Coswell's Guide To Tambralinga

Part One
Brothel
1
That morning a certain phrase lodged itself in Conrad's head, a quote from the guidebook that began playing itself over and over like a refrain from a French rondeau. The phrase concerned Ko Neak Pean, the island just adjacent to the one he and his wife were visiting, the second of seven from the mainland, whose dark profile Conrad had glimpsed on the afternoon of their third day, just a hairsbreadth above the horizon. The guidebook had said something like, "Recent years have seen an increase in ferry traffic to the island, mostly from mainlanders visiting the infamous Princess Daha Hotel. Single male travelers invariably tell us that when things get slow on Ko Banteay or Ko Prasat, one can always take the boat over to the brothel." This last part--about taking the boat over to the brothel--was what stuck.
Conrad liked the sound of the words. It was a phrase he might drop while describing his vacation to one of the engineers in the office: "And of course, you can always take the boat over to the brothel." It was a phrase greased with the insinuation of tropical delights, yet at the same time suggesting the smug indifference of an enlightened traveler. Conrad classed the phrase with others he'd come across in travel memoirs ("we arrived in Carcassonne without so much as a sou"), phrases that alluded to an enviable sophistication. At least Conrad envied it. He'd never been farther from the U.S. than Canada before this, never taken a vacation longer than ten days, let alone a sabbatical.
"On sabbatical"--here was another phrase you could swish about your palate like pricey cabernet. Of course it wasn't a sabbatical in the traditional sense, just a long vacation his company compelled upper-level employees to take every five years. But if hecould repeat, without blushing, the revised mission statements that came down from the CEO's office nearly every quarter, statements that included phrases like "creating wisdom infrastructure" and "information empowering," then perhaps "sabbatical" might not be such a stretch.
Conrad adjusted the pillow in his hammock and looked across the porch of his teak bungalow, past sand and sea to a hazy white patch along the horizon. He regretted losing the guidebook. He would have enjoyed rereading the section on Ko Neak Pean, for gradually the refrain in his head was beginning to represent an entitlement, a compensation he was owed for agreeing to take his wife to an obscure and preposterous vacation destination.
"I was on sabbatical, you see," he heard himself reminisce at a hypothetical party (at his stage of life, parties were becoming increasingly hypothetical), "when I found myself on this boat going to the brothel." He pictured his lanky form being swept up in a general rush from the ferry dock and down a narrow, winding street, throngs of young men pressing him forward.
The brothel itself he could not quite picture. The term "brothel" was deliberately vague, he felt, unlike "whorehouse" or "hookshop," for instance, and suggested wholesome and invigorating sport. Perhaps it was because its first syllable was "broth," which Conrad associated with heartiness and health; and because the entire word sounded like "brawl," thus suggesting rigorous activity.
He opened a distressed paperback and tried to find his place, but none of the paragraph starts looked familiar. He went back page by page to the middle of the previous chapter before anything clicked. This backward scanning left him with the beginnings of a headache. For a moment he was lost in the rows of faded letters, his gaze following the white spaces between the lines as if trying to penetrate the gaps in a picket fence.
He closed his eyes, meaning to rest them for just a moment. The wind nudged the leaves of the shading banana tree, so that sunlight fell across his closed lids. Against the flickering orange screen that suddenly filled his field of vision, he pictured his wife'ssilhouette, the mass of wavy hair hanging just above the shoulders, the slim, taut torso, the pouting lower lip. It was a familiar form, one that had once been the entire world, but was now just one of its regular features, like fog and traffic lights. There was in fact something menacing about the habitual tilt of the head.
Lucy had arisen early that morning and gone down to the restaurant without him, still angry with him for losing the guidebook. It was just as well. Since their arrival on the island, Conrad had all but given up breakfast. Dishes at the bungalow restaurant were invariably fried, and Conrad's stomach couldn't handle oily foods before noon. Lucy had returned while he was shaving and announced her plan for the day's outing. "A trek in the jungle," she'd called it, and he'd seen right away that she meant to discourage him from joining her. There was no forest to speak of on Ko Banteay, just groves of banana and coconut trees. And she knew his dislike of strenuous hiking. If she'd used the word "stroll," he'd have taken it as an invitation.
