Denis Johnson - Tree of Smoke

“We’ll have time to discuss that later. You and I. Lots and lots of time.” “Benny’s got books. He has all kinds of reading matter. He has a

Bible,” the warden said. Sands stared at his own ugly bare feet and spoke very softly. “What did he say? What was that?” the warden said. Storm said, “Tell me who to see.” “For what.” “Old Uncle.” “He’s dead, man. He’s dead.” “Yeah? So were you, supposedly.” “And soon I will be again.” Shaffee’s unease was palpable now. He indicated the guard: “I have a

witness. I am nearing retirement in a few months. I could get in a lot of trouble.” But he did nothing to stop this. He seemed incapable of the slight rudeness needed, at this moment, to enforce prison policy.

Storm stepped closer. “Will you pray?” He bowed his head. “Dear Lord,” he said loudly, and then more softly, “I know you’ve got family in the PI. And I can find them.”

He stepped back and watched the prisoner shake like a toy until even

the stupid warden noticed: “He’s sick? What’s wrong?” “It’s the power of his conscience,” Storm said. “Here,” the warden said. “Sit down. Yes. The struggle.” Now Warden Shaffee and Storm stood there like a couple of prison

ers, and it was Sands sitting in the warden’s chair.

Sands gripped the edge of the desk with both hands and looked back and forth from one hand to the other. “Ju-shuan, or something like that. He runs a trap up in Gerik. They call him Mr. John, or Johnny.”

“Give me directions.” “You don’t need directions. He grabs every Euro who comes off the

bus.” “And he’s the man to see.” “If you feel the need.” “See him for what?” the warden said. Not that he didn’t get it. He got

it, he got the whole thing, but he just wouldn’t let himself see he’d made a mistake. Shaffee had already failed to prevent this conversation. The best he

could hope for now was to dominate it. “The two Australians who were executed got no help from their embassy,” he remembered now. “We’ve had a lot of foreign prisoners—drugs traffickers and those such people,” he said. “I’ve never seen an embassy take so much interest. The Canadians are very helpful to Benny. Benny’s got books, things like that.”

“You’re gonna hang,” Storm told the prisoner, “but life goes on and everything plays itself out. Inside of every cycle is another cycle. You know what I mean?”

“I hear what you’re saying, man. But I don’t know what you mean.” Storm leaned close over Sands and said, “It’s just a machine.

Relax.” “As long as you leave my family out of it.” Shaffee said, “We are civil servants. Please. We have our rice bowls,

we want to keep them filled.” “You’re not who you think you are,” Storm said. “You’re dead inside.” Sands said, “Look, whatever kind of revenge you want—you’re not

gonna get it.” “Things have to play themselves out.” Sands stood up. “We didn’t pray.” He beckoned him close. The warden said, “I am a Christian too. An Anglican. I pray for

Benny. He’s a bit psychotic. Depressed. But he’s more cheerful the last few weeks.”

Sands bowed his head, almost touching his brow to Storm’s, and hit him with an uppercut below the sternum. Storm’s legs gave in and a lot of tadpoles raced around his field of vision. He said, “Yow, daddy.”

Shaffee helped to hold him upright. “Are you sick? What is the prob

lem sir?” Neither the prisoner nor the visitor bothered replying. The pause in communication seemed hard on Shaffee. He had to

talk. “The Red Cross gave us the kind of report I would call useful. Yes, we have areas in this prison to be improved. Hygiene, diet, I appreciated their suggestions. But not the Amnesty International! For instance we have Chinese gangs. If we don’t lock up the members without bail, they’ll be out where they can reach the witnesses. The people making the report for Amnesty International didn’t understand this. They gave us a very bad report. So you see why we don’t want reports. Why should we allow it? We don’t want you if you are a humanitarian,” he said. “We don’t want you if you are a journalist. You are not a Christian. I know what a Christian looks like because I myself am already a Christian.” This speech had given him strength. “Get out!” he cried. He turned to the guard: “Yes! This man is not permitted here!”

Thirty minutes later Storm was eating a rib-eye steak in a place with bamboo décor but with an Anglo name —Planter’s Inn Pub—listening to a wrenchingly beautiful lament played on native flutes which slowly became recognizable in its sadness as an old Moody Blues tune: “Nights in White Satin.”

He’d already tried Phangan, the low-rent druggy island resort east of Thailand—but that one flopped. A lot of retrograde hippies with melted eyes, rip-off Indian ganja freaks, various bits of psychedelic European burn-off. Airheads. Just air. He couldn’t deal with them.

This after his escape from the Barnstable County Jail in Massachusetts: one day a door had simply stood open—surely the Agency’s doing, and likely the colonel’s—and he’d walked away.

This after the great sea battle, the only firefight of his life, in which the Coast Guard had sunk his boat and many tons of Colombian ganja, and shot one and drowned another of his crew of three Colombians.

In Bangkok he’d heard the colonel might be buying and processing raw opium in the region. He moved down from Bangkok where the whores were friendly and zoned on chemicals to Kuala Lumpur where the whores performed with the bloodless efficiency of automatic shoeshine machines. Kuala Lumpur, a name somehow connoting limpness and no warmth, like Cold Lump. A decaffeinated town, clear, acrylic brains, the precise opposite of Phangan. Air-conditioning that could reasonably be described as brutal, everybody seemed to have a respiratory condition. Very Western, very modern, kind of an Asian Akron, Ohio, with cut-rate prices, tropical fruit, and everybody driving on the left … He’d seen the photo of William Benęt in the New Straits Times and had realized that along the way a sort of psychic and spiritual gravitation had guided his every footstep and that he had bested the Assassin, survived the Smugglers, transcended the Prison, wandered among the Fools, and that he would confront the Hanged Man or the Betrayer— Sands would be revealed for what he was —and that the colonel was now possible.

Storm stayed in Kuala Lumpur long enough to get a tattoo and make sure Sands really did hang. He stayed at a spittoon for humanity in Little India called the Bombay, just over a money changer’s. They gave him a small blue electric fan and a white towel but no soap. He could listen to seven radios at once through the quarter-inch plywood walls.

The cheap hotels were short. You were always close to the street in these places, almost down in it. The whistles and exclamations, the baby-voiced horns.

The hallways of the Bombay reeked thickly but not unpleasantly of curry and Nag Champa incense. In the dawns after first prayer call he could smell bread baking on the still air. Then the diesel smoke overpowered everything, rising with the urban noise. Each cycle held another cycle. You could not break out of the machine.

He spent the mornings reading from a Bible defiled by some Muslim with a Magic Marker. Or listening to the radio. In his speeches the prime minister stressed emotional tranquillity.

Or he wrote in his notebook. Efforts in verse. He admired the poet Gregory Corso, a man who spewed out genius by the ream. As for himself, a line now and then. You can’t extort the Muses.

Or he read from his copy of Zohar: the Book of Splendor. He’d picked it up in an English bookshop years ago, in Saigon, before the fates had renamed it Ho Chi Minh City