The girl chained to the papier-mâché rock (a dragon lurks in a hole nearby) is quite naked and trying not to look bored while they whip her and drop hot wax onto her breasts. She smiles at me with a face serenely incapable of debauchery (she will sell mangoes from a market stall tomorrow with exactly the same happy smile) and with her eyes asks if I want her. I am about to signal no when I notice the serpent coiled around her navel. The club is gloomy, too gloomy to examine a work of such quality. Confident that I am not the first to make the request, I call for illumination. The mamasan obliges with a flashlight (Hitachi, rechargeable battery). Up close and without the need for a magnifying glass, I confirm my deepest forensic suspicions: this is a very superior snake: emerald green scales of variegated shades, an ink-blue forked tongue ravishing her belly button, brilliantly designed wings. (Not the huge clumsy things you see Saint George grappling with, but the delicate, diaphanous propellants of Oriental myth: I know I’m on to something here.) I demand that the damsel be released from her bonds immediately.
Once I confirm that I am willing to pay, the girl, whose name is Dao, slips out of her chains without need for assistance. She recognizes no social imperative to put any clothes on, so now she and I are sitting on a padded bench at the far end of the club, situated not far from other benches with other bodies in perpetual motion. The mamasan would clearly be happier if I conducted my interrogation while at least going through the motions of seduction, and Dao rescues me from professional restraints by taking my right hand and cupping it over her left breast, where I gently pull off the wax flakes. She checks my cock to see if her body is having the usual commercially desirable effect on my body (no comment), while I whisper my question lyrically into her right ear: Where in Thailand did she get such a marvelous tattoo?
She smiles gratefully, as if I have complimented her on a new dress, and reveals there is another. Kneeling on the bench and turning her back to me, I see that a couple of dragons (lightly done with considerable humor, hardly more substantial than clouds, masterpieces of the body artist’s craft-if I were to have dragons competing for my private parts, I would certainly choose these) are fighting for possession of the dark prize. “Fantastic,” I confirm as she happily straddles me and places my left hand directly on her vagina, which she informs me, in case I hadn’t noticed, is quite wet.
“But the tattoos?”
“Stroke me and tell me what you want me to do. I work much better when I’m horny.”
There is (let’s face it) a primeval signal sent to all parts of the male nervous system when direct contact is made in this way. It’s quite a wrench to pull consciousness out of the crotch area and shove it a little higher up the spine.
“It’s okay, you can fuck me here if you want. The boss is a rich Japanese-he pays off the police. We can do anything you like.”
“But the tattoo?”
“Ask me while we’re doing it. You’ve got me really horny.”
“I can’t-I’m shy.”
“Oh, you want to take me somewhere?”
“No, I… I can’t get it up.”
“You kidding? That’s one hell of a stalk.”
“I like to just pretend.”
Disappointed: “Oh.”
“Just go through the motions. That’s right.”
“What turns you on?”
“If you would just talk about the tattoos, that would be great. I’ll pay you just the same as if we were doing it.”
“Tattoos, huh? And you’re not even Japanese. A customer made me have them,” she confesses into my ear, working her loins with a feline motion I’m rather fond of. “He was Japanese, of course. He said he liked my body, but I was too naked without tattoos. He said he would want me much more if I had them, and then he’d pay me double, so I said okay. It worked. Without the tattoos he hardly lasted more than a couple of minutes. With them he could go on and on for ages. Every time he got tired, he would make me stand up so he could study them again and get horny. He said they were the best he’d seen outside of Japan -the guy who did it was a master.”
“What was his name?”
“You like the dragon who is licking my cunt from behind?”
“Very much.”
“That one took ages. He had to come back every day for a week. He sort of sketched it out first, then did the coloring. He had to be really careful-you know, to avoid infection.”
“Was it painful?”
“Not too much. He used some long Japanese bamboo needles that he had a special name for. I was terrified, but actually he was very gentle. He sort of turned me on in a weird way.”
“What was his name?”
“The customer?”
“No, the tattooist.”
“Can’t remember. Ishy something? Ikishy? Witakashi? Or maybe it was Yamamoto-I really can’t remember. Can you talk dirty some more? I’m losing concentration.”
“What was the customer’s name?”
“Maybe Honda. Or Toshiba.”
“Okay, you don’t want to tell me, that’s okay.”
“Them’s the rules. Talk dirty, will you?”
Talk dirty? Oddly enough, considering my vocation, this is not an art I have ever had occasion to master. Furthermore, ever since my incarnation in the great Buddhist university of Nalanda, sex has often taken me in an odd way. With all due respect, farang, I have to say you’ve wasted the past two thousand years with your weird tendency to suppress it. That was never the purpose of celibacy; no sir, au contraire, the point is sublimation. Stoke up that fire, build it into an intolerable heat, a boiling cauldron of unendurable intensity, then let it take you up through the chakras all the way to the thousand-petaled lotus in the head. I always think about mathematics at this stage-Buddhist mathematics, of course. At Nalanda it took me only five short lifetimes to work my way up from slopping-out-untouchable to the abbot’s favorite disciple. With the Mogul hordes clamoring at the gates and slaughtering monks all over India, five of us worked serenely to restore the zero to its pre-Vedic dignity as the numerical symbol of nirvana (it is the number of om, if that helps); as such it not only represents Nothing (an obvious enough discovery, hardly worth all the credit the Arabs demand for stealing it from us) but also Everything and, naturally, every shade of value between those two extremes. My discovery was that when trapped in an equation, so to speak, it constantly changed value, thus solving the problem and re-creating it at the speed of thought. Transcendental math may not be much use for the household budget, but it remains the essence of narrative.
“What was that you were whispering?” Dao wants to know.
“Nothing. Everything.”
“You’re a romantic? I haven’t had a romantic client for ages. Would you like to have me with another girl? Do you have a wife? You could take turns dominating me.”
“I’m not married.”
“Or with another man-I like that. You can exploit me with both your cocks at the same time. It wouldn’t cost double-say, fifty percent more than for one.”
“Did he have a shop?”
“Who?”
“The tattooist.”
“No, he came to my customer’s condominium every time. There was something special about him, you know, he wouldn’t have had a shop.”
“What was special?”
“What are you thinking about now?”
“ Om. ”
“That’s your wife’s name?”
“I told you I’m not married. Did he tattoo any of the other girls?”
“No. He was sort of special for my customer. All the other Japanese men were jealous when they saw my tats, but he wouldn’t say who did them. They really turn you on, don’t they?”
“Umm.”
“Tell you what. Carry me over to the other bench, then you can look at them in the mirror.”