Bonded for the future
by Stephen Chan
[ fiction - march 09 ]
Retired now, no longer killing, but still tuning his senses, aware of all around him - and dressed well though, these days, needing to blague his way to upgrades on the airlines of the world. He traveled incessantly, escaping something he supposed, but he wasn't much given to articulate his introspection. He had served a cause, had overladen the dirty business with as much style as possible, refused the gratuitous and, though forbidden to show mercy, allowed his victims a split second for dignity. Always. He was proud of that, hoped God, Jesus Christ, Buddha, Whatever, would take it into account at the doors of Purgatory; hoped someone some day would show him such courtesy - courtesy, not respect for his white hair or bewilderment at almost symmetrical lines marking his face. The body was still taut, agile in a manner of speaking, his clothes even more classical and timeless now - an antidote to time passing - and his learnt accent deeply embedded. He had managed business class on this trip - the charm still worked, although he was less misogynist of late - and he was headed, via Hong Kong, to a location far from his imagined enemies and where he would sit without his back to a wall and watching every person walking into his restaurant door. He imagined an open patio overlooking the sea, where death would not suddenly rain out of the sky.
And there would be no young women on this trip. Besides how could he reveal how his hips chafed? It was impossible to choose the right underwear. Elastic had developed an allergy to him. In fact, he now lived with a younger bride - who wanted children. But he would be dead before the child reached adulthood, perhaps even adolescence. The bride didn't think about such things, being too young. But he, he was mindful of death, both from age and from having survived it and dispensed it. How he had dispensed it. He had been given a right to dispense it. He wasn't going to dwell on that now. Dinner was being served and, even on Cathay's business class, the wine looked, through the small closed bottle, a mottled blended shameless confluence of dregs. Life is exactly like that, he thought to his private self.
The food was cardboard as well, though expected. In the world of product placement you could expect passable food only on Air New Zealand. At least he still stuck to the original Submariner watch, only the screen's time and his were two minutes out. He wanted to get down in the aisle and do sit-ups. Even a man a year off his 60s needed to keep his abs in shape. But he couldn't do it in fine suiting. He had no expense account these days. Things had to last. The suits were still tailored - one or two bespoke - but the shirts weren't, nor the shoes, and of course the underwear was a problem. Away from the face the skin wasn't lined, but it chafed at the drop of a hat or the ping of elastic, or if you played a bad orchestra massacring Prokofiev. His skin was already itching as the headphones played a bad orchestra attempting Prokofiev...
Now, this is age, he thought, his body still aching from the last workouts. You can still do it all but you ache more. Something had been implanted in the connective tissues. Ten tons of antioxidants wouldn't clear that. And why should it? All he wanted was an airline that would choose a decent orchestra. Prokofiev actually wasn't hard - just slightly abnormal. It just took some flexibility of mindset. It wasn't like ripping hair out of armpits. You didn't have to body-wax. He didn't anyway. With the years, hair on his head had grown thicker but white as snow; his eyebrows had grown thicker on first sight but, if you trimmed them, it was clear that they had grown thinner. They just grew longer. And almost all the body hair had fallen out. Smooth as a baby, as capable as an adult, as ache-ridden as a pensioner. Next year he would be gifted a senior citizens 'Freedom' travel card. All bus and underground travel in London would be free. He wouldn't miss his Aston Martin. He'd had his licence revoked anyway for speeding too much. He looked forward to the travel card. A true positive of age. He would go everywhere. Stop off everywhere. Anywhere. Somewhere. Somewhere safe.
His apartment, in St Georges Wharf, was safe - with a view of Parliament and overlooking MI6. He only had to take the lift downstairs to enter Vauxhall tube station. He could still afford the riverside bars and bad restaurants beneath his apartment. He had shelves of books. He was reading philosophy these days. is study was a place his young bride could not go. She wouldn't anyway. She recognised a nameless detail-free life. Let him retire to the repository of harsh memories and thoughts for an ethical future. He wanted to be of use to the world, help the good guys win, but had been its sullied mercenary servant - paid in the opportunities to despoil and take life. He admitted it. He had been innately sadistic. Now? Almost repentant. Intellectually repentant. If he had to do it again, emotionally he could. Would. It would be a very long Purgatory. What do you think of over 10,000 years? I am sorry, I am sorry. What good would, could that do? The medieval mindset was limited. He'd prefer electrodes attached to all extremities - yes, even those - because he could imagine screaming at least a thousand years. For a millennium he could fill his mind with the insistence he deserved it.
