Phantom Lover and Other Thrilling Tales of Thailand

by Jim Algie

  Wade was still looking for that answer as the years drifted past like clouds slowly changing shape and, before he knew it, they’d already come and gone.

  Whenever he thought that all those nightmares and experiences were gone for good, another wave of reminiscences washed over him, inspired by yet another earthquake or natural disaster, like the 2011 tsunami in Japan. He could not bring himself to follow that story, but he did send a thousand dollars to a small NGO working on environmental issues. Wade was surprised by how bitter he still felt towards all the bigger aid organizations and relief networks, which had turned down his numerous requests for grants (“We regret to inform you that your proposal does not meet our criteria for funding.”) so that his dive shop and training center sank into a sea of red ink.

  Fifteen years after that fateful Boxing Day, Wade was living on Barbados and managing another dive shop for an American owner. He had married a local woman and they had a young daughter together.

  One of the volunteers whom he hadn’t heard from for years sent him an email, along with an attachment for a feature story about the short life and sad death of a Swedish artist. At first Wade did not make the connection. It was only when he got to the paragraph where a gallery owner talked about the woman’s strange beginnings as a painter after a few art therapy sessions in the wake of the tsunami that he understood who she was.

  Astrid Eld had enjoyed a stratospheric rise in the art world of Europe, becoming the first artist to have solo shows at many prestigious galleries when she was still a teenager and already her paintings were selling for fifty thousand euros apiece. (Wade mumbled, “Fifty k? Wonder what that’d be after taxes? Man, I’m in the wrong line of work.”) As her career rose, her mental health plummeted. She had several nervous breakdowns. She sought treatment for depression and substance abuse in exclusive clinics in the Swiss alps. At the age of twenty-three she died from an overdose of antidepressants, perhaps accidental, perhaps not, nobody knew for certain.

  Wade opened the attachment of her last installation. He clicked on the image to enlarge it. Wait a second. He had seen this painting before. It was the one she had drawn in that hospital room all those years ago.

  Except that sketch now filled the entire wall of a gallery. Amidst an ocean of towering black waves curved like shark fins, and dabs of rain shaped like teardrops, the only human figure in it was a girl, her head and blonde hair just visible above the waterline. The grey sky and the blue sun bled from multiple stab wounds.

  Wade did not need to be an art critic to see that this was not only a reenactment of her and her sisters’ ordeal, it was the state of her own mind, cast adrift in a sea of misery which had eventually drowned her. This was more of a suicide note, written in red, black, blonde and blue, than it was a painting.

  Wade rubbed his forehead. Was there no end to this? Would he be laying on his deathbed remembering that hospital room in Takuapa and how he’d invited that little girl with the wounded leg to come trail riding in Jasper? “Don’t worry about that little scratch. You’re gonna grow up and still be a beautiful woman. When we find your parents we can all go horseback riding together.” He still didn’t know if that family had ever been reunited. After she got shipped back to the States, he never heard from her again.

  On the other hand, if he had not taken a shine to Sophia and scuba-diving in Thailand, would he have ever wound up living and working in the Caribbean?

  While they were standing next to each other in a supply line of people unloading foodstuffs from a truck, next to a Burmese fisherman, a Thai high-society lady with a shock of blue hair, a backpacker with dreadlocks and eyebrow piercings, a middle-aged couple from Scandinavia, and a volunteer doctor from Kenya, Wade told Yves, “I’m not sure if the tsunami is the worst thing that ever happened to me or the best.”

  “Exactly. My favorite opening lines to any book or column or article is still Dickens’s Tale of Two Cities. ‘It was the best of times. It was the worst of times.’ Because you could say that about any era or time in your life and you’d always be right.”

  Wade’s daughter with the mocha skin and mane of frizzy hair came barreling into the living room and launched herself into his arms. That was always the most gratifying part of raising his kids— the unconditional trust they placed in him. Because he had to live up to that trust, it made him a better and more reliable man.

  He gave her a hug and tickled her ribs until she screamed and wriggled free.

