It’s Freezing in This Future – Epilogue

I was accepted by both LSE and Dalhousie, and I put off making up my mind for as long as I could. In the end, it just wasn’t good timing for my Dalhousie professor: she’d be on sabbatical during my first year, and another school was trying to hire her away in the meantime. I said yes to LSE.

This closes the book on two long winters in Montreal. No more nightly walk home between close-set snowbanks, no more commuter cars that will need digging out in the morning, no more snow-trammelled sidewalks lodged with split recycling bins, or twin rows of streetlights bearing soft yellow globes. Above each of those, no more thin wooden staircases that twist up the fronts of brick buildings, where three stories of walk-up apartments twinkle at each other at midnight. And still above those, goodbye to the lattice of branches that suggests an arch over everything, and that catches the last drifts of airborne snow, which never loses its newness in the night-time lights—and up, up, to the blank Montreal sky.

For the first time in a long time, I feel like my envies are on hold. I’m in a good place with my studies, and hopefully the love and inspiration will follow. School will take me back to the sea.

This is my ecosystem, every winter I’m here: the salted street eats my boots; my boots eat my leg hair at mid-calf, chafing it away to two naked rings; and I eat the salted street. Although—no man ever claimed perfect harmony with the world around him. I’ve also eaten the friends who live on this street and on others nearby. And I eat you, too. I wouldn’t have survived all my damn-fool plans without you.

Much love,

Nathan

Now You Konfrontasi Me, Now You Don’t (It’s Freezing in This Future – Ch. 4)

Singapore’s past is practically being zoned out of existence. Happy memories are disappearing everywhere you look: the traditional corner coffee shops, with their sugar-butter, soy sauce and half-boiled egg on toast, have been sterilized into franchises, and the birdsong competitions, which once filled Sunday squares with tame birds, have gotten replaced by a plaque. Lord knows what’s become of the young Chinese women you see in old photos, sipping Fantas in go-go boots and bobbed hair, but there’s no point in looking for them either. The flip side is that Singapore loses all trace of its bad memories, too. It doesn’t get much worse than what happened after the British surrendered in WWII: the Japanese seized 25,000 to 50,000 local Chinese, loaded them onto trucks and slaughtered them by the sea. Dhany and I saw one of the killing fields on Sentosa the day we were there. It had been landscaped into the 18-hole golf course on our way up to the fort.

Toward the end of my summer there, a man from a family of Singapore billionaires took me to see one of the places where he’d grown up. A highway plows right through it now, and barriers have been put up on either of side of the road to hide a tawdry, impossible secret: the shuttered buildings of an abandoned colonial estate, doing nothing, allowed to age forgotten in the heat. A bauble in the empire of a Chinese immigrant who’d married into rubber and pineapple wealth during the high-rolling 1920s. The gate pushed in with a metal sigh, revealing an empty drive. The rubber baron’s grandson glanced at me as we realized nothing was locked.

He showed me into a building that the family had converted into a hotel after the war. By 1985, what had once been part of a palace called Karikal Mahal was charging 50 Singapore dollars for a four-hour room. The floor plan unfolded along a series of two-story courtyards, each looking down on a garden of rocks and withered plants. They’d installed bathrooms with drab green toilets in the suites. Plywood sat piled up on the single mattresses. My host shrugged at the mess: “What would you do with this property if you could, Nathan?”

I’ve got no business sense. The only reason I knew this man was because Mel’s mother had grown up in a similar mansion—now long gone except for the fading patios in her photo albums—and she’d gone to grade school with him. During the whispered, late-night phone calls that Mel and I had shared when I was still in Canada, I’d promised to help her find a Singapore that wasn’t all climate-controlled glass towers. We’d discover the lost places together. In a city of 4 million people, there had to be one or two. And now that I was here, this man was asking what I’d do with the place? A scheme to bring this property into the amnesiac present was the last thing on my mind. Embarrassed, I stammered a stupid non-reply: “I—I have no idea.”

Beyond the last courtyard, the building opened out onto a shaded concrete balcony. The balustrade was patched with lichen, and dry leaves covered the dirt of the yard below. My guide rested his hands on the railing and took in the view. Mel impatiently called the man “Uncle Chin”: as one of the middle-aged heirs to his family’s fortune, he drove a Land Rover and wore polo shorts that showed off the muscles in his bandy, hairless legs. After his business column in the national paper got him in hot water with the Government, he’d founded a magazine of his own (look it up under Asia!, with the exclamation mark), where Mel had gotten me some writing gigs when I first arrived on the island. I’d asked Uncle Chin for this tour after handing in my first few articles.

“When I was little,” Uncle Chin said as he looked out, “this hotel used to be right on the beach. None of the land in front of us was here before, you know. It used to be nothing but ocean.” His parents brought him out here in the 60s, during the years of the country’s independence and the Indonesian attacks that followed. Jakarta trained covert operatives on Batam and set off bombs all over Singapore, as part of a larger confrontation with its formerly British neighbours that came to be called Konfrontasi. “The Indonesians put mines in the Strait of Singapore, and these things used to wash right up on the beach here. I wasn’t allowed to go down there—it was too dangerous. But I could see my uncle walking along the shore to look for them.”

At the end of a Hollywood movie, the ancient temple caves in on itself, or the Grail is sacrificed. It’s as if the really important things can’t survive in the sunlight, and all we’re left with are tall tales, pleas for belief, or (in the Singaporean version) ghost stories: the restless spirits of the paved-over past, perfectly unverifiable, but perfectly true. Uncle Chin’s mansion is already filling with ghost stories, just like the rest of Singapore. In 2006, all I could see from its balcony were ranks of new condos, rising up on lot after lot of reclaimed land. The sea was gone from that place too.

