Escape From Kathmandu

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  So George rushed around the used bookstores trying to find the latest Tribbies and failing, which made him paranoid. “Maybe that’d be the first sign,” he kept saying. “Maybe that means the end has already come.”

  Finally he found one, as usual dated four days before—August 5th, and the front page was still full of the crisis. The main article described an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council, very acrimonious from the sound of it. A side article reported as to how our President had been overheard saying that if the Russkies and the Chinese really had a disagreement well then maybe they ought to duke it out man to man. He could think of worse things happening. This view had apparently displeased the Russkies who immediately declared that they considered the USA to be allies of China, and party to any aggression by same.

  And so things stood. Not for anything could George find any later Tribbies in Kathmandu, and besides, the situation was clear. The world was on the brink.

  The only question was, what were we going to do about it.

  “We’ve got to hit it from every angle possible,” George said. “I’ve got some groundwork laid already, thank God.”

  It seemed to him that the letters he had typed on A.S.J.B. Rana’s typewriter and passed around could be adapted to the present emergency. “I figured Rana was trying to use us as a cover for something he was doing in the Secretariat,” he said as he sketched out flowcharts on the floor. “Remember how someone once told us they thought the road to Chhule had been contracted to the family of a minister? I decided it might be useful to make it look like Rana was that minister. He’s probably the one who approved that road, after all, and he was keeping us coming back as if he needed to keep an eye on us to prevent us from finding anything out. So I wrote up a bunch of memos implicating him, and spread them around before we left. Now if we can connect that stuff to the right people.…”

  So the next day he dressed up in his foundation suit and charged into Singha Durbar, and with his face chopped up like it was he looked so bizarre that no one dared stop him. He went to the offices of the Nepal Gazette and found Bahadim, and told him to slip the word to the relevant ministers that the attack on Chhule had not been made by the Chinese Army, but was in fact the work of a faction in the Palace Secretariat, which was feuding with another faction in the Secretariat that had stolen all the contracts for the Chhule road.

  That same afternoon he went to the Swiss agency. The letters George had left there implicated A.S.J.B. Rana in a plot to sabotage the Chhule road, as part of one of the Rana family’s endless tussles among themselves for higher ground at the palace. George told the Swiss that the border incursions had in fact been faked as part of this Rana family struggle, and he said that the Swiss should use that information to try to cool things down in Geneva and on the international scene generally. The Swiss told him they were already working on it.

  Last thing that afternoon he cracked the Palace Secretariat and found the Ministry for Development, Chinese Friendship Agency office. This, as Bahadim had told him, was run by a Rana who personally and departmentally was a rival of our A. Rana, and George had primed him before our trip with the information that A. Rana was accusing him of trying to sabotage the Chhule road. Naturally this had gotten the other Rana paranoid, and when George returned to tell him that A. Rana had gotten people to fake the border incursion, and was now telling foreign aid agencies that the raid had been organized by this guy in the Chinese Friendship Agency, the Rana there sat down abruptly before his telephone and got to work.

  That evening George was utterly beat, but he lay there on his bed figuring out the ramifications of the day’s work—who was likely to tell what to whom, and what it would mean. And the next morning he dropped by the Chinese embassy with another letter written on A. Rana’s stationery. This one asserted that the incursion into Tibet had been made by Tibetans desperate to escape a mopping-up operation run in secret by the Nepali Army, which had hoped to make the Chhule road completely safe for use by the Special Frontier Force of the Indian Army, by forcing all Tibetan guerrillas over into their home country.

  Lastly he biked over to the American embassy, and told them he was a friend and representative of one faction of the outlawed Nepali Congress Party, the party that had formed the legal government until the royal coup of 1960. They wanted the Americans to know that both border attacks had been part of the internecine warfare in the corrupt Palace Secretariat, that one group in the palace wanted to stop the Chhule road by creating friction between China and Nepal. Now that the hoax had gotten way out of hand the perpetrators were too frightened to confess. George told the Americans that the Congress Party had spies in the palace who had found all this out, and they wanted everyone in the world to know so that tensions would be eased.

