What It’s Like Here

On the seventh week, the truck gets stolen.

Together we go to the hotel’s secure compound. It’s a chainlink fence, a ticket-booth, four mismatching cars. Gunter leans on the booth partition and talks to the guard. His namebadge says Yen in red italics. I know the workers here pick daily from a cache of badges by the door – it’ll be Yen today, Wao tomorrow, Lei on friday. Yen removes his cap and awkwardly shoulders his rifle, a Kar. 98. He has a custom crimson shoulder strap, with badges on it. One of them is a peace sign. He tells us the man on the night shift, Hwan, is not responding to messages or phone calls. He has gone AWOL.

Then Yen takes us to the hole in the fence. It’s truck shaped. Tire tracks lead up the dirt bank and onto the road.

‘Can’t fucking believe this,’ Gunter says, under his breath. He kicks the fence till it rattles.

‘I am sorry,’ Yen says, adjusting the rifle strap again. ‘I lost my car two weeks ago. I use my bicycle now. Five miles.’

He holds up the four fingers on his left hand. It should be five, but the middle-finger has been hacked off. Yen is grinning despite this. Yen, I feel, is an optimist.

‘Fifty grand,’ Gunter says. ‘Fifty fucking grand.’

‘I understand,’ Yen says, nodding now. ‘I lost my car two weeks ago.’

‘Huh,’ Gunter says and turns on the guard. Before I can stop him, he’s unholstered his revolver and has the barrell pressed against Yen’s temple.       

‘You don’t understand,’ Gunter says. ‘You don’t have a fucking clue. You and I aren’t even in the same fucking league. You and I aren’t even playing the same fucking sport.’

Yen – bless him – smiles and says: ‘Sorry. It was a nice truck, I understand, I lost my car,’ while showing his palms and trembling and nodding; still nodding.

Then I’m there, pulling Gunter away – an elbow rushes up and strikes me on the nose. I go reeling. Then he cracks Yen on the skull with the revolver butt, and kicks his feet out from under him. I ask Gunter what the fuck, exactly, was that for and Gunter spits and tells me to fuck off – louder this time – so his voice booms out across the car park.

I stumble over, still giddy from the elbow, and apologise to Yen. The poor man is blinking in the sunlight; there’s a red mark the shape of a revolver butt on his temple. Not once did he reach for the rifle. He stands, dusts off his trousers.

‘It’s not a problem,’ he says and saddles the Kar. 98 on his shoulder once more. ‘People love cars. People will do anything for a good car. I understand.’

And he beams, eyes shut, crooked teeth showing. I turn to Gunter, but Gunter is already marching across the parking lot with the Smith and Wesson 657 over his shoulder.

Next Gunter waves his gun around the hotel reception, sending bell boys and kindly matrons barrelling for cover. Gunter demands they waiver the booking fee – he’s pissed, he says, about the booking fee. Tourists squat behind a pot plant. A waiter is stood with a flute in hand, just watching. Eventually the manager arrives in his underwear, trembling and blubbering. Gunter shoots a window to prove he’s serious and says something about being fucking pissed about the booking fee. Someone, somewhere outside, screams. The manager yields, through tears, and gives us a hundred yen out of his desk. He apologises, hands together, prayer-like.

At the bus stop, Gunter scowls and looks east. I do my breathing exercises and try to think. The rebels plastered recruitment posters all over the town, offering money, good wine, bounteous woman. I imagine a truckload of weapons would buy a man a lifetime of good-will. I imagine Gunter believes that if our truck is anywhere, it will be in the camp.

*

This is our last contract together.

Two weeks ago, I found Gunter in a bar with Carlos. Carlos is one of our suppliers; he wears flip-flops with little pictures of palm trees on them and is often coated in a fine sheen of sweat.

When I arrived, Carlos was in the middle of telling Gunter about his new business. Gunter was counting out notes on the table.

I told Gunter no. And I tried to stop him, a hand on the shoulder. But Gunter brushed me off, and told me to fuck off. Meanwhile, Carlos giggled to himself and sipped, lengthly, from a gin and pineapple. I tried again and this time I was harder.  I told him to think about lilly, the kids back home.

‘I’m going,’ he said.

I said nothing.

Gunter spat.

