Devils on the Northward Bound

Something dark hung over the disfigured man sitting opposite me, staring at me. I was relieved when his face finally turned away to absorb the view through the window. Consumed in our separate imageries, I was able to ignore him.

The view from the train was undoubtedly beautiful, and I let myself get caught up with it. The sun shone with incredible intensity, somehow blazing my eyes into seeing distances as smoked filled. Looking horizontally across the speeding paddies and plains, the deep green mountains appeared as an indistinct hulk, hanging in the distance; like mere shadows of themselves. The fields shone in a curiously vigorous way, brimming with refreshing water. Splashes of reflected sunlight sparkled, bouncing in and out of sight off of the swampy pools. Crooked trunks of palm trees passed by in uneven patches.

The train chugged through a heavy clump of vegetation and we were forced back into mutual contemplation. Once again he aimed his unnaturally level stare at me, and I felt compelled to grant it with a hello.

“Where you from?” he asked with a thick, uncontrolled voice as if he was eating food and regurgitating words. His eye made an uninvited scan over my clothes and bag.

“England.” I answer.

He offers a short, smile free, sinister grunt.

People all around are sitting quietly, settled. One or two turn their heads towards us. Now that it’s established he does speak some kind of English, I feel trapped. A conversation has been born, gaining its own logic, its own momentum. Why do I put myself in such situations? I could have sat anywhere on this rickety old train. I could have got a bus, or a plane. I could have just stayed at home and faced the music, instead of running away.

So I can’t say why, only conjecture. Aside of course from my humanitarian duty not to dismiss books merely by their covers, perhaps on a deeper level there is something fundamentally interesting and not just repulsive about this man. His lonely single eye staring at me, yellow pair of rough, jagged teeth and three dozen flaky blue stitches running across his half bald head; these features are so conspicuous it almost pains me to look at them. Especially that powerful eye, misty and terrible, inviting me to tantalising speculation. Surely he possesses that ineffable knowledge I imagine all those who are pained and who really suffer must mystically acquire?

Further talk ensues, and my theory is instantly proved false. His visage does not hide any underlying virtue. Rather, his words, followed by involuntary spittle, are those of simple, half-educated hate.

It is as follows. The Americans are crazy and stupid to think they can rule the world. How can they think that? The French are murderous, big headed and stubborn. Why did they try and hold onto their downtrodden, unhappy colonies when the writing was clearly on the wall? Algeria, Vietnam, the violence and death, what were they thinking? What were YOU thinking? His words seem to point the finger of blame straight at me.

In a brief corner, whisked past through the window, a man in ragged red t-shirt catches my eye as he dozes in a hammock, protected from the basking sun in the bowels of a half built mud shack. For a moment, I concede that the words of the twisted man before me do resonate with a sour truth. I imagine that perhaps he is a victim of fate. Perhaps he was tortured in war, his family senselessly murdered.

Outside, a noticeable shift from country to city living begins to emerge, houses more concrete and colourful. Yet his monologue continues without significant development. I try blocking it from my mind, merely a directionless monotony lacking balance and reason. The more he speaks the more I long to know where his acute disgust came from and what it was that so physically deformed him. I don’t have to courage to ask him straight out.

He continues unabated. Some children sitting nearby are compelled into delighted squeals by the sight of monkeys leaping from trees and phone lines. I look to the right, but I’ve missed them. He is still talking, and I meet the shy sympathetic gaze of a beautiful, well kept young woman who stands tolerantly in the aisle, dressed simply in students white shirt and black short skirt uniform. I sigh the briefest of sighs and dearly wish that she was the person sitting opposite me.

More interminable moments pass, and I know the train is close to reaching the centre of a provincial town. The buildings outside grow ever more grey and grubby. At the same time, his face grows sterner, his arguments less robust and more frightening, his spittle more slimy and acrobatic. Next I am being told definitively that China will soon crush the world and punish America. That’s it, I decide, and reciprocate by closing my ears and inventing histories for him.

