That Savage Water

by Matthew R. Loney

  Year Zero. Emptied streets of the capital, laundry on lines strung between deserted apartments. Glorious restart of civilization: The city dwellers marched along the highways out into the countryside, hospital beds poured out, newspapers careening down the abandoned sidewalks with no traffic to stop them like birds with propaganda wings. A forced evacuation, all of Phnom Penh empty as marrowless bone.

  A girl knocked on my door this morning.

  Shlomi picks up the binoculars and peers out across the lake at the boys in the canoe.

  Ten minutes, she said. She had her hand up my shorts and Christ, I had to shove her out. Six-thirty in the morning. For some reason, I thought she was being chased.

  That was a dream?

  No, very real.

  Every day, for hours and hours. What do they do when the rain comes?

  Piat’s motorcycle growls beneath us and pulls out into the alleyway leading from the guesthouse. I want to get lost in this city with its corners of orange carts, soldier-guarded bank machines, hundreds of parked motorcycles lined up outside the market, patient as cattle. Bicycles, guns, cement buildings with their corners held up by precarious scaffolds, workmen in bare feet ferrying baskets of crushed stone. We weave between trucks and then sit in thick exhaust at stoplights. I study the back of Piat’s brown neck, the afternoon heat blazing heavy on my own. From the upper-story apartments, curtains blow like ghosts out towards the farmland.

  We turn off the main road into a tidy division of parallel streets, each towering with open-windowed apartments, flowerpots, the smell of fruit peels forgotten in the sun. Snug behind a row of pink flowering shrubs and neat lines of palm trees, a low three-storey school building sits on its manicured lawn: Tuol Sleng prison, S-21 concentration camp, a former high school turned torture headquarters still with its nets of barbed wire guarding the open-air hallways.

  What do you want to go there for? – Shlomi’s leg dangles from the hammock – Why are people so fascinated by killing? It’s the same with the Jews. Everywhere these memorials where people have been murdered. All their names and their pictures. It’s like suffering in multiple lifetimes, I don’t need to visit a place like that. There’s nothing worth remembering about killing. It’s not like the movies where the good guy shoots the bad guy. When there’s war people die. It’s not so clean as you think.

  Okay, so stay here. But history happened. Being reminded of our mistakes prevents them from happening again.

  Bullshit – he says – Is that what you think? With all our shrines to terrible things, you think we think twice before killing again? Israelis, we should know better! We should let these people heal and stop…whatever…picking the scab.

  Wide-nose girl digs her fingernails into my arm as we walk towards the back room along a narrow, dead-end hallway with peeling black doors. Now in different light, I see the roughened texture of her skin, her clusters of acne, her eyes shadowed with dark aureoles – That guy no good! Everyday he try come and stay with me. Sometimes I do with him but now I don’t want. Now you stay with me!

  Filthy as a psych-ward mattress, this whole business of buying and selling. Hot fluid exchange, drip and stain, rodent viruses that chew canals into immunity linings then burst with swarms of shit-flies. And not even that, not simply the sickness, even if this whole thing was sanitized of danger, still that roar of want – teeth grinding, hold-her-down-until-I-finish, chopper blades thrusting through the sound barrier over enemy territory, smal hand up the leg of my boxer shorts, want feel sex ten minutes cheap price. Our law. Their law. The toll it must take and all I’m responsible for.

  Inside the room, wide-nose takes her shoes off. Holes litter the toes of her stockings. Gold earrings bounce against her cheeks, her skirt clasp strains beneath her belly – I happy tonight you stay with me. That guy before, no good. What you want, handsome? – she takes off her shirt revealing two Asian breasts rorschached with bruises – Come here, I give you head.

  It’s okay…don’t worry about it.

  You no like? You want I call my friend?

  No. Don’t do that.

  You watch me fuck myself?

  Jesus Christ, I don’t want anything.

  What?

  I said don’t worry about it. Let’s just sit and wait here.

