It began to rain harder. In his camouflage raincoat, he saluted and greeted all as he had done two years before on that armored personnel carrier in Battambang; they smiled as before, but as far as his heart was concerned he might as well have been inside one of those blocks of ice. He was not exactly sad or lonely. He was simply a marionette pulled by strings of resignation.
As he splashed in his sandals through the calf-deep streets into which squatting children pissed, he saw that there were new lights, sometimes even neon, trembling jellies of light that lay on the black night he sank his legs into, that night between steely grayish walls and shut windows, that liquid night of dark crowds walking slowly, some bearing lighted cigarettes like torches, that night of glowing trucks splashing; and he came to a man. He and the man had never seen each other before. He said to the man:
The man looked at Vanna's photograph. Then he said:
Non, he said a moment later, with the young wife peeping out through the open door.
He went another block and came to where the disco was, and it was not there.
Maybe I made a mistake, he thought. He went up and down the next two streets on either side, soaked to the knees.
No, he said to himself, it's not there.
Three blocks from where it had been he found an absurd new whorehouse shaped like a wicker beehive. The motorcycle drivers at the entrance stood silently aside. He opened the door and went in.
The ceiling was an immense wheel whose infinitely packed bamboo spokes recalled for him the density theorem of numbers. The circular bar had a circular island with bottles on it and ashtrays crammed with cigarette butts. That was where he sat. UNTAC soldier-boys were playing pool beneath the tigerskin-hung walls. The jukebox sang "You Ain't Nothin' But A Hound Dog." There were tall girls in bathing suits moving about. They did not look Cambodian at all. He said hello in Khmer to the barmaid and she did not understand.
Where are you from? he said.
I am Filipina. Me, her, all from Philippines. Manila.
How long have you been here?
Two weeks. All girls very news. This bar very new.
He pulled out the photograph, which now had a water-spot on the corner. — I'm looking for my wife, he said. Have you seen this person?
She called the other girls, and the soldiers looked at him with the neutrality that comes just before anger, because he had stolen their girls, and the women all inspected the photo and said: No. Never seen that one.
He bought a beer to make the barmaid more helpful. She made him pay in dollars; Cambodian money was no good there. He asked her where he should go next and she told him the Martini. — Many Kampuchean girls there, she said.
If I paid you, would you take me there? he said.
We are not allowed to go out, the girl said carefully. Not ever.
Oh, that's a great job you have, then, he said wearily. He wanted to crush the world under his heel.
Have a good night, Ernie, a soldier said, and he saw another soldier walking beside a girl, going into the back. No, the girl was right. Only the soldiers went in and out. There were no Cambodians in this place at all. He was the only one who wasn't either a soldier or a whore; he was both.
Three dollars for the beer. He left a twenty on the bar and went out. He heard a seashell's silence behind him.
Girl good? Girl number one? laughed the motorcycle drivers in the rain.
He took out Vanna's picture. — This is my wife, he said. Which of you will take me to my wife?
A raindrop fell on Vanna's mouth.
The motorcycle stalled in deep water. He and the driver knee-waded between bamboo fences which leaned in darkness, pushing the motorcycle down a prison-like corridor of bamboo in which giant rats swam. The driver cleared the engine. — Quickly, quickly! he cried. — They yawed back into the night. Occasionally motorcycles of other dreams passed like lonely motorboats. This street was a dark lake whose window-shores very rarely shone.
