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.