“More or less. To have no desires left is to die or reach Nirvana. The only man to have reached Nirvana was Gautama Buddha. Void of suffering and without any desires, she killed herself. That’s it. I do not believe she rose to Nirvana, I believe she went to a dark spirit world, like the demon in your dreams.” The Abbot opened his hands in front of him and raised his eyebrows to indicate the open-endedness of the tale.
FIFTEEN
AN AIRPLANE flew overhead and the abbot shaded his eyes watching its path. “Another guava delivery,” he said.
“You believed this story, Father?”
“Well, I had no reason not to.”
“How does a spell like that work?”
“I’ve heard stories, but I cannot be sure. Maybe we’re missing the point. Maybe the warning is not about the spell at all.”
“What do you mean?”
“You see, she was killed in a way that Lord Buddha taught against. Material desires in this world are not to be held onto tightly nor wished for. In Bangkok, they practice what is not preached. A new car, gold, high-rise condos, are what dwells inside of the heart of every single person you will meet on the street. If we start cooking up spells, then we are already in hot water whether they work or not. The spell is symbolic of the desire, you understand. This is a city built on greed and desire.”
“What city isn’t?”
The abbot breathed out tired spent air. The morning sun heated the temple. The monks lazily swatted flies.
“So the spell might not be magic?”
“What is magic? A tree? A bird? The glimmer in a newborn’s eyes?
If you hold onto a glass of water too tightly, then the glass will shatter and your thirst remains unquenched. If I hold the glass of water gently, then the water will remain in the glass and reward me by quenching my thirst. Of course, I will get thirsty in time, but for the present moment, I am satisfied and the present moment is all we have. Do you understand?”
“So you are saying that I should try and communicate with this ghost?”
“You must find out what is wrong in your life and what is wrong with life generally, and try to put it right. If we are content with our life, then we do not entertain suffering or visitations from hungry ghosts. Demons are very real when you are seeing them, and if you don’t see them, it’s because you are one or are living so close to one that you might as well be one. Demons are everywhere in Bangkok, on every street corner. Have you ever walked on Sukhumvit Road?”
“I live on it.”
“There you are. Living with the prostitutes, the beggars, the pimps, thieves, scam artists: all demons. Sprinkled around them are places like this,” the abbot spread his arm out to illustrate, “places that try to even up the balance. Places to shelter from the storm.”
“Does it work?”
“Sometimes. Depends if the demons know they are demons and if they want to change. Most demons haven’t a clue they are demons.”
“The woman that died left a note. I was hoping maybe you could translate it for me.”
Joe passed the Abbott the piece of folded paper. He opened it, stared at the script, and frowned. He looked at it for a long time, and then he slowly read the words as if it was painful to do so.
“We open the box
We surrender to the Ancient Ones.
We open the box,
ToRavana, the Destroyer,
To Soma, the drink of pleasure,
To Sita, Bringer of Beauty, love and hope,
To Fonkeal, Master and Guardian of the secret
To the number: 10102555.”
The words resonated slowly as the monks hovered around them, gracefully moving here and there. A cat padded towards them and then hit a patch of sunlight, turned back towards the shade and lay down panting, exhausted.
The abbot spoke. “It is a spell. Perhaps the spell that women used to kill themselves. The words, names, are from old Thai folklore.”
“We have no way of knowing if she wrote this.”
“I daresay it matters. If she was with somebody that was writing this kind of material, then it is fair to say that it wasn’t by accident that the note was found near the body.”
“Fon-keal means green rain.”
“It does, yes. It’s an invocation of some sort. The other characters are from the great epic, the Ramakien, or the original Ramayana as told by the forest poet, Valmiki.”
“And the box?”
“I would say to keep it closed.”
“Have you ever seen anything like this before?”
“No. Not many have. Bangkok is only two hundred years old. I’m a bit younger than that. People should know better than to bring these things to the city. The harm it can cause, you understand...”
SIXTEEN
YOU WALK in… A glimpse of Bangkok at street level… Kids looked after one another in the cafes, played games, hatched plans, and learned about life both off and online… A modern day penny-gaff… A place where kids learned about the tricks and the twists that escalated into an adult life on the streets… Life was an arcade game where you only had one life… Some slot machines cost more than others did… The trick was to learn that the machine always won… Practice for the real thing…Learn how to drive a sports car, play football, and fire an M16… Twenty-four hour air-conditioned sanctuaries… Large comfortable chairs… Street kids used the cafes as a hotel… The chairs were a bed for the night and the bathroom a shower…
The Bangkok internet café… A space where a few coins bought escapism from the heat and the harsh realities of offline city living…
Joe paid a pinch-faced operator fifteen baht and sat down in front of station number fifteen… Next to him, a youth slept – Next to him on the other side, a pimply youth with a hawk-like face drank ice coffee, advanced levels on some old-school platforms-and-ladders…
Joe keyed black magic suicide into the search engine. A number of matches appeared…he clicked on each one in turn, the same basic information, time, place, name… Monica had made it into most of the local news but none of them had a new angle. Then he logged onto a Thai- English dictionary and typed in ‘len maja kon,’ the word Shaman appeared… he searched shaman Asia and was led to an article on shamanism. A story about a Taiwanese witchdoctor who instructed his teenage son to make love with his wife, who was also, naturally, the boy’s mother. The shaman explained to the authorities that the boy was weak and needed to have sex with his creator in order to become strong enough to overcome his limitations. The authorities took a different view, both parents were imprisoned on the grounds of incest, and the boy has to deal with it.
