Jenn and I tramp from one distant, flickering streetlight to the next, hopping over chunks of pavement and over ditches to avoid the buzzing scooters that prowl the strip. The brilliant full moon on the flag of Laos, fat and white, winks at us from the window of a darkened concrete hulk. Tuk-tuk drivers eye us carefully, some shout offers of transport to us, but we turn them down; we don’t have far to go, we think.
Oudomxay is an island of noise in a sea of silent mountains. Chinese letters lit up in neon illuminate National Road 13. The market we pass is open late, late, awnings shading fruit merchants from white electric suns that draw squadrons of singing insects and blur out the immense starscape. Oudomxay’s one-block downtown crawls with vendors selling grilled chicken and buffalo sausage on sticks to locals on bicycles and bearded young white men with $1000 backpacks. Blistered whole-roasted ducks smile from hooks and sweaty trays of gray meat turn sweatier and grayer as the hours pass, and beside them we spy signs advertising baguettes and the only cups of coffee for hundreds of miles. Cuisine to comfort Oudomxay’s conquerors be they from China or France, from the previous century or the next.
Jenn and I are not conquerors, though we know we appear as such to those we pass by. We’re just teachers, a musician and a would-be writer, harmless cycle travelers in search of a meal, even if that meal was cooked for those who would colonize this place. Our story is simple, innocent, though every time we meet another bike traveler it feels less so.
From behind an overgrown palm we spot the same yellow Beer Lao-branded sign that graces every guesthouse, hotel and restaurant in this country. Suphailin Restaurant, the sign coaxes. Of every guidebook that mentioned Oudomxay, all of them but one had sung the praises of Suphailin, its kind proprietress, and most of all, its generous, Western-sized portions. (That one aberrant review, incidentally, was the usual bit of traveler’s chest-beating, proclaiming that the servings really aren’t that generous, and that a truly dedicated backpacker could get a meal from the vendors across the street for a wooden nickel and a smile.)
Suphailin is a tin-roofed cabin transported from the middle of the jungle to the concrete side-streets of Oudomxay. Its front porch is overgrown with potted vines, thorny bushes, aloe plants, enormous tamarind pods, baby palm trees sprouting from coconuts, birds’ nests and wasp hives stolen away from the forest, all hanging beneath the colorful yellow Beer Lao banderoles. Peeking through the undergrowth, I can just make out a couple of long tables with staggering collections of condiments and stacks of books bound in banana leaves.
I peek my head into the house. Sitting on the concrete floor amid folding tables and plastic stools, a child and an old woman are watching television side by side. I cough a greeting and they turn their heads.
“Sabaidee, hello,” the woman calls to me. I silently mime spooning a plate of something into my open mouth, trying to emote just how powerfully, endlessly hungry we are after three months of bicycle touring. She nods. “Yes, open, open,” and with the slightest of grunts she is on her feet. The little girl looks at me with dark, impish eyes.
We seat ourselves on the porch and leaf through the menu. “Dear foreigners,” it begins, “welcome and enjoy your meal at my restaurant.” Listed below is a Lao phrasebook for our enlightenment.
The old woman with the lined face comes out with a pad of paper. Smiling, she takes our orders and retreats to the kitchen. The little girl stomps out of the house toward us carrying a magnetic drawing pad. The sleeves of her pink sweatshirt are rolled up, and the shirt hangs down to her thighs. When I meet her eyes, she purses her lips and raises her eyebrows.
“Sabaidee,” I say to her, and she blinks, unimpressed by my Laotian.
“Hello,” Jenn tries. This the girl ignores entirely and sets her drawing pad on the beat-up purple tablecloth. With the attached stylus, she draws a perfect representation of an indistinct black scribble.
“Wow!” I say, and, “Good!” I flash her a thumbs-up, sliding easily back into expat English teacher mode. The girl says something back to me and, with a wicked grin, slides the plastic tab across the pad, erasing her work. “Oh no!” I cry, putting my hands to my head, mouth hanging open.
This cuts a smile across her face, and she quickly begins another masterpiece, drawing carefully along each of the sides of the little white rectangle and putting a single dot in the center. She looks to me expectantly, then slides the picture into nothingness. “Bye bye!” Jenn says, waving to the pad. “Nooo!” I yelp.
