Comfort Zone

by Christopher G. Moore

  “How much time do you think I’ve got?” asked Harry Markle.

  “Pratt laid Wang’s murder on Marcus. That’s what he wrote in his report, the one he filed with the Department, and that was the report the Department sent to Wang’s family in Hong Kong. The report also said Marcus had used all kinds of diversions and false trails to divert attention, to implicate others. They might buy it.”

  “Or they might not.”

  “It’s what you’ve got to live with, Harry.”

  “Looking over my shoulder for the rest of my life.”

  The only domino theory that ever fit the reality of Vietnam was the domino of betrayals. Men like Judson had been misled and betrayed by their commanders, who had been betrayed up the chain of command. On the way back down that chain of command, Judson had betrayed Marcus, and later Marcus betrayed Harry Markle. And at the end of the day, Harry had betrayed himself, thinking that somehow he alone was immune from being struck by the last domino to fall. It always hits the next guy, the one next to you. This time it was coming for Harry, and even though he was drunk, he could feel the shadow of that final self- betrayal closing in.

  *******

  BY the time they went downstairs for dinner Harry Markle was pretty drunk. He had polished off half a bottle of Mekhong and smoked a joint as thick as his gorilla’s thumb. In Vietnam, the men in the field were divided between boozers and dopers but, after the war, the distinction blurred when the boozers added pot to their daily maintenance program and dopers found a cheap whisky to clean the taste of grass from their mouth. Harry’s kids were seated at the table spooning rice onto their plates and reaching toward a plate of chicken legs. Noi set down a large bowl of prawns, the steam and smell of garlic rolling off the surface. Her sister, Meow—the Thai nickname meaning “cat”—came out of the kitchen carrying a plate of vegetables. Calvino had been introduced to Meow briefly before Noi had taken him upstairs to Harry’s office. Her presence had come as a surprise; no one had warned him in advance that she was coming to dinner. That had been Harry’s idea: a romantic ambush. Calvino’s law was that all romance was ambush, a surprise attack, no warning, no chance to escape from the direct hit. He tried not to look annoyed though he was. It wasn’t Harry or Noi’s fault; they didn’t know about Mai. He hadn’t told them. It would have been pointless to have done so, until now, when he realized that Noi assumed that he had come to dinner to meet the elusive Meow— the cat who had not shown up at the Fourth of July picnic. She had slipped into the shophouse before him, merging with the rest of the family as she did her part to make him feel comfortable, as if she naturally fit into the domestic scene. That was always the best kind of ambush, around food, around kids and around friends— the last place where one expected to be felled by the opposite sex. “Did Harry tell you that we signed a lease for a shop at Seacon Centre?”

  Harry grinned and winked.

  “Yeah, he mentioned it,” lied Calvino.

  “Noi is the one with ambition in our family,” said Harry. From the expression on Calvino’s face he knew that he had connected.

  “She’s opening that New Age drugstore.”

  “You talked about it at the Fourth of July picnic,” said Calvino, who had sat down at the table.

  Meow sat opposite him and was peeling a prawn with her fingers.

  “I’m sorry I missed the picnic,” she said in good English.

  “I heard something about you having a bad star alignment,” said Calvino.

  “Some things are difficult for a farang to understand about us,” she said, dipping the naked prawn into a small bowl of sauce. “What Meow means,” interrupted Noi, “is that when you grow up with mor doo, you know, fortune tellers, it is not something you shake off. It stays with you. You go to university and study science and then you go to visit the mor doo to find out...”

  “If you should open a shop at Secon Centre,” said Harry, finishing her sentence.

  “Exactly,” said Noi.

  “It’s normal,” said Harry, slurring the words.

  “Are you alright, honey?” Noi asked him.

  “I’m just a little drunk,” he said.

  “Nothing new in that. Nothing wrong. Right?”

  She didn’t say anything, inhaled deeply. Smiling, she picked up the large spoon cradled on the plate of vegetables and began to fill Calvino’s plate.

  “You see the special treatment, Vinee?”

