"All right, then, I'll go to hell!"
Well, what else was I to do after being fired from my cushy post as foreign correspondent for The Sociologist? It was all very well for my former boss, Jenkins, to suggest a career in nursing but it had been years since I had rudely rebuffed my mother's dream of a medical career for me. She would probably still be willing to pay but she would be smug about it. I do occasionally love my mother but not when she gets her own way. I like her best when she throws a tantrum. I can feel superior then.
And I couldn't really go back to Mongolia. My grandfather was probably still mending fences from the many affronts I had inadvertently given his friends and official connections during my brief sojourn as a reporter there. Besides, I was still addicted to my creature comforts then, in those days, oh so long ago, in that glorious autumn of 199-, when I was fired by The Sociologist. I was going through a belated infatuation with crumbly Cheddar cheeses and, revelling in their subtle syntheses of sharp and bland taste-sensations, I couldn't bear the thought of Mongolian cheeses which are, as you know, uniformly pungent whether curdled from the milk of sheep or goats. I have disliked sheep passionately ever since I had a near-death experience with a bad-tempered mob of sheep in the Scottish Highlands. Ever since, I have studiously avoided any contact with sheep except with legs of lamb (spiked, however, with many cloves of garlic to mask the rank sheep smell) which I demolish with a certain fierce and unholy joy at the thought of three-legged sheep hobbling along as fast as they can, cursing vainly, unable to catch up to their escaping prey.
Mongolia was out of the question, then, and so was Amerika, not least because my mother lived there. If I went back there, it would be with my tail between my legs, a whipped whelp scurrying back to its mother for succour. It didn't matter that she lived in Kalifornia and that I would probably try to lie low in Vancouver, where I still had some friends from my civilised childhood in Canada: She would find me. You can run but you can't hide, she said to me when we were saying goodbye at the airport as I left Amerika forever. "I'll call once a week, dear," is what she actually said, I think, but I was strung-out from lack of sleep and from all the designer drugs at the parties thrown by my "friends", ostensibly to mourn my leaving, but my imminent departure was really just a convenient excuse for manic orgies of pretentious conversation under the pernicious influence of glistening white walls and exotic mineral waters; and the thought of my mother managing to insinuate her presence through many time zones, breaching the austerely forbidding defences of my Oxford college, infiltrating what I devoutly hoped would be a reclusive, even monkish, existence: this thought stunned me into an appalled silence for the first few hours of the long flight from Los Angeles to Heathrow, persuading the stunning model in the next seat that I was either gay or a stuck-up son of a bitch. But as she later said, first impressions can be so misleading. So much for the monkish existence.
But it was again the monkish existence that I sought now to find in Prague. I dreamed of crumbling Art Nouveau facades, of dilapidated mansions with boarded-up windows, of a dank hallway lined with mailboxes whose flapping lids bore the faded indecipherable names of past tenants long since disappeared in mysterious circumstances, of laboriously climbing many flights of broken stairs and fumbling in the musty dark for the key to my airy atelier... my dreams were stolen from Baudelaire: how desperately I wanted to feel the sweetness of seeing the first star in the sky and the coal smoke streaming upward and the moon shedding a pale enchantment over it all! Pollution in Prague was bad in winter, I knew, from the brown coal that was used to heat apartment buildings, but I was young and healthy enough to cope, I thought, and besides, I could do as my opium-smoking idol had done, close my shutters, draw the curtains snug, and dream of alluring distances. Even, perhaps, of Kalifornia.
It was so easy to get by in the world we lived in then, if you had the right connections. I did. A week after Jenkins fired me, I happened to be in Oxford on my way to a weekend at the country cottage of my Kurdish friend Maya. Inevitably, I missed my train connection at Oxford and since the next train to Maya's small Cotswold village was several hours later, I decided to drop in on my old college tutor, Terence Killjoy-Yuck.
Terence greeted me with horribly sweet sherry and muted enthusiasm. "I have a proposition to make you, dear boy," he (might have: I'm exaggerating, but only a little) murmured, rubbing his thin hands together. "I have heard of your, ahem, slight contretemps with The Sociologist, and I gather that you are… available at the moment?"
I hesitated. Frumpy wife notwithstanding, everyone knew Terence was gay. It had also always been rumored that Terence was one of the dons who double as recruiters at Oxford for the British secret services, mentioning discreetly to suitable undergraduates the possibility of serving their Queen and Country in, ahem, underhanded ways. I knew I was being propositioned: I just didn't know for what.