* * *

On August 8, 2007, soon after my mad expedition to Barbados, I went to see a psychiatrist about my future. It was time to figure out which grad schools I hoped to get into in 2008: of all the places in the world where I could study psychology, I wanted one that felt like more of a home than a Hell Cocoon. That day, I’d made an appointment at McGill’s Division for Social and Transcultural Psychiatry. It was right in town, and I’d wanted to meet a certain doctor there since the spring, when I’d seen her give a talk on Western bias in trauma counselling. I perched on an ottoman in her office while she read over my CV. She had a long, thin build and a long, thin face, offset by hippie trimmings: forest-green vest, shock of frizzy greying hair, sympathetic eyes. Guatemalan folk art on her walls. She put her glasses down and smiled at me.

“It looks like you have a serious choice to make,” she said. “You’ve done so many things this year: working with children, helping in labs, researching policy … and you were a translator and an artist before this, also? To do well in school, you’ll either have to choose one thing to specialize in, or else keep doing different things and accept that you’ll always be marginal in your career.”

Two minutes in, and she’d cut me to the quick. This was what I’d been afraid of: she was telling me I had to decide between school and having what I thought of as an inspiring life. One way or the other, I’d have to lobotomize a part of myself. As I retraced my steps back to the elevator, I felt amazed at how immediately she’d understood me, shaken that the world might be as black and white as she’d said, and sure only that the Division for Social and Transcultural Psychiatry wouldn’t be a home for me after all.

I knew there was such a thing as a respected iconoclast. I had the impression they came mostly from Harvard. When I was a 19-year-old with heat rash in Haiti, I’d billeted at the home of a trim-moustached medical anthropologist whose shelves had been full of Antillean poetry, West African singers and Creole prayers. His Harvard degree had opened doors with the local humanitarian regime: he spent his days climbing on the backs of motorcycles and trying to convince rural principals to stop whipping their kids, coming home after nightfall and collapsing into a thin, sunburnt heap on his bed. I wanted to see the Harvard that produced men like that. In fact, it was the first school I’d visited that year, back in February, when I went down to see Mel.

Melanie met me at the Boston bus station. She was bundled in a black scarf and white beret, the beauty mark unchanged on her rosy cheek. I’d gotten a haircut. We were looking forward to spending the weekend together, but we were still unclear on some of the fine points. I leaned in to her smiling face. She leaned aside.

“Oh man, I’m—I’m sorry. I kept thinking what to do when we saw each other. Were we supposed to shake hands?”

“I know! Should we hug instead? Aggh, messed up already!” We self-consciously arranged our arms around each other, then turned to catch the T to her home.

Bright and early the next morning she dropped me off by Harvard Square, near her work. With my hands stuffed in my pockets and my breath hanging in the air, I jogged across the intersection and entered the grounds of the most well-heeled centre of learning on earth. Block after block of tidy gingerbread architecture—red brick, snowy gates, curlicued eaves—and, suddenly, the psychology building towering above it all: a 15-story slab of white marble that sloped out, just so, toward the fairytale village around me. The spitting image of a transplanted tropical hotel.

None of the professors in there had returned my e-mails. Their website warned they did nothing but theory and labs, so I knew this wasn’t a home that would bring me closer to people’s lives. Still: a guy can dream he belongs. As long as I was in the neighbourhood, I figured I’d get a sense of the place, and hopefully track down a particular professor who was shaking up some received wisdom on racism.

The hallways inside were all but deserted. From each silent floor, I could look through plate glass windows onto the milling university town below. The professor’s door was locked, and gave no indication of when he might return. I was feeling the oppressive elation of being in a place I shouldn’t be—until I finally ran into a group of people arranging chairs on the topmost floor.

“It’s a NIMH conference. Power, culture and mental health. We need to bring in more seats—you’re welcome to sit in if you want.” NIMH. National Institute of Mental Health. Right, like the Rats of NIMH. Funny thing was, they were all physicians or anthropologists or sociologists. Not a psychologist in sight.

“Maybe I will stick around for a bit. Thanks.”

I helped haul chairs into the lobby and settled in to hear a French former vice-president of Médecins Sans Frontières. Young idealists, he said, used to react to foreign crises by going and fighting alongside the revolutionaries. Now they want to analyze and cure them instead. When Palestinian boys throw stones, mental health workers go in and try to help by revealing that the boys are so traumatized, they wet their beds. I liked this man. He knew people needed help, and he knew psychologists needed their heads checked too if they wanted to be the ones helping. I liked it less when a counsellor got up to discuss spousal abuse, and the crowd responded with knowing laughter at the lies that the abusive husbands told about themselves. High up in the sky, at the intellectual summit of the world, this was how the ivory tower looks upon its subjects: earnestly, cynically, condescendingly, in pain, take your pick.

Halfway through the talks, the audience rippled and abruptly went quiet. A huge eagle had landed on the sill outside the picture window. It paced, it reopened its wings, and it swung out of sight. Everyone started talking at once.

“What was that?”

“A peregrine falcon!”

“They roost under the roof here.”

Leaning back in his seat, the Médecins Sans Frontières man said to no one in particular: “No, I think it was a golden eagle.” He was right. The American PhDs didn’t know the eagles outside their own window.

On my last evening in Boston, Mel took me to a student hangout called Café Algiers. A dimly lit haven for people who like Moroccan tea services on tiny, knee-knocking tables, and washroom walls covered in egghead graffiti about Wittgenstein.

“It’s been so good having you here,” Mel told me. “I’m happy with what I’m doing here”—she was raising funds toward a new university for poor Asian women, and before long she’d be a shoo-in at high-profile NGOs around the world—“but I still haven’t found friends like the ones I made in Montreal.”

“Oh Mel, I know you’re doing this for your future—you’re doing something we both wanted so bad. It’s going to be better the next place you go. It has to be, after all this.” The mint tea scalded my tongue. “You know, I’ve been back in Montreal with all my old friends, but it’s my turn next. Who knows what’s waiting for me at grad school, either.”

