Ian McDonald - River of Gods

“Could you come over? Something’s happened.”

She had never, ever heard his voice sound like that before. Terrified, she drove through the greying predawn. At every intersection her imagination cranked up a new level of dreads and possibilities but back of them all was the master fear; they had been found out. The lights were all on and the doors stood open.

“Hello the house?”

“In here.”

He sat on the old rollback leather sofa she knew from faculty barbecues and Sunday sports days. It and two tall bookcases were the only pieces of furniture in the room. The rest had been stripped. The floor was bare, the walls carried picture-hooks like hanging Spanish question marks.

“Even the cats,” Thomas Lull said. “Right down to the toy mice. Can you believe it? Toy mice.

You should see the den. She took her time over that one. She went through every single book and disk and file. I suppose it’s not so much losing a wife as getting rid of a collection of Italian opera favourites.”

“Had you?”

“Any idea? No. I walked in and all was as you see it. There was this.” He held up a piece of paper. “The usual stuff, hadn’t been working, sorry, but it was the only way. Don’t try to get in touch. You know, she has the gumption to get up and lift everything without a word of warning, but when it comes to the fond farewell, she comes out with every fucking cliche in the book. That is so her. That is so her.”

He was shaking now.

“Thomas. Come on, you can’t stay here. Come on back to mine.” He looked puzzled then nodded. “Yes, thank you, yes.”

Lisa picked up his bag as she steered him to her car. He suddenly seemed very old and uncertain. At her house she made him hot tea which he drank while she made up the spare bed, out of sensitivity.

“Would you mind?” Thomas Lull asked. “Could I come in with you? I don’t want to be on my own.”

He lay with his back to Lisa Durnau, folded in on himself. Photosharp images of the desecrated room and Lull tiny as a boy on his big man’s sofa startled Lisa awake each time she approached the drop into sleep. In the end she did sleep, as the grey of predawn filled up her big bedroom.

Five days later, after everyone telling him she was a cow and how well he was doing and he would get over it and he would be happy again and there’s always your work/friends/self, Thomas Lull walked out of the worlds real and virtual without a word, without a warning. Lisa Durnau never saw him again.

“You’ll forgive me, but this seems a somewhat unorthodox way of curing asthma,” says Dr. Ghotse. Aj’s face is red, her eyes bulge, her fingers twitch. Her tilak seems to throb.

“Couple of seconds longer,” Thomas Lull says. He waits until she can take no more, and one second beyond. “Okay, and in.” Aj opens her mouth in an ecstatic, whooping inhalation. Thomas Lull clamps his hand over it. “Through the nose. Always through the nose. Remember, the nose for breathing, the mouth for talking.”

He removes his hand, watches the slow belling out of her little round belly.

“Would it not be simpler taking medication?” Dr. Ghotse opines. He holds a little coffee cup very delicately in his two hands.

“The whole point of this method,” says Thomas Lull, “is that you don’t need medication, ever again. And hold.”

Dr. Ghotse studies Aj as she again empties her lungs in a long, whistling exhalation through her nostrils and holds.

“This is very like a pranayama technique.”

“It’s Russian; from the days when they had no money to buy anti-asthma drugs. Okay, and out.” Thomas Lull watches Aj exhale. “And hold again. It’s a very simple theory if you accept that everything you’ve been taught about how to breathe is dead wrong. According to Dr. Buteyko, oxygen is poison. We rust from the moment we’re born. Asthma is your body’s reaction to try to stop you taking in this poison gas. But we go around like big whales with our mouths open taking great searing lungfuls of O2 and tell ourselves it’s doing us good. The Buteyko method is simply balancing your O 2, and your CO 2, and if that means you have to starve your lungs of oxygen to build up a healthy supply of carbon dioxide, then you do what Aj here is doing. And in.” Aj, face pale, throws her head back and expands her belly as she inhales. “Okay, breathe normally, but through the nose. If you feel panicky, do a couple of rounds of breath retention, but don’t open your mouth. The nose, always the nose.”

“It seems suspiciously simple,” Dr. Ghotse says.

“The best ideas are always the simplest,” Thomas Lull says, the Barnum of breathology.

After he has seen Dr. Ghotse creaking off on his tricycle, Thomas Lull walks Aj back to her hotel. Trucks and Maruti micro-buses roll along the straight white road tootling their multiple horns. Thomas Lull raises a hand to the drivers he recognises. He should not be here. He should have sent her off with a wave and a smile and when she was out of sight taken his bag straight to the bus station. And why does he say, “You should come back tomorrow for another session. It takes a while to get the technique right.”

“I don’t think so, Professor Lull.”

“Why?”

“I do not think you will be here. I saw the case on your bed, I think you will be leaving today.”

“What makes you think that?”

“Because I found you.”

Thomas Lull says nothing. He thinks, can you read my mind? A dug-out carrying neatly dressed schoolchildren crosses the backwater to the landing, alcofuel engine burbling.

“I think you want to know how I found you,” Aj says mildly. “You do?”

“Yes, because it would always have been easier for you to leave, but you are still here.” She stops, head following a dagger-billed, wild-eyed bird that glides down from the pastel blue Church of St. Thomas through the palms, their trunks handed red and white to warn traffic, to settle at the edge of a raft of copra husks softening in the water. “Paddy-bird, Indian pond-heron, Ardeola greyii ,” she says, as if hearing the words for the first time. “Hm.” She moves on.

“You obviously want me to ask,” says Thomas Lull.

“If that is a question, the answer is, I saw you. I wanted to find you but I did not know where you were, so the gods showed me you here in Thekaddy.”

“I’m in Thekkady because I don’t want to be found by gods or anyone.”

“I am aware of that, but I did not want to find you because of who you were, Professor Lull. I wanted to find you because of this photograph.”

She opens her palmer. The sunlight is very strong even through the palm-dapple, the picture is washed-out. It is taken on a day as bright as this, three Westerners squinting in front of the Padmanabhaswamy temple in Thiruvananthapuram. There is a slight sallow-skinned man and a South Indian woman. The man’s arm is around the woman’s waist. The other is Thomas Lull, grinning in Hawaiian shirt and terrible shorts. He knows the picture. It was taken seven years ago, after a conference in New Delhi when he took a month to travel the states of newly sundered India, a landmass that had always fascinated, appalled, and attracted him in equal measures. Kerala’s contradictions held him a week longer than planned; its perfume of dust, musk, and sun-seared coconut matting, its sense of ancient superiority to the caste-ridden north, its dark, fetid chaotic gods and their bloody rituals, its long and successful realisation of the political truth that Communism was a politics of abundance not scarcity; its ever-shifting flotsam of treasures and travellers.

“Can’t deny it, that’s me,” Thomas Lull confesses.

“The other couple, do you recognise them?”

Thomas Lull’s heart kicks.