We repeat this act twice, three times. Each time the girl seems charmed by our performances, each time she is completely uninterested in hanging onto her work. At last, I ask to see the pad to draw something myself. She cocks an eyebrow, then gives it over with a look of sour magnanimity. I draw a large circle, then a smiling face hiding behind a pair of enormous eyeglasses and capped by a mountain of curly hair. The girl frowns at the drawing, puzzled. I point to the picture and then myself and flash her a huge smile. She gasps, jaw shaking her little teeth. She looks at the picture, then me, points at both of us and begins to laugh. The girl grabs the pad from me, shows it to Jenn and laughs some more, then takes the pad into the kitchen to show her grandmother.
Our hostess shoos the girl away when our food is brought to us, but we invite her to come back and sit beside us while we eat. She continues to draw and looks to us expectantly for our parts of the schtick, which we happily perform around mouthfuls of peppery noodles and chicken laab. When we finish our dinner I teach her “rock, paper, scissors,” which she takes to with great excitement (though she does insist that she can win every match by throwing “scissors” and mimics my cheering even when it is unearned).
Jenn and I pass a pleasant hour digesting, drinking our Beer Lao, and playing with this little girl. I tell her my name, pointing to myself, and repeat it two or three times. Then, pointing to her, I wait for her reply and get a pair of scissors and a cheer instead. Our laughter bounces off the hot metal roof and echoes into the Oudomxay night.
Then, flipping through the guestbook, I read something that brings me back to Wayne.
* * *
We met Wayne in Half Moon Bay, California, two years before. It was my first cycle tour, and I was still excruciatingly green, knew nothing about bikes but had plenty of opinions about art and life and politics. That was between writing my first first novel and my second first novel.
It was the day before the famed Half Moon Bay Pumpkin Festival, an autumnal explosion of harvest-themed American wankery. A handful of locals set up card tables and tents filled with things made of wicker or pumpkin spice, every surface draped in brown or orange or red-white-and-blue, a column of gleaming Port-O-Johns flanking Main Street in preparation of the oncoming surge. The atmosphere was that of hushed anticipation, afraid that making too sudden a move or raising your voice would provoke a stampede of wound-tight Californians. On the corner, the world’s largest pumpkin squatted expectantly.
When Jenn and I woke up in the municipal campground that morning, Wayne was just there, lying in wait for us. The minute we left our tent to greet the frigid Bay Area morning, he sauntered over in his red-and-white lycra cycling gear—or rather, he came as close to sauntering as one can when hobbling along in expensive cycling cleats.
He was a very unassuming-looking gentleman, with a tall forehead made taller by pulling his hockey hair back into a kinky blonde-gray ponytail under a red-and-white bandana. His small, close-lipped but warm smile was shaded by a few days of stubble and colored by weeks of sunburn. In a clear, reedy voice, he complimented our tent. We thanked him (he was right, it was a very nice tent), and the conversation turned to the usual ritualized butt-sniffing that cycle tourists engage in. Where did you come from, where are you headed, nice bike you’ve got there. He answered these questions and many unasked follow-ups, making himself comfortable on the edge of a picnic table. Jenn and I were charmed by this stranger’s friendly demeanor, and as he told us his incredible story we began to regard him as an intimate friend.
A few years before, you see, Wayne had awoken in bed paralyzed from the neck down. The doctors told him that he was suffering from an obscure auto-immune disorder. He was given a dire prognosis and told he would likely never walk again, but against all odds, he struggled through a tortuous healing process and made a near-complete recovery. In the process of reclaiming the use of his body, he also beat diabetes, high blood pressure, and multiple organ failure, and between physical therapy sessions he had written three novels. Now, as a benefit for awareness of his illness, he was cycling from Vancouver to Patagonia, a trip of some thousands of miles, and back again. Also, he was working on novel #4.
My eyebrows rose another inch above my head with each melodramatic detail of Wayne’s life. To me, just as impressive as his miraculous recovery was his creative prolificacy. I had glided through two degrees in English and a handful of creative writing courses (always submitting the same half-dozen stories and chapters of abortive novels), but I had been unable to finish a single work to my satisfaction. Innocently, I expressed amazement at his productivity.
At my non-question Wayne grinned like an axe murderer and leaned forward. “In my fiction, I have two rules,” he said in a hushed tone. “One: what I write has to be utterly original. I don’t want to write anything like anything else I can read. Otherwise, what’s the point?
