Before dawn I went to find Mau at Psar Tuol Tom Pong. The drivers sitting on their motos and tuk tuks outside the market said, He’s not here yet.
I asked them, How long to drive to Ang Tasom?
A young man with a good moto said, The road to Ang Tasom has many holes, very slow, dancing road. My friend can take you in a car.
How long does it take in a car?
A half day, borng srei. Not long. Faster in a car. I will give you a good price.
When Mau arrived I said, I want you to help me find him. I want you to take me to Ang Tasom.
Mau said, This is not good, borng srei. Even if you find him, what can you do?
I said, If I do not find him, how can I live?
Two drivers who were listening stepped forward and Mau stood up. He said, Okay, I will take you. My wife has family there. I cannot promise but I will try. I need money for gas.
He left me at Will’s, then went to tell Ary. I ran upstairs to Will’s room.
I heard Will get out of bed and when he opened the door he was still slipping one arm through the sleeve of a dirty yellow T-shirt. He said, Anne, people say anything for a dollar. Even if it is true, they want him disappeared.
He was barefoot and his hair was tangled and there were smudges under his eyes.
You look terrible.
Thank you. I just got to bed.
I can see. I am leaving now. Come with me. Come, you can sleep on the way.
What makes you think they’ll
let
you find him?
I have already started to find him. They have no right to hide him.
No one has rights here. You are not going to find him. It’s not gonna happen.
It already
is
happening.
Anne, two tourists got pulled off a train and shot in Kep this week. People are going missing. The embassies won’t help. The banks are closed. I’m not screwing with this government.
Fine. I am not begging. Even if you offered to come, I wouldn’t let you.
Will looked out and saw Mau down below. He was beating dust from the yellow fringe, had extra gas in two Fanta bottles under the seat. Will turned to me, said, Why Mau? Why not a four-wheel-drive with some air-con? Why not a car with windows that open and close?
I said, A moto never gets stuck. I trust Mau. He knows people there.
Will shrugged, said, Wait a minute.
He packed a small rucksack, threw in some bottles of water,
found his shoes, tied a krama around his neck. He said, There are things people regret not doing. I don’t think this would have been one of them.
When Mau saw Will get in the remorque he smiled and pulled down his Chicago Cubs cap, slipped his bike into gear and cut into the slow motion traffic, past an oxcart piled with wood, past a white Toyota van. The swaying fringe behind Will’s head looked like an old-fashioned lampshade.
A prayer bird flew up from a temple. Over the riverbanks were vultures, and circling above the eddying river a falcon. I said to Will, We should make it in less than a day. Maybe by tonight I will know what happened.
Will said, There are many wonders in the world. But none so wonderful as a human being.
Along the quay two street sweepers already worked in the cool of morning, kritsh, kritsh, bent creatures making a few riel a day, their straw brooms herding eternal dust. One stopped to make an offering under a tree. What did she pray for? Who would I pray to? I believe in no god but I burn incense and give food to the dead, to the monks, repeat old prayers. It is not necessary to complete the work, but neither are we free to desist from it. I watched some red-collared doves pecking on the pavement and heard a cuckoo-shrike in a tree down the quay.
The Phnom Penh we were leaving was subdued. Former leaders were disappearing across the border, the government demanded uncontested victory, everyone was trying to protect interests, secrets, the world looked away so that things could appear to be free, all solutions delicate, political, violent.
As we rolled through the streets we watched early morning people hasten along. In craving. In need. All over Phnom Penh
people were waking and rubbing their eyes, making ready to survive another day. Through a window I watched a woman wipe and swaddle her baby. The older children had to do for themselves.
On the river, rusty pocket freighters, fishermen poling along the shores, a police boat already roaring by.
I watched the waking city and prayed for you to be alive.
Will touched my leg and pointed with his eyes to a young woman walking up a side street, hand resting lightly on the arm of a child. I could not see her face, only her thin, erect back. Will said, There’s Sineth. As we drove by I turned to see the woman with the beautiful lips from Seeing Hands, her face without eyes or nose, the flattened patched skin graft scarred tight to her forehead and her lips. She walked gracefully, and Will said, She’s going to work. I was supposed to go say goodbye to her today.