But he'd brought many young women passable, if passing, happiness. The amazing steel prick had satisfied them more than him. The steel was more pliable now. Not much to balance the ledger, he agreed. Indian generic chemicals let him relive the old days, but the disgorgings of liquids and implosions of nerve endings meant less now. Besides, the chemicals allowed temporary steel. They did nothing but render blue climaxes brown. Not good, brown. Persian blue was best, but the West was against Iran these days. He smiled at his political irony. There was a momentary flicker beneath the lovely worsted. Purple-lined at least. Purple. One stage on from Persian blue. He smiled and fell asleep.
And had an annoying dream of when his body hair had started falling out and a girlfriend had inexpertly tried to help it along. He didn't mind too much. Anything was better than something that couldn't make up its mind whether to come or go and, as a profoundly unsatisfactory compromise, broke off and rendered his surfaces brittle and stubbly. In his sleep he knew he was happy that was over.
But then the dream lurched, as dreams do. In the year 500BC, Hezekiah the king was blinded by his Babylonian captors. The eyes were plucked out by a barbed arrow head. He had been dressed in green and made to kneel and then two spluttering rivers of blood had framed the middle of his robe.
He awoke and disconsolately searched the duty-free catalogue. Always the same sort of dream. Always just as he had achieved a clear run to something smooth and childlike. Somehow King Hezekiah could still see, but people shunned him as people shunned all blind men in those days. King Hezekiah had no eyes but seemed to see with his rivers of blood. Murky vision but, given the circumstances, vision was vision, and he had been allowed to live.
He bought an Armani watch. An elegant, cheap watch. He was always buying watches which he seldom wore. Always the Submariner. Keep your head down. Under water's best. Never buy scent. Enemies can sniff you out. Never buy watches with luminous markings. The hours that go by cannot be lit. Life does not glow. It is allowed to be elegant and other lives had been cheap.
It was reverie now. Snap out of it, he said. If death should come you want a clear mind for that split second's grace - can't waste it trying to clear befuddlement. He cleared it. King Hezekiah disappeared into the bright blue sky that erupted through his window as he raised his blind. Fellow passengers grunted, so he shut it again. But at least Hezekiah had gone. Although probably chasing the plane in his bloody chariot in the sky.
He almost fell asleep again, shook it off, rearranged his suit. He only wore suits. Beautiful lightweight 120 cloths, ideal for summers; in winter he just topped them with the slightly waisted black cashmere three quarters length. He had only one such coat. Like everything, there had been more. He was retired now. Not widely known for introspection. He just had these dreams, and the fearful honed instincts of a cat stalked by a platoon of dogs. Weave, cat. The cat's got to weave. Double back. Climb trees. Leap branches. Blend. Smooth coated. Blend. Dogs would always bark up the wrong tree.
It wasn't so much tiring - he'd been doing this all his life - but he wondered what it would be like to relax, unfettered and unkempt, with a child by the river, getting up to kick a football, absorbed only by the child. Battersea Park, by the pagoda, smiled upon by Buddhas.
Dogs drifted back into his imagination. They were being walked in the park. Under control. And, anyway, they would never catch him with his pants down - just scratching at the elastic, that's all. But, holy moments of splendour, the sun would set radiantly across the river as he hoisted the child onto his shoulders when they left the pagoda for the walk home. Behind the old power station, down the bust road, back to the river, a straight line back to St Georges Wharf. The child would race for the elevator to see his young mother. He would pour a scotch and watch the last of the sunset. Play Prokofiev's 'Peter and the Wolf' for the exhausted boy as he sat stubbornly not moving in the shower. A wolf is a powerful giant dog, he would explain. Ten times more powerful. A hungry wolf would hunt you down. "Relentlessly," said the boy, showing off one of his precocious new words.
