Chloroquine

Bed

Face-down in the center of a fully made bed, hazy behind the white mosquito net, is the body of a young, white-skinned woman with dark hair, dressed only in a pair of pink shorts. She is breathing shallowly. The hair near her temples and at the nape of her neck is stained black with sweat. Sweat also pools in the small of her back, and presents itself as a sheen across the rest of her skin. The white sheets around her are damp, translucent. On the floor beside the bed, a plastic bottle of water is nearly empty. A fan stirs the mosquito net, which is dotted with a half dozen species of insects, though for the moment, no mosquitoes.

Room

The room is small and made entirely of wood. The walls are unsanded, splintery, and have been stained a deep brown reminiscent of fertile earth. If not for the shine of the polished floor and the window letting in the light, the effect would be of burial. But the rough shutters beside the bed are thrown back, and from outside the light enters, pooling in the polish of the floor, along with the low lapping of a calm sea, which can be heard beneath the rattle of the tin fan. The furniture in the room is all made of wood, and consists of a bed, a broad and mostly empty desk, and a nightstand, which has been carved from a single tree trunk. The air is heavy, humid and smells of low tide, and the fan does little to relieve this.

Desk

The fan, a dented tin contraption dotted with flakes of olive paint, sits on a warped wooden desk. Clustered on the side opposite the fan are a mobile phone, an international phone card, and a ticket for a bus to Bangkok, scheduled to leave at midnight that night. Directly in the center of the desk, in front of a simple wooden chair, are ten sheets of pale blue paper with a ballpoint pen laid crosswise on top. On the topmost sheet, a single word was written, then repeatedly crossed out. It was a short word, probably three letters long, and ending perhaps with a u, or a rounded w. The cap of the pen is flattened and pocked with teethmarks.

Nightstand

On the nightstand there is a handful of copper change and a few pink and blue bills. Beside that, tipped over so that a line of four large, white pills lies in a line across the wood, there is an empty, orange medicine bottle labeled Chloroquine. Beside the pills is a passport. Its reddish cover is worn and faded so that the crest is no longer legible, and one corner has been folded over in such a way that a crease remains in the thick material. Other than those things, there is only a folded drink coaster with a hastily drawn map of Canada on its back side, a few cities marked by dots and the Rocky Mountains a swath of carrots extending through the southern border. Slightly to the east of the mountains, something, most likely a town, has been indicated with a dark star.

Window

Outside, rows of identical doors are arranged along three floating docks surrounding a rectangular sheet of seawater covered over by lime-green algae. At the end of her dock, which extends out into the shallows of the sea, two rowboats are lashed to one mooring, a rusted cleat screwed into the rotting wood. The rowboats float low on the tide, and occasionally strike each other, but so softly that there is no sound except the oars clacking in their locks. The bay is studded with misty islands backlit by the sun, which is only inches from being extinguished by the sea. The tide is out, and the smell of the uncovered shore hangs in the air. Along the docks, a nut-brown man with a shark tattoo is patiently skimming algae from the surface of the water with a long bamboo pole, lifting the green, dripping mass and setting it in a white plastic bucket.

Backpack

Tipped over on the floor is a green rucksack unzipped along one side to expose its contents, mostly lightweight and brightly colored clothes made dull by dust, silk scarves and, on top, a straw hat. There are two pairs of sandals, both leather, a pair of flip-flops, and two pairs of thin slippers woven of brightly colored cloth. A few books are tucked in among the clothes. Among them are a Lonely Planet and two novels by Alain Robbe-Grillet. The bag itself is dusty, but in good condition, well-made and probably expensive, with most of its capacity unused. There is enough remaining space for the entire wardrobe of a second person, and the empty part of the bag has been rolled over and strapped down. There are, in addition to the clothes, the customary toiletries, plus clear plastic bags of make-up and various medical supplies, as well as insect repellent and iodine tablets for water purification.

Bathroom

The bathroom has cement walls and a white tile floor, no ceiling except for the palms stretching across the sky. The shade and the cement walls keep the bathroom a few degrees cooler than the bedroom. The toilet is clean ceramic, but is flush with the floor, a squatter. Beside it, there is a cement cistern of seawater, and on the ledge are a pink plastic beach bucket and a bar of white soap. There is no mirror over the sink, because its shine encourages monkeys to drop down out of the branches to investigate, and then they steal everything, including the wallets and passports of the guests, who will later blame the guesthouse staff. There is a clean ceramic sink, and on the sink there is a drinking glass, and inside it, two toothbrushes.

