Hunters in the Dark

ONE

He came over the border as the lights were about to be dimmed, with the last of the migrants trailing their stringed boxes. With them came gamblers from the air-conditioned buses, returning short-time exiles tumbling out of minivans with microwaves and DVD units. The border forced them all into a defile in the rain. The gamblers complained about their summary treatment while opening plastic umbrellas provided by the tour company. It seemed a shame to them that the casinos on the other side could not manage it better. Their Bangkok shoes began to suffer in the coffee-colored mud. Between the two posts the ground was already filled with pools and the dogs waited for the money. The hustlers and drivers were there, silently smoking and watching their prey. The officer ripped away his departure card in the Thai hut and his passport came back to him and he set off for the farther side lit up by the arc lamps.

The drivers began to wave, to raise their arms and shout, but he could not hear what the words were. Carrying a single bag, he was quick on his feet. He had the aura of poverty about him, but still, he was white and therefore — in their eyes — affluent. He went under the dry eaves of the opposing nation and gave his passport anew to the men behind a shabby window. There were four windows and the men behind did not look very forgiving. They bore considerable weight in their eyes. In the bare concrete rooms, tables were set up with thermos flasks and darkened TV sets. The new king high on the walls in his wise white uniform.

“Tourist,” he said, and they charged him a surplus two dollars for not having a photograph for the visa. He counted out his baht and pushed the filthy money across the table and they stuck a full-page green visa into a page of his passport and tossed it dismissively back at him. He had a month to roam their green and pleasant kingdom and he spent the first minute looking across at the neon lights of the casinos, the dusk and the men waving at him.

The pools opening up under the lamps had grown green as well and he walked gingerly around them with his shoulder bag and his straw hat growing soggy as the rain enveloped him.

“Sir, taxi,” the men were crying, already each one setting off toward a large run-down Japanese car. Forced to pick one at random, he chose a man with a Toyota and an umbrella and it was seven dollars into Pailin. Above them shone the red and blue lights of the Diamond Crown casino. But he was tired and not yet in the mood for a fling on the tables. He resolved to return the following night.

—

He sat in the backseat and drank from the bottle of iced tea he had bought at the border stalls. The verges were filmed red with sticky and wettened dust and in the dark were rolling green hills dotted with primeval-looking, isolated trees. Fields of mung and shaggy sugarcane. It was windy, the sky jagged with storm clouds and a Peeping-Tom moon. The site of a disaster, or of a disaster about to happen. The earth dark with iron and cloying and musty to the nose. He was down to a hundred dollars so he asked the driver to take him to a cheap place for the night, he didn’t care where. Turning his head for a moment, the driver told him there were only two or three choices in the town anyway and none of them was the Hilton. A half hour later they were passing the traffic circles of the town, a few roadside bars with red Angkor beer signs. A small park with twelve golden horses prancing in a grit-filled wind.

The man took him to a place called the Hang Meas. It was on the main road to the border, which was lined by one-story shops. Pailin, to his eye, was clearly a place with three streets and little more. A town built on illegal gemstones and the undeparted Khmer Rouge. A dead and absurd sign on the hotel’s facade read, as if contradicting its current lamentable state, Le Manoir de Pailin. The establishment’s pink walls and the karaoke club on the ground floor gave a further dying look to it — he could tell that it was about to close. There were life-size sculptures of deer on the roof gazing out to the Cardamom Mountains and white glass-ball lamps on the balcony. A huge model cockerel stood in the car park and next to it a spirit house filled with kneeling figures with painted white hair and beards. The ancestors of that windswept place, secretly connected to the fields and the mountains which could be seen even in the night. The car left him by them and he waded into a decrepit lobby with his wet hat and his chills and the girls looked up with a subtle contempt.

He sat in a leather chair by some fish tanks while they photocopied his passport and stamped the forms, and he saw the entertainment hall next door to the lobby with a multitude of red pillars wrapped with ribbons and covered with mirrors. In there the karaoke was going on, Viet or Chinese businessmen singing badly. The girls were in clasped silk skirts playing them for a song. It was a Bee Gees number, “How Deep Is Your Love?”

A girl ambled over and invited him to come with her to the room on the third floor. They went up the stairs and their scents came into awkward contact.

“Holiday?” she said, as if it was the sole English word she had.

“Business,” he said.

It was the word that usually ended all conversations.

“We closed next week,” she said sadly.

They came into the room and the same smell pervaded it. It’s OK, he said, as if there was a choice in the matter. She showed him the workings of a few switches and left him alone. He turned on the AC, stripped off and took a tepid bath with the lights on. One had to fear such a wonderland of roaches. He smoked his last three Thai cigarettes and considered if he had the gall or the energy to go out straight away and find a casino. There would be little else to do here anyway. The other foreigners who crossed the border — nearly all Thai — either went straight back into Thailand or carried on toward the capital, a mere five hours away. They would have to think of a reason to stay in Pailin. He would have to think of a reason other than not having more than a hundred dollars. But it was a reason, at least. He opened his bag and pulled out a cheap dress shirt and pressed it out with the iron in the cupboard. He could make himself half presentable after a shave and an oiling of the hair.

At nine thirty he went down to the lobby and asked them to call a taxi to the gates to drive him to one of the casinos back at Phum Psar Prum. He strolled out in his awkward shirt, his pockets filled with US dollars, and the car was summoned by the boys outside in their “security” uniforms. He said “Casinos” to the car that pulled up, and when he added that he didn’t know which one, there was a confusing consultation. In the end he was driven to the towering place he had seen an hour or two earlier, the Diamond Crown. It was a pointless forty minutes driving there and back again, but he didn’t mind. Anything was better than karaoke or an empty room.

The Diamond loomed over the village around it. There was a forecourt garden of towering palms, and a blaze of neon across the facade in Latin and Khmer lettering. Outlines of playing cards and golden women. A KTV to the right, and a hotel of the same name. Inside, red carpets, sky-blue vaults with painted clouds. There were Chinese shrines; a tacky, run-down feel. The tables were green felt. The Khmer girls in their equivalent green waistcoats watched him slowly with a dim interest. In one corner two staff workers struggled with a large rolled carpet. It was a hot crowd, mostly Thais playing simple poker and baccarat and roulette. They looked like officer workers on a lost weekend. He walked around sizing it up and wondering if he had luck on his side that night, or ever, for that matter. Finally he sat at a drunken table and played roulette for five-dollar bets against a ring of Thai middle managers downing the Sang Som and Yaa Dong and far gone in their daze. There was no time to calculate or think and later he thought to himself that this was how he had won. It’s how an outsider always wins. He pulled in two hundred, packed up and went outside to buy some Alain Delons. At the far end of the forecourt was an outdoor restaurant filled with half-dead gamblers and he sat there and smoked and saw that the moon had appeared again out of the fast-moving black storm clouds.

Fireflies now shone in groomed-looking frangipani trees nearby and he felt his skin moisten and harden at the same time. He had spent nearly all his cash and was due to go back to the homeland, but he had stuck his neck out for a few days across the border and suddenly it seemed to have paid off. It sometimes came up like that, a flash of good luck out of nowhere and the night — and the nights after — looked a little different. A little more and he’d be able to pay the fee to change the ticket home and linger on. You want to linger on sometimes, when there is nothing better awaiting. A teacher from England did not have any worlds at his feet. He did not have anything at his feet but doormats and cigarette butts and the plucked fins of cooked fish.

The Alain Delons were harsh but the face of the French actor was everywhere on the billboards. He smiled down above the streets on scaffolds, his face from around 1960 more youthful than the twenty-eight-year-old Englishman’s. So time passed but not for Delon, not for the immortals.

He lit a second cigarette and smoked it down just as coolly and slowly. The waiters didn’t even bother to give him a menu. There were no barangs here and he didn’t fit the scheme. Yet he liked this new country a little better than the previous one. It had a different feel to it, a slower spin.

As a teacher he profited from a long summer holiday. Two months were enough to slip away entirely from one’s life, however complicated that life might be. But as it happened his life was not complicated at all. He lived alone at the edges of a town called Burgess Hill, close to the Sussex Downs, in a damp cottage with a wooden lintel and horseshoes decorating the walls. He had not even redecorated it to his taste. He had done very little to personalize anything in his surroundings. He did not, in the end, raise much objection to his own passivity. It suited him.

Did it make him dull? He didn’t mind. The dullness was only an impression made upon outsiders, to whom he was, in turn, completely indifferent. He had gone through three years at the University of Sussex as inconspicuously as he could. Studying English and dallying with a few girlfriends. There had not been much more to it than that. A dream that passed quickly. He had chosen the university because it was close to his family, to his parents, and even to his grandparents, who lived in a council house in Bevendean on the road from Brighton to Falmer. They were a family whose members never strayed far from each other. The elements of life remained stable. He could take a bus to the Bevendean estate every weekend and walk to his grandmother’s gooseberry bushes. They made him trifle and he went for walks in the hills above the estate.

Outwardly, he remained stable as well. Even his haircut remained the same for years. Long at the back, with a parting to the right. Weekends, after visiting his family, he went to the rowdier pubs in Lewes and sat at the bars and talked to strangers. Then he left on his own and rode his motorbike back to his cottage. This invariable pattern was never broken by anything surprising. Naturally, he reasoned, this was because he wanted it to be so. His unconscious wanted it, and therefore he wanted it. It was like a period of waiting, or a period of sleep from which he would suddenly wake up armed with a sword.

But every year there came the summer holidays and with his free two months he tried to engineer a few surprises. One year he went to the island of Hydra in Greece. Another summer saw him in Iceland. He went alone and came back alone, and he was mostly alone when he was there. Even in Hydra he was alone, walking the dust paths that ran around the island. Swimming alone, eating alone. Most importantly, sleeping alone. He couldn’t say why he was alone; he was pretty in his way. But then again he was a dreamer and a loner. It was the way he was.

Iceland and Greece: the northern extreme of Europe and the southern. But he had found them to be remarkably similar. All he had come back with were photographs and a general irritability. There were times on Hydra, in particular, when he had felt something more like rage. He never told anyone where he was going, not even his parents. He would say, “I’m off to Greece,” and they would say, “Oh, are you? Take care then.” But his rage was not obvious to himself. What was it directed against? Not the Greeks. Not the ruins of the house of Ghika looking over that beautiful sea. Something else. Sometimes he thought it was merely his own anxious, unsteady blue eyes staring back at him from a hotel bathroom mirror. Could you feel rage against that?

Places in Europe, he sensed, were now the same tourist mills. The same restaurants, the same nightclubs, the same hotels, the same sexual escapades. This summer, however, he had saved up for two years so that when July had come around he would have the money to sail off into a deeper, more distant, blue. He had never traveled very extensively when he was younger and resented that he had never explored much of the planet. And even now, the Far East was not that far. The flight to Bangkok had been less than six hundred pounds.

He went back inside the Diamond. He felt even cockier and surer now and sat at a different table, but one nevertheless swarmed by the same Thai managers with their throat-scorching herbal Yaa Dong. The game itself was still a mystery to him. He had never even played cards much, let alone roulette. His game was amateur chess. But now he felt the attraction of a larger risk, a more uncertain venture. He played for an hour, throwing down his bets blind and hoping for the best. There was a hilarity in it. And the voice in his head urging “One more, one more” until he was running with the unfamiliar idea of playing and imperiling his small amount of capital. It was the kind of spontaneous risk that ordinarily he never took. He threw himself into it innocently. It turned out well. Who could understand it? Then, as if in a single moment, he had a thousand and the staff began to notice. The girls came over in their starched white blouses and bow ties and asked him if he would like a Black Label or a vodka neat or, you know, an orange juice or some fried ants. If it was a joke he didn’t know and he took a Black Label and looked at the clock on the far-off wall and decided that he might as well keep on destroying the middle managers and padding his new nest.

He did so. It was the moon, of course. It was something in the atmosphere. Soon he had two grand and some change and that was a fair winning for the Diamond Crown. Before unease set in and decline came upon him he wrapped it up with two grand in US dollars and collected the stash at the window without ceremony. The staff didn’t seem especially put out or surprised. The Thais were often high rollers themselves and wasted extraordinary amounts of money in the border casinos. It was something they saw every week.

“You have a heart of gold,” the floor manager said as he escorted him out, and as he passed to the gates he saw Alain Delon smiling down from his scaffold and the moon full of juice rising above the one-story shops and the road where the motodops waited. He could sense unlit roads rising up the hillside with dark bars and men with bottles in their hands. It was quicksand, all of it. He took the cash out of its envelope and squeezed it into one of his front pockets and took a farewell of the thugs in cheap suits who had come out to stare him down. They wanted to remember his face.

—

He took a motodop back into Pailin. The town was now almost asleep and in the Hang Meas restaurant he ordered a pho and a Lao beer and pork satay with cucumbers. The karaoke was still going strong and the grounds were alive with roaming Khmer girls in heels, their eyes finding him with ease and laying upon him a dallying charm. He drank on with the dark Lao beer all alone in that restaurant with the red lanterns stirring quietly as the wind picked up, the long tassels moving slowly back and forth like horse tails. Two thousand. It was something from the half-forgotten realm of sorcery. Years ago, he thought, you got an education for nothing and now here you are, boy, a rabbit shooting out of a hat, all set up with no future at all but with a stroke of luck that has served you right. It was a fine thing and no one saw it coming. Moreover, he resolved never to set foot in a casino ever again. He was not going to lose what he had won so flippantly. He was going to hold on to it and plant it for a while and, if possible, make it flower.

TWO

Across the fields of grass came the winds that had no obstacle, the summer breezes that still tasted of the Downs and distant fuel. The heads of the tall grasses rippled and they made a green horizon that moved with this spirit, and he ran through the stalks on his bloodied feet until the wind forgot him and he was alone on the rise that culminated in the Stensons’ barns. He woke just as he saw them. The room in which he found himself was bathed in early sun, the curtains flapping because he had left the windows open. The heat came upon him as if suddenly. He found his skin already drenched and acclimatized and the cocks crowed in the Khmer gardens across the road where sugarcane grew along the verge.

He got up and showered and dressed, his fingers shaking because he was not yet sure how real or unreal it was. The plants coated with dust and the skies already beginning to darken at the silver edges. Packing neatly he went down fully ready to move and asked the sleepy boys if they could find a car to take him on to Battambang.

“No can,” they said, sadly shaking their heads.

“Of course you can.”

“No can. It no can.”

“Just call a car — I’ll pay one dollar.”

“No dollar, no car.”

It went on for some time.

It took fifteen minutes to organize the car and he went into the restaurant and ordered Nescafé and pho and another pack of Alain Delons with a glass of watermelon juice. He sat there by the window looking out at flame vines hanging above a pool of shade. The hotel now seemed to be ruinously empty but for cleaning staff and hordes of boys in pressed white shirts, and from afar came the vibrancy of the mountains that were nevertheless burned half black and the white glare of frangipani.

At this hour the stillness and the quiet vitality of things had returned. You thought of home, but with a distant sadness. He wondered where he would go. Battambang was just the next city along. He knew nothing about it, it was just a place to go. Drifting, and drifting consciously. One could drift for a long time and not mind and where life was cheap and unhurried it rarely mattered. He decided then to go and walk around Pailin since the car was not going to arrive for some time. He told this to the girls. They smiled and said nothing and he went out into the heat with a curious determination.

—

He walked up the main road, up and up until he was at a Victory Monument exactly like the one in Phnom Penh. From here a road led up to a temple on a small hill called Phnom Yat. It was announced by a gigantic Buddha statue which looked down on the town. A giant in a gold tunic, a clean pink skin, the immense hand raised in the mudra of ayodha. He climbed up the steep shaded path to the temple steps, with a line of blue demons pulling the naga serpent like a tug of war. And so into the walled plateau filled with life-size figures brilliantly painted. Trees hung low among the pavilions and the broken green glass floors, and they tossed and hissed in a burning high wind. He passed a basin of black water with three stone human heads half buried in it. Next to it was a depiction of Buddhist Hell: white figures in black loincloths being tortured. A man having his tongue pulled out with a pair of pincers. The local Khmer Rouges must have known it well. Higher up, bodhisattvas, princesses playing long lutes (he didn’t know, he had to guess). A figure of a corpse lying on the earth while vultures tore out his intestines. At the top he came into a little court with three-headed elephants and tall gold flag posts and here the tree-dotted plain appeared with the mountains around it. A polished gold-plated tapered pagoda with tinkling coinlike chimes around the top mast, a reminder that the temple had been built by Shan Burmese immigrants.

He sat on the wall and watched the shades of quick clouds speeding across the plain. There was no sound but the wind-tormented trees and the chimes of the pagoda. Why not here, then, he wondered — a place to linger? It was a place with its own solitude and austerity and he liked it. It seemed to have an idea about death and about suffering. He could feel it very clearly. He didn’t know what it was and he didn’t need to know. The monks half asleep in the shade, the shrill chimes and the scenes of Hell just below the mirror-bright gold spire. There was something that beckoned him deeper in.

He walked slowly back down the hill and went to the market, alongside which the notorious brothels were supposed to lie. There was nothing there, and it was clear there would be nothing there later either. The former life of the town had moved on, it was taking a different shape. He returned to the hotel and asked the girls if his car was there yet. It was on its way. He sat in the lobby and drank a Sprite.

—

When the car finally rolled into the Hang Meas courtyard with its monumental gold cockerel he saw that it was the same man who had driven him from the border the day before. So it seemed that everyone knew everyone in this incestuous land. The Toyota was caked in dust the dark red of ground chili powder.

It was now ten. Robert went out into the hot sun and they shook hands and he said “Battambang” and they haggled and settled on a price.

“Where you hotel in Battambang?”

Robert shrugged because he had no idea. That too was settled. The driver knew the best place for seven dollars, and there was no luxury option in Battambang. The dollars were handed over and they had a coffee together outside. As they sat on plastic chairs without shade the sun made him dry and still and happy and the driver looked him over with a cool shrewdness. It was certain enough that wanderers like himself had passed this way before. They represented a living to some, to the drivers and guides especially. The driver asked Robert now if he needed a guide. Didn’t everyone need a guide in Battambang? But the other shook his head and said that he was just passing through and had no thoughts of visiting things. He didn’t even know there were things to visit. Oh yes, sir, there were things to visit. The temple of Wat Ek Phnom and the temple of Sampeau and others. There was an all-inclusive price and Mr. Deth knew all the history.

“Your name is Deth?”

But the driver saw no joke in it, not at all.

“My name Deth. I know all facts and the temple.”

“So I’m going to Ek with Deth?”

“I very safe driver man. All hotel recommend Mr. Deth.”

—

On the road with Mr. Deth. He shaded his eyes and looked up at the deer on the roof of the Hang Meas. One couldn’t say what they were for or what they meant. The deer of Buddha’s park twenty-five centuries ago. Deth played Thai music on his radio and the windows were rolled down because it was not yet high heat and the fields offered a cooler wind.

They went through wide meadows filled with bales. The hay was already roasted dry and dark. By the road great acacias and cherry trees shadowed the pitted surface, robusta coffee bushes with umbrella forms. The sky was untouched by clouds. Kapoks with pagoda-shaped tops cooled the walls of polychrome temples. The land near Battambang was charred black. The fields smoldering as far as the eye could see, since the farmers had burned the topsoil, leaving ghostly papaya trees standing in the smoke. They churned the iron-red dust and children in the yards of stilted houses watched them go by and the strange demonic charred darkness of the hills began to disquiet him. Yet the dry season was ending. The trees on the plain were entirely solitary, gaunt in their apartness and they threw no shadow onto the chocolate earth. Through this paradoxical dark brightness the people moved with a vivid lethargy and calm. Bicycles floating, the women with poles slung across their shoulders and masked by their krama, glancing up without animus. It was a day of dust, and yet the rain would come later.

—

The first things he saw in Battambang were faded billboards looming over the river advertising ABC beer. That river was green and still, men asleep on the grass slopes on either side. Under that vast sky now puffed with plume-white rococo clouds they seemed becalmed. Deth stopped and they got out and stretched for a bit. They were on a boulevard laid out alongside the river, with new cement benches inscribed with the words Diamond Cement. There were cream-cake French facades on the far side of the road, old shophouses. There was a generator chugging on the riverbank, and a series of nets lying idle. A bridge baked in the sun and along the embankment lay a sprinkling of trash and glass sparkling amid the high grasses. The traffic circles with their whitewashed curbs buzzed with a soft rotary motion of bikes, and the air was light and dry and saline with the near-invisible dust. He liked it at once. There was a dried-out fountain with sculptured nagas and a mosque singing somewhere up the river. He couldn’t imagine leaving in a hurry, any more than he could imagine arriving in one.

—

At the Alpha Hotel, Robert went up to his cell-like room and had a cold shower. He had paid off Deth and they had parted amicably, though the Khmer was a little clingy as they did so. Did Monsieur want a driver for the following day? He had declined, but now he wondered if he had done the right thing. He heard arrogant French voices wafting up from the lobby. Arrogant merely because they assumed they were understood when they were not. He lay on the bed and smoked: the Delons, he decided after all, were raw and bad. There was a sign on the door which said, Do not to bring the explodes or the cars into the room. After a short rest he went down to the bar, which was entered through a lobby filled with marble Buddhas and disturbingly exuberant fish tanks. Little red lanterns swung in the wind from the open doors, as they had at the Hang Meas, and above there was a polished wood ceiling with Chinese paintings of birds. The place, he could sense, was about to be remodeled into something more modern. A year from now it would look completely different. He got a shot of Royal Stag and watched the French group of middle-aged women trying to order from a garbled menu.

“C’est quoi, dove on fire?” one of them asked the waitress.

“Chicken fire,” the girl said slowly.

“Et Salad bin Laden?”

—

When the day had cooled he walked down to the river along a straight road by a temple complex. Where it greeted the water there was a sign for Electricité de Battambang and a row of rather grand French government buildings, each dedicated to different indispensable functions. “Battambang Water Supply” announced by a grandiose sign of gold decoration, with the water tanks rising behind it, the Provincial Hall like a viceroy’s villa. Mansions with guardian lions and cannons at the gates, but with a slight suffocation, a feeling of termination and decay. A faded park with a statue of an ape rising from the long grass and a tricerotops dinosaur. A legless beggar on a skateboard followed him for a while on this road, saying nothing, just paddling indefatigably with his arms as they went under the tall trees that almost met in the middle and formed a very French vault.

