You must be a mind reader.
No, you’d just be a terrible poker player. I’m getting somewhere, I know that much. It’s like I thought. He’s a big thinker. He’s got ideas. So look, listen to me. I’ve covered insurgencies before. That’s my specialty. Leonard Peltier, Mumia, all the great ones. They all needed a chronicler. A mythologist. You know that book In the Spirit of Crazy Horse? Matthiessen ripped it off from my reporting. I would’ve sued him, but AIM said no. Didn’t want the distraction. Listen, I’m a movement guy underneath. Ask anyone I’ve worked with. I can talk a good line to the lamestreamers, but make no mistake: I’m a tool in the hands of the people. Not a word of this comes out till the moment is ripe. Listen, if you are actually in Martin’s pocket, let me talk to him. That’s all I want. Ten minutes to make my case. We can all be in it together. I’ve got the connections and the savvy. You’ve got — well, whatever it is. You’ve worked with him. And Robin, too. Robin’s obviously the key.
What are you talking about?
Have you read her master’s thesis? Talking Resistance: Therapy as Emancipation from Freire to Fanon? I know I’m not supposed to use words like this, but what the hell. Here we are in Bangkok. The girl’s fiery. We’re talking about the diary of a mad black woman. I don’t care if she works for Hopkins or Harvard or the goddamned Cato Institute, she’s a double agent. Scratch that surface and you’ve got a latter-day Angela Davis. Put the two of them together and you’ve really got something. The brains and the means.
A waiter brings me the same thing he’s having, the mango shake and the glistening bottle of Singha.
The mango’s for the vitamins, he says. The beer’s to stay relaxed. Old R&R trick I learned from my friends who spent years in Saigon. Because you never know, do you, when someone’s going to bomb the place out? All these Yankees, out here in the open air? One of these days they’re going to do Bangkok like they did Bali.
He grins, lifts his straw fedora, scratches his bald spot. I never noticed, in the office, just how hairy he was — a salt-and-pepper thatch that runs up his wrists under the sleeves of his linen shirt and emerges over the collar, covering the nape of his neck. A sinewy, almost apelike, grasp. Here is a man, I’m thinking, who loves living his life. Mort Kepler, by Mort Kepler. A self-authored man. Emerson would be proud, and horrified. Does anyone my age live so vigorously, so unironically, so heedless of offense? On the other hand, did his parents? Or are the Boomers just a separate species, never to be repeated?
Mort, would it help in any way, I say, would it make any difference, if I told you you were completely fucking crazy?
All I need is one word. Not even a word. You don’t even have to say it. Just nod. What’s in the boxes? Is it rocket launchers? Centrifuge parts? C-4?
It’s electronics. Gray market electronics. You can ask him.
Well, answer me this, then. If it’s not a movement, what the hell is it? What happened to you, to turn you into this kind of, what, a robot? Is it a cult? A new religion, excuse my language? What, is he some kind of mystic? I mean, if it’s not drugs, and it’s not revolution, and it’s not just out and out money, then what the fuck is left? Religion, right?
I want to tell him. This is it, I’m thinking, this is the door, the way around and over and out. Mort Kepler is a steaming pile of crap, yes, but he’s also a real reporter, who has actually in his life turned a story around and sold it. Leave it to him to break the news. Who cares if it’s Mother Jones or The Nation? Let him have the scoop, let him write the book, and then go back to Baltimore and start again. Hire a lawyer and negotiate a plea deal. Probably it’ll all amount to nothing. Look for another NPR job. Move back in with the parents, if it comes to that. Take shelter. Embrace the ordinary. Take shelter in this pockmarked face, in these big capable hands. Treat Mort Kepler as a father confessor. Why the hell not?
Because I’m free, that’s why. When I’m Curtis Wang, I’ll never have a conversation like this again. What would Mort Kepler say, if Curtis Wang were sitting across the table? He’d be mincing his words, biting his tongue, thinking all kinds of inappropriate thoughts about the Little Red Book and internment camps and industrial espionage and Yao Ming. And penis size. How else do men like him measure their distance from other men, when it comes down to it? Wasn’t I tempted to ask Martin about it, once, long ago? To ask, that is, as a joke, whether Silpa had invented penis extensions, as a side project, to correct for anatomical averages? I can see it in Mort’s face even now, in embryo: Chinaman, my dick is bigger than yours.
Why would I choose that? Why would I step out of the circle of belonging, where I’ve always been? The gilded prison house of whiteness, with its electric fences, its transparent walls? Being the most visible, therefore the most hated, of all? The one who can always condescend, not the one condescended to?
Reader, doesn’t the question answer itself?
I’m expected back at the office, I tell him. Conference call at five.
No more R&R, huh? Who’s the conference call with?
I give him a pitying look.
Enjoy the rest of your time in Bangkok, I say. Go get a massage at Wat Po. They’re only five bucks.
The massages I want are all in Patpong.
With that, I give him a wave, and walk easily out of the bar and down the alley, as if I’ve lived here all my life, and step into a hot pink taxi waiting at the corner. No one follows me.
EPILOGUE. ENDTIME
I wake up with Wendy sleeping next to me.
Her hair spilling across the pillow, her fingers dug into the crook of my elbow. Long white curtains blowing away from an open window, a French door, actually, on her side of the bed. Birds twittering and the hump and sizzle of the surf.
We’re on vacation. Meimei is with my parents in New Paltz. I know these things immediately, automatically, when I open my eyes. This is the vacation we promised each other we would take for our eighth wedding anniversary. Vieques. My supervisor at BUR, Kathleen, insisted we borrow her condo.
How is it that things sometimes fall into place so easily?
That was what Wendy asked me at dinner last night. We were picking through the remains of a grilled yellow snapper, eating the last tostones with our fingers.
I mean, when we came to the United States, she said, the first thing I promised myself is we would take vacations. She switched to Chinese. My parents never took one. Where would they have gone? All their family was in Wudeng, and it’s not as if they could have afforded to go back to Shanghai. Or Beijing.