Short Story / Out of somewhere dark (Analysis)

Phnom Penh, Cambodia April 2004

It’s about midnight on a Tuesday, or maybe Wednesday, and I’m in the front seat of an SUV as it hurtles through the streets of Phnom Penh. I really don’t like the guy driving, but right now my life is in his hands.

Actually, I didn’t like him the very moment I met him, but now he cackles as he misses pedestrians by inches, almost wrapping the SUV around a light post, and I think he is the devil.

As we launch off a crater-sized pothole, I turn around for some reassurance. In the back seat is the Italian. He smirks roguishly, and gives a thumbs-up.

I don’t know the Italian well. In fact, I only met him two nights before. As for the Cambodian driving the car, I just met him a few hours ago. That makes it all the more strange that I’ve decided to come along with them in the first place. See, we are not on our way for a late night snack, or to view constellations from a hilltop. The Italian and I are looking for prostitutes.

The driver, a young Cambodian male, has agreed to find us some, and I’ll probably regret this either in whole or part come morning. But right now it doesn’t matter. Along with the thrill of adventure, I feel a prurient tingle, and I give into it.
                                          

SREY THEY, CAMBODIA 2:30 P.M., two days earlier

At the Thai border, I squeezed into the bed of a 1980 Nissan pickup along with sixteen other Cambodians, mostly farmers hopping on for a short village-to-village ride.

After an hour on crater-pocked dirt roads, the truck stopped in a marketplace at the edge of a small town. The driver got out and demanded more money, claiming I’d only paid for half of the route. I tried arguing, but he turned away and spat at the ground. Some of the younger locals in the truck grinned brown teeth. It seemed I had fallen victim to a common ruse. Full of the fatuous indignation that comes from being duped only a couple of dollars, I walked away from the truck in no particular direction.

Beyond the jarring pickup ride and the squalid scramble of the border town, this was the first look I had at Cambodia. But there really wasn’t too much difference from the border—the dirt that had made up most of the road from the border continued on, creating a sort of muddy crater. In fact, there were no paved roads as far as I could see. And, for that matter, anything that would suggest modernity, beyond a few small motors rigged to a large tractor-looking vehicle, on which a few old men tinkered. Barefoot children clambered about the metal monstrosities, looking up at me with dark, round eyes.

Circling back to where I’d gotten off, I smelled burning meat and walked over to where charred bits of chicken hung on a skewer above a tar pit. I pointed at one of the less burnt pieces and an old woman plucked it off the skewer, cradled it into a brown napkin and handed it to me.

I sat down on a wobbly rock. A small Khmer boy crouched in front of me batting the ground relentlessly with a straw broom, his bony knees sticking up like an insect’s antennae. He appeared to be swatting at flies, but when I looked closer there was only thin air.

I realized I could remain frustrated over getting dumped here, yet in a way this was why I’d come to Cambodia—to experience life outside of what I’d become familiar with, to get off the beaten tourist trek.

Thailand, where I’d spent the previous few weeks bouncing from island to island, had hit the downward slope on the travel buzz trajectory. I had become restless and edgy.

I could have returned to the States, found a job and settled down. But I knew that would put an end to my travels for a while. I wanted to experience all I could. And that’s when I heard about Cambodia.

The Wild West one traveler had described it to me as, painting a picture of a rundown cityscape where the locals did whatever they wanted (or whatever made them money), and where if there was a law, nobody seemed to enforce it. Guns, girls and ganja another foreigner had winked to me lasciviously.

As I gnawed at the bone, thinking about my current trajectory and what Cambodia would have in store for me, another foreigner walked up, pointed at a blackened morsel and sat down next to me.

He was about my age and wore similarly styled camouflage pants to those I was wearing. Strong-jawed and handsome, he had a week’s worth of stubble and his hair was a riot of dark, unruly curls covering half his face.

He took a bite, turned to me, and as though he’d known me a long time said, “This is going to give us the worst shits tomorrow.”

And that’s how I met the Italian.

THE ROAD TO PHNOM PENH, next day 1:00 P.M.

“They have such a natural beauty.”

The Italian flashed a white-toothed smile at a group of Cambodian peasant women seated in the bed of a blue Nissan pick-up. The youngest of the three smiled, her hair billowing from underneath a loosely tied shawl as the truck bounced along an unpaved road. Her two friends started to giggle.

