Floating City
Authors: Eric Van Lustbader
for my beloved Victoria:
my tireless advocate; my best friend—
without her I would no doubt float away
The hunting lanterns
on Mount Ogura have gone,
the deer are calling for their mates....
How easily I might sleep,
if only I didn’t share their fears.
—Ono no Komachi
It’s all very well in practice,
but it will never work in theory.
—French management principle
In nature a repulsive caterpillar
turns into a lovely butterfly.
But with human beings
a lovely butterfly turns into a
repulsive caterpillar.
—Anton Chekhov
It was said that they called him Wild Boy because he had seen every Tarzan film, knew every Tarzan’s name from Elmo Lincoln onward. He had his favorites, of course, but he claimed to love them all.
They—that is, the mountain tribes of the Shan—had no reason to disbelieve him, since Tarzan films were the rage in the foothill towns below that were lucky enough to have a projector, and able to rent films flown in from Bangkok.
Truth to tell, the Shan who knew Rock—which is to say all of them who were involved in the growing, harvesting, refining, selling, and shipping of the tears of the poppy—called him Wild Boy because they had seen him screw together his custom-made rocket launcher, slap it over his right shoulder, and blow his enemies into kingdom come.
Over the years, one opium warlord after the other had tried to kill Rock, but Wild Boy had been, in his own words, “born and raised on rock ’n’ roll and war.” He was a veteran of Vietnam, at the war’s height, in charge of recruiting CIDGs, Civilian Irregular Defense Groups, from the Wa, the Lu, the Lisu, all the mountain tribes of Burma, and from the Mekong Delta-born Cambodians to fight the Viet Cong.
He was one of those rare, blood-soaked demons who found that he could not do without the proximity of death. He loved everything about it: the smell of it, the cessation of hearts and spirits it caused, the noise of it or the stealth required to achieve it. But he loved, most of all, the contentment it brought him, the softening of the hard edges of his mind that, like diamond blades, sought to chop his reality into incomprehensible pieces.
He was not one of the casualties of the war, who returned home with their heads filled with ARVNs and helicopters and a tide of burst bodies and running blood so high they could never climb out the Pit. The Pit was Asia, and they had been in it up to their eyeballs.
So had Rock, but the difference was he reveled in it. Because he emerged from the war, for the first time in his life, with a purpose. And that purpose had led him here, to the Shan Plateau, the metaphorical apex of the Golden Triangle, that area where China, Burma, and Thailand came together, where the altitude, the weather, and the soil were ideal for the growing of poppies.
Rock not only accepted the attempts on his life, he welcomed them. He rightly saw in them not merely a macho test of his skills, but a path to his acceptance up here in the rarefied air of the Shan Plateau. And he knew these people well enough to understand that without acceptance, he would be forever adrift, a kind of jungle wraith, no better than a beggar, really, making his living going from warlord to warlord, selling his own particular brand of death. Besides, in their eyes, he was a Western barbarian.
Without accepting him, the Shan would never trust him. And without their trust, Rock knew, he would never get rich. Rock wanted very badly to be rich. It was the only thing that mattered to him, save the manufacture, subtle or swift, of death.
In the end, he defeated everything they sent at him, defying General Quan’s public threat that “your agony will live forever.”
It was General Quan, opium warlord of the Shan Plateau, who had over the past five years systematically murdered his rival warlords—all Chinese—and who now had a monopoly on the richest and most productive poppy fields in the world. As a Vietnamese, General Diep Nim Quan was better supplied—officially, cheerfully from Saigon—than his rivals, who were obliged to barter inferior arms from itinerant Soviet black marketeers.
A goddamn Vietnamese,
Rock had thought,
that’s who I’ve got to deal with here. Who said the war was over?
Rock was on his way down the mountainside. He had been waiting for the money that had been promised him, but had never come. Now he was on his way to Rangoon to telex his partner. He had to know how long the delay was going to be.
He stumbled across Mai, who was lying along a path with a wooden cart overturned on her leg. It was the animal pulling the cart, however, whose leg was broken.
Even Rock, with his acute sense of paranoia, had to admit that Mai was irresistible, with her golden, glowing skin, her long, lithe legs, her huge eyes, and her firm, hard-nippled breasts.
Rock had righted the cart and seen to Mai, then shot the animal to put it out of its misery. He had expertly skinned it, quartered its flesh, scraped down the bones.
