We arrive in Vientiane as the sun drips pink in its long descent. Purple shadows spread over the yellow butter and creamy French architecture, and the air smells of banana crepes. Tuk-tuks and slow traffic fill the streets, motorbikes piled with husband, wife, and at least three kids, one baby riding on daddy’s lap and holding onto the handlebars, boxes in tightly bound stacks tied to the back. We arrive at the magic hour when the streets in Vientiane begin dying with the waning of light and the streets don’t wake up again until sunrise. We’re marked for easy traps and accosted by pimps of vacant rooms and empty restaurants, but only tuk-tuk drivers seem to wait.
We decide to split up in different directions and converge in an hour with any news. The hour passes as the sun sits still, and we meet in front of the banana crepe cart, both of us shaking our heads.
“Everything’s booked and the streets are still empty. That’s Laos for you,” Jacky gripes. “I didn’t know there even was a high season.”
“You know what they say: Dry season is high season.”
“I’m not sleeping outside,” she says. “We’d better find an internet cafe. There’s got to be something—”
“I’m sorry, I don’t mean to interrupt, but I couldn’t help overhearing your situation.”
We turn around and notice him for the first time. It’s obvious he’d been lingering, eavesdropping, waiting for the opportunity to strike. An interloper, vaguely Middle Eastern, or Eastern European, his accent sounding Transylvanian, his entire attention directed at Jacky’s glistening cleavage.
“Hey, eyes up here!” I snap my fingers, answering for her, not liking the smell of Dracula’s mustard.
“I have a bed available in my room, if you’re willing to share with me and my friends,” the vampire continues, smiling a devious tea-stained grin.
“How many friends?” Jacky asks dubiously.
“Just three: Me, myself, and I,” he replies, but does not laugh and gives no indication as to whether this is a joke or not.
“Should I take it?” Jacky asks, wrinkling her brow and looking at me searchingly. It’s clear she sees her options as thus: fighting off cockroaches, rats, and stray dogs, or just one altruistic vampire. The impact of leaving me behind is unclear. I see her leaning toward the room.
“This guy clearly has a mental disorder,” I murmur to her in conference, but loud enough for him to hear.
“You can always sleep on the streets,” Dracula reminds her. “Anyway, I think your boyfriend is getting mad at me, so I will leave. . .”
We watch as he pretends to leave, but doesn’t, finding a reason to search his fanny-pack instead. The moment stretches to the point of awkwardness, and just as he begins to zip back up, she agrees.
“All right, I guess I have to,” Jacky says and smiles at me apologetically. “What about you, love?”
I see her throwing in that extra “love” just to soften the feeling of concrete I would soon be lying on, but I appreciate it all the same. What can I do? A girl needs a bed.
“I’ll figure something out.”
“Sure?”
“Go ahead. We’ll have breakfast.”
“Yes! Meet me at the Malaysian donut place near the travel agency tomorrow?” she suggests.
“How’s eight?” I say, and we agree, both of us knowing we might never see each other again.
I walk all night, as is my custom, searching for a clue as to the whereabouts of Candidate Dim. I feel my heart heavy enough to weigh me down to the bottom of the Mekong, which I contemplate for a while staring at the lurid reflections on the dark river. In the distance are the impressions of fluorescence and candlelight behind bamboo screens and corrugated metal, shops that sell anything and nothing, whispers of tuk-tuk drivers who seem intent on taking me somewhere that will numb my disenchantment.
I clutch in the palm of my hand a single pill I’ve been holding onto for reasons which were unclear to me at the time, when I flushed my medication before the start of this journey, when I believed this was the answer to freeing my mind. I had pictured this ending differently, reverent in my faith in the mission and the gift of the signs, now stripped of the whispers which had guided me, the intuition which had always led me straight to my man.
I stare into oblivion, feeling I should join it now, end the cycle, end Sam, let it be what it was meant to be, let Jack have his way and win, keep my true body, chop off my dick. It’s all the same in the end. If My True Love is out there, or if she ever even existed. If Jack puts in two quarters for another round and I’m forced to come back again. If Candidate Dim has his way and eats all of the world’s chicken, who am I to complain? There is no ending, there is no resolution, there is no love or girl to save. I reached out to touch her, but couldn’t see her face; a shadow I’ve only seen in the falseness of my dreams.
I close my fist around the hard little capsule, close my eyes and imagine seeing her once more. If I just take the pill, I can see her again. Real, fake; illusion, feeling. My heart is heavy enough to sink me to the bottom of the Mekong. I throw the pill as far as I can into the darkness and imagine it splashing into the river. Though I can’t see or hear it, I know that much is real, that it’s gone now, and I’m alone, with no one to help me, and nowhere to go.
I’m wandering along the dilapidated street that lines the riverbank when I see him sitting at one of those shops that always keeps moving, selling everything and nothing, depending on who it is and where you are. He’s a beardless blonde kid with his hair cut so short it almost has a silver sheen. He’s college material, but not a student, tells me he’s Parisian, but speaks a little of everything, and he’s not lying. He’s dressed in expensive street fashion, even wears some gold chains; definitely not a backpacker.
“What’s up, bro?” I hear him say as I slowly pass by, which when said by one foreigner to another in a third-world country usually means “Who are you? Where are you from? Take a seat and rest. Tell me your story if you want to; I’m not going anywhere,” all in one breath. And just like that, I’m coaxed away from the brink; just when I’m ready to crash, they send an agent to guide me back. Or stranger still, the idea that he was always there, waiting for me.
“Got a light?” I say, and walk up to the storefront, where he sits drinking a beer and smoking a clove under the dim lights of the shop, the river and the street dark and silent witnesses.
“Sure,” he says, looking at me with those discerning eyes. “You’re an American?”
“Yeah, something like that,” I say, being purposely vague, unsure of his allegiances, holding the lighter in my hand.
“Need a smoke?” he offers, taking one out for himself after I gratefully pluck one from his silver case.
“I don’t really smoke,” I explain, lighting the clove, coughing on the fragrant embers and handing back the lighter.
“One of those nights, eh? Take a seat. I can order you something.”
“Thanks,” I say, and hit the chair like a sack of rice. “I’ll take a beer. My name is Sam, by the way.”
“Nice to meet you, Sam. You can call me Saint,” he replies, and then calls to someone in the back in what sounds like fluent Lao, which is almost the strangest thing I’ve seen today. He returns to me and smiles. “She’ll bring you a beer.”
A young serving girl brings two bottles of Beer Lao followed by whom I guess to be the shop’s matron. The 30-something-year-old Indian woman seems to see me with her red dot only as she sweeps the streets and nods at the serving girl to go back inside. Saint looks back at the woman and says something with a schoolboy smile in what sounds like textbook Hindi. She gives a tight grin and sweeps the streets once more before fiddling with some flowers on her way back in.
“She’s in charge here,” Saint says softly and pops the beer open for me with a wink. “So, what brings you to Vientiane?”
“I want to end the cycle,” I say with a sigh after taking a long cold draught from the bottle.
“Aha. We call that ‘samsara,’ the endless cycle of rebirth,” Saint replies. “You came to the right place.”
“You ever think you knew somebody, but it turns out you didn’t know them at all?”
“Trust me, I know perfectly what you mean.”
We clink bottles and drink beer like water, suddenly thirsty in this quiet evening of fraternal therapy. The supersized moths of the Mekong flutter and bang against the fluorescent lights and the awning as we wonder at the mysteries of the other sex, sharing our war stories like two soldiers wounded in the field of love. We finish our beers, which Saint says he’ll pay for, but doesn’t actually pay for, instead telling his friend, scary Hindu gangster lady, that he’ll see her later on; he’s taking his new friend out for drinks.
“I call her ‘mom,’” Saint says as we walk toward some bar he knows. “She’s not my real mom. I have a lot of moms here.”
“Do you think My True Love is really just a projection of the mother figure I wish I had?”
