osmoala

Arthur said,

   ”Yes I know – Trainspotting, but there is not a single train in the whole movie.” He displayed a toothless grin, the margarita next to him, lying on the sunbead here at Blue Bar. It was the usual crew – The Australians, the French, the Japanese and the Dutch. I was living on the other side of the river and I could walk here in half an hour. It was a lovely gang of misfits, and they would make you laugh any day of the week.

   ”Yep, I think it's a metaphor.” I asked Mali for another margarita. ”That's the guy, I forget his name but the book I'm reading is Marabou Stork Nightmares.”

   ”Irvine Welsh.”

   ”That's him. I read Ectasy, and Porno. This one is full of lingo and I was having trouble understanding some of it when I started reading it.”

   ”Yeah, the Scottish dialect can be a bit hard to understand.” He lit a Gambo.

   ”Your foot looks a lot better. How is your hip?” He had hurt it when some drunken idiot pushed him and Arthur charged with pastis walked into the wrong room at his guest house.

   ”It's better, but it's not totally okay.” I changed the subject. We spent some time talking about books. Arthur has a thousand stories and he is an amazingly quick reader. In his case it is a light load to carry.

I did the shopping and the cooking, keeping the flat in order, always close to the dustbin. Did the dishes from yesterday evening, took the trash downstairs, and went out to buy potatoes and onions at the old market.  

   From there it's not far if you take the dirt road past the cinema. I would say thirty-five minutes including the shopping and then I was at Blue Bar. ”Bonjour monsieur”, he is from Bretagne. ”Hello Mr Japan!” – he is a lookalike to the old gentleman who trains Karate Kid in the first movie. Hank was also there, we were sitting around the rounded, horseshoe bar. He is from Australia and now he says that he bought a guitar for thirty dollars. He looks like a sixty year old hippie, but he will catch your drift before the average Joe.

   ”Where?”

   ”Road Six. You know where it is.”

   ”Of course. Where is the guitar?”

   ”At Apoa's. She closed it for a few days. Friday, she'll be there on Friday.”

   ”Good – Mali, can I have another margarita, please.”

I went there there two days later. Apoa was back from her parents on the Mekong River.

   ”Hank promised me I could try the new guitar.”

   ”Yes, of course.” She took it out from the glass cabinet. It had a red ribbon around the neck. I did some tuning and for a thirty dollar guitar it sounded great.

   I started playing and the drinks and the beers would just land on the table. Apoa was constanly filling my glass with more of the Amaretto, ”This is from the French gentleman”, and the next was from Vijay, the Malaysian doctor who lived in Saigon, but he would come back to Siem Reap every second month, simply because he liked it here. Like the rest of us did. I played for two hours and on my way home I noticed that I had to focus on walking straight. Carolyn was back home.

   ”How was your day? She said.

   ”I was at Apoa's and the guys made me drunk.” I was faking an apology.

   ”Yeah, sure. I bet they forced you to drink.”

   ”Yes they did, bwao wah wah!”

   ”Okay, haha. It's up to you – what do you want to do tonight?”

   ”How about sharing a pizza at Belmiro's?”

   We walked over to Belmiro's, across the river, it took half an hour.

   But first we had a few drinks a Home Cocktail. It was virtually ten metres from the pizza place Toby had bragged about. ”They have the best pizzas in town,” he said. ”Try. And say what you think.”

   And here we are. They have only two sizes – medium or large. We choose the medium to share, with pepperoni, and when it landed on the table it's the biggest dough I've have ever seen in my whole life.

   ”So, what is the large like?”

   Carolyn pointing at the wall behind the wood fired oven. Illustrations of medium and large. The large is the size of a coffee table.

The Corona-virus was all around us, most believed. They were from China and South Korea, and they were using the blue masks that were totally useless. The locals wore them too. It was a hysteria here for a while, but soon the media would find something else to rave about. But it could also be serious. Ross messaged me that Bangkok was estimated to have the next serious outbreak outside of China.

