Читать книгу Saving Fish From Drowning - Amy Tan - Страница 4

Almost everything I had planned came undone. My original itinerary began thusly: My friends, those lovers of art, most of them rich, intelligent, and spoiled, would spend a week in China and arrive in Burma on Christmas Day.

It started as planned: On December 18th, after nearly two days of travel and two stopovers, we arrived in Lijiang, China, the “Land Beyond the Clouds.” My group was met by the best tour guide of the region, one I had used on a previous trip. Mr. Qin Zheng was an athletic young man, who wore designer-label jeans, Nike sneakers, and a “Harvard”-emblazoned pullover. My friends were surprised that he looked so Western, and except for the Chinese accent, he could have been one of them. He narrated the sights they could still appreciate as twilight approached.

From the window of the deluxe air-conditioned tour bus, my friends and I could see the startling snowcapped peaks of Tibet glinting in the distance. Each time I have seen them, it is as amazing as the first.

Vera was jingling and jangling on the bumpy bus ride. She wore a profusion of ethnic-style jewelry around her neck, and encircling both wrists and ankles, and this was complemented by a colorful caftan, sized extra-large, though she was hardly fat, merely tall and big-boned. Since turning fifty, ten years ago, she had decided that her usual garb should be no less comfortable than what she wore to bed. Thrown over her shoulders was another of her trademarks: a raw-silk scarf printed with African motifs of her own design. Her hair, dyed taupe brown, had been shorn into a springy cap of baby’s tears.

Seated next to her on the bus was the newly designated tour leader, Bennie Trueba y Cela, who began to read aloud the commentary I had meticulously appended to the itinerary months before: “Many believe Lijiang is the fabled city of Shangri-La that James Hilton described in his novel Lost Horizon.…” In remembering me, Vera chuckled, but her eyes stung with tears and she used her scarf to wipe away the wetness on her smooth cheeks.

I confess I was overwhelmed with self-pity. Since my death, it had taken me some time to accustom myself to the constant effusion of emotions. Whereas I had lacked dimension of feeling my entire life, now, through others, there was width, volume, and density ever growing. Could it be that I was sprouting more of the six supernatural talents that Sakyamuni received before he became the Buddha? Did I have the Celestial Eye, the Celestial Ear, along with the Mind of Others? But what good did it do me to have them? I was terribly frustrated that whenever I spoke, no one could hear me. They did not know I was with them. They did not hear me vehemently disapprove of suggested changes to the careful tour plans I had made. And now look, they had no idea that the “commentary” I had planted in the itinerary was often meant to be humorous asides that I would have elucidated upon during the actual tour.

The remark about Shangri-La, for example: I had intended to follow that with a discussion about the various permutations of “Shangri-La” notions. Certainly it is a cliché used to lure tourists to any site—from Tibet to Titicaca—that resembles a high mountainous outpost. Shangri-La: ethereally beautiful, hard to reach, and expensive once you get there. It conjures words most delightful to tourists’ ears: “rare, remote, primitive, and strange.” If the service is poor, blame it on the altitude. So compelling is the name that right this minute, workmen, bulldozers, and cement trucks are busily remodeling a ham-let near the China – Tibet border that claims to be the true Shangri-La.

I would have brought up the link to geography as well, the descriptions of the botanist Joseph Rock, whose various expeditions for National Geographic in the 1920s and early 1930s led to his discovery of a lush green valley tucked in the heart of a Himalayan mountain topped by a “cone” of snow, as described in his article published in 1931. Some of the inhabitants there were purported to be more than a hundred fifty years old. (I have met demented residents at old-age homes who have made similar claims.) James Hilton must have read the same article by Rock, for soon after, he used similar descriptions in penning the mythical Shangri-La. Voilà, the myth was hatched, delusions and all.

But the most interesting aspect to me is the other Shangri-La alluded to in Lost Horizon, and that is a state of mind, one of moderation and acceptance. Those who practice restraint might in turn be rewarded with a prolonged life, even immortality, whereas those who don’t will surely die as a direct result of their uncontrolled impulses. In that world, blasé is bliss, and passion is sans raison. Passionate people create too many problems: They are reckless. They endanger others in their pursuit of fetishes and infatuations. And they self-agitate when it is better to simply relax and let matters be. That is the reason some believe Shangri-La is so important as the antidote. It is a mindset for the masses—one might bottle it as Sublime Indifference, a potion that induces people to follow the safest route, which is, of course, the status quo, anesthesia for the soul. Throughout the world you can find many Shangri-Las. I have lived in my share of them. Plenty of dictators have used them as a means to quell the populace—be quiet or be killed. It is so in Burma. But in art, lovely subversive art, you see what breaks through in spite of restraint, or even because of it. Art despises placidity and smooth surfaces. Without art, I would have drowned under still waters.

THERE WAS NOTHING PLACID about Wendy Brookhyser. She had come to Burma with an itch in her brain and a fever in her heart. She wanted to fight for Burmese rights, for democracy and freedom of speech. She could not tell anyone that, however. That would be dangerous. To her fellow travelers, Wendy said she was the director of a family foundation. And that was indeed the case, a foundation set up by her mother, Mary Ellen Brookhyser Feingold Fong, the “marrying widow,” as she was unkindly called in some circles. For her position as director, Wendy had never done much more than attend an occasional meeting. For that, she received a salary sufficient for a carefree lifestyle with regular infusions from her mother for her birthday, Christmas, Chanukah, and Chinese New Year. Money was her birthright, but since her teens, she was adamant she would not become a party-throwing socialite like her mother.

