He was a ghost in the first place.
An idea more than a man.
Almost better that he is not still clad in a body.
Everything is lost in a sense.
The journey a failure.
But to put eyes on him would have been to undo a myth.
And to have found him, to have him lay eyes on you, would that have undone the peace, the resolution he seemed to find at the end?
Revealing to him that he had not just a son, but a granddaughter?
That his blood lived on?
Would that have shattered him?
To know that these realities existed that he could have participated in?
Souls that he could have mentored, stewarded.
Toiling as a parent and a grandfather, forgetting his own pain by dealing with theirs?
Maybe that was what he was missing, though he didn’t know it.
Maybe in the end he sought family.
Family he had been deprived of, and he in turn, in his pain, deprived the world of.
That growth of the soul implicit in family.
That psychological leap from child to parent.
Where the needs of the self are sacrificed for the needs of the ones who can’t do it themselves.
Another kind of war, isn’t it?
Another kind of courage.
Goddammit, Gray, we really were blood, weren’t we?
There is a lurching, grotesque noise as she returns to the village.
Something not of this place.
A four-wheel-drive, bouncing and jouncing over the mud and stones on the far side of the common area.
Lily eyes it along with the villagers.
It stops.
A fat Caucasian man hops out of the passenger seat.
To the villagers, he is another oversized exotic beast from afar.
To Lily he is an impossibility.
Bruce.
A Burmese driver climbs out from the other side of the vehicle.
He looks to Bruce inquisitively, as if to say: you’re sure this is the place?
Bruce spots Lily.
Being the only other Caucasian she is not hard to spot.
He crosses to her.
All eyes are upon them.
The Great White Show has taken on another cast member.
Bruce’s eyes: swollen, familiar.
Looks like you’ve been in your Ambien, is all she can think to say.
She is not sure whether she dreads his appearance or welcomes it.
He looks like hell: sweaty, angry, his clothes disheveled.
Bruce nears her.
His breath is beer-tinged when he speaks.
Is he here?
They stand along the river, the spent pyres before them.
The villagers linger a few dozen steps back, three-deep.
Bruce looks sick.
Shit, he says.
He is not talking to her, he is not speaking to anyone specifically.
He is speaking to the totality of this.
Shit crap, he says.
Shit crap fuck.
I didn’t know, says Lily.
They said he was alive.
That he’d come this way just months ago.
Bruce sits down on the river rocks.
He does not meet eyes with anyone, just stares at the ashes, runs his hands over his face.
Runs possibilities through his head.
We take pictures, he says.
Or we get these people’s testimony.
We don’t even need that, he decides.
We’ll just take some of this ash, DNA-sample it.
He looks to her, meeting her gaze for the first time in a long time.
We got you, you’re our evidence, he says.
We DNA this against you, we’ll prove he was your bloodline.
Lily doesn’t know what to say.
She gives voice to the only thing she can think: I don’t think you can DNA-sample ash.
He glares at her with those swollen eyes.
He wants this to be her fault.
She can see that.
And understand it.
Because it would be great if it could be someone’s fault.
Bruce stands.
He’s got a fanny pack on.
He digs into it.
Produces his bottle of Ambien, the pharmacy bag still wrinkled around it.
He withdraws the bottle, puts it back into his fanny pack, holds onto the bag.
Yes, that’s exactly what we’re going to do, he says.
He bends over, sinks a hand into the soggy black ash that was once Gray—
—and is met with an eruption from the villagers behind him.
A number of men stepping forward aggressively.
Kan is one of them.
No no no, he is saying.
The other men are saying similar things in Burmese.
Everyone is angry suddenly, tight.
A line has been crossed.
Oh Jesus, Lily thinks.
This is how I am going to die.
Kan’s English is good, but not that good.
Desacredizing, he is saying.
Lily for a few rounds cannot tell what he is saying.
Then: desecration.
You mean desecration.
Yes, that is what I said, Kan says.
Everyone has been separated.
Kan has, with Bruce’s driver’s help, separated the two Caucasians from the incensed villagers.
They are up the riverbank.
Kan’s chased most of the villagers away, but a few remain.
The younger men, faces still ascowl as they watch Lily and Bruce from afar.
Bruce is saying nothing.
Occasionally casting a glance at the men, but otherwise staring down at the shallows of the river.
The look on his face is shellshock.
Overreach.
But mostly an inward fear.
He is pale.
No one, Kan is saying.
No one touches the dead except the river.
If you touch the dead before the river touches, the river will not take the dead.
The fire purifies the dead.
The river rises in monsoon, carries the dead away to the sea.
