LATER, this is the moment Jude will return to again and again, when he stands two customers from the teller in a bank awash with fluorescent light and Thai chatter, looks down at the pair of hundred-dollar bills in his hand, and sees that one of them is darker than the other. He frowns, shifts his shoulder bag, and holds them up to look. On the right, an anaemic Franklin, worn smooth by dozens of thumbs; on the left, a chiaroscuro of wrinkles and jowls. Jude checks the dates: 2001, 2005. Okay then, he thinks, but he can’t stop looking.

     He compares the Treasury seals, the typeface, and the signatures. He reverses the bills and checks the clock dial and thin trees of Independence Hall. Both are darker and more detailed on the left-hand bill, in a fine-lined ink that makes Jude think of old Dutch woodcuts. On the right, again, the image is blurred and pale.

     A dark-suited man gathers up a stack of baht from the counter and steps away to be replaced by the broad woman just before Jude. Jude looks again at the two bills and his heart begins to speed. Is he actually considering that one may be a counterfeit? The thought seems absurd, but then he thinks how easily Daw Mai Mai could have been sold a phoney banknote inside Burma – a North Korean super-note perhaps. He thinks of paper quality and crumples the edge of one bill and then the other between his fingertips. The same.

     The absurdity strikes him again – Jude the Midwestern philosophy major, worrying about a Thai jail sentence for counterfeiting – and he bites back a smile. He lives too much in his head, he knows, blowing up hypotheses and imaginings. The bills read ‘legal tender’; surely they are.

     And yet, he thinks, the consequences if he’s wrong. He looks to the bank’s door, where a young Thai man stands smiling with his blue jacket, cap, and gun.

     Ahead, the broad woman slips a roll of baht into her handbag and signs her name to a form. The bank is quieter now, the remaining conversations muted by carpet and air-conditioning. If the money were his, Jude could leave the line, think, and come back tomorrow. But he imagines trying to explain in Daw Mai Mai’s five-hundred-word vocabulary that the last of her money might be a fraud, and for what? The comparison of an old bill to a new? To half-remembered hundreds from birthdays and Christmases?

     ‘Sir?’ the teller asks, and the suddenness of her English makes him jump. It’s not too late, he knows. He can make an excuse. He can walk away.

     Instead he thinks, come on, Jude, be rational, and steps up to the counter as if stepping onto a stage.

     ‘Sà-wàt-dee krup,’ he says to the teller, smiles wide, and hands her the bills.

 

*   *   *

 

Robin loved to tease him about his claims of shyness, and he loved to hear it. The truth was, Jude had surprised himself each time: asking to join her in the sickly sweet shade of a blooming Russian olive, where she sat reading a Louis L’Amour novel and chewing the end of her long, yellow braid; asking her to join him as he walked the trails, his binoculars dangling between them; asking her to a dinner of vegetarian sushi, and, weeks later, to bed.

     ‘There are days,’ he told her as she lay beside him, ‘when I try to just pretend I’m not shy. A will-power thing.’

     ‘So how many days do you have to pretend you’re not shy before you’re just not shy?’ she asked, smiling, her hair loose and spread beneath her like a blond lagoon.

     ‘A lot.’ The truth was this had been his project for years, yet he kept butting up against something stubborn in his own nature, in the comfort he took in a shut-up afternoon of web design or a Saturday morning in the still woods, waiting for a glimpse of a Swainson’s Thrush or a Sharp-shinned Hawk.

     ‘Like I said,’ he whispered, dipping his fingers into that pool of hair, ‘will power.’

     On their fourth date she had taken him back to her apartment to show him her Elvis lamp, her classic Godzilla posters, and the vintage model horses she restored for sale on eBay.

     ‘The biggest problem with this town,’ she said without a trace of irony, ‘is that they don’t keep the Hobby Lobby open late enough,’ and even as Jude laughed, he suspected that he was falling in love, and when he stepped forward to kiss her and felt the way she shivered in his arms, he was sure of it.

     In a fit of honesty the following week, Jude listed his liabilities to her – his baby-fat face and paper-pale skin, the long hours of web design for shitty part-time pay, the long weekends of birdwatching and introspection, his annex-room abutting the house of his father, a widowed Unitarian minister – but she only nodded solemnly and then pointed out her widening hips, her thousand cousins and collection of Disney lunchboxes, and then squeezed his thigh and said, ‘I think I can make do.’ But the greatest problem, his departure, they left unspoken, and it lay between them this way for months.

     ‘You understand that this can’t really happen,’ he said to her much later, long after it was too late and apropos of nothing, but still he knew she followed. ‘I’m still leaving in January and I won’t be back for a year.’

