In case any of you readers happens to be a member of the Public, that mysterious organization that rules the world through shadow-terrors, I beg you not to pull censorious strings merely because this book, like one or two others of mine, is partly about that most honest form of love called prostitution � a subject which the righteous might think exhausted with a single thought � or, better yet, no thought at all � but the truth is that there are at least thirteen times as many different sorts of whores as there are members of the Public (and I think you know what I mean by members). Shall we pause to admire them all (the adults, I mean, the ones with the ambitiously long-tubed mouthparts)? Looking under the trees I spy billions of species, most of whom fly only during the night, unlike the insects after whom they're named; the pupa stage is often enclosed in a cocoon of brightly colored silk. And yet some are alive and some are dead and some find money to be the least of their worries!�� Oh, my prismatic Nymphalidae, my cross-veined Psychidae, my Sesiidae with the delicious anal veins, how could cruelly unimaginative lepidopterists have pinned you to a common corkboard of classification, when after all the world is so shadily large? I'll not commit that crime! So fear repetition not; there remain many seas of blood and cream to be traversed. If this advertisement be not sufficient, I can only protrude my wormlike tendrils of apology, craving forbearance on the grounds that a writer must write about what he knows, and since I know nothing about any subject it scarcely matters where I dabble.

Your friend,

Under the leaning plant-tumuli were galleries of wet dirt in which the escapees hid, panting like animals, naked and trembling, gazing up at the flared leaves whose stalks, paler than beansprouts, wove each other's signatures. Not everybody was caught again. Their families had to be bulldozed into the American bomb craters without them. Wormy dirt pressed down on bloodstained dirt until everything stopped moving, and the slaves were forbidden to work there for a month, until the mound had settled. The slaves had no desire to go there anyway. Water buffaloes rooted and splashed slowly in the rice paddies. They were valuable. As for the slaves, there was a slogan:�Alive you are no gain; dead you are no loss.�So the slaves obeyed the rule of absolute silence. After a month, they were sent to plant the grave with cassava.

Meanwhile, the ones who had gotten away lived hour by hour beneath the roof of maculed leaves swarming with darkness as they crept toward Thailand, ducking through green-fringed purple leaves, dodging golden berries as hard as copper. Sometimes a land mine got them, and sometimes a snake did. It did not matter whether the land mines were Russian or Chinese because they rended people with the same sudden clap of smokepetaled flame. But the snakes came in so many varieties as to guarantee an interesting death. One kind let you live a day after you were bitten. Another kind killed in an hour. There was a kind that let you walk two steps before you fell down dead. The people who survived the snakes fled on toward Thailand, where if they were lucky they might win admittance to a barbed wire cage. As they ran, they gasped in the strong wet smell of ferns. Fallen flower-bowls, red and yellow, lay in the knee-deep carpet of ferns. In the very humid places, moss grew out of the tree trunks and mounded itself upon itself in clusters like raspberries. From these places ferns burst out, and spiderwebs grew on the ferns, and within the webs the spiders waited. Some were poisonous and some were not. Sometimes the people who survived the spiders became lost and came out into a clearing where their executioners were already conveniently waiting. Around the lip of the bomb crater, generous grass bowed under its own wet weight, the dark star-leaved trees meeting it in a terrifying horizon. The people would begin to scream. The order was given to approach the grave in single file. Sometimes the executioners cut open their bellies or wombs with the razor-sharp leaf-edges of sugarpalm trees. Sometimes they smashed their skulls in with pickaxes. The executioners who were especially skilled at this enjoyed practicing what they called "the top." When you stand behind someone and smash his skull in in just the right way, he will whirl around as he falls and gaze up at you with his dying eyes. Sometimes they beat them to death with gun butts. Sometimes they pushed them off cliffs. Sometimes they crucified them in trees. Sometimes they injected them with poison. Sometimes they peeled back their skins and ate their livers while the victims were still screaming. Sometimes they wrapped up their heads in wet towels and slowly suffocated them. Sometimes they chopped them into pieces.

On the morning after what was supposed to be his last night on earth, the boy who wanted to be a journalist dreamed that we were falling toward Jupiter. Other people had no conception of how horrible it was going to be, but he did because he was an expert on atmospheres. First they'd see the Great Red Spot getting huger by the hour, tinting everything red and baleful, driving animals to madness. The oceans would rear into thousand-foot tides, smashing cities with cold dark fishy blows, drowning Asia and Africa, exterminating all but the rich and flabby elite in their mountain bunkers. Their time would run out, too. Gales of methane and mothball-smelling gases would rip the air away so that everyone would die in convulsions of unspeakable pain, kicking like bugs in a killing jar. The boy who wanted to be a journalist decided not to wait. He drank paint stripper and swallowed pain killers. The gentle girl found out and asked why he wanted to worry enough to do that, since he'd die anyway when they got to Jupiter; when he strove to explain, his skeleton overpowered him, and he began to weep in helpless spasms. The gentle girl drew him into her arms. He tried to jerk away, but she held him all the more tightly and he felt better. Instead of crying much harder as he usually did, he vomited poison all over her. She'd saved him.