They went outside and climbed into the truck, Gunter hanging heroically from the rigging. I stayed underneath the electric heaters, and watched them fade into distance. I ordered two shots of ozo to pass the time. Then two more. I remember throwing up into one of those dank Korean toliets. When Gunter returned, I was on my fifteenth.

I broke a pool cue across his back. He slammed a fist into my ribs. We went through a table. Gunter told me he always hated me. I spat teeth and told him to go fuck off, dickhead. Someone had to knock me out before I swung at him again. That night we slept in separate rooms. I lay awake, did my breathing exercises, and thought.

Carlos had found out, somehow, that certain people wanted to experience killing. He’d seen an opportunity, hired the right people, and was selling the experience for two hundred a time. He’d take the buyer to the woods, place a gun in their hand and bring them a hooded P.O.W.

The gun was a Nagent with a six-round revolving cartridge. I know because I sold Carlos the gun. It’s not a bad gun by any means, but dramatic and messy for close-range executions. Gunter used all six of the cartridges, and finished the guy off with the butt.

At night, Carlos would return and escort the body to one of the many mass graves, which had sprung up, like theme parks, around town.

*

On the second day, we get stuck in traffic. We crawl past a row of cages with prisoners jammed against the bars for two hours. Men with cattle prods, in federation colours, poke at the cages and smoke cigarettes. None of the passengers seem to notice there is a war happening. A boy at the back of the bus reading may have looked up from his reading; once, maybe.

Gunter walks the length of the bus, and stands, with his hand on the holding bar, behind the driver. Then he comes back, and sits with his legs across the seat. Sometimes, he smokes. Then he walks the bus again.

Gunter comes back from the front of the bus with a cigarette in his mouth and sits on the seat in front of me.

‘We should get our truck back,’ he says.

‘I was wondering when you’d bring that up.’

‘They fucked us.’   

I shake my head. Days before, my wife had found a villa on the slopes of southern Italy. I gave it to her. On a whim. Like it was nothing.

‘So what,’ I say, ‘look at what’s around you.’

Outside, a line of chained men are being packed into a cage. ‘Let’s let them fuck us,’ I say, ‘they deserve at least one last consolidatory fuck. We owe them a fuck.’

‘They still fucked us.’

‘It wasn’t personal, Gunter. They don’t give a fuck about us, or our money.’

‘It’s not money,’ Gunter says, eyeing the other passangers. ‘Don’t think it’s about money. It’s-’

‘It’s what? About respect?’

He said nothing.

‘Go on. Say it.’

‘It’s about respect.’

The heat is untenable, I realise. Before I thought it was managable, but with Gunter sat there, I suddenly think it’s untenable.

‘That’s a very broad brush application of that word.’

Gunter nods, says he thought I’d say something like that and goes back to staring through the window. Gunter has our kitbag on his lap. Every so often, he feels along the creases for the rifle butt, then he caresses that and takes deep, sonorous breathes – as if this, the caressing, is soothing him.

*

Town after town of bombed out shop fronts, collapsed church roofs, orphans playing in the streets.

Gunter finds a car rental in a town by the sea. It’s a murky lot on the main street, ringed by a lilting chain link fence. When we arrive, the proprietor is closing for the day. He’s in a Cardiacs t-shirt and knackered boat shoes. He doesn’t let us inside until we pay fifty, each.

Twenty minutes later we’re beyond the city limits and in the mountains again. At sunset, we eat in the outside dining area of a family restaurant. Crickets play in the darkness.

Opposite us is a shot up play area, bullet holes in the slide, the swings torn from their frames. Beyond that, another pair of men, men who look just like us, dour in suits and striped ties, who eat like us, talk like us, could be us, maybe are us; will, at the very least, become us. We tip extravagantly.

I remember, while sat in the restuarant’s well-heated outdoor area, that for a time, Gunter and I were friends. On the first week at the resort, TV reports had informed us of a Buddha boy who was protesting the war by meditating in one of the forests around the town. We rented bicycles and rode there, spokes clacking in the silence of the afternoon. One of the bridges had collasped and we’d had to take the long way round, so by the time we arrived it was almost mid-day, and hot. The buddha boy was just as expected, silent, still, composed, with his legs crossed and his forefingers pressed to his thumbtips.

‘This isn’t bad,’ Gunter said.