“And two,” he said with a faraway sparkle in his eye, “in my fiction, nobody can get hurt. Nobody can get hurt, and nobody can die in anything that I write. That’s my rule.”
Jenn and I felt the electricity of our mutual thoughts spark and die off before speaking. “Wow,” she said.
“Wow, yeah,” I agreed. “Huh. But…I mean, you know, death and pain are such a fundamental part of the human experience,” I mused. “How do you…I mean, like, it’s amazing that you can express something artistic while limiting yourself in a way that doesn’t reflect, like, our reality. Right?”
Wayne shook his head sagely. “It’s my rule. I’m in charge of the universe when I write, and I don’t want anyone to have to go through any death or any pain. If it’s my universe, then I can make it better than this one.”
I felt my lips fold into a tight crease. Behind Wayne I saw a chorus of my university professors standing in the wild yellow grass, shaking their heads disapprovingly or throwing up their arms in exasperation. I blinked them away; this was my chance to learn from someone who knew fiction far better than I. The time that I had spent sleeping through Modern American Lit Wayne had spent writing (and conquering death itself).
From nowhere, he produced a packet of dogeared printer pages. “This is the beginning of my second novel, which is about the smartest man in the world, and he’s able to solve all the problems that the world faces because in this universe people listen to him and his ideas and, well, here’s the first chapter.”
Licking his windburned lips, occasionally batting away the fruit flies that are the true rulers of Francis Beach Campground, he read to us his incredibly, stupendously, eye-poppingly wretched prose. The Smartest Man in the World was taking his breakfast in a diner, where he was listening in on an unfathomably stupid conversation between two characters named Miniskirt and Daisy Dukes and, eventually, Tiffany and Amber. These shrill harpies clicked their long fingernails, smeared lipstick on their coffee cups, said “like” and “oh my god” and other such unforgivable nothings while they discussed the Mayan apocalypse with comically poor understanding and somehow avoided swallowing their tongues in their own imbecility. And reader, if you can believe it: they were blonde. Of all things!
All the while the Smartest Man in the World chanted “stupid, stupid, stupid” to himself, offended on behalf of the whole planet by their transgressions of intelligence and fashion. The scene came to a crescendo when the Smartest Man in the World riotously explained to these stupid dumb dummies that they had a poor grasp of history and geography, and that they were terrible people for even mentioning the name “Paris Hilton.” Then, in a rush of victory, he departed to go fix all the problems in the world.
By now my eyes had shrunken to the size of sesame seeds, my mouth dry as ash. “And that’s just the first chapter,” Wayne said with a wink, and promised that it got even better from there. He would be happy to engage in a reading of Chapter Two later that evening, but now he had to go and buy his groceries for the day. Chicken, you see, and new potatoes may be cooked over a camp stove by careful application of small amounts of water, provided that first one adds olive oil to the pan, which is difficult to carry while bike touring but is important to this recipe and to others, such as…
Eventually he was gone, hobbling back to his sleek little tent. The sun jumped across the sky, somehow, vanishing the shadows of the campsite’s warped little trees. Jenn and I checked our belongings, afraid that some might have been carried off by raccoons while we had lost consciousness.
Gulls wheeled over the impossibly blue Pacific coast before us, but I could talk of nothing but Wayne, always with a furtive eye cast over my shoulder for flashes of red or blonde. Wayne’s magical universe, I raved, the one where no harm ever befalls any individual, is complete trash. Emotions are felt sadly or happily or angrily, thoughts are spelled out even to oneself, nothing is shown and everything is told with depositional directness. Protagonists are tall, handsome, virtuosic lovers, and possess immeasurably vast IQs, while everyone else is a drooling imbecile who resents the hero’s perfection.
We laughed, our toes in the warm October sand. After a moment I realized that Jenn was saying something, but I couldn’t hear it; my mind was entirely occupied by an all-encompassing Canadian.
