Bangkok Haunts

me.
    “Welcome to my palace,” Damrong’s brother says with a smile, hitching his robes and waving a hand at the particularly tumbledown shack the abbot has loaned him in the name of hospitality. I
wai
him, as if he were a real monk. Now he’s smiling modestly. “You checked with the Sangha? They’ve never heard of me, right?” He laughs. “I ordained in Cambodia, brother. The Thai Sangha wouldn’t have me. Something about a criminal conviction.” He offers a shrug to lose the world.
    “Oh,” I say, as if I didn’t know.
    “Does that bother you?”
    “I’m a cop.”
    “No,” he says, all-knowing, “you’re a monk, like me. You just signed the wrong form. You’ll be in the robes,
chart na.
”
     
    I settle down in a semilotus with my back against a flimsy wooden wall, facing him. Down below a dog with almost no fur left on one leg is ferociously scratching. In the middle distance two senior monks are talking softly in the shade of the huge bodhi tree that forms a sort of center to the complex. “It’s true we have a lot in common,” I concede. “You lived off your sister’s prostitution all your life before you ordained, I lived off my mother’s. You traded
yaa baa,
I watched while my buddy Pichai murdered our dealer. I spent a year in Buddhist purgatory. For three months my abbot had Pichai and me breathing death.”
    Perhaps it is melodramatic of me to use this colloquial phrase. While I have been speaking, he has allowed a smile of affectionate amusement to flicker back and forth across his mouth, a master watching the clumsy gropings of one who has never passed intermediate level and likely never will.
    “Breathing death is good practice,” he says. I want him to say more and find myself fidgeting, wishing he would continue. It seems the perfect expression of compassion when he finally starts speaking again.
    “In Cambodia it is still possible to use real corpses. I lived with one in my cell for a year, experiencing its dissolution from the flies-and-stench stage all the way to dry bones. While I watched I identified: every attachment, every aversion dropped away as the organ that created it disintegrated.”
    “A year? I would have gone mad.”
    A tolerant smile. “Of course I went mad. For a monk, what the world calls sanity is a whorish compromise.”
    “But something saved you. You seem okay now.”
    A curious expression. “Saved? There is nothing to save, my friend. You are talking like a Christian. You cannot cast yourself into the Unknowable in the hope that gesture will buy you salvation—you have to jump for the hell of it. In a nirvanic universe there can be no salvation because we are never really lost—or found. The choice is simply between nirvana and ignorance. That is the adult truth the Buddha urges upon us. We are the sum of our burning. No burning, no being.”
    I accept defeat in awe, a mere B-plus student effortlessly demolished by a true yogin. I decide I may as well give up testing him, since I am only making a fool of myself. I sneak back into forensics.
    “If that is your enlightenment, why did you trouble to seek me out?”
    “I told you, my sister’s spirit is not at rest. As a monk, of course, I have nothing to do with her dharma at all anymore, but particles of my debt to her remain.” For
debt
he uses a word which has no counterpart in English but invokes the most serious obligation known in my culture:
gatdanyu,
a kind of blood debt.
    “But to a near-
arhat
like you, how can a cop help?”
    Perhaps it is my imagination, or perhaps that really was a wince that distorted his features for a moment.
    “Her spirit craves justice” is all he will say.
    A few beats pass. He is the one who finally breaks the silence to prompt me: “Why don’t you ask me questions that will push the case along? Isn’t that what you’re here for?”
    A pause. “Okay, do you know about the video?”
    More beats, no answer. I say, “Someone sent it to me anonymously. I think it must have been you.” Still no answer. “I thought you wanted to help with the case. You do know about the video?”
    A long pause before he says, “I am still in touch with my village. Monks are allowed e-mail.” A very long pause, during which he seems to dwell in another universe, then: “The function of the West is to turn bodies and minds into products. It cannot understand that the rest of the world holds this to be an obscenity, a corruption of our nirvanic nature.” He follows