Instructions

INSTRUCTIONS


The way it works is this: Claude receives instructions.  When Claude follows the instructions the quality of his life improves.  He becomes markedly more prone to the experience of actual happiness.  There may even be delicate evidence that he has made a meaningful contribution to the whole, though of course that can always be argued.

The instructions are remarkably non-mysterious.  They are really quite clear.  There is every reason to believe Claude might have an upright and successful life if he could just listen to the instructions, listen and obey and then hunker down to listen some more.

Instead Claude forgets the instructions.  Invariably.  Claude does the wrong thing.  It is not enough to say that Claude does the wrong thing.  Claude does the perfectly wrong thing.  Claude does the most wrong thing possible.  Catastrophe follows.  And Claude is always just downright astonished.

Later, Claude receives the instructions again.  He even practices them, for a very short time, during which his life improves.  Feeling better now, Claude takes the earliest opportunity to do the worst thing conceivable.  To his surprise, he finds that he feels like crap.  Not that this prevents him from choosing, with great care, the worst actions possible and then persevering in those actions.

Then, a breakthrough. Claude receives instructions!  They are the exact same instructions he has received umpteen times before, but they seem totally new to him.  He carefully writes them down -- so that he’ll never forget, never ever in his whole life -- marvelling at their unique clarity, in a series of notebooks wherein the the exact same instructions have been written and rewritten to an extent somewhere between possibly pathological and downright spooky.

“Why can’t life come with instructions?” many people lament, including Claude.  But the truth is that Claude is continually receiving instructions, Claude’s whole life is instructions, instructions he very carefully writes down and then ignores and then is astonished by and then forgets again.

Microscopic Alimony

MICROSCOPIC ALIMONY


With taxi drivers, Claude often quarrels but when men on motorbikes give him a lift, Claude automatically gives them whatever they ask and often a little bit more.  This seems the most natural thing in the world and indeed he hardly thinks about it.  After all, they have just been through a life-threatening experience together.  How could they fail to be fond of each other, as old soldiers are?

Isn’t it fair, to give a guy a few bucks, if he asks for it nicely, when you’ve had your legs wrapped around him for the last twenty minutes?  Enough for a beer at least?

Imagine, Claude thinks, if we had to pay money to everyone about whom we have lewd and lascivious fantasies!  A kind of microscopic alimony for the use we have made of their image and form.  Say, point zero one cents a fantasy.  Maybe point zero five it’s something really intensely perverse.

A lot of rough characters would suddenly be wealthy.  Claude would be destitute and owe a lot of people money.

Those Who Don't Love You, A Summary

THOSE WHO DON’T LOVE YOU, A SUMMARY


One blazing afternoon, hiding from the sun behind drawn curtains, Claude creates, solely for his own perusal, a summary regarding those who do not love him.

Those who don’t love you are all above average good-looking.  There is a certain resemblance, akin to that found in members of small profitable religions.  It appears likely that God has chosen to reward these people for their good judgment.  (About this, they agree with you.)  Their collars are fluorescent white to match their teeth and the confident whites of their eyes are as smooth and unruffled as the sheets pulled tight across the king-size bed of a luxury hotel.

Those who don’t love you appear sculptural in profile.  They live their lives in the future.  Their futures are secure.  They itch only for acceptable reasons and only in sanctioned areas.  Their desires are all the official and sanctioned desires  which stimulate the economy in predictable ways and provide jobs for those less fortunate.  They practice virtue.  Virtue means only wanting exactly what you are supposed to want.

From the serene way they pass their days, like a sharp knife through a fish, you’d swear that instructions were passed to them each morning at breakfast, typed on one side of a sheet 8 ½ by 11.

How is it possible that they live so cleanly, those who do not love you?  It is because they know what is right and what is responsible.  Right and responsible never fail include them.  Oh, why can’t you be responsible!  Of course for you to be responsible would mean being someone else entirely.  Oh, why can’t you be someone else entirely!

Those who don’t love you naturally find themselves in positions of authority.  In fact, no one possesses such innate and unquestioned authority as those who don’t love you.  They are so compelling.  It as if they have understood something that you yourself long suspected.

