Bangkok Haunts

triggers off the nightmare I’ve avoided replaying all week. I block it, though, somehow, and now that the massage has reached the relaxing stage, I start to nod off.
     
    I wake in a state of total disorientation. Despite what I told the FBI, I myself do not normally fall asleep during massage. Why has Kimberley opened her curtain? Why is she kneeling next to me, stroking my cheek?
    “You started screaming, honey. You were scaring the staff.” Her face is the very picture of compassion when she says, “You’re a passionate man, Sonchai. Anyone can see a part of you kept on loving her, bad as she was.”
    After we have dressed and paid, standing together in the narrow
soi
at something of a loss, I finally have the courage to say, “Kimberley, I have a favor to ask. Can you guess?”
    “Sure. You need to watch the video again, and you need me to hold your hand.”
    I touch her shoulder. “Thanks, Kimberley.”

24
    The video and Stanislaus Kowlovski’s performance in it weigh on my mind all the way home. Knowing I’m going to have to put myself through it all over again is a little like the second parachute jump. I’ve never done it, but I’ve heard people talk: the first jump is tolerable because you don’t know what to expect. On the second something deep in the mind rebels, a feeling like,
Why am I driving myself through this terminal horror?
After all, Vikorn wouldn’t bat an eye if I gave up investigating the Damrong video altogether. In fact, he would prefer it.
    I’m asking myself this question as I reach home, kiss Chanya, pat the Lump, and eat the food she puts before me with love and devotion in her eyes. She catches my gaze with hers for a moment, then swallows hard. I think,
Oh Buddha, she has seen into my heart.
Then a lover’s intuition kicks in, and I grab her and kiss her. The darling was feeling threatened because I had a massage with my
farang
friend. Chanya would never be challenged by a Thai girl, but she is overawed by Kimberley, whom she believes to represent the Western side of my mind: much as she loves me, Chanya can never forget I am a
leuk kreung,
a half-caste, and must surely have
farang
tendencies and
farang
preferences lurking somewhere.
    It is almost comic, how accurate the heart can be and at the same time how mistaken. Of course I spend most of my time thinking about another woman, but it isn’t the FBI. My vow—which I make with a mixture of tears and giggles, to the effect that I volunteer to be reborn a hungry ghost if I ever have so much as thought of sleeping with Kimberley—is so forceful, so convincing, that Chanya now is ashamed of herself and wants to compensate for doubting me. She promises to cook my favorite,
pla neung menau,
steamed fish in lemon sauce.
    We make love as best we can in her condition. She is anxious to please me, needing comfort and reassurance. She uses some of her old tricks from her days on the Game, which causes us to share a smile or two. I make her feel how much I love her, force that certainty upon her, and there is no hypocrisy here, only a haunting. Afterward, perhaps from subtle signals she has interpreted, whole packets of information transmitted by the subtlest alteration of pressure in the touch or intonation of voice, now processed properly through her encyclopedic experience of men, gives the right answer: “It’s her, isn’t it?”
    I grab her to hug her, but she turns away.
    “I have to see the video again, my love. It’s quite a chore for me. Kimberley is going to be with me.”
    “Why not me?”
    A long silence full of the anguish of separation: “Because of what you would see.”
    “You think I can’t handle a video like that?”
    “Of course you can. I can’t handle you watching me watch it.”
    Neither of us wants an argument, and Chanya has grown too used to serenity to squander it on something trivial like a snuff movie. I watch while the kind of divine sleepiness which is the privilege of the pure takes over.
    I take the opportunity to caress the Lump, full of wonder, fear, and anticipation.
Vipassana
meditation affects everyone in different ways. Although I was never any kind of master, I penetrated to that part of the psyche where memories of the womb lurk. These have returned to me since I’ve known that I will soon be a father. I can easily relive the fear of birth that afflicts us in that transient security: that first agonizing acid-breath of oxygen, air burning your skin like napalm, hanging