added draft of desert story and a bad edit of the thailand piece

2 files changed, 326 insertions, 0 deletions

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+Claire woke up in a sleeping bag. The familiar shimmer of nylon against her skin. The smell of creosote and dampness. Already the darkness was lifting off the desert in front of her. She rolled over on the chaise lounge and groped the ground until she found her headlamp.
+
+The little tuna can stove was back against the wall of the house. She stretched until she could hook it with a fingertip. She filled it with alcohol and lit it with a match. As the stove heated up she poured the water and grounds into the moka pot.
+
+She sat up, still in the sleeping bag, and sipped the inky black coffee. She thought of something an ex had once said to her, "Claire, normal people want to be liked and accepted. You don't seem to give a shit. All you seem to care about is your coffee in the morning and your drinks in the evening". More or less. She took another sip. But not really.
+
+Little bubbles of the past had been welling up and bursting on the surface like that ever since the plane touched down yesterday evening. Every time she heard that horrid kitty litter crunch of someone walking on the endless gravel of Tucson, some bit of her younger self broke loose inside. 
+
+She was facing west, but could tell that the sun had not cleared the horizon. Two Cardinals flitted in the Mesquite tree at the edge of the patio. Flashes of red amongst the blacks and greens. She listened to them talking, the thin chip of their song muted by the morning stillness.
+
+The desert began to sketch itself in the morning light, watercolor hues of sand and rock that surged together over the rolling canvas until everything was a million rioting shades of pink sandstone that held the river plain like a cradle, the dark green Palo Verde and Mesquite groves nestled like some dark scars in the blushing sand. It seemed to extend forever, spreading out to the west until it climbed up and disappeared into the green, juniper and pine cloaked world of the Catalina mountains. 
+
+It was wet. The rain she had dreamed was not just a dream. Everything beyond the few feet of solid patio cover where she had slept was dripping. The foot of her sleeping bag was wet. She slid out into the cool of the morning, gravel gouging at her heels, and hung the sleeping bag to dry from a hook on the patio cover. 
+
+She cupped her hand to the window and looked inside the house. Her grandfather was passed out in the recliner, fully reclined, just the way she had left him six or seven hours ago, when his eyelids had finally slid shut over the constellations of grief she had watched drift quietly across those dark expanses. The TV still flickered. Ever since she was a girl, the only way he had ever slept. 
+
+--
+
+The late evening sun was just starting to temper its edge, take a little something off finally, maybe give a little respite from this goddamn heat, Ambrose was thinking when the entirety of the gravel station lot just outside the window was swallowed by a giant dust cloud that might, he realized, have somewhere in it a car, a customer, perhaps even customers, something he had not otherwise seen since much earlier in the day, back when it was hotter than Ambrose's repertoire of swear words could convey.
+
+He'd been wondering for some time if he'd need to expand that repertoire for the jungle. The Army was unclear on many things, especially to Guardsmen like Ambrose, not the least of which was how many words he might need to describe the heat of Panama.
+
+He was still standing in the shadows of the garage wiping his tanned forehead with a greasy rag, trying to imagine humidity, or at least the idea of water, when he heard the door slam and the inevitable gravel crunch of footsteps coming his way. Squinting against the glare of the setting sun he was just stepping out of the shadows when a woman's voice startled him.
+
+"Sorry about the dust."
+
+"That's all right ma'am."
+
+"We need some petrol and a place to stay."
+
+"Okay. Well I'll fill it up for you. You can stay down to street at the Vida Court. I'm sure there's some rooms."
+
+"I see."
+
+Ambrose followed her back to the truck where two small boys and a teenage girl sat atop a pile of trundles and suitcases in the bed. He nodded to the boys and tipped his hat to girl who met his gaze directly, without flinching in the slightest, which brought a warm heat to his cheeks before he could stop it.
+
+Ambrose turned his head away and busied himself with the gas pump. 
+
+"Heat brings the color to your cheeks." The woman was beside him again.
+
+"Yes ma'am." Ambrose stared at the ground. "Been a hell of summer, if you'll pardon me."
