Phantom Lover and Other Thrilling Tales of Thailand

by Jim Algie

  “Since I don’t know what that means, and frankly it sounds kinda gay, I’m gonna pretend you didn’t say it and leave it at that. The way I see it, people get even hornier and have more sex after disasters like this. It’s lust for life, just like that song by Iggy and Bowie goes.”

  “I thought you were a metal head.”

  “Not always. Far as I’m concerned there’s only two kinds of music. There’s good music and there’s bad music. I like good music. Whether that’s metal or punk or classical or country, my ears are wide open, bud. Bring it on, turn it the fuck up, and give ‘er.”

  The middle sister went over to the easel and began sketching furiously with a black pen. Wade, Yves and Sophia were transfixed. The motions of her hand, combined with the movement of the lines, swirls and circles as the outline took shape, made it look like they were watching a comic turn into an animated cartoon. The boat was going up the wave like a surfer. The three girls were thrown off the side. A woman tried to grab them but the propeller cut off her arm.

  The artist grabbed another paintbrush, dipped it in red, and started stabbing the sun and the sky with it until it broke in two.

  The jolt of recognition snapped Wade out of his lethargy. He sat up in his chair. He gripped the arms. In his mind, he was going a thousand miles per hour, leaping days in seconds, to arrive back on that long-tail boat on Boxing Day. The little girl with the pink T-shirt that read “I’m Crabby” beside an illustration of a crab. The three sisters flying over his head. Their mother trying to catch them. The propeller. The sun spouting a geyser of blood. In the water trying to wrap his T-shirt around the woman’s arm. His collarbone sticking out of his skin.

  The artist put that sketch aside and started another one of two blond girls swimming for shore in a sea of blood where all the black waves looked like shark fins. Her hands were moving a mile a minute. Wade had never seen anything like this before, except maybe the little girl who became possessed by a demon in The Exorcist. But this kid was possessed by the tsunami, which was rushing and roiling through the rivers of her veins.

  The other two sisters wept and hugged each other. Sophia sat down on the bed between them. She put her arms around them and clasped them to her bosom.

  Wade watched the scene unfold, as any parent would, with an ache in his heart and arms that could only be relieved by hugging his own sons or at least hearing their voices on the phone.

  The artist began another painting of a little girl sitting on top of a palm tree surrounded by water. Sinking beneath the waves beside the tree was an Asian man with a saint-like halo of sunlight around his head. Wade squinted at the painting. It was Yai. It had to be him.

  In her next sketch, he was crucified on two palm trees surrounded by black sea.

  The former snake-handler’s disappearance and death had been much discussed among them, but no one had any proof of what had happened to him. Even after his body was found, nobody knew where he’d been when the tsunami struck. Was this what happened? Yai had come to their rescue and become a saint in the eyes of this girl? Yves was trying to talk to her, but she kept shaking her head and continued sketching.

  Wade looked away. Then he noticed the altar in the corner of the room, the altar festooned with blinking fairy lights and bedecked with lotus blossoms, incense and yellow candles. Sitting atop it was the Buddha protected by the seven heads of the Serpent King. That was Yai’s favorite Buddha image, the one he talked about the most.

  By Wade’s reckoning this was at least one coincidence too many. He had to be alone for a while to give this a long hard think. He told Sophia it was nice to meet her. He shook her hand. He wanted to say something to the girls, but he couldn’t. The artist, it was like she’d been touched by the hand of God or the devil, Wade couldn’t decide which.

  Whenever he was drinking with Yves they would often circle back to that afternoon. Wade would mention his theory, but Yves would disagree. “No, she was touched by the hand of genius. Most people think watching a child being born is a miracle, right? I’m sure it is, but what we witnessed was an artist being born and that’s equally miraculous.”

  Wade would not contradict him. He was not an expert on such subjects. But there was more to it than that. Much much more.

