Private Demons

by Robert Masello

  On the dock, Lucien made it clear to the boatman that he wanted him to wait there; the man nodded, smiled, nodded some more. He seemed to understand. The dock itself was about thirty feet wide, and the distance to shore looked, to Hallie, to be about three or four city blocks. Every hundred yards or so, there was a narrow pole, with a bare light at the top, shedding a feeble, faintly blue illumination over the wet concrete.

  “Kind of spooky, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, I suppose it is,” Lucien replied. “But for me, it is also very familiar. So I suppose I don’t feel it so much.” He lifted his chin toward the enormous ship that was berthed at the dock. “This is one of mine—the Apsara.”

  The word was vaguely familiar to Hallie. “Isn’t that one of those celestial maidens, the dancers?”

  Lucien looked impressed. “Yes, it is.”

  “Well, you sure have a strange conception of beauty then.” The ship was simply a great hulking brute, with a crane towering over the center of its main deck, and a hull mottled with rust and carbuncles.

  “Not that strange,” Lucien said, looking straight at Hallie.

  “Yeah, you’re just trying to make up for lost points, Calais.” He laughed. “But that doesn’t mean you should quit,” she added.

  “Would you like to go aboard?”

  “How?”

  “This way.” He cocked his head, and she followed him down the dock. She now saw, bolted to the side of the ship, a fixed metal ladder with closely spaced rungs. It still didn’t look exactly inviting.

  “Don’t you think you should have called ahead?” Hallie said.

  “It’s my own ship. And unless I am very mistaken the crew is all ashore.”

  “Don’t they have some kind of night watchman?”

  “Yes—they should. But he’s probably asleep.” He held one hand out toward the ladder. “Are you coming?”

  “After you. I’ve got a dress on.”

  Lucien bowed to her judgment, and in one fluid motion swung himself up onto the ladder. He climbed steadily and swiftly, and Hallie had to remind herself, once again, that there was this side to Lucien that wasn’t all business and high finance; he had a hard and supple body that she knew best only when they were making love. Climbing the narrow ladder, with his black ponytail hanging free, he looked like a pirate boarding some unsuspecting galleon. At the top, he turned around and leaned over the railing.

  “All right,” Hallie said, reluctantly, “I’m coming.”

  The rungs were cold and clammy in her hands, and her shoes felt slippery, but she climbed methodically, not looking down, not thinking about the height, just gripping each rung firmly, then reaching for the next. Arriving at the top was the scariest part, because there suddenly weren’t any more rungs to grab; she had to take one leg off the ladder, and swing it over the bulwark and onto the deck. For that one brief moment, she was off balance and looking down—down the swelling curve of the ship, down to the concrete pier with its glistening oil stains and empty crates. Lucien put his hands on her waist and pulled her in.

  “Okay?” he said.

  “Okay . . . I think.” She breathed a sigh of relief. “That was worse than the chili pepper at dinner.”

  “It’s easy going from here.”

  They crossed the deck, made of corrugated metal sheeting, and up another small set of stairs, with two very welcome handrails on either side. They came up onto the bridge of the ship, where there was a semicircular deck that wrapped around the wheelhouse; inside, it was entirely dark, except for a pale green glow from some of the instruments that, even unattended, continued to go about their business.

  The view from up here was a panoramic one, taking in the lights of the city, the silvery sheen of the Chao Phya, the blue and black shadows of the harbor itself. On land, Hallie could see a motley collection of what had to be warehouses, customs offices, packing sheds, all of them dark and deserted at this time of night. There was an air of desolation about the place . . . an air that even Lucien, for all his familiarity with such ports of call, recognized and felt himself.

