As he rode away from Joe he recollected how in Herculaneum steel bars had been installed by the Museum staff in so many of the streetfronted rooms to prevent anyone from damaging the frescoes; thus these curatorial efforts formed an empty afternoon of ruined jails, like Joe's barred rooms reminiscent of prostitutes' cages in Thailand or India. And he wondered which of his own memories were like that, in sight but out of reach like place-names on an atlas page which the eye grazes over. A squirrel descended a tree headfirst. I want to remember my first love, too, he said to himself, but his love was in out up down everywhere everybody. (At the train station in Sydney the man by the turnstile said: Out you go. Off you go. Off we go. Now, where did you want to go?) He'd been too promiscuous. In Cambodia, where everyone talked slowly and dreamily, where even the beggars walked slowly, he could look through the gratings of the restaurant windows and see the cyclists' heads go slowly by. At that time he hadn't finished. He had never wanted to reach through the grating and touch one of those shiny blue Russian-made bikes as it slid by. But the next time he went there the cyclists had begun decomposing into memories; motorbikes had injected themselves onto the scene, in accordance with the smog dialectic. He said: I guess I should start remembering these bicycles. He said: I want to remember my first love, every time everywhere forever. In the French restaurant across from the Hotel Papillon, boys in clean shirts slowly, almost silently tried to sell him things. They squinted and wrote out the prices in thousands of riels, and began to pray the count of bills whenever he bought something. The hundred-riel notes were jungle-green, with a socialist face, stern and green, hair cropped back like some Viet Cong general's. He could almost remember his first love's face. The city seemed empty that first time. Had so many been killed? Of course Bangkok had been very crowded; most other cities would seem empty after Bangkok. The boys in clean shirts went out, and he could see them through the restaurant grating and then they were gone.
They passed an abandoned beaver dam in a winding river that reflected everything in the hue of a sepia-tinted photograph. The river was widening, the trees lowering. Admiring the turf of the winding banks so overhung with bushes and rich grasses, he said to himself: This is Joe's river. If Joe were here with me he'd dive beyond those grimacing branches of dead spruces to be with that virgin he loved; he'd find her here. What kind of jail would that be?
Rocks furred with blueberry bushes sank their snouts into blue lakes. An osprey flapped low with open talons. Knowing that very soon now he'd vanish forever from the atlas, he felt a happy excitement. His eyes drank from ponds whose rich mud tinted them the color of wine.
