by Nick Seeley
Senn is my connection to Phnom Penh’s gay mafia. It’s a strange little world: open enough to those in the know, invisible to everyone else. Cambo isn’t known for tolerance—but most Khmers wouldn’t recognize a screaming queen if one tried to pick their pocket, so Senn and his friends can vogue all they want, as long as the sex stays behind closed doors. In their back-stair bars and secret house parties, princes and sons of high officials rub shoulders (and other things) with boys right out of the provinces. Senn himself is the offspring of some big hoo-ha in the customs department. He has a degree in eighteenth-century French literature from the Sorbonne and no brothers, which means he’s stuck here—useless at any local job, and forever complaining about the new anticorruption laws eating away at his family’s income.
“Honey trap,” I say. “I gotta get him somewhere we can do a little photo shoot. Got any ideas?”
Senn feigns shock. “You want me to out a brother? Tu me prends pour une racaille, ou—”
“It’s not for the papers. Someone wants info from Daddy and is willing to pay well for compromising pictures of the kid.”
“C’est ça—pour finir en petits morceaux dans un sac plastique au fond de la Tonlé Sap.”
I get the gist—something about dismemberment. “That’s the client’s problem.”
He sips his drink again, lost in thought. “With Charlie’s taste in boys, I’d say we’d have to use you as the bait. But that’s no good, with your face looking like something from Sophocles.” He pauses, lips pursed. “I know a guy, if you’ve got the place. But we have to do it very soon. Garçon—”
He screams for more drinks. The band strikes up “Eternal Flame.”
This can’t possibly end well.
* * *
The river’s bank is quiet. Saturday is somewhere else tonight. A few lifers droop outside the pizza joints. In the murky water, a splash and a shout, and the smell of it wafts over: urine, garbage that’s been in the sun too long. The lights in the Edge are bright and yellow. I can see Channi smiling at me from behind the bar. Go in.
“Your face better.”
“Give it time. It’ll get worse.”
The corners of her mouth turn down a bit as she slides me the peanuts. Laughing? Tom Waits on the stereo again.
I watch as she hands out beers and talks up the one other lonely punter in her broken English, Tom growling away behind her. She says she’s nineteen, but the girls all know that’s the magic number. From her face I might almost believe it, but her eyes say different. She could have five years on that, or fifteen—but they weren’t all easy.
She watches me watching as she brings my drink.
“What you work?” she asks. Serious.
“I take pictures.”
“Where you camera?”
“Someone threw it off a roof.”
“They no like pictures?”
I laugh. “Guess not.”
She’s silent a minute. “You no like take pictures.”
“I used to,” I say, surprising myself. “Guess I don’t anymore.”
“What you do now?”
“I’m looking for a girl.”
I realize this sounds like a come-on, but she takes it as meant, her brow lining with concern. “What happen her?”
I shake my head. “She’s lost.”
Channi’s huge eyes are locked on me, expectant. I didn’t want to think about this. Don’t want to talk about it, so I reach for something else. “Do you like Tom Waits?” I ask, switching to Khmer.
“I’m in love with him,” she says, changing languages with me. She smiles, but her eyes are still worried.
“How do you know about him?”
“My friend Ruth played him for me. A long time ago. His voice was so sad. . . . He could have been Cambodian.”
I got nothing to say to that. Tom’s singing about girls who look like Cadillacs, and Channi’s fingers are lingering next to mine on the counter, like she’s waiting for me to take her hand. It’s a bar-girl move—I didn’t think she’d be the type.
I’m paying way too much attention.
The other customer has vanished, and Channi unfolds her story: the neighborhood she grew up in, out on the edge of Phnom Penh where it’s not really city, just what happens to farmland when it dies. Ruth and her folks fixed up a little school in one of the old houses—they used song lyrics to teach the girls English. Religious stuff, or pop hits if they were lucky, Celine Dion and Faith Hill. The girls loved that. But Ruth had a bit of rebel in her, and when her parents weren’t there, she’d play Tom Waits and Bob Dylan and the Eagles, and Channi fell for them because the songs were hurt and lonely and strange, and here in Cambodia we understand those things.
