The return to the real world is always traumatic. When traveling every day is fraught with intensity, every meal and bus trip and squalid hostel room an adventure, every new place a fresh assault on the mind and senses; whereas in the real world you can go weeks without raising your head from whatever rut you have dug for yourself. I called the transition from one to the other 'decompression'. In this case, moving from two months in high-intensity South Asia back to low-intensity San Francisco. And like decompression from scuba diving, if I didn't do it carefully, I just might get the bends.
Still, it was nice to see my old haunts again, even if they were coupled with the bewildering did-the-last-two-months-really-happen? sense that absolutely nothing had changed since I had gone, that my two months of Asian travel equated to a single California day. It was good to eat breakfast at the Pork Store, to have coffee and play chess at the Horseshoe Cafe, to wander aimlessly up and down the west-coast beach, to lie back in my own bed and listen to my favourite music, to cycle across the Golden Gate Bridge into the hills of Marin. And San Francisco is a beautiful city, a wonderful place to return to, even if it had been overrun of late by too much money and too many people and dot-com dreams of avarice.
Thankfully that particular house of cards was in mid-collapse when I returned. "This town needs a recession," I had snorted more than once in the previous year, and it looked like I was getting my wish. Many of the hundreds of dot-com companies in the area had been founded on little more than a wing and a prayer and an astonishingly stupid idea, and every day more of them shut their doors or laid off half their staff. While in Asia I had received a half-dozen emails from friends or acquaintances informing me, often with curious jubilation, that they were newly unemployed. And while apartment prices weren't yet descending from the stratosphere, they were in a holding pattern for the first time in years.
I wasn't worried about my job, even though I was a programmer for an Internet consulting company. I knew times were going to get leaner as the dot-coms that had flung ridiculous sums of money at us for the last year were winnowed out, but we had a pretty good portfolio of real customers as well, and I was very good at what I did. Even if all fell apart I had a pretty good nest egg saved up thanks to my decision to accept a cash bonus in lieu of stock options during the previous year, a decision that was much-mocked by my friends at the time but seemed prescient now that the company's stock had dropped 80 % in six months. The lease on my pleasant Cole Valley apartment expired in three months and the landlord had already let me know that I could renew it if I wanted to. Life was comfortable.
Comfortable. Not the same thing as good. I can't say that life was good, or that I was happy. I had friends in the city, but no close friends. My work was diverting and paid ridiculously well, but I didn't really enjoy it. More and more I got the feeling that life was somehow drifting away from me just as I should be ready, in my late twenties and established at last, to reach out and grab it.
The truth was that I traveled so much, that I insisted my employers give me four months unpaid leave a year, because even though on paper I was one of the most fortunate people on this earth, healthy and wealthy and privileged, I was unhappy in the real world, and I did not know how to make myself happy. The truth was that the last time I was happy, really happy, was in Africa.
Two and a half years before I went to Asia I joined an overland truck trip with the audacious goal of driving all the way from Morocco to Kenya in five months. We went a long way, we went across the Sahara and along the Gold Coast to Cameroon, but we did not drive all the way across Africa. This was in part because a large war broke out in the Congo, and in part because one of our number was murdered on a black sand beach in Cameroon. Laura Mason. My girl.
Until then it was a weird and wonderful experience. There were twenty of us on the truck, all of us complete strangers traveling independently. It was no catered, guided tour. The company had hired a driver, a mechanic, and a courier to go with us, but within a few weeks they too were just part of the group. Everybody cooked, everybody cleaned, everybody went to the local markets for supplies, everybody worked, everybody got filthy digging the battered old truck out when it got stuck in soft sand and mud, which happened more than I care to remember. We met in Morocco, which is a tourist trap in a good way, and after a few giddy drunken get-to-know-you weeks there, we went south, where nobody goes. And we drove across the Sahara Desert.