She'd become moody and withdrawn the last few days, the way she'd been at home for months until she'd received the inspiration for this trip. In a bookstore one rainy evening just before Thanksgiving, she'd been transfixed by the calendar images of white sand and green corals, and temple ruins swarming with monkeys. At first Conrad was taken aback by this unprecedented spasm of romanticism, but was later grateful for it when Lucy's dismal spells vanished and she began planning and organizing the trip with something like her old cheerfulness. "Cheerfulness" was not quite the word. She'd done a lot of smiling, but always there was an edge to it, like sunshine on a clear winter's day.
And Conrad had humored her, not believing she would ultimately go through with it. While he and Lucy had often talked about taking an extended trip, their speculations had always centered on the Mediterranean. No thought was given to Southeast Asia, to tiny nations he'd never heard of, in the middle of seas he couldn't find on a map.
The silhouette faded. Conrad found himself mentally composing the note he would leave:
Gone to the mainland to change money. Back by morning. Or the next day at the latest. We'll see how it goes.
Gone to the mainland. Possibly it was not a lie. Possibly he would make it to the mainland, where they had electricity on a grid, and therefore banks, and change his traveler's checks into rials. But there really was no urgency. He might not make it past the next island, if anything there caught his fancy.
Back by morning. Or the next day at the latest. A lot could be accomplished in a single afternoon. On the other hand, a night or two apart might not be a bad thing for them. He sat up in the hammock and rubbed the purple splotches from his eyes. It was such a simple proposition: get a moto-taxi into town and then walk to the ferry. The ferry schedule was posted on the restaurant wall, right next to the counter and the little window where he ordered food and paid bills. He'd scanned it a dozen times while waiting for his change.
Now came a familiar surge in his nether regions, a feeling unwilling to declare itself as either anxiety or excitement. He stared at a group of sunburned German children trooping down to the water's edge, resplendent with fluorescent snorkeling gear. As they donned their pink flippers and adjusted their sparkling green masks, Conrad realized the children intended to swim along the reef before the sun got too high. By noon it would be too hot to do anything but sit under the thatched roof of the open-air restaurant and write postcards or play chess with the island's lone Japanese tourist. Lucy, back from her walk, would huddle in the bungalow, tired and sweaty and peeved for no reason. It might be useful just to see what a brothel looked like. He was certainly old enough to have been in one or two, but regrettably he hadn't. He'd entered a bar maybe a dozen times since leaving graduate school, and the last time was to ask for directions.
He spent little time packing, spurred by the thought that Lucy might return early from her walk and start asking a lot of annoying questions about the purpose of his trip. Or worse, decide she wanted to come along. He stuffed some T-shirts and a pair ofkhaki slacks into the large nylon duffel bag, a bag he'd meant to fill with souvenirs. The guidebook had insisted such a bag was a necessity on this kind of trip, but the handicrafts available on the island were a huge disappointment: tremendously ugly silk paintings of palm trees and sunsets, crude clay statues of reclining Buddha or sitting Buddha, top-heavy figurines of Hindu gods carved from sandalwood, penis-shaped amulets to be worn around the neck or attached to key chains, exotic insects encased in clear, hard plastic. It was as if the idea of handicrafts had not occurred to the locals before the arrival of tourists. Around the restaurant he'd heard it said that Ko Banteay had already been spoiled by surfers and scuba divers, that if you wanted an "authentic" experience of the country, you had to visit the undeveloped parts of the bigger islands or go up into the mountains on the mainland. This struck Conrad as a dubious proposition, authenticity in his mind being closely aligned with parasitic worms and an absence of indoor plumbing. Still, a search for the real Tambralinga was as good an excuse as any for wanting to get off the island. He started out the door and then, as an afterthought, returned to fetch his sleeping bag--a light nylon job that took up hardly any room in the duffel.
