by Daniel Mason
‘You ha’ money?’ the man asked, calmly turning to me as he brushed his hair.
Slowly, I asked, ‘Excuse me?’ wondering if I was about to be mugged in the bathroom.
‘Ten American dollar, I gi’ you a blowjob,’ the man said, grinning. He had no front teeth.
‘Fuck off,’ I said, and pushed past him.
The man started laughing, running the comb through his hair as he watched me leave, and I heard him say, ‘Me love you long time.’
Back at the bar, the handsome man was poring over my newspaper.
I said, ‘That’s my paper.’
‘Sure, sure,’ the man said. He pushed the paper back toward me. ‘I don’t need to read it anyway, not really. I work for this paper. It’s a pile of shit.’
He waved to the bartender, who came sauntering over.
Realising I had left my cigarette in the bathroom, I lit another and drew deeply.
‘My friend,’ the handsome man said. ‘You look like shit.’
‘Travel weary,’ I explained. I didn’t want to talk to this man but I knew I couldn’t avoid it, so I ordered myself a drink.
‘I know the story. Came back from Hong Kong about a week ago. Now that was a bitch.’ He wanted to finish his story, but I held up my hand.
When you travel for a long time, the only people you seem to meet are fellow travellers, and all they want to do is tell you their stories, and nobody seems to understand the complete insignificance of their stories and their lives.
Our drinks came, and I noticed that my hand was trembling lightly as I held the glass. My skin felt clammy. I couldn’t tell if it was water drying on my face or whether I was beginning to sweat. I wiped at my brow and swayed dizzily.
I swallowed and said, ‘Don’t give me another travel story. I’ve heard enough of those for a lifetime.’ It sounded to me as if my voice were coming from far away, beneath the thump of the tumour in my skull.
‘Fair enough,’ the man said.
We sat there in silence for a short while, and I could tell that there was something he wanted to say. I wiped my brow again. I took a drink from my glass and my dry tongue absorbed it like a desert. I watched the man from the corner of my eye. I massaged my temples and watched the runway through the big tinted windows, planes coming and going, and finally I told him to talk, just talk, because I couldn’t stand him sitting there silently anymore.
He told me he was an American journalist who had been living in South East Asia for the last ten years. His father was a GI who died in Vietnam in ’68, stabbed to death by a Vietnamese hooker with a stiletto heel. He had never met the man and only owned one photograph that showed a soldier with a blank expression on his face in a cleanly pressed regulation army uniform. His mother had never spoken much of her husband, and she never remarried. She died when Hayes was twelve years old, overdosing on sleeping pills. She had always been a bad sleeper, and it was never determined whether her death was by accident or suicide.
He was forced into foster homes, which he described as places where people ‘gave you genuine love out of pity’, before escaping to Europe. In London he found work with a newspaper, despite owning no official journalistic qualifications. He became renowned as the man with the keen eye for good developing stories, and would most often take the tasks that nobody else dared to touch. Eventually he found his way to Asia, going there out of a curiosity for the place where his father had died never knowing his son.
‘I was raised by the world,’ Hayes said. ‘In some ways it’s a better parent than your own could ever have been. In other respects, it’s a harsh baptism. Today you get raised by television, and you learn the power of violence and the supremacy of the weapon. The television generation are seduced by these sorts of things because they’re like a constant image, like subliminal advertising. Me, I don’t watch television, never really have. In the real world I go to Cambodia and see a little orphan girl have her leg blown off when she steps on a landmine while chasing a buffalo. The buffalo is worth more to a peasant family than their own children.
‘Every morning I look down from my balcony onto the street below,’ Hayes said. ‘And I see these young backpackers, and they’re just like off-duty GIs, wandering the streets with their cameras, bartering with vendors, dodging cyclists.’
Together we walked to the airport terminal, drunk and giddy. Security gave us wary eyes as we meandered in an exceedingly unsteady line. Hayes had a girlfriend who had been vacationing in America. She was due on the same flight as Miranda, the 3:30 from Hong Kong. I wondered aloud if the two of them might be sitting next to each other, figuring that one coincidence equalled another.
