Chanya couldn’t handle it any better than I could. She became a novice nun at a radical forest convent out in Mukdahan, on the border with Laos. They still meditate over pictures of dead bodies there. She turned into a fanatic, observing and merging with every stage of human decomposition. For my part, I found Doctor Norbu Tietsin, the mad Tibetan mind master. Let’s say he showed me how to orbit the earth, as an alternative to living on it. The technique doesn’t go with alcohol, though. Even a small amount is inimical to spiritual evolution; alcohol is a death drug, a devil brew from the lands of the setting sun. It drags the spirit back into the body: more torture.
“I’m going to have to roll a joint, Lek,” I say, suddenly feverish.
“Not in the taxi, for Buddha’s sake.” He stays my hand, which is reaching for the small bag of pot I’m never without these days. “Master, face it, you’re bipolar. Your tragedy has done this to you. With help you can get over it. Real help, hospital help. Farang help.”
“Sorry, Lek,” I say, and pull the handle to open the door and get out of the cab. “It’s an emergency.”
It’s been no more than an hour, but I’ve forgotten all about the gigantic dead American and the theatrical circumstances of his murder. I’m concerned with how to survive the next five minutes. It happens that the cab has stopped in the jam outside the Rose Garden on Soi 7, where I’m quite well known. I dash through the bar to the toilets, where I find a booth and roll a joint, but I can’t stand the claustrophobia, so I leave the booth as soon as the joint is rolled. While I’m feverishly smoking, I check out some of the signs on the wall above the pissoirs, which warn that the establishment is not responsible for the behavior of the women who use the bar to solicit customers, and advises patrons to take note of a girl’s identity card before taking her back to a hotel. There’s a female worker in the process of cleaning the toilets, but she doesn’t seem to notice the acrid stench of my joint. I retreat to a cubicle to sit on the throne and soak myself in a damn good cry.
3
We were going to talk about psychosis, farang. The word, I believe, means perforation of the psyche: we must imagine a delicate net of filaments, like the old-fashioned mantles of gas lamps, which, due to ill-treatment by life, people, and gods, suffer irreversible damage, leaving cancerous black holes where the clear light of unimpeded consciousness once radiated. Actually, it is a mystery which cannot be penetrated without resort to myth, metaphor, and magic, but we’ll keep it simple for now. Nor can it be understood without reference to the law of karma: cause and effect. I kick you, you kick me back. Confession: I provoked the world and the world turned on me. The private history of my fragmentation is as follows.
I have only myself to blame. For years my boss, mentor, and surrogate father Police Colonel Vikorn nagged me to get him a set of DVDs of the Godfather series, with Marlon Brando and Al Pacino. The problem all along was that I only could find editions with Thai subtitles, and Vikorn is too lazy to read and watch the action at the same time. Finally, Lek found an illegally dubbed set of a reasonable standard and I gave them to Vikorn on his last birthday. According to his Wife Four, who was down from his mansion in Chiang Mai to do her tour of duty at his house in Bangkok (he likes to operate a roster, which the wives appreciate since it enables them to know when they are free for full-time shopping and when they are required to perform marital chores), he devoured all the DVDs in one long, whisky-enhanced sitting.
His verdict, the next day, was carefully balanced. I have indelibly burned into my memory cells the image of him sitting behind his vast, empty desk, with the DVD set dumped in his out-box, like a solved case. His posture was both regal and forensic, although he brushed his hand over his short gray hair and stood up when he got bored with sitting down. He is of average height, muscular, given to wearing the homely brown fatigues of a police colonel the way Napoléon wore his old uniform to reassure the troops (Vikorn is a multimillionaire; some even use the B word to describe his wealth); but for a man in his midsixties he moves with an unusual suppleness; only gangsters are so feline at his age. In his considered opinion old Corleone was a total sissy for refusing to trade in smack, and Sollozzo was well within his rights to try to have him bumped off. My Colonel even honored me with one of his famous analects:
“What’s wrong with trafficking in heroin? The smack goes to Europe or America. Some self-obsessed narcissist who otherwise would be causing untold pollution driving to and from work every day, probably in a car without passengers, only to go burning electricity in an overheated office somewhere-thanks to us he stays home in a stupor and gets the sack. His work gets outsourced to Bangladesh, where someone does the same job better for a fifth of the pay, which he uses to feed a family of seven, and to top it all he commutes to work on a bicycle-the whole earth benefits.”
On the other hand, he liked the ruthless way young Michael Corleone cleared out the opposition after the Don had been shot, but doubted it was really necessary to flee New York and start over in Las Vegas. With better planning and more efficient use of funds, contacts, and leverage, the Corleones could have bridged the country like a colossus with a foot on both coasts. He loved the way they severed the head of the racehorse to intimidate Jack Woltz, but despised them for failing properly to capitalize on the wheeze: “They could have had the whole film industry wrapped up after that. This is the problem with farang jao paw: they’re shortsighted, triumphalistic, and they don’t have Buddhist restraint or humility-that’s why I hate dealing with them.”
But there was one feature of the Don’s setup that intrigued Vikorn and brought that gleam into his eyes which invariably spells danger for someone, usually me. “That light-skinned farang who’s not as hairy as the others-what’s his name?”
“ Hagen. He’s light-skinned because he’s Irish-born. Vito Corleone adopted him after Sonny Corleone dragged him in off the street one day. The Don sent him to law school.”
“Yeah, that one. What do they call him, his job title?”
“Consigliere.”
“Right,” he said, looking directly into my eyes.
As usual, he had taken me by surprise. I had thought we were discussing an old movie nobody talks about anymore. I had not detected any signals that we were discussing the rest of my life.
“No,” I said. “Don’t even think about it. You know me, I’m the biggest wimp on the force, I only survive through your patronage, in ten years of active service I’ve never killed anyone, not even by accident-isn’t that despicable? All the real men on the force think I might be a secret katoey, a ladyboy like Lek-” I was stuttering a little at this point, for while I was speaking my subconscious was delivering pictures of me full of holes bent over a car hood somewhere in Klong Toey, near the river. Or maybe in the river itself.
“I, I, I have this Bu-, Bu-, Bu-, Buddhist conscience, I really do try to follow the Eightfold Path, I mean I take it seriously, I don’t juh-, juh-, just go to temple, I study Buddhism, I probably know more about Buddhism than the average monk, you said it yourself, I’m a monk manqué-no.” I said it again, more to convince myself than him, “No. No, no, no way I could be anybody’s consigliere.”