There was a shimmering in the air: the eternal frangipanis. He walked for a few hundred yards until the skateboarder gave up, his arms exhausted, and the Englishman sat down on the bank among white flowers and tall lush grass blades and caught a little repose. The place was so quiet that he could lie there until the sky began to darken and the sound of the cicadas rose in the high grass as dusk approached.

Looking down the river it seemed almost rural, with only a girdered railway bridge in the distance. People had begun to walk under the trees at the top of the bank as if in a passeggiata and a longtail came puttering down the river. The Sangker was unusually high because of a downpour earlier in the week. He got up and walked as far as a long cable slung across the river, though submerged deep in the middle, and on the other side he saw huts on stilts and little boys throwing themselves nonchalantly into the water with fishing lines wrapped around their wrists. Stumps of archaic trees separated the drifts of trash. Farther back were new hotels, the Ty King and the Classy. They seemed to have come out of nowhere, crystallizations of alien capital. The lights in front of the French palaces came on but the windows offered nothing but a kind of administrative torpor and as he made his way back to the Electricité de Battambang he wondered about the stern and splendid functionaries who must have once inhabited them.

It made him think of his own shabby clothes, his semi-poverty. He hated being poor as much as he hated how predictable he was. His blond hair always cut in the same way, thrown casually to the right of a parting all his life. The clothes that never varied because he hated thinking about them. His life never seemed to go into surplus, into wonderful excess. He never had a surplus, never had a truly fine pair of shoes or a shirt that wasn’t strictly necessary. His girlfriends came and went too easily; acquired in fits of absentmindedness and lost in the same way. It baffled him. But when he was lucid he realized that he was waiting for something different. Beyond his own life there was, without question, a parallel one that he might one day acquire. It was a fantasy that could not be defended.

Like his father, he had a fear of being in deficit and in need. It was a fear that came from nowhere, it had no real source. “It’s just my character,” he used to think. He never bought himself anything extraneous or luxurious. Just those cut-price tickets to Reykjavik and Athens. Yet he was never broke, never in trouble. He always looked ahead and made sure that he had those extra pounds under the bed just in case. He never jumped off cliffs with empty pockets.

But here such calculations didn’t matter so much, and maybe that was why he had warmed to the country. Almost everybody was poorer than himself. He had arrived in Bangkok a month earlier not even knowing where he was going to stay and he had been able to live in that tangled city quite well for almost nothing: a flophouse in Ekkamai and salted fish grilled on the street with kanom jeen noodles and lettuce for ninety baht every night and nothing to do but walk around by himself and meet the occasional hippie girl at pavement eateries. He was sure, however, that it had been the happiest month of his life thus far. The happiest and also the vaguest: the two were connected.

—

After two weeks in Bangkok he moved down to an even seedier place, the Rex, on Sukhumvit near Soi 38. His money began to run down. He had come there without any plan or vision, and a two-month summer holiday was always hard to fill satisfactorily. He called his parents and they sent him a little more money. “What are you doing there?” his mother asked, sounding as if she were on another planet. “It doesn’t sound like a holiday to us, Bobby.” What did it sound like to them?

He was beginning to like the heat and the pace, the day-by-day gentle sinking into his own laziness. The other backpackers whom he met at the outside café in the passageway in Soi 39/1—a place he went every day for lunch — told him about Laos and Cambodia. They portrayed Cambodia as a tough paradise where you could live even cheaper than you could in Bangkok. He learned all about the gambling buses that went to the border from Lumpini Park every morning at 5 a.m. and the $3 flophouses in Battambang where you could live “like a fish.”

Some nights he went down to the dingy eatery on the ground floor of the Rex and sat among the lonely old white men and their solemn girls eating spring rolls and drinking Coke. Even this place was better than being at a loose end at the pub in Elmer, the Jack and the Beanstalk. Even the girls here were more beautiful than the ones in the Jack and the Beanstalk. He read novels that he bought in the secondhand shops and later at night, with a few baht, he went down to Nadimos, a Lebanese restaurant on Soi 24, and sat outside next to a fake temple wall and smoked a shisha pipe with a Lebanese coffee in a copper pot and daydreamed. The towers all around shining with lofts and gardens, the ridiculous lions of the Davis Hotel across the street and the fat Arabs with their enviable molls lounging with their shisha and looking remarkably well maintained. There was a life here that he had never imagined. Even Bangkok was not at all what he had expected. It was not the city of Hangover II or The Beach. It purred with affluent leisure and women dressed to slay. It was a shop window with no glass. One could feel the sucking tide of Asian money flowing through it.

It was in those moments at Nadimos under the awnings when the evening rain fell, smoking his shisha, that he realized how much he hated where he came from. He was certainly beginning to realize that he didn’t want to go back. Night by night the thought grew in immensity inside him until it no longer felt quite as incredible.

To begin with, there was no future for him in the little village of Elmer. It was like a posting on a colonial frontier, except that the frontier was merely East Sussex. Elmer had a green like most English villages. There were timbered pubs and gardens that petered out into cornfields, and paths with stiles and fields with stooks in summer. You could walk around it in three hours.

There was a railway station and an abattoir. It was sweet with old secrecies and it was home and would be for a long time. He hiked among the abandoned flint farmhouses above Bevendean when he dropped in on his grandparents. He had been going there all his life and it was like turning over stones that have been turned over already a hundred thousand times and yet what else was there to do but turn them over? He talked politics with his grandfather, an old trade unionist with a dark red china bust of Lenin on his front-room mantelpiece. Old Albert had once been a trombonist on a Cunard cruise ship and later a chauffeur for a famous professor at the University of Sussex. He was filled with quiet disdains. “Those blummin’ people,” he would say vaguely to his grandson, referring to the classes above him who were perhaps dying out as quickly as his own class. He complained bitterly about the trashy hip-hop blasting from the house next door as he was quietly trying to practice Count Basie tunes on his trombone in the basement. “Those blummin’ people, they play their blummin’ noise all night long at weekends. They’ve got no jobs.” The old man told him he should go and live in London. But Robert himself had never wanted to live there. He was not suited to a city like that. He had always wanted a quiet life with his books and a hint of woodland and sea out the window. Too quiet and withdrawn, his parents had decided. They ceased preaching to him about his ambitions. He didn’t have any.

One had to have a future. But, as it happened, he didn’t have one. The drawn-out economic crisis was gradually overwhelming the once eternal-seeming middle class and eroding it day by day. He was one of the eroded. His parents were barely middle class anyway. His father had been a customs official at Gatwick Airport. Their money was in a converted council house. The only thing that Robert had in his name was the fact that he had always wanted to be a teacher. He went every day to his little provincial schoolroom and stood in front of a blackboard and drew diagrams illustrating the connections between great English writers and kept the kids awake with the occasional sharp word. But to what end? It was little more than ventriloquy. Every day there was a long walk home to a cottage with odorous carpets and a kitchen with a hot plate. An evening playing YouTube videos and old jazz and waiting for something to come on the TV. The sweet bird of youth, in his case, had nowhere to perch and had not taken flight to begin with. His youth was a wingless dodo. One could go on and on and that bird would still not sing. You waited for life to begin and yet for some reason it did not begin. It hesitated while you wondered about the risks. You stood in the wings of your own play, afraid to walk onto the boards and begin.

He had a sense, meanwhile, that the country’s fortunes were not going to recover for a very long time, perhaps centuries. He was never going to be as comfortable as his father, or even his grandfather. The machine of progress had begun to go backward, and like an Irish navvy a century ago he was better off emigrating. Only there was nowhere to emigrate to. Nowhere that would take him in and give him employment. The world which had once been wide and commodious with America on the horizon had gradually become small and anxious and walled-off. His parents didn’t understand it, and neither in a way did he.

—

The embankment lamps came on. How had the day passed so quickly? The swallows were out. Along the roads came the bulbs of pushcarts. It must have been that most surprising thing, contentment, an onset of happiness. The happiness that never is.

The bridge was alive with motodops. The hive stirred and he felt as if his childhood had been returned to him. Only twenty-eight, and there was no reason ever to feel otherwise. So what a con his life had been up to then, burdening him with things that were not his, and how long it had taken him to find a place which disburdened him. But there it was. Now it was the first cool hour and the phone shops on the far side of that road and the clinics with their blue crosses — Clinic Nouvel! — were as alive as little bazaars. He got up and walked back the way he had come. In front of the guardian lions and the cannons was a pedestrian bridge, people lounging over the river. Below, blossoming cafés, outdoor tables, the thin, elegant young men in their clinging ironed shirts. A place called the River where the handsomer set gathered, the fans stirring a hundred paper napkins. The nights here were soft and aimless and endless. He walked back into the town center. On the pavements, families drinking cans of winter-melon tea with straws. On the televisions, Khmer music and soap operas and the children transfixed. There were fairy lights strung across the streets and beggars hanging by the river wall moving toward him as if they knew already how soft and young his thoughts were. They came out of the darkness with toys and books about Pol Pot and the eternal words one dolla.

He moved through the twilight quietly until he was at the White Rose on Street 2, a place marked in all barang guidebooks. It was empty so he went to the first-floor balcony. He sat under painted lampshades and plastic vine leaves and ordered lok-lok, fried morning glory, a baguette and an Angkor beer. In the Lean Hoa Chinese School opposite, a mass of schoolgirls scattered in slow motion toward the gates: they looked up at him. There was always a curiosity in the eyes here. It had not yet been eradicated by familiarity or contempt. A few drops of rain fell and there was a flash of soundless lightning. By the time he had walked back to the hotel it had become a fine warm drizzle. A small group of drivers waited in the courtyard playing cards by flashlights attached to their heads. Robert hesitated before going up to his room; he wasn’t quite ready for boredom. The sister hotel to the Alpha, divided from it merely by a flimsy wall, was the Omega; it was a riot of lecherous neon advertising the massive KTV next to it and a sauna in the lobby, whose denizens — in the absence of any clients — sat around on the sofas looking up at a TV. The Alpha and the Omega. But it was at the Alpha that he lingered. He soon found a kid called Ouksa who agreed to drive him around the next day for a few dollars. He had no plan but he wanted to visit a temple and say a prayer for his parents.

The “kid” was in fact about the same age as himself, in square-tipped shoes and a knock-off Tommy Bahama camp shirt with a black-and-white Mojave tile pattern, and he said he often drove the Chinese people staying at the Alpha or the Omega, but usually the Omega.

“I can start at six,” he said hopefully.

“I think nine is a better time,” Robert said. “Come at nine.”

“Where we going?”

“We’ll go to a temple. Do you know a temple?”

The kid held up four fingers.

“There’s four temples?”

“Four I know.”

“Then we’ll think about it tomorrow.”

Ouksa shook his head for some reason.

“I can take you winery.”

“I’ll think about the winery too.”

“Think about it. You can drink wine.”

“Well,” Robert said irritably, “I don’t really want to drink wine in Cambodia. Who does that?”

“Many, many.”

THREE

But in the morning the heavy rain had come at last and the river flickered with more forceful lightning. The drivers sat disconsolately in the Alpha lobby and drank Yaa Dong medicinal liquor and waited for the weather to break. Robert sat with them and bought Ouksa a few coffees and they talked about his girl and the abominable price of car parts. It was amusing enough. The boy seemed to have ironed himself into one long crease for his payday, his hair slicked and the Brut pungent on his cheeks. He had clean hands and girlish nails properly cared for. From time to time he glanced out at the rain and the lax banana fronds flapping in slow motion and his eyes rose in a silent disdain. He was training to be an engineer and he drove a taxi in his spare time.

His spare time, as it turned out, was quite ample. In Battambang the days were long and, as Robert now thought, gently uphill. Ouksa had a contract with a Chinese company that manufactured plumbing parts on the outskirts of town. He took the middle managers around and showed them a good time in the evening. He took them to Kirin, a club where the girls were all dressed like government officials. Did he know it? The Chinese were very into that. They tipped him recklessly and with the proceeds he bought his girl silk dresses and Nokia phones. Such were the visitors from Harbin, flabbergasted in their short-sleeved shirts.

“The barangs, they stay in Angkor place. There were four barangs from Siem Reap yesterday but they left.”

“I think I saw them,” Robert said.

“They did not like. I took them to Kirin and they did not like. I am going to take you to temple Phnom Ba Nan. At the top it is many hippies.”

A great atomic cloud had formed, bright silver at the edges, and as it evolved upward it grew darker. The thunder did not seem related to it. In the street the long puddles brightened for a moment then grew dim, and the electricity which rippled through the air drew the eye to the slow-motion mushroom cloud and its impending crisis.

Ouksa’s face was smooth, open and yet impervious to camaraderie. His fake gold watch had a charm, his eyes were slow and accurate. They didn’t miss a mote of dust.

“I gave you good discount,” he said sheepishly, and as if to reward this acknowledged fact Robert ordered more Nescafé and crêpes.

“If you are happy with service, maybe you will take it day after. Or are you go to Phnom Penh?”

“I don’t know, I might.”

“Thirty dollar take you and come back.”

“Maybe I won’t come back.”

“It OK, stay. I can take you Hotel de Paris!”

“You can take me everywhere, I guess.”

“Au kun, if you want it.”

After they had eaten the crêpes Robert sauntered to the bar and bought some cigarettes and a bottle of Stag for the road. When he returned to the table, Ouksa asked him where his wife was.

“Not got one, as it happens.”

“You such a good-looking man, I don’t believe.”

“No one wants to marry a schoolteacher. There’s no money. You understand that, I’m sure.”

“Sure, no money, girls run away. Same here.”

He sniffed glumly at the window for some reason.

“Where do you live, Robert?”

“In England. You know England?”

Ouksa made a knowing nod. “Of course I know it. Man United.”

“More or less, yeah, that’s about it.”

“So you come here for better living.”

“More or less, you could say.”

“Long way you come. You have girl here?”

“No girl yet.”

Ouksa grew a little bolder.

“But you at White Rose last night!”

“Word gets around, I see.”

“Rainy season — no barangs. So you are news.”

“I see, I’m news, am I?”

“Yes, sir. Everybody see you.”

“Well, I’ll be damned.”

“Next time I take you to Kirin Club.”

“That’s OK, Ouksa. We can leave the girls to the Chinese.”

“Aw, they prefer you, Mr. Robert.”

“But do I prefer them, Mr. Ouksa?”

“You never try Khmer girl? Very sad. We can go to Savuth Club. Girls are dressed to be farmers, all in black. Very kink.”

The rain cleared and they went out to the car and turned on the air-conditioning and waited for a while, then set off through the puddles and mud toward Phnom Ba Nan.

The roads had turned to chaos and they pulled in at the winery after all, a place called Chan Thay Chhoeung. They could wait a while and let it dry out. There was a kind of rose garden with tables for drinkers and a reception with bottles of Chardonnay and Shiraz. They sat in the garden under a shade and played cards with Ouksa’s battered pack. Then, after an hour, the clouds parted and a moist, heavy sunshine came down. The road improved and Ouksa put on his sunglasses and said, “It hot again.”

—

The ruins of Ba Nan lay at the top of a steep hill which had to be climbed on foot. The site was deserted after the rain, and it was probably deserted most of the time anyway. Even the hawkers had scattered. They parked under the monkeypods. Ouksa waited for him at the foot and Robert set out to climb the two or three hundred steps to the top, watching him as he went. A barang guarded by nagas, slow-footed among the hungry. It made him smile. It was torture for nothing, for very little. And sure enough halfway up Robert stopped and rested. He was young but he was out of shape. Soft and sweet, like some kind of fruit that has ripened too early. So Ouksa thought, and after all he was the same age.

Halfway up the hill, the forest was quiet. A monk sat just above him with crazed eyes, motionless under a parasol. At the bottom of the steps the beggar mites had reappeared with their matted hair, but looking up at him they were thinking that he was not really worth the bother of a climb. So he went on alone, suddenly dark at heart, the mosquitoes stinging his neck, and he came above the flat canopy and into a magnified light and a forest horizon that had no gaps, seamless as a flat layer of algae resting upon water.

Ba Nan was strewn all across the hilltop. Its tea-dark blocks scattered into piles which no one had disturbed for a thousand years. He walked through it knowing that he must be alone, since no one had come up with him. The heat made him dizzy. Tall dark pink flowers grew up among the stones. Sprawling prickly-pear trees stood between the prasats and on every one of their paddle-shaped cladodes spells and graffiti had been carved, the letters turned white with hardened sap. Yet there were blue signs which read No Touching and Writing. So the spells were written on the cactus blades.

He took pictures. Trees rose over the ruins, tossing and hissing like the trees at the temple in Pailin. But these were far older. Dark clouds loomed over them, sparkling with menace. The apsaras slowly fading away, the lintels carved and faded. Inside one of the claustrophobic prasats a huge but beautiful carved female foot, severed and orphaned forever. At the edge of the platform, then, he looked down at the silvery haze of the fields and the tall sugar palms and soon he heard voices and looking up he saw two soft-drink hawkers picking their way like herons across the stones toward a barang standing alone at the far edge of the complex and smoking a cigarette. He was aware that the man must have been watching him all along, but there he stood in elegant summer whites, dark blond and incongruous and indifferent all the same. Robert heard the peddlers cry Choum reap and the man took the cigarette out of his mouth and said something to them in Khmer. They turned away and the solitude of the two foreign men was resumed, the man in whites simply returning to his contemplation of something on the distant horizon.

One might be surprised to meet another Westerner in the ruins of Ba Nan, and he was sure this one was a fellow English speaker. But the surprise was not curiosity, it was just the elegance of the whites and the manner and their dainty anachronism.

He turned and walked back to the top of the steps. The monk was still sitting there under his broken parasol but he now saw that a small shrine lay to one side of the steps and that a lone incense stick burned there. Another monk had appeared and reclined there, shaded by a piece of tin on a stick. Black butterflies, stirred by the sun, began to swing lazily across the steps, circling their heads, and from the undergrowth came the susurration of revived cicadas. In the shrine behind him, a fortune-teller was reading texts to a small cluster of women and children. Suddenly they all laughed. The plain now shone far below and he felt for a moment an unsteadiness in his calves. He reached out and held himself firm against a huge carved jamb. The drink sellers were talking behind him and he turned to see them putting up a plastic umbrella and come toward him. In that moment he came to a decision, but it was unclear what it was going to mean — it was a decision about the plane ticket and the plan to drive back to Bangkok the following Wednesday. In the space of a few minutes that plan had dissolved and he knew that he would be staying on a little, now that he could afford it — a week, a few weeks, however long his winnings would last here. He would explain it to his parents by phone if he had to. One could always come up with an excuse about travel delays or minor illnesses. He could say that he had the runs and was laid up in bed for a few days. Many such things would sound entirely plausible. He began to descend the steps, followed by two young girls who had suddenly appeared waving paddles made of pieces of cardboard torn from commercial boxes. They came toward him and when they were a step from him they began waving the paddles as fans to cool him. They followed him down, fanning his back and giggling. It would cost him 2,000 riels. Soon he saw Ouksa waiting patiently at the foot of the steps in all his starched composure with his hair parted laboriously to one side and his dramatic scent. One didn’t know what to make of him. The way his eyes lifted slowly to find the man who was paying him, and to whom he was only partially obsequious.

“How was it?” he said as Robert came down into the clearing where the car stood and the children swarmed around him crying One dolla, one dolla.

“It was a hell of a place. There was a white guy up there too.”

“Oh? I not see that one.”

“He was doing what I was doing, I guess.”

It was noon and the heat made him fumble inside his own mind. He paid the two fanners a dollar and they cocked their heads with pleasure. He wondered about lunch. He wanted to invite Ouksa and make him feel more at ease. The flies tormented him, but they could not be discouraged.

“Why don’t we go and eat somewhere?”

“Why not. We can go to Wat Ek Phnom and buy some things.”

“I’d say I owed you lunch.”

—

They drove back into Battambang, shadowing the river promenades again. They went past the Masjid Dhiya mosque, and then northward out of town toward Wat Ek Phnom. The temple lay next to a pond filled with bursting water lilies. It was clear that these temples were all part of a known tourist circuit through which a privately rented car was bound to pass with the driver peddling cultural information. Ouksa, however, did not provide it. He sensed that this white man was as empty as himself and it suited him fine.

They had bought some chicken skewers and Cokes on the way and they walked to the edge of the pond and sat. The new part of the temple was a riot of gold leaf and dubious taste; the ancient prasat rose from shattered piles of blocks. They sat and ate and there was somehow nothing to say for a long time. A monumental chalk-white Buddha sat among the weeds on an unfinished brick pedestal, his hands raised in a mudra. Water-lily flowers opened in motionless heat on the surface of the water. Ouksa lay down, taking a small liberty with his young and easygoing employer, and they listened to a plane droning in the far distance and gardeners in straw hats raked the edges of the flower beds.

“Still,” he said eventually, “you are not really on normal holiday. You are doing some pass time, no? It must be nice to have money. Ort mean loy. I have no money yet.”

“I usually don’t have any.”

“Ah, but you have.”

“I got a little saved up for my holiday. But I’ll be going back soon.”

“How do you like this Ek?”

“It’s quite a place.”

“It’s haunted, did you know? The Ap is here.”

“Ghosts?”

“Like a lady ghost. She hunts all about at night. Can eat the dead water buffalo, you know, and eat children. A head that flies about — just the head. Ah.”

“And she is here in the temple?”

“Baht. So someone said. It may not be true. I never came here at night to see. I wonder you have Ap in your home?”

“England. We might, but I stay home at night.”

“Home?”

“Yeah, I stay at home.”

“Ah, Robert, you are not home now. If the Ap sees you she will hunt maybe. Believe it?”

“No.”

“You don’t know…”

Ouksa smiled at him; his eyes had their inborn mischief and he folded his hands on his chest. Robert had no idea if the Ap was a genuine folk belief or if Ouksa was just inventing it to spook him. The latter seemed more probable.

“I’ll bear it in mind,” Robert said.

He didn’t succeed in being as dry as he had intended.

They walked through the ruins in the crushing heat but in the interlocked shade of trees. A swarm of half-naked children followed them, brushing against their legs, their hands outstretched, the eyes mock-pleading. The shrines were filled with colored metal flowers. There were plastic tablecloths and bowls of incense sticks embedded in ash. A sign pinned to a ficus tree: Give earth a chance. They stood for a few minutes under a prasat tower open to the sky, the blocks arranged in concentric squares that tapered upward. The children had hung back. Ouksa seemed to be holding his breath. An uncharacteristic patch of sweat had appeared on his temple and his mouth had tensed. They came out into the open again and insects deafened them, and Ouksa shot a sharp word at the beseeching mites and caused them to scatter sulkily into the woods. The two men walked on. There was a fragment of ancient wall half buried in the trees, strangled by ficus roots, and they dawdled here for a while chatting desultorily about the remainder of the day. Would Robert like to see a curious monastery by a river outside town? It was a place that barangs did not go to see because there was no one specific attraction there. It was just a place where the monks would talk to them. The prime minister, Hun Sen, was building a bridge there, a special project that was a marvel to see. Though the words he actually used were “a big special thing.”