As it turned out, Miranda was not on the flight. Maybe she missed the plane, arriving at the airport late and running to the gateway screaming, ‘Stop, wait for me!’ Maybe she overdosed on her precious cocaine in the seedy hovel she had been occupying in San Francisco. Or maybe she simply forgot that I was waiting here for her, like I didn’t matter.
‘Looks like your package didn’t arrive,’ Hayes said later.
Hayes’ girlfriend was a short American bottle-blonde who wore glasses with invisible rims. She immediately asked for a cigarette and Hayes obliged. She sniffed it with a frown. ‘Haven’t you got any Western cigarettes?’
I offered her one of my own, and Hayes introduced us. Her name was Phoebe.
‘Are you waiting for someone from the flight?’ she asked.
‘I don’t think so anymore,’ I answered, looking past her to the gate. I offered a description of Miranda, and Phoebe said, ‘No, I don’t remember a girl like that on the flight.’
I nodded and turned away.
Hayes planted a hand on my shoulder. ‘You’re catching a cab with us into the city. I’m going to pick up three bottles of wine on the way.’ He smiled like I was prey.
A month ago, Miranda had smuggled five pounds of cocaine out of Colombia, but by that time I had been waiting in Miami for three days to avoid indictment if it all went wrong. She said that the street value would be higher in New York or San Francisco than it would be anywhere in Florida. It would be even higher in Europe, she told me.
I met her in Mexico, where she was searching for spiritual enlightenment. I had been on the road for close to a year, searching and yearning aimlessly. She told me that she could teach me everything, give me meaning. I was foolish to think she could be an end to my search.
Miranda found spiritual enlightenment in mescal, among other things.
She said that enlightenment came when you experienced ‘terror, pain, and roadlessness’. Taking the mescal is how you see your own road, she said. She told me that our roads could wind together and she would guide me. We’d go to Europe and follow our road until we truly knew ourselves. And I was tired of roadlessness, not knowing who I was.
I thought Miranda might actually be able to teach me something, but for half the time I knew her she was out of her mind. She moved from one place to another and never settled for long. Drugs paid her way, aided her search, rattled her mind.
Shortly before I met her, Miranda had been swimming off the Mexican coast and had an encounter with a shark. She had been alone, she told me, naked and treading water a mile out from the shore, when she first spotted the shadow circling at the bottom. She had not been afraid. The water was a brilliant blue that sank to navy toward the floor, where sand sloped like drowned dunes. The shark was nothing but an outline, a shape in the dark. She made a gradual move for the shore. The shadow followed, staying low along the ocean floor. When next she checked, the shadow had disappeared. Her relief had yet to set in when a fin surfaced about fifty feet in front of her, like the periscope of a submarine coming to surface. It was a dull grey, chipped with age along the curve. It sliced effortlessly through the water toward her.
She didn’t move, treading water and watching as the fin circled her. The water seemed to chill around her with each pass. She wasn’t sure if she should make a break for the shore or remain where
she was, pedalling up and down to keep herself afloat. Her heart was beating furiously in her chest. She waited it out and the shark disappeared, fin dropping below the surface, and then the shadow was gone into the depths.
She waited a while longer, and there was no sign of it. She swam for the shore, always thinking that it would come up from beneath her, jaws wide. When she made it to the shore, her brush with death had left her feeling more alive than ever before. The adrenaline and endorphins flooding through her body had left her almost euphoric.
That was Miranda’s theory—that to stare death in the face and walk away alive gave you enlightenment. It re-affirmed your life and gave it meaning.
I didn’t buy into that theory. Not at first.
In Miranda I thought I’d found a kindred soul, another searcher. But that was all a lie. She was only ever searching for the next score. Without her, I felt the same way I’d felt so long ago when my mother remarried. Abandoned, worthless, left behind. Now I was alone in Vietnam, where she told me that she’d follow.
