Ned Beauman - Glow

Then one day he came into his toilet laboratory to find that all his bags of glo had been ripped up. He accused Hseng, of course, because he knew that Hseng had some suspicions now, and this was just the sort of pathetic, thuggish way that Hseng might express his jealousy. But Hseng insisted he didn’t know anything about it. It happened twice more, and Win was baffled, until at last he happened to catch the perpetrators in the act.

Two foxes stared back at him as he came in, their jaws still working the petals like cud. He’d never seen a live fox before. Unhurriedly, one of them bent its hind legs and shit on the floor, as if that was the only comment it cared to make. Then they darted out past him down the corridor.

There were at least three new smells in the small room: dung, yes, and fox musk, just as he would have expected, but also a third that stood in some cognatic relation to the aftertaste of glo petals. Remembering Craig’s civet coffee, he pulled on a pair of latex gloves, picked the turd up off the floor, and began another experiment.

A fortnight later he brought an eighth of a gram of white powder with him to Craig’s hotel room. ‘Do we snort it?’ Craig said.

‘No, it really stings.’

Win poured two small glasses of Coke and dissolved half the dose into each. After they’d both gulped down their drinks, Craig kissed him and then looked around the room. ‘I can’t believe how long I’ve been living here. I never thought I’d miss my ugly condo in Charlotte.’

Win noticed that Craig had written out a few lines in longhand on a piece of notepaper and taped them up on the wall next to his desk. He went over to read them: ‘This laugh at once evoked the flesh-pink, fragrant surfaces with which it seemed to have just been in contact and of which it seemed to carry with it, pungent, sensual and revealing as the scent of geraniums, a few almost tangible and secretly provoking particles.’ He looked back at Craig. ‘Oh, it’s just some Proust I like,’ Craig said. ‘Did I ever tell you I took French Lit. in college?’

On the internet there were PDFs of the laboratory notebooks that the chemist Alexander Shulgin had maintained in the 1960s when, out of gratitude for his invention of a new pesticide called Zectran, his employer Dow Chemical had funded his experiments with drugs like MDMA and mescalin; and during those experiments Shulgin had made continuous painstaking observations on ‘visual distortion’, ‘mental coordination’, ‘mental attitude’, and so on, sometimes interspersed with hand-drawn graphs. (Despite its complexity, the chemistry was often much easier for Win to follow than some of Shulgin’s other references: ‘This was a miniature high,’ he’d written about one compound, ‘in the same sense that I would describe a piece by the jazz pianist Bud Powell as miniature.’)

Win had planned to imitate Shulgin’s methods, even his irritatingly precise time measurements — why should anyone care about the exact minute that something happened? — and he persuaded Craig to take notes too. But when they checked the next morning, Craig had written only a few lines:

12.30 a.m. Nothing so far.

12.50 a.m. OK, quite tingly now — reminds me of that one time I took ecstasy in NY.

1.10 a.m. No, this is much better than ecstasy.

Then:

LIGHTS!!!

And Win had written nothing at all.

‘Did I say anything really schmaltzy to you last night?’ said Craig. When they hadn’t been flipping the fluorescent light above the bathroom mirror on and off or gazing at the red neon across the road, they had mostly been having meandering, slithery sex, any possibility of orgasm suspended several miles out of reach.

‘About what?’ said Win.

Craig smiled and looked away.

There was nobody at the brothel when Win got home around noon. This was the first time he’d ever stayed out past dawn, and he wondered if Hseng had noticed. Too tired and stiff to work in his laboratory, with raw patches all over his body where he’d rubbed himself against Craig for too long without any feeling of pain to tell him to stop, he lay in bed eating a couple of poppyseed cakes in such tiny rodent mouthfuls that they lasted the whole afternoon. When Hseng still wasn’t back by dusk, he began to wonder if something might have happened, and he put his flip-flops on again to go outside. Blue and gold and pink were piled up on the horizon like bolts of silk on a dressmaker’s shelf. Outside the bar where he’d first met Craig, he saw the same three boys who’d wanted to sell their carton of cigarettes.

‘Are you looking for your fat Chink boyfriend?’ said one. Win, who couldn’t be bothered to start a fight, just nodded. ‘Try the dump.’

For a while after he got there, Win kneeled watching two black cats gnawing at Hseng’s fingertips. A small landslide farther up this hillock of rotten cardboard and burned plastic had already covered parts of the corpse, so it looked more like an old buried thing exposed by erosion than a recent delivery from a van or a pick-up truck. In its back were three exit wounds, not too bloody, the bullets perhaps exhausted by the long slog through Hseng’s blubber.

Maybe Hseng had tried to default on a loan, or maybe an old enemy of his cousin’s had come back to Gandayaw; in either case, it was a reasonably gangster way to die. Those were Win’s suppositions until he talked to a bald rag-picker who told him that the shooting had happened that afternoon outside the Lacebark hotel. The sight of Hseng’s body had given him only a gentle churn in his bowels, but as soon as he heard that he was really anxious. He ran all the way there, but he couldn’t see anything out of the ordinary, so he asked a woman selling biryani from a cart. She’d seen the whole thing, she explained excitedly. An American had been coming out of the hotel when a fat Chinese man had rushed out of an alley and run him through the belly with a samurai sword. Then a Lacebark security guard who was smoking a cigarette nearby had opened fire on the Chinese man with his AK-47. Win asked about the American’s body, and she said it had been wrapped up in a plastic sheet and taken back inside the hotel. After she wheeled her cart on down the street, Win just stood there staring up at the hotel, trying to find the window of his lover’s room.

4.54 a.m.

By now, most of the foxes have slunk away, as if they don’t like to hear the end of that story. ‘How long did you stay in Gandayaw?’ says Raf.

‘I carried on making glow. I had to pay guys from the Concession to start bringing the flower back for me. They told me a lot of stories about the foxes in the jungle acting like people. I guess I was torn up about Craig, but. . “It feels good to get paid, regardless of how many homeboys get slayed”, right?’ Raf doesn’t find Win’s bravado very convincing here. ‘Then one night Sam — he’s one of Zaya’s — he comes to me, he tells me who he is, and he says Lacebark looking for me and I need to get the fuck out of Gandayaw.’

‘But how would Lacebark have known who you were?’

‘Zaya worked out how it must’ve gone down.’ Lacebark would have seen that handwritten note on Craig’s desk about something ‘better than ecstasy’, Win explains, and if they sent a femoral blood sample back to North Carolina — standard procedure for insurance reasons whenever an American employee died on Lacebark business — they would have detected trace quantities of an unfamiliar amphetamine-class substance. So they would have known right away that Craig was into drugs. But their suspicions wouldn’t have stopped there. Craig’s killer, after all, was the cousin of a one-eyed Chinese heroin dealer who had been chased out of town by the Tatmadaw a year earlier for late payment of protection money. Also, in his early draft reports Craig had mentioned a rare flower with promising stimulant properties that was picked by mine workers in the Concession, and later on he’d made a procurement order which had attracted no scrutiny at the time but which now looked a lot like supplies for a drug laboratory. Overall, there would have been enough evidence to imply that their internal management consultant — thirty-seven years old, unmarried, owner of a seven-hundred-dollar programmable espresso machine — had made a preposterous and doomed attempt to set himself up in Gandayaw as some sort of small-time trafficker. As the investigation continued, the hotel staff would have reported that a Burmese boy had often visited Craig in his hotel room, and the local security force would have reported that the Burmese boy was known to be a lackey of the Chinese heroin dealer’s murderous cousin.