Magnus has to rethink his situation. A week in the country might be quaint, in a pinch, but a month or more is a different ballgame. Especially without sex. With the increased emotional need which is a function of insecurity, McKay finds it difficult to keep his hands off Lalita. Images from those two incandescent times he slept with her provoke almost continuous arousal. What to do? Furtive fumbling at night, or during the day when her parents are working the fields, is out of the question—Lalita has made that clear. On the other hand, he dares not take her to a hotel in Surin, not so much because the Colombians might be looking for him (though they might be), but mostly because Samson Lee would surely find out and Magnus is supposed to be incognito McKay doesn’t want to enrage Samson Lee at a time like this.
So what about a quaint Buddhist ceremony, as Lalita more or less suggested? Probably Lalita, considering her profession, will understand his pragmatism: get married Buddhist-style in order to make his sojourn in the country that much easier. Using his lawyerly knack of expressing himself in positive terms whilst playing down the counter arguments, he subtly lets Lalita understand that he will accept a Buddhist marriage with her, on certain terms which could be summarized as voluntary sex slavery on her part. He is not sure they are quite reading from the same hymn sheet, but does it really matter? He’ll take care of her and her parents, he really will solve all their money problems with a wave of his platinum Visa card. He knows you don’t get nothin’ for nothin’ in this world, and he is genuinely grateful to her. The way he puts it, the whole deal sounds eminently reasonable, although he’s not sure she’s fully understood his complicated logic in English.
He’s no sooner given this heavily nuanced “yes,” than her father appears as if from nowhere to discuss Lalita’s sale price. Her father is only a couple of years older than McKay, but to McKay he looks about eighty.
McKay has very little cash with him, but in Surin he can use his credit card to get money from an ATM. Except that he cannot go to Surin. To his astonishment, he realizes he can probably trust his fiancée. In these circumstances, the old man’s fee of fifteen thousand dollars for his beautiful daughter’s body for life does not seem unreasonable. (Maybe he’ll keep her indefinitely, a twenty-two-year-old sensual feast waiting for him in a sarong in the country—why not?)
Lalita rides to Surin in back of a pickup truck, and by using a number of ATMs manages to extract fifteen thousand dollars. Out of curiosity, McKay calls his bank to check: Yep, she took out exactly the agreed sum, not a penny more.
Next day, nine monks appear in their saffron robes, form a semicircle, join themselves together with a length of white string, and start chanting in Pali, while Magnus and his bride kneel with their palms held together near their chests for what seems to McKay like an inordinate period of time. Indeed, he is so tired from keeping his hands up after the first hour, and so bored with listening to the incomprehensible Pali, and at the same time so determined to show he has the stamina of any Thai man, that he is not paying very much attention to Lalita.
Like most Thais, Lalita understands quite a lot of Pali, thanks to the cultural influence of Buddhism. She knows that Pali is a dialect of Sanskrit, which is perhaps the only language on earth wholly dedicated to the sacred. Like most people in the world outside of the West, Lalita assumes that everyone, even McKay, has a God-shaped hole in his head, otherwise he could not be human at all, could he? She also assumes that the monks’ words are having the same effect on him as they are on her.
Of course, she knows he does not consciously understand anything, but this is a magical moment and these words are sacred. So sacred, indeed, that she finds she is undergoing that religious experience which she has always known would come to her sooner or later. Quite simply, this is the happiest day of her life and she has quickly forgotten the rather legalistic caveats that McKay tried to impose on their union. Indeed, as invariably happens when a soul begins to awaken, the spiritual experience is so powerful that she simply drops her former identity like a set of old clothes. Miraculously, but not unusually, she is able to forget she was ever on the Game. After all, as far as her community is concerned, in one smart move she has become a rich, respectable, powerful, married woman.
She enters a trance while the monks recite ancient texts concerning the sacredness of marriage, the intrinsic part it plays for lay people on the eight-fold path, the importance of the tiny beam of light at the center of every human soul that is like an authentic splinter of nirvana, and how much stronger we become when we are able to join with another in total commitment and faithfulness, and how we need this strength for that crucial and terrifying moment when at death we enter the transitional state called “The Other Side.” They end by reciting the duties each spouse owes the other, particularly emphasizing fidelity and honesty.
