Exiles (3 page)

“It’s very good,” Peter said, just before he tried the buttered flatbread and gagged. Alex looked at him disapprovingly, but Sangita smiled.

“Goat butter strong,” she said. “Maybe some cow butter tomorrow getting.”

Peter nodded his agreement and took a drink of water. Alex was scarfing like a
T. rex
, and watching her, Sangita beamed. After a few minutes, when they’d taken the edge off their hunger and could sit back for a breath, Peter asked Sangita where she lived.

“Not far,” she said. She’d already finished her plate, as she ate only about half of what they did. She got up and ran some hot water into the sink from a little on-demand propane water heater bolted to the wall. “Up road, near Italian embassy,” she added.

When they were finished, Peter offered to help her with the dishes, but she flicked a dish towel at him. “You not clean house, I not treat patients,” she said. “Fair okay?”

For a few groggy seconds the next morning, he couldn’t remember where he was. Sun streamed through the windows, birds sang outside, and the room was so cold he could see his breath. The past few days of packing and traveling seemed vaguely hallucinatory. He ducked his head lower into his sleeping bag. The bag was dirty and torn, with duct-taped patches and tiny plumes of Polarguard geysering out here and there. The bag was three or four years older than his daughter. He’d slept in it as a young man, climbing in Yosemite and Joshua Tree and at Smith Rock; he’d slept in it in the Olympic Mountains and the Cascades and the Sierra, and in the Great Basin country and the Sonoran Desert. Over time it had taken on his smells and absorbed the smoke of innumerable camp-fires. Wherever he found himself, the bag had always felt like home.

At least until now. His sense of dislocation was stronger than it had ever been, so strong that even familiar things seemed alien.

He lay on a hard bed four thousand feet above sea level, in a valley surrounded by mountains that brushed outer space. His room held only the bed, a wooden chair, and a battered dresser.
The walls were covered in a chalky green wallpaper, some of which had peeled off in strips so fine they lay on the dusty floor in filaments. An empty glass stood on the dresser, though when Peter looked more closely he saw that it wasn’t completely empty; a spider had spun a web inside it and waited there for insects that never came. It hung now, a desiccated husk, in its own trap.

His side hurt, so he rolled over. There, on the gray-striped mattress in front of his face, lay the traveling pouch he wore around his neck. Passport, two credit cards, medical license, medevac card, dollars and rupees. He opened the passport and studied the picture, which had been taken seven years earlier but already looked like some other person, someone enthusiastic and hopeful. The physical particulars hadn’t altered much: a few fine worry lines creasing the forehead, the early warning signs of jowlish softening, dark hair shot through with gray—though in the photo it was pulled into a ponytail that had since been cut off.

The change was mainly in the eyes. There was an eagerness in the man in the photo, and Peter hadn’t seen that look in the mirror for some time. It had been replaced by the steady, resigned gaze of a guy who had grown used to getting through the day on stamina instead of joy.

He missed joy, in fact, yearned for it. It troubled him, sometimes, that he found it in the company of his daughter but rarely anywhere else. He suspected that a broader distribution might be healthy. This would be easier if the rest of the world were as funny and peculiar and engaging as she was.

As if the world had a response to this thought, the door popped open and Alex stood there, encased in her own mummy bag and peering out from under the hood.

“Make room,” she said crossly. Peter slid over. She hopped to his bed and fell in beside him, her teeth chattering dramatically. “You and your goddamn wall map,” she said.

He watched the breath steam out of him. “You threw the fucking dart. If you wanted warm, you should have aimed at Fiji.”

“I didn’t aim,” she said. “That was the point.”

“What you mean is you didn’t aim
well.
”

“We’re in a country with a king,” she said. “An actual king, and Maoists in the mountains.”

“You read your guidebook,” he said testily. He sat up and rubbed his eyes. “Let’s get our big butts out of this meat locker.”

“Speak for your own butt.”

“My butt speaks for itself,” he said, and farted. She shrieked with disgust, rolled off the bed, and hopped back to her room. A few minutes later they met on the landing in their fleece, ready to explore the place in daylight.

A hallway circled the stairs and led to Alex’s bedroom, which overlooked the back garden. Downstairs, to the left as they faced the front door, a capacious living room ran the length of the house. It held a rattan couch, a few chairs, and a couple of dusty glass-topped coffee tables. Alex dragged her finger along the surface of one of them, then blew the dust into the air. Evidently Sangita hadn’t had a chance to get to such things yet.

On the other side of the stairs was a small dining room with a table and chairs, and behind it, the kitchen, which also had a doorway into the back of the living room—the opening Sangita had burst through the night before. You could, if you wanted, walk a complete circle around either floor. Peter figured that on long, fretful nights he might find himself doing just that.

They opened windows to bring in some warm air, then went out back. The yard was small but had a stone patio and two trees: a tall jacaranda covered with purple flowers, and a persimmon. As if they’d been cued, a small flock of bright green parakeets flew into the jacaranda and began to sing.

Peter watched them and said, “Maybe it won’t be so bad.”

Alex eyed the birds skeptically. She crossed her arms over herself and shivered. “I think I’m coming down with some sort of tropical fever,” she said.

He put a hand on her forehead. It was cool and smooth. “More likely hypothermia.”

