A Haunting Smile

by Christopher G. Moore

  “My exit song,” said Tuttle, and then left.

  “Every man needs an exit song at HQ,” said Snow. “Tuttle’s doomed. He’ll find true love in Bangkok before he finds Daeng.”

  Crosby ignored this. He didn’t care about Tuttle’s search and rescue mission. HQ had a revolving door for people who were failed searchers and those who were beyond rescue. That never stopped these people from hoping; but theirs was a lesson never learned, Crosby had often thought after several bottles of Kloster.

  “I remember Ding, Dong,” said Crosby, his mind still fixed on the T-shirt business. But it so happened this was also a song; one which had been a favorite on the HQ jukebox and the title song had been pirated by the bar he was now trying to fleece with the T-shirt deal. “Unfort-unately, it’s no longer on the jukebox,” sighed Crosby. “Ding, Dong reminds me of the time Noi and I were fucking and we punctured my Lilo.”

  “Say what? Punctured a kidney?” asked Snow.

  “A Lilo,” insisted Crosby, pouring his Kloster over ice.

  “Man, talk English.”

  “It’s like a mat but it’s got air in it.”

  “You wando. You mean an inflatable mattress.”

  “We call them Lilos.”

  “And the blow-up fuck dolls. . . .what do you call them in England? Miss Lilo. I had a screw with Miss Lilo last night, but her ass was low on air.”

  “No, we call them fuck dolls,” said Crosby, drinking from his mug.

  “How did Noi puncture the Lilo? With a sonar controlled fart?”

  “She was wearing an amulet on a two-baht gold chain. You know how the girls like to flip the amulet around, so the amulet won’t press against their tits and they feel the image can’t see what they are doing? Well, she had the amulet turned around so it hung down her back. I was giving her a real good one. We were pumping up and down on the Lilo. The edge of the Lilo must have caught on her gold chain. Because there was a loud boom, and then a violent hiss like a tire on a Land Rover blowing at eighty plus on the M1. You ever try to steer a woman on a Lilo losing air like a sonofabitch?”

  “Can’t say that I have,” answered Snow. “But a racetrack driver like you must have brought the vehicle under control.”

  “I got off her and turned on the light.”

  “And you’re a real gentleman of the old school,” said Snow.

  “And the girl. She’s like a dog leashed to a kennel. She was hooked. She couldn’t raise her head more than twelve inches from the deflated Lilo. Her amulet held her down. The gold chain pressed into her neck and her eyes went wild. I think she was damned scared. This bloody amulet was giving her a real working over in her mind. Spirits flying at her. Pee swooning down to devour her guts. She had violated something sacred and now the spiritual forces were seeking their revenge in her mind, screaming at her, ‘Fucking shape up or next time we’ll have you good and proper.’”

  “In an English accent? On the deflated Lilo?” asked Snow. “And now the big question, did you or did you not come?”

  “I must confess, I don’t remember. The burst of the Lilo was a bit of a shock. Nothing like that had happened before. The same with her. She had been screwed on mats, floors, tables, chairs, and no doubt on beds. No big deal. But this was a first for her. She was hardcore. Still she felt special for a few seconds. I didn’t want to get carried away. I helped her unhook herself. She was in no proper mood for me to blow up the spare Lilo I kept in the closet. After she was up and about, she started shaking, cupping the amulet between her palms in a wai, and touching her forehead with her hands. She was muttering in Pali. Then, in Thai, I heard her make a promise, that if the spirits didn’t properly fuck her over, let her off with a warning, spared the pain bit, and gave her and her mother a long life, she would never return to HQ and sell her body again.” Crosby made a great show of pouring out the last of his Kloster.

  “And, aren’t you gonna tell me the obvious…?”

  Crosby smiled. “She was back at HQ a week later. She was hardcore. All those promises to the spirits were in the heat of the moment stuff. But afterwards she wouldn’t go with me. She wouldn’t even acknowledge me. I tried. I promised no more Lilos. We’d go to a proper short-time hotel with a bed. A real bed. None of those water bed jobs where fear of drowning would have crossed her mind. But she refused, clutched her amulet and walked away. She had lost too much face.”

