TAROKO GORGE
TAROKO GORGE
JACOB RITARI
This is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2010 by Jacob Ritari
All rights reserved. This book, or parts thereof,
may not be reproduced in any form without permission.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Ritari, Jacob.
Taroko Gorge / Jacob Ritari.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-1-936071-65-4
1. Americans—Taiwan—Fiction. 2. Missing persons—Fiction.
3. Taiwan—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3618.I755T37 2010
813’.6—dc22
2009053806
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Book Design by SH • CV
First Printing
The poem quoted on page 11 is “Song of the Master and Boatswain,” by W. H. Auden. The song quoted on pages 19–20 is “Sarabai,” by Aki Hata, © 2002, Lantis. The poem quoted on page 148 is “The Song of the Smoke,” by Bertolt Brecht.
This dedication belongs to:
Tom Newhall
(without whom there would have been no idea),
Peter Piatetsky
(without whom there would have been no story),
and
Chris Castellani
(without whom there would have been no book).
C: Well, for practical purposes—but theoretically, that is only a partial explanation. An adequate explanation must ultimately be a total explanation, to which nothing further can be added.
R: Then I can only say that you’re looking for something which can’t be got, and which one ought not to expect to get.
• debate between Frederick C. Copleston and Bertrand Russell •
A man who goes on a trip has a story to tell.
• German Proverb •
TAROKO GORGE
PETER NEILS
I was fourteen when I stopped believing in God. At the time it wasn’t dramatic. I remember lying in the bedroom of that old, drafty house and thinking: If you are there, I hope you’ll forgive me if I stop believing in you for a while, because right now I just don’t see the reason. When you’re fourteen, you don’t have much reason to believe one way or the other. Everyone tells you what to do and anything you want is within arm’s reach. Then you grow up, and you start disbelieving for other reasons.
But unbelief has its own comforts. You’re not in such a hurry to figure everything out if you’re not sure it will make a difference in the end, and you always figure if he does exist, and he’s the forgiving guy everyone says he is, you can still make it in under the wire. And hey, the world’s a big place, and there’s plenty of time to find something you can believe in—maybe on the other side of the world.
Then you go to the other side of the world and maybe you don’t find what you were expecting. You find something you’d just as soon not have seen. Then you come back and try to tell people about it, but you can’t. When you finally have a story to tell, you can’t tell it anymore because the person you were—along with the means you had for relating what you knew—is dead.
I should back up, though.
My name is Peter Neils—Nils originally, Scandinavian—I’m forty-six, and I’m a journalist. I’ve been in Nigeria and Sierra Leone, I got as close to Chechnya as they’d let me, and I was in the Gulf during the war, although by the time I got there most of the fun was over.
But that was when I was younger, still living down a bad marriage (high school sweethearts, seventeen, preggers, the whole nine yards—that’s how it gets in Wisconsin), and I was probably hoping half the time I would die. As I got older I cooled off. These days I mostly do short pieces for Vanity Fair and National Geographic—pictures of waterfalls and tree frogs, the sort of thing people like. Nobody wants to see a hole full of severed arms. But for some reason people like to look at pictures of glaciers.
No one is ever frightened by a glacier—although, perhaps, they should be.
I was once profiled in Esquire. The lady interviewer asked me a question I assumed was just conversational, but it later—to my immense chagrin—cropped up in the interview.
“What do you think,” she asked me, “should be the UN policy on intervention if the People’s Republic of China were to invade Taiwan?”
You see there were no other political questions, so I was thrown for a loop, although it was a hot topic then with the handover of Hong Kong.
“If that were to happen,” I told her, “I would personally enlist in the Taiwanese army and fight the Chinese. The UN can do what it likes, but Taiwan is a beautiful country full of lovely people, and I will die before I see those godless communists step one foot on its soil.”
I had imbibed some vermouth.
That whole “godless” bit was a joke: I’m still more or less godless myself (although I’ve flirted with the whole Buddhist thing, and my brother is very Catholic, which I respect). And it was more a sentiment than an expression of fact: if China were to invade I doubt the Taiwanese would be dumb enough to put up a fight, no matter how seriously they take their army. I just liked the idea, and I liked how it sounded, and there it was in print in a little red insert. My fifteen minutes, and I’d come off like an Internet wack job.
Not that I didn’t get support. A lot of people felt the same, it turned out, but I’m not a radical by nature—I’m an observer—and besides, this isn’t the Spanish Civil War; the days of Hemingway and heroics are over. Hemingway had a line about heroics being over, and how you die like a dog, but at least then you could still fight—even if it didn’t mean anything. These days the gap in this world between the helpless and the heartless is wider than ever.
I’d
