Bangkok Haunts

magic. For the antics of ghosts, though, you have to remember that when the brain dies, many urges are left. Generally quite ugly to look at, I agree.”
    “Those other creatures, the nonhuman ones—how did you do that?”
    “Oh, I use a special kind of animation program,” Supatra says, at the same time making a little
wai
to the Buddha sitting in a little shrine halfway up the wall, asking for absolution for telling a white lie.
    “It’s incredible. I’ve never seen anything like it. It seems more advanced that anything coming out of Hollywood.”
    Supatra accepts the compliment and takes us back upstairs. I can tell she’s angry with me for encouraging her to share her hobby with a
farang
by the way she doesn’t look me in the eye when she says goodbye.
     
    Out on the street I don’t want to talk about Damrong, but I’m trapped. I have to take Kimberley back to her hotel in a taxi, and her silence presses on my consciousness like an ever-increasing weight. She doesn’t even need to look at me. She stares out of her side window pretending to be diplomatic, while all the time she’s adding tick by tick to the great black burden of silence.
    “Of course Chanya knows,” I say after a long pause. “It was before she and I met. The reason she talked to you about the case is she’s scared of the effect it’s having on me. She thought you were the one person who could help on a psychological level. She feels helpless herself.”
    Kimberley doesn’t say anything for a while. Then she leans forward to tell the driver to take us to The Dome on the top of State Tower, instead of her hotel. It’s a smart choice. A few hundred feet above the city, sitting in an open-air restaurant and cocktail lounge, naked to the stars, an exotic coconut-based cocktail in Kimberley’s hand and a Kloster beer in mine, one may feel as if the ceiling of one’s skull has been raised to be contiguous with the night sky: a cosmic confessional.
    “So it was like this,” I say.

3
    Unless you’ve been there, it’s hard to understand. If I’d never met Damrong, I too would have remained bemused at the antics of men in that morbid state that you insist on calling “being in love,”
farang.
We don’t look at it quite like that over here.
    Let me get the least embarrassing part out of the way first: she seduced me effortlessly, within a week of coming to work at my mother’s bar, which I still help to run. Like all good
papasans,
I had as a guiding principle never to sample our own services, and I had never done so. I was lonely, though, and missing my partner Pichai terribly, after he was killed in the line of duty. Like a fool, I had no idea how obvious were my feelings for the new superstar. Looking back, she probably knew how I felt before I knew it myself. At what point do a man’s feelings for a woman switch from objective admiration to the psychosis of possession, against which the Buddha so vehemently counsels? I know only that it was Songkran, the Thai New Year and the hottest time in the solar cycle.
That
Songkran—it was about four years ago—was particularly steamy; while the Sun transited Aries, Mars pursued Venus in the unforgiving sign of Scorpio. In my lovelorn state I was reduced to sharing Proustian paeans with my computer:
    Last evening I watched from the door of the bar when she arrived at the soi on the back of a motorbike taxi wearing some new, violently colored dress that seemed somehow to embody the essence of this terrifying season, and with a haughty toss of her head, almost overendowed with its thick mane of heavy black hair, so that even her gaunt beauty was overwhelmed by this dense silken mass of shining darkness, stalked proudly into the brothel where I had been waiting for her and only her…
    Oh, dear. I guess every man in that state is transparent to the love object, right? I think it was the night after I wrote those words, around two A.M., when she just happened to be the only girl left in the bar and I was about to lock up. I had already turned off the sound system, and it seemed to me the ugly noises I made prior to locking up—rattling bottles, trash chucked in the bin, glasses sloshing in the sink—possessed the very quality of loneliness that dogged me. I looked down at the floor so as to avoid her eyes as she passed me on the way out. She played a little game of getting in my way, but I refused to fall for it. So she gently placed a hand under my jaw and raised my head until I