PHILOSOPHY AND FUCKING IN VIETNAM A Travel Memoir ★ Isaac Simpson Outlaw Publishing Los Angeles Author’s Disclaimer: I am not an expert in history, economics, sociopolitical theory or international law The following observations are the immediate impressions and speculations of a common man as he travels through a strange new world Words © 2015 Isaac Simpson Cover design © 2015 Bjorn Johansson Interior design © 2015 Beverly Butterfield Imprint: Outlaw Publishing 726 S Santa Fe, Apt 107 Los Angeles, CA 90021 ISBN-13: 978-0692501030 ISBN-10: 0692501037 The following is exactly 93% true Names have been changed to protect the guilty Vision quests are an ancient Native American rite of passage Boys nine to sixteen years old travel alone to the wilderness and stay without food for one to seven days Visions occur, sometimes induced by hallucinogenic drugs The visions reveal to the boy his purpose in the world Upon returning to society, he is considered a man One of the only surviving accounts of a vision quest was written by a famous Lakota Sioux medicine man named Black Elk He described the moment when he went over the edge, into his vision And while I stood there I saw more than I can tell and understood more than I saw; for I was seeing in a sacred manner the shapes of all things in the spirit, and the shape of all shapes as they must live together like one being And I saw that the sacred hoop of my people was one of many hoops that made one circle, wide as daylight and as starlight, and in the center grew one mighty flowering tree to shelter all the children of one mother and one father And I saw that it was holy —Black Elk [PROLOGUE] The End and the Beginning Fall 2010 New Orleans A sickle of Asian coast Heat and dust and people squatting on the ground, eating fetuses out of head-sized eggs like the guts of a melon A sweaty hulk in a bus station smothering a pre-teen girl, the bows in her hair are buried under his fat and dark with his sweat Zombies creep into an orphanage and pull the chubby orphans out of their beds and pop them open with their teeth like bloody soup dumplings The boat-sized stone head of a blonde patrician, unflinching as jungle vines thick as sewer pipes weave through his eye sockets The white chocolate faces of the presidents of the United States melting under fluorescent lights and a red flag rigid above, frozen in the air conditioning The perfect ass of a woman with the skin of an apple and the flat face of a crab An all-glass skyscraper protecting a heap of shimmering human skulls piled like cinder-blocks all the way to the top And an old woman standing in the dark, watching me sleep I awoke to the bleep of a heart monitor, curled up in a lump on a skinny cot The room was cordoned off with a curtain the color of doctors’ scrubs When I remembered where I was, a vice of depression clamped my gut It was the second time in a month I had taken myself to the emergency room to be sedated The shuffles and beeps of the ER triage at Touro Hospital in New Orleans, Louisiana, filled my ears There was a crusty glaze on my lips and my eyes felt sticky The freezing air-conditioning found the gaps in my paper gown I unfolded myself and rolled off the cot The heart monitor clip was attached to my finger and I pulled it off and threw it on the bed My clothes sat in a pile on the floor and I put them on and slipped my feet into my sandals I peeked out of the curtains and saw a few orderlies waddling around I moved through the curtains and past the orderlies The double doors of the main entrance slid open I walked out of the fluorescent hospital into soft purple dawn The air was damp and cold, the sort of chilly humidity you only find in the bayou states I walked through the parking lot in search of my truck and the blood returned to my limbs I found it where I had left it and climbed in and turned the key The thin neon numbers on the digital clock flickered awake 5:00 a.m I was a second year at One Road University Law School, where, with substantial effort, I had carved out a typical law student’s world—a clean, quiet apartment, a daily schedule of reading and exercising, and a set of friends in various stages of high-functioning alcoholism I had spent my 1L summer working as an intern at a law firm in Saigon, Vietnam I had returned to New Orleans from Asia two months ago By the end of the summer, I had tumbled into a pit of depravity so deep I wasn’t sure I could climb out I had hoped that returning to my boring American life would allow me to convalesce, that the daily routine of it would work as a sort of decompression chamber But somewhere along the way Asia had flipped a switch in me that I couldn’t turn back off Readjusting was more difficult than I could have possibly imagined It’s hard to explain what clinical anxiety feels like to someone who hasn’t experienced it, but a good analogue is an endless paranoid high—a bad trip that will not go away Every moment I felt like something was profoundly wrong I could not relax Nothing was enjoyable I couldn’t have a drink or watch a movie or eat a meal in peace People with depression say everything looks grey For me, everything looked red The worst symptom of my anxiety was insomnia It had started on the long plane ride across the Pacific Ocean from Hong Kong to LAX My drug of choice for flying is Xanax Usually two.25mg pills put me in a slobbery coma for up to twelve hours That day I was feeling off so I took one-and-a-half and slept in my cramped seat for maybe three hours then jolted awake in claustrophobic fear I spent the rest of the flight in the throws of a full-on panic attack, getting up from my seat to stretch, sitting back down, ordering water then coke then coffee then beer Nothing helped I was in the clutches of something out of my control After several days of travel, I made it back to my apartment in New Orleans, where