The sexual life of savages

PHOT

ickie Bernbaum arrived iii Pap- ua Now Guinea in the middle of the rainy season and Hew up to the Highlands. He had come straight from an embed in Iraq and liis duflel bag was stuffed with three months' worth of clothes and books and video games, sunblock, antimalarials, Skin-So-Soft, water-purification tablets,

liis Kevlar vest, two canons of Marlboro Rods and a Lonely Planet guide. Ho had come on assignment to photograph a jail. 'Die IliglJands rain pounded down eveiy day, aggressive and unrelenting, then all of a sudden cleared to reveal a low wjuatoiial sun lighting up rain­forest-covered mountains and orange earth roads that crisscrossed the small

town of Gehuku. Dickie had never expe­rienced anything like it.

Alter the rain stopped the place had a slowed-down out-of'-time feeling, too, almost like being underwater. It was surreal, a little, for Dickie, who'd just been in the sped-up world of night­time house-to-house patrols in Mosul, ear-popping gunfire and bombs and

adrenaline. When he got to the High­lands he slept through the night for the first time in weeks, slept in a way he hadn't in years, as though he had slipped inside the quiet and rain and smell of wet earth. It was like being on another planet after the blaring, dry heat of Iraq.

On his third day in the Highlands, Dickie hired a driver to pick him up

from the hotel and take him to the jail, wliich was 10 miles outside of Gehuku. The driver, Peter, a taciturn man with cinnamon-colored skin and a thick black beard, waited in his van smoking and listening to the radio while Dickie wandered outside the prison gates. Neat rows of coffee trees grew on either side of the road, their small dark leaves

reaching up to the sun, throwing shad­ows on the packed earth. A lew young New Guinean soldiers with AK-47s strapped across their chests who were guarding the entrance ignored him. But then, when he approached, friendly and smiling, offering to share his pack of Marlboros they grinned and started joking around. The six-foot-four Dickie

with liis gloaming gold hoop earrings and arms covered in tattoos was unlike any whito man they had ever seen. They were curious and, at the same time, re­laxed by liis almost fraternal attitude; it seemed as though he must be an old soldier. Eventually they posed, smiling into his camera, their lips and gums and teeth stained a deep crimson color from all the betel nut they chewed.

"You can't get into the jail without the governor's permission," Peter told him scornfully. "Those boys with their guns can't do anything for you."

"That's okay," Dickie said. "I like hang­ing out with them."

As they drove back into town the sun began to sink behind the mountains and the clouds were orange and pink. The air smelled of wood smoke and deep-fat fiying oil, blooming frangipani and cut grass. Dickie closed his eyes happily and breathed in. I he thought, of liis wife, Tricia, her soft black hair and full lips, flickered across liis mind. They had fought about liim taking the assignment instead of coming home after the em­bed in Iraq. He would call her when he got back to the hotel and tell her about this landscape. It was like Hawaii, which she loved, but so much more intense and hidden and ancient-feeling.

The Gehuku Hotel was owned by the governor of the province, Sir Norman Barnett, a wliite Australian business­man who'd lived in New Guinea since 197-4, before the country gained its independence from Australia. Dickie had wandered around the hotel that morn­ing, waiting for Peter to arrive, look­ing at the series of framed photos and laminated captions that told the stoiy of Barnett in the Highlands over the de­cades: the governor flying liis helicopter, campaigning out in the rural villages, dressed in a traditional tiibal chieftain's get up surrounded by bare-breasted women, standing in front, of a school, then a clinic, then liis fleet of helicopters at Barnett Air Freight. The governor looked immense and pink-skinned and bald surrounded by the diminutive New Guineans. The photos seemed absurd to Dickie, laughably politically incorrect and self-mythologizing. What a strangely backward and unconscious place it was, Dickie thought. No wonder liis editor had sent liim here for the series on the infamous jails of the world.

He had a small cheap room down the hallway from the hotel's open-air restaurant, which also served as a mess for the Barnett Helicopter pilots. Dickie had heard the pilots at their meals in liis sleep; the nasal tones of their Australian accents floated through his dreams. The hotel manager, a pretty Canadian woman named Mally, worked in the din­ing room during the pilots' meals, wip­ing tables and helping set up the bullet,

then bringing out press pots steaming with fragrant coffee, and plates of but­ter cookies. Dickie had flirted with her from the first moment he saw her, fol­lowing her as she worked, teasing her, showing off, telling her stories about Iraq. She was almost six feet tall and they were like two giraffes, wandering around the dining room and the front office, chatting and smoking.