“I hope not. Having a real mom isn’t as great as you think. Mine kicked me out when I was 18. She got sick of me, I guess.”
“How long have you been in Vientiane?
“A couple of years. I was in Bangkok for a while working as a club promoter. Then I met this girl and we fell in love, and things were good for a while. . . but you know how it goes. Things got kind of crazy. I had to go on the run. Laos is like a Thailand for people who need to get away from Thailand. Do you know what I mean?”
“A quiet place to lay low?” I conclude.
“Exactly.”
We arrive at our destination, an unassuming building on the corner of a dead street. The pour of luminescence comes from above on the second floor, where some jazzy blue neon glows in darkened windows that allow for a view into this dreary nothingness. I’m picturing plastic tables and floors it’s okay to piss on. But as we enter I’m surprised to find the joint swanky, big enough to find a quiet corner for some hands down the pants in a leather booth; a semicircle of a black bar lined with hanging glasses and mirrors if you’re just here to watch the game. There seems to be a conflict of vision and reality. Maybe an investment made on the ghost of a promise that the tides of money would make Vientiane the next Kuala Lampur, or Bangkok even, instead of a city with a midnight curfew where nothing happens. Bottles glisten under the dimmed ambience; servers wear black shirts and black pants, and appear well-groomed. Yet despite the aim of cocktails and sparkling wine being serviced to stylish professionals, there are only bloated old men in soccer jerseys, a clientele that doesn’t even see the point in wearing proper pants. Swimming trunks and flip-flops, fuck it, it’s Laos — there’s an underlying message beneath it all. Pints line the bar with girls in miniskirts standing beside red-jowled mandrills who are apparently territorial, taking a moment to pause from shouting profanely at the soccer game on screen to stare us down with pure hostility, particularly me, for no reason that I can immediately perceive without a moment of self-reflection. I take in their beady eyes, puffed bodies, and fleshy faces as they growl menacingly, bristled to the point of danger and ridiculousness.
I want to leave, but in order not to offend, I decide to have one beer. One more beer with this young stranger who seems like a really nice guy, but is possibly affiliated with some kind of underworld network that I’m not sure I want to know about. There he is at the bar now, getting our drinks, not paying of course. We don’t have to pay anywhere, is what I’m guessing. Perfect. He talks with the bartender, a slick-haired mustached Laotian who looks exactly like the kind of guy who can slip you information without saying a word. If they exchange paper, I’m out of here. Saint comes back with our two pints, but not before briefly engaging with some of the mandrills at the bar, perhaps explaining my presence, or making some loose commitments to get them this or that. Fuck, what am I doing here? Leave now!
“Thanks for the beer,” I say, and clink pints with him, letting the amber hops massage my worrying neck.
“Is everything okay? Not your kind of scene, huh? I would take you to a disco, but we’d have to go out of town. Vientiane has this curfew. You can’t be on the streets past midnight.”
“That’s all right. I wasn’t really looking for anything special. I think I’ll just have one beer and be on my way.”
“Really? It’s so early. Where are you staying?”
“Uhhh, not sure. I was thinking I could just sleep somewhere on the street, near the river. Under the stars, that kind of thing.”
“Not a good idea,” Saint says, shaking his head, his eyes concerned. “If the police find you, you might get charged with vagrancy. The laws here are pretty strict. Don’t you have any friends here? You came by yourself?”
“That’s the thing. See, I was with this girl. We traveled to Vang Vieng together. Then she met this guy who said he had a room. And she kind of, well, I guess she ditched me.”
Saint shakes his head, tut-tutting in sympathy.
“Is that the girl who you’re upset about?”
“No, not really. I mean, I might see her tomorrow. I just met her. I don’t know. I’m kind of confused. I was talking about another girl before.”
“The one who made you want to jump in the river?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, there’s lots of girls here. Take your pick. You’re an American. You can have any one you want. Just don’t fall in love.”
“Thanks, I appreciate it. But when you said you were going to take me to meet some girls, I was thinking of something else.”
“Not pretty enough?” he asks, raising his eyebrows, pegging me now for some whore connoisseur.
“No, no. They’re very pretty. Very sexy, but I don’t think I’m that kind of guy.”
“Ohhh,” Saint says, catching on, and then laughs. “They’re not prostitutes. You don’t have to pay them. They’re here on their own. Well, some of them are prostitutes. Most of them just want to meet a rich foreign man. You don’t have to go home with them. You can just buy them a drink and talk. Most of them can speak English. Some English. Enough English, I guess.”
I take a long look at the albino gorillas with their hairy arms around the shoulders of two girls at once, laughing coarsely in the dark, having good nights and happy endings. A skinny little thing in miniskirt bends over to take a shot at the billiards table; her partner, or opponent, playfully rubbing the end of his cue up her ass. She seems to enjoy it, or at least doesn’t let it break her concentration.
“I appreciate the sentiment, but I’m pretty sure this isn’t the answer. Maybe one day when I decide to drown in an ocean of sex, I’ll come back here. Until then I think I’m going to pass.”
“You shouldn’t be so hard on them,” he says, laughing all childlike. “Or the girls. Most of them just want to take care of their family. When you marry a Lao girl or a Thai girl, you’re not just marrying the girl. You have no idea how many people can be in one family.”
“Brothers, sisters, cousins, aunts, uncles, grandparents,” I say, ticking them off like bills to pay.
“Lots of divorces in Thailand happen that way. Guys who come here and don’t know what they’re getting into. But you can’t say it’s all money. Lots of girls just want to have sex with foreign men,” Saint pauses and almost blushes. “Maybe foreigners do it better.”
Saint laughs charmingly.
“You should meet my roommate. He’s a sex addict. He is, as you say, a bitter divorced guy. Kind of a genius, but kind of an asshole as well. I think his dick doesn’t work anymore. He makes me get stuff for him. He wants to die of a heart attack while fucking. This is what he tells me.”
“I bet he paints virgins like Raphael. I feel sorry for the girl who gets traumatized under that carcass. Anyway, it’s been good talking with you, Saint. I think I’m going to hit the road. I have to find a place to sleep tonight.”
“Why don’t you stay at my mom’s house? She lives in one of those mansions from the old days, before the revolution. It’s pretty nice actually. She’s trying to make it into a hotel, but it kind of ended up as a museum. There’s always an extra room.”
“You think she’ll be okay with that?”
“Yes, of course! She’ll be happy to meet you. She likes handsome guys. She’s kind of an alcoholic.”
“This isn’t some kind of brothel, is it?”
“No way. My roommate has girls come over, but they don’t stay. Mom hates that. They fight about it a lot.”
“Sounds cozy. Well then, shall we get going?”
“Sure! There’s just one place I need to stop by before we go home. It’ll just take a minute.”
“O-kay,” I hear my voice croak, now picturing Saint handing me two bricks of that Golden Triangle wrapped in brown paper, asking me to hold them in my backpack. I envision my execution by firing squad.
Saint disappears to settle our bill, which he won’t pay for, and basically leaves me wondering if I should run out the door as fast as I can. Despite his reassurances, I can’t help but assume my lodgings will be in some kind of pseudo-museum/hotel/whorehouse with a crazed old man running around inside ranting about the government, greeting me at the door with an angry stiffy, spraying spittle in my face as he demands to know who I am and who I’m working for. I lay my gaze upon the view from the rooftop, revealing dimly lit orange streets below and a dark blue night, occasionally a stray dog running down the street doing nothing to avoid getting hit by the scatter of passing motorbikes. I listen to the sound of a tuk-tuk passing and then back to the ruckus of the bar, the last calls being taken, one for the road as different men leave with different girls, off to the rodeo.
Saint returns, and we meander from the riverside road toward downtown, where we see the white government buildings and international hotels. The avenue is wider here, the architecture impressive in its illuminated silence. Here and there, and kind of everywhere, we see beggars and panhandlers, street musicians — some of them just kids — missing arms, missing legs, missing body parts.
