Butterfly Stories

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At breakfast the photographer sat on pillows, a sweet brown arm sleeping around his waist. Eighty percent of the Pat Pong girls had tested positive for AIDS that fall. Probably she'd be dead in five years.

She watched the TV's cartoons as wide-eyed as before. Coffee was all she ordered from room service, giggling rapt with head on chin, while in the hotel's humid halls the maids in blue stood folding towels and talking, leaning elbows on the desk, and the tuk tuks went by and the clothes dried from windows across the courtyard, barely moving, and rainwater dried on the tiles while one of the hotel's men in red livery went out to smoke and scratch his belly, and across the courtyard a brown man naked to the waist flickered past a window of shadow.

The journalist's balls glowed faintly. The soles of his feet stuck itchily to his rubber sandals.

Suddenly the sun came on like a dimmer knob turned rapidly up to maximum, and it began to get hot.

When Joy left, she was dressed conservatively, smiled blandly; she shook each of their hands. Did she become that way in the morning, after the photographer fucked her up the ass, and she saw that he was like the others? (The photographer told him she'd pointed to her vagina and said: Here OK condom OK and then to her anus and said: Here OK no condom OK.) Or was her affection just an act? Or was this public demeanor of hers an act? The journalist's heart sank. He'd never know.

And what's this injection? he asked.

The doctor's glasses glinted. — Pure caffeine, he said enthusiastically.

If I wear a rubber from now on so that I don't infect the other girls, can I keep having sex, starting today?

I think it would not be good for you, said the doctor. You see, the disease has already migrated far into the spermatic cord. .

Receipt No. 03125 (two soda waters, 60 bhat) was already in the cup, and fever-sweat from the clap ran down his face. At the bar, the two girls watched King Kong, plump-cheeked, wide-eyed, almost unblinking. (Joy wasn't there yet; probably she was still sleeping in some other place of narrow alleys. .) A girl in a blindingly white T-shirt came in, and then another. They leaned on the bar on that hot afternoon, talking, while the spots of disco-light began to move and the fan bulged round and round like a roving eye. No-see-ums bit the journalist's feet between the sandal straps, so he put some mosquito repellent on; business stopped as all the girls watched. The two plump-cheeked girls looked catty-corner at opposing tvs as King Kong roared; then, when it was only helicopters again, they went back to the click-click-click of red and yellow counters, thinking hard as the pattern built up, six by six, click by click; in their concentration they lowered their noses almost against the wall of that gameboard, hair long, cheeks smoother than golden nectarines, so young, so perfect; perhaps it was just to a coarse-pored Caucasian that they appeared perfect. Click, click. Soon the meaningless game would be finished (meaningless since they weren't betting ten bhat against each other as they did when they played the journalist; he always lost), and then one woman would pull the release and the plastic counters would clatter into the tray below with a sound like gumballs. Then they'd start again, smoothing back their hair, reaching, showing hand-flesh through the holes.

The journalist was working, and the girls sometimes gathered around to watch him write. Lifting his head from the bar, the photographer explained to them: My friend likes to write long letters to his balls.

In Oy's bar the Western video was repeating and dinner had closed because it was six o'clock now, Oy's hour to come to work as the photographer had kindly ascertained; and paunchy white guys grinned. The staff was getting ready for dancetime. Someone was chopping ice, and a girl in a beige miniskirt sat spread-legged by the register where the glasses were, scratching a mosquito bite on her thigh, and the great green ceiling grid was activated; then the blue fluorescents came on, then the yellow and green spotlights at angles, then the multifaceted ball, and a girl with a lovely face like all the others (who seemed increasingly ghostly) smiled encouragingly at the journalist and drew her arm grandly down as if to yank the ripcord of a parachute and went into the Ladies.

The journalist's teeth chattered with fever. - Man, I hope you make it, said the photographer.

I'm all right, the journalist said. Do you see Oy anywhere?

You wait here. I'll ask around.

Well, he said after a moment, they say she'll be in at seven or seven-thirty. You want to wait?

Sure.

At seven, Toy came in. She said hi, smiling; she said no Oy today. She smelled like perfumed excrement. There was some-, thing so sincere about her that the journalist almost said to hell with it and asked her, but she would only have said no. He wrote her a note for Oy, showing her each of the note's words in the English-Thai dictionary: Oy — I worry you blood that night. Are you OK?

Will Oy come today? he asked her again, just to be sure.

Toy patted his arm. - Not today.

You come hotel me, Toy?

No, sir.

You my friend?

OK friend OK.

Oy is sick?

Oy no today.

Then Oy came, smiling. Toy went off to dance.

He bought out Oy, saying: I just take you back. Just sleep watch TV no fucking just sleep you know OK?

OK, laughed Oy.

She seemed in perfect health. That annoyed him after all his anxiety. Oy? he said. Oy? I'm sick from you. From your pussy.

Oy hung her head smiling. .

The photographer went back to the other bar to buy Joy, and the four of them walked down the hot narrow alley, the two boys in faded clothes a little dirty, the two girls in fancy evening wear; what a treat! — Oy went to a store to buy condoms; he said no need and she was happy. They got a taxi to the hotel. Joy rode in front with the driver. Oy pressed against him. He held her hand, gave her leg a feel; her dress was drenched with sweat. - You hot? he said. - She nodded; she'd always nod no matter what he said.

How long have you worked in Pat Pong? he said.

Six month.

How long has Toy worked there?

Ten month.

(Toy had told him that she'd worked there for six months.)

The photographer grinned. - So, how do you know she worked there for ten months if you only worked there for six months?

Oy blushed and ducked her guilty head.

He led Oy into the hotel while the photographer paid off the driver.

The journalist went grandly up to the desk. - Two-ten, please.

All the Thais in the lobby watched silently. Oy hung back, ashamed. They began talking about her. She raised her head then and followed her owner up the stairs, into the humid heat and mildew smell… At the first landing, when she could no longer be seen, she took his hand and snuggled passionately against him. .

He told her again that she'd gotten him sick, but that it was OK.

I go doctor; doctor me in here! she giggled, pointing to her butt. Later, when he'd gotten her naked, he saw the giant bandage where she'd had some intramuscular injection. It did not give him confidence that while her disease must be the same as his her treatment had been different. - Best not to think about it.

The photographer came in. - Same room? said Joy on his arm.