"A friend of mine is on the lookout for sensible young men," Terence continued. "Setting up a new international university in Prague. No students yet, but that's just a matter of time. Perhaps, a leetle unusual, but then the benefactor is a billionaire… Albanian, I believe. You wouldn't have to learn Albanian," Terence hastened to add. "In fact you wouldn't have to do very much at all. Just hang around, keep your eyes open, look around…"
I didn't quite catch the rest of what he said; I was filled with a bizarre exhilaration. No wonder they lost their silly empire, I giggled to myself. It struck me as cosmically absurd that the British spy agency should want to recruit me, congenitally incapable of catching trains, let alone reporting on world-historical events, and a Mongolian-Canadian to boot. Without even asking whom I was to spy on or how much I would get paid, I accepted. Terence was a little taken aback by the swiftness of my acceptance but I think he attributed it to my Mongol blood or to my North Amerikan impetuosity. Perhaps he thought they were the same thing. It's hard sometimes to tell just what the British think of other races. They're so inscrutable. But they do make great cheeses: after I managed to successfully catch my train to Growe-on-the-Mold, an ever-so-quaint ye-olde-English village, I spent a wonderful weekend at my terrorist friend Maya's charmingly draughty stone cottage sampling many varieties of crumbly Cheddar cheeses, both sharp and bland.
I had always liked Maya's taste in wine and cheese: she was by far the best-adjusted terrorist I met in the four years I intermittently went to seminars on international politics at Oxford. At an especially boring talk, I would look around the room at people I knew, hands propping up familiar faces, studiously scribbling, and I would count the number of terrorists in attendance. Oxford was an asylum for terrorists on sabbatical and the lands for which its inmates had fought read like a litany of the oppressed: guerrillas from El Salvador nodded across conference tables covered by torn green baize at counterparts from Tamil Eelam; Kashmiri freedom-fighters rubbed elbows with grizzled combatants from Mozambique; waiting in line for watery coffee, participants in the armed struggle for South Africa made polite small-talk with the new arrival from East Timor. They dressed like students, they dressed like housewives, some even wore suits and ties. Lunch at St. Antony's College felt like a general assembly of the United Not-yet-nations. And between these sober people, these good students, there floated a few long-haired Amerikans, wearing tattered T shirts and gold-rimmed round glasses, uneasy yet earnest, determined to fight the good fight, to struggle for justice and peace, violently if necessary. Students/terrorists, terrorists/students: at times my head reeled and I found it hard to tell the difference and even harder to decide whom to dress like. I compromised by wearing jeans and a jacket and my hair modishly short. I was destined to be a yuppie but, mercifully, History intervened.
Or Terence. I felt a deep personal gratitude to this deus ex machina who had resolved my tedious existential crisis with such ease. After my weekend with Maya, on my return to London, I went from Paddington train station straight to Harrods to buy Terence a mango. I instructed the salesgirl to send the luscious fruit to Oxford immediately. I then ran around Harrods buying all those little necessaries I would probably not be able to find in Prague. I was to leave the next day and I winced at the thought of pining for months on end for a complete set of Mystique face products for men. I have very sensitive skin and after months of suffering in Mongolia I had my priorities straight. To thine own face be true and all the rest shall follow...
Flossie, my best friend in the world, whose London flat I shared, was not at home when I arrived, out of breath and laden with shopping bags. The situation was clearly dire: Floss had irregular habits and my latchkey had fallen out of my pocket some months before into an anonymous dune in the Gobi desert as I struggled to hold on to a particularly obstreperous camel. I sank into an uneasy nap, broken eventually by a vicious kick in the ribs from a steel-toed boot. "What's with you?" Flossie demanded as she kicked the door open and threw my parcels into the apartment.
"I'm going to Prague tomorrow," I said complacently. "You can't come."
"I don't want to," she shouted from the kitchen. "Want some coffee?"
"Yes, please," I screamed ecstatically, following her into the disaster zone we called our kitchen. Our parents hadn't visited in months.
"Well, you can't have any," Floss crowed but she relented after I had grovelled a bit. For a total bitch she has a heart of gold.
"I've got a job."
"What job?"
"Can't tell you," I said, after I had my bowl of cafe-au-lait securely in my hands. "It's top secret."