Here I must interject my own opinion that the aforementioned mother was not the senseless schemer her daughter made her out to be. Mary Ellen gave the best parties to draw attention to worthy causes. She didn’t simply write checks to charities like other nine-digit doyennes who had generous pocketbooks but not the time to amplify their compassion. She was utterly involved, financially and morally. I knew this because Mary Ellen was a friend of mine—yes, I believe I can call her that, for we chaired a fair number of events together. And she was quite the compulsive organizer, one who attended every boring planning meeting. I’m afraid I had a rather embarrassing habit of dozing at some of those. Mary Ellen was all about details; she knew if the proposed dates for events conflicted with the social calendars of the big money-givers. And because of her social web, she could line up celebrities to generate “publicity heat,” identifying the singers, movie stars, or athletes who could be inveigled on the basis of their family background of genetic disease, mental illness, addiction, cancer, murder, sexual abuse, senseless tragedy, and other sorts of unhappinesses that fuel causes and then galas for causes. She also kept a meticulous record of those black-tie events for which she had bought tables at the highest level, and whose event chair might then be vulnerable to the unspoken but well-understood system of payback. It was all based on connections and intimate gossip, don’t you see. In any case, I knew I could always count on Mary Ellen to contribute yearly to Self-Help for the Elderly by pointing out that it served those with Alzheimer’s, the illness to which her first husband had succumbed; he was, by the way, the one who practically invented PVC pipes and made a huge fortune distributing them. Ernie Brookhyser. Perhaps you’ve heard of him. One of the many benefits Mary Ellen had attended was for the Asian Art Museum. During the live auction, she was high bidder for the Burma Road trip—paid thrice the value, I was pleased to see. She then gave the trip for two to Wendy as a birthday present.

Wendy had first thought to refuse the trip and also rebuke her politically unconscious mother for thinking her daughter might holiday in a country run by a repressive regime. She had fumed about this over lunch with a former Berkeley housemate, Phil Gutman, the director of Free to Speak International. Phil thought the all-expenses-paid trip might be useful for “discreet information-gathering.” It could be a humanitarian project, and a necessary one. Wendy might masquerade as a pleasure-seeker, go along with the happy-go-lucky tourists, and when the opportunity presented itself, she could talk to Burmese students, have casual conversations with natives to learn who among their neighbors, friends, and family members were missing. Free to Speak might later float her report as a spec piece for The Nation. But Phil also underscored that she had to be extremely careful. Journalists were prohibited from visiting Burma. If caught rummaging around for antigovernment views, they and their informants would be arrested, possibly tortured, and made to disappear into the same void into which thousands had gone before them. Worse, the government there would deny that it detained any political prisoners. And there you would be, invisibly imprisoned, forgotten by a world that had secretly concluded you must have had some degree of guilt for getting yourself in such a jam. You see what happened to that American woman in Peru, Phil said.

“Keep the rest of the group ignorant of your activities,” he cautioned Wendy, “and no matter how strongly you feel, don’t engage in activities that would jeopardize the safety of others. If you’re worried, I might be able to rearrange my schedule and come with you. You said there were two tickets, didn’t you?”

Their conversation drifted from lunch into dinner. Phil made suggestive remarks, picking up on the flirtation they had had while housemates, which Wendy never acted on. She thought he looked spongy, like a Gumby toy with bendable limbs and no muscle. She liked hard bodies, tight butts, chiseled jawlines. Bad Boy Scout was her version of sexy. But the more they talked and drank, the more impassioned she became about the plight of other people, and that impassioned sense transformed into sexual passion. She saw Phil as an unsung hero, a freedom fighter, who would one day be as admired as Raoul Wallenberg. With these heroics in mind, she let Phil think that he had seduced her. He was an awkward lover, and when he nibbled her ear and said nasty words, she had to suppress her laughter. Back in her apartment and alone in her own bed, she wrote about the experience in her journal. She was pleased that she had had sex with him. It was her gift to him. He deserved it. But would she do it again? Not a good idea. He might start thinking that the sex was more meaningful than it was. Besides, he had so much hair on his back it was kind of like having sex with a werewolf.

When Wendy departed on the Burma Road trip, it wasn’t Phil who was with her but a lover of one month’s duration, Wyatt Fletcher. He was the adored only child of Dot Fletcher and her late husband, Billy, the Barley King of Mayville, North Dakota, a town whose motto flaunted: “The Way America Is Supposed to Be!” This was a town that fully came together when its native sons fell into trouble, particularly when the trouble was no fault of their own.

Wendy adored Wyatt’s style, for instance, the fact that he could not be coerced or co-opted. If something or someone disagreed with him, he simply “moved on,” as he put it. He was tall, slim-hipped, hairlessly muscled in the chest and back, towheaded and perpetually bronzed as those of Norwegian extraction can be. Wendy believed they were complements of each other. I, however, do not think opposites necessarily are. She was short and curvy, with a mass of curly strawberry-blond hair, skin that easily sunburned, and a sculpted nose, courtesy of a plastic surgeon when she was sixteen. Her mother had homes in San Francisco, Beaver Creek, and Oahu. Wendy assumed Wyatt was from a blue-collar family, since he did not talk much about his parents.

In one sense, Wyatt could be called homeless; his bed was whatever guest room of well-heeled friends he was bumming in for the month. What he did for a living depended entirely on where he was staying. In the winter, he found odd jobs in ski shops and snowboarded in his spare time, and for housing, he shared floor space with his ski patrol friends and a few indoor squirrels. He spent the previous summer bicycling on the fire roads of Mount Tamalpais, accompanied by two Scottish deerhounds that belonged to his ex-girlfriend’s parents, the absentee owners of a countrified wood-shingled mansion in Ross, which was where he house-sat and resided with the hounds, in the quaint pool house with its hammock, billiards table, and oversized rock fireplace. The spring before that, he crewed on a private luxury yacht that took ecotourists around the fjords of Alaska. Several of those well-heeled clients offered him future house-sitting employment, “gigs,” he called them. All in all, he was an easygoing charmer whose predictable rejoinder, “Like, whatever,” to any remark or question was synonymous with his lack of direction and encumbrances in life.

As vacuous as my descriptions may make him sound, I rather liked Wyatt. He had a good heart toward all, whether they were former teachers, girlfriends, or employers. He was not cynical about those of us who were wealthy, nor did he envy or take excessive advantage of us. He remained pleasant and respectful to everyone, even the meter maid who ticketed the car he had borrowed. He always paid the ticket, by the way. I would say he had one of the finest attributes a human being can have, in my opinion, and that is kindness without motives. Of course, his lack of motivation was another matter.

During the bus ride into Lijiang, Wyatt dozed, and Wendy gave everyone who was awake the benefit of her stream-of-consciousness observations. “Omigod, look at those people on the side of the road. They’re smashing rocks, turning them into gravel to pave the road.… Those faces! They look so beaten down. Does the government think people are machines? …” Though Wendy had only arrived in China, she was already sharpening her sensibilities about despotic rule.