It is just like when you listen to a beautiful spiritual talk and say, “On some level I always knew that”.  So, too, comes the news of your own inadequacy, your unacceptability, your worthlessness.  Their disdain and disapproval slip on so naturally, and fit so perfectly, like a shoe specially made.  How could it not be right?  How could it not be yours?

Tourism

TOURISM


Upon entering the bathroom at the cafe, Claude was surprised to see that bottom of the urinal had been lined with slices of lime.  This seemed to him very opulent, especially considering the worldwide shortage of limes.  He wondered if the limes in the urinal had once been in people’s drinks, or if someone in the kitchen was actually slicing fresh limes directly for use in the urinal.

He peered down at the limes.  They did not appear to have been squeezed or used in any way.  The smell -- lime piss -- was not ideal, but it was certainly preferable to piss on its own.

Claude needed to use the toilet actually, but he stood at the urinal first, because it seemed to him like a once in a lifetime opportunity.  

Origins of the Universe

ORIGINS OF THE UNIVERSE


Obviously the universe must be considerably interested in human being doing stupid things the vast majority of the time.  No one is entirely sure why we are here.  But, to judge simply by the evidence, it appears that we are here for slapstick.

It’s as if God the Father said, “I feel like a movie tonight” and God the Mother said, “OK, but my head is tired, just something dumb”, and God the Father said, “OK!”, and here we are.  

It's a Process

IT’S A PROCESS


Ek explains that it’s a process, and that for lots of men the process is pretty much the same.  

“When I leave my wife I have twenty-five dollars.  Three dollars I pay for a bus to the city.  I get job at hotel for food only.  Later they give me twenty dollars a month.  Then they give me forty.

I buy my friend’s moto bike, be driver, get better moto bike.  When I buy tuk tuk I sell moto bike to my friend.  After few years I get airport license, drive tuk tuk to from airport, now my friend rents my airport tuk tuk and he pay me ten dollars a day.”

Next, Ek explains, he will buy a small guesthouse.  Later he will buy a big one.  Then he will be rich.  Meanwhile he gives what help he can to men just coming from the village -- “not for free but for fair.”

Claude finds this very interesting and he thanks Ek for telling him about it.  He likes understanding a little about how people live.  But Ek interrupts him.

“But foreigner also have process.  You 41.  Always 41.  My last boyfriend he 41.  Boyfriend before that 41, too.  My last boyfriend Germany.  He has small dick but better face than you.  Like you he crazy for sex.

“41 year gay guy come this city, looking, looking.  Little crazy, maybe.”  Ek cranes his head forward and bobs his head like a bird pecking in the sand.  “Looking looking!”

Claude is taken aback.  “But if it’s a process -- what happens next?”

Ek looks at him carefully, as if he reading his forehead.  “Sihanoukville,” he announces.  “You go beach.  My old boyfriend he live in Sihanoukville now with his new boyfriend and his small small penis.  In two three years you inherit money or become drug addict.  Do both, even better!  

All the time same process.  Little different always.  Not so different.  Only thing know for sure is you teach English!”

The Room

THE ROOM


Without a doubt there are a very great number of people who fear that no one loves them, but it is a much smaller number who are afforded the opportunity to live after the fact has been confirmed. 

It is no surprise that the room in which these people find themselves is austere, that there is gray mixed into the white with which the walls and ceiling have been painted, that it is cold and cold in the way that gets to you, with a floor that feels like ice, that seldom is it ever clear if the door has been locked from outside or from within, the door upon that densely populated solitude most commonly referred as haunted.  

All of this is very commonly known.

The surprise is that you can live there.  Despite threats to the contrary, no one arrives to actually kill you.  You live there.  Braced for the chill, with the chill for company, recreation and exercise, like a pet dog made of ice, and that what matters, above all, is the choice as to whether you are a prisoner, a discard, or a monastic.

Reciprocation

RECIPROCATION


Claude is ashamed that he needs people in his hotel to be kind to him, but he does.  In one hotel, where he was intending to stay just a few days, the staff spoke to him so tenderly it brought tears to his eyes.  He stayed in that hotel for a month.  All his life Claude has addressed people as though they were injured forest creatures.  Now he yearns to be addressed in that same way.

