Phantom Lover and Other Thrilling Tales of Thailand

by Jim Algie

  Wade wasn’t really sure what to make of this guy. He projected the kind of rage that went both ways. It could be inspiring. It could wake people up when he projected it outwards. But if it backfired, if it got clogged up like a shitter that was out of order, it could do him a lot of harm. Wade figured it was about fifty fifty with this guy.

  After they’d known each other for a few days, Wade would rib him, “You missed your calling in life, bud. You shoulda been a preacher or a dictator.”

  “Dinkum, fucking oath, mate.” This appeared to mean that Kendall agreed with him—at least he was smiling—but then he’d turn back to Yves and continue his tirade about politics or weeping widows and starving orphans. He spoke as if he was certain of every syllable, as if he believed in what he said with every atom of his body and every cell in his brain. Wade could see how he’d be a hit on the lecture circuit and at photography workshops, but his conviction and passion had taken an enormous toll on his health. The guy had worn himself down to skin and gristle. He looked like a scarecrow in army fatigues, his face gaunt and haggard.

  After they found Yai’s body, Wade told him not to tell Yves about it. He was already in a vulnerable position with a fingertip grasp on sanity. One more loss might push him over the ledge.

  Because all of Yai’s fingers had been torn off and his teeth knocked out, the only identifying marks on his body were the snake bites running up his arms and down his legs.

  His cadaver was laid out on a white sheet, alongside dozens more of the dead. Wade bent down to look at the stumps of his fingers. He looked up at Kendall. “Man that guy wanted to live. He was holdin’ on to life with everything he had. I’ll say that for the guy, he put up one helluva fight. You betcha.”

  Kendall had been around enough men in war zones and crime scenes, prisons and riots, to know that Wade was reassuring himself right now. He believed that courage was the most important quality for a man to possess. It gave meaning to life and lent perspective to death. Without courage a man was not a man; he was a coward, a sissy, a failure.

  Kendall had also been around enough dead bodies to find no honor in death, no heroism in self-sacrifice. “Whether you die for your country or a woman or in a stupid drunken accident, you still end up dead,” he’d once told Yves during an interview. “If I had to choose between a posthumous medal and one more day of surfing and whale watching around Perth, it wouldn’t be a choice.” He smiled. “Surfing is the only thing that’s better than sex, but I’m Australian, so I would say that, wouldn’t I?”

  Standing by the rows and rows of the dead, laid to rest in white cocoons, all he felt was a perverse gratitude that the cadavers were not his. But in the same way he told religious people he was an agnostic and would not mock their beliefs, he did not dare to contradict Wade. Even atheists have commandments that they live and die by.

  Kendall did not raise the subject of Watermelon’s disappearance either. It was delicate in several ways. Among the expat men of Thailand the standard question asked of couples, “So where did you two meet?” was off limits, because they’d often met under less than wholesome circumstances.

  Kendall had only met her on a couple of occasions when she was the mamasan of that blowjob bar on Patpong 2 called the Star of Love. From what little he could remember of those drinking sessions with Mick and Yves he was impressed by how quick witted she was and her smiling resilience in the face of Mick’s constant taunts. “What makes your pussy wet, love?”

  “When I take a shower.”

  She was not even cowed by this other huge hooligan named Martin who demanded a blowjob or he would tear the place apart. She crawled under the bar: a large wooden box with a curtain at the front. Kendall could not see what was going on, but Martin soon shut up. His eyes closed. He rocked back and forth on his stool. After he had climaxed and staggered out the front door, she crawled out. In her hand she held up half a cantaloupe with a hole in it. “First man who ever pay a thousand baht to fuck a fruit,” she announced to riotous laughter from all the bargirls and customers.

  A week after Kendall arrived Wade finally brought up the subject of his fiancé’s disappearance, when they were sitting on wooden caskets drinking vodka at Col’s Coffin Cocktail Lounge. “What I’m thinkin’ now is she got airlifted out to another hospital, came down with amnesia and can’t remember how to contact me. Well, shit happens, eh?”