When he stood on the balcony there was a line of fire only from Vauxhall Bridge - so the assassin would have to do it in broad view of endless cars - or from the top of the MI6 building. So it would have to be a former colleague. No, the apartment and the balcony were safe. Probably as he took his favourite walk - across the bridge, turning right into Regency Street, left for St James's Park, up for Bond Street to sniff out how much Submariners cost these days; look - only look - at truly expensive and spoilt women. But take pleasure still when, through their dark glasses, they not only looked back but appraised him. It didn't have to be positively. Worthy of consideration was fine. The best place for death would be the Royal Academy. While he was admiring a painting. Probably one of the Bond Street girls would do it - careful not to miss and damage a piece of art. He himself was hardly priceless these days. Better he should take the hit. Not a Russian painting. Nothing from the resurgent east. He admired the sheer stubborn grind of the resurgence - until it had suddenly broken through. Not with a bang. Pop. Voila, the new Russia. Voila, the world's brand new most expensive city. He couldn't afford to live there. He could barely afford London. What if the child needed a private school? Even so, he'd paid for the apartment, partly from an unauthorised share of a precious consignment he had redirected for Her Majesty's pleasure. He'd have to curtail his travels if the child needed a private school.
Sunday morning as his plane lurched and turned over Hong Kong. He shuffled in his seat, against his inclination, but someone was coming out of the washroom behind him. He heard, "hello James," but affected not to hear - but, in his peripheral vision, and surely, he thought, not on an aircraft, he sensed a hand reaching for a breast pocket.
But he was only calling someone else and scratching his chest. Walked onto someone else called James in the next row. Our James meanwhile controlled a sigh of relief. He had recoiled - inwardly, not visibly (or had he blanched?) - and had eaten that nano-second of reconciliation to fate, or springing to life for the last instant fight of his existence. He was ashamed. He hadn't expected it on an aircraft. There would be no escape for the assassin. It had to be beyond airside, near a nexus of roads or busy streets. He recovered himself at Hong Kong airport, his connection delayed, forsaking the business lounge for a view of the water. Assassins always traveled business class. They had to get their minds ready. He retrieved his readiness with a joyous proletariat. And a double scotch, smiling at the imagined assassins who would be meticulously refusing their drinks to keep their own reactions razor sharp, emotions trap-doored shut. Poor darlings, he thought, happy to have been spared another time. Die another day. Sliding smoothly away.
The airport was full of Chinese. No problem. He had studied Chinese and Japanese at Cambridge. Learnt enough Arabic as an unsanctioned option to make mundane conversation in a Cairo coffee bar. But he could read poetry and philosophy in Chinese. It would be atypical airport conversation, he admitted to himself, smiling.
He went back to the business lounge to take a shower, shave, change the clothes beneath his suit. The suit itself he hung just outside the cubicle and let the steam massage the creases away. He would be ready for his teachers in Kaohsiung in southern Taiwan and Ginowan City in Okinawa. Southern White Crane, with the meditation and medication that would heal his physical despairs. The diseases of the spirit would take longer, but the teachers would divine that he had them still. He would be ashamed that they would instantly know he had made no progress. "You must have done terrible things in your younger life, James." But he never told them what, although he guessed they new he had been a killer. "To sail through your opponent you must be smoother than a bullet passing through," the grandmaster would smile. "The energy must be cleaner. Not leave a signature. This energy will also help you live a cleaner life. You must let it clean you inside like a shower cleans you outside." He could only do outside. The outside was meticulously hygienic. Obsessively.