I lived alone I had interviews for lawyer jobs scheduled the very next morning That night I couldn’t sleep, but I passed it off as jet lag I went to the interviews red-eyed and full of coffee and was so tired and unprepared that I made a fool of myself A baldheaded lawyer with big shoulders from the law firm Skadden Arps asked me what kind of law I wanted to practice “Definitely not transactional.” “I’m transactional.” “Oh… ” I laughed He didn’t “I’m sorry You’ll have to excuse me I just returned from Vietnam and I’m super jet-lagged It’s not that I don’t want to transactional… I guess it’s just that I… I don’t know what I want to do.” He didn’t ask me why I’d been in Vietnam or any other questions at all We spent the next three minutes in awkward silence then he said “pleasure to meet you” and pointed to the door The other interviews went just as well Two more nights passed with nothing more than a few minutes of halfsleep I would roll around in bed, alternately reading, watching TV on my laptop, and trying very, very hard to force myself to sleep Like all insomniacs, the harder I tried, the more awake I felt On the third day I managed to doze off for a few hours, but then something even stranger happened I woke up with the same excruciating feeling of panic I had experienced on the plane, but I was disoriented and could not remember where I was The objects in the room, some of which I had owned for years, seemed strange and foreign I was overwhelmed with the feeling that there was an intruder in my space At the foot of the bed stood a dark figure When I saw it, my heart jolted like in the first moments of a freefall “Who’s there!?” The faceless figure didn’t respond After about thirty seconds, reality started to fall back into place and I remembered the desk and bedside table I had bought at IKEA It had taken me a whole afternoon to build that desk It was a sunny Saturday shortly I had moved to New Orleans and I had smoked a spliff and blasted a classic rock mix and the desk had come together without much trouble It was a happy day, a tranquil one, and now I felt about as far away from that happiness and tranquility as one could get The dark figure melted into my desk chair with a heap of dirty laundry on it I grabbed my phone from the table and checked the time It was after two I collapsed back into bed, my heart beating like a methed-out metronome, and tossed and turned until morning The pattern continued Every night around the same time I would wake up disoriented More than disoriented, amnesic I couldn’t have told you where I was, or even my first name The objects in the room were empty of meaning Then I would see things that weren’t there, usually in the shape of a human intruder—sometimes a large man, sometimes an old woman—causing the anxious feeling that I wasn’t alone There were other visions, too On one occasion, a cloud of colors flew out of an open closet, about ten feet off the ground It moved slowly to the bed and hovered over me I reached out and tried to touch it, only to find myself grasping at nothing but air Other hallucinations were auditory One night, a dripping sound trickled loudly in my ears for a full minute after waking, even after I had tightened the bathroom faucet as tight as it would go The worst hallucinations had a smell Unearthly, like death, they lingered in my sinuses until I brushed my teeth Whatever the hallucination, the fugue state lasted about thirty seconds to a minute, and then slowly melted away I could remember everything, and felt terrified about the malleability of my own mind I developed rashes on the crux of my left elbow and behind my left knee They were red itchy circles, raised skin like ringworm For months they didn’t fade, nor spread They just sat there, like coins of interminable red etched onto my flesh Sometimes red bumps would rise on the tops of my hands, right below my thumb joints, and vanish almost as soon as they appeared I averaged two or three hours of sleep a night, all while working ten-hour days at school I had graded onto the Law Review, a sought-after distinction that rewards students by forcing them to edit and cite-check complex legal articles in a bi-yearly periodical Making Law Review is a pie-eating contest where the prize is more pie It is notoriously time-consuming, brain draining, and boring beyond measure Since I couldn’t sleep, each hour in the Law Review suite felt like Saran Wrap cinching tighter and tighter over my brain I was stuck in a hamster wheel of work, fear, insomnia, and hallucinatory sleep patterns, and I thought for sure I was going insane On the tenth night, I couldn’t take it anymore and I took myself to the emergency room I explained that I had slept only six hours in nine nights The doctor gave me a shot of Valium and told me I was exhausted and that the nightmares were normal symptoms of jetlag and that I just needed to relax I slept for four or five hours on a cot in the ER, and woke up just after dawn I drove myself home and tried to go back to sleep, but couldn’t get it done I became angry and frustrated with myself beyond any point I had ever experienced Twin engines of rage and depression cycled through me in rapid rotation I was in a state of disbelief about what I was going through Despite every neuron screaming for sleep, the only thing I could was start my day again I folded laundry in a black cloud It was the closest I have ever come to suicide, which was until that day something I had never understood Trying to juggle law school while sleep deprived creates enough anxiety on its own to make most people cry, but trying to process an experience that had essentially turned me into a different human being caused my brain to seize up like a frightened armadillo My whole being was inflamed After a few weeks of nighttime hallucinations, I noticed that my vision had become blurry I couldn’t