Saving Fish From Drowning

  And now he recalled Black Spot saying, “Thank you for your wisdom.”

  When the tourists didn’t return on Christmas Day, Heinrich tried not to show that he was concerned. He had to steer the military away from the truth, as well as he could. If the authorities learned they were all in cahoots, that would be a death sentence for the tribe and possibly him. And he had to get that bastard Bailley to stop stirring up the waters. When Black Spot next came to the resort for supplies, Heinrich collared him. The white brothers and sisters are fine, Black Spot assured him. They love their Karen people. They said so on their movie camera. And they are very, very comfortable, so this is not a problem at all. They think it is a great adventure to sleep in trees. At each meal, they praise the unusual food, saying they have never eaten so many unknown delicacies and tasty insects. Heinrich was astounded that the tourists believed that cockamamie story about the bridge being down. But he was relieved to have more time to extricate them from calamity. He would wait a few more days, hoping that the tourists would tire of their adventure and that the tribe would realize the boy wasn’t their savior. In the meantime, he made sure that Black Spot brought them plenty of provisions lest they starve, tasty insects notwithstanding. He also berated Black Spot for stealing his satellite phone. He told him it was senseless for the tribe to have a phone in the jungle; you couldn’t get reception below those trees. Black Spot replied that his people seemed helpless without a phone, and they could order many things to happen when they had one. He assured Heinrich he would pay for it soon.

  Black Spot came three more times. Once it was to pick up food supplies, including noodles, which the Younger White Brother said he craved. On the second visit, he delivered the curious red plants, which would indeed raise money for a new satellite phone. On the third, he handed over the camcorder tape that would make the Lord’s Army TV stars. He asked Heinrich to give this to Harry, who already had a popular show that appeared all over the world. Heinrich had watched the tape twice, trying to decide whether it would hurt or help. Who knew for certain? He went into his office, closed the door, and poured two jiggers of a very old port, one for himself and one for the Nat who lived in his liquor cabinet. Several days and many jiggers later, the Nat finally agreed not to make mischief.

  WALTER RECOVERED his memory two days after he was found in the pagoda, knocked unconscious by the corner of a loose brick. He recalled exactly what had happened:

  They had been on the dock, waiting for Rupert. The guests and longboats were waiting to take them to their Christmas surprise, the school on the other side of the lake, where a classroom of children would sing carols. To find the troublesome boy, one of the boatmen went in one direction, and he in the other. Minutes later, the boatman ran to him saying he thought he had seen the boy, but he might be hurt. He had glimpsed a boy climbing a sacred pagoda that was under repair, he said, and then the boy slipped and fell out of sight. The boatman cried out to the boy many times but received no answer. He suggested that Walter climb up to find the boy, and he would seek help to carry the boy back.

  The pagoda was in very bad shape. Bricks and stones had fallen out in several places and the Buddhas inside the recessed walls had no faces left. Against the interior back wall, Walter found a wooden ladder. He climbed up and searched carefully, but there was no sign of Rupert. Was he even in the right pagoda? He went to climb down, but found the ladder had toppled (thanks to the boatman, who had set it down to waylay him while he and the other boatmen spirited the tourists away). Twenty feet lay between Walter and the ground. What to do? He shouted. Surely someone would come looking for him. But after a quarter-hour went by, he worried that the tourists would be impatient and angry, and he decided he should descend without the ladder. He dug his fingers into the cracks between the stones and placed his feet onto tiny perches, while apologizing to the Nat of the pagoda for stepping on the fragile wall. But he must have displeased the Nat anyway. When he was only two feet from the ground, the stone slab he was hanging on to with his left hand slid out like a rotted tooth yanked from moldering gums. In a flash of pain, he fell into a bottomless place, and there he saw his father for the first time in more than ten years.

