In fact, it isn’t clear that Wade died alone—he might have died with Jake, even with Tashi, whose body is the only one of the three that has been found. The immediate rescue mission, including Kaljang, quickly recovered the young Sherpa’s body, but then had to turn back short of the Lawson Wall, as it’s now called by the media. The next June, a German-Nepali expedition set out for the peak—hoping also to locate Wade’s and Jake’s remains and determine if they’d summited—but they had to retreat from the wall not once but three times, in whiteout conditions. A German filmmaker who went along on that climb is said to be working on a documentary about the search for Lawson and about his controversial career. Last time Sophie heard, the man was trying to mount a new expedition but was having trouble getting permits from the Nepali government—and even more trouble finding sponsors. After all, it has been two years, and how long do stories, even big ones, stay in the news these days? So her father says. Like Sophie herself, he seems relieved that their story is receding into smaller and smaller font.
Still, she occasionally surfs news sites or simply googles keywords to follow up on the aftermath in China, and around Tyamtso, where the villagers created for her a fleeting paradise at the possible cost, to themselves, of a lasting hell. Hell didn’t happen, it seems. The authorities, probably fearing an image-management disaster in the run-up to the summer Olympics, decided to make a PR exhibit out of Tyamtso, releasing video clips of PLA military engineers helping the villagers to rebuild their bridge. (In one of the clips Tenzin Lodi, distinctively lanky, long-haired, a cigarette in the corner of his mouth, can be seen repointing the mortar on one of the cairn-like piers.) The wounded refugees left behind in the village—Lhundup and the nun Pema—were quietly arrested, then conspicuously freed. Norbu Dawa, killed by the helicopter crew before their accidental crash (as it has been officially declared) has been branded chief culprit in the jailbreak shootings; the authorities maintain that the death of this “Splittist assassin” has closed the case and satisfied The People’s need for justice. Meanwhile, Lieutenant Zhao has largely recuperated from his wounds, received a promotion and returned to his family in Beijing, where he holds an administrative post. As Sophie’s father comments, the authorities had a choice between punishing him for failing, and thus admitting a failure, or else celebrating his heroic wounding. Trying to make the best of a fiasco that provided them with few heroes, they chose to turn Zhao into one.
And what of Palden Jangbu, the Tibetan PLA corporal she met only briefly in Tyamtso? Sophana now knows what happened to him—several times in the clinic her father told her, speaking in a halting, haunted voice, so that she wasn’t sure if it was a true memory or a delirious vision. But since his recovery he has confirmed the story, as has Amaris—and while Amaris seems willing to talk more about it, to study and reframe the event from different angles and try to understand, her father has made it clear he doesn’t want to talk about it again. Taking the Hippocratic oath, he told her one time in the clinic—another odd segue—it’s a perjury. You swear to do no harm, but you do your share.
Seems no one wants to talk about Palden. There’s no mention of him anywhere on official Chinese news sites. Feed his name into any search engine and all that pops up are a few references to Palden Jangbus who can’t be him: a Tibetan guerrilla chief executed near Gyantse in 1961, a lawyer for refugee rights in New Delhi, the Facebooking owner of a Tibetan café in Amsterdam. It’s odd to think of anyone these days suffering total digital oblivion—as if dying alone in a remote, cold place, your body buried under the snows, were not enough of an erasure. And this haunts Sophana. Which is why she keeps making sketches of Palden, based on her limited memories. When she gets a few images that seem right—face-on, profile, three-quarter—she’ll run them past Amaris, and then start working up a short, speculative graphic tale, trying to lend Palden some sort of prehistory and, at the same time, a narrative afterlife.
She guesses that by now he must have had a “sky burial.” The snows in that ravine must have melted enough by the next summer that his body would have been unblanketed and the scavenger birds and birds of prey would have moved in, till only his bones remained. And somehow this reminds her of another of the rituals Choden has mentioned in her letters: she has been learning to collaborate on a sand mandala, a composition of differently dyed sands that a group of nuns arrange, over a number of long, silent days, into an elaborate, exquisite pattern. When the mandala is finished, the nuns promptly destroy it, raking and blending the sands back to a sort of nebular chaos, as if to say that no complete thing—a body, a nunnery, a relationship, a country, the universe itself—can hold its form for long.
