Nomad Codes

the ethanol. Calming down his ladies, dabbing off their sweat in a vain attempt to keep them looking regal, Mr. Bling seemed to grow annoyed, although his irritation may have been as ersatz as outrage at a WWE meet. As the orchestra mimed a rock band in an eternal drum roll climax, one woman—responsible for much of the cash flow throughout the afternoon—went into trance: flailing limbs, wiggly eyes, wacky-assed dancing. After the mediums had brought her back, the Hottie tried to do something with the money the possessed woman had earlier given her. The proceedings were obscure, but the woman leapt up and began arguing passionately with the Hottie, until the Boss and Mr. Bling came over to straighten things out.
    At this point, the most powerful supernatural force that animated these rites came to the fore: cash. Many of the folks around me had scrimped the entire year in order to splurge at the nat pwe, believing that their offerings would bounce back to them in the form of luck or lottery numbers or good business. Now the liberal economy of the earlier “lucky money” phase, with its free-for-all distribution of small bills, gave way to a more retentive logic, as the mediums paused amid their chaotic dancing to count their accumulated cash with the finesse of bookies and dole out chunks to the singers and the orchestra. Clearly unsatisfied with the numbers, the nats aggressively focused on the further extraction of cash from their devotees, affecting an attitude of haughty privilege no doubt designed to stimulate the superstitious awe of their temporary acolytes.
    As wealthy Westerners, we were inevitably drawn into this monetized game of seduction and command. I had been recording the event with both a Sony video camera and a small Canon Elf, and I happily handed over a small wad to the various musicians I had recorded. But I was not satisfied with the footage I had shot of the Hottie, and so, in order to coax her to perform for the camera, I kept slipping more money into her garb, soon switching from kyat to single dollar bills. As she wised to my game and began to deliberately turn away from my camera, I realized that this exotic Burmese possession rite had become something much more akin to a strip show. Given all the attention and money I had paid to the younger medium, I should not have been as surprised as I was when a jealous Boss stepped up and aggressively demanded three dollar bills. As this transaction occurred, the Hottie started rifling through J’s bag in search of more greenbacks, and only narrowly missed the twenty that J had expertly palmed. Yanking out a copy of Orwell’s Burmese Days , the Hottie looked utterly disgusted and threw down the book.
    Finally the orchestra quit and the crowds dispersed. The Hottie approached me and coyly cupped her hand near her mouth, as if feeding herself rice, and I realized she wanted to eat with us, or me at any rate, or me and my wallet. But before my imagination could grapple with the quantum wave form generated by this invitation, Mr. Bling put the kibosh on the whole affair, whisking away his nat kadaw in the blink of an eye. J and I wound up eating with some of the people who manned the pwe stall. They served us rice and vegetables and a dish featuring Burma’s classic stinky fish sauce, which should certainly be sampled by all lovers of Marmite. We had great fun as these disarmingly friendly folks schooled us on how to eat the clumpy sauce-soaked rice with our hands, a procedure that involved flicking the moist clump of kernels into your mouth using your thumb as a kind of shovel. As I practiced this move, I briefly thought of the Hottie, while I most likely picked up the bug that, once again, wreaked havoc on my gut.
    Sated and still blazing from the pwe, J and I wandered through the early evening, surrounded by droves of young trannies, flirty but sweet, dressed to the nines. These ladies were not channeling the ghosts of ancient heroes but were here to strut their own stuff, and they lovingly vamped for our cameras, which to my eternal horror had run out of juice. Though J and I were still sloppy from our earlier slugs of nat whiskey, we finished off our own bottle, huddling in the dark as the crowds thickened around us. Over the next few hours, we dipped into a handful of pwes, and I tried and failed to track down the one great tape by a Burmese metal act called Iron Cross. After visiting the main nat temple, where we stumbled over a drunken