The Chronoliths Read online

  We came off the smugglers’ trail into a nest of Thai military police.

  Hitch made a brave attempt to reverse the Daimler and haul ass out of trouble, but there was nowhere to go except back up that dead-end trail. When a bullet kicked up dust by the front wheel, Hitch braked and killed the engine.

  The soldiers bade us kneel, hands behind our necks. One of them approached us and put the barrel of his pistol against Hitch’s temple, then mine. He said something I couldn’t translate; his comrades laughed.

  A few minutes later we were inside a military wagon, under the guard of four armed men who spoke no English or pretended not to. I wondered how much contraband Hitch was carrying and whether that made me an accomplice or an accessory to a capital offense. But no one said anything about drugs. No one said anything at all, even when the truck lurched into motion.

  I asked politely where we were going. The nearest soldier — a barrel-ribbed, gap-toothed adolescent — shrugged and waved the butt of his rifle at me in a desultory threat.

  They took Hitch’s camera. He never got it back. Nor his motorcycle, come to that. The army was economical in such matters.

  We rode in that truck for almost eighteen hours and spent the next night in a Bangkok prison, in separate cells and without communication privileges. I learned later that an American threat-assessment team wanted to “debrief” (i.e., interrogate) us before we talked to the press, so we sat in our isolation cells with buckets for toilets while, across the world, sundry well-dressed men booked flights for Don Muang Airport. These things take time.

  My wife and child were less than five miles away in the embassy hospital, but I didn’t know that and neither did Janice.

  Kaitlin bled from her ear until dawn.

  Doctor Dexter’s second diagnosis had been correct. Kaitlin had been infected with some ominously poly-drug-resistant bacteria that dissolved her tympanic membrane as neatly — one doctor told me — as if someone had poured a vial of acid into her ear. The surrounding small bones and nervous tissue were also affected, in the time it took for multiple doses of fluoroquinolones to battle back the infection. By the following nightfall two things were clear.

  One, Kaitlin’s life was no longer in danger.

  Two, she would never hear with that ear again. She would retain some hearing in her right ear, but it would be impaired.

  Or maybe I should say three things became clear. Because it was plain to Janice by the time the sun went down that my absence was inexcusable and that she wasn’t prepared to forgive me for this latest lapse of adult judgment. Not this time — not unless my corpse washed up on the beach, and maybe not even then.

  The interrogation went like this.

  Three polite men arrived at the prison and apologized contritely for the conditions in which we were being held. They were in touch with the Thai government on our behalf “even as we speak,” and in the meantime, would we answer a few questions?

  For instance, our names and addresses and Stateside connections, and how long had we been in Thailand, and what were we doing here?

  (This must have been fun for Hitch. I simply told the truth: that I had been in Bangkok doing software development for a U.S.-based hotel chain and that I had stayed on for some eight months after my contract lapsed. I didn’t mention that I had planned to write a book about the rise and fall of expatriate beach culture in what the Thai travel guides are pleased to call the Land of Smiles — which had turned from a nonfiction work into a novel before it died aborning — or that I had exhausted my personal savings six weeks ago. I told them about Janice but neglected to mention that, without the money she had borrowed from her family, we would have been destitute. I told them about Kaitlin, too, but I didn’t know Kaitlin had nearly died a mere forty-eight hours earlier… and if the suits knew, they didn’t elect to share the information.)

  The rest of their questions were all about the Chumphon object: how we had heard about it, when we had first seen it, how close we had come, our “impressions” of it. A Thai prison guard looked on glumly as a U.S. medic took blood and urine samples for further analysis. Then the suits thanked us and promised to get us out of confinement ASAP.

  The following day three different polite gentlemen with a fresh set of credentials asked us the same questions and made the same promises.

  We were, at last, released. Some of the contents of our wallets were returned to us and we stepped out into the heat and stench of Bangkok somewhere on the wrong side of the Chao Phrya. Abandoned and penniless, we walked to the embassy and I badgered a functionary there into advancing us one-way bus fare to Chumphon and a couple of free phone calls.

