by John Burdett
“He did the same thing to me yesterday.” I’ve noticed that Lek is less keen on the monk than he once was. “Maybe he is nuts. Did he show you his scar?”
“What scar?”
“I thought that was why he was holding his hands up. He has this scar on his wrist, like he once tried to commit suicide or something and maybe now he’s obsessing in some way.”
“But the bracelets?” I say.
“Maybe he’s giving bracelets to everyone he meets. Maybe there is no connection.”
“He didn’t give me one.”
Actually, I did see the scar but paid it no attention. We both shrug. Nobody wants to be the one to get a monk put away in a mental asylum. It’s a shame, though, for one so young to be in such decline. I dismiss him from my thoughts as I refocus on how to pot Tanakan, whether Vikorn likes it or not. I don’t think about the monk at all for the rest of the morning, and it’s only when Lek and I are sitting at a cooked-food stall for kong kob kiao, something to chew, that I think of him again. I am holding half a dozen fish balls on a stick, which I put down on the table.
“The scar,” I say.
“What scar?”
“On the monk’s wrist.”
“What about it?”
“I want you to check the Internet café to see if he’s still there. I’m going back to the station. If he’s in there, ask him if he wouldn’t mind coming up to see me at his convenience. Be polite.”
Lek shrugs. Maybe I’m the one who will soon end up in the nuthouse.
I watch from the window next to my desk while Lek emerges from the Internet café, pushing his hair back with both hands. He appears at my desk a few minutes later, alone.
“Well?”
“He said he would be delighted to come and see you here in about an hour. He is going to the wat to meditate for a short time.”
I feel a twinge of annoyance, then let it pass. I remember that no one is more meticulous than a fraud. I’m recovered by the time he does show up, only to get irritated all over again at his self-conscious monk-at-the-shore-of-nirvana posing. I have to take myself in hand not to use an aggressive interrogation technique. Since he likes to wear monk’s robes, he obviously enjoys seeing others grovel.
“Phra—I’m sorry, I do not know your Sangha name.”
His sangfroid is imperturbable, I have to give him that. “It doesn’t matter. From the look on your face, I suppose you believe I do not have a Sangha name. Is that not so?”
Irritated all over again, I ask, “How many precepts do you follow?”
“What a childish question, Detective. You know very well every monk must follow two hundred and twenty-seven precepts.”
“I’m sorry,” I say, “foolish of me.” I am taken aback at the educated quality of his Thai. I expected a lost, unlettered young man from the poor north.
“I understand. You think that I have not been behaving like a monk, therefore I cannot be one. This is called clinging to fixed images or, more generally, ignorance. Do you always behave like a detective, Detective?”
The elegance of his answer startles me into playing a poor hand. “For a monk you spend an awful lot of time in an Internet café. Are you a modernist Buddhist?”
A smile—not quite patronizing, but close. “Of course not. Modernism is largely a form of entertainment, and a superficial one at that. It doesn’t survive environmental disasters or oil shortages. It doesn’t even survive terrorist attacks. It certainly doesn’t survive poverty, which is the lot of most of us. One flick of a switch, and the images fade from the screen. Ancient questions begin to torment us all over again: Who am I? Where do I come from? Where am I going? But without wisdom, these questions turn toxic. Confusion seeks relief in bigotry, which leads to conflict. One high-tech war, and we’re back to the Stone Age. This is the connection between modernism and Buddhism. In other words, there isn’t one unless you posit the latter as a cure for the former.” A sudden charming smile: “On the other hand, it’s convenient to download Buddhist texts without having to spend hours searching for them in a library. Until recently I’d had no idea how limited Theravada is. If I were to ordain today, I think I would do so in Dharamsala, where the Dalai Lama lives.”
I push my chair back. It has dawned on me that the case has taken an unexpected, even a shocking turn. In my surprise I find I am mesmerized by this young phra, whose true identity seems to grow more elusive whenever he opens his mouth. Have I mistaken his mannerisms for those of a fraud exactly because he is so advanced that he is no longer conscious of the effect he has on others? Perhaps he doesn’t give a damn. Real monks don’t.
