But luck was on Jordan’s side. As we turned to go, the French couple entered the gallery. They gravitated immediately to the collage of twigs and fur beside which my brother and I still stood.
“C’est fantastique,” the woman said, continuing in French: “Can you tell . . . it is a real animal?”
“It is real,” her partner returned. “Real fur. Incroyable. I love the combination, the interplay of animal and vegetable. And the bound-up sticks, the leaves; it’s magnificent. We are bound to the cycle of mortality.”
“Ritual,” she declared. “Ritual and renewal. Like the building of this nest. The suggestion that dead things can somehow provide a home for the living. C’est profond.”
“C’est merde.”
Jordan had crept up behind the couple and now spoke, in fluent Parisian French, to the backs of their necks. “It is an abomination. How one longs for true art, honest visions of life; for the living, breathing passion of Man!” He spoke as if addressing the sculpture itself. “What we see here is a representation not of ritual, or of renewal, but of narcissism and self-delusion. The individual responsible for this monstrosity should be managing a parking garage, or stuffing sausages. Both better-suited vocations,” he concluded, “than roping dead rodents to a panel and proclaiming it ‘Art’!”
The man pivoted on his heels. “Who is this fool?” he barked. “Who do you think you are?” His companion turned as well, regarding the gaunt young man with the beaklike nose, black eyes, and patchy stubble on his arrogant chin.
“Je suis l’artist!” Jordan cried. “And the only thing I loathe more than the smell of dead rodents is the stink of intellectual pretension. Now get out of my gallery, and embarrass me no more with your pompous clichés!”
The couple fled the room. Jordan did not watch them go. Instead he moved closer to the work in question, studying it with fresh interest.
“Now that they’ve explained it,” he confided, “it’s not half bad.”
IN 1979, WHILE I vagabonded through Europe and Asia and made my way to Nepal, Jordan was enrolled as a linguistics major at the State University of New York. He soon established his brilliance, uncovering in some hoary text a Greek verb form that had eluded scholars for centuries.
He was also dating, but with mixed results. The problem wasn’t an inability to meet women; it was the way he perceived courtship. The tango of the sexes was, in Jordan’s eye, yet another opportunity for satire and confrontation. Inanely, he expected the women he met to indulge his acid observations.
“As we sat upon a bench, upon a grassy promenade,” he wrote in one letter, “I placed my arm around Cynthia’s shoulder; and, in doing so, felt her delicate clavicle beneath my fingers. Her ribs felt the same: fragile as a birdcage. Touching her this way, I was stunned by the direct experience of the classic gulf between men and women: specifically in upper-body strength. It was at this point that I remarked to Cynthia, ‘Your bones seem so fragile, it seems I could crush your ribcage with a firm embrace.’
“My remarks distressed her far out of proportion to their intent. She fled quickly, and I admit to you with some embarrassment that I’ve not heard from her since.”
Over time, Jordan acquired a better grip of dating etiquette. He even became something of a ladies’ man. But he never stopped treating his girlfriends as abstractions: reflections of the impossible, “ideal” woman.
His real problems began a few years later, during an active and optimistic period in my own life. This was in June 1983. I’d received a Journalism Fellowship from the Rotary Foundation and was preparing to leave California for a year in Kathmandu. I decided to reach Nepal via Europe and stopped in Plainview for a family farewell.
Jordan had sublet his Binghamton apartment and was home for the summer. Everyone was at home. Debra, who’d just turned twenty, was working nights at a biker bar in Farmingdale. Mom had completed a degree in Early Childhood Education, and was directing preschool programs at the Mid-Island “Y.”
Dad wasn’t faring so well. After seventeen years, he had been laid off by GE. There was no future, the corporation had decided, in fax machines or personal computers, and they’d scrapped their entire data processing division. Dad sent out a barrage of résumés, but data was a young man’s field. I returned from California to find him rooted in front of the television, waiting for the phone to ring. His eyes seemed dull, and his copper-colored hair had gone white.
