Honey: Selected Journals from the Years Away
Book VII: Along the Mekong
29.4.17 to 2.5.17: Ko Rong Samloem, Cambodia

 

I woke to the heat of something or other, waving its nothingness around me. In the night I’d covered myself in a blanket, but now I was kicking it off. Before me, through the tent flap, the fan sat in the sand, blowing noiselessly, an extension cord running back to the compound. More than the heat was the sound: behind me, this booming, nasally groan of what sounded like a table saw. The sound of a dentist with a power tool, screeching, filling your entire being. I unzipped the tent and crawled out. The noise bore down.

The place was a disaster zone, a post-apocalyptic refugee site, marred with trash and half-built structures and dead fires and woven hammocks. The majority of the trash being beer cans – Angkor, Cambodia, something with an elephant label – and these thin plastic cups that crumbled under pressure. And straws, and cigarette butts, and cigarette packages, and unclaimed flip-flops. For ashtrays there were conches, black with tar and nicotine. I was realizing the reason for my sore throat: an increase in cigarettes since I’d started with Simone in Siem Reap. It was growing. It came on at night.

I moved towards the shore. The spot looked abandoned, like everyone had left in the five hours I’d been out. It was blissful, mind-clearing. The tide was out, exposing these tiny jagged rocks that were destroying our feet. And then there was the expanse. It seemed to burst forth, like a bubble. The sun was barely up, the real temperature some way off. It was perhaps the moment I looked to achieve: struggling to move, some animal picking across the destroyed landscape. The view was enough. I felt the silence of it all, the clarity of mind – that internal cohesiveness you can’t summon if you try. Questions bloomed: Who are these people? What do they want? Why are they here? Why am I here?The questions appeared separately, blank space between them. They weren’t judgmental. They were full of morning pureness. The sort that you can’t replicate later, when the day is on, and it all comes down.

Two nights before I was in Sihanoukville at Monkey Republic. I was at the bar with three travelers who’d moved into my dorm after Henrietta left. Martin from Sweden, Patrick from Australia, Stina from an amalgam of countries. Born in Denmark, lived in New Zealand, now in Australia. She had that accent where you can’t tell if it’s a put-on or truly a hybrid of people and places. Then there was Julian, who wasn’t in our room but we’d met playing pool. He was from LA and clearly older: his faced was lined and leathery, but his eyes were full and frantic. He was obviously dealing with some internal conflict that he was nowhere near breaching. He was 28, and that was still quite young – we were all still so young. He kept repeating this, like he needed to hear it to believe it.

After dinner we were having a beer while Stina showered and Patrick changed, which meant they were fucking in our dorm – and it pissed me off, because I’d just gotten my laundry and was now sitting at the bar with it like an asshole. I’d assumed they’d been together for ages, but Martin said they’d only met two days back. Thus, it was weird how obsessed they were, with Stina unable to keep her hands off Patrick, and them discussing weddings and honeymoons, and Stina saying Patrick looked like a mix of Bradley Cooper and Ryan Gosling when really he looked like Sharlto Copley. I liked Patrick, because he listened to Broken Social Scene and had been to India, but I thought he should cut Stina loose because she was crazy. She was developing a theory that they’d met before at a public pool in Australia and destiny had reconnected them.

After they were done fucking we went to the shore and started trying to get as many free drinks as possible. The strip was full of these janky bars that looked like they could be folded up and gone in an hour if there was any trouble. Most had white people on the boardwalk handing out flyers that read: Free Drink When Presented. If you got a beer you were alright, but anything else was going to be watered down and useless. We made it to the beach’s end, where leftover backpackers and drunken Cambodians danced in the final bar. Martin and I chain-smoked. I was ready to write off Sihanoukville as a depressing shithole when this Cambodian girl started eyeing me. She was looking me up and down. I said to Martin and Patrick: You seeing this shit? She wore a tight yellow dress and had long platinum blonde cornrows. But it was her eyes: piercing, done-up, born through the fog. She held my gaze. Patrick called her the Basilisk. I spent an hour trying to decide whether or not she was a prostitute. I stared back. I went and stood beside her. I looked her up and down. I asked what she wanted. She said: “No speak English,” which didn’t bode well for my survey. We rattled on until I said: “I don’t pay for women.” It was something I’d never had to say before. She looked confused. It’s hard, because you don’t want to offend a girl by asking if she’s a prostitute – and there’s always a chance she’s a hot Cambodian out on a Saturday night looking for love. I was unsure, until I went outside and she followed, hovering with a group of girls who were definitely prostitutes. She eyed another guy and started looking him up and down. He was smitten. I felt stupid. He had a beard too. It seemed like the Basilisk was scoping out a particular type of gullible white guy.