She was sixteen when she became a Mormon. Ruth’s parents told the girls that when they were twenty-one, they could go to the States as missionaries, and it was an easy sell.
“I wanted to see the moon in America,” Channi says. “I was sure it must be a different one to the one we have here. A whole different sky. Better, maybe.”
But she’s still here. Wonder why? Things changed after 9/11, maybe the missionaries just couldn’t deliver. Or it was the usual: a sick relative, a sister needing school fees—something she had to work for, something she couldn’t leave behind. What a number they’ve done on this girl’s head. Cambodia, the Mormons, the tourists in this damn bar—
I realize she’s taken my hand as she talks. Tom says he’s irresponsible, and he’s ruined everything he does.
“In America you never see the sky.” I drink deep. “They light up everything like it’s Water Festival all year round, and there’s nothing up top but black.”
She smiles, some sadness in her eyes I can’t understand. “Let me read your palm.” She pulls my hand across the backs of the carved snakes and studies it like an archaeologist. I take it back.
“I don’t wanna know my future.” But there’s a strange expression on her face, and I wonder what she saw. The intro to “Jersey Girl” comes on. Outside, the rain starts again.
“You want beer,” she says, in English, and slips away to get it. I feel something big and dangerous happening, just past the corners of my vision.
I don’t move. Sit hunched at the carved bar, waiting for something I can’t explain. Sip my beer.
Just until the rain stops.
* * *
Another late night.
The uneasy feeling that came over me in the Edge has followed me up the stairs to my room. I open the cage door and stand a minute, looking at the unmade bed, the white walls, the bare bookshelf. Nothing there—nothing but the journals on the desk.
My room is full of her. I’m barely here at all.
DIARY
July 11
Damn Gus, and his damned judgments and instincts. It’s one thing if he doesn’t want to listen to me, but to punish me with this picayune nonsense? I had been doing exciting stuff, with the break-in at that NGO, and then the heroin in Australia, and those customs officials getting arrested . . . I was sure I was onto something good.
But for the past week, he’s been sending me to every pointless press conference and NGO ceremony celebrating another year of achieving nothing. Now I’m spending the entire day on this press bus with a dozen Cambodian reporters, headed down to a village on the Mekong to check out some Red Cross project. . . .
The road to the southeast is pretty much a dirt track, and we had to crawl along at 15 miles per hour, rocking back and forth like a carnival ride. All around us, water country: stippled with ribbons of reeds and cattails, houses rising on stilts and tiny islands of hills. Even the poorest villages had temples: wats hundreds of years old whose roofs glistened with new yellow paint, the eyes of their giant bodhisattva faces brilliant lime-white. Religion is life, and spirits and devils are to be feared. How could it not be so?
* * *
The town, when we finally got to it, seemed to have been sucked down into the thick brown mud of the riverland. Just a few r
eed houses, poking their way through silty earth on either side of the road. We got off the bus, all the reporters’ shiny shoes squelching in the mud, and the Red Cross woman started talking in Khmer about the project, whatever it was—Samean was supposed to be translating for me, but he just stood there, smoking and occasionally chatting with a photographer from one of the Cambodian dailies. No one was listening. Perhaps there was no project. The Red Cross here is run by the prime minister’s wife, and the boy says it’s pretty much a front organization for political propaganda.
A little way up the road, a couple villagers, naked except for their kromah-sarongs, were struggling to get a donkey to pull a two-wheeled cart out of the mud. The animal struggled, the men sweated; the cart moved half an inch. It was piled high with what appeared to be the exact same brown dirt it was stuck in. There’s an economics lesson in there somewhere. That, I felt sure, was the story I ought to have been writing. . . .
The Red Cross woman kept talking. I pushed up to Samean and asked him what was happening.
