The Marriage Tree

by Christopher G. Moore

  She sniffed the air and shrugged her shoulders.

  “I smell wine.”

  He was just as she’d found him on her first visit, a few days earlier. Sweat bubbling on his forehead, eyes staring straight ahead in the darkness.

  “Do you see them?” he asked.

  She strained to see what he was looking at in the dim light but saw nothing.

  “No.”

  “The woman, that’s Mya, the Black Cat. She’s a singer. And Rob, he plays guitar. And Yadanar, he’s the one on the piano.”

  She stroked his hair.

  “We make love now, okay?”

  “They play jazz. But sometimes the music is delayed, and it makes listening distracting. Do you like jazz?”

  “I don’t like crazy talk.”

  She looked at the clutter in the room—a heavy debris of photographs, newspapers, files, artifacts, and old Remington typewriter—and started to show her fear.

  She pointed at the typewriter, “Is that your computer?”

  Calvino smiled, pressed a couple of the keys that struck the paper. “This is Apple’s grandmother.”

  Her eyes narrowed as stared at the typewriter. Slowly she shook her head, hands on hips and clicking her tongue. “I no like crazy customer.”

  He pulled out his wallet, and she watched him remove three thousand-baht notes and hand them to her. He might be insane, but he paid well. She looked at the money, returned to the bathroom, dressed and, as she’d done the first time, let herself out without saying goodbye.

  THREE

  EARLY TUESDAY MORNING Calvino woke up to witness three ghosts standing on the balcony outside his bedroom window. They stared at the lake across the road. What were they looking at? In the past they had never ventured onto the balcony. They never seemed to focus on anything in particular. He rubbed his eyes and looked again at the balcony, but the ghosts were gone. Sometimes they stayed for hours; other times, less than a minute. But one thing was clear—the ghost visitations always returned like a bad penny. He’d lived for decades in a culture where the number of people who believed in ghosts approached a dictator’s percentage of votes in an election. It was one thing for Thais to subscribe to ghosts as real, but when a farang started seeing ghosts, even they assumed he had gone mental and needed psychiatric attention. Calvino was faced with a dilemma—who had the strength, resources and time to constantly resolve such contradictions? Many a farang had gone crazy trying.

  Calvino’s sightings created a wrinkle in his perception of time and space. If he didn’t believe in ghosts and still saw them, what could he do? Who could he turn to? And would it make any difference? His friend, Colonel Prachai Congwatana, who was a member of the Royal Thai Police, deployed Shakespeare and jazz as his assault troops to conquer the world of ghosts.

  “It’s unpatriotic for a Thai not to believe in ghosts,” Colonel Pratt had told him.

  The Colonel believed that finding the right combination of pitch and tempo for a John Coltrane piece sent a signal for ghosts to gather and to perform for the living. The kicker was different for every person. A ghost suspends itself inside the shell of a person, he said. He used his saxophone to burrow inside and release the ghost trapped within. Jazz sets ghosts free. For Colonel Pratt jazz was more than music; it was a telecommunication system. Dudes like Dexter Gordon and John Coltrane created a common language linking life and death. The right sax player had the talent to coax the ghosts back to the other side.

  Calvino’s problem was he hadn’t been listening to jazz before the ghosts’ arrival. On the contrary, the music only started when the ghosts gathered and started performing themselves. Colonel Pratt had suggested therapy, and Calvino had grinned in response.

  “So when a farang reports a ghost haunting, it means he’s mentally ill?”

  Colonel Pratt had said, “Farang are non-believers. One who sees his first ghost in middle age should be viewed with suspicion.”

  Calvino couldn’t argue. Belief in ghosts, he knew, is an essential part of Thainess. A farang by definition lacks Thainess. Of course this was an illogical loop, an eternal circle, but Calvino accepted that logic had nothing to do with who fit in the loop and whether their mental world made any sense.

  Colonel Pratt decided against allowing Calvino’s PTSD to slide under the Thai door of ghosts. He’d been a few meters away in Rangoon the night Calvino had killed two men. They’d held Calvino’s client hostage in an SUV. And, again, he’d been with Calvino the night in Bangkok when Mya—the singer known as the Black Cat—and Yadanar, the piano player from a wealthy Rangoon family, had been killed in a car bombing.

