The Tourist

LATE ENTRY FROM A WESTERN TIME ZONE!

The thing was, no one doubted him. He stood with the other men, and they had trusted him.

It had happened so quickly – the explosion, the rubble and the dust. The embassy was reduced to nothing. There were bodies, or parts of them, all around him. In the way that happens after big, definite disasters, everything seemed oddly quiet. He looked around, somehow not surprised that he had survived. He listened to himself breathing for a moment, almost as if to check that he was actually, in fact, alive. He was. He saw one of the guards, laying dead, and took the gun from the corpse’s holster, tucking it into his waist band, while untucking his shirt to conceal it He felt vaguely disturbed at how calm he was. Maybe it was because he was a stranger here. He had never been to this town, this country before. Everything was once removed in its way, and in the same sense, everything, anything, was possible. That he had survived fit within the old rules of being a stranger in an unknown land. It was the grand adventure of being anonymous, and therefore witness to infinite possibility, like how the women in the market had instantly assumed he was wealthy (no) and American (also no) and followed him down every isle, using their broken English to try and entice him. He felt at home with the strange, tilted perspective people had of him as an unknown foreigner, and didn’t bother to resist their random assumptions of him.

Now he heard a sound, looked down, and saw a serving woman, pinned under a large hunk of concrete. Much like the sellers who had dogged him in the market place, she wore a vibrant, draped sarong, only her clothing had been torn away some how, and one of her breasts was exposed. It was covered in dust, making it look cold, almost like stone. Her expressionless face, unfocused eyes, and faint, whistling breath indicated she was about to die. She spoke a few words in a language he could not speak. He nodded, not because he cared, but because it seemed like the thing to do at the time. He stood and watched her as she died. He felt nothing. Everything – everything about this world was alien to him, so why not exploding government buildings?

As the woman lay there, dying, partially nude, yet strangely inhuman to him, he couldn’t help but think of the ambassador’s wife. She had been so very human to him. It turned him on that she was one of the broken people. Her drinking had not been apparent to him at first. He had taken her bold honesty and bawdy laughter as flirtation until he saw her interacting with the other guests at the embassy dinner. When he saw that she was that way with everybody – the business men, the political types, and the helping staff – then he knew. That kind of freedom is too dangerous, too vulnerable for someone who’s lived in the world, and is only bought with liquid courage. He looked at her more closely then, saw that her hair had come unpinned on one side, not for style, but because she too was unfurling. Her eye make-up was ever so slightly smeared, not because it was fashionable, but because she had been unaware of herself, maybe crying, and smeared it without knowing. The ambassador coldly ignored his wife, smoothed the napkin in his lap, and spoke of some imaginary future that would never come to be. The staff continually replaced the wife’s drink just as she emptied it, and it seemed obvious that this was how she operated. He wondered what had caused her to collapse into this life. Was it being so far away from home? The loneliness? Her marriage to this asshole? He found her impossibly, irresistibly sexy. Not because he wanted to save her, but because he knew he couldn’t. The messiness of her, her finite, fatal flaw was something he could see his way into.

“We have a botanical garden behind the residency. Would you like to see it?” she asked. Her tone, the obvious underlying implications, shocked him. He glanced at the ambassador, who had either not noticed or not been bothered by his wife’s nearly blatant sexual invitation to a virtual stranger. None of the guests acknowledged it. The dignitaries, the business men… Had they really not noticed her? The way they all ignored this beautiful, tragic woman, made him hate them all intensely.

“I would be happy to join you in the garden, madam, thank you.” Their eyes locked, she smiled at him like a satisfied cat, he felt his cock stir, and was shocked again by her openness in such a public, formal forum. He felt like a stranger to himself. Who accepts a public invitation to fuck a total stranger, in front of her husband and the upper crust? Certainly he didn’t know anyone who would do such a thing, and would have never imagined himself in such a position. But here he was, and he was so far away from not only his home, but who he was when in it, that he saw no reason to resist.

