Red Night Zone - Bangkok City

by James A. Newman

  Lucky.

  Lucky was naked, covering her shame with one hand and looking into the camera with what could be dedication, or puzzlement, or perhaps desire, or perhaps nothing at all. Below the inscription, the same hand had written:

  Red Night Zone. 2010.

  A voice rose from behind him. Joe’s hand reached for the gun. Then he recognized that voice. His hand stopped like a rat’s conscience as it nibbled the bait in a spring-loaded trap.

  “What are you doing here?”

  TWENTY-FIVE

  FRANCIS WAS hammered.

  Losing control.

  He was about to pass out with fear, rage, guilt, shame, or more likely, the booze, it smelled like he’d been drinking since dawn and most likely the night that led to it. Whatever ate him, it ate him bad. He wore a dirty white shirt with the sleeves rolled up to the elbow and a pair of beige slacks and black brogues that were maybe once shiny, but now were scuffed and scraped by the serpentine wanderings of a lost drunk in a dirty city. He held a plastic bag with a few bottles and food packages inside.

  “My investigation led me here, Francis. The door was open. I walked in.”

  He breathed out an exasperated whiskey-soaked breath: “I suppose you think that I killed her?”

  “Well, Sir, I don’t know what to think.” Joe decided in the interest of his sanity, not to mention his daughter, her messages, or her concerns about his conduct in the Zone.

  Francis collapsed into a beige sofa. “I appreciate you are only looking for the truth. The truth is, I didn’t know she was dead until I went to the police. I know how it looks...”

  “...You knew she was dead. You asked me to find her. It looks bad. You said you went to the cops straight after the incident?”

  Francis sighed. The sigh of a man who had found himself in the middle of a particularly nasty section of hell with no apparent way out of it. His hands shook with the terrible anxiety of alcohol intoxication, withdrawal, fear, and exhaustion.

  “I was economical with the truth. I admit that. I can see how this all seems. Take a seat, Joe, let’s get up to speed.”

  Joe sat on a chocolate coloured chesterfield and accepted the offer of a drink. Soda water. Francis looked surprised, almost offended, stood up, and walked over to a cabinet, poured the drink and handed it to Joe. Next, he poured a generous portion of Scotch and looked at it. He didn’t add any soda. Social hesitation lasted a second before metabolic need took over and he hit the poison in one fluid motion before pouring himself another. He looked thoughtfully at the tumbler in front of him as if it had the answer, or at least some clue to his current predicament. The glass said nothing. The glass was just a passenger. Sodium. Calcium. Silicon dioxide. What did the fucking glass know? He turned and looked at the detective. “Look, Joe. It stinks, I mean it really smells.”

  “Bangkok plumbing, or that giggle juice in your glass? I thought you didn’t drink?”

  “I didn’t until a matter of hours ago. Last night after I spoke with you, I walked into the Plaza. Nana Plaza is one hellish place to relapse. I was on the program, you see, for twelve years solid. AA,” he blurted wearily. “I went to all those dreadful meetings and spoke about my most embarrassing inadequacies with perfect strangers. Then after the briefcase, after speaking with you, I tried one, just one. Well, one is too many and a thousand is never enough as they say in the club. Now I’m right back where I was all those years ago; a slave. I’ve returned to her as one would to an old lover or the country of one’s childhood. An old friend in a strange world.” He collapsed into the chair.

  “Old friends are the most dangerous of friends. Beware of old friends,” Joe said.

  “This bloody place is uncivilised, backward, and possibly evil. Like alcohol and like women, it takes more than it gives.”

  “It’s the third world.”

  “I’ve seen the third world. Travelled with the army. There’s something different here, a certain type of special greed that one doesn’t find in other places. The way parents from upcountry see their children as a way to make money. Poverty-ravaged villages throw their daughters onto a bus to head south, to work in the streets of Bangkok. These people are all so obsessed with money that they value it higher than the stuff that money can’t buy, like happy, healthy children, dreams and ambitions. There are fish in the lakes. Birds in the trees. Rice in the fields. The west is in on the deal, the west is worse, the west funds the abominations. I’ve witnessed how the Non-Government charity organisations employ workers who abuse the system and buy the girls out from the bars. Most of the charity workers live up in the five-star condominiums, watching cable TV and sending out for good French cheese. Makes perfect sense. If they solved the problems they’re supposed to solve, they’d all have to go home where the bars are expensive, TV’s terrible, and they have to walk to the shop to buy the processed rubbish.”

