by John Burdett
The hole is exactly that, a circular excavation in back of the police station originally dug for some plumbing or construction purpose, then discarded. It was Ruamsantiah who arranged for a hinged trapdoor with padlock to be cemented on top. Inhabitants are dependent on the imperfect fit of the lid for ventilation. It takes a few minutes to find the key to the padlock and someone to help me drag the kid out. When we have done so I am relieved to see that Adam Ferral can still walk. Except that it is no longer Adam Ferral who inhabits this body. He staggers around somewhat before I put my arm around him to help him into the building and out again into the public area, where he walks into the front desk, then into the monks, before I take him in hand again to lead him to some vacant chairs at the back where I sit him down. All of a sudden he bursts into chest-jarring sobs. I can think of nothing to do but pat his back and wait. Only a few of the other people in the waiting area turn to look, and then turn back again as if nothing unusual were happening. This is District 8 after all. It takes ten minutes for the sobbing to quiet, and then Ferral yanks at the hatpin through his eyebrow until it comes out and hands it to me.
"You don't have to do that."
"I'm not doing it for you or the sergeant, pal." His voice is surprisingly strong and firm and as far as I can recall hardly resembles the voice he used this morning. "When I was down your fucking hole I promised Christ, God, Krishna, Muhammad, Zeus, the Buddha and anyone else who would listen that if I got out of there with my mind halfway intact I'd get rid of it. My old man hates it, he calls it a disfigurement. I've been torturing him with it for two years. I'm keeping the nose stud, though."
"That's quite a collection of deities you were in touch with."
"More than in touch," Ferral says, looking at something on the far wall. "I been talking to them for ten fucking hours. They helped me, you know, with the other things. You know?"
"Yes," I say. "I know."
"You been there, huh?"
"Yes."
He taps my arm. "The Buddha's great, isn't he? Terrific sense of humor. He tell you any of those jokes of his?"
"No, I don't think I've ever been quite that intimate."
Ferral shakes his head. "Cracked me up, man. Really cracked me up. Well, thanks for the experience."
"I look forward to reading about it on the Web."
Ferral looks at me as if I've committed sacrilege and, pulling himself to his feet, staggers off in the direction of the street. In my hand a hatpin. I watch him go not without a tinge of envy. In nearly two decades of meditation the Buddha has not told me a single joke. Surely one would laugh for eternity?
Back in my hovel I turn Pisit on. His favorite female professor is answering the standard question from a caller about what the trade of prostitution does to a woman psychologically and what kind of wife does she make for those strange farang men who marry her.
"Prostitution ages women in ways they don't notice at the time. It's not the act of sex of course, which is perfectly natural and good exercise, it's the emotional stress of continual deception. After all, the customer is only kidding one person that there is any meaning at all in what he is doing: himself. But the girl has to keep up the pretense with one or more men each night. Such stress works the facial muscles, tightening them, producing that hard look prostitutes are famous for, but more important than that, a great dam of resentment builds up in her mind. The first thing a prostitute does when she finds a man willing to look after her is to give up the sex goddess role and probably the charm too. Invariably, she makes the mistake of assuming the customer wanted to marry the real her, not the fantasy, despite the fact that he is only familiar with the fantasy. Then there is a dramatic change in appearance. Many of the girls use hormones to enhance their breasts, but doctors warn them not to continue for more than a year, because of the risk of cancer. Also, there's not a whore in Bangkok who doesn't walk around in six-inch platform shoes. The return to reality can come as quite a shock: from tall, bosomy porn star to flat-chested dwarf. No, prostitutes do not make great wives as a rule, but it has nothing to do with fidelity. Usually the last thing such girls want is an extramarital affair, in which they would probably be expected to play the sex goddess all over again. What they want is the right to be irritable and charmless, which they lost the moment they started on the game."
Caller: "So such marriages do not usually last?"
"Sadly not. Most bar girls who marry their clients end up back in the bars within a couple of years."
I think of him. In my mind's eye his uniform is torn, there is blood on his sleeves and a scythe-shaped scar impressively disfigures one side of his face when he walks into the bar in Pat Pong. He came for some relaxation from the torment of war, a beer and some female company. He is a clean-living American boy, he does not hire prostitutes, not even on R R, but three (or more) of his closest buddies died yesterday (or the day before) and a man can only take so much. He is young, for god's sake, twenty-two-no more than twenty-five at the most. The eighteen-year-old girl behind the bar is more than beautiful, she possesses something he didn't know he was searching for: she is bursting with a vitality which might be the only cure for his crippling sense of loss. It is self-preservation, not lust, that moves him to pay her bar fine and take her back to his hotel. She can play the sex goddess as well as any woman, but she read the heart of this broken young man the minute he walked into the bar. It is not fantasy he wants, but health. She uses her amazing strength to heal him until he is sure he cannot live without her. Some token of their mysterious and sacred coupling is called for. They decide to make a baby. Me.
They were not the kind of people the professor is talking about. There was a war on and it was thirty-two years ago. I dismiss Pisit and his guest as unreliable and turn them off. In the silence I think of Fatima. Surely her dream life is almost the same as mine? It is hard to think of a father figure who would have fit the bill better than Bradley.
