The Unusual Suspect

by Ben Machell

  Stephen couldn’t understand why this was, which only made it worse. He was intelligent and motivated and full of questions, but none of these employers seemed to want him. Months dragged by and Stephen felt increasingly embarrassed and upset that he couldn’t find employment. What was so wrong with him that nobody wanted to at least give him a chance? “I felt rejected. I felt discarded by society.”

  He was also thinking, increasingly, about the opposite sex. He would have liked a girlfriend, although he never actually used that word, referring instead to his desire for a “soulmate” when writing in his journals. He wrote ever more romantic poems in which nature is personified as a woman and Stephen takes the role of her chaste and faithful servant. At one point he noted down his “life objectives,” which consisted of three wishes:

  To set foot on another world

  To spend just one night and one day (preferably more!) with a soulmate, alone, and in total bliss

  To build a new society in another world or beneath the oceans

  None of these objectives seemed particularly possible to Stephen as he languished in Sidmouth. Winter came and the days were dark and wet, with cold winds rolling in off the sea. He drifted through the small town like a ghost, hiking alone in gray shadowy valleys and passing the time in dingy pubs studying the racing pages. But his winning system seemed to have stopped working and he was starting to lose more and more. The stockpile of cash that had kept him afloat since the previous year had dwindled to almost nothing. Julian had moved back to London, Ben Weaver had left for university in Wales, and the stress and conflict of his home life were constant. To make things worse, his father had been diagnosed with prostate cancer, news that Stephen struggled to process the implications of and so pushed to one side. He refused to sign up for unemployment benefits because he maintained that he’d get a job any day. But the call never came. Stephen stood on the high coastal path above the cliffs outside Sidmouth and he looked out to sea and fantasized about being somewhere else. Somewhere far away. And never coming back.

  One day, Stephen visited John Paige in nearby Totnes. During a long walk through the countryside, he told his former teacher that it was quite possible they would never see each other again. With a cautious but convivial curiosity, Paige asked him why. Stephen told him that he intended to travel around the world. His friend bit his tongue. The idea that Stephen—Stephen, a teenager who was barely able to make it to school on his own—might be capable of traveling around the world seemed beyond unlikely, never mind the fact he clearly could never afford to do so. Paige smiles at the memory. “I remember thinking, ‘Fuck that. That’s ridiculous.’ ”

  Only, a few weeks later, Paige came down his stairs one morning to find something bright and gaudy peeking from beneath the pile of mail on his hallway floor. He bent down to investigate and found a postcard. From Stephen. And he was, somehow, in Bangkok.

  * * *

  —

  Just when it seemed luck had completely deserted him, Stephen hit a lucky streak with the horses. His betting system suddenly began to fire again, like an old car engine that finally purrs into life after the twentieth twist of the ignition. In early 2006, over the space of a week or so, he made several hundred pounds in profit. Then he did some research and discovered that for £700, the Student Travel Association offered round-the-world plane tickets, with stops in various places across Southeast Asia, Australia, New Zealand, and America. The prospect of such a journey was daunting. But after an entire childhood spent looking at maps and globes, fantasizing about smelling mint in the forest and lying in the desert looking at the stars, he knew he had to go: to do whatever he could to put half the world between himself and Manstone Avenue. He told John Paige that they may never see each other again because he wanted to believe it, and that his dream of running away and never coming back might come true.

  His parents did their best to discourage him, particularly Peter, who didn’t like the idea of his son being “out of reach.” In the end, though, it was Peter who gave his son the last few hundred pounds needed to make the trip practicable. Which was how, in January 2006, Stephen found himself walking through Bangkok with a large backpack and an expression of tentative happiness on his face. It was like nothing he could have imagined, the skyscrapers, ornate golden temples, and wooden buildings built cheek by jowl. The Buddhist monks in their bright robes paying early morning visits to shrines. The noise and organic chaos of the traffic and tuk-tuks. Street vendors hawking everything from tropical fruit to dried snakes to bright and shiny trinkets while, overhead, monkeys skipped from tree to tree, sometimes pausing to peer down at him with blank, appraising eyes before vanishing with a jump.