LIKE ANY EXUBERANT PUP, Wendy needed to learn “shush.” That’s what Harry Bailley thought. He was sitting across the aisle from her and Wyatt. He had forgotten that he had once possessed the dedication of an activist. In his youth, now some twenty-plus years past, he, too, had wanted desperately to sink his teeth into important causes. He had vowed to resist complacency, abhor apathy, “to make positive, incremental change and leave an imprint after this tenure on earth.”

Years before, a much younger Harry had led the movement to abolish aversive dog-training methods, those that relied on leash-jerking, shock collars, and rubbing the dog’s face in its feces. When he finished veterinary training, he did doctoral studies in the behavioral sciences department at UC Berkeley, investigating pack behavior, how dogs instinctively learned from higher-ups and taught protocols to lower-downs. Dog temperament was not ingrained from birth, he noted. It could be shaped by interaction with other dogs and people and by tasty bribes. Anyone who understood basic Skinnerian principles could tell you that when given positive reinforcement, dogs respond more quickly and consistently to what humans want, and they learn new behaviors more quickly through luring, shaping, and capturing.

“If your doggie has your very expensive alligator purse in his mouth,” Harry would say in his seminars, “offer to trade him a piece of hot dog. Oh goodie, pant-pant, and he’ll drop the purse at your feet. What’s the lesson here? Put your overpriced purses and pumps where Pluto can’t get to them! Then go and get him a smelly old tennis ball. The game is simple: Ball in your hand, treat in his mouth. Even if he’s a basset hound, he’ll turn into an impressive retriever if you do enough trades.”

And through such commonsense advice, Dr. Harry Bailley became the Dog Trainer of Dog Trainers, the founder of the well-regarded International Society of Canine Behaviorists, the inventor of humane training devices (patents pending), the star of The Fido Files, and now the well-qualified owner of my dear, dear Poochini. I’m afraid I never did much training with him, and naughty Poochini had already chewed off the spines of some of Harry’s collection of first-edition books.

“You must inform your clients, gently but firmly,” he often told his disciples at lectures. “Dogs are not people in fur coats. No, indeed. They don’t speak in the future tense. They live in the moment. And unlike you and me, they’ll drink from a toilet. Lucky for us, they are perfect specimens of how operant conditioning and positive reinforcement work, and beautifully so if only we learn how to apply the principles properly. Their human handlers have got to be absolutely objective about what motivates their poochies—so quash their tendency to ascribe Muggum-wuggum’s barking, growling, and counter-surfing to anthropomorphic motives such as pride, revenge, sneakiness, or betrayal. That’s how we speak of our ex-wives, former lovers, and politicians. Remember that Canis lupus familiaris is driven by his own jollies, which are usually harmless to others but can be detrimental to white carpets and Italian shoes. The fact is, dogs mark territory and they masticate. And if dogs resemble Homo erectus in any respect, it is in those traits of the poorly socialized male. Both do what pleases them: they scratch their balls, sleep on the sofa, and sniff any crotch that comes their way. And you, the brilliant dog trainer, must train the owners—that’s right, those barely evolved humans holding those rolled-up newspapers in hand like cavemen’s cudgels—you must train the humans to show the dogs what lucky canines prefer to do other than nip and yowl, or use the leather sofa as a chew toy. Ah! ‘Prefer’ is the operative word, isn’t it? …”

Harry Bailley believed in training people early, before they could inflict any lasting damage upon the wee and impressionable pooches. “Puppy classes!” he would exhort on his television show. “A great equalizer, the perfect socializer, far better than those bore-and-snore book clubs that are all the rage on the other channel. Doggie classes, what a fantastic way for singles to meet. Strong, sensitive men. Woof! Loyal, long-limbed ladies. Woof-woof! And all those sweet, slurpy puppies. Picture their tails wagging—the doggies, you scalawags.” And as his TV clients and their dogs tangoed to “Sit,” “Down,” “Stay,” and “Come,” Harry would ham it up to make everyone feel successful, proud, and continually motivated. “Lure your dog. That’s right, dangle that cheese bit above his nose, now back until he sits. Steady, steady … Yessss! Bingo! Give him the jackpot right away. He’s got it. You’ve got it. Only five point two seconds that time. Good Lord, you two are fast! What a fantastic team!” The dogs panted. The humans, too.

Harry revolutionized dog training. Everyone said so. In the early days, he went so far as to believe his notions of dog behavior could be applied to anything, from toilet training to international politics. He said so in seminars: “Which works faster: beating and humiliating a dictatorship, or luring it to follow a better and more rewarding model? If we call upon the country only to pummel it for being bad, how likely is it to come seeking our humanitarian advice? Isn’t it utterly obvious?” And then Harry would dangle a hundred-dollar bill and bob it up and down so that people in the front row would nod dutifully in agreement. He was rather cocky in those days.

In more recent years, Harry had become less focused on the bad behavior of dog owners and governments and more on his own virility, which he feared might share the fate of endangered species—going, going, gone. He still had his hairline, though it had grayed on the sides—excellent credentials for authority. His physique was still trim; expensive tailored suits helped give him that effect. The damn trouble was, he had an enlarged prostate, the typical benign prostatic hyperplasia that afflicts many men, more annoying than harmful. But by God, Harry would moan, it shouldn’t strangle a man’s best friend before he’s even turned fifty! He was troubled that he had to urinate frequently, and the more he strained, the more he issued forth only driblets, much to his shame at public urinals. He was educated enough to know that the force of urinary flow—or lack thereof—was not a correlation of sexual prowess. Yet he feared that his personal plumbing, which had once spurted those two essential fluids as forcefully as the nozzle on his garden hose, might soon become choked off like a water-saving shower head, and unsatisfying not just to him but to the woman of the moment as well.

He searched the Internet for information that might indicate the prognosis of his sex life should his condition worsen. Ejaculatory backfiring was one worry. Could women really tell? He found a website on prostate problems, with messages from men who shared the same annoying condition. Several posters suggested that daily ejaculations might slow down the hyperplastic activity and keep the pelvic muscles better toned. The message board was also littered with invitations to join porn sites where sufferers could find instant relief for one flat rate. Great, Harry thought, the answer is to masturbate like a kid with a magazine as your one-night stand. No, thank you. He grew more determined to find a lovemate—one would do nicely in this day and age of protected sex and privacy angst—one incredibly wonderful woman he could have and hold, who would understand when parts of him sputtered and gave out, for now or forever. Harry was desperate for love and sex, and for the first time, in that order.

