5/24 3:44 p.m.
It’s an adventure. You haven’t lived until you’ve faced down a Cambodian pimp.
He asked if she wanted to get together, but she never wrote back. He decided to go in search of her and rode a motorbike up the Ho Chi Minh Trail, stopping only to see some spider holes. The mission went to hell, though, after an unsettling near-death experience: dusk, an errant log, launching over the handlebars and past the ledge of the trail into pure jungle canopy, tumbling and falling for what seemed like such an enormous gulf of time, sensing a final impact that would surely end in a dry twig snap he’d hear first in the bones of his neck, trying to settle on a pleasant final memory to go out on and coming up only with Kunthea, an understandably shy nine-year-old girl with bony, collapsible limbs and a mouth of bent brown teeth.
(They’d successfully negotiated with her madam, an old woman who’d probably been the plaything of German businessmen when she was a child and understood this as the natural order. When Kunthea clung to the post outside the house, afraid to follow the four white people and Cambodian translator now hectoring her to come along home, Bill reached down and plucked a Jolly Rancher from behind her ear. While she busied herself with the wrapper, he loaded his fist and plucked out another: “This is insane. Your ear’s a candy factory.” She came with them after that, and before she went to bed that night, Bill found a toothbrush in her ear and taught her how to use it.)
A fine memory to die on. Until he came to land softly, improbably, in a bed of grass as comfortable as a down pillow. Eyes darting, lying in the noisy breath of the jungle, he checked to find himself completely intact. He spooked the birds when he screamed that he was fucking unbreakable.
A few days later, unable to track Lisa down, he caught a flight out of Hanoi with the last of his cash, and he never heard from her again. He wrote her several more times, but she never answered. He worried about all the typical things: if she’d found out about Kaylyn, if she’d always known about Kaylyn, if she’d long hated him, if she’d thrown her laptop into the South China Sea, etc. What it came down to, though, was this: like everyone else, she’d vanished from his life. He could only stare at the dark and wonder what had become of her.
Gripping the wheel with both hands, Bethany Kline took one last small roll of her head, as if saying to herself, Sure, I guess I’ll live with this miserable thought, and punched the accelerator. The car went zooming off, carburetor rattling.
Then again maybe Bethany was another hallucination. An acid flashback materializing from the sweat-drenched electrical storm. Either way, he wished he could simply rip open the package and blindly snort away whatever was inside just to see where the cocktail took him.
“Wanna get a drink?” he said to a busted blue fire hydrant.
Closing in on thirty fast, he had an urge, undaunted by the temporal challenge, to find Lisa Han, wherever she was, and ask if she still saw passion and decency in him. If that young version of her could see him now, like this, a decade on, would she still recognize what she saw back then? How dearly he wanted to ask her if there was any chance she still believed in him.
In the liquor store, he scanned the shelves looking for the right potion, tickled by that lovely little thrill of unexpected booze. You could go high-end, he figured, groping a bottle of Johnnie Walker Black, or just keep on keeping on with the Jim Beam that had gotten him over the Ohio River. The decisions alcoholics had to make. If sober people understood all the work that went into deciding how best to get loaded, they would get over themselves and sling a little fucking admiration his way. He selected Jack Daniel’s in the end because they didn’t have the right size Beam.
“I’ll take a pack of Camels and a Bic too,” he told the Indian cashier, who seemed to recognize him from all his efforts to buy booze in high school. Bill glanced at the analog clock hanging over the cashier’s left shoulder, but the hands all pointed, dead and still, to the ground. He pulled out his timer. It was the size and shape of a large skipping stone or maybe some middling lizard’s egg and felt good to hold. In the white plastic casing the stiff numbers read: 01:47:18.
“You got ID, buddy?” he asked in his crisp accent. Bill used to try to stop guys on the basketball team from calling him “Apu,” usually to no effect. He knew, likely, by the way of his mother, that this man had an engineering degree and had lost a child to leukemia. Now he was only an obstacle to a drink, and one with Cheetos dust in his mustache at that.
