Two young, sweaty travelers meet on the rooftop of a hostel in Hôi An. The air is thick with moisture, there is half-drunk coffee with condensed milk gathering flies on the table between them, and one of the two is bleeding.
“Are you interested in going out tonight?” says the person who resembles a blonde girl, sounds Dutch. “I heard there is a great night market.”
“Yes,” says the person who appears as a strawberry boy, speaks like an American. “I’d love to. When do you want to go?”
“Now? Seems alright?”
The couple waddles toward the canals in the central district.
“There are gangs in this city, I’m told,” she says softly to break the silence. “Where I’m from, too,” he smirks.
He is uncomfortable sweating like this so he suggests an indoor bar with misting fans along the North side of the main canal. She insists the night market is close and they cross over a bridge. His grey, cotton shirt is completely drenched by the time they sit down for Cao Lâu. The rice noodles, shredded pork, greens, bean sprouts, and steaming water seem to break his perspiration.
She has been here longer than him, he found that out on the walk. Her trip is scheduled for one year and she is closing in on ten months, but the friend she began the adventure with went to Fiji with a boy they met in Taiwan and now she thinks she might stay on the road if she can find a job in a hostel that will pay her enough to sustain another eight months of travel. As she brings up a big globule of rice noodle dotted with mint and chives to her mouth, she thinks this might be the best thing she’s ever eaten. “Maybe I am overly sentimental now, because it’s nearing the end, and my friend left me for a boy, but I can’t stop thinking about how reality never lives up to imagination.”
“It can’t,” he says. “Imagination is limitless. Reality has strict laws that define what is and is not possible. Gravity.”
“Yeah,” she shakes her head. “I mean that reality is unconcerned with the possibility of utopia. To the point that it’s a bad word. ‘Unrealistic’ like a pejorative.”
She gives an example about her friend that went off to Fiji with the boy. The moment the two arrived on the archipelago, he began to ignore her. Not in broad ways, he still accompanied her physically, but he was emotionally elsewhere. When they would go swimming or taxi to the airport or check into hostels, he would appear stricken by her presence instead of grateful for her company, which is what prompted him to ask for her to join him in the first place.
“And it all came to a boiling point one night when she was readying to go out for dinner and he said that he didn’t want to go, that he wasn’t hungry and would miss dinner, but that she could go if she wanted to. She said, ‘I came here with you, I want to eat with you’ and then he just blurted out that he wasn’t satisfied with her and preferred to be alone for a few days, to gather his thoughts.”
“So,” the American asks as they make their way to a bar along the mouth of the river. “What did she do?”
“Well, she told him she wasn’t satisfied either, although she told him the honest truth, all of it, which was that she wasn’t satisfied sexually as well as emotionally because he had increasingly treated her like an object without a soul in bed, just some external device to get off with. And of course that bit of truth sent him into a tail spin. They spent a few days apart.”
She falls silent and he asks, “How does that indicate reality not living up to imagination?”
“Right,” she snaps out of the quiet trance that the heat lulled her into. “Because I heard this and I was really happy for my friend. Personally, I felt the guy was shallow and not even particularly interesting. When she told me that his penis was closer to small than average, I thought it made sense because he was obsessed with my friend’s beauty. Everything was about how pretty she was rather than how much he truly enjoyed her as a person. Like her outward appearance was the main reason he was drawn to her, which I think can only be talked about so much before your emptiness shows itself. My friend didn’t care about his size, but he did. And it made all the difference. And I just thought, wow, she got to have a fun time with a boy on this trip, but then I assumed she would come back and join me. I imagined us both working in order to save money for future travel, and meeting another group of boys, maybe like you, or something, and having a better experience that would make her forget that guy. But now they’re in the same hostel in Kyoto and she says she thinks they’re in love.”
The Dutch and the American laugh and eventually buy balloons full of chemicals and a small bag of marijuana from a man who comes up to their table and offers drugs. And then they find themselves in an after-hours bar called The Tiger Trap at two in the morning. More travelers that the Dutch knows join them, and the American scurries off before saying goodbye to anyone. The next day he rents a moped and drives all the way to Hai Vân pass, the luscious green mountain range that served as a boundary between kingdoms in historical Vietnam, where small monkey’s now cross the road right in front of him, waiting for him to drop treats. He wishes he would have invited the Dutch along. Doesn’t know why he didn’t. On the way back, he gets what is known as a Thai-tattoo when he crashes into a motorcycle that turns in front of him and flies over the handlebars. Road rash cuts him to the bone.
Limping into the hostel that evening, scraped and cut on his ankle, and concussed, he passes by the Dutch, who asks him where he went off to last night, that she didn’t even see him go and wishes she would have, because she enjoyed their conversations, but, well, she doesn’t really know why, but she would have liked them to walk home together. He lies and says something about how the same thing happened to him, that he looked for her and wishes they could have walked home together but now he must go to the center of town for an appointment with a tailor that will make him a world renowned, handmade suit in three days. She says she would like to do the same, and get a pretty dress made.
They are both bleeding, despite each other’s personal thoughts that they are perfect and whole... Exciting and mysterious.
He waddles up to his room and tries to disinfect himself, wishing that he could connect with a person he doesn’t know for longer than a few hours. Wishing he wasn’t bleeding and about to try on a terry-clothed suit. Maybe next time, he thinks, wonders what the Dutch thinks about him.