Weaponized (7 page)

R
obinson has the tuk-tuk drop them off a block before the bar. The second that Robinson’s tasseled shoe hits the ground, a studious-looking young man approaches him. “You speak the English?” He’s college age and dressed like a Bible salesman, white shirt and short-sleeved blazer.

Kyle pays the driver and steps to the side to watch the exchange.

“Just want to practice,” the young man says. “No one for me to practice with at school. No one want to learn English…they all lazy. I want to move to United States when I graduate. Great country.”

Robinson pats him on the shoulder and tells him in flawless German that he doesn’t speak English.

“Not possible,” the student says.

Robinson and Kyle walk down the street. Phnom Penh at night, still hallucinatory with the lights off, like the love child of
Blade Runner
and Rudyard Kipling.

The outdoor market stalls are set for the dinner crowds; large spits spin meats round and round, like a carnivore’s carnival ride. At a wooden butcher table, a grandmother carves up a side of beef that spurts blood in uneven intervals.

The banyan trees are thick, leafy inkblots against the moon.

Robinson and Kyle wait for a momentary break in traffic that doesn’t come. They look at each other and decide to make a suicide run. They sprint, holding their hands up against the phalanx of vehicles and screaming “Shit” all the way across, and when they hit the other side, they’re greeted by a local pissing in a sewer grate.

Across the Mekong, the Royal Palace drips with gold glitter, like a celestial chocolate box, and nearby, several floors of a new Western-style skyscraper are lit up as freshly indoctrinated capitalists work through the night.

A Catholic missionary stands outside the bar, hoping to find a few late-night converts before heading home. She offers Robinson a pamphlet and starts her spiel, but he waves away the booklet and takes her hand in his own. She seems shocked by the intimacy of his action. He puts ten American dollars in her palm and closes her fingers around the money as if they were precious petals.

“God bless,” she says. “You are a wonderful man.”

Robinson puts his arm around Kyle’s shoulder and walks him toward the bar. The act of friendship, of bonding, would mean more if Robinson hadn’t just shown the missionary the same unexpected familiarity. Kyle’s beginning to learn that’s Robinson’s way; he’s intimate with everyone.

T
hey walk into Bar 69.

The bar is fringed with blinking red and green party lights, an illuminative scheme somewhere between Christmas and the display window of an adult bookstore.

Atop the bar, girls in halter tops and miniskirts dance to a techno-tribal rhythm.

The girls are barefoot and trying to avoid stepping on the lights.

The crowd’s a mix of expats, sketchy locals, journalists, and administrative staff from various embassies. Robinson and Kyle sit at the bar, and Robinson points to a group sitting at a back table. “North Koreans,” he says.

Kyle squints to see them. “You sure? How can you tell?”

“They’re partying like they might get sent back tomorrow. Hoarding all the good times, saving up, like squirrels in winter. Won’t be like this when they get back home.”

Kyle watches one of the bar girls put on a private show for Robinson. Her dance is a true ballet
mécanique,
drained of passion, just a fucking job she doesn’t seem thrilled to have. But Robinson looks like he couldn’t care less. He got a look up someone’s skirt.

The bartender walks over to them.

“Vodka tonic naked. No ice,” Robinson says.

“Scotch on the rocks,” Kyle says.

Robinson finds his cigarettes and offers Kyle one.

“No, thanks…you gave that missionary a lot of money.”

“It was ten bucks,” Robinson says.

“That’s a fucking fortune here.”

“Been working up the balls to say that?”

“Are you a believer?” Kyle whispers in a tone usually reserved for something sexual.

“Not especially.”

“Then, why?”

“The entire twentieth century was about finding alternatives to the Judeo-Christian narrative. And they all ended in unspeakable tragedy. Better to support the one that seems to do the least harm.”

“The least harm?” Kyle looks at Robinson in shock. “I suppose…if you don’t consider pedophilia to be particularly harmful.”

“Half the people in this room are fucking pedophiles. Ever hear of the sex trade? You’re in the armpit of it here.”

“Yeah, but they’re not wearing collars…”

“No, they just work for the government. Our government, their government. So pedophilia’s okay as long as tax dollars are footing the bill?”

