Couldn’t we just chat on the Net?
You have to give me your number. I talked to my boss yesterday, told him I was ready to go over there, and he practically went down on his knees to thank me. Now in return you’ve got to send me at least your telephone number. Please, Chanya, I’m dying over here. PS: I watched The Simpsons for you last night. Homer became the official mascot for the Springfield Isotopes baseball team-it was a good episode.
Just as at the very beginning of their relationship, she found herself drawn in by some mysterious force. Perhaps that legendary energy that Americans were supposed to have? Or maybe just plain old female narcissism-you couldn’t help but feel flattered when a man wanted you so bad he was prepared to give up Washington and live in a third-world dump just to be in the same country. She sent him her Thai mobile number. After that it was ring, ring, ring. To judge by the timing of the calls, he was a true insomniac and took the precaution of having a glass of wine before he called her, so she was protected from that heavy, preachy, serious side. Drunk, even over the phone, he cracked her up. All of a sudden those long, hot, sleepy, boring afternoons were punctuated by her straight-from-the-gut laughter.
A few weeks later he was calling her from a town she’d vaguely heard of, right at the other end of Thailand, on the Malaysian border, a place called Songai Kolok. She’d never been there herself but knew it to be a brothel town catering to Muslim men who came over in droves from puritanical Malaysia. In the flesh industry the women tended to be looked down on by the Bangkok elite.
She closed her mobile after that first call from Songai Kolok in a strange state of mind. So far it had been one long telephonic giggle, a hilarious injection of American wit, passion, energy, and optimism with not a single flash of possessiveness, intrusiveness, hypocrisy, preaching, or intolerance. She was getting the United States strictly as advertised, but she doubted he would be able to keep it up face to face. Despite his pleas she took more than a month to make that first visit down south. She steadily refused to give him her address in Thailand. He still did not know her family name.
He met her at the bus station in Songai Kolok, and she saw immediately something was wrong. It was early morning (she traveled by night), and he had not had a drink. That brooding, boiling, resentful, fragmented side was working his jaw as he took her bag, but there was more than that. He had lost weight and looked ill. Songai Kolok was not doing him any good at all. From his conversation in the cab on the way back to his apartment, he let slip how much he hated it. Quite simply, he was suffering from severe culture shock. The only other Asian country he’d visited (the only country he’d visited outside of the United States, period) was Japan, which had been a kind of reverse culture shock: in the minutiae of daily life the Japs were streets ahead of the United States, they had managed that almost-impossible thing of combining an ancient culture with hypermodern high-tech gizmos. In Japan everything was better than in America, the food, the hygiene, the nightlife, the women, the tattoos-especially the tattoos. By contrast Songai Kolok was, well, a third-world toilet.
He pointed out the window of his apartment at the police station with the hundreds of whore shacks leaning against the perimeter wall. “See that? I watch them every night.” Staring aggressively into her face: “I watch them every night.”
So what? Perhaps he was not sure himself, but it chilled her heart when he showed her his little telescope. “They’re always grinning and smiling. It’s so… hell, I don’t know.”
“What is it, Mitch? What’s the problem?”
A shake of the head. “How can they do it? Why aren’t they in hell? How can they just do it, like they’re taking a shower or something, and afterward it’s all over, like nothing happened at all? Like they’re good friends doing each other a favor, money for her, blow job and fuck for him? It’s like, like… I don’t know.”
On her way from Surin she had changed buses at Bangkok, where she slipped into a downtown supermarket especially for him. She took out a bottle of Californian red, one of his favorites. He scowled at it but gave her a corkscrew to open it. She found a couple of glasses in his kitchen, poured him a very generous slug, and watched him drink. She waited to see if the magic still worked. At first it seemed not to, he continued to curse the filthy animalistic young people who congregated around the shacks every night, but little by little his mood altered. A light-slightly insane but preferable to the depression-came into his eyes. All of a sudden he was grinning.
Kneeling in front of her where she sat on his sofa: “Goddamned hypocrite, aren’t I?”
“Yes.”
“I’m getting on my high horse, and what do I really want right now more than anything in the world?”
“To screw the ass of a Thai whore.”
A shocked look, then laughter. “My god, Chanya, what is wrong with me? What is it that I just can’t deal with?”
She did not say: reality. To tell the truth, she was feeling pretty horny herself. It had been nearly five months since she’d had sex with anyone, and she’d been remembering his extraordinary stamina, when drunk. She allowed him to undress her.
After his usual command performance, he burst into sobs. “I’m so fucked up, honey. I’m sorry. Maybe this is a mistake. I don’t want to see myself torture you all over again. Maybe I’m just a totally impossible, fucked-up freak?”
She buried a hand in his hair and did not reply.
She stayed with him three nights on that first visit and began to understand what had happened to him. His mind went through the same cycle as in Washington, with a vital difference. In D.C. his work had had the effect of focusing his talents, giving him something to chew on hour after hour; true, he left work and prepared for his change of personality in a grimish sort of state, but still with the feeling of having gotten somewhere, of having achieved something, of having made progress. In Washington, in other words, he had purpose, and to an American there is no higher god. Down in Songai Kolok he had no purpose, his excuse to his boss for being here was false, as was obvious after the first day. With his quick mind, he saw that this brothel town was pretty much impervious to Muslim fanaticism for the very good reason that it was dominated by Muslim decadents who knew how to deal with troublesome beards. So night after night he watched the shacks. This had become his purpose. It was so blatant. The cops came in full uniform from time to time to talk to the girls, have a chat and a laugh, and drink a beer or two, and the johns came and talked to the girls and the cops, and everyone was kind of partying. There didn’t seem to be any guilt at all. The Muslim boys were strangely respectful and polite to the girls, and as for the girls-well, you would never know they lived on the bottom rung of a feudal society; they didn’t seem to carry any kind of inferiority complex at all. Actually, they seemed a lot happier than the average corporate drone. Come to think of it, they seemed a lot happier than anyone he knew, in the States or in Japan. Their gaiety seemed not in the least forced or brittle.