No one touches the dead.
The dead are needed by the living, he says.
Lily considers that, finally nods.
How so?
Kan looks down the river—its slow-moving expanse reflecting now not the golden dawn of earlier, but the purpling depth of dusk.
They show us the way to the sea, Kan says.
Kan has calmed the villagers, at least as far as Lily can see.
She looks at them from the elevated stoop of Gray’s hut.
She has been watching for the last hour or so.
Watching as Kan moves among them, his voice calm, his palm occasionally on their chest.
The dialogue is in Burmese but the pantomime universal: it’s all a misunderstanding.
Everyone relax; they didn’t know.
And the men, like peacocks, must maintain ruffled feathers for a bit afterward to complete the show.
To maintain face.
To prove their anger and unease.
I don’t just get talked off a ledge when someone touches the dead, their faces and puffed-out chests say.
But Kan is winning, she can tell.
And the fact that she is still here, still allowed to stay in Gray’s hut, is even more telling.
She will survive this.
So will Bruce, in the hut next to hers.
They cannot hate him so much and still clear out a family’s hut for him.
Kan comes over later.
Everything is good, he says up to Bruce and Lily in their respective stoops.
Lily asks, just to confirm, to placate Bruce as much as herself: You sure?
Yes, very much so, Kan says.
But I still think it would be best i
f both of you left in that truck first thing in the morning.
An hour or two later it is dark.
Bruce has sat emptily in the door of his hut, looking out at the village, but mostly at his feet curled before him on the top rung of the wooden ladder below him.
He looks sick, she thinks.
Like the soul had somehow been pulled out of him at the riverbank.
The only thing she can think is to say something summative.
At least we found out what happened, she says.
He considers this for a long time in silence.
Bleary-eyed.
Finally, he speaks in a low voice.
Shut up.
He meets her gaze for a moment before disappearing back into the darkness of the hut.
Then he is gone, and she sees no more of him that night.
She does not see him, but she hears him, snoring volubly through the thin set of planks that separate their huts.
He is like a bear, she thinks.
Hibernating.
Come halfway around the world just to get a good night’s sleep.
Morning: the truck is ready, the driver milling anxiously by the front bumper.
Lily is ready.
As ready as she will be.
She has nothing to her name, other than Gray’s doctor’s bag, which Kan wants her to take.
She crosses to the driver as the villagers watch.
Bruce is nowhere to be seen.
She asks the driver about him.
Then Kan.
No one has seen Bruce.
It is well enough into the day that no one should still be sleeping.
She looks back to Bruce’s hut with some consternation.
Meets eyes with Kan, crosses to it.
She stands at the base of the ladder, calls up to Bruce.
No answer from the dark interior.
All the while, the villagers watch.
She calls again.
Again, no answer.
Just that dark stillness within the hut.
Dread now.
She climbs, peers in.
Bruce is there, inert, facedown on the woven mat.
She knows in this moment that the great jagged bearlike snores she’d heard out of him are nowhere to be heard.
Nothing but silence.
She clambers in to him.
His eyes are half-lidded, staring into oblivion.
The bottle of Ambien is open beside him.
Empty.
Oh you dumb sonofabitch.
There is vomit, a little bit, on the mat.
More like spit-up.
But stinky, and the flies are into it.
She presses her ear to his chest.
There is breath in there somewhere.
Weak, rasping, indecisive.
On the verge of quitting but not certain.
Before she knows it, she is rolling him onto his side.
Calling his name into his face.
Already someone has ascended the stairs, not necessarily to help, but to spectate.
(These white people: the gift of drama that keeps on giving.)
They hang there as Lily calls Bruce’s name into his face again.
Bruce’s eyes shift a fraction of a millimeter in response.
He’s still in there, she thinks.
Stupid sonofabitch is trying to check out but he’s still in there.
She pounds him on the chest then rolls him onto his stomach and climbs onto his back, pushing hard with her knees.
She is clueless.
But she is trying.
Trying to get this shit out of him.
But he is larded with love handles, muffin tops, all wrapped inside a scuba suit.
It’s like trying to give the Heimlich maneuver to a whale.
She can only bounce on him.
At first the only thing she hears being driven from his face, pressed to the floor beneath her, is his breath.
She bounces on him again and again.
No doubt about it, it is a hell of a show for the growing number of people peering in from the door.
A woman trampolining on a man.
And finally,
Bruce convulses, vomits up a droolly, intermittent stream of gooey whiteness.
That’s a good boy, that’s a good boy, she says.
More of the shit comes out of him.