     ‘What if you stay?’ she asked. It was a cold Wisconsin night and they lay beneath his comforter in the glow of each other’s bodies, and for a long moment all he could think was, I do not want to leave this space. But he thought, too, of the people he’d been promising to help for a year now, of his great experiment to test his ethics in the field and of what he might write when he returns, of the endless postponements for his father’s prostate scare and Jude’s own lack of funds, of the florid emails of scrambled English: Mr Jude, thank you for want to help Internet teacher with so very important democracy, justice and human right. Many Burmese people very much need to talk on Internet about human right and brutal thug dictatorship. Mr Jude, when will you come?

     ‘I love you,’ Robin said, ‘you love me.’

     Jude rolled on his back to stare at the ceiling.

     ‘Listen, maybe we’d better be ready to forget that.’

     ‘Oh, right,’ Robin said, sitting up. ‘Will power.’ After a minute, she climbed out of bed and began to dress and the cold air leaked under the cover from every corner.

     ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I love you. I love you but I also have to do this thing, I have to do it, and I don’t know what to do.’ He expected this to soften her, but still she put on her socks and then her boots and only then did she turn to look at him.

     ‘I don’t know what to do either,’ she said. ‘But I think I’d better go.’

     He spent the next two hours writing her an email about his actions, reaching deep back into his philosophy BA for Kant’s categorical imperative and Nagel’s possibility of altruism, and then he deleted it all and wrote I love you and I’m sorry and please come back. He clicked ‘send’, laid his head on the mouse pad, and cried.

     An hour later, he heard a knock on his window and turned and there she was in cap and coat with the snow coming down all around her.

     ‘Sà-wàt-dee kaa,’ she said, practising.

 

*   *   *

 

The teller is older, with shockingly black hair and red nails, and she doesn’t return Jude’s smile as she takes his passport and the two hundreds and slides him a bilingual form. As she rises to make photocopies, Jude starts to write, but then hesitates at the blank for his Thai address. Though Daw Mai Mai has registered with the United Nations through the camps, his other students are in the country illegally, and to write their address would needlessly endanger them. He himself is risking deportation doing volunteer work on his tourist visa for an unofficial organisation. Jude tries to remember the last intentional lie he told before his trip, and can’t. He thinks of Kant’s insistence that one should tell even a murderer the true location of an intended victim, yet in truth, this has always struck Jude as one of Kant’s stupider ideas, and so finally he shrugs, apologises inwardly to der Allzermalmende, and writes No. 1 Guest House, a name he saw beside the bus station.

     The teller returns and sets aside his passport and its photocopy. She takes up the darker of the hundred-dollar bills and then the lighter, looks from one to the other, and frowns. She lifts a bill in each hand, framing them against the ceiling’s lights. Jude watches her for a long minute and then forces his eyes back to the exchange form. He writes his hometown, his state, his country, and the passport number he’s conscientiously memorised. He signs his name, and when he looks up, the woman is still staring at the lighter bill.

     Should he say something now, he wonders. Ask if she sees anything wrong, mention his own uncertainty about the bill? Yet how could he explain giving it to her without warning in the first place? This is what he should’ve done from the beginning, he realises – handed her the bill and asked her to check it for him. But again, he thinks, he’s being ridiculous; of course the bank has to check foreign currency.

     Jude’s teller says something quick and hard in Thai to the teller beside her and flicks on a lamp that bathes her workspace in purple. She puts the hundreds into the beam and studies them in much the same way he’s seen local medics check slides for malaria, squinting as she moves them up and down and left and right to see from one angle and then another. Jude looks down at the counter to see that his hands are trembling and moves them to his side. In his bag, he has a magazine piled in with the latest HTML worksheets, and he wonders if he should flip through it to create a more casual air. How would a real counterfeiter handle this? he asks himself, but the thought only sets his hands shaking harder.

     The teller frowns at the lamp, switches it off, and says something else to the woman beside her that makes them both laugh. She takes the bills and places them back on the counter beside Jude’s passport, and Jude feels the muscles relaxing in his legs and chest.

     ‘Okay, then?’ he asks, his smile genuine now. ‘Now I get baht?’

     ‘Please-sir-wait,’ she says, running the words together without inflection. She uncaps a pen and makes a tiny yellow check mark on each bill. On the paler of the bills, and only on the paler, the check mark slowly, irrevocably, fades to black.

     ‘What is that?’ Jude asks.

     The teller says nothing to him but turns her head to the left, eyes always fixed on Jude, and calls to the back room in Thai. He looks down the counter. The other tellers have stopped their transactions and are watching him, fascinated.

     A man with a receding hairline and a managerial air steps forward and speaks quickly with the teller and the only word Jude can understand is ‘A-may-rí-gaa.’ After a moment, the man straightens.

     ‘Excuse me, sir, where is this money from?’

     ‘Wisconsin,’ Jude says as one security guard and then another step up unsmiling beside him. ‘America. Is there some kind of problem?’

 

*   *   *

 

Because Aaron, the volunteer coordinator, had warned him to treat older students with deference, and because Daw Mai Mai made such a show of greeting Jude each morning before class and cooking for him after, it was three days before it occurred to him to call on her during the lesson. They were still going over computer parts and so he pointed to the monitor and asked, ‘Daw Mai Mai, what do you call this in English?’ and she exploded.

