by John Burdett
She buried a hand in his hair and did not reply.
She stayed with him three nights on that first visit and began to understand what had happened to him. His mind went through the same cycle as in Washington, with a vital difference. In D.C. his work had had the effect of focusing his talents, giving him something to chew on hour after hour; true, he left work and prepared for his change of personality in a grimish sort of state, but still with the feeling of having gotten somewhere, of having achieved something, of having made progress. In Washington, in other words, he had purpose, and to an American there is no higher god. Down in Songai Kolok he had no purpose, his excuse to his boss for being here was false, as was obvious after the first day. With his quick mind, he saw that this brothel town was pretty much impervious to Muslim fanaticism for the very good reason that it was dominated by Muslim decadents who knew how to deal with troublesome beards. So night after night he watched the shacks. This had become his purpose. It was so blatant. The cops came in full uniform from time to time to talk to the girls, have a chat and a laugh, and drink a beer or two, and the johns came and talked to the girls and the cops, and everyone was kind of partying. There didn’t seem to be any guilt at all. The Muslim boys were strangely respectful and polite to the girls, and as for the girls—well, you would never know they lived on the bottom rung of a feudal society; they didn’t seem to carry any kind of inferiority complex at all. Actually, they seemed a lot happier than the average corporate drone. Come to think of it, they seemed a lot happier than anyone he knew, in the States or in Japan. Their gaiety seemed not in the least forced or brittle.
To a lesser spirit this would not have been so earth-shattering, but Mitch, to give him his due, saw the significance. These boys were Islamic, they were the skullcap-and-mustache equivalent of devout Christians, yet they sinned cheerfully, not appearing to notice the effect they were having on their immortal souls. What was going on here?
Chanya, veteran of that eternal battleground called the Western mind, supplied the answer. “None of them important, Mitch.”
He blinked at her. Goddamn it, it was true. It didn’t occur to any of them, not even to those young gallants, that they possessed the least importance in the scheme of things. But of course, that was where they were wrong, that was the mistake primitive people made because they had not yet received the great gift of ego.
A change of expression: Of course, in time all will change, even Songai Kolok would start to look and act like a first-world town once enlightenment had been brought to a permanently ungrateful world, and all the filth would be swept . . . under the carpet. In the meantime, though, the whole sick, immoral thing seemed to be growing. Through his telescope he’d seen five new huts appear since he’d been there. This was a boomtown, for God’s sake. Booming on sex. Muslim sex. And no one was doing a goddamn thing about it.
Chanya had been watching the anguish pass and repass across his features. Now she said something that must surely have been the distillation of everything she intuited of him, of the West, of white men: “If you didn’t torment yourself, there wouldn’t be any difference, would there?”
It was quite literally too much for him to take, the idea that there was no difference at all between him and those horny young Muslim men, nor the whores nor the cops either come to that, apart from his needless self-torment. The West was mostly a structure of smoke and mirrors, after all; but it was exactly those with the biggest stake in it—men like Mitch—who found that rather obvious truth so difficult to swallow. He retreated into vanity, checked his body in the mirror, and muttered about that tattoo he was planning.
So she would open a bottle of wine, hand him a glass, and wait until that crucial thing in him started to loosen and he was able to forget purpose and laugh at himself. Purpose, though, was so ingrained, only alcohol could free him from it. At least, alcohol was the only cure she’d found so far. The problem: it seemed to make his grim even grimmer, once the effect wore off. And one other thing. This was the first time Mitch I and Mitch II had inhabited his body simultaneously, batting his mind from one end of the internal tennis court to the other and back again. She had no way of knowing that this was indeed a significant progression in the stages of psychosis. In her Thai way, she could not help seeing the funny side. With the best of intentions she seemed to have rather dismantled this big, muscular, brilliant, and incredibly important man. But how could she possibly have guessed how fragile he was?