+
+"It's not always this hot?"
+
+"It's always this hot, but not for so long." The woman said nothing, Ambrose glanced up at her. "Ma'am?"
+
+"I was thinking, I was wondering if my grandchildren will have to endure this place."
+
+"Ma'am?"
+
+"We're here for my husband. They said that the dry air would be good for his tuberculosis."
+
+"Mmmhmm. They say that." Ambrose studied his feet.
+
+"I don't expect I will get to leave." She was staring off in the distance. "But I'd like to think my daughter might."
+
+He waited a moment, but she did not say anything more. She paid him in coins and climbed back in the truck. The engine coughed back to life after a few sputters that Ambrose attributed to grungy spark plugs. Most people didn't know to soak them in gasoline, it was rare that they need to be replaced. He decided he liked the woman, she was maybe a bit odd, but the heat did funny things to you if you weren't used to it. He imagined she would endure, something about her seemed incapable of not enduring. At the very least he didn't feel like she should need to buy new spark plugs just yet. He would tell her as much tonight, after he went home to the Vida Court.
+
+He watched the truck crawl out onto Prince road. He followed it out, kicking a rock out the driveway into the road. He saw the brake lights at the end of the street. The truck lurched into the Vida Court. He thrust his hands in his pockets and walked back toward the office.
+
+
+--
+
+If she really didn't give a shit Claire reasoned, then she would not have come. People who don't give a shit don't abandon their lives half way around the world, book very expensive last minute plane tickets and come back to this godforsaken fucking desert.
+
+Although, in truth, now that she was here, she missed this desert in some deranged way that made her half understand why people stayed in abusive relationships. Hate is just a perversion of love, but rage, rage is another thing altogether.
+
+She had left the desert in a kind of rage, a dull rage of unfairness wrapped up in punk rock and politics, and being born at the wrong time in the wrong place to the wrong people. The people who didn't stick around.
+
+Claire found her aunt's cigarettes tucked in the side of her purse, which she had left next to the impossibly long telephone cord that connected the old push button land line her grandfather insisted on keeping around. She took two and ducked out the back door for walk in the desert. She wanted to get away from her aunts. 
+
+Her mother's sisters both thought she didn't give a shit. They always had. All because Claire hadn't cried at her own parents' funeral. As if a six year old is aware of social decorums. 
+
+They still hated her for it. Or, if not hated, at least thought she was strange, most likely a little dangerous and best studied in silence. That she insisted on sleeping outside, like animal she had heard her aunt say last night, only reaffirmed this belief. But outside was the only place the rage dissipated. Outside there was only the heat and the stillness and the relative cool of the evening and mornings. Coffee and cocktails were not so far off after all perhaps. 
+
+There was also the rather insulting move of leaving the desert. Claire did what no one else in the family had dared to do since her grandmother stepped off the beat up flatbed into the cactus-strewn world of kitty litter. Leave. We are here to go she had said with the smirk and she disappeared over the horizon, traveling halfway around the world to do god knows what. Claire imagined how much they must enjoy talking about her when she wasn't around. Sometimes she thought she should sit them down and just tell them everything, but they had over the years made it pretty clear that they actually liked her better as an object of fascination than a person. Who was she to deny them such pleasure? 
+
+It was April, the edge of searing heat, more of a baking heat right now. The dry heat of spring in a place where somehow flowers still contrived to not just exist, but explode out of the seemingly dead soil. Claire looked down at the cigarette between her fingers. She'd quit years before, but somehow it seemed like something Emma would do. Now though, standing in the middle of a flame red cluster of Ocotillo flowers she realized Emma would never have lit the cigarette. Would never have even taken it. Would never have even come at all. She was never part of the desert the way Claire was, she had floated above it like a cloud.
+
+Claire watched a tiny dust devil gathering in the wash down the hill. The desert was where the earth's dust came from. Bits of the Sahara coat the Amazon every year. There is no escaping the desert. Even if you travel half way around the world your desert past will find you, grain by grain, dust to dust. Everything ends up back here in the dry desert plain where it settles and bakes in the heat until it's all as hollow as a corn husk. A little wind and it would all be off again, headed south down to the Mexican coast and out to sea.
