As soon as you arrive in Vang Vieng, you know you’re there even without ever having been. There’s no mystery about it as your van slows to a crawl and lightly honks girls in bikinis out of the way. Heaps of drunken Aussies roaming about in search of god knows what, phrases like “Get Fucked” and “I’m a Cunt” finger-painted in rainbow all over their bodies.
The protest against Candidate Dim broke down fairly quickly once it was announced he had gone on to Vientiane. A few zealots claimed they would follow him there and put up road blocks for some reason, but the mob soon dispersed and the morning got started as the first bottles of the day cracked open and plastic buckets were filled with liquid love.
“We’ll protest him anyway,” we cried, hoisting our buckets, convinced we had somehow won this exchange. It was a happy day for R.E.I.N. I never saw any of them again.
The sun is high; the air is warm. Jacky appears with another red plastic bucket sloshing about with four straws. We each take two and hit the bucket, sipping away like two honeybees on an overgrown blossom. The buckets are endless, a never-ending cocktail, a drinker’s mansion wrapped in plastic, leading toward your final transformation as a beast. The idea is to get smashed immediately. Soon enough, I’ll be dancing around in my trunks, and there’s nothing I can do about it. It’s only a matter of time before the juice hits me and makes me understand this.
“Stop looking around! You’ve got to feel it!” Jacky cries.
“I am feeling it!” I say, and start chugging the bucket over the rim.
“If I don’t have anyone to dance with, I need you to be my dancing partner!” she says over the music, never missing a beat.
“I’ll do my best!” I say, and do my best impression of whatever Paprika and Maya are doing next to us, laughing happily in matching sunglasses, tangoing up on a platform.
There beside the sparkling river is the lush green and clear blue sky of a summer that never ends. Here and there I catch glimpses of that crazy vision: a place of music, sunshine, and peace welcoming all people, free from class or occupation, a communist paradise with each man to his own and all as one, here on the river Vang Vieng. Here comes the traveling man and the wandering woman, in perfect harmony, anarchy, strangers, friends, bedfellows, soulmates who arrive with no invitation needed, no reason to live, and therefore none to die for either, which to the members of R.E.I.N. means to simply live without regret, in defiance of time, ignorant of death.
None of us will ever die here. Not us. We’ll grab a bucket and pour it back endlessly as if trying to make ourselves spout out the truth in a confession somewhere down a long line of bars so far you can’t even remember what time it is. And finally at the height of all the endless chatter, the noise of screaming conversations, laughing and yelling and being brought to the most basic words that still contain any meaning, the aping of primitive language only to say, “Hey! Let’s procreate!” The music so loud you can’t even hear anything. You simply smile at the one across from you. She’s dancing and acting to your surprise sort of reserved, aware, looking for someone. She smiles to herself and shakes her head back and forth, dancing without having to try to be sexy; she just is. She puts her hands in the air and twists her hips, claps her hands, pumps her fist, and laughs as you grind up on her. Where will we be when the sun dies? They throw you in until finally you feel nothing, fly into the water, land in a tube, and float away to the next bar. . .
Soon we’re adrift in the river of floating people; all of them, like me, holding their precious drinks, splashing along in tubes, gently paddling toward the ropes cast nearby, grabbing hold, and letting the bartenders pull them up. It’s a strict catch and release system. You let yourself be caught, and when you’re ready to move on, you release yourself. There are several ways of doing this. The preferred methods are by zipline, trapeze, or rope swing. Not all recommended for beginners, of course. You can almost tell how long a guy has been traveling based on one extraordinary dive. Most people land badly, being unskilled, drunk, and overambitious. No one seems content with a simple cannonball into the water unless they’re still sober. No one is sober. Once the punch has them, they go flying in at all angles and directions, and the splash, while appearing painful, is completely drowned out by the blasting music, making it even more surreal as people dance around with drunks awkwardly flying into the water behind them.
So much color and inspiration. What would Mr. Yellow have thought of this? Girls with tanned bodies laid out in the sun with flowers painted on their thighs and stomachs. A sea of absinthe. More finger-painted messages. “Jesus was a Jew” on a freckle-faced Irishman. “Paint is Gay” on another guy’s back. What are these? Zen koans? I used to have the power to discern such messages. Now they only point me to my drink. How many have I had? I notice I’ve lost Jacky. There she is, shouting the happy cries of “Oh my god! What are you doing here?” Some guy she knows. Looks like an old flame. I decide to fall off the planks when I feel a hand clasp my shoulder.
“Jergen!”
I turn and see my fellow agent holding a beer, still dripping wet from the river. I almost hug him I’m so glad to see him. A group of singing Brits passes by.
“Where the hell have you been? Candidate Dim’s on his way to Vientiane! We’ve gotta stop him!”
“Stop him? From doing what?” Jergen asks blissfully, drunk and possibly high on ecstasy.