Holding the blushing trio in his gaze, the Italian continued, “And the land here is also so natural. These people, they are living like it was three hundred years ago. It is so amazing traveling to a place like this.”

It was easy to rhapsodize the passing countryside. Green pastures, dotted with water buffalo unfolded in every direction. Every hundred yards or so, a small thatched hut would pop into view. But even as we jetted by in the pickup, it was difficult not to notice the small gully filled with green gunk. Still, I found myself ignoring the septic roadside and falling under the spell of both the countryside, and the Italian.

Since meeting him, I had found myself going along with the Italian on more than a few things. I had decided to stay overnight with him in Battambang, a town en route to Phnom Penh, instead of trying to make the whole journey overland. And the next morning, I’d agreed to take the pickup with him into Phnom Penh, where he’d knew a place with three dollars a night rooms. He slapped my shoulder excitedly. “That’s one dollar-fifty each.”

I was usually far more wary of travelers I met on the road. But the Italian had a disarming ease. He also spoke good English from living in Boston for a few years. Where we really bonded, though, was in our approach to travel. He too had heard similar stories about Cambodia and had come looking for a little adventure and excitement. To him, this mainly meant interacting with the locals. To show this he spread his arms as widely as possible in the pickup’s cramped bed, his right covering the field of vision of two saffron-robed monks and the other nearly touching the breast of a peasant woman nursing her child. “You think I would travel in a tour bus when I could have this.”

A teenage Cambodian boy looked amusedly at the Italian with his outspread arms. The Italian turned to smile at him, and then reached in his pocket for a piece of gum. Just as he handed it to the boy, the truck hit a dip in the road and was suddenly aloft. When it landed with a coccyx-crushing thud, the Italian’s hand was clasped around the arm of the boy, who had fallen half way off the back of the truck. Once the Italian had pulled him to safety, the peasant women laughed and the pair of monks smiled benignly. Still embraced, the Italian and the boy grinned at each other.

PHNOM PENH, THE CAPITOL GUESTHOUSE 4:30 P.M.

The Italian was right—the room was cheap. It was also located in the center of town amidst a confusion of trucks filled with chicken cages, motorbikes rigged with two-wheeled seating carriages, and sun-withered men on mopeds, dusty handkerchiefs covering their mouths.
Many of them surrounded us the moment we stowed bags and stepped outside. I don’t know if it was because I hadn’t shaven in a week, or that both the Italian and I were males clad in tank-tops and camouflage pants, but the first thing the touts offered was to drive us to get massages and meet a “nice lady.”

Instead, we climbed into a tuk-tuk and asked the driver to take us to get some food. As soon as we turned the first corner, the Italian turned to me, his green eyes blazing mischievously through a crack in the wall of his hair. “I could go for some food. But what about a massage first.”
Living in Asia for three years, had desensitized me to prostitution. But it wasn’t so passive. There had definitely been a curiosity on my part. In Thailand, I’d gone to the parts of Bangkok where girls come running out of bars to pull me in, or where heavily rouged girls sit behind a glass screen trying to woo me with a pout. Sometimes, I succumbed.

“Sure. Why not?” I said.

The Italian grinned delightedly and pantomimed massage to the driver. The tuk-tuk whirred to life and the driver whizzed through the streets, weaving through oncoming traffic and sending the wheels aloft as he dug sharply into turns.

When the tuk-tuk finally skidded to a stop, I was disorientated. In front of us, stood a crumbling two-story apartment with only pitch-black squares for windows. Like two lilies sprouting daintily out of some bleak wasteland, a pair of girls no older than 12 swatted at a shuttlecock near the entrance.

I pulled my eyes from the building. I wanted to get out of there as soon as possible; yet another part of me was titillated to see what lay inside the building, to see what took place behind those hollowed out windows.

I looked at the Italian almost imploringly, as though he could resolve the conflict that was taking place in my mind.

“What do you think?” I leaned into him, almost thinking he would say yes.

Instead he paused for a moment, and then said slowly, “You know, I have a feeling that if we go in there, something very bad will happen.”
With that, the Italian barked at the rickshaw driver, who at first pretended not to hear him. Only after the Italian and I both protested did he rev up the tuk-tuk.

As we pulled out, one of the young girls turned to me, her face heavy with make-up, her eyes unblinking.

THE RIVERSIDE 4:45 P.M.