He was awakened by a pounding at the door. He heard the door handle turning futilely. Last night for the first time he'd locked himself in.

He put his underwear on and went to the door. It was the boy who believed in praxis. He'd known of his plan, and came by early to learn what had happened to him. - Congratulations! he said. You're alive!

Yeah, said the boy who wanted to be a journalist.

He stood there for awhile in his underwear, and then he began to feel that he needed to justify being alive, so that the boy who believed in praxis wouldn't feel that he'd come for nothing.

I decided to flip a coin, he said. Heads would be life, and tails would be the other. I went and flipped the coin, and it came up tails. But I figured I'd released it sooner than I meant to, so I flipped it again, and it came up tails. I decided to try one more time. I flipped it, and it came up tails. So I decided the coin was wrong.

A couple of weeks later he started slitting his wrists. He never cut deep enough to do any harm, however. A Band-Aid lengthwise seemed to do the trick.

Once upon a time a journalist and a photographer set out to whore their way across Asia. They got a New York magazine to pay for it. They each armed themselves with a tube of cool soft K-Y jelly and a box of Trojans. The photographer, who knew such essential Thai phrases as: very beautiful! how much? thank you and I'm gonna knock you around! (topsa-lopsa-lei), preferred the extra-strength lubricated, while the journalist selected the non-lubricated with special receptacle end. The journalist never tried the photographer's condoms because he didn't even use his own as much as (to be honest) he should have; but the photographer, who tried both, decided that the journalist had really made the right decision from a standpoint of friction and hence sensation; so that is the real moral of this story, and those who don't want anything but morals need read no further. - Now that we've gotten good and evil out of the way, let's spirit ourselves down (shall we?) to the two rakes' room at the Hotel Metro, Bangkok, where the photographer always put on sandals before walking on the sodden blue carpet to avoid fungus. As for the journalist, he filtered the tap water (the photographer drank bottled water; they both got sick). There was a giant beetle on the dresser. The journalist asked the bellboy if beetles made good pets. - Yes, he grinned. It was his answer to every question. - Good thing for him he doesn't have a pussy, said the photographer, untying his black combat boots with a sigh, putting foot powder on; and the journalist stretched out on his squeaking bed, waiting for the first bedbug. The room reminded him of the snow-filled abandoned weather station where he'd once eked out a miserable couple of weeks at the North Magnetic Pole; everything had a more or less normal appearance, but was deadly dangerous, the danger here being not cold but disease; that was how he thought, at least, on that first sweaty super-cautious night when he still expected to use rubbers. The photographer had already bought a young lady from Soy Cowboy. In the morning she lay on the bed with parted purple-painted lips; she put her legs up restlessly.

Last night tuk-tuk fifty bhat, she said. * Come back Soy Cowboy, thirty bhat.

So you want some more money for the tuk-tuk ride, is that what you're trying to tell me? said the photographer in disgust. Man, I don't fucking believe it. You know she only let me do her once. And then she wanted a thousand bhat � that's why I had to get that five hundred from you.

The woman's teeth shone. She slapped her thigh, yawned, walked around staring with bright black eyes.

Where do you come from, sweetheart? asked the journalist, flossing his teeth.

Me Kambuja.

Cambodia?

Yes. Kambuja.

We go Kambuja, said the journalist. You come Kambuja?

* In 1991 a US dollar was worth about 25 Thai bhat, or 1,00��Cambodian riels.

At breakfast the photographer sat on pillows, a sweet brown arm sleeping around his waist. Eighty percent of the Pat Pong girls had tested positive for AIDS that fall. Probably she'd be dead in five years.

She watched the TV's cartoons as wide-eyed as before. Coffee was all she ordered from room service, giggling rapt with head on chin, while in the hotel's humid halls the maids in blue stood folding towels and talking, leaning elbows on the desk, and the tuk tuks went by and the clothes dried from windows across the courtyard, barely moving, and rainwater dried on the tiles while one of the hotel's men in red livery went out to smoke and scratch his belly, and across the courtyard a brown man naked to the waist flickered past a window of shadow.

The journalist's balls glowed faintly. The soles of his feet stuck itchily to his rubber sandals.

