Border Run

by Matthew Burrell

Part 1 appears in this issue.

conclusion

It was late afternoon when they docked on the pier and began to debark. The sky was blunted and painfully blue; it hurt to look upon it without the protection of sunglasses. The sea reflected its brightness, one the mirror image of the other.

Jacob could taste the bad omens in the air. It wasn’t just fever and chills and fatigue and hallucinations, either. Dysentery might be an uncomfortable condition but, if anything, it heightened the senses, so that everything took on a different hue. He could discern premonitions before they happened and, when he set foot on the island, he knew he would never leave.

He took out the documents from his pocket and looked over the pages of a worn and ruffled passport. He’d worried they might have fallen out during the boatride, but they were all there.

Jacob folded up the paper and put it back in the passport with the other documents. He could feel beads of sweat strung together like one of those handmade necklaces. When he looked up, the line had unraveled into groups of backpackers milling about, and there was no activity from inside the immigration office.

It was unbelievably hot standing on the pier. It was like stepping into a blazing furnace and being raked over hot coals and blowtorched, all at once. Twenty minutes later, a tall immigration officer emerged from inside the shack. At the front, backpackers in cargo shorts and Red Bull singlets crowded around the officer with their passports extended. They gestured to the open pages and begged for a stamp, but the officer waved them off.

“Welcome to Burma,” the officer stood in front of the immigration shack and spoke through a bullhorn. “You have come for vee-sa stamp, yes? There will be no vee-sa stamp until two-thirty pee-eem.”

There wasn’t a single person on the dock that didn’t let out an audible sigh at the prospect of having to wait several more hours. Here they were, on the last days of their visa, stuck on the wrong island. They so desperately wanted to be in Koh Phangan, Koh Samui, Koh Phi Phi, Koh Trang, or Koh Chang.

“You may go to Burma Town,” the immigration officer said into the bullhorn. “Come back two pee-eem.”

“I’m supposed to be in Surat Thani to meet my boyfriend,” the French girl said. “We have tickets for the ferry at four.”

Jacob looked at his watch. It was only twelve-thirty. “What do we do now?”

“I know what I’m going to do,” David said with a mischievous smile. “I’m going to buy some viagra.”

“Scum,” Lizzy said. “That’s what you are.”

“Buy viagra? Where?” someone else asked.

“It’s like the man said,” David said. “Burma Town.”

Burma Town wasn’t much of a town. A single dusty unpaved road split between the saddle of hills, rickety wood buildings on either side of the avenue, a perpetual fog of dust and grit sullied the air. There didn’t seem to be anything else on the island besides the one road with movie set cardboard cutout buildings which the immigration officer had referred to as “Burma Town.”

Jacob followed Lizzy and Fasho up a dusty street and stopped to look into the windows.

The architects of ‘Burma Town’ had focused more of their attention on its appeal from a distance than what the place looked like up close. The paneled wood was obviously plastic, but the windows were real glass, and filthy, and inside were bottles of Johnny Walker, stacked in their color-coded labels from red to blue. The stickered prices on the bottles were far too cheap to be real.

Everything about ‘Burma Town’ was unreal, and the streets were crowded with western backpackers, and young Burmese boys touting their wares of whiskey, viagra, knockoff Louis Vuitton handbags, denim jeans, their coolers full of Singha and Red Horse and Chang, and even more interesting were old-timey saloons with falsetto tunes belted out from open balconies, and girls in cowboy hats with signs advertising ridiculously cheap drinks.

“Jesus,” Fasho said. “I’ve never seen anything like this.”

Jacob peered around one of the buildings. Hidden between, and behind, the plastic cutouts, were piles of debris and trash so large they almost eclipsed the buildings themselves. “I told you they buried the tourists here,” Jacob said to Lizzy.

“Right,” Lizzy said. “I’ll contact the authorities immediately.”

“You still have stomach problems?” Fasho asked.

Jacob thought about it. “No,” he said. “Those malt rabbits are a miracle drug. Got problems with digestion and heartburn? Diarrhea? Just pop two malt rabbits and you’ll feel fine within the hour.”

