“Sometimes,” he says. “Mostly I read.”
She says, “Oh.” She presses her thumb against the bottle top, shakes the bottle, and puts it to her ear, hoping there’s enough left to fizz but not hearing anything. Then she does it again and licks the beer taste off her thumb. “You smart.”
“Yeah,” he says. “Smart.”
“You read comic book?”
There’s a pause, and she can feel him looking at her. Then he says, “Sure. I love comic books.”
“Same me,” she says happily. “When I small? My papa, always he angry me. I read comic book, comic book.”
“Why would that make him angry? Didn’t he want you to read?”
“No, him want me read bang-bang book, like boy. But not like. I like comic book with love, comic book with princess.”
“And that made him angry?”
“Yes. Him want me be boy. Him not want—” She breaks off, feeling a sudden wave of certainty make the floor move beneath her. He doesn’t know?
“He wanted a boy?” Edwudd asks, but she barely hears him.
It’s never occurred to her that he doesn’t know. She looks like a girl, sure, she is a girl, but not quite yet. Not all girl, not yet. And he hadn’t . . . She has a swift, dizzying, shrinking feeling, as though she’s growing very small, very fast, and she realizes exactly what she and Edwudd have been doing, where they’ve been going, where she’s been half-intentionally leading him. But he doesn’t know she’s a katoey, he thinks she’s a born girl, he’ll probably be angry when he finds out, he might be disgusted. He might hate her. And she’s so ugly now—what has she been thinking? And then another thought steamrolls itself at her, from a completely different direction, and with a sensation like a spike driven through her heart she thinks, Miaow.
If she were a girl, she thinks, with a wave of self-loathing. Or if he’d known she wasn’t, and if he, if he liked that . . . she would have, would have betrayed . . .
. . . but what would it have been like to be with someone she wants to be with, someone who’s good, someone who’s beautiful, who’s not old and drunk? What it would have been like to hold—
What, she thinks, would it have done to Miaow? Everything on her body that hurts attacks her at the same time, and she accepts it. She welcomes it. She deserves it. She puts the bottle down and rolls over and, a little stiffly, gets to her feet. “I need go to bed now,” she says. “Can you show me room?”
24
An Honest-to-Jesus Bobby Pin
Kang hates to talk.
It’s not because he’s not articulate. He isn’t—or at least not very—but he doesn’t care about that. What he cares about, and keenly, is his flutish little cartoon-mouse voice, so at odds with his height and bulk. Until the sudden spurt of growth that kicked in when he was fifteen, he was comedy material for his peers, good for a cheap laugh whenever they tricked him into speaking. All a kid had to do to get a hand was to mimic him in a tremulous falsetto.
Later, when it was clear to him that the growth spurt wasn’t one of nature’s little jokes and that he was destined to remain bigger and stronger than almost anyone, he took his time about settling scores: breaking the comedians’ noses, splitting their lips, aiming a bare-knuckle punch at the precise spot where the skin on the face is thinnest to explode a single eyebrow into a furry little archipelago of eight or ten pieces that some surgeon either would or wouldn’t be able to sew back together. In several cases he waited so long that his victim had no memory at all of the laughter he’d caused. But Kang remembered, and that was enough.
Still, the voice remained a problem. He hoped, during the time it seemed to his apprehensive classmates that he was doubling in size each year, that he’d tow his voice along with him, but ultimately he accepted that his voice had changed as much as it ever would, and even if he looked like a gunboat, he was doomed to sing soprano. The saving grace was that, big as he was, he looked even bigger close up, and he discovered at the age of seventeen that his preferred conversational gambit was to get more or less on top of people and force his voice into a kind of choked gargle, big on the back-of-the-throat rasp that makes some Middle Eastern languages such effective vehicles for swearing. And it worked.
And after the loss of his eye, a lucky thumb plant by someone who was seconds away from a broken spine, his physical impact was intensified, especially since he declined to wear a patch. When he dealt with people face-to-face, he found, he had a marked advantage; the simple proximity of someone who looked like a mountain and sounded like a strangling parakeet persuaded most people to end the discussion or negotiation quickly and, for him, satisfactorily. If necessary he’d give them the side of his face with the bad eye and bring it very, very close. A real deal sealer.