Kyle chooses to ignore the warped validity of Robinson’s argument and presses on. “And don’t even get me started on the pope—”

Robinson smiles. “I love the pope. If I’m going to be instructed not to masturbate, I want to be told in a German accent. It sounds more definitive…”

“The pope not allowing Catholics to wear condoms even though a huge number of people have AIDS and the countries don’t have the resources to support the population explosion. All the massive growth is happening in the places least able to handle it, and most of them are Catholic. All the future resource wars, you can hang them on the Church’s outmoded morality…”

“Kyle,” Robinson says, “you’re fucking
exhausting
me. These girls are nearly naked and smiling at you. I’m absolutely the least interesting thing here.”

Kyle laughs. Robinson’s got a valid point.

Their drinks arrive and they toast their new friendship forged in mutual risk. “I’m off to piss,” Robinson says.

Kyle sips his drink, looks at the girl doing a robotic dance before him, a parody of eroticism.

The guy sitting next to Kyle speaks. “You like her?”

Kyle doesn’t answer.

“She’s my wife,” his neighbor says. “Well…kinda my wife.”

“Congratulations, then. Kinda.”

“She’s coming home with me. South Carolina. She wants to go to cosmetology school and do people’s nails and hair and shit like that. It’ll be great. Till I lose her.”

“The loss of optimism usually comes later in the relationship—”

The guy ignores Kyle. “She’s gonna get to the States and realize a big-shot American in Cambodia don’t mean shit back home.” He gets lost in the girl’s dance, in the lace going up her legs. “Look at her…fucking beautiful…so fucking beautiful, it kills me. And she’s gonna realize back home I don’t mean shit.” He brings the beer to his lips. “Here, I’m above average. Fuck…I’m fuckin’ rich. Here, I mean. Home, I’m barely average. Below average, in fact. And she’s gonna know the minute we get there. I’ll lose her to a fuckin’ banker in a month.” He frowns at the imaginary banker. “Fuckin’ cocksucker.”

Robinson returns and puts his hand on Kyle’s shoulder. “I’ve procured us a table.”

A
new song with a heavy bass line starts up. Robinson does an indecent little dance with his head and neck, mimicking the girls atop the bar.

“What did you do before telecom?”

Robinson keeps the dance going, drags off his cigarette. “Have you been to the Killing Fields?”

“Yes.”

“Astounding, isn’t it. The Khmers have no money to build proper memorials, but maybe that’s right, maybe that’s the only way to show crimes against humanity. You go to Auschwitz and it’s all so eerily preserved, it’s like visiting a satanic art installation. The Killing Fields, though…just endless piles of skulls and a handwritten placard that says
Here, four hundred people died.
Maybe that’s the only way, right? Just tell the truth. Here are the skulls of four hundred people who died for fucking nothing…What was your question?”

“What did you do before going into telecom?”

“Studied poli-sci and poetry at Yale. Then a year at Harvard Law. Then the rest of my life trying to unlearn all of it.”

“So you’re an anti-intellectual?”

“If you think Ivy League colleges create intellectuals…”

“No?”

Robinson smiles and shakes his head. “Where’d you go to college?”

“MIT.”

“Meet any intellectuals?”

“Why only a year at Harvard Law?”

“I quickly realized law was the art of negotiation and compromise. Neither of which are skills of mine. Nor ones I wanted to develop.”

“Then telecom?”

“Some false starts. Worked as a representative’s aide for a while, but we fell out. He would say due to my ideological rigidity. I would say due to his utter lack of vision. Either way, I never put him down as a reference.”

“You don’t strike me as ideologically rigid.”

“I was young.”

“You
are
young.” Kyle stares at his drink. “Do you think you have to lose your values to grow up?”

Robinson seems taken aback by the earnestness of the question. “No. It’s just going to be really painful to be you.”

“Guess so…”

“I mean, it’s really gonna fucking hurt.” Robinson drags on his cigarette. “See…business is fantastic because it has no memory. It’s why I chose it. Good or bad, it remembers nothing. Henry Ford—great businessman, obviously—said history is basically bunk. And from a business standpoint, he’s absolutely right. To be a truly successful businessman—not some nine-to-fiver who half-asses it to pay his mortgage but the
real
deal—you need to be a historical blank. You need to be a psychopath.”

“Don’t most psychopaths get caught?”

“Or rich.”

“So I guess you haven’t been affected by the global recession?”

“God, no. You have to remember—there’s always someone
somewhere
making money.”

“Where’s the money now?”

