Eric & Lia

We found the joint they rolled, the one that fell down between their bed. They scored some from a guy in Koh Tao and brought it with them to Phi Phi. We get stoned and they tell me about how they met in China at a language submersion school. For the first three months they only spoke Mandarin to each other. A week from now he'll be back in Berkley and she'll be back in Jersey.

I tell them a story about a man who was sent to space to live on a space station for twenty years free of earth contact. The space program created him an android that looked identical to his wife—a women he loved dearly. The android was programmed with an advanced artificial intelligence. It had all the qualities he loved in his wife and none of the one he hated. Several years they lived together before the man realized it wasn’t his wife he had been in love with but the android. In desperation he lit the space station afire, triggering the release of the escape pod that would take him back to his wife. When the pod entered earth’s atmosphere and crashed into the ocean a retrieval team took little time getting him to safety. Once debriefed and let free he went to see his wife. When she told him that she wasn’t in love with him anymore but rather in love with the android the space program had provided her upon his absence he told her about the people he killed to see her and how it was only a matter of time before they found out what he had done. She says she never wants to see him again, that she’s happy with what she’s got. The story ends with the man being escorted from his own house by an android that look and sounds identical to him.


She wipes a tear from her eye before excusing herself. I can hear her crying in the bathroom over the wiz of the fan. “I don’t know what I’m gonna do without the girl,” he says.

At the Sunshine Guesthouse

In Phuket there stayed a deaf backpacker in my guesthouse. He was German I think. It was hard to tell. When he first arrived I saw him arguing with a tuk-tuk driver over the fare. He tossed his hands about and threw a tantrum, his eyes watering in frustration. Though he would smile when we passed in lobby, he never made an attempt to communicate. In the human evenings he shuffled through images of great Thai and Chinese temples, replaying video after video, each one of him and a group of deaf children, all with smiles and the hand sign for ‘I love you.” But one night, the man didn’t come back. Someone from the consulate collected his belongings the next morning. In broken, English the proprietor told me, “sneaker wave.” I imagine he was squaring up a photo, back to the ocean when it took him. The next night two English girls checked into the dorms; one slept in the same bed he did. I told her the story but I don’t know how she took it. She didn’t know him like I did.

Holiday in Cambodia

In Phnom Phen a women on the street offered me an hour with her infant daughter. The day before a man handed her a hundred dollar bill. I told myself he was doing it so she wouldn’t be out her today. I don’t see anything wrong with lying to myself.

JJ's

One night she couldn’t take the noise anymore. When she was a girl, before the backpackers found it, before it was Sihanoukville it was quite. It wasn’t full of techno and beach bars. Six years ago an English guy raped her daughter and left the country before they could catch him. It was the only time she was thankful the Khmer Rouge took her husband. She didn’t know what he would have done.

I was there the night she showed up at JJ’s. It was twenty-five cent beer night. The September crowds of budget travelers started fights, spilled drinks and danced topless on the bar. She sat near the door, putting all her weight on the balls of her feet. At one point an American asked her for a dance on a dare. When she didn’t respond he told her to fuck herself.

She sat quietly for nearly an hour until she caught herself tapping her toe to the beat. Only early mornings, when the passed out are sound asleep and the dubstep is no more she sleeps. It was often she looked in to the blue eyes of her grandson and cursed his existence.