(PDF) Stories From Cambodia

Stories

From

Cambodia

Books by Richard Symanski aka Korski

Nonfiction. The Immoral Landscape: Female Prostitution in Western Societies, 1981;

Order and Skepticism, 1981 ; Wild Horses and Sacred Cows, 1985; Outback Rambling

1990; Blackhearts: Ecology in Outback Australia, 2000; Geography Inside Out, 2002;

87 Days in the Gentle City, 2007; Brumbies and Blue Eggs, 2007; Irreverent Essays on

Geographers, 2007; The Inquisition and Other Essays on the University, 2008; Here’s to

a Martini in Your Shoe: Critiques of Presidential Addresses before the Association of

American Geographers, 2010; A Father’s Journal of His Son’s First Year, 2012; Bullies

and Other Essays, 2013; The Thousand Mountains of Borneo, 2013; Famous Geographers

in Need of Schooling, 2013; When I was Immortal, 2013; Bad Boy Geographer: A Memoir,

2014; Wandering Vietnam (2004-2013), 2014; Lust & Love in Southeast Asia, 2014; Rum

Jungle Two-Finger Stories, 2014; Brazil Beyond the Amazon, 2014; Skin on Skin, 2014;

Unmasking the Great God Sauer, 2015; A Burning Man Seminar on Fieldwork by

Geographers, 2015; The Philippines: Occasional Essays, 2015; Cuba and Jineterismo,

2015; Welcome to Bangladesh, 2016; Mangled Minds in Myanmar, 2016; Wandering

Small Pieces of India, 2016; Wandering Cambodia, 2016; Israel’s Graffiti, 2016; Allah’s

Gaze & Other Essays on Indonesia, 2016; Travels in Malaysia, 2016; 14 Days in

Trumplandia, 2016; Goodbye Mom, 2018; Liberals Kill People, 2018; Burning Man 2005,

2018; True Tales and Tall Tales on the Monger Trails of Southeast Asia, an Open Letter

to John Agnew, President of the AAG 2009, 2019; Ethnogeography & Other Essays on

Geography and Geographers, 2019; Dumb Students & Other Essays on the University,

2019; Assholes, 2019; Cowboy Shirts and a Thirty Dollar Watch, 2020: Ayala

Disappeared, Treseder Canceled. 2020; Strong Weed and Dead Snake, 2020; Deceitful &

Dishonest Geographers, 2020; Middling & Mindless Feminist Geographers, 2020;

Geographers Who Dropped the Ball, 2020; Life on a Remote Island in the Philippines:

Vol.1 Introduction, 2021; Life on a Remote Island in Island in the Philippines: Vol. 3

Growing Up Poor, 2021; wanderingasia3@gmail.com, 2021; Meandering Musings on a

Covid Road, 2021; 100 Small Texas Towns: Photo Geographies, Vol I: The Border

Region, 2021; 100 Small Texas Towns: Photo Geographies, Vol. II: North and Central

Texas, 2021: 100 Small Texas Towns: Photo Geographies, Vol. III: North and East Texas,

2021; Life on a Remote Island in the Philippines: Vol. 10 Culture Shock, 2021; Life on a

Remote Island in the Philippines: Vol. 7 Bargirls and Their Customers, 2021; An Apology

Rejected: The Precipitant That Killed a Marriage, 2021; More Hokum from Geographers,

2022.

Fiction. Improbable Fictions on the Road to Poona, 2007; The Bar Girl & the Belly

Dancer, 2010; I Cry for You & Other Stories, 2010; The Libertine & Other Stories, 2014;

True Confessions, 2014; The Wire & Other Stories, 2015; Follow the Blood & Other

Stories, 2016; Bong-gai & the Four Sisters, 2016; The 17th of April: Stories, 2020; The

Black Widow Spider, 2020; To Shoot a Muskie, 2020; The Wayward Professor, 2020:

Hotshot, 2021; Stories from Indonesia, 2022; Surreal Stories, 2022; Stories from

Cambodia, 2022.

Stories

From

Cambodia

KorsKi

Estrilda Publications

American Copyright Conventions. Published in the

United States by Estrilda Publications.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any matter

whatsoever without written permission except in the case

of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and

reviews.

ISBN 1-978-1-4276-9510-9

First Edition

`

Contents

Life and Death in Cambodia 1

Jit Stories 10

Stabbed in the Chest 19

The Braided Beard 33

Mosquitoes 42

A Lucky Birth Date 47

A Murder in Phnom Penh 61

Mad Dog Henry and a Cricket Dying 72

A Fallen Man 89

The Game 95

My Cambodian Mistress 104

vi Contents

Murder He Called It 116

The Void 125

`

Life and Death in Cambodia

I first met Cal on the restaurant balcony of the Mealy

Chena Guest House & Restaurant six years ago. I had

gotten in late the night before from Phnom Penh, had a

few beers, and then retired to my room where I read a

couple of John Cheever stories. In the morning, I headed

over to the restaurant and found a small table overlooking

the decaying relics from the French era and the many-

colored bay and the islands beyond. I was about halfway

into an English breakfast—eggs, baked beans, bacon,

hotdogs and toast—when I noticed that a heavyset man

with a full and unkempt head of salt and pepper hair and

a huge beard more gray than brown had taken the table

next to mine.

I finished my breakfast and had a second cup of strong

drip coffee, all the while eyeing this man next to me, who

as far as I could tell had not once turned in my direction.

What I had noticed right away when he sat down is that

he took out a plastic sandwich bag that had an ample

amount of marijuana in it, and one of those tiny packets of

cigarette paper for rolling your own. Meticulously, he

made a joint, and then he began smoking, slowing tilting

his head back as he inhaled, and then just as slowly

moving his head forward as he exhaled. He didn’t order

2 Life and Death in Cambodia

a breakfast, but he did have coffee and three glasses of

orange juice.

I remember my opening words to him: You seem

relaxed, like you’re unfolding all this around us on your

own special clock.

He didn’t turn to look at me, and instead took what

was left of the joint to his mouth and went through this

ritual that did not vary, and would not change in the

slightest when I saw him in subsequent years. The last of

the smoke out of his mouth, he said, It’s easy here. That’s

what you have to know about Cambodia. There’s never

any trouble or hassles unless you’re stupid, a statement

that in more recent times he amended to: Or a Russian.

The Russians had come, he and others would tell me,

and a reminder of what I had seen in Thailand. They have

brought money to be laundered, and they have brought

their famous penchant for heavy drinking, and most

telling perhaps they have brought their disdain for even

the most minimal standards of acceptable behavior, which

more than anything gets them in trouble with the police

who are amazingly tolerant, or demanding of no more than

a few dollars for what in this part of the world might be

called your run-of-the-mill fuckup—no driver’s license,

drunk while driving, beating the shit out of someone who

deserves it.

He invited me to join him, and he said his name was

Cal and that he’d come here a little over a year ago from

a small town south of Austin, Texas. And west of

Life and Death in Cambodia 3

nowhere you ever heard of, he added. I think he might’ve

named the town he came from that first time we met, but

I never could remember it, and it didn’t matter anyway.

Geography of this sort is beside the point.

After taking up a chair across from him, he asked me

if I wanted to smoke, and when I nodded he made one for

me before he fashioned a similar one for himself, the

second of what would be three joints on this our first day

together. Or rather I should say the second of three that I

saw, for he may well have had one or two in his room

before I met him, and I have no idea how many later that

same day. Then, and in later get-togethers, I would notice

that as the day went on he would sometimes, for an hour

or so, turn to smoking a local brand cigarette and drinking

what seemed like an endless run of Angkor draft beer,

before he’d again return to a joint. A morning, afternoon,

and night dessert, he once said to me when describing his

habit. But maybe this isn’t being quite fair to Cal and even

others that I meet from time to time in my aimless travels

in this part of the world. One person’s joint is everyone’s

joint, and maybe it has always been like this among weed

aficionados—a way of bonding that visibly brings to the

fore certain attitudes about this small life we all live, and

in the long moments of sharing a way to make light of

what others invariably take too seriously given that we all

must face the inevitability of personal extinction.

4 Life and Death in Cambodia

In subsequent years, I would learn that Cal had had

some run-ins with the law in Texas, though as far as I

know he never spent any time in prison, nothing more than

a few days or a week in a local jail. I gathered that none

of these problems had anything to do with the marijuana

he was growing in the general vicinity of the trailer he

shared with his wife and three dogs in the years before he

found Cambodia. The problems, I think, had to do with

gun issues, and taking game out of season, and on one

occasion threatening a neighbor with a shotgun because,

as he said, the neighbor had gotten sassy and mean with

his wife. I sensed that Cal had great respect for his wife,

and he didn’t like anyone treating her like less than an

equal.

His wife, Holly, had gotten diagnosed with a rare kind

of blood cancer at the age of thirty-seven, at a time when

they had been making their first attempt to have a child.

They never had the child because Holly was soon getting

Life and Death in Cambodia 5

radiation and chemotherapy treatments for that kind of

cancer that short of a bone marrow transplant or

something similar is fatal. It was a tough time for Cal, all

this suffering by his wife and thinking about the child he

would never have, and about the only relief he got from

watching his wife slowly die was the strong friendship he

had developed over the years with a neighbor, Russ, who

had been living alone for several years in a nearby trailer.

Russ also had been married, to a woman who worked

as a waitress in the small Texas town not far from where

they lived. Cal said that Russ’s wife couldn’t keep her

panties on when she found herself around customers who

gave her the pretty eye and sugary words and then wanted

her for an hour or two in a hotel or in the back of the cab

of a long-haul truck, followed by a tip of the sort she was

not accustomed to getting serving coffee and meals. Russ

knew about this problem with his wife and ignored it,

claiming he loved her and this was just the way some

women are--dropping their panties for all comers--and

you have to accept it, just like some women have to accept

that men are this way too.

He lived with this bad behavior by his wife until the

day he found out that she had given him the clap on one

of those two or three days a month when he needed a little

relief and she was in a good mood and, as Russ liked to

put it, willing to spread her legs and take that fucking

cancer stick out of her mouth long enough to give me a

smile while doing it. But after the doctor told him the

6 Life and Death in Cambodia

news and Russ knew that there was only one way he could

have gotten the disease, he’d had enough. So one day

when his wife was at work he rented a small U-Haul trailer

and put all of his wife’s belongs in it and parked the trailer

outside the gate coming onto the property. He took an old

piece of plywood and wrote on it: Don’t Ever Come Back

or You’ll Regret It. Like Cal, Russ loves guns, and he

likes people to draw their own conclusions about what this

might mean under certain circumstances. As Cal tells it,

Russ never saw his wife again. He didn’t bother with

getting a divorce, and he doesn’t to this day know whether

she is alive or dead. He doesn’t care one way or another.

It was when Cal’s wife died that Cal and Russ decided

they’d had enough of paying too much for electricity and

paying property taxes that made no sense and always

having to worry about being stopped on their bikes when

high or drunk. Texas like everywhere else in America is

just lots of people who don’t know what to do with their

own lives but love getting into other people’s business all

the time, Cal would often say. That just doesn’t happen

here in Cambodia, he says. No one pays any notice to

what I do and that’s the way I like it.

From time to time I’d find myself around Cal and

Russ, always in the same little bar on the street with all the

bars with needy girls who come from even needier

families, and always slouched in one of the bamboo chairs

facing the dirt street, invariably drinking beer or a rum

coke and enjoying either a cigarette or a joint. It became

Life and Death in Cambodia 7

clear that this is where they spent most of their afternoons

and evenings, obvious because they could tell me the

names of all the girls on their way to work and how long

they’d been here and if they had a kid or two; and how

much the Russians across the road were drinking and who

or what they had run over or smashed in their big cars; and

all about the pretty and tall Khmer woman with the baby

in arms who came around in the early evening with a

plastic box full of the best apple pie you could find

anywhere in Sihanoukville, maybe the whole of

Cambodia.

Some nights we’d sit there for a couple of hours and

drink and smoke and recycle stories, until it got really

quiet and everyone had had too much and then we’d all go

our separate ways. There were other nights when the only

difference was the billiards we’d play, the stakes never

higher than the half dollar or so for another glass of

Angkor draft, and maybe not even that. Now and again I’d

get lucky and someone I’d never met before would join

the small nightly gathering of expat runaways and drunks

and dope heads and I’d hear stories that I could then turn

into one of my small essays or use in a short story that I’d

write and be read by all of four or five people.

A couple of years ago, Cal and Russ bought some land

a couple of hours to the west of Sihanoukville in the

mountains. I didn’t have to ask what they’d be growing,

but I was a bit curious about how much they’d have to pay

the cops, corruption something that has always fascinated

8 Life and Death in Cambodia

me, long working on the assumption that it gives one the

real market value of a good or service. I never found a

way to get this information, however, and as much as I

sensed the two of them had come to trust me they didn’t

reveal much at all about this venture. I would learn just

this year that whatever they had been doing didn’t work

out. I don’t know whether they had problems farming the

weed, or with the cops asking for too much, or maybe it

was just too damn much trouble and interfered with the

easy life they’d come to embrace. What I did learn just a

few days ago is that Russ is now into doing a little

electrical work for the bars and restaurants when there’s

an outage, which might come several times a day because

no one has a clue how to run power through the ancient

lines. Anyway, Russ gets enough from this talent he

learned back in Texas to allow him to give a little more to

the local girls with kids who no one wants to be with and

then come to Russ asking for a small loan that he can’t

refuse and knows will never be repaid.

Since I last saw Cal, a couple of years ago at about this

time of the year, he’s slipped, and he’s getting worse by

the day. He now can’t seem to get himself out of bed most

days in the small room he has. He sleeps long hours, he

reads novels, he goes to his weed habit as much as he ever

did, and the depression that was there long before he came

to Cambodia has gotten worse. He’s now chronically

depressed, for days at a time unable or unwilling to speak,

or eat much, or even drink like he has done for so long.

Life and Death in Cambodia 9

A little over a month ago, Cal discovered a rash on his

arms and legs, and it began to spread. It now covers a good

part of his body. He has no explanation for what it is or

where it came from, and he doesn’t want one. He won’t

go to a doctor, about this he’s quite insistent. He’d rather

just lie in bed in his small musty room with the noisy

overhead fan and the cockroaches feasting on the food on

the floor and wait until there’s no more waiting to be done.

No one can help on this, and just like all of us advice isn’t

something he wants to hear, any more than he ever wanted

to listen to two words from a Texas cop or some

bureaucratic ding-a-ling from the county coming around

to reassess the value of the land on which his trailer sat.

Maybe it’s the memory of his wife and how she died

that’s now killing him? Maybe it’s just a cancer like the

one that got his wife, he believes. Maybe it’s just the Dark

Hole of depression that has no explanation and needs none

and now cannot be kept under wraps with another joint,

another dozen beers, another game of billiards, or another

repetitive comment on the familiar traffic on the dirt road

where for so long you could find him seated next to Russ,

two gentle and unassuming men with no goal other than

to enjoy another hassle-free day in the best place they can

imagine living. And dying too, that thing they really don’t

care to talk about.

`

Jit Stories

She brings me my first one when I wake up. Then she

goes to the street and gets us some food. She comes back

and sits at the small table near the window and eats. I ask

her to join me and eat beside me in bed. She shrugs her

shoulders and keeps eating. That’s the way Jit is.

Later she disappears and comes back in three or four

hours. I never ask where she goes because by then I’m

into my second or third one and I don’t care. Anyway,

where she goes and what she does is her business. Why

should I need to know?

Jit says she loves me and wants to take care of me

forever. I don’t know about the love part. I do know she

does a good job of making sure I have what I need. When

I need more she goes to the street and buys it. When I tell

her I’m not up to going out to the little restaurant we like

that’s okay with her too. She goes out and gets us street

food. She gets spicy for herself and something not so

spicy for me.

I try to take care of Jit too. I can’t do it during the day

or before I have some sleep at night. I’m doing too much

to forget Christie and put all that violence behind me. So

Jit and I have this agreement. She wakes me in the middle

of the night and kisses me several times and says okay

honey. It takes me a while to wake up and get in the mood.

Jit Stories 11

I do though and do all she wants. She likes me to stay

inside her as long as I can. She says when I do this it makes

her warm and loved like she never knew before.

We’ve been having problems lately. There’s a little

blood after we’re finished most nights. I think it’s because

I’m inside her too long and then what she asks for after

that. I tell her and I show her with my hands what the

problem is. She says no that’s not it. The problem she says

is I’m too big around for her. That’s when I give her a

picture lesson with my hands and talk about having

babies. But she doesn’t believe me. She has her own

ideas and I can’t change them. That’s how Jit it.

Jit asked me yesterday if we could stay together for

another month or two and maybe longer. I said I sure want

to. But I don’t know how long the money will last and

how long it will take to get Christie behind me before I

can think of doing something productive. I told Jit a little

bit about Christie and how we were girlfriend and

boyfriend for five years and in love. I told her too how

Christie lost her job and started drinking and then turned

violent with me. I couldn’t control her. She would hit me

with plates and anything she could find. I couldn’t hit her

back until that last night. That would have been real

trouble for me. Twice I called the police and they came

and just listened and did nothing. That’s all they did was

listen and days later Christie began again. Then one day I

came home and found her with an empty bottle of vodka

on the table. I groaned and said not again and she took the

12 Jit Stories

bottle and hit me in the face. I bled good and when I came

out of the bathroom and still bleeding I beat her up. I hit

her with my fists and kicked her when she went down. I

don’t know how hard I kicked her but she screamed and

then stopped and rolled into a ball. That was when I

packed my bags and got the money I had and left. I got

my head fixed up and soon I was on my way to the airport

and a one-way ticket over here. This is pretty much what

I told Jit about Christie and me. When I told her she just

listened and hugged me and made me another one and said

she loved me. She said she wouldn’t do that to me.

Now she wants me to stop. She says she’s going to

leave me one day if I don’t because I’m getting worse.

That’s true. It’s one to another now all day long. I don’t

seem to care most days, and I spend time, too much time,

wondering if Christie is alright and got a job and a new

boyfriend. That’s what I would like to hear most of all.

I don’t want to believe Jit about leaving me. I tell

myself it can’t be true because of the way she cuddles up

and hugs me all night long. She couldn’t be without that.

I don’t think she ever had it before like with me. Once I

asked her how her husband made love to her. She didn’t

want to answer me at first. Then she said they did it for

five minutes and that’s all. That’s how they always did it.

After five minutes he was off and asleep or off to see his

friends and drink.

I met her just over the border after I got my visa. I was

traveling on a dirt road on a motorbike going to where we

Jit Stories 13

are now. Jit was by the side of the road and a little

crummy house and three naked kids running around. I

could tell she needed a ride and was going to the same

place. I had the guy taking me stop and I asked her if she

was going in the same direction.

She said she didn’t know if she wanted a ride right

then in the same direction. She lost her Thai passport and

couldn’t go home. Then she said she thought maybe she

could find it if she went back in the direction I was going.

Come with me is what I told her. Maybe you can find

your passport and get the problem fixed.

I don’t know if I can trust you, she said.

I looked at her kindly and told her she could just get a

ride and get off when she wanted to.

She thought a long minute and looked at me carefully.

I don’t think she trusted me then. Then she got on and

before long she was grasping my hands around her small

waist because I was sitting behind her. She didn’t want

me to fall off. That’s when I knew we would be spending

time together.

Along the way Jit asked me if I had friends where we

were going.

I shook my head and said not really. I did know a

friend who was here on a long-time buzz like I’m doing.

He’s the one who got me to come here.

Why you going there? she wanted to know.

14 Jit Stories

I didn’t want to tell her so I said I didn’t know. It was

too early to tell her about Christie and how I could get all

I needed every day to make her and that problem go away.

Okay, Jit said when I said I didn’t know. Up to you if

you want to tell me.

That’s pretty much all there is to say about how Jit and

I found ourselves together. I didn’t say anything about the

passport problem after that even when I found it one day

among her things. I figured she had her reasons for not

wanting to go home and one day she’d tell me.

Jit tells me stories about her past. This is after we

make love in the middle of the night and she wants to talk.

It’s all one story that gets revised. Jit doesn’t have any

special order for the chapters. In the morning when I

remember the latest chapter she told me I give it a number.

Then I have to revise the numbers of the other chapters

because she tells them to me out of order. Some days it’s

hard to think about reordering her chapters because the

road I’m on is so flat and beautiful and there is not a bump

or Christie anywhere in sight.

I used to be on one of those mountain and curvy roads

with Christie. That’s how I think of it now. But it was

driving me nuts and what I did was going to happen one

day and it did. I regret it but there’s nothing I can do about

it now. It’s better that I’m here and don’t know what

happened to Christie or what would have happened to me

for what I did to her. Maybe she’s okay and maybe she’s

not. That’s up to her now.

Jit Stories 15

So here’s one of the first chapters Jit gave me. In this

one she only had one boyfriend up to the time we met and

she’s twenty-four. They were together three months and

then she had to leave him. He was spending all his money

and hers too and wouldn’t take care of her. In this version

of this chapter like the next version he was hitting her and

that was another reason it ended after three months.

Funny or not so funny is how it was just the opposite of

my problem. That’s probably why she didn’t say too

much and just held me the way she did when I told her

about Christie.

Last week Jit gave me a revision of that chapter. She

didn’t go back to the first version and it was like she forgot

it. She out and out said she had been married for six

months. It was her parent’s idea and not hers. She didn’t

like him that much but she did it for them. They wanted

the money and the gold. He had to pay 100,000 baht for

her plus two of something or other in gold.

Jit went to the next chapter two nights later after I told

her she was bleeding again for the third time and we had

to be more careful about how we were making love. They

moved from the north to Bangkok and got jobs. She

worked during the day and he worked nights. Then she

got a second job and barely saw him except on Sundays.

He was making 8,000 baht a month and spending it with

his friends and drinking it all away. He was always with

his friends and didn’t want to cuddle and hold her and

make love to her like I do. That wasn’t good but she could

16 Jit Stories

keep doing it for the money and gold he gave to her

parents. She stopped there and didn't say more. The next

night I told her I had to know what happened in the next

chapter.

He hit her like a boxer on both sides of the face. It

sounded almost a little like what I did to Christie when she

hit me with a bottle and I needed nine stitches on the side

of my head. After he beat up Jit pretty good she left him

and went home to her parents and told them they made a

big mistake. She told him she couldn’t return to him. You

made a mistake she told her parents and I hope you learned

something. They had to give back 40,000 baht and one

piece of gold. That was the deal for getting rid of him.

I asked Jit why she didn’t have a kid with him. She

couldn’t give me an answer. I guess there were not

enough of those five-minute times they had on Sundays or

whenever.

Several days ago Jit came home with more of what I

need and I asked her how much. She’s been good about

my money and remembering how much things cost. She

told me and it was cheaper than the last time and this is

the reason I can’t leave right now. I didn’t tell her that.

She wouldn’t like to hear it.

She wants me to quit and go with her to her home in

Thailand and live there. She says I’ll quit if I love her

enough. I try to tell her that I need to get Christie out of

my mind first and that might take a while. Jit says she

doesn’t understand about Christie staying so long in my

Jit Stories 17

mind. I should just forget like she did with her six-month

husband. That’s how Jit thinks.

She cares for me a lot and I know that. I tell her I love

her a lot too because she likes to hear that. But right now

I can’t see the end of the long smooth road I ride all day

long until I go to sleep and then get awake enough to make

love to her.