Martin and I left, walking back across sand through competing neon lights and bursting stereos. Martin was tall and thin, with a long smooth ponytail and a snaggletooth. We stopped to buy Oreos and Pringles. Martin worked at a customer complaint line, and said sometimes women called up wanting to return items they’d purchased for their recently deceased sons. He said he never knew how to respond. In the morning I went to write while everyone slept, and when I returned they were gone, just like Henrietta – and I was starting to think there was something inside me that made it this way. But no one ever exchanged information, and people moved so quickly through the thread of life that I could hardly keep track.

I waited at the pier for the speed ferry. I was hungover. I was carrying all my shit, and a helmet Stina had given me that said: Drive With Your Head, Ride With Your Heart. Everyone stood with their massive bags in the sun. The boats arrived at the dock, but parked a meter below and away – which meant you had to hop over the clear blue water, with your shit, in a moment of complete oblivion. It worked out fine. The boat was full of tourists, mostly Chinese, who were determined to videotape the entire ride, including me. We moved fast, knocking against the waves, cresting in the sky before falling back to the sea. One lady bent over the side and puked.

I got sat next to the one other white girl. She had bleach-blonde curly hair and a thin face with one big pockmark on her cheek. When we reached Koh Rong I took out a headphone. She said: “You going to Koh Rong Samloem? M’Pay Bay?” I said yeah. She was too. People got off and other people got on. We started towards Koh Rong Samloem. These islands were far from the mainland; part of the journey saw nothing but surrounding water. That, I assume, is part of the appeal. It is isolated, otherworldly, even if it appears as a beach. You can’t conceive of the danger this holds, but you can conceive of the island.

This girl starts chatting. She has a lot to say. She lifted her sunglasses to reveal big crazy eyes hiding in a gaunt face, and yellow teeth with a front one grey. She was heading back to the island, planned on spending six weeks. She’d renewed her visa, then come back as soon as she could. She was working on the island, but couldn’t remember the name of the place. She’d been working somewhere else, but the boss and her had gone through some shit that was too complex to explain now. The boss was actually on the boat. She pointed to a Cambodian lady holding a baby. The woman’s eyes narrowed when she saw the pockmarked girl.

She knew the place I was staying. She said most people went there to drink.

I’d picked Yellow Moon at random. Lina had suggested Driftwood Hostel, but reviews were pretty harsh. To be fair most reviews oscillate between calling a place amazing and calling it a shithole. Stuff like: “This place is disgusting – there was a rat in the bathroom,” and: “These people are completely incompetent,” and: “The towels were weird, they didn’t dry you.” It’s all a gamble. Henrietta had come from Yellow Moon and I figured I could trust her. The pockmarked girl told me how to get there, and what to do on the island, and how to buy a return ticket – and I was appreciative, but she was so loud and crazy-eyed that everyone was staring and I didn’t want to be associated with her.

We arrived at Koh Rong Samloem. The dock was wooden and rickety, jutting out from the swelling shore. A few shacks budded off the pier onto their own platforms. We were helped from the boat and into the sunlight. Standing there was a group of people with big backpacks on their backs and little backpacks on their fronts. They were lined up, looking sad and dejected and exhausted, like they’d just been let out of prison and were so broken that they couldn’t even get excited about freedom. I suppose I should have taken that as a sign.

Koh Rong Samloem was small, a crescent of rocky shoreline filled out by a few fishing boats. Across the bay was a tree-ridden island, presumably abandoned. Set back from the water was a single road of sand, populated by hostels and restaurants and small shops; the sand was fair, hot, deep – walking through it was difficult. The hostels looked like they’d created a cool logo but not done much by way of construction. It gave everything this incomplete, skeletal appearance. The restaurants were small huts, usually with a shirtless guy watching television inside. They had signs offering any dish for $2 USD, and a little girl running around both taking and delivering orders. There was this plain, sticky heat that permeated everything.

The main thing, though, was that something felt off – that this wasn’t how it was supposed to be. Like the place was some manifestation of paradise gone wrong, or at least on its way to going wrong. I hadn’t wanted to come to Koh Rong Samloem. I was tired. I didn’t want to drink or party. I was down to relax with a book, but that wasn’t going to happen. I’d fallen prey to the island’s myth, and now here I was. But what I saw was strange. There were kids, and foreigners playing with them, hoisting them up, getting them laughing – like communal children cared for by the island. But they were dirty, wearing rags, shoeless; they weren’t in school, they were playing with old beer cans; they seemed to be loosely begging, almost teasingly. It wasn’t clear whether the locals had come first and were adapting to the newcomers, or if they were a reaction to the tourist market. It didn’t matter. It was a microcosm of something larger. It’d be naïve to think that the booze and the drugs and the pollution wouldn’t corrupt the island beyond repair. I saw that there was no law. Maybe nothing terrible had happened, but it certainly would.

