Bangkok Haunts

“I see.”
    “Perhaps you don’t. She did a tour in Switzerland that lasted eighteen months. She was making so much money, she didn’t want to lose her clientele until she felt she’d cleaned up.”
    Two beats pass while he brings his heart under control, then: “I was the one who couldn’t stand it. I simply couldn’t. Without her I was less than half alive. I smoked too much
yaa baa,
started selling it, got caught. She had to rush home to bribe the cops to get me out of jail.”
    A terrible choking takes hold of him. He coughs hoarsely and shakes his head. He points to that short, thin white scar on his left wrist, which precisely replicates the one on his sister’s arm. “Childish, third-world melodramatic—but the blood was real. We vowed our lives away to each other. She said she’d never leave me for so long again, I promised to reform, go to some fancy school in Bangkok that she wanted to send me to, learn to speak English—I would be the saved one. When she was totally burned out by her late twenties, I would be able to look after her. Repay the debt:
gatdanyu.
That’s what this case has always been about, Detective. You could call it a Case of Third-World Debt.”
    “But you ordained,” I say.
    He rubs his eyes. “She did try to make more regular visits, but then the chance came to work in America, and she was greedy. She used some Mafia connections to get a visa. She was away two years that time. I wasn’t a teenager anymore, I was in my early twenties. I’d graduated from university with a degree in sociology, of all things. I don’t think she realized how useless that was going to be.” He looks frankly into my eyes. “I knew I could never work—too fucked up. But I didn’t want to betray her by going back to drugs. I did what any young Thai or Khmer man might do. I took refuge in the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha. But the Thai Sangha wouldn’t have me because of my criminal record, so I crossed the border to Poipet, the Cambodian gangster town where our parents came from. No worries about criminal convictions there. When I e-mailed my decision to her, she didn’t mind at all. She thought I would stay in the robes for a month or so before boredom forced me out. So did I.”
    I am staring at him, lost in horror, wonder, and admiration. I say, “Oh.”
    “Yes, oh.”
    “You found you were a natural.”
    “Everyone said so, from the abbot to my meditation master.
A reincarnate for sure,
they said.
This kid has been around for millennia, flirting with Buddhism, never quite taking the final step.
I found
vipassana
so easy, I was able to meditate for a full two hours after only the first week. After a year I could manage a full day and night. I was experiencing freedom and happiness for the first time in my twenty-four years on earth.”
    “While she was in the States.”
    “Yes.”
    “It was easy to believe that the Buddha had intervened and relieved you of all karma, even
gatdanyu.
”
    “Yes. Exactly.”
    “But when she came back?”
    He turns again to the window. “She’d been busted for prostitution and running a bawdy house in Fort Lauderdale with her American husband. She didn’t give a damn about that, but she was in a rage against American men. According to her, they were either pubescent boys in men’s bodies, or total animals. She despised her husband. Two years with not a single emotional event in the life of a young woman, even a woman like her, was hard to take. She’d spent the last twelve months craving me.”
    “She wrote to you?”
    “E-mail. In Cambodia the rules are very relaxed. Monks surf the Net all the time—it’s not even frowned on.”
    My sharp intake of breath sounds like a hiss in that hot little hut. “You were living two lives.”
    He nods. “I couldn’t tell her by e-mail that I was the real thing, a genuine monk. I didn’t have the strength.”
    “Then she returned from the U.S.”
    “Then she returned,” he agrees, with a grunt not totally devoid of humor. “She was boiling with rage that I did not make myself available.” He coughs. “You know how Cambodia is. She bribed some monks to look the other way, shaved her hair, dressed in white like a
looksit,
and sneaked into the monastery.” He challenges me with a sudden ironic smile. “Can you imagine? I hadn’t had sex for two years. How erotic, her naked body with her head shaved. Silent and furtive in candlelight. Insane.” A pause. “Of course, after that night