Yotaka. The flagman held out the dark green banner to send the train on; the red cloth hung sleepy in his other hand.
Vanna's husband gave a kid one of his apricot cookies, and the kid prayed thank you. His mother kept her money between her breasts. She had to reach up there to pay the conductor.
Prachinari. The rice fields ended, and then there was jungle with mountains ahead, and that Cambodian sandalwood smell. Sometimes they came out again into rice-lakes, but those were now bayed by trees and mountains. Houses stood on stilts among the big tree-ferns; and between the houses' legs lived colonies of birds in baskets.
Aranyaprathet. Last stop. All day the fan had been slowly dipping and turning overhead; now it went off and Vanna's husband felt his stomach begin to coil. .
He passed an open-doored place that said COFFEE SHOP — RESTAURANT and inside it was all girls kneeling before a smoking Buddha; all the chairs faced Buddha, and beyond Buddha was only the bar. The owner had died. It would be closed for nine days.
He thought: Aside from this, what do I have left to accomplish? — Nothing, really. I don't care if I never screw another whore.
He thought: Crossing the border isn't really worth it.
He thought: The reality is that these trips are getting harder for me physically, emotionally, morally and maybe mentally. There is nothing out here that I really want.
He thought: How many of my sweaty twilights has God seen?
He remembered how one night he'd sat up in bed beside her, kissed the medallion of Catherine Tekakwitha which he wore on the homemade loop of parachute cord now stained greyish-green by years of feversweat and sleepwax and the fumes of happiness, and he prayed for Vanna. She was watching him. For the first time he slipped the medallion off. Then he hung it round her neck. After that, he gave her the medallion every night, and in the morning she gave it back to him. On their last night he kissed it and gave it to her to keep, and she confided to him her own most precious thing, a snapshot of her baby. .
Far away on a sidewalk corner, a boy bounced a ball. He was many zones of light away. That sidewalk might as well be the whole empty world. Dresses hung in an open bay of light. A yellow traffic light opened and closed like a mouth. People were sitting at sidewalk tables by a parked wheel-stand that sold nothing. Their bent backs gave off aquarium colors as they ate.
You want to cross the border with Khmer Rouge? But that is illegal; that is very dangerous!
Well, he told the translator, it's all Esquire's fault. Esquire said I had to. Otherwise, I'll lose my job.
I know some people without legs, said the translator. Because they try to cross the border. Why you want to do that?
Oh, to meet the Khmer Rouge -
The translator laughed incredulously.
Staring into the square black stagnant pool in the center of town (a squiggly white-cube reflection weighing down one corner of it), he tried to screw up his courage to ask a cyclo to take him to the border. The translator had said that they had checkpoints on the road at night. It was all so pointless, and so much effort, and nothing but a nightmare to reward him at the end of it, if he got anywhere at all. Why didn't he just drown himself in that filthy pool? — He felt very much alone. Outside the fence, the cyclo drivers sat in their vehicles in a row. The lighted markets with their piles of red and yellow fruit seemed to balance the leaves that hung over him like some scaly underbelly of the night. A barefoot boy passed through the tube of green light that spilled on the street. He was carrying a basket. Vanna's husband felt sad.
The man gladly accepted fifty bhat. On this kind of cyclo the driver sat ahead, towing the passenger in the wheeled booth. Seeing those sturdy brown legs pedaling him into the palmtree darkness, Vanna's husband felt inexpressibly lonely and sad. The man pedaled him down back ways, smoking a cigarette as he went. No one else was on the road. He saw people eating inside, and they were laughing loudly at something that one of them had done or said. On the sidewalk he passed three children, a boy and two girls. The boy gripped one of the girls' knees.
On the main road Vanna's husband kept his head down every time a car or motorbike passed. The sound of crickets and the smell of hemp were overpowering. The man pedaled on very slowly and serenely, like a distance swimmer. After a short time they reached the first bridge.
Ahead were white and red lights (very still and bright).
The lights were getting closer now and he wondered if that was when the trouble would start. They were very still and steady.
So they came to that first checkpoint, a triangle of incandescent tubes in the road, swarming with insects. A giant beetle crawled slowly up one of the bulbs, seeking something it would never find or understand. Then it slid to the ground.
There were three Thai policemen. They turned Vanna's husband back, and he beamed like an idiot and went. But he'd noticed that the car and motorbike drivers did not stop at that first checkpoint unless they wanted to. On his next attempt he'd lie down in the back of a car.
A firefly winked low in the grass. A motorbike shot by. A reflected light shone upon another stagnant pool.
In the car he made it to the second checkpoint before they were stopped. The soldiers returned him to the first checkpoint, and this time the three policemen shouted and shook him. Again he grinned as stupidly as he could. Astonishingly, they did not arrest him or take his passport. After they had driven him back to town he sat trying to decide what to do. He could walk (it was only six kilometers) but what then? If he evaded the glares of checkpoint light, if he succeeded in clambering over the rolls of barbed wire at the end, then he'd be in a jungle filled with land mines. The best thing that could happen to him would be losing a leg -
There she was in the dimdark hotel room sitting side-saddle on the bed with one arm resting on his back while she touched her widely smiling mouth (though it was not exactly a smile since her eyes didn't change; it was just sweet and incomprehensible) with her forefinger — a pose she must have considered endearing or photogenic, since she did it all the time for the photographer; her husband didn't remember her doing it much for him; perhaps it was a trick she'd learned from some actress; anyway, she lounged in her waspdark-and-goldstriped dress, her elbows bent like wings, her face a little elongated by her "smile" in the mysterious blue air-conditioned quiet of the hotel darkness, no one able to see them because he or she had closed the shutters; her hand patted him very softly through the towel that entubed his waist; that was all he had on; he lay resting so beautifully, resting, happy with her weight on top of him, her butt against his side; he patted it; he wanted her to take her shower and lie down next to him so that he could hold her very tight and sleep (did she sleep when he slept or did she just lie there patient and close-eyed? he'd never wondered that before). He lay down and slept for an hour. Then he went out to try again.