  None of this overwhelmed him in the way he’d feared it might. Instead, he felt energized and alive. In Sidmouth, he was isolated, unwanted, invisible. In Thailand, strangers smiled at him and said hello as they passed. He didn’t always know how to respond, but there was no pang of awkwardness. He did not find himself bowing his head or averting his eyes. Staying in hostels, he traveled along Thailand’s coast, heading east toward Cambodia. He passed through resort towns teeming with traffic and tourists, and spent nights on empty beaches off the beaten track. More than anything, it was the sense of freedom that made him feel giddy. He was not in his bedroom peering at a map and imagining all of this, or fantasizing about it in his diaries. He was here, in real life, diving in tropical seas and exploring ruined temples in the jungle. It’s not that the sadness, stress, and fear of the previous ten years had left him. It’s that he had left it. Far away. On the other side of the world. He had escaped.

  One night in Thailand, Stephen was sitting by himself in the quiet bar of a backpacker’s hostel. He was writing in his journal when he heard a voice and looked up. Standing next to his table was a Thai woman in her early twenties. She introduced herself to Stephen as Chailail and, in perfect English, explained that she worked behind the bar and thought that she would come over and say hello. She smiled. Stephen blinked. There was a pause before he put down his pen and quietly introduced himself. Chailail sat down beside him and started to ask questions about where he had been in Thailand, what he had made of her country, and where he planned to go next. And Stephen started to tell her.

  Stephen was naïve, but he was not stupid. He had already seen enough of Thailand to know that, in some places, Western men automatically attracted attention from local women. “You could be a hunchback dwarf with horns coming out of your head and still have approaches.” But this did not feel like that. She was not some teenage girl just coming up to him with a fixed smile while softly repeating the word “hello.” Instead, she was a university student from Bangkok. She seemed smart, curious, and genuinely interested in knowing where he’d come from and where he was going. Stephen was attracted to her and she was attracted to him, a slim, reserved young man who was spending the evening writing in a journal rather than getting shit-faced and trying to round up girls for skinny-dipping or beach parties.

  Ever since he started to experience an interest in the opposite sex, Stephen’s problem had been that talking to girls he liked was even harder than talking in front of his class.

  “I think a lot of the times girls tried to form a relationship with me or just be friendly,” he remembers. “But I would just automatically feel quite awkward and shy, and then they would assume I wasn’t interested because I wasn’t maintaining eye contact and I wasn’t smiling back.”

  But tonight, in the quiet backpacker’s bar, Stephen did maintain eye contact. Or at least, he tried his very best to, harder than he’d ever tried before. They spent the rest of the night talking. They arranged to meet the following day. And the next day. And then the day after that. She taught Stephen some Thai words and he repeated them so solemnly and precisely that she laughed and he didn’t understand why. At some point, they kissed. And for a while after that, they barely stopped kissing. Stephen lost
his virginity. He and Chailail arranged to go traveling together, and for the next few weeks, the two of them explored eastern Thailand, rattling around the lush countryside in old buses and cramming against each other in the squeaky single beds of hostels. Stephen asked lots and lots of questions. They visited temples and shrines, and he began to develop an interest in Buddhism, buying up cheap paperbacks on the subject as they moved from site to site and town to town.

  Stephen tore through the books. He absorbed new words and concepts: dharma, karma, the idea that pain and suffering stem from mankind’s desire to crave and cling to impermanent things, be they wealth or love or sensory pleasure. He thought about Sidmouth and the endless days spent in pubs and bookies with Julian, the bullet-point lists of wishes he wrote down for himself, the yearning to have his mother simply stay his mother and not keep turning into a stranger, cold, distant, and frightening. He turned his past over and over in his mind. Beside him, Chailail snuffled and slept.