“Damn it! You’ve been compromised. Don’t even tell me. I already know who. Where is he?”
“Candidate Dim?”
“The agent who gave you the pill. Was it Jack? Dressed up as one of these raver kids, I bet.”
“I got it from Waldo.”
“Waldo?”
“Yes, there he is. Over there.”
I turn and look past the volleyball court and see him, that nefarious double agent handing out blue pills to make agents forget their mission. He’s dressed from top to bottom like that ubiquitous beatnik, hiding amongst the crowd of half-naked bodies, that red and white striped shirt, glasses, and beanie. In a way, he was our teacher, the one who taught us everything we knew about hiding in plain sight. I hate the idea that I now have to take him out, but I decide to wait until he’s done motorboating.
“What lies inside the mind of a person who packs their luggage with a Waldo disguise?” I ask Jergen as we watch Waldo pour shots from a bottle of vodka surrounded by Swedish swimsuit models, burying his face in their tits.
“A genius we cannot understand,” Jergen says.
“It’s too late, isn’t it?” I ask him.
“It’s still early,” Jergen replies, glancing at a wristwatch that isn’t there, replaced by a tan line.
“I meant for us. This dream. Vang Vieng.”
“It’s happening already. Look.”
I follow his long point finger towards the river where already the evidence of Candidate Dim’s presence is found: a fast food burger wrapper.
We walk over to the water and fish it out with a stick, ignoring the splashing bodies around us, the partiers dancing and trying to throw each other in.
“That’s one of his,” Jergen confirms, eyeing the specimen hanging from the end of the stick. “Tarantula Burger from the looks of it.”
“So it begins,” I say solemnly, taking a moment to soak in the as-yet unspoiled beauty of the river, the painterly reflections of splashy sunlight sparkling blue and green.
“It had already begun, long before we came here. Trust me. There’s nothing we could’ve done,” Jergen comments prophetically.
“What are you talking about? Are you saying he’s—”
“No, I’m not talking about Candidate Dim. I’m talking about us. This revolution. We never had a chance. All we had was a moment in history. To unite and stand against someone, to fight for something. A way to reassure ourselves that there was good in this world, and that we could stand there and fight for it. But what is good? Are we good because we say so? What gives us the right to say what we are and what he is? We have no foundation, no history, no mythology. We look at the world as a narrative of uprising, a denial of gods, a protest against our forefathers. We have no ancestry. We have no link. All we have is this blank sheet of paper that says ‘Utopia,’ and a pencil we give ourselves to draw it.
“What do you think guides us but our highest esteems, this worship of freedom? Are we not slaves to our own desires? How can we know purpose when morality becomes an invention of our mind? We pick and choose at our own convenience. Our hunger becomes a reward. Candidate Dim and all the others like him have already won because they believe in something, as shallow and corrupt as it is, while we deny any absolutes and embrace the transient. Our truth is just a feeling. Soon we will be buying Bug Burgers and moving on to the next outrage. But when the revolution is co-opted and branded into the next commercial catchphrase, don’t give credit to their overwhelming strength. Instead weep over our crippling weakness. Nihilism is dead, and we have killed it.”
We stand there by the shade tree watching the scene of afternoon delight pass by carefree while at our backs lies the hot intrusive breath of apocalypse.
“I thought you were supposed to be all carefree and happy on that stuff,” I say finally.
“I’m Norwegian. This is me being happy.”
A little later, Jergen disappears to get another drink and doesn’t return. “I need some air,” I say to myself. Then I realize I’m outside.
A Lao guy hands me a rope, and without thinking, I swing. The sudden splash into the water snaps me out of my daze. I grab a stray tube and glide away in the flow of the current. I lie back and close my eyes, no longer sure what belongs to me. My soul, my body, my mind. I’m just another note in the music, written upon the radiant sheets, all these floating donuts playing melody, dotting a river of sheet music as we pass in a stream. I suddenly want to escape, find a sense of peace, become a monk, and receive enlightenment under a Buddha tree. How can I deny my mission without a sense of regret? Fishers of men lift me out of the waters. A cloud passes over and darkens the sun.
I feel her hands suddenly spin me around, but as I’m already spinning, I dip into a windmill and almost break my neck. Jacky pulls me up onto my feet and shouts so I can hear.
“HAVING FUN?”
I feel myself nodding, floating in the air. My smile stretches so wide it feels like my cheeks are about to tear. My teeth grind against each other in a ghastly fashion.
Did Waldo spike my drink?
I turn back and see him at the bar, his bespectacled face laughing at me.
Damn it! I’ve been compromised!
“LET’S GET YOU SOME WATER!” Jacky says, shouting so I can hear.
“OKAY!” I hear myself say, but there’s only this beat that drives the symphony, that drives the life, that drives the whole damned river!
I’m afraid to leave now, feeling as if I have found the source of all this life around us, so beautiful, so idyllic, so crazy, wild, and free.
