Naked in Dangerous Places - Cash Peters [62]
At that moment, forty sodden South Korean tourists come to my rescue, splashing along the causeway, hunched under umbrellas, and barge on through the doors of the temple, oblivious to anyone or anything.
Half of me—the dark, pathetic half—is hoping that they'll whisk the little girl away with them in their rush to get indoors, so that I won't have to deal with this situation or feel the depth of survivor's guilt that I do. But that's not the case. When the crowd dissipates, she's still there, in her pretty lace-trimmed floral summer dress, leaning against a stone balustrade. And we're right back where we started.
Doe-eyed, she rattles her cup, surveying my awkwardness calmly from behind the flap of pale grafted skin that connects her top lip to her forehead. I guess she's used to moments like this, to rejection, double-takes, revulsion, the slow drip of pity from passersby, and is inured to them. But knowing this doesn't make it any easier to deal with, or alleviate the profound sadness I feel as I try to avoid staring at her.
“No,” I plead silently, “please don't rattle your cup at me. I have nothing to give you.”
I want to explain that I'm making a dumb, gimmicky TV travel show where I visit foreign lands without money and pretend I'm hungry and desperate and poor. Christ, what a feeble concept that's seeming right now; what a miserably lame idea for a piece of so-called entertainment. I don't even carry loose change. Whatever money I have is given to Tasha between shots for safekeeping. As proof, I drag the lining out of my trouser pockets, mumbling under my breath, “I'm sorry. I'm sorry.”
Then, badly shaken, and stung to the point of tears, I do what everyone else seems to do to the girl with no nose: I dive through the temple doors and run off.
If you can work it that you visit Angkor Wat in the early hours of the morning while the tourists are back at their hotel eating breakfast, or in the evening while they're having dinner, it's a blissful, entrancing experience. Or so I hear. As it is, I arrive midafternoon and find that the reverie of traveling through time is almost impossible here, marred as it is by Swedish babies crying, Argentinean camera shutters turning over, German students scrunching together for a group photo, and the infuriating nonstop clatter-patter of sensible English walking shoes echoing down the dark stone passageways. It's utterly depressing. Like watching ants dismantle a dead bird. I mean, if you can't be alone even for a couple of seconds in a place that was constructed for that very purpose, then you can't find peace, and what's a temple without peace? It's just a building.
Curiously, even if you take the initiative and walk against the flow, somehow you end up in the same place as everyone else: a giant, scalable stone tower on the roof. Shaped like an elongated pyramid, it rises steep and looms ominous, and is supposed to represent Mount Meru, home of the gods in Hindu tradition. It was here, at its summit, that King Suryavarman erected a giant golden statue honoring Vishnu, who, though acclaimed as “the creator of all things,” appeared, when it came to constructing this tower anyway, to be very much dependent on mankind to knuckle down and do the heavy lifting for him.
The statue was placed at the tip of some thin stone steps, more like little ledges really, numbering around twenty-five in all, rising to a point some thirty feet high. Think of it as an early Cambodian escalator, one that's broken and no longer moves.
Cowering in an alcove out of the lashing rain, I watch amused, along with a crowd of eager spectators, as several elderly robust grandmothers from the American Midwest tell themselves that you can't come all the way from Ohio to the greatest Buddhist temple in the world and not see the golden statue of Vishnu, can you? Of course not. So, goading each other with clucking noises