from The Size of the World
© 1995 / Jeff Greenwald

Whenever an O approaches in my life, I get an irresistible urge to jump through it. The ’round-the-world overland journey I envisioned was my gut response to a long-anticipated need – as March 6, 1994, crept ever closer – to perform a worthy and appropriate ritual. What better way to celebrate the circle, as cycle, shape and circus hoop?

But there was something else, even more compelling. In Indo-Tibetan Asia, performing a kora – a clockwise circumambulation around revered shrines, holy cities or sacred mountains – is considered a supreme act of pilgrimage. This, then, was my goal: To perform a kora around the Earth itself.

The idea had looked great on paper. As I plotted my route, though, and fathomed the lonely logistics of such a voyage (weeks at sea, days on trains, hours on oxcarts), my heart sank. Six months was a long time. It was a very long time. It was more time, I realized, than I could bear to spend with myself.

Finding a less familiar companion proved difficult. Friends who had money had no time, friends who had time had no money, and everyone else had children. Also, I felt that my ideal partner should be a woman. It seemed self-evident that a man and woman traveling together would have access to a greater variety of people and social situations than two men. A single man cannot always approach single or married women in Africa, India or the Middle East, but "couples" are acceptable currency wherever humans tread.

The frustrating thing was that I already knew who I wanted to travel with. My consort of choice was Sally Knight, a beautiful Australian who’d entered my life two years earlier, when Coriola was off in Dharamsala. I’d been hired to edit a book about the political turmoil in Burma, and Sally was assigned as my research assistant. If intelligence is the ultimate aphrodisiac, a day working with Sally was like an oyster banquet at a lingerie party. As the project progressed we’d moved our chairs closer and closer together until, one afternoon, she was close enough to bite me. This appetizer was followed by a six-course meal; and though we stopped sleeping together before Coriola’s return, our appetite for each other’s company remained insatiable. We still got together at least once a week to study Tibetan, collaborate on magazine articles and compose, among other dreams, the proposal for this very book.

I was sure she’d be perfect. For one thing, we had traveled together before. The previous January we had met briefly in India, spending a few days exploring the sights of New Delhi before journeying off to meet her guru – affectionately known as "Papaji" – in Lucknow. Though young by conventional standards (she was twenty-two), Sally had been deeply immersed in meditation and Eastern philosophy since her teens. Her centered and stable approach would be the ideal complement to my manic-depressive psychosis. To ice the cake, Sal was supernaturally lucky: If the IRS ever decided to audit her, Stephen Hawking would show up to balance her books.

Unfortunately, like Coriola, she was dead broke. Sally’s budget for a big night out permitted Star Trek, take-out Szechwan and a scratch-off lottery ticket.

As the weeks ticked by and a solo voyage seemed ever more likely, I launched a desperate ploy. Ignoring the advice of my friends ("You’ll be swamped by crackpots!"), I ran an ad in the Personals section of the local weekly:

    Writer with book contract seeks female companion for ’round-the-world overland trip. I’m 39, and a seasoned traveler. My partner must be fit, adventurous, adaptable and engaging. I’m looking for someone who’s always dreamed of making such a journey, and has her own vision and motive for the trip. Some expenses will be covered, but self-sufficiency is required. Note: This is not a relationships ad! Sexual orientation or marital status are no bar.

I braced myself, expecting to be buried beneath an avalanche of responses. There were eight.

During the next two weeks I met each of my potential companions for lunch at King Yen – a bow to the old Jewish proverb that you can learn everything you need to know about someone by ordering Chinese food with them.

The first candidate, a professional storyteller at the Oakland Public Library, was eager to collect local folktales from around the world. I was intrigued until, to my horror, she ordered pork-flavored gluten in oyster sauce. The second woman was the recently widowed wife of a famous yacht racer, and a renowned carnivorous plant breeder in her own right. We were having a great time until, allergic to prawns, she accidentally blew her nose into our last mu shu pancake. I actually did hear from one married woman: a feisty, green-eyed pet liability lawyer whose husband had eagerly welcomed the suggestion of a six-month hiatus. The comic potential of such a tryst grew on me, but her fortune cookie – "You will soon survive a great natural disaster" – compelled me to reconsider.

