by Peter Straub
With the force of some crazed bird escaping his throat, a loud burp tasting of smoke and pitch flew from Conor’s mouth. Most of the men laughed. Conor was amazed that the woman laughed too.
The General lifted the shirt-jacket of his Thai suit and pulled a revolver from the waistband of his trousers. He crooked his second finger through the trigger guard and displayed the revolver on his palm. Conor didn’t know much about guns, but this one had flashy grips carved from some milky substance like ivory or mother-of-pearl, and filigreed scrollwork on the side plate beneath the cylinder. Intricate scrolling covered the barrel. It was a pimp gun.
Conor stepped backwards, then stepped backwards again. Finally his brain caught up with his body. He could not stand and watch while the General shot her—he couldn’t save her, and he had the terrible feeling that the woman would fight him if he tried, that she did not care to be saved. Conor moved backwards as silently as possible.
The General began to speak. He was still displaying the pimp gun on his palm. His voice was soft and urgent, persuasive, soothing, and compelling at the same time. He sounded just like a General to Conor. “Crap crop crap crap crop crop crop crap,” the General intoned. Give me your poor your huddled masses. O glorious we. “Crop crop crop crop crap.” Gentlemen, we are gathered here today. Conor eased himself further back into the darkness. The bartender’s eyes flicked at him, but the men did not move. “Crop crap.” Glory glory heaven heaven love love heaven heaven glory glory.
When Conor thought he was close enough to the bottom of the staircase, he turned around. It was less than six feet away.
“Crap crop crop.” There came the unmistakable metallic click that meant the firing mechanism was cocked.
A shot echoed loudly through the basement. Conor jumped for the stairs, hit the bottom step, and scrambled up, no longer caring how much noise he made. When he reached the first landing he heard another shot. It was muffled by the ceiling of the basement, and this time he knew that the General was not shooting at him, but Conor ran up the stairs until he reached ground level, and hurried outside. He was out of breath and his legs were trembling. He staggered through the hot wet air, and came out of the alley onto a main road.
A grinning one-armed man beeped the horn of his ruk-tuk and steered the rackety little vehicle straight at him. When he stopped he bobbed his head and asked, “Patpong?”
Conor nodded and got in, knowing that he could walk to his hotel from there.
On Phat Pong Road Conor staggered through the crowd to the hotel, went to his room and collapsed on the bed. He kicked his shoes off lying down, and saw the bruised naked woman and the little General with his pimp gun. Conor finally swam out into deep sleep on the tide of the recognition that he had learned what “telephone” meant.
1
The elephant appeared to Michael Poole a short time after Conor had seen him getting into a taxi outside a bar in Soi Cowboy. Michael had failed twice by then, as Conor was to continue failing for the rest of the day, and the elephant’s appearance so thoroughly surprised him that he immediately took it as a token of success. He needed this encouragement. In Soi Cowboy, Michael had shown Underhill’s photograph to twenty bartenders and fifty patrons and a handful of bouncers; not one had even bothered to look at it carefully before shrugging and turning away. Then he’d had an inspiration, to look at Bangkok’s flower market. “Bang Luk,” said one of the bartenders, and a taxi took him across town to Bang Luk, a narrow strip of cobbled street near the river.
Flower wholesalers had set up their wares in a series of empty garages on the left-hand side of the little alley, and displayed them on carts and tables set out before the garages. Vans pulled in and out of the alley. On the alley’s right-hand side, a row of shops lined the ground floor of three-story apartment houses with French windows and abbreviated balconies. Washing on clotheslines hung before half of the open French windows, and the third of these balconies, above a shop called Jimmy Siam, had been covered with green plants and bushes in earthenware pots.
Michael paced slowly down the cobbles, breathing in the odors of a thousand flowers. Men watched him from beside the barrows of birds of paradise and carts laden with dwarf hibiscus. This was not the tourist’s Bangkok, and anyone who looked like Michael Poole—a tall white man in jeans and a short-sleeved white safari jacket from Brooks Brothers—did not belong here. Without feeling in any way threatened, Poole did feel extremely unwelcome. Some men loading flats of flowers into a mustard-colored van gave him only a brief glare and returned to their work; others watched him so intently that he could feel their eyes on him long after he had passed by. In this way Michael walked all the way to the end of the alley, and he stopped to look over a low concrete wall to the silty Chaophraya River, churning with an incoming tide. A long white double-decker boat marked ORIENTAL HOTEL moved slowly downriver.
