by Daniel Mason
I’ll be exhibiting exceptionally high levels of testosterone, nothing overly suspicious. But Phoebe will show trace signs of cocaine in her bloodstream. Not the best news. But it’s going to be a few days before the results come in.
They don’t send us home. They keep us in the country in expensive hotel rooms paid for by the embassies. Day after day men come to ask us questions and fill out paperwork. Time drags on, and most of the details are boring. It’s hard to maintain a lie for so long. Time melts together as if weeks are condensed into minutes, and every time I wake it’s like a distant memory, scenes from a movie I don’t remember seeing.
On the upside, we’re minor celebrities after our ‘ordeal’. It happens like that, with the click of my fingers. International media agencies want us for interviews and we can charge twenty thousand dollars a pop. I watch my bank balance triple. I’m watching myself on television or reading newspapers with quotes I don’t remember having given. I do all the talking, because Phoebe’s too traumatised.
When I give an interview, I’m sitting in an air-conditioned television studio in a chair so comfortable I could just fall asleep. There’s a dark blue screen behind us that serves as a backdrop. The lighting is causing me to sweat a little around the neck and they have me wearing a shirt that makes me itch, and I have to resist the urge to tug at the collar. A technician keeps telling me to stop tugging, because it dislodges the mic pinned to me, as if I care.
This is the first time in my life that I’ve worn make-up and it doesn’t feel so bad. I’m reclining in the chair, trying my best to look composed for the cameras, trying to stay awake at the same time. It’s like having to retell a story every time somebody new enters the room, and you change slight details every time and think that nobody is going to notice.
Sitting across from me is a middle-aged woman in a neatly pressed suit jacket and skirt. The varicose veins on her calves won’t show up on film because you don’t see anything below her shoulders during the interview. Her greying hair has been dyed but you can tell she’s grey anyway. That lipstick she’s wearing gives her lips a natural glow.
She’s asking me: ‘And how did that make you feel?’
I act like I’m thinking about this for a moment, and I draw a heavy breath. I say, ‘Like an animal. Like … I wasn’t something worthy of their respect.’
She’s asking me: ‘And how did that make you feel?’
And how did this make you feel?
And what happened next?
And what was running through your mind at the time?
You have to be able to turn on the tears toward the end of the interview. That’s when the memories really start flooding in, and you reveal how traumatised you are. You can do this earlier in the interview if you’re bored and feel like closing early. At the end of the interview you’ve earned a lot of money, and it’s been a long hard day and all you feel like doing is going to the hotel and collapsing into bed to rest your tumour.
When I wake up to chaotic sounds, it’s like I don’t remember how I got here. My hotel room faces the street and the noise outside doesn’t stop until somewhere past midnight, only to return by dawn. I have this strange feeling that my lies are unravelling around me. It’s like they know our story is false. They’re still keeping Phoebe and me in separate rooms and we aren’t allowed to see each other without an appointment. This is like a concentration camp. They’re waiting for one of us to crack.
It’s like twice a day they throw us in these big interrogation rooms with giant mirrors taking up one wall. I stare at the mirrors and I know there’s some creep on the other side taking note of my every move; when I scratch my nose or rub my chin, am I indicating a lie? They keep these spotlights shining in my eyes and I’m sweating and I just stick to my story, I won’t let them break me.
I hear rumours that Phoebe has contracted malaria somewhere along the line and now she’s suffering a grade-three fever. I’m out of artificial testosterone and I ask the doctor what he can do for me, which turns out to be very little. The comedown is tough, but going cold turkey is great for interviews and interrogations because I’m tired and weak and depressed and it almost seems like I’ve been through the things I’m claiming.
Things have been very hectic this last week and now my body is slowing down and all I want to do is sleep. It’s been like rush, rush, rush.
‘A man just needs some time to himself,’ I tell whoever comes knocking on my door. I say, nobody’s home. I say, I don’t want to go out today. Just leave me alone.