How in all hell could someone be exactly the kind of person I aspire to be—friendly, creative, strong, dedicated, accomplishing great things for the betterment of others—and yet be so completely loathsome to be around? Someone who had accomplished so much and yet was so vomitously boring, vapid, self-centered, misogynistic? Was this what I would need to do to be a real, productive writer? Just eliminate all my standards? Write whatever immature, sexist garbage came to my mind first, dash off a draft where heroes are introduced as “brave” or “smart” and call it a novel? Anyone can appear smarter than a ridiculous straw man that they invent! Can you believe the way that guy portrayed women? And what was all that garbage about never putting death into his works?
Jenn nodded along with me, then at some point she escaped to the far reaches of the park to read while I continued my tirade in my head. This man was the Ed Wood of novels, the Tommy Wiseau of fiction. And it was all presented so earnestly, with such a dearth of irony, with the expectation that no one had ever written a novel without death or suffering simply because nobody had ever had the idea before.
“And those rules!” I barked, startling several horseshoe crabs. The arrogance of the first rule filled my mouth with bile; what writer could claim with any sincerity that what they write is unlike anything ever written before? To say nothing of the fact that there was nothing even the tiniest bit special about stringing together a chain of two-dimensional stereotypes and power fantasies and calling it a novel.
But to me, to Art, nothing was as great a sin as Rule #2. More than being boring, more than talking too much or writing bad prose, Wayne had sinned against fiction itself. An author refusing to confront death, pain, or human suffering might as well write Bazooka Joe cartoons for all the artistic merit it would bring the world. Wayne’s proclamation of his benevolent omnipotence in his own world was the most immature thing I’d heard in my life, a child’s power trip when playing god with his toys, decreeing execution or clemency for his dolls and dinosaurs.
“Are you done yet?” asked Jenn. “We need to find dinner.”
The sun barreled down over the sea. We wandered down the rocky backstreets of Half Moon Bay in search of that most precious of Californian treasures, fish tacos. Eventually my vitriol reserve began to run low, leaving a cold pool of guilt in my gullet. Who the hell was I to pick apart the prose of this man who had shared so much of himself with me? A sick man, no less, who was in the process of cycling across two continents, who had finished three more novels than I had?
“I mean, what am I saying, that nobody should make art unless it’s good? That the only people who should write are the ones who can meet the standards of some schmuck like me?”
“Eat your taco,” Jenn agreed.
I was cruel to judge Wayne so savagely, I decided. There is a place for criticism, certainly, but maybe in the end it was better to be a fool who wrote novels than an overeducated critic who wanted to but didn’t.
Still, I swore, I would never allow myself to write anything as atrocious as that chapter as long as I lived. And nothing would ever persuade me that Wayne’s rules of fiction were anything but utter dreck.
Night settled over the ocean by the time we got back to the campsite. The grounds were studded with floodlights from the RVs that starred the dark boughs of trees with the eyes of stray cats and fat old raccoons. The air was thick with the hum of generators. Somewhere, someone plunked on an out-of-tune guitar. In the center of the hiker-biker section of the grounds, three orange faces huddled around a fire pit. Two of the faces, unlined with age, had very familiar expressions of desperate vacancy, their eyes blinking morse-code cries for help. The third face was obscured by a packet of papers. The young campers looked to us, but our worse nature won out: we pretended not to see them and zipped ourselves away in the tent.
As far as I know, Wayne is still on some lost road somewhere in the Americas, ambushing unsuspecting campers, boring them limb from limb and preaching the gospel of literary benevolence. I never saw him again after that day. In fact, for as much of a crisis as he provoked in me, I scarcely thought about Wayne until the day I read something even worse than his story.
* * *
There is no moon in Oudomxay that night, and by the time we finish our dinner, two more of the buzzing white streetlights have flickered into blackness. But there is still enough light for me to make out what’s been written in the guestbook of Suphailin Restaurant:
9/9/07
“Hello KEV + DARACH,
Enjoy yisser Meals. Up the dubs.
There is a savage club in the hotel
down the road. Go to main rd,
go left, + take 1st left.
If they’re old enough to bleed, they’re
bleedin old enough — I’ll tell no-one
if you tell no-one wha!!
Rafter,
David Pasley + Stephen Howard
When I first read the words, I close the book quickly. My face grows hot. Jenn rereads Suphailin’s charmingly worded menu while the little girl watches cartoons inside the restaurant alongside her friend or sister.
