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  For my father. My first and ideal reader.

  —NM

  To Dena, Penelope, and Leo. Everything is for you. Everything is because of you.

  —DG

  [The speaker is Death.]

  There was a merchant in Bagdad who sent his servant to market to buy provisions and in a little while the servant came back, white and trembling, and said, Master, just now when I was in the marketplace I was jostled by a woman in the crowd and when I turned I saw it was Death that jostled me. She looked at me and made a threatening gesture; now, lend me your horse, and I will ride away from this city and avoid my fate. I will go to Samarra and there Death will not find me.

  The merchant lent him his horse, and the servant mounted it, and he dug his spurs in its flanks and as fast as the horse could gallop he went.

  Then the merchant went down to the marketplace and he saw me standing in the crowd and he came to me and said, Why did you make a threatening gesture to my servant when you saw him this morning?

  That was not a threatening gesture, I said, it was only a start of surprise. I was astonished to see him in Bagdad, for I had an appointment with him tonight in Samarra.

  —W. Somerset Maugham

  1.

  PHNOM PENH, CAMBODIA

  Kyle West lies atop stiff sheets with his eyes half closed. It burns to keep them open, but shutting them is a paradoxical tease. He would kill for distraction, for the benevolent throb of a headache.

  There’s nothing worse than insomnia in a tropical climate.

  He can’t go much longer subsisting on stolen naps, he thinks. Falling asleep for five minutes on public transportation, chickens pecking his hands, children picking his pocket, and a background of hacking lungs.

  His brain and body work overtime to fend off the inevitable systemic collapse.

  His arms and legs vibrate, a plucked violin string beneath his skin replacing the beat of a pulse. He’s hyperaware of the world around him, keyed in on an almost cellular level but unable to take in anything specific, the environment reduced to a passing blur in a rearview mirror.

  He turns on his side and thinks, Maybe not sleeping is a blessing. Maybe I’m looking at this all wrong. Because when he does sleep, his dreams are ruthless, rooted in fact, absent of unconscious properties. There’s no fever logic, no abstract questions answered, no deviant acts banned during waking hours fulfilled.

  He tried to end the pain, picked up some natural remedies at the pharmacy. All they did was give him a dull drone of a headache and an erection lasting three and a half hours. He bought some capsules off the black market, purported pharmaceutical grade. Turned out to be expired Tamiflu.

  He rolls onto his back and listens to the singed symphony of bug zappers.

  The heat in the room is unbearable, a constant reminder. If you can’t sleep, you can’t forget your body, and forgetfulness is sleep’s universal gift.

  The walls around him are slathered in a white gloss. There’s extensive water damage underneath. In response, the hotel management keeps adding more coats of paint. The wall is now several inches thick with subterfuge.

  The only art is a print of Buddha in a chrome frame. The Bodhisattva sports almond eyes and an android smile. Behind him, the jungle explodes in plumes of purple and pink and green, its vines falling around his shoulders like fairy-tale hair.

  The air-conditioning is a collapsed lung, helpless against the heat. The time before the rainy season. The time no one wants to be here. The daily room rate, normally twenty-two dollars, has dropped to sixteen while everyone waits for the storms to come and drown the city.

  Even at sixteen dollars a night, the room is starting to strain Kyle’s purse strings.

  He exhales, puts his hand over his heart, hoping to slow it down.

  This is how you measure the length of your exile, he thinks, by the topography of your hotel rooms.

  He rises from the bed, runs his hand through his hair, and gets it caught in a knot. He hasn’t cut it since he got here; hasn’t shaved either. Which is fine. The expat populace isn’t famed for their grooming. The West’s prime export to Southeast Asia is tall blond surfer girls with unshaven armpits who do nude yoga on the beach while their scraggly boyfriends case the waves, looking for the perfect one to die in.

  Kyle turns on the LCD television, flips the channel to CNN.

  He was never a news junkie when he lived in the States, but now CNN has become a reminder of a world he misses terribly; Senate hearings trigger a warm rush of involuntary memory. Even though—as of late—those hearings have been focused on him and his former boss Christopher Chandler.

  Kyle hears the rooster start up outside. Bastard lives on the balcony one floor below. One morning Kyle stood above him, ready to douse his head with ice water to cut short the dawn sonata, but after they locked eyes, Kyle decided it was best for them to peacefully coexist.

  The rooster didn’t look like he fucked around.

  The tub is stopped up, filled with water that rose during the night. Kyle asked maintenance to take care of the drain, but they snaked the toilet instead. The hotel manager borders on Basil Fawlty when it comes to the operational side of things.

  Kyle pours bottled water over his toothbrush, dumps the rest over his head. He should be immune to the tap water by now, but he sticks with the bottles. He still hasn’t quite conquered the trauma of his first bout of sickness. The fever, the auditory hallucinations, the feeling there was a ball growing in the pit of your stomach and you had to keep throwing up until it burst.

  Two days and ten pounds later, he had learned his lesson.

  Don’t drink the fucking water.