  The makeup on her face flexes in offence – So stupid. Piece-of-shit Cheap Charlie! Why you come here, you no want something?

  I just want to sit. That’s what I want.

  I think maybe you want boy.

  Concrete wall, metal bed frame, her brown body under the fluorescent bulb. This room is a strange underworld cavern I’ve surfaced in. Not my territory. Shining armour bullshit. Definitely not in the saving business. From behind the walls, the rhythmic creak of a rusted bed shifting positions, smell of wet skunk weed, water hyacinth, diesel fumes. The girl picks at her toenails through the holes in her stockings. After ten minutes, the sound of Cambodian rap translated through plywood.

  I come out into the red-lit room again. Piat waits at the bar with the two girls. The lesbians and Cambodian men have disappeared.

  You like my honeys? On my life! Tonight I cum so quick!

  Take me back to the guesthouse.

  How was the prison? – Shlomi says from behind his sunglasses, his shoulders tanned, reclined on a chair pulled out on the wooden deck soaking up the afternoon breeze off the lake.

  How you’d expect. Barbed wire still, bloodstains on the floor. Nothing moved or changed. A horrible feeling of ghosts…thousands and thousands.

  A girl from the kitchen brings him a plate of fried rice and a coconut milkshake.

  I don’t know why you wanted to go there – he scoffs – It’s like taking your vacation at Auschwitz.

  Khoi calls from the bar – Hey! Some guy gave me his iPod. You show me how it works? My iPod is your iPod. My wife, your wife!

  The sun disappears behind the storm clouds. Rain patters on the wooden deck. We move the table and chair inside beneath a growl of thunder. Out on the lake the boys paddle to shore as the storm pulls closer. Suspended on heavy clouds, lightning shudders loose from their insides. On the street everyone on motorbikes is draped in plastic raincoats, tails of muddy street water spraying up behind them. Monsoon season. Tropical laundry day.

  Bought some weed from Piat this morning. He’s surprised me, that guy. Just a kid but sure knows how to make a sale.

  The sky is dark now: The air smells fresh and cooler. The rain bullets down onto the tin roof, hard enough to wash stains from prison floors, to release bones caught in the ground still hung with the rags of their clothes.

  I’ll roll it.

  Do you want to come to the girlie bar tonight? It’s somewhere over in Tuol Kork district. More entertaining than the prison, I hope. I’ve never been to a bar like that before, but it’s supposed to have some shows you don’t forget. Ping-pong balls, birds, razor blades.

  Khoi – Hey! Come see my iPod!

  That’s west of the lake. You aren’t supposed to go there – Shlomi says, licking the Rizla closed – No thanks, I’ll stay here.

  Finally I say good-night to Khoi, passing the chalkboard beside the darkened bar: Tonight – Killing Fields 7 pm. Going to my three-dollar room hung with a pink mosquito net sticky with smoke resin, my bathroom still wet from the shower this morning, a smell I recognize from back in the Mekong Delta: swampland, cracked plastic soap dish, toilet roll soggy with condensation, I feel the entire weight of the city’s history press down on me. Ghosts like grease marks on painted plywood. Lying in bed beneath the growl of street traffic, there’s always that dread of making things worse, having left a more permanent stain. Year Zero. Jesus Christ. What do you want to go there for? This isn’t my territory, done wandering through smoldering villages, climbing Angkor with all the tourist hoards, smug and empathetic. Wide-nose women never heard of being saved. What if I had let her in this morning? Just given her a few hundred
riel, made sure she wasn’t being chased. Tiny hand up the leg of my boxer shorts, piece-of-shit Cheap Charlie, my God, how does this all happen? The cost of one bullet, that blood on the prison floor, flared nostrils, Khoi riding the water buffalo through the emerald rice fields as the soldiers search his house and the rain clouds drift over.

  LES 3 CHEVALIERS remains etched on a wall in S-21 prison. It means “the three knights.’”

