osmoala

Now the dogs were barking on the other side of the street from my balcony facing Sok San Road. There were barks with intonations and questions, 

   “What happened?” asked Barry, The Slaughterer of Chickens. That’s what he called himself. 

   “Oh, we were chasing someone who didn’t belong here,” answered Scooby, The Conductor Over Life and Matter and Cats and Sheep. Queen Lafaytte was here too. She was The Destroyer of Persian Carpets.

   “A guy or a dog?”

   “Both - the dog was on a leash.”

   “Yeah, sissies. They should know by now that it is the other way around.” 

Sometimes you wake up in the morning laughing at the crazy dreams from just a moment ago and there is the energy to last you the whole day. But sometimes it only lasts until after breakfast and you go back to sleep again for an hour or two and then get out of bed at noon. What happened to the early walks and the one dollar gym? I had obviously forgotten about them, so the next morning I took a 10 kilometre walk. When I came back Jade was already up, working on the next article. She was focused and there was a smile on her face. I said hi, and kept silent. It was like a chess game.   

Now it was the Chinese New Year, it was full moon and we were entering the year of the Dragon according to the lunar calendar, a year that presents qualities such as power, strength and good luck. 

   The riverboats happily competed with the other ten man crews. There are the people paid by the government competing too. Here are the police, the army and the other guys who could easily melt into a crowd. 

   I was standing next to them, we all watching what was going on with the competitions on the river that now had a higher water level than a week ago, maybe because there was a dam upstream and somebody had turned the water on. 

   The Other Guys didn’t advocate their presence with uniforms and badges but they all seemed to take this event quite seriously even though there were a lot of laughs and cheering. There was drama, and when one of the hardworking rowers fell off his boat into the water there was more amusement, with the cops and the rest of the security cracking up too. The boats were fast and their tactics for winning was a chess game where you attack right from the start.   

The Siem Reap Chess Club was only a 10 minute walk from my room.

   John was the president of the Siem Reap Chess Club. That was in the daytime.    

Later at night he was a football hooligan. The first time I met him was at King Kong. He looked like General Alcazar from a Tin Tin comic book. He was half Turk and half Swede and he cheered for one of the infamous teams. I am not sure how this works so I asked him about the Swedish football clubs with fans who were known to love to pick a fight. Supporters who liked to punch supporters from the other club then afterwards, no matter who had won the game.

   “We don’t fight. It’s the other clubs that cause trouble, because they know who we are. One more beer, now!” John slams his fist on the bar.  

   “You had enough,” says the tiny girl behind the bar with a smile.

   “Okay.”

   He turns to me and says, “She knows my limit. Sunday …”

   “Sunday? I don’t know - I’m checking the hell out of here …”

   “Chess.”

   “Chess?”

   “Chess.” 

Le Tigre looks like a dungeon with the jungle inside. No disturbing sunlight in the restaurant. Sundays at 2 in the afternoon it is The Chess Club. People stay here and they say the rooms are good. My experience of walking into a room next to the reception was the fine scent of mould. 

   I played a few games and lost them all, except for the one lucky draw, where I did a chess mate in four moves. It was an old classic so the guy I was playing did not see it coming because it was too simple of a move. The guy was the vice president of the chess club and he was devastated,

   “I’m going to jump into the pool,” he said. “And then go home.” 

   John was laughing at him now, “Four moves?”

   “Yes, four moves.”

   “Hahahahaha, what the fuck happened to you?”

   All the guys were experienced players and they came here simply because they enjoyed the game. John had his eyes on Andy,

   “You lost in four moves?” He was pointing at me - “He is a rookie, and you are supposed to be the Vice President of The Chess Club!” 

   “I know.” Andy was working in the administration in one of the international high schools - “But I teach when we don’t have a teacher.” Playing along with the blame game John was shooting at him now he was looking at the floor holding both hands against his temples. 

   There was a bit of theatre because John wouldn’t let it go. Then afterwards Andy and I had another game, off the record, and he won quite easily.

  Maybe that was when I decided to go to the South. Kate and I took the Giant Ibis to Phnom Penh.

Phnom Penh is a lovely town and a nightmare at the same time. Some of the local expats don't look so well. Socks, but no shoes? Street 172 had the same delicious western food as always - lasagnes, pizzas, beef steaks, fish and chips. Shepherd’s Pie. Later, back from the seaside, check into the hotel where the breakfast is 20 dollars if you are not staying here.    

   Lovely room with three beds. Balcony, good wifi, spacy, and mahogany was everywhere, the roof, the walls, the furniture. And the smell of mould. Mould. I’m not keen on the smell of mould. I would have it in my clothes, my box with Swedish snuff containing small bags, like tea bags with nicotine and flavours. The bags had been in the open air overnight and they virtually stank of … mould. The cleaning girls had sprayed the room before but after a few hours you start coughing. 

   It was a shame, this 15 floor hotel had only one room left. I would find out why - the mould in the room had the same theme as the classic sci-fi flick, The Blob, with the alien virus spreading to the population on Earth at an alarming speed. It was a big room and I had three beds. Yet, the next morning I woke up on the floor between two beds. How did this happen?   

   The breakfast was … okay. Breakfast closed at 10am and I was there five to. “It’s almost ten now,” one of the girls softly complained. The clock on the wall said five to ten.

   “The elevators took five minutes.”

   “Okay.” I had some of what was left and it was so so. This place looked better than you felt afterwards. There was a sky bar with the pool and a grand view of the capital. It was not the Overlook Hotel though. Yet. I checked out at 1.45 in the afternoon. Anyone would get nightmares after staying in that room too long.   

   I would smell mould for the next few days. It was everywhere, my gear and my nose. Everything I ate and drank tasted of mould, and even the air I was breathing in the big city tasted of … yes. Like chewing big chunks of it and for a brief moment I thought the vicious attack on my senses would stay there forever.  

Anyway, before all this happened we went to Kampot and Kate said, browsing her phone, 

   “Fuck, I booked the hotel in Kep instead of Kampot - sorry about that.” She looked a bit alarmed.

  “No worries, I wanted to go there anyway.” She had said she wouldn't go to Kep. It was an hour by tuk tuk from Kampot. I said I did it by magic.

  “Magic, yes, sure you did, hahaha.” For a split second she believed me, and then she remembered who she was talking to - Tony Cox, the intergalactic spy who jumped between time and space and dimensions before breakfast. Kate was detoxing for two weeks now. She was going to fly to Manila soon. “I want to be fresh when I travel,” she said.

Captain Chim’s was a nice resort with some lovely staff. There were not so many customers now and you could relax in the jungle garden with a cold Cambodian beer after your activities throughout the day. We took the boat to Rabbit Island and it was just as lovely as the last time a few years ago, with the beach, palm trees, restaurants and the jungle next to you. Later we took a tuk tuk to Kampot for a few hours. There were more restaurants and girlie bars than last time and I was surprised to meet four different people I knew in the next five minutes.  

Back in Phnom Penh Kate said, 

   “You want to do something?”

   “But of course. What do you want to do?”

   “How about some Indian food? - It’s not far, I’ll show you the location on the phone.”

   “I believe you. Let’s do it.”

   The food was probably a disaster because she felt sick afterwards. “Good or no good?”

   “Not really.” My food hadn’t arrived yet and when it materialised I was already done here. “I’m not paying for this, we are just about to leave.” They did not object so I paid for my beer and we walked.

   “You okay?”

   “No, I feel sick.”

   “The food?”

   “I don’t know what it is.” She kept a straight face. 

   What do I know? - I didn’t even have a chance to try the dinner myself. I wanted bangers and mash anyway. 

   “I’m going back to the room. I’m exhausted.”

   “I’m going to have a bite at Golden Home. Speak later.”

   I had the bangers and mash and ended up speaking with Johnny the Anarchist over a few beers.

   He was not happy with the way the Globalist Mafia were planning to take over the world.       

    “The pandemic was a test to see how people would react to living in lockdown.”

    “Okay?” I had never been to the anarchist meetings in Acapulco every year in March. He showed clips on his phone and it looked like they were having a good time with the speeches, the sun and the jungle and the beach. There were live bands too.

   “Looks like a party - how long do you stay …

   “All night.” He looked happy saying this. There was a sparkle in his eyes that lit up the heart of the old anarchist. He was in his 50s. I told him all people looked happy on the clips.

   “Yes, they are - you meet people, different individuals and they all have one thing in common.”

   “Speeding tickets?” 

   “Yeah sure, hahahaha.”

Next time on Street 172 with Kate and we spoke with Johnny who was sitting at Golden Home. I said, “Johnny goes to Acapulco now and then.“

   “I have been to Acapulco,” Kate said. 

   I went to the bathroom and when I came back they were still talking about Acapulco with jungles around the corner and cliff divers waiting for the right wave.    

   Later Kate would say, “There is something about him that goes for all expats here … I’m looking for the right word …”

   “No need to, I get it, I think.” She was probably right about the expat guys and girls living here in Cambodia. They were from the US, the UK, the EU and Australia. They might not fit in the Western world but they knew how to adjust to it, well, for a period of time that is, and everybody had a welcoming smile on their face. 

   “Misfits?”

   “Not misfits, there must be a better word for it.”

   “The unjustible?”

   “That’s not a word.”

   “It is now. And what does it make you?”

   “I’m not talking about me - talking about the people who are staying here for a long time.” She was a bit tense but she was sober so she knew how to handle it. She had some things on her mind. And she had a flight to Manila in a few days. 

   “I’ll have one more draft - do we have the time?”

   “Of course. I don’t mind you having one. And sometimes - I just wish I could have one too, but I promised myself.”

   “Yes you did. Actually, I like you better when you are sober. A few days ago here in Phnom Penh you took me to places I’ve never been to before. We saw five bands. They were really good, you know.”

   “Glad you liked it.” She hesitated for a moment, “And thanks - otherwise I would have stayed in the room all week in Phnom Penh waiting for my flight. And Rabbit Island was just amazing!” I was happy she said that, because she had experienced different surroundings in her life, and she has been to over 65 countries so far. She listed the next ones - “The Philippines (been there before), Taiwan, maybe Korea and then Japan.” 

   “I spent a week in Tokyo once.”

   “How was it?”

   “Crowded - they had these strong men pushing people inside the cars in the subway so they could keep up with the schedule.”

   “What’s the name of the subway? - or the tube, or whatever you want to call it?”

   “I forget what it’s called in Japanese … Shinkansen? … and it takes you through places like Shinjuku, Ginza … among other stations - I’m sure it’s different today.” 

   I was not very keen on crowded places, but you got used to them and then you started enjoying these mega cities. Tokyo and Yokohama had grown together for a long time now with over 30 million people living in the Megapolis. Kate was going to fly to Manila, which by the density of the population is the most crowded city in the world, well over 20 million people.

   Her mind was already there and her body was a shell, waiting to be collected, like luggage. She showed a straight face so I didn’t ask what it was that was eating her. 

   The next day I said, “Speak later.” I missed her already and I wished her happy landing. Later she would message me that her blood test was okay. She had been worried because sometimes she was overwhelmed by fatigue. “But I’m low on thyroid.” Well, that could make sense.

   I took the Giant Ibis back to Siem Reap and it was a comfortable ride. Sok San Road had changed. But perhaps it was only from my point of view.

Where Tony Cox leaves the town and ends up in another town and yet another town. He is meditating on something, possibly perspectives, but who knows what he is thinking

Bruce said,

   “Let’s go to Pattaya.” So we started. Bruce had gotten the tickets. He is 70 and wants a trip to Thailand to get his asthma medicine. He is a professional harmonica player, with seven top quality harmonicas in a black bag. We played on a regular basis and he would catch up with any of my songs, and we were getting better and better at it too. Later we would end up playing the blues at Chris' place.

   Christian is Belgian and Bruce is American. Christian makes the sausages he delivers to the restaurants and Bruce is from Minnesota but he has travelled all over the world. I am just  happy they both have a positive attitude to things.

Then. We had been promised a big bus but we only got the minivan, because not enough people, said the girl at the office, so we sat in this cramped vehicle and the driver, a middle aged man took off. I was in the passenger seat next to the driver but it was still cramped. He started honking the horn, as all drivers do, and then he honked even more at some guy on the road on a scooter connected to a trailer with a dog at the back - “My brother,” he said smiling. “And my dog.”

   Then he honked at a girl on a scooter. “Your sister?” I asked innocently.

   “Yeah … sure.”

After two and a half hours we were at the border, so we checked out of Cambodia and queued the snake queue to the boxes with security windows all around where the officials were stamping passports. 

   Now it took only 50 minutes to get to the officer and you would leave your fingerprints and get your stamps into Thailand. I got through and turned around to look for Bruce but he seemed to have some kind of an issue here. Now he was following a stout lady in a uniform to her desk. She was in a bad mood, and she told him in a loud, too loud, voice, “No, you cannot come in - you go back, back - NOW!”

   I did not understand anything and neither did Bruce. “Can I talk to your supervisor?” he asked politely.

   “I AM THE SUPERVISOR! NOW GO!” 

   A girl at the other desk told him in a calm voice, checking through his passport, “You have already been in Thailand two times this year. You can only go two times overland in a year. You can fly…”

   “No, only one time,” Bruce protested. “In June and now. What is the problem?”

   “Here.” She showed him a stamp from January. “See, two times already.”

   Bruce had obviously forgotten about the January trip. His face was ashes and with slumping shoulders he had to return to Cambodia to work his way back to Siem Reap.

   It was a shame. While he took his steps after we shook hands I could hear the next person, an elderly gentleman with a proper London accent speaking to the Supervisor - “Why are you so angry? You could be more polite, because there is no need …” The rest was lost because I hugged Bruce again and then I walked down the steps to Thailand. 

There was another minivan waiting for me and it was packed with local people and bags with groceries. People come to this border town to shop. The woman driver was stout and grumpy - she could have been the Supervisor’s sister - and she wouldn’t let me sit in the front seat because her shirt was hanging over the seat. “NO, YOU CANNOT SIT HERE, MOVE TO THE BACK!” 

   What is it with these scream queens? 

   Well, welcome to the land of smiles. 