In the tree-lined, well-swept but exhaust-ridden streets of Kaohsiung he walked with Roland Wang - Roland the King, if you translated the second name - his hall-mate at Cambridge and, briefly, a vice-minister in the government of Taiwan. Until some millions intended to buy diplomatic recognition from Papua New Guinea had been traced to his account. He'd already laundered other millions, so lived a very European life with his balcony overlooking the concert hall and its surrounding park. Paintings by modern Taiwanese artists, replicas of old masters painted in Beijing, and Zimbabwean stone sculpture filled his apartment. The living room was a gigantic library and there was almost of furniture and no carpets on the parquet flooring. Each Shona sculpture was shaded by a weeping fig, and sat alongside a ruggedly miniature bonsai oak. Each sculpture depicted a man and a woman emerging from, or disappearing into, the polished blackened stone. Philip Glass's Akenaton played from the tall speakers that intersected the crafted book shelves. In fact, all this had taken very little of the informally-acquired fortune. A larger part had been spent on hopeless charities in Africa. A qualified doctor, he took his turn on the foul rosters that Medecins sans Frontiers operated in Darfur and elsewhere. A month in every six was spent like this, amidst the stench of cholera-gasping and dying children, and amputating gangrenous limbs shattered by bullets from any side but the side of the terrified barely-sedated victim on Roland's makeshift table in his filthy hot tent.
They walked the streets at night. "What do you think?" James asked as they passed by an open doorway showing a mother and four children seated around a low table about to eat a dinner that looked palatial amidst its dull and grubby surroundings. "I was one of those," said Roland. "Sometimes I wish I had never escaped. Perhaps the joys of a poor family out-weigh the urge to step outside the grime and limits. When you step outside, what you see is worse than what you left inside." They broke the pattern of their walk to avoid yet more motor scooters parked on the footpath. "Sometimes, too," said James, "I wish I had never escaped." The eyes of the children followed them.
The habits of Kaohsiung were as everywhere in East Asia - a combination of meticulous visible cleanliness and every invisible pollution and microbial community known to humanity. This humanity survived them all. The cramped living quarters, living rooms that spilled into the streets, armchairs carried outside to mix with the motor scooters - and mothers ferrying their helmetless children back and forth on those motor scooters, the children standing slumped against the steering case, oblivious to the murderous traffic, in and out of which their mothers weaved with an insouciance that would be mistaken as inscrutability in the West.
The master taught on his flat rooftop. James endured and admired his beatings, patiently suffered through the energy-correcting massages and manipulations, almost freely demonstrated the formal exercises, swallowed gleefully the medications, and performed poorly the meditation. Even so, he was allowed to wear the advanced sash and bowed with a real humility to the old man at the end of each class. "I am total crap," he wrote in his diary.
Okinawa was different again - even noisier, the traffic thicker but curiously less polluting. He put it down to fewer motor scooters. The master more brutal but also more jovial, and not giving a damn about James's past. He gave a big damn about crafting James for a decent future. "Energy leaves no fingerprints. It reaches forwards. It dreams. The past is an illusion. A dream is better." He tried to dream, but the terrified faces of his past filled them. Increasingly his own face appeared as if in a mirror. Was it also terrified - or curiously, almost distractedly, horrified? Would he put out his eyes in horror at the sight of himself? Do it absent-mindedly because naturally, deservedly? "I am marked by fingerprints," he said. "I can do nothing about those," the master said, "and you are too strong now for me to beat them out of you. Only you can find a way to live beyond their reach. What about the family she wants to start?" "Family? One. Only one," James stammered.
Far from escaping his past, he could not bear to be cut adrift from it. Living next to MI6 was the crudest manifestation of this. But, like Roland Wang, he had also begun an elaborate sequence of requitals. Not a doctor, and so unable to inject, amputate, deliver, relieve and hasten in a refugee camp, he did the only thing he knew how. He advised liberation groups free of charge. "Without me you could not relieve your conscience," he joked bitterly to Roland. "I hope you choose your groups well," said Roland. "Augustine talked of just cause, after all." "And just conduct if you have to fight," James replied. "No children, no unarmed targets." "I be you finish men off when they're down," Roland almost snickered from the corner of his cut-crystal mouth. But James had not killed for years. Yet Roland was right: the byproduct of James was killing. As if his entire being knew it, he retained more sharply than ever all the awareness and intuitions that a hunted man learns only first by being a hunter. What passed as the last jungles of Okinawa contained one hundred rifles pointed at his heart. Rather, James wished it so. At Nakajin Castle, the old hilltop ruins of the pirate kingdom of northern Okinawa, James offered his customary prayer to the sea. "Waves, drown the beast in me, wash the beast from me, scour my soul, set me free." He had been coming here to chant this prayer for years.
