Pantheon 00 - Age of Godpunk (19 page)

But Guy was adamant. Thailand was not under threat. The Vietnam War was in its death throes, less likely than ever to spill outwards and infect the rest of South-East Asia. North Vietnamese troops were closing in on Saigon, the ultimate prize. The endgame was being played out, ugly but self-contained. He would be safe. Besides, Europe was hardly the most peaceful spot at present. A febrile, fissured continent. NATO fighter jets on a state of constant high alert ever since Warsaw Pact tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia back in ’68. The Iron Curtain trembling. Terrorist revolutionaries – the Baader-Meinhof Gang, the Red Brigade – setting off bombs left, right and centre, though mostly left. Olympic athletes murdered in Munich. England itself wasn’t immune either, with IRA cells active, carrying out assassinations and bombings, testing the nerve of Special Branch on a daily basis.

Life could be gone in an instant. If nothing else, Molly Rosenkrantz had taught him that. He should see places, have experiences, be his own man, while he still could.

It was a sort of homecoming. Six years on, he was back in the heat and humidity, under the same constellations he had known as a boy. Here was Bangkok with its rush of tuk-tuks and bicycles, the air brown with the fumes from two-stroke engines, the stench of rotting garbage catching you unawares on street corners, the Chao Phraya river greasing its way through the middle of the city. He backpacked north, via the ancient Thai capital Ayutthaya, up to Chiang Mai and Chiang Rai and the jungles on the border with Burma. There he smoked opium and met a former mercenary, a local, who had lost a foot in a Cambodian minefield and was proud of the prosthesis he had carved for himself out of teak. He stayed with a hill tribe for three months, earning his board and lodging by teaching the village children the rudiments of English. The kids, though their parents never found out, became proficient swearers and regularly greeted one another with cheery cries of “Hello, wanker!” and “Good morning, you old hairy bastard!” He loved them. They were never reluctant to learn. They seldom squabbled. They owned nothing but the T-shirts and flipflops they stood up in, yet they were unfailingly happy. The only time he ever saw them sad was when he left. They ran after the pickup truck that carried him away, sobbing their eyes out. Guy’s heart ached. But he had to move on.

The beaches of the south beckoned. He caught the overnight train down through the Isthmus of Kra. He slept folded like human origami in a couchette bunk that was far too short and narrow for a lanky Westerner. A puttering ferry took him from the seaport of Surat Thani out to the islands in the Gulf of Thailand. One of the smallest, Koh Maan, became the terminus of his journey. It lay at the far end of the hippie trail, a kind of Ultima Thule for those who had tired of Marrakesh and Goa and wanted to go that one step further. All sorts of oddballs and outcasts fetched up on its shores, from slumming-it rich kids to brain-fried dopeheads, and every night, somewhere, there would be a beach barbecue, a bonfire, beer, music. Somebody would strum a guitar, playing Dylan or Simon and Garfunkel. Girls would dance, often naked, then select a man they liked and settle in his lap. The surf would crash, opium-laced joints would be passed round, and it felt, in every sense, like the end of the world. The furthermost tip of civilisation. The last days of planet Earth. A party to drown out the ticking of the doomsday clock. An orgy in Atlantis.

W
HEN THE
A
MERICAN
approached, Guy resolved to ignore him. The man had a shambling gait and twitchy eyes, and Guy was certain he would try to bum a cigarette or beg for a few spare baht. He kept his head down and concentrated on his eggs.

“Hey, my man.”

Here it came. Guy pretended not to have heard. Hopefully the man would give up and go away if he blanked him long enough.

“Those eggs look good.”

Buy some of your own
was the obvious response to that, but Guy opted for continued silence.

“Want seconds? My treat.”

Before Guy could stop him, before he could really work out what was going on, the American had ordered two more rounds off Mr Khun and sat himself down at the table.

“Yeah, nothing like a good breakfast, right?” He extended a hand. “Nick Scranton. And...?” He raised eyebrows expectantly.

“Guy. Guy Lucas.”

Scranton’s grip was surprisingly strong. “Cool. That’s cool. I’ve seen you around, Guy Lucas. I make it my business to know who’s who on Koh Maan. You’ve been here awhiles, and we’ve kind of not connected yet, so I thought introductions were in order.”