One day is just like the next, and none of this seems real. It might be because I’m so tired, so sick, or it might be because this celebrity life isn’t what I expected. When you make up a lie you have to stick to your story from that point on and deal with the consequences. I couldn’t have honestly expected a fuss like this over a little abduction fabrication. There’s no fun in it anymore.
I’m curled into the foetal position in a bundle of sweet-smelling sheets in my hotel room. My tumour has been giving me hell these last few days. I can feel it like a paperweight I carry around in my skull, and if I’m not careful sometimes my head flops around at the end of my neck like it’s made out of rubber. When I close my eyes I see a roulette table and a pistol against my head, and I just want to pull the trigger even though I know it isn’t real. It’s like I’m suffering withdrawals and the game is all that I think about now that I’ve slowed down.
When my tumour pulsates, I blink my eyes and open them again to a whole new scene. It’s like watching a slide show. Blink, next slide: interrogation room. Blink, next slide: hotel room. Blink, next slide: doctor’s office. Blink, next slide: radio interview.
In an interview with a Canadian magazine I’m quoted as saying: ‘They forced us to play Russian roulette. It was like a scene out of that movie, the one with Robert DeNiro? The Deer Hunter, yeah. They were laughing the whole time as I had the gun to my head like Christopher Walken. I didn’t want to pull the trigger, but at the same time I think another part of me just wanted to escape so bad. You can’t imagine the terror I felt with that gun to my head, not knowing if I was about to pull the trigger on my own death. And they would have shot me if I didn’t pull. I know it, I just know it …’
I don’t remember having ever said these things, but the magazine tells me that I did. The cover to the magazine shows my picture and reads SURVIVOR TERROR.
Fame is more fleeting than the isolation that comes with it. I’m used to isolation, but passing so much time in the hotel room with only my interrogations to distract me is beginning to wear me down.
In my hotel room I restlessly smoke cigarettes and deplete the contents of the mini-bar. I lie on the bed and watch the ceiling fan. Sometimes I pace restlessly or try to sleep. The embassy won’t allow me to leave the country until all of the legal ends are tied. That’s what they tell me. I don’t even know what this means but I have a feeling they’re spying on me, closely observing my every move, waiting for a mistake.
It isn’t me who’ll make the mistake, but I’m tired and restless.
I pick up the tapped phone and dial for room 2B, which is Phoebe’s room. There’s an unpleasant buzzing in my ear and the woman who answers isn’t Phoebe. It’s her ‘minder’.
I haven’t seen my minder since I attacked him with a piece of broken mirror a few days ago. I have no idea how the mirror became broken in the first place. All that I remember is a thousand shiny slivers reflecting my grin, each broken piece like a gateway to a different little world, so many possibilities. I can’t remember why I attacked my minder, but I know I’m irritable in the mornings, so I guess it had something to do with that. There was a long line of blood sweeping over his cheek, and he ran away in tears. Nobody has come to reprimand me.
‘Hello?’ Phoebe’s minder says.
Attempting to mask my voice, I ask to speak to Phoebe.
‘Excuse me?’ the minder asks.
‘Phoebe,’ I say. ‘Just put her on, you useless bitch.�
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There’s a gasp on the other end of the phone line before Phoebe’s minder gets her back up. ‘Who is this?’ the minder asks. ‘What right do you have to talk to me that way?’
I scream into the phone until my words are barely audible. ‘Just put the girl on the fucking phone already!’ I spit and curse until finally I hear progress on the other end of the line and Phoebe answers. She sounds heavily medicated. I say, ‘What have they got you on?’
She says, ‘Who is this?’
I tell her, ‘It’s me.’
She says, ‘Oh. I’m wearing a sleeveless top, it’s white, and—’
‘No. Not what have you got on. What—have—they—got—you—on? Are you sick?’
‘The doctor gave me some pills. I don’t know what they were. He told me to go to bed and I wasn’t to be interrupted. Is something wrong?’ Her words come through in monotone, as if she were reading carefully from a set of cards, like somebody on one of those memory enhancement commercials who still can’t seem to remember their lines.
