Snake Lake

by Jeff Greenwald

  Sodium streetlamps washed out some of the ancient magic, but cast an eerie, off-Broadway glow upon Asan Tole. A woman in a dark shawl wandered from temple to temple, offering flame and receiving blessings. I stopped at the Annapurna temple and gave myself a red tika, a chalky benediction over my third eye. Then I just stood there, awed by the transformation that midnight visits upon these usually overcrowded squares.

  A few blocks onward I’d had my fill. I took a narrow lane that led back toward Kantipath, and dog-legged toward the Clock Tower. It loomed above Rani Pokhari: the Queen’s Lake, a man-made reservoir that, though shallow, was popular for suicides. The clock chimed 1 a.m.

  One moment I was alone on the avenue; the next, a deranged-looking man stood in the middle of the street. He was in his late thirties, underdressed for the chilly night. His face was covered with bruises. He walked straight toward me, blocking my path, and stopped.

  “Excuse me, sir. Would you like to fight?”

  “What?”

  “I wish to fight you.” He squared into a boxer’s pose, arms up, sucking in his belly. “Please . . . Let us fight.”

  Back home, the encounter would have made me take flight. Here, oddly, it didn’t feel threatening. I regarded the man gamely, wondering what twist of karma had thrown us together on this particular night.

  “I can’t fight you now,” I said. My ostensible opponent looked so crestfallen that I felt the need to blunt the sting. “But thank you, sir.”

  “Thank you.” The man lowered his arms. “Thank you very much.” He stepped courteously aside, and I continued on my way.

  The valley, characteristically, had tossed me a metaphor: the battered young warrior, emerging briefly from the shadows, desperate to be a contender but unable to channel his energies. I turned around and saw that the man had not moved. He stood poised beneath the Clock Tower, shadowboxing the moon.

  GRACE WOKE UP as I slid back into bed. She wasn’t aware I’d gone out at all.

  “Hey . . . how do you feel? About leaving?” She pressed up to me, her hands folded against her chest.

  “It hasn’t sunk in. I keep thinking it’s a huge mistake. But those letters from Jordan really spooked me.” I felt her nod; there was no way to contest that imperative. “Anyway,” I said, “I can’t imagine I’ll stay away for long. I seem to belong here.”

  “You do.” She touched my nose. “Maybe you’ll come back with your brother.”

  “That would be amazing.” I stroked the clipped hair falling across her cheek. In her eyes, glowing in the dark, I saw something I hadn’t seen before.

  “I’m going to miss you,” she said quietly.

  “I’m going to miss you, too.”

  There was a moment’s silence.

  “What about Carlita?”

  I remembered the last letter I’d received from her, three weeks ago. There was little pretense at affection. What had come through most strongly was her angry doubt that I would return and ambivalence about whether or not I did. I’d wanted to reply reassuringly, but everything I wrote seemed false, and I never mailed the letter. And then I’d met Grace. Altogether I’d acted abhorrently. Visiting the scene of that wreckage was not a happy prospect.

  “I would say we’re pretty much the past tense.”

  “Is that your conclusion, or hers?”

  “Probably both of ours, by now.”

  “I guess you’ll find out.” Another, longer silence. “If I ask you a question, will you tell me the truth?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you really coming back?”

  “Of course. I always come back.”

  “That’s not what I mean.” She drew a slow breath and took my hands into hers. “Would you come back for me?”

  I studied her face in the darkened room, knowing what it had cost her to ask.

  “I would,” I said. “I will.”

  We kissed, and kissed again. I drew my fingers across her shoulder blades, tracing the smooth, white scars from the accident. She wriggled upward, bringing her neck to my mouth. The perfume she’d put on earlier commingled with a deeper, irresistible scent. We met and merged and rocked together, sending the lumpy comforter to the floor. When we fell asleep, her face was in my hands.

  I didn’t know where I’d be in a day or two, but wherever it was, it wouldn’t be as good as this.

