It is twenty minutes past midnight, just the hour when the great game reaches a climax. Shy men who have been saying no all night find their wills sapped by drink and the ceaseless attention of near-naked young women; all of a sudden the prospect of going back to the hotel alone is more appalling-and somehow more immoral, a crime against life, even-than congress with a prostitute. Skillfully, the girls build a dream world of fantasy in the Western mind, a world which is mysteriously difficult to let go of. And the girls, too, have their fantasies: of finding the farang who would support them for life, or, failing that, take them to the West and relieve them, for a year or two, of this living hand to mouth, not to mention the indignity of their trade. The bar is packed.
A gang of brutal-looking young men, their heads shaved like pink coconuts, ears pincushions of ironmongery, tattoos glowing at the edges of cutaway singlets, sit mesmerized around the bar, which is in near darkness. It is the paint act. The girls on the platform are naked except for streaks of luminescent paint asymmetrically applied the length of their bodies. Under the ultraviolet spots the effect is eerie: erotic pink and mauve shapes move sinuously to the music, a Thai pop song with the usual upbeat rhythm. Other men sit in padded booths surrounded by attentive girls and staring at the show. The floor is flooded, too, by Englishmen telling each other it is the cheapest bar in Pat Pong. As I pass a booth I hear: “I want to take you out, I’ll pay your bar fine.”
“I don’t know. Cork you too big.”
“I tip big too.”
“Oh, okay.”
Outside the street is no less crowded. Here the forces of capitalism produce a strange conjunction. Families on their first trip to the Orient, sleepless with jet lag, browse the dense lanes of clothes stalls. Women and girls make oohs and aahs as they translate the prices into their own currency while their men acquire rubber necks. The moral impropriety of designer rip-offs seems not to trouble the respectable bourgeois conscience as they cram plastic bags with Calvin Klein T-shirts, Tommy Bahama jeans, fake Rolexes.
“Well, if you’re tempted, Terry, go ahead and get it off your chest,” a stout woman is saying in bitter tones as she holds the hand of a wide-eyed boy of about seven. “Just remember to use protection, and don’t expect us to be waiting in the hotel when you’ve finished.”
“I didn’t say I was tempted, darling,” the man says (also stout, balding, haggard), “I merely said you can see how some blokes might be tempted.”
“Well, I have to say I can’t see what’s so tempting, I hate to be racist, but this is the Third World.”
I am in a hurry to escape this street full of sad memories, but it doesn’t do to try to rush. The place is so crowded, the night so hot, the music so loud, the ten thousand television monitors so insistent, you have to adjust to the prevailing rhythm: somnambulant rather than relaxed, as if these were not real people so much as dream-bodies the true owners of which are tucked up between crisp sheets in one of the safe clean suburbs of the West. I eventually make it out to Silom, where still more stalls line the road for more than a mile. I hail a cab.
It takes more than an hour to reach Kaoshan in the dense midnight traffic. When I arrive the music is even louder. The taxi cannot penetrate the crowds in the street who are carousing, swigging from beer and whisky bottles and checking out pirated tapes and CDs on the stalls. I pay the driver and, once again squeezing between hot damp Caucasian bodies, find the soi where the teak house stands in near darkness.
I imagine the black man doing this: escaping the insanity-with-soundtrack of Kaoshan, escaping the light, escaping the city, escaping the world to retreat with a sigh to his private and perfect world in the nostalgic wooden house of yesteryear. At the top of the stairs leading to the first floor I slip off my shoes and gingerly try the door. It yields to my push and I slip inside like a shadow.
It takes a moment to realize the lights are switched on. The glow they give is so soft, hardly more than that of safety lights. The old lady sits cross-legged in one of the dark corners, softly murmuring.
She is perhaps the last survivor of her generation in the village where she was born and brought up-probably somewhere in the northeast in the area we call Isaan, near the Lao border-and she is talking to all those friends and relatives who have already passed over to the other side. They are as real to her-realer-than the living. She must do this every night, no doubt longing for her own liberation from a world she has never understood and never will. I take the key from my pocket and slip out the front door, climbing up the external wooden staircase to the upper floor where the twenty-first century awaits.
The computer is as I left it, still running with the screen turned off. When I press the button to illuminate the screen, it reads:
Thank you, Detective, congratulations on getting here before us. A thousand bucks is a little steep but Uncle Sam can take it. We would like you to meet Special Agent Kimberley Jones as soon as possible. Regards, Khun Rosen and Khun Nape.
I nod at such gracious tones from a superpower, and delve into Bradley’s software. It is difficult at first to find a common theme amongst it all, the marine was nothing if not eclectic. Little by little a surprising statistic emerges. In addition to Webster’s dictionary there are three medical dictionaries, each more extensive than the last, as if Bradley started off with the simpler version and found his needs to be more complex. Similarly there are three separate programs which deal with human anatomy, the biggest occupying three gigabytes. I enter it to find stunning graphics demonstrating every aspect of the human body, from skeletal details to musculature, to highly colored representations of every organ. From the way Bradley has customized the program it seems as if his favorite page is a map of the female form with a point-and-click facility. I point to the left ear, click, and instantly find myself looking at a gigantic Technicolor ear, with a detailed explanation of the hearing faculty in text at the bottom of the screen and an invitation to examine different details more closely. I blink at the great lion-colored mountain range of the outer ear, ruthlessly cut away to reveal a temporal bone in leopard-skin cross-hatching, a tympanic membrane in wet-look mauve, a snail-like cochlea in cornflower blue.
In a flash of inspiration, I check the program for bookmarks, find several and double-click on one of them. I find myself staring at a brilliantly colored breast. The bulk of the pendulous mound is sandstone, with a fiery inner core from which lead the volcanic lactiferous ducts to the towering summit. A footnote explains that the whole hangs between the second and sixth rib from those ocher pectorals. A sound like a soft thud penetrates the floorboards from below.
I close down the computer, switch off the light and slip out of the office into the corridor. The steps on the wooden staircase are so soft they would have been undetectable except for two creaks which I noticed on the way up. I sense rather than hear a body on the other side of the door, then the unmistakable squirt of betel spit.
I open the door wide and the little old lady flies in, knocking me down. Under her, I squirm in a sticky mess, trying to gain a footing, thrusting her to one side to send her skidding across the polished floor while I roll over to avoid the blow and spring to my feet. A meat cleaver sticks in the floor at an angle while its owner, dressed in black with black motorcycle helmet and tinted visor, pulls out a knife. The visor, clearly, is an irritating impediment to my assassination; he thrusts it roughly upward, revealing a Southeast Asian face, from the Thai ethnic group, otherwise anonymous in the spherical frame of the helmet.