Mel said something that surprised me, then: “I’m glad you’re doing it, Nathan. It means I don’t have to worry about you anymore.”

As a parting gift, she gave me a biography of Paul Farmer: another Harvard graduate, who lives in a godforsaken Haitian valley next to the revolutionary AIDS hospital he founded. The brilliant rebel hero of a discipline known as “public health.” I might have had a different impression of Harvard if I’d visited its School of Public Health instead of the psychology building. It’s a field that makes room for outward-looking doctors, social scientists and social workers, and one more young man with psychology training could probably fit under its umbrella. I hadn’t chosen the most obvious path for myself, insisting on asking why it’s so hard to help Brazilian crack alleys and Indonesian red-light districts from within the rigid confines of psychology proper.

After I dragged my spent body home from Barbados, I was truly happy exactly twice that year. The first time happened while surfing the web at the McGill library (at the broad, sunny worktables behind the Vomitorium reference stacks). My wire-thin, TNT-laughing teacher had recommended I check out the Institute of Social Psychology at the London School of Economics, and their site softened my face into the beginnings of a genuine smile. Oh my God: they offered a Master of Science on the role of community in international development. They had a professor from Brazil, who went to the slums of Rio de Janeiro to involve kids with an arts group called Afroreggae. They had a British prof whose homepage described how growing up in Africa and the Pacific had helped convince her that psychology can “challenge the social inequalities we are part of.” And it was a good school. A really good school. A possible home. On the way back to my apartment, I wondered at how completely I’d forgotten what it felt like to be in good spirits.

The second time I was happy was the afternoon of January 10, 2008, in an upstairs room in a wood-frame house at Dalhousie University, Halifax. This one was less of a morale booster, and more of a speechless sense of recognition. I’d come just a few days before Dalhousie’s applications had to be turned in, to cross my t’s about their Master of Arts in health promotion (a multidisciplinary public health degree). Halifax was a laid-back fishing town where I felt like myself, and I thought a solid education from a Canadian university like this would get my foot in the door wherever I ended up. What really blew me away, though, was a last-minute meeting with a human sexuality prof.

“Take a seat,” she said. “What can I do for you?” The students who came to her office sat on the couch with the afghan throw. A shelf along the far wall was full of teaching awards. I apologetically ran through all the things I’d done to try and decide what to do with myself since 2006, and ended by saying I just wanted to help figure out how academics could serve their communities better.

“Have you ever worked with First Nations communities?”

I tried to dredge up some experience worth mentioning. “No. I haven’t. But I’d do my best if—if I had the opportunity.” She looked Native, or half Native. The daughter in her office photos looked half black. She’d had an interesting life.

“I do quite a bit of field work with Mi’kmaq women in Nova Scotia. You seem like a good man. You’d do a good job. You could work with me if you wanted.”

It was the strangest thing. She’d sized me up, and she believed in me. Just like that. And lord did this woman have things to teach me. As I rose to shake her hand, I didn’t feel the need to break down in her lap—just a calmness in the spot where I’d built up two winters of shrilling self-doubt, and where I’d inexpertly tried to wall it away.

Two schools that inspired me: the London School of Economics, where an impossibly independent-minded group was tucked away at a world-class institution; and Dalhousie, less ambitious but more human, with a better chance at connection than I’d felt with any other professor in years. I’d apply to both, and wait and see.

* * *

When Charles and Jeremiah set out the second time, a two-decker warship had been assigned to escort them into the open sea. From there, the Seahorse sailed over the horizon once again alone.

Their first letter home was dated May 6, 1761, three months after their departure. Charles was pleased to report “exceeding good passage” south from the Spanish Canaries, and he had just completed tests of an observatory that he had hammered together at the Dutch Cape Town colony.

Years later, after Charles and Jeremiah had completed illustrious careers with the Crown, astronomers would confirm the quality of their early observations at the Cape. Their work contributed to the first estimate of the distance between Sun and Earth, now established at 149 million kilometres—give or take.

This was the closest that the two men ever came to the East Indies. In his tactful postscript, Charles explained why they’d stopped at the Cape of Good Hope: “Pondicherry is taken by the English, and Bencoolen by the French.”

WWII: The Japanese Storm Singapore by Bicycle (It’s Freezing in This Future – Ch. 3)

One of my Singaporean friends was a guy named Dhany, who’d been in the gifted program at Mel’s high school. He talked about it with a sly, sleepy smile, insisting he’d only gotten in as a test of the system, because they were all convinced he was actually slightly retarded. Now he was back from UCLA, producing some punk bands from around Southeast Asia. It was an easy-going schedule, which got interrupted by his annual National Service: apparently his Malay half made him a threat to national security, so he did his conscription with the police rather than the armed forces. For a few weeks, he amazed me with stories of things he’d seen on patrol. Human turds in flophouse stairwells! Not in squeaky-clean Singapore. Of course there was no way I could tag along—but then he saw something he couldn’t keep to himself.

Off the south coast of Singapore, facing out to Indonesia and the sea, is a resort island called Sentosa. Today it’s thick with five-star hotels, artificial lagoons and amusement rides, but the jungle there hides other things. Dhany’s unit had been up a hill where archaeologists had started excavating the ruins of a British fort. Rumour had it that there were escape tunnels leading all the way under to Singapore’s main island. One Saturday morning, three of us struck out upland from a Sentosa tourist beach: Dhany, a band mate from “Doomcock”—a side project of his—and myself.

