As I relax further another strange fact rises to the top of my mind and escapes like a trapped wasp into the free air: none of the movies that Frank Charles directed was in his collection at the penthouse on Soi 8, not even his very first feature film, Black Wednesday, which, according to critics other than myself, was a very decent attempt to transpose French and Italian noir into an American genre. None of his schmaltz features on his shelves either. If he had been a man sensitive to opinion, one might have deduced he was ashamed of his life’s work and didn’t want to flaunt it before discerning friends. But as far as we know, Charles brought few guests to his enormous condominium, and they were usually Thai working girls who could not read English and knew nothing of Western intellectual snobbery. Maybe the one person whom he didn’t want to see his own movies was himself?

My mind flips back to how fat he was. To hate oneself in a complete way is impossible; to hate one half of oneself with the other half is not only possible but frighteningly common among farang. But I cannot take the thought any further because I’m slowly falling asleep. When I wake, it is because people are rushing around the plane trying to take pictures. The mountains are back. I fumble with my camera for a moment, then decide to concentrate on seeing them. They’ll be here on the return journey.

At the Kathmandu Guest House I take a suite on one of the upstairs floors near the antiques showroom. The first thing I do, as a kind of homage before I begin unpacking, is to climb to the flat roof of the guesthouse to look out over the city. Nepal is two hours behind Thailand, so it is just at the point of twilight, when translucent indigos and purples repaint what little is left of the mountains, and other people on other rooftops bring in the washing and prepare the evening meal. From the rooftop I call Lek.

“I want you to call the Thai Chamber of Commerce here in Kathmandu, if there is one, or whoever at the embassy deals with this kind of stuff. If the Thai government can’t help, ask Kimberley to contact the American Chamber of Commerce. I want to know the names of all the agencies here that might be involved in filmmaking, you know the kind of thing?”

“Of course I don’t, I haven’t got a clue what you’re talking about. I suppose I’ll work it out, though. And by the way, what did your last slave die of?”

Naturally, I try all the numbers Tietsin gave me to contact him. Naturally, none of them are in operation, either because he’s turned his phones off or because the network is not operating just now. I go to my room to unpack, then stroll down the driveway, through the iron gates manned by impressive men with black moustaches and military uniforms, out onto Thamel.

Once on Thamel, though, I realize I simply cannot resist a visit to Bodnath, even though I’ve not been able to contact him.

It’s almost dark by the time I arrive, with just the faintest glow in the west, when I begin my ritual journey around the giant stupa. Its brilliant white breast disappears with the last of the sun, but the two great eyes benefit from spotlights. There are not so many pilgrims and tourists spinning the brass prayer wheels at this time of day, and the eyes have an intimidating aspect to them. Without the certainty of clear daylight, it’s easy to imagine the mind behind them as master of the night.

The journey all the way around the stupa takes much longer than during the day. Strange thoughts assail me; my mind changes. It occurs to me that a stupa was originally a means of contacting the dead, that it is a Neolithic burial mound that I’ve come to pay my respects to. It occurs to me that the Far Shore is never all that far away, had we not been programmed to pretend it doesn’t exist. It occurs to me that our ancestors, long before the Gautama Buddha arrived with his clarifications, knew more about death than we know about the motions of the stars. With their short, hard lives they must have faced the mysterious disappearance of loved ones every year; it must have seemed as if the whole stream of human life led straight back to the stupa-the sepulcher, you might say-and the more enduring world of the dead. And it occurs to me that nothing has changed, except that the extra twenty or thirty years we can expect to spend on the planet these days seem to have blinded us to a truth that for our ancestors was brutally obvious.

This meditation takes me one complete circumnavigation. I deliberately began in the west so after three and a half turns I will end in the east. When I start the next round, I am thinking, I know he is watching. He knows I am here. Nevertheless, the second round with the brass I spend in a kind of trance state in which thought, though it still exists, is relegated to a secondary function while some kind of emptiness, a beautiful, indescribable absence, takes its place. So it’s not until the last leg, the half turn from west to east that will finish my tour, that I remember what the stupa looks like when I see it through Tietsin’s eyes. And suddenly there it is: black under a bloated full moon, quite still, no people anywhere, only me dwarfed by this great dark mountain of death from which a lurid lightning bolt seems to split the sky.

But this time the vision doesn’t fade. It stays with me in the cab on the way back to the guesthouse, and when I lie down to close my eyes it becomes obvious that this is where Tietsin’s blade wheel has been leading. That all the great fuss I’ve made about my state of mind is as nothing compared to what comes next. And it’s not Tietsin whose name I call just before nodding off. I hear myself whispering, Pichai, my brother, my self. Pichai, tell me, what happens after you die, really?

Well, what happened to me at that crucial moment in my spiritual development was that I fell asleep. Now it’s some awful predawn nightmare that has awakened me; no, wait, that really was “All Along the Watchtower” I was hearing in my sleep. I find I’ve not corrected the clock on my cell phone, so I can tell at a glance it is six a.m. in Bangkok.

“This is your katoey secretarial service. I hope you took plenty of clothes, I hear it’s freezing up there. I got a short list. Actually, there are only three agencies worth considering, only two of those do high-altitude locations-I’m assuming that’s what we’re talking about here-and only one really looks like the kind of outfit Charles would have used, I mean with fluent English speakers, contacts in LA, et cetera.”

“What are you talking about?”

“The agencies-the people who assist foreign film crews, especially Americans, to make a movie in a foreign location. Sorry, I am speaking to Detective Sonchai ‘Never Left a Case Unsolved’ Jitpleecheep of Bangkok and Kathmandu?”

I blink. Sarcasm and work are two different modes of consciousness, and I can only cope with one at a time right now.

“There’s only one agency?” I say with considerable relief. I was not looking forward to spending the day talking to wannabe Asian Hollywood producers in dark glasses and black T-shirts. “So, what are the details?”

“I’ve sent them by e-mail. I don’t trust you to get the details right this early in the morning. Have you been smoking?”

“No. I forgot to score. Too busy. I’ll try today, thank you for reminding me.”

“Sonchai?”

“Yes?”

“Master?”

“Yes?”

“Is there really no such thing as love?”

For a moment I’m tempted to spill bitterness all over the cell phone. Then I see the inherent irony in the question. You could say Lek has been chasing love all his life in his own way, lifting the rock every morning, watching it roll back down the hill every night, just so he can endure the full day. His martyrdom is immeasurably vaster than mine.