1.
Jason saw the island just once, when the monsoon clouds briefly released their clammy grip on the skies and its smudgy silhouette appeared on the horizon. Sunlight glittered on waves for one hypnotic moment before the clouds knitted again.
Fat rain splats blurred the dirty hostel window, then came in thick sheets, as though a giant was scooping up the ocean in a bucket and flinging it down on the city of Sihanoukville in an angry effort to sweep it away.
“I thought you said the storms would stop soon,” Jason said to Sopheak, the receptionist, sprawled as usual across a worn sofa with cushions so big it looked like his wiry body was being swallowed whole.
“It’s Cambodia, mate. Everything late, even the weather.” Sopheak’s sweet laugh rattled.
Jason opened his disintegrating guidebook for the fifth time, though its entry on Sihanoukville was outdated. “This city changes faster than anyone can write,” Sopheak had said. There was no advice on what to do when a lingering rainy season stranded you ten miles from paradise, all ferries cancelled.
Stuck. For the first time in all these months of relentless travel, Jason felt stuck.
Sopheak ambled over and stood behind him, resting his arm on Jason’s shoulder while muttering along to one of the Cambodian hip hop songs he played incessantly. This was an escalation in tactility, the latest in a series of confusing maneuvers. Jason had seen how easily physical Cambodian men were with each other, walking the streets with arms around each other or doling out neck rubs without self-consciousness. But still, this seemed excessively intimate.
As whimsically and wordlessly as he’d come over, Sopheak drifted away again, still muttering. Jason pulled out his phone and checked Grindr again. He refreshed but Sopheak’s face still didn’t appear on the grid. The meat griddle, Jason’s ex had called it. If Sopheak was gay, he wasn’t using this app to hook up.
Jason broke a promise to himself and started scrolling messages. Nestled among obviously fake profile pictures, one face popped out as if backlit. Not as pretty as Sopheak — paler, cheekbones not quite as sharp – but still within the narrow territory Jason euphemistically thought of as “his type.” Indonesia was his profile name, and Jason felt relieved, then guilty. When he’d first checked in, Sopheak had warned Jason to be careful of the Chinese in Sihanoukville, this chaotic coastal city he’d planned as a one-night stop on his way to Koh Rong Sanloem island. Sopheak said most Chinese were in gangs, and though Jason flinched from the potential racism he hadn’t quite dismissed the warning.
On the second night, Sopheak had elaborated over a smoky game of cards. “This was a normal Cambodian town when I was kid,” he’d said, triumphantly slamming down a winning hand. “Good vibes. Happy. Then the high-ups let the Chinese come to build condos and casinos. It looked like they’d bombed us for two years while they built it.” He snatched Jason’s money. “Then COVID came, and most went home, except the ones China didn’t want back, the bad guys.”
“What kind of bad guys?” Jason asked. Part of him wondered if he should object on behalf of the Chinese, another part worried that would be presumptuous — he didn’t know what Sopheak knew.
“The crime kind. Bad things happen here. Human trafficking. Women like slaves, made to fuck anyone who wants. People get bits stolen.”
“Bits?”
Sopheak made a slicing gesture across his side. “Kidneys and stuff. Go to the Burmese army, I heard.”
“Everyone told me Cambodia was safe.”
“It is. You can go anywhere, no problems, people nice to you. Except here. Here, you should be smart. It’s not bad like before but still bad.”
Jason thought he was exaggerating, but searched later and read international newspaper articles suggesting Sopheak might, if anything, be understating the black blood throbbing under the city’s skin.
When the storms remained relentless the next morning, Jason had thought about leaving, but stubbornness kicked in. For three months he’d dreamt of Koh Rong Sanloem, ever since a Serbian had slurred its praises in a Bangkok gay bar. Jason had obsessed over photos of its wild, empty beaches dotted with spindly palms and occasional shacks. The exact opposite of the crowded beaches in Thailand, where the bars pumped the same empty dance music he’d heard back in Britain, and every other face was sunburnt white, just like his.
He had to get there. He might never be in Cambodia again (a ghost future floated through his mind, a career in some grey British office with two weeks leave capped) and it was there, just out of sight.
2.