The telephone, however, presented problems.
So: big, frightening, ugly, and uneducated, but nowhere near as dumb as he looked. Add to that combination a surprising indifference to pain—rare among bullies—and a flair with knives that was almost musical in its delicacy and virtuosity, and by the time Kang was eighteen, he was highly employable in the darker sectors of the Thai economy.
Muscle is a necessity for businesses that trade in women. Any good pimp knows that the two most important aspects of managing a string of pros, some of whom are not volunteers, are protecting them and threatening them. Kang excelled at both. The sheer menace projected by the enormous body, the tiny voice, and the empty eye socket was usually enough to get pissed-off johns to appreciate management’s point of view while simultaneously keeping even the angriest, craziest, most drugged-out working girl in line without marking her, thereby necessitating unprofitable recovery time.
With these assets Kang had effortlessly scaled the ladder of the red-light world until, at the immensely profitable Cherry Girls, he’d met the business partner he needed, a harmless-looking little scoop of ice cream who was even colder than he was. He’d watched all the new girls as they came into the stops on his climb, rarely speaking to them, just letting his bulk make the necessary impression until the girl did, or tried to do, something that required a more complex interaction. They rarely required it twice. As the places changed—from run-of-the-mill whorehouses to tag-team joints, to “gentleman’s clubs,” to relatively mild fetish bars, to whipping shops, to Cherry Girls Massage, and then to the moral black zone of the Heart Clinic, so did the fees the men paid and the unpredictability of both girls and customers. By the time he was running the Heart Clinic, Kang began to regard the back rooms—where people paid large money to be immobilized, filled with dope, and mothered, nursed, titillated, or tormented—as the potential first step to a much more profitable conversation. Why not go private, cut loose all the girls but one, and take literally everything the customer has, one punter at a time?
He’s still a bit pissed that Lala got so rattled at so little this afternoon. Disaster wasn’t the only explanation. Maybe the check took the account close to overdraft and the teller had to get approval for it. Maybe the credit line on the card had been maxed. Maybe the patient had missed a payment. In spite of Kang’s best efforts, the patient hadn’t been very precise about his finances. He had the careless attitude toward money that comes with never having needed any.
But Lala wants the man upstairs finished, and she’s the one who has to go into the banks, so if Kang isn’t in the market for a fight, it’s his responsibility to do the finishing. But he’ll insist Lala run each of the other credit cards first, all the way to the real limits.
So he goes into the triple-locked drug room he’s created from the kitchen in one of the vacant apartments and mixes the bye-bye cocktail for the man upstairs, which has to be strong enough to let them manhandle him and then throw him into the water without a bunch of time-consuming resistance. He uses fospropofol with a little of the opioid compound called fentanyl, being as precise as always about quantities and proportions. Such a useful drug, fospropo
fol. A water-soluble version of the drug that carried off Michael Jackson, it was developed because propofol sometimes causes significant pain when it’s injected, and pain is a memory marker. Propofol had seemed perfect for Kang’s purposes, because people who were given it rarely remembered what they did when they were high, but the injection pain, to an extent, counteracted that. As he’d been told by a mistress in a whipping shop, pain produces something called adrenaline that hangs a bright yellow tag on the memory of what happened to cause it. According to the whipper, a tiny little thing who called herself Eiko although she was no more Japanese than larb kai, adrenaline makes sure we remember the things that hurt or frighten us. Without it, she’d said, most of us wouldn’t survive childhood. Kang, who rarely laughs out loud but whose childhood had been one mercilessly prolonged nightmare, had been caught by surprise and released a girlish tee-hee.
