Bangkok hits you like a fever. The heat first - through the jacket I was still wearing from the plane, through the shirt underneath it, into the skin. Then the smell. Then the noise. Then the light, or the lack of it, because the sun in that city does not shine - it presses.
I arrived with a backpack and four thousand euros in a money belt. The euros were the leftover of everything I had sold. The backpack contained: three shirts, two pairs of trousers, a copy of a book I did not open for a year, a toothbrush, a phone charger, a photo of the apartment.
The first hotel was a mistake. Too expensive, cockroaches of an unusually confident kind. I stayed one night. The second hotel was worse and I stayed five. By then I had stopped trying to make sense of the city, which was the correct move. Bangkok does not want to be understood. It wants to be survived, or enjoyed, or both.
I spent the first two weeks walking. Not touristing - walking. Down streets until they ended, then back. Across bridges. Through markets. Sitting on plastic stools at every open-air restaurant that had a menu in English and an old woman behind the wok. I ate things I could not name and drank beer that tasted the same as beer at home, which surprised me.
I did not speak to anyone for eleven days. Not properly. I said thank you, I said numbers, I bought things. But I did not have a real conversation. And somewhere around day twelve, I noticed this as a fact — as something that had happened - and I was not sad about it. I was relieved.
For the first time in years, nobody knew my name. Nobody knew my business. Nobody knew my wife. Nobody was waiting for an answer from me. I had become, overnight, a man with no past and no future. Just today, on a plastic stool, with a beer.
That was the first taste of what would later become Garry.
After a month I moved into a small room above a laundry, in a neighborhood I could not have found again on a map. The rent was three hundred euros a month. The room had a fan, a bed, a window that opened into another building's wall, and hot water that worked for four minutes a day, at unpredictable hours. I loved it.
I read. I started reading again - that is something I had stopped doing in Moscow, without noticing. First cheap paperbacks from street vendors, then better books, then books I should have read at twenty and was reading now at forty, and understanding differently.
I walked less. I sat more. I started keeping a small notebook, not because I wanted to write anything, but because I wanted to remember certain things. A sentence overheard in a bar. The name of a street. A dream. I did not know it then, but that notebook was the first of a hundred others. Somewhere in those pages, Igor was quietly turning into something else.
Bangkok did not save me. I do not believe cities save people — people save themselves, if they are lucky, and cities are just good or bad places to do it. But Bangkok was a good place to do it. The city did not ask me to be anyone. It just took my money, fed me, and left me alone.
I stayed five months. Left in March. Not because Bangkok had turned bad. Because I had started to sleep through the days and stay up all night, and I recognized the pattern from Moscow - that slow fade, that slipping. I needed to move before I settled into a different kind of disappearing.
The next stop was India.
I thought: if I am going to look for something, I may as well do it properly. I did not yet know that looking for something was exactly the way to make sure you never found it.