It's OK, the journalist told her. No sex. Don't worry.

That was truly his plan — just to lie there in the darkness with Oy, snuggling and watching Thai TV while the photographer and Joy did the same. Needless to say, once the photographer took a shower and came out wearing only a towel and cracking jokes about his dick, the journalist could see how it would actually be. He took his shower. .

The photographer laughed. - You should really get back in the shower, he said. You finished, man?

The journalist just nodded. He was feeling dizzy. He wandered out with his shirt around his waist; the girls laughed; Joy shook her head saying you baah which means you crazy and he hopped into bed sopping wet. Obedient Oy snuggled up to him in her fancy clothes. .

You take shower, he said to her.

Finally she did, wearing the other towel. The light was still on. Every time anyone flushed the toilet the floor always flooded; he could see the comforting sparkle of that water on the bathroom tiles. . She crawled in, snuggling him, and he slid a hand between her legs and was happy to feel her narrow little bush.

I go ten o'clock, she said. Toy birthday party. Toy my sister.

Whatever you say.

He lay sucking her tits while she held him. She let him kiss her a little but she didn't like it. Her body was slender, her nips just right. Her face looked rounder and older tonight; her voice was hoarser. She kept coughing. After awhile she started playing with his penis, probably to get it over with. He had an erection, but no desire to use it; his grapefruit-swollen balls seemed to be cut off from the rest of his body. He still didn't plan to do it, but when he got up to go to the bathroom with just the shirt around him, the two whores sitting eating room service (the bellboy had carefully looked away when he brought it into the half-darkened room, the photographer and the journalist lounging like lords with their half-naked girls beside them), the head of his dick hung down below the shirt and they started laughing and then he started getting wild like the class clown. First he began tickling Oy. Then he started lifting her around, and pulling the covers down to show her off naked; she laughed (probably thinks you're a real pest! said the photographer, shaking his head); she kept rubbing against him to make him do something, and then she'd look at the clock. .

Eventually, she rubbed against him in just the right way, and then he knew he'd have to do it. What a chore! But life isn't always a bed of guacamole. He squeezed K-Y into her cunt, handed her the rubber, and then she said she didn't know how to put it on. . Wasn't that SOMETHING? She tried sincerely, but she just didn't understand it. He did it and then thrust into her. She pretended to come and he pretended to come; he didn't care. In the carpet of light from the half-open bathroom door the other two were doing it in the far bed; Oy lay watching the photographer pedaling slowly like a cyclo driver high between three wheels, and she clapped her hand to her mouth and snickered softly; meanwhile Joy suddenly noticed that Oy was on top of the journalist and rolled off her trick and went into the bathroom and turned the shower on loud for a long time.

He really enjoyed playing with her body, lying there relaxed and feverish, doing whatever he wanted while the TV went ai-ai — if he felt like sticking a finger up her he'd just grease it and pop it in! — I have the clap! he announced to himself, and he felt that he'd won some major award. Light-headed and distant, he enjoyed snuggling up to her and smelling her, sucking her shaved armpits, pursuing with kisses her face which sought to evade him; every now and then he'd catch her and kiss her lips and she'd laugh. Whenever he'd touch her between the legs she'd start going urn urn and begin swinging her hips as if in ecstasy, but her cunt stayed dry and her face didn't change and her heart didn't pulse at all faster beneath his other hand. . He lounged, played, stroked in a delightful fog of disease like the foggy sprawl of Bangkok he'd be leaving in four hours, soaring east over big grey squares of water going into greyness, riding the hot orange sky. At the moment it was still dark. She tried to get him off again and he let her play with his useless and meaningless erection; later he lifted her onto his neck and ran around the room in his underpants with her on his shoulders clinging and laughing in fun or terror while the photographer and his whore laughed themselves sick.

He kept saying: Oy, you want go Kambuja?

No want! No want! Kambuja people is bad people! Thai people like this (she prayed); Kambuja people like this! (she saluted fiercely). The journalist saluted her in return, and she cowered back. .

Oy was feeling fine from her injection. - But what if she wasn't? What if she'd been in terrible pain that first time and then the other time; what if she'd just done it for the money to pay the doctor or for rent?

Joy stayed with the photographer until the last minute, of course. Joy had class. The photographer had class. The whole time he was in Thailand, the journalist (poor slob) could never get any but short time girls. .

Grey-green and beige squares like a flaking dartboard showing its cork beneath; these and the other squares of grey water absorbed the plane's shadow as it sped through the morning-cooled patches of trees and rectangles of various greens and greys all shining wet. .

Cambodia seemed a no-nonsense country. There was a line of soldiers on the runway, each soldier directing the photographer and the journalist on to the next.

He went into the hotel lobby and took a few stacks of riels out of the paper bag. - Help yourself to some money, he said to the concierge. . and shot past the big traffic island with the monument to independence from the French. He was hot, weak and dizzy. Thanks to the caffeine injection, he hadn't slept for two nights. In the wide listless courtyard and porticoes of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which seemed almost empty like the rest of Phnom Penh (how many people had been killed off?), he and the photographer sat playing with their press passes, waiting for their fate to be decided. - In our country, at the moment, the militia plays more of a role than the army, an official explained, and the journalist wrote it down carefully while the photographer yawned. - A tiled roof was flaking off in squares of pink like weird rust or lichens. The afternoon smelled like sandalwood. An official led them into one of the rambling yellow buildings and told them to come back tomorrow. They took a cyclo back to the hotel, and the photographer went outside to snap some landmine beggars while the journalist lay down on the bed to rest. As soon as he rolled over on his stomach, something seemed to move in his balls, weighing them down with a painless but extremely unpleasant tenderness, as if they were rotting and liquefying inside and slowly oozing down to the bottom of his scrotum. Thinking this, he had to laugh.

It was evening now, just before curfew. The boys were shooting cap guns and everyone was cheering. A boy in sandals, a dark blue shirt and a dark blue Chinese cap pedaled a cyclo slowly down the street. The photographer brought some takeout from the French restaurant across the street — steak and fries. The journalist appreciated it very much.