+
+--
+
+Emma had developed a peculiar fascination with chewing sand. It came to her mouth as a dry film licked off her lips. From western Oklahoma onward she had been chewing at the nothingness of sand. Now, after jumping down from the truck bed, she violently spat the contents of her mouth on a cactus and resolved to never chew sand again. 
+
+Except that it kept settling on her lips. And she kept licking them, out of habit. Perhaps, she thought, the whole West is just one thin dusty film settling over the world. Certainly the room at the Vida Court was saturated with fine grit. 
+
+Mother had laid Father out on the bed and was giving him a glass of water and some saltines. They were talking in low voices that Emma could not make out. She went outside to get her bag and have a look around.
+
+The Vida Court was, Emma reasoned, better than sitting atop trundles in the back of the flatbed wedged between sweaty siblings and a mucus and blood-spewing father. And that was about all that could be said of it. 
+
+It was not, for instance, a ten-room farmhouse with three floors and a tornado cellar. Nor was it surrounded by endless acres of imported genuine Kentucky bluegrass with a semicircle of drooping cottonwood trees growing around the pond. There were no ponds for miles. Just a small, rusted copper tub full of sun-warmed water.
+
+It was only after she removed her stockings that she realized how thoroughly the sand had saturated her. Or perhaps, she thought, perhaps my thighs have tanned through these skirts. She climbed into the water and watched as the brown of her legs faded back to milky white, the dusty film of Oklahoma and New Mexico drifting across the water like great orange clouds moving from one end of the tub to the other.
+
+She could see the young man from the gas station through the chalky pink haze of the bathroom window, but only as a still, dark frame in a chair on the porch. It wasn't long before Emma found herself standing in the bathtub, dripping water, watching the shadowy porch for signs of movement.
+
+She put on a clean dress and evacuated the bungalow as fast as she could without raising undue suspicion. The sun was already gone, but the air still held the heat like a treasure of the day. She walked around the cacti and was tempted to touch the thorns. She reached out her hand and ran it from the center out and down the edge, careful to keep her hand moving with the hooked direction of the needles.
+
+"So y'all sold your farm, bought the truck and hauled your dad out here for some fresh air huh?"
+
+His voice startled her enough that she almost leaned on the cactus for support.
+
+"Sorry?"
+
+"You sold the farm, bought the truck and here you are, TB and all."
+
+"Something like that."
+
+"We get quite a few passing through these days..."
+
+"Oh we're staying I believe."
+
+"I'm Ambrose"
+
+He extended his hand and she stepped out of the cacti and took it in her own. 
+
+"Emma."
+
+"You know, Emma," he took another sip of the beer for courage, "that truck you're family is drivin... you need to pull the plugs and soak them in some gasoline. I can do it if you like."
+
+--
+
+The funeral was over by four. Claire sat on the patio with her Grandfather, eating leftover Fancy Franks. 
+
+"These were her favorite," he said staring down at the last one in his hand. 
+
+"No they weren't, she hated little cocktail crap like this."
+
+He laughed and pitched the last one out into the desert. "You're right, she did."
+
+She watched a Brown Thrasher study the frank from a low branch of a Palo Verde tree. "Are you sure you're going to be okay?"
+
+"Have I ever not been okay?"
+
+"You wife just died Papa..."
+
+"She died three years ago Claire, her body stopped working recently is all. I'm old, she was old. People die. It's what we do Claire. Next time you come around here it'll be for me."
+
+"Don't take this the wrong way Papa, but I'm not coming back for you."
+
+"I know."
+
+"How do you know that?"
+
+"Because when I'm gone there's no one to come back to."
+
+Claire smiled. "True, plus I'd hate to disappoint all of them. Everyone thinks I don't give a shit. If I show up here after you... well, that would seem like I gave a shit wouldn't it?"
+
+"Who thinks you don't give a shit? Give a shit about what? They don't think that."
