by Tom Robbins
Suddenly, rockets of racket, loud and competitive, attacked their ears from every direction: squadrons of musical missiles launched by ceiling-high stacks of Japanese amplifiers and supercharged jukeboxes. Through the meat-heavy tropical air, a hundred lovely smiles and attractive entreaties glided to greet them. The very gutters seemed to run with intoxicating perfumes, a fluid mixture of Buddhist incense, coconut cocktails, bubbling cooking oils, tongue-peeling spices, marijuana’s merry musk, and sweet girlie scent-signals dabbed from makeup kits or biologically secreted. The Americans felt a tingle not unlike carbonation in their blood as they were enveloped by mysterious and sleazy splendors almost as ancient as nature. It was as if they were turning the three-dimensional pages of a virtual-reality men’s magazine, published in Gomorrah by the Dragon Lady’s nymphomaniacal nieces. The pages were thick and steamy, and the “readers” were developing a thirst.
Their course was set for the nearest gin garden when they found the path blocked by a small elderly man in a stained and rumpled suit. Although more than a trifle seedy, there was a seriousness and a kind of dignity about the gentleman that prevented them from brushing him aside. Colonel Thomas had been leading the way, and the old man addressed him directly. “Hey, mister,” he said earnestly, “you want to see a girl fuck a tanuki?”
“Say what?!” Thomas could scarcely believe his ears.
The Professor politely repeated the invitation. “You want to see a girl fuck a tanuki?”
Thomas laughed in amazement. He turned toward Canterbury. “Did you hear that?” But Canterbury had not heard because Canterbury was distracted by a pair of gorgeous teenage hookers costumed as Catholic schoolgirls. Thomas turned toward Foley. But Foley had not heard either—because Foley was no longer there.
Dern Foley was already half a block away, running, running hard, running at full speed through the throng; cutting, side-stepping, stutter-stepping, dodging, pirouetting, stiff-arming pedestrians, or bowling them over; running brilliantly, like the star collegiate fullback he had always dreamed of being. With an oath, Sergeant Canterbury set out in hot pursuit, but Dern was running into the chaos of Patpong rather than away from it, barreling into a convolution familiar to him but not the others, running with inspiration, and Thomas knew that the sergeant, though more than twenty years Dern’s junior, had not a prayer of catching him. He’s gone, reasoned Thomas. This MIA is now twice missing.
Thomas turned back to the Professor. The little man had been standing by, stoic, imperturbable, inscrutable. “You want to see . . .”
The colonel smiled. “Lead me to it,” he said. “And name your price.”
When the equilibrist Madame Phom returned to Fan Nan Nan, she did not find Dickie Goldwire at home. Dickie had hiked up to the Hmong village that noon to see if he might acquire enough rubies on credit to jump-start his financial battery, and though it was late in the day, he hadn’t yet returned. Because she needed to get over to Villa Incognito and back before darkness made walking the wire impossible, she placed Lisa Ko’s letter atop the belongings that Dickie had piled in the center of his hut, as though he were preparing to leave on a long journey. Madame Phom wondered what was going on, but the moment she deftly slid her balancing foot onto the cable, she erased all thoughts of Dickie and Lisa and concentrated every erg of her energy, mental and physical, on the wire. “To perform without a net is ecstasy,” Papa Phom had often reminded her, “to perform without focus is fatal.” Consequently, she took very little notice of such extraneous things as the cuckoo that sailed past the wire with something like a glowing golden noodle in its beak.
The houseboy named Lan admitted her to the villa but gestured to her to be silent, for Mars Albert Stubblefield was then speaking to a roomful of people. Lan whispered that the lecture was just beginning, so Madame could be happy she hadn’t missed anything. Before the aerialist might reply, Lan moved off to squat on the parlor floor in front of his master.
