Bangkok Haunts Read Free Page A

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