     ‘No, Teacher!’ She threw up her hands as if in panic. ‘I cannot speak! I cannot learn!’

     Jude stared at her as the teenager beside her giggled and then turned to the boy and said, ‘Okay … Kyaw Nyunt?’

     ‘Teacher,’ the boy said, becoming solemn, ‘I do not know.’

     ‘She is crazy, Teacher,’ the teens told Jude later, smiling nervously. All three had been child soldiers in the Karen National Liberation Army, he knew, but they carried themselves without any of the cynicism or weariness that the BBC had led him to expect. They laughed, they scuffled, they kicked a cane ball over a ragged net and walked hand-in-hand along the fence, arms swinging like sweethearts.

     ‘Crazy?’ Jude asked.

     ‘Yes,’ Moe Sein put in. At forty-two, he was the oldest after Daw Mai Mai, lean and handsome, his gums stained clown-red by betel nut. ‘Her son die.’

     ‘How?’ Jude asked.

     ‘Burmese police, they kill him,’ Moe Sein said. ‘Now she is, very crazy!’ The students laughed, and Jude spent the next hour pacing the fence of the compound, bewildered by their cruelty and wishing that Robin was there to speak to.

     The next day in class, Jude pointed again to the computer monitor and asked Daw Mai Mai its English name.

     ‘No, no, no, Teacher!’ she cried.

     ‘Yes,’ Jude said, ‘It’s okay. Just try to guess.’

     ‘No, Teacher,’ she said. ‘I cannot. My brain, crazy.’ Jude stared, open mouthed, but Kyaw Nyunt chimed in at her side with, ‘Monitor’.

     ‘What?’

     Kyaw Nyunt pointed. ‘Monitor, Teacher. Computer television.’

     After class, Daw Mai Mai insisted that Jude wait at the card table he used for teaching and returned minutes later with a fried egg over rice.

     ‘For you, Teacher,’ she said.

     ‘No, please, I don’t want any special treatment,’ Jude said, knowing that his students in the next room were eating rice, and rice only, but he could see that she didn’t understand and he finally, guiltily, accepted the plate.

     ‘I am sorry, Teacher,’ she said. ‘In class, I do not understand. My son, last year, he died.’

     ‘Moe Sein told me. I am very sorry.’ Struggling to appear casual, Jude forked some egg into his mouth. The egg was crispy, unseasoned, and with a mouthful of rice, revoltingly bland. Jude chewed, forced a swallow and then reached for some more.

     ‘Yes, Teacher. All the time, I cry and I cry.’ She pantomimed rolling tears, rubbing her knuckles down worn cheeks. Her smile never broke. ‘Now, every day, I read … I forget!’

     Jude knew Daw Mai Mai, like so many other refugees here, was waiting on papers from the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, the golden ticket to Sweden or America, to safety and surplus. He tried to imagine her using her English to buy a cluster of grapes or a bus ticket to Philadelphia. Americans, he suspected, would not be so patient with her language skills as the Thais were with his.

     ‘Well,’ he said, ‘we will keep trying.’

     That night, his fourth at the students’ compound, Jude explored the two large wooden houses where they lived, counting rooms and bedrolls. As he suspected, his was the only single room, while the students slept four to a room on mats of woven plastic, their belongings piled in backpacks and plastic bags. In the common room Jude found the men, smoking cheroots and watching a Thai kickboxing film on the computer.

     ‘Moe Sein,’ Jude said, ‘I will share a room also. I want to be the same as everyone else.’

     Moe Sein stared at him.

     ‘But you are not the same,’ he said at last. ‘You are American. You are Teacher.’

 

*   *   *

 

They have taken his bag, his passport, his wallet, his cell phone, and his watch, and now Jude sits alone in a concrete room of the police station and waits, his stomach roiling like a hot spring.

     ‘Man come, speak very English!’ an officer assured him before closing the door. Jude feels as if hours have passed since then, but he understands that the adrenaline is distorting his sense of time and understands too that, right now, every minute is a gift, if he can use it to construct the lie that will save him. If he sticks to the story that he got the bill in Manitowoc he can plead that this was an accident. Which, oddly enough, it was – Daw Mai Mai surely hadn’t known either – but to explain the circumstances would only endanger her without freeing him. Yet they’ll investigate any story he gives them, so where could he have picked up the bill? The counterfeit is too clumsy to have made it past an American bank teller, he suspects, but Jude’s never taken cash from a client or carried large bills; the truth is that before today, he hasn’t touched a hundred-dollar bill in years.

     Be rational, he tells himself, think. But even as he tries his mind returns to outrageous prison sentences, beatings and deprivations, and the age he might be when he returns home at last, and so when the door finally opens, Jude still hasn’t the least idea of what he might say.

