“Are you going for a test as well?” I’d asked Ernest.
“Hell, no! There’s no reason at all to think I might have AIDS. That’s whatl toldNoi. Christ! I’m not a homosexual. I’m not a hemophiliac, a heroin addict, or a Haitian. I don’t screw around. I don’t take bargirls home, especially since I met Noi. If I’ve got AIDS, I told her, then that’s really bad luck — that’s like bad luck on the magnitude of somebody getting hit by a meteorite or bitten by a rabid platypus. If I’ve got AIDS, I told her, then I got it from her, and that would be some kind of miracle, wouldn’t it, since she says she’s never slept with any other man in her life. Jesus Christ!”
If you could believe the authorities, there were fewer than a hundred people in all of Thailand who’d been infected with the virus thus far. It would’ve been bad luck even for one of those sporting gentlemen who frequented the massage parlors. That’s if you could believe the authorities; it would be a shame to spoil the tourist trade, after all.
“Anyway, what good would it do to have a test supposing you did have AIDS? Like I told her, we’ve been together almost a year, now, and if I’ve got it, then she’s got it. So then we find out we’ve got it, what are we going to do? First off, I’m going to get deported, and it’s no more Ernest-and-Noi-what-a-sweet-couple. Then we wait to die, and we can’t even comfort each other, living on different continents the way we’d be.”
“You told her all this?”
“Oh, yeah. And she cried and wailed ‘Oh, no’ and said she’d never let me go. And then she went ahead and took the test.”
And now she had gone to get the results.
It wasn’t even as though there was anything wrong with her, Ernest told me. It was nothing but the power of suggestion. Her suggestibility and the irresponsibility of the authorities in publicizing AIDS in the way they had.
“Superstition. That’s all it is, basically,” Ernest told me. “I’m a farang and us farang brought the disease to Thailand. The government has called it a foreigners’ disease, and Noi has been sleeping with a foreigner, which bothers her anyway, deep down on some level, since she’s a ‘nice’ girl; and consequently she has AIDS because she’s practically supposed to have the blasted thing. I guess. I really don’t know how it works. She’s just about the closest thing to a Roman Catholic you’re ever going to find in a Buddhist. It’s nothing but some kind of guilt trip.”
Ernest looked at his watch and then looked out through the deluge at the traffic. All that was moving by now were the motorcycles. They were coming up on the sidewalks, out of the deeper torrent on the street, weaving past the few pedestrians who were wading along, shoes in hand, trousers rolled up to the knees.
Ernest sipped earnestly from his glass, and shook his head. “Look at that: not one of them’s got an umbrella. That’s Thais for you. And here it is the rainy season.
“They probably figure if you’re wearing an amulet, or you’ve got a couple of lucky tattoos, then no problem. Or maybe their fortune-tellers told them they wouldn’t get wet. That’s most likely it.”
Needless to say, Ernest had his umbrella with him. I’d forgotten mine. I guess I’d been in Thailand longer than he had; maybe I was going native. Anyway, who needed umbrellas when you had noodle shops and cold beer?
“She wakes me up in the middle of the night, and she announces ‘Ernest, I’ve got AIDS.’ She’s been crying, because, she says, she doesn’t want to die, and she’d wanted to live a long and happy life with me and have children, especially a little boy just like me, just like how I used to be. She almost had me crying myself, except I was so pissed off she’d woken me up to lay this nonsense on me.
“’How do you know you’ve got AIDS?’ I ask her.
“’I just know”’ she says. “’I can feel it.’
”To hell with it”, Ernest said, and he ordered another beer. Usually he was a very moderate drinker.
What about Sunantha?” he asked me. “Does she worry about AIDS?”
Sunantha was my proper Thai ladyfriend. So far as I could tell, she had no negative feelings at all about our relationship, no matter how well-bred she was. I was the one that carried the burden of any guilt involved.
