A Man in a Blue Trenchcoat

Looking rather slight in his pale green button down shirt, close cut hair and thin hands, the Khmer guide explains how the dents in this bed frame are the same ones that you see in the photograph. ‘That body in the photo? It used to be right where you’re looking now.’ A sheer moment of horror trapped in silver halides. I look away from the photograph. The same shovel lies beside the bed frame.

The re-purposed S-21 classrooms aren’t any easier. The photographs of every single victim of Pol-Pot’s political liquidation have been carefully pasted to bulletin boards as if notice were being requested for a book club meeting. My guide doesn’t say much as the somber faces stare back in quiet acceptance. On the ride to the Killing Fields, Phnom Penh peels back its silky black skin in irregular pools of streetlight as the guide jokes with me about the Thai, Korean pop songs, and George Bush. I don’t understand how he could ever smile again, but somehow he does.

The Killing Fields’ stupa rises like a horned serpent trying to digest the 20,000 skulls inside like some sort of odd cultural viscera, or a poisoned rat. The skulls’ puncture wounds are almost uniform. They’ve been arranged among four stories of wooden platforms separated by age from newborns to 65+ years. Scores of birds watch me peer through the glass as they shuffle their wings like the leaves of newspapers bearing the headlines of some forgotten war. As their eyes twitch among pools of standing water, I imagine them spying the fragments of human bones surfacing from the afternoon rain and calling to each other to cover them with leaves of grass, twigs, pebbles. 'This didn’t happen,' they say. 'We were hiding among the trees when this happened but we know better now. We’ve learned to accommodate. The shells in the jungle are gone now.'

The Cambodian civil war in the late 1970s resulted in over 2 million casualties, many of them citizens deemed political dissenters whose mass graves dot the landscape like fencepost holes. Oddly, flower patches have sprouted from the pits. I think about how the decomposing bodies fertilized future plant life, and how firing old AK-47s and RPGs now draws tour groups from all over the world.

A day later I watch the sun’s first rays wake dozens of sleeping Buddha heads anchoring the back of Angkor Wat’s temple complex. I marvel at the ranges of stone walkways and corridors carved with innumerable Vishnu and Avalokitesvara renderings laid in immense detail, some of it so fine that a magnifying glass would be in order to see the full range of artistry. The Khmer realized that they were capable of this once, and that their violence was foolish and absurd. Now, if you drink, they’ll have one too; if you joke, they’ll smile; if you need help, they’ll find somebody to get you there. Despite the countless faces on that bulletin board, they can still laugh.