Jordan was in crisis as well. The move back into his childhood room, at the age of twenty-five, was an indignity, challenging his notions of self-reliance. He worked on his texts behind closed doors, Virgil Fox’s Heavy Organ surging through his room. As we sat on his bed—the same bed beneath which he had disappeared as a child—I was shocked by how morose he’d become.
His mood was not the result of his financial straits. There was a more serious cause, he admitted quietly, for his gloom. Something had happened to him: something physical. During sexual intercourse—he used the clinical term—he’d felt a short, sharp pain at the base of his penis. It was as if a switch had been thrown. At that moment, all pleasurable sensation ceased.
“And this happened while you were having sex,” I repeated.
“Yes. A sudden pain, as if something had snapped.”
It was more than a loss of sensation. It was as though his very will, his life energy, had fled. He was still able to have sex, after a fashion. But there was little sensation connected with it, and no enjoyment.
As he spoke I sensed how disheartened he’d become: not just about sex, but about his life in general.
“Depression itself might be the cause of your problem,” I offered. “One of the symp—”
“My state is rooted in my sexual dysfunction,” he interrupted, “which I absolutely believe to be corporeal in nature. It’s as if part of my hormonal system has shut down.”
“Have you even considered visiting a psychologist?”
“It is a physical problem,” he repeated. “I don’t believe in Ouija boards or faith healers.”
I wondered, vaguely, if coming to Nepal with me might not be a solution. At that point I’d been to Asia only once, but the trip had forever altered my sense of the world. Maybe all that Jordan needed was perspective: the realization that there was a world out there, bigger than the one behind his eyes.
Bringing Jordan to Asia might have inspired him. Or it might have repulsed him, driving us farther apart. It was impossible to predict whether he would view my beloved Hindu kingdom—with its living goddesses and towering Buddhist shrines—as a center of spiritual power, or a backwater of superstitious mumbo-jumbo.
“BHAYO.” THE BARBER folded the razor. He lifted a spray bottle and spritzed my face with a fine mist. I closed my lips tightly, wary of the water. Once he’d toweled me dry, he launched into a brief head massage, punctuated by percussive claps against my skull. A few skillful, chiropractic twists cracked my neck back into—or out of—alignment. And that was that.
“How much?” I asked.
“Pay as you like.”
Above the mirrors hung a framed print of Laxmi, bestower of wealth. Fresh incense burned beneath the goddess, whose hands dripped gold coins. The hint wasn’t subtle, but Nepal was an easy place to be generous.
12
New Diamond Intermezzo
To: Foreign Desk, San Francisco Examiner
From: Jeff Greenwald, Kathmandu, Nepal
Unrest Escalates in Nepal
KATHMANDU, 25 FEB 1990: Over 900 pro-democracy activists, including the Mayor of Kathmandu, were arrested this afternoon during city-wide sweeps by riot police. Hundreds of other arrests occurred in districts throughout this Himalayan kingdom, and several towns were placed under 24-hour curfew.
Police in the capital effectively crushed “Black Flag Day,” during which demonstrators planned a march in honor of their colleagues killed during the past week. Official figures put the death toll at 11, but witnesses claim that more than 30 people have died, with many m
ore wounded. An estimated 4,500 Nepalis have been arrested since the National Liberation Front launched its campaign for free elections on February 18th.
There were few vehicles on the streets of Kathmandu this morning, and downtown shops were closed and shuttered. Asan Tole, the normally bustling marketplace in the center of town, was abandoned. Instead of the usual fruit and vegetable sellers, helmeted police stood among the ancient Hindu and Buddhist shrines.
Early this afternoon, bands of police wielding canes and bamboo shields combed Kathmandu’s neighborhoods in search of potential demonstrators. Dozens of young men were pulled from their homes and shops, herded onto trucks, and driven away to undisclosed locations.
At 4 P.M., Haribol Bhattarai—the Mayor of Kathmandu, suspended from office because of his ties with the pro-democracy Nepal Congress Party—appeared on a downtown street. He was accompanied by two supporters. The men chanted anti-government slogans and waved black flags. They were immediately arrested, and dragged off to prison.