The morning sky was a delicate grey, cats stalking along the terraces, ladies puttering among potted plants, the rows of cool doors all open in the four- and five-storey apartment blocks, rows of x-shaped vents atop each square of territory, gratings on the windows. The journalist lay in bed, clutching his distended balls. It was warming up nicely. His underpants steamed against his ass. The hotel maid came in and cleaned. She made seven thousand riels a month. The Khmer Rouge had killed her father, grandfather, sister, and two brothers. She'd worked hard for the Khmer Rouge in the fields. .

A cloud blew over the street. Papers started to swirl. The vendors ran to cover their stands. Suddenly came a hiss of rain. A militiaman dashed. The almost naked children danced laughing. Potted plants shook on the terraces. Now as the rain slanted down in earnest, people braced themselves between the almost shut gratings, watching. A cyclo driver pedaled on; his two lady passengers held red umbrellas over themselves. Power wires trembled; the rain shivered in heavy white rivers. A boy prayed barefoot to Buddha in the street, then clasped his hands and danced, water roaring from his soaked shirt. A clap of thunder, then rain fell like smoke; rain spewed from the roof-gutters. .

The English teacher wrote sixteen in standard and phonetic orthography on the blackboard while the children wrote sixteen in their notebooks, and the English teacher got ready to write seventeen but then the power went out and they sat in the darkness.

Your English is very good, said the journalist.

Yes, the teacher said.

Where did you learn it?

Yes.

What is your name?

Yes. No. Twenty-two.

Well, that's red good, said the photographer brightly. That's red nice. Do you know what the word pussy means?

Steamy-fresh, the sandalwood night neared curfew while water trickled down from the balconies and orphans sat down on bedframes on the sidewalk, huddled over rice. The grilles were drawn almost closed now. Only one was open. A lady stood with her child in yellow light, guarding rows of blue bicycles whose wheel-skins caught a glow of gold. On the sidewalk, boys were carving a deer. Its head hung from a hook. The rest, now flensed to a snakelike strip of steak, red and white ribs, danced as their knives stripped it down. The journalist went to watch, and everyone crowded to watch him, crying: Number one! — He hadn't picked up any whores yet; they still liked him. - Another long strip peeled off — scarcely anything but bone now. A boy with muscled brown arms held the swaying backbone like a sweetheart; another fanged the cleaver blade down. Skinny-necked like a bird, the carcass tried to flail against a grating, but the strong boy wouldn't let it.

How happy he was when on the third day of the antibiotics something popped like popcorn in his balls and he started feeling better! The tenderness was now in his lymph nodes, but it would surely go away from there, too.

To celebrate, he showed all the hotel maids his press pass. -You very handsome, they said.

They had an engagement with the English teacher who couldn't speak English. The small children were silhouetted in the dark, singing A, B, C, D, E, F, G. . On the blackboard it said THE ENGLISH ALPHABET. The teacher pointed at this, and the children said: Da iii-eee aa-phabet.

Why does the alphabet only go up to S? asked the journalist.

Yes, the teacher replied.

The journalist pointed to a photograph that concentrated darkness like an icon. - My father is die by Pol Pot regime, said the teacher simply. He go to Angkor Wat to hide Buddha. They die him by slow pain. .

For a moment the journalist wanted to embrace him. Instead he stared down at the floor, and the sweat dripped from his nose and forehead. As soon as he wiped his face it was wet again.

The English teacher and his friend took the journalist and the photographer to someone's house. The room was dark. Someone lit a candle and connected a gasoline generator outside. Then the lights flickered on. The wall-gratings looked out on darkness. The journalist sat in a corner consuming cool tea and cakes; the photographer sweated wearily. It was very hot. After a few minutes they thanked their hosts and went to dinner.

They sat at an outside table on the rainy street, while everyone watched them from underneath lighted canopies or leaning against trees; the rain gleamed on bike lights. There was a pot of cold tea on the table. One-legged beggars kept approaching, some in soldier's uniform; the journalist gave each of them a hundred riels because he and the photographer still had plenty of money. The English teacher ordered Chinese noodle soup with organ meats and peppers. Then they went for a walk. The English teacher's friend suggested a movie, which proved not to be a Chinese story about angry ghosts as the poster had suggested but a dubbed American thing; lizards crawled up and down the cement walls, and it was sweltering. After five minutes the journalist was ready to go. After ten minutes he slid out of his seat and walked down the dark stairs, knowing that the English teacher and his friend would be hurt, feeling guilty, but only a little; after all, he'd bought them dinner. At least the photographer wouldn't care.

The night was lovely at curfew time, the rain just barely condensing out of the hot black sky like drops of sweat, motorbikes purring down the street. A woman pedaled slowly in the rain. It was very nice to see how her wet blue skirt stuck to her thighs. He passed the new market and saw a disco's dark doorway evilly serendipitous; I'll have to tell the photographer about that, he thought. (He didn't go in. The gaggle of taxi girls and motorbike drivers sitting hands on thighs, or looking sweetly, palely, over their shoulders, daunted him like pack-ice black and grey and all in a blue of mystery.) Every little chessboard-floored restaurant had become a movie theater of chairs packed with mothers and children raptly watching a TV screen placed high in the corner; two naked children, brother and sister, sat on the sidewalk staring in through a grating; every cell in the honeycomb was a cutaway world made expressly for the journalist to stare into and long to be taken into, just as the TV screens were for everyone else. Crossing a pitch-dark street he dodged cyclos and bicycles (all headlightless, almost silent). No one paid much attention to the curfew anymore; even so, as the hour shrank, more and more steel accordion-diamonds stretched taut to meet and lock everything into darkness. Girls leaned out of their terraces; doors opened to show darkness or brightly turning fans. The girls put both hands on the railings and leaned, their watch-dials white like fire; they gossiped across at each other, enjoyed the hot night's raindrops, watched the street where a boy crossed with long slow steps, the scrape of his sandals a continuous sound, his blue shirt glowing like a night aquarium. Lizards waited head down on hotel walls. The girls looked at the journalist and waved; he waved back. A black dog scuttered across the street like a moving hole.

In the hotel there were paintings of bare-breasted girls in butterfly-winged skirts standing waist-deep in the mist before science fiction palaces. The night was so hot that his face felt as if it had peered into a steaming kettle. He went into the room, turned the air conditioning on (he and the photographer, being boys of high morals, always traveled first class), and took a shower. He was standing naked in the cool water when the photographer came in with two whores.