  That day and into the next, he stayed in the bottomless place, where he and his father had long conversations. What a good talk it was, both joyful and sad. His father said he should not think of his family’s inheritance as a curse. English could save him. He should go away and study, let his mind wander freely. Until then, he should not be obeisant in spirit to those who trampled it. His father then gave him a photograph of himself with his own father. On the back he had written: “With hope, a mind is always free. Honor your family and not those who destroyed us.” Walter nodded and put the photograph under the stone that had hit his head and loosened his thoughts.

  When Walter woke in the green room, his head was a pounding drum. There were three military policemen nearby. He learned that the American tourists had disappeared. He was about to tell the police what he knew, but then he clearly remembered his father’s words. He remembered the sound of his voice. He remembered the pain of losing him. “I remember nothing,” he told the military police.

  Walter remained as dependable and as efficient as I had always known him to be. As soon as he heard that his charges would be airlifted, he arranged to have their luggage retrieved from Floating Island Resort and sent to the American Embassy in Rangoon. He secured airline tickets for their flight to the capital, where they met with Embassy officials for a debriefing. When my friends insisted he have dinner with them the night before most of them departed, he was able to speak to them openly, knowing they would safeguard what he said. He told them of his father, the journalist and professor, of his steadfastness to the truth, and later the cost of it. “I wanted to be a journalist at one time,” Walter said, “but I became afraid, more concerned with my own life than that of my country.”

  “Come to the United States. You can study journalism there,” Wendy said. “Your English is perfect, so you’d have no problems keeping up.”

  Many of the tourists he had met had said he should go to the States. It was a nice gesture, and only that, since it was nearly impossible for anyone to secure a visa. First you had to speak English fluently, which he did. Second, you had to have an unblemished academic record, which he had, in English literature. And last, you had to have sufficient funds to get there, and then to buy your food and books and pay your tuition and rent. He was short by about twenty-five thousand dollars.

  “Come,” Wendy repeated. “We’ll take care of you.”

  Walter’s heart quickened. It was terrible to have such a great hope casually dangled before him.

  “You are too kind,” he said with a smile.

  “I’m not just being kind,” Wendy told him. “I’m offering to put money in the bank so you can come study journalism. We need people like you to do that.”

  Walter took the TOEFL exam and received a perfect score. He was accepted into the UC Berkeley School of Journalism with a fellowship that would cover his tuition. And true to her word, Wendy opened an account in his name and deposited twenty-five thousand dollars. The consular officers at the American Embassy in Rangoon knew him well by then, and all the paperwork was approved with deliberate good speed. But before he could leave, the United States was attacked. The tallest buildings in New York fell, and so did Walter’s dreams of going to America. He had not learned of the attacks in the newspapers or on TV Myanmar. The government had banned all mention of them. An American consular officer told him when he explained to Walter why his application had been put on hold indefinitely. Like so many with similar hopes, he was on a waiting list, at the mercy of many unknown factors.

  The day he was told this, he returned to Inle Lake, to the pagoda with his life-changing stone under it, he removed his father’s photograph, turned it over, and read the words that would keep him free.

  A YEAR AFTER THE RESCUE, Moff and Heidi had not yet married. Heidi was the one who
was hesitant. She knew that both love and fear were reduced states of consciousness, not good for making important decisions. For now, living together was risky enough.

  On weekends, Moff took her to the Laguna Seca Raceway, near the bamboo farm. The cars shrieked and her heart boomed, nearly shooting out of her chest. She loved the sensation, the release of terror. She would close her eyes and listen to the cycle of the deafening and diminishing whine. Approach and retreat, dread and thrill, a rhythm that repeated, that didn’t stop. The racers were hurtling at the speed of love, on the verge of leaving the track and colliding into her. But they always held to the course, and she did, too, safe from disaster, lap after lap. Whenever the old dread rose and threatened to consume her, she recalled that she had already been through what she had prepared for. She had survived the jungle. She had also enrolled in a paramedics training course, the first of many she would need to take, because one day, she would jump into a van and zoom toward disaster, and that would be her choice.