When the monks are gone, Lalita explains to her parents the strange farang inhibition about privacy: Basically, Magnus wants them to consummate their marriage alone in the house. After a short discussion, McKay forks out another three hundred dollars for her parents to go stay with her father’s brother, who lives up the road, for a week or so.
Now he can finally achieve what he has been planning since New York. A week is a long time for a millionaire to postpone gratification.
Afterwards, he tries to stifle his disappointment, tells himself it is early days and there has been a breakdown in communication somewhere along the line. She used none of her tantalizing tricks at all, employed none of those spectacular techniques which had been haunting his libido for so long. On the contrary, she made love to him with unstinting adoration in her eyes and the functionality of a country girl who wants to make a baby.
Laying on his back, controlling himself, not looking at her, smoking a Marlboro Red, McKay uses his softest, most charming tone. Smart attorney, he makes his pitch as a man with a problem: Due to an appalling childhood he is hopelessly promiscuous and favors threesomes. He would like for her to work on him with another woman, especially since he knows that Thai prostitutes often prefer threesomes and he has no doubt she has often done that sort of thing in the course of trade. There are plenty of whores for hire twenty miles away in Surin, right?
Somewhat preoccupied with his disappointment, he fails to notice a stiffening in her arm which lies across his chest. Staring at the ceiling, he does not notice a sudden contraction in her pupils or the tightening of the muscles around her eyes.
Changing the subject, Magnus asks her if she can get him some opium to help him pass the time (he does not say: in this godforsaken hellhole). He’s heard it is easily available in Cambodia, so logically there must be some importation, no?
Lalita nods: Yes, she can get him some.
“We can make out on it—wouldn’t that be fun?”
“Yes,” she says, looking away, “that could be fun.”
Of course, they do not make love on opium. She shows him how to prepare the pipe, as the old crone in the village where she bought it had shown her, and after a few puffs his mind takes a quite different direction. After five pipes he is in a trance which lasts eight hours. When he comes around he decides that opium is definitely his new recreational drug of choice. It is incredible: a lot more civilized than crack and therefore more suitable for one’s middle years. He has spent eight hours in a fascinating dream world where he lay on the king-size bed from his Manhattan apartment, except that the bed floated in a dynamic, light-filled space and Magnus was able to travel to different stars and back at will, on his magic bed.
While Magnus is in his opium trance the next day, Samson Lee calls on the special cell phone. Lalita tells Lee that McKay has gone out for the day. Lee speaks to her in Thai and tries to convey, in coded language McKay would understand, that the war is won on all fronts. The bodies of twenty-three horribly tortured and mutilated Colombians have been found by Thai police, following a tip-off, somewhere on the border with Mayanmar; at the same time, someone who shall be nameless informed the DEA of the exact location of th
e Escaverada family’s main jungle factory. He tells her to tell Magnus to watch the international news or buy a newspaper. In any event, McKay must get the next flight to New York, Lee has some urgent matters for him to attend to.
Lalita watches CNN at a shop in the village and sees how a massive haul of cocaine has been retrieved from a certain factory known to be the property of the Escaverada family, who have all been taken into custody except for those who died in the battle, which happens to be most of them: A combined Colombian government and U.S. operation had mobilized more than five hundred men. However, the godfather, Pablo Escaverada, is still at large; indeed, according to intelligence he has been traveling overseas for some time, running his operation by cell phone and e-mail.
Lalita is able to guess, from tone and manner, what kind of Thai-Chinese Samson Lee must be. She now has no doubt that Magnus is in reality Pablo Escaverada, a business partner of Lee, for sure, on the run from international law enforcement. Lalita doesn’t tell McKay about Lee’s call when he comes around.
For three and a half days Lalita keeps McKay opiated while she waits for the sow. Whenever he comes down from his opium trips, she has a fresh pipe prepared and ready for him, and off he goes again. She has no way of knowing that in his disembodied state he sloughs off all carnality. He wants to tell her he has discovered that he genuinely loves her, from the bottom of his heart, but he never gets the chance. Finally, she knows by the unusual grunts that the sow has started to give birth.
