Calendar of Regrets

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11.07.76. Hans, Werner, Leyna. The Germans' names. A couple more rounds of beer, a teetery stroll through the unlamped streets swarming with rats after dark, Leyna laughing every time one darted out of the shadows. Asked if I wanted to join them on their voyage. My flight back to Bangkok tomorrow. My visa runs out. Have plenty of notes for my piece, but zero motivation to write it. I've been dreading that disengagement one experiences upon arriving home. Remember when I returned from Cairo? Who was the person who went over there and did all those things? What in the world was he thinking? You end up maintaining a fever-distance between where you are and where you've been. As if you've been sick. Yeah. That's it. As if you're recovering from some sort of illness.

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11.08.76. What the hell, right? Landed a cheap ticket on the ferry to Mandalay. Bought a secondhand sleeping bag stinking of mothballs from a trekker named Jules on his way back to London. Will mail the next batch of these from Bagan. We're living on the noisy, crowded upper deck with the natives. Below, the Irrawaddy is the color of melted chocolate ice cream. A bloated pig's carcass has gotten sucked into our wake. It's been clinging to the side of the ship for miles. Werner is taking bets on how long before the thing parts company with us. He's winning.

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11.10.76. Pretty cool, huh? The horizon low flat jungle at sunset today. The reflections Giacomettis shaped out of glistery light. Germans passing around a bottle of rotgut vodka they bought before leaving. Lenya laughing. Hans staring down at the water, sullen. He shaved his head this afternoon to look like a monk. For the hell of it. Werner busy arguing with no one about how Buddhism is the perfect religion for impoverished countries and authoritarian regimes. It teaches you how to put up with endless shit, he says, then ask for more.

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11.11.76. You open your eyes this morning, Taru, and see the same scene a man a thousand years ago saw upon opening his.

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11.12.76. Among other provisions on his trek across Africa, do you know Dr. Livingstone carried 73 books in three packs? Together, they weighed 180 pounds. Because of his porters' growing fatigue and complaints, Livingstone finally agreed to jettison a small part of his traveling library — after putting more than 300 miles behind him.

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11.13.76. Pulled into a village this morning for supplies and passenger exchange. Disembarked to have a look around. Hans in grim mood. Something's going on among the three of them. My tinea versicolor's flowered again. Fuck. Light reddish patches across my shoulders and chest. I'm genetically wired to produce such epidermal junk in these climates. A reminder of where I am, worn on the skin. And me without my antifungal. The village kids follow dog us along the dirt paths as if we were the best movie they've ever seen.

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11.13.76. The women fire hundreds of pots at a time under smoldering knolls of hay like this one. Werner strolled up behind me as I was watching and patted me on the back. Hand loitering, he said under his breath: Every culture contributes what it can to world history, nicht? Then he wandered away.

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11.13.76. I understand Sigmund Freud almost always had to be accompanied by someone on his trips because he had difficulty reading a railroad timetable.

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11.13.76. Sorry about the blurriness. She wouldn't stay still. Did we ever talk about how Columbus lied to his crew on their maiden voyage west? It's true. They didn't know where they were, where they were going, how long they'd be at sea. Try to imagine what they were feeling. From their point of view, reality could end any minute. In order to reassure them, Columbus created two logbooks. The private one gave the actual distances covered as he reckoned them, the public shorter ones designed to lead his crew to believe they were closer to home than they actually were. In retrospect, though, it turned out the falsified figures had been more accurate than the authentic ones. When he returned to Spain, Columbus brought with him several captured natives, some gold, some tobacco, and a few specimens of pineapple. But you know what his favorite discovery was? The hammock, Taru. The hammock.

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11.15.76. Arrived in Bagan at dawn. The view's astonishing. As every tourist says. Unavoidably. But in this case there's really no other way to put it. Five thousand pagodas from Burma's golden age clustered in sixteen square miles of dry central plains. The place thrived from the eleventh through thirteenth centuries — until, that is, the population refused to pay tribute to Kublai Khan and Bagan was sacked and abandoned. Because the current government doesn't think the architecture will attract enough visitors, it's planning on putting in a world-class golf course.

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11.16.76. Ducked away from the Germans long enough to picnic by myself atop one of the tallest stupas, spend a little time imagining what we might talk about, Taru, if you were sitting beside me. You can go pretty much anywhere you like here. There aren't any guards, almost no locks. The stone-block steps are so steep you have to use your hands and feet to scrabble up. It's like rock climbing. Every so often you come across the milky translucent skin of a cobra shed on the sandy ground among the ruins. Found a quasi-room for all of us in town this afternoon. Looks like a garage missing its front door: three unpainted cinderblock walls and a cement roof, one side entirely open onto the street, bare floor, one gas lamp, no beds or tables, the outhouse a short walk around back. Dinner at a nearby café. Werner annoyed that it took 45 minutes to get a bowl of lentil soup while seven waiters keystone-copped for nearly 15 in an attempt to change our tablecloth. Hans told him to stop whining. Werner told Hans to go fuck himself. Lenya's artificial laughter becoming increasingly prevalent and unpleasant.

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11.17.76. Market day. Warm wet blackred slabs of meat lying out on wooden planks. Piles of unidentifiable spiky fruits, vegetables, dried fish. Open gutters used for everything from pissing to chucking out food scraps, empty potato chip bags, shreds of cloth. A vomity medieval rot general in the air. Leyna struck up the semblance of a conversation with one of the locals, asking him what the Burmese thought of Westerners beginning to descend on his country. The guy smiled madly and hemmed and hawed. She pressed. Eventually he admitted he thought we were foolish for throwing away so much good money to travel halfway around the world to be worked so hard. But your sneakers very good, he added. VERY good.