  In his mind, Kendall ran through a list of possible replies. Best to look on the bright side. Keep the faith, mate. Like they say, hope springs eternal.

  Each he discarded. Finally, after not coming up with a single comforting thought he would dare to repeat, so trite and unconvincing did they sound, Kendall looked up from the dregs of his thoughts and drink to see that Wade was gone and twilight had settled over the temple like a blanket of dusk blue tossed over a terminally ill patient.

  COLIN CAME RUNNING AND S creaming across the temple grounds. He paused to give the men “high fives” and hug the women. “Pardon me for acting like a Yank and screaming ‘woo’ but it’s a miracle, a bloody miracle. A fishing trawler just rescued an Indonesian teenager in the middle of the ocean. He’d been clinging to an uprooted tree for ten days. Badly sunburned and dehydrated, but he’ll live. Isn’t that brilliant? Best news I’ve heard all day.”

  It was brilliant and no one was happier to hear about another miraculous survival story than the forensic teams and Disaster Victim Identification Units surrounded by death.

  At the same time, Kendall could not help but notice the way that Wade and the Hungarian truck driver Yves had profiled, who was still searching in vain for his sister, wrestled with the news, their joy quickly rubbed out by envy. They wanted the miracle survivor to be their loved one. It was perfectly understandable, Kendall thought. In their position, he would have felt the same.

  As the news broke, many of the volunteers were thinking the same thing but nobody wanted to say it aloud and make it real. Two weeks into the search and salvage mission, this would be one of the last castaways found alive. After this they would only be fishing out bodies.

  AT THE TEMPLE, WADE saw all the volunteers lose it in completely different ways. His own breakdown had come quite quickly: attacking the policeman he’d spotted looting the corpse. It was painful to relive, thinking how close he’d come to grabbing the cop’s gun and bashing his teeth in with it. But that was his way of dealing with things. He said to Yves, “I have to face things head on. Shit or get off the pot. That’s my motto.” It was the same as putting his fingers down his throat to puke after getting a little too drunk. Better to purge himself early on before the poisoning became too severe.

  He wished some of the other volunteers had gotten the bad blood out of their systems before it turned toxic. Christ, the way some of these men behaved, UN guys, bureaucrats, bigwigs, paper-pushers who’d never seen any real action before, and there they were screwing the asses off two or three bargirls a night over on Phuket, then coming back to work on no sleep, still stinking of booze. It was embarrassing. No respect for their jobs or countries.

  After yet another all-nighter, one of the bureaucrats from a big-name aid organization, driving a rented Range Rover on his five-star expense account, reported to work with the coffee machine from his hotel room. He set it up on a wooden coffin. From his duffel bag he pulled out cups, bottles of milk, sachets of sugar, and spoons. The young Englishman with the racing-stripe sideburns then made a sign out of a piece of cardboard. He hung that from a bamboo stake he drove into the ground. The sign read, “Col’s Coffin Café: It’s Dead Good.”

  By this point a group of monks just returning from their early morning alms round had gathered around the coffin where the ginger-haired Colin sat making coffee for the other volunteers. Down the first row of corpses a chicken strutted spasmodically. One of the orange-robed monks chased it away. “Anyone fancy a side order of chicken?” asked Colin. Much to the amusement of the monks, he began making chicken noises. Then he winked and grinned at his colleagues. �
�Feeling a little peckish are we lads?”

  Wade, who had just slept in a plastic chair for the past three hours and was still not sure if he was awake or dreaming, cupped his hands around his mouth and called out, “Nah, I’m chicken.”

  All the foreigners roared.

  With mock outrage, Colin said, “I’ll have you know, sir, that this is the finest corpse-fed chicken in Southeast Asia. Tsunami Poultry, ask for it by name at posh supermarkets.”

  One of the tattooed backpackers yelled, “It’s CFC, dude, Coffin-Fried Chicken.”

  These jests were in response to the latest stories making the rounds that the fish served in restaurants in southern Thailand had nibbled on corpses. What had started with one local tabloid had then been picked up and repeated by so many different websites and blogs that the news networks began repeating it verbatim, with no proof whatsoever.

