Year Zero (13 page)

The mist bled pink, then burned to white. Nathan Lee felt like a vampire, desperate to get off the streets. Clutching his
jhola,
he reached the main road, Kanti Path, and it was strangely silent. By now there should have been a stream of traffic with honking horns and the jingle of bicycle bells. Instead, two farmers were trying to push a cart piled with grass between scores of taxis and autorickshaws and buses…all of them abandoned. Some stood parked in the middle of the street, others had pulled onto the sidewalk. Judging by the flat tires and missing seats, they had been sitting here for weeks or months.

Astonished, he spoke to the two farmers. “Why are the cars like this?” he asked in Nepali.

“Bhote,”
one said to the other, indicating Nathan Lee. With his bad accent and dumb question, they took him for a mountain yokel.

“Do you think a car uses water?” the other said to Nathan Lee.

Fuel,
he meant.
There was no fuel.
Now Nathan Lee saw the strangle weeds growing everywhere from cracks in the asphalt. He looked around, and the post office was in similar condition, its doors lolling open, creepers growing up the concrete. Telephone cables hung down the sides, slit open for their wires. Wood smoke came from broken windows. Squatters had taken residence in there. No fuel, no postal service, no police, no electricity, no phone. The infrastructure had vanished. “What happened?” asked Nathan Lee.

“Mahakala,”
one farmer responded.
Mahakala
was a wrathful deity. He was black and ferocious, with a sword of flames to cut down the demons of ignorance.

“The world is coming to an end,” said the other farmer.

“Was there a war?” asked Nathan Lee.

“No, I just told you. It just is so.” The man shrugged.
“Ke garne?” What to do?

They returned to pushing their cart. The morning fog opened wider. Sunlight glinted on Swayambunath, the hilltop temple to the west. People surfaced from their homes. Freshly painted
tikas
on their foreheads were bright and precise like bullseyes. Men wore tiny devotional flower petals in their hair. Shopkeepers opened their shutters and peasants laid their winter vegetables in neat rows for sale. As if the odor of raw meat weren’t enough, bright orange goat heads—rubbed with tumeric to keep away flies—advertised a butcher shop. Chinese bicycles, deathless clunkers, clattered back and forth, bells jingling.

And no one paid the slightest attention to him!
Penniless, weak, and bewildered, he began to relax. Maybe this was a dream, after all. Maybe he was still lying asleep on his straw mat.

Kathmandu had always been a vortex of centuries swirling upon themselves, the medieval and the modern. Electric lines threaded among thirteen-tiered temples. Ancient stone gods peered up from shafts in the asphalt. What he saw this morning was mostly the medieval. Video and fax shops, Indian boutiques, carpet and
thangka
stores: all were closed, their signs ripped away. The air was rich with spices, smoke, dung, meat, wood shavings, incense…everything but the city’s infamous smog. The dinosaur blaring of taxi horns was extinguished. Time had slowed down. The world had slipped a cog.

Nathan Lee couldn’t shake the feeling of fantasia. His stomach rumbled. Kathmandu was huge. Its temples loomed. What really threw him was the shift in human scale. Nepalis had always seemed to him slight and undernourished. But this morning everyone looked lush and muscular. His norm had become emaciated prisoners.

The plaza of Durbar Marg was packed so tightly with cars and buses that it looked like solid metal. Vehicles had been pushed from the narrow streets into this rusting junkpile among serene pagodas. He kept moving, letting the tangle of streets guide him. He had escaped into a city moving backward in time. Now he had to figure a way to escape time itself.

At the time of his arrest, political parties had been waging street warfare with posters and paint. Now all the political graffiti had been whitewashed to extinction, replaced by images of their god-king, a young
caudillo
in sunglasses and a pencil moustache. Had he decreed a return to traditional ways? That might explain it.

The street wound back and forth. The city was so quiet! No radios, no horns, no engine roar. Here and there little courtyards opened in the walls like separate worlds. People circled shrines, ringing little temple bells. Soothsayers and ayurvedic doctors and professional ear cleaners plied their trades on steps beneath temple eaves.

