Bangkok Haunts (2 page)

The FBI is finding it hard to believe what is happening. Only seconds ago it was a normal sort of day in the life of a cop. I’m watching Kimberley intently while the images start to play. Supatra has done this to me before, so I have a good idea of what the FBI is seeing, even though the screen is not in my line of sight. Kimberley turns pale, puts one hand to her face, stares at me for a moment, turns back to the laptop, shakes her head, then winces. She puts her hand to her mouth as if she is about to vomit. Supatra leans over her to turn off the video clip.
The FBI stands up, anger distorting her features. “I’m sorry,” she says, red-faced. “I’m a guest in this country, and I’m afraid I don’t think that’s very funny.”
Supatra shares a glance with me and raises her hands a little. I say in Thai, “It’s okay, Kimberley is doing exactly what I did the first time I saw it. She has to find a way to convince herself that it’s not real, things like that don’t happen, it must be a trick.”
Supatra: “What should I do? She’s very annoyed. I don’t think this was a good idea, Sonchai. Is it easier if I pretend it’s a trick?”
I shrug. “Whatever is easiest.”
“I’m very sorry,” Supatra says to Kimberley in English. “It’s Thai humor. I didn’t mean to offend you.”
Mollified, the FBI manages a smile. “It’s okay. I guess it’s a cultural thing. Sure, I guess I would have found it funny in a different context. I’m not a killjoy—I just wasn’t expecting a practical joke.”
“So sorry.” Supatra wais to indicate sincere regret.
Now Kimberley is anxious to show she’s a good sport. “It’s very clever,” she offers. “I don’t know how you did that. Is it part of Thai culture to believe that ghosts fornicate with each other and do those— those, uh, ugly things to each other? I’ve never heard of that. Amazing the way you got those kinds of effects. You must be a serious amateur filmmaker.”
“Right,” Supatra says. “It’s all camera magic. For the antics of ghosts, though, you have to remember that when the brain dies, many urges are left. Generally quite ugly to look at, I agree.”
“Those other creatures, the nonhuman ones—how did you do that?”
“Oh, I use a special kind of animation program,” Supatra says, at the same time making a little wai to the Buddha sitting in a little shrine halfway up the wall, asking for absolution for telling a white lie.
“It’s incredible. I’ve never seen anything like it. It seems more advanced that anything coming out of Hollywood.”
Supatra accepts the compliment and takes us back upstairs. I can tell she’s angry with me for encouraging her to share her hobby with a farang by the way she doesn’t look me in the eye when she says goodbye.
Out on the street I don’t want to talk about Damrong, but I’m trapped. I have to take Kimberley back to her hotel in a taxi, and her silence presses on my consciousness like an ever-increasing weight. She doesn’t even need to look at me. She stares out of her side window pretending to be diplomatic, while all the time she’s adding tick by tick to the great black burden of silence.
“Of course Chanya knows,” I say after a long pause. “It was before she and I met. The reason she talked to you about the case is she’s scared of the effect it’s having on me. She thought you were the one person who could help on a psychological level. She feels helpless herself.”
Kimberley doesn’t say anything for a while. Then she leans forward to tell the driver to take us to The Dome on the top of State Tower, instead of her hotel. It’s a smart choice. A few hundred feet above the city, sitting in an open-air restaurant and cocktail lounge, naked to the stars, an exotic coconut-based cocktail in Kimberley’s hand and a Kloster beer in mine, one may feel as if the ceiling of one’s skull has been raised to be contiguous with the night sky: a cosmic confessional.
“So it was like this,” I say.
3
Unless you’ve been there, it’s hard to understand. If I’d never met Damrong, I too would have remained bemused at the antics of men in that morbid state that you insist on calling “being in love,” farang. We don’t look at it quite like that over here.