  She put her fingers on his cheek. “Daddy, why are you crying?”

  “No big deal, got somethin’ in my eye.”

  Sitting on his lap, she looked at the screen. “What’s that?”

  Sooner or later he’d have to tell her. The best and worst thing that had ever happened to him had to be passed down to the next generation. Now was as good a time as any to make a start. “Well, on the day after Christmas in the year 2004, your dear ol’ dad was in southern Thailand. Little did he suspect…”

  ONCE THE BODIES AND debris had been removed, the reconstruction of the Khao Lak beach community began in earnest. Wade set up his dive center in a Chinese-style shop-house down the road from a Royal Thai Navy gunboat. The three-ton vessel had been washed about a kilometer onshore and left at the bottom of a foothill as a memorial.

  Yves said the boat was his boundary line. He would not live any closer to the ocean than that. When the next tidal waves came, he would be safe in his old house, next to an abandoned rubber tree plantation.

  Wade saw little of him. He stopped answering phone calls and responding to emails. On those rare occasions when they met by accident at the supermarket in town and Wade asked what he was doing, he was elusive or mumbled something about “studying the black arts.”

  Under the circumstances and the horrible experiences he’d been through—the deaths of his dear friends, and his divorce-in-progress—Wade cut him some slack. In time he would come around. He’d find some new buddies, rustle up a new gal. Wade still believed that time would heal those wounds, because memories dim, scars fade, and broken hearts mend eventually. That was the message Wade tried to ram home during their occasional phone conversations. But Yves defied him at every turn. “We’re not talking about somebody chopping garlic, cutting their finger and going for four or five stitches. We’re talking about the deaths of a quarter of a million people. We’re talking about one of the worst natural disasters in the history of the planet. And who’s to say that bones always mend the way they’re supposed to? Have you seen Yai’s thumb? He was bitten by a Siamese cobra ten years ago, and his thumb is still partially paralyzed and numb. It’s never going to be like it was. He’s damaged and the damage is permanent.”

  The most alarming thing about talking to him was the way he kept talking about the dead as if they were still alive.

  Month after month, Wade looked for any sign of improvement on his part and a willingness to start socializing again. But he saw nothing on either score.

  Just before the first anniversary, and the opening of the Tsunami Memorial Park and Museum in the village of Nam Khem (Salty Water), which had been pretty much obliterated, Wade jumped on his old dirt bike to drive over to his house. He doused the light and killed the engine before he got too close. If he didn’t, Yves would have time to hide.

  The decrepit, one-storey house sat in a dirt clearing in the middle of rows and rows of dead, tapped-out rubber trees. Every day around now, when the sky darkened and the insects ratcheted up their jamboree, Wade found himself remembering that this was Watermelon’s favorite time of day. The indigo sky gave her childhood flashbacks of the natural dye her mother used to color the cotton shirts and pants she made by hand.

  This was the curse, the worst curse of love, condemned to remember and unable to forget. Once, when they’d been sharing a post-sex cuddle and marinating in each other’s sweat, Wade said, “The way I see it, sweetie, after you fall in love with someone, it don’t matter what happens or what they do, a part of you remains in love with them
forever.” On this point Wade wished he’d been wrong, but sure enough, whenever he thought he’d forgotten about her, some keep-sake would turn up in the damnedest of places: an old photo of them smiling together in a field of Mexican sunflowers up in Mae Hong Son province, or a long-forgotten video from her in his inbox showing a cute kitty doing something silly. Healing this wound was going to take longer than he had expected. Yves was right; some injuries did not heal properly. Wade’s collarbone still gave him grief once in a while. It was especially bad during the rainy season and when he went scuba-diving.

  There were no lights on in Yves’s house, but a faint glow came from the open windows. Wade crept up to the window, trying not to crunch any gravel or twigs. Squinting into the darkness, he could make out two people sitting on the floor beside an altar of wavering candles, smoking incense, and a severed pig’s head. They spoke in low voices that underlined the seriousness of the conversation and the secrecy of their relationship. One of them was Yves. The other man appeared to be Thai. On his head sat a mask or crown. The room was too dim and shadowy to tell.

