At first, I was sure they were birds.
“How the hell did it get in here?” my boyfriend wondered as we lay in bed, staring up at the darkened ceiling. Outside the window, Siem Reap was settling in to the business of night time. Dogs woofed in the distance; somewhere across the way, a deep bass line was clearing its throat. I knew without looking that at the enormous outdoor bar across the way, a disco ball was spinning frantically for no one, pouring specks of rainbow light onto the dusty red road.
But those were outdoor concerns. The chirping was closer, much closer; a high-pitched trill so local it seemed to be in bed with us. But no birds were in sight, and anyway, where would they perch? There were no trees near the apartment where we were staying, and no neighbors save for a small cluster of food stalls and a vacant lot filled with twisted heaps of metal.
“It’s the lizards,” I joked. Or, I thought I was joking. It would have been a pretty good joke, too, had it not been true. The lizards had been constant companions since we arrived in Southeast Asia a few months earlier, turning up everywhere in almost every dwelling we stayed.
My feelings toward them began with delight—Lizards! Fantastic!—but, as with any lasting relationship, quickly grew more complicated. Just how many lizards were we living with, anyway? It seemed like every light I flicked on would send one scurrying across a wall or under refrigerator. I knew they ate bugs, which was great, but did they ever tangle with people? And what—this I was afraid to Google—were the odds of one falling into my mouth while I slept?
But on the whole, I didn’t give the lizards much thought. Until I arrived in Siem Reap. Until I was kept awake at night, forced to think about the source of the chirping, which again, seemed to be emanating from my own inner ear.
“Do lizards chirp?” I typed into the Google search box, laughing at the silliness of the question and my increasingly demented search history. (Examples: scooter death rates southeast asia; how to pronounce “riel”). “Not usually,” the internet replied. Except for geckos. Geckos, it explained, practically never shut up.
“IT’S THE GECKOS! GECKOS CHIRP!!” I shrieked in disbelief, startling the geckos into rare silence.
It turned out our roommates are so far from exotic, they’re basically benign pests. Wikipedia quickly identified them as “common house geckos,” a name so pedestrian it made me feel like a more boring person for even looking it up. In my defense, they’re also known as Moon Lizards, which I think we can all agree is more enticing.
Anyway, if you spend enough time Googling “house geckos” (because your house geckos are making it impossible for you to sleep), you will learn a few things. The first is that while they’re native to Southeast Asia, their prolific breeding habits and hardy eggs mean that they’ve successfully exported themselves across the globe, where they’ve become an invasive species and a detriment to native gecko populations in places like Australia.
Another thing you’ll learn is that, in theory, house geckos prefer to select a specific place to use the bathroom. From my personal, now considerable, house gecko experience, this is not necessarily the case. House gecko poop varies in size, but in general seems to run around the length and girth of a slightly emaciated Tic Tac. When we first entered the apartment in Siem Reap, I thought nothing of the brown, white-tipped pellets dotting the area around the sink where I thought my toothbrush might go, because traveling on a tight budget enables you to exercise an exceptional blind eye toward unidentifiable filth. Once I learned what those brown pellets were, my regard for the geckos took on a slightly more hostile hue. How many geckos are in this freaking place, I wondered, again.
I thought about this one night as I watched two geckos face off on the wall to the left of the bed. It was unclear to me whether this was a territorial beef (common house geckos are extremely territorial, which is partially why they are so successfully taking over the planet) or a mating dance. Both geckos were similar in size, perhaps three inches long, and both shared the same skin tone, which seemed to contain every color and no color at once. One would retreat, and the other would advance, flicking its non-colored tail. It made a sound while it did this; a clipped version of its usual nighttime chuk-chuk-chuk. Great, I thought. In my time in Cambodia, I’d failed to learn a word of Khmer, but my Gecko was coming along splendidly.
Should you choose to, the methods by which to rid your home of geckos are many, and they all sound completely nuts. The easiest—and nuttiest—way is to litter your place with broken eggshells, because geckos associate broken eggshells with predators. This makes perfect sense, and I love this tactic for its piercing insight into the gecko psyche. It’s the type of fact so wonderfully weird that I regret not being on mushrooms when I learned it. The most violent way of ridding your house of geckos is making a ball of tobacco and coffee, which will poison the gecko and kill it. The weirdest is garlic, which, like vampires, they hate.
A week later, I left Siem Reap for Phnom Penh, and was staying in a delightfully austere apartment with an enormous, plant-filled terrace I would never sit on, thanks to the blazing, unforgiving October heat. Maybe there were geckos out there, but I wouldn’t have known it. This was an unprecedented respite from nighttime chuk-ing. Geckos, and their orchestra of sounds, vanished from my mind. Until.
Until I visit Sihanoukville, a coastal city best known for jutting directly into the heartbreakingly turquoise water of the Gulf of Thailand. I came to Sihanoukville not to come to Sihanoukville, but because by the time my bus blazed into town I’d missed the last ferry to my island destination. No matter. I headed for the beach and found a bungalow so close to the water’s edge it made my breath catch. I unfurled the mosquito net over my bed from its tidy knot, bathing happily in the sound of gently lapping waves and Frank Sinatra floating up from the bar below. As I was thinking I might keep missing my ferry forever and just stay here instead, my reverie was interrupted by what sounded like a rubber duck with a severe case of pneumonia.
It was a different, more terrible sound than the one that so often startled me awake in Siem Reap, but at this point, I knew a gecko noise when I heard one. And it was close. Very close. My boyfriend, having failed to find work to sustain his traveling habit, had been forced to return to the States a week earlier, leaving me to ponder the gecko noises on my own.
I scanned the room for the culprit, and it wasn’t long before I found it, not even bothering to conceal itself along the bungalow’s rough wooden walls. Another thing about geckos: They’re extremely haughty, and rarely appear perturbed by humans, even when those humans are examining them closely and wondering if they shouldn’t go downstairs and beg some eggshells off the kitchen. House geckos, it turns out, live in close proximity to humans on purpose, attracted by our light-filled windows and the bugs that congregate there.
This tolerance for one another is unique in my experience, particularly since I’ve spent most of the last decade living in New York, where the humans inhabiting ancient, semi-permeable apartments are engaged in constant battle to keep the city’s gritty fauna outside. It’s strange to know how to feel about geckos, which were neither specifically invited, nor unwelcome. They’re not pets, but they’re not rats, either. They eat bugs—a huge, undeniable plus. They poop everywhere—a pain, especially when toothbrushes are sitting vulnerable in the open. There is no available data on whether geckos tend to fall into sleeping mouths, because I refuse to look. If you crunch the numbers based on these factors, geckos read as neutral, neither a positive nor a negative. Except, of course, for the noise. A person’s attitude toward geckos is largely dependent on their capacity for tolerating their rainbow of chirrups and squawks; their wheezes and clucks.
This being the beach and not the city, it made sense that the gecko I was staring at now wasn’t a common house gecko, but something far more colorful and exotic. This was a tokay gecko, and this particular one was significantly longer and bulkier than my previous geckos. Its skin, far from colorless, was a luminous purple and orange, and it looked at me sidelong from the yellow orb that was its eye. Tokay geckos are thought to have descended from dragons, which, looking at it stuck to my wall, I believe. Unlike house geckos, they don’t specifically prefer to live among humans, but doing so seems fine by them.
We stared at each other for awhile before I finally turned out my light and tucked my mosquito net into my mattress. “Poo-kaaaayyyy,” it bellowed.
“Goodnight,” I said.