Gaining inspiration from the trackside slums that suddenly pass by, the smoke of oil frying meat wafting freely amidst satellite dishes and corrugated iron, I decide that his core occupation is a beggar. Noticing a brand new four wheel drive parked next to an open air barber shop, I am somehow suddenly convinced that he also runs for gangsters. And with this opening vision, I get rather carried away.

I see him working for free, often without even realising it. He is exploited mercilessly by criminal patrons, who hand him unscrupulous and dangerous missions, communicated secretly by expertly placed whispers and signs. He carries them out without a word of complaint. Moving in rank and fetid spaces his masters would never go near, he sleeps rough and ready. Clubbing someone a few times round the head with a discarded plank, slapping a naughty youngster in the face with a grubby palm a few times to teach them a lesson, sending death threat notes to women he guesses are prostitutes; these are the good works I imagine he carries out.

Further inspiration follows. Why does he do it? I ask myself. And the answer follows rather too clearly for comfort. His reward may only be a night’s sleep in an alleyway under a urine sogged cardboard box, or an evening spent in the heart of the big slum, losing money at high-low, but for him, it is all worthwhile. Because there is just the faint outline of the belief, perhaps something he doesn’t truly realise himself, and only detectable from the outside, that he alone is righteous in this world. I think I’ve gone too far now, but can’t seem to stop. A tragic image emerges into the light. I see his shadowy puppet masters laughing heartily amongst themselves, counting their winnings over Johnny Walker Gold and Coke.

Sitting opposite him on this bumpy train listening to his still unchanged topic, I make the final, irrefutable conclusion that, for whatever reason, he is now a permanent worker for his own causes. The obvious nature of global injustice, the arrogance and stupidity of Western perpetrators, their unacceptable lucky escape from justice, the inevitable future retribution. Just like his murky underworld violence; it’s all one and the same to him. He possesses a rare dedication to his field.

“How they think they can to do it? You know? Can you tell?”

People are beginning to rise, sensing our imminent arrival at the station of whatever this town is, yet he still won’t give up his unanswerable question. So I answer as best I can, hoping to defuse his anger. Unconsciously, without quite realising what I’m doing, I take responsibility for the histories of brother nations. We regret it dearly now and seek remedy and fair redress. We know we were acting upon misguided beliefs. We were wrong. We admit it.

But these ideas, once articulated, produce a little sickness in me. I can’t help also imagining how much money the vast majority of less sympathetic tourists would throw at him just to avoid looking at his horribly disfigured head. Let alone tolerate his terrifying discourse.

Finally, the train comes to a shaky stop. The station, despite its central location amidst roads and traffic, still manages to find itself surrounded by leafy palm trees. It soothes me, and I resolve to shake him off.

Using the camouflage of shifting passengers, I move seats to the far end of the carriage. As I sit down, I am overwhelmed by an uncomfortable feeling that I have done him a personal slight, that I now conform to and reinforce his international stereotype. Am I being rude? Doing him a disservice? Not granting him his deserved human rights? His words have left their mark.

Glancing over at him nervously from my new vantage point, I see with relief he is not looking in my direction. Appearing to have forgotten all about me, he sits, chewing his bitter cud silently; staring out the window at the violated land. I wonder in what sense I really existed for him? Perhaps I only have meaning to him as a foreigner, an invader, a pirate. A Westerner.

But now, safely out of range from his fiery tongue, I try to relax back into my own cool and considered anxieties. The train is soon once again deeply embedded in green rural landscapes. My eyes fixed through the window, I realise that it’s possible to take an existential view of things. I try to think of a clear stance.

In spite of the turmoil I’ve left behind, maybe even because of it, right now I would be best advised to see my life as simply the act of going northwards. Travelling through fields with dotted palm trees and tired looking bamboo shacks. I maintain this peaceful state of mind, from time to time noticing flocks of birds fluttering across the sun sodden blue sky, or buffalo chomping in the muddy swamps, searching for hidden grass clumps. If only life could always be this untroubled for me, like the endless journeys of the train through its natural terrains of forest, field, mountain and sky. I fritter away the time as so.

