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The road to Eli’s planned hiding place in the country is long and lonely, especially in the dark hours before dawn. On the expressway, after you get past the outer exurbs and the bejeweled carpet that is the sprawling city at night, the terrain is flat, uninspiring, and cavernously dark if there is no Moon. Your companions on the road are mostly semitrailer trucks carrying foreign-made goods from the docks in the harbor to the superstores of the country’s interior.
Eli and Keiko were headed, not for a glitzy resort, but to a little health spa tucked away in a rural area surrounded by scrub woodland and dusty backroads. Eli knew the owners, Vivek and Myra Singhe, who ran a budget-priced retreat where hippies would go to meditate and drunks could dry out. The adjacent small town had doz