37
"No one in the market has seen the full potential of Viagra," my mother explains over a Marlboro Red. We are sitting at a food stall after finishing a meal of tom-yum soup, fried fish, spicy cashew nut salad, three kinds of chicken and thin rice noodles on a street in Pratunam. Our table is loaded with six different dipping sauces, beer bottles, chopped ginger, fried peanuts, mouse-shit peppers and bits of lime. We are about twelve inches from the traffic jam but the stall is famous for the quality of its roast duck curry. It is so famous the police colonel in charge of the district doesn't dare to bust or squeeze it even though its tables and chairs take up most of the sidewalk and force pedestrians to risk their lives among the traffic. Thai cuisine is the most complex, subtle, variable and generally the best in the world. It knocks the socks off fussy French and flaky Chinese, although one must give credit where it is due: during Nong's one and only Japan trade (in Yokohama, a Yakuzi mobster with impeccable manners whose chronic migraine could only be relieved by more or less continuous sex): on my first bite of Kobe beef I forgave Pearl Harbor on your behalf, farang.
Protected by a firewall of chili, our cooking has been immune to the corruption suffered by other great cuisines due to Western influence and the best food can still be found in humble homes and, more especially, on the street. Every Thai is a natural gourmet and cops don't bust the best food stalls if they know what's good for them.
"I suppose not," I yell above the traffic noise.
"I mean, everyone knows about it and farangs know they can get it over the counter at any pharmacy anywhere in Thailand, but we haven't woken up to the new client potential which is coming onstream."
"It sounds as if you have, Mother."
"Think about it," she yells. "You're a seventy-year-old farang man and for the past twenty years your sex life has gone from extremely boring to nonexistent. You expect to die within the next ten years and you haven't even thought about sex for the last five. You've thought of yourself as totally out of the running and you've got used to your family and loved ones thinking of you a
s some decrepit old fool who ought to have the decency to pop off sooner rather than later so they can inherit the house."
My mother is remembering Florida, of course, and Miami, where everyone seemed to us to be on their way to or from an old people's home. I blink several times as certain images of Dan Rusk pass before my eyes. It must be the work of imagination that I see a hoary old hand so huge it is capable of covering the whole of my mother's backside; the trip from the airport to his "spread" in the U-Haul truck was interminable, as was the spread. A massive kitchen and other vast vacant spaces so impregnated with his solitude it felt as if we had landed on a planet with double the gravity of the earth, turning the most normal activities-conversation in particular-into a chore requiring superhuman strength of will. Rusk lasted a week before my mother called her only relation who possessed a telephone and invented a family emergency-I forget what dire accident her mother was supposed to have suffered, but it was enough for Rusk to drive us back to Miami and pay for the nonexistent hospital care. We were never so glad to be back in Krung Thep with its effortless vitality. "You've always had a positive view of human nature."
"Then one day someone at your old people's home mentions Viagra. Some old bugger even more ancient than you, who even you think should have the decency to pop off immediately, whispers in your ear that he recently spent a week in Bangkok and tried the blue pill and had an erection that lasted four hours which he used to sample three or four beautiful young women. Well, what would you do?"
"You've got a point."
"You'd choke on your false teeth in your rush to book the next flight to Krung Thep is what you'd do. So the market can't help but grow. There are more than fifteen million American men over the age of sixty-five, their wives and kids have treated them like shit at the best of times and after age fifty in America it is no longer the best of times no matter how much money you've got." She emphasizes these startling truths by stubbing out her cigarette. "They put up with it because they ran out of options a long time ago. At least, they think they did. I have good news for them. But do they really want disco music, techno, all that frenzy-they're probably too deaf to hear it anyway. Do they really want to watch girls in bikinis cavorting around steel poles, all that nonsense? Of course not. They want something from their own times, an environment that caters to their age group and is sensitive to their needs."
"Oxygen on tap behind the bar? An ambulance waiting in the street? Why not add a hospital wing to your brothel?"
"I wish you wouldn't call it that. I'm providing libido therapy to the aged. What I'm trying to explain is the matter of timing."
"Timing?"
"That's the thing. A young man gets an erection because a woman has aroused him, and for ten thousand years the trade has built itself around that biological fact."
"What else would it build itself around?"
"So we're still a primitive industry at the mercy of nature. We're still at the stage of hunting and gathering. But with the market we're targeting, the customer gets an erection more or less exactly one hour after taking the pill, it's the equivalent of a steak in the fridge. We've freed ourselves from Mother Nature and taken control of the timing. There's a four-hour window which he's not going to want to waste drinking beer and listening to junk music. He might want to relax later, but his main priority is to take advantage of the drug. Especially when he has probably read that it can cause heart attacks."
I blink at the apparent incongruity of this last remark. She lights another cigarette. "Don't you see, in their minds this could be their last fling? They might have decided to go out with a bang, so to speak. We could be helping them to celebrate their last days on earth. They're trading in a couple more years of limping across the linoleum and endless card games with the other arthritic goners for maybe a week of ecstatic humping with the best thing they've seen for fifty years. This is a service of compassion and enlightenment. I'm sure the Buddha will approve."
