The Craving

In the monochrome hush of 1918, a Bengali polymath—eyes like smoldered saffron, gait as soft as ink on rice-paper—glides through San Francisco’s fog-choked docks, hunting a combustible American savant whose veins run with corn-whiskey and sodium nitrate. The scholar, Dr. Sati Chandra, carries no passport save a hunger for the formula that can unmake empires; his mark, Prof. Alden Parrett, nurses a thirst so ferocious it rattles the beakers in his clandestine lab. Chandra insinuates himself into Parrett’s blurred nights—slipping tinctures of sympathy and shots of rye into the same crystal tumbler—while Parrett’s estranged wife, Leonora, a watercolorist of dying light, senses the Oriental visitor is less colleague than eclipse. Between Chinatown opium attics and the powder-stinking piers, allegiances shift like tectonic plates: a half-Chinese dock boy who believes dynamite is a language, a missionary spinster hoarding secrets in her hymnal, a federal agent whose left hand trembles whenever justice is mentioned. When the final reel ignites aboard a coastal freighter, the coveted explosive is not in the chemist’s battered notebook but in the very air—desire itself, volatile and unlicensed, detonating the frontier between East and West, sobriety and oblivion, love and annihilation.