  “Shut up, Harry. He only has one arm to use.”

  Meow had finished the one prawn and started to peel another one as she looked up at Calvino. An awkward smile crossed her face. Blind dates were hell with all that pressure to make conversation with someone you don’t know but everyone else at the table knows and speaks to in a kind of short-hand code. She was nervous, feeling that she had a duty to please her sister.

  “Who do you think are more beautiful? Vietnamese or Thai girls?”

  Calvino looked up from his plate of rice, vegetables and a prawn he couldn’t peel.

  “More beautiful?” he asked, his ears ringing and hot, as if the explosion in Marcus’s room had just gone off.

  “Some men think Vietnamese girls make better wives than Thai girls. You were in Vietnam, what do you think Khun Vincent?” asked Meow.

  His chin dropped and he stared at the table. All eyes were on him, watching, waiting, wondering why this man in a shirt and tie had tears streaming down both cheeks.

  “Did I say something wrong?” asked Meow.

  She was in a state of near panic.

  Calvino looked up. “I’m sorry, Noi. But I have to go now. It’s nothing you said. It’s just that I’m not feeling so good.”

  He pushed his chair back. Even the kids had stopped eating as they watched Uncle Vincent rise from the table and walk toward the door. Noi started after him but Harry grabbed her by the arm and pulled her onto his lap.

  “Harry, what’s happened to Vincent? That’s not like him.” They watched the door close behind him.

  “He discovered Vietnam,” said Harry. “Or Vietnam discovered him and won’t let go.”

  Calvino took in a long breath outside the shophouse door as Harry’s daughter locked the metal gate from the inside. Across the street he noticed a 500 series Mercedes parked with the engine running, and in front were the figures of two men. The tinted glass made it almost impossible to see who they were. One lit a cigarette and, for a fraction of a second, he could see the man in the driver ’s seat was holding a pair of binoculars to his eyes and that they were trained on him. His heart skipped a beat looking at the car. Should he bang on the door, run up and warn Harry that men in a Mercedes were outside, watching his house? Maybe they were just a couple of real estate developers, or maybe they were people hired by Mark Wang’s family who knew the Thai Police Department were trying to pull them over the table concerning Mark’s murder. If he had wanted to play full-time bodyguard for Harry, if the men had been hired by Wang’s family, he might stop these two. But there would be two more, and then two more, until finally there was no more Harry. That was the way the world worked, Calvino knew it, and so did Harry Markle.

  ******

  AS Calvino walked into the Comfort Zone Bar, a new double shophouse bar stuck in the back corner of Nana Plaza, where many naked girls were dancing to the beat of “I Can’t Get No Satisfaction,” some of the girls already looked zonked out and moved like they were shuffling underwater towards some distant shore. Royal barge, fisherman’s boat, Calvino thought to himself.

  A couple swung their legs around the metal poles, moving their pelvis in and out, and watching themselves in the mirror. He leaned his head against the black upholstery and nursed a Mekhong and water. Number 14—her plastic number badge pinned to her bikini bottom—wore a silver peace medallion on a chain around her neck and had a blue swastika tattoo on her right shoulder. The smile suggested glue sniffing, uppers, or heroin—the ice smiles came from a cocktail of drugs, any one of which might stretch the lips back, bare the teeth, for
hours and hours, without pain, without effort. Almost immediately, Calvino felt himself ease into the Zone space. He liked the back, where it was dark, where he could be hidden, his arm in a sling, nothing more special than three or four other cripples dotted around the perimeter, watching the ice goddesses dance. The Zone was not just a bar, or a bunch of bars, it was a state of mind. A mental Zone that never turned off, day or night. He looked around the bar, recognizing a face here and there. It was a new bar that had opened while he had been in Vietnam. In the space of a week the Zone changed, shifted; it was constantly on the move. Very few had any idea as to the borders of the Zone; even fewer had knowledge as to who inhabited the Zone. What everyone agreed upon was that the Zone existed. Out there. Somewhere, maybe everywhere, like thousands of neon holograms flashing from the inner depths of souls, projecting every desire, fear, judgement and doubt. Without checkpoints, without any controls other than the nominal patrol, the Zone was a natural force like a volcano existing beyond the ability of man to master.