  These weeks were a learning curve for Stephen, who had never before been in any kind of romantic relationship. Sometimes he upset Chailail with his directness. Sometimes he made what he felt were innocent observations about Thailand or Thai people that made her angry or, even worse, go completely silent for hours at a time. “Sometimes she would not talk to me and I would say, ‘Why are you being like that?’ I couldn’t understand. I just said whatever was on my mind, really. Even now I sometimes wonder whether I can read people in the same way most people would,” he says, discussing how his Asperger’s appeared to jam his ability to pick up on nuance, inference, and subtle, nonverbal social cues. He says he probably learned these things in the same way a computer would, by adhering to pre-learned patterns rather than by intuition. “I’ve got it wrong many times. Many, many times.”

  In the case of Chailail, it’s hard to gauge how much of their difficulties could be chalked up to Stephen’s Asperger’s and how much was simply because he was a nineteen-year-old experiencing his first relationship. As they explored the beaches, jungles, and villages of southeastern Thailand, it became clear that Chailail was not the soulmate Stephen had dreamed of meeting for so long. After two or three weeks of travel, she had to return to Bangkok and Stephen wanted to press farther east, into Cambodia. They said goodbye and agreed to stay in touch, possibly even meet up later in Stephen’s travels. They swapped emails for weeks afterward, and Stephen even went through periods of missing her as he traveled alone. But despite some half-baked plans to eventually reunite, they never saw each other again.

  Stephen crossed into Cambodia, riding buses eastward, toward the city of Siem Reap and the sprawling twelfth-century temple complex of Angkor Wat. As he passed through towns and villages, often stopping off for food or to spend the night at a small hotel or hostel, a sensation began to grow inside Stephen, a tension in his head and chest that made him feel flushed and uncomfortable. These places and these people were poor. Incredibly poor. Poverty unlike anything Stephen had ever seen or imagined. Many of the houses appeared beyond flimsy, made of nothing but rusty sheets of corrugated metal and bamboo. There were skinny children, shoeless and dirty. Whole families doing nothing but sitting on roadsides in silence, looking weary and resigned, seemingly waiting patiently for something, though he couldn’t imagine what.

  He began to fixate on the poverty he saw in Cambodia. Thailand had been exciting: a release, an adventure. But seeing the conditions these people lived in made him feel impotent and ashamed. The other Western backpackers and tourists he met all admitted, with a sigh, that when traveling through parts of Asia it takes a while to get used to the poverty. Stephen, however, could not get used to the poverty. He didn’t understand how anybody could. He had always thought that he and his family were poor and disadvantaged, but here he started to understand what a naïve and self-pitying outlook that was.

  Whenever he had the opportunity, he used hostel computers to search the Internet and find out about where he was. Around 40 percent of Cambodia’s rural population live below the poverty line. Around a quarter of all children are engaged in child labor. Thanks to the legacy of civil war, millions of still-unexploded land mines litter the countryside. Because of these mines, Cambodia has more amputees per capita than anywhere else in the world, and a disproportionate number of these are children. Sometimes when his bus passed through a village, Stephen glimpsed a child playing by the roadside with other children, and he just had time to register that something was wrong with the picture and that one of those skinny kids should have had four limbs but didn’t. He looked around at his fellow passengers and saw a British gap-year student down the aisle dozing contentedly, or singing along to a pop song while sharing iPhone headphones with a friend, and he balled his fists and drove his knuckles into his forehead.

  In big towns and cities, it was even worse. The contrast between luxury and poverty was as vivid as it was raw. In Siem Reap, the gateway to Angkor Wat, there were a dozen luxury hotels aimed at high-end travelers. Staying at the Amansara resort, Stephen learned, cost $650 a night. Some hotels charged over $1,500 for their most opulent suites. Visitors paid $1,375 per hour for helicopter tours of the Angkor Wat complex. One or two streets away from these oases, Stephen could see Cambodians sifting through piles of rubbish, or begging on the streets, blind or limbless. Initially, he wasn’t sure what to do—he felt exactly how he’d felt when he passed that homeless man in Exeter—but this time he didn’t put his head down and ignore the outstretched hands. He went out and gave away some of his cash to street children and beggars. He explored the possibility of volunteering for a land mine NGO, but his own meager supply of travel money was almost spent and he knew there’d be no way he could afford to work in Cambodia for free for a year.