“Well, that’s
much
better.”

|   |   |

The summer monsoon had washed Kathmandu’s air of most of its smog, and now the light etched everything with the hard, crystalline clarity of a mountain morning. The streets were as full as they had been the night before, and Peter’s last foggy notions of exotic paradise burned off in the brightness.

He’d decided to walk the mile to the teaching hospital, where he would be a visiting instructor and attending physician for the year. He planned to start after the weekend, but he wanted to meet his new boss, the chief of cardiology, and get a sense of the situation. On the way, he stepped around piles of garbage, cow shit, dog shit, and what was possibly human shit. People traveled on foot or by bicycle, or straddled little Honda Heroes and other motorbikes. Some rode in rickshaws with landscapes painted on the back. They led goats and water buffalo by ropes, dodging buses and bicycles, as dogs roamed free in small packs, happily investigating the garbage piles.

Peter was taller and paler than just about everyone else, but there were a few other Westerners in the throng, and he wasn’t much noticed. This apparent invisibility came as a relief; he was just another “Ingie” shambling along among these small, lithe people, getting in the way of oxen and bikes. Kathmandu was bigger and more chaotic than he’d expected. But it was a pretty morning, he had a job, and he figured his daughter would eventually adjust.

Both sides of the street were fronted by small shops displaying everything from handmade copper kettles to plastic bangles to the elaborate icons of Buddhist deities called
thangkas
. Every now and then he stopped to gawk. Boys of ten or eleven carried bundles on their heads with tumplines—giant, planetoid-like bales of rags and other amalgamations twice the boys’ size that probably weighed more than they did. Incense wafted out of storefronts in stringy white clouds. Peter saw a kid of about ten riding one of the ubiquitous green Chinese bicycles, with six or seven live chickens tied to it, upside down by their feet, their wings and beaks bound.
Chickens, to him, had become slabs of flesh in a package. It was a startling pleasure to remember that the real thing had claws and would take out your eye, given half a chance. It made the situation seem a little fairer.

He walked on. After Alex had thrown the dart that pierced Nepal, Peter felt the need for reassurance. He tracked down an old climbing buddy, Bruce Wang, who’d practiced medicine overseas.

Bruce thought Nepal a reasonable choice. He gave Peter the contact at the hospital and added, with good-natured condescension, that a lot of people in Kathmandu spoke passable English, and that the city would offer at least some of the amenities spoiled Americans were used to. Although central heating, Peter reflected now, was apparently not on the list.

He found the hospital and the office of Dr. Banerjee. The receptionist was in her forties, with graying hair, and shockingly thin. When Peter introduced himself she stared at him with troubled eyes.

“Peter Scanlon?” she said. “The American doctor?”

“If he’s busy, I can wait,” Peter answered affably.

“Dr. Scanlon, you have not received our several communications?” The receptionist pulled on her pen with both hands, as if it might stretch like taffy.

Peter regarded her quizzically, and she began to explain. A sort of nauseating fog descended on him; by the end he’d missed some of the details but had gotten the gist. First, something about the funding. Second, Banerjee having gone back to India, a family emergency possibly requiring a lengthy stay. Third, a competing doctor with different ideas that didn’t include giving any of their scant money to visiting Americans. Peter thought maybe she’d actually said “vacationing” Americans, but he couldn’t tell if this had been the editorial slant of the doctor or of the receptionist, or if he himself had just misunderstood.

Still, he couldn’t comprehend why they hadn’t reached him. “You had my number,” he said. “My email was supposed to be forwarded.”

The receptionist responded by consulting a piece of paper, then matter-of-factly picking up the receiver of her phone and punching in a series of numbers. She handed it to him. He was startled to hear himself at the other end, but it was his old message, not the one he thought he’d recorded just before leaving, providing his cell number. Had he forgotten to press Save, or something? He was fine with medical technology, but this mundane stuff invariably drove him nuts.

“I assumed you received the message and the email,” she said, sounding angry. He wondered what
she
had to be upset about.

“What email?”

“The email!” she exclaimed. “The one explaining everything I have just told you.”

For Christ’s sake, he thought. He vaguely remembered the IT guy saying something about a firewall problem when they tried to forward emails from international addresses, but by then Peter’s life was in an advanced state of disintegration. He was extricating himself from a busy practice and moving out of his house; he figured the firewall would be fixed, just as he’d figured the voicemail had taken his changed message, and he hadn’t really paid attention.

Now he just felt heavy, his senses dulled, as if this conversation had coated him in warm lead that was gradually solidifying.

“I gave up a medical practice to come here,” he said. “My daughter is missing her senior year of high school, and she isn’t happy about it. Why would you assume I got your messages if you didn’t hear back from me?”

The woman folded her hands in front of her, looking somewhat contrite but not overly so, as if the matter were embarrassing but resolved. “You are certainly in a problematic position,” she said. “I must wish you better luck!”

He shook his head, which seemed to crack the coating of lead. If this was any indication of how the hospital functioned, it would be hell to work in anyway, but he was still pretty much screwed. He stalked down the hallway, where he noticed that half the offices
were abandoned and held nothing but a desk, a chair, and a phone. He picked one, went in, closed the door, and, among the phone books in the desk drawer, found one in English.