I reached the end of the sandy lane, where a concrete slab traversed the stagnant, swampy river. On the right was this old busted pool table with a group of children sitting atop it playing cards. A white guy in a tank top was snapping photos of them. I crossed the bridge.

Yellow Moon was segregated from the strip and the most deconstructed of all. They’d been open four months, but the only completed structure was a standalone tiki bar. It looked like it’d been bombarded with trash and couldn’t pick itself up. The main building was a large, open-air atrium that housed ten tents, extension cords running like dead snakes across the concrete. Around back was a tin kitchen, and two bamboo showers: a floor of smooth stones and a spout made from a PVC pipe and a Coke bottle. The bottle had holes poked in it to create a makeshift showerhead. Between the compound and the beach were wooden tables, and hammocks strung between trees; and then at the shore were two hammocks hung above the water by three erected poles. And then the island opposite, and the complete sky.

Behind the bar was a girl in a bikini and a black sleeveless tee. I walked over. Her name was Roe. They’d overbooked and there was a bit of a problem. But she’d seen this coming and had worked out a plan. She was looking at a spreadsheet on a sand-covered laptop. She said they had a Vietnamese group that’d booked the dorm, but she could move me to a tent, charge me the same rate ($6 USD/night), and give me a free beer. I said: Fine. The tent was one of two beneath a sagging blue tarp, nestled in the sand on the far side of the compound. I dropped off my stuff and went for the beer. Another girl was now at the bar. She apparently worked at Yellow Moon too. When she saw me having a beer she said: Well, I’ll have one too. Her name was Sophie, and she was blonde and Swedish. We sat drinking our beers while she taped a gnarly-looking gash on her foot. She’d cut it on the rocks, and sand ants had burrowed into the wound. Behind us was a big chalkboard that said: Shotgun For Your Country!I asked Sophie about it. She said if you did a shotgun you got a tally mark for your country. Britain was in the lead by far.

Another employee came by carrying a cooler. He was a Brit named Jimmy: shirtless, red, the start of a beer belly, dirty curls held back by a bandana. A cigarette dangled from his lip. He said: I’m going to the shop. Roe asked what he was getting. He said lotion, gesturing to his skin. “Time to restock the condom locker as well. I swear, if it’s trulyan equal world we’re living in, you’d think these girls ought to bring their own every now and then. Share the load, you know.” Sophie laughed. “Especially if they’re sharing my load.” He winked, Roe rolled her eyes, Sophie laughed again; Jimmy patted me on the back, said: “Alright then,” and wandered off.

The people working at Yellow Moon, or any of the surrounding hostels – they weren’t really working. They were volunteers, which meant they got room and board in exchange for doing menial tasks around camp. They were the same as the white people handing out flyers on the Sihanoukville Strip. It was an agreement by which no money traded hands, in compliance with the No Employment status we agreed to when entering Cambodia. Anyone bragging about working abroad – it was a lot simpler, easier, less official. They were making beds, bartending, checking people in, taking out the trash. The real work was done by a small Cambodian staff: manning the kitchen, cleaning the dorms, picking up cigarette butts. One could assume that the bad reviews were directed at the volunteers, who had little incentive to run an efficient hostel. Their motivations lay elsewhere.

Things grew dull at the tiki bar. After the beer Sophie wasn’t much for conversation. Roe tapped away at the laptop. I felt awkward. I didn’t realize that the staff was recuperating from the previous night’s debauchery, and preparing to do it all again. It wasn’t personal. I left to the shore and looked out at the water. Lying in one of the seaside hammocks was an Asian girl getting her photograph taken. Her watching the sunset, her pondering the wonders of nature, her pouring water out of a conch. The photographer squatted in the shallow water, capturing her best angles. Three girls and a guy sat on loungers, watching the shoot. The lounging guy and I started talking. His name was Fo and he was from Ho Chi Minh City; he and the photographer owned a boutique furniture store. Fo was the business end; the photographer designed the furniture. He had a massive circular scar on his knee, with little dots where pins had been. I didn’t ask about it. Only he and one of the girls, Hu, spoke English. The photographer and his subject returned. We sat on the loungers as Fo translated. The sun began to set. I was drinking a fair amount of beer, to fill the awkward silences – but I figured this was what it was all about. The night wore on, with everyone buying everyone copious drinks; and so when 11PM rolled around and they announced they were off to bed I felt sufficiently drunk enough to return to the tiki bar, which by now was abuzz with the night’s festivities.

