The next morning, I wait for the bus to Siem Reap and watch the morning scene by the river. A father stands knee-deep in the blue river, sloshing buckets of water onto his shiny blue motorbike. A mother washes her two boys as they laugh and dance naked under the torrents. The morning light creeps into cracks and crevices, illuminating the edges of blurry buildings. The mist quickly fades as 80s rock comes bursting forth and a dream machine rolls in from the heavens. This tangerine dream hums with no need for introduction. This is the one. Hop on. The fuzzy beast holds me in great arms of comfort. Now this is more like it!
“They didn’t skimp out on us this time, did they boys?” I whoop for joy and elbow the thin elderly man seated beside me. He smiles with a thousand little crinkles like cracks in a building at sunrise. I point at his scarf, giving him a thumbs-up. A blue-checkered pattern, the cross between bandana and a turban.
“Krama,” the old man says, and pulls out its red-checkered twin, rolls it up in a way that I will never repeat, and places it upon my head.
Orange dirt road, fields of tall grass swaying endlessly into the flat horizon beyond. Basin life. We pass a home set back in the fields and pick up this young guy standing at the wooden gate with a huge grin on his face and his whole family behind him, seeing him off as he takes that first step into the world. One day he will return, and they will see a change in his eyes, a gaze like two mirrors reflecting distant suns on top of that old familiar smile, that look of innocence explaining the misadventures of his journey, the mysteries which lay beyond the river, over the mountains, and deep in a glassy neon wilderness, if only he could find the words to make them understand how beautiful, terrible, and strange. But today, he only begins his journey. Who knows when he’ll come back again? Will he remember this moment as he should? As she will, growing up without her big brother around? Will he still be the same? Will he talk about things no one understands and feel alien until he finally runs back into that glass-refracted oasis where she knew he should never have gone in the first place? Rain-filled windows writing to baby sister that he’s okay. The naked babies watch from the shade as the tangerine dream disperses the dust, and suddenly he is not there. There is a stillness from the birds and insects observing his passing, and then vibrations remain.
The young man finds his seat and tries to contain his excitement, not wanting to make it so obvious that he’s nothing more than a country bumpkin who’s hardly left his village. But that all changes now. He’ll make mistakes in the beginning, show his wonder too easily before his eyes harden into steel and he becomes wary and suspicious of everything. He’ll know how to order a cocktail and keep himself from getting cut in line. He’ll bring air-conditioning into their world as he feels it here in this electric fabric, the whole caboodle vibrating as if in ascension, never climaxing, just staying there. The theater-like seats keep everyone in deep immersion, dark and fancy lighting along the aisles, a Thai-pop karaoke video playing softly, but loud enough so that you can’t tune it out without your own personal immersion equipment, of which I have none.
The song is a ballad, a specialization in sudden bursts of reckless emotion, spiced with English tropes of “I love you,” “I need you,” and “Baby come back to me” on top of Thai lyrics. Singing from his white piano in the middle of a windswept field, our hero, dressed in a long purple coat that flies in the wind, bangs away at the keys and sees a gallery of images starting from the moment he first laid eyes on her, one night in the library as he studied an old leather-bound edition of Romeo and Juliet, dressed in a silken pirate shirt, when suddenly there she was, her pretty face visible through a space between the shelves, pure as the driven snow, red lips softly reading, completely unaware that he is staring at her intensely from what seems like mere inches away.
Her books fall to the ground and they both reach down to pick them up. Their hands touch. They look up. He doesn’t even have the decency to apologize for “bumping into her” before placing two fingers gently beneath her chin, lifting her head up as they both rise now in duet, abandoning the books altogether, because really, who gives a shit? He caresses her cheek and they mysteriously transition into scenes of autumn, walking hand in hand beneath the yellow, red, and orange leaves. The scene of autumn bliss is short-lived. Now in an all-white suit topped with a sable coat, he’s playing an ice-piano in his snow-mansion of loneliness, and I begin to understand that all he wants is to feel cold. I see them walking in autumn, leaves like stars drifting around their smiling faces, little puffs of breath indicating the low temperature, and understand the deepest dreams of dreamers in the jungle.
Tarantulas stacked everywhere. Giant crickets, too. I don’t know how these people manage to catch these critters, but certainly their abominable size has something to do with it. There they are, staring at your from their massive girth and their 50 or so unblinking, dead black eyes. Some lackey is given the job of wiping all of the sweet and sour sauce from their peepers. Helps sales when you can see your mirror-reflected image 50 times right before you polish off the head in one last bite — Burp! — comb your hair and leave.
As I stand there flabbergasted, wondering if this is someone’s idea of a sick joke, I hear someone say in American English, “Crazy, dog. These bugs are going to be the next thing, dog. I’m telling you.”
I turn my head and meet Victor, a mildly excitable 30-something-year-old with a conspiracy theory and a dream, born in Phnom Penh, his accent Cambodia Town, Long Beach, returning now to his homeland, for good, it seems.
We share noodles at a rest stop in the middle of somewhere dusty and bushy and green. Shacks and concrete buildings, sparse and sporadic, on the way to the capital. Victor tells me how, despite being somewhat successful (well, not really) in America, he gave it all up to chase the eight-legged dream of spider meat.
“This world ain’t gonna last forever, dog. We need to get on top of this shit. You know how many forests we cut down to let cows feed? How are we even going to breathe? How are we going to live? And all just to put a steak on your plate and a burger between two shitty pieces of bread. That ain’t right.”
“Yeah man, I don’t know,” I agree noncommittally.
“Man, soon people are going to wake up. They’re gonna like, be all healthy and open-minded. Shit, we’ve been eating bugs for centuries. It’s not impossible to like it. Did you try one yet?”
Gulp.
I feel my stomach drop in response. I wonder if they could take it out of the shell or something, smother it with mayonnaise. An arachnid aioli on top of some fried chicken, lots of iceberg lettuce to create a nice buffer between my tongue and the spider meat. Isn’t that Candidate Dim’s recipe? The cartoon spider grinning and holding up a grotesque eight “thumbs up” at the drive-thru. Serenaded by a giant cricket playing a fiddle as you receive your food. “Thanks for eating open-minded! Please come back soon!”
Here you are standing before your spider selection as this fool you no longer wish to call a friend stands there expecting you to be open-minded. “Seriously, dog,” I want to say, throwing his Californian all back in his face, “why do you have to put me in this position?” But I know he’ll just get defensive, this being his stupid dream, not mine. You go ahead and eat spiders all you want. I won’t judge you for it. Just don’t make me have to stand here and be a part of it. I’ll just think secret thoughts in my head. You do whatever the hell you want. Just keep that leg out of my — Ahh! Ahh! It’s on my lips! It’s on my fucking lips! Oh god! Fuck! Help! — Hey! — Okay. . . Alright. . . I see what you’re doing there. . . Just went in with that special sauce? . . . I get it. . . Cause otherwise it’d be unpalatable. . . I see where you’re going with this. . .
I eat 10 of them. I’m stuffed with spider legs. One of them might have been fresh off the ground. Before we part ways, Victor tells me about Angkor Wat, which he makes a pilgrimage to once a year.
“Just pick any room, dog. And don’t just look at the buildings. Look at the carvings. They didn’t just make this shit for their kings. They made this for their gods.”