  But he had been fending off this feeling of emptiness ever since the floor show at dinner; in truth, he thought, he had been fending it off for close to twenty years. The sight of the dancer, costumed like his mother, bent to the stage, had stirred the sadness and the longing that always, in some measure, inhabited his heart. It had been almost twenty years since he had last seen his mother . . . or his sister. He had been returning from his year in the hills, his year as a novice monk at the secluded Buddhist monastery. He had been aware of the political convulsions assailing his country, of its precarious position as a pawn caught in the greater game being played out by Viet Nam, the United States, China, the Soviet Union. He had seen, on his trips into the rural villages where he begged for his rice each day, signs of the increasing upheaval—caravans of military vehicles, sending up clouds of dust as they barrelled down the red dirt roads; soldiers, many of them wearing the distinctive checked kerchiefs of the Khmer Rouge, marching single-file over the low dikes surrounding the rice paddies; villagers, hopping along on wooden limbs, victims already of the land mines that the various factions sowed like corn in the jungle, the fields, along the roadside. But nothing had prepared him for the cataclysm that he, like millions of others, was about to be swept up in.

  Nothing could have.

  “What does this ship carry?” Hallie asked, the breeze from the water ruffling her blond hair. “Fuel oil, like the Garuda?”

  “No, this is just a freighter. It carries dry goods, produce, grain, rice.” He leaned out over the railing, surveying the still harbor . . . and the sad procession of images, which flickered through his mind’s eye, like ghosts before a gale . . .

  . . .

  The closer he got to Phnom Penh, the greater his sense of foreboding had become. For the first part of the trip, he had managed to hitch a ride on the back of a fanner’s truck. But after a few miles, the road had become so pitted with bomb craters that the truck couldn’t go any further. He had continued on foot, wearing only his orange robes and loose sandals; his head was shaved, in the monastic custom, and he carried a string-bag that contained his rice bowl, a wooden spoon, several strips of dried fish, and a small Buddha that he had carved himself from a piece of teak; the Buddha was going to be a gift to his mother.

  In his time as a monk, Lucien had learned a great deal—less about the world outside, which, according to his teachings, was largely composed of illusory objects of desire, than about the world inside himself . . . the world in which all temptation must be overcome, and peace achieved by renunciation. It had been a hard lesson to learn—he had been so attached to his motorbike, his Coca-Cola, his various girlfriends—but he had gradually come to realize, and accept, the wisdom of the Buddha and the never-ending cycle of life.

  Now, perversely, it was the everyday world, of barter and exchange, of pursuit and acquisition, that seemed strange and unreal to him.

  It was only as he got closer to the capital that he noticed the mounting confusion and traffic on the roads. And all of it was heading in the opposite direction. Some of the people looked frightened; others were carrying knapsacks, or suitcases, bulging with their possessions. He began to wonder if there had been a fire in the city, or a bombing raid, or even an epidemic of some sort. He stopped a young man, carrying a cage with three live chickens in it, and asked what was going on.

  “The Khmer Rouge,” the man said, “the Khmer Rouge have taken over the city.”

  Lucien still wasn’t sure what to make of this. Even if they had gained control of Phnom Penh, why would that create such an exodus? He was about to question him further, when the man excused himself as politely as he could and hurried away. A three-wheeled cyclo tore by a moment later, and Lucien had to step off the road to avoid being hit.

  What was going on?

  And what about his family?

  By the time he reached the ancient town of Oudong, he knew he had to rest, or el
se he would faint away from the heat and exertion. On a hill, he saw the three familiar stupas, or shrines, built by the Cambodian kings when this had been their capital. He had visited them as a schoolboy; now he made his way to their shelter.

  The central stupa was the largest, a circular stone temple with a rounded roof. Inside, it was dim, and the air was several degrees cooler. On a raised dais, there was a simple, but immense, statue of the Buddha—the only one in Cambodia, he remembered, that faced northward, toward China, rather than west, toward India, where The Blessed One had been born. It had been a gift from the Emperor in Peking.

  Before it, an old woman was kneeling on a spread cloth, looking with reverence at the icon. When she became aware of Lucien, in his monk’s garb, she bowed her head to the floor. He acknowledged her devotion, then knelt beside her.

  “Can you tell me, Mother, what is happening on the roads? Why is everyone leaving Phnom Penh?”