Suddenly the sun came on like a dimmer knob turned rapidly up to maximum, and it began to get hot.

When Joy left, she was dressed conservatively, smiled blandly; she shook each of their hands. Did she become that way in the morning, after the photographer fucked her up the ass, and she saw that he was like the others? (The photographer told him she'd pointed to her vagina and said: Here OK condom OK and then to her anus and said: Here OK no condom OK.) Or was her affection just an act? Or was this public demeanor of hers an act? The journalist's heart sank. He'd never know.

And what's this injection? he asked.

The doctor's glasses glinted. ��Pure caffeine, he said enthusiastically.

If I wear a rubber from now on so that I don't infect the other girls, can I keep having sex, starting today?

I think it would not be good for you, said the doctor. You see, the disease has already migrated far into the spermatic cord. .

Receipt No. 03125 (two soda waters, 60 bhat) was already in the cup, and fever-sweat from the clap ran down his face. At the bar, the two girls watched King Kong, plump-cheeked, wide-eyed, almost unblinking. (Joy wasn't there yet; probably she was still sleeping in some other place of narrow alleys. .) A girl in a blindingly white T-shirt came in, and then another. They leaned on the bar on that hot afternoon, talking, while the spots of disco-light began to move and the fan bulged round and round like a roving eye. No-see-ums bit the journalist's feet between the sandal straps, so he put some mosquito repellent on; business stopped as all the girls watched. The two plump-cheeked girls looked catty-corner at opposing tvs as King Kong roared; then, when it was only helicopters again, they went back to the click-click-click of red and yellow counters, thinking hard as the pattern built up, six by six, click by click; in their concentration they lowered their noses almost against the wall of that gameboard, hair long, cheeks smoother than golden nectarines, so young, so perfect; perhaps it was just to a coarse-pored Caucasian that they appeared perfect. Click, click. Soon the meaningless game would be finished (meaningless since they weren't betting ten bhat against each other as they did when they played the journalist; he always lost), and then one woman would pull the release and the plastic counters would clatter into the tray below with a sound like gumballs. Then they'd start again, smoothing back their hair, reaching, showing hand-flesh through the holes.

The journalist was working, and the girls sometimes gathered around to watch him write. Lifting his head from the bar, the photographer explained to them: My friend likes to write long letters to his balls.

In Oy's bar the Western video was repeating and dinner had closed because it was six o'clock now, Oy's hour to come to work as the photographer had kindly ascertained; and paunchy white guys grinned. The staff was getting ready for dancetime. Someone was chopping ice, and a girl in a beige miniskirt sat spread-legged by the register where the glasses were, scratching a mosquito bite on her thigh, and the great green ceiling grid was activated; then the blue fluorescents came on, then the yellow and green spotlights at angles, then the multifaceted ball, and a girl with a lovely face like all the others (who seemed increasingly ghostly) smiled encouragingly at the journalist and drew her arm grandly down as if to yank the ripcord of a parachute and went into the Ladies.

The journalist's teeth chattered with fever. - Man, I hope you make it, said the photographer.

I'm all right, the journalist said. Do you see Oy anywhere?

You wait here. I'll ask around.

Well, he said after a moment, they say she'll be in at seven or seven-thirty. You want to wait?

Sure.

At seven, Toy came in. She said hi, smiling; she said no Oy today. She smelled like perfumed excrement. There was some-, thing so sincere about her that the journalist almost said to hell with it and asked her, but she would only have said no. He wrote her a note for Oy, showing her each of the note's words in the English-Thai dictionary: Oy � I worry you blood that night. Are you OK?

Will Oy come today? he asked her again, just to be sure.

Toy patted his arm. - Not today.

You come hotel me, Toy?

No, sir.

You my friend?

OK friend OK.

Oy is sick?

Oy no today.

Then Oy came, smiling. Toy went off to dance.

He bought out Oy, saying: I just take you back. Just sleep watch TV no fucking just sleep you know OK?

OK, laughed Oy.

She seemed in perfect health. That annoyed him after all his anxiety. Oy? he said. Oy? I'm sick from you. From your pussy.

Oy hung her head smiling. .

The photographer went back to the other bar to buy Joy, and the four of them walked down the hot narrow alley, the two boys in faded clothes a little dirty, the two girls in fancy evening wear; what a treat!�� Oy went to a store to buy condoms; he said no need and she was happy. They got a taxi to the hotel. Joy rode in front with the driver. Oy pressed against him. He held her hand, gave her leg a feel; her dress was drenched with sweat. - You hot? he said. - She nodded; she'd always nod no matter what he said.

How long have you worked in Pat Pong? he said.

