(Paul Harding, Ha Jin, Marilynne Robinson, Noreen Tomassi) Acclaimed literary fiction writers who have unforgettably illuminated the nature of evil will read from their work and then engage in a discussion of their approaches to this topic well as their thoughts on other writers' work in this subject area, followed by an audience Q&A.

Published Date: October 3, 2012

Transcription

Amber:

Welcome to the AWP podcast series. This event originally occurred at the AWP Conference in Chicago on March 3, 2012. The recording features Jimmy Santiago Baca, Linda Hogan, Pam Houston, and Mat Johnson. You will now hear Alison Granucci from Blue Flower Arts provide introductions.

Alison Granucci:

Welcome, everybody. Having a good conference?

Audience:

Yes.

Alison Granucci:

It's Saturday. We're all tired. So again, thank you for coming to our fiction reading, Charting Unmarked Terrain Fiction at the Borderland. As Amber said, I'm Alison Granucci. I'm the president of Blue Flower Arts, which is a literary speakers bureau. We represent authors and filmmakers for their readings and appearances. We have a booth in the book fair, booth number 400 if you have a few minutes and want to stop by before you leave.

Today, I'm delighted to bring you an ensemble of Blue Flower Arts clients, four provocative voices in contemporary fiction, Jimmy Santiago Baca, Linda Hogan, Pam Houston, and Mat Johnson. I'm going to introduce all of them now upfront and they will be reading in that order.

Charting Unmarked Terrain Fiction at the Borderland. The human mind can be as wild as the landscape it inhabits. By exploring the untamed natural and the wild cultural landscape they hail from, each of these authors chart the hidden dimensions of what it means to be human. While taking their readers on an adventurous ride of the imagination, they offer us new perspectives on notions of identity and selfhood and what it means to be free. Living in the interstitial lands between cultures, heritage and races, their characters find their way through both loss and redemption to find not resolution, but the ever expanding questions of how to better move through our journey on this earth.

Jimmy Santiago Baca has lived his life at the Borderland. Born in New Mexico of Chicano and Apache descent, he was raised first by his grandmother and was later sent to an orphanage. A runaway at age 13, it was not until Baca was sentenced to five years in maximum security prison that at the age of 21 he began to turn his life around. There he learned to read and write and found his passion for poetry and for language. After living his first 25 years in the system, last year marked with the publication of The Esai Poems, 25 years and one day that he has lived outside the system.

He is the author of the memoir, A Place to Stand, 12 books of poetry, and the novel, A Glass of Water. Following a family of young immigrants from Mexico, a Glass of Water takes us deep inside the tragedies unfurling at our country's borders, providing as one reviewer claimed, "an antidote to the dehumanizing discourse in Washington."

Linda Hogan is a Chickasaw poet, novelist, essayist, playwright, and activist. And she is widely considered to be one of the most influential Native American figures in the American literary landscape. She is the author of many collections of poetry, two memoirs, and the novels, People of the Whale, Mean Spirit, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, Solar Systems, a finalist for the International Impact Award, and Power. Image Journal writes of Hogan, "To be human, according to her vision is to be situated on the planet and to be sensitive to its moods, its angles, and to its secrets."

In Pam Houston's newest novel, Contents May Have Shifted, we travel across the globe with the narrator also named Pam as she searches for what? Understanding? A sense of peace? Love? Spiritual fulfillment? While the quest may be for all of these things, the greatest journey she undertakes is not to Alaska or Tibet or the kingdom of Bhutan, but it is into the unmarked terrain of the heart. "I know all about the anatomy of restlessness," declares Pam early on. Then later finds herself reflecting, "How did I ever think I'd get to freedom without my arms swung open wide?" Houston is also the author of the novel Sight Hound and two collections of stories including Cowboys are My Weakness.

Mat Johnson takes us into the ultimate land of whiteness in his novel Pym, A comic, epic journey under the permafrost of Antarctica and beneath the surface of American history. Publishers Weekly wrote, "Social criticism rubs shoulders with cutting satire in this high-concept narrative." Pym is caustically hilarious as it offers a memorable take on America's racial pathology and the whole ugly story of our world. Or as one of his characters declares upon reaching their destination after arduous travel, or should I say trudging. "I saw that there was nothing out there, no sign of an eco habitat, no sign of life, nothing. What are we going to do now, Garth?, I asked, searching around for salvation and seeing nothing but snowdrifts." Born to an Irish-American father and African-American mother, Mat Johnson writes primarily about the lives of African-Americans. His graphic novel titles are Dark Rain and Incognegro.

