I check to see that the pissing monk is not in sight. It’s late afternoon. Cannes is all lit up now, a gaudy jewel. “I want to fuck right next to the Twenty-Third Psalm, Janya. I want to do something really, really bad. Let’s fuck right here.”
She presses close to me. I can smell her skin, a scent like orange blossoms which always reminds me of Bangkok.
“Don’t ever leave me,” I whisper in her ear. “I’d go nuts if you did.”
She looks at me in the eye, smiling, wondering.
“What?” I ask her.
“You are so full of surprises. Maybe I should pull one of my own.”
“No, don’t. I hate surprises.”
“Not fair.”
“Okay, but make it nice. Like Christmas or a birthday.”
“Or a baby.”
“No, no babies. Babies scare me. They’re loathsome and full of themselves. Egomaniacs.”
“We were all babies once. Some of us still are.”
“Hmm. Broad hint.”
She presses her lips to mine. “Shut up, baby. Close your eyes and open your heart.” And then she mumbles something strange, and I realize she is reading the psalm again. “Surely goodness and mercy will follow me all the days of my life. I will fear no evil.”
the little toil of love
His first words to me are: You don’t look like shit.
His next words are: Liana hasn’t been asking about you.
I have no idea what he’s talking about. I stare blankly at him. He passes his hand across my face.
Jesus fuck, Andy, he says. It’s me. It’s fucking Nick. I’ve come to get you out.
* * *
The 3 most important things in life are marijuana, getting laid, & rock music. That’s what you always said. So what the fuck are you doing in there with a bunch of Commies?
Nick’s words bounce off me & make no sense. He’s brought me coffee in a thermos jug. I haven’t had decent coffee in months. The liquid scalds my tongue. It feels good. It feels good to feel something.
We’ve traveled days on foot to get to this town. I don’t know its name, I don’t know where we are. It’s a small army barracks with a visiting area packed with people looking for guys like me & the student & Eddie. There’s no one else here, but they’re staying just the same, as though the sheer persistence of their presence will make the missing materialize before their eyes. They’re wives, mothers, fathers, children, & babies—lots of squealing, besotted babies. Every time somebody’s brought in, they come here, thinking it’s someone they know.
I tell Nick these guys have a lot to learn from Mao.
What?
Mao. You know. The babies & shit. Only one child per household. That’s the way to get your shit straight.
He looks relieved. Welcome back, you old motherfucker, he says. Thought I lost you there for a while.
* * *
Nick’s just got a job scraping corneas off dead people. He says it’s some kind of transplant experiment that’s going to be standard in a few years. He works late-night shifts, alone in a lab in Manila with a bunch of dead bodies. Some of them come all badly messed up from accidents or shoot-outs with the Communists, but their corneas are still perfect. It pays good money.
Nick’s never had any medical experience, much less held a degree. He’s already passed himself off as a daytime soap actor, a journalist, & an exiled aristocrat. Nick says it’s easy to fuck these guys when they think of you as white. Greeks technically aren’t white but he can be white if that’s what it takes to get things moving. He’s learned to be anything since he escaped Papadopoulos’s dictatorship back in Greece. White guys can do anything, he says. Give us a dead body, & we’ll goddamn scrape any eye off like it’s nobody’s business.
* * *
Where are we?
You’re back in Manila, man. Just outside the city. Fucking suburban boonies. Back where you started from.
Nick stares at me with a mixture of sympathy & horror, like I’ve risen from the dead. You look 10 years younger without your hair, he says. You look like a fucking teenager.
He’s trying to make me feel good. I know I look like shit.
Why’d you do it? he asks. I think Nick is playing the guilt thing again, & he senses it, & he says, Your hair, why did you cut your hair?
I tell him I had to look inconspicuous. Like I was already enlisted. Like I was just on furlough.
Good thing, he says. The government’s banned long hair.
I know all about it. The lieutenant says it all the time, says long hair is a sign of decadence. The Beatles are messengers of the Antichrist. Rock is the music of the devil. Hippies are souls that have gone astray. There’s a strong message of divine righteousness in dictatorships. Every megalomaniac has to believe his actions are sanctioned by God.
Long dark-blond hair, Nick says wistfully. You looked like James Taylor in Two-Lane Blacktop.
James Taylor had darker hair, I tell him.
You know what I mean. Now you’re just damn skinny. What the fuck got you here anyway?
Here we go. I knew it was coming. To do that, I tell Nick, we’ll have to talk mojo.
* * *
Talk mojo, noun, or verb, or whatever: a language of negatives, purely intended as a private joke. Nick & I invented it, one stoned & drunken night at a bar or something. Hard to remember where.
Examples: I’m never getting high again. I’m not so going to fuck that girl. I’m never horny. We used to banter it around in the red-light district & got all the putas puzzled or pissed & afterward Nick & I had a good laugh. & of course sometimes it backfired. She’s so not good looking is something no girl wants to hear. & Nick liked it when it backfired because he didn’t like it that the girls liked me & just sort of liked him, because he was a doctor or a baron or some kind of important person from the US consulate & that’s supposed to turn them on.
Talk mojo. I knew that shit was going to be useful someday.
* * *
I haven’t been avoiding the other American residents in the city. I don’t hang out with the few backpacking dharma bums just passing through. They don’t tell me to lie low, to go somewhere else. They don’t tell me it’s too risky here. The army’s not going to conscript every fucking one of us, no matter where we are. I don’t follow their advice. I don’t disappear somewhere myself. I haven’t been living in the south, on the island of Cebu.
& absolutely none of this can be blamed on Liana.
* * *
The language of negatives poses some problems. How do I tell Liana to stop asking about me? How do I tell Nick not to mention her ever again?
Here is what Andy did, in real language.
Follow Liana to Manila, where she has found work as a Peace Corps volunteer. Don’t ask why. Filipina American UC Berkeley activist wanting to go back and do something for her country. Immediately finds a local boyfriend, a friend of the family, whatever. Me alone with Nick, that’s the only friend I have left. The girls. Anna, most of all. Liana gets insanely jealous, but what the fuck? She’s fucking someone else, I get to do the same thing, right? Draft happens;