Bangkok Days

by Lawrence Osborne

  I could tell that Fritzy was listening carefully to all this. Pharyngeal cultures taken from people with acute epiglottitis frequently yield a wide range of pathogens, which include the following: Eschericihia coli, Fusobacterium necrophorum, Klebsiella pneumoniae, Enterobacter cloacae, Group A Streptococci, herpes simplex virus, infectious mononucleosis, and Aspergillus.

  "Of course," Somnath added, suddenly standing still and sending himself deep into parallel thoughts, "I cannot rule out a Bacteroides melanogenicus."

  •

  During that second night, my fever raged. From down the corridor came the chanting of Buddhist monks at a deathbed, the smell of sad incense and a whiff of Dettol. At the ends of these corridors the dead were memorialized by small shrines with photographs and flowers, and anyone who died during the night in Bumrungrad could end up as a shrine photo.

  I thought even more seriously about death and cremation. Then a hand swept aside the plastic curtain and the head on the far side stared directly at me with those sad, immoveable eyes. Fritzy pointed to his throat and said, "So you got it in the throat, did you?"

  There lay the notepad on the night table between us, and I decided to write a reply.

  Got what?

  "Got it," he repeated. "You got it in the throat."

  Epiglottitis.

  "Epiglottitis in the throat?"

  Where else?

  He looked at me seriously, then turned the TV off. We lay in the dark, the red glare of the city bathed us, and he said, "Isn't that life-threatening?"

  And when I said it was, he nodded, as if he knew exactly what this might mean for all concerned.

  "I gave myself a Thai name," he went on irrelevantly, and he pointed to the name tag on his drips. Now that I looked at it again, it read Thatsit as well as Fritzy. Herr Thatsit Furnau.

  •

  Fritzy was watching live fly-fishing on Sky TV. He imitated the looping throws of these competing and notable anglers with his right hand, which reared up and back, then flicked into space as if hurling a plastic dragonfly into the dark waters of a Scottish stream. "Ay," he said from time to time, echoing the expressions of these competitors, who are men of few words. However, he said not a word to me throughout four hours of live angling, and I wondered if he, like all viewers of live angling, had entered a parallel mental universe, shaped itself like a shallow stream which drowned out all thought. But in the middle of the afternoon of that second day, the nurses came in and I heard a subdued struggle on the far side of the curtain. "Leave it alone—" the German snapped.

  "Mr. Furnau, it's your injection."

  "Fuck my injection. I want my lawyer!"

  A syringe was brought into the room and there was a quiet sobbing. I gripped the edges of the bed. To die in a white room, among smiling angels—in Room 7036. And I thought of the earl of Rochester murmuring to his penis: Tell, my prick, can this be death? A specialist appeared in a tweedy suit. The discussion rattled on under the strip lights which made everything look blue and metallic; the pictures of windmills in Greece, the bowls of tweezers and swabs, the iodine bottles. The specialist spoke in Wall Street School English.

  "Mr. Furnau, the infection has spread. One in every one hundred and seventy cases. The swelling has not gone down as we had hoped. One moment, please. Now, let me explain. We must go ahead with a third injection, and probably we operate tomorrow morning."

  "You can't save it?"

  The specialist tried to make a joke out of it, as specialists often do, because they can afford to.

  "Sperm count," he whispered, "remains exactly the same! Exactly. You can have more children, Mr. Thatsit Furnau."

  "Thatsit Furnau," the German echoed.

  The doctors left and we were alone again. I reached for a small bottle of Lucozade that I had ordered from room service and forced it down. Surprisingly, it opened up my throat a little and for the first time in two days I felt as if I could utter a word or two. I lay back and watched the bubbles flowing down the plastic tubes toward the buffer, slow but regular like the workings of a klepshydra, and it reminded me that my body, too, was a clock of sorts, and it would run down eventually. Fritzy then put down the magazine he was reading and asked, "Are you awake?"

  He picked up the nurse bell and pressed it. The sweetest of our nurses, Lila, appeared, and he said, "Lila, can we have two champagnes, please?"

  I tried to laugh, but she simply replied, "One minute," and after that minute had expired the champagne arrived.