  Together they’d circled the wreckage of the Benz and the crater the bomb had left in the street. That night, Colonel Pratt felt that something snapped inside Calvino’s head. Some internal mental switching system had swung open a gate, and for the better part of a year now, Calvino had been reporting visitations by ghosts. Putting them back in the bottle had become a full-time job. Calvino had tried yoga and meditation before moving on to drinking and bar-fining. None of the self-help remedies had exorcised the visitors.

  As the first hint of sunlight leaked into the room, Calvino kicked back the sweat-soaked sheets and rolled out of bed, his mouth dry, and slipped into his workout clothes. He downed a glass of orange juice before leaving the building and crossing the road to jog on a two-kilometer track that circled Lake Ratchada. The ghosts so far had left him alone on this excursion. Jogging seemed to be the one way he could lose himself and forget the hauntings. As he began to run around the track, it occurred to him that the place would never make it onto any list of the top 100 places to jog before you die. There were thousands of places like this one in the world, though here it was possible to rent a two-seater paddleboat in the shape of white swan for 100 baht.

  He wondered whether the earlier risers he was joining on the track were also running from ghosts. The shallow-breathed joggers, their sweaty faces flushed and eyes bugged out, ran past the swan paddleboats without noticing them. Men and women, young and old, were out before eight in the morning, racing against the clock, against the thermal boost that kicked in late each morning, suffocating the city as if with a pair of hot, sweaty hands. Joggers lost in thought or in the music playing on their iPhones kept up a steady pace around him. Calvino understood he was running among people haunted by many things other than ghosts.

  As April turned a hairpin corner and roared toward the Songkran holiday—the annual water festival that marks the start of the Buddhist New Year—Calvino was finding that a cool breeze was as rare as a white hair on the head of a Chinese leader.

  Beads of sweat rolled down Calvino’s neck as he slowed his pace to a fast walk. If a car leaked oil at the rate he sweated, even a large bribe wouldn’t buy a roadworthy sticker from the Motor Vehicle Division. Even corrupt officials have their limits, just as human bodies have theirs. His lungs heaved. Coming to a halt, he leaned forward, trying to catch his breath. Other joggers passed him on the track. He watched them disappear into the shimmering heat haze. He walked along the edge, waiting to find another jogger to use as a pace car. Joggers, he thought, belong to the tribe trying to escape the snare of old age. They share a delusion that the impossible is possible. It reminded Calvino of Bangkok’s expat community, which subscribed to a whole catalogue of delusions to use as a shield against the brutal truths of their situation.

  Calvino had started jogging on his doctor’s orders. He had no illusion it would make him immortal. The idea of immortality made him snicker. Dr. Apinya made him grin, too, with her insistence on his writing down his inner thoughts, fears and anxieties and then sharing them with her. She read his feelings like inkblots or tea leaves.

  On his second lap around the Lake Ratchada track, Vincent Calvino wiped the sweat from his face with the hand towel he’d wrapped around his neck. His speed slowed for a moment before he found the energy to pick up his pace again. A memory flashed through his mind. He was on a Rangoon street. It was night
, and he was hunched down in the driver’s seat of an SUV. Behind him two men held guns on Rob, his client’s son. The image vanished as a passing jogger brushed against him.

  The interior of the SUV had smelled of cordite and blood. Sometimes that mixture of smells came back to him as he ran in the early morning.

  But he wasn’t in Rangoon; he was in Bangkok, running around a lake, enveloped in the heat, Ratchadapisek traffic on one side, the water on the other side and blue sky clouding up overhead. Morning, not night. What is “real”? Isn’t that what Morpheus said to Neo, Calvino wondered. He saw himself hovering above the lake in a hot air balloon. Lake Ratchada from a hundred meters above looked like a wading pool for one of Goya’s giants. The water had shed its soft blue of a newborn’s eyes, replacing it with the dull green stare of a reptile. Calvino wiped his face again. On the surface of the reptile’s lidless eyes floated a pair of swans.

