But no one comes to visit. There’s one person here for every fifteen on the other street. From where he stands, Rafferty can see both left and right almost to the intersection at each end, and there’s no kid with a bad haircut. The rain has thoughtfully lightened, so visibility is good. He steps up on the sidewalk, and, hearing Wallace say “back-shooter,” he peers through the plate- glass window of the cocktail lounge on the corner before he leans his back against it as he reviews how he got here and what might be next.
The boy had been running, but no one had seemed to be chasing him. So, two possibilities. First, whoever was pursuing the boy—for argument’s sake, let’s say it was Varney—had seen Rafferty and stopped, melting into the crowd. Second, of course—and it’s suddenly so obvious it feels like a whole tray of ice cubes poured down his back—there may have been no one at all after the boy. He may have been sent to draw Rafferty out, may have been running solely to get Rafferty to follow him—maybe to Varney—and Rafferty has, brainlessly, fallen for it. That means that Varney, or whatever surprise Varney might have arranged, is in front of Rafferty, not behind him.
Perhaps the surprise is an explanation of what Varney means by “Or what.”
It feels like a ripe moment to stand still. Wallace, he suddenly thinks, probably knew how to size up the most logical spots for ambushes, trip wires, and punji pits in a jungle. Rafferty believes he’s developed an equivalent eye for the streets of Bangkok. This seems like an appropriate time to put it to work.
To his left is a row of outdoor bars, just pink-lighted tables sharing a single long, thick, dripping concrete roof, from which hang a few flat-screen TVs tuned perpetually to the soccer game of the moment. Rafferty has come to the conclusion that there’s a soccer game being televised somewhere in the world at every second of every day of the year and that Bangkok sits at the very bottom of a kind of digital valley, down into which every single one of these games rolls, ripe for television. On the far side of the outdoor bars is the sidewalk, and on the far side of the sidewalk are the doors to the indoor bars. The kid isn’t visible in the outdoor bars, and he wouldn’t be allowed into the indoor ones. With his back comfortably pressed against the solidity of the cocktail lounge, Rafferty studies this nocturnal little cityscape until he’s reasonably certain he can discount it as suitable to Varney’s purposes.
Just to the left is the first of the indoor bars, the infamous Star of Light, whose slogan could be “Decades of Oral Satisfaction.” Movement catches his eye, and he sees a woman in the black clothes favored by the bar’s specialists leaning against the wall with an expression that suggests she’s projecting her personal movies onto the rain. She catches his eye for a second, sees nothing to engage her attention, and returns to her reverie. No one else is visible in the stretch of street beyond her. So scratch the left.
To the right are a couple of cocktail lounges like the one he’s leaning on and a massage parlor, and then there’s a slight elbow curve that leads the last twenty or thirty meters to Silom. There’s some kind of fetish club there, beneath a big sign that says, helpfully, fetish club, although Rafferty has never been able to imagine what kinds of fetishes are so trivial or so wholesome that their practitioners would walk boldly under that sign and through the door. He thinks it’s probably people who don’t alphabetize their bookshelves or intentionally wear mismatched socks and want to be mildly reprimanded. Beyond the fetish club are a couple of stores selling cheap luggage that are open until 2 a.m., and beyond those is the busy sidewalk of Silom. He figures he can dismiss the street to the right, too.
So that leaves the area more or less directly across the street.
It’s a teensy bit of middle-class life, a snippet of Pleasantville dropped into Gomorrah: two respectable-looking restaurants and a big, shiny supermarket, a Foodland, bright enough inside for a person to get a fluorescent tan. It’s so pragmatically Thai, he thinks: towing the kids past the Fetish Club, the Star of Light, and two or three more of the most disreputable bars on the Asian continent to buy them a Tootsie Pop in Foodland. Look, kids, here’s this part of life, that part of life, and here’s your Tootsie Pop, and when you grow up, you’ll have to decide which door to go through, so pay attention.
Foodland and the restaurants, he believes, can also be struck from the list of the likely destinations Varney might have chosen to explain the specific nature of his “or what?”—perhaps accompanied by a short, painful, and memorable teaching aid.