  Francis took another sniff of the charge. “Look, Joe, when in Rome do as the Romans. I’m not saying the city should be completely cleaned up. But just a good once over would go down a treat. Have you seen the homeless situation? It just disgusts me. Last week I was walking along Rama IV, when a beggar jumped up and attacked me. He attacked me. Beaten black and blue by a worthless tramp. Lucky I had this,” he says waving his walking stick. “Other beggars shout up abuse if you care not to donate. I mean it’s bad enough them just being there, but resorting to guerrilla tactics beggars belief, if you excuse the pun. Children are crippled and put out on the streets. All for money. They say they need food, but there’s fruit falling off the trees. Chickens running around everywhere. Pigs guzzling waste.” He stood up using the stick as a third leg, and stood staring out the window at the concrete mess of the city. He balanced himself on the walking stick. “The beggars are controlled by gangs who see nothing wrong in mutilating their charges. They take these city strays, cut off a leg, or break an arm into an impossible angle and hey presto, put them on the street to beg for somebody else’s dinner. In eighteenth century London, we had beggarly classes: Ballad singers, lamp-boys, brush-boys, charwomen. To my knowledge, these people worked the streets independently. The Thais have taken the business one ugly stage further. It disgusts me what these people can do to each other for money.”

  “Why don’t you move?”

  “I’m stuck here, Joe, like a rat in a trap. When I lost that briefcase, the trap closed tight shut,” he clapped his hands together with a smacking sound. He took another drink and walked towards the open balcony window. “I’m stuck here in purgatory with no other choice than to write my way out, find that case, or take a jump out the window. The rent on this place is due. What do I tell them?”

  “You tell them to wait. Listen, Francis. Sometimes we wake up in the morning, in the afternoon, or in the evening, or whenever time it makes sense to wake up, and we wonder why we took a disastrous wrong turn. We realize we made some awful life choices, but this is our life and it’s the life we’re stuck in. When it all goes wrong, we start looking for excuses, blaming others, examining our past. But that was the risk we took. The risk we all take. Anybody can end up destitute. All it takes is a beautiful girl, a wonderful bar, and a bunch of good old boys sat around in a circle drinking. It can happen in any country to anybody and it often does, everywhere, anywhere there’s life, there’s those trying to snub it out.”

  “I know this, yes, I know it, but I can’t help thinking I was supposed to take that wrong turn to justify other’s predictions. Give them a reason to hate me. Prove them right.” He moved closer towards the glass door. He clicked the latch. Outside, an area too small to call a balcony and too big to call a ledge. The sound of traffic. He slid the glass door open with his walking stick and then walked on through to the ledge. He stood there, looked down at the ground six floors below him, and then looked at Joe and smiled. Below them a road with traffic. The fall would be enough to take his other good leg and probably the rest of him w
ith it if he dived the right way.

  “Well, this, as they say, is it,” Francis spoke as he looked down. “Good night, Vienna.”

  Joe stood up and walked towards the ledge. “Take a look at the distance between you and the ground, Frank. Doesn’t look too far from up here. A couple of broken ankles if you land it right. Six floors up. It mightn’t even kill you if you dived head first. A fifty-fifty jump. If you’re going to do it, then do it right. Take the stairs up to the top. With the long drop, they say that the only pain you feel after taking the plunge, is that one tiny second of mental anguish that you experience before you reach that painless square metre of concrete that was kind of pretty before it got spoiled by your inconsiderate pizza of a corpse. Most folks of suicidal persuasion don’t stop to consider the sight of disgust that they will cause the passerby. That flight is filled with euphoria, pretty much like a bungee jump without the cord. That’s if you’re taking it anywhere above the fifteenth floor. I hear the best part of suicide is the build-up. This is true from personal accounts, numbers I’ve read about and people I’ve spoken to. Once, I knew a chick who was as mad as a bucket of frogs and studied abstract art at Goldsmiths to prove it. Crazy hair she had. Her name was Alice. Great lay. She bought all the drugs to complete the trick and would habitually lay out the blues, reds and yellows out in front of her, basking in the glory of the pain she’d cause others once she checked out. She always made sure she was doing it just as she was expecting a visitor. Caught her playing the rainbow trick more times than I care to recall. She never took the plunge and there were some in her family that might have wished she had. You following me, big boy?”

  Francis’ body shook on the ledge. A small crowd had gathered on the street.

  “Don’t give them the pleasure, Frank. As soon as you jump, those people will be gathering around me like vultures. Finding out your room number. Your date of birth. Using the numbers to play the national lottery. Death is lucky here. Shit. The concrete doesn’t deserve to be messed up in such a way and neither do you. But there’s a deeper issue here, one that has been bothering me ever since my girl Monica saw the light from the end of a noose, and danced the dance in the east side of town. If that’s what really happened. I’m trying to figure out why such a young looker would want to do such a thing, and if you jump, maybe I’ll never know. On the other hand, your intensions may be sound and maybe jumping is the best option. But the question still remains. Why do we, any of us, ever, consider the balcony plunge, the noose, the gas, or the second-wife? We reach a stage where we think nobody cares about us and then that strings us along for a bit, especially if we grew up with a mother who cared enough to feed us corn-beef-hash and a father who played ball once in a while. Life, when we weigh it up with all the ifs and whys, all the characters, all the sets saying different things in different places, and all the situations that should have turned out different but didn’t, has come to a crossroads. Hell, Francis, nobody gives a shit about you, the second coming, nor me. Those guys on the ground want you to jump. They want to see some death so that they feel alive. Nobody cares about your problems but you. This is the first rule in life and once we learn that, it’s often too late. Girls like Monica, knew all this. She grew up an orphan in Klong Toey and had no preconceptions that anybody cared about her. She knew this all along. She knew the city. That’s what confuses me. You still with me here, big boy?”