Twenty perfect strangers, thrown together in a gruelling and hyperintense situation. We had a major breakdown in the middle of a minefield in the no-man's-land between Morocco and Mauritania. We huddled together on the floor of the truck as we drove through forests of trees bristling with razor-sharp eight-inch thorns in southern Mauritania, clawing at us through the open sides of the truck like that scene from the Wizard Of Oz. We watched all of our tents and possessions pounded flat by a freak near-hurricane in Mali and spent two days recovering what we could. We suffered the attentions of Bamako's street hustlers. We trekked through Dogon Country just as it was hit by a heat wave, carrying our packs twenty kilometers a day in 130-degree heat. We endured through the eight hours and seven different inspections of the Nigerian border crossing, dealt politely but firmly with the drunken men with guns who demanded outrageous bribes. We took three days to travel the forty kilometers of the Ekok-Mamfe road, a swamp of mud with potholes as large as our truck.
Everyone got sick. Everyone got fed up, everyone got angry, everyone snapped. And we spent every waking hour together whether we liked it or not. And I know it doesn't sound it, but looking back, it was fantastic. We were either going to fragment into screaming hostility or gel into one tight group, and, miraculously, we gelled. We had our squabbles, had our screaming matches; had our irritable black sheep; but somehow we became a kind of family.
And then one of our sisters was killed.
I returned to California on a Thursday and returned to work on the following Monday. Long experience had taught me to give myself a few days to deal with the jet lag, and the decompression. The bends, like I said. I'd gotten them in a big way when I had come back from Africa to Toronto and gone to work the next day. After two hours in the office I had quit my job on the spot.
I swiped my security card at the door and walked into work, past vaguely familiar faces, and sat down at my desk in the hipper-than-thou, open-floor-plan office. It was a good desk, near to the fridge and foozball table. I felt like I had never left, like my entire trip had been a Sunday night's dream.
I sat down before my laptop and cleared the screensaver. The to-do-before-travel list I had left open two months previously was still on the screen. I had 743 new e-mail messages in my work inbox. I dumped the first six hundred and fifty into a read-later folder and worked my way through the most recent. The project I had been working on, which had been "almost complete" when I had left, was still in beta testing. They wanted me to add a small collection of new features which wouldn't take long. There was another project "almost out of the sales pipeline" and once the specs were written I would be its lead developer. And there was a patronizing buzzword-laden email from the CEO, dated last week, informing us that he keenly regretted laying off twenty people but had great faith in the company's vision and execution. Also, the company was embarking on a cost-cutting plan and cans of Mountain Dew would now cost fifty cents instead of nothing. Snapple, seventy-five cents.
"Paul!" Rob McNeil said, clapping me on the shoulder, and I brightened up almost immediately. He had that effect on people. "You're back! How was your trip, man?"
"Yeah," I said. "Pretty good. How's things here?"
"Interesting question, cogently put. Read the Principal's email?"
"Yeah. Can you loan me seventy-five cents for a Snapple?"
"First sign of the apocalypse, boyo. Twenty down, four hundred to go. This is official Resume Burnishing Week for everyone in the office. Mark my words, forty percent of today's web traffic will be to Monster. com." He sat down and shook his head ruefully. "You know, I don't really mind that management has made more incredibly stupid decisions than fleas on a St. Bernard. It goes with the tie, you know? Lack of oxygen to the brain. What I mind is that they think we're even stupider. He writes like he's writing to fucking children."
"But they think we are children," I said. "Idiot savants anyways. Me know language of magic machines, you draw pretty pictures. Daddy, can I have a Snapple? Mommy, you promised me my stock options would vest today!"
He grinned. "That's right. And I don't know about you, but I'm thinking about taking my toys and going home."
The first thing I did, after working through my e-mail and meeting with my manager Kevin, was go back to the Lonely Planet site and see what the word on the Thorn Tree was. I had avoided checking it since my return to California. I wasn't quite sure why. I supposed it was at least in part because I had been trying to get the whole subject out of my mind and avoid obsessing about it on an hourly basis. But now that I was back at work it somehow seemed safe, as if the banality of my job could neutralize any dangerous thoughts or emotions.
Rakesh219 10/29 19:03
I am Nepali and I say you are a liar. Our police are good people and would not do these things. I always liked people from Canada but now I think that you are liars. I think maybe you murdred this person yourself. Go home to Canada if you think Nepalis are so bad. People like you are always coming here who think they can tell us what to do because we are poor. I think you white people make us poor so can come here and do bad things to people and our temples. Everybody knows that you are weak and all your women are whores and all you men sex each other. I hope more of you come here and get killed.