  Yves said, “I need to speak to my departed friends. I have to know where they are now and find out what’s on the other side.”

  “I can conjure them, but we need more herbs, more chanting. In certain places and at certain times, the membrane between our worlds is very thin.”

  “I hope so. This world is a wreck for me. Maybe there’s something better on the other side.”

  “Maybe it’s worse.” He chuckled.

  “What if there’s nothing at all? Maybe death is The End in capital letters, like at the finale of a film, and what could be worse than that? Emptiness and black space for eternity… that’s what scares me.”

  “I have been a ghost doctor for thirty years. Many of those in hell, many reborn as hungry ghosts, wish there was only emptiness and black space out there.”

  Wade figured a ghost doctor must be like a Thai version of a witch doctor or shaman, but this guy did not fit the stereotype he had in mind of a backwoods hillbilly with a string of bones or amulets around his neck. This man sounded eloquent. The way he spoke and the crown upon his head gave him a regal air.

  He sparked up two more bowls of herbs. The smoke stung Wade’s eyes. The smell was almost as pungent as marijuana and the taste was like puke. It made Wade’s stomach try to turn itself inside out. He doubled over. He vomited.

  When he straightened himself up and looked at his arm, the skin was giving off a fluorescent glow and slowly melting, to reveal the pink muscles and wriggling tendons beneath. The bones in his legs were melting too. Wade sank to his knees. His body dissolved into the earth, so all that remained was a dewdrop of consciousness that trembled on the edge of a leaf.

  An ant the size of a dinosaur, its mandibles mashing, swallowed him. He fell into a dark cave, where he was no longer he but it, where he had no arms or legs or mouth. Everything he had ever been or done, every place he’d visited and every experience he’d had, was null and void. None of it mattered now.

  The ant excreted him onto a rock where a sparrow stabbed him with its beak and picked him up, flying across the sky, to drop him on a green mango dangling from a tree where he was sucked up into the belly of a cloud that turned black and sent him hurtling back down to earth in a bullet of rainwater which landed on the head of a flying fish as it leapt from the ocean.

  All these images flew past at the nauseating velocity of a carnival ride going around in circles. Life, death, rebirth. One cycle after another. It was nothing like his conception of life that revolved around the family, the job, the mortgage and car payments. All those cornerstones of his life had been swept away by this tsunami of brain chemicals. His old life was gone, his old self had died. In this new world he was but a tiny seed in a vast forest. If anything, it was more like Watermelon’s conception of life. “There is no progress in Buddhism, only circles. We go around and around and around, but never go anywhere.”

  Standing above the engine of a whining jet-ski, Wade skimmed the waves of Khao Lak, flecks of salt coating his face and lips, as he searched for her. But she was not out on a jet-ski, as Yves had told him later, when the waves slam-dunked the coast. He was now in two places at once. Physically, he was back on Boxing Day 2004, but mentally it had to be some time later because he realized that bastard had lied to him.

  Backing off on the throttle, he banked into a turn towards the ocean as the house-high waves came barreling towards the beach. Imprinted on the whitewater’s surface were a thousand screaming faces, blood pouring from their eyes and mouths.

  Wade woke up in a bed beside Watermelon, who was cold and dead and smelled like rotten fish. Wade bolted upright but she came with him. He looked down. Their torsos, hips and legs had been fused together. Between them they only had two arms.

  Holding her up with an arm around her shoulder, Wade struggled to get to his feet. Walking anywhere was like running in the three-legged race back in junior high school, except now his running mate was a corpse.

  They lurched into the bathroom and entered the reception area of the district hospital in Takupa. It was bedlam: bodies and stretchers everywhere, patients weeping and moaning, people shouting at each other in a dozen different languages, more of the injured being wheeled through the door in wheelchairs or hobbling past bandaged up like mummies.

  Sophia, dressed in a white doctor’s coat, approached. She did not seem to recognize him. “How may I help you, monsieur?”