     The man who enters is not a police officer, but Jude has seen this uniform before, with its asparagus-green shirt and dull epaulettes. After a moment, he places it; on a rare trip to the tea shop, Moe Sein had pointed one out across the market, tugged at Jude’s sleeve and said, ‘Thai Military Intelligence, Teacher. We must go.’ But the man inside it is new to Jude, muscular and balding and nearly his own height, and he sets a plastic chair across from Jude’s and a folder beside it on the floor, and sits without shaking hands.

     ‘My name is, I think, very long for you,’ the man says, smiling, ‘but you can call me Lieutenant Ting. Would you like a cigarette, Jude?’

     Jude doesn’t smoke and says so.

     ‘Are you sure?’ Ting draws a pack of Marlboros from his shirt pocket. ‘Your country, yes?’

     Just the thought sets Jude’s stomach flopping again.

     ‘No, thank you,’ he says, and Ting laughs.

     ‘Healthy, healthy Americans. And yet so many, so fat. Why, I ask you?’

     Jude says nothing.

     ‘I lived in America, you know,’ Ting says. ‘Los Angeles, California. For five years. So every time there is a problem with an American, or British, or Australian’ – he drags out each nationality to emphasise the imposition – ‘they call me.’ Ting smiles. ‘You are having a problem, I think.’

     ‘Yes,’ Jude says, smiling himself. ‘I think I’m having a big problem.’ He must keep calm, he thinks, but already he feels his guts twisting traitorously within him.

     ‘So why are you in our city, Jude?’

     ‘I was thinking of visiting Umphang National Park. I’m a birdwatcher.’ So far, so good, he thinks.

     ‘And you are staying at …’ Ting picks up the folder, flips it open, and takes out Jude’s currency exchange form. ‘… Number One Guest House?’

     ‘Yes.’

     ‘That is strange,’ Ting says. ‘I called them and they do not recognise your name. Maybe you are there with a different name?’

     Jude says nothing.

     ‘So let us cut the chase,’ Ting says. ‘Where is this bill from?’

     ‘Manitowoc, Wisconsin. You know Wisconsin?’

     ‘This is a state, yes? In the north?’

     ‘Yes. I do computer work, and I must have gotten it from a client there.’

     ‘You are sure now? This bill?’

     ‘Yes, I’m sure. Whenever I got a large bill, I set it aside for travel cash. It’s the only place it could have come from. I’m very sorry for all this trouble. I just didn’t know it was a bad bill.’ The more Jude speaks, the more plausible it sounds, and for the first time in an hour he thinks, maybe I’m not going to jail after all.

     Ting narrows his eyes. ‘Yes? You had no idea?’

     ‘No,’ Jude says, ‘I’m not a bank teller or anything.’

     Ting takes a long drag on his Marlboro.

     ‘I am here because I want to help you,’ he says.

     ‘I know. I appreciate it.’

     ‘So why are you lying to me?’

     ‘It’s the truth.’ But Jude can feel the hot flush in his forehead, the sting of sweat in the corners of his eyes.

     ‘Jude,’ Ting says sadly. ‘We know this bill, we have many others of these.’ And he takes the pale hundred from the folder. ‘This is from a counterfeiter in Yangon, an already arrested man. You see this spot on your president’s forehead?’ Jude looks at the spot and does not correct him. ‘This is dust on the man’s … what do you call it?’

     ‘Scanner?’ Jude is breathing fast now, pressing a hand hard into his abdomen.

     ‘Yes!’ Ting says. ‘Scanner. You see, perhaps I need computer classes as well.’ So he went through the bag, Jude thinks, of course he did. ‘So every cheap bill he prints is same to this one. So I ask you … how does this bill go then to Wisconsin? And back?’

     ‘I think I need to talk to my embassy,’ Jude says.

     ‘Oh, I think so too! Do you know how long you go to jail for counterfeit in Thailand?’ Ting leans forward, his breath stinking of cigarettes and green curry.

     ‘I don’t want to…’ Jude can’t finish the sentence.

     ‘Fifteen years, Jude. This is minimum. Minimum.’

     Jude rocks back, tipping his chair, and stumbles to his feet clutching at his stomach as if he’s been shot.

     ‘Where is the …’

     ‘If you must upchuck,’ Ting says, ‘do it in the corner.’

     And then, to Jude’s shame, he does, staggering the final step, bracing himself against a wall filthy with sweat and piss-reek, noodles and soup and rice and acid surging out of him in hot gouts and splashing away across the concrete floor. He heaves and retches and when his stomach is empty he sinks to his knees, gasping and dry-retching, and when he looks up the lieutenant has not moved from his chair.

     ‘We know what happened, Jude,’ Ting says. ‘We are not stupid, you know? Like every other farang in this town you feel bad for the Burmese and want to help them. They ask you to exchange money at the bank because you have passport and they have no papers at all. Stupid, but okay. You break the law but you aren’t wanting to be a criminal, right?’

     Jude slumps against the wall and watches warily.

