by Paul Theroux
“They’re closing you up,” said Shuck.
“That’s one way of putting it,” I said. “Who’s they?”
“U.S. government.”
“They’re closing me up?” I snorted, “What is this?”
“It’s nothing personal—”
“You can say that again,” I said. “This isn’t my place—it’s theirs! So I suppose you mean they’re closing themselves up.”
“In a manner of speaking,” said Shuck. “Officially the U.S. Army doesn’t operate cathouses.”
“If you think this is a cathouse you don’t know a hell of a lot about cathouses!”
“Don’t get excited,” said Shuck, and now I began to hate his lisp. “It wasn’t my decision. The army’s been kicking this idea around for ages. I’ve got my orders. I’m only sorry I couldn’t let you know sooner.”
“Do me a favor, Ed. Go down the hall and find Mr. Khoo. He’s just bought the first car he’s ever owned—on the strength of this job. He’s got about ninety-two more payments to make on it. Go tell him the Pentagon wants him to sell it and buy a bike. See what he says.”
“I didn’t think you’d take it so hard,” said Shuck. “You’re really bitter.”
“Go find Jimmy Sung. He’s paying through the nose for a new shipment of Jap cameras. Tell him the ambassador says he’s sorry.”
“Sung’s a crook, you said so yourself.”
“He knew what he was doing,” I said. “I shouldn’t have stopped him. I was getting bent out of shape trying to keep this place honest, and then you come along and piss down everyone’s shoulder blades.”
“Everyone’s going to be compensated.”
“What about Penang? You screwed them there.”
“That’s classified—who told you about Penang?”
“I’ve got information,” I said. “You’re ending the R and R program there. They’re all looking for jobs, and you know as well as I do they’re not going to find them. It’s not fair.”
“Jack, be reasonable,” said Shuck. “We can’t keep half of Southeast Asia on the payroll indefinitely.”
“Why put them on the payroll in the first place?”
“I suppose it seemed like a good idea at the time,” Shuck said. “I don’t know. I don’t make policy.”
“I can’t figure you out,” I said. “You’re like these fellers from the cruise ships that used to come to Singapore years ago, dying to get laid. Money was no object, they said. Then when I found them a girl they’d say, ‘Got anything a little less pricy?’ And you! You come in here with an army, making promises, throwing money around, hiring people, building things, and—I don’t know—invading the frigging place and paying everyone to sing “God Bless America.” And then you call it off. Forget it, you say, just like that.”
“Maybe it got too expensive,” said Shuck. “It costs—”
But I was still fulminating. “Play ball, you say, then you call off the game! You call that fair?”
“I never figured you for a hawk.”
“I’m not a hawk, you silly bastard!”
“Okay, okay,” said Shuck. “I apologize. What do you want me to say? We’ll do the best we can for the people here—compensate them, whatever they want. You’re the boss.”
“Oh, yeah, I’m the boss.” I was sitting behind my desk, puffing on the cigar, blowing smoke at Shuck. Briefly, it had all seemed real. I had a notebook full of calculations: in five years I would have saved enough to get myself out, quietly to withdraw. But it was over, I was woken.
Shuck said, “You don’t have anything to worry about.”
“You’re darned tootin’ I don’t,” I said. “I had a good job before you hired me. A house, plenty of friends.” Hing’s, my semidetached house on Moulmein Green, the Bandung. There’s Always Someone You Know at the Bandung.
“I mean, I’ve got a proposition for you.”
“Well, you can roll your proposition into a cone and shove it. I’m not interested.”
“You haven’t even heard it.”
“I don’t want to.”
“It means money,” said Shuck.
“I’ve seen your money,” I said. “I don’t need it.”
“You’re not crapping out on us, are you?”
