Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale Her infinite variety. Other women cloy The appetites they feed, but she makes hungry Where most she satisfies; for vilest things Become themselves in her, that the holy priests Bless her when she is riggish.
“School play,” he adds with a smug smile. “I was Enobarbus.” And closes his eyes again.
It is not until we are on the outskirts of Krung Thep that the drug’s high tide begins to recede. He starts to rub the angry bruise under his eye and other parts of his body where they beat him. His mind seems to be working on a more powerful distraction than pain, though, when he begins to narrate his inner journey:
“Monochrome, shades of gray, white floor with gigantic tiles, maybe ten feet square, with black between them, like a giant chessboard. On each square a gray spiral staircase leading to a gray platform. She is color: gold and green mostly, dazzling, with dark purple, crimson, orange, a blaze of colored light in some kind of silk robe, stepping off the platform into the void. Go to the next tile. Again, spiral staircase, this time taller than the last; same thing, she is the only colored object, stepping off the platform into the void. And so on, for infinity, staircase after staircase, each one taller than the last, Damrong after Damrong— a different robe every time, do you see? Always about to step off into the void.” He grasps my forearm. “She comes to me every night, glowing gold-green. She controls my dick, my orgasm, everything. She can make it last for hours, literally all night, or make me come in five seconds flat. Every night, every night!” Digging his nails into my flesh: “I want to jump off into the void with her, but I just don’t have the guts.”
I have called ahead, so Vikorn has arranged for a police van to meet us at Hualamphong railway terminal.
14
We are tiny figurines hanging from the charm bracelet of infinity. When these bodies wear out, we will migrate to others. What will I be next, tinker, tailor, tiger, fly? Demon, Buddha, mountain, louse—all things are equal in their essential emptiness. But will there be a planet worth living on in fifty years’ time? Chart na means “next life,” and if you’re Buddhist you worry about it. Not only yours, but the earth’s too, for it, also, is a living being with its own karma with which our own is inextricably entwined.
Well, it’s getting hotter year by year—that’s finally official. Even scientists employed by the United States government now agree: we will be the only species in cosmic history deliberately to fry itself to extinction. I happened to be watching the BBC on our cable link this morning and half expected the newscaster to adopt an urgent tone, but he used the same smooth voice as for births, deaths, and football results. It’s not his fault, of course; he knows better than most how retro normality can be, but what is the appropriate reaction when the mind relies on denial to balance itself? Carry on as normal, I guess: just keep burning carbon. Environmental fascism will come eventually. When the Himalayas are melting, leaders of English-speaking countries will threaten to nuke to a crisp those third-world nations still relying on fossil fuels. That’ll help global warming.
So now the FBI and I are in a cab on our way at last to a warehouse in Chinatown by the Chao Phraya River, which Vikorn has rented and is in process of buying for the purpose of developing the arts side of his empire. It was, clearly, a blunder on my part to mention to Kimberley this amendment to my job description, for I happen to loathe this new role of mine and need a couple of beers before I can steel myself to enter Yammy’s atelier.
I order a Kloster at a riverside cafe, and to my surprise Kimberley joins me. We both spare a moment to take in the river, which as usual is roaring with human life. In the midstream brightly painted tugs tow barges with big eyes on the bows, while longtails with gigantic former bus engines mounted on davits with outboard propeller shafts about fifteen feet long roar up and down, packed with tourists. The river is still the only jam-free thoroughfare for a lot of people commuting to work and back, so the long, thin passenger ferries are packed; they arrive and depart the floating docks amid a frenzy of hysterical whistles from the pilots at the stern, who like to give the impression of catastrophe narrowly averted.