Long ago, when they emptied Phnom Penh, closed the borders, people remembered things, the last time they slept in a bed, the last time they saw a loved one. There was that last telegram out of Phnom Penh before all lines to the outside world were cut:
I ALONE IN POST OFFICE. LOSING CONTACT WITH OTHERS. I AM TREMBLING. HOW QUIET THE STREETS. NOWHERE TO HIDE. MAY BE LAST CABLE TODAY AND FOREVER
.
Calm when the end is near. Calm, from the word for heat.
Kathen festival. Outside the city, everywhere people made offerings for merit. Tables in front of the temples, tinny loudspeakers blaring, hands and baskets outstretched for alms. Monks stayed in monasteries through the rainy season and wore their old robes until the people brought them new ones on the last day of Kathen. Dirt and cleansing. Death and rebirth. Wet season and dry. After we crossed the agitated river, temple music mixed into the dust of the road.
What I have left is sand running through the narrow opening of an hourglass, grains falling, and falling again, and falling again, like a stick beating someone to death, and never stopping and never disappearing.
At the first pagoda gate, Mau got off his moto and looked down the path toward the temple. A monk appeared and Mau offered him some worn riel from his thin pocket. I asked the ajah to bless our remorque and our journey. I tied a krama over my nose and mouth against the dust as country women do.
Fifteen kilometers out of Phnom Penh, the first market. Ropes of meat hung from bamboo poles under the thatch roofs of the sausage stalls. Steam rose from pots of boiling water and
orange coolers hid bottles of colored sugar water and Coke. Small tables and kitchen chairs were tucked under the shade for hungry travelers.
Twenty-four kilometers farther, the flats and dikes. Mau worked hard to keep us out of the ruts and mud. Soon now, nothing but paddies of green rice shoots stretching to the horizon, bits of scrubby bush and sugar palms, blue shadows of mountains in the west. No one but farmers and their oxen. Will rolled a joint and offered it to me. I stared at the paddies and felt the hot air on my toes. We bumped past skinny, barefoot kids not in school, past people cooking food to sell, wiping the leaves of money plants near their stalls. My mind slowed and spread against the wide fields.
Why do some people live a comfortable life and others live one that is horror-filled? What part of ourselves do we shave off so we can keep on eating while others starve? If women, children, and old people were being murdered a hundred miles from here, would we not run to help? Why do we stop this decision of the heart when the distance is three thousand miles instead of a hundred? I stared as far as the Elephant Mountains. I liked the road, moving, being nowhere.
Will leaned back, eyes half closed.
I said, How do you measure time?
He said without opening his eyes, By how long it takes to get stoned.
At home I used to measure time by when I first heard the song of the white-throated sparrow in spring. How long does it take a body to go cold?
Will frowned, Can you not just relax for even one moment?
I laughed.
I was a warrior, stoned, sleepless, heading for battle. Looking to recover lost comrades. Being a warrior is easier than waiting. Going to war is easier than talking.
Will said without opening his eyes, Only a couple of hours, less usually.
We bounced like seeds in a rattle.
I rolled a cigarette with one hand to amuse Will, lit it and handed it forward to Mau, who nodded without taking his eyes off the road, the scar on his cheek folding in two as he smoked. What did it mean to him to drive foreigners on errands he himself would never do? A dead dog rotted in a ditch. Ignorance, craving, wrong views. I have all of these. I cannot free myself from desire. I want to know. Will stared at me and I thought, I am not pretty anymore. I have gone yellow from childdeath and grief and I have become a boneless shadow. I said to Will, What do you see? He said, That this moment is good enough.
We hit a big rock and bounced and we both laughed. The dope made the wind slow down.
I had opened my whole body to you. I heard no groan of work above me, only pleasure and relief. You said once that my love released you from wishing you were dead and I believed you.