“I’m like thirty, bro,” Bill rounded up, swiping his near-maxed credit card and snatching the bottle.
The cashier made no objection. Instead he said, almost tenderly, “Big storm coming later. Don’t be wandering around all night drinking.”
Bill left without acknowledging this, tearing the cellophane wrapping off the pack of smokes. He wasn’t a smoker, but there was nothing like a cigarette when you were drunk (which basically made him a smoker). One thing he missed about the northern climes was having a cigarette during a brutal midwestern winter. Something about standing on frigid pavement, switching hands as each went numb, pulling in that silky cloud of nicotine. The warmth ran all the way to your toes. A buzz like a tuning fork going off in your core.
Clamping the little guy in his teeth, he unscrewed the cap from the whiskey and drank from his bottle of light.
Now he was really feeling no pain.
He wandered to the side of the lot where he could watch the entrance and took a seat on the curb to smoke his cigarette and wait for the world to happen. The tape around his midriff crinkled when he sat, and the package dug in, acted almost as a back brace so that he had to sit with preposterous posture. He recalled the night’s loose-leaf events: a nose exploding to pulp under the fist of a drunk hick in the Lincoln Lounge. Interrupting a long conversation about The Murder That Never Was, the town’s great isosceles-sided rumor, too crazy to be true, too ingrained to discount. He and Jonah outside, recalling when Harrington bricked two free throws with half a second left to almost cost them the conference championship. Harrington had been a better songwriter than basketball player. From there, he finally got to thinking about Kaylyn. The green-eyed island of heat.
He took the idle time to pull the picture from his pocket. At some point long ago he’d folded it into quarters, maybe to tuck it in his wallet when he was certain he would get mugged in a harsh neighborhood in Phnom Penh, and the paper had two tactile ridges bisecting the surface, cutting through the date (10.15.02). On the actual picture side these ridges were reversed into chalky white divots flaking away whatever chemicals formed the images, so that Bill’s face, which had gotten caught in the fold, was scabbing away from his nose to his left eyelid. Like he was vanishing à la Marty McFly’s family in Back to the Future.
He sucked on his cigarette and let his gaze travel from the center out. He had his arm around Lisa, his fingers just creeping over her neck. He wore a blazer a size too big and gray dress pants a size too small. He remembered how the waist had bit at him all night. The silver tie almost matched the pants. He had sideburns down past his ear, a teenager’s demonstration of masculinity. Lisa wore a slim black dress with spaghetti straps and a deep V that exposed, in some of the mothers’ opinions, an expanse of olive-brown cleavage too scandalous for a homecoming dance. Her hair popped off the back of her skull in an abrupt ponytail, and she was shaking her head so that the black strands were caught in inky motion. She’d chosen for her goofy face a model’s squinch, her slim, smoky eyes boozed and dangerous.
On Bill’s other side was Rick, face partially obscured by two fingers traveling John Travolta–style across his visage. He’d gone all out and rented a black tux, from which his football muscle practically bubbled. His butt protruded slightly toward Bill, and it looked like a couple of black balloons trying to escape. Beneath the coat, the vest struggled to stay buttoned. Behind the Travolta fingers, he wore his football scowl, his brow tight and formidable, already spilling sweat before the dance had even begun. His other hand clung to the stark green of Kaylyn’s waist. Kaylyn had chosen to blow a kiss, and her lips, shellacked in purple lipstick, frozen in a pucker, passed the kiss to her open palm. Strands of her blond hair fell carefully to either side of her head, curled and bobbing timelessly in the stillness. Her lips reminded him of a single purple flower growing from a verdant forest floor. The way that color clashed with her dress certainly had to be intentional. Kaylyn knew how she would stand out in pictures, even in the background, and years later when people flipped through photo albums, they’d come to this homecoming section, and no matter if they’d known her or they were originally from Oregon and now married to a graduate of New Canaan High, their eyes would still be drawn to the girl in the green dress with the purple lipstick, and their gaze would track her in any photograph that followed.