One of the pilots, a round, sun­burned Australian named Ed, pulled Dickie aside.

"Careful, mate," he said. "She may not act like it, but dial's Caesar's wife."

But Sir Norman was in Port Moresby, the capital, where parliament was in

session. And Dickie couldn't believe that the bald, ugly man in the framed photos—who had to be 60 by now— was the lithe, young Mally's boyfriend.

"So, what is that? A beauty and the beast tiling?"

"It is what it is. The governor is mas­ter and commander here. Don't think he isn't. And that's his woman."

"I just appreciate pretty girls," Dickie said, laughing. "I'm harmless, Ed. Any­way, she doesn't take me seriously."

Wliich was why he was suiprised that night when Mally knocked at his door a little after nine o'clock, holding a bottle of Bundaberg rum and a bag of weed. Dickie turned down the MTV-Asia he'd been watching while he fiddled around on Photoshop. He hadn't been able to call Tricia or upload liis photos when he got back from the jail. The phone lines were down, which was ordinary accord­ing to a shy New Guinean woman with her hair in tight cornrows who sat at the front desk. "No Internet, no phone for the next day or so, Mr. Bernbaum," she had said. "Sony-true." So Dickie spent the evening going through the

photos on his own, editing, touching, color-correcting, working on a series of the prison guards.

Mally smiled at Dickie, who was in liis boxers, sat down on the bed and stalled rolling a joint. He could tell she was ner­vous, and she started talking quickly; her life story came tumbling out, confus-ingly, into the small, messy hotel room. She told him that she was originally from AllxTta, that she had been running the governor's hotel for the past three years.

Mally hated Papua New Guinea, she said, she hated Ck'huku and the hotel, but most of all she loathed the New Guin-eans she had to supei"vise eveiy day.

"I used to like it," she said. "I used to

take tons of pictures and buy all these handicrafts and stuff and send them to my mum and sister. But I don't even go to the market anymore. They slit your pock­ets with razor blades to get your wallet."

Ihey were a nation of small-time con artists; they smelled, were riddled with disease and worms and bedbugs and lice. Gang rape was routine, and practi­cally everyone under 30 had AIDS. The hotel cleaning stall stole toilet paper, soap, lightbulbs, sheets, towels, pillows, blankets, shower curtains, and once she had even caught them sneaking a mat­tress and a box spring out the back gate. And they wen- crazy, too. Only the day before she had had to give the head maintenance man a live rooster because she had inadvertently insulted him.

"Why are you laughing?" she asked.

"I don't know; isn't it kind of funny?"

"Not at all," she said. "Not if you under­stood tliis place. Not even a little."

Mally watched liim with brown eyes tliat were the color of milk chocolate. She was big-boned and strong-looking and wore her dark hair in two tliick braids. Her short blue-painted fingernails flashed as she gestured and smoked.

"Tliis stuffis (continued on page I OH)

SAVAGES

(continued from page 74) total ditch weed," she said, shrugging her shoulders, "but it's better than nothing."

Dickie showed her some of his pictures from Iraq. The images flashed and faded and bled into each other on his computer screen; house-to-house in Mosul, a cramped apartment full of frightened-looking Iraqi women and children, a young marine, bulg­ing with gear, looking down at two dead Mahdi militiamen. Sometimes he thought that if he didn't photograph a thing he didn't really experience it, but right then, looking at the photos with Mally sitting next to him it seemed as though someone else had taken them. And he was glad to be so far away from that world. Dickie breathed in the oil in Mally's hair and her rich, musky skin smell. She radiated a slowed-down sad­ness that felt deeply erotic.

"Clod, they're hot," she said. "I love a man in a uniform."

"They would love you, too," Dickie said, thinking of the U.S. soldiers with their endless porn and loneliness. He put his hand up her shirt tentatively, waiting to get brushed away. Mally wasn't wearing a bra and her small breasts were soft and warm, her nipples erect as soon as he touched her. She acted like she didn't notice what he was doing. She told him that she'd been adopted and when she was 18 had found out that her biological mother was a full-blooded limit.

"You mean you're an Kskinio?" Dickie asked, stoned and happy, drawing light circles around her nipples with his lingers. "Like the dudes that live in igloos?"

"Yeah, I guess."

"That's very, very cool."

He lifted up her shirt and kissed each of her breasts slowly and then her belly.

"So, how are you planning on actually getting inside the jail?" she asked.

"I've put a request in with your boss to get permission."