"You're so juvenile," Floss said, kissing on the nose her larger than life teddy bear which took up most of the kitchen but which she insisted was a vital component of her social life. "Did Maya recruit you finally or has she realized now that you would be fatal to the Kurdish struggle?"
"Maya is, as usual, wonderful. But since she won't let me share her struggles till death do us part, I've joined the other side. That's all I can say for the moment."
"You're working for Saddam Hussein?"
"No, silly. I am now an active agent of the forces of good old capitalist imperialism."
"You always have been," Flossie said indifferently. "You're such a consumer. Hey, did you look for any pants for me while you were shopping?"
Clothes were a constant tribulation for Floss. While consistently deploring the wanton waste of scarce resources represented by such disgusting absurdities as the fashion industry in western consumerist societies, she was all too aware of the growing hole in the seat of the only trousers she owned, a pair of jeans she had stolen from her brother. Six feet two in her tattered socks, Flossie found it impossible to buy women's clothes that were less than a foot short at her wrists and ankles. "The British are so short," she complained bitterly. "Generations of malnutrition. I can't even find men's Levis that fit in this absurd country."
"Go to Denmark," I advised her. "The women there are all seven feet tall."
"No, I'm just going to get a lot of clothes made for me next month when I go back to India."
"Exploiter. How long are you going to be there this time?"
"I don't know," Flossie replied moodily. "I have to beg D'Urberville College for a leave of absence. And the Principal of the college, this Lady Monica person, she's such a bitch. She's always complaining that I'm never there."
"I just don't understand these Oxford colleges one little bit," I said sympathetically. "Why did they make you a fellow of the college if they just want you to hang around there?"
"Exactly. Oxford is just so boring. I'm sick of wine and cheese and these twittering upper-class accents. I want to go to India. I want to see people killing each other and to write all about it."
"That's exactly why I became a foreign correspondent. Can I come visit you this winter?"
"I haven't heard yet if these people will give me the money to go for a whole year."
"Whom are you begging from this time?"
"It's called the Fund for Peace and Love."
"Are they missionaries?"
"I don't know. I've heard they give a lot of money to dissidents and revolutionary movements. Funded by some mad Albanian billionaire…"
"How odd. That's the second one I've heard of this weekend. I wonder if it’s the same one. There can't be two Albanian billionaires, can there?"
"Depends how much you've been drinking."
"It doesn't really matter if they don't give you a grant, does it?" I asked, cruelly referring to Flossie's considerable fortune, over which she still spent sleepless nights, tossing and turning because of her socialist convictions. "You can still go, can't you?"
"Yeah, but nobody will take my research seriously unless I'm sponsored by some international body. Besides, I'm giving all my money away."
"Can I have some?" I asked hopefully.
"Only if you join the Punjab Liberation Front. They're really short of people right now. The Indian army slaughtered another bunch of guerrillas today. It was horrible."
"Tell me all about it."
By the warm flicker of long black candles we sipped twenty-five year old single-malt whisky all night long and Floss told me tales of torture, unimaginable brutality and degradation. It was our form of bonding. Unsurprisingly, I was a little shaky the next morning, as I tottered into my seat on the plane to Prague.
"Would you please bring me some whisky?" I murmured huskily to the flight attendant whose attention I had finally secured by grabbing the edge of her magenta and orange striped uniform. I looked at her and my heart sank. Middle-aged, healthy, bossy, painted. She looked cruel.
"We do not serve complimentary drinks on short European flights, sir," the stewardess replied frostily. "Besides, we haven't even taken off."
"I'll pay," I mumbled feebly. "Name your price. Double it. Multiply it by four." I couldn't remember what came next. I passed a shaking hand over my unshaven chin. Drinking with Flossie is dangerous enough at the best of times, but letting her drive me to Heathrow in the early hours of the morning in her vintage Jaguar, tires squealing, police horns blaring, the manic race to the boarding gate... Damn it, I deserved a drink. I pulled out my wallet and jammed a fifty pound note into the stewardess's pudgy fist. I looked up at her imploringly. "Please..."
The stewardess glared at me and flounced off, returning a moment later with a bottle of Chivas. "Your change, sir," she snarled, flinging a bunch of crumpled notes and coins at me. My neighbour, a youngish guy with glasses, helped me gather most of the change from the floor.
"Have a drink?"
"It's a bit early for me," he answered, looking at me curiously. "But, say, did you by any chance go to Bendover…"
"Its not possible. You can't be..." But by then we were standing locked in a clumsy embrace as the plane wobbled around us.
