Cambodia Noir (6 page)

I have done too many drugs.

I don't understand anything except that this is not a woman I can say no to. I cast a glance down the street, looking for the watchers I'm sure are lurking in the shadows. There's no one: just me and her. We're alone in the sunlit darkness an hour after dawn, and there are no doors, no exits.

The only way out is to go on.

Find words.

“I'm five hundred a day, plus expenses. And I'll need an advance.”

The night is hung in black velvet, torn through by bright neon and Chinese lanterns. Iron balconies cling to crumbling façades, and garages gape like shocked mouths. No one uses them for cars, they all have motorcycles, so most have been re-shaped into strange, cave-like rooms. A few are still lit:

A workshop crammed with broken machines, where a man strokes a greasy lathe under a naked bulb . . .

A sitting room where a family crowds together on a ragged couch, watching television in the flicker of fluorescent tubes . . .

The ground is muddy and full of holes. A big brown sedan crawls up beside me, and a fat-faced Cambodian man looks out the window.

“Taxi?” he says. “You want taxi? Anywhere, five dollar.”

“Okay,” I say, getting in.

I'm here to get lost.

Kara is gone, but it's too late: everything's got way too real. I'm trying to hold off the paranoia, but I've done way too much yaba and my nerves are like hangnails. I can feel the craving welling up, red and in my bones. Need something to get me through the day. Two more yaba to hold off the crash, and I flag down a moto.

Hang on tight.

Wind cools the sweat on my face, and I force the panic down. Try to think back: the night I met June Saito. No chance I'd forget, it was the night I left for Vientiane. I was hanging around Gus's apartment, drinking and waiting for my flight, when Number Two showed up with this girl in tow.

What was she like?

She got my attention. My first thought was she was sick, maybe dying. Couldn't say why: she was cancer-ward thin, but there was something else—some asymmetry to her features, maybe? Unwholesome. She had this baby face, where nothing seemed to go with anything else: tiny, flat nose, downturned mouth, almond eyes set too wide and blue like empty sky. Big cheeks, acne scars. No eyebrows, and silver-blond hair. My second thought was to go for my camera: I could have shot her all year. I guess I wondered if I could fuck her. Whatever she was, it wasn't boring.

But what was she
like
? I know we talked—I can see the way she held her wine glass next to her face as she spoke, the practiced cock of her eyebrow. What did she say? Was there something that could have warned me?

Beyond the image, nothing.

She's disappeared.

The bike turns off at the graffiti-tagged wall of pink cinder block that surrounds the mosque, and the road narrows. Walls of pressed tin and ragged wood crowd in on every side; graffiti in English. The shacks and shanties have grown along the lake for years, spreading into each other, merging and dividing until the neighborhood has become a living thing, unplanned and trackless. The back doors of little guesthouses open into the storerooms of tiny shops that share bathrooms with the neighboring cafés. Rough structures weave together through makeshift passages and temporary walls: a maze of back rooms, alleys, and nameless, interstitial spaces. Easy to get lost. Down in the guts of it are dark places, but the main street is safe enough. Foreign money grew it: a slice of exotic for the backpacking crowd, slums for tourists.

The driver pulls to a stop in the rutted dirt, and the touts close in.

“Pizza, happy pizza—”

“Girls!”

“Hash—”

“Pizza—”

“—very pretty!”

Elbowing to the front is a cheery, one-eyed pusher I've known for ages. “Wah you wan', man?” He grins. Never use a sullen dealer, you'll get catnip and coriander seeds. “You wan' happy?”

“Yeah, gimme happy.”

I pass him a five, and he slaps a bag the size of a cigarette pack in my hand. I pocket it and walk down the track, past the pizza joints and the tattoo parlor and the secret things that live behind them. Stop for rollies at a window stocked with razor blades and cans of skin-lightening cream, and slide down an alley to the Green Dragon Excellent Traveler Hotel. A hall that's shoulder width, paste-wood doors leading to guest rooms. Most are shut, silent, but a few offer desolate snapshots of occupation: a black toilet bag spattered with toothpaste, dust-stained flip-flops on a dirty towel.

