Glow (20 page)

This was such a reliable pattern whenever the Burmese government had any dealings with a foreign business that it began to resemble a kind of bureaucratic derangement, this uncontrollable compulsion towards starting projects and then reneging halfway through so that all the money that had already been spent was squandered. Today, even the few completed rooms were often so wretched with moss and rats’ nests and leaky ceilings that sleeping there felt only a little bit milder than sleeping out in the jungle, and Zaya and his seven comrades didn’t really live in the hotel so much as they lived in a camp that happened to use the hotel for scaffolding. At the back of this monument to waste and stupidity there was still a stagnant midden full of all the plastic debris that the builders hadn’t bothered to take away with them when they left, and under a half-completed stairwell Zaya had found a stash of Thai porn magazines, fused by twenty years of monsoon damp into a greenish loaf of nipples.

‘In a sense, it’s exciting that you’re here,’ Zaya said. ‘After all this time, an American tourist finally comes to stay. By the way, can you understand me all right?’ He was speaking a mixture of Danu and Burmese.

‘Yeah. This is how I talk to Mom most of the time.’ She was still dripping like a banyan tree. ‘Are you OK, Zaya?’

‘Don’t I look OK?’

‘You look like Uncle Chai the day he came back from the Concession.’

‘Cherish, I have Aids.’

She was silent for a while. At last, quietly, she said, ‘For how long?’

‘Since 2004. Only a few years after you left. But until recently it wasn’t so noticeable.’

He told her about the night he had gone into the Concession with Sam and Chao to plant bombs on three of Lacebark’s diesel generators. They moved through the darkness past the smelter, the crusher, the water tower, the engine workshop, the kitchens, the clinic, all three of them knowing the layout by heart because they’d done their time as workers at the mine, and it was so easy, they had so much good luck, that Zaya’s fear turned to exhilaration and he began to feel as if he had superpowers. He wanted to stay in the Concession for ever, flitting around like a vengeful ghost, disassembling it bolt by bolt, breaking into the foremen’s dormitories to piss in their yawning mouths. Then, when they were almost back at the hole in the fence, the emergency floodlights came on and the shooting started.

Zaya took a rifle bullet in the back of his thigh, and the other two had to half carry him for nearly a mile before they felt safe enough to stop and rest. While they made a tourniquet, all Zaya could think about was that he hadn’t heard any explosions. The bombs hadn’t even gone off. They’d failed. He passed out.

When he woke up, he was lying on a mat in a hut, and his tourniquet was being untied by a man he recognised as the stuttering doctor from Gandayaw. Zaya could see the doctor’s instruments laid out on a cloth, and on their blades were flecks of rust or dried blood or perhaps both. The last thing he remembered before he passed out again was a fly crawling out of the doctor’s open mouth, but he realised afterwards that he must have been delirious.

‘I didn’t notice anything for about a year after that. Then I started getting weaker, and after a while I started to suspect what must have happened. That doctor treats plenty of hookers in Gandayaw. Sam and Chao probably hustled him out of town without giving him time to get a clean set of instruments together.’ While he was recuperating he read a paperback anthology of Karl Marx’s writings in Burmese translation from the eighties, the spine repaired with duct tape. Marx’s creed seemed to be that material things had more power over people than people had over material things, which struck Zaya as not all that different from the animism of his grandparents, with its tribe spirits and crop spirits and weather spirits. His wound would heal up without even leaving a scar, as if the virus were so cunning that it wanted to scrub all evidence of its ingress.

‘Have you ever taken a test?’ Cherish said.

‘No.’

‘So you’re not sure?’

‘I’m sure. You’d be sure too if you saw me with my clothes off.’

‘Don’t they have drugs for it now? I know a couple of older guys in LA who’ve had it for years and they don’t even look sick.’

‘Did you pass a dispensary on your way here?’ Zaya said. ‘No. It’s only going to get worse. I live in the jungle, for fuck’s sake. Even the air is sick here. Living in the jungle with Aids is like having Aids twice over. But it’s not going to kill me for a long while. I’m sure of that too.’