As soon as the first piglet pops out, she takes it tenderly in her arms and climbs the stairs to where Magnus lies on a futon on the floor. With grim stubbornness working her jaw, she takes a large roll of agricultural plastic to lay out next to him, then rolls him over onto it. She turns up all the corners and edges, so that it forms a kind of shallow pool. Then she removes the gold Longines watch from his left wrist and lays it next to the piglet, which she lays next to McKay; or rather, next to McKay’s body, for as we know, Magnus himself is off on some celestial frolic, where we must join him briefly to get his side of the story.
THE OTHER SIDE, TUESDAY MARCH 8, 2005, AROUND NOON
McKay, who after only three days has developed a measure of expertise in the manipulation of his opium dreams, has discovered that it is not only the bed which is under his control: On the contrary, the whole dream is at his command. This is the total-immersion virtual world that computer scientists hope to achieve in maybe fifty years time; opium smokers have been visiting it for thousands. His new and favorite trick is to expand until the bed is a structure of stardust and he is as big as the universe.
Today, unaware of Lalita’s strange arrangements, McKay has once again expanded his astral body until he is almost perfectly absorbed by the great, luminous Inner Kingdom. Then something odd starts to happen. A door stretching from Saturn to Andromeda appears in the sky with the words Other Side hanging on a sign above it. McKay notices millions upon millions of people entering this doorway and cannot resist following them.
On the other side of the door, things are not so idyllic. The great football crowds of bewildered souls are engulfed by terrible whirlwinds consisting of samsaras from all the lifetimes those souls have lived through. A large number of the newly dead are overcome by powerful currents, which lead them into the bodies of animals and insects. To his surprise, he watches a highly respected Supreme Court judge, who must have died that very hour, turn into a scorpion. The more developed reincarnate as humans, usually in some situation of tedious drudgery and/or reckless debauchery. Only one or two escape the spiritual tsunami to rise to the challenge of an intense beam of white light shining above the appalling chaos. McKay is not one of these. Although his commendable clarity of mind enables him to see without self-deception, his lifelong commitment to undiluted self-indulgence makes it impossible for him to resist the turgid urrents Then, all of a sudden and with an overwhelming relief that makes him cry, he sees his gold Longines watch, which appears magically before him in gigantic form. He flies toward it as if toward salvation. Too late, he sees the trap. Struggle though he might, he is sucked into a warm, smelly, squealing body.
MEANWHILE, BACK ON THE FARM
Lalita has opened all the major veins and arteries that she can penetrate with a kitchen knife, and while her husband bleeds to death, she caresses the piglet whose name hence-forth will be Magnus McKay and presses his Longines gold watch against the wriggling creature until she is quite sure McKay’s soul has found its new lodging. She ties a crimson ribbon around each of the piglet’s legs, so that she will not get him mixed up with the others, then gives him back to his mother to feed.
She has been terribly torn, right to the core, but she is finally at peace. Her torment consisted of the conflict between her undeniable need to possess him forever and the equally pressing need to kill him because he was a depraved monster who deceived and abused both her and the Buddha’s holy monks. This is resolved now. Pigs live at least ten years and she will have him with her constantly for that time. Using McKay’s platinum Visa card and the ATM code he gave her, she takes out as much as the account will allow on a daily basis, until she is rich enough to pay for her mother’s cataract operation and her father’s quadruple heart bypass. She also makes sure she can pay for her young brother’s school fees all the way to post-graduate level, and for herself to retire from the Game and live contentedly in her native land for the rest of her life. Her first and most pressing expense, though, is to bribe the local cops. Fortunately, she has known them since childhood, so once a sum has been agreed upon, they conclude that the faran died of bird flu.
When Magnus McKay the Pig finally dies, she will have had enough time to arrange for his transmigration to a more long-lived creature: perhaps an elephant? Marriage is forever, right?
BONUS SEASON
BY HENRY BLODGET
Shanghai, China
When you were right, all was well in the world. The air seemed clearer, the future brighter, and the forest of roof-top construction cranes stretching west over the Huangpu a symbol of limitless opportunity. When you were wrong, however, as Emerson Jordan was now, a knot tightened in your chest, the Shanghai skyline just looked polluted, and your dubious future condensed to a red number at the bottom of your screen.