Moments later Mahesh Dixit, a 55-year-old journalist, emerged from his hiding place one block away. A solitary figure, the renowned writer waved a black flag as scores of Nepalis shouted encouragement from windows up and down the street. Dixit was surrounded by police, beaten across the legs with bamboo canes, and taken away.
Other demonstrations are planned for the remainder of this week. A nationwide bandh, or general strike, will occur on Friday.
—END—
I PUNCHED THE “save” button and ejected the diskette from my laptop.
“You better grab some of these.” Grace pointed to the plate on the night table. Stale french fries lay in a murk of ketchup. The hotel bed was cluttered with camera bodies, empty film canisters, wadded-up lens tissue, peanut packets, and batteries. “The Reuters guy said they’re closing the kitchen at six. Did you order anything?”
“No. You think they have a printer downstairs?”
“No printer, no fax. The hotels are under orders not to fax stuff for foreign journalists. You’ll have to use Coal’s if you want to send that story tonight.”
Taking a room at the New Diamond had been Grace’s idea. It was a stroke of genius. Along with a desk, telephone, and functioning toilet, the hotel provided a bird’s-eye view of the city center. Through Grace’s aggressive charm, our room had become an informal gathering point for the foreign press corps. Tonight there’d be a rumpus. There was something sophomoric about the scene; I was reminded of my college days, and the nightly high jinks in the dorms.
And while the reporters were drinking Johnnie Walker, where would the local teens be? Packed into a flooded dungeon below Singha Durbar, knee-deep in cold water. Blood on their shirts. My bone-dry article recorded, as dispassionately as possible, the events I’d witnessed earlier in the day. If I hadn’t conveyed the horror, I’d tasted it. Racing down Sukhrapath alongside the riot police, I’d felt like a squirrel running with wolves. I kept up with the pack, always a few steps back, trying to remain invisible, waiting in the street as they flooded through narrow doorways and raided private homes. It was always the same scene: a wife’s or mother’s voice, screaming from within, the sounds of a scuffle, and the huddle of troops squeezing back outside, a young man with a bloody nose or split lip pressed between them, staggering on tiptoe as they held him up by his hair.
Similar scenes, and worse, were being played out across the kingdom. Kids were being beaten up, imprisoned, shot. Right in front of us. The press, of course, enjoyed total immunity. It was an accepted convention that we belonged in the center of the action, that we had permission to tag along, snapping pictures and jotting down notes as teenagers got caned in the teeth.
I wanted to rewrite my whole fucking article. But there wasn’t time, and it wouldn’t run if I did.
“When does curfew start?”
Grace looked at her watch. “One hour. It’s six now. You can hurry up and come back, or just go home if you want. I don’t think anything’s going to happen tonight. I’m staying, in any case.”
“Should be cozy. Is the gal from Agence France-Presse here tonight, too?” I stood up and stretched; my spine made a sound like popping bubble wrap.
“She managed to get her own room, so we could have this one to ourselves.”
I picked up a french fry, dragged it over the edge of the plate to scrape off the ketchup, and threw it into my mouth. “What about the BBC guy?”
“Across the hall.”
I walked to the window. Kathmandu lies at the same latitude as Daytona Beach, and though this was February it was still bright outside. The intersection of New Road, Dharmapath, and Sukhapath, visible from our seventh-floor window, was virtually empty. Half a dozen riot police slouched on the pedestal of the Jung Bahadur Rana statue. The monument to the nineteenth-century despot, whose reign had been marked by assassinations and political chaos, seemed an appropriate perch for the goons.
I turned around. Grace had finished off the fries. “I’m on my way.”
“Better call first,” she suggested. “They might not be home.”
“Where else would they be?” But I reached for the phone. It rang three times. I braced myself for the machine, but Coal picked up.
“Hey, Coal, it’s me. I’m down at the Diamond. The hotels won’t transmit anything, and curfew starts at seven. Can I come over and fax from your place?”
“This might not be the best time, old chap.”