Wild Boy had become like every Asian; he never let anything go to waste. In fact, it was safe to say that he thought of himself as Asian. He might once have been American, but now nationality had ceased to mean anything to him. Every so often he would finger the metal dog tags that still hung around his neck, as if, like jade to the Chinese, they were a powerful talisman. But he never looked at them. He was Rock, the Wild Boy, a state, a country, a law unto himself.
He loaded everything—the meat, the skin, the bones (for soup), the girl—into the cart. When he lifted her up, her long nails gently scratched his skin. The sapphire in the lobe of her left ear sparked in the sunlight.
Rock pulled the loaded cart himself seven miles to his temporary camp. Though he had been on the plateau for three years, he did not yet have a permanent home; that luxury would only come in time, a perquisite of acceptance and trust. For the present, however, he needed to make it difficult for the assassins to find him; it was part of the game, yet another demonstration of his skill.
Mai told him that she came from a farming village high in the mountains, “at the top of the world,” as she put it. By which she meant amid the poppy fields.
He could see that look in her eyes. He recognized it because he had seen it so many times before throughout Southeast Asia, and because he was so attuned to the Asian mind. It was his size. He was six foot two. In the States that was medium tall; here in Asia it was gigantic. Rock laughed to himself. He could see right into her mind. She was wondering if all of him was that big. Soon she would find out.
While she tended to the deep purple bruise on her leg, Rock made dinner, a stew utilizing the fresh meat he had brought back. When the pot was simmering, he set about scraping the inside of the hide to prepare it for tanning. While he worked, he wondered about her long nails, something one would never see on a farm girl. His sixth sense—what the Japanese, under whom he had studied hand-to-hand combat, called
haragei,
the divine energy—began to flood his mind with the clarity of insight.
When he looked up, he saw Mai standing naked just outside the flap of his tent. He stared at her, thinking,
This one is special.
His hands and forearms were covered with blood. He could feel himself getting hard. It had been some time since he had been with a woman, but seeing Mai, he knew that it wouldn’t have mattered if he had had sex an hour ago—he would still be hard.
He dropped his enormous Marine combat knife onto the red underside of the skin and stood up. He saw Mai’s gaze lower from his face to the place between his legs. He stood out a country mile. Then she turned and went inside the tent. Rock followed her, bent over slightly from the fierceness of his erection.
Inside, she was kneeling in the dimness. She beckoned him on, then held her cupped palms in front of her breasts. Rock unbuckled his belt, and she did the rest. She held him tenderly in both hands.
Her head bent, the cascade of her lustrous hair fanned his naked thighs, the flutter of a nightbird’s wing. She touched him first with the tip of her tongue, then laved him with the flat of it. At length, she used her lips.
She engulfed him, and as he watched with slitted eyes her cheeks hollow, Rock had that flash of insight that the Shan call the Ruby. He knew by her skill and her expertise who she must be. He knew where she had come from, and who had sent her. He knew what he must do.
She sucked slavishly at him. One hand gently squeezed his scrotum, the other snaked between his thighs to probe his other opening.
Rock bent over and, encircling Mai’s tiny waist, slowly inverted her until her breasts pressed against his lower belly, her thighs resting on his shoulders. He felt as vibration her moan as he plunged his face into her humid mound.
She tasted of mango and spice. He tongued her while her loins tensed expectantly, then all through the spasms caused by her contracting muscles. And again.
She sucked all the harder, moaning for him to come. Rock put her on the floor of the tent and entered her. It was not easy. He was very big, and she was small. But, gradually, she accustomed her engorged flesh to his.
Rock began to stroke long and hard, feeling her thrusting up on him with what seemed genuine desire. Even as his eyes began to glaze, he was in touch with
haragei,
connected with the treachery and deceit spun like a web around him.
He was about to come, and he let her know it, grunting and thrusting even harder. Felt her lifting her right hand from his shoulder where it had been gripping him with sweaty abandon. Saw, out of the corner of his eye, a bright gleam, like a darning needle, the metal jacket fitted over one long nail, its tip dark and lustrous with poison.
He grabbed for her hand, but he misjudged her quickness, or his willpower was not quite strong enough, and he began to ejaculate into her. He lost his hold on her wrist, saw the nail, curved like a scorpion’s tail, blurring in toward the side of his neck and his carotid, knew he’d be dead within seconds.