And here it comes again, that phenomenon of seeing yourself in a strange place, rather than the strange place itself. All over Southeast Asia, I grew accustomed to men approaching me on the street and offering to take me on some or other excursion. Waterfalls were a common suggestion -- as if we don't have them in the West, or as if the water in Asia falls up or something. Boatmen in Louang Prabang pitch the "Buddha Cave" where old, broken, and discarded Buddha statues go to die. The cave is a long way down the Mekong, and not more interesting, I understand, than its exact physical description: a whole bunch of busted Buddhas heaped in a dank cave. The trip's main attraction comes during the return, when your boatman stops off at a riverside village where much lào-lào is distilled, and you are given a long straw from which to suck right from the barrels. Apparently, only a consolatory and brain-frying drink can redeem the Buddha Cave. In Vang Viang, a grubby backpacker town halfway between Vientiane and Louang Prabang, innertubing the Nam Song river is a favorite pastime. Notwithstanding the consulate-documented cases of tourists drowning in vicious, invisible eddies after missing the critical fork (or never being alerted to the danger in the first place), I can't think of anything more boring than tubing down an indolent river, scorched by the tropical sun, alone. I never accepted a single unsolicited offer to do anything or go anywhere on my own.
My favorite temple at Angkor was the enigmatic Bayon -- but not for its celebrated infinity of mysterious smiling faces, carved into every turret and rampart. I cherish it for its roundness: that shapely dome, those domes within domes, like a multichambered egg or womb; the labyrinths of narrow flights and darkened corridors that made you feel at once protected and disoriented. I would have missed all that without Lijsa. Although she was planky and angular and tall, she rendered the Bayon's essential femininity for me. My intimacy with Angkor was tied to my intimacy with her. Yet there was error and disjunction there, too, as when any two adults come together. Our bodies at night interlocked bluntly, at the corners, it seemed, with the crude inelegance of language in translation. Once I had to repeat something before she understood me, which caused an awkward caesura. Later she said, "That was... güt," with that Germanic harshness, pausing first as if to wonder whether I'd construe that as a compliment or an insult. Somehow that one ü seemed to fully enunciate our mutual estrangement: from each other, from our homes, from Cambodia.
