Sun After Dark (15 page)

The lure of modern travel, for many of us, is that we don’t go from A to B so much as from A to Z, or from A to alpha; most often, we end up somewhere between the two, not quite one, not quite the other—in an airport, perhaps, that is and isn’t the place we left and the place we think we’re coming to. Jet lag, in some ways, is the perfect metaphor for this, the neurological equivalent, I often feel, of some long grey airport passageway that leads from one nowhere space to another. It speaks, you could say, for much in the accelerated world where we speed between continents and think we have conquered both space and time.

And yet, of course—this is its power—it isn’t just a metaphor. It’s painfully real, as real as those words that are coming out slurred, or that piece of paper on which we’ve methodically added 2 + 2 and come up with 3. We’ve been placed at a tilt, and the person that comes out from us is someone suffering from something much deeper than the high-frequency hearing loss or the super-dry sinuses that flying six hundred miles an hour above the weather in a pressurized cabin mean.

Being human, we try to counteract the spell in the usual human ways, by exchanging secrets and telling stories. Take leopard’s bane, or melatonin; walk barefoot across fresh grass for ten minutes after you arrive. Carry a fluorescent light box with you to reproduce the patterns of the place you’ve left; turn your watch forward as soon as you board, to the time of the place you’re going to.

But none of it, I think, really speaks to the person we’re becoming. I feel, when lagged, as if I’m seeing the whole world through tears, or squinting; everything gets through to me, but with the wrong weight or meaning. I can’t see the signs, only their reflections in the puddles. I can’t follow directions; only savor the fact of being lost. It’s like watching a foreign movie without subtitles, perhaps; I can’t follow the story, the arc of character, but something else—that inflection of a hand, this unregarded silence—comes through to me intensely.

Things carry a different value, a different heft, when you’re jet-lagged, but there’s no counter on which the exchange rates are posted. People will tell you it’s like being under a foreign influence, but it’s not; for one thing, unlike with drink or drugs, its effects don’t diminish with the years, but grow and grow. You can make rules for yourself for what you should do in this parallel world, but they are rules, by definition, you can’t remember when you need them (the imagination is a drunk who’s lost his watch, as Guy Davenport says, and has to get drunk again to find it). Once, under jet lag, I threw away all the notes I’d taken on a magical, and unrepeatable, foreign trip. Another time I decided to do my taxes just off the plane and, happily ignoring a $40,000 credit, faced month after month of I.R.S. letters and threats.

I try to make the most of it, as ever, and say that jet lag can release me from the illusion of the self. Getting off the plane, I go through three months’ worth of correspondence, and hardly notice that this letter is praising me to the skies while that one is condemning me to perdition. They all belong to someone else, I tell myself, and I’m very happy not to be a part of his drama.

The next day, trying to pick up the pieces of my life, I go out to the post office, the bank, and all I can see is a desperate loneliness in the faces in the street; they seem plaintive, unclaimed somehow, as if they were issuing a cry for help. For someone who’s just stepped off the plane from Japan, where everyone wears a mask of cheerfulness as she goes from one place to the next, it’s all unnaturally unnerving.

The next day, though, I’ve begun to settle into the world around me; I hardly notice the lonely faces. Four, five days later, if you were to remind me of what I’d said before, I’d say, “What are you talking about? Everything’s normal. These people are just the way they’re supposed to be.”

One day in 1970, a woman called Sarah Krasnoff made off with her fourteen-year-old grandson, who was caught up in an unseemly custody dispute, and took him into the sky. In a plane, she knew, they were subject to no laws; and if they never stopped moving, the law could never catch up with them. They flew from New York to Amsterdam. When they arrived, they turned around and flew from Amsterdam to New York. Then they flew from New York to Amsterdam again, and from Amsterdam to New York, again and again and again, for the better part of six months.

They took 167 flights in all, one after the other. They saw twenty-two different movies, an average of seven times each. They ate lunch again and again, and turned their watches six hours forwards, then six hours back. The whole fugitive enterprise ended when Mrs. Krasnoff, aged seventy-four, collapsed, the victim, doctors could only suppose, of terminal jet lag.

