“That is Banteay Srei, ma’am. The Citadel of Women.” Soun was still staring at her. Where the whites of his eyes should have been was a brownish color instead, as if he had been steeped in strong tea as a baby and never lost the effect of it over the visible parts of his body. Myriam felt the urge to reach out and touch the drops of sweat on the skin just above his cheekbones, which were reflecting the scant rays of sunlight able to penetrate the deep jungle canopy.
Instead she said, “That’s fitting,” and shrugged her muscular shoulders.
Soun looked perplexed for a moment and then did a little half-jog to catch up to Harry. As she watched them, quickly lost again into conversation, Myriam was suddenly and overwhelmingly happy to be alone. The fear that she had gulped down earlier in the day – when she heard, rather than saw or felt, all the insects buzzing around her, when the thickness of the air had begun to force its way into her lung cavity making it an effort to inhale and a whisper to exhale, when she saw that the trail was barely a footpath with no markers and no wooden signs with white-painted lettering and no caretakers to cut back the insanely-green vegetation that seemed to encroach upon her ankles and calves as though trying to trip her up as she trudged forward through the reddish-brown mud underneath her boots – had all faded into a minor irritation, not even a prick on her skin’s surface. She was in the Cambodian jungle seeing things, great things, unbelievable things, things she might never have had the opportunity to see if it weren’t for Harry’s stubbornness and stark inability to compromise. He had brought them here to this jungle, not her. But she was the one really in it, wasn’t she? She was the one smelling the dirt caked in her nostrils and wondering what kind of an animal could possibly move so quickly hidden in the underbrush, crackling dead branches and swooshing palm leaves out of its path as it traveled to some unseen destination for some unknown purpose. Harry was the one doing all of the talking; she was the one doing all of the listening.
Myriam curled up her pink-glossed lips into a smile, took another swig of her water, and began following Harry and Soun, careful to keep the distance between them. Though she might be in a mood to listen, she didn’t want to hear Harry’s incessant questions or Soun’s faltering answers. The murmur of their talk was enough to keep her company as she made her way toward the clearing ahead of them, where they would see their umpteenth temple and they would all – even Soun – be breathless and awed by the sight. As though none of them had ever seen anything like it before. That was the way the experience made Myriam feel, as though each structure was unique and the same all at once. But it didn’t matter because they were all spectacular, rising up out of the jungle like they were part of it themselves and had never been touched by a man’s hands. It was as though, covered in rich, green moss with massive trees sprouting right out of the center of them, nature had crafted those temples all by herself.
“Screw Harry,” Myriam said.
*****
As they sat across from each other in the nearly empty restaurant having a late lunch, Myriam scanned back through the pictures she had taken throughout the morning and early afternoon. There was one of Harry as a self-styled ancient king, one of his arms folded across his chest and the other raised with his hand in a fist, legs spread atop the Elephant Terrace. Soun, who at the moment sat having his lunch with their driver on the hot, sun-drenched terrace, was in the background of the photo, squinting into the sun and smiling broadly. From the angle of the photo it appeared as though Soun, who was indeed a foot shorter than Harry, was no more than a dwarf. Harry towered over him more like a beast than a king.
When she glanced up from the camera, Myriam saw that Harry had slurped down his second coke and was eyeing her own. Instinctively, she reached out for the moist, cool glass and took a sip. She sat the glass down six inches closer to her, so that Harry might have to half-stand and lean across the table in order to grasp it. She doubted that he would go to the trouble; with Harry it was always more the ease of taking than the effort of desire.
“Does this chicken look good to you?” Harry said.
Myriam looked at the already half eaten dish of chicken curry on his plate and nodded. For emphasis, she took her own fork and grabbed a morsel of meat from his plate, cut it open and gave it a cursory inspection. It didn’t look pink. But then it was hard to tell with all of the reddish sauce covering it. Myriam had never eaten such horrible meat, the quality of it was awful – gristly, oily, stringy, tough – as though they had mistakenly ordered beef jerky or dried meat. Myriam had been a temporary vegetarian since Bangkok three weeks ago.
“It looks fine. As far as I can tell, anyway.”
“That’s a fat load of help.”
“Don’t start,” Myriam said and forced herself to concentrate again on the photos. Almost the moment they had stepped off the plane in Hong Kong to catch their connecting flight to Ho Chi Minh City, they had started to bicker. By Bangkok, the bickering had escalated into frequent arguing. By Hanoi, they had established open hostility. Myriam was tired, not of traveling, but of the constant fighting. Today, as they trekked from one scenic spot to the next, she had begun to think that perhaps she was beginning to be tired of Harry himself.
“Any good photos?” Harry said.
“Some. I wish we had brought the manual, most of them are fuzzy.”
“I told you we should have brought the old digital camera. At least we knew how to work the damn thing.”
The fan overhead kept blowing Myriam’s white paper napkin off of her lap and scurrying across the floor. Although the staff had turned on the air conditioners when Harry and Myriam had arrived, it was still hot and sticky in the open room. Myriam noticed that they had left some of the windows open despite the air-conditioning. She could feel her skin peel back from the plastic chair as she stood up to retrieve the napkin. As she sat heavily back down in her chair, she inhaled the aroma of the curry and felt intensely hungry for the first time that day. Something about the heat had made it continuously impossible to eat. All she wanted to do was drink liquids, preferably straight out of the refrigerator, so cold that when she took a sip her teeth would seize up and cause her a sharp pain. And the quality of the food wasn’t helping. She could see that people in Cambodia were mostly poor and she couldn’t exactly expect them to import meat and cook it differently just because the Blakes had come to town. So she tried her best not to complain, not to grimace or cringe or otherwise show her displeasure if she put something into her mouth that was disagreeable to her western palate. She simply swallowed it quickly and asked for another beer or coke to wash it all down.
Roughing it, was what Harry had said.
*****
Hong Kong is rainy this time of year. . . .
17 06 2008Well, I’m back from Hong Kong. After living there for nearly 3 years, you would think that I would be able to remember what the weather is like in summer. Luckily, I packed an umbrella, because we definitely needed it. It rained everyday. Actually, rained is a pleasant way of putting it for some of the days. At one point, we encountered a “black rain” day. Basically, this means run inside and stay there, and don’t come out until we tell you to. The rain was so bad that it made news headlines for days afterward, with dramatic pictures and roads completely washed away. It turns out that the Midwest is not the only place being drenched. (Though Hong Kong is mostly prepared for this in a way that the poor farmers simply cannot be.)
In the next few days, I’ll be retelling and reliving my trip in snippets on this site, with accompanying pictures.
In a stroke of luck, I managed to be in Hong Kong when an outbreak of bird flu was occurring. Thus, I got a firsthand experience and access to things that I wouldn’t have dreamed of back in Berkeley. This will help my dissertation project as well as my thinking through the issue of public health, prevention, and the cultural significance of disease surveillance. What fascinated me the most was that no one local seemed all that worried. People still purchased fresh chickens, people still went to the markets, and life went on as normal. Only with a lot of dead chickens in one market in Sham Shui Po.
Stay tuned for more. . . .
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