by Daniel Mason
The article that I handed in under Hayes’ name was filled with poor grammar and spelling. It was a human-interest piece on a boy who had lost one of his legs to a landmine. It was during the flood season three years previous, when a lot of the old antipersonnel gadgets came loose in the flooding. A landmine had washed up in his backyard, and he’d set it off unawares.
There was a photo included with the printed article that showed the boy and his stump. The photograph was one that I stole from the wall of the apartment, and I made most of the story up from what I knew about landmines in Vietnam.
I sat for eight hours stewing over what to write, knowing that Hayes had a deadline marked on the calendar for the next morning. Nobody knew that he had gone missing, and I wasn’t planning on reporting it.
The editor of the paper called me the next morning after I faxed the story in. He was an English fellow who spoke with an air of class. He said, ‘Hayes, what the devil do you think you’re doing with this human-interest piece?’
I said, ‘Well, sir, I was trying for something different.’
He said, ‘You’re calling me sir, now? Good God, man. You’re sick, I can hear it in your voice. Sounds like your nose is all blocked up. It’s going to your head. Take a week off.’
‘Consider it done,’ I told him.
Hayes never handed in another article for that paper. For a brief while, he continued to answer the telephone of his apartment and pay the bills and spend his money, but nobody ever saw him again.
This suited me just fine.
INTERMISSION
Definition 1. break in performance 2. momentary respite
A psychologist would try to figure out the exact moment I cracked. It wouldn’t matter if I tried to explain that there was no real crack at all. Some of them would try to blame it on the tumour and say that I went insane. If I ever made it to a court, I guess that’s the defence my lawyers would recommend. Plead insanity.
Others would say it began with the death of my wife. Others still would want to say it happened when I was diagnosed with this sponge in my brain. Others still might probe further into my past and decide it had something to do with my father rotting in his grave.
I don’t think that any of it really matters. I mean, everybody knows that some day they will die, don’t they? We are born only to die, and every minute we’re alive, we’re dying anyway. So maybe life is a great contradiction. Maybe there is no such thing as life. There is only death. We live in death and we are surrounded by it. We spend our time cheating it.
Is that the purpose of life, to cheat death for as long as you can? Is it unhealthy to obsess over death? Can we know death, touch it on the shoulder and come away cold but breathing? Can we tempt it, playing a game which might cost us our lives?
So you idle away at the life you think you’re supposed to be living. A few hardships are thrown your way and maybe you overcome them. You try not to think of the fact that one day you’re going to die, even though the thought is always there in the back of your mind. And one day, the doctor tells you that death has actually been growing there in the back of your mind anyway. Death is living inside your own fucking skull, cancerous and bloated, slowly consuming your senses and killing off the vital parts that make you alive. Good news. You’re going to die, and your own brain is going to kill you.
Until that fateful day with the doctor, I hadn’t really given it all any thought. But suddenly I couldn’t see the point in just dying, collapsing one day at work, twitching and then gone. Found a week later by fellow co-workers who hadn’t even noticed I’d been sitting at my desk rotting for so long. Who thought I was just appreciating the view.
Found dead alone in my house which was owned by the bank.
Dead in my car trapped in traffic.
Where was the point?
I cashed my life insurance because I could. My wife wouldn’t be needing it anymore. I thought that maybe there was something in this world that could make me happier before I died.
It’s nice to remain idealistic even in the face of death, I guess.
What they’ll say about me after I’m dead is that I cracked. I went insane, over the edge. My ability to deal with reality went out the window. But that’s all wrong. I never cracked. I just didn’t want to go out the same way as everybody else. I didn’t want to go out feeling empty, vacant. And is that enough to declare a man as insane?
I rest my case, Your Honour.
PLAY
We made the decision to run. This was after I’d killed the Russian, shot him twice in the chest and once in the neck. I never knew his name. To me he was nothing but another corpse, and I’d seen my share in recent times. I saw him dance a ballet of bullets and flounder in the hall outside the apartment, smacking against the skirting board and leaking blood.