Robert was halfhearted. He was already thinking of going back to the Alpha and getting a nap in his chilled room with the blinds down. Darkness and sleep and a swig of Sang Som from the minibar. Another day of life. They walked to the car in the sun’s glare and he saw the brilliance diminishing at the sky’s edges and the mood of rain returning yet again. The weather was in seesaw mode. Why not? he thought. A day existed to be filled with bright activities and labors.

“Let’s go to the river and the bridge,” he said wearily. “Can we get a beer on the way?”

“Of course, mistah.”

FOUR

They drove past old Khmer Rouge field guns rusting in paddies, the shell of a tank lopsided at the edge of a ditch. Thunder rolled in from afar, incongruous in that silver light, and the dried dust began to rise up again, shivering around the kapoks. They came to the river where Hun Sen was building his bridge and there a construction crew of several dozens spilled down the dark ochre banks with hods and sandbags. They went into the water where some of them bathed in their krama. The bridge was half completed. Ouksa parked above it among cement mixers and walked across a narrow footbridge to the monastery on the far side.

The river curved here and a mournful chanting echoed down it, a funeral service of some kind with the whiff of incense, while on the cliff opposite the dormitories of the bhikkus could be seen by the lines of saffron robes drying on lines along the walls. Silk cotton trees towered above these walls and cast down an almost impenetrable shade, within which a few cows moved, stirring their bells. They stopped halfway across the bridge and took in its jagged silhouette and the girls washing clothes on the mud isles dotted like stepping-stones across the river.

They went into the monastery and the shade of the silk cotton trees and as they wandered around the ramshackle dorms they heard the rustling of hundreds of bats hanging in the higher branches.

“Are you fraid of bats, Robert? I want to show you something very nice. Come here a little and we stand underneath them.”

They were between the monks’ houses and the boys were watching them from the walls and Robert felt a quiet dread go through him. Ouksa raised his hands and then clapped as loudly as he could and a moment later the mass of somnambulant bats stirred and rose as a single body.

It crackled and hissed as it lifted itself clear of the treetops and whirled around in a circle while the air rushed down and touched their faces. It was a little party trick but it made Robert put his hands over his ears and the monks had their laugh. They walked back down to the river.

The older monks had not come out to talk to them and the rain was clearly on the move. Ouksa said he knew a place a little farther up the river where they could relax if the downpour arrived. They drove there in fifteen minutes. It was a shack on the water, an NGO bar by the look of it, with the usual Bob Marley paraphernalia and one-dollar Tigers. They went out onto the empty deck and sat on the moth-eaten sofas and poured ice cubes into their beer glasses. In some breathless way the day had passed more quickly than they had realized. The waters here were faster and dyes from the construction site upriver swirled past. They felt rather good sitting there with Bob Marley and Smashing Pumpkins on the system. The rain was just beginning.

“I hear you went to the casino two night ago.”

“You heard that?”

“Baht. I know all the guys there. I take the Chinese to Caesar. They love Caesar.”

“Well, I did.”

“Win or lose?”

“Lose.”

“Lose a lot?”

“Not very much.”

“Win nothing?”

“Nothing.”

He could feel that the part-time driver did not believe him. It was not easy to say why.

Robert made him drink more, and they waited for the rain to abate and the dusk to settle in. At six the drying out began and the clouds parted; the ironwood trees still dripped as they made their way back out to the car and the edge of a moon had appeared low in the sky. The road was wet and the car slid a little as it made its way parallel to the river before coming to a crossroads and the edge of wide fields, where Ouksa turned by a corner shop garish with rod lights and they began to cross the fields toward the town.

—

A sudden dusk had come. The road dipped slightly by a second crossroads and they paused while the engine turned and they could hear the insects purring wildly in the fields. A headlight was coming across the opposite field at high speed but they could not see the surface of this other road. The sugarcane was high here on all sides and tall banana trees lined the road. The moon now flashed between their leaves. It was because the road curved sharply that they did not see the other beam of light for a few seconds. It came around the bend at a leisurely pace and they saw that it was a motorbike and on it was the white man that Robert had seen at the temple earlier in the day.

He recognized him at once and when the bike slowed the barang looked up and saw them and drew to a halt at the side of the sugarcane.

“It’s the guy I saw earlier,” Robert said to Ouksa, and he felt a desire to get out of the car and make himself known.

Ouksa said nothing, but the sudden frown was telling.

“I’ll say hello,” Robert said.

He was out on the road and the quietness came down upon him now that the motors had been turned off and he saw that the barang was handsome and only slightly older than himself and dressed in his sharp summer linens and dark blue suede drivers.

“Are you lost?” the man said, laughing and showing all the openness in the world.

“Half lost, maybe,” Robert said.

“Englishman?” the American said.

“Can’t deny it.”

“I thought so. A Brit on a country road — I thought you might need some help.”

Robert turned toward the car and the face of Ouksa peering through the windscreen.

“I don’t know about help. I suppose he knows the road.”

“Depends where you’re going.”

“Back to Battambang, I guess.”

The bike rider shook his hand.

“I’m Simon Beaucamp.”

“Robert Grieve.”

“England then? That’s a long way to come. Or go.”

“Yes, it is.”

“Me, I live here.”

The voice was aristocratic New England, slightly clipped. Money, ease and familiarity with out-of-the-way things.

“In Battambang?”

“Down by the river. I have a place there.”

He made a motion to the fields, to the high trees.

They were as if alone in the sweet darkness, the two barangs, and mutually amused at the coincidence.

“Well, I just thought you might need some help. You traveling?”

“Yeah, passing through.”

“Come down to the river and have a drink if you like. There’s a bar called Angkor Town down there.”

“That’s a good idea — I’ll ask the driver if he doesn’t mind.”

“He won’t turn down a drink.”

Robert walked back to the car.

“What say we go with my new friend here and have a drink down by the river? He says there’s a bar called Angkor Town. You know it?”

“Yes, sir.”

But Ouksa was pale and he kept his eyes upon the motorbike gleaming at the far side of the road.

“You look a little worried,” Robert said. “It’s just a drink and you can join us.”

Ouksa shook his head emphatically. “Not with him.”

“What’s wrong with him? He’s just a barang like me.”

“No, sir.”

“Why not?” Robert said irritably.

“He has a bad feeling about him. It’s clear.”

“Clear to who?”

“Clear to me. Don’t go with him.”

“Nonsense.”

But Robert himself now had a small doubt. Should he listen to the more knowing Khmer? But his pride kicked in and he decided to go for bravura. There was also his sense that Ouksa’s emphatic warning was itself a con. He didn’t know who to believe and who to trust and so he went with the benefit of the doubt he was inclined to offer a fellow Anglo.

“Anyway,” he said with a kind of counteremphasis, “I’m paying, aren’t I? It’s my call.”

“I don’ care you pay.”

“Come on, Ouksa. It’s just a damn drink down by the river. There’s no harm in it. We’ll drive back to the hotel after. I’ll pay you more.”

“How more?”

“OK, twenty dollars more. Plus drinks.”

Seeing that he had little choice the Khmer relented.

“I won’ take him in the car,” he said, however.

“All right. He’ll just lead us down there.”

Robert went back to the stranger.

“I talked him into it. He seems a bit spooked for some reason.”

“Oh? Well, I’ve been known to have that effect.”

“Never mind him, we’ll follow you down to the river. I hope we aren’t putting you out.”

“Not at all.”

Beaucamp went back to his bike and mounted it, and the smile had not left his mouth.

“Just follow me,” he called out.

—

Robert nodded and walked back to the car and got in the back. The night suddenly felt a little hotter and he rolled down the window despite the air-conditioning. There was a scent of burning rubber coming from somewhere and of singed hay. The Milky Way had appeared and yet there was still a cloying rain in the air, a claustrophobia of monsoon.

“We’ll go for a drink at this Angkor Town and it’ll be OK,” he said to Ouksa. “It won’t take more than an hour or so.”

The driver said nothing, merely caught his eyes in the mirror. He was not happy about it but he would not say why. There was something tough and unspeakable in the air.

Perhaps he didn’t like being out in the fields at night. One never knew. He didn’t trust what he found on those roads where ghosts roamed. They set off anyway and they followed the taillight of the bike. Soon they were passing through more of the lifeless fields and the lines of tall sugar palms that made the sky seem even larger than it was and the wind rushed against his face. He had noticed that at night a ghostly music floated across those same fields, a music of roneat, bamboo xylophones, and pai au, flutes, as if being played by men wandering through the fields blind. Of course, the farmers had radios. Within ten minutes the river had come into view, mostly dark but with a few lights strung along it. It was the outskirts of town, the same road that led straight to the French buildings on Street 1. He didn’t know where exactly but he didn’t care, it was just the same river and a river was a welcome thing in that flat, disorienting land. The suffocation lifted and one felt, paradoxically, the intimate immensity of the land again. The air changed and a voice inside Robert said “Yes” and he licked his lips and he saw the houses on stilts on the far side and felt glad to be down by the water at last. The road had many small houses with gardens on the water and a temple called Wat Kor.

Angkor Town was the only bar on this stretch, a large red Angkor beer sign — as always — hung above its gates. A narrow courtyard led down to the deck over the river. It was a Khmer place through and through, almost boisterous but never quite reaching that critical point. Red tables and red plastic chairs, jungle foliage right at the elbows of drinkers on the deck. Rows of small Angkor flags hung from the rafters and posters for Freshy orange juice. There were longtails hauled up into the reeds, red blossoms arching down to the water.

Beaucamp waited for them, with the bike tilted in the courtyard, and when they came up he pointed at the red sign above the roof and for some reason made a face.

They went out onto the deck.

The waters glided past like black oil, momentarily lit by fusty lamps with their color of honeycombs. On the far bank the massive trees looked like the columns of some destroyed Babylonian palace which even centuries of violent rain could not wear down.

“This is my spot,” Beaucamp said, the place where he passed his evenings reading novels. “It’s a fine spot, too.”

The barman did not move from the bar, but called out Simon’s name and waved a pair of ice tongs. Then he came over with a bottle of Royal Stag and a bucket of hacked ice and they laid out their tumblers and filled them with the ice. Ouksa finally relaxed a little and the smell of the opened bottle chased off his superstitious timidity. When the glasses clacked some of the fear seemed to go out of his eyes and he swigged back the Royal Stag with a relish that was clearly customary. The suave American spoke fluent Khmer to him, a language he seemed to speak as easily as he did English. It must have taken years to master. He said his house was a little way upriver, a place he had built himself after buying the land from a policeman.

“So you’re passing through our little town,” he said to Robert. “Not that many people come through here. You came over the border at Pailin?”

“I took a taxi from Bangkok.”

“It’s a cheap way to come. I like that trip myself. See the casinos?”

“I played.”

“That’s what my friend said.”

Robert cocked his head, and he felt a small disbelief.

“Everyone seems to know—”

“It’s a small world up here. A barang wins two grand at the Diamond, everyone knows. That’s the way it is.”

Beaucamp crossed his legs and laughed.

“Like our Ouksa knew too, I’m sure. Yeah, everyone knows those things.”

“I got lucky for a night.”

“Everyone gets lucky for a night. You’re not here for the casinos though.”

“As a matter of fact, no. I’m not here for anything.”

“When I first came here years ago I didn’t know why I came either. Then I ended up never going back. Don’t ask me why. You could get a house back then for about ten grand, which is what I paid to build it. Got real teak from the Cardamom Mountains too. Can’t get that now.”

“Like you say, it’s a sweet spot. I can see that.”

“It is and it isn’t. It’s a tough spot too. I like it. Not everyone likes it. Seems like you’re undecided.”

“I don’t know,” Robert said, “I only just got here.”

“So you did. How do you like our Indian whisky? It’s better than the Thai one, I think.”

“It’s great.”

“You can drink it all day and not get a headache. One day I’ll give you some Golden Muscle wine. The local stuff. It’s made from deer antlers.”

Simon switched to Khmer.

“Did you give him a fair price, brother?”

“Sure I did,” Ouksa said. “Same price as everyone else.”

“Every other barang, you mean.”

Ouksa shrugged. “Every other barang, sure.”

“Why don’t you drive back to the hotel and get his stuff and bring it back here? I’ve decided to ask him to stay tonight with me. Can you do that?”

“Sure.”

“Don’t forget anything in the room. It’s paid in advance, I think.”

Ouksa put down his drink and Simon explained to Robert in English.

“At your place?” Robert said.

“Why not? The Alpha is a fleapit. It used to be called the Teo and it was a fleapit then too. You’ll like my place much better, believe me. We can play chess. Do you like chess?”

Robert shrugged. “I do, sometimes.”

“Splendid. Then we can play chess.” Simon’s eyes began to shine with mocking humor. Did he really enjoy these sorts of games? “I haven’t played in months. I can’t find anyone here to play against. You’d be doing me an enormous favor actually.”

But the favor was also the other way around.

Within a few minutes, in fact, Robert had begun to feel curiously attracted to Simon. It was not a sexual attraction, but it was certainly physical. The American’s body was relaxed and affable and confident. His elegance was simple, unaffected. It suggested a man who didn’t care what judgments he was subjected to because they couldn’t possibly be all that bad. And usually they would be flattering. It was Robert who was confused and a little blinded, and both of them knew it. Simon had acquired a fluent familiarity with his surroundings. He obviously spoke the language perfectly, and it was not by any means an easy language. At first Robert had wondered if Simon was gay and the purpose of the game all too easy to understand. But gradually his instinct told him that this was not the case; he might be bisexual, but either way the game was not sexual. It was about something else. Perhaps Simon was bored on his luscious river and he needed something, or someone, to manipulate.

Ouksa finished off his drink and stood up.

“Drive straight back here,” Simon said in Khmer. “I don’t want to go looking for you.”

“No, sir.”

“Is it all right for him to go alone?” Robert asked.

“Sure it is. Everyone knows everyone here. He won’t do anything amiss. He knows I’d find him.”

When Ouksa had gone and the car had begun its short trip up to the Alpha, Simon filled his glass again and put fresh ice into it.

“All the same, Robert, you should be a little careful moving around with that kind of money. It could be tempting for some people. Not for this one. But others. Two grand is a fortune here.”

—

They watched the slow river for a while. Someone holding a lantern at the end of a stick moved along the opposite bank, the light flickering behind reeds and trees, and you could tell that it was swollen by the rains. Near the reeds the water rustled against debris and the edge of moon lit the smooth, unctuous surface as it constantly shifted. All along its length the frogs sang at full throttle, a sinuous chorus that seemed to possess a relaxed relentlessness, and it served to calm slightly jangled nerves, the apprehension that for Robert always came with night. He let go of his glass finally and sank back against the pliant plastic chair. His skin was dry; his eyes felt keen and lucid. He wasn’t nervous at all, but he was not at his ease either. It was surprisingly easy to linger between these two states of mind.

“It’s a damn warm night again,” Simon said. “But it’ll get hotter tomorrow. Does it bother you?”

“I’m getting used to it.”

“It’s cool by the river. It’s why I live here, of course. On the river, I mean.”

Robert said he loved rivers too.

“It’s a British and American thing,” Simon said.

“Is it?”

What did that mean? Robert wondered.

Simon took out a cigar box, opened it and took one out. He left it open and asked “Smoke? They’re bergamot cheroots I get in Burma.”

“All right. It’s been a while since I had a cheroot.”

“Why’s that? Don’t have them in England?”

“We have a few. I just don’t smoke them.”

“Is that right, hombre? Well, we got more here than that. These are fine enough. Not Cuban, but they’ll do. Of course they’re not cigars.”

Simon smiled, lit up both cheroots and closed the box. Soon the smoke had enveloped the table and the river breeze did not remove it. There was something manly and satisfying about it. The scent of bergamot, like a pot of brewed Earl Grey tea.

Simon continued his questions, about which he was quite casual and slow, as if it was just the normal pace of his curiosity. A barang who did not talk with another barang all that frequently. One had to wonder if he was lonely up here on the river of Battambang. He didn’t seem lonely or even put out. There was something, to the contrary, smoothly oiled and implacable about him. As if he was used to questions and answers.

“Moving on soon?” he asked Robert.

“I guess I should be. Though honestly I hadn’t thought about it.”

“Where to?”

Robert shrugged. “Phnom Penh — maybe.”

“It’s an underrated city. Lots of girls there.”

“It’s all right, I’m not going for the girls.”

“You don’t have to be prickly with me about things like that. Visitors like you are always much more moral and decent in word than they are in deed. It’s OK. Everyone’s the same.”

“I hadn’t really thought about it.”

“Oh, sure you thought about it. Everyone thinks about it.”

“Even if I thought about it I wouldn’t do it.”

Simon smiled. “You young barangs are so earnest. Wait till you’re forty.”

“Are you forty?”

“Damn near close. I’m trying to find a way to avoid getting there.”

“Well, good luck with that.”

“I wouldn’t leave it to luck. Maybe I’ll just change names.”

“Anyone can do that.”

“So,” Simon drawled, not looking up, “are you going to take a bus tomorrow?”

“Maybe.”

“You can take a boat down there too. I have a boat I use myself. I can call the guy down for you. He’ll be here any time you like.”

“Is that the best way to go?”

“Sure it is. Relax, take the sun on the deck. And all that.”

“All right then. Maybe I will.”

“You do say maybe a lot, Robert. Life is not maybe.”

“All right, I will take the boat.”

“That’s better.”

“Do you have business there?”

“I’m on holiday.”

“Ah yes. Holidays. I forgot about them.”

They smiled. Simon eyed him carefully over the edge of his glass.

“I say we have three chess games. Best of three. All right with you?”

“I’ll do my best.”

“That’s the spirit. You know, Robert, you seem like a sport. When I saw you at the temple earlier I thought, He’s a sport, you can tell from his body language. Well, that’s what I say. You can tell a man’s a sport from his body language. And from his shoes of course. I gave you a pass on the shoes. But overall I think I was right. You wouldn’t believe many of the people who come through here. Pure Flintstones. I don’t look down at them but it’s how I feel. One can’t help it. It’s like they come here to die and they aren’t sports about it either. They do it as if they’re too lazy to do it properly. In fact a lot of them do. They throw themselves in the river. Three or four bodies wash up every week, barangs down on their luck and tanked up with Yaa Baa. It’s a cottage industry for the crematoria at the monasteries. I never can figure out who pays for the funerals.”

Simon looked out across the waters, momentarily distracted, and picked a shred of tobacco from his lip.

“Well, I pay for some of them, if you want to know. I have the money. I don’t care. It seems a damned shame to let some kid go uncremated because no one came in to claim the body.”

“Then you are a sport too.”

“It’s nice of you to say. I think of myself as the guardian of this part of the river. I watch over it, you see.”

They mixed the Royal Stag with soda now and made it very cold.

“You’re lucky you can live like this,” Robert said. “You must have a business here.”

“I had the money when I moved here.”

That’s luck, Robert thought. The lucky have great timing.

“Back in the days when the dollar was high,” Simon went on, swirling his ice. “Back when we were rich. It’s a rather different story now, isn’t it?”

“I’ll say.”

“But you came into a bit of cash.”

“I didn’t think I’d win it in a casino.”

“It’s a sign. The Khmers believe in signs. Every sign means something. When my housekeeper told me about it I laughed and I thought, There’s a sign if I’ve ever heard of one.”

“Your housekeeper?”

“News travels on gossamer wings. She told me and we agreed it was a real sign.”

“Of what?”

“Who knows — one never knows. That we would meet tonight? That we would play chess? You have to think in the Khmer way.”

They were laughing and Simon was thinking how much more elegant Robert would look with a proper pair of shoes. He was a good-looking boy all the same, a boy with swing and lilt and charm. The English farmlands in his cream complexion and open skies in the eyes. It was a charm that survived all changes in locale, one felt it quickly and it was not something one could walk back from. But his English solidity let him down. He was still harnessed to another way of life, you could see the cowed look in his eyes.

Robert, for his part, had begun to give in to this charm offensive even as his mind kept returning to that grisly image of bodies floating down the river. He congratulated himself on ignoring Ouksa’s advice. Simon, he reasoned, was not understandable to a Khmer boy with no experience of the wider world. He was an oddity even in the Western context. To Robert, in those slightly giddy moments, he suggested a man of another age, an anachronism that was appealing for all the affectation it implied. There was a subtle menace about him, but it never quite broke into open view.

—

Robert pushed a hand through his loose, foppish blond hair and the moths buzzed around his head. The car was returning and Ouksa was driving it with paranoid slowness as the tires slipped in the wet gravel. Simon smoked his cigar down and they waited for Ouksa to come back into the bar with his sheepish look and his acute suspicion. When he had done so they all rose and went to the car in a jovial mood and the owner emerged and told them not to worry about the bill. They came out into a faint moonlight and the glimmer of open sky and the bushes seemed alive with moths. They followed Simon’s taillight as he turned left from the bar and followed the river-hugging road past the last small villas and family houses and into the somber, purring open countryside and its dark palm-shaped silhouettes.

Here there was a network of unsurfaced roads that had no lights. Beaucamp’s house seemed to be the very last one of all, and was half a mile from the nearest neighbor, its back garden sloping right down to the river where there was a small private jetty. It was surrounded by a low gray wall and had two gray gateposts and a rusting iron gate. The garden was startlingly lush and wildly overgrown, with black ceramic amphorae standing about in the uncut grass and a hammock between two cotton trees. It was a simple concrete villa raised above the ground in the Khmer-village style by posts. But he had turned this ground-floor area into a kind of veranda which projected out to the water’s edge and was filled with sofas and carpets and low coffee tables. It was an original arrangement, artfully disheveled in the way that a superb dresser will be. The ceiling had four propeller fans and there was a drinks cabinet in one corner nicely protected from the elements.

Ouksa carried his bag to the door and Simon told him gently in Khmer that his duties for the day were at an end and he could leave.

“He looks relieved,” Simon said to Robert with a merry eye. “Can’t wait to be rid of us.”

But Robert walked Ouksa back to the car.