  For years he would puzzle over the events of that afternoon. To meet those angelic-looking girls again, all three of them, yes, a trinity, to discover they were still alive after he’d given them up for dead. To find out how Yai had saved one of them. To see how the artist had depicted him as a saint and a Christly figure. To look over and see Yai’s favorite Buddha image with the Serpent King. And then, the kicker, to suddenly see Wade’s father, plain as day, but just for a split second, standing under that Buddha image. His father who had taught him how to ski, skate, hunt and drive a snowmobile. The father who had been dead for more than twenty years.

  And for all these things to happen within such a short space of time just when he’d reached a point of complete despair and utter exhaustion was a… revelation. That was the only word which fit and even that sounded inadequate.

  After all these years and beset by so many doubts, God, the Creator, Whoever, Whatever, had visited them in that hospital room or at least made their presence felt. Wade was almost certain of that.

  Growing up in the Bible belt felt more like a noose and strait-jacket, because there were so many different rules to follow, the Lord’s Prayer on the radio in the morning, saying grace every night at dinner and his prayers before bed, going to Sunday school every week and memorizing hymns to sing in the church choir. There was no escaping the word of God or his many laws. On Wade’s way to school every morning on the black and yellow bus, looking out over the long flat prairies, desolate in winter, but abundant with sheaves of wheat and ears of corn during the summer, even the colossal grain elevators were etched with Biblical warnings: “What good for a man to win the world but lose his own soul?”

  He did not want to look up at the night sky, vaulted like a cathedral and aglitter with thousands of stars, to see a moral written there about how cleanliness is next to Godliness, when he was awed by the boundless infinity of the universe and its millions of mysteries. That was the kind of religion he wanted—full of beauty, mystery, and eternity.

  The tsunami and its aftermath had stirred up those old longings. As much as he’d lost, and as bad it was, and as fucked up as his collarbone would always be, for the rest of his days Wade remained grateful to the catastrophe for bringing him back to the Creator, who was maybe not a God at all, not even remotely human, probably more like an alien intelligence, he imagined, and a combination of architect, engineer, electrician, plumber, artist and astrophysicist.

  Wade could not understand the workings of the universe anymore than he’d been able to understand the architect’s blueprint for that new ski resort they were building. As a plumber who’d done an apprenticeship, and as an amateur electrician, he could work out where the shitters went and how the wiring worked, but the rest of the design was way beyond his meager capabilities. The same went for the universe.

  Big tragedies ask huge questions. After 9/11 his American buddies from Montana and Minnesota, even the bikers, were more thoughtful than he’d ever seen them before. On their fishing and hunting trips, the small talk dried up pretty quick when they sat around the campfire at night, pounding back brewskis with twigs crackling and sparks impersonating fireflies, so they could talk of God and country, death, democracy and, in the end, what it all came back to was good friends, family loyalties, and the simple dignity of doing an honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay.

  Wade would also never understand how Watermelon came to him in a dream, some four months after her disappearance, to show him where her body was hidden in the roots of a mangrove tree. She said it didn’t matter what became of her physical form. In life it was only a bankable commodity. But in death it became a chrysalis for a spirit that was like a butterfly. After her body died, her spirit would use it as a runway to li
ft off into the sun, she said.

  They found her body exactly where her dream ghost said it was. Just as Wade spotted it, a tiger butterfly circled around his head and flew up, up and up, until it disappeared into a shooting star of sunlight.

  Wade did not know how to explain that either. His mind said it was a coincidence. His heart said it was love. His soul that it was a miracle.

  Over the years, he did come to a few conclusions that he tinkered with and refined, like he’d tinker with his old motorcycles once in a while, changing the pistons and plugs, trying out different carburetors and valves. He did not need any religious groups or books on physics to confirm these convictions. He did not even think that any of them, save for an afterlife, were especially religious. All the same, he did not repeat them to anyone, just like he didn’t talk about his love life with anyone except his partner. Some things are sacred and can only be conserved by silence. Out on the prairies, there were already enough preachers, televangelists, and Jehovah’s witnesses going from door to door like traveling salesman. Nobody needed him to throw in his two cents on matters that he did not understand anyway. And he certainly wasn’t going to etch any of his beliefs on the sides of no grain elevators.