"He'll give you permission if I ask him to," Mally said.

The television screen lit up the small room, flashing blue shadows.

"Really?" Dickie asked. "That'd be swell." lie decided that she was much more beautiful up close than from a dis­tance; her full mouth and olive skin, her high cheekbones, impenetrable brown eyes. He wanted to take Mally's long hair out of her braids. In Iraq he had been sleeping with a pretty blonde stall'sergeant who was sweet but blandly muscular and scentless. He liked women like Mally, like Tricia. Dark and full of feeling; sexual to their core and musky and sweaty.

"Yeah, he'll do it. He's my boyfriend. He's totally crazy about me. He does any­thing I want."

Dickie had a habit of feeling things in his body before he understood them. He pulled back from her and tried to read her expression.

"Norman'll be back tomorrow," Mally said. She lit the roach and held it out to him.

"I don't think so," he said. "Thanks."

"Yeah, this weed is hunk. I don't even know why I'm smoking it."

Mally gazed at the television. Her lips were open and he could see the tip of her tongue. Rain began splashing on the roof. Without really meaning to, Dickie put liis hand back up her shirt to feel her lovely breasts, and she turned to face him. Her eyes loomed, enormous in the glow from the television. She leaned over and kissed him deeply, as though they knew each other. But when they started having sex she seemed to disappear; he felt her bkxking him out of the room. He started to regret what he was doing and tried to stop, twice, but she held on to him and pushed him back into her.

After Mally left Dickie turned the lights on and sat, unable to sleep or work on his photos. He wished he hadn't gotten high. He thought about Tricia. They had been arguing about a baby for the past year. All of a sudden lying there, so far away, with another woman's taste in his mouth, Tri-cia was more vivid than the whole time he'd been in Iraq, when they had talked on the phone every day. He could feel her small, smooth hands and feet, her thick black hair, the sound of her voice in his ear, whispering while they fucked.

The rain, hammering down on the roof, kept him awake until dawn, and then he floated into a dream of being back in his bed in New York with his wife lying next to him, in his arms.

The next morning when they arrived at the jail, the soldiers waved Dickie and Peter inside the gates. A heavyset Papua New Guinean official, wearing an immac­ulately pressed uniform, with faded blue tribal tattoos on his face slowly walked over to Peter's van.

"You the man who wants a tour?" he asked, his gold-and-brown eyes taking in Peter and Dickie, the rusted-out inside of the van, the camera bags, Dickie's red Converses.

"I am," Dickie said, smiling, and slid open the van door, holding out his hand. When he stood up, he towered over the New Guinean.

"Are you the warden? I'm Richard Bernbaum."

"No," he said, "I am the assistant warden."

When the assistant warden went to take his hand Dickie clapped the man's shoul­der and pulled him, almost enfolding him in an embrace. It was a trick he learned watching a young American lieutenant on street patrol in Mosul. As quickly as pos­sible show you are physically vulnerable, friendly, on the same side.

"How you doing, buddy?"

The New Guinean looked up, unsmil­ing, into Dickie's face. "I am not your buddy," he said.

The reply made Dickie more unhappy than he knew it should. He mxlded and smiled. "Oh, okay," he said. "That's okay— that's cool too."

lie followed the assistant warden along the wide dirt road that led into the prison grounds. They passed a chicken coop and a grove of banana trees. In the distance the mountains that lead east spread out, their peaks obscured by cloud and mist. The immense mountains felt alive to Dickie, like beings that were aware. This count 17 is time travel, he thought, looking around him. It's like seeing the primeval world before humans existed.

The road curved up a steep hill, and then, as it flattened out, a series of con­nected, low blue-painted cement-brick buildings with corrugated aluminum roofs appeared. A Christian hymn being sung in the Melanesian patois floated over the day. Fenced-in gardens of sweet-potato ivy cov­ered the hills, and a black goat stood on the side of the road, chewing grass.

Dickie Ux>k photos of the assistant war­den looking straight into his lens, his tiger-colored eyes and tawny skin and facial tattoos striking in the mid-morning light, silhouetted by lps of razor wire. They walked over to the first building in the compound. As they stepped inside, Dickie thought the assistant warden had brought him to see the morgue; the place was one open-air room full of dose-together rows of cots with motionless, emaciated men lying on them. The only discernible movement was flies circling and buzzing over the bod­ies. The sweet rank stink of human shit and piss and unwashed skin, mold and ammo­nia engulfed them.