focus on a TV screen even if it was only a few feet in front of me The image would wobble, as if the pixels were being mashed together If I tried to focus on a specific spot, it would wobble even more I went to an eye specialist who sprayed air into my eyes and dilated my pupils with drops He couldn’t find anything wrong and told me to go see a neurologist I didn’t It got worse The night terrors continued I got accustomed to being greeted by a dark presence in the middle of the night A doctor in the family suggested that if it didn’t stop, I should go back to the emergency room and ask for a brain scan That night, I laid in bed, mind racing, fear ramping up to the point where I felt totally out of control, enveloped in a mental anguish I couldn’t begin to fight back against Again I threw my covers aside, put on my clothes and glasses and drove myself to the ER This time I told them not just that I could not sleep, but that I had rashes and that I couldn’t see and that I thought something was wrong with my brain The doctors were skeptical but agreed to perform a CT scan Then they shot me full of Valium, and again left me to sleep in a green-curtained triage room I awoke, snuck out of the hospital into the cold air and started my truck It was 5:00 a.m I turned the radio on to an early morning talk show My truck rumbled through the empty, craggy streets of New Orleans, the wipers cutting paths on my cracked windshield through a glaze of frost The regret and depression I had still felt upon waking dissolved About two blocks from my apartment, I experienced a feeling I can only describe as spontaneous happiness It was a sort of profound tranquility, an almost meditative state, something like what people say they feel when they’re certain they are going to die All of my problems seemed trivial and distant I felt supported, held up by the world I am staunchly agnostic; otherwise I might say I had been touched by God The fact that I was going insane stopped bothering me I had given up For the first time in two months, I relaxed I recovered steadily from that morning on The hallucinations faded Sleep came easier and easier The constant stress I had felt during the day was dotted with stretches of tranquility Eventually the anxiety became something I could control I never received a concrete medical diagnosis The CT scan came back normal and none of the doctors I saw while accruing $5,000 in medical bills had an explanation for what was wrong with me They had only prescribed medications to treat the symptoms, everything from anti-nausea meds to antidepressants to muscle relaxants to pills to inhibit puking I never took any of them I googled my hallucinations and arrived at something called sleep paralysis, a condition in which the sufferer awakes frozen in place, sometimes while experiencing terrifying hallucinations, and often involving the belief that there is an intruder in the room It is a common condition similar to night terrors and has been linked for centuries to demonic possession Cases have been recorded for over six hundred years, and have never been explained Whatever it was, it had been the most painful time of my life Why did it occur? I don’t know exactly There were aggravating factors, one of which was that I didn’t have an explanation for why I felt so bad all of the time If I could have pointed to a disease with a name, it would have made things a lot easier There were also transitions happening in my life that were causing a great deal of pressure I was losing an important childhood best friend, not to death or sickness, but to growing up I had an insurmountable responsibility at a school I hated I was on course toward a successful career I did not want Yet I believe the true cause was my experience in Vietnam Four months in Southeast Asia had poked a hole in me where everything drained out, the good and the bad bile, the dark and the light humors, and I had to reanimate with new fluids Before Vietnam, I had been a run-of-the-mill young American narcissist, certain that my country was the best and the free-est, and that I was entitled to fame, wealth and “greatness” simply for being born My identity was built on faulty foundations, blind spots I didn’t want to face, and certain beliefs about myself, my country and the world, all of which had me at the center That system of belief just could not last after the things I had seen that summer Thus my life is divided into B.V and A.V It was in Vietnam that I started writing, which led me to escape law and start doing what I wanted—creating, exploring, not shifting money back-and-forth between big corporations After my months of anxiety hell, I stopped viewing myself through the eyes of others My warped ethics unraveled and I joined the human race I chose warmth and freedom over achievement and control Before Vietnam I was a hypochondriac, worried constantly about my health, which would make me sick I had severe asthma and terrible allergies Constant sinus infections forced me to have sinus surgery Every time I took a flight I got a cold for several days afterward A week didn’t go by when I wasn’t convinced I was dying Quite frequently I was feverish and missed work or school because of it Before Vietnam I was sick more than anyone I knew In the five years since my return, I have been sick only once, with food poisoning My asthma and allergies are gone I’m a practical person, and not a particularly spiritual one I not believe in ghosts or spirit animals or fairy godmothers I don’t think Jesus is staring down from heaven while people are dying all over the globe for no reason at all I am not suggesting that Native American vision quests are real communions with the spirit world, or that I gained some sort of enlightenment simply by working in Vietnam for a few months Still, this is not a novel It is true Something really happened