He thinks of Joseph Conrad, whose own adventures in the South Seas began here in Bangkok. It was here that Conrad received his first command. Stephen Cox admires Conrad. He is drawn to his loneliness, his restlessness, his temptation to despair. He likes the possibly apocryphal tale of the young Conrad, pointing at the atlas and putting his finger ‘on a spot in the very middle of the then white heart of Africa’ and vowing to see it for himself. And so he had gone, into the unmapped quarter, amongst cannibals and savages. Stephen, like Conrad, had nourished his boyhood dreams with travel books, with Mungo Park and Marco Polo and Captain Cook and Pierre Loti and Gide in the Congo. Dreams of escape, dreams of distance. He had wanted to see, before he died, the whole wide world.

The bare light bulb dangles. The machine hums. A tap drips. Stephen fills in the turning globe, patch by patch. At prep school, in what was called Geography, he and his classmates had been taught to surround islands and continents with a blue edging of sea. A useless, harmless exercise. There were strict rules governing the angle of the blue pencil. A wide, rayed fuzz was not allowed. Little, even, horizontal strokes alone had been permitted. No reasoning for this had been provided. Prep school, like the army, had been without reason.

He is feeling very tired, but he dares not close his eyes lest he fall asleep and miss his rendezvous with the improbable Miss Porntip. He picks up a copy of the Bangkok Post purchased in the lobby below, and runs his eyes over news stories about Ronald Reagan and the Ayatollah and the King of Thailand and a logging concession. In this paper he will find no deaths, or none that he can call his own. He finds an item about the deployment of Vietnamese troops of the People’s Army in the Phnom Malai area of Battambang, an area briefly reconquered by the Khmer Rouge three years earlier. There is a picture of a young Khmer Rouge soldier in a denim jacket, sitting on the ground, smiling broadly, casually and proudly cradling a gun. His head is wrapped in a chequered cloth, on top of which perches what appears to be an American cowboy hat. His smile gives no indication that he is in any way aware that the Khmer Rouge are the folk monsters of the modern world. The author of the article speculates that there are 40,000 trained Khmer Rouge soldiers active on the frontier and inside Kampuchea, and that Pol Pot himself is in a hideout in the Cardamom mountains.