  She looked at him now, with respect, but also some puzzlement. Lucien was accustomed to this—his Cambodian coloring and largely Western features sometimes gave people pause. With his head shaved, and his saffron robe, the effect, he knew, was even more startling.

  “The Khmer Rouge have come into the city,” she said, as if that explained it all.

  “But I thought the people wanted that.”

  She looked away from him now, and up at the Buddha. “They did. But now they are sorry that they did.”

  “Why?”

  “The Khmer Rouge are making everyone leave the city.” She seemed to be telling this to the Buddha as much as to Lucien. “They are emptying Phnom Penh . . . of everyone.”

  This was madness. Why would the Khmer Rouge, apparently victorious at last, enter the capital only to evacuate it? And what could they do with all those people? As calmly as he could, he said to the old woman, “Where are they sending everyone? Where is everyone supposed to go?”

  The old woman studied the huge, implacable eyes of the Buddha, as if the answer to his question might be found there. With one hand, the Buddha was pointing downward, demonstrating to the earth his determination not to rise until he had achieved enlightenment; after forty-nine days, according to the legend, he had done so.

  “Where can they go?” the old woman said. “When they leave Phnom Penh, they must go into the fields.”

  The fastest way to reach the city, Lucien knew, would have been to take the main road that ran through the surrounding plains. But that road was raised and relatively narrow; he would be too conspicuous upon it, especially going against the flow of the mass evacuation. Instead, he took to the back roads he knew, and remembered, from his hell-raising days; on some of them, he and his friends had taken their motorbikes for drag races and obstacle courses and what they liked to call their “Grand Prix.” At one house, already clearly abandoned, its door gaping open on a stripped interior, he found a motorbike with a bad tire and not much gas in it, but still able to run; hitching up his saffron robe, and slinging his string-bag over the handlebars, he drove along the bumpy trails and dirt paths that gradually brought him, by a roundabout route, to the outskirts of the city itself.

  He had no idea what he should do. If a complete exodus was truly underway, then he might find his own home abandoned by the time he got there; his mother and sister might already be part of some refugee army, marching toward some unknown destination. But he would never find them by standing at some roadside, scanning faces; for that matter, he wouldn’t be allowed to. If he was spotted by the Khmer Rouge soldiers, and they were doing as the old woman had said, he’d be shoved in among all the others—being a monk would gain him no special favor from Communists—and sent wherever they were going.

  No, the only way to find his family, as far as he could make out, was to get home and start from there. Maybe they were still there, after all . . . or maybe they had left word somehow—his mother had sometimes left messages for him and his sister on scraps of paper stuck on the top of the bird cage.

  The motorbike was sputtering badly, and had already died twice, so he left it propped against a mango tree; its owner, something told him, would never miss it. He hurried down. He entered the city from behind the railway station, where today nothing was moving; the few trains that were there—composed of, rickety old coach cars that had never been much good—sat idle on the tracks. The loudspeakers made no announcements; there were no travelers sitting on the outdoor benches. The fruit and flower stalls were unattended. A sheaf of tuberoses, with long stems and white blossoms, lay scattered across a station platform.

  It was eerie. Lucien had never seen the railway station so deserted. Even in the dead of night, there were usually vendors re-stocking their stalls for the morning rush, or cleanup workers sweeping away the previous day’s refuse. But today, there was nothing.

  Nor was there anyone on the broad Avenue Kossamak. Where there were usually rows of buses, and crowds of picnickers gathered on the wide green lawns, now there were only sparrows and linnets, pecking at the grass, flitting among the delicate branches of the flame trees.

  How could they have done this? How could they have emptied an entire city?

  Instinctively, Lucien continued to avoid the main thoroughfares. He made his way through the town by the back alleys and side streets, sticking close to the walls, and ducking into open doorways at the first sight or sound of life. At a corner on the Avenue Sisowath, he heard shouts from a tea shop down the street. He crouched behind a green kiosk stocked with paperbacks and postcards, and watched as four men—Khmer Rouge—in black shirts and trousers, with checked kerchiefs loosely knotted around their necks, stepped outside again. They were laughing loudly, and the last of them was dragging by his chin whiskers an old Chinese man—no doubt the owner of the shop. The old man was scuffling along, in his bathrobe and velvet slippers, trying to keep up with his captor. One of the other soldiers purposely tripped him, and as he fell, the one holding his beard ripped away a handful of the long, gray whiskers. The old man screamed. The soldiers laughed.

