another car speeding from the other direction. Sylvain loses control. The car skids and shoots off the cliff, landing on the jagged rocks below.
* * *
There are more reels and more boxes, but we’ve finished an entire bottle and, not surprisingly, Janya and I are both exhausted.
The next morning, Janya suggests that we take the ferry to Île Saint-Honorat. There’s not much to see there, especially at this time of the year. We walk around the island and linger at the ruins of the tower, where we have a 360-degree view of the bay. Below, we can see the back of the abbey’s barn. A monk comes out, stands against a wall, lifts the skirt of his soutane, and takes a piss.
“Well, this is it,” I tell her. “This is where the story ends.”
“Or begins,” she says.
“Now that I’ve told you my life story, I’m afraid to lose you.”
“What do you mean?”
“Weird to think about it, but it would be like losing a part of myself.”
“Well, isn’t that what this game is all about?”
“I wish we wouldn’t call it a game anymore.”
“Well, it’s certainly beyond that now.”
“I wish I hadn’t told you so much, but we do have this agreement. I wish you’d tell me something as outlandish or as intimate from your own life. Then I wouldn’t feel so, well, vulnerable.”
“I could make something up.”
“That’s cheating.”
“Or I could start something outlandish right now.”
“Hmm. What did you have in mind?” I slip my hand inside her blouse. The wind has picked up and is getting icy cold. Her nipples are hard. I pull her other hand down to my crotch.
“Not here,” she says.
“Why not?”
She points to the stone slab behind me. There’s a carved inscription of the Twenty-Third Psalm written in Provençal. She reads it aloud. “Bewitching,” she says. “I don’t get it, but it almost makes me want to believe.”
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
