IF YOU NOTICE

I've got a bit of a bulging right eye now, the result of who-knows-what, but according to the local Australian doctor who I visited the other day, a teeny tiny ant may have found the taste and texture of my skin too tempting to resist. (What a character, this doctor is. Mid-fifties Aussie lady, tall as a basketball player, married to a Cambodian, crude as a sailor. And on top of that, she knows her stuff.) The result is not quite as bad as what Robert DeNiro endured in Raging Bull, but it definitely looks like somebody clocked me a good one.

The remedy? A few pills, a few drops in the socket a few times a day, and there you go. Cured. Although it's been three days, and, while the swelling has been reduced a little bit, it still doesn't seem a heck of a lot better, medicine or no. I read the instructions that came with the eyedrops (yes, eyedrops do have instructions, funnily enough), and it mentioned that Cambodia is a dusty country, uh-huh, knew that one, and it stressed that this dust contains all kinds of nasty things that you don't necessarily want getting your eye. Or your nose. Or your mouth.

I knew that, too -- after a year and a half in this dusty place, how could you not -- but I'd never really thought about it before. Hadn't considered it much. What that dust could do, if it got inside me. What havoc it could wreak on my fragile body. Let alone my eye. (And it's my right eye, too, which is the one with the stigmatism, said stigmatism being the reason why the right lens of my glasses is so much bigger than the left one.) I briefly thought about what would happen if I happened to lose sight in my right eye. Scary, but I do have another one, another eye, and hey, I wonder what it would be like to read with only one eye all the time? (And now I've tempted fate, God, the controller of the universe, whatever deity is floating out there, and I'd like to declare that I will not tempt this force any longer: I like my right eye, alright? It's served me well. Please let me keep it. Amen.)

Point is, you get used to the dust. You get used to the little lizards called geckos crawling around your walls, croaking their rhythmic croak every morning around six. The smell of rancid water down by the river. The fog of dust that bobs and weaves its way through the crowded streets, guided by the mercy of the wind. You don't really think about what it does to you. What it can do to you.

Oh, the objects and forces malice that await us! The STOP sign the moto driver ignores. The brakes on the car that just, won't, brake.

Luckily, we have happy endings most of the time. We go to work, come home, sleep. We fail to notice, if we're lucky.

So, while I was sleeping and unnoticing, a peckish ant decided to give me a little peck and see what I had to offer. (I'm hoping it was an ant. The idea of, like, a giant cockcroach crawling across my chest, up my neck, over my cheeks and onto my eye is something I don't care to consider. Even though I just did.) Maybe it lingered on my face, staring at the closed lid of my eye. (Can ants stare? I guess they can, right?) Maybe it had to choose, this ant did, between a piece of my forehead and a piece of my eyelid. Maybe it deliberated, pondered, considered. Maybe it had a moment of mercy, when it was going to turn around and head back down the bed, angling for my knee or a few of my toes. Then it thought: Naw, screw it. And it dove right in.

I didn't know it was there; I was in dreamland. The clouds of dust and the piles of garbage and the stench of sewage are there when I'm awake. Not everywhere, no, but common enough, potent enough, to make me sometimes pause.

If I notice.