After six more episodes of trial by sizzling iron platter, I had narrowed the field to two. The finalists had absolutely nothing in common, except that (a) they had exactly the same birthday, and (b) both had been crazy enough to answer my ad.

Lucy showed up for lunch in a ten-gallon hat and frilled leather vest with a vintage sixties button pinned above her breast: Feed Your Head. Blond and petite, she made a good living providing manicures and conversation to bedridden elderly women. One of them, a San Francisco art collector, had recently passed away, leaving Lucy a small Degas sketch. The drawing had fetched a bundle at auction, and Lucy had earmarked part of the money for travel.

And Lucy needed a change of scene. Her condo was stale with portraits of Elvis, dog-eared Shirley MacLaine books and the pet-shop smell of hamster droppings. She’d come home from work the previous evening to find her ex-boyfriend changing the lightbulb in her bedroom. He was standing on her pillow, in his boots.

"I knew then and there," she said, "that your ad was destiny speaking." Her fortune cookie seemed to concur. "This marks the beginning," it declared, "of an unforgettable vacation."

Lucy had no qualms about circling the globe with a total stranger; her main concern was finding her precise shade of lipstick in Senegal or Tibet. This thorny obstacle was removed when, at our third meeting, she located a San Francisco body-piercing salon that would tattoo her makeup on for her.

"It lasts five years," she gleefully declared. "The savings practically pay for the entire trip."

Zelda, on the other hand, was a professional magician. She’d been performing since the age of twelve, entertaining audiences from Tokyo to Madrid. Any doubts I had about her talent were dispelled at our second encounter, during a heated argument about the "psychic surgeons" of the Philippines (I believed, she didn’t). To make her point, she "extracted" a roll of breath mints from my spleen.

The Great Zelda had other impressive attributes as well. She was a martial arts expert, with a street-tested ability to defend me from irate rickshaw wallahs, drunken sailors and rabid temple monkeys.

There was just one problem: We bickered. Warning lights flashed at our very first encounter, when we nearly came to blows trying to decide between pan-fried string beans and Mongolian chicken.

"I’m not a team player," she warned me, narrowing her eyes and twirling her chopsticks like kung fu weapons. "I’m used to having my way."

This gave me pause. Though the thought of roaming the globe with a magician was nearly irresistible, I could imagine any number of situations in which she might decide to make me disappear.

I told Lucy and Zelda that I’d make my decision by ten P.M. the following Friday. As the hour drew closer, however, my doubts grew. Both women had their attributes and idiosyncrasies. Both had charisma and charm. Either would be a colorful character in my book. And either one, Sally sagely pointed out, could just as easily turn out to be a total nightmare….

Several minutes before ten I picked up my world globe, placed it on the dining table and gave it a dizzying spin. I closed my eyes, and pointed. If my finger touched land, Lucy would be my companion; if it touched sea, Zelda.

La!
I looked down. My finger rested squarely on the Panama Canal.

Five minutes later the telephone rang. I hesitated, still debating what I’d say to either of the hopeful candidates.

To my great surprise, it was neither. Sally was calling from a restaurant in Marin; and I could tell by her tone of voice that someone’s wish, for better or worse, had come true.

"Pack your bags," she commanded. "I’ve just won the lottery."

My God, it was hot in Tokyo.

"The little boy lost
will find his way once more/
Just like before/
When lips were tender…."

Our apartment, like most in Tokyo, had no shower. But when the cool evening finally arrived I climbed gratefully into my yukata (robe) and made for the sento (public bath).