After Jit told me that first chapter about herself that

she revised she told me another story with some different

chapter headings. One was about her younger sister. She

is twenty-two and a little fat. That’s because she wasn’t so

lucky and had a kid and can’t lose all the weight she

gained. It was bad luck having the kid because her

husband was bad too. He was stealing all her money and

didn’t want to work. That marriage lasted not even three

months. Their parents are taking care of the child. Jit

didn’t say if they had to give money and gold back or how

much her sister got in the beginning. She did tell me the

father has never come around once to see his kid. He

doesn’t give Jit’s sister money either.

The last two mornings Jit hasn’t been giving me the

first one. I don’t know exactly what’s up. She got up both

days and disappeared for longer than usual. I think maybe

she met another guy and will tell me about him soon.

Then I'd be on my own and I don’t know how I’ll get by

without her.

Today when she gets back I’m going to ask Jit if she

found someone else. There are lots of young guys like me

18 Jit Stories

here all doing the same thing I’m doing. I don’t know if

they have their own Christie stories or not. Whatever is on

their minds they like the nice soft buzz and no hassles

same as me. We’re all talking about staying here long

time. We don’t know how we’re going to do it money and

job wise. That’s what needs working out.

I have to think this one through with Jit now. I’m

thinking if she says she’s leaving me for someone else I’ll

try to persuade her to stay. But I’m also thinking I have

to tell her it’s up to her. That’s what she would say to me

if I found someone else. I think she would say this. Who

knows what Jit would say?

If she says I have to stop doing so much I might have

to give that one a real long and hard thought. She’s been

taking good care of me and I owe her something. Maybe

if I stopped it would be easier at night too and then she

wouldn’t bleed. That’s what makes me feel bad and why

I need to try harder if she found someone else. If she

stayed then maybe we could find a road we could both get

on going in the same direction.

`

Stabbed in the Chest

This month it will be twenty years since I last saw

Chantou. I do not know if she remarried, or even if she is

alive. At the time I did what I had to do, and I would do

it again.

I met her in a restaurant in Phnom Penh. She was

living with her parents and four siblings. She was pretty,

small, vivacious, smart, and determined. It is this last

trait— determination—that I feel certain got her to do

what she did, and caused me to do what I had to do.

When I brought Chantou to the U.S. I was living in an

apartment in the Haight-Ashbury district of San

Francisco. I had gotten divorced seventeen months earlier

and lost a considerable portion of my assets to my ex-wife,

Susan, including a yacht and a large home on a hill in

nearby Sausalito. I planned to buy a home for Chantou and

me after we got settled and she felt comfortable in her new

environment. The best that we could find for her when

she arrived was a job as a waitress, what she had been

when I met her. It was hard getting something more

rewarding because of her meager education and lack of

fluency in English. After four months and sensing

increasing dissatisfaction on her part, I persuaded her to

quit her job and take some courses in English and then try

20 Stabbed in the Chest

to get into San Francisco State University, or perhaps a

junior college. She could pursue whatever major caught

her fancy, I told her. She liked the idea, enrolled in a junior

college not far from where we lived and worked hard at

her studies. I had hopes that within a year or so she would

find herself in a four-year university.

We got along well and Chantou was very affectionate

and loving, especially compared to my ex-wife. I could

not have asked for more from a partner. Chantou was fun

and loved to go sailing. She was great at picking out new

and different restaurants for us to try on weekends. And

she absolutely delighted in spending a Saturday morning

among the gay crowd in the Castro District, whispering in

my ear with a child-like sense of surprise when she saw

two men kissing or hugging. There are gays in Cambodia,

but this was different, because this was America and it is

not what she expected.

But there was a problem that I misjudged or I didn’t

see with the clarity that I should have, and on this score I

think I have an enormous amount of company among

those who have found wives in Asia. When we got

married, I agreed to send $200 a month to her parents, a

considerable amount for a family living on the edge of

starvation and with virtually no material possessions to

speak of. Chantou was delighted with my generosity. I’m

sure, even to this day, that her family was happy with the

money I was sending. But as with all things good and bad,

time changes everything, and not least demands and

Stabbed in the Chest 21

expectations. What is initially seen as a great gift soon is

taken for granted. Once this happens more and more is

expected, and demanded. Then, too, I encountered that

familiar problem of reconstructed history. One can no

longer “remember” what was said, or memory has

mutated and there is an adamant denial about what one

person took to be a fact beyond dispute.

Less than a year into our marriage, Chantou claimed

that after we had been married six months I would start

sending $300 a month to her family. I had said no such

thing; about this I am certain. She also claimed that I

agreed to buy her a new car on the first anniversary of our

marriage. Again, I am certain that I made no such

promise. As if this was not enough, she argued with me

that I had promised that during our first year of marriage

I would buy a home for us. It is true that I had talked about

this as a possibility, but it was—in my mind, at any rate—

far from a firm promise. I am sure that I made clear that

we had to find something at a good price, and that both of

us would like.

I had two major bank accounts. One was solely in my

name and was where I deposited the bulk of my salary.

The other account had both our names on it, and every

four months I put several thousand dollars in it. From the

beginning I had told Chantou that it was an account we

would use for household goods and personal effects.

Wanting to share with her and demonstrate that I trusted

her, I had her take responsibility for reconciling this joint

22 Stabbed in the Chest

bank account and making sure that— unforeseen expenses

aside—the money that I deposited in the account lasted for

the entire four months. I needed to trust her with this

responsibility, and I did. I gave little thought to monthly

checking the account balance. It was important in my

mind that I not do so.

In the early days of the month of March, twenty years

ago this month as I write these words, I came home early

one day from work, picked up the mail, found the bank

account statement to our joint account, and—in a rare

moment of curiosity about how Chantou was budgeting

our expenses—I opened the statement. My eyes

immediately fell on the balance, which showed that based

on the amount that I had put in the account in early

January there was not enough to carry us through the next

couple of months. I immediately knew that either Chantou

was on a spending spree of a sort I had never seen before,

or she was withdrawing the money and sending it to her

family. I sat at the kitchen table and poured myself a

strong drink, and I began to wonder what else she was up

to that I didn’t know about.

I said nothing about the bank balance discovery that

night when she came home. I wanted to give myself a

couple of days to decide how to confront her. One day

turned into two, and then into four, and it was Saturday

night, that day of the week when we went dining and

dancing or to the theater. This particular night she found

an upscale restaurant at Fisherman’s Wharf--Sarmientos-

Stabbed in the Chest 23

-and as part of our evening out she suggested we park the

car near Nob Hill and take the cable car to the wharf. I

thought it was a splendid idea, yet another example of

Chantou’s initiative, one of the many things I found so

attractive about her.

We had cracked crab legs and pasta and a couple of

bottles of wine, and I think it was about as lovely an

evening as I could have imagined with her or anyone.

Everything was going so well that I had not given a

thought the entire evening to the nagging question I

wanted to ask her about what had happened to all the

missing money in our joint bank account. But then I felt

this sudden urge to do so, brought on I would guess by all

the wine and before dinner drinks we had. While we were

waiting for the bill to come and finishing the last of the

wine, I remarked, How’s the household budget looking?

Are we doing okay?

It’s fine, it’s fine, she said, not looking at me but with

her eyes down as she did so. And then as abruptly as she

had spoken, she got up and excused herself to go to the

bathroom.

She was gone an unusually long time, and when she

returned I was waiting outside the restrooms, ready to

leave. As I normally did, I reached for her hand. But it

wasn’t there, or rather it was there but she didn’t want to

be touched.

I had thought that when we got home we would follow

a routine that I’d become accustomed to. We would have

24 Stabbed in the Chest

a glass of sherry or cognac, cuddle on the couch, begin to

get intimate, and then head for the bedroom and some

vigorous lovemaking. But on this particular night, she had

her cognac down before I’d had a chance to take my first

sip, and before I knew it she had pulled away from me and

said she didn’t feel well and wanted to go to bed.

I felt restless and turned on the TV and looked for a

late-night movie. Luck wasn’t with me. I found

something with Doris Day, not that kind of movie I cared

about. I began channel-hopping, and when I heard

Chantou’s light footsteps I thought that she’d changed her

mind and was coming to urge me to come to bed for love

making. She came up behind me and as she often did she

wrapped two arms around my neck and kissed me on the

cheek. She pulled away and I expected her to come around

and sit on my lap, or grab my hand and we’d straightaway

head for the bedroom, perhaps undressing each other on

the way. But suddenly I felt this enormous and frightening

pain in my chest. I looked down and saw the knife and her

small and delicate hand, and then the blood beginning to

ooze and squirt out of me. All of this happened so

suddenly that I had no time to think. I would later

conclude that my system was being flooded with

adrenaline. Reacting without forethought, I ripped at her

hand and pulled the knife from my chest and got to my

feet. Beyond this point, what happened is a fog. I think I

grabbed hold of her arm and threw her to the ground and

began violently, madly, uncontrollably kicking her in the

Stabbed in the Chest 25

head. I don’t know how long I continued doing so—

perhaps this all happened in a long minute or two. And I

got to the phone on the table and dialed 911 and shouted,

I’ve been stabbed in the chest! I must have given our

address before I passed out.

The next thing I remember I was in the hospital and

there were tubes attached to my arms and a nurse hovering

over me and whispering something like: You’re going to

be okay, just try sleep if that’s what you feel you want.

I was lucky. Chantou missed my heart by less than an

inch. I would have to spend nearly a week in the hospital.

It might have been longer had I not insisted that I hated

hospitals and would prefer to be at home and hire a nurse,

were that necessary.

As soon as I was not sedated and able to speak there

were a couple of cops who had all kinds of questions about

what had happened. I reconstructed the events as best I

could. As might be expected, they wanted to know what

triggered Chantou’s behavior. What was her motive? I

was asked, not once but several times.

They asked if I wanted to bring criminal charges. They

said it was possible that Chantou was going to charge me

with attempted murder.

What are you bastards talking about? I remember

shouting. I loved her. She tried to kill me!

One of the cops, a tall skinny guy with thin lips and a

fat mustache and bald as a monk, said, You’ve got some

reason to worry. Your wife has been unconscious since

26 Stabbed in the Chest

that night and just woke up this morning. There is no

evidence of brain damage from your mauling her, but

she’s going to need some repair work done to her face and

teeth.

Sounds like she was lucky, I said. I should have killed

her.

He took down some notes in a pocket-sized notebook

while his partner fiddled with an unlit cigarette.

There was still plenty of evidence of blood on the

chair and the floor when I got back home and tried to

decide what to do. Yes, what should I do? And what, I

asked myself a thousand times, had I done wrong? It

wasn’t that I hadn’t loved her, treated her well, or

supported her in pursing career goals. I had even given

money on a regular basis to her family, and might well

have increased my giving in the future— on my terms, of

course. She had wanted a family and so did I, and we

often discussed starting one, after she’d finished her

schooling and been able to get a teaching job.

What I had done wrong was now obvious, I finally

concluded. Chantou had never known anything but

poverty and need, and when I took her out of that world it

was everything she could have hoped for, and yet would

never be able to cope with except on her terms, and in light

of her history. It would only be a matter of time—less

than a year I could now see with clarity—before she took

me and all my riches for granted. And then, inevitably,

inexorably, wanted more, and more. Nothing would

Stabbed in the Chest 27

satisfy her. It was as if she had to make up for all those

years of having nothing. It might be said that she became

greedy, but this is not quite the right word, or the way that

word is used in the world I grew up in. I don’t in fact

know what word would best describe her state of mind,

and that of so many millions like her. Perhaps it was a

way of behaving, and thinking, that cut to her essence:

take as much as you can--it is the way the world works,

and if you do not believe me then try to relive my history

and maybe you will begin to understand.

There was, I decided, yet more to what she had done,

and it was something that I had read a fair bit about in

those days of travels in Asia but never really digested,

made a part of my thinking and understanding of her. It

was this: no matter how much I gave her, and what I did

to show my love for her, I could never be family, that inner

circle of blood: parents, grandparents, cousins, brothers

and sisters, and even more distant relatives. In a very real

sense, Chantou demanded that I treat her extended family

as I treated her. I could almost imagine her thinking that

whenever I spent $100 on meals and wine for an evening

I should be setting aside an equal or greater amount for

her kin. And if I did not, she would take from me by

whatever means possible. If I made it hard for her to get

what with time she saw as her own, and if I discovered the

deceptions she was engaging in, she was quite willing to

go to extremes.

28 Stabbed in the Chest

If there was something I wanted to do to dramatically

change matters, and quickly, I had about three or four days

to put a plan together. After that I could expect Chantou

to be released from the hospital.

I was still so beside myself over her attempt to kill me

that I made no effort to even see her, and made only a

cursory attempt to ask about her condition. I just could not

bring myself to look into her eyes and believe that there

was so much as a smidgen of love. But then at other

moments, as the night got long and I had had several

drinks, I did want to see her. I very much wanted to get a

good look at what my new brogues had done to her.

I waited a full day before making any decisions, and

then one night as I was eating out alone, at a corner table

by myself, the decision about what to do came to me

quickly—click, click, click, bang, bang, bang, it was all

there.

I contacted a real estate dealer and told him to find me

an apartment or a condo, or even a house to rent, and

somewhere on the other side of the city or perhaps north

of the Golden Gate Bridge. I made it clear that I needed

something right away. I then called a moving company

and arranged for them to move all my furnishings and

other goods, and said that I’d be willing to pay a healthy

surcharge if they could do so on short notice.

I was now in lying and deception mode, and I figured

the best way to get this next part of the plan underway was

to get a firm decision from the doctor on when Chantou

Stabbed in the Chest 29

would be able to leave the hospital and then be fit enough

to be on a plane for up to fifteen hours. It took two days to

get an answer to the first question, and all I got to the

second question was a lot of hemming and hawing and

nothing definitive.

I got Chantou a nice room in the Sheraton, and then

forced myself to go the hospital and sound reasonable,

telling her—all lies—that I was deeply sorry for what had

happened and I sure hoped we could reconcile and I still

loved her. I then told her that psychiatrists I had talked to

recommended that we spend a week or so apart (the reason

for the room at the Sheraton) and that she then fly home

to be with her family for a couple of weeks or so while she

recovered.

At this point, I don’t think she had any love for me at

all, but then I also don’t think that she could see what I

was up to. And what I was up was to put her in a position

where she could not return. We were finished. I didn’t

want to have to deal with any kind of charges and counter-

charges and legal expenses. Nor did I want to give her

one-cent more than I had to, and certainly not enough to

be able to return and claim what was rightly hers under

California joint tenancy laws.

I saw that she got room service and could make

international calls. I went to see her often and we had

meals together, and in our conversations I worked hard to

convince her that I loved her as much as I ever had and

would begin sending much more money to her family. I

30 Stabbed in the Chest

also told her that I was looking at cars for her and a nice

house for the two of us, and that once she returned from

Cambodia we would buy her a car and decide on a house

to buy. As far as I could tell, she found me persuasive, and

I even began to believe my own devious words.

It was clear that she was going to need some

reconstructive surgery on her face and some dental work

to replace teeth I had broken. I said that I had been talking

to surgeons and dentists and we could take care of

everything upon her return.

One night at dinner she asked me if it would be

possible to get permission from the psychiatrist to fly

home right away. I said I didn’t know but would find out

the following day. When I saw her that day for lunch I told

her that I had now gotten permission for her to fly home

and had purchased a ticket for the following morning.

How much money will you give me to take? she

asked.

Five hundred dollars in cash and another ten thousand

in an ATM card in our names.

Can you give me everything in cash?

I would love to, honey, but both of us would hate to

lose that money or get it stolen.

Can you give me half in cash then?

It’ll be no problem at all.

The following morning at the hospital, I got her

dressed in a hurry and said I had to get her to the airport

right away because I had an important business meeting

Stabbed in the Chest 31

to return to. She’d heard the line before about important

business meetings and didn’t react. She said nothing

about the additional cash she wanted that I said I’d give

her. But after getting checked in by the airline, she said,

Where is the rest of the money for me?

I brought my hands to me forehead and shook my head

and said, Oh, God! What have I done? I got it out for you

and then left it in the office at work.

Can you get it for me?

There won’t be time, honey. But don’t worry, there is

more than enough in the account and I will make sure

there is no limit on how much you can draw out when you

get to Phnom Penh.

She kissed me and I told her to give her parents kisses

and hugs from me and that I would be waiting for a call or

email from her saying that she had arrived safely. I hope

to see you soon, I added.

You didn’t buy a return ticket for me, she now said, as

if it had never occurred to her that she had a one-way

ticket.

As soon as you want to return, let me know and I’ll

have a ticket waiting for you in the airport.

Okay, if that’s how you want it.

That’s how it has to be, I said. She kissed me again,

and I hugged her as much as I could bring myself to do,

and then she walked toward the gate and did not look

back.

32 Stabbed in the Chest

I don’t know if she tried to call or reach me by email.

I changed all my numbers and my e-mail account as soon

as I got home that evening from work. Before her plane

had landed in Phnom Penh, I had taken all but ten dollars

out of the joint ATM account that she had a card for.

What became of Chantou? I have no idea, and I have

not had the slightest curiosity about what happened to her.

She died and was buried the night she picked up that

kitchen knife and tried to kill me.

`

The Braided Beard

Larry and Mark live in the nicest hotel on the Hill. The

hotel is a compound, gated and locked after sundown. Just

inside, and on an incline, there’s a large parking area for

motorbikes and cars. Behind the parking lot and to one

side of the hotel is a carpeted runway that leads to a

sprawling restaurant, with a view onto the bay and a

temple and the islands to the south. Above the restaurant

is a bar, with pool tables and bamboo couches with large

soft pillows where people still in love, or thinking about

being in love, sit and watch the sky turn purple while the

distant islands become black shadows.

Larry lives on the second floor, in a long rectangular

room with a huge bed with teak posts and mosquito

netting, a writing table and two easy chairs, and a door

onto a balcony from which there’s a view of the restaurant

and the bay and the islands. He rents the room by the

month, at a price that is cheaper than a down-and-out

jobless family in skid row in any American city pays for a

rundown room with cockroaches and a toilet down the

hall.

Mark, with less money than Larry, lives in a small

room below the first floor, a room without a window, and

34 The Braided Beard

less than half the size of Larry’s. He also rents by it by the

month, for eighty dollars.

Larry and Mark previously lived in Las Cruces, New

Mexico, at the end of a dirt road among run-down trailers

and not far from a garbage dump and an old cemetery.

They had lived there for fourteen years, with a string of

forgettable wives and girlfriends. They worked when they

felt like working, in construction, gardening, whatever

they could find. Most of the time, if they had a few dollars

in their pockets, they did nothing at all. They had little

interest in work of any kind.

They’re both in their late fifties. They look much older

with their long and unruly salt and pepper beards, graying

hair in shaggy ponytails, yellow and missing teeth. They

both have earrings, and tattoos that are so faded it’s hard

to make out most of them. Larry has a four-inch braid at

the bottom of his beard.

Larry and Mark live for the daily routine of getting by,

seeing the morning and feeling the hot sun and doing what

comes next. They’re interested in billiards, the beer

they’re drinking, the cigarette they’re smoking, the joint

they’re sucking on. They don’t read, they don’t own any

books. They’re not interested in politics, or America, or

Cambodia.

They come out of their hotel rooms just before noon

in the clothes they wore the day before. Mark heads to a

small restaurant that’s cheap. Larry, with more money,

goes to the hotel restaurant and takes a table by himself,

The Braided Beard 35

one where he can get a view of the bay and flex his legs

and stretch his arms and kiss the day. For breakfast, he

has a cup of coffee, preceded by a cigarette, followed by

a joint and a second cup of coffee. Some mornings he has

nothing else. Some mornings he has rice and eggs and a

baguette. What’s on his mind as he sits quietly alone,

oblivious to others around him? Nothing more than the

taste of the coffee, the cigarette, the feeling of ease that

comes with the good weed. Were he asked what he’s

thinking, he would say—he will say, Why do you ask?

A long time ago Larry lived in Humboldt County. He

was a grower, and a seller, and it was all pretty good until

the Feds came and started messing things up and putting

their noses where they didn’t belong. Then it was time to

think about leaving and finding a new home. He sold what

he had and he traveled south and he didn’t really stop until

he got to Las Cruces and met Mark.

In those days, a long time ago, when he was living in

Humboldt County, when he was making all the money

that allowed him to retire long before other people even

get the thought of retiring, he had a few women in his life.

One came and stayed for a while. Her name was Ruth and

she had a bad leg and red hair down to her ass, and she

whined a lot. But she was a good cook. She fixed the best

ravioli and the best tacos and the best pea soup he’d ever

had. She wasn’t much for making love, but Larry didn’t

care. He wasn’t much for making love either. He’d never

thought love amounted to more than what you can get

36 The Braided Beard

from a dog. After Ruth there was Cheryl. She didn’t much

care for cooking, but she liked to keep a garden and sell

what she grew in town. She was good at helping with

Larry’s crop, and she was good at finding buyers. By three

in the afternoon all she wanted to do was get stoned. After

that she just wanted to be near Larry and squeeze him a

little and give him a kiss or two on the cheek. Then she

wanted to sleep until she got up around sunup and went to

the garden or the money crop to see what needed to be

done. Cheryl stayed around for four and a half years. One

day she hooked up with a buyer who made her feel good

in bed and promised her the moon and the sun and sex for

lunch, and that was the last Larry ever saw of her. That’s

life, he told people when they asked about losing Cheryl.

Larry found Mark on an ad board in a grocery store in

Las Cruces. Mark was advertising for someone to move

into one of his falling down worthless trailers. When

Mark ran out of money and wasn’t feeling well enough to

work, Larry bought both the trailers and let Larry live in

one free. By this time neither of them felt any need for the

company of women. They had three dogs and that was all

the love they needed. They found the comfort and peace

they now needed in their cigarettes, and beer, and dope.

They rolled and they crawled and they eased and they

toked and they drank their way through the years. They

didn’t own a car between them. They could always find

someone to take them into town for a few groceries and

cigarettes and whatever else they needed. Their biggest

The Braided Beard 37

hassles were getting enough money for food and dope and

the electric and water bills. Then one day Mark didn’t feel

so good and he couldn’t piss at all, so he went to the

doctor. The doctor said he had a tumor on his prostate the

size of a tangerine, and he didn’t have long to live. He got

treated with radiation and chemotherapy and it changed

nothing. They operated and it was successful. Five years

later he was still alive. That’s when he heard about

Cambodia and how cheap it is. That’s when he heard

about getting a pound of dope for a hundred dollars.

Sounds like a good place to go and die, he said to

Larry. What do you think?

Let’s go.

When?

Soon as we get passports and plane tickets.

The passports took forever to arrive. They flew to

Cambodia three days after the second one arrived.

In the afternoons, every day, Larry and Mark get

together at Shelly’s, an open-air bar right around the

corner from the hotel where they stay. They begin the

afternoon with a beer and a cigarette and a game of

billiards. Then they sit and watch the afternoon traffic:

locals, young hookers out for a stroll, other expats on the

lam and dying, the occasional backpacker who’s lost.

They stare, they smoke, they drink, they toke. They play

another game of billiards and get another beer. They don’t

talk much. There’s not much to talk about. They don’t

care to return to their histories or the women they lived

38 The Braided Beard

with, or even their dogs. They don’t read or watch TV.

They don’t care at all what’s happening off the Hill or

beyond Cambodia. They don’t even care about the new

cough they got, the persistent pain in the groin, or the leg

that has gone numb. When it happens it happens, Larry

says, and Mark nods. When time’s up, you’re a goner,

Mark says, and Larry nods.