Sunantha wanted to get married — quite properly, some might say, after a year of fairly intimate association with yours truly. And not out of any guilt, but mostly because we could save money. If she were to give up her apartment, for one thing, she could give that rent money to me; we could share my rent. Our rent. But I’d insisted we keep our separate places, no matter she used her joint mainly as a storehouse for her extensive wardrobe.
Anyway, it wasn’t just the money—she wanted to. And she thought I should want to; didn’t I want a nice baby boy? Soon I’d be too old, she told me, thereby not endearing herself to me a lot. I knew I was too young to get married, and it irritated me she didn’t recognize this. I wasn’t ready. I didn’t know how much longer I wanted to stay in Thailand. As a free-lance writer I didn’t make enough money. My life prospects were too uncertain, right now, to think of starting families. Anyway, the whole idea made me very nervous. And there was the problem of cultural conflicts, as well.
“No,” I told Ernest. “She’s never said anything about AIDS tests.”
The rain had let up, but the waters in the cafe had not yet subsided to the point where you could put your feet down again.
“Shouldn’t you be going?” I asked.
“She’ll be late,” he said. “She’d be late even if there was no rain. Thais are always late.”
“Go easy on her,” I suggested. “Noi’s a fine lady. She probably just isn’t feeling too well. Maybe a touch of the ‘flu. Give her a break; you’ve never gotten upset, yourself — acted a little screwy?
“And she’s in a difficult position, you said so yourself: a proper young Thai lady living with a foreigner? It’s a good thing you guys are finally getting married.”
I meant it, too. Noi was a sweetheart, and Ernest was definitely the marrying type. Not what I’d want to call ‘staid’, exactly, but kind of sober and responsible; a no-nonsense fellow, resourceful and down-to-earth. He made a fine rural development specialist for an international organization in Bangkok, and he’d make an excellent husband and father. A rare bird, in any social circle I was part of.
“We’re getting married, I guess. Right. But sometimes I have to wonder. About the children, I mean. What kind of guff is she going to fill their heads with?”
This was serious. Never had I heard anything but unalloyed praise from Ernest on the subject of Noi. “What kind of guff are you talking about?” I inquired.
“Her superstition. Her gullibility about almost anything you want to mention. Sometimes I wonder if we’re living on the same planet.”
“For instance?” I asked him.
“For instance: you know how you go to a doctor in Thailand, and he gives you six different-colored pills, no matter what’s wrong with you — not always the same six colors, that’s why they have to go to medical school, to know which color combination is good for which problem—and how, if you’ ve got any sense at all, you throw away everything except the aspirin and maybe the turquoise ones, ‘cause they’re so pretty? Yeah? Well, Noi takes ‘em all, and then asks for more, why didn’t she get any of those little green ones, this time, she wants to know?
“She eats everything the doc gives her, and then she stops by the Chinese medicine shop on her way home and picks up a bunch of roots and bark and, it wouldn’ t surprise me, bugs, and she wolf s all that too. At least what she doesn’ t rub on or stick up or whatever. ‘Chinese-medicine man knows things the doctor doesn’t’, she’ll tell you.
“It’s not like she’s a hypochondriac, exactly; it’s just she’s got this implicit faith in the efficacy of all things dispensed by doctors, monks, and herbalists. And this idea you can beat all the odds if only you are forewarned and you take all the right precautions.
“I mean, what’s going to happen when we have kids? She
’s liable to poison them, first time they come down with diaper rash.
Feed ‘em penicillin and sulpha mixed with one toad ground up fine and combined with milk of magnesia and toe-nail clippings from the abbot of the temple next door.”
I laughed, and one of the waitresses gave me a big smile. A fairly cute waitress.
“You think I’m kidding? I get any medicines, I have to hide them. It doesn’t matter that the doc prescribed them for me or what he’s prescribed them for — Noi’ll be asking me ‘Do you think I should take some of this? It might do me good.’
“She’s nuts. A couple of months ago she wanted to take some pills I’d been given for an infected foot. I kind of blew up, and asked her why the Christ she’d want to do this junk when she didn’t have an infected foot. She thought that over for a minute, and then she said she figured she might have an infection inside, somewhere’. She got pissed at me when I wouldn’t let her take the pills; seemed to think I was hoarding them, just being mean.
