Bangkok Haunts

poisoned your days and nights for months on end for you to even think of doing anything so reckless as to invest in that snuff movie. Can you admit that you loved her?”
    “What are you talking about?”
    “Yes, with you I can use that word. Strange, isn’t it? You are so much harder, so much tougher than your accomplice Smith, and yet with you that word comes to mind. She was, after all, your total and complete opposite—dare I suggest your other half? You in the penthouse, she in the gutter. She twisted a knife in your heart by telling you all about Smith, the handsome, phallic
farang
whose cock was so much bigger than yours. She was an expert at injecting acid into your veins just when you thought you were winning. Am I right?”
    “Go on.”
    “Lust is blind to class. What drove you out of your mind was her total and intimate understanding of that reptilian side of you. She knew where your ambition came from. It came from a kind of hatred of life—exactly the same impulse that drove her. You got rich out of revenge on life. So did she, in the end. And then there was always your mother. At the end of the day, only a whore could really turn you on.”
    His eyes pierce like needles. “Bring on the elephant. Get it over with.”
    He retreats to a corner of his cell where light does not reach.
    “Ah, no one doubts that you are harder than steel, Khun Tanakan. All who know you would agree. But think about this. If she is able to reach you at will, night after night, and rape you dry even while you are in the body, what chance will you have on the other side?” Chinese are even more ferociously superstitious than we are. I observe a twitch in his right hand, then a shudder as he turns to the wall.
    Over in a corner of the compound the Khmer have gone back to work on the first of the bamboo spheres. It’s taking shape but is still very wobbly. After an hour or so they give up. Too hot. There is no hurry. The show won’t begin today, or even tomorrow.

35
    The first you see of dawn is blood in the eastern treetops and a universal glowering heralding another unbearable day. Twenty minutes later the sky starts to blind while it boils, and you do everything in your power to get out of the way. The sun itself is usually invisible behind a pulsating screen of humidity, so that the whole sky seems to radiate an unhealthy intensity of light and heat. I awaken early, before first light, wash myself down at a stone trough outside my hut, and wrap my sarong around me.
    My body still wet, my sarong soaked, I make up my mind to climb the stairs to Gamon’s hut. I decide not to knock but press the door. It opens, and I step over the threshold. I guess he could not be dead and still be in a semilotus position, but the vital signs are few. I step over to him where he meditates with his back against a wall under a window. I think I am about to shake him, but the Buddha directs differently. I caress his beautiful face and kiss him gently on the forehead. “Phra Titanaka, my brother,” I whisper.
    He opens his eyes in another universe. He smiles with the generosity of one who has dumped ego and accepts eagerly the love in my eyes; then he remembers, and the anguish takes over.
    “Gamon,” I say, “we’re going to have to let them go. Baker is dead because of us, but it was not really our fault. We don’t have a lot of bad karma arising from his death. But if we go through with Damrong’s plan, what will become of us? We’ll be locked in granite for a million years.”
    Horror in his eyes: “And if I don’t obey her? Have you any idea the power she has? She visits me every night.
I still have sex with her.
”
    “Because you let her. You’re a Buddhist monk—how can you allow yourself to be enslaved?”
    My words startle him. He blinks at me then stares at his robes. “Of course, I’m so used to these, I’ve forgotten I no longer have the right to them.”
    In his disoriented state his childlike response is to stand and disrobe in front of me. This is not the effect I expected, and I want to tell him to put them on again, but as he stands in a pair of boxer shorts with the heap of saffron cloth at his feet, I watch a fascinating transformation. The monklike comportment quite melts away in less than a minute, together with the personality that went with it. That other side of him emerges: harder, more primitive, more built for survival, more criminal. I see clearly now the young man who once smoked and