We were finally able to extricate ourselves from the driver who insisted on taking us to another massage place first. When we stepped out of the tuk-tuk, however, a phalanx of other drivers blocked the way. They were upon us immediately.

“Nice lady for you.”
“You go farm. You shoot cow. Blow up. 40 dollars.”
“I take you. Fun time.”

Death, destruction, and depravity, it seemed, were all for sale.
We broke through the wall of touts and sat down at one of the many restaurants that lined the riverfront. In front of us, foreign couples, their arms and legs a pale gray, where they’d not been fried red, lingered along the quay. Well-dressed Cambodian couples sat atop a small terrace, palm trees and the azure Tonle Sap Lake as backdrops.
But the idyll stopped there. A Khmer boy of about 12, with chafed knobs for legs, waddled up to our table wearing a crown of fat-bodied flies. Saying nothing, his eyes clouded, distant and gray, he cupped his palms in supplication.

As soon as we’d dropped a few quarters in his hands, young children no older than nine came scurrying to our table. Around their necks, they carried red plastic baskets in which they sold books, most on Cambodian history, particularly the recent genocide. I wondered if these children had any idea of what they were selling, or for that matter any conception of the genocide. But I figured they were unconcerned with their history; they had their own brutal present to deal with.

Coming to Cambodia, I imagined I’d at some point visit the genocide museum and anything else the guidebooks exhorted tourists to see. Now as I sat in Phnom Penh reading about the genocide, witnessing its aftermath several decades later, I saw the visit not so much as a chore but as a chance to understand how Cambodia had become the spectacle of misery that unfolded about me.

“Tomorrow, we should go see the Killing Fields.”

The Italian laughed. “I’ve heard it’s very depressing. But you can go if you want.”

THE KILLING FIELDS (Choueng Ek) 12:00 P.M.

When I woke in the morning the Italian was snoring loudly. He’d been out late drinking; I’d stayed in and read a few books on Pol Pot and the genocide before falling asleep. Not wanting to wake him, I flagged down a moped and headed to the Killing Fields.

After 15 minutes, the moped driver—a pot-bellied Khmer with aviator sunglasses and a wide, unwavering smile—stopped at a barren field tufted with green.

There were hardly any tourists in the sticky heat, nor for that matter any markers suggesting that this was Cambodia’s most notorious site. For the scene to resonate, at least initially, I had to recall what I’d read about the Khmer Rouge the night before.

Their ascent to power came unheralded and suddenly. On a typical April morning in 1975, thousands of peasant soldiers clad in black and marching in tight formations besieged the capital. Brainwashed by Pol Pot and his cadre, the Khmer Rouge, the soldiers wielded bayonets and entered homes at random, gutting those inside.

So great was the disconnection between a peaceful April morning and the death squads that it must have been easy to believe that the imagination was playing a morbid joke. That Pol Pot would inflict genocide on his own people, under the banner of some vague agrarian revolution, was just as unbelievable. Such an act was without precedent, not only in the history of Cambodia but also in the history of the world.
I wandered over the uneven, ankle-spraining contours of the land, when I noticed a sign hanging from a wooden stump: Beware Land Mines. At once the field became alive with the scepter of death. No longer was it just some sleepy landscape or history lesson. Nevertheless, I tried to force some context on the barren field.
I thought back to back to the doctors, professors, and intellectuals I’d read about. They were dragged out of their homes and forced to march on the road into the countryside. Many were shot as soon as their steps flagged the slightest. But it really didn’t matter. Those who eventually made it to the countryside were shot anyway. In the end, they all arrived at Choueng Ek—their bodies thrown into hastily dug pits, or stacked several stories high in a mountain of decaying flesh.

Realizing that I could very well be stepping where these bodies once lay strained credulity just as much as imagining the million-person exodus that quiet April morning in 1975, bullets raining from the rifles of young men warped into machines of murder. But I was quickly learning that in Cambodia death and depravity emerged from the most innocuous looking surroundings.

There was, however, one feature of the landscape that punctured the semblance of a normal rice field, and required little imagination. A 50-foot stupa, or dome-shaped Buddhist shrine, stood in the middle of the field. Viewed from the side, it seemed oddly out of place. When I stood in front of the stupa, though, I saw something altogether different. A glass partition ran up the entire façade of the stupa, revealing a series of shelves separated in three feet intervals. Stacked upon each shelf were hundreds of human skulls.

