Bangkok Haunts

doesn’t mean the walls don’t close in on you from time to time.” We carried on like that, with middle-of-the-night chats, until the Damrong case gave us something practical to talk about. I really didn’t expect even a supercop like Kimberley to jump on a plane, though. So, the case aside, I’ve been waiting for signals that she’s ready for the deep and meaningful. It’s taken me a whole week—there are parts of the
farang
psyche with which even I am unfamiliar—to realize that under the tough, relentlessly extrovert, take-no-prisoners carapace, there lives quite a shy girl who doesn’t have a lot of practice in sharing her heart.
    The conversation, at this minute, however, is not about her mood but mine.
    “It’s kind of funny how much you dislike pornography—you know, considering,” the FBI says.
    “That I’ve been involved in the Game all my life and run a brothel? It’s just not the same thing.”
    “What’s the big moral difference?”
    I search for words. Actually,
moral difference
is the right way of putting it. “Spontaneity. A girl arrives in Krung Thep from Isaan feeling lonely, terrified, inadequate, poor. A middle-aged man arrives from the West feeling lonely, terrified, inadequate, rich. They’re like two halves of a coin. All my mother’s bar does is facilitate their inevitable congress, supply the beer and the music, the short-term accommodation, and rake off a little profit. The whole thing is driven by a good healthy primeval human need for animal warmth and comfort. In all my years with the Game I’ve only come across half a dozen serious cases of abuse of one party by another, and I figure that’s because the whole thing works perfectly as an expression of natural morality and grassroots capitalism. The way I see it, we’re like a real estate agency that deals in flesh instead of earth. Setting it all up artificially, though, in a film set, choreographing the whole thing so flabby overweights in Sussex and Bavaria, Minnesota and Normandy, can jerk off without having to tax their imaginations—that strikes me as downright immoral, a crime against life almost. I guess the real difference is that in the bar people actually
do
it. There’s a reality input.”
    She smiles and shakes her head. “You’re just too much, Sonchai. Some people would say you were slightly insane. But when you come out with that kind of stuff, it makes sense, at least for the moment that you’re saying it. How did your mind get so free? What happened to you? Are all Thai pimps like you?”
    “No,” I say. “I’m strange, I guess.”
    She has drunk a bottle of Kloster rather quickly and seems to be sinking into depression. She orders another, though, and drinks it rapidly, straight from the bottle.
“Actually doing it,”
she says in a musing voice. “I guess that’s exactly what we’re not good at. Maybe that’s why we love war so much: reality starvation.”
    Now she’s giving me one of her most puzzling looks. “You’ve changed,” I say. “Big time. What happened?”
    Another gulp from the bottle. “I hit thirty-five. The midway point. It finally dawned on me that my whole description of reality was secondhand. My generation of women never rebelled—we felt we didn’t need to. We inherited a message of hate and simply elaborated it a bit. I never saw much of my father—my mother made sure of that. I think I went into the only important relationship of my life in order to be a bitch. In order to express hate. Isn’t that sick?”
    How to answer that? By changing the subject. “Why did you come to Bangkok, really?”
    A sigh. “I think I came for this conversation. We don’t have them at home anymore, you know? Maybe it’s modernism: we trade tribal sound bites so we can feel we belong to something. I came for your mind, Sonchai. Chanya can have your body—she deserves it. That is one very smart woman. I can hardly stand to see the two of you together. The cozy, unspoken, genuine love makes me want to have you both arrested. I don’t think it exists stateside. There’s a very powerful taboo against it. Think of all the hours you spend loving when you could be making money.”
    I say, “Let’s go.”
    “I want another beer.”
    “No.”
    In the cab we enjoy silence for a while, then: “I did marry. I lied to you.” A pause. “And divorced, of course.”
    “Any kids?”
    “One. A boy. I let his father keep him. His father said if the baby stayed with me, I