“It’ll come back,” a voice on Jordan’s left said.
Jordan prayed that, for once, Fishman would be right.
They had $400 million in a yuan-baht derivative, a bet that this afternoon’s Ministry of Finance meeting would send the yuan to the stars. Two hours earlier, when the markets had briefly lurched their way, Jordan had fantasized about ending his year with a ninth-inning grand slam. Up $80 million, he had rehearsed the final pitch he would make to Stack that night, after Stack had been softened by hours of hosannas from Reingold and other visiting New York brass. He had also considered taking the easy money, quitting while he was ahead. But he hadn’t, and now this was no longer an option.
As the red number blipped lower, the tightness in Jordan’s chest crept outward, and the scroll-wheel of his mouse grew damp with sweat. He had worked hard on hiding the stress—the lip-pinching and fetal slouching of the early years were long gone—but he couldn’t do anything about his palms. Wiping his hands on his pants, he glanced out the windows, where the smog had thickened to an ugly brown soup in the afternoon sun.
Should he cut and run? Even down $120 million—the latest bulletin—he was still up on the year (barely). Yes, the timing was terrible—mere hours before Stack finished the numbers and made the final decisions—but as of now, he could still make a case for a solid number. If he hung on, though? In the space of an hour, the trade had wiped out most of that year’s gains.
“You think they know something we don’t?” the everhelpful Fishman asked. “Maybe some bastard in New York has a direct line into the meeting?”
Jordan suppressed an urge to smash Fishman’s face into his keyboard. But it was possible—especially here, where the same bigwigs who plotted policy
placed trades on their BlackBerries. But that was what Stack was for—Stack, Mr. China, Mr. Guanxi. Stack had made his calls. Stack had signed off on the trade.
Two minutes later, after a tantalizing uptick had falsely raised his hopes, Jordan was down another $20 million. The knot in his chest now extended into his arms, stomach, and legs. All traces of the morning’s optimism were gone, replaced with the conviction that this new frontier was a land of pirates and thieves, that he’d lost his touch, that he was about to lose his job. A trader’s primary task is to manage emotions, and—irony of ironies!—he was actually thought to be good at it. An entire year’s work draining away, Jordan pushed his chair back and rose to his feet.
“Where are you going?” Fishman asked.
Jordan ignored him.
Stack’s office was off the far end of the floor, a glass box that jutted from the building like an observation platform. To get to it, Jordan had to walk past no fewer than fourteen trading desks. In the middle of a trading day, there were only two reasons to see Stack: you were making a killing, or you were getting killed. As he walked, Jordan tried to maintain his poker face—his Stack face—but he knew he wasn’t fooling anyone. On the contrary, on this day of all days, he imagined his fellow traders quietly celebrating, thinking that Stack’s erstwhile boy wonder had finally blown himself up, leaving more for everyone else.
The entrance to Stack’s imperial suite was guarded by two secretaries: Clara from Hong Kong and Lauren from New York. Neither seemed surprised to see him. Jordan nodded to both, then walked past into a dim, windowless corridor. As always, the door to Stack’s office was closed, leaving Jordan with nothing to do but stand helplessly in the gloom. Sometimes Stack made you wait seconds. Sometimes minutes. Sometimes, rumor had it, an hour or more. Today, thirty seconds after Jordan arrived, the door clicked softly and swung open.
Stack’s office had been designed for maximum impact: a sensory deprivation trip through a dark tunnel followed by an assault of light and space—as though you had burrowed into a cave and emerged on the side of a cliff. The office was two stories high, walled by 270 degrees of floor-to-ceiling glass. Not content with the knee-weakening vertigo this instilled—and eager to fully embrace the over-the-top carnival spirit of the new Shanghai—the London-based architects had added another special feature: a translucent floor. It supposedly employed the same technology as photosensitive sunglasses, except in this case (and others), Stack retained control. On Stack’s desk was a box with the usual knobs—temperature, lights, AV, etc.—one of which allowed him to modify the clarity of the glass. If Stack wished, he could set the floor to “clear” and watch visitors discover what it felt like to negotiate while hovering 870 feet above the wide streets of Pudong.
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