12
Meat scares me and makes my flesh crawl, even when it doesn’t resemble anything human. Am I getting soft or are the cases getting harder? Why do I see three faceless corpses whenever I close my eyes? Why does my mind keep fixating on the deep gashes and the floppy blubber where livers and kidneys used to be? And no eyes, sweet Buddha, no eyes. The worst was this morning just before waking: an army of the blind and faceless moving in a dogged mass toward rebirth and revenge.
I’m curled up on my bed sucking my thumb and trembling. If anyone asks, I’m going to say I caught a touch of fever in Dubai. This case has got to me like no other, and I’m not even convinced it’s a case. To make matters infinitely worse, my partner, my darling Chanya, doesn’t seem to have noticed there’s something wrong. She watched me drag myself across the room after only a couple of hours on duty, blinked at me without losing that glazed look she has for everything and everyone except her computer monitor, seemed to have a bright idea while I limped broken and shattered to the bed, and started stabbing ferociously at her keyboard just as I collapsed.
I called Lek on my cell phone to tell him to get me a supply of dope from Sergeant Ruamsantiah. I’m going to smoke until I forget who I am, and I’m not coming back to earth until they’ve improved it. Really, this time I’ve had it with everything. I can feel it, that thing that happens to your mind when they add that extra few ounces to your paranoia and you sink under the weight. Every time I close my eyes I see someone with a curved knife aiming for my vital organs with an expression of insane greed. I see monsters from the deep, breaking the surface after billions of years in the lightless zones: blind, hideous, eel-gray, voracious for human flesh. I’m trembling.
“I’m just going out to buy some more printer ink. D’you want anything?” Chanya calls.
“No,” I groan.
She comes over to the bed. “You okay?”
“Fine.”
“Good. Listen, I just wrote this brilliant paragraph. I’ve nearly finished my thesis, and I had to get the ending right. I know you won’t understand much, but you can get the idea: Thus the comodification of bodies, whether superficially in the sense of a prostitute painting herself in a way designed to send the required signal to prospective customers, or in the more extreme sense of a person selling, or having taken from them, a vital organ such as a kidney, is obviously and unavoidably a consequence of the present economic system which relies on what has been called “the promiscuity of objects.” This system carries with it the unspoken implication that once something has been defined as an “object,” it is automatically assumed to be “promiscuous” in the sense that it may be bought and sold like any other object, even if the object in question is somebody’s kidney or liver-or whole body. This kind of thinking is exactly what underpinned the slave trade for hundreds of years: as soon as a captive West African was defined as “property,” then he could be treated as a “promiscuous object,” that is to say an object whose human rights have been magically transmuted into a money value in the accounts of the property owner. What is unclear, however, is why modern Western culture has continued to target prostitution by adult volunteers as “immoral” (i.e., in Professor Smith’s definition “the enemy”). Consider the manner in which both Hollywood and the advertising industry have been comodifying bodies for the purpose of profit (i.e., treating both male and female models as “promiscuous objects” to be traded). At first glance it seems strange that the line should be drawn at what one might call the “cottage industry” of street-level prostitution, especially in Bangkok, where the practitioners are relatively free of exploitation by pimps and can therefore fairly be described as choosing to commodify their bodies on their own account for the purpose of survival. It may be that the answer can be found in a parallel paradox: the obsessive repression of “soft” drugs like marijuana, despite the wealth of data which proves that the “hard” drug alcohol is far more dangerous to health and responsible for almost an infinitely greater number of diseases and deaths. It is not difficult to see what the private trading of marijuana and street-level prostitution have in common: these are industries any private person can develop on their own account without being squeezed out by big business or falling liable to tax. Thus it is in the suppression of prostitution and soft drugs that we see the hypocrisy at the heart of the culture. It is in the interests of government and big business to appear to uphold a “moral code,” the true purpose of which is to ensure that impoverished individuals cannot escape their poverty except by becoming fiscally and commercially usefuclass="underline" read slaves. In other words, it is a “code” driven by exactly the same dynamic as the slave trade. But, as Professor Steiner points out (op. cit.), the peculiar reverence we have for moral codes depends exactly on their being founded on something beyond functionalism. A money-driven morality is no morality at all.
“That’s just amazingly brilliant. You’re a genius,” I say. I do not add: I just hope I’m still sane when you get your Ph. D. In my insecurity I want to ask about the rumors, but in my insecurity I don’t have the courage. She’s basically a very honest girl, and I don’t think I could handle any form of toxic truth right now.
While she’s out, Lek comes with a sizable package, takes one look at me, asks where I keep my skins, rolls me a big one, shakes his head, and leaves. Now Chanya is back, and I’m quite high. At least I’ve got control of the demons. Thanks to the power of cannabis, I’m able to shrink them with my brand-new green demon-shrinking gun, which sort of grew out of my right hand after the third joint. Chanya smells the dope, gives a mildly disapproving glance, shrugs, goes back to her computer. Time passes (it could be a minute or a couple of aeons, this is export-quality stuff).
She comes back over to me. “You sure you’re okay?”
This time the floodgates open. “No, I’m not fucking okay,” I bawl. Now I’m blurting, mostly about the eyeballs I sold that won’t give me any peace, but also about those three anonymous corpses in Phuket.
She raises her eyes to the ceiling. To complicate matters still further, I am horny. I can just about reach her left breast, thanks to the way she’s leaning over, which suddenly seems to offer solace in a cruel world, so with the directness of a monkey I grab it. I wouldn’t call it a lecherous gesture, myself, more like a dash for safety by a threatened psyche.
She sighs. “Oh, Sonchai, it’s always the same.”
“What is?”
“When you smoke too much. You go space traveling for a couple of hours, disdaining the earth and everything on it. Then when you finally get back, you’re like a horny sixteen-year-old.”
I release her breast like a drowning man releasing a straw. “I’m in a state,” I admit. “I’m kind of scared, but it’s not that exactly.” She frowns, because she sees I’ve gone into that mood of meticulous self-analysis that often accompanies a comedown. “It’s more like fear overlaying something fundamental. I mean it is fear, but it’s mixed in with something more general, like what’s happening to the species?”
“What species?”
“Humanity.”
She curses. “It’s Vikorn who’s done this to you. That old bastard. I hate him. I hate having to look at his hypocritical bloody mug on every third lamppost. I hate the way he’s going to win the election and bleed Bangkok white.” She pulls her cell phone out of her jeans pocket and stabs at one of her autodial numbers. “Get me Vikorn,” she snarls at the reception.