Bangkok Haunts

impressed me is the degree to which he rose above it all. I never scaled such heights. My late partner, Pichai, and I spent a year in a forest monastery as a deal to keep us out of jail. Apparently Gamon ordained voluntarily, for life. His supervisor must have been as ruthless as my own, probably even sterner. He could not have survived long as a novice monk without putting himself through that form of destructive testing called
vipassana
meditation. I know he must have started from some hell of frustration, with its complex trap of poverty, crime, drug abuse, and the selling of his sister: an authentically lost soul only a membrane away from despair and madness.
    When I get back to the station, I find Lek standing at the window near my desk. “He went back to the Internet café for ten minutes, then crossed the road in the direction of the
wat,
” he says in a dreamy voice. “That’s a very holy brother.”
    My cell phone bleeps twice:
    We could start small, just to test the mule. Or I could risk everything on one big consignment. I’m willing to die for my art. How sincere do I need to be? How desperate? Yammy.

22
    “He told you, didn’t he?” It is the FBI’s voice, a tiny, nervous hiss in the cell phone.
    “Yes.”
    “How pissed are you, on a scale of one to ten? Don’t say eleven.”
    “Eleven.”
    “Okay, with you that means going back to biblical times. You think the Western mind is some Frankensteinian product of a botched religion and a bunch of ancient Greek pedophiles, the same unholy combination of schoolboy logic, lust for blood and glory, we-know-best, and destroy-to-save that slaughtered three million in Vietnam, most of them women and children, all in the name of freedom and democracy, before we ran away because it got too expensive. Right?”
    “Right.”
    “Well, you’re wrong, dead wrong. I had no idea I was going to say what I said to Lek. It wasn’t in my head at all. I took him to a good Thai restaurant that even Thais respect and watched him using his fingers to eat the
somtan
salad with the sticky rice, and I saw that you were right: that is one totally innocent soul.” I do not dignify the pleading tone with a reply. “But it didn’t make any difference. I felt this flood of love, compassion, lust—the whole nine yards, totally overwhelming. I didn’t know such emotions could happen to a woman like me. I adore him. Totally, helplessly, ridiculously. I’m head over heels in love, Sonchai. Isn’t that what you once told me was the secret to understanding the Buddha: that he was head over heels in love with the whole universe?”
    “Then you won’t have any problem in loving him after he’s had the surgery, will you?” I say testily, and close the phone.
     
    Forget Wat Po and the Temple of the Emerald Buddha; most
wats
are ramshackle affairs where hungry cats, flea-tormented dogs, and dispossessed humans take advantage of the Buddha’s compassion under bhodi trees, along with a motley crew of monks of varying degrees of commitment. (Some are hiding, some are weeping, some are frustrated, some are ambitious, some are gay, most are devout, and some are almost Buddhas.) It is above all a community where
looksits
in white pants and shirts clean and wash robes for their monk mentors in return for a fast track to enlightenment,
chart na;
handymen gain merit by repairing the roofs of monks’ shacks; and there is always someone cooking and eating, except for monks who are not allowed to eat after noon. Kids whose parents cannot afford fancy schools where Mandarin and business English are taught are left to absorb whatever wisdom the monks offer; people who may or may not be passionate about Buddhism come and go.
    You might think it medieval, but it’s far more ancient than that. We are a deeply conservative people at heart. Our version of Buddhism, called Theravada, is two thousand five hundred years old, and we haven’t changed a word of it. The robes our monks wear are stitched together from the same template Siddhartha himself used, and we follow the same Four Noble Truths the Greatest of Men expounded when he began his ministry, the first being:
There is suffering.
Only
farang
ever argue with that one.
    I pass through dilapidated but majestic wooden gates onto consecrated ground, and it is as if he is waiting for me. A young novice, all bright and earnest, points him out where he is sitting on the balcony of an old wooden
kuti.
He is not surprised to see