“I’m stranded in Paris. Nothing Nora told me is right. What should I do?” I asked him.

Jack was annoyed but decided he could not leave me to my own devices. “Go find a Western Union. Tomorrow I’ll wire you money for a ticket.”

The wire didn’t come for several days, but I didn’t mind; I wandered Paris in a haze of excitement, taking everything in. Alongside most French women I looked like a teenager, so to counter this I bought a pair of spidery and beautiful black crochet stockings to go with my Doc Martens and miniskirt. I didn’t care if I ever left Paris. I was in heaven, all alone.

WHEN I got off the smoky thirteen-hour flight from Paris to Bali, I was surprised to see my former brewery coworker Billy waiting for me, towering above the Indonesians with a big grin on his freckled face. Billy could have passed for my brother, strawberry blond with bright blue eyes. “Nora’s waiting at the resort. You’re going to love it here!” he said. Reunited with Nora in our luxurious room, I felt shy with her in this unfamiliar setting. But she acted as if this were all perfectly normal.

Bali was a bacchanalia: days and nights of sunbathing, drinking, and dancing until all hours with Nora’s crew of gay boys, any pretty locals who wanted to help us spend money, and young Euros and Aussies we met in the clubs at Kuta beach. I went to the street market to buy a bikini and sarong, bartered for carved masks and silver jewelry, and walked the back roads of Nusa Dua talking to the friendly locals. Expeditions to temples, parasailing, and scuba diving offered other diversions-the Balinese scuba instructors loved the long-finned, jeweled, and elegant blue fish that had been tattooed on my neck back in New England and eagerly showed me their own tattoos. But the festivities were punctuated by tense phone calls between Nora and Alaji, or Nora and Jack.

The way their business worked was simple. From West Africa, Alaji would make it known to select people in the States that he had “contracts” for units of drugs (usually custom-built suitcases with heroin sewn into the linings) available-they could turn up at any number of places in the world. People like Nora and Jack (essentially subcontractors) would arrange to transport the suitcases into the States, where they were handed off to an anonymous pickup. It was up to them to figure out how to manage the transport-recruiting couriers, training them on how to get through customs undetected, paying for their “vacations” and their fees.

Nora and Jack were not the only people with whom Alaji worked; in fact, Nora was now competing with Jonathan Bibby, the “art dealer” who had originally trained her, for Alaji’s business. The tension I observed in Nora derived from how many “contracts” were available, whether she and Jack could fulfill them, and whether the units of drugs would actually arrive as scheduled-all factors that seemed to change at a moment’s notice. The job required lots of flexibility and lots of cash.

When cash ran low, I would be sent off to retrieve money wires from Alaji at various banks-a crime itself, although I did not realize it. Then I was sent on one such errand in Jakarta, one of the intended drug couriers asked to come along for the ride. He was a young gay guy from Chicago who was heavily into Goth but cleaned up well and looked the part of the perfect prepster; he was bored by the plush hotel. During the long, hot ride across the sprawling city, we were transfixed by the gridlock, the cages of barking puppies for sale at roadside, and the human strata that the Southeast Asian metropolis offers. At a traffic light a beggar lay in the street asking for alms. His skin was almost blackened by the sun, and he had no legs. I started to roll down my window to give him some of the hundreds of thousands of rupiah that I had with me.

My companion gasped and shrank back in his seat. “Don’t!” he shouted.

I looked at him, disgusted and perplexed. Our taxi driver took the money from me and handed it out his window to the beggar. We rode on in silence.

WE HAD tons of time to kill. We blew off steam in Bali beach clubs, Jakarta military pool halls, and nightclubs like Tanamur that were borderline brothels. Nora and I shopped, got facials, or journeyed to other parts of Indonesia -just the two of us, girl time. We didn’t always get along.

During a trip to Krakatoa we hired a guide to lead us on a hike in the mountains, which were covered by dense, humid jungle growth. It was hot, sweaty going. We stopped to eat lunch by a beautiful river pool at the top of a towering waterfall. After a skinny-dip, Nora dared me-double-dog-dared me, to be precise-to jump off the falls, which were at least thirty-five feet high.

“Have you seen people jump?” I asked our guide.

“Oh yes, miss,” he said, smiling.

“Have you ever jumped?”

“Oh no, miss!” he said, still smiling.

Still, a dare was a dare. Naked, I began to crawl down the rock that seemed like the most logical jumping place. The falls roared. I saw the churning, opaque green water far below. I was terrified, and this suddenly seemed like a bad idea. But the rock was slippery, and as I tried in vain to edge back like a crab, I realized that I was going to have to jump; there was no other way. I gathered all of my physical strength and flung myself off the rock and into the air, shrieking as I plunged deep into the green gorge below. I burst the surface, laughing and exhilarated. Minutes later Nora came howling down the falls after me.

When she popped up, she gasped, “You are crazy!”

“You mean you wouldn’t have gone if I had been too scared to jump?” I asked, surprised.

“No fucking way!” she replied. Right then and there I should have understood that Nora was not to be trusted.

Indonesia offered what seemed like a limitless range of experience, but there was a murky, threatening edge to it. I’d never seen such stark poverty as what was on display in Jakarta, or such naked capitalism at work in the enormous factories and the Texas drawls coming from across the hotel lobby where the oil company executives were drinking. You could spend a lovely hour chatting at the bar with a grandfatherly Brit about the charms of San Francisco and his prize greyhounds back in the U.K., and when you took his business card on the way out, he would explain casually that he was an arms dealer. When I rode the elevator to the top of the Jakarta Grand Hyatt at dusk, stepped into the lush garden there, and began to run laps on the track that circuited the roof, I could hear the Muslim call to prayer echoing from mosque to mosque throughout the entire city.

After many weeks I was both sad and relieved to say goodbye to Indonesia and head back to the West. I was homesick.

For four months of my life, I traveled constantly with Nora, occasionally touching down in the States for a few days. We lived a life of relentless tension, yet it was also often crushingly boring. I had little to do, other than keep Nora company while she dealt with her “mules.” I would roam the streets of strange cities all alone. I felt disconnected from the world even as I was seeing it, a person without purpose or place. This was not the adventure I craved. I was lying to my family about every aspect of my life and growing sick and tired of my adopted drug “family.”

During a brief stay in the States to visit with my real and very suspicious family, I received a call from Nora, who said that she needed me to meet her in Chicago. O’Hare Airport was known as a “safe” airport, whatever that meant, and it was where the drugs were flown. I met her at the Congress Hotel on Michigan Avenue. What a dump, I thought. I was used to the Mandarin Oriental. Nora explained tersely that she needed me to fly out the next day, carrying cash to be dropped off in Brussels. She had to do this for Alaji, and I had to do it for her. She never asked anything of me, but she was asking now. Deep down I felt that I had signed up for this situation and could not say no. I was scared. And I agreed to do it.