One day I’m sitting with them and it’s early evening and

the hookers are going to work. We’ve had pizza and

several beers each, and several joints too. We’ve played

several games of billiards. By the sixth or seventh beer

and the third joint or pipe, I can’t remember who’s been

winning and who’s been losing. I can’t remember who’s

paying either, or if anybody’s paid. That’ll happen when

it happens, who pays.

We’re sitting at a small table at the front of the bar and

passing around a bong and two girls are walking down the

street. They work in a bar at the corner that’s called Lucky

Man. They’re cheap and their price is always negotiable

and they smile a lot. One of them keeps looking over at

us.

What’s up with her? I say to Mark.

That’s Natalia. She got a sweet tooth for Larry.

Looks young and innocent, I say.

She’s twenty-seven and has half a dozen brothers, says

Mark. Larry says nothing.

The Braided Beard 39

I pass Mark the joint and he smiles. His eye lids have

five minutes before sleep time, fifteen if someone lights

up another bong. He turns toward Natalia and shakes his

head. He says, In the end they’re all like Rosie. That’s my

Rosie, ancient history and one sweet bitch, she sure was.

Good for a while and then they’re all the same. After that

best thing that happens is they’re gone.

Whatever, Larry says, looking like he’s talking to

himself and about to fall over. However it works, that’s

how it works.

Give her long enough and she’ll drain you.

That’s okay. I’m not counting time.

She speak English? I ask Larry.

Five words. Maybe six, I don’t know. She knows

enough to say I love you. She says it twice that makes six

words. That’s okay. Don’t matter what she says.

She’s like a dessert, Mark says. Takes the place of a

Hershey bar or a little cup of ice cream, right, Larry?

That’s about right.

Chocolate or vanilla?

Don’t matter. All the same to me.

I leave the Hill, and I don’t return for almost three months.

When I return I go to the best hotel and ask for the best

room. It’s on the second floor. It’s the same room that

Larry had when I was here the last time. I know it’s the

same room because one night the three of us were there

and Natalia came along. It wasn’t long before Larry was

40 The Braided Beard

lying on the bed with all his clothes on and whispering

something to Natalia who was down to her bra and

panties. He was rubbing her tummy. Natalia looked good.

She had great legs and beautiful skin. Mark saw me staring

at Natalia, She loves him, she tells him every time they’re

together. She tells him in the middle of the night and in

the morning too.

Later, at Shelly’s, I ask the Frenchman, who owns the

bar, if Larry and Mark are around.

Not for a while, he says. And not ever again for Larry,

he adds. One day the maid found him in his bed not

breathing. They got a box to put him in and took him down

near the Freedom Hotel. Sent him on a plane somewhere.

Mark coming back?

No way of knowing.

I have another beer and the Frenchman and his

girlfriend return to playing cards. I’m feeling good and

don’t want to move. Natalia comes walking down the

street with the same girl I’d seen her with on my first visit.

Natalia looks over and throws a half smile at all of us

and then turns away and keeps walking.

She’ll find someone soon, the Frenchman says. They

all do.

She know he died?

I don’t know. Doesn’t matter to her. The customers

come and the customers go. That’s how it is on the Hill.

I stay three more days in the hotel. On the last day, as

I’m looking under the bed for belongings that might have

The Braided Beard 41

wandered. My eyes fall on something strange, near the

leg of the bed next to the bedside table. I get on my belly

and grab it and right away I recognize it. It’s the braided

part of Larry’s beard. I figure he must have cut it off and

somehow it got swept under the bed and the maids who

fix up the rooms never found it.

Before leaving, I stop at Shelly’s and have a noon beer

and a ham and cheese sandwich and a joint. I give the

braid to the Frenchman. Maybe Mark will want it when he

returns, I say.

The Frenchman gives me this funny look. Then he

says, Larry come in one day not long before he died and

the braid was gone. I asked him how come. Larry said

Natalia got rid of it in the middle of the night. She thought

with it gone he would be a different person and they’d get

married. She didn’t understand. The braid didn’t mean

nothing to Larry. She didn’t mean nothing to him either.

`

The Mosquito

In an unnamed Asian city in a hotel of no distinction a

foreigner and a native are fucking. He is atop her and

moving slowly and rhythmically, and she is rhythmically

moaning in pleasure. They will do this for a long time,

and then he will slowly pull out and she will open her eyes

and he will go to his knees and get between her legs and

stroke and kiss her breasts and her belly and her legs.

She waits, in anticipation.

He continues doing what he has been doing, and then

he says, Close your eyes.

She does as he says.

He continues doing what he has been doing, and then

he says, I will return. As he says these words he takes the

white fluffy comforter and covers her.

She thanks him.

When he returns, he gets in beside her and she comes

close and he brings her closer, and she buries her head on

his shoulder and against his head, and beneath the cover

that she and he brought higher, to wrap herself within his

embrace.

She is no longer waiting in anticipation.

There are few sounds from beyond the small hotel

room, only that of the rain hitting the window and the

The Mosquito 43

cricket in the shower seeking love and the maid whistling

in the corridor and pining for love she has never known.

There is amid all these sounds a silence, but for her

breathing. A rhythm he does not understand and does not

try to understand, knowing that understanding is no more

than mindful noise.

He brings to mind the wife he once loved, and he tries

to remember the day and the month in which she died. He

cannot remember either, and then it occurs to him that he

cannot even remember the year. Does he even remember

how she died?

He loses the thought and he brings to mind this young

woman in his arms whose name he does not know, and he

thinks that in this moment it was like this with his wife in

the beginning. But in the beginning he did know her name,

and he thought that knowing her name mattered. It

mattered because if he knew her name then he knew things

about her that were important. He believed this for a long

time, and then one day he awoke to a mosquito biting him.

And then for reasons that he could not fathom the

mosquito reminded him of his wife and all that he didn’t

know about her.

Then one day his wife died. Or she died before she

died, he told himself now and again, and whenever he saw

or heard mosquitoes, and even when one was trying to bite

him.

Why is it so hard to put a day and a month and a year

on when a wife dies?

44 The Mosquito

He brings her closer, and he feels her bringing her legs

closer and wrapping one leg over his legs, and he knows

that she will be like this until his mind is empty of

thoughts of the past. She will be like this until he moves

from beneath her, because she is young and she can sleep

like this and she has never been married, and she has never

had a mosquito bite her in quite the way that he has been

bitten.

She does not know his name or what he does or why

he has come here or how long he will stay, or if he has a

wife and children, and whether she will ever see him

again. She does not ask these kinds of questions. She is

that kind of girl. But if she did ask these kinds of

questions, he might tell her the truth, or he might not tell

her the truth, or he might tell her the truth about some of

the questions and not about others. She wouldn’t know

which ones were true and which ones he made up, and she

wouldn’t much care until that day when…well, who

knows when. It is that kind of uncertainty because of the

kind of girl she is.

Earlier in the evening he saw her on her motorbike,

something he did not know she had and was certain before

seeing her on it that she could not afford. Before this, this

same evening, he pictured her living in a tiny bamboo

shack and sleeping on the floor on a mat beside her mother

and her young son. He pictured her father in a distant

province working the land and returning to the city to see

his wife and daughter and her son once a fortnight.

The Mosquito 45

Knowing that she has a motorbike and may not have

grown up in a tiny bamboo shack was a thought that lasted

all of a minute or two, and in truth it had no more

significance in the minutes or hours or days that followed

than whether in crossing the street he had to wait one

minute or five minutes before getting to the other side.

All he cared about then and in the hours that followed

was that she would wrap a leg over his and she would stay

there and she would quietly go to sleep with her head on

his shoulder. There was more that he thought about later,

but later was later in what she might and might not do and

he would think more about that when the time came.

He did not have to ask her why she wanted to be with

him and not with others, and others were so simple for her

to get. He knew why she was with him and why others

were with him like this. It was the money. And yet it was

more than the money. It was the way he did what he did.

It was the way he did what he did after they had finished.

These were the kinds of things that she rarely experienced

when with others, and that she never knew from the

husband who would not work and only wanted to drink

and sleep, until she threw him out.

There is no morale to this scene and what might be

called a story. This is simply a simple rendition of what

happened on one night in an unnamed city in a hotel of no

significance, an event that lasted the night and into the

morning, until that time when it was safe for the young

woman to get on her motorbike and go home, because it

46 The Mosquito

was that hour after the mosquitoes had gone to sleep, and

after the thieves with knives out to kill young women on

motorbikes had gone to bed.

`

A Lucky Birth Date

I don’t take much stock in coincidences or luck. I know

that things happen and sometimes you can see a pattern,

or make one, but they really don’t mean anything. Or not

much, surely. Something goes wrong on Friday the 13th.

I lose a house key. I cut myself while slicing tomatoes.

An old friend who was going to die soon dies on this date.

Same with walking under ladders. Or having a black cat

run in front of you. Or getting a room on the 14th floor

which you know is the 13th floor.

But sometimes I reconsider my thinking on these

matters of coincidence and luck. Take what happened

recently in Cambodia, a great place to enjoy cheap weed

and find yourself among kind and gentle people, and then

now and again wonder when the cops are going to knock

on the door and start asking questions about the gun shot

you’d swear you heard in the middle of the night—next

door, down the hall, the room right above yours.

On my second day on my most recent trip to Phnom

Penh—perhaps the twelfth or so time I’ve been there in

the last decade, I was about to enter the Lemon Grass

Restaurant to have a light dinner when standing outside

and looking at the menu was a young man who I guessed

48 A Lucky Birth Date

was in his twenties. He was about five eight, solidly built,

and had a three or four-day growth of blond hair on his

face. One of his front teeth was broken, the tooth

reminding me of a razor knife used for cutting cardboard.

He was wearing tan shorts, blue boat shoes, and a T-shirt

on which were the words: FUCK YOU ASSHOLE!

I said hello. He returned the greeting with a large

lingering smile. Looking at his T-shirt I half-imagined

he’d come back with the words: Who the fuck are you?

But he said nothing, just smiled. I asked him if he’d like

to eat with me, said the food was hard to beat.

He said he wasn’t that hungry but would have

something to drink, if the Lemon Grass had the kind of

beer that he drank all the time. I assured him it did. I’d

had just about every kind of beer you can find in Phnom

Penh in this one restaurant, a measure of not how much I

drink but how often I eat at the Lemon Grass. Great food,

small and intimate environment, and friendly and prompt

waitresses.

Ray was his name. We chatted about little things in

this part of Phnom Penh: where to find some live music

after dark, the best places for a cheap massage, where to

get good French food, how to deal with the street beggars,

the best places to sit and eat and watch the local traffic and

take the measure of the expats and all the big and blond

European backpackers. I also told Ray where he could get

some good cheap weed and which of the girlie bars were

A Lucky Birth Date 49

worth spending time in, and the ones to avoid on Streets

104 and 136.

Ray was slow getting around to where he was coming

from. He seemed more interested in drinking and moving

the bottles around inside his hands. A nervous tic, I

thought, not aware at this point what he’d been through.

He didn’t seem to have much interest in what I was all

about or where I’d gotten all the information I was passing

on to him.

As I neared the end of my shrimp salad, Ray revealed

that he’d spent a couple of tours of duty in Iraq and

Afghanistan. He’d finally decided he’d had enough of the

“fucking mess” and the paranoia and seeing buddies get

lifted off the ground or blown into chicken-sized pieces

by IEDs. He didn’t say if he killed anyone or how close

he came to finding himself in a body bag, but it was easy

to infer that his mind was like a volcano waiting to blow.

But then maybe he wasn’t as fucked up as I imagined,

because he went on about some plans he’d had for college.

The army was giving him $2,000 a month for three years

to cover expenses. He’d started his studies at a community

college in western Pennsylvania where he grew up.

Before long he got bored and couldn’t find any direction.

All this was compounded by a couple of girlfriend

experiences that went nowhere.

Through a friend, he’d heard that he could live

cheaply in Southeast Asia, and particularly in Cambodia.

After he finished his second semester he abandoned the

50 A Lucky Birth Date

idea of getting a degree and got a ticket to Phnom Penh.

He’d been coming here off and on for over a year when

we met, staying for two to three weeks at a time and then

returning home.

He was currently living in a cheap guest house and

eating off the street, the latter I reminded him not a

particularly good idea in Cambodia. Not as bad as India,

but still a place where the bacteria loaded street food can

have you shitting your guts out for a week because you

wanted to save a few dollars. He laughed at what I said

and went to his beer.

Early on I figured I’d leave Ray as soon as I finished

a second glass of wine. I’d return to a story I was working

on. Maybe sketch out a new scene or two on one set in

Zamboanga in Mindanao. Then I’d return to the streets.

But the more I listened to Ray the more fascinated I

became with his stories, especially one about being

robbed.

In the early evenings, he was in the habit of going to

one of the cheap brothels used by locals. He’d take his

pick among three or four girls, all legal age, then repair to

a tiny room to get his rocks off. After he finished he’d

pay the girl ten dollars and then leave, about a quarter of

what he’d pay in one of the bars that targeted foreigners. I

assumed he was on a tight budget. He was the first

foreigner I’d met who frequented these quick fuck-and-

run joints where you find more than a few nasty diseases.

A Lucky Birth Date 51

The problem was that Ray thought he was getting a

bad deal because the locals only paid five dollars for the

same services with the girls. He tried to get value for the

extra five he paid by asking for a massage. But either the

girls weren’t willing or what they gave him was so brief

and unsatisfying that he abandoned the idea after three or

four so-called massages.

After he’d been going to these walk-ups with dim pink

lights for several months and shady looking touts pulling

you in, Ray got careless. One night as he was dressing to

leave, he noticed that his fanny pack, in which he kept his

money, was gone. He searched about for it but he couldn’t

find it anywhere. He went to the manager with the girl

he’d had a go with and shouted at both of them and

accused them of stealing his fanny pack. It didn’t take long

to get it back, but on looking inside he saw that twenty

dollars was missing. Now he got really pissed and said he

was going to bash some heads and destroy the place if the

money wasn’t returned. He emphasized the point by

standing and showing me his one-two punch. Youthful

war-zone bravado that I didn’t pay much attention to at

the time. Anyway, Ray said that a minute didn’t go by

before the manager came up with his money and then

immediately asked him to leave and not return.

Less than two weeks later, more or less the same thing

happened but in this case the girl just took the money out

of the fanny pack and he didn’t notice the loss until several

hours after he left. By then he figured it was too late to

52 A Lucky Birth Date

return to the third-floor whorehouse and recover his loss.

When he told me this part of the story, his blue eyes

shifted left to right and he brought a fist to his chest and

said, They were lucky cunts, believe me! Ray’s words

were hard. I was sure he wasn’t someone to fuck with.

When we left the Lemon Tree after Ray had two more

Tigers and I had one on top of the wine I’d had, I didn’t

think I’d see him again. This is how it is with almost

everyone I meet on the road. A one-off experience and

with a bit of luck a story to feed into an essay or use for a

short story.

It was five days later and rather late in the afternoon

when on leaving the Lux Hotel where I was staying on

Street 136 I saw Ray coming out of the convenience store

across the street, a hole-in-the-wall stuck between girlie

bars where I go if I need some shaving crème or toothpaste

or want something to drink while working on another

essay or story. He saw me before I saw him, and he shot

across the street weaving among tuk-tuks to greet me. We

bumped fists and hugged, and he came forth with,

Motherfucker, bro! Didn’t think I’d see you again.

We exchanged small nothings for a few minutes, and

then I asked him if he wanted to come with me to a few

bars down the street. There’s a good ten we could pop in

and out of and see what kinds of girls were on the menu

and if there were any above a seven or eight who spoke

more than a dozen words of English. I said I hadn’t been

in most of them on this visit thus far, but I did know the

A Lucky Birth Date 53

owner in one and wanted to get an update on an American

who’d been put in jail on my last visit. The guy was in shit

over his eyebrows for allowing a couple of his girls to

dance on top of the bar with their bras off. Then to make

matters worse, he was showing some hardcore porn on the

floor above the bar where he had a couple of billiard tables

that I sometimes went to for a game with one of the girls.

Cambodia is one very conservative country, even now

and again arresting young women who have dyed their

hair red. As far as I knew, this American had been in jail

for some seven months when I first heard about him and

with little likelihood of getting out anytime soon. He was

probably still sleeping on cement and breathing cellmate

shit and never known so much as a single fan to cool the

oppressive and fetid air.

We went to the 69 Bar--one where none of the girls

have a clue what 69 is--and the mamasan told me that the

owner was away in Bangkok. He’d be back in two days or

four days or a week, she really didn’t know. I wouldn’t be

getting an update on the jailed American anytime soon.

Neither Ray nor I had any interest in talking to or

sizing up the dozen or so girls in the bar, several of whom

needed to get on a diet and learn how to put on lipstick.

We weren’t in any hurry, so we just sat there for a long

half hour or so and watched some music videos on the

large screen behind the bar. We each had two beers and

didn’t talk much. I paid for the drinks and then asked Ray

if he’d like to go to the Butterfly Bar down the street. I

54 A Lucky Birth Date

said it was always packed and there were usually fifteen

or so girls about, and some of them were stunning. And

on this particular night I knew from experience there’d be

live music, not first-class by any standard but then a good

band or vocalist or the kind of music one might prefer is

hard to find anywhere in Phnom Penh.

We were in the bar only a couple of minutes when I

picked up on some Aussie accents. I also noticed, as I had

increasingly in the last couple of years, some Malaysians.

They’re invariably from Kuala Lumpur. This rather

boring city is one of the harder places in Southeast Asia to

get your ashes hauled by a decent looking hooker, and of

the few venues I know in KL you’re going to pay double

for what you’d get in Angeles City or even Manila. Thus

the men coming from KL to Cambodia and the

Philippines. Occasionally in these bars, and not just in

Phnom Penh, I’d make a mistake and think I was looking

at Indians. But generally, despite the similar skin tones,

the Indians are just different: less well dressed, louder, and

not as polite as Malaysians. A generalization sure to have

exceptions, as I was soon to find out.

Anyway, Ray and I are trying to find a seat because

there’s a singer with some guitar talent, and there’s a few

stunners about who haven’t yet been picked off. If

nothing else, beside the music which I would enjoy this

night, I know I’m going to get at least one story out of one

of the girls. Perhaps something about a dead father and a

mother dying from water buffalo wounds and with a sick

A Lucky Birth Date 55

child, no evidence that the young woman has even had

one. She might even come off the wall and push for

another quick drink if I want to continue chatting with her.

The Butterfly girls are invariably dressed in their evening

best: nice skirts a couple of inches above the knee, high

heels, lipstick, and some eye shadow. And some of them

speak a fair bit more English than the average bargirl in

Phnom Penh.

Ray and I stood around for a long ten minutes at the

bar. We couldn’t find a small circular table against the

wall to sit, always fun because as soon as you did so three

or four girls would come to your side, eager for you to buy

all of them a drink. If you picked one and you asked her

to leave the bar, she could score fifty or more for a couple

of hours of one-off fucking and a little cuddling.

While waiting for a table, and mildly engrossed with

a young woman with large eyes and loopy long hair who

was putting the make on me, I turned a couple of times

and noticed that Ray had his eyes on these two big

Malaysians about six to eight feet from us. It was

beginning to dawn on me that Ray was getting a little

agitated, because the biggest of the two of these quite large

Malaysians kept trying to put his hand inside one girl’s

bra, and she kept resisting. She was pushing him away,

but he was ignoring her. At one point, the girl pulled the

guy’s large hand out of her bra and pushed it toward him.

He just laughed and went for his drink. While all this was

going on, Ray was staring and tapping the bar with his

56 A Lucky Birth Date

beer bottle. And then--obvious that what he was

witnessing was getting to him--he shook his head and

slammed the beer bottle down and formed a fist.

I was probably watching Ray for no more than a long

three or four minutes when he took a couple of steps

toward this huge and rude Malaysian and said, loud

enough for even the bartender to hear his words: Fuck off,

dude. She’s sending you a message and you’re not

listening.

At first the guy ignored Ray. Or maybe he didn’t, and

he wanted Ray to know that he was the one who ought to

fuck off and mind his own business. For again, his large

dark hand reached for the girl’s breast, and before she

could back away or push his hand to one side he again had

it inside her bra. Now he made a show of squeezing it,

hard. It was clear from the pained look on the girl’s face

that she didn’t like what he was doing.

As the girl grabbed the big paw and shouted

something at the rude bastard, Ray took another step

closer, and as he did, he said, One more time asshole and

you’re going to be tasting a five-finger sandwich. The big

Malaysian--and big he was--laughed and flashed two rows

of nearly perfect white teeth. He then slid off the high

stool he was on and stood in front of Ray, who was a good

four to five inches shorter and at least a hundred pounds

lighter. Without warning, the Malaysian took a large step

toward Ray and threw out his very considerable belly and

knocked Ray back, a fall broken when he hit me. Ray

A Lucky Birth Date 57

regained his balance, wiped the back of a hand across his

mouth and said, Watch this, bro. This motherfucker’s

going down.

He swung his body to the right to gain power and then

hit the guy square on the right side of his face. He then

quickly followed with an elbow to the back of the jaw and

the head. As the very big Malaysian’s head rocked and

hit the wall behind him, Ray followed with another hard

fist to the face with his left hand. Then he brought his

right hand back like he was cocking a large weapon and

hit him again, this time with a fist in the solar plexus. The

asshole with a notably impolite hand was now not going

to have an easy time breathing. And then as this rude hunk

of flesh slid and dropped to the floor, Ray wasted no time

kicking him three or four times on the side of the head.

The other Malaysian, also big, had not come to his friend’s

rescue. After Ray’s first double hit, he quickly backed

away and headed for the rear of the bar.

It was not until the first of these kicks to the head that

I tried to stop Ray. I put both of my arms around his chest

and tried to pull him back, and as I did so I said, Easy

dude. This is the wrong place to fuck up somebody. But

I wasn’t quick enough or strong enough to prevent a

couple more kicks to the head. And then Ray uncoupled

my hands and broke free and stood back, people around

us staring, their hands at their mouths, not sure what to do.

Ray now quickly killed what was left of his beer. He’d

barely got the last gulp down when a couple of well-

58 A Lucky Birth Date

tattooed Aussies grabbed his shirt and arms and dragged

him toward the entrance. It wasn’t clear whether they just

wanted the beating to end or were going to take Ray

outside and kick the shit out of him.

The bar was quickly turning into a loud and

rambunctious and messy cacophony of jumbled words

and moans, grunts and shaking heads. People were

reaching for their bill bins, eager to exit before others

started throwing punches and the police came. I had my

back against the bar, one hand on my beer. I now stared

down at the beaten Malaysian, his head and back forming

a twisted lump against the wall. Blood was running out of

his mouth.

By now the music had stopped and there were a good

dozen eyes on the downed Malaysian, who was groaning,

obviously in pain. I grabbed the small bamboo bin with

our bar bills and took money out of one of my shirt

pockets and stuffed five dollars in it and then tried to push

my way through the thick and stunned crowd of chattering

bargirls and foreigners.

When I got to the street that was cluttered with

motorbikes and food vendors, I saw that Ray was talking

to two cops. I got close enough to get the drift of the

discussion. I had little doubt that he’d be detained and

probably spend at least a night in jail. Maybe a week or

two. And yet since he’d hit another foreigner and not a

Cambodian, he might be able to make a plausible case that

he was just protecting a local girl. But then one could

A Lucky Birth Date 59

never tell in Cambodia, the cops are that unpredictable.

And they always want money.

Before I left, I took sixty dollars out of my pocket and

approached Ray on his back side and squeezed the bills

into his right hand, and said, Take this, you might need it.

I had no idea how much money he had, and in the little

time that I’d gotten to know him I doubted that he carried

either debit or credit cards, which extorting cops know all

about and how to drain bank accounts.

