A bar girl feels kai nah—selling the face—outside the temple of skulls. She has sold her face for a few hundred baht. But this reduces the transaction to a turn of phrase. The skull bone behind the face has a history of possessing an independent spirit; one that survived after the spirit of the flesh had been swallowed back into the earth. The skull behind the face was not sold; the skull remained for the cremation fire, the journey down the Mekong or Nan River where bone spirits travelled for the release.
Some said that a bar girl who worked in a skull bar suffered deeply. Others said she was a hostage to a condition of life, a way of being, which she did not want, understand, or choose but remained helpless to resist. The skull profile—she was either too old, uneducated, or afraid to dance. Dancers and skullers were two different kinds of women. Dancers worked off the premises and made big money; skullers worked on the premises for small change. Two classes of sexual workers. They represented two modern classes of human sacrifice and the modern patrons fell into two classes of customers as well: those who liked their head hunting ritual in private and those who liked a head in their lap as they drank their beer in public. The temple skulls talked on Patpong Road. In Temixtitan the polished skulls were silent.
Where, when and with whom a soldier had sex was a military decision. A question of support and comfort for the troops who had been combat trained. Men who had been ordered to use weapons of destruction. When such men were sent to temples they were confronted with skulls. In Hawks’ time, the skulls had no flesh. In modern times the flesh remains intact. This has been called an improvement, an advance of civilization. Bone head logic.
Cortez, for example, had seen the skulls collected in the Aztec temples as evidence that the Aztecs had gone terribly wrong in the gods they worshipped—soldiers in a skull bar had evidence of rituals of worship they did not question as right or wrong. Each ritual skull user—Aztec, Spaniard, or Patpong patron—found a release system. Who is to say that in the battle of skulls, Montezuma’s temple skulls were wrong? His temples were offering to powerful gods who communicated through omens. A sacrifice is a human being’s way of controlling his fear of gods which no weapon system can destroy. Generals have their fears. The politicians have other fears. The root fear is that forces beyond their control can and will cause their mysterious defeat. It is containing his fear that gives the alpha male his edge over the pack. What has changed is how the human sacrifice is carried out. In skull bars, and in blood on the street. For it is in sex and blood that generals believe that fear is transmitted.
As Hawks said in his chronicle there is no cause for Everything and All that Stuff. But what there is, however, out there waiting, is a business opportunity to allow the arms merchant to take over the role of the gods.
4
THAT SAME NIGHT a soldier threw a stone with a note demanding surrender up the stairwell at Radio Bangkok 108.3, Cortez had slipped away from Montezuma and materialized in Patpong. He had been reading about Hawks over Harry Purcell’s shoulder on several occasions. Checking out the skulls in modern temples was something Cortez could never resist; he would go so far as to say that it was a weakness. With the Thai Army shooting into the crowds, the skull bars were vacant and as black as combat boots. The girls squatted on their haunches, and Cortez’s ghost radar picked up their pubic hairs stirring feathery balls of dirt, ash, cockroach shit, dead skin, hairs, scattering them across the floor. Three or four whores huddled near the door like pets waiting for the owner to come home and feed them. The girls were all wet eyes and tongues like they had just been chased at gunpoint out of a shower. One scratched her ass with a nail file. Another one hugged a bottle of Mekong between her bare tits and blew on the top, making a little tune. Disco music blared like a foghorn from a speaker hooked by wood, nails, and rods like a monster’s nest to the ceiling. The square speaker had a brown fungus spreading on the cloth front, and small puffs of dust exploded when the bass part kicked in. Cortez surveyed the rest of the bar. Not a single customer was seated at the bar and the sofa was empty; naked youngsters waiting for money to swing through the door and all they had got was a ghost.
You could have any whore you wanted for a song.
And five hundred baht.
Cortez had vomited on his boots when he had seen the Aztec equivalent of skull bars four hundred plus years before. Cortez had written to Charles V that the Aztecs—not some but all of them—practiced sodomy. Cortez, a man who never missed a mass, or a message to the Pope, had been horrified these fucked-up Aztecs had skulls in the temples and sodomy in the archways of the towers. When Cortez arrived in Patpong, and walked up the flight of stairs, he was a ghost so he couldn’t barf and he had no feet on which to put boots. He didn’t see much in the bar except a lot of fear and boredom. The usual wartime companions. He was no longer disturbed—nor did he take it personally—that some people who sensed a ghost giggled and ducked out the back door. A couple of girls squatted on a small stage eating rice and grasshoppers fried in hot oil. The air-conditioner was turned off. The stale air was smoky from cigarettes. What would Charles V and the Pope have made of Patpong? He crossed himself and walked across the room.