The rough contours of the rudimentary keep at Nakajin contrasted with the smooth priestly curves of Nagusukuru Castle some way down the road. He never went to the gaudily restored tourist-trap Shurijo Castle. His skin felt rudimentary now - the whole body chafing from the rough canvas martial arts uniform against his sweat-drenched skin. Out came the microbes to perch and grow on his red abrasions. They would have laughed at him in the dressing room if they had known how. But the masters taught only children and American servicemen these days. Adult Okinawans no longer studied the old arts. Neither the children nor the Americans felt they had a point of entry to James. His Englishness - bearing and accent - intimidated both groups equally. In addition he seemed a favourite of the master, who would take James aside for private instruction. Or was it an exchange of knowledge - for often, from their sideways glimpses the marines in particular would discern James showing the master something they knew came from a crack Navy Seals unit. Not to mention the nerve point work James had learnt in Taiwan. No one questioned his new right to wear a belt with the second of the three gold bars reserved only for the masters. He had a right to the title, 'Kyoshi', a special master, one up from the norm. But this master, marines and children knew, was haunted by ghosts. An energy shadowed him, and it was not clean energy. Sometimes he almost seemed to cry as he left his conferences with the teacher - the truer master who could radiate cleanly fro his non-stagnant unpolluted core. No dead men's bodies in foul mangrove swamps oozed from the teacher. His body did not chafe, and the microbes did not settle on his childlike skin.
Roland Wang was waiting for him at Kaohsiung Airport. "Didn't work, did it?" he smiled almost sardonically. "You'd better come home for a decent Scotch." "I would like a very old St Emilion if you have one," said James. "I can do that," Roland replied, smiling at the simple light cottons James had been reduced to wearing. "Afterwards we can go to the new Spanish restaurant beside one of the feeder streams of Love River. A genuine Spanish chef who can speak only Spanish and hasn't learnt yet how to adulterate what he cooks." A flicker of an unforced smile danced across James's face. "I am officially no longer crap," he whispered. "I have a new gold stripe on my belt and an elevated title." "God knows you're still crap," Roland said, his eyes raised to heaven.
High in the Splendour Hotel, reputedly the third tallest building in the world, through his wall-to-wall floor-to-ceiling window, James contemplated the harbour. He let himself command a submarine under its surface. It began to leak and drop to the bottom, but a gold stripe appeared fro nowhere and winched his craft and his men to safety.
He was quite pleased by the new gold stripe.
And he had greatly enjoyed both Roland's St. Emilion and the Spanish restaurant afterwards. On Okinawa he had eaten only soba at the local cafes, accompanied either by sake (which he only lightly appreciated) or American beer (which he never appreciated). Once he had been the guest of the general commanding one of the interminable US bases on Okinawa, but the food there had been choice cuts of steak with too much marbled fat, and salads made from basic vegetables with sweetened dressings. And the wine had been Californian. But one of the marines who lived at Camp Foster saw James being escorted by the general, and heard the general call him "commander". Word raced around the martial arts studio that the Britisher was gold-braided in more ways than one, and this made the sergeants and corporals even more standoffish. There are three class systems in the United States, mused James. Between black and white, rich and poor, and officers and NCOs. But he had found the general boring and would have liked to talk to his martial colleagues - except he also did not know how.
He fell asleep above his view and dreamed of the Spanish restaurant. Suddenly at its clear glass door the long-awaited assassin appeared. James was unarmed, there was no rear exit, if he tried to open the glass door it would take too long. He dived through the glass, toppling over the assassin, but shards lacerated his eyes - and he awoke with the image of his vision having been thickly running and sticky read, looking down in that congealing colour as he speared his fingers through the assassin's throat.
He rang Roland. "No eyes. The dream was again of no eyes." "You need a psychiatrist, not me," said Roland. "Either that, or you believe you can start a new life with your wife - or you can retrieve the beautiful Beretta you left with me and blow your brains out." "I am 59," said James. "Can I really start a new life?"