I had a hunch that I’d see Ray at the Lemon Grass around

the time we first met there. I went there three nights in a

row and stayed for quite a while. But he didn’t show. Nor

did I see him at the 69 Bar or any of the others on this one

street packed with girlie bars. I considered going to the

jail and thought I might do so a day or so before leaving

on a flight I’d scheduled for Jakarta. But I’d been to the

jail once and to say it’s a scary and unpredictable place is

an understatement.

Six days later and two days before I was to leave for

Jakarta, I was sitting at a familiar café on the corner of

Street 136 and the main tourist drag. I was into a second

cup of coffee and thinking about heading down to the

Cadillac Bar around the corner. It was once owned by a

Texan but was now in the hands of an Irishman who had

the loudest and funniest and crudest Dutch waitress

working bar that I’d encountered in a very long time.

60 A Lucky Birth Date

And then suddenly I saw Ray coming down the street,

wearing tan shorts and the familiar blue boat shoes. He

got his eyes on me and waved before I got a chance to do

the same. We embraced. He looked good.

It turned out that they had taken him to the police

station and asked him several questions. They had not, to

my surprise, asked for money. They let him go within an

hour or so, at no point even cuffing him. He told me this,

but then after giving me back the money I’d put in his

hands, he said, Want to tell you a fucking unbelievable

story, bro.

We was talking and this cop he says to me, When was

you born? Shit, I had no idea what this was about. So I

give it to these cops. July 14. Soon as I did this one cop

is smiling like you can’t believe. He tells me to write it

down. When I was born and that stuff. So I did it like he

said. I put my name and July 14, 1989 on paper. Then this

one cop takes the paper close to his nose and shakes his

head and fucking smiles. He looks at me crazy like, then

smiles some more. Then—I swear—he tells me he was

born on the same day as me and he’s going to let me go

for this reason. That’s all he said. No shit. I got up and

left and got me a tuk-tuk and then I got thinking maybe he

figured putting someone in jail on the day he was born

gave him bad karma. You ever hear shit like this before?

`

A Murder in Phnom Penh

It’s called the Diamond Star Bar. He had never been there

before. The night he went for the first time he had been

drinking a lot. He thought that he would have one more

drink and then go to his hotel alone. It would not be

another night to sleep with someone whose name he could

not remember the next day.

She was sitting on the right side. Her name was

Aimee. He could not help but notice her. It was the baby

innocence and full lips. It was the unwavering innocent

eyes. It was the way she looked at him and stared when

he entered the bar and then sat.

Aimee spoke only two or three words of English. He

didn’t care. He was told that she had been working in the

bar three days. She had only been with one man. He was

Chinese and it was for a short time. He did not treat her

well. He was not told why. He did not ask why.

She smiled and sat close when he bought her a drink.

Aimee put an arm around him and got closer. She stared

at him as she had before. He tried to say something to her

but she understood nothing he said. She just smiled and

continued to stare at him.

He wanted her freshness. It would have been even

better if she had not gone with the Chinese man. He

62 A Murder in Phnom Penh

wanted her knowing that it would not go well in the room.

It rarely did go well when they are new to the game of

going with any man who will pay the going rate.

Aimee lost her mother and father before she was two.

She went to live with her aunt. It was her aunt who raised

her. She was raised in one of Cambodia’s poorest

provinces. It is along the Vietnamese border. It was an

area heavily bombed by the Americans during the

American war.

Aimee did not know what to do when they got to the

room. She did not know how to turn on the water in the

shower. She did not know how to make the water hot or

cold. She knew only how long she would stay. She would

stay until morning because this is how long he told the bar

girl translating for Aimee he wanted her to stay. She did

not speak good English. He did not need the translating

bar girl to tell Aimee how much he would pay her. Aimee

understood how much when he held up five fingers.

She was warm and she was close. She stayed this way all

night. She would not leave his side. He tried to teach her

how to kiss and open her mouth to kiss. He tried three

times to enter her. He could not get it. She was that small

and tight. It hurt both of them. He stopped when he saw

pain on her face. He did not care that they would not have

sex. It was something about her face and the innocence

that made him not care. It was also something about her

full and womanly body that made her desirous. It was the

A Murder in Phnom Penh 63

way she smiled and stayed close and stared at him that

made him want to take her a second night.

The second night was the same as the first night. He

could tell he was hurting her and he again stopped. She

cried a little and he thought it was because she could not

please him. She stayed close and hugged him all night

long. She hugged him tighter than she had the first night.

She was needy. She wanted his arms around her. He

wanted her arms around him.

He took her out of the bar again on the third night. He

did not know why he did so. It seemed foolish. But this

time he managed to enter her. He was gentle and did not

finish and it did not bother him. Maybe she had relaxed,

he thought. She seemed happy to have pleased him. She

stayed longer this time. He sensed she did not want to

leave. On leaving she came out with the three words: I

love you. He knew these were not her words. They had

been given to her. The purpose was to get him to take her

yet another night. He knew this but he did not care.

64 A Murder in Phnom Penh

He had mixed feelings about taking her a fourth time.

He did not know why he felt this way. Maybe it was

because he had taken the innocence he saw in her eyes and

smile. He did take her a fourth time. He again entered her

and this time he climaxed. She was more pleased than the

first time. It was obvious in her smile which was open and

lasting. She looked happy.

He expected she would stay until morning as she had

before. He thought she might even stay later this time. It

did not happen this way. After he took her and she smiled

and told him with her smile how she felt he went to the

bathroom. He went to clean himself as he always did with

all of them. He would rejoin her and they would spend

the night wrapped in each other as they had done since the

first night.

When he returned from the bathroom she was sitting

on the end of the bed and talking on her cell phone. She

was animated. He approached her and she ignored him.

Then she handed him the phone and a voice he recognized

said that Aimee was scared of staying the night with him.

She had to return to the bar right away. What was she

scared about? he asked. He got a second and different

answer. She had to return to the bar because in the

morning she had to travel to see her aunt. Her aunt was

sick. She owed everything to her aunt who had raised her.

Aimee started to get dressed. He sat where she had sat

when making the call. He was naked. He just stared at

her. He asked her why she was leaving even knowing she

A Murder in Phnom Penh 65

could not answer. He shook his head several times and

said no don’t go. Please don’t go, he said. She continued

to get dressed and did not look at him. When she picked

up her purse to go he went for his wallet and he paid her

as if she had stayed the whole night. She left without

saying a word.

He did not return to the bar for two days. He was

puzzled and hurt and did not understand what had

happened. When he again walked into the bar it was after

midnight. She was sitting beside a customer having a

drink. He asked the bartender if Aimee had worked the

previous night. She had but went with no one. He asked

if she had gone to the province to see her aunt. She had

not gone anywhere.

He got a drink and went to a couch where he could

watch Aimee having a drink with this man he had not seen

before. He tried to make eye contact with her. He could

not. She could see him but she ignored him. He wanted

to go with her and he told the bartender to tell her. The

bartender went to her and told her in Khmer so the

customer could not understand. She turned to him and

gave him a half smile and no more. Then she got up on

the bar and pretended to dance. He had never seen her do

anything like this. He did not think she would do

something like this. It hurt him to see her like this. While

she danced she looked only at the customer who bought

her the drink.

66 A Murder in Phnom Penh

He ordered another drink and stayed on the couch and

watched the two of them. The customer did not touch her

and she did not touch him. He hoped that she would tell

the customer no if he asked to go with her. But she did

not. He paid a barfine to take her out of the bar for the

night. Then she went to get dressed so she could leave

with him.

He went up to the very tall white customer who was

sitting at the bar waiting for Aimee to get dressed. He

didn’t introduce himself. He simply said to the man: Be

gentle with her. She is new and very tight and you are

probably bigger than me.

There will be no worry, the man said. I have had too

much to drink and will probably go right to sleep when we

get to the hotel.

Is this your first time to Cambodia? he said.

Yes. Never been here before. I lived for three years in

Thailand and then Singapore.

A Murder in Phnom Penh 67

Maybe you should know about the difference between

Thai and Cambodian girls then.

The man looked puzzled.

Smoking or a blowjob is called yum-yum here but

they rarely do it. They are very conservative. It is even

hard to get them to react emotionally. If you have been

with Thai women you will be disappointed.

The man from Singapore drank what was left of his

rum coke. Thanks for letting me know but I am only here

for two days, he said. These are days to drink and relax.

Then I must return to my demanding job. One more night

and I’ll be gone.

When Aimee came to the bar dressed to leave she

stood beside the tall white customer. She made a point of

ignoring the man who had been with her four times. She

showed little emotion toward the man she would soon be

in bed with.

Aimee and the customer walked out of the bar. He

waited a long minute and then left. When he got to the

street he saw Aimee and the customer walking toward a

hotel he had once stayed in. They were not holding hands

as he expected they would be. He stood and watched them

go into the hotel. He had hoped Aimee might turn and see

him.

Why had she so blatantly done this to him?

It was already nearly two in the morning and he was

feeling tired. He could stop for another drink but decided

not to. He felt melancholy and even a little jealous. He

68 A Murder in Phnom Penh

tried his best to avoid imagining Aimee naked in bed with

the man.

When he got to his hotel he dropped his pants and shirt

at the foot of the bed and was soon asleep.

It was around three in the morning when the phone

beside the bed rang. It startled him. He could not imagine

someone calling him at this hour.

The voice on the other end identified herself as one of

Aimee’s two roommates. He did not know that she had a

roommate who spoke English. She sounded frantic and at

first he did not understand what she said.

Say it again, I’m confused, he said.

She told him that the tall white customer had done

awful things to Aimee. When he began to hurt her she

pushed him back and shook her head and said no. He

grabbed her and forced himself into her and she screamed.

He continued forcing himself into her and hurting her.

She began bleeding.

The frantic roommate went on. She was screaming.

He had to ask her to repeat what she was saying.

She said he grabbed her hard by the hair and forced

himself into her mouth. He did it several times. She tried

to pull away and she screamed. He did it harder each time.

She finally bit him while he was in her mouth.

He slapped her hard and punched her in the face and

threw her to the floor. He then fucked her in the ass until

she cried and bled.

A Murder in Phnom Penh 69

She got up and she dressed and got out the door. She

ran down the early morning Phnom Penh street as fast as

she could. She was screaming and bleeding from her

vagina and her ass.

He had given her no money. He had given her only

pain and blood. He had given her a memory that would

be with her for the rest of her life.

Aimee wanted to come to his room now and spend the

rest of the night with him. She was insistent the roommate

said.

He wanted to help but he said no. She cannot come

he said. He saw her bleeding. He saw her screaming. He

pictured her being fucked in the mouth and in the ass and

everywhere. He felt numb. The phone call had to be a bad

dream.

The frantic roommate asked again and again if he

would let Aimee come to his room. He said no each time.

He saw cops. He saw a setup. He imagined a rape charge.

He imagined prison time for what he did not do. He

imagined a dozen bad scenarios. This is Cambodia.

Everything can be imagined and everything will happen

that was not imagined because this is Cambodia.

He woke early and picked at a breakfast of mango and

pineapple and watermelon slices. He drank several cups

of coffee to find his senses and put a plan in place. He ran

the plan through his mind several times. There was no

doubt what he would do.

70 A Murder in Phnom Penh

Before noon he was sitting at a small table in a café

across from the tall white man’s hotel. He was waiting for

him to come out.

When he came out he met him and said hello. He

invited him to lunch. They ate and talked about

everything but the night before. He did not mention

Aimee or anything about her or the bar where she worked.

They talked about Singapore and Bangkok and what the

tall white man did to make money. They agreed to meet

for a late dinner at a Khmer restaurant that he knew and

where no one would know either of them.

He changed his plane ticket to the following morning.

It was a ticket that would take him to another country.

They had dinner and they drank rum and vodka and

several beers. Then toward the end of dinner he asked the

tall white man from Singapore about his night with

Aimee. How did it go? he said.

She was not cooperative. She was a bitch.

She is only nineteen and new to all of this. I think I

told you to be careful with her.

He said nothing. The conversation about Aimee was

over.

He was invited to the tall white man’s room to finish

the large bottle of rum they had started in the restaurant.

They finished the bottle and the tall white man from

Singapore passed out. He never woke up. Late the

following day, several hours after the plane had left the

ground, the lady who came to change the bed and clean

A Murder in Phnom Penh 71

the room found the tall white man from Singapore. He

was lying on the floor close to the couch where he has

passed out. He was lying in a pool of blood. His throat

had been cut. He head had nearly been severed from his

body.

`

Mad Dog Henry and a Cricket Dying

It was a little after nine in the morning and I was having

breakfast in the Phoenix Hotel in Bangkok. When the

waitress came with a second pot of coffee and a copy of

the Bangkok Post I'd asked for, I immediately flipped the

paper over and looked for the latest NBA results. I then

turned to the front page, saw little of interest, and was

about to put the paper aside and bring my journal up to

date when a small article just below the crease on the

second page caught my eye. It was titled: “Mysterious

Death of Cambodian Tour Bus Operator.”

I read on, and my interest turned to concern, and then

to that kind of anxiety that rapidly brings a cold sweat to

the forehead and gives the heart a wild fluttering kick. All

I could now think about was Henry, or Mad Dog Henry,

as I'd come to think of him after our west-of-Angkor-Wat-

and-on-to-the-border misadventure with thirteen

backpackers had bonded Henry and me like conspiring

brothers with evil hearts. In truth, the bond between

Henry and me really began in earnest after dinner in the

Inter Hotel in Thailand when we got on a drinking

marathon with Singhas and Heinekens. By the time we

staggered our way to the steps to get to our second-floor

rooms, we had enough piss in us to fill two bath tubs. But

Mad Dog Henry and a Cricket Dying 73

it was not the bad hangover that now came to mind as I

began to read this article easily missed. No, it was what

Mad Dog Henry and I had imaginatively concocted--and

I primarily, I hate to confess--by way of revenge for the

scam, the hundredth or two-hundredth or whatever that

collectively we'd had more than enough of in our many

years of vagabonding through that marvelous hunk of

Asia that lies east of always-in-your-face India and south

of behemoth and elusive China.

The relevant parts of the article that made me deeply

concerned read: “The owner of a small mini-bus company

in Siem Reap was found dead behind a village toilet thirty-

five kilometers west of the city. An employee of the

company claims that the victim, Nuk Pratham, age thirty-

one, recently had some mechanical problems with one of

his buses and a number of young foreign travelers were

left stranded halfway between Siem Reap and Pol Pot on

the Thai border. The employee, who wishes that his name

not be revealed, has reason to believe that one or more of

these young foreigners may be involved in Mr. Pratham's

death.”

I slowly reread the article, and I thought: Henry, you

didn't do it, did you? Please, Henry, find me in the next

couple of hours wherever you are and tell me that my

imagination has simply gone into overdrive and all we

talked about had nothing whatsoever to do with what I've

just read. Henry, you Mad Dog, Did you do it? Those

eight words reeled through my mind again and again as I

74 Mad Dog Henry and a Cricket Dying

stared at the white coffee pot, half hoping that a genie with

comforting words would emerge.

When I was a young teenager my Uncle Joe would come

to the house for dinner on weekends and bring along his

invalid wife, Miriam, at this point in her life confined to a

wheelchair and only a year and half away from a fatal

stroke. I loved Uncle Joe. He always gave me a dollar or

two and told me to spend it in some “obscene” way: how

I remember that word obscene! He always had a

fascinating story or two to tell me if I agreed to sit beside

him during the telling and promised to pay careful

attention. And usually, before leaving and while we were

eating my mother's incomparable apple or banana pie,

Uncle Joe would come forth with some little pearl of

wisdom about life: why it's unpredictable and usually not

much of a story taken as a whole; how to deal with

adversity when you're really down and nearly out and

going black; and how to think about love and relationships

and deal with human imperfections. He had dozens of

things to tell me, and I remember many to this very day.

Real words of wisdom, they were.

One that came right to mind after I put down the paper

about the death of Nuk Pratham is this one. Uncle Joe said

that whenever you've got a day that's all planned and

you're sure nothing ever worth talking about will happen,

keep your ears open and your eyes alert. For, son (he

always called me son, never having had any children

Mad Dog Henry and a Cricket Dying 75

himself), it is in these times of planned certainty that you

come to appreciate just how unpredictable the most

predictable of times can be. Then, these were little more

than abstract words to my young and unformed mind. But

as I grew older and a bit wiser, I could begin to appreciate

exactly what Uncle Joe said. And then more than ever on

a day in Cambodia that should have been pretty darn

ordinary.

Yes, I don't at all mind admitting that as I sat there with

that article in the Bangkok Post staring me in the face, I

was rattled, deeply so; and I say this as a person who is

known for taking most everything calmly. Stoic among

stoics, my friends have often called me. Now I feared that

poor Henry was or soon would be in deep trouble and

there was nothing I could do to help him. Nothing at all.

In fact, if I wasn't careful, I might find myself in the same

predicament. Maybe the best thing I could do was to make

myself scarce.

The morning after reading the article, I booked a ticket

to Vientiane, Laos, left on an afternoon flight, and upon

arrival in a capitol that's really no more than a large village

with half a hundred motorbikes and lousy food I took a

rattling local bus that would take me east where I could

get lost in a small village along the Mekong River.

The story really began when I'd had enough of Angkor

Wat and all the other crumbling and half-reconstructed

76 Mad Dog Henry and a Cricket Dying

black-rock temples spread far and wide around Siem Reap

and decided it was time to get back to Bangkok and plan

my next little adventure. For years now, I have used this

frenetic city as my home base when wandering my

favorite part of the world. Bangkok is centrally located,

easy to get about in (for me, but not for many who come

to this mega Third World city and expect it to be orderly),

and a great place to meet up with friends for a few days

before getting a ticket to some place I've not been. Or

must return to for reasons that have as much to do with the

beasts of midnight and three-quarter moons that roam like

medieval hunters in my restless soul as with a charming

ambiance or some unique local food.

I had in my possession a plane ticket from Phnom

Penh to Bangkok, and I'd hoped to be able to change it and

leave from Siem Reap rather than repeat the six-hour bus

ride from Phnom Penh I'd taken a couple of days earlier.

But it so happened that I had a discounted ticket and it

could not be changed, which meant that I either had to

return to Phnom Penh over the same route I'd just come

several days earlier, or I'd have to come up with a hundred

seventy dollars for a ticket from Siem Reap to Bangkok.

I didn't mind paying out this much given all the

inheritance money I’ve got. But the amount was enough

to perk my interest in looking for other options. And one

other good option I discovered was traveling the bad road

west to the Thai border. Okay, so the road is notoriously

bad, I thought. I'd been over a dozen of them in Laos and

Mad Dog Henry and a Cricket Dying 77

the highlands of Vietnam and eaten enough road dust

some days to fill my daypack. But the trip might be worth

the discomfort. Who knew what I might see, or what small

adventure might come my way?

The bus ticket was a mere five dollars, a dollar less to

the enterprising backpackers I would find myself with.

The fare promised a large air-conditioned bus of the sort

I'd enjoyed on the journey from Phnom Penh to Siem Reap

and, to boot, I'd be picked up at my hotel, the Angkor

Diamond, where I'd spent a couple of nights enjoying

spicy fish dinners and bottles of French wine and reading

accounts of the genocidal years of Pol Pot. Everything

went as promised until I got to the bus station and found,

as did the fourteen others taking the bus with me, that

there had been an unexplained change of plans. We'd all

be stuffed into a mini-bus without air conditioning. We

weren’t given a reason, but I assumed that this came about

because it was low season and the number of those

purchasing tickets would just fill a mini-bus. Fair enough,

I thought: profit and cost cutting are the same idea the

world over. If anyone needs a small boost, it surely is

Cambodia.

I wasn't the first one onto the bus, but as luck would

have it I found the seat directly behind the driver available

when I got on. It was right away obvious that this would

be the best one to take. I'd have extra room for my long

legs and a window I could open wide to give me plenty of

breeze as the day became oppressively hot. No one was

78 Mad Dog Henry and a Cricket Dying

quick to take the seat beside me, another choice spot in the

van. About the only reason I could figure for this was that

everyone else I'd seen standing around was much younger

than me and wanted to chat with someone of a similar age;

or they were paired up, as so many backpackers tend to be

when traveling for months at a time. One obvious

exception on this particular day to this generality I've

found to be true the world over was a twenty-six-year-old

pregnant Canadian woman I'd talked to for several long

minutes upon arrival at the station. She was traveling

alone. Rather arrogantly, and right after a brief

introduction, she described herself to me as an

independent archeologist who was going to do major

research on and reconstruction of Angkor Wat waterways

while carrying on similarly important work in

Mesoamerica. All of which had me raising my eyebrows

and laughing inside at these astonishing claims, which I

knew to be preposterous since I'd once been an academic

before Uncle Joe died and left me an obscene amount of

money to be used in a manner that I’m sure would have

greatly pleased him. Anyway, what really made me laugh

about all these claims coming from Carolina--the name

she gave me--was that she had only finished her

undergraduate degree a year earlier. I suppose she

might've taken the seat beside me, but I sensed by the time

we got on the bus she'd gotten a pretty good idea that I

wasn't much for tolerating people who pushed donkey

Mad Dog Henry and a Cricket Dying 79

drawn cartloads of horseshit around town and called the

load precious stones.

And so it was that the bus filled up and just about the

very last person to sit down was Henry, a forty-five-year-

old Englishman from South London who right away

struck me as a character whose story would soon come

rolling my way and would fill several pages in my journal.

Fact is, Henry had barely pushed his blue and silver

backpack up onto the huge pile that filled the whole right

front of the mini-bus when he turned in my direction with

this who-the-fuck-are-you look on his face, which made

me think: this guy looks so interesting we might be hitting

on the dope pipes before this small journey is an hour old.

This was Cambodia, after all, a country where you can

bring out the dope in the police station and the man in

charge will say: You want something really good that'll

kill you if you're not careful?

Yes, Henry. He had short-cropped black hair and

wore small black wire-framed glasses. On the left side of

his mouth, which often seemed to be staring at me with an

evil mischievousness even when he was minding his own

thoughts, two upper front teeth were missing. This was

one hell of a hole, I don’t mind saying. I remember at one

point, even before we got going on the scam we knew was

being carried out at our expense, I thought: Henry, I bet

you scared your mother half to death when they pulled you

out of the womb and saw that devilish little mouth of

yours.

80 Mad Dog Henry and a Cricket Dying

Well, enough on Henry for the moment, for I need to

get around to what happened and what Henry and I

concocted, or rather I unwisely suggested, a plan that as I

thought about the Bangkok Post article had me wondering

if I was going to have to take a dump earlier in the day

than I normally did, such was my growing anxiety.

So, the mini-bus, with all these young backpackers in

need of showers and shaves, and Carolina who was getting

on my nerves before we hit the really bad parts of the

rutted road, seemed to be moving along smoothly as we

headed west toward Pol Pot on the Thai border. About all

that concerned me was whether or not the driver would

stop if I had to take a piss.

Suddenly, and without warming, and about a half hour

into the journey, the mini-bus started sputtering, and I

knew from experience it was that unmistakable sound that

we were running out of gas. No worry, I thought, and said

as much to both Carolina and Henry. These guys love to

run out of gas solely to create a little drama, I added.

Henry snickered, and said, When this kind of thing

happens they got something up their pantyhose and be

assured it will slap you a good one in the arse.

I couldn’t much argue with that. I’d seen more than

my share of small and large rip-offs, and more than one, I

hate to confess, successful at my expense. A traveler no

matter how experienced just can’t keep alert enough to

catch them all, and this was what Henry was saying.

