Lights Out

by Douglas Clegg

  Greer had a particular problem that Jane recognized without being able to understand: he had a fascination with children, which she knew must be of the sexual variety, although she could’ve been wrong. It was just something about him, about the way he referred to children in his speech, even the way he looked at her sometimes, that made her uncomfortable.

  She didn’t fathom his marriage to Lucy at all, but she fathomed very few marriages. While Greer had witnessed the Bokai Ritual of Circumcision and the Resurrection Hut Fire in Calcutta, Lucy had been reading Joan Didion novels and painting portraits of women weaving baskets.

  They had money to burn, however, inherited on both sides, and when Greer had spoken, by chance to Jane at the hotel, he had found her story of going to White Chapel fascinating; and he, in turn, was paying for the boat and boatman for the two-day trip.

  Jane said, in response to Lucy, “White Chapel’s decent enough. Remember, British rule, and then a little bit of France. Most of them can speak English, and there’ll be a hotel that should meet your standards.”

  “I didn’t tell you this,” Greer said to both Jane and Lucy, “but my grandfather was stationed in White Chapel for half a year. Taxes. Very unpopular job, as you can imagine.”

  “I’m starved,” Lucy said, suddenly, as if there were nothing else to think of, “do we still have some of those nice sandwiches. Jim?” She turned to the boatman, smiling. Lucy had a way of looking about the boat, eyes partly downcast, which kept her from having to see the water, like a child pretending to be self-contained in her bed, not recognizing anything beyond her own small imagined world.

  He nodded, and pointed toward the palm leaf basket.

  While Lucy crawled across the boat—unbalanced and in terror that the entire thing would tip and throw her into the water—Greer leaned over to Jane and whispered, “Lucy doesn’t know why you’re going. She thinks it’s for some kind of National Geographic article,” but he had to stop himself for fear that his wife would hear.

  Jane was thinking about the woman in Thailand who claimed to have forgiven the man who tore her face off. And the children from the massacre, not just murdered, but obliterated. She had seen the pictures in Life. Faceless children. Skinned from ear to ear.

  She closed her eyes and tried to think of less unpleasant images.

  All she remembered was her father looking down at her as she slept.

  She opened her eyes, glancing about. The heat and smells revived her from dark memories. She said, “Rex, look, don’t you think that would be a good one for a photo?” She pointed to one of the characteristic barges that floated about the river, selling mostly rotting meat and stuffed lizards, although the twentieth century had intruded, for there were televisions, on some of the rafts, and a hibachi barbecue.

  Rex lifted his Nikon up in response, but was overcome by a fit of coughing.

  “Rex,” Lucy said, leaning over to feel his forehead, “my God, you’re burning up,” then, turning to her husband, “he’s very sick.”

  “He’s seen a doctor, dear,” Greer said, but looked concerned.

  “When we get there,” Jane said, “we’ll find another doctor. Rex? Should we turn around?”

  “No, I’m feeling better. I have my pills.” He laid his head back down on his pillow and fanned mosquitoes back from his face with a palm frond.

  “He survived malaria and dengue fever, Lucy, he’ll survive the flu. He’s not one to suffer greatly.”

  “So many viruses,” Lucy shook her head, looking about the river. “Isn’t this where AIDS began?”

  “I think that may have been Africa — or outer space,” Greer said in such a way that it shut his wife up completely, and she ate her sandwich and watched the barges and the other boatmen as though she were watching a television show.

  “Are you dying on me?” Jane asked, flashing a smile through the mosquito net veil.

  “I’m not gonna die,” Rex said adamantly. His face took on an aspect of boyishness, and he managed the kind of grin she hadn’t seen since they’d first started working together several years back, before he had discovered needles. “Jesus, I’m just down for a couple of days. Don’t talk about me like that.”

  Jim, his scrawny arms turning the rudder as the river ran, said, “This is River of Gods, no one die here. All live forever. The Great Pig God, he live in Kanaput, and the Snake God live in Jurukat. Protect people. No one die in paradise of Gods.” Jim nodded toward points that lay ahead along the river.