  He watched as small wakes formed behind the aimless glide paths of two swan boats crossing the lake. The people inside the swans sat under blue and red umbrellas. As the hot air balloon inside his mind drifted down from the sky, Calvino felt a sudden, inextinguishable trace of regret just as one of the swans changed course, exposing its profile. A pearl-shaped teardrop rolled down its face like a stone and splashed into the lake. The single tear seemed to turn the color of the lake to amber and then a roiling, hot red, as if grief had ignited the water.

  Seen from ground level, the vast circular track appeared to collapse into an arrow-straight line. The early morning sun penetrated Calvino’s sunglasses as he climbed to his feet again to rejoin the others jogging round and round. They ran as if there was a finish line, but none was to be found. Instead for each runner there was an endurance limit, the unmarked place in the circle where he or she slowed to a jog and then further to a brisk walk before collapsing onto a bench. This was Bangkok, a city that set its men and women on an endless track that inevitably defeated them. The track stretched ahead, never-ending. Calvino glanced at the blue sky. There was no balloon. For Calvino, Bangkok realities flashed in and out of existence like rare subatomic particles.

  The rising heat was now leeching the life out of the older runners. Middle-aged office men and women, already on Songkran holiday, discovering that bodies stationed at desks for hours day after day will suffer on the track—huffing, red-faced bodies, shiny with perspiration, perched atop aching, trembling legs. When Calvino had run a 10K marathon in Rangoon a year before, he’d finished dead last. Watching the others on the track, he saw a mirror image of himself back then. After Rangoon he’d vowed to get into better shape. He didn’t want to end up like the old men he spotted now, sitting on a stone wall under the shade of a palm tree, talking into their cell phones, with stork legs dangling under large stomachs. He knew that a private investigator had to stay fit or he wouldn’t survive. Passing the old men, he saw their defeated look—another mirror image, he thought. The tropics had etched deep line drawings on their faces, drilling under the skin as if the muscles and bone couldn’t stop that drill bit from plunging to the bottom.

  He found his pace car—actually two pace cars. They hadn’t taken notice of the farang shadow on their tail. Calvino hung back a few meters and then closed the distance slowly. The two Thai-Chinese men in their late forties ran side by side. The early morning light turned their skin the color of an unripe pumpkin. Their faces were gnarled and slack, like those of drinkers and smokers. Calvino let them set the pace. He recognized them as the kind of men who had come on a rescue mission, hoping to save their bodies by jogging around a lake. He thought of them as kindred spirits, men who still believed that staying healthy remained possible despite the blow torch tropical heat of April burning through the heart of men.

  One runner’s calves, wrapped in sinews and veins like double helixes, had hatched blue snakes breaking through the surface. Pacing himself with these runners, younger than him but in worse physical condition, allowed Calvino the luxury of feeling he’d improved since his Rangoon run. The doctors had told him that someone was always in worse shape, mentally and physically, and he tried to remember that advice in the face of overwhelming evidence that in his case the doctors were wrong. Keep the faith, they’d said.

  It occurred to him that faith is like bubble gum—you have the choice to chew, swallow or spit it out. It’s only a matter of time before your aching jaws force you to make a choice.

  Running alongside the two men now, Calvino overheard their conversation. Government offices had shifted gears to a downhill coast for the Songkran holidays. The joggers were government officials who talked about Burma. A spirit house war had erupted between the Thais and the Burmese. A Thai company had built spirit houses inside Burma, and the Burmese had burnt them down. The problem had ricocheted like a stray round hitting a flat surface as it bounced among various ministries. The joggers were on one of the negotiating teams.

  “The Burmese are agenda throwers. No good. At our meeting yesterday, they want to talk about refugee camp policy. What do refugee camps have to do with spirit houses? Nothing, but he insists on talking about refugees. I say it’s not on our agenda. It’s in another committee. He says, throw out the agenda. We talk about it on this committee.”