End of the hall, through the bead curtain: a sitting room full of tattered couches, and a deck over the lake, set with tables. Thankfully it's empty. Mama T is sitting at her counter in the corner, chewing peanuts and watching some Cambodian soap opera on the TV. She doesn't say hello, just looks me up and down and vanishes into the kitchen. I take a table next to the water, and a minute later her son, Sammy, comes back with beer and black coffee. Mama T always knows what you need. I start skinning up. You can't just get off a trip like this, your only choice is ride it out. Coffee versus beer, yaba versus pot: get the ratios right, you can work your way almost back to human.

“You all ri', Mr. K?” Sammy asks. He's in his thirties, but his moon face and wisp of mustache make him look like a kid.

“I'm okay, Sam.”

“You not lookin' so good. You sick?”

“Nothing a little happy can't cure.” He spies the joint rolling itself between my fingertips. “You want some?”

“Yah, okay.” Lots of Khmers won't touch the stuff: it's a painkiller for old men, not a recreation. But years in the guesthouse have given Sammy
barang
habits. He sits, and we smoke the first one of the day together.

“You look like . . . not here,” he says, after a while.

“It happens.”

“Maybe you wan' go back to America?”

Anything but that.

The last toke. Watch the roach go spinning into the scummy water below.

Another joint, three cups of coffee, and two more pints of beer, and I'm back where I need to be: far from missing interns and demanding relatives. In the Dragon, the phantoms vanish back into the sunlight. The red ache is fading, but I still want something.

I've watched a whole crew of chirping couples eat their pancake breakfasts by the time the girl comes out. Got America practically stamped on her: tank top from a party school in the Midwest, beige capris with cargo pockets. She's spilling out all over. She sits a table away and I see her notice me. I start to skin up again, taking my time so she can see what I'm doing. She looks interested, so I pull my chair over.

“Hate to smoke alone,” I lie. “Care to join me?” She giggles without thinking, throwing furtive glances over her shoulder. “It's okay.” I light up. “They're paid up with the right people.”

I pass and she takes it, drawing down the heavy smoke without antics.

“I'm Will. Photographer. Been in Iraq awhile. A friend told me Cambodia was the place to unwind, and I'm starting to think he was right.”

“I'm Claire. I just finished school, so I'm backpacking from India to Japan before doing my master's.” Her little smile says,
I know that's cheesy, but what can I do?
She's exactly what I've been waiting for.

Getting laid in Cambo is risky: disease, jealous boyfriends, bosses, pimps. Locals are bad news. Foreign girls are safer and usually more athletic, but they'll run if they know you live here: all the guidebooks helpfully point out that half the foreign guys in this country have AIDS. NGO girls won't even fuck plastic, but backpackers are sometimes game—if they think you're one of them. The Dragon is the best place to find them: Mama T weeds out most of the junkies, and the brats look for someplace with sheets.

All Claire wants is a good time and a few weeks' escape from Derrida. If I can keep from sweating and being obviously speedy, I should be all right.

“Are you staying here?” she asks, glancing around the deck.

“I'm staying with a friend.” Sometimes they catch on if you go to a house, but it improves the venue a lot. “I found this place yesterday, and I like the view. I got three days here, three in Siem Reap, then on to Koh Phangan.”

“Wow, you'll love it. I just came from there!”

“You'll have to give me some advice. I'm new.”

Claire has no plans.

Four lines of yaba in the Green Dragon bathroom, then I take her to the National Museum—right across the street from my “borrowed” room. Getting her up the stairs is the toughest part, but not that tough. A joint and an OxyContin and a few drinks of sweet, imported wine and then she's in my bed, sweaty in the midday heat, and I'm licking the salt sheen off those big, American breasts.