  “And what about the Monkey God?” Jane asked. Jim smiled, showing surprisingly perfect teeth, which he popped out for just a moment because he was so proud of the newly made dentures. When he had secured them into his upper gum again, he said, “Monkey God trick all. Monkey God live where river goes white. Has necklace of heads of childs. You die only once with Monkey God, and no come back. Jealous god, Monkey God. She not like other gods.”

  “Monkey God is female,” Jane said. “I assumed she was a he. Well, good for her. I wonder what’s she’s jealous of?”

  Greer tried for a joke. “Oh, probably because we have skins, and hers got taken away. You know women.”

  Jane didn’t even attempt to acknowledge this comment.

  Jim shook his head. “Monkey God give blood at rainy times, then white river goes red. But she in chains, no longer so bad, I think. She buried alive in White Chapel by mortal lover. Hear her screams, sometime, when monsoon come, when flood come. See her blood when mating season come.”

  “You know,” Greer looked at the boatman quizzically, “you speak with a bit of an accent. Who did you learn English from?”

  Jim said, “Dale Carnegie tapes, Mr. Greer. How to Win Friends and Influence People.”

  Jane was more exhilarated than exhausted by the time the boat docked in the bay at White Chapel. There was the Colonial British influence to the port, with guard booths, now mainly taken over by beggars, and an empty customs house. The place had fallen into beloved disrepair, for the great elephant statues, given for the god Ganesh, were overcome with vines, and cracked in places; and the lilies had all but taken over the dock. Old petrol storage cans floated along the pylons, strung together, with a net knotted between the cans.

  Someone was out to catch eels or some shade-dwelling scavenger. A nervous man with a straw hat and a bright red cloth tied around his loins ran to the edge of the dock to greet them; he carried a long fat plank, which he swept over the water’s edge to the boat, pulling it closer in.

  The company disembarked carefully.

  Rex, the weakest, had to be pulled up by Jim and Jane both.

  Lucy proved the most difficult, however, because of her terror of water. The boatman pushed her from behind to get her up to the dock, which was only four rungs up on the ladder.

  Then, Jane didn’t feel like haggling with anyone, and so, after she tipped Jim, she left the others to find their ways to the King George Hotel by the one taxicab that existed in White Chapel.

  Jane chose instead to walk off her excitement and perhaps get a feel for the place.

  She knew from her previous explorations that there was serendipity to experience. She might, by pure chance, find what she was looking for. But the walk proved futile, for the village was dark and silent, and except for the lights from the King George, about a mile up the road, the place looked like no one lived there. Occasionally, she passed the open door to a hut through which she saw the red embers of the fire, and the accompanying stench of the manure that was used to stoke the flame.

  Birds, too, she imagined them to be crows, gathered around huts, kicking up dirt and waste.

  She saw the headlights of a car and stepped back against a stone wall. It was the taxi taking the others to the hotel, and she didn’t want them to see her.

  The light was on inside the taxi, and she saw Rex up front with the driver, half asleep. In back, Lucy, too, had her eyes closed; but Greer, however, was staring out into the night, as if searching for something, perhaps even expecting so
mething. His eyes were wide, not with fear but with a kind of feverish excitement.

  He’s here for a reason. He wants what White Chapel has to offer, she thought, like he’s a hunter. And what did it have to offer? Darkness, superstition, jungle, disease, and a man who could tear the faces off children. A man who had become a legend because of his monstrosity.

  After the car passed and was just two sets of red lights going up the narrow street, she continued her journey up the hill.

  When she got to the hotel, she went to the bar. Greer sat at one end; he had changed into a lounging jacket that seemed to be right out of the First World War.

  “The concierge gave it to me,” Greer said, pulling at the sleeves, which were just short of his wrists, “I imagine they’ve had it since my grandfather’s day.” Then, looking at Jane, “You look dead to the world. Have a gin and tonic.”

  Jane signaled to the barman. “Coca-Cola?”

  When she had her glass, she took a sip and sighed. “I never thought I would cherish a Coke so much. Lucy’s asleep?”