I wake up one day in my mother’s house, on one of my periodic trips “home,” and we have breakfast together. She walks more slowly than she used, and has lost, she tells me, two inches in height; now, as I prepare to fly back across the Pacific, she shows me the articles and clippings she’s saved up for me. A cartoon from
The New Yorker,
an article about the virtue of drinking water eight times a day.

She drives me to the airport, bravely, hardly letting on that she might be sad that her only living relative is flying to the far side of the world, only putting out a protective hand as I disappear through the security machine. I get on a small propellor plane for Los Angeles and see her standing at the gate, waving. At seventy, there are certain things you must let go of.

I watch her standing there, waving and waving as the plane starts up, begins to taxi, then takes off into the heavens, and I know that this is an image I must keep close to me. A person for whom I am responsible in some respects, too kind to burden me with her own concerns.

Fourteen hours later, I’m on a different continent, and hardly able to imagine the life, the home I left this morning. It’s as if I’ve switched into another language—a parallel plane—and none of the feelings that were so real to me this morning can carry through to it. It’s not that I don’t want to hear them; it’s that they seem to belong now to a person I no longer am.

Was it always like this, I wonder, when people were just boarding carriages for London? Or, even today, when a nephew of a friend of mine makes the two-week-long walk to school across the fields in Kenya? Isn’t infidelity part of the sales tax, part of the lure, of travel? It is, of course, and it’s nothing but the nighttime side of the dissolution of self, the release from normal boundaries that flight induces. Indeed, it’s part of what moves us to take flights in the first place: to walk through that archway of lights and become a different person. A girl in a long dress is serving up an elixir of forgetfulness. The music numbs us into a kind of trance state. Lethe—the Sirens—is available on every corner in the global order.

And yet the man who disappears into the dark arcade knows at some level what he’s doing, and chooses the amnesia that’s waiting for him. He drinks to forget, he goes home with a stranger explicitly because he longs to escape the life that doesn’t satisfy. In the realm of jet lag, though, the double life feels accidental: you’re watching TV and someone comes up and changes the channel on you and you can’t summon the energy to get up and change it back. I don’t want to betray the life I left behind six hours ago, but I’ve changed my money on arrival, changed the voltage on my shaver, and I’m working in a different currency now. I could take a drug of sorts to reverse the effects of the drug of displacement, but I’m not sure if it could return me to the person I was when I got on the plane. All it could do, perhaps, is induce me to forget that he is someone different.

“You’ll call me when you get there?” a sweetheart asks.

“Of course I will,” I say, and do. But whoever is calling isn’t the person who made the promise, and the sentences, the sentiments, so achingly alive last night, sound as if they’re coming from someone else.

Not long ago, in Damascus, I lived for a few days on muezzin time: long silent mornings in the Old City before dawn, walking through labyrinths of dead-end alleyways, in and out around the great mosque, and then long hot days in my room sleeping as if I were in my bed in California. Then up again in the dark, the only decoration in my room a little red arrow on the wall to show which direction Mecca was.

I went on like this for a while—watching the light come up in the mosque, seeing the city resolve itself into its shapes in the first hours of light, and then disappearing myself, down into a well—and then, after a few days, something snapped: at night, by day, I could not sleep. I stayed up all the way through a night, and the next day couldn’t sleep. I drew the curtains, got into pyjamas, buried myself inside the sheets. But my mind was alive now, or at least moving as with a phantom limb. Soon it was dark again, my time to wake up, and at last, at 2:00 a.m. or so, reconciled to my sleeplessness, I picked up an old copy of
Fear and
Loathing in Las Vegas
and began to read.

From outside, in the fourth-floor corridor, the sound of a door being opened, then closing. Furtive rustles, a circle of whispers. The thump of a party, forbidden booze, female laughter. The ping of the elevator as it came and opened its doors; the sound of the doors closing again, the machine going up again and down. Sometimes I went to the window and, drawing the curtains, saw minarets, lit in green, the only tall monuments visible across the sleeping city. Once, putting away the story of Dr. Thompson and his Samoan, I opened the door to check the corridor, but there was no one there. No footsteps, no figures, no anything.

