Paul Theroux - Saint Jack

In the basement corridor I passed a fire alarm; the red spur of a switch behind glass, with a handy steel mallet hanging next to it on a hook. The directions shouted to me. I waited until the corridor was empty, then sprang to it and followed the clear directions printed on the black label riveted to the wall. I smashed, I pulled. A bell above my head rapped and rang and lifted to a scream.

AN HOUR LATER, in a phone booth, that alarm was still screaming in my ears, turning my recklessness into courage as I dialed the American embassy. I held the receiver to my mouth like an oxygen mask; I was out of breath, and panting, felt incomplete — rushed and unimaginative. The phrases I was prepared to use, urgent offers of service my canny justifications, you might say, had once mercifully blessed, struck me as whorish. They had not troubled me before—“Anything I can do—,” “Just name it—,” “Leave it to me—,” “An excellent choice: couldn’t have done better myself—,” “No trouble at all—,” “It was a pleasure—,” “That’s what I’m here for—,” “What are friends for—?” But that was when I had a choice. This phone call was no decision. It was hardly my choice; it was the last plea possible. I was on my back. I needed a favor. Is there anything — anything at all — you can do for me?

“Ed, remember—”

“Flowers, is that you?” It was a relief to hear Shuck’s jaws, the familiar and endearing buzz as he casually moistened my name with the kiss of his fishy lisp. “Where have you been hiding yourself?”

“Had my hands full,” I said.

“It’s good to be busy.”

“It was driving me bananas,” I said.

“Nice to hear your voice.”

“Same here,” I said. “I thought I might drop around sometime. Chew the fat. Maybe this afternoon if it’s okay with you. Things are pretty quiet at the office. I could hop in a taxi and be over in a few minutes, or—”

“I’d really like that,” Shuck said. “But I’m tied up at the moment.”

For pity’s sake , I was going to say. I resisted. “Some other time then. It’s just that I’m free this afternoon, and, ah, I don’t know whether you remember, but we’ve got some unfinished business.”

Shuck hummed. He said, “Jack, to tell the honest truth I didn’t think I’d hear from you again. You know?”

“That’s what I want to explain.”

“Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad you called,” he said. “I’m damned glad you called.”

“How about a drink?”

“Sorry,” he said.

“What about after work? What time do you knock off?”

“I’ll write you a letter,” Shuck said quickly.

“A letter? What if it gets lost in the mail?”

“You’re a card,” said Shuck. “Hey, heard any good ones lately?”

“Gags? No, nothing.” I thought of my double, the hilarity and malice he provoked, the embarrassment of his presence which was the embarrassment of a comic routine (“Does this establishment—?”), fumblings which circumstances twisted into laughless gestures of despair, the alien clown killed by tomfoolery. At a distance, as a story — with death absent — it was a joke I could enter into. But death turned the shaggy-dog story into tragedy by making it final. If Leigh had survived I would have found it all screamingly funny; I could have kicked his memory with a mocking story at the Bandung. But it was different, I was on the phone; the memory of smoke stopped my mouth.

“You’ll get the letter tomorrow,” said Shuck. “Stay loose.”

It was delivered to Hing’s by an embassy peon. I signed for it and took it into my cubicle to open. It was a limp envelope of the sort that just squeezing it in my fingers I knew contained nothing important. I slit it open and shook out a brown coupon and a small memo. The coupon said, HARBOUR TOUR — ADMIT ONE ADULT $3.50; the memo specified a day and time, and bore Edwin Shuck’s squinting initials.

“We can talk better here,” said Shuck on the launch Kachang. We climbed the ladder to the cabin roof and took up positions some distance from the tourists. Shuck looked back and said, “Hold the phone.”

A feller in a straw hat had crawled up behind us. He said, “Hi! Do me a favor? Take a picture of me and my wife? That’s her down there, with the hat. All you have to do is look through here and snap. I’ve set the light meter. Swell.”

“It’s not usually this crowded,” said Shuck, aiming the camera at the man and wife on the afterdeck.

“Thanks a lot,” said the feller, retrieving his camera. “How about a snap of you two? I’ll send you a print when we get back to the States.”

“No,” said Shuck sharply, and turned away and closed his eyes in an infantile gesture of refusal.

The Kachang ’s engine whirred and pumped, and she leaned away from the quay steps. All around us a logjam of bumboats and sampans began to chug and break up, bobbing across our bow. Waiting behind a misshapen barricade of duffel bags and cardboard suitcases at the top of the stairs were six sunburned Russians, two stocky women with head scarves and cotton dresses, four men with Slavic lips, blond crew cuts, transparent nylon shirts, and string vests. One smoked a tubelike cigarette.

“Russkies,” I said.

“What do they want?” muttered Shuck.

“Going out to their ship,” I said. “Next stop Bloodyvostok, heh.”

Gray sluggish waves, streaked with garter snakes of oil slick, sloshed at the cement stairs, lapped at an upper step, then subsided into rolling froth, depositing a crushed plastic bottle on a step halfway down. A new wave a second later lifted the bottle a step higher. I watched the progress of this piece of flotsam traveling up and down the stairs — the stairs where small-toothed Doris Goh had stumbled and soaked herself, where my handsome girls boarded sampans in old pajamas and overalls and giggled all the way to the freighters.

It was late afternoon; the sun behind the customs house and maritime building put us in shadow that made the inner harbor all greasy water and dark vessels. But farther out, where the water was lit, purest at the greatest distance, ships gleamed and made true reflections in the sky-blue sea mirror.

“See that little jetty?” I said. “Years ago, I used to take gals out from it in little boats. There, where that old feller’s in the sampan.”

The old man in flapping black pajamas, his foot braced against a plank seat, stirred his long oar pole back and forth on its crutch, rocking the sampan through the continual swell.

“I used to worry. What if a storm comes up and blows us out to sea? We’re set adrift or shipwrecked. Makes you stop and think. You’d probably say, ‘Great, alone with some hookers on a desert island.’ But it would be fatal — you’d croak or turn cannibal. You’d be better off alone.”

“You’d still croak,” said Shuck.

“But you wouldn’t turn cannibal,” I said.

“I’m glad you made it today,” said Shuck.

“So am I,” I said. “God, I’m tickled to death.”

Shuck pulled a sour face. “The way you talk,” he said. “I can never make out if you’re putting me on.”

“Cut it out,” I said. “I wouldn’t do that.”

“At Paradise Gardens I used to see you rushing around, getting into a flap and think, Can he be serious? ”

“I worried about those fellers,” I said. The Kachang was a hundred yards out; the tour guide had started his spiel. “That gray stone building over there is the general post office. One Christmas eve, about eleven o’clock, I stopped in to send a telegram for Hing. There were three Marines in there sending telegrams — to their folks, I suppose. I followed them out, and down the street. They headed over Cavanagh Bridge at a pretty good clip and I went after them. At Empress Place I was going to say something, wish them a Merry Christmas, offer them a drink, or take them around. I had some dough then — I could have shown them a real good time. But I didn’t do a thing. They went off with their hands in their pockets. I felt like crying. I’d give anything to have that chance again.”