“This bad man,” Ouksa said in a low voice. “Dun you stay here.”

“He’s just a little odd — don’t worry. He’s American — I understand him. I’ll be fine.”

He slipped Ouksa the extra twenty dollars.

“Thank you. This man not what he look.”

The thought had gone through Robert’s mind several times by now but it had not been enough to deter him. He was not sure why. It was an open question whether it was the very thing that he was attracted to.

When Ouksa had driven off, the two white men sat on the veranda with gin and tonics. The open rafters of the house seemed immense in the night shadows, the moths spinning around the wooden beams. It looked like a house which Simon had built himself since it was so much better-looking than the houses he had seen up till then. Simon put on some music from the house above them. He took out his ornate Moroccan chessboard, with its pieces carved from argun wood and hand-painted, and they set it up on the coffee table between them. He said he had bought it long ago in Essaouria on the Atlantic coast and it had a “spirit” that helped his game. He laid out the pieces and they flipped for black and white and Robert got black. He kicked off his sandals and the alcohol swelled within him and he absorbed the humid smell of datura coming in from the forest. The roneat music was faintly chiming out in the pitch-black fields, a wailing of fiddles as well. Simon made the first move and soon he was winning easily. He was the kind of player who had all his moves prepared in his head long before he touched a single pawn.

FIVE

Slowly, the whole sky visible above the bend in the river began to empty of clouds. It filled with a soft light that gradually made the sugar palms on the far bank more distinct and the piles of the jetty sharp and clear. The sweetness of this ripening night sky made Robert not care what time it had become. Birds sang in the forest, looping sing-song calls like those of macaws, and a million falling waterdrops merged together into a single sound. It was strange how trees kept dripping long after the rain had stopped. A country like a waterwheel, like a mass of wind chimes.

The second game had begun but it was slower in pace than the first one. More cheroots, lit with a certain ceremony.

There were feet on the steps, a pair of bare ankles appeared. They paused and Simon engaged his eye and smiled and put a finger against his lips. The girlfriend came down in a bathrobe, a slender Khmer yawning, and when she was at the bottom of the steps she turned and looked at them and said nothing, just walked over to the drinks cabinet and poured herself a tonic water.

“Sothea,” Simon said, “this is our new friend Robert, all the way from England. He’s a little deaf so you’ll have to speak up.”

She was dark and long-haired and oiled, and she looked from one man to the other and back again and said nothing at all. Simon said to her in Khmer, “You can go back to sleep if you want. We’re playing chess.”

“I can see what you’re doing,” she said.

She came over with her feet faintly oiled and smiled for Robert and he saw that her hair was wet. Her long fingers grasped the glass of tonic water with an awkward uncertainty, as if she were already resigned to the idea of dropping it and watching it smash.

“Sues’day,” she said, and nothing more.

“Are you hungry?” Simon said to Robert. “We can eat satay if you want.”

“Maybe a little.”

She went back up the stairs and soon there was a smell of cooking and they played the second game while the frogs seemed to come closer in the undergrowth. The moon became very still. The girl returned with a plate of pork satay on sticks and a little dipping sauce. She sat at the edge of Simon’s chair and watched his hands move his pieces back and forth. One could see the easy familiarity, the sexual tenderness between them. Simon began to dominate the board just as he had before and yet he seemed reluctant to win the game too quickly. He wanted to know about Robert.

“You don’t seem like a schoolteacher.”

“What do they seem like?”

“Oh, I don’t know. I only know American ones. They seem — depressed. It’s sort of a dead-end career, isn’t it?”

“I don’t know if I’d say that.”

“Well, obviously you wouldn’t. But that doesn’t make it untrue.”

“It doesn’t make it true either.”

Robert talked about his last two years. There was something false about it, a slight artificiality in his voice as he complained about his town and his job and his solitude.

“Do you believe in ghosts?” Simon said suddenly.

“Not at all.”

“You’re going to have a difficult time in this country then. You cannot be here and not believe in ghosts. Say, Sothea honey — do you believe in ghosts?”

Gravely, she stared at him and her mouth opened.

“See? They all believe in ghosts. Ghosts are more real to them than you and I are. That means ghosts are more important to them than we are. I like that view of the world myself. It seems serious.”

“Does she really believe in them?”

“It’s categorical. I’m a Yale man myself. Highly reasonable. But don’t hold it against me, because she doesn’t. And I believe in ghosts just as much as she does. I’ve come around to the idea. I prefer the idea. It goes against everything I was raised with.”

“I’ll drink to that.”

“Let’s drink to ghosts—”

The girl got up brusquely and walked out into the garden, where her hair shone and her cool distaste was removed from them. It was a disreputable thing to make a toast to but Robert had the sense that Simon had done it on purpose.

“There are many ghosts along the river, hombre. Quite a few. I don’t see them but she does. She has a knack of seeing them. I used to say, Oh, it’s a Khmer thing, and it was a bit patronizing, but now I wonder. I wonder if she’s just got a flair for it. A nose.”

Along that river a longtail now moved, a lamp hung from its rear end, the motor purring quietly. They got a little drunk. The girl went back upstairs and Robert lost the game and they sat for a while under the careering moths and the oil lamp hung on a black wire.

“I suppose you’ll leave tomorrow,” Simon said. “My boatman can drop you off in the city and just tip him a twenty if that’s all right.”

“I’m grateful — it seems cheap.”

“It’s not cheap at all. But if you think it is, that’s great. I might even come with you, though I think we have things to do up here tomorrow. Meanwhile, I have a bit of red opium left over from last night. Shall we smoke it and be hippies?”

“Let’s.”

—

As they lit the pipe Robert felt ants crawling across his naked feet, things crawling between his toes, and he didn’t mind. The air had suddenly become deliciously cool and the heat and bustle of the day had receded even mentally. So this was what it was like here. The days pinned you down in stress, sweat and misery and then the nights came along to rescue you and set you back on your feet. Nights were the key to survival, the way out of the stultifying labyrinths of the days. Without the nights humans would shrivel up like cockroaches and die. Simon won the game and they began another, and as they did so they puffed at the pipe, which Simon had prepared with delicate dexterity. It tasted sweet, like stewed plums, and the smoke passed easily into Robert’s lungs and out again into the air.

“It’s tasty” was all he could say. “I’ve never—”

“It’s hard to get these days. It became an unfashionable addiction at some point. I can’t imagine why. It’s so mild and pleasant.”

“It’s like something for children.”

“In a way, yes…”

Robert began thinking about the boat the next day.

“Maybe I should go early,” he said. “That’s what everyone recommends here, isn’t it? Get up early and avoid the heat.”

“Generally that’s what we do. Shall I call him now?”

Simon made the call and spoke in Khmer.

“Six all right for you?” he called over to Robert.

Robert nodded and so it was decided. He would probably have an opium-and-beer hangover but it didn’t matter.

“Where does the boat go exactly?”

Simon put down the phone and extracted his pleasure from the pipe, which he held with three fingers as if an ancient Chinese man had shown him how to do it properly.

“Where you want. We usually go down to a small town a few miles out of the city and taxi in from there. The piers in Phnom Penh can get way too busy with all the tourist boats.”

“I’ll do that then.”

“You’ll be there for lunch. Do you eat lunch, Robert?”

“I can’t remember. I can’t—”

“I know a place you could go. Right on the river.”

“Yes, on the river.”

Robert felt light-headed. The lights along the far side of the river had begun to seem more spread out and their reflections in the water shimmered more violently. The outlines of the trees had grown more imposing in some way.

“I’ll write it down for you,” Simon went on. “You can go there and eat fish amok. Very nice.”

Simon rose and walked over to the paraffin lamp hanging from the rafters and lowered the flame. He half turned and glanced down at the stoned visitor who had stretched out his legs and sidled onto the entire length of the sofa he was seated on. The music had stopped and it was just the insects now, the sound of the fields. The pipe lay in the center of the table on a dish that seemed to serve that specific purpose, its wisp of smoke perfectly vertical. A life of casual idleness was expressed in that single upright line of smoke and it was a life which, looking at it, Robert suddenly wanted for himself, even though he was repelled by its uselessness. It couldn’t be that hard to attain. He thought: I am in some kind of fairy tale and nothing can be that hard to attain. All I have to do is wish for it on a star. Simon came back to his own sofa, fell into it and restocked the pipe so the smoking of it could go on. He lit it up again and passed it at once to his guest. The conversation between them had now run dry, but without awkwardness. Like a stream that peters out at its appointed place and time, without drama. It no longer mattered. It is always the way when conversation no longer matters. It dies its natural death with a quiet submission to fate. Robert felt himself falling backward into the rough fabric of the sofa while the ants ate his feet alive. He thought to reach down and scratch the skin or crush the ants but when he raised his hand to do so he found that he could not.

“You can sleep down here,” Simon said at last, and his words came to Robert like something whispered at the far end of a long tunnel.

Robert rolled slowly onto his back and his mind let go of the unfinished chess game and the ants. He stared up at one of the shiny black fans. The mosquitoes were audible, their beating wings as loud as rotary blades. Out in the darkened rows of sugarcane the rabbits nibbled at the edge of the covering shadow, their eyes shining for a moment as they turned and listened to birds of prey. He placed a hand over his eyes and felt his mouth go dry. He remembered the bats which Ouksa had roused earlier that day, their wings beating just like the insects now. What world, then, did they inhabit?

SIX

He came over the Downs in the tall grass and the flint walls of the old barn stood high on the crest almost with a view of the sea through a gap in the hills. There were large holes in the walls filled to bursting with stinging nettles and through these a small boy could step. Inside it was gloom and fragrance but he always hesitated because he was alone. Around the barn the grass quivered and rippled and there were momentary patterns upon its silvery surface. He reached out and ran his hand along the rough flints and he drifted through the cornflowers at the bottom of the walls. Why always here, under this same apex sun which made the shadows stand still only a millimeter from the forms that cast them? The terror of the cows standing in their isolate shadows too all over the hillsides, in gleaming rivers of half-dried mud. Look up at the sun and you wake at once, always the same.

He did so then and he saw the blueness of a morning sky, almost the same as the sky of England and childhood. It, and not his eyes, seemed to blink. Then, almost at the same moment, he heard water and sensed it close by. The lapping of lake waves, weak but ploddingly insistent. The horizon tilted, then righted itself: he was on a boat.

It must have been the boat that Simon had called for him. Though his head still hummed from the night before he got onto his elbow and forced his eyes to work again. He was on the deck of a small shabby fishing boat with a motor at its rear end and above him in a ramshackle cockpit a man stood at the wheel smoking a half-crushed cigar. He was naked but for a pair of shorts and dark blue tattoos ran all down his back.

Robert was lying on a mattress, like that of a sunbed, and the early-morning sun had burned his nose a little. Water, he thought. I need a bloody drink. He got up with difficulty and steadied himself and made his way forward to the cockpit. The man turned without surprise and motioned to a thermos lying in the shade. It was hot coffee with sugar and milk.

“Good morning,” Robert said as loudly as he could.

A godsend, the coffee.

The man grinned and made a playful salute with one hand. Robert unscrewed the thermos’s cap and fell gratefully into the coffee. He sipped it cautiously at first then took larger mouthfuls.

Instantly, he revived. They were on a vast toffee-colored lake. Across it a saline wind swept, warm and menacing, and far off on the horizon he could see systems of nets laid low against the water. There was no land to be seen, they had left it far behind.

He sat half in the sun and gulped down the whole thermos. It was only gradually that he became aware that he was wearing clean clothes and that they were not his. He looked down and spread his hands over his warm lap. He was wearing off-white linens, freshly laundered. He felt in the pockets and there was a hundred-dollar bill. The shirt was a soft dark cream linen with heavy buttons. He got up and turned once as if looking at himself in a mirror. Incredible. Espadrilles too.

He called out to the pilot.

“Where is Simon?”

The man waved a silent hand but didn’t turn again.

All right, Robert thought, he doesn’t speak a word of English. That’s to be expected, I suppose.

He took out the hundred-dollar bill and looked it over. Then he thought about his backpack. It was nowhere to be seen on the deck.

“So that’s it,” he said aloud.

Exhilaration came upon him, and then a back-pedaling panic.

He leaned against the boat’s side and let his senses clear and soon he saw low shimmers of green on the leftward horizon. It’s a small country, he thought, and no one is more than four hundred miles from anyone else. For some reason he didn’t yet care about the backpack and yet he knew instinctively that it was not on the boat and that there was no use looking for it. There was no point asking the pilot about it and there was no point asking him to take him back to the house by the river. He did not even know where the house was or where the jetty was or what the river was called. He would never be able to find it, and the pilot would never take him anyway even if he understood.

He lumbered to the rear of the boat and looked down into the toffee waters being churned by the motor. A five-mile swim in any direction. He shaded his eyes and saw that the shimmers of jungle on the horizon were in any case coming closer. But there was no way of calculating how long he had been on board this boat, or for how many hours they had been plowing through this featureless wasteland. It could have been for several hours. It could, for that matter, have been for half the night. There was no way of knowing. Nor was there any way of knowing if a gentlemanly favor had been done him, or the reverse — one barang gentleman to another.

—

Toward noon, to judge by the position of the sun (he had no watch, he discovered) the boat began to near land — the same low forest and waterlogged banks of reeds and flat grass — and soon he saw people walking along a road, bicycles flashing in the sun.

The pilot turned to him and said something, the name of a place perhaps, Prek Pnov, and he stood up and walked to the bow, which would touch land. There were long shelving banks of dirty wet grass and reeds, and above them a scrim of slum shacks made of tin. There were a few children with mechanical toy birds and fishing rods standing at the tip of a line of planks that led up from the water’s edge into the shanty. It was not quite the city but over the slum and the river soared a modern bridge which suggested its presence. The thick dust of the country roads hung above Prek Pnov, the dust which dries in an hour and then rises to envelop the head, and through it he could see the gold tints of a ramshackle wat covered with wooden scaffolding and high sad trees caked with cement powder.

When the boat came to, Robert stepped onto the planks and looked down at the mysterious pilot, who seemed unconcerned. This was not a stop that any commercial boat would use; it must have been a secretive place that Simon used to get ashore while going about his equally secretive business.

“Where’s Simon?” Robert asked again, but now more clearly and forcefully. “Where’s my bag?”

The pilot smiled with a vast charm.

He had already unmoored the boat again and the craft was moving away from the path of planks as suddenly as it had arrived. As it did so the children closed in on Robert and began to pester him. One dolla, one dolla.

“Oh, OK then,” Robert called after the pilot, “you dump me here and then you just leave like that? Just like that? What am I supposed to do now?”

The pilot waved cheerfully. Nothing to be said or expressed, just the fact and the consequences that sprang from it.

“Come back,” Robert shouted after him, waving too, but not in the same friendly way. “Come back right now!”

He knew already that no such thing could happen. The men in the cluster of longtails below him stared and slowly their ironic smiles gained traction in Robert’s mind and he desisted. “Damn and fuck it,” he muttered and brushed past the children and began to climb the precarious gangplank through slopes of colorless plastic trash. The planks snaked through shacks on stilts, up into the shadow and heat of a single alley that wound its way through the slum.

He was just at a loss, and aboard the boat he had not been able to think anything through. He moved as an automaton until he was clear of the river and he thought wildly, in great leaps: go back up the river by car and find the house again or press on and see what happened. But there was no sense in going back, he knew there was nothing behind him and, far more importantly, he didn’t want to go back. Secretly, he was thrilled. From now on he could tell himself that he was a victim of circumstance.

He laughed and the people out on the alley sitting around with their lunch saw it and laughed along immediately. It was the Khmer way. Their surprise was not melodramatic. It came out in that subdued collective laughing. He was in an alley filled with little shops and two-story houses where the balconies were crowded with makeshift altars of bowls of fruit and decorative piles of beer cans. Great round earthenware urns stood outside the doors. As he turned and decided to walk to the right, his head narrowly missed a line of tiny fish impaled on a wooden pin that dangled from an awning rod. The children burst into laughter. He ducked and laughed along and moved awkwardly toward the cheap gold chedi of the temple which he could see over the roofs.

The wat looked like a half-abandoned construction site. But there were gold guardian lions erect and snarling in the sun and chedi which had been restored. The naga heads on the stairs had been repainted gold and green and there were smaller lions posted on the roofs. He walked in, seeing nobody and now no longer followed by the children, passing venerable trees whose shade covered a ground of rubble and grass.

He came out onto the road, and he could sense at once that it was the main route into the city. In fact it was the Battambang highway. Chaotic traffic pressed through it, a medley of motorbikes in swarms. The sun beat down on tangled cables and pink bricks and forlorn flag posts.

He walked along the dust bordering the tarmac until he came to a small shop with a curious sign for a thing called “Alexand” brandy with a black head of a Greek warrior. He stepped into its shade and felt the sweat and burn on his skin. He cashed in the hundred-dollar bill for an Angkor beer. As he stood by the road, tuk-tuks and motodops began to stop. In his nice linens he appeared a profitable target but he soon beat the motodops down to five dollars for the run into town. Since he had no baggage they assumed he lived there. No, he said, I’ll go to a hotel, you know one? The motodops were not as wise to the hotels as the tuk-tuks but they knew a few flophouses.

It was a choice, according to them, between the Sakura and the Paris. Both had girls. The Sakura was cheaper but the Paris had a nice location on Kampuchea Krom Boulevard and a restaurant on the ground floor. It was a difference of about five dollars. He chose the Paris.

They drove in through the heat of the day. The rain, the driver said, would not come in until the late afternoon that day. The suburbs, meanwhile, lay in a sullen calm and he went over in his mind the dozens of theories he had established as to what had happened. The most likely, to his taste, was that Simon had helped him on his way and would send on his things as soon as he sent word where he was staying. There must have been a reason why he had held on to the backpack, a reason that was not injurious, but, as it happened, no such reason came easily to mind.

SEVEN

On the outskirts of central Phnom Penh the light dimmed and clouds began to mass and they crawled through a river of traffic toward a thing called the Japanese Friendship Bridge. It was two o’clock. He could see already that it was a small, low-lying city with the great river pouring through it. They went past Chinese factories and loading bays, the metal boxes covered with Chinese characters, an office for Bruntys cider, mounds of rose bricks, the shapes of metal silos and the gleam of the pale green-tinted river below. They passed under the bridge, the tarmac shattered as if by mortars. The afternoon hysteria of car horns and the cafés along the streets filling up with anxious men in white shirts. A city with pools of slow life from another age. The trees along the roads then, the echoes of provincial France, a disappeared France of green shutters and dark yellow walls. The long pale gray walls of the French embassy topped with rings of barbed wire and a riverine boulevard swirling with dust and violent wind.

The river curved slowly, dividing the city they were on from a farther shore where half-constructed buildings rose up out of a slightly silver haze. New hotels, towers of dreary metal. They turned inland at a street market of some kind and passed alongside a baked city park, the frangipanis creamy in the sun. The driver glanced at his fare in the vibrating mirror. He looked like a young man about town, a rake down for the weekend. In fact, he looked vaguely familiar. But why did he have no money, so little that he had to stay at the miserable and ill-reputed Paris Hotel? But maybe he wanted a hotel with girls for the weekend. That must be it. But then, where had he seen his face before? Or something about the way he dressed. Most barangs dressed like beggars. This one dressed as if to hide the fact that he was a beggar. If he waited outside the Paris Hotel for a few days he might get another ride out of him. He might need something illegal like a passport.

Robert was not thinking about such things at all. He was watching the rotary swirls of girls on motorbikes, the back riders sidesaddle and helmetless. People massed on the pavements under the shade of mango trees. The great heat slowing down even facial muscles. He was not as dismayed as he had expected to be. The city was, one could see, young and upbeat and fierce, and yet its traffic had a slow, almost choreographed motion to it. They sped leftward into a large boulevard, wide and French — Norodom — and he could see old European villas and mansions set behind walls topped with broken glass and a dark monument at its distant end like a gloomy relic of Angkor. A quiet motor seemed to organize the city. The bikes whizzing in both directions simultaneously never quite collided. The tuk-tuks snaking their way through this chaos never quite came to grief. Almost, but not.

The driver had gotten lost and he circled back up to another boulevard — Monivong — and turned right into it until they came to Kampuchea Krom at a right angle to it. It had a somber, commercial feel. After the second junction, they came to the Paris. The hotel’s name was written over a curved entrance in English, Chinese and Khmer, and around its pale orange columns lounged a handful of cynical-looking drivers. There was a KTV with red Chinese lanterns across the street and a shop with a sign that read Sony, Make Believe.

He had no bags, he was free and light as he came into the colorless and empty lobby with “international” clocks on the wall and the cool glance of two young receptionists.

They barely looked up, in any case.

The lobby had white leather sofas and a coppery bas-relief of Angkor Wat and a soft-drinks fridge with the word Vinamilk. Sashed boudoir curtains made it feel like something other than a hotel.

“Passport,” one of them said impassively.

And suddenly he remembered his passport. Which is to say that he no longer had it.

“It’s at my other hotel,” he said quickly, not missing a beat.

“What hotel?”

“The Sakura. I can get it later.”

The two Khmer girls looked at each other doubtfully.

But it was a barang, a barang was not really a risk, and they didn’t really care either way. Cash is cash.

One of them looked up at the clocks for some reason. The red letters below them spelled out the names of cities they would never see: Sydney, New York and of course Paris. The time in Paris would never be of any use to anyone staying at the Paris.

“All right,” one of them said, “you can bring it later.”

“I will, yes.”

“But then you got to pay up front now.”

“All right — two nights please.”

It was thankfully cheap.

“No bags?”

“I’ll get them later.”

He paid the cash and one of the girls took him up to the fifth floor. As they passed by the lift he saw the photocopies of passport pages of wanted criminals taped to the wall next to it. Heng, Sarquen, Cambodian: eyes like pumice. Men on the run like himself, their images of little interest to guests of the Paris who probably had enough secrets of their own. The girl glanced at him. Her attitude quickly relaxed even though the lift was broken. The futility of the building’s internal heat seemed to make her more amiable. It was the way here, the surface coolness quickly broke down.

“Holiday?”

“Business.”

“Ah,” and her face fell a little.

The Paris was a claustrophobic place, with half-lit corridors, a mama-san on every floor, and girls from the massage parlor sat around doing their day’s makeup and coiffure. They looked up for a moment as he passed and the brushes and eyeliners came to a moment’s standstill. So it was a single man’s place and they kept track of the resident denizens. The room itself was the usual cheap affair in the tropics but there was a working fridge and air-conditioning and a TV with a Japanese channel. The wooden ceiling was so polished that it looked like a floor. No gambling in the HOTEL room on the back of the door.