“Did I tell you I was training to become a Buddhist monk?” Saint says, dropping some money in a legless guitarist’s hat. We pause and listen to the guy strum chords by Bob Marley in his wheelchair. “That’s why I came here to Laos. I did a temple stay in the mountains so I could get off drugs, after my ex called the cops on me and I went on the run.”
“She called the cops?” I utter in shock. “What happened? She catch you at the Ping-Pong show?”
“She thought I was cheating on her,” Saint shrugs nonchalantly, all of this old news. “She was helping me sell drugs. Like I said, I was a promoter. She was a bar girl. We just got caught up. All of the backpackers who come to party in Thailand take ecstasy, smoke weed, smoke meth, whatever you want. I could get anything. I became that guy. Eventually I got addicted. I couldn’t get out of the cycle. When she called the cops on me, I felt so betrayed. I felt so angry and lost. But now, when I think about it, all she did was force me to get my life together. I escaped to a Buddhist temple and almost became a monk.”
“What happened?”
Saint sighs and flicks his clove regretfully.
“I was able to quit coke, pills, weed, meth. I even quit sex! I don’t even think about girls anymore. The only thing I couldn’t quit are these stupid cigarettes.”
“They wouldn’t kick you out of a monastery for that, would they?”
“Maybe I just wasn’t ready. Still, I think it saved my life. I don’t know where I’d be now if that didn’t happen. Probably dead.”
Our friend, the guitarist, finishes Redemption Song. The two of us clap for him, and he smiles the brightest smile you could imagine a guy with no legs smiling.
“I still plan on becoming a monk later on,” Saint says faintly, and puts more money in the guitarist’s hat. They fold hands and exchange khob chai’s. “I just want to help people.”
We walk through a warren of alleys until we finally stop in front of what seems to be a KTV silently glowing. I follow Saint down a dark rabbit hole and enter an underground that twists and turns until suddenly we come to a heavy wooden door. Saint knocks three times, no special pattern, but loud because of the jazz that muffles from a deeper source. A panel in the door slides open and two black eyes check us out. The door clicks and we enter a dimly lit, heavily gilded, rather gaudy antechamber filled with an eclectic array of colonial-era oil paintings, Buddha statues, and tantric carvings of naked goddesses being seduced by demons. A man who looks like something between a maître d’ and a gangster greets us with a smooth formality that makes it questionable whether he and Saint have ever met before. No words are exchanged and no questions are asked as he ushers us to the other side of the antechamber, opens the golden door, and bows, despite the obvious fact that we are both wildly underdressed. One of us looks particularly unbathed and has those wild what-the-fuck-is-going-on eyes just staring at the wonderland on the other side of the wall. Before us extending through the blue dark, I see a posh lounge with a beautiful singer on the far stage sparkling in her black cocktail dress singing How Insensitive, the bluesy band behind her playing soft keys, rhythm guitar, and stand-up bass, each band member dressed in velvet while servers patrol the darkened perimeters, responding quickly to any candle being raised, a signal from the spread of circular tables, where gangster politicians from various nations around the world sit with their mistresses, mouthing drink orders and requesting ice amid clouds of cigarette smoke and music-drowned laughter.
“Welcome to the ASEAN,” Saint murmurs for my ears only, as I continue gawking at the scene. There’s a dancefloor in front of the stage, the room divided into four sections, each section containing lounge seating with about half of the tables empty. We choose a table with a safe view of the old tycoons, mob bosses, and moguls dancing slowly to the bossa nova with their dates for the evening. These guys were even older, and the girls even more beautiful than the skanks we’d seen back at the mandrill bar. Each girl wears a glamorous evening gown that she definitely doesn’t own, and it almost seems like each one somehow fell off the stage from a Miss Universe pageant, or perhaps this is one of the hoops you have to jump through to get in. They’ve clearly mastered the discipline. Their eyes are heavy-lidded in eyeshadow, and their cheeks touched with rouge, their statuesque faces emotionless as they slowly step and turn in the arms of the old moguls whose wrinkly old faces glow with ecstasy.
“Should I even ask how much a drink is here? What is that, kip? That’s nothing!”
“That’s not kip; that’s dollars.”
“Shit-za!”
Before the song ends, Saint goes off to take care of some business, and I am now nursing an overpriced beer, which I shouldn’t have ordered, but did anyway, needing something to hold onto which would give me strength. I had to once I saw him, spotted him, nearly dropping my water glass in the process. That rich old codger, dancing as if he’s on top of the moon, like this is the only dream that still brings his pickled soul any happiness. Just when you think it’s a night out, there he is, Candidate Dim, tonight sporting an ambitious and slightly delusional toupee. So that’s why he’s in Vientiane. Of course! There’s no finer hair in the world than a Laotian’s. He’s here for a new wig!
I still owe the old man a drink. The old splash in the face. Security is tight. The dancefloor reserved just for them, the patriarch gangsters of the East, their bodyguards, soldiers, lawyers, and righthand men all sitting in the dark beside their own escorts, enjoying themselves, but keeping their libations respectfully subdued. I sip my $20 beer slowly, thinking about how I can skip the bill, rip that toupee off his head without getting captured, and disappear conveniently into the mist before getting shot in the leg. If I was still an agent, I’d blow the horn on all these crooked candidates, breaking bed together, watching each other commit unfaithful acts, secretly filming each other in their hotel rooms, bonded together by blackmail, blood money and lawsuits. Tonight I’ll let them wine and dine and then sign away pieces of their hell-driven souls for another slice of the world. I’m only here for Candidate Dim. The eyes of the girl being turned counterclockwise in his arms meets my eyes by chance across the darkness, asking me in that brief moment, “When is this going to end?”
“Where are you, Louis?” I whisper in the near-dark.
“Right here.”
“Louis!”
I drop my beer in shock and watch mouth-opened as Louis, dressed in a server’s uniform, catches the bottle before it hits the floor. He puts the bottle back on the table gently and leans forward, pretending to adjust the napkins on the table.
“It’s never too late for a Beer Lao,” he says quietly, echoing the commercial none of us knew, but different this time, his voice low and serious.
“You work here?” I ask obliviously.
“Only for tonight,” he says, keeping his voice low. “Better drink up. The bar’s about to close.”
“Are you—”
He cuts me off, nodding, his eyes communicating more than words.
“Do you see that door next to the statue? When I leave your table, I need you to get back there and wait for my signal. As soon I signal, the guard will leave his post. The door will be open. I need you to open it and help whoever is in there get outside the club to safety. Can you do that?”
“My friend, I mean, this guy I came here with—”
“He’s waiting outside. Don’t worry. Just get to that door and open it after my signal.”
“What’s the signal?”
“A lot of fucking noise.”
As soon as Louis leaves, I begin chugging what’s left of my beer, holding it in case I need a weapon. I watch as he makes his way toward the center of the room, where a bunch of suited gangsters sit with their girls. Rising slowly, I inch my way along the perimeter edgewise toward the secret door where Candidate Dim’s muscle stands guard. I see that thick shaved skull turn and spot me and approach like the Terminator as I clownishly duck behind a statue of Mara, the goddess of death.
Suddenly there’s an explosion in the room. I feel myself being thrown in midair, instantly thrust into Lao Time, my eardrums popped, all hell breaking loose. Fragments of glass spiral in slow-motion, sparkling shards in the midst of short-lived gunfire and the twisting of the first thug’s arm. I watch in amazement as Louis spins him into an arm lock and then uses the momentum to do a flying roundhouse kick in the face of another goon. The gangsters all rise up from their seats in Lao Time with looks of rage twisting their faces as they scramble to grab Louis or their weapons while their girls scream and flee from the shattering glass and flipping furniture. The band abandons the stage in a panic, knocking the mic stands over as the look on Candidate Dim’s face goes from shock to fury and he pulls out a tiny pistol and holds it against his date’s ribs as she flails and tries to escape. Candidate Dim’s muscle forgets me and goes bounding toward the melee. Louis is now doing Jackie Chan moves with the chairs, confusing and flip-kicking the gangsters as they struggle to get ahold of him. Some conveniently placed chandeliers provide enough dazzle to daze them as Louis swings around comically, kicking every one of them in the face. I sprint toward the curtains, where Candidate Dim is attempting an escape. Just as he spots me and points his derringer in my direction, I throw the beer bottle and watch it explode in midair. I come through the burst of broken glass with my fist cocked and punch the old man right in the face. His false teeth fly out of his mouth and spin in slow-motion until they hit a rim shot on the cymbals. I grab his toupee (which is glued on surprisingly tight) and hold back a karate chop, threatening to crush his windpipe.