How I loved our neighborhood sento! Big bright locker-room-cum-gym, spotlessly clean. Please Leave Shoes At Door. Never crowded. A handful of Japanese men – I was the only foreigner – attended themselves naked and unselfconscious, rubbing their bodies with rough towels.

The walls were lined with low mini-showers. One must squat. Also, Please Turn Faucet On Slowly: those little Japanese showers can knock you across the room. 

The entire back portion of the sento was occupied with baths. First there was an olympic-sized hot-tub/jacuzzi. Next to that was a cold bath; then a green bath; and at the end a small mystery bath, perpetually empty, with an alarming lightning-bolt emblazoned in red on the white tile wall above.

Glancing now and again at that placid final bath, the surface of which seemed supernaturally calm, I felt a nagging curiosity. For all I knew it might have been a device for sterilizing surgical tools, or hyper-cleaning jewelry. Why was I seized by a crazy intuition to climb recklessly in?

There are no beggars, few elderly on Tokyo streets. The city seems to belong to a youthful post-bomb generation that moves at ease among high, clean buildings and throbbing electrical billboards. As if there had been nothing before this. As if Tokyo had elected to submerge its history under canyons of steel and glass and especially plastic, infinite quantities of plastic. Flowers wrapped in plastic. Plastic eel in the windows.

Another day ended. I sweated and staggered from subway to subway, swooning in the unspeakable heat. Home at last and all I wanted was a bath. Collecting my toiletries in a plastic bucket, I set off for the sento.

There were men in the mystery bath.

Two old men, covered from neck to waist with outrageous tattooes. Their faces wore expressions of the purest transcendence, like samurai warriors under torture. One of them motioned to me with his head – a mere twitch really – in what seemed to be a gesture of invitation.

Silence prevails in the sento, but foreigners are expected to breach every custom and who was I to disappoint the Japanese? Pointing to the fateful pool, I inquired of the young man on my right.

"Denki Furo," he explained. Electric bath.

There is a moment we have all experienced, on the edge of a diving board or at the threshhold of a bedroom, when we know that to take another step is to commit ourselves irreversably. I walked, naked, to the wall of the denki furo. The water within pulsed invisibly, and I felt the fascination and aversion one experiences when bending over to touch a completely still animal that may or may not be dead. But to touch the water hand-first would be, I imagined, shameful, as if I lacked the strength of my convictions.

Every eye in the room was upon me as I swung my leg into the bath. Electricity swarmed up my calf, buzzing and stinging. I uttered no cry. Bracing on rubber arms, I swung my other leg in. Face be damned; this was as far as I was going to go.

But wait – the bath was doing something, not unlike love, to my loins. They were turning to soba (noodle). Wearing the resigned grin of a fall guy in some 50’s comedy, I began to sink gradually into the water.

There was no point trying to escape; my feet would not respond. The most important thing, I understood, was to remain unflinching as my testicles went under. Every situation in Japan is a test. I would not disgrace myself.

Contemplating the wu (essence) of the white tile wall I sank, expressionless, up to my neck. The men in the adjoining bath watched my eyes, staring with an impassive, cat-like gaze.

What did it feel like? Imagine the howling physical rush of a blow to the funny bone, generalized over your entire body. Or think of yourself as a silver filling, and the denki furo as a mouth full of foil. Did it hurt? The exquisite intensity went far beyond pain. My only hope was that there would be no permanent physical damage; that, like the cartoon cat whose tail is thrust into a wall outlet, I would sizzle for a while then reappear, unscathed, in the next scene.

I do not recall how I left the denki furo. Perhaps the two old men lifted me, a recalcitrant tumor, from their buzzing province. Perhaps I mustered a supreme effort of will and climbed from the tub myself, like Batman in a fix. Or maybe I never left the bath at all. Perhaps I’m still in it, existing in a Borgesian dream-state of compressed time. It often seems that way.

