Reluctantly, I pull off my headphones. This is the moment I’ve set myself to visit Pichai’s old room.
It is in the same project as my own, an identical room in an identical building half a mile away. At least, the architecture of the room is identical to mine. Pichai owned a TV which he left on all the time when he was at home, and a very modest stereo system on which he played Thai rock (especially Carabao) and sermons from eminent Buddhist abbots.
A superficial observer might have expected me to be the one who took the decision to ordain, but this is to leave out of account the decisiveness required to step onto the spiritual escalator called the Eightfold Path. True, it was Pichai, not I, who killed that dealer, but that only goes to show he was capable of making a decision. I, on the other hand, find myself to be one of life’s ditherers. Was the Buddha really a transcendent genius who pointed out all that time ago that Nothing was even more inevitable than death and taxes? Or was he a third-century B.C. dropout who could not cope with the rigors of statecraft? His dad the King certainly thought so and refused to talk to him, post enlightenment. Is it my farang blood which fills my mind with such sacrilegious thoughts from time to time? And why should I be thinking this in Pichai’s room? I’ve actually come for his silk short-sleeved shirt and his Fila loafers, which he won’t need anymore, but find that they are gone, along with the TV and the stereo. There is no one to blame; soon after he decided to ordain he stopped locking his room, claiming that anyone desperate enough to steal from him was welcome to whatever they could carry away. Nobody stole anything for months, but after his death I guess his property was seen as fair game. I return sadly to my own room. In my absence someone has slid a piece of toilet tissue under my door. It is gray with grime and folded in a way which makes it difficult to open out. When I do so I find a short phrase in English: Must see you. Fritz. I know it is my duty to destroy the evidence, which I do by dropping it down the hole in the corner of my room.
When Pichai was alive I never felt the smallness of my home, its squalor. Working with farangs has not helped. Even the poorest of them have windows. I wonder if a miracle of modern technology will help me in my hour of need? I take out the Motorola that Rosen gave me and decide to change the ringing tune. I work steadily through the instructions in the manual and find that I have been given a choice of fifteen different tunes which includes the American national anthem but not that of any other country. Star Wars is the only attractive option, but I hesitate to copy Rosen. Angrily I realize that Motorola has led me down a labyrinth of apparent choice leading to a dead end. I have found the perfect paradigm of Western culture, but without Pichai to share it with, who gives a shit anyway? I return the tune to the factory setting, a perfectly acceptable bleep. The exercise has not improved my sense of well-being.
I am still in a maudlin mood and looking at Pichai’s Buddha necklace as I pass it from hand to hand like a fistful of sand when there is a knock on my door. Nobody ever visits me here, so the knock is obviously a message from Pichai, proof that he is looking after me from the other side. I cross the room in one stride and pull back the bolt.
The FBI has reinvented herself. Jones is wearing a T-shirt with the headline SO MANY MEN SO LITTLE TIME screaming from her bosom, denims cut off just a little below her crotch, sandals with Velcro fastenings. She has dyed her hair the color of a carrot and cropped it in some spiky boyish style and is wearing a smile I’ve not seen on her before. Wet-look lipstick. I do not conceal my astonishment.
“Hi. Ah, am I disturbing you? This isn’t a good moment, right?”
“How did you know where I lived?”
“I looked it up on the computer. Look, this obviously isn’t-”
“I meant, how did you find the project?”
“Oh, right. Well, I’ve hired a car with driver. It’s incredibly inexpensive here. The Bureau’s paying, anyway. It’s part of my job to look after you, but I’ll go if this is a bad moment.”
She is looking over my shoulder. I step aside. “Come in.”
She takes the step over the threshold. “This is…”
“This is where I live.”
It is not difficult for me to see with her eyes. My cave is a windowless box ten feet by eight feet with a flimsy shacklike structure at one end to conceal the hole in the ground. Ventilation comes from a black hole in the rear wall which gives onto a shaft which services all the other apartments. On a windy day I know what every one of my neighbors is having for lunch. There is a picture of the King on one wall, and a narrow set of bookshelves where any normal person would have placed a television. The books are all in Thai script, so I explain to Jones, who tries to examine them: “Buddhism. I’m a Buddhist bookworm.”
The only furniture is a futon on the floor. Jones is clearly dumbfounded. To her credit she makes no attempt at concealment. “I… I don’t know what to say, Sonchai. I’ve never seen… I mean…”
“You’ve never seen such a hovel?” I feel hard toward her. I would like to rub her nose in this reality, but my depression has miraculously disappeared.
She looks me in the eye. “No, I’ve never seen such a hovel. I’m sorry.”
“Welcome to the Third World.”
Sex is an odd thing, isn’t it? A power that can transform your mood like a drug. She stands there, glowing with health and some kind of anticipation, and the images of immediate coupling are surely flooding her mind as well as mine. We both cough at the same time. She smiles with those vivid wet-look lips.
“I figured you might need some cheering up, so I bought two tickets for the kickboxing at Lumpini Stadium tonight. It’s Saturday. I hear there’s a big fight. Maybe you want to take me? I see it as part of my orientation. If you don’t want to, though, if you’d rather stay here and get suicidal…”
The car is a white Mercedes. In the back seat Jones says: “I tried watching Thai TV last night. I think I got a soap, but not a soap like I’ve ever seen before. People kept dying and being reborn and carrying on the conversation they were having just before they died, and there were ghosts and a bunch of wizards who could defy gravity and lived in some enchanted land about five miles above the earth. Would you say that represents the Thai mind?”
“Five miles high is about right. But you left out the skeleton.”
“That’s right, there was a nifty human skeleton following the lead couple all over the place. What was he doing?”
“You have to bear in mind we are a holistic people. We cannot take little bits of life, like lovers walking off into the sunset, and pretend that’s the final word.”
On the way to Lumpini I feel the need for a cultural lecture: “You shouldn’t call it kickboxing. Kickboxing is a synthetic sport that had to be invented after those Bruce Lee movies. Muay Thai is something else.”
“Oh, it is? What are the rules?”
“Actually, there are none.”
A grunt from Jones. “Why am I not surprised?”
“At least there weren’t, until we had to invent some to make it acceptable to international television. Now the boxers wear those ridiculous gloves. In the old days a boxer would dip pieces of gauze in a pot of glue, then wrap them around his fists and drizzle ground glass over them.”
“Nice.”
“We’re talking about national defense. Until relatively recently our wars with Burma-we’re always going to war with Burma-consisted mostly of hand-to-hand combat. Primitive in the extreme, no? On the other hand, there were no civilian casualties, no deaths from friendly fire, nobody lost their home. In fact, it was rare for more than a thousand or so men on either side to die in a full-scale war.”