by John Burdett
Her first message to his Internet address at work was a masterpiece of coy:
Hi, how are you?
He replied within minutes on a private account:
Chanya? Oh my God, where have you been? Where have you been? I've been going totally insane! I've prayed every day since you left, I go to church every morning and evening now, I sit in the back of the pews, and when I'm not praying I'm crying. Chanya, I just can't make it without you. I know I'm fucked up, honey, I've got religion the wrong way, I'm totally out of touch with everything, I'm a hypocrite in my work, the whole fucking system here is a mess, I know all that, but for me the only way out is you. These last weeks I've known just one thing: only you can save me. I've just got to be with you. I'll do anything you want. You can do anything you want. You can go on whoring if that's what you need to do. We'll live in Thailand. Where are you? Look, I know I can get a posting over there somewhere. This whole Trade Center thing has got the Company totally wrong-footed. There are guys driving desks who will follow any hint, especially from someone who knows Asia. All I have to do is say I'm willing to hang out on the Thai border somewhere where there are Muslims, gather intelligence, check which way the beards are going… I can be there in maybe a month at most, probably sooner. Everyone wants to gain 9/11 points, sending someone like me to a foreign posting in Muslimland looks good on their books. Give me a telephone number, sweetheart. Please.
Couldn't we just chat on the Net?
You have to give me your number. I talked to my boss yesterday, told him I was ready to go over there, and he practically went down on his knees to thank me. Now in return you've got to send me at least your telephone number. Please, Chanya, I'm dying over here. PS: I watched The Simpsons for you last night. Homer became the official mascot for the Springfield Isotopes baseball team-it was a good episode.
Just as at the very beginning of their relationship, she found herself drawn in by some mysterious force. Perhaps that legendary energy that Americans were supposed to have? Or maybe just plain old female narcissism-you couldn't help but feel flattered when a man wanted you so bad he was prepared to give up Washington and live in a third-world dump just to be in the same country. She sent him her Thai mobile number. After that it was ring, ring, ring. To judge by the timing of the calls, he was a true insomniac and took the precaution of having a glass of wine before he called her, so she was protected from that heavy, preachy, serious side. Drunk, even over the phone, he cracked her up. All of a sudden those long, hot, sleepy, boring afternoons were punctuated by her straight-from-the-gut laughter.
A few weeks later he was calling her from a town she'd vaguely heard of, right at the other end of Thailand, on the Malaysian border, a place called Songai Kolok. She'd never been there herself but knew it to be a brothel town catering to Muslim men who came over in droves from puritanical Malaysia. In the flesh industry the women tended to be looked down on by the Bangkok elite.
She closed her mobile after that first call from Songai Kolok in a strange state of mind. So far it had been one long telephonic giggle, a hilarious injection of American wit, passion, energy, and optimism with not a single flash of possessiveness, intrusiveness, hypocrisy, preaching, or intolerance. She was getting the United States strictly as advertised, but she doubted he would be able to keep it up face to face. Despite his pleas she took more than a month to make that first visit down south. She steadily refused to give him her address in Thailand. He still did not know her family name.
He met her at the bus station in Songai Kolok, and she saw immediately something was wrong. It was early morning (she traveled by night), and he had not had a drink. That brooding, boiling, resentful, fragmented side was working his jaw as he took her bag, but there was more than that. He had lost weight and looked ill. Songai Kolok was not doing him any good at all. From his conversation in the cab on the way back to his apartment, he let slip how much he hated it. Quite simply, he was suffering from severe culture shock. The only other Asian country he'd visited (the only country he'd visited outside of the United States, period) was Japan, which had been a kind of reverse culture shock: in the minutiae of daily life the Japs were streets ahead of the United States, they had managed that almost-impossible thing of combining an ancient culture with hypermodern high-tech gizmos. In Japan everything was better than in America, the food, the hygiene, the nightlife, the women, the tattoos-especially the tattoos. By contrast Songai Kolok was, well, a third-world toilet.