She drove fast, and when I thought we would make it to Pattaya on time I was wrong, because she made stops all the time delivering bags with rice and what not, and to let people off only to pick up new people and she took detours into villages to let people off, and then she drove back to the highway. She was multitasking as a minivan, taxi, the local bus and the food delivery service. It could have been impressive. But why was she so angry? At the final bus stop on Sukhumvit Road she barked something but I didn’t care anymore. I took my pack and was happy to step off the bus.

Then after 14 hours from Siem Reap I was at my hotel - Prima Place where I had stayed a number of times over the years - and I got a room, despite all the tourists and the locals celebrating Christmas in Pattaya. Thailand and Cambodia are Buddhist countries, of course, but every opportunity to get drunk and have a good time is good enough.

I went to the local food market nearby and had the deep fried chicken with sticky rice I’d had  many times before. It was delicious. I was drinking water, orange juice and the occasional Coke from a bottle. And all the water. The heat and humidity makes you perspire, and it is a good thing. Bad things go in, bad things go out. I was drinking water and orange juice and the occasional coca-cola from a glass bottle.  

Except on the Friday night in Bangkok where I would have a few Leo and wine coolers with Pam who arrived from Kalasin, ten hours by bus from up north, and I took the big bus from the south up to the big city.

The next few days I would be completely by myself. I took walks to have a look around Pattaya and the town was packed with tourists, groups of men walking together, not giving you any space so you had to step onto the street from the sidewalk. Then I ignored it and walked straight into the crowds of holidaymakers dressed in djellabas and the occasional fez, and they would let me through, like a school of fish that closed behind you when you had passed by. I walked along the coconut bar, a strip where the working girls go. It's maybe 300 metres along the beach. But they were not here now because this was two o’clock in the afternoon. 

   Coconut Bar would open later, after sunset. It was open after dark. I thought I would see some faces but this was not the right time. When talking to prostitutes I always focused on their eyes, because their eyes could tell you stories. My intentions were quite innocent compared to some wild looking, western men on Walking Street. Had they been kidnapped by some UFO:s and then dumped back on earth afterwards after having been examined, probed and having their brains sucked out? But then I realised it was just people being used to watching television. I was looking into the girls’ eyes when they walked up to you in high heels and said, “Hello, how are you?” They studied you too of course and sometimes the only thing they wanted from you was your trust. I believed it too, but maybe I was a too romantic of an individual to survive in this town.  

The clouds were gone and it got hot now, walking up and down on Pattaya Beach, so I took a shortcut through the side street, with Indian restaurants almost back to back with the whisky bars there in between them. Some bars spelled it “whiskey”, but it somehow looked cooler on this street. 

It was about a 20 minute walk back to my hotel and then I felt tired afterwards. It was hot, I hadn’t been drinking enough and I was hungry. I walked into a local restaurant next to my hotel, room 307, and ordered pork and rice. I was developing an almost alarming taste for Coca-Cola in the slim glass bottles. For some reason this allegedly toxic stuff tasted better from glass bottles.  

Usually I am never bored or feel lonely, but after a few days in Pattaya I felt a sting of both. What is this about? I didn’t go to the bars where I could easily meet people, simply because I didn’t feel like drinking and engaging in shallow conversations. I did not mind the tourists but I also felt like an alien here. So I took my walks and I had some nice food at the local restaurants and the deep fried chicken at the food market where I used to go every night. 

Then I took the bus to Bangkok and met Pam at the hotel. It’s Thara House, where I have stayed for the last ten years on my short visits in town.

   Pam knocked on the door. My room was the size of a closet with no window, because it was the only room available right now.

   “Hello,” she said, “long time no see.” 

   "Yes." It had been a few years. She looked happy and she looked better than last time, she had gained two kilos and there was confidence in her eyes I had not seen before. “Do you remember your goals from the last time I met you?” She said yes. She smiled. “Goals, I know what you mean with goals. Today I am working every day,” She was happily complaining now.  

   “How long have we known each other?”

   “Nine years,” she said. 

   We chatted for a while and then we walked out to get something to eat on Rambuttri. I ordered Panang curry and she ordered two or three plates with different stuff, and more rice, just the way all the locals like to have it. When they are finished eating they leave food on the plates enough to feed a starving man. I tried the papaya salad with pork and the bowl with seafood. Some of it was so strong it brought tears to my eyes.    

   “What would you like to drink?” I asked.

   “Small Leo. You?”

   “Okay, I’ll have a Leo too. But make it a big one.” 

   She ordered the beer and I thought it was good to have her with me here and now, because she knew what she wanted and she knew what I wanted. “Do you like spicy food?” She laughed.

   “Did you just order some papaya salad?”

   “Yes, I did …” 

   We were sitting on Rambuttri at my favourite local restaurant. It was authentic food and so was the Papaya Salad. It was hot … Gimme hope Johanna … “I need more beer.”

We bought beers for me and wine coolers for her and went back to my room. I hated the room - there was not enough room to swing a cat, and I like to have some space. Back in those days I thought everybody did. There was a big double bed that dominated the premises. So we would end up staying there for three nights and only go out to get something to eat.

Pam showed clips of her house in Kalasin with the farm where she grew fruits and vegetables and chickens. She had a restaurant together with mom and sister and people came there all the time for the food Pam was cooking. She probably showed most of it live during these phone calls with the camera on.

   “I work every day,” she said, “seven days a week. Sometimes I’m tired.”

   “Yes. You need some holiday. Now you can sleep all you want.”

   “Good,” she said.

   “When was the last time you were in Bangkok?”

   “Long time.”

   “But you know, when we met, let me check it out.” I did. She was right. How did she know about the years? “Really? I said. “Yes.” Pam said and smiled. She had the smile of a country girl. She was also more confident than before because she was responsible for things now.    

   She was handling money every day and sometimes she wished it was hers. It was not her money, she told me, because she had to go to the market every day to buy more groceries. She shows me around inside the shop. I say hello to some locals and they say hello, smiling at the camera. It is a nice shop and a nice restaurant, and the locals are sitting here now for the daily chat. 

   She has a nice house where she lives with her family - there are two kids, a sister and the mother. The surrounding area is full of fruits, the main street is a dirt road and I guess she is a little bored. She says she wants to open a new restaurant.

   “I want to open a restaurant or a bar in Pattaya or Phuket. What do you think? I have never been to Phuket. Good or no good?” 

   “Maybe not in Phuket," I said, simply because I did not like it so much. The surroundings were beautiful, food was terrible and the tourists never looked that happy anyway. “You would not like it there - Pattaya might be better. And you know some people there.” There were people from Kalasin she knew, friends who had bars and restaurants.  

   “Or maybe I will sell my body. What do you think about that?”

   “Well, you sound like a businesswoman already.”

   “Hahahaha! No darling. I'll talk to you later.”  

I decided to change my life for the worse, I had been a good boy for too long. Everybody has two sides and I had a thing working against me sometimes - I was too nice. Then the cleaning girl came and did a thorough job on the apartment. She put her hands together over a tip and I felt like a saint there for five minutes. I was glad to see her happy.  

   Now it was six minutes.  

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.”

CALLED BACK - The Inscription on Emely Dickinson’s tombstone

Zarah, Gerry and I had a few beers in my apartment on Friday afternoon. They had bought me a present, a pair of loudspeakers for my computer, so we connected them and now I could hear the full range of the music including the bass. I thought it was wonderful.    

   “Thanks a lot,” I said, “what a difference!” 

   “Glad you like them,” Zarah said. Gerry said, “You’ve got a disco here.” He was right, the lights on the speakers were changing with the beat.

   Zarah was a former nurse from Sweden and Gerry was a professional poker player from the UK. When Gerry went to the bathroom or to buy more beers Zarah and I switched to Swedish and Gerry was back and he imitated our conversation because he didn’t understand a word and it sounded like the two Swedish chefs in The Muppet Show.

   “Have you ever tasted Vegemite?” I asked Zarah. 

   "No, what is it?” 

   “I hate Vegemite,” said Gerry.

   “Vegemite is made of barley, fermented with yeast, and it’s an acquired taste of course because it’s like nothing you have tried before. In Australia we used to have it on toast all the time. It’s going to explode like a hand grenade in your mouth.” 

   She took the spoonful and kept a straight face. “Hmmm, interesting,” she said diplomatically.

Jade walked in at seven, just in time for a quick beer so she and I could get a tuk tuk to Star Bar. “I’m scared of going there,” I protested mildly and not very successfully because we were there twenty minutes later.

The house was packed and everybody in the music business was there, they came from here and there and everywhere. So many familiar faces in one and the same place and these people were professionals. They went up onstage, sang and played and then the next band was on. Brian was waiting to go up next. We hugged and I kissed him on the cheek,    

   “This is from Kate”. Brian laughed. He looked fresh, like always. He went up onstage and did a few numbers. 

   I talked to Louise, a long legged, slim brunette with a smile that could melt a rock. 

   “How do you know Brian?” I asked.

   “I’m his makeup artist.”

   “He doesn’t seem to be wearing any make up.”

   “Tricks of the trade,” she said with a laugh.

   “I don’t think we have met before.”

   “I live in Phnom Penh.” She tapped me on the shoulder and walked away to get Brian ready for the next act and when he was back on the stage he kicked off Sympathy for the Devil. “So you painted his face green to make him look like the devil? It’s working.”

   “Yes, but the eyebrows are his own.” Louise laughed and gave me a high five. I loved her there for a little while, and when she passed by my table I said, Thanks.”

   “For what?”

   “For the make up.” 

There were the artists who played on all the scenes in Siem Reap, Phnom Penh and Kampot - Sage, Paul, Julien, Andy, Virgil, Leo, Kevin, Cesar, Giuliano, all the rest, and of course Brian -  Brian who totally rocked the house. His artist name was Brin and this Rockestra was titled Life of Brin, a totally fantastic and the best show ever here in Siem Reap. Where was Jade?

   She stood at the back, by the pool chatting with Rob who had a large ice box full of beer. I hadn’t seen Rob for a while.

   “I haven’t seen you for a while.”

   “I work on an oil rig for a month at a time and then I come here for a month. Back and forth.” His local wife stood next to him and smiled happily. Everybody smiled happily tonight, on this the most sensitive, enthusiastic, well orchestrated, heartwarming evening.  

Later, when Jade and I crossed the river on the wooden bridge on our way back to Sok San Road I said it was the most amazing night.

   “Yes,” she said. “What a way to go.”

Last night I dreamed of Annie. We had an invitation to a wedding in Kensington Gardens and now in a hotel room in London we were getting dressed for the occasion. We were in high spirits, she looked at me with a happy smile and burst out laughing at some silly joke. Her lovely face, so full of life so close to mine. She was still there like a fading echo when I woke up… And now she was dead. 

I felt gloomy. The phone showed the time was five past six in the morning. All of a sudden a funeral started nearby with monks chanting prayers coming out from loudspeakers turned up to eleven and now you knew it would go on for the next three days. But what did it matter, Annie was gone for reasons I would probably never understand. She passed away a year ago. That’s all I know. I had read about it on Facebook, with the tearful comments and the arrangements for the funeral back in the UK. And I felt gloomy. So I tried to cheer myself up every way possible. 

I was playing with Chris, the Belgian guy, in his house and it was always blues. He made sausages which he sold to the restaurants around, Rock Around the Clock and Bella’s, where Henk used to buy from him too.

   “I haven’t played for a long time so my fingers feel like the spicy sausages you keep hanging there to dry on the rack. I like your kitchen - it’s a big kitchen and it’s the centre of the house because the other rooms revolve around the cooking place”. 

   “When this new batch has dried I will give you one to try,” he said in the Belgian accent that made him sound like a nazi officer in a movie about the second world war. He was in his seventies and he was timid and soft spoken and gentle about his views of the world. He looked like a butler in the British aristocracy. He had respect for all people in an almost Buddha like way and his dog, Toby, was always around. He barked at me a few times but then he grew tired of it. 

   “How old is he?” I asked about the dog who could be a crossbreed between a greyhound and a fox. 

   “One year. I thought he would stay small but then he grew and grew, hahaha.” 

   Chris’ son went back to Brussels two days ago and his local girlfriend was away somewhere. We played the blues on the guitars and the sausages were drying in the next room. 

I was in my new room and the phone rang. It was Jade.

   “Right, see you in twenty”, she said.

   “Oh, look at this big room!” She took a stride on the floor which was made up of tiles so the floor was always a little bit cold and a pleasure to walk on.

   We opened beers and I put music on Youtube. Sultans of Swing was the second from the top. Why? I never played it so I had no idea.

   “Why is Sultans of Swing at the top of my YouTube list?” I never play it.”

   “Because of algorithms.”

   “I know, but still - every bar on Sok San Road always plays it sooner or later - is that an algorithm too?”

   “Yeah, probably. They play it everywhere.” She smiled and raised her can. “Here’s cheers to music.” She didn’t take me seriously so when we clinked cans I said, 

   “Do you want to listen to the best disco song in the world?”

   “Sure, let’s hear it.” I put ELO on the Last Train to London.

   We had known each other for years. You know the girl that always reminds me of Jennifer Jason Leigh, and she was in a happier mood now compared to when I first met her in Karma Bar years ago after her serious motorcycle accident, and when I tried to talk to her she told me to shut up.

We had a few beers talking about this and that. She told me of her plans to go to Portugal to live at her brother’s house. And then Mexico. And Colombia.

   “The world seems to be changing.”

   “I know and I hate it.”

   She was not happy about the way covid-19 had changed her life.

   “I lived in Nice for years and I had everything. Now I have nothing. And I spent five and a half months in Koh Rong in lockdown, we couldn’t get anywhere.” 

   “How was it?”

   “It wasn’t so bad. Everybody was stranded on that island but we took care of each other. We supported each other.”

   “Like a community?”

   “It wasn’t a community, but we saw if there was somebody who couldn’t take it and we would be there. And there were those who couldn’t take it, believe me.”

   “Okay. I suppose you could take it.”

   “I did. I was fine. But not everybody was.”

   “You’ve seen all the episodes of Survivor. Did that help?”

   “Hahahaha, maybe it did. And I’m not used to eating a lot anyway, so it was okay. Sometimes a boat would come and deliver some food to us. We had to walk out to the water to get the packages because they refused to go onshore.”

   “Did you have some … cases?”

   “No. It was crazy, the whole setup. There were no cases. Maybe one, but he developed a fever so there was a boat that took him to the mainland, but it could have been anything.”