He turned around, and a few men slowly returned to their work.
He returned to Charoen Krung Road on the pavement opposite the flower stalls, looking into every shop he passed for a glimpse of Tim Underhill. In a dingy café Thai men in dirty jeans and T-shirts drank coffee at a counter; in Gold Field, A Limited Partnership, a receptionist stared back at him from behind a screen of ferns; in Bangkok Exchange, Ltd., two men spoke into telephones at large dark desks; in Jimmy Siam, a bored girl tilted her head and stared into space at a counter full of cut roses and lilies; in Bangkok Fashions a lone customer dangled a baby on her hip and flipped through a rack of dresses. The last building in the row was a shuttered bank with chains across the doors and cardboard squares on the windows. Michael passed by a stop sign and was back out onto Charoen Krung Road without having seen Underhill or even sensed the possibility of his presence. He was a baby doctor, not a policeman, and whatever he knew about Bangkok had been read in guidebooks. Michael looked out into the maze of traffic. Then a ponderous movement in a sidestreet across the road caught his attention. He focused on it and found that he was looking at an elephant, a working elephant.
It was an old elephant, a laborer among elephants, carrying half a dozen logs rolled in its trunk as easily as if they were cigarettes. It plodded down the middle of the street past inattentive crowds. Michael Poole was charmed, as enchanted as a child would be by a mythical beast. Outside of zoos, elephants were mythical beasts: in this one he saw what he would have hoped to see. An elephant wandering a city street: he remembered a picture from Babar, one of Robbie’s sacred books, and that old deep grief waved to him again.
Michael watched the elephant until it disappeared behind jiggling crowds and a wall of shop signs in enigmatic Thai.
He turned south and drifted for a block or two. Tourist Bangkok—his hotel and Patpong—might as well have been in a different country. White men might have been seen in the flower market before, but here they were unknown. In his short-sleeve safari jacket, his White Man in the Tropics regalia, Michael was an intrusive ghost. Nearly every one of the people on his side of the street stared at him as he went by. Across the street were warehouses with low, slanting tin roofs and broken windows; on his side small dark people, mostly women, carried babies and shopping bags up and down the sidewalks and in and out of dusty shops. The women gave him sharp, anxious looks; the babies goggled at him. Poole liked the babies. He had always liked babies, and these were fat, clear-eyed, and curious. His pediatrician’s arms longed to hold them.
Poole moved on past drugstores with window displays of hair and snake’s eggs, past shoebox restaurants with fewer people in them than flies. When he walked past a school that resembled a public housing development, he thought of Judy again with a renewal of his old despondency. He thought, I’m not looking for Underhill, I’m just getting away from my wife for a couple of weeks. His marriage seemed a kind of prison to him. His marriage seemed a deep pit in which he and Judy endlessly circled around Robbie’s unspoken death with knives in their hands.
Drink it down, drink it down.
Poole walked beneath a highway overp
ass and eventually came to a bridge over a little stream. On the far bank was a hodgepodge village of cardboard boxes, nests of newspaper and trash. This warren smelled much worse than the compound of gasoline, excrement, smoke, and dying air that filled the rest of the city. To Poole’s nose it stank of disease—it stank like an unclean wound. He stood on the quavery little bridge and peered into the paper slum. Through an opening in a large carton he saw a man lying in a squirrel’s nest of crumpled paper, staring out at nothing. A smudge of smoke curled up into the air from somewhere back in the litter of boxes, and a baby cried out. The baby squalled again—it was a cry of rage and terror—and the cry was abruptly cut off. Poole could all but see the hand covering the baby’s mouth. He wanted to wade through the stream and do medicine—he wanted to go in there and be a doctor.