“I’ll take you to a private room.”
In our smallest interrogation room I say, “You have been watching me for more than a week now. Why?”
“I wanted to tell you about my sister,” he says with that same balance of compassion and detachment that may or may not be authentic.
My tension collapses in a grateful sigh. “You sister’s name is Damrong?”
“Yes. You guessed anyway from the scars. I made it obvious enough.”
“You have information regarding her death?”
“No, none at all.”
“So why come to me?”
“Because she has information she wants to give you. She visits me every night. Her soul is not at rest.”
I take a moment to absorb this forensic bombshell. “Why play games? Why not come to see me like a normal person?”
“I am not a normal person. I am a monk.”
“Or does it have something to do with that?” I point to his left wrist, where a short white scar exactly replicates the scar on Damrong’s wrist.
“Not what you think,” he says with a smile. “A teenage prank, nothing more.”
I grunt in resignation. “Please tell me all you know,” I say with a sigh.
“Not here,” he says, looking a little fastidiously around the small bare room. “I prefer the outdoors. I think you do too, is that not so?”
He leads, I follow, out into the blinding light and the never-ending business of the street. I remain half a step behind him, as protocol requires. We keep pace with a man in a straw hat pulling a cart piled high with brushes, brooms, and dustpans while I bend my ear to catch the monk’s every word.
Damrong, according to her brother, was something of a female arhat, or Buddhist saint. Born with the name of Gamon, now using the Sangha name of Phra Titanaka, he was a sickly child. Even at that time their mother was a yaa baa addict and losing her mind, given to sudden bouts of irrational violent anger. Their father was a career criminal whose body was covered in tattoos bearing magical incantations in khom, the ancient Khmer script, who was ritually murdered by local police when Gamon was seven years old. Both parents were Khmer refugees, who fled after Nixon bombed the eastern half of their country and destabilized the whole of it. Both children were born in a refugee camp on the Thai side of the border. His reverence for his sister is impressive.
“I would never have survived without her. She took all my beatings when our father was still alive—she wouldn’t let him touch me. She was so fierce, he was afraid of her. And she saved me from our mother too.”
“She paid for your education?”
“Yes. All of it.”
Our eyes meet. My own education was funded in the same way. I cannot help asking, “You knew where the money was coming from?”
“Not at first. Of course, I grew up and could not help knowing.”
His discipline is excellent. The single trickle down his cheek from his left eye must surely cause an itching sensation, but he makes no attempt to wipe it away. From his level, even his emotional anguish is simply another misleading phenomenon, like everything else in the world. He is amused that I admire him. He has no idea how tempted I used to be, perhaps still am, by the monastic life. I spent a year in a forest monastery in my midteens. It was the most peaceful year of my life, and the simplest.
We stop at a crossroads to let a
motorcycle trolley pass; it is festooned with lottery tickets and brightly colored magazines, to the extent that the guy riding it is invisible. The cop in me has a cruel question: “Do you know how good she was at what she did?”
He suppresses a shudder. “Of course. She was very beautiful and had a brilliant mind. That’s how she paid for my education, from the time she reached sixteen and could sell herself. The way she saw it, she could provide me with the chance she never had. But I was never that clever. I think in another country, or if she had been born into a different class, she would have been a great surgeon.”
“A surgeon?”
“She had a natural healing gift and was a supremely unselfish person. She learned about nutrition and drugs so she could stop our mother from killing me.” He allows himself a gulp. “She was very gentle.”
“When did you hear of her death?”
A shrug. “She came to me in a dream.”
Since his information is voluntary, I have no way of forcing him. I am intrigued, though.
“There is nothing more you can tell me? You’ve gone to a lot of trouble to check me out.”
“I needed to know if you would be receptive. I’m overjoyed to have found such a devout man as you.”
