Ned Beauman - Glow

The white guy’s name turned out to be Craig. He was an ‘internal management consultant’ at Lacebark, specialising in ‘process efficiency optimisation’, and he’d been sent to Gandayaw for three months to find out how to boost the productivity of the mine workers in the Concession. Modern efficiency consulting, he told Win, was all about neuroscience: the old, loose terms like ‘alertness’ and ‘initiative’ and ‘morale’ just gestured at specific brain states that could now be described much more precisely in empirical language. When Win started posing questions about dopamine and norepinephrine, Craig asked him how he already knew so much about all that stuff.

‘Back in Mong La, I run factory for yaba pills,’ Win said.

‘What’s yaba?’

‘Mix of methamphetamine and caffeine.’

‘Really?’ said Craig. ‘You were in the drug trade?’ His hair was dark but there was both ginger and grey in his stubble.

Win nodded and clenched a fist over his heart. ‘For life.’ He rapped a few lines: ‘?“The chemist is brolic, Pyrex scholars, professors at war over raw, killing partners for a million dollars.”?’

‘Did you do much business with sweatshops in Thailand? They go through amphetamine like it’s powdered milk. You can’t knock it from an efficiency point of view. But we’ve done a couple of studies and in the long run we think it works best for small, repetitive, seated tasks. Not so much for heavy resource extraction. . Godammit, sorry, I’ve got to stop talking about work.’

Three drinks later, they walked back to Craig’s room in the Lacebark-owned hotel on the north side of town, where the American turned out to have the biggest penis that Win had ever seen outside porn videos. Afterwards, as he lay dreamy and exhausted, Craig got up and started rummaging through his suitcase. Even though the windows were wide open, the air in the room was still fuggy and ammoniac, as if within the valvular manifold of their connected bodies they had synthesised a molecule so complex it couldn’t filter out through the mosquito screens.

Craig held up a bag of coffee beans. ‘You ever had this? Civet coffee. I got it in Jakarta. The civet eats the coffee berries, softens them up in its stomach, and craps them out. Then you make coffee with the roasted beans. Tastes amazing — like cherries. The Indonesians came up with it in the eighteenth century because the Dutch wouldn’t let them pick coffee berries from the plantations but they couldn’t keep them from scooping up the civet crap.’ He started fiddling with some sort of expensive-looking black appliance on the desk. ‘I got the company to send this here before I arrived. I’m a coffee nerd, obviously, and there was no way I was going to live in a hotel for three months without my own grinder. You know, back in the States, you can’t use the coffee pots in hotels, because people like you use them to brew meth. Even in the good hotels, I heard. Do you want a cup?’

‘No,’ said Win.

Craig pursed his lips apologetically. ‘I’d rather come back to bed but it’s still the afternoon in North Carolina and I’m going to have a million emails. It’s like they’ve never heard of time zones.’

Later, Win walked home to the brothel. Craig hadn’t offered him money and Win was glad that he hadn’t. The room at the back with the turquoise walls was dark when he came in but Hseng was still awake. ‘Where have you been?’ he said.

Win lay down beside Hseng on the psoriatic foam mattress. ‘I was at a bar watching videos.’

‘You don’t smell right.’

Win realised he should have just rinsed his cock and arse before he left the hotel instead of taking a long, soapy shower — this was the cleanest he’d been in weeks, and Hseng could tell. ‘I swam in the stream on the way home.’ He spat on his hand and reached under the sheet for the chubby radish between Hseng’s legs. If he surprised him with a handjob right away, it would both etherise his suspicions and pre-empt any larger demands that Win was still too sore to satisfy.

Win started meeting Craig at the bar about every other evening while Hseng was back at the brothel accomplishing nothing much. Even apart from the diverse pleasures of Craig’s company, he found that simply to carry with him a pleasant secret was in itself enjoyable: growing up, you got so used to all your secrets being sad or shameful that you came to assume that secrets, like alkyl halides, were intrinsically neurotoxic, and now he had learned for the first time that they weren’t. One night, after they’d gone at each other like Muay Thai fighters for a couple of hours, Craig got up to work on his laptop as usual, but instead of brewing a pot of coffee he took from his holdall a small clear plastic bag full of what looked like white petals.

‘What’s that?’ said Win.

‘It’s just a flower that grows out in the forest. Most of the Myanmar guys I’ve interviewed in the Concession say they don’t like our polyphasic sleep schedule, but if they eat this, it makes everything a little easier. I tried some yesterday. It works. I mean, it’s no Adderall, but it’s better than a cup of coffee if you want to get a whole draft report done in one night, and the really special thing is, you can still get to sleep afterwards without any trouble. We might start prescribing it officially, after a few tests.’ He tossed the bag on to the bed. ‘Want to try some? You just chew and swallow with some water.’

The effect was mild, as Craig had said, but Win was certain that he could perceive something more in this drug, an incandescence blotted out, an urgent thought left unspoken. It was there in the smallest seams of his awareness, in the instants of absent-mindedness or blurred concentration, when he turned his head or licked his lips or scratched his neck in the first sixty minutes after eating the petals. What had set him apart from the older chemists at Hseng’s factory wasn’t just that he could pick up chemistry so easily, it was also that he seemed to have powers of introspection that they entirely lacked, as if his eyeballs could swivel all the way round to focus on his own frontal lobes. And he’d tried enough different batches of yaba back in Mong La to know when a phenylethylamine’s real potential was still unborn.

‘I can make this better for you,’ he said to Craig.

‘What do you mean?’

‘I just need some equipment and some lab chemicals and I can make this a better drug for you to give to your workers.’

In fact, what he anticipated from a more potent formulation of glo wasn’t the boring and reliable concentration and wakefulness that were needed at Lacebark’s mines — it was the lawless, luminous core that he’d already sensed. But he couldn’t admit that yet.

Craig was bemused. ‘How the hell would I get you equipment and lab chemicals?’

‘Same way you got your coffee grinder,’ said Win.

‘Oh. Right.’ Craig admitted that it might not be that hard to put in an order with Lacebark’s procurement department and make it look as if it was all needed at the mine for some reason. People still joked about the Lacebark executive — no one seemed to agree on who he was or whether he was still at the firm — who’d managed to use corporate money to set up his Burmese mistress and lovechild in a beach house in Los Angeles five or six years earlier.

When the supplies finally arrived, Win installed them in one of the two defunct indoor toilets in the brothel, telling Hseng that he’d scavenged them from a dump out of sheer boredom. Hseng, who by now had been obliged to sell off all his gold jewellery, accepted this explanation with the same sceptical silence as usual. Craig started bringing back several bags of glo a week from the Concession for Win to use in his experiments, and at first he tried to get something out of glo roughly as you might get morphine out of a poppy or cocaine out of a coca leaf or ephedrine out of a joint fir. But he had no luck with oxidation or fractal distillation or acid-base extraction or any of the other documented methods. There was something evasive, almost coquettish, about the alkaloids in the flower. It was as if the skin of the ripening molecule couldn’t be peeled away without pulping the flesh inside.