Killing Rain

Sukhumvit Road, letting the crowds carry me and flow past me, then carry me along again. My God, the area had grown. I’d been back several times since the war, of course, and had even done a job here once, a Japanese expat, but somehow my frame of reference, which was over three decades out of date, seemed unwilling to oblige the area’s changing topography. There were vendors back then, yes, but not this many. Now they had overgrown the sidewalk and were selling every manner of bric-a-brac: ersatz luggage, knockoff watches, pirated DVDs, tee-shirts proclaiming “Same-Same” and “No Money, No Honey.” Hawkers wheedled and cajoled, competing with the hum of the crowd, the roar of passing bus engines, the distinctive, sine-wave growl of motor scooters and tuk-tuks weaving back and forth through the constipated traffic. I smelled diesel fumes and curry, and thought, Yes, same-same, it all really is, and was surprised at an overwhelming sense of sadness and loss I couldn’t name. Nothing looked the same here, but to me it smelled the same, and the dissonance was confusing.
    I walked on. And then, with a burst of mixed pleasure and horror, I came upon an artifact: the Miami Hotel, which was still here at the top of Soi 13. Squalid and moldering from the moment it went up in the late sixties to house U.S. troops on R&R, the hotel now felt like an architectural middle finger extended to the rich, upscale Bangkok that was growing up around it. As I moved past, I caught a glimpse of a grizzled expat looking out from one of its windows onto the street below, his expression that of a man serving a life sentence for a crime he doesn’t understand, and I thought it possible that I had just seen one of the original inhabitants, as stubborn and anachronistic as the hotel itself. I walked. Arabs and Sikhs in turbans smoked cigarettes and sipped coffee under the corrugated eaves of collapsing storefronts. Prostitutes lurked in the vestibules of massage parlors, passersby ignoring their sad eyes and desperate smiles. An amputee, filthy and in rags, rattled a cup at me from the sidewalk where he lay. I gave him some baht and moved on. Half a block later, the vendors’ tables parted momentarily and I saw a sign for the Thermae Bar & Coffee House, the lowest of the low, which had once housed the women who serviced the Miami’s soldiers. I wondered if its patrons still called it, appropriately and inevitably, the Termite. The original building, it seemed, had been torn down, but the Termite had been reborn, demonstrating in its reincarnation that although the body might fade and die, the spirit, for better or worse, is eternal.
    I passed a vendor selling knives, and took the opportunity to arm myself with a knockoff Emerson folder with a wooden handle and a four-inch, partially serrated blade. For a long time I had gotten by without carrying a weapon, and I had liked it this way. For one thing, you tend to comport yourself differently when you’re armed, and there are people who can spot the signs. Also, my lawsey, lawsey civilian cover would have been compromised somewhat if I’d been picked up carrying, say, a folding karambit or other concealed cutlery. And then there’s the matter of blood, which can get all over you and severely compromise your attempts to blend with the crowd after a close encounter. But I sensed that the balance of costs and benefits was changing now. I wasn’t as fast as I once was, for one thing. Or as durable, for another. I wondered whether what had happened to me in that restroom with Manny, also, was in part the consequence of age. I had needed Dox to bail me out there, as he had at Kwai Chung a year earlier. On top of all this, being back in Sukhumvit was itself a reminder that I had aged in the intervening years, and that things I had once ably done with my hands might now be accomplished more effectively with tools.
    I caught a tuk-tuk for the final leg over to Sukhumvit 23. Dox and I were supposed to meet at the restaurant at noon, but I arrived early to scope the area out, as I always do on those rare occasions when I agree to a face-to-face meeting. A sneak preview tends to prevent surprises. In this case, though, the surprise was already waiting for me, in the form of Dox. Resplendent in a cream-colored silk shirt, he was sitting in one of the cushioned teak chairs at the back corner of the main room sipping some tropical concoction from a tall glass through a long straw, and looking, I