His pampered, luxurious practice also felt like a confining pit. In the pit he patted heads, gave shots, took throat cultures, comforted children who would never really have anything wrong with them, and calmed down those mothers who took every symptom for a major illness. It was like living entirely on Heath Bar Crunch ice cream. That was why he would not let Stacy Talbot, whom he quite loved, disappear entirely into the care of other doctors: she brought him the real raw taste of doctoring. When he held her hand he confronted the human capacity for pain, and the stony questions beyond pain. That was the cutting edge. That was as far as you could go, and for a doctor it was a deep, humbling privilege to go there. Just now this unscientific notion was full of salt and savor, the real taste of things.
Then Poole caught again that cryptic exhalation from this human sewer, and knew that someone was dying, breathing in smoke and breathing out mortality, back in the rubble of packing cases and smudgy fires and bodies wrapped in newspapers. Some Robbie. The baby gasped and screamed, and the greasy smudge of smoke unraveled itself in the heat. Poole tightened his hands on the wooden railing. He had no medicine, no supplies, and this was neither his country nor his culture. He sent a feeble non-believer’s prayer for well-being toward the person dying in the pain and stink, knowing that any sort of well-being would be a miracle for him. This was not where he could help, and neither was Westerholm. Westerholm was an evasion of everything his poor feeble prayer was sent out against. Poole turned away from the world across the stream.
He could not stand finishing out his life in Westerholm. Judy could not stand his impatience with his practice, and he could not stand his practice.
Before Poole stepped off the bridge, he knew that his relationship to these matters had irrevocably changed. His inner compass had swung as if by itself, and he could no longer see his marriage or his medical practice as responsibilities given to him by a relentless deity. A worse treachery now than to Judy’s ideas of success—which were Westerholm’s—was treachery to himself.
He had decided something. The grip of his habitual life had loosened. It was to allow something like this, and to allow Judy to do what she might, that he had accepted Harry Beevers’ absurd offer to spend a couple of weeks wandering around places he didn’t know in search of a man he wasn’t sure he wanted to find. Well, he had seen an elephant in the streets, and he had decided something.
He had decided really to be himself in relationship to his old life, to his wife and his comfortable job. If really being himself put his old life at risk, the reality of his position made the risk bearable. He would let himself look in all directions. This was the best freedom, and the decision allowed him to feel very free.
I’ll go back tomorrow, he told himself. The others can keep on looking. Koko was history, Judy was right about that; the life he had left claimed him now.
Michael nearly turned around to recross the wobbly bridge and go back to the hotel and book the next day’s flight to New York. But he decided to continue wandering south for a time on the wide street that ran parallel to the river. He wanted to let everything, the strangeness of Bangkok and the strangeness of his new freedom, soak into him.
He had come upon a tiny, busy fair tucked behind a fence in a vacant lot between two tall buildings. From the street he had first seen the crown of a Ferris wheel, and heard its music competing with hurdy-gurdy music, childish squeaks of pleasure, and what sounded like the soundtrack of a horror movie played through a very poor sound system. Poole walked on a few paces and came to the opening in the fence that admitted people to the fair.
The lot, no more than half a block square, was a jumble of noise, color, and activity. Booths and tables had been set up everywhere. Men grilled meat on skewers and passed them to children, candy makers handed out paper cups of sticky candy, other men sold comic books, toys, badges, magic tricks. At the back of the lot children and adults stood in line to get on the Ferris wheel. At the far right of the lot, other children howled with pleasure or froze in terror atop wooden horses on a carousel. On the lot’s far left had been constructed the gigantic plasterboard front of a castle, painted to resemble black stone and decorated with little barred windows. They suddenly reminded Michael of those in St. Bartholomew’s Hospital; the whole false front of the funhouse reminded Michael of St. Bartholomew’s. Looking up, he could identify the window behind which Dr. Sam Stein sat plotting, the one to the room in which Stacy Talbot lay reading Jane Eyre.