"This is our sick ward," the assistant warden said. Dickie began photograph­ing; close-ups of slack-jawed faces, flies clustered on sores that were weeping puss, ashy skin stretched over bone.

"Do they all have AIDS?" Dickie asked. He couldn't help himself; waves of excite­ment were washing over him. Ihc grotesque images were superb. F.ven the tropical mountain light filtering through the win­dows saturated everything with a rich, textured glow.

"This is all AIDS, right?" Dickie asked again from behind the viewfinder.

But the assistant warden didn't respond. Dickie wandered among the rows of cots, over to a wide-open window. A cross, painted the black and red and yellow and white of the Papua New Guinea flag, hung on the wall above a man who lay staring up at the ceiling with eyes that were unseeing from cataracts.

Dickie photographed the man's ema­ciated face and sunken, opaque eyes, a dog-eared Bible next to his hand.

He shot him in black and white, in color digital and film, finally two rolls with his Ilolga.

"Ib him who overcometh will I give to eat of the tree of life," the body lying below him said quietly.

The assistant warden, who had walked over to observe Dickie, said, "This man is a New Tribes pastor."

Dickie kept photographing; compos­ing shapes, with light and rows of empty plastic water bottles under the cot, a

fire-blackened pot of rice, the colorfully painted cross on the wall.

"A mighty angel took up a stone and cast it into the sea," the pastor continued, but his voice was so low that Dickie only heard him when he bent down. It occurred to him that the pastor, wandering somewhere in his hal­lucinations, had heard him and the assistant warden and mistakenly imagined he was in front of his congregation and had started preaching. Dickie knelt on the floor and shot the rows of beds at eye level.

"Wow," he said. "Just, wow."

"Tour is over," the assistant warden said.

"But this can't be the whole tour," Dickie said, annoyed, from beliind liis camera. "Tliis was hardly anything. This is just one building."

There was a pause while Dickie kept shooting.

"I should say tiiat you are lucky to have got in here at all."

Dickie glanced up at the assistant war­den. The New Guinean was looking back at him with contempt shot through with a kind of contained, hard violence. The assis­tant warden was standing, perched, on the balls of his feet with his fingers clenched into loose fists. Something like danger or threat slithered up from the floor into Dickie's awareness and became a heavy, tightening pressure in his chest.

"Well, okay. If that's how yon .say it," Dickie said brightly, slowly standing up. "No prob­lem. Let's go."

They walked out of the sick ward and along the road in silence. Dickie still felt afraid, and his heart was pounding. What can this man do to me? Dickie thought. He has a job to worry about. Barnett would lire him, at least, if something happened to me here. As they passed the sweet-potato garden the singing started up again. The sound of the hymns

floating in the sunshine soothed Dickie.

"May I ask why you are taking these pic­tures?" the assistant warden asked when they reached the gate.

"It's just my job," Dickie said, calculating what would be the best answer. "My boss told me to do it."

Ihe assistant warden looked up at him, still hostile, but his eyes full of sonietiiing else that Dickie couldn't read.

As the man turned away and walked up the hill Dickie watched his retreating figure until it disappeared and realized, too late, that it would have made a great shot.

The phone still wasn't working when they got back to the hotel. The woman in cornrows smiled. "This is truly an impossible country, Mr. Bernbaum. But don't worry. Hie lines will be back up later tonight. Or tomorrow morn­ing, I should think."

Dickie stayed in liis rm through dinner so he wouldn't have to see Mally. lie chewed two Ativans and played (Wand Theft Auto on his PSK At 10 the rain lulled him into a shal­low, fitful sleep. Mally woke him around 11, knr and calling his name. She had been drinking and she sUxxl in the hall, smoking, grinning lewdly at him.

"Come on!" she said, pulling so hard on his T-shirt that he stumbled, a little, into the hallway. "Come and meet Norman. We're all having fun and drinking."

Dickie followed her to the open-air din­ing room where the governor, his bald head gleaming in the restaurant's fluorescent light, sat at a table surrounded by a group of Aus­tralian men Dickie had seen around the hotel. The governor was a strange-lking man, much more so than in his photos—he didn't have eyebrows or eyelashes, and his skin was

pitted with acne scars. There was a chill in the air, and the insects and birds throbbed in the distance. Dickie felt them all gazing at liim. lie rubbed his eyes and smiled.

"Iley, how you guys doing?" he asked. "Sony I'm a bit of a mess. I had already sacked out for the night."

"You the seppo who's been crawling around me jail?" the governor asked, his intensely blue eyes looking at Dickie, then Mally, then oil"at a point in the distant night. Barnett had the strongest, most nasal Australian accent Dickie had ever heard.

