She enters a trance while the monks recite ancient texts concerning the sacredness of marriage, the intrinsic part it plays for lay people on the eight-fold path, the importance of the tiny beam of light at the center of every human soul that is like an authentic splinter of nirvana, and how much stronger we become when we are able to join with another in total commitment and faithfulness, and how we need this strength for that crucial and terrifying moment when at death we enter the transitional state called “The Other Side.” They end by reciting the duties each spouse owes the other, particularly emphasizing fidelity and honesty.
When the monks are gone, Lalita explains to her parents the strange farang inhibition about privacy: Basically, Magnus wants them to consummate their marriage alone in the house. After a short discussion, McKay forks out another three hundred dollars for her parents to go stay with her father’s brother, who lives up the road, for a week or so.
Now he can finally achieve what he has been planning since New York. A week is a long time for a millionaire to postpone gratification.
Afterwards, he tries to stifle his disappointment, tells himself it is early days and there has been a breakdown in communication somewhere along the line. She used none of her tantalizing tricks at all, employed none of those spectacular techniques which had been haunting his libido for so long. On the contrary, she made love to him with unstinting adoration in her eyes and the functionality of a country girl who wants to make a baby.
Laying on his back, controlling himself, not looking at her, smoking a Marlboro Red, McKay uses his softest, most charming tone. Smart attorney, he makes his pitch as a man with a problem: Due to an appalling childhood he is hopelessly promiscuous and favors threesomes. He would like for her to work on him with another woman, especially since he knows that Thai prostitutes often prefer threesomes and he has no doubt she has often done that sort of thing in the course of trade. There are plenty of whores for hire twenty miles away in Surin, right?
Somewhat preoccupied with his disappointment, he fails to notice a stiffening in her arm which lies across his chest. Staring at the ceiling, he does not notice a sudden contraction in her pupils or the tightening of the muscles around her eyes.
Changing the subject, Magnus asks her if she can get him some opium to help him pass the time (he does not say: in this godforsaken hellhole). He’s heard it is easily available in Cambodia, so logically there must be some importation, no?
Lalita nods: Yes, she can get him some.
“We can make out on it — wouldn’t that be fun?”
“Yes,” she says, looking away, “that could be fun.”
Of course, they do not make love on opium. She shows him how to prepare the pipe, as the old crone in the village where she bought it had shown her, and after a few puffs his mind takes a quite different direction. After five pipes he is in a trance which lasts eight hours. When he comes around he decides that opium is definitely his new recreational drug of choice. It is incredible: a lot more civilized than crack and therefore more suitable for one’s middle years. He has spent eight hours in a fascinating dream world where he lay on the king-size bed from his Manhattan apartment, except that the bed floated in a dynamic, light-filled space and Magnus was able to travel to different stars and back at will, on his magic bed.
While Magnus is in his opium trance the next day, Samson Lee calls on the special cell phone. Lalita tells Lee that McKay has gone out for the day. Lee speaks to her in Thai and tries to convey, in coded language McKay would understand, that the war is won on all fronts. The bodies of twenty-three horribly tortured and mutilated Colombians have been found by Thai police, following a tip-off, somewhere on the border with Mayanmar; at the same time, someone who shall be nameless informed the DEA of the exact location of the Escaverada family’s main jungle factory. He tells her to tell Magnus to watch the international news or buy a newspaper. In any event, McKay must get the next flight to New York, Lee has some urgent matters for him to attend to.
Lalita watches CNN at a shop in the village and sees how a massive haul of cocaine has been retrieved from a certain factory known to be the property of the Escaverada family, who have all been taken into custody except for those who died in the battle, which happens to be most of them: A combined Colombian government and U.S. operation had mobilized more than five hundred men. However, the godfather, Pablo Escaverada, is still at large; indeed, according to intelligence he has been traveling overseas for some time, running his operation by cell phone and e-mail.
Lalita is able to guess, from tone and manner, what kind of Thai-Chinese Samson Lee must be. She now has no doubt that Magnus is in reality Pablo Escaverada, a business partner of Lee, for sure, on the run from international law enforcement. Lalita doesn’t tell McKay about Lee’s call when he comes around.
For three and a half days Lalita keeps McKay opiated while she waits for the sow. Whenever he comes down from his opium trips, she has a fresh pipe prepared and ready for him, and off he goes again. She has no way of knowing that in his disembodied state he sloughs off all carnality. He wants to tell her he has discovered that he genuinely loves her, from the bottom of his heart, but he never gets the chance. Finally, she knows by the unusual grunts that the sow has started to give birth.
As soon as the first piglet pops out, she takes it tenderly in her arms and climbs the stairs to where Magnus lies on a futon on the floor. With grim stubbornness working her jaw, she takes a large roll of agricultural plastic to lay out next to him, then rolls him over onto it. She turns up all the corners and edges, so that it forms a kind of shallow pool. Then she removes the gold Longines watch from his left wrist and lays it next to the piglet, which she lays next to McKay; or rather, next to McKay’s body, for as we know, Magnus himself is off on some celestial frolic, where we must join him briefly to get his side of the story.
The other side, Tuesday March 8, 2005, Around noon
McKay, who after only three days has developed a measure of expertise in the manipulation of his opium dreams, has discovered that it is not only the bed which is under his controclass="underline" On the contrary, the whole dream is at his command. This is the total-immersion virtual world that computer scientists hope to achieve in maybe fifty years time; opium smokers have been visiting it for thousands. His new and favorite trick is to expand until the bed is a structure of stardust and he is as big as the universe.
Today, unaware of Lalita’s strange arrangements, McKay has once again expanded his astral body until he is almost perfectly absorbed by the great, luminous Inner Kingdom. Then something odd starts to happen. A door stretching from Saturn to Andromeda appears in the sky with the words Other Side hanging on a sign above it. McKay notices millions upon millions of people entering this doorway and cannot resist following them.
On the other side of the door, things are not so idyllic. The great football crowds of bewildered souls are engulfed by terrible whirlwinds consisting of samsaras from all the lifetimes those souls have lived through. A large number of the newly dead are overcome by powerful currents, which lead them into the bodies of animals and insects. To his surprise, he watches a highly respected Supreme Court judge, who must have died that very hour, turn into a scorpion. The more developed reincarnate as humans, usually in some situation of tedious drudgery and/or reckless debauchery. Only one or two escape the spiritual tsunami to rise to the challenge of an intense beam of white light shining above the appalling chaos. McKay is not one of these. Although his commendable clarity of mind enables him to see without self-deception, his lifelong commitment to undiluted self-indulgence makes it impossible for him to resist the turgid currents. Then, all of a sudden and with an overwhelming relief that makes him cry, he sees his gold Longines watch, which appears magically before him in gigantic form. He flies toward it as if toward salvation. Too late, he sees the trap. Struggle though he might, he is sucked into a warm, smelly, squealing body.