“I was only planning to throw water in your face. I didn’t know it was going to be a hostage situation,” I say, smiling at Candidate Dim, enjoying seeing his panic-stricken mug convulse in search of words.
“Ah-American! Let me go! They get me, it’s over! No more Candidate Dim!”
“That’s the idea,” I say, grinning all shitty.
“What talking about, you idiot?” Candidate Dim sputters angrily. “Who side you are on? I’m Uncle Sam, stupid! I’m your side!”
“What the hell you talking about, Dim? And make it fast. This Lao Time ain’t gonna last forever!”
“I puppet leader for transition phase. Jack bring me to open door for American business! Understand? White House gonna be furious! Bomb everyone! Campaign over! Junta win! Communist win! What you? CIA? Looks too dumb for spy.”
“Where’s Jack?” I growl and clamp my hand over his mouth, inside knowing that I had peed earlier without washing my hands.
“I don’t see, Jack!” Candidate Dim splutters desperately after I unclamp his mouth. “He only send sexy young lady! Long leg, short hair. Very sexy, but little cold in bed!”
“Thanks for the useless information,” I mutter and slowly loosen my grip on Candidate Dim’s toupee. I smooth it out for him, and then yank it off completely. He lets out a horrible womanly shriek.
“I’m going to let you go, Dim. But just remember one thing. You work for us, you’re working for the greatest nation on the planet. A new world, a democracy, a creed, and a dream. This isn’t some beauty pageant you’re representing here. A little dignity! Please!”
Candidate Dim cowers away, and then runs as fast as his fat little legs can take him into the darkness, covering his naked pate in shame.
I turn around and notice his former hostage, a beautiful girl in a golden gown with a matching yellow orchid in her hair still standing where I left her, perhaps waiting for permission.
“Go on, miss. You’re free to go.”
She babbles wildly, gesturing and pointing toward the door. The door! Together we run back into the lounge, where bullet holes make a tight trail right behind us. We open the door and there’s a large dressing room filled with Miss Universe hopefuls all huddled in fear, crying out, but perhaps a little used to this sort of thing. Here are the handpicked flowers of the valley, raised and cured to perfection, cut at the stem just before blossom to be thrown together in a bouquet and arrayed upon couches for the choosing. They’re the most beautiful prisoners I’ve ever seen, waiting in a golden chamber filled with borrowed gowns and vanity mirrors, their only window to freedom a small TV, living vicariously through actresses on dramas, who in a way seem to suffer so much like themselves, but do so in a way of their own choosing, and so are envied by these young girls, too powerless to consider a true destiny. The door is open. The girl with the flower in her hair cries out something in Lao like, “What the hell are you waiting for?” The girls all come running in tow, and we barrel through the antechamber spinning the maître d’ on his ass, his head getting trampled by 20 pairs of stilettos, and I kick the door open and we burst upstairs into the warm night filled with red and blue lights.
Outside the club, there’s a swarm of police vehicles and soldiers in green and black, rushing in just as we bust out from the karaoke. The Miss Universe contestants run into the arms of various policemen and agents. The girl with the flower in her hair grabs my hand and pulls me along the shadows, not wanting to be seen. We duck down the alley and run until we are just out of reach of the lights and the crackling of megaphone.
Down by the river, she stops and removes her stilettos, now a head shorter than me. She looks up and touches my arm, stands on tippy-toe and kisses me on the cheek. I look into her eyes and see all that her makeup hides; she’s just a kid. She turns and spirits away into the black night. I let her go. She knows where she’s going. I hope.
“And now the movie ends,” I say to myself aloud, and stand there for a moment, expecting credits to roll across the inky blue night above the Mekong as I go walking off into the darkness alone. Then I remember Saint.
“Saint!”
I run back to the scene and arrive just in time to see him being placed in the back of a police car, handcuffed, looking through the backseat window with his sad blue eyes. I’m stopped by a baby-faced guard, who intercepts me and speaks rapidly, shaking his head.
“Whoa, slow down there,” Louis says, stepping in from out of nowhere.
“What the hell is going on? He’s innocent, I tell ya! We went there by mistake!” I start to explain.
“Hold on. Take it easy. Come here for a second,” Louis says, taking me and guiding me a little ways off the scene before I end up in the back of a squad car.
“Louis, you have to get my friend out of there. I’m staying at his mom’s house.”
“Your friend is a well-known dealer in these parts. He won’t be charged with anything tonight, but we’ll have to ask him some questions, just for formality’s sake. I’ll make sure he gets home safe,” Louis says.
“Dealer? What do you mean ‘dealer?’” I scoff, acting dumb.
“Where’d you two meet?” Louis asks, turning the tables on me.
“I hardly know the guy, I tell ya! I don’t even know his real name!”
“But you’re staying at his mom’s house?”
“It’s a brothel or something,” I stammer. “Just trying to get my rocks off in Vientiane!”
“So he was pimping,” Louis concludes casually.
“No! It wasn’t like that at all. He just lives in a brothel. He’s a Buddhist. You gotta give him some credit for that!”
“Your friend is a merchant of the infamous rhino horn. Pure extract. Used as an aphrodisiac. It’s likely he was here to sell some to the nefarious parties gathered. So they could,” Louis clears his throat, briefly uncomfortable, “do boom-boom all night long.”
“Does that stuff really work?” I ask curiously.
“Whether it does or doesn’t, the sale of rhino horn is illegal. We’ll probably have to deport him back to his home country.”
“But you won’t. . .” I trail off, silently pantomiming a firing squad.
“No, definitely not. After questioning, we’ll send him home.”
“Well, that’s probably better for him,” I concur. “He needs to call his mom. She doesn’t even know where he is.”
“There’s no crime for being a bad son,” Louis agrees. “But there should be.”
“Can I just talk to him for a minute? I should tell his Lao-mom what happened, or his roommate, or someone. They might be worried.”
“Plus, you need that spare bed,” Louis points out all too wisely.
“If they offer it.”
“Go ahead.”
I walk up to the police car now, the guard being given the nod by Louis to give me a minute to have a final word with Saint.
“Are you okay?” Saint asks me as I lean into the window.
“I’m not the one in handcuffs. You gonna be all right?”
Saint smiles.
“See? Laos isn’t as boring as everyone thinks. You just have to know where to look.”
“They’re going to ask you some questions, and probably send you home. Back to Paris, I think.”
“Yeah, maybe it’s that time,” Saint says without remorse. “It’s my dharma.”
“Dharma knows best.”
“Can you just tell my mom what happened? I don’t want her to worry,” he says, and slips me the business card of some place called Sabaidee House. “This is where she lives.”
“Not what I was expecting,” I murmur, examining the card.
“It was nice meeting you. Good luck on the rest of your journey.”
“You too. Thanks for everything,” I tell him, unsure which part of the night I should be thanking him for. “But just one thing.”
“Yeah?”
“When you get home, make sure you call your mother. She misses you.”
Saint smiles, looks down, and nods. When he looks up, I’m pretty sure I see a twinkle.
“I will,” he promises.
I walk away and get approached once again by Louis.
“Another day in the life, huh?” I quip.
“Yeah, that’s right. Tomorrow, it will be someone else’s turn. But there will always be more. Can I give you a lift?”
“Sure. You know where this is?” I ask and show him the card.
“Oh yes. Famous place.”