"The Kaohsiung Symphony Orchestra is performing Prokofiev tomorrow night. They might just fail to massacre it. Come and keep your mouth shut. A night without scorn can be practice for your new life."
As ever Roland had struck home. All the web he had spun of taste and bearing was to match his care and daring. But who was Roland to lecture on his life? Roland's own wife had committed suicide when the corruption scandal involving the husband had run riot over the newspapers and broadcasts. Roland had never touched female flesh since, running fingers instead over headstone sculptures that had somehow emerged from the wild degenerations of Robert Mugabe's Zimbabwe. Roland couldn't make a new life to save his soul. He, James, at least knew he had s soul in peril. He would pluck t from the ashes like a burnt phoenix. And he would not scorn a note of the Prokofiev - even if it proved to be (as it did) profoundly terrible.
In one of those small, almost petty contritions with which one starts he thought of writing to the marine sergeant that commander is not a high rank. It was below naval captain - which is above marine captain - and naval captain is below, in the British system, commodore, and below rear admiral in both the US and British systems - so, therefore, he had been sort of equivalent to only a marine major, verging lieutenant colonel. But, he reflected, that was far too high for the young marine, struggling through the lower ranks and the rough-and-ready college programmes offered on his base, trying to haul himself up from southern US poverty and urban trauma. It had been a big ste for him to set foot outside the self-contained base. He didn't need a gentrified English toff ruining his alternative structures with letters of apology of how much higher he had been to a mere sergeant - even if he hadn't been an admiral.
Back in Taiwan he asked his teacher what he should do. "Wear dark glasses in your dreams. The world will not know who you are. Gradually, through the blood and the dark lenses you will see the world as it sees you. The red weep obscured and screened eventually even from yourself."
It seemed passable advice - one step up from not being seen because you had your head in the sand. And he would not wear Armani glasses but a pair recognisable as within the reach of all who witnessed his screened self. A pair a sergeant would buy on his proletarian base.
About to wheel out of and over Kaohsiung, Bond was almost delirious with joy in an economy seat. He hadn't even tried to blague business class - used his persuasive skills only to ensure an aisle seat. But at the Hong Kong changeover his name was paged and Professor Dr Commander Bond was ceremonially upgraded to first class - the upgrade and the plenitude of titles being the work of Roland Wang, both to please James and to embarrass him, both of which would have pleased Roland. James was escorted to his own cubicle with sliding doors, was immediately offered a champagne of sorts - which he declined on sight, then chided himself and asked for it back, his face red with rare apology.
In his dream in his cubicle he remembered why he lived next to MI6. It was in the vague hope of protection. He arrived home to St. George's Wharf to a chaotic melange of police and ambulance workers. The young wife and the child, three years old in the dream, were dead. He awoke with a start, remembered where he was and asked for a whiskey. She gave him three and he clutched the little bottles as he shuffled back, white-faced, to his cubicle. Even if he gave up everything, he asked himself, would his enemies give up on their own dreams of revenge? He crept back and took another bottle. Two double Scotches later he was reasonable in his outlook.
Except that the alcohol, entering his bloodstream, burnt his chafed skin from the inside. All the long lessons in pain-control worked only partially in itch-control. In his cubicle, doors slid shut, he surmounted his red-botched and hive-ridden skin with long claw-marks dragged through by his fingernails. His body looked like one of Roland's experimental paintings. A little blood seeped from one of the long diagonal claw-marks. He sprayed perfume on the wounds then, also from the complimentary toiletries, covered his body with scented lotion. Now, everything stung - but sting was much better than itch. Scented like a bull who had just crashed through a perfume shop, he curled naked on his first class bed and again fell asleep - this time without dreams and without the vision of loss.
He awoke to a memory of his day trip to Tainan, 40 minutes north of Kaohsiung. It was a city of temples. Roland would not let him pray to the gods of war. He was made to pray to the goddesses of seafarers ("for that is what you were"), of birth and childcare ("for what is about to come"), of marriage ("so that you lead yourself honorably and unselfishly"), and, above all, of mercy ("for what you still have time to learn"). Roland took him to museums where bamyan trees had eaten houses ("plant a bamyan tree in your heart"), where Dutch soldiers surrendered to renegade Chinese generals ("just as you also must learn to stand on lower ground") and where the university study of a learned female novelist had been preserved ("so that you also should write and say something worth handing down").