Her visit did him good, though—there was no doubt about that. Even sober at the bus station wishing her goodbye, there was a healthier glow to his skin and a saner light in his eye. But she wasn’t sure when she would be back. She refused to make any promises, and for once he was man enough to accept that. This discipline he was able to sustain for about as long as it took for her to reach home. In her handbag her mobile started ringing as she was getting off the bus.
So it went. Her worst fears were coming true. He called every day. If she didn’t answer the phone, she felt pangs of guilt and fear for what might be happening to his mind. (After all, she was the reason he was in that sleazy town in the first place.) When she answered, he would seduce her with his humor, then just when she was molten, his mood would turn ugly, he would demand that she come see him, or give him her address so he could visit her.
Chanya, veteran of a thousand men, had so little experience with love tangles, she felt the need for ancient wisdom. The old crone in the Internet café seemed able to read her mind without the need for much explanation. Chanya told her it was not a love potion she needed, maybe something to cool him down. He was a farang, she admitted, with that excitable farang psychology that just could not accept life as it came. Why was he like that? He obviously wanted to turn her into an American, colonize her, in other words, as if she were some backward country that needed development. It drove him crazy that she resisted his attempts at psychic invasion. Worse, there was no hiding the fact that she owned a better mind than his. Of course, she had hardly had any education, but she could read his oversimplified moods as if he were a picture book, while at the same time he seemed to understand nothing about her. To tell the truth, he wasn’t interested in who she was at all. This was understandable—he didn’t want to focus on the way she made her living. But that was also ridiculous. If her work was such a problem for him, why had he come halfway around the world to be with her? This was him all over, a thoroughly divided mind: fatally attracted to the thing he loathed, or thought he loathed, driven to transform her into the thing he thought he wanted but actually hated. The minute he turned her into an American, of course, he would be bored and disgusted. He was a Christian, she added.
The crone knew nothing about Christians, but she knew a thing or two about crazy men, farang or otherwise. For her generation living in that part of Thailand next to the Cambodian border, there was a sure cure, a universal cure, that farang in their ignorance had driven underground. In her day if you caught the flu, suffered depression, needed an anesthetic, or simply wanted to improve your homemade soup, nature provided all you required in the form of the poppy. Try a little opium, she advised. Slip it into his wine or his food. Once he’d started to appreciate it, teach him how to smoke it. No one ever hurt anyone while they were on opium, and there was no hangover, no ugly mood change such as that caused by alcohol. The crone had once been married to a violent alcoholic and held all fermented liquor to be an abomination that ought not to be legal. In her shop all alcohol was banned, even beer. She sold Chanya a few grams of opium and a pipe. She showed Chanya how to prepare the pipe, and also how to prepare the opium if she wanted to slip it into his wine. The next time Mitch called, she agreed to go see him again in a week.
Throughout the whole of the interminable bus journey down south, her stomach was in knots, and she resented him for it. If this was love, then maybe she’d had enough of it already. She was dreading his mood when he met her at the bus station, for once again she would arrive early in the morning.
&
nbsp; Hard to say if it was an improvement or not, this unshaven man who met her bleary-eyed and exhausted. She was horrified at the deterioration that had taken place within so short a time, but at least he did not start nagging her. On the contrary, he seemed apologetic, quite unnaturally so.
He admitted he’d got hold of a couple of yaa baa pills the night before. After an hour, he’d been so terrified of the effect the meth was having on him (violent paranoid fantasies, a strong temptation to jump out the window), he bought a bottle of cheap Thai whiskey and drank it all. Probably the whiskey had saved him because it had made him vomit. Meth and alcohol don’t mix, she told him. He could easily have killed himself. A shrug of indifference and a slightly insane grin. Incredibly for an American, he had not brushed his teeth that morning. They were dirty, and his breath smelled.
“So what? I feel like a dead man anyway. You’re destroying me. I don’t know how you do it, or why you do it. D’you know why you’re doing this to me, Chanya? Is it because you hate Americans? Are you in league with our enemies?”
A hand to her mouth. “Mitch!” Then: “I’m leaving.”
“No, no, please honey, I didn’t mean anything, just a joke, you know, pretending to be paranoid, an American joke, you wouldn’t understand. Stay, please stay. If you go, I’ll kill myself, I swear it.”