She has a tattoo of a blue-and-yellow lizard on her right hip bone; its green eyes stare down into the reddish-dark patch between her legs. I lick it and she laughs, hips writhing their way into the creased white of the sheets, and the sun rays are bouncing around us, painting the walls with ripples like we're underwater and hiding the dark forms that grow in the shadows.

We fuck hard, fast; she pants and I push and she screams. Frantic kisses, like tiny bites—

Then the quiet, euphoric and dizzy and sick all at once, and she goes to the bathroom naked, sunset caressing her so she glows like an image on a lightbox, transparent, and she comes back and—

“You're not staying with a friend, are you?”

I just stare at her from the bed.

“There's only one toothbrush and the suitcases in the hall are a girl's suitcases and—”

Then I don't listen because I can't stop the room from spinning—

—did she say there was a girl in the suitcases?

“Jesus, fuck . . . lied to me . . .”

“I'm not, come with me to the temple—”

“Get lost! I can't believe I'm here—”

come with me, it's sunset

and she's dressing, throwing clothes left and right

and then she's leaning over me and saying something even now it doesn't make any sense but I just laugh because the thing in the suitcase has gotten out and I feel it creeping up behind—

“When you find her, she'll make you wish I'd torn you apart.”

And then it's finally dark.

Head full of grenades: concussions pound me from sleep. Open my eyes, but everything stays black. For a moment I have no idea where I am, and I reach across the bed for a hand that isn't there, hear strange voices whisper my name—

Outside, a dog barks. Night wind comes warm through the windows.

My apartment. Phnom Penh.

Alone.

I get up and pad to the door. Legs feel weak, shaky—like the fever that took me once in Battambang. Stumble across the landing, go to the bathroom in the dark. My head still pounds. Splash some water on my face and stand at the sink, listening: no motors on the street. No bats, just the distant barking of that dog. Smell of night rain over wood smoke.

Back on the landing, I reach for the light switch—then think better of it. Tea lights are by the sink, for when the power goes, and I light a couple; even their dim glow burns my eyes.

I haven't eaten anything in two days except beer. Bread rolls in the freezer: I pull one out and halfheartedly heat it over the burner. Scorch the outside and give up, sucking on it frozen. For a moment, I feel better—then my knees buckle. Hang on to the countertop, let it hold me as I slide to the floor.

I'm shaking too bad to stand up, so I reach over to the fridge. Two more frozen bread rolls. On the shelf, a packet of Styrofoam cookies, three left. I stay where I am, back against the cupboard as I work my way through them. Sugar helps, and the fit subsides.

After a while, I realize what I'm looking at.

June's suitcases.

They've been waiting here for days, weeks—who knows? For a moment I feel it again, like on the river: something rushing at me out of the dark. Then it's gone.

There are two cases: a black sports duffel, carry-on size, and a black, soft-sided roll-on, much larger. Too large: How much stuff do you need for three months in Phnom Penh in mid-summer? I open it. Inside: clothes, carefully rolled to maximize space. Underwear on top in a mesh bag. Sundresses and summer-weight pants: the things she'd need most, easily accessible. Under them, more layers. Skirts and tops; a pair of sneakers and a pair of summer sandals, carefully wrapped in plastic grocery bags. Either this girl is used to living out of a suitcase, or she's a massive control freak. Likely a bit of both.

By the time I get to the bottom, it's clear she didn't pack just for Cambo. There are sweaters, long underwear, a worn pair of Doc Martens. A heavy leather biker jacket, good for cold and rain. I hold it up: it would have been huge on her. She dresses like some kind of hippie punk. Blue jeans with flowers embroidered on them,
salwar kameez
shirts, loads of scarves. She doesn't have any
gea
r
: no brand names, no microfiber or roll-up water bottles or any of the fancy crap the scum bring with them. This one isn't reading catalogs: she just puts her stuff in a bag and she goes.