Bangkok Haunts

traded
yaa baa.
His voice is stronger, hoarser. He goes to the single window of his hut to look down on the compound where his elephant assassins graze.
    I say, “Gamon.”
    He sighs. “There is more.”
    “Tell me. It might save someone’s life.”
    Controlling his tone: “Her last e-mail didn’t tell the whole story. It didn’t tell the story at all.”
    I think he wants to turn his face to me but cannot. I have him in profile while light starts to bleach the compound. “Things she didn’t want to remember or think about simply ceased to exist in her mind.”
    He summons the courage to face me. “You saw the reference to incest, but you didn’t pick up on the significance.”
    “Tell me, my friend, while there is still time.”
    A groan comes from the heart. “It started just like she said, two frightened kids in a wet and stinking two-room hut, Mum and Dad drinking, smoking
yaa baa,
and screwing in the next room—partying, you understand—no food for a day or two because they were too far gone. Then when Mum was unconscious and Dad was out of his head, he would call for her. He liked to mix sex with his voodoo. She would go to him, then come back looking like death. Looking like a seventy-year-old fourteen-year-old. But she stopped him from using me. Even then she was using her body to protect me.” A long sigh. “But she had her needs too.”
    After a pause, he starts again in a stronger voice. “Sure, that’s how it started. She showed me what she wanted and how she wanted it done. When I was a little older, she showed me what
I
wanted and did it for me. That was after her first tour. My first experience of sex was world-class, you might say.”
    He coughs. “Nothing wrong with that, apart from some primitive taboo designed to keep the tribal genome healthy, which hardly applies in an age of contraception. People who worry about such things should worry more about how Damrong and I would have turned out without incest.”
    A long pause. “But when she came back from her first tour in Singapore, she had changed. She was only eighteen, but she was a woman.” Licking his lips: “And a whore. Whores suffer from terminal love starvation—you know that. They screw and they screw and they screw, and not a drop of love comes out of it no matter what they try. A kind of madness takes over them. They must have a real lover, even if he’s some ugly, broken-down, old white man—”
    “Or a close family relation.”
    He nods. “After every tour she came home panting for me. Usually she would get to Surin and call for me. I would go see her in a hotel. If she’d done well that month, she would rent a five-star suite. She liked showing me the power of her money. She was so hungry for me, it was almost like being raped. But of course, I wanted love too.” A couple of beats pass. “She would always spoil me afterward, buy me motorbikes, whatever I wanted. One time she’d made so much, she bought me a Harley-Davidson Fat Boy—we had to sell it a few months later when times got tough. She would say over and over again that our love was the only way, that she couldn’t keep on the Game and support me if she didn’t have me to come back to.” Looking at me curiously: “How did your mother handle it? Did she keep asking you if you really loved her?”
    “We went through that stage.” Paris, old Truffaut snoring in his gigantic Belle Epoque bedroom under the silk bedspread, Nong embarrassed in front of me for going with such an old man:
You do love me, Sonchai, don’t you? You forgive your mum, darling, don’t you?
    “But she never seduced you?”
    “Nong? No. Impossible even to imagine.”
    “From the age of fifteen I heard the same words over and over:
If you ever leave me, I’ll kill myself.
”
    Light dawns in my skull just as the heat starts to bite, and sweat magically appears all over his brown body. I think:
Of course, foolish of me, she would have needed a real lover just to carry on.
But he would have had to be a cripple, hobbled. Memory flash: once walking with her on Sukhumvit, hand in hand, insanely happy, I tripped on a manhole cover—a stupidity you commit only when you’re in love. I had to limp for a couple of days. I expected Damrong to despise me, but her reaction was opposite to that. She took care of me, urged me to lean on her shoulder, massaged my ankle in the middle of the busy street, showed love while I was helpless, used kindness from her palette of seduction.