This is when things get blurry. Time lost linear direction. We swarmed. Everything was so fucking bright. Sophie and I were competing in multiple games of Connect Four – which is much harder to play when inebriated than one might expect – and she was beating me in all kinds of ingenious ways that made my heart pound. By now I’d abandoned my policy of buying beer from the shack across the bridge for $0.25 USD cheaper – but Mom had transferred a tax return into my bank account and this seemed the perfect way to spend it. We were shotgunning for our countries with Jimmy and Emily, a bright-eyed eighteen-year-old from Vancouver; I opened my gullet and let the liquid ride down. Jimmy was re-bandaging a bite mark on his forearm from a rabid dog; I asked if he’d been to get a rabies shot; he said no, but it’d been a month and nothing had happened. He was still shirtless and red, with an arm around Sophie, mumbling innuendos – witticisms she didn’t understand, but made her laugh; witticisms I didn’t understand, but I was drunk and he was British – and I hated him then, hated him for ruining my chance with her. There was the stadium-sized roar of a beer pong game behind me, lit by fluorescence – an event I couldn’t reckon with. An American named Sander was feeding me cigarettes from his barstool. I was playing Connect Four with a Canadian named Kyla, except we weren’t playing Connect Four – she was yelling at me. She was asking if it was hard being an American with everyone hating us; I said: Well, Kyla, being an American comes such privilege that I can’t blame anyone for hating us, particularly when we do shitty things to other countries; and yes, Kyla, I personally am not responsible for said shitty things, but if my country is and I choose to throw my hands up and say it’s not my problem we don’t really get anywhere now do we? Kyla wasn’t interested in any of that. She cozied up with a thin-mustached Cambodian named Sam. At which point some internal switch flipped and I knew there was no more – no more music, no more lights – and I moved almost instinctively back to my tent, fell inside, and found sleep despite the noise; only to wake the next morning, crawl out to the wreckage, reach the shore in my underwear, and think, in a brief moment of escaping clarity: Who are these people and want do they want?

Shortly thereafter I put on my speedo and started towards the abandoned island. It wasn’t the smartest move given how ravaged I was – but I felt like I needed to reclaim something, and the only way to do it was to swim. The thing about eyeing distance is that it’s always farther than you anticipate, and swimming in open water is surprisingly challenging. The difficulty lies in the current, a product of size: deep, wide, vast, working from its own system – you’re no match for that. I was looking down at the sea’s rippling floor, growing foggy as I ventured on; the saltwater burned my nose and mouth, sent little shocks of pain across my body. Set between the islands was a rusted blue fishing boat that I thought to be the journey’s median. I hung from the side and watched the fishermen detangle their nets.

As I neared the island I came upon a boat with six people in lifejackets floating at its side. The pockmarked girl had mentioned this: for $2 USD they’d take you snorkeling. The group was Vietnamese, plunking their heads down, coming back up to scream with delight. I swam beneath them, and there it was: a reef of coral, deeply shaded, obscuring the black bottom. There were tiny fish, mostly blue and green, and a translucent kind tinged yellow. They seemed nonplussed by our arrival. I wondered what they thought of us: busy giants shrieking at their daily routine, polluting the world with trash and muck. The look in their expanding eyes said: Whatever.

The biggest presence, though, were the sea urchins. They were everywhere. They looked like little black holes, the size of softballs, with pointy vectors shooting from their base. Some of the vectors had to be a foot in length. They seemed motionless, except to sway in the current. They didn’t have faces, but some had two tiny white dots on their jelly-like bodies that looked like eyes. They seemed ominous. I knew nothing about sea urchins. Later I learned that their spikes are barbed, and can give you over fifty splinters from one touch. I didn’t have to know that to sense they were dangerous. They multiplied in density towards the island. Logic said to turn back – but I’d come so far and wanted to reach the shore. To be where no one was.

Things grew shallow. First the challenge was moving slow to avoid them, but eventually there wasn’t time to contemplate. They clustered on rocks and coral; they hid in crevasses, only visible via white eyes. In certain places I found the path blocked and had to double back and find a different route. It was a dense, dangerous maze. I’d find my foot an inch from them – and if it turned out sea urchins moved, I was fucked. When it became too shallow to submerge my body I spider-crawled across the rocks. The urchins dispersed, but the terrain was jagged; I could slip, fall, crack my head open. I felt the sun beat my back, burning me; I didn’t care. Finally, I reached the sand and was able to pull myself onto the island.

The shore was sparse, littered with rocks and bottles. Flies moved in dizzying circles. Set back from the sand was the thick, untouchable forest. It pulsed with the unified sound of insects. There was no beating that. I found a long, smooth rock and lay in the sun panting. The snorkelers were still squealing beside their boat, but a new world separated us. I saw Koh Rong Samloem across the way. It was deceptively close.