I saw this through the spyhole, waiting on the other side of the door as he ambled along the hallway. I kept my eye to the spyhole as I lifted the pistol and pressed it against the wood of the door, sliding it back and forth, judging where I would hit. When he lifted his knuckles to rap on the door, I pulled six times on the trigger. His white suit bloomed roses.
We were out the door before the police could arrive, though I heard the sounds of sirens nearing before I started the car. We’d packed our bags, our passports, and headed for the coast, and then followed the coast northwest to the Cambodian border.
For a few days we’re in Ha Tien where it’s peaceful and we can be sure there’s nobody following us, and we plot our ways of making it over the border. We don’t have a great deal of money and our visas have expired, we’re driving a dead man’s car, I’m using a dead man’s ID, and I’m feeling like anything but a dead man.
To get overland into Cambodia you need a Cambodian visa, and for this you need a Vietnamese visa, and for this Vietnamese visa not to have expired. My original intention on entering the country was to keep drifting overland to Laos, but they were just words on a visa application, and anyway, that’s shot to pieces now; we’re too far south with not enough money, and so far as we know the entire criminal underworld is after us. Or they’re after a man called Hayes, and since I’ve pretty much been living his life for the past few weeks, they’re after me.
A tour guide will tell you that Ha Tien is five miles from the Cambodian border, sitting on the Gulf of Thailand. It’s a small town, little more than a fishing community. In the jungle you have to watch out for uncleared landmines and they tell you not to stray from the beaten track for danger of booby traps left over from the war. But if we’re wishing to smuggle ourselves over the border to safety in Cambodia, where nobody knows us and we aren’t wanted criminals, we’re going to have to cross through the jungle on a march like the soldiers from the war.
I conjure images of Vietnam films, the footage of my youth and the memories I don’t really have. I’m thinking paddy fields and napalm and sunsets and machine guns.
History lesson: Prince Norodom Sihanouk, then Chief of State of Cambodia, kept his country neutral throughout much of the war in neighbouring Vietnam. Cambodian borders were under constant use by North Vietnamese and Vietcong forces, who set up base camps in the east.
In March of 1970, General Lon Nol staged a political coup and seized control of Cambodia. With the support of South Vietnamese and US forces, he attempted to drive the communist Vietnamese troops from the Cambodian border. At this same time Khmer communist guerillas, the Khmer Rouge, began an insurgency against Lon Nol’s troops, aided by the North Vietnamese and Prince Norodom Sihanouk, exiled in China.
It reads like those scrolling yellow words at the beginning of Star Wars.
Say whatever you will about Cambodia, have whatever preconceived notions you may; for me it represented nothing but a means of escape from a vicious kneecapping.
‘This is dangerous,’ Phoebe is telling me, but I can tell in her voice that she’s excited. This isn’t really real for her anyway. I’m staring at the white cocaine rings on her nostrils.
Cocaine will give the
user a sense of euphoria. They become energetic, talkative, and there is an increase in their mental alertness. They become highly responsive to sensations of sight, sound and touch. I’ve seen it all before from my time with Miranda.
Phoebe’s drug habit has begun to grate away at me over days, and if she fucks this up, I’ll kill her. There are those moments of constant sniffing, and she never shuts up and always seems to be moving. It’s like all women are the same, easily interchangeable, from Phoebe to Miranda; it’s no different to me.
Phoebe obviously doesn’t know the difference between her dead boyfriend and me either. Her lines of reality are blurred. For people like us, everybody is the same. We’re all the same faces on the same personalities.
She calls me Hayes and that helps me to stay in character.
‘What are they going to do?’ I ask her. ‘Deport us?’
We’re sitting at a café in Ha Tien, eating a seafood dinner, and the sky above is clear and full of twinkling stars. My mouth tastes so much like cigarettes that the fish I’m chewing barely registers. I can feel her eyes on me but I’m not going to look up. Instead, I chew, watching the plate before me, the greasy fish, those curly little green things that look like leaves, rice.