They were from that same disco he'd passed, as he soon learned (the photographer's soul always gushed when he'd made a novel score). - I was gonna take the tall one because I kept thinking how it would be, you know, with her legs around me, but as soon as we got into the street the short one took my hand, so that's that. - I guess it is, replied the journalist, toweling himself off while the girls screamed and looked away. - They went through all his pills and medicines first, sniffing the packets, going nnnihh! giggling at the condoms, whispering and pointing like schoolgirls. The photographer's girl was already in the shower and out, halfway demure in her towel. The journalist's girl stayed dressed. She did not seem to like him very much, but then that didn't seem unusual to him because girls never liked him; was it his fat legs or his flabby soul? Fortunately this was an issue he'd never be called on to write a newsicle about. - Look at 'em! shouted the photographer. They're as curious as fucking monkeys, man! — With great effort they mouthed the Khmer words in the dictionary section of his guidebook; they opened the box of sugar cubes, which were swarming with ants, and ate one apiece. The journalist's girl had a beauty spot over one eye. When she opened and closed everything, her eyebrows slanted in elegant surprise. She wore a striped dark dress. There was something very ladylike about her: she intimidated him slightly. He lay sweatily on the bed watching them; when they'd completed their inspection they neatened everything up like good housewives, so that it took the journalist and the photographer days to find their possessions. Such well-meaning young women, though. . They stared with satisfaction into the mirror, the photographer's girl tilting the purple tube of lipstick and drawing it along her lower lip like a gentle loving penis while her earrings and necklace shone gold, her hair spilling black and pure black like squid's ink. Suddenly she turned toward the photographer, her nose's beauty spot spying on him, something shiny and watchful in her eyes and tea-colored face in the darkness as she made her hair into braids for him, smoothing the electric blue dress down over her tits; but the journalist's girl never looked away from the mirror; she smiled into it or she leaned her nose against it so as not to have to look at anything else; only the gold glitter around her dark breasts like drops of light in the humid darkness of the hotel room, her face level or low, maybe satisfied after all; or maybe the smile was only some resigned grimace.

The photographer's girl got ready right away. But after half an hour the journalist's girl was still silent in the bathroom with the door closed. She stood staring at the back of her little mirror, which had a decal of a man and woman together. .

He communicated with her mainly by signs. She liked to smell his cheeks and forehead in little snorts of breath, but not to kiss him; whenever he tried, she'd whirl her head away into the pillow, so he started Buddha-ing her in just the same way that Oy had steepled her hands very quickly together for good luck when he'd bought her out, she probably hoping he wouldn't see, probably praying that he'd give her a lot of money; so he did this to the Cambodian girl; he'd seen the beggars do it; he'd do it to say please, then he'd touch his forefinger from his lips to hers — and she'd Buddha him back to say please no. Sometimes he did it anyway, and she'd jerk her head away, or let him do it only on her closed lips. Then sometimes he'd steeple his hands please and point from his lips to her cunt, and she'd wave her hand no, so he wouldn't do that; he'd pray to kiss her again, and she'd pray him no; so he'd pray and point from his crotch to hers and she'd nod yes.

He smiled at her as affectionately as he could. He wanted her to like him. It just made things easier when the whore you were on top of liked you. - The truth was, he really did like her. He traced a heart on her breast with his finger and smiled, but she looked back at him very seriously. Then suddenly she ran her fingernail lightly round his wrist and pointed to herself. - What did she mean? So many prostitutes seemed to wear religious strings for bracelets; was that what she meant? Somehow he didn't think so. .

Give 'em more Benadryl; come on, give 'em more Benadryl, the journalist whined as the photographer's girl turned on the light giggling for the fourth or fifth time that night; he didn't know exactly what the hour was, since his watch had been stolen in Thailand, possibly by Oy. . The photographer's girl loved to watch the journalist making love. Even when the photographer was screwing her she'd always be looking avidly at the other bed, hoping to see the journalist's buttocks pumping under the sheet; whenever she could she'd sneak up and pull the sheet away to see the journalist naked with a naked girl; then she'd shriek with glee. It was very funny but it got a little less funny each time. - Fortunately they obediently swallowed whatever pills the journalist gave them; the photographer told them that the journalist was a doctor and the journalist neither confirmed nor denied this report, which most likely they didn't understand anyway. So he gave them Benadryl; one for his girl, three for the other, who was hyperkinetic. Even so they both kept turning the lights on to see what time it was; they wanted to leave by the end of curfew. - The journalist's girl lay against him, her cool weightless fingers resting on his chest. Her face smelled sweetish like hair-grease. In the morning she pulled a towel about herself and slid into her gold and purple dress. Then she sat in a chair, far from the bed, making up her lips, using her eyebrow pencil, occasionally uttering brief replies to the other girl's babble. The other girl had a voice like a lisping child. The girl in the chair ran the lipstick very slowly over the outside of her lower lip. She saw the journalist looking at her and smiled guardedly, then raised the pocket mirror again. She smoothed her hair away from her cheeks and began to apply more of the sickly-sweet cream.

Once they'd left, he told the photographer he didn't want to see her again. Why, she hadn't wanted to do anything! — and she'd seemed so sorrowful he'd felt like a rapist. What did she expect anyway? — But as soon as he'd conveyed these well-reasoned sentiments, his heart started to ache. He didn't tell the photographer, of course. They rarely talked about those things. But he remembered how she'd hung his trousers neatly over the chair, how she'd ordered his money in neat piles without stealing any, how before leaving she'd taken each of his fingers and pulled it until it made a cracking noise, then bent it back; this was her way of pleasing him, taking care of him.

At the disco that night he didn't see her. He sat and waited while the crowd stridulated. Finally her friend, the photographer's girl, came to the table. She was slick with sweat; she must have been dancing. He asked the English teacher who didn't speak English to ask her where his girl was. The man said: She don't come here today. - Already they were bringing him another girl. He said not right now, thank you. He tried::o find out more, and then there was another girl sitting down by him and he figured he had to buy her a drink so she wouldn't be hurt, and the photographer's girl was biting her lip and stamping her foot, and then his girl came and stood looking on at him and the other girl silently.

He pointed to his girl and traced the usual imaginary bracelet around his wrist. (He didn't even know his girl's name. He'd asked the photographer's girl and she said something that sounded like Pala. He'd tried calling her Pala and she looked at him without recognition.) Finally the other girl got up, carrying her drink, and began to trudge away. He patted her shoulder to let her know that he was sorry, but that seemed to be the wrong thing to do, too. His girl sat down in her place, and he could feel her anger, steady and flame-white in the darkness, almost impersonal.

