Where God Divided by Zero 1

                      “In my third novel there is an actual black hole that swallows everything
                        you love.”
                                                                                                              Jonathan Lethem

Kathmandu was the traveler’s black hole. It bent light, defied time, and devoured mass unperceived, until no energy remained. The only thing the outside world ever saw was charge and spin. I spent another week in Kat, but I couldn’t account for all of it. A fever woke me, the morning after my thirtieth birthday. I hoped it wasn’t an inauspicious sign.
Dan and I cycled down to the Indian Embassy to get permits for Darjeeling, had my thangka authenticated at the archeology office, and spent the rest of the day repenting, consuming Hemingway as my candle consumed itself. Tenzing was trying to get me a permit to go with him to Bhutan, and Robyn and Julie would leave the next day for Rajasthan. It was our last daybreak. The dogs had howled all night.
We didn’t say much. Just after noon, I went with them to the bus station. The bus left two streams of tears as it pulled out. My batteries used the last electrons to get back to meet Tenzing at the Earth House. It would take twenty days to process his application. I told him I didn’t have it in me to wait that long. He told me we could go to Tibet instead.
Bruce and Terry were holding forth at a medieval banquet at Niryana’s that evening. I was at their table, but in a different place.
The next day Tenzing brought me good news. His friend in the First Secretary’s office at the Chinese Embassy could get me a visa to Tibet for a small financial consideration, six photos, and a fifteen day wait. I said that would be fine. The following morning he returned to tell me that, no, we couldn’t get to Tibet, but that was not a problem either. He would come with me to Darjeeling. I said that would be fine.
My fever broke the next morning. I came down the stairs into the Earth House restaurant, and couldn’t find a place to sit. The entire room was pulsating with overstuffed traveler’s consuming pancakes, cappuccinos, and platters of their own mythology. It was time to go.
At sunset Tenzing and I walked past the hanging bats and their soft migrations down Rajput, to buy a bus ticket to the eastern border town of Karkavita. Just one. Tenzing said he understood, but I could tell he had hoped this friendship would be special. And it was. Because I’m telling you now that it was. This heart, I know, To be long loved was never framed, For something in its depths doth glow, Too strange, too restless, too untamed. Tenzing said he understood, but it was a Tibetan understanding.
He met me at the bus next afternoon, and put a scarf over my neck.
“Tashi delek.” I said. Thank you. He grinned. And was gone too.
The rattrap was full of foreigners. There was Doug and Mike, two soft-spoken Midwesterners, a Dutch couple, an English traveler, and a Canadian girl with long blond hair and a button nose. I actually slept most of the night despite the chai stops, Hindi nyah-nyah music, and bone-jarring potholes and gear changes. An old Indian babu held us up for an hour to look for his shoe. It was gone. As were we. Our bus pulled into Karkavita just after dawn.
I called out the back of my rickshaw to tell Button Nose she had forgotten to get stamped out of Nepal. An hour later she arrived in time for the last seat on the sardine Siliguri Express. Before she even sat down, she had asked for my address. I was to discover that she was a collector. The second request was to change seats with me. Her third was for me to understand that she had a boyfriend. He had returned to Europe without her. I was to discover the logic of that that.
Button Nose was an Upper Canada rich spoiled helicopter ski brat, pretending to be a student in a Swiss private school, and a flounder out of water in India. This was not the garden party she signed up for, and I would end up wearing every weed-whacked shred of her disapproval. No matter where she was, she wanted to be anywhere but where she was.
In Siliguri we piled into a collective taxi for the last three-hour climb to Darjeeling. A chubby German girl filled the vehicle. Button Nose asked for her address.
We ascended through tea plantations and dense alpine forests of sal and oak. There were orchids. The snow peaks of the Mahabharat Himalayas appeared on the horizon, and Kanchenjunga loomed in the distance.
Our taxi coughed into the cold thin air of a colonial hill station. We plodded past the Planter’s Club and several mock Tudor residences, and shuddered to a stop in front of an old Gothic church. Button Nose and I walked through Chowrasta Square, to the fortress enclosure of the Welkin Hotel. There would be wired barbs inside the barbed wire. We put our packs on opposite sides of the room, and turned to face each other.
“Let’s go to a movie!” She said. OK. So I took her to The Rise and Fall of Idi Amin. It was a romantic comedy, compared to the vibe in the seat beside me.
We retraced our path, for sag paneer and a cup of cold tea, with Doug and Mike, at Gleneary’s. Button Nose got their addresses.
“You do alright for yourself.” Came the voice over my left shoulder. I turned to find Adera and Alan, from Naggar Castle, still trekking the Himalayas, trying to get home.
“I have a boyfriend in Switzerland.” Said Button Nose, not making it any better. Adera smiled. We left them later to roll out our sleeping bags. I turned to say good night but she was already facing away, zipped tight. The last traveler had left a book on my night table. Darkness at Noon.
It was even colder next morning. I awoke to the frozen fractals of my own breath.
“I need laundry soap!” She said, and bolted out the door. I shaved and showered, and emerged to find her back.
“They won’t take my rupees.” She said.
“They’re Nepali.” I observed.
“But they’re still rupees.” She insisted. I took her down to Grindlay’s to change money. She befriended two more travelers in the bank, a large pale English girl named Mary, and an American nurse, whose name got lost in her rapidly burgeoning collection of addresses. Somehow, we all ended up eating brunch with a petite, opinionated, and stubborn South African girl named Sue. Blah blah blah.
“Let’s all go to the tourist office!” This was where Button Nose discovered that a permit was required to visit Kalimpong. She didn’t really want to visit Kalimpong. She just wanted the permit. I waited for her in the square, and found a horse rental place. Now this was something I thought any blue-blooded silver spoon gentrified girl would enjoy.
“I’ve got some good news.” I said, when she returned, and told her about the equine excursion I had booked.
“Oh, no.” She said. “I never ride horses.” I was about to make some remark about hymen preservation, but the need for explanation would have been too difficult.
“Let’s go to a movie!” She said. All the adolescent Indian boys in the theatre watched Button Nose watch The Kidnapping of the President. I was pulling for the terrorist.


                               “Now there's a look in your eyes,
                                 Like black holes in the sky.”
                                                                Pink Floyd