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I began to protest, but Nao Kao stopped me firmly, his hand raised at shoulder height, its palm facing me in the near-universal gesture of telling another to cease and desist.
“I want to explain this so that you can understand not in an economist’s terms, Liss, but in the terms of daily life. Please.”
I nodded slowly, slightly ashamed at the worldliness that masked my ignorance.
“You know, the first time I saw a full pack of cigarettes, it was a complete surprise. In Bangkok. I was eighteen, maybe nineteen years old, and I had never seen cigarettes sold by the package. Why not, you ask? Because almost no one in Laos can afford an entire package of cigarettes!
“If someone wants a smoke – and you know more than half of the population smokes, right? We can thank Joe Camel and the Marlboro Man for that – but when someone wants to smoke, they buyacigarette. One.A single one.It costs less than one U.S. penny. That is how poor the people of Laos are.
“I love the U.S., Liss. So many years I dreamed of studying in this country. But I have learned so many things here, things I could not even dream, and I am not speaking of the academic education I am receiving. Before I understood America only through the movies, the news, or in a textbook. To be here now in person is a great gift, one I will not forget. But I do not want to forget where I come from either. Or what I will return to.”
A penny for a cigarette. I let that idea spin through my mind, as though launched on a downward race through a coin vortex, its circles becoming tighter and faster before landing with a plink at the bottom. As this new knowledge sunk in, I considered not only what my little clock represented, but also the five-dollar waffle cones or pitchers of beer, half of which I usually spilled anyway, or the takeout left to molder in my fridge. I remembered my shock the first time I flew into São Paulo, the plane swooping low and casting shadows over the corrugated metal roofs of the shacks below. And Brazil was far, far wealthier than Laos. I couldn’t help but wonder at the difference between our worlds, Nao Kao’s and mine.
“I’m sorry, Nao Kao, I –”
“No need for sorry. But I think I will go back to my apartment.”
We parted ways at the bus stop, Nao Kao still agitated as he boarded the bus that would carry him back to the calm of North Campus, to the plentiful trees and quietude that seemed to settle him. I walked back to my apartment, with the weight of the clock dangling from my conscience as well as my wrist, noticing the leaves turning over in advance of the storm. The first fat drops landed as I reached my building considering how cavalier I must have seemed all those times I goaded him about tickets to the Ark or breakfast at Angelo’s. Even encouraging him to order a double instead of a single at the Washtenaw Dairy suddenly felt callous.
I had failed to infer so much.
∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞
Despite the hundredsof hours we had spent conversing for the past year, I had little idea of what to expect in Vientiane.
You don’t become a Million Miler, the one sitting in 2A compliments of Delta’s generosity, by staying home. For the better part of two decades, I had planted trees and donated carbon credits in the name of offsetting whatever harm I inflicted on the planet with my round-the-world ways. When I started down this road, launching myself into the orbit of world-weary road warriors, I might have guessed that the vagaries of bad weather, broken seatbelts, overweight aircraft, and absent flight crews were to become a way of life. I could not have guessed the extent to which travel and its rituals would sear themselves into my soul.
Travel and its rituals: escape. I would not realize the connection until it was too late. When the college asked on Thursday who could be in Prague by Monday, they knew the answer before they asked question.
Was anyone available for a weekend roundtrip to Osaka to escort a wayward student home? What about an unexpected run across the equator to check-in with a university partner in Santiago who had gone a little quiet? Anyone for travel that will involve forty hours in the air and thirty-six hours on the ground?
Anyone? Anyone? The answer, invariably, was Liss. From filling in at the last minute on a workshop panel in Portland to multi-country, monthlong slogs to visit a parade of partners, Liss was available, forever and always.
Such dedication did not pass unnoticed. The publications stacked up, the presentations, too. Advisory board member, grant reviewer, accreditation consultant – my CV no longer listed them all. A rolling stone collects no moss; Liss Larkin never said no.
In the early years of our marriage, the years when I still tried, I would call as the wheels hit the runway, letting Jake know I had arrived over the din of the landing announcements. We talked whenever we could, which is to say wheneverIcould, me sharing an anecdote of cultures colliding, some piece of this life that was ours, but mostly only mine.
As I traveled more, the time between calls lengthened and soon, maybe too soon, the calls became texts, then one text, “hi, honey, I’m here.” By that time, “here” could have been anywhere to Jake; he knew only that here was not “there.” Knew and was grateful, I should say. As for myself, I had made my bed.
The first time I forgot to let Jake know I had arrived in some far-off land he texted me. The second time, it seemed we both forgot. The gulf continued to widen, then yawned all the way open;no news is good newsshorthand for everything else we no longer shared. “When are you leaving again?” he would ask on the occasions my presence at home lasted more than a week. Eventually we did not communicate at all when I traveled – and we were both just fine with that.
Indifference can look mighty similar to liberation.
I thought back to the stories I had tried to share: the early morning laps I’d swum unwittingly alongside a freestyling rat at one of Jakarta’s swankiest hotels. The second-hand humiliation I felt at a Roman lunch where a colleague declared the carbonara in Tokyo to be superior to that of the present trattoria. The stunning reds as the sun sank to the horizon beyond Manila Bay. The afternoon I had spent in Vietnam adrift in the Mekong after so much debris was sucked into our engine that the blades gave a final protesting sputter before falling silent there in the middle of the great muddy river.
“Why are you telling me this?” Jake would ask irritably, and then he’d pointedly return his attention to his guitar, assiduously bringing the sharps and the flats back into line. Oh, but that guitar was the backdrop of our relationship, Jake slumped against the soft red leather of his favorite chair, alternately tuning and strumming, strumming and tuning as he hummed along. “What do you want now?” he’d ask impatiently when I had the gall to interrupt, only to return his attention squarely to the instrument before I’d even finished my thought. If he’d ever found the nerve to tell his academic parents how much the music meant to him, to pursue it beyond the boundary of our living room, maybe we both would have been happier.
I thought now of the old stories Nao Kao could recount with me, tales of adventure I’d shared once, twenty years ago, but whose every detail he knew by heart. Ambivalence was too kind a word for how Jake felt about hearing such stories. He might know the name, date, and location of every concert he’d ever attended, but ask him where I’d choked down a plate of tripe or been forced to bail from a still-moving taxi cab and he’d come up blanks every time.
In the face of such disregard, I began to keep more than just my traveling adventures to myself, and the chasm gaped open. Millimeter by millimeter, the tectonic plates of our own little planet were drifting apart.
What cause, these gales? I’d asked that question of myself so often through the years. Only later did I consider that it was not the presence of some mysterious force, but an absence of one, that caused such stormy seas.
Gradually I came back into the moment: me, coursing through the air, bound for parts as yet unknown. Vientiane. Luang Prabang. Laos.
∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞
The least denselypopulated country in its corner of the world, what passes for development in Laos these days is almost entirely dependent on China. As a result, many projects are not only funded by the Chinese, but completed with Chinese workers using Chinese materials purchasing Chinese goods paid for in Chinese yuan. The unwitting traveler might mistake some cities for China. If Laos was not quite so desperately poor as Cambodia, neither was that much of a measuring stick.
