remember not

4.14.13

A heavy haze greets the throngs, a red-orange ball rises majestically.  Happy New Year, a reason to rejoice?  A reason to sing?  A reason to be thankful I’m still alive on this dusty planet?

An interview in three hours.  How prepared are you, well, we’ll see.  Just sing a little Audioslave and be yourself and drink a few cups of coffee beforehand. Fifty percent chance of rain this afternoon, plllff.

We stayed in the room, three hundred rupees a night, ordered masala tea on the kitchen roof a month before the tower was erected, waited an awfully long time for that tea and told the pleasant woman busy with other things, oh here come people for sodas.  Two hours to go, I’ve read up on the university, it’s country, does it have Taco Bell, yes, Starbucks, of course.  We’re doing ok.  The haze is keeping the spring sun heat to a minimum but the glare blinds.  Time for a smoke?

As we were leaving the room a bee came in and Keith and I tried to wave it out, but to no avail.  When we returned the bee had died, suffocation I presume, and a colleague of the fallen bee flew into the room, saw his buddy overturned and went right after me! Stinging me in the arm like I knew his friend had hours to live and I was responsible.

We left the view top and I saw a woman standing on the steps in front of an entrance to a café and here we stopped for chai.  I can’t say I wasn’t too sympathetic with my colleague’s anguish; three girlfriends, a new jeep, more money than he knew what to do with, I knew a cosmological bit of colluding was in the works but there was no way to explain anything then.

The rain and tornadic winds come mid afternoon from the north and now a dark cell sits right over the lake rumbling and blowing, such clean air refreshes, the multitudes heading for the top have vanished, except for the big group, I hear above, 4:44, Sawaddee Ka! and the winds turn vicious bending trees and umbrellas, the group is happy to have arrived in the booms and crackles.

My recollection of the first time I met Sumjana is fuzzy but we talked about plans for the future, strikingly similar or she was parroting my plans and I was naïve; she took down our email addresses and phone numbers, which we learned later was something she took from many, perhaps a result of growing up on top of a touristy mountain; I asked Keith what he thought of this woman, albeit she was young, she was playing a role she’d soon regret, standing next to me, the top button of her blue jeans open revealing red undies and all I get from him is I can do better.  This wasn’t the time to slap him in the head and he knew I wouldn’t but I needed all my restraint.

And here, somewhere in the discourse the eighth daughter of eight daughters alleged coincidence occurred and I thought she had been somehow chosen for me and it took four years to scrub this from my intellect.  A mistake.

I am glad the storm came today, it seems righteously appropriate.  As for the interview, I felt I blathered a bit, thinking hard of history to recall, going back to graduate school, I don’t know.  Class sizes are overflowing, the country is ranked number one in the world in its growth rate at 4.9, and they need teachers, well, dude.  If we’re gonna get personal, you’ll lose every time.  Hire me you won’t regret, my trade, my profession, how can I walk away without a plan, without a buck, without a prayer, apparently.

Maya arrives among the Thais.  I greet the guide in front of room three, the same one in December who snarled at me like I was the prototypical bad American who has comes to her country and given it a bad name.  ‘Oh you’re still here’.  If she weren’t attractive I’d put a few extra chilies in her chicken curry, we’ll see.

A thought occurred in the toilet; what if I were to simply overstay the visa three months and pay the fine.  I figure it would cost less than five hundred clams, a lot cheaper than any flight to the states, though I need a driver’s license and some kind of police clearance or a good citizen certificate, yikes, I’m a good citizen, blah.

The air is calm again and the Thais stand on the terrace retelling experiences.  Another language I am a foreigner of, what a bloody shame it is, and they’ve gone up for masala tea.  I’ll stay in room eight a little longer.    

9:38pm—The twenty Thais had dinner at the Lake View and will have breakfast here.  All are safely in bed and are quite happy with their time in Nepal.  Today we also saw the wind and the rain blow in, clearing out the haze and such are the stars with a crescent moon in the northern sky. 

And finally nothing supernatural happened.  Four years and as each day passes the illusions become distant.  It’s hard to keep the faith when one feels foolish.