  He goes back into the bedroom, brushes his teeth while watching the news-crawl at the bottom of the screen. National news, local headlines, human-interest stories, all interspersed with the postmodern cant of perpetual Tweeting. Viewers commenting on the news as it happens, present turned past in thirty seconds. His best friend, Neil, was right: Revolution is pointless today. The world moves too fast; we’ve fucked time. When the revolution finally figures out what it wants, it’s already too late—the opposition has factored it into its own plan. The revolution becomes another cog. We’re all working for the opposition now.

  Back in the bathroom, Kyle spits out his toothpaste and avoids the mirror—a safety precaution. If you don’t want to crack, shun surfaces, be a mystery to yourself.

  He walks over to the desk and boots up his computer. While the laptop launches, he goes to the fridge, pulls out an Angkor beer, and holds the cold can against his forehead.

  He taps his finger against the tab, trying to decide whether or not to pop it.

  The pounding starts again in his chest. Hot fingers tight around his heart and squeezing. His heart hurts. Not metaphorically. It genuinely aches, like a leg muscle cramping with lactic acid after a hard mile.

  His breaths are shallow. He can’t take in air. His heart sends electric reminders down to his fingertips.

  The air-conditioner starts to heave, a biometric groan suggesting imminent collapse.

  He pops open the Angkor. It may not do much for his heart, but at least it’s cold. He swallows, feels
the alcohol start to build a barrier between his brain and body.

  The panic goes gauzy, alcohol dulled but still there, bubbling.

  These are the worst moments, the moments of clarity, the bone-deep time when Kyle knows, knows it and can’t tell himself different:

  I’m gonna die in this place and no one even knows my real name.

  He stands before his laptop, signs onto the Internet, and activates his self-designed proxy server, hiding his IP address so he can’t be tracked.

  He scrolls around some music-downloading sites, finds a few tunes he likes, then opens up a real-time news stream and turns the volume up.

  Christopher Chandler, his former boss, sits before a Senate subcommittee. He looks right in his element, like a lizard perched on a rock offering its throat to the sun. His suit is tailored to reveal only three-quarters of an inch of cuff. Chandler doesn’t give anything away without a fight, not even fabric.

  Chandler crosses his legs, blinding onlookers with a recent shoeshine, while a righteously indignant Democratic senator from Maine—utterly out of his depth—attempts to grill him about financial records no one seems to be able to recover.

  Chandler’s lawyer, Thomas Lozen, keeps putting his hand over the microphone and consulting with Chandler, who is preoccupied writing the first chapter of his memoirs on a yellow legal pad, finishing sentences with a fountain-pen flourish, not paying a bit of attention to the senator’s questions.

  Kyle knows something no one in that room except Chandler knows.

  Chandler’s been working on his memoirs for twenty years and has never gotten past the first chapter. He just keeps writing and rewriting, finding the joy in repetition, finding nothing but pure narcissistic renewal in waking up every day and sculpting the story of his own creation.

  There are no references to his parents, to his childhood, nothing. It’s as if Chandler were hatched fully formed, as if he hadn’t required the traditional means of begetting.

  He can exist as pure fact.

  Besides, no one would ever let him publish his autobiography. He told Kyle once:

  “Do you think it’s an accident George H. W. Bush never wrote an autobiography? He’s the only former president who hasn’t. All we got were a series of letters he wrote during his time in office. That’s it. Well, he and I have the same problem. But it doesn’t take away the fun of writing it.”

  Kyle mutes the subcommittee, shrinks the window, moves on to a cluster of bookmarked news sites, and the panic starts again.

  This morning, like too many mornings, he’s headline news:

  “Megalomaniac with Mommy and Daddy Issues.”

  “Tech Fascist Had Red Parents.”

  “Irony: Engineer Traded in Commie Parents for Chandler.”

  Kyle can’t read the articles; even skimming causes the room to spin. He knows what they’re about, knows where the information emanated from.

  While working for Chandler, he started suffering from severe anxiety attacks, panic so intense he was sweating right through his skin; so intense he wanted to jump out a window to make it stop. Chandler sent Kyle to talk to the company’s retained psychiatrist, and then, Daniel Ellsberg–style, someone from the inside leaked those files to the press.

  He feels violated, vivisected for ratings, his personal tragedies reduced to casual breakfast-nook conversation.

  Thank God his parents aren’t around. Of course, if they’d been around, he never would have gone to work for Chandler in the first place.

  2.

  NEW YORK, NEW YORK

  Neil O’Donnell sits at his desk and pours himself a Jack and ginger, raises his glass to a framed shot of Lech Walesa, and then goes a few inches to the right and stops at the one of Stalin. Neil’s not a Communist, but he loves the way Stalin’s photo kills conversation the minute someone walks into his apartment.

  His desk is his mind made manifest. Envelopes opened but their contents never read. Magazine back issues featuring his most searing articles. A boneyard of half-smoked cigarettes. He can’t concentrate long enough to finish a whole one.

  He turns around and rests the drink on his treadmill, a relic of a valiant attempt at clean living, then gets up to fetch his computer from the bedroom.