The flight attendant came running up. "Gentlemen, the seatbelt sign is still on…" she began furiously.
"It's all right, its all right, we'll sit down, we haven't seen each other in ten years, that's all, relax, honey, oh, and by the way, would you get us a couple of glasses and some ice, thanks a million." Steele put his arm around the stewardess. She stiffened, freed herself, and marched away uncertainly. Her experiences with Central European businessmen hadn't prepared her for Amerikan preppie charm. My old school friend Steele and I grinned at each other. "You first," he urged. "Where have you been?"
"Let's see," I pondered. "When did I see you last? Was it when..."
"When Yasuhiro and I came to visit you in college..."
"Hiro! Remember how he wanted to try acid and so we gave him some and..."
"And he just held his head in his hands for twelve hours and groaned and we were really worried..."
"No, we weren't. We were just trying to figure out what he was saying. It sounded like `I am woe,' which seemed pretty profound and we were glad that he was facing up to the harsh realities of his life because he was such a superficial twit, but actually what he was saying was, "I am... whoa!"
"And we were so disappointed that he couldn't find the words to articulate his experience. Hiro never said anything after that. I dropped him off at his parents' place in D.C., still holding his head in his hands, still groaning."
"Did you ever run into him again?"
"Nope. He's probably gone back to Japan and become just another salary-man."
"And what have you become? What's with the suit?"
"Hey, bud. I work for the government."
"Foreign service?"
"Something like that."
"Isn't your dad ambassador in Moscow now?"
Steele groaned and reached for the whisky. "Well, what the hell else was I supposed to do?" He shot back a serious slug straight from the bottle. "A Bendover education doesn't prepare you for the market place. Nobody speaks Latin out there. I did the investment banker bullshit but then the crash happened and a million slobs like me were on the streets. Did you ever hear about the anarchists silently parading down Wall Street, that day when a trillion dollars got wiped off our computer screens, holding up sheets that just said, `Jump'?"
"So now you're in government. What are you doing in Prague?"
"I'm at the Embassy."
"Really? I'm going to be working there as well. In Prague, I mean, not the Embassy. I've got a job at a new university. I don't know what I'm supposed to do but I guess I'll find out soon."
"Wait a second." Steele looked interested. "Is this thing run by that guy, what's his name, Socks? The mad Albanian billionaire? You better be careful. Ooops," he said anxiously, looking around. "I'd better be careful. I shouldn't go around saying things like that."
"Steele. You're talking to someone who knew you back in the days when you were a gawky freckle-faced brat, running around Bendover with a goddamn glow-in-the-dark orange baseball cap the wrong side on your head. We used to stay up all night just so that we could go buy donuts at five in the morning. We used to break rules. What are you not supposed to go around saying? I need to know what I'm getting into."
"Oh, nothing really. You'll be fine, I'm sure. It's just that this guy, Socks, is somebody everybody is watching. He's a weirdo. Nobody knows what he's up to."
"Who is he?"
"That's the thing. Nobody really knows. Nobody really knows where he came from. Nobody really knows how he made all that money. Nobody really knows why he's giving it away. Oh, he's written books about it. He gives interviews constantly. But who is he?" Steele was warming up to the subject. I liked the sight of this gaunt young man in a rumpled ill-fitting standard-issue government-grey suit and bent steel-rimmed glasses talking, scowling, gesticulating, as in the days when we were best friends at boarding school and stayed up late every night, sitting in the bathroom of his basement room in our dormitory, smoking illicit cigarettes, snorting lines of an orange powder which derived its color from the mixture of its constituents since we compounded it from pink speed and yellow caffeine tablets which we ground into our proprietary concoction, staying awake just for the hell of staying awake, arguing all night long about such schoolboy topics as the nature of love, about whether love was merely a mixture of lust and friendship, like the orange powder we snorted, or whether there was something more to love, some mysterious ingredient which we longed to discover in those days of our innocence.
But those days were gone. Steele refused to say more. The plane landed. We made small talk as we wended our way through passport control and then parted ways, promising to get in touch soon. I pushed my baggage cart through the sliding doors and looked around the crowd waiting to greet passengers, friends, loved ones, holding up hand-lettered signs or just eager faces. I couldn't see my name on any sign and I certainly didn't recognize any faces. All my friends were far away and I was entering the service of a mad Albanian billionaire. At that moment I felt very alone.