+
+"About anything. And they do. Like everyone else has these complicated situations and feelings and worries and all this shit and I just float away on a bunch of merry red little balloons."
+
+Ambrose chuckled. "Who thinks this?"
+
+Claire gestured around her, "I dunno, everyone..."
+
+"Mmmhmm. Claire, you know better than most that there is no everyone."
+
+
+--
+
+
+The rock sounded like a bomb against the window. She was a foot clear of her bed before she had even made sense of the noise. Then she heard his hissing whisper, "Emma..."
+
+She pulled the window up and crawled out, tumbling down into his arms. "Stop with the rocks, you scared the life out of me". 
+
+They crept through the sandy yard and down the banks of Palo Verde snarls to the edge of the river. He stopped suddenly and she crashed into his body. He started to say something, but she smothered his mouth with a kiss.
+
+Later they lay on their backs listening to the river. Ambrose told her the names of the stars that he could remember, making up the rest on the spot. 
+
+She asked about the stars in Panama and then suddenly, "you aren't going to get Malaria are you?"
+Despite all the words he had conjured for Panama this was one he had not thought of. The Army had not mentioned it either. "Do they have malaria in Panama?"
+
+"Of course. And snakes and worms and all sorts of nastiness. It's a jungle you know."
+
+"I know. It'll be beautiful, no desert, no dry cracking horridness."
+
+Emma smiled. "You've never felt humidity have you?" 
+
+"No, but I already know I love it."
+
+Emma laughed. "You might be the only person I've met who's happy to be going to war."
+
+"I'm not happy to be going to war, but I'm happy to get out of here. I've been trying to get out of here for years."
+
+She laughed again ans stroked his cheek. "You can always leave anywhere Ambrose, you just go. You just have to make sure you understand what you're leaving." She slid out of his arms and walked down to the water's edge. He watched as she crouched down at the river’s edge and skipped rocks out toward the middle. 
+
+
+--
+
+
+The patio had a fan. It spun too slow to move the air much. It had always reminded Claire of a tape reel or a movie projector, except that it was broken and only spun backward. A tape reel forever rewinding. 
+
+The rain had started again off in the distance, a low cloud hung over the mountains, a black mist trailing down from it, filling the canyons and ravines with drops that would become a raging wall of water by the time it passed by here tomorrow morning.
+
+Inside the house Ambrose tilted back the reclining chair with a long angry sounding trail of ratcheting clicks. She could hear her aunts talking in the kitchen, their words muffled by the faucet and clatter of dishes. She heard the TV come on. They would be running the ticker tape at the bottom of television again tonight: Flash flood warning in effect. 
+
+Tomorrow the newspaper would want everyone to know that someone had died; that a new golf course is going to be built on the hillside above someone’s watery grave; that the threat of flood is the price we pay for sunshine; that the desert is a barren curse; that every place has its curse, that eventually all the curses will combine; that everything will be cursed; that the curse is not so bad; that loneliness is a curse; that loneliness is different than alone, that still, the coffee is quite good down at the....
+
+Claire slid her legs into the sleeping bag, enjoying the dry slipperiness of nylon against her skin. It felt like slipping between worlds, cool dry worlds where she could float on red balloons forever. Darkness closed in, the world telescoped down into blackness. The foothills faded, the dark splotches of river slipped into black. Eventually there was only the lone saguaro still glowing in the soft blue light of the television flickering behind her. 
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+Morning smells of the smoky charcoal burning beneath his window. The city is long awake. Martin Ives lies in bed staring at the swollen blisters of plaster ceiling, waiting for them to burst. He has been awake for some time, listening to the city come to life. He scratches his belly through the thin, yellowed fabric of his undershirt. The alarm clock begins to buzz.
+
+He pauses in the doorway downstairs, overwhelmed by the glare and heat. The sun glints off the distant high rises. The city rings around him, moto horns, tuk-tuk bugles, bicycle bells. Two children laugh as they roll a pair of tire rims clanging down down the street, flicking them along with thin bamboo poles as they running alongside. 