JenBelvar 10/30 11:15
Folks, please don't think the guy above (Rakesh219) is representative. Nepalis are the nicest, friendliest people in all of Asia, if not the world. I guess there's one in every crowd, especially on the Net.
The Kathmandu Post had an article on Mr. Goebel today. They said he was a suicide. I don't know what happened but it sounds awful and my heart goes out to his family and to the people who found him.
Anonymous 10/31 01:42
I met Stanley Goebel in Pokhara just a couple weeks ago, before he went trekking. We had a beer together and he was a great guy. I can't believe some sick fuck killed him. But I sure can buy the coverup. Yeah, the Nepalis are great, but everyone knows their government is massively corrupt.
Anonymous 10/31 08:51
The Bull was just a rumour, people ask about it all the time in the Africa trail, and there weren't any more murders after the ones in the book. And before everyone gets paranoid let me just remind you all that the number 1 killer of backpackers, by a really huge margin, is traffic. Worry about crazy drivers not crazy serial killers. Especially in South Africa — those taxi drivers are nuts!
GavinChait 11/01 11:03
I'm the South African that Paul Wood mentions, who found the body with him, and I'd like to verify for the record that everything he wrote is true. I'm in Pokhara for the next two days and staying at the Gurkha Hotel if anyone there knows anything or wants to know more.
Inga 11/02 05:07
I met the girl who was killed in Malawi a couple of years ago just before she died. People there were totally freaked about The Bull, and a lot of people said they'd heard about other people killed who weren't officially murdered. It sounds just like the story here and it's scary. Sure, there weren't any more deaths after the Lonely Planet book came out, but what if that's just because the guy (OK, or girl, equal opportunity mayhem here) read the book and decided to cool it down and move somewhere else? I think maybe there's some sickhead out there who goes traveling to kill people.
Anonymous 11/02 18:06
Hey, everybody needs a hobby.
That night I met most of my San Francisco friends for an unofficial reunion dinner. Rob and Mike and Kelley and Ian and Tina, people I worked with, and Ron and Toby, who like me hailed from Toronto and like me had been brain-drained down here by the almighty American dollar. We ate at Tu Lan, a hole in the wall in the worst area of the city that serves the best Vietnamese food on the planet.
Everyone talked about layoffs, recession, the collapse of the stock market, and the hubris of last year's paper multimillionaires, mostly with a relieved sense of schadenfreude. We had spent the last two years in an environment where the subtext was that you were a total failure as a human being if you weren't a millionaire by age 30, and I think everyone was grateful to have that kind of pressure off their shoulders.
They didn't ask about my travels other than vague "how was the trip?" questions. I answered equally vaguely. I had learned over the years that almost nobody wants to know. Nobody wants to know the war stories, nobody wants to hear about the irritations and frustrations of travel, or about the madnesses and cultural events you've witnessed, and they really don't want to know about the wonderful experiences that you had and they did not. Experienced travelers want to know, and close friends want to hear you tell it, but these were neither. Of course they would have listened to the story of Murdered Man's Body Found On Trail, but I couldn't bring myself to do that, couldn't reduce him to an anecdote. Not yet anyways.
We ate, we drank, we smoked, we talked, we laughed, we exchanged catty comments about mutual acquaintances and friends at work, we speculated about whether our waiter was gay, we had a good time. I had a good time. I really did. I enjoyed it. But I kept looking around and wondering why these people were my friends. Was it just by default? Just because we happened to have met some day at school or work, and found each other's company acceptable, and met each other again often enough that we grew comfortable in each other's presence, and now we called that friendship? They were good people, all of them, and I enjoyed their company. But was it any real mystery why none of them were close friends? Were any of them really my tribe?
Did I even have a tribe? I pondered that as I sat on the N-Judah subway/streetcar back home. My family, never close, had fragmented around the continent. I could not remember the last time my sisters and my brother and my parents and I had all been in the same room. I had had close friends in high school, and they still lived back in Canada, and when I visited there we all acted like we were still a band of brothers. But of course we knew we weren't. Time and distance had worked their inevitable decay, and I had grown apart from them, and they from me. We called each other friends only to honour the memory of the friendship we once had.