‘Do you want me to tell Mom when I get home?’

‘No. Because you can’t tell her, or anyone else, that you saw me. How is she, though?’

‘She’s fine. She likes her new job. But we argue a lot. She couldn’t understand why I’d want to go partying in Thailand a few months after a cyclone. What was that like, anyway?’

‘What was it like?’ Zaya looked at his sister and for the first time he was aware of her not as a potential ally or a potential infiltrator but merely as a young woman who had seen almost nothing of life since she left Burma. He remembered the two days he’d spent travelling south in that boat, when he learned that the best way to shunt a floating corpse out of your way without slowing yourself down was to jam the oar in its armpit and wheel it past you. Except that sometimes you’d notice too late that it was tied by the wrist to the corpse next to it, probably to help the two of them stay up in a palm tree during the winds, and just at that moment you’d feel the second corpse knock its heels imploringly against your bow. ‘It was bad, Sis,’ he said. ‘It still is.’

‘What was it like in Gandayaw?’

‘Gandayaw was too far north for the worst of the flooding. But the Concession was in chaos for a while.’

‘So that’s what you do now? You go into the Concession and blow stuff up? In that case, why are you here? Isn’t Gandayaw a hundred miles away?’

‘Nearly four hundred miles. Yes. But at the moment we need to be near the border.’

Cherish slapped at a mosquito on her wrist, but not fast enough, so it left behind a jewel of her own blood. ‘For what? Zaya, why’d you bring me here now after all this time? What’s all this about? Are you fighting the regime?’

‘No,’ Zaya said. ‘Not the regime.’ He gave the generals only about five more years, he told her. Between Cyclone Nargis and the Shan State Army and the Karen State Army and the monks in Mandalay and the punks in Yangon, and the sheer complexity, for men with no geopolitical competence whatsoever, of playing China off against the West year after year, they were starting to lose their grip. He believed that the instant a despot took power the date of his humiliation and death was in some sense carved in the stars, or if not his own humiliation and death then his successor’s. A tyranny grew old and tired and palsied just like any other beast. But if killing a tyranny was like killing an elephant, killing a corporation was like killing a colony of sentient fungus. Lacebark was founded in North Carolina in 1919. Only one government in Asia was older than that, in the sense of surviving continuously without a destructive transfer of power, and that was the constitutional monarchy of Bhutan. Anyway, Lacebark, at eighty-nine, still wasn’t even that long-lived, relatively speaking. Freeport was ninety-five. United Fruit was a hundred and eight. Chevron was a hundred and eighteen. De Beers was a hundred and twenty. Unlike governments, corporations endured: deathless, efficient, self-renewing. And whoever replaced the generals in Burma, whether it was Aung San Suu Kyi or Maha Sammata back from the dead, Zaya was sure that they would let Lacebark keep their Concession so that they could carry on slurping up the royalties from the mine.

Back in the mid-eighties, when Lacebark prospectors first arrived in Gandayaw, they probably assumed that the local tribes had been there since the Stone Age. But even six or seven generations earlier, Zaya and Cherish’s ancestors had been down in the valleys, tending rice paddies and trading with Mandalay. In Burma, though, when a king asked for too much rice in tribute or too many sons for his army, he would often have to watch as his subjects flew away like skittish doves, into the forest or up to the hills, far beyond his control. In the process, they might abandon their written language, their genealogy, their folk stories, because all those things made you dangerously intelligible to the valley powers, and even to be included in a statistical table was a submission too far. That willingness to leave everything behind in the mud was why no government had ever had real control over the entire nation and why no government ever would.

Still, the people of Gandayaw and the neighbouring villages might have returned to the valleys in the long run. They’d moved back and forth several times before. But only in their own good time. And when Lacebark came to Gandayaw, the locals should have made the same sort of escape they used to make from all the old kings and conquerors. They should have gone far enough away that they wouldn’t even have been tempted to sell their souls for a few dollars in the Concession. If Zaya had been old enough for leadership by then, perhaps that’s what would have happened. But they were all just too awed by what the Americans brought.