Jason grinned when he read Indonesia’s message, much longer than the usual blunt questions Jason had got used to while traveling. Fun? Pics? Looking? Or, for the real talkers, top or bottom?
In his first two months traveling, Jason had answered these questions gamely if attached to a handsome face or a muscled body, and flung himself through a series of one-off fumbles and fucks in shabby guesthouses across South East Asia. But the sex had sometimes been as functional as the questions, a series of rote mechanics presumably learnt from porn. One night, as another guy slipped furtively out of his room, not one meaningful word exchanged, he was capsized by melancholy.
He must be spending two hours daily sifting Grindr and another hour on the sex, time he should be using to absorb the messy, raw beauty of Asia. He’d abstained from the app for a month, until Sopheak’s breezy flirtiness and wonky smile had reawakened the old hunger.
Indonesia’s message said he missed his homeland, that he didn’t socialize in Cambodia, and would like to make a friend or — better still — a friend with benefits. There was something so sweetly, disarmingly sincere about someone writing a near-letter on Grindr that Jason might have replied even if the words weren’t attached to such an arresting face (something about those eyes).
As rain whipped the window, they exchanged messages with fluid ease. Indonesia’s English was good and the replies came too fast to have been fed through a translation app. His name was Arif and today was his day off. He’d learnt English online to try and escape a farmer’s future, but jobs were hard to find in Sumatra so he’d said yes when the village chief said he could work in an online casino in Cambodia for good money. The Chinese hired platoons of Indonesians to target the vast market back home, where gambling was outlawed. Arif sent half his wages home to his enormous family: mother, five sisters, two brothers. Jason felt an only child’s envy.
They swapped pictures. One showed Arif net-fishing in a river, water to his waist. His t-shirt was soaked, revealing the kind of complex, intricate musculature that made men like him look like a different species to Jason. A body shaped by daily physical work that strains every muscle, not a few hours in a gym pumping up chest and biceps.
When Jason said he hoped to go to the island tomorrow, Arif replied, Meet me first. You should leave with a good memory. I can give you one. Jason wondered if Arif knew he’d just written a perfect British innuendo. He thought about the chain-smoking, middle-aged Austrian who’d spent the last two days watching “Breaking Bad” loudly in their dorm, checked his bank balance, and told Arif he’d hire a guesthouse for the night. $20 was $5 over his daily budget, but it wasn’t like he was spending much trapped here in the hostel, and the idea of sex didn’t seem stale anymore, but fresh, sweet and exciting.
3.
Jason lay on the lumpy guesthouse bed, mind roaming the possibilities ahead. Sometimes anticipation was the best part of hooking up. Anything could still be imagined, before reality shut those doors one by one until there was only one left and that finally slammed shut too. It was only when Arif was due to arrive that anxious thoughts started tugging at him. How did he know the Indonesian was who he said he was? Would the guesthouse’s elderly receptionist hear him if he shouted for help?
When Arif finally knocked on the door and Jason opened it, relief wash through him, followed by a shivery excitement. Arif was better looking than his photos, real life adding a glow to his skin and sweet animation to his smile.
Most of Jason’s hookups in Asia had been initially awkward and he was expecting the usual tentative dance of stilted small talk and clumsy steps towards sex. He offered Arif a drink and they exchanged a few sentences that Jason instantly forgot, his brain glitching like an overheating computer.
The shift in dynamics was sudden, like a big beat dropped in a dance track.
Arif’s shyness evaporated and he gripped Jason’s neck and kissed him urgently and then it was like they tumbled effortlessly into the sex, clothes torn away almost unnoticed during the fall, and there was kissing and licking and hugging and sucking and their bodies bent and hooked around each other like ju-jitsu grapplers and it was Arif who fucked Jason, Jason’s legs bent back so Arif could stare into his eyes as he pushed deep into him, and somewhere in that twinning of minor discomfort and major radiating pleasure he worked out what it was about the Indonesian’s eyes, they were so dark that the pupils were barely distinguishable from the irises, two bottomless pools of midnight, and they each gripped the other’s back fiercely, as if crushing together might split their atoms and fuse two into one, and they glistened and glowed with heat and sweat and if they didn’t quite come together it was close enough that they burst into laughter at the rare, unlikely ease of it all, the messy perfection.