The receptionist gave him the key and left him there. He locked the door behind him and went to the window and looked down into Kampuchea Krom. Tired and stoic trees withered up in the last hour of sun before the rain hit the city. The traffic went by in a curious silence. Behind a blue grille on a rooftop a woman sat combing out her wet hair. He sat on the bed in a state of vast emptiness and relief and took off the clothes that were not his and looked at the back of the collar and the inside of the linen trousers. Were they not Simon’s clothes, pretty obviously? They did not quite fit and Simon had been wearing the same kind of thing. The labels were of a tailor in Phnom Penh, a place called Vong. They were Simon’s clothes all right, they even smelled of a stranger. The gesture was strange and murky and he could not think it through even now. There was the money, and this was merely a better way of getting rid of him than killing him.

He lay back on the stiff bed and smiled at the thought of Simon and his slender girl trying to kill him. Obviously this was better. And they would not have had the nerve to kill him. No normal person ever had the nerve. And yet it was also possible that Simon had given him a backhanded gift in the light of their conversation the previous night. He had read Robert quite cannily, and he had surely sensed that the Englishman would not protest too much. He would not come back looking for his things, not even for his passport. It was an incredible game, sending him off naked into the world like that, but he had intuited that Robert would survive and make the best of it. People lost their passports all the time, it was never the end of the world. He would not, Simon had guessed, even go to the British embassy in a hurry and make a declaration, and if he did they would just give him a new one. It was difficult to see what difference it would make. But alternatively, he could go find himself a false one. They were easy to procure from the city’s army of forgers. And in fact he was thinking about it already. He was thinking how he would step, lightly, into someone else’s life.

But what life had Simon led here? Exhausted, he lay naked on the bed and turned on the TV set and watched a program about outer space that was all in Khmer. He could tell that it was about some tiny distant blue planet which had just been discovered a few months earlier, a place where it rained shards of glass all day long and where the nights lasted barely thirty minutes. He dozed. The sounds of the hotel drifted down into his consciousness. The girls shuffling in nighties and hot pants from floor to floor, the Khmer pop music, the men coughing on their way out and flinging the spit in the back of their throats. The daily thunder rolled in with a generous laziness and the trees shimmered with lightning, spreading a subtle panic through the street below. He was easily refreshed. When he was up, he felt confident again and he shaved with the hotel’s plastic razor and put his expensive clothes back on after a cold shower. The air-conditioner barely kept the grit-filled heat at bay but he no longer felt hot. He thought he would go out and find an Internet café and maybe something to eat as well. It was going to rain then, but rain never hurt a man.

He went down by the stairs, landing by landing. In the street the rain came down in terrible sheets, the drivers outside cowering at the edge of the lobby. There was a soft surprise in their faces.

He found a motodop and told the driver to take him to an Internet café. They set off through the downpour and he let go of any remaining apprehension about staying dry. They drove down Kampuchea Krom until they crossed Monivong, and then they had reached a street called Pasteur, passing clubs with names like Shanghai and Flamingoes and bars stirring into nocturnal life with a laziness that gave them a natural and inevitable force.

In the thunderous rain the neon had a frosted, childish quality. They passed the Sorya Mall, a ground-floor open space filled with bars and sofas, and at the end there was Street 136 and the Internet café where the driver let him off. He dashed inside, soaked through, and sat at a terminal by the window for half a dollar.

He had wanted to just check his e-mails but now he was not sure if he should. To open his account would perhaps expose his whereabouts to someone who might be looking for it. He didn’t know who would be looking for it as yet, but eventually — surely — his on-off girlfriend, Yula, would be anxious and maybe his parents as well. Incredibly, he hadn’t thought of them. It might be a decisive thing, to use his Gmail password now. Decisive, that is, down the line. He therefore hesitated before signing in.

His hand hovered over the keyboard and gradually it relaxed and retreated. It had to be thought over, and now he was not sure that he wanted to go back to anything. He only worried about his mother, even though there were other things to worry about, a thousand loose ends left in a chaos of abandoned responsibility.

He often thought, in this respect, how un-English he really was, because breaking away from home was not proving to be as difficult as he might have once anticipated. On the contrary. It was proving easy and harmless, at least to himself. Because his own motive was becoming clearer to him, he assumed that it would become clearer to everyone in his life as well. It was not the case, and he realized that. But he hoped it would be soon. If he could walk out of the door and not come back, others would eventually understand why. There was no point, then, explaining himself to a chorus of puzzled resentment. If they couldn’t understand, nothing could make them understand. Most people appreciated where they were born and grew up. They grumbled, but they liked it, could not live without it. He was not like that, he now understood. There was nothing about his birthplace or his life there that he enjoyed or would defend to the death. There was nothing he enjoyed in that way of life. It was claustrophobic and petty, and the police watched everything you did and thought. It was a way of life that justified itself as being the pinnacle of freedom, but it had not come up with an alternative reason for existing once the freedom had been sucked out of it. There wasn’t even sex or sun. There was health care, so that although life was expensive at least death was free. A society premised on free death.

It was then that he opened the Gmail account and quickly went through his messages. Surprisingly, almost no one apart from his parents had sent him anything. It was as he had suspected. He felt a bitter contempt for himself for even hoping that it might have been otherwise. The two messages from his parents, moreover, were simple enough.

Bobby, we know you are on the road and it’s awfully hard to send message sometimes, but still we are here, you know, not six feet under. You might pop us a message once in a while just to let us know that you aren’t either!

The second seemed a little more anxious.

Bobby, are you all right? We don’t know how we feel about you being in the land of Pol Pot. I mean, really. Awful things happen there, we’ve heard. We hope you are being careful at least. Send word, all right?

And impulsively he did.

Everything OK. Don’t worry. Having a marvelous time in the land of Pol Pot. Would I be a monster if I decided to stay here a year and not come back to that awful job? Would you be furious if I did that? I met a girl. You know the story. But everything’s dandy! It couldn’t be better.

Bobby

It was fake, but it was not entirely so. The gist was true.

He imagined his father turning to his mother with a sly wink.

“So, he’s got a girl out there. I told you so.”

It was then that he decided to “go invisible.” He felt that he could cut off contact with them for a while without arousing their fears. How long that would turn out to be he couldn’t imagine. It might be weeks, or even months. He knew how they thought — once they had received word from him that he was thriving in foreign parts they would tend to let it go for a while. He would send them a curt word later on, when he knew what he was going to do. He didn’t know himself at that moment, and so there was little point trying to explain it to them.

Out in the rain there was a street almost in rubble. Wide, sultry, open to vice. Short-term hotels with little white neon signs were still open and freelance girls trawled the flooded pavements in pressed white shirts and black hair combs. He went onto some sites where people posted services ads and personals and looked through the Language Tuition section.

It was free to register and put up an ad, but in the Language Tuition Sought section there were quite a few people asking for English lessons at about ten dollars an hour. He scribbled down the phone numbers of six or seven and went out into the rain again and walked down 63 for a while until he came to a shop selling cheap phones and SIM cards. He got a ten-dollar one and a one-dollar SIM and fixed his new number up inside the shop so that it worked before he made his way out.

He didn’t want to waste any money now so he made his way back to the Paris — he was wet anyway and the humidity would never let him dry out — and on the way a Viet girl followed him slowly on a kind of damaged Vespa and called out “Why not, why not?” until giving up and turning away. On Kampuchea Krom the pavements had emptied, the trees poured with warm water. When he arrived back at the lobby a man asleep at the reception desk raised his head and looked up with an aimless eye at the barang. Two girls ahead of him on the stairs turned and asked him what room he was staying in. They smelled like Ivory soap and turmeric. He said he only spoke Romanian. Then, when he was back on his granite bed, he remembered that he had meant to eat and had forgotten. He lay down and felt slightly feverish and decided to leave the curtains open because the lightning flickering through the window would, against its usual proclivity, help him sleep and forget everything. And so it did.

EIGHT

The following day he got up early and went down to the restaurant on the ground floor of the hotel. Its doors were opened to the street and the sticky tables attracted flies. He ate some dried sand gobi in soya bean sauce and some kai lan in oyster sauce and after them some weak tea. The day had risen in a new spirit, with a low, aggressive sun and a dry, acid dust that came onto the tongue and the eyelashes. It was strange how at this time of year the city did not remain either wet or dry for long. The men there ate while silently reading newspapers with tin pots of Vietnamese coffee, the glasses beneath the metal filters lightened with condensed milk, and when he had tired of the tea he got the same coffee for himself and counted everything out carefully dollar-wise. He would have to survive on very little until he got a pupil or two. He sugar-loaded the coffee, which had a nutty, almost chocolate taste, and drank it down as slowly as he could. Soon the discomfort of the night and the bad sleep were dispelled and he came back to life and set to work calling the numbers which he had culled from the Language Tuition section.

None of them answered. Perhaps it was too early in the morning. He paid and strode out into the sunshine and walked slowly down Monivong until he reached the Victory Monument. The sky had lost all its monsoon darkness and he looked forward to a dry and bright spell. It seemed like a city of twenty-year-olds in which only the old possessed the shabbiness he had expected, as if they had emerged suddenly from a distant age of terror. He went ambling down Neak Banh Teuk Park toward the Samdech Chuon Nath statue, an old man with large ears seated cross-legged surrounded by nagas and lions. Robert paid it no attention. He pressed on along Hun Sen Park and past the massive Nagaworld casino and a fairground on the left called Dream Land, the Ferris wheel temporarily stilled, waiting for night, but the street vendors already there with their barrows of tiny steamed snails topped with artful crests of red chilies. He went inside Nagaworld for a few minutes to cool off and sat inside a kind of Chinese pavilion with plastic willows and painted blue-sky ceiling and stone waterfalls. He came out dried of sweat and circled around past the Landmark Hotel until he came alongside the Himawara Hotel, where the gold leaf of the palace was suddenly visible and the saline river could be felt in the nose.

There was a restaurant next to it, with tables set out above the river, empty at that hour. He sat there and ordered an omelette with cucumbers and pork and a fermented fish called tray prama. He made his calls again as he was drinking the next round of Chinese tea and this time a woman picked up. She was Khmer and spoke little English.

She said, “Dr. Sar coming back at eleven.”

He said it was for the English lessons.

“He will call you back, Mr….”

A name, he didn’t have a name yet. He had not even been asked to give one at the hotel, or maybe he had signed his usual signature, he couldn’t remember.

“Mr. Beauchamp,” he said quickly.

He pronounced the p.

She repeated it and he said “Yes.”

“Mr. Beauchamp, Dr. Sar will call you before lunch.”

So he was a doctor.

“All right, I’ll wait for his call.”

“Aw khun!”

He thought of continuing with the calls but his superstitious side was strong and he thought he might jinx this one and he didn’t want to jinx a doctor. A doctor might pay well enough, and he loathed the thought that he might have to break silence and call his parents for money. That was unthinkable. He went back out into the street and walked down alongside the river until he was by the Cambodiana Hotel and then the wide, milky water itself with the construction cranes shining on the far side as if sprinkled with silver dust.

Although the day was typical of those that follow a night of rain — the earth patted down and compact, the insects somehow uninterested in humans — the sky showed the first anxieties of the struggles that would return by nightfall. In the center of the blue void a great atomic cloud had formed, blindingly bright at the edges, and as it evolved upward it grew darker and yet more brilliant at the edges.

The tension in the air did not at first seem related to it, but soon one began to know better. In the street the long puddles brightened for a moment then grew dim, and the electricity which rippled through the air drew the eye upward to the slow-motion mushroom cloud and its impending crisis, which would not arrive for hours, maybe not even till the next day. Along the Tongle Sap the frangipanis and star trees were held in a total stillness, like things carved out of wax, and under them old ladies performed their t’ai chi to music boxes. The beauty of automata, the beauty of wax and stillness and sky-tensions. For the first time in twelve hours his clothes began to dry and become crisp again and the sun burned into his shoulder blades. He crossed the road and went into one of the spread-out café terraces with cane chairs that line the tourist stretch of Sisowath Quay. It was La Croisette. As he settled into one of the cane chairs the phone rang and a male voice said his new name with a gravelly amusement, as if he had heard it before but as if it didn’t matter. The doctor introduced himself in a slightly struggling but distinctly American-inflected English.

—

“I was glad to get your call, Mr. Beauchamp,” the doctor said. “My wife and I have been looking for an English tutor. Could we maybe meet up for lunch in an hour? Where are you?”

Robert looked across the road and said, “At the river.”

“The river? Whereabouts?”

“Near a place called the Wagon Wheel.”

“All right. Why don’t you meet me at Le Royal Hotel at twelve?”

“I could do that.”

“Are you English?” the doctor asked.

“I am. Is it a problem?”

“Good, I thought you were. We wanted someone English.”

“Well, I am English.”

“We can have lunch at the Royal restaurant. I suppose you know it. The table will be under my name, Dr. Sar. They know me.”

“All right.”

“I’ll see you there. I think my wife wanted to meet you too but she can’t come to lunch.”

“Next time then. I’ll see you there, Dr. Sar.”

“Twelve. If I am late, please do have a drink on me.”

“I’ll do that.”

The man said, “Au revoir!”

Dr. Sar. It was such a resounding name. To kill the next two hours Robert went to the National Museum and wandered through the galleries of Angkorian art. The place was hot and almost empty and finally he came to a huge statue of Vishnu from the obscure temple of Phnom Da in Takeo Province in the south. He sat down on the floor in the lotus position.

The god’s hands clutched a flame, an antelope skin and a flask, and on either side of him stood two smaller figures of Rama and Balarama. Carved from a single block of sandstone, only five of his eight hands were still attached to surviving arms but all of them were carved with finesse, the individual nails carefully grooved. Like a young pharoah, the god wore a tall cylindrical hat and a folded loincloth, his physique slender and lifelike, with wide shoulders and a little bulging belly. The surface had turned a dark green from the unhappy centuries.

Robert, however, found himself thinking not about unhappiness but its opposite. Vishnu, destroyer of worlds, might have something to do with happiness but he didn’t know what it was. The missing hands seemed to be the clue. They must exist somewhere even now, relics mounted in distant American or Chinese homes or buried in dusty museums on the far side of the world. Timeless. Where, though, did these oval faces, aquiline noses and almond-shaped eyes come from? Even the tear ducts, the pupils and canthi of the eyes were perfectly carved. The figure of Balarama, the elder brother of Krishna, which stood to the right of Vishnu, was arresting. His left eye had been obliterated but his gentle smile was still intact, as was the symbolic swing plow he carried. His figure was boyish, tilted at the hips. Rama, meanwhile, held a tall bow and gazed down at Robert with a haughty gentility. As an avatar of Vishnu, he was associated with knowledge and eternity. He also partook of the enigma of happiness.

—

Robert walked to Le Royal after getting directions from the museum staff. It was a stiff walk, but he had an hour to waste anyway, and as he made his way through Street 102 he saw a lovely shaded colonial-looking apartment block called Colonial Mansions with a pool shining behind glass doors. If his fortunes improved he made a resolution to look in and see how much it would cost to live there. At Le Royal, on the far side of the park behind this building, the staff had stepped out onto the gravel driveway and were peering up at the sky as if something unpleasant had just happened or was about to happen. In his decent clothes he passed through them with a mere nod and a smile, and he felt a sudden pleasure at this automatic respect, which he had never enjoyed from anyone before. He had a different step now, a more confident stride. It had come to him quite suddenly. The grand hotel was gearing up for lunch and in the lobby the upscale barang types and the businessmen from Seoul and Shanghai were there in their dark suits. He slipped in among them and a few of the women looked up and checked him out with a quiet appreciation. He saw it, he felt it, and it made him smile. He was aware of himself looking quite glamorous, burnished by sun and idleness and a youth much less latent. Blending in, he passed through them with a quicksilver pleasure.

A long corridor to the left of the lobby led to the Royal restaurant, and the table was waiting in a still-empty room. It stood next to a door-size beveled mirror with a view of a pool. The staff looked him over without any trace of snobbery and he took the table and ordered a Singapore Sling and a tall glass of iced water. He did it without missing a beat. It was curious how naturally it came to him. Maybe Simon had been right — he was a good sport. Now stilled and appeased in some way, he stretched out his legs under the table and looked around. The walls were covered with French colonial lithographs, scenes of moonlit picnics and elephant rides, images with titles like Pique-Nique sur le Bassac and Éléphants au bord du Tonlé Sap. There were old photographs of dance troupes in traditional costumes, like child-women with painted white faces, Des danseuses du roi se préparant à la danse. It was a world within a world, and the world to which it had once belonged had entirely disappeared. The foreign correspondents had all lived here during the war in 1975. Even now there was something not quite right about it. The boys in bow ties and awkward waistcoats, the chandeliers moving slightly in the subtle gusts from the air conditioners. The ceiling’s painted panels. Yet it was not a decor he felt out of place in now. He thought, with a quiet astonishment, that this would not have been true only a week earlier. It was like stepping into a grand house to which, although it appeared unfamiliar at first, he had been subconsciously accustomed all his life. From beyond the walls the koel birds could be heard in the towering trees arranged around the two colonial pools. High above which, on the room balconies, were little signs that read Please do not feed the monkeys. It was the life of the rich, the tropical rich, and all one had to do was look the part and not hiccup.

Robert felt sweat spreading slowly all along his shoulders, his hand was unsteady on the stem of the water glass.

“Keep it steady,” he told himself. “No passing out here. No scenes.”

The doctor, as it transpired, was late — he was a busy man — and Robert was alone until 12:20, sipping down his Sling and getting quietly tipsy on a stomach that now felt empty. The dining room filled and the music was turned up. Until, as if announcing Dr. Sar, the doors finally swung open and the man himself walked in, a small and hairless head of about sixty-five with a body wrapped up in a white suit. He carried a briefcase and a strange-looking paper parasol which he had folded. One could imagine him stepping into the sun and suddenly unfolding it to protect his pale Chinese skin. The eyes were fast. He spotted Robert at once and came over rocking slightly from side to side on bowed legs. Yet the face was actually quite young, almost wrinkleless, and one didn’t see at first the incredibly fine wire spectacles that lay across the bridge of his nose.

“You are Beauchamp, then?”

There was a laugh and a handshake and down went the briefcase into the arms of a waiter.

“Welcome, Dr. Sar,” the boys intoned, bowing.

“They know me here,” Sar added unnecessarily.

It seemed that he sometimes took wealthy clients here to break bad news to them and, by Buddha, it was better than doing it at the clinic.

He looked over the foreigner with a careful attention to detail. The boy’s clothes didn’t quite fit, and there was a dogged rigor in his eyes. So he had come to put on a show for the doctor. He needed the money.

“The truth is,” Sar said almost at once, as the salmon carpaccio was brought in and a bottle of Perrier was broken open as if it was champagne, “that my wife and I are looking for a language tutor for our daughter. She’s twenty-five. She just came back from a year of medical practice in Paris. A place called the Hôpital Dieu. Do you know Paris, Mr. Beauchamp?”

The eyes twinkled and Robert decided that lying was better than not.

“I do, yes.”

“Mrs. Sar and I are terrible French snobs, I am afraid. Even though I applied myself much more to English. Not that I speak well or anything—”

Robert’s protests were waved away.

“No, no, I know how badly I speak. But anyway. My daughter has never learned it properly, since like us she is French-mad. But now she finds that her sorry English is stopping her progress here. The tyranny of English reached us a long time ago, I am afraid to say. I am against it myself — but what can one do against a whole age? At least at the Royal we have Tournedos Rossini for lunch.”

“Ah.”

“Have you ever had them? Of course not, you are too young. You’ve been raised and brainwashed by doctors. You are all vegetarians now, or worse. Let me take you back in time then. Tournedos Rossini. Steak with foie gras riding on its back. I am a doctor eating such things. My wife does not know. Shall we have two orders of that? And no salads, please!”

“No salads,” Robert said, and they seemed to instantly agree on something — but it was not the undesirability of salads.

A waiter brought to the table what looked like a cologne bottle, with a label that read Huile d’Olive. He set it down.

“So I put out an ad,” Sar went on, his hands relaxing on the surface of the tablecloth. “I thought there must be a fair number of nice educated young foreign men in a city like this — and one of them might be the right person to teach my daughter perfect English. Between you and me, however, we want — how can I say it? — a gentleman. We are not going to hire someone in cargo shorts and flip-flops who wants a few months bumming around Cambodia.”

“I understand.”

“I interviewed a few fellows. They showed up in shorts.”

“I’m sorry to hear it.”

The doctor expelled a heavy sigh tinged with a kind of macabre hidden humor.

“This is the way it is these days. Well, I won’t have it in my house. Do you wear shorts, Mr. Beauchamp?”

“Never.”

“Not even at the beach?”

“I never go to the beach.”

“Excellent answer, by Buddha.” The doctor finally laughed. “I think that merits a glass of Sancerre, don’t you?”

“I do.”

The doctor’s hand rose and the ordering of the Sancerre consisted of two quick motions of his index finger but no click. A whole world of sly provincial wealth was expressed in that gesture, an authority whose true root was obscure to an outsider.

“They know me here. They know what I drink.”

He’s easy, Robert thought, and he relaxed. The doctor looked like he would give him some work. He just had to be a gentleman.

“Naturally,” Sar was continuing, “we need to know a little about you. My daughter has been rather ill lately so she is staying at home with us. Nervous exhaustion, I think.”

“Was she working here?”

“Not yet. She is looking. Her time in Paris didn’t do her much good. I don’t know what she got so exhausted from — I have scratched my head over it for weeks. My wife says — but she always has a theory. It’s easy to have a theory, isn’t it?”

“It is, yes.”

“I say there’s no point having a theory. Just give me an explanation and a plan of action. I thought working on her English would do her the world of good. The social scene here—”

He pulled a face which, unexpectedly, made his face much handsomer. The wine arrived and they made a silent toast, but the doctor had not let go of his train of thought.

“—I mean, for kids of good family. The high-society kids. Well, it’s appalling. They can do what they want. Sophal hangs out with the sons of air force generals and suchlike. The children of the rich. I can’t seem to talk any sense into her. They do a lot of drugs and do what they want and no one will touch them. The boys are utterly worthless. They can kill any homeless person they want and nothing will happen. It’s difficult to explain to you, you being a foreigner. I can’t stand the thought of her ending up with one of them. I thought if she got her English up to speed…”

The doctor emitted his second sigh and the Tournedos Rossini arrived, the foie gras laid carefully on their surfaces. It was service au guéridon, the steaks prepared tableside.

