It might have been the way that the early-evening sunlight painted the sky a dark and subtle amber over the dusty streets. It could have been the constant news of the tsunami's toll, a barrage of non-stop death. The root of it doesn't matter. What matters is that I found myself on the back of a moto in Phnom Penh suddenly remembering a chocolate milkshake I drank, God, must have been eleven, twelve years ago now.
Memories have a way of unleashing themselves upon you whether you're ready or not. (You're usually not.) There's no rhyme or reason (or so we believe.) They come, and you have no choice; rejection is not an option.
And here was this one, like it or not, a remembrance of a day at the cottage our family used to go to each summer along with our life-long family friends, the Craddocks. Near the cottage was a general store, presided over by a middle-aged woman who had the biggest moustache I've ever seen on a lady. A black and fertile centipede, this was. The fact that this woman was supposedly married, well, we couldn't believe it. Didn't want to believe it, because then that meant that there was somebody who, like, kissed her goodnight, potentially more than once. (Did it tickle, that moustache of hers? I'm betting it did...)
She couldn't keep us away, though, because at this store they had milkshakes, see, thick ones, monstrous ones, the kind that you can sip and slurp for a long, long time before even reaching the beginning of the end.
On this day I went and grabbed a shake with Tony, a big, funny, good-natured Italian kid who was a friend of my buddy Jason. (Tony had tagged along with Jason's family the past few years and joined us for a week or two at the cottage.) I don't know where Jason was at particular moment; maybe down by the beach, maybe napping, maybe watching the tube. Nobody else was around, I guess, so me and Tony decided to get a drink of that blissful chocolate nectar. I was, what, maybe seventeen? And Tony fifteen, I guess. That week (or had it been the year before?) he lost his wallet with all his vacation money inside, and so we all spent a lot of time scouring the beach and the cars and the cottages looking for the missing loot.
No luck.
Ah, well. He wouldn't go hungry this week, not with all the food we had, and the milkshakes were cheap, so what the hell.
I don't remember much about that particular moment. Just the two of us walking towards the general store, the sun slowly setting in the late-afternoon, mid-summer sky. Looking foward to the shakes. Making the kind of small talk you make with people you know, but not that well.
I don't think I ever saw Tony again after that week at the cottage. He died a couple of years later, killed in a car accident with one of his best friends. Somebody had fallen asleep at the wheel one night as they were driving back from Casino Niagara.
They were barely into their twenties. A double funeral for the two of them in Fort Erie.
Strange, the way the mind works. In the centre of Cambodia, ten, eleven years on, and something about the sunlight triggered an image, a flash, of a moment in time. Two Canadian teenagers going to grab a shake as dusk starts to fall.
Ten years on, one of them in Cambodia, the other gone. Gone for good. I've already lived a good five or six more years than Tony ever lived, come to think of it, and that's a scary, sobering thought. The kind of thought you don't know what to do with it.
There's nothing to do with it, I guess. You latch on to what you remember about a person -- the fact that he lost his wallet, the fact that he played a pretty good game of beach volleyball, the fact that we all went out one summer night on the boat and got together at the cottage of a couple of girls that we had met a few days before, a bunch of nervous teenagers sitting under a wide sky, in front of a blazing fire, making inane jokes. Those kinds of thoughts, memories, glimpses.
I think his dad had a roofing business, Tony's dad did, and I think that's what he was doing right after high school, laying tiles up above our heads, beneath the sun. Must have been hot up there. He was tough kid though, Tony was. He was probably pretty good at his work.
But --
Better to stop. Sometimes even glimpses are too much.
Just for a moment, for whatever reason, I thought about poor Tony (gone so soon!), about that point in time on a summer night long ago when we walked to get a shake, nothing on our minds but the taste of chocolate. I remembered it, I did, and then there was nothing else to do but grab onto the back of the moto and hang on tight and hope that the early-evening light would linger for a little while longer.