   “How much does the winner of Survivor get?”

   “A million dollars. Let’s talk about something else. Can we have another beer before we go?”

   “You know it.”

   “So, are you still in contact with the guys you know from third grade?”

   “Yeah … We met in Copenhagen last year in June. Lovely town, lovely guys. Last night in a restaurant I got so drunk I mistook the closet for the bathroom.”

   “So, that’s why you are taking those?” she said and pointed at the pills on the table. According to her I had a whole table with tablets but they were minerals and vitamins.

   “Yes, Cialis. For the prostate. I take 5mg every day, and it’s said to shrink the prostate. 

   “Does it?”

   “Maybe. I don’t have to go and take a leak all of a sudden anymore where I would piss in the nearest scrub.

   “Good. Cheers.” The beers were cold and we went out on the balcony to smoke a cigarette. It was hot outside. There was traffic and the shops were open. Tuk tuk drivers drove all night and the shopkeepers had a room at the back with the whole family tucked up. 

We walked upstreams to Bella’s and I told her about my magical stuff - how I could detect a winner inside the can before opening the can itself. Sometimes when you opened a can the tab would promise you a beer. Or ten dollars. Or two hundred dollars. Or a scooter.

   “I saw it the other night.” 

   “Well, It’s a lousy superpower - I would rather be able to fly or travel in time.”

   “Yeah, I’m sure you would.” 

We sat down on the comfortable leather seats near the entrance. There was not really an entrance - the entrance was the fourth wall as they like to put it in the world of the theatre and people passing by could see everything that happened inside, with people sitting along the long bar, playing pool or just relaxing at the tables with drinks. It was a popular bar and Henk was the manager. A nice fellow always in a happy mood telling stories and he was probably the reason why so many people came to the bar all the time, the usual suspects of course. There were people around the table and one of the lovely waitresses handed me a can of cold beer. “This is a winner,” I said. Now everybody was looking. I opened the can of Cambodia and showed the tap around the table. It was a winner. 

There was a pool table at the far end and when I played Mini and Peter I won every game. I guess I was on the rampage there for an hour. Peter was Dutch, wearing a baseball cap with blond hair and he spoke as good English as all Dutch people do. There was music from YouTube on the loudspeakers. The next song was Sultans of Swing. Peter said,

   “There must be more behind this - the food shortage and now they are closing down all the farms in the Netherlands. Why do you do that when people are going to starve because of a proxy war, electricity bills are skyrocketing. Gas prices… The politicians don’t seem to care about their own voters anymore, and that’s a threat to the idea of democracy itself.”

   We went to eat at King Kong. Prim, the manager, was welcoming us with open hands, maybe because I already had a tab here. We sat down, ordered beers and looked at the menu. I got the one in Khmer but it was all Greek to me. Got the English version and ordered the best cheeseburger with fries in a while. Peter had fries, “It’s made of potato flour”.

   I wasn’t sure - the fries were perfectly shaped, with ribs and edges and an aftertaste that made you order another beer.

   “Potato flour?”

   “Potato flour”. 

   “Yes. They might still be better than the insects and bugs you will be eating in the future.” I forgot to ask him how they could shape the perfectly formed fries but let it be a mystery. Surely there was a machine for it. It was good to see Peter again and Mini was on her phone sipping Baileys with ice through a straw. Peter said,

   “The first night I came here I had five beers and was hungover the next day. Tonight I had a few more.”

   “Anyway, you might be safer here than in Europe if hell breaks loose. The hangover will be your worst problem here. You know they are mobilising in Europe?

   “Who?”

   “Don’t know … NATO? Anyway - Sweden wants to join. There should be an election about it but people are overrun by the politicians. And some other shady characters. And there is the threat of the atomic bomb.”

   Yes. And I hope of course it doesn’t have to go that far. However - I like conspiracy theories as much as the next guy,” Peter said. He patted me on the shoulder, “And here’s the next guy.”

   “So - what is the difference between a conspiracy theory and the truth?”

   “Okay…”

   “Six months.”

I used to take my walks on the river. Families driving around with their small kids standing in the front of the scooter all the time and everywhere. Except for the river. The police were standing there everyday now so nobody without a helmet or a kid in their lap would drive there anyway - most of the law breakers seemed to be high school kids with the officers calling their parents asking for money to pay for the ticket. 

I kept the balcony door facing Sok San Road open and the kitchen window was open too with the mosquito net stopping bugs from flying in. There was a pool with sunbeds in the garden like a jungle, trees and bushes with huge leaves that the landlord, landlady, and the son looked after every day. The room was big enough to keep four African elephants and you would still be able to move around. 

   One day after the gym I had a shower and went out on the balcony with a small towel wrapped around my waist. A sudden gust of wind slammed the door closed and the hook fell down and the door was locked from the inside. It took me two roofs to climb over to the kitchen window where I could easily open the mosquito net. 

   This is never going to happen again. Next time I’m going to wear more clothes.   

Then Kate flew into Siem Reap. We got drunk in the evening, a mission that would last until the next day. We hadn’t met for two and a half years. She said,

   “Do you think I look the same as last time?”

   I looked her over and said, “Yes”. That was a big mistake. She obviously thought that everyone had the same perception of her body as she had. “I know - you lost five kilos.” She was still not happy but I knew the remedy for that, more booze.

   Now she was lying down in a soundless sleep. She looked, if not innocent yet temporarily disarmed. We’d had a few laughs that came with the beers and some Jagermaister, and to my surprise she all of a sudden said, 

   “Do you want a punch on the face?”

   “What?”

   “Do you want me to hit you in the face or not?”

   “No thanks.”

   It was a delicate situation. What was she talking about?

   “What are you talking about?”

   “I just asked you if you want a punch on the face?”

   “How about a Jagermaister?”

   “Okay. It was just a joke, hahahaha!”

   Sometimes I get lost in translation.

We were sitting in Big Bang Bar and we were the only customers here, Kate, I and some guy in a corner who looked like he was waiting for the train. There was a pool table and comfortable sofas. It was a 24 hours open bar but it had been open for years, hahahaha.  

   The shots came and we had a chat like the weather channel, sometimes temperatures rising and westerly winds come and go. Some turbulence might arise but only if you were flying a plane at high altitude. 

Now she was asleep. She moved and got up, went to the bathroom and when I came back from the balcony she was back in bed with a cover over her since it was cooler now because the AC was set on super cold. 

The two helicopters in the sky circling the town for two days were gone. Khmer Times wrote, “There would be a meeting between the Chinese Defense minister Gen. Wei Fenghe and US Secretary of Defense, Lloyd J.Austin III, which would lead to regional and global stability.” 

I took another walk on the river and The King’s summer residence was heavily guarded by the police carrying machine guns. The cops looked relaxed so the hot shots might not be here yet. And there were still some poor and homeless people sleeping on the benches along the water.

I had a draft with Toby at Aroi Dee. I had the draft, he was slowly sipping on one of those strawberry shakes. Toby was the Danish guy from years back. He had not been here for two and a half years. We were talking about something, what was it? Yes,

   “Do you pick up these girls now and then?” he said.

   “No.”

   “Why not? Some of them are really pretty.”

   “Because I would like them to have a PhD so we could talk.” 

   “Hahahahaha! You don’t talk to them.”

   “I haven’t had a date with these local girls in years. They have all been Western…”

   “Yeah yeah - for me the Western girls are spoiled and self centred. You do what you do and then you're finished. I wish they had a brothel here.”

Out on the balcony you could see Sok San. There was the neverending traffic of scooters, tuk tuks, some heavy bikes and women selling fruits or clothes from shops on wheels.     

   There was a spider in my bathroom above the toilet seat with long legs and a body the size of a grain of rice, but I could see the body grow day by day. I caught him a fly now and then, threw it into the web and watched the spider get into the act. It spun the web around the prey to trap it properly and then sucked everything that was worth sucking out of the delicious meal. When done it dropped the remains into the toilet bowl. It was all very practical. I called the eight legged creature Frank the Kid.

   But Kate told me that it was probably a female. “Maybe better call her Fransesca.”

   Then Franscesca disappeared for a day. When she was back she was thinner than ever. 

What has all this to do with the title of the text? Well, it is a story by Robert A. Heinlein about a man with a cat. Every winter the cat makes the man open all the exits from the house hoping to find The Door Into Summer. I was finally back in the tropics after spending a long cold dark and gloomy winter in the snow belt. I don’t know, but maybe there is a metaphor somewhere there. 

One evening I took a walk on Sok San and met Jesse in a bar. We had drinks and he told me his story.

The first time Jesse ran away from home he was three years old. He ran over to his grandma because his mother was constantly high or low on pills and his father who was half gypsy was drunk most of the time. Later Jesse did it again and again until he was sixteen when he finally moved out and left his parents to seek his own fortune. 

   A few years later he was working as a mercenary in different countries in Africa.

   “Do you miss your parents?”

   “No, I can’t say I miss them. I remember them, yes. But I don’t miss them.”

   I asked him about his Africa years and he said he was training soldiers in paramilitary groups. He showed me photos and clips on his phone to back up his story, and there were the local guys happily shooting away with semi automatic weapons at random targets.

   “Did you kill anyone?”

   “Yes, in the military I killed a lot of people, but never in private.” 

   He was an interesting guy to talk to, always in a good mood with a welcoming smile whenever I met him. 

   “It must be a change living here”, I said.

   “Yes. But there are days when I could easily pick up the keys to my bike and just drive away.”

   “From?”

   “Everything. But it’s not important - I’m happy here but I always need to know I have an option.” 

   “Mee too.”

   He laughed and we clinked glasses.

Jade slept almost all day. But why was she wearing her glasses while sleeping? So the dreams … don’t get me started on that one.

   I went downstairs and bought some coffee for her and a six pack for me. She drank half of the coffee and went back to sleep again. She was going to see the new Indiana Jones at the cinema. I had seen almost an hour on the computer and said that the first 20 minutes are great, “I can show you.”

   “No thanks.” I did it anyway and she couldn’t keep her eyes from the action. But, I’m sad to say - somebody killed James Bond, Avatar and now Indiana Jones. I did not say that. And she would probably love the movie anyway so no harm done.

She woke up, had another coffee and cancelled her plans for today. There was a light storm passing by for a while and it rained and the sun was burning. “Look,” I said, “sun and rain at the same time, very practical…”

   “Yes,” she said. “Ever heard of Spock?”

   “Of course.”

   She introduced me to the salute of a “V”, and we watched Star Trek IV,  where captain Kirk and commander Spock travel back in time to the 80s San Francisco. The Holodeck appears in the next generation of the Star Trek franchise but here the characters are there for real. They discover a pair of humpback whales they want to bring back to the future and there are twists and turns. Does it sound like a complicated plot? Jade didn’t think so. 

   “Fascinating,” I said.

   “Yes. You don’t know anything about the Star Trek World, do you?”

She lectured me about the Holodeck for a little while. I already knew something about the places, the future or the past, that are possible to create inside of this room which expands as you walk across it. It’s at least as big as the starship itself and its technology is thousands of years into the future where the Enterprise is sailing through the universe, sometimes at warp speed. Jade had watched every episode and every movie and I had only seen a few. 

   Now it was dark outside. But we had all the time in the world. 

   “Are we hungry? How about we go to King Kong? The kitchen is open till 5am.”

   “Okay,” she said. “Let’s do it.”

All evil people are sentimental but all sentimental people are not evil - Isaac Asimov

The torrential rains were back again now in June and I just made it home from my walk on the river before it started pouring down again. I usually woke up at six o'clock in the morning and took a short walk to the gym or a long walk around the riverside which took me two hours. I did some running today and was enjoying the rush of dopamine that usually lasted for a few hours. I had two vices - I was a dopamine junkie and I was addicted to cheese, which was expensive here but I needed my daily fix of Emmental or Cheddar that I had with the baguettes or the rye I bought from the bakery on Tapul Road. 

I loved the daily routine of getting up early and doing my things before breakfast, but it also happened that I stayed up all night drinking beer with Kate or Jade or some of the other people I knew here on Sok San Road which is the liveliest street here in Siem Reap, located in the northern part of Cambodia. 

One of the other people was Stanford. Some connect the name with a university in Palo Alto in California, but this guy had very little to do with higher education even though he was a mastermind, but that was only in his own world and he was as easy to read as a comic book. Hemingway said that you have to be nice to the people you write about, but I was no Hemingway, and Stanford was constantly planning schemes and scams and cons, and he used people as puppets, or pawns on the chessboard for his own purposes, conquering by dividing people he knew. I may sound a bit too hard expressing my impressions about the guy but how do you describe someone like him in any other way? Using irony? Okay, irony it is.

I went out on the balcony to watch the rain for a moment and flies flew in through the open door and pretended not to find their way out again. Grow up. Where was I? Oh, yes - Stanford was a funny guy. I met him yesterday when he walked into Taste for Life, the restaurant I sometimes went to for breakfast. It was ten o’clock in the morning and he had probably been snorting cocaine all night again because he appeared to be sober but his eyes were bulging and he babbled like a circus monkey.

   “You look angry,” I said.

   “Yes, I had a fight with my ex. She was in the bar and left and came back with two other guys, and I said, ‘don’t bring other guys here!’” He was staring at me - “You just don’t do that!” 

   “Maybe she was trying to get you customers?”

   “No no no, this was something else.”

Stanford had been the owner of the biggest bar on Sok San for three months now, with pool tables and rock bands playing several nights a week. It was a nice establishment and I had been there with Kate now and then, and I knew most of the guys playing there. 

There was a guy, Nathan, who had helped him out starting the whole business, but he fook off with what Stanford said was a lot of money, so he also had an archenemy. Kate had helped him with getting bands to the bar because she knew the musicians playing at The Laundry Bar on the other side of the river and they were all very nice guys and great at what they did onstage. Stanford was grateful for her help even though he didn’t pay her anything but he gave her a beer now and then. 

When Kate flew back to Australia for a few months Stanford was angry with her for not helping him anymore and he made up stories to make her feel sympathy for him and come running back to help him with the bar, stories that all of a sudden involved me. He sent her a picture of Nathan, whom I had never met, with me badly photoshopped into the picture sitting together in a bar on Sok San. It was like - look they are together, obviously ganging up on me. 

“What about the photoshopped picture?” I asked Stanford.