Six month.

How long has Toy worked there?

Ten month.

(Toy had told him that she'd worked there for six months.)

The photographer grinned. - So, how do you know she worked there for ten months if you only worked there for six months?

Oy blushed and ducked her guilty head.

He led Oy into the hotel while the photographer paid off the driver.

The journalist went grandly up to the desk. - Two-ten, please.

All the Thais in the lobby watched silently. Oy hung back, ashamed. They began talking about her. She raised her head then and followed her owner up the stairs, into the humid heat and mildew smell� At the first landing, when she could no longer be seen, she took his hand and snuggled passionately against him. .

He told her again that she'd gotten him sick, but that it was OK.

I go doctor; doctor me in here! she giggled, pointing to her butt. Later, when he'd gotten her naked, he saw the giant bandage where she'd had some intramuscular injection. It did not give him confidence that while her disease must be the same as his her treatment had been different. - Best not to think about it.

The photographer came in. - Same room? said Joy on his arm.

It's OK, the journalist told her. No sex. Don't worry.

That was truly his plan � just to lie there in the darkness with Oy, snuggling and watching Thai TV while the photographer and Joy did the same. Needless to say, once the photographer took a shower and came out wearing only a towel and cracking jokes about his dick, the journalist could see how it would actually be. He took his shower. .

The photographer laughed. - You should really get back in the shower, he said. You finished, man?

The journalist just nodded. He was feeling dizzy. He wandered out with his shirt around his waist; the girls laughed; Joy shook her head saying you baah which means you crazy and he hopped into bed sopping wet. Obedient Oy snuggled up to him in her fancy clothes. .

You take shower, he said to her.

Finally she did, wearing the other towel. The light was still on. Every time anyone flushed the toilet the floor always flooded; he could see the comforting sparkle of that water on the bathroom tiles. . She crawled in, snuggling him, and he slid a hand between her legs and was happy to feel her narrow little bush.

I go ten o'clock, she said. Toy birthday party. Toy my sister.

Whatever you say.

He lay sucking her tits while she held him. She let him kiss her a little but she didn't like it. Her body was slender, her nips just right. Her face looked rounder and older tonight; her voice was hoarser. She kept coughing. After awhile she started playing with his penis, probably to get it over with. He had an erection, but no desire to use it; his grapefruit-swollen balls seemed to be cut off from the rest of his body. He still didn't plan to do it, but when he got up to go to the bathroom with just the shirt around him, the two whores sitting eating room service (the bellboy had carefully looked away when he brought it into the half-darkened room, the photographer and the journalist lounging like lords with their half-naked girls beside them), the head of his dick hung down below the shirt and they started laughing and then he started getting wild like the class clown. First he began tickling Oy. Then he started lifting her around, and pulling the covers down to show her off naked; she laughed (probably thinks you're a real pest! said the photographer, shaking his head); she kept rubbing against him to make him do something, and then she'd look at the clock. .

Eventually, she rubbed against him in just the right way, and then he knew he'd have to do it. What a chore! But life isn't always a bed of guacamole. He squeezed K-Y into her cunt, handed her the rubber, and then she said she didn't know how to put it on. . Wasn't that SOMETHING? She tried sincerely, but she just didn't understand it. He did it and then thrust into her. She pretended to come and he pretended to come; he didn't care. In the carpet of light from the half-open bathroom door the other two were doing it in the far bed; Oy lay watching the photographer pedaling slowly like a cyclo driver high between three wheels, and she clapped her hand to her mouth and snickered softly; meanwhile Joy suddenly noticed that Oy was on top of the journalist and rolled off her trick and went into the bathroom and turned the shower on loud for a long time.

He really enjoyed playing with her body, lying there relaxed and feverish, doing whatever he wanted while the TV went ai-ai � if he felt like sticking a finger up her he'd just grease it and pop it in!�� I have the clap! he announced to himself, and he felt that he'd won some major award. Light-headed and distant, he enjoyed snuggling up to her and smelling her, sucking her shaved armpits, pursuing with kisses her face which sought to evade him; every now and then he'd catch her and kiss her lips and she'd laugh. Whenever he'd touch her between the legs she'd start going urn urn and begin swinging her hips as if in ecstasy, but her cunt stayed dry and her face didn't change and her heart didn't pulse at all faster beneath his other hand. . He lounged, played, stroked in a delightful fog of disease like the foggy sprawl of Bangkok he'd be leaving in four hours, soaring east over big grey squares of water going into greyness, riding the hot orange sky. At the moment it was still dark. She tried to get him off again and he let her play with his useless and meaningless erection; later he lifted her onto his neck and ran around the room in his underpants with her on his shoulders clinging and laughing in fun or terror while the photographer and his whore laughed themselves sick.