"Yes, sir," Dickie said. "I really appreciate all your help with the permission."

"Appreciate it, do ya? Y'gonna put ya pic­tures in Time magazine so the punters can go 'B(x) hoo h, look at those poor savages all l<x'ked up and the key thrown away by that nasty old whitey'?"

Dickie smiled. "Something like that, sir."

Mally carried a chair over for Dickie and then sUxxl standing, smoking, watching him.

"Want a drink?" she asked him.

"No, thanks," Dickie said.

"All, Jesus, and he's a pf," Barnett said, and the table erupted in laughter.

"No, no, no, I'll have a beer, I'll have a beer," Dickie said, chuckling along with the men at himself. "Please."

The governor watched Mally walk behind the bar and unlock the refrigerator. I Ie turned and stared at Dickie, taking him in. Then he shook his head.

"I'll tell ya something ya may not have figured out yet, my line young American friend. Yanks are bloody cowards in battle. I Dew combat missions in a RAAK chopper during Vietnam. You've never seen a bunch of jelly-kneed bastards hide from a light like the Yanks."

"Is that right?" Dickie said, grinning, open­ing the beer that Mally put in front of him.

"Yeah, that's right. Seppos're always run­ning from a light. I mean, bloody fucking hell, what are they doing mucking atxnit in Saddam's old bullshit when the real light's in Afghanistan, ay?"

Dickie smiled at the governor. "I just take pictures. I don't know anything. I don't even write my own captions."

"Iraq's a right fucking mess, isn't it? It's all just filthy lucre and oil money for Bush's best mates at Halliburton, ay? I'm a businessman. I get it. I wouldn't do it, but I get it. The only country in the world more corrupt than Papua New Guinea is the United States of America."

Dickie looked around the table at the men, heavyset and burnt from the equatorial sun, flushed from drinking, who were nodding along with Sir Norman. Mally was standing, watching from the bar. Behind her intricately carved shields and masks were lit up by the flickering bulbs hanging from the roof.

"The fucking Yanks are the most destruc­tive, bullying force in the history of the world, by far."

"No doubt," Dickie said, laughing. "Except when we're all knock-kneed and hiding from alight."

Barnett, searching Dickie's face, caught a glimpse inside him. Or at least he under­stood enough to realize that he was being dismissed as so much insignificant bleating from an insignificant blip of a country.

Truth was, Dickie was intensely patriotic. If

he believed in God, he would have believed that America was G<xl's own country, but he knew his work, especially liis war photogra­phy, would be taken much less seriously if he let liis patriotism slip. Not even Tricia knew the extent of his feelings, and it wouldn't occur to him to argue with the Norman Barnetts of the world. lie didn't care what anyone else thought or said on the subject.

"You seppos really are a bunch of smug wankers, aren't ya?"

"Well, honestly, that's one of the kindest things I've heard said about us in a long time, governor." But again, Dickie was smiling. He didn't care.

Mally emerged from the kitchen's swinging doors carrying a plate piled high with French fries and a hamburger and brought it over to Dickie. "I thought you might be hungry," she said with a kind of coy shyness. "Since you missed dinner and everything."

Dickie glanced down at the plate of greasy, delicious-looking food and felt himself blush, deeply, with embarrassment. Mally had just exposed him—had exposed them—to Bar-nett. It hadn't occurred to him that she wouldn't understand the governor, that Mally wouldn't realize how clear-sighted he was. From the moment he walked into the dining room Dickie had felt Barnett's intelligence like a distinct physical presence, sharp and alert, prying, watching everything. The governor seemed like the most calculating man he had ever met, as cunning and suspicious as the old warlords he had photographed last year in Afghanistan who had evaded generations of the Soviets, Taliban and then Americans. The men around the table were disinterest­edly watching the governor for liis reaction. Only Mally, smiling at Dickie as he slowly looked up at her, was oblivious.

"Hey, thanks a lot, Mally," he said. "But I'm not really hungry."

"I just warmed it up for you. Come on, you must be hungry, Dickie. You didn't eat anything."

"Don't be rude," Barnetl said, watching Mally. "The lady was kind enough to bring you dinner."

Dickie nodded and smiled. He saw Mally start, all of a sudden hesitant, maybe a little afraid.

"You're right. Thanks veiy much, Mally," Dickie said.