I had difficulty looking up for more than a few seconds. Besides the arid ground at my feet, there was no point of reference to orientate myself away from the horror of a thousand skulls. Worse yet, many had been shot in the head, or when bullets ran out, bludgeoned with farm implements. Their hollowed-out eyes seemed to implore posterity for an answer to their senseless fate. I had none, and walked back to the moped.

My mood wasn’t helped much when the moped driver pulled out his finger, making a toy gun out of it, and began mock shooting me. In other circumstances, I would have played drolly along, maybe even fallen on the ground. But enough bodies had fallen here.
                                        
                                              

Unlike the Killing Fields, which I had learned about from the movie, I had never heard of S-21 until a little girl had earlier left the book on my table. She pointed at it as though it were a weekly celebrity magazine, and said declaratively, “You like.”

A row of skeletal faces stared up from the front cover. I quickly flipped the book over for a synopsis: known as Tluong Seng, S-21 had been a private high school for the wealthy, until Pol Pot had turned it into a torture prison.

As the moped pulled up to a sleepy suburb on the city’s fringe, I was reminded again that in Cambodia utter evil could spring up in the most unlikely places. Before the Khmer Rouge turned it into a prison, S-21 had been a private high school. Even now, a palm-rimmed courtyard where students had once frolicked lulled me with its sleepy charm. But it was here that Pol Pot and his myrmidons had dumped prisoners headfirst into vats filled with scalding oil and human feces.

Most of the torture, however, took place inside the classrooms. I walked through a row of classrooms on the second story, where I saw desks studded with rusty nails and rigged with spike-ridden manacles.

Because it was mid-afternoon, and there was hardly anybody else at the prison, I felt like I was trespassing upon some horror yet to be discovered.

But the faces were what really haunted me. The Khmer Rouge had photographed the victims—school children, mothers, husbands, and men with promising careers at the universities—in various states of degeneration. In the last several years, thousands of these photos had been collected and thumbtacked to the walls and chalkboards of the classrooms.

The victims’ names were posted below their gaunt faces. Many stared out into some sad infinity; other faces were bug-eyed in the rictus of shock. In most likelihood, they had all died during their stay here. When the Vietnamese liberated Cambodia in 1979 and arrived at the prison, only eight of the 17,000 prisoners who’d come to S-21 were still alive.
I walked back to the moped, my bones heavy with anguish. Thankfully, this time the driver did not pull any more antics. I paid him and wandered off in no particular direction.

My original purpose in coming to Cambodia for mere thrills seemed frivolous. After the prison, I experienced what most travelers do after visiting genocide-related sites—an overwhelming sense of pointlessness to life.

As I walked down a dirt road, little children jostled near my feet chasing a lopsided ball thatched together with palm fronds. Men with families of five stacked on a moped, an imminent vehicular calamity, shuttled past with gleeful, complacent grins. Futilely, I wondered how a country wracked by an inexplicable genocide could on the surface be so carefree.

I remembered then how light and darkness, the benign and the malignant, existed so seamlessly—the sleepy quay filled with touts offering tourists a chance to blow up a cow; the palm lined courtyard of S-21 torture prison; and the young mascara-ed girls swatting at a shuttlecock with a backdrop that suggested the annihilation of innocence.

I walked along the dirt path in the fading sunlight, wondering where darkness would spring up next.

RIVERSIDE 5:30 P.M.

In Cambodia, the suffering and misery always find you. I spotted the Italian lounging at one of the restaurants along the quay. As soon as I sat down at the table, limbless mendicants scraped by, as malnourished children, faces grimed with clay, huddled close. Impervious to my “no’s”, they slapped down photocopied books of the Khmer Rouge’s history. In S-21, haunted, moribund faces stared up at me. In Genocide in Cambodia, a ring of skulls glowered ominously.

The Italian didn’t seem nearly as fazed by the starving children or the book covers. He joked around with the children, feigning interest in a book, and then buying a chafed leather bracelet from one of the more aggressive girls. He’d marvel at it for a moment, then quickly hand it to one of the smaller children, pretending that the others hadn’t seen him. The children would laugh, point at the Italian and say something like “silly man.” Then it would be back to business as usual as they tried to sell us more, the cycle continuing, seemingly never-ending.

