“I’m sorry, sister,” he said, as the sounds of love from the bedroom subsided. “It’s just a job.”
Khun Taworn’s wife sat on the edge of the bed, wearing a cream silk dressing gown. Her wig was off, and she was rubbing moisturizer slowly over her pale, bald cranium. When she finished, she wiped her hands on a small towel, leaned over to the bedside table and poured herself a glass of tequila. When the mobile phone shuddered to life, she did not rush to answer it but stretched her free hand behind her to pat the body that was stirring—the beautiful, naked body of the young actress she was grooming to be a star.
“I have to answer this, darling.” She too used the English word but pronounced it correctly. “Go back to sleep.”
Now she picked up the phone and took a sip from her glass.
“It’s done,” said the man’s voice on the other end.
“No hitches?”
“None. But the girl was making a home movie. That’s why she called the electrician from the “Twilight” the other day.”
“Then he has to go too. And get rid of the tapes.”
“No problem.”
“Tell me. How was it? My husband?”
“He promised me the moon.”
“He was always a bad liar.”
“The gay boy cried. The girl tried to talk her way out of it. She wasn’t making sense. She kept on saying that all she wanted was her freedom.”
“She should have taken the money and run. Why are people so greedy? Anyway, now she’s free.”
“The papers will have a field day.”
“Yes, it’ll be juicy. You’ve done well. Thank you.”
With her drink in her hand she walked to the window with its view of the city stretching south. Her sad eyes looked down at the lights twinkling in the streets below and at the giant billboards on the sides of the tall buildings, then slowly towards the horizon, where the glow of the city gave way to the dense, dripping dark of the tropical night. Then they started to fill with bitter tears.
Tew Bunnag
Tew Bunnag was born in Bangkok in 1947 and educated in Cambridge University where he studied Chinese and Economics. In his time he has been a T’ai Chi teacher as well as a volunteer worker in the Klongtoey slums and feels at home in all the stratas of Thai society. His fiction writing deals with the tensions between the traditional and the modern, and the contradictions and anomalies that are evident in present Thai society.
Hansum Man Timothy Hallinan
The room was dark when he opened his eyes. For a moment he was confused; the window was in the wrong place. Had he been sleeping with his head at the foot of the bed? His sleep was thin these days, thinner than the worn sheet that covered him, but he didn’t usually move around that much. Or did he?
Oh.
The new apartment. The one he still couldn’t navigate in the dark without bumping into something. Unlike the shopfront he had lived above for all those years, the two rooms with the woodshuttered windows that you could prop open with a length of doweling. Cool cement floors.
He sat up with a soft grunt and put his feet down. Carpet. Window on the right. Not the shophouse then, the apartment. What had happened to the shophouse?
Now that he knew which room he was in, his hand could find the surprisingly heavy little brass lamp on the bed table. It put out just enough light to show him a heavily shadowed room, almost too small for the bed and the table, with a wide recessed closet yawning open in one corner, one of its sliding doors derailed and leaning at a seasick angle against the wall. His clothes, what remained of them, were hanging any old way, like a mixed crowd of birds pecking seed on a pavement before they lift off and sort themselves into flocks. The air conditioner sat aslant in the window and silent, since he had decided long ago to live with the heat. After all, he’d chosen the heat. The bathroom, over there, through that grimy door. He reminded himself again to take a sponge to the door.
With his sight restored, the world tilted slightly and snapped into place with an almost audible click. The shophouse had been demolished long ago, along with the whole neighborhood, a cluster of two-and-three-story structures of inky, mildewed concrete, spiderwebbed with black electrical wires, built on either side of a soi almost too narrow for cars—paved over one of Bangkok’s lost canals. A neighborhood where people knew each other, talked to each other when they met, laughed good-naturedly at his occasional sallies into Thai. All the buildings gone now, knocked into dust and chunks of cement.
How noisy it had been, the machines growling like big dogs at the buildings before taking bites out of them, some of the people staring dolefully from across the soi, looking like attendees at a cremation.
He got up and launched himself toward the bathroom, feeling a light fizziness in his head. Had he drunk before going to bed? Stupid question. And what time was it, anyway? It had been weeks since he’d been able to find the heavy steel Rolex his father had given him to take to Nam. He’d promised his parents he’d keep it on California time so he’d be with them whenever he looked at it, but that hadn’t lasted. And neither, after all these years, had the Rolex. He’d bought a counterfeit at a sidewalk market, and as he turned on the bathroom light, the watch gleamed at him and informed him it was 10:21. So he’d slept through the day’s heat, and outside, the Bangkok he loved best had blinked into life.
The bathroom mirror showed him the grandfather or great-grandfather of Wallace, never Wally, Palmer, shockingly old. His head of dark, curly hair had been replaced by a few long, iron-gray strands, inexplicably straight, that pasted themselves across his spotted scalp. He’d played a few times with the strands, trying to comb them lower on his forehead to simulate a real hairline, but the last time he’d done it the phrase “turban renewal” had flashed through his mind, and he’d laughed and abandoned the effort. At least his hair didn’t stand up on end and lasso the light, the silver-beech forest of frizziness that haloed the heads of so many old guys.
Old guys.
Wallace said, “Shit,” avoiding looking at the devastation that was his neck, and picked up his toothbrush.
Someone knocked on the door in the living room.
“It’s always something,” Wallace said, although he was aware that, lately, it hadn’t been. He leaned heavily against the sink and waited, hoping whoever it was would go away, but a moment later he heard three knocks, louder this time, and—muffled by the door—a basso profundo voice called, “Vallace? You are in zere, Vallace?”
Leon, Wallace thought with a surge of despair. Leon Hofstedler, the most boring man in Bangkok. So boring, Leon’s friend Ernie had once said, that you’d avoid him if he was the first person you’d seen in a month. What had happened to Ernie? Ernie always made him laugh.