But that night when he put his closed lips gently on her closed lips, not trying to do anything more because he knew how much Thai and Cambodian women hated kissing, her mouth slowly opened and the tip of her tongue came out.

You got her to french you? laughed the photographer, as the two chauvinists lay at ease, discussing their conquests. - Oh, good! She must have been really repulsed.

Sliding piles of fish empyred the dock, bleeding mouths where heads used to be, heads white and goggle-eyed and wheel-gilled at their new red termini like the undersides of menstruating mushrooms. The heads went into a big aluminum bowl; then the squatting girl with bloody hands and feet started picking through yellow tripe-piles, getting the yellow snakes inside; the dock was red with blood. - Another pile (smooth skinny silver fish) still flapped; the flies were crawling on them before they were even dead.

The rickety boards, which bent underfoot, were laid over a framework of wet knobby peeled sticks. Big fish and small fish flashed in the water-spaces. They were from Siem Reap. The fishers had been feeding them corn for four months. If all went well, they'd make more than a hundred million riels' profit. A big basket of live fish gaped up as sweetly as angels, winged with gills, their lips mumbling a last few water-breaths as their eyes dulled. They stopped shining. The flies were thick on them like clusters of black grapes.

A man tied two live fishes together through the gills with withes. Then he lifted them away.

Boys in dirty white shirts and pants scuttled on the planks. Then they leaped into the water. They began to draw in their nets. A gorgeous leopard-butterfly crowned them. - Why do butterflies love blood? the journalist wondered. The beauty of the butterfly seemed a sort of revenge that left him uncompre-hendingly incredulous.

The glistening brown boys came up from the brown water, squatting on the frames. Fish splashed in the nets. The boys raised the nets a little more. The splashing was loud and furious now. The fish were fighting for their lives. The boys began their work. They grabbed each fish by the tail. If it was still too small they threw it back. That didn't happen often. Usually they whacked it on top of the skull with a fat stick. Then they beat its head against a beam until it was still, and blood came out of its mouth.

The butterfly had settled in a drop of blood, and was drinking.

A man with a notebook wrote numbers. He had a stack of money in his shirt pocket. Another man stood by pressing buttons on his calculator. It was like the Stock Exchange.

The dead fish were in a big basket. Two men slid a pole through, and lifted the pole onto their shoulders, carrying it away down the long wagging double planks onto the land, past the photographer who stood scowling like an evil dream, past the sweating journalist, past the people scraping earth into broad half-shell baskets which they dumped up onto the levée so that the pickman could tamp it down. (Everyone was worried about flooding.) The two men walked on and finally set the basket down in the back of a truck.

In the square wood-walled cells of water, the boys raised their nets until fins broke water. The squatting girl was already chopping off the heads of the other fish with a big cleaver. Her toes were scarlet with blood.

The disco was stifling hot, and everybody mopped their faces with the chemical towelettes that the hostess brought. Waves of stupid light rusted across the walls.

You happy? he asked the English teacher who couldn't speak English.

Good! the other replied. I'm berry excited. .

It was long and low in there with occasional light bulbs. Girls said aaah and ooh and aiee while the crowd swarmed slowly and sweatily. Semen-colored light flickered on men's blue-white shirts and women's baggy silk pajama-pants or dresses; the accustomed smell of a cheap barbershop choked him like the weary Christmas lights. The barmaid brought a tall can of Tiger beer. Hands clutched all around, as if in some drunken dream -

She almost never smiled. Once again that night she traced an invisible bracelet around her wrist, then his. He watched her sleeping. In the middle of the night he pulled her on top of him just to hug her more tightly, and she seemed no heavier than the blanket.

She lay hardly breathing. He could barely hear her heartbeat. Her hands lay folded between her breasts. Her nipples were very long, brown and thin.

In the morning she cracked his finger-joints and toe-joints for him; she stretched and twisted his arms and legs; she slapped him gently all over. Then she made her rendezvous with the mirror, where she stood painting her eyebrows in slow silence. When she was finished he sat her down with his guidebook, which contained a few dictionary pages. He pointed to all the different words for food, pointed to her and then to him. She just sat there. He made motions to indicate the two of them going off together. She followed soundlessly. He locked the door. She came downstairs with him, into the lobby's world of eyes which shot the weak smirk off his face, and the eyes watched in silence. She was behind him on the stairs, creeping slowly down. He dropped the key onto the front desk and she was far behind him. He let her catch up to him a little, not too much because she might not want that, and went out into the street that was filled with even more spies, spectators, jeerers and hostile enviers, and she was farther behind than before. It must be difficult for her to be seen beside him. He concluded that the best thing to do was to walk without looking, which he did for half a block, then sat down at an outdoor restaurant where they brought him tea and bread. She had not come. He drank a few sips of his tea, paid, and walked wearily back. He said to the cigarette vendeuse: You see my friend?

Market. That way, she said.

You tell her, please, if she go to hotel, she come in.

No, no. You go market. She that way.

He did, but of course he never found her.

He felt miserable all day. He didn't want to fuck her anymore, only to straighten things out. He'd find someone to speak English to her…

Again and again he circled the market's yellow-tiered cement dome. The traffic was slow enough to let jaywalkers stand in the street. He loitered among the umbrellas and striped awnings, under each a vendor's booth or table; and sometimes they tried to sell him things: moneychangers studied him behind their jagged walls of cigarette cartons; but there was only one vendeuse he wanted, and what she had, it seemed, he couldn't ever buy.

The photographer's girl, on the other hand, had stayed. The photographer was getting sick of her. He told her that he and the journalist would have to go to work soon; he pointed to her and then to the door, but the girl tried desperately not to understand. In the middle of the morning she was still there. She wanted him to buy her a gold bracelet. They were out on the street, the three of them, and the photographer said to the journalist: All right. We'll each grab a cyclo and split.

Where to?

Where to? cried the photographer in amazement. Anywhere! Just as long as we get rid of this bitch. . Oh, shit, she's getting a cyclo, too!