  “Sophia, it’s me, Wade.”

  “Do I know you?”

  “For sure. Listen, I’m real sorry I said that about your husband and daughter and stuff. I was hammered, eh? I sure as hell didn’t mean to upset you like that.”

  “I do not know what you speak. Is zere a problem?”

  “Uh yeah, you could say that. Check it out. I have a dead gal attached to me. Do you think you could separate us?”

  “Not without killing you. You two are Siamese twins.”

  Watermelon screamed, “Why do you always flirt with other ladies? I cannot trust you never.”

  “Honey, you’re alive.”

  “I don’t love you now. I want to separate na.”

  Grunting and gritting her teeth, she pulled and pulled until she tore her leg free, then her hip and finally her torso. Wade fell flat on his face, snapping off a few of his teeth, but felt no pain. Without her he could no longer walk or even stand up. As she hobbled away on a crutch, Wade crawled behind her on his stomach, yelling and sobbing, while Sophia laughed and the Swedish girl painted a portrait of him.

  Wade woke up on the floor of his bathroom, clad only in his boxer shorts and hung over as fuck. Groggily, he thought, this is some seriously bad shit, man. I ain’t had a trip this bad since gobbling those five hits of acid at the Black Sabbath gig in Frisco.

  By the time he finally got through to Yves’s cell phone some three weeks later to tell him about the bad trip and ask him what was going on, Yves said, “That bit of secondhand smoke you had was mild. We’ve been doing doses five times that strong and blasting off into the next dimension. It’s all part of my apprenticeship to the spirit medium and black magician. I want to be like Faust and cut a deal with the devil to find out the secrets of the universe.”

  “Okay, bud. Just make sure you keep paying those utility bills. Even Lucifer himself needs a hot shower sometimes.”

  Yves didn’t get the joke. He went silent. Then he hung up.

  It was useless trying to talk to him anymore. He had better get Zara on the horn. Wade needed a second opinion on whether it was time to get him to a shrink or have him shipped home in a straitjacket, before he did some serious damage to himself.

  IN HIS YOUTH, YVES had once thought that “love at first sight” was among the corniest of romantic clichés. It never happened in real life. It was a cliché contrived by romance novelists looking for a shortcut between the ballroom and the bedroom, hacks who rhymed “love” with “dove” on Valentine’s Day cards, and po
pular songwriters who had to condense an entire love saga into two verses, three choruses and four minutes.

  Lust at first sight was common enough for most men, but love? That could not happen overnight, let alone in a stray glance or a drunken leer.

  Love, in his youth and Bohemian circles, was a comparing and twinning of tastes in books, music, films, art, booze and narcotics that was forged in a blast furnace of sex, lit by candles in wine bottles hurling shadows across band photos, fine art prints and film posters that served as a theatrical backdrop. Over a few weeks or months, the affair played and guttered out amongst a rotating circle of parties, gallery openings, gigs in dive bars, plays in lofts, drugs in bathrooms, and art-house films in musty old repertory cinemas with moldering velvet curtains and chandeliers whose light had gone grey with dust spiders. By then, whatever passion had not been incinerated in bed or in a bong or both was funneled into arguments of increasing acrimony.

  All his preconceived notions about love and sex were altered forever after on a Sunday afternoon in Barcelona. Still reeling from a smashing encounter with a bottle of absinthe the night before, he was walking the cobblestoned backstreets of the “Gothic District” in search of the best hangover cure and pick-me-up in Spain: the carajillo, a jolt of coffee strengthened by a shot of brandy. After two shots and a few cigarettes, the heavy gloom of the hangover had only begun to lift so he could raise his eyes from the wooden floor that served as an ashtray and a sleeping place for dogs, which wandered in off the street. He looked up as a woman who was part sculpture, part painting, strode into the bodega. As tall and thin as a model, she had a mane of scarlet hair that hung down to her hips. Her tight black jeans, the loose peasant’s blouse and long black boots were streaked with different shades of paint.