‘No,’ I said, ‘it’s not.’

Sunlight was coming down through the leaves and twenty shimmering pennies of light dot Gunter’s face. Birds burst from treetop to treetop.

‘It’s always quieter than I expect,’ he said and looked around at the trees.

‘The forest?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘The war. You always expect war to be loud. Bombs, screams, gunfire. But here it’s just kind of still. Like everybody’s waiting for something to happen.’

‘I thought I’d see someone get shot. I prepared for it, tried to imagine what it’d be like to see someone get shot. Maybe what it would be like to shoot someone myself.’

‘In my dreams, I always see myself carrying someone from the wreckage. A pretty girl in a white dress. A business man in his dust-coated suit. An old woman. I answer questions to microphones. Flashbulbs illuminate my face.’

I nodded. ‘When my wife was pregnant, I always imagined saving our son from something. He’d slipped and slashed his wrist open, but I was there, in a flash, assembling a tourniquet with startling rapidity and technique.’

‘You’ve said that before.’

‘I haven’t.’

‘Startling rapidity and technique. That’s scripted. That’s pre-written.’

‘That’s how I tell it to people in my head.’

He nodded towards the Buddha boy. His clothes were orange, but he’d been sat so long in the wind and rain and snow that it had faded and become a sort of reddy-brown.

‘What do you think he’s thinking?’

‘Apperently nothing.’

‘I don’t believe that. I don’t believe any of that.’

We mounted our bicycles and rode back to the town. By the time we arrived, the stars were out. Our first deal was with a rebel captain in the back-alley of some pub. He wanted to sell us cocaine, and had bags of it ready to sample, but we told him no, we weren’t those people.

I saw someone get shot later that evening. A serving girl. The bullet went through her metasternum and she was thrown over a table. I tried to help, came stumbling over with the medical pack I kept in my briefcase. I made a mess of the whole thing, got myself and two of the waiters covered in blood. Gunter did the rest of our round alone and I sat in the hotel shower, scrubbing and scrubbing and scrubbing.

*

Gunter drives from then on; I curl up in the backseat and try not to dream. I dream anyway – the usual – fire and singed limbs. There is this one incident with a child climbing out of a bus with an arm missing, and trying to get his back pack to just, you know, kind of, sit right, which I think about – dream about – a lot. I dream that in the backseat, with the highway streetlights passing over my face.

When I wake, the clock shows one a.m. I try to get my bearings. It’s just trees, a gibbous moon, shadows moving like oil across the road. We pass the restuarant again – the waiters are out, bowties undone and slung around necks, striking golf balls into the forest.

‘Where are we going?’ I say.

Gunter keeps his eyes on the road.

‘East,’ he says, like I didn’t know.

I climb awkwardly between the seating partition and into the passenger seat. We drive a while in silence, the trees coming up and by.

‘I’m not coming with you,’ I say.

‘I know,’ he says, eyes on the road, sharp-mouthed.

‘I think what you’re doing is stupid,’ I say.

‘I know,’ he says.

He turns down a mountain pathway and we drive for some time along twisting roads. There are no lights, only stars.

*

It’s three hotels before we find a room. I wait in the car with my bag clutched to my chest while Gunter pays triple; he comes out, looking fleeced, and raps on the window.

‘Get moving,’ he says.

The bell-girl – teenage with unconditioned hair, haunted eyes – welcomes me with a loose-limbed gesture and takes our suitcases. She struggles with them; when she picks up the first one, she almost falls flat on her face with the weight. When she picks up the second, it looks as if she’s walking on tip toes. By the fourth flight, her face is flushed red and she groans with every step.

At a turn in the stair, she staggers and catches herself on the corner. The suitcase goes trundling down the stairs, and Gunter steps asides to let it go. She darts after it before I can stop her and gathers up the suitcase. Hurt plays across her face.

‘I can take that?’ I say, but she’s already past me, making her way, lopsidedly, up the staircase.

I give chase and say, no, no, it’s alright, I can take it, I can take it and I make a grab for her wrist.

‘No,’ she says and wrenches it from my hand.

‘I can help,’ I say, and try again to take it, but she shakes her head and twists he suitcase away.

‘No,’ she says. ‘I have to carry. I have to carry.’

