by Daniel Mason
There is a wet smack when his head hits the floor.
The room is silent, and then a cheer breaks out, and there is clapping.
Hayes looks at me, and then he starts to laugh.
From where I’m sitting I get the faint whiff of gunpowder residue.
Hayes is still laughing at what seems like some kind of sick private joke, drink in one hand and cigarette dangling from his lip, when he tells me that the next game is ours.
I ask him to repeat himself.
‘Next game,’ he says, seriously. ‘We play.’
REWIND
Establishing shot: an airliner at several thousand feet, streaking through the cloud.
Seated next to me on the plane had been a Japanese –American businessman named Shiro, another man who felt compelled to tell me his story. He lived in San Francisco and ran a neat accounting agency. His brother was a solicitor. His wife was pregnant with their second child. Shiro had a client in Hong Kong who was footing the bill for the entire trip. He only wished that his wife could have been able to come, but as a rule, women so far into pregnancy as she was were not allowed to travel by air. He did not seem particularly despondent at her absence.
The suit that Shiro wore was slightly crumpled, though undoubtedly he had another freshly pressed and stowed with his baggage. He had attended university in America and only once returned home to Japan since. He was thirty-seven years old and still called the country ‘home’.
What I did was smile and nod at everything the man said, half listening and wishing that I had been able to fall asleep before the stopover. Sao Paulo, Miami, San Francisco, Hong Kong. Every destination was a stopover, and nowhere was permanent. I just wanted to sleep and wake up in another place, another time.
When the plane landed I sat in the airport bar, waiting for my connecting flight to Ho Chi Minh City. That anxious sensation was slowly creeping back in. Get out, get away. I ordered a drink to calm myself.
This was Hong Kong in the weeks following the hand-over to China, and the airport was a mess of journalists and media with nothing left to do. Most were on their way out. Others seemed to mill about uselessly, and many were occupying the bar. You could pick them out easily because of the press passes they wore clipped to their breast pockets. They flashed them like police badges.
A few weeks ago at the airport bar in Miami, I had spoken briefly with a reporter. He’d told me that three months earlier, on a flight that he’d taken from Brazil to Florida, a young man had overdosed on cocaine in the bathroom of the plane. He’d looked violently ill for most of the trip, the reporter said. Kept downing glasses of water. Pale and shaking, most people thought the guy was airsick. Locked himself in a cubicle and started throwing up. Didn’t come back out. Apparently the kid had been smuggling cocaine stuffed into condoms that he’d swallowed. One or two of them had burst.
When I was in South America I watched cocaine being made. The villagers soak the leaves of the coca plant in some chemical solution for three days in giant troughs. They mix the solution into the leaves barefoot like they’re making wine and squashing grapes.
By the time I boarded the flight to Vietnam I was praying for sleep. The fat man seated next to me said nothing during the entire flight. I found myself wondering if maybe the man was a vet returning to the country that had sent him home shell-shocked. Was this journey an attempt at some kind of catharsis? I’d seen too many movies, read too many books. He was just a fat man on a plane. So I drank some more.
With the alcohol, I fell asleep in Chinese airspace, woke upon landing at Tan Son Nhat Airport in Ho Chi Minh City shortly before dark. This was Vietnam. I had a thirty-day tourist visa from a travel agent in Miami. Entry point, Saigon. Exit, overland into Laos. From there, maybe Thailand. Depart Bangkok. On the visa application, it was required that I specify my exit point from Vietnam. I had no real idea where I was going anymore. I was looking for my road, my path through uncertainty. And I couldn’t be sure if such a thing even existed.
Sometimes I felt like I was making these things up as I went along. It’s like pinning the tail on the donkey: you take a stab in the dark.
As I walked through the passenger terminal I noted my reflection while passing a window, travel weary and bleary-eyed. A tall man who hadn’t shaved for days stared back at me. The alcohol in my system buzzed around the back of my brain. The reflection waved back at me but I didn’t move my hands.