Afterwards, they talked, with that low-voiced intimacy that comes easily when you’re sprawled over someone naked, sticky with each other. Jason had often thought how easily people surrendered their life stories in these moments, and sometimes believed these brief, deep dives into another human’s world were the real thrill of hookups, more than the cruder penetration of a body.
“Didn’t do that for long time,” Arif said, smiling, eyes half-closed.
“Fuck someone?” Jason said, breath still ragged.
“I haven’t even touched anyone in six months.”
“That is a very long time. How come?”
Arif gave Jason a serious look. “Indonesia is a Muslim country, so I must honor Allah.” Jason fumbled for a respectful response but Arif’s face creased. “Joking. I don’t believe. You?”
Jason laughed, charmed by this surprising man. Arif was 22 — a year younger than Jason — but seemed the older of the two. “Same. Definitely not a Christian, anyway. I like Buddhism, though.”
“Yes, everyone loves the Buddhists.” There was an irony there Jason couldn’t place.
They talked about families, when they realized they were gay, nineties British bands, hated superhero movies, Cambodian kindness, and what they liked best in nature. When the conversation turned back to sex Arif saw Jason harden, and grinned like a mischievous kid, crawling teasingly down the bed until he licked Jason’s thighs with a slow, feathery tongue and the conversation stuttered.
Later, Arif lay sprawled across Jason’s chest and Jason savored the weight of him, his solidity, until finally, with a deep sigh, Arif pushed himself up and said he should go.
“No, you shouldn’t,” Jason said, surprisingly alarmed at the prospect of this unexpected connection being cut off so soon. He grabbed Arif’s arm and tugged him back. “Sleep here.”
Arif rolled away, laughing. “No, can’t, start work at seven.”
“Fuck, that is early. But I need to get up early anyway, check if the ferries are running. We’ll both set our alarms.”
Arif grunted. “My phone’s dying, and I didn’t bring my charger. I didn’t plan to stay. Your alarm is loud? Let me hear it.” Jason laughed, but Arif was serious so he sounded his phone’s grating wail. Arif nodded, but still looked uncertain.
“What if I said you could fuck me again?” Jason grinned. “Would that sweeten the deal?”
Arif studied his face, and Jason thought of the way he’d seen Cambodians inspecting fruit in markets, weighing them in their hand and squeezing to see if they were good.
“If you fuck me this time, we have a deal.”
“Obviously I won’t let you leave after saying that. Deal.”
“But I must be at work by seven. I can’t be late, that would be bad trouble for me.”
“Don’t worry. I promise.”
“It’s important.”
“Promise.”
They finally slept somewhere in that fuzzy realm between midnight and dawn. Once, Jason woke to the sound of drunken shouting nearby and nuzzled in to softly snoring Arif, breathed in the tangy sticky smell of both of them, and slept again. He dreamt he was alone on a train rattling through a country of explosive green beauty, but the train didn’t stop and there was no-one to ask for the country’s name.
4.
When his phone wailed at 6 a.m., Jason snatched it and stabbed it onto snooze. Just a few more minutes. The sun was already filling the room with gauzy light barely diluted by the thin curtains. Arif had rolled away from Jason in the night, his left arm dangling over the far edge of the bed. Jason eased over and threaded his right arm underneath Arif’s, dangling his hand on his oak-hard chest. Arif sleep-murmured and pulled him in closer. Jason lay in a happy dozy daze and realized he must have been lonelier than he thought these last few months. He wished this borrowed time could last hours. Everything felt warm, soft and…
5.
“Fuck!”
Jason snapped awake, alone in the bed. Arif stood naked beside him, brandishing Jason’s phone. The sun was behind him and Jason’s sleep-blurred eyes couldn’t see his expression but he could hear anger and something worse. Panic.
“It’s eight. What happened to alarm?”
Jason pushed himself upright, still sleep-dazed. “I just hit snooze.”
“You turned it off,” Arif snapped, snatching up clothes.
“I’ll call a taxi. I’ll pay. You won’t be too late.”
“One minute is too late. You can’t buy me out of this.”