   “What picture?”

   “You know what picture - the pic where you photoshopped me sitting together with this guy I have never met.”

   “Oh… it was my ex who sent me that picture. She found it somewhere on the internet.”

   Bullshit.

   “It was a bad photoshop, didn't you see it was fake?”

   “Yes, of course.”

   “So, why did you send it in the first place if you knew it was fake?”

   “Can I have a cigarette?”

   “I’m not happy about it.”

   A guy with an amputated arm walked in to the restaurant with his right hand outstretched and Stanford barked twice - “Fuck off! FUCK OFF!” 

   It was embarrassing and Lily, the owner, gave the beggar a few notes, looking at me, rolling his eyes.

   This was leading nowhere and Stanford was out of it anyway, high on coke and no sleep. All of a sudden I saw the whole scene as very comical - I looked at Stanford’s cherub face with the silly haircut that made him look like a schoolboy, he had two missing teeth in the lower jaw (why the hell didn’t he get some dental work if he was so well off? Or maybe he wasn’t?) and I started laughing and my anger drained away. 

   Later I would blame myself for letting him off so easily because he deserved a punch on the nose, but there were people in the restaurant and I had known Lily for years. And there were surveillance cameras. We would meet again though. Maybe somewhere with no cameras.

   But then I had a conversation with myself for a second opinion and decided not to do anything about it at all.       

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.

The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated – Mark Twain

Everybody around seemed to have fever attacks and headaches, Toby, Mervin, Jade and Carolyn, to only name a few.

   I was down for two days with a temperature and a splitting headache that felt like having spikes hammered through my temples. Taking a walk to the balcony and back to my room was like climbing a mountain. So I stayed indoors watching Timeless, a series where the crew use a time machine to go back to different historical events trying to stop The Rittenhouse gang from changing the past in order to create a worldwide dictatorship in the present day. It is a great show and when I finished the last episode of season two it was like having to say bye to old friends. But the good thing was that I had recovered from whatever hit me.

Carolyn came back from work. She said,

   ”I had the most horrible day today – tired with no energy and this headache is driving me mad.”

   ”I told Toby that the Government is using Siem Reap as a test site to observe the impact of different viruses on the population.” It was a conspiracy theory even I didn't take that seriously. I gave her an Aspirin and we went down to the restaurant. We had a draft talking about important things, like where to eat tonight.

   Jade came by. She sat down and ordered a beer. ”I'm so tired today, and my head is a mess. I can't think straight.”

   ”We all have the same thing,” Carolyn said. They started the speed conversation I was used to with these two girls. They had known each other for only a short time but they chatted like sisters who have spent a lifetime together, and I thought it was lovely. It happened sometimes that people on Sok San Road mixed up these two happy ladies thinking Carolyn was Jade, and Jade was Carolyn.

   Then something else happened. Jade got a text from Hank, a friendly chap from Australia who has been around for years. She looked horrified. She said,

   ”Arthur is dead! Look!” She showed us the text that read 'He is gone, died last night'. I couldn't believe it. My longtime Dutch friend wasn't around anymore. She texted back: 'Are you sure?' and the reply was 'Yes, he was conscious for a while but then he just closed his eyes'. He apparently passed away in the hospital. We were in shock. I had met him only two days ago at Taste For Life, a restaurant where Arthur spent his mornings before going to Blue Bar, and he paid back the fiver he owed me.

   ”At least he gave me back the money I lent him before he died,” I said, but the girls didn't think it was that funny at all.

   ”They are having a memorial at Sway Away,” Jade said. ”Hank is there now. We must go there.”

   I had tears in my eyes, remembering the happy moments I'd spent with Arthur, and we were all sobbing quietly for a while. Arthur hadn't been well for some time – he had a bad leg, an infected foot the size of an American football, and he was all skin and bones, not looking healthy at all. We walked over to the bar and Hank was there. We were all hugging each other uttering sad words with sad faces.

   ”I'm so sorry to hear about this,” I said. ”Arthur was a dear friend of mine and he was too young to die.”

   ”What are you talking about?” Hank said. ”Arthur was my father and you never met him. He was ninety-four when he passed away.”

The next night when I was walking upstreams on Sok San Road I spotted Arthur sitting at Taste For Life. I walked in and shook his hand. He was probably on his sixth or seventh pastis because he was in a rhetorical mood.

   ”Obviously the rumours about your death are slightly exaggerated,” I said.

   ”Who told you I was dead?”

   I told him.

   ”Well, you can tell them to go and fuck themselves.” That was Arthur alright.

The lives of most men are determined by their environment – Somerset Maugham

When the occasional rains came they were brutal, viscious and unforgiving, so people were running for shelter where ever they could find it. Most people were laughing, watching the hard showers that were like alien attacks from the sky, and they hurt too. Huge drops, and they came down like bullets. There were those who did not laugh when nature showed some of its powers, but they were of the negative and misogynistic kind, so who cared about what they were thinking anyway.

   The monsoon always brought back happy memories, pictures I thought I had forgotten because they were buried somewhere in the back of my mind – only to be awoken by the thunder and the sudden showers, and after the rains the air was always fresh and clean, smelling like flowers, almost like a rose garden with the trees and the plants vibrating with joy. The tropical rains were my Madeleine cake.

   The Madeleine cake is a classic from the famous series of novels by the French writer Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Times where he discusses how your senses sometimes connect to memories from your past. Proust dips the Madeleine cake into a cup of tea, has a bite of the biscuit and the smell and the taste suddenly bring him back to his childhood days.

The monsoon season was over now and the rains were gone already, for a couple of weeks. There was a heat wave and we spent time in the pool at JaMe Hotel and Spa, where I had a room at the end of the corridor on the first floor. Carolyn was my next door neighbour and Toby had a room next to the balcony facing Sok San Road.

There was a ghost house next to us. It was a huge building painted in marine blue. It used to be a hotel too. Now it was closed and it must have a dark history, because in the evenings when you were sitting by the pool, haunted souls - invisible to the untrained eye, came flying out through the darkened windows of the ghost house. They would fly to our side of the wall and make swoops over the pool. Sometimes they could get into bodies and suck on the energies of people who were not aware of them and not being prepared for the attacks. I was immune because I could see them so they avoided me like the plaque. But I could also see the sudden changes with some of the guests who were being possessed by the disembodied spirits of former residents of the blue house.

   Carolyn for example. She had blue eyes, but when she was attacked by the demons her eyes turned gray and she became restless and argumentative, repeating her complaints about this or that, it could be about anything – about the staff adding things on her tab that were not supposed to be there, or me spending too much time on the computer, or me changing the corrections she made on my texts – giving monologues in a whispering monotonous voice. It was horrifying, and the first time it happened I tried to laugh at it,

   ”The bitch hour comes early this year.”

   The complaints would wear off as the spirits went back to spend the light of the day in their haunted house, ruminating on the energies from their feast on the previous night.

The balcony outside our rooms was facing the dusty Sok San Road.

   ”It's a dusty road,” I said. ”You can see the gray clouds of dust hovering over the street.”

   ”It's dusty everywhere in Cambodia,” Toby replied. He was from Denmark and I met him seven years ago when we both stayed at The Prom Roth Inn, on the other side of the river, off Wat Bo Road. He had spent the winter season in South East Asia for the last thirteen years.

   I was sipping from a can of Cambodia beer and Toby had a cup of coffee on the table. He has Lyme disease so he cannot drink any alcohol because booze makes him sick and bedridden for days afterwards. ”The restaurants and hotels keep watering the dusty dirt roads, which in turn creates huge potholes and erosion given all the traffic.”

   ”Yes. And I start coughing every time I walk out on the street.” I love Siem Reap, with all the familiar faces around you, but there is this dust that makes people cough and constantly blow their noses. It is fourteen hours to the beach, and sometimes I miss the ocean and the fresh air. But there are pools around here everywhere.

   ”I'm going down to the pool,” Toby said. ”Are you coming?”

   We went down to the pool and Lun, the local guy was there. He is one of the staff here, he confuses orders and sometimes he pours beers that are flat. Now there were also trainees, two young girls from some village in the outskirts of Siem Reap, and Lun was training these girls. So the beers got even flatter for a while.

It was a lovely place though, and Mervin the owner was a great guy. He is from Mauritius and he ran the hotel like the captain of a ship with a tight, but gentle hand. He was constantly training his staff and they needed the training too because some of them didn't speak any English and had never worked in a restaurant before. He is a good looking guy with a constant smile on his face and he goes to the gym so the muscles are bulging under his shirt. He has the same haircut as Bond in Dr No, with a fringe of black hair hanging down his left eye. He is always in the restaurant and his beautiful Khmer wife, Jamiefer, is often behind the bar.

   ”Hello Merv, how are you today?”

   ”Good! You?”

   He showed me pictures on his phone of two huskie puppies he was going to bring to the hotel in a few weeks. They were furry and loved the cold climate in Greenland. I had seen quite a few huskies around, but how could they stand the everlasting heat?

   ”They need ice. I put ice in a box and they lie there enjoying themselves.” He laughed.

   ”Can I get you something?”

   ”A draft, please.” I sat down next to Toby on one of the sunbeds facing the pool.

   ”So, how come you can't swim? Are you shitting me?”

   ”No, I'm not shitting you. I was occupied with other stuff when I was a kid.” He told me about playing computer games, driving rally cars, flying hot air balloons, and focussing on the stock market where he made enough dough to start the enterprises that gave him the money he has today. Sometimes he would stay up late waiting for the American stock market to open.

   He looked like a hippie though, with his gray hair in a ponytail, dressing in singlets, shorts and flip flops like the rest of us did. He has lost twenty kilos since I met him the first time. He has Lyme disease. Toby told me that some of the richest guys in the world dressed like bums.

   ”I do too, but it's not because I'm rich, and when I was a kid we used to lie down in the tall grass, run through bushes and spend the whole day in the fields and the forest, but we never got any ticks on our bodies.”

   ”There are more of them today and the number is increasing rapidly.”

   ”Perhaps because of the climate change?”

   ”Possibly. And they are evolving. You can get different diseases from ticks today. I got a number of different strains from the tick bite and Lyme is the worst in my case,” Toby said. ”But the climate change alarmists are talking a lot of bullshit. Where are all the scientists they are referring to? You get numbers, but no names.”

   ”In my country they are banning plastic straws and increasing the tax on plastic bags. But ninety percent of the plastic in the oceans come from the ten biggest rivers in North Africa and Asia. There is something to work on here. Instead, the politicians in Europe are trying to make everybody feel guilty about the climate change – so they can tax them even more to pay for whatever is going on there. They are holding the voters by their necks.” I was thinking of the breakfast we had earlier.

   ”Somebody came from behind and he twisted my neck in the middle of a 'hello'.”

   ”Nico.”

   ”Yes. It was really nice to see him again. But I can still feel the twist.”

   ”Oh, I feel so sorry for you.”

   ”Yeah yeah yeah... Want to take a walk to the cinema? Just to see what they are showing,” I said.

   We did, and a few days later we went to see the new Jumanji.   

   Afterwards Toby said,

   ”How the hell did you manage to fall asleep in the middle of the movie? You were out for half an hour.”

   ”Really? I thought it was only five minutes.”

   ”It was not five minutes.”

   Apoa's was on the left now. We made a stop here.   

   Apoa was a fine looking local woman in her late thirties and she shook my hand,

   ”Hello. How are you?”

   ”Cold. We went to the movies.” The air conditioning at the cinema was always set at super cold.

   ”Oh, I see... but I want to ask you a question. Do you want to come here and play the guitar on the twenty-seventh? It's going to be a party and there will be somebody else playing the guitar too.”

   ”Maybe...” I was hesitating. ”Okay. Of course.” She had a guitar inside the restaurant and I had been practising on it for a few hours in the last weeks. Sometimes I got a free beer for playing for her customers. And she really knew how to cook meatballs. I'm talking food here, and the meatballs with mash and onion cream sauce was always delicious.

When Carolyn came back from work I mentioned the party. She had the dish a couple of days ago, and she said it was the best meal she'd had in Siem Reap. Ever.

   ”Ever?”

   ”Yes. Ever.”

   ”Good. Toby ordered the meatballs for the three of us. He didn't even ask me about it, he just assumed things. Do you think we should go?”

   ”Of course,” Carolyn said. ”Let's do it.” Two days later we were supposed to be there at four, and we eventually arrived at quarter past eight. Toby was there and he was not so happy about it, because he had arranged the whole thing. But it was only rock'n'roll and later he said that most of the artists never showed up on time anyway.

The restaurant downstairs at JaMe had dressed up for Christmas – there were lights, decorations, the happy smiles and every staff member was wearing jingle bell hats, including Mervin.

   ”I'll have a double Jagermeister,” I said. ”What will you have?”

   ”I'll have a double vodka,” she said.

   Mervin sat down. He talked like there was nothing to worry about. But there was something. Carolyn would explain later. She said,

   ”He wants to have a baby but his wife doesn't want to. She already has two children of her own.”

   ”The young boy and the girl always around the restaurant? They look like happy kids.”

   ”Yes, and yes. I think they are.”

   The burgers came to the table. It took a while, they had to go out to get the cheese because they had run out.

   ”I had a swim today. I might actually be the best swimmer in the house.”

   ”In your dreams.” She showed me pictures on her Facebook page about the beach life in Cape Town and she was surfing on some of the photos. She looked great.

   ”What else are you good at?” she said.

   ”I might also be the best bullshitter in the house.”

   ”Well, that I know already.”

JaMe was a nice place to stay at. Then Carolyn and I met Jade on Sok San Road. She was back in Cambodia for months. She and Carolyn connected immediately because they both have Irish blood. And the next day Jade moved into Carolyn's room for a few nights. It was hard to find a room during the holidays and Carolyn never spent much time there anyway so it was a convenient arrangment. My life was slowly turning into being determined by my surroundings. So I decided to learn how to make compromises again.   

   But that is not what happened. Somehow the unholy spirits had also found their way into my room.

When Tony Cox went through his training to become a super spy he was exposed to all kinds of situations, challenges of course, to see if he was of The Right Stuff. It wasn't so bad and the final tazer test only made him tickle a little. This was not The FBI though.

   Then, along came Carolyn. He met her here in Siem Reap, he was trying to remember if they had met before and when she told him that she couldn't find a decent plate of mashed potatoes in the town he knew she was talking code. He took her to The Red Piano.