   The conspiracy theorists would say – it may have leaked out of a laboratory, mutated from a living snake at the fish market, or, again, leaked out of the laboratory. The labotatory is located twenty clicks from the centre of the outbreak, a place where they were specifically having a close look at this virus that was catching their very attention. It mutated super fast.

In the meantime.

Tony Cox did not care. Much. He had seen enough tragedies that would be with him for several lifetimes on this timeline. But he was not always on this timeline. He was shifting between different outcomes of this reality he lived right now, and sometimes the Organization sent him to different times and realities with creatures you could not even start fantasizing about, because they were too weird – usually , let's say, a normal person would go crazy when being exposed to the entities who seemed to be in charge in parts of the multiverse.

   But they have one fault, Cox said to himself. It's a two hour job but I'll charge the company for a week. They will pay. They always do. He got into the act.

I was happy to be able to cook again, and it was one of the simple pleasures of life. Carolyn came back from work and she was having my chicken pasta with cream and onions, the mash that came with pork striploin and beef tenderloin with the creamy sauce. She always finished her plate.

   ”Thank you so much for the food,” she would say, ”it was delicious.” I believed her because she repeated herself five times in a row, ”Thank you – it was absolutely delicious!”

   ”I know. I'm the perfect housewife. And I'm a catch, because I know how to cook, and I'm nice to the children.”

   ”Oh yeah, sure you are. Now I might lie down for a while, if you don't mind.”

   ”I wrote a new text. Would you like to read it?”

   ”Later.” She didn't mind reading my stuff, but she was not always happy with the changes I made about her corrections on my writing.

   ”It's about the style,” I would say.

   ”Oh, about your style?” She laughed at me, but style was more important than being grammatically correct all the time, and I knew were to place my commas.

   ”Yes, it's about style. And Panang curry is not spelt Punang.”

   ”Okay, sorry about that.”

   I was happy to be the housewife, for now, cooking and cleaning and doing the dishes. There was nothing that compared to it. And the apartment was a lovely place, with the kitchen, the living-room and the balcony. The bedroom was big enough to play soccer. I loved it. And my fever was gone and so was my headache. The air was clean, and on the balcony the fresh wind would blow in through the palm trees and the fever and the nasty headaches were only a memory now. There was a gym only a five minutes walk away and I have decided to start going there.

   Tomorrow. Definitely maybe.

Tony Cox knew about their weakness. They were unbelievably greedy. He spotted one of them standing at the intersection on Sok San Road, next to Viva!, pretending to read a map. His shades were down his nose and Cox could see his eyes. The eyes were black. He was in the disguise of a tall Somali guy somewhere around 37. Cox, trying to avoid the traffic around him was looking for other aliens, but he could not see another one. But there is one more. I can feel it. And these guys from HD 18875 have three suns revolving around the gas planet so they have an everlasting sunburn, and they walk like they are floating on water. They always work in pairs. Maybe they had been watching too many American cop movies. But there was never the good cop, bad cop routine, they were equally bad.

   Cox touched the gold nugget heavy in the right pocket of his shorts. It was the size of a duck's egg.

It was a heatwave from hell.

   Tony Cox was sitting at Viva! next to the Old Market and the frozen margaritas gave him the most pleasent brain freeze. He felt like his body was still in the tropics and his mind was temporarily located in Iceland. For once he loved the contrast. And the heat would cool down in a few days anyway, because he had eliminated what was causing it in the first place.

The aliens from the planet with three suns, HD 18875, had been around for a week to cause trouble, by increasing the temperature to a level normal to their home planet. People would die from the heat and following the front troops there would be a colony taking over this part of the world. And then the rest of the planet.

   The front troops had only consisted of two individuals, because it was supposed to be an easy take over – since they were using one of the most powerful weather control devices ever, The Blaster. It was not the HAARP, it had technical similarities, yes, but it was much more potent, and it was the size of a pack of cigarettes. You place it somewhere, push the button and within the radius of hundreds of kilometres it heats up the air, blowing up people like putting living frogs inside a micro wave oven. It would take some time though and Cox had caught them half way through their evil scheme.