  None of the volunteers were making fun of the dead, nor mocking Buddhism. The monks understood that even with their limited English skills. This was the gallows humor of combat-fatigued soldiers and Emergency Room nurses, of cops and coroners working overtime, for whom laughter is the safety valve that releases all the hypertension so they can get back to work.

  The jokes got sicker as the volunteers got drunker during the nightly drinking sessions at the curbside restaurants down the road from Yan Yao Temple, where the volunteers and DVI teams sat on plastic stools only a few meters away from the passing trucks carrying rubber tree logs, pineapples, sugarcane, and massive bronze statues of the Buddha.

  The volunteers divided themselves up along racial lines. The Thais had their tables; most of the laughter came from their direction. The other Asians, mostly Japanese and Koreans, had theirs; between the older folks there was an uneasy truce among these former enemies. The Brits and the Irish had cornered the two tables closest to the TV for the football matches. Wade and Kendall sat at the table reserved for North Americans as well as a smattering of Aussies and New Zealanders, and Yves moved between all the tables, getting quotes and checking facts.

  The nightly “entertainment” consisted of a TV showing local soap operas, game shows, ghost serials, martial arts dramas, and English football with Thai announcers. In this provincial town, where the newsstands at the local bus station, next to a ramshackle wooden market, did not stock any English-language magazines or newspapers, Thai songs dominated all the karaoke machines. The videos accompanying them were like soft-core porn: Thai women in bikinis walking down beaches and wading into the water to splash themselves with it in slow motion.

  Every night another fearful rumor spread from table to table. The next aftershock would be bigger than the original earthquake. Outbreaks of cholera, typhoid, and tuberculosis were imminent. It was no use leaving now; all the volunteers had been infected already. Local papers said the forensic unit of the Thai police had accused Dr. Pornthip and her team of mistakenly identifying hundreds of bodies. They wanted to move the identification center from the temple to Phuket, where they would be in charge. Around the tables where the Asians sat, they swapped ghost stories of the drowned returning to haunt the beaches, waterways and the temple’s mortuary. They recited these tales with the same mixture of credence and fascinated dread that the Westerners reserved for the rumors of pandemics and aftershocks in the offing.

  As if all of that wasn’t weird and worrisome enough already, now everyone was too freaked out about the latest stories of corpse-eating fish to order seafood in the restaurant.

  “Better stick to the beer diet,” said Wade, and Kendall nodded.

  After a couple of weeks of rumors, hauntings, aftershocks, coffins used as coffee tables and dead bodies that appeared to be talking, all the black humor had turned very bleak and all the laughter had a desperate edge and lunatic-asylum hysteria to it.

  Colin, the ringleader of the British and Irish crew, insisted that he was expanding his business empire with a new venture. “Here it is, lads, the new frontier in post-tsunami businesses, Ned’s Bordello for Necrophiliacs. We’ve got a few thousand tarts over there for those sick fucks.”

  Above the clatter of utensils on the alfresco wok, insects caroming off the fluorescent lights, and the off-key warble of a Thai song-bird venting her spleen and heartbreak through karaoke, Colin’s friends were moaning, “Bloody hell, give it a rest, Col.”

  Yves looked at Wade who had taken off his baseball cap to wipe the sweat from his bald head. He said, “Man, I gotta take a break from this insanity. Listen to Colin. Now he’s rehashing some old comedy sketch by Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, aka Derek and Clive, about how dead popes excite them and give them the horn, ie, a boner. I think Col is about two days away from a serious stretch in a loony bin.”

  “For sure, he’s way outta line, but the way I see it, this is a whole new ballgame. Nobody’s ever seen anything like it before. So how are they supposed to react? All bets are off and all crazy possibilities are on.”

  “Nice of you to excuse the loony, but I’m still gonna bail out for a few days. Don’t worry. I shall return to my sorry lot in life and do my meager part.” He managed a smile. “I won’t chicken out on you or Col and the lads.” He put some bills on the table.