A thought wings its way into my mind, perhaps originating in his. “You knew she was dead because she came to you as a ghost. How could you be so sure?”
He has turned to face me, with exactly the same abstract elegance as all his other movements. “I have said enough for the time being. I came to make contact.”
“How shall we proceed?”
“When I have more information, I will find a way of telling you. I would not like to meet at the police station again, though. We shall meet at the local wat, if you don’t mind.” I experience a sense of loss, a fear I might not see him again. He offers a compassionate smile. “Don’t worry—whom the Buddha intends to bring together, nothing can keep apart.”
I smile, quite seduced by this extraordinary saint. “That’s true,” I say enthusiastically. Then the cop within starts with his annoying doubts, which I suppress.
It is pathetic, but I cannot help wanting this young man’s approval. Nor can I help feeling the need for some kind of absolution. “Did you know your sister worked at my mother’s club for a while? We knew each other, Damrong and I.”
My question seems to cause a shift in his consciousness. There is a contraction of his brow, a frightening concentration at the chakra between his eyes. His look is quite merciless, and there is no need for him to say, I know everything.
“She said you were a holy fool,” he mutters before he crosses the road.
Only when he has gone do I realize I forgot to ask which monastery he ordained at. I call Lek to ask him to check with the Sangha. Half an hour later he arrives at my desk to tell me the Sangha have never heard of Gamon, aka Phra Titanaka. Lek’s manner is ambiguous as he plays with his yaa dum stick, then pushes his hair back with both hands. He coughs.
“What is it, Lek?”
Another cough. “That farang woman. You remember?”
“Lek, you could at least call her ‘the FBI.’ It’s more polite.”
“Well, she took me to lunch yesterday while you were out.”
I push back my chair, not quite sure what expression to use. “I see.”
“She wants to marry me. On condition I don’t go through with the surgery.” He is staring directly into my eyes. Suddenly I am the outsider, the one with farang blood; perhaps I can explain? Nothing in his manner suggests that he has even considered the FBI’s alarming offer; the cultural gap is far wider than that. He simply wants to know if I have a clue as to how an Earthling should behave in the presence of a particularly pushy Andromedan.
“If you married her, you would be entitled to half her income. I think the FBI at her level get about thirty-five thousand dollars a year gross.”
Casually, Lek shifts the calculator on my desk toward him and punches in the numbers with one finger while he shoves the yaa dum stick up his right nostril, then blinks at the result. I think it is more than he expected. He raises his shoulders helplessly. “But then I wouldn’t be able to be a woman, would I?” He walks away, shaking his head in despair at the level of education on Andromeda these days. At some level I’m furious with the FBI, but I have to leave her on hold while I focus on Damrong’s brother.
The problem with an unknown and perhaps unknowable quantity is that your imagination will make anything of it. Fraud or madman? For once I share my self-doubt with Lek. “He had me fooled. For a moment I really thought he was the real thing.”
“He is,” Lek says with total confidence, now that he’s sure the monk is not loony after all. “And you’re crazy about him. He’s what you were supposed to be, master.” He adds the last word by way of cushioning the impact of his katoey truth-telling.
“But the Sangha have no knowledge of him.”
Lek puts his aroma stick away to give me one of his rare frank looks. “You know as well as I do that he is a real monk who has spent years in a monastery. If he hadn’t, he couldn’t walk and talk like that. He’s very advanced. He must have ordained in another country.”
“Cambodia, where his parents came from? How could someone like him ever come out of Cambodia?”
I frown and get up to leave the station and go for a walk. For want of direction I follow a saleng as he slowly pedals his flatbed trishaw down the street, looking for trash. Saleng are our sorcerer-scavengers; in their hands beer cans turn into toys, plastic bottles become painted mobiles to hang in shopwindows, Coke cans are stitched into sun hats, and grilles from truck radiators transmute into garden gates. I watch him stop to dip into a garbage bin and triumphantly return to his trishaw with a broken umbrella. Without his sublime humility, I cannot prevent my thoughts from turning back to Damrong’s brother.
