Glow (27 page)

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.

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.

Day 14

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.