As I lay there I started thinking about what this was, why we were here, where I fit into the mess. The sun was high; we were nearing midday. The creatures were crawling from their tents and dorms and hammocks, back towards daylight, back towards dark night. Roe was back at the laptop, Sophie was back at the barstool, Jimmy was back recounting last night’s escapades – the whole thing was starting again. That was perhaps the most fascinating quandary of the island: what, exactly, all these people were doing out here. Why they’d chosen to stay, dreaded visits to the mainland, were counting weeks almost proudly. Maybe they liked the idea of being on an island. Maybe they were running from something. I thought they were killing time. As if they’d found some loophole in the dimension’s thick properties – flattened it, disappeared. And yet it didn’t seem like any of them were enjoying themselves. They were dead-eyed, dehydrated, sunburnt, bloated, carrying on almost begrudgingly. Nature was destroying them. They didn’t realize they were dying out here – physically, yes, but also losing some eternal life force they’d need to exist. When I tried to ask them – any of them – about what exactly this was they looked at me as if the question had never occurred to them.

On my last morning at Yellow Moon I was at the tiki bar preparing to leave. Roe was checking me out with baggy eyes. Jimmy, mascara smeared on his cheeks, was cracking a beer. She said, almost absentmindedly: Did you get with that Canadian last night? Jimmy nodded and sipped. I said: How many girls do you hook up with a week? “Two or three,” he said, staring into his can. “With 100% accuracy,” Roe chimed in. Jimmy pointed a finger at me: “Never with staff, though. I have my rules.” I immediately felt stupid for thinking we’d been competing over Sophie. “No staff. Except we got quite close one time – didn’t we now, Roe?” Roe shrugged at the memory. I asked about the other rules. He was 27, and 17 was the lowest he’d go. I thought both of these facts were sleazy. But there, at the bar, I felt a rare sense of fraternity with them. We had nothing to gain or lose from each other. I was leaving; they were staying. It was a game – a serious game, just like everything else. It was all that kept us tied to this earth. We were prisoners of our own creation. Islands only clarified it.