"Euthanasia by orgasm must be better than lethal injection."
"Exactly. Also, if it's your very last party on earth, why spare the expense? If your kids are all selfish jerks you may as well sell the house to spend the money on my girls. So what I'm proposing is a telephone booking service. Just like a restaurant. The customer comes to the bar the first time, sees a girl he likes, after that he calls us from his hotel, warns us that he's about to take the pill and expects to be rampant in exactly one hour. There's a plus for us, of course, since we don't have to hang around waiting for the customer to decide if and when he wants the girl. We get a fixed timetable that we can work around. I've discussed all this with the Colonel. He thinks we can't fail."
"How will you structure the advertising? Medical journals or triple X web pages?"
"Web pages, with plenty of visuals, but we think word of mouth will work for us over time. After all, there's no one else in this field at the moment." I think of geriatrics shuffling into the bar with crooked grins and bulging trousers, the missing link between sex and death. "So, Sonchai, what about it?"
"It could work," I agree with some reluctance.
"Of course it will work. The trouble is there's no way to patent it. As soon as the competition sees what we're up to there'll be a thousand similar bars springing up all over the city. We've got to move quickly, I'm not the only financial brain in the business."
I watch while two young women try to walk past us carrying about ten plastic bags each, crammed with cheap clothing. There's no room on the pavement and they walk around a taxi caught in the jam. This is where most of the sex traders buy their clothes and we have said hello to a lot of old friends today. My mother's purchases are under the table. We are in Pratunam because a couple hundred yards away lies a vast market where T-shirts, shorts, skirts, dresses, trousers, blouses indistinguishable from the products of the ateliers of Calvin Klein, Yves Saint Laurent, Armani, Zegna et al. can be purchased for as little as three dollars each. Nong has bought her season's wardrobe, which I noticed is a little more austere than usual, befitting a matriarch of industry. I call to the waitress to pay the bill, but my mother restrains me. "This is on me, darling, I want to thank you for signing those plans."
I say okay, the plans did amount to a fair amount of work because she and the Colonel kept changing them. Of course there had to be a TV in every cubicle and in the end they decided to include a full Thai massage service, so each five-by-eight room has to be equipped with a small Jacuzzi in the corner with all the plumbing that goes with it. I foresee disaster with ninety-year-old scarecrows slithering around in the soap suds and expiring during the full-body massage. At that age surely a man might be knocked out cold in a skirmish with a mammary gland? But I have to assume the Colonel knows what he's doing even if Nong has been carried away by her brief congress with the Wall Street Journal. I pass over the slim briefcase in which I've been carrying the plans and watch while she opens it. She takes out the plans and rifles through them with growing consternation.
"You forgot to sign them, darling."
"No I didn't."
"But you promised."
"I know."
"So what's stopping you? Here, use my pen."
"No."
"Sonchai?"
"I'm not having anything to do with this… Until you tell me."
It's one of those mother-and-son things. We have too much on each other not to be aware of the significance of this eye lock. I do not waver or blink. Finally she drops her gaze. "Okay, I'll tell you. Just sign the plans."
"Tell me first. I don't trust you."
"Brat." Her hand is shaking as she reaches for yet another Marlboro and lights it.
"Why is it so difficult? If you don't know who he was, if you were banging three a night that month, just say so, it's not as if I don't know what you did for a living."
"Of course if I didn't know I would have told you long ago," she snaps, and inhales rapidly. "It's not as simple as that."
"How can it be complicated? For god's sake,
Mother."
I might be hallucinating, but it does seem to me that some tiny tears have appeared at the corners of my mother's eyes. "Very well, darling. But you have to promise to forgive me. Promise in advance."
I experience profound suspicion but promise anyway.
"Sonchai, did you ever wonder why I made such efforts for you to learn perfect English? Did you even notice that almost every one of those trips we went on were with someone who spoke it perfectly, even Fritz and Truffaut?"
"Of course I noticed. If I didn't notice before I would have noticed with that Harrods man. What else did he have to offer?" An image of a skinny Englishman with a huge nose through which he emitted most of his vowels and an even bigger mother problem, who derived strange pretensions from his apartment's proximity to Harrods in London-an appalling two weeks when Nong had a screaming argument with his mother, who lived in the flat upstairs, and I went through a brief shoplifting phase in the great store-passes through both our minds. "I thought you were just doing the best for my future."
"Well, I was, but it was more than that. I was full of guilt about… I was trying to make it up to you… He loved me, you see." My mother bursts into tears. "I'm sorry, I'm so very very sorry, darling"-dabbing her eyes with a tissue from her handbag-"it was all those fire engines. And the food, it was so bland, they had no idea how to cook, it was totally tasteless."
Thank Buddha I'm a detective and able to make sense of these fragile clues. Suddenly everything falls into place. A past I never had and a future I never will have flash before my eyes. My heart rate has doubled and for the first time in my life I feel like hitting her. Instead I reach for her cigarettes, take one, light it with shaking hand and order more beer. I drink in great gulps straight from the bottle. "An American?"
"Yes."