  Greer nodded. “Like a baby. And I helped with Rex, too. His fever’s come down.”

  “Good. It wasn’t flu.”

  “I know. I can detect the D.T.’s at twenty paces. Was it morphine?”

  Jane nodded. “That and other things. I brought him with me mainly because he needed someone to take him away from it. It’s too easy to buy where he’s from. As skinny as he is, he’s actually gained some weight in the past few days. So, what about you?” She didn’t mean for the question to be so fraught with unspoken meaning, but there it was: out there.

  “You mean, why am I here?”

  She could not hold her smile. There was something cold, almost reptilian about him now, as if, in the boat, he had worn a mask and now had removed it to reveal rough skin and scales.

  “Well, there aren’t that many places in the world… quite so…”

  “Open? Permissive?”

  Greer looked at her, and she knew he understood. “It’s been a few months. We all have habits that need to be overcome. You’re very intuitive. Most women I know aren’t. Lucy spends her hours denying that reality exists.”

  “If I had known when we started this trip …”

  “I know. You wouldn’t have let me join you, or even fund this expedition. You think I’m sick. I suppose I am. I’ve never been a man to delude himself. You’re very—shall I say—liberal to allow me to come even now.”

  “It’s just very hard for me to understand,” she said. “I guess this continent caters to men like you more than Europe does. I understand for two pounds sterling you can buy a child at this end of the river. Maybe a few.”

  “You’d be surprised. Jane. I’m not proud of my interest. It just exists. Men are often entertained by perversity. I’m not saying it’s right. It’s one of the great mysteries…” He stopped midsentence and reached over, touching the side of her face.

  She drew back from his fingers.

  In his eyes, a fatherly kindness. “Yes,” he said, “I knew. When we met. It’s always in the eyes, my dear. I can find them in the streets, pick them out of a group, out of a schoolyard. Just like yours, those eyes.”

  Jane felt her face go red, and wished she had never met this man who had seemed so civil earlier.

  “Was it a relative?” he asked. “Your father? An uncle?”

  She didn’t answer, but took another sip of Coke.

  “It doesn’t matter, though, does it? It’s always the same pain,” he said, reaching in the pockets of the jacket and coming up with a gold cigarette case. He opened it, offered her one, and then drew one out for himself. Before he lit it, with the match burning near his lips, he said, “I always see it in their faces, that pain, that hurt. And it’s what attracts me to them, Jane. As difficult as it must be to understand, for I don’t pretend to, myself, it’s that caged animal in the eyes that—how shall I say—excites me?”

  She said, with regret, “You’re very sick. I don’t think this is a good place for you.”

  “Oh,” he replied, the light flaring in his eyes, “but this is just the place for me. And for you, too. Two halves of the same coin, Jane. Without one, the other could not exist I’m capable of inflicting pain, and you, you’re capable of bearing a great deal of suffering, aren’t you?”

  “I don’t want to stay here,” she told Rex in the morning. They had just finished a breakfast of a spicy tea and shuvai, with poached duck eggs on the side, and were walking in the direction of the village center.

  “We have to go back?” Rex asked, combing his hands through what was left of his hair. “I don’t think I’m ready, Janey, not yet. I’m starting to feel a little stronger. If I go back…and what about the book?”

  “Not back, no,” she said. “I just meant I don’t want to stay here. At the hotel. Not with those people. He’s a child molester. No, make that child rapist. He as much admitted it to me last night.”

  “Holy shit,” Rex screwed his face up. “You sure?”

  Jane looked at him, and he turned away.

  There was so much boy in Rex that still wasn’t used to dealing with the complexities of the adult world; she almost hated to burst his bubble about people. They stopped at a market, and she went to the first stall, which offered up some sort of eely thing. Speaking a poor version of Khou-dali, or at least the northern dialect that she had learned, Jane asked the vendor if there might be another hotel – not an English one, but one run by locals.

  He directed her to the west and said a few words.

  She grabbed Rex’s hand and whispered, “It may be some kind of whorehouse, but I can avoid Greer for at least one night. And that stupid wife of his.”