  Francis tested the air on the other side of the balcony with one foot. He swayed suddenly toward the edge and then used his walking stick to hook himself back onto the balcony.

  “What are you trying to say?”

  “What I’m saying is that she didn’t kill herself and neither are you. Get back in here before you catch yourself a tropical cold. That’s the boy. Where was I, yes...it was about people caring for us...People that we think should care. The cocktail table is exactly where you left it, Francis, get yourself a drink. You lived through this one, you deserve it.”

  Francis took the two steps backwards into the apartment. He walked to the cabinet, picked up a bottle, and then swayed towards the window, the ledge.

  A gasp of excitement from the crowd below as he came closer to death once again.

  Francis stepped forward one more step, lowered himself down, and sat with his feet dangling over the edge. He waved his walking stick at the crowd of pedestrians. “Whatever in heaven is happening here...They want a show? I’ll give them a bloody show.”

  “It’s not worth the effort you drunken fool, but I’m trying, I’m trying...to explain... It’s exactly that moment, that we realize heaven don’t care and nobody we ever met cares that we realize about the way the whole shit house has been stacked up for us to play in, or to not to.”

  “I’m going to jump.”

  “So do it, baby. Life is unfair, kill yourself or get over it.”

  “What?”

  “You heard. It’s when we realize it’s unfair that we get over it. It is then that we become free. Nobody cares about us, why should they? That’s the truth and after we realize that truth, things become a lot clearer and we avoid hanging from high ledges. But you should know this right? To be honest, Francis, I don’t give a rat’s ass if you throw yourself off this balcony, but I could do without explaining it to the city police. You are holding some information that I don’t want to lose right now. It’s a god darn given that nobody on this rock gives a darn about your ass. Put it this way. You have a friend that takes the leap, well, it makes you feel better about yourself, because at least you had the guts not to do it like that fool did. And if he did it because of you, then all the better, it means you meant something to the poor suffering bastard. Someone else’s life ain’t worth killing yourself over, and neither is yours. So what’s the point in proving a point to a nobody that doesn’t care about anyone? Nobody cared about Monica.”

  “But that was different,” he shuffled closer to the edge. The crowd was now waving their hands up at him, willing him to jump. “She was different.”

  Joe didn’t miss a beat. “How was it different? Because she was a whore? Tell me, Francis, who is worse? The whore, or the ones who use them? Neither of them matter once they’re dead. If you jump, you prove them right. If you don’t jump, you have a chance of beating them. But most of all, you get to live the rest of your life knowing you cheated death. Death doesn’t like to be cheated. Once you’ve stared death in the eye and made him back-off, then pretty much anything else in life is a cinch. Trust me on this.”

  Francis exhaled and raised himself up from the ledge. He used the stick to stand upright. The crowd below cheered. “You’re right of course.”

  “I hope so. So let’s not jump out of any windows just yet. Come inside and sit down.”

  Francis walked back inside the apartment. A gasp of disappointment from the crowd.

  “Did she say anything to you about a secret?”

  “Who?” Francis sat on the couch and reacquainted himself with a glass.

  “Monica.”

  “She robbed me, Joe. That’s no secret. The truth is, I gave up a lot to be here, and now I’ve no choice but to stay.”

  “And the women?”

  “Stay with any woman for a while and the knives are being sharpened in my experience. Smiles have to be earned, usually with hard currency. That’s just the way things work here.”

  “What I don’t understand is how a Buddhist country can be so obsessed with money. Do you see the contradiction?” Francis asked.

  “Seen it, questioned it, and came to the conclusion that I don’t have the answer to it,” Joe said.

  Francis stood up, took a book from the shelf, looked at its cover, and then replaced it, muttering something about the modern novel.

  Joe broke the silence: “What about the transsexual situation, Francis? Men undergo gender reassignment and change their sexual leanings for money. They take hormone tablets. The hormones are
pretty important, they are like the body’s conductors. Why do they do it?”

  “Money is something new and exciting to these people. They want as much of it as possible. They want to try to figure it out, play with it, see what it can do. That’s what makes this city so unmanageable. As I say, the people aren’t starving. They mutilate their bodies, chop off their legs, blind themselves so that they have the money for luxuries, like cars they can’t drive and widescreen televisions they can’t bloody see. The average Thai would chop off both his arms for a gold Rolex.”

  “One man’s paradise is another’s hell. It’s all a matter of dimensions. You need to get yourself a new point of view. Try and keep in the present moment. One day at a time.”