Myths for hire.

Science doesn’t have all the answers. Take cold, for example. If I’m remembering high school chemistry, then high school physics, then college chemistry and college physics right, “cold” (or “heat” for that matter) essentially refers to the amount of energy something has. If an object (using the term object loosely here, so it refers to places, people, drinks, etc.) is “hot” it’s more energetic, all those little molocules jumping around and bouncing off one another like animals in one of the dance numbers in The Lion King; if that same thing is cold there’s less energy, molocules, atoms, whatever moving more slowly, then more slowly still, until finally at absolute zero they freeze into lock-step. And then it’s possible, a friend of mine told me once, to get into *negative* temperatures, but I didn’t quite understand what he was talking about then — no doubt due to an obstinate and bullheaded refusal of mine to associate temperature with anything other than, well, *temperature*, hot and cold and all that, which may be old-fashioned but is nevertheless a reflex of mine — and I’m not going to attempt to explain it now.

(Though, parenthetically, if anyone does know or would like to take a second try at explaining to me what a negative temperature might be, I promise to be more flexible.)

Anyway! The point of all this babble is to say that the commonly-held impression of cold is wrong, as I know! Or, if not wrong, then at least incomplete. China, oddly enough for a country that burns like a somewhat congenial if polluted furnace from May to August,
has a way of showing one kinds of cold one didn’t quite think existed. There’s cold as in my house in southern Anhui province, wet and just above freezing, which wouldn’t be a problem save that there’s a shortage of indoor heating in Anhui, or at least indoor heating that doesn’t excoriate you and squeeze every ounce of moisture from your tortured flesh. So when the cold creeps in through layers of coat and sweater and long underwear and so forth, it doesn’t leave. Ever. Like the spiders on your ceiling and the field mice who creep around your window at night looking for ways to sneak in, it becomes a constant companion.
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This morning I woke at 4:30 AM in a white-walled motel room outside Phnom Penh International Airport to the angry, full-voiced chirp of a gecko on the wall; it scuttled for cover behind the curtains when I sat up. And now, I’m sitting back on Stephanie’s couch in Beijing, waiting for her to get off work (her crazy, backbreaking work, poor woman, she left New York and came to just about the only place on the planet where your time as a legal assistant is in even higher demand - save me from professions, if not from professional salaries!) so we can grab a bite to eat and maybe watch some of Rome before bed. It’s cold outside, though dry, the horrid ice-tentacles that have seized the southern half of the Chan’s Great Continent having spared the capital mostly. My students back in southern Anhui are seeing more snow than they have known since they were in grade school. There are no snow plows in Anhui, there are no salt trucks, there are no paved roads going out to most of their houses. They are sleeping eight to a concrete bunker of a room, waiting for the weather to let up - or so I hear.

And, as I said, this morning I awoke some eleven degrees and thirty-three minutes north of the equator to the chirp of a gecko and the cry of a bird in the palm tree outside my window and the burbling and coughing of an air conditioner that sounded more like the engine of a particularly tuburculotic old station wagon. Around midnight, awake for the second time due to the noise, I had tried to sleep without the AC, but then the heat and wet stickiness set in, and the scratchy sheets, and the bugs, and the complete lack of ventilation in the concrete motel room, and I gave in.

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I sit now in an internet cafe in the lobby of my guesthouse in Thailand, land of Muy Thai kickboxing, peanut sauce, and delicious iced tea - And fully legal and government-supported gender reassignment operations, my Lonely Planet guide informs me. No wonder the Chinese folks I know who come back from this country are always talking about “Taiguo renyao,” which is to say Thai Transsexuals. (Actually to be precise, and I know some of you care about precision in matters like these, it’s “Thai Transvestites,” but whatever the differing psychologies it seems likely to me that a culture with a history of accepting out-and-out transvestitism would have less problem with transsexuals than the norm… but anyway, here I am writing on the clock (1 hr 52 min remaining of my purchased internet time as I finish this parenthetical) and within one paragraph I’ve already got myself from an internet cafe to transsexualism. The point of all this was to establish that the title of this particular volume in the Dispatches is now somewhat erroneous, but I’m not going to change it for numbering reasons. Those of you who grew up playing Japanese video games will understand that this is somewhat similar to how Mario III showed up in the US without a Mario II, or how “Secret of Mana” the gameboy game was renamed as “Final Fantasy Adventures”… Anyway. We enter the wayback machine - Cambodia!

More scene-setting, which I neglected to do in the previous e-mail: Siem Reap, which means “Thailand (Siam, Siem) Defeated” in Khmer (the name for the people, the language, the adjective for everything connected with their culture) is a small but fast-growing tourist town about three hours away from the Thai border, which is kind of like if Augusta, Maine were named “Scourge of Canadians” or something. The roads are paved, mostly, and sand is everywhere. It’s the dry season - after rains, the vegetation regains something of its normal unearthly green but here there’s a good bit of droopy, dry tan in anything and everything, even though the real dry stretches begin to the north and west, where everything fades into dust and cows stand like Pharoh’s lean kine by the side of the road. But back to Siem Reap: close-gathered, low buildings, a few tall luxury hotels on the outskirts. More tourists - read, foreigners, farang in Thai and something I can’t even begin to pronounce in Khmer, waiguoren in Chinese (though here they really feel more like Gringos; there’s a Mexican feel to the country in a way) - than I’ve seen in a long time, wandering around and for the most part glancing at each other and away, even in a crowd. People are here to see temples, and Cambodia and Cambodians, not ungainly hordes of French or Cantonese, well-mannered as they may be.

