‘What did your father write?’ I asked Orhan. I had to shout to be heard.
‘Everything,’ he answered. ‘Poems, short stories, even a couple of novels.’Orhan said something else but his voice was drowned out by the loud music of the place. The girl closest to us was massaging her tiny boobs. I was enjoying the scene, my enjoyment both befitting and misplaced, and therefore mildly confusing.
‘So your heartbreak happened recently?’ Orhan shouted the question to me.
I don’t know why but I felt I could not answer the question in a straightforward manner. I shifted in my chair. I cleared my throat. I resorted to what I now consider a poetic response. Maybe a sentimental response. The words came out as if they had been rehearsed over and over. This is what I said: ‘Well, she left about a year back. Eleven months, more like. But how do I know just when my heart broke? How many days before she left did it begin to break? I don’t know that. The breaking has continued. But somehow the story tore and now even that tearing has to end. I would know if there was anymore to it. There is no more to it. This is the end. Though life goes on indifferently, you know, like clichés do, like truth does.’
Orhan nodded and I knew that he had missed most of what I had said. ‘My father wrote poems,’ he said. ‘Many.’
‘Yeah?’
‘Yes. Many poems. There is a poem about __________ opening into an impenetrable dark. ________ digging a hole________. I think that one borrows _________________. Paul Celan. CHE-LAN. A poem about remembering the evening sky of ______. And Jordan. He calls the sky a lavender beast. There is a very similar poem _________. _________ giant autumn______. You know what a crocus means? A CROCUS? Then there is a poem about a couple and their baby ____________ Himalayas, camping. A poem about drinking _________ the sky. A poem about protecting __________ from the first monsoon showers. _______ searching for constellations. ___________________. Isn’t that funny? I find that funny. There is a poem about a ball ________________a pool of black water where it will probably float. And others. Many __________’
I heard perhaps only half of what he said, but filling the blanks of what was not heard did not seem impossible, nor did it seem imperative. I had a feeling that I knew these poems just as well as I knew myself, but it would have been an extremely stupid thing to say. So I stayed silent and drank my water, choosing to catch a glimpse of the anfractuous girls.
‘Poetry is useless,’ Orhan shouted after some time. I saw that he had a Singha in front of him now.
‘Yes. Life is a fucking war novel,’ I said. The words just came out of my mouth.
‘_________’ Orhan shouted something.
‘Yes, a document of the trenches,’ I said. ‘The fucking dregs. Rat piss and rat semen.’
‘I realized…’ Orhan said. I told him that I could not hear him, so he came closer and began again: ‘I realized some days back that my father had been to Pattaya. Alone. That is why I came here.’
I felt like ordering a Singha now. The cross-dressed man obliged; he seemed to have grown taller by an inch or two in the last half hour. Or maybe he had been replaced by another cross-dressed man. But this man also had chest hair jutting out of his neckline.
‘Well, he must have had his fun,’ I said.
‘I prefer not to think about that.’
‘But what do you want to discover here?’
‘I don’t know,’ Orhan said. ‘It is tough. It is tough to describe, I mean. The things he saw, I want to see those things. With the same eyes, maybe. Maybe I like believing that _____________.’
‘How did you find out that he had been here?’ I asked.
‘He published a set of poems about Pattaya,’ he said. ‘Very, very descriptive.’ Orhan winked, but wistfully.
We clinked our beer bottles and made a little toast to Pattaya. If we were in the same boat it would also have been a boat in the eye of a storm, a storm belonging to no season. The music at the place suddenly died down.
Orhan looked at the dancing girls, now coming down their pedestals. ‘I said the thing about Pattaya’s whores not being sorry for themselves. It was a stupid thing to say.’
I immediately thought about Noon; and Orhan’s words, which had come to me clearly this time as the music had been shut down, somehow made me feel that Noon had not swindled me into a sexless night, that she was as innocent as she had seemed and that the old woman at Soi6 had just peeved me maliciously. Sure enough, a Pattaya of disguised suffering suited me better than a Pattaya of unadulterated pleasure.
‘In the last two days in Pattaya,’ Orhan carried on, ‘I have sometimes felt as if there is a scream that prevails all over the city.’
‘A scream?’
‘But it is a dead scream. Or a scream of death. I don’t know. A howl out of slaughter. Of something slaughtered by the edges of these neon lights.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, you know, in this city of pleasure, pain has suffered genocide.’