There was my Africa tribe, the tribe of the truck. But they were almost all Brits and Aussies and Kiwis, mostly living in London, and a tribe six thousand miles away is in many ways worse than no tribe at all. And I'd seen them only once after Cameroon. I'd felt then that our bond was unchanged, even stronger, that Laura's tragedy had in some way sealed us together. But was that really true? Was I just romanticizing? And if they were my tribe, why wasn't I in London right this very minute?
Maybe I belonged to the tribe of people that have no tribe. Maybe I would stay in that tribe forever. And maybe almost everybody I knew belonged to that tribe too, and we all spent half our social energy hiding it from one another.
I fell asleep desperately wishing for Laura.
I started falling for Laura, or more accurately started admitting to myself that I had fallen for her the moment I saw her, the day both of us nearly died for chocolate-chip cookies. A day that didn't take place in any country on this earth. It said so right in my passport. The French- and Arabic-language stamps reported that I left Morocco on April 14 and entered Mauritania on April 16. It was the day between, the fifteenth of April 1998, that we afterwards called Cookies To Die For Day.
The only way to go overland from Morocco to Mauritania was in a military convoy that leaves twice a week. At first I assumed this was just paranoid bureaucratic convention. I changed my mind when we drove past the first shattered Land Rover. We saw a good half-dozen of those, plus a few heaps of metal that might once have been motorcycles, the half-buried skeleton of a truck that looked disturbingly like ours, and occasional piles of bleached camel bones. Once we saw an actual land mine, unearthed from the sand by the desert wind. It looked like a rusted, frisbee-sized can of tuna.
On our second day in no-man's-land Big Bertha broke down. Big Bertha was our Big Yellow Truck, thirty-year-old army surplus, never designed to cross the Sahara where the omnipresent sand wreaks endless havoc on every moving part of any machine foolish enough to enter. We counted ourselves lucky if she broke down only once a day. For the umpteenth time Hallam and Steve donned their overalls, peeled back the cab, and dove into the grease and machinery. After a little while Steve emerged to warn us "It'll be a few bloody hours. Unless it's a few fucking days."
Big Bertha was physically divided into the cab, which fit three people comfortably, and the body, about thirty feet long, where us passengers rode. Between the cab and the body was a six-inch gap where the main table and assorted tools were stored. We entered the body via a retractable iron staircase in the middle of the left-hand side. Those stairs took you up to "second class" or "the mosh pit", a flat wooden floor with inward-facing benches on either side that extended towards the back of the truck. To the left of the entry staircase, two more steps went up to "first class", three rows of padded double seats with an aisle in the middle. At the very back of the truck was a big wooden cabinet that contained our packs and, beneath them, the safes for our valuables. Instead of windows there were thick transparent plastic sheets attached to the roof of the truck which we could roll down and lash to thin vertical steel bars, spaced about two feet apart, that ran around the perimeter of the truck. Here in the desert we kept the sides open. With the plastic down the truck quickly became an oven.
Not a cubic inch was wasted. Overhead lockers hung above the benches. There was storage space beneath the seats and benches. Food supplies were under the mosh-pit floorboards, engine parts below first class. The bookcase, tape player, and frequently-broken fridge were at the front of the mosh pit opposite the stairs. Compartments accessible from the outside of the truck held twenty jerrycans of water, extra fuel, more tools, firewood, the stove, tents, folding chairs, cooking gear, etc., behind locked iron gates. The roof held spare tires and firewood. In all Big Bertha would have been one of the most impressive expeditionary vehicles on the planet, if only her engine didn't falter and fail at least twice a week.
Broken down in the middle of a minefield, in the middle of no-man's-land, in the middle of the Sahara Desert. It sounded desperate and romantic, but at the time it was teeth-grindingly boring. Melanie's thermometer told us it was 45 degrees in the shade. Too hot to read, too hot to play cards, too hot to do anything but sit and be miserable. So I decided to go for a walk.
Not quite as stupid as it sounds. We had finally left the trackless desert behind and were driving on a hard-packed, semi-permanent trail. From the roof of the truck we could see down the trail to the military checkpoint where the rest of the convoy waited, maybe two miles away. It seemed perfectly safe so long as we didn't venture off the trail. And no matter how many times I read page 17 of Walden I was too hot and too far away from New England to understand a thing.