  PART II

  During

  21

  Happy Birthday to You

  “IT’S GORGEOUS OUTSIDE,” Paula called out from the flat’s tiny kitchen. “Why don’t you guys go up on the roof?” The old North Beach apartment, tucked into a block-long lane that didn’t make it onto many San Francisco maps, had a small, flat roof with a panoramic view.

  “In a couple of minutes . . . Damn!” Gina Rosa, Paula’s six-year-old daughter, was teaching me to play Tetris. Her eye-hand coordination left mine in the dust. She shrieked with glee as I lost another round, the awkward geometric shapes moving too fast, colliding, rarely a fit.

  “Let me,” she demanded, grabbing the Game Boy out of my hands. “Watch.” Her fingers danced effortlessly over the tiny keys.

  “I want that game. As a birthday present,” I said.

  “No way, José!” She pranced into a corner and turned her back to me, geomancing with single-minded concentration.

  It was the late afternoon of March 10, 1990. I’d been back in the Bay Area four full days, but hadn’t been able to reach my brother. Paula and Mark, who lived in the flat above Carlita’s, were throwing me a small birthday party. Carlita orbited the dining table, distributing a gamelan of goblets and flatware. I’d arrived half an hour ago, but aside from our long and almost wistful welcome-back hug, we hadn’t had a moment alone.

  “I think that was a hint,” said Carlita, referring to Paula’s suggestion. “I’ll go up with you. Let me grab a sweatshirt. Paula, sure you don’t need any more help?”

  “No, no. Go to the roof. It’s almost never this clear.”

  “Take my jacket.” I slipped it over Carlita’s shoulders. “Paula? Where’s Mark?”

  “Downstairs, probably. In the studio.”

  I’d met Mark and Paula in 1979, during my first visit to Kathmandu. Paula and I were teachers at ELI, the American English Language Institute. Her partner, a shadowy figure who never showed up at ELI parties, was a painter. That August, the American Cultural Center sponsored an exhibition of his work, and I dropped by after class. I hadn’t expected much, and found myself in awe. The canvases were hypnotic and surreal, like nothing I’d seen before. They conveyed complex, hallucinatory thoughts, opium dreams of travel. One showed a richly textured rear view of three Thai monks climbing the stairs of a golden pagoda. There was something deeply disturbing, yet somehow revelatory, about the image, but the painting was so well balanced that I couldn’t put my finger on it. After a few minutes, I got it: One of the monks had no head.

  A guest book in the gallery invited comments. I was lavish in my praise and left my number. That evening Mark called, and we spoke for hours. During the five months I stayed in Nepal, we saw each other several times a week. He and Paula (as extroverted and spunky as Mark was private and morose) had continued their travels long after I’d returned to America. When they returned, a full year later, they called me: They’d gotten married in Australia, and had settled into this North Beach fourplex, owned by Mark’s family.

  Six years later Carlita, a Spanish teacher from Tucson, moved to San Francisco. She was a dark-eyed beauty who could have been cast as a tough but vulnerable south-of-the-border barmaid. Carlita loved teaching, but her secret passion was sculpting: creating whimsical assemblages out of religious fetishes, barbed wire, and other semifound objects. Mark had seen her ad on the Art Institute’s housing board and called her for an interview. Two days later, she was living in the downstairs flat. Within a week she’d bonded with Paula, who had introduced us. It seemed an inspired match. How could I resist a woman who had created a mosaic of Ganesh out of the shattered s
hards of a ceramic Jesus?

  Carlita and I ducked out the back door and carried our glasses of wine to the roof. It was nearly sunset. We stood facing northwest, toward the Golden Gate and its bridge. The weather was clear, but a foghorn blew. A seagull, or goose, passed above our heads. Fisherman’s Wharf lit the water-front while, further east, the sky mirrored the Ghirardelli sign’s ruby glow.