“Then her chances for happiness will increase?” Robert said to himself.

“Wrong wine for steak,” Sar laughed, “but I don’t care. Do you care, Mr. Beauchamp?”

“I don’t care, no.”

“Then we don’t care. If we don’t care, no one does!”

“It’s delicious wine — thank you.”

“Thank you for coming to a job interview at such short notice. Bon appétit. Now tell me about you. What brought you to Phnom Penh?”

On his long walk over from the National Museum Robert had prepared his story. He thought it best to be at least half truthful. The issue was whether he should own up to being a teacher; it had its pros and cons.

In the end he decided against it. English teachers were a dime a dozen in this city and in most cities like it. They formed a kind of sub-society all over the Far East, a loose confederation of dubious individuals with their own social niche and their severe reputation for being mangy and broke, though somewhat successful with the girls. Several of his friends at college had gone on to pursue that way of life in places where the koel birds sing and nothing more was ever heard of them. The tropical English teacher in his cargo shorts and flip-flops and his bad haircuts, saving his pennies by eating local every night and scouring his adopted city for sexual scraps and tidbits: easy to find here and free for the young. No money, yet still plenty of honey. But that was not his niche and he intended to stay as far away from it as he could. The clothes he had unexpectedly inherited, strangely enough, had nudged him into other ideas. It seemed absurd, in fact, to step down from them. He didn’t really want to go this route at all, it was just that he couldn’t think of any other way to make some quick cash. It was ironic, given that it was the only skill which he actually possessed. The doctor, meanwhile, seemed to sense — or rather wanted to believe — that this artfully disheveled youth was more than he appeared.

“The truth is,” Robert said, “I’m just traveling around Asia for a few months. I know it’s a horrible cliché—but there we are. I was working at a bank in London and got absolutely fed up with it.”

“A bank, you say?”

“Just a company that audits banks, actually. Terribly boring.”

“I see. What was the company called?”

“Deloitte.”

“Well, all you young people seem to be traveling these days. Sophal says she wants to travel as well. Travel where? I ask her. She has no idea. Anywhere as long as it’s travel. I can’t really understand it myself, but then I am not twenty-five anymore. What is the point of travel just to travel? How old are you, if I may ask?”

“Twenty-eight.”

“A fine age, a fine age. A fine age for a man if you ask me.”

A fine age for anyone, Robert might have replied.

“At twenty-eight,” Sar added, “you can do whatever you want. Or you can nowadays. When I was twenty-eight it was rather a different matter. When I was thirty I was in the countryside being whipped.”

This seemed like an unpleasant topic so Robert steered the conversation away from it. He talked on about himself. Outside, the light visible through the windows dimmed a shade and Robert knew that the sunny part of the day was already over. He talked about England, life in London — tedium, monotony, gray skies, high taxes, the usual things that people living far away always like to hear about, as if they simultaneously both damaged and solidified the sterling image of Albion. He began to talk about his parents, but then stopped, thinking that he was overstepping the mark.

“No, no,” Sar objected, “do go on.”

“My father worked in a bank as well and my mother wrote plays for the radio. They live in East Grinstead.”

“East Grinstead?”

A thin smile came to the old man’s lips. He always seemed to know more than he immediately let on.

“Are they aware that you are running around the world?”

“They disapprove, if that’s what you mean.”

“I would disapprove too if I were them.”

Robert decided to find this amusing.

“It’s only for a short while. I wanted to see the world a bit.”

“Where are you living, by the way?”

“I found a place called Colonial Mansions. It’s just around the corner.”

“I know it well. The American embassy sets up many of its employees there. It’s not terribly cheap, is it?”

Robert shrugged.

“It’s all right. It’s cheaper than East Grinstead.”

“Maybe you should come around for dinner at our house and meet everyone. Would you do that?”

“Certainly.”

“Not tonight, Sophal is out doing music. What about tomorrow then?”

“All right.”

Robert’s voice wavered and he sensed some tensions coming to him from afar, like something clammy and malevolent carried over a body of still water.

“I’ll have my wife ask the cook to make something Khmer. Do you like Khmer food?”

“Of course.”

“Some barangs won’t eat it. They survive on steaks and milkshakes.”

Robert shook his head. “I find that hard to believe. It’s so delicious.”

“I’m glad you think so. You seem like you’ve been here a long time.”

“A few weeks. But it feels like a few days.”

“A few weeks already. You don’t sound too sure.”

“Maybe I’ve lost track of time.”

Robert smiled but the doctor did not return the gesture.

He said, instead, “That’s what happens when you come here when you’re young and you’re not Khmer. It makes the time fly by. Everyone says so and I believe it.”

—

From the shadowed corners of the room the boys in the bow ties watched them with a wary aloofness that found its only expression in the permanently upturned corners of their mouths. There was a fixity about them, a muted beauty which made them, strangely, unapproachable. They stood there watching the Englishman in his odd clothes listening to the old Khmer doctor, whom they knew for his kindness and dottiness, and they reminded Robert of the children he taught in Elmer and who sometimes walked home with him across the railway bridge to his cottage at the edge of the woods. Their eyes moved as slowly as marbles rolling on a gradient which the eye could not detect and they spoke reluctantly only when they were spoken to, but there was thought and a subtle malice in their stoniness and gravity. It was a form of respect that does not shrink from quietly judging. The children were always curious about him and he was sure that they felt sorry for him: he was a forlorn figure to them. They could smell his loneliness and mediocrity, and in a perverse way it drew them to him. The doctor, for his part, could sense the same thing but it didn’t draw him to Robert. It made him aware that there was an opportunity here.

“Maybe you’ll stay a while, now that you are here,” he said affably. Their plates were covered with mustard-seeded blood. “Do you not have a girlfriend back home — or something like that?”

“Not really, no.”

“That’s a shame. Maybe you are living in the wrong place. It’s always wise to live in the right place.”

“I guess it is at that.”

“What does your father say?”

“My father?”

“What does he say about you not having a girlfriend?”

“He doesn’t say anything about it.”

“Does he not, indeed? Does he not?”

“Not at all.”

“That is rather strange. Maybe he is under the impression—”

“I’m an obscenity?”

The doctor roared with laughter and raised his fork.

Obscenity? Robert thought wildly. What did his father think he was? The doctor’s insinuation was strange, but it was a provocation to sound him out about his sexuality. It was better to ignore it.

“Well, never mind, Robert. You are in our land now. You don’t have to pretend to be anything you are not.”

“Pretend?”

“You know what I mean. You can let your hair down here.”

Again, the index finger was raised.

“Garçon, let’s have some crème brûlées, by Buddha. Why not? Does anyone have anything against it? We’ll grow fat for a day then deflate to normal size.”

The doctor now receded an inch or two from the edge of the table and took off his glasses and then wiped them with his starched napkin. He apologized for using the phrase “by Buddha,” which was entirely inappropriate and heretical, but he had taken to using it in the old days and he had stuck with it because he found it amusing. He discouraged his guest from doing the same.

“Tomorrow night, when you come — here’s my card with the address — I’ll give you crème brûlées again, it’s our favorite dessert at home. I hope you won’t be bored. We are rather quiet people who enjoy our evenings in our garden. We rarely go out or throw dinner parties.”

They drank green tea with the crème brûlées and Robert asked if Sophal would know why he was there when he came.

“We’ll talk to her this afternoon. She’s not terribly enthusiastic about English lessons, I’ll admit, but she’ll go along with it because it pleases her mother and she doesn’t have to do it fanatically. We are thinking something like an hour every day or so. Would you be able to do that?”

“An hour every day?”

“Well, I know it’s a bit bold of me to suggest every day, but we’d be very grateful. It’s honestly what she needs to do in order to improve.”

“I suppose I could.”

“You sound a bit doubtful. I understand. I’ll be willing to make it worth your while. If you could do two hours, even more so.”

“Two hours?”

“Of course, I don’t know how much time you have—”

“I have time,” Robert said. He held himself back from adding, “A lot of time.” How easy it was! They finished up their meal and walked through the Royal corridors to the Elephant Bar, on the far side of the lobby, which was more crowded than the restaurant. There was a pool table there, the arches were painted with images of elephants and there was a case of fine cigars with a hygrometer and little boxed posters of Jalisco and Gaulois.

They went to the bar and ordered cosmopolitan flights and the doctor paid again. One of the three shots that made up the cosmopolitan was with black pepper; another with orange. The glasses were expertly iced and the little silver elephants around them seemed to be keeping an eye on Robert’s hands. He noticed how short and curiously shaped the doctor was. Like a bowling pin. From where did his inexhaustible good humor come? But it was a humor that was like light playing on the surface of oily water. Peer into it and all you saw was rainbow oil and reflections that moved constantly.

The doctor sipped his overcolored drink and his lips were sugared.

“It was pure luck, Robert, that you answered my ad. But do you really believe in luck?”

“I can’t decide.”

“It seems like an impossible idea, doesn’t it?”

“I’ve never experienced enormous good luck, to be honest. Just once or twice.”

“We all get lucky one time in our lives. And usually four or five times. I’ve had a stroke or two in the past. I should have been dead by now.”

Some pretty barang girls looked over at Robert with a detached curiosity. Here the whites always looked each other over at a distance, suddenly aware of something deep within them that never needed to come into expression.

“I am probably more superstitious than you,” Sar said. “It’s said that we are a superstitious people. But I think superstition is a biological trait in human beings.”

“Like being honest, then.”

“Yes, and like murder. Murder seems to be really universal, doesn’t it?”

Robert laughed, though keeping his voice down.

“You could say that, yeah.”

“I do say it. Surely your literature studies have proved that to you.”

“I see your point. But I try not to think about murder if I can help it.”

“Neither do I. I do think about superstition, however. I’m not convinced, in short, that all superstition is superstitious.”

“I’m only superstitious about ladders,” Robert said. “I’ll never walk under one.”

“You might get hit by a pot of paint.”

Sar was now carefully measuring the English boy. His tone, the way he paced his sentences. He was not as obvious as he had at first appeared. There were thin, layered depths to him. There was something about him that was affected and forced. His accounts of himself were not quite true. But they were not sufficiently false for the doctor to dismiss him out of hand. He was playing a role, but Sar felt tolerant toward those who played a role. He had had to play many roles himself during the terrible years. It was survival, and the roles a man assumed in order to survive did not seem to him a capital offense. Robert (or Simon to him) had level and transparent eyes that gave the lie to some of the less trustworthy things coming out of his mouth. Should one trust the eyes then? His father had always told him that the eyes never lie.

He disguised his thoughts, however.

“Now let’s drink to making Sophal speak perfect English in a matter of weeks.”

“Maybe she should meet me first,” Robert said.

“She’ll like you well enough. I do.”

It was a promising start, and when they went out into the now-thunderous afternoon the doctor called a tuk-tuk for him, paid the driver upfront and said that they would expect him the following evening at eight.

“Don’t bring anything, Simon. Just yourself.”

“I will and I won’t.”

“The girls will be thrilled to meet you.”

Maybe they would be. The doctor had his own car and Robert rode in the tuk-tuk as far as the Paris then went up to his room and slept for an hour. The city was now sweltering and sunless but his mood was up. He had a good feeling about his prospects, which only a few hours ago had seemed as dark and uncertain as could be. His luck had turned. Luck always turned. He slept as if drunk. Thunder in the afternoon. Rain swept in while he was unconscious, beating down the dust and the people slipping under the trees. At six in the evening the electricity went off in all the streets around Kampuchea Krom and the roads overflowed with caramel water. He opened his eyes and felt happy. A drifter always knows when he has drifted far enough from the system to feel the thrill of surviving against the odds. The flood when it came would see him float like one of those little paper boats that even children know how to make.

NINE

The deluge lasted all night and through the following day. It was hardly worth getting up and he spent most of the day in bed reading the Herald Tribune and drinking from a bottle of Royal Stag which he had bought on the street for a few dollars. He lay there naked with his clothes hung on wires to keep them clean and uncreased. The city, meanwhile, sank into a premodern gloom hour by hour, fragile and beautiful as it seemed to diminish into a lacework of newly created canals. When he went down to the lobby to buy some fried rice at the restaurant he saw the girls sitting glumly on the stairs with their iPhones, texting and chatting with nothing to do. The rooms were stifling. Yet the street was fresh with a menacing wind. The tuk-tuks still raced along them like boats, spewing dirty water on either side and the drivers laughing it off.

He took one, eventually. Robert leaned over and handed the driver Dr. Sar’s business card with the address printed on it, a numbered street off Norodom Boulevard, and the driver handed it back to him with a nod. Water roared against their doors as they set off in entirely the wrong direction, eventually coming to the Wat Phnom, which was marooned in a virtual lake. The American embassy was high and dry to one side and at the unsubmerged street corners people stood in plastic capes stoically waiting for Noah’s flood to recede. They went past the generator lights of the Sunway Hotel and then crossed the little bridge by Street 106. Here by long park lawns and trees the sudden darkness was even stranger. On the bridge a few people also stood under beaten-down umbrellas paralyzed by the sudden disappearance of light and the pools emerging within the lawns behind the Phsa Reatrey market. The power had still not come back on by the time they reached Norodom.

The usual illumination of that immense French street had been knocked out and the crowds had scattered with the downpour. They went down what was now a half-empty boulevard plunged in gloom, with restored villas and ruins alike behind high walls and sugar palms. The gardens were suddenly more magnificent than the houses they served. They splashed through the corners where the traffic hesitated in the dark and careered to miss collisions. The people standing there had taken off their shoes and carried them in one hand. It was as if they didn’t know what to do now with a lightless night. Tramp through it and hope for fun, soldier on and pray that nothing went wrong before first light? What did one do here when the lights went off and the streets became like this — hushed and ancient and the trees suddenly remarkable?

They crossed the traffic circle around the monument. On its far side, Norodom continued. The streets became quieter, perceptibly more refined. At the corner of Street 334 they turned but only for a moment: the house occupied the entire corner. Behind cypresses and palms a dark yellow European house rose up with trims of white stucco. There was an ironwork gate with an electric bell, but none of the lights were on and it was hard to see anything clearly. The potential absurdity of the situation was suddenly obvious to Robert. It was possible that they had not been able to call him. He got out nevertheless and paid the driver and the man simply parked the tuk-tuk there on 334 and said he would wait for him. It was a narrow street darkened by spreading trees. Outside the villas of the affluent stood sentry boxes with all-night guards. The wall of the adjoining property was a dark and somehow menacing red.

“There’s no need to wait,” Robert said.

“No, I wait.”

“I don’t want you to wait.”

“But I will wait. I wait here.” What will you do if I do not wait? his face said.

It was true.

Robert turned, walked up to the gate on Norodom and rang the bell, the cascade of water slithering down his back. He could see a loggia of some kind with potted palms, a lone chain lamp suspended above it. The garden hissed with cicadas. To his surprise the door opened and a maid stood there holding a candle in a glass cage in one hand. She was old but subtly elegant in that small circle of light and behind her he could see the shadowed, unlit house with candles flickering inside it.

“The power is off,” she said sweetly, “but the doctor and his family are waiting for you inside. It’s going to be a candlelit dinner.”

She led him up a brick path under takien trees and the closer they got to the house the brighter the candlelit windows seemed. As the door opened he heard music, a piano being played quite well, and the doctor’s quick, rippling, girlish laughter. The Sars were sitting in their front room, among their Khmer antiques. At the far end of the room the piano was being played by their daughter. Kinderszenen, he was sure.

He tensed and then resolved to be suave and calm. To be Simon, in effect. The room was lit with dozens of tea-light candles and there was a table set for four with painted terracotta dishes and a decanter of red wine that looked as if it had stewed badly in the oppressive heat. The windows were open in the hope of catching wet breezes, but the air inside the room had come to a numbing standstill and he felt his hands burst with perspiration. The doctor got up and a tall, thin woman next to him did the same and as they rose together the alarming difference in height between them made itself known.

—

“Simon, so here you are! Allow me to introduce—”

The wife was younger, much younger. She had a peering, inquisitive face, half Chinese maybe, the eyes full of hope.

“My husband has been talking about you nonstop. Now the power is out.”

“Sit down, please,” the doctor cried. “Sophal!”

They sat and the girl at the piano rotated on the stool, hesitated and then got up and walked over to the coffee table and the fabric sofas.

Mrs. Sar asked Robert if he would like a glass of brandy.

“It’s the best warm drink, isn’t it?”

He accepted and the girl, small and willowy, alighted like some human-shaped moth on the padded arm of the sofa on which her parents sat.

“This is our daughter,” the doctor said. “She knows all about why you are here.”

The family laughed, as if among themselves.

And in a moment the soft eyes of the girl were upon him, made even darker by the lack of electric light, made quietly bolder by this artificial privacy of candlelight. Her hair was immensely wavy for some reason and it reached down to her waist, its volume exaggerated by shadows. The hands folded on her lap, the feet unshod and loose in her own home. She had an effortless confidence in the hearth of her father. He couldn’t see any trace of the illness to which her father had referred, her hands rested perfectly still, the eyes were also as still as magnetic needles pointing north. She was dressed in cut-off jeans and a white T-shirt with the image of a Burmese pop star — Chit Snow Oo.

“Did you get a tuk-tuk here in the rain?” she asked in perfect English.

“I managed all right. I think the guy is waiting outside for me.”

“Shall we tell the maid to get rid of him?” the doctor asked, obviously amused.

“No, keep him,” his wife objected. “It’s going to rain all night and we’ll never find someone else.”

“So be it,” from the doctor. “Now, shall we have some home-made prawn crackers?”

Sophal turned to Robert more fully, perhaps as a matter of politeness. Robert had the sense, already, that she was playing a game with her father.

“Daddy says you are living in Colonial Mansions. Are you?”

“Yes, I took a small unit.”

“I think they changed the name to Central Mansions. New owners from Hong Kong. I have some friends in there, maybe you know them. Mary O’Neil at the embassy?”

“No, I haven’t met anyone yet.”

She smiled archly. “Oh, you’re too busy, just like her. Maybe you’ll run into her.”

“I might, yes.”

“I love the pools there.”

“You know it then?”

“I know it very well. I sometimes go in pretending to be a guest and use the pools. No one’s ever stopped me.”

Her English was indeed quite perfect — it was too awkward to bring the matter up, but how was he going to improve it?

It was baffling.

“I wonder how much you’re paying,” she went on. “The city is getting so expensive for barangs. Do you find it expensive?”

“It’s all right for me.”

“They say it’s more expensive than Bangkok now. For the real luxury.”

“It’s Asia rising,” the doctor said with firm jollity. “The Chinese are pouring their money in here. Not that we’re rich yet. But they are.”

“People say,” the daughter continued, “that barangs are also pouring into Asia looking for jobs these days. Do you think that’s true?”

“I don’t know,” Robert said. “It might be.”

The maid now brought in dishes and set them on the dining table.

“One can see the way the wind is blowing,” her father said. “For our generation it’s a remarkable thing to witness. All we knew was poverty.”

“It’s true,” said Mrs. Sar.

“Everyone in the army’s rich,” the girl laughed.

Robert upended the brandy glass. He would go along with this. There was money in it. The house was obviously an old French mansion. Teak floorboards from the old days, high windows and airy rooms. The doctor had filled it with antiques. With the rain sliding in sheets down the windows and with the candlelight it was cave-like and yet charming. The small family seemed almost lost inside it, like dolls in a doll’s house, but the doctor had put his medical certificates on display on a mantelpiece and the two servants were not deferential.

Before long, the doctor rose and they rose with him and they went to sit at the table, where a French dinner had been laid out.

“Chicken Dijon!” he said mysteriously.

The doctor chattered with his anecdotes of the Khmer Rouge years, during which time, as a very young doctor, he had been posted to a small town near the Thai border.

“They asked us to do terrible things, Simon, but you would hardly believe me if I told you what they were. It was like life on a different planet.”

“You’ve been to the genocide museums?” his wife asked.

Robert shrugged, and he said that he hadn’t wanted to go since everyone else did.

“But they’re our biggest tourist attractions,” Sophal said. “Don’t you find that cheerful and exotic?”

“That’s why I didn’t go. It’s so tiresome, all that.”

“I quite agree,” the doctor said. “It was all right for twenty years and then, suddenly, one gets tired of being an atrocity circus. You should go once, however. I am sure Sophal will take you if you want to.”

“Daddy, that’s a terrible idea.”

“You can discuss it between yourselves. Meanwhile, do you like our Chicken Dijon? Don’t look so surprised. It’s a dish I invented myself. It has a secret ingredient — entirely French, you see, but for a single component from the Cambodian forest.”

“He’s always inventing dishes,” Mrs. Sar put in. “I can’t stop him. If it’s disgusting please don’t eat it. We have plenty of bread.”

It was strange-tasting but Robert soldiered on, mumbling a few compliments to its inventor. Sophal, however, wanted to know about him. He had expected this all along and had prepared his speech carefully in advance. His invention now flowed thicker and faster than the one he had offered to Dr. Sar the previous day. He depicted his new imaginary parents, a disgruntled stockbroker father and a mother who wrote radio plays, giving them appearances that roughly matched the real ones but also giving them backgrounds that were vaguely upper-class. He borrowed traits from his real parents to keep it realistic and then went off into elaborate riffs which he knew were really inventions based on what he thought Simon’s parents were like. But how strange it was that he should even have a conception of what Simon’s parents were like. He described detestable garden parties and weekends in Istanbul and clubs in London that he had no idea about. He said that his father was a member of White’s, because he had read about White’s in a novel and it sounded appropriate. On it rolled, musical and rushed.

“White’s?” the doctor exclaimed to his wife. “He says there’s a club called White’s.”

“Is there a Black’s?” she asked innocently.

Soon he realized that as he talked he was holding his knife in his right hand with a clenched fist. He quietly put it down and told a silly joke.

“Your father,” Sophal said, “is he one of those typical English guys?”

“He used to wear a bowler hat on the train, if that’s what you mean.”

“I love that idea,” she laughed.

“What school did you go to?” the doctor suddenly asked.

Robert didn’t have to think, he simply plucked from memory the name of a random village in Sussex.

“Chalvington,” he said. “It’s a small school — no one’s ever heard of it.”

He had made the calculated risk that Sar would not look it up online later that night.

“Did you board there?”

“No, I lived at home. My mother said she’d never allow me to board.”

Chalvington with Ripe — it was where Malcolm Lowry died of alcoholism.