He still couldn't get over the nerve of Roland, how someone with a ruined life thought he could help another's life - but Roland weaved through appalling traffic in his black hybrid Lexus with aplomb and always with space and time to spare. Huge lorries and squadrons of motor scooters drove on lower ground for Roland. It was as if Roland repaired his life by refusing to repair it. He was more balanced within his trauma than without. But James had to get out - so Roland had taken him to pray to the deities who would help; had made him eat tremendously unhygienicly-prepared fish at a host of stalls, had taken him finally to one of Tainan's famous fortune-tellers.
But this is where Roland's mothering of his old friend came to an abrupt halt. "There is no future," the fortune-teller had said. "There is nothing here to be read." But Roland knew that James knew how to with-hold access. Both what he had learned from his oriental teachers and in the long years of operating for Her Majesty. Under interrogation, even under the truth drugs, make your mind a blank. The British methodology was different to the American. The latter trained its operatives to fantasise the obscene pornography possible. When the truth drugs took effect all that would be filling the front of the brain would be delirious recitations of extreme sexual indulgence. Dozens of babbling child molesters, water sport enthusiasts, would-be passive eunuchs, and serial sexual killers were shot by disgusted enemy interrogators.
The British, who were shot in any case, died with marginally more dignity. Marginal, because the truth drugs made you dribble and achieve, from the other end of your body, a remarkably unlimited incontinence.
Thus James thwarted the fortune-teller. "You're good." said Roland. "Sometimes I'm fucking good." "Run with it. Run as far and as fast as you can with it."
On the plane they showed 'The Bucket List', Jack Nicolson and Morgan Freeman hamming it up in an ultimate guy-flick. Hamming it expertly. "In fact," thought James, "I would like to go, to die, on top of a pyramid." Then he checked himself. Thinking of death as he contemplated making a new life.
He put it behind him. As he walked to the toilet he noticed the girl in the cubicle opposite him. She had not drawn her doors and had big breasts and was very beautiful. He noticed her in that order. In the toilet he wondered what she might think of his almost smooth pubis. He pissed out a long whiskey stream. Oh, he knew what he would be babbling if he were an American under the truth drugs. Then he was ashamed. She would have had to have been rich to ride first class. She could be a nuclear scientist, at the least a Wall Street banker. He confined his imagination to dancing a sultry tango with her. But it was sultry. He was pleased he still had response.
Then he was thinking of the film again. "I'll not die, hooked up, chained down, by pain-killing drips and feeds. I'll ask for tablets, wander the world. If I can't die watching God's sunrise on a pyramid, I'll be shot to pieces emptying my Beretta into the head and heart, especially the heart, of Robert Mugabe. I'll die a guerrilla in a jungle, fighting for a forlorn freedom. Roland will pick up the terrible pieces but, decades from now, a free people will remember me and recreate the mess, gore and slaughter as something somehow romantic.
He wandered into business class, then economy, donated his Armani watch to a startled teenager, came back and watched for a long time the girl with big breasts, which were clearly also very smooth, imagined how she would react if she had to have a mastectomy, imagined how he would react if he had penile or testicular cancer - or both - thought he had better get down to the business of steel fucking for procreation as soon as he landed. Went back to his cubicle. Did sit-ups in a private space almost obscene in an aircraft. Dedicated his abdominals to Roland Wang, still king of the stricken, still the Samaritan who reached into the skies. Still God's child on yet another interminable flight where the plane tosses itself up and, one day, one hour, sometime soon, sets you down to begin the steps to a new and very strange life.
Went one last time to the toilet before landing. In the next cubicle he heard a mother and daughter giggling. One was trying to persuade the other to perform. One was resisting in order to persuade the other to persuade. He smiled. There were not many years ahead. Perhaps someone from the past, vengeance in his right hand, would find him. He didn't care. There would be no stone sculpture. There would be a final smooth silk stripe on the belt.