Lovely, sleek Marlena Chu had boarded the bus to Lijiang ahead of him and had taken a window seat, while her daughter, Esmé, raced to the aft of the bus and flopped lengthwise on the long bench. Ye gods, an opportunity. Harry pretended to pass Marlena before reversing to inquire quietly whether she might have any aspirin. Women adore helping creatures in pain; Harry knew that, as well as the fact that ladies always carry remedies for menstrual cramps and headaches. As Marlena began to dig through her purse, he sat down next to her and waited puppylike for his treat.

Although Harry had seen Marlena at many social gatherings in San Francisco, here in this mountain valley in China, she looked positively exotic. Why was that? Why had he not sought her out before? Could it really be that he had overlooked her because she was past a certain dewy-skinned age? But look at her now. Everything about her was smooth and elegant: her hair, her face, her clothes, and especially her movements and gestures. When applying insect repellent, she looked like a goddess. Such grace, such style. She wore a simple black sleeveless sheath and a large colorful pleated scarf, wound and wrapped, so that it resembled a sarong, an origami shawl, a sari, the multiple effects waiting to be undone by a breeze, a whisper of consent in the night.

Naturally, he worried that his friend Moff might have similar thoughts. The two men often did when it came to women. He glanced over at Moff, who was staring right this moment at Heidi as she reached into the overhead rack to pull out a neck pillow from her rucksack. Moff’s son, Rupert, who had been playing with a deck of cards, also stared openly at the young woman’s breasts. Harry had noticed that Moff had given Marlena a number of second glances, his eyes drifting down the length of her figure, lingering on her buttocks. By sitting next to her, Harry hoped this territorial hint would find its way into his friend’s brain, stir some cognition where impulsive behavior and primitive reflexes now resided. Moff could be thickheaded exactly when you didn’t want him to be.

There was that time, Harry recalled, when they were both at a café in Stinson Beach, and Harry had clearly indicated his interest in the café’s owner by saying to Moff: “What gorgeous peepers. Huge hazel irises, fourteen millimeters in diameter, I reckon.” Harry had a fixation about eyes. And Moff had answered, “Really? Hadn’t noticed.” The next day Harry was back at the café and ordered eggs sunny-side up. The woman was friendly, but it was hard to move in more closely; she was like those hand-shy dogs in shelters that had been beaten by previous owners. But he loved the challenge of transforming untrusting creatures into licking maniacs. Take it slowly, he cautioned himself. No sudden moves.

The next day, she wasn’t there. He learned later that Moff had wooed the pants off her by asking if he could drop her somewhere on his refurbished Harley. She rode with him down the coast to Monterey, shedding almost every stitch of clothing and flinging it into the Pacific. After two rapturous months, Moff had to break things off because of “serious differences in expectations.” She responded by spray-painting his motorcycle pink. Harry was more upset than Moff about this report. Blast it! Moff had turned her into a Cerberus hellhound who wanted only to lunge and kill anyone with a penis. He had utterly ruined her as far as future dating was concerned. Adding insult to injury, Moff had also said to him, “Those hazel irises you admired so much? Colored contact lenses, my friend.”

What the devil did women see in Moff? Harry tried to imagine him from a female’s perspective.… He was taller than average (meaning, taller than Harry, who was five-feet-ten), had a passable build, lanky and no flab. But he was a complete washout when it came to proper clothes. His boyhood pal wore the same jungle-safari shirts and baggy short pants no matter what the season or event. And the shoes, well, they were more working-class boots, greased with dirt and flecked with paint. His hands were callused, like an ordinary laborer’s. He wasn’t the sort to buy a woman flowers or speak to her in endearments, not like Harry. And Moff’s hair was a mess, long bushy locks gathered into a ponytail, and a receding hairline accentuating a massive forehead. The latter made him appear super-brainy, which he was, Harry acknowledged, though he also knew that Moff had been kicked out of school for truancy and smoking pot by the time he was sixteen, and thus was forced to become an autodidact.

What knowledge Moff possessed had come from reading, roaming the streets, and took odd jobs in his youth, many of them in dockyards where he did inventory for import-export companies, the rest in backyards in Miami and Los Angeles, where he pruned hedges and cleaned pools. His interest in bamboo began in the 1970s, when he grew walls of it to camouflage his marijuana plants. Keen to make his cannabis as powerful per puff as possible, he devoured books on horticulture, particularly those related to genetic enhancement. Later, bamboo cultivation itself superseded his nefarious grass-growing interests—and why wouldn’t it, when bamboo regenerated so quickly, just like marijuana, but without the legal hassles? And thus he made the 1980s transition to capitalist farmer, shipping containers of “live product,” as he called it, to the lobbies of new office buildings, remodeled airports, and luxury hotels around the world. (Harry didn’t know at the time that Moff and Marlena had quite a few clients in common. Then again, neither did Moff.)

All right, so Moff had an unconventional business, Harry granted him that. And by calling himself a “plantation owner,” Moff made himself highly attractive to women with romantic illusions. They probably thought the plantation was idyllic, like the set for a dinosaur movie, and indeed, it had been used for that purpose on several occasions. But Moff himself had not a whit of romance in his brain. His plantation was intentionally situated near the Laguna Seca Raceway in Salinas, and that was where he took his dates—a factor in a man’s favor if a woman’s idea of a good time was smelling crankcase oil and getting her eardrums blown out by the rpms of Le Mans prototypes. Inexplicably, there was no shortage of women in that category.

Perhaps, Harry thought, he should just be direct with Moff, inform him straightaway that he was interested in Marlena, strongly so. “Old chum, I hope you don’t mind, but you know …” and Harry would indicate with a nod that the lady in favor was Marlena. He imagined Moff would reply with a “Ho-ho,” then clap his hand firmly on Harry’s back, thus sealing their understanding. Marlena, while unaware of the pact, would subconsciously sense the respect these two men shared and never violate it by bedding both of them.

“Have you noticed the trees along the roadside?” Marlena now said to him. Harry peered out the window and in doing so leaned his chest against her arm, his cheek hovering close to hers. The tree trunks were painted white halfway up.

“It’s been that way mile after mile,” she continued, “like a white picket fence.”

