'And sit at the same table?'
'Well, yes, it so happened ...'
'So you admit to sitting at the same table with this man you have never seen before? And perhaps you share also the same compartment? The same bed, no doubt?'
'It's not true!' she screams.
Soldiers light a wood stove. The assistant speaks: 'Pardon me, sir, but my son is a collector. Could I keep one of these forgeries?'
'You may keep one. Which do you prefer?'
'Well, the girl, sir. She is prettier. My son will whack himself off looking at it, I don't mind telling you.'
Very well. Destroy the other passport.'
My passport is dropped into the wood stove. He turns to the other American passengers.
'All of you now come forward and surrender your lies. Documents purportedly issued by a government which ceased to exist two hundred years ago....'
A chorus of outraged protests goes up from the passengers but soldiers snatch their passports and dump them into the stove.
'Well, Mother and I want you to know we will report you to the American Consul,' a tourist moans.
The officer stands up. 'The currency you are carrying is of value only to a collector. I doubt if you will find one in a town of this size.' He gets into the train, which starts to move.
'But what about our luggage?'
'It has been impounded. You may recover it in the capital on presentation of valid passports.'
The train gathers speed. We are standing in a turn-of-the-century western town: water tower, a red dirt street, Station Hotel & Restaurant. I leave my countrymen waving credit cards and traveler's checks in front of a bland Chinese behind a counter who takes a toothpick out of his mouth, looks at the end of it, and shakes his head.
I walk along the street past a saloon and barbershop and turn into a rundown weed-grown street: Street of Missing Men. The houses on both sides look deserted. As I walk, the buildings change and the street slopes steeply down.
BATHS OPEN DAY AND NIGHT. I go into a steam room with marble benches. A boy smooth and white as alabaster beckons me and I follow him through a maze of showers and steam rooms into a waiting room and out into the street looking for a taxi on a steep stone platform over a green slope with stone steps going down.
We are looking for a Twin Taxi. He has a twin with him who is crippled, one leg in a cast. The alabaster youth sits next to me on a stone bench. He has no white to his eyes, which are a delicate egg-blue and shiny as glass. He sits there with his arm around my shoulder, talking a strange language that sets off little cartoons and film sequences ... languid white legs flicker ... silver buttocks in a dark room....
I can take the hut set
anywhere
I have rented a riverfront shack from someone named Camel. The river is slow and deep, half a mile wide at this point. Rotting piers along an unpaved street. Loading sheds in ruins, roofs fallen in. Standing in the middle of the street I turn now towards a row of houses. The houses are narrow and small clapboards, peeling paint, galvanized iron roofs separated by drainage ditches choked with weeds and brambles, rusty tin cans, broken stoves, pools of stagnant water running to culverts broken and blocked with refuse. I go up steep wooden steps to what had been a screened front porch. The screening is rusted through and the screen door off its hinges. I open a padlock and push the front door open. A musty smell of disuse and a sudden chill. Warm air seeps into the room behind me and where the outside air and inside air come in contact I see a palpable haze like heat waves. The house is about twenty feet by eight feet.