“You mean, ‘infamous?’”
“Not like that. Old mansion. Historical building. Very nice.”
“Sweet.”
“Hop on,” Louis says, and bends down to a squat.
“What do you mean?”
“Get on my back. We’re going to fly there,” Louis says.
“You can FLY?”
“Yeah, but don’t tell anybody,” he replies as I climb aboard.
We lift off and shoot like a rocket into the night sky above the dark, sleepy city below into the stars.
“And by the way,” he shouts as we zoom at blinding speed through the air. “Don’t call me ‘Louis!’”
“What should I call you?” I shout back, my face peeling back from the speed.
“Call me . . . The Diplomat!”
We fly over the downtown esplanades and land minutes later on a dark street filled with stray dogs and clouds of huge insects having a nocturnal fiesta by the dismal street lights. Before we part ways, Louis gives me a little background on the house where I’m staying, an establishment run by a noble family punished by the regime for their prosperity under French rule, that once upon a time of land and servants, French tutors and English governesses, before the revolution woke up the coolies and they burned it all to the ground.
“I hear she drinks quite heavily. Who can blame her? The poor at least got some rice out of the bargain. People like her lost everything; generations of wealth gone with the stroke of a pen. She’s still from a respected family. No one forgets that. But she’s a widow. Be nice to her.”
“Don’t worry. Old ladies love me. I know how to talk to them.”
“There it is. See the house with the veranda?” Louis says, pointing to a French colonial mansion, rain-beaten with moss and vines growing wildly around the white stone. “I have to get going. My girlfriend, you know how it is.”
“Yeah,” I chuckle along knowing I do not.
“Remember,” Louis says, rising from the ground floating upside down. “It’s never too late for a Beer Lao!”
And with that he takes off in a streak of lightning. I stand there for a moment, unsure of what to do. I was kind of hoping he’d make the introductions, knock on the door and say something like, “Ma’am, is this your son?”
It’s after curfew. Should I just ring the doorbell? It feels way past visiting hours, but I have no choice. Soldiers roam the streets in search of cigarettes or bribes. Packs of stray dogs tear each other apart in the dark. I whisper my lines and walk through the rusty gate hanging halfway ajar, trying to configure the half-truths I’m about to tell.
The door is answered by a brawny kick boxer in a crew cut with a steely glint in his eyes. He wears soccer shorts and sports a rippling six pack and the kind of scowl that tells me I’m interrupting the game.
“No vacancy,” he says, and begins to close the door.
“I’m a friend of Saint’s! He sent me here to tell you something!” I call.
At the mention of Saint’s name, I hear Ms. Alana, the lady of the house, order me to come in. Her son Ken (I find out later) scowls and lets me in. The foyer opens majestically with a massive sitting bronze Buddha growing green with tarnish, but this is quickly overlooked due to the meditation pond that trickles below. The walls are lined with oils, ancestral portraits of men in the evolution of dinnerwear from princely white and gold to French royal blues, circular gold rims on patriarchal faces, each man sporting the kind of facial hair that once commanded armies.
There is a wooden screen with intricate carvings of lotus flowers and patterns metaphorically infinite in their repetition. Behind this screen sits the lady of the house, Ms. Alana, with her empty dinner plates and half-bottle of vodka, the other half hidden somewhere in her bloodstream. She has a sultry beauty, smoky-voiced, seductive, alcoholic, and old enough to be my mother if I was in fact 25. She wears the traditional Lao sinh, a tube skirt in silky peacock blue that displays her voluptuous figure and her tipsy sauntering walk, caused both by the tightness of the dress and the half-bottle of vodka.
“Welcome to Sabaidee House. Please sit down. It’s not every day we have such a handsome young man come to visit us,” Ms. Alana smiles with hungry eyes. “I’ve just finished dinner, but I can have a few dishes put together. Shall I prepare something for you?”
“I’m fine. Thank you,” I stammer, feeling more at home than when I thought it was a whorehouse. I sit up straight and keep my hands folded on my lap, suddenly unsure of my posture. “Saint said he was staying here. He wanted me to tell you some bad news, as you might be wondering why he’s not coming home.”
“First, we have a drink,” Ms. Alana insists. “Then you tell me everything.”
Without a change in her expression, her honey voice transforms into the barking command of a dictator. Two young serving girls bring out glasses and a fresh pitcher of water.
The girls obediently place the pitcher and glasses on the table, and I watch as Ms. Alana holds them in her arms in a drunken matron’s sudden outpouring of tenderness, then transforming again and shooing them away like flies. She pours me a glass of vodka. It tastes like nothing. Not like water, but like nothing. There is only a slight burn at the end.
“Saint’s been arrested,” I tell Ms. Alana, who reacts with a drama so immediate and complete it could only be Russian. I measure out the details as she wails and laments, not mentioning the wheres or whats exactly, wondering how to steer the conversation towards the topic of an empty room.
“I have too many children, too many little birds. They fly away and I am happy, but then I wait for them to come back,” Ms. Alana sighs afterwards. “My little girls in the kitchen, they come from the countryside, from poor, poor families. I take them in. Can I pay them? No, I have no money to pay them. All we have is the food on our table and the drink in our glasses. I was once from a wealthy family. My grandfather was a great scholar. He was part of the king’s council, a doctor. There were no doctors in those days. And my father, a great man in the royal army, a brave and respected leader. We had the most beautiful garden when I was a little girl. Now look. It grows wild with snakes. In America, people have big house, yes? But they work in their own garden. This I cannot understand.”
“It’s a beautiful home,” I venture to say, faced with this open lament. Ms. Alana gives me a withering look and snorts, throws back her drink, and pours us both another triple shot from the bottle.
“Come. I show you my beautiful home,” she says, mocking me, and laughs, either at me or herself, or both. We walk into the adjoining room and stand before the family shrine, a photographic history mixed with colored prints and black and whites, framed and arranged neatly from generation to generation in a timeline. Towards the center is the portrait of a beautiful young woman with soft intelligent eyes and ringlets of hair in a classical Western style, pearls in her ears and around her neck. There are others of her in traditional costume, heavily caked with makeup, and a wide shot of the whole clan standing for a wedding portrait, and others which I look at, but receive no explanation for, since technically visiting hours are over. I try not to ask too many questions, but let her tell it the way she wants, between jolting shouts and hard disparaging laughter, riddled with sudden tangents. She’s quite drunk.
“I grew up in Moscow because of my father. He sheltered me there when the war tore our world apart. There is my husband. He is dead now. He was my father’s favorite captain. Both of them served in the royal army.”
“Is that him with Ho Chi Minh?” I ask, spotting a black and white photo of important men who simply seem to be enjoying a cup of tea rather than negotiating the terms of defeat.
“That dog-faced coward! I keep on the wall only for historical purposes, for my museum. I spit on his picture every night!”
“Oh, sorry.”
“When I come back to Laos, the war was over. The communists take everything. They hated my family because we were wealthy. They call us all their foolish names. Aristocrat. Bourgeoisie. They steal everything from us like thieves. To them this was justice, to give everything we had to strangers so that we could feed them like dogs. Now look at my land. We had fields of rice, bananas, spices, coffee. Now you see what it is. Nothing but snakes and weeds.”
She takes a pause and seems emotionally distraught. I almost put my hand on her shoulder before she laughs bitterly and takes a drink. She turns her attention to brighter times, better times, further back in the family history.
“In Russia, I had a sable coat. My husband buy me for wedding present. I miss wearing that coat. I wish I never sold it. I felt like a czarina. You cannot wear a sable here. The rain ruins the fur.”
I nod sympathetically, observing now that she is starting to spend more time staring into her empty glass than at the pictures on the wall. I decide this is as good a time as any to interject.
“So I guess Saint might need his personal belongings? I don’t think he’s coming back. Maybe you’d like to have them sent?”
