Calendar of Regrets

Tell me the fucking frequency. I wanna go home now.

I've got like a hundred bucks in my pocket and a nice watch. A ring, too. Let me up and they're yours.

Fuck you.

A Rolex. Self-winding. Just let me up here, and—

Tell me the fucking frequency, man, or I'll fucking kill you.

Dan didn't say anything else. He just lay very still, collecting his energy, tasting the blood where he had nipped the inside of his cheek and tongue. Next, he exploded up and was hobblerunning along the block.

His shoulder hurt and his coat and pants were torn and somehow he had twisted his ankle, but he knew he couldn't stop moving.

He heard the guy's footsteps closing the gap between them. A hand brushed his shoulder, scrabbling for a place to grab on. Dan sidestepped it, bobbed and weaved, and a set of glass doors welled up in front of him.

The footsteps fell away as Dan found himself in a marble lobby, palms on knees, inhaling and exhaling frantically.

Behind the main desk a security guard looked up, taking in this new information in his environment. He was massive like Marines are massive. His head was shaved. Dan opened his mouth as if he were about to say something.

Then he was on his back, staring up into bright fuzzy fluorescent light.

He heard someone talking very quickly on a phone across the lobby, and, next, talking very quickly right beside him, telling him to take it easy, pal, take it easy, an ambulance is on the way.

Listening, Dan wafted in the over-lit white space. He watched as black words solidified before him like they were solidifying on a movie screen.

Gradually, they formed a sentence.

Dan had to study it for some time before it made any sense.

Well, it said, I'm here.

November

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11.02.76. Well, I'm here. Third floor. Right set of shutters. I thought it couldn't get any muggier than in Thailand, Taru, and then I stepped off the plane in Rangoon and lost the little appetite and desire for sleep I had. A two-inch-thick mattress on a narrow bed, damp sheets, a pillow smelling of someone else's hair, a rickety side table with one leg shorter than the others, a lamp without a shade, flaking white walls blossoming with mildew. At night I lie here sweating, crashingly jetlagged, listening to people jabbering nearby in a language that doesn't sound as if it could possibly be a language. Now and then insects built like tanks miniature heavy-duty assault vehicles drop off the ceiling onto my legs and belly. Handcarts, shouts, the giant mosquito engines of tuk-tuks starting up outside the moment the light ashes toward dawn. Yesterday I crossed this border and suddenly became a blurrier version of myself. That's how it works.

~ ~ ~

11.03.76. Wandering through Shwedagon Pagoda complex this morning, note-taking. No sandals allowed, even though the marble floors are blistering. They call this “the cool dry season.” Lower stupa plated with 8,688 solid gold bars. Upper with 13,153. The tip is set with 5,448 diamonds and 2,317 rubies, sapphires, other gems. At the top, a single 76-carat diamond. All that for housing eight hairs from the Buddha. People check you out with sidelong glances when they think you're not looking at them as if you were missing your hands. These monks refused to see my Polaroid and me. They treated me like I was invisible. It hit me this morning: yesterday was my birthday. I'd forgotten. Must have slid into travel's elastic time. Wish me a happy 33 when you get this, okay? Man, do I miss our late-night conversations at the bakery. Man, do I miss you.

~ ~ ~

11.03.76. More Shwedagon this afternoon. The sweeping women go round and round the complex clockwise, cleaning. Out front, vendors sell wooden dolls, good-luck charms, books, incense sticks, gold leaf, prayer flags, Buddha images, candles, warm cut-open orange melons crawling with flies. I bought a bottle of water from this cute kid, sat down to drink it on a low wall outside, and noticed the seal was broken. When I returned to show him, I discovered him refilling plastic bottles at a spigot around the corner with his friends. Women and children wear pale yellow bark powder on their cheeks, foreheads, and noses as makeup. It occurs to me, sitting under the shade of this banyan tree, drinking a warm Coke, beige dust fogging the air, perhaps the greatest thrill of traveling is to be the one to tell.

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11.04.76. The reclining Buddha at Chu Chaukhtatgyi Paya is nearly 200-feet long. Its gargantuan feet are covered with 108 sacred symbols. I have no idea what they mean. No one who speaks an approximation of English in the vicinity seems to know, either. The plaque at the base is in Burmese with its string of half-circles and round doodles broken by abrupt right angles. Studying it, another case of reading blindness comes on. As with the rest of the signs in this country, there's no chance I can tease the script into meaning. I find that sort of sight loss appealing. Most tourists prefer the guidebook to the confusion before them. They want those Michelin reductions that impersonate knowledge, even though the day after tomorrow they'll have forgotten everything they wanted to believe they took in. But isn't travel, Taru, all about the opposite of that? Call it the Aesthetics of Misreading, a continuous reminder of the disorder of things.

~ ~ ~

11.05.76. What I guess I'm trying to say is that movement is a mode of writing, writing a mode of movement. So it suddenly feels like I'm cheating when I try to picture the travel article I'm supposed to be putting together. You know what I mean? Its heart seems diminishment, its prose the kind unaware that travel was originally the same word as travail, that travail originally referred to an instrument of torture made with three stakes forming a conical frame to which the sorry victim in the Middle Ages was tied and burned alive.

~ ~ ~

11.06.76. A few beers with these three German trekkers last night amid the surreal polished teak, rattan furniture, chandeliers, and black-lacquered ceiling fans at the fancy bar in the old colonial Strand Hotel down by the river. The woman of the trio so blond she seemed made out of light. They told me the real Burma is north up the Irrawaddy. That's where they're heading. You don't worry about visas, apparently. No one checks outside Rangoon. Today the markets: aged women, teeth stained dark red from betel-nut juice, sitting cross-legged along the streets, frying mutton, asparagus, onions, beans, green peppers, and ginger in heavy iron two-handled woks. They wrap the betel-nut leaf into a triangle with a smear of slaked lime, insert it between their gums and cheeks, let it soak there for hours, spit the excess onto the sidewalk. The air around them carries this pungent fecal reek. Came across a vendor selling fried tarantulas stacked high in a bowl like black potato chips. He spoke wrecked English. I asked him what tarantula tasted like. He thought some, then asked me, expectant: You ever have scorpion?