Glow (26 page)

Slathered from head to toe in damp grit, Raf shunts himself all the way out of the fridge and gets to his feet. ‘Am I safe here?’ he says.

‘For a minute,’ says Fitch. ‘Probably won’t be any more simulations until morning – real world morning.’

Not having paid much attention the last time they met, Raf now looks Fitch up and down with renewed interest. He’s only about five feet tall, with darkish skin even for a Burmese guy, and delicate, sombre features that contradict his demeanour. ‘I know you’re “Fitch” on Lotophage, but what’s your name, really?’ says Raf.

‘Win.’

‘Do Lacebark know who you are?’

Win tuts. ‘You a retard? Of course not! They don’t know I’m a chemist. They think I’m just an actor they hired to play a chemist. Otherwise why they still hunting me all over town?’ Interrupting his heavy Burmese accent is the occasional pronunciation that sounds distinctly American, giving his speech a cut-and-paste quality, and he has the syntax of someone who’s made a diligent study of English from coke rap and specialist messageboards.

‘And the guy in Zaya’s flat who answers to your name?’

‘Some asshole with nothing better to do.’

Raf began to understand all this the minute he saw that graph. Cherish has a fake chemist in a real kitchen, like a false real morel, while Lacebark – without even realising it – have a real chemist in a fake kitchen, like a real false morel. The guava juice incense burner is here because Win actually made it himself, but the passionfruit juice incense burner was in the kitchen in Camberwell Green because Cherish thought it would make her fake Win look more realistic to Raf. Perhaps it didn’t occur to her that by reproducing a minute detail that Lacebark would never have been able to get right on their own, she was bringing the two models so close together that the logic of her story got squeezed to death in between them. (After all, if Cherish had the real chemist and Lacebark had a fake one, then the two kitchens should have looked dissimilar, because Lacebark didn’t know Win personally and they were just guessing at his habits. It was only if Cherish herself was the counterfeiter that the two kitchens could have matched so exactly, because she knew Win well enough to build a near-perfect imitation of his workspace.)

‘What happens to the foxes when Lacebark are running simulations or showing people around?’ Raf says.

‘They hear anyone coming, they bail.’

‘They didn’t this time.’

‘They know you not a threat.’

‘How would they know that?’

‘Maybe they been watching you for a while.’

Raf thinks of the fox on the bus, the fox by the basketball court, the five foxes in the video. ‘Are they . . .’ He hesitates. ‘Are they getting more intelligent?’

‘Don’t expect them to start talking. But, yeah, they are. The
glo
does that. They get more social. And they spatial memory gets better. I think maybe they start using light the same way they already use smell. They make these three-dimensional maps in they heads.’

‘You mean
glo
, the plant?’

‘Yeah. They love to eat that shit. And they come here because I feed it to them. You understand how glow made, right? Glow, the drug.’

‘No.’

‘Foxes metabolise the precursor in they bodies from the alkaloids in the plant. Then I purify it out of they excreta.’

Again Raf thinks of Isaac and his autogenous rocket fuel. ‘Wait, so glow comes from fox piss?’

‘And fox shit, yeah. Don’t look so surprised. How you think those Siberia shamans started getting high on fly agaric? You can’t just eat the mushrooms out of the ground – they toxic. So you wait for a reindeer to eat some and then you drink some reindeer piss.’ Fitch shoos a feathery-cheeked fox off a chair so that Raf can sit down. ‘Look, you obviously totally fucking clueless. Maybe I ought to start from the beginning.’

Glow might never have come to exist, Win explains, if he hadn’t wandered into a bar in Gandayaw one muggy, sour night in 2007 to watch a Muay Thai match they were screening. One of the fighters was getting ground up like fish paste by the other, and the picture on the old TV set was flopping and wincing as if the satellite dish on the roof could feel the punches all the way from Bangkok. The only other customers were a handsome white guy in a sweat-soaked shirt and three drunken Burmese boys whom Win had seen around town several times already in the month or so since he came to Gandayaw.