I closed the book and looked around. A dozen people looked at me listlessly from whatever shade they had managed to improvise for themselves.
"Anybody want to go for a walk?" I asked.
There was no response. I felt a little like a visitor in a hospital's terminal-cases wing. The only life came from the few, Michael and Emma and Robbie, who occasionally raised their Sigg water bottles and used the tiny hole in the screwtop to drip a little water on themselves. It didn't really help. The only thing that cooled you down was the spray bottle, but Hallam had forbidden its use until we took on water in Nouadhibou.
"Nobody?" I said dolefully.
A voice emerged from the raised seats at the front of the truck. "I'll come."
I turned my head and looked at her. She smiled at me. I smiled back.
We had spent nearly six weeks in Morocco but this was only our second real conversation. Our first had been in Marrakesh, just before her two-week fling with Lawrence ended, almost a month ago. One of the weird things about truck life was that you were always but always in a group. With twenty people constantly crammed together, one-on-one conversations with anyone but your tent partner were rare.
We set out to the south, hatted, sunblocked, carrying a litre of brackish desalinated water apiece. For a little while we walked in silence.
"I really like the desert," I said. "I guess I knew I would. I mean my favourite movie was always Lawrence Of Arabia. But I didn't know just how much."
"I do too," she said. "Although I was expecting more, you know, Hollywood, English Patient desert than this."
Up until today the Sahara had consisted mostly of plains pounded absolutely flat by sun and wind, punctuated by straggling chains of rock and tufted with thorn bushes and cacti. Today even that hardy vegetation had begun to dwindle away. We didn't know it then, but Hollywood desert, the windswept fields of enormous dunes between Nouadhibou and Nouakchott, was only two days away.
"But it's amazing," she continued. "It, not to be all hippie on you, but it feels like it's alive. You know? It's the most blasted, dead place there is, but it feels…present."
"You can be all hippie on me," I said. "I don't mind."
"Okay. Good. And you can be all cynical on me if you like."
"Do you think I'm cynical?" I asked.
"I think you'd like to be. But you never will."
"Why not?"
"You're too nice," she said.
"Oh."
We walked on a few paces.
She said "That was intended as a compliment, in case you're unclear."
"I know," I said, smiling sheepishly. "Thanks."
"Sorry. I'm crap at being praised too. I never know what to do."
"I know!" I exclaimed. I'd often thought that but never heard anyone else say it. "What are you supposed to do? You can say thank you insincerely, and then you look like you're just being polite and don't really care, or you can say say it sincerely and make a point of it, and then you seem insecure, or…I don't know."
"Maybe we should just stick to taking the piss out of each other," Laura suggested. "We're all pretty good at dealing with that."
"You Brits are."
"Really? Is it very British?"
I raised my eyebrows. "Are you kidding? You guys are miles, light-years, more sarcastic than the worst of my friends back home. In Canada you'd all be ostracized in seconds. One look and boom. National silent treatment."
"Would you really ostracize me? Poor little old me?"
"Well…no. I'd still talk to you. But nobody else would. You'd have to rely entirely on me for translation."
"Would you still talk to me if I told you Canadians were rude? And wimps when it gets cold? And crap at ice hockey? And," barely keeping a straight face, "secretly you all wish you were American?"
I grinned and put on a mock John Wayne drawl. "Listen, lady, you better know where I draw the line. And I draw it way back over thataway. And you know what you find on this side of that there line?"
"What do I find?"
"Trouble. Trouble with a capital T."
I half-noticed when we passed two piles of large flat rocks on the right-hand side of the trail, spaced about thirty feet apart from one another, but paid them no mind. We were too busy entertaining one another and gaping at the landscape. The desert had changed its look yet again. Here the sand had been densely packed by the wind and then baked by the sun into near-sandstone. The result was a huge field tiled by a fractal pattern of cracks, occasionally interrupted by puddles of soft sand, or by swooping, curving forty-foot ridges worn smooth as glass by the wind, all of it coloured the rich gold of a lion's pelt.
Our trail was marked by deep tire ruts that could have been gouged decades ago. Occasionally it disappeared into patch of soft sand fifty or a hundred feet wide before re-emerging. As we crossed one of those patches, I saw a flicker of movement in the distance, and I stopped and squinted.
