“What are you talking about?”
“Yes, with you I can use that word. Strange, isn’t it? You are so much harder, so much tougher than your accomplice Smith, and yet with you that word comes to mind. She was, after all, your total and complete opposite-dare I suggest your other half? You in the penthouse, she in the gutter. She twisted a knife in your heart by telling you all about Smith, the handsome, phallic farang whose cock was so much bigger than yours. She was an expert at injecting acid into your veins just when you thought you were winning. Am I right?”
“Go on.”
“Lust is blind to class. What drove you out of your mind was her total and intimate understanding of that reptilian side of you. She knew where your ambition came from. It came from a kind of hatred of life-exactly the same impulse that drove her. You got rich out of revenge on life. So did she, in the end. And then there was always your mother. At the end of the day, only a whore could really turn you on.”
His eyes pierce like needles. “Bring on the elephant. Get it over with.”
He retreats to a corner of his cell where light does not reach.
“Ah, no one doubts that you are harder than steel, Khun Tanakan. All who know you would agree. But think about this. If she is able to reach you at will, night after night, and rape you dry even while you are in the body, what chance will you have on the other side?” Chinese are even more ferociously superstitious than we are. I observe a twitch in his right hand, then a shudder as he turns to the wall.
Over in a corner of the compound the Khmer have gone back to work on the first of the bamboo spheres. It’s taking shape but is still very wobbly. After an hour or so they give up. Too hot. There is no hurry. The show won’t begin today, or even tomorrow.
35
The first you see of dawn is blood in the eastern treetops and a universal glowering heralding another unbearable day. Twenty minutes later the sky starts to blind while it boils, and you do everything in your power to get out of the way. The sun itself is usually invisible behind a pulsating screen of humidity, so that the whole sky seems to radiate an unhealthy intensity of light and heat. I awaken early, before first light, wash myself down at a stone trough outside my hut, and wrap my sarong around me.
My body still wet, my sarong soaked, I make up my mind to climb the stairs to Gamon’s hut. I decide not to knock but press the door. It opens, and I step over the threshold. I guess he could not be dead and still be in a semilotus position, but the vital signs are few. I step over to him where he meditates with his back against a wall under a window. I think I am about to shake him, but the Buddha directs differently. I caress his beautiful face and kiss him gently on the forehead. “Phra Titanaka, my brother,” I whisper.
He opens his eyes in another universe. He smiles with the generosity of one who has dumped ego and accepts eagerly the love in my eyes; then he remembers, and the anguish takes over.
“Gamon,” I say, “we’re going to have to let them go. Baker is dead because of us, but it was not really our fault. We don’t have a lot of bad karma arising from his death. But if we go through with Damrong’s plan, what will become of us? We’ll be locked in granite for a million years.”
Horror in his eyes: “And if I don’t obey her? Have you any idea the power she has? She visits me every night. I still have sex with her.”
“Because you let her. You’re a Buddhist monk-how can you allow yourself to be enslaved?”
My words startle him. He blinks at me then stares at his robes. “Of course, I’m so used to these, I’ve forgotten I no longer have the right to them.”
In his disoriented state his childlike response is to stand and disrobe in front of me. This is not the effect I expected, and I want to tell him to put them on again, but as he stands in a pair of boxer shorts with the heap of saffron cloth at his feet, I watch a fascinating transformation. The monklike comportment quite melts away in less than a minute, together with the personality that went with it. That other side of him emerges: harder, more primitive, more built for survival, more criminal. I see clearly now the young man who once smoked and traded yaa baa. His voice is stronger, hoarser. He goes to the single window of his hut to look down on the compound where his elephant assassins graze.
I say, “Gamon.”
He sighs. “There is more.”
“Tell me. It might save someone’s life.”
Controlling his tone: “Her last e-mail didn’t tell the whole story. It didn’t tell the story at all.”
I think he wants to turn his face to me but cannot. I have him in profile while light starts to bleach the compound. “Things she didn’t want to remember or think about simply ceased to exist in her mind.”
He summons the courage to face me. “You saw the reference to incest, but you didn’t pick up on the significance.”
“Tell me, my friend, while there is still time.”
A groan comes from the heart. “It started just like she said, two frightened kids in a wet and stinking two-room hut, Mum and Dad drinking, smoking yaa baa, and screwing in the next room -partying, you understand -no food for a day or two because they were too far gone. Then when Mum was unconscious and Dad was out of his head, he would call for her. He liked to mix sex with his voodoo. She would go to him, then come back looking like death. Looking like a seventy-year-old fourteen-year-old. But she stopped him from using me. Even then she was using her body to protect me.” A long sigh. “But she had her needs too.”
After a pause, he starts again in a stronger voice. “Sure, that’s how it started. She showed me what she wanted and how she wanted it done. When I was a little older, she showed me what I wanted and did it for me. That was after her first tour. My first experience of sex was world-class, you might say.”
He coughs. “Nothing wrong with that, apart from some primitive taboo designed to keep the tribal genome healthy, which hardly applies in an age of contraception. People who worry about such things should worry more about how Damrong and I would have turned out without incest.”
A long pause. “But when she came back from her first tour in Singapore, she had changed. She was only eighteen, but she was a woman.” Licking his lips: “And a whore. Whores suffer from terminal love starvation-you know that. They screw and they screw and they screw, and not a drop of love comes out of it no matter what they try. A kind of madness takes over them. They must have a real lover, even if he’s some ugly, broken-down, old white man – ”
“Or a close family relation.”
He nods. “After every tour she came home panting for me. Usually she would get to Surin and call for me. I would go see her in a hotel. If she’d done well that month, she would rent a five-star suite. She liked showing me the power of her money. She was so hungry for me, it was almost like being raped. But of course, I wanted love too.” A couple of beats pass. “She would always spoil me afterward, buy me motorbikes, whatever I wanted. One time she’d made so much, she bought me a Harley-Davidson Fat Boy-we had to sell it a few months later when times got tough. She would say over and over again that our love was the only way, that she couldn’t keep on the Game and support me if she didn’t have me to come back to.” Looking at me curiously: “How did your mother handle it? Did she keep asking you if you really loved her?”