The huge grey hungry face of a vampire, red-lipped mouth open to expose sharp fangs, had been painted across one side of the plasterboard façade. Bursts of cackling laughter and eerie music came from behind the plasterboard. Horror’s conventions were the same everywhere. Within the funhouse, skeletons jumped out of dark corners and mad leering faces gave the young a reason to put their arms around each other. Warty-nosed witches, sadistic capering devils, and malignant ghosts parodied disease, death, insanity, and ordinary colorless human cruelty. You laughed and screamed and came out on the other end into the carnival, where all the real fears and horrors lived.
After the war, Koko had decided it was too scary out there, and had ducked back inside the funhouse with the ghosts and the demons.
Across the fairground Poole saw another towering Westerner, a blonde woman who must have been wearing high heels to reach her height of about six feet—her hair was rapidly going grey, and had been tied into a braid at the nape of her neck. Then Poole took in the breadth of the shoulders and knew that the person across the fairground was a man. Of course. From the grey in his hair, from his loose embroidered linen shirt and long braid, Poole gathered that this was a hippie who had wandered east and never returned home. He had stayed in the funhouse too.
When the man turned to inspect something on a table Poole saw that he was a little older than himself. The hippie’s hair had receded from his crown, and a grey-blond beard covered the lower part of his face. Oblivious to the alarm bells ringing throughout his nervous system, Poole continued to watch the man as if aimlessly—he noticed the deep lines in the tall man’s forehead, the creases dragging at his wasted cheeks. Poole thought only that the man looked oddly familiar: he thought he must have been someone he’d met briefly during the war. They had met inside the funhouse, and the man was a Vietnam veteran; Poole’s old radar told him that much. Then sensations of both pain and joy jostled within him, and the tall, weathered man across the fairground raised the object he had been examining to within a foot of his face. It was a rubber mask of a demon’s catlike face. The man answered its grimace with a smile. Michael Poole finally realized that he was looking at Tim Underhill.
2
Poole wanted to raise his hand and shout out Underhill’s name, but he made himself keep standing quietly between the vendor of grilled meat and the line of teenagers waiting to get inside the funhouse. Poole finally felt his heart beating. He took in several deep slow breaths to calm down. Until this moment he had not really been certain that Underhill was still alive. Underhill’s face was of a lifeless whiteness that made it clear the man spent very little time in the sun. Yet he looked fit. His shirt was brilliantly clean, his hair was combed, his beard had been trimmed. Like all survivo
rs, he looked wary. He had lost a good deal of weight, and Poole guessed that he’d also lost a lot of teeth. But the doctor in Poole thought that the most visible fact about the man across the fairground was that he was recovering from a good many self-inflicted wounds.
Underhill paid for the rubber mask and rolled it up and slid it into his back pocket. Poole was not yet ready to be seen, and he moved backward into the shadow of the funhouse. Underhill began moving slowly through the crowd, now and then pausing to inspect the toys and books arrayed on the tables. After he had admired and purchased a little metal robot, he gave a last satisfied, amused look at the diversions around him, and then turned his back on Poole and began working his way through the crowds toward the sidewalk.
Was this what Koko did, wander through a street fair buying toys?
Without even glancing toward the far bank, Poole clattered over the flimsy bridge after Underhill. They were moving toward central Bangkok. It had grown darker since Poole had first come upon the fair, and dim lights now burned in the shoebox restaurants. Underhill moved at an easy pace and was soon a block ahead of Poole. His height and the brilliant whiteness of his shirt made him very easy to see in the turmoil and congestion of the sidewalk.
Poole remembered how he had missed Tim Underhill on the day of the Memorial’s dedication. That Underhill had been lost, and here was this Underhill, a ravaged looking man with a braid in his whitening hair, just strolling beneath a noisy concrete traffic overpass.
3
Underhill’s stride lengthened as he neared the corner that led to Bang Luk. Poole saw him round the corner at the shuttered bank like a man hurrying to get home, and jogged through the darkness and the crowd of milling Thais on the sidewalk. Underhill had simply melted through all the people, but Poole had to jump down into the street. Horns blared, lights flicked at him. The street traffic too had increased, and now it was thickening into the perpetual traffic jam of Bangkok’s night.