Phoebe is going to crack soon. She’ll ruin me.
‘No. Nothing’s wrong. You go back to sleep.’ I want to tell her to stick to the story. I want to tell her that she better not fuck this up. I want to tell whoever’s listening to get off the line.
She’s silent for a while before she says, ‘Okay, goodbye. I love you.’
I sigh. ‘No you don’t,’ I tell her. ‘You’re so stupid. You just think you do.’ But I might as well be talking to the dial tone. In fact, I am.
Blink: cut to a street scene. I am weaving my way through crowds and resisting the urge to look over my shoulder. You’d think I was responsible for a terrible crime, the way I’m being followed. It’s pretty clear I’m under suspicion for something, otherwise there wouldn’t be two men following me. They’ve been with me since I requested to leave the hotel. They aren’t making themselves conspicuous, but I know they’re there. The threads of my abduction story are coming undone and I figure it’s only a matter of days before Phoebe gives them the truth.
The men following me aren’t expecting me to give them the slip, which is how I lose them without any great fuss in a side street. I walk, throwing furtive glances over my shoulder, just to make sure they haven’t found me. I do this for about half an hour, wandering aimlessly and making sure I’m not being followed.
I take a cab around the block and get out where I started, just to make sure I’ve lost them. I check for bulges under the coats of everybody I pass, making sure nobody is carrying a weapon. I’m staring at people’s ears to make sure they aren’t wearing mics. When a car comes close past me on the street, I leap in surprise and expect a swarm of agents to dart out and bundle me in.
The streets are crowded and there’s a surprising amount of construction work going on. I listen to trucks rumbling and men shovelling gravel, and they holler to one another from scaffolding on empty buildings.
It’s another ten minutes before I find what I’m looking for in the red-light district. All I want is a pick-me-up. After feeling so deflated in that hotel room day after day, question after question, all I want is to feel that I am alive.
The boy is sitting on some steps outside an ornate old building, minding his own business. He’s a teenager, probably no older than fourteen. He’s dressed entirely in black and grey and his head seems a lot bigger than his neck can support. His upper lip is dotted with fine hairs, like soft down. He sees me coming and cocks his head to one side.
I stand over him and look both ways along the street before I speak. The boy is looking up at me now. I’m a curiosity to him. I say, ‘Do you speak English?’
The boy frowns, but maybe he understands the question because he shakes his head in reply.
I produce several bills from the pocket in my pants and count them. I hold them up for him to see, waving them back and forth. ‘Do you know what these are?’
His eyes grow bright and he nods three times, up down, up down, up down.
I smile in return. I speak very slowly and I tell him, ‘I will pay you two hundred dollars if you play a game with me. Do you understand?’
The boy frowns at first, and his eyes flit toward the bills in my hand. After a moment of deliberation he smiles and nods and utters something in his incomprehensible language. He understands something, because he’s getting up from the steps and beckoning me to follow.
I give him another smile. ‘Okay, excellent. Let’s go.’
If the kid is leading me to a cop I’m going to strangle him until his eyeballs pop. It occurs to me that I don’t actually know what a Cambodian police officer looks like.
He takes me to a motel that isn’t anything more than a red doorway in a wall in the street. There’s a radio nearby playing The Rolling Stones, ‘Paint It Black’.
Inside, there’s a sallow old man at the desk, and the boy does the talking. The two nod and give hand gestures, the boy pointing to me, jabbering. The man nods and gives me a smile, like he’s involved in my conspiracy. He sees this sort of thing frequently and hands me a key, and I give him some money.
The room is along a hallway where the wooden boards betray your every step with an echo. The room itself is small, with a table and a set of drawers and a dirty bed, a tall cupboard. There’s a lamp on the table, and out of curiosity I check the drawers to see if Gideon has been here, check the cupboard. The boy starts tugging at my belt, eager to get started. I’m bewildered for a moment.
The boy reels from the slap I land on his head. He doesn’t understand.