Dusk

At sunset, the mosquitoes emerge from their nooks—the folds of clothes, behind the shutters and under the desk—and they converge on the net, attracted by the scent of blood. The sunlight reaches out across the floor and crawls up the wall, then begins to recede from the window until it is only a square patch of light hung on the opposite side of the room, a painting of a sunlit wall. Outside, the man with the shark tattoo sets his bamboo pole on the dock and walks off carrying his plastic bucket, mostly full of algae, though the sheet of water between the docks is still perfectly coated with green muck. From the rooms around the water, people begin to emerge, Europeans wrapped in exotic clothes, languid with the heat, making their way to the bar singly or in pairs. The silence is now punctured at intervals by the revving of a blender.

Movement

First, it is her hand, searching the far side of the bed. Her body tenses, then relaxes, and she rolls over, reaches through the mosquito net and slides a pill slowly across the nightstand, into her palm, then back through the netting and into her mouth. The other hand reaches down through the curtain on the other side of the bed, groping for the water bottle, which she drags up into the bed and to her mouth. She replaces the cap and lets the bottle drop. It rolls into the depression in the bed created by her body and comes to rest against her side. She breathes, and the room darkens around her. Eventually she reaches through the screen again, this time for the sheets of pale blue paper, which she doubles so the pen rolls to rest in the fold and, sitting propped against the pillows, she uses her legs as a writing surface. Beneath the crossed out word she writes the word 'you', and stops. With the word printed cleanly beneath the scribble, it is clear that 'you' is also the crossed out word. She draws a single stroke through the freshly printed you, then sets the pen and paper on the bed at her side and closes her eyes again.

Fever Dreams

The walls are a deep brown, like fertile earth, and the effect is of burial. In this fertile earth she feels herself growing towards the sun, her head becoming larger, inflating, wrapped in a bridal veil of mosquito netting. In the bathroom there are two toothbrushes, then there are three, then only one. The toilet sinks into the ground, leaving only a hole, a circle of blackness with no bottom. Somewhere inside that hole there is a night bus crossing the back of a beer coaster, searching for the Rocky Mountains in a web of ink. Somewhere on that beer coaster there is a town marked with a star, somewhere in that town there is an unmarked sheet of pale blue paper. Somewhere on that unmarked sheet there is a mosquito perched upon a toothbrush. There is the revving of a blender. An airplane taking flight, then a fall, and the air she falls through is soft as the breeze from a fan.

Darkness

She awakens again in the pure dark, and the shape in the corner, the fan oscillating atop the desk, is a person slowly shaking their head no. Then it is a fan. The things closest to her resolve themselves most quickly. The bridal veil becomes a mosquito net, and the white worm a line of pills. From outside, the murmur of conversation drifts across the water, words and tones make a melange of language which, from inside her fever, she alone can understand. The words say that the bar is a boat disappearing around a bend in the muddy Mekong, and she is alone on the dock, fixed in the current. She feels across the dark surface of the desk, fingers like antennae groping for her mobile phone. She has no missed calls, and it is midnight.

The Invention of Memory

The digital face of the phone blurs, fades, and goes dark, and she is left lying awake, hovering there in the black, still close to her dreams. She tries to pin down the things in her room. The backpack she dropped upon entering, and there it has lain for days. The things inside it, her clothes, toiletries, books, tell the bulk of her story. Like the stamps in her passport, she can identify each article of clothing, when it was bought or received, which events were witnessed by which shoes. These things are unequivocally hers. The pills. The pills could not have been a going-away present, a last kindness to precede a neverending cruelty. Perhaps they are a placeholder, a see-you-when-you're-well. They are her white worm; they stand out in the darkness, eyes to watch over her as she sleeps. She presses a button on the phone, to see what will happen. It is one minute past twelve. She has no missed calls.

Fever Dreams

She intends to marry a white worm, a larvae which will grow into some winged thing—a moth, a butterfly. Or the worm could remain a worm, a burrower, making the fertile earth more fertile. The wedding is to take place aboard a bus which crosses the flat surface of a passport, following a groove inadvertently folded into the cover. The guests have all arrived, and they speak a melange of language which only she can understand. Her family is marked on the back of a beer coaster, waiting in the shadows of a garden of carrots. A line of pill-white eyes watch her. The procession is lit by chemical light, the digital face of the sun shining down on her guests, each wearing on their back the sum of their lives, their clothes and their books, the customary toiletries and their expectations sealed in waterproof bags. The guests all rise, and set their toothbrushes in a glass before her, dozens of toothbrushes planted in a drinking glass.