He kept saying: Oy, you want go Kambuja?

No want! No want! Kambuja people is bad people! Thai people like this (she prayed); Kambuja people like this! (she saluted fiercely). The journalist saluted her in return, and she cowered back. .

Another boy who longed to learn English lured the journalist up lightless stairs to a lightless apartment which was empty except for a table, two chairs, and a wooden sleeping platform: six thousand riels a month. He took the journalist out to the terrace where they could look down on the yellow dome of the central market, bugeyed with terraces, bikes and motorbikes lined up in rows; and all the journalist could think was: The disco is on the other side; I wonder if Vanna is there��� But I have no good teacher, the boy whined; I have no money for good teacher��� and the journalist thought: Your obsession is no better or worse than mine. - When the boy's begging began to get under his skin, he went out into a new rainstorm, all the people laughing at him sweetly; a woman came running up with an umbrella to hold over him and he smiled and thanked her and then stuck his arms out wide into the rain and flew away, laughing so happily while she laughed; he splashed drenched through the street puddles, and, giving everyone his best thumbs-up, yelled: Number one!

At the base of the great bridge which the Khmer Rouge had destroyed almost twenty years ago now, during the Lon Nol time, were barber stands, which is to say greyish card tables and old chairs in which soldiers, police, cyclo drivers and others sat to have their hair snipped; the street was black with hair. A barber stropped his razor at a desk. There were little mirrors on the tables, and a styling poster. . On either side of barber's row was a cement well whose stairs were pancaked with excrement; there was no way to avoid stepping on it. The journalist ascended this stinking way and came out onto the bridge, which seemed very far above the wrinkled brown water with its thatch-roofed junks. The Khmer Rouge had done a good clean job, shearing through steel, concrete and asphalt to leave a squared-off edge of sunny air. Remembering this much later, he thought: Three steps, and I would have been with Vanna forever, even if she stayed alive��� But at the time he entertained no such designs because Vanna was present and urgent; he'd see her as soon as darkness came. .

Her hand and face were amazed at the ice cube tray in the freezer; he knocked a cube out for her and she crunched it happily between her teeth. She was finally laughing and smiling and going psssst!� - she finally trusted him; yes, she loves you, the interpreter said; she trusts you; you can see it in her eyes��� She lay in bed with him singing Khmer songs in a soft voice until the photographer, who was very ill, sat up in bed and started mimicking her in the ugliest way that he possibly could, and Vanna became silent.

The photographer had made a mess of things. He'd bought everyone a dictionary, but then he was too sick to be there when they made a banquet to thank him. He'd caught a fever from the journalist, who'd caught it from Vanna. . Then the money-changer saw him with two different women and cried her eyes out and hated him. . He'd made up with his girl at the disco, probably for the journalist's sake since the journalist was going to go there for Vanna no matter what; now the photographer's girl was weeping because the journalist was asking Vanna EVERYTHING (by means of the English teacher), while the photographer only lay there not caring whether she stayed or went � preferring, in fact, that she'd go, because the photographer knew it was only a matter of time before he had to puke, and anyway Cambodia wasn't exactly his country the way Thailand was; the girls here didn't attract him as much, and everyone seemed so docile and lazy to him whereas he only respected people like his next door neighbor in San Francisco whom he'd caught pissing in the hall and the photographer started yelling at him but the neighbor only swung round his bleary terrible face and shouted: Next time I'll shit on your head! and then the photographer had to forgive and admire him; his girl in Cambodia didn't do that, not quite; and when the time came to send her away forever because they were leaving for Thailand early next morning, the girl began to weep and grovel again, soaking his knees with tears, clinging to him; it was horrible to see her; as affectionately as he could, the journalist kissed her hand goodbye. .

THE END

But that wasn't the end, either, because in the morning, ' very early, there was a tapping at the door, and when he got up sick and fat and groggy in his underwear to see who it was he still didn't know; he opened the door and shouted VANNA! with glee and thankfulness and she was glowing at him; she'd brought loaves of bread for his journey; he shared one with her; the photographer, who'd passed out puking on the floor, lay feverish in bed; and the journalist opened the refrigerator door where the photographer had left his fruit to be abandoned and gave it to her, a gift for a gift, and she smiled and took it so that it became something special; lying in bed beside him she peeled a fruit somewhat like a giant grapefruit, each sector of it walled off by a bitter cuticle as thick as a flower petal, the reward inside being a mass of rubbery pale yellow teardrop-shaped fibers with bittersweet juice; and she put the segments into his mouth, and she said: I wuff you -

