The Marriage Tree

by Christopher G. Moore

  “That’s good to know,” he said.

  She looked at him, trying to see if he was mocking her.

  “I will phone you tonight,” he said.

  “I can’t promise anything.”

  Calvino understood the hedge. Judy was going into something like a war zone, not knowing the circumstances.

  “Tell Mon Hla I feel hen jai,” he said—Thai for give her comfort and compassion. “And ask her one question: does she know the girl in the photograph? I’ve attached a couple of photos in an email. Is that her sister? And if it is, I want to know who bought her sister. I want that man’s name.”

  “Mon Hla’s lost her family. Don’t put me in a difficult position.”

  “The Thais say, lam baak jai. It will be uncomfortable to ask her. But wouldn’t you want to know if that loss included a sister? Even if it tore my heart apart, I’d want to know.”

  She closed the car door and walked away with her carry-on. She didn’t look back. Calvino wondered if that was the way she dealt with disturbing, conflicting emotions. And it might point to the cause of his own troubles. He’d been unable to stop himself from looking back at the murders in Rangoon, the bombing in Bangkok.

  Nothing was more confused in Thailand than the heart, a torrential storm of hearts, good ones, black ones, hot ones, cold ones. Jai pointed in one direction—to matters defined by the heart. And in Thailand that was everything.

  FIFTEEN

  JUDY DIDN’T PHONE. Instead she sent an SMS: Mon Hla says photo is her sister, Ploy. More later.

  Calvino typed a reply: Tell her I am sorry.

  He stared at his message. Not Mi Swe, but Ploy, a Thai name. He tried to make sense of the names. His message seemed too much and too little. He deleted it and typed again. Phone me. Sao jai—Sad-hearted. He sent it.

  Twenty minutes later she replied: She’s lost her whole family. No time. Maybe later. Sia jai. Judy.

  She’d nailed her sadness perfectly in Thai, thought Calvino. Not too bad for six months in the country.

  When was this time called “later”? Calvino asked himself this question as he sat alone, waiting for another message. Several minutes passed, and Calvino eventually busied himself. He used the time to download dozens of images from what was left of the smoldering Mae Hong Son refugee camp. Fire cleanses, they say. Fire clears away the undergrowth and renews the soi with ashes.

  He closely examined each of the photographs. The images had been taken by reporters, NGOs and locals who’d gone to witness the devastation. The age of digital cameras and cell phones had made “what happened” a matter of record. Why it had happened and who had caused it to happen remained as much mysteries as they had since the beginning of time.

  Not a single hut had survived, leaving behind a ghostly outline drawn with gray mounts of ash. He thought of the ground zero moonscapes of World War I battlefields, with the trees stripped of branches and leaves, some of them no more than skinny, shattered poles. A shirtless man in black baggy trousers and sandals standing in front of corrugated sheets, leaning at odd angles, stacked in piles, the intense heat of the fire having twisted and bent the sheets into objects of utter desolation. The computer screen filled with an aerial shot of what was left of the camp. From a thousand feet above, it didn’t look like anyone had ever lived in that place. What remained was a uniformly gray fine powder, like the contents of a giant ashtray. One official said a helicopter had dropped a spark on the camp. He was quickly transferred. After that the authorities reported no contradictions of what had caused the fire; they said the preliminary investigation produced evidence that the fire had resulted from the careless use of a gas cooking stove. A cooking accident had caused the firestorm.

  The bamboo huts, the two clinics, the camp hospital, the warehouses—a community for Burmese refugees seeking shelter from political forces larger than themselves—had all vanished. Not a single bamboo structure remained, and scattered among the ruins was a lone brick dwelling. Why hadn’t someone noticed that one of brick structures appeared to have been specifically targeted? Or had it been incinerated in the firestorm? He wondered. He looked out the window at the traffic jammed in front of Queen Sirikit Center. People in the cars were returning to their homes, families, dinners, TVs and beds. Could they imagine returning to find all they possessed and loved reduced to rubble? A cooking accident, the authorities said.