Rafferty feels like he’s been here too long.
What remains, when the right, the left, and most of the area across the street have been eliminated, is the thing he hasn’t wanted to think about: a narrow, dreary alley in between the restaurants and Foodland, a little dead end with a curve to it that leads perhaps ten meters to a door, once the entry point to a dodgy girlie bar that seemed to change its name every few weeks and took advantage of the alley’s length to provide enough time so the patrons could stow the dope and the women could get up off their knees and wipe their chins, before the cops came in. The space is empty now, and, Rafferty thinks, one way God could demonstrate his or her existence would be for it to remain empty until the end of time.
Surely Varney can’t think Rafferty is stupid enough to enter that alley in pursuit of the running boy moments after getting a message about “or what.”
Well, how stupid is he? Stupid enough to come this far.
Varney is selectively capable, Rafferty thinks. Probably much more dangerous in a small, dark space than Rafferty is, especially since, as Treasure says, he can’t be hurt. But he’s got one obvious drawback: he talks, but he doesn’t listen. And then Rafferty hears one of Miaow’s acting terms: monologue.
Varney is a monologist. He does not share the stage well. The entire relationship between the two of them has, so far, been a monologue with Varney getting all the lines, setting the parameters, and calling the shots. It’s been a bravura performance in bits and pieces, and it’s been allowed to flow largely unchallenged. And when Rafferty had challenged it, in the silliest possible way, with the Halmahera Sea, Varney hadn’t liked it at all.
So challenge it again. Walk away right now, leaving Varney waiting to spring his surprise on no one. Just remember to keep checking your back. Take the most obscure and counterintuitive route home to your wife and child and soak yourself in the atmosphere of love, liberally seasoned with amused tolerance, that they’ve created for you.
And write yourself a part. Turn the monologue into a dialogue, one that Varney doesn’t control. One with some surprises in it. Take some immediate precautions for those you love and for Treasure, and then kick this thing into act 2, in which Varney no longer has all the good lines.
So he does. He turns and walks away, looking back every few steps. He’s not running away, he tells himself, he’s making a strategic retreat. It takes him almost forty minutes and two taxicabs to get home, but when he’s there, he knows he’s arrived alone. Upper-Crust Theatre is over, the television is dark, and the people he loves most are there. He kisses both of them, eats some leftover take-out food, listens to Miaow’s imitation of Alan Rickman, and goes to sleep feeling that tomorrow he’ll go to work on the second act.
And in the morning he reads that a male street child has been found dead in an unused and partially burned Patpong bar, and at around ten that evening, after a day spent in a kind of stunned self-loathing, he gets a call from Leon, who says that there’s a new note, and when Rafferty insists that Leon read it to him over the phone, he learns that it consists of three words: Where is she?
Part Two
THE BANGKOK OF THE GHOSTS
13
Thai Heaven
The canal that parallels New Petchburi Road is the worst-smelling waterway in Bangkok, a town notable for noisome canals, a vast, interlacing network of open-air sewers. The people who live beside the canals poop directly into them, and hundreds of underground pipes carry
waste from the more distant and more socially elevated neighborhoods straight into these slow-flowing diversions of the Chao Phraya River. There are places where weeds grow on the water’s surface, rooted in the floating night soil. Walking on Wallace’s left, Ernie says, “Whoever called this place the ‘Venice of the East’ was born without nostrils.”
Wallace had laughed the first time Ernie said that, as though he’d known what Ernie was talking about when in fact Wallace had no idea that anyone had ever compared Bangkok with Venice. He’d never seen Venice either; Wallace’s Venice was a vague, misty, postcard vision of crumbling old buildings afloat somehow on a flat gray sea with a bunch of movie extras pushing boats along with poles and singing. A Californian’s Europe, steepled with churches, stripped of color, full of foreigners, and cold.
