Other Earths (collection)

The hotel was situated in an old quarter of the city, well away from modernity of the kind I favored, and no element of the place seemed to have the least relation to the concepts of either radar or ninety-nine. The building was three stories of decrepit stone that had been worn to an indefinite salmon hue—it might originally have been orange or pink (impossible to say which)—and had green French doors that opened onto precarious balconies with ironwork railings. Faded, sagging awnings skirted that section of the block, overhanging restaurants and shops of various kinds; and parked along the curb at every hour of day or night were between ten and twenty motos, the owners of which, according to Lucy, provided the guests, mostly expats, with drugs, women, and whatever else they might want in the way of perversity. You entered through a narrow door (the glass portion painted over with indigo) and came into a dark green-as-a-twilit-jungle foyer, throttled with ferns and fleshy-leaved plants. There was never anyone behind the reception desk. You were compelled to shout, and then maybe Mama-san (the elderly Japanese woman who owned the place) would respond, or maybe not. Beyond lay a tiny courtyard where two clipped parrots squabbled on their perch. Our room was on the second floor, facing back toward the entrance, the metal number 4 turned sideways on the door. Apart from lizards clinging to the wall, its decor was purely utilitarian: a handful of wooden chairs; a writing desk that may once have had value as an antique; three double beds about which mosquito netting could be lowered, all producing ghastly groans and squeaks whenever we sat on them and playing a cacophonous avant-garde freakout each time we made love. The bathroom was also an antique, with a claw-footed bathtub, a chain-pull toilet, and venerable tile floors. Stains memorializing lizard and insect death bespotted the cream-colored walls and high ceilings. Everything smelled of cleaning agents, a good sign in those latitudes.

I spent five days rooted to the room, trying to deny and resist change, infrequently stepping out onto the balcony to survey the street or going into the corridor overlooking the courtyard to observe the tranquil life of the hotel. I could detect no change in my surroundings—proof of nothing, but I grew calmer nonetheless. A German couple was staying in the room on our left, two Italian girls on our right. Farther along: Room 2 was home to a pair of twenty-somethings: a thin, long-haired man with a pinched, bony face and a Canadian flag embroidered on his jeans and a gorgeous gray-eyed blonde with full breasts and steatopygian buttocks. She was the palest person I had met in Cambodia, her skin whiter than the bathroom tiles (covered, as they were, by a grayish film). I never saw her leave the room, not completely. She would open the door and, without letting loose of it, as if it were all that kept her from drifting away, offer a frail, zoned, “Hi,” then hover for a while, looking as though she were going to make some further comment, before fluttering her fingers and vanishing inside. Once at noon, when the sunlight brightened the courtyard floor, casting a lace of shadow from a jacaranda tree onto the stone floor, she performed this ritual emergence half-nude, dressed in a tank top, her pubic hair a shade darker than that on her head, yet firmly within the blonde spectrum. It became evident that she was distressed about her boyfriend—he was overdue, probably off buying drugs (heroin or opium, I guessed), and she hoped these appearances at the door would hurry him along.