I'll leave you now with a slightly phrased quote from Jimmy Baca's, A Glass of Water. "As the words come forth from these hearts strung together like grains of rice to people holding out their souls like wooden bowls, may these words feed some deep hunger in your hearts."

Please welcome.

Jimmy Santiago Baca:

Thank you, thank you, thank you. I wanted to thank Alison for inviting me. She pulled me away from New Mexico to come here, and I wouldn't do it for anybody else I don't think. Alison and [inaudible 00:07:27] the years have have displayed extraordinary and enormous amounts of love for me, because need love being a parentless child. And Alison has always been there for me, so I strongly suggest Blue Flower Arts is an amazing, an amazing group of people that have furthered the careers of many of the writers and poets that I know, including myself. So thank you very much Alison and [inaudible 00:07:55], you're the best. There's nobody, you're unrivaled. They're booth, as I said, 400 down in the big exhibit hall. You must go there and don't let them carry any books home with them.

This is from Casimiro. This is, it's a border book. I live in New Mexico. A lot of people have died and a lot of people continue to die. And like other friends of mine have said, it's an oxymoron, it's just all the Mexicans are much older tribes than we have here, but the Mazatecs, the Mayans, Aztecs and they continue to kill them off. A lot of women, yeah, a lot of young women.

This is Casimiro. He's 14 years old and he's come to this country. He's from the Raramuri tribe, but Mexican. And this is how he discovers his wife, how he meets his wife. He's run away from Mexico because he killed a banker trying to possess his parents' house on foreclosure. But this was January, 2006. She's already dead, they killed her, but he's reminiscing how he met her.

"Casimiro was burning brush and tumbleweeds." Oh, I got to say one more thing before I start. Sy Safransky from the Sun, the editor and publisher's here, and we've been friends for 30 some years. When I was in prison, he was the first one to ever pay me. He paid me $10 for a poem and that $10 could have been $50 million to a prisoner who was only 25 years old. So thank you, Sy. And of course Linda Hogan, I've had a crush on her for God knows how long. It's the first time I ever get to actually meet her. I just didn't know how to get ahold of her. I have her picture all over her and books everywhere. Anyway, you know us Chicanos, we got the Mexican blood, it excuses all our weaknesses. Anyway, here we go. I've had a great time. There's been extraordinary people here. I got to get on with this. Here we go.

"Casimiro was burning brush and tumbleweeds. The night sky twinkled with stars and the red-hot moon was slowly fading. He raked and scooped up embers in his shovel, glanced at his watch. It was a little after 5:00 AM. He stepped near the heat and the crackle of the flames pleased him and within the hour he finished scorching the northeast corner of the field and started banking smoking mounds of burning ash. He privately begrudged God for allowing Nopal to have been butchered so savagely. She deserved a lot better than that he thought. And he knew the proper way of enduring Nopal's absence was through prayer, but it didn't do much to alleviate the melancholy, the chronic melancholy. His Catholic faith offered little relief and the only way to tolerate her absence was to work, work every single day dawned the dusk until he fell.

His stomach churned with a memory of the crime he had committed in Mexico. It was a curse that followed him and he often wondered, was it because of that, that his wife was murdered? The crime had trailed his footsteps to America like a scorpion in the dirt, a white one under the sheets, a clear one in the water basin he washed his face in every morning. A red and green scorpion in the rows of the chili plants he worked and picked and a golden one in the blistering sun of his brow. The poison of its many stings settling in his empty heart every day.

The last Sunday afternoon of her life, they'd varnished the floor and stain the paneling in the Pullman car they called home. Nopal was humming her favorite [Mexican 00:11:34], which she had written about coming to America when she was 16.