I left the terminal and nobody was milling around, everybody seemed busy and wanting to be somewhere. There were taxi drivers offering to take you wherever you wanted to go. For a moment I considered a trip to the airport bar, and thought better of it. I wanted to sober up. The air was hot and still, and with sweat now dripping down my neck I went for the nearest cab. I asked to go to the city, and the driver told me that would be 60,000 dong. I told him to turn the meter on and drive, sinking down in the back seat, closing my eyes.
To relax, I remembered Brazil, men and women picking ripe beans under the heat of the sun. Within a month I’d done three continents. From Mexico to Colombia to Brazil to Miami to San Francisco to Vietnam. I’d become a red line charting the globe.
The driver dropped me at a cheap hotel on Pham Ngu Lao Street where the rooms were small and dimly lit, the once-white sheets gone yellow. I was beyond luxuries. Downstairs I asked the man behind the counter what all of the decorations were for, and was told that they were in preparation for Wandering Souls Day. I didn’t ask any further and took the key to my room. I’d encountered enough wandering souls for one lifetime.
I listened to the sounds of the city as they came through the open window. The air that floated up from the street held the stench of motorbikes and cigarettes. I wanted to lie back on those stained sheets and sleep. Just sleep. The presence of a thousand other people who had once occupied that squalid room haunted me, and I needed to clear my mind. My head was pounding furiously.
When the doctor told me that I was going to die, he tried to let me down easily—as they do. But by that stage I had been through months of tests, and I was ready to expect anything. So the doctor didn’t dance around the issue. He came right out with it. You have a kind of terminal brain cancer. This is going to kill you, slowly and painfully. Radiation therapy can slow the growth and prevent it from spreading, but that would be little more than delaying an inevitable process. Either way, you die in the end.
In the end, everybody dies. Everything withers and fades and is gone without consequence.
Some days I think to myself, If the doctor had never diagnosed me with this, would I still be dying?
The doctor had produced several sheets of black plastic and put them up against the light board. He showed me the scans of my brain, and with an elongated finger he pointed to a bright fuzzy area and said, ‘This can be a lot of things, but it would appear to be some kind of lesion. It doesn’t belong here, and we need to get it out. I’ve got you scheduled for an operation early next week. We shave a portion of your scalp and make an incision through the skull. We need a tissue sample to further determine what this is.’
What this turns out to be is a level four glioma.
Fasten the noose.
A kind of fast spreading brain tumour.
I ran my fingers through my hair. There was no bald spot anymore. I dry swallowed two Secanol and curled myself into a ball on the dirty bed. Despite the drugs, there was only one real way that I knew how to sleep anymore, like counting sheep. There were always tired stories waiting to be told by some fellow traveller, and the world was a great beast which dragged its knuckles from one day to the next. But I didn’t want any more stories. All I ever wanted was to sleep, and escape it all. Slowly, my brain allowed it.
You think of a zoo, rows of displays and enclosures, and snaking paths through neatly manicured lawns. There are birds in their huge cages or open aviaries. You can see a flamingo standing on one thin branch of a leg, its wiry neck curled around itself. Its smooth pink plumage glows brightly in the s
hade. A sign tells you that the feathers are tinged pink because of a chemical called carotene, which the animal draws from its food.
You can see a peacock, blue and yellow in colour, its giant tail feathers spread wide and dazzling. You see a vulture, a scavenging spectre of death. You see an eagle, the proud militant surveyor.
You move on to find a crocodile basking in the warm sun. You see a death adder behind glass, scales the colour of the earth, curled and coiled and cold. You find a bright green iguana standing rigid. A turtle lumbers slowly on open grass nearby.
Hippo, round and lazy, covered with mud. Fiercely territorial.
Jaguar, long yellow teeth, beautiful hide. Calculating.
Chimpanzee, looking aged and weary, smiling. Ancient intelligence lingers in his eyes.
On, and on, and on.
Routine, like counting sheep. And through that, I sleep.
