LAST HOURS IN BANGKOK
September 20th 2011 10:56
I was stabbed while the receptionist, some British girls and some Thai guys and I were wondering around Bangkok, laughing. It was much after the tuk tuk ride and it was a little bit after our fourth bar. Maybe not stabbed. More like cut deeply. I don’t know who cut me but it hurt like hell, and it’s not like the movies, where you’re just watching someone get cut – it’s more like real life, where you’ve actually got a deep gash pulsating in your arm.
“This hurts,” I told the receptionist.
“It doesn’t look that bad,” she said. “You’ll live.”
We’d been waiting in the hospital for about three hours. I looked at her. “Remember when we were with the tour guide, and we were in that jewellery store, and she showed us the souvenir section, and I jokingly asked her, ‘so where do you keep all your ivory?’ and she actually pointed us to a shelf completely full of ivory stuff?”
The receptionist giggled, quickly stealing a glance at my bloody shirt.
There was another guy sitting next us. “I don’t know your name,” he told me.
“I don’t know yours either.”
“What do you do?” he asked.
“I’m a writer.”
“No you’re not,” he said.
“You’re probably right,” I said. “So what do you do?”
“I’m a writer.”
We both laughed.
“Can you give me a lift home later?” he asked me.
“No.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t live here. I don’t have a car.”
He didn’t say anything. He looked at my gash, then at the receptionist. He smiled at her and shook her hand. He was reading a book: Forrest Gump.
There’s something irresistible about running away, about leaving what you know to travel somewhere different. There’s something also irresistible about running back home. A few hours later (ten painful hours later) the receptionist and I were back at Suvarnabhumi airport, back under the high ceiling and the long walkways and the brightness and the art to our right. We both left the majority of our luggage back at our hotel but that didn’t really matter anymore. We found a restaurant that let us order as much as we wanted, only as long as we paid for our first dish. I rummaged through my pockets and found just enough to pay for us both. We sat down, ordered, waited for our orders. We looked at each other as she giggled and put food in my mouth. “Why did you make me sleep with a prostitute?” I asked her. “I made you sleep with three,” she said, wiping my bottom lip. “But the third one didn’t count because she was ugly. And possibly a man.”
We’d lost a few things, we’d gained a few things. There were so many things we never got to see. Where the hell did we spend our time? At least we got to see three temples. At least the receptionist looked good. She looked hung over, irritated, happy, insane, strung out, but good. I most likely looked like a pile of cow shit with a few hairs sticking out of it. I suddenly remembered this moment in time when I was a kid, when I was about ten or eleven or something, and I noticed that my fingers had started to form wrinkles.
“The best holiday of my life.” The receptionist smiled a frightening smile. My arm hurt. She put her hand on the table and I held it tightly.
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