Bangkok Haunts

you start with the kettle drums, what’ll you have left for the crescendo?” He goes to a laptop on a table to check something. “And you’re not quite in position, Marly darling,” he says distractedly, working the mouse. “I’ve got your clitoris and the top of your pussy in the floor camera, but we’re going to miss half of Jock’s dick for the fuck cut. Shift your bum about half an inch backward. Good. Perfect. Now, get your body memory to lock onto that. Jock, are you drooping?”
    “Ah wah jus’ wai’in’ on hold,” says Jock, looking down.
    “Okay now, when you enter her, don’t use too much thrust, or you’ll push her out of position, and all we’ll get is your hairy balls. Make it look merciless, but don’t use any real horizontal pressure. Smoothly controlled grinds come out best on the celluloid. Clear?”
    “Och aye,” says Jock.
    “Good man.” Yammy’s mood has swung. With the Promethean will of a true artist, he has conquered despair. He casts me a grin. “I wish mine was that reliable. Okay now, Marly love, you have this gorgeous Ed here polishing your ass like it was Sung dynasty, and you know what’s going to happen next, but you don’t know when, and he’s teasing you to the point of madness. Anticipation agony in every facial muscle, please. Good, keep that. Now give us a little tongue—no, don’t stick it all out, we want only the teeniest pink tip sneaking between those hungry lips. Perfect. Okay, take two.”
    Take two is the penetration shot, starring Jock. I cast a glance at the FBI. “Can we go now?” Kimberley groans. “I need to sit down somewhere cool, or find a man.”
    It is as we are leaving that I see the tall athletic forty-something Englishman for the first time. He is sitting in a far corner of the studio in a plastic chair, watching everything, wearing smart casuals of impeccable cut; his open-neck linen shirt reveals a filigreed gold chain. I already know what he looks like naked and that his name is Tom. I feel exactly the same jolt of sexual jealousy as if Damrong were still alive:
    Tom, you’re just amazing. I don’t think I can stand the thought of you with another woman. I just can’t.
    Don’t worry about that. There wouldn’t be any fucking point, would there?
    Why is he here?

    On the way back to Sukhumvit I tell the FBI I have to pick Lek up from the hospital, where he has his monthly check. Kimberley immediately assumes he must be HIV positive and considers taking precautions, like getting out of the taxi and taking another, so I explain he’s in perfect health. The checkup has to do with his gender reassignment. Basically, the procedure is not to cut his goolies off all at once but to ease him into his new identity using the estrogen. The surgery is almost the last stage. Now the FBI is a helpless doomed creature caught in an overwhelming mudslide of curiosity and cannot help staring at him when he gets into the backseat next to her. “You’re so beautiful,” she tells him, taking in his long black hair parted in the middle, his big oval eyes with just a hint of mascara, his gaunt high cheeks, the adolescent litheness that is still upon him.
    “Lork?”
says Lek, trying to catch my eye.
    As she gets out of the cab at the Grand Britannia, there’s a catch in her throat: “My first angel.”
    Back at the station I’m thinking about the Englishman named Tom and trying to work out what the hell he was doing at Yammy’s atelier, when my cell phone rings.
    “It isn’t going to happen,” the FBI says.
    “What?”
    “We’re not going to let him go through with it. I’m having nightmares about the knife, and I’m not even asleep yet. Ugh!”
    “Of course he’s going through with it. For a true transsexual, the surgery is the most important day of his life. It is the birth of his real self.”
    “It isn’t going to happen,” the FBI says in that tone Americans use when they intend to bomb the future into submission. “He’s too beautiful. Give me his phone number.”
    “No,” I say, and close the cell.

15
    Next day Lek comes to see me at my desk at about four in the afternoon. He has something of the weary professional about him, which he manages to feminize by passing his hands deftly through his long inky hair and shuddering. He has not been able to resist adding a touch of rouge to his cheeks. He takes out a
yaa dum
aromatherapy inhaler and sticks it into his left nostril.
    “I’ve been chasing leads all day,”