Well, what else was I to do after being fired from my cushy post as foreign correspondent for The Sociologist? It was all very well for my former boss, Jenkins, to suggest a career in nursing but it had been years since I had rudely rebuffed my mother's dream of a medical career for me. She would probably still be willing to pay but she would be smug about it. I do occasionally love my mother but not when she gets her own way. I like her best when she throws a tantrum. I can feel superior then.
And I couldn't really go back to Mongolia. My grandfather was probably still mending fences from the many affronts I had inadvertently given his friends and official connections during my brief sojourn as a reporter there. Besides, I was still addicted to my creature comforts then, in those days, oh so long ago, in that glorious autumn of 199-, when I was fired by The Sociologist. I was going through a belated infatuation with crumbly Cheddar cheeses and, revelling in their subtle syntheses of sharp and bland taste-sensations, I couldn't bear the thought of Mongolian cheeses which are, as you know, uniformly pungent whether curdled from the milk of sheep or goats. I have disliked sheep passionately ever since I had a near-death experience with a bad-tempered mob of sheep in the Scottish Highlands. Ever since, I have studiously avoided any contact with sheep except with legs of lamb (spiked, however, with many cloves of garlic to mask the rank sheep smell) which I demolish with a certain fierce and unholy joy at the thought of three-legged sheep hobbling along as fast as they can, cursing vainly, unable to catch up to their escaping prey.
Mongolia was out of the question, then, and so was Amerika, not least because my mother lived there. If I went back there, it would be with my tail between my legs, a whipped whelp scurrying back to its mother for succour. It didn't matter that she lived in Kalifornia and that I would probably try to lie low in Vancouver, where I still had some friends from my civilised childhood in Canada: She would find me. You can run but you can't hide, she said to me when we were saying goodbye at the airport as I left Amerika forever. "I'll call once a week, dear," is what she actually said, I think, but I was strung-out from lack of sleep and from all the designer drugs at the parties thrown by my "friends", ostensibly to mourn my leaving, but my imminent departure was really just a convenient excuse for manic orgies of pretentious conversation under the pernicious influence of glistening white walls and exotic mineral waters; and the thought of my mother managing to insinuate her presence through many time zones, breaching the austerely forbidding defences of my Oxford college, infiltrating what I devoutly hoped would be a reclusive, even monkish, existence: this thought stunned me into an appalled silence for the first few hours of the long flight from Los Angeles to Heathrow, persuading the stunning model in the next seat that I was either gay or a stuck-up son of a bitch. But as she later said, first impressions can be so misleading. So much for the monkish existence.
But it was again the monkish existence that I sought now to find in Prague. I dreamed of crumbling Art Nouveau facades, of dilapidated mansions with boarded-up windows, of a dank hallway lined with mailboxes whose flapping lids bore the faded indecipherable names of past tenants long since disappeared in mysterious circumstances, of laboriously climbing many flights of broken stairs and fumbling in the musty dark for the key to my airy atelier... my dreams were stolen from Baudelaire: how desperately I wanted to feel the sweetness of seeing the first star in the sky and the coal smoke streaming upward and the moon shedding a pale enchantment over it all! Pollution in Prague was bad in winter, I knew, from the brown coal that was used to heat apartment buildings, but I was young and healthy enough to cope, I thought, and besides, I could do as my opium-smoking idol had done, close my shutters, draw the curtains snug, and dream of alluring distances. Even, perhaps, of Kalifornia.
It was so easy to get by in the world we lived in then, if you had the right connections. I did. A week after Jenkins fired me, I happened to be in Oxford on my way to a weekend at the country cottage of my Kurdish friend Maya. Inevitably, I missed my train connection at Oxford and since the next train to Maya's small Cotswold village was several hours later, I decided to drop in on my old college tutor, Terence Killjoy-Yuck.
Terence greeted me with horribly sweet sherry and muted enthusiasm. "I have a proposition to make you, dear boy," he (might have: I'm exaggerating, but only a little) murmured, rubbing his thin hands together. "I have heard of your, ahem, slight contretemps with The Sociologist, and I gather that you are… available at the moment?"
I hesitated. Frumpy wife notwithstanding, everyone knew Terence was gay. It had also always been rumored that Terence was one of the dons who double as recruiters at Oxford for the British secret services, mentioning discreetly to suitable undergraduates the possibility of serving their Queen and Country in, ahem, underhanded ways. I knew I was being propositioned: I just didn't know for what.
