In a Brothel Atop Street 63

I THINK OF THIS RICE FIELD AT SUNSET, out in the countryside. I’m with Lisa and the sun is going down and the sky is dark with storm clouds on the horizon, but the long grass is glowing, luminescent, and there’s a water buffalo caked with mud standing motionless by the side of the road staring me straight in the eye. Two men are riding by on heavy Chinese bicycles, each wearing sandals and shorts and a headlamp powered by a six-pound battery slung over his shoulder, each holding a wooden spear against the handlebars. Frog hunters. And from far away—a mile across fields and trees—an electric guitar and the bass notes to “Oye Como Va” played karaoke style.

There’s a village of wooden huts built up on stilts—cows and chickens underneath, pigs in a pen around back, fruit trees, vegetable gardens, marijuana plants. Lots of kids running around, babies on their sisters’ backs. Dogs barking. Mosquitoes. The men come and we eat dinner sitting cross-legged in a circle—one of the chickens and some of the vegetables in a noodle soup made with ganja buds, a specialty for Lisa, who says her stomach has been acting up. The men are joking and laughing, pouring shot glasses of homemade alcohol and making toasts where every glass touches. The two oldest men are in their mid-50s and one is wearing a hat with a bald eagle and an American flag. I ask him if the Americans bombed this area in the early ’70s, and he says not this village but in the mountains nearby there were a lot of bombs. “And you still like America?” I ask. He says, “Yes, of course. I fought with the Americans as a Lon Nol soldier.” He tells me the man whose house we are eating in also fought as a Lon Nol soldier, but he died four months ago from AIDS. He and the other men believe his ghost is still here, that he hasn’t left yet. We toast the ghost, and it gets quiet, except for the crickets.

After dinner, we walk through a couple of gardens to a small hut made from bamboo poles and thatched palm fronds. There’s no light inside, completely dark, but there’s a voice, like a rock being rolled through dry grass, and the room smells as if an animal has died. Someone brings a light, a 29-watt fluorescent tube on the end of a long extension cord. The woman is at least 80 years old, white hair, skin and bones, lying on a wooden bed without a mattress, blanket, or pillow. Her eyes are moist and cloudy. She sits up and holds her arms around her shins. The toes on her right foot have swollen to twice the size of the toes on her left foot, and there’s a three-inch square of skin on the top of her foot that has turned to mushy liquid, pureed salmon. Above the infection, the skin is a black flame, turning green and yellow. Gangrene.

She says it hurts.

There’s no money for a doctor or a hospital. Traditional ointments and teas did nothing to stop the infection.

Lisa sits down next to the old lady, takes her leg gently in her hands, and speaks to her in Khmer. Lisa is an American who produces public service commercials and documentaries for Cambodian television. She knows nothing of medicine, doesn’t know the woman has gangrene, but she does know she’s dying—slowly and painfully—she can feel it, and she tries to comfort her. I’m frightened by the whole thing and turn around and there are 12 children pressed together just inside the door, all motionless and absolutely quiet, eyes fixed on Lisa’s hands, all wondering if this American woman who is tall and beautiful can cure their great-grandmother. Maybe she has magical power. I can’t quite take it and step through the kids to get some fresh air and listen to the dogs bark. Next door there’s another, larger hut, and inside a man is sitting on a stool two feet from a 12-inch television screen. He’s glued to it, as if manning a periscope. The screen shows new cars and houses with carpets and refrigerators, beautiful people with stylish clothes, women with lipstick. It shows this world, another planet, where there’s lots of cool stuff and money, a place where grandmothers do not die slowly, painfully, in the dark, from gangrene.

THIS IS HOW what we now call human trafficking begins. It’s an awkward term, borrowed from the black market for drugs and guns, only in this case it means the buying and selling of human beings. We used to call it slavery, but the United Nations and the U.S. State Department thought we needed a new name because it’s become such a big business. Worldwide, people are cheaper now than ever before, and there seems to be an endless supply as well as an endless demand.

The causes are said to be exploding populations, increasing power differentials between the rich and the poor, corrupt governments, failed states...and television, which functions like a huge suction machine, a black hole, pulling people away from shrinking farms and into swollen cities. It starts as migration, a children’s crusade for some of that stuff to bring back home. They leave the village and give themselves up to the great sky of luck; they take a chance. And it ends, too often, with young people being bought and consumed and thrown away like a candy bar and its wrapper. And this is also a cause: the desire, the pull for more cheap bodies, whether they are put to work in garment factories and paid 15 cents an hour for 90 hours a week, or thrown onto Thai fishing boats and fed methamphetamines for a few years then shot and thrown overboard, or sold into prostitution or domestic service in Sweden, the United States, or Saudi Arabia. The supply and the demand, the push and the pull, are inseparable.