Guy studied Scranton, whom he now vaguely recognised – a face at one of the many Bacchanalian revels he had attended, a jovial presence, invariably squiring at least two women at once. The American, perhaps in his early thirties, had long, grey-flecked dark hair, tied back in a ponytail. A red bandanna encircled his head. He wore jeans and a denim waistcoat, which hung open to reveal a scrawny but still muscular torso. Beads dangled around his neck, and a pair of military dogtags.

“Ah, you noticed those, huh?” Scranton said, tapping the dogtags. “Yep. US Army. Hundred-And-First Airborne, a.k.a. the Screaming Eagles. Did three tours up north, chasing Charlie through swamp and jungle. Now officially demobilised. Well, I say ‘officially,’ but...” The sentence lapsed into a shrug.

“But Uncle Sam might not see it that way,” said Guy.

“Ha ha! Well put, Guy Lucas.”

“Absent without leave, isn’t that what they call it?”

“When they’re being polite. Deserter, when they’re not. I prefer to think of it as done with hellholes and terror and bullets and choosing to
live
instead. I figure, I didn’t volunteer, right? I got drafted in. So I gave as much as I was willing to, and now I’ve drafted myself out again.”

“Why are you telling me this?” Guy asked. “You don’t know me from Adam. I could report you, couldn’t I? Make a call to the right people...”

“...and bring the MPs down on my head. Yeah, sure. You could. But you won’t. You aren’t like that. I’m a good judge of character, Guy. I’ve got you pegged as the sympathetic type. That’s what I said to myself first time I saw you: ‘the sympathetic type.’ Anyways, what does the army care about one washed-up old grunt? America’s falling apart. I tell you, my country hasn’t got long left. It may not even live to see its bicentennial. Everything’s gone to hell since The Man started killing presidents and black preachers and college kids. By the end of this decade, there won’t even be a USA any more. There’ll be a giant glowing hole, with wolves and coyotes roaming the edges, eating the corpses. You can bet on that. It’s all over for the Land of the Free. And I’m going to sit here, at a safe distance, and watch the whole goddamn country burn. But that’s enough about me. You.”

“What about me?”

The eggs arrived. Scranton tucked in with gusto, holding his fork like a magic wand and scooping. Guy dug in too.

“You,” Scranton said through a bulging yellow mouthful, “have the look of somebody who’s seen his unfair share of shit. Kid your age, but you got an old man’s eyes. Don’t mean to pry. I can just tell.”

He leaned closer; lowered his voice.

“You’ve touched the Devil,” he rasped. “Or the Devil’s touched you. It’s much the same thing.”

Guy did not reply, but all at once the old chill was back, the familiar needling in the gut. Two years since Oxford and his spell in the sanatorium. He had put his past mistakes behind him. He had run. There were six thousand miles between him and all that. Wasn’t he allowed to escape it? Would it be chasing him forever?

“I know how that is, my friend,” Scranton went on. “I know ’cause I’ve met the Devil myself. No word of a lie. He was out there in that steaming Asian jungle, walking in plain sight, bold as brass. He was out there watching the slaughter and rubbing his hands like it was all part of the plan. Every GI who got cut down by sniper fire or died of sepsis from a punji stick wound, every VC who got napalmed or shot like a rat in one of their tunnels – that was the Devil leaving his mark. He saw me and staked a claim on me too. He’s at large in the world and he’s after us, and he won’t stop until he gets us. All of us.”

“No,” said Guy. “I don’t believe that.”

“Don’t or won’t?”

“Both. There is no Devil.” This had been his mantra since Oxford. This was the fragile creed he clung to, most ardently at night, a crumb of comfort in the dark of the small hours.
There is no Devil
.

“You say that, but he has plans for you, and if the Devil has plans for you it doesn’t matter what you think or feel or desire, you just have to accept it. Embrace it. And I can show you how. You’ve less to be scared of than you think, Guy. Open up to the Devil, and you’ll soon realise it’s not as bad as the alternative, which is to keep shying away from him, when it’s inevitable he’s going to catch up to you sooner or later. That’s just lunacy – denying reality. I can open your eyes, my friend. I can make the fear disappear.”

Guy had been all set to leave the table – perhaps abandon Koh Maan altogether. Anything to get away from this crazy person, this Vietnam veteran who’d clearly left several of his marbles behind somewhere north of the 17th Parallel.