I made it back past the urchins, gliding over them in a void of abandon. I waved to the snorkelers and started towards Koh Rong Samloem. There were schools of fish now; I dove deep to swim among them. They swerved as one. I grew tired. Salt took my mouth. I floated on my back and stared at the white sky. The fishermen weren’t far. When I reached the boat I treaded and waved, signaling with an extended thumb for water. One of them entered the cabin while I clung to the side. He produced a cooler, dunked a cup, took a drink, passed it over and re-entered the cabin. I lifted myself to the deck and drank three glasses. It was an icy liquid, tinged yellow-green. I thanked them and let myself fall back to the water. I swam in the direction of the shore, cool against the hot sea.

~~~

After I returned there wasn’t much to do. You could read in a hammock, or start drinking, or take a nap if you could stand the temperature. That was the worst of it: a windless heat, touching you always. Only the staff seemed not to mind. The rest of us lay exasperated, wilting, sunburnt and perpetually thirsty. I’d lucked out with my tent, because the dorm cut power from 9AM to 5PM, turning the room into a sweat lodge – my extension cord ran all day. We set my fan to glide and waited for it to turn our way.

Past Yellow Moon was a path that led to an arching beach. The trail was patrolled by a group of kids yelling: “Tan! Tan!” and sticking their tongues out when you didn’t offer anything. In the water were two guys lazily tossing a Frisbee. I recognized one of them: it was the French dude from the van to Sen Monorom, the one hooking up with the forty-year-old Chinese lady. I waded out to meet them. The other guy was a German in a flat-brimmed hat. The Frenchman said: How’s the writing going? I said: Good. He said: Need some inspiration? We moved to the shore and rolled a spliff. We sat on small dark rocks and passed the joint around. The German had a nervous laugh that followed everything he said. The Frenchman wore sport sunglasses. I couldn’t focus on anything except these details. When we were through I went back to the water and floated, staring out at the horizon. I felt the urge to shit, and realized I could right there. The fish were doing it all the time. I didn’t understand what was happening until I was pooping in the sea. I thought that I was either very high or had lost my mind. There wasn’t much. I covered it with sand and swam away.

The high lasted an hour, after which I ended up back at the tiki bar with Kyla and a posh girl named Demi. She had short brown hair, graceful cheekbones; she was good-looking in a way that seemed out of place. I’d seen her earlier sunbathing topless, the rest of us trying to sneak a look without appearing too conspicuous. Her and Kyla were moving dorms because of a bedbug infestation. When word first came down Roe had handed the complainant a can of Raid, but now she was just moving everyone. While they waited I pointed to the island and said: I swam there this morning. Emily, who was bartending, said: They call that Snake Island. She said that before Ko Rong Samloem had opened to tourists the locals captured all the snakes and released them on the abandoned island. Kyla said: No way. Emily said: That’s what they say. Kyla said: “You’re telling me the locals caught every snake on this island and put them there? No fucking way.” She seemed almost angry at the suggestion. She seemed angry about a lot of things. Emily shrugged. Demi said it sounded true enough.

At dinnertime the three of us walked to this all-you-can-eat buffet, one of the suspended shacks branching off the dock. Both Sophie and the Vietnamese had recommended the place – it was so popular that you had to make a reservation. I’d gone by earlier, paid $6 USD, gotten a handwritten ticket that read: 1 x $6 = $6. When we arrived there was a long table of people from Yellow Moon and only one seat vacant. The guy beside it was this muscular South American in a black V-neck; he had a shaved head except for a tiny ponytail. He was patting the seat anxiously and looking at Demi. The waiter seemed worried. He said he could add two more, but definitely not three. It turned out Kyla hadn’t reserved – at which point you’d think societal norms would dictate Kyla’s departure. But that wasn’t how Kyla rolled. She stood oblivious to the apparent awkwardness. I suppose she didn’t have the wherewithal to understand, despite being Canadian and thirty. The tension mounted. I felt like I was in high school again – and I wasn’t going back there. I excused myself to another table, considering none of us knew each other anyway.

I ended up next to Sander, the cigarette guy. Sander was fine. Sander wasn’t a name, but I didn’t say that. He was young, from Colorado, looked like Christian Bale in American Psycho but chubbier. He didn’t have much to offer in terms of conversation, which was maybe why he’d been offering so many cigarettes at the bar.

A lady came out and got our attention. She was the head chef, and started to explain what was happening. She said that all the leftovers went to the locals; and if you didn’t eat everything on your plate you were fined $5 USD, which went to the local hospital. She said they were in the process of opening a second, cliffside location that would serve 250 people. I thought that was a huge undertaking, but if anyone could do it it’d be her. She seemed to be the island’s last true hope. She said we could get up and eat, at which point people cautiously entered the queue. I got in line behind an old, tan, longhaired guy who was clearly the island’s resident crazy person. He was hugging his plate, saying: “Mine! Mine!” He was joking, but it didn’t make sense because we’d all been given plates. I returned to the table with squid, mango, and grilled fish. Everything was delicious. The chef wasn’t fucking around.

As I sat there eating, I saw a girl. I suppose the problem is that I see every girl and think some sort of thing – and this girl shouldn’t have been any different. What I mean to say is that I noticed her in particular. She had a caramel complexion and fair shoulder-length hair; she wasn’t petite or thin, but she wasn’t big either. She wore a long black elastic dress that seemed made for her curvature. She was barefoot. She was a person. But she had this aura about her – a force that seemed to pull energy towards her. She had the thing that the rest of the world wants to bottle up and know. I just wanted to know her. I was pretty sure she was at the long table, which gave me further reason to hate Kyla. I felt a fishbone catch in my throat.

Back to Yellow Moon the night was beginning its long and arduous journey. Jimmy and Sam had donned dresses and were getting their make-up done. Apparently it was Ladies Night, in which girls – and those resembling girls – got free shots. Jimmy wore a long cotton slip; Sam sported a tight, floral-printed thing, his hair in pigtails. Next to my tent three of the Cambodian staff were grilling squid and tossing empty beer cans beneath them.