  Rex took photos of just about everyone and everything they passed, including the monkey stalls. He was feeling much better, and Jane was thrilled that he was standing tall, with color in his cheeks, no longer dependent on a drug to energize him. He took one of her with a dead monkey. “I thought these people worshiped monkeys.”

  Jane said, “I think it’s the image of the monkey, not the animal itself.” She set the dead animal back on the platform with several other carcasses. Without meaning to, she blurted, “Human beings are horrible.”

  “Smile when you say that.” Rex snapped another picture.

  “We kill, kill, kill. Flesh, spirit, whatever gets in our way. It’s like our whole purpose is to extinguish life. And for those who live, there’s memory, like a curse. We’re such a mixture of frailty and cruelty.”

  The stoop-backed woman who stood at the stall said, in perfect English, “Who is to say, miss, that our entire purpose here on Earth is perhaps to perform such tasks? Frailty and cruelty are our gifts to the world. Who is to say that suffering is not the greatest of all gifts from the gods?”

  Her Khou-dali name was long and unpronounceable, but her English name was Mary-Rose. Her grandmother had been British; her brothers had gone to London and married, while she, the only daughter, had remained behind to care for an ailing mother until the old woman’s death. And then, she told them, she did not have any ambition for leaving her ancestral home. She had the roughened features of a young woman turned old by poverty and excessive labor and no vanity whatsoever about her. Probably from some embarrassment at hygiene, she kept her mouth fairly closed when she spoke. Her skin, rough as it was, possessed a kind of glow that was similar to the women Jane had seen who had facelifts. This may have been from living in White Chapel with its humidity. Something in her eyes approached real beauty, like sacred jewels pressed there. She had a vigor in her glance and speech; her face was otherwise expressionless, as if set in stone. She was covered in several cloths, each dyed clay red, and wrapped from her shoulders down to her ankles; a purple cloth was drawn about her face like a nun’s wimple. It was so hot and steamy that Jane was surprised she didn’t go about as some of the local women did, with a certain discreet amount of nakedness.

  “If you are looking for a place, I can give you a roo
m. Very cheap. Clean. Breakfast included.” Mary-Rose named a low price, and Jane immediately took her up on it. “You help me with English, and I make coffee, too. None of this tea. We are all dizzy with tea. Good coffee. All the way from America, too. From Maxwell’s house.”

  Mary-Rose lived beyond the village, just off the place where the river forked. She had a stream running beside her house, which was a two-room shack. It had been patched together from ancient stones from the ruined Y-Cha temple, and tar paper coupled with hardened clay and straw had been used to fill in the gaps. Rex didn’t need to be told to get his camera ready: the temple stones had strange images scrawled into them. He began snapping pictures as soon as he saw them.

  “It’s a story,” Jane said, following stone to stone. “Some of it’s missing.”

  “Yes,” Mary-Rose said, “it tells of Y-Cha and her conquests, of her consorts. She fucked many mortals.” Jane almost laughed when Rose said “fucked,” because her speech seemed so refined up until that point. No doubt, whoever had taught Rose to speak had not bothered to separate out vulgarities. “When she fucks them, very painful, very hurting, but also very much pleasure. No one believes in her much no more. She is in exile. Skin stolen away. They say she could mount a believer and ride him for hours, but in the end, he dies, and she must withdraw. The White Devil, he keeps her locked up. All silly stories, of course, because Y-Cha is just so much lah-dee-dah.”

  Jane looked at Rex. She said nothing.

  Rex turned the camera to take a picture of Mary-Rose, but she quickly hid her features with her shawl. “Please, no,” she said.

  He lowered the camera.

  “Mary-Rose,” Jane said, measuring her words, “do you know where the White Devil lives?”

  Seeing that she was safe from being photographed, she lowered the cloth. Her hair spilled out from under it; pure white, almost dazzlingly so. Only the very old women in the village had hair even approaching gray. She smiled broadly, and her teeth were rotted and yellow. Tiny holes had been drilled into the front teeth. “White Devil, he cannot be found, I am afraid.”