Midnight in a Perfect World

I lounged for a while in the shallows letting the small waves lapped over my back while I studied the rock and shell bed that lay just under the surface of the waves, watching the stones and bits of shells pitch back and forth to the rhythm of the sea. The undulation of water and light distorted and rippled the size of the stones such that after a while I decided they appeared to be a distant mirage in some watery desert.

Up on the shore I could make out several hammocks, grass huts and some slatted bamboo platforms on which Debi and Jules were lying. Two ducks wandered about beneath the platforms scratching at the sandy dirt and making curious wheezing sounds I didn’t know ducks could make. Up the beach to my left were three trees with dense spindly branches which harbored hundreds and hundreds of yellow butterflies that fluttered in and out of the green leaves. For some time I had noticed Debi alternate between staring out at the infiniteness of the horizon which was shrouded in grey thunderheads such that the boundary between sky and sea was obscured and indefinite, and scrutinizing me or Matt as if trying to memorize us, much the same as I was beginning to do to them, trying all the while not to think too much about our limited time left. I could occasionally hear the strains of The Rolling Stones Sympathy of the Devil drifting out of her headphones, a song that for me has long called up visions of Bulgakov, Dostoyevsky and a Russia that exists only in my mind and probably bears little resemblance to the Russia of today. The image in my head inhabits some boundary world between history and magic. After three days of Templing in Angkor we were spent. We joined forces with Rob and Jules and headed back down to Phnom Penh for a day. The next morning, after a bowl of noodle soup at the local soup shop we negotiated a cab down to Kep on the coast. And guess what? Down on the coast things are much cooler. In Kep things dropped back down to just hot. We took a room in a nice hotel overlooking the meager, but ever so inviting beach. I for one parked myself in a hammock and proceeded to do a good three hours of absolutely nothing (unless you count writing as something). Eventually Rob and Jules came to find me and I met up with the rest at the local crab shack. A whole crab can had in Kep for one U.S. dollar. Not Alaskan King Crab by any means, but good size and extremely tasty. We ordered up about thirty crabs between the five of us and proceed to feast—crab in pepper sauce, crab curry, steamed crab, grilled crab, endless endless crab. Beautiful.

There wasn’t a whole lot to Kep; as seaside towns go it felt a bit like an appetizer, whereas we were ready for a main course. We decided that what we really needed was an island. Luckily for us there is an island or two off the coast of Kep. In fact there’s at least twenty, but a lot of them are Vietnamese and off limits from this side. We settled on an island that shall for selfish reasons remain nameless. Or better yet we’ll just give it the name Rob gave it—Death Island.

Yes somehow in the midst of nearly deserted tropical paradise with gentle lapping waves, warm breezes, hammocks and grass huts, Rob managed to step on a sea urchin, bash his head on a bamboo roof, stub his toe on a nail, get bitten by red ants, step on another sea urchin…. Death Island it is.

I found Death Island to be the best island I’ve been on in all my travels. Though that may not be much of a complement since it was also the only island I’ve been on. I knew Death Island was just what I needed the first day we arrived when we ordered crab and a boy in his underwear proceeded to run out of the kitchen and down to the water where he swam out and began unloading crabs from a trap into a bucket. It doesn’t get much fresher than that. Throw in a nice beach, some cheap bungalows and you’re away.

The island consisted of a few scattered fishermen’s huts on the leeward side and some long nets cast out over the rocky shores where the local gathered and dried vast amounts of seaweed. On the leeward side of the islands were three bungalow operations of more or less similar quality, one of which rented us two fairly large bamboo and grass huts, which we called home for three nights. The first day I walked around the island (not far really, only a two or three hour hike) to get a feel for it, see what the locals did all day and find a descent spot for snorkeling. The best spot as it turned out was just up the beach from where we were staying. After renting a snorkel mask that looked as if it had been left behind by a young Jacque Cousteau in the late fifties, but which functioned perfectly well, Rob and I did a bit of snorkeling. For the most part it was just rocks, though here and there were bits of coral and a few fish, but it wasn’t much. The only notable thing we saw was a sea snake, a rather fat, ugly creature with black and red rings around his body. Otherwise, while a fun diversion for the morning, the snorkeling wasn’t much.

