Thirst (15 page)

There is no parking lot at Carolyn. Would-be shoppers drive around it for hours, looking for a place to leave their cars. Bewitched by the illusion of a parking space glimpsed in a rearview mirror, or through the windows of intervening vehicles, or in some parallel universe visible only from the corner of the eye, some drivers abruptly back up, turn, accelerate without warning, or attempt to squeeze between other cars. There are numerous collisions. Most of the drivers, however, allow themselves to be entertained by their car radios, snack on whatever provisions they have brought with them,
and then return home. If they voice any complaint, it is only with the amount of traffic they have encountered.

Like other indoor shopping malls, Rachel is roofed, its internal climate regulated by hidden machinery. Daylight is allowed into the building only through its doors. Yet before the shopper can focus his eyes on the racks and display windows ahead of him, they are directed upwards to a fantastic apparition. Where in other malls are nondescript ceilings, Rachel’s master engineers have installed an intricate mechanism of lamps, gears, pulleys, cams, flywheels, springs, and weights that approximate the silent churnings of the universe. Clockwork drives a mammoth lamp, the mall’s sun, across a painted sky, and then raises a lesser lamp, a manic face etched in its glass, the mall’s moon. The mechanism’s motion is accelerated to encompass a full day, from sunrise to sunrise, during the mall’s business hours. Planets move forward and then in retrograde, and hundreds of thousands of lights suspended by wires wheel above our heads. As a service to their customers, Rachel’s merchants have also arranged to make visible to the unaided eye what God cannot: galaxies, nebulae, clusters, quasars, pulsars, novae, planetary discs, meteor swarms, and interstellar dust clouds. The shopper need not emulate the astronomer’s patient attendance to the heavens. Rare and spectacular celestial events, such as eclipses, occultations, conjunctions, and transits are scheduled to appear at least once every day.

From the moment you step into Sophie, you are overcome by aromas sweet, pungent, sour, and meaty. Sophie is exclusively a food court, offering not only ice cream, pizza, popcorn, and tacos, but also manna, loquats, and ambrosia, all of it deep-fried. Strolling down the concourse with a sixteen ounce cup of immortality-conferring amrita in one hand and a hot dog in the other, you pass strangers who are drinking kvass or goat’s milk, or nibbling Uzbek plov or shark nuggets, and, enveloped by the grease-laden steam wafting over the formica counters, you wonder what you will eat next. But food is the least of your desires. Where are the public restrooms?

Not a single watch or clock is sold in Lucy. Indeed, visitors are asked to leave their timepieces at the coat check, lest the relentless ticking of their mechanisms fracture the delicate goods within, as it does outside the mall. Lucy is devoted to time in its deepest, sourish essence and diverse manifestations: lost time, time made, time that stands still, daylight savings time. Aware that their product is a sensory illusion caused by physical motion, the merchants run the entire mall on a railroad track around the parking lot. The shopper is invited to stand still and allow the eons to wash over him like an ocean on its way to becoming a desert. For clients who are habitually late for their appointments and trysts, Lucy’s retailers sell packets of time purchased wholesale from
those who are always punctual or even early. The former conventionally swindle the latter; Lucy imposes an orderly and just economy upon them.

Emma is so up-market that its boutiques are named for designers that you have never heard of; nor are you allowed to hear of them. If you do learn the names of these designers, Emma’s security commandos abduct you to a secret location within a remote discount store and chemically induce memory loss. If the commando team fails (induced memory loss is still a developing field), the shop goes out of business and is replaced by a store dedicated to an even more exclusive designer, selling clothes at prices too high to be pronounced by the human voice.

In malls from Paramus to Zanzibar, adolescents wash down every promenade, crowd every aisle, besiege every register, and monopolize every video game. A population in pained transition, its records, jeans, toys, and bedroom decor are also in transition, coveted one day and discarded the next. The exception to this state of affairs is Gloria, an indoor shopping mall located in a subterranean fissure. It is patronized exclusively by the dead, who shop without hurrying, who can wait for closeout sales, and who buy goods to last forever.

The peasant couple first thought we were doctors. Their infant son was ill. His grandfather had been sent by bicycle the day before to the nearest telephone, which was in the post office at Pat’in, about ten strenuous kilometers north, in order to summon an army physician from Sempril. At the time of our arrival, in the midst of a storm that left us at their door gasping for air, the family was engaged in a tense and solemn vigil.

It was with great difficulty that I made them understand that neither of us was a doctor. I did not even try to explain that I was an economist. There is no word for economist indigenous to our language. In the capital we usually employed the French cognate, though the government of the day had officially replaced it with a newly coined one derived from the native expression “he who tallies cattle.” It was an especially inappropriate term for use in a country whose dairy industry had declined to the position where it could no longer supply milk even to that part of the population that was under five years of age.

“Can you not do something?” the child’s father asked.

“I just told you. I’m not a doctor.”

“I do not understand,” he said, perhaps accusingly,
as if he were claiming that my slight, persistent accent somehow made me unintelligible.

“Our jeep broke down. It’s about a kilometer down the road,” I told him again. I wanted to step away from the infant’s pallet: I was unsure of the age at which children began to understand speech. “We’re traveling to the capital from Queling.”

“The army sent you from Queling?”

