I pass over my intimate knowledge of his misery; no point playing those old tapes on his behalf; what has 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 cafe 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 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.