‘You know the best thing that Burma ever got from America, really?’ Zaya said. ‘Cassava. You plant it in the ground. You leave it there as long as you need to. Then you come back and eat it when you get a chance. It won’t be noticed. It can’t be burned. It’s not worth the effort of confiscating. It doesn’t need tending. It won’t rot or dry out. It will grow where nothing else will grow. For a free people, it’s the best food in the world. But we’re not a free people any more. We eat Lacebark rations.’ He scratched at the rash on his hip.

‘If you have cassava, there’s only one real problem with going up into the hills when the king starts asking too much of you. How do you get anything back down to market? If it’s timber or bamboo or cattle or potatoes, you can’t lug that all the way down into the valleys. You can only really stray from the towns if you have something to sell that you can carry for a day on your back. So that’s what the tribes in the hills started trading. Elephant tusks, peacock feathers, sappanwood, rubies . . . For a while, the best was pepper. A few hundred years ago, peppercorns were more valuable than anything in the world except silver and gold, and you could pluck the drupes right off the vine. If you have pepper to trade and cassava to eat, you are truly free.’

‘Is that an old proverb?’

‘No, it’s an anachronism. Back when pepper was still expensive, there was no cassava in Asia yet. But you understand what I mean.’

‘I guess.’

‘Are you hungry?’

‘Yes,’ said Cherish. ‘What’s for dinner? My guess is . . . cassava? Right? Cassava with lots of pepper?’

Zaya smiled. ‘Maybe some of that. But it’s your first night here. We should celebrate. Let’s go out and get something tasty while it’s still light.’

‘Go out and get something?’

‘Yeah. It’s not raining so hard now.’

Zaya went inside to tell Kham where they were going. When he came back out he brought with him a machete, a catapult, and a nylon bag full of rusty half-inch nuts. He handed the catapult to Cherish and said, ‘Do you remember how to use one of these?’

‘I think so.’

‘You used to be really good at it.’

While Cherish practised shooting into the trees, Zaya searched for truth behind the concentration in her face. At this stage he could still get one of the others to drive her back to Mae Sot, and even if really she were working for Lacebark she couldn’t do any damage. They were moving on from the hotel soon and he hadn’t told her anything important yet. But a few sentences could change that. If he took her past a certain boundary and only realised afterwards that she wasn’t on his side, he would have to make sure she disappeared from the world for at least as long as their plans in London were still a secret. It wasn’t that he wanted to believe she could betray him. The thought made his stomach twist. But in 2008 it had taken him weeks longer than it should have to realise that Chao had switched sides, and he’d nearly died in a raid as a result. He wasn’t going to make that mistake again. Also, Cherish was an American now, and he knew that every American had a price.

Thankfully, it was still just about plausible to suppose that Lacebark didn’t know enough about Cherish to have considered approaching her. Back when her father had organised her hasty emigration, there wouldn’t have been any obvious reason for the company to bother keeping track of her afterwards. In that case, they would no longer have any means of connecting this eighteen-year-old from LA with either Zaya or Gandayaw. That was what he hoped. Today she didn’t look to him half Burmese and half white but rather fully, emphatically both.

‘I’m so bad at this now,’ said Cherish, looking down at the catapult.

‘You can practise some more on the banana blossoms,’ said Zaya as they set out through the trees. They were following a path that the men in the camp often used when they went hunting, although the vegetation was still so dense in front of them that if you weren’t used to the jungle you wouldn’t have recognised it as a path at all. These days he couldn’t use the machete for very long before his arm started to ache.

‘What are we looking for?’ said Cherish.

‘Probably grouse or quail. Keep the catapult ready.’ They paused for a moment while Cherish untangled her foot from a dead vine. ‘Have you ever been to London?’ Zaya said.

‘No.’

‘When you get home you’ll need to tell Mom that you’re moving there in a few months.’