Fasho had a perplexed look on his face. “What was that?”

“An advertisement for malt rabbits. What do you think?”

Fasho shrugged. “You lost me.”

They found a saloon with cocktail deals and an old man in chaps strumming a banjo outside, so Lizzy looked over and shrugged before walking in the swinging double doors, and Jacob and Fasho followed her inside to a milieu that could only be described as an old western movie set, with a long table bar and bottles of whiskey lined against a brick facade, and an automated piano, and stairs leading up to a second-floor balcony where a row of backpackers were swaying to the hiphop music coming from the Filipino band playing on a raised stage.

It was a raucous scene on par with what Jacob had witnessed at the other island parties he’d been to on Koh Samui and Phangan. There was a great chandelier that was almost certainly constructed of plastic that strobed the saloon in brilliant yellows and oranges, giving everything a soft, dreamlike glow.

“I’m going to get a drink,” Fasho said.

“I second that notion,” Jacob said.

“For sure,” Lizzy said.

When they got to the bar, it was full of backpackers all the way down the tabletop with brightly colored drinks helter-skelter on the lacquered wood. The barlady, a middle-aged Thai woman with glittery eyelashes and breast implants, motioned to a lockbox behind the bar. “Do you have passports?”

“Yeah,” Jacob said. “Why?”

“We keep them here,” she said. “For safekeeping. The island has many pickpockets and can be dangerous.”

“Okay,” Jacob said, handing the passport over. “Whatever.”

She took the passports, flipped through the pages, and then put them in the safe and locked the door. She looked back at Fasho. She looked at Jacob. “Now that that’s settled, let’s get you a drink. First one is on the house.”

“You speak really good English,” Jacob said with his head propped on his hands. He was beginning to grow fond of the bartender in a short time.

The barlady smiled. She took two plastic cups and filled them with a ladle from a vat of murky liquid behind the bar.

“What’s this called?” Fasho asked.

“Island punch,” the barlady said.

“All right,”

“What’s in it?”

“Who cares?” David said, sidling up to the bar, snatching one of the cups and downing it in a single gulp.

“Did you find viagra?” Fasho asked.

“No,” David said, wiping his lips, “not yet.”

Fasho looked at his watch. “You better hurry. We have to be back at the pier at two.”

“All the time in the world, mate,” David said wistfully, “all the time in the world.”

An hour later they were on the dance floor when gravity seemed to reverse itself in a kaleidoscope of blues, greens, and tangerines. They were now on the ceiling — which was still the dance floor — looking down at the people fused together to form one entity, like the single-celled protoplasm microbes inside of Jacob. There was a ripple like some great being blowing giant bubbles, then everything came in waves.

“Jesus,” Fasho said. “Some island punch.”

“Yeah,” Jacob agreed, smiling dumbly.

Jacob had smoked marijuana, but this was much stronger than anything like that. The feelings were overwhelming, an incredible tingling numbness coupled with bright-eyed visuals. Words became indecipherable gibberish. There was no language to describe this sensation.

“Passengers, please take your seats for the duration of this flight,” Jacob said, belching up a sour-tasting liquid.

It was all they could do to hang on to their seats at the bar top as the world whirled around them in hypnotic marshmallow yellows and oranges and blues and greens.

They made their way center stage in front of the band and squished in with the crowd of backpackers. By this time, the saloon had filled up with several hundred revelers mixed in with paid staff and locals. The floorboards were bending and bouncing under the weight. The chandelier sparkled brightly. There were people hanging from the wood railings, their bodies draped over one another, writhing and coming together, flowing like amoebas. Jacob looked around and saw Lizzy dancing close by. He moved toward her.

When she saw him she pointed to her wristwatch and raised her hand. Two fingers were extended. Two o’clock. The time they needed to be back at the pier. The passports would be stamped, the boats would be departing soon.

Jacob smiled and raised his arms in rhythm to the music. It didn’t matter anymore. These were islands. There would always be another boat.