I am afraid my identification with him is too great for objectivity. I don’t need to read his biography—I can smell every detail. He had it tougher than me, but it’s only a question of degree. We too were inches away from disaster, my mother and I. Nong took the relocation path, by deliberately cultivating clients who took us overseas, but Gamon stayed home while his sister sold her body. The price he paid for survival was the abuse of his sibling by armies of rampant men of every race and creed; on his own admission he was a sensitive child. How many nights did he spend in torment before someone told him about methamphetamine? It’s expensive, though; if you’re poor and need it, you more or less have to trade in it.
I pass over my intimate knowledge of his misery; no point playing those old tapes on his behalf; what has impressed me is the degree to which he rose above it all. I never scaled such heights. My late partner, Pichai, and I spent a year in a forest monastery as a deal to keep us out of jail. Apparently Gamon ordained voluntarily, for life. His supervisor must have been as ruthless as my own, probably even sterner. He could not have survived long as a novice monk without putting himself through that form of destructive testing called vipassana meditation. I know he must have started from some hell of frustration, with its complex trap of poverty, crime, drug abuse, and the selling of his sister: an authentically lost soul only a membrane away from despair and madness.
When I get back to the station, I find Lek standing at the window near my desk. “He went back to the Internet café for ten minutes, then crossed the road in the direction of the wat,” he says in a dreamy voice. “That’s a very holy brother.”
My cell phone bleeps twice:
We could start small, just to test the mule. Or I could risk everything on one big consignment. I’m willing to die for my art. How sincere do I need to be? How desperate? Yammy.
22
“He told you, didn’t he?” It is the FBI’s voice, a tiny, nervous hiss in the cell phone.
“Yes.”
“How pissed are you, on a scale of one to ten? Don’t say eleven.”
“Eleven.”
“Okay, with you that me
ans going back to biblical times. You think the Western mind is some Frankensteinian product of a botched religion and a bunch of ancient Greek pedophiles, the same unholy combination of schoolboy logic, lust for blood and glory, we-know-best, and destroy-to-save that slaughtered three million in Vietnam, most of them women and children, all in the name of freedom and democracy, before we ran away because it got too expensive. Right?”
“Right.”
“Well, you’re wrong, dead wrong. I had no idea I was going to say what I said to Lek. It wasn’t in my head at all. I took him to a good Thai restaurant that even Thais respect and watched him using his fingers to eat the somtan salad with the sticky rice, and I saw that you were right: that is one totally innocent soul.” I do not dignify the pleading tone with a reply. “But it didn’t make any difference. I felt this flood of love, compassion, lust—the whole nine yards, totally overwhelming. I didn’t know such emotions could happen to a woman like me. I adore him. Totally, helplessly, ridiculously. I’m head over heels in love, Sonchai. Isn’t that what you once told me was the secret to understanding the Buddha: that he was head over heels in love with the whole universe?”
“Then you won’t have any problem in loving him after he’s had the surgery, will you?” I say testily, and close the phone.
Forget Wat Po and the Temple of the Emerald Buddha; most wats are ramshackle affairs where hungry cats, flea-tormented dogs, and dispossessed humans take advantage of the Buddha’s compassion under bhodi trees, along with a motley crew of monks of varying degrees of commitment. (Some are hiding, some are weeping, some are frustrated, some are ambitious, some are gay, most are devout, and some are almost Buddhas.) It is above all a community where looksits in white pants and shirts clean and wash robes for their monk mentors in return for a fast track to enlightenment, chart na; handymen gain merit by repairing the roofs of monks’ shacks; and there is always someone cooking and eating, except for monks who are not allowed to eat after noon. Kids whose parents cannot afford fancy schools where Mandarin and business English are taught are left to absorb whatever wisdom the monks offer; people who may or may not be passionate about Buddhism come and go.