I live in America now, where the burgers are charcoal-broiled. People take baths at home. I have never met anyone else who has taken an electric bath. We have all seen movies or read newspaper stories of people getting electrocuted when their radio or blow-dryer decides to take a bath with them, and I would go so far as to say that electrified water, like darkness or sharks, is a deeply rooted fear.

The men in the Japan National Tourist Board laughed when I asked them what I had encountered in Japan. "Denki furo," they replied, unable to elaborate.

Still mystified, I called a shiatsu school specializing in oriental healing techniques. "It obviously effects the polarity of your electrons profoundly," speculated the director. "It can probably alter your brain-waves. After all, we’re nothing but masses of electrons to begin with…."

Which explains some things. But sometimes, in Japan, there is no explanation save that single four-word mantra, uttered by the visitor in awe and italics:

They are the Japanese.

from Mister Raja’s Neighborhood
© 1986 by Jeff Greenwald

Night moves…in a plush living room with the mosquitoes buzzing, the sound of bells outside, always bells even if they’re only voices, the dogs that never stop barking, the arrogant horns of the nouveau-riche, sound of my own breathing, arrogance of the man alone. Three and a half weeks and already a surfeit of tales to tell. My senses are sharpening to what’s going on around here and I’m keeping good company, although none of it stays the night. Only the ’skeeters….

At night, like now, it’s usually reflections on what the day wasn’t, and sometimes a rare sweet jerk-off to the tune of one of these Newar beauties drawing her sari, all five meters of it, deliciously through my crotch. But there’s no point being desperate. Everybody’s settled in to their own private safety, and I’m on the waiting list. Come what may, I can’t hold on to stateside expectations; everything’s drilled at a different calibre here.

Here. What do I see? Gods and clouds reflected in scummy puddles; my own reflection in a bowl of mo-mo soup; the brown faces with white teeth and a weird sense of what’s funny that I seem to share; the holes burned through my stack of typing paper from the smouldering incense I forgot about; a tree stump hammered thick with ten thousand nails, each one a prayer to the goddess of smallpox; rainbows every evening as the sun breaks under the thick belly of the sky and shoots to where it’s been raining.

But it hasn’t rained for two days now, and you could cut the air with a khukuri. It’s impossible to move from point A to point B without a thin scum forming on your body. No amount of the parasite-polluted water can clean you for long. Scratch mosquito bites and worms of dirt roll under your fingers. It won’t last long.

I know it doesn’t sound very appealing, but the monsoon does have its own peculiar beauty. It’s like living in the elbow of a question mark.

Write me a letter and you’re in my world, but I know damned well it’s a stranger world than any of my friends out there can speculate. We carry sticks to fend off rabid dogs, boil the buffalo milk for 20 minutes before daring to drink it. The flowers that grow here eat human flesh, and all our peanut butter is imported from India. Twice a day the electricity fails, plunging us into darkness or silent light. The nearest ocean is a thousand miles away.

As I came out of Narayan’s Pie Shop this evening I saw an odd scene transpiring in the center of the pitch-blacked-out intersection just outside the popular haunt’s front door. Someone had built a weird little shrine on the ground, with Indus Valley-esque clay figurines, incense, a burning candle, an offering of cooked rice and about a dozen 5-paise coins (100 paise in a rupee; one rupee worth about a nickle). It was all right out there, on the scrambled pavement, spared by the wheels of rickshaws and bicycles that hurried by in the otherwise dark. I crept up to have a look, then asked the kid running the "pharmacy" next door was the story was.

"For coots," he said cryptically.
"Coots??"
"No, no, coats!" He started to laugh. "Like night-time they are coming, bad coats."

Suddenly I understood. Everything in Nepal is understood suddenly, or not at all.

"Ghosts!," I shouted. "You mean ghosts!"
"Yes, yes! Goats!"

We had established that the bizarre construction somehow related to spirits, but any other attempt at drawing the boy out was futile. By the time I glanced back at the shrine a dog had arrived and was gobbling up the rice. The ragged kids came by and stole the coins. A passing rickshaw smashed the figurines. Still, the candle did not go out.