When Lan was settled, Stubblefield, nodding to Madame Phom, rinsed his tonsils with cold champagne and began anew. “As I was saying, many of you have no doubt noted the prolonged absence of Monsieur Foley. Indeed, there are a couple of young women among us who are beginning to exhibit symptoms of neglect.” Stubblefield smiled, but as there was no need to point out the young women in question—they being discernibly possessed at the moment of dry, brittle, antsy, irritable dispositions—he continued. “Most of you, however, have made not the slightest reference, subtle or overt, to the fact that my friend and yours has been lacking for several weeks now. To be sure, there is an admirable discretion, native or acquired, always on exhibit around here, and Foley may not have been away long enough yet to arouse alarm, but I’m convinced that should his absence prove to be of infinite duration, you would behave no differently. That is because you Asians acknowledge and accept the impermanence of that material world to which we in the West cling with the last torn finger and broken nail. Oh, yes.”
Stubblefield was outfitted in his favorite three-button suit of purple silk. He was barefoot and bare-chested, tattoo resplendent. During the morning toilette, when he was customarily bathed and anointed with oils, one or more concubines had plaited his beard, weaving fresh flowers (probably wild chrysanthemums, considering the season) into the braids. For all of their reverence, thought Madame Phom, the girls seem to treat him like their toy. She waved the letter to get his attention, but he was warming up to his subject and would not be distracted.
“In the West we have a desperate need for the certain, the explicable, and the absolute. In fact, one of our euphemisms for our lonely monogod is ‘the Absolute.’ Ironically, perhaps, that happens to be an appropriate title. God is absolute. Absolute mystery. Absolute ambiguity. Absolute uncertainty. Ha-ha!
“In this world that God (or Mother Nature) created, it is always hazard and novelty—hazard and novelty—which assert themselves, thereby rendering notions of fixity absurd. Incongruously enough, however, when we allow ourselves to fully accept uncertainty, to embrace and cultivate it even, then we actually can begin to feel within ourselves the presence of an Absolute. The person who cannot welcome ambiguity cannot welcome God.”
There was something hypnotic about Stubblefield’s pontificating, and though Madame Phom comprehended little of it, she would have liked to have remained for the rest. Even more, she would’ve liked to have stayed around for the post-lecture supper, whose preparatory aromas were wafting in from the kitchen. Alas, as the sun would soon be setting, she had no choice but to exit. Once again, she waved the letter, but Stubblefield disregarded her, swerving off, instead, on a tangent about terminally insecure, ego-addled American patriots and their propensity to deny the lessons of history and the inevitability of change.
“In their secretly nervous hearts, they’ve convinced themselves, poor little delusional narcissists, that their nation is the most powerful that ever was or ever will be, ignoring the still vaster empires that have crumbled in the past, conveniently forgetting that the U.S. has only existed for a mere two hundred twenty-five years, and refusing to consider for a nanosecond that in another two hundred twenty-five years it very well might be gone. Those towering skyscrapers that to everyone in this room constitute such vivid symbols of America, its wealth and its strength, can—by acts of nature or acts of men—literally topple overnight. Contradictorily, while insisting on America’s abiding permanence, the many Christians among them profess also to believe that the world is scheduled to end forthwith and the sooner the better—so, you see, they do embody the absurd, even though they can neither recognize nor benefit from it.” He sighed. “I confess, I almost miss their cocky brand of schizophrenia. Yes. I do sometimes miss it. It’s good tragicomedy. Holds a snakelike fascination.”
Those last few words, and the many that followed them (was the speaker preparing his audience for his own imminent departure?), failed to reach Madame Phom’s ears, for having finally slid Lisa’s epistle across the teak threshold of Stubblefield’s private study
, she slipped out through the big front door. She crossed the wire—though it should have been routine by now, the crossing was always daunting, in an exhilarating way—and headed home, where, drained by that day’s long journey from Vientiane, she soon went to bed. She was dreaming (of birds and glowing noodles, oddly enough) by the time Mars Stubblefield and Dickie Goldwire discovered and read their respective letters.
My dearest one, my mentor, my friend, my lover, and, yes, my “father,” I have long told you that a day was coming—and now that day is here.