  Then when the embassy official George had been talking to went to get the ambassador, or some higher-up like that, George quick got up and asked a secretary for the bathroom, and then slipped out the front and biked away, joining me at the corner and then leading the way at high speed. When he told me what he had told the embassy I said “Hey, that’s almost the truth.”

  “Best kind of lie,” he panted.

  On the way back to Thamel we biked down Naxal road, past the palace itself. We stopped to let some cows cross, and George craned his head back to look up at the bats hanging from the pine trees on the palace grounds. “They’re in conference,” he said, laughing weakly. He was pale and his face sweaty. “Trying to work it out. I just gave them some of their own medicine. Exactly Birendra’s technique. Put enough contradictory information out there, it’s interference. Like wave tanks in physics class. So much cross-chop … all goes to.…” He stopped, and I thought he was considering his next words. But then he keeled over, bang up against a cow and then down into the street. Fainted dead away.

  I flagged a cab and stuffed him in it, and took him to the Canadian health clinic, back up near the American embassy. This was a Western-style clinic that looked like it had been lifted out of Glendale, and when you were sick the sight of its white walls and pastel prints and old magazines and the smell of disinfectant was enough to make you weep.

  They took George in and gave him some intravenous stuff—he hadn’t eaten that day, and was still suffering from dysentery despite the Precious Pills. So he was dehydrated, and some of his cuts were infected—obviously his immune system had been shredded by years of antibiotic abuse. In short, he was completely fucked up.

  They made him stay in their little two-bed hospital to pull back together. It took a while, and I brought him Tribbies every day.

  And slowly, with our four-day delay on real time, we watched the crisis simmer down and go away. Everyone decided it had been a false alarm. Rumors of secret American and Swiss diplomacy were rife, especially in George’s room in the clinic. Critical intervention, no doubt. And so George would finish the day’s read, and give a little shudder, and then fall asleep again.

  One day I slogged through a downpour to K.C.’s with the Swiss guys, and over some beers they told me that the Chhule road was deader than Mussolini. The Indians wouldn’t build it for anything, and Birendra and his gang wouldn’t build it for twice anything. Too dangerous.

  So the next afternoon I went to collect George, as the Canadians were releasing him. “You did it, George. They’ll never build that road now. Aren’t you happy you decided to help us out?”

  No reply from George.

  We cabbed down to Thamel and walked the main street toward the Star. George was such a ghost of his former self that the street merchants didn’t even recognize him, and they laid their rap on as if he were a stranger rather than their beloved Mr. No. “Change money? Hash? Carpet? Pipe? Change money?” and he would stare at them as if he were considering their offer, or trying to understand it. I’ve often tried to understand that money-changing bit myself, I mean the street folk pay you more than the official exchange rate for traveler’s checks. They then sell the traveler’s checks for more than they bought t
hem. Whoever they sell them to must also sell them for more than they bought them, I assume, and so on up the line, and what I wonder is, how does it end? Doesn’t someone at the end finally get stuck selling them for the official exchange rate, and losing lots of money?

  Anyway, George stood in the street just staring at people as if he were having trouble focusing, until they gave up and moved on.

  “Look,” he kept saying. “Look, Freds. Look. That’s a pile of garbage. Right there in the street.”

  “That’s right, George. We dodge that pile every day.”

  “Cows eating it. Rats. Dogs. Kids.”

  “That’s right.”

  We walked on.

  “Let’s go to the Old Vienna,” he said suddenly.

  “Are you sure your system can take it?” I asked.

  “I don’t care.”

  But in fact he did care. He had suffered so much that when the food hit the table he got cautious and decided that actually he shouldn’t really eat the meat, because we had never been able to decide for sure where Eva got it. He spooned a little of the goulash broth up and left the chunks of water buff for me, and sat there trying to sniff the meal down, looking mournful as I had my schnitzel Parisienne and apple strudel buried in whipped cream.

