Indecision (25 page)

I went out onto the porch and settled into a plastic deck chair. The Valley of Longevity . . . That was what the guidebook called it, since its inhabitants were supposed to be these mestizo Methuselahs cradled over the course of their absurdly long lives in the permanent equatorial summer of this gentle, fertile valley where on most days the high averaged out at seventy-eight. I kicked my feet up, cowpuncher-style, onto a wooden railing and took in the view of the valley. I heaved a sigh and rocked back in my chair, watching the spreading, forward-folded hills get filtered into definition by a falling saffron-esque light. Now Brigid came out in a fresh tee shirt, her harem pants, flip-flops, and sat down too. The light went gold, then coppery, then more like roseate—with all these stalled clouds a lurid coal red on the undersides—and we just sat there as the sky powered through the spectrum with as much sunset grandeur as I’d ever seen mustered in one place. There was this last long throb of violet light, then—bang—night, stars, crickets.

“Wow. That was some coucher du soleil there, Bridge.
I
feel like I could grow old here.” I was trying to be more nice and less sullen, while alive.

“I have empathy,” Brigid said. I looked at her. “I feel the same? Oh I am sick that my English is no better. It constantly improves if you will talk to me. Otherwise—”

“On peut parler le français, si tu veux. Je comprends—plus ou moins.”

“Beaucoup moins que plus! You are nothing in French. And in English you have no strong wish to be clear.”

“I like
your
English, Bridge. ‘I have empathy’? I’m serious, that’s a nice expression. It deserves a wide currency.”

Down on the terrace we ate some great organic food—a main dish of nothing but quinoa and carrots, but somehow spiced to be good. Maybe Episcopalian vegetarianism really was the thing, or so I considered as we sat munching among the usual suspects: the American, German, Israeli, Scandinavian, Norwegian, British and French backpackers who apparently haunt all the cheap idylls of underdevelopment and paradises of neoliberal neglect. Next to me was a suntanned and boyish young Israeli lady with her hair cut short and a dusting of freckles across her nose. I asked what was fun to do around here.

“Drugs,” came the firm unhesitating answer.

“Really? I like drugs.” So maybe I’d just been maligning drugs to Bridge—but whatever.

“There is a drug here called the San Pedro cactus. You drink a boiled juice of it and then you vomit. But don’t worry—afterwards you become insane.”

“Hey, Bridge, you hear that?” I thought it might be nice to try
one
more drug. Then to the Israeli girl I said, “I’m on a potent drug right now. It’s meant to cure your chronic indecision, although to be honest—”

“This should be very popular in Israel.”

“So where do you guys live in Israel? You live in the part of Israel that’s Israel or the part that’s not so much?”

“Does this drug make you very inquisitive?”

“Yes,” I said. “I guess it does. So what did you guys do in the army?” I was entertaining the last-ditch idea that conscription into some force might do me some good. They must have a whole regimen of calisthenics and mental training.

Brigid elbowed me sharply in the ribs.

“Brigid is from Belgium,” I told everyone in order to encourage a shared curiosity among nations. However this seemed the wrong line too. I felt bad about my mysterious gaffe(s), and tried to make up for them by inviting Amira and the others to happy hour at the bar. It was reported that there you could get two drinks for the already scandalously cheap price of one, and I began to tell the Israelis how they all ought to take Abulinix, if decisions ever gave them trouble, and not only for that reason, but also because it was a potentiator with regard to alcohol. “Basically at happy hour I’m going to be getting
four drinks for the price of one.
”

“We don’t like drinking,” Amira’s male companion said. “We’re more into drugs.”

“Sor-
ry,
” I said later on as Brigid and I sat swaying together on a porch swing in the dark. “I was only being friendly. I don’t even know what’s going on over there in Israel and the other parts. I wash my hands of the whole thing.”

“You wash your hands of everything.”

“Look I’ve
known
people who’ve known things about the Middle East—and it was never any good.”

Brigid ignored this concern—and as we sat together on the swing, sipping doublefistedly from our four mojitos, there followed from her what I really hope was an exhaustive account of the traded crimes of Palestinians and Israelis, as well as American connivance in the mess. And when I asked whether Belgium was so wonderful in comparison, she was ready with tales of the evil Belgian adventure in the Congo, and a handy analysis of the not-very-helpful Belgian division of Hutu and Tutsi into separate administrative castes in Rwanda.

“You’re a real student of atrocity, aren’t you? This is the most beautiful place I’ve ever been—and it hurts and pollutes my mind to know all this stuff which I couldn’t have done anything about. Sorry if our presence here was paid for by a bunch of atrocity coupons, but I mean . . . What good does it do if we have all this knowledge and no power? That’s poison. Don’t you think? And who wants to drink poison? Except Socrates, of course.” And maybe me too. (I sipped at my mojito.)

“But what do you mean when you talk? Perhaps this drug you are taking disrupts your mind.”

“What I mean is this. So you’re interested in human happiness. Good for you, Brigid. But you’re kind of human too. So your happiness also figures in the basic global tally. And it doesn’t seem to make you very happy to consider all the massacres and thefts and frauds ever done, am I right? Or am I right?”

“Tu es nul!” She stepped violently off of the swing and left it lurching askew in the dark.

“I’ll sleep on the couch,” I offered.