The scenery changed the higher we went, from tiled pools with tame monkeys, to manicured golf greens, to a moonbase of satellite dishes, to a side road slipping up into the damp understory. We ducked past police tape at the first trailhead and scrambled to the spur of the hill, where massive concrete platforms marked former artillery emplacements, which once would have had a sightline clear across the ocean to Batam. These guns had been part of the Empire’s strongest fortifications, meant to make Fortress Singapore untouchable by sea. Japan had had other ideas in 1941, though, and they’d attacked from behind instead, choosing to strike far up the Asian mainland and fight their way south through a thousand kilometres of rubber plantations. Their soldiers charged forward on bicycles, wearing pith helmets and knee shorts. Britain never regrouped. It took 50 days for the Japanese to reach Singapore’s inland coast: so far and so fast that each man arrived about 20 pounds thinner. The big guns on Sentosa were cranked around to fire back on the invaders, but the ones we saw here likely got just a few shots off before they were bombed from the air.

We found the fort’s command post at the top of the hill. Vines around the doors, no light inside—and at the centre, where the hallways met, a steel floor hatch. We heaved it open. A slim shaft, just big enough for one man, dropped straight down beyond the reach of our flashlights. Our pebbles took forever to hit bottom. If there were escape tunnels here, this was it. Dhany was the one who finally started down the ladder.

His voice carried back to us: “Man, it just keeps going ... Okay, I can see the ground!” And then: “I made it!”

“What do you see?”

“There’s another tunnel going off sideways, but it’s too dark from here! Come on!”

Twenty metres inside the earth, we followed trailing electrical cables down a horizontal passage. The worst we’d seen so far had been two-inch house centipedes, which froze under our lights. Little sign of life. We came out in a half-collapsed chamber, where we had to navigate across boulders of concrete that had caved in from the ceiling. Here, our beams caught a flash of glass. We climbed up to it, at the crook of a pillar rising out of the rubble. It was a toy treasure chest, small enough to fit in one hand, its sides all transparent panes. Inside—a stack of modern-day business cards. Local treasure. Way to burst our bubble. The first card belonged to the Singapore GPS club … the others, presumably, to enthusiasts who’d tracked down this room before us.

A second passage led out the far end of the room, gradually growing tangled with roots at our feet. It hit a push-bar door, like you’d find in a gym—and suddenly we were out in the sun. Our tunnel had brought us barely down the side of the hill, nowhere near the shore between Sentosa and Singapore, which still glimmered far below us through the leaves. We trudged back down to the beach, stripped down to the shorts we’d had on under our gear, and went swimming with our girlfriends. If you look for the fort online today, you’ll find a few accounts of night-time expeditions by local paranormal clubs, who’ve gone up looking for the ghosts of Chinese comfort women from the years of the Occupation, when the Japanese used Sentosa as a camp for prisoners of war.

* * *

McGill University lies on the downtown slope of Mount Royal, the low peak of parkland at the heart of Montreal. At McGill, the higher up the mountainside you are, the more serious the studyies you do. When I did my language degree here at the end of the 90s, for example, my classes were clustered on Lower Campus, or sometimes in office buildings even farther downtown. Now that I was taking something with an -ology in the name, though, I was proud to have a tougher slog up the hill. The cinder-block halls of the psych and bio building are lined with specimen freezers and eye-flushing stations—monuments to the arcane, important work being done there. I threw myself into it: lab hours one day, research questionnaires at a suburban primary school the next, organizing talks by the odd activist professor, TAing for an online psych course at the underground Bahá’í university in Iran (Bahá’ís are banned from State schools over there), pulling all-nighters during exams to do the copywriting that paid—just about—for my tuition, gym three times a week for the first time in my life. I’d bike back to my apartment in the wee hours of the morning, bent under my books, carrying my exhaustion like a medal of honour.

In the fall I applied for a student fellowship at McGill’s new Institute for Health and Social Policy. The director was supposed to be a genius, an MD–PhD who had just been hired away from Harvard. She’d founded the Institute to build bridges between research and action, which was the point of this whole gruelling exercise, for me—to get back from this mountaintop to the rest of the world, better, more prepared—and there was even a chance they’d pay me to travel over the summer. I’d be useful, and on my way to becoming even more so. Maybe this was the mentor for me to believe in. In the event, it seems the position was poised at the precise outer limit of my capacity: I didn’t get rejected or accepted, just wait-listed, on the off chance that someone more qualified would end up dropping out. Which, after a few weeks, was what they did.

That January, the Institute welcomed me into a 100-year-old house about as high up the mountain as you can get at McGill: any higher, and you’d either have to be interned in one of the consuls’ mansions that overhang the city, or in a tower at the Ravenscrag psychiatry building. Along with the five other fellows—a master’s student in anthropology, a PhD candidate in epidemiology, two law students and a whiz kid doing her bachelor’s in psychology and international development (who all made me wonder if the Institute kept me on so they’d have at least one guy in the program)—I started what amounted to another part-time job on top of everything else, writing shaky policy reviews and attending the graduate course on global health that the director taught herself.

I heaved myself into the classroom each week, sweaty and hockey-haired from the hike, and there she’d be: a diminutive woman from a Boston medical family, wearing her hair down to the seat of her pants and her pants up to her waist. She struck terror in us. Too accomplished, and at the same time too damn kind. When I was working late, I’d run into her on her way to catch a flight for Mongolia or Capitol Hill, and she’d be having a heartfelt exchange with the janitor, in good Spanish. I promptly had a dream where I was chatting with her online:

NATHAN: I think we could be best friends some day

JODY: why some day :)

We all wanted to impress her. Adding to the tension was that only half of us would actually get to do research abroad that summer. At a meeting, one of the Institute staff wrote in a notepad she thought we couldn’t see: “Fellows to stay in Canada—Nathan? Emma?” In the director’s course that semester, I responded by churning out more PowerPoints than I had in my entire life. I interviewed contacts at the Indonesian sex-trafficking NGO for the class essay. By spring, a fellow named Adrienne was finding me hunched over my computer when she opened the lab in the morning.

“Nathan! Did you get any sleep at all?”