  But the gist of his experiences and imaginings boiled down into a few unshakable convictions:

  There is a master-plan and a design to the earth,

  the solar system, the universe, and the human race.

  There is a higher power out there somewhere.

  We are never alone and death is not the end.

  In fact, it might only be the beginning.

  WADE’S BACKGROUND IN ART appreciation had begun with bare-breasted, sword-wielding Viking babes featured in airbrushed murals on the sides of the “boogie vans” that were popular back in the seventies, and ended with the drawings of timber wolves, beavers and polar bears on the walls of the resort where he worked.

  He had never heard of “art therapy” before, but he watched Sophia perform a few minor miracles over the next few months. Through painting and drawing, she provided an outlet for those too traumatized to speak about their experiences. It proved to be especially effective with the many orphans.

  Around the temple of Yanyao and the town of Takuapa, the tireless Sophia was everywhere. Wade kept running into her as she escorted the families and friends of the missing through the temple, as she performed clerical tasks for Dr. Pornthip, as she helped the Buddhist nuns (dressed in puritanical white, their heads shaven in a rejection of vanity) to prepare food for the monks and the volunteers, as she gave interviews on French TV: always with a smile on her face, always wearing these beautiful saris, bangles and scarves from India. The Thais adored her because she was so fun loving and down to earth, which was a lot more than you could say for many of the Westerners from the bigger aid organizations and DVI units, who were easy to anger, quick to judge and slow to adapt (“In the countries where I’ve worked we didn’t do it like this.”).

  Her very French dedication to slapstick humor and comic prat-falls kept the Thai volunteers in a state of hysterics. One morning she showed up to work with her hair tinted red and gelled into punkish porcupine quills in the same style and shade as Dr. Pornthip. Thanks to her hairstyling, by noon, thirty different women were walking around the temple with the same hairdo as the forensics specialist.

  During the nightly drinking sessions Sophia did not bitch like the other volunteers did. She didn’t even complain about them putting ice in the beer—unusual for a woman with such refined tastes, Wade thought, who always brought a European literary novel to dinner every night and listened to Indian and Western classical music on her MP3 player. In English she was far from fluent, “I speak English… in a style very French,” but she had enough brio to keep up her share of the conversation, even when she had to resort to body language punctuated by bursts of French, “Mais oui. C’est sa. In France, we are very enlightened and very liberal. We stopped using ze guillotine in 1981.” Sophia seemed to have gone through life in a constant state of amusement or a state of reverence for all things artistic.

  Wade was impressed by the fact that she was the only one of the volunteers who had ever been to Canada. (The Brits and Aussies kept mistaking or accusing him of being an American and asking, “What state are you from?”) She was complimentary about the country and curious to learn more. “You have two national languages in Canada. You must speak French, uh?”

  “Yeah, well, we had to study it when we were kids. I still remember a few phrases. Ouvert la fenetre, Monsieur Thibault.”

  His deadpan rendering of French made her laugh so much that all the bangles on her arms jingle-jangled. “Open the window, Mr. Thibault. Yes, you speak French… in a style very English.”

  This became their in joke. Every morning when they saw each other, Wade would say, “Ouvert la fenetre, Monsieur Thibault,” and Sophia would laugh and repeat the English equivalent.

  By then Wade had decided that if, in the unlikely event that Watermelon turned up alive, she could go back to Yves. She didn’t really love him anyway. All she wanted was a visa and for him to buy her parents a house. Wade would be better off pursuing Sophia. It would be nice to have someone to talk to for a change. As beautiful and feminine as some of these Thai women were, they made for dull conversationalists. Talking about food and prices all the time, or playing cards and making funny faces at each other, had its limitations. With Sophia he could talk about anything. She had few taboos. “When I was eighteen, because of my sexual life, I had to leave the Catholic church, uh?” Another bonus was that she was in her forties, he guessed, close to his own age.