Character profile and motivation: this is Hayes speaking through me again now, and he is saying that when you buy the gun, do not tell the salesman what you really want it for. You don’t go telling him the circumstances under which you plan to use the weapon. That would be stupid. You need an excuse that sounds viable. You could tell him that you’re going hunting, but for that you need a rifle or a shotgun. So you tell him it’s just for protection: that your ex-wife has a boyfriend with a few loose screws in the head, and he’s been threatening you. You turn yourself into the weakling here, because that way you sound much less dangerous when purchasing a weapon. That way you get the sale.
The salesman doesn’t understand that guns are for killing people. He’s naïve, and he can’t see that. He’s been a weapon enthusiast his whole life, but he doesn’t quite grasp the fundamental purpose of the weapon. He’s like the man who admires a car for its engine and doesn’t realise that a car is made to get you from A to B, nothing more. A gun is designed with the express purpose of killing people. The same cannot be said of the television, even when it drains the life right out of you.
Life just doesn’t happen the way television tells us. It isn’t the same as those happy TV families with their superficial problems and never-ending supply of smiles. You grow up and your parents are Mike and Carol Brady, and it fools you into thinking everything’s going to work out just fine. You aren’t prepped for disappointment like this, Greg, Peter, Bobby.
Most people will tell you that they’re happy with their lives, but that’s because they don’t know what else to say. They don’t know any better, and they have no aspiration to climb out from the pit of mediocrity in which they are trapped. They will live on and on, unknowing, paying off their mortgage and working from nine to five in a job they hate and never wanted. They will never have a thought that wasn’t pre-programmed by the society surrounding them.
So, when you buy a gun, don’t tell the salesman what you really want it for, because he won’t understand the reasons behind it. He’s never had a real thought in his life.
Single people look at the world around them, and suddenly they see a lot more couples smiling happily and holding hands in the street. Young married couples begin to see children and babies and mothers pushing prams. If you feel like you’re getting old, you look around and begin to notice people with grey hair and walking frames. If you’re sick you start to notice when people cough or sneeze or clear their throat. If you’ve just been told you are going to die, you start to question why you’ve been living all this time in the first place. You start to see everything differently. Or at least that’s what Hayes says, and I’m inclined to believe him.
The impression that I had growing up was that in life you went to university and studied hard so that you secured yourself the opportunity of a weekly pay cheque for the next forty years. You settled down with somebody you loved (or even just remotely liked) and bought a house and popped out some children. You lived like this until you were old, and your children had moved out and away to replicate the cycle. When you’re old you retire from the measly job you’ve worked for forty years and then you have all the free time in the world. But you’re old now, so you can’t really enjoy it like you could when you were younger.
It happens before my thirtieth birthday: I am diagnosed with this level four glioma. What proud achievements can be attributed to my name when I’m gone? None.
I slaved through four years of university. I did what was expected: I got a job and I settled down. I was living the life I’d been fooled into wanting.
I worked in advertising and marketing in Montreal. I imagine it’s a little like what working for Hitler must have been like, herding different people into their assigned compounds. From the office where I worked you could see most of the city. On a slow day I would watch the world outside, looking far below at the people like ants, insignificant. I’d tell them to buy, and goddamnit they’d be rushing around doing it.
I came home to meals cooked by a woman who told me that she loved me. I came home to a house that I’d be paying off for the next twenty years. After a long hard day, I came home and I played DOOM on my PC, and I blasted away at alien zombies until the tension was gone, until I heard my wife calling to me from the bedroom. It’s one in the morning, come to bed.
My wife, God bless her soul, she and I were planning on having children. We tried. She miscarried. Turns out that I married a dud, because she miscarried again and again. I think she must have grown pretty tired of spitting out dead things, because one day just before my tumour was diagnosed she locked herself in the bathroom and slit herself from the wrist to the elbow and bled herself out.
I figure at least I didn’t have to listen to her cry anymore.