Dawn

The air is cool, the sunlight hazy. Islands emerge from the mist, black at first, like the backs of sea monsters, then violet, then green. The rowboats float just above the dock, and the air smells strongly of salt. Inside the room, the mosquito net is thick with buzzing, long-legged mosquitoes, each the size of a child's outstretched hand. The sheets of the bed are not damp, bu wet, soaked through in a stain surrounding the form of a mostly nude young woman lying face-down on the bed. Her hair is knotted, and she sleeps with one arm thrown over a sweat-darkened pillow. The light in the room is diffuse, and objects seem far off, their exact positions hard to judge. The only noise is the rattling of the old tin fan, and the monkeys outside, screeching. A moan grows from the bed, but it could be the wooden dock creaking against itself with the rising of the tide. Outside, the man with the shark tattoo crosses the dock carrying a length of bamboo and a white plastic bucket.

10:20

There is a moan from the bed, then violent coughing. She tries to unscrew the cap of the water bottle still nestled in her side, but is not able. She presses the bottle to her face. It is no cooler than the air, and besides, it is empty except for a centimeter of water which swings around the bottom. She tries the lid again with a desperation disproportionate to the bottle's contents, and this time succeeds. She holds the water in her mouth, swallows it slowly, and lies back. She checks the display on the phone, which is in the bed next to her. It is twenty past ten. She doesn't know what number to call to have water brought. Doesn't know the word for water. It is time for another pill, but she has no saliva to swallow it with. Her dreams of the white worm are not far off. It is impossible to say whether she is improving.

Monsoon

The rains come every day between two-thirty and three. Today is no different. There is blue sky, then there is black sky, with nothing in-between. Then there is a rain so thick that nothing can be heard except for the pounding on the tin roof. It has a martial sound to it. Outside the window, the corrugated tin lets fall unbroken streams of water as if from an open tap. She picks up the empty plastic bottle, braces her weight on her hands, the crinkle of the plastic bottle for a second louder than rain on tin. She crawls to the edge of the bed, her legs limp behind her, like an ancient creature leaving the sea for the first time. She tries to part the mosquito netting. Cannot find the slit. She scoops up the netting, lets it rest on her head, scoops it up again until her head is clear, worms her way out from beneath it until she is lying on the wooden floor. She climbs to her feet, bracing herself against the window sill, and she holds the bottle beneath a stream, closes her eyes and listens to water striking plastic, then water striking water, the pitch deepening, deepening. The sound is like a distant drumbeat growing closer. Like a heartbeat growing stronger. But before the bottle is halfway full, her forearm begins to twitch, then to tremble. The bottle, too heavy to sustain, falls to the dock outside. The water bubbles out, flows through the cracks into the sea. She leans there, watching it, then with one hand on the wall guides herself to the door. It is light, and swings easily inwards. Then she is in the rain, the cold rain, the rain that carries off the sweat and the fever, the rain that soaks into her hair and runs fast in rivulets down her face. The rain so thick it hides the far dock, the bar, the rain so loud on the tin roofs and the flat palms that nothing can be heard, no voices, no clacking of oars. She sits, then she stretches across the rotted wood, reaching for the bottle. Everything that is left, everything below the bottle's mouth, she drinks. Everything that is left to be felt, she feels. The fever, the cold rain, the rough dock rocking beneath her. The smell of the sea, and water striking water, the fluidity that makes things live.

Fever Dream

The water carries her sweat to the sea, salt mixes with salt, water with water, pieces of her return on currents to the far shores of her home. The darkened sheets, the cistern, the green muck undulating on the surface of the water. It's all water. The concerned call of the man with the shark tattoo is obscured by the beating of water against water. Her fever breaks like the falling of the tide, the sea gone off in search of the moon. The white worm disappears into the trough of a wave, appears, disappears again, each time more distant, a tiny animal carried for a time upon a vast animal. Sweat runs into the sea, and the water that was hers tomorrow will be the monsoon. At three o'clock, she will fall from the sky, punctually, for an hour. Every day the same day. All this water the same water. All these dreams just one dream, of a wooden room, of a toothbrush, of misty, distant islands emerging from the rain.