The Secret Garden

Today I went in search of the Korean Airlines office in a quest to reconfirm my flight on Thursday, bound eventually for Seattle. I want to make damn sure I’m going home (or somewhere like it) in the near future.

I am sharing a hotel room with Abe and a pigeon. Abe is mostly a good companion but the pigeon flutters around the fire escape all night and keeps me up. I am also kept awake by visions of the nightmarish novel The Road by Cormac McCarthy. Before I attempt sleep I read the following warning “Just remember that the things you put into your head are there forever.You might want to think about that… you forget what you want to remember and you remember what you want to forget.” I slip into sleep only to see the ashen landscape of the novel in my nightmares, so I pick the book up again and read it by headlamp, like some poison I can’t stop devouring. The boy in the novel ponders “Why did I have that scary dream?” and his father replies “I don’t know. But it’s ok now. I’m going to put some wood on the fire. You go to sleep.” I think about whether I’m more like the boy or more like the father. Freud would say that I wear a beard because I am still a child underneath it. The pidgeon flutters and coos eerily in the darkness.

The next morning I awake and search for the Korean Airlines office, my mind ravaged by sleep deprivation. I wander around and enquire for directions until I eventually get what I want. The lady at the counter remembers me from four months ago when I last visited the office, is polite and waives the fee for changing the ticket, a gift of 100 dollars. She informs me though that once I get back into the US I will have to deal with Alaskan Airlines and try to change THAT ticket without paying a fee. “Welcome home to the USA—land of the fee” I say and she gives me a knowing smile, perhaps in comprehension of my pun and shares her experience with an American-run airline that recently charged her a fee to use the bathroom in flight.

I leave the building with Abe and we eat sushi in a restaurant nearby, careful to avoid meat. We eat what’s not quite sushi and I remember Laurel’s wisdom about how when you travel it’s never as good or as bad as you expect.

We walk toward home and pass by the Royal Palace of the King of Nepal, now converted into a museum by the Maoist-run government. Seeing as how King Birendra and all of his family have now been dead almost 10 years, it seems like the time is right to make money on the whole affair. We pass the long line for admission, Abe lights a cigarette on a flag-pole and we walk on down the road. It’s a normal day.

We then pass the “Garden of Dreams.” I have no idea what this place is except to say that I once poked my head in there with Fabrizio and we both agreed that it would be a place better visited with a chick. But I don’t have a chick. I have Abe and a pigeon. So we pay 2 dollars admission and walk in. It’s not too much. Just enough to keep the locals out, the thought behind the place now in line with the sentiments of those who constructed it, members of the Royal Family.
After walking around the magnificent garden, the whole place modeled on Greek architecture and culture, we are able to construct a story out of the scattered facts we gather from signs in English and mutterings of blasé tour-guides and guards. Apparently the place was built in the 1920s when some relative of the King won a bet on a card game for an astronomical sum of money—this no doubt all taking place while people starved outside in the streets. The garden was built and then it went into disrepair for many years, becoming overgrown and green—becoming a secret. It was set to be demolished when someone decided to do some gardening and open it back up for tourists. The statue of the goddess Nike was mutilated and made to look like Lakshmi, and the whole place became a tourist attraction for wealthy Nepalis and Americans below the poverty line, who are the only Americans who could be comfortable enough in squalor to spend long periods living in Kathmandu.

Abe and I take out our separate books and read for awhile, neither of us comfortable with the fact that we are there in this secluded, romantic, fountain strewn flower garden with just each other for company. He looks up from White Tiger and says “you’re gay.”

“You’re gay.” I reply. Also he looks like Jay Buhner with his goatee and Mariner’s hat. But I don’t say that. I’m too enshrouded in the post apocalyptic future of Cormac McCarthy. The protagonist of the novel reminds me of my own father the way he picked the boy up out of the snow. I remember being picked up out of the snow. Or maybe I’m the father and my father is the boy. I remember cooking Ramen for my dad as he lay dying in the tent, our roles reversed, myself now the care provider.

ME: What flavor of Ramen do you want Dad?
Jack: (inside the tent, sounding weak) I’ve got news for you. There are no flavors of Ramen. They all taste like salt.

The book’s echoes of fatherly wisdom stimulate these thoughts. Maybe the boy is someone I don’t know yet. This is what I think before I’m interrupted by Abe. He wants to go get some coffee at the Secret Garden Restaurant.

We sit down at their little café and order—Abe gets an espresso and I get an Irish Coffee. It comes out and we sit there reading our separate books. We are approached by a Dutch Girl whom I had asked to join us for dinner on the previous night. She never showed.

“Oh hey I am so sorry we didn’t meet you the other night. You must have waited?”

“It’s cool. Eventually we ordered dinner. Actually we were feeling ok about it. It relieved us of the pressure of having to be funny and entertaining and so we just sat there and ate like cave men, which was what we wanted to do anyway.”

“Oh! Well, I’m glad!”

Later Abe would tell me that he thought she was probably lying. I told her that I felt she was probably speaking the truth, after all, girls suck at finding stuff. I told him that there’s 2 things I hate: 1) people who are intolerant of other cultures and 2) the dutch. I was availing myself of the opportunity to quote Austen Powers, something I do when I can. He laughed and we considered the matter closed.

Seconds later, a strong breeze disturbed the quiet of the roses and the still surfaces of the coy ponds, rustling the leaves of the nearby bamboo grove, planted there to shield the royal eye from the news of Kathmandu. The breeze blows a glass from the adjoining table and it breaks on the floor. This is the problem with a sanctuary. It can never fully shelter anyone from anything--it definitely can't shelter me from the guilt of having eaten three meals by the time the beggars on the street were rustling their cardboard shanties, waking from the restless and cold night. The car horns of the street are still audible in the distance as a Newar woman crouches at our feet to sweep the glass shards into a corner where they can’t hurt anyone of importance. She hunches over with one hand behind her back and stoops to reshuffle the dust on the floor. Her clothes are dirty.

How amny times can a man turn his head and pretend that he just doesn't see? For us, today, at least 7 or 8 times.