  I tried to reach Janice at our rental shack. There was no answer. But it was dinnertime and I imagined she was out with Kait securing a meal. I tried to contact our landlord (a graying Brit named Bedford), but I talked to his voicemail instead. At which point a nice embassy staffer reminded us pointedly not to miss our bus.

  I reached the shack long after dark, still firmly convinced I’d find Janice and Kaitlin inside; that Janice would be angry until she heard what had happened; that there would follow a tearful reconciliation and maybe even some passion in the wake of it.

  In her hurry to reach the hospital Janice had left the door ajar. She had taken a suitcase for herself and Kaitlin and local thieves had taken the rest, what there was of it: the food in the refrigerator, my phone, the laptop.

  I ran up the road and woke my landlord, who admitted he had seen Janice lugging a suitcase past his window “the other day” and that Kaitlin had been ill, but in all the fuss about the monument the details had escaped him. He let me use his phone (I had become a phone beggar) and I reached Doctor Dexter, who filled me in on the details of Kaitlin’s infection and her trip to Bangkok.

  Bangkok. And I couldn’t call Bangkok from Colin’s phone; that was a toll call, he pointed out, and wasn’t I already behind on the rent?

  I hiked to the Phat Duc, Hitch’s alleged bait and tackle shop.

  Hitch had problems of his own — he still harbored faint hopes of tracking down the lost Daimler — but he told me I could crash in the Duc’s back room (on a bale of moist sinsemilla, I imagined) and use the shop’s phone all I wanted; we’d settle up later.

  It took me until dawn to establish that Janice and Kaitlin had already left the country.

  I don’t blame her.

  Not that I wasn’t angry. I was angry for the next six months. But when I tried to justify the anger to myself, my own excuses seemed flimsy and inadequate.

  I had, after all, brought her to Thailand when her explicit preference had been to stay in the U.S. and finish her postdoc. I had kept her there when my own contracts lapsed, and I had effectively forced her into a poverty-level existence (as Americans of those years understood poverty, anyway) while I played out a scenario of rebellion and retreat that had more to do with unresolved post-adolescent angst than with anything substantial. I had exposed Kaitlin to the dangers of an expatriate lifestyle (which I preferred to think of as “broadening her horizons”), and in the end I had been absent and unavailable when my daughter’s life was threatened.

  I did not doubt that Janice blamed me for Kaitlin’s partial deafness. My only remaining hope was that Kait herself would not blame me. At least, not permanently. Not forever.

  In the meantime what I wanted was to go home. Janice had retreated to her parents’ house in Minneapolis, from which she was very firmly not returning my calls. I was given to understand that a bill of divorcement was in the works.

  All of this, ten thousand miles away.

  At the end of a frustrating month I told Hitch I needed a ride back to the U.S. but that my funds had bottomed out.

  We sat on a drift log by the bay. Windsurfers rolled out on the long blue, undeterred by the bacteria count. Funny how inviting the ocean can look, even when it’s poisoned.

  The beach was busy. Chumphon had become a mecca for photojournalists and the idly curious. By day they comp
eted for telephoto shots of the so-called Chumphon Object; by night they bid up the prices of liquor and lodging. All of them carried more money than I had seen for a year.

  I didn’t much care for the journalists and I already hated the monument. I couldn’t blame Janice for what had happened, and I was understandably reluctant to blame myself, but I could without objection blame the mystery object that had come to fascinate much of the world.

  The irony is that I hated the monument almost before anyone else did. Before very long the silhouette of that cool blue stone would become a symbol recognized and hated (or, perversely, loved) by the vast majority of the human race. But for the time being I had the field to myself.

  The moral, I suppose, is that history doesn’t always put its finger on the nice folks.

  And of course: There is no such thing as a coincidence.

  “We both need a favor,” Hitch said, grinning that dangerous grin of his. “Maybe we can do one for each other. Maybe I can get you back home, Scotty. If you do something for me in return.”

  “That kind of proposition worries me,” I said.