Hours later, I was in an Internet café in Covent Garden, not sure of who or where I was, having not slept for what seemed like weeks, and hours after that, in Manhattan, where I’d lived in a former life. My bags had not arrived, and so I was wearing clothes not my own, bought with an airline voucher. Outside, a drill screamed in the harsh summer light—“reconstruction,” the Front Desk said—and I tried to push myself down into sleep, somewhere else.

A little after midnight—I was just coming to life and light now—I went out and walked to Times Square, where there was still excitement. A man was cradling his girl’s head in his arm, and kissing her, kissing her softly. She stooped down to get into a cab, and he leaned in after her, kissing her again, as if to pull her back.

The cabdriver, with a conspicuous slam, put on his meter, and the car pulled away. A woman nearby was shaking her breasts at a male companion, who looked as if he belonged to another world from hers. He watched her in delight, the screens and lights all around exploding.

The man who had been kissing, kissing his girl, eyes closed, straightened himself up as the car disappeared around a corner, looked around—taxis, crowds, from every direction—and then walked across to a telephone as if to start the night anew. Crowds streamed out of theaters so one could imagine for a moment this was New Year’s Eve, the center of the world. The hushed, deserted mosque of the Old City of Damascus—I’d been there yesterday morning—was a universe away.

I walked and walked through the city in the dark, seeing a place I could easily imagine I’d never seen before, let alone lived in for four years. At Sixty-second and Broadway, a man, tall and dark, suddenly raced out into the street, and I stiffened, my New York instinct telling me this was an “incident.” But it was just a group of cheerful men from the islands, playing cricket under the scaffolding of a prospective skyscraper at 2:00 a.m.; the man fielded the ball in the middle of the empty road and threw it back as if from a boundary in Port of Spain. Around the all-night grocery stores, the newsstands, people were speaking Hindi, Urdu, who knows what language, and epicene boys were wiggling their hips to catch the attention of taxis.

Elsewhere—last night in Damascus again—people were huddled on stoops, against buildings, bodies laid out as if no longer living, scattered across the steps of shuttered churches. A woman crouched on the steps of an all-night market, three suitcases in front of her. A man reciting to himself, outside a darkened theater. Another wheeling a suitcase across a deserted intersection—2:57, says the digital clock outside the bank.

I’d never seen these signs of poverty, this dispossession, in all the years I’d lived here, but in the dead of night a kind of democracy comes forth. The doorman says hello to me as I pass, and the night manager of a McDonald’s laughs at a drunken joke as if he’s never heard it before at 3:15 a.m. On the floor of the same McDonald’s, a group of kids sits in a tribal circle.

On Sixth Avenue, as I walk, a clutch of Japanese tourists, twenty or thirty of them, following a woman under a flag, stand silently, waiting for the light to change. As soon as it does, they walk across, en masse, as unfathomable as everything else here, off on some kind of night tour.

An all-night guard is saying something about a colleague who got lost. A tall, tall girl with a model’s ponytail is hailing a cab on Eighth Avenue. A woman with a shock of blond hair, a leopardskin coat, is traipsing after a man in a suit, while another woman sits up and goes through her worldly possessions: a bundle of blankets beside her on the street.

I could be in Manila again, I suppose, on the night side of the world. Certainly I feel as if I’ve never seen this place around me, even when I lived here and worked many a night till 4:00 a.m., taking a car back through the deserted streets before awakening and coming back to the office after dawn. When the light comes finally up, and I go to breakfast at a fashionable hotel across from where I’m staying, the friend who greets me tells me that there was an incident last night, a mass murder in an all-night fast-food store. Five bodies discovered in a pool of blood; it was on all the morning news shows.

“That’s strange,” I say (in Damascus now, Covent Garden?), “I never would have guessed it. I was out in the street last night, walking and walking; the city never looked to me so benign.”