At this latest hotel no one is friendly at all.  No questions or banter, no smiles, even though Claude is very polite and very smiley, determined, above all, to be culturally sensitive, and thus extremely careful, always bowing and flinching, tip-toeing in and out the door of the hotel where the receptionist lady passes him the key and the boss turns away and that is all.

One afternoon Claude propositions his tuk tuk driver.  (As has often been noted, rigid prescriptions for correct behavior have a remarkable tendency to evaporate instantaneously.)  The tuk tuk driver turns out to be not only willing but enthusiastic.  Overwhelmingly enthusiastic, in fact.  Downright keen.  He wants to give as much as he wants to receive.  More, even.  That tuk tuk driver reciprocates as much as human being can.

Taken aback by this unexpected level of attention, Claude abruptly finds himself at the extremes of pleasure and, not knowing what else to do, screams for three minutes at the top of his lungs.

From this point on, every time Claude walks in or out of his hotel, everyone smiles at him.

Anarchy

ANARCHY


Claude thought anarchy sounded great.  Do what thou wilt!  LIve and let live!   Claude imagined himself strutting through the Wild West, swigging from a bottle of beer and adjusting himself whenever he felt like it.

But, the fact is, it is sometimes difficult to live in a country where traffic lights are merely suggestions, where a red light means nothing more than, “If you have extra time, you might consider slowing down now.”  

Anarchy is hard on pedestrians.  If everyone is going to do exactly what they want, exactly when they want to do it, then -- it is best to be inside a large truck.

Claude had a marked tendency toward indecision, which had often been a source of weakness and embarrassment to him.  Now, however, since he couldn’t make up his mind about whether or not to kill himself, it appeared that indecisiveness was actually preserving his life.

Sometimes Claude wanted to die, sometimes not, but absolutely one hundred percent of the time Claude possessed total crystalline clarity in regard to the fact that he did not wish to be crushed flat by a bus.  

Waiting on the curb, Claude wished that, before running away to a distant land, he had thought about whether or not he would be able to cross the street.  Buses and trucks roared past, cars swerved, bikes zipped on both edges of the road in the opposite direction of traffic.  “Look both ways” doesn’t work when there are drastically more directions than “both”. 

The situation was made acutely worse by the fact that, every time Claude came to an intersection and paused to consider how he might survive traversing it, men immediately began shouting to him from all four corners “Tuk tuk!  Moto-bike!  Hello!”  Thus it was impossible for Claude to do what he needed to do in order to survive, namely pay attention to what was directly in front of him.

This was low season and the taxi-men were quite literally hungry, which is not to suggest that these gentlemen were not also motivated by genuine concern because it was very evident that Claude was out of his element and it was obvious, even to those zooming past at high speeds, that Claude would have been better off in a very small village, a century before the invention of the automobile.

Clarification

CLARIFICATION


Who were they -- the two people who cruised past on a motorcycle, as Claude stood stunned at the side of the road?  Claude recognized them at once.  It was his brother and his brother’s wife.  His brother with the confident profile of a well-regarded patrician politician and his wife, the best-loved person in town.  Like movie stars, they have noted the passing of the time by turning gray at the temples.

It does look like them, doesn’t it?  When it was in fact obviously his cousin, the perpetual volunteer, and her husband, the money guy.  Which is not to say it is not his brother and his brother’s wife.  (His family is extremely close-knit.  Cousins only marry cousins and everyone’s relations can be described in any number of ways.  For example, Claude is actually a distant cousin of himself -- though they met only once, at a reunion for extended family, and the  meeting was, by all accounts, awkward.)

The family resemblance is unmistakable -- how could it not be?  It is was in fact his very own mother and father who drove past him, smoothly and without stopping, on the road after they decided not to have children but instead to drive across the Orient and here they are, just passing by now.

Mangoes

MANGOES


One day after lunch, as Claude returns to the shade of his simple but pleasant hotel, the receptionist hands him two mangoes in a small wicker basket.  “These are for you,” the receptionist says.

As usual, a group of young men stand around the desk.  Claude thanks each of them individually, makes a short speech expressing his gratitude, shakes their hands, laughs along with them and bows.  Then he walks away without the mangoes.  Because he assumes it is all some small joke he does not quite understand.  (Because, seriously, aren't most things?)

