‘In a sense, it’s exciting that you’re here,’ Zaya said. ‘After all this time, an American tourist finally comes to stay. By the way, can you understand me all right?’ He was speaking a mixture of Danu and Burmese.
‘Yeah. This is how I talk to Mom most of the time.’ She was still dripping like a banyan tree. ‘Are you OK, Zaya?’
‘Don’t I look OK?’
‘You look like Uncle Chai the day he came back from the Concession.’
‘Cherish, I have Aids.’
She was silent for a while. At last, quietly, she said, ‘For how long?’
‘Since 2004. Only a few years after you left. But until recently it wasn’t so noticeable.’
He told her about the night he had gone into the Concession with Sam and Chao to plant bombs on three of Lacebark’s diesel generators. They moved through the darkness past the smelter, the crusher, the water tower, the engine workshop, the kitchens, the clinic, all three of them knowing the layout by heart because they’d done their time as workers at the mine, and it was so easy, they had so much good luck, that Zaya’s fear turned to exhilaration and he began to feel as if he had superpowers. He wanted to stay in the Concession for ever, flitting around like a vengeful ghost, disassembling it bolt by bolt, breaking into the foremen’s dormitories to piss in their yawning mouths. Then, when they were almost back at the hole in the fence, the emergency floodlights came on and the shooting started.
Zaya took a rifle bullet in the back of his thigh, and the other two had to half carry him for nearly a mile before they felt safe enough to stop and rest. While they made a tourniquet, all Zaya could think about was that he hadn’t heard any explosions. The bombs hadn’t even gone off. They’d failed. He passed out.
When he woke up, he was lying on a mat in a hut, and his tourniquet was being untied by a man he recognised as the stuttering doctor from Gandayaw. Zaya could see the doctor’s instruments laid out on a cloth, and on their blades were flecks of rust or dried blood or perhaps both. The last thing he remembered before he passed out again was a fly crawling out of the doctor’s open mouth, but he realised afterwards that he must have been delirious.
‘I didn’t notice anything for about a year after that. Then I started getting weaker, and after a while I started to suspect what must have happened. That doctor treats plenty of hookers in Gandayaw. Sam and Chao probably hustled him out of town without giving him time to get a clean set of instruments together.’ While he was recuperating he read a paperback anthology of Karl Marx’s writings in Burmese translation from the eighties, the spine repaired with duct tape. Marx’s creed seemed to be that material things had more power over people than people had over material things, which struck Zaya as not all that different from the animism of his grandparents, with its tribe spirits and crop spirits and weather spirits. His wound would heal up without even leaving a scar, as if the virus were so cunning that it wanted to scrub all evidence of its ingress.
‘Have you ever taken a test?’ Cherish said.
‘No.’
‘So you’re not sure?’
‘I’m sure. You’d be sure too if you saw me with my clothes off.’
‘Don’t they have drugs for it now? I know a couple of older guys in LA who’ve had it for years and they don’t even look sick.’
‘Did you pass a dispensary on your way here?’ Zaya said. ‘No. It’s only going to get worse. I live in the jungle, for fuck’s sake. Even the air is sick here. Living in the jungle with Aids is like having Aids twice over. But it’s not going to kill me for a long while. I’m sure of that too.’
‘Do you want me to tell Mom when I get home?’
‘No. Because you can’t tell her, or anyone else, that you saw me. How is she, though?’
‘She’s fine. She likes her new job. But we argue a lot. She couldn’t understand why I’d want to go partying in Thailand a few months after a cyclone. What was that like, anyway?’
‘What was it like?’ Zaya looked at his sister and for the first time he was aware of her not as a potential ally or a potential infiltrator but merely as a young woman who had seen almost nothing of life since she left Burma. He remembered the two days he’d spent travelling south in that boat, when he learned that the best way to shunt a floating corpse out of your way without slowing yourself down was to jam the oar in its armpit and wheel it past you. Except that sometimes you’d notice too late that it was tied by the wrist to the corpse next to it, probably to help the two of them stay up in a palm tree during the winds, and just at that moment you’d feel the second corpse knock its heels imploringly against your bow. ‘It was bad, Sis,’ he said. ‘It still is.’
‘What was it like in Gandayaw?’
‘Gandayaw was too far north for the worst of the flooding. But the Concession was in chaos for a while.’
‘So that’s what you do now? You go into the Concession and blow stuff up? In that case, why are you here? Isn’t Gandayaw a hundred miles away?’
‘Nearly four hundred miles. Yes. But at the moment we need to be near the border.’
Cherish slapped at a mosquito on her wrist, but not fast enough, so it left behind a jewel of her own blood. ‘For what? Zaya, why’d you bring me here now after all this time? What’s all this about? Are you fighting the regime?’
‘No,’ Zaya said. ‘Not the regime.’ He gave the generals only about five more years, he told her. Between Cyclone Nargis and the Shan State Army and the Karen State Army and the monks in Mandalay and the punks in Yangon, and the sheer complexity, for men with no geopolitical competence whatsoever, of playing China off against the West year after year, they were starting to lose their grip. He believed that the instant a despot took power the date of his humiliation and death was in some sense carved in the stars, or if not his own humiliation and death then his successor’s. A tyranny grew old and tired and palsied just like any other beast. But if killing a tyranny was like killing an elephant, killing a corporation was like killing a colony of sentient fungus. Lacebark was founded in North Carolina in 1919. Only one government in Asia was older than that, in the sense of surviving continuously without a destructive transfer of power, and that was the constitutional monarchy of Bhutan. Anyway, Lacebark, at eighty-nine, still wasn’t even that long-lived, relatively speaking. Freeport was ninety-five. United Fruit was a hundred and eight. Chevron was a hundred and eighteen. De Beers was a hundred and twenty. Unlike governments, corporations endured: deathless, efficient, self-renewing. And whoever replaced the generals in Burma, whether it was Aung San Suu Kyi or Maha Sammata back from the dead, Zaya was sure that they would let Lacebark keep their Concession so that they could carry on slurping up the royalties from the mine.
Back in the mid-eighties, when Lacebark prospectors first arrived in Gandayaw, they probably assumed that the local tribes had been there since the Stone Age. But even six or seven generations earlier, Zaya and Cherish’s ancestors had been down in the valleys, tending rice paddies and trading with Mandalay. In Burma, though, when a king asked for too much rice in tribute or too many sons for his army, he would often have to watch as his subjects flew away like skittish doves, into the forest or up to the hills, far beyond his control. In the process, they might abandon their written language, their genealogy, their folk stories, because all those things made you dangerously intelligible to the valley powers, and even to be included in a statistical table was a submission too far. That willingness to leave everything behind in the mud was why no government had ever had real control over the entire nation and why no government ever would.