Even though he’d heard the joke before, Wallace laughs again now. It’s become automatic for him to laugh when Ernie uses that flat, uninflected voice that says, This is nothing special, and means he’s thought of something funny. Wallace turns to say something to him, but Ernie’s not there anymore, although Wallace is sure that Ernie just made a joke and that it had been Ernie, a minute or two ago, who’d first spotted the lights of Thai Heaven, where Jah is waiting.
But when Wallace looks ahead again, the lights aren’t there. Nor is the smaller constellation of lights that signals Rhapsody, the bar across the way from Thai Heaven. Instead the road stretches away in front of him, a straight black line paralleled by the leaden gleam of moonlight on the thick, stinking canal water to the left. On the right side of the road, he sees the indistinct shapes of foliage. Here and there a kerosene light gleams in one of the small, wooden, stilted houses that alleviate the flatness of the riverine semi-swamp on which Bangkok is built, still dark and unbroken in this area, as empty as it would be if the nearest city were a thousand miles away. But just then the swamp shimmers and wavers for a second, and here’s Ernie again beside him, but not looking the same, looking dead, which, Wallace remembers, he is; Ernie has been dead for years. And the canals have been cleaned up for years, and the swamps have been built over for years, pressed beneath the weight of skyscrapers and tunneled through for subways, but here Wallace is, walking a dark road through the swamp with the stench of the canal—the klong, they call it—to his left.
The moonlight on the canal breaks into circular ripples as though a stone has been thrown, although there’s been no splash, and Wallace realizes that this version of New Petchburi Road—the “Golden Mile,” they call it—shouldn’t be this empty: there should be other guys walking, there should be smaller bars here and there, and he should have passed Jack’s American Star Bar, where the black guys hang out to the sounds of live jazz and rhythm and blues, and the girls have permed their long, straight Thai hair into Afros.
But those things are absent, and Wallace senses that the edges of this moment, of this place, are more flexible than usual, that space is twisted so that it might be a kind of Möbius loop where he’ll soon come upon his own footprints in the road and then see himself up ahead, trudging away into the distance. The margins to the right and left feel fluid and permeable, like a page off of which the words might heedlessly run or onto which sentences from a different page, or a different book altogether, might suddenly push their way, a train wreck of meaning.
Ernie says, “It’s something, ain’t it, kid?” and when Wallace looks at his friend this time, it’s apparent that death has almost finished with him: Ernie’s uniform hangs in rotting tatters, and his face seems to have melted a bit, so that the bone beneath the skin of his forehead gleams through, smooth and white and somehow unthreatening. With the expertise of someone who has dreamed profusely since childhood, Wallace realizes he is dreaming.
Wallace spent his childhood in a nightmare-free zone, probably because the days were so benign. The ocean was right there, serving as the western margin of the small town of Carlsbad, California—a blue, sparkling margin that advanced and receded, but on a regular basis and not enough to be alarming—and the sun was a permanent fixture in the sky, supplying the gold in a color scheme that was dominated by the harmonizing blues of the sea and the sky, the white of the sand, and the eye-piercing orange of the California poppies that carpeted the hills, soft as folds of cloth, as they tumbled toward the water.
To be sure, there were monsters out there in the deep, and once in a great while something lifted sharp teeth toward Wallace’s helpless feet, coming up out of the deepwater darkness of a dream. But when he woke up, he knew where he was: in a safe bed, in a safe house, in the bosom of a safe family who lived in a safe town. The real monsters were kept at bay . . .
. . . waiting for him in Vietnam, where he found them all. He found them in the enemy, in his friends, in himself, in the sudden death of his comrades, and in the hell his platoon created in the villages. In the dead children, the weeping women, the small, dark-skinned men standing stunned with their hands secured behind them, waiting for the bullet.
His dreams went very, very bad during his first tour, and one night he was awakened because he was making too much noise in his sleep. The person who woke him, Ernie, taught him a secret. When the dream goes wrong, Ernie said to Wallace, swing your fist, as hard as you can, at the nearest solid object. When you don’t break your hand into a hundred pieces, you’ll wake up.