"A friend of mine is on the lookout for sensible young men," Terence continued. "Setting up a new international university in Prague. No students yet, but that's just a matter of time. Perhaps, a leetle unusual, but then the benefactor is a billionaire… Albanian, I believe. You wouldn't have to learn Albanian," Terence hastened to add. "In fact you wouldn't have to do very much at all. Just hang around, keep your eyes open, look around…"
I didn't quite catch the rest of what he said; I was filled with a bizarre exhilaration. No wonder they lost their silly empire, I giggled to myself. It struck me as cosmically absurd that the British spy agency should want to recruit me, congenitally incapable of catching trains, let alone reporting on world-historical events, and a Mongolian-Canadian to boot. Without even asking whom I was to spy on or how much I would get paid, I accepted. Terence was a little taken aback by the swiftness of my acceptance but I think he attributed it to my Mongol blood or to my North Amerikan impetuosity. Perhaps he thought they were the same thing. It's hard sometimes to tell just what the British think of other races. They're so inscrutable. But they do make great cheeses: after I managed to successfully catch my train to Growe-on-the-Mold, an ever-so-quaint ye-olde-English village, I spent a wonderful weekend at my terrorist friend Maya's charmingly draughty stone cottage sampling many varieties of crumbly Cheddar cheeses, both sharp and bland.
I had always liked Maya's taste in wine and cheese: she was by far the best-adjusted terrorist I met in the four years I intermittently went to seminars on international politics at Oxford. At an especially boring talk, I would look around the room at people I knew, hands propping up familiar faces, studiously scribbling, and I would count the number of terrorists in attendance. Oxford was an asylum for terrorists on sabbatical and the lands for which its inmates had fought read like a litany of the oppressed: guerrillas from El Salvador nodded across conference tables covered by torn green baize at counterparts from Tamil Eelam; Kashmiri freedom-fighters rubbed elbows with grizzled combatants from Mozambique; waiting in line for watery coffee, participants in the armed struggle for South Africa made polite small-talk with the new arrival from East Timor. They dressed like students, they dressed like housewives, some even wore suits and ties. Lunch at St. Antony's College felt like a general assembly of the United Not-yet-nations. And between these sober people, these good students, there floated a few long-haired Amerikans, wearing tattered T shirts and gold-rimmed round glasses, uneasy yet earnest, determined to fight the good fight, to struggle for justice and peace, violently if necessary. Students/terrorists, terrorists/students: at times my head reeled and I found it hard to tell the difference and even harder to decide whom to dress like. I compromised by wearing jeans and a jacket and my hair modishly short. I was destined to be a yuppie but, mercifully, History intervened.
Or Terence. I felt a deep personal gratitude to this deus ex machina who had resolved my tedious existential crisis with such ease. After my weekend with Maya, on my return to London, I went from Paddington train station straight to Harrods to buy Terence a mango. I instructed the salesgirl to send the luscious fruit to Oxford immediately. I then ran around Harrods buying all those little necessaries I would probably not be able to find in Prague. I was to leave the next day and I winced at the thought of pining for months on end for a complete set of Mystique face products for men. I have very sensitive skin and after months of suffering in Mongolia I had my priorities straight. To thine own face be true and all the rest shall follow...
Flossie, my best friend in the world, whose London flat I shared, was not at home when I arrived, out of breath and laden with shopping bags. The situation was clearly dire: Floss had irregular habits and my latchkey had fallen out of my pocket some months before into an anonymous dune in the Gobi desert as I struggled to hold on to a particularly obstreperous camel. I sank into an uneasy nap, broken eventually by a vicious kick in the ribs from a steel-toed boot. "What's with you?" Flossie demanded as she kicked the door open and threw my parcels into the apartment.
"I'm going to Prague tomorrow," I said complacently. "You can't come."
"I don't want to," she shouted from the kitchen. "Want some coffee?"
"Yes, please," I screamed ecstatically, following her into the disaster zone we called our kitchen. Our parents hadn't visited in months.
"Well, you can't have any," Floss crowed but she relented after I had grovelled a bit. For a total bitch she has a heart of gold.
"I've got a job."
"What job?"
"Can't tell you," I said, after I had my bowl of cafe-au-lait securely in my hands. "It's top secret."