“Yes. That is a wonderful idea. My poor boy. He was a good boy. Sweet child. But young, and foolish. He trust everybody. I knew one day he would be caught,” Ms. Alana says sadly. Then just as suddenly, her voice sharpens as she barks orders at her son, who groans and responds with something to the effect of “But the game’s still on,” to which she grows furious, prompting him to get off the couch to get Saint’s things.
“You go with Ken. Bring down his things. We bring them to the police station tomorrow.”
“Sure, I can do that,” I reply, glancing at Ken, who does not look one bit pleased that I am making him miss the game. I hope he won’t smash my nose with his knees when we get upstairs.
Ken motions me through a beaded curtain, and we walk up a servant’s stairwell to the upstairs hall, dimly lit and decorated with more relics. Welcoming us at the top of the stairs on a low wooden table is a reclining Buddha, the slimmer and more meditative kind, as opposed to the fat, cheerful baldy. On either side of him are those French-style fainting couches which aren’t really meant for sitting unless you’re desperately tired during the tour and are willing to sit on anything. The paintings that line the upstairs hall are Laotian landscapes with princes in white uniform riding elephants leading colorful bands of emissaries and courtesans. A million elephants under a white parasol. A monk in saffron walking beneath a red sun. A gong that looks ancient and battered. The decor almost all Lao while architecturally European. The ceilings are high and the floors are made of stone tile, keeping the place relatively cool. If I wasn’t avoiding Interpol, I might write an anonymous recommendation on a travel site noting Sabaidee House as a place of cultural interest, full of history and all the vodka you could drink. But I’d probably keep it down to four stars; not going to pretend I didn’t spot a few roaches here and there, or notice a mildewed smell that must come with seasons of rain that never end, slowly rotting away the mansion somewhere deep in its core, and later finding out, that of course, the plumbing doesn’t work so well either.
Down the hall, rows of shutters on the side look out over the unkempt yard, and old French doors, some open, most closed with lodgers, occupying the spaces inside. As we pass by, Ken calls out to the guests he’s on friendly terms with, not bothering to introduce me of course, but receiving his “heys” and “hellos” in different European accents.
We come to the far end of the hall, where we pause in front of a closed door and Ken gives me this look like an inside joke I don’t know yet before knocking on the door twice.
“Pat-ty, it’s Ken. Are you busy or lonely?” Ken calls in a teasing manner. “We need to come inside.”
“Fuck off!” is the reply which comes muffled from inside, but a few moments later, the doorknob turns and an elephantine Englishman with a remarkable sunburn covering the whole of his face and what’s exposed of his body beneath a poorly-tied bathrobe answers the door. He has squinty eyes, which indicates that he’s not wearing his glasses, but the way he peers at me isn’t from poor vision. He’s not the type of man to welcome visitors, unless of course, they’re there to give him a blowjob.
“Where the fuck is that little dodger with my ivory? I’ve been trying to stand straight for nearly an hour now and nothing’s coming. I’ve had to send two girls home tonight because of that tardy little twat.”
“Saint gone. He get in trouble with police,” Ken says simply, and looks to me to fill in the details for this monstrous lobster in a bathrobe.
“Hi. I’m a friend of Saint’s. My name is—”
“I don’t give a fuck what yer name is. Where is Saint? Speak up now. Don’t stand there like a daft cunt.”
“For Saint, it was just another night in Vientiane. For Sam, it was the adventure of a lifetime-”
“Just get to it!”
“Okay! I know a guy, a government official, I suppose you could say, who tells me Saint is fine and in good hands. He’ll make sure Saint gets home safely.”
“Who the fuck are ye? Ye just show up, Saint gets nicked, and ye just expect me to stand here and believe ye ain’t had nothing to do with it? Boy, this fella’s got some bollocks, he has. Look at the apples on this one, Kenny. I ain’t never seen an agent show up at the door to give news unless he wanted more information.”
Pat stands there dead-eyeing me with a look of pure malice.
“Easy, Pat-ty. We just get Saint’s things and go, yes?” Ken intervenes, prompting Pat, as I am later told to call him, to step aside and let us into his room.
“I don’t just let anyone in me pad, Kenny. Ye know how I am.”
“Only they has ass and teets,” Ken jokes, and motions for me to come inside. I follow Ken through the doorway.
It’s a bit repulsive entering the lair of a rumored sex addict, but it’s the master suite and I’m curious to see what the accommodations are like. The room isn’t as big as I expected, but the decor is surprisingly tasteful, executed with understanding and displaying an appreciation for the minimalist aspects of Asian design. On the other hand, the general clutter of papers and books occupying every free inch of space show the mark of a writer who has not been practicing Zen.
The mounted samurai sword and Ukiyo-e prints on the wall tell me he was fascinated with samurai as a young lad, while the various Buddha statues suggest he graduated to more sophisticated inquiry with an Eastern philosophy course in university, perhaps with serious thoughts of becoming a monk (as everyone has) while simultaneously falling in love with a Japanese girl in his class. The chopsticks and lacquerware set on the small table confess a young and inspired love-drunk decision to pursue the girl.
The large Japanese folding screen painted with plum trees in flower tells me he’s tragic. The wall-to-wall bookshelves overflowing with volumes tell me his greatest dreams. The piles of neatly stacked sheets of paper tell me he’s obsessive. Arranged in mysterious formations, making sense only to their creator, like steps ascending higher and higher into nowhere, the never-ending drafts of a novel, a magnum opus which would eventually read as syphilitic madness.
“Inspired by the Japanese existentialists,” I begin monologuing aloud, “he attempted the life of a struggling novelist, teaching English to businessmen for another year, and then finally returned to the UK to settle into traditional life. He spent his honeymoon in Bali (note the dark wood and white canopy), had kids and divorced, and after a lifetime of setting his literary aspirations aside to work at a well-paying job he despised, he came back to the Far East. Washed up and embittered by nonstop betrayals as his life went down the toilet, he searched for the life he had never lived, writing his novels on a Pacific island with women in endless carousel.”
Pat and Ken stand looking at me in wonder.
“Back there, in the sick room,” Pat finally says to Ken with a heavy nod toward a modified veranda where Saint meditated deeply enough to ignore the grunts of exertion.
Pat wields huge lobster claws that block me from going in or out, his eyes full of interrogation. He wants to know who I am, who I work for, just like the premonition I had had before.
“Fess up now. Who ye working for? Yer police, ain’t ye? Out of nowhere ye show up and Saint’s in the can, ay? I never heard of ye. Saint ain’t never mentioned ye before. I think ye had him set up, mate.”
“Saint was a good friend to me. I only met him for a night, but he saved me from drowning. I would never do anything to harm Saint. There are some things that happened that I can’t explain, but I’m not who you think I am. This isn’t even my real body.”
“Boy’s a bit screwy, ain’t he?” Pat remarks to Ken, who reappears with a small duffel bag filled with Saint’s meager possessions. “I call bollocks. He’s no James Bond, that’s for sure.”
Ken shrugs indifferently, rather in a hurry to catch the rest of the game.
“I’m going to keep him for a minute, Kenny. Go on and bring that down to the lady. Me and him are going to stay for a little chat.”
This is decided without my consent of course, but Ken nods in the affirmative and leaves me standing there awkwardly, wondering if Pat’s planning to tighten up that bathrobe anytime soon.
The door closes. Pat remains standing where he was, blocking the door, lobster claws out, ever-expanding, his body filling up with some kind of gas.
“All right, let’s have it. What ye here for, mate? Just come clean. I won’t keep ye all night. Ye’ve been looking for me, and now ye’ve got me. It’s my fault. I should have never taken on a roommate. But something about him moved me to help. I don’t know why I did. I can’t stand people usually. I’d rather help dogs in the street. Them I can understand. But then again, Saint was a bit of a stray dog, wasn’t he? I didn’t know he was going to be my end.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I tell him. “Saint had nothing but good things to say about you. Okay, that’s not true. But he’s not going to give you up, no matter what you did. So you don’t need to worry about that.”
