Bangkok Haunts

was looking into her face. That’s all it took. In our fever we didn’t bother to go upstairs to the bedrooms.
    “You’re the most amazing lover,” she whispered afterward. Standard whoretalk, of course, and like a standard john, I really wanted to believe it.
    Indeed, with the benefit of hindsight, the whole affair strikes me as quite horribly standard in its beginning, middle, and end, and I say as much to the FBI, who carefully avoided looking at me while I was outlining the sorry saga. Somehow it seemed to emerge out of the wildness of Songkran itself. Originally it was a holy festival in which sacred water was gently and lovingly poured over monks and respected elders; nowadays, though,
farang
have taken it over in Bangkok: pink-faced juvenile delinquents in their thirties, forties, and fifties stand guard with two-foot water pistols and squirt at passersby; in drink they become quite aggressive, until they get tired and emotional and curl up on the sidewalk with their plastic toys. Everyone who entered the bar that night was soaked to the skin; the wise kept their cell phones in plastic Ziploc bags. Madness was everywhere.
    I take a gulp of beer. Now the FBI and I are both staring at Orion in his priapic march across the sky.
    “So spare me the middle. How did it end?” the FBI says, with no sign of jealousy or any other emotional response; her voice has gone a little sandpapery, though.
    “Do women experience extreme passion the way men do?”
    “Total psychic dissolution, identity annihilated, ego shot, not sure if you’re one person or two, no sense of security when you’re not in bed with them, precious little when you are? Sure.”
    “And how does it end, usually?”
    “The one who is suffering the most ends up with a simple choice: kill the other or get the hell out while you still can.” A quick look. “You’re a cop—you know better than most there’s no violence like domestic violence.”
    Her harsh
farang
truth-telling stuns me for a long moment. I wasn’t expecting to come to the climax quite so early in the evening. I think maybe ten silent minutes pass before I can get it out:
    “After that first night I made her swear she would not go with any john. She would just serve drinks and flirt, and I would make up for her loss in income, whatever it was. A classic case of a gaga john buying his girl’s chastity. She kept up her side of the deal for at least ten days. Then she got tipsy one night with a muscular young Englishman. He paid her bar fine and took her upstairs in front of my nose.” Another long pause. “It’s like you say, either you kill them or you get out. I held my guts together for as long as it took to call my mother to have her take over the bar for the rest of the night. The other girls had to tell her what had happened. I took a two-week vacation on Ko Samui. When I got back, my mother had gotten rid of her.”
    Kimberley shakes her head. A compassionate smile, spiced with wicked humor, plays on her features. “So Mom saved you after all?”
    I nod. “Yes, but not only her. When I got back from Samui, Chanya had started to work for us. Spend time with the morbid, and you develop a taste for the wholesome. I don’t think I would have appreciated Chanya so well if I hadn’t gone out of my mind with Damrong. The universe is composed of pairs of opposites.”
    In the taxi on the way back to Sukhumvit, the FBI says, “That night, when she went off with the English john in front of your nose, you very nearly went upstairs to the room where they were? You were almost out of control?”
    “Yes. My gun was in its holster under the register. I became very aware of it.”
    “Then when you were on Ko Samui for those two weeks, what you were doing was fighting homicidal fantasies?”
    “All the time. They would come in waves. Mornings were my only strong time, when I could handle them. The rest of the time I used alcohol and ganja.”
    “And what about her? Why did she do that? Wasn’t it self-destructive? You were her boss, after all.”
    “The dirt poor don’t actually have selves to destroy. When they get a little power, they know it’s only for a moment. They have no practice in preparing for the future. They generally don’t believe they have one.”
    The FBI ponders this. “Is that true?”
    “For the poor, birth is the primary disaster: owning a body that has to be fed and sheltered and looked after, along with the drive to reproduce, to continue.