The Best American Travel Writing 2014 by Paul Theroux Read Free Book Online Page A

him later, at his apartment in Manhattan, he assured me that BEN was a closed case, and that a greater source of concern was the public health risk caused by the use of a variety of aristolochia in Chinese herbal medicine. He described his recent collaborations with researchers in Taiwan, where aristolochia is a commonly prescribed remedy, and where the reported incidence of upper-urinary-tract cancers is the highest in the world. Whereas a hundred women got sick in Belgium, Grollman says, millions of people may be at risk in Taiwan and China.
    Researchers like Tatu, on the other hand, think that BEN is unique: although its causes may occur individually all over the world, their combined effect is specific to the endemic regions. For my father, too, the disease is defined by a set of particular locations. He thinks it’s significant that patients speak of doomed houses—that they feel it’s the places and not the people that are sick. He often quotes a remark by an old colleague, now deceased: “I could live in this town for twenty years, and I’d know which house to live in, to not get sick.”
    On our last afternoon in Bosnia, the driver drove my father and me around the countryside to look for aristolochia. We stopped at a swamp overgrown with creeping tendrils, trembling fronds, and strange, earlike formations. We did not find aristolochia. We stopped by a cornfield, and walked along the perimeter and down one of the rows. A sudden commotion broke out among the cornstalks, a violent rustling and shaking, as if from the thrashing of some hidden beast. A moment later, the source of the disturbance revealed itself: a glossy, compact pheasant, running through the corn.
    We got back into the van. The sun hung low over the late-summer fields. The cornstalks seemed to be standing around chaotically, like skinny, crazy people, their arms flung in all directions. As we drove past, there was one magical moment when they arranged themselves into rows and it was possible to see clearly all the way to the end, before they dissolved back into disorder.

JULIA COOKE
Amigos
    FROM
Virginia Quarterly Review
    Â 
    I F THERE WAS ONE THING Sandra knew well, it was hair. She knew hair from root to split end. In beauty school, she had learned the shape of the human head and how the best thing to do when trimming its hair was to section the skull into eighths. Her long nails shone red as she held her soft hands in front of her to demonstrate on an imaginary client. Her gold rings glinted. When she tired of haircutting techniques, she waved her hands quickly and her fingers sparked through the thick night like fireworks.
    Sandra, like other girls who hung out where we sat on Havana’s waist-high seawall (
malecón
) where it hit Paseo, wore fashionable clothes of the barely there variety: diminutive shorts with interlocking
C’
s on back pockets, glittery heels, bras that peeked from tops, halters leaving midriffs bare. She dyed her own long, straight hair blue-black and lined her lips with the same dark pencil that she used around her eyes because shops hadn’t carried red in months. Her plastic nails were thick and whispery along the tips; she grabbed my forearm as we crossed the street on our way to the bathroom at a nearby gas station, dodging the cars that sped around the curve at Paseo. We went the long way to avoid the police who hung in the shadows on the intersection’s traffic island, keeping an eye on the strip. “The cars here, they’ll hit you. And if it’s him”—Sandra flicked her chin and pulled her hand down to mime a beard, the universal gesture for Fidel Castro—“they won’t stop. They’ll run you over and keep on going.”
    There were clubs and bars at the hotels that hulked over the crossroads—the mod Riviera, the shimmery Meliá Cohiba, the Jazz Café—but since few locals could afford drinks there, the tourists who wanted to meet