  Moff, on the other hand, was becoming more cautious. He had never been the worrying kind of dad. But he had agonized over Rupert’s near death. The camera had not lied. When his son was shaking hard enough to break Moff’s teeth and crack his skull, he knew that the terrors of remorse would deepen and widen, encompassing the rest of him, consuming his heart with baby teeth. In dreams, he saw it happening, like the camcorder tape he had watched, rewinding, replaying, trying again and again to save his son, then failing, each time failing. When he told Heidi about this recurring nightmare, she said, “I know.” That was exactly what he needed to hear. She knew that his fear almost wasn’t enough. He would worry. He would always be watching for ways in which he needed to be more careful.

  ALTHOUGH RUPERT had acted annoyed to be treated like a god, he now fantasized about the Younger White Brother and the Lord of Nats. He played an anime version of himself in these two roles. Sometimes he became a tree, or a bird or a rock. Other times he wore the mask of a martyr with a grimace of agony. He pictured himself scaling temples and throwing bricks on advancing soldiers of the regime. One day he would return to Burma and save his people. He would make them invisible.

  In the meantime, he practiced new card tricks and surfed the Internet. Out of curiosity, he searched for references to “Younger White Brother.” He was surprised to find mention of it in several websites as a myth among the Karen hill tribes. He thought that what those people believed was weird, but this was weirder than that. It said the Younger White Brother would bring back the Lost Important Writings and end their suffering. He did more searches and found an article that was part of an unpublished memoir by the wife of a captain with the Raj. In lively prose, she recounted meeting an Englishman in “the wild part of the jungle inhabited by the Karen hill-tribe.” He called himself a lord. But she could see he had “the mistaken arrogance of one raised to peerage, not through merit, but with filthy lucre.” The hill-tribe people, she said, being isolated from the modern world, believed this Englishman was the “fabled Younger White Brother.” He went by the odd Christian name of Seraphineas, and he fathered many children with his two dozen “perpetual virgins.”

  Rupert spent most of the night searching like a dog on a scent trail until he found a clue that made him shiver. His favorite book, The Expert at the Card Table, was at one time called Artifice, Ruse, and Subterfuge at the Card Table, and the author was S. W. Erdnase, which was “E. S. Andrews” in reverse. I am not suggesting that Rupert is indeed the Reincarnated One, as the Karen hill tribe called him. I will simply remind you of Rupert’s own words: In magical lands, magic can happen. But only if we believe. Rupert believed.

  WENDY AND WYATT were no longer a couple. But you guessed that already. Wyatt left her for a hero’s welcome in Mayville and never returned. He wrote only to thank her for the “unforgettable trip to Burma,” and said he hoped to be back soon, so he could attend some of those reunions they talked about. Wendy cried for a solid day and then off and on for several weeks.

  Eventually she threw herself into her work. She was a full-time activist with Free to Speak now, who denounced the regime and spoke of the Burmese people’s plight. Phil Gutman coached her. “You can’t soft-pedal this,” he said. “You have to denounce the fucking regime. People who believe this constructive-engagement shit usually turn out to be public relations consultants and lobbyists hired by companies doing business there. And the lobbyists get people all hopeful by saying the military is going to start talks with Aung San Suu Kyi. Get real. It’s all a sham to make people think they’re going to reform.”

  “How do you know that this time it’s not for real?” Wendy said.

  “They’ve done it before,” Phil told her. “They let her out, arrest her again, let her out, arrest her again. It’s the old cat-and-mouse tease. You can’t reform psychopathic killers, serial rapists, and torturers. Would anyone in their right mind let people like that out of jail? Why would they let them run a country?”