“I’m sorry. But… it can’t be that bad.”
“You don’t know. They might fire me. Might send me home. Might not pay me.”
“They can’t do that.”
“They can, do it every day. Don’t even need a reason.”
Arif yanked the curtains open and searched for something on the floor.
“What can I do?” Jason said miserably.
“Nothing now.” Arif’s voice softened. “Don’t worry. I’ll try to fix it. Can you see my keycard?”
“Do you want to borrow my phone and call?”
“They know my number. If I call from stranger’s phone, that’s worse. I’m meant to sleep in the casino dorm.”
“I didn’t know,” Jason said, out of bed now and hunting for the keycard.
“I know you didn’t,” Arif said, dropping to his knees, looking under the bed. “My fault. I shouldn’t have stayed. Stupid.”
That stung. Jason didn’t want to be a mistake.
“I’ll leave it,” Arif said, getting back up abruptly. “Better than being more late.”
“Wait a minute,” Jason said.
“Can’t. I’m in trouble. Got to go.”
He grimace-smiled and left, moving so much faster than the calm Arif of the night before.
Jason fell back onto the bed. The violence of Arif’s reaction lingered, floating in the air like dust particles. After a while he got up and looked out of the window. There were patches of blue in the sky. Sopheak had been right, the storms were growing tired.
He tapped out a Grindr message.
Sorry. Must have turned alarm off by mistake. Hope work understands. Let me make it up to you. Can I take you to island tomorrow? Or day after? Want to see you again. Really sorry. Last night was great. SO GREAT. No kisses — he thought Arif might sneer at that.
He stared at the message after it was marked “sent”, hoping to see those four letters rematerialize as “read”. They didn’t. Arif must be at work. Jason tried not to imagine proud Arif groveling to some bully supervisor.
He pulled on clothes and guesthouse flip flops and trudged downstairs to buy cigarettes. He lit one as he sloped towards the sea, walking through the shadows cast by craggy concrete buildings. Bulging black plastic bags lined the streets, most ripped open by cats or rats, a sickly beery smell seeping out. A dark-suited man wearing sunglasses lurched past him, barely able to stand.
He found a seaside bar and sat, the only customer. Though the sun danced around the coast, and he caught glimpses of the beauty he’d heard so much about, the grey clouds lingered further out. The island remained hidden.
An hour later he risked one more message. Arif, tell me everything is okay. I feel bad. The message was marked sent then read. Jason’s heart lifted then sank as no reply came. He tried to distract himself on Instagram but couldn’t concentrate, kept swiping back to Grindr. After forty minutes without a reply he trudged back to the guesthouse, the room still scented with sex and sweat. When he put on his shoes, something hard stabbed his toes. He fished Arif’s keycard out, wondering how it got there.
A reason to message again, anyway. I found your keycard. How can I get it to you?
He sent and stared. The message remained stubbornly unread.
6.
“Hello, player. What was her name? Better not be my sister,” Sopheak cackled when Jason walked back into the hostel, then misread his worried expression. “Don’t worry, don’t have sister. Hey, ferries might run later. The rain is going off to get those Thai motherfuckers.”
“I’ll probably stay one more night.”
“Huh. Don’t get many of you these days.”
“Many of who?”
“People who stay. Most people get out quick. Bad vibes, man. Wish I could get out too.”
“Why don’t you?”
“Family. Asians aren’t lucky like Westerners, we can’t just leave our family behind.”
Jason tried to sleep in the empty dorm, but caffeine twitched in his system and his mind looped back to Arif like a maddeningly catchy song he couldn’t shake. He checked Grindr again, last message still unread. His rational brain told him this only meant Arif was working, but then he remembered the Indonesian’s fear and that calm voice lost its authority. What if Arif’s bosses had taken his phone as compensation? What if something worse was happening? He didn’t want to think about that, couldn’t not think about that.
After an hour of uneasy wriggling, he returned to the hostel’s communal space. The sofa was still eating Sopheak.
“Random question.”
Sopheak’s eyebrows shot up. “Go.”
“How are the casino workers treated here?”
“Like shit. They’re prisoners, really. I heard some get their fingers cut off for breaking rules.”