Let me get the least embarrassing part out of the way first: she seduced me effortlessly, within a week of coming to work at my mother’s bar, which I still help to run. Like all good papasans, I had as a guiding principle never to sample our own services, and I had never done so. I was lonely, though, and missing my partner Pichai terribly, after he was killed in the line of duty. Like a fool, I had no idea how obvious were my feelings for the new superstar. Looking back, she probably knew how I felt before I knew it myself. At what point do a man’s feelings for a woman switch from objective admiration to the psychosis of possession, against which the Buddha so vehemently counsels? I know only that it was Songkran, the Thai New Year and the hottest time in the solar cycle. That Songkran —it was about four years ago—was particularly steamy; while the Sun transited Aries, Mars pursued Venus in the unforgiving sign of Scorpio. In my lovelorn state I was reduced to sharing Proustian paeans with my computer:
Last evening I watched from the door of the bar when she arrived at the soi on the back of a motorbike taxi wearing some new, violently colored dress that seemed somehow to embody the essence of this terrifying season, and with a haughty toss of her head, almost overendowed with its thick mane of heavy black hair, so that even her gaunt beauty was overwhelmed by this dense silken mass of shining darkness, stalked proudly into the brothel where I had been waiting for her and only her…
Oh, dear. I guess every man in that state is transparent to the love object, right? I think it was the night after I wrote those words, around two A.M., when she just happened to be the only girl left in the bar and I was about to lock up. I had already turned off the sound system, and it seemed to me the ugly noises I made prior to locking up—rattling bottles, trash chucked in the bin, glasses sloshing in the sink—possessed the very quality of loneliness that dogged me. I looked down at the floor so as to avoid her eyes as she passed me on the way out. She played a little game of getting in my way, but I refused to fall for it. So she gently placed a hand under my jaw and raised my head until I was looking into her face. That’s all it took. In our fever we didn’t bother to go upstairs to the bedrooms.
“You’re the most amazing lover,” she whispered afterward. Standard whoretalk, of course, and like a standard John, I really wanted to believe it.
Indeed, with the benefit of hindsight, the whole affair strikes me as quite horribly standard in its beginning, middle, and end, and I say as much to the FBI, who carefully avoided looking at me while I was outlining the sorry saga. Somehow it seemed to emerge out of the wildness of Songkran itself. Originally it was a holy festival in which sacred water was gently and lovingly poured over monks and respected elders; nowadays, though, farang have taken it over in Bangkok: pink-faced juvenile delinquents in their thirties, forties, and fifties stand guard with two-foot water pistols and squirt at passersby; in drink they become quite aggressive, until they get tired and emotional and curl up on the sidewalk with their plastic toys. Everyone who entered the bar that night was soaked to the skin; the wise kept their cell phones in plastic Ziploc bags. Madness was everywhere.
I take a gulp of beer. Now the FBI and I are both staring at Orion in his priapic march across the sky.
“So spare me the middle. How did it end?” the FBI says, with no sign of jealousy or any other emotional response; her voice has gone a little sandpapery, though.
“Do women experience extreme passion the way men do?”
“Total psychic dissolution, identity annihilated, ego shot, not sure if you’re one person or two, no sense of security when you’re not in bed with them, precious little when you are? Sure.”
“And how does it end, usually?”
“The one who is suffering the most ends up with a simple choice: kill the other or get the hell out while you still can.” A quick look. “You’re a cop—you know better than most there’s no violence like domestic violence.”
Her harsh farang truth-telling stuns me for a long moment. I wasn’t expecting to come to the climax quite so early in the evening. I think maybe ten silent minutes pass before I can get it out:
“After that first night I made her swear she would not go with any John. She would just serve drinks and flirt, and I would make up for her loss in income, whatever it was. A classic case of a gaga John buying his girl’s chastity. She kept up her side of the deal for at least ten days. Then she got tipsy one night with a muscular young Englishman. He paid her bar fine and took her upstairs in front of my nose.” Another long pause. “It’s like you say, either you kill them or you get out. I held my guts together for as long as it took to call my mother to have her take over the bar for the rest of the night. The other girls had to tell her what had happened. I took a two-week vacation on Ko Samui. When I got back, my mother had gotten rid of her.”
Kimberley shakes her head. A compassionate smile, spiced with wicked humor, plays on her features. “So Mom saved you after all?”
I nod. “Yes, but not only her. When I got back from Samui, Chanya had started to work for us. Spend time with the morbid, and you develop a taste for the wholesome. I don’t think I would have appreciated Chanya so well if I hadn’t gone out of my mind with Damrong. The universe is composed of pairs of opposites.”
In the taxi on the way back to Sukhumvit, the FBI says, “That night, when she went off with the English john in front of your nose, you very nearly went upstairs to the room where they were? You were almost out of control?”
“Yes. My gun was in its holster under the register. I became very aware of it.”
