Seven shook her head. She squeezed Chinapat’s hand. “Goodbye, Mr. Shockley.”
He smiled and nodded. “The rescue was worth 10,000 points. You are almost over the finish line. Why stop now?”
Seven knew that was a con. Simulations never had a finish line, only a continuous loop, with points stacking up to reach the moon but never quite reaching the stars.
5.3
Where are you?
Friendship Hotel, Sukhumvit Road, Bangkok
Like ice into water and water into steam... Seven continued to fix her gaze at the crate of iceberg water bottles Shockley had left behind. She had never felt more alone and sad. Anger welled up inside as she picked up one of the bottles by the neck and flung it as hard as she could at the sea. It exploded in a star cluster of light, turning the shoreline a silvery glowing white.
As she leaned down for a second bottle of water, she looked to her right. Chinapat was next to her in bed in their Bangkok hotel room. They’d been drinking Mekong whiskey, and the bottles were strewn on the floor. She held an empty bottle in her hand, and as she rolled over she asked Chinapat if he was awake. He’d unhooked a red and blue wire from the insert plates at the base of his skull cables. The first two rows on the consort unit beside the bed flashed a hot white.
“Why does the dolphin simulation always upset you?” he asked. It was like asking an addict why she couldn’t go cold turkey.
He gently removed the cables from Seven and let them drop to the side.
She twisted the wires between her thumb and forefinger, and looked up at Chinapat. He was waiting for her answer.
“We’re out of the router, right?”
He nodded.
“We’re off the grid, right?” she asked.
“Right.” That seemed obvious, and he wondered why she asked.
She shook her head. “It’s not right. I’m logged at 5.2? And where are you, if you’re not at 5.2?”
Chinapat rolled over and grinned into his pillow. She’d confused the “where are you” with the “who are you” matrix.
“Listen,” he said, “and they’ll tell you themselves.”
He cranked up the volume on the black console no bigger than a shoebox. Dolphin voices echoed across the room, liming the ceiling with a blanket of white ice crystals. The hotel window overlooking Sukhumvit Road was caked with a half-inch thick sheet of frost. The rising and falling singsong notes, like musical instruments, formed patterns in the ice.
When Shockley opened the door, it was no longer the hotel. They were aboard ship, in the holding tank. As he stepped inside, Shockley handed her a glass filled to the top with pure iceberg water.
“Take another sip and relax. Another ten thousand years will pass in the blink of an eye.”
Canadian Christopher G. Moore is the creator of the award-winning Vincent Calvino crime fiction series and the author of the Land of Smiles Trilogy.
In his former life, he studied at Oxford University and taught law at the University of British Columbia. He wrote radio plays for the CBC and NHK before his first novel was published in New York in 1985, when he promptly left his tenured academic job for an uncertain writing career, leaving his colleagues thinking he was not quite right in the head.
His journey from Canada to Thailand, his adopted home, included some time in Japan in the early 1980s and four years in New York in the late 1980s. In 1988, he came to Thailand to harvest materials to write a book. The visit was meant to be temporary. Two decades and 22 novels later, he is still in Bangkok and far from having exhausted the rich Southeast Asian literary materials. His novels have so far appeared in a dozen languages.
For more information about the author and his books, visit his website: www.cgmoore.com. He also blogs weekly at International Crime Authors: Reality Check: www.internationalcrimeauthors.com.
The Mistress Wants Her Freedom
Tew Bunnag
Was it destiny? According to Pi Nok there was no doubt about it. His regular fortune teller in Onnut market had told him that very morning that it was going to be a special day, one in which someone from the past might reappear, and that he should be prepared. Admittedly he had already put that piece of cheap, innocuous advice out of his mind by the time he saw Nong Maew later in the Siam Paragon shopping centre for their weekly gossip session. Of course the conversation turned, as always, to her love life, or rather the lack of it.
“It’s so unfair,” she was saying as they peered through the smoky glass display window of a designer store at the ridiculously expensive pair of red suede Italian loafers that they both lusted after.
“He’d buy them for his wife, if she asked him. But I have to wait for him to give me the presents that he chooses.”
Without taking his eyes off the shoes, Pi Nok replied in a sarcastic voice, “You’ve had a sweet Japanese sports car off him, and a sweet luxury apartment and a wardrobe full of clothes and your regular little envelope...”
“All right, he takes good care of me,” said Nong Maew, giggling. “But why do I have to wait around for him all the time? I’m fed up with it. I’m twenty-three. I want a life!”
This was a line he had heard a dozen times — the unhappiness of the kept woman — and he never found it convincing. Usually, out of friendship, he commiserated with her, but today her words grated on him. Having lost his own foreign benefactor the previous year and now working in a massage parlour, struggling to keep afloat, he found it hard to sympathize with her poor little mistress number.
“Well, you can always go back to your old life,” he said cattily.
Nong Maew was annoyed at this remark. Even though Pi Nok was her closest friend and confidant, her “gig”, he had no right to be unkind. She did not ever want to be reminded of what she had done or what she had been.Without answering him, and with a petulant swish of her young, lithe body, sheathed in its blue polka dot dress, she turned and headed straight for the escalator.
Pi Nok walked behind her and said, teasingly: “Don’t be so touchy. You know you’re beyond all that now.”
“Oh, you’re such a bitch today. I don’t believe it!” she half-whispered, and they both laughed out loud.
As she looked up towards the floor above, she stopped in her tracks and, to Pi Nok’s surprise, took hold of his hand and squeezed it tightly. Without turning around, she said in panic: “That’s him with his wife. And that must be his grandson. Don’t look, they’re coming down. Oh no! What do I do? Where do I go?”
Without hesitating, Pi Nok pulled her gently onto the escalator. Now he too looked up and saw a man with grey hair carrying a yellow plastic shopping bag. He was in a dark, well-cut suit and looked like a businessman taking time off from the office to do some shopping with the family. Next to him was a stout woman in a Thai silk outfit, wearing thick sunglasses and a complicated, stiff hairdo, and behind them a small boy whose hand was touching the man’s shoulder. As they came closer, to his utter astonishment Pi Nok recognized the man’s face. “It’s destiny,” he thought to himself, suddenly remembering the fortune teller’s prediction. Nong Maew had never divulged her patron’s real name. She always referred to him as Darling, using the English word but stressing the last syllable so that it sounded Thai. It was the way they addressed each other, she had said when she first told Pi Nok about the man who had picked her up in the club two years earlier and who then, one day, out of the blue, proposed that she should be his mistress. She had added that he was good-looking and fit for his sixty-eight years, and that, naturally, he was loaded. This last detail was the most important one. For why else would she be wasting her youth on a married man nearly four times her age who had no intention of committing himself to her in a million years? As the family passed Nong Maew and Pi Nok on their way down to the second floor, the man she referred to as Darling looked over in their direction. The woman was turning the other way while the boy’s attention was drawn to a colourful film poster that was hanging off the balcony. Nong Maew did not return the gaze. Instead she put on a hard, artificial expression of indifference and fixed her attention on the space in front of her. In doing so, she was unaware that it was not at her that Darling was directing his gaze, but at her companion, for as they passed each other with only the two feet between them, he too recognized Pi Nok and in that moment, involuntarily, his whole face lit up with a spontaneous expression that can only be described as remembered pleasure.