But then I got to thinking that maybe she never showed up in Vietnam because the shark finally caught up with her.
Three bottles of wine later: Hayes lived in a large apartment on the north side. I didn’t ask how he could afford a place like that, and he made no mention of it. As he and Phoebe took a shower I paced back and forth, swaying drunkenly, my eyes glossing over the hundreds of framed photographs on the walls. Most of them were in black and white, some featuring Hayes with small Vietnamese children, others merely capturing landscapes or villages. I wondered if he had taken any of them himself.
Phoebe emerged from the steaming bathroom wearing a towel and made a beeline for the kitchen.
‘How long have you been in the country?’ she called over her shoulder.
‘A few days,’ I answered.
She opened the fridge and put a bottle of water to her lips, swallowing twice.
‘I love it here,’ she told me, sighing. ‘I came here on vacation six years ago and never left.’
I asked, ‘How often do you make it back home?’
She raised an eyebrow, and I noticed how different her face seemed without glasses. ‘The States? Never. First time last week. Quick trip. I had some things to pick up over there.’ She seemed distracted and changed the subject. ‘Are you worried about your girlfriend? You haven’t tried to call her or anything.’
‘I’ve got no number to call. And she wasn’t my girlfriend, just a travelling companion.’ Just somebody I thought I cared about. It’s easy to forget that caring about people only leads to trouble in the end, I told myself.
She gave a shrug and said, ‘Whatever,’ pushed the fridge closed and went back to the bathroom, clutching her towel to her chest. ‘Got to dry my hair,’ she said with a wry smile. The door slammed, then there was silence.
After a minute or so, Hayes emerged from the room, also wrapped in a towel. His hair was dripping, plastered to his forehead and the back of his neck. He held a syringe in one hand, and I frowned when I saw it. I thought ruefully that I might have fallen in with a pair of junkies.
‘What’s this?’ I asked, nodding to the syringe.
‘I am HIV-positive,’ Hayes explained, twirling the needle between his fingers. ‘My body produces dangerously low levels of testosterone. To counter this, I inject myself with an artificial testosterone gel.’ He waved the needle, which was filled with a golden substance.
I found myself watching, dumbstruck, as Hayes suspended the needle over his bare thigh. He gave a sudden jab and the needle was in, pressed through the skin, and he injected the gel.
‘Per decilitre of blood plasma, a man can have anywhere between three and eight hundred nanograms of testosterone,’ Hayes said with a grimace. He plucked the needle from his thigh and slapped the bare flesh. ‘A woman has only twenty to sixty nanograms. That’s what makes us different. Who we are, and everything we are, lies in that little syringe. But were I to overuse this drug, I would suffer excessive liver damage and my testicles would shrink. I’ve seen it happen to other men, because it’s an addictive drug. I inject it once every two weeks. No more.’
I said nothing.
‘But unlike many drugs,’ Hayes continued, ‘my body can produce this drug naturally, under the right conditions. Your body will raise its testosterone levels depending on external circumstance, like it does with adrenaline.’
‘So you’re chasing a high,’ I said.
‘The greatest high,’ Hayes said, grinning.
‘What do you do? Run? Box? Drive fast cars?’
‘Those activities will raise adrenaline and testosterone levels, certainly. But I have a whole new way of doing it, and I don’t have to expend any of my precious physical energy at the same time.’ Hayes bent the plastic syringe and it snapped sharply.
‘So what do you do?’
‘I look a man in the face as he dies,’ Hayes explained. ‘It’s the greatest natural high, when you know that it could have been you.’
During the night I feigned sleep on the couch and listened to Hayes and Phoebe having mad sex in the room next to me. Somewhere else in the city there was a bed that I had already paid for and was not sleeping in. The clock in the kitchen told me it was nearing four in the morning.
