Weaponized (3 page)

T
he Central Market is a prime tourist site; built in 1937, it’s a massive art deco dome with four wings radiating from its center. The inside is a labyrinth of stands, merchants, and shops.

Kyle stands in the heart of it. The unreal city. Bruised-fruit sky dripping phosphorescence. Even abject poverty looks ethereal in its glow. The crowded outdoor stalls selling black-market electronics; the local dealers with Buddhist handicrafts and traditional Khmer instruments; the infants running around bottomless, reminding everyone that diapers are in short supply. All of it has the tint of gold left at the bottom of the sea.

No real pedestrian space. Bob-and-weave walking, like Sok moving through the traffic, and instead of horns, there’s the squawk of loudspeakers, the pitch and pluck of Khmer music, the cacophony of commerce.

Kyle walks on. He scans faces, goes through his mental Rolodex, marks anyone who looks out of place. Distinct scents of stale urine, barbecue, fresh fish. Shadows with no source. “Want to drink blood?” someone asks.
God, I hope it’s snake,
Kyle thinks, although you never know.

He passes a row of stands selling Chinese electronics; disposable cell phones; bootleg DVDs; computer software; wall outlets; pop-music CDs with no covers, just the artist’s name and the album title written in mangled English.

Kyle points to a cell phone with prepaid minutes. He’s out of minutes and doesn’t like the feeling, even if he hasn’t called anyone in weeks. The owner slides it off the rack and pulls a price out of thin air. Jacked up a few dollars for the color of Kyle’s skin.

Although the globalized economy is starting to crack open the city, it’s still free of occidental ornament. If all cities are whores, this is still Phnom Penh’s first week working the corner. In 1975, she had been more than your common streetwalker, but Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge took care of that.

Pol’s was the pinnacle of the revolutionary ladder that started with the Soviets or, some would argue, with Robespierre. For all the zealots who wondered whether the great social revolution had failed on its prior attempts because it didn’t go far enough, because of internal ossification, because the people lost their nerve and harbored secret bourgeois sympathies, Pol Pot provided the answer.

What would it look like if the revolution went all the way?

There would be no one left.

No one was loyal enough to survive. No one was worthy enough to live in paradise.

Extermination was the sole area in which Pol excelled. A failed technical student and a piss-poor electrician, capable of only a rudimentary understanding of Marxism—forget Hegel or Feuerbach—and an uninspired military leader who wasted thousands of troops in misguided offensives. Mao may have been the century’s biggest butcher, but there are a billion people in China. We wouldn’t talk of Pol Pot today if he hadn’t killed off a quarter of all Cambodians. And Phnom Penh bore the brunt of it.

One of the first things Kyle noticed when he got here was the lack of middle-aged and elderly people. Pol and his Khmer Rouge had made sure of that: liquidate the cities, the intellectual classes, and then, as is de rigueur for all revolutions, liquidate yourselves. A country of orphans, average age of seventeen.

The UN wouldn’t call what happened genocide because Pol Pot wasn’t looking to exterminate a specific group of people.

He wanted to kill
everyone.

The Cambodians put up monuments, counted the bones, and wanted to move on. You had to.

Kyle slows down, and the beggars and hustlers surround him. Some offer newspapers to rent so you can read while you eat, some a chance to squeeze off shotgun rounds at chickens, some visas for a hundred American dollars, some close-up views of skin diseases and the ravages of dengue fever, and some nothing but a glimpse of devastation.

He loses his bearings, loses track of the faces.

The girl is the victim of an acid attack, a frequent denouement to lovers’ quarrels in this part of the world. Kyle’s seen girls like her before, but this one has suffered horribly. Half her face has been scorched off—lips and one eye—and her arms and legs bear tremendous scars, tortured terrain. He figures she must have been wearing a sundress on the day of the attack. He tries to avoid looking at her mouth, a corrugated pinpoint, a scream that closed in around itself.

He swallows hard and drops a dollar in her hand.

He’s a block from Armand’s when he hears the shriek. Two cops have a monkey in a wire cage, and the fucker’s going crazy. Banging around inside, trying to pry the bars apart. It takes both cops to hold the cage steady.

The monkey’s a glue addict separated from his poison. He’s one of a gang of fifteen most-wanted that the cops are trying to round up. Pictures of the criminal simians line the walls of restaurants, offices, and embassies.

They’re considered public enemies.

The chief of police is on record as saying, “We treat them like people, like citizens. If they do crime, we will hunt them.”

So how does a monkey end up sniffing glue and forming a habit? Street kids and criminals train them to pick pockets and snatch purses. One monkey scratches your leg or jumps on your back while the other snatches anything of value. On one such boost, a monkey scored a bottle of glue from a woman’s handbag and then huffed it. He brought it back home, and everyone got a turn. Before you knew it, there was an epidemic.