"Look," I said. "Camels." A half-dozen of them, barely visible.
"One hump or two hump?" she asked.
I shook my head. "Too far to tell."
"They could be horses," she said.
I looked at her.
"You know," she said, "with big growths on their backs. Hunchback horses. That happens. A ship carrying a whole circusload of hunchback horses might have crashed on the coast here and released them into the desert. And maybe it was years ago and they've survived ever since by sneaking up on convoys like ours and ambushing them at night."
"I don't think that's very likely," I said sternly.
She blinked at me innocently.
"But," I said, "they could be people wearing camel suits. You know. Soldiers. Saudi Arabian soldiers who got lost because they didn't make the eye slits big enough. They might have just taken a wrong turn in the Sinai and wound up over here."
She nodded. "That's possible too."
"But from this distance you just can't tell."
"I guess just to be safe we shouldn't really call them camels," she said, her lip quivering with repressed laughter. "We should call them Unidentified Dromedarial Objects."
I nodded very seriously. We managed another two seconds of sober looks before both of us burst into laughter.
The rest of the convoy, a dozen civilian vehicles escorted by three military Jeeps, waited for us at the checkpoint. Europeans, mostly, in Land Cruisers and Land Rovers brought across from Gibraltar, plus four crazy Germans on fully-decked-out motorcycles, two Belgian girls cycling around the world, and a half-dozen multinational hippies in a Volkswagen man who looked older than me. There were also a few African families driving back home in battered but serviceable Renaults and Peugeots.
The rest of the convoy seemed even more bored and bad-tempered than our group. The checkpoint itself was a brick pillbox just big enough for four soldiers dressed in jungle camouflage suits and carrying AK-47s. Like all the soldiers they were Arabic and not black. There had been more and more black faces as we moved south through Morocco, but rarely among soldiers or officials.
A French couple approached us and demanded that we tell them what was wrong with our camion and how long it would take to fix. They had to repeat it five times before my rusty high-school French decoded what they were saying. " Trois heures, peut-etre plus," I said with a casual shrug, annoyed by their hostile tone. The French pair muttered with frustration and retreated back to their Land Rover, casting occasional angry glances our way.
The Moroccan and Mauritanian soldiers who escorted the convoy were within earshot of the conversation but paid no attention. They had the African relationship to time. Things happen when they happen, if they happen at all.
Laura and I decided to abandon the convoy and walk up the hill above the checkpoint, bigger at maybe a hundred feet than any other hill in sight. The view from the top was incredible. An endless stark sea of golden desert extended to the horizon in every direction. Our Big Yellow Truck looked as small and unimportant as a Tonka toy.
"You know what I'd really like?" Laura said, after we had our fill of gaping and sat down. "I'd really like to take a shower and eat some ice cream. But not at the same time. And if I could only have one I'd pick the shower."
I nodded. "Between the sand and the sweat I feel like I grow a new layer of crud every day."
"And you don't have to deal with a bra," she said, looking down at herself. "You blokes get to walk around topless all day. You can only imagine our troubles."
"Another victory for the grand patriarchal conspiracy."
We smiled at each other. After a moment she closed her eyes, lay back on the ground, and tipped her Tilley hat over her face. I sat and watched her. I wasn't exactly ogling her but I was very aware of her presence. Even encrusted in sand, her long dark hair pulled into a ponytail, she was pretty. She wore sandals, khaki shorts, and a white shirt, and just beneath the brim of her hat I could see the small smile that was her default expression. She was a naturally happy person. I liked that about her. Just being near her made me happy, right from the start.
"Cookies?" a voice from behind asked.
I turned around and looked. A goateed man grinned down at me and held out a bag of Spanish chocolate-chip cookies. They seemed so out of place in the middle of the Sahara that for a moment I wondered if the man was a mirage. But he was real, and the cookies were delicious. I couldn't remember the last time I had tasted anything so sweet. Laura devoured three, closing her eyes to savour the taste. We used the last of our water to wash them down, and our Spanish angel Fernando offered to fill up our water bottles from his own, claiming he had plenty of water. After a moment we accepted.
"Oh my," Laura said, after a sip. "Real water. Clean water." I nodded blissfully. For ten days now we had been stuck with safe but foul-tasting desalinated water from the town of Dakhla, and Fernando's water tasted like champagne by comparison.
