Lawrence Osborne - Hunters in the Dark

He lay back on the stiff bed and smiled at the thought of Simon and his slender girl trying to kill him. Obviously this was better. And they would not have had the nerve to kill him. No normal person ever had the nerve. And yet it was also possible that Simon had given him a backhanded gift in the light of their conversation the previous night. He had read Robert quite cannily, and he had surely sensed that the Englishman would not protest too much. He would not come back looking for his things, not even for his passport. It was an incredible game, sending him off naked into the world like that, but he had intuited that Robert would survive and make the best of it. People lost their passports all the time, it was never the end of the world. He would not, Simon had guessed, even go to the British embassy in a hurry and make a declaration, and if he did they would just give him a new one. It was difficult to see what difference it would make. But alternatively, he could go find himself a false one. They were easy to procure from the city’s army of forgers. And in fact he was thinking about it already. He was thinking how he would step, lightly, into someone else’s life.

But what life had Simon led here? Exhausted, he lay naked on the bed and turned on the TV set and watched a program about outer space that was all in Khmer. He could tell that it was about some tiny distant blue planet which had just been discovered a few months earlier, a place where it rained shards of glass all day long and where the nights lasted barely thirty minutes. He dozed. The sounds of the hotel drifted down into his consciousness. The girls shuffling in nighties and hot pants from floor to floor, the Khmer pop music, the men coughing on their way out and flinging the spit in the back of their throats. The daily thunder rolled in with a generous laziness and the trees shimmered with lightning, spreading a subtle panic through the street below. He was easily refreshed. When he was up, he felt confident again and he shaved with the hotel’s plastic razor and put his expensive clothes back on after a cold shower. The air-conditioner barely kept the grit-filled heat at bay but he no longer felt hot. He thought he would go out and find an Internet café and maybe something to eat as well. It was going to rain then, but rain never hurt a man.

He went down by the stairs, landing by landing. In the street the rain came down in terrible sheets, the drivers outside cowering at the edge of the lobby. There was a soft surprise in their faces.

He found a motodop and told the driver to take him to an Internet café. They set off through the downpour and he let go of any remaining apprehension about staying dry. They drove down Kampuchea Krom until they crossed Monivong, and then they had reached a street called Pasteur, passing clubs with names like Shanghai and Flamingoes and bars stirring into nocturnal life with a laziness that gave them a natural and inevitable force.

In the thunderous rain the neon had a frosted, childish quality. They passed the Sorya Mall, a ground-floor open space filled with bars and sofas, and at the end there was Street 136 and the Internet café where the driver let him off. He dashed inside, soaked through, and sat at a terminal by the window for half a dollar.

He had wanted to just check his e-mails but now he was not sure if he should. To open his account would perhaps expose his whereabouts to someone who might be looking for it. He didn’t know who would be looking for it as yet, but eventually — surely — his on-off girlfriend, Yula, would be anxious and maybe his parents as well. Incredibly, he hadn’t thought of them. It might be a decisive thing, to use his Gmail password now. Decisive, that is, down the line. He therefore hesitated before signing in.

His hand hovered over the keyboard and gradually it relaxed and retreated. It had to be thought over, and now he was not sure that he wanted to go back to anything. He only worried about his mother, even though there were other things to worry about, a thousand loose ends left in a chaos of abandoned responsibility.

He often thought, in this respect, how un-English he really was, because breaking away from home was not proving to be as difficult as he might have once anticipated. On the contrary. It was proving easy and harmless, at least to himself. Because his own motive was becoming clearer to him, he assumed that it would become clearer to everyone in his life as well. It was not the case, and he realized that. But he hoped it would be soon. If he could walk out of the door and not come back, others would eventually understand why. There was no point, then, explaining himself to a chorus of puzzled resentment. If they couldn’t understand, nothing could make them understand. Most people appreciated where they were born and grew up. They grumbled, but they liked it, could not live without it. He was not like that, he now understood. There was nothing about his birthplace or his life there that he enjoyed or would defend to the death. There was nothing he enjoyed in that way of life. It was claustrophobic and petty, and the police watched everything you did and thought. It was a way of life that justified itself as being the pinnacle of freedom, but it had not come up with an alternative reason for existing once the freedom had been sucked out of it. There wasn’t even sex or sun. There was health care, so that although life was expensive at least death was free. A society premised on free death.

It was then that he opened the Gmail account and quickly went through his messages. Surprisingly, almost no one apart from his parents had sent him anything. It was as he had suspected. He felt a bitter contempt for himself for even hoping that it might have been otherwise. The two messages from his parents, moreover, were simple enough.

Bobby, we know you are on the road and it’s awfully hard to send message sometimes, but still we are here, you know, not six feet under. You might pop us a message once in a while just to let us know that you aren’t either!

The second seemed a little more anxious.

Bobby, are you all right? We don’t know how we feel about you being in the land of Pol Pot. I mean, really. Awful things happen there, we’ve heard. We hope you are being careful at least. Send word, all right?

And impulsively he did.

Everything OK. Don’t worry. Having a marvelous time in the land of Pol Pot. Would I be a monster if I decided to stay here a year and not come back to that awful job? Would you be furious if I did that? I met a girl. You know the story. But everything’s dandy! It couldn’t be better.

Bobby

It was fake, but it was not entirely so. The gist was true.

He imagined his father turning to his mother with a sly wink.

“So, he’s got a girl out there. I told you so.”

It was then that he decided to “go invisible.” He felt that he could cut off contact with them for a while without arousing their fears. How long that would turn out to be he couldn’t imagine. It might be weeks, or even months. He knew how they thought — once they had received word from him that he was thriving in foreign parts they would tend to let it go for a while. He would send them a curt word later on, when he knew what he was going to do. He didn’t know himself at that moment, and so there was little point trying to explain it to them.

Out in the rain there was a street almost in rubble. Wide, sultry, open to vice. Short-term hotels with little white neon signs were still open and freelance girls trawled the flooded pavements in pressed white shirts and black hair combs. He went onto some sites where people posted services ads and personals and looked through the Language Tuition section.

It was free to register and put up an ad, but in the Language Tuition Sought section there were quite a few people asking for English lessons at about ten dollars an hour. He scribbled down the phone numbers of six or seven and went out into the rain again and walked down 63 for a while until he came to a shop selling cheap phones and SIM cards. He got a ten-dollar one and a one-dollar SIM and fixed his new number up inside the shop so that it worked before he made his way out.