Sopheak might as well have punched Jason in the stomach.
“What if one of them missed some work?”
“They wouldn’t be that stupid,” Sopheak paused. “What’s going on, brother?”
“Nothing. Just curious.”
“Foreigners are weird sometimes.”
Returning to the window, Jason watched the sea until the afternoon began its slow death. There was no sunset, the horizon still obscured by angry clouds. Full dark fell just after six. Arif couldn’t still be working, could he? Not if he’d started at seven? He looked again at the last unread message.
That was when he remembered the keycard. Retrieving it, he found dim faded print spelling a name in tiny letters in three languages, one of them English. THE GOD OF LUCK CASINO.
Jason was surprised to find it on Google Maps. Two kilometers uphill, where Jason knew the ugliest buildings stood, tumbled over the hillside like a giant box of upended Lego. He thought about asking Sopheak for advice, but didn’t want to explain why he wanted to go, or be told he shouldn’t.
7.
He hadn’t been into Sihanoukville at night before, not since Sopheak’s dark warnings.
At first, he thought again Sopheak had been exaggerating. He passed brightly lit grocery stores with huge Chinese characters emblazoned, overshadowing the larger but darker Khmer letters beneath. Ordinary people shopped inside: mothers with children, clean-cut businessmen. Then he passed a hotel casino: an expensive car pulled up and a beautiful young couple were helped out by Cambodian workers in red uniforms that made them look like schoolchildren. Next, a restaurant with outside tables where men — almost all men — noisily drank beer and smoked over plates overflowing with shellfish leftovers.
The next building was a dark empty hulk with one mysterious window lit high above. Unease tickled Jason’s spine. Most windows were smashed, and a tattered green netting hung across the building’s facade like a death shroud.
After that, THE GOD OF LUCK.
There was nothing godly or lucky about it. It was short, squat and wide, a gargantuan brick dotted with windows so tiny that barely any light escaped through their bars. The top floor windows were wider, leaking the sickly blue glow of computer screens. It was like a prison. Bad vibes.
What was he doing here? What was his plan?
He had thought Arif must work somewhere different to the place he lived, but now realized that was an assumption based on his own world, not this one. The blue glow was likely the online casino: Jason imagined a row of cubicles where workers tapped away. The smaller windows were probably the dorms where they slept. Whole lives lived inside those walls.
The building sat like a dark island surrounded by a pool of dim electric light. Jason watched from the shadows. He could only see one entrance and studied the two men guarding it, one hulking, the other small and fidgety. Jason thought they looked Chinese but could he confidently tell the difference between Chinese, Cambodian or Indonesian? The day before he’d have said yes, but the world seemed blurrier now, less solid and certain.
He felt afraid and stupid, standing there. He wanted to smoke, but the flame would give him away. He wanted to check if Arif had messaged, but the screen would light his face like a beacon.
Jason had no idea how long it was before a few men noisily spilled out of the building, flashing cards at the guards, and drifted off to form a circle ten metres away. Most lit cigarettes and started speaking in a language Jason thought might be Indonesian. He stepped towards the men, but the guards saw him and strode forward fast, cutting him off.
The smaller one talked in rapid machine gun bursts Jason couldn’t decipher, his eyebrows furrowed into one narrow line of hostility. Jason was alarmed but stood his ground. He wasn’t breaking the law. He’d not climbed over any gates or seen any warning signs.
“Why are you here?” The bigger one asked, voice surprisingly small and soft.
“I’m looking for a friend.”
“No friend here. Go.”
“I just want to talk to those guys…”
“Go. Now.”
Later, Jason would grimace at the stubborn stupidity that came over him then.
“I’m just talking,” he said, flapping his hand to imitate conversation, and walked towards the Indonesians.
The fist landed in his face with startling speed and impact. Jason had only been punched once before, and that was by a nine-year-old in a playground. This was something else entirely. It wasn’t pain so much as shock that exploded through his consciousness. The blow knocked him backwards and he tripped, landing heavily on his back.
A childish outrage surged through him with the shuddering pain. They can’t do that. The small one who’d punched him smirked as the big one reached down, grabbed Jason’s wrist and pulled him back to his feet. Jason looked to the Indonesians as if for help, but they seemed to have stepped away.
