orphans and had bragged to her teacher and classmates of this noble cause, would have protested unceasingly had she been told they were now going to fashionable Italy instead.
How I knew all this, I had no notion at first, didn’t even wonder how I knew. But I sensed others as clearly as I sensed myself; their feelings became mine. I was privy to their secret thoughts: their motives and desires, guilt feelings and regrets, joys and fears, as well as the shades of truth within what they said, and what they refrained from saying. The thoughts swam about me like schools of colorful fish, and as people spoke, their true feelings dove through me in a flash. It was that shocking and effortless. The Mind of Others—that’s what the Buddha would have called it.
Whatever the case, with this enlarged consciousness, I eavesdropped on my friends as they discussed the upcoming Burma trip. “To tell the truth,” I heard Roxanne Scarangello say, “I’ve been asking myself why I even agreed to go to Burma.” This was a small jab at her husband, Dwight Massey, who had booked them on the trip without gaining her full enthusiasm. It could be argued that she had never said no, not absolutely. While she was busy with a critical part of her research, she told him to make the arrangements but said she wouldn’t mind another trip to the Galápagos, so she could further document ecological changes and their effects on the endemic species of the islands. That was the topic of her forthcoming book. She was an evolutionary biologist, a Darwin scholar, and a MacArthur fellow.
Her husband was a behavioral psychologist who had once been her student; he was thirty-one, twelve years her junior. His specialization was the neurological differences between males and females, “often erroneously referred to as differences in mean IQ,” Dwight would say, “rather than different fluencies in regional areas of the brain.” He was now assisting with the research project of another scientist, investigating the means by which squirrels were able to bury nuts in a hundred-some places, without any discernible pattern except a roughly circular one, and then months later find the nuts again. What strategies did females use to bury and find the nuts? What strategies did the males use? Were they different? Which were more efficient? It was an interesting project, but it was not Dwight’s. He was an underling. His career thus far had been determined more by the universities where Roxanne was sought.
Dwight had worshipped Roxanne unquestioningly when they first paired up—this was ten years back, shortly after she appeared in Esquire’s “Women We Love” issue. He was twenty-one, her brightest student. In recent times he more frequently competed with her intellectually, as well as physically. Both Roxanne and Dwight were appallingly athletic and loved very much to perspire. So they had much in common. But if you were to meet them for the first time, you might think, as I did, that they were an unlikely couple. She was muscular and stocky, round-faced and ruddy-complexioned, with a demeanor that was at once smart and friendly. He was lanky, had sharp-angled facial features that made him look roguish, and his manner seemed combative and arrogant. She evinced confidence, and he acted like the nippy underdog.
“It’s the ethics that bother me,” Roxanne now said. “If you go to Burma, it’s in some ways a financial collusion with a corrupt regime.”
Marlena stepped in: “Roxanne makes a very good point. When we signed up, it seemed that the regime was improving matters. They were on the verge of some kind of rapprochement with that woman, the Nobel Peace Prize winner—”
“Aung San Suu Kyi,” said Dwight.
“—and to go,” Marlena continued, “when many are honoring the boycott, well, it’s similar to crossing a picket line, I think—”
Dwight cut her off again. “You know what kind of people blindly follow boycotts? Same ones who say that eating hamburgers means you approve of torturing cows. It’s a form of liberal fascism. Boycotts don’t help anyone, not real people. It just makes the do-gooders feel good.…” Wherever he really stood on the matter of boycotts, Dwight keenly wanted to make this trip because he had learned only a year before that his great-great-grandfather on his mother’s side had gone to Burma in 1883, leaving his wife and seven children in Huddersfield, a city of industry in Yorkshire. He took a job with a British timber company, and, as the story was reported in the family, he was ambushed by natives on the banks of the Irrawaddy in 1885, the year before the British officially took over old Burmah. Dwight felt an uncanny affinity toward his ancestor, as though some genetic memory were driving him to that part of the world. As a behavioral psychologist, he knew that wasn’t scientifically possible, yet he was intrigued by it, and lately, obsessed.
“What is the point of not doing something?” he went on arguing. “Don’t eat beef, feel good about saving cows. Boycott Burma, feel good about not going. But what good have you really done? Whom have you saved? You’ve chosen to vacation in fucking Bali instead.…”
“Can we discuss this more rationally?” Vera said. My dear friend despised hearing people use sexual expletives for emphasis. Invoke religion instead, she’d say to those in her organization—use the “damn” and “God Almighty” that show strength of conviction. Use the f-word for what it was intended, the deep-down guttural pleasure of sex. And don’t bring it into arguments where hearts and brains should prevail. She was known to have kicked people off projects at work for lesser linguistic offenses. She observed that Dwight was smart and abrasive, and this combination was worse than being simply stupid and annoying. It made people want to pummel him to bits, though they might have agreed with some of what he had to say.
“Sanctions worked in South Africa—” Marlena began.
“Because the oppressors were white, and rich enough to feel the pinch,” Dwight finished. “The U.S. sanctions in Burma are pretty ineffectual. Burma does most of its trade with other Asian countries. Why should they care if we disapprove of them? Come on, what’s the incentive?”
“We could reroute to Nepal,” another from our little group said. That would be Moff, an old friend of Harry’s from boarding school days at École Monte Rosa in Switzerland, which they had attended while their diplomat fathers were assigned to countries without English-speaking schools. Moff was interested in Nepal because he owned a bamboo farm near Salinas, and, as it happened, he had been doing research on harvestable wood products in the Nepal lowlands and the possibility of living there six months out of the year. His name was actually Mark Moffett, but he’d been known as Moff since Harry started calling him that in boyhood. The two friends were now in their forties and divorced. For the last four years they had made a ritual of traveling together during winter holidays.
Moff figured that his fifteen-year-old son, Rupert, would love Katmandu as much as he had at that age. But his ex-wife would no doubt throw his Nepalese singing bowls at his balls if he took their son to that “hippie place.” In the custody battle for Rupert, she had accused Moff of being a drug addict, as if he had been smoking crack ’round the clock rather than just a few friendly tokes of weed every now and then. It had been a battle to get her to let Rupert with him to China and Burma for the holidays.
Vera cleared her throat to get everyone’s attention. “My dear fellow travelers, I hate to tell you this, but to change or cancel anything now means forfeiting the entire deposit, which, by the way, is one hundred percent of the cost since we are now just days from our departure date.”
“Good Lord, that’s outrageous!” Harry exclaimed.
“What about our trip insurance?” Marlena said. “That would cover it. Unexpected death.”
“I’m sorry to report Bibi didn’t buy any.” Why was Vera apologizing for my sake? As everyone murmured varying degrees of shock, dismay, and disgust, I shouted and pounded my fist into my palm to make my point. But no one could hear me, of course, except Poochini, who perked his ears, raised his nose, and yelped as he tried to sniff me out.
“Shush,”
