Everything jolly now? said the hypnotist. Outside the snow-ledged window, voraciously seeking replication upon the walls of the Quonset huts, the sunrise reflected itself in blackish-yellow necroses of that palest lavender blue sky, and the snow was one shade paler than that, the morning being yellow like the low yellow tunnel with the ladder and then the snow on top; the runway beacons were steady; purple steam moved east. Men in dark coveralls roamed around the terminal, drinking coffee, waiting for more freight on this Sunday morning. Just outside the other window, the master beacon flashed subtly. It flashed on a metal knob and a green door, making the former white, the latter a brilliant greenish-yellow. Sirhan Sirhan, that Kennedy assassin, had insisted in his insanity defense that it was precisely this meaningless winking which triggered his soul's evil trances; so he had no need to employ hypnotists to achieve his desire. The husband saw Sirhan Sirhan on the summit of a mountain of dirty snow; Sirhan Sirhan was the retarded boy whose reddish-purple face was armed with yellow teeth; he turned his hunched head in a series of unblinking spasms, shrieking like a bird. - I'm not afraid of you anymore, the husband said. Because I have someone whose life means more to me than mine. - The. fire extinguisher and the two pay phones remained ready to preserve homeostasis, letting people live as if cold and loneliness didn't exist. The orange shimmer of sunlight mounted higher on the dark buildings outside; snowy snow-roofs sprouted confusions of pipes and wires like measures of music. Beyond the work camp lay ice, and more ice, and at the end of the ice the Inuk girl he'd almost married was waiting, and he knew now that she was Vanna.
Everything jolly now? said the hypnotist, joining him in holy matrimony to the parking garage whore, the transvestite whore, the streetcorner whore, the English girl whose mother kept crying, and they were all Vanna like dead brown fern leaves on a pillar, like a school of sardines all salted and dried at once, like a grove of trees hung with long brown aerial roots that dangled down like hairs, thick and musty and chocolate colored; he'd reached the end of the tunnel now where a titanic bone-fan of bamboo rose rusty green in the fog. A few stalks had fallen across the creek to spear the other bank, forming high skinny bridges. The vines were like giant guitar strings. She stood in a grove of "textbook" leaves whose veins caught attention as if engraved for beginning students; she picked one and touched her lips to it and gave it to him and then the veins began to crawl and change, first forming his old wife's name, then a semblance of a skull, then an eye, a bullet, a crocodile (the Khmer Rouge had thrown her uncle to the crocodiles).
On the whole (not remembering any of this), he was more inclined to trust a pint of Murphy's and some vegetable soup, so he went to the nearest pub. - Cheers. - (The ponytailed old bartender stationed at the taps said that he personally never drank any but bottled beer.) With every swig, the red velvet couch he sat on became more restful. He looked at absurd marine engravings and liked them. - Hey! a regular shouted to himself. I love the sound of broken gloss! — The white taphandles promised unknown flavors more plausible than unknown books or girls because to the husband they really were known; viS'à'Vis English beverages he was an ignoramus. The last bit of smog-colored foam traveled deliciously down his throat.
When you get AIDS, the first thing that happens is you come down with the flu, said one of his wise friends. Then the flu goes away and you think you're fine. And you are, for awhile. It's just that you have AIDS.
So when his fever died after so many days the lucidity was a refreshment as delectable as lemon ice. What a shame to become habituated to that pleasure until it was normalcy, like being addicted to some drug. . I feel fine, he said to himself. Of course I don't have AIDS.
He stood at the hotel window, looking out between grey ledgestones and tiles at the corner pub's compounded and frosted windows half smoothed by rubbery light, and people's heels struck the pavement like hammers until he thought his ears would bleed. The cold air made him cough. But he stood looking on as if he'd never see those sights again. Certainly he'd never see the white girl again. Two men and a woman stopped in front of the pub for a moment. Then one of the men raised his arm sharply and they went on. Car light flowed across their shoulders. From the Underground he heard a mother say: Keep still. Keep still, will yer. Oi, d'you wa' a smack? — A man and a woman strode across the husband's field of vision and vanished. He'd never see them again. The BBC would pay him any day now. They'd said he'd get the check before he left England, but now that didn't look promising. The husband was a pretty small fish. But they would pay him soon, and once they did he'd have enough to go back to Cambodia for his wife. He was too tired to be properly excited. The right side of his head felt as if it were about to split open. Fluid oozed from his ear. His throat was so swollen that he could barely swallow. Every meaningless detail pierced the senses unbearably, but left no memory. The hypnotist had done that. He stared for a long time at the illuminated orange and blue logos on the Asiana Airlines terminal, a shape between hexagon and oval, comprised of parallelogram tiles of varying luminosities; he couldn't quite parse the shape in his mind, and wondered if the mind must redraw what it sees to comprehend it; closing his eyes he saw plenty of images which his mind was too weary to flush; their vividness reminded him of his childhood; he'd gradually lost the ability to visualize at will as he'd grown older. Korea had seemed to be in dawn time when he came, in keeping with the meaning of its real name, Han-Guk, the Land of the Morning Calm, but then it got dark while he sat in the transit lounge trying to ignore a cartoon starring a growling jellybean and he could now see the whiteness of some of the Asiana tiles; the alien mountains faded into darkness — anyhow, they weren't so alien