We sat and chatted with Fernando for a little while, talking mostly about football and the girlfriend waiting for him in Senegal. His English was uncertain and it didn't take long for the conversation to peter out. The sun was beginning to sink from its apogee and I was growing tired from our constant exposure.
"Should we go back?" Laura asked, moments before I was about to suggest the same thing.
"Yeah," I said. "Time for a siesta."
We rained thanks on Fernando and began the walk back. At always it seemed three times as distant as the first leg. But with Laura by my side the time shrank away nearly to nothing.
"Hey," I said, about halfway back.
"What?"
"You're a lot of fun."
She smiled at me. "Thank you," she said. "So are you."
We walked in pregnant and slightly awkward silence for a little while, glancing at each other without saying anything. I was trying to work out if anything she had done during our expedition counted as flirting or whether she was just being friendly. Later she told me that she was pondering the same thing in reverse.
Then two hoarse, desperate voices called out, and we looked up in surprise. Just a few hundred feet away, right where those two piles of rocks met the side of the trail, was one of the military convoy's Jeeps. The two men inside were shouting to us in French. I couldn't make out what they were saying. Laura and I looked at each other, worried — they were were clearly alarmed by something — and hurried towards them. We were only twenty feet away when I realized, from the position of the Jeep between the rocks, that the soldiers had not driven on the visible hard-packed road that we walked on. Instead they had taken a longer and much fainter path I only now noticed that ran from those two rock piles — trail markers — to where the convoy waited.
"Oh shit," I said. I turned around and looked behind us, wide-eyed.
"What is it?" Laura asked.
"Nothing," I said. "Come on." I consciously made myself hurry to the Jeep before allowing myself to fully understand the implications. Laura followed.
"No walk there! No walk!" the soldier nearest us said loudly, anger and worry jostling for space on his face. He pointed to the trail the Jeep had followed. "Road!" He pointed to the road behind us, the stretch of obvious road between Jeep and the convoy, the length of which we had just walked twice. "No road!" he exclaimed. "No road! Minefield!"
"Oh my God," Laura said.
We stared at each other wide-eyed for a moment. Then, to the soldier's great disapproval, for no real reason, we both began to laugh.
"You could have died," Robbie said, his voice faint with enormity, when we returned to the truck and told our story to the assembled masses.
Laura and I looked at each other. Then Laura turned back to Robbie.
"Believe me," she assured him solemnly, "those cookies were to die for."
When I woke up I believed, for half an instant, that Laura was there, with me in Cole Valley, still alive. That hadn't happened for almost a year. But the moment of realization had lost none of its power to hurt.
I went to work. At work I checked the Thorn Tree. There was only one new entry.
BC088269 11/04 06:01
Ha ha ha
The Bull is real, I am The Bull and I'll stick knives in all your eyes
Random juvenilia by some mental twelve-year-old, I thought, and shut the window.
Then I sat bolt upright and opened it again.
Knives in all your eyes. Nobody had mentioned that. Nobody knew about the Swiss Army knives except myself, Gavin, and the Nepali police. Of course the LP article had mentioned mutilation. But still. I went back to the Thorn Tree and carefully reread that new entry.
What I saw the second time turned my spine into an icy river. The sender's name, an apparently random collection of characters. BC088269. I thought I had seen it before. And I thought I knew where.
I got up and walked out of work and took the N back home. So I missed an hour of work. Let them fire me. This was important.
I went into my house and dug into my stack of travel pictures, waiting to be filed into albums. Near the top was the picture I had taken in Muktinath, the picture of the false ledger entry the killer had made in Stanley Goebel's name. His name and his passport number.
His passport number was BC088269.
Of course it wasn't definite proof. It just meant there was someone who knew Stanley Goebel's passport number and the details of what had happened to him. But for me it was the straw that finally broke the skeptic's back. It was the final piece of inconclusive evidence which made me certain that there was more to this iceberg than just the tip. It made me certain that there was some kind of connection, that these deaths could not be coincidental one-off events. That there was somebody out there stalking and killing travelers on the Lonely Planet trail.
The Bull is real, I am The Bull.
It was such a relief to be certain.
But now that I was certain, what exactly was I supposed to do?