  Pratt leaned against the steering wheel, thinking that he had let his wife go into the Zone. Alone. He knew she could handle herself and that she would find Calvino. Who was waiting inside Nana? He started to worry, the same kind of fear he felt carrying Calvino down the stairs. He had gone into the unknown. Now he had let Manee go into the Zone alone. He had protested, but he knew that she was right. That she was probably the only person on the planet who could bring him out. It was one thing to carry him down those stairs and into Le Loi Boulevard, it was another to deliver him from another kind of wound.

  No one knew who the bar owners were—Thai or farang, and no one really cared—what mattered was that it was there, open space filled with young women who learned the fine art of feeding off the ice which hung throughout Nana Plaza. The Zone was a space in time without care or emotional risk, offering every pleasure imaginable.

  The duo-stages were designed to look like the transporters on the Starship Enterprise. Above the girls were yellow, red, blue and—of course—green lights synchronized to the music, flashing and twisting like stars in another galaxy, and the Comfort Zone was a black hole, sucking in all light, all feeling, all emotion faster than the mind could record. The light washed over the customers, balding heads, short-sleeved shirts with tiny bird wings, over countless faces who had come for the show. Neon like the light that had bathed Marcus Nyugen’s body as the J&B neon side outside the window turned him into a being from another world. Any minute he thought Marcus might descend from the ceiling. Any minute he thought Mai might come through the door. What he was looking for was enough Zone ice to cool the minute, to pull it over to the curb and write it a ticket for speeding inside the Zone where time stopped.

  Two dozen girls or more on each transporter platform waiting for someone to beam them down or up or round and round until the meter registered finished. “I Can’t Get No Satisfaction” faded into “One Night in Bangkok” which cranked through the speaker system filling the internal universe with sound. All around the bar were middle-aged men. Some had advanced decades beyond middle age, white haired, large stomachs, wrinkles and loose skin as if they had mutated into some other kind of being visiting from another solar system. Out of the darkness a farang slid onto the cushioned bench.

  “You had that one, Vinee?” asked the voice. “Number 46.”

  A Calvino looked at the profile of the bearded face. He recognized him from the Zone. Lambert was his name and he was a broker during the day.

  “No,” said Calvino.

  “You should try her, she’s good. You need snow shoes to get through all that ice. For thirty minutes she gets into it. That’s the only downside. She’s yours for twenty-nine minutes and fifty- nine seconds and then some switch kicks in and she is pure ice.”

  “Never had her.”

  “She’s worth it,” he said, drinking from a bottle of Singha Gold cooled inside a condom.

  “What happened to the arm? Looks like you got on the wrong end of a gang of katoeys. Yes? No?” asked Lambert.

  “No, it wasn’t a gender bender who did this,” said Calvino. “I fell down some stairs.”

  “Yeah, sure, man,” said Lambert.

  Half of the girls had climbed down from the transporter platforms, wearing only G-strings and high-heeled shoes, they fanned out among the customers on barstools and those farther back against the wall, seated on cushions. They had beamed down. Invasion of the ice goddesses. They had been on stage, looking to make eye contact, someone to pay the bar fine and take them out of the Comfort Zone Bar and into one of the short-time hotel rooms above the Plaza. That was the drill, walking stairs from one Zone to the other, ice forming as they walked, holding hands with a trick, smiling, flipping back long, black hair and almost skipping, that ice walk of the young who are holding the hand of the old, the infirm, the crippled, those with the single desire to forget the past, to turn back the clock, those who were looking for one more chance to scale the mountain of their youth. Time warped as the teenagers ran wild and naked around the Zone, cadging drinks from punters—ice picks—finding others to buy them out—ice torches. The ice could be hacked, torched, blown up, but the next morning it was as thick as the first time he saw her dancing on the transporter, before she had beamed down and scooped him up, wrapped him around her little finger. A mamasan ran around with a wooden dildo the size of a billy-club, banging the side of the platform, the stage, bar stools and rubbing it against the crotch of bar girls.