Gunter stands two steps down from us, arms folded.

‘For chirst’s sake, Jason,’ he says. ‘Let her carry the damn suitcase.’      

She’s panting by the end of it. I try to tip, five yen, but she wags a finger.

‘No,’ she says. ‘No tip no.’

I force the money into her hand and tell her to take it.

But she won’t, she tries to give it back and I dodge and parry her hand. She looks to Gunter, but he’s stood over by the window with his back to us. In the end, she leaves it, neatly, on the side table and says again:

‘Can’t.’

She leaves and I try to follow, but Gunter forces the door closed with a palm.

‘The tip will go to the owner,’ he says, firm.

‘Not if I do it right.’

He looks at me.

‘There’s no way to do it right.’

‘There is.’

He exhales for what feels like a minute.

‘This isn’t our fight,’ he says, at last. Outside, a bi-plane screams across the sunset, flanked by birds.

*

Gunfire in the night. I hear trucks barrelling towards the forest. Shouts and cries. There is a fire somewhere in the town and the blue lights of a fire engine come wailing past the room. With the sheet clutched in my hand, I think of home and do my breathing exercises. Gunter sleeps, curled up, alone.

*

When I wake, Gunter’s bed is made. His suitcase sits in the centre, open, with the luggage – shirts, shoes, books – scattered around it. He has removed both our pistols, a rifle and an army knife. Outside, the rental car is gone. I sit and think about this. Then I pull on my coat. I climb into the forests surrounding the hotel. I call his name. I kneel and try to find tracks. I listen for the tell-tale sounds of snapped twigs or heavy breathing. I wander and try to navigate by the stars.

Mostly though I just call his name.

I keep going till my throat starts to hurt. By then, I realise that Gunter won’t reply even if he does hear my shouts. But I want to feel, I guess, like I’ve backed myself up. Like I’ll be clear now, conscious-wise, when I look back on these days.

After a while, I return to the streets, and the streetlight. My shoes are thick with mud and pine needles. A passing car heckles me as I walk along the pavement. Three soldiers on bikes come by and their heads turn in unison. It’s something like 6 when I get back to the hotel. The dark-eyed girl is polishing shoes in the hall light; their shine winks at me, like sucked liqourice, when I come inside. It is not clear whether the shoes are owned by guests or the manager. I do not ask.

In my room, I lie on the bed, turn over, sleep like a baby.

*

In the canteen of the hotel, I eat breakfast slowly. A tv shows news footage on a one hour loop and I watch it till twelve. There is no mention of Gunter, or anyone resembling Gunter. On loop four, the dark-eyed girl comes out of the back room and waits by the hotel counter in her coat.

When I come over to her, she does not look up.

‘I want to buy you something,’ I say.

She looks at me then, tired, but awake. Her shoes are battered converses; they have red laces, different in design, as if she laced them herself.

I say it again, and she shakes her head. I tell her how much money I have made. I go into great details about the deals Gunter and I have made. I give her breakdowns, figures, percentage gain; she listens throughout, patiently, then looks about the hotel lobby.

‘Where is your friend?’ she says.

She looks around as if he is hiding.

‘You were here with friend?’

The hotel manager comes out with a small brown envelope. They exchange a few words in Korean. He laughs at the end of it, with his hands on his hips. She smiles at him, then says something else. He nods and laughs again. He has redness around his cheeks, from drink.  

Then she is walking. I scramble after her.

‘Let me buy you something.’

She turns left out of the hotel; her satchel bag bumping against her back.

‘It is nothing to me,’ I say. ‘I have lots of money. Much yen.’

‘No,’ she says. ‘He paid, look.’ She shows me the envelope. ‘I paid.’

We are at the bicycle rack now, and she is removing her bike. It’s a horrible thing, coated in rust, loose handlebars straps, rotten spokes. What she wants, I decide, is a new bicycle.

She shakes her head when I suggest it.

‘This one okay,’ she says and rings the bell three times.

I stress the fact that she will be getting a new bike and that I will be the one to pay for it. I say this slowly, then I take hold of her wrist and lead her, and her old shitty bike, downtown.

She stumbles along beside me, barely keeping her bicycle upright. I’m coated in sweat from the sun. We pass a fire hydrant, painted green of all colours, and she makes this horrible whimpering noise.