in Vietnam that changed my life Something that almost killed me Something I had to write a book to explain conditions and he must be vaccinated immediately He needs our help to raise his family Little children should not be paddling around in boats alone, that’s dangerous They should be in their rooms on Facebook and this patriarch should be sitting on an IKEA couch not in a dirty hammock made out of a fishing net In the West we are taught that everyone else is jealous of what we have, but that is not so with Ton Le Sap The West is so worried about it not because it is in any kind of trouble, but because the West is jealous of it Our unstoppable engine of conquest is powered yes by ambition and yes by the desire to right, but lurking beneath those motivations, in its heart of hearts, is jealousy So the banks will come in and tell these men that they owe someone money, and that now they have to lease their little space on the lake NGOs will come in and empower the women and educate the children about the things they should really want The women will leave the men who have given their lives to the lake, move to the city and give themselves to rich white men Just like Tam This was Tam’s father She was one of the little girls paddling by on a saucer boat The man will be called stubborn and old-fashioned and he will get left behind and the burden of envy and loss will now belong to him, as the fish he once caught will fill the insatiable stomach of the West We will eat his dinner and fuck his wife His pissing son will want to plug in His paddling daughter will want to be a star The bellies of the women in Beer Lao shirts will fill and his will shrink, and the rest of his family will be saved to a place where they will become just as fat and miserable and pointless as we are We will shove screens in front of his face The lake will be “preserved.” We will save him [nineteen] Lucky Mike Week Thirteen Phnom Penh At the end of a string of “Whys” there is always a paradox Take any principle to its ultimate limit and, however good it may be, it becomes evil The principle of freedom is a good one, perhaps the most important tenet upon which to build a society But “freedom” and “society” are opposites and a society built on freedom is a paradox Society is a communism of freedom It takes freedom from the individual and re-distributes it as it sees fit I could feel my freedom in Cambodia It bubbled right out of the Mekong and came through the blinds It’s why I felt so good there, just standing, staring out at the streets I could take as much as I wanted There was no one around to stop me But freedom has its limits Follow freedom long enough down its open road and it takes you to dark places The darkest places The heart of darkness is not ultimate cruelty, it is ultimate freedom When you bump up against that limit it means you have touched evil, actually tasted it, mixed with it as the fisherman mixed with Ton Le Sap It infects you ••• Southeast Asia—mainly Cambodia, Vietnam and Thailand—is known as a haven for pedophiles Post-genocide Cambodia is the worst In its vacuum of authority, it is the kind of place where a tourist can blow up a cow with a rocket launcher for the right price Where a tourist can rape a child for the right price The number of times white men have been arrested for sexually abusing kids in Phnom Penh is absolutely astounding Based on the endless stream of Google news reports, it must be a 24-hour non-stop pedophile sex party There are lengthy communiqués by NGOs and other institutions describing the ins-and-outs of the Cambodian child sex trade These reports describe everything from casual street interactions, like the one Rob and I encountered with the boy on the tuk tuk, to sophisticated syndicates involving hundreds of Westerners They reportedly adopt strange, child-like code names and solicit networks of Cambodian families to give up their kids for raping The reports contain photos of shockingly bold pedophiles, old white men holding hands in public with boys and girls, playing with them on their laps, grinning like it’s the most normal thing in the world Famous pedophile glam rocker Gary Glitter had sex with hundreds of children and recorded thousands of hours of child pornography in Cambodia before being deported to Vietnam, where he continued to the same thing In a famous recent case, an English schoolteacher named Christopher Paul Neil, aka Swirl Face, was identified as the central fixture in a massive child pornography ring based in Cambodia His face, distorted by a digital swirl effect, appeared in hundreds of photographs depicting sexual abuse of young boys He was caught when German investigators were able to digitally unswirl the image and identify him Another Brit, Richard William Fruin, fled to Cambodia after serving a year in a British prison for child pornography He was arrested in Phnom Penh, in a guesthouse just blocks from the Indochine II, in bed with an eight-year-old boy The so-called American “Pied Piper of Pedophiles,” an engineer named Jack Louis Sporish, was finally let out of prison in 2004 for molesting more than 500 young boys since the 1960s He moved immediately to Cambodia, built a mansion, and began luring boys inside with trails of $1 bills ••• Sunset came to the Cambodian countryside The bus ran silent through green marshes and rice paddies Triangle-headed figures scooted through the shallow water, belly down on single body skis, picking out beads of rice stalk by stalk The hills rolled in blunt humps forever into the glowing haze, hints of soft blue barely visible above the green There was a pedophile with a 12year-old prostitute sitting three rows behind me He was being very careful not to touch her Three hours earlier, Rob and I were sitting in the bus station in Phnom Penh We had taken the bus back from Siem Reap and spent a night in Phnom Penh