Smeared with blood?
The uncertain implications of this made him struggle, fitfully, just one last time: he rattled at his straps and yelled for help — but again the taller man came across and lifted the metal wrench. Yet again he clattered Jake, brutally. And this time he did it so hard that Jake blacked out at once.
He awoke — moments later, maybe minutes later — to a strange sensation. A sharp prickle. In his arm. He looked down. There. They were sliding a steel needle into the crook of his arm. A second jab of pain, on the other arm, followed the first. It was another long needle, sliding in.
Tubes were now attached to the inserted needles. Numb with horror, Jake watched the men intubating him. He felt the coarseness of the leather restraints, saw the spray of old blood on the ceiling. It was all from his dreams, from the nightmares: the tongue of the krasue, the many tongues of the krasue, probing inside — seeking his innards.
The machine was switched on with a casual flick. It was now buzzing and humming. It was, of course, a pump. An electric pump. The men looked at one another and shrugged. Job done.
The machine suctioned and pumped, rocking very slightly from side to side, a small but effective electric pump just doing its hum ble task.
Jake twisted against his straps and gazed down at his feet, tethered to the iron bed frame. Now he could see bulky glass canisters beyond the end of the bed. The vessels were slowly and imperceptibly filling up with bright scarlet blood, dripping down the inside of the glass vessels. Making fat carafes of blood. Flagons of rich crimson blood.
Jake’s blood.
The electric pump ticked over.
Jake began to gasp, to croak, to stridulate. He was dryly croaking as the machine vacuumed and sucked the lifeforce from his flesh. As the pump ticked over.
He rasped, in his agony, like a dying insect.
38
Julia waited wearily and headachingly in the house on the road to Balagezong. For two days she stood cold and frightened at the window, like a fisherman’s wife. She watched the herdsmen patrolling the mountain paths, she saw a man carrying a huge creamy red-and-yellow yak skeleton on his back.
She counted the stones on the roofs of the houses, she watched the black-necked cranes glide against a blank white sky.
Guilt and determination held her at the window, waiting for Jake. Then, as her fever worsened, she retreated to her bed of straw: she was half convulsed with cramps, listening semiconsciously to the creaks and moans and smells of the Tibetan farmhouse. Her cold limbs shivered. The woman with the teeth came across and medicated her with cups of warm barley wine poured from a tin thermos.
She lost track of time. The only indications of daytime were the spears of light through holes in the timbered ceiling, shining on the flattened pig faces — plus the noise of occasional laughter and singing outside. And then even these dim sounds melted into a white noise of pain and fever.
The smell of yak dung rose from the livestock below. The fever climbed inside her bones. The cups of yak-butter tea tasted like her own bile. She lay back in pain. The loneliness was intense. No one spoke English, she had no one to talk to. The old woman and her granddaughters came and went in her dreams, her half-dreams, her daydreams.
Men came and went. A Frenchman. An American. An Englishman. But through her perspiration she realized she was hallucinating — it was the Tibetan men, stomping into the house in the evening to eat their chicken feet and spit the bones into the fire, brutal daggers tucked under their jerkins. Some of them gazed in curiosity at the white woman with the bright hair, the woman dying in their house; they stared at her stomach.
Amid her dreams she wondered if they could see through her — see the faint skeleton of the child she never quite had, inside her red uterus, like a fossilized bird with its Jurassic feathers preserved in soft red sandstone. Like a ghost baby, a smoke baby. The grandchild she never gave her parents, the baby she aborted after Sarnia.
The ghost of her guilt, still stalking her across the world after these many years.
Her dreams melded. Dreams of Alex, making love to her by a lake, with frightening flocks of storks and cranes. She was trembling all the time now. Once she woke in a swinish perspiration and saw the old woman eating blue plums. The plum juice drooled down the woman’s face. Where was Jake? Where was Tashi? They had gone, gone forever, everyone was gone, smoked, ghosted. The kippered pig face stared across the room.
Was she going to die from this thing, finally?
She almost didn’t care — until she cared. At some unheralded moment — five or six days in, maybe seven, she summited, she topped the mist-shrouded mountain of her illness without even realizing.
The fever abated.
After that Julia slept properly, undreamingly, and when she woke she felt a firmness in her bones, an energy returning. She sat up. She stood — for a second. Then she slumped into the wooden seat by the fire, where she rubbed her stiff legs and eased her aching neck, before sorting through her bag.
There. Julia examined her phone. And sighed. The battery had died long ago. Even if she could somehow, miraculously, find a signal, the phone was dead.
What was she going to do? Wrapped in an embroidered blanket, she shuffled to the window.
Her hopes had finally gone, likewise the rains. Jake was not coming back. Maybe he was dead. Surely he was dead. But she had to help him, just in case. She wasn’t going to stop now. She’d come this far, the idea of turning back seemed perverse. She had to help him, and help Chemda. It was her duty.
Julia gazed out.
The corn was laid on the top of the houses to dry in the new winter sunshine. Two Tibetan men were singing a song as they worked in the yard, sawing logs. An eerie dancing song. She followed the tune with her mind, gazing along the valley, sensing an idea. What she needed was electricity, therefore what she needed was a big building, somewhere that might have a generator, and an electrical outlet, so she could recharge her cell phone.
The biggest building in the valley was large and tiered and far away and painted white. A monastery? It looked, from this great distance, like a monastery from a picture of Tibet. The palace in Lhasa.
She crossed the room and asked the old woman, who was busy shelling walnuts. What was the place at the end of the valley? The woman shrugged and smiled, toothlessly, blankly. Of course she did not understand. Julia signaled, and pointed and gestured: Big building. Up there?
Miraculously, the woman nodded and smiled properly and said, “Songzanlin!” And then the old lady did a praying motion with her head, like a Buddhist monk, chanting.
It was a monastery, a lamasery. Julia hurried downstairs and out into the dry, dry sun, her head still faintly swimming with the altitude, and she hitched a ride from a youth on a motorbike, riding pillion along the dun-hard valley. She barely knew what she was doing, or why: maybe a nonexistent God the Father would speak to her at the lamasery. Guide her movements. Certainly she needed an outlet for her phone, and the only likely place in the entire valley was the most significant building of all.
The drive took a frustrating twenty minutes. Past a trail of Tibetan tribeswomen carrying enormous wicker baskets of grasses on their backs. Bent over by the burden.
Songzanlin was tucked hard against a mountainside, tiered and bleached and dazzling in the sun, like a terrace of snow mountains, like the very mountains that it faced across the sloping brown fields. The ancient steps up to the white monastic buildings were steep and knackered. A few stray pilgrims were climbing the steep archaic steps on their knees. A yellow-robed monk was playing a trumpet made from a human thighbone, heralding the heavens.