  Carlita seemed affectionate, but guarded. I knew she was unhappy I’d waited this long to see her. I’d told her I needed to decompress, get my feet back on the ground, unpack, and sleep, but she’d waited long enough. My failure to leap into her arms must have seemed like a sign of something hidden, which it was. We’d spoken on the phone a few times, and she’d set up this dinner. But her usually effusive spirit was held in reserve. I wondered if she, too, had taken a lover while we were apart. We’d discussed the possibility before I left, deciding it wouldn’t be the end of the world. The understanding had seemed like a good idea, a sort of emotional and physical safety valve, but neither of us had raised the obvious question: What if one of us actually fell for someone else?

  Of course I’d tell her about Grace. But it was important to pick the right time. In Nepal everything had seemed clear; it was as if no other world existed. My life in America—Carlita, Jordan, my familiar Oakland routines—had faded into abstraction, impossibly distant. But now everything seemed dizzy and scrambled, and Nepal itself unreal. Grace, Coal, and Clarice were a universe away. The idea that their lives were continuing without me, in a radically different time zone, was profoundly disorienting.

  This state of mind was not unfamiliar. Despite years of traveling, I was more susceptible to culture shock than ever. Each time I visited Nepal I immersed myself more deeply, opening my cynical shell to a little more of the magic and mystery. Returning to the United States meant reacclimating myself to a world of spiritual anemia, existential doubt, and political decay. The equation was tenuously balanced by fresh onion bagels, live jazz, and a community of like-minded friends, many of whom had lived in Nepal themselves. But neither Max Roach concerts nor ripe avocados could compensate for the fact that I felt more at peace in Nepal than anywhere else. The question that followed on the heels of that realization (“Why don’t you just live there?”) was one I could not answer, though my reluctance seemed to revolve around vague concerns about health and my career as a writer. As deeply as I loved Nepal, as closely as I had bound the kingdom’s fate with my own, it was not my country. The place in which I was most at home was a place to which I did not belong.

  I’d promised Grace I’d come back. But when? And how? And what would I do in the meantime?

  “I’m thinking of driving to Utah,” I remarked. In fact, the idea had just entered my mind. It was a sudden compulsion, a need to make some plans, to ground myself. “Go hiking in Bryce, or Zion, or somewhere.”

  “Sounds like fun.” Carlita leaned against me, her arms folded inside her leather jacket. I slipped my arm around her waist, remembering the feel of her hips, her body against mine. An immense longing filled my chest. Who was it for?

  The moment for me to add something, to include her in my plans, lengthened. She stared ahead. “Did you get hold of Jordan?”

  Carlita was good at this: the art of subtle admonition. It was the East Coast I should be racing off to, not Mormon country.

  “Not yet. I tried a couple of times, but he doesn’t have an answering machine. But I talked to my mother. She said he’d called a couple of days ago to ask when I was coming home.” I’d reread his last letter on the plane from Hong Kong to the United States; its urgency had not diminished with time. “It’s weird he hasn’t called me.”

  “Does he usually remember your birthday?”

  “He does. Last year he sent me a first edition of Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus, in German.”

  “I didn’t know you spoke German.”

  “I don’t.”

  The buoy sounded again. Now we could see the fog rolling in, swirling between the towers of the Golden Gate Bridge. Due east, Berkeley sparkled.

  “So,” Carlita said.

  I nodded. “I’m not all here yet,” I said, sensing a precipice opening in front of me. The time and distance between us seemed too wide to fill with explanations.

  “What was her name?” Carlita didn’t move away, but after a moment she turned her head, and I felt her eyes on me.

  “Her name is Grace.” I watched the fog; the upper levels of the orange towers were already hidden. “But it isn’t just her. It was a very intense time. Did you read my stories?”

  “Of course.”

  “Well, it’s crazy. The whole place is ready to crack. Like an earthquake fault. Being there, living there, working with Grace and my friends . . . it was like being in a different dimension.” I shook my head, annoyed with myself. Articulating the experience would explain nothing; it could only diminish the mystery that kept me somehow connected to that world.

  “Do you even want to be in this one?” It was a fair question, to which I had no instant answer. “Because if you don’t, this would be a very kind and honest time to admit that to me.”

  “What I think I want,” I said carefully, “is to be okay with being here. But the transition is painful. It’s as if I’ve traded one dream for another. I was completely, 100 percent invested in being in Nepal. But it was time to leave, and here I am.”