I returned to Narayan’s. A Tibetan woman had come in with a wounded crane she’s picked up in the street. It wouldn’t eat. The bird’s wings looked fine, but the eyes held a completely resigned expression. The thing wasn’t even fully developed; maybe it had been born sick. I ran next door to the medicine shop, returned with a plastic eye-dropper and showed the Tibetan how to force-feed the crane sugar water. She took over and I left, feeling like a regular bodhisattva of compassion.

Rode home through the unimaginable stinks and the hulking shadows of sleeping cows, the racy panic of barking dogs, black alleyways illuminated for blinding instants as gigantic buses heave by, spewing clouds of diesel, black on black, to the posh safety, the rugs and warm lamps and wicker of this house. Sometimes I just want to bolt the door behind me, even though there’s nothing and no one to fear. It’s an E-ticket ride out there.

The fact remains that Nepal is a different world, and the edges of Asia scrape incessantly against what’s common and true to us-in-America. Even the little things. Drinking tea this morning in the offices of Himalayan Steel, a spry clerk asked me to guess his age. The game never fails to delight the Nepalese…. I regarded the man, his eyes alive, his posture erect, hair a distinguished gray above a virtually wrinkle-free face (enlivened by a red tika-mark on his forehead) and guessed, charitably, fifty-five. Both he and my translator broke into laughter. "Guess again." All right; I guessed sixty-six. "I’m sorry," my liason admitted, "But Mr. Manohar here is eighty-four years old."

So many things that are hard to believe; that I’m here at all is a constant source of amazement. Funny how a place can be so much home, yet so full of unexpected angles and inconveniences. A list of things there are not: drinkable water, drinkable milk, washing machines, dish soap, ready telephones, mailboxes, avocados, 35mm slide sleeves, toasters, ten-speeds, size 10 tennis shoes, bowling alleys, Dos Equis beer, etc… but what is here compensates, albeit in a different dimension.

Like the fantastic Swayambhunath temple, high on a hill inhabited by monkeys; I love to go up on full moon nights and watch dusk descend upon the Kathmandu Valley. Since it’s the monsoon the cloudscapes are beyond imagining, puffing like huge white blowfish over the towers and pagodas, sometimes running like quicksilver over the shoulders of the hills. From inside the monastery comes the anamelodic rhythm of a puja as saffron-clad monks ring thick brass bells and blow through horns shaped from human bone…and all around the massive stupa, butter lamps flicker in the breeze.

Night-time is alive and full of mystery. Riding my HERO bicycle over the potted, muddy streets, I catch glimpses of other worlds at every turn. Two men working by the light of a bare bulb, planing huge sheets of wood with primitive hand tools; doorways full of sleeping humans and dogs; the shadow of a sacred cow, shapelessly chewing some rinds thrown out as an offering from a nearby fruitseller. Down the alleys I sometimes glimpse a temple, where vermillion-smeared gods and goddesses dance erotically in the darkness, or where the intense, all-seeing eyes of Buddha peer out with enlightened indifference. Rickshaws, pedestrians and other bikes come bumping out of the blackness at any moment, and only quick serving cheats a collision.

During the afternoon the sidewalks are a tangled maze of merchandise and humanity where one can find spectacular printed cloth, incense, padlocks, Tibetan thangkas, bangles, Yak cigarettes, lentils, sugar, tofu and tea. Seedy individuals materialize by your shoulder: "Hey, hashish? Heroin? Cocaine? Change money?" Or it’ll be some hopeful entrepreneur who reaches into his satchel and extracts a traditional khukuri knife in a gilded sheath, or a copper prayer-wheel, and waves either or both in front of your face until you break away with an oath and the requisite smile. Grain-sellers squat in the stalls alongside huge scales, living on the thinning profit margin; a grotesque butchery displays the yellow-dyed head of a freshly-slaughtered goat on a spike outside his shop, its guts spilled out alluringly below.