With unfocused eyes I look at the beat-up guestbook, the bottommost and oldest in a stack of eight or ten identical volumes on the table. It looks like a simple composition notebook, the same they sell in every bookstore from Omaha to Oudomxay: hard bound, matte red with painted-on black corners and an unlabeled piece of scotch tape where a title should be. Closed, it could be anything, any one of a hundred innocuous books, with not a single clue that deadly poison is contained within.
I open it, flip once more past identical blue words of praise in English, Korean, German, Japanese, French. “Greetings from Singapore!” “I am the first Indonesian to come this place.” “Thanks for feeding a hungry cyclist!” It’s easy, for a minute, to pretend that it was a mistake, that I hadn’t seen those words at all. Perhaps it happened in a different story, a fragment of something written by a dark part of my subconscious.
And then, of course, I find it again.
“If they’re old enough to bleed, they’re bleedin old enough.”
“I’ll tell no-one if you tell no-one wha!!”
Above the awful blue words someone else has written in their own message to David and Stephen in blotched and running script:
“BASTARDS! Taking advantage of wonderful people
Try this in your own country – [???]!”
The last word is unsmudged, but it could be virtually anything. “Wasters,” it looks like, though “wankers” seems more likely.
I look at the red molded-plastic chair next to me and see David Pasley sitting there. He is clean-shaven, his face prematurely sagging at the jowls. His gargantuan legs, thick like trees and covered in wiry yellow hairs, punch from his cargo shorts and barely fit under the table. He is laughing and speaking incomprehensible Australianisms to Stephen, who is downing the dregs of a Beer Lao while he pounds on the table. High above my head, David is holding a ballpoint pen in his sausagelike fingers and squints at the guestbook. The table is a mess: condiments strewn about, grains of rice spilled everywhere, uncountable empty beer bottles standing in rank puddles on the tablecloth. Those men came here through the same jungle we did, crawled from some dark, horrible place, though it is still night, it’s always night and moonless now.
“What’s wrong?” Jenn is looking at me, her deep brown eyes reflecting yellow and green.
“I, uh…” and I pass the open book to her. I see each word zip through ropes of nerve to her brain. Her lip slowly, slowly curls, her brows arch in the center.
“Oh, ugh,” she says to me.
“Yeah.”
I see her eyes meet some invisible mote of dust and I do the same, unfocusing my vision and surrendering to my imagination.
Our little friend toddles back out to the porch, her mouth open in a silent little shout that changes to a flirty kissy-face and then a full-toothed snarl. A tiny gray kitten mewls from its hiding spot under a bamboo planter, but the girl pays it no mind, more concerned with something quiet in her mind. Her drawing pad, half-forgotten in one hand, is now scarred by a few swipes from a green crayon. I can picture her trying to delete that mark with the plastic slider, trying again and not understanding why she can’t make her little pad clean and white again. At the moment, though, she doesn’t seem to have noticed what she’s done. I want to point it out to her, but stop myself; how does one point out some unhappiness to an unsuspecting child, show her that something is now bad and she should feel upset about it?
I watch her buzz her lips in boredom, then look to me querulously.
“Dok,” she says, extending her fist. “May-pa. Zii!” and makes a claw with her fingers, her thumb cocked out carelessly.
She looks up to me, her faint brows furrowed in frustration.
I swallow and gamely extend my hand. She cheers as I do.
I don’t want to be in this story anymore. I want this girl to be safe. I want so badly to live in Wayne’s universe, the one where nobody dies, where nobody gets hurt. I want to be there and I want to take her with me. I want to rip her from this story, sacrifice all these words so I could keep her forever in a hackey, no-good story where she will be reduced to two dimensions, be forgettable and implausible and offensive and safe.
I want Wayne’s Second Rule of Fiction to be real. I want it more than I want to write good fiction. I want it more than Art or Love or Jenn or anything I’ve ever cared about so long as this little girl whose name I don’t know never has to meet David Pasley and Stephen Howard.
Sylvie Althoff is a professional writer, teacher, musician, and editor based in Lawrence, Kansas. Her first published story appeared in Tales of the United States Space Force by Baen Books, edited by C. Stuart Hardwick, and her short story “Endymion” is forthcoming in Escape Pod. A licensed elementary teacher with Master’s degrees in English and Education, she is an instructor and co-founder of Philomath Microschool, an online virtual learning community. She also sings and plays banjo with The Twangles.
https://www.sylviealthoff.com/contact