before going to Sihanoukville, a Cambodian beach town We had stayed in the Indochine II again and had taken a few Adderall and gone to Pontoon again and drank until sunrise, so I was feeling achy and weak My flight back to America was only a week away Back to law school, back to “friends,” back to the prison I didn’t know I was in The embers of an uncontrollable anxiety were already ignited in my gut We waited for our bus at the hot station Midday sun pierced through the deteriorating plastic blinds and muted yellow light flooded the outdated interior My hungover eyes crinkled and teared Across from us sat a fat old white man He had greasy white hair, bushy white eyebrows, wrinkly tan skin and a permanent scowl Loose green overalls wrapped his enormous belly We drank out of our big warm water bottles I tried to sleep The door opened and so did my eyes Two Cambodian men led a girl up to the old man His scowl breached into a smile and he said, “I’m Lucky Mike,” in an Australian accent She nodded, blushed and smiled He talked with the Cambodian men more, but I couldn’t make out what they were saying Then the Cambodian men left I shut my eyes and went back to semi-sleep “Oh my God, that’s disgusting,” said Rob I looked again at Lucky Mike and the girl and realized what was going on If it were a movie, high strings would explode onto the soundtrack at this point A charge of adrenaline swept through me The wind got knocked out of me I almost puked up the shawarma I had devoured five minutes before I felt faint The station was about 100 degrees Dust particles floated through the air, glinting like single pixels of sepia I looked around Everyone in the station was sweating The few other tourists were now staring at Lucky Mike and whispering The Cambodians took the opposite tack, turning their heads away in silence In the West, we ostracize by talking about you In the East, you’re shunned Lucky Mike looked to be about 70 years old and about 300 pounds There was something agrarian about him, as if he had just stepped out of a cornfield His blanket-like overalls looked homemade and misshapen; like they had been sewn from a single massive swath of green wool A blotch of sweat had formed around his navel, which a foot beneath his torso He held a cane She sat next to him She couldn’t have been more than eleven or twelve A red bow bisected her hair She wore royal-blue jeans and black high heels and had her hair plastered up like a prom date Far from looking sad or oppressed, she appeared to be restraining a smile The attention of the whole bus station was on her Joining the embers of anxiety, a black fear formed in my stomach and rolled up my esophagus, igniting them into waves of hot panic I was sweaty I sipped my water and glanced again at Lucky Mike He stared straight ahead I looked at the girl She stared straight ahead The other tourists continued to mutter Lucky Mike knew we were talking about him, but no one protested Rob was looking up from his book In transitional waiting times like this he tended to check out, but now he was alert I got up and motioned for him to follow me We went into an adjacent room There were bags piled high there, waiting, like us, for the bus to Sihanoukville “You saw that right?” I whispered “Impossible to miss She can’t be more than thirteen years old!” “Do you think he heard you say, ‘That’s disgusting?’” “I hope so.” “What we do?” “We can’t anything, mate There’s nothing to It’s very common in this part of the world You’ve heard about Gary Glitter This country is filled with disgusting old men just like that The locals don’t give a shit.” “How you know they don’t give a shit?” “Ask anyone, mate It’s the same in Vietnam Vung Tao is full of pedophiles.” He found his bag and started walking back into the other room “Wait! Dude, are we really just going to nothing?” “Maybe there’s some other explanation Maybe she’s his maid.” “His maid?” “Yeah, maybe she works for him.” “Then why did you say, ‘That’s disgusting’?” “Because that’s not likely.” “I’m gonna say something to the bus people.” He rolled his eyes, “You’re wasting your time, mate They won’t lift a finger.” “Then we should say something to him!” “I’m not getting murdered by an angry pedophile, mate Not gonna happen.” I pulled my bag from the stack and followed Rob back to the main room My vision was spinning a little bit I felt panicked by the pressure to act and the shock that nobody else would I had always viewed myself as a hero If it came down to it, I thought, I would for sure be the one to save the day I might be an asshole, but actions speak louder than words and I was a good person who would ultimately the right thing “Sihanoukville! Buh to Sihanoukville!” shouted the attendant A rickety blue bus pulled up out front I prayed that Lucky Mike and the girl wouldn’t stand up and I would be saved from having to something, but sure enough, Lucky Mike hobbled up on his cane and she sprang up and followed him toward our bus He rolled a threadbare suitcase and she rolled her own small one, which looked brand new His wide girth tripled her tiny body Once they were out of the station and lined up for the bus, I rushed to the ticket counter There was a young woman there in a municipal uniform “Did you see that?” She averted her eyes “Did you see that in there?” She refused a response I turned to a skinny Cambodian in his 30s at a desk next to her He worked for one of the bus companies He had a light brown blotch in his quaffed black hair “Did you see that?” “See wha?” “You know, the man and the girl.” “Yes, I saw It disgusting It tewible.” “What can you do? “Cannah nuting.” He shook his head with genuine remorse My hands were shaking The panic was edging off into exhilaration “There must be something!” “Cannah nuting unless see dem touch.” “What if I see them touch?” “You call expat.” “Expat?!” He dug in the desk and