"You're so juvenile," Floss said, kissing on the nose her larger than life teddy bear which took up most of the kitchen but which she insisted was a vital component of her social life. "Did Maya recruit you finally or has she realized now that you would be fatal to the Kurdish struggle?"
"Maya is, as usual, wonderful. But since she won't let me share her struggles till death do us part, I've joined the other side. That's all I can say for the moment."
"You're working for Saddam Hussein?"
"No, silly. I am now an active agent of the forces of good old capitalist imperialism."
"You always have been," Flossie said indifferently. "You're such a consumer. Hey, did you look for any pants for me while you were shopping?"
Clothes were a constant tribulation for Floss. While consistently deploring the wanton waste of scarce resources represented by such disgusting absurdities as the fashion industry in western consumerist societies, she was all too aware of the growing hole in the seat of the only trousers she owned, a pair of jeans she had stolen from her brother. Six feet two in her tattered socks, Flossie found it impossible to buy women's clothes that were less than a foot short at her wrists and ankles. "The British are so short," she complained bitterly. "Generations of malnutrition. I can't even find men's Levis that fit in this absurd country."
"Go to Denmark," I advised her. "The women there are all seven feet tall."
"No, I'm just going to get a lot of clothes made for me next month when I go back to India."
"Exploiter. How long are you going to be there this time?"
"I don't know," Flossie replied moodily. "I have to beg D'Urberville College for a leave of absence. And the Principal of the college, this Lady Monica person, she's such a bitch. She's always complaining that I'm never there."
"I just don't understand these Oxford colleges one little bit," I said sympathetically. "Why did they make you a fellow of the college if they just want you to hang around there?"
"Exactly. Oxford is just so boring. I'm sick of wine and cheese and these twittering upper-class accents. I want to go to India. I want to see people killing each other and to write all about it."
"That's exactly why I became a foreign correspondent. Can I come visit you this winter?"
"I haven't heard yet if these people will give me the money to go for a whole year."
"Whom are you begging from this time?"
"It's called the Fund for Peace and Love."
"Are they missionaries?"
"I don't know. I've heard they give a lot of money to dissidents and revolutionary movements. Funded by some mad Albanian billionaire…"
"How odd. That's the second one I've heard of this weekend. I wonder if it’s the same one. There can't be two Albanian billionaires, can there?"
"Depends how much you've been drinking."
"It doesn't really matter if they don't give you a grant, does it?" I asked, cruelly referring to Flossie's considerable fortune, over which she still spent sleepless nights, tossing and turning because of her socialist convictions. "You can still go, can't you?"
"Yeah, but nobody will take my research seriously unless I'm sponsored by some international body. Besides, I'm giving all my money away."
"Can I have some?" I asked hopefully.
"Only if you join the Punjab Liberation Front. They're really short of people right now. The Indian army slaughtered another bunch of guerrillas today. It was horrible."
"Tell me all about it."
By the warm flicker of long black candles we sipped twenty-five year old single-malt whisky all night long and Floss told me tales of torture, unimaginable brutality and degradation. It was our form of bonding. Unsurprisingly, I was a little shaky the next morning, as I tottered into my seat on the plane to Prague.
"Would you please bring me some whisky?" I murmured huskily to the flight attendant whose attention I had finally secured by grabbing the edge of her magenta and orange striped uniform. I looked at her and my heart sank. Middle-aged, healthy, bossy, painted. She looked cruel.
"We do not serve complimentary drinks on short European flights, sir," the stewardess replied frostily. "Besides, we haven't even taken off."
"I'll pay," I mumbled feebly. "Name your price. Double it. Multiply it by four." I couldn't remember what came next. I passed a shaking hand over my unshaven chin. Drinking with Flossie is dangerous enough at the best of times, but letting her drive me to Heathrow in the early hours of the morning in her vintage Jaguar, tires squealing, police horns blaring, the manic race to the boarding gate... Damn it, I deserved a drink. I pulled out my wallet and jammed a fifty pound note into the stewardess's pudgy fist. I looked up at her imploringly. "Please..."
The stewardess glared at me and flounced off, returning a moment later with a bottle of Chivas. "Your change, sir," she snarled, flinging a bunch of crumpled notes and coins at me. My neighbour, a youngish guy with glasses, helped me gather most of the change from the floor.
"Have a drink?"
"It's a bit early for me," he answered, looking at me curiously. "But, say, did you by any chance go to Bendover…"
"Its not possible. You can't be..." But by then we were standing locked in a clumsy embrace as the plane wobbled around us.
