Exiles Read Free Page A

past few days of packing and traveling seemed vaguely hallucinatory. He ducked his head lower into his sleeping bag. The bag was dirty and torn, with duct-taped patches and tiny plumes of Polarguard geysering out here and there. The bag was three or four years older than his daughter. He’d slept in it as a young man, climbing in Yosemite and Joshua Tree and at Smith Rock; he’d slept in it in the Olympic Mountains and the Cascades and the Sierra, and in the Great Basin country and the Sonoran Desert. Over time it had taken on his smells and absorbed the smoke of innumerable camp-fires. Wherever he found himself, the bag had always felt like home.
    At least until now. His sense of dislocation was stronger than it had ever been, so strong that even familiar things seemed alien.
    He lay on a hard bed four thousand feet above sea level, in a valley surrounded by mountains that brushed outer space. His room held only the bed, a wooden chair, and a battered dresser.The walls were covered in a chalky green wallpaper, some of which had peeled off in strips so fine they lay on the dusty floor in filaments. An empty glass stood on the dresser, though when Peter looked more closely he saw that it wasn’t completely empty; a spider had spun a web inside it and waited there for insects that never came. It hung now, a desiccated husk, in its own trap.
    His side hurt, so he rolled over. There, on the gray-striped mattress in front of his face, lay the traveling pouch he wore around his neck. Passport, two credit cards, medical license, medevac card, dollars and rupees. He opened the passport and studied the picture, which had been taken seven years earlier but already looked like some other person, someone enthusiastic and hopeful. The physical particulars hadn’t altered much: a few fine worry lines creasing the forehead, the early warning signs of jowlish softening, dark hair shot through with gray—though in the photo it was pulled into a ponytail that had since been cut off.
    The change was mainly in the eyes. There was an eagerness in the man in the photo, and Peter hadn’t seen that look in the mirror for some time. It had been replaced by the steady, resigned gaze of a guy who had grown used to getting through the day on stamina instead of joy.
    He missed joy, in fact, yearned for it. It troubled him, sometimes, that he found it in the company of his daughter but rarely anywhere else. He suspected that a broader distribution might be healthy. This would be easier if the rest of the world were as funny and peculiar and engaging as she was.
    As if the world had a response to this thought, the door popped open and Alex stood there, encased in her own mummy bag and peering out from under the hood.
    “Make room,” she said crossly. Peter slid over. She hopped to his bed and fell in beside him, her teeth chattering dramatically. “You and your goddamn wall map,” she said.
    He watched the breath steam out of him. “You threw the fucking dart. If you wanted warm, you should have aimed at Fiji.”
    “I didn’t aim,” she said. “That was the point.”
    “What you mean is you didn’t aim
well.
”
    “We’re in a country with a king,” she said. “An actual king, and Maoists in the mountains.”
    “You read your guidebook,” he said testily. He sat up and rubbed his eyes. “Let’s get our big butts out of this meat locker.”
    “Speak for your own butt.”
    “My butt speaks for itself,” he said, and farted. She shrieked with disgust, rolled off the bed, and hopped back to her room. A few minutes later they met on the landing in their fleece, ready to explore the place in daylight.
    A hallway circled the stairs and led to Alex’s bedroom, which overlooked the back garden. Downstairs, to the left as they faced the front door, a capacious living room ran the length of the house. It held a rattan couch, a few chairs, and a couple of dusty glass-topped coffee tables. Alex dragged her finger along the surface of one of