  Snow nodded to a farang who stood leaning against the bar. The farang, late 40s, had a chinless face, dirty braided hair, wore cuff-off shorts, plastic sandals, and a Crosby T-shirt with the words “Stop me before I fuck again” printed on the front. “See that guy without the chin, Crosby?”

  Crosby picked him out of the crowd, and gave Snow a so-what look.

  “I nominated him for the HQ psychopath of the week award.”

  “It’s the new generation,” said Crosby. “But his taste in shirts is impeccable.”

  “The new generation, man! That guy’s old enough to be your father. How did you leap-frog from your 20s to sixty- something? You’ve not even hit 30.”

  Crosby poured his Kloster over the ice inside his freshly delivered mug. “I’m quite looking forward to hitting 30. When I’m your age, Snow, I will have virtual reality sex every night. HQ home delivery downloaded via a computer Skynet feedback loop.”

  “And you will be the first wando to pick up a virtual reality dose. Crosby will be immortal as the first man to contract a sexually transmitted computer virus,” said Snow.

  “The Lilo after her amulet ripped a hole In it made this long bleating hissssss sound—hisssssssssssssss.”

  “The sound of virtual reality when the amulet bites.”

  Snow pushed off to cover the mass of people flooding into the Ramkhamhaeng University area of the city.

  “Try taking a course in reality while you’re at the university,” Crosby called after him.

  Snow turned. “Crosby, you know no limits. Now you’re ripping off the lines from that wando on 108.3. He said that about the Army. Addison. What an asshole.”

  10

  CORTEZ’S TEMPLE

  by

  Harry Purcell

  GENERAL XUE BRAIDED ivory skulls in his moustache. He gave them to young virginal girls as amulets. He worked this scam until he drank a cup of poison and died. An updated definition: amulet—an object desired for the sacred power with a lure no human can resist—a promise that the amulet can protect against personal destruction. A ticket on the Escape of Death ride.

  General Xue was ahead of his time. He was part of the trend of transforming the religious amulet into currency. Money. Cash became the source of power. This begged the most important question—the power to do what? The power to acquire, maintain and support the best, most healthy sexual specimens of the species. Power is who you can fuck and who can fuck you. Who will accept the ivory skulls for favors?

  Man learned to count before he learned to write (less than 5,000 years ago), and he was fucking himself crazy for hundreds of thousands of years before some asshole decided a system was needed. Arrogance arose through the process of counting. Once you decide that recording one, two, three, four, etc. is important, the step into the abyss of writing is one footfall behind. Why worry about what follows one? Could it be that man wished for a destiny better than a sexual animal which fucked on the road? So who counted first and what did he count? Ahhhhh, there was a question which was worth pursuing. He may have been a warrior who desired to show his power and counting illustrated accumulation, and accumulation equalled wealth and power; to master counting permitted him to number his women, record what was owed him, establish the number of enemies killed, and friends loyal to him. Counting pointed to a particular kind of relationship with people. Then one day, after a massive counting binge, man invented a written word and named his women, his enemies, his friends.

  You count your ivory skulls and earmark your women, they become—if you are a true pagan—like any other token of power. Pagans thought of
women as a toy, game, charm, livestock, collectable, slave, or inventory. Thousands of years passed. Then someone counted. Someone invented a new method of counting. More time passed and someone said counting alone was no longer working; there were too many things to count and no way to distinguish between them. Then a written word or proto-cuneiform script appeared scratched into the wet clay. This pictographic script was a woman. This word became woman. Soon an object attracted a status.

  Skull display was an early stage of collecting the sacred power in temples controlled by priests. In the next incarnation, amulets were manufactured from clay and stone by temple priests. Temples had the authority—the monopoly—to confer the power of the sacred. Temple priests brought the power of their gods to the mintage of coins. Why go along with this transition? The currency of choice changed; more men had a chance to count and use words, competing for the best women with temple coins. Money became a sacred object from the temples; a new kind of amulet to be exchanged with others, and for others. Coins ruled. And bingo, man and woman were no longer animals. What animal could count, use words, or build temples issuing sacred images for an exchange system? Who ever thought the basis of the exchange system—buying into the sacred sex machine—would be forgotten, repressed, suppressed?