“I like that,” I said. “Ever hear the one about the feller with the rash on his arm? No? He goes to this skin specialist who says, ‘That’s a really nasty rash! Better try this powder.’ The powder doesn’t work. He tries ointment, cream, injections, everything you can name, but still the rash doesn’t clear up. Weeks go by, the rash gets worse. ‘It’s a pretty stubborn rash—resisting treatment,’ says the doc. ‘Any idea how you got it?’ The feller says he doesn’t have the foggiest. ‘Maybe you caught it at work,’ the doc says, ‘and by the way where do you work?’ ‘Me?’ the feller says, ‘I work at the circus. With the elephants.’ ‘Very interesting,’ says the doctor, ‘What exactly do you do?’ ‘I give them enemas—but the thing is, to give an elephant an enema you have to stick your arm up its ass.’ ‘Eureka!’ says the doc. ‘Give up your job and I guarantee the rash on your arm will clear up.’ ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ says the feller, ‘I’ll never give up show biz.’”
Shuck pursed his lips. I didn’t blame him: I had told the joke too aggressively for it to raise a laugh.
“Do you know the one about Grandma’s wang house? Seems there was this feller—”
“I’ve heard it,” said Shuck. “‘You’ve just been screwed by Grandma.’”
“That’s how I feel,” I said. I split a matchstick with my thumbnail and began picking my teeth.
“Just listen to my proposition, then say yes or no.”
“No,” I said. “Like the feller says, it’s a question of mind over matter. You don’t mind and I don’t matter. Get it?”
“You’re being difficult.”
“Not difficult—impossible,” I said, and added, “Mr. Shuck,” lisping it with the same fishmouth buzz that he gave his name. I regretted that, and to cover it up, went on, “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I think I’ll go break the news to Hing. I get the feeling Hing and I are on our way back to Beach Road. I’m not really a pimp, you know. That’s just talk.” I puffed the cigar and grinned at him. “I’m a ship chandler by profession, and it’s said that at ship chandling I’m a cracker jack.”
I winked.
Shuck glumly zipped his briefcase. “If you ever change your mind—”
“Never!”
At lunchtime it rained and the rain quickly developed into a proper storm, a Sumatra of the same velocity I had weathered in the harbor on Mr. Khoo’s launch when we towed that lighterful of girls to the Richard Everett. Ever since then, storms excited me: I could not read or write during a storm, and for the duration of the rain and wind my voice was louder; I found it easy to laugh, and I drank more quickly, standing up, peering out the window. I couldn’t turn my back on a storm. I switched off the radio and watched this one from my office at Paradise Gardens. It grew as dark at half past twelve as it was at nightfall—not sunset, but after that, dark sunless evening. I threw the windows open to hear the storm; it was cool, not raining yet, but very dark, with leaves turning over and stiff tree branches blowing like hair.
The lower part of the sky was lighted dully and all the pale green grass and the palm leaves turned olive, and tree trunks blackened. The birds disappeared: a last blown one straggled over Dr. Lim’s hedge. The fronds of the traveler’s palms parted and the larger trees swayed, and in the darkness the widely spaced drops began, as big as half dollars, staining the driveway. There was a rumble of faraway thunder. At the beginning it was still dark, but with the torrent it grew silvery, the air brightened as the rain came down, and softened to daylight as the larger clouds collapsed into the dense glassy streaks of the downpour flooding the garden. Soon it was all revolving sound and water and light; the trees that had thrashed grew heavy, the drooping leaves seeming to force the branches downward. Water foamed and bubbled
down the roof tiles and flooded the gutters of Dr. Lim’s bungalow.
It continued for less than an hour, and before it was over the sun came out and made the last falling drops and the mist from the hot street shine brilliantly. Everything the rain touched glistened and dripped, and afterward all the houses and trees and pushcart awnings and bamboo fences were changed. The wetness gave everything in the sun the look of having swelled, and just perceptibly, buckled.
Some months later, in the old shop on Beach Road, Gopi the peon sidled into my cubicle, showed me two large damp palms and two discolored eyes, and said, “Mr. Hing vaunting Mr. Jack in a hurry-lah.” You know what for.
