Weaponized Read Online Free Page B

mutability of identity. This is where you come to shed your current form, to mingle among other ghosts. It’s the same as when you take a plane ride; you can lie to the person next to you for the entire trip.
    Even Pol Pot changed his name, ten times.
    “You see what happened to my fish,” Armand says. “Electricity went out most of yesterday. Fucking power failures.” Armand’s fish tank—previously his pride and joy—is now a cemetery. His fish float atop brackish water, their gills clogged with drain scum. “The filter stopped working and they drowned in their own shit…I loved those fish.”
    “I know you did.”
    “This fucking city…it just takes and takes from you.” Armand swats away his negativity. “It’s always good to see you, Andrew.”
    Andrew was one of the first names Kyle toyed with upon arrival, and Armand seems to have taken to it. No sense in changing things now.
    “Drink?” Armand says, and pulls an unmarked turquoise bottle from behind the bar.
    “Yeah.” Kyle squints. “The hell is that?”
    “Do you trust me?”
    “It looks like the stuff they use to clean combs at a barbershop.”
    Armand laughs, fills two shot glasses, and makes engine noises at the baby, who smiles.
    Armand’s a true child of Cambodia, raised in Phnom Penh until 1975, when most of the Westerners made a mad dash before Pol Pot’s shock troops emerged from the jungle. Until Pol’s revolution, Armand’s dad owned and operated casinos. In a desperate attempt to balance the budget, Prince Sihanouk had granted licenses to gambling houses. He needed a way to signal to the West that he was trying to stanch the flow of Communism and didn’t want his country to end up like Vietnam. The easiest way was to fly the flag for private enterprise. Financially, the casinos were a tremendous success, and both the prince and men like Armand’s dad got fat off the proceeds. However, for the populace, they proved to be a disaster. People committed suicide after incurring insurmountable debts. Business activity bottomed out as everyone from factory owner to common laborer lost his life savings on a pillow of green felt.
    Armand’s dad still talked about the last days before Phnom Penh fell, talked about it like it was Rome under Caligula minus the midgets. One night, Armand’s dad hosted a pool party. Everyone was embalmed in champagne and sniffing heroin from Laos. A Frenchwoman dove into the water and invited all the men in there with her. She traveled around the pool and fucked a stranger in every corner until they all met in the middle and had their way with her.
    The other partygoers sipped gin and cheered them on.
    Some Cambodians weren’t upset when Pol Pot and his crew put an end to this strain of Western bacchanalia. Then they learned what was taking its place. Suddenly, orgies seemed almost quaint, a foreign lark.
    Kyle and Armand do the shots, and it takes Kyle three tries to force it down. “Somehow, it tastes worse than it looks,” he says, rubbing his teeth with his index finger, trying to scrub the taste away.
    Armand notices Kyle’s hand. “You’re shaking.”
    “I…I haven’t been sleeping well,” Kyle says. “How do you sleep in this heat?”
    “Air-conditioning,” Armand says.
    A Khmer song explodes from the jukebox. The singer’s voice is absolute bubblegum—remnants of a style that went out in the West with Phil Spector’s girl groups—and the stringed instruments sound like they’re mourning. The contrast is the perfect sonic summation of Phnom Penh.
    “Andrew…you have to sleep,” Armand says. “Sleep is where we work out all our problems. It’s elemental. Goes back to our origins. When it was hunting season and the men of the ancient tribes were up for days searching for prey, they would pay a shaman to dream for them.”
    Kyle points to the baby. “Maybe I could buy his brain for a night.”
    “Oh, no,” Armand says. “He dreams for me.”
    “That explains a lot.”
    Armand