He pointed out the window of his apartment at the police station with the hundreds of whore shacks leaning against the perimeter wall. "See that? I watch them every night." Staring aggressively into her face: "I watch them every night."
So what? Perhaps he was not sure himself, but it chilled her heart when he showed her his little telescope. "They're always grinning and smiling. It's so… hell, I don't know."
"What is it, Mitch? What's the problem?"
A shake of the head. "How can they do it? Why aren't they in hell? How can they just do it, like they're taking a shower or something, and afterward it's all over, like nothing happened at all? Like they're good friends doing each other a favor, money for her, blow job and fuck for him? It's like, like… I don't know."
On her way from Surin she had changed buses at Bangkok, where she slipped into a downtown supermarket especially for him. She took out a bottle of Californian red, one of his favorites. He scowled at it but gave her a corkscrew to open it. She found a couple of glasses in his kitchen, poured him a very generous slug, and watched him drink. She waited to see if the magic still worked. At first it seemed not to, he continued to curse the filthy animalistic young people who congregated around the shacks every night, but little by little his mood altered. A light-slightly insane but preferable to the depression-came into his eyes. All of a sudden he was grinning.
Kneeling in front of her where she sat on his sofa: "Goddamned hypocrite, aren't I?"
"Yes."
"I'm getting on my high horse, and what do I really want right now more than anything in the world?"
"To screw the ass of a Thai whore."
A shocked look, then laughter. "My god, Chanya, what is wrong with me? What is it that I just can't deal with?"
She did not say: reality. To tell the truth, she was feeling pretty horny herself. It had been nearly five months since she'd had sex with anyone, and she'd been remembering his extraordinary stamina, when drunk. She allowed him to undress her.
After his usual command performance, he burst into sobs. "I'm so fucked up, honey. I'm sorry. Maybe this is a mistake. I don't want to see myself torture you all over again. Maybe I'm just a totally impossible, fucked-up freak?"
She buried a hand in his hair and did not reply.
She stayed with him three nights on that first visit and began to understand what had happened to him. His mind went through the same cycle as in Washington, with a vital difference. In D.C. his work had had the effect of focusing his talents, giving him something to chew on hour after hour; true, he left work and prepared for his change of personality in a grimish sort of state, but still with the feeling of having gotten somewhere, of having achieved something, of having made progress. In Washington, in other words, he had purpose, and to an American there is no higher god. Down in Songai Kolok he had no purpose, his excuse to his boss for being here was false, as was obvious after the first day. With his quick mind, he saw that this brothel town was pretty much impervious to Muslim fanaticism for the very good reason that it was dominated by Muslim decadents who knew how to deal with troublesome beards. So night after night he watched the shacks. This had become his purpose. It was so blatant. The cops came in full uniform from time to time to talk to the girls, have a chat and a laugh, and drink a beer or two, and the johns came and talked to the girls and the cops, and everyone was kind of partying. There didn't seem to be any guilt at all. The Muslim boys were strangely respectful and polite to the girls, and as for the girls-well, you would never know they lived on the bo
ttom rung of a feudal society; they didn't seem to carry any kind of inferiority complex at all. Actually, they seemed a lot happier than the average corporate drone. Come to think of it, they seemed a lot happier than anyone he knew, in the States or in Japan. Their gaiety seemed not in the least forced or brittle.
To a lesser spirit this would not have been so earth-shattering, but Mitch, to give him his due, saw the significance. These boys were Islamic, they were the skullcap-and-mustache equivalent of devout Christians, yet they sinned cheerfully, not appearing to notice the effect they were having on their immortal souls. What was going on here?
Chanya, veteran of that eternal battleground called the Western mind, supplied the answer. "None of them important, Mitch."
He blinked at her. Goddamn it, it was true. It didn't occur to any of them, not even to those young gallants, that they possessed the least importance in the scheme of things. But of course, that was where they were wrong, that was the mistake primitive people made because they had not yet received the great gift of ego.