2002

A HAUNTED HOUSE OF TREASURES

Eyes followed me everywhere I walked around the half-lit monuments of Angkor—out of darkened doorways, out of openings in the carvings of devils and gods, out of little Buddhist shrines illuminated by the flicker of a guttering candle. An old crone waved an incense stick at me as if it were a curse, and another, her lips stained red with betel nut, spat out what looked like blood. Everywhere, soldiers were standing in the shadows of the temple, scarcely discernible by candlelight, and a white-robed soothsayer, in a sudden patch of sunlight, was dealing out futures to villagers. The Buddhas I saw in corners were not serene or reassuring presences, as they might be in other parts of Asia; they were skeletal, often, or pinch-faced, like wraiths in some complex pagan pageant (as befits, perhaps, an area that went from Hindu to Buddhist to Hindu to animist monuments during the six centuries of its creation). All around the scores of temples scattered across seventy-seven square miles of jungle in northwestern Cambodia, there were images of snakes, of leper kings, temples to Yama, God of the Dead.

“Look, there are demons here, look,” said my guide as he pointed out the frescoes that twist and swarm across the sprawling complex known as the Bayon.

Indeed, there were demons everywhere. Every time I got out of my car, wild and dusty children swarmed around me, like spirits of the jungle, waving Buddha amulets at me, waving fans and postcards, calling out, “Mister, mister, only one dollar.” Their sweet, strange faces seemed spooked, of a piece with the ancient carvings all around, and if I said no to one, her features would scrunch up till they looked like a howl, and her eyes themselves a hiss.

From the trees all around came the chattering of green parrots, and in and out of all the stone corridors of the temple, children were slipping and slithering, parroting back the sad excuses of foreigners with an eerie exactness: “You come back tomorrow, you buy from me?” “You buy T-shirt, you buy only from me? Sir, sir, you buy from me?”

On New Year’s Day I drove into the darkness, with a handful of others, a lonely winking light from a policeman on a motorbike in front of us guiding us through the dark. At 4:00 a.m. or so we disembarked near the temple of Preah Khan, a twelfth-century Buddhist monastery almost enfolded in jungle, and, each of us handed an oil lamp, were invited to walk into the night.

We walked and walked, through a long avenue of candles, the forest buzzing on every side, the trickle of lamps in front and behind flickering like fireflies. Into the heart of the old, half-ruined building, up unpaved steps, through a chattering of crickets from the silk and cotton trees nearby. Through a chamber for Buddha, another for animist spirits, a sudden phallic Shiva shrine. Every now and then, by the light of candles placed in the broken windows, we could see a man, watching us in the dark, a child creeping out from behind a pillar.

Finally, after forty-five minutes of walking through the lane of lights, we came into an open space at the far edge of the eastern causeway to see white-cloth tables and all the appurtenances of a sumptuous New Year’s Day champagne breakfast laid out in the jungle (put on, free of charge, by the Grand Hotel d’Angkor). And slowly, as the light seeped into the area—a group of Cambodians gathered on a ridge above us, in cowboy hats and baseball caps, and the red-and-white scarves associated with the Khmer Rouge—we watched the features of the ancient structure emerge from out of the trees and come into sharper focus.

Then, suddenly, from a nearby courtyard, we heard the sound of traditional Cambodian instruments. We followed our ears to the Hall of Dancers, where a troupe of tiny children from a local school was performing angel dances in the place erected for such rites eight centuries before.

I had, I suppose, brought an active imagination to Cambodia, and all the associations built up over years of the great extended holocaust of my lifetime, the Khmer Rouge nearby having killed 1.7 million of their countrymen in fields like the ones around here. But still, I had gone there with no particular expectations, simply to accompany my mother to the legendary religious site that she had been dreaming of since she was a little girl.

In the other old monuments of the world—Machu Picchu, Borobudur, the pyramids of the Yucatan and Egypt, Rome—I had been forcibly reminded how insensitive I am to history; they were living places, certainly, charged with the memories of all that had taken place there, but I had left them feeling they were of interest mostly to historians or sightseers.

Angkor, however, was different. It was alive, for one thing, electric with the unburied presences of the jungle all around, the soil, the long-ago workers who had built temples across an area twice the size of Manhattan, and the blood-soaked fields on every side. Angkor was the shrill whine of cicada bells issuing from the trees, and the little girl who put a pink water-pistol in her mouth and pulled the trigger. It was the bullet holes in the temples and the marks left by recent tanks, and the creepers enfolding the shrines of the “holy city” (as “Angkor” truly means), the fingerlike roots swallowing up lichened archways, the protruding branches encircling a face of Vishnu, snakelike vines threatening to pull the buildings back and back into the forest.