THE END

He was feeling sick again; his balls were aching again. He certainly didn't know what he'd done to deserve that. At the Pink Panther, lights reflected through his mixed drink; high heels clickclacked on the bar-enclosed platform; black bathing-suited ladies danced slow and sure while overhead the balloons aped red traffic lights. The first one that came to him was very fat and desperate. She kept sticking her tongue in his mouth. - I'm sick, he said, but she started jouncing on his lap. -Pussy accident, he said, and she laughed. - I have VD, he said, and she laughed. She kept asking him to buy her out tonight, tonight, and he said maybe tomorrow and she started screaming no no no and cramming her tongue into him, becoming more horrible every second until he almost wanted her to catch the white fungus on his tongue.

Finally she gave up. - You sick OK no problem you come bar tomorrow darling buy me out tomorrow?

OK, he said.

Promise? You promise? I say you promise me now?

Sure, he lied. I promise.

On a cocktail napkin she wrote NAME and then her name, first and last; she wrote NO. and then her bar number; then she wrote:

forget me not

He kept waking up in the middle of the night not knowing who this person beside him was. After she started sleeping in the other bedroom they got along much better. Sometimes he'd see her in the back yard gardening, the puppy frisking between her legs, and she'd seem so adorable there behind window-glass that he ached, but as soon as she came in, whether she stormed at him or tried desperately to please him, he could not feel. He could not feel! For years he and his wife had had arguments about the air conditioner. He'd turn it on and then she'd turn it off and he'd wake up stifling and turn it on again and then she'd start screaming. These days, he did nothing when she turned it off. He could hear her bare feet on the hardwood floor of the other bedroom; then her door opened and he heard her in the hall; then the air conditioner stopped. Sometimes he couldn't sleep. Other times he dreamed of struggling in blue-green jungle the consistency of moldy velvet; the jungle got hotter and deeper and then he'd find himself in the disco again, no Vanna there anymore, only the clay-eyed skulls from the killing fields, white and brown, a tooth here and there; from the Christmas lights hung twisted double loops of electrical wire (the Khmer Rouge, ever thrifty, had used those to handcuff their victims); no girls, no beer; they kept bringing him skulls. .

He was not inhibited by mechanical rules or by metaphysical thinking. . To follow rules would have have been to court sure disaster.