  "This," Fritzy said, "is what I love about Thailand. You ask for two glasses of champagne in a hospital, and they give it to you."

  "But," Lila objected, "Miss Lalant can no have."

  I looked at the tag on my drip: I was marked as Miss Lalant.

  "Miss Lalant," Fritzy said, "can have the champagne put into his intravenous tube. It is farang custom."

  "Oh? No you joke me."

  "No joke. I'm serious."

  The invalid thinks constantly of life outside the hospital. He is now an outsider to normal existence, and therefore the inside of his room acquires a critical mass. He notices both the minute details of its furniture—every nut and bolt, every brand name on the clocks and medical instruments—and the city's electricity, which seeps through the windows. The outer world seems even more glamorous now. Street corners with sports bars and bamboo-screen eateries, and girls in miniskirts sitting on stools bigger than them, sipping at coconuts out of straws. The Land of Sanuk-Dukkha. It was just there, at the end of a driveway, but frustratingly distant because it was located at the far end of a sickness. Fritzy and I both thought of it with longing: the heat like a Mississippi swamp, the animal swagger and the smell of mango skins piling in the gutters, the sweetness of decay that stirs the penis to life, just at the insolent tip.

  PARADISE OF ELEPHANTS

  Portofino Trattoria on the first floor lacked only a mulberry tree and a few sickles on the walls to make it something fully blown in that style that could be called Italian Rustic, but it did have trompe l'oeil murals with little views of the Coliseum circa 1780 and reconstructions of the Roman Forum. It is enough, is it not? And there was a long bar behind which stood the confused mural Dennis had once spoken of, highlighting a row of bottles. Helix's mural, I thought suddenly. But that must have been a tall tale.

  Fritzy and I went in, maneuvering our drips through the doors, which were held open for us by charming waitresses. It would be an arresting sight in a Western hospital, but not here, for the place is actually full of people with drips. A man sits with a drip at his side as the wine list is opened for him, a napkin tucked into his pajamas. We went to the bar, which was better stocked than many bars in New York nightclubs, with a line of aged scotches, curaçaos, and designer vodkas.

  Fritzy was a familiar here, and there was a braggadocio to his limp, a braggadocio that didn't quite work, not even here. A dying man blustering his way into a pub full of cronies. The bar was in fact filled with crippled and invalid farangs in varying degrees of decrepitude. Wrapped in bandages and splints, they sat smoking in front of Camparis, gazing at the mural of Christ at a drinking party of Alexander the Great. Wasn't that Saint Peter swigging a bottle of Gordon's?

  It was like a bar in a Sicilian village, a camaraderie of old men who do nothing but talk, because every other avenue of life has been closed off. The look in the eyes is intensely distant, expressing a constant reckoning with medical fate. They were mostly British, with a few Germans and French among them, and all of them looked the worse for wear. One said, "Wotcha, Fritz," and winked as Fritzy glided past. They brushed knuckles, like gangsters.

  We sat at the bar's end and the waitress asked if we were permitted to drink.

  "Absolutely."

  No further questions were asked.

  "Two glasses of champagne, Jill."

  Under the red lanterns of the Ayame sushi restaurant next door, a girl in a kimono stood in white socks, bowing between two curtains decorated with fish. Fritzy got us a tabl
e close to the windows, so we could people-watch. Bumrungrad has a true passeggiata every night and the Middle Eastern patients in particular take to the "streets" en masse, circulating through the corridors of the all-night malls in their best clothes.

  Women on crutches with face masks flirted openly with men suffering from epileptic fits and sciatica. Hobbling, limping, squinting, this injured mass proved that the sex drive is the supreme of all instincts and cannot be suppressed even by terminal cancer. We lust till we die, we concluded with some relief, and ordered Tuscan white bean soup. "A straw for the gentleman," Fritzy asked the waiter, and we watched the passeggiata. I noticed that his right hand was limp, and shook a little. "As happier men watch birds," Evelyn Waugh wrote, "I watch men." I was delighted by the ease with which the straw was provided, as if it were no more unusual than a soup spoon, and the delicacy with which our drips were treated by the servers who danced around us. An invalid restaurant where you could smoke and drink and suck Tuscan white bean soup through a straw. Everything is commonsense and in proportion.

