Bangkok Haunts

seems to cause a shift in his consciousness. There is a contraction of his brow, a frightening concentration at the chakra between his eyes. His look is quite merciless, and there is no need for him to say,
I know everything.
    “She said you were a holy fool,” he mutters before he crosses the road.
    Only when he has gone do I realize I forgot to ask which monastery he ordained at. I call Lek to ask him to check with the Sangha. Half an hour later he arrives at my desk to tell me the Sangha have never heard of Gamon, aka Phra Titanaka. Lek’s manner is ambiguous as he plays with his
yaa dum
stick, then pushes his hair back with both hands. He coughs.
    “What is it, Lek?”
    Another cough. “That
farang
woman. You remember?”
    “Lek, you could at least call her ‘the FBI.’ It’s more polite.”
    “Well, she took me to lunch yesterday while you were out.”
    I push back my chair, not quite sure what expression to use. “I see.”
    “She wants to marry me. On condition I don’t go through with the surgery.” He is staring directly into my eyes. Suddenly I am the outsider, the one with
farang
blood; perhaps I can explain? Nothing in his manner suggests that he has even considered the FBI’s alarming offer; the cultural gap is far wider than that. He simply wants to know if I have a clue as to how an Earthling should behave in the presence of a particularly pushy Andromedan.
    “If you married her, you would be entitled to half her income. I think the FBI at her level get about thirty-five thousand dollars a year gross.”
    Casually, Lek shifts the calculator on my desk toward him and punches in the numbers with one finger while he shoves the
yaa dum
stick up his right nostril, then blinks at the result. I think it is more than he expected. He raises his shoulders helplessly. “But then I wouldn’t be able to be a woman, would I?” He walks away, shaking his head in despair at the level of education on Andromeda these days. At some level I’m furious with the FBI, but I have to leave her on hold while I focus on Damrong’s brother.
     
    The problem with an unknown and perhaps unknowable quantity is that your imagination will make anything of it. Fraud or madman? For once I share my self-doubt with Lek. “He had me fooled. For a moment I really thought he was the real thing.”
    “He is,” Lek says with total confidence, now that he’s sure the monk is not loony after all. “And you’re crazy about him. He’s what you were supposed to be, master.” He adds the last word by way of cushioning the impact of his
katoey
truth-telling.
    “But the Sangha have no knowledge of him.”
    Lek puts his aroma stick away to give me one of his rare frank looks. “You know as well as I do that he is a real monk who has spent years in a monastery. If he hadn’t, he couldn’t walk and talk like that. He’s very advanced. He must have ordained in another country.”
    “Cambodia, where his parents came from? How could someone like him ever come out of Cambodia?”
    I frown and get up to leave the station and go for a walk. For want of direction I follow a
saleng
as he slowly pedals his flatbed trishaw down the street, looking for trash.
Saleng
are our sorcerer-scavengers; in their hands beer cans turn into toys, plastic bottles become painted mobiles to hang in shopwindows, Coke cans are stitched into sun hats, and grilles from truck radiators transmute into garden gates. I watch him stop to dip into a garbage bin and triumphantly return to his trishaw with a broken umbrella. Without his sublime humility, I cannot prevent my thoughts from turning back to Damrong’s brother.
    I am afraid my identification with him is too great for objectivity. I don’t need to read his biography—I can smell every detail. He had it tougher than me, but it’s only a question of degree. We too were inches away from disaster, my mother and I. Nong took the relocation path, by deliberately cultivating clients who took us overseas, but Gamon stayed home while his sister sold her body. The price he paid for survival was the abuse of his sibling by armies of rampant men of every race and creed; on his own admission he was a sensitive child. How many nights did he spend in torment before someone told him about methamphetamine? It’s expensive, though; if you’re poor and need it, you more or less have to trade in it.
    I pass over my intimate knowledge of his misery; no point playing those old tapes on his behalf; what has