  Looking at the photos, Calvino thought about the refugees who had died at the camp. The refugees had lived no better than herd animals. Livestock fenced in, largely forgotten, waiting for a future elsewhere. They had found their future in fire and ash. Now they were news, where they’d remain until the next disaster flung them to the back pages and finally out of the press altogether.

  He created a slide show on his computer and sat back, letting each frame freeze and change after a minute. After a photo of Mon Hla, Calvino inserted images of Mya Kyaw Thein, Rob Osborne and Kati, sweet Kati. A strong scent of cordite filled his nostrils as he stared at Kati. He wrinkled his nose and drank some wine, but the stench of cordite wasn’t easily defeated. It was as heavy and strong as the night when a round from a long-barreled Colt .22 crashed through Kati’s skull just above her right eye. In the next frame Mon Hla appeared, and next showed Mya with her signature Black Cat smile. He stopped the slide show and stared at Mya’s photo, clicked back to Mon Hla, and then back and forth. When he looked up, he saw the twisted wreck of what had been a car scattered in pieces over a hundred-meter range along Ratchadapisek Road. Inside, two bodies charred beyond recognition—and then Mya and Yadanar reassembled into flesh and blood, breathing human beings.

  There they were, in the sitting room on the sofa, talking to each other in low tones. They paid him no attention.

  “I can’t hear you!” Calvino, sweating, his head pounding, shouted at them.

  They gave no indication of hearing him.

  “You aren’t real. You’re from my head.”

  Mya Kyaw Thein turned away from Yadanar and smiled at Calvino, her head tilted to the side. She sang “My Man.” It had become her theme song, the one he remembered from the first night he’d seen her at the club. Such illusions are as fragile as cut flowers, and umbrellas, rain and whiskey can’t stop the inevitable withering and dying process at the heart of the impossible. The death of illusions, he thought, must be nature’s way of establishing the boundary of where truth and lies meet.

  He covered his ears, closed his eyes and said, “I can’t hear you.”

  She stopped mid-song and returned her attention to Yadanar, who had opened a copy of Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer. Yadanar giggled as he read a graphic passage with a vividly recalled sex scene. Rob Osborne appeared on the balcony, staring in through the window and then beating his fists against it. But Yadanar continued his reading. Disturbances between Yadanar and Rob had happened before. Mya showed no expression as the two men threatened, taunted and insulted one another in their ritual of hatred.

  Calvino’s heart pounded as a panic attack made his breathing shallow, irregular and rapid. He felt like he might black out. The shouting in his head then increased as if the volume had been turned up, and no amount of covering his ears could disguise it. He slowly found the strength to lift his computer and carry it across the room. One step at a time, he tried to control his breathing, using the exercises his therapist had taught him. Sweat dripped from his face onto the computer. The air conditioning made no discernible difference. It was as if his body were on fire. He told himself to keep on moving, that whatever he did, stopping wasn’t an option.

  He’d turned his back on the visitors, leaving them in the sitting area. They hadn’t followed. That much he was grateful for as he walked across his loft to position himself as far away from them as possible. He sat on the edge of an elevated platform and stared out at the traffic, the lake, the Tobacco Monopoly grounds. Then he realized he’d forgotten his cell phone back in the sitting area. Going back to retrieve it seemed like a physical impossibility.
Something very bad would happen if he went close to the visitors. He couldn’t explain the feeling, but it was overpowering.

  When would Judy’s “later” arise? It no longer seemed important. Staying away from the visitors was all that mattered.

  Calvino told himself to ignore them. Those people were dead. Gone. Buried. Nothing he could do would change that. What they were doing now was trying to change him, control him. His mind tried but couldn’t control the place where he lived. They had taken over his sitting room, made it their environment. They had chased him away from the interior place where he lived and worked. Calvino returned to his computer screen. His hand shaking, he furiously sorted through a file with hundreds of photos. He found Ploy in her designer running outfit. The woman he’d found in the high grass, the woman he’d seen at the morgue, was no longer a Jane Doe.

  He added her photographs to the slide show, next to the one photo Judy had given him of Mi Swe’s sister, Mon Hla.