At times there is an overpowering sense of Eden to Angkor—the virgin light falling through the trees; the houses on stilts above the green, green paddies; the water buffalo clomping along immemorially beside Tonle Sap lake. But look a little closer, and you notice a one-legged man hobbling towards you with a dirty cup extended, or a swan-necked girl following your every movement from afar. Walk along the main national highway, unpaved a few minutes out of town—a lone cyclist peddling past in the rustic, languid light—and you can feel yourself in some sepia-colored dream of a temple in a jungle from an earlier time. But tugging at you from the edge of the idyll is a girl who stops at the waist, rolling towards you in her aged wheelchair, and pulling you back into something primeval—atavistic— where all the lights are off and you can’t tell right from wrong.

One reason I had gone to Angkor now was that, for the first time in my memory, it had become possible to visit the embattled monuments with relative ease. For years I’d been trying to fix up a trip for my mother, but every time I was about to make our reservations, fighting would break out again, or some political convulsion would yank the country back into the darkness, behind the creepers. The area around Angkor is still not entirely safe—2.6 million land mines remain unexcavated there, I was told, and it could take twenty years at least to find them all—and the political situation is still as changeable as the wind. But now, for the first time since 1969, there were direct flights to Siem Reap (the provincial town four miles from Angkor Wat) from Bangkok, allowing you to bypass the tumult of the rest of Cambodia. And, as of the last day of 1997, the Raffles International Group of Singapore had reopened the restored Grand Hotel d’Angkor, a sumptuous French colonial palace built in 1929, and now a luxe homage to the nostalgia of Indochina, all wicker chairs and slowly turning fans and teak paneling, a vision of Banana Republic chic.

Knowing that Angkor had been cut off from the world for more than twenty years, and knowing that it could disappear again at any moment, if not through the intermittent fighting nearby, or the simple encroachments of the jungle, then through the sheer press of human bodies, I told my mother that we should go now. Angkor would never be frictionless, I thought, but it would surely never be much more accessible than now. I think of myself as a relative veteran of all the moral and political conundrums of visiting difficult and wounded countries—in Tibet and Burma and Cuba, I had wandered through every corner of the debate about whether to go to a land in which almost every penny you spend will go towards a government that is oppressing its people and destroying their culture. I’m used to those wrenching forms of calculation whereby one tries to puzzle out how much one is helping those in need with cash and information and visions of a distant world (changing their own home in the process), and how much one is harming them. Yet I’ve seldom felt the ache so plaintively as in the Grand Hotel, where every $6 cup of tea costs as much as the average Cambodian earns in a month (and the $1,400 a visitor may spend on a bathrobe in one of the elegant boutiques could support a whole village for a year).

Sometimes I stood on the terrace of my beautifully appointed room—all wooden desks and framed prints, with copies of the
Herald Tribune
flown in to the gleaming Business Center every day—and watched the workers far below, crouching down to make the four formal gardens, the jogging track, the twenty thousand trees around the swimming pool and pavilioned spa immaculate. As soon as the hotel walls ended, the overgrowth began again, and there was nothing in the distance but a rusty-looking Ferris wheel.

When you visit Angkor Wat, the glorious centerpiece of the Khmer Empire (so central to the country’s sense of itself that it has appeared on five consecutive national flags), you find yourself walking through a long causeway of the crippled: a boy grins at you from a broken wheelchair, a man with stumps for legs holds out his hand for help, others in khaki fatigues like ghosts from the time of Pol Pot smile over their souvenirs, and little girls with cataracts in their eyes play with monkeys on a string.

It is a transporting thing to come upon the vivid carvings of the temple that take you up, up, up, the chambers filled with gods and candles, to a roof from which you can look across the trees (the Buddhas around you sitting under the protective hood of a cobra). Yet it is a desperately poignant thing, too, to see the children, with faces that are unnaturally old (and bodies that seem unnaturally young), calling out, in all the languages of the world, “Hello, papa! Madame, madame! Esta bella!”