In September, 1983 in the village of Via Alonso, Casimiro was given the gruesome task of pitching corpses on the carts and hauling them down the crematorium. The village had almost been wiped out from some kind of strange virus. The work done, he put his torch to the roof timbers of homes, and as the flames devoured houses, they shredded every aspect of his own identity, reduced his previous life to a meaningless mound of smoldering ash. And it was an obvious sign. God's message was to start his life anew. And so invigorated with a renewed faith that better things lay beyond the horizon, he bid the remaining inhabitants audios he left.

And that was not the only reason he left. He remembered his father saying, 'Sometimes a man is so poor all the pride he has in the last cigarette is smoking.' And it was true. A day or so into the trip, he sat on a boulder and smoked his last cigarette, feeling a little pride that he had escaped, inventing the story in his mind in case he needed to explain himself to authorities.

And though he had tried to bury the incident in the ashes with the houses in his village, each dawn the pistol in the man's expression when he shot him charred his mind and his heart. And he could sniff the air every day and breathe it into his lungs. The crime was his burden to carry in life, carry alone until he died, keep it close to his heart and tell no one lest his two sons inherit the affliction. He sensed however, that the curse had already taken what he valued most in life, his wife, Nopal.

He coughed now as the field smoke blew his way. 'What do you think, [Mexican 00:13:15]? Was it my fault? Is it not so,' he asked the sparrow, skimming the black and field referring to the fact that he had saved Nopal that day, married her and had children with her only to have her taken from him.

The sun was coming up and he resumed tending the burn line. He appeared dreamlike an aging five foot six silhouette against a blushed horizon, a shadow wearing a dirt stained cap to shade his eyes from the smoke. A denim collar pulled up around his ears, waistline riding high and khaki trousers stuffed into his oversized boots. The bandana that he was wearing was the one that Nopal used to wear in her hair when she picked chili.

The breeze spiraled around as he sifted over a flash fire dowsing flashpoints as they materialized. Now and then he blew on a twig to get the flame carrying it to redirect and control the fires widening line. Nearby prairie dogs and black-footed ferrets bolted across his line of vision. Panicked quails chirped. Rattlesnakes melted. Scorpions squirmed to cinders. He heard a hiss, a squeal and a rack attack, rack attack sound, which he believed was a spirit humoring itself at his expense. He watched as the spirit twitched its windy tail. He took a water bottle from his coat pocket and gulped it, snorting phlegm out through his nostrils and spitting until the saliva was clear and clean. He watched as the wind spirit skimmed the ground. He was 39. He had been in America 23 years, but it seemed like he had arrived only yesterday. Leaning on his shovel, mesmerized by hundreds of lit embers, he retreated into memory.

I am standing in the desert looking around expecting something to happen. It's very strange and confusing. I walk most of the time at night, but I decide to walk through it at daytime. Soon I see an object in the distance and I turn in the direction thinking hopefully there might be a person. It would be refreshing because it's been weeks since I talked except to myself, to the [Mexican 00:15:19], or to God when I pray. I hurry to reach it so I can rest under the shade. The heat is unbearable. What is it in the middle of nowhere in the desert out here? Is it a plane crash or maybe a minor shack or maybe God's will telling the purpose of sparing me.

And I'm finding in front of this truck and I smell the foulest order I've ever smelled and I want to get as far away and keep on running until I turn back and I don't see anything but the desert again. And I call out 'God, audios por favor [Mexican 00:15:52].' And I hear a single little voice and I think it's my imagination and God's voice sounds very strange right now. I can hear it again weaker. And I say out loud, 'Is this really happening? [Mexican 00:16:02]? Are you people really people? Can you hear me? Are you really there?'

I'm here and the sun's above and the air still. And I walked here a little while ago and then I take a rock and I break the lock and I push the big door. And as it goes back, sunlight floods the dark space of the truck back and there's chicken wire blocking access in the back part of the truck. And I try to move it and I handle it roughly, and I swing the screen away. There's another barricade of plywood and cardboard siding, and I shove that barrier to the side, but the smell's unbearable and I have to turn for a moment to puke.