Thus began Lisa Ko’s letter to Stubblefield. It went on to say that all of her life the clues to her future had lain locked in her mother’s past, in her grandmother’s and great-grandmother’s pasts. She wrote:
At last, I stand on the verge of discovering the family secret, of learning what it was that marked me, that left me different from ordinary women. Perhaps it will turn out to be but a small thing, a ridiculous thing, an anticlimax. Yet as conditions grow more dramatic in the top of my mouth, I tremble with fear that I shall learn something too strange to explain or to bear. Okay, it is what it is and I am what I it, but its isness and my itness seem to be stretching the meaning of “is”and “it.” Nevertheless, I am simultaneously (and I remember how you appreciate paradox) flooded with an unearthly happiness!
There is a sense, an intuition, that this thing that makes me so unusual is actually shared by all human beings. It’s just that in me, in my matriarchal lineage, it is uniquely pronounced. Am I some kind of throwback, a living echo of a more ancient, primal age—or am I a premature herald (an early warning) of a time that is yet to come? Or, as I’ve suggested, am I imposing exaggerated and wholly theatrical importance upon a physiological condition that I’ve inherited from, and that has been embroidered by, two or three generations of rootless, foolish, Zen-piqued, superstitious women? I hope someday to provide you with an answer, beloved, although at the moment it is difficult to believe that we shall ever meet again.
Lisa went on to reveal that she was pregnant:
Believe it or not, this was forewarned, as well. I cannot tell you who the father is. It isn’t that I will not: I cannot. I’d intended to give birth in Dickie’s house as Dickie’s wife, and that when the day came for me to go away (to meet my fate, if that doesn’t sound too pretentious), I’d entrust the child to his care, for I know that he would make it the most wonderful father. But Dern’s arrest threw a monkey tool, as you say, in the machinery. Now Dickie—and you, too—must likely flee, must bolt and perhaps be pursued. To live on the run, or in hiding in a large city, would not be a life for my little daughter, who I strongly feel must grow up in close proximity to what’s left of the natural world. And if Dickie is caught and imprisoned, what then?
About my pregnancy, and my need to go away, I’ve written to Dickie, also. Naturally, he will not take it well. He is as dear to you as to me, and you must help him to—not to understand, for he can never understand, but to accept. Dickie has in his heart a great capacity for joy, an easy joy less complicated than your own aggressive joie de vivre, and you must promise me that you will not allow him to lose it or fall into despair. That is my parting wish.
There followed a few lines of fond reminiscence about their time together, hers and Stubblefield’s, lines that walked as gracefully as a Phom the slender strand that separates the spiritual and the erotic. They concluded thusly:
The fine things you taught me (except, of course, for the fine you-know-what) can be seen on one level as a negation of the wisdom passed down to me by my ancestors—but I am, I think, the better for the lessons. One cannot arrive at no-mind unless one has a mind to start from. The brighter the mind gleams, the softer the silence of the eventual no-mind, just as the overturned bucket that was once brimming seems so much emptier than the bucket that never held milk in the first place. Thanks for filling my little pail.
The venue—it was too small to be called a theater or a club—was up a rickety, dimly lit staircase above a bar. The bar was particularly seedy, a dive more frequented by pimps and tuk-tuk drivers than by tourists. Conversely, the theater (we might as well call it that because it did boast a tiny bamboo stage) possessed a kind of ersatz elegance, due to the fact that it was draped here, there, and everywhere with folds of blood-red silk. No more than a dozen café tables with wire-back chairs filled the room, lending it the feeling—enhanced by the absence of air conditioning or fans—of an ice cream parlor on Main Street in Hell.
At one end of the little stage was a cage, covered by something resembling a banquet-sized linen tablecloth. At the other end, to the right of the cage, separated from it by a stained cotton pallet, a plain, rather plumpish young Thai woman in a loose-fitting robe sat on a low plastic stool. The woman was motionless, expressionless, eyes half-closed, but there was movement inside the cage, a constant stirring accompanied by growls and grunts, as if its occupant was anxious to consummate . . . that which was promised to be consummated.
Colonel Thomas and Sergeant Canterbury had seated themselves at a table in the rear. The sergeant appeared agitated; brooding, no doubt, over his failure to foil Dern Foley’s getaway, but the colonel looked to be taking the escape in stride. If he was upset about anything, it was the amount they’d been charged for their beers.