“Then there are the fortune-tellers and monks and things. Laying off her bets, I guess. Or she probably feels too healthy, and knows that can’t be right, so she’d better get expert advice on how she really feels, and on what to do because of it.
“She’s just not rational. I don’t mean she’s stupid, or anything like that — you know better, but she’s just not always rational.”
Ernest, on the other hand, was nothing if not rational. He once told me how, at the age of nine, he’d deduced the nonexistence of Jesus Christ, first, and then of God as well, and how he’d gone on to explain to his folks on principled grounds why he would never go to Sunday school again.
“She still believes in magic and spirits and things — ghosts, you name it. You remember that lovely bit of temple carving I brought back from Sukhothai — that old wooden piece? A real bargain. I had to get rid of it; I finally gave it to my brother when he was in town. Noi said the thing hadp/ui. Ghosts. She said she couldn’t sleep with the thing in the house, and you could be sure I wasn’t going to get any sleep either, not till that thing was gone.
“Spooks and spirits. They’re all around us, as far as she’s concerned. When she’s not trying to getridof one, she’s consulting another. I hate to think how my parents are going to react after they get to talk to her. They’re coming out for the wedding, you know? They’re Presbyterians; they figure the Catholics are a bunch of idolaters. How are they going to handle Noi?”
My parents had met Sunantha. They liked her. She liked them. And everybody was always reminding me how much everybody liked everybody else, so why didn’t I do the right thing? When I really thought about it, I couldn’t come up with a satisfactory answer. I wanted to talk to Ernest about it, but not just at the moment; he had his own problems.
“Like she once told me,” Ernest was saying, “she’d known all along we were going to get engaged, because she’d gone to the Erawan Shrine and put in the fix with Phra Prom. She said she’d gone and offered flowers and incense and a little wooden elephant to the spirit of the shrine. This Thra Prom’. Then after we got engaged, she went back and promised that once we were actually married, she’d return to the Erawan and make a really special gift. She wouldn’ t tell me what she’d promised to give; this was a private thing between her and this screwy four-armed idol sitting on a busy Bangkok intersection surrounded by touts and tourists and supplicants bearing gifts.
“This shrine isn’t even Buddhist; I think it’s Hindu, or something.”
It was, in fact, a Brahman shrine. A particularly potent one, judging by its popularity with Thais and other Asians. Sunantha had spoken respectfully of the place.
“You know about this place, don’t you?” Ernest asked me. “All kinds of people believe in it. Even educated people. Didn’t you hear about that movie star, for example — the one who promised this spirit she’d dance nude in front of the thing, if she got her wish? I think she hired the whole joint for awhile, so she could pay up without starting a full-scale riot Had everybody tossed everybody out, before she did her little number. I call that cheating. You know the one I mean? Talk about a beauty....
“Oh, yeah — and there was the Chinese businessman who beat himself up — beat himself unconscious, right there in front of the shrine. Just to say thank you, or something. This guy was some bigwig in banking.”
The way I’d heard it, the gentleman had banged himself on the head with a mallet for a while, in fact till his eyes were going all around and he’d toppled to his knees. Right there in public. I don’t know exactly what he had told the spirit he was doing or why. Pretty interesting, though.
“People who you think would know better,” Ernest said. “Unbelievable.”
The laying off of one’s spiritual bets is by no means an uncommon practice in Thailand. You find all manner of rituals going on at the same time, with Hindu images on one hand, Buddhas on the other, pre-Buddhist, pre-Hindu spirit houses in between, and magical Khmer script tattooed all over the people who’ve come to pay their respects, offering flowers, incense, food, drink, toys, make-up — whatever they feel the various supernatural agencies have a hankering for — and asking for health and prosperity and marriage to Ernest in exchange.