For a while Sander shadowed me around the compound. I lay on a lounger; he walked past, relieved himself in the sea, reclined beside me. I moved to a water hammock, looked out at Snake Island basking in the white moon; soon I felt an upheaval, realized he was in the other one. This felt like high school also. I was thinking I ought to feel more empathetic towards him, considering I’d shit in the sea earlier. Eventually there was a tap on my shoulder and I removed a headphone. He said he’d seen the Frenchman and the German going to the other beach to see the bioluminescent plankton if we wanted to go. He’d mentioned this off-hand a few times at dinner, clearly trying to lock down plans. I figured he wasn’t going to let up, so I said alright.

We changed into our suits and started down the path. Sander had brought a headlamp, but it wasn’t working. He said it was a bummer because it’d been really expensive. I thought: How expensive could a headlamp be? We reached the beach. There was nothing plankton-like around. There was no sign of the Frenchman or the German either, but I didn’t mention that. You had to go into the water to see anything. Kyla had told a story about a guy who’d trekked to the beach and not gone in the water, and how big of a fucking idiot he was.

Sander and I moved into the sea, searching. There was nothing below us. I thought I saw something akin to ghosts – tracts of light moving in the dark – but I also thought it could be my mind playing tricks. Then, though, there were these dim twinkling dots, particularly around my hands. I submerged myself to the shoulders and whooshed my arms back and forth, the water alit with whirling white. It was subtle, small – but all the more majestic for it. I put on my goggles and went under. There was the silent black of the sea, interrupted only by obscure glimmers that soon faded. I was struck by solitude: the complex, yet simple beauty. I thought that it might be what death was like. The disappearance of all things; vague particles of life dancing past, forever vanishing. I thought that it wouldn’t be so bad. I loaned the goggles to Sander.

We trotted back to camp. I was feeling closer to Sander after all that, so I walked across the bridge and bought us beers; but when I offered one he said: No thanks, I’m allergic. I thought it was weird, but it also sucked – not because beer was so great, but because he must have found himself in that situation all the time. I could imagine people not believing him, or getting angry – because people get needlessly angry over beer. I didn’t get angry; I just drank two beers.

A fire show was starting near the shore. Everyone gathered to watch. Two Khmer guys held sticks with rags on the ends; they doused the rags in oil, then lit one end on fire; they shook the sticks and the flame grew; then in one rigorous jolt they bounced the fire to other side. They twirled and tossed the fireballs to the crowd’s adulation. People clapped and cheered; others took videos. The juxtaposition between this and the general lethargy I’d witnessed on the island was overpowering. I said aloud: “I’ve wasted my life.”

Kyla and Demi returned from dinner with the girl in the black dress. We congregated at a wooden table as the show continued. The South American with the tiny ponytail had followed, draping himself over the girl from behind. She patted his arm, but looked unenthused. When he disengaged and left she rolled her eyes. “He’s been at it all night,” she said. “Anyone who will give him attention.” She was a Brit named Jess. I felt Sander plop down beside me.

I don’t know how we started talking about this, but it was probably watching the South American flame out with Jess, and Jimmy urging the girls to get into their skimpiest dresses for Ladies Night. It got me thinking about how hard these guys gamed, and how much my game lacked; and so I asked the table what they thought of the line I’d been working on: “Do you want to fool around?” I found it neatly vague, nostalgically sentimental, even self-referential – but I was too terrified to use it. I explained how after a long night of drinking and dinner Henrietta and I had ended up back in our dorm room alone; and there was an air of awkwardness, because I put on Feist’s new record and was debating if I ought to shower, to which Henrietta said I definitely should; and so I was standing there in the water, knowing that she wanted me and that I wanted her, living and reliving the moment in which I exited the bathroom and said my pre-written line – because we were both us, and we were leaving, and that’s all there was – but the moment never came, and it passed me by, and we went to sleep in separate beds like two assholes. They liked it okay, but the girls preferred: “Want to cuddle?” I said I’d had this one experience in Battambang where a girl told me to join her in bed because she was cold, and it got me thinking that maybe we’d only hooked up because a blanket wasn’t available. Everyone laughed. They wanted to hear more about that, so we all got drinks and I continued.

Sometimes I get self-conscious when telling stories. Not because of how I’m portrayed in them, but because of the audacity one has to exhibit, assuming that what they have to say matters to anyone but themselves. I told them about Chet and Tara, and the disco; and when I said I was leaving out the larger themes – the void, my descent into despair – they said they wanted to hear that too. They wanted to hear everything. So I told them. At some point the South American returned and tried to squeeze in beside Jess; she said, frankly: “You can sit over there,” pointing to the bench across from her. He did for a bit, but when he realized it was a lost cause he moved on to a German girl who was clearly next on his list. All the while staff was coming by – boys dressed as girls; girls dressed as boys, mustaches drawn on their lips – to pour pink liquid into the girls’ mouths; and they took it readily, but never left for the tiki bar. When I was through they were enthralled, and said they couldn’t wait to read my books – they wanted to hear another. I said I had a big one that I hadn’t told in a while. We went for drinks and the toilet, and they sat back down to listen.

This is hard. Because of all my stories – of all the things that have happened to me – this is the one I always return to. It’s the one that resonates most. What [name redacted] and I went through was traumatic, exhilarating, life breaking; it set in motion what came after – the genesis of it all. It’s about everything and nothing. People find themselves in its layers. But at one point it wasn’t a story – it was real, it happened. Sometimes I think that everything I’ve done is an attempt to pass it: to go beyond it, to drain its meaning. Really all I ever needed to do was turn it into a story. Now I didn’t feel anything. It was gone, expelled. I couldn’t feel love or hate. All that remained was what lay in the blast radius – and here I was, crawling around, picking through the pieces.