   She loved the mustard and honey glazed ribs that come with a mountain of mash, and he did too. He had probably had it ten times in the last two years. That was when he had patiently been waiting for his contact person to show up. Possibly.

   There was small talk and then he asked her a few questions and it was still small talk. Innocent questions to find out who she really was. He deliberately took the conversation a little bit too far and when she was trying to control her temper, trying not to punch him in the face he knew she was the real deal. You're a sleeper agent. That's the spirit! It takes one to see one.

   ”So, what do you do for a living?”

   ”I'm a medical doctor by profession but I haven't practised for twenty years”, she said. ”This mash is sublime...”

   ”I know a lot of doctors and you don't use half the amount of the curse words they do. Are you sure you are a real doctor?”

   ”Of course. Why would I lie about a thing like that? Let's Google and I'll show you.” She was upset with him now and she had every right to be too. Cox wanted to slap himself in the face.

   ”I believe you and now, if you'll excuse me I'll just go to the bathroom and shoot myself in the head.”

   He realized her job at the hospital was the perfect cover for what she was doing for The Organization.

Many of the aliens all over the globe knew perfectly well how to act as humanoids, but a simple screen showed that their bodies did not consist of many of the components that made the human body work. But there was usually carbon. In most places carbon seems to be the universal glue in order to create life.

   Some of the molos were perfect examples of what mother nature comes up with when the conditions are right and many of the aliens he had met were like well oiled machines as they were made up by nano robots. The nanobots were microscopic entities with a goal, they worked individually as well as they cooperated with the rest of the body. Like a bee hive or an anthill. Turned up to superspeed, that is.

   Some had two brains. One for killing and one for praying. They lacked imagination and any sense of humour so they were also arrogant. At Io they would slash your throat to please their god, but that was only one of many different possible futures. Tony Cox was on this timeline to prevent things from turning into catastrofies. It was usually the same story – fanatics love to hate. And the idea that was poisoning their minds was always more important than the individual who might have come up with the very idea itself in the first place. On 10225TP, the mob slashed the throat of the woman who had tried to explain how to control gravity, because it was against what was said in their Holy book.

   You are an individual, and that is what makes you special. With the dreams and hopes and your plans for the future. Everyone has their unique way of looking at the world. It's a treat that should be treasured. So why give up on it?

   He was trying to understand what it was that made the warriors at Tannhauser Gate happily kill anyone, even their own kind, who did not share their version of the ”truth”. He did not get it. But Tony Cox had never been the collective type anyway.

Cox was a sleeper too, and had been for years. Now and then new assignments made him wake up and he was usually ready to go within a few hours. He always had his cabin bag packed with the necessities for a life on the road. Some of it consisted of lethal materials too, but they always passed through the check points and X-ray machines as if they were toothpaste and shaving foam.

Sometimes he was happy about the job, saving the good guys from the bad ones. They were always guys. There surely must be wives somewhere, he thought, or at least female versions, where ever they came from. Maybe they were home cooking and breeding new alien babies. What the hell did he care? Alright – he felt a little bit sorry for the wives because the sometimes vicious life forms you meet on your travels through the multiverse were mostly built on patriarcial societies. Everybody knew how to handle a knife though – the wives in the kitchen and the men, to slash a throat whenever there was an opportunity to get away with murder.

   But sometimes he also felt bad about the work he was doing in order to save humanity – he could not have long lasting relationships and he always had to be ready to be on the go. The assignments always came to him in his dreams, because using telepathy was the most secure way of sending a message.

   This was what he was living for though, saving the planet from the bad guys. Sometimes The Organization sent someone to help him out during a mission. He realized that Carolyn was his contact person. This must be big. But he did not have all the details yet. The only thing he knew so far was that there was a vicious species from Proxima Centauri who were using the ancient energies of Angkor Wat to create havoc and destruction in this part of the world. It was a take over. His mission was to eliminate them. Who they were, and what they looked like he did not know yet.

   He decided to tell her what he knew so far.

   ”This is a huge load of bullshit”, she said. ”Do you even believe one single word of what you are talking about right now?”

   Of course she would say that. She was a professional, and there were eyes and ears everywhere.

   ”No. But do you know who my father is?”

   ”Who is your father?”

   ”Mick Jagger.”

   ”Hah hah haa! Let's pay and go and get a drink somewhere.”

   That was the other part of the secret code. He was happy to have her sitting next to him. Guys passing by their table were staring at her – the blonde hair, the pretty face that combined calm thoughtfulness with spiritual energy coming from the invisible tentacles. Her body was a race car. But they were tourists so they did not worry him at all. No aliens around, so far.

   ”Okay. Let's go.”

   They paid and left the restaurant. They needed to have a staff meeting. Later she would explain to him that time itself was merely an illusion, but he already knew that. And all of a sudden he remembered where he had seen her before. They had met in the future.

And the aliens at Angkor? Cox spotted them and what happened to them later, nobody knows. Some other people came and finished the job.

   ”That would be enough for one day”, Carolyn said. ”Are you eating tonight?”

   ”Of course. What would you like to have?”

   ”I love pizza.”

Tony Cox was hanging off the cliff holding on to the last branch in the world trying to focus at anything than the hungry void a few hundred metres below. Pull out that granade, count to three and drop it. How about that? Was he pleading to his personal Guardian Angel? Repeating the chant from the Army days? Was he talking in his sleep? It was a blind anyway, without the spikes, shells and metal, screws, razorblades that cut your body into pieces, but it still held the power to change gravity for a brief moment. The blast made him weightless, it pushed him in the right direction and when it all was over he wouldn't be able to hear a thing for the nex few hours. He busted his knee landing back on safe ground. It was a brief pain. He brushed away the dust from the torn clothes on his body. He tried to recall where he was only a moment ago. Where am I now? Oh, yes...

I fell asleep in mid jump between CPH and BKK. It was a good sleep, with a few vivid dreams too and when we landed it was early morning in the capital of the Land of The Smiles. People still smile here but not as much as they used to some forty years ago. Now they smile when they see the bundle of cash in your hand.

   At Suvarnabhumi International Airport it's convenient to take the escalator up to Departures for a cab, instead of walking out thru Arrivals where the helpful taxi mafia relieves you of another hundreds of bahts for making you stand in a queue waiting for your ride into town.

   The Highway took me to Rambuttri in half an hour, and it always brought back memories traveling at high speed above the rooftops, watching the giant skyline grow rapidly in the distance. I loved Bangkok, but I had mixed feelings about the place after being here at least fifty times over the years – it was polluted, the traffic was heavy, there were the usual scammers, but if you had some good friends here you would certainly have a good time. Now there was nobody I knew here. Everybody had relocated, some to the islands, some back to Laos, one girl had got married to an American, and Shandy had been drunk for years so I was not sure he remembered me at all anymore. I met him on Rambuttri and he was staring at me with his red shot eyes like I was a stranger and possible prey.

Tony Cox decided to keep a low profile for the time being. He was not enterily alone here. There was this other entity inside of him trying to rack his brains, so he was biding his time. Later, he said to himself. Soon.

Carolyn said, ”'Where?”

   ”Anywhere. Pizza?”

   ”Yes, I love pizza! It's already in the fridge!”

   ”What is?”

   ”This conversation!” She laughed and slapped me on the shoulder. ”Joking”, she said having a sip the fine Ukranian vodka.

   We had been talking about serious matters, like – how to enhance her principal's vocabulary using the F-word. But now she had gotten her job back and we were happy about it so we celebrated with some Ruskov.

She was from South Africa and she she used to surf the cold waters off the coast of Cape Town.

   ”Does it sometimes get to fifteeen or sixteen?”

   ”Never.”

   ”What about the sharks?”

   ”The sharks don't worry me, they're not around where I surf. They're at the next bay.” She wasn't scared of the sharks. But surely they could easily swim from one bay to another?

   ”So it doesn't worry you? The big waves, the sharp corals, the dangerous animals?"

   ”No, never. I'm never worried about surfing there. And there are no corals where I go. It's sand. If you fall off your board the worst thing that can happen is you hit sand.”

   I remembered falling off my board so many times I was happy not to have them in my nightmares. It was like being thrown around inside a washing machine. And sometimes you had to hold your breath up to a minute. It happened so often I started counting the seconds, one Missisippi, two...

   ”Last time I saw you had broken both of your feet falling down seventeen stairs. And now you are down with Dengue Fewer. What's next?”

   ”There's nothing next. I think I had my share. Why do you ask?”

Tony Cox knew the right places to go. Draft Bar was his favourite bar. And so it was for many other people too. The attractions of this 24 hour open establishment were made up by the bar in the middle, the pool table and the girls. Tony Cox shared a mutual interest with the rest of the crowd. Everybody was looking for something.

I liked it the way her smile connected to the eyes. Like she was thinking of something fun most of the time. ”Don't take everything so fuckin' seriously”, she would have said if I asked her. Maybe.

   This was after working hours. Carolyn came back, wearing a stylish black outfit, knocked on my door, tired but full of life. Black blouse, black skirt, black shoes. Low heels. She was 1.76.

   Sometimes we went out to have something to eat and drink, and she laughed when I was joking, because she knew the difference between what you say and who you are.

   ”What happened?”

   ”They said they had a demand for English teachers.”

   She had been fired for taking too many days off. Because of the Dengue fewer that had put her to bed for two weeks. She was still recovering. But a week ago she had the shakes and the tremors and shivers she got from the three striped big mosquito. There is nothing funny about it, but when she was trying to move around in the room she looked like an extra in a zombie movie. She was feeling bettter now. This was Cambodia – you get sacked because you are too sick to work.

   But she had her job back the next day, and she had mixed feelings about it. ”I was prepared to never work again, and here I am.”

   ”Back on the chain gang?”

   ”Not really. I love the students. But it's hard work. I teach 350 students every day, and I work from seven in the morning till seven at night.”

   She spent her days at the school, five days a week. She put in a lot of hours there. Then it was when I found myself counting the hours until she would be back from work I realized I was in trouble.

What about the boys at Blue Bar? They will be there tomorrow. Sometimes, if you are lucky, you will hear the most fantastic stories from these guys. Blue Bar is a revolver spinning around it's own chamber. And Tony Cox, well, he knew about Blue Bar too.

                 I'm not young enough to know everything – Oscar Wilde

I diagnosed myself with a slight case of melancholia or loneliness or whatever the hell this was about – then she knocked on the door and all of a sudden my temporary sadness was gone.

   The last week in Cambodia, at, and around Garden Village had been a whirlwind, like a song by Ian Dury, and it had left me emotionally drained.

   That was Siem Reap. This was Pattaya.

   ”Kita...”

   ”Hello...”

   I hadn't seen her for a few years and she looked great. She was as tiny as they come in this part of the world and I didn't mind – I like them big or small or old or young as long as they have a good heart. She was dressed in a smart outfit, a combo wearing the look of a business girl on a night out on the town. I knew about her passion and now she had her own clothing store and everything else that came with it, so she picked whatever she wanted to wear for the occasion.

   ”I'm so happy to see you and you are so beautiful!”

   ”And you, handsome man.” Whatever that meant.

   ”You have changed, for the better... Your eyes – they are blue!”

   ”Contact lenses.” Marine blue eyes, but they looked good with her clothes, colours that went well together with her smooth tanned skin. I told her.

   ”Thank you. I offered here some water. She saw the uke and said, ”Play the song.”

   ”The song?”

   ”The song you wrote about me. I want to hear it.”

   I played the song. One More Time. It's more than three minutes but she listened attentively till I finished and she clapped her hands.

   ”Thank you.” She repeated – ”One More Time... I remember – I sleep very good with you,” she said and I remembered her soft skin.

   ”Yes, we used to sleep all the day.”

    She made that sound like an elevator going up a sky scraper. Same laughter as before.

We talked for an hour and when we touched her skin was velvet.

   ”I see you tomorrow after I close the shop. I'll buy you dinner, because now I have my own money.”

   ”Really? I'm looking forward to that.”

The next night we were sitting at a steak house close to my hotel. I said: ”You always wanted your own shop and now you have it. That's why you look so happy, don't you?”

   ”Yes. But now it's low season so not so many customers. Come and have a look tomorrow.”

   I enjoyed her company, as always, and she had changed. She moved with grace as always and now I could see the happiness in her eyes. She looked younger than four years ago. Now she was thirty-eight. Like a revolver of 0.38 caliber. It's funny, but sometimes it happens – some people look younger, for different reasons, than they used to do.

   I ordered fish that tasted mackarel, with salad and rice. She ordered the same without the rice but with a slice of toast bread.

   ”Where I live, in Siem Reap, it's river fish and it tastes like mud. This is very nice.”

   ”You like?”

   ”I love it!” I ordered another soda water. ”So, tell me about this shop.”

   ”Come to see it tomorrow. It's next to Big C. Central Pattaya. Come at seven because then I have not so much to do.

I walked over there, it took me a while to find it walking from Big C, the mega super mall and I found the boutique on the road leading back to my hotel. It was freshly painted and she had arranged the clothes and accessories in a beautiful fashion. It was like walking into the dressing room backstage of a theatre where they keep everything you need for the play.

   ”Hello”, she said and gave me a hug.

   ”Kita – this is nothing like next to the Bic C. The Big C is a long way from here.”

   ”No, only five minutes walk.”

   ”Five minutes walk is not next to the Big C.”

   She laughed and slapped me on the shoulder. ”Come, outside I show you it's not far.”

   ”I came that way. So, how is business?”

   ”I had some customers before but now quiet. Why is your fly open?” She was looking at my crotch.

   ”I have to zip it up all the time because I have no belt. Do you have any belts?”

   ”Look. You can choose.” I chose one I liked. ”How much?

   ”Hundred bath.”

   I put on the belt and gave her the money. She laughed and whisked the bill around. ”Money to the shop!” I was happy to buy something I really had some use for. The day before I had bought two pairs of jeans shorts at a at mall she had shown me a few years ago when she used to show me around in Pattaya. They were 150 bath each but still needed a belt. We sat down next to the fan.

It was a beautiful shop. She had arranged it all herself and she looked happy about it. We were sitting inside, she closed the door, put the air con and the fan on because it was hot outside. We sat at the table and she was putting right the bottles for colouring your eye lashes – ”This is your colour”, she said.