“I slept for, um, two hours. How’s it going.” At that point, I was officially looking rough enough to worry the people who saw me. I flashed Adrienne what was left of my smile, and that put an end to the conversation right there. I was driving myself around the bend, but it worked: PowerPoints, Batam and insomnia got me an A. The Institute decided to send me to Barbados.

Barbados. 13°10' N by 59°32' W, warm winds from the northeast. The same history of slavery as Haiti and Brazil, but turned on its head in an inconceivably hopeful way: for once, the goal of my trip wasn’t urgent do-gooding—it was simply to witness how they had overcome. On this tiny Caribbean island, flanked by white sand and blue sea, black political leaders maintain civil debates in widely read papers, and black professors get stopped by eager black students at their own breezy hilltop university. These descendents of slaves have built one of the most highly developed countries in the New World, third only to Canada and the States … and in June and July 2007, I was being paid to poke around in their labour laws, explore how they approached the right to decent work for the poor, so that other countries might be able to learn from their example.

During the day I put on dress shirts and interviewed government officials, law professors, at one point a former Prime Minister whom I was told I could address as Sir Lloyd. Lots of air conditioning, and a lot more work on my handshake than on my tan. In the evening I did my social tourism, looking for people to inspire the burnt-out spirits I’d brought down from Montreal. There was a pair of beautiful Bahá’í sisters who’d started a weekly supper for homeless men in the capital, and I lent a hand with that throughout my stay—the first night, they took me to their after-party in a slick clubbing district, and I gamely joked around with them, but maybe because my questions weren’t fun enough, or maybe because there was something blasted about my eyes, I wasn’t invited out to any of their social events again. In the downtown slum where I did some interviews with workers, there was a Guyanese grandmother who’d invite me into her little house to watch bootleg Pixar DVDs with her family, for no other reason than simple hospitality—but when she asked if I could pass on some of the fishcakes she sold, to try and find new clients, I realized I knew no one who I could approach in that way. Even when I tried the crowd at the nightly basketball game outside my room, I got no takers: “We don’t do things like that in Barbados. You don’t know where food like that is from.”

I was staying at a McGill field school: a clutch of scruffy seaside buildings breaking the otherwise solid wall of fine hotels that screen the beach, its grounds half-surrendered to a covey of cooing island doves. Most of the students there were marine biology majors, bronze, physically perfect, outwardly untroubled, going on daily dives among the reefs, spear-fishing for lobster on Sundays. A policy researcher would have had to work overtime to look any doughier next to these people. I ended up feeling my biggest jerk of kinship with a Messiah College kid who came through to look at virus loads in the doves. He trapped them and drained vials of blood from under their clenched, outstretched wings. I watched the extractions with sick fascination.

In retrospect, I should have spent more time at a particular community centre called the Pinelands Creative Workshop. I liked the intelligent director, in his glasses and embroidered African shirt, who’d grown up in the surrounding tenements. I liked the way neighbourhood moms and dads brought their kids, attracted by the buzz of activities: theatre, mask making, bike repair, small business development. I liked how, while I was waiting for a meeting there, I ended up bowling cricket balls to a little boy and girl on the front stoop. Instead of all that, though, I began retreating more and more to my close-aired room and its lazy fan.

Barbados was the last place I wanted my fatigue to catch up with me, but my mind and body were finally rebelling. I all but shut the door on the palm trees, the coral beaches and polite Barbadian “Good evenings,” losing myself whenever I could in a wireless cloud of distant people, places and Flash sites. I fretted over an early draft of this letter, which I sent Mel during one of our chats—and, oh look, she just e-mailed me a picture of herself in New England, grinning next to a 33-inch sea bass that she’d reeled in.

By my last few weeks, I stirred myself at least to end my trip with a diving course. It would be an easy story to tell the other fellows, hopefully make me look like less of an ass for wasting my time in the Caribbean: “It was great! I learned to scuba dive!” I spent one morning drifting under the water among grey-blue sponges and pipe worms—then was called back out by the Institute before I completed my lessons. As my final task, they wanted 50 interviews with low-income hotel workers, and I had a week and a half to get them done. I buckled down one last time. Interview No. 50 got finished the night of my departure home, as I followed a security guard on his graveyard-shift rounds. I got a single hug goodbye—from a Catholic woman who helped serve the homeless men in the capital—and I got back on the plane.

* * *

On January 17 and 21, 1761, the Royal Society posted replies to Charles’s letter. There was no question: he and Jeremiah should do everything to reach Sumatra as planned, whether or not their damaged ship had any hope of arriving in time for the Transit of Venus that June. Charles lay sick in his Plymouth lodgings. The illness dated from before his first sailing, and it was made worse by the knowledge that the Seahorse would be unfit for at least another week, and then only to return to deadly waters. He pored over his charts in search of alternate solutions.

On January 25, Charles and Jeremiah excitedly informed the Secretary of the Society that they could observe the Transit from the Ottoman port of Scanderoon: “We find no place on the Globe which we can reach to be of as great consequence as one made at Scanderoon; to which place if the Council of the Royal Society will please to send us, we shall with the greatest Pleasure obey their commands; but shall not proceed from this, to any other Place, where it is impossible for us to perform what the World in general reasonably expect from us, and therefore shall wait for a Line to inform us of their further pleasure.”

Having received no reply, two days later the young men pressed with a letter to another Society member: “we shall, be very sorry to proceed from this Place, to any other, where the Society (as time stands) can gain no Honour, or we any Reputation; and to go to India merely for the Premium is an Intention far from our first design.”

They finally provoked a response on the last day of the month: “Resolved unanimously, That the Council are extremely surprised at their declining to pursue their Voyage to Bencoolen and which they have solemnly undertaken; and have actually received several sums of money upon account of their expences, and in earnest of performing their contract.

“That their refusal to proceed upon this voyage after their having so publickly and notoriously ingaged in it, will be a Reproach to the Nation in General, to the Royal Society in particular, and more especially and fatally to themselves … their declining it at this critical juncture, when it is too late to supply their Places, cannot fail to bring an indelible scandal upon their character and probably end in their utter Ruin.

