Free Ransom by Jay McInerney Page A

additional baksheesh. Ransom did what he had to do. But still.
    He belonged on a ship like this: rusting, dirty, infested with rats. The rats seemed to be in command, confident oftheir rights. The steward, the cabin boys, the waiters were silent and distracted. The brass fittings had turned brown and green with neglect. Crew members were occasionally seen in groups of two or three, smoking in some corner. They fell silent and dispersed at the sight of a passenger. Ransom spent much of his time on deck, looking out over the curved sea. It would have been better, he thought, if the earth had been flat, if you could arrive at the point where the known stopped and the unknown began, where you could finally say—this is the end, or the beginning. He vaguely imagined Japan as such a place, a strange island kingdom at the edge of the world, a personal frontier, a place of austere discipline which would cleanse and change him.
    The waiter had cleared plates and replaced them with dishes of green Jell-O when the intercom began to click and buzz. “Attention. Attention all passengers. This is the captain speaking. The republic of South Vietnam is just coming into view over our port bow.”
    The passengers drifted to the upper deck. Daylight was falling into the west over the stern. At first Ransom could see nothing but the crests of waves catching the last sun. Then someone called, “Look, there.”
    A thin sliver of land was wedged between sky and sea. Within minutes the land was plainly visible, and above it, a random succession of dull yellow flashes.
    â€œLightning?” the schoolteacher said.
    The hippie laughed.
    The soft pink and gold illuminations were hypnotic. Ransom watched as the weird light grew brighter in the darkening sky. So that’s it, Ransom thought. Later, whenthe boat docked at Hong Kong, he would learn that what he had seen was the final battle for Saigon.
    The passengers watched the flickering show of lights in silence. Ransom stayed at the rail until the peninsula had crossed over their stern and the light was little more than a dim, pulsing glow.

7
    From a deep sleep Ransom woke into a sovereign state of anxiety. For a moment he held back on the edge of waking, with the notion of slowing the inevitable. Sunday morning, once the start of the Lord’s day.
    Ransom slipped on a pair of boxers, washed, shaved and rolled up the bed. He pulled back the doors to the terrace and stepped outside, where two sets of karate gi were hanging from the clothesline. The view from the terrace was the backsides of the houses on the next street, rigged out like galleons with TV antennae and clotheslines. Above the tiled rooftops, the sky was overcast. If it rained, practice would be cancelled.
    Beneath the terrace was Kaji’s garden, an immaculate plot with stones and dwarf trees that gave the illusion of major landscape. Presiding over the ornamental puddle was a ceramic tanuki, an animal that the Japanese loved inordinately and that seemed to Ransom a bear-racoon hybrid. The buds of the cherry tree were swollen and showing pink, the tortured yellow branches of the trained pine tipped with a new green. As he looked down, a ferret darted from underneath the house with a piece of paper in its mouth and dashed across the pebbles to the water; itrose on its hind legs to examine the tanuki and test the air. Ransom whistled. The ferret looked up at him, then bolted underneath the fence, leaving the paper behind. Ransom tried to remember if a ferret was a good or bad omen. In Japan, everything was some kind of omen.
    The first to arrive, Ransom changed into his gi and began to sweep the parking lot. They only trained inside during rainy season, when there was space reserved for them in the gym. The sensei had no use for padded mats and controlled temperature. Asphalt toughened the soles of the feet and gave you an incentive to stay on them. The winter had been cold and they had often practiced with snow