The monkey keeps banging his head against the bars until he passes out.

T
here’s no door. Only a threadbare beaded curtain. If people want to come in, they’re going to come in.

At least, that’s how Armand sees it. It’s his life’s philosophy boiled down to a decorative flourish.

The mirror behind the bar is sweaty and streaked, and anything reflected in it looks like the cover of a 1970s glam-rock album: Vaselined lens, vaguely space age.

Kyle parts the beads, enters, approaches the bar, and leans on it with his elbow. He locks eyes with another Westerner, a woman wearing a muscle tee with a marijuana leaf on the front. The leaf curves around her breasts, and her tanned, toned shoulders finish off the fetching effect. Kyle can’t stop staring, but it’s not lust. He doesn’t like seeing new faces in Armand’s bar, especially new Western faces.

“Another round, Armand,” she calls out.

“Coming, my love,” he yells in return.

Armand’s in the corner messing around with the television, playing with the picture. He finally gives up and broadsides the panel with his palm, causing it to miraculously come to life.

Kyle stares at the television tuned to CNN.

After several onsite suicides at a plant in the Chinese city of Taiyuan, the reporter says, management encircled the factory’s exterior with inflatable mattresses. The restive workforce decided that was the final indignity and is rioting in response—smashing windows, starting fires, overturning management’s luxury cars and dancing on the debris.

A journalist is able to get a few words with Li Bao, standing member of the CCP and former governor of Shanxi Province. Li is there to speak for the striking workers.

“You need to allow these people to unionize. No Communist country has ever allowed their workers to unionize. Why? Because it’s supposed to be a workers’ paradise. Well…paradise is burning,” Li says into the camera, which quickly cuts back to the chaos, the real reason for being there.

“Turn the channel,” the girl in the marijuana-leaf tee says. “If I wanted to watch CNN, I’d have stayed home.”

Armand’s body has moved past obesity and into the realm of existential claim. He wears a Hawaiian shirt, and entire petals are lost in the chasm between his chest and stomach. His shorts used to be jeans, and both of his exposed legs are as thick as someone’s waist. There’s a baby strapped to his chest, and its chubby legs kick nonstop, a machine working itself to death.

Armand pours the girl another drink. She goes off and sits alone.

“She got here two days ago,” Armand says in a French accent muddled by years of overseas living. “Says her name is Violet.” He laughs, a huge sound that obliterates every other noise in the room. “Bullshit, obviously. My bet…she stabbed her boyfriend and is on the run.”

“Could be,” Kyle says.

Phnom Penh lends itself to the mutability of identity. This is where you come to shed your current form, to mingle among other ghosts. It’s the same as when you take a plane ride; you can lie to the person next to you for the entire trip.

Even Pol Pot changed his name, ten times.

“You see what happened to my fish,” Armand says. “Electricity went out most of yesterday. Fucking power failures.” Armand’s fish tank—previously his pride and joy—is now a cemetery. His fish float atop brackish water, their gills clogged with drain scum. “The filter stopped working and they drowned in their own shit…I loved those fish.”

“I know you did.”

“This fucking city…it just takes and takes from you.” Armand swats away his negativity. “It’s always good to see you, Andrew.”

Andrew was one of the first names Kyle toyed with upon arrival, and Armand seems to have taken to it. No sense in changing things now.

“Drink?” Armand says, and pulls an unmarked turquoise bottle from behind the bar.

“Yeah.” Kyle squints. “The hell is that?”

“Do you trust me?”

“It looks like the stuff they use to clean combs at a barbershop.”

Armand laughs, fills two shot glasses, and makes engine noises at the baby, who smiles.

Armand’s a true child of Cambodia, raised in Phnom Penh until 1975, when most of the Westerners made a mad dash before Pol Pot’s shock troops emerged from the jungle. Until Pol’s revolution, Armand’s dad owned and operated casinos. In a desperate attempt to balance the budget, Prince Sihanouk had granted licenses to gambling houses. He needed a way to signal to the West that he was trying to stanch the flow of Communism and didn’t want his country to end up like Vietnam. The easiest way was to fly the flag for private enterprise. Financially, the casinos were a tremendous success, and both the prince and men like Armand’s dad got fat off the proceeds. However, for the populace, they proved to be a disaster. People committed suicide after incurring insurmountable debts. Business activity bottomed out as everyone from factory owner to common laborer lost his life savings on a pillow of green felt.

