OK, I pay for you ten thousand baht.
No no no.
OK, I said, my duty ended, and as I turned away I saw the deaf and dumb girl in the corner, bowed over her thumbnail of a mirror.
She could speak only in a series of cries which resembled those of a woman reaching orgasm.
Drowning accident, a barmaid said. She get water in her ears. After that, she never speak or hear again. Crazy in the head.
Walking over to her corner, I saw her lipsticking herself with graceful untiring insect motions. The other girls were sipping their Scotches, sodas and fizzy waters, but she had nothing. I wanted to be her friend.
She can have a drink, too, I said. I promised you I'd pay for everyone.
OK, sir, never mind, said the barmaid.
I put my arm around her and bought her a Coke.
She she she want speak with you, but she cannot, said the barmaid.
Stroking her waist-length hair, I drew a heart on a sheet of paper, and she uttered a cry of joy. She wrote: I like you. — I kissed her hands, and she pretended to push me away.
I gave her my pen, and she drew a flower, and then a long-beaked bird. I drew a flower, too. For an hour we constructed a garden on that greasy piece of paper, and she made that strangely happy noise of hers. Our flowers twined and gathered like the roots that the bat-winged fishes swam between, and we crafted each petal with the care of a reputable goldsmith because we owed all the responsibilities of citizenship to this world of ours which we were crowding with greenness and lemony-smelling bushes (on each, a single yellow flower). In the center of that world we made a country where her shy spirit could dwell in the tea-dark shadows of tree-tendons. Have you ever seen the cloud-forests around Chiang Rai? Our country was steeper than those (that sheet of paper being a sheer white wall) and lusher, its hills bursting with wet leaves and trees bulging and bowing under the weight of their own fecundity. Together we drew our bananas and breadfruits, our red and blue blossoms scented with the sweetish smell of her lipstick. We raised throat-high grasses and the spider-webbed darknesses between flowers, penning in each stamen with a steady loving stroke. I made for her a flowering banana's petals folded back (stubby peels they were, with white bananas inside). Smiling faindy, she thickened the hills with green lace that was delicious like her beloved frothy spit. Finally I presented her with a Virginia meadow beauty, four petaled, pink like her lipstick, whose antlers of a buttery gold reached down to cool the backs of her hands. She moaned in delight.
But the next time I went to that bar, the lady who'd had ten husbands said: Your darling no come today. Hurt her leg motorcycle accident. Hospital. Never go back here. So. You buy me, ten thousand baht?
Never mind, I said. But I'll buy you a drink.
After I'd paid I got up and went to the corner where the deaf and dumb girl had sat. There was a lipsticked napkin, almost certainly not hers, which I turned over, half hoping to find a flower ballpointed on the other side; of course there wasn't anything. It was only a variation of the game I'd played with the woman who had ten husbands, the sad game of searching for something known not to be there.
A few days later, a friend of mine visited that bar. He told me that she was back. He assured me that he'd seen, touched and danced with her. And that wasn't all. He'd found another bar in the same alley, a better and friendlier bar where the drinks were cheaper and he'd met two beautiful deaf and dumb girls, one of whom was a midget. He highly recommended the midget. He said that lately he'd begun to notice deaf and dumb girls everywhere. They were discreet and they were cheap. I myself never saw them.
It would be an exaggeration to claim that every day I thought upon the one I had cared for, but sometimes I wished that I could be with her just an instant, just to make her utter for me that cry which I had so greatly longed to believe expressed perfect happiness.
* About U.S. $40. Although in 1993 some bars in Pat Pong charged 1,500 baht or more for a girl, a small establishment such as this one would have asked between 300 and 500.
THE RIFLES
They caught baby birds and held them. One bird they passed too many times among them and it ended up with a broken wing. They threw it repeatedly into the air to see if it could fly, but it only tumbled crazily down into the moss, flapping its good wing in desperate silence. Finally they dropped it into the campfire. They did that where life was green and muddy and stony in late July; they did it on their low brown mass of island with its pale-eyed lakes and skinny long wispy streaks of snow across gullies and mounds; they did it in their streaky whiteness between capes, but he'd done it down south with Reepah, picking her up one time too many so that she loved him and couldn't fly away, then dropping her and when her wing got better seizing her again. He'd never drop her, though, never. Besides, she'd started it.
He felt terribly nervous and gloomy as he waited for Reepah at the airport. She was now above the blue and green squares and rectangles of fields half hidden by bright northern clouds (small irregular puddles of forest among them); now if she looked down she'd see the lovely indigo of the Saint Lawrence River mirroring clouds between the pincers of its islets where the river darkened between the flat gray bellies of thunderheads; it partook of the wide grace of rivers suddenly tinged by hot dark clouds.
Thank you for Montréal, she said.
It was a July day, a sunny day of rain in Montréal. The maple trees sparkled. Red trucks were so red and the fresh girls as bright as wet stones, striding umbrellaless in the rain.
She wanted him to buy her cigarettes. She said: Secrets is my best friend.
She didn't really want to talk to him or be with him. When they met a drunken Inuk lady on Rue Sainte-Catherine, Reepah talked with her for hours. Him she ignored.
She wanted him to buy her beers until she got drunk. He didn't want to. She looked at him with a hard and nasty viciousness he'd never seen before and shouted: You want to fuck me tonight? If you want to fuck me, I want drunk. I want drunk!
Fine, he said. You don't have to fuck me at all. I'll get you drunk and you can do whatever you want.
After her second or third beer she got louder and happier and she said: I like you. 'Cause I'm drunk.
Every few blocks some spectacle would come out of the summer darkness, like the fantastically roofed houses shooting steep and narrow above the dark street. Purple-plumed clowns mimed by candlelight. They passed the fountain where Reepah had wanted to swim in the afternoon, and she didn't remember it. Everybody was sitting around it; its water fell with a glow; and people sat on the grass listening to musicians and smelling the sweet summer night. Reepah dipped her hand in and wanted to go get drunk. Fullbreasted girls in sundresses floated on the grass's emerald darkness. On the lighted cobblestones a pancake-made-up twelve-year-old was singing humorous French ballads in an exaggerated mincing voice while her father played the guitar; then suddenly the songs grew serious and he could tell that she had a magnificent voice. Reepah smiled faintly for the first moment. Then she sat scratching and staring at her empty beer.
The musicians (who were really astoundingly good) got everybody clapping, so she clapped; in those marble mirrored morgues of blue-lit soundproofed sex bars at first she smiled with naughty delight to see naked boys and girls but soon enough she sat picking her teeth morosely between beers (each of which lasted seconds), and her lower lip gaped slightly wider at the flash of genitals or the applause of the other drinkers but then her black eyes would gaze into some particularly monotonous version of zero. And then a beautiful dancer might move in beautiful ways and she would stare steadily, leaning forward, maybe trying to be beautiful in the way the dancer was (the dancers usually thought that Reepah was a boy), trying to learn what made this other soul the center of attention in a way she could never be. When she was happy, when he bought her another beer, she cried: Aw-riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiigh'!