(31)
I remember most of what was said between Orhan and me, which is strange enough in itself, but there was a phase in that conversation after Orhan had used the word ‘genocide’, when the distance between the two of us collapsed. This is not to say that we became close in the figurative sense, or connected, as I might have said in an unsophisticated moment. This is to make an even taller claim: Our identities became irrelevant. His words were mine and mine his. It was like talking in a dream, or in a movie, where the lines are the construct of a single mind. I was on my guard, no doubt, and a thin curtain of fear continued to billow inside me, but it also struck me that this fear was the fear of a miracle, the fear of stumbling on something powerful, something like love.
The end of the conversation too had some similarity with the capricious ways of love. A couple of Thai women distracted me, and in the time it took me to politely refuse their advances, Orhan disappeared from his position next to mine.
I took the long walk back to my room then, intending to rest, or rather, to enter an enclosure and give myself a break from Pattaya.
I found my room dirty and immediately thought of complaining to the hotel staff, but then I remembered that it was I who had asked them not to clean the room that day. I had perhaps done that out of a maudlin desire to preserve Noon’s presence in the room. There were many marks of the previous night: the limp condom that I had used lay on the floor, on one side of the bed, and the torn condom wrapping lay on the bedside table; two long black strands of Noon’s hair snaked about on the white bed sheet, which was terribly crumpled and gave off a weird smell that I imagined to be a derivative of her sweat and perfume; my own body hair was scattered around the room; the two pictures on the low tabletop were surrounded by bottles of beer and a half-empty glass. All these marks just vexed me now. They either pointed at sex or a connection—neither of which had really concluded. I affixed Anne-Marie’s picture to the mirror, from where it could see the bed. I put the other picture on the writing table just below the mirror. I then took to looking at myself, at my beat-down face, and thought of Orhan—of how his eyes were like mine, blue while mine were brown; of how his nose was just like mine, only slightly upturned; and also of how his ears were similar to mine, only less protuberant. I then looked at Anne-Marie’s picture, her eyes and nose and ears. A poet, that’s what Orhan had called himself. I settled on the bed then, and resolved to read myself to sleep.
I read some poetry this time. While reading, I often imagined Orhan traipsing through Pattaya’s streets, writing down things in a little notebook, things that would later turn to poems. My thoughts and the questions embedded in them brewed and brewed till they slowly became too much. Beyond the window, on a hill that was faraway, the letters PATTAYA twinkled. I shut my Kindle, got off the bed and dropped the spent latex in the trash. There were sounds coming from the room next to mine, and hearing the grunts and moans, I felt that all this literary cogitation was a waste of time. I was a tourist in Pattaya, a tourist with money in his pocket. And w
hether I had a story and whether that story was to be augmented in this city should be of no concern. What happens to pain is irrelevant, as long as there is pleasure. I went to the bathroom and washed my face. In the mirror above the sink, I bared my teeth to see how a grin would appear on my face—a dirty, whore-mongering grin. All I got was a grimace. Frustrated with myself, I decided to have a whore for the night.
And so in thirty minutes, I was on Beach Road with a whore shackled to my elbow. On my way, sometimes, when I was not looking down at the asphalt, I would look up at the sky. And I did squint for a view of the Orion, the Roman Soldier with the large penis, but there were clouds and the whore was Thai-ly giggling. And I did think of you—NO, not you, HER—and I did think of HER, of the nightly walks in dimly lit parks in that red-bricked campus where SHE would go away from me ten paces only to run back and jump into my arms and I knew again, what I had known ever since those park nights, that it was risky for everything to be HER, and I did caress the whore’s arm, did feel the coolness of her flesh, and I did bring her to my hotel room with all the nonchalance my solitude could muster, my efforts at nonchalance true to my status as consumer, and I did consume the whore, consumed even the consuming in the mirrors, from where HER photograph gaped at us, and when I was sated I did try to run my fingers through the whore’s hair in the manner SHE, only SHE, knows but may have forgotten, but the whore didn’t care and I asked her politely to leave, and after she left I switched on the television and watched a slew of Thai music videos, and I thought of my bed as a short story of surrender in crumpled white sheet, and I did turn to poetry again, started thinking in that pathetic way again, knowing that memory was my enemy.
(32)
The whore I fucked that night called herself Ai. To ignore her role in this story is possible, but it feels wrong to me now.