since he'd seen mountains before but the more one travels the more alien everything is. - Then back in Bangkok: another little table stacked with plates; he had some cow's head or whatever it was, the man pulling it out of the stewpot and chopping it on the half-meter-thick block; the husband didn't ask how much or why; they brought him rice; he uttered Sprite over the dull double-heartbeat of the chopper. . Then Cambodia again, slopping over him like the cold wetness on your belly when you bushwhack up a rainy jungle hillside; he went to the disco, sank knee-deep into the carpet of girl-ferns because the tables were closer together than ever before, trapping him in narrow sharp-edged lanes down which the other prostitutes hunted him, seizing his hand, pulling him down to sticky chairs beside them where he had to buy them a Tiger beer, the darkness hotter and louder as the music blared so pervasively and unintelligibly that he had to breathe it in like all the smoke from the other men's cigarettes that rose in great pillared trunks flanged with leaves that stuck out like shelf-fungus; now the photographer's girl captured him and started screaming at him to buy her for the photographer; then the Chinese-porcelain-faced one clamored silently for his favor, devouring the light before it could reach his eyes so that he couldn't see if Vanna was among the dancers; knowing his poor vision, however, the photographer had printed up a hundred copies of her picture for him to pass out, so he awarded one to the photographer's girl, who began wailing like a mother whose children have been tortured, and he gave one to the Chinese-porcelain girl, who tore it into shreds, smiling, drifting closer and closer like the queen of nightmare pleasures; cautiously he bought her a Sprite, slipped her five hundred riels, but she still wouldn't leave; her arms grew tight about him like skinny lichen-spotted trees; Vanna wasn't there! She wasn't there! He blundered among the dancers, trying to smell her sickly-sweet face powder, hoping for the sheen of her triangular face, but she wasn't there. He went to the temples and the kids crowded around staring, one with a plastic sword, one smiling, one blinking, one leaning, one almost naked, all bashful; they looked down at their sandaled feet as they asked him for money; he was in Wat Korgue — let's see, some Khmer Rouge damage although the altar had retained its stone flower-nipples and concentric curvy polygons like nested frogs' tongues repeated row to row. There were two glazed figurines. One was a woman in lotus position, with only her lips and eyeballs painted. Not Vanna. The other was a man elaborately colored. The husband took out Vanna's photograph and showed it to the kids but they looked blank. He went on to the Wat Svay Popter. . When he'd been to every temple in Cambodia, he set out for every rice field and she wasn't there though he ducked under every dark ceiling, scanning every hammock and bicycle wheel, studying every pair of sandals on the dirt floor to see if one might be hers, while faces peered in; he searched out whole villages of such houses: displaced people, with chickens underneath (a half-coconut on the platform, a sarong); there was a little boy whose head was shaved to bluish fuzz; the boy held his monkey on a chain so that it wouldn't hurt Vanna's picture and then the boy said: She escaped from place Pol Pot shelled with heavy guns. First time Pol Pot came and attacked her village. Then they shelled with heavy guns for three-four days. She die here malaria. We very sorry, sir. - He thought: If she's dead then maybe she's living on Sailing Boat Mountain. - All he knew about Sailing Boat Mountain was that the Khmer Rouge had killed a few thousand people there, which was all he needed to know. Quite possibly she was the earth-spirit hovering round atrocities, lurking like moisture in the palm trees at the base of that great green rock (they'd thrown the victims off); so he rode up the muddy jungle road, over barely repaired bridges (the driver flashed his gold tooth in the mirror), past abandoned houses and tree trunks so saturated with wet that he could squeeze them like sponges, past fringed green leaf-awnings slung with cartridge-belts of nuts the reddish hue of a baboon's anus; so he arrived at the white stairs (some garnished with giant snailshells) that the murdered ones had been compelled to climb, their hands already tied behind their backs with wire, and he ascended those green-clad cave-cooled cliffs into the rainy sky; she wasn't there. For an instant he remembered the book he'd seen long ago when he was the little butterfly boy, the book about the five unkillable Chinese brothers, and there was one who was pushed off a precipice and smiled in the air as he fell. - Vanna, Vanna! — He said to himself: Well, no skulls screamed from this mound of jungle over rock despite my dreams when I was sleeping with my other wife; maybe my other wife was warping and torturing my dreams so I couldn't find her but she couldn't have made me dream a dream of perfect untruth; maybe Vanna's sick with malaria in the hospital. - Voilà, another set of yellow concrete buildings chessboard-floored like his foolish ruinous life, the white cross wall-inset (maybe once red plexiglass), fire in the courtyard, smell of jasmine. A girl lay on the bed almost naked, sleeping. Not her. A lady was sweeping the floor very slowly. Some of the tiles were grey; a few were still white. Pale light bled through the blinds, losing itself among the dingy dark wooden cribs, darkness and concrete. A girl's brown feet stuck out from under a blanket. Not her. Three girls lay huddled in colored sheets; ladies stood over the dirty cribs; a dark-skinned woman attached to the intravenous snakes smiled whitely (not her), a nurse put her hand in front of the dark-skinned woman's face; one brown baby began to cry when another cried; a soldier sat beside his child, his feet fidgeting in the sandals; a lady waved a palm-woven fan very gently over her baby; the nurse took her hand away from the dark-skinned woman's face and it was Vanna after all. He rushed to her, bent over her. . She nodded a little and closed her eyes.