She says, ‘No, we can rot in a foreign cell for eternity.’
I tell her, ‘No.’
‘We can rot in the jungle in a pit of bamboo spikes, our skulls and lungs pierced.’
‘Sounds interesting.’
‘We can die alone in a minefield, our legs blown off.’
‘You’re getting warmer,’ I say, and sip from my beer.
She says, ‘This is completely twisted.’
I say, ‘I know. Let’s do this.’
This is our run through the jungle.
In the bush I feel like a soldier hiking toward unknown combat, with my pack on my back and sweat pouring down from my temples, drawing heavy wet breath, losing my footing and swatting at mosquitoes. If it wasn’t for the pain in my head, the pulsating tumour, I might really be able to enjoy this.
I’ve swallowed a handful of painkillers and still the pain pierces my cloud. It’s like nothing around me is real. The painkillers keep the world at bay but do nothing for the pain itself.
The only true painkiller must be death.
The pack on my back is filled with weapons. Each one is wrapped in a separate rag, and all have been polished to a fine sheen. Among my equipment I also have several handfuls of packaged syringes and the all-important testosterone gel that keeps me driving, like fuel. I’m running low. I’m waiting to crash and burn.
I could shoot up right here and now and this journey would barely be a problem. Like the Incredible Hulk I could swat trees aside and plough through the countryside, an unstoppable destructive force. This is how the testosterone makes you feel.
I can’t openly critcise Phoebe for her drug problem because I’m dealing with my own. But I don’t think of mine as being at all debilitating. This is performance enhancing. This is bringing me to my fullest potential. While I’m feeding my body with energy I’m also feeding my tumour and aiding its malignant growth.
Phoebe treks behind me and I guess I’ll be the first one to step on a landmine or trip a wire. I can hear twigs crunching beneath her lithe frame. This isn’t nearly as exciting as she anticipated; though she’s yet to complain. But being a woman, she’s bound to complain sooner rather than later, unless she’s so high that she doesn’t understand where we are.
We’ve been playing that game where you name a movie title and then the next player has to name a movie beginning with the last letter of the previous title. I started the game by saying, ‘The Killing Fields.’
She said, ‘Show Girls.’
I said, ‘Straw Dogs.’
She said, ‘Saturday Night Fever.’
I said, ‘Raging Bull.’
It goes on like this for ten minutes (though we take a break for three so Phoebe can get high, snorting from a leaf cupped in her palm, and then we push on again) and Phoebe is stumped on O. Around us the grass is long and brittle and we’re walking through a field and I can see low purple mountains on the horizon beyond closer lines of dark trees, and the heat in the air is close to unbearable. I’m wondering if maybe there are snipers perched in the trees waiting to pick us off, or maybe if there are landmines here in this overgrown field. I’m thinking of landmines and Phoebe is thinking of films that begin with the letter O.
I swat a fly from my face and say, ‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.’
‘You’re not supposed to give me the answers,’ she says, sniffing, her eyelids twitching.
I don’t say anything because I’m tired of this game and my headache is even stronger now.
We continue our walk across the field in silence. It’s a while later that this happens:
‘Stop,’ she says from behind me, and I can tell she isn’t moving because I’m not hearing twigs crunching or grass swishing anymore. I want to keep walking but I don’t. I stop and I turn around to look at her with my hands on my hips and say, ‘What is it?’
She’s standing there with this look on her face, and I can’t quite place it at first. She isn’t moving, just staring at me. I ask myself why she chose to wear white on a hike like this. Her clothes are stained with mud and dirt and grass streaks.
‘I—I think I’m standing …’ she starts and trails off, casting her eyes down to her unmoving feet. It’s insensitive when I smile at her terror.
I raise an eyebrow and don’t move toward her. ‘Landmine?’ I ask.
She nods. ‘I think I heard a click. I’m not sure.’
I could walk away right here. Leave her behind.