  Tangled in electric-blue sheets, bathed in the fluorescent glow of his fish tank—which is completely devoid of aquatic life and consists solely of cacti, coral, and sunken treasure—is his intern, Katie, a nineteen-year-old journalism student at the New School. Neil unplugs his laptop from the outlet on his side of the bed, and Katie stirs.

  “When are you going to get some new fish?”

  “Never,” he says.

  “Why?”

  “The fish were a test.”

  “What kind of test?”

  “Doesn’t matter. I failed it.” He runs his hand through her raven hair. “Go back to sleep.”

  Neil has a predilection for—actually, correct that, an addiction to—fucking his interns. He looks good for his age: thick, curly hair; skinny body in a uniform of ripped jeans and T-shirts preaching irony. But his fuckability bona fides come courtesy of being a bit of a rock-and-roll cyber-muckraker. And that’s what makes the leftist undergrads look at him like some kind of sexual Ellis Island. You’ve got to fuck Neil O’Donnell when you’re in New York if you want to be taken seriously at the next WTO protest.

  Truth is, politically, Neil would label himself a Zen anarchist. In fact, he’d tell the Progressives after a few whiskeys that people had to worry about the health of the Left when its most prominent mouthpieces were an ex-rightist formerly married to a gay oil tycoon, and a socialist billionaire who’d sunk the British pound.

  Neil started out as a freelance political journalist, contributing pieces to the likes of Mother Jones, the New Republic, Rolling Stone, and Vanity Fair. But he got sick of the lag time between his articles and the events of the real world, got sick of his big stories becoming sad commentary instead of news. He wanted his stories delivered moment to moment, fresh and uncut. So he became one of the first big-league bloggers, posting news in real time, making it a living, palpable thing. He had gotten his undergraduate degree at MIT, and no, he had to keep telling the interns, he didn’t study with Chomsky. What he studied was international relations and computer science. So setting up the site and networking and server was no problem. And besides, he had all-around tech genius Kyle West, his college buddy, helping him out free of charge.

  Neil bankrolled the site out of his own pocket and luckily it moved into the black before he went red—but, man, was it was close. Now he’s got on-site advertisers; he’s got sponsorship, as he puts it. He’s got a whole army of freelancers who sit in their apartments all day waiting for something to happen so they can upload it instantly. He has his own media fiefdom, which he runs out of his two-bedroom in Greenwich Village while frequently naked and even more frequently drunk.

  He lights a cigarette, watches the smoke coil around the bare bulb in his ceiling fixture, hears the steel-cello chirp of a connected call, and knows exactly who it is.

  “How’s my favorite exile?” Neil says when he sees Kyle’s face in the corner of his screen. “Today the day you’re gonna tell me where you are?”

  Kyle’s voice is low, suffused with fatigue. “Safer you don’t know.”

  Neil puts out the cigarette. “I can’t help you if I don’t know.”

  “You can’t help me. Not only can’t you…you shouldn’t.” Kyle exhales hard. “See the news today?”

  “Yeah.” Neil nods. “Waited to hear from you. Wanted to give you some breathing room.”

  “Why the fuck didn’t you tell me this was coming?”

  “I didn’t know.”

  “Bullshit,” Kyle says. “You’re the king of alternative media.”

  “When it comes to you, no one tells me shit. Look at my site…one of my freelancers posted the article. When it comes to you, man, I’m in the dark. They’re afraid I might leak it back to you. I’m—you’ll love the
irony of this one—considered a security risk.”

  This has been a sore spot in Kyle and Neil’s friendship for the past year. Ever since Kyle became permanent front-page news, Neil’s been forced to sit on the sidelines, to farm the story out to freelancers. Too many people know about their shared history; know they were college roommates, know they remained best friends, know Kyle put up some capital to help Neil start his site.

  And this kills Neil, kills him, because he’d love nothing more than to be out there eviscerating Chandler in print. Taking down guys like Chandler is the reason he got into the news business.

  Kyle snaps his fingers, nothing rhythmic, a nervous tic. “What do you think?”

  “Of what?”

  “Of what to do. Can we do any damage control?”

  “You’re already damaged.”

  “Why are you talking to me like this?”

  “Like what?”

  “Like you don’t care.”

  “’Cause I’m trying to hold back how much I do care. Because you’re not the only one with insomnia…you’re not the only one in exile.”

  “Why are you upset? I’m the one who just got creamed.”

  “I haven’t seen my best friend in a year. I don’t know where you are…”

  Kyle tries to focus Neil. “My question was, what do I do now?”

  “Same thing I told you on day one. You never should have gone to work for Chandler. Guy’s most printable nickname is the Prince of Darkness.” Neil picks up the half-smoked cigarette and relights it. “Remember the article I posted. The one about how on the eve of the Baghdad invasion Saddam sent out an urgent telegram. He was willing to make oil concessions, to let the UN in and inspect? He capitulated to all of our demands. And who does Saddam send this telegram to? Not Cheney…not W. …not Rummy—he sent it to Chandler. He knew Chandler was the one with the power to stop the war. And you went and fucking worked for him.”

  “Where is this getting us?”

  “Nowhere. This is me venting my frustration with you.”