And it wasn't until he started eating that he realized how hungry he was. Mally brought him another beer, and he half listened to the conversation and watched fat moths flutter­ing around the light fixtures. A New Guinean man came out of the kitchen with a bucket and tx'gan mopping the dining room floor. Dickie got up to leave. He was careful, casually thanking Barnett, who was by now danger­ously drunk, saying a distant g<xxl night to Mally, walking slowly, behaving the way an innocent man might.

It was cool and green, and the sun hadn't bro­ken through the early morning clouds yet. 'Hie smell of coffee and toast and wet earth filled the air. The dining rm was empty, and Dickie looked out at the small creek that flowed past a little open thatch-roof hut that had lx;en built as a folly for the hotel guests. Peter had driven him up to the jail that morning, but

they couldn't get past the gates. The guards had only laughed and asked him for Marl-boros. And the phone lines were still down.

Dickie sipped his coffee and tried to sort through the jumble of thoughts in liis head. He wanted to leave. I Ie had two more assign­ments lined up before the end of the month in the States. Even if he couldn't get through to the magazine by noon he was changing his ticket. He'd leave for Port Moresby on the afternn flight. The magazine would still have to pay his expenses, and he could enter some of the jail photos into contests. lie had decided the trip wouldn't be a total loss.

Mally walked out of the kitchen toward him, canying a press pot of coffee.

"Iley," she said. She was wearing a bright, aqua-colored Patagonia jacket.

"Iley," he said, smiling.

She looked very pretty in the morning light.

"You want to go for a helicopter ride?" she asked him and set the pot down. "Norman's flying out to one of the villages."

"Right now?"

"Well, after I have my coffee."

lie didn't want to go. He sipped his coffee, waiting for a sense of calm reality. His editor would want him to go. He could almost hear

her telling him to get aerial shots. And maybe, alter spending the day together, Barnett would relent and let him go back to the jail. If he could get inside the (Jehuku jail, inside the real jail, the trip would be a success. And anyway, l(X)king out at the sun, which was finally break­ing through this mist, Dickie realized that he was curious to really see the place.

As they got into the hotel's beat-up pickup truck Dickie thought there was sometliing thrilling and larger-than-life alxmt Mally in the morning light and saw how, at a different moment, he might have fallen in love with her. lie took a photo of her in her Kxpos cap and huge sunglasses as she stuck a Joan Arma-trading tape in the stereo and stalled to sing along, her freckled arm shilling the geai's. She sucked down on a cigarette and smiled at him, her blue fingernails sparkling in the sun.

They stopped at the top of a hill in front of a rotted wo(xl fence that was covered with loop­ing circles of razor wire. A guard appeared and opened the gates. They drove past an electri­fied chain-link fence and through a second set of gates. An immaculately manicured tarmac spread like a wide obsidian platter in front of the amphitheater of mountains, proffering up dozens of gleaming helicopters to the equato­rial sky. New Guinean men in brown coveralls chili ed around in the blight sunlight. Forklifts

loaded with barreb and boxes whizzed by, and strains of Metallica floated out from the main hangar where the mechanics were working.

Barnett emerged from the hangar, strid­ing towai'd them, his whole being focused on Mally. The governor glanced at Dickie, liis blue eyes flickering over the younger man's earrings and cameras, his talloos.

"Thank you very much for inviting me along, Sir Norman. I appreciate it."

"Thank me girl here. She wants you to come along, not me. Just tiy not to make a bkxxly nuisance of yourself." But the gover­nor was smiling and shook his hand.

Dickie followed them across the tarmac to a jet helicopter. Barnett had just bought it, Mally said. The inside was luxurious: comfortable black-leather seats, the floor and ceiling cov­ered in soft gray carpeting.

"Not like flying around Iraq, shoved in a Chink with a bunch of shit-scarcd kids, is it?" Barnett said.

"No drink holders in Sadr City, that's for sure," Dickie said, strapping himself into the backseat. Barnett grunted through the head­set to the control tower, and the whole world became the thudding rotor blades vibrating as the helicopter picked itself offthe ground and crawled up into the sky. And then, all of a sudden, Barnett swooped and rushed forward, the helicopter's nose down as they raced toward the mountains.

'They flew over dried-out grassland and sleepy-looking settlements of round, thatch-roofed houses scattered along the foothills. Ribbons of white smoke rose up from where people were working in their gardens. A truck, loaded down with burlap sacks of coffee, bounced along a road. Then they were in a cloud, and the helicopter started climbing again, groaning with effort, until they burst over a sea of dark green waves. Rain forest and blue equatorial sky spread out into the distance.

