Chapter One - Richard Lewis

"It is only my wife," Gusti said. "She is sick."
"My God, man," Reed said in English before reverting to Balinese. "Bring her in."
Gusti stood and clapped his hands. Out of the darkness two men appeared,
carrying a makeshift bamboo stretcher, on which a woman moaned and writhed with
pain. Rusty followed after them.
Gusti smiled and repeatedly apologized for disturbing Reed while wringing his
hands, that common and curious mix of fatalism and distraught urgency. His wife had
terrible pain, he said, and after several days of treatments with the local balian, she wasn't
getting better. Perhaps Reed had some special medicine in his medicine box?
Now Reed understood the late night visit, but he only had basic first aid training,
and something was seriously wrong here. He hoped that the French doctor who'd been on
a six month volunteer mission to Father Louis's orphanage was still in residence.
The woman moaned again. Five vials of morphine nestled in Reed's first aid kit.
He hated needles, and even though he wasn't getting the shot, was already growing
lightheaded as he read the dosage and filled the syringe. He managed to get most of the
morphine into the woman's buttock before he fainted clean away into Rusty's arms. When
he came too, he was flat on his back on the grass, Rusty sprinkling water on his face.
Gusti's wife had melted away in narcotic euphoria, and with Rusty and Gusti and
a brother holding the stretcher steady in the jeep, Reed barreled along the night-shrouded
roads to Den Pasar. The orphanage and clinic were tucked down a back lane, a complex
of several bamboo and brick structures. Father Louis's rectory hunkered by a stream. On
the rectory's front porch, the beam of Reed's flashlight fell upon children curled up
together on mats. They remained asleep as Reed knocked with increasing vigor on the
front door, rousing a sleepy housekeeper, who went to fetch Father Louis. He appeared in
his bathrobe, eyes sleepy behind his tilted glasses, pink cheeks twitching.
Reed explained the situation, gesturing to the groaning woman and her anxious
husband. Father Louis told the housekeeper to get Doctor Philippe, and then knelt to tuck
a blanket around a girl of thin bones and scraggly hair, who was restless in her dreams.
"From Klungkung," the Father said, rising. "The harvest failed. Their parents
were ready to sell them to a middleman."
Doctor Philippe shuffled out from his room. By the light of the porch lantern the
doctor briefly poked and prodded the woman and told a male nurse to take her to the
clinic. "Most likely kidney stones," he said to the relieved husband.
Reed declined Father Louis's offer of a room. With Rusty snoozing in the jeep's
passenger seat, he drove home to Ubud and collapsed into bed for the last hour before
dawn, exhausted enough to sleep until the start of eternity, but sleep wouldn't come.
Images of Naniek combing her hair returned and kept him awake.
With dawn birds chirping, he finally gave up, threw on a shirt and walked to the
morning market. There a barber under a tree greeted him, lathered his jowls, and shaved
him with a straight razor. A notorious gossip, the barber had this morning new topic of
conversation. "You fell like a tree," the barber chortled. Rusty had spread the word about
his mid-night faint. "A big strong American like you."
After breakfast and a shower, Reed drove to the Bali Hotel, bringing along his
Nikon. He'd had word from Arini that the Udayana military command had booked the
function room for a seminar and luncheon. At the hotel, Reed parked on the street, as
Army vehicles and MP jeeps and top brass sedans filled the hotel lot. Several souvenir
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