I wander through my day-to-day, not yet settled, and wonder how the hell I plan to do justice to all this, and how long it’s going to take. All my ambitious plans seem so superficial, as if as if I naively believed I could live in one of Asia’s liveliest cities and concentrate only on cuteness. There is a dark side here as well, and it cannot be ignored by anyone who hopes to give more than the tourist-guide impression of the Kingdom.

 The action takes place in Jean-Luc Picard’s ready room, stage right of the bridge. Patrick Stewart is inside, separated from the film crew by a cut-away wall. The space is jammed; he’s barely visible through the clutter of lights, cameras and cables. I sneak up behind Jonathan Frakes and watch the action on the director’s twin Sony monitors.

Stewart currently inhabits a position that every actor dreams of: dominating a role so completely that a replacement would be unthinkable. With Captain Kirk in cold storage, only one man alive can bridle the Enterprise, and Paramount wants to keep him happy. As a result, Stewart’s touch can be felt all over First Contact. He edited the script, helped choose some of the music, and lobbied – hard – for the choice of Frakes as director.

Movies are almost never filmed in chronological order. The scene now being shot comes just moments after the opening credits. Picard struggles awake from a bone-chilling dream. Images of his assimilation into the Borg collective, the gory alien surgery that transformed him into a cyborg, invade his memory, and the murmur of the Borg hive rattles through his skull. The inhuman chirp swells in volume, until a bleep from a nearby terminal jars him back to reality.

Picard swings from his cot in full uniform. Visibly shaken, he authorizes the incoming message. A Starfleet Admiral appears on the screen. "Catch you at a bad time, Jean-Luc?" The actor portraying the Admiral isn’t there; his part is read by a script supervisor.

"No, of course not."

"I’ve just received a disturbing report from Deep Space Five," the Admiral continues. "Our colony on Ivor Prime was destroyed this morning. Long-range sensors have picked up…."

"Yes, I know. The Borg."

That’s it: one line. Five words. That’s the meat, the goo, the gold ring that Frakes is after. Once it’s in the can, everyone goes home. But first takes are rarely perfect, and Frakes asks Stewart to do the line several more times. There’s a short delay between each take while the lighting is adjusted, the cameras refocused, and the film rolled up to speed. The clapboard snaps, then: "Action!"

"Our colony on Ivor Prime was destroyed this morning. Long-range sensors have picked up…."

"Yes, I know." The camera zooms slowly in from just below Stewart’s chin line, moving until his face fills the frame. "The Borg."

A beat. Frakes frowns; sound man Tommy Thomas reaches for his New York Times crossword puzzle. After seven seasons as Jean-Luc Picard, Stewart needs no direction. There’s nothing Frakes can say to explain how the line ought to be read. Frakes himself might not know what he’s after, but he knows that wasn’t it. The cameras are realigned, and he tries a fifth take.

"Long-range sensors have picked up…."
"Yes, I know. The Borg."

Still not there. "Again."

"Long-range sensors have picked up…"
"Yes, I know. The Borg."

The weary Stewart sounds like he’s anticipating a visit from his mother-in-law. Frakes, ever cheerful, stifles a laugh.

"Sorry, Patrick…. let’s try it once more, shall we?"

Stewart gives no argument. The two have an excellent rapport, on and off camera, that dates back to the first day they worked together on TNG. Stewart, then a self-described "pompous ass", blew a line, and Frakes playfully dissed him: "I say! That must be what they call British face-acting! Not bad… for a Brit!" The crew howled, and Stewart’s slow, often painful process of Americanization began.

"Everyone ready? Action!"

"Our colony on Ivor Prime was destroyed this morning. Long-range sensors have picked up…."

"Yes, I know. A pregnant pause; so far, so good. "Borg." Stewart groans; he forgot the "the."

