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baseball-cap painter.
    “So they know what they are talking about,” Saya finishes.
    The orange light has faded into deep rose. We talk until we’re sitting in the dark. But we can still see one another. We listen to the frogs. Crickets ring in a second chorus. I listen to the growing choir of creatures singing around us. How free they are, frogs and insects and the final birds of the day. When a clap of thunder crashes above us, we jump in our seats, shaken from our separate reveries.
    Saya says, “You hear that big sound? That is exactly what we want to tell you. That is how we would like to speak. But we cannot.”
    * The Shan leader and druglord Khun Sa died in Rangoon on October 26, 2007, of complications from diabetes and high blood pressure. He had lived in seclusion and relative luxury in the Burmese capital for over a decade. Though he had been at war with the Burmese military regime for much of his life, the generals gave him amnesty in 1996 and refused the U.S.’s request to extradite him on heroin trafficking charges (for which he had been indicted by the U.S. District Court in New York in 1989). In return for the protection of the generals, Khun Sa disbanded his powerful Mong Tai (Shan) Army.

CHAPTER 7
HORROR WITH LAUGHING

    On our way back to the guesthouse, I tell San Aung about the editor who is now in jail.
    “Yes, I heard about it while you were away. He is well known. Every month, after the publication of each issue, he would say, ‘Maybe they’ll come and get me now.’ So they went and got him. It’s no surprise.”
    “Are you afraid sometimes?”
    “Of what?”
    “Of going to jail?”
    He grunts. I’m not sure if this means yes or no or if he’s just showing his disdain for the question. “I like to think the military intelligence network isn’t interested in me anymore. I don’t do much.”
    “But you do enough. Don’t you?”
    He thumps the big, bare-looking steering wheel. “This is enough. Driving around with you, an external destructive element.” This is a joke, a reference to one of the SLORC’s ubiquitous red-and-white propaganda billboards:
Crush all internal and external destructive elements as the common enemy
.
    “What did you used to do?”
    “You asked me that already.”
    “I’m just curious.”
    “Don’t you have a saying in English about curiosity? And dead cats?”
    “Curiosity kills the cat.”
    Another grunt, and a lurching lane change. There is not so much traffic on the streets in this part of town, but somehow we’re stuck in a little posse of cars with ailing mufflers racing down the wide thoroughfare. “I used to work with underground agents. Find places for them to stay, food to eat. I’m retired now. But I should not tell you anything about it. If the MI agents pick you up and torture you, please don’t mention my name.” He laughs.
    I say, “Ha-ha.”
    “It wasn’t such a great job. The pay was bad.” It’s hard to tell if he’s joking or not. “You know when you go back to your guesthouse and write things down?”
    “Yes?”
    “Things that you see, the talks we have, about what happens here? You know?”
    “Yes?”
    “For you it’s notes on paper. For me it’s my life.”
    Silence. But not really: the close roar of traffic, to which I add, “I’m trying to understand that.” He takes a sharp corner onto Mahabandoola Street and I sway toward him in the narrow car.
    “Sorry.” He’s referring to the turn, though he doesn’t sound apologetic.
    I try, and fail, to hold my tongue. “Do you think it will always be your life?”
    “Yes, I think so.”
    “Even when democracy comes to Burma?”
    He clears his throat of phlegm and spits out the window. “In ’88, wethought the change would come immediately. The military would step down and a caretaker government would rule, then we would have free elections. You would not believe what it was like—the protests, the streets filled with people. So many people!” Now he flings