I am on the night train from Bangkok to the Thai/Lao border. I’ve taken it many times, but wonder for the first time if riding retro is not a good enough reason for just going cheap. We’re riding through another rainstorm and the water starts to splatter all over the sheets. In the middle of the night I find that the sliding doors on both ends are jammed and I know what claustrophobia is, the panic of knowing there is no exit.
It’s 3 AM and I can’t sleep anyway. I’m heading back to Laos and the thoughts creep in again. The school that won’t pay for a thousand books, the debt, the bleak outlook of making books sustainable.
There is no exit. In the early days, somebody prophesized, “If you leave Laos, you’ll just try the same thing somewhere else and you’d have to be crazy to think it’d be any easier in Cambodia.” In the early days, somebody else assessed that I was in a kind of Lala land.
I pried one door open in the train. Maybe it was a staff car or something, but a group sitting and eating on the floor seemed very displeased that I had intruded. “Go to the other side,” they said. I explained that that door was stuck too and it was pretty scary to know we were locked in a train carriage. The guy who had to answer my plea couldn’t squeeze his body through the opening, but didn’t seem concerned. So we crash, there’s a fuel leak and the train threatens to explode into an inferno while everyone is going to try to squeeze through this space one-by-one?
Chicken little is vindicated because true to my words, the other door is stuck fast too. The guy struggles with it, gets it loose and walks off without saying anything.
I’ll soon be back in Laos. How am I going to make these doors open?
