Bangkok Knights (19 page)

“She eats everything the doc gives her, and then she stops
by the Chinese medicine shop on her way home and picks up a bunch of roots and
bark and, it wouldn’ t surprise me, bugs, and she wolf s all that too. At least
what she doesn’ t rub on or stick up or whatever. ‘Chinese-medicine man knows
things the doctor doesn’t’, she’ll tell you.

“It’s not like she’s a hypochondriac, exactly; it’s just
she’s got this implicit faith in the efficacy of all things dispensed by
doctors, monks, and herbalists. And this idea you can beat all the odds if only
you are forewarned and you take all the right precautions.

“I mean, what’s going to happen when we have kids? She’s
liable to poison them, first time they come down with diaper rash.

Feed ‘em penicillin and sulpha mixed with one toad ground
up fine and combined with milk of magnesia and toe-nail clippings from the
abbot of the temple next door.”

I laughed, and one of the waitresses gave me a big smile.
A fairly cute waitress.

“You think I’m kidding? I get any medicines, I have to
hide them. It doesn’t matter that the doc prescribed them for
me
or what
he’s prescribed them for — Noi’ll be asking me ‘Do you think I should take some
of this? It might do me good.’

“She’s nuts. A couple of months ago she wanted to take
some pills I’d been given for an infected foot. I kind of blew up, and asked
her why the Christ she’d want to do this junk when she didn’t have an infected
foot. She thought that over for a minute, and then she said she figured she
might have an infection inside, somewhere’. She got pissed at me when I
wouldn’t let her take the pills; seemed to think I was hoarding them, just being
mean.

“Then there are the fortune-tellers and monks and things.
Laying off her bets, I guess. Or she probably feels too healthy, and knows that
can’t be right, so she’d better get expert advice on how she
really
feels,
and on what to do because of it.

“She’s just not rational. I don’t mean she’s stupid, or
anything like that — you know better, but she’s just not always
rational.”

Ernest, on the other hand, was nothing if not rational. He
once told me how, at the age of nine, he’d deduced the nonexistence of Jesus
Christ, first, and then of God as well, and how he’d gone on to explain to his
folks on principled grounds why he would never go to Sunday school again.

“She still believes in magic and spirits and things —
ghosts, you name it. You remember that lovely bit of temple carving I brought
back from Sukhothai — that old wooden piece? A real bargain. I had