  Thus prepared with purpose, Wendy took up investigative journalism, writing about human rights causes, not that she could write, but it is heartening nonetheless that she found a passion and was acting on it. Yes, she was immature, quite silly, and no doubt she would make embarrassing mistakes, yet none of them too serious, one could hope. But Wendy had the desire to make a difference. One day she would mature enough to do that in small or even large ways. She had already persuaded her mother to become the biggest contributor to Free to Speak’s meager coffers. Wendy was glad she had made her mother more politically aware. She even asked her to fund another trip to Burma, so that she and Phil could go as human rights observers, incognito, of course. Her mother nodded and said, “That is so brave of you,” but I knew that would never happen. The last rescue aged Mary Ellen twenty years, so that now she looked her age. I also felt Wendy shouldn’t go. The junta had put her name on a special list of visitors. If she ever stepped foot in Burma, they’d lop it off.

  Wendy admired Phil as her mentor so much she slept with him, in fact, enough times for them to qualify as lovers. Hard bodies, she decided, were not that important anymore. He was smart and articulate, and that was a form of seduction. She liked it that Phil worried she didn’t care enough for him—which was the opposite of how things were with Wyatt. Actually, she noticed that Phil could even be somewhat clingy. He asked little test questions, like, “I was thinking about your tush today. Were you thinking about mine?” Sometimes he came across as desperate. She wished he were as confident in bed as he was with the press.

  Every now and then, when she did think of Wyatt, which was “hardly ever,” she told herself she was “so totally over him.” He was a brief infatuation, and she convinced herself it was a hypomanic side effect induced by a change in her medication. Wyatt was a loser, and not very smart. Plus he had no idea what responsibility to others was. He didn’t ever think about having a real job or having a goal in life beyond mooching off people so he could take off on his next adventure. He would never do anything to distinguish himself, just as he hadn’t when they were stuck in No Name Place. There was nothing much to him, she concluded several times a day when he sprang to mind, besides his cute butt and a certain jackhammer talent of the pelvis.

  WYATT DID indeed return to Mayville, which held another parade and a grand banquet in his honor. For weeks, he was invited to one luncheon after another. His high school held a victory dance in the auditorium, and there he ran into a woman who laughingly said, “Don’cha know it’s me?” It was the ditzy woman with heavy black eyeliner who had been interviewed on Global News Network, the one who called herself his girlfriend.

  He said, “Ma’am, I have no idea who you are.”

  She shrugged and said with a friendly smile, “That’s how time is, isn’t it, it just goes away before you know it, and in between, people grow older and some get old. I guess I look like nobody you ever woulda knowed.” She gave a rueful laugh. “Don’t matter. Like everybody, I just wanted to say, Glad you’re back.”

/>   He knew that laugh. Sherleen, the woman who introduced him to sex. At the time, he was sixteen, half the age he was now, and she was thirty-one, younger than he was now. She had worked at the ranch where his mother boarded his horse, the gift he received from his father shortly before he died of emphysema. He was the rich kid, and she was the gal who described herself as “rich in heart and heartaches.” She had been his secret haven, somewhere between comfort and escape. When he was twenty, he left to take a car trip to the Southwest. He sent her postcards, but she had no way to write back, and when he returned, he heard she had moved.

  He was embarrassed to remember this. “What you been up to, Sherleen?”

  “Kind of the usual,” she said, “which is not a whole lot.” And he knew it was hard times by the number of times she said “Oh, well” as she talked about all the “usual” things. He could see it in his mind, her getting bucked and kicked while breaking in horses, her hooking up with the seasonal ranch hands, this “bad-ass” and that “mean sucker,” who kicked the shit out of her after they rode her like a bucking horse in bed. That was back when she could still work. Not anymore. She had a scrunched-up back, miserable pain eased by bottles of whatever was cheap. She had come to town when she heard that he was missing in Burma. For old times’ sake, she had worried a lot.

  Sherleen was also the mother of his eleven-year-old son. He immediately recognized that fact when he saw the boy come up to them holding a plate piled high with turkey and mashed potatoes. It was like seeing himself at that age, down to his facial expressions and loping walk. So those get inherited, too, he thought. And just as he expected, the boy said, “Wyatt,” when asked his name.