+
+Martin walks around the corner and places his order at the cart. The thin strips of meat hiss on the grill. The heat from the smoldering coals brings beads of sweat to his forehead and sends them down his cheeks. Her face shows no trace of sweat. She pours the sauces together in a plastic bag, dunks his pork and hands it to him.
+
+He buys a bag of pineapple on the dock and munches on it, watching the muddy brown river undulate past. It flows like a restless sleeper thrashing at the sheets. Longtail motors churn and chop and the longer rolling wakes of ferry boats. The water burps bunches of soggy earth clinging to roots of water plants. Martin hears the calmer water behind him begin to bubble and roil. He turns and watches as hundreds of the fish surface in the impossibly small area between docks, their sliver bellies streaking in the morning light. They wriggle and squirm like eels, fighting their way to the little pelts of food thrown by bored commuters. 
+
+People begin to stand as the ferry approaches from upstream; it's already crowded. He wads up the rest of the pineapple, shoves it in his pocket and climbs aboard the ferry. The boatman yells something in Thai and pilot guns the engine, pulling out into the river. 
+
+He stands near the bow, watching the banks pass by, Wat Rakhang, Memorial Bridge, Wat Arun. The river smells of fish and rotted vegetables. Women wash clothing in the river water, children leap from pylons into it. The boat surges upward, over the wake of a cross river ferry, and the water splashes up in in a high arc that moves in slow motion, a solid body separating, breaking apart and regrouping. He watches as it splatters down around him, darkening his sleeves and the front of his coat.
+
+At Saphan Taksin Martin exits with the rest of the crowd and makes his way up the stairs to the sky train. At one stop he spies a group of Red Shirts gathered around a soup stall, hunched over tables. The brazenness surprises him. The train accelerates off again.
+
+Martin is midway through sorting two new piles of refugee immigration information when Jerry descends on him. Martin keeps his head down, give no sign of acknowledgement. He stares at the words on the page. It's easy to loose yourself in the words. The Hmong have no real concept of surnames, no patronymic or matronymic system that anyone knows of and they often change their names several times in the course of their lives. It makes Martin's job very nearly impossible, though he suspects the Thai authorities simply throw away the forms Martin processes anyway. His boss Michele, and presumably her bosses somewhere back in Geneva, likely feel different.
+
+He is aware that Jerry is speaking, he can hear his voice, but the words have not reached him yet, they move slowly toward him, if he looks up he thinks he might see them, floating down like the little plastic rings Martin used to play with at the community pool when he was a boy.
+
+"They're sending us out in the field."
+
+"What?" Martin glances up to see Jerry pulling the last of some mysterious ball of meat off a long skewer with his teeth. Jerry licks his finger tips and smacks his lips. "You and I, Martin. We get to go out," he waves his hand to the north, "there... somewhere. Chang Mai I believe."
+
+Martin stares blankly at Jerry, remembering the one and only time he had agreed to go with Jerry for drinks after work, how Jerry had brought along his Thai girlfriend, how much Martin desperately wanted to punch the man in his sweaty red cornfed Ohio face every time he pawed at the woman's ass on the Skytrain. But he had not. Martin simply squirmed in discomfort and tried to step away from the couple, ignoring the ugly stares of the other people on the train.
+
+"Relax old boy, it'll be fun, get you out of the city, dip your wick even." He smiled. "Oh shit, Here comes Michelle now. Back to work." Jerry scurried off back to his cubicle at the other end of the room.
+
+Martin watches as Michelle made her way across the office toward Martin's cubicle. 
+
+"He told you didn't he?"
+
+"Chang Mai?"
+
+"He's such a worthless piece of crap."
+
+Martin arches an eyebrow. "Can't you fire him?"
+
+"And replace him with whom exactly? He's an asshole, but he shows up."
+
+Martin ponders taking on Jerry's workload simply to never have to see him again, but decides it isn't worth it. "So, Chang Mai?"
+
+"Chang Mai."