  He drifted back toward Bangkok in order to catch a scheduled flight to Singapore that would then take him on to Australia. As he traveled he became sullen, his mind replaying what he had seen over and over. His planned route back took him through Thailand’s Khao Yai National Park, a lush landscape of forests, lakes, waterfalls, and hiking paths. He stayed in a comfortable log cabin, and for a day or so, the sheer beauty of his surroundings soothed him. One afternoon he rented a mountain bike and explored some of the trails. The bicycle chain snapped, so he dismounted and continued to explore the jungle on foot, skirting great fallen trees and climbing over boulders. At one point, he stumbled across a small hamlet and, just like that, the sight of poverty snapped him out of the reverie of his hike. The barefoot children. The chickens strutting the dirty street. The run-down, ramshackle homes. Hot anger and embarrassment flushed through him and he turned away, feeling like an ignorant, intruding voyeur.

  He retreated back into the jungle, walking quickly, breathing hard. After an hour or so, he began to realize that he had no idea where he was. Whatever trail he had taken into the jungle had just…vanished. The map he had with him was no help at all. The sun was beginning to set, the temperature was starting to drop, and black clouds of mosquitoes were hounding him. Trying his best to remain calm, he attempted to retrace his steps back to the village, but couldn’t. He shouted for help but as the echoes died, the only response was the low buzz and chatter of the jungle. Eventually, he accepted the inevitable. He was completely lost and would have to spend the night in the jungle darkness.

  On a large, flat rock beside a small stream, Stephen curled up in his shorts and T-shirt and tried to sleep. He couldn’t. The sound of creatures, close but unseen, moving around him kept him awake. So did the cold. So did the sensation of being utterly alone in nature, of being the only human for miles in any direction. He looked at the stars, and they only reaffirmed to him just how remarkable it was that we exist at all. But it also made him afraid. In twenty years’ time, will this jungle even be here? Just a morning’s drive away was the concrete and traffic of Bangkok. “It made me realize how much the world is changing,” says Stephen. “There are not many places left like that, and it just gave me a feel
ing of ‘What is humanity doing to the world?’ ”

  Dawn came and, shivering and exhausted, Stephen managed to find his way back to a path. He followed it and arrived back at the village he had stumbled across the previous day. Despite his awkwardness and embarrassment, some villagers approached him. They could see he was cold and tired. They invited him to sit. They brought him food and bowls of rice. Some handed him small gifts. One man had a cheap mobile phone and called the park ranger’s office to explain that they had a lost Western man in their village who needed collecting. A Jeep arrived soon after and took Stephen back to his comfortable lodge.

  The night in the jungle changed him. He had ordered his thoughts and emerged with a clear sense of conviction. Everything he had ever suspected about the unjustness of the world and the built-in inequality of modern global society was true. He had seen it with his own eyes. He thought of the children scrabbling through rubbish piles for something to eat and then considered the fact that the largest component part of America’s gross domestic waste is food. Food! In fact, America burned so much uneaten food it would, in 2006, account for almost 15 percent of the country’s carbon emissions. Man’s greed means that Earth does not face just ecological catastrophe, but humanitarian disaster under a system that forces more than half the world’s population to survive in poverty while the rest live in a state of complacent, selfish plenty. The backpacking trustafarians he met who railed against capitalism despite traveling with their parents’ platinum cards and the rich couples who bragged about haggling down local traders enraged him. But they were only doing in microcosm what their societies have been doing to the developing world for decades.