The flight attendant came running up. "Gentlemen, the seatbelt sign is still on…" she began furiously.
"It's all right, its all right, we'll sit down, we haven't seen each other in ten years, that's all, relax, honey, oh, and by the way, would you get us a couple of glasses and some ice, thanks a million." Steele put his arm around the stewardess. She stiffened, freed herself, and marched away uncertainly. Her experiences with Central European businessmen hadn't prepared her for Amerikan preppie charm. My old school friend Steele and I grinned at each other. "You first," he urged. "Where have you been?"
"Let's see," I pondered. "When did I see you last? Was it when..."
"When Yasuhiro and I came to visit you in college..."
"Hiro! Remember how he wanted to try acid and so we gave him some and..."
"And he just held his head in his hands for twelve hours and groaned and we were really worried..."
"No, we weren't. We were just trying to figure out what he was saying. It sounded like `I am woe,' which seemed pretty profound and we were glad that he was facing up to the harsh realities of his life because he was such a superficial twit, but actually what he was saying was, "I am... whoa!"
"And we were so disappointed that he couldn't find the words to articulate his experience. Hiro never said anything after that. I dropped him off at his parents' place in D.C., still holding his head in his hands, still groaning."
"Did you ever run into him again?"
"Nope. He's probably gone back to Japan and become just another salary-man."
"And what have you become? What's with the suit?"
"Hey, bud. I work for the government."
"Foreign service?"
"Something like that."
"Isn't your dad ambassador in Moscow now?"
Steele groaned and reached for the whisky. "Well, what the hell else was I supposed to do?" He shot back a serious slug straight from the bottle. "A Bendover education doesn't prepare you for the market place. Nobody speaks Latin out there. I did the investment banker bullshit but then the crash happened and a million slobs like me were on the streets. Did you ever hear about the anarchists silently parading down Wall Street, that day when a trillion dollars got wiped off our computer screens, holding up sheets that just said, `Jump'?"
"So now you're in government. What are you doing in Prague?"
"I'm at the Embassy."
"Really? I'm going to be working there as well. In Prague, I mean, not the Embassy. I've got a job at a new university. I don't know what I'm supposed to do but I guess I'll find out soon."
"Wait a second." Steele looked interested. "Is this thing run by that guy, what's his name, Socks? The mad Albanian billionaire? You better be careful. Ooops," he said anxiously, looking around. "I'd better be careful. I shouldn't go around saying things like that."
"Steele. You're talking to someone who knew you back in the days when you were a gawky freckle-faced brat, running around Bendover with a goddamn glow-in-the-dark orange baseball cap the wrong side on your head. We used to stay up all night just so that we could go buy donuts at five in the morning. We used to break rules. What are you not supposed to go around saying? I need to know what I'm getting into."
"Oh, nothing really. You'll be fine, I'm sure. It's just that this guy, Socks, is somebody everybody is watching. He's a weirdo. Nobody knows what he's up to."
"Who is he?"
"That's the thing. Nobody really knows. Nobody really knows where he came from. Nobody really knows how he made all that money. Nobody really knows why he's giving it away. Oh, he's written books about it. He gives interviews constantly. But who is he?" Steele was warming up to the subject. I liked the sight of this gaunt young man in a rumpled ill-fitting standard-issue government-grey suit and bent steel-rimmed glasses talking, scowling, gesticulating, as in the days when we were best friends at boarding school and stayed up late every night, sitting in the bathroom of his basement room in our dormitory, smoking illicit cigarettes, snorting lines of an orange powder which derived its color from the mixture of its constituents since we compounded it from pink speed and yellow caffeine tablets which we ground into our proprietary concoction, staying awake just for the hell of staying awake, arguing all night long about such schoolboy topics as the nature of love, about whether love was merely a mixture of lust and friendship, like the orange powder we snorted, or whether there was something more to love, some mysterious ingredient which we longed to discover in those days of our innocence.
But those days were gone. Steele refused to say more. The plane landed. We made small talk as we wended our way through passport control and then parted ways, promising to get in touch soon. I pushed my baggage cart through the sliding doors and looked around the crowd waiting to greet passengers, friends, loved ones, holding up hand-lettered signs or just eager faces. I couldn't see my name on any sign and I certainly didn't recognize any faces. All my friends were far away and I was entering the service of a mad Albanian billionaire. At that moment I felt very alone.