Finally they went home with her. She took them down a very dark narrow dirt lane, then right into an alley, then up a steep plank ladder two inches wide to a dormitory that smelled like wood-smoke and was rowed with tiny square windows for light and air. Puddles on the floor darkly reflected the ceiling's patchy plaster. Mosquitoes and fleas bit the journalist's feet. The room was filled with beds, enclosed by patterned sheets hung from strings like laundry; sturdy beds, neatly made up. People lay one or two to a bed, very quiet, some sleeping, some not. The photographer's girl said that she paid ten thousand riels a year to stay there. She lived with her aunt, in a bed against the wall.

She pulled the photographer down on top of her, tried to get him to marry her — with a gold chain -

How many times has she been married? asked the journalist.

The aunt smiled and fanned him. - Five times.

He heard the sound of a thudding mallet, saw the shadow of a woman's bare legs darkening the nearest puddle on the dirty-grey cement. The photographer lay listless and disgusted on the bed, his girl on top of him whining, working him slowly but determinedly like a cyclo driver polishing his wheels. The journalist felt sorry for her.

Now they brought another girl for the journalist to marry in the dimness; she'd gone through it three or four times at least from the look of her gold chains; she took over the task of fanning him, smiling so wide-eyed that the journalist began to feel sorry for her, too; he already had a girl — Pala, Pala! he said. - The photographer's girl knew what he meant, and she gnashed her teeth. This rejected matrimonial prospect turned away and put on a new bra, kneeling on her pallet two feet away. The disks of her gold necklace gleamed consecutively when she turned her head, like the bulbs of a neon sign. While she was away the aunt resumed fanning him. Her teeth were perfectly white except for one of gold. She wore a ruby ring from Pailin (where he had promised his editor he'd go; he had no intention of going because the Khmer Rouge were still in control of the town).

I can't stand this anymore, the photographer said. Let's get out of here.

They'll want us to take them out to lunch.

So we'll take 'em out to lunch. Then we'll dump 'em.

The aunt didn't come. So it was only the photographer and his girl and the journalist with two new ladies, each hoping and vying, who went to the nearest sidewalk restaurant. He was a little afraid of one of them, a very pale girl with a Chinese-porcelain face (was she albino, or sick, or just heavily powdered? The longer he looked at her, the more corpselike she seemed. .); she, noticing how he studied her most frequently, said something in a smug undertone to her rival, who then withdrew her solicitudes. The Chinese-porcelain girl kept lowering her head and smiling, fingering her strings of gold, while the other girl, still hopeful to a small degree, gazed lovingly from time to time into the journalist's eyes. Crowds lined up behind their chairs, staring unhappily. By and large, they did not seem to admire whores or foreigners who whored. But of course there wasn't a damned thing they could do about it, thought the journalist as the Chinese-porcelain girl peeled him the local equivalent of a grape, which had a green rind, an inner sweet grey substance the texture and shape of an eyeball, and then a round seed — did it taste more like a grape or a cantaloupe? Being a journalist, he really ought to decide the issue once and for all — oh, GOOD, he'd have another chance (she'd hardly touched her soup; she looked very very sick; quite suddenly he was sure that she was going to drop dead any minute). . She called the fruit mayen.

So after lunch they dropped the girls, and the girls were very disappointed.

The photographer had to go back to the hotel to get more ointment for his rash, which had spread from one arm to the other and itched practically as bad as scabies or crabs (which the well-traveled photographer had already experienced; of course he'd never had *** GONORRHEA *** so the journalist was one up on him there). The journalist sat waiting for him in an open square of grass riddled with wide walkways and rectangular puddles between which children ran. On the far side (this park was quite large), two-storey houses whose roofs were truncated pyramids strutted stained balconies. Between the roots of a tree, a boy was digging with a stick.

The journalist thought about the gold chain that his prostitute wore about her naked waist. He wondered who'd given it to her, and whether the man had loved her in his heart or whether he'd just paid her. Did he still see her?

There were red lines running down her skin in slanted parallels from her shoulders to her breasts, three lines on her left side, three on her right, the two triads arrowing symmetrically inward; they reminded him of aboriginal tattoos. Most likely they'd been made with a coin's edge. Someone had told him that Cambodians did that to ease the blood when they were ill. Suddenly he recalled the nightmare pallor of the Chinese-porcelain girl, and he almost shuddered.

