Free God Lives in St. Petersburg by Tom Bissell Page A

to, supplying bleak sketches of how annihilated the Aral’s fishermen had been. He spoke with the world-weariness of one who simply knows too much. Had he been to Uzbekistan, the country that bore the brunt of Aral’s ailments? Amanda asked. Once, Ted explained, to Tashkent, the capital, which was still pretty Russian. More Russian than Russia, in fact. Ha-ha.
    On her own, Amanda had learned that the rest of the world had, by and large, dismissed Central Asia and its problems with Aral; that most of the solutions for the problem cost somewhere in the twelve-figure range; that the UN was trying to do everything it could, but until Central Asia’s nations began to cooperate on water allocation and set prices for water usage like the good little budding market-economy nations they claimed they wanted to be, there was little the UN could do. Add to this the fact that the Aral Sea was found in one of Uzbekistan’s biggest headaches, Karakalpakistan, a nominally sovereign republic with its own government, bureaucracy, and eddies of red tape apart from Uzbekistan’s, and you were left navigating waters too tricky even for the United Nations. The entire scenario had the fiendish unsolvability of a physics story problem, and Amanda felt both intimidated and relieved. She and her team couldn’t, even at their least effective, possibly make anything worse.
    “It’s damn sad,” Ted Whitford concluded with a sigh. “It rips me up.
Damn
sad.”
    “Sounds like it,” said Michael Nam, sitting across the aisle from Amanda and Ted, reading the Cadogan guide to Central Asia (Amanda had
Lonely Planet
). Amanda had sat next to Michael on the first leg of the trip, over the Atlantic. She leaned forward to wink at him, become an accomplice to his insult of Ted in some way, but he did not look over at her. Instead, he turned the page in his book and pushed his styleless, thick-lensed glasses farther up his bridge. Michael was Korean, from the University of Miami—the “Carl Sagan of oceanography,” as she’d once heard him described. From their earlier conversation, Amanda had concluded that he, too, was an asshole, but an abidable, even interesting asshole.
    “Righto,” Ted said to Michael and, alarmingly, touched Amanda on the knee.
    “How long before we reach Tashkent?” Amanda asked Michael, again leaning forward.
    “Two hours,” Michael said, closing his book and then his eyes.
    Amanda looked around the plane. Nearly everyone was asleep, one or two souls glowing like angels under their reading lights. As far as she could tell, she and her colleagues were the only Americans on board. Her around-the-world trip was in its twentieth hour, and she was wide awake. She closed her eyes anyway, but opened them when Ted once again began talking. She turned to him and saw he’d not been speaking to her. He was addressing a small handheld tape recorder, whispering intense Churchillian cadences into it: “I’d say we’re at thirty-five thousand feet,” he was saying. Amanda rolled her head as far away from him as physiology would permit. “Tashkent,” he said, milking it, “Tash
kent
is down there too.” A pause of several moments. “And so is Aral. It all makes Murmansk and Barents . . .
Jesus!
Kid stuff, Ted. It was kid stuff.”
    While they waited in the customs line, Amanda first began to grow nervous. She could see quite a bit of the airport behind the customs booth but no one was there, not a soul. She tapped Michael, who was still reading his travel guide, on the shoulder. “Hey. Who’s supposed to meet us here, anyway?”
    Michael frowned and dug into his breast pocket. “Some guy named Nuridinov, from the Ministry of Water, and two other gentlemen. I can’t seem to read this.” He frown-squinted. “Hm. My own damn handwriting, too.”
    “I don’t see
anyone,
Michael,” Amanda said. The customs line opposite hers was for nationals, and every dark-skinned, black-headed, heavy-lidded man in that line stood