The Greatest Lie Part 16

We peeked furtively through the window at the following checkpoints, and noticed the driver passed the Thai security men closed envelopes bearing the seal of the Shan State Army. We passed through the checkpoints unmolested and uninspected. It seemed Eddie had wired the lower ranks of the Third Army as thoroughly as he had wired the Thai civil police.

We drove all night and through the next day, climbing the mountains on roads whose quality declined as our altitude increased: tarmac gave way to untarred macadam, to loose gravel, to packed earth, and finally to a pair of ruts in the earth. The truck swayed and rocked through a moonlit night and an overcast day, as patches of terraced rice paddies appeared less frequently amidst the dense hardwood forest through which we drove.

We huddled under our tarp against the cold of high passes and sweltered under mosquito netting as we descended through steamy, insect-infested valleys, where the surrounding forest seethed with the sounds of predators and their prey. The drivers were indefatigable: more than once we noticed the vanilla fumes of yaba as they drove through the night and the following day.

By the end of the second day of our hejira, I was exhausted but couldn't find rest. I felt tormented by guilt and remorse. My ambition and drive had outrun my luck and ability. I had wanted to soar, but instead I had crashed and burned. As the truck lurched through the gathering twilight, I flayed myself mentally for my recklessness and vainglory.

My Thai Transsexual Sex Worker study was a hopelessly flawed, incomplete disaster. Its truncated remnants existed precariously on a lost iBook that would soon be found and confiscated by the goons of the corrupt commander of the Third Army. Then my findings, whatever little they were worth, would be lost forever to science.

I had misjudged my capacity to understand and operate in this complex land. The methods of science and analysis in which I had been trained, and in which I believed, were foolish ideals in a place where one's place in society, even those of the sao praphet song, had been established, understood, and accepted by all, long before America had even been founded.