If it had been daytime, they would have been in the shadow of the plain high-rise up ahead. But the buildings all around them were three-story piles of stucco that reminded him of home, save for the fact that their fragile-looking columns were painted bright shades of pink, orange, and neon green. Now the other pedestrians were almost entirely male, and the pretty, heavily made-up young woman who went running past them as if she were late for an appointment had the broad shoulders and thick legs of a man; she ducked inside the entrance to a nightclub with a giant poster above its entrance featuring a different beautiful, doll-like woman in a sparkling evening dress.
“Kathoey,” Cameron said. “That’s the word for them.”
“They are men and women at the same time?”
“In a manner of speaking, yes.”
“Disgusting.”
“Ah. So that’s how it is.”
“That is how what is?”
“Like I said. Not Switzerland.”
Up ahead was a patio bar where all the patrons were either older white men or young brown-skinned Thai boys. Cameron headed straight for it.
Their table was close to the sidewalk, and now that they were seated, their surroundings came into focus. Their waiter looked to be younger than Aabid; he had a mincing strut and a faint dash of facial hair above his upper lip.
On all sides of them, the older white men were seated comfortably while the Thai boys buzzed around them like bees. It was the prettier and younger visitors to this street corner who were doing the work of seduction. And here they were, a strikingly handsome blond American and a pretty Arab boy, and neither one of them had managed to turn a single head. To this crowd they were all but invisible, excluded from the commerce of the place.
He could feel Cameron’s eyes on him as he took in their surroundings. Two portly bald white men with guttural German accents were flirting with their very attentive waiter, who at one point made a show of sitting down on one of their laps, only to shoot to his feet when the other expressed jealousy.
The waiter brought their drinks, and Cameron paid before Aabid had time to note the arrival of his scotch.
“You still have that envelope?” Cameron asked.
Aabid nodded, but he made no move to withdraw it from the pocket of his shorts.
“Let me see it,” Cameron said.
“When we go back to your hotel.”
“We’re not going to my hotel.”
Of course not, Aabid thought. Of course he would want to come back to the yacht. How to negotiate this with the men who watch over me?
“The envelope, Aabid.”
“Not here.”
“Oh? So you’re embarrassed?” The wry smile was gone, and there was a hard look in the man’s stunning blue eyes that bathed the pit of Aabid’s stomach in something cold. “I see.
Why is that?”
“You told me we would—”
“I told you I would show you what you could get for the money in your pocket, and here we are. Look around you.” Cameron pointed one index finger. “See? Look over there.” Against his will, Aabid looked back in the direction of the two fat German men who were being entertained by their enthusiastic waiter.
“Earlier today, those men went to the website for this fine little establishment and they browsed through profiles for all of the waiters who work here. They picked out the one they liked the most and they sent him a note letting them know when they were going to be dropping by this evening. For them, it’s the beginning of a hot night. For him, it’s another chance to feed his entire family, who are probably working themselves to the bone on some tiny little farm north of Bangkok.
“Now see the white man on the right, the one who keeps grabbing the kid’s ass, he’s being more aggressive right now because the kid’s pulling away from him and starting to favor the other. You want to know why that is? Look at the man’s eyes and cheeks, see? He’s been on protease inhibitors for years and a side effect is that they’ve drained most of the fat out of his face. Now, the kid’s obviously not new to this, because he can recognize the symptoms. That’s why he’s leaning toward the other guy. But the way things are going now, it looks like they’re going to go in for a split. That means he needs to come up with a plan. Or he needs to consult the lord Buddha because the fact of the matter is he’ll earn twice as much if he agrees to let them fuck him without any condoms—”
This single profanity bumped the lid a few inches off the cauldron of emotions within Aabid. How could he have allowed himself to be lured into some kind of trap? His voice was weak and tremulous; it contained nothing of the anger building inside of him. “Do not use those kinds of words with—”
“But no matter what he decides,” Cameron continued, undeterred, “he’s still one of the lucky ones, because he works out of a bar and so the bar owners gives him a certain level of security. But what does he do five or six years from now, when he’s got crow’s-feet and a belly? True, everyone in the country spends most of their life looking like a teenager, which is a real boon for the prostitution trade, but then the question becomes, how do you retire? When do you retire? Unless, of course, you find your perfect little Prince before then.”
Cameron sat back in his chair and made a grand gesture toward Aabid with both hands. Aabid’s face felt as if it were on fire. For several minutes, they just stared at one another, and when it became clear Aabid could summon no words in response to Cameron’s lecture, Cameron broke the silence.
“What are you waiting for? You have a wallet full of cash and everyone around you is selling. Go to it.”
“You lied to me,” Aabid whispered.
“No, I didn’t. I said I would show you what you could get for all that money. Here it is!”
“You have no right to talk to me like this. I could—”
“Aw, go ahead. Throw a temper tantrum. Call your father or your security team or whoever the hell they are. But here’s what I wish for you, Aabid. I hope that someday you can look back on this moment and realize how utterly insulting it is to offer a total stranger an envelope full of money and expect them to go to bed with you. And what I can promise you right here is that if you go through life trying to buy everything you want, you’ll find out very quickly and very painfully what isn’t for sale!”
