Sky a close and humid pink, like a closed eye, as the snowfall curls and billows under the streetlight.
The street is snowed smooth, scalloped at the curb. Black arterial treetops.
Inside, in bed, my childhood room on the second floor. Where I can lay on my side and watch the snow with one open eye and listen to the heartbeat in my ear. I suppose I have been a real person, my dreams and memories. Cocoon of a teenager, staring out a bedroom window in the hour of mellow blood and curling flakes of suggestion. Like I'd never left. All alone and night brings expectation to a rolling boil. Earth a polychrome leviathan waiting in the black deep, angels and aurochs, faint beings singing to you like the chorus in Euripides, sweet suggestion, the kindly ones, honeyed humors shunting in the too-full flesh. Whatever I was waiting for, I was well into my 20s before I made myself notice that this wasn't that. You open your hands and let go of the unravelling threads and you go to the doctor with your bloody chafed palms. And winter lets you appreciate slow accumulations of fleeting moments: the snowfall rises, an objective correlative.
After Inle Lake we went to the coast of the Indian Ocean. We stayed in a ramshackle motel across a dirt highway from the beach. A fisherman walked along the sand with an extravagant lobster. It was polychrome and polymorphously spined and crenelated. It was tropical gothic. Under the tail, a foamy orange mass of eggs. Female.
The modest Burmese swam in shirts.
We ordered grilled snapper on rice and squeezed lime over the cubed flesh. big sweating bottles of Myanmar Beer. The pink quality of the sea, the sand, and the air: there was an exciting soupiness to all of it, a completely new texture of ocean. Prickling stars. The Indian Ocean - far out, the Andamans, mysterious and fragrant, coated so heavily under the gold dust of longing. Black rocks and tiny crabs, schools of silvery little fish running the tide pools up the beach, at the foot of the cliffs where the sure-footed nearly-naked boys pried urchins and bivalves with a savage heavy knife. Out upon the deep, the heavy-muscled silver carnivores that chase through the schools with idiot mouths. A fish is always desperate on the high seas - a sizzling axon unblinking. The trawlers sloshing with blood.
At the beachside restaurant tables, fat men in shades with scintillant pirate-plunder wristwatches smoked American cigarettes, while their bored mates in shades fussed at status phones and tried to stay out of the sun. The jewel-like fingernails. All over the developing world there is a code of toilette that says 'I belong to a vulgar and powerful man.' I watch these women - careful not to look too long - and wonder it's like. The routine, phone and jewelry and preening and pouting, appears to me sometimes like heartbreaking naïveté, other times like a naked expression of our species' fundamental callousness. And still, each woman, each man, girds themselves in western luxury in order to tell the story of his or her unique personal worth. What are they showing me? They sit in the shade, smile and translate for me when I ask to see the Fisherman's spiny lobster, and we look out together on the brown bodies hauling boats in the surf, wait for our next beers. The sea is full of food. The air is full of mosquito-smoke and grill smoke. The clean white column of the snappers spine when you've picked the meat off - it reminds me of cracking certain old perfect-bound paperbacks and finding that ribbed strand of hard gray glue. The charred tailfin like an insect's wing.
We stayed a few days, the scene repeats. Moved to a slightly nicer motel on the other side of the dirt highway. A sign in the rooms warned visitors not to eat the kebabs carried up and down the beach by timid women in headscarves, in baskets on their heads, day after day, which makes sense. At night geckos lashed their tails and cackled. I searched around the room for them. They hide in shadowed corners and in seemingly impossible crevices: behind bookcases, along the tops of picture frames, watching. I like to grab them and feel their paws pushing, the vise of their little jaws around my finger. I watch them heaving their micro ribs and I peer into their night hunter's eyes, swollen scheming black orbs full of gold chips, then I let them go free again. A big moth goes down in three gulps. A glutton's blinking ecstasy.
What really delights me is when a hotel will leave you a perfectly-formed miniature version of a normal tube of toothpaste.
The beach is in a wide cove. You can see hills, cliffs at either end. After a few beers and the sweat in your eyes you forget it's not Puerto Vallarta. We pick up decaying paperbacks in one town and swap them in another, proceeding this way around the continent, in and out of serendipitous tales. The one hardcover book I bought new - Bring Up the Bodies, I read it in Deqin under a sacred Tibetan mountain that never quite emerged from the fog in our time there. I studied photographs in tourist flyers, took a picture of one, trying to make it look like a picture of the thing itself but with a supercharged aura, like a Richard Prince.
The snow has nearly smoothed the division of street and curb now.
We returned to Yangon and stayed with a wealthy Malaysian businessman who'd come to Burma long ago to manage a factory, and in the way of long-term expats become proficient in the mechanisms that sustain comfort for the rich alien, and over time entrap him by accustoming him to a life he can't afford back home. A satrap, he retains a fawning household staff, curries favor with his easy charity, and affects to cultivate some eccentric passion. For the Malaysian it turned out to be collecting jade. I always wondered, Am I one of them? Put me down here for a few years, on a fixed income: will I then be writing a history of the church tower and employing a stable of widows to turn out sustainable handicrafts?
The snowplow grinds past. The muffled scrape stirs up something young and desperate. Suspended in the yellow taillights, crazy spangles caught from nowhere.