At least it was good I had met the Italian. He was able to block out everything that was horrible, while celebrating that which made the country beautiful—the people’s unaffected smiles, the endless miles of pastoral green unscathed by gray modernity. Without him, I would have probably retreated to my room and brooded.

Still, I wanted to tell him about my daytrip and how I found the country one of stark contrasts—death and destruction, smiles and giggles.
Whenever I tried, he quickly changed the subject to how he wanted to move to Cambodia and start an import/export business. When he went on to talk about exploring the discos and meeting beautiful girls, I found myself slowly forgetting the stupa and the haunting faces of S-21.

With each beer we drank the more I wanted to lose myself in the lawlessness of Phnom Penh. As the sun vanished over the Tonle Sap, I hatched with the Italian all the things we’d do during our night out in the Wild West of Phnom Penh.

PHNOM PENH CENTRAL MARKET 6:30 P.M.

I imagined the central market would have been a visceral experience even if I had been sober. But after five or six beers it became a living, breathing beast upon which death and life lustfully commingled. Strewn on the muddy market floor were swine carcasses with rib cages oozing green flies. Brown, eel-like fish flopped in a pool of muck as cockroaches scuttled by. Land-mine victims dragged gangrenous stubs across the floor. Behind them stalls hawked one-dollar T-shirts emblazoned with a giant skull and crossbones reading: “Danger: Land Mines.”

Covering this twisted menagerie, a canopy of dirty sheets blocked out the remaining daylight, lending the market a cavernous, dreamlike aspect. Still, there was also the far more mundane—cheap shoes, photocopied books, knock-off Rolex’s. But the Italian and I had come for something completely different.

According to the proprietor of the Capitol Guesthouse, it was in this labyrinth that they sold them. “Ap-ing-a” he’d slowly mouthed when I asked him the Cambodian word.

Normally, I would have usually flinched at the idea of putting anything remotely hairy in my mouth. And “apinga” was perhaps one of the most vile things I could imagine eating. But I was now determined to throw myself into the circus of Phnom Penh by pushing the envelope of what I’d do.

The Italian didn’t need much prompting. He adopted my harebrained scheme of eating apinga with gusto. Beers in hand, we trawled the dense, sprawling market repeating the word- apinga, apinga, to all who would hear, the Italian miming the movements these creatures made, his arms making a rapid crawling motion, his eyes ablaze with menace. Finally, persistence won out— in a sepulchral nook of the market, an old woman pulled out two plastic bags from underneath a worn blanket. In each, there was a tarantula, a Cambodian delicacy.

THE CAPITOL GUESTHOUSE 7:30 P.M.

The Italian pulled a plastic bag from a pocket in his camouflage shorts.

“Okay. Who goes first?”

Making a face at the spider, he dropped it upon a wooden desk he’d positioned in the middle of the room. Slightly withered, and with hair already shedding from its legs, the spider was not as frightening as it must have been when it scurried about on all eights. Still, it was revolting. I wondered if that manic zeal to attempt the outrageous would hold up once I plucked a leg from its bulbous thorax and dangled it in front of my mouth.

The Italian poked gingerly at the legs, as if the spider could snap to life at any moment and dig its fangs into his hand.

I hoped he’d go first, tear a leg from the torso, suck out globules of meat and then toss the hollow limb to the ground in disgust, claiming it unfit for anyone to eat. Instead, he chuckled, took the second spider out of the bag and handed it to me.

“Okay, you first.”

An hour later, we’d only managed to touch some cans of beer. Both spiders still sat eight-legs asprawl on the table. Neither of us had even brought them near our mouths, as if they threatened to explode some horrid filth onto our tongues.

Eventually, the Italian nudged the spiders back into the bag with the butt of a hunting knife he’d pulled from his backpack.

“You know, sometimes you think you are going to do something crazy. Because it just sounds so wild…but later maybe.”

With that, he laid both spiders aside on his bed.  

THE CAPITOL GUESTHOUSE CAFE (later that evening)

“Have you seen The Killing Fields?”

I looked up over the book. An ectomorphic male of about 20, eyes wide with excitement, bounced up and down on his chair. He was clearly South East Asian, but had a strong command of English and was not clad like a typical tout. He looked at me intently over his wire-rimmed glasses and starched collared shirt.

“Yeah. I went today.” The tower of skulls instantly appeared in my mind;
I didn’t feel like saying anything more.

“Well, what about S-21 prison?”

