and explained to Yak that he would have to leave the house. It had
never been his.
“You killed her,” he said.
“Where will I go?”
“To hell, probably,” he replied. “In the meantime, out of this
country.”
“I have no money.”
The man showed him a slip of paper and handed him a square
plastic card. “It will not work in this country,” he said. He also
handed him a passport, a tiny blank book. “Your mother was
Filipino,” he said, “And now so are you.” Finally, he handed him a
one-way plane ticket. “I hear it’s hot there.”
Yak abandoned the unread boxes of his writing. Soon they would
be discarded by the renovators. As Roy would do many years later, he
walked all the way to the airport, asking directions from sullen
strangers as he went.
From the window of his plane he watched as the wild waves of
the Pacific grew smaller and smaller until they became only a mild
green patina upon the surface of the earth. The steel machine
mercilessly chased down the sun, prolonging its death, until,
struggling violet against the void it slumped down somewhere in the
Far East or the ocean.
2. Chapter Eleven
Yak found Colin the morning after Sprout’s attack, unconscious on
the Undergrounds floor, his arms around one of Partment’s female
Let-it-all-Hang-Outfits. He rustled the disoriented young man
awake and helped him to the bathroom to throw up. Bennie arrived
for work.
“My mom’s been deported. Someone tipped off the police,” he
told Yak with only a twinge of annoyance: he knew they would get
back in. His mother’s magic knew no borders.
The phone rang and Bennie took the call. He answered with short
mumbles of affirmation.
“That was Morris Bidden,” he informed them, “He wanted to see
if we got the present.”
“The present?” Yak said.
“A coffee tree. He had it specially delivered last night. An offer we
ABYSSINIA
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