“I’d better go — the rain’s stopped.” Ernest got to his feet, a little unsteadily. Too late, he saw he was up to his ankles in water. He sat down again to take off his soggy shoes and socks, cursing softly, and rolled up his trouser legs before setting off once more. He was becoming a real Old Bangkok Hand.
“Good luck,” I called after him. “I hope everything’s okay.”
“Of course it is. It’s all in her head. The blasted nitwit.” The waitress with the nice smile turned out to be married. I finished the one last small beer I’d ordered, and waded away towards Boon Doc’s, estimating I’d be late for Happy Hour.
II.
I saw Ernest again some days later. Ernest had asked me to meet them at the hospital; Noi had had some more tests, and they were going back for the results that afternoon. No. No AIDS, but there might be something else. Could I go along? Something serious? Oh, no; probably not — but the doctors wanted to be sure. There was a chance Noi would have to stick around the hospital for a few days for ‘observation’, or something. Could I just meet them there? Ernest felt he might want some company, if Noi did have to stay. And Noi had asked if my friend Sunantha could come along, too; it would be better if Noi had a woman to talk to.
I didn’t tell Ernest that I’d been gently trying to set Sunantha and myself upon our separate paths to happiness in this life, and having a hard time of it already—even without people enlisting our services as a happy couple. But this wasn’t the time to go into all of that; Ernest had enough to worry about.
In the hospital, endless lines of the sick, the despondent, the confused and fearful waited at this desk and that one, dumbly suffering yet one more indignity in this life; it wasn’t enough they were ill, they also had to be subjected to State hospital procedures in triplicate.
Noi looked lovely, as usual — a slender exemplar of Thai femininity, big bright eyes in an elfin face, long black hair in cascades. She wore a simple white dress and enormous hoop earrings. I thought her face showed strain, though, despite her determinedly cheerful manner.
“Don’t worry, Ernest,” she told him. “I don’t think it’s anything bad. I think it’s only a woman’s problem, you know?”
That day it was Ernest who was bothered by specters, by premonitions and dark shadows on the psyche. Noi was the one being sensible and reassuring.
We wound up in a big room — the Houston Astrodome of waiting rooms — with the multitude sitting on folding wooden chairs facing a thin brave line of doctors at tables, each with a little black bag and a nurse in attendance. There were a few beds with curtains on ceiling runners, just in case somebody needed privacy.
I was only thirty-six, but suddenly I felt aged; these doctors, all of them, were a bunch of kids. Were they old enough to have finished
medical school?
“Are these real doctors?” asked Ernest, echoing my thoughts exactly.
Yet there they were, ministering to the masses with a fair pass at aplomb, wanting to have us believe this was all routine stuff; no problem, they’d seen worse every day of their lives. They stroked beards that weren’t there, and gazed reflectively off across great expanses of worldly experience they couldn’t possibly have had.
They were doing these things with greater or lesser degrees of success. The young fellow right out in front of where we were sitting was having problems. At that moment he was attending to a broad brown peasant woman of some fifty years. He was frowning in concentration at a card on his table as he asked questions and jotted notes. The woman looked incredulous, even indignant, in a stolid kind of way, that her health and well-being could be in the hands of one so young. She looked at his white coat — yes, there was that; and she noted the stethoscope dangling from his neck. Okay, maybe. Then she examined his face again, and you could see she felt cheated. Couldn’t the government even give her a real doctor?
Finally, he finished his scribbling; his nurse started handing him little plastic envelopes of pills, and as he took them he wrote something on each before giving it over to his patient. You could see the placebo effect taking hold immediately. Earlier doubts dropped away; her features relaxed and she kept nodding in response, not listening, visibly hungering for these tangible healing substances. She even glanced approvingly at him, once, as he handed her the fourth or fifth packet. This was a good doctor after all — just look at this stuff. She felt better already.
“Will you look at that,” said Ernest. “If that woman eats all that medicine she really will need medical help, I’ll bet you. These people are crazy.”
“You don’t know,” Noi accused him with some heat. “Are you a doctor? You don’t know. These are good doctors.”
Bangkok Knights Page 14