Passing over bridges, little boatmen lazily traversing the deep brown waters flowing imperceptibly below, it is not too long before my quiet stream of existentialism begins to flow into a river of resolution. I see her face clearly once more, my mind wandering tenderly and inevitably over the counters of her chocolate skin, her plush, rosy cheeks, her teeth as white as ivory. There is something special about her, definitely something so very unique. Yet, as is life’s want with me, my breezy chains of thoughts are blown away just as they begin to take a more solid shape. The train makes another unknown village stop, and my attention is immediately arrested by the extremely wizened old man who sits down airily in the empty seat opposite me.

Traditional and oriental looking, he wears a faded red fisherman’s pants and a thin buttonless white shirt with a round low neck that exposes his dry skin and sharp collar bone. There is a striking, simple expression of serenity upon his face of well worn lines and dips, as if there is nothing that could possibly upset it. For me, it beguiles any comparison with the younger visage it once must have housed. An involuntary picture wafts to mind of black tattoos, ponytails, and skateboarding youths smoking cockily on Bangkok street corners. Then I find myself recalling a certain Neil Young song. There is something so alien about this old gentleman, so invigorating to my unrefined fear of old age and death. I begin to wonder, did this old man truly go through the same tribulations that I face? Is it possible?

I can’t let go of this thought, can’t stop it following through. Can it really be said of this human being that he once tussled with the purpose and very nature of his own being, his proper place in the world, whilst ignoring the charms of the female kind? Did he ever experience this hopeless infatuation, tussle with the seductions I am prey to? Visualisations of the past few days begin to emerge to embarrass me. Of magic smiles and mischievous eyes, inviting. Of hands clasped lightly upon bouncing breasts and supple bottoms? Of chests and mouths locked together, tongues dancing in duet. Of breath rising in and out in excitement as soft shapely legs are wrapped around coarse thrusting hips. What can this old man know of these things? I can’t imagine it, thinking of him only in terms of dawn Tai Chi in the park and incense misted temple prayer.

The train rattles back into life with a shudder, and I urge to ask him straight out. What has happened to you? How did you get to be so serene? But framing such a profound idea into a manageable conversation is beyond me, and as I tussle with this very problem, he notices my looking at him. Twinkling eyes wide open and alert, he smiles at me with jovial, disarming friendship. I smile back, and he begins reaching into a small plastic bag I notice he has placed on the seat next to him.

It doesn’t take more than a few seconds to produce the dusty, red labelled whisky bottle and offer it to me.

“Wh-sk-ee”. He pours out the syllables slowly with a typical Asian over-emphasis.

For an instant, I despair, both because he has shattered my idyllic illusion of him, and because I really don’t want to taste his whisky. The large foreign characters that adorn the tinted bottle, the golden soda-pop flip cap, the smell of petrol and vodka; all of these typical local characteristics put me in no doubt. Were I to place this “whisky” anywhere near my lips, there is no question it would immediately cause me to wretch. So I have to refuse him in the well practiced fashion.

“No thank you”, I say, waving my hands. “Gives me headache.” I point to my head and make a toilet face.

He chuckles light-heartedly and takes a quick, harsh swig. Gulping the stuff down, the pain is clear to see in his reddened eyes. Indeed, his whole body contracts for an instant, lips shuddering with uncontrolled natural reaction. Oddly, he remains smiling throughout, and I envy the unadulterated pleasure he takes, without an inkling of shame at his public alcoholism. Doesn’t he know it’s only 10am?

I smile privately to myself. There are no angels on this train. Facing the window once more, I can no longer resist direct, open thoughts of her. Her strange, incomprehensible, passionate ways. What is she doing now? Is she thinking of me? Does she really know me, or love me, at all?
Passing over another bridge, onto the next town, the train shakes momentarily on the edge of its rails. Holding onto my seat with both hands, I listen to the metallic rustle of carriages clunking back into place.