What I learned by day, then, was supplemented by the lessons of the night. In the blue tropical mornings and afternoons, I took in the wonders of the past; after nightfall, I returned to the hotel, paged through a copy of
The Merchant of Venice
in its paneled library, and mused on all the riddles of the present. To give money to that little girl whose face looked as if it had been deformed by acid might be, inadvertently, to give money to the Khmer Rouge guerrillas who were still shadowing the country; yet to withhold money from her might be to hasten her decline. And why give it to her and not to the man on crutches, or the blind father wailing a plaintive melody? Cambodia is a kind of emotional puzzle with spikes, and anyone who puts his hand into it emerges with bloodied fingers.

The locals I met, of course, seemed to see only good in tourist faces. “Now is a marvellous time for us,” said a young friend called Phalla, one lazy afternoon in Siem Reap. “Now we have cell phones; three years ago, only guns. When I came to Siem Reap, ten years ago, we never saw a foreigner.” For Phalla, clearly, tourism was a blessing from the heavens, offering him opportunities that had not been known in the Cambodia of his lifetime. He had picked up English (and watched CNN every morning over breakfast in a tiny local café); he dreamed of setting up his own travel agency.

“Tourism is good for us,” he went on, echoing the New Year spirit. “We worry about our monuments, the conservation; but we are happy that the money is here, even if only seven percent, eight percent goes to the temples.” When Pol Pot instituted his Year Zero in 1975, people were routinely executed for wearing glasses, for speaking English, even for having gone to school; to this day, therefore, Cambodia is even more desperate than its status as the poorest country in the world outside Africa (in per capita terms) suggests. By the time Pol Pot returned to the jungle in 1979, there were scarcely three hundred people in the whole country who had had higher education.

And when I looked at the little girls selling postcards for a dollar a set, I wondered what alternatives they really had. If they weren’t living off visitors, how would they be living at all (given that their fields, their lakes, their villages had been devastated)? Tourism was turning the children into parasites, yet the absence of tourism might turn them into skeletons. (It was striking, too, to see how these kids with no formal schooling were picking up bits of Japanese, French, Italian, and English.) Give money officially to Cambodia (as the U.N. had done recently, to the tune of $2 billion), and it promptly disappears inside the coffers of those who need it least; put it into the hands of a child in a T-shirt with a skull on it, and at least it goes to someone who seems to need it.

At the Grand Hotel, the workers in the hallways, achingly sweet and eager to please—every time I passed them in the corridor, they would stop what they were doing to smile, and wish me a good evening—seemed glad of the chance to have any work, and to expand their horizons. Most of them—such is Cambodia’s misery—had learned English only because they had been forced out of their country to refugee camps in Thailand, where English was taught. On New Year’s Eve, they placed candles in lotus leaves and sent them floating across the hotel swimming pool, turning the night into a field of little lights.

The people who officially oversee the “City of Monasteries”— “Auctorité Apsara,” as the signs on the vans call them—try hard to ensure that tourism does not overrun the mysterious site. So far they have resisted the idea of a sound-and-light show at Angkor Wat lest it damage the sandstone walls, and they try to enforce strict rules over all the new buildings that are coming up (the road from the airport into town is lined with multistory new palaces being built, all hotels, but all constructed, by decree, in traditional Khmer style). Goodwill, however, is powerless against sheer need, especially in a country as broken as Cambodia: when a foreign company comes in and wants to build a hotel larger than four stories, all it needs to do is place a few coins in the right palm, and suddenly the rules are forgotten.

“There are serious, serious problems connected with mass tourism,” I heard on New Year’s Day from a foreign archaeologist, one of the many overseas workers who are laboring heroically to protect Cambodia’s monuments and its people. “But so long as some of the money goes to Cambodians, it does some good. They may get a museum going, they may start returning statues from the Conservation Office stores to the sites.” Right now, the fact remains that one of the most astonishing World Heritage Monuments on the planet still lacks a real museum on site, or any kind of visitors’ center from which to get reliable information or help.