The FBI almost never drinks alcohol, but I know from various telephone conversations that she’s been in a strange state ever since she arrived. Why is she here, exactly? Sure, she’s interested in the case, and from what she has disclosed so far, it really does tie in with her work in Virginia. But even razor-sharp FBI agents don’t just jump on a plane overnight on the basis of a call from a friend. Delighted though I am to have her around, I’ve been wondering about her. As a matter of fact, our friendship went on hold for more than a year, before it restarted with one of those telephone calls farang make out of the blue: “Hey, Sonchai, how’s it going?” as if she were just around the corner and we’d been constantly in touch. It was the middle of the night, my time, and it took me a while to wake up. I had to take the cell phone out into the yard so as not to awaken Chanya and the Lump. (No, I did not say, “Kimberley, do you realize it’s two a.m. over here?” Thai courtesy.) My attitude changed when I started to realize how unhappy she was. As her voice slowed and drooped, compassion kicked in. When she tried out a few amorous gambits, I had to tell her about Chanya and the baby; that gave her pause for a while. She didn’t quite admit that she’d been fantasizing about living happily ever after in Bangkok with that weirdo half-caste cop she’d sort of bonded with on the python case. (A transsexual Thai —M2F—murdered a black American marine with drug-crazed cobras and a giant python. We refrained from potting her/him for reasons of compassion.) Not quite, and anyway it started to emerge that her need was extrahormonal: “I’m hitting a wall over here, Sonchai. I don’t have a lot of friends outside the U.S.—only you, really. Just because America is a big country doesn’t mean the walls don’t close in on you from time to time.” We carried on like that, with middle-of-the-night chats, until the Damrong case gave us something practical to talk about. I really didn’t expect even a supercop like Kimberley to jump on a plane, though. So, the case aside, I’ve been waiting for signals that she’s ready for the deep and meaningful. It’s taken me a whole week—there are parts of the farang psyche with which even I am unfamiliar—to realize that under the tough, relentlessly extrovert, take-no-prisoners carapace, there lives quite a shy girl who doesn’t have a lot of practice in sharing her heart.
The conversation, at this minute, however, is not about her mood but mine.
“It’s kind of funny how much you dislike pornography—you know, considering,” the FBI says.
“That I’ve been involved in the Game all my life and run a brothel? It’s just not the same thing.”
“What’s the big moral difference?”
I search for words. Actually, moral difference is the right way of putting it. “Spontaneity. A girl arrives in Krung Thep from Isaan feeling lonely, terrified, inadequate, poor. A middle-aged man arrives from the West feeling lonely, terrified, inadequate, rich. They’re like two halves of a coin. All my mother’s bar does is facilitate their inevitable congress, supply the beer and the music, the short-term accommodation, and rake off a little profit. The whole thing is driven by a good healthy primeval human need for animal warmth and comfort. In all my years with the Game I’ve only come across half a dozen serious cases of abuse of one party by another, and I figure that’s because the whole thing works perfectly as an expression of natural morality and grassroots capitalism. The way I see it, we’re like a real estate agency that deals in flesh instead of earth. Setting it all up artificially, though, in a film set, choreographing the whole thing so flabby overweights in Sussex and Bavaria, Minnesota and Normandy, can jerk off without having to tax their imaginations—that strikes me as downright immoral, a crime against life almost. I guess the real difference is that in the bar people actually do it. There’s a reality input.”
She smiles and shakes her head. “You’re just too much, Sonchai. Some people would say you were slightly insane. But when you come out with that kind of stuff, it makes sense, at least for the moment that you’re saying it. How did your mind get so free? What happened to you? Are all Thai pimps like you?”
“No,” I say. “I’m strange, I guess.”
She has drunk a bottle of Kloster rather quickly and seems to be sinking into depression. She orders another, though, and drinks it rapidly, straight from the bottle. “Actually doing it,” she says in a musing voice. “I guess that’s exactly what we’re not good at. Maybe that’s why we love war so much: reality starvation.”
Now she’s giving me one of her most puzzling looks. “You’ve changed,” I say. “Big time. What happened?”
Another gulp from the bottle. “I hit thirty-five. The midway point. It finally dawned on me that my whole description of reality was secondhand. My generation of women never rebelled—we felt we didn’t need to. We inherited a message of hate and simply elaborated it a bit. I never saw much of my father—my mother made sure of that. I think I went into the only important relationship of my life in order to be a bitch. In order to express hate. Isn’t that sick?”
How to answer that? By changing the subject. “Why did you come to Bangkok, really?”
A sigh. “I think I came for this conversation. We don’t have them at home anymore, you know? Maybe it’s modernism: we trade tribal sound bites so we can feel we belong to something. I came for your mind, Sonchai. Chanya can have your body—she deserves it. That is one very smart woman. I can hardly stand to see the two of you together. The cozy, unspoken, genuine love makes me want to have you both arrested. I don’t think it exists stateside. There’s a very powerful taboo against it. Think of all the hours you spend loving when you could be making money.”