I think it over and then step toward her, slowly, careful not to place too much weight on the ground. The earth beneath my feet is soft as if it’s rained recently. I tell her, ‘Don’t move. Stand very still. Be sure you don’t shift your weight.’
I’m thinking if I’m close enough and she moves, we’re both gone. The thought is almost comforting, and I crouch carefully beside her trembling legs. Her feet are spaced inches apart and I’m looking at the dirt beneath them, which seems just as flat as the dirt around them or where I’m kneeling. I brush carefully at the dirt between her boots, thinking maybe I’ll uncover the sheen of metal, like some kind of archaeologist on a dig. But there’s only dirt between her feet, so far as I can tell.
‘There’s nothing here,’ I say, looking up at her.
‘You’re sure?’ She’s shaking with fear, not relief.
I say, ‘No.’
‘Jesus.’ She moans and doesn’t move.
I place a hand on her bare calf, gently, and say, ‘Just step off.’
She doesn’t want to do this. ‘What if it explodes?’
‘What if there’s nothing there?’
Somewhere far away, a bird calls out from the trees.
The ghosts of soldiers who died in this field are watching us, standing proud in their tattered military uniforms, soldiers from both sides of the war, side by side, waiting for us to join them.
She sighs, and I tell her to do it, that I’m right here, and then she steps off.
Like you didn’t know it, nothing happens.
In Phnom Penh we can relax, even though we’re in the country illegally and we have no visas. We’ve had a ten-hour ride in a truck that we flagged down when we stumbled from the undergrowth. Bumping along a major road we noted bright red signs sporting skulls, text in both English and Khmer warning us of the danger of landmines. In the jungle I saw minefields and abandoned military equipment and temple ruins and snakes as thick as my arm. I saw Buddha sitting calmly in a tree, cross-legged, but I think that part was a hallucination.
The original site of this city dates back to the year 1327, when a rich old widow found a tree with five Buddhas sitting in it. Phnom Penh is the capital of Cambodia, where you can pick up AIDS on a street corner in a box—the kind of box you can take home and unwrap or have right there o
n a dirty mattress. Armed bandits can knock you from your scooter in the street, cut your throat and steal your wallet. That’s a holiday in Cambodia.
It’s because of the reputation for danger in this country that we can get away with going to our respective embassies and lying through our respective teeth, telling them that we were abducted by guerillas when we were hiking. Phoebe and I have our stories arranged before we even enter the country, and in the jungle I made her go over it several times to make sure she could lie right.
The first thing I do when I get into the city is find a safe deposit box. I stash everything we have, our bags, our equipment, my guns and testosterone. Phoebe wants to get some lunch, she wants to get high and have coffee, and I have to tell her sternly no. We’re going to take ourselves to the authorities now, and we’re going to give them our version of events.
Separately, we’re interrogated and asked if they were communist guerillas. Our answer is, How the fuck do we know? We don’t speak Khmer and these abductors spoke some pretty piss-poor English. They grabbed us while we were hiking on the Vietnam side of the Cambodian border, you see. That explains why our visas aren’t Cambodian and why there are no official records of us entering the country. It also explains why our Vietnamese visas are out of date, because we’ve been captives for this whole time. Phoebe and Hayes, that is. They don’t even ask why the photo looks nothing like me. We were tourists in Vietnam who wandered a little from the beaten track, and that’s when they grabbed us. This kind of thing happens all the time.
We were held by these guerillas in a camp somewhere for seven days before we managed to escape in the night when our captors were drunk on cheap moonshine. We cut through our ropes with the edge of a broken bottle and ran, eventually making it to a major road. We can’t remember how much time passed wandering in the jungle before we found that road, emerging emaciated and dirty. This is our story and I’m laughing on the inside the whole time they make me tell it. The authorities believe every word, because we’re exhibiting all the signs of a couple of people who’ve just trekked through the wilderness. That is, until they run some blood tests on us later. A full medical, just to make sure our health is restored after our ‘ordeal’.