My desire to get a whore for the night was strong, and I did not have the energy to walk too far. I took to Beach Road and told myself that I would turn into the first bar that came to my left. I did so and entered a place called The Green Joint, which turned out to be quite literal, for the place was awash with a dark green light of no traceable source. There were two or three leftover ladies there, one of them being Ai, who sat behind the bar on a table, gossiping with another whore. She was the most passable face among the lot there. I could have just gone up to her and asked her to accompany me, but out of some vague sense of decency I placed myself at the bar and ordered a shot of whiskey. An old lady manned the territory behind the bar; she was playing a Tetris-like game on her smartphone. After some sips of my whiskey I asked her if I could have a lady for the night. ‘Only one?’ she asked me, in the tone of tired shopkeepers who are all too ready with a discount when it’s near closing time. I gave some thought to a threesome, and if the ladies at The Green Joint had been pretty I would have perhaps taken two of them. But it was not so, and so I consoled myself with the fact that a threesome was tiring business, with the necessary change of condom every time the man moved from enjoying one lady to the other. ‘One,’ I said, and then pointing to Ai added, ‘That one.’ Ai came up to me immediately and smiled. Her smile was marked by the blackness of an incisor in the lower jaw, possibly due to a cavity. I could not refuse now, I thought, not merely because she had a bad tooth. I drew her closer to me. I was decidedly un-shy, and maybe I overdid the drawing close bit, for Ai squirmed out of my grip. Anyway, the old lady behind the bar made me pay for the whiskey and the bar fine, and off we were—Ai and I.
Away from the green light of The Green Joint, in the fifty or so paces before the right turn into Soi4 where my hotel was, I could evaluate Ai more clearly, and I realized that she wasn’t to my liking and that I had made a mistake. Once again I felt low, and once again, by now like an automatic maneuver, my pathetic mind travelled to pathetic thoughts about Anne-Marie. Ai clutched at me, visibly happy at landing a customer. Anne-Marie and Orhan, I was thinking. Also Noon. I looked up at the sky, as if in prayer. On a renewed whim I decided I would fuck Ai’s little brains out that night.
Two things happened almost immediately after we entered the room and I switched on the lights. I saw the difference in complexion between Ai’s skin below her elbows and knees and her skin elsewhere. Her limbs were as dark as charcoal, while the rest of her body was of a much lighter shade. I have a rice farmer for my girl tonight, I thought, feeling further deflated. On Ai’s side, the deflation happened due to the slovenly state of the room. She used her broken English to convey her displeasure, and if a third ethereal party were gathering cues from the resulting rictuses on our faces, it would have bet money on the night passing without a fuck. But me, I was going to be decisive. I ordered Ai to undress. She did so. Then I ordered her to suck my cock. This she completely refused. ‘I no suck cock.’
We fucked despite our moods and Anne-Marie’s photo’s gaze and other inconveniences, and kept at it even though it was never good for me.
After the fuck, Ai tried getting more intimate with me, as in intimate on a personal level. I had struck a long-time deal with her, and she must have known that that gave me the right to fuck her repeatedly, all night. To avert this, she had to distract me; and to distract me it was essential to become friendly. And so she laboured to take out her smartphone from her jeans pocket and lay her dichromatic body beside me and began flicking through her picture gallery. The pictures were intended to evoke my interest, something that they eventually succeeded in doing. These were pictures of Ai, of her white clients, of her ex-husband, and finally of her daughter who seemed no younger than eight and looked no different from nice, uniform-clad, zoo-visiting eight-year-olds anywhere in the world.
Knowing that your whore for the night is also someone’s loving mother needles your conscience in a very strange way. More so when you have seen the child, more so when you have seen the child and the mother together, more so when you can connect the dots and realize that the whore is a whore because the child needs to be fed, to be educated and to grow up and not be a whore. Speaking for myself: As I looked at those pictures, tentatively at first and later with intent, I involuntarily abdicated the throne of being the central character of my own story, one who was besieged with love and reminiscence and a painful addiction to literature, and I took on the role of a supporting character in Ai’s saga, one where she had to pass under scores and scores of men (of which I was an indistinguishable part), only to raise her child against all the odds that there may be. And although at the back of my mind I was aware that this, this display of family photographs, was in itself a manipulation, I could not avoid being manipulated, simply because it was liberating to feel like an inconsequential part of someone’s story. There was nothing I could do to alter the course of Ai’s saga; and aware of the lightness of my every feeling or action now, I allowed myself to feel tender toward her and tried to caress her hair in the only manner I knew.