Dickie had a perfect vantage of Barnett and Mally, like a child in the backseat of a car, watching his parents. lie could see their faces behind their sunglasses, their hands and arms, eveiy expression and movement they made. Barnett with the stick in his hands, Mally glancing from him to the instrument panel, out the window, lighting a cigarette.

Dickie photographed immense water­falls that gushed out of rocky gashes in the mountains and fell hundreds of feet into oblivion. Barnett swooped down into a canyon and followed a swollen brown river, almost touching the whitecaps of its rush­ing surface. Then they were climbing again, passing over a mountain wall.

"Would ya look at the bloody savages. Don't fucking cut the grass and they're bitching and moaning that the missos won't fly out here to pick up their coffee," Barnett muttered into the headset. "Can't land a bloody fixed-wing on this shit."

Ihey circled over an overgrown grassy land­ing strip next to a village that had appeared in the midst of the rain forest. A church with a corrugated aluminum roof and a huge cross made out of white-painted 1 <x'ks sat in the cen­ter of a dozen thatch-roofed huts.

A group of people sUxxl and staled as the helicopter landed. "I've got to fix tilings up with a Big Man here, but then I want to get out quick-hurry-up, so don't you wander off.

I'll leave you for the savages to roast for din­ner," Barnett said. "Don't think I won't."

"Clot it," Dickie said.

The governor, sunglasses flashing, walked over to a group of griin-lking men and began holding forth in the Melanesian patois. Looking around, Dickie thought he had never been in a human habitation as lovely as tills village, surrounded by vast mountains drip­ping with clouds, the whole place full of a kind of soft, green-tinged sunshine. He breathed in the wet smell of the earth and grass. A bird was calling, an eerie high-pitched ka-caw-ana from far off. lie turned to Mally.

"This is so fucking amazing," he said. "Thanks for bringing me out here."

"Yeah," she said, gazing out at the moun­tains. "I guess it is."

A group of children, barefoot and dressed in filthy, falling-apart rags, ran through the over­grown grass to Dickie and Mally. He shk hands with them, and they broke into giggles and beamed into his camera as he took their photo. They followed him and Mally down the airstrip as he shot the village's thatch-roofed houses that were up on stilts, the pandanus trees, a sleeping pig, a group of women sitting together sifting through tan-colored coffee beans, a crashing liver in the distance.

"Look," Mally said. "I'm really sorry if I was weird, the other night when we—you know, the whole tiling—I just really like you. I've been out here for so long, you know? I feel so isolated here and lonely and I don't know what."

"You weren't weird," Dickie lied. "I really like you, too."

Dickie photographed her as she looked at him, her sunglasses pushed back on her head, her huge brown eyes staling into his lens.

She took his right hand and turned it over and kissed his palm, slowly. "Do you really like me, Dickie? You don't have to say you do. It's okay. But I really do like you. Like, I've been fantasizing about coming to New York with you. I mean that's crazy, isn't it? You're married, right?"

Right then he saw that she was pushing a kind of nervous urgency at him, that she wanted him to take her on. He felt, remotely, a kind of pity for her but disdain, Ux), at her helplessness. Did she have no agency at all?

"Iley," he said, laughing, gently pulling his hand back, aware of the crowd of vil­lage kids staring up at them. "What are you doing? Trying to get me in trouble?"

"No, what? These kids? They don't under­stand English."

"No. Not these kids."

"You mean Norman? He's oblivious."

"That, I actually don't think," Dickie said. "I don't think anybody in this place is oblivi­ous about anything."

The helicopter's engine started up and the two of them walked back over the length of the airstrip with the children shouting and laughing behind them. In the distance a woman emerged from behind a woven-bamlxx) and thatch-rfed hut, carrying a weighed-down net bag and firewood on her head. She turned to look at the chopper, and as the light fell on her Dickie saw that she was heavily pregnant; he took her photo.

"Let Mr. Pictures here sit in the front, Mahala," the governor said. "He can have a geez from up here."

"Thanks, governor," Dickie said.

"You want the door back?" "That'd be awesome," Dickie said. Barnctt slid the front door back, latching it against the rear window. With the door gone the unobstructed view was breathtaking, as exquisite as anything Dickie had ever seen. The clouds draped across the mountains constantly shifted in shape and size, thick vertical columns reaching up, flat and rip­pled, golden and puffy like an expanse of cotton. Dickie leaned out and photographed a canyon full of trees that threw fat black roots straight up in the air. It looked like something out of Dr. Seuss to him.

