The Devil Tree Read Free Page A

pounding on the floor while the rest of my family, the respectable ones, sit upstairs ignoring the tumult. I don’t know what to do about my lunatic—destroy him, keep him locked in the cellar, or set him free.
    Since I left home I have been a vagrant, an outcast, living always in the present. Often I have regretted I was not brought up in the Catholic faith. I have yearned to confess, to have my broken inner autonomy cemented by means of union with that two-thousand-year-old institution of moral authority. But I have also realized that, however mystical, no church and no sacrament can protect me against the ultimate threat to my vital existence: losing the sense of my own being. Now, back at home, therefore, I must confront my past. Karen told me that she envied other people their pasts; she did not say she envied me mine.
    If focused on closely, any moment of my life—even the one that has just ended—telescopes all that I need to know about myself, contains all my chances for the present and my prospects for the future. My past is the only firmament worth knowing, and I am its sole star. It is as haunting and mysterious as the sky overhead, and as impossible to discard.
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    On the crossroads outside Bangkok, during my playful moments I used to wait for the villagers to drive their carts home from the market.
    The drivers, who smoked opium all day, trusted theirdonkeys to find the way home, so by the time the carts reached the place where I waited, the men were asleep. As each cart approached, I would leap out of my car and patiently turn the donkey around without waking his driver; then I would watch the donkey trot away with the cart. One day I turned twenty carts around. Was I an instrument of each driver’s fate, or were these drivers instruments of mine?
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    Some opium smokers rely only on raw opium; some mix it with dross; some, like me, have enjoyed both. Opium is unlike certain other drugs or narcotics in that one does not need to keep on increasing its strength or dosage in order to enjoy it. Whether with dross or without, opium gave me a sense of wisdom and balance, a spiritual tranquillity I had not known before I began to smoke and have not experienced since I’ve been disintoxicated.
    Although smoking opium provides you with a sense that things are safe and predictable, the stuff itself seems crazy; it won’t light up near the sea, it loses strength in the snow, it drips when the air is humid, and its potency changes from day to day. Opium does other weird things. In a man, it slows his sex drive but speeds up his heartbeat. In a woman, it slows her blood but speeds up her lovemaking. With time no longer your jailer, each pipe frees you: you inhabit a space where waterfalls turn into ice, ice turns into stone, stone turns into sound, sound turns into color, color becomes white, and white becomes water.
    Maybe because opium is so unpredictable—only one pipe in ten producing the effect one desires—you never feel like an addict when you reach for the pipe, for the stuffmight again refuse to please you. And when, like me, you don’t smoke it anymore, you are not a past addict; you have merely abandoned opium.
    I met Barbara, a Princeton dropout, in Rangoon. I introduced her to opium and she introduced me to several American and British expatriates, among them a Mrs. Llewellyn, who had remained in Rangoon alone after her husband, a British civil servant, had died there. One day Mrs. Llewellyn invited Barbara and me to lunch at her house, which stood sheltered by tall trees on a hill overlooking the Gulf of Martaban.
    During lunch Barbara complained to Mrs. Llewellyn about the hotel we lived in, and when the old lady suggested that we stay in her house while she went to visit an ailing friend in another town for two or three days, we gladly accepted her invitation. Once a week a Burmese servant and his helper would come to clean the house, the garden, and the