Aabid picked up his drink and hurled it in Cameron’s face. He didn’t linger to see the results. Instead, he took off into the street, racing through the crowds as if he had just been held up for ridicule in front of each and every prostitute and drunken tourist.
20
Phuket
Aabid was two blocks from the beach when he heard Cameron calling his name, and for some reason, this brought tears to his eyes. And in an instant, his vision was so blurred he could not keep running lest he dart in front of a motor scooter by accident.
He bent at the knees to catch his breath and heard Cameron’s footfalls behind him. Once he had his breath back, he righted himself and turned on his attacker. Cameron seemed visibly startled, wounded even, by the sight of Aabid’s tears.
“You lured me here to humiliate me!”
“That’s not true.”
“It is! Every American, you are all the same. You are desperate for what we provide you and you pay hand over fist for it, but then you hate us. You hate us for how much you need our oil and you insult our culture and you demean us whenever you can.” These were not his words, and they felt heavy and awkward on his tongue. He was quoting one of his father’s tirades almost verbatim, and doing so brought about a sudden, almost uncontrollable burst of homesickness. Homesickness in paradise? It was all the fault of this blond devil.
“No, Aabid. I’m one of the few people you have ever met who doesn’t want anything from you. That’s why I said those things to you.” Cameron closed his eyes and took a deep breath. Shame? Embarrassment? If it was either, it didn’t appear to be nearly as painful as the emotions coursing through Aabid.
“Nothing? You wanted nothing from me?”
>
“I wanted to tell you the truth. And I figured you were lonely enough to hear it.”
“Lonely?”
“Oh, come off it, Aabid. You’ve been sent out to sea by yourself, with no family, with no friends. Your father knows exactly what you are and it scares the shit out of him. He’s containing you, all right? That’s why your brother gets to go off to school and you have to visit the Indian Ocean with armed guards. Whatever! Buy all the sex you want in whatever part of the world you want it in. But from me you get the truth, free of charge. If you can take it.”
He stared past Aabid, out toward the dark ocean. “I’m sorry I was so hard on you. I just …” But the catch in his voice was strong enough to take his words from him entirely.
For a few seconds, Aabid felt as if the handsome man before him were on the verge of revealing some truth about himself, some eloquent series of sentences that would be carried by something other than arrows aimed at Aabid’s heart. But Cameron fell silent and stared down at the pavement between them.
“So it is only my company you want to keep?” Aabid asked.
Cameron dug into his front pants pocket, removed two tickets, and handed one to Aabid. He read it carefully as he made his way to a nearby bench. It was a ticket to something called the Simon Cabaret; he had never heard of it.
“I would like to take my new friend to see a show,” Cameron said. After a while, he took a seat on the bench next to Aabid.
“What kind of show?”
“That word I taught you,” Cameron said. “Kathoey. It doesn’t just mean a man who acts like a woman. It can be used to mean third gender.”
“Third gender,” Aabid said.
“Yes. Something that is made up of parts of what we see all around us, but in a combination we can’t classify. To our eyes, it can be either magic or evil. See it as magic, Aabid. Trust me. It will be easier that way.”
“You say you want nothing from me, and yet you love to lecture me.”
“I want to take you to a show. That’s something, right?”
“A kathoey show?”
“I want to show you something you’ve never seen before.” Cameron nodded, and Aabid stared down at the flimsy ticket in his hand. The show started in less than thirty minutes.
“My father is not containing me,” Aabid finally said. “Yes, he knows … the way that I am. And so he is protecting me, you see? I know this is true. He is trying to find a way for me. I know this because it is not forever that I am to remain at sea.”
“Fine. Then use the time you have.”
Cameron got to his feet and brushed off the seat of his pants. It was a small gesture, but it reminded Aabid that regardless of how well-spoken and worldly he seemed to be, Cameron was a foreigner here as well. Then he turned and extended his hand. For several seconds, Aabid stared at it. Then he allowed Cameron to pull him to his feet.
Once they climbed onto the motor scooter Cameron had parked near the beach, Aabid waited for permission before curving his arms around Cameron’s stomach.
Kathoey. How could Cameron have confused this kind of deviance with the urges they both experienced? As they sped through the narrow streets, Aabid was plagued by memories of the mutawwa’ patrolling the streets and shopping malls of Riyadh in their thobes and leather sandals, searching out any public violation of sharia. It would be unheard of for the mutawwa’ to seek out two men pleasuring one another in privacy. But they frequently targeted the beautiful Filipino boy immigrants with their long, girlish hair and their hip-swaying walks; they were hauled away into SUVs, held overnight in jail, and interrogated until they could walk like men.
Aabid knew he was different from the countless Saudi men who sought release from other men. He knew his preference for the submissive role would have enraged his father if he had learned of it. But to risk the wrath of God by parading oneself as being of the opposite gender? This was beyond foolish. It was suicidal.
Would he have accepted Cameron’s request if he had not been so exhausted and defeated, if he had not been too humiliated to return to his yacht and face his employees after only twenty minutes ashore? Absolutely not. But how could he endure a long walk down a tiny, darkened alley toward a cramped theater packed with more mincing Thai boys and their generous white customers? The answer revealed itself soon enough; he wouldn’t have to.