“That in case they shall persist in their refusal, or voluntarily frustrate the end and disappoint the Intention of their Voyage, or take any steps to thwart it, they may assure themselves of being treated by the Council with the most inflexible Resentment, and prosecuted with the utmost Severity of Law.”

Fatal … Ruin … utmost Severity of Law. Four years prior, a British admiral had been executed for pulling his ships from the Battle of Minorca rather than fighting to the end. This was the nature of the contract that Charles and Jeremiah had signed for King and Country. A postscript in another hand tried to soften the Royal Society’s threat: “The Councils do absolutely and expressly direct and require Mr. Mason and Mr. Dixon, to go on board and enter upon the voyage, be the event as it may fall out.” It didn’t matter where they ended up, so long as they were seen to have set out.

So chastened, on February 3, 1761, the two men returned the only possible reply: “We hope to sail this Evening.”

The Chinese Make Land at the Temple of Heavenly Happiness (It’s Freezing in This Future – Ch. 2)

Singapore is steeped in a different metaphysics than the one I’m used to, from the florid Taoist and Buddhist imagery that colours the city by day to the ghosts that haunt streets and housing blocks and banana trees by night. I used to cast furtive glances at the Chinese temples there, long enough to catch the dragons doing their snaky cartwheels above the gables, but not so long that anyone would catch me staring. At the end of the summer, Mel’s father, Bill Hui, came for a visit, and I begged him to guide me through the thicket of carving at their gates. As an adult he’d studied law at Harvard and worked on retainer for the Sultan of Brunei, then became a full-time pro bono Bahá’í in China—but before all that, as a teenager in Malaysia, he’d been a novice Hinayana monk. He agreed to meet me at Thian Hock Keng (“Temple of Heavenly Happiness”), one of the oldest holy sites in Singapore.

Although a flourishing half-Chinese Singapore had already existed in the Middle Ages, at the start of the 17th century the Portuguese swished in and burned that city to the ground. It was only after 1819, the year a renegade knight with Britain’s East India Company re-established a port there, that poor Chinese migrants once again started hauling up on the beachhead to seek their fortunes. At a thatch-roofed joss house that once stood where Thian Hock Keng is today, they thanked the Goddess of the Sea for protecting their crossing. Over time, they brought the pinewood, stone carvings and imperial inscription for a self-respecting shrine. The temple stood directly over the sails of their tethered junks, protected from high tides by a skirt of steep granite. In 1887, though, the bay was drained, and the goddess now greets her believers far inland.

When we arrived, the whole place was locked up, and we had to lean in from the old stone threshold to catch thin glimpses of the giltwork inside. In a deserted side court, Bill pointed out a red-faced statue of Kuan Ti, the God of War and Justice, who used to receive his prayers. We went into an adjoining shop that sold devotional objects. He reached for a cup of ornaments sitting on a countertop—the woman behind the till snapped: “Don’t touch.” Wherever the water was, it must have been miles away.

By July I was asking Mel if her contacts could help get me steered in another direction. They immediately obliged with two communications postings in East Timor: perfect for a Portuguese and Indonesian speaker, I hoped. I applied for both and didn’t get either. Mel was jealous of my nostalgia for Brazil … I envied how everything came to her so naturally. I lasted two months at the desk job that I finally landed at the university. Their teambuilding tests said I showed more leadership than my boss did, which I demonstrated by cramming a redesigned website onto their servers just in time to let them know I was leaving for good. The director called me in for a last-second heart-to-heart. He was a small, balding man with a harmless smile, sitting at the back of a broad corner office that was done up in teakwood and shaded by half-rolled-down scrims. Around the walls he’d hung sensitive pencil portraits: old, sleeveless Chinese men whom he’d drawn himself, melancholy ghosts of a very different path that his life could once have taken.

“I admit I don’t know your work well, Nathan, but I thought the fundraising letter you wrote for the Annual Campaign was very good. Now, you may not be aware of this, but I’ve wanted to hire Melanie for quite some time. If she agrees, this could be a place where you two could build a future together.” This was his best card: the open secret that Mel was the one he really wanted. What could I say? That it was a sad joke to think Mel would ever give up her life for a desk at a university fundraising office? That I’d failed at love, that I’d failed at inspiration, that my last refuge was to head back to school, and fast?

“Sir … I think that’s something you’ll have to discuss directly with Mel. A big part of my decision was that I’m being paid less now than I was at my last salaried job in Canada, even though I have a lot more experience than I did then.”

The director took out a calculator and started fingering numbers into it, then spun it around to me and said: “No, you see, you’re making exactly as much as you were before.” I took exception to everything: to his figures, to the insinuation that just holding even should be perfectly enough, most of all to his blindness about all the unspoken reasons that a man might need to leave the country after having come to make a life with a woman. There was no point in replying. At the end of summer 2006, Mel and I boarded a flight to America together: her to take up an assistant directorship at her NGO’s home office in Boston, me to take up undergraduate psychology in Montreal.

* * *

I spent two long winters back in my booksmart city. I weathered them both underground, riding the Montreal metro, where the nations of the earth pack on with their reading: noses in newspapers, college coursepacks, paperbacks with broken spines. In Salvador there was no thought of anyone reading the news at the corner lunch counters, and in Singapore the transit system distracts its passengers by blasting Diva on a Dime on closed-circuit TVs. In Montreal, though, the literacy is everywhere you look. The long, brown-brick factories that line the canal have been retooled into non-stop information-economy startups, and the café-culture readers have no shortage of inner meaning behind their flipping pages. I moved into the libraries at McGill University, where my landscape was a sprawling skunkworks of computer labs I called “Vomitorium,” “Regurgi-Cave,” “Hell Cocoon.”

