Performance Anomalies Read Online Free Page A

to him. Personal. It was a world apart from the trips he made for others who needed his talents. He did their bidding by impersonal choice, and for his own amusement and occasional gratification, for he had no need of the money they gave him for his trouble.
    Xiao Li was unique. But there were many other unique women in his nomadic life, who together formed a network of sorts. It wasn’t a formal network; it had just emerged and grown and changed over time. And it wasn’t fashionable in the Western world—a man at the center of a web of women. They lived in varied spots around a shrunken globe, in cities or towns or villages. Some traveled, and some were trapped in place by poverty or tradition or family or men, or even by wealth and position.
    At times Cono thought it was he who was trapped by this carousel of women, despite his freedom to go anywhere on the planet he chose. Trapped by his desire for them, his admiration of them, his adoration of their strength and beauty. And they in turn persisted in their allegiance to him, an allegiance of spirit that was hardened by the intensity of their encounters with Cono, who offered each a different relief from her circumstances.
    Cono’s meditation faltered. Rather than going deeper, as if tied to a heavy stone sinking into a dark river, it leveled out, then began to bob and rise, tugged toward the surface by his aching worry for Xiao Li.

3
    Cono’s seatmate, Anvar, was still asleep, his hands resting palms-up on his crotch, when Cono pressed a finger into one of the palms to wake him and tell him the plane was at the gate.
    As Cono walked briskly among the passengers in the dim airport corridor, he spotted his friend Timur in wraparound sunglasses at the side of the brand-new immigration booths. The two did not greet each other, but Timur signaled to the official to let Cono pass. “It’s the gray Mercedes, to the right,” Timur said softly without looking at Cono. As Cono passed the customs desk he glanced behind him at the bag man, the pigeon, next to Timur, still standing beside the immigration stall. The bald man holding the case passed through, leaving the other passengers in a jostling crowd. Timur was always doing double duty.
    Cono got into the back seat of the Mercedes. In less than a minute, Timur opened the car door and climbed in next to him. Without instruction the driver pulled into the trickle of cars and vans exiting the airport. When they were on the lightless road heading into the city, with whitewashed tree trunks flashing by in the headlights, Cono looked at Timur’s face, still concealed by his wraparound shades. Timur extended his hand to the seatback in front of him, where the driver couldn’t see it through the rear-view mirror. He made a thumbs-up. Xiao Li had been spared.
    It would be at least another half hour before they got to the center of the city. There would be no conversation during this time—no further information about Xiao Li, no news of their friend Muktar, no details shared about the twists and turns of their lives since last they had last seen each other. Four years. Had it been that long already? And before that, another four years since their first meeting. Cono was startled by the realization that Timur was one of his oldest friends.
    Timur had grown into a big-time player, but when they first met he’d been just a soldier on furlough, singing his own form of Tupac-inspired rap in mangled English, drunk on warm afternoon beers.
    It was a week after two of Timur’s buddies had been shot through the head next to him on night patrol at a southwest border. “Wahhabis,” he’d explained to Cono. “They take Afghanistan, then they move into Uzbekistan, now they want Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan.” Timur had had to give the bad news to the mother of one of the dead comrades. “She cried. She screamed, ‘Why did he die and not you?’ Fuckeen good question. She’d begged Zaman to stay out of the service, just like my mother