  “A little worry is a healthy thing.”

  That evening, the English-language papers printed the text of the writing that had been discovered on the base of the monument — an open secret here in Chumphon.

  The inscription, carved an inch deep into the substance of the pillar and written in a kind of pidgin Mandarin and basic English, was a simple declarative statement commemorating a battle. In other words, the pillar was a victory monument.

  It celebrated the surrender of southern Thailand and Malaysia to the massed forces of someone (or something) called “Kuin,” and beneath the text was the date of this historic battle.

  December 21, 2041.

  Twenty years in the future.

  Two

  I flew into the United States on a start-up air carrier with legal berths at Beijing, Dusseldorf, Gander, and Boston — the long way around the planet, with numbing layovers — and arrived at Logan Airport with a set of knockoff designer luggage in the best Bangkok tradition, a five-thousand-dollar grubstake, and an unwelcome obligation, all thanks to Hitch Paley. I was home, for better or for worse.

  It was amazing how effortlessly wealthy Boston seemed after a season on the beaches, even before I left the terminal, as if all these gleaming cafés and newsstands had sprung up after a hard rain, bright Disney mushrooms. Nothing here was older than five years, not the terminal annex itself nor the Atlantic landfill that supported it, a facility younger than the great majority of its patrons. I submitted to a noninvasive Customs scan, then crossed the cavernous Arrivals complex to a taxi bay.

  The mystery of the Chumphon Chronolith — it had been given that name by a pop-science journalist just last month — had already faded from public attention. It was still making news, but mainly in the supermarket checkout papers (totem of the Devil or trump of the Rapture) and in countless conspiracy-chronicling web-journals. Incomprehensible as it may seem to a contemporary reader, the world had passed on to more immediate concerns — Brazzaville 3, the Windsor weddings, the attempted assassination of the diva Lux Ebone at the Roma Festival just last weekend. It was as if we were all waiting for the event that would define the new century, the thing or person or abstract cause that would strike us as indelibly new, a Twenty-first Century Thing. And of course we didn’t recognize it when it nudged its way into the news for the first time. The Chronolith was a singular event, intriguing but ultimately mystifying, hence ultimately boring. We set it aside unfinished, like the New York Times crossword puzzle.

  In fact there was a lot of ongoing concern over the Thai event, but it was restricted to certain echelons of the intelligence and security communities, both national and international. The Chronolith, after all, was an avowedly hostile military incursion conducted on a large scale and with ultimate stealth, even if the only casualties had been a few thousand gnarled mountain pines. Chumphon Province was under very close scrutiny these days.

  But that was not my business, and I imagined I could disentangle myself from it simply by flying a few thousand miles west.

  We thought like that then.

  Unusually cold weather that autumn. The sky was cast over with turbulent clouds, a high wind tormenting the last of the year’s fishing fleet. Outside the street atrium of the AmMag station, a row of flags beat the air.

  I paid the taxi driver, crossed the lobby, and bought a ticket for the Northern Tier Express: Detroit, Chicago, and across the prairies to Seattle, though I was only going as far as Minneapolis. Boarding at seven p.m., the vending machine informed me. I purchased a newspaper and read it on a coin monitor until the station’s wall clock showed 4:30.

  Then I stood up, surveyed the lobby for suspicious activity (none), and walked out onto Washington Street.

  Five blocks south of the magrail station was a tiny, ancient mailbox service called Easy’s Packages and Parcels.

  It was a storefront business, not prosperous, with a flyblown mylar shade over the display window. While I watched, a man with a steel walker inched through the front door and emerged ten minutes later carrying a brown paper envelope. I imagined this was the typical customer at an establishment like Easy’s, a golden-ager perversely loyal to what remained of the U.S. Postal Service.

  Unless the gentleman with the walker was a criminal in latex makeup. Or a cop.