“All in the East. Plus, war and disaster are great for telecom. And there’s been no shortage of either the past few years. Hurricanes, earthquakes, tsunamis—nature’s indigestion erupting all over the place. The War on Terror. Boom times. First city I ever got sent as a sales director was to Kabul after we invaded. The army was wired for networks, but there was no infrastructure there. So we built one. From the ground up in the moonscape. Then the telecoms started thinking,
Well, the stuff’s all there now, shit…let’s sell these people phones.
Fucking tremendous. Afghanistan—a country arguably still in the nineteenth century… if you’re feeling generous, right? I talked to some soldiers there who were training the Afghan security forces. They had to explain to the fucking Afghans what a toilet was. But all those guys have cell phones now. Mostly because of me. Amazing.”

“Is it also amazing how all these people who never had phones before figured out how to use them to set off IEDs and blow up our soldiers? You armed them all.”

“The uses and misuses of technology are far above my pay grade. Tell you this—they may use my phones for IEDs, but know what else they use them for? Remittance payments. People who couldn’t get money to their families back home can do it now. So, maybe, because of someone like me, one person might not take the money to become a suicide bomber because their sister or brother is able to get them money by pressing a key.”

“That’s just moral relativism,” Kyle says, pissed.

“You say it like it’s supposed to hurt me.”

“It is.”

“
You’re
exiled here, need my passport, and you’ve got the fucking nerve to speak to me like Mr. Morality himself?”

“Eric.” A girl appears next to Robinson. “Eric, it’s Deanna.” She’s a stunning American, an inch shy of six feet with an untamed mane of blond hair she’s pulled off her face.

Robinson squints. Kyle’s stunned. He was so caught up in their conversation he missed this statuesque creature enter his line of sight.

“Deanna,” she says again. “We met in Indonesia at the fair-trade protest.”

“Deanna from Indonesia,” Robinson says. “Love, I want to know you more than anything, but I’m afraid I don’t.”

“I work with COHRE. Housing rights.”

“Pains me to say, but you’ve got the wrong guy.” He offers her his hand. “I’m Julian.”

“I could’ve sworn it was you. I usually have a photographic memory when it comes to faces.”

“Sorry to break your streak,” Robinson says. “What are you drinking?”

“Don’t worry,” Deanna says, “I’ll let you two get back to your talk.”

“Don’t be silly,” Robinson says. “Have a seat.”

“No, I gotta go,” Deanna says and walks off, clearly disappointed.

Robinson watches her ass in retreat, a perfect heart shape. “Fuck…I wish I was Eric. What a magnificent creature. God. Ever fuck a tall woman from behind?”

Kyle’s taken aback. “No.”

“Ahh…I mean, you look down and you just think,
Fuck…I’ve really been somewhere…accomplished something.
Dealing with the legs alone…like landing an airplane on water.”

“I think she really liked Eric,” Kyle says. “She seemed so sad.”

“You should do something about that. No reason for someone like that to be sad.”

“Nah,” Kyle says. “I’m out of practice.”

“And I am out of time.” Robinson looks at his Patek. “I’ve got to make a conference call to work. Day’s just starting there.”

“I’ll come back with you.”

“Nonsense. You’ve got half your drink.” He motions toward Deanna. “And new friends to make.”

“She’s not going to give me her number.”

Robinson smiles. “No, she
isn’t
…she’s not going to at all.”

Kyle laughs, stares into his glass. A little drunk and full of self-deprecation.

“I’d wish you luck tomorrow, but that’d mean I think something might go wrong,” Robinson says.

“Same here.”

Robinson dips into his pocket, removes his wallet, and hands Kyle his American Express card. “Don’t forget this. You need it to get your ticket tomorrow.”

“Right,” Kyle says. “Thanks.”

“Pleasure meeting you.”

“You too.”

“Really. I wish we had more time.”

“Funny thing about meeting new people…” Kyle begins, then stops himself.

“What?”

“Nah…I’m drunk and you’ve gotta go.”

“No. I want to hear.”

Kyle may be drunk, but he’s still touched. “Really?”

“I do.”

“It’s like this. When you’re younger, you think,
There’s so many interesting people I still have to meet, so many connections out there for me.
And then at some point, it just stops. You know everyone you’re going to know. And you didn’t even think you were that old yet.”

“Worst thing about getting old, you forget about one word—
possibility
. And it changes your whole life.”

“Yeah.”

Robinson stands, pushes in his chair. “I’ll see you on the other side.” He puts his hand on Kyle’s shoulder. “You take care.”