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emotional roller coaster. It becomes a fascination to see how the great Ferris wheel of Self gets stuck with you strapped into the top seat with your legs dangling over the void.
    How different would life have been if I had not flown to Nepal that morning?
Totally, totally different
, I mutter as I take a toke.
Would you do it any differently today?
I ask the haggard face in the mirror with the funnel-shaped joint hanging from its lips.
No
, I tell the poor distraught fellow staring back at me,
for then I would never have met Tietsin
. With the detachment of the truly psychotic I start to cackle, then double over, whether in genuine hilarity or some caricature thereof is hard to say:
I wouldn’t have missed him for the world
, I say, cackling and shaking my head,
not for the world, damn him
. And all of a sudden he is there, large as life, in the men’s room with me, in his old parka jacket unzipped at the front, his long gray hair in a ponytail, his straggly beard somehow comic, his eyes rolled back, revealing only the whites. “Your problem is you’re not remembering in enough detail,” he explains. “Your Western blood makes you superficial—go deeper in. What have you got to lose?”
    “Oh, nothing,” I say with theatrical emphasis. “Only my mind, and there’s not much left of that, is there?” But of course he was a hallucination and has disappeared like mist.
    •   •   •
    In Nepal we don’t fly through clouds, because the clouds have rocks in them
.
    The guidebook used this quote from a Royal Nepal Airlines pilot to open the section on Nepalese geography. The poorest country on earth is also the most vertical. Anyway, why would you worry about national resources when you have Everest? Overachievers from developed countries pay tens of thousands of dollars to get frostbite, lose limbs, and die at twenty-nine thousand feet, so they can call themselves
summiteers
. I also learned, for the first time, that Mr. Everest was a humble surveyor of the British Empire who really did not want the biggest rock on earth named after him, and neither did anyone else within a radius of ten thousand miles, since they had had their own names for the mountain for a good five thousand years before the ever-ready Everest turned up with his theodolite: Chomolungma (Mother of the Universe) in Tibetan; Sagar-martha (Goddess of the Sky) in Nepali.
    Take a tip from me: if you’re approaching Nepal from East Asia, try to get a window seat on the right. I’d never seen the Himalayas before, and they come up on you disguised as clouds, delicate white wispy things at first, you think, until it dawns on you: it’s not a cloud, it’s not a mountain, it’s fifteen hundred miles of wall many miles high built by gods as a six-star dwelling place (there is no other rational explanation). As we landed I felt Vikorn’s genius and influence evaporate after holding my spirit prisoner for more than a decade. He was vicariously out of his depth too.
    But as a cop, I could not help falling in love with the airport. It’s the only one I’ve found that insists on throwing your luggage through a security machine
after
landing; but the good news is the machine doesn’t work, probably never has, and anyway the guy with the knitted topi on his head sitting behind it chatting to a friend probably wouldn’t know what to do with a sizzling little electronic device if he found one. Outside, there was the usual collection of hustlers, hotel runners, half-legal taxis, and ragged people who like to watch planes land and take off. On a whim I grabbed a taxi hustler with a rag tied around his head and such an array of astrological charms and charts all over the windows and roof of his cab he put your average Bangkok cabbie to shame. His eyes were black oil wells with insane flecks of red. His name was Shiva, of course.
    Shiva wanted to know where I was staying. After studying the guidebook I narrowed the short list down to two: the five-star