  Think of the dawn rising, when man can count and there are words in the world, and suddenly amulets no longer have the magic or force around the neck to bestow power on the holder. Examine the earliest coinage from the temples, and line them up side by side with the amulets and see the obvious connection—temples became the first mass assembly lines producing objects which promised to confer the power of God, and the rush was on for every alpha male to grab as much as he could carry away.

  And what image did the priests place on the coins? Heads. Not simple skulls. But skulls masked in flesh and garlands of power to protect the possessor. Heads gathering as money. And what was carved into the ivory but a tiny, smooth skull bearing the image of General Xue? Or could it have been the carver’s own face? The carver had hand drilled a hole to allow the braided hair to pass through. He had a deep love for these objects which the general dispensed as gifts of face. General Xue would never have fully understood the horror Cortez felt upon his discovery of the temple skulls. But General Xue never made the mistake of thinking that man was that far removed from the animals which he hunted and collected. Or that man had evolved beyond ivory collectors going to battle. Only a Westerner like Cortez would have bothered to count all the way to 136,000 and to record the word—skull.

  11

  “THIS IS RADIO Bangkok 108.3, Denny Addison back on the air. Give us a call. Hey, hey, we’re waiting here for you, Bangkok. We are inside this sick, vile, twisted nightmare with you. I’m sticking pins in a voodoo doll I bought a couple of years ago in Bali. Does it work? Are there any generals feeling pain? Like who cares, it makes me feel better. And that’s what counts. So what are we doing? Hanging out, drinking, rotating on the air, and meanwhile rough-as-pig-guts-Jackson, the Aussie, who only realized a few minutes ago he didn’t unplug his rice cooker, rang his house. His phone has been disconnected. He didn’t pay his phone bill. And of all the fires raging in Bangkok, we get a weeping Aussie complaining about his rice cooker burning up. Okay, what’s next? We’re trying to catch up on our sleep. I lie. We are on a steady diet of Canadian Club. Only it’s fake. This pirated stuff could be used to remove paint from steel. It burns all the way down the shaft. But I’ve gotta say, we have lost all desire to sleep or eat. We just keep driving ahead. It’s weirdness. Tangled, twisted visions of hell, booze, shooting, roller-skating images of tall virgins. But you know all this. You’re hip. You’re cool. And best of all, if you can hear my voice, you are alive. Latest happenings street level in Bangkok. Do you really want to know? The answer is yes. Of course you do. As far as we can tell what is happening is…more of the same old bullets and bottle battles. Soldiers shooting demonstrators armed with plastic bottles and bricks. As you may have heard the Public Relations Building has been gutted by fire. Who set the fire? And why burn that building? The Army says terrorists started the fire. We have people calling in saying that guys with crewcuts dressed in civilian clothes with handguns in their belts torched the place. Sounds a little suspicious. Anyway, there isn’t a lot of need for a Public Relations Bureau right now. Man, you need more than public relations to explain what has been happening out there. You need major brain surgery to remove the images. Time, time, and major drug therapy will be needed to do the job. But I don’t want anyone to get stranged out. Follow the Hunter Thompson chemical diet. We had a report from one listener that she heard on an Army radio station about the fire at the Public Relations Building five hours before the fire broke out. The caller seemed sober. But one can never be sure. Maybe she’s plugged into the paranormal. She might know things before they actually happen. That’s one explanation. Or is there a remote possibility that the demonstrators didn’t start that fire? But someone else likes to play with matches? Also the Revenue Department building was trashed, burned, looted. Rough-as-pig-guts-Jackson who not only doesn’t pay his phone bill, does not pay his taxes, and he’s one happy Aussie at the moment, figuring the government tax people will never track him down. Come to think of it, where was Jackson when the Revenue Department was torched? And the State Lotto Building has gone up in flames. Figure that one out. Not even communists are against lotteries. Maybe it was a case of mistaken building identity. Finally, yeah, yeah, we’ve had several further reports from listeners who claim that headhunters with automatic rifles are riding around town picking off motorcyclists. Could this be traffic control in the New World Order? Why take a chance? If you have one of these motorcycle fixations, get professional help, park your bike and walk. The boys with the hunting rifles are shooting first and not asking questions last. Anyone on a motorcycle remember—you have been designated as targets. And the boys are getting a lot of practice. Unless you have a death wish, stay off your bikes. As for you die-hard bikers, who can’t resist a ride through the smoke-filled, trashed streets of our city, here is one from us at Radio Bangkok 108.3 to you, good luck, fellahs, you’re gonna need some luck and a bullet-proof helmet. The pirated sound track from Peter Fonda’s movie Easy Rider.”