Armand’s dad still talked about the last days before Phnom Penh fell, talked about it like it was Rome under Caligula minus the midgets. One night, Armand’s dad hosted a pool party. Everyone was embalmed in champagne and sniffing heroin from Laos. A Frenchwoman dove into the water and invited all the men in there with her. She traveled around the pool and fucked a stranger in every corner until they all met in the middle and had their way with her.

The other partygoers sipped gin and cheered them on.

Some Cambodians weren’t upset when Pol Pot and his crew put an end to this strain of Western bacchanalia. Then they learned what was taking its place. Suddenly, orgies seemed almost quaint, a foreign lark.

Kyle and Armand do the shots, and it takes Kyle three tries to force it down. “Somehow, it tastes worse than it looks,” he says, rubbing his teeth with his index finger, trying to scrub the taste away.

Armand notices Kyle’s hand. “You’re shaking.”

“I…I haven’t been sleeping well,” Kyle says. “How do you sleep in this heat?”

“Air-conditioning,” Armand says.

A Khmer song explodes from the jukebox. The singer’s voice is absolute bubblegum—remnants of a style that went out in the West with Phil Spector’s girl groups—and the stringed instruments sound like they’re mourning. The contrast is the perfect sonic summation of Phnom Penh.

“Andrew…you have to sleep,” Armand says. “Sleep is where we work out all our problems. It’s elemental. Goes back to our origins. When it was hunting season and the men of the ancient tribes were up for days searching for prey, they would pay a shaman to dream for them.”

Kyle points to the baby. “Maybe I could buy his brain for a night.”

“Oh, no,” Armand says. “He dreams for me.”

“That explains a lot.”

Armand lets out that huge laugh that devours all other sounds. “What I mean is, I’ve seen it before. Many people like you…”

“Americans.”

“Westerners in general. But mostly Americans.”

Kyle nods.

“They come here to get away from it all,” Armand says. “You know, take some time. Lose the city hustle. Get some sun. Well, many…many of them take it too far. They forget they brought
their bodies
with them on vacation. They act as if touching down on another continent relieves them of all responsibility. Whatever you’ve been doing…don’t do it anymore. Please.”

“I appreciate your concern,” Kyle says. “I do. It’s the heat. Nothing more.”

Armand points to the blue liquor. “Another?”

“Not even if Jesus was pouring.”

Armand grins, pours himself a round. “Suit yourself.” He tosses down the blue liquor with a full-body shudder and then wipes his lips with the back of his hand. “Your package is in my office.”

“Right,” Kyle says. “Thanks.”

He nods, and as he walks toward Armand’s office, he locks eyes again with Violet, who sits alone, sucking on a lime wedge.

A
rmand’s office has a stained sign on the door that says
PRIVÉ.
Three different locks dot the cherry wood, and none of them work. Armand says the illusion of security is all one needs. If someone’s determined to break in, one lock—or three locks—isn’t going to stop him. He says it’s like the concept of the law: There is no law. There’s only regulated punishment. Law exists solely to inform people of what they can—and will—be punished for, not to actually stop them from committing crimes. In fact, Armand would continue, the law is a vile institution, because it
goads
you into breaking it, just so it can punish you properly.

Kyle steps into the office, which is bare except for a metal desk holding spilled files and a potted plant. On the wall, there’s a calendar from a local restaurant featuring girls in scanty bikinis lounging on muscle cars.

Kyle fishes his package out of the clutter on the desk and opens it. He gets all his packages shipped to Armand. His hotel isn’t particularly skilled at or concerned about protecting the mail from marauding children.

He opens it up, and inside is a well-thumbed edition of Graham Greene’s
Collected Short Stories.
Kyle wasn’t much of a reader back in the States, but since arriving in Phnom Penh, he’s been searching out the poets of exile—Durrell, Hemingway, Duras, Conrad, and, of course, Greene.

Kyle wonders if exile—either physical or mental—was what spurred all these authors to be so exceptionally prolific. Was each book a silent scream into the void with the hope a voice would answer and guide the author to a place to call home?

Kyle slides the book back into the packaging, tucks it under his arm, walks back into the bar, and sees Armand has his drink waiting for him with a napkin laid over the rim. Kyle nods in thanks, and Armand returns only a quick nod; he’s occupied, talking to Violet. Armand would be the first to tell you that in the West, he’d have no shot fucking someone who looks like Violet, but—as he’s fond of pointing out to Kyle—people do really
strange
shit when they’re away from home.

Kyle grabs his drink, sits down at a table close to the door so he can get a hint of a breeze, takes a swallow, and cracks some ice with the back of his teeth. For a moment, his eyes do a slow close. Not because he’s got any chance of sleeping; it’s pure reflex.

His eyes are tired of being open.

Almost as soon as they close, they’re brought back to bloodshot life.

The beads are swaying. Someone’s crossed into the bar.