“Don’t be stupid,” the big one said. “Just go.” Jason looked into his face, and saw sadness or weariness, but no leeway.
He turned and left, nothing else to do. He tasted metal and touched his face as the shadows swallowed him again. His hand came away wet with blood. He walked downhill fast until he was out of sight of THE GOD OF LUCK, then pulled his t-shirt up to wipe away the blood. He tipped his head back, wondering if his nose was broken.
When the bleeding stopped, he sat down on the curb and lit a cigarette, sitting half-dazed until he heard steps approach from uphill. The approaching man was backlit by streetlights and Jason couldn’t see his face, but recognized the shoulders.
“Arif!”
“What?” the man said. “No. Not Arif. You okay?”
“Sorry. I thought you were Arif.”
“No, I am not Arif,” the man said, using the voice reserved for small children, madmen or drunks. “I must go back. Just want to see if you okay.”
“Oh. Yes, I think so.”
“Good.” The man turned away.
“Wait. Do you know Arif?”
“I know many Arifs. You know family name?”
Jason didn’t. He wanted to describe him, but how? Dark hair, dark eyes? That would be every Arif. “Arif from Sumatra,” he said, memory rescuing him.
“Oh. Yes. Know.”
“Do you know if he’s okay?”
“Don’t know. Didn’t see him today.” This frightened Jason, and perhaps the man noticed because he said, “I don’t always see him.” He gestured uphill. “Big place. How you know him?”
Jason realized he couldn’t say the truth or think of a plausible lie. The man regarded him.
“You coming can cause him trouble. You should not have come.” He walked away.
8.
When Jason lurched back into the hostel, Sopheak’s grin turned to alarm. He tugged him to the shower block, soaked a towel and sponged at Jason’s face with a tenderness that nearly made Jason cry. Rusty brown water dripped onto the tiles. Sopheak stepped back, inspecting.
“You are okay,” he said. “Not broken. What happened? What did you do?”
Everything tumbled out of Jason’s mouth. He confessed how frightened he had been, for himself and for Arif, even as Sopheak led him to the sofa and sat him down.
When he was finished Sopheak stared, unsmiling.
“You are lucky you have white skin,” he said at last. “If not, maybe you wouldn’t be here. Maybe in hospital, maybe in sea.”
Jason believed him, a nauseous feeling. “What do I do?”
“Get the night bus to Phnom Penh. You don’t want to see those guys again.”
“What do I do about Arif?”
“Wow, you still think you can help him? Did that punch give you brain damage? There’s nothing to do. Just get out.”
“What if he’s hurt?”
Jason expected something consoling but that soft part of Sopheak had disappeared. “Then you can’t change it, only make it worse. Leave.”
“What about calling the police?”
“You think they give a fuck about some Indonesian? Hard enough to get them to care about Cambodians. I’m calling the night bus, okay. Go to Phnom Penh. Go somewhere safe.” He started calling without waiting for a reply.
Jason packed and then sat miserably at the window. He stared at the sea and for a moment thought he saw lights, as if the island was again visible. But the lights moved, and he realized it was a cargo ship ploughing its slow way around the world.
“Five minutes, friend,” Sopheak said, sitting down beside him. There was softness in him again. “Sorry this happened.”
“Looks like I’m not going to the island. What’s it like?”
“Don’t know, never been.”
“What? But it’s right there.”
“I said this was a city for prisoners,” Sopheak said. “Me too. I work every day to earn 200 dollars. Hardly enough to buy food for my baby, no money for holiday.”
He had a baby? How old was he? Not gay, anyway, that was settled.
“You only get 200 dollars a week?”
Sopheak snorted. “In my dream. 200 a month.”
“That’s shitty.”
“That’s life.”
A tuk-tuk pulled up, honking.
“He’s probably fine,” Sopheak said to Jason, squeezing his arm as he left. Probably.
9.
Jason slept in broken bursts on the bus, squashed against the window by a snoring Cambodian. His dreams were fragmentary and drifting, like particles in a shaken snowglobe. A beach polka-dotted with jellyfish. Playing pool in a pub with an eyeless man. His mother mysteriously arriving in Cambodia but getting lost and Jason not knowing how to find her, or the words to ask for help.