My God, Harry thought, her voice was liquid amber, light and mysterious. “An insecticide,” he concluded.

She frowned. “Really? I thought it was so the drivers could see the road at night.”

He backpedaled: “Brilliant deduction. Dual-purpose white. Kills bugs, saves lives.”

“Watching the trees can be hypnotic, though,” she added. “Not great for drivers.”

“Is that why I’m feeling dazed?” He stared into her eyes.

Out of protective instinct, she did a quick deflect. “Probably jet lag.”

He wished he could see her eyes more clearly, but the light was too dim. He could tell how responsive a woman was from the way her pupils reacted. If they pulsed into superdilation, that meant she was open to flirtation, and sex within hours if not minutes was a strong possibility.

Marlena smiled, then yawned. “I can’t wait to fall into my bed.”

“Funny,” Harry quipped, “I’m looking forward to the exact same thing.” He gave his best version of a puppy panting.

She raised one eyebrow, acknowledging the naughty ambiguity of his response. He grinned, and she returned a small smile that was neither rebuke nor acceptance. “The trees,” she ventured again, her voice a little higher, “are they poplars? It’s hard to see the shape of the leaves. Most of them have already fallen off.”

Cheek to cheek, they stared into the darkness, at the blur of whitened trees.

TO HELP MY FRIENDS find the right sensibilities for viewing Lijiang, I included in their itinerary the translated sentiments of a local amateur archivist: “Throughout the last eight centuries, the frequent earthquakes of this region, some measuring to a greatness of 7.0, have rattled the teeth of its citizens, and shaken a few foodstuffs from the cupboards, but not our determination to stay. Because of its beauty, Lijiang is a place no one can ever leave willingly. But if you must go, by peaceful old age or by tourist jet, look down from the sky, and you will notice that Lijiang resembles an ancient ink stone used for centuries to write poetry celebrating its antiquities and self-replenishing virtues.”

This tribute to his hometown was quaint, and perfectly expressed. But of course, most of my friends did not bother to read it.

As I had planned, the group checked into the best hotel Lijiang had to offer. The Glorious View Villa was in the newer, rebuilt section of town, directly across the street from the historic old town with its ramble of lanes, small canals, and aging courtyard homes with their snaky gray tiles and sun-dried mud bricks. The newer hotels of Lijiang were bland but provided one essential tourist attraction: private toilets and baths. The Glorious View had other markings of luxury: a marble-floored lobby lined with uniformed staff, who had received extensive training in greeting customers with happy faces and cheerful phrases: “Welcome!” “You’re welcome!” “You’re most welcome!”

The rooms themselves were small, dull, and dimly lit by energy-saving fluorescent bulbs. The twin beds, sheets, and towels were newer and cleaner than those of any other hotel in the city. The carpets had only a few watermelon stains. A small amount of toilet paper was doled out each day, adequate if one had intestinal fortitude. More was available on request or by theft from the supplies cart in the hall that was monitored by a surveillance camera. The Glorious View Villa was, in fact, the best hotel in the whole of the Naxi Autonomous Region, but for a group used to staying at a chain no worse than the Four Seasons, “best” should have been thought of as a restricted comparative term, not a fixed standard of excellence.

This distinction was lost on Roxanne and Dwight, who tried the knobs on the bedside consoles, the ubiquitous fixture of Chinese hotels. They duly clicked to appropriate notches marked “Lights,” “TV,” “Stereo.” The lights remained lit, the television stayed black, the radio silent. “How can this be a first-class hotel?” Roxanne groused. “This place is the pits.”

Because Lijiang had been described as “historic,” “remote,” and “near the Tibetan foothills,” Roxanne had imagined they would be staying in a nomadic tent – style villa. The floors should have been beaten earth covered with yak hides, and the walls adorned with colorful tapestries. She wanted saddled and snorting camels waiting outside, in lieu of battle-scarred taxis and tens of thousands of tourists, most of whom were Chinese. But it was only Dwight who was snorting. He nuzzled his wife’s breasts, his usual sign that he wished to mate. I use the word “mate” deliberately. They were both desperate to have a baby before it was too late. For this trip, she told him, she had brought along the thermometer, and the last reading indicated it was prime time. She wasn’t in the mood, but this was not about lust.

“I can’t believe they make beds even smaller than twins,” Roxanne said. She pointed disparagingly at the twin bed with its headboard permanently nailed to the wall, a good six feet apart from its match. “Honey, see if you can get us a room with a king-sized bed. If we have to pay more, so be it.” And Dwight dashed down four flights of stairs—no slow elevators for him—in pursuit of this mission. A baby was at stake, his scion, a cross between two future Nobel laureates. By the time he returned to inform his wife that king- and queen-sized beds were deemed imperialist, Roxanne was sonorously asleep.

Across the hall, Harry Bailley, alone in his hotel room, replayed the conversation he had had with Marlena. She was flirting with him, he was damn sure of it. So what should he do to step things up a bit? And what about that midge of a daughter of hers? What a surprise to learn Esme was already twelve. She looked like an eight-year-old, an elfin sylph with her pixie haircut, pink T-shirt, and jeans. She still had a child’s body, not a hint of adolescence on the horizon. But at twelve, the girl could take care of herself and would be less of an obstacle to his gaining Marlena’s solitary affections. In any case, three weeks lay ahead of them, plenty of time to figure out logistics and ways that a prepubescent could amuse herself without the company of her delightful mother. Esme, love, here’s ten dollars. Why don’t you run off into the jungle and give a dollar to each monkey you find?

Harry peered into his wallet. There they were: two condoms. He briefly considered the other attractive single woman in the group, Heidi, younger half sister to Roxanne. She had a certain beguiling quality: big wondering eyes, limber legs, tumbling bunches of blond hair. And those breasts on such a tiny rib cage—they could not possibly be real. (In fact, they were.) Harry, an expert in animal structure, had convinced himself he knew better. They pointed and didn’t sway; he had noticed that many times. What’s more, the nipples sat too high, as if they were doilies floating on balloons. No doubt about it, they were not the bona fide mouthable chew toys. He had slept with a half-dozen women with artificial bosoms, so he should know. His friend Moff had also slept with many of the same type of inflated woman—a few, in fact, were the same, not surprising since the two vacationed at the same Club Meds—and Bamboo Boy swore he could not tell the difference. Tut, tut. That was more telling of Moff, Harry secretly opined. A superior lover, such as he, knew instantly. Naturally endowed women reacted with intense shivers when their nipples were caressed with a feather, an edge of silk, a silky tongue. The reactions of women with implants were a second or two off, or sometimes, to Harry’s horror, entirely absent, especially if their eyes were closed so they could not gauge when to pretend. This left Harry feeling he had fondled a corpse.