“What’s going on?”
“Perhaps you’d better ask Clarice. Let me get her, she’s right underneath me . . . Clarice, sweetheart, are we . . . oooooh . . . are we too busy to talk?”
“Give me a break,” I snorted. “Do you always answer the phone during sex?”
“Of course. One never knows who might be calling. This morning it was the British Consulate. Just after lunch it was my Hong Kong silk supplier. But this time, alas, it is only you.”
Who knew when to take him seriously? It was quite likely Clarice was beside him in bed, naked and giggling; it was equally possible she was outside feeding the dogs, while Coal sipped tea in the living room.
I realized, with a start, that Coal reminded me of my brother. Like Jordan, he was a social prankster: always testing, always teasing, always eager to shock.
I vividly recalled a weekend, nearly fifteen years ago, when I was a senior at UC Santa Cruz. Jordan had taken the Greyhound from Bishop to spend a few days with me. I wasn’t sure when he was arriving. At three o’clock on Friday afternoon, the phone rang.
“Meet me at the bus stop,” Jordan whispered, all but inaudibly, into the receiver.
Deep Springs was an unusual school. Along with his academic load, Jordan was learning how to brand cattle, shear sheep, and butcher his own meat. My own extracurricular experiences were quite different. During my first semester at Santa Cruz I’d attended an all-night Woody Allen festival, learned how to repair a two-stroke Yamaha, and dropped acid for the first time. During the trip I’d gotten hungry and tried to fry myself an egg—but the yolk had a blood spot, and I freaked out. My brother, meanwhile, was castrating calves.
I arrived at the bus station and saw Jordan at once. He wore a jean jacket and was gesticulating in an odd manner at a man feeding a pay phone. The man dug into his pocket, pulled out a few coins, and handed them to my brother with an irritated expression.
“Jordan! Jord!” I waved both arms as he pocketed the change. He gave no sign of hearing me. When I approached, he smiled broadly but said nothing.
“How the hell are ya?” I hadn’t seen him in two years.
He continued grinning but nodded blankly, placing a hand on my shoulder and guiding me toward the bus.
“It’s 50 cents. Do you have enough change?”
He nodded emphatically and boarded first, paying both our fares. As we moved toward the rear of the bus, we walked past my psycholinguistics teacher. I introduced my brother. Jordan nodded and shook the man’s hand, but offered no verbal greeting. I covered the awkward lapse
and fell into a seat near the broad rear window.
“What’s wrong? Have you got laryngitis?”
Jordan shook his head briskly and reached into his shirt pocket. He handed me a faded, yellow card printed with blue ink. It bore this message:Hello!
I am a deaf person
I am selling this
Deaf Education System
card to make my living.
WILL YOU KINDLY BUY ONE?
Pay any price you wish!
Thank you!
On the back was a series of drawings illustrating the “American Single-Hand Manual Alphabet for the Deaf”: twenty-six hand gestures, each symbolizing a different letter.
I regarded him with confusion. “What are you doing with this?”
He tapped the card with his finger and launched into a spasm of hand movements, too rapid for me to follow. Then he patted the pocket of his coat. It was the Ghost of Christmas Past: a hearty, sustained jingle.
I pieced things together gradually. Arriving in town hours ago, he had been accosted by a deaf-mute soliciting donations. Jordan bought the card for a quarter. He mastered the simple language immediately. From noon until three he had canvassed Pacific Avenue, raking in contributions. He’d already reclaimed the cost of his bus fare from Bishop to Santa Cruz, and was working toward the goal of a round-trip air ticket to Tel Aviv. He did not doubt he could achieve this—but doing so would require total immersion in his role.
This meant, in short, that there would be no speaking at all: neither in public nor in private. Not to my friends, and not to me. “We can at least exchange written notes,” I pleaded, facing him directly to facilitate lip reading. “Will you accept that?”
He nodded, jotted something on the back of his bus transfer, and handed it to me. If you’d like to spend tomorrow working together, he’d written, I’ll find you a white cane.
Snake Lake Page 11