+
+-----------------------------
+
+They took a night bus. Martin hated buses. Hated to cars too. He never slept on anything that moved. Jerry gave him two Ambien before he crawled in his own berth and began to snore. The night dragged on, most passengers fell asleep. Martin put on his headphones and listened to Daniel Carter. In front of him, down the aisle he could watch the stripes in the road through the massive windshield. The stripes came like arrows shot out of the asphalt, rushing toward him and then disappeared under the bus. 
+
+He remembered the desert night, the small arc of headlights carving out. The white lines blinking on, as if sent from infinity. Martin was in the back seat, leaning forward, his head resting on the cool leather of the bench seat in front of him. His father was driving, his windows down, his arm resting on the door. Martin could see him smiling in the side mirror, white Cheshire cat teeth hanging in the darkness of his black beard. His mother slept, leaning against the passenger door. The wind rushed in his fathers window, dragging the smell of creosote and sage into the back seat. Martin watched kangaroo rats and rabbits bouncing in the sand, leaping out of the arc of lights that chased them back into the desert beyond the road. He felt the wind playing through the blond hair on his arm, battering at it until the skin went numb. He lay down in the back seat and listen to the sound of the air and night wrap itself around him. 
+
+He woke up in the hospital. His legs were broken. Every movement sent searing shocks of pain through his body. After a while he began to see them coming, like white lines rushing out of the darkness toward him. He stopped crying so much. He became quiet. He became still. The doctors said it was good. The nurses smiled, left contraband candy in his hands when they changed the bedpan. Feelings swelled inside him like enormous balloons of light, threatening to burst out of him if he did not lay incredibly still. He lay still and dreamed of his parents. He dreamed of the wind pulling at the hair of his arm. He cried. 
+
+The bus pulls off at a Caltex station. Martin sits up and wipes his eyes. He jams the memory back down in the floorboards of his mind, where it belongs, where it stays, asleep and unknown, save for rare nights when he he was awake late enough to hear it get up and rummage about in the refrigerator, looking for something to feed it. 
+
+The driver steps outside and lights a cigarette. Martin follows him. He blinked in the harsh glare of florescent lights and nodded at the driver before walking away, toward the well lit insides of the Caltex mini mart. In the bathroom he washed his face and threw the Ambien in the toilet.
+
+He bummed a cigarette from the driver. A gradient of light fell across the parking lot, fading into darkness around the white lines of parking spaces. There was no else around. The driver grunted behind him. They climbed back into the bus.
+
+--------------------
+
+
+Here is the form. Here is the woman to fill out. The woman can't write. The woman can't speak English. Martin can't speak much Hmong. A young boy acts as interpreter. The young boy spells out the names, Martin fills in the boxes on the form. The days roll away. Men, women, children; Martin writes for them. Then Jerry types it up and sends it back to Bangkok. Sometimes papers come back. The men and women and children are grateful, some clutch his hand, others cry. And then there are gone. 
+
+The camp is twenty miles north of Chang Mai, in the low foothills that lead up to the Burmese border some five miles northwest of the camp. Martin and Jerry stay in temporary trailers that have been erected by the Army. He glances up from his desk at the tent city beyond the window. It starts as tents, with orderly, if muddy streets running between them. Some two thousand people camped in a sea of mud. At the edge of the tents begin the less fortunate, the late arrivals, the tents give way to a squatters village, scraps of metal sheeting braces against bamboo poles, car doors held up with baling wire, tires stacked to form a wall, cardboard tables, stones piled for a fire pit, scraps of heavy cloth torn from the military trucks that bring food draped over doorways. 
+
+In the evenings an old woman with only a couple of teeth left walks by his tent shaking a clutch of dried, smoldering plants that give a thick, but not unpleasant gray smoke that drifts in the mosquito netting and settles on his sheet. The smell is something Martin knows, but can't place.
+
+It takes Martin seven days to figure out how to get rid of Jerry. It's Jerry's day off when Martin happens to actually dump a large black scorpion out of his boots in the morning when he ritually turns over his boots to make sure nothing has sneaked in them overnight. He's been doing it religiously for four years now, but this is the first time something actually drops out. After the initial shock wears off his impressed with how quickly his brain decides to carefully coax the equally alarmed creature into Jerry's boot. Jerry, regrettably, never developed a similar precaution and Martin is free of him forever a day later when the transfer comes through.