Most of the tables were occupied by middle-aged Japanese men in business suits. They were gulping bad Thai whiskey, jabbering, giggling, sweating, and fidgeting with their cameras. The exception was the table adjacent to the Americans. At it, there sat a pretty Asian woman of about thirty in a jade green, high-collared dress. She sat alone, self-contained, cool, strangely bright-eyed, sipping a cola. Colonel Thomas found himself staring at her. He nudged Canterbury. “That woman,” he whispered. “That woman next to us.”
“Sir?”
“That’s the woman from the circus. In San Francisco. She wasn’t at the show I went to, but she was in all the ads. I saw her on TV a bunch. She had the tanuki act, the one the drunk clown screwed up. I’d bet my retirement it’s her.” Thomas hadn’t succeeded as an intelligence officer by being unobservant. “See, she’s wearing the black boots. Maybe she’s recruiting talent or something. Researching her new act. I’ll be damned.”
Confident, Thomas caught the woman’s attention. He leaned toward her (politely, he hoped), intending to speak. Before he could open his mouth, however, two things happened: the lights dimmed, signaling the beginning of the show, and his satellite phone beeped.
Thomas almost switched off the phone. The covering was being removed from the tanuki cage, the girl onstage was slipping off her robe, and the woman he’d been about to address was smiling at him. Talk about bad timing! Who said irony was dead? In the end, his sense of duty (so wobbly of late) prevailed. “Yeah?” If it turned out to be Mayflower, he’d really be pissed.
“Colonel Thomas, sir, have you heard the news?” The voice belonged to Lieutenant Jenks, and it sounded shaky. Disturbed.
“What news would that be?”
Until that moment, Canterbury would have bet his retirement that a black man couldn’t turn pale. Thomas whirled to him. “Come on, Sarge! We’re out of here!”
The sergeant rose quickly. “Foley?” he asked hopefully.
“Fuck that peanut. The shit has hit the fan in New York and Washington. Terrorists. Big time!” He led the way out.
As they rushed downstairs, a strange pla-bonga pla-bonga sound followed them. Funny. They hadn’t noticed any drums on the stage.
At the Queen Anne branch of the Seattle Post Office, the clerks that Tuesday morning were inattentive. No customers complained, for they were equally distracted by the terrible news that poured continuously from a radio near the rear of the mailroom. Bootsey Foley was not the only person present with tears in her eyes, though she may have had a few more than most.
On her lunch break, however, Bootsey didn’t join those workers who repaired to bars, cafés, or appliance stores to watch reruns of the death planes ramming the buildings. I
nstead, she went looking for Pru, who had neither answered her cell phone nor returned a call all morning.
Luckily, Key Arena was but a few short blocks from the post office. When Bootsey (uncharacteristically oblivious to any “adorable” undertones of fall in the air) arrived there, she found that, according to the arena reader board, the circus performance that evening had been canceled. As the arena appeared deserted, Bootsey joined the line at the box office, where people were turning in their tickets for refunds. The ticket seller informed her that because of the tragedy, all circus personnel had been sent to their railcars or hotels but would doubtlessly return on Wednesday, if only to strike the show.
Since Bootsey hadn’t taken so much as one sick day in nearly fifteen years, her boss was sympathetically agreeable when she requested the afternoon off. She splurged on a taxi, and was both relieved and concerned when she saw Pru’s old black and gray Hyundai (it made one think of a campground stewpot) in their driveway. At the cottage door, Bootsey paused, surprised not to hear the sound of television. “My goodness,” she muttered.
When she opened the door, she “my-goodnessed” some more. It was “my goodness” squared, “my goodness” cubed, “my goodness” to the thirteenth power. There, on the sofa, hair disheveled, lipstick smeared, sat Pru Foley with her arm around a clown.
Dickie felt that the wind had been knocked out of him. His breath was knotted. He went so far as to drop to his knees. The letter fluttered out of his grip.
To be sure, it was a gentle letter, loving and warm, but at bottom it was a rejection, and rejection of that magnitude is a pill so bitter all the ladles in Candyland could not coat it nor all the molasses in Africa aid in its ingestion. Dickie was stunned and stung. He was sickened by loss. And, finally, he was angry.