One of the girls was curled up on a sofa while another girl dry humped her. Their long, black hair covered their faces. He had a wild hope that Daeng might be among them. But she was nowhere to be found in the skull bars or on Patpong. She was miles away waiting to be rescued by Robert Tuttle who could not find her. Frustrated by this failure of connection—since Cortez’s own fate rested on the success of this rescue operation—Cortez, a curl of cigar smoke, blew downstairs and into the street. He was resigned to watching the Army killing civilians in the streets of Bangkok. That, at least, made sense. Cracking heads was a black and white, and good and wrong business. He wondered if the Army had been supplied by the Purcells, whether they had the helicopters he had once been promised. Back on the street he watched a couple of farang buy condoms in a drugstore. The ribbed, lubricated kind which came in flavors like strawberry, coffee, cherry, and nutmeg. Then he headed down Patpong Road where the merchants sold pirated tapes, videos, shirts, belts, and pimps held up signs offering sexual menus involving boys and girls. He was late for an appointment with Montezuma. The humid heat reminded him of Latin America. The more he thought about it, the more worried he became that Daeng would be one more in a long line of missed opportunities. He had gone to the skull bar, thinking it was a kind of local temple where the gods accepted offerings. After all that time—about five hundred years—he had been preparing himself for the temples at the front lines—he was, after all, from the Old World—and in Patpong he found temples where human sacrifices retained the flesh around their skulls, where their lips still puckered, and their tongues were still wet.
Cortez was racked with questions. What had he witnessed? A few naked girls dry humping on a sofa. What would he report to Montezuma? And would Montezuma ever trust any report delivered from such a temple? Patpong—a temple with forty towers—all filled with live, working skulls. That would freak out Montezuma.
Cortez decided to make something up. Reality lacked the basic elements of believability.
He had watched a girl playing with herself in front of a mirror.
It occurred to him what he would say.
The Army had used chemical warfare. The women in the skull bars were horribly disfigured, skin the color of steamed rice peeled off their naked bodies, and they whispered for medicine and death.
That’s what he would tell Montezuma, and he would like that explanation.
Montezuma often spoke of the trenches during World War I. The Purcells had made a small fortune selling tons of mustard gas to the Germans, English and French. Cortez had climbed the stairs to a skull bar and found whores with lungs filled with dust spores, twisting and rolling around in agony. Whores suffering from chemical wounds, that’s what he’d say.
5
May 18th, 1992—Fax
London
Dear Robert,<
br />
BANGKOK IS THE lead story on the BBC evening news. But you are there—on the front lines, so to speak. I won’t bore you with the facts from England as you already are painfully aware (though Graham Greene once said the closer you are to the fighting the less you know) that the Thai Army opened fire and killed many demonstrators in Bangkok. Burma in ’88, China ’89, and now Thailand ’92. These appalling images of brutality rolling over the Asian landscape make for a most disturbing reminder of excess and cruelty. I hope that your daughter, Asanee, was sensible enough to stay away from the free-fire zone. It must be extremely difficult for you, her, and your friends. My thoughts go with you....
Now on to Harry’s gift of bones!
I received the bone fragment you sent some weeks ago. And as you requested, I gave it to a friend who works for Scotland Yard, and a Carbon 14 dating test was performed and this morning I received the report. The bone is probably the femur of a male, Asian, who weighed around one hundred twenty pounds, aged between 60 and 65 years old, and he suffered from the following disabling diseases: malaria, typhoid and rheumatism. The bone fragment is three hundred years old, give or take fifty years. Not much else can be divined (with any degree of certainty) from a shard of bone. Harry says it is from one of his Chinese relatives, a General Xue. The lab report can’t give a rank in the Army, the Chinese part does fit. Beyond this point of reason, I am afraid the descent into the realm of mystics is precipitous. The Orient has kept alive the flame of voodoo, ghosts, and wandering souls more than does present-day London, which is preoccupied with sales at Selfridges.
It is strange Harry would have given you this. The Chinese revere their dead relatives and would hardly part with the bones. But Harry is only half-Chinese and his upbringing is likely to have disrupted many of the traditional Chinese beliefs. But it is not only the Chinese who have held these beliefs.
There have been bone cults as far back as the Stone Age. Ancient man gathered the bones of animals killed on a hunt with some hope of reviving the spirit of the slain animal. In South America peyote gatherers planted deer bones with peyote root; transporting the spirit of the deer to the power of the peyote. One might be cynical and say so what! They were stoned. People under the influence of drugs are likely to do and believe whatever pops into their head. In any event, only much later did Stone Age man go the next step and believe that man’s bones had an immortal soul.
If you go back and read Herodotus, he records a tribe living along the Black Sea who disposed of shipwrecked sailors in an artful manner: “As for the enemies they overcome, each man cuts off his enemy’s head and carries it away to his house where he impales it on a tall pole and sets it standing high above the dwelling, above the smoke-vent for the most part. These heads, they say, are set aloft to guard the whole house.”