By the time Claude has put one foot on the stairs, a young man is beside him.  "Sir," he says.  "You have forgotten your mangoes."  He is looking at Claude a little strangely.  And Claude, for his part, has an extremely hard time understanding, believing, and accepting that the mangoes are actually for him.  He asks, Seriously?  Really? several more times before consenting to take hold of the basket. 

Claude climbs the stairs carrying the delicate wicker basket feeling -- despite his gray beard and combat boots -- exactly like a preschool flower girl at a spring wedding in a lace frock.

Many strange things have happened in the life of Claude.  There have been many odd surprises.  Nothing, however, has quite prepared him to be given two ripe mangoes, one bright afternoon without warning and right out of the blue.

Immediately Claude has theories.  Does this mean the daily rent is going up?  Will there soon be another wedding blaring next door?  

Or, is this mystery somehow connected to the other mystery?  Are these mangoes a peace offering from his lurking family members?  Are they in cahoots with the hotel staff to monitor his movements?

Claude is so perplexed, and also so moved, that he is ready, almost, to cry.  He decides the mysteries must go together: the mangoes must be a gift from his invisible family.  The mangoes are very cool, obviously having been refrigerated.  Yes, it was all part of a plan.  The mangoes must be a gift from his family.  As such they are presumably saturated with cyanide.  Thus the delicate wicker basket: to ensure the receptionist did not die while handling them.

Claude takes a knife and peels the first mango. He is determined to cooperate, even unto death.

Claude is not at all surprised when the mango is the very most perfect and delectable mango he has eaten in his life.  Somehow he expected that.  One mango he finishes, the other he puts aside. Perhaps someone will come along with whom he can share it.  He is so covered with juice he must shower, which he does, still marvelling that, even at this late hour, he still understands so very little about the world, which is as saturated with mystery as a mango is with juice. 

Suprise

SURPRISE


One afternoon in that distant and unheralded city, where it appears that Claude’s life is winding up quietly, unobtrusively, and according to plan, something happens that is entirely strange.  Claude has just stumbled out of an over-priced but shady cafe where he has made a single cup of coffee last long enough to compose three poems as mediocre as they are heartfelt and is blinking his eyes in the bright sun when he sees two members of his family drive past on a motorbike.  The woman holds lightly onto the man who is driving.  Neither is wearing a helmet.  They cruise right past him, crisply and smoothly, without turning in his direction or stopping.  

Claude is too surprised to call out.  

He has seen them for only a few seconds.  They are two people he has not seen for several decades, in a city thousands of miles from this one.  Nonetheless he is sure it is them.  He is certain, too, that they have recognized him.  Or, to be more precise, it seems they did not need to recognize him, since they presumably knew that he was there all along and stopping for him had not been part of the plan.

Claude stands slack-jawed beside the street, like a man who has suffered a small but not negligible seizure.  This sudden appearance seems to him as unkind as it is precipitous.  It was very long ago that he first left home, and he went far away, so that his family would not need to go to the bother of rejecting him, and so that he need not feel rejected.  It is unnecessary to reject what is already absent: on that fine principle he had arranged his existence.

Now it appears that his family has pursued him.  Why?  Are they checking up on him?  Has additional rejection been deemed necessary?  Why should it be so?  What business could members of his family, inveterate successes one and all, possibly have in a unprofitable city like this one?  

All at once Claude understands the helpless suffering of those who suffer phantom pain, the unappeased throbbing of a limb long-gone.  He is like a deeply devoted man who has lost his dearly held faith in a single moment.  Oh, that it should abandon him now, his faith in the efficacy of going away!

The Verb 'to Claude'

THE VERB ‘TO CLAUDE’

Claude has always felt that the name Claude was the most pompous and useless name ever.  His mother chose it because she loved France, or, as she would say, she adored it, though she’d never been there and neither had he.  His mother had used the French pronunciation, somewhere between “cloud” and “clod”.  His father thought that was ridiculous.  To his father, he was always “clod”.

