The two of them have been running their continuous amateur neurochemistry seminar ever since Raf first got diagnosed with his syndrome and Isaac first took amphetamines (which happened around the same time) but it’s still odd to hear words like ‘hypothalamus’ and ‘pituitary’ in conversation with a stranger. And odd, too, that she seems determined to treat her own amygdala like some lawless vertex of the Golden Triangle, purging her oxytocin with alcohol like a drug agent spraying a poppy field with glyphosate, although maybe that means she’s just more advanced than Isaac or Raf. His own internal serotonin labs are up and running right now after six long weeks of downtime and he really hopes they don’t get busted again. ‘How long have you been into. . brain stuff?’ he says.
‘There were girls at my high school in LA who’d been taking Zoloft since they were three years old and they didn’t even know how it worked. If you don’t educate yourself about this shit you’re an idiot.’ She scratches her knee. ‘Do you have anything we can eat?’
He decides against a joke about the other condom. ‘Not really.’
‘How about a curry? I know a place near here.’
Raf sometimes thinks there is nothing in the whole world that makes him happier than spicy food soon after sex. ‘Yes,’ he says. ‘Wow, yes.’
4.31 p.m.
Raf was considering a prawn madras, but Cherish makes him turn to the end of the laminated menu, where there’s a page that says ‘burmese specialities’: tea-leaf salad, catfish soup, peanut curry, tamarind lamb, royal noodles.
‘Why do they have all this stuff?’
‘It’s a Burmese restaurant.’
‘I always thought it was Indian.’
But in fact there were clues that it wasn’t: in Raf’s experience, Indian restaurants in London, even the cheap ones, usually feel a bit like funeral homes with their tinted windows and dark carpets and low lighting, whereas this place just has linoleum floors and vinyl tablecloths and a few creased posters of Buddha on the walls. On the ledge by the door are two of those battery-powered Maneki Neko cats, the white one bigger than the gold one, so their metronomic paws move in and out of phase.
‘They cook Indian food here because people don’t know what Burmese is. But the staff are all Burmese.’
The waiter, a short guy with a goatee, brings over their beers and takes out his notebook. Earlier, Cherish greeted him as if they knew each other.
‘I don’t know what to have,’ says Raf.
‘You want a curry?’ says Cherish.
‘Yeah.’
She turns to the waiter and says something in what is presumably Burmese. He nods and goes back into the kitchen.
‘So that’s what you are too?’
‘Burmese? Kind of. At higher resolutions I’m half Danu, half American.’
‘Where did you grow up?’
‘In a mining town about halfway between Mandalay and the border into Yunnan.’
Cherish’s earliest memory, she tells Raf as they wait for their food, is the night her Uncle Chai came back to Gandayaw after six months away in the Concession and she burst into tears because he looked so much like a monster: eyes buried alive in the gloom of their own sockets, cheeks like slack grey tarpaulins, mouth turned down in a paresis of pure despair. But he promised her he was still her Uncle Chai and he was just very tired. Years later, she would find out why. At the Lacebark mine, you got two hours a day to eat and wash and pray and play cards, and the rest of the time you were either sleeping or working. But you didn’t work for fourteen hours and then sleep for eight, or even work for sixteen hours and then sleep for six. Instead, you worked for three and a quarter hours at a time, then unrolled your foam mattress wherever you stood and slept for forty-five minutes. That was the cycle. In total, you slept for only about four hours a day. When she was older, Cherish would learn that this was called polyphasic sleep, and it was used all over the world: the purpose was to maximise the productive hours of the workforce at the mine by teaching their bodies to skip straight to essential REM sleep, while also eliminating the inherent inefficiencies of the three-shift system. It was an agronomic approach to the brain, like some new method of crop rotation. And Uncle Chai had admitted that after a full month of sleeping only four continuous hours a night, he would have been passing out on his feet like a drunk, and yet even after six months of polyphasic sleep, he was still able to work. But polyphasic sleep gave you a tiredness of a different kind, a soggy tumour of exhaustion that grew heavier and heavier every sunrise, so that you could always feel it squeezed against your skull even if it hadn’t yet made you sick. After Uncle Chai returned that first time, he lay down inside the house and couldn’t be woken for more than a day, even to eat the welcome-back feast that Cherish’s mother had been planning for weeks.
When her mother was young, Gandayaw had still been a village of only a few dozen families, so isolated that many of the locals had never seen a pair of shoes, but in 1989 the Burmese government leased a vast area of copper and ruby deposits, half a million hectares of the Shan forest at the base of the hills, to an American company. Lacebark Mining built an office on the western edge of the Concession, and Gandayaw puffed up into a boom town out of the Wild West: from China and Thailand and India and other parts of Burma came traders, pedlars, fixers, translators, builders, electricians, plumbers, doctors, drivers, hoteliers, cooks, missionaries, musicians, hairdressers, tattooists, bodyguards, extortionists, confidence tricksters, drug dealers, bootleggers, pimps, prostitutes, beggars, and government agents. Helicopters landed three times a week. A discotheque was built, with a karaoke lounge, a jacuzzi, and a sign in the foyer warning people not to bring in hand grenades or durian fruit. Uncle Chai once told Cherish that the change had come so fast that it was as if the village itself had been abducted in its sleep and then woken up somewhere entirely new.
Gandayaw was not only a boom town but also a border checkpoint, because in exchange for a forty-five per cent royalty to the government, Lacebark ran the Concession like a sovereign enclave. They couldn’t patrol more than a fraction of the perimeter, but it was rumoured that if they found you ‘trespassing’ in the forest you might be beaten or even shot. Although some of Gandayaw’s savage new prosperity came from Lacebark’s executives and managers and engineers, much more came from its private security corps, who could often be seen swaggering like conquerers through the town with AK-47s strapped at their sides on their way to meetings with liaison officers from the Tatmadaw. Mine workers coming home from the Concession never seemed to want to talk much about life inside, which led to a lot of stories among the children of Gandayaw: that the Americans kept order with robotic tigers they brought to the forest in shipping containers; that when men died in accidents, which was often, they were reanimated and made to keep toiling. Even back then, Cherish had a feeling that one day she would have to see the Concession for herself.