  The other jogger listened and added, “The Cambodians are much worse. I really hate the way the Khmer kidnap agendas. They come into a conference and talk about Khmer King Jayavarman VII and how we steal their heritage and disrespect their culture. They never listen to anyone. No one sees what’s happening until it’s too late. Then they use a temple to steal Thai land! The Khmer are stupid like water buffalo.”

  “The Burmese are evil, which is worse.”

  The fatter jogger with jelly legs answered his cell phone, panting as he pressed it against his ear.

  “Why can’t the Burmese and Cambodians understand us?” his friend asked before noticing the phone call had taken him away.

  “Chai, tilac,” the one with the phone said—Yes, darling—in a toy robot voice.

  After the call had ended, he shook his head and without breaking his stride said, “She makes my life a misery. Have you ever lived with a woman who made you wish that you’d been born gay?”

  Calvino laughed as he passed them.

  “Thanks for making my day,” he said to the jogger with the woman problems.

  In the past he’d happened upon joggers discussing astrological charts, auspicious dates and advice from bosses, patrons, parents, monks and gurus. A wish for sexual realignment was something new. It seemed that any reality that could be imagined could be found in Bangkok.

  He ran with them until they reached the park side of the lake. The 130-rai Benjakiti Park had been carved out of a vast tract of government land. As large as the park was, it was no more than a tiny razor nick on the huge face of the Tobacco Monopoly Land, with its low-rise houses, factories, warehouse, offices, green space and treed spans. Enclosed by the spiked, whitewashed walls of an earlier age, the area stood firm against the invasion of the modern Bangkok that engulfed it.

  At the far end of the track, with the Queen Sirikit Center ahead, Calvino waved goodbye to the two Thais and jogged up the path to a gate of the parking lot. He stopped as a Honda Accord and a Toyota pickup negotiated the speed bumps and drove to the guard station. As he waited, Calvino thought about walking back to his condo, showering, dressing and writing down his thoughts to be delivered at his doctor’s appointment the next day.

  The two Thai joggers had given him material to write about for Dr. Apinya, but he wanted more time outdoors. So rather than turning left and following the way back to the MRT and the underground passage to the opposite side of the road, he turned right and jogged past a security guard in front of a kiosk. He crossed the road and jogged along a lane that led to the interior of the vast area. The buildings had the look of the 1970s shophouse culture of Bangkok—low-key, no more than a couple of stories tall, with no space between them. Like all tightly gated communities, the locals looked at everyo
ne who wasn’t working for the company with suspicion.

  FOUR

  THE BACK STREETS were deserted on the Tobacco Monopoly Land. Though Songkran didn’t officially arrive until Saturday, for most Thais the holiday had already started. Offices, factories and warehouses were all closed and shuttered. The parking lots were empty except for one crammed with heavy trucks, light pickups and forklifts parked in neat rows. The city had gone quiet with the absence of half of its population and the remaining half sitting in their living rooms, watching TV. As Calvino jogged along the back lanes, the grounds appeared deserted. In the windows of houses and offices he saw no movement. He saw no one as he made his way through the area. No security guards, no workers, no bosses. Silence and solitude wrapped the buildings and the street. He could hear the beat of his own heart.

  Calvino sighed with one of those pent-up, long exhalations that come when at last a man can breathe freely, with no wet ashes, and enter a secret place abandoned by its gatekeepers and staff.

  Running off-track had become an article of faith for Calvino. With some clever planning, a 10K circuit could be traced inside the grounds. The land ran for a couple of kilometers behind the lake. He had to remind himself now and then that this quiet piece of paradise wasn’t in the boondocks but smack in the heart of a city of over ten million people.

  The people who worked on this land brought billions of baht a year into the coffers of the Ministry of Finance. Tobacco, Calvino knew well, was a cash cow for Thailand. A government monopoly over cigarettes was like owning a big herd of cash cows. The milk poured continually from their multi-tits, an image Calvino conjured for himself as he turned off the lane and jogged through a narrow grassy area, some of it overgrown with tangled tropic plants as strong as bamboo and as thin as string, shoots climbing toward the sun. He ran beside a small canal with wildflowers sprawling along the banks, finding himself glad to have gone exploring. His doctor had said that departing from routine would speed up his recovery.