“She saying . . . the project,” he said, with a shrug, and offered me a cigarette. I found myself wishing I smoked. It seemed to pass the time, so I took one and lit it, then coughed and dropped it in the mud in a wave of nausea. No one even looked at me.
The woman started walking, and we followed her to the edge of the river, where her excited chatter ramped up a notch. She was gyrating like a cheerleader now: either her Ritalin just kicked in or we were about to see something very important.
“What’s that about?” I whispered to Samean.
“Big water,” he said, and walked away.
The river was narrow enough to throw a stone across, but deep and fast. A farmer in Nike shorts was trying to coax a half-submerged donkey onto the bank. Skinny men pushed skinny boats into the frantic current. Their tiny outboard motors looked like the things you use to trim weeds in your driveway back home.
The Red Cross woman gestured proudly to a tall concrete cylinder on the river bank, and we all lined up to look inside—apparently whatever they’d made or built was in there. Even the Cambodians had to stoop to peer in, then nodded sagely to the woman and moved along. A few made comments with the tone of congratulation. I was last, and when my turn came I bent down and squinted into the darkness like all the rest. There was nothing there.
The woman smiled at me and said something in Khmer. I smiled back. Then she led us back to the bus.
I thought that was the end, but five minutes away from that doomed town we stopped again, this time pulling off the road to a clearing in the woods with a concrete pavilion. The other journos seemed excited, but I was groaning inwardly: another slog through the mud to see nothing. Then I realized the pavilion was filled with tables, all set with bright silver and red satin napkins. This was lunch.
It must have taken three hours, course after course after course: spicy Tom Yam soup floating with fat prawns, chilled seaweed salad, crisp and salty. Fried noodles sweet with sesame oil, plates of brazed bok choi, chicken salad with mint and peanuts, pork spareribs Cantonese-style, hot-pots stuffed with steamed crayfish the size of small cats (the local delicacy), sweet pastries and mango sorbet and plates of chilled fruit . . . a couple of the Cambodians had brought their own beer and were getting sozzled down at the end of the table. Everyone, I suddenly understood, was going to go back and write about what a great project this was, and how much good it was doing for Cambodia.
Perhaps Gus was trying to show me something important, after all?
I have to figure out how to convince him. I feel so sure I could do something great . . . something real . . . if I could just get the space. But lunch has weighed me down, and I’m having trouble thinking. The only thing keeping me awake is that cut I got on my leg—it’s throbbing and itching like crazy.
It’s nearly dark out now. Everyone else on the bus has drifted off—either sleeping, or smoking, or both. The only other person not in a coma is the guy in the seat behind me, a tallish Cambodian with a Ritchie Valens ’do and terrible skin—worse than mine. He’s in the uniform: a short-sleeved shirt with an ugly pattern, no tie, shiny shoes. His camera and cigarettes stick out from a faux-leather fanny pack, and he’s eagerly paging through a Khmer-English dictionary.
And as it did after Tuol Sleng, my mind keeps swinging back to the night my mother left. I don’t understand—I seldom think about that time anymore, and I don’t know why it keeps coming to me now. Was it something she told me? I was only six, but I can see her, face still tracked with tears, sitting beside my bed. I can see her lips move, but I don’t know what she’s saying.
I like to think she said she would take me with her (though Father would never have let that happen). Sometimes I imagine there was a clue she left, if only I could remember: Here is the lock, break it. This is how you get out.
I don’t remember her leaving. One moment she’s there—the next she’s gone.
Out the window to my right, the reeds part to reveal another great, shining stretch of water. Across it, on a tiny island or spit of land, I can see the first old thing that looks properly ancient and neglected. A temple of some kind—just a glimpse of crumbling gray stone wrapped with vines, like the head of some slumbering, cyclopean creature. On the pagoda top, instead of bodhisattvas, the faces are bug-eyed, tiger-mouthed. I can’t turn away.