     ‘So I tell these police, I think we do not want you.’ Ting reaches into his folder again, takes out a sheet of paper, and turns it so Jude can read it. One of the HTML worksheets, he sees. Daw Mai Mai, it says at the top. ‘We want her.’

 

*   *   *

 

Two days after her son’s death, when she was sure she could control herself long enough to fill out the paperwork, Daw Mai Mai returned to the police headquarters.

     ‘Excuse me,’ she called to the moon-faced man behind the desk, ‘I’m here to file murder charges against Officers Tin Aye, Saw Tun, and Myint Shwe, and Police Lieutenant Colonel Than Kyaw, for the torture and death of my son. Can you help me?’

     And now the man’s eyes were wide as moon craters.

     ‘Please just go,’ he said. But already another officer was walking over to the desk, a man with a thick jaw and large, ugly hands.

     ‘Lady,’ this man said, ‘if you say one more word about the lieutenant colonel, I’m going to throw you right out of here.’

     ‘I don’t need to speak,’ Daw Mai Mai said. ‘I only need the form.’

     ‘Okay,’ said the man with big hands, lifting a panel to step around the desk, ‘come on,’ and he took her by the arm and pulled hard.

     ‘I just need the form,’ Daw Mai Mai said calmly, but the man opened the station door and shoved her down the three concrete stairs. She hit the pavement hard and lay there.

     ‘I’m trying to help you, lady,’ he said from the doorway. ‘Just because your son died doesn’t mean that you have to.’

     Daw Mai Mai heard the door close and she lay on the rough concrete for some time, listening to the cries of street hawkers and the squeaks of trishaws trundling past, and she thought of the week it took her son to die, of the ragged holes in his left hand where his fingernails had been, of the way he had coughed blood whenever the friends brave enough to visit had made him laugh, of the cigarette burns on his genitals that, after he died, Daw Mai Mai had lifted the sheet aside to see, and, after a long while, ignoring the pain in her back and hip, she straightened and stepped up the three stairs one by one and opened the door and returned to the desk.

     ‘I only need the form,’ she said to the moon-faced man. His big-handed colleague was nowhere in sight, she could see. ‘Just give it to me and I’ll be no more trouble to you.’

     ‘Daw Mai Mai,’ he said. ‘They know you were a political prisoner. If they come to kill you there is no one who will stop them. Please, you must go.’

     ‘Yes, thank you,’ she said. ‘I’ll choose for myself.’

     He shrugged and passed her the complaint form. ‘It’s not me they’ll bury.’

     Why didn’t they kill her, she wondered that night in bed, an old woman already at forty-four, her hair grey and her back a ruin from the concrete floors of prison, if she was the one they wanted? Why her son, with his harmless love poems and his taste for green mangoes? She lay awake and wept and when the police came shouting taunts and throwing rocks at her shutters, she didn’t even stir.

     The men came again the next night, and the next.

     ‘We will burn you out, Mai Mai,’ they called, young men but still dropping the honorific before her name. They called her ‘traitor’ and ‘spy’ and many worse names than that and they told her how her son had begged and wept and always they threw rocks, and when, in a rage, she finally opened her door to confront them, one of these caught her square on the temple, and she fell to her knees, gasping. The headlamp of a motorcycle was behind the men and as they approached they were only shadows.

     ‘You know what you need to do to make us go away, Mai Mai.’ They were standing all around her now in their thick police boots.

     ‘Tin Aye,’ she said. ‘Saw Tun. Myint Shwe. Than Kyaw.’ She saw a boot rise and she prepared herself for the kick but instead the man placed it on her shoulder and, almost gently, tipped her onto her side.

     ‘Withdraw the complaint,’ he said, ‘or we will rape you, and we will kill you,’ and then they walked away.

     The next day, Daw Mai Mai talked to an old friend from the resistance movement, the friend who had given her the tapes of Daw Aung San Suu Kyi for which she had been arrested all those months before, and by nightfall she was stowed between two bushels of new potatoes in a truck on its way to Thailand, to continue her fight from there.

     When Jude spent a week piecing together her story for the organisation’s web site at her request, working sometimes from her own words but more often from Moe Sein’s translations, and then brought her the finished article to look at, Daw Mai Mai only laughed and threw up her hands.

     ‘No, Teacher,’ she said. ‘English, I do not read!’

 

*   *   *

 

When Jude first saw the men gathered in the snowy road, he assumed that there had been some kind of accident. Even when the car ahead of him pulled off the road into a bank car park to turn around, Jude guessed that the driver was making room for emergency vehicles, and he prepared to do the same. So it was Robin who told him, ‘It’s a fight. Just turn around, I’m calling 911.’

     Jude’s headlights reflected up from the slush to frame the five men as they circled a man on the ground. As Jude watched, the man raised himself on his knees and one arm. The men let him rise but when he was erect on his knees one stepped forward to clip his face with a gloved fist and then another gave him a fast kick to the ribs that sent him sprawling. Jude clicked the radio off and even over the snowy wind he could hear their laughter.

