Dispatches
You can avoid reality, but you cannot avoid the consequences of avoiding reality - Ayn Rand
Once I knew a girl who was a shapeshifter. What was her name again? Never mind, you wouldn’t know her anyway. Let’s call her Hannah. She was a funny girl, in a hah hah way. But after enjoying six beers she changed and she was still a funny girl but not in the hah hah way anymore, and it was like a different person staring at you now, with a cunning smile and these shiny, gleaming snake eyes. We could sit at the bar and everybody else's attention was more important than mine, because she thought she already had my attention. But I was planning for my escape when she started saying things things like,
“Sometimes you can be a bit boring.”
“You should be more like him,” about some newly found friend.
Speaking about me in third person, “I don’t pay much attention to what he says.”
Or - “Fuck off, I don’t want you here!”
But the hah hah moment was not entirely gone because a minute later she would embrace me, holding me tight and kissing me on the cheek. I didn’t know what to think about it. Maybe she was having sudden flashbacks from some previous life, I don’t know, but the snake eyes scared the hell out of me. So I was always planning for my escape when she turned that way. Later she would not remember anything from the previous night.
One night she broke a few ribs. I wasn’t there so the next day I asked her, “What happened?”
“I don’t know.”
“Imagine that - you wake up in a lot of pain and you have no memory of what happened last night.”
“It’s not very uncommon,” she said and shrugged her shoulders. In her mind, that is. She was in too much pain to shrug her body. “Can you get me some morphine?” she asked. “I can’t move, the pain is excruciating.” We were in the room she shared with Sandy, her friend from years back. I looked at Sandy. She was such a lovely and sensible girl. She nodded and said, “Yes, yesterday at the hospital she was screaming her lungs out.”
“They gave me something to block the pain but it’s gone now,” Hannah said.
“I can’t promise anything.” I went to a pharmacy run by a doctor and his wife. They were a nice couple and I had been buying my vitamins and minerals there for years.
“I have a friend who had an accident - she broke some ribs and is in terrible pain. Do you have some morphine?”
"Yes." He returned with a box, “One pill, 30mg, 5 dollars,” he said.
“Good. I’ll have two of them then, please.” I went back to her place, “I have your stuff.” I sounded like a drug dealer. She took one and 20 minutes later she said, “Look, I can move.” She was sitting on her bed now. “I still feel the pain but now I can handle it.”
Sandy and I laughed at her - “Wouldn’t do to make a habit of it though.”
“Yes, but thank you so much.”
“The dopamine that comes with the substance sometimes makes people talk.”
“Okay.” She moved slowly when she put her shoes on, and the three of us went out for dinner at Taste for Life. And yes, she talked.
And they talked too.
There were these two girls, a mother, 47, and daughter, 26. They were both fine looking women and Zelda had a slim figure and a pair of boobs the size of bowling balls. They were from the UK, and Zelda happily announced that they both were prostitutes. I knew they were wanted by the police for overstaying their visas, stealing from customers and leaving restaurants without paying their bills. Let’s call them Zelda and Charin, suitable names too, since they were on this planet on a mission. It may sound a bit wild but this is what happened:
They were Goddesses here on this timeline, to enhance the spiritual energies and awaken the population to what was going on with the world and where we are heading.
“Where are we headed?” I asked Zelda.
“To a higher frequency. To a total understanding of the human condition, and what is beyond. We are here to liberate people from their mental slavery. People have their minds locked inside of a box, and they don’t even know about it.” Charin agreed to this. She was her mother’s daughter after all.
“We are Goddesses and you are a God,” Zelda said.
“How do you know?”
“I can read your vibrational energies, you are a God, and the reason we get together is that we look for, and find each other on this planet, to get together and grow stronger so we can do a better job helping people out of their misery.”
For a moment I thought - what if she’s right … “Like magnets drawn to each other?”
“Yes.” Charin said. I looked at her and saw that she had her own thoughts about things but she also listened to mum.
We were in my apartment now, playing the guitar and the girls were doing beautiful harmonies to my songs although they had never heard them before. I thought they were brilliant and the acoustics in my studio were great. We were also a bit drunk and the beers made us happy so we had a few more and we laughed and talked. We were on the balcony now and I pointed at the restaurant on the other side of the road, where I had met them earlier tonight. “They have live performers six days a week.”
“Money laundering,” Zelda said.
“Yes, it looks like it too - from here you see the place is empty most evenings. And when cars are parked outside they look expensive, especially here - a Hummer, Mercedes and a BMW.”
“Yes, the mobsters are scheming up their evil plans.” She rolled her eyes and laughed. “Let’s go back to where you played the last song.”
We walked upstream on Sok San Road. There are quite a few expats living here named Chris, Darren, Dave, Jeff, and since dental work is cheap in Cambodia many of them greeted us with a nice hello displaying a set of shiny white teeth. Some looked a bit rugged after years in the tropics but they would happily give you the Hollywood smile.
First time I met Hannah was in one of the all night open bars on Sok San Road. She was all smiles and her blond hair was shaking with laughter. She said, “My name is a palindrome.”
“Yes it is.” The phone showed half past eleven in the evening. I was sitting on a stool at the bar in Draft Bar. She was from London. “I live here at the moment,” I said as an answer to her question.
“Do you know where the longest palindrome in the world can be found?”
“Your country, right? You were born in Finland and you lived in Sweden for many years. So let’s hear the palindrome.”
“Saippuakauppias.”
“Which means?”
“He is a soap salesman. Somebody who sells soap.”
“You have the longest…”
“Yes, palindrome in the world.”
“Can you say it again?”
“Saippuakauppias.”
She laughed and clapped her hands, “Bravo!”
There were musicians everywhere and sometimes I went to listen to some good music. Jade took me to Pub Street where her friends Andrew and Natalie were having a session. We were sitting at their table and when they had a break Natalie ordered beers for all of us, “On the house,” she said. Andrew was her boyfriend, he was from Colombia and Natalie was born in London with parents from India. I should mention something about her physical appearance since people stared at her and then looked away like they had never noticed her. I don’t know how she felt about it because it was about her face. It is not a rare condition, but in her case it was a rare condition and people we met later on the street had a happy smile of sympathy for her and they appreciated her happy smile back. I don't know how to put this, but, well - she was extremely beautiful.
Natalie and Andrew took Jade and me to a bar with pool tables, ping-pong tables and quite a lot of other gear for amusement purposes. There was a second floor with chairs and tables, and a comfortable slide downstairs if you got too drunk to take the stairs. The owner was a German guy with a Bavarian black beard and a happy smile. He made his own beer. He gave us tastes and Natalie bought us shots and we had a look at the brewery. “Here is where I store the beer,” he said. It was a cool room with the air con on 24 hours and the bottles of craft beer were neatly placed on the racks. He gave us a taste of the different kinds of beers he was producing. They tasted of the German’s love for good beer. “This one is around 8 percent,” he said. “I can believe it.” This was craftsmanship at its finest and it was a treat. “Which is your own favorite beer?”I asked Rudy.
“The one around 5 percent,” he said. We tried it and it was good. Easily drinkable with a lingering fruity aftertaste of hops.
We were living in strange times. According to the Chinese horoscope this was the year of the water rabbit. The animal in question suggests hope, peace and harmony for the year.
I had not seen much of it happen but I did not mind. I was born in the year of the rat.
“You jump sometimes,” Jade would say. “You listen and then you start talking about something else.”
“Yes, I do.”
“Why?”
“Because it is connected.”
“How is it connected?
"Later. Could you get me a beer, please.”
“We need to defrost your freezer.”
“There you go.”
“Hahahaha.”