“So yer not an agent?” Pat says narrowing his eyes, but seeming to relax a little.
“Not the kind you’re thinking of. Anyway I left the business. I’m a free man.”
“Ye are, are ye?”
Pat shakes his head and laughs like he has a bunch of phlegm in his throat, probably from the onset of a heart attack. It would’ve happened with or without the sex. Too bad.
“This is why I can’t have no one over,” he mutters to himself. “I sit in here all day writing confessions on paper and start babbling my brains out to anyone who talks to me. I’ve finally gone round the bend. I have, I have.”
“Should I leave?” I ask as he gingerly lowers himself into a leather chair that grumbles.
“Please, stay a minute. I think I, I thought, I almost felt that one,” he laughs, looking a bit pale in the face now. “Go on and fetch us some water. There in the pitcher.”
I look toward where he’s pointing by a bonsai tree and fetch this man some water. His hand trembles as he takes a drink.
“What you done, mister?” I ask softly, looking at him now without judgment, but curiosity.
“I-I,” he laughs and looks at me, shaking his head like I’m too young to understand what a lifetime can make you do. “I’ve done terrible things. Saint knows. I’ve told him everything. Him and this fucking book.”
He nods over to the stacks of paper laying all around the room.
“Memoir?” I ask.
“Confessions of philosophy, I suppose you could say.”
I gaze around the room, wondering where it starts.
“I’m not just some bloated old wanker. . . if that’s what ye think I am,” Pat says now, the panting stage of his breathing beginning to pass. “But I do love my girls, and I do love that ivory. The doctor told me it was going to be the end of me. I told him that was the end I was waiting for. HA! Go on, yer supposed to laugh.”
I shrug and say nothing, wondering how much time is okay before you leave someone who nearly had a heart attack that you were responsible for delivering. Ten minutes? Ten seems okay.
“So, ye’ve left the agency, ay? What ye gon’ do with your newfound freedom?” Pat says semi-derisively, but perhaps too tired to really give it all of its effect. He almost sounds sincere.
“I used to have a plan. I was supposed to save the Dalai Lama. I thought finding Candidate Dim would lead me to Jack, but now I don’t have a reason. It’s not like I need Jack to die. I just thought if I defeated him, I could meet My True Love and be with her again. Now I realize I didn’t even know her. The pills made me believe she was real. Interpol wanted me to believe in her so that I would keep chasing Jack and help them complete their mission.”
Pat nods slowly, his look of malice faded, now replaced by the look of someone analyzing, probing, connecting the dots for you, trying to help.
“Ever read Dostoyevsky?” Pat says after a moment of contemplation. “He wrote that book over there, The Brothers Karamazov. It’s a long book, but every sentence in that novel is absolutely brilliant. In the interest of time — how long’s the lady got you for down there? Half a bottle, ye say? Ye’ve got time — I’ll give ye the short version. There are three brothers born by a randy old patriarch who fathers them all with different women. They have completely different upbringings. None of them close with dear old dad. Dmitri is the first, a hedonist, driven by lust and passion. He ends up killing dear old dad at the end of the first act.”
“Because he was drunk?” I ask.
“No, because dear old dad was shagging the lovely Grushenka, the same girl he’s in for. Plus he needs drink money.”
“Classy.”
“His brothers Ivan and Alyosha come to town while all this is going on. Ivan is an intellectual, an atheist and a nihilist, and a bit of a communist as well. Alyosha is a priest whose spiritual father, the head priest Zoshima, has just died. Gives up an awful stink, his body does. Gets so bad it makes Alyosha question his faith, as the Russian Orthodox believe that the smell from the body of the dead showed ye how sinful the deceased are.”
“Could just be the herring and onions,” I say, offering an opinion. “So what happens?”
“What happens don’t mean a thing. What’s important is who the brothers are and what they represent. Dimitri is driven by passion. Ivan driven by intellect. Alyosha driven by spiritual faith and heart. All of us are driven by something. Which one of the brothers are ye? That’s the question the book asks in the end.”
“You like this book?”
“The best therapist I’ve ever had.”
“It’s helped you?”
“It’s helped me massively.”
“From what I hear, you’re still stuck on Dimitri,” I say, glibly snubbing him. For a moment, he’s stunned. He sits there and finally tightens his robe a little out of modesty, or perhaps a sudden flesh wound.
“Ye think you know me, eh? Ye think I’m the white man here in another third-world country just having my shits and giggles?”
“That’s exactly what I think.”
“Like ye said, laddie. Ye don’t really know someone, do you? Ye didn’t know that girl yer on about. Ye didn’t know she was just a one-night, an illusion, gone before ye can even blink. Ye think true love is out there just waiting for ye. Ye think it’s always going to be true in the end. Ye don’t know the heart of a woman, the way she can make ye suffer in pain. She can’t love ye without making ye suffer. So what yer really looking for is a reason to suffer, aren’t ye? Because ye have nowhere else to go. Ye don’t know what else to do with yerself, so ye suffer.”
“You can’t live without love. People like you just think your way out of it without calling it cowardice.”
“So ye think ye know love? Ye’ve never even had it. Ye think love is going around the world and chasing some dream girl to lay with her in bed and whisper all yer sweet nothings, do ye? PAH! Yer just a kid. Ye don’t even know that love is sacrifice, love is giving up all that ye want and dream! Ye don’t ask for nothing, no tenderness or appreciation. Why? Because it’s a losing game! That’s what love is! And when the love’s run out and yer left with nothing, all ye can do is go somewhere so ye can just die quietly. That’s what love is!”
“So you’re saying I dodged a bullet?” I ask.
“Ye think I don’t take care of these girls? I’m not some animal,” Pat goes on, lightening the weight of his conscience. “Of course I feels bad for ’em, as much as I feels bad for me-self! But better me than someone else, and believe me laddie, there’s always someone else, someone not as gentle as I am. What am I guilty of doing anyway, besides feeding the family their husbands, or lack thereof, can’t provide? And I’m giving them something else they’ve been looking for, believe me laddie. I don’t mean to be a boastful cunt, but I’ve got an elephant trunk. We’ve all got our vices, laddie. Sometimes it’s just fuel for the fire. It’s what keeps us going, isn’t it? Our obsessions become our gods until they destroy us, or ye renounce the world and live in a monastery. It’s a lonely existence, but there’s yer love. There’s yer truth. Just let me vindicate my life with one last sentence before I die. That’s all I ask.”
“Maybe you don’t want the story to end,” I suggest ironically, nodding at the endless wasteland of words.
“Don’t kid yourself, laddie. We’re all racing towards the end. If we’re lucky and it’s not all a gobsmacking lie, we’ll have new bodies and a new Earth when the angels come and take us home. Home is where we can worship and finally rest in a world without death. It’s only us that can’t seem to live in harmony with the rest of it, isn’t it? The fish knows how to swim, the bird knows how to fly, and the flower knows how to point its face to the sun. Only we don’t know what the bloody hell we’re here for. All we know is how to cry out in pain. It’s the very first thing we do in this life, and it’s the last thing we do in the end. The rest of it is just moments between the choruses. If I wasn’t raised a Catholic, I’d have already shot me-self in the head. As it is, I’m afraid to die. But I’ve nothing left to hang on for in this life, laddie. If I ever get to that last sentence, I’m ending it with a bullet in me head.”
“Yikes,” I say.
“And so here we are, riding on chariots of death into battle,” Pat almost sing-songs. “Facing the enemies far off, and the ones ye have to kill are the ones ye love. What does Lord Krishna say to Arjuna, eh? There ain’t no sin in this world except to deny yer destiny. Ye know yer destiny if ye know yer heart. When yer meant to do something, every fiber in yer body tells ye it’s right. Ye’ve got to listen to what’s inside ye. Whether that leads ye to the path ye’ve wanted or expected is beside the point, but ye walk that path, no matter the consequences, and ye let the gods of the universe sort it all out. Ye give up the notion that ye know what’s right and what’s wrong. Ye follow the path.”