Mau stopped for a group of villagers crossing the road, pushing a house on stilts. They rolled it on four-wheeled platforms. Men pulled and pushed, ropes over bare shoulders, children ran barefoot alongside carrying sticks. In the sway of a stilt house people learn to move lightly. A woman rolling over in her sleep can sway a stilt house. A boy climbing up the steps
with a heavy load can sway a stilt house. Even the wind sways a stilt house. Now the house swayed across the road, pushed and pulled by the villagers, like a traveling carnival with clowns and trained animals and acrobats and brightly robed women and barefoot men.
Will?
Yeah?
Do you think he is alive?
Do you want the truth?
Not right now.
I leaned back and felt the heat in my hair.
Another thirty kilometers down the road, a pair of three-meter-tall Kathen puppets with papier-mâché heads and pursed lip smiles and round eyes blocked the way. Enormous papiermâché hands sliced through the air on long sticks under orange and green shirts, collecting alms for the monks. Long dresses covered the puppet bodies down to their ankles, and wide feet in sandals poked out below. The puppets swayed and reached out their hands in the middle of the road. A scatter of people ran alongside the puppets like chickens, laughing and touching the puppet dresses. Mau wanted to drive around them but they blocked the road and forced us to stop.
The male puppet stepped forward and received the money I handed to him. Everyone laughed. The female puppet walked beside the remorque reaching her hand in for more. Will jumped up and shouted in a terrible accent, Bawng! Bawng srei! and the crowd grew excited. He took the puppet hand and vaulted out onto the road, reached up and took the other hand and started to dance. Children laughed and Will called out in English to me, Look! I’m dancing for merit in the next life.
Then he dropped the puppet hand and fell back clutching his face and yelled, Aowww. My tooth! My tooth!
He twisted his head from one side to another and moaned. He fell on his knees in front of the male puppet and begged in English, Help me! Help me! I’ve got a horrible toothache.
The toes under the puppet spread in his sandals. The puppet knew a clown when he saw one and he reached out his hand for more alms and everyone laughed. The female puppet knelt down, swaying at the waist, reaching out both hands to hold Will’s head. The crowd sighed. And the male puppet chanted a nonsense riddle:
When no judge stretches out his hand to take a coin
When every case in law is righted
When no child is found alone in an alley
When no monk takes alms from a politician
When a woman lives outside the home
And no spirit roams unburied
Then shall the world
Come to great confusion.
Then comes the time we see not yet
Of future prophecy, we live before this time.
A child ran up to the remorque and put a sweet smelling white-yellow romdoul flower in my hand. Mau called Will, Come. We must arrive before dark. As we drove away, I watched the people grow smaller in the red dust. I will never see them again, I thought. I will forget these people and they will forget me, just more barang passing through their festival. When I was young I thought I would remember everything, and now I know that
people lose things in the sand and that how we tell the past and how we use the past are unconnected.
You loved the Kathen puppets. You might have explained their strange song. You knew me when my laughter hid nothing. Things do not suddenly happen to us. Things happen step by step.
I studied the red earth. I counted trees to keep awake, umbrella trees and mango trees and peacock trees. Then the road disappeared.
Memory is a bit of light on a winter wall. Yesterday while I was writing I met a distant cousin I had not seen since childhood. She had my father’s mouth. Our daughter had your mouth. The travel that single day was so slow, bumping along kilometer by kilometer. And then we came to the gulley where the road disappeared and I got out of the remorque and stumbled and dropped the flower I had crushed in my palm.
The bridge broke under a truck loaded with concrete. At the bottom of the gulley, a stream ran through the cab. Bags of concrete mix were scattered down the riverbank and men were tossing what was still dry away from the water.
Will stretched stiffly, looked at the broken bridge, said, I am asking myself why the hell I came on this trip.
The truck driver’s head was wrapped in bloody cotton strips. People stared. He walked in circles. Someone handed him water to drink but he shook his head and said, My truck.
I said to Will, Here is safe if you don’t count landmines or holes in the road the size of moon craters or bridges that collapse or people who disappear.