  “What you’re saying is that I didn’t figure in this decision at all.”

  “You were part of it. Jordan was part of it. Part of it was just impatience. It’s hard to explain, even to myself.” It was so much easier, infinitely easier, to stay in Nepal than it was to return there once you’d left. “Carlita, we’ve spent an awful lot of time apart. I thought I’d be better at readjusting, but all I feel right now is a sense of . . . disorientation. Literally.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, I’m not in the Orient anymore.”

  Carlita pondered this, nodding. She was trying to be supportive, heroically so. “Maybe what you need is shock therapy.”

  “That sounds extreme.”

  “Culture shock therapy.”

  I looked at her for the first time since we’d been on the roof. Her eyes were hopeful, tentative. “I like that. How is it administered?”

  “The usual way. You lie in bed and grit your teeth.” She giggled. I found myself highly receptive to this change in focus.

  “I see. Is the treatment center open this evening?”

  “I think something can be arranged.” She turned her body toward me. “Do you have insurance?”

  “No. Is it expensive?”

  “Very. You have to promise to forget Nepal, forget whatever-her-name-was, forget the big news earthquake . . . I even want you to forget about your brother. Just for tonight. As an experiment. Can you?” She looked at me with a shy, vulnerable smile. “Can you do that?”

  The thought of it broke my heart. “I can try.”

  “Seriously. I’d like you to stay. If you want to.”

  “Carlita . . . Of course I do. I just don’t know if I’m ready.”

  We heard a series of thumps on the stairs: Mark, jogging up from his basement studio. “Hey you two! Dinner!”

  Paula yelled up the stairs. “You ready to come down?”

  “Are we?”

  “I guess so.” Carlita rested her hands on my shoulders. Her eyes were cool, and she seemed to have decided something. “Happy birthday,” she said, and gave me a distant kiss.

  THE MEAL ENDED with a cake, a mocha mousse monstrosity that Mark had decorated with the all-seeing eyes of Buddha and a tactful minimum of candles. Gina stared at it, enraptured. Everybody sang while I grinned awkwardly, standing behind Carlita and gripping the back of her chair. There’s something disarming about being sung to, privately, by a group of people; nothing in our mammalian or reptile memory contains an appropriate response. I blew out the candles, forgetting to make a wish. Mark took dozens of pictures, but soon r
ealized there was no film in the camera.

  We drank espressos and shot the breeze about Nepal. A few years ago, when Dr. Dan returned to Kathmandu after a couple of months back home in Portland, he joked about his visit to America. “Everybody wants to hear all about Nepal,” he said. “For exactly five minutes.”

  It was a different story in San Francisco, where so many people had spent extended periods of time living or trekking in Asia. Mark and Paula were hungry for details about the People’s Movement and ravenous for news about the social scene. Though eight years had passed since their last visit, we still knew a few names in common. Jenny Klein, for example. Here was a nice Jewish girl who spoke Hebrew, played a mean game of Scrabble, and taught Advanced English with Paula at the ELI. One day she failed to report for her classes and was never heard from again. Paula remembered the unanswered phone calls, the alarm and mystery surrounding her disappearance. “It seemed she’d vanished from the face of the Earth.” I was able to provide the juicy intelligence that Jenny had become a born-again Christian, entered into a polygamous marriage with a Turkish juggler, and was now living in Goa, expecting her third child.

  Then there was Nat Montgomery, a mutual friend who’d achieved fleeting fame by mountain biking from Kathmandu to Everest Base Camp (truth be told, he carried the bike most of the way). Montgomery had moved to Hong Kong, where he’d fallen in with a band of expatriate gold smugglers working the Nepal-Hong Kong trade. He had amassed a small fortune, then made the mistake of diversifying. Montgomery had been busted by bloodhounds while carrying a kilo of Nepali hashish through customs at the Geneva airport. He was four years through a seven-year sentence in a Belgian prison, contemplating the error of his ways on the gymnasium’s exercycle.