“Then when you were on Ko Samui for those two weeks, what you were doing was fighting homicidal fantasies?”
“All the time. They would come in waves. Mornings were my only strong time, when I could handle them. The rest of the time I used alcohol and ganja.”
“And what about her? Why did she do that? Wasn’t it self-destructive? You were her boss, after all.”
“The dirt poor don’t actually have selves to destroy. When they get a little power, they know it’s only for a moment. They have no practice in preparing for the future. They generally don’t believe they have one.”
The FBI ponders this. “Is that true?”
“For the poor, birth is the primary disaster: owning a body that has to be fed and sheltered and looked after, along with the drive to reproduce, to continue. Everything else is kid stuff, including death.”
She sighs. I know she is thinking of the Damrong video when she says, “I was afraid you were going to say something like that.”
When I drop her off at the Grand Britannia, she says, “She would have let you do anything, right, anything at all, any perversion or degradation, just to capture your soul?”
I answer with silence. There is one other little thing, though, that the FBI wants to get off her chest before going to bed tonight.
“That little hobby of Dr. Supatra’s—is it typically Thai, or am I right in thinking she’s a little eccentric?”
I cough. “All Thais are eccentric, Kimberley. Nobody colonized us. We don’t have much sense of a global norm to follow.”
“But you’ve seen that stuff yourself, right? I mean, it wasn’t just phantoms fornicating. There were really grotesque things going on, with demons and, like, subterranean creatures. I’m talking seriously bestial. It was very clever but very morbid.”
I shrug. “She’s been a forensic pathologist for more than twenty years. Imagine what her subconscious must look like.”
The FBI nods at this convenient explanation, which fits her own cultural prejudice. There’s something nagging at her, though. “Son-chai, I’m getting a feeling that there are levels here, levels below levels. Are you being totally straight with me? I mean, if that stuff Supatra has on her hard disk, if that was for real, she would be world famous by now, right? There would have been investigations by National Geographic and the Discovery Channel, Scientific American, all that?”
I have to suppress a smile at the thought of Supatra allowing herself to be the center of any kind of public attention. “Dr. Supatra is a very private person,” I explain. “I think she would rather die than be involved in a media circus.”
By now the FBI is out of the cab, the door of which is still open, bending down to speak to me, her forehead a mass of wrinkles. “You mean you’re saying that stuff is real? Or might be?”
“Depends what you mean by real,” I say, and gently close the door.
Alone in the cab on the way back to Chanya, my mind insists on replaying the whole of those steamy, intense, impermissibly passionate moments with Damrong. I don’t think there was a day when we didn’t make love at least three times: Tell me your heart, Sonchai, tell me your pleasure. I want you to do things to me you’ve never done to any other woman. Sonchai, make me your slave, hurt me if you like, you can, you know.
It might look corny in black and white, but it’s heady stuff when it comes from a sorceress who has already bent your mind.
When I reach home, I see that Chanya has waited up for me. She is watching a soap on TV (magicians, ghosts, and skeletons add spice to a kitchen-sink drama) and welcomes me with a slow blink and the eternal greeting of country folk: “Did you eat yet?”
“I had a bite.”
The first thing I do after I kiss her is caress the Lump. It’s a sort of joke between us that the fetus is the reincarnation of my former partner and soul brother, Pichai. Except it’s not quite a joke. We have both been dreaming about him almost nightly, and Chanya has described him perfectly even though she never met him in the flesh. So I say, “How’s Pichai?”
“Alive and kicking.” She studies my face. “Well?”
“I showed Kimberley the video. She thinks she can check the perp’s eyes using isometric technology. It’s like fingerprints for the eyes. Every foreigner coming into Thailand has to have a digitalized mug shot these days, on the insistence of the U.S. They call it freedom and democracy. We should be able to catch him sooner or later.”
She puts a hand on my cheek, then checks my brow for fever. “I’ve never known you to be so affected by a case. Is it only because you were lovers?”
“What else?”
“What else? The ending, of course. What did Kimberley say about it?”
“She can’t quite handle it either. It made a strange atmosphere.”
“Even dead, that woman has the power to turn your world upside down.”
I take a couple of beats to absorb that penetrating observation. “Not only mine. The FBI isn’t exactly naive, but she’s in shock. It’s what it does to your faith in life. Makes it that much harder to get up in the morning. You don’t want to believe it, but it’s hard to ignore the evidence.”