So people who are given fospropofol remember very little, which means they’re far enough under that they don’t know what’s happening when they sign the checks, and the same is true when they’re being towed out at the end of their stay, until they hit the water, by which time it’s too late for them to do anything about it. The patients’ first reaction when they land in the relatively cold canal is invariably a reflexive inhale, but they’re facedown with the cast’s weight pulling them deeper, and what they get is a lungful of water that speeds things along. The addition of the opioid to the mix knocks them out so deeply that he can tote them downstairs, but—if Kang doesn’t overdo the fentanyl—the patient will also be able to bear some of his own weight when it’s time to walk. As much as he hates to admit it, Kang’s deteriorating spinal disks are a constant reminder that he’s not getting any younger.
Once he’s got the precise mix he wants, he opens a new package of fixed-needle syringes. There are ten of them in five bright, playful colors, two in each hue to reduce the likelihood of accidental sharing among groups of self-injectors, not that most of them, Kang thinks, register anything as subtle as color. If more than five are shooting up, tough luck. These are low-dead-space syringes designed to fill completely and deliver precise and unvarying doses, and Kang was delighted when they hit the market.
He draws the fospropofol mixture into three of the syringes, caps the tips, and cleans up after himself, washing the small graduated beaker in which he mixed the doses and putting everything back into the safe that looks like a garbage-disposal unit beneath the sink. Then he puts the three full syringes into his shirt pocket, the tipped caps protruding, locks the room behind him, and goes out through the empty, unfurnished apartment and into the dim hallway, which is sharp with the smell of dust. He figures he’s earned a beer.
There are six apartments, each with one bedroom, on the ground floor, and four, identical to the ones on the ground floor except that each has an additional, smaller, bedroom, on the second. He and Lala occupy adjoining ground-floor apartments at the end of the building that angles closest to the klong, an arrangement that was originally for convenience—they were in and out of each other’s rooms frequently in the beginning—but which over time has evolved into a way he can keep track of her. All the other apartments on that floor are dark and empty behind windows blocked with tinfoil. Same with the ones upstairs, except for the patient’s room.
When they started the business, they kept the disposal simple. He just waited until three or four in the morning, sent her out to make sure no one was around, and carried the uncomprehending patient to the edge of the klong, tossed him in, and let the weights planted in the foot of the cast do their work. But as his back got worse, with increasingly sharp pains that were diagnosed as a degenerating disk or three, he bit the bullet and spent a month of miserable nights digging a tunnel that leads from the space beneath his kitchen sink to a spot a little more than halfway to the edge of the canal, running dead straight for about six meters and ending in a clump of very well-fertilized, well-fenced bushes. Dead center in the garden, surrounded by other bushes, is a flat trapdoor, actually a shallow box, set into the opening so that when the box is full of earth, it’s the same level as the ground. A couple of stunted plants are fixed to it. He sprayed them green, and from a few feet away they look alive.
People might miss the tunnel’s opening, behind the cabinet doors and a sliding wall panel, in a hurried search, but anyone with time will find it. Kang figures, though, it will give him and Lala time to get out before anyone goes through the place carefully. The passageway is just big enough around for him to crawl through it on hands and knees, pulling the patient behind him on the lightweight plastic creeper, originally designed to allow auto mechanics to slide beneath a car. Now it’s the patient’s last ride. Even with Kang’s bad back, the tunnel gets him part of the way to the klong, the creeper carries the patient through it, and the dope mixture gives the patient just enough control of his legs so that after a couple of focusing slaps he can bear part of his own weight.
Lend a guy a hand.
Getting old is no fun, Kang thinks.
At the end of the hall, he opens the last door on the right, into his own space. The refrigerator hums away, singing its one-note song about beer. He pauses for a moment to listen past it. The patient’s room is directly above him, but, of course, he, Kang, can’t hear anything. Problem is, when they put the place together, they wanted the patient to believe he was in a hospital—at least at first—so they bought the machines and put them in the patient’s room and got the uniforms and made a recording, to be played in the hall, of doctors being summoned to far-off emergencies.
So the illusion wouldn’t be ruined by the noises Kang and Lala made downstairs, Kang pulled out the ceilings in his apartment and put in three layers of one-inch lightweight foam, followed by an inch of SonoLite, which is used to absorb sound in recording studios. So now, after all that work, they’ve abandoned the hospital pretense, and the only lasting result is that he can’t hear anything above him. It irritates him almost daily, even though, with the patient handcuffed to the bed, the best he could possibly do is knock something off the table with his elbow.