  Colin was the one who took him aside and said, as they stood beside a gilded statue of the abbot who had founded the temple and whose robes were graffitied in black and white with bird guano. “Between you and me and the gatepost, as it were, Sophia’s husband and teenage daughter are both missing. The situation looks dire. So go easy or give her a miss.”

  Wade did not know how to broach this subject with her. The best thing to do, he figured, was to wait for her to bring it up first, which didn’t work either because she refused to mention it.

  He now saw her frenetic pace around the temple and town in a darker light. As long as she kept moving and talking and joking and cooking, as long as she did not allow herself the time to sit and contemplate the horrible truth, she would be fine.

  At the party following the last night of work at Wat Yanyao, identifying more than five thousand bodies over almost six weeks, Wade got drunk and carelessly sentimental. He cornered her by the bar. “Ya know, Sophia, I just gotta take my baseball hat off to you. Considering what you been through and shit, you have put in one hell of an effort.”

  “What do you mean by zis?”

  “I mean you’ve been through a lot… a lot of family troubles for sure.”

  She fixed him with a forty-five caliber glare that shot down all the fantasies he had concocted about seducing her in a matter of seconds. “My husband and my daughter are only missing and not dead. Do not ever speak to me again of zis.” Her voice was so frosty that all he could do was stand there, frozen to the spot and feeling like a snowman in the glacial blast of air-conditioning, for twenty minutes.

  Nothing messed with his self-confidence like getting rejected in such an icy and heartless way. Nothing made him question himself so ruthlessly either. The questioning led to doubting, the doubting led to drinking, and the drinking led to more questioning and doubting. His looks, his wit, his physique, his job prospects, his virility, his earning potential, his charm or lack thereof, all came into doubt and question.

  The sum total was a feeling of gross inadequacy. No wonder she had given him the cold shoulder. She was too good for him anyway and he was a clown, a schmuck, an idiot. It was going to take weeks to dig himself out of this hole. He might never have another girlfriend or ever get laid again.

  From what he heard on the grapevine, too devastated to leave his room, Sophia did not reapp
ear the next day, nor the day after that or the following day either. A full week later, just as Wade was starting to come back to life again, he ran into one of the American volunteers in the lobby of the hotel, with its tacky Roman fountain full of golden cherubs and fancy carp. She was a Peace Corps volunteer who always wore what she thought were native clothes, like fisherman’s pants, except none of the real Thai fishermen he had ever met wore those kinds of pants because they preferred blue jeans and T-shirts. Wade asked her what had happened to Sophia

  “If you can believe it, like some creep suggested to her that her husband and daughter are dead, and the poor woman had a nervous breakdown. Yesterday her sister came to take her back to Paris.”

  Wade could not bring himself to admit that he was the creep in question.

  What the hell happened? Sophia had seemed so tough and together. It was hard to believe that one conversation like that could push her over the edge. But she had been living in denial for weeks now and finally she could deny the truth no longer: her husband and her daughter, wherever their bodies lay, were dead.

  Through some of the other volunteers, who formed an informal support group that lasted for years, Wade followed her decline: the slow descent into alcoholism, the premature retirement, the gradual seclusion until she became a total recluse, and finally, not four years after losing her husband and daughter, Sophia passed away too. The doctors said it was cirrhosis of the liver. Wade knew she’d died of a broken heart.

  After the rejection and the news of her breakdown, he turned gloomy and introspective. Even the beer tasted bitter, as if it had been poisoned by all his regrets and inadequacies before it reached his taste buds. He would listen to Yves and Kendall, as they sat at the street-side bar, drinking, smoking and bitching about the media. By the time they were drunk the Aussie would be doing most of the ranting.

  “When those media vultures piss off after two or three weeks in search of the next fucking disaster area or warzone, it leaves folks with the wrong impression. All they see on TV or in the paper is that the aid money poured in, the sick were taken to the hospital, the dead were honored, the authorities have the situation sorted, and everyone dealt with their grief and lives happily ever after. It’s not on, is it? The biggest question goes unanswered. How the fuck does anyone live with a tragedy this big?”