   Cox ordered another margarita and took a trip down the memory lane. It was the code word for sending reports, and he started focusing on images and details for his last two hours. He sent the report telepathically to the Organization.

Here we go:

”I approach the individual in the intersection – black eyes, studying the map of Siem Reap, upside down – showing him the gold nugget asking what he thinks it's worth.

   ”Five dollars.”

   ”It's not five dollars, it's 5000 dollars.”

   ”Okay, 10 dollars.”

   ”Let's go and talk somewhere.” His greedy eyes look to the right and I spot his companion, sitting at the bar opposite of Sok San Road, sipping a draft. These guys are both greedy and thirsty, so the second one finishes his beer in a hurry and the three of us walk down the road leading towards Blue Bar.

   ”Here, to the right.” It's a dirt road with no lights but there are a few houses further on. ”But I want 500.”

   ”Hahaha!” they both laugh in the alien language you've heard so many times before. ”250, it's just a small piece. And that's final,” the first one says.

   ”Guys, here's something else that's final.” From the dark in front of us four shadows appear. They are my partners in crime – even though I would not call it a crime. Or them partners for that matter. They are silent co-workers and they finish the business. And the two aliens somehow disappear from the face of the earth. Their whereabouts are unknown at this moment. Over and out.” Cox deliberately used the Hollywood movie cliché to end the telephatic contact.

   Cox heard inside of his brain freeze the final, ”Message received. Over and out.”

   Apparently someone at the other end has a sense of humour. He orders a third margarita. Now it is time for a few days off.

Kids carrying big black plastic bags were digging through dustbins searching for cans ten o'clock in the evening. Next to them tourists from the age of twenty to seventy engaging with local girls with dyed blonde hair and heavy make up. Young hippie wannabes in the bars shouting at the top of their lungs.

Nobody paid much attention to what somebody else was up to though, everyone had their own business to take care of.

It was not a lot to attend to anyway, and your daily chores you could sometimes take care of within five minutes. It was an everlasting summer. An illusion of course, but it was a persistent illusion.

Not everybody felt that way though. I had a new cold. Again. And around you there were people working all the time.

   They didn't measure their input in hours and minutes, because working was merely a part of the daily life, and you should have fun doing it – like the musicians you met on Sok San Road and you could see them playing in the restaurants in the evening, Brian, Dave, Cesar, Kevin, Slim – and no one wanted anything from you, instead they gave you something, inspiring you, because they always had a smile on their faces and a nice word for everybody.

   And Africa, she was working too, five days a week. And when she came back from lecturing her students all day she was still smiling. And if it happened that she tried to lecture me too, I would just say, ”You're still in the teacher's mode - let's go to the restaurant and have a beer." It worked, sometimes and the beers we were sipping would be Swedish Absolut, Irish Jameson, German Jagermaister, or the local draft. She never bothered to carry a grudge after the occasional argument, and I could not see the chip on her shoulder anymore. And who would care, when you had all the restaurants around you with the cuisine from Mexico to Japan, Greek. A delicious moussaka. The third moussaka was the freshest of them all. It's hard to argue about small things when you are enjoying some lovely food.

   And all I wanted to do was some cooking with my own stuff. Sometimes I would get tired of the restaurant food. You mostly know what you get. But there were some meals I had at least two times a week, well, that was the Punang curry.

   Africa laughed at me about my favourite dish, "You're in love with this Punang curry, aren't you?" I accidently had a bite of the red chili and she laughed even more. For two hours.

   Sok San Road was a fantastic place, and it was also a tragic place, in the sense that some people had lost their last hopes. It was a paradise for some and a harbour of stranded ships for others. And the garbage collecting, glue sniffing kids with no future whatsoever could break your heart.