     ‘Go, Jude,’ Robin said angrily, but then the 911 operator was on the line and she began explaining and giving directions and when she looked up again Jude was already stepping out of the car. ‘Lock the door,’ he said, and he slammed it shut with a bang that made two of the men cock their heads in his direction like startled deer.

     ‘Hey,’ he called, his voice as loud and firm as he could make it. He couldn’t fight even one of these men, he knew, but if he stayed behind the headlights he hoped he might be able to bluff them.

     ‘We’ve called 911,’ he said. ‘The police are on the way. Why don’t you just get out of here and we can all still have a good Saturday night.’ Jude watched as the men squinted in his direction, but at thirty feet they could no more make out his form than he could make out their faces.

     ‘There’s no need for this. Let’s just all go enjoy our Saturday night,’ he repeated.

     ‘You want to be next, asshole?’ one of them called and took a step forward, but another in a snorkel parka put a hand on the man’s arm and began to guide him toward a hastily parked car at the curb. The bloodied man was on his hands and knees again, coughing, but the others were ignoring him now, murmuring to each other and squinting again toward Jude, and then
they set across the snow and slush in the road at a quick and dangerous stride and before Jude could think of what to say or do, the three men were around him.

     ‘You think you’re funny, kid?’ one of them asked. They were only inches away on all sides, older than Jude had realised and moustached and stinking of bourbon and beer and cigarettes, and Jude resisted the urge to step back, knowing that if he did they would certainly set upon him.

     ‘I don’t want to fight you,’ Jude said, and the three men laughed.

     ‘That’s a relief. Are you relieved, Gene?’

     ‘I’m relieved.’

     ‘There’s no need for any of this,’ Jude said. Already Gene was reaching for him and Jude had time to think how badly he’d miscalculated, that this could only end with two people bleeding in the snow instead of one and possibly Robin as well, but then Jude’s car horn blared and each man jumped and even as their ears cleared they could hear the siren rising from the next block.

     A car pulled up alongside them now, the man in the snorkel parka at the wheel, and without any further prompting the men glared each in turn at Jude and then piled inside. The car fishtailed away and Jude looked over to where the bloodied man had lain and saw that he was gone too. Jude turned and tapped on the window.

     ‘Okay,’ he said.

     They answered the officer’s questions but of course they could identify no one nor press any charges themselves. Robin’s face was flushed and tight as she spoke, and as Jude listened to her staccato sentences, he began to understand how much trouble he was in.

     ‘I don’t want to talk about it here,’ she told him in the car. He spent the drive internally rehearsing his argument – the small risk to his own safety balanced against the much larger risk to the safety of the victim, the need under the democratic social contract to gamble one’s safety for that of another – and before they’d arrived at her apartment he already felt he had her on the run. He thought too of the old ethics problem of switching the tracks of the runaway train to save five lives, even though it kills one who would otherwise have lived, and he wondered if he should mention it. Jude had never been sure if he was prepared to flip the switch; he was, he felt, prepared to be the man on the other track.

     But inside Robin stripped her coat and boots off in a rage and still did not want to speak.

     ‘Listen, I had to help,’ Jude started, sinking onto her bed.

     ‘Is this what Thailand is going to be like?’ she asked, and the question was so far from the conversation he’d been preparing for in his head that she had to repeat, ‘Is this why you’re going to Thailand?’

     ‘I’m sorry I put you in danger,’ he said, but Robin waved an arm to indicate that this was not the issue.

     ‘Do you have a death wish?’ she asked.

     ‘They wouldn’t stop kicking that guy, they could have killed him.’

     ‘They could have killed you, and then what was I supposed to do?’

     ‘Listen,’ Jude said, trying to re-route the conversation. ‘That guy …’

     ‘Any time I hear you say “Listen,” I know a great bit of moral reasoning’s about to come out. Please, edify me.’

     Jude kept his voice carefully level as he spoke.

     ‘I just wanted to say that that guy was a person just like me, and every bit as important as me, and if there was a way I could help him, there was no way I could drive past.’

     ‘But he wasn’t you.’ Robin sat down beside him and touched his hand, yet he understood that this was not surrender but rather a new line of attack. ‘Where do you fit into all of this, Jude? What about your happiness?’

     ‘Just the same as everybody else.’

     ‘And what about mine?’ she asked.

     ‘I love you, you know that.’ He reached to put a hand to her back but she twisted away.

     ‘That’s not what I asked,’ she said.

     ‘I love you,’ he said again. ‘It’s just that …’

     ‘… it’s just that you have to be somebody better than that,’ she finished for him, and he didn’t know how to correct her. After a minute she stood and walked to the window and with her back to him she said, ‘If you want to stay with me, you can. But I don’t think I can go to Thailand.’

     Jude ran his hand over the soft blues and purples of the quilt. Robin had sewn it herself, he knew, from patches given to her by a grandmother and two aunts. One day after Thailand, she’d make him one, she’d said. He closed the door behind him so softly that he could barely hear the click of the latch.

