Darker Things
This place is entirely too bright, too clean, at least by daylight. The sunshine here drenches everything in a cleansing light. It’s not at all mysterious like the yellow wash which filters through the jungles of Asia. And although there are misfits here who sink into a drugged haze every night, they are not the outcasts of other places. You feel the pull of humanity too strongly here. Someone is watching.
I miss those places where morals slowly rot into the soil. I have an uneasy yearning for the lack of oversight that being very, very far away from home brings. It’s not distance; here I am no fewer time-zones away from home than I was in Cambodia. It’s something else, the waking dream sensation of living in a place where a pile of skulls is a tourist exhibit, where sex and drugs are just commodities for the decaying rich. Back home, in civilization, everything is spelled out. There I must not put my head and arms out the window, let alone contemplate the sensual allure of cheap opium and brown flesh. Within civilization there is a net, a structure, a code which keeps us all in line. There it is not possible to know if you’re really just pretending at a fundamental drive towards respect, to goodness. You suspect something in yourself, but you never have the chance at temptation.
And so they collect, the sometimes brilliant and the sometimes unreformably crude degenerates of the world, in the backwaters where no one else wants to go. You can still leave the world, if you want, exit entirely and live on bowls of rice and crumbly marijuana purchased by the kilo at the local market, right next to the butcher who sells flyblown meat rotting in the sun. It’s not at all glamorous, but glamour is not the point. Freedom is the point, the strange potent possibility of doing absolutely whatever you want without repercussion, or nothing at all. In such places there is a conspiracy of desire, and you can at last say out loud what you used to wish you didn’t want, but do want. You talk about it over beers, and some decaying expat will point you the way.
And what thrills! The erotic surge of an automatic weapon firing in your hands. Raw lust, a parade of young and obscenely taut brown flesh standing with bored expressions in a shack on the other side of the fetid river, a single lightbulb illuminating the miserable excuse for a bar. Alcohol everywhere and pot so cheap they’ll put it on your rice for free. A beautiful child whose fear, you finally admit, makes you want her more. You can hate yourself, but the grizzly British doctor just shrugs and says that humans are like that. It’s in all of us. And you realize he’s right. You feel the pull, shudder in the opium allure of decay, darkness, the knife-edge fascination of pain, a rich languid spiral to death and silence. There is the satisfaction of getting what everyone else always secretly wanted, and self loathing becomes easy and comfortable after a while. Lying there in the dark, sweating in the heat, your pupils dilate with the rush of oblivion, and finally, finally, you’re not trying to be anyone at all.
I left, in the end. But I remember. I know now that such places exist within me, and sometimes my soul wants for darker things. I feel the stink of unrepentant truth in this; in the end I’d rather know who I am.