  THE STAMPEDE

  The police had already cordoned off the entrance to the rocky path that snaked four kilometres up to the Naina Devi temple. A crowd had gathered along the road and most of them were crying, throwing their arms up in the air and forcing the stiff-backed policemen to restrain them from running up the trail. Carter looked out over the valley and then to the flashing lights of the ambulances and wondered if being crushed under a stampede felt anything like knowing about what he knew but not being able to stop it.

  Maybe she won’t do it – he thought – She’s only trying to scare me. That’s how it works.

  It was unlikely, but he thought it anyway.

  From the base of the hill, Carter could see out over the roofs of the houses that were stacked up the side of the valley to the road where the cars were parked. Farther in the distance low peaks emerged, patched with orchards and meadow-like carpets of wild flowers. They weren’t marigolds; their petals were the same colour but with stems that seemed as though they would break more easily. The base of the hills was stepped in terraces of rice and as the emerald slopes rose, their colour faded to brown from the scree and then to white where the snowy tips of the Himachal Pradesh disappeared into wisps of cloud.

  Om Prakash stood next to Carter – I believe I have the beginning, sir. Please tell me if you like it – then he read from a notepad that shook slightly in his hand – One hundred forty-five Hindu pilgrims were trampled to death during a stampede at a northern Indian temple…

  No, no – Carter interrupted – You can’t begin like that. Trampled makes them sound like cattle.

  Cattle, sir?

  Were they trampled by cattle?

  No, sir. By other people.

  Prakash, the world won’t tolerate Indians being written about like that anymore. Maybe in the fifties you could get away with it, but not now. No more memsahib or tiger hunts, you know that, right? The sun never sets and all that? Begin with how their clothes are brightly coloured.

  Brightly coloured…

  That way it’s not all chaos, you see. Now it’s all engineers and hydro dams, female doctors and such. At least that’s what they want you to believe, Prakash. Seems everyone’s forgotten that most of India is still a poor garbage heap.

  Carter felt the muscles in his stomach clench and the air rush from his lungs as he remembered again and wondered whether or not she would go through with it. The feeling was involuntary. Like a sudden nausea that wakes you in the dead of sleep, he was at the feeling’s mercy. She had promised she would do it and even though she had said it all from spite, the look in her eyes had said – I’d do it just to prove I would.

  No panic then?

  What?

  A stampede is about panic, sir.

  Right. Of course there should be panic…

  My wish is to preserve the accuracy of the event. I would not like to lose sight of what really happened.

  Om Prakash spoke deliberately and respectfully. Carter appreciated that but didn’t like how long this was taking. Reuters had a strict deadline for filing evening reports and he wanted this article taken care of before they returned to Delhi. Carter took a drink from his water bottle, closed his eyes, and wondered if he could still make it back in time to catch the overnight flight to London.

  Maybe there’s time – he thought – If we hurry, there might just be time.

  He spoke to Om Prakash, who had started writing in his notepad again.

  Do you have a wife, Prakash?

  A wife?

  Or are you engaged to be with someone?

  Prakash blushed – No, sir. I do not have a wife.

  Carter looked out at the peaks of the mountains – A male friend then? A buddy or something?

  Prakash’s blush deepened – No, sir. That is not even legal in India, if that is what you mean.

  It should be – Carter said – Things might be a lot easier for you.

  He looked at Prakash and wondered if he might be lying.

  That man in the blue shirt and white dhoti, do you see him?

  Yes.

  That one over there.

  Yes, sir.

  The man stood wailing in the shade of a tree, his hands pressed to his face. He had a moustache and was shaking his head distraughtly at something being said to him.

  That man claims there were rumours of landslides…

  Landslides?

  Because of the rain. Write that – Carter said – Incessant rains had loosened the soil and rumours of landslides startled the crowd…

  With all due respect, sir, startled sounds like cattle too.

  Does it? Maybe if I had said spooked I could see that, but startled seems appropriate. Hard work getting this right, isn’t it, Prakash? Are you sure you want to be a journalist?