Water’s a good idea. Pretty sure I’m dying.
“I’m sorry,” I say to Jacky as we sit down and I chug a bottle of water.
“Sorry for what?”
“Making you do this. You go on. Have fun. I’ll see you in the morning.”
“I knew I’d have to take care of you.”
“It was Waldo! He’s a double agent! He’s working for the feds!”
She touches my forehead, almost motherly, but drunker.
“You’re such a nice boy. Why doesn’t anyone try to keep you?”
“Do you want to dance?”
“No, let’s do something better!” Jacky cries, eyes blazing. “Let’s go mud-wrestle! Come on!”
She grabs my hand and off we go to the mud pits where a few friendly matches are already in play. Lao guys stand off to the side with buckets of water ready to make more mud. I squish on the scene like a jellyfish. It feels like I have no legs. I’m not talking landmines here. I resist the urge to rub it all over my body.
Jacky skips the warmup and approaches me, hands out in a convincing pose, daring me to make the first move. What am I supposed to do? Tackle her? She has no idea what I’m capable of. I make a little mudball instead and toss it at her feet, expecting this to lead to some amorous grappling. She charges like a rhino, scoops me in a judo toss, and stands over my fallen body like Muhammad Ali.
“I dated an MMA fighter,” she boasts.
I execute a takedown, which she blocks impressively, and pretty soon we’re just rolling around in the mud. I feel her skin soft, cold, and wet, now growing warmer, that little space between our bodies which becomes no space, just her lying on top of me, that feeling as if the clay is baking, the fire raging in the kiln, and both of us know I’m not making a giraffe in there, but something seems to be taking form. She sits on top of me, dominating me, for what purpose, I still don’t know. Are we traveling in the same direction, or have we just not found another place to go? I see her smiling less mischievously now. Her blue-green eyes capturing the sun, her dirty gold hair hanging down in my face.
Rising from the muck, we laugh as I chase her around from bar to bar and I stalk her as she weaves in and among the people, appearing like someone and then reappearing as someone else. Smiling, laughing at being caught, I almost have her cornered for a drink before she slips away again. The last bar I see her at she’s wearing a flower in her hair. A plumeria, her favorite. “Where’d you get that?” I ask her. “Someone gave it to me,” she says and lets me hold her hand. Suddenly my hand is cold and wet. The moment she lets you take hold, she jumps in. You have to go with her.
I know she’s impossible to capture, impossible to hold, like that flower you find on dilapidated streets that somehow seems like a glimmering door. The moment you pluck it, it’s already faded. No way to return. We’re separated on the river, and I find myself headed down the rushing rapids while she sails on slowly, looking back at me and shouting, “Where you going?” But I have no idea.
Jostled along some bumps downriver, I eventually find myself far from the noise, away from the bars and the people and the music. The echo of bass quickly fades into the stirring buzz of insects and babbling stream. I float on my tube down a channel surrounded by grass and canopied by jungle trees. The hidden hollow seems to send drones to spy on me. Dragonflies helicopter around me, taking photos and sending them back to headquarters. Even in a paradise formed from the imagination and desires of the heart, to defeat the lonely darkness, the bird-calls that inspire music as we make love beneath the archetypal windows, we still have this place of silence away and down the river where we belong.
How many of us disappear into the forest only to walk alone? Which of us will survive in the end? What echoes of genetic bravery are left in those wanderers? Surely they find someone to love and settle or simply leave and forever become a shadow on the wall. And then they grow up. Their seed becomes a legacy of lostness, and that desire to range across mountains and float down rivers stays deep in us still. What makes us wander from the fire? From the beat of the drums? Who’s here in the presence of the silence of the trees, and the infinite days when there is no one left? The universe keeps dividing itself in half, and yet the only world I live in is this one.
To impregnate a planet, the full moon of a woman, this alien invasion sending all of a million and one ships in three bursts of blast-off. White sails gliding through the water. How can I save the natives without destroying what we have? What appendages can we make when we don’t like the future? Create a monster, and make amendments to the document until it reads as insane. Into the girl’s arms, into an unraveling of culture, unwrapping myself from my own preconditioning. The last waning bows of sunshine stone me quietly that shimmering orange towards the horizon. Let me be the sky that remembers all pink and nostalgic while looking at something new.
I feel the jolt of my tube hitting and scraping the sloping side of the riverbank. I sit up, turn, and look around me and see a bamboo shack by the water, the limestone hills rolling in the distance, a dirt road that leads through the grasses back to Vang Vieng. A young woman tends the kitchen as her little boys play about in the front. A dog sits curled in the dirt, gnawing some bones, getting shooed by the broom on its backside as I approach the simple wooden table. I order spicy chicken salad, sticky rice, and beer. Bob Marley sings in the background and everything is calm. Everything seems still, the sun frozen there in the middle of the sky in its lazy descent behind the palm trees.