A change of expression: Of course, in time all will change, even Songai Kolok would start to look and act like a first-world town once enlightenment had been brought to a permanently ungrateful world, and all the filth would be swept… under the carpet. In the meantime, though, the whole sick, immoral thing seemed to be growing. Through his telescope he'd seen five new huts appear since he'd been there. This was a boomtown, for God's sake. Booming on sex. Muslim sex. And no one was doing a goddamn thing about it.
Chanya had been watching the anguish pass and repass across his features. Now she said something that must surely have been the distillation of everything she intuited of him, of the West, of white men: "If you didn't torment yourself, there wouldn't be any difference, would there?"
It was quite literally too much for him to take, the idea that there was no difference at all between him and those horny young Muslim men, nor the whores nor the cops either come to that, apart from his needless self-torment. The West was mostly a structure of smoke and mirrors, after all; but it was exactly those with the biggest stake in it-men like Mitch-who found that rather obvious truth so difficult to swallow. He retreated into vanity, checked his body in the mirror, and muttered about that tattoo he was planning.
So she would open a bottle of wine, hand him a glass, and wait until that crucial thing in him started to loosen and he was able to forget purpose and laugh at himself. Purpose, though, was so ingrained, only alcohol could free him from it. At least, alcohol was the only cure she'd found so far. The problem: it seemed to make his grim even grimmer, once the effect wore off. And one other thing. This was the first time Mitch I and Mitch II had inhabited his body simultaneously, batting his mind from one end of the internal tennis court to the other and back again. She had no way of knowing that this was indeed a significant progression in the stages of psychosis. In her Thai way, she could not help seeing the funny side. With the best of intentions she seemed to have rather dismantled this big, muscular, brilliant, and incredibly important man. But how could she possibly have guessed how fragile he was?
Her visit did him good, though-there was no doubt about that. Even sober at the bus station wishing her goodbye, there was a healthier glow to his skin and a saner light in his eye. But she wasn't sure when she would be back. She refused to make any promises, and for once he was man enough to accept that. This discipline he was able to sustain for about as long as it took for her to reach home. In her handbag her mobile started ringing as she was getting off the bus.
So it went. Her worst fears were coming true. He called every day. If she didn't answer the phone, she felt pangs of guilt and fear for what might be happening to his mind. (After all, she was the reason he was in that sleazy town in the first place.) When she answered, he would seduce her with his humor, then just when she was molten, his mood would turn ugly, he would demand that she come see him, or give him her address so he could visit her.
Chanya, veteran of a thousand men, had so little experience with love tangles, she felt the need for ancient wisdom. The old crone in the Internet cafe seemed able to read her mind without the need for much explanation. Chanya told her it was not a love potion she needed, maybe something to cool him down. He was a farang, she admitted, with that excitable farang psychology that just could not accept life as it came. Why was he like that? He obviously wanted to turn her into an American, colonize her, in other words, as if she were some backward country that needed development. It drove him crazy that she resisted his attempts at psychic invasion. Worse, there was no hiding the fact that she owned a better mind than his. Of course, she had hardly had any education, but she could read his oversimplified moods as if he were a picture book, while at the same time he seemed to understand nothing about her. To tell the truth, he wasn't interested in who she was at all. This was understandable-he didn't want to focus on the way she made her living. But that was also ridiculous. If her work was such a problem for him, why had he come halfway around the world to be with her? This was him all over, a thoroughly divided mind: fatally attracted to the thing he loathed, or thought he loathed, driven to transform her into the thing he thought he wanted but actually hated. The minute he turned her into an American, of course, he would be bored and disgusted. He was a Christian, she added.