  So when we rolled out of there George was feeling a little low, even though the latest Tribbie we found in a used bookstore seemed to consider the border crisis pretty much over. But as I was folding the paper up I saw a little filler article on the back pages, headlined “Everest Is Still the Highest.” “Hey dig this,” I said to George, and read—“‘Early this year University of Washington scientists stunned the mountaineering world, recalculating K2 to be 29,064 feet. Now an Italian team has used satellite measurements to put Everest back where it should be, in first place at the new height of 29,108. The team rechecked K2 and found it to be 28,268 feet above sea level. U.S. mountaineers are willing to accept the Italian measurements,’ you ain’t kidding! Great news, eh? Now you won’t have to climb K2 with Kunga Norbu and me.”

  “Good,” George said.

  “And you saved Shambhala,” I told him. “You saved the holiest most important hidden valley on the whole earth.”

  “Good,” he said. “But we still need to get some kerosene stoves up there.”

  “Not necessary. Didn’t you hear? The Rimpoche is going to try that idea of yours—they’re making ceramic pipe to put the eternal flame down into a communal kitchen, maybe even several of them. Dr. Choendrak and some of the other monks are really getting into the design and all.”

  “Good.”

  But he was still low, and still looking around as we made our way through Thamel toward the Hotel Star. “Freds, that’s grass growing on the roof.”

  “I like grass on the roof.”

  “Freds, this is one of the biggest streets in this nation’s capital, and it’s mud.”

  “That’s right.”

  “And this is the nation’s capital.”

  “That’s right. Kinda like parts of Washington, D.C., as I recall.”

  He sighed. “Yeah, but still…”

  Then we ran into the beggar and his daughter. They stood there hand in hand, both with free hands extended toward us, looking just the same as always except wetter because of the monsoon, the beggar with his gap-toothed smile and the little girl in her shift looking like a UNICEF poster and not all that different from Sindu’s little boy up in the valley, and George said, “Oh, man,” and ransacked his wallet to pull out a fistful of rupees and give them to the beggar. The beggar took them and stepped back, looking shocked.

  George pursued him, looking back at me. “Freds, we gotta do something, don’t we?”

  “You just did, George.”

  “Yeah, but something more! I mean, couldn’t we hire them to clean our rooms, or sweep the halls out front, so they had a job?”

  “The clerks hire that gal with the baby on her back to sweep, I think it’s the same kind of thing.” And actually the beggar had a good thing going, his little girl was worth lots of rupees to him in this neighborhood. There were other beggars hurting bad compared to him. But I didn’t say that.

  “But couldn’t we … couldn’t we tell them to do just our rooms?”

  “They wouldn’t understand you.”

  The beggar and his little girl retreated cautiously from us, and then wandered off. George’s shoulders fell.

  “There’s nothing we can do, is there?”

  “No. Just what you did, George.”

  We reached the Star and went up to our rooms, and read the rest of the Trib, and smoked a nightcap, and laughed over the great adventure of saving Shambhala, not to mention world peace. And we recalled our climb of Everest and the time we unkidnapped Buddha and set him free, and I told George for the first time about how Buddha and some of his bros had showed up during the battle of Chhule to help us out. “No,” he said. “You’re kidding.” And he wouldn’t believe me. “YOU’RE KIDDING!”

  It made me giggle. “Ain’t that my line?”

  And he laughed, and we talked some more, about Nathan and Sarah, and Jimmy and Rosalynn, and all the rest, and it was fun.

  But George wasn’t easy about things, not really. He was restless. When I was about to crash he decided to take a walk down to K.C.’s and have a beer. I told him not to overindulge so soon after his recovery because he still looked like death, fresh scars and black rings under his eyes, the envy of every anorexic in the world, but he assured me he was fine and took off.