The lecture halls were full of kids nine years younger than me, tapping away at Facebook on their laptops, rolling their eyes at Statistics. It had been a decade since my last math class, but I needed this chance to remind myself what it felt like to do something right. Between Fall 2006 and Fall 2007, this was the plan: Get good grades, get research experience and get published, and turn myself into a contender for any grad program on the planet. I started going down corridors and knocking on professors’ doors, partly to ask if I could help in their labs, and partly—more than I realized at the time—to try and find someone I connected with. I wanted to do good science without losing sight of doing good, and if I could find someone who did that in a way I believed in, and who believed in me in return, I don’t think it’s too much to say I would have broken down right there in their lap, just a bit. The defeated man given a chance at redemption.

The fact is, most McGill psychologists aren’t that into saving the world. This is the place where in the 1940s Wilder Penfield pioneered the art of sticking electrodes into people’s brains, and most research here is still of the lab-rat and language-acquisition varieties. Exceptions: an old college linebacker who hangs out with Inuits and gives slapstick lectures on the psychology of racism—but whose theories have never made much of a difference; maybe he’d have liked me better if I smoked, so I could join him out in the rain when he lit up—and a wire-thin woman with a TNT laugh, who has 31 flavours of theory saying how Bangladesh ought to be improving its health behaviours, but treats students and Bangladeshis with the same obvious impatience. Or there was the nine-months-pregnant social work prof I went to see in December, a former ballet dancer whose efforts at rehabilitating child soldiers had just won her a noiseless McGill office of her own. It was still bare from its floor to high ceiling, except for a) the newly unpacked bookshelves, heavy with the language of authority and knowledge, and b) a solitary framed souvenir from Sierra Leone, which showed a clumsy stick woman getting machine-gunned by a second figure, who’d been tagged by its young artist with a single scrawled “I.” That self-portrait spoke a stranger, older language altogether. I’d never seen anyone decorate like that, anywhere. The good professor giving herself a bleak, never-ending heads-up, that she mustn’t let this university cut her off from the sufferings she hoped to help cure. If she had an answer for me—how on earth do I reconcile my science, here, with my compassion, way out there—she replied like a good oracle, in the form of more questions. In a few days she’d be off on maternity leave, and she was going to have more than enough crying in her lap without me. I thanked her and rose to shake her hand.

* * *

In January 1761, Charles and Jeremiah set sail for Sumatra—modern-day Indonesia. The Admiralty had provided them passage on the frigate Seahorse, which hove out of Spithead with some 160 crew and 20 gun. A land war was raging in Europe, and the French and English navies were contesting every landhold they’d seized in either hemisphere. In London, Tories were decrying the all-capitals EFFEMINACY of the British youth. And in the midst of all this, long-wigged astronomers found themselves counting down to a Transit of Venus across the face of the Sun, the first in 121 years: if it could be measured from the Americas, the East Indies, Siberia, the parallax would reveal for the first time the true distance between Sun and Earth. In England, France and Austria, Age-of-Reason scientists acquired military escorts to some of the most inaccessible corners of the globe, each promising glory to their own warring nation.

The Seahorse was gone four days before it limped back to Plymouth harbour. Charles submitted the following report to the Secretary of the Royal Society: “…on Saturday last at Eleven in the Morning, 34 Leagues SW 2 W from the Start point we Engaged the L’Grand [more accurately, the L’Aigrette?] a thirty four Gun Frigate; when after an obstinate dispute of about one hour and a quarter, Monsieur thought proper to run as fast as possible; after chacing sometime in vain, the Captain steer’d for this port to refit. In the action we had eleven men kill’d, and thirty seven wounded, many of whom I believe mortal … All our masts are wounded, and to refit the ship will take up so much time that in my opinion it will be impossible for me to arrive in India in time to make the observation [by India he referred to the East India Company’s holding on Sumatra]; and therefore must desire you will please by a line as soon as possible to acquaint me in what manner the council would please to have us proceed.”

The Decline of the Sultans of Johor-Riau (It’s Freezing in This Future – Ch. 1)

Batam is a little nowhere blip of an island. Even though it sits on some of the busiest waters in the world, where over half the earth’s shipping passes by its front door, world maps often leave it out altogether. In the 16th century, Batam lay at the hub of the regional powerhouse, the Sultanate of Johor-Riau: Imagine green mangrove jungles and Malay fishing villages perched out on stilts, with palaces and mosques on Batam’s sister islands to the east. Today, the local dialect has become an official language for 400 million Southeast Asians. Batam itself, however, has been reduced to a 21st-century frontier land, where the rule of law is slackened to bring in jobs and business from Singapore: once a backwater province of the Sultans, now the ascendant republic across the waves. Almost everyone on Batam has come from other islands, rich and poor, and everywhere dozers have cleared the ground for unfinished housing developments, sudden colleges, palatial KFCs. Behind the construction sites, nearly half the population lives in squatter towns, hoping the wealth will trickle down.

At her condo in Singapore, Mel and I read how Batam’s sex industry is luring young girls with the promise of a better life. We had a few words of night-course Indonesian, which got us out of the ferry terminal and to the address of an NGO that was fighting child prostitution. Down a path between banks of naked yellow earth, into a new commercial block, past a door marked “Counseling—Private.” The director was a pixie-haired Javanese woman who greeted us in English and waved us into her office, which looked through Venetian blinds onto the scarred terrain outside. She listened to our offer of help and tentatively asked what we could do.

We’d rehearsed our answers. “I know a lot of aid organizations in Singapore,” said Mel. “We can try to get them involved. A lot of Singaporeans come for the prostitutes here, and we think Singapore should be part of the answer.” With her British-inflected English, her big dark eyes and the beauty spot on her apple cheeks, she presented a package that could usually wait to get what she wanted, without ever having to put anyone ill at ease.