  “You have a name. A Burmese name, Mi Swe. And a Thai name, Ploy,” he said. “You have a sister. You had a family.”

  A huge sense of sadness enveloped him as he stared at her picture. He changed it for Mon Hla’s photo. That didn’t resolve anything as Ploy and Mon Hla could have passed for twins. Sisters in Thailand—hill tribe, Thais, Khmer and Burmese alike—could bear an uncanny resemblance. Ploy and Mon Hla had faces that were nearly interchangeable. Only Ploy’s features had been shaped, modified, enhanced. The natural beauty of Mon Hla had been heightened in Ploy, as if an expert had been hired to perfect a work of art. When he saw the next photo, it was Mya in her stage clothes—black leather pants and a tight-fitting black T-shirt.

  Calvino refused to run or back away. He sat on the platform near the bank of windows. He shifted his weight, trying to get comfortable, sweating inside the air-conditioned room. He breathed through his mouth. He fought against the presence of the phantom visitors. He fought the smell they trailed in with them. The pizza deliveryman who’d been attacked on his motorcycle, his girlfriend on the back, had been in the street below. Protected by the glass window, the distance to the street, he could observe and stand separate from the violence. In his loft he had no such protection. The visitors had plans for an attack. He felt they were biding their time, waiting for the opportune moment.

  He prepared the only way he knew how; he slipped on a set of earphones and listened to his best friend Colonel Pratt playing John Coltrane’s “My Favorite Things.” It had been the song he’d played that last night at the Living Room. Mya had been on stage performing beside the Colonel. Yadanar played the piano as she sang. She owned the audience. The two of them were booked on a New York flight for their gig at the Blue Note. Nero, Calvino’s cousin, had pulled off the impossible, calling in a favor, and the impossible became a three-night gig. Nero had come through big-time. They were going to the Big Apple, where Mya would take ownership of one of the toughest audiences in the world. She never got there. The audiences that never gathered to hear them went on with their lives and would never know what they’d missed. Calvino listened to the music and remembered. The experience was forever lost except for a handful of people who’d heard Mya perform in Bangkok and Rangoon.

  Listening to the Colonel playing Coltrane pushed the timeline back, taking the moment back to a celebration of life, a pre-death moment, one Calvino clung to. Colonel Pratt’s saxophone set up shop inside Calvino’s head as he scrolled through the digital photos. He found himself looking at a continuum of one woman with slightly different expressions—but three women, who were one woman. And the visitors appeared at the opposite end of the room. He cranked up the sound until the Colonel’s sax drilled deep into his brain, inhabiting it, throwing out the ghosts who sat an arm’s length away. He could reach out and touch them if he wished.

  An hour later, after the visitors had gone, Calvino checked his phone—he’d had four missed calls. None of them were from Judy. The first two calls were from McPhail’s number. Call number three was from the Soi Cowboy bar owner Patterson Roy. And the last call was again from McPhail.

  Calvino dialed McPhail’s number. Before he could say anything, he caught a blast from the voice on the other end.

  “Hey asshole, I thought we had a meeting tonight. Who am I talking to? It’s fucking McPhail you’re talking to. So where are you?”

  He looked at his watch.

  “I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”

  “It can’t be that important if you forgot.”

  “I didn’t forget.”

  He heard McPhail arguing with someone. Another voice came on the phone.

  “You are an asshole for not letting me know you’re running late. McPhail said you’d clear his bar bill. I want some comfort, Calvino. He’s got six chits in the cup.”

  “Who is this?”

  “Who is this? It’s Patterson. Who the fuck did you think you had a meeting with?”

  “Happy New Year to you, too,” Calvino said.

  “Everyone is throwing water, and no one but McPhail is drinking.”

  “Twenty minutes,” said Calvino. “I’ll pay McPhail’s bill.”

  “Don’t forget your umbrella.”

  Patterson hung up a happy man. His main worry had been money. Calvino had eliminated his anxiety about getting paid; he could take as long as wanted.