He was on his knees, holding her legs tightly as if saving himself from disaster. She thought of the opium in her handbag. “Have a glass of wine, Mitch. Calm down. This is crazy. You think I came all this way to be with a crazy man?”
She watched him drink the wine mixed with opium, wondering if perhaps she was destroying him. After all, wasn’t she the one who’d taught him to drink? And now she was adding opium. Well, it might be a short-term expedient, but the atmosphere in the small flat was so claustrophobic, the madness in his eyes so frightening, that anything would be an improvement. She was administering emergency medical aid, she told herself. And maybe saving her own skin. This farang might be wasted, but that was an awesomely powerful body still.
40
Come on, farang, admit it—you’ve always wanted to try a little O, haven’t you? Only the once of course, just to see, no? Naturally not with close family around, probably not even with any of your peer group who might snitch on you to the boss just when you were being considered for promotion, but if you got the chance to experiment (you know) on some private little vacation that you and your partner agreed you could take on your own to find yourself and your meaning during your midlife crisis (or your post-teen crisis, or your thirtysomething crisis), perhaps in some exotic foreign country somewhere in Southeast Asia? Opium—the word alone seduces, doesn’t it? It’s so alluring, so literary, so special, so rare these days.
They do O tours up north near the Laotian and Burmese borders, although they don’t call them that, of course. Adventure is the word. You get the elephant trek through the jungle, the bamboo raft on the river, all the ganja you can smoke—and a couple of very special nights in one of those flimsy bamboo shacks you see so much of in Vietnam movies, sharing a pipe or ten with those colorful mountain tribesmen and women (whose children, for reasons lost to history, know all the words to the song “Frère Jacques” and are liable to belt them out at the slightest provocation). And why not? It’s not as addictive as TV, than which there is no greater mental pollutant. For centuries the white man was a passionate trafficker, even fighting righteous wars to uphold his sacred duty to alleviate the burden of existence for Asia’s teeming billions with a drug already deemed dangerous to white men. (Ring a bell, Philip Morris?) Nowadays there’s a lot more profit in prescription tranquilizers and home entertainment . . . think about it.
There was a touch of Thai coolness (perhaps repugnant to you, farang, but somewhat charming to me) in the way Chanya watched for his reaction to the opium. The alcohol reached his brain first, with the usual effect. His mood changed, he joked with her and commenced to undress her. They took the ritual shower together (he called it whore hygiene), and her body worked the usual magic. There was no doubt about it, at these moments he literally worshiped her. She could not cynically characterize it as simple lust—there was such reverence in his love-whispers, such gratitude at the relief their coupling would bring to his feverish mind, such genuine awe at her beauty, especially when she smiled. What woman would not be impressed? This was heady stuff, better than the movies and apparently authentic.
Just when he slid his muscular thigh over her body in preparation for mounting her, he gave a long, slow incredulous grunt of satisfaction, like a man who has finally broken the curse of a lifetime. His right leg lay heavy across her own, and she was able to experience the progressive relaxation of the muscles. One by one they opened like flowers, giving up their insane energy, that mad grasping that the Buddha identified as the source of all karma and therefore all suffering. She was so surprised and impressed (the old crone really knew a thing or two after all) that all she wanted to do herself was to lie there, as if she also had taken opium. It was such a relief to experience this great masculine tornado finally let go, the catharsis was hers as well as his. They lay like that for fully ten minutes with him staring at the whorls in her right ear and her listening to the relaxed, deep breathing of a mind that had temporarily healed its terrible wounds. Peace rearranged his tormented features.
It was difficult to overestimate the effect this moment had on her: all of a sudden the expression on his face was normal, human. For more than a year she had assumed that this strange giant was a being—a farang—constituted differently from anyone she had ever known. Now she was witnessing a transformation in which he returned to the human family, with the inevitable implication that everything that went before was a form of insanity, a farang delusion leading nowhere, walking evidence of a whole society’s failure to grow up. She was in shock. Finally she managed gently to push his leg off and lay him on his back. He held her for a moment, staring unseeing into her eyes.