  Did I have qualms about what I was doing? Many… or at least second thoughts. Hitch had bankrolled my trip home, and the favor he had asked in return had seemed simple enough when we were basking penniless on the sand. I had known Hitch for most of a year before the advent of the Chumphon Chronolith; he was one of the few Haat Thai regulars whose conversation extended to anything more advanced than personal sexual conquests and designer drugs. He was a master of unaudited deals and subterranean income, but he was essentially honest and (as I had often insisted to Janice) “not a bad person.” Whatever that meant. I trusted him, at least within the boundaries of his nature.

  But as I stood watching Easy’s Packages for evidence of police surveillance — fully aware that I wouldn’t recognize professional surveillance unless the Treasury Department happened to rent a billboard to advertise its presence — all those judgments seemed facile and naive. Hitch had asked me to show up at Easy’s, give his name, and take delivery of “a package,” which I was to hold until he contacted me, no questions asked.

  Hitch was after all a drug dealer, though his beach trade had been confined to cannabis, exotic mushrooms, and the milder phenylethylamines. And Thailand was indeed a source country and established commercial route for the narcotics trade since the days of Marco Polo.

  I wasn’t modest about intoxicants and I had sampled more than a few. Virtually every psychoactive substance was legal somewhere and almost all of it decriminalized in the liberal Western nations, but the U.S. in general and Massachusetts in particular were still heavily punitive when it came to the transportation of hard narcotics. If Hitch had somehow contrived to mail himself, say, a kilo of black tar heroin — and if his sense of humor extended to giving me custody of it — I might be paying for my ticket home with penitentiary time. I might not see Kaitlin without a sheet of wire-reinforced glass between us, at least until her thirtieth birthday.

  Rain came down in a sudden, sheeting torrent. I ran across the street to Easy’s Packages, took a breath of damp air, and stepped inside.

  Easy himself, or someone like him — a tall, intricately wrinkled, muscular black man who might have been sixty or eighty — stood behind a hardwood counter, guarding a row of aluminum mailboxes tarnished a foggy gray. He looked at me briefly. “Help you?”

  “I’m here to pick up a package.”

  “You and everybody else. Mailbox number?”

  Hitch hadn’t given me a number. “Hitch Paley said there’d be a package waiting for me.”

  His eyes narrowed, and his head seemed to rise a quarter inch in sudden indignation. “Hitch Pale
y?”

  From the tone of his voice this was already going badly, but I nodded.

  “Hitch fucking Paley!” He thumped the counter with his fist. “I don’t know who the fuck you are, but if you happen to be talking to Hitch Paley, you tell that asshole our scores are not settled! He can keep his fuckin’ packages to himself, too!”

  “You don’t have anything for me?”

  “Do I have anything for you? Do I have anything for you? The toe of my fucking boot is what I have for you!”

  I managed to find the door.

  Thus the failed journalist, failed husband, and failed parent became a failed criminal.

  Riding the AmMag coach out of Massachusetts, out of the urban corridor into shanty sprawl and dusky farmland, I tried to put these mysteries out of my mind.

  Anything could have gone wrong between Hitch Paley and Easy’s Packages, but I told myself it didn’t really matter. I had done what Hitch had asked and I was frankly relieved not be carrying a butcher-paper-wrapped bundle of incriminating evidence. The only potential problem was that Hitch might (and in the near future) want his money back.

  Midnight inched past in the rainy dark. I reclined my seat and contemplated the future. West of the Mississippi, the economy was booming. The new covalent processor platforms had enabled oceans of complex new software, and I was certain I could find at least an entry-level gig with one of the Silicon Ring NASDAQ candidates. Put my degree to use before it became obsolete. In time, I could pay Hitch back and null the debt. Thus crime engenders virtue.

  In time, I imagined, I would become respectable; I would prove my worth to Janice and be forgiven, and Kait would come toddling back into my arms.

  But I couldn’t help thinking of my father — seeing him in my own reflection in the rain-scored window. Failure is entropy, this specter seemed to announce, and entropy is a law of nature. Love becomes pain. Eventually you learn to ignore it. You achieve the nirvana of indifference. It’s not easy. But nothing worth doing is easy.