“Not look,” says a voice. I turn and there’s Ritchie Valens, a cigarette caught between two long, yellowed fingernails. He’s looking intently at me, dictionary open in his hand. I can’t say anything. “Not good look,” he continues, then looks down at the page for the word he wants. “Demon,” he says. “Demon. Not look.”
WILL
OCTOBER 7
In dreams, I’m following a blond shadow down dark alleys. She doesn’t run, but she’s always ahead. Can’t tell if she knows I’m here. If I could just catch her eye, I’d know what she’s running from, but she never looks back.
I drag myself out of bed and pour a whiskey, still chasing June in my head. Can’t remember where I stopped reading: where real June ended and shadow June began. I remember nighttime walks, tropical fevers—
Drugs.
Malarone: it protects against malaria, but the price is dreams that are vivid, violent—dreams that hold so hard you can’t wake up. If you’re careless, or unlucky, they can follow you right into the waking world. June had bottles of the stuff in her bag, mostly empty. And she said she was unlucky with drugs—
“I could wake and discover I was someone else altogether.”
June was a fake—but her diary feels real. She cared about her work at the paper. I’d been focusing on what she wrote about Cambodia, but after what I learned yesterday, I went back to see what came before. In Paris, she describes going to a university—or at least hanging around one, it’s not clear she was studying anything. That must have been how she came across Jun Saito. Something happened while she was there. I don’t think she says what, but I get the impression it gave her a fright.
Before that, it was Italy, where she was helping out on some archaeological dig. In Greece, she was feeding the homeless. She traveled around South America for a while, as some kind of assistant to a documentary filmmaker named Rafe. It doesn’t make any damned sense.
But it will. I’m learning her like a foreign language. I see how her stories dance around the edges of the real story—like in her photographs: the real subject is always just out of frame.
You’re looking in the wrong place.
Hell. For all I know, I’m reading scenes from her great American novel. Maybe her ma’s really a schoolteacher in Pasadena. What I need is facts. And I know where I could get them—
No.
I’ll find another way. Anyway, it’s seven in the morning—not much I can do now but think, and I’d rather not.
Head downstairs to see if Gus has anything to eat. Find him perched in the kitchen; he’s picked up fried fish and noodles on his way back from the club, and he’s eating them out of a
paper bag. I start going through his fridge, find the remains of a stir-fry and a Black Panther.
“You could at least shower,” he says.
“Buy me dinner first.”
“I’ll make you a coffee if you change your shirt. I think you’ve been in that one since Thursday. It’s still got blood on it.” He’s fucking chipper. Beating the hell out of somebody usually puts him in a good mood. “Then maybe you can shoot the opposition protest out by the monument.” Say nothing. He pauses, looks over at me as he puts the coffee on. “You recall having a job, right?”
“A job.”
“Yes. You take pictures, and I pay you.”
“And the girl?”
The look he gives me is dangerous. “I thought you’d got Steve on that.”
“All Steve can do is try to ID her. Could take days.”
“Then we go to the Americans—”
“How do you know she’s an American?”
“This much trouble, of course she’s a fucking American.”
“And you think more of ’em are gonna make it better?” He glares at me. “Until Steve comes up with something, we’re on our own.”
“Then leave it.”
“Whoever this Kara woman is, I don’t think she’s gonna let it lie.” There, I said it. Hell.
Gus is still frowning, but he knows I’m right. We don’t know what June was mixed up in. I can’t sit around here reading her diary, hoping she’ll hand me the answer.
Like it or not, I’ve got to talk to Kara Saito.
I stall until ten, pacing Gus’s room and hoping the harsh light of day will banish whatever irrational paranoia has got into me since that morning on the quay.
Really, I’m looking for a better option.
Kara wanted this whole thing hush-hush. That might have nothing to do with June: maybe Kara was afraid of being recognized herself. I’ve toyed with asking around, but that seems even riskier: word could get back to her. Whoever she is, she’s dangerous. I’ve got to figure out my approach. I’ll only get one shot.