But inconsequentiality is impossible to sustain. Soon my fingers got into a knot in her hair and pulled at them. She shifted her position a bit, and it appeared that she had no more pictures to show. From being flotsam, I immediately turned into the captain of my ship, a captain who had lost his compass many moons ago. And Ai turned into this ugly whore who was mother to an eight-year-old. One of the many in Pattaya. One of the many that I would forget. The air in the room soured unbearably, as if Noon’s sweat and my sweat and Ai’s sweat had just concluded foul reactions with each other. I knew that Anne-Marie still smiled in her little photo, her face resplendent albeit marred by the blotches and stipples time had created on the paper, things I could not see from the bed but knew existed.
I will have a wife and I will have children, I thought, and my children will see the world die, or maybe their children will, and my words will burn and others’ words will burn and all the words will disperse as ashes in the black milk of dawn. Ai left, and I switched on the TV to watch some Thai music videos. I made vague associations between the various things in the room. My sullen bed sheet, my writer’s min
d, my lover’s heart, the sweat of whores, the girls and boys dancing on TV, the simmering of the air conditioner, a freshly spent condom on the floor, a photo on my mirror.
Day after tomorrow I have my flight back home, I thought. I shut off the TV, drew the curtains and fell on my bed.
(33)
That night I dreamt as if a projector had been installed in my mind and a slew of reels had been fed into it. The reels played not in any order, but jumbled, which is not much because such is the custom of dreams. It started with a faceless woman and me walking in a park at eventide, hand in hand. I can’t say that it was Anne-Marie because the dream never allowed me to turn my head to ascertain that.
‘Come on, we need to catch the ship,’ I said to this faceless woman, feeling a panic of meaninglessness right after I said it. To our left there now was the lapping sea, although its darkness allowed only the foam of the waves to be visible. A ship sounded its horn, and we could see its few lights from the shore. The woman broke free from my grip and ran toward the ship. She splashed into the waves and soon began to drown. I swam over to her, but in-between I was taken over by the waves many times. I opened my eyes under the water and, although I could not spot her, I saw something wholly incomprehensible at the bottom of the ocean, a shapeless mass of agitation. Terrified, I came up for a breath, and the woman appeared an arm’s length away. I lunged and held her by the neck and began to pull her out. But as I was saving her I also saw the commotion below us, those warring energies, those indescribable monsters, and something perverse grew within me and I began to twist the neck in my grip and push the head under water, twisting and pushing with all the strength I had, and then there was a gurgling sound, and then a bodily struggle, and then a howl drowned out by the water, and then the growing rigidness of a body, and then its sudden limpness, and a rush of fatigue in my limbs, the sweet fatigue of a job well done, and from my lungs a content, distended sigh. The ordeal over, I looked up, the body still in my grip. The ship had come very close by now, and a rope twirled down from its deck, not too far from me. Before making for the rope, I lifted the body to look at the face. It was not a woman. It was Orhan. Blue-eyed, mouth agape, death-shocked Orhan. I lost all sense of reality, of whatever reality a dream can encapsulate. In a blur I was on the ship’s deck, Orhan’s contorted body at my feet. I called for a doctor. There was no doctor, but there was a nurse, who came running toward me. She looked at Orhan and said, ‘He dead.’ The nurse was, of course, Noon. ‘I killed him,’ I said to Noon. She shrugged and said, ‘He hap to die.’ I asked her what she meant by that, but Noon had a hand on my cheek now; she was caressing me. ‘He hap to die,’ she said again. The next instant Noon and I were making love on the deck, beside Orhan, who was now disappearing into those blurry edges of the dream’s frame. I had hiked up Noon’s white skirt, and she was emoting as if she wanted me, as if this was what she had been waiting for. Our undulations went on and on. The ship sounded its horn again, as if goading us on. My dream self was still thinking of the murder it had committed. In certain ways, I began interpreting the dream from inside it. Noon was present not as Noon but her meaning, whatever it was. My unborn son, I said, silently, perhaps to the meaning that was Noon. My unborn son, I said again, and the shadow that was Noon encouraged me to speak.
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