PART THREE
1
THE SMOKE behind me—Leigh combusted—as I drove from the crematorium with Gladys, was the same pale color as the mid-morning Singapore cloud that sinks in a steamy mass over the island and grows yellow and suffocating throughout the afternoon, making the night air an inky cool surprise. I felt relief, a springy lightness of acquittal that was like youth. I was allowed all my secrets again, and could keep them if I watched my step. It was like being proven stupid and then, miraculously, made wise: a change of air.
Leaving, I was reminded of the chase of my past, my season of flights and reverses; and I began to understand why I had never risen. The novelist’s gimmick, the dying man seeing his life flash before him, is a convenient device but probably dishonest. I had once been clobbered on the head: my vision was an unglued network of blood canals at the back of my eyes and the feeble sight of the sausage I’d had for breakfast. Pain made my memory small, and Leigh had looked so numb and haunted I doubt that he had remembered his lunch. A life? Well, the dying man risks pain’s abbreviations or death’s halting the recollection at a misleading moment. The live glad soul I was, bumping away from the crematorium, had access to the past and could pause to dwell on the taste of an ambiguity, or to relish an irony: “Let’s face it, Flowers,” the feller had said, “you’re an institution!” I was rueful: feeling chummy I had helped so many, stretching myself willingly supine on the rack of their fickleness—any service short of martyrdom, and what snatchings had been repeated on me! But, ah, I wasn’t dead.
Leigh was dead. He had told me his plans, everything he wanted. It amounted to very little, a quiet cottage on that rainy island, a few flowers, some peace—an inexpensive fantasy. He had got nothing. His example unsettled me; and as death rephrases the life of everyone who’s near, I felt I was reading something new in my mind, an altered rendering of a previous hope. It was a correction, needling me to act. It worried me. My resolution, inspired by his death, was also mocked by his death, which appeared like an urging to hope at the same moment it demonstrated the futility of all hope. His life said: Act soon. His death said: Expect nothing. My annoyance with him as a rude stranger who messed up my plans was small compared to my frustration at seeing him dead—there was no way to reply. And worse, his staring astonished look had suggested the unexpected, the onset of a new vision irritatingly coupled with an end to speech. Behind me, clouding Upper Aljunied Road, was the smoke of that dumb prophet, made private by death, who had stared at an unsharable revelation, which might have been nothing at all.
“Where I am dropping?” Gladys’s voice ended my reverie.
“Palm Grove.”
“Air-con?”
“I wouldn’t be a bit surprised.”
“I like Palm Grove.” Gladys hugged herself. Her skinny hands and the back of her neck were heartbreaking.
“Good for you,” I muttered.
“You sad, Jack. I know. You friend dead,” said Gladys. “He was a nice man, I think.”
“He wasn’t,” I said. “But that’s the point, isn’t it?”
“Marry with a wife?”
“Yeah,” I said. “In Hong Kong. The cremation was her idea. She chose the hymn. The ashes go off to Hong Kong in the morning, by registered mail. She thought it would be better that way.” I could see the mailman climbing off his bike and pulling a brown paper parcel out of his knapsack. Your husband, one pound, eight ounces; customs declaration and so forth: Sign here, missy.
“Why you not marry?”
“That’s all I need.” Marriage! Any mention of the Chinese gave me a memory picture of a caged shop near Muscat Lane, the family seated grumbling around a table (Junior doing his homework), beneath an unshaded bulb of uselessly distracting brightness; I couldn’t think of the Chinese singly—they lived in gangs and family clans, their yelling a simulation of speech. The word marriage gave me another picture, a clinical American bathroom, locked for the enactment of marriage: Dad shaving, Mom on the hopper with her knees pressed together, the kids splashing in the tub, all of them naked and yakking at once. It was unholy, safety’s wedded agony; I had been tempted, but I had never sinned that way. I said to Gladys, “What about you?”
“Me? Sure, I get marry every night!” She cackled. My girls were always asked the same questions—name, age, status—and they built a fund of stock replies. It was possible for me to tell by the speed and ingenuity of the reply how long a girl had been in the business. I get marry every night: Gladys was an old-timer.