  12

  DAENG WALKED AROUND the desk and stared at the old, cast-iron floor fan with the greasy grille. Bits of grime feathered out on the safety guard like tiny gray banners lashed to invisible poles inside a wind tunnel. Around the base of the fan was a series of chains and bicycle locks that were jerry-rigged around a laptop computer. The chains suggested the owner’s hysterical fear of robbery; his passionate desire to possess. This half-assed security system didn’t impress Daeng. A tuk-tuk driver blinded with drink and riding high on paint thinner could have stolen the goods in five minutes. She looked disapprovingly as she surveyed the dusty room. The ragged wrinkled curtains were drawn. Her eyes narrowed in the near darkness, trying to find any object which wasn’t rotting, rusting or falling apart. She reached over and touched the chains.

  “You have kamoy ?”

  “Not so far,” Cortez said. He had chosen the dump as a safehouse. He had been in a hurry.

  “Why you afraid kamoy take? Why a ghost afraid? ” asked Daeng.

  “It’s a lover’s nest,” said Cortez.

  “This place is a slum even for a ghost.”

  It had never ceased to amaze Cortez just how impossibly confused the living were in their views about the dead. They had a funny idea what spiritual element the dead were made of; it was his purpose to explain what eternal, evil storms raged, what military crackdowns happened inside the souls, what computer software barricades separated the living and dead. Thailand was a tropical country. He had hoped he would have more luck here.

  Then her eyes worked across his walls. The same look of horror he had seen for hundreds of years. So this is the way a ghost farang chooses to decorate his apartment was the thought he read flickering through her brain. There was a thick, pad
ded wall hanging with mythical half-horse, half-man beings and three dancing girls in traditional costume. It reminded Cortez of the good old days. But Daeng thought of it as trashy art sold to farang by sidewalk vendors on Sukhumvit. On the opposite wall were two slightly torn pieces of mismatched hilltribe fabric. She looked away, they reminded her of home. None of the usual appliances were evident—no television, VCR, microwave, or automatic toaster. The room had a closed-up feeling, stuffed with too much old, faded wicker furniture. The bookcases were nicked, dusty, lined with yellowing copies of the Bangkok Post. The gray lino was cracked and scuffed. Odd nails had been pounded into the walls like stakes. God only knew what objects had once been connected to the wall. The room might have been in a military hospital or a prison. Or a waiting room in a bus station. It was the kind of enclosure where strangers had no second thoughts about spitting on the floor or throwing their gum away with a flick of the thumb.

  She looked troubled, and Cortez saw that Daeng’s eyes were swelling up into tears for a good crying jag. What he didn’t know was why this storm had crossed her face. Daeng hurt when she saw a farang ghost living in conditions as impoverished as her own. But after all, she told herself, he had floated as a blue gas out of a sewer. It made her uneasy that death could be this unfair. It made her hurt that her father could be dead and stuck in such a hole. This poverty which she had tried to escape in this life was just as bad on the other side. The edges of her mouth became hard as she was lost in thought for a moment.

  “Why you bring here?” she asked him. Outside was such a scary night and to think the night had crept inside with her. There was no place to run to.