And then I fall to my knees praying as fast as I can for God to know that I wasn't involved in this crime. It was not me. And then I uncontrollably for some reason I start to weep. And I want the poor victims to know I'm here. I'm here to help you. I want them to hear me. And my crying grows louder into groaning. And through the tears and the groans, I shout prayers, [Mexican 00:16:54]? Yelling words like a madman, turning around on my knees in circles, in the dust and in the desert and until the voice comes again. And I can't breathe. I'm lightheaded. I'm going to fall down. I'm feeling that I'm going to pass out. I'm thinking I'm lost in this other kind of reality. Where am I? I look around and I beg the angels, 'Please protect my soul wherever I'm at right now.' And I hear the voice and it's a woman's voice.

And my mind's gone blank and I can't think of what to do because it's just everything's overwhelming. Maybe I got hit over the head. Maybe I fell down. Maybe I'm having a nightmare. And maybe I'm really asleep and I need to wake up and get on the road, but I'm too exhausted to raise myself. And I can't come up with an answer and it scares me. I try to tell myself, Casimiro, do not be scared [Mexican 00:17:43].

And then there's an answer for everything that happens. And I'm trying to move and I'm trying to speak and I'm trying to do something to move an inch with my feet or raise my arm or move my fingers or any motion, but I can't do anything. And I pray again to God, 'Help me decide what to do next.' And little by little I start to move first my fingers and then my toes and my feet and my hands.

And I turn my head and I see bodies. Bodies on top of bodies twisted and bloated, left in this truck by some [Mexican 00:18:18] to die. Piles of rotting bodies tied with ropes, drenched in intestines and mucus, neck metals, rosaries. Little tiny babies, women, men, gunny sack belongings strapped to the backs infested with insects. And my whole body seizes up, speechless, petrified where I'm standing. But in a panic and with great, great effort, I pry one foot up. I step forward until I grip the ledge of the truck and I squint intently at the dark in the back and I see a small, tiny hand move. I see as I search for God's voice and I find her alive."

Thanks.

Linda Hogan:

I am short. Can you see me down here in front? I also thank Alison very much. Thank you for organizing this. And everyone who's here, thank you, my friends, my sister Deborah over here. And Jimmy, I wish you'd told me that you had a crush years ago because I could have had some self-esteem in my life. And Pam, you have been very good and kind and supportive to me also in the past, thank you.

I'm going to read a novel excerpt from something that's unpublished and this section is, I'll just tell you a little bit about it so it's not confusing. Hopefully I have the right section. I did everything to be organized.

It is about the last of a tribe, the last woman, the last girl, child whose father just died of tuberculosis after the two of them being discovered together after hiding in a forest from people. Discovered by fox hunters, British fox hunters and colonizers of where they live. And as you know, new tribes are being discovered daily so this is not set in the long ago past. And much of the story is going to be about her daughter. So this is the older woman telling the story to the daughter. And it's from a new novel, it's not yet published. But I do have a new book out called Indios. It just came out so I don't know if you have copies back there, but it's from Wings Press and they do have copies downstairs. I'm signing after this at 2:30 PM. I'd be happy to sign for you for that.

And this is called Burn Talker. I live in Oklahoma even though I don't sound like it. And there is an Appalachian history, a healing. It's called burn talking. And so even doctors go to burn talkers when they're badly burned and people speak to the burns and they talk to the burn. And it comes from the Appalachian areas and it's used as highly effective.

This girl has been in a museum. She's seen what happens to bodies in a museum. And she burns her father's body after he dies so he won't be in a museum. And in the meantime, to protect the burning of his body, she is burned because she has to stand there to keep his body burning from all the people who are trying to stop it and to take him back. And so Lisa becomes her guardian later. But in the meantime, she's the burn talker who comes to help the girl who is herself burned.

Burn Talker.

"I had a private entrance at the end of a road with plants and vines. It was a hill of plants with a dark gray door going into the earth. I kept as far away from the general population as I could in those days away from crowded streets, not to attract any attention. Mrs. Willis beat on my door one day calling my name. She said it was an emergency. 'It's the girl, she's burned.' The doctor had called me already to help her. Your mother, she was burned badly they said. Water dripped from the leaves above Mrs. Willis as she watched me fold my clothing and put things in order. She talked to me all the while about your mother. I picked up my herbs to leave. She followed as I walked with my large flowered bag. Finally at the footpath, she stopped. She wore no shoes. The brambles and broken glass were in her way. But when I looked back, she waved. 'Let them know I'm on my way,' I said in case they were anxious and called.