The way his bubbling enthusiasm clashed with the subject matter irked me. “Yes, that too.”

“And discos?”

Before I could respond, he continued, “I can be your guide to Phnom Penh. My name is Elak. I grew up here and I am now going to the university. So what about tonight? Disco, maybe?”
Just then the Italian, who’d been upstairs dozing, appeared with a sprightly hello. He introduced himself to Elak and in less than a minute, they were joking around with one another.

“You find beautiful Cambodian girlfriends for us?” the Italian ventured excitedly.

“I show you many girls.”

I didn’t like the way Elak was aggressively trying to become our friend. He even tried to impress us with his pedigree. “I’ve got a new SUV. Like my sister. She studies in university in the U.S.A.”

But the Italian only seemed to be thinking about the beautiful girls. “Okay, we meet you here in two hours.”

Again, I found myself going along with the Italian. “Sounds good.”
                                          
                                                  

Elak was already waiting when we came downstairs at the agreed time.

“You’re late,” he bristled.

The Italian ignored this and shook Elak’s hand, and we jumped in his SUV.

Elak brought us to a few nightclubs where he knew some other well-to-do locals.

Throughout the night, I constantly got the impression that I wasn’t the only one who disliked him. Most of his “friends” hardly disguised their contempt, cutting the conversation short, or making an excuse to leave when Elak sat down with them. Part of me wanted to do the same.

Another part of me cajoled, who cares? You said you wanted an adventure in Cambodia. That means you have to take a risk. Sure, this guy is tactless, but maybe he will show you a wild time and introduce you to beautiful girls.

The Italian ended up sounding much like this little voice when I expressed my reservations. “He’s not that bad. And look, he has some pretty girlfriends from the university that he will introduce us to later. They will be beautiful and then tomorrow we will take them to the beach town.”

But the girls never showed up. I sat alienated in the corner getting, while the Italian and Elak continued drinking beers and chatting merrily.
Finally, the Italian came over to me. “His friends aren’t coming, but maybe we can, you know, get special friends.”

“Paid friends?”

“You don’t have to come.”

He was right—I could have taken a tuk-tuk back to the guesthouse. But driving around looking for prostitutes was the type of thrill that had brought me to Cambodia.

“Okay.”
“You sure?”
“Yeah, let’s go.”

THE STREETS OF PHNOM PENH, sometime around midnight

With the streets deserted, Elak decided to gamble with both gravity and our lives. When he did see a few pedestrians, Elak would send them scattering with a skid that destroyed any distinction between road and walkway.

After he had tired of this play, he turned to the Italian,
“Now, I take you to find some girls.”

As Elak turned into a small dirt road line with hovels, a young Khmer with a red bandana covering most of his face whizzed aggressively close to the SUV. He kept pointing at someone behind him, but from the front seat it was hard to tell whom. It was when he pulled up closer that I saw a girl dressed in a short blue skirt and a white blouse, her small arms clutched around his waist.

“There is a girl for you,” Elak offered proudly. “What do you say?”
I was a little taken aback by the casualness of his offer.

I looked at her again. She sat with her legs facing us. But instead of looking at us, she stared blankly ahead, her eyes shocked with dread. I guessed she was no older than 14.

“That’s just a child.”
“What do you mean? She’s cheap. You don’t like?”
“That’s just a child.” I said again this time not disguising my agitation.
“She’s just a fucking bitch,” Elak shot back.

Elak, it seemed, cared about nothing, including our own lives. And at that moment, moral relativism didn’t hold up. To me, he had crossed a line by so callously accepting child prostitution. The self-righteous part of me wanted to choke him. The stronger, more practical part simply wanted to get out of the car and be done with Elak for good.

But he was driving. Instead, I began tapping insistently on the Italian’s shoulder, rasping, “I’m getting out.”

“Calm down,” was all he said.

Elak soon brought the car to a stop on the side of the road anyways. The Khmer had pulled his moped over to the driver’s side and had begun talking to him.

After a few moments Elak turned to us. “Okay you guys want, or not?”
Before I could say no, he continued, almost threateningly. “I’m your good friend. I show you Phnom Penh. I take you to find girls.

Again, I wanted to erupt on Elak. From the beginning, he’d inflicted himself upon us and was now cornering us, paying no heed to my protests.

The Italian tried to calm me, chiding me as though I were a whiny child.  “Tranquilo, tranquilo.”