  “That’ll teach you how to shave,” the one still clutching his whiskers said. He threw the hair aside, and fastidiously brushed his hand on his trousers. Then he pulled a gun, with a long black barrel, from under his belt. And while looking at his comrades, and laughing, and paying almost no attention, he lowered the gun and shot the old man just below the throat.

  The blood erupted in a red spray.

  The soldiers walked on, toward Lucien, without looking back.

  Lucien huddled lower, his mind reeling, his heart racing. He found himself staring at a postcard display: Angkor Wat; the Independence Monument; the Royal Palace; a color photo of Sihanouk’s daughter, the Princess Bopha Devi. She’d been married five times—think of that. Five times. He heard their footsteps on the smooth macadam of the street. But with looks like hers, it wasn’t surprising; she was beautiful. And a princess. Who wouldn’t want to marry her? One of the soldiers, it sounded like the one with the gun again, said, “That one had to be the last—I don’t think there’s anybody else left around here.”

  Lucien wanted to swallow, but didn’t dare. The Princess Bopha Devi smiled at him, her head coquettishly tilted to one side.

  “Hey . . . what about a magazine?” It was one of the others.

  There were several wire racks, stuffed with magazines and newspapers, a few feet from where Lucien was hiding. He heard footsteps approaching. He kept his head down, not even looking up. He heard a wire rack turning, squeakily. Then the sound of pages, rustling. The soldier whistled, softly, under his breath. “Look at this,” he said . . . walking away. He showed whatever it was to the others.

  “Not bad.”

  “I could use some of that.”

  There was laughter again.

  “You can get it anytime now.”

  They were moving away from the kiosk, down the cross street. Lucien heard the sound of the magazine being tossed aside. The Princess Bopha Devi smiled on at him, unaffected, unafraid.

&
nbsp; How long he remained there, unmoving, barely breathing, he couldn’t tell; it was long after the soldiers had gone. He had never seen someone killed before. He had seen death; no one who lived in Cambodia had not. He had seen victims of bombing raids. Victims of malaria. Victims of random violence. But he had never seen the moment of death before . . . he had never seen the actual killing.

  He had never seen murder.

  Now he was torn between fleeing the city himself, and continuing on. But the thought of his mother and his twin sister, left to the mercy of men like these, made up his mind; he would have to try to find them, and he would have to start from his home. When he looked around, the streets were once again deserted—except for the body of the Chinese merchant. He lay on his back, in a bright puddle of blood, the slippers thrown from his feet.

  The pages of the discarded magazine rustled in the late afternoon breeze.

  As if under fire, Lucien ran, keeping his head low, to the other side of the street; he flattened himself against the wall of a barbershop. He suddenly realized he was still hanging onto his little string-bag, with the dried fish, his begging bowl, the teak Buddha. He tossed it onto the floor of the empty shop. What good was any of it now?

  He also kicked off his sandals; they made too much noise on the street.

  He ducked into an alleyway that ran parallel to the main avenue, and raced down it on bare feet. There were piles of garbage, pigeon coops, rusting automobiles raised on cinderblocks. He felt something sharp—a bit of glass or metal—cut into one heel, but he didn’t bother to look; he had to keep his eyes on whatever lay ahead, on whatever might suddenly appear from behind a car, or from between two of the tumbledown houses. At each corner, he stopped to catch his breath and look in every direction. Once, he saw another Khmer Rouge patrol—just two men this time—sauntering down the middle of the street with automatic rifles slung over their shoulders. A red and gold banner fluttered above their heads, tied to the trees, welcoming “The People’s Army, Defenders of Our Homeland.”