The irony of all this is that Stewart excels at live performance, the kind where you’ve got to get it right the first time. A veteran of the Royal Shakespeare Company, he’s as comfortable with a monologue as he is in a large ensemble cast. From 1988 until 1995, during winter breaks from the production of TNG, his solo rendition of Dickens’s A Christmas Carol (in which Stewart played all forty-six characters) drew standing ovations on Broadway. His 1995 appearance as Prospero in The Tempest – performed to enormous crowds in Central Park – was the toast of the town. Prior to First Contact, Stewart appeared in no less than 150 stage productions. Seeing him stumble over this stupid line is like watching Mohammad Ali get beaten up by a kangaroo.

"Action!"

"Our colony on Ivor Prime was destroyed this morning. Long-range sensors have picked up…."

"Yes, I know. The Borg."

"Our colony on Ivor Prime was destroyed this morning. Long-range sensors have picked up…."

"Yes, I know. The Borg."

"Our colony on Ivor Prime was destroyed this morning. Long-range sensors have picked up…."

"Yes, I know. The Borg."

Frakes rises from his chair and approaches Stewart. They speak in hushed tones, a pitcher and manager huddled on the mound. What’s the problem here? Is it with Stewart? Or the script itself? In a very real sense, the film begins with this line; it anticipates everything to come. All the emotions that Picard feels at this instant – revulsion, fear and a wretched awareness of his bond with the enemy – must be expressed in five syllables. I glance around; the grips and gaffers are all mouthing the line, trying to get it right. From the looks on their faces, no one is succeeding.

Because it’s not Stewart, and it’s not the script. It’s the fucking aliens themselves. The Borg. It looks great on paper, but you just can’t say it; much less with a British accent. Bawg. The Bawg. Klingons, Cardassians; these names roll off the tongue like restless fillies. But Borg articulates like a belch, and there’s no way to save it. I know it, the crew knows it and I have a big feeling that Stewart and Frakes know it, too. What to do? The word must die, but die it cannot.

Frakes returns to his seat and takes a long swig of designer water. "Okay, quiet everybody. Last time… we hope. Lights…. action!"

"Our colony on Ivor Prime was destroyed this morning. Long-range sensors have picked up…."

"Yes, I know. The Borg."

Stewart peers hopefully into the camera, his face cloned double on the director’s monitors. "How was that, Jonathan? Much better, I think."

"Uh…. great." Frakes turns toward his peanut gallery, holding his nose. "Try it again, Patrick."

New Road begins at the Tundhikhel Parade Ground, and plows a broad swath through what has become, such as it is, downtown Kathmandu. I steer my old clunker – a Chinese-made "Flying Pigeon" with tassels streaming from the handgrips – through the brightly painted arch, and glide by the district of the gem shops; past the American Cultural Center, which used to have pictures of the Space Shuttle in the window but now shows photographs of Ronald Reagan felicitating the stiffly self-conscious personage of His Majesty, Sri Panch Maharaja Birendra Bir Bikram Shah Dev; past the pipal tree, beneath whose spreading branches are stacked piles and piles of newspapers issued by banned political parties; past one-hour photo finishing, 21 Flavors Ice Cream, cows lying complacently in the road as traffic swerves around them. And in the windows of the tour agencies I can read the brightly lettered signs saying,

VISIT DAKSHINKALI!
LIVE ANIMAL SACRIFICES
EVERY TUESDAY AND SATURDAY!

At the end of New Road is the old royal palace with its towering pagodas, and fantastic courtyard populated by gods, goddesses and demons. Not a bad place to do some shopping…. But before making that plunge into the giddy world of Buddha buying, I stopped my bicycle and locked it by a telephone pole at the corner of Dharma Path and New Road. And there I gazed up, face to face with the entrance to Kathmandu’s most grotesque capitalist monument: three tiers of sooty raw concrete, and a hand-lettered sign reading "Shopping Centre." Yes, it was an enclosed mall: five years old, and already an ancient ruin.