+
+There are a dozen other westerners in the camp. Most are volunteers, college students saving the world. They drive down to Chang Mai on the weekends and come back with cases of beer. They keep to themselves and Martin makes no effort to join in. He isn't sure what to say to the young anymore. The world can't be saved? The world can be saved? There is no world to save? There is nothing but world and it doesn't need saving. 
+
+The summer heat is just starting. There is no air conditioning. Martin lies awake at night sweating, tossing in his cot, wondering what saving means. The first night he dreamed of Havasupi, plunging from the cliffs into the cold, clear water. He dreamed of the Everstons, his step sister Emily and her boyfriend Tom. The took him hiking, up behind the waterfall over slippery smooth rocks until they reached the top. The sky was endless, long sweeps of thin cloud written from one end to the other. Contrails of airplanes. Tom jumped in the water and disappeared over the falls. Emily went next. Martin waited. Afraid. He sat down in the water, but did not push off. He wakes up drenched in sweat.
+
+He gets up and wanders the camp. The Medicines Sans Frontiers doctor, Chambers, is sitting up in the mess tent, drinking Mekong whiskey by the light of a small candle. He invites Martin to join him, pours him a paper cup of whiskey. 
+
+"Terrible stuff."
+
+Weeks pass. Newspapers bake yellow in the sun. Government trucks haul people away, off to life in the city, some small town, somewhere else. But always more come. Martin begins to suspect that the only way he will ever escape this place is to jump on one of the trucks, quit his job and just disappear. He drinks late into the night, sitting with Chambers.  They rarely speak, just listen to the night, watch the mosquitoes zigzag through the candlelight. 
+
+Once Chambers asked, "how did you end up here Ives?"
+
+"Got transferred."
+
+"Not here. I mean, here at all, in Thailand."
+
+Martin shrugged in the dark, "I needed a change."
+
+"Originally?"
+
+"Arizona."  "You?"
+
+"Berkley." 
+
+Martin nods. Chambers seems to have no more interest in subject, it is merely a means of classifying. Everything here can be reduced to location. Really there is only here now, Martin thinks. There was there, but Martin is no longer sure that he was really there when he was there. Here was still here when I was there, still waiting for me, but now I am here and there is everywhere. But there is something I can remember, I think. But when I was there was I really there? 
+
+Chambers swirls his whiskey around the bottom of the paper cup. An old woman walks by the tent, waving a smoking bunch of plants, whispering something in Hmong. She stops to watch the men. Chambers smiles, waves, calls out good evening in Hmong.
+
+"How long are you here?"
+
+"Hear?"
+
+"Here..." Martin gestures around the camp. 
+
+Chambers says nothing, glances at his whiskey. "Here, there, which one are we?" he mumbles, then smiles, "I'll be here until I hear otherwise." Chambers swirls his whiskey around the bottom of the paper cup. 
+
+The shape of a woman drifts by the tent. It is the incense woman as Martin has come to think of her. She stops to watch the men. Chambers smiles, waves, calls out what Martin has learned equates to good evening in Hmong.
+
+He turns to Martin, "have you met Ma-Lee?"
+
+It's dark, Martin can barely make out the womans face. Martin doesn't want to admit it, but Hmong names have all blurred together for him now, a long mashed together string of nearly unpronounceable syllables that simply stands for everyone, names everyone. Everyone all at once. The name of god Martin thinks. He shakes his head in the dark.
+
+"She wouldn't have come into the office, she's got no plans to stay here." Chambers waves her in, pulls a chair up to the table and pours her a small cup of whiskey. She smiles and takes a seat, holding the plant bundle behind her. Chambers says something in Hmong that's too complex for Martin to follow, though he does smile at when he hears his name.
+
+"I told her to take you up the river tomorrow"
+
+"What?"
+
+"It's your day off right?"
+
+"Yes".
+
+"Good, you can see the orchids."
+
+
+
+
+