The Chronoliths

Bangkok. And I couldn’t call Bangkok from Colin’s phone; that was a toll call, he pointed out, and wasn’t I already behind on the rent?

I hiked to the Phat Duc, Hitch’s alleged bait and tackle shop.

Hitch had problems of his own — he still harbored faint hopes of tracking down the lost Daimler — but he told me I could crash in the Duc’s back room (on a bale of moist sinsemilla, I imagined) and use the shop’s phone all I wanted; we’d settle up later.

It took me until dawn to establish that Janice and Kaitlin had already left the country.

I don’t blame her.

Not that I wasn’t angry. I was angry for the next six months. But when I tried to justify the anger to myself, my own excuses seemed flimsy and inadequate.

I had, after all, brought her to Thailand when her explicit preference had been to stay in the U.S. and finish her postdoc. I had kept her there when my own contracts lapsed, and I had effectively forced her into a poverty-level existence (as Americans of those years understood poverty, anyway) while I played out a scenario of rebellion and retreat that had more to do with unresolved post-adolescent angst than with anything substantial. I had exposed Kaitlin to the dangers of an expatriate lifestyle (which I preferred to think of as “broadening her horizons”), and in the end I had been absent and unavailable when my daughter’s life was threatened.

I did not doubt that Janice blamed me for Kaitlin’s partial deafness. My only remaining hope was that Kait herself would not blame me. At least, not permanently. Not forever.

In the meantime what I wanted was to go home. Janice had retreated to her parents’ house in Mi

All of this, ten thousand miles away.

At the end of a frustrating month I told Hitch I needed a ride back to the U.S. but that my funds had bottomed out.

We sat on a drift log by the bay. Windsurfers rolled out on the long blue, undeterred by the bacteria count. Fu

The beach was busy. Chumphon had become a mecca for photojournalists and the idly curious. By day they competed for telephoto shots of the so-called Chumphon Object; by night they bid up the prices of liquor and lodging. All of them carried more money than I had seen for a year.

I didn’t much care for the journalists and I already hated the monument. I couldn’t blame Janice for what had happened, and I was understandably reluctant to blame myself, but I could without objection blame the mystery object that had come to fascinate much of the world.

The irony is that I hated the monument almost before anyone else did. Before very long the silhouette of that cool blue stone would become a symbol recognized and hated (or, perversely, loved) by the vast majority of the human race. But for the time being I had the field to myself.

The moral, I suppose, is that history doesn’t always put its finger on the nice folks.

And of course: There is no such thing as a coincidence.

“We both need a favor,” Hitch said, gri

“That kind of proposition worries me,” I said.

“A little worry is a healthy thing.”

That evening, the English-language papers printed the text of the writing that had been discovered on the base of the monument — an open secret here in Chumphon.

The inscription, carved an inch deep into the substance of the pillar and written in a kind of pidgin Mandarin and basic English, was a simple declarative statement commemorating a battle. In other words, the pillar was a victory monument.

It celebrated the surrender of southern Thailand and Malaysia to the massed forces of someone (or something) called “Kuin,” and beneath the text was the date of this historic battle.

December 21, 2041.

Twenty years in the future.

Two

I flew into the United States on a start-up air carrier with legal berths at Beijing, Dusseldorf, Gander, and Boston — the long way around the planet, with numbing layovers — and arrived at Logan Airport with a set of knockoff designer luggage in the best Bangkok tradition, a five-thousand-dollar grubstake, and an unwelcome obligation, all thanks to Hitch Paley. I was home, for better or for worse.

It was amazing how effortlessly wealthy Boston seemed after a season on the beaches, even before I left the terminal, as if all these gleaming cafés and newsstands had sprung up after a hard rain, bright Disney mushrooms. Nothing here was older than five years, not the terminal a

The mystery of the Chumphon Chronolith — it had been given that name by a pop-science journalist just last month — had already faded from public attention. It was still making news, but mainly in the supermarket checkout papers (totem of the Devil or trump of the Rapture) and in countless conspiracy-chronicling web-journals. Incomprehensible as it may seem to a contemporary reader, the world had passed on to more immediate concerns — Brazzaville 3, the Windsor weddings, the attempted assassination of the diva Lux Ebone at the Roma Festival just last weekend. It was as if we were all waiting for the event that would define the new century, the thing or person or abstract cause that would strike us as indelibly new, a Twenty-first Century Thing. And of course we didn’t recognize it when it nudged its way into the news for the first time. The Chronolith was a singular event, intriguing but ultimately mystifying, hence ultimately boring. We set it aside unfinished, like the New York Times crossword puzzle.

In fact there was a lot of ongoing concern over the Thai event, but it was restricted to certain echelons of the intelligence and security communities, both national and international. The Chronolith, after all, was an avowedly hostile military incursion conducted on a large scale and with ultimate stealth, even if the only casualties had been a few thousand gnarled mountain pines. Chumphon Province was under very close scrutiny these days.

But that was not my business, and I imagined I could disentangle myself from it simply by flying a few thousand miles west.

We thought like that then.

Unusually cold weather that autumn. The sky was cast over with turbulent clouds, a high wind tormenting the last of the year’s fishing fleet. Outside the street atrium of the AmMag station, a row of flags beat the air.

I paid the taxi driver, crossed the lobby, and bought a ticket for the Northern Tier Express: Detroit, Chicago, and across the prairies to Seattle, though I was only going as far as Mi

Then I stood up, surveyed the lobby for suspicious activity (none), and walked out onto Washington Street.

Five blocks south of the magrail station was a tiny, ancient mailbox service called Easy’s Packages and Parcels.

It was a storefront business, not prosperous, with a flyblown mylar shade over the display window. While I watched, a man with a steel walker inched through the front door and emerged ten minutes later carrying a brown paper envelope. I imagined this was the typical customer at an establishment like Easy’s, a golden-ager perversely loyal to what remained of the U.S. Postal Service.