  He thought about Mai and the pain was nearly unbearable as he watched the naked girls dancing on the stage. Cold, it felt cold inside. He knew it was the air-conditioning turned up full blast; the girls danced as if in a wind tunnel and if they stopped for a moment they would turn to ice. And Calvino knew the purpose of the Zone was to freeze all feeling. Tears of anger sometimes spilled inside the Zone, and they were almost always those of a dancer who had not learned how to form enough Zone ice to shelter behind. Calvino was an old hand, he knew that the right girl was a virtual ice machine, she froze you in time, numbed out the core of the pain, the memories of loss, and of death.

  ******

  MANEE had made Calvino promise that he would bring her husband back. She had told him that she had a real bad feeling about his going off to Saigon. The oath she had required from Calvino was one of serious consequence; she wanted Pratt back, no excuses, no explanation, and she wanted him back in one piece. And, in the end, it had been Pratt who had brought him out. As she walked through the door of the Comfort Zone, Pratt waited on Soi Nana behind the wheel of the family car. As he watched his wife walk toward Nana Plaza, he turned over in his mind the threat the Wang family had made: expose every last contour of the Zone to the outside world, let them see how deeply implicated the Police Department was at every level of the industry. Maybe that would have been a good thing, he thought. Under that intense spotlight of international judgement, the will might have been found to dismantle the Zone, to disconnect from the Force, to end a way of life. Some said the Zone destroyed lives, others said it saved lives. There were no neutral voices in or out of the Zone. Calvino had once told him that the Zone was a refuge against madness. “It’s in Shakespeare. As You Like It.” Calvino and Manee, to make a confession or to win an argument, often resorted to Shakespeare as an ally. Later, when he looked up As You Like It, he found the madness quote, “Love is merely a madness, and, I tell you deserves as well a dark house and a whip as madmen do; and the reason why they are not so punished and cured is, that lunacy is so ordinary that the whippers are in love too.”

  *****

  MANEE had gone in and out of several bars, asking for Calvino. He was easy to describe: the Italian looking farang with his arm in a sling and his heart on a life-support system. The girls on Nana knew who she was talking about and guided her to the Comfort Zone Bar. She parted the plastic strips which hung like a curtain over the entrance and walked straight through the crowd, found Calvino in the corner, his hand cupped around his glass. He w
as staring at the lights in the ceiling. He was sitting alone.

  “Vincent, it’s time to go home,” she said.

  At first he thought that he was dreaming one of those strange Zone dreams where voices appeared without bodies, and bodies appeared without voices, then he saw it was Manee.

  “What are you doing here?”

  She stepped up and sat down on the bench next to him. He was embarrassed that she was in the Zone, seeing him like this, with the lights, the girls, the Zone men leering, grabbing, poking, laughing and staggering back and forth from the toilet.

  “We’ve come to take you home, Vinee,” she said.

  “Pratt’s outside in the car. I insisted on coming. It was my idea. I know how much you miss her. I know if something had happened to Pratt...I don’t know what I would’ve done.”

  “I thought about you and Pratt a lot. I wanted that thing you two have managed to find, Manee.”

  “You can wish all you want but you won’t find it inside this place.”

  It had been Marcus who had said that the lesson of the world was that brutality was the rule. This was the rule that explained the Zone. The refuge where people pretended to escape in an ice- like coldness of the soul, a place beyond brutality. He turned toward her, trying to make out the expression on her face.

  “Manee, where will I find it?”

  “You want me to tell you the truth or do you want me to lie to you?”

  He didn’t respond, his eyes glancing at the stage before they found their way back to Manee.

  “I know you care or you wouldn’t be here, Manee. But the truth is that she’s dead.”

  “The truth is that you are alive. She taught you one great thing, Vinee. She taught you, that you can commit to one woman. You, Vincent Calvino, actually found that you can love a woman and plan for more than one night at a time...”