He reached Thamel, the tourist district. His little expedition with Ochs had started here at the Tibet Guesthouse, a favorite of mountaineers. It was closed, the metal gates wired together. He meandered deeper into tourist territory, his stomach pinched with hunger. This should have been his sanctuary, a place among fellow Americans, brothers of the rope, sympathizers. But there were no climbers prowling for one-night stands, no adventure-travelers with StairMaster thighs, no package tourists, no money changers, shoeshine boys, or professional beggars. Trekking shops and bookstores stood shuttered. Gaudy Christmas tree lights in restaurant windows were dead on the vine. Led Zeppelin was nowhere in the air. The whole scene had gone belly-up.

Then he glimpsed a man and woman at the far end of the block. They were dressed in New Age gypsy clothing. Her hair was blonde. The man was pushing a sturdy, green mountain bike. Westerners!

Nathan Lee didn’t call out. After so many months spent among the whispering lepers, he had become an untouchable in his own mind. He hurried to catch them. His knee ached. The missing toes forced a rocking, hitched gimp. He even walked like a leper now.

The woman was draped with half a dozen scarves flowing in the sunbeams. Their pace was casual. Her laughter sparkled. She was smoking a mint
bidi.
What for Nathan Lee was a painful, life-and-death pursuit amounted to nothing but a morning stroll for them.

His pursuit slowed. He was weak. He lost them. Then he spied a
bidi
in the gutter still venting mint tendrils. Spurred on, he found the man’s bicycle resting against the wall. Nathan Lee smelled food. It was a restaurant of sorts, an old-fashioned, no-nonsense
bhaati
that probably served nothing but tea, rice and lentils with chicken parts on the bone. He descended the few steps and bent to enter a room lit with two candles. It could have been an opium den.

As his eyes adjusted to the dimness, Nathan Lee saw the man and woman. They were the only customers. He went toward them and stopped, keeping a respectful distance. He didn’t speak.

Finally the woman said, “Ooo are yoo?” She was French. She had rings on her thumbs and fingers. Her eyes were rimmed with kohl, her ears fringed with gold earrings. Exotic was her middle name. The man wore red puja threads around his throat. His left hand was wrapped with prayer beads. His eyes were golden with jaundice. Dharma bums. Nathan Lee read them in an instant. They had cast themselves loose from their homeland. They would be dogmatic about not being dogmatic. Mankind was their landscape. Once upon a time they might have been his parents.

Nathan Lee was afraid to tell the woman his name. “I need your help,” he said.

She moved a candle towards his face. “Why is that? Look at me.” She moved the candle back and forth. “Have you forgotten yourself?”

Nathan Lee blinked at the flame. Was this some mystical riddle? The question was very concerning to her. He didn’t know what answer would satisfy her, so he said nothing.

The woman could not make up her mind about him. She set the candle back on the table and spoke to her companion. “Maybe, maybe not,” she said. “I can’t tell. They say it doesn’t always show.”

“How did you come here?” the man asked him. “And speak louder so we can hear.”

“I followed you,” Nathan Lee confessed.

“No, no. Where do you come from before this?”

“America,” Nathan Lee said tentatively.

The man tsk’ed at his dull answer. Of course he was an American. The woman was more patient. She tried again. “Did you come from the south? Or from the north, down from Tibet?”
Tea-bit,
she pronounced it.

Nathan Lee saw no choice but to trust them. “I was in jail.”

“You see, Monique?” The man backed from Nathan Lee. “The stories are true. They are locking them up at the border.”

Locking who up?
wondered Nathan Lee.
What border?
“They let me go,” Nathan Lee quickly assured them. “This morning. One hour ago.”

“Here?” said the man. “In Kathmandu?”
Kotmawn-doo?

“Let him sit,” said Monique. “Look at him. He can barely stand. Have you eaten? Where are your things?”

Among the lepers he had quit feeling impoverished. At least he had all his flesh, or most of it. And he had his book.