Mad Dog Henry and a Cricket Dying 81

The driver, who had introduced himself to us as Nuk,

and only given us his last name when a pushy French girl

with bad breath said she had to know it for the book she

was going to write about her travels, mumbled something

about there being engine problems as he got up from his

seat and went outside to look around.

Pure cock and balls, Henry said, loud enough for

everyone to hear him, including Nuk. It’s nothing more

than running out of petrol.

Nuk must have fiddled with the engine for a long ten

minutes before Henry got on his case and insisted that he

take out the spare petrol can and put it in the tank and

prime the carburetor. Nuk dropped his head and mumbled

that wasn’t the problem. But when Henry insisted Nuk

went to the rear of the mini-van and got the large plastic

container and did exactly what Henry or I or any sane

person would do. The way he primed the carburetor and

then tried to get it started looked right to me, and right to

Henry, but the van wouldn’t start. At about this point,

Henry and I decided that this probably wasn’t the problem

after all. So Henry insisted on seeing for himself that Nuk

hadn’t pulled out a couple of wires or stuffed some spark

plugs in his pocket to get the scam rolling. A scam the

nature of which we hadn’t yet figured out.

I got restless and started wandering among the tiny

unpainted wood and stick homes and little half-naked kids

running about, looking at me with my camera like I was

going to eat them alive. Soon I found myself on one edge

82 Mad Dog Henry and a Cricket Dying

of this little cluster of maybe eight or ten houses, and my

eyes feel on three or four peculiar contraptions lying on

the ground. Each one was a rectangular wood frame about

the size of a small table. Inside the frame, covered with a

piece of thick semi-transparent plastic, was an inch or so

of water, and floating on the water were a couple of dozen

crickets and other insects and bugs. On one end of this

contraption was another frame identical in size, and at

ninety-degrees to the piece lying on the ground. This

frame also had a thick piece of plastic attached to it, and

on it some oily looking gunk. Obviously these were traps,

and the victims that piled up during the day were going to

be boiled or fried and either salted and eaten individually

or become part of a soup.

I didn’t think a whole lot more about this cricket trap,

as I now thought of it, not until that night when Henry and

I got to drinking hard and we went over what happened

later in the scam. This was at the point when Henry said

we ought to give a warning to all these Asian scam artists

who think people like us are easy targets. Anyway, before

I get to what I brought to Henry’s attention, and I fear he

took all too seriously, a little while after I saw these

ingenious little contraptions a mini-van came down the

road headed in the direction of Thailand and stopped. It

was empty, and right away it occurred to me that he had

been called and was there to pick us up and take us to the

border.

Mad Dog Henry and a Cricket Dying 83

But I got it wrong, and so did Henry. The best we

could make of what was now going down was that Nuk

told the driver of this min-van something like this--putting

it in my own words, of course, after Henry and I discussed

the matter. I’m going to tell these fools that I have a

serious motor problem and have to sputter and crawl my

way back to Siem Reap. Soon as I get up the road a ways

I’m going to stop so everyone can see me. I’ll start waving

my arms about. Then you—(referring to the other driver)-

-tell these dumb foreigners you have to see what’s up with

me and you’ll be right back. Like I said, this is how Henry

and I reconstructed the thinking behind what happened.

The only thing we would be really certain of was that

when the second min-van got up the road near Nuk’s van

he didn’t even stop. He just kept going like he was on a

motor speedway. Then it wasn’t more than a minute or so

before Nuk and his van were rolling down the dusty road

toward Siem Reap and was out of sight. And this meant

that all of us were stranded there and didn’t have the

slightest idea how to get west or east at that point.

Goosed up the arse hole a good one, Mad Dog Henry

said after we’d been standing around for more than two

hours in the middle of nowhere, Nuk and the other driver

long gone. During this whole time not a single vehicle

came our way. Then we had a small stroke of luck. A huge

dump truck came along and Henry and I and a couple of

backpackers, and even pregnant Carolina, stood in the

middle of the road like we would get run over before we’d

84 Mad Dog Henry and a Cricket Dying

get out of the way. This forced the truck to stop. Before

the driver could say yes or no or anything else, I put some

bills in his hand and all the backpackers climbed up some

ladders and got inside. Henry and I figured we’d sit up on

top and enjoy the view, on the big wide lip over the cab.

When we turned around and looked at the backpackers, I

swear they looked like rag dolls that had been randomly

tossed about on a pile of dirt and garbage.

We kicked and rolled down the road, and Henry and I

grabbed one another when it got a bit dangerous or we

laughed too hard about a joke one of us told. It took us a

couple of hours to bump and rattle along the red dirt road

toward Thailand. When the driver had to finally turn off,

we found ourselves at a junction where we could get about

five or six of us stuffed into some taxis and hurry on

toward the border. In a heavy rain, as it happened, and on

a badly scarred road full of pools of muddy water and big

rocks. We just barely managed to get to the Thai visa

station before the border closed for the night.

Which brings me around to that night after we got into

Thailand and Henry and I started pouring down the

Heinekens and Singhas and Henry got steaming about

how we’d been treated and asking me what we ought to

do about it. It was pretty clear to me that Henry had

something drastic in mind. I don’t know exactly when but

at some point I brought up these cricket traps I’d seen and

then how one might be used as a rather unique device for

helping someone get an early exit from this life. I think

Mad Dog Henry and a Cricket Dying 85

I’ve might’ve joked that it probably wasn’t even

something that Pol Pot who knocked off more than a

million Cambodians thought of. So, anyway, I told Henry

that if he was really serious about showing the whole

world that these kinds of scams were just plain

unacceptable, then all he’d need to do would be to get

back to Siem Reap and book another mini-bus trip to the

border and make sure Nuk was the driver. Then, along the

way, he could tell Nuk that he had to stop because he was

about to have a major disaster in his pants if he didn’t.

Would you mind taking me behind one of those houses

where I can do a dump in private? you could say to Nuk,

I told him. Then it wouldn’t be that hard to pick up a stick

or a large rock and hit Nuk a good one on the head and

drag him over to one of those cricket contraptions. Once

you had him there you could push his face down into the

water full of dead crickets and other bugs and insects and

take some rope or whatever you could find and tie the two

pieces together with Nuk’s head between them.

Crikey, my mother in hell! Henry said. That’s a

bloody brilliant idea. Our little old Cambo Nuk, in the

water just like a cricket dying.

Mad Dog Henry was a little concerned about what he

was going to do after that. I told him, Just go back to the

van and tell everyone Nuk has some relatives in one of

those houses and he wanted to stay and he asked you to

drive them on to the border. Henry wasn’t sure about this,

thinking it might not float with the backpackers. Don’t

86 Mad Dog Henry and a Cricket Dying

worry, I told him. They’re not together enough to figure

out what you’re up to. They’ll all be so young and gullible

they’ll believe anything you say.

After that, Henry had a couple more beers and so did

I, and he kept coming back to what these cricket

contraptions looked like and how he was going to find one

and do what he had to do with no one looking.

Henry, I said, I saw them everywhere. You’ll find

them behind the shithouse and in front of it and

everywhere else, I swear. Just don’t worry, I told him. If

you don’t find one and you don’t want to go through all

that trouble, then just hit him a couple of extra times on

the head with a rock and drag him out into the bush and

leave him there. That’s a good enough lesson.

Up your mama’s arse it is! he said.

I don’t remember much talk of all this after those

mama arse words by Henry. But I had no doubt as I

stumbled down the hall to my room and saw Henry doing

the same that he hadn’t taken lightly what I’d suggested

as a solution. After I managed to brush my teeth, I started

to get a little worried that Henry wasn’t going to just laugh

about the idea and then forget it. No, he had that crooked

look that ran all the way from that big hole in his mouth

up to his eyes. Nuk was going to get his due, and he was

going to get a whole lot more than a hard slap on his

Cambodian ass.

Mad Dog Henry and a Cricket Dying 87

After I more or less got lost among some Lao villages

along the Mekong—dirty and dumpy little places where I

paid a dollar or two to sleep on a straw mat with kids and

dogs and eat spicy and rotten looking food that gave me

the runny shits for days, I decided it was time to get out of

Southeast Asia. The last thing I wanted was to have some

people hunting me down and asking questions about

whether I had known Mad Dog Henry and what might’ve

happened to Nuk.

So, that’s what I did, and it wasn’t until I was home

for more than a month that I got the courage to do a good

search on the Internet. It took me a while but I found what

I was looking for. Just about the time I had enough of the

Mekong Lao villages and my anxiety had started to slide

back down to normal levels, there appeared a small piece

in the Bangkok Post. It was, I had to conclude for some

piece of mind, some bad news but enough good news to

make me feel like time was taking its toll on the Nuk

problem. The article said that Nuk Pratham had been

murdered by means of a “local food collection device,”

which I took to mean that he’d drowned or choked to death

with his head tied inside that cricket contraption just like

I had suggested to Mad Dog Henry it might be done. The

good news was that the Cambodian authorities had “no

good leads on who might have committed the crime.”

That didn’t mean that Henry wasn’t on their list, or that I

wasn’t there too for that matter.

88 Mad Dog Henry and a Cricket Dying

When you think you might be implicated in someone

else’s premature demise—murder not being a word I

prefer to bring to mind, you keep wondering if there’s

going to be that knock on the door that tells you they found

you after all and they’ve got some serious questions to ask.

I worried, and I worried some more, and then one morning

I brought to mind Carolina and I remembered something

she had told me and I had completely forgotten about,

mostly I think because I just didn’t like the young upstart

woman.

Not more than a couple of minutes after she took a seat

behind me in the mini-van and I would have to start

stomaching all her archeological research bullshit, I saw

her running her eyes over the ticket for the trip. She did

this a couple of times, like she was looking for something.

Then she put the ticket in a daypack pocket and got my

attention and said, Did you happen to see that if we get

killed on this road going to Thailand and someone steals

all our possessions after we’re dead, they won’t be able to

get in touch with our loved ones? All that’s on my ticket

is a first name and nothing else.

`

A Fallen Man

It was a month or five weeks after we’d been together, I

think. I’m not sure. It’s one of many things I’m not sure

about. I had brought her photo up on the screen in

Photoshop, and I did not remember her. I could remember

nothing about her. Not her name, not what we had done,

not even, initially, where I had been with her. Was it

Bangkok? Was it Jakarta? Had we been together in Phnom

Penh? I simply did not know.

It was a strange feeling, because while I forget their

names I never forget—when I see the photo I have

taken—where we were. Or what we did. If there was

music, or if she was good or bad in bed. Or if I had her

stay for breakfast. But this one was different. I had no

claim on any of these memories.

I went to bed that night and every hour or so, perhaps

more frequently, I woke to that image of her, still sitting

on my screen in my study. Twice in the middle of the

night I went to my study to look at her photo and try to

remember something, anything about her.

In the photo she is sitting on the edge of the bed, the

sheets rumpled, the top sheet on the floor and out of view.

She’s smiling, and it’s easy to focus all of my attentions

on her small white teeth and prominent gums, and the

90 A Fallen Man

innocence writ large all over her young face. In the second

of my trips to my study in the middle of the night, I stared

for long moments at her eyes, the folds, and I wondered if

she was part Chinese.

She was wearing a red T-shirt with some writing on it,

but I couldn’t make out the words. The more I stared it at,

though, the more I thought that we had been together in

Phnom Penh. There wasn’t much in the photo to help me.

In the background and to her right was a bedside table, but

the only thing on it was a telephone. To the left and behind

her, a shade, brown and otherwise nondescript, covered a

window.

In the morning, while brushing my teeth, I concluded

that we had been together in Phnom Penh, in a third-story

room that fronted on the Tonle Sap. I wasn’t positive, but

I just couldn’t imagine that I had been with this particular

young woman in Bangkok or Jakarta, or anywhere else. It

had suddenly become important, no matter my

uncertainty, to locate where we had spent time together.

The geography was important, the date was irrelevant.

Later, on toward noon, I laid down to read some

stories, fantastical fictions, a collection I had recently

bought. I started a story that takes places not far from

Berlin when I began to doze. And then dream. Or half-

dream, I guess, because she kept coming to mind. This

lovely person sitting on the edge of a bed about whom I

could remember almost nothing.

A Fallen Man 91

Slowly I began to remember small things, though I still

had no name, only a growing sense that we had indeed

spent at least one night together in Phnom Penh in a hotel

I could now name. I concluded that I had taken the photo

in the morning.

She said to me, at some point, I think it will rain.

I ignored her and tried to explain the word love. Why,

in response to her comment about it raining, I don’t know?

I couldn’t explain what I meant by love in words. So I had

to try to do so with my mouth and hands. She was naked,

and so was I, and this made it easier. Her skin was

unusually light, and taut.

Now I see her, almost two weeks after first bringing up

her photo on my monitor. She’s sitting before me, her

back against a pillow. I’m sitting at the end of the bed, my

legs crossed. We have just made love, and in the afterglow

of our slow love making she wants to ask me some

questions.

She holds in his hands blue sheets of paper on which

are fragments of stories. They are my stories and she

wants me to say something about them. She wants me to

do this to know me better, she says.

Story One. A woman of thirty has a father who is

completely paralyzed on his right side. He’s sixty-three.

He was paralyzed four years ago. He cannot work. The

woman has a mother, but she can only make enough

92 A Fallen Man

money for food for the day. The daughter, who is thirty,

is asked to support her father. She has little education and

no skills.

What liberties is she allowed to take to make money to

support her father, and her mother too? she asks me.

Are you that young woman? I think. Whatever it takes,

I say.

She smiles, and I expect her to follow with another

question. But she does not. Instead, she reaches for my

hand. I want to kiss her on the lips.

Story Two. A middle-aged man of considerable

generosity is killed one night by two men who were hired

by his wife to do the job. The wife had the husband killed

because she wanted his very considerable insurance

policy, of which she was the beneficiary. The brother of

the man who is killed has the right to either ask for the

death penalty for the wife, or to say that he does not want

it applied. He can do this because of the country in which

the killing took place.

What should he do? she asks me.

I say, I don’t have enough information.

Assume you do, she says. She’s not smiling. There is

nothing in her face or the way she moves her body to

reveal the kind of answer she wants or expects.

I’m the wrong person to ask, I finally say. I’m what

my friends and others would call a fallen man. My moral

compass is broken.

A Fallen Man 93

Fallen? You fallen?

Yes.

She smiles, and she extends her hand. I put my hand on

hers. I squeeze her hand, gently. I want to kiss her more

than ever. She says nothing. I imagine that she will never

answer this simple question.

I want to say something, so I say, Will you marry me?

No, she says, without hesitation.

Will you tell me why?

Maybe after we make love again, I don’t know.

Will your answer then be the same?

I do not know.

I am not sure what to say. I think that perhaps I need

to give her an answer to a question she asked and I did not

answer. I say, Death for killing someone, or a lengthy

prison sentence? I have an opinion on the matter, but it’s

irrelevant. It’s the brother whose opinion matters.

You do take moral positions, don’t you? You are not a

fallen man, are you?

I think she has set a trap for me. I am worried. I say,

Would you now like to make love?

Will you hold me close?

I go to her and she falls into my arms and we lie on the

bed with the light coming through the window, a window

covered with iron bars. The kind I see in the hotels in

Phnom Penh. I wrap my arms around her and she comes

closer and puts a leg over mine. I sense she cannot get

close enough.

94 A Fallen Man

I don’t know how long we’re wrapped in each other

when she pulls away and says, I must go.

Will you marry me? I ask her as she opens the door and

steps out into the hallway. There is no answer. Or is there?

I thought I heard some words, but I cannot be sure. I go

to the door and look down the long hallway and I see no

one.

I return to the bed and lie down and fold my arms. I

pretend she’s still with me and we are married. I hear a

noise and I turn to the window. It is raining.

`

The Game

On Victory Hill in Sihanoukville, Cambodia, there’s a bar

called the No Name Bar. The cops make jokes about the

foreigners and how bad they look and how much they

drink and smoke weed. They joke that these foreign men,

almost all of them middle-aged and sun weathered and

often with tattoos on their arms and legs and in poor

health, look just like all the men one will encounter in the

countries from which they come. They do not know better

than to make this kind of a generalization because they

have never been outside Cambodia, and they are poorly

educated, and they embrace stereotypes as much as

anyone who is uneducated. These cops also love to drink,

and they often drink until drunk, and then, from where

they sit in the No Name Bar the Game begins.

It’s a game with no known history. No one can tell

you when it was first played or who came up with it, or

even if it is a game unique to Cambodia. What these cops

will tell you is that the Game is the primary reason they

come to Victory Hill, and it’s a game to which they are

addicted. They are so addicted, in fact, that their need for

money to bet in the Game requires them to steal money

from their needy families, and to shake down foreigners

at every opportunity. But oddly enough, the cops never

96 The Game

shake down anyone on Victory Hill. It’s a place that’s off-

limits to such corruption, but only because of the Game.

The Game proceeds more or less in the following

manner. As soon as nightfall comes on, and after several

foreigners walk by these cops seated in the No Name Bar

on the muddy and boulder-strewn street, one of the cops,

whose turn it is in the Game, chooses one of the passing

foreigners by pointing his beer bottle or glass at him. He

becomes the Chosen One. As far as I know, the process of

fingering the Chosen One is random. I have thought there

must be some rationale here, but then this is my rational

mind talking and not that of these Cambodian cops who

have assured me that their method of choosing a foreigner

has nothing to do with a method they can specify.

Once a foreigner becomes the Chosen One, he cannot

get away. Or get away on the night chosen in this small

place, because should he try to get a tuk-tuk or motorcycle

driver to take him off the hill, one of the cops in the Game

will talk to the driver and tell him that on this particular

night, and only on this night, the foreigner who is trying

to leave the hill cannot do so. The drivers are never told

why, I’m told, though because the Game has been going

on for so long—almost as long as foreigners have been

coming to Victory Hill—they know from long experience

that they can never talk about anything related to the

Game. The consequences of doing so are death.

With a foreigner for the night targeted, the cops wait

until he wanders off and away from the bright lights of the

The Game 97

bars, and as soon as they have their Chosen One in a dark

place, they grab him. They put him in handcuffs and they

put a rag in his mouth and blindfold him. And then they

march him off the hill and to a cemetery that lies on high

ground not far away. They take him to the back of the

cemetery, where no one is ever about at night and where

there is an old building that is falling down and once was

used to store the tools for digging holes and burying

people.

The Chosen One is taken inside the building and to the

rear where there is a small room. In this room, the Chosen

One is given two bowls of rice and a cup of water each

day, for as long as it takes to get a confession from him. If

he should confess right away then it is possible that he

may not see any rice, or have rats and cockroaches

crawling all over him, a common occurrence I was told

among those who hold out for a day or two.

The heart of the Game begins when one of the cops

takes the Chosen One from the cell-like room and pushes

him into another and larger room. Here there are a number

of instruments and other paraphernalia, including chains.

In the middle of the room is a small rickety table, and on

top of it is a large clay bowl. Inside the bowl are several

small squares of paper, each one with a number and brief

description of what the Chosen One will be subjected to.

The cop who fingered the Chosen One goes to the

bowl on the table and looking away picks one of the pieces

of paper from it. He then shows it to the other cops, and

98 The Game

he reads a description of the torture to follow. The Chosen

One understands virtually none of this since the

description is in Cambodian.

There are a number of possible tortures that the

Chosen One could face. One is that until he confesses to a

crime he did not commit, he will be subjected to a game

of Russian roulette. A revolver with one bullet in one of

the chambers will be put to his head. He will be told in

English that if he does not confess to the murder of a

young Cambodian girl that took place the day before he

could be unlucky and have his brains blown out. He is not

told whether the cylinder will be spun once, twice, several

times, or until he dies if he does not confess. The Chosen

One, it should be noted, does not know that no murder

took place; it is a “murder” that was invented solely to

serve the Game’s end, and that end is to get a confession

from the Chosen One.

There are other scenarios the Chosen One might be

subjected to, which one depending on when one of the

tortures is arbitrarily terminated and the cop who chose

him decides to draw another number and torture

description from those in the bowl on the table. Another

possibility, for example, is that the Chosen One will be

chained at his feet and hoisted upside down until his head

is mere inches off the ground. Then—his eyes covered

with a black rag—a large bucket full of human excrement

will be put under his head. He is told what is about to

happen, and if he does not want to confess his head is

The Game 99

lowered into the bucket, which is deep enough for him to

suffocate in the excrement. Like the game of Russian

roulette, the Chosen One could have his head dunked into

the bucket once or several times depending on how

quickly he decides to confess, or when the cop decides to

move on to yet another form of torture.

A further possibility is that the Chosen One is told that

if he will not confess then his testicles will be subjected to

a hot iron poker. He may or may not be told that this is a

torture that could make him scream like he cannot imagine

and grind his teeth so hard he will feel like they are turning

to powder.

The betting had several components, and it is possible,

with luck, to win more than one bet. One bet is placed on

the day the Chosen One will confess, and this is perhaps

the least interesting, for most bet that the break will occur

on the first day. Another bet revolves around which of the

nine possible tortures will be the one that breaks the

Chosen One. A third aspect of the game that allows for

betting is that of how many times a particular torture will

be used by a cop on a particular night, and if used multiple

times what will that number be before the Chosen One

confesses to a crime that did not happen. For example, will

the Chosen One break after his head had been submerged

once, twice, or a half dozen times in excrement? Will he

break before the trigger is pulled the first time in Russian

roulette, or as soon as he sees the hot poker that may or

may not be applied to his testicles? There are other kinds

100 The Game

of bets, or combination bets, but these I have outlined are

the staples of the game. From all this it is easy to

appreciate that there are several unknowns: the will of the

Chosen One, which torture comes up and in which order,

which torture is most likely to bring the Game to a speedy

resolution—a function not just of the specific torture but

of the will and unpredictable behavior of the Chosen One.

Now for anyone who has been following the story of

the methods of torture used by the U.S. Government on

suspected terrorists at Guantanamo, he will likely respond

to the Game I have been describing by saying: What you

have related is nothing by comparison with what the U.S.

has done. After all, the U.S. is a country of civilized

people, while just about everyone knows that even now in

the twenty-first century Cambodia remains a lawless Wild

West. It is a place where drugs are freely available, and

young women sell themselves for ten dollars for sex, and

for a pittance you can kill a water buffalo with an AK-47,

just for fun. So, what’s the big deal about the Game? One

might also say that while this Game appears to be all about

chance, and chance that plays itself out with men who are

uneducated and very drunk, the situation was even worse,

all reasonable men will agree, with suspected terrorists at

Gitmo. For those in charge at Gitmo probably had

university degrees, and what they and those below them

did they did not do when literally drunk. But were they

insane?

The Game 101

Who knows? And what do we in fact mean by the

word insane? And what about those at the very top of the

government who approved all of this at Guantanamo,

those sitting in and around the White House? Well,

they’re different than these drunk and uneducated and

insane Cambodians, surely. They don’t smoke and traffic

in dope. They don’t allow young girls to walk on the main

streets of a small American town and show off their bared

breasts and do anything any foreigner asks them to do for

ten dollars. And no one in the higher echelons of the U.S.

government could ever be accused of any of these lowly

and vile practices that take place on Victory Hill, and least

of all the kinds of things that goes on in the Game, right?

But back to the Game. If it so happens that the Chosen

One is able to hold up in the face of these tortures for ten

days--surely a matter of luck, for example, because if

Russian Roulette comes up and he doesn’t immediately

confess he could be dead with the first release of the

hammer--then he is free to go, more or less.