I’ll tell you why I stopped. Some friends had come to town a couple of weeks earlier, and they returned from a stroll one afternoon to inform me that the management of this so-called Shopping Centre had just finished installing an attraction that proved to be the modern-day equivalent of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. We’re talking about Kathmandu’s very first escalator, linking the first and second floors of the gritty enclosed mall.

Now, I’d been by before, hoping to find this marvel of technology in action. As a rule it was broken, covered with an enormous sheet of plastic, like a minor work by Christo. Today, though, contrary to any of my expectations, the escalator was running; and this I had to see.

There were two enormous crowds. One was gathered at the foot of the escalator, where a sneering guard wielding a nightstick pushed the bravest of the brave, one by one, onto the verandah, the no-man’s-land at the base of the procession of hypnotic, endlessly ascending steps. A barefoot porter in filthy, tattered rags – some lost refugee from the hills – stood immobilized at the starting line, awed to paralysis by the stream of metal that flowed, as if by divine writ, from the rubber cowl beneath his toes. As I watched, I realized that the man was experiencing a beatific transformation. His knees weakened; and within a moment he was bowing, praying, practically prostrating himself before this divine sight, this river of steel issuing miraculously out of the ground, just as the holy Ganges flows from the scalp of the great lord Shiva! The guard reached forward, and jerked him rudely aside.

The next victim was a 12 year old boy who, poised at the bottom, eyed the rise with all the trepidation of a diver who suddenly realizes that yeah, the high board is really a lot higher than it looks; he swung his arms and took a few deep breaths before closing his eyes and plunging out in his best urban swan dive. Right behind him was an elderly Moslem lady, who took one look and tried to back away… but instead she somehow stumbled onto the device. At first she kept her eyes closed, and seemed to heave a sigh of relief as her senses convinced her that she wasn’t moving after all. But as soon as she opened them, her face whitened into a mask of absolute and abject horror. She clung desperately to the rubber rail, crouched as if for combat, as her sisters, her husband, her sons, her grandsons all faded, perhaps forever, against the backdrop of blinking advertisements far below.

The second mob waited at the escalator’s summit, delighting in the huge joke of relative motion. These sophisticated voyeurs – many of them seasoned escalator veterans themselves – shouted with glee as each of the hapless riders was propelled, panicked and staggering, from the apparently motionless safety of the escalator onto the utterly unexpected menace presented by stable ground.

I ran up and down the stairway parallel to the marvelous escalator, enslaved by the realization that I could not leave, could not bear to leave, before demonstrating my utter command, my consummate prowess with escalators. No; I positively could not continue my search for a perfect peaceful Buddha before leaping onto this escalator like a trapeze artist, and wowing these local yokels with a bit of spontaneous street theater.

So, after mingling patiently with the downstairs mob (who ushered me forward with the respect and generosity characteristic of all Nepalis) I found myself at the coveted brink. At first I made a show of trying to back away and then, letting loose an awful howl, mounted the flying stairway in the most histrionic fashion imaginable, a pantomime of sheer terror, flailing and doubling back, slipping down the railing, disappearing from sight, finally rising to my feet only to be propelled like a rag doll into the waiting arms of the electrified crowd.

Ah, they roared! They loved it! These people! My people! I walked back down the steps, Nepalese slapping me on the back. Whew! Hey! What a riot! That was great! I was great!

But then the grin slid off my face like a wet towel, because the crwod was captured by a momentary silence. Far below, making their way through the swinging glass doors, a retinue of Buddhist monks, entered the Shopping Centre. They aproached it single file, heads shaven, their robes flowing behind them like a flood of fresh-squeezed Florida Orange juice.

The crowd melted, dividing like a cell to let them through. The guard abashedly lowered his nightstick and stepped hastily aside. And the monks, without panic or ceremony, simply mounted the escalator and

rode it

to the next

level.