Night having smothered the wasted day at last, he set out for the disco while his dear friend the photographer lurked in the rat-infested shadows of the garbage heap, not wishing to show himself to his girl, the five-time bride, whom he'd dismissed definitively, and who was in corresponding agonies. The journalist knew very well that by returning to the disco he'd be disturbing her, and the photographer as well, but this was the time to actualize his own reproductive strategies. So he passed through the hot outer crowds alone. Every time he came here they seemed more menacing. It was all in his head, but that was his problem; as the saying goes, he was thinking with the wrong head. As soon as he'd been sucked into the sweaty inner darkness, the photographer's girl came running up, seizing him by the hand, weeping, pleading in a rush of alien singsong. He shook his head, patted her shoulder (this was becoming his stereotyped Pontius Pilate act), and she stamped in a rage. Just as nightshade grows tall and poisonous in American forests, its spider-legged veins hung with red balls, black balls, and milky white putrescences, so grew her fury in that long narrow cavern whose walls dripped with lust-breath. She ran away into the cigarette fumes between the crowded tables and though he'd lost sight of her, her terrible howling made his ears ache. She was back again, snarling and groveling monstrously (did she need to eat so badly as that? what didn't he understand?) and he wondered whether she only wanted him to buy her out so that she could rush to the hotel in pursuit of the photographer, or whether she wanted him now, whether he was her fallback; anyhow it was clear that she wasn't Pala's friend (that night she finally took the trouble to tell him that the woman he was falling in love with was not named Pala, but Vanna) because that afternoon she'd tried to get him to go with the girl in the bra, the Chinese-porcelain girl, or failing that the other one (did she get a commission?); she wasn't loyal to Vanna! — Thinking this helped him harden his heart. (In truth, what could he have done? His loyalty lay with Vanna and with the photographer, not with her.) — I want Vanna, he said. - Excuse me, sir, said a low-level pimp or waiter or enforcer, presenting him with two other girls, each of whom slid pleading hands up his kneee. - I want Vanna, he said. - The photographer's girl said something, and the others laughed scornfully. Then they all left. (Later the photographer said that he saw his girl come running out, and he hid behind the garbage pile so she wouldn't discover him; she got on a motorbike and went to the hotel to sniff him out; not finding him, she came back weeping.) — Vanna must be dancing, probably. There was no possibility of finding her if she didn't want to be found. She was a taxi girl; it was her profession to find him. If she wanted him she'd come… He sat back down, and a waiter said something in Khmer that to him sounded very eloquent. Evidently it was a question. Tall, white, conspicuous, the journalist sat at his table facing the stares from other darknesses. - Seven-Up, he said. The waiter trotted off, and returned with a long face. - Sprite, said the journalist. The waiter brought him three cans of ice cream soda. - Perfect, he said wearily. The photographer's girl was sitting down beside him again; he slid one can toward her. His own girl came from the dance floor at last, eyeing him with what he interpreted to be an aloof and hangdog look. A man said to him: YES, my friend!. . and began to explain something to him at great length, possibly the causes and cures of hyperthyroidism, while the journalist nodded solemnly and Vanna stared straight through everything. The journalist offered him a can of ice cream soda as a prize for the speech. The waiter remained anxious at his elbow; the two staring girls needed so badly to be taken out… — At last the man pointed to Vanna and then to himself, joined two fingers together. . Then he said something involving many vowels, concluding with the words twenty dollah. Buying a girl out was only ten. The journalist reached into his money-pouch and handed the man a twenty-dollar bill. The man rose formally and went behind the bar, speaking to a gaggle of other smooth operators as the journalist took Vanna's hand and tried to get her to rise but she made a motion for him to wait. The man came back and announced: Twenty-five dollah. The journalist shook his head and popped up from his seat again like a jack-in-the-box. He was required to stand and sit several more times before the man finally faded. Then he took Vanna's hand. She walked behind him without enthusiasm. Every eye was on them. The photographer's girl made one more attempt, weeping again. He was too exhausted now to feel anything for her. Outside, Vanna shook her hand away from his. He'd already slipped her a stack of riels under the table. She picked out a motorbike and he got on behind her. The hotel was only three blocks away but she didn't like to walk much, it seemed. When they got to the hotel she paid the driver two hundred from her new stack, and they went in. The lobby crowd watched them in silence as they went upstairs. .

Wait, he said gently, his hand on her shoulder. He left her in the room and went downstairs.

Do either of you speak English? he asked the desk men.

Yes, they both replied in low voices.

Will one of you please come and help me? There is someone I want to talk to, and I cannot speak Khmer.

There is some kind of problem?

No problem. I just want to talk to her.

I cannot go, one clerk said, and the other clerk said nothing. Maybe if my friend comes I go or I send him. What is your room number, please?

102.

OK. I go with you, the other man said.

That's great, the journalist said with all the enthusiasm of his nationality. I sure appreciate it. .

She was standing in the middle of the room, staring into the mirror.

The journalist said: Please tell her I want to talk to her. I want to find out if she is angry with me.

The man in the yellow shirt said something, and she opened her mouth and began to reply. It was practically the first time he had heard her speak (but as long as he knew her it always seemed that way when she said something; she talked so seldom). He marveled at the lisping syllables, the clear calm childish incomprehensible voice.

Oh, it is only a misunderstanding, the man laughed. She think you are ashamed of her, because you walk in front of her very fast.

Tell her I thought she was ashamed of being with me, because she walked very slowly.

You walk very fast, she walks very slowly; it is nothing. I told her you seem to be a nice person, a good person; she says she likes you very much.

Please ask her what she expects from me.

Well, you know she does not like to ask you for anything. She never ask. But a small gold chain, for a souvenir of you, that would please her very much. To show your… — well, it makes her very happy.

Ask her if I should give her the money to buy whichever gold chain she wants.

She says she wants to go with you, to pick it out together with you.

Ask her if she has anything to ask me.

She says she wants to do what you want, to make you happy.

Ask her if she can stay with me tomorrow morning.

How long you want her to stay?

Up to her.

She says she can stay until eleven or twelve. She has a job in the morning. She gets paid by the hour to work in the fields for small wage; that is no problem, to miss that; she simply won't get paid. But after that time maybe her uncle comes looking for her. These taxi girls, you know, they do this work to make money for the family. They never tell the family what they do.

Then they were alone again. Once more she wasn't really looking at him. Then she smiled a little and got the towel and went into the shower. .

He'd made up his mind, as I've said, not to fuck her anymore. He just wanted to be with her. When they lay in bed that night he kept his arm around her and she drew him close, drumming playfully on his belly, pinching his nipples; but then she was very still on her back beside him and he could see that she was waiting for him to do what he usually did (as meanwhile in the street the photographer met his former girl, who'd come hunting for him again alongside the girl with the Chinese-porcelain face, who still entertained hopes of majoring in journalism on her back; the photographer's girl was sobbing and screaming in the street. .) He didn't even kiss her or touch her breasts. He just held her very close, and the two of them fell asleep. All night they held each other. He wanted to respect her. In the morning he could see that she was waiting for it again, so he got up and took a shower and started getting dressed. He couldn't tell if she was surprised. She got up, too, and pulled her bra on, while in the other bed the photographer lay grinning.

You mind if I hop her while you're in the shower? he said.

I don't think she'd like that, the journalist said evenly.

That's a good one, the photographer jeered.

He made eating motions and she nodded faintly.

He took her downstairs, this time holding her hand and introducing her to everyone as his girlfriend, but she didn't look anyone in the eye.

At the restaurant they pretended she wasn't there and asked him what he wanted.

Ask her, he said.

They looked at him incredulously.

He said it again, and she said something.

Uh, they said, she want, uh, only soup, sir.

Two soups, please, he said.

When the soups came she put pepper on his and smiled a little. She picked the meat and noodles out of hers, leaving the broth as people always seemed to do in Cambodia, and then she just sat there. He suddenly wanted to cry.

He drew an imaginary gold circlet on her wrist, and she nodded.