What you are suggesting, I think, has been thought and written about before (at least in the academic journals). In the West, not all bones were equal. The skull has since ancient times been thought of as the dwelling place of the soul, and the brain the bone marrow of the skull which produces semen. It is an old myth and like most myths never quite died out completely. My point is that when you cremate the bones, all the bones are treated as a unified entity; the spirit resides throughout the skeleton. Our obsession with the skull has defined our cultural destiny. Without it, for example, how does a Western culture produce a Descartes? The short answer is that most of our religious and philosophical ideas are recycled bone cult notions updated and perpetuated as modern, progressive faiths.
On to a personal matter which concerns Snow.
I had a disturbing letter from him last month. He has had flashbacks to his days as a hostage in the north of Thailand and is taking medication. He has what he calls a “high-miler” roundeyed American girl friend and they have travelled the west coast of California in a Winnebago, camping out in shopping centers at night. He suffers like a dog which has been beaten and cowers in the corner, shaking and whining. Snow appears to be lost in action. A POW who has returned to America but no one has taken the effort to discover him in their midst. I wrote Snow to the same effect so don’t think that I’m speaking behind his back. I have the feeling he will return to Bangkok not because I profess to be a “seer.” Such a return is not uncommon for a hostage who desires to relive his experience, in order to come to terms with it, and bury the devils which haunt him. If I’m right, then he may be walking as I write into a killing field in the streets of Bangkok.
Ever since my promotion to Harry Purcell’s Chair at the University I have had this uneasy feeling. Harry loved working in the field. Perhaps it was in the Purcell blood, running guns for countless generations is bound to make one different. He was restless in London like an inmate in a cell, waiting for a chance to escape over the wall. Unlike Harry, I feel that there is something reassuring about the solitary confinement a university cell provides—beyond the ordinary prison. Harry believed it was a gross felony to have government, foundations, corporations and others pay us to think for them, to solicit our views and ideas, and to write them down on paper for them to read. Ironically, this came from a man whose family fortune was based on selling instruments of death and destruction; living on such funds never caused Harry the slightest moral problem or doubt.
Harry wrote one brilliant monograph: Magic Hilltribe Rituals. No one can still accept Harry’s reason for resigning from the university. Myself, I accept his words at face value. He gave one of those boyish Harry smiles and said, “I am finishing the family chronicle.”
He was always secretive about this chronicle which somehow involved his family. Perhaps he confided in you about these matters. I am afraid he never took me into his confidence on personal matters. He was, I gather, an intimate friend of yours.
There are those who say that Harry Purcell was not politically correct, that he was out of step, out of date with modern developments. From your years of teaching, I don’t have to tell you about the nasty daggers looking for backs to stab in any university. Harry may have appeared eccentric, but as one who now occupies his Chair, I must say he discarded a great deal of conventional scholarship as disconnected with reality, as useless. This hurt the pride of colleagues and others who thought Harry had dismissed their lifetime of work. Harry liked the Goethe quote, “Few people have the imagination for reality.” One of his common-room critics once replied, “Even fewer people have imagination for the act of mass extermination.”
Yours,
Richard Breach
6
May 19th, 1992—Fax
Bangkok, Thailand
Dear Richard,
THE KILLING IS not over in Bangkok. I saw enough last night to convince me that your fax yesterday raised the right question: What can we say or truly know about what goes on inside the skull? Harry Purcell’s family chronicle was a half-millennium burden he thought he could carry; but I am not convinced that he can handle the full weight of what has passed into his hands. As for my friendship with Harry, I think of a famous painting with two people with bags over their heads looking at each other. The image sticks in my mind as the kind of intimate friendship I have with Harry.
I returned from a kayak trip on the Nan River to discover the killings first hand. Snow is in Bangkok reporting on the street battles, and Crosby is selling T-shirts at HQ. Thus the world of Bangkok is much as you remember it.
In a small village on the Nan River, I made a complete fool out of myself. I delivered the headman a handful of what I told him were floating stones, so he treated me—and he had every right to—like a simpleton. If I couldn’t tell a stone from a bone, surely I wasn’t to be expected to know the location of the invisible spirit.
Spirit, mind, and brain are another magical trinity for which there can never be a rational, materialistic answer. If there is a consciousness, now, from moment to moment, when the brain ceases to function, does this consciousness continue in some form or does it stop altogether like a machine unplugged from its energy source?
As for Harry Purcell’s views on living, it probably would come as no shock to you that he has built a super-computer, virtual reality system in his house. He closets himself away in a simulator, where he tests weapon systems in famous battles of the past. I told him this is the Purcell equivalent to a busman’s holiday, and he smiled. He hints at things in a Harry kind of way, but never goes into detail. A confession: my motive for sending the bone fragment. Snow once said years ago that Harry was a vampire. He probably drank the blood of young girls and had lived a thousand years. I had this strange feeling there was something not right about this bone. I am grateful your expert has proved my instincts to be wrong.
Yours,
Robert Tuttle
PS Radio Bangkok 108.3 just reported a rumor that the Army was going to cut all electricity to the city. So I hope I can get this faxed to you before we go off the grid.
A Haunting Smile Page 13