   ”It will make me look like a lady boy.”

   ”No. It's your colour. You have blue eyes.”

   ”So did you last night. You had blue eyes”

   She made that click click sound with her tongue when she was joking or feeling pleasure.

”Where is your girlfriend”, she asked.

   ”What girlfriend?”

   ”The girl on your Facebook.”

   ”She is not my girlfriend. We are friends.”

   ”She looks very nice. So why you don't have a girlfriend?”

   ”I travel too much. Where is your boyfriend, the German guy?”

   ”He's back in Germany. He come back in seven months.”

   ”You been together like... five years?”

   ”Yes, so that's why I don't go boom boom.” I had a different memory from a few years ago, but I said, ”And now you have this boutique.”

   ”Yes, but before I didn't have this shop. I only had it for two years.”

   ”I'm so happy for you. This is what you talked about all the time, remember? When we went to Bangkok and you did the shopping in Chinatown to buy gems, You had this idea all the time. You wanted to open your own shop.”

   ”Yes.”

   ”And then your Papa died and your money went to the funeral...”

   ”Yes.” She looked sad for a brief moment. ”I had to start again...”

   I dared to asked the question – ”Are you in love with the German guy?”

   ”Not really. He's a good man – but he likes to drink beer and smoke cigarettes and he is sometimes a butterfly.” A butterfly of course means a man who goes with other women.

   ”And you don't care?”

   ”No, it's up to him. When he comes here he sometimes goes to Walking Street and goes with other women.”

   ”So – you're not really in love with him, are you?”

   ”Not really. But he sends me money sometimes.”

   ”Have you ever been in love?” That was the key question. Someone else had once told me that they had never been in love in their whole life.

   ”No. I don't think so.”

   It was an enigma. How can anyone understand somebody else's feelings if they never have experienced the same emotions themselves?

   But, what did I know.

We hugged bye and I walked back to Big C, down the street, back on third road to the night market where I had the best deep fried chicken I've ever had. With sticky rice. I'd had it five times in the last week. I loved this delicious food.

   Does it count as love? I guess not, but it was very good. Maybe that is enough for more than only a few people.

Where Traveler goes to the South in search of beauty but only finds a ghost town. He ends up meditating on the running water in front of him and comes up with the not so original idea – life is a river.

Traveler was his name. And why not? There are many Trevors and Tyrones but to his knowledge he was the only Traveler.

If there is a god, he thought, he probably has some kind of a narcissistic personality disorder. And if she is a goddess, then she is an attention whore. Just talk to any deeply religious person you meet and you'll know what I mean. A totally sane god or goddess, with all the power that comes with being almighty, wouldn't like millions of delusional fanatics following them. So, maybe the multiverse is being run by the devil after all? As they say in the movie The Usual Suspects: ”The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was to convince the world he didn't exist.” And do we have any kind of proof of some super powers at work? No. It doesn't necessarily say I'm right, only stating a fact here.

   And Traveler was not a hardcore ateist either; he believed in the energies floating around us. Some would label it as physics or chemistry. Or Shamanism. He trusted these things because he had first hand encounters with these matters, and they usually came to him half way through a bottle of good Russian vodka.

By the way, it was hot like hell. Traveler checked into Footprints at Otres two, and he was lucky to get a room because it was The Cambodian New Year and all places he'd been to were fully booked.

   The owner was a blond woman in her sixties with a British accent. ”I don't know where my staff is. Where is the girl? And the guy called in sick today.”

   ”The sickness is spelled hangover”, I said thinking about The New Year. She flashed her white teeth, ”I'm going to call them, I need them here. But let me show your room first.”

Traveler walked the ten metres to the beach and the sea was there and it had been there for ever. The land had mostly been taken over by the Chinese today. He took a walk over to Otres one. The bungalows on the beach were 20 dollars last year, now they were 30. Across the road Ross and Traveler paid 15 each for the nice rooms. He talked to the manager, a khmer guy with a happy smile. He said:

   ”Yes, I remember you from last year. There is a new owner now, he's Chinese. They put in air cons in the rooms and now they are charging 35 dollars a night.”

   ”That's a bit steep,” Traveler said and took a sip of the Cambodian beer bottle.

   ”Yes, it is. I want to treat everybody nice. Every room is full now, with Chinese people.”

   ”Are they nice?”

   ”Some are, some are not.” He shrugged his shoulders and for a moment his happy smile was gone. ”But what can I do?”

But it was Sihanoukville that was the ghost town. Traveler had never seen a city change so fast. The seafood restaurants were gone, so were the guest houses, supermarkets and the beach. No one walked there anymore because the stench of the garbage dumps made you want to throw up.

   Instead, shops and restaurants with the rounded Chinese letters, where the new holidaymakers were slurping noodle soups like there was no tomorrow. Cranes everywhere working on the skeletons of the new skyscrapers. Traveler looked for a guest house for a while but even Monkey Republic, the famous back packer place was gone. Somebody said:

   ”Everybody escaped to Kampot from here.” She was French. ”I wanted to share a taxi to Kampot yesterday so we could pay 40 dollars each, eighty for the taxi, but nobody wanted to go. So I'm still here.” She didn't look like she cared anyway, and Traveler didn't care what she was up to, with that stoned look on her face, so he said, ”Good luck to you.” ”You too.”

   Traveler walked up to the first travel agent on the street and they said eight dollars to Kampot.

   The mini van took him there in less than two hours.

The day before, at Otres two, his phone started ringing, messages on Facebook, and they all said the same thing – Papa John just passed away. Traveler had known Papa John for years in Siem Reap and it was a sad day for us all. He died of the cancer that had been there like an alien force for years. Traveler was not feeling so good now.

   ”Keep it, Papa John had said about the ukulele. I can't play anyway.” He stepped into the the tuk tuk outside King Kong Bar and shouted, ”Love you!” ”I love you too.”

   Traveler had this eerie feeling he would never see Papa John again. He called the uke Jane as it was the female variant of John. Now here in Kampot, he poured some vodka on the floor for absent friends and played a song on the ukulele. What a Wonderful World. Papa John loved that song.

   Traveler stepped outside on the balcony overlooking the intersection and smoked a cigarette. People were walking and driving around, but nobody never looks up. It's a good thing too, because no one saw the tears in his eyes.

   Enough of this, he thought, let's go down to the river. But he only made it 25 metres, and he was soon talking to a lovely couple at one of the restaurants. They were from New Zeeland, John and Erin, eyes with a good sparkle. They had been here for four months and they looked like a happy couple.

   ”I'll have a draft, please”, Traveler said to the happy waitress.

Shape without form, shade without color, Paralyzed force, gesture without motion – T.S. Eliot

This text is going to be a bit jumpy. Sometimes time and places are being mixed up and that's the way it's supposed to be. If you want a straight timeline - like: we woke up and went for breakfast, then we went for a walk, and then she bought some milk and I had a draft, and it was a lot of fun - you might as well stop here and now, because this is not for you. But if you choose to keep on reading, well here we go:   

People flew away in all kinds of different directions. Torben, the Danish guy flew to Vietnam; Dave to China; Thomas to Thailand; Jade to the islands and Kate flew to Bali via Bangkok. She said,

   ”I'll be back in Phnom Penh in a month. I have a poncho I don't want to take with me – could you keep it for me until I come back?”

   ”Of course.”

   As an afterthought she said, ”And if I don't see you, just leave it behind.”

It was a nice poncho. And a few nights ago she had said – now she was petting a cat she knew from previous sessions in the market on the other side of the river – ”I sometimes love animals over people.”

   A lot of people did. And they were right to do so too, because Sok San Road was turning into a freak show. I just didn't realize it yet.

   ”Cats?”

   ”Yes”, she said ”– my favourite animals are cats. Then dogs. You're number three.” She laughed. She was watching me now and how I would react on her teaser. I probably dissapointed her by not reacting at all. But later I would tell her about the halal thing, just to see how she reacted – how they skin an ox alive, hanging on a hook, screaming in terror, even after they have cut his throat because they want to see the blood.

   ”Stop”, she said. ”Please, not now.”

   She was right. We were at Natural House and the omelettes and eggs benedicts landed on the table.

We stayed five nights together in the same room so of course we talked. She said,

   ”People change. Everything changes.”

   ”How did you feel about moving out of your 250-dollar a month apartment?” I asked.

   ”Nothing." She had told me that she never looked back. Obviously there were some things that didn't change. "How did you feel about moving out of yours?”

   ”Yes, I was sentimental there for five minutes.”

   ”I wouldn't expect anything less from you. Look – what does my hair look like?”

   ”It looks great!” She was back from the hairdressers. The girl had straighted out her hair so it reached down her back. ”Which do you like? This, or the other style?”

   ”I like them both. This one in the daylight and the blurred hair in the evening.”

   ”It's not blurred!” She hit me on the shoulder. ”Blurred is not the right word!”

   ”Thanks for bringing it to my attention. Are you sure?” Maybe her hair was only blurring my vision?

   "No. What are you saying?”

   ”I don't know. Something about your hair. You could shave it off and I would still like you. The night hair is wavy. Does it feel hot when it's like that?”

   ”Yes it does.” The air con was set at 16 degrees, on full blast and the room had a cool feel to it. We went to to the pool. Kate said,

   ”I'm not going to drink anything today because you know... tomorrow... travelling with a hangover...”

   So I bought her four margaritas. Maybe it was the best thing to do. We were hanging in the pool area. Arthur was also there. He was waiting for his money. Kenny was waiting for his wife to arrive. And the rest of us were also waiting, for what, I don't know.

   Kate said on her second drink: ”How come we have so many common friends and we never met before?”

   ”Because I hang out with these guys.” I streched out my hand at the round table that was the very centre where the tales of King Arthur were being told. That's when he was drunk. Arthur lit a cigarette for me. I was smoking and we were sipping on our margaritas floating around like on a water planet.

   ”How do you spell rhythm?” she said. Her eyes were miscallaneous. I tried it a few times until I got it right. ”I love you”, she said ” – that's a tough one!”

   ”Yes, it's high school stuff – Oscar Wilde spelled 'jail' as 'gaol', so the spelling changed so it would sound more like the spoken word – jail.”

   This was the kind of small talk we sometimes entertained ourselves with, and she was good at expressing herself with the English language. And why wouldn't she? She was a native speaker. And she knew some nice words and how to put them together too. And I was happy she was not using the 'fuck' word all the time. She was working in Perth as a teacher with young criminals. She had told me she had been to fifty-four countries. "I lived in Hong Kong for four years. They kicked me out from South Korea because I was working without a permit."

”Do you know why some expats get crazy over here?” Kate said. We were having some Jameson in the room, taking silly photos with the gargantuan lamp above as. I'm not sure why the lamp was there and what it was good for.

   But it was like with a lot of things here in Cambodia – there was stuff that just didn't make sense.

   Kate explained it to me:

   ”... especially here in Siem Reap and sok San Road, where you meet individuals who change by the month, simply because they have nothing else to do but hang out in the bars. It's like they create a void they are filling with drinks and beers and cigarettes and joints. A void that was not necessarily there in the first place.”

   I was thinking of a poem by T.S. Eliot. About the hollow men. But it was not the right poem now, after the drinks, because I felt like playing the ukulele – it should say – 'Mango, banana and tangerine...' The song from a James Bond movie. Dr No it is.

”You need to do some voluntary work now and then because otherwise you go crazy here in Siem Reap”, Kate said. ”I like your company. But you are totally crazy.”

   ”I'm not crazy – you are crazy.” But it was still a bucket of ice water over my head. It would take me some time to realize I was creating my own void too. We all did.

   All of a sudden the people walking up and down here on Sok San Road turned into mannequins, wax dolls, melting away in the for everlasting sun, or, well, for another five billion years or so. This was in the evening but the air was still hot. And a month was five billion years away too. She said –

   ”A few months ago I broke a few ribs and it put me to bed twenty hours a day.”

   ”What happened?”

   ”I was celebrating on my birthday party; I was dancing and the guy took me too far so I fell over a table, at the corner, and I broke some ribs. I was hurt for a long time. You changed my life.”

   ”How?”

   ”Because you took me out. I didn't see anybody for two months."

   ”So, now that your ribs are okay, how about we take a walk?", I said. Would you like to take a walk with me?”

We took a walk on the other side of the river, with night markets, hotels, restaurants and bars. At Hard Rock Café a band was going all in. We walked on and there was a closed shop with a quote from Anais Nin.

   ”See that sign?” I said. She read it aloud – ”The only human abnormality is the incapacity to love.”

   She had an answer to that: ”I love. I love cats and dogs. You are number three.” She laughed,

   ”Hahahahaa!” She thought it was funny, and it probably was too. What would it take for you to do something for me?

We had moved into the hotel connecting with Blue Bar and she was happy to use the pool. So this is the closet, – now, where is the room?

   ”Yeah, I know... and where is the kettle I was using the last time I was here?”

   It was a nice room though, and there was a big balcony just outside the door. But it was steaming in here so why not put the air con at 16 degrees and go down to the pool?

   Arthur was sitting by the pool. So was Kenny and Eric. Eric was a former English professor from Canada who had lived in Kuala Lumpur for ten years teaching at the university. Now he had been here in Siem Reap for two months. Kenny was still waiting for his wife to arrive. Arthur had no money so he was sober and attentive, listening to what people were saying.

   I asked for a beer from the lovely waitress. I told the guys, ”I don't want any rumble from this table while I'm staying here.” They were a bunch of philosophers so they didn't take it too seriously. I sat down with them and had a draft. Pet Shop Boys were playing on the speakers, Always On My Mind. Eric's thoughts about the future with Europe, ”Where is the money to pay for all this immigration in your countries? Trudeau fucked up my country pretty bad.”

   ”Yes, thanks to the bankers. The World Bank was created by The Bilderburg group, and so was the UN. By Rotschild and their buddies. George Soros is doing what he can to fuck things up. Europe is going down the drain. We are looking at the New World Order.” It was another conspiracy theory but we agreed on this one.

   I dived in to the blue water and stayed in the pool for the next few hours.

   ”I love this”, said Kate. It was around 36 degrees; the sun, the heat packing between the walls, the cool water all around you. We were floating. It was like the universe itself was talking to us at this very moment.

