Burma, part 3: Bats and Trap Churches

Some things make you take a deep breath and steel yourself to the onslaught you know is about hit. Like bracing yourself before a crest of foaming surf crashes down, or feeling the heat of a defender on your neck as you rush toward the goal line, knowing you're about to be planted into the turf. Stepping around the corner and into that first real street in Burma was a moment like that.

They came at me in a loose cluster and locked on with dull but persistent eyes, numb and unflinching to rejection, unknowing of shame. These were the tuk tuk drivers, pirated video hustlers, scam tour operators, and cigarette peddlers of the Burmese borderland. You come to know their type well in this part of the world. There's a seemingly inexhaustible supply of these mangy men, from every big city to seedy backwater port.

You want movie? Motor bike, cheap cheap. Tuk tuk? Marlboros, sunglass, anything, you want?

I saw them through my smokey lenses and clenched my teeth, squaring my jaw, and felt my chest rise with a long, slow sucking of air. I needed the air. The flurry of dismissals, the roll of rote rebukes I'd steadily distribute among them, would take a lot out of me. I like to be left alone most of the time, unless you just want to talk. If I want something, I will ask for it. If I need help with anything, I will seek it out. But most of the time, I just like to do things for myself.

My preferences are completely incompatible with who these men are and what they want. Their goal is to pressure clueless schmucks unfamiliar with their surroundings into disgorging some of their conscience-burdening, lust-fueling, or shamelessly mad money.

I waded through the knot of short copper-brown men. Their hair was stiff from shampooing with bar soap, and their too-big polyester shirts made them sweatier than necessary. I wasn't desperate yet, but I was fervently looking for an escape. I only need to get away somewhere long enough pass an hour or two, to wait for suspicions to pass and paperwork to process. Then I would turn around and catch a bus back to safe, sunny Chiang Mai, to good food and hot showers, and that sweet, svelte coffee house waitress who's still on my mind.

But before I could even think about getting back, I needed to act, and act fast. The tree-lined road ahead was a crowded strip of gray asphalt paralleled by cracked sidewalks. These sidewalks were a gauntlet of push carts and beggar children and legions more of the hustler sort, their eyes already stonily grinding up at the sight of me. Today, you see, I'd decided to play the part of Joe Tourist. I'd faux-hawked my hair a little more, broke out the cotton khaki shorts, and rolled up the sleeves on my blue linen shirt from Banana Republic. I figured I'd have less trouble at the borders if nobody suspected me as a local, or a foreign drug runner trying to lay low.

But it also painted a big, fat mark my chest, and projected a green dollar-sign halo over my head.

Not that identifying me as a foreigner was hard to do, it's just that lately, I'd been trying to tone down my appearance. I had been perfecting a disguise over the past few weeks, picking up on certain wardrobe cues from the natives, trying to blend in as much as I could for daily operations. I found that my torn up leather sandals were perfect streetwear, accompanied by a generic polo shirt and the Thai-brand Greyhound jeans I'd picked up in Bangkok. Hardly the look of a farmer, but if I shaved, and kept my tan up and parted my hair, people would second-guess me. I am vaguely Asian, after all, though look more East Asian than Thai.

With no way to simply vanish, and the road ahead far too sticky with the nagging men and a few heart-rendingly poor children I didn't feel like feeling sorry for right then, I took the only other option I had: the narrow concrete steps I'd almost sworn off as being too anonymous. They led down from the raised street into the heart of the city's border market. If I'd known what was waiting for me at the bottom, I would have waded through the swamp of little dirty children along the road and given them all of my coins and felt guilty for not doing more.

The stalls of bric-a-brac and animal pelts, fake shoes, pirated movies, and thousands of other tacky items you could find in nearly every marketplace around the region stretched out to an intersection, and kept on going down each of the side streets. I'd stepped not ten steps away from the stairs when the first of the hardcore hustlers approached me. These men were a breed beyond the simple purveyors of scam tours and fake gems that predominantly populated the raised road I'd left behind. These were a different strain, the kind that would commit actual depravity for a dollar. I didn't know where they came from, but like bloodsucking bats hiding unseen in the darkness, they'd drop off their guano-covered cave walls and jerkily fly down when a hot meal came strolling past.

The first man had a simple, determined look on his face when he offered the prescription painkillers and boner pills to me. Selling felony-worthy amounts of drugs in broad daylight appeared no big thing to him. He had a shallow plastic basket with him, filled with controlled pharmaceuticals, likely knockoffs imported from China. The pills' packaging was not terribly well done. If I hadn't seen with my own eyes how beautiful in substance and spirit this part of the world was once you get away from the places like this, I would have been trying to hold down a bubbling resentment in my heart.