The “hospital,” as it turned out, was a waste of time and money, an unnecessary holdover from the Heart Clinic. The idea had been to keep the patient from panicking or getting violent, loading him up with dope to harvest signatures, leaving only muddled memories in the victim until it no longer mattered what he remembered. But it became obvious reasonably quickly that the sooner the patient realized it really wasn’t a medical facility, the sooner he cooperated, the sooner he started trying to buy his way past Khun Death, grinning at him from the other end of the room, through the lipstick on Lala’s mask.
Lala. She’s stored up a lot of venom over the years. If this is the last patient, as it well might be, he’ll have to be careful of Lala. She’s been taking some of her cash after every bank and ATM run, but the rest of it has gone into a joint account to cover expenses. He’s never talked to her about how much money the account holds, but knowing her, she’s kept a running total of everything they’ve brought in on some calculator somewhere, with multiple backups, and he’s going to need all his tact when he explains to her that her half of it is actually about thirty-two percent.
Or maybe he’ll just kill her.
He removes the three hypos of the fospropofol mixture from his pocket and lays them side by side on a careful bed of paper towels, smooth enough to have been ironed, and then he opens the refrigerator. Lala will be back soon, and she’s going to want to know that the patient has had his first two shots and is on the way to dreamland. The third can wait until fifteen or twenty minutes before the heavy lifting. Kang takes a long pull on the beer, puts it down, and picks up the first hypodermic. Then he figures the hell with it, life is short, and he settles in to enjoy the beer. It’s exactly the right temperature. He’ll give himself a few minutes before Lala gets back.
He can’t do it. It isn’t possible. His fingers are cramping into permanent claws. A
nd he’s barely made it through five inches of the cast.
The open handcuffs dangle from the bed frame behind him. Beside the machines on the bedside service table is the bobby pin that must have been one of those that secured Lala’s nurse’s cap, the bobby pin he found today on his sheet, maybe six hours ago, although it’s hard to tell when you’re loaded and there’s no good view of the sun. But there it was, an honest-to-Jesus bobby pin.
Paper clips are a little stiffer and might have been better, but so would a key, and the bobby pin is a gift from God. A long time ago, a swimming teammate of his, the only guy in the league who could get anywhere near him in butterfly, had taught him a party trick, guaranteed to impress any girl with a few drinks in her. Have her put a cheap set of cuffs on you, good and tight; it actually helps if the cuffs don’t wobble too much. Take a paper clip or a bobby pin and straighten it out, then make a tiny oblique angle, say sixty degrees, at one end—he’d done this with his teeth—then make another one just above it in the opposite direction to create a sharp little zigzag, left and then right, that looks like a tiny step. Slip the angled tip into the keyhole, find the point of resistance, and move it. Then get the girl to let you put the cuffs on her so you can teach her the trick. After a while.
But it’s been years since he did it, and he wasted most of a precious hour trying to figure out whether the movement should be clockwise or counterclockwise, trying and failing until he was brimming over with panic. Finally he’d done the deep breaths he’d always taken before a race, filling his lungs, holding it, and then blowing out, forcing oxygen into his bloodstream, and after eight or ten fumbling tries and much cramping of the fingers in his free hand, the one he’d been shoving back up under the cuffs at the head of the bed, whenever he heard them coming, muscle memory finally took over, and the lock popped.
Enos was the guy’s name, the guy who had taught him, if you can imagine any parent naming his kid Enos, with the inevitable rhymes, but Enos was big enough and fast enough in the water that he was spared most of the nicknames and the limericks that occurred to absolutely everyone else Buddy met. Buddy had done the trick the first time he tried it, at a no-parents party, and it had given him the little push he needed to get past small talk and down to business with what-was-her-name, the bleached-blonde cheerleader with the big chin and the bigger chi-chis. What the hell had her name been? Why could he remember all the Enoses and Daves and Jasons and Justins and Joshuas and Jakes—the whole fucking J-crowd—and none of the girls’ names?
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