The owner’s wife brought food. “Sit,” said Monique, and she slid her tea in front of Nathan Lee. He wrapped both hands around the hot glass and brought it to his lips. The rich taste of milk and sugar and tea dust took his breath away.

“Monique,” her companion complained in French. “We have little enough. And what if he came up from India? He could mean the end of us all.”

“The end is coming,” she answered serenely. “It’s only a matter of time. We agreed.”

Nathan Lee had no idea what they were talking about. Monique pushed across a tin plate heaped with rice and lentil gravy.
“Merci,”
he said.

Monique’s partner was not pacified. He turned to Nathan Lee. “Tell us the truth. Are you infected?”

Suddenly Nathan Lee realized their concern. It was his toes. They thought he was a leper. He smiled. “Don’t worry. I lost those to the mountains.”

It was their turn to be confused. “Now he talks nonsense,” said the man.

Nathan Lee held out his foot. “Frostbite,” he amplified. “Not leprosy.”

The man tsk’ed again. Stupid American. “Leprosy, what is that? I’m talking about the plague.”

“Plague?” The rice was so fat, the spices so rich!

“He treats us like fools,” the man snorted in French.

“Or maybe he doesn’t know,” Monique replied.

“After a year?” The man gave Nathan Lee a hard look.

“They call it
kali yuga,”
said Monique. “A dark era. We are entering a period of planetary holocaust. And then the planet will be reborn. All of us. It will be a paradise on earth.
Shambala.”

Nathan Lee took another drink of tea. Who was talking nonsense now? He’d thought the apocalypse was all over with after the Y2K scare. But apparently some people were going to the ends of the earth to get another hit.

Nathan Lee played along. He wasn’t finished eating. He pointed at the candle flame. “I saw. The city has no electricity. The cars don’t run. The tourists are all gone. Where have they gone?”

“Tourists?” the man grunted. “There is no such thing anymore. No more dilettantes. No more voyeurs. Now one must live real life. Or die.” He seemed pleased. Nathan Lee’s father could have spoken those very words. Life was risk, death a bitch.

“You really don’t understand, do you?” Monique said to Nathan Lee. “The whole world is like this.” She swam her fingers through the flame’s aureole. “And soon it will be like this.” She pinched the wick, plunging their tabletop into gloom.

After a minute, Nathan Lee’s eyes adjusted and he could see his plate of food again. He applied his spoon to it.

“We came ahead of the
maladie,”
she continued. “We were in India when it broke out in Europe and Africa. That was eleven months ago. Now it is coming across central Asia. We have come here to wait for our destiny.”

“There were signs. Omens,” said her lover. “Earthquakes. Great avalanches in the Alps. Windstorms that flattened parts of the continent. Drought in Africa. Wildfires in Russia. Swarms of locusts. Deformed frogs. I have a friend who saw rivers turn to blood in Kosovo.” He paused to see the American’s reaction.

Nathan Lee didn’t dare speak his mind, not before his meal was finished. There was no telling when he would eat again. Things were getting buggy with this French pair. This was what they meant by a plague? The litany of disasters was feeble. Since when had there
not
been earthquakes and avalanches and wildfires and locusts? They fell under the heading Mother Nature. As for deformed frogs, blame Dow Chemical. And bloody rivers? The cutthroats of Serbia. “Sounds like Moses all over again,” he said between bites.

“Yes,” said the Frenchman. “But this time God is erasing His own book of Genesis.” He went on to list more adversities: crop failures, heat spells, lightning storms, a full eclipse, and an Arctic winter…in Rome and Miami!

“And now some kind of flu,” Nathan Lee helpfully added.

“No, not flu,” said Monique. “It is a disease like man has never known. You become infected and soon grow blind. That is the first phase. The color leaves your eyes.”

That was why she had wanted to see his eyes.

“Later, your skin becomes transparent. You grow into an apparition. The effect is quite beautiful,” she said. “In the final hours, the human heart is bared for all to see.”