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The motorcycle crashed into the back of my white $2 bicycle and the bike skidded on the road and I flew, thinking to myself: “this would be a stupid way to die.”  (I didn’t, as you have probably assumed by now, unless you’re one of those folks who believe the Dead can Talk to Us on the Internet.)

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My apologies once again for my prolonged absence. Rumors of my whatever have been greatly exaggerated. It’s hard to come up with
stuff to write consistently when one is in situ in the countryside in
China, but when one travels, the juices get flowing again and there
are things that need to go down on paper. And right now I’m sitting
in an internet cafe in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, where you take off your
shoes before you go into internet cafes. It’s about 27 degrees
outside (Celcius, you American schvine! About eighty degrees F.) , and
I’m hurrying this so I can get back and join Carl Dull, whom some of
you from my Sewanee days might know, for a bottle of beer and an
attempt to commandeer the guesthouse’s television so as to watch Six
String Samurai. This is the Kingdom of Cambodia.

We arrived around 8 or 9 last night, after what turned out to be
something like a seven hour plane flight, and got off the jet to feel
the air around us like a blanket. The visa issue was a non-issue;
US$20 and I got myself a shiny new Cambodian visa in my passport along
with all the China stamps. The people behind the visa counter were
small, and darker than Chinese. Some of the women had very wide
mouths, and everyone smiled a lot. They were joking, and seemed
relaxed and happy. One girl was off-duty, hanging out with her
friends and eating oranges.

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“I need to ask you a question, Mallory.”

I’ll give you what answers I can, she said. I don’t know if you’ll like them. And we can’t talk here.

Umber looked left, looked right. “We’re being watched.”

Always.

“So, where do you want to go?”

Follow me.

She stood with a creaking of joints, and walked, with the slow step of one in pain, to a door at the rear of the room, a door that had not been there before. As she stood, the noise of the bar stopped - beer froze in midair as it drained into the patrons’ mouths, feet stuck in the act of being put down. Nothing moved. They were between moments now.

She opened the door with a brush of her steel hand. Beyond, there was only darkness. She stepped through it, and he followed her. The door did not close behind them, but once Umber passed through it, it was no longer there.

Nothing stretched around on all sides, formless and void.

Something glowed. “There’s light now,” he said.

“Maybe its just your eyes getting used to the dark,” she said from behind him, though she had passed through the door first.

“I don’t have eyes.” He paused. “And you don’t have a voice.”

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By Max Gladstone

All Rights Reserved

Phase I

Their prison was too brightly lit for comfort. In other respects, though, it was well appointed, with a coffee maker, a large bed and a leather couch, a full-length mirror, bad wallpaper, and a television that only turned to dead channels.

When they realized they couldn’t escape, the two of them settled down to wait. Walker made some coffee, and Adrienne lay back on the couch.

“So tell me a story, old man,” she said, when the silence had extended for too long.

Walker poured her a cup of coffee and put the pot back on the burner. “I’m thirty-five. That’s not old.”

Light glinted off the spikes on her black leather bracelet as she accepted the cup and raised it to her smiling lips.

“What kind of story do you want to hear?” he said.

“A true story, about what’s going on outside.”

“I don’t think it works that way. I’m a writer, not a prophet. And I don’t even write very good books.”

She looked over at him. Her blue eyes were lined in black, and stray strands of white hair fell across her face. “I don’t see any prophets here. If all I’ve got is an old writer who makes bad coffee, then that’s all I’ve got.”

He harrumphed into his beard. “All right then, little girl. I’ll tell you a bedtime story.”

“Just because I’m patronizing doesn’t mean you get to be.”

He sat down in a chair next to the couch and tried not to look at her. “This story isn’t any less true than any other. It happened not too long ago, and it happened everywhere at once. Gods are as large as our dreams, and as small as our jealousies. It’s important to remember that.”

“Just tell the story already.”

“Stop being a brat, and listen.”

#

It wasn’t Heaven, Olympos or Elysium, or the root of the World-Ash Tree.

Of course, it wasn’t a pleasantly breezy and blue summer mid-afternoon on a hilltop in middle Tennessee, either, but it was something like that, at least as far as the two individuals drinking tea were concerned.

The man – or so we’ll call him, for he looked and operated very much like a man - was a little over six feet tall, most of his frame shrouded in a beige trench coat. He had short, bristly black hair and a little trace of stubble. Beneath the trench coat he was dressed formally, as if for a business meeting, which this was, in a sense.

The man’s name was Matthew, as far as any human ear could hear it or human tongue could pronounce it.

He sipped his tea.

“Good afternoon, Grandmother Spider,” Matthew said.

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And it’s 12:20 AM. Once again, I’ve failed in my quest to get to sleep at a reasonable hour. At least the mouse is dead.