I say, “Let’s go.”
“I want another beer.”
“No.”
In the cab we enjoy silence for a while, then: “I did marry. I lied to you.” A pause. “And divorced, of course.”
“Any kids?”
“One. A boy. I let his father keep him. His father said if the baby stayed with me, I would destroy him. I was like a smart bomb programmed to destroy anything male. I was afraid he may have been right.” Another long pause, then: “It was a hell of a long time ago. I was barely out of my teens. When it all fell apart, I joined the Bureau. I figured if I was a natural-born man-killer, I might as well get a license.”
Somehow she sneaked an extra can of beer into the cab, which she opens. Raising the can to her mouth: “I don’t know, Sonchai, the minute you start to search for meaning, you’re lost. But without meaning, we’re lost also. Who am J, where do I come from, where am I going? Fuck knows. I can’t handle marriage—that’s way beyond my tolerance level. But a lover who lasts more than a weekend might help my emotional stability.” She takes a swig of the beer. “So now I masturbate,” she says with Tragic Mouth, “every fucking night. Maybe I need a toy boy?”
The best way to check if you’re in Chinatown is by counting gold shops. If there’s not one on each corner, chances are you’ve taken a wrong turn. The shop signs are invariably yellow on red in Chinese characters, and the gold is of the extra-shiny variety that screams at you from the windows. Many of them are not technically shops but hangs: warehouse-size affairs with scales on the counters and turbaned Sikhs with pump guns on guard, all ablaze with neon light bouncing ferociously off the interminable stretches of gold Buddhas, gold dragons, gold belts, gold necklaces, gold bracelets. Clothing is the other industry: crowded narrow lanes made still narrower by stalls selling every kind of cotton or silk garment at astonishingly low prices.
The FBI has managed to get drunk on a few beers and stays my hand when I try to pay the cab driver. “Do you know I’ve never known simple joy? Darker, more complex emotions, yes, but joy, no. Nor have any of my friends. We were infected by the psychosis of winning at the age of five. But you know joy. That’s what blows me away. You’re the son of a whore, a pimp, you run a brothel, you’re an officer in one of the most corrupt police forces in Asia, but you’re innocent. I’ve never broken a law, cheated, lied, or presided over a crooked deal in my life, but I’m corrupt. I feel dirty twenty-four hours a day. Does anyone on the planet recognize the significance of that apart from me? The material you’re made of is fifty percent lighter than ours. Why?”
“We don’t have original sin,” I explain as I hand a hundred-baht note to the driver. “That iron rod through the skull. We just don’t have it.”
Vikorn has posted a couple of plainclothesmen outside the warehouse. They recognize me and let us into Yammy’s studio, where Marly, Jock’nEd are sitting around discussing the Iraq war in white silk dressing gowns with crimson trimmings. I feel the FBI’s sexual frisson when she clocks Ed. Excuse me while I explain Jock’nEd:
They are a team, famous throughout the Bangkok porn industry, and the invariable performers whenever the script requires a farang male to flesh out the skeletal story line. Ed is, well, simply magnificent. A natural six-two male animal with superb pecs that gleam under the lights when rubbed with Johnson’s baby oil, power thighs that could do justice to a lioness, a rocky-handsome bone structure, one of those aquiline noses that emit erotic fire with every exhalation, relentlessly seductive baby-blue eyes, and a telltale cleft in the chin that is so distinctively American it could have been invented by Ford. (Actually, Ed is a Cockney who hails from Elephant and Castle.) On the other side of the karmic balance, lamentably—well, how can one put it? Even tumescent his dong is not of the Big Mac dimensions your randy granny in Omaha is accustomed to ogle over a TV dinner. He has to be supplemented, in other words, using the magical techniques of the silver screen we all love to be conned by. Enter Jock. He is a five-foot-nothing Scotsman with a consonant-free burr, bald, pot-bellied from a heroic beer habit, almost chinless, with slurpy lips you wouldn’t want your worst enemy to be kissed by, but armed with—you guessed—a gigantic member of positively pneumatic obedience.