Free For Us Surrender Is Out of the Question by Mac McClelland Page A

them leave?”
    That, or my anger, shut him up. “I am interested in your ideas,” he said, evenly, after a minute. “I think it is important to keep an open mind.”
    I shut up, too, and focused on eating rice for a few awkward moments.
    “So,” I said eventually. “Do you guys have sex?”
    Htoo Moo and Ta Mla shook their heads while Htan Dah said, “Sometimes.”
    “Ever?” I asked Htoo Moo.
    “No,” he said.
    “Why not?”
    “Because, I am not married.”

    “What about you?” I asked Htan Dah.
    “Yes,” he said, nodding hard once. “I am married.”
    “You’re married ?”
    Htan Dah laughed. “Yes! I am married.”
    “I didn’t know that. Where is your wife?”
    “She is in camp. With my kid.”
    “You have a kid ?” They were all laughing at me now, because I was raising my voice. “I can’t believe I didn’t know that.” Other things I didn’t know: that everyone currently in the house save Htan Dah and The Blay, who were married, apparently, was a virgin. This extended even to kissing. Their society was way removed, literally and figuratively, from the Asian cultures in which prostitution is a mainstay. And these guys hailed from the parts that had long been converted to Christianity, which had brought premarital-sex-forbidding to the traditionally less conservative animist tribes. Htan Dah asserted, obtaining the agreement of the other guys, that if an unwed couple was caught fooling around, a village chief might force them into marriage on the spot. Htoo Moo volunteered that he wasn’t actively looking for a girlfriend and that he wouldn’t know what do with her even if he found one.
    We’d long since finished our meals. Though I was, as always, ready to lie down by nightfall, Htan Dah told me I had to accompany the three of them into the computer room and show them MySpace again.
    “Not for me,” he said. “For Ta Mla.”
    Of course.
    The rainy-season air was sticky. Ta Mla and Htan Dah and I crowded around a computer and played on the Internet, our cheeks flushed with satiety and humidity and new camaraderie. After I got up to pee, the sweaty Htan Dah stripped to the waist, so that when I got back, he was all sculpted arms and torso.
    I’d assumed that the bulk underneath his baggy clothes, beneath his wide, round face, was soft. Just before I’d left for the bathroom,
I’d even tried to use as delicate a translation as possible when referring to a chubby girl on the computer screen. I shouldn’t have been so surprised by Htan Dah’s abs, since he’d told me earlier that sometimes, when the guys were bored, they exercised compulsively, doing marathon push-ups like prisoners or something. But his toplessness and his shape caught me so off guard that “Look at you, sexy!” fell out of my mouth. And that caught him off guard, and he laughed.
    Htoo Moo, meanwhile, continued working at a nearby computer, even though it was late, and a weekend. The communication gates between us had evidently opened, though, so he interjected burning questions about American life as they came to him.
    “Do you eat rice in America?”
    “Yes.”
    “Really?”
    “Yes. Usually I eat brown rice.”
    “Brown rice?”
    “It’s rice with the hull still on it. Do you know what I’m talking about?”
    “No. I don’t believe that.”
    “Htoo Moo, I swear, it’s rice, and it’s grown in the same way, but it’s brown, because it’s still hulled.”
    “Have you ever eat tiger?”
    “ Eaten tiger. No.”
    “Have you ever eat . . . monkey?
    “‘Have you ever eaten monkey,’ you mean. No.”
    “Are there black lady in America?”
    “ Ladies . Yes. . . .”
    “Are they tall?”
    “It depends. What the hell do you mean?”
    “What language do they speak?” Htan Dah chimed in.
    “English.”
    “Really?”
    I gaped at him, disbelieving, but before I could formulate a
response, Htoo Moo said, “In America, you have cream to grow hair.” He ran his hand over his baby-smooth