They went out, and he was about to take her by the hand to go to the market where he'd seen some gold things for sale, but she took him by the hand and led him to a motorbike and they got on. They traveled far across the city, down shady lanes of coconut palms, past clean white two-storey houses already shuttered against the heat, then a sudden crowded marketplace, then a sidewalk lined with the checker-clothed tables of the cigarette vendeuses, ahead more palm trees receding infinitely… He gripped her shoulders. Everyone was looking at him as usual. He kept expecting to get used to it; instead, every day it got harder to bear. There was a young soldier in fresh glowing green who lounged in sandals, smoking and talking with a friend sitting on a Honda; the soldier looked up suddenly and locked his eyes on the journalist's face; when the journalist looked back, the soldier was still watching. Two old brown faces leaning close together, smoking Liberation cigarettes over a bicycle, peered round and caught him. They stood up slowly, never looking away. A cyclo driver with veined brown pipestem legs saw him, and there was almost an accident. The journalist never tightened his grip on Vanna's shoulders; he did not want to add to her shame. They vibrated past shady chessboard-floored chambers open to the street, their corrugated doors and grilles retracted to let the last of the morning coolness in, glass-fronted shelves not quite glinting in the dimness, people resting inside with their bare feet up on chairs, schools of child-fish watching TV; and the journalist drank them in almost vindictively because so many had drunk him in; everywhere soldiers and gorgeous-greened police rode slowly on motorbikes, looking both ways.

At last they reached a video arcade which was also a jewelry store without any jewelry, without anything in the glass case except for a tiny set of scales on top of a cigar box. The Chinese-looking man in the straw hat opened the cigar box and took out three gold bracelets. Vanna gestured to the journalist to choose. He smiled and signed that it was up to her. She smiled a little at him. Already a new crowd was secreting itself, like the swarm of black bees eating the sugar and flour in the market's open bowls… — Two of the bracelets were slender and lacy. The third was quite heavy and had three blocks that said ABC. That one would obviously be the most expensive. She took that one. He took a hundred-dollar bill from his pocket and gave it to her. She looked at it as if she'd never seen one before, which she probably hadn't. The man in the straw hat said something to her; the motorbike driver joined in, and they all began to discuss the alphabet bracelet with its every ramification. There was one chair, and she gestured to him to sit down; he gestured to her to do it, but she shook her head. The man in the straw hat gestured to him to sit down; he gave in. The man in the straw hat got a calculator from somewhere and clicked out the figure 30 and said dollah. The journalist nodded. I guess I can give Vanna a lot of change, he thought. They all talked some more. The man in the straw hat clicked out 137. They were all watching him to see what he'd do. When he got out two twenties, everybody but Vanna started to laugh. Were they happy, polite, scornful, or sorry for him? What did it matter? The man in the straw hat brought out his miniature scales and weighed the alphabet bracelet against a weight. Then he switched the pans and did the same thing again. The journalist nodded. Vanna took the bracelet and draped it over her left wrist. He realized that everyone was waiting for him to fasten it for her. He bent down and did it, taking awhile because the catch was very delicate and he was clumsy and nervous with his fat sweaty fingers. The man in the straw hat came to help him, but he waved him away. When he'd finished, he looked up. An old lady was standing at the edge of the crowd. He smiled at her tentatively, and she stared back stonily.

Then he looked at Vanna. The smile that she gave him was worth everything. And she took his hand in front of them all.

They got back on the motorbike and went to a bazaar. She paid the driver off with two of the one hundred-riel notes he'd given her last night, and led him into the awninged tunnels. People stared at them and snickered. A woman with her three young children was sitting on a bedframe on the sidewalk, eating rice. When they spied Vanna and the journalist, they forgot their rice. Someone called out: Does you loves her? — She stared ahead proudly; he hoped that their cruelty did not touch her.

She went to a bluejean stand and held a pair of black ones against herself and then put them back. (Did she want him to buy her something?) She looked at a white blouse and a yellow blouse. She put them back.

She kept looking at her watch. Had he already used up his hundred thirty-seven dollars' worth of her time? She caught them another motorbike and brought him to a place that looked like a prison. Soldiers were sitting at a table behind a grating, with their pistols lying pointed out. There was a ragged hole in the grating. She put some money in, and a hand reached out and gave her two slips of waste paper with hand-written numbers on them.

Then he realized that they were going to the movies.

Taking him by the hand, she guided him upstairs through the molten crowds and bought them fruit. Then they went into the auditorium. It was almost unbearably hot, and the shrill screaming crackling echoing movie was interminable. But he was very happy because she held his hand and snuggled against him, and he could watch her smiling in the dark.

There was a newsreel about the latest floods. She pointed, held the edge of her hand to her throat like rising water.

Then she brought him back to the hotel. People lined up on the sidewalks to watch them pass; he longed for one of those Chinese rockets-on-a-string, to clear the landmined path. .

Well, what have you been up to? said the photographer, on the bed, nursing his skin rash.

Got married.

Oh. Well, I guess that means I'd better clear out. Is an hour enough?

He still didn't really want to fuck her. He just wanted to be naked next to her, holding her for the last ten minutes or two hours or whatever it would be until she went to work. He stripped and took a shower. While she did the same, he looked for his gonorrhea pills. When she came out he got into bed with her. She pointed to her watch. She had to go soon. She snuggled him for a minute, then pointed to the tube of K-Y jelly. He didn't want to confuse or disappoint her anymore. If that was what she expected, then he'd better do it. She touched his penis, and he squirted the K-Y jelly into her and rolled the rubber on and got ready to mount her, and then something in her face made him start to cry and he went soft inside her and rolled off. - She was not pleased, no two ways about it. After all, it was their honeymoon. She was rubbing him; she wanted him to try again. He put more K-Y jelly inside her and took the rubber off and threw it on the floor. The doctor had said he wouldn't be contagious anymore; sex was only hurting him, not anyone else. As soon as he was inside her, he went soft again. He was crying, and she smiled, looking into his face, trying to cheer him up; he was behaving like a baby. He traced a heart on his chest, pointed from himself to her, and drew a heart between her breasts. She nodded very seriously. He made a motion of two hands joining and she nodded. He said: You, me go America together. . and she shook her head. She drew a square on his chest, not a heart, then pointed to a heart-shaped chain of gold that some other man must have given her. .

She got up and took a shower. He started to get dressed, too, but she gently motioned him back into bed. She dressed very quickly. She came and sat with him for a moment on the bed, and he pointed to the number eight on his watch and signed to her to come to the hotel then and she nodded and he said: Ah Khun. * — Then she stood up to go. She clasped her hands together goodbye and he was crying and she was waving and kissing her hands to him and she never came back again.

THE END

' Thank you.