Page 92 of The One Day You Were My Husband
I watch him wrestle with something. “I have to be honest, Carrie: that’s bothered me. You knew how we’d been. You and me. Did you really think I could have just forgotten and started sleeping with someone else?”
I almost laugh. “You were bundled into a riot van and imprisoned for drug trafficking on our wedding day. Anything seemed possible after that.”
He nods resignedly.
“So how did they find you? Why didn’t they arrest you until we were on Koh Samui?”
“Just before we flew down to the islands, they finally arrested the guy the drugs were taken to. Some Taiwanese guy, a trader who worked in the Bangkok financial district—he’d been on their radar a long time. He stayed up all night using this godforsaken drug so he could work the financial markets in the US and Europe after working all day on the Asian markets. His main supplier had a big shipment on its way, but he just needed, like, a week’s supply to get him through.
“I was in the right place at the right time. A guy I was working with in Myanmar asked me to take some ‘Adderall’ over for a trusted friend, and I said yes because Adderall’s…well, it’s everywhere. It’s legit. My cousin in Canada’s been on it for decades. It really helps with his ADHD. It wasn’t simply that I thought it was legit, though. The truth is: I had my own agenda. I have to own that—I really just wanted to help the guy in Myanmar. He’d sent his team in to get us out of a hairy situation with an organized crime syndicate who didn’t like us diving near their opium export routes. He even got us upgraded—not just to better hotel rooms but to a whole other hotel, which felt like the most luxurious place I’d ever stayed after the shithole we’d been at before. Stuff like that goes a long way when you haven’t had a day off in weeks. I wanted to repay him.”
“But I don’t understand—who was he? Did he work for the windfarm company that hired you?”
“No, he was our fixer. He lived locally, helped us organize stuff on the ground. Fixers iron out problems, make introductions, translate. But unfortunately this guy, who had been nothing but helpful, introduced me to one of the most dangerous drugs in Asia and solved only the problem of some trader’s drug dependence. Never mind that I got twenty-five years.”
He stops for a while, staring out at the dark sea. A boat is making its way through the blackness toward the mainland, obediently skirting the glowing green buoys. I get up and add a log to the fire, even though it doesn’t need one.
“But I must remember that I didn’t have to serve twenty-five years. It was a little over five.” He exhales slowly. “I’d be dead otherwise. I wouldn’t have survived.”
This was something I often heard from patients in clinic.The pain will kill me. I can’t go on like this; I’m at the end of my rope.But of course death is seldom the clinical outcome of psychological suffering; we are wired for survival. Johan would have had to endure that mental agony day after day, year after year, with no way out except by his own hand.
He carries on. “The fixer in Myanmar, he actually wasn’t one of the bad guys. He was just a young guy like me, doing his job. But part of that job was keeping his boss happy, and his boss was definitely a bad guy.
“And it was as simple as that. One morning he got a message from his boss saying that one of their associates in Thailand needed a small shipment ofyaba, to be delivered within forty-eight hours. And there I was, flying to Bangkok the very next day—it was so easy and straightforward. I already had your mum’s antibiotics; what was wrong with a bit of Adderall thrown into the mix, too?
“You can’t say no to bosses like his,” Johan says, sadly. “Have I forgiven him? Of course not. But he was just doing what he was told. It’s how that world works. The evil’s always at the top of the ladder; everyone below complies out of fear. Men like his boss are more than capable of having noncompliant employees eliminated.”
My phone buzzes. It’s Roof, telling me I have a message from Johan.I’m coming over,he wrote two hours ago. It must have been delayed.I’ve just heard that you bumped into my mother, Carrie, I’m sorry. Please wait for me.
He crosses his arms and stretches out his legs. I remember him loping around his flat, normally naked, those long legs always sticking out over the end of his sofa. Johan had never worn clothes when he could avoid it. If he got cold he’d just put a big coat directly onto his naked body and carry on padding around his flat, cooking and talking and working.
“So was this fixer the one who was worried about the dive permits? The guy who told you to lie low for a few days?”
Johan nods.
“Was that just a smoke screen?”
He frowns. “The permit thing was real. But it wasn’t a big deal at all. The real problem was that someone was onto theyabasupply chain. The fixer called me and told me there could be some trouble. That’s why I was freaking out.”
“Was that when we went to that go-go bar district? And you were off-kilter?”
He nods. “I still didn’t know exactly what I’d been carrying, but by then I knew it wasn’t good. Then he emailed saying everything was fine. And so I relaxed—I told myself I’d overreacted. We went down to Koh Samui and I put it behind me.
“What I often forget, though, is that while I was panicking about my twenty-five little pills, someone else was on their way with hundreds. They caught him too. Nigerian guy. Desperately needed the money. He was appealing a death sentence when I left Bang Kwang.”
I wrap my arms around myself. I’ve longed for this information for more than a decade, but now that it’s here I don’t want it at all.
“Did he survive?”
Johan pushes air through pursed lips. “He’s still on death row. I write to him every other month. Occasionally I hear from him, mostly I don’t. He doesn’t know what’ll happen.”
We both sit in silence. Two free people, at liberty to sit in a cabin by the sea, to take airplanes, buy bread, plan a future.
“I was just a tiny cog in a machine,” Johan says. “But these tiny cogs are the ones who go to prison. The big guys just carry on with their money and their supply of whatever it is that fuels their lives. They get what they want because there’s always someone who’s willing to risk everything.”
I look at the lines on his face, the scar on his hand. I wonder if he wakes at night, crying out. If Freja has to turn on the lights, or hold him until he feels safe.
“How did you get through it?” I hear myself ask. “How did you rebuild yourself?”