About ten minutes after Win bought a bottle of beer and took a seat in front of the television, he became aware of angry voices behind him. Evidently the three boys were determined to sell the white guy a carton of cigarettes but their English was so bad that the sales pitch involved snarling ‘Cig-et! Cig-et!’ The white guy thought they were asking him to give them some cigarettes, and he kept pointing at the carton as if they might have forgotten about it. ‘But you already have all those,’ he was saying. ‘There must be ten packs in there.’ By now they’d decided he was being deliberately obstructive and one of them had just taken out a flick knife.

Win got up and walked over to the white guy’s table. ‘They want to sell you box. Give them five dollar and they leave you alone.’ His English wasn’t quite as good back then.

‘Oh,’ said the white guy, and laughed. ‘Shit. OK.’ He found a five-dollar bill – holding his wallet under the table like a poker hand in that tourist way that’s supposed to stop anyone from seeing that you have a lot of cash on you but in fact just makes it immediately obvious that you do – and passed it across. The boys sneered at him and walked out.

‘Thanks,’ said the white guy, looking up at Win. ‘Do you want . . . uh . . . do you want some money too? Or a drink?’

They held eye contact for a waxy second before Win called to the barman for a glass of Johnnie Walker Red and Coca-Cola, which was the most expensive thing you could order in this bar. The white guy turned the carton of cigarettes upside down so that all the individual packs fell out on to the table. ‘There are only four in here,’ he said, and laughed again.

Win knew that if they went back to the white guy’s hotel room later, the white guy would probably offer him cash again at some point, and he wasn’t sure whether he’d take it. He had never quite decided whether it was more gangster to turn down money for sex, because a gangster couldn’t be bought and sold, or more gangster never ever to turn down money for anything, because a gangster was always on his grind. Anyway, tonight it didn’t really matter, because he genuinely wanted to fuck this guy. It had been a long while since he’d had sex with anyone but Hseng, and sex with Hseng was like having ten thousand scalding hot pork dumplings shot at you point blank out of a greasy mortar cannon.

‘You Lacebark?’ Win said.

‘Yeah. Just arrived yesterday from Jakarta. But I live in North Carolina.’ There was a wasp in the ashtray, almost dead, shivering in small circles like a mobile phone left to vibrate on a table. After a long pause, as if he was so surprised to be having this kind of conversation that he’d lost track of the rules of banality, the white guy said, ‘Are you from around here?’

‘No. From Mong La.’

‘Oh. I haven’t heard of it.’

Mong La was a town on the Chinese border where the United Wa State Army made such extraordinary profits from opium that one year they whimsically used some of the surplus to construct a Museum of Drug Eradication. Win’s aunt had sent him to work in Hseng’s small yaba factory when he was fifteen years old. The pay was low and the hours were long and the fumes gave him headaches, but at least he knew it was gangster to be so close to the drugs and so close to the money. Also, he was captivated by the chemistry: the logical magic and odorous grammar of the catalytic reactions, the precursor’s ascension to new forms like a soul moving through the thirty-one planes of existence, the idealistic, asymptotic pursuit of absolute purity. He even loved to watch the last fastidious hesitation of the electronic scales before they settled on a count, the polar shimmer of the crystallised product in the first few seconds after it was sifted out of the evaporator.

His boss, Hseng, was an obese, mottled Chinese guy with a big appetite for boys. Once or twice a week, he would bring Win into the back office, lock the door, and undo his fake designer belt. But Hseng had what Win would later come to identify as a rare disability among males: he couldn’t seem to turn himself on by the use of force. He was happy to let Win suck his cock for the price of a bowl of soup, but if Win ever started trying to fight him off, Hseng would immediately forfeit his erection. This left Win with some bargaining power. And quite soon he asked to be allowed to take some lessons from Hseng’s chemists and to spend a few hours a week in the internet café on the corner, browsing websites like Lotophage.

Within two years, he was running the factory for Hseng, and its output had never been higher.

For a while, everything was pretty good. Hseng paid Win quadruple his old wage, and even bashfully presented him with a gift: a shoddy Chinese-made portable CD player so he could take his hip hop with him wherever he went. He took to wearing a home-made necklace based on the hexagonal benzene ring common to all amphetamines. Then, late one night towards the end of the rainy season, Hseng came to Win’s aunt’s house and told her to wake him up because he was needed at the factory. Win blearily followed him outside, and they stood in the wet shadows under a banyan tree while Hseng explained that a colonel in the United Wa State Army was planning to murder him and steal his business.