There was an airy silence when I finished. I apologized for bringing the mood down. The table disagreed: they thanked me for sharing such a thing. Jess said it was beautiful. Even Sander looked moved. The only person who didn’t seem touched was Kyla, who’d left after ten minutes: she was interrupting and people told her to shut up. I felt better. I felt like the island wasn’t only made up of absolute maniacs who were destroying themselves. They were people who, like me, were searching. I could see it in Sander’s eyes. Maybe nothing had happened; maybe nothing ever would. But there was so much that didn’t make sense to him – so much that didn’t make sense to any of us. Stories were like a piece of some puzzle you’d never solve – but you didn’t care. You wanted the piece anyway.

Things were dying down at the bar. Now only stragglers remained. It was 1AM. Sander and Demi complained of mosquitos and soon left – but Jess and I felt no bites and kept talking. Kyla had moved back with Jimmy, who had an arm around her and was thinking up as many names for a girl’s period as he could. We were talking about television. Jess was heading home in a week and had booked herself three nights at a five-star hotel in Phnom Penh, to unwind and finish The Leftovers. I pictured her there, wrapped beneath clean white sheets and bolstered by numerous pillows, laptop on her knees, sun filtering through impenetrable windows. It was only when met with Jimmy’s silence that I looked over and saw his tongue down Kyla’s throat. It was graphic, like a David Lynch film. I said: What do we do? Do we just sit here?

The truth was I wanted to do something similar with Jess, but I had no idea how. I wasn’t drunk, and she was very beautiful; and I’d told her about everything, and yet she was still there, wanting to talk to me, looking at me the way people do when they care. She was funny, and smart, and I hadn’t felt this way about someone in a long time. But I didn’t know how to execute the thing. I also desperately had to shit. I told her I was going to bed, but had to use the bathroom first. We walked towards the compound, stopping at the fork to talk.

She said she was so glad to have met me. She said sometimes she met people and knew they were going to change the world, and I was one of them. She said she’d nearly been in tears at my story, because she knew what it was like. She said she’d dated a guy for three years and they’d only just broken up; and it was so hard, but she just had to go, and keep going. She said they’d had a plan: they were at different universities, long distance for two years, but they had a plan: he was getting a job in Qatar afterwards and they’d move. But when she thought about it she knew she didn’t want it – felt trapped, felt like he didn’t care, felt less important than him – and she was talking, and I wish I’d been listening more, but I was so damn nervous, my throat full of acid and my stomach churning, and I wasn’t catching it all. I didn’t even know what her profession was. But she was saying: I feel nothing now. I can’t feel it. I can’t. I wasn’t listening. It wasn’t until later that I thought: I can’t feel it either. I can’t. But I felt her. Some semblance of something there with me. Even after she left, I still felt it.

I said I really had to go to the bathroom, but to wait for me. On my way I collided with Kyla. She was heading there also. She asked if I was going to try the cuddle line. I said I didn’t know. Kyla was drunk. We entered our adjacent stalls, and I realized Kyla was going to hear everything – but then I thought: Fuck Kyla, and let it all out. When I returned I said to Jess: “Do you want to come hang out?” but before she could answer Kyla was behind me saying: “Where did you go?” I said: What do you mean? She said: “You left while I was talking to you.” I said: I thought the conversation had naturally ended. Kyla stumbled off. “She fucked the guy working here last night,” Jess said. I said: Tell me everything. Jess said: They made out, had sex in the sea, went back to the room, he went down on her, she went down on him, they fucked again. I said: Woah. Then I said: “Do you want to come hang out in my tent?” and Jess said sure.

The tent was small, filled with my belongings, but we crawled inside. Jess talked more: more about her ex, more about how she couldn’t feel anything, more about how we were hurting, each and every one of us, somewhere inside – and then I was saying: “Okay, okay.” I sat up and took her face in my hands and kissed her. She was warm, and soft, and close

We lay there afterwards. She said she had to pee, but would stay for a bit. We held each other close, covered in sand. It felt very real. I said, after silence: “Why did you say all those nice things about me?” She said: “Because I believe them. You’re going to do great things. You’re going to change the world.”

I believed her. I believe her. I have so much hate for myself – so much anger, so much sadness. But I believe it to be true, despite that. That’s why even though it’s been so long, alone out here, pushing on, I don’t fear it. I don’t run from it.

I tried to explain that she had it too. I didn’t do a good job. I didn’t want to creep her out, say I’d seen her at the buffet and known it then – but I did. I couldn’t say she’d change the world – I didn’t know that. But there was something: quieter, maybe – a breeze rather than a flame. The rest of us would always orbit that. It’s why I didn’t want her to go, even when I knew she would, out of my tent and out of my life.

She unzipped the tent and kissed me. She said I could write about this. She got out but didn’t leave. All through I’d seen lights finding their way across the campsite: What were they doing? Where were they going? Who was out there? Jess didn’t go. She’d say something, then bend down and kiss me once more. It was dark, and some of them were misplaced; and each time I wanted another, one that would be perfect – a perfect kiss before she went into black and left me behind.

I awoke at 6AM. I’d slept maybe three hours. The sun was only rising. I exited the tent, coughing, feeling like some death, in my underwear. Directly outside was a guy asleep in a hammock, mouth dangling open. I hunched myself towards the sea, where the light was coming on hard – it was there. The massive orange orb, just above the horizon’s line, turning everything to fiery dust. Sunsets had been bullshit. Behind me was the compound, destroyed again, like no time had passed, like 24 hours hadn’t gone by. And it never would: it’d go on into infinity, until the island ate itself alive, consumed; faces not faces, but black something-or-other, repeating the same damn trip – all of us, onward. Before me was the sun, doing the same, nowhere similar. It turned the jagged rocks to the knives they’d always been. I stood there naked, on the island, looking out. It was the next day.