“So what was he like?”
“Very thin, very white, very lost.”
It really did seem to her that he just needed to talk, and so she listened while he told her he came from London, was unemployed, had been in the kingdom four days. It’s got to be said, there are more ambitious pickup lines.
As a reward for not hitting on her, she suggested they meet the next day, same place, and she’d take him to see the Temple of the Emerald Buddha. I raised my eyebrows at that. “Because?”
“He needed a break. Stop thinking about his competition.” This was the World Human Calculator Championship — what else? I’d never even heard of it, but apparently it was going on in Bangkok right now. He’d showed her the events page of The Bangkok Post (she hadn’t heard of it either) and said, “That’s what I should be doing.” Anthony looked so stressed that she said, “No, you need to relax.” Atiya shrugged. She was the one putting her younger sister through college. It was her doung[1] to be responsible for other people. So the next day she turned up at the McDonald’s, took a corner table, sucked her way through two vanilla milkshakes, and after an hour realized he wasn’t coming. “I have a feeling about these things. When my mother died, I knew. It was the same stretch of road she took every month, here to my uncle in Rayong. But that evening, suddenly I knew. I sat by the phone and when it rang I thought, ‘I have to look after Fon now.’ It’s the same. Something bad happened to him.”
Not surprisingly, the police didn’t see it like that. “They just laughed at me and said, ‘He’s gone to Pattaya to look for girls.’ They think I’m some Thai woman who’s lost her farang[2] boyfriend.” She crossed her arms under her chest. “I have a good job, I have my own car. I don’t need a farang to look after me.”
I looked across to Doi’s desk, caught her eye, and shrugged. “I’ll be honest, it’s not a lot to go on. But if you’re really willing to pay for this, then it’s two thousand baht a day, two days in advance. Okay, look... make it one thousand five hundred, one day in advance.” After Atiya went out I said, “As it’s for a good cause.”
Doi made a face. “A good cause with good legs.”
Atiya didn’t have Anthony’s phone number or the address of his guesthouse, which left me only the Calculator Championship itself. They were holding it in Pantip Plaza, the computer geek Mecca of Thailand. Six floors of motherboards and CPUs, memory sticks and hard drives, LAN cables and webcams, and basically anything else guaranteed to make a geek drool, not to mention pirate CDs of all the most up-to-date software, newest films, and the latest porn.
The floors of Pantip rise around an internal courtyard, the first half of which was devoted to Pantip’s particular brand of miscellaneous tat: alarm clocks, binoculars, hair curlers, laser pointers, megaphones. The space beyond this had been cleared out to make way for a small stage covered in red velvet, set in front of four rows of chairs. Up on the stage were two tables, each with two chairs facing each other. A large whiteboard, currently blank, loomed behind the tables. Nothing was happening on the stage, while of the chairs below, about half (thirty-odd) were taken. I would like to report that the audience for the World Human Calculator Championship represented a true cross-section of Thai society: dark-skinned manual laborers, middle-aged professorial types, hi-so women dripping jewelry, young girls in low-rise jeans... I’d like to report that, but I can’t.
Yup, they were all guys under thirty. Everyone had left his girlfriend at home, possibly on his hard drive. Well, they do say clichés exist for a reason.
I spent some time scanning the audience, looking for — I don’t know — the Least Geek Geek. Or the Most Geek Geek. Then two white guys came up onto the stage and took seats facing each other. The one on the left was in his late twenties, had a shock of unruly red hair and a flinty, unhappy face. He stared down at the table, as though forced onto the stage against his will. The guy on the right was about ten years older, slightly podgy, wore a Hawaiian shirt, a black goatee, and an air of quiet toleration, like a film star who was used to being noticed. He looked at his opponent, looked out at the crowd. Then a Thai woman in a tight black bodysuit joined them, tossed her hair a couple of times, and told the crowd via a microphone how excited she was to begin the last match of round one. She placed a sheet of paper and a pencil in front of each competitor, paused, and said, “Go,” into the microphone. Each man snapped over his paper and sat staring. Redhead looked angry, Goatee looked blank. On the whiteboard the woman wrote 4 (square root) 9648573. For a beat nothing happened. Then Goatee snatched up his pencil, stabbed an answer onto the paper and dropped the pencil as though it had burned him. Redhead made a despairing noise, pushed his chair back and stared up at the ceiling. The woman took Goatee’s paper and wrote 55.733 on the board. Below that she wrote the true answer, demonstrating what the crowd, with its calculators out, could already tell. The man had been right to the first five figures. There was a scatter of applause and the two men shook hands. As the audience drifted off I reflected that while it wasn’t the most compelling spectator sport in the world, the more you thought about what you’d seen, the more special it became.
Redhead jammed his hands into his trouser pockets and slouched off to the escalator. I wondered what he was thinking. Unlike a physical competition, he couldn’t blame luck or the bad bounce of a ball. The loser was stuck in his own mind. As I watched, he went up to the second floor and, once there, ambled over to the booth selling coupons for the food court. Meanwhile, Goatee had gone, disappeared into the crowd.
Off to one side of the stage there was an organizers’ table. The emcee in the black bodysuit was there, chatting with the woman behind it. I went over. “Excuse me, a friend of mine is competing here. His name’s Anthony.”
“Mr. Ann-tony.” The woman behind the table nodded as though she’d been expecting me. She wore a businesslike white blouse and dark blazer, the effect offset somewhat by a pair of shocking pink spectacles. Turning an A4 list towards me, she pointed, “Care-wen-dish?” I scanned the list of names. Anthony Cavendish was the only Anthony there, so presumably it had to be him. “You have a number?” the woman asked.
“No, sorry. Actually, I came here trying to find him.”
She took on the frowning, reluctant look of someone about to be drawn into an argument. “We can’t give a refund. I’m sorry. It said in the rules.”
“Right, and that’s because...?”
She waved a hand at the stage. “Round One already finish. It’s too late.”
“You mean he never turned up?” She shook her head. “Oh well, don’t worry. I mean, I’d explain that to him if only I could find him.”
“You try his friend?”
“That’s a Thai woman, right?”
“No, a Thai man.” She craned her neck to look over my shoulder. “He was here asking as well, but I can’t see him now.”