I shake my head. ‘No. No.’
He doesn’t understand.
I point to my belt, my pants. ‘No. Not this.’
He frowns and then thinks he understands, and begins to take his own pants off.
‘No,’ I say, shaking my head, waving my hands. ‘No. No. No.’
He pauses with one leg outside of his pants and stares at me. He mouths a blowjob to me and grins, nodding. He says, ‘Yes? Yes?’
I curse and pull the gun from my jacket.
The boy sees it and lets out a cry and makes to run, tripping over his own pants as they fall to the floor. I grab him by the shoulder and throw him to the bed, and he calls out something in Khmer that I can’t decipher. I’ve got the gun in his face and his eyes are wide, and I’m telling him to shut up, just shut up. ‘You don’t understand what I’m asking,’ I tell him.
‘Let me show you,’ I say. Popping the chamber, I show him that there is only one bullet in the gun. I say, ‘See? See?’ Then I spin the chamber and snap the weapon shut with a flick of my hand, just like a cowboy. The boy is frowning the whole time, his eyes continually flicking to the door as if he thinks he might make the distance before I shoot him.
He doesn’t understand that I don’t want to shoot him.
With the gun pressed against my own temple, I say, ‘I’m not going to shoot you. See?’
The boy is wide-eyed with fear and confusion and when I go to pull the trigger he struggles against me. There isn’t a bullet in this chamber, and the boy looks up at me as if I’m crazy. He just doesn’t understand.
I hand the gun to him and say, ‘Your turn. You understand? Your turn.’ Then I mimic the action of putting the gun against your own head and pulling the trigger.
Even if he understands what I’m asking of him, he does the wrong thing.
Close-up on the boy as he points the gun at me; get the pistol in the frame as he lifts it level with his eyes, then focus on the barrel of the gun.
‘Bastard,’ I mutter. I’m waiting to see if he pulls the trigger. His hands are shaking and his aim is very unsteady, and I’m not really looking forward to a bullet tearing my stomach open.
The boy is saying something in Khmer, speaking so fast it just sounds like noise. At the same time, I’m telling him to put the gun to his head, I’m saying, ‘Shoot yourself, not me. You’re breaking the rules. You, not me.’
He pulls the trigger but I don’t flinch. There isn’t a
gunshot and he doesn’t get enough time for a second try because I’ve hit him and I wrestle the gun from his hands, then knock him to the ground. All the while, I’m not thinking that he’s just a boy. I’m thinking now that he’s a nuisance.
So I shoot him.
It takes three pulls on the trigger before the hammer hits home on the bullet, and I catch him in the neck. He’s dead inside of thirty seconds, sprawled out on the wooden floor, choking on his own blood, twitching and trying to stem the flow from the wound with a hand that eventually loses strength.
I’m standing over the corpse, shaking my head and saying, ‘Stupid.’
‘You’re stupid,’ I say. I shout. ‘You’re so fucking stupid.’ I can barely hear my voice over the rush of blood from my chest to my ears, pounding like tribal drums.
Outside, in the hallway, the manager is approaching the door. He’s heard the gunshot and he’s called the police. He’s approaching the room warily when I come bursting through the door, stumbling in the hall. Behind me he can see the pantless dead boy and a lot of blood. I thrust some crumpled notes in his direction and say, ‘Here. This should cover the cleaning bill.’
I’m gone before the police arrive, and I am alive again.
What I know is that I’m at a bus stop on Street 63, minding my own business, smoking a cigarette. There’s a gun in the waistband of my pants, hidden beneath my jacket. I don’t remember how I got here, it’s like there’s a blank space in my mind. I’m not even sure which bus I’m waiting for, or where I want to go.
There’s this United Nations worker waiting for the same bus, and I guess because I’m a Westerner he starts talking to me after a while. He’s telling me that to legally own a firearm in Cambodia you need a permit. He’s not saying this because he knows I’m armed, he’s just talking about it because he’s an American and they’re always talking about gun control, no matter where they are.