By Bjorn Turmann
(Second of Two Excerpts)
The following comes from The Last Tobacco Shop in the World (2010, Konstrukt Books, 333 pages), a new novel by Canadian author Bjorn Turmann, a resident of Bangkok, Thailand. Set in the year 2040, the story opens at a Cambodian casino and then trails protagonist Anton Brick to Jarangwa, a tiny island created by the seismic activity that led to the 2004 Asian tsunami. It’s one of the world’s last places where smokers find refuge. Reprinted with permission © Bjorn Turmann 2010
Set free by failure to defeat Mr. Khieu's house rules, I searched the casino island for places without air-conditioning. By day three, I must have looked lost, desperate.
Somewhere north of the casino's gigantic stone lions -- the creators and defenders of good fortune -- a round man pushing a cart with square wheels clotheslined me as I tried to pass. Straw hat pulled down like a tropical dome, I couldn’t see his eyes.
“I think I know what you are looking for,” he said in a lathered Khmer accent.
“I just want to have a beer,” I replied, agitated.
“I just want to point you to that beer.”
He waited for me to nod my understanding.
“Okay,” he said, lowering the clothesline. “You see that big clump of banana trees… there… 100 feet just there?”
I looked at his pointing hand. He was missing every finger but his thumb, an oversized appendage jutting out like a cannon.
“Walk through the bananas,” he instructed. “Do not stop walking. You will find a path not wider than you. Keep your arms in close. The bushes have dangerous thorns.”
“And…?” after he clamped his thumb around the cart handle like a sturdy hook.
“And enjoy your beer.”
I counted off 100 feet. He was exact. My arms swam through the dense labyrinth of immense green leaves. Ducking bushels of unripe bananas, I moved quickly to avoid rocks and the skulls (or so I thought) of former Valmont negotiators. I emerged from the humid banana plantation and fell on my face in a mossy clearing like a crop circle. Do not stop walking, the cartman’s voice reminded me. I spotted the path not wider than me and went inside. Thorns grazed my shoulders. A squawking bird with large purple wings and a tiny black body like a bat swooped in. Her cries echoed through the jungle as she kept me moving towards an opening that it took square wheels to find.
The instant she soared I knew I'd found my non-air-con island paradise. It wasn't just like time had stood still. It was better than that. Time had walked into the sea over its head leaving five bamboo bungalows, towering palms and enough bananas, pineapples and coconuts to last dozens of lifetimes.
An old Khmer woman with a red and white checkered krama tied tight around her head waved at me from a hut next to the shore. I raised my hand like I wanted to ask a question, suddenly unsure when she motioned me on.
Something pressed against my stomach.
"Mmmm," hummed a shirtless man holding a coconut to my navel, his smile sailing over the edges of both cheeks.
I cradled the bottom of the shell, still hoping for a beer. My mouth went oval -- I raised the coconut to my lips and drank until I needed to breathe again. “Thank you.”
"Mmmm," he reminded me with his everlasting smile, walking away.
"Mmmm..." with deliciousness in my voice. "Mmmm...."
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