She was burning up with fever. She was his wife, and she was dying!�� He took a vial from his pocket, and began to feed her pills of pure Arctic ice. He held her hand, which weighed nothing. He could feel it cooling down as the red fever-flush went away from her face. - I wuff you, she said. - The nurse detached the intravenous snakes. He put his hand on his wife's heart and kept it there until the pool of sweat between her breasts evaporated. She'd been breathing quietly but desperately through her mouth, and now her lips closed and her sweet eyes opened and she gestured to her throat until he understood that she needed more water. He jumped up to fill the pitcher. The water was tepid and muddy. When he poured it into the cup, he shook in the last pill of ice, and it turned clear and cold at once; after she'd drunk it down she smiled at him just as she had when he'd bought her the gold bracelet, that smile that scorned the world's scorn; then she sat slowly up and made room for him to sit beside her on the narrow bed as she put her arm around him and began very quietly to sing a strange sad song in her lisping voice. He put his cheek against hers. No fever. She laughed and pinched him. She pulled him to his feet and they began to dance together, right there in the hospital, and all the other patients were cured. She took his hand, and they walked together out of the ward and through the jasmine-smelling courtyard whose fire had died down and between the other yellow concrete buildings and past the white cross and out the gate, and then they were gone from sad places forever. White swirly mane-ways, down-pods and foam spilled on the sky-blue sea. He took her where leads unrolled like grey ribbons too long to have ends, their colors changing from a cumulus-white with a slight hint of yellow to a very pale sky-blue. Now she made signs that she was hungry, so they went caribou hunting with his friends in the summer moss. Reddish-black racks of seal meat hung on wood frames to dry. His dear wife felt chilly at first, but when she saw the children (copper-faced like her) laughing in the icy rocky streams, catching fish, then she began to forget the spidery green reflections of palm trees in ricefield water; everyone was good to her; the old ladies made her sealskin mitts; she learned to enjoy raw meat, to saw off a frozen steak� A long low cliff-finger rested lightly on the ice, cushioned by blowing snow, and a dumptruck full of snow left the scatter of houses to discharge its blue-smoking load, which squeaked as it slid out. Pointing at the frozen sea, he laughed and said to her in their secret universal language: Do you remember that wooden stand in Phnom Penh whose only ware was an uneven block of ice, with a rusty sawblade to cut it? and she said nothing, perhaps because she preferred to remember the ice-pills instead, or perhaps because she never said anything anyhow, only chewed on the piece of caribou fat he'd given her, walking beside him up the low ridge that bordered the sourceless river. Almost noon. The low sun and clear sky held the weird subdued transparency of morning and evening at the same time. In her smooth-soled sealskin kamiks she slipped on one of those strange ovals on the ice swept clean as if by spotlight beams; his arm was around her waist before she could fall. Then he saw that the faint breeze had begun to chill her cheeks. He took her face gently between his mitts and blew on it and she giggled because that tickled. When the color came back, he kissed her in the Cambodian way, inhaling in teasing little sniffs through his nose as he pecked her and she hissed with pleasure; he and she were polar bear twins��� He said: Now I'll take you to my house, which I hope you'll like because it's your house, too (he'd asked the photographer: What do you think Vanna will do when she sees this place? and the photographer looked around grinning and said: She'll shit in her pants, man! She's gonna love you so fucking much! By her standards you're a millionaire! Once she sees this place she'll never ever leave you!) � So the Twin Otter taxied in the snow; steam puffed from a tomato-red Quonset hut; a raven flapped; sunrise over blue clouds; past the wires the Twin took off at a sedate angle, leaving the velour hills alone. He'd given her the window seat and she couldn't take her face away from the glass; it was so beautiful. They were going from one heaven to another, by the scenic route because he wanted to draw it out as much as he could before that first time when he'd give her the key to the house and take her to the bedroom and they'd fall asleep side by side. (It was a little strange, the way he almost always imagined her sleeping as he fell asleep. Making love with her, taking her into a supermarket for the first time, giving her her first elevator ride, letting her try ice cream, buying her dresses, gold rings, a new red motorbike to ride up San Francisco's steep hills (her name pricked out in gold on the bar between her legs), these were all things that gave him joy to look forward to, but somehow sleep was the real tree whose trunk was a hundred roots, each root, as big around as an arm, one of these other happinesses, all intertwined like pipes, wrapped with vines of sleep which bore white flowers and blackish-blue berries. He was tired. He felt unwell. He wanted to sleep.) So the plane landed in the desert. The floor of the canyon was entirely river, cool, green and shallow, with the usual surprises in the lowest overhang: grey ferns downheaded like stalactites. In that shadow was the last coolness. After that, slanting rock-sides burned to touch, although there was another shelf at an angle of forty-five degrees from which huge trees jutted, both evergreens and pale green virgins leaning into space as if to drink the vapor, at least, of the river they could not reach. A man and a woman were wading up the stream slowly, knees apart. The woman was soaked and muddy, and evidently had lost her gauzy butterfly hairclip. But she seemed tranquilly happy. A wake formed from her like a shadow. From time to time she stumbled, and then the man would give her his arm, and she'd smile. Her rainbow prostitute dress shimmered like a glorious rage of dragonflies; the drops of river-water that danced up from her knees reflected every color like crystals: the pinkish-red that formerly looked so dramatic in the Cambodian night when she came walking down stenchy greasy pitchblack alleyways, the yellow splash, that hue of streetlights which Cambodia didn't have yet; the electric bluish-green that once shocked its way down breast and belly in the darkness, now a summer riverwater color, a little mournful as artificial glows always are in daylight. . She was smiling shyly and holding her husband's hand. Her earrings sparkled rhythmically as she walked through the water; they glittered like sunlight on mica. He took her slender arm and steadied her when he saw an eddy; he slipped his hand round her narrow waist. (Of course she actually would have hated all this; in Cambodia she always had to go by motorbike even if it was only two blocks, and she wouldn't even ride the same motorbike he did.) The upside-down Vs of her eyebrows glowed blackish-gold in the strong sunlight; the sunlight glistened on her cheeks. - Yellow glare of mustard fields, then phosphorescent white of cottonwoods, then grey-pink and greyer green ridges studded with little blue tree-buttons; he was taking her to their new house hidden beyond a tall slit in the sand ridge so narrow he could barely lead her through. She got tired, and he carried her across the blue desert of Utah, the yellow desert of Nevada, the grey desert of California, so grateful to be able to ease her way. He showed her everything, led her safely between the skyscrapers too aloof and alien even to accept each other's shadows, brought her under the red struts of the Golden Gate Bridge to marvel with him at the fog-colored bay and Marin headlands; on his shoulders he carried his darling wife up the steep slopes knit-sweatered with buttercups, ferns, grasses and raspberries; she stopped to weave him baskets from the windy grasses shaking alertly like sentient porcupine quills and antennae-forests while cars swirled and flickered overhead, bridge-shadow on the water. . Now before sleep Scarlatti's sonata K. 95, the thrilling happy feminine hurrying beats of that bridal march which no one else would ever want to make a bridal march out of because it wasn't sedate; he thought it simply glorious, brief and glorious, like a girl hurrying to her sweetheart; she was rushing to him in that church filled with all his relatives and everyone else he'd ever known so that she wouldn't have come to his distant land believing that he was ashamed of her; he wanted the whole world to see her and love her as she came down the aisle to him on no one's arm, the clavicord pounding like a million angels' hearts, nothing but joy. . He closed the window. Then he opened it once more to look upon the steeply slanting awnings and triangularly-crowned windows of that London street. - Everything jolly now? said the hypnotist.