  "This," Fritzy said, "is why Thailand is the best country to get sick and die in, in spite of the obvious vileness of all doctors. You can actually half-enjoy your demise. You can enjoy the service."

  I could now talk in a hoarse whisper, so I was able to say, "You sound like you intend to die here."

  "I do intend to die here. What? Am I supposed to die in Deutschland?"

  Gruffly, he savaged open a pack of Alain Delon, Cambodian cigarettes.

  "Look at that." He smiled. "The Cambodians call their cigarettes Alain fucking Delon. Some genius must've thought that one up."

  "The Alain Delons will hasten it."

  "What? You mean dying? Jesus. Don't you think I have enough problems without worrying about my lungs and Alain Delons? They're going to give me a ballectomy. That's right, they going to cut out the left ball. Even my lawyer can't stop them. You'd think we had some legal right over our own balls, but no. They are very cavalier, I must say, with other people's privata."

  "Privata?"

  "It's a word, it's a word—our private particulars. They lop them off on a moment's notice, woosh."

  "But isn't it to save your life?"

  "As if you have a life without a ball. I'm telling you, they enjoy it. It's pure sadism. Doctors. Nurses. The lot of them. Lawyers. Especially lawyers. Lawyers love watching you having your left testicle removed. For them it's a metaphor for what they do all the time."

  He shot down his Australian bubbly and lit up. Could you really smoke in a hospital restaurant?

  "How is your blood pressure?"

  "No idea."

  "Jill, two vodka tonics please."

  He was a real German, relaxed, permissive, blue-eyed. But behind his cragged face and lopsided gentlemanly smile lay a darkness of soul. It's an appealing combination if you're not on the receiving end of the darkness of soul. Germans loved Thailand, but in a different way from the British. They were more cynical about themselves, and therefore less cynical about the Thais, the very reverse of the British mentality. They settled down often, married, happily took on the onerous burden of supporting an extended family in the girl's home village up in Issan. They were fatalistic, and being fatalistic was a good trait to have in a fatalistic country like Thailand. Except when it came to losing a ball.

  "The insurance," he growled, grasping at one of the Alain Delons and sucking on it like a straw. "They have a value scale for different parts of the body. Three thousand euros for the ball."

  "Each?"

  "Of course each. Six thousand for the whole package, if you are so unlucky. But, get this, five thousand for a foot. Ten thousand for an arm. A million for the head, ha ha. I asked them if I could switch the arm for the ball, because, you know, the ball is much more important to me than the arm. And it's seven thousand more. I could build a garage next to my house in Pattaya for that. But of course the problem isn't in my arm. It's in my inner tubes. Reverse infection or something. Men in their fifties. What a life. Verdammt."

  His voice got louder the more he ranted, and his eyes became pale and delicate as cornflowers threatened by a combine harvester.

  A drink, an Alain Delon, a hospitable ear—the invalid doesn't need much. Fritzy cast an appreciative eye over the mural in front of us and his brow tensed. Alexander or Christ, one couldn't decide.

  "If you had a choice between the ball and your head?" I asked.

  "I'd keep the ball, obviously. A million! I could build a house in Ko Samui."

  Finally, I asked him what he did for a living. Even in Thailand you have to have a living.

  "I run a Mercedes dealership in Pattaya. Oh yes, and I also have a small hotel on the beach. It's sort of a boumboum hotel, but aren't they all? We do have families stay there as well. We're popular with holidaymakers from the Pfalz. Word has gotten out there that we are good value. Sunshine Hotel." He leaned over and there was a whiff of fennel seeds on his teeth. "We have a disco for the under- tens. Beanbags."

  That night, we lay in bed, playing cards. Down the hall, a choir with handbells sang Christmas carols and people in the neighboring rooms sang along. What day was it? The 20th? The 21st? The nurses took our blood pressure a little before midnight and refilled the drips. One always has the feeling that they are privy to a secret concerning the immediate future. We drifted in and out of a heavy sleep imposed by the sedatives, and when I was half-awake I was sure that I could hear someone padding up and down the corridor in socks.

  "It's the ghost," came Fritzy's voice in the dark. "It's the old woman who died in this room last month."