It’s nasty, like something in Alien or The Exorcist.
But it’s coming out of him.
Finally, between her grunts and the sounds of the flexing floorboards and the shocked whispers of the villagers, a sound other than throwing up emerges from Bruce’s mouth.
It’s a throat-constricted, pained whisper at best.
Stop it, you dumbass, he says.
She rolls off him.
Relieved.
She thought she’d break his backbone the way she was going at him.
Bruce shifts slightly, on his side, slowly gravitating toward fetal position.
Get the peanut gallery out of here, he says, nodding with closed eyes to the spectators.
She snaps her fingers, gives a half-whistle, half-hiss to their audience.
Kan, bless his heart, ushers them away over the course of the next couple of minutes.
Lily sits there with Bruce.
Watches as he gravitates ever further, inch-by-inch, toward fetal position.
Like it is unfamiliar territory long and unknowingly sought.
You dumb sonofabitch, she says.
Just let me go, he says.
Lily shakes her head above him, like there’s no way this will happen.
His eyes are closed, but she senses he gets her response anyhow.
That was it, he says.
He is trembling.
She doesn’t know how to do this, how to hold someone in their most abject childlike state, but she does anyhow.
That was everything, he says.
I know, she says.
I was in a hole before this thing even started, he says.
I know.
I doubled-down on this.
I know.
That son of a bitch out by the river was my way out of the hole.
I know.
There’s no way out now.
She wants to say I know to this too, because for all intents and purposes he is right, about not just his life but hers, yet something in her resists.
Bullshit, she says finally.
XXX
Bruce is sheepish in the coming days.
Once they are back down in Yangon.
Staying in separate rooms at the hotel but meeting for breakfast, lunch, dinner.
It is not easy to look someone in the eye after a suicide attempt, she thinks.
But in the end, on their last night, he meets her gaze.
They are sitting over curry.
Thank you, he says.
His voice is quiet, feathery.
The words are angels’ wings in her ears.
They won’t be flying out together.
Bruce is taking the earliest flight out he can.
His goes first, so she walks with him to the gate.
When boarding time comes, they embrace.
There is nothing sardonic in it.
No been-there-done-that in it.
Maybe because they have in fact Been There and Done That together.
Gone up to the edge of things together.
Played their hands.
He looks at her with unvarnished eyes.
The world is still out there, those eyes say.
With all the bullshit.
But at least there is this.
Us standing here now.
He, of course, says none of this and doesn’t need to.
I’ll text you, he says.
That’d be great, she says, and lets go of him.
She watches as he disappears up the gangway.
She turns, heads back through the terminal.
Passe
s all the gates.
Passes the concessions.
Heads out through Baggage.
There will be no flight for her.
She hasn’t the money nor the passport nor the desire.
No life to return to.
She has only the doctor’s bag.
With its aged instruments she will give away to the first clinic or nurse she encounters and shows a need.
No, it is the bag she wants.
The reward of this journey.
Symbol of a man cast into circumstance by heartbreak.
And, despite himself, mopped up a few people along the way.
That’s it, isn’t it?
We mop ourselves up, then we mop up the world.
She is free of the airport now, free of its air-conditioning.
Touts yell taxi-taxi at her but she just walks.
The world will sustain her or it won’t.
Because, truth be told, taking grand inventory of her life, she belongs nowhere.
And as such belongs everywhere.
She will walk until circumstance finds her.
Until someone needs mopping up.
She will fill this bag with toiletries and trinkets she gleans along the way.
With the incidental things that keep a journey going.
And maybe one day she will write a letter with great wisdom and leave it in there.
But she has to live a life first.
It has been far too long.
Acknowledgments
This book would not have been possible without Naomi Long Eagleson’s keen editorial insight (and insight into certain language “tics” I had no idea I had!), the publicity work of Natalie Obando and the Do Good PR Group, and lastly the lifelong tutelage provided to me by my late mother, Ann Scheuring, whose love for language and writing survives on in her youngest son.
Paul T. Scheuring
Born in Aurora, Illinois, Paul T. Scheuring attended the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television, and has written numerous projects for film and TV, including the Golden Globe–nominated series Prison Break. He also wrote and directed The Experiment, starring Academy Award winners Adrien Brody and Forest Whitaker, and most recently served as producer alongside Ridley Scott on Klondike, a series he created and co-wrote, starring Richard Madden, Abbie Cornish, Tim Roth, and Sam Shepard, and which received a Writers Guild of America (WGA) Award nomination for “Long Form Adapted Screenplay.”
Scheuring resides in Northern California.
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