I had seen your mother before. I watched her from hidden places near where they kept her. I watched for some time to be certain they treated her well. She was their source of income, but she was the source of my heart. She was so like a tendril, a new plant, vulnerable, a child subjected to treatment that had one devising methods to kidnap her. The fire had passed entirely without our knowledge. Even though like everyone on the islands, we knew the Manhattans. They had a mixed reputation, philanthropists, philanders drinkers, art buyers who didn't pay. People on the way down, who pretended not to know it and entertained too often.

Even before I arrived I could feel your mother, the child crying inside the house. I didn't need to hear her, I felt it in my bones. And then outside, near a stand of trees, I saw the burned mattress and blackened bed frame on the long grasses, a ticking covered pillow and pile of charred debris, clothing, books, and papers. All had been hosed down. Then my ears hurt too. A whale of pain, not for her own burned body, but I have always known the sound of grief too well.

I went around to the back door and knocked customary on the islands in places of seeming wealth. Inside was the smell of cooking. Clara, the cook with rosy cheeks was wringing her hands. She wanted to follow me from the kitchen, the room with light mingled with wisps of steam and odors of smoke that on another day would've looked like the clouds in our forests.

Then the Mrs came to the dining room. 'Oh, you are here at last.' She looked me over. 'Come with me.' She was chic, bangs, hair cut in a dark bob. She took in my appearance, which was not to her approval. I followed her reading her mind, what she thought of me, my embroidered blouse, my skirt and flowered bag, my everything. Not the kind of healer she'd imagined the best practicing doctor would have recommended for assistance. Even at 10:30 AM in the morning, it was all darkness. You know how your mother hates dark rooms still? Nevertheless, everything was shadowed. The halls, the tables all threw shadows down like objects on the floor. The place seemed forever uninhabited by daylight or morning air, but at least I heard the sound of hammering, which I always believed to be the sound of new beginnings, buildings, new starts.

Mrs. Manhattan tried to prepare me for what I was going to see, but I already smelled the burning flesh. 'We've moved her to a room. It's bare.' With some spite, she said this herself. 'She was well, strange always.' She said about the girl. 'She burned her own father's body. We don't know what came over her. Previous to that, she was mild.' But as she said again, 'But she was strange.' I noticed she spoke of the girl as if she had died. For her, perhaps it was true. 'I just thank God she didn't burn the whole building. Think of what that child could have done.' She fumbled her words nervously as she did her clothing playing with the top buttons of the beige silk shirt. I hated her words. I felt what your mother might have been through in that house heavy with great misery.

The cook followed us, her hands in her apron pockets, her hair in a bun, straggly at the neck. She became our ally. But who knew at that moment, Libra Manhattan led us past the hallway of art, down some stairs to another hall and we were there in the nearly bare room where Lily sat pale, crying and shaking. Cold in the corner with nothing but underpants on, her back visible to us. I started to cry too and Clara, the cook, 'My God, she was cooked.' She'd be lucky to survive was my first thought. She was both hot and cold, shaking, trembling with something and more that none of us would ever come close to knowing. She cared nothing for her burned back which was burned so terribly, so deep. I felt there wasn't a chance in hell I could make it any better. I'd have had a better chance if it was hell. For her, it was. All of it was and had been the entire time she'd been kept there.

I sat to work anyway. 'Bring me ice,' I told them seeing that even with all this, even at that, the woman in fishnet hose with the bob just stood wringing her hands at the doorway, watching. The cook who was crying too went downstairs to bring the ice and was back so soon I know she ran. I tried to soothe the girl, Lily, such a delicate name. The cook brought a whole tub of ice so much for her to carry. She was a good-hearted woman and her lips moved as she prayed. I could see that she wanted to stay and see how things would go in the room, but I went to the door and said, 'You'll have to leave now.' And I closed the door securing the latch. The smell still lingered. 'I'm going to help you,' I told Lily, praying I told the truth. I never knew what worked through me. It could have been St. Francis, St. Anthony, or any other saint or God only knows my first lover, Manuel now probably in the other world."