‘We have to leave Mong La. I have a cousin in a town called Gandayaw about a hundred miles west of here. He’ll set us up. We’ll start a bigger factory. You can oversee everything.’

‘Why would I leave?’ said Win. ‘My aunt is my only family.’

Hseng looked hurt. ‘You have to come with me. They’ll kill you too. They’ll gut you with hooks.’

Later Win would realise that Hseng had been lying about this – if anything, the colonel probably would have given Win a better job. And it was almost certain that Hseng had done something idiotic to provoke the colonel, because his second-rate business alone would scarcely have been worth killing for. But at the time Win wasn’t savvy enough to understand any of that, so he packed a bag, said an inadequate goodbye to his aunt, and set off west with Hseng.

When they got to Gandayaw, however, it was obvious at once that although the town had a lot of drug addicts and a lot of drug dealers it had no place for a drug factory. The Tatmadaw and the Lacebark security force had never been on such spiteful terms, so even if one had tolerated it, that would have been reason enough for the other to shut it down. Also, Hseng’s legendary cousin turned out to have left for Thailand almost a year earlier. So Hseng decided he was going to start a casino. He used most of the cash he’d brought with him from Mong La to buy an old brothel that had closed after an electrical fire, with the intention of installing baccarat and blackjack tables. (Also he wouldn’t shut up about his idea for a fishtank full of turtles whose shells would be encrusted with tiny mirrors, like autonomous disco balls.) But Hseng didn’t have any connections here, plus no one trusted the Chinese, so he ended up paying for most of the materials and labour in advance, and in Gandayaw paying for anything in advance was like giving alms to a monastery: you certainly wouldn’t expect to see any direct benefit in your current lifetime. After a month, the former brothel looked even more dilapidated than when he’d bought it. One morning he decreed that Win should start helping out with the refurbishment, but Win deliberately hammered enough holes in the walls that by lunchtime Hseng changed his mind and banned him from the project. Now he just mooched around Gandayaw, pining for his reactor and his drying oven and his rotary tablet press.

The white guy’s name turned out to be Craig. He was an ‘internal management consultant’ at Lacebark, specialising in ‘process efficiency optimisation’, and he’d been sent to Gandayaw for three months to find out how to boost the productivity of the mine workers in the Concession. Modern efficiency consulting, he told Win, was all about neuroscience: the old, loose terms like ‘alertness’ and ‘initiative’ and ‘morale’ just gestured at specific brain states that could now be described much more precisely in empirical language. When Win started posing questions about dopamine and norepinephrine, Craig asked him how he already knew so much about all that stuff.

‘Back in Mong La, I run factory for yaba pills,’ Win said.

‘What’s yaba?’

‘Mix of methamphetamine and caffeine.’

‘Really?’ said Craig. ‘You were in the drug trade?’ His hair was dark but there was both ginger and grey in his stubble.

Win nodded and clenched a fist over his heart. ‘For life.’ He rapped a few lines: ‘?“The chemist is brolic, Pyrex scholars, professors at war over raw, killing partners for a million dollars.”?’

‘Did you do much business with sweatshops in Thailand? They go through amphetamine like it’s powdered milk. You can’t knock it from an efficiency point of view. But we’ve done a couple of studies and in the long run we think it works best for small, repetitive, seated tasks. Not so much for heavy resource extraction . . . Godammit, sorry, I’ve got to stop talking about work.’

Three drinks later, they walked back to Craig’s room in the Lacebark-owned hotel on the north side of town, where the American turned out to have the biggest penis that Win had ever seen outside porn videos. Afterwards, as he lay dreamy and exhausted, Craig got up and started rummaging through his suitcase. Even though the windows were wide open, the air in the room was still fuggy and ammoniac, as if within the valvular manifold of their connected bodies they had synthesised a molecule so complex it couldn’t filter out through the mosquito screens.