‘Please,’ she says. ‘I come, but,’ and she touches my hand. I look down at her wrist; her hand is coated in blood.

‘What?’ I say.

‘It hurts.’

‘You’ll run if I let go.’

‘I won’t.’

‘If you run I can catch you.’

‘Just please,’ and she pulled at my wrist. ‘Whatever happened to your-’

‘Shut up,’ I say and wipe my hand on my top. ‘Just shut up and come with me.’

When we arrive at the bicycle shop, the owner sits, gut out, on a white plastic chair. His bicycles are hung from the ceiling behind him. The sign is blackened from grease and there’s a bomb crater just outside the front door. The price of the bicycles ranges from between 300 to 600 yen. There is one for 800. When she sees it, and sees too what I’m about to do, she shakes her head.

‘No,’ she says, ‘no.’

I say: ‘come on, for fuck’s sake,’ and grab her by the wrist. She tries to pull away.

‘No need,’ she says.

And then it all comes to a head: I shout at her first of all. I tell her I don’t give a fuck about whether there’s a need or not, she’s getting a fucking bike. You know, it’s just a kindness. Why won’t she just accept the fucking bike? What’s wrong with just a simple act of kindness? Then I hit her, barell a fist into her stomach, and she falls to the floor. Her bicycle is thrown off to one side, and I’m going for her face. A pair of arms drag me off her, and I kick at them and bite and elbow. She frowns at me; everybody is telling her to ride away. Someone comes over, the owner I think, and hits me in the stomach. Another fist, then another. I lose my footing. There are four or so around me. She’s at the corner of the street, pulled to a stop, with one foot on the bike’s left pedal, and one foot on the pavement. Another fist, or maybe a foot, comes down on my nose and I feel it give. She watches for a moment, then cycles.

*

My contractor tells me about it. I’m just off the bus and have my holdall with me. Storm clouds gather above the airport.

Gunter had got to the truck, he’d managed that much. He killed two of the camp’s guards and jettisoned the camp’s fuel tanks. This was his mistake. They would have let him go, my contractor tells me, if he had just stolen the truck.

‘Are you crying?’ I say, phone cradled against my shoulder, while I pay for my ticket.

He says no. He says he had just not expected this.

They flayed Gunter afterwards.

‘Flayed him?’

‘Stripped the skin off his corpse. With, like, a boa knife. Like the red indians.’

‘Yes,’ I say. ‘I know the definition of flayed.’

They strung him up from the fence posts after that. My contractor had pictures forwarded to him from an on-site consultant. He can send them to me, via email, if I’m interested. I tell him I’m not. He says they are very high quality. I tell him I don’t want the pictures, regardless of quality.

I sit in the foyer of a fast food restuarant, with my rucksack on the table.

‘They want a fee,’ my contractor says.

‘For what?’

‘The body.’

A family of six arrive, with kids dressed in hawaain shirts and peaked caps. One of them has a life-sized inflatable dolphin. The adults examine maps and translate foreign text on devices. The government cordoned off resorts in the south, where the fighting has not yet started.

‘It’s strange here,’ I say.

I hear my contractor move something around his mouth.

‘You going to pay?’ he says.

One of the kids hurtles past with a cap in his hand, followed by another, capless.

‘How much is it?’

‘Ten thousand.’

‘Ten?’

‘Too high?’

I look down and hold the bridge of my nose in between my fingers. My eyes sting.

‘I need to go.’

‘I’ll message them,’ he says.

In the the bathroom, there’s an empty stall. I climb onto the toilet seat and once again I do my breathing exercises. I shave in the wall length mirror. I nick my chin, twice.

I leave. I try to read. I walk between the stores. I ask a clerk whether there are more stores, on a different floor, with different stuff. He shrugs, says it’s all pretty much the same.

‘I sold guns,’ I say. ‘That was my job.’

He nods.

‘Yes,’ he says, ‘you look like the type.’

I drink two scotches and sit on a row of plastic seats. A family arrives and bickers. A couple hold hands and talk about finance. I try to sleep, curl up with my head on the rucksack, but nothing happens. The ceiling is one large window, broken into small triangles. Planes, when they arrive, come in over the glass, their wheels unfurling like silver petals. I try to sleep, but can’t.