Two demerits to Heidi for the implants, Harry decided. Marlena’s breasts were smaller, but they would react lusciously to his touch, and these days, that was far sexier than size. Also in Marlena’s favor, she was relaxed, older than Heidi to be sure, but with a confident maturity he was ready for. Heidi was young, cute, and a little neurotic, a combination that would become in a short time less young, less cute, and more neurotic. She was always so worried about things going wrong—was it clean, was it safe? If she’s on the lookout for problems, Harry thought, she’s going to find them. The best thing for her to do is be on the lookout for good things. It’s how they train people to train dogs. If you’re keen to spot bad behavior that you must punish, you will see only bad behavior. Catch the dog doing something good and reward him, and you’ll start seeing good behavior all the time. God, if only more people knew the principles of dog behavior. Wouldn’t the whole world be great?

Marlena’s child, Esmé, was thinking of dogs as well, one in particular: a tiny Shih Tzu puppy with runny eyes and a cough, which she had seen in the hotel’s beauty parlor late at night. The beauty parlor with its pink lights had odd hours and even odder services. It provided not haircutting or styling but the companionship services of three beauties, who looked not much older than Esmé. One of the girls owned the puppy and said there were others—seven fingers’ worth. This puppy was maybe three months old, she guessed, and a “very good dog.” As she said this, the puppy squatted and let out a stream. It was also for sale cheap, the girl went on without hesitation, only two hundred kwai, about twenty-five American dollars.

“Where’s the mother dog?” Esmé asked.

“Muzzer no here,” the girl replied.

“It’s an orphan?”

And the beauties were quick to assure her, “Fun, fun. Guarantee you money-back.”

Unlike Esmé, who still preferred T-shirts and jeans, the beauties were swathed in tight dresses and perched on chunky-heeled shoes. They carried key chains slung on low-hipped belts, attesting that they owned cars, or at least had privileges to them. In their well-manicured hands, they gripped petite cell phones, always at the ready to offer their services. Harry had received just such an offer a half-hour after checking in. A voice cooed in a Texas twang and Chinese tones: “Hello, honey, you lonesome tonight?” And though Harry was tempted, he was also a veterinarian who was well aware of the precise opportunistic methods by which parasites and deadly viruses travel. Down, boy. Good boy.

Bennie Trueba y Cela had received a similar call and had laughed uproariously. “Sweetie, you’ve got the wrong number,” he said. He had the girth and robustness of his Texan mother, and the sensual lips and extravagant gestures of his Spanish father, who died a month after Bennie had announced to him by letter that he was gay. This sent Bennie to a psychiatrist to examine his problems with other people’s anger, disappointment, and criticism. “My father’s death was like a complete rejection.” He said some variation of this at almost every session, making it sound each time as if it were a sudden epiphany.

Bennie’s room at the Glorious View Villa was the one that would have been mine, across from Vera’s at the end of the hall. The hotel liked to please tour leaders and gave them rooms with a mountain view, that of Jade Dragon Snow Mountain. Its numerous jagged peaks did indeed recall a sleeping dragon with a ridged back. When I was last here and was told I had a mountain-view room, I was suspicious of what this meant, for I have been in hotels that claimed to have panoramas but had only the poetic hint of one. And on one unpleasant occasion, I snapped back the curtain to see that the view was indeed that of a mountain, only it was placed right against the window, the dark rock obscuring all light and emitting the dank smell of a cave.

Bennie took a deep breath and inhaled inspiration from the mountain. The group had originally hoped to secure Dr. Bill Wu as tour leader, and a wise choice that would have been. He was a dear friend from the days when he and I were teaching at Mills College. But he was busy leading another group on an intensive study of the thousand Buddha carvings of the Dunhuang caves. Bennie had a few years of docent experience, but unlike me, he had never been to Burma or China and knew little about either country or its art. He had cried with gratitude when told after my funeral that he had been chosen the new leader. (That was after several other possibilities had been ruled out.) Thus appointed, he vowed to help in any way he could—by organizing luggage collection for transport, confirming airline reservations and passport needs, doing the hotel check-ins, arranging matters with the local guides provided by China’s and Burma’s offices of tourism, anything that would ensure that everyone had a marvelous, first-class adventure.

Pleasing people was his greatest joy, he liked to say. Unfortunately, he often promised what was humanly impossible, and thus made himself the target of people’s ire when reality replaced intention. It was that way with his business. He was a graphic artist, and his lover, Timothy, was an art director. Bennie pledged impossibly fast turnarounds, special design elements and paper stock upgrades thrown in for free, a budget twenty percent lower than what any other firm had submitted, which later grew to be twenty-five percent higher than anyone else’s. (He had inherited this technique of estimates and overruns from his father, who was a building contractor.) There were always unavoidable, perfectly legitimate reasons for the overruns, of course, and in the end he endeared himself to the clients, for they were always ecstatic with the final product. He was, in fact, a very talented designer. But by going away to China and Burma for three weeks, he risked missing his deadlines—again.

On the other hand, the current project was for the Asian Art Museum, and Bennie believed that they, of all people, would understand. He even convinced himself that I, dearly departed Bibi, was sending him signs to lead the tour in my permanent absence. For instance, he found a message in a fortune cookie: “Go where your heart leads you.” A book on Burma popped into his hands when he was in a bookstore. That same day, while purging his files, he happened upon an old invitation to a fund-raiser for the Asian, for which I was listed as a patron and he as having provided a donation in kind. I assure you, I was incapable of sending any such billets-doux. And had I been, I would have been far less subtle. I would have advised Bennie to stay home.

To his credit, Bennie did conscientiously study the itinerary I had prepared. Before the departure date, he had called the various tourism offices in China and Burma to confirm that all arrangements were still locked in. He was so obsessed with making sure everything was right that he ate cashews constantly to assuage his gnawing anxiety. He later switched to pistachios and sunflower seeds, since shelling them required slowing down his consumption. Nevertheless, he gained several pounds, which meant his goal to shed twenty before the trip had to be increased to “a little more.” Going to Burma would aid in that direction, he believed. With the heat and all the running around he would have to do, the fat would melt away like glaciers transported to the Gobi.