I thought to myself that I didn’t really know these people. During the evening we sat around the living room drinking wine and telling stories, and I watched uncomfortably as Hayes groped at Phoebe in front of me. Hayes suggested going out and Phoebe said she was lagged from the plane trip and they could do that tomorrow. Let’s just relax tonight.
In the morning Hayes rose early and showered and dressed for work. He wore a crisp suit without a tie. I noted that he was wearing running shoes. He smoked a cigarette and made coffee for the both of us. Phoebe did not emerge from the bedroom.
Hayes had mixed bourbon into the coffee.
‘Today I have to meet with some corrupt city officials,’ Hayes said. ‘Big business, local government. The usual sort of scandal. Sooner or later you realise that every city in the world is Fat City. You should come.’
‘I should come?’
‘Sure. The interview will take about an hour. Then we can see some of the seedier parts of the city.’ He said this last part like it was a secret.
‘I think I’ve already seen those,’ I told him. On my lips the coffee was sweet.
‘You haven’t,’ Hayes said. He winked and turned away.
The city was alive at eight in the morning. I had not showered or changed my clothes. There was a tape playing ‘Exile on Main Street’ in the deck as the car idled slowly in traffic. Hayes kept a cigarette behind his left ear like an architect might wear a pencil. He had removed his jacket.
He sat behind the wheel and seemed largely oblivious to the other cars packed tightly around us. He was busily singing with Jagger, out of tune. After a while he gave up.
‘Where we are right now,’ Hayes began, ‘was once a part of the kingdom of Funan. This was sometime during the second century, of course. Funan no longer exists.’
‘Thank you for the history lesson,’ I said. I was tired and hungover and in no mood to play Encyclopedia Britannica.
Hayes continued: ‘The French captured Saigon in 1859. Long story short, Ho Chi Minh led communist guerillas in a resistance against French domination. He declared Vietnamese independence after World War Two. Eventually Vietnam was divided into two zones, one for the Communist north and the other for the anti-Communist south, which was supported by the US. There was a great deal of political opposition which eventually led to what you and I affectionately know as the Vietnam War.
‘I tried to write a novel about the war,’ Hayes said with a laugh. ‘That was during my first few years out here. I gave up after the first chapter.’
‘Crying shame,’ I sympathised.
‘Shit is shit,’ Hayes said. ‘No point denying your own doesn’t stink.’
I shrugged.
‘You’re not much o
f a morning person,’ Hayes observed.
I wanted to amend his statement. I am not much of a person.
While Hayes met with the corrupt city officials in a tall glass building with reflective windows, I sat in the car with my feet on the dash and the newspaper open in my lap. All that I could taste were fumes from passing cars. I wanted to gag.
After about ten minutes a policeman came up to the car and leaned in through the open driver’s side window. He began to jabber away at me and I simply stared. I had no idea what he was trying to tell me. He was all arm signals and violent neck movements. Some of his spittle landed on my upper arm, and I thought that he was pretty good to make the distance over the driver’s seat.
‘I don’t understand a word you’re saying to me,’ I told him.
He continued to talk in his own language and I smiled and nodded. I was getting the vague impression of what he was trying to tell me: You can’t park here.
‘Nothing you’re saying is making any fucking sense to me,’ I said.
I ignored the man for long enough and he wandered away.
When Hayes returned, the cigarette was still sitting behind his ear. I had been drifting into unconsciousness when he opened the door and dumped himself behind the wheel.
‘You’ve got to love politics,’ he declared.
I yawned. He seemed on edge.
He said, ‘During my first year in London I stumbled across a policeman getting a blowjob from a homeless girl in a dirty back alley. Eight years old, this girl. He paid her ten pounds.’
He said, ‘When a crack addict has a seizure in the bathroom and hits their head on the sink, it can take weeks before anybody finds the body. You’ve never smelled anything like it before. My opinion, crime scene reporting is the worst.’
He said, ‘The Rex Hotel was once the quarters for American officers, but that was during the war.’
‘Thank you for that, Mr Tour Guide,’ I muttered. I lit a cigarette.
