I sighed and took out a five-hundred-baht note to slip under the can of Nescafé on the shrine to the household gods.
“Of course it crossed my mind,” I lied.
The Sergeant used his cell phone to call a cab. I heard him tell the driver to put the ride on the Sergeant’s own bill. He was quite emotional when we said goodbye, I assumed because we’d bonded while drunk. Or perhaps he thought I didn’t have much time left in this body. Just before the cab drew away he said, “Of course, that wouldn’t explain a hundred photos. It would explain the connection but not the photos.”
“That’s right.”
He grunted. “And it wouldn’t explain why the phone came to me via that young farang killer.” He scratched his beard. “Not every mystery has a solution-which is okay, solutions can be dangerous.”
“Yes.”
“There’s one other thing, though. I’m surprised you didn’t ask about it.”
“What’s that?”
“Well, I don’t speak English worth a damn and that young American only had basic Thai.”
Now I knew I was losing my skill set. Why didn’t I think of that? “So how did you communicate?”
“Khmer. Same as I used with the old Americans, before they mastered Thai. I was brought up in Surin. Khmer was the local dialect.”
“He was fluent?”
“Spoke it like a native. Better than me. The Surin dialect is pretty basic, but he spoke the real thing without accent.”
–
In the back of the cab on the way home, with no fellow human to distract me, the mind returns to primal chaos. I am like a tower of billiard balls that miraculously remained vertical for a moment and now collapses as I knew I would. Why me? is the question everyone asks at this point in a breakdown. I go over the three curses for the thousandth time: Nong X, murdered, my name on the mirror; an iPhone with one name in the Contacts application and a hundred photos of me; another cell phone with three more photos of me. None of this should have destroyed my sense of self were there not the haunting possibility that one of those Americans in the hospital, all of whom are naturalized Cambodians, may be my father and the looming conviction that we are all implicated in something bigger than a murder and a son in search of a dad.
When I arrive at the hovel Chanya is awake and working at her desk. I enter and press my back against the door before succumbing to the tremble-and-blurt phase of mental disintegration. At first she wants to carry on working; then she decides that as my lifelong companion she may have a part to play in my despair; then, as I blurt with ever greater rapidity, trying to pierce her shell, she gets up, takes my hand, and has me sit in her chair while she squats in front of me.
“But these are two totally unrelated issues, work and personal issues, all mixed up,” she explains in a tone that scrupulously avoids sentimentality. “You need to distinguish them.”
“How?”
“Well, work is real, and all this lost-father stuff is just something that’s been hanging there rotting in the back of your mind forever.”
I stare wild-eyed at her, failing to comprehend her total lack of comprehension. Then she remembers she once did a course on what might be termed first-response therapy: Cries for Help and How to React to Them. She suddenly assumes a care-and-concern expression (wide and worried eyes, furrowed brow, social-worker buzzwords, physical contact to provide the illusion of warmth, nauseating patience). When she starts to wipe my brow, hold my hand, and gaze earnestly into my eyes, it pisses me off so much I pull out of it and push her away. Am I alone in preferring madness to therapy? She now stands up in a flash of anger.
“So, have you spoken to your mother about any of this?” she snaps.
“Any of what? Decapitation? Transhumanism? Geopolitics?”
“That’s all professional stuff, that isn’t what’s bothering you. It’s the illusory connection between you and those three Americans: you have transferred your personal id onto what should be superego preoccupied with work and contribution to society-I’m using old vocabulary here, but the ideas are basically the same today as in the time of Freud.”
“Huh?”
“Of course none of those old farang are your father. That’s a classic transference from fantasy to reality. The reason there were photos of you on that old cell phone was just as Lotus Bud said: they heard you were a smoker and a cop and wanted you as a client.”
“So what about the hundred pictures on the iPhone? What about my name on the mirror in blood?”
She waves a hand. “Stuff like that can always be explained, once the whole picture is clear.” I see from her face that it is quite a while since she did the course. She is not totally sure she is following the right tack. “Clearly, the father thing is at the root of all this. I’m going to speak to your mother tomorrow. Perhaps some kind of intervention is what you need.”
That seems to have exhausted the twenty-first century’s reservoir of compassion. I’m happier when she reverts to a more primitive technique. She gives me a big smacker on the lips, jiggles my dick in a friendly way, grins right into my face, and says, “What about that oil Krom gave you? How are you supposed to smoke it?”
I sag with relief: whatever the issues between us, we are both big fans of self-medication. Now Chanya is intrigued by the idea of dipping a couple of cigarettes in the oil, then baking the cigarettes at hundred degrees centigrade for fifteen minutes until the solvent has burned off, leaving, in theory, pure THC stuck to the tobacco fibers. Neither of us have smoked this way before and we have no idea what to expect. We bake two Marlboros, one each, lie on the mattress with a makeshift ashtray on either side, smile at each other, and light up.
So far as I can recall I was a third of the way through my own little ciggy when I found important information to share with Chanya. This stuff is really strong, is what I wanted to say, but the words came out so garbled that even I could not understand them. It didn’t matter, for Chanya was lying dead straight, arms rigidly by her side, her eyes firmly fixed on the Invisible. Eventually she roused herself enough to say, “Krom’s oil is very strong,” and returned to heaven. For myself, while I felt in full control of my mind, my facial and tongue muscles were a different matter. The couple of syllables I attempted seemed garbled; I could not understand what I was trying to say. And so we lay on our backs, the two of us, for quite a few hours, our bodies touching, our souls a cosmos apart. From time to time during the course of the night I returned to earth to take a glance at Chanya, who remained rigid, bug-eyed, and enthralled by my side.
12
Krom sent separate SMSs to Chanya and me to remind us that we were invited to supper tonight. In the cab on the way to Heaven’s Gate Tower, generally known as the HGT, Chanya suffers from an attack of nerves. Despite her former success as a hostess and escort, it has been a while since she worked.
“It’s going to be awkward, isn’t it?”
“How so?”
“You must have thought about it. This invitation comes from on high, through Vikorn’s PRC connections. Vikorn has let this Professor Chu think he’s going to lay a dazzlingly attractive inspector who is also a high-tech whiz kid-a woman totally up his alley-all on the Colonel’s tab. It’s one of those male transactions in which women are the currency, don’t try to pretend otherwise.”
“Women aren’t the currency, lust is. It’s like the Buddha said, it’s lust, fear, or indifference with humankind.”
“That’s right,” she says with a grin. I still admire the way she can flip her moods in a second. She has flown across an internal abyss like a lama, now she’s on the other side, laughing. “On that retreat I went on two years ago, we turned it into an exercise. We used the imagery of a clock face with an arrow and three positions: attraction, aversion, indifference. In our meditations we had to observe which one the arrow was pointing at, from second to second. Then from split second to split second. The arrow moves automatically according to the thoughts in your head, there’s no control. In the end the whole universe amounts to that: lust, fear, boredom. Unless you’re enlightened.”