“I can’t tell you how little I care what you do. I have been
with
you for a week and while sometimes you are very productive of bizarre things to say, have you ever mentioned this drug to me? But then to tell a stranger?”

“I was
embarrassed.
”

“This is a drug for making decisions with? If I were to swallow this drug I would decide to hit you. So you will masturbate in front of me but you won’t tell me about the drug in your mind?”

A blaze of embarrassment more existential than onanistic went through me, and I couldn’t talk at all.

“Oh don’t be so arrogantly ashamed. Don’t you think I masturbate as well?”

I sipped from the right then sipped from the left mojito, just to do something with my mouth besides talking. Eventually I said, “How do you enjoy masturbating?”

She made a sound of exasperation. “Frankly I find it rather second-rate.” And then she was walking up the stone steps, going from terrace to terrace until she was gone, and formulating by her absence as much as by her presence a number of questions, starting with: to run after or not to run after?

In my experience when a person doesn’t know what to do with himself, he will check his email. So with a blank and troubled mind I strolled into the office of the pensión, and stood in line waiting for the one super-slow email connection. When it was my five-minute turn I logged on and found my inbox mostly choked with offers for penis enlargement and longer lines of credit—but also there was something from Vaneetha.

FROM: [email protected]
TO: [email protected]
SUBJECT: [none]

You may wonder how I’m feeling. But you’re not coherent enough that I feel anything much.

On our first date remember we discussed karma. Now I wonder: what is the karma produced by meaningless actions? An interesting question—perhaps you have simply placed more nonsense into circulation.

But would you like the pop psychology post-mortem? Here is what I tell my friends: “He was a screen. I projected hopes. It was right after 9/11. The night before had been so blissful and I suppose I always imagined something like that might be recovered.” And in fairness—to me, not you—I will acknowledge your better-than-average looks, your infectious enthusiasm (the appropriate cliché?), and I will say that you gave the impression—it took some time to wither—of being quite responsive and attentive. You also seemed so American. I believe this made me feel more at home here.

Do enjoy the best nation in the world.

No reply necessary. — V

The world has probably never been so hospitable to ill-considered words as since the invention of email. So I wrote:

Thank you, Vaneetha, denouncing me as the nonsense I am. What you say is true.

Just before I left America another credible denunciation was leveled at me and at this moment I am synthesizing my fathers constructive criticism with yours to conclude that I am or have been a DOG whose master has been nonsense. jhsdlkjhfksadhflkasjhdflkjsh!!!! is what I say, frothing at the mouth. Ijshedfkjhsdkjfhskdjhfk!!!

Plus your email is helpful in another way. I see you as liberated from me and this makes me feel better. I can imagine that I would feel like this a lot if I could date many wonderful women (not to compare them with you—you’re incomparable!) and then leave them, feeling that in this I had done them a good turn. Isnt it nice to be rid of me? I nearly feel that way myself. —D

PS Natasha not here, btw.

PPS hjkhkjhaslkdfhlaksedjfhlkasdfk

PPPS Sorry if I’m being a jerk but it is a nice-guy fallacy that you should keep being nice into breaking up—then the woman might persist in imagining you are a decent person whom it is hurtful to have lost.

Next I wrote to Dan:

FROM: [email protected]
TO: [email protected]
SUBJECT: [none]

Not much time but some questions.

a) How are you?

b) Could serious involuntary memories be included in the package of side effects, do you think?

c) How about—speaking just hypothetically, and out of impartial curiosity—thoughts of suicide?

d) Would any trial participants have reported a marked increase of taciturn and/or jerk-like behavior in themselves, especially with regards to women, if they are men, at the same time that no other decisions have been made by these male participants?

Would write more about the good time I’m having but my minutes are almost up.

Maybe it was some reckless desire to bring things to a head between us that led Brigid to seek out the big-time autochthonous hallucinogen Amira had recommended. In any case when I got back to our cottage, this pair of South Americans, somehow obviously non-Ecuadorian, just these generally very sketchy-looking dudes—they were standing negotiating with Brigid while two hippyish gringo girls beamed in, beads and all, straight from a Phish show, sat giggling on the couch.

I nodded at everyone and told them buenas tardes. Brigid glanced my way as if to ask a question and I looked at her like
Whatever you want.
Eventually it was my job to hand over our money. Forty dollars. Gouged—but we didn’t protest.

The Chilean guy in the bodhisattva tee shirt stuffed the bills in his pocket while his henchperson handed over a big two-liter bottle filled with this turbid semi-Coke-colored water chocked with floating particulate bits.

“A tea made from the leaves. He says it is best to drink it in the morning so you can experience the whole day.”

The Chilean raised his eyebrows and twirled his index finger in a circle to the side of his temple. In sequence he looked at me, then the liquid, then Brigid, rolling his eyes and grinning a lascivious grin.

“I’m glad you trust those sketchy people,” I said to her afterwards. “I don’t.”

“
No
—I thought the same. At least
Dwight
trusts them. You are the one to let me buy it. Before I was only asking questions.”

“It’s cool.” I didn’t care about anything anymore. “You don’t believe, but you believe the other person believes. I think that’s a model for how everything works out in the end. So I’m sure we’ll be fine.”

TWENTY-TWO

About nine hours later we were vomiting. And as Brigid and I took turns retching over the toilet, my previous theory of the joys of evacuation had come to seem wrong-headed.