“So does your heart rest easy with the way that you live?” I ask Pat, challenging his thesis. “Because a minute ago, it looked like it almost flopped. You can’t just let the world be a mess and fuck the time away. You think you can intellectualize the world’s suffering, waiting until the last gasp when some epiphany is going to bring you redemption, but it doesn’t work like that. You can’t make yourself your own moral authority. That’s called corruption. It’s rampant in these destitute lands, and we can forget about their problems and say they did it to themselves, but are we going to forget the days we declared war on evil and killed millions of innocents on our own conquest for gold, to dominate and rule and shape the world in our own image? Lo and behold, the nations crumble, and the women become prostitutes, and the people cry out and overthrow their king because he’s fallen, the gods have left them, and the only thing left is to start from scratch.”
“We give birth to our own gods, laddie. Or they’re above us and all we are is a mirror. Look at our streets, our cities. Go to Angkor Wat! We build temples to the things we worship. In a time when most people couldn’t even go to the bloody dentist, they erected temples so massive they can be seen from space, perfectly symmetrical in every way so that even the streets, the brickwork, the statues, all of it, represent their philosophical conception of the universe as taken from the constellations themselves. And they did it with their bare hands! Look at our streets now. What do we worship? We worship money, beauty, power — we worship ourselves! Walk the streets of London; look at the skyscrapers in Manhattan. The streets of Moscow and Pyongyang are so wide ye can have an entire army goose-stepping with their Armageddon on wheels trailing behind. We are what we worship, we become it, and we ain’t got the choice to quit that without giving the whole thing away. It’s slavery! That’s what it is! It’s the nature we can’t accept because we have free will.”
“What’s the point of all this?” I ask him, surprised to find myself sitting down in front of him now in a mutual search for answers.
“‘I believe like a child that suffering will be healed and made up for, that all the humiliating absurdity of human contradictions will vanish like a pitiful mirage, like the despicable fabrication of the important and infinitely small Euclidean mind of man, that in the world’s finale, at the moment of eternal harmony, something so precious will come to pass that it will suffice for all hearts, for the comforting of all resentments, for the atonement of all the crimes of humanity, for all the blood that they’ve shed, that it will make it not only possible to forgive, but to justify all that has happened.’”
“Did you memorize that?” I ask in shock.
“It’s written on the wall,” Pat replies.
I turn and there it is, written on a piece of paper in a spidery scrawl taped to the wall.
“Who said that?”
“Ivan Karamazov.”
“I thought he was an atheist.”
Pat smiles, sliding the bishop in for checkmate.
“Now why would Dostoyevsky do that?” he asks aloud, mocking me.
I stand up and ponder a moment, staring at the long sprawling quote.
“A friend of mine told me to stop using my eyes to see the world. He tried to teach me how to see with my mind, but all I saw were horrible things. Lies and deception, programming from Interpol, tricks from Jack. I lost my senses and started drowning it all in alcohol, just wandering from one place to the next. And now those people are gone, but I know it wasn’t a mistake to meet them. They led me to where I am, to where I stand now, talking about the deepest parts of my being with someone I hardly know. How does the person I detest become the same person to show me who I am? Or the words of truth, the words of hope, and ultimately, the words of faith, come from a person who claims to believe in nothing?”
“And so ye become Alyosha. Go and minister unto the world.”
Pat makes the sign of the cross over me in a sanctimonious manner, yet still I receive his blessing.
“Go to Angkor Wat. Ye’ll find what yer looking for there.”
I nod solemnly and promise, and leave him sitting in his armchair to consider the remains of his life as I drift down the hall.
The lights are off, but I find the stairs and float downward in a haze towards a dim light at the bottom, which seems impossibly far.
I see Ms. Alana through the beaded curtain sitting alone at the table while her children sleep on floor mats in the other room. I hear her telling one of them to go back to bed, but when I reach the bottom of the stairs, she’s already pouring me a drink.
“So you met the fat man?” she says with unveiled derision. “He is a disgusting pig, a permanent resident, a thing I must live with. I don’t go upstairs anymore. I hate his stink.”
“Pigs are kind of smart, in a weird way. They’re smarter than dogs. They have the same flesh density as humans. If you want to test a gun on a body, you shoot a pig.”
Ms. Alana’s face is illuminated by low candlelight as we take a drink in the semi-darkness. Her face looks both beautiful and decrepit at the same time.
“This is a place of the dead,” Ms. Alana says thick-tongued, too drunk to have any emotion or bitterness, a hollowness which seems to thud. “You never imagine the future when you are old and have lost everything. I live with guests in my house and have become their servant, fulfilling their needs and desires and endless requests. We used to own land. We had servants. . .”
The candle light dances in reflection off the glass frames of portraits and photographs spanning the ages like fire in the cave.
“Drink!” Ms. Alana barks, and in one jerking movement, I take the vodka I don’t really want to drink anymore and absorb it into my bloodstream. I should have thrown it over my shoulder. She wouldn’t have noticed if I threw it past her head.
“I was once a beautiful young woman, with a proud husband, a loving son. You don’t imagine the future. You don’t think you will be the one with no one to help you. We live in a museum. Look at the photographs. Look how they smile. They don’t know what will happen to them. And now here we are looking at them. Are we not the same?”
“They say time moves in a spiral.”
“History is full of mistakes,” Ms. Alana sighs and pours herself another drink. I see her face both young and old in the candle. I see her traveling as that young, stunning beauty with a diary wrapped in rosaries and going from the misty jungle mountains of Laos to the wintry empire of the U.S.S.R. She’s a good student who keeps a low profile, but still has enough adventure to keep her skin glowing rosy in the Moscow nights. She wants to live in snow forever so her skin will become white. She speaks fluent Russian, Chinese, and English, among her studies of classics and mathematics. She is arranged to marry her father’s favorite captain, back then so dashing and brave, and then broken by the war. He died of whisky.
“Life was beautiful back then,” Ms. Alana trails distantly.
Suddenly I feel something tickling my thigh. For a moment I freeze, thinking it’s some kind of tarantula that comes out to hunt birds at night. But the thing seems to move about clumsily, fumbling for my zipper.
What? It can’t be!
But it is.
I look up to see Ms. Alana, eyes half-shaded, ready to show me some photos she doesn’t keep on the wall, glamour shots on bedcovers in a one-piece teddy that hides her belly and stretch marks. She smiles and breathes so noisily I’m afraid she’ll wake up her kickboxing son, snoring audibly from a near distance. Is this what happens? Right after that romantic story about her childhood in Russia? Can someone make these beads a little thicker? Or perhaps, soundproof?
I’m pretty sure I squeak at that moment, accepting a final drink to lubricate the moment. We are both drenched in lubricant. Slogged, really. I take the shot as a means of courage, a foolhardy decision. The vodka sits stagnant in my stomach since the last shot, burning away my organs like battery acid. I feel an earthquake.
I run into the spiraling maze-like darkness and search in panic and pure instinct, using what little moonlight there is available to locate an acceptable place to puke.
“Think about it. If 20 percent of Americans get their passport, that means that less than 20 percent of Americans are traveling the world. They don’t even know what they want control of,” a French-Canadian girl was saying to me in a bar back in Shanghai.
I empty out my guts in a dark room and pray to the god of bed and breakfasts that it’s the bathroom. I wouldn’t want them giving me a poor rating and writing disapproving notes on my behavior. “Guest left a MESS in the prayer room. Did NOT clean, but instead fled the scene. DO NOT RECOMMEND!”
“Hey! I gave you a 4.5-star rating!”
I come out of the bathroom and feel Ms. Alana looming behind me. I feel her grab me and nibble on my ear whispering, “I want to eat you,” in a Russian accent, running her tongue over my earlobe, tasting me. She pats me on the ass and disappears in the darkness, and still all I feel is her tongue in my ear, that hot breath that feels more like the kiss of a lioness. I wake up with my head in the bidet.