Joe couldn’t figure out why the story related to Monica’s death.
It didn’t.
He typed in the words to the spell and knew that he was getting somewhere:
Ravana: the demon prince in the ancient Indian epic – The Ramayana. It was the story of a prince who was banished to the jungle with his beautiful wife, Sita. Soma was the alcoholic drink favoured by the Hindi gods of destruction, its ingredients remain secret. Fonkeal meant nothing more it seemed, than ‘green rain.’
The web spider kept spinning its web through pages of hits until he found access to an Indian library resource. Joe found a free eBook and begun to electronically turn the pages.
He read for three hours.
The two thousand year old epic was written by the Indian forest poet, Valmiki and was passed on by word of mouth by the Khmer dynasty to Thailand. Back then, Cambodia ruled a large chunk of South-East Asia. During the Ayutthaya period, the Thai monarchy commissioned a group of poets who transcribed the Indian epic Ramayana into the Thai Ramakien. The tale concerned prince Rama, who married the beautiful Sita, winning her affections by lifting and stringing the magic bow. All was not well in the palace. The couple was banished from the kingdom to the forest by the king,
who reluctantly sent them into exile, as were the demands of a witch who once saved the king’s life. The demon king, Ravana of Lanka, held desires for Sita and kidnapped her from the forest by transforming his body into that of a beautiful deer. The epic told of many battles with giants and animal armies. Mountains were moved and boulders tossed around in these great conflicts. Shape-shifters and witches. Mare mott – Mother of ants. There was often mention of the drink soma, alcoholic with magic powers, used to fuel the demon army. Rama was once tempted by his brother, Lak, to drink the potion, but once he did, a vicious army of lizard demons rose throughout the city. Ravana and his demon army were almost triumphant, owing to this turn of events, until a holy forest yogi concocted a potion from the jungle that counteracts with the Soma. The Indian epic ends with the earth swallowing Sita, after Rama discovers she has been unfaithful with her demon captors.
The story was epic, colourful and timeless.
Drawn back into the present time.
He typed in witchdoctor Bangkok, an address in Ekami, a telephone number, and an email address appeared. Joe sent the witchdoctor an email requesting an appointment in a dive of a hotel on soi 13.
Joe logged off and took one more look at the words scrawled on the piece of paper:
We open the box
We surrender to the Ancient Ones.
We open the box,
ToRavana, the Destroyer,
To Soma, the drink of pleasure,
To Sita, Bringer of Beauty, love and hope,
To Fonkeal, Master and Guardian of the secret
To 10102055
SEVENTEEN
CARINA WAITED in the hotel lobby. She wore hot pants and a red tank top with a logo of a panda bear clinging to her left breast. The panda seemed pretty casual about it. Carina had papers in her hands and was looking at Joe as if she had to get something off her chest, and it wasn’t the panda. She spoke with a Scandinavian voice that made Joe think the world was clean and simple. A place where furniture was skilfully assembled: “Hello, Joe, you look to be in good shape, well, what are you discovering?”
“I’ve discovered that the panda’s got it made.”
“Excuse me?”
“Eats shoots and leaves.”
“Is this some kind of humour?”
“Used to be.”
“I was meaning, what are you discovering in the investigation?” She favoured her weight from one foot to the other. Joe wondered if she had ever tap danced. Naked.
“Look, lady, this investigation works best...”
“...If you are working alone, I know. But I am finding something, it could be important. Can we talk?”
“Sure, there’s a cafe across the road. They allow talking. We can see it from here.” Joe pointed to a place that had been standing longer than the others had. It reminded him of Hopper’s Chop Suey. They ordered pancakes, heavy on the maple syrup, coffee, black, and took a table by the window. “Okay, let’s hear it,” he said, raising a cup to his mouth. It burned, slightly.
Carina looked at her cup but didn’t pick it up.
“I felt embarrassed to tell you before. Why? I don’t know, we all have secrets and this secret isn’t mine, it’s hers, but I am feeling that I am somehow to blame,” she looked at the cup as if it had offended her.
He realized that she’d been hitting it.
Hard.
Joe recalled a place and a time. He used to pick up ideas while hanging onto the bottle from dusk until dawn. Ideas were like caged birds. In sobriety, they only spread their wings, but with soma, they flew. Yes, Joe’s wings had been clipped in that place. His ambition crippled, and yes, he knew he couldn’t ever fly again with or without the juice. But it didn’t matter; a girl had died, brutally, and Joe liked her and this Dane knew more than she was letting on.