It turns out that freedom is not always simply freedom,

as least in this instance, however. On being released,

whether after ten days or after the first threat—say that of

getting one of his testicles fried—the Chosen One is given

a warning. (He is never told that the “murder” was pure

fabrication.) He is told that should he tell anyone about

what he has gone through, then he can expect to be taken

again and to be put through a whole series of new tortures,

and the ones he came to know intimately. He is also told

102 The Game

that he can never leave Cambodia. He may not have been

an expat until death in his own mind, but now he is.

Now the reader may wonder if this Game I have

related is purely a product of my imagination or is as real

as the memorable night that he may have had with a young

Thai or Cambodia hooker. For the record, I have no doubt

whatsoever that everything I have related is factual, and

not least because I have spent considerable time on

Victory Hill and have a good idea what goes on there. On

the other hand, it should be noted that more than one

person who knows me will swear that I am clinically

crazy, no different and perhaps worse than those who

carried out tortures at Gitmo. It should also be noted that

there are two people who are very close to me and have

known me for more than twenty years, and long ago both

of them became so confused about my sense of reality that

by their own admission they confess to being unable to

decide when I am telling the truth or simply spinning a tall

tale. This means, as one might easily appreciate, that I am

in little danger of ever being held to account for a narrative

of my behavior that I have verbalized or put to paper,

behavior that some might judge to be immoral, sick or

even criminal. On more than one occasion this has led me

to wonder whether long ago I embraced this kind of

inscrutable ambiguity to get the very result I have just

noted; or whether I find myself telling stories that can be

taken as either factual, fictional or somewhere in between

The Game 103

because I am simply unable to distinguish fact from

fiction. About this I can only say that…

`

My Cambodian Mistress

I rarely think of the consequences of my actions, or rather

actions that have to do with my sexual needs. It is not that

I am not smart in a great many matters—or so say my

business associates. It is rather than when it comes to

attractive women of a certain age I simply cannot help

myself. And so it was in a rather spectacular way with M.,

who, in spite of my quite good marriage and lovely wife

Karen, became my occasional mistress. Or to be more

precise, she was my mistress for two weeks twice a year

for three years. And some two weeks they were, of bliss

and happiness and wild coupling in Phnom Penh,

interrupted only by a day here and there when M. had to

be with her family in Bantambong. This she had to do not

just to satisfy the needs of her family but also to be able to

credibly lie to her husband, a lie made easy by the fact that

he spoke no Cambodian and M.’s parents knew no more

than half a dozen English words. I thought it was the near

perfect arrangement, one far distant from home and with

my own near perfect excuse for being away I was certain

that nothing could go wrong. But it did! And at times

when I reflect on what happened I now could kick myself

for letting my guard down and giving into temptation.

My Cambodian Mistress 105

The best place to begin, I suppose, is to note that I have

been going to the gym for years, nine years to be precise,

five and six times a week. My job makes it possible, and

for reasons that go back to my last year in high school and

my father getting me interested in the gym, I am what

might be called a gym addict. I love the workouts, I keep

track of exactly how much time I spend on aerobic

activities, and I rarely forget which machines I have used

the previous day to tone my muscles and keep my weight

at 165 pounds plus or minus a pound of two, and in spite

of those nights when I cannot resist the alcohol and the

second helping of lamb or beef and a marvelous desert that

my caring and incomparable wife insists I enjoy at one of

our many candlelight dinners beside our pool.

I’ll freely admit that I have long eyed women at the

gym, those at any rate that are roughly between twenty-

five and thirty-five. I’ll also admit that I have engaged

more than a few in conversations, invariably with the

thought that if the chemistry is right and they are willing,

then why not? I’m still young—just hit the forty mark two

months ago—and I cannot see any reason, moral, ethical

or otherwise, to deprive myself of what my like-minded

friends call the incomparable pleasures of pussy. That any

sane man with opportunity would do so!

There is no need to get into the many stories about this

or that young woman I picked up at the gym and have had

for an afternoon or two. There have been several of them,

some good, some bad, some that have left me indifferent.

106 My Cambodian Mistress

But fortunately, all of them--up to this point in life--have

been discreet. I have been careful to reveal very little

about my married life, and I have not been that inquisitive

about the personal lives of those who enjoy sex as much

as I do.

Now to M. Lovely, busty, gum-chewing M. I suppose

I had seen her in the gym, always at mid-morning on

Tuesday and Thursdays and Saturdays (I go in the

afternoons on other days when she is not there), for two or

three months before I decided I would have to make a

move, knowing of course that it would be risky since she

had a big diamond on her left hand and always came to

the gym with her two young children, one a boy of about

two and a girl just under a year.

M. sure was dedicated. She was always on the

Stairmaster, and always for at least fifty minutes, and

always chewing her gum and reading her novel, and

always with her hair pinned up. By the time she was a half

hour into her hard walk on the moving stairs she was

sweaty all over, from brow to that fetching thin waist

below her enormous breasts. God were they big! I loved

them, I couldn’t get enough of them! When I first saw her

I thought she was a Filipina. The skin color was right.

There were four or five of them who came to the gym

regularly and I’d had a brief affair with one who was a

nurse and had just gotten a divorce. This and the fact that

I’d had one other fling with a Filipina who had just turned

twenty-one when I was thirty-four (she had wanted to try

My Cambodian Mistress 107

an “older man”) led me to infer that M. was also a Filipina.

But no, I quickly learned that she was Cambodian. As

much as I have an eye for Asian women, I still have

problems putting them in the right country. Well, except

for Chinese women, and I’m usually good at picking out

those who have Korean blood. But I’m getting off track

and onto matters that do not really matter.

Anyway, I resisted for a long getting on that damn

Stairmaster. I just don’t like it. But then I saw that if I was

to get where I wanted to be with M., about the only way

was to take one of the machines next to her and begin by

slipping in a comment here and there about what she was

reading or how much she exerted herself. And that’s

exactly what I did. She warmed to me quickly, and we

chatted about little things, like the business she was in

with her husband, and all the reasons that she brought the

two kids with her to the gym (it was not about money).

I worked hard on her for nearly a month before I got

the information about her yearly visits to Cambodia.

Slowly the details began to come out. About when she

went, and how the trips were all about catering to her poor

family, and her not really wanting to go, and how her

husband couldn’t go because of the family business—they

made home mortgage loans and, if I was to believe her,

were really quite successful. Anyway, it did not take all

that much thought on my part to see that if I could get

away at the same time that she was in Cambodia, and if I

continued with this long courting warm-up, then I had it

108 My Cambodian Mistress

figured that we just might be able to spend a good deal of

time together. Of course, this isn’t how I put the matter to

her. No, I was much more subtle than that! Or at least I

thought so.

It happened something like this. On three different

occasions I convinced M. to have coffee with me at

Starbucks, a mere fifty yards from the gym where we

worked out. We sat and chatted and laughed and I turned

on my charms. The kids were still in the nursery, so there

was no worry about keeping her attention and finding just

the right moment to make my move. A move, really, that

was little more than getting a firm read on when she would

next find herself in Cambodia, and then respond in just the

right way with measured enthusiasm.

She came forth with the information, I mentally noted

it all down, and then about two weeks before she would

leave for Phnom Penh I off-handedly mentioned that

company business (I worked for a transnational that sold

pharmaceutical products) would take me to Bangkok and

I would have a week or so free if I was lucky enough to

get my business matters wrapped up. And should that

happen, I said, we could meet up and you could show me

around. Cambodia was a country I had long wanted to

see, I let her know on a couple of different occasions.

That would be a great, she said. I am always looking

for an excuse to get away from the suffocating family and

sleeping in a hammock with pigs and barking dogs

everywhere.

My Cambodian Mistress 109

And so that’s what we did. Oh, did we! French

restaurants and long and intimate walks along the Tonle

Sap and music venues at night, and then all that time later

and often well into the morning enjoying each other like

two young newlyweds who were utterly glandular,

oblivious to time and circumstance and the simple fact

that all good things, and all bad things too, must come to

an end. (How banal to have to say this, but it is true, is it

not?)

It was inevitable that we would get into trouble, and I

must take the blame for it. Yes, it was my fault. I hate to

admit that it was nothing more than giving into

temptation, doing what I knew I should not do. But then

M. did play a role too, she sure did.

I am just like all men I have ever known. I can’t stand

wearing a condom. I would never wear one were it not

for being mindful that I must be careful. This is something

that I would remind myself of each and every time I found

myself with a new woman. The simple fact is that I had to

be very careful, since Karen and I have such an active sex

life and were I out of commission for even a couple of

days she would be all over me with questions.

On the first two trips to Phnom Penh to meet up with

M. I didn’t even consider going bareback with her. With

two young kids I just figured she was as fertile as a

twenty-year-old, and then there was the matter of whether

or not she was also fooling around with other men and

might have something nasty. On the second of these trips,

110 My Cambodian Mistress

she said I didn’t have to use anything, that there was

nothing to worry about. I said, Okay, I believe you, and

just went on being careful. (Well, not when we had oral

sex, of course. Everything I read and knew told me that

here there was nothing at all to worry about, and I never

have with any of the women with whom I have had an

affair.)

In the second year of our Cambodian adventures, M.

returned to this idea that I didn’t need to use anything with

her. And then she added that I really did not have to worry

because after her second child, she and her husband

decided that they didn’t want anymore. For a reason she

didn’t explain, she was the one who had the small

operation that, she said, made it impossible for her to

conceive. By this time I had no reason whatsoever to not

believe whatever she told me, and it was not therefore hard

to do what we both wanted.

Everything moved along to near perfection with our

little semi-annual affairs. Each one in fact proved better

than the last one. M. found a way to convince her parents

that she could only spend two or three days with them on

the front end of her trip and then she had to return home.

I gathered from what she said—she wasn’t quite clear on

this point—that she gave them more money than she

usually did and this compensated for spending less time

with them. Right away, we took advantage of the

situation. We traveled to Hanoi and Vientiane and down

to Bali, and if there was a good restaurant that one of us

My Cambodian Mistress 111

had come across in our internet researches we didn’t miss

the opportunity to go there. Nor did we skimp on hotels,

never staying at less than one with five stars.

And then there was that call on my cell phone, so

unexpected and so alarming that I had to sit down and

catch my breath. I was initially so stunned and so alarmed

with the news that I had to put my head between my legs

to avoid fainting. M. was pregnant! And not just pregnant,

but she was certain beyond a doubt that I was the one

responsible.

How could this be? I said, and not quietly. How could

this possible be? You told me that you had been tied off.

I lied, she said. I had to. I just wasn’t enjoying what

we were doing when I couldn’t truly feel you.

And your husband? I thought you told me you had a

good sex life with him?

Honey, that was another lie.

How big a lie?

Do I have to tell you?

Now you do.

He’s impotent. Or maybe I should be kind and say

that he just has no interest in me sexually.

When’s the last time you had sex with him?

Before you.

I don’t believe you.

Why do you think I was so horny all the time with

you?

112 My Cambodian Mistress

I didn’t know what to say. I finally said, trying to find

a small amount of humor in this mess, I thought it was me.

She laughed. Okay, it was you.

What now?

I want the baby.

You can’t have it. It will destroy two marriages.

I must!

You can’t!

She hung up on me.

I called her right back, and she hung up again. I called

an hour later and I said, Please reconsider. This is a huge

disaster for both of us if you insist.

I must. I want another child. I just didn’t know it was

going to be with you.

I didn’t call her for a day, and when I did I said we had

to meet. We agreed to go to a nearby park, as soon as she

put the kids in the babysitting room at the gym.

I pleaded with her to have an abortion, told her I would

pay for it. I said, We can find some excuse for you to be

away from the family for a couple of days while we get

this taken care of.

You haven’t heard me. I want the child.

The conversation went nowhere, and we left, angry at

one another, no resolution in sight.

We met again three days later, and this time I told her

that I had had a hypothetical discussion with Karen, who

she knew about. I said that she would immediately file for

divorce and take me for everything if I were to get another

My Cambodian Mistress 113

woman pregnant. I bet your husband would do the same,

I said to M. I had not in fact talked about this issue with

Karen. I was afraid she might start asking questions I

couldn’t answer. I had made all this up in the hope that M.

would change her mind.

I haven’t changed my mind, M. said on hearing me. I

want the child. End of discussion.

I now went to the gym at times when M. wasn’t there.

I felt angry, depressed, and I tried hard not to blame M.

for lying to me. I tried to accept the blame, knowing that

I had been stupid. I had finally gotten myself into a pickle

that I had avoided all these years. What was I going to do?

This question came to me a hundred times. I could barely

function. I don’t know how I was able to hide my state of

mind from Karen.

The solution came to me one afternoon when I had to

detour off the freeway because when there was a pileup. I

found myself in a section of the city where there were lots

of Hispanics. It was a part of the city that the newspapers

claimed was dangerous, where drugs were rampant and

you could find a different gang every couple of blocks. At

a stop sign I saw a couple of kids with arms covered with

tattoos. They weren’t the kind I’d want to meet on a dark

street at night. They looked downright scary. That night I

couldn’t get these tattooed kids out of my mind as Karen

and I went out to a high-end Italian restaurant for dinner.

We had a bottle of wine, and perhaps it was the wine that

made me clearly see what I had to do.

114 My Cambodian Mistress

Two days later, after work, I went over to the Hispanic

neighborhood where I had seen the tattooed kids. I drove

around for almost an hour before I came to a park and saw

two brawny Mexican kids throwing a football. They

didn’t have shirts on. They were covered with tattoos, and

like those that had planted the idea in my mind they looked

rough, headed for a life of crime and lots of prison time. I

approached them and said I was a business man who was

looking for someone to help me with a small job. I was

willing to pay the two of them $600 for less than an hour’s

work. They looked at me suspiciously, unsure who I was,

what I was up to.

Here’s what I want you to do, I said. Go to an address

I’ll give you. I’ll tell you what time to go. When the

woman comes to the door, I want the two of you to say the

following words to her and no more. Tell her that she has

been asked to get rid of something by a friend. Tell her:

Now do what you have to do within the next ten days or

you’ll never see one of your kids again. That’s all I want

the two of you to say, I then said, Make sure you wear T-

shirts to show off your tattoos, and look mean. Look like

you might kill her. Don’t raise your voice, just look mean.

Don’t answer any questions. Just walk away after you give

her the message. Don’t let her see your car or motorcycle

or be able to identify you.

When you pay us? one of them said.

Four hundred now, the rest I’ll put in an envelope and

tape to the underside of that garbage can behind you. I

My Cambodian Mistress 115

will put the money there as soon as I find out you did what

I want you to do.

One of them said, You on, man. Both of them gave

me high fives.

I gave them four one-hundred-dollar bills.

Three days later I got a text message from M. It read:

I changed my mind. Tell me where I can have it.

I set it up and paid for it. I got confirmation that she

got it done. I changed my membership to another gym. I

never heard from M. again. I still work out as much as I

always did, and now I’ve got an affair going with a blond

high school teacher who’s twenty-seven. Boy, is she good,

and even a little kinky! I met her the first week I started

going to a new gym. I’m thinking of ways to convince her

to meet me in Phnom Penh when she’s off during the

summer. I know all kinds of nice places to stay, and

French restaurants where we can really enjoy one another.

I might even take her to Bali, where M. and I went

bareback for the first time and started down that road that

led to….

Murder He Called It

He struck me as a rather kind, even gentle, man. It was

there in his soft face and manner of speaking, and the

moderation he showed in drinking—at first. These

impressions did not change for the first ten or fifteen

minutes as I listened to him describe in some detail how

he went about his street photography and the contests he

entered. He went on at some length about one photo that

had done quite well in an international contest, and very

much to his surprise because it was taken in bad midday

light. It was a photo of several live chickens on the back

of a motorbike.

Someone had turned up the music in the bar where

we found ourselves, and it began to irritate both of us. We

expressed our concern to the bar manager and he promptly

turned down the volume. This brought a large smile to

Ryan’s face. Ryan, I forgot to say, is this man who was

telling me about his interest in photography.

Suddenly, and apropos nothing we had been talking

about, he said, Have you ever murdered anyone?

I was taken aback, for I don’t think it’s a question that

anyone had ever asked me. I went to my drink and looked

at him to see if he was serious. And then I said, No, never.

I don’t even own any guns.

Murder He Called It 117

Guns are only one way to kill someone, and not

necessary the best, he said.

I nodded. I couldn’t help but bring to mind the recent

beheadings by ISIS. And then, perhaps wanting no more

than to keep the conversation going, I said, There was one

scenario that came to mind more than once in which I

might have committed murder. When my son was

young—he is now 24—it sometimes occurred to me that

had someone been stupid enough to sexually molest him

and I had found out I probably would have killed the

person.

Really? he said. You would not have let justice take its

course?

Don’t think so, I said. I would have gone out and

bought a hand gun, and assuming I could find the molester

would have gone up to him and asked him what he did to

my son. If the answer he gave me more or less agreed

with what my son claimed, I would have taken out the gun

and put two or three bullets in his head.

He shook his head, as if he didn’t believe me. He said,

rather matter-of-factly I thought, I did kill one person

many years ago. I knew it would happen. It was planned.

I planned it like I try to plan my best street shots. And so

he began to tell me about it, but not straightforwardly as

one might have thought.

He began his story with these words: I had been in a

trying position for years and I knew it was not easy to

extricate myself from my predicament. He then went on

118 Murder He Called It

to say that around this person—still unnamed or

identified—I began to act crazy. I would destroy things.

I would shout and scream obscenities at everything. I

would say that if a policeman stopped me and I didn’t

think he had reason I would kill him right there. This was

all planned on my part. I even kept a journal of what I was

doing, how I was escalating my behavior.

Who was this that you were intent on killing, and did?

I will get to that soon enough, he said. I need to tell you

more first.

He said he then bought a gun, then a second one. The

first one was a rifle, the second a pistol. I let the person

know what I had done, he said. I would flash them when

I had the chance. Load and unload. Point them here and

there and at the person. I would talk about how useful they

were for killing anything I didn’t like. I continued to

behave like I was crazy, but now I would have a gun in

my hands when around this person. The message was

getting across.

You were after this person, then? I said. The one who

saw this behavior?

He didn’t answer and went to his drink. He acted as if

he had not heard me.

The next thing I did, he said, was get into a fight at a

local bar. I started the fight and I threw the first punches.

I wanted to get arrested, and I did. I spent three days in

jail. My plan was working perfectly.

Murder He Called It 119

I felt uneasy, and I said, You plan a lot of your street

shots, I take it?

Yes and no. The street is different. You cannot be so

methodical.

He went on. He said, It was a game of escalating

intimidation. Soon I began to feel like a killer when I

woke in the morning. I could just feel this need to kill

someone. It was coming, I said to myself. It would

happen any day.

He stopped here and went silent. I waited for him to

continue, to finish the story, tell me who he killed, how he

did it. He smiled at me, as if I was to now know what

happened.

I finished my beer and looked over at the waitress. I

caught her eye and motioned for another one. I asked

Ryan if he wanted another drink. He shook his head,

fiddled with his glass, and looked away. Like he had

moved on, was no longer with me. I had gotten too snoopy

on the wrong topic, I surmised.

I asked him if he had an apartment in Phnom Penh.

No, he said, crisply. Then he said, I get rooms around

Street 51 . Know it?

Yeah. Don’t go over there much, I said. Lots of

scummy street trade and shady hustlers about. Not one of

my favorite nightlife places.

I know what you mean, he said. I got stupid with one of

the freelancers. Left my raincoat on the shelf and got

120 Murder He Called It

warts. A real bloody pain in the ass, always having to get

them burned off.

I turned to my beer, looked over at a young guy—

maybe an Aussie I thought—who was rolling one. A

Khmer girl was sitting nearby but not too close. Now and

again he’d lightly rub her lower back. She barely reacted.

She was attractive. I hadn’t seen her before in this bar. I

got a picture of them naked in a room within the hour.

Play for pay, nothing fancy.

Ryan was now tapping several fingers on one side of

his empty glass. I sensed he was going to pay the bill and

move on.

I’m curious, I said. I thought you said you had

committed murder?

There was a long pause. The he said, in measured

words: I did. I killed my wife. It was planned, like I said.

The craziness, the guns, the fight and jail time.

Everything.

I wanted to ask why. And how. The why interested me

more than the how. Instead, I said, Do you feel remorse?

I did for a brief time and then forced myself to forget

her by marrying a Thai woman I only knew for two weeks.

The marriage didn’t last three months. I’ve got bad

instincts for women. Then I married an Indonesian

woman. She had a good career and knew how to be

thrifty. She was beautiful and took good care of me. But

I could never get my mind settled for what I had done to

my Kiwi wife. I cheated on the Indonesian woman and

Murder He Called It 121

she found out. She didn’t really find out. She just knew

what I was doing. I was stupid.

So you began traveling and turned to photography?

I did. I wanted to forget everything. I forget nothing.

I see what I did to my wife in all of my photographs.

Sounds dumb but I see her face in market meat covered

with flies. I see her in the faces of women packed into

trucks going or coming from the shirt factories. I see her

in the beggar women on the street with their kids.

You have a vivid imagination.

He stared at me. A blank stare. A photograph not worth

taking, I thought.

I couldn’t figure where he was going, or going next. He

had another drink and so did I. I looked for the young guy

who had rolled himself a joint and had been stroking the

back of the bargirl with the nice long ponytail and the

model’s ass. He was gone. They were both gone. He was

banging her, and then she would be gone and on her way

to a small room somewhere in one of the poor

neighborhoods near the airport where her mother or a

sister or cousin would be watching her child while she

hustled foreigners for a drink and a ten-dollar barfine and

fifty for fucking. I know these stories in all of their details,

and by heart. I have walked the neighborhoods, I don’t

know why. I also don’t know why I have taken no

photographs in any of these rundown garbage cluttered

areas that are home to a million rats, and why through the

years I have taken so few photos of bargirls. But then I

122 Murder He Called It

never forget them, or their stories. I see them when I am

walking to class to give a lecture on Great Apes. I see

them when I am enjoying some wine and cheese on the

back patio at home. I see them in dreams that make no

sense.

I began to lose track of what Ryan was talking about. I

was thinking about my own interest in photography, and

how it has gone into remission in the last year or so, and I

don’t know why.

How? I said.

How? he said. How I got away with it? Why I did it? I

bloody well knew you would want to know! He was

suddenly animated. Everyone wants to know when I tell

this story. But I have to be careful what I say. You

understand?

I nodded. Who would admit to a murder? I thought.

I know you are nothing, he said. You are just another

road traveler, a bum rolling through life like all of us. I

can see it in your eyes. I see it in the way you survey a

bar like this one. I have seen your kind before. Often. You

never carry a notebook, do you? You never write anything

down, do you? Just like to watch, right?

There are several stories about me, I said. I am not one

person, believe me. Which story do you want to hear?

He ignored my question. He said, It’s always in the

telling. A story matters because of how it is told. He was

staring at me. I now thought he looked ten years older than

when I first laid eyes on him and got him talking. I looked

Murder He Called It 123

for the killer in his eyes, in the lines on his face. I could

not see them. It might have been the poor lighting, the

alcohol I’d had.

He took a slow sip from a drink that was nearly

exhausted, and he said, I knew she would take everything

from me. She was smart. She had found one of my

journals where I detailed all the women I’d slept with.

What we had done. How I felt. How they compared with

this woman I’d once loved.

I looked into his glassy eyes, and I stared at him. There

was a long pause. A new song I didn’t recognize began

and a bargirl approached me on the right and put a hand

on my leg and gave me a name. I ignored her. I turned to

Ryan and said, How?