But now, almost to his horror, he heard himself saying, “How?”

“Easy. With this.”

From a pocket, Scranton produced a small polythene baggie, inside which were squares of blotting paper, each no bigger than a postage stamp. He took one out and proffered it to Guy on the tip of his index finger. On it was ink-stamped a cartoon face: a leering demon with horns and a protruding tongue.

“A gateway,” he said. “A portal to truth.”

F
OR THREE DAYS
Guy refused to touch the tab of acid. But neither did he throw it away. It sat sandwiched between two pages of his tattered paperback copy of
Steppenwolf
. It called to him from the book.

A portal to truth
.

Most nights on the island, he had been skying on a cocktail of dope, opium and alcohol, getting a decent buzz on and often feeling as though he was close to some sort of breakthrough. He kept receiving glimpses of something vast and intricate and magnificent, an underlying scheme, the solution to everything. It was there, so near, but remained tantalisingly out of reach. It was as though one day he saw a leaf, the next day a branch, the day after that a root, but never the entire tree.

He had travelled, as so many did, in order to find himself. So far, however, all he had found was hedonism, old memories, and an infestation of pubic lice. Guy Lucas’s purpose in life was still a mystery to him.

Finally, on a bright, muggy afternoon, he bit the bullet – took the tab.

The blotting paper gradually disintegrated on his tongue. For long minutes he sat outside the beach hut, feeling no different. Maybe it was a dud batch of acid. Maybe Scranton was a bullshitter, or a prankster – went round distributing squares of blotting paper that were nothing more than that, for his own obscure amusement. And maybe that coconut on that palm tree over there was about to fall. Maybe it was already falling. Maybe its fall had happened long ago, and was happening now, and would happen in the future, and was always happening. Guy saw the coconut stay put, and descend, and lie on the ground having descended, all at once. The potential for falling was inherent in it. Latent. Nascent. It was born to fall.

Fascinated by the coconut, he stared at it for hours. Days. Weeks. The beauty of it dazzled him.

Was everything so beautiful?

It was. You only had to look – really
look
. The coconut. The hummingbird flirting with the hibiscus bush. The blades of coarse grass between here and the beach. The beach itself, where the foamy waves curled and the sea unpeeled itself beneath the sky.

Knee-deep in the surf, Guy could feel the rhythm of the tide, the pulse of the universe. The water was as warm as blood. Further out, he floated on his back, until the rollers gently returned him to shore like caring hands.

The answer, he thought as he lay on the burning hot sand, was that there was no answer. There was no underlying scheme. It was only an illusion.

He waved his arms up and down and scissored his legs open and shut, making a sand angel.

You could chase that illusion all your life, and only on your deathbed would you realise it meant nothing. It was just some will-o’-the-wisp. A flickering lie.

The heavens darkened. The sun hid its face. From somewhere came an immense deep groan, and the rain plummeted.

Guy did not move. Droplets pelted him like countless ball bearings. Lightning stalked across the horizon like the legs of a giant. The storm was terrifying, but he submitted to it, giving it the awe and respect it deserved.

As the tempest intensified, he heard footfalls. Someone was coming along the beach.

A faint, acrid smell reached his nostrils. Sulphur.

He looked round.

Scranton had been right.

The Devil was at large.

G
UY AWOKE IN
his beach hut. He was sprawled in the hammock, soaked to the skin. The rain rumbled on the corrugated tin roof. Thunderclaps rolled against the planks of the walls.

Nick Scranton was sitting in the one and only chair, idly thumbing through
Steppenwolf
. His denim waistcoat was damp from the shoulders to the breast pockets, his jeans from the knees down. His ponytail dripped water on the floor.

“Welcome back, my friend.”

Guy tried to get up, but his head swam every time he raised it. He voiced a question, a single guttural monosyllable. It could have been “Where?” or “How?” or “When?”

“Dragged you indoors,” Scranton said. “You were lying there in the shallows, out cold, with the waves breaking over you. I thought if the tide didn’t get you, a lightning bolt might. Drown or fry – either way, not good. So you tripped, huh?”

Even nodding made Guy dizzy.

“Good? Bad? Indifferent?”

Guy cast his mind back.

Before passing out, he had seen the Devil walking. He was convinced of it. The Devil in human guise.