     And when she apologised to his voicemail three days later and asked him to come over for hot cocoa and a talk, he neither picked up nor called her back. He’d made his choice.

 

*   *   *

 

‘Do you like movies, Jude?’ Lieutenant Ting asks, proffering a handkerchief. Jude takes it and mops at his lips but he can still taste the sour burn of stomach acid caking his cheeks and gums.

     ‘Documentaries,’ he says, settling weakly back into his chair. ‘Sometimes.’

     ‘Do you watch cop movies?’

     ‘Not really.’

     ‘Beverly Hills Cop? LA Confidential? Another 48 Hours?’

     Jude shakes his head at each and Ting sighs in exasperation.

     ‘But, you know, good cop, bad cop, yes?’

     Jude nods.

     ‘Okay, Jude, good. Well, I am good cop. Okay? I am here to help you. Those men outside …’ he indicates the closed metal door. ‘Bad cop. All bad cop. They tire of farang in their town looking for drugs and prostitutes and little refugee children that no one will miss.’

     ‘I’m not …’

     ‘I know, Jude, I know. You have big heart and you want to help the refugees. It is against the law, but you take tourist visa and come anyway. But the problem is that you do not understand our problems here. It is like your Mexicans, yes? Like California. They are poor and they come from bad lives, but there are so many of them, and now we have the gangs and the drugs and many violence.’

     ‘They’re not all like that.’

     ‘Then why did they give you this money that sends you to jail?’

     ‘I think we need to call my embassy,’ Jude says.

     ‘We have already made this call, Jude. An officer will be here in the morning. The problem is that we have many forms that we must give to her and we are having many troubles completing the paperwork.’ Ting shakes another cigarette out of his pack and sticks it between his ragged lips. ‘Did we arrest an American criminal for counterfeit dollars? Or did we arrest the alien criminal who took advantage of this innocent American – who tricked him, Jude, into taking counterfeit money to the bank? He taps the worksheet again and smiles. ‘Right now, I do not know who gave you this money. But this is the woman the Myanmar police need. This is the woman we will give them.’

     No matter what this man says, Jude thinks, he will never believe that Daw Mai Mai has done this to him on purpose.

     ‘This must be clear by morning,’ Ting says. ‘Perhaps if you have the night to think you will remember what happened?’ He lights his cigarette and stands to go. ‘A man will bring you a mat and a bucket for toilet,’ he says.

     ‘I have money,’ Jude says. ‘My father has money.’

     Ting shakes his head sadly.

     ‘Not as much as Myanmar,’ he says, and goes out the door.

 

*   *   *

 

The day before Jude’s arrest, he biked to the hills that ringed the town and paced over them for hours with his binoculars and two canteens that he drained almost immediately of their water. He sat above the road in the thin shade of a mango tree and watched old pick-ups trundle past with their loads of pineapples, sisal, migrant workers and hitchhiking monks. He waved to three children picking plastic bags and scraps of metal from the roadside debris and shared with them the last of his peanuts and the change from his pockets. He walked on and found a grove of lychee trees but even sitting patiently within it, he saw only three pipits and some thrushes and though he heard the piercing aut-see, aut-see of a Slaty-backed Forktail, he could not find it. As the sun sank, Jude gave up and rode his bike back into town.

     ‘Where are all the birds?’ he asked Daw Mai Mai when he returned to the compound. She shook her head, not understanding.

     ‘There are many trees outside of town,’ he said. ‘There is much forest. But not many birds. Where are the birds?’

     ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Many refugee, always hungry! People eat them, Teacher.’

     Jude laughed.

     ‘No,’ he said. ‘I mean little birds. Little birds that sing.’ And he held his fingers to the width of a sparrow.

     ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘People eat them.’ And then, without segue, she drew two one-hundred-dollar bills from the pocket of her blouse.

     ‘Teacher,’ she said. ‘I need help.’ And after she explained, it made sense. He’d read of how the Burmese junta would suddenly declare certain denominations of kyat worthless, stripping families of their savings in an instant; he’d read, too, of the growing demand for black-market dollars, and of the junta’s rising prison terms for possession of foreign currency.

     ‘It is, end money,’ Daw Mai Mai said. ‘I hope, I go America soon!’

     Jude knew it wasn’t likely and ached to offer her money of his own, but he knew also that his dollar-a-day budget could stretch no further, that to help her with his money now would mean later to help no one at all.

     ‘I hope so, too,’ he mumbled instead.

     ‘So, you can change, Teacher?’

     ‘Sure,’ he said, taking the bills, relieved there was something he could do. ‘No problem.’

 

*   *   *

 

They give him a plastic mat and plastic bucket and a tin cup of water and a bowl of pasty rice that he forces himself to eat, using his fingers as a scoop. After a while, the light bulb clicks off and Jude sits in the flimsy chair in darkness until his eyes adjust to the faint light of the single, barred window. When he goes to look through it, he sees only another concrete wall.