  •

  Ghosts, in Thai, are called phi. There are innumerable kinds. There are phi pop, evil ghosts, or phi kraseu, often portrayed as a woman with a head made of intestines. There are spirits called phi am which sit on a person's chest and make breathing difficult: in the northeast part of the country it's believed that these are the ghosts of widows, and men paint their mouths with lipstick before going to bed so that the widow spirits will think they are women and leave them alone. The ghosts of people who died violently are called phi tai hong. After the 2004 tsunami, there were hundreds of sightings of these near the country's beaches. Many rural Thais believe that simply walking about at night puts one within grasp of these ghosts.

  But not all ghosts are entirely fearful. I would soon discover that my house on Soi 51 was also haunted, by the ghosts of Kitty's uncle and aunt. The staff claimed unhesitatingly that they saw them pottering about the garden, inspecting the mango trees. But when aunt and uncle crossed the lawns at midnight there was no sense of alarm. Quite the contrary. Such things were related with a shrug in the voice, and the servants would say things like, "If you come out here, sir, you'll see them too. They are sometimes carrying a tea kettle. They inspect the mango trees to see that we're pruning them properly."

  •

  Fritzy and I then took to daily promenades around the hospital in our pajamas. We looked like a couple of crime bosses from Oliver Twist, picking our way through the consumer outlets which we couldn't patronize, people-watching at the ground-floor Starbucks. Eventually we found a way to sneak outside, and so down a side street to Soi 1. After five days and nights of continuous air-conditioning, the heat took me by surprise and we moved slowly, but unremarked by the crowds, as if invalids from Bumrungrad often used this escape route. Where were we to stop—Bunny Bar? Bamboo Bar? Tahiti Bar? The bars of Soi 1 are tolerant of hospital uniforms, of the general messiness of the sick, and the girls mobbed us. Sick men, sick men! Down Soi 1 came the sound of "We Wish You a Merry Christmas," sung at breakneck speed in contralto, and I suddenly felt happy again, reunited with the sound of ice in a tilted gin and tonic. Moreover, Fritzy's eyes were green as primitive ferns, but unlike those graceful plants they also slopped from side to side like loose water in a bucket. I had no idea who this man was, or why he was spending time with me. I surmised that he was bored, that his medications had gone to his head, as mine had to
mine.

  "This is my last night of having two testicles. I think a toast is in order. Farewell to youth and all that. From now on, I will be half-castrated. My ex-wife will be very happy."

  "Are you going back to Pattaya?"

  He ignored me. "Night on Soi 1! Marvelous. Shall we go to a girly bar? We're only ten minutes from Nana."

  "With drips?"

  "What difference do drips make? When is a man not up for a girly bar?"

  "When he is connected to an IV drip."

  "My left ball is aching for one last adventure. Can we not take him on a last farewell visit to a girly bar?"

  The Nana Complex doesn't get busy until after ten, but even then the twenty-odd bars were up and rolling. We went into Rainbow II, on the second floor, where the dance platforms were already full, and sat at a bench with two Singhas. Fritzy was pale and uncertain-looking, his mouth quivering slightly as he sipped at his bottle. It was a ritual more than an active pleasure spiced by novelty. But, personally, what I have always enjoyed in the bars of Nana and Soi Cowboy (I exempt the hideous tourist traps of Patpong) is the lack of menacing bouncers, the calm and relaxed ordinariness of the show. No men, in other words, except the humble clients, who are not there to make trouble. If one insists, one can laugh at the whole charade, or sneer at it. It's up to you. But I've never seen any need to do either. The show itself consists of girls dancing around poles, and by law they are now required to wear bikinis. On average, they dance quite badly, but there is a lot of giggling and horseplay, and the girls who are waiting for their set sit around with the clients, teasing the girls who are on. There are times when they get into a groove. If a luuk thung hit comes on, the northern girls from Issan all get up and start dancing and singing on the tables, suddenly nostalgic. If they pick up a client, they go downstairs with him and make an offering at the Ganesha shrine near the exit. The elephant god receives their gift and grants them credit. What characterizes this entire operation is the absence of any atmosphere of brimstone or anger, its clumsy naïveté and lack of self-consciousness, or at least a self-consciousness which has not yet toppled over into sin.