Amaris McRae’s new short film, Bordercam Near Vamori, is composed entirely of surveillance video, some of it slightly doctored (tinted, sped up into time-lapse, slowed down) taken from a webcam mounted on a new border fence in the Sonoran Desert near Vamori, Arizona. The webcam belongs not to Amaris but to U.S. border security services now outsourcing some of their surveillance work to “virtual border patrol deputies”—thousands of them. Apparently there are too few state and federal agents to monitor the twenty-four-hour video coming in from a growing network of webcams along the Mexican border. Early last year, in an online article, Amaris read about a Maori security guard, working nights in an industrial park in Auckland, New Zealand, who now spent hours every week staring at sweeping, low-res feeds of a newly fenced stretch of desert southwest of Yuma. He had a password and logged on every night. If he observed suspicious activity along the fence—either refugees or drug runners attempting to climb or cut through or tunnel underneath—he was supposed to email tips to border security headquarters. Officials wouldn’t say if he had sent them any useful tips so far.
For the six months that Amaris watched and downloaded webcam feeds onto her laptop—logging on for a couple of hours a day and sometimes at night—she saw little and yet so much. The fish-eye webcam turned 200 degrees and back again every two minutes, giving a grainy black-and-white vista of the fenceline and southern horizon from the west to the east: a featureless, hot tundra with a few saguaro cacti to the south and, off to the southwest, a lonely mesa and a range of snowless peaks. Sun setting just to the left of the fenceline. Unclear forms loping out of the distance, defining themselves now as wild dogs trotting east along the fence, glancing through it into Arizona (maybe a hare or an antelope on the other side?), eagles, buzzards, vultures gingerly alighting on the razor wire topping the fence, tumbleweeds ploughing into it and piling up there in a southwest gale, storm-blown dust and sand at times subtracting visibility to a few metres. On two occasions a security crew of some kind drove up on the U.S. side, approaching from the west in a dusty black Jeep with official insignia on the hood, maybe checking to see if the fence was intact. On the second occasion they parked close under the webcam and two officers got out and stared up and conferred, maybe wondering if they should examine the camera, while the lens veered indifferently away from them. Two minutes later it swung back. They stood face to face now, smoking, laughing about something, two bearded, thickset, genial-looking men.
The next time the lens swivelled back, they and their Jeep were gone and the desert was desert again.
She was greatly relieved that she never saw anyone trying to cross the border. How could she have been certain what they were—refugees of poverty or of drug violence, or actual drug runners? Gun runners? The smugglers she would have reported, refugees she could not have. Bordercam Near Vamori is twenty-one minutes of lyrically intercut footage showing the weeks and the weather passing over and through the porous border, silent days flowing across the earth, big storms, a wild dog chasing a buzzard off a tiny carcass and then gnawing on the carcass, burying the remains. The two guards standing on the desert floor, peering up at the webcam, until, by the third pass, there’s nothing. Finally a storm, late December, two a.m., snowflakes blowing like a gale of shooting stars across the dark screen while the credits silently roll. Sophana Book, Dr. Lewis
Book, Choden Lhamu and her adoptive parents are among the people Amaris thanks. This film is dedicated to my birth parents in Vietnam, whoever they were.
October 2006
The air of those high mountains turns anyone into a mystic, and the depths of a convalescence can do the same: even wearing an oxygen mask, the patient drifts in his mind through a trackless delirium. “The patient.” Who, you wonder remotely, is the patient? Here there is no I, not yet—the ego remains an extravagance that takes too much fuel—here there is only him, or you. In the wintry chrysalis of the sheets, as respiration slowly proceeds, you see him, isolated yet unalone, people slipping in or out of the room, and often, it seems, they keep vigil, though it’s hard to distinguish night from day, your children, Nika, and, on a few occasions, Amaris, too, a feeling of peace and bliss at times expanding through your body like drip-fed morphine.