Past the restaurant, a steep path led up to the road. There, under the shade of a huge tree, three motor scooters stood. Reclining on each, feet on the handlebars, heads pillowed on the rear fenders, were the drivers, gracile young men with slick black hair and sunglasses, dressed in batik shirts and immaculate white trousers. At the sight of Conrad, they all sat up and took hold of their handlebars. One of them patted the seat behind him and beckoned to Conrad. Another started his motor and smiled.
A price was negotiated--that is, the driver reduced it by two rials when Conrad hesitated--and Conrad climbed aboard the biggest of the three bikes. As they pulled away the two other drivers resumed their reclining positions on their scooters. At no time had their feet actually touched the ground.
"Tambralinga," Lucy had announced one night over a cornish hen stuffed with morels and red grapes, and a salad of watercressand blue cheese. "Tam-bra-ling-ga." It might have been the name of the featured instrument on an album of world music, a bowed instrument of polished horn and oxhide favored by the nomads along the Silk Road. "Tambralinga." Possibly a chapter in the Kama Sutra.
"It's like Shangri-La," she assured Conrad. The country was guarded by steep mountains on the west, by dense mangroves to the south. But the islands in the gulf were the big draw. The New York Times said they compared favorably to Bora-Bora, and yet no one seemed to have heard of them until just last year.
"I thought we were going to the Aegean," Conrad said, but was made to feel timid and conventional for this protest. Greece was overrun, and expensive. Too close to Germany.
"If you want a real getaway, you have to travel to the frontiers of our despoiling civilization."
Conrad recalled these words as the motorcycle bounced along the dirt road, winding its way through hills strewn with precariously placed boulders. Lucy had been quoting something of course. She was always quoting, could not engage in a discussion unarmed with references of some sort. As they descended toward the town and the harbor, gaps appeared in their path, places where the monsoon rains had washed away the road. The driver slowed the bike and coasted around the inside rim of an enormous hole, sounding his scabrous buzzer as another moto-taxi charged up the hill. There was really only one way around the hole, and both motorbikes had reached its perimeter at the same time. Conrad looked the other way as his driver cried out, felt the rush of air as metal and flesh brushed past. In this country there was no such thing as a margin of error; the compromises drivers made when vying for space on the narrow roads were always worked out at the last possible moment. On their way from the airport Conrad had felt what he'd imagined was his life starting to flash before his eyes, as their bus driver attempted to pass a row of cars on a blind curve and discovered a truck coming the other way. The situation had been resolved miraculously, mysteriously,on the other side of Conrad's splayed fingers, while Lucy sat impassively, leafing through a magazine.
He remembered being surprised that she could read on the bus. Just glancing at a page while the bus was in motion would make Conrad ill. During the fifteen years they'd been together, they'd never ridden a bus together. Nor a boat, unless one counted the ferry ride from San Francisco to Sausalito.
They hit a rock. Conrad felt himself sliding off the back of the bike. He grabbed the driver's shoulders for balance and then noticed the outlandish size of his thumb and fingers against the man's back. In a country of bantamweights, of fine-boned, delicate frames, his own body felt grotesque: a stomach that required three normal portions before it began to feel satisfied, legs that invariably hung over the edge of hotel beds, feet that could not be squeezed into locally made sandals. Should he choose to enter the brothel, he would undoubtedly have to stoop. The birdlike women would laugh and banter in their unintelligible language about who would tow this lurching juggernaut up the narrow staircase.
Or perhaps not. Perhaps there was no staircase. Perhaps the girls would barely look up, exhausted from a recent boatload of German tourists. (The Gulf of Siam, as it turned out, was swarming with them.) Most likely he would experience no embarrassment, no feeling at all, and the whole affair would boil down to nothing, an empty day in another empty week.