handed me a business card with the acronym ECPAT on it A red circle crossed out the words “Child Trafficking,” just as sign at S-21 had crossed out the smiling man “Ohh, ECPAT I see So if I see them touch, I call this number, and then what?” “They make report.” “That’s it?” “Yes They inform police.” “So they will inform police?” “Yes they inform police.” “There’s nothing else?” “No, nuting can do,” he shook his head “Very sad It vewy tewible But nuting can do.” “But they make a report? ECPAT?” “Yes, they make a report Very goo’ ECPAT, goo’ people from America.” From outside the bus driver yelled, “Sihanoukville, buh leaving now! Las’ call for Sihanoukville!” I stood up “Ok I will try to see if they touch.” “Ok!” We waved goodbye to each other and exchanged a dutiful glance before I ran to catch the bus The other passengers were mostly Cambodians with a smattering of easily identifiable tourists Most sat near the back A guy in a tank top had already donned his headphones A skinny girl rested her head on her boyfriend’s arm I kept trying to catch someone’s eyes, to come to some sort of understanding that we would take action But no one would engage The justification that there must be some other explanation is so much easier to make than to overcome the hurdle of intervening But that calculus is absurd The cost of saying something, even if it’s just, “I’m sorry, sir, but you know how this looks?” is only a few moments of awkwardness, even if you’re wrong The potential benefit is saving a little girl from rape Inaction is, literally, insane, yet none of us took any action A child was being forced to have sex with a fat old man, and we didn’t say a single word I tried to forget about it, but the bus was a claustrophobic shithole and it was impossible The seats were small and every five minutes we fell into a pothole and everyone screamed A woman in front of me carried a naked wailing baby She breastfed him openly An old woman in the seat next to me had black teeth She drooled and stunk I don’t remember exactly, but I might have watched a couple of episodes of The Office That’s what I did while a brazen pedophile sat behind me next to his victim After a couple of hours we stopped for a bathroom break at a makeshift truck stop He and the girl got out and sat together, silent, untouching, at a dirty table in the gravel lot They didn’t buy anything, not even water I stood behind a pillar and watched They did not touch, nor speak Rob and I went to the bathroom and he put eye drops into his eyes He saw me shaking my head “What?” “We should say something,” “It’s none of our business It could be something else Stop bothering with it, mate.” “Dude! I mean… we can’t just… ” “I’m not going to listen to this anymore.” I looked at him in the mirror and knew he meant it He walked out of the bathroom We got back on the bus and the panic returned There were mosquitoes everywhere Terrified of getting malaria, I frantically slapped at them like I had Tourette’s I stood up and adjusted myself and snuck a glance back Lucky Mike frowned and glared at me There was no fear in his eyes, just anger A few minutes later I did it again, and he glared right back again Eventually I was so uncomfortable that I moved to the front of the bus and tried to stretch out near the driver I wedged myself up against the windshield, trying to get as close to outside as possible while still on the bus I put my headphones on and listened to music but I couldn’t relax I stared out of the windshield at the countryside It was beautiful and serene The sun set It was midnight when we arrived in Sihanoukville, two hours late It was pitch black and pouring rain The rain came from everywhere and there was almost no artificial light Floodwater flowed through the dirt parking lot and soaked my feet up to the shins The bus driver brought out a flashlight to help the travelers as we splashed and scrambled to get our bags from under the bus I was soaked The driver’s light bounced around I caught a glimpse of Rob under some dim lights near the concrete canopy of the bus station He was speaking with a tuk tuk driver holding an umbrella I looked frantically for Lucky Mike, hoping to catch a glimpse of touching “Mate, let’s go!” I ran over to Rob under the canopy and I put my bag down and looked around at a chaos of lights and umbrellas Tuk tuks were circling the wagon train of wet tourists and picking them off one by one “What are you doing? Mate, it’s pouring Let’s go!” Finally I saw them They were at the far end of the station under the same dimly lit canopy, about 100 feet away They were talking to two young Cambodian men I couldn’t tell if they were the same ones from the bus station Lucky Mike shook their hands and grinned She grinned too I saw his misshapen overalls lying on the floor of a dark hotel room Outside it is thundering and lightening and she is terrified They are finally alone She knows what is coming but she does not understand it Then the image zooms out and the hotel room becomes just a tiny speck on a globe, a world in which she only has him because there is not another person on Earth who cares about her “Ok, I’m leaving, mate! You can stay here in the rain!” I got on We motored toward the strip of tourist hotels on the beach The rain pattered on the canopy of our tuk tuk [EPILOGUE] The Beginning and the End Spring 2015 Los Angeles My apartment in downtown Los Angeles is an industrial loft with a giant metal door that once allowed trucks to drop off pallets of fabric The door is open and I can hear the Israeli garment merchants shouting outside There is always somebody fighting out there Sometimes I sit and read and write all day until it is time to go to the gym or start drinking Other times I get stuck in a loop of Facebook arguments and waste the day, and end up restless and angry On those days I smoke weed I’m doing fine I’m