  Om Prakash looked at him – Yes, sir.

  There will always be difficult things in life. A journalist must try to portray them all correctly to the world. Passionately, but correctly. That’s the job. You think you can do that?

  Yes, sir. I’d like to interview a family member, if you wouldn’t mind.

  Fine, Prakash, but make sure they’re upset. You’ll need a strong headline.

  Om Prakash walked over to the group of mourners and began speaking with an old woman. Carter watched her as she wailed and thought – What should I believe? That she was only threatening to leave me? That she said so as a last resort? Goddammit. Prakash should hurry up. I could get back to Delhi and be in London by tomorrow.

  Carter knew he deserved it if she left, but the pain in his stomach didn’t seem fair. All this churning inside him didn’t seem fair at all. He looked out over the valley, and in the distance he could barely make out a tiny hut sitting on the edge of a green rice field. A thread of grey smoke spiraled into the air from some sort of rubbish fire and for a moment he deeply envied whoever lived there – Why does everything have to be so complicated?

  Carter watched Om Prakash write furiously in his notebook as the crowd of mourners gathered around him, each eager to cry out their version of the events. Prakash took tiny steps back on the gravel and every time the crowd inched forward. He could understand the disgust of the British but he wasn’t allowed to say it. His job was to report the news and to keep personal opinions to himself. India was becoming too difficult to write about these days. One had to be so careful.

  The police carried the dead bodies down from the temple and were lining them up at the guardrail near the edge of the cliff. Carter looked at his watch – Dammit, Prakash. Hurry up.

  Om Prakash turned his back to the mourners and wiped his forehead with the sleeve of his shirt. He walked over to Carter and said – They say the guardrail broke. Many people fell to their deaths, it seems.

  So they weren’t trampled after all?

  Some were. Others fell, sir. One woman said she saw her children… – Prakash read from his notebook – …tumbling down the hillside.

  Terrible – Carter said – But make sure you mention those children.

  One man lost all three. He said to me, ‘I fail to see why God was so cruel.’

  Cruelty is relative – Carter thought – There are many ways for the gods to be cruel. He looked at Om Prakash and said – You see there, a fine headline.

  Such a tragedy – Om Prakash said, looking out at the valley – to be trampled under human feet. There are too many horrible things in the world. Aren’t there, sir? Does a journalist ever grow tired of seeing them all?

  Carter lo
oked at the tiny hut in the distance. The sun had begun to tilt the shadow of the mountains towards where Carter and Prakash were standing, but a gap of silver light remained between them. Carter mentally marked the sun’s boundary with a boulder resting at its edge. He forced himself to reply.

  A journalist must never become tired of the truth, Prakash. Our job is to show others what they’re unable to see for themselves. Isn’t that right?

  Carter looked back at the boulder hoping the sun had moved. It had, but only slightly. He looked at Om Prakash again – I’m going to ask you a personal question.

  Yes, sir.

  Carter hesitated and then said – Where will you go tonight, once we’re back in Delhi?

  You mean for dinner, sir?

  Well, yes. That. But more generally too. What I mean is, will you sleep alone?

  Sir?

  Alone…as in by yourself. Never mind, Prakash. You’re an idiot sometimes. I really think so.

  She was going to break his heart; he should resign himself to that. He should prepare himself so that when he returned to London and she wasn’t there, he would be ready.

  I should never have let myself care about anyone in the first place – he thought. His stomach still felt coiled in knots and he could feel it all thudding in his chest.

  If you must know, sir – Om Prakash said – I will sleep alone tonight. And tomorrow night and the night after that. For myself, sir, I think this is the safest way for a man to live.

  Perhaps – Carter said – You could damn well be right about that.

  Yes, sir.

  And you didn’t have girlfriends in school?

  No, sir. I studied and played cricket mostly.

  Better that way. Women love a cricketer, don’t they? – he turned towards the sound of the wailing again.