Do Hookers Dream of Electric ATMs?

I was travelling in country Australia, visiting small, leafy villages. I don’t recognize it as anywhere specifically or even typically Australian, but I knew it was Australia. The overdone light, the dusty gray of the eucalyptus leaves. I had friends there. I knew no-one. I had been there. I was going somewhere else. I had arrived, finally. I sensed an evil presence, but with its malediction directed somewhere else, not towards me, like an arrow whistling past my ear.

Someone said not to be afraid. If there was nothing to be afraid of, why did they even say that? As I turned a corner I looked up the road to where a wall of men in black suits, three or four-tiers of men, impossibly high, a procession like this, all in black, all walking silently with an otherworldly and decidedly unpleasant intent. I stepped back to let them pass, but there were only two men. They nodded and kept walking past, turning into a side lane up a slight hill, talking in a mumble to each other about something I couldn’t hear, laughing but serious, serious laughter, maybe talking about going for a drink.

I walked after them up the hill, not so much to follow as to go somewhere else from where I stood on this dirt road, to go up this dirt lane. I walked between small huts, it was like a surfing camp-ground - people were sitting outside, nodding to me, smiling. They knew me, but they were not particularly friendly, merely and nodding smiling through politeness, accepting that I was here, but not really belonging here. But the ringing?

What was ringing?

My alarm clock. I woke up.

It was true. I HAD been living in Thai village. The Australia part had been only in the dream. There was another reality now, a new one.

I had married a Thai hooker. The village I had been wandering in was not Australia but outside Chiang Mai.

I searched my memory for her face and it came easily. She was not very attractive: square-headed, a small mid-third of face with a very tiny nose, somewhat jutting chin, but this face was strongly etched in my mind. Of course it was, this was my wife. What had I done? Maybe I was drunk when the ceremony had been performed. I don’t remember any ceremony, only the fact we were married. Maybe I felt sorry for her and she was friendly enough to make it seem like the right thing to do. Everyone wants to be happy with someone, someone friendly...

And there it was in front of me, virtually, the reality. This was how it was.

The other life, my life before this dream, THAT was the dream. All this time I had only been fantasizing that I was single. Dreaming that I had never fallen prey to these temptations, that I had surfed the single-guy vortex of Bangkok bars successfully, remained free. But, no. That idea of my life was a lie. I had repressed it. I had to tell my family. I was a disgrace. How would they react? I had to do this now, get it over with. I was sitting up in bed. Time to get to work, work must go on.

The conviction that all this was true stayed on, still firing around my brain. Oh shit, I moaned, what have I done? I’d have to send money to Thailand to pay for her and her family. She loved me (she wouldn’t lie), depended upon me, I couldn’t let her down. Had I already organized this, surely I must have done, I couldn’t recollect. If only I hadn’t been so stupid as to let this happen in the first place. What was I thinking?

I stood up to go to the bathroom for a piss. It was still a bit dark, before 7am, and I had an early(ish) start this morning. I didn’t see things clearly, only the outline of my desk and chair, the piles of clothes spent, the tangle of sheets and pillows on the bed almost the size of a small person, the shadow of the fan ticking its circuits.

But I was waking only slowly.

This feeling of having been mistaken about everything covered me like dew on the morning grass. Like down from a ruptured pillow.

Heavy-lidded, eyes thick-shut with a hoary crust of sleep, I padded into the bathroom. The yellow hued globes flickered on, eerily casting shadows across my face like an x-ray. I splash cold water on my face.

I clear away my strange thoughts, wash away these idiotic dreamings…

I wipe at my waking impression that something is wrong in my life.

I clean this silliness out my mind.

Everything is fine. I am not married. What had I been thinking? What? Did I really believe that I was married again, and to a Thai Hooker?

I look at myself in the mirror and smile, thinking, Man, what a horrible nightmare!

And I wonder who that arrow was aimed at?

A voice comes from the bedroom - "Torng kaan ngoen samrap suea paa maai...*"

A bell is exploding, I shake myself awake again and sit up suddenly in bed.

Alone.

Single.

The alarm is ringing.

I have to be at work in an hour.


«* "I need money to buy some new clothes..." »