a writer now I pretended to be one for long enough and people finally believed it In some ways I have freed myself, but I still have nightmares They are rare Only when I’m stressed or coming down from a bender They’re not really nightmares anyhow, because I’m half awake I’ll jump out of bed and see a demonic girl-creature crouching in the corner I’ll get up for a closer look and I’ll shout “who’s there!” and my girlfriend will say “Isaac, it’s okay! Lay back down!” and then I’ll put my head on her chest and go back to sleep Having her around helps a lot My mental breakdown wasn’t all Lucky Mike’s fault, of course He was only a symbol The last chapter paints me in such a terrible light (though it’s not like the preceding 18 depict me as a saint The difference is that those chapters show me in a way that I am, in some sick narcisstic corner of my brain, proud to share) It is not so much that I had seen evil I had not really gotten the full measure of it, not like soldiers in war do, or serial killers, or kings It is the fact that I did evil I really did it At the end of Apocalypse Now our hero kills Kurtz, the embodiment of ultimate evil It would have been great to say that I had vanquished Lucky Mike, my own personal Kurtz, or at least discharged my duty to something, anything But I didn’t That inaction was an evil act, no doubt about it I have no excuses After seeing Lucky Mike in the rain I was overcome with loneliness Not guilt, loneliness Rob and I tuk tuked to a decent little hotel on the beach Sihanoukville was even cheaper than Phnom Penh, so we lived alright, though we were once again sleeping four feet away from each other I was despondent when I tossed my bags on the bed On the nightstand there was an ECPAT sticker It had the same crossed out “Child Trafficking” symbol and said something like, “This is a certified child-trafficking-free zone.” The international hotline number in was right there in bold I just about lost it then We went around the corner in the rain to some bars, but I couldn’t enjoy myself For once, Rob was pushing me “Look alive, mate,” he said “Let’s find some girls.” After the beers we wandered around and indeed ran into a throng of Dutch backpacker girls One of them was short and pretty and dirty blonde She flirted pretty hard, but my heart wasn’t in it Rob was trying to force the issue and I said, “Look, I’m tired I’m going to bed You have fun.” “No, no I’ll go with you,” he said and got one of the girls’ numbers Once we got a few feet away he said “Dude, what is your deal? That girl liked you.” “I’m just super tired.” Back in the room, Rob fell asleep instantly He snored I tossed and turned for a couple hours I finally slept but then I woke up in the middle of the night and didn’t know where I was I tossed my sweaty covers off in panic and was standing straight up before my brain could put it together Sihanoukville The Coast of Cambodia Where pedophiles run free and I don’t shit about it I spent the next day scouring the tiny city for a pharmacy that was open I finally found one and bought some more antibiotics because I was worried my ear infection had returned I also bought sleeping pills and mosquito repellant It was the beginning of my prolonged state of panic, but I still had cognitive dissonance on my side I convinced myself I had malaria, or an ear infection, or some sort of terrible side effect from the single malaria pill I’d taken I hadn’t realized yet that something deeper was going on I had been considering continuing on into Thailand with Rob, but I decided to take the bus back to Phnom Penh, then fly back to Ho Chi Minh to catch my flight to Hong Kong, where I would connect to LAX When I told him we would be parting ways it didn’t seem to bother him If anything, he seemed relieved “How can you keep going on like this forever?” I asked him “How can you stay here not knowing anyone? With no job, nowhere to be, nothing to hold on to? Don’t you feel like you’re spinning off the globe?” “Have you gone stupid, mate?” he said “What should I prefer? An office and a boss with his foot on my neck all day? You go ahead and hurry home to your lawyer job, I’ll be fine doing as I please out here No strings attached.” That evening, my last evening in Cambodia, I got a massage I had hoped a woman’s touch and a happy ending might finally take me out of my head The place seemed high-end There was a male proprietor and a staff of friendly lady masseuses A butch, middle-aged woman did a real number on me, digging into my back with her elbows, pulling my legs as far as they would stretch It hurt There was no happy ending After that Rob and I ate a seafood grill by the beach It was fresh, like the one in Phan Tiet, but smaller, not much more than a guy with a grill and a bag of fish Still it was perfect King prawns, marlin steak and filet of barracuda We drank beer and I smoked JET cigarettes This was the one moment in Sihanoukville I felt anything resembling tranquility The memory of Lucky Mike temporarily melted away Little did I know it would be the last moment of peace I would experience for over two months, until that quiet dawn in my truck in New Orleans By the time I returned to the states I sort of hated the Vietnamese I sort of hated everyone I had been stuck in a metal tube infected with the The Fear for thirteen straight hours I was up against a wall of exhaustion and fury, ready to strike out at anything The customs line was a thousand people long, mostly clumps of chattering Vietnamese and Chinese I towered over them One man, in classic Vietnamese fashion, tried to cut ahead of me in the customs line He came from behind and sort of merged over in front of me The same man had already done the exact same thing getting on the plane in Hong Kong I already had my eye on him “HEY, STOP IT!” I shouted “THIS IS AMERICA! WE HAVE LINES!” ••• Indeed we In America, the