Someone stole page four and they kept it. So anyway, this has never happened to me before. But I just gave a reading.

Anyway, "The woman comes back into the room and she says, 'Mrs. Manhattan, is it an herb you're using?' 'No ma'am, it's ice and prayers.' 'Oh, is that why you have the little statues? Some are plastic, I see.' 'Yes, and some are plaster, but they work. That's all I can tell you. They could be chalk. I'd use them if they worked.' 'Okay, you must leave us now. We have work to do.' The door closed. Heels clicked outside the steps. From my bag. I took the head of lettuce and the aloe vera. Vera, the word for truth. I lay the lettuce leaves on your mother's back. It is the one thing most like flesh. It breathes and does not stick. I learned this from my great aunt who had 18 children. She said butter didn't work. She didn't know why they used it. I worried she might get infected. Being a girl not immune to this world, she was susceptible to all the ills of humans. Her father had grown sick almost as soon as they found the two of them.

When I reached toward her, it felt like a cloud even though it was a hot humid day. Even though she was burned and should have felt warm, I felt the coolness and wetness of a cloud. I remembered that they, her people had once been called the cloud people. My father had passed on some of their story to me. He said they could sing the clouds toward them. And so I reached through the cloud to touch her. She held a blanket to her naked front and she wept again but it was not about pain. It was grief for her father, even though she smelled charred. Yet there was also the fresh cloud smell. This is good I thought, it gives her a better chance. It is coolness. But I think that she had gratitude at being touched with care by any other human being.

This wasn't the first time I saw her since she'd been found. I was haunted by her face, her eyes. I worried about her and I had been there frequently spying, anything to get her away from them. I knelt in my brown skirt. Why I recall, I don't know, just that the skirt was on the dark wood floor, the floor that was once her forest. I closed my eyes to look at this curled up little body to keep it in my mind. It was like I could see backward in time, the forest with the fern people still in it. The first time I saw her, when I found her asleep and covered her naked body with the blue shawl Manuel had given me. I was thinking of what this meant, the way she took back her father's body from them standing in front of it, protecting him in death by burning him. It's what she did for him.

When I closed my eyes, I saw forward in time also, us driving and on unpaved roads. It was the first time of late I'd had my abilities as the kids called them. It's funny, but she saw it too, and she said, 'You're the worst driver I've ever seen,' in her little accent. I laughed. It was true.

I couldn't tell her I saw happiness in her life because she no longer remembered what that was. She couldn't even imagine it, but I saw it. 'She won't eat,' said the cook to me the next day. She handed me a plate of the girl's favorite food like I was the be all, the end all and could accomplish anything. 'Here, try this. All her favorites.' A beautiful plate of mango and nuts. 'She needs water,' I said lots of it. 'I'll bring you more lettuce.' 'Thank you.'

This day she lay on a little cot on her stomach. She was lythe, the most flexible body I have ever seen. I checked to see if she was feverish. Then still on my knees feeling them hurt on the floor, I handed to her this food the maid had brought, beautiful perfectly cut slices of mango. There must be a special knife. Rice with sweet coconut. 'Your father wants you to live,' I said. 'Your father wants you to tell the story.'

'How do you know what he wants?' I heard her think. 'You are going to have your own daughter,' I told her not knowing why. 'You are going to be happy.' Then after a long time, a little hand itself slightly burned, reached out of the curled up body and took one piece of mango. 'Keep giving her water,' I said to the cook. 'She's eating, call me if she stops again.'

As I left, I said, 'I'll be back day after tomorrow. Tell the Mrs. same time, 2:00 PM. Would you apply this to her every hour?' I gave her a bottle of gel from my plants. 'She can sleep on her side, light cover, call me if she has any odor, it could mean infection. The doctor should give her an antibiotic, so call him and tell him I ordered it.' The cook was smart and got it that fast, the information. I could tell in my first glance that the Mrs. wouldn't have recalled any of this even though she came in to talk to me to see if I needed help. Nor would she have followed through. I said, 'Antibiotics and herbs.' I went back again and again until Lily, your mother was sitting up. She healed because sometimes the body will do what the soul doesn't want."

Thank you.