When Claude was in high school, one of his friends teased him that Claude was actually a verb and to Claude meant to leave unexpectedly.  Claude had a tendency to wander out of parties without telling anyone.  More than a tendency.  More like a rule.  Only twice had Claude left and never returned.  Two disappearances.  Perhaps these were rehearsals for what would come next: his final and permanent disappearance.  

The first disappearance was when he was sixteen and exited his family, who sighed audibly with relief.  The second disappearance, from small city in the Midwest of the United States had occurred just a few months previous.

As you might expect, Claude is one about whom the neighbors will say, he kept to himself.  Even by the standards of the very ordinary he ranked as uncommonly lusterless.  Then again, nowadays the neighbors are so busy examining their devices that it might well be possible to exit, from a fourth storey window, on a metallic colored winged horse, without anyone noticing.  Unless of course they happened to record it accidentally on their camera phone, out the window in the background of a dinner party, in which case someone might notice it later, after the video has been uploaded to Facebook.

Dandelions

DANDELIONS

Claude has a hobby. A project, just like everyone needs, excepting those who are struggling to simply not starve. Not starving is also a project, though, to be sensitive, it must not be called a hobby. Claude likes to write small poems. They are not very good poems. He is not a very good poet. Just the same he enjoys writing his poems very much. He has excellent penmanship and he enjoys watching the words as they come out, one well-crafted letter after another. For a time he even had a muse. A university exchange student from Spain who, on several spectacularly fortunate occasions, had taught Claude new, important, and invigorating things about sex. Claude wrote several hundred poems inspired by this young and beautiful man. (Under no circumstances should ‘inspired’ be considered a synonym for ‘good’.) Then, one day, he made the mistake of asking his muse what he thought of his poems. The muse wrote crisply back. To be frank, he disliked the innate cowardice of fragmentation as well as the museum-ready cliches of Imagism, and when was Claude finally going to write something that might add up, matter, and make money? Claude’s muse was not wrong about anything. Claude was entirely in agreement with his assessment. Claude had a deep and secret desire to matter and add up. Money, too, he would have accepted graciously. Claude understood that his poems were not very good and that he ought to do something else, if only there were something else that he could do. It was also true that Claude felt somewhat sad that he had chosen, as his muse, the kind of It’s-Important-To-Be-Honest mother who does not hesitate to tell her child that, frankly, she has never liked dandelions.

Lice

LICE

One thing that Mister Ek found very interesting, even forty years later, was that his lice at that time were an entirely different color. Now, if he got lice, they were black or very dark brown, but back then, if, as often happened, he found himself crawling with lice, the lice were very pale, even white. "And my shit! My shit was like rat shit!" Mister Ek laughs and shows with his hands the small amount of rice he was given, only rice and just once a day, even though he worked in the fields all the time after Khmer Rouge came to power and his father and brother were killed in the fighting. Both his father's wives caught malaria and, weakened by hunger, soon died along with two of his sisters. Many other brothers and sisters survived, for a while. "I care them nothing. They care me nothing. Hungry only.” Mister Ek showed how thin wrists became. His skin, he said, became like the scales of a fish. "I lose my hair. Young people look like old people." He described how much it hurt to sleep on the ground with no flesh on his hips and when he got up he would find his skin left behind, like the skin of a snake. The lice interested him most. Those pale lice, feasting on the thin blood of the starving. "That is how it was then,” Mister Ek says. “Even the lice suffer.”

Silence

SILENCE


The first morning the loudspeakers roared on at six and continued until nine that night.  Distorted wedding music, suitable for a union of a deaf groom and an undead bride, so thunderous that Claude had to lock himself in the bathroom to be able to think.  Music so loud that, over the course of the day, a glass crawled to the edge of the table and jumped.

The next morning, the loudspeakers startled him awake at five.  Claude fled his room, but within three hours he’d run out of things to do in town.  He returned to his room, which continued to shake with overwhelming noise.  He didn’t know what to do.  He was grateful that, in a climate like this one, it is always correct to take another shower.

As Claude was drying off, the music stopped.

The music stopped and Claude was neither happy nor relieved because the music had stopped many times before.  Every time it turned back on again within thirty seconds.

But after a minute the music had not started again and it didn’t start the minute after that either.  Claude noticed he was tip-toeing around the room, as though the music were an angry stereophonic beast he might wake up again.