As soon as I quieted down, the Italian turned to Elak. “How much did he say?”

“20 dollars. Like I told you.”  

Elak made a quick gesture, and the girl dismounted, opened the back door and sat down in the car.

The Italian whipped out a twenty-dollar bill and handed it to Elak. Elak gave it to the moped driver, who held the bill up in the air to check if it was counterfeit before zooming off.

The car was suddenly quiet as Elak revved up the engine and started driving. I wanted to say something, but now with the girl in the car a certain line had been crossed, and I felt it almost foolish to protest. And though I told myself this was wrong, a part of me wanted to see what would happen, how far the Italian would take this; how far I would take this.

I turned around to get a glimpse of the girl. She looked even younger up close. A childish smile (or maybe it was fear) flashed across her face as our eyes made contact. I quickly looked away.

CAPITOL GUESTHOUSE 1:00 A.M.

There is something about the imminence of naked flesh that suppresses my inner voice of reason. As the girl sat upon the Italian’s bed, I tried to imagine her naked, slipping out of her shoes, removing her white blouse, pulling down her blue mini-skirt. But it didn’t make sense; my lust was confused, the pre-pubescence was overwhelming.
The Italian didn’t seem too overwhelmed. He began unbuttoning his shirt and taking off his trousers.

I rose from my bed with a start.
“I can’t do this.”

The Italian was facing her and had undone the first button on her blouse. From underneath a tangle of curls, he looked vaguely in my direction. His voice was suddenly deeper, almost menacing, his face contorted, older. “Go take a walk.”

Before coming to Cambodia, I had imagined I would stomp on a pedophile if I’d caught one in the act. In that scenario, the moral boundaries were clearly cut—I was the valiant male, the pedophile the vile miscreant. But as I watched the Italian on the bed, the thin limbs stretched out before him, everything seemed grey and murky. What I thought was evil and far removed from me, was now nearby, almost familiar, and I felt powerless in stopping it.

I opened the door and walked out.

                                        *

For twenty minutes, I read from a bookshelf of discarded fiction one floor above our room. Seated on a rattan chair, I pretended to lose myself in a world of staccato dialogue and cheesy banter. Finally, I debated whether or not to fall asleep in the chair, wake up to a balmy morning, refreshed and purified, and continue on. I considered going back to Thailand, maybe even the States.

Yet when my thoughts returned to what was happening below me, I felt a quick fluttering in my stomach.

When I’d closed the door and walked out, leaving the Italian alone with the girl, I felt innocent, even childlike, as though my decision to walk away had been a form of absolution.

But now seeing myself as undefiled by all that was happening perhaps made me prey to darker impulses, for I wanted to go back and find out—had the Italian really done anything with her?

It only took a few moments before this morbid lust became stronger than the initial revulsion I felt at seeing someone so young engaged in such an act. I stood up and walked back down to the room, uncertain and afraid of what would happen next.

I knocked on the door. There was no answer. I entered.
The Italian was sitting on his bed alone.

“I couldn’t do it,” he said without looking up.

“She’s gone?”

“I had her naked you know,” the Italian continued on, not answering my question. “I was about to and then she let out this childish laugh. Like she was a little girl.”

The Italian brought up his hand and stretched apart his thumb and index finger, beholding it as he had the spider earlier that night. “And her feet, they were so small. So tiny.”

I looked down at the ground between my own feet, wondering why I’d returned to the room. It was easy to feel guiltless; I had only been a spectator. Either way I found it hard to condemn the Italian. In the end, we’d both crossed some line.

The Italian stopped suddenly in the middle of the room, as if lost in deep thought. “She took it. I can’t believe it. That girl took it.”

“Took what?”

“The money. There were 60 dollars on the table when I came in.”

His eyes were focused on the table upon which we’d earlier placed the spiders.

“I don’t know why I did that,” he continued monosyllabically, “why I left it there when I went to the bathroom.”

I pictured the Italian in the bathroom washing off, the first shock of guilt numbing his senses. And I imagined the girl, perhaps far less fazed than we were, quickly foraging through the room for money, hoping only to find some quick relief from the grind of her daily existence.

And then I saw myself—tired, depleted, yet pressing onwards with no real direction.

I lifted the bags of spiders to my face—their gangly limbs secreting a juice against the plastic—and I wanted to return home.

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