with the Filipino (he spoke good English, whereas the Thai smugglers had only the most basic vocabulary) and learned of his mission. Within an hour, thanks to Stubblefield’s XXL personality and the demonstrable quality of the Fan Nan Nan chandoo, they made a deal.

  As has been chronicled, Dickie Goldwire objected to the arrangement. He’d been comfortable neither with the raw O nor the chandoo, and now he took a stand. “You can’t be sure,” he told his comrades, “that at least some of this heroin isn’t going to end up in an inner city shooting gallery or a rock star’s veins.”

  Dern glanced up from his bottle of Beer Lao, at which he’d been staring so intently one might have imagined him in communion with the tiger head on its label. He had, after all, a fascination with animism. “You’re starting to sound a lot like the government you’ve run away from,” he said.

  Stubblefield was more civil. “No,” he admitted, “the white river of poppy sap is a meandering stream with many tributaries, few that flow above ground. We can’t be a hundred percent certain that some portion of our contribution won’t overflow its intended channel. We can only be trusting and hopeful.”

  “Right. Hopeful some downtrodden kid doesn’t OD on the stuff you may be putting in circulation.”

  “There are reckless people who can—and will—die from the cars your father sells every day. Anything can be misused. Furthermore, every individual has to assume responsibility for his or her own actions, even the poor and the young. A social system that decrees otherwise is inviting intellectual atrophy and spiritual stagnation.”

  The night before, Dickie had endured an especially embarrassing session of dream school, one with endless missed assignments and lost classrooms, and now his lingering frustration was compounded. There was some truth in Stubblefield’s views, he felt, but not enough to obscure the bleating of the Goldwire conscience. So, he gathered his meager belongings, including the piece-of-trash Ukrainian guitar on which he, for better or worse, would compose “Meet Me in Cognito,” and piled them neatly in a corner for Dern at some point to ferry over to the village in the chopper. He shook hands with Dern, grunted audibly from the compression of Stubblefield’s bear hug, and headed for the door and the terrifying wire across the chasm.

  Before he was halfway to the exit, the other two had resumed their debate about the relative popularity of drugs such as heroin when common sense dictated that the use of those substances was self-destructive. Stubblefield contended that as long as methods were available that allowed people to dissolve the ego and kill time—not while away the time, not pass it, but annihilate it—they would seek out those methods regardless of the risks involved. The ecstasy of living completely in the present moment, which almost everyone experiences briefly in sexual orgasm, mystics access during deep meditation, shamans savor as a reward for their psychedelic ordeals, and some artists stumble upon gratuitously when they lose themselves in their work, that egoless euphoria was, according to Stubblefield, at the core of transcendence, the liberated state of elevated innocence for which every human animal unwittingly hungers. Transcendence was, quite literally, heaven on earth, and any narcotic that punched a ticket to paradise was going to be consumed, even if there might be hell at the end of the ride.

  Dern, citing Buddhist texts and an obscure passage from Genesis, countered that the barriers that blocked our entrance into earthly paradise were not time and ego but, rather, fear and desire. The only problem with man’s notion of time, Dern argued, was that it called constant attention to his mortality, as well as to the always uncertain future, thereby accentuating his fear of death and the unknown. Then, after a gulp of Beer Lao, the balding pilot asserted that the ego, when divorced from its weighty, neurotic burden of ambition and greed, was actually more of a boon than a hurdle. Could we but jettison our fears and desires, our relaxed egos would serve to keep us well-centered in a permanent, portable Eden. The hophead nodding on smack neither quakes nor covets, neither cringes nor grasps, and it’s for that supreme equanimity, rather than to escape social squalor or personal responsibility, that he jabs his artery with the spike. So said Dern.

  Subjected to this dialogue as he packed and, after farewells, as he made his unhappy way to the door, Dickie muttered upon exiting, “Jeeze! I wonder which god it is that’s the God of Bul
lshit?” He didn’t really mean it, of course: under normal conditions he would have loved to have taken part in the discourse, and, furthermore, he hadn’t thought the others could possibly have overheard. Alas, the ever alert Stubblefield called after him:

  “All of them, Goldwire. All of them. No particular god gets to preside over bullshit, or else they’d fight among themselves for the privilege. The gods tolerate the human race for no other reason than our talent for bullshit. It’s the only thing about us that doesn’t bore them to tears.”

  “What about love?” Dickie thought to yell back. “What about our capacity for love?” But by then the door had swung shut behind him.

  For several years the MIA entrepreneurs relied on a “mule” to transport their product from northern Thailand to the Philippines. The mule was recommended by the lab and seemed reliable, always returning in a timely fashion with the previously specified amount of cash in the previously specified currencies: Thai baht, Lao kip, and U.S. dollars. Sometime in the mid-eighties, however, Dern Foley began to make runs to Manila two or three times a year. Dern had already ventured twice into Bangkok, and on his second foray there, had had fake French passports made for himself and his confederates. He had also managed to acquire the official garments of a Roman Catholic priest, breaking out, the first time he donned the habit, in what was undoubtedly the biggest smile of his adult life. “I thought I would expire of geriatric infirmities before seeing you actually grin,” said Stubblefield.

  On each and every visit to Manila, Dern did the best he could to ascertain that the heroin produced from the Villa Incognito narcotic was going exclusively to hospices and not onto the street. By the time of his third round trip, he and Stubblefield were “reasonably convinced” that they were providing a purely humanitarian service. So assured of this was Stubblefield that he would sometimes put on his favorite concubine’s dressing gown, bind a dishcloth about his head, and prance around the villa, pretending to be Mother Teresa. (The champagne that Dern was bringing back to Fan Nan Nan in large quantities played no small role in the display.)