We generally went swimming in the mornings, lay on the sand and read or listened to music and then around lunchtime ordered up crab. I came close to eating nothing but crab for three days, lunch and dinner. The afternoons we spent under the shade of the trees playing cards or telling stories and flicking giant red ants off our legs until the sun began to sink down to the horizon and we moved back out to the beach to watch it set. The restaurant would then start up the generator for a few hours to provide light and allow us to take turns charging camera batteries and ipods and such.

It turns out that Rob is a card player. I think it was about two hours between learning that tidbit and the start of the first hold ‘em game. It had been a while since I played any hold ‘em, not that it’s a game you forget, but it was nice to play a few friendly hands. After a few beers and a few hands I once again had those fantasies of quiting my job to play cards full time. Luckily I know I’m not good enough to do that. And besides I don’t have a job to quit so it just wouldn’t work. But it was a nice change from the most popular travelers game—shithead. If you’ve never played shithead learn it before you travel. I for one love shithead even if I’m not that good at it. It seems to be one of the universal languages of traveling. Something miraculous happened one day on Death Island when we were playing shithead. But I’m not going to say what it was. Just that that was the one and only time it ever happened. You know how some people are evilly good at cards? Well even those people have their off days.

We spent three days on Death Island. Late the second night, after the cards were put up, the generators shut down and everyone had headed off to bed, I decided to go for a midnight swim. As I waded into the water I noticed little bubbles glowing around my feet. At first I thought they were catching the faint glow of the moon which was poking through the sullen thunderheads and casting a bluish pallor over the water in front of me. But, as I got deeper, I noticed that bubbles at my feet continued to glow and were joined then by bubbles coming off my legs and stomach as well. I grew up by the ocean and have done plenty of nightswimming in nearly every ocean and sea, but I have never seen anything like this. I laid back floating looking up at the stars between clouds and watching the phosphorescence of the bubbles out of my peripheral vision.

Off in the distance I could hear the faint mutter of a long tail engine coughing to life and dying and then coughing to life again as some wayward fisherman tried to get home. The mainland was faintly visible through the low clouds. I saw the flicker of lights and the long dance of high beams on the coastal road, which eventually rounded a bend and disappeared. The long tail engine came to life again with a steady puttering that gradually trailed off over some horizon of sound too distant to see in the increasingly cloud-obscured moonlight. I laid down once more, floating on my back and for a few minutes, as the water filled in my ears shutting out the sound of the sea, I felt as if I were actually floating amongst the stars in the sky, phosphorescent blue stars below me and more distant white and yellow ones in front of me.

I had had Sympathy of the Devil in my head most of the afternoon and I noticed then, floating there in the water that the drum beat in my head matched almost perfectly with gentle lapping of the ocean on the shore. I got out of the water for a while and sat with my back to the ocean listening to the waves, watching the coconut palms and pineapple trees rattle in the wind and wondering whether we’ll ever figure out the exact nature of the devil’s game. If, as Bulgakov would have it, heaven is the dominion of god and earth that of a rather swanky and stylishly likeable devil, then, as Mick Jagger suggests, the nature of the devil’s game is also the secret to living well. There are of course those that do not think life is a game, that it is dead serious business, but then perhaps that’s just their manner of play, just as there are some that can sit at a hold ‘em table for hours without cracking a smile. I’ve realized lately that I haven’t been playing very well myself, but for a moment or two there on Death Island if you had met me I think I would have had the courtesy, sympathy and taste that we’re all looking for.

After a while I waded back out into the water and they there floating under the stars. Directly overhead was a curious cluster of four stars forming a midsized square, a nearly perfect square, either a curious pattern formed by cloud and stars or perhaps part of some constellation I had never noticed before. Whatever the case it quickly disappeared behind a fast moving cloud and a slight drizzle began to fall creating endless ripples on the otherwise glassy surface of the water. The blue bubbles rising off my legs floated up and were pitched about in the rippling surface until they ruptured and disappeared, quickly replaced by new ones. Eventually the clouds covered the stars entirely and as my legs and arms grew still, the bubbles stopped, the water filled in my ears and a general blackness fell over the sky and sea and land until all was one.