The Wild West

*

He was fragile, sick on the gut, looking out the mansion doors across the scaped garden and the guard at the gate. It's the wild west here, the wild west, David says. Cambodia is a dangerous place. Dangerous place. We began at the Riverside Bar, and it was as if we had always been here, or he had been here before. First time deja vu, it was always strange. Time crawled and yet the universe was his answer. He had surrendered and died and spun out from a former life. He had been here before and he had never been here. Moments were everywhere, time splashing. He couldn't help himself, he was back to zero. It was awful and it was nice. At least he knew he was alive.

Until he woke up in the morning and all he could remember were the hard faced girls in the Ten Bar; all of them attentive if you wanted. He could surrender. He could die. But things would never be the same. There wasn't a solution to this. Sick to the core, he tried to stop from vomiting. He wasn't going back, or backwards, in any sense of the word. The car bounced over pot holes, and the contrast between the glistening top end aspects of Bangkok and the barely developed aspects of Pnom Penh were complete. There were shadows everywhere, gangsters, gangsters. He could find his path and he could say sorry. It was the cruellest and most blessed of times.

In equal measure, the past and the future, one step forward and one step back, every movement a crab like sideways shuffle. These guys are gangsters, he said, mowing through the dark streets. It's dangerous. Don't walk out here on your own. Some do, but I don't. It's the wild west and I'm top of the food chain. In equal measure. In times gone by. In the future which may never be ours. In times gone by. In the briefest of circumstances. In compassion and kindness and hard eyed bar girls who couldn't care less, who didn't really want to dance, who didn't really like you, who covered you with affection if they were paid and ignored you if they weren't.

There weren't any friends here, there were only opportunities. There were only different ways of being. There was kindness, but only of the most desperate kind. Sometimes I think he's still on it, he said. And the streets were marked. He was marked. There were shadows everywhere, now that the night had fallen. They passed the Pnom Wat, after which the city was founded. People lounged under trees, just as he had imagined. But there was complete disregard. He didn't know what he was doing. The sickness came in waves. He had done a job on himself yet again. His time was over. Time for someone else to take over. The sentinel. The reporter. The documenter of lies.

It had come to his attention; here in the sickening, filthy heat. Here where grand gestures meant everything. The four wheel drive parked outside the Riverside Bar denoted high status. Beggars wheeled themselves by. Are they really land mine victims? he asked. Some of them are, came the reply. This was a different place. These were different times. There wasn't one simple answer. He needed to rest. Oh save me, save me, he thought, yet he was beyond saving and beyond death; and these last spasmodic movements, periods of sobriety, work, communion, togethernes, they were all coming to an end in a spasming fit. He couldn't keep anything down; he couldn't survive much longer, not like this, not with this level of mental dysfunction. They pased more shadows and amidst the old wooden houses; and he was gone.