It is by the activity of our passions, that our reason improves. . The passions, in turn, owe their origin to our needs, and their increase to our progress in science.

He knew and sensed that everything was going according to timetable. There was no need to interfere. They knew everything themselves. It would only make people nervous. They were good lads.

This is a libation to Jupiter the Liberator. Look, young man! For you have been born (may heaven avert the omen!) into an age when examples of fortitude may be a useful support.

Death isn't sad; it's Being itself. Death is the founder of consciousness, and therefore of political awareness.

Skinny boys were shouting at him. They tied his wrists behind his back with wire. - Are you imperialist lackey of traitor? a boy shouted. - Yes, he beamed. I am a traitor.

They were very happy then. They'd finally found someone who was guilty.

They led him along the edge of a luminous brownish-green creek that smelled like muck. A huge crab dandled its claws in the middle, clutching at unripe twigs. It was not a beetle-shaped crab like the ones in the markets, but broad, flat and brown. Leaves and garbage were everywhere. The view vanished into stinking greenness. The trees were not especially tall or leafy, but they were everywhere. Weird structures of roots and intersecting vines like musical instruments played chords upon his heart. They led him through turnstiles of latticework roots the hue of ginger-bulbs, and it got darker and so did the stench of the creek. There was another crab, even bigger than the last, and it was eating someone's face half-sunk in the reddish-brown ooze. There was a crowd of toiling crabs, and then more barbed wire and they were there where they were supposed to be. She was looking on him full at last with that sweet soft pale smooth delicate face of hers, open and trusting, smiling � really smiling!�� a pouty little smile like a kiss, her gold chain necklace coming shooting out of chin-shadow with the heart lying on her thin bluish-white blouse just above her breasts, inverted-V eyebrows seeming to question him a little as she smiled; the recognition of him took up her whole face as she sat waiting for him with that sad smile; he was hers; soon he'd be sleeping beside her forever.

The Butterfly Boy

Epigraph � G. W. Leibniz, preface to The New Essays (1703-5) in Philosophical Essays, ed. and trans. Roger Arlew and Daniel Garber (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1989), p. 293.

Ulrich and the Doctor

Epigraph � Chuck Taylor, The Complete Book of Combat Handgunning (Cornville, Arizona: Desert Publications, 1982), p. 63.

More Benadryl, Whined the Journalist

Epigraph � Bert H�lldobler and Edward O. Wilson, The Ants (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1990), p. 154.

The New Wife

Epigraph-N. Sanmugathasan, General Secretary, Ceylon Communist Party, "Enver Hoxha Refuted," in A World to Win: International Marxist Leninist Journal, no. 1, May 1981, p. 8.

Quotation in sec. 32 � Hanna Reitsch, The Sky My Kingdom (London: Greenhill Books, Lionel Levanthal Ltd., 1991), p. 81.

The Answer

Epigraph � Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract and Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, rev. anon, trans. (New York: Washington Square Press, 1967), p. 188.

/ Wouldn't Be Smiling That Way If I Were You

Epigraph � Yaroslav Golovanov, Sergei Korolev: The Apprenticeship c a Space Pioneer, trans. M. M. Samokhvalov and H. C. Creightot (Moscow: Mir Publishers, 1975 rev.), p. 7.

The Bordello of Pain

Epigraph � Tacitus, The Annals of Imperial Rome, trans. Michael Grant (New York: Penguin, 1975 rev.), p. 396.

Witness testimony footnote � "A group of Cambodian jurists," People's Revolutionary Tribunal Held in Phnom Penh for the Trial of the Genocide Crime of the Pol Pot-IengSary Clique: Documents (August 1979) (Phnom Penh: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1990), p. 11�60.

Bridal Mines

Epigraph � Paul Virilio and Sylv�re Lotringer, Pure War, trans. Mark Polizzotti (New York: Semiotext(e) Foreign Agents Series, 1983), p. 125.