The doctor listened patiently and something told Robert that he didn’t believe it. He didn’t believe Robert, but he also didn’t care.

When the chicken was finished they went back to the sofas and the maid brought the candles over. The doctor said that it was an unusually long power outage and that normally they only lasted two or three hours at most. Yet they did seem to be getting worse. It was the rain that triggered them. The city flooded easily and the generators went out. In his youth, however, they had gotten used to doing without electricity. He and his wife didn’t mind it, they liked the return of heat, starlight and nature. They secretly preferred it. One would have thought, however, that with the advances of technology and the huge increase in the country’s wealth — well, it was exasperating. He told Robert that he ran an exclusive private clinic for patients with psychological problems. Such problems were on the rise these days and doctors were at a loss to know why. The recent protests in the capital against Hun Sen had contributed, perhaps; dozens of people had been shot dead. There was a curious ripple effect from such things.

The maid then brought in coffee and some rice-ball desserts not unlike the Thai boua loy Robert had eaten in Bangkok. Sophal was next to him on the sofa with her legs crossed and their arms rubbed against each other as they used their spoons. It felt like centuries since he had felt anyone close to him. He could smell the rose talc under her T-shirt now turning faintly sour with the heat. Her father suggested they set up a time for an inaugural lesson and she said, “Well, I can come to Colonial Mansions the day after tomorrow if you like.”

“How about it?” the doctor said.

“If you like,” Robert replied, but now he had to think fast. “On the other hand,” he suggested, “we could just meet in town. You can take me somewhere.”

“All right,” she said slowly. “I can take you somewhere.”

The doctor and his wife exchanged a clearly delighted look.

“You two will figure it out,” Dr. Sar said with finality. “What about a Vietnamese lunch?”

“I’ll come and pick you up at the Mansions,” Sophal decided. “We can just stay in the lobby there if it’s convenient.”

“I’m not sure what I’m going to teach you,” Robert said. “Your English seems perfect as it is.”

“I need to practice — don’t we all?”

“If you say so.”

“She gets her future tenses mixed up,” the wife said. “And her past tenses too.”

Robert put down his dish, looked at his watch and said, “Maybe I’d better be going. That driver has been waiting outside for two hours.”

“So he has,” the doctor said, and put his dish down as well. “Sophal, give Simon your phone number and you two are all set.”

The girl, in fact, walked him down to the outer gate in the rain. She seemed nonchalant about the lessons and said that all she wanted was some fun conversation, which her family was prepared to pay for. She saw no reason to pass it up.

“By the way,” she said, “my father said to give you this. He didn’t want to give it to you himself. He’s quite shy about things like this.”

It was an envelope, and it obviously contained money in cash, and she pushed it gently into his hand and shook her head as if to say, “Don’t worry about it, it’s normal — he likes you.”

He took it and there was no awkwardness at all.

“He needn’t have,” he muttered and quietly gauged the amount inside.

“Tomorrow I can’t,” she said as the gate came open, and they saw the driver sprawled inside his tuk-tuk, his bare feet balanced on the metal rail. “The day after, Colonial Mansions. About two is OK, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, that’s fine with me.”

“Goodbye then, Mr. Beauchamp. I forgot to tell you what a weird name that is — but I’ve heard it before somewhere. I can’t remember where.”

“It’s not a common name.”

“Is it an American name too?”

“I don’t know. Maybe it is.”

She shook his hand, and there was a subtle mockery in her look.

He said, “Bonne nuit,” and went down to the tuk-tuk, whose driver had stirred. She waited by the gate and the driver peered out and then looked up at the rain. He saw that the electricity had not come back on.

“It’s going to be a dark night,” Sophal called down to him. “I’d go straight home if I were you, Mr. Beauchamp.”

“I’ll do that.”

“Bonne nuit yourself.”

And as the tuk-tuk pulled away she smiled and the gate closed and the driver shot him a knowing look. Robert asked him to drive to Street 102 and he slumped into the backseat and held the rails tight. The evening had been a success, but he couldn’t really say why that success had happened.

—

They went down Norodom again and the lights came back on. He opened the envelope and looked inside, feeling slightly guilty that he had taken the unexpected gift without more of a protest. It was five hundred dollars which he had done nothing to earn and which the doctor had given him as an encouragement. Or else as some obscure gesture which could not be reciprocated. Five hundred. It was the windfall that changed the situation. It made no sense at all but, as he now thought, the lucky have great timing and he knew that he wouldn’t think about it again.

He pocketed the bills and threw away the envelope. At Colonial Mansions, which was his destination, he found the boys scooping up the water that now formed a moat around the buildings and the night manager standing in a black suit with an opened umbrella. Robert jumped over the moat and went into the ice-cold lobby, where the air-conditioning seemed to have been on the whole time. The manager came to the reception desk with him and Robert asked him if he had any units he could rent him starting from the following day.

It took a while to find a smaller unit on the first floor that Robert could rent by the day or by the week, as he pleased. It was furnished and it was discounted because it had an obscured view and little natural light.

“All right,” Robert said, and laid down a hundred to hold it. “I’ll take it from tomorrow afternoon. Does it have a table?”

“A table, four chairs and a sofa. And a king-size bed.”

“Kitchen stuff?”

“All equipped. It’s a one-bed apartment.”

It was perfect.

Robert thought for a moment about whether he should see it first but then he let it go: if it was unacceptable he didn’t much care.

The manager gave him a receipt then took him around the ground floor to show him the facilities. There were two wings to the property, one with the handsome old pool and one with a sleek new pool. Both were lit from below and the rain puckered their surfaces.

“Most of our guests are long-term residents,” the manager said. “They work at the embassy next door or with the Korean construction company up on the boulevard. It’s very quiet.”

“I was looking for a quiet place. I’m having good luck today.”

“We are getting more Chinese now.” The manager lowered his voice. “They like to swim late at night.”

At the center of the old pool was a woman’s head patiently making its way along its length, beaten by the rain but calm-looking, the hair trussed up above it. A strangely nightmarish sight, with the goggles and the rhythmically gasping mouth.

Robert stood just out of range of the rain dripping from the eaves and looked up at the balconies stacked on top of each other with their foliage and waxy flowers. The French windows darkened and yet open here and there, the resumed glare of the city glowing against low-hanging clouds. Every step of the way things had been laid out for him, from the very moment he stepped across the border. It was neither good luck nor bad, just luck in itself. Phnom Penh was a city that encouraged such things. He could see the tight discretion which had come over the manager’s inscrutable face as they turned and walked back into the lobby, upon whose walls old photographs of colonial Indochina made an unnecessary case for a difficult romanticism. Robert told him that he would be around after lunch the following day.

“You can try it for a week and see if you like it,” the manager said gallantly.

“I don’t think I won’t like it.”

He went back out onto Street 102 and he saw at once glimmers of welding torches high up within the skeleton of the half-built skyscraper rising on the far side of the street. The Hangul characters burned into the plastic sheets that covered the building, undulating slightly as the elements tormented them. So they didn’t stop work even for a storm or a blackout. They found a way to keep slaving for their masters.

The same driver was waiting for Robert and the tuk-tuk wheeled around in the great scummy pool that still divided the hotel from the rest of the street. Seeing which, the staff had a low laugh as they lay on the hoods of the cars parked under the trees. It was not a difficult laugh to understand. There was a magisterial tolerance and indifference in it, as well as centuries of clandestine observation. As Robert clambered into the tuk-tuk, moreover, the driver turned with exactly the same laugh and said, with an iron evenness, “Boum boum, mistah?”

TEN

He arrived back there earlier than he had predicted and on that now dry street swarms of dragonflies played around the clumps of weeds and the still-damp datura. Like the day itself, the hotel seemed completely different. The ground-floor restaurant was serving its bistro lunch and the old pool was filled with paunchy white people who appeared to be on some kind of antagonistic holiday. His room was not yet ready and he sat by the pool windows and ordered a steak and fries with a glass of Coke and kept his shades on because he had slept badly and his eyes were fragile.

The men out in the pool all had shaved heads, the concentration camp look, with tattoos hard-edged on painfully white skin. The girls were immensely fat and arrogant and loud, and carrying much the same tattoos though on different parts of their bodies. They disported themselves through those blue waves like elephant seals, and the Asians coolly dressed at the restaurant in their pressed white shirts and cufflinks looked at them with a kind of despairing amazement and a quiet certainty that the economic decline of these beasts was somehow legible in the obscure codes of their tattoos and the weight of their belly fat. They were no longer the lean aggressors and masters of yesteryear. Robert felt the same way.

He ate his steak slowly then ordered a tarte tatin and a double espresso since he no longer had to worry about money, at least for a few days. The day manager then came to his table and said that his room was now ready, and left the key politely on the table. She asked him if he had any luggage and he shook his head and said something about having his things brought on from somewhere else. She nodded and wished him a pleasant stay, then turned as she was about to move off and asked him how long he was going to stay. He said he hadn’t decided but at least a week. Afterward he would see. It was all that needed to be said.

While he enjoyed his coffee, he called a few more of the numbers he had taken from the Language Tuition site and set up some more private lessons as best he could. There was a Khmer lawyer who offered him a few hours a week and a female musician who needed English to write songs. It didn’t seem that difficult to make a few bucks doing this sort of thing and he calculated that with five or six clients combined with the generous Dr. Sar he could do quite well for himself.

All it needed was time and patience and application. He already knew how to teach, it was second nature to him. It was a city where people didn’t ask many questions, certainly not as many as Dr. Sar had asked.

He would not need to repeat his performance of the previous evening. He could sense that it was like a giant wall of coral through which thousands of mutually ignorant fish swarmed night and day going about their secrets and evasions. There was no surveillance here, very little police presence and almost no puritanical curiosity or disapproval. The Khmers, thankfully, didn’t seem to be driven by a tormenting and malicious need to know everything about their curious visitors, the barangs whom they found faintly ridiculous but undeniably lucrative. The core Occidental principles of nosiness and constant outrage were not their thing. They simply went about their lives without mentally harassing everything and everyone around them. They lived in their coral and tormented each other in different ways, no doubt, but their history had at least taught them the terror of destroying privacy and individuality. With Westerners, it was going in exactly the opposite direction. In the body language of the human seals, with its lack of discretion and tact, you could see the retreat of privacy and the individual. It was curious.

He went up to his room unnoticed. On the landings he paused and glanced down the tiled corridors at the rows of doors and the garden tables on the balconies where the more discreet Chinese girls liked to sunbathe with their books. It was like a hotel where people spent their whole lives instead of a few days. The unit was right under the roof and there was a smell of disuse about it. He went in, turned on the AC and the single fan and waited for the two rooms to cool down. It was obvious no one had occupied it in weeks. Why then had he waited for it to be readied? While the place cooled he wandered up to the roof. There was a Jacuzzi there and a small ornamental garden. It looked over a good portion of the city, including the nearby fortified American embassy. The scraps of park burning in the afternoon heat with their piles of scattered refuse, the radio towers and the Hangul characters of the skyscraper where the welders were still hard at work. A single white girl lay on a sunbed under the little frangipanis, her face covered and oblivious to his presence. It was a genial hideout for him. He went back to his room, locked the door and unpacked a bag of groceries which he had bought earlier in the morning at the Sorya Mall.

Cartons of lychee juice, shampoo, soap, paper towels and both razors and a pair of scissors. He had also bought some cheap local hair dye in a dark blond color. He showered and then dried off and began to cut his hair carefully with the scissors. He cut his fringe straight and then shortened the hair around his ears. He mixed the two elements of the dye in the washbasin and applied the emulsion with a toothbrush to the top of his hair, making streaks which he toned down by rubbing them at once with a towel. He went back into the shower, washed off and waited for the hair to dry. It came out a dull blond-brown which was what he wanted. A gradual, barely noticeable change. Then he clipped his eyebrows.

He looked again at the label on the back of the shirt Simon had given him and he saw, as before, that it was a place called Vong with the street number. Street 200. It should be easy to find.

At five he left the Mansions and walked across Kossamak and the Freedom Park toward the street market at the far end. He walked in the direction of the river and then turned south onto the quay. He had decided to spend thirty dollars on two new shirts and when he was abreast of the hustle-bustle streets behind the river he turned into 130 and wandered aimlessly until he was on Street 19. Here he caught a motodop and told him to go to Street 200. It was a quiet street with little to recommend it. There was a row of cream-colored shophouses with metal grilles and above them balconies with plants. He quickly spotted the sign for Vong that he was looking for. It was next to another tailor called Beary. He had not stopped to think why he was going to the place where Simon had gone. It was more a dark curiosity than a rational move. He went in, and a Viet man of about seventy rose from a newspaper, a glass of tea and a pipe. There was, of course, no recognition in his eyes but neither was there any surprise. Robert simply said, “Are you Vong?” and the man said that he was. There were Vietnamese calendars all over the walls and a blood-red Buddha in the corner with electric candles. Bales of cloth stood in the shadows with colored pins stuck into them.

“A friend recommended you to me,” Robert said, and he closed the door behind him.

The old man was in a collarless Viet shirt with a tape measure draped around his neck. A bamboo cloche hat hung on the wall behind him and there were paper chits all over the counter, seemingly in disorder. Vong asked him who his friend was.

“An American — I met him here.”

“I have a lot of Americans I make shirts for.”

“Well, I’d like a replica of this one — can you do it by tomorrow?”

Vong touched his mouth with his thumb and there was a sly irony in the air.

He said, “If you leave it here.”

“Well, I can’t leave it here.”

“All right, I will measure you up now.”

“Can you make it from linen like this one?”

“I got it.”

“If you measure me up can you do it by tomorrow?”

“I can do by three p.m.”

“Make it twelve and I’ll give you two bucks extra.”

“You’re in a hurry.”

“Yeah, I’m in a hurry.”

“What’s the hurry?”

“What does it matter to you?”

“A man in a hurry—”

“I lost my other shirts,” Robert blurted out.

“Lost them?”

“Yeah, I lost them. A drinking party.”

Vong laughed. “You jumped in the river?”

“Yeah, I jumped in the river. Can you do it?”

The tailor said he could and stepped out from behind the counter with the tape already extended.

“All right, good,” Robert said, and he felt, suddenly, the sweat pouring down his face and into his neck.

He held out his arms and Vong measured him.

“You’re not NGO,” the affable Vong bantered. “NGO don’t jump in the river and lose their shirts.”

“Sure they do.”

“But you’re not NGO. I wonder who your friend was. I might remember him.”

“His name was Simon. Tall and blond.”

Vong continued measuring, a pin between his lips. When he removed it, he said, “Don’t remember that one.”

“Never mind, I was just curious.”

“I make a hundred shirts a week.”

When the measurements were done they looked over the available linens. Robert picked out a pale green and a sand color. They came with mother-of-pearl buttons and trimmings. He went for soft collars and three buttons on the cuffs to make them look a little dressier.

The tailor stepped back and looked at the shirt he was wearing.

“One of mine,” he said immediately.

“I didn’t say it was one of yours.”

“I know my own shirts when I see them.”

“It was a gift.”

“From your friend?”

Robert realized now that he had made a mistake.

“Never mind. Shall I pay you up front?”

“That’s the way usually.”

Out came the thirty dollars.

“Thank you,” Vong said. “What about trousers?”

“I’m all right for trousers.”

“Your trousers look a bit beaten in. But they’re mine too.”

“Excuse me?”

“They’re my trousers too. No way I wouldn’t recognize my own trousers.”

Robert looked down helplessly at the trousers, which were indeed looking a bit beaten in.

“Maybe they are,” he stammered.

“Lose those too?”

“It’s a long story.”

“You seem to like Mr. Vong’s clothes!”

The tailor wasn’t really curious, he was more amused, and that kind of amusement could be brushed aside if Robert held his nerve and laughed along.

“But I like them so much I decided to get some more.”

“Good, good! So how about some trousers?”

Blackmail, then, Robert thought.

“All right, I’ll get one pair. Just like these.”

Vong measured him again and they picked out the very same material.

“They’ll look nice,” he said affably. “Twenty-five for you.”

It was more than Robert had wanted to spend but he had to let it go. His irritation burst out, however.

“Have those ready tomorrow as well. You may as well.”

“Yes, sir.”

Vong rolled up his tape.

Robert paid the extra twenty-five and Vong wrote him out a ticket for the three items.

“You want to have many Vong clothes,” he said. “Don’t be one of those barangs who look like homeless people.”

“I’ll try.”

“Everything will be ready tomorrow at noon. Is your friend Simon in town?”

They were at the door now and Vong had opened it and his body had moved into a small bow.

“I don’t know — why do you ask?”

“So you can tell him to come by and get some more shirts, of course.”

“I’ll tell him if I run into him.”

And then Robert’s curiosity returned and he asked Vong once again if he remembered the tall, blond American’s face.

“Not at all,” the tailor said. “But I might remember it by tomorrow. I might.”

“I hope you do,” Robert said.

His voice was dry and slightly hostile but he couldn’t help it. He felt victimized and he wanted to know where his predator was.

—

That night he went to Street 136 and ate on the outdoor terrace of a place called Okuncha. Salmon tartare salad and a cold Angkor. Sitting there he looked up at the first-floor balcony of the Candy Bar opposite, and the girls under the propeller fans looked down at him and smiled and cocked their heads like spaniels. What an easy life it was. Just moments randomly pieced together. Then he walked over to the Sorya and played pool by himself among the open-air bars. The rain swept in at about nine. For a long time he sat brooding close to the street and the puddles and the drunks with umbrellas and the white college boys dumbfounded by the easy sex and the way the middle-aged men didn’t move on their perches for hours. The bars were playing Psy that night and girls danced around the tables with quiet, spinning motions that were footsure and elegant and distant. He thought about Vong. It had clearly been a mistake to get involved with him and he cursed himself for his stupidity. Tailors are always shrewd. They are observers of men. Robert had bought some postcards in the supermarket and now he wrote one to his parents and one to Yula. He wrote that he was having a good time and that nothing was out of the ordinary. The phrases were trite and typical of the things he wrote home. It might be the last thing he wrote to them in a long time, and he wondered if he could rise above the clichés he had scribbled. But the less dramatic he was, the less they would feel suspicious or become alarmed. His parents would shrug and criticize his irresponsibility, but Yula was the tricky one. She would pore over every word for hidden meanings. She was already suspicious, he could sense it even from a distance of five thousand miles. They had no commitment to each other now, but she would be hurt by his silence.

He wondered if he should send either postcard after all. He finished them anyway, then put them in his pocket and thought it over. Perhaps not, then. Disappearance ought to be an event that is thought through carefully. One ought to take it seriously. It couldn’t be undone flippantly, and in any case he didn’t want to undo it. Surely she had known how miserable he had been when she knew him. It wasn’t her fault, but then it wasn’t his either, and in his mind it was only a temporary situation. He might be gone for a year, or two, or three, and then he would see.

He lit a bitter Alain Delon and got a one-dollar rum and Coke. Things disappeared in any case for different reasons. One day, not long ago, he had given to his class of thirteen-year-olds a copy of the famous daguerreotype of the Boulevard du Temple in Paris taken in the year 1839. He asked them to write an essay on the theme “Why is the street in this photograph empty?” It was the kind of thing they relished. But none of them got the right answer. The street was not empty because in those days there were very few vehicles and very few people and very few pigeons. Paris in 1839 was not empty. One could clearly see the awnings of busy shops and cafés. It was just that the exposure time had been about ten minutes, and thus nothing moving within that window of time had left a trace for the ages. There was just the ghostly silhouette of an unknown man having his boots polished by another man, at the corner of the cobbled Boulevard du Temple. It took more than ten minutes to shine a pair of boots in those days and he told them that he often wondered who that man was — the Frenchman with the thin, manly leg raised upon a shoe polisher’s stool.

ELEVEN

Sophal arrived early for her lesson, while Robert was still at Vong collecting his clothes. She went into the busy lunchtime restaurant and sat at a table and ordered a coffee and then asked the boys to go up and alert Mr. Beauchamp. “He’s out,” they said at once, and she nodded quietly and resigned herself to a salad. She was early, it was true, but it was still a little odd. She looked out at the brilliant pool and the dark-skinned boys with nets skimming its surface. Her mind soon emptied and grew out of its irritation. She had spent the morning being interviewed at a clinic and she felt she had done well, but in the end it was of no interest. There was a futility about trying for such things. In the back of her mind she had a growing sense that her efforts were going to yield nothing down the line. Even in the last few weeks the future — the feeling of the future — had become foreshortened. It had narrowed and dimmed, just a little but enough to make her anxious. A suffocation had come upon her. What if she had no future at all?

She had been in Paris for a year and now Phnom Penh felt alien and small. Just as once there had seemed no way out if it, now there seemed no way into it. Even her command of Khmer had weakened a little — it was strange how that happened, as if the brain could handle two languages at a time, but never three. All her friends had what they called “language partners,” those fairly well-to-do foreigners who liked to spend a few hours a week with a pretty girl pretending to hone their English skills. It was usually their fathers who went out and found them — it was more seemly that way. She thought of herself as too old for these kinds of childish games, but sometimes there was nothing for it, one had to play by the local rules. Why care too much?

She impaled the cherry tomatoes lazily on her fork and wondered about Simon Beauchamp. He was good-looking all right. Young and nicely aloof and undesperate. He had been quite a surprise when he appeared the other night since, she idly supposed, she had been expecting a goofy desperado in shorts and flip-flops. When he walked in in his nice linens and his clean-shaven cheeks she had been pleasantly surprised. So what was he doing in Phnom Penh? she had wondered even as she was turning away from the piano and getting a good look at him. He was not an English teacher, for one thing. Nor was his name Simon: she felt it in her bones.

His eyes were spacious and pretty and you could open their doors and enter on light feet. A man of wide-open portals, but what was he expecting? A man didn’t float around a foreign city for no reason whatsoever, not at the age of twenty-eight. A Khmer boy would never do that unless he was working at a large company in Germany or the United States. Yet there was no aura of leisure about Mr. Beauchamp. He was far from being a pathless wanderer. He bustled and bristled and his eyes were quiet and malicious.

He was a bit Heathcliff, wasn’t he?

She smiled and wondered if she should have a drink. Her hands were itching to do it, to rise and click the fingers and say “Drink!”

But she waited. There might be someone there she knew, but there wasn’t. She continued thinking about Simon. She was a little tired of men, in reality, because one could only go through the process a given number of times and suddenly one came to the realization that the repetitions were not only dull but toxic. And her parents were so desperate for her to get married and worse. She was almost twenty-six and, to their eyes, the danger zone was approaching.