I decided that a joke and some posturing might be the best form of therapy for me and bat repellent for him.

"Buddy, do I look like I need stuff like that to get my game on? You know what I'm saying?" I clenched my fist and held my arm up for him, like an erection. I took off my glasses, winked at him, and smiled.

He did not smile back. He looked blank for a moment, then took out a squat brown vial from his basket.

"You put in lady drink, she fall love with you," he said.

I wasn't sure if the vial contained roofies or hormones. I didn't want to ask. I was beginning to think that men like this were so far gone, or so locked into scraping money into their hands whatever way they could, that even humor was lost on them. Couldn't he see how ridiculous this scenario really was? I tried to give his humanity the benefit of the doubt.

"I've got a lot of problems my friend, but I don't have any problems with that," I said, throwing some swagger into my voice. I grinned at him and turned away and kept walking down the street. He followed me, and tried to show me some wrapped bundles of porn.

"I have plenty at home, man. I don't need it. The Internet already has you out of business," I chided to him as I walked. Then he put his hand on my arm to stop me, and stood closer to me.

"You want girl? Very small, I can get. Little girl, no problem. You like."

A resentment bubbled over, and wiped away my winks and grins. I knocked his hand away and leaned into him.

"I don't want your shit, Ok?"

I turned down the road and kept walking, moving away from that market. Two more bloodsuckers would jerk over to me before I got out of that garish and malaise-stricken block.

The area beyond, though, was not much more pleasant.

I'd emerged onto a desolate street that was covered in dust, lined with trash, splashed with the direct glare of an unrelenting midday sun. The buildings were gray and white and shedding plaster and paint all over the street. I kept walking until I'd rounded a slight bend and the market was nearly out of sight. That was when I saw the church.

It was a pale building with a crimson roof that looked brittle at its seams. It was behind a tall fence of metal and concrete, the iron gate filled with ornate swirls of curled metal, with an ornamental flourish at its top. There was a Christmas tree outside the chapel's red doors, even though it was now February. Two raised boxes covered in Plexiglas outside contained neon lights, giving the bare churchyard a vegas-style kitsch that was badly out of place. In the middle of the churchyard, there was a thick concrete crucifix topped with an oversize crown, draped with a crimson shroud shaped from plaster.

Part of me wanted to go inside, if only for the quiet, and for the guarantee of a place clean from the muck spread around just outside its gate. But a fear lanced out from the part of my brain that I tend to trust; no, it wasn't the fear of dogma, or of the twisted cultish acolytes that might lurk inside. I was afraid that this church, so aptly placed and easily discovered, was a trap. The ever-restrictive government of Myanmar might have set this place up to find out exactly which visitors have tendencies to challenging their brutish inanity, to spread something that could undermine the restrictive tenets of their power.

I couldn't be seen here. I stepped away from the gate and began walking down the street away from the market again. And then I saw her. The steady-eyed Swiss girl.

Her hair was down and it flashed more auburn than blonde in the sunlight. Her shirt was coral pink, sleeveless and cotton. Her bra straps were exposed. She was trudging down the street just past the church, each step seeming belabored by the equivalent of a midget strapped to her back. She must have gone around the market and emerged from a side street ahead of me. I was happy she'd gotten clear of the immigration checkpoint without too much difficulty. From the direction she was walking, it appeared that she had indeed opted for the long haul, and was looking for a place to sleep.

Part of me wanted run up to her and walk with her down these desolate streets, at least until she'd found a place to stay. She would be a slow target if any of the fiendish short caught sight of her, with that pack pressing her to the ground so firmly. From what I'd seen of the character of this city, it was no place for a petite woman with enough cash to sustain herself in a country that had hardly any ATMs to be hiking around alone, obviously with little idea of where exactly she was going. Then again, who was I to inject myself into her adventure? She thought she could take care of herself. If she'd wanted help, she would have asked for it.

I watched her walk until she disappeared around another slight bend in the road. The last thing I saw was a flash of her hair over the top of her pack. I'm sure she'll return to Switzerland in six months or a year with a fabulous story to tell. But I couldn't help imagine an alternate future, one where all Interpol would eventually find after an exhaustive search was that hulking backpack, riddled with bullet holes and floating in a trash-clogged river. She'd gotten curious and come too close to an opium farm.

I turned back toward the market. I was getting hungry, and was willing to again face the bats for a bit of food for myself.