  “You’re not gonna go after Zara and Stephan now, are ya? Tell me it’s not about all that macho crap and blood vendettas, like life is a blues song and you gotta go kill the guy who stole your gal, eh?”

  “Don’t speak of the dead. It’s blasphemous. To me they both died in the tsunami.”

  “Okay, however you wanna play it, bud, just as long as there ain’t no bloodletting, is fine by this ol’ pacifist.” Wade looked at the bills, sitting beside a plastic container for a toilet roll and a little tray with condiments like dried chili, fish sauce and sugar. “That’s too much. You always pay more than your share. Here…” He gave him back a red, one-hundred baht note with the king’s face on it. “So where ya goin’?”

  “I’m going back to Bangkok to find my cat.”

  WADE WATCHED HIM GO and said nothing except, “Take ‘er easy. If ya need anything gimme a shout on the cell.”

  None of his previous experiences, working in nickel mines and on oil rigs, managing a heavy metal band and driving a snowplow, had prepared him for this. He had no advice to offer, no remedies to dispense. This was uncharted territory. The aftershocks from the third largest earthquake ever recorded on a seismograph (9.1 on the Richter scale) had stopped after a few months, but they continued rippling through the survivors, and all those who’d witnessed the deaths and the devastation, for decades to come.

  The most disturbing case Wade had come across was Sophia’s: kind, hilarious, outgoing and seemingly indestructible Sophia. Yves had pointed her out in the provincial hospital in Takuapa, two weeks after Boxing Day, when they were visiting some of the friends Wade had promised to check up on: the Japanese golf pro who’d come down with malaria, the old Chinese lady who kept kicking his butt at gin rummy, and the young girl whose leg had to be amputated. “One leg is still better than none, sweetheart, and that won’t stop you from goin’ horseback riding up in Jasper. Trust me. Soon as we find your parents we’ll be good to go.”

  How long could he keep spewing this BS? It was wearing him down. The heat, the long hours, the stench, the lack of sleep, the brightness and the energy-sucking heaviness of the sunlight, and especially all the lies he had to keep repeating to reassure the orphans that all hope was not lost.

  Yves showed him into another room with four beds, all occupied and surrounded by bands of chattering friends and relatives. He explained a little about the art therapist. Sophia was working with three young Swedish sisters who were catatonic. The unconfirmed rumor was that their parents and siblings had died, but no one knew how or why because the girls were not able, or refused, to talk.

  Sophia had set up a canvas and an easel by the window. In spite of the cast on her arm and the bandages around her knee, she was showing them how to mix colors and paint portraits. But the three blonde girls just sat t
here on the bed covered by the drab green sheet. They looked like dolls with blue eyes only half alive and half deadened by the terror of their ordeal.

  With admirable patience, Sophia kept cajoling them, kept smiling at them and encouraging them to paint and draw. From time to time she would banter with Yves in French. Sophia’s accent sounded French, but she did not look European. Her caramel skin and languid mannerisms gave Wade flashbacks of his holidays in the Caribbean, of beaches with black sand made of volcanic ash, of buying freshly caught lobster straight from the fishermen in their dugout canoes, of encounters with sable-skinned women who made love like they were dancing to salsa propelled by steel drums and who wore wild-flowers in their hair. By dawn no traces of them remained in his bed save for some petals of red hibiscus and the faintest tang of the sea.

  When the Thai doctor and a nurse came to check on the girls, Wade said to him, “Don’t tell me. She’s gotta be from one of those French colonies, like Martinique or St. Tropez.”

  “Not bad, man. Not bad at all. Her father is from Martinique but her mother comes from Paris, that Montmartre area, the Bohemian quarter where Toulouse-Lautrec and Henry Miller used to live. That’s what we were just talking about. She’s had a remarkable life as an actress, an artist’s model, a TV presenter and now as an art therapist. Yes, a remarkable woman.”

  “With a remarkable rack. Look at the fun bags on her, would ya?” Wade kept his voice low so Sophia and the three sisters would not hear him.

  “You are incorrigible, Wade.”