Lawrence Osborne - Hunters in the Dark

Life was far too enjoyable to waste it working at the mid-level of things. He gave up the idea of writing and wondered instead about traveling for five years, dropping everything and folding up the wigwam. But even that required too much planning. When the old man called him a “worthless sonofabitch” he internally agreed and wondered if there was a remedy to being one.

It was rumored among his horrified family that as a boy of eleven he had tried to burn down a dorm at his prep school in Vermont. Through a series of hysterical confrontations he had gradually persuaded them that it was a lie, a defamation on the part of his hated schoolmates, but the reality was that he had tried to burn down the dorm and kill all the sleeping boys, whom he loathed. The strange thing was that through those hysterical confrontations he had come to doubt his own memory of the event and to start believing that he really was innocent and persecuted. Moreover, he enjoyed this slippage, this moving from one version (the true one) to another one (the false one) which cast him in a better light. It seemed to him more truthful to the spirit of things, not the letter of things. He was not a real arsonist, any more than he was a real dropout from Yale.

He had suffered a mental breakdown during his second year. He was diagnosed with clinical depression and began to take the medications. But the chemistry did not agree with him; he was going down to New York every weekend and hiding out in a place on Rivington which he kept secret from his family. He began going over to Brooklyn to score his smack and “China white” in the streets around the Gowanus projects.

It soon became his favorite area of the city — he sometimes picked up from his dealer on the Carroll Street footbridge overlooking the canal or on Butler nearby where there was always a strong smell of roasting coffee from the warehouses. He would sit in the Thomas Greene park after hours, watching the trucks shooting down Third Avenue and the crack whores walking alone up from the darkness of Douglass Street. He was always there, half high or mostly stoned but with enough money to keep them happy.

When he went down Nevins they called out “Skinny” to him, because everyone on the street had to have a name. They took him onto the warehouse rooftops for blow jobs or into the empty Douglass and Degraw swimming pool. Years later, when he first arrived in Phnom Penh, it made him think of that half-forgotten place.

That was his secret life at Yale. On other weekends he went to family dinners out on Long Island or at the Pierre Hotel. He insulted his sisters after a few bottles of champagne and then he took the last train back to New Haven. There must have been something about these extremes that he relished. It was easy for an upper-class boy to slum, many of them did, but eventually they grew out of it and took the jobs desperately being offered to them on Wall Street by their alarmed kin. He had no intention of doing the same.

When his grandfather died, the old ladies’ footwear manufacturer from Worcester unexpectedly left him a sizable amount of money. There was nothing his father could do to thwart the transfer, and Simon packed up his bags and left Mendocino without a second thought. He always left without a second thought. He was always free to roll in a leisurely fashion downhill, as he thought of it. For how can you roll uphill?

He drifted back to New York, then Paris and Barcelona and a few other cities suitable for rich boys who didn’t need to engage with the local economy. His funds began to diminish but he had not paid attention. His fleeting businesses rose briefly and then failed predictably, and as each one failed he moved on to a new one with his own money and then his grandfather’s money and then, at long last, the money of an uncle here and half-forgotten cousin there. His family began to think of him as a wastrel, though the word was old-fashioned relative to what he actually was. But throughout it all he never lost his taste for reading and beautiful things and his careful, attentive visual snobberies, which were applied to everything from female makeup to chessboards and bespoke shoes. He knew that such things didn’t save you, but they did pass the time. It was only in the East, however, that he had finally come to understand that he was good at nothing and that being good at nothing did not prevent him from being a success. He had learned to make money in new ways, he had adapted to his own failure and turned it into a way of being happy.

—

They did not sleep, as he had foreseen, and during the night a storm broke over the mountain and they came outside onto the cabin’s porch and smoked. They dressed and packed the suitcase again and Simon wrote a quick note to his friend. Pressing matters, no time to explain . He left money for a night’s stay with the note and left it on the bed and then they whiled away the dark hours coming out of their high. Simon had no idea where they would go next. It was just a matter of disappearing for a few days and it was likely better to move than stay in one place.

Perhaps they would go to the north and find a village to hide in. He had done it before after a drug sale had gone wrong. He had once sold cocaine to a Khmer club owner who had decided to kill him because he thought it wasn’t pure — a jolly caper. He had learned all the tricks of evasion, the thousand and one ways of disappearing.

He wondered what his dead father would think seeing him in this pitiful condition. That thunderous and silky Wall Street man would have been amazed more than outraged, but deep down he would not have been surprised. He told all his friends that Simon was “scum.” His only son had never worked properly for a living and his tastes had always been dubious. A violent death in Cambodia would not have struck the old man as unexpected, Simon thought bitterly. It would have seemed logical. A body floating in the river at dawn in a pair of Brooks Brothers socks.

It was about five when they got going at last. The rain came down with a lazy savagery as they struggled up to the house and threw the suitcase into the back of the car. Everyone was asleep, and the cicadas roared in the forests that Mick had reputedly bought from Ta Mok, Pol Pot’s most trusted man. They sat in the front seats for a moment and began to laugh. They were still half stoned and the effects of the heroin had not cleared from their senses. Nevertheless, they started the car and drove quietly back down the slippery hill toward the track that curved down the mountain’s side. The first light was about to reveal the papaya trees stark and burned in the near distance.

Ouksa drove down the same track with a stunned disbelief in his own luck. Standing by his car and staring into the loggia he had noticed and recognized Simon at once, but controlling his instinct to make himself known or extend a greeting he had turned away as if nothing had happened and driven away as coolly as he could manage. In the driving, bestial rain the act had been easy. But he shook with excitement.

So the barang con man had made it up to the Moonrise Lodge. It was a place which all the cab drivers around the border knew, even if they had few reasons to ever go there. He had come up there with his girl to hide out while the landlord went through his abandoned rental by the river and the locals whispered about the scandalous goings-on which had gone rippling through their lives for months.

It was said the American had thrown a man into the river while high on Ecstasy. They said, too, that he went asking for the bodies of barang suicides so he could pay for their funeral expenses in exchange for going through their pockets. No one could imagine how much money he had made this way. Thousands. People had seen ghosts walking around his property, the souls of the dead walking through the wild fields that surrounded Beauchamp’s house and sloped down to the river. It was an evil business; he was an evil man in his way. Gently spoken and mannered but off on the devil’s business. The Ap was close to him. Now he had ripped off the nice young Englishman and he had heard about that too. The boatman who took Robert south had returned north and talked about the matter high and low. Paid to keep his mouth shut, he had duly opened it for nothing.