As he eased into bed that first night in Lijiang, he was confident that all plans would run as smoothly as the second hand on his Rolex. The bed seemed awfully hard, but he would sleep well, no doubt about that. On the plane, he had been forced to stay awake because there were no electrical outlets for powering up the continuous positive air pressure machine he used for his obstructive sleep apnea. He had feared he would fall asleep and snore loudly or, worse, stop breathing while flying at thirty-nine thousand feet over the Pacific. With transfers in Seoul, Bangkok, and Kunming, he had gone ages without sleep, and when the plane touched down in Lijiang, he was hallucinating that he was back at the San Francisco airport and late for his departure.

Now that he was safe and sound in the hotel, he slipped the sleep mask over his face, adjusted the CPAP machine to the high-altitude setting, cranked the pressure up to fifteen, then lay back with his head in a horseshoe-shaped neck brace. He silently thanked me for my wisdom in suggesting that the group sleep in late the first morning, then leisurely rise to enjoy “A Taste of Winter Delicacies” at a picturesque local restaurant. I had chosen the menu myself: sautéed ferns, pine needles in a spicy sauce, north-wind mushrooms with their tiny caps, cow-liver mushrooms, large and smooth black, oh, and best of all, a lovely braised white reed whose texture is somewhere between asparagus and endive. Bennie was happy to transition from sleep to food.

Dwight had other ideas. At seven a.m., he managed to roust Roxanne and Heidi, as well as the young and the restless, Rupert, Esmé, Wyatt, and Wendy. They went jogging through the old town, where they risked ankle wrenches while dodging Tibetan spaniels and Pekingese lying on the uneven stone-paved lanes. Rupert and Esmé zoomed past Dwight. Rupert had the same coloring and features of the local kids, Dwight noticed. I would say, however, that Rupert’s height and his earrings, two on the upper part of one ear, were glaring signs that he was not from these parts. But Esmé could easily have passed for many a child in Lijiang. The majority of the inhabitants were the result of centuries of bedtime mergers among Han Chinese, a dozen Yunnan tribes, and over the ages, British opportunists, European explorers, passing nomads, and fleeing Jews. The populace was an unplanned and lovely mix, no two ever the same, just like art.

It was a thrilling, vertiginous run—the smell of morning fires, steaming cauldrons, and fire-snapping grills, the awesome snowy peaks. “Coming up behind you,” they would shout, and then pass successive clusters of Naxi women with their crisscross halters to which were secured ninety-pound loads of pine needles pressing on their backs.

Our early-morning risers spent forty-five minutes aerobically seizing their lungs at an altitude of seven thousand eight hundred seventy-four feet and a temperature of forty-eight degrees, then chanced upon the perfect place to breakfast. What luck: there they were, sitting among the locals on long benches, gulping down with proletarian gusto bowls of thick spicy noodles and chives, a breakfast that well suited them, since their confused stomachs had been crying that it was time for a flavorful dinner and not a bland breakfast.

At nine, the nip in the air was gone, and when the hale and hearty returned to the hotel, they were ready for more adventures. They rang up the others, gurgling over what delights were to be seen while running about in the fresh alpine air as opposed to dozing in a dreary room. Soon everyone was in the lobby, so that they could meet up with the local guide and be on their way.

Bennie announced that there had been a slight change in plans. He quickly assured them that it was all for the better. He had had a phone call earlier that morning from a man who told him that their guide from yesterday, Mr. Qin, had experienced an unavoidable problem. (The problem was that another tour leader, who knew of Qin’s merits, had, with a few dollars pushed into helpful hands, pirated him away.) Bennie assumed the original guide or a member of his family had taken ill. The voice at the other end of the line said Bennie could choose from one of two available guides. One was an older man born and raised in this province and an expert on every square inch of the area, from the tops of the highest mountains to the rocks down below. Besides knowing English and Mandarin, he could speak several minority dialects, including Bai, his native tongue. He was excellent, energetic and happy, and everyone was pleased with his services, in spite of “his recent loss.”

“What loss?” Bennie had asked.

“His arm,” the voice on the phone said. “He misses his arm.”

“Oh. I’m sorry. What about the other one?” Bennie asked.

“That arm no problem.”

“I mean the other guide.”

The voice described a woman, younger than the man, but not too young. She had no losses. Formerly, she was from the big city, Chengdu, and was reassigned to here. Formerly, she was a teacher. Because she was new to the area, she was not as experienced as the older man, but she had studied intensively, so she was also very good.

“What kind of teacher?” Bennie asked.

“English,” came the answer.

“So that’s who I picked,” Bennie explained to the group. “I could tell they were trying to stick me with this old guy that nobody wanted. But I managed to get the English teacher, who sounded more hip and up-to-date on things.”

A minute later, the former English teacher walked in. She wore oversized glasses with lenses so shiny that it was hard to see her eyes. Her hair had undergone a tragic experiment; her sister-in-law, who hoped to work in a beauty salon one day, had subjected her to a permanent, and no matter how much she tried to tame the tightened curls, her hair was a battle of tufts that all jutted out in opposing directions. She wore a drab blue top with wide lapels and white buttons, complemented by matching unattractive slacks. It was never my nature to judge people solely on appearances, but I had a bad feeling.

She stepped forward timidly and in a barely audible voice said, “So pleasing meet you in Lijiang.” This was how the group met the stiff and reticent Miss Rong, a name that everyone pronounced “wrong” from start to end.

If I could have stopped this fiasco by jumping back into the living, I would have done so. Miss Rong was not local to the area, not even to Yunnan Province. She spoke no minority dialects, had no training in art and culture. The one-armed man, by the way, was an excellent guide, the most knowledgeable of all the guides. But Miss Rong was at the bottom of a very deep barrel. She was not able to talk about the ravishing mountain meadow scenery or give insight into the history of Lijiang, its two ancient families, the customs of the Naxi or any of the other tribes in the area. She had memorized information and stated the number of square kilometers, the population, the percentage of economic growth in key areas of industry and agriculture. I had to hear it only once. “The old city,” she said in a heavy accent and with the stiffness of recitation, “is protect by UNESCO. You know UNESCO. For that reason, Lijiang will stay ancient with economic developing, and because therefore, you can inspect the authentic historical site with special law for snacks selling, tailor, barber, and tourist traps.”