Pam Houston:

Hello. I too am grateful to Alison and [inaudible 00:38:03] and AWP for having me. And I'm very pleased to be here reading with my elders, my literary elders. But also just because nobody's mentioned the fantastic Mat Johnson, I thought I'd better. One of the pleasures of this spring has been discovering his work, so I'm very excited to hear him read next. In the meantime, this is from Contents May Have Shifted. This is called Delta 55.

"The plane is gradually but perceptibly descending. It is barely light outside and we aren't due at Orly until nearly noon. There is an odd ticking noise coming from the wing outside my window. I come fully awake and realize we are listing strenuously to the right. I glance at my seatmate on the aisle. Her name is Rebecca. She's a 26-year-old bank teller from Cincinnati who has never flown before, who has saved for five years to take her dream trip to Paris. I spend most of dinner telling her how much safer airplanes are than car travel. How the 777 has a minimum of three fail safes on each of its major systems. How even if one of the engines fell clean off the fuselage, it is designed to tumble backwards up and over the wing so that it doesn't tear the wing from the plane.

Now, in spite of all my reassurances, we seem to be heading shoulder first into the North Atlantic. 'Ladies and gentlemen,' the pilot says, 'as many of you are probably aware, we are descending, preparing to make an unscheduled landing into Reykjavik, Iceland. Approximately 35 minutes ago, we experienced an explosion in our number two engine and that engine is now inoperable. The ticking sound you hear is the wind running through it spinning the blades backwards, much like a household fan. You can probably also tell that we are tacking toward Iceland much as we would in a sailboat, as our current engine configuration will not give us full power in a straight line.' Now Rebecca is awake and looking at me wild-eyed. 'The man likes a metaphor,' I say and offer a small smile.

The light out the window has strengthened and I can see white caps on an angry gray sea. 'I always kind of wanted to go to Iceland,' I say, but by now Rebecca is no longer looking at me. She has her eyes closed tightly, has given herself I imagine to prayer. 'We will be landing in approximately 15 minutes,' the captain says. 'Please give your undivided attention to the flight attendants as they instruct you in landing in the brace position.' I like that he did not say crash. I like that he's a language guy. The ocean is getting quite a bit closer. No sign of Iceland out my window and I hope that Reykjavik airport does not turn out to be a metaphor for fucked.

Just when it seems that our wheels have to be skimming the water, land and runway lights appear and then more of them, so many lights, it is hard to count them, a sea of spinning red and blue. Every ambulance and firetruck in Iceland seems to have come out to greet us. 'Holy shit,' I say just before the wheels hit the foam and the foam splashes up and covers all the windows, throwing the cabin in a half light exactly like waking up in a tent after a snowstorm. And then everyone is cheering as the plane glides to a jerky sticky stop.

Much later in an upstairs blank space of terminal as we are being fed rice with some kind of yellow chicken-y goo all over it by something resembling the Icelandic Red Cross, the crew tells us the reason for the emergency equipment. When the number two engine exploded, it spit jet fuel all over the fuselage. 'We were a Molotov cocktail hurdling through space,' is the way the literary captain puts it. 'There was no way to be certain that the friction of the tires on the runway wouldn't make a spark and ignite us, turn us into a 90 mile per hour ball of flame.'

This is chapter 25, Ban Xang Hai, Laos.

"My guide Zi and I are standing in the warm mist of a Mekong River morning in the village of Ban Xang Hai, Laos watching an unusually tall Laotian tend his boiling vats of lao-lao, the rice wine moonshine that has put his village on the map. Monkeys scream in the trees above us and a gentle faced woman stands nearby holding a glass I fear is meant for me.

It is slightly after 8:00 AM and in America that would be good enough reason to decline politely. But here in Laos where decorum is far more rigorous and complicated than it is in America, I'm pretty sure there isn't going to be a way out of drinking the pickled Mekong water that is about to come from the steaming rusted 50 gallon drum. I reassure myself that no self-respecting amoeba could possibly live in 80 proof hooch and quickly down the glass of white I am offered. Which gets me another glass and then a glass of red, which I realized the second it goes down my throat without searing my tonsils isn't nearly as strong as the white. I am seized with regret, flooded by premonitions of feverish vomiting in a Laotian healthcare facility.