I was taking some testosterone, so I had extended the half an hour at the gym to one and a half hours. It was fun and in the morning I was looking forward to going there again. There was a place on the concrete road, past Aura Bar and the hundred metres of dirt road, and I started going there instead of The Angkor Muscle Gym on the other side of the river. It was only five minutes away from JaMe.

   Three days after having started taking the Andriol caps I felt like punching some stupid fucker who happened to come my way showing arrogance. But it would always wear off in five days, and I regained the control over my mind and body again, sleeping well, having five meals a day and having the appetite for more life.

   One day on my way to the gym a young bull was standing on the dirt road. I stopped. This could go either way. It started sniffing at the doorway to one of the shacks and a little girl came out through the door and chased it away. It was a moment of embarrasment but I shrugged my shoulders and went inside the gym, paid a dollar, blushing a little thinking the little girl may have saved my life.

   Maybe that was when I got the cold? And maybe the cold was a metaphor for something I did not yet understand?

Africa shrugged her shoulders too. She had forgotten her shades somewhere.

   ”How much do they cost?” I asked.

   ”Around two-thousand dollars.”

   ”You lost a pair of two-thousand dollar sunglasses and you are shrugging your shoulders about it? Photographic memory is a funny thing.”

   ”Yes, they are expensive. Tom Ford. I had other things on my mind.”

   We walked back to the supermarket at The Temple and she got her glasses back.

   ”I'm so glad. I've had these for years.”

   ”Fantastic! How about an ice-cream!” We were inside the shop. ”Would you like a Magnum?”

I was eating constantly. The emerald coloured capsules made me hungry for food, amongst other things, and my muscles were sore from the training.

   ”I'm free tomorrow,” Africa said, ”because of the Chinese New Year". This year will be the year of the rat.”

   ”Good. I was born in the year of the rat. And so was James Bond. It's a good year. The rats are imaginative, inventive and prosperous.”

   ”Yeah, sure. I don't like rats.”

   ”Neither do I. But it's different if you are one of them I guess, a part of the community, so to speak.”

   ”Yes. You would know.” She laughed at me. Her eyes blue at this moment.

   It was a good sign. In a few days we were going to move to an apartment, on the other side of the river, only a few minutes walk from the school she worked at.

Sok San Road was a tourist planet for some, and a prison planet for some others. It was an everlasting repetition, an endless summer of both joy and misery. It was a street that contained the very essence of human life, happiness and sorrow at the same time. You never knew who you were going to meet when you were taking your walks.

   Africa said, back on her lunch break,

   ”I never give the poor kids any money, but I give them food sometimes.”

   ”The money goes to buy more glue?”

   ”Yes. They become irrational.” She had a puff of the Mevius option purple, her brand. ”And I want to tell you something else – the testosterone you are taking makes you grumpy. You have been grumpy for days. We'll talk about it later. But I have to go now, I'm already late.” She put out the cigarette and took off for her afternoon classes.

I thought about it. Taking Andriol was like driving a Ferrari. And, then it sometimes happened, when traffic was slow, you felt like putting the pedal to the metal. So, I simply decided to lay off the testo until I started training again. 

As soon as this cold wears off. As soon as this cold wears off. As soon as this fucking cold wears off...

I was tired of being sick with the temperature, the runny nose and the constant headaches. It was The Sok San Road Curse.

   At four in the afternoon it was rush hour on this narrow road and the traffic stood still. The fumes from the exhaust pipes from the scooters, motorcycles, tuk tuks and cars, one or two coaches with Korean and Chinese groups, comfortably taking snapshots inside the security of their vehicle – pictures they would show their relatives and friends afterwards, because they experienced their holidays through the camera lense – and there was always the gray demon, built up by dust, dust, dust.

   I never used to be sick and now I was down with my second cold in three weeks. I hated it. The headache from hell. This horror, this horror. The monologue from colonel Kurtz in Apocalypse Now.

Then we moved to the other side of the river.