“So what’s up for today?” Bennie asked in a nervously cheerful tone. He hoped she would improve once she loosened up. Miss Rong began to outline the day’s activities. The more she talked, the worse her English seemed to be. Everyone had a hard time understanding her. Bennie pretended he did not. A discussion ensued among my friends, led by Dwight, about changing the plans a bit, including perhaps a bike trip the next day instead of the temple visit, and a hike rather than the tour of the UNESCO site. Miss Rong looked blank-faced as English words ran past her ears. “And we should cancel this ‘Taste of Winter Delicacies,’” Dwight said. “I don’t want to sit in a tourist restaurant and eat what all the tourists eat.” He went on to brag about the native cuisine they had eaten that morning, how they sat among the locals, and it was completely spontaneous, not a tourist activity, but a real experience. The noodle soup was also delicious. My friends made affirmative responses. “Sounds great.”

Dwight turned to the speechless Miss Rong and let spew a rapid assortment of words she could not follow: “… authentic … no buffet … no touristy restaurant … no strict schedule.” He was very stern, she sensed, had so many prohibitions to not do this, not do that. But what? What he did not want was not entirely clear. The tongue-tied Miss Rong could answer only, “This no problem.”

Bennie also had no objections to the suggested changes. He had wanted to please and was mortified that he had instead chosen a guide who was nearly unintelligible. “Terrific. Let’s do it!” he said of the new plan. He secretly mourned not eating winter delicacies. Sautéed ferns—lost to spontaneity, alas.

A further powwow led to the consensus that they should set forth immediately on a bus ride to Stone Bell Mountain, where they might do some hiking. They gathered what they needed for the day, which for everyone except Heidi was hardly more than what they wore, some camera gear, journal books, and sketch pads. Soon they boarded the bus and were on their way, hooting and cheering, “To Stone Bell Mountain,” as Roxanne took a group shot with her camcorder. This would be their habit from now on: to change plans and announce their new fate as if it were a better course.

Two hours into the bus ride, several people yelled that they had seen a roadside restaurant with an authentic local look about it. The bus pulled into a dusty lot in front of a one-room hovel. Being famished, Bennie declared this an oasis befitting a possible write-up in Travel & Leisure. The quaint stools and low table with its antique plastic tablecloth had transformed into an al fresco mirage … The group stepped off the bus, shed their jackets, and stretched. The air was warm. Moff and Rupert headed for the nearest clump of trees. The others sat at the tables. Bennie took out a sketch pad, Wendy had her soft leather journal with its nearly pristine lined pages, and Roxanne looked through the viewfinder of her omnipresent digital camcorder. What luck that they had come upon this rustic eatery (which even the locals eschewed with authentic disdain). What luck for the cook (promoted to “chef” by Wendy) and his waitress wife. They had not seen a hapless customer in three days.

“What shall we order?” Bennie asked the group.

“No dog!” cried Esmé.

“How about snake?” joked Rupert.

“You don’t suppose they eat cats?” Heidi added, and shuddered at the thought.

Miss Rong conveyed this message in Mandarin to the chef: “They don’t wish to eat dog, but want to know if you serve the famous Yunnan dish Dragon Meets Lion.” The cook sadly informed her they had had no deliveries of fresh snake or cat recently. But his wife interjected they would gladly serve their finest. That turned out to be a bit of something that resembled pork, and might have been chicken, rice twice reheated, and all of it invisibly sprinkled with cockroach legs coated with little microbes that feed off human intestinal lining. This plat du jour was washed down with plentiful bottles of warm beer and cola.

Harry Bailley drank three local ales and ate nothing. Dear friend that he is, I know he is quite the fussy eater, who prefers Languedoc with this peasant dish, Sancerre with that, and it should be this vintage, served at that temperature. Beer was already a concession for him, let alone a lukewarm bottle that was not Guinness stout. Having drunk three, he was in urgent need of a loo. He was slightly inebriated, and because the restroom was unlit, he nearly fell into the abyss. Catching himself, he then observed both visually and viscerally the level of hygiene practiced in this restaurant. Good God, that hole in the floor that passed as a toilet was only a suggested target. It was also evident that quite a number of deathly ill people with bloody bowel disorders had found refuge there. Furthermore, toilet paper was not to be found, nor water with which to wash one’s hands. Abominable! Thank God he had not partaken of the fare.

Heidi also did not indulge in the roadside picnic. She had eaten the protein-rich soy bar she carried in her daypack, where she also stored a bottle of water, along with the heating coil she had used that morning to disinfect the water. In the same pouch she had two mini-bottles of antibacterial disinfectant, a half-dozen alcohol wipes, a doctor-prescribed needle and syringe in case she was in a head-on collision and needed an operation, her own nonporous eating utensils, a pack of moistened towelettes, chewable antacid tablets for coating the stomach before and after eating (this, she had read, could ward off as much as ninety-eight percent of the common nasties that cause travelers’ diarrhea), a plastic funnel with a six-inch retractable tube for urinating while standing, nonlatex gloves for handling the funnel, an epinephrine injection pen in case she went into anaphylactic shock from an exotic insect bite, extra nine-volt batteries for the portable air sanitizer she wore around her neck, lithium batteries for the anti-nausea device worn on her wrist, as well as Malarone tablets for preventing malaria, anti-inflammatories, and a prescription bottle of antibiotic for bacterial gastrointestinal diseases. More preventatives and remedies, including a bag of intravenous fluid, were in her suitcase back at the hotel.

Heidi and Harry were thus spared from dysentery this time, she by anxiety, and he by snobbery. From years of experience, the bus driver, Xiao Fei, who was called “Mr. Fred” for American convenience, had an intestinal tract and immune system conditioned to resist infection. Some in our group, by virtue of their inherited robustness in warding off disease, would overcome the invaders before any symptoms manifested. As for the others, the dysentery consequences of this Shigella bacillus culinary adventure would not be felt for another few days. But the bacteria had already begun their descent into foreign guts, and would wend their ways into intestinal tracts and into bowels. The bus would take a similarly tortuous, winding route along the Burma Road, where soon the forces of fate and Shigella would meet up with them.