In the lobby of the Palm Grove Hotel a huddle of tourists gave us the eye as we walked toward the elevator. If I needed any proof that there was no future in hustling for tourists there it was: two wizened fellers gasping on a sofa, another propped on crutches, a vacant wheelchair, a white-haired man asleep or dead in the embrace of a large armchair. Struldbrugs. Like the joke about the old duffer who says he has sex fifty weeks a year with his young wife. “Amazing,” says a youngster, “but what about the other two weeks?” The old duffer says, “Oh, that’s when the feller that lifts me on and off goes on vacation.”
Gladys was no beauty, I wasn’t young; the tourists were watching, trying to determine the relationship between the red-faced American and the skinny Chinese girl. I hooked my arm on hers like a stiff old-fashioned lover and began remarking loudly on the tasteful decor of the lobby and the thick carpet, pleased that the suit I was wearing would deflect some of the scorn. Who does that jackass think he is?
Upstairs, the feller answered the door in his bathrobe.
“My name is Flowers.”
He looked at Gladys, then at me.
“We spoke on the telephone about a month back, when you were passing through on the Empress.”
“That’s right,” he said. “I thought maybe you’d forgotten.”
“I made a note of it here,” I said, tapping my desk diary. “Anyway, here she is, skipper.”
Now he leered. Gladys nodded and looked beyond him into the cool shadowy room.
“Thanks very much,” he said. He opened the door for her, then fished five dollars out of his pocket and handed the money to me.
“What’s this?”
“For your trouble.”
“That doesn’t exactly cover it,” I said.
“It’ll have to.”
“Hold your horses,” I said. “How long do you want her for?”
“We’ll see,” he said.
Gladys was in the room, looking out the window.
“Gladys, don’t let—”
“Leave her out of this,” the feller said.
I wanted to sock him. I said, “Until tomorrow morning is a hundred and twenty bucks, or sterling equivalent, payable in advance.”
“I told you we’ll see” he said. “Now bugger off.”
“I’ll be downstairs.”
“That won’t be necessary.”
“It’s my usual practice,” I said. “Just so there’s no funny business.”
“Suit yourself,” he said, and slammed the door.
At half past three Gladys was nowhere in sight. I was standing by the elevator, afraid to sit in the main lobby and get stared at by the Struldbrugs who would know what I was up to as soon as they saw me alone. Until Leigh came I had never found that embarrassing.
Next to the elevator there was a blue Chinese vase
filled with sand, and bristling from the sand were cigarette ends, crumpled butts, and two inches of what looked to me like a good cigar. I was anxious, and I quickly realized that the source of my anxiety was a longing to snatch up that cigar, dust it off, and light it. What troubled me was that only the thought that I would be seen prevented me from doing it.
A fifty-three-year-old grubber in ashtrays, standing in the shadows of the Palm Grove lobby. Downtown, on Beach Road, a towkay hoicked my name and kicked his dog and demanded to know where I was. Between the cremation of a stranger and the session of hard drinking that was to come, I had obliged a feller with a Chinese girl and been handed five bucks and told to bugger off. I had kept the five bucks. I waited, doglike but without a woof, and I went on swallowing self-pity, hugging my tattoos and watching Chinese hurry through air remarkably like the smoke their own ashes would make. I knew mortality, its human smell and hopeless fancies. What was I waiting for?
“She’s not down here, skipper,” I said over the room phone. “You’re overtime.”
“You’re telling me!”
“Where is she?”
“Take a wild guess.”
“I’ll inform the management,” I said. “You leave me no other choice.”
“I’ll inform the management about you. Moo-wah!”
“Be reasonable, skipper. I don’t find that funny.”
“Stop pestering me. You her father or something?”
“Guardian you might say.”
“Is that what they call it these days!”
“I’ve just done you a big favor, pal!” I shouted. “And this is what I get for it, a lot of sass!”
“I don’t owe you a thing.”