First he saw the tour buses, scores of them lined up along one side of the street, disgorging an endless tide of camera-toting tourists. The theater was a palace of neon and glass with an elaborate fountain out front. Cameron parked the bike and soon they were lost in the crowd moving toward the entrance, where Aabid thought he could hear a mix of every language known to man. He paused now and then to allow an entire family to pass him by, the children walking with their hands linked to avoid becoming lost in the crowd. None of them seemed ashamed to be there. It was as if the entire world had convened at the scene of his most secret shame so that they might enjoy a picnic lunch.
Cameron never took his hand, even as they entered the theater, but he did take Aabid by the shoulder a few times, if only to steer him in the right direction. Once they were seated, Aabid took in the audience all around them. He kept expecting them to take on the menacing, angry mood of the crowd at an execution, but there was only a nervous excitement throughout the theater, and when the lights finally went out, it turned into a torrent of applause.
Perhaps if it had been only white faces in the audience, he could have dismissed their enthusiasm for what followed as the typical godless decadence of the West. But he could not ignore the roar from the Taiwanese tourists in the audience when the ravishing kimono-clad kathoey completed her expert lip sync to a song by Sally Yeh, nor could he ignore the thunderous applause from the Latinos when a group of deviants in sequined, feathered, flame-red dresses performed an elaborate dance routine to the song “Baila Amigo.” The music went all around the world, and the audience went with it, and to Aabid’s delighted astonishment, the theater was able to contain the powerful, surging ecstasy of the audience. The walls did not come down. The lights did not fall from the ceiling and crush the audience to death. There was no need for the mutawwa’ to storm up the aisles and restore order, because there was no chaos.
Instead, the lights glinted off the sequined costumes, and he was sure he smelled sweet perfume as it was cast out over the audience by the exertions of the slender performers, with their dark, mascara-framed eyes, long lashes, and full, sensuous lips miming the words of so many different tongues. And he said to himself, Yes, I can see this as magic. And he said to himself, Let something begin here. Because here in this place, where he had expected a cellar of secrecy and shame, he had been privileged to hear what joy sounded like when it came from the chests of those who came from lands he had never visited and could not have found on a map.
Yes, this is magic. And he knew with utter certainty that while the bliss he felt throughout the performance would not last, his memory of it would be a certain and solid thing. He could return to it and hold it close to him, whether he was dancing aboard his father’s yacht or searching desperately for shade in downtown Riyadh.
When the performance came to an end, Aabid leapt to his feet along with everyone else, and as he applauded hard enough to sting his palms, Cameron patted him on the back gently, and when he saw Aabid wipe the tears from his eyes with the back of one hand, he gave him a broad smile, and Aabid said to himself, This I will keep too. Even though it is not the smile of a lover.
Aabid did not dance as they left the theater, even though he wanted to. Instead, once he was on the back of Cameron’s scooter, he raised his arms over his head and let the wind buffet them. He closed his eyes, and heard the music of a dozen countries. Soon Cameron had rolled to a stop at the same spot of beach where Aabid had landed earlier that night.
Aabid stepped off onto the sidewalk, but Cameron remained on the bike.
“I would like to invite you back to my yacht,” Aabid said. “But it is only your c
ompany I ask for.”
For a few seconds, Aabid took the slight, sympathetic smile on Cameron’s face to be the first sign of a refusal. Instead, Cameron ordered Aabid back onto the bike. A short while later, they had called for the Zodiac and retrieved Cameron’s flight bag from his hotel room. When the Zodiac arrived, Aabid and Majed greeted their new passenger with curt nods, which Cameron returned in kind.
They boarded the Moon of Riyadh to find the captain and two stewards standing at attention on the back deck. When their eyes cut to the new passenger coming up the steps behind their boss, Aabid said, “This is Cameron. He is my friend.”
The next morning, Aabid woke to the same smell of perfume he had detected in the theater the night before. But it was gone as soon as he blinked, just like the final moments of a dream, and he was left with a mouthful of silk pillowcase scented by the three glasses of bourbon he used to subdue himself the night before.
The owner’s massive stateroom sat just behind the wheel-house; the view was as impressive as the one the captain required, only in reverse. Above the four-poster bed was a coffered ceiling with recessed lighting. Sliding glass doors led out onto a large patio area that took up the remainder of the deck. Ensconced in this silken chamber high atop the yacht, Aabid entertained the illusion that he was floating just above the surface of the sea, that the gentle swaying of the floor beneath him was not the result of ocean tides but the work of the winds carrying him effortlessly along.
With the press of a button he raised the automatic shades on both walls of picture windows. They had just rounded the southern tip of Phuket Island. Phang Nga Bay lay before them. On the near horizon, massive rock formations rose from the emerald water like the flooded ruins of a primitive civilization. On one of the outdoor banquette sofas on the main deck, Cameron dozed with a paperback book open against his chest. He was exposed to the sun, but he wore a white T-shirt and shorts that went down to his knees.
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