   She said,

   ”There is a series on Netflix I would like you to see. I was watching it early this morning when you were asleep. Can we watch it together later?”

   ”Sure, let's do it.”

   After four margaritas we were back in the room. We took showers. She said,

   ”I'm drunk now. I want to go to Draft Bar.” What happened to The OA, the tv series we were going to watch?

   I hated Draft Bar, and so did everybody else I knew. But Kate. It was open 24 hours and I could feel the sad vibes from all the lonely people who came there all the time. There were sometimes people in a strange mood and it happened that some of them confused kindness with weakness. Mostly everybody was nice though.

   ”Why do you want to go there? It's funny – you call yourself an empath... don't you sense the strange vibes floating around there?”

   ”I do. It intrigues me. And the girls love me. Why would they love me? Are you angry?”

   ”No. I'm hungry. Which girls?” The drama girls?

   ”The girls who work there, the staff. They are nice to me. Then, there are all kinds of people – the prostitutes, the ladyboys and the customers.” She wrapped a white towel around her. We hadn't had anything to eat since breakfast and now the sun was going down fast.

   ”You go to Draft Bar and I go to eat something. Leave the key in the reception and I'll see you in the morning.” I left the building,

   I met Torben on Sok San. ”Where you going?” he said.

   ”Red Angkor. Come with me.” We went to Red Angkor and he had a cup of coffee and I had the noodles. When I came back to the hotel I asked for the key to room 301 but it was not in the reception. I went into the room and she was sleeping tucked inside double blankets. The air con was at 16 degrees full blast as usual. She didn't make a sound. I wanted to give her some space so I went out again, to King Kong Bar.

   Cats, I was thinking. Cats. Cats?

On the last day, when she had packed and was about to leave the hotel room she asked me, "Are you going to miss me?"

   "Yes. And you?"

   "Yes", she said. And I remembered the very words she lived by. Never look back.  

   We never talked about Gordon anymore, so this is before all the other stuff happened:

She showed me the picture on her cell of a man in an orange dress. ”Do you know who this is?”

   ”Of course. It's Gordon. He's been around for years. He used to come all the time to the Same Same Bar. Haven't seen him for a while though. Why is he wearing the orange?”

   ”That was before, when he was in custody. Now he's back in jail. In the US.”

   ”What happened?”

   ”He was raping babies. He was wanted by the FBI for not appearing in court on charges of child abuse. He was on bail and he disappeared before the coming up on a court case on raping a four-year old girl. And he showed me photos of babies and he said he had nine babies, with different women.”

   ”What the hell? I didn't see that coming. Maybe he was raping the babies too?”

   ”Of course he was.” It was merely an assumption, but she said, ”Read the article.”

   I did. There were the photos of Gordon along with the warrant – it looked like a poster in a wild west movie – Wanted, it said, with the details; Native American, brown eyes, six feet four, 265 pounds. The poster promised 1000 dollars to anyone who could give information about his whereabouts leading to his arrest. Somehow he escaped from the States and ended up in Cambodia and Siem Reap.

   ”How did he get out of the country in the first place?”

   ”You ever heard of people in high places in the US – politicians, judges, business people? There's a list, and they are all members of a huge ring of pedophiles?”

   ”Like Pizzagate?” It was another conspiracy theory, true or not, I don't know, but Gordon was very real.

   ”That's right. And that's how he could escape. But when the guy who was protecting Gordon retired, the FBI found out he was hiding in Siem Reap, and with the help of the local police they got him. He was deported back to the US. He's looking at a very long sentence”.

   ”He had a local girlfriend here, and they had at least one kid together”.

   Kate showed me a thumb and two fingers – ”Three.”

   ”Must have been a shock to her when the cops came knocking on their door. How did you know him?”

   ”From Same Same Bar. I saw him abuse people around him, like a cat playing with a mouse.”

   ”It's funny. I never saw him do that. And he was always nice to me.”

   ”He was coming on to me, but I had this creepy feeling about him so I kept him at a distance. I guess he understood, because he messed up my hair and said, 'If I can't mess up your mind I can always mess up your hair!'”.

   It was shocking. Absolutely shocking. And how come I never saw anything strange about this man. Maybe the beers had clouded my mind?

   ”And he was always nice to you?” she said ” – I saw him treat people like crap. How come he was nice to you?”

   ”I don't know. Maybe he thought he would lose?” I wasn't sure. Gordon wasn't a kind of a guy who would take a no for an answer.

   ”It could be true”, she said. The whole story was dramatic and I had to let it sink in for a while. I wasn't feeling hungry anymore. ”Let's go to The Temple and have a beer.”

   We did. Later on our nights out on the town would be calibrating to the perfect storm and I loved every minute of it.

But now tears were beginning to well in her eyes. She said:

   ”I won this ping pong game and you did that! – l'm going home now!”

   ”Please wait. Let me explain one thing – what I meant was I want to play with you again.”

   ”I win every time and all the guys react the same way you do – they make excuses, because they don't think I can play. It's the only thing I'm good at and you wouldn't let me enjoy this moment.”

   What I had said was, ”Let's do it again when I'm sober.” I regretted it when I saw her reaction. And it didn't work as an excuse either, because we were both drunk.

   She had asked me, ”How do you look at yourself – as a happy or a sad person?”

   ”Happy.” I had a sip of the draft. We were sitting at one of the outdoor restaurants at the old market. I was faking surprise:

   ”Look – my glass is already half empty.”

   ”Hahaha!” Of course she knew about the half empty/full glass theory. Everybody does. I thought she was trying to pick my brains because she had told me that she sometimes picked people's brains just for the fun of it. It was a wasted talent. You pick people's brains only when you need to. Like when there is danger ahead. Some guy wants to fight you; you make them cry and they will buy you the next beer. There's nothing to it. It never happened here though. And maybe she just had spent too much time at the university anyway?

   ”Theories is not the reality”, I said.”

   ”Then, what is?”

She liked to compete. And she liked to win. I asked her to come with me and play a game of table tennis at Aura Bar. I thought I could win that one. But she took me to the cleaners.

   And here we are.

   Kate had the long blond hair that every local girl loved enviously; the smile; a face you could take a photo of, scramble it into pieces, put them together again and she would still be photogenic. The camera loved her. She had long legs that would happily take her for a ten mile walk any day of the week, and I should have understood there was something that was not a joke to her.

   I had gotten my ass beaten. It was a good thing too. I told her. ”It's a good thing for my ego and it's a good thing for you too.”

   ”Why?”

   ”Because now I'll have to upgrade you, hahaha! I promised you a drink if you win. Let's go and get that drink.”

   Guy was sitting at the bar. I hadn't seem him since last year. ”So, this is were you are hiding?”

   ”Yes. I don't go to Sok San Road that much anymore.”

   ”Good to see you mate. Kate, what would you have?”

   ”Jameson. With ice.”

She had told me she was an empath. I had to google it so now I said:

   ”Good for you! Have you seen Species?

   ”What is it?”

   ”A science fiction movie where they encounter an alien race that has landed here on earth. One of the members of the crew that go to meet up with the ET is an empath.”

   ”Haven't seen that one.”

   First when I had met her she talked the happy talk, chatting away, like nothing really matters. Now she was more composed and relaxed. I asked Guy if he still had his blue motorcycle. ”Yes, it's here outside.”

   ”You have a motorcycle?” asked Kate.

   They started a conversation and Lee walked into the bar. It was the same Lee who had been to Christian's place on the Mekong a few month ago when I also was there. ”I thought you'd gone back to the Mekong”, I said.

   ”I thought about it, but no, I've been here all the time. I'm staying here at Aura Bar. They have nice rooms. I've been sick. Gastric ulser.”

   ”And now?”

   ”Yeah, for the moment. I haven't had a drink for weeks.” He looked okay, a little bit worn out but the smile was the same, the smile of a skateboard pro. I wished him soon recovery and he grabbed a water and walked back to his bungalow.

   Guy paid for his water or whatever he was drinking, said bye to everyone and started staggering towards his blue trike. He was holding on to tables and chairs on his way out. He had a balance problem.

   Kate looked at me and flashed the empath eyes. We changed the subject. ”So, how many bands?” I asked.

   ”Six bands.”

A few days later we went to The Republic for the festival. Six bands were playing and we were there half past three in the afternoon. There was a beautiful garden and we were outdoors. The bar and the pool table were covered by an tin roof. More people were coming and almost everyone looked happy.

   Well, it was not like, six bands. They just changed instruments with each other and called it something different. ”Cheers!” Cans were clinking to plastic mugs. We were sitting at the musicians' table close to the scene. We had the best seats in the house. I knew some of the people playing and Kate knew most of them too.

   There was Dave on trombone, Cesar would soon join at the drums and Andy was the front guy. There was Ray on bass with a cigarette in his mouth and there was another fellow with a saxophone. They were playing reggae and ska. Message to you Rudy.

   Andy was jumping around on the floor in front of the mic with an electric guitar in his hands. Now he was bouncing up and down on his right leg with the left one in the air, and when Dave with his trombone briefly exchanged a smile with the bass player you knew it could go either way.

This festival was about caring for the environment, healthy living too and only vegan food was served – and Andy, the front guy in the band, high as a kite fucked the whole thing up. The music would end with Cesar leaving the premises because he, as a pro, wouldn't tolerate Andy's antics. I saw the change with Cesar when Andy in the middle of a song ran over to him trying to show him how to play the beat by slamming the chords in front of his face.

   Later Andy would burst into the bathroom, I was there washing my hands – ”Did I show any aggressivity on stage?”

   ”No. Not from where I was sitting. What happened to you guys on stage I don't know. I liked it. It was really good!”

   ”I want to ask you – did I show any aggressivity?”

   ”Look, I already answered your question. If you don't like the answer, don't ask the question.”

   Andy ran out of the bathroom and when I came out he was talking into the mic so everybody would hear. He said, ”I'm gonna find two more bands for you!” He took off on his bicycle.

   Dave sat down at the table. He put his trombone there too. ”What happened? I asked.

   ”I don't know how to say this...” He smiled.

   ”You don't have to say anything. You know. I know.” I glanzed at Kate. She took a sip off her Sangria. She knew too. And for a moment, a very brief moment, I was worried about how Andy was going to bring back two bands on his bicycle.

Since I had no keyword to a sentence I did not write for a while. Sometimes it's all about a single phrase, or even the single word to get you started. I had no clue. There was nothing dramatic about my everyday life. Maybe I was a bit lazy too.

   Anyway, this is what I remember from full moon.

There was a full moon above us covering the street outside The King Kong Bar, in a friendly or spooky light depending on the way you felt about things.

Moon parked his scooter outside and walked in. Moon happens to be his name. He is a local young guy and he was doing double time with the school, studying hotel management and the job in the reception at one of the big hotels on the river. His vocabulary and grammar is better than some of the ”English teachers'” I meet here all the time.

   Last year he was full of positive energy, a great smile that connected to the eyes, telling me about his plans going to France to learn more about the hotel business. The smile was still there, although he had a limp and six spikes were drilled into his left leg after a motorcycle accident a few months ago. The spikes stood out ten centimeters pointing in every direction and when he sat down at the bar they touched my right leg.

   ”Does it hurt?”

   ”No, I don't feel anything.”

   I tried it rocking one of the spikes up and down.

   ”Now?”

   ”No. Nothing.” He smiled, ”I haven't seen you for a long time, but I met with Mr Ross a few months ago, he used to come here all the time. Where is he now?”

   ”Back in the UK. He hates it. It's rainy and the cold wind...” is like spikes thru your legs. I did not say that. ”What the hell happened to you?”

   ”Everything. But I'm okay now – look!” He pulled up the the shorts and showed a long scar running down his thigh.

   ”I stayed in the hospital for a month and I thought my life was finished. Then they gave me the bill. It cost me two thousand dollars.” He was laughing now.

   ”Rain”, I said ”– give him a beer. Put it on my tab.”

   ”Of course.” Rain was a friend of Moon's too. And two thousand dollars is a lot of money. ”How did you get it?”

   ”Loans and friends and parents. I paid a thousand already and it's going to be another thousand later.”

   ”When?”

   ”When they pull she spikes out.”

   ”What happened to Paris?” All of a sudden I felt like an idiot.

   ”I missed three months in school but I've caught up. Paris is coming later”.

There was a good sparkle in his eyes, the six spears into his leg didn't seem to worry him too much either. Hotel California started playing on the speakers and we clinked glasses.

   ”What the hell is this song Hotel California about anyway? Is it about addiction?”

   ”Maybe. At the hospital they gave me morphine but I didn't like it so much.”

   ”Yeah, maybe it's up to the individual where their next kick is coming from?”

   Moon laughed and we clinked glasses again. ”Beer is good enough for me”.

   ”Mee too. How long?”

   ”Until it has healed”.

   I wished him all luck. When we had finished our drafts we promised to meet again. I told Rain I would pay her later. I left King Kong Bar, crossed the intersection on my way to Karma Bar and then I saw Jade sitting at Mc Cool's.

I hadn't seen her since last year. I was happy to see her. She stood up from the table and gave me a short hug. Her stepmother was sitting opposite of her. Stepmother. Opposite. Literally.

   Her name is Marilyn and she is a lovely lady. I whisper to Jade, ”She was very beautiful when she was young. She still looks great.”

   ”I agree”, said Jade. ”Look – I will need an excuse to get out of here. How about I meet you at Karma Bar in twenty minutes?”

   ”Of course.” It would only take her one hour to get there.

Next morning, two o'clock in the afternoon we woke up. I took her to Palm Café and after her coffee and sandwich she looked happier. We went to the mall across the street, she collected the things she needed and we took a tuk tuk to her place with the groceries and the anti bug spray.

   ”Cockroaches”, she said.

   It was looking good. Two doors on both sides of the apartment that let the breeze in, the kitchen area, a big fridge, air con and two fans against the everlasting heat.

   ”I moved in yesterday but I haven't slept here yet because I stayed at your place.” She is like a sister to me though. ”You like a beer?” She opens the fridge, hands over a can of Cambodia.

Outside there is a big veranda connecting the apartments and we sit down at the table outside her door. It's on the first floor.