"Aie we going over the prison by any chance?" Dickie asked through the headset. "Nope. But we can do if you'd like." The monotonous chatter through the headset of distant pilots arid control tower operators induced a kind of thoughtless focus in Dickie. He became absorbed in the rain for­est beneath them, picking out colorful birds that fluttered in the treetops, crashing rivers, the thick, vine-draped canopy. lie didn't feel dizzy l(X)king down; the governor was a much

better pilot than any he had flown with in Iraq or Afghanistan. Dickie could just feel it, how much the machine was under the governor's control, how smooth the ride was.

"How old are ya, then, Dickie?" Barnctt asked him absently.

"Twenty-eight next month."

"I was 25 when I first arrived in PNG. Came straight from Vietnam, more or less. Never really left, did I?"

"Do you think you'll ever leave?" Dickie asked, lking at a crashing river winding through a valley below them.

"Well, I've got me condo in Sydney," the governor said and tugged at his harness. "But PNG's in me blood. Can't live any­where else for veiy long."

"It is so beautiful here. I guess beauti­ful isn't even the word, is it?" Dickie had a twinge of missing Tricia, of wishing she could see this with him. Barnctt began talk­ing to the air traffic controller, announcing rapid-fire his flight plans.

The sun got blocked by the clouds and the light turned gray and hazy. The rain forest

seemed endless; it was like being in the mid­dle of the sea. Dickie changed the film in his camera. Without thinking he glanced back at Mally and as he saw her, with her headphones on, looking out the window, it was as though all of a sudden everything was a long way away. It was almost like he was looking at a memory: lie could see the heli­copter's rotors thudding and the instrument panel. Just then the governor glanced over at him with a strangely intent expression on his face. Dickie smiled, but Barnett didn't seem to notice. Suddenly, Dickie became unreason­ably terrified, sure that the governor was going to try to kill him.

Don't be ridiculous, he thought.

"My editor will be thrilled when I tell her about these photos," Dickie said out loud. "This is superb."

The governor didn't respond, and the fiat, calculating expression on his face didn't change. Dickie tried to reassure himself with the thought of how he'd been afraid the assistant warden at the jail was going to poke him with an AIDS-contaminatcd needle and how that had been less than nothing, a cul­tural misunderstanding. And as a blister of brittle, paralyzing agitation burst inside him he decided that it must be post-traumatic stress from Iraq, from Afghanistan, from all of it. He wasn't right in the head.

Without tliinking he fingered the buckle on his harness, the zipper on his camera bag. The staticky sounds in his headset of faraway voices made him nauseous. Dickie wanted to look in the back, to see Mally and say some­thing to her—but all at once he understood there was nothing she could say. Barnett knew they had slept together. And right then the man seemed like a kind of brooding ani­mal to Dickie, beyond reason.

Dickie felt how stupid—how sorry he was. The whole thing seemed as inevitable and fatal as sleepwalking onto a highway. He saw

his death, how Tricia would feel. The shock of loss, the eventual forgetting. Right then it occurred to liim that Iris death was a small thing, minute. How could he not have under­stood how small death was before, even when he was in Iraq, around it every day? It was only being alive that meant anything.

Barnett's rage was like a smell, filling up the chopper. lie swooped down, Hying close to the tree canopy, pitching a little to the side so that Dickie was beneath him. The chopper jerked violently and Dickie's Ilolga, which had been in his lap, ilew out the open door. He realized that if he hadn't strapped in, he would have fallen out too. Dickie felt for his camera bag and began, shaking, put­ting the telephoto lens on his other camera, imagining how pathetic it was to think that he could use it as a weapon; as though he could fight back against this man.

"I don't," he said out loud, surprised at his voice echoing through his headset, "I don't want this. Please." He took a breath and said, loudly, "I'm sorry." Without mean­ing to, Dickie shook his head. Trembling, feeling the tears in his eyes, he repeated, "I'm so sorry. I'm just really so sorry."

The governor didn't reply. lie just sat grim and silent as they made their way over the mountains toward Gehuku. By the time they Hew over the Bena-Bena mission Dickie became aware in some distant part of himself that the danger had passed. The afternoon rains started to come in from the south. The clouds were churning in the Chimbu gap, but there was a clear flight path all the way to town. The governor radioed the tower, telling them his position.

And then all that was there was the thud­ding helicopter and the dense green rain forest beneath them, pulsing with barely contained life.

There was something thrilling and larger-than-life about Mally in the morning light, and he saw how, at a different moment, he might have fallen in love with her.