Gratitude for the gift of each connection. Each new moment.
Toward the end of this twilight, a recurring dream. It belongs in a class with those dreams where you discover a formerly unknown room in a house that you’ve inhabited for years. In this version, you realize that you have a child you’ve somehow forgotten. You have left him or her somewhere and forgotten and now you learn that the child has been discovered and is flying home to you and that certainty explodes into your heart with excruciating joy—a sort of coronary of euphoric pain. For some seconds there’s no limit to this returning joy. To be happy, see yourself as entitled to nothing. Breathing without the mask, you crest a pass in your mind’s eye: there’s nothing up here but prayer flags.
NOTES & ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My gratitude goes to the following people, whether for expert advice, editorial acumen, or other forms of help and support:
—Editor Michael Schellenberg and Production Editorial Assistant Amanda Lewis. Also Marion Garner, Deirdre Molina, Michelle MacAleese and Adria Iwasutiak of Random House Canada
—Anne McDermid, Martha Magor and Monica Pacheco of Anne McDermid and Associates
—Mary Huggard, Elena Heighton, Pelly Heighton, Tara Heighton, Esme Varvis and John and Christina Heighton
—Edna Alford, Jeff Balderson, Jared Bland, Judith Cowan, Richard Cumyn, Elisabeth Harvor, Jenny Haysom, Michael Holmes, Bruce & Peggy Horne, Michael Hurley, Reena Kukreja, Alvin Lee, David McDonald, Shane Neilson, Michael Newman, Alec Ross, Douglas Roy, Ingrid Ruthig, Alexander Scala, Mark Sinnett, Sue Sumeraj and Dasey Wangkhang-Silva
A winter 2009 writer-in-residence stint at the University of Ottawa was helpful in various ways, as was a brief residency at McArthur College, Queen’s University, in 2007. I’m thankful to both institutions, as well as to the Canada Council and the Ontario Arts Council for its support. I also want to thank the Yaddo Foundation for giving me an ideal place to begin the novel, in February 2007.
One reference work I found indispensible was Peter Hopkirk’s excellent Trespassers on the Roof of the World. Martin Windrow’s The Last Valley: Dien Bien Phu and the French Defeat in Vietnam provided, via Richard Cumyn, one piece of essential information. A version of the story of the Bodhisatva and the murderer is recounted in Emotional Awareness: A Conversation Between the Dalai Lama & Paul Ekman, Ph.D. The phrase that Lewis Book tries to remember, and misquotes, on page 263 of this novel is from a poem by Ezra Pound.
This book is for Mary, who was there.
—S.H.
Kingston, Ontario
November 2009
STEVEN HEIGHTON is the author of the novel Afterlands, which has appeared in six countries; was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice along with a best book of the year selection in ten publications in Canada, the U.S. and the U.K.; and has been optioned for film. He is also the author of The Shadow Boxer, a Canadian bestseller and a Publishers Weekly Book of the Year. His work has been translated into ten languages, and his poems and stories have appeared in London Review of Books, Poetry, Tin House, The Walrus, Europe, Agni, Poetry London, Brick, Best English Stories and many others. Heighton has won several awards, including three golds for fiction and poetry in the National Magazine Awards, and has been nominated for the Governor General’s Literary Award, the Trillium Award, a Pushcart Prize, the Journey Prize and Britain’s W.H. Smith Award.
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF CANADA
Copyright © 2010 Steven Heighton
Map copyright © 2010 Steven Heighton
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Published in 2010 by Alfred A. Knopf Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited.
Distributed by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
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Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Heighton, Steven
Every lost country / Steven Heighton.
eISBN: 978-0-307-37395-3
I. Title.
PS8565.E451E93 2010 C813′.54 C2009-905244-X
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