   Downstairs in the yard there is a guy spray painting black tires into different colours. He starts with pink. The Catwoman walks out of her room. She is feeding twelve cats. She is from Australia, seventy-two years old but like everybody else she looks a lot younger. She has lived here for almost two years now. Downstairs from the balcony it looks like a junkyard on the left and a construction site on the right, and upstairs they are building new apartments.

   ”You must like it here...”

   ”I do. The work they do doesn't bother me”. One cat after the other is coming out thru her open door licking their mouths.

   Later Jade would explain about the coloured tires. I was just going to tell her the guy with the spray paint must be out of his nuts but she said – ”He made them as flower Plants for his daughter's birthday – they looked great! And you should have seen all the balloons! There was a big party, everybody was so happy!” Lucky me I kept my mouth shut.

Two nights later we were sitting at The Karma Bar. The music was competing with The Draft Bar next door. Jade had an answer to my rant about the aliens visiting us here on earth – I had just read an article online because I loved conspiracy theories. There were different kinds, at least seven different races of extra terrestrials, she told me. She was into conspiracy theories for the same reasons I was – why did some people take them so seriously? She said:

   ”How come they travel all this way, it could be light years, with all this advanced technology they have – and they only end up meeting country folks and rednecks?”

Dave from Wales showed up and I repeated the last thing Jade just said, simply because I thought it was funny. He shrugged his shoulders – ”I'm a redneck.”

   ”Yeah, you look it too.” I was joking – there was a curious happy shimmer in his eyes connecting to the eyes that I liked but did not yet completely understand where it came from. Bright eyes, hair reaching down his shoulders and a happy grin with a set of teeth that did not need a toothpick.

   He stretched out a hand for a high five. He was a fun guy. He would tell us about his religious beliefs. He was a Protestant Christian with some Shamanism thrown into it. Jade started a conversation with David. Sometimes she would only concentrate at one person at at time. I was almost strumming at the desk. So sing, Jade. Sometimes you make time stand still...

I took Jade and Dave to King Kong and then to The Temple. We ordered beers and drinks. Dave said: ”Just don't say you're an atheist.”

   ”I'm not. The shaman world with its connecting energies within all kinds of any life forms is all around us. Have you heard of 5G? It's also all around us. If I need to label something I would say I'm a agnostic.”

   ”Yes, the 5G is going to expose you like sticking your head into the micro wave oven. You don't want that.” But he wouldn't let me off so easily.

   ”There has to be a God to create all this.” He streched out his arms, from the street lights down to the drink in front of him. I agreed to a certain point and right now I had no need to calibrate my gun for the future, so I said simply: That's where you're wrong – if god had anything to do with the world as it looks today he would be ashamed looking himself in the mirror.” That's the Theodocity problem – if god is almighty, then why does he let all the suffering with the people on earth go on, and on? Universe is a big place and even if there is an infinit number of universes around, and different dimensions too – why can't god look after all this, if he really is almighty?

   I remembered an old tv show with Isaac Singer and Anthony Burgess discussing the subject, and they agreed that if god is almighty he also gave the best gift to humankind he ever could give us – the free will.

   ”We are ready when you are”, said Burgess to the camera men and the producer said, ”We are done.” It was fifty minutes.

   ”But, you see”, said Dave – ”God is not looking at himself in the mirror. He jus started it all.”

   ”Then we agree. He's a lazy god though.” We did a fist bump.

We had a few beers and Jade asked if we should share a tuk tuk. We left Dave outside his hotel and Jade said, ”Tapul Road”.

   We were looking thru a few videos on YouTube with her and some jazz band. She laughed, ”That was in Paris, they just picked me in from the street.”

   ”I don't believe it.” Nobody could sing like that without rehearsing. But maybe I was wrong. She was a natural. When on stage she was always the centre of attention.

   ”Let's watch something else”, she said, and I put on The Shining.

   Soon we fell asleep, holding hands like Barbie and Ken. The way some girl would arrange her dolls just before closing her eyes.

The beers at The Blue Bar were fifty cents and the margaritas two dollars. There was a nice pool with blue water and the sunbeds lay in the sun. Sometimes I went there after the gym for a swim and a draft. It was a convenient arrangement and I usually met people I knew there. Today Arthur showed up wearing a multi coloured shirt and a white hat that could have been a Borsalino. Hannibal Lecter wears one of those at the end of The Silence of the Lambs.

   ”I found it on the top of a garbage container on the street.”

   ”It looks brand new.”

   ”Yes, I think it is... Can I have a beer”, he said to the lovely waitress. She nodded a smile. Only a part of her face smiled. She had a stroke some time ago.

Kenny showed up and we moved to the comfortable chairs by the pool. Kenny had told me about his adventures in The Land and of Thieves.

   I picked up on the subject because I knew Arthur loved a good story. Kenny was from Europe; he had lived here in Siem Reap for a few years now; most of his face was covered by a white beard reaching down his pot belly that would make Santa envious, and he was supporting himself on a stick after a motorcycle accident, that had also developed into a stroke. He had been a cook on different cargo and research ships for seventeen years, and he lived in what he called 'The Land of Thieves' for four years. It turned into to a disaster.

   ”What happens if you go back?” I asked.

   ”Then they will kill me”.

   He told us the story, and after a few drinks Arthur said, eyes moist, that he had sixty-five flying hours and he was ready to hire a plane and go there on a rescue mission. Maybe it was the margaritas talking.

   The more Kenny elaborated on the subject the crazier the story got; there were tentacles pointing in different directions, some of them leading up to high ranking officials and to the top of the Government. The story is so fantastic I don't know what to say. Anyway – this is what he told us, with his own words:

”I have a wife in The Land of Thieves and her ex-boyfriend, an Australian, was one of the top guys in a huge drug smuggling operation. Another top guy in the ring was the son of a very high ranking official. They were smuggling tons of ecstasy and they hid all the money in different banks around the world.”

   ”I thought they are against drugs?”

   ”Yes, but it's all about money. Now – the boyfriend had made an arrangement with my wife that she would have access to the money if something happened to him. So he set up a joint account.”

   ”How much?”

   ”Millions of dollars.”

   ”Did something happen to the Australian?”

   ”Yes. He was killed”.

   ”Who killed him?”

   ”Well...”, Kenny said with a dubious smile on his face; ”Somebody I knew. His brother was killed by the Australian so he wanted to kill the guy himself. But the Australian was trying to kill my wife in the first place, and he was also behind the killing of her bodyguards and also my wife's father! I celebrated for a week when I was told the Australian had been killed. He vas a real devil!”

   ”So, how is she doing?”

   ”Not so good. They have tried to kill her many, many times – poisoning her with all kinds of shit, cutting off the brakes of the car she was going with, alone or together with her bodyguards or the attorney. They have tried to shoot her three times so far. The first time they killed her attorney outside the house in the morning when they were on their way to the court. There are many attorneys that have been killed over the years and many of her bodyguards also. But they don't give up. She's been in jail several times, because they accuse here for all kinds of shit. They want the money.”

   ”Who?

   ”The drug lords. They have the Government backing them up and the police are involved too.”

   ”So she cannot leave the country?”

   ”That's right. If she does that she will have access to all the money. Her only chance is to go with the people from the Government to the different countries, Hong Kong, Switzerland, Cayman Islands, Spain – and give them the money. Then they will let her go. They will split all in half. At least they said so.”

   ”So why are they trying to kill her?”

   ”Because she knows too much. But if they kill her they lose the money. So they are keeping her in the country for now. I think they really don't know what to do. But they are tapping our phone conversations, they are reading her mails, and mine too.”

   ”Have you ever thought she might be a part of a scam herself?”

   ”Of course I have. But what would she gain by lying to me? No – I trust her. But she's stuck there and I can't go back, because they will put me in jail and then they will kill me and make it look like suicide. I know too much too.”

   It was a hell of a tale and I just didn't know what to believe. I had known Kenny for over a year, we had long conversations over dinners and beers and he didn't strike me as someone who would make things up just for the fun of it. So, why would he invent a story like this?

   He had also shown me emails from the guys – bad language with threats and insults, much in the style of some of the Nigerian scam letters I read in the past. Demanding money. And more money.

   And what about all the killings?

This is when Arthur intervenes with his plans of a rescue mission, Rambo style: ”Let's go and take her out of the fucking country!”

   I knew he was touched by the story but I had my doubts it would ever happen. As he was a savant I was always looking forward to his next outbreak.

   ”Kenny, in these emails they are demanding more money”.

   ”Yes. But I have nothing more to give them. My money is finished”.

   ”And when do you believe your girlfriend will be here?”

   ”She said tomorrow yesterday – and I talked to her today. She said maybe they'll let her go tomorrow.”

                                      Revenge is a dish best served cold...

Poipet was a nerve-racking experience as always. These border towns have a bad reputation amongst travellers and Aryanaprathet-Poipet probably makes the worst border between Thailand and Cambodia with all the scammers around. It's located some 150 kilometers west of Siem Reap and the bus ride took four hours and we spent an hour picking up people from different hotels before we even got out of town. That's because the bus companies, except for Ibis, never follow the promised schedule. I left my room before seven in the morning and returned just before seven in the evening.

The-no-man's land between the two countries is like a scene from a science fiction movie after the Apocalypse. There are posh looking casinos on both sides, but when you walk along, the road is filled with beggars, hustlers, scammers; you look down at the river dividing the two Kingdoms and the black water is filled with tons of garbage, mostly plastic materials, bags, bottles, containers; also paper boxes, diapers, a wooden table and the skeleton of a bicycle. The stench makes the air heavy to breath.

The border crossing is a chaotic mission and at lunch time the arrival hall to Thailand was so crowded I had to wait for a while before I even could get in there. The queue was a slowly curling snake along the ropes. It was hot. There were fans, but the air cons didn't do much to cool the place down as they were set at 29 degrees. Almost two hours later I was at one of the three windows where I handed the passport to the border police. She was wearing a light make up and looked liked a fashion model in a uniform; lovely eyes, high cheek bones, the perfect nose and the full lips. She pointed at my arrival card:

   ”You didn't write down your adress in Thailand.”

   I hesitated. The word was that they didn't care much for the expats using the system to do visa runs. ”I'm going back there today.”

   ”Hmmm... And how long have you stayed in Cambodia?” Surely she could see it on the stamps in my passport?

   ”Two months.”

   ”Are you working in Cambodia?”

   ”No, I'm not. No work.”

   She glanzed at me for a moment like she was looking right into my soul. Then she smiled and said: ”'I will write down a hotel here in Aryanaprathet.” It was only for the formalities and I thanked her. I felt happy there for a moment.

   I walked down the stairs and thru the customs which was upgraded with an X-ray machine for the luggage. My bag contained a novel, an almost empty bottle of Aquarious and half a baguette. I walked out in the blazing sun, crossed the street and went in to the departure hall. It was a ridiculous system with these visa runs and I was cursing Oddjob for having to make this totally unnecessary trip.

   I left Thailand after five minutes and went to the Immigration Office where I got the E-visa for 35 dollars I should have gotten in the first place, when arriving two months ago. The E-visa, the ordinary visa, you can extend uptill one year without having to leave Cambodia. I hated Mr Oddjob and wished every evil to come upon him.

Back in Cambodia it was the same routine as always. Some guy asked me promptly about my visa. ”I'll just get it over there, at the Immigration office”. No kick backs for you. I stamped into the country and some other fellow was following me; ”Where you going?”

   ”Don't worry, I've done this many times.” I walked to the roundabout where they pick up people in private cars to drive you whereever you want to go. I usually paid ten dollars for a ride to Siem Reap in a Toyota, sharing the cost with two other random travellers. There was another guy. ”You want a private car?”

   ”Yes. I'll pay the ten dollars.”

   ”Okay. Wait here.” He came back after five minutes. ”You go with him, he take you to the car.” I sat at the back of the scooter and the driver took me two hundred meters along the road, to a travel agent. He demanded one dollar for the ride. I was losing it:

   ”What? The other guy told me ten dollars to Siem Reap, and now you want me to pay a dollar for this short ride. IT WILL NOT HAPPEN!”

   He drove away, muttering in Khmer. I had a vague idea what he was saying about me.

   The man behind the the desk said: ”Okay, ten dollars. But listen – here in Cambodia there are usually two people in the front seat. You want the front seat? Can you pay me five dollars more?”

   ”For fuck's sake!” I turned to walk away.

   ”No problem – okay, ten dollars. Can you wait here maybe twenty minutes?”

   I waited twenty minutes and then the ride arrived. It was not a private car, it was a mini van. Full of groceries, kitchenware and what not at the back. We took off, five passengers and enough of supplies to keep an army marching for weeks.

   But, of course we didn't go straight to Siem Reap – we took detours into the country to let off stuff at markets, drove into villages to let off people and pick up new people. The driver's cell was ringing all the time. Then, after hours we were getting close to Siem Reap. Then the guy takes a left and drives to the airport. Now we were sitting in the van, obviously waiting for somebody to check out from the airport. I was steaming. I took my bag, said a few not so polite words to the driver and walked to the nearest tuk tuk. ”Taphul Road, please.” It cost me another four dollars to get home, but I just had had enough of detours for one day.

Two months ago I left Bangkok for Siem Reap on a coach. Although I'm not the collective type it seemed to be a convenient way of getting all the way to Siem Reap on the same bus. Just before the border a Thai man climbs aboard. He looks like a smaller version of Oddjob, the henchman in Goldfinger, but without the hat of course. He collects our passports and asks for the money for the visa. ”How much is it?”

   ”Forty-five dollars.”

   ”It used to be thirty-five.”

   ”Now it is forty-five, but you can extend it for three months.” That´s two lies in one sentence, but I would only discover it later. What he got us, everybody on the bus, was a tourist visa which you can only extend for one month. That one is thirty dollars at the border.

   Imagine – fourty people on every bus, whom he´s scamming for fifteen bucks a piece. A few of these busloads a day makes some handsome money at the end of the month. This border scam had elevated to an industrial level.

   Next time I would interrupt his syrupy monologue and talk to the passengers; I would take the whole crowd over to the Cambodian side and show them the Immigration office where they would pay the proper fee. I was also going to take his picture and display it on the Internet with a nice story exposing the scam. I would tell him – ”I´m going to make you famous, baby”. Surely that was going to make Oddjob very angry.

   This is what I was thinking in the tuk tuk on the way back home from the airport. But let's remember I was also hungry, thristy and needed to take a leak.