So, yeah, life just doesn’t work out the way we’re brought up to expect it will happen. This isn’t Love Story, and I’m not going to get sentimental on you. If you’re expecting a sweet ride, a box of tissues, I recommend you open the door and step out of the vehicle right now.
I’m not going to apologise.
I’m not asking you to like me.
I didn’t always used to be this way. It’s like, once I was blind and now I can see. You try going through what I have, and you’ll turn out just as bitter.
Too sour for your taste? Spit me out.
Miranda was due on a flight three days later. I took a taxi to the airport to meet her, arriving an hour early. The flight was delayed. I had spent my first few days in Vietnam wandering the streets, through mazes of stalls, avoiding vendors who reached out or called to me. I saw the Giac Lam Pagoda, and stood outside the former US embassy and imagined people being airlifted from the cluttered roof. During the night I tried to sleep and drank or walked up and down Mac Thi Buoi Street. One time, a thin man had grabbed me by the arm and offered, ‘You want lovely women? Meet some nice women?’ In the Cholon market I drifted aimlessly and eventually picked out a pair of earrings and took them to the airport, wondering all the while if they would complement her face.
There was a thin man with a sallow face lurking about the newsstand outside. Another hustler, I figured, a vulture circling the den of new arrivals. I bought an English language paper and moved on.
In the airport bar I sat and watched the neon clock, listening to flight announcements over the speakers. I restlessly smoked a cigarette and ordered myself a drink. The bar was mostly empty. There was a handsome man in a bright floral shirt and tattered jacket drinking a half-empty glass of something potently brown, stirring the ice with a finger. A young European couple wandered in and took a table near the window, talking quietly. There were three Vietnamese men who looked to be moto drivers come in from the heat for a drink and blast of cool air, hunched conspiratorially over a table.
The newspaper had little of importance to say, and I flipped through it in a matter of minutes. I looked briefly at an article about the upcoming festival, and then folded the paper shut.
‘Could I trouble you for a light?’ the handsome man in the bright floral shirt asked, leaning across the bar. A packet of cigarettes was clearly visible in the t
orn pocket of his jacket, an Asian brand.
I said nothing and slid the lighter over the polished surface of the bar, not particularly wanting to strike up a conversation. The man plucked a cigarette from the pack in his pocket and struck a light. His hair hung lankly about his face. As he inhaled, he nodded to the pack that I had placed on the bar. ‘You can tell a real Westerner by the brand he smokes.’
I straightened my back and said defensively, ‘I bought these at a local store.’
‘That’s what I mean,’ the man said. ‘They sell them, but nobody around here smokes those.’
He returned the lighter, saying, ‘I wouldn’t worry about it. Just an observation.’ The man shrugged and finished his drink, tipping his head back and crunching ice between his teeth. He pushed the empty glass away from him across the bar with the back of his hand. ‘I’ll have another,’ he told the bartender, who nodded.
I feigned disinterest, yet eyed the man curiously as we each of us puffed on our cigarettes. I had taken up smoking again after the news of the tumour. Why not? A friend who had been trying to quit had said that they were down to one pack a week. I had quipped in return, I’m up to three packs a day. It was growing to be an expensive habit, but when I cashed my life insurance I had at least enough money to smoke myself to death.
Pocketing my cigarettes, I pushed away from the bar and wandered to the bathroom, lightheaded. I trailed smoke behind me, the cigarette balancing lightly on my bottom lip, as I wiped my sweaty palms against my pants. The moto drivers were preparing to leave, to go outside and brave the humid air again in an effort to secure easy dong. One of them, a short man with a narrow moustache, seemed to notice me and followed to the bathroom.
In the bathroom I stared at my tired reflection, red-eyed. I ashed my cigarette in the sink and splashed cool water across my overheated brow. There was a blinding pain above my eyes. The short Vietnamese man came through the door and stood beside me at the sink. There were dried sweatstains around the white collar and armpits of the man’s shirt. He produced a comb from his back pocket and ran water through his hair, whistling.