For her part, she felt no such thing. All she felt was fatalistic curiosity and a desire to return to the outside world. Maybe even London, given how affluent his family seemed to be. It was a sin to think like that — and stupid, too — but it crossed her mind anyway as she finished her salad and ordered a gin and tonic out of boredom. It came with a sprig of mint and a pile of ice.

Her father would be shocked but she drank them quite a lot these days. They went down well in the hour before lunch, the black hour before consciousness arose. She had given up rising early like her parents. Now, with nothing to do but study and wait, she could get up when she wanted and go to bed when she wanted. It was contemptible but she wasn’t yet twenty-six and she had her excuses. Everyone knew the future would be different.

—

Meanwhile, as she was sipping her freezing gin and tonic, Robert was watching Vong folding his clothes and looking at the clock on the wall. He would be back just in time.

“Now that I think about it,” the tailor was saying with his back turned to him, “I remember your friend Mr. Simon. He came in six months ago to get some shirts. My assistant said he was the most dashing man in Phnom Penh. I don’t know why I forgot him. He is an antiques dealer, isn’t he?”

“I never ask him about his work,” Robert said.

“I think he said he was an antiques dealer. I might have his card somewhere. These ones will fit you better than the ones you are wearing. It’s always a problem wearing another man’s clothes.”

“It certainly is. Did Mr. Simon say where he was living these days?”

“Not a word. You’d know that better than me. I just remember his shoes — he was wearing a remarkable pair of shoes.”

“Oh?”

“I thought he must be a man of taste.”

Vong turned with the package neatly tied up and handed it to him. There was nothing more to say between them and Robert let the awkward conversation die where it was. He went out hurriedly and rode back to Colonial Mansions on a motodop.

When he came through the lobby he immediately saw Sophal sitting alone by the window and it was too late to go up and change into his new clothes. It was too bad but he had to make the best of it. He came up to her table and she was sucking on a straw inserted into a gigantic gin and tonic and her eyes had gone askew. But he was not late at all. He apologized anyway and held up the tailor’s bag and sat down opposite her and asked her if that was indeed a gin and tonic.

“It’s the real thing,” she said.

“Then I’ll have one too.”

When it came he touched her glass with his and they agreed that their English lesson had gotten off to a flying start, by Buddha.

“I don’t expect you to give me an English lesson,” she said. “I’ve been speaking it since I was five. I thought — I thought I’d show you around the city a bit since my father is paying you anyway. So who cares. He’s not going to know.”

“You know, I used to be a teacher,” Robert said slowly. “It wouldn’t be any sweat for me. I know how to do it.”

“Yes, but it’s a bore anyway. I just thought — I don’t know, I thought you might be interesting. In some way.”

“Interesting?”

“A foreigner is always interesting. Even if he isn’t.”

“But I’m not interesting.”

“It’s not for you to say though. Were you really a teacher?”

“Yes.”

“Really?”

“Why?”

“You don’t seem like a teacher.”

She ate the mint sprig and looked at him calmly.

He said, “It’s not the first time someone has said that. I think I have teacher written all over me.”

“No, you don’t. You look like something else. I don’t know what. A cattle rustler.”

“Oh?” He laughed, but she didn’t.

“Something like that,” she said. “Something slippery.”

“I’m not slippery,” he snorted. “I wish I were.”

“You’re slippery enough. My father doesn’t think so though.”

“Your father is a good judge of character.”

“He’s anything but that. But I look out for him. Shall we go for lunch somewhere else? I have a feeling someone I know is going to walk in and I don’t want them to.”

“You said you’d show me around.”

“Let’s go to Street 136 and eat some pho. Then I’ll take you somewhere else.”

“Let’s.”

“It’ll be stinking hot.”

“I don’t mind.”

—

Robert was pleased to be out of Colonial Mansions. He made to pay for her salad and drink but she had already settled up. He left his bag at the reception and they went out into the cloying heat and took one of the tuk-tuks that were always loitering along 102. They sat side by side and rattled without words into the maze of streets which shone in a dour, metallic sunlight. Sophal now assumed a cool, tensile posture, as if she were in public and this required a different composure. She looked straight ahead with her neck poised and upright and her eyes did not stray to either side. High above the city, however, the familiar atomic cloud that seemed to appear there every day was moving with its silent fatalism toward the sky’s apex, where the sun monopolized all the light. Its edges were frilled like the coat of some unimaginable sea creature. There the mass of cloud turned suddenly brilliant and hysterical. It’s moving, he thought idly, watching from under the tuk-tuk’s shade, moving like a predator toward our light.

They came to 136 and 13 and a place called the Café de Coral. It was a Viet place with cheap outdoor tables opposite a Smile supermarket. The little area had an alarming concentration of dentists, with molar-shaped signs dangling above the mayhem with happy faces painted on them. They sat outside just at the edge of the fans’ refreshment and ordered iced water. When it came she loosened up and took off her straw-brimmed hat and laid it on the chair next to hers.

“Is this the kind of place you like?” she asked.

“I love this kind of place.”

“I come here all the time by myself. Do you know bau buns?” He shook his head. “Then we’ll try bau buns. You’ll like them.”

It was the hour for bau steamed buns and purple kelp roll and turquoise herbal pudding downed with salt lemon water. She added twist rolls and mini cage buns and then iced Vietnamese coffee with the filters resting on the glasses. The sun went out as they sipped coffee and she talked about her year in Paris, because he had asked her to. At the junction the traffic began to thin and a few raindrops hit the dust and speckled it. She ate her buns with her fingers and when she looked up her eyes were obscure and resilient, giving away nothing.

“I even had a boyfriend there, a French stockbroker. The stockbrokers love Khmer girls. He told me that. He used to take me on holiday to Morocco and Rome and all that. I never told my parents.”

“You’re telling me.”

“I told my friends so why not you? You’re not going to report me. It’s a private matter anyway — we don’t tell our parents everything these days. We keep it to ourselves. Claude still writes to me.”

“What does he say?”

“He says he loves me and can we go on holiday to Marrakesh again.”

“And you don’t go.”

“Of course I don’t go. C’est fini. He’s not going to come and live here. If he’s not going to come and live here it’s out of the question.”

“You could go back and live in Paris.”

“No, like I said — when something’s finished, it’s finished. For me it’s finished. I want to live near my parents. I want to live in my own country.”

“Unlike me, then.”

She smiled. “It’s a different circumstance. Are you close to your parents?”

“Not at all.”

“So there you are. Girlfriend?”

“C’est fini.”

“You’ve made a new start.”

“Yes, you could say that. I guess I have…”

“My father says one has to do that from time to time. Do you smoke?”

He took out a packet of the inevitable Alain Delons and she laughed.

“You’re smoking those?”

“I got into the habit.”

“You’ll be dead within a month.”

“I doubt it. They agree with me.”

“You’re a strange one, Mr. Beauchamp. My father says you’re getting over a broken heart.”

“It’s not the case. I wish it was.”

“I don’t think it’s the case either. I think you’re just kicking your heels.”

“All right,” he drawled, “you got me there. I am kicking my heels. It’s not a crime.”

“I didn’t say it was a crime. It’s better to do it somewhere hot and cheap. Do you like the girls here?”

“I haven’t got to them yet.”

She pulled out her own cigarettes, a Thai brand called Wonder.

“These aren’t much better,” she said. “But they taste good with Vietnamese coffee.”

He took one and they shared the smoke.

“If this was an American movie,” she said, “we’d be censored. We’d be erased.” She mixed four spoonfuls of sugar into her coffee and gave him a smile which had maybe been enhanced on that same street.

He said, “Yeah, whatever. I find I’m smoking more now.”

“My father says it’ll make me older by ten years by the time I’m twenty-eight. I’ll give it up then.”

“You should give it up now.”

“I certainly won’t.”

—

The afternoon began to wear down. Egg sellers on their bikes moved down 136 with their loudspeakers; the molar signs began to glow. One could feel the rain coming, the tingle on the tongue.

Sophal looked through him, but it was not coldly. She was merely curious about him. She had met men like him before in Europe, the subtly vibrating ones that have an uneasy distraction about them. The ones who are polite and impeccable and who never tread on your toes. They usually came from a little money and had been to good schools, but they were not happy or festive — it was not enough for them. They were brooding, internal men living in their world of ease and frost and corduroy and she found them attractive and chilling at the same time. The bright light here exposed them in some way. They became happier and more ghostlike at the same time. Some of them married local women and settled down and managed bad restaurants; others drifted about. One didn’t know what to say about them. It wasn’t pity exactly, it was more like a maternal anxiety. One wanted to save them, to put them right. She wondered if she had a sad propensity to be attracted to the exotic. Because for better or worse the Khmer boys didn’t do it for her, for some reason. She always said to her mother that she was “spoiled.” The stint in Paris had ruined her for life and it was the world of the barang that now seemed richer in possibilities. She might once have felt guilty about it. But there is no guilt in the ruthless pursuit of happiness, there is just the pursuit. It’s like moving toward the light. One crawls on all fours, if need be. One crawls on one’s belly and whimpers, it doesn’t matter. And in the end weren’t the white men the same the other way around? What were they looking for? They didn’t even know. Her father had a fine phrase for it which he had found in his history books: hunters in the dark. It came from medieval Japan and referred to the restless courtiers of the Imperial Court who were always hunting for their own advantage. But also, as her father liked to add, for happiness. The phrase was his favorite way of summing up younger people of the present age. His own ravaged generation was another matter.

She had intended to go back to the house and practice the piano, but as the skies darkened she lost interest in the thought of Brahms and asked the charming boy if he’d like to go to one of the Chinese places on Monivong and then maybe a bar on the other side of the river. He seemed an idle type, and not as busy as she’d thought at first. His days empty and long and confused; like hers, in other words. He said he’d love to.

As he smiled his consent there was a quick sympathy between them, a little flash in the dark.

They took another tuk-tuk up to Monivong. When she was alone, she said, she loved coming to the kitsch Chinese seafood places at the far end of this boulevard, which lay well beyond the tourist city. They were places which her parents liked as well: Khmer, familial, with a touch of Chinese garishness. On the far side of Sihanouk, in the darker stretches of the boulevard, there were a score of these places identifiable by their stark white glare, their gold-and-red interiors and their fish tanks on the street.

There was Lyky, with its bright white interiors and glass-screened private booths and, farther down on the same side, Man Han Lou, a place of nacre cabinets and palms with its live fish tanks outside. It was there, in the end, that they ate. It was like a spare Chinese tearoom of former decades. They ordered sea bass barbecued in rock salt and rice prahok, because, she said, he had obviously never tried the national dish.

When it was finally dark outside strings of blue lights came on in the windows. They were content to talk about food for a long time; the ordinariness of the subject was a relief. The prahok, meanwhile, was a little mound of rice with flecks of red in it and when he put a forkful in his mouth the intense fermented saltiness of the ground-up fish made his eyes water.

“That’s — that’s something else.”

“I think it’s garum,” she said. “Some people say the Romans brought it here once upon a time.”

“It’s vile. But it’s delicious-vile.”

“That’s the supreme delicious.”

“Or the supreme vile?”

“It’s both. My father has to eat it every day. I can’t quite.”

“It’s like eating dead eels made into a paste.”

“That’s not far off. Afterward we’ll go for a drink and get the taste out of your mouth.”

Her eyes were merry, she had it all planned out.

“I’ll be awake for a week,” he said. Tears were on his cheeks.

They went over the Japanese Friendship Bridge on motodops, struggling through the swarms of bikes which from the air must have looked like ants competing for traffic space on a single banana leaf. He was behind her and could see the slim arch of her back in its white cotton dress bobbing and weaving ahead of him and the flicks of her hair as the river wind caught them halfway across. It was later than he had realized. How much time had gone by chatting over Vietnamese coffee?

The sun had begun to change color and dip toward the Tongle Sap, turning the water so bright that the longtails skimming across it were almost invisible. He felt a sharp exhilaration. The haze above the riverine construction sites burned a milky white, calm with a poisonous sultriness.

He followed her bike as it turned right on the far side of the bridge and moved quickly along a rural-looking road with small factories and warehouses and walls on either side. At its farthest end, where the road again turned right, there was a large beer garden called Golden Chroy Chang Var, with the girls seated outside in silk gowns. They were just gearing up for the evening trade. Here Sophal slowed, looked back at him and made an obscene but friendly gesture at the girls.

The road met up with the river and shadowed it and soon they were close to the machines and the cranes and the half-built skeletons of girders. Between the road and the water there was a string of shack bars held above the river by stilts and beams. The riverside was being redeveloped, and half of them had already been destroyed. In a few months they would all be gone, to be replaced by a treeless, shadeless river walk where no one would ever go. They stopped outside the last one in the row and went into an open-plan bar alive with a brisk wind. There was no one there. They went out onto a balcony with old leather chairs and a coffee table and fell into them with their legs up on the rail.

It was a sundowner bar, with waving reeds around it.

“I should be home playing Brahms,” she said after they had been drinking beers for a while. “But suddenly I’m bored with it. There’s a party later at a friend’s studio. A Dutch painter. Want to come?”

“All right, I could I guess. I don’t go to parties much.”

“It’s a small city, Simon. Soon you’ll know everybody who you’re ever going to know. It’s either depressing or comforting — depending on how you look at it.”

“I’m just going to go along with it. If it’s depressing I’ll take a lot of pills — they’re cheap here, no?”

“That’s wisdom for you. That’s what you ought to do.”

“I’m not leaving any time soon either. I like the sunsets here. I like a lot of things. I keep waiting for the homesickness but it never comes. It will come eventually, I suppose. Or maybe not. These old barang guys here don’t seem to feel it.”

“I never asked them, myself.”

“I don’t want to be one of them, though. That’s my worst nightmare. I can’t imagine turning into one of them.”

“But maybe they’re happy — that’s why they stayed.”

“Yeah, I guess. They feel at home, whatever that means.”

“That’s a good reason to live somewhere — I don’t think. You’re like me, though, you’re at a loose end. My father thinks it’s a disaster. A generational disaster. He thinks we’re all at a loose end.”

“Maybe we are. A generation of drifters.”

She blew between her teeth. “That’s a massive generalization. I don’t think it’s true at all. Why, are you a drifter?”

“Well, I never thought of myself as one. God no. Anything but.”

“You look like a drifter. You feel like one.”

“Really?” he said. He was a little incredulous.

“It’s just my instinct,” she said. “My instinct is you’re a bit of a drifter.”

He denied it again, but she was teasing.

“Look at you,” she said. “Your clothes are all wrong. I have to take you shopping or something. You’re dressed like an extra in a film. I should take you to Uniqlo or Muji or something. Unfortunately they don’t have any branches in Cambodia. No, I’m teasing. You look very beautiful in your clothes. But I wonder where you got them.”

“A tailor,” he said. “I don’t want to look like the usual barang slob.”

“So that’s it.” She laughed. “No wonder my father likes you.”

—

The lights of the city came on over the far side of the river. Longtails with bales of okra passed underneath, the men looking up for a moment, and the wide power of the Mekong nearby could be sensed. The hour of sunset and they switched to sangria. He thought wistfully of all the people he had left behind in his old life. Now he began to wonder if any of them would notice his absence in the longer term. In the shorter term, of course, they would, but in the longer term, in the grander scheme of things, it was not so certain. As long as he kept his parents informed, meanwhile, nothing would happen. He was now sure of it. The friends and his job would all pass away. The friends, few in number; the job, minor. People walked out on minor jobs all the time.

It was an inexplicable callousness, but it had just come upon him out of nowhere. How had it come about so easily? It had not even surprised him. It’s one thing to hate your life, but to merely dislike it — that was a greater mystery. There was no explaining that, because the dislike was total, not partial. There was no explaining that to even the most cynical Khmer girl. But somehow — a small miracle in itself — they understood it anyway and at a certain moment the questions died away.

They did now. Sophal told him about her father.

“He was a doctor for the Khmer Rouge, if he didn’t tell you. He didn’t choose to be — he was only thirty at the time. They overran his clinic and he had the choice to work for them or disappear. He chose not to disappear. As people usually do.”

“It must have been a terrible experience.”

“Everyone has their stories. His is not the worst, believe me. He and my mother came out alive.”

“I’m glad they did.”

“Ah, are you really a flatterer, Mr. Beauchamp?”

“Not really. I mean I’m glad they’re alive.”

“Because they’re alive, I’m alive. Are you glad about that too?”

“Absolutely.”

“I’m hungry again. I have a place we can go and eat arepas.”

“What?”

“Arepas. South American things. And mojitos. Arepas and mojitos.”

He thought that sounded excellent.

“OK. We’ll go South American.”

“Sí, señor.”

They walked back to the dusty and now-dark road and felt the cement dust on their lips. It seemed to be everywhere. The workers from the sites were walking through clouds of the same dust back to the main road, a long line of white eyes under the trees. It was like a street far out in the country, in the villages. The mulberry trees and the bats winging through them. She walked beside him with a soft apprehension, her bare shoulders inviting an initiative which he was too shy to take. They passed a school called the Chroy Chang Var, a tiled French building with a large garden. They wandered in for a moment to look at a curious circle of half-life-size mythological figures in the middle of the garden. They could feel bats and sleepy guards momentarily stirred in the shadows. She turned to him for some reason with an enormous smile. At the bend in the road the karaoke girls were still there sitting on plastic chairs and lit by the glare of their Galaxies. One could smell fields nearby, burning hay and rubber. They walked past the clubs until they were among weeds and low white walls, alone in the dust, and the city was just an orange glare above the treeline. She brushed against him and something in him flared up silently. He was about to take her hand when she said, “It’s not much of an English lesson, mistah.” He shook his head and they smiled and entered their conspiracy as quietly as two people entering a church by the side door in the middle of the night.

On the other bank of the river they found the China House and went in happy and sweaty and dusty and sat at the bar and ordered the long-anticipated mojitos with the arepas. It was an old Chinese shophouse with red lanterns and wooden floors, the bar alive with ice buckets and mint and miniature straw parasols. They rubbed the iced towels over their faces and a dark red dirt came off on the material. Within ten minutes they had sunk down the second round of mojitos and eaten the mint. Within twenty, they were in a world of their own.

They went upstairs and lay on one of the covered divans with their shoes off and ate curries and jasmine rice with gin and tonics. They hadn’t spoken for an hour.

“Shouldn’t you be back?” he finally asked.

“No, we’re going to Pontoon. I’m taking you to Pontoon. It’s where the bad boys go.”

“Are we bad boys?”

“We’re not bad or boys. But we’re going to Pontoon anyway.”

He looked at his watch and then remembered it wasn’t there and she noticed the odd gesture.

“You don’t have a watch,” she cried. “But you looked for it. That was quite cute.”

“Strange — I must have left it at the hotel.”

“Really? Maybe you don’t have one, Mr. Simon.”

“A man without a watch,” he muttered. “Disreputable, eh.”

“It’s better not to have one in this town. It’ll get you into trouble. You should leave it at home every night from now on.”

“All right, I’ll take your advice.”

Her foot had crossed over to his side and touched his. They were slipping downward and the Chinese screens around them blurred in his vision. An hour later they were in a tuk-tuk to Pontoon, a fresh and bright rain falling all around them.

Outside the club was a small crowd of Khmer drivers. They pushed their way to the doors and the bouncers nodded them through after glancing at Sophal’s ID. At the end of a dark corridor lay an immense horseshoe bar with sofas around it. They danced for a while, Sophal raising and lowering her arms with her fingers extended in the positions of classical Khmer dance, and then they sat at the bar among the punters and the girls on the make and the waify NGO men who moralized by day and picked up girls by night. She ordered a bottle of white rum and they drank that with huge pieces of ice and Coke and watched the aid workers and diplomat staffers from India and Africa and Europe elided into a great pleasure-seeking confusion which the Khmer girls preyed on with a nimble awareness of the smallest advantage and disadvantage. It was amusing for an hour. But without a watch, he reflected, there was no way of knowing how long it was amusing for. When they came back onto the street, in any case, it felt much later. The streets had gone into that delicious comatose state of the late nights, the pavements given over to noodles and fried squid and cats, the tuk-tuks moving through the rain more silently. The desultory, lazy atmosphere of sex and loose ends and straying curiosity. There was no violence in the air at all, just a rambling sense of restlessness and anticipation. Soon, later still, the street people would come out of the shadows, the scavengers and sweeps and drifters who sifted through the city’s rubbish and detritus in the hours before dawn, but they too had a listless gentleness.

He offered to walk her home to her parents’ house and as they walked along the boulevards the lights went out again and the roads filled with their indolent floods. They came to the gates and she said, “We could go to Colonial Mansions instead — for a bit. I’ll tell Daddy we couldn’t find a driver with the blackout.”

Robert went along with it and they went back down to the boulevard and found a tuk-tuk who could be reasoned with. The lightning now came down in clearly visible forks but as yet there was no sound, no audible threat.

In his room they took off their clothes solemnly although there was no light to be had and no fan or cooler. He ran a cold bath and they lay in it for a long time. She had gone into his miserable kitchen and found some coffee grounds and mixed them with milk and brought the paste back into the bathroom. As they lay in the cool water listening to the rain she rubbed the coarse grains into his back, his shoulders and his arms, then his hands and fingers, filling every crevice of him with the mixture. Then she told him to do the same with her. He scooped the paste into both hands and then spread it across her back making it dark, then her tiny arms and the back of her neck. When they were both coffee-dark and grainy they lay back in the water and smelled the coffee and the milk and the rising sweat mixed together. The rain had reached a furious crescendo and hammered now on the half-open windows and the roof garden above them. They went to the bed only half washed off, still reeking like a coffeepot, and lay down in the damp sheets and kissed until they fell asleep for a while.

Even when they woke they were not entirely in the world. The rain had stopped and a vast, anvil-shaped cloud had taken form above the city. At its center, emerging hour by hour and with a ghostly uncertainty, a new moon finally forced its way into the picture. A halo surrounded it, a perfect circumference of surrounding atmospheric light. The cloud evolved around it also, frothy edges glowing with silver brightness. Inexorable and silent, it ballooned upward like a sign of terrestrial war, its black core unaffected by the moon. Watching its outer edge progress into space, the observer felt a subtle madness. Far down the river, in fact, on the banks of the Mekong, the men who worked on the river looked up and made predictions. Some said it was a sign of good things to come, an omen that could be trusted, but by far the majority sensed that it foretold something evil and unknown. They said it was a cloud of dogs and vultures.