“Carina, listen, baby; integrity is the one thing that shouldn’t have a price-tag on it, but it always does, like everything else on this stinking rock. Never believe an Insurance salesman or a lawyer that say they got it, because they don’t. It doesn’t exist. All they got is pain, and they like to spread it around thick to those that’ll listen. Not many people have it, and if you meet one that does have it, then stick with them through the rough and the smooth and you’ll thank your lucky star’s for it to the end. I admire integrity, and as we both know, Monica, she had it, but now she has left us, both of us. Now’s the time to tell me whatever it is that is bothering you, because she left us here unexpectedly and I haven’t a gypsy-clue why. Tell me what you have to say and I’ll listen to it, and I’ll not get upset nor emotional by it, whatever it is. There’s nothing to fear unless you’re scared of ghosts, which you aren’t. You got that intelligent beautiful head on your shoulders, and a body that knows how to move it around without fearing the irrational visions of a few crazies in this strange city. This is a city where people like me do the watching, while people like you enjoy being watched.”
“You know, Joe, I’m beginning to dislike the way you try to rationalize people, is that part of the job?”
“No, it’s not part of the job. It is the job.”
“Interesting the way a man’s mind works - when it does, which isn’t often.”
“If that’s a compliment, then I’ll take it. Thanks.” Joe took a hit on the java. Outside the window, two taxi drivers sat down at a stone table and played chequers with bottle tops.
“It is and you’re welcome – kind of. Nevertheless, I didn’t walk all this way to exchange pleasantries; I found this card,” she opened her purse, dipped in, and then passed Joe a black business card. That’s to say the card was black in colour, front and back, the raised font was another two colours – red and green. It had the words, Demon Dreams written across it, and underneath was an address, The Street of Dead Artists. She finally took a tiny sip of her black coffee and spoke: “I found the place; a meter-taxi drove me there. I didn’t go inside. It’s some kind of fetish bar,” she made a wry face at the word fetish. Joe looked at it again; the card was black in colour with blood- red raised print with a small green lizard demon standing in the top right corner. There was an address and a telephone number on the bottom left.
Joe could tell a lot from a business card. From this card, he could tell that it was the kind of place where people that had too much money to spend, threw it away on things that they shouldn’t be doing, knowing full well that they shouldn’t be doing them. Joe was a moralist and a realist. He had never been inside a church or a synagogue. He had once dated a psychologist, but it got complicated. He reasoned that most of these fetish freaks were whack jobs, and that’s what gave them a kick out of doing what they believed they shouldn’t be doing. Joe didn’t discriminate. He hated everyone. Kinky parents and private schools where the kids sleep together in dormitories. Freaky upstairs-downstairs, good-boy, bad-boy behaviour, swinging parties, and yacht clubs. He remembered a time in the city when the rich university types would have parties on the weekend at some old manor house where they used to meet up and get naked. They used to sit around naked and get royally drunk. The rich and educated were invited.
Joe wasn’t invited.
“No chance this card could belong to anybody else?” he asked Carina.
“No,” she looked offended at the concept of having more than one fetish lover and then continued: “Impossible, she had been going out a lot before she left for good,” she said taking another sip of the coffee. “Monica left this after our last night together, it wasn’t exactly hidden.”
“You think she wanted you to find it?”
“I think she wanted me to find it. At first, I thought she wanted to hurt me,” Carina’s eyes began to well up. Hurting her had worked if that’s what Monica had intended to do, but it didn’t add up the way Carina saw it. With her looks, the Dane could turn any pro skirt goose and perhaps turn some daisy men straight in the same afternoon. Monica had no
reason to upset her. Unless the Dane also cheated, but that was something Joe’s gut couldn’t stomach. He figured Monica was in the bar for different, more complex reasons. His mind wandered back to the Nazi bargirl and the talk about the black magic gimmick.
“I see,” he said handling the card, “but now you think it could have been a message in case she got in too deep, and you could come rescue her?” Her silence confirmed this, and Joe added, “You want me to check it out?”
She nodded. Joe noticed for the first time that her eyes had dark rings around them like the panda on her shirt. The coffee cup shook a little in her grasp, and was the kind of shake that’s Buddha’s way of telling you that you have been picking up too many drinks in too many places and not always because you’re thirsty, and not always the java.
“Okay, I will, but not quite yet. I have to do things in their correct logical order. Carina, I think you need to get some rest. Maybe lay off the drink, clear your head, loosen up, and stop hurting yourself. Try to be kind to yourself this evening. This wasn’t your fault. You know that, right?”
“But if I had just...”
“...If nothing, she was driving in the fast lane and she crashed. Period, baby. Nobody could have stopped her, Carina, nobody, not even you. Think about how many times you have seen people make the biggest mistakes and how impossible it was to stop them. You can’t stop a train crash, whether you’re inside the carriage or standing by the tracks. People generally do what they want to do and we can only be there for them once they have fallen. If they fall so far there’s no way up, then there really is nothing we can do. But we gotta understand that they wouldn’t want us to feel bad because of their decisions. Monica wouldn’t want this. She was mixed up with the wrong people. She thought she could handle it. She couldn’t.”
“She would want the killer caught.”
“I’m working on it,” Joe said, not sure that he was getting anywhere solid, but it seemed like the thing to say under the circumstances. “I don’t know if there was a killer yet.”
Red Night Zone - Bangkok City Page 6