list of my freedoms is short They start with watching TV and end with chasing my dreams and there’s not much in between The kind of freedom America offers is potential freedom The pursuit of happiness The freedom to try to have whatever, and whoever, you want Socialism is different In the five years since Vietnam I’ve traveled to Cuba, another one of the last five communist (socialist) countries on Earth I wrote an article about it that got published in Vice I shat on the communists in that article, which is what piqued the interest of the staunch capitalists at Vice I said Havana was crumbling and everyone was frustrated, because nobody had any incentive to anything Eating canned food and drinking the days away is not freedom, I said, even if you don’t have to work for money Ho Chi Minh City had a better society than Havana and was less dilapidated though still very much crumbling In any case both places are playgrounds for capitalists When a capitalist arrives, he can trade in his status chips That’s what I did Instead of continuing on the path of ambition toward one day having it all, Vietnam allowed me to skip the line It was hedonistic arbitrage The drive I had to be better than, to be worshipped, to fuck whoever I wanted, to be that very special person that capitalism promises I can be, was only satisfied, albeit briefly, when I got outside of capitalism I experienced the American Dream in a country that doesn’t allow it, all for the price of a plane ticket But in having power, or the illusion of power, I was blessed with the knowledge of it I saw the view from the top In capitalism, the normal people think the special people are free because they can control people, and the specials think the normals are free because there’s no pressure What I learned is that too far over the top edge is madness or evil: Max swimming toward his death, Parker jumping off the roof, Lucky Mike raping a little girl But too far over the bottom edge is destitution and isolation: the man with the elephant trunk for a forehead, the breastfeeding women crying “help me” from the doorways in Phnom Penh, Rocky Balboa cut in half by a power-mad tourist The two poles are related The calamities I saw were not separate from the freedom of the special people, they were the result of their freedom Lucky Mike’s ultimate freedom depended on the ultimate slavery of another Those at the top are not free either, because their freedom is tied inexorably to the sacrifice of those at the bottom Safely in the middle was my life in New Orleans; the one that I couldn’t bear returning too Law school Working Staring at a computer Working Not getting laid Working Jerking off to pixels Working Watching movies and chasing my dreams That’s all I was allowed Vietnam showed me the truth about the dreams I was chasing They weren’t freedom Somewhere deep down I felt suddenly like I had nowhere to go Dreams are a sort of medicine, but once you realize they’re an illusion, the medicine stops working What I was too horny and fucked up to realize in Vietnam was that the socialists were laughing at me They had already learned what I had learned They intuited it, somehow I thought I was the best, I knew I was the best, because the women threw themselves at me The desire of women, in my mind, was the canary in the coalmine of my own greatness But while I executed my hedonistic arbitrage they executed a subtler version of their own, one that Westerners have trouble detecting We are exploiting them indeed, but they are also exploiting us The socialists are not stupid They don’t have socioeconomic status but they have something else They have life While we’re fighting for a ticket to an all-but-unwinnable lottery, they sit back with their family, beer in hand, and watch us enslave ourselves We live to work, they work to live They are our slaves yes, but we are theirs too They not innovate because they not want to innovate Their community is their greatest innovation The man in the hammock on Siem Reap does not have to accumulate enough to live “on the lake,” because he lives in the lake What the Vietnamese and the Cambodians and the Cubans have that we don’t is each other In the States we are everything but united I was mistaken when I thought the good feeling of being in Vietnam came from my sexual freedom It came from being in that expat community, constructed in response to and in the image of the Vietnamese social net It was the first time I felt I belonged and that if I fell someone would catch me no matter what I felt free precisely because I wasn’t What I had to accept to get past my anxiety is that there is no freedom, no matter which end you are on Remember Black Elk and the tree of life he saw during his hallucination, the one of which are all a part We are indeed part of one tree and that is beautiful but there is another side to it that people fail to consider If we are connected, we are bound The tree of humanity shackles us to each other It enslaves us in each others’ service Accepting this is becoming an adult Before we accept it, we are terrified of it and in response we try to force ourselves off the tree into something special, something separate But there is only togetherness Togetherness and the fallacy that you can ever be free ... time-consuming, brain draining, and boring beyond measure Since I couldn’t sleep, each hour in the Law Review suite felt like Saran Wrap cinching tighter and tighter over my brain I was stuck in a... life is divided into B.V and A.V It was in Vietnam that I started writing, which led me to escape law and start doing what I wanted—creating, exploring, not shifting money back -and- forth between... paralysis, a condition in which the sufferer awakes frozen in place, sometimes while experiencing terrifying hallucinations, and often involving the belief that there is an intruder in the room It is