The terrain leveled off. There was pavement. Huts offering cold drinks and souvenirs appeared. Signs nailed to the trunks of coconut trees announced hotels, restaurants, and scuba-diving schools. They passed building sites where bare-chested workmen in short sarongs wielded picks. Then a row of buildings sprang up on either side of the road, with shops selling T-shirts and snorkeling gear and used paperbacks in English, German, French, and Dutch, and open-air bars where big-bellied white men in baseball caps sipped drinks from green coconuts. Music blared from the shops and the bars, rock and roll from Thailand, folk tunes from Malaysia, disco from Hong Kong.
At the pier a group of touts--young men with a few words of English or German--had gathered to meet the next boatload of tourists from the capital, whom they would drag off to hotels in town or bungalows on the other side of the island or steer into nearby fabric stores for a hefty commission. The boat was just unloading as they arrived, bursting like a milkweed pod with the billowing white forms of the budget tourists, who almost without exception were dressed in loose-fitting cotton pajamas that Tambralingan tailors seemed to have created just for them. The guidebook had stressed the importance of covering the body, especially the legs, to avoid offending the sizable Muslim population. The heat and humidity rendered blue jeans too uncomfortable, and tying a sarong so that it didn't fall off at an inopportune moment was too tricky for the average visitor. But already Conrad had begun to question the way things were laid out in the guidebook. As he saw it, entering this country was like being admitted to a hospital. They issued you a uniform, a simple garment that identified you as recipient of services offered. Maybe it helped the people cope with this influx of foreigners, to be able to think of them as patients. His own uniform was of nylon and rayon and polyester, was mostly khaki and light green, featured large pockets with zippers and trousers that converted to shorts. It had about it vague intimations of safari, or at least the fantasy of jungle adventure, and marked him glaringly, he realized, as a middle-aged, middle-class American.


As he purchased his ticket at the little office at the foot of the pier, Conrad felt the first flicker of doubt. Was he perhaps doing exactly what Lucy wanted him to do? Was it possible that her moodiness had been subtly engineered to produce just such an outcome? For her spells never dissipated until he did something reckless, something out of character. Once, he had left her in a restaurant, in the middle of the soup course, and walked the three miles back home. Another time he'd shattered a vase by throwing it on the floor when her back was turned, explaining afterwardthat it had "just slipped." And both times he'd detected relief, even sly rejoicing on her part. It was his equanimity that made her crazy.
He slipped the ticket into his pocket and slung the duffel over his shoulder. During this outburst, anyway, he would maintain his equanimity. As he walked down the wooden pier, the expedition took on a symbolic importance. A visit to the brothel now revealed itself as the main purpose of his trip to Tambralinga, just as a visit to the Wailing Wall or the Church of the Holy Sepulcher might be his purpose in traveling to Jerusalem.


The boat was not the one he'd pictured. True, it was larger and slower than the one he and Lucy had taken from the capital. It sat lower in the water and had a pleasant weather-beaten look about it. But instead of natives, the boat was filled with young tourists in their white pajama outfits. He moved carefully down the steel ladder to the deck below and picked his way through the travelers who sat cross-legged next to their rucksacks and bedrolls, smoking cigarettes and chattering in languages that could have been Dutch or Danish or German dialect. Seating was available in the air-conditioned cabin for an additional eighty rials. But Conrad now kindled vague notions of being an outdoorsman, someone who drank healthy broth and engaged in vigorous brawling, and so he sought a space on the open deck big enough to park his large frame. The rear deck was packed. At the very back of the boat, a thin young man with longish blond hair had set up a video camera on a tripod and hovered anxiously over some bit of equipment, adjusting knobs, pressing an earphone against his ear. And when he moved the tripod, he failed to notice how the legs jostled the passengers seated nearby.
