You won’t find the Jade Lily Cafe on any tourist map or Michelin Guide. Its fading facade and sputtering neon loom over a particularly brutal back alley of Chiangpalopo, teetering precariously on stilts above the festering, grey-green Salwiyawaddirakiso River. Those who know it avoid it. And those who don’t know it - well, trust me; if you’ve never heard of the Jade Lily, you’ve got no business there.
The day was steaming, a dung-and-curry scented sauna with a broken thermostat. Through the greasy, cracked windows of the Jade Lily the sounds and smells of the river drifted like a reeking, rattling fever dream, enveloping the three men and two woman huddled around a battered rattan table. Fate, ideology, and lives as splintered, tangled and twisted as the ancient wicker chairs they sat on had brought them all to Chiangpalopo, each along their own dark path.
Stageleft leaned back in his sweat-stained camo gear and shook his head wearily. It had been a long haul from the tundra to the tropics, and the change from ice to spice was taking its toll.
“It’s been three days now, folks,” he rasped. “I want to make this work. I really do. But if we can’t figure out how to achieve benevolent world domination, then there are other places I need to be.” He folded his arms. “There’s a dozen good ideas on the table. I really like the subliminal messages encoded in Scrabble tiles. But I don’t believe…”
Treehugger listened intently, piercing aquamarine eyes glittering through the gold pince-nez below the brim of his broad brimmed panama hat. They knew little of Treehugger. Abducted in his infancy by itinerant gypsies, schooled in acrobatics and prestidigitation, a childhood of performances before the crowned heads of Europe, recruitment by an unnamed intelligence bureau, years of anonymous service in black ops - the usual story. Many thought his name arose from a sentimental commitment to environmentalism. But those who knew him best whispered of a wilder, darker tale - rumours of forbidden love for a shy, smooth-barked Dutch elm, a passion tragically blighted by her long and lingering disease and cut short by her untimely demise. He never spoke of that tree. But he always wore a single toothpick around his neck on a gold chain, and some nights, he would gaze upon it in the moonlight, and weep.
Balbulican was sitting back slightly from the table, fingers steepled, a trickle of heat sweat running slowly from beneath his green Pang hat and dripping to his impeccable white silk suit. He had always been a bit of a mystery. At various time he had claimed to be named for Balbulica, a small Mediterranean island south of Malta; for a double-stemmed goblet used in wedding ceremonies; for a lesser known demon from the sixth circle of hell; and for a washed-up British popstar of the sixties. His presence in Chiangpalopo was equally obscure, although the most persistent of the rumours had him either trading in the interior with the Bundangamo for the hides of endangered species, or field recording their chants for the Ethnology Department of Trinity College, Dublin - or both, and more.
“It still seems to me,” said Balbulican, “That we can’t do anything until we all agree on a consensual formulation of the fundamental principles of governance to be incorporated into the paradigm we collectively…”
From behind the bar, Max Cheung nodded vigorously. Her years as a martial arts instructor in Mao’s Fourth Revolutionary Women’s Battalion (White Tiger Platoon) had done little to improve her English, but she recognized the cadence of a good political rant. There was nothing she loved better, in fact; you could practically see the ecstatic shudder that ran through her with every “bourgeoisie”, “jackal”, or “proletariat”.
Then a ruby-handled, engraved obsidian ceremonial ulu sliced through the air and quivered in the table.
“You men.” Silence fell immediately around the table, broken only by the chatter of the one-eyed tattooed albino macaw perched above the bar. When Lily Cheung spoke, everyone listened. And not just because she owned the cafe and kept the tabs.
“You goddamned men. You always manage to make everything so complicated. Look. It’s simple. We need to answer one question. We all just want people to be nicer to each other, or if they can’t be nicer, just to leave each other alone. Right? I mean, if that happens the political issues and economic issues sort themselves out, right? So cut the academic bullshit and all the political rhetoric!”
She glared once around the table.
“Just focus on the question. Right? What should we be doing? Just WHAT the HELL should we be DOING?”
The echoes of her voice faded, and strangely, so did the clatter of the city and the river outside.
And then in the expectant silence, like the voice of the Cosmos, a single word rang out. Not a “word”, exactly - it was nothing more than the ship’s horn of a rusting Malay freighter, a decaying hulk limping upriver, laden with some unknown, rotting cargo for some unspeakable cluster of abandoned humanity nestled by the foul river’s banks.
But sometimes the Cosmos speaks in unexpected ways - through a child’s laughter, or the sound of wind through palms, or even, occasionally, in the quavering, spectral moan of a tired tramp freighter’s horn.
And the ship’s horn said:
“BLLLLAAAAAAAWWWWWWG…”
