Fireside Magazine Issue 7 by Brian White

Author:Brian White
Language: eng
Format: epub

The Forever Endeavor: Part Four

13. THE BIRD AND THE WORM

The Bardo Bar, Kathmandu: December 25th,2010.

The big bastard is already at the table, drinking a Godawari Lager, greedily eating momo dumplings by hand—pinching each dough pocket between two tree-grubby fingers, tilting his butt-white head back so the rolls of neck fat bunch up like a rug made rumpled by the heel of a boot, then dropping each dumpling into his mouth from above. As if by helicopter. Then he licks his fingers of chili sauce and giggles: a high-pitched warble.

The girl, who looks like a Korean teenage backpacker, walks up and looks down. She sneers, lip curling over a hand-rolled cigarette whose cherry glows like hot coal.

Her right arm is inked with black birds of varying sizes.

Her left, a spider’s web. The spider visible at her elbow.

The bloated man’s neck is wound with a tattooed collar: a coiled dragon. A worm, of sorts, which makes sense if you know him.

She does know him. She has known him for a long, long time.

Forever, really.

“You disgust me, as usual,” she says in Korean, pouting.

“And your very presence makes me feel unsettled, as if perched on the peak of a very high mountain, my sphincter clenched so hard it could bend rebar.” He titters, then licks a little sauce from the corners of his wine-dark lips. “Can we speak in English please?”

“We speak all languages.” That, in Chinese.

“Yes, but English is the most fun, and I am lazy.”

She nods, and pulls up a stool.

A few backpackers and ex-pats mill about. In the corner, a Sherpa, going over an Everest ascent list with a couple climbers. Otherwise: the place is pretty empty. The bartender is a raggedy strip of rope, an older woman with skin like sun-baked yak hide.

The plump grub pushes the momo toward her. “Dumpling?”

“I ate.”

“You don’t look like you ate.”

“Are you my mother?”

“Maybe in some life.” His lips tug upward as if drawn by fishhooks. A joke, of course. He, even in his female forms, could’ve never been her mother because that’s not how things were set up.

“Don’t be the fool. I don’t have time.” She stubs out her cigarette in the middle of the table. “I’m going to climb Everest in three days, I have to prepare, you see.”

“Testing yourself?”

“Testing something.”

“Mm. So, I understand the Cochineal Box is once again in play.”

“It is.”

“So soon after the stockbroker found it.”

“His choices were poor.” She stiffens, already defensive. “But they were his choices.”

The big man—whose name is lost to time, a name that like hers is an epoch-long hymn of sounds (his hard with brutish consonants, hers soft and long with ululated vowels). His true name is forgotten, probably even to him.

But she knows him as Charu.

And he knows her as Vanth.

“Died in the street, that one,” Charu says.

“Died in an alleyway off the street,” Vanth corrects. “And, in a way, it was thosetwo, not that one.

“Pedant.”

“Motherfucker.”

“So crass.”

“So what?”

“Mm.” He turns his arm and uses the back of his arm to push the plate away, then takes a swig from the beer bottle.

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