After half an hour Claude realized the music really might not turn back on.  Might or might not.  For now there was silence.  And that silence was not at all the same silence that had been there two days before, when the loudspeakers had first crackled on.

Here now was a lush and textured quiet, a far more luxurious expanse than he ever would have expected from a dusty semi-industrial city like this one.  He could have gone on listening to the silence all day and felt that he was making entirely practical and satisfactory use of his time.  This was a silence that was not entirely silent.  Of course not.  Not in a ragged city like this one, with motors, barking, shouts, calls to prayer, and, just now, a cardboard box being dragged down a gravelly street.

Just the same, it was the silence you heard.

Plan

PLAN


Claude has a plan.  It is likely the first actual plan he’s had in his whole life, despite a lifetime of being told he must prepare for the future.  Claude is very pleased to have a plan which, as promised, has brought a degree of ease and security to his life.  Like a millionaire with top-knotch Blue Cross and a second home in Arizona, he basks in the knowledge that his future is assured.

Claude’s plan is to live entirely quietly, in a foreign and unheralded place, until the sum of money he has saved for that purpose is exhausted.  He will then end his life, having composed a beautiful thank you note on the unlined blue Japanese stationery he has selected, without neglecting to leave an enormous tip for the cleaning lady, who quite understandably might like to receive several sessions of counseling.

He has saved the money and stockpiled the pills.  He has not neglected the unpleasant details: a small tarp, a plastic bag, electrical tape.  He is free now to do what almost no one ever does: to live as he chooses.  An early departure is by no means too high a price to pay for this liberty.  Any number of reasonable people might be perfectly willing to exchange twenty years of drudgery for six months of freedom, if ever they were granted the option.

It must be said that Claude is not in any way opposed to life.  He is not, god forbid, A Negative Person, the kind of detestable misery-monger who deflates parties and acts as if aging, loss and climate change were real.  No, Claude uses skin cream, drinks eight glasses of water, votes, and makes any number of optimistic acts that have been proven repeatedly to be of zero utility.

Claude’s earnest -- if measured -- enthusiasm is expressed in the fact that he has chosen places in which he can live for ten to twenty dollars a day.  Claude savors the vegetable soup with yellow noodles that costs just one dollar.  If he detested life he’d head to Stockholm, blow through his money, and be dead in three days.

As it is, Claude sees fit to extend the exercise.  Not too short and, may it please the Lord, not too long.

Lights Out

LIGHTS OUT

The lights go off and everyone cheers.  It’s blacker than black.  Why is the first flash of feeling that of vast relief?

The lights come back on.  Another cheer, but more subdued.

Perhaps we die and cheer right up.

Acrobat

ACROBAT


Always the same show, but never exactly the same.  Today the acrobat is blindfolded as he juggles the torches (and drops one), today he is wearing a sparkling copper head scarf that gleams as if pennies have been stitched to it.  When the acrobat, instead of swallowing the third flaming torch, tugs wide his waistband and thrusts the torch into his pants, Claude cannot help but feel that he is being personally addressed.

The acrobat pulls the flaming torch out the leg of his shorts.  The tourists sitting at lunch watch the show covertly, as if snitching grapes.  When the acrobat comes around with his long red satin cap, the tourists stare past him.  Claude hurriedly pulls bills from his pocket, smoothes them, arranges them in a neat pile with all the faces facing the same way, and thanks the acrobat vigorously from the bottom of his heart.

The acrobat pays zero attention to Claude.  Pays no more notice of him than he does of the tourists being tight-fisted and rude.

Claude must throw all his neatly arranged bills into the red satin hat.  What Claude feels is best described as reverence.  Reverence is not at all too strong a word.

Non-discrimination

NON-DISCRIMINATION


Claude is offended, frankly, that the fluffy mutt here at the pseudo-French cafe appears to like the drunk back-slapping Australians every bit as much as he likes him.  The same tail-wagging enthusiasm, the same benedictory small licks.  So much for his St. Francis fantasies.  Fuzzy slut.

The same way you can get to feeling, some afternoons at the baths, that you must be good-looking, until you see who the guy who was just with you goes with next.