It took Wallace dozens of hair-whitening dreams before he remembered how to find that exit, but when he did, he learned it deeply enough that after a while he could play with the bad dreams, see how far they could take him, how unendurable they could become, before he swung at the nearest tree, the nearest wall. In Carlsbad he had ridden the mostly mannerly waves of the Pacific. Now he surfed fear in his sleep, and there was nothing mannerly about it: he was riding ten-footers, twenty-footers, tsunamis of fear, daring it to get bigger, then bigger still, and ducking out of the wave when it did.
So, trotting along a dark, unrealistically empty New Petchburi Road beside his dead friend, with a stinking klong to the left and a haunted swamp to the right, with the lights of Thai Heaven having disappeared in front of him, Wallace figures he’s got five or six more numbers on the volume knob before it’s time to bail. Remembering Ernie’s question, he says, “What’s something, Ernie?”
“All of it,” Ernie says. “The whole fucking mishmash. Every one of us who got dropped into that meat grinder, on both sides, to fight a war that never should have been fought. A million people dead, and I’ve met a lot of them by now, and what did we accomplish? I mean, why am I rotting here?”
“Guys in suits,” Wallace says. It had been their answer back in ’Nam.
“Dead now, most of them,” Ernie says. “Of course, they died on silk sheets on top of mattresses stuffed with money, or in intensive care in some hospital that was like a medical country club. But I have to tell you, Wallace, I hope some of them writhed with colon cancer, screaming in some white room while the nurses poked them for fun and told each other jokes. I hope some of them wound up pushing their swollen scrotum in a wheelbarrow, listening to people say, ‘Hey, Jack, how’s the balls?’ when there they were, big and bright as day, the size of watermelons, fire-engine red, and hurting like a nail through the toe.”
“Well,” Wallace says mildly. He burned through his anger long ago, but Ernie died with his at its zenith. It was what had kept him going when he was alive, it was what had sharpened the edge on the jokes. “As you said, they’re dead now.”
“Fuck that,” Ernie says. “You know what? Doesn’t make any difference if they’re dead. No difference to the world, I mean. They’re like the girls on Patpong: they’re immortal, one generation replacing another so you hardly notice. The fatsos in their suits, they’re always there, they always look the same. In the big offices, in the goddamn capital cities. All dressed alike, all keeping their eyes on the big cake, all with the fucking flag pins in their lapels. ‘Make money, shore up our power, by killing people? Sure. No-brain
er. Next question.’”
“Look,” Wallace says. Up ahead the night thins as though water has been poured into ink, and the lights of Thai Heaven shimmer toward them. Inside, there will be music and drinks and the famous sky-blue dance floor and dozens and dozens of women, but however many women there are, he’ll be looking for Jah. “Ernie,” he says, “why are you here? Just a visit?”
“A visit?” Ernie says. “You don’t think I’ve got things to do?” He looks at his watch, and Wallace looks with him, seeing the skin disappear to reveal the bones of Ernie’s wrist.
“Well, then,” Wallace begins.
“Remember Hartley?” Ernie says, and when Wallace, surprised at the name, looks over at him, he’s Ernie again, his uniform pressed and neatly buttoned, the same expression, the one that says, We have to find something funny about this or we won’t get through it, and Wallace hears quite clearly the last two things Ernie ever said in life, sitting thunderstruck beneath a tree with his insides spilled into his lap. He’d looked down at himself and said, “If you’re going to take my picture, I need a minute.” And then he said, “Hold my hand?” and slumped sideways, and while he was still falling, he made his escape.
“Hartley,” Wallace says, pushing the memory away. “That motherfucker.”
“You just met him again,” Ernie says. “You know who he is. And you need to be careful.”
Music reaches Wallace’s ears, but it’s the wrong music, not the Beatles and Beach Boys and Doors songs that keep everybody dancing in Thai Heaven, but some kind of marching music, all brass and drums, trombones and tambourines. Ever since ’Nam, Wallace has thought that the phrase “military music” is a perversion of language, an evil oxymoron along the lines of “sadistic sex,” taking something that should be constructive and peaceful and chaining it to aggression and discord. He says, “The guy with the mustache.”
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