The crone knew nothing about Christians, but she knew a thing or two about crazy men, farang or otherwise. For her generation living in that part of Thailand next to the Cambodian border, there was a sure cure, a universal cure, that farang in their ignorance had driven underground. In her day if you caught the flu, suffered depression, needed an anesthetic, or simply wanted to improve your homemade soup, nature provided all you required in the form of the poppy. Try a little opium, she advised. Slip it into his wine or his food. Once he'd started to appreciate it, teach him how to smoke it. No one ever hurt anyone while they were on opium, and there was no hangover, no ugly mood change such as that caused by alcohol. The crone had once been married to a violent alcoholic and held all fermented liquor to be an abomination that ought not to be legal. In her shop all alcohol was banned, even beer. She sold Chanya a few grams of opium and a pipe. She showed Chanya how to prepare the pipe, and also how to prepare the opium if she wanted to slip it into his wine. The next time Mitch called, she agreed to go see him again in a week.
Throughout the whole of the interminable bus journey down south, her stomach was in knots, and she resented him for it. If this was love, then maybe she'd had enough of it already. She was dreading his mood when he met her at the bus station, for once again she would arrive early in the morning.
Hard to say if it was an improvement or not, this unshaven man who met her bleary-eyed and exhausted. She was horrified at the deterioration that had taken place within so short a time, but at least he did not start nagging her. On the contrary, he seemed apologetic, quite unnaturally so.
He admitted he'd got hold of a couple of yaa baa pills the night before. After an hour, he'd been so terrified of the effect the meth was having on him (violent paranoid fantasies, a strong temptation to jump out the window), he bought a bottle of cheap Thai whiskey and drank it all. Probably the whiskey had saved him because it had made him vomit. Meth and alcohol don't mix, she told him. He could easily have killed himself. A shrug of indifference and a slightly insane grin. Incredibly for an American, he had not brushed his teeth that morning. They were dirty, and his breath smelled.
"So what? I feel like a dead man anyway. You're destroying me. I don't know how you do it, or why you do it. D'you know why you're doing this to me, Chanya? Is it because you hate Americans? Are you in league with our enemies?"
A hand to her mouth. "Mitch!" Then: "I'm leaving."
"No, no, please honey, I didn't mean anything, just a joke, you know, pretending to be paranoid, an American joke, you wouldn't understand. Stay, please stay. If you go, I'll kill myself, I swear it."
He was on his knees, holding her legs tightly as if saving himself from disa
ster. She thought of the opium in her handbag. "Have a glass of wine, Mitch. Calm down. This is crazy. You think I came all this way to be with a crazy man?"
She watched him drink the wine mixed with opium, wondering if perhaps she was destroying him. After all, wasn't she the one who'd taught him to drink? And now she was adding opium. Well, it might be a short-term expedient, but the atmosphere in the small flat was so claustrophobic, the madness in his eyes so frightening, that anything would be an improvement. She was administering emergency medical aid, she told herself. And maybe saving her own skin. This farang might be wasted, but that was an awesomely powerful body still.
40
C ome on, farang, admit it-you've always wanted to try a little O, haven't you? Only the once of course, just to see, no? Naturally not with close family around, probably not even with any of your peer group who might snitch on you to the boss just when you were being considered for promotion, but if you got the chance to experiment (you know) on some private little vacation that you and your partner agreed you could take on your own to find yourself and your meaning during your midlife crisis (or your post-teen crisis, or your thirtysomething crisis), perhaps in some exotic foreign country somewhere in Southeast Asia? Opium-the word alone seduces, doesn't it? It's so alluring, so literary, so special, so rare these days.
They do O tours up north near the Laotian and Burmese borders, although they don't call them that, of course. Adventure is the word. You get the elephant trek through the jungle, the bamboo raft on the river, all the ganja you can smoke-and a couple of very special nights in one of those flimsy bamboo shacks you see so much of in Vietnam movies, sharing a pipe or ten with those colorful mountain tribesmen and women (whose children, for reasons lost to history, know all the words to the song "Frere Jacques" and are liable to belt them out at the slightest provocation). And why not? It's not as addictive as TV, than which there is no greater mental pollutant. For centuries the white man was a passionate trafficker, even fighting righteous wars to uphold his sacred duty to alleviate the burden of existence for Asia's teeming billions with a drug already deemed dangerous to white men. (Ring a bell, Philip Morris?) Nowadays there's a lot more profit in prescription tranquilizers and home entertainment… think about it.