Fear. Intense and growing fear. Paranoia. Of my

unpredictability, violence that anyone could see coming.

You could see she knew it was going to happen any day.

She got skittish and itchy all over and she’d start crying

for no obvious reason.

And so…?

I got out of bed one night to get some juice and took a

pee. When I returned I knew that something had

happened. I just knew it. I put my face on her face and

she wasn’t breathing. I’d killed her.

So it was not murder, as you led me to believe?

It was murder. It was… He was now leaning his back

against the wall. He looked spent. Suddenly he said, She

had a weak heart. A congenital childhood issue she never

124 Murder He Called It

talked about. Never revealed to anyone. She only told me

when we were about to get married and we were in love

and she wanted me to know everything about her.

Knowing everything at least once is the key to a long and

happy life, she told me the day she told me about her heart.

I paid my bar bill, and as I left I wanted to ask him if he

ever thought he had murdered someone by taking their

photo. I let the thought pass.

Out on the now quiet street, most of the bar lights out,

I thought I saw the bargirl with the ponytail and the

model’s ass coming toward me. She was alone and

smiling. Another successful night. Better than three

weeks in the factory making the very briefs I was wearing.

I went for my camera in the bag on my belt. It wasn’t

there. I had left it in my room.

`

The Void

I met Stanley Rochet in the year of the drenching rains,

when there were rats in the streets and constant brownouts

and hand-sized cockroaches were out in search of new

homes. It was another one of those years for me of

wandering among the deadbeat and dying and lost souls,

the unnamed and nameless expats at the end of the road,

the road going nowhere, ending for all of us in colorless

silences called death. That was the year we sat and drank

at the Riverside Bistro on the Quay and laughed as much

as we could, which wasn’t much, not much at all. He

shared these words with me about his life.

My name is Stanley Rochet. I am fifty-nine years old. I

live on the Quay. The address is 2198 Sisowath Quay,

Phnom Penh, Cambodia. That is the address my sister

uses when she sends me money. That’s the money we got

when our father died. Sometimes she sends the money to

the Paragon Hotel. That’s how most people know 2198

Sisowath Quay.

I have room 404. I have had this room for five years.

Maybe it is six years now. I am a little vague about that.

I think of the room as my room. It has a small writing

desk. It has a TV. It has a bed I don’t use. It also has a

larger bed I use. It’s good for when one of my girlfriends

126 The Void

stays over. There is also a picture above the small TV. It

is of three clowns. They are laughing. I don’t know who

made the picture. There is a small lamp near the writing

desk. I turn it on when one of my girlfriends comes for the

night. I put a pair of my long pants over the shade. My

Khmer girlfriends don’t like a lot of light. They always

want the curtains on the window closed. I tell them no one

can see us. They still want the curtains closed when we

are together.

I have a routine. I make my girlfriends leave by eight

o’clock in the morning. Sometimes I let them shower

before going. Sometimes they shower while I am shaving.

This is when they are late getting up. Some of them don’t

like to go home. They want to stay with me all day. I don’t

allow that. I have my routine.

I have my favorite restaurants. There are six of them

along the Quay. I have my favorite chairs too. They are

close to the street. This way I see everything. I don’t know

why I want to see everything. I used to know. I don’t

anymore.

I have breakfast every day at nine o’clock. Already it

is hot. I sit in the shade so it doesn’t matter. I have the

girl waitresses bring my coffee first. Then they bring my

juice. Then they bring my eggs and bread. I don’t have

to tell them to do this. They all know me. They know what

day I will come to their restaurant. They know I will tip

them one dollar.

The Void 127

I return to my room before noon. I read. I watch

sports on TV. I nap. I try not to think when napping of

my life before the Quay. That was when I was married.

That was when I had a job and was not happy. That was

when I stopped going to church. That was when I had my

stroke and stopped loving my wife and said goodbye and

she cried. That was when I came here.

Once in a while somebody wants to talk to me. That’s

okay. I tell them to sit down. I listen. They ask me what I

do. Maybe I tell them I read. Maybe I also tell them I

watch TV. Sometimes I just tell them I do nothing. I am

just living. That is pretty much the truth.

I tell myself stories. The stories have happy endings.

I am always in them. They are the endings I wanted before

I came here. They are the endings I will never see. That’s

okay. I think I understand why. It happens to everyone.

I have my first beer at ten o’clock. This is after I have

paid my breakfast bill. I like to keep things separate. I

want everything to be simple. I once had lots of

complications in my life. My wife was a real

complication. My job was one too. Then I had the stroke

that made everything simple.

I keep it simple with my girlfriends too. They want

complications. They want to live with me. I tell them no.

I tell them it is better the way it is. When I need you I will

find you, I tell them. They are all on Street 136 and Street

104. I will invite you for the night, I tell them. Then you

will have to go in the morning. I might see you the next

128 The Void

night too, I also tell them. Maybe I will not see you again

for another week, I might say. I don’t want to decide

before I decide.

I have my first cigarette of the day with my first beer.

My second smoke I have with my second beer. I cannot

now do without the second one. I have three more like the

second one before dinner. Sometimes I have one before I

find my girlfriend for the night. Sometimes I have one with

her too. It depends on her.

Four years ago, I had a little hobby. I would write a

story. Then I would print it out and paste it on the wall by

the TV. I would write another story and paste it on the

wall by the bed I don’t use. Then I would wake up one

morning and take the stories down. I would put them in

the trash. They weren’t very good. I didn’t want to think

about them ever again.

My sister who sends money writes to ask how I am

doing. I don’t answer these questions. I also don’t know

what to tell her. I can’t tell her about my drinking or dope

smoking or young girlfriends. She wouldn’t like that.

Sometimes she tries to tell me about my wife. She wants

me to know what happened to her. When I see it coming I

don’t read what she writes. I don’t want to know anything

about the woman. Maybe she is remarried or is dead now.

I don’t know. I just don’t want to know.

Sometimes I sit on the balcony outside my room and

watch the monks. They walk along the river with their

The Void 129

umbrellas. I don’t think they pray. I see them laughing

too much. I think they wear the robes to get free food.

There are other men living here like me. We talk a

little sometimes. I don’t ask questions about their lives.

They don’t ask about mine. That’s good because I don’t

want to tell them I’ve got nothing to say. There isn’t much

to say.

I now have a good girlfriend who is 28. I have been

seeing her for several months. When I met her, she told

me she had a son. He is two, she told me. I think this was

a story she invented. She has no breasts and no birth

marks on her. I don’t know why she told me this story. I

never asked her. I won’t ask her. I see her every Friday

and Saturday. These are the days she stays with me. She

takes my laundry on Friday and comes back on Saturday

with everything clean and pressed. On Saturday afternoon

we sit at the Hope and Anchor Bar and Restaurant and

have ice cream. She has two scoops of strawberry and one

of vanilla. I have one scoop of chocolate. We share a pot

of tea. She wants to be with me all the time. When she

says this, I talk about something else.

I read books about wars and the Romans. I read

books about the Victorian era too. I just started on wars

and Romans one day and that’s why I read about them.

The same goes for the Victorian era. I read a lot some

days and don’t remember much. That is okay. I like

forgetting. I like forgetting my girlfriends too. They are

here one night and then they are not here. That is fine.

130 The Void

Everything is here and then it is not here. That’s what I

learned when I had the stroke.

Last year I had a hobby of counting young foreign

girls with blond hair on the street. I would do this for an

hour and then quit. I had notes for every day of the week.

I did this for two months and then quit. I don’t know why

I did this.

I have another sister. She lives in New York. She

doesn’t write to me and I don’t write to her. She wanted

no more of me when I disappeared on my wife one day. I

think that’s fair of her to feel like she does.

Three years ago, I had a girlfriend who had a

motorbike. She took me everywhere I wanted to go. One

day we fell and she got hurt on one leg. She wore a

bandage wrapped around the big scar until it healed.

After that she liked how the bandage made her look. Last

time I saw her she was still wearing a white bandage on

that scar. This was five months ago. I can’t remember

why we stopped seeing each other.

I have lunch every day at one o’clock. It is always at

the same corner café. I always order a sandwich and

French fries. I don’t eat the French fries. They are for

my two little friends who come by. We don’t talk. They

just take the French fries and then run away. I think of

them as my sons. I don’t even know their names.

My girlfriend before the one I have now disappointed

me. I had seen her many times. I came to trust her. One

morning I showered and she took my pants and

The Void 131

disappeared. I had ninety dollars in my money wallet in

the pants. My other wallet which I hide has my debit and

credit cards. My good sister pays the bills on my credit

cards. She also puts money in an account for my debit

card. She has three children. I guess they’re good

children. How am I to know? I should send them money

or gifts. I don’t. I don’t know why.

A Dutch boy wanted to talk to me one day. I was

eating lunch at the French restaurant near my hotel. He

had seen me every day for a week he said. What do you

do? he said to me. Nothing much, I told him. Do you get

bored? he said. I don’t think about that, I said. He asked

some other questions. I told him I don’t like to talk about

myself. He left. I never saw him again.

I like the afternoon rains. They start slow around two

o’clock. Then it rains hard and the streets flood. The

monks disappear. The tourists get wet and smile. I don’t

know why they smile when they get wet. One day I might

ask one of them why. I have different questions I might

ask my sister. Maybe I won’t ask her though. It seems

like a lot of trouble. I want to keep everything simple.

My sister who sends money asks when I am coming

home. She asks me every couple of months. I don’t answer

the question. She would not like the answer.

Now it is one year and one month later. I am staying at the

Lux Hotel, around the corner from the Paragon Hotel. The

Paragon is where I have often stayed in the past. It is

132 The Void

where Stanley lived, and still lives, I think. The other

night I had it in my mind that he was in New York or going

to New York. He was going there for the first time in many

years. He was to see his sister who has been sending him

inheritance money to keep him going. He has not wanted

to see her but she wrote and said she was dying and would

he come. He thought no at first and then he changed his

mind. Maybe going was on a list, he wasn’t sure.

When Stanley was married and living in North

Carolina his wife made lists. She made one every day for

him and put it beside the bed on his bedside table. The list

was all the things she wanted him to do the next day.

These were things like cleaning the coffee pot and

checking the toilet rolls in the bathrooms and buying more

cat food. Susannah had been preparing these lists since

the first child came. In the beginning she only prepared

them every other day. Then it was every day when the

second child came. It was Susannah’s way of bringing

equality to the marriage. Stanley told Susannah from the

very beginning he did not like the lists. She heard him but

she did not hear him. He told her at other times not to

make the lists and only ask him to do things. If she wanted

to make lists of things to do she should make them for

herself. She heard him but she did not hear him. She did

not change her ways.

One day when we had breakfast on Street 136, not far

from the Lux Hotel, I asked Stanley why he did not ignore

the lists.

The Void 133

Because I did not want to get divorced like my parents

got divorced, he said.

You always did what was on the lists? I asked.

Sometimes not right away but I always did what she

asked. I did what she asked until the stroke.

When Stanley had the stroke that changed everything.

His speech became slurred and he had difficulty eating.

There was numbness on the right side of his body and he

needed a wheelchair to get about. His wife helped him for

the first month and then she got tired of helping him. She

hired a live-in nurse and continued with her active social

life. Stanley didn’t understand why his wife did this since

she did not work and the children were not at home. He

asked her and she said, Your problems are your problems

and my problems are my problems. He thought: so, this is

love till death do us part.

A couple of days after Susannah told Stanley that his

problems are his problems he had one of his colleagues

from the insurance company where he worked buy a ticket

to Utica, New York. This is where his sister lived. On the

day when his wife went to play bridge and not return until

late evening Stanley had his insurance colleague pick him

up and take him to the airport. He left a note on the

refrigerator for his wife. The note read: Thank you for the

two children and not listening to me about the lists. Do

what you must do in filing for a divorce. Stanley never

saw his wife again.

134 The Void

His sister Joan, who lived alone, cared for Stanley

until he could walk and eat without help and his speech

was more or less normal. Then he thanked her and said

goodbye with a kiss on each cheek, and before another day

had passed he was on an airplane headed for Phnom Penh.

He came here because he wanted to live somewhere that

was cheap and he liked French food and he spoke

rudimentary French that he learned in college.

Two years after moving to Phnom Penh with one

suitcase, Stanley’s mother and father died in an

automobile accident. His parents were rich and he now

would have enough money to live on for the rest of his life

without working.

He was grateful for what his sister did when he had the

stroke, but he told her little about how he lived. Several

times she asked to come and see him but each time he said

no. Each time he said it was not a good time to come and

she could come in the future. He had no intention of Joan

ever visiting. He didn’t want her to see how he lived and

what he did, and he did not like her lesbian lover who she

would bring along.

Then one day he got a note saying that Joan was dying

and would he come and see her. This happened not long

before I heard the two sharp noises very early in the

morning that scared me. The day of the two sharp noises

was the day I went to find Stanley and renew our

friendship.

The Void 135

He was living in the same room he had always lived

in. He was happy to see me, and we hugged. He asked

me how I was and I told him I was good. We had some

beers and a little food. He wanted to tell me about his

girlfriend Ami.

Before he told me about her I asked him if he heard

the two sharp noises. His hotel was close enough to mine

that he could have heard them.

From time to time I hear noises like you describe, he

said.

You know what they are? I said.

I do, he said. He said no more and scratched his bald

pate and turned away and then looked down at his sandals.

I noticed that one of his large toenails had turned a deep

yellow.

What were they? I said. I had to know.

We will talk about them another time, he said. His

words had a bite, and they were not Stanley’s words, not

the kind of words I had come to associate with him.

I had my own ideas what they were. I had been

hearing rumors since my arrival that strange things were

happening in Phnom Penh. Some said they were

happening in the whole country. Some said that whatever

was happening was nothing to worry about because the

Khmer New Year was approaching. It was somehow all

about the coming New Year. I believed this at first, and

then I wasn’t sure. Then I was sure it wasn’t the New Year

at all.

136 The Void

I was hearing that everything was changing and

nothing was certain. The military police were now afoot

like they had never before been before. The legal age had

suddenly changed from eighteen to twenty-one, I heard.

The police were ignoring the famous Red Book.

Foreigners were being taken away and not heard from for

weeks or months. They could be held for eighteen months

without charges against them. Reasons did not have to be

given. No one seemed to know what these foreigners were

being charged with. I thought I should leave but I was

fascinated by the uncertainly. It put me on an edge that

made me feel good. The more I heard of all this ominous

news the better I felt. I began running at six in the

morning and doing double sets of pushups before hitting

the bars at night. I began to find bars I had not known

existed, bars like Voodoo on Street 106 and Happy Man,

not far from the Lux, close to the massage parlor where

daily I got a Swedish oil massage.

Some of the bars were scary bars with girls with alien

faces and probing stares, always into my eyes. They

seemed transfixed by my blue eyes, my white teeth, my

smile. This is what they told me. I believed them. I felt

renewed, years younger.

The mysteries and the uncertainties began to multiply.

One day the police raided six bars on Street 104 and

picked up all the girls and charged them with having

unnatural hair color. Some of them had red in their hair.

Some of them had blond streaks in their hair. Girls who

The Void 137

didn’t work in bars and came from good families that

drove new cars paid for by foreign money meant for new

roads had red and blond streaks in their hair. But they did

not work in the bars. They had connections. Everything

in Phnom Penh is about connections. You go to jail

because you do not have connections, or your connections

are not good enough. There are no laws for those with

connections.

Connections and money are almost the same words in

this country that some call the Wild West. Love and

money are the same words here too. They only sound

different to those who still believe in pure love.

The other day I heard a pretty Khmer girl in a café say

to her Australian boyfriend: I will have no money in five

days. I learned this as I bent my ear to hear their

conversation. She had a smile that never wavered, never

revealed what it meant. You begin to learn the

transparences. You come to accept the unexpected

bluntness.

I heard, and I did not believe, that the girls in the bars

with the colored hair were fined based on their weight.

How could I believe this? I am still sane, I think. But I

asked around. I asked many people, and they all said the

same thing. The girls with colored hair who were picked

up in the randomly chosen bars paid fines based on their

weights. Uncertainty, irrationality, fear, paranoia, they are

all here.

138 The Void

Phnom Penh was becoming increasing weird and

unstable, and I could not leave. I could feel the rush in the

middle of the night when there was a loud noise outside

my door or window. There were strange thumping sounds

above the ceiling, above my bed. I imagined those

unwanted knocks on the door. They would come. It was

only that I did not know when they would come.

I might leave, but not now. I am changing. Perhaps I

will become a novelty I will not clearly recognize.

Stanley leaned toward me and said, Why have you

taken a room in the Lux this time? I liked it when you

were in the room next to me.

I met Hans, I said. I met him as I was leaving Bangkok

and he told me the rooms in the Lux were bigger and

cleaner for the same price. I told him a little about Hans,

that he is about my age, and he has my kind of tastes, and

he likes to drink the same kind of beer. I said that we

talked often about our travels, and about his time in jail.

One time he was in for two days because he called the

cops to quiet his Brazilian wife who was going mad. She

had come at him with a knife and just missed. They put

Hans in jail and not his wife, because when they came she

told them he had some guns, some pistols that could kill

her and she was afraid. They wanted to see the guns and

the permits. Hans didn’t have the permits he needed so he

went to jail and had to post $50,000 to get out. This

happened in Indian Wells, in a state I know well. After

that Hans found a way to give his Brazilian wife a one-

The Void 139

way ticket to the south of Brazil where he had met her. He

said he left her with a kiss and a generous smile. He said

he might have shot her if he could have gotten away with

it.

You thought I had left? Stanley said.

I wasn’t sure you’d still be here, I said. Those I meet

in this part of the world are here today and then a week or

two later they are gone. I never see them again. I even

forget their names.

I see, he said. But I am different. You know a little

of my story. And now I have interests here.

I imagine, I said, not knowing what he meant.

Knowing little more than that he had now been here more

than six years. I then said, I also wanted to try something

different, and I didn’t like all the night noise around the

room I had in the Paragon. The roar of the motorbikes on

the Quay never stopped. I thought he would understand.

The noises don’t bother Stanley because he’s going deaf.

He said he has hearing aids but doesn’t use them.

Unexpectedly, Stanley’s eyes became empty circles

and devoid of life, and he said, You don’t hear the shots

as often when you stay in the Paragon.

Oh, I said. Shots? Are there always two? I said. Or

are there more?

It’s like all things here, he said. You never know. It

depends on circumstances, and interests. He paused and

took in a deep breath.

140 The Void

That word interests, again. I was intrigued.

You cannot know ahead of time when it will happen,

he went on. Or what will happen. Everything is like that

here. Nothing happens for weeks and you relax. Then for

days or longer you can be certain of nothing. You begin

to shake. You begin to drink more. You hear something,

and two men are moving a long, large bag out of a room

down the hall. You wonder who will turn up dead. Who

did it? You wonder if you drank coffee with him two days

ago. Sometimes you know it is time for someone to turn

up dead.

I see, I said. What you say is not unlike my life at

home. Periods of calm and then there are explosions--

--and consequences, he interrupted with the exact word I

would have used.

Yes, and sometimes harsh ones. But not deaths. Or

not deaths I hear about. Where I live there are no guns,

only men who brag about guns they don’t have.

It is different here. Death stalks the night and the early

mornings. It comes naturally, forced by a peculiar kind of

Asian moral order. It is always unannounced. It is never

explained. There are only conjectures and what you read

in your dreams. Three days ago, they found a young man

from England one floor down. They said it was an

overdose. Heroin or opium. I don’t remember who said

this. But he was guessing, I would say. The boy was

nineteen. He was about to go home in a few days to start

university.

The Void 141

You knew him? I said.

I had seen him at the front desk. He looked normal

when I saw him. He had short hair and crooked teeth and

the usual Buddhist wrist string. It was red, I remember

that. He was like all sons who are nineteen or twenty and

find themselves here. They are searching, and they don’t

know how to find what they are searching for.

There are other stories about how he died. I said. I

wanted to believe it was a more innocent death.

There are always other stories. There will be three or

four new ones about the young man before another week

has passed.

How will you know which one to believe?

If it matters, the one that feels good. He looked down

and his hand had turned to a claw and he scratched the

table, attempting to injure the wood, I thought. He then

picked up a straw that was lying on the table and stuck it

in his can of Angkor beer and began sipping it. He made

a funny sound that struck me as purposeful. It was like he

was at the bottom of the can and it was empty. But it was

a can he had just ordered. I had never seen him use a straw

before when he drank his beer.

I was going to ask him again about those two sharp

sounds I heard but I did not. I wanted to hear his stories.

He had so many of them. I sensed he didn’t want to tell

me anymore than the little he had. I wanted to believe they

were nothing more than two sharp sounds, not gun shots.

Perhaps they were a tuk-tuk misfiring? This is what I

142 The Void

wanted to believe. I am like that. I have things I believe

because they make me feel good. Because they make it

possible for me to sleep.

The girl who works at the corner selling bus tickets to

Siem Reap and Sihanoukville and cities to the north of

Phnom Penh came to our table and whispered something

in Stanley’s ear. She giggled and laughed as she pulled

away. She gave me this inviting look, terribly solicitous.

Stanley’s face remained the same but he pulled on his ear

like it itched. The girl didn’t look at me now and she went

back to her box on the corner. She lay down on the

reclining chair and brought her legs to her chest and I

stared at the folded cuffs on her blue jeans. She was a

little girl with big feet and rings on three of her toes. I

liked her, her energy and how she looked when she

walked. But I feared what she would be like if we were

along in a room with a locked door. I imagined she would

scream for no good reason, and then who knows what

would happen?

I have not seen her here before, I said to Stanley.

She is new. She is looking for a husband who lives in

America. She makes friends of everyone who comes to

this corner. Be careful.

I glanced at her again. She was staring at something

in the pepper tree that shaded the box with all the

brochures and the tickets. She had a big smile. It is the

kind that never goes away, I thought. It is the kind of

The Void 143

smile you cannot be certain about. Is she happy or is she

laughing at you? If I kissed her would I know?

Stanley said, Do you want me to tell you more about

her?

Maybe later, I said. I feel distracted. For the moment

I wanted to make my own story about this girl who could

turn laughter into a scream.

He did not ask me about what was on my mind and he

began telling me about his girlfriend Ami. He began by

telling me she was twenty-five and tiny and I would meet

her later. They had been seeing each other for more than

five weeks. She speaks good English. Then he told she

had lots of hair on her legs. She has more hair than I have

on my chest, Stanley said.

Oh, I said. I wondered why he told me this. Stanley

has a way of telling me things that come out of nowhere.

They only make sense later when I think about them.

He didn’t tell me how he met her so I got curious and

asked him.

He answered me roundabout. She was working in a

hairdresser salon in Siem Reap when she met an

Australian from Canberra. He was fifty-three and a

lawyer and he weighed 113 kilos. Stanley mentioned this

fact about his weight twice in beginning this story about

how Ami met him.

How much does Ami weight? I felt I had to ask.

Thirty-eight kilos, he said. She told me once she

weighed forty-eight kilos. She lost all the weight working

144 The Void

hard. I don’t believe it, Stanley said. There are certain

things I cannot believe that she tells me.

I could understand exactly what Stanley meant. There

are certain things I do not believe that I hear from people

who are close and say they love me. They have that Asian

mind without being Asian.

He went on to say that Ami agreed to see the

Australian a couple of nights after she manicured his

hands and feet. She saw him several nights for dinner

before he invited her to stay a night with him. They did

not have sex or anything for a week. He just wanted her

to be with him. She said he was lonely.

