So the rat-catcher kept me alive. To what purpose? “What do you want me to do?” I ask.

He’s silent for a moment, peering out of the rib-vaulted window as if he can see the shaggy vines beyond the square. “This land,” he says, “is the best place on earth because it’s possibly the last place to succumb to the ravages of civilization.” He turns back to me. “That doesn’t make it a utopia, and it won’t remain an unexploited frontier forever. But for a few precious years…” Those penetrating eyes gleam; could it be a trace of tears? “Would you help us keep it this way?” he asks. “We’ll need advisers, counselors—people more familiar with Western tactics and procedures than we are. We’ll need an envoy to the World Health Organization and perhaps other organs of the U.N., and to represent Assama if need be before the Security Council, and when the war’s ended, to deal with Iraq as our parent state.”

A stillness comes over him, as if he were suspended in that dark space of a cell, as if he were one of his own statues in the square.

“Would you consider?” he asks. “Or are you shocked by the prospect?”

I could embrace him—of course I’ll consider. Particularly (and this I don’t mention) when the alternative is doom, without ever regaining the feel of Valerie in my arms or the heat of the Asso earth under my feet. Our pledge is sealed as, with a firm hand, he grips my scrotum.

“We’ll try to keep you alive,” he says, raising the remaining pouch looped over his shoulder. “Here’s to our future together,” he adds diffidently. He drinks.

“What about the present?” I ask.

He smiles slightly, for the first time. “Don’t know how to dispatch a dozen armed guards?”

“Afraid I don’t.”

He shakes his head. “Sometimes,” he sighs, “I don’t know what we ever went to university for. I know your being in here is an acute… inconvenience.”

We share a long silence. It should have swelled into a tremulous vibrato, like in a gut-wrenching movie. Instead he says, “We’ll do what we can.” And with a final, robust squeeze of my plums he’s gone. But…

Instead of dwelling with high hopes and good cheer on my future as Zun sees it, for reasons I cannot explain I zero in on my past, a history so brief that I wonder how there had ever been time for it all. Which leads to an uncanny quietude, a resignation not unlike old people are said to experience with the approach of ineluctable death. How can I possibly escape? Zun, the nice old geezer, was trying to set me at my ease, if I had one. I don’t. There is no way out. Period.

FORTY-ONE
THUNDER AND FLAME