The air was heavy, and perfumed with flowers as he stepped out into the garden. It was thickly humid, the moisture of it fell like a cloak over him. He stood, waiting for her to come out, when he heard the animal screeches and caws before he saw them. He stepped out further and saw how the garden was filled with cages, and was in fact, a make shift zoo. A cage full of parrots, another with a few monkeys, and a large enclosure made up to look like a rock cliff that contained a bear. Further off were other cages, and he was about to walk out further to explore when he felt her arm slip around his waist and grasp his cock firmly in her hand. Their lips locked, she pulled him with her toward a wall covered with vines. His pants were undone, her dress was lifted, and he was fucking her. She had pulled open the front of her dreass and he pressed his lips to her breast – it was incredibly soft and delicious in an entirely perfect way. Then their eyes were locked on one and other , and the intensity of the moment was written across both their faces as they thrust and sweated together. He heard a noise, thought maybe someone was coming, and jerked away as if to go. She grabbed at him, chanting urgently in his ear “don’t stop, don’t stop, don’t stop.” So he didn’t. He hadn’t so much as touched another human being since his arrival several months ago, and giving way to his hunger was easy. He fucked her and fucked her, until the heat of the night and their bodies grinding made it impossible to continue. He looked at her as her head reeled backward: she was coming and drunk and impossible to look away from as she arced backward in ecstasy. Then he came too, so long and hard that his head was reeling and he couldn’t help by cry out. She smiled that smile again, and somehow he felt like she had won more than he had in this exchange, but he didn’t care.

He said “you’re so beautiful. Do you know that your beautiful?”

“Of course I do.” She said with absolute certainty as she stood, let her dress slide back down over her hips and legs, took out a cigarette, lit it, turned her back and walked away from him, back into the embassy. He watched her go, uncertain what to do next. Certainly it would be improper to go back in now. But had anything been proper since he got here in the first place? He waited, gazed up at the sky and the strange now unfamiliar stars, and all around him at the flowers whose names he did not know and the animals in their enclosures. The bear made a soft snuffling noise as it shifted in its sleep, and he took this as his cue to re-enter the embassy. One of the serving staff almost immediately appeared beside him with an intensely, almost impossibly cold local beer, which he drank down greedily while he stood back aloofly, scanning the party for her. Other than her, there were only a few women in the embassy, and they were all locals, and part of the staff. And she was no where in sight.

The bomb went off at exactly 11 pm. At first he thought everyone was dead, but as he stood there, after the serving woman had quietly died at his feet, four of the other men from the party emerged. He knew from earlier introductions that they were all strangers to each other.

“The ambassador is dead,” said one.

“The Minister is dead” said another.

“Who the hell did this?” asked another. All the other men looked at each other dumbfounded.

“Hey… does anyone know where the safe is?” asked the first.

“And what about his whore wife? If she’s still around, we should have some fun with her.” All the other men looked at each other with hunger painted across their faces. How had he come to this place where disaster instantly turned to greedy opportunism in a heartbeat? The men were all waiting for someone to decide.

“I know where the ambassador’s safe is,” he said with an easy confidence. All the men looked at him. Not a flicker of resistance on any of their faces. He thought of all the logical places a safe might be, and how to get to them with all the rubble. What an adventure it would be to find it, like a treasure chest in a book, and grab fistfuls of the imaginary gold he could dream might be inside.

“Alright, take us to it. I can get it opened if you can find it, and we’ll split what’s there among us” said a man with an accent that he couldn’t place.

“Follow me,” he said. He started walking, looking at the ruin around him. It looked like the apocalypse, like another planet, and he realised there was no chance in hell he would find the imaginary safe he had claimed he knew of. He was a tourist though, so any adventure would do. No point stopping. The men were following him, blindly as he searched the rubble. He stepped over piles of debris, broken furniture, pools of blood, and the men followed him. Then he saw her and he stopped. She was lying there, eyes opened, dead. Her face, without the animation of life and alcohol, looked haggard and ugly. He knew then that she too was another attraction, something he had experienced, but would not need to hold on to.

“Look at that bitch” said one of the men “too bad we lost our chance.”

He nodded, because it seemed like the thing to do, and stepped over her because he had spotted a stairwell, leading down into the basement.

“Is it down there?” asked one.

“Yes,” he said “follow me.”

So they did. Two of the men had had the forethought to find sources of light, which they carried with them. He had his own useful tool. And down the stairs they went.

The thing was, no one doubted him. He stood with the other men, and they had trusted him. He pulled out the gun and shot them, one by one, by one, by one. He saw them each fall, recorded each of their expressions in his memory: shock, fear, anger, fear. He was surprised at the amount of blood, but pleased that he had managed to avoid getting any notable amount on himself. As he walked away, out of the rubble and off into the streets beyond, he wondered who the ambassador and the other men were, who the ambassador’s wife was, if anyone would miss them all apart from the animals in the garden, and if it mattered. After all he was a tourist, and there were some things he would never know. He wondered about when he might buy a ticket home, but then day dreamed about what Southern Italy might be like at harvest time. It was too late at night for any travel plans, so instead he wondered where the closest hotel he could check into for the night was. He would worry about new clothes in the morning.