“Marge,” he whispered.
“Yes, Homer,” she replied, doing her best to imitate the cartoon character despite her Thai accent.
The teeniest little chuckle as he spun off into some intriguing puzzle where she could not follow. She put a pillow under his head and wrapped a towel around herself and left him there. Eight hours later he came around feeling delightfully refreshed and in the most serene of moods.
“Opium,” she told him. “I put opium in your wine.”
The news didn’t puncture his serenity at all. Just as the crone had predicted, he asked her for more.
41
How like a farang to find a sweet spot in life and then ruin it by excess! In the golden days of opium, a gentleman smoker would restrict himself to a couple of pipes a night and might live to be a hundred, contentedly carrying out his daily chores with the confidence that an exotic vacation from the mundane awaited him on his divan in the evening. (Buddha knows where you get the idea that the unvarnished monotony of the inventory-obsessed mind is normal and healthy, farang.) No one thought the poppy was the answer to life’s problems; everyone understood it as merely a break in the interminable workings of the mind; nobody expected to stay high all day.
Chanya made several visits to Mitch after his opium debut. The drug almost replaced her as his main focus of attention, and he always wanted more. He became expert in the use of the pipe, and she grew accustomed to his smeared eyes and stares into the middle distance. The upside was his great gentleness and gratitude. From the depths of serenity he was a perfect lover and husband, although their sex life did reduce in intensity. That also was probably no bad thing. She liked the long, contented silences, during which the farang obsession for filling space with noise was replaced with—glorious emptiness.
On each visit she brought more opium, but with a sinking heart. The crone was becoming alarmed at the amount the farang was consuming. She didn’t see herself as a dealer at all—she simply gave people who needed it the traditional herbal cure that was part of
her culture. It went with her role as village crone. Finally she warned Chanya she wasn’t going to sell her any more. The last thing she needed was some farang drug enforcement agency on her back, or the local cops demanding a cut. Chanya determined to tell Mitch he would have to quit, because she couldn’t get him any more of the drug. For once, though, fate seemed to intervene in her favor.
On her next visit Mitch told her a strange story that, in retrospect, she realized had a profound effect on him, although how much was truth and how much fantasy was impossible to say; he at least seemed to believe it.
One evening about a week before, on returning to his apartment from one of his interminable roams around the small town, which he now knew like the back of his hand, he slid his key into his door only to find it open. The truth was, he had grown somewhat absentminded with the various drugs he was abusing and could not be sure that he’d locked it in the first place. As he walked in, however, two pairs of hands pulled him into the front room and silently closed the door behind him.
The scene before him so exactly resembled his worst nightmare that for a moment he was quite paralyzed with fear. The two young men who were holding his arms looked like burly Malays in skullcaps. Seated on the floor was an imam of some kind with a long gray beard, Muslim robes, and a highly decorated cap. Seated around him were about fifteen men, most of them middle-aged, all in skullcaps, who clearly were disciples of the holy imam. The two young men forced him to sit on the floor, facing the imam.
After the first wave of quite devastating paranoia, which made it hard for him to breathe, his training returned to the extent that he panned the group to check for weapons. He saw none, and indeed even the two young guards were unarmed. Mitch’s muscles were so developed from decades of pumping iron, he reckoned that he could probably overpower the young men and make a run for it. Evidently this thought had not escaped the minds of the imam and his group, who were making gestures with the palms of their hands that seemed to be requesting him to stay seated. He made a quick assessment. If this group intended to kill him, they could do so whenever they chose. If he escaped from this room, they could easily assassinate him before he reached the airport in Hat Yai—before he could leave Muslim Thailand, in other words. His nerves were badly damaged from opium and speed, but he controlled himself enough to stay seated. He even tried to prepare himself for death. It was deeply embedded among his most sacred promises to himself that he would at least die like a brave American, even if his life had been less than perfect. You can at least do that, he told himself above the violent thumping of his heart.