Conditions on the forward deck looked more promising. Two young women made space for Conrad and motioned for him to sit down. He nodded his thanks and one of them, big-boned and blond, with those full Scandinavian lips so familiar from cigarette ads, smiled at him. She looked a little like Liv Ullmann and Conradwondered if she might be Swedish. As he settled down next to her, she said something indistinct to her friend, a petite woman with long hair on the cusp between light brown and dishwater blond. The smaller woman laughed and covered her face, and replied in hushed tones. Conrad straightened up and looked out to sea. They were undoubtedly regretting their invitation to him, had miscalculated the amount of space he required. He felt his ears and forehead flush.
The blond woman laughed in a husky, sensuous way, then turned to Conrad and smiled again. She really did look like Liv Ullmann, he thought, the young Liv Ullmann he'd seen in a movie many years before. It had been a black-and-white movie about an invasion of a small seaside town. He recalled Liv being forced to say something to the invader's movie camera and later seeing herself on TV, mouthing army propaganda--the slogans having been flagrantly overdubbed onto her grimacing lips.
The smaller woman said something and her eyes momentarily met Conrad's. He could tell that she didn't mean to catch his eye; apparently she only wanted to avoid looking in the opposite direction. Conrad remembered how at the movie's end Liv Ullmann sat in a lifeboat floating in a sea of corpses, speaking slowly at the camera. Liv was Norwegian and so must have been speaking Swedish with an accent, probably the equivalent of a Canadian accent if the whole situation was somehow transported to North America. North America was where he'd seen the movie. It had been his first date with Lucy, a rainy Wednesday in Berkeley, an evening at the Pacific Film Archive, and even then the film had seemed ancient.
Conrad identified the source of the women's amusement. Farther up the deck, toward the prow, stood a Westerner dressed only in a sarong. While this form of dress was approved for workmen and farmers, it was deemed inappropriate for men of a higher station, especially Europeans. The guidebook had been very clear on this point, filling half a page in bold type. It was not just that the foreigner had bared his heavily muscled torso, but that his sarong was unbelievably short, little more than aminiskirt that left his pole-vaulter's legs exposed to mid-thigh. He stood, arms folded, looking out to sea, his blond hair, streaked here and there with hints of gray, falling nearly to his shoulders. He had to know he'd become a figure of fun, Conrad noted, and that his pose made him look even more absurd. He was certainly old enough to know that.
As this thought arrived, Conrad again felt himself flush. He pretended for a moment that the heat in his face was the result of the sun emerging from behind a cloud. He noted the sweat that was pouring from his hands where they touched the deck. But then it occurred to Conrad that he and this fellow in the miniskirt were probably the only two on deck over thirty years of age. He was drawing down the spotlight on both of them, making them both ridiculous. By his stance he seemed to mock everything Conrad was trying to do. There was no longer any pretense of being "swept along"; the whole business had become appallingly deliberate. The visit to the other island suddenly seemed a rickety proposition. Perhaps he would go on to the mainland and spend the day exploring the city or the town or whatever there was to explore. Perhaps he would just get off the boat now.
The blond one spoke distinctly in her Scandinavian tongue. Each word contained a nugget of something familiar, something tantalizingly close to English, but the meaning remained out of reach, enclosed by a hedge of Norse consonants. The other woman replied and Conrad sensed a latticework going up around him, a construction of concepts and perceptions too subtle to be rendered into English. And he felt the familiar fear that he was missing it, that better half of existence, the throbbing center of what it meant to be alive, that everything was slipping past.
He stood up, intent on leaving the boat. A young man at the stern, a Tambralingan dressed in baggy blue pants, blew twice on his silver whistle. A boy on the pier untied the rope and threw it to him. The engines surged. The boat lurched forward. Conrad sat back down. Okay, so he was going to the island. And then maybe the mainland. Lucy wanted to be alone, that was just fine. She could be alone all goddamn week.
Copyright © 2004 by Scott Landers