That last one unsettled him enough to fully wake him. He checked his phone, trying not to wake the snorer. It was 2 a.m. He tried to sleep again but Arif’s face haunted him. He checked Grindr but the messages remained unread. The profile said Arif hadn’t been online in 14 hours. He wished he could just find him and confirm he was okay. He opened Facebook and Instagram and searched for Arif Sihanoukville but no familiar faces appeared. There was no way to connect again. They’d just drift onwards and away from each other, into different futures.
He must have eventually slept because when the driver shook him awake he was the only one on the bus. He climbed off, groggy, collecting his backpack while assailed by tuk-tuk drivers.
The newly rising sun spilled an orange glow down the capital’s shabby streets, no rainclouds in sight. Jason squinted, ignored the drivers and set off in search of somewhere that would let him sleep. He walked into the first grim guesthouse he saw and negotiated $12 for an early check-in and overnight stay. He slept until the afternoon and woke with a throbbing face.
10.
Four days later Jason sat in a bar in Bassac Lane, Phnom Penh’s tiny hipster quarter, half-listening to friends made at his hostel: an Australian couple, a chatty student from Shanghai, a sunburnt Slovak. They swapped travel war stories: trivial mishaps of missed buses, rip-off taxis, and dud drugs. Jason knew his own story would shock them, but couldn’t think of any telling that mightn’t offend Mei the student. Anyway, it was still too raw. He hadn’t yet cooked it into an anecdote.
Sopheak had been right about Phnom Penh feeling safe. He’d finally ventured out into the capital on his second day, feeling jumpy until the charm of the ramshackle city and its people soothed him. Here, walking down any street was an adventure, but the good kind. Tuk tuk drivers and coffee shop workers yelled greetings and jokes wherever he went and he’d spent a whole day wandering the teeming yet somehow still sleepy riverside, awed by the sheer immensity of the Mekong. The Thames, the Seine? Trickles of piss compared to this.
But he couldn’t quite shake off his memories of Sihanoukville. He opened Grindr under the table, and checked Arif’s profile. Last online 5 days ago.
That didn’t mean anything terrible had happened. He’d looked at the profile dozens of times and run through every scenario. He’d imagined Arif on a plane to Sumatra, returning penniless and ashamed to his family. He’d imagined Arif arriving late that morning and arguing with the small man, pictured something going wrong, a gun being pulled. He’d imagined Arif’s hand bound, blood seeping where a finger used to be. And he’d imagined Arif getting his pay docked as punishment and returning meekly to the glowing blue screens, vowing to never go on Grindr again.
He knew the last scenario was likeliest. The other possibilities whispered from the shadows of his consciousness, but they were growing quieter. He’d been ghosted, that was all. It happened a million times a day. He wished he could know for sure but the truth was he never would.
As he stared at Arif’s eyes the app buzzed, alerting him to a new message. Almost reflexively, Jason tapped it open and a stranger’s pretty face flashed up: Fun?
“Look at his smile,” Mei said, pointing at Jason. “What’s making you so happy?”
Jason shoved his phone back inside his pocket. “Nothing, just a message from a friend.”
The conversation turned from the marvels of Cambodia to the wonders of the Philippines: its thousands of islands, perfect hidden beaches and incredible scuba diving. Jason nodded along and made some mental notes, but mostly thought about the new message and how long he should wait before he replied.
Image: Supplied by the author.
- The God of Luck - December 31, 2024
What a story… ominous, foreboding, with such clearly wrought scenes thanks to the crisp prose. The MC carries a little piece of the naivety hiding in the heart of every foreigner who ever washed up in Cambodia and we are forced to identify with his hopeful foolishness. Brilliant work Jaime
such a captivating and devastating story. In a world of hook up culture, people tend to look for a deeper connection during those short “visits”; the sad reality is pursuing the connection further will always lead to a dead-end.
Thanks so much Alex. It’s always a good feeling to know your writing is reaching people, particularly if they obviously know a bit about what you are writing about. Thanks for taking the time to read it and comment!