     He can’t believe the lies he’s told, the bribe he offered; he thinks of it as a hung-over man might reflect on his drunken misdeeds. How little it took for his deontology to fall away, he thinks, into this shoddy ends-justify-the-means. And the vomiting, and the tears he felt swelling in their ducts. So he’s human after all, he thinks, and then he thinks, wryly, of how relieved Robin would be to know, and then he thinks, but she knew all along, I was the one who didn’t, and before he can help himself he thinks again of her email the week before: I don’t know if you still check this, she’d written, but I still think about you a lot. And, further down: I miss you. I know you won’t, but I wish you’d come home. And the longing he’d felt when he returned, alone, to his unfurnished room, to his mattress and mosquito net and histories of Southeast Asia, and looked at his calendar and saw that ten months of his promised time yet remained.

     He thinks of escape, checks the bars in the window, and returns to his chair.

     He thinks of the Americans he knows – Aaron, the coordinator always out of town, Sam, the ex-cop who spends every night at the bar, Lee, the ex-dietician who smiles at her handsome Burmese boyfriend with every sentence she speaks – and he understands that he can get help from none of them.

     He thinks of his father and the way he lay in Jude’s bed and wept the night Jude’s mother died, Jude reaching his five-year-old arms around his father’s neck and then patting his balding head and whispering to him that it would be all right, and he wonders if his father will cry like this again when he hears the news. He wonders if Robin will think to go to him and he knows that she will.

     And he thinks of Daw Mai Mai’s doting care and how easily this decision could be taken out of his hands, of what she might do when she hears of his arrest, and the thought gives rise to a swift joy as he imagines his future restored and returning to it, blameless, through no action of his own.

     But Jude also remembers his father’s words that if a man can simply pretend to be a good man from when he rises in the morning until he retires at night, imagining all the things a good man might do and then doing these things, he will look back at the end of his life and discover that he has, in fact, been a good man, regardless of what was otherwise in his heart.

     He is the man on the other track, Jude thinks, and if he can remember that till morning, it’ll be done. But as he lies on his mat and shivers in the February chill, all he can think of is Robin’s quilt.

 

*   *   *

 

‘All I need from you is address,’ Ting says to him in the morning, ‘and then you fly back to America.’ He’s brought porridge with squid for both of them, and Jude, rationalising his vegetarianism, ignores the lingering stink of his vomit and devours the bowl to the last grain of rice.

     ‘You are worrying for me, Jude,’ Ting says, his forehead creased. ‘You understand Thai prison is not safe for farang. The government works hard but still there is AIDS. Still there is …’ and he pantomimes the upward stabbing of a shiv, so suddenly that Jude flinches, but still says nothing. Ting looks at him for a long moment and then takes two objects from the bulging pockets of his shirt. One is a microcassette recorder; the other is Jude’s wallet. Ting places the recorder on the ground between them, but keeps the wallet in his hands and extracts a picture from it.

     ‘This is your father?’ he asks, handing it to Jude, but Jude can already see the back: ‘Jude and Dad, Christmas 2006’.

     I am the man on the other track, Jude thinks, and does not look at the picture, but Jude only carries two pictures in his wallet and it’s easy to guess what’s coming next.

     ‘And, your girlfriend?’ Ting asks. ‘Robin with Duchess, October 2006’. He hands Jude the photograph and this time he can’t help but look: Robin curled on a cousin’s couch in plaid pyjamas, dangling her hair for the kitten like so much yarn. She’d made them banana pancakes that morning, he and her cousin and her cousin’s husband, and then walked him to the pond at the back of their property and sat for hours with him in the tall grass, taking turns kissing and scanning with the binoculars, their fingers knotted inseparably. He looks at the picture and can’t believe that once this happiness was his, can’t believe with how few words he could make it his again.

     ‘She is very beautiful,’ Ting says. ‘She is waiting for you?’

     Jude can feel the tears coming to his eyes and he curses the exhaustion that has reduced him to this.

     ‘She is,’ he says.

     ‘The embassy officer will be here soon,’ Ting says. ‘We must record your story. You will cooperate?’

     Jude nods and wipes his eyes and picks up the tape recorder, but still the tears are coming.

     ‘Turn it on,’ Ting says, and Jude does. ‘Now, you must tell the address.’

     ‘The address was in Thai,’ Jude says. ‘I don’t know it.’

     ‘This is okay, Jude. You can show later. But now, tell me,’ Ting asks, leaning forward and over-enunciating for the recorder, ‘who bought this counterfeit bill on the black market, and then wanted to change it for Thai baht?’ He flips his hand twice toward Jude, cuing him to speak.

     ‘I did,’ Jude mumbles, trying on the words.

     ‘Excuse me?’

     ‘I did it,’ he says, louder now and into the tape recorder’s stub of a microphone. ‘There was no one else.’

     ‘Jude …’ Ting begins.

     ‘Listen,’ Jude says, staring straight into the rage of Ting’s eyes. ‘It was me.’