They stayed all this time in Siem Reap? I said. I had

been there to see the ruins but didn’t like the place. I didn’t

like all the tourists. It reminded me of the one time I had

been to Disneyland. One of the hustling young girls there

spoke Spanish better than I do. She was fourteen or

fifteen. She even knew the Spanish jokes about Andorra,

which I did not learn until I was forty-two and been to

every country south of Mexico. I only then learned the

Andorra jokes by accident, from a Spaniard who had two

small black rings in one corner of his lower lip and said I

sounded like I was from Argentina.

That is where she had the only job she had since

leaving the family farm, Stanley said. She left the farm

and her mother and father and brothers and sisters to find

work. She wanted to send them money because they were

so poor. She was making forty dollars a month and tips

The Void 145

and sending fifteen dollars a month to her family. She

lived in a tiny room with three other girls. They slept on

mats and had to go outside to a toilet.

It was at this point that an elephant came walking

down the street and a tourist reached for his camera and

knocked his beer over. He ignored the beer draining onto

the table. He ran toward the elephant with his camera. He

followed it down the busy street to take pictures. Who

would he show them to? I wondered. An elephant

surrounded by motorbikes and expensive new cars that

belonged to the rich and the NGOs.

Every day this happens, Stanley said. You never

know when there will be an elephant and his minder on

their way to the temple.

Why? I said. I don’t know what I expected him to say.

I don’t know why I asked the question.

There was no answer from Stanley. His mind had

gone elsewhere.

A waitress was now wiping up the spilled beer. The

tourist had returned and he said he wanted another beer.

He did not want to pay for it. The waitress went to get him

another beer. The Khmer are a beautiful obliging people.

Except for the unpredictable cops.

Stanley looked at the tall tourist in shorts with the

camera. I think he wanted to say something to him but he

didn’t. I wanted to say something to him too but I didn’t.

What was there to say?

146 The Void

I have to go now, Stanley said. I will see you

tomorrow. Come at around ten in the morning. I want

you meet someone. You will like him.

I was a little anxious, and I said, Will you tell me about

those two sharp noises tomorrow?

He ignored me and waved his beer at the waitress. He

wanted to pay the bill. I pushed some bills at him, all

dollars. I let the riel accumulate in my wallet and then get

rid of them all at once.

He left and I ordered another beer and I thought about

how much I liked Stanley. He was a little like me and he

was different than me. I remember him once telling me

that he likes hearing the early morning Khmer music

pounding against the window. He said that the music

reminds him of the emptiness of a day that is not yet here.

It is the day to come, the day devoid of color or shape, he

went on. It is all that is unknown. It is what awaits all of

us when we die, he said.

A void, I said.

Yes, a void, the day not yet here. And all that follows

for all time. Death, we call it.

I nodded. I could see what he meant.

Dead does not, Stanley reminded me, mean the person

has stopped breathing.

I nodded again, then went for my beer, a place to hide.

I did not ask him when he said this if he was thinking

of his wife. I could ask him later. Maybe she died forever

The Void 147

when he wrote her that final note. I have done that to

people, and they have done that to me.

In the early morning hours when I wake and roll about

and hear new and strange noises I wonder what will

happen when I begin the day before me. What will I think

about what I see? I ask myself. What will I think when I

see the tall blond man with long eyelashes and large pink

toes and a diamond in his right ear with his eyes on the

man hauling the cart of coconuts and coming down the

middle of the street? I saw him yesterday. I should have

seen more than I did see, I think. But I didn’t see more.

Or maybe I did and just can’t remember what I saw.

I remember the day Stanley said to me: I like it here

because endings do not matter and no one any longer cares

about beginnings. No one cares much about what

happened after beginnings either. And then I remember

him adding these words: after beginnings there are all

those dreaded and inevitable endless savannas of

unwelcome happenings. Things happening that define a

life that cannot be controlled and go out of control for

reasons that defy reason.

Yes, I thought. Yes, that is right.

An e-mail from brother Harry came today. I have not

heard from him in nine or ten weeks. I write to him often

but he doesn’t write. I want to believe he is busy with work

and his family and that is why I do not hear from him more

often. But I know this is not true. His work is just work

148 The Void

and a salary, and his family is a thing in the past. Harry

spends all of his evenings on the computer. His e-mail and

a note to me of a few words is only a couple of strokes

away. A couple too many, I guess. Absence is another

kind of death rarely acknowledged.

I don’t know what Harry does at night other than the

video war games that have taken over his life. For all I

know he may have some war game friends who want to

talk about scores and strategies and new editions, I don’t

know, he doesn’t tell me about these people who are his

life there. His marriage is still sliding downhill, I know

this. Or maybe it has just come to a long pause in the road,

an acceptable standstill for both of them. He rarely talks

about his wife Karen as he once did. He mentions her now

and again with no more than a few words about her reality

TV shows and the latest series of whodunit books she is

reading. He once used to ask her about the plots, how

many people got killed in her books. She could never tell

him, or never wanted to, and he stopped asking. Now he

is indifferent. I don’t think any of this indifference now

has anything to do with his prostate problems he has had

to deal with for three years. He once told me the marriage

began to die in the tenth or eleventh year when Karen

made some woman friends in the neighborhood. They still

talk all night, most nights, he says. They drink wine and

they eat ice cream and cookies and put on weight, he says.

That’s okay with him, I guess. Or maybe it’s not, he

doesn’t say, exactly. I asked him once about what they

The Void 149

talk about, Karen and her women friends. Woman things,

feminist things, kid things, card game things, he said. I

don’t think he cares. He’s never very specific with me. He

cares as much now about her life as Karen cares about his

video games, I guess. That’s five percent, or ten percent,

he would say. Harry has always liked percentages. That’s

how he measures interest that people have in one another.

That’s how he thinks about how much time he has to live

and how much his few investments go up or down from

day to day. That’s how he got around to deciding what to

do when they found the cancer in his prostate.

He’s still having wetting and drip problems, and

there’s nothing there, he says. It’s like it died after the

operation. Nothing will make it go up anymore. Now he

thinks it was a mistake to have the operation and he tells

me this every time he writes. He should have ignored the

doctors or waited to see what would happen. It was fear

that got him to do it, he said. He didn’t like not knowing

that he might die from the slow growing cancer. So, he

said to them: take it out. They told him the risks of how

he now finds himself. He thought he would beat the odds

because he’s a percentage man. Numbers, odds,

abstractions of the kind I find hard to understand. I don’t

tell Harry that I never think about my prostate except

when he writes. I don’t get the tests he got. I don’t go to

doctors to get checked either. Why should I?

Harry goes back and forth in his occasional e-mails

about Karen. She has her job and he has his and they have

150 The Void

separate lives. One bed and the same table for breakfast

and dinner and they share the newspaper when they eat

and that’s it, he says. Harry has never been too

forthcoming so I don’t know how much all this bothers

him. Perhaps he is just quietly philosophical about getting

older and this long marriage of his. What can you do about

anything, meaning the marriage and the prostate and such

things? I have no vote about the Iraqi war or what happens

on Wall Street, so why bother thinking about these things?

Harry says. I agree with him. When I say something like

this, that I agree with him, he says it’s in the genes. I don’t

know exactly what he means, it’s in the genes. Dad wasn’t

this way, and neither was mom. They argued about

everything in the world until they died. They weren’t

happy when I stopped voting and said I had no interest in

the news and went through a couple of meaningless jobs

and didn’t care and then dropped down to part-time jobs

and wandering here and there. Wandering became my

job, I wanted to tell them. They couldn’t understand how

this could happen to someone with a college degree. I

would tell them: things like this just happen, you can’t

control them. You can control everything if you try, dad

would say. Funny he should say that the way he lost a job

he had for more than twenty-six years on an assembly line.

Or the way he got that cancer that killed him. It was a

lung cancer that made no sense because he never smoked

and went out of his way to avoid smoky rooms and

restaurants. He asked the doctors where it came from.

The Void 151

They couldn’t tell him. I once said to him: if you had

control of everything you wouldn’t have lost your job and

gotten that incurable cancer. He agreed. And then a little

later, a couple of weeks later, when we picked up the

conversation again and he’d thought about it, he didn’t

agree. He said the job and the cancer were different. But

my dropping down to part-time jobs and going off to crazy

places for no good reason were different, he said. I could

be more responsible and in control. I couldn’t get him to

see how I saw things or what he was saying that didn’t

make sense to me. That was okay, thought. Dad was a

great guy, a good father. I probably couldn’t have done

better. I don’t think he thought that way about me in his

last year or two.

In this most recent e-mail, Harry feels he has to tell

me again about Karen and what her friends say about me

and my friends in Asia. What am I doing over there among

all those young girls? she wants to know. And her friends

want to know too. They have been looking at some

documentaries and hearing rumors about older men and

younger Asian women. Harry says they feel sad for all

these men, not knowing whether or not I am one of them.

I am one of them to Karen and her friends because I am

here. It’s all geography, Harry would say. It has nothing

to do with her knowing or not knowing. Harry doesn’t

know what I’m up to either. This is how I’m like Stanley,

private about private matters. There cannot be anything

good about a fifty or sixty-year-old man and a twenty-

152 The Void

five-year-old Asian woman together, Karen and her

friends say. What can they have in common, an old man

and a young girl? She is young and with little education

and the men from a Western country are much better

educated. They don’t like how it looks either, a father who

looks like he’s with a daughter, and a small one at that. I

once tried to send Harry some thoughts on all this, and I

told him he could share my thoughts with Karen if he

wanted to. I didn’t have a lot to say. I said: the men here

who are happy at all are happy because they have someone

to take care of them. Their young wives or girlfriends have

material things they never had before, and so do their

families, and this makes them happy. This is all or mostly

what they care about, money and what they never had

before. I think Harry and his wife understand what I’m

saying, but then maybe not. Harry doesn’t care about this

part of the world or anything beside his war games and

seeing his grandchildren once or twice a year. I don’t

know why Karen and her friends care about the world

here, I really don’t. Maybe it just feels good to put

everyone into one package, and if they don’t fit then

something must be wrong.

I will write to Harry in a few days. Maybe I’ll tell him

about Nick and Fa. Nick is the Australian buddy I drink

with some afternoons at the Candy Bar or over at

Cheerleaders around the corner. He’s a nut surfer who

lives in Bali on the north coast and comes over here for a

couple of weeks every once in a while. He comes to get

The Void 153

away, when he tires of surfing and needs a break from Fa,

his young wife. He cares about her and loves her most

days, except on those days when he can’t take all the lying

and she just won’t let up. She lies about everything, he

says, even her son’s birthday. It’s in February, the same

day as Nick’s father’s birthday, which he can never forget.

Fa has to go to a village in Sumatra for her son’s birthday

in June, she tells Nick. She’s going to be gone three

weeks. Nick knows it’s to see one of her boyfriends or do

something she doesn’t want to tell him about. He tells her

this, he tells me, but what can he do when she just says no

that’s not true. She’s going for her son’s birthday in June

when it’s in February. So, he was born twice in the same

year? Nick says he tells Fa. She ignores what he says and

walks away and won’t talk for days. Nick concludes

there’s something wrong with her mind. Or maybe it’s

Asian logic, Nick tells me, and then he laughs a little. One

thing’s for sure: you don’t get used to lying you’re not

going to do well in Asia. I’ve heard it said often that

Chinese women start lying when they open their eyes in

the morning. Filipinas don’t lie until they open their

mouths. I wouldn’t say it’s that bad, but it’s bad enough,

that’s for sure.

Why do you stay married to her? I ask Nick after I’ve

had enough to drink.

She’s good, he says. He doesn’t mean good in bed, I

know this. Nick is always too drunk to want or care about

154 The Void

sex. He doesn’t have a prostate problem like Harry, he

told me as much. He’s just drunk all the time.

I think what Nick calls good is habit. It’s a kind of

absence of pain, one hour and one day to the next hour and

day. I sense this is what he means because he talks often

about not liking pain, something I can understand. That is

a common aim over here, with Stanley and me and those

we know. Or it used to be like this with me. Now there is

this uncertainty that has me on edge and alive like I cannot

remember. I wait for the next thing to happen, never

knowing when it will happen. I want to get inside some

of the mysteries. Which ones I can’t decide.

I was thinking the other day that I’m like Stanley when

I’m with the my first coffee and I’m trying to wake up and

the begging rag boys that come to my hip, and the one

legged man with a toothless face as dark as a walnut,

crawls to my table with a begging hand and my eyes turn

inward and I feel guilty having been born where small

riches were easy to acquire. I know that nothing matters,

legless or rich. There is only the passing of time. Time

silently ticking on a cheap watch I barely look at, and

wonder why, except when waiting for a plane or a bus to

diminish my boredom.

I noticed that about all the young Cambodian girls.

They don’t have watches and it doesn’t seem to matter.

When they come close and touch me it’s always about

wanting the little hair I have on my forearms, my white

The Void 155

skin, my big nose. I don’t know why, but they want my

nose most of all.

I have another black coffee in a thick glass, and I have

a small gritty cookie with blue paste in the center, and the

Khmer girl who is a waitress approaches and wants me to

take another picture of her and see her image on my digital

display. I show her what she wants to admire. Then I

again explain what smile means, after telling her she has

a pretty smile, and that she has a charming smile. She

really does, and she seems innocent in her twenty or

twenty-two or whatever it is years. I try to explain what

charming means too, but I’m not up to the task. There are

no words beyond a few that I know that mean charming,

not enough to help this young girl understand the word

charming as I mean it.

If I took the time to show her the meaning of charming

she would marry me. She would love my money and she

would call it love, and I would be foolish enough to hear

only the word love. Then one day I would wake up. But

would it be too late? Maybe this is the wrong question,

the kind that should never be asked?

She walks away and my eyes follow her, and I

remember that I didn’t get her name. I am reminded of

what I have not noticed on previous visits to see Stanley,

sunk too far perhaps into my consuming thought of the

fleeting moment. I notice that she has not shaved her legs,

and as I look about at Khmer girls whose legs are exposed

to my eyes I see that they also have not shaved their legs.

156 The Void

They have more hair on them than I have on my own. I

then think of our ancient ancestors millions of years ago,

and I wonder in what year I lost all that hair on my legs.

Hair on my legs. A day in Cambodia. The Daily

Welcoming Void, I have come to think since that chat with

Stanley. The void is shrinking and dying in the absorbing

heat that brings on small waterfalls on my temples and

forehead.

Stanley will be going to see his sister soon. I imagine

he will, anyway. We have not talked much about it, or the

certain, or uncertainty, of his plans. He does not know

what she is dying of, and I do not think he much cares. Or

maybe he cares, like we all care, and yet knows that there

is nothing but an unpredictable and inevitable future, so

why care?

He asked me why I have come again to Phnom Penh,

and then will go on to other familiar places in this part of

the world. I told him I wasn’t sure. Then I begin to find

reasons for a curiosity I have not seen in Stanley before,

one that surprises me. I tell him it is the French balconies

with the laundry drying that fascinates me. I tell him that

it is to walk the streets and find another broken and lost

expat and invite myself to join him and get him to tell me

his story that brings me here again. I tell him that I come

because at night, beginning at around seven or eight

o’clock, I find a restaurant and order a Khmer dish, often

amok with lots of ginger, and plenty of rice, and a draft

beer, and then another draft beer as I wonder in which

The Void 157

direction I will walk after paying the bill and reaching for

instinct that will take me to another small adventure.

Then it will that time to visit the bars. Always the bars

with life, where one finds anxiety, anticipation, dreams,

desperation. One bar after another, until I find myself in

my bed and am unable to count how many there were or

remember their names or which of the stories I liked best

that I heard. I will have only minutes to regret what I have

said, wonder about what I have heard and not understand,

imagine what might have happened if…. That did happen

and is now just another story in an endless string of stories

that chaotically define everyone’s Daily Void.

Two days ago, I found myself with a five-dollar bill

with a couple of small tears on the long top edge. I thought

nothing of it. I will just pass it on, for a meal, or some

beers, or whatever, I thought. Just money, I thought, not

thinking much about money as everyone here does, so

insistently, always handing you your change with two

hands, that small Cambodian gesture that reminds me not

so much where I am but where I am not. Not at that place

called home. How do you explain to people like Harry

what some of these gestures mean?

It is like those times when Khmer women take off

your shoes and then your socks and tuck them in your

shoes, and you know this is just where it begins, Stanley

tells me. It is also like those times when Khmer women

shower and then bathe you while they are wrapped in

towels, nothing missed, everything attended to, even the

158 The Void

careful drying of the souls of your feet. This is not

subservience, Stanley tells me, just the unfolding of how

things should be.

Seven times in seven bars I tried to pass the five-dollar

bill, and each time the waitress returned and asked me for

another bill, saying that they could not take the torn bill.

Okay, I said, each time, and paid with other bills. With a

twenty, or a fifty, or a ten, or…never with ones, which I

save, hoard, for the late-night motorbike trip back to the

hotel. Each time increasingly fascinated by the meaning

of two tiny tears that remind me of small cuts on my left

hand. Cuts that came from…I don’t know where they

came from. I was curious for a day and then it did not

matter.

This morning I began my walk into the Void by

moving a few things around in the room, Room 222, and

then thinking, I will take the five dollar bill and fold it

carefully and put it on the desk beside my bed, where it

cannot be missed. I will do this every day until I leave

Cambodia, knowing that it will never go missing. It will

be as secure there in the obvious light of the room as is the

small brown pouch with my passport and several hundred

dollars in Thai money and Filipino money and American

money that I carefully placed beneath a tall lamp in the

corner of the room, knowing that it would be never be

found, and that were it found by the maids who daily clean

the room it would be touched as if an object without

substance.

The Void 159

The streets were hot and the light of late morning was

blinding and I found a café with tables on the street, tables

that sat in shade, and I had beans and a blackberry jam on

toast and friend eggs and coffee, and I talked with a man

as old as me about what he was doing here. He was here

to monitor development money given to Cambodians for

their people, to move this very poor country one tiny rung

up the development ladder, a ladder on which it is a long

reach to the first rung for a country like Cambodia. A

country defined by piles of blue plastic garbage so

ubiquitous that I think of such piles as Cambodian foliage.

Yes, this is Cambodia, among the most corrupt

countries in the world, he reminds me. The politicians

who do everything and own everything never get enough,

he tells me. The only English word he knows for this is

greed. He does not have a limited vocabulary because he

is a Kiwi from the south of North Island. Greed is greed

is greed….

Look on the streets, he says, and see all the new cars,

and you will see what comes of the intricate web of

handoffs and payoffs and rip-offs. Of family ties as

extensive as the broken roads of this city. These are not

the cars that belong to those who work for the NGOs.

They are cars, the new cars, the best cars, the cars that go

by the name of development aid.

I tell him about Honduras and my time there, and the

corruption. This was at the time of Hurricane Mitch when

I had an urge to snoop in that broken country. It was that

160 The Void

time when I was told that I should stop asking questions if

I wanted to live. I understood the wisdom of the advice

and left.

Twenty percent is the figure we talk about. That is the

amount that gets to the people. Maybe it’s that high,

maybe not, after the job gets half done or not done at all

because the money meant for new bridges and the new

roads found its way into the hands of someone who

wanted a new Lexus SUV, just like the one I saw the

stunningly gorgeous Cambodian women get into four

days ago, a Lexus SUV with tinted windows that was

sitting in the alley, a chauffeur in dark glasses sitting at

the wheel. She did not go out the front door as I did, and

I think I know why. This was the morning I heard two

sharp noises. Sharp, and unmistakable, the kind you know

can only be one kind of a noise, even when you really

don’t know that kind of noise.

I was with her in the elevator, going down, she from

the tenth floor. Riveting beauty. Murderous beauty.

Fearsome beauty. Too beautiful and cold and cunning to

ever want to fuck.

I will never forget her. I have already told Stanley

about her. He listened, and he moved his yellow teeth

over his lower lip and sucked on it, like he knew what I

would say before I said it. Then I looked for Stanley's

eyes. I saw, again, the flat lines, the dull circles, that

emptiness of the stroke that brought him happiness.

Stanley, I have to remind myself from time to time, does

The Void 161

not care about the daily Void, filling it, diminishing it,

giving it shape and form and color. Caring as I think I still

care, not knowing why. At times telling myself it is all a

joke.

The joke is on me.

I returned to my room and the five dollar bill was

gone, and I called the front desk and told them, and they

said that maybe the maids thought it was a tip for how they

fixed up my room each day, and I thought that was the

case because these people are so kind, and I wanted to say,

Yes, okay, forget it. But I was curious as Stanley is not.

So, I let the story become a small story, not better but

different. A story to be recalled between sips of beer at

bar Number Three of Number Seven…who cares.

There was soon a knock on my door and a young

Khmer boy with flawless skin and a nose as small as my

thumb was there was the five dollar bill, held by two

begging hands, and he explained that they thought it was

a tip, and he was sorry, very sorry, and I took the bill from

him and took out my wallet and found several riel bills,

thousands, I don’t know how much, I did not count them,

and I handed them to him and said, Thank you, here is

your tip.

He bowed, and took the bills with graciousness, and I

felt the cunning predatory fox within me begin to die.

This is what I want to tell Stanley about before I hear

more noises and more gun shots and hear that another law

was changed yesterday so watch out. The legal age was

162 The Void

changed from eighteen to twenty-one, I was told the other

day. This is the same day I was told about the two

Englishmen who were caught with two fourteen-year-old

girls. A true story or a made-up story, no one knows. Now

words concerning identify, Cambodian identify for today

and maybe tomorrow, must be words on paper, on cards

that are laminated. That have official stamps.

But perhaps Stanley will be gone to see his sister and

I will have to wait for his return to continue with his story,

and maybe I will have to imagine that his sister didn’t

really die and that’s okay he will say. And then I will

imagine the ending to what happened between Stanley and

his girlfriend of one year and a few months. But I don’t

have to imagine this ending do I, because it really

happened, I think it did, I’m almost sure it did.

What he told me last night is that two weeks ago he

took her to Sihanoukville and they went to the Wall, and

he watched her dance while they drank, and he took her

back to the hotel and she went wild and he didn’t

understand why and let it be. She broke plates on walls

and screamed at the mirrors and kicked him in the shins

for no reason he could imagine. And then in the morning

he returned to Phnom Penh, he needed calm days where

nothing happened, not even thoughts about his sister,

maybe dying, maybe not, it doesn’t really matter. And

then a few days later he went back to get his motorbike

which he had left with her. It was gone, and she was gone.

No one knew where she had gone. He said she did have a

The Void 163

real passport and she had no identity card, and so no one

could find her. He did not know all this in the beginning.

He did not know any of this until she went missing with

his motorbike.

I bought Stanley a drink, and he said, I have a friend

who will cut off two thumbs for fifty dollars.

Oh, I said. I had not heard this one before him. I felt

obligated. I told him how much it cost to have a wife go

missing in the Philippines. I told him how much it cost

for three bullets to the head in Thailand.

You cannot do much without two thumbs, he

responded, indifferent to ways some women die in the

Philippines and some men die in Thailand.

I had to agree. I thought of my primate ancestors,

these marvelous opposable thumbs, the English boy in

Thailand I met a couple of years ago who lost one to a

moray eel when he tried to feed it. When I saw that he

was missing a thumb I wondered how his hand would feel

to a woman expecting a manly caress.

I waited for Stanley to go on, but he did not. He did

not have to. I understood that there would be a time in a

Daily Void when things would happen. There would be

two thumbs in two little bottles. Then there would be no

more to say about the ex-girlfriend. Stanley would never

think again about what happened to the motorbike. He

would be flat lining, back in the Living Void, a land of

expats and others who do not want to be labeled.

Stories From Cambodia

Abstract

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