“The army didn’t send us. I’m on leave.”

The man stared at me. He still didn’t believe that we had not come in response to the grandfather’s summons.

“But what were you doing at Queling?”

Annoyed at his thickheadedness and his impertinence, I assumed a military posture, looking just a little bit past him, and identified myself: I was a reserve officer, Sublieutenant Palin Ni Lap, under the direct command of Major General Ti of the Third Patriotic Division.

I pronounced each word carefully, sure that at least one would make an impression on the couple. But none did. They turned and, still seeking a doctor, looked to the completely alien figure warming itself by the small peat fire.

I explained: “This is my wife Leslie. She is from Westchester, U.S.A.”

Hearing her name spoken, my wife offered the couple a smile that, although diminished in recognition of the child’s condition, nevertheless consisted of more teeth than could be counted among the peasants’ communal property. She was sitting on an old Coca-Cola crate partitioned to hold deposit bottles, a relic from the days when empties were shipped to a bottling plant outside
Bangkok, making a small profit for our fledgling trucking industry and producing a certain amount of revenue for our Roads and Customs Department. Indeed, empty Coke bottles were once a major export item. Now no-deposit cans lay spent meters from the spot where they had given up the last of their juices. Our trucking industry was moribund, all but the most marginal concerns bought up by Indian entrepreneurs who had the capital, the contracts, and the volume to operate them competitively. Of course, the officials of the Coca-Cola Company eluded reproach; in fact, they could point out that some of the savings of using cans had been passed on to the consumer, making the soft drink available to a greater number of my countrymen than ever before. It was just something that came to mind whenever I saw an empty Coca-Cola crate. The Hotel Progress in the capital used two of them, installed behind the check-in counter, to hold guests’ post and keys.

Three small children stood across from my wife, absolutely transfixed by the extravagant curls of her light brown hair. Sitting on a makeshift couch, an elderly woman, an amorphous mass of distended skin, stared at her, turned away, cackled obscenely, and turned back to stare.

The peasant glanced at his young wife, trying to gauge how well she understood the gravity of the situation. Her head was bowed.

“You are from the capital?”

“Yes.”

This had an even greater effect on him than the fact that Leslie was an American or that my family’s name
was one of the most famous in the country. My grandfather had owned the largest plantation in the adjacent province. My uncle was the publisher of the country’s single daily newspaper (though the government was technically its sole owner, in trust for the people, only eighteen percent of whom were literate). My father, a former deputy ambassador to the United Nations, was now Minister of Posts and Telegraphs. But what mattered to the peasant was that I was from the capital, a city.

“This is our certified residence,” he stammered.

“Fine.”

“I have my papers.”

He took a painful step toward his wife, revealing that he was partially disabled. The fronts of his torn cloth shoes stared at each other. His back arched to the right of his hips. Such misfortune was not unusual in my country; if it was not the legacy of childhood rickets, then it was the outcome of a losing confrontation with some sort of imported machine. For a non-industrial nation, we suffered a good many industrial accidents. There wasn’t a collective farm in the country that hadn’t made an offering of at least two limbs to its combine.

“We don’t want your papers. We ask only for a place to spend the night.”

“Get them,” the peasant told his wife.

“I told you. I don’t need to see anything.”

A sudden fit of strangled cries coming from the object on the pallet interrupted us.

“That child sounds awful,” Leslie said in English.

The children gasped, surprised that she could speak. Of course, she was completely unintelligible to them, but
her voluptuous voice, plumped and edged by her native region, nasaled just enough to identify the suburb with the city that gave it any meaning at all, was as strange and wonderful as her curls, and as eerie as the cries of the sick child.

“They know it,” I replied.

The peasant repeated his order to his wife, discomfited that words secret to him were being exchanged in his home. She did as she was told and also removed a bundle of rags from a large carton.

“Dry yourself and change into these,” she said to Leslie and pointed to a screen at the other end of the room.

Leslie knew only a few phrases of my obscure native language, and she knew them rather badly. Nevertheless, she spoke the language better than all but perhaps thirty other Westerners in the world, and she understood the woman’s invitation. She ducked behind the screen, which in fact was a genuine, if somewhat battered, home movie screen salvaged from God knows what dump, mounted on a low tripod as if the peasants intended to show us slides from their vacation on the Côte d’Azur as soon as electrification reached this part of the province.

No one offered me a change of clothes, nor did I expect any. I resigned myself to examining the family’s official documents, which were bound by an old and frayed length of, what? Dental floss? This dilapidated shed was indeed their certified residence. They had each been born in this district. He was twenty-four and she was twenty-two. Krik and Sana. He had served nearly two years in the army, but only in the “reconstruction
corps” of conscript workers, and had probably not left the province once in his life. His injury was recent: he owned an “heroic sacrifice” early discharge. The old hag, age forty-six, was Sana’s mother. The couple had four children ranging in age from five months to seven years. Miraculously, everyone was properly vaccinated or, almost as miraculously, given their poverty, immobility, and unsophistication, they had managed to get their vaccination papers forged.

And although I had never met this family before, there was certain, even more intimate information about it in my possession. I knew its annual income, its average daily intake of protein and carbohydrates, and its members’ life expectancies. In air-conditioned offices in New York, Paris, and Geneva, these profound truths were objects of commerce.