I added what I could. “I’m a translator. If you have ads and reports that you need in English, I can do those too.”

Behind her desk, the director put forward an unswerving look of worried kindness: the face of someone haunted by the fate of the girls being kept above the local nightclubs, maybe, or maybe reluctant to offend by saying we couldn’t do any good. “In December we will have a campaign for Anti Child Trafficking Day,” she considered. “Do you want to help organize it?”

Finally, this was a project I could share with Mel. It was just a foot in the door on what was obviously an impossible task, but it also felt like a straight line back to the hot tears I used to cry in the backlands of Brazil, when it seemed that I—that all of us—could be a joy to the sorrowful, a sea for the thirsty, a haven for the distressed. And this time, I wouldn’t be alone: Mel was there with me. Lord knew I couldn’t join her on her day job. Her last time in Indonesia, she’d been reporting for the World Bank on rebuilding efforts after the tsunami. Her latest job was helping with a case study on Pakistani microfinancing, which would send her and a documentary film crew across the Indian Ocean for two weeks. She already had a busy life of her own, so if she wanted to share this one extra shot in the dark with me, it was that much more a miracle.

I tried to keep the home fires burning while Mel was gone again. There was an English class on Batam that we’d started for a few Bahá’í kids and their friends, and I ran into Bahá’ís in Singapore who were more than happy to join in. One weekend, as I was taking the ferry home with a German woman and Korean man who’d come along (and done a better job than Mel or I could really hope to do), I saw the Korean guy writing in his diary: “This is how I want to live my life.” My heart rose. I would have given anything to have had Mel there, to have seen her writing those words instead of this man I barely knew.

If anything, though, every passing week was pulling us farther apart. Day in, day out, I’d sit alone at the university in Singapore, looking up words in an Indonesian reader, so I’d be prepared when the NGO asked me to translate their reports. A few did come, eventually. The first one was murky on what it is the NGO did about child trafficking, exactly, other than name-check it in their external communications. The figures didn’t add up: it turned out they were spending most of their time with adult factory workers, distributing morning-after pills. When they took us to a bar to show us where the prostitutes were picked up, they made apologies that we’d arrived too late to see anything untoward—the crowd was just there enjoying the cover band, the lead singer dancing around in her knee socks. I was getting fed up with the whole operation.

* * *

I’d smuggled a psychology textbook into Singapore when I first came, thinking way ahead to a time when I might go back to school and learn how to help people properly. It could have been a textbook on anything, probably, but between South American crack alleys and red-light districts in Asia, psychology looked like a pretty tempting side route to being a joy, a sea, a haven—and it might shed some light on my own deep-seated drive to try and fix everything for everybody, too.

On June 5, 2006, I took a cross-town bus to volunteer at Singapore’s Institute of Mental Health. I didn’t have the Chinese to do much for the elderly residents, so my duties were confined pretty quickly: I could serve as a human pylon, so they placed me at the end of a row on one of their Chinese-opera excursions, and I’d alleged some painting skills, so they had me coordinate a mural in one of their wards. On the morning in question, I was buzzed into a sunny upstairs common room and introduced to a team of engineering students, who’d gamely assembled to work off some community service hours. We were given a trolley of house paints and a little picture of a tropical beach, which I had to reproduce life-size on the ward’s nice clean wall. The clock was ticking. No colour for the sand? No problem—paint the beach bright purple. My palm trees look diseased? Add highlights, they’ll look diseased in 3D! When I finally stepped back, my failure knocked me flat. It looked like the painter had either never seen a beach before, or else wanted to put his contempt for South Seas paradises right where the residents would have to choke on it, day after day, for the rest of their institutional lives. The volunteer directors came in at the end of the day and promptly turned grey: I was given a plastic cup of juice, and that was pretty much it for me there. If psychology could make a better world, mine was going to be an illustrious career.

* * *

Even though a few extra years of study were looking more and more like a step in the right direction—traveling as an effective man instead of a kid, not getting left at the docks by my girlfriend—I still had my issues with going back to school. It would mean joining ranks with the centuries of pale Europeans who’d gone out and filled their books with botanical curiosities, anthropological hierarchies, measurements of the Earth. Even in my short time out there, I’ve seen white scholars acting in ways I want nothing to do with. The first time I visited a Candomblé temple in Brazil, it was with an American anthropologist who was interviewing the Mother-of-the-Saints who ran the place. While he was stuck in her audience chamber, handing over gifts for the privilege of recording her public-consumption announcements, I got to hang out in the sun-dappled yard and chat with her husband about how his life had brought him there, and sketch him with their daughter on his knee. Later, the professor told me he’d seen my drawing tacked up on the audience chamber wall. If science meant trading that kind of human connection for a tape recorder and a list of publications, I didn’t want any part of it.

And yet, and yet: I still feel a jerk of kinship with even the most random scientists on the most random projects out there. Take the young men who scattered out from Europe to watch Venus cross the Sun in 1761. One of them was a guy named Charles Mason, 32: he’d been assisting at Greenwich Observatory going on four years, and the funeral for his wife Rebekah was still fresh in his head, when the Royal Society summoned him to set up a telescope at a pepper-trading fort called Bencoolen on the island of Sumatra, the remotest speck of the British Empire. There was Jeremiah Dixon, 27: when the Royal Military College called on him to test his surveyor’s skills, it had been a matter of months since his Quaker hall had disowned him for drinking to excess. You can see him anxiously checking the fall of his wig and long, plain red coat in the mirror. It was a war out there, from Quebec to the Philippines, and Bencoolen was a boggy malarial hell at the best of times, but if the Royal Society would have him, it would mean a princely £200 and a shot at a whole new life. Then there’s Nathan Wilkinson, 26: the world is smaller in 2006, but I’m no more prepared for the enormities out there. As Charles and Jeremiah head into the unknown, I’m already there, treading water, furiously trying to think what to do as the ocean rolls away.