  SIXTEEN

  POOLS OF NEON washed over Soi Cowboy in a continuous rainbow of dappled light, spilling into the shadows in the narrow soi and illuminating touts, enforcers, bargirls, coyote girls and a throng of farang showing up like a herd of wildebeest on a steep river bank, contemplating whether to cross. Bargirls ran water gun patrol missions, ambushing strangers on organized hit-and-run operations. With predators lurking along the fringes of the neon, the sober passersby looked nervous, but the drunks, as always, were ready to splash in and swim for it. Calvino avoided two drunks, faces caked with white talcum powder, stumbling toward him, hair dripping. A group of Chinese in cargo pants and polo shirts rushed past him like a precision team on a mission, running from a three bargirl hit squad who fired their water guns as they ran. One of the bargirls shot him in the back with a water rifle. He’d dressed for the water gun battlefield in shorts and a New York Yankees T-shirt, securing his wallet in a plastic zippered pouch hanging around his neck, thus blending in with the other members of the Songkran red-light tribe.

  For the duration of Songkran the whole street converted into a hot and wet-bodied tribal zone, expanding the scale of public lewdness and drunkenness, and escalating water gun massacres to epic proportions. Lost in the Soi Cowboy mayhem was the seed of a Thai tradition—splashing water to wash away sins to celebrate the Buddhist New Year. The thrills of the water battles were intense enough to let them forget about the sin-cleansing part of the festival.

  Most of the bars on the street had gone corporate. Patterson Roy ran one of the last of old-fashioned Soi Cowboy watering holes, where a handful of long-term expats dropped enough cash to support the bar on the understanding that outsiders weren’t welcome.

  McPhail sipped on his seventh gin and tonic as he sat on a stool outside Mama, Don’t Call. The name had come from one of Patterson’s old girlfriends, who always hit him up for a loan that would never be repaid. He believed it was pressure from the mother. They’d fight, she’d say, “Mama, don’t call,” and he’d give her money. He figured the expression helped her rake in the dough, so it might help him to do the same. McPhail had been watching the action on the soi. Next thing he knew, Calvino materialized in front of him, coming in on his blind side. McPhail jumped as if someone had taken a swing at him.

  “Where’ve you been, Vinny?” he asked.

  “Easy, Ed.”

  Calvino lowered himself onto the stool next to him.

  “Where’s Patterson?”

  “Inside. It seems Mama calls his new live-in girlfriend all the time. He fucking regrets the bar name. It’s come back to bite him in the ass. I told him to rename it Knuckles—The Place Wher
e Knuckle Draggers and Knuckleheads Exchange Bodily Fluids.”

  A waitress took Calvino’s drink order.

  “It’d be expensive to get all of that in neon,” said Calvino.

  Patterson Roy came out a couple of minutes later carrying Calvino’s Jack Daniel’s and soda.

  “I thought it’d be you ordering the Jack Daniel’s,” Patterson said. “You look like you could use a drink.”

  “What’s up, Patterson?”

  “You remember Nui?”

  Calvino nodded. He’d bar-fined her twice.

  “She’s quit the bar.”

  “She’s marrying the guy from Berlin,” said Calvino.

  “She told you?”

  Patterson was upset at being excluded from the information loop, and humiliated that a customer knew more than he did about one of his girls.

  “She asked my advice.”

  “Nui was my most popular bargirl.”

  “Did you expect her to stay until retirement?” asked McPhail.

  Patterson stared at his drink, glanced up with a sigh and watched foot traffic passing on the street.

  “It’s a tough business,” said Calvino, as the potential customers failed to give Mama, Don’t Call a second look.

  “Thank God for the 100 milligram little blue pills, or I’d be out of business,” he said.

  He faked a punch to Calvino’s shoulder.

  “You look like you’re all tensed up. Relax. I’ve got a couple of new girls. When you want some company, I’ll arrange it. They might not be up to Nui’s quality, but they’ll help you make it through the night.”

  Calvino removed the chits from McPhail’s ribbed bamboo cup, which looked like a pencil holder, and handed the seven slips of paper along with two thousand baht to the waitress.

  “Keep the change,” he said.

  Smiling, Patterson said, “And call your mama. Tell her you found the rent from a farang jai dee.”