  A couple of hours later fleas in my mattress woke me, however, and I checked in George’s room and found he hadn’t returned. It was late for K.C.’s. Worried that he might have gotten shitfaced and passed out, I went down to the streets to have a look for him.

  Thamel was dark, it was late and the narrow streets were near empty. No noise but the dogs barking some neighborhoods away. K.C.’s was closed, that whole area really pitch-black.

  And so I almost stumbled across him. He had found the beggar and his daughter, who slept against the wall of the German Pumpernickel Bakery under a wide eave where they were sheltered from rain and caught some warmth from the ovens on the other side of the wall. George and the beggar were sitting back against that wall on each side of the little girl, who lay stretched out between them. All three fast asleep. George’s head was canted back against the brick and he was snoring like a crosscut saw, his face all dessicated like he’d been dead in a desert for forty years. Lightly I kicked the bottom of his boot and he jerked a little, cracked his lids, stared up eyes glazed, not seeing a thing. “Wake up, bro,” I said quietly. “Come on home.”

  No reply from George.

  PART 4

  The Kingdom Underground

  I

  IT IS REMARKABLE HOW short a time the innocence of youth lasts.

  Actually it lasted nearly forty years in my case, but I never noticed it until it was gone, and so of course it didn’t feel like I had had it long. A couple seconds at the most. And after that I was experienced. I knew. I walked the crowded streets of Kathmandu, which used to give me such joy—perverse joy, but joy nevertheless—and now all I saw was squalor and poverty and lame civic planning.

  And you know whose fault it was.

  So one night I was in my room at the Hotel Star kicked back on my bed with the Tribbie, wondering if it could really be telling the truth about the world; and knowing, now, that it probably was. And someone knocked at my door. I opened it and there stood Freds Fredericks, looking like he had just gotten out of the Himal.

  Quickly I slammed the door and locked it. “Get out of here, Freds!” I said loudly. “I never want to see your face again!”

  Muffled protests from outside. I ignored them and returned to the bed, picked up the paper and stuck my nose in it. “Go away!” I shouted at the door. Bang bang bang. “Get the fuck out of here!”

  My door shares the front wall of the room with a window, and the window has three panes—one big one flanked
by two narrow ones, which are mounted on swivel posts. These can be turned like little revolving doors if you want to open them, to encourage a breeze or let out smoke. Now as I tried to read I saw Freds’s hand rotate the narrow pane nearest the door, then reach in and find the doorknob. With a twist he had the door unlocked and opened.

  Thus security at the Hotel Star.

  It was hopeless anyway; no doubt Freds had already checked in, probably to the room next door, which was his regular. I wouldn’t be able to avoid him. “What do you want,” I said, throwing the paper down.

  “Nothing, George. I just got back from the sacred valley, you know, and thought I’d check in and see how you’re doing.”

  “I’m doing fine,” I said. “I’m almost back to my eighth grade weight.”

  “That’s good, George, real good. You look good, too. Can’t hardly see those scars even.”

  “Wonderful.”

  Freds sat on the room’s only chair. “Listen, George, I got a little favor to ask—whoah—hey!—no!—hey! Real little, George! Real little!”

  By this time we were out in the hallway, and I had him by the throat. I couldn’t remember exactly how we had got there. This was a tendency I had developed recently that gave me concern. Blank-outs. Periods of amnesia, or undue emotion. Insanity—yes, that’s what we’re talking about here.

  I eased my grip on his throat and said carefully, “Do I have to do anything?”

  “No! Nothing at all!”

  “Good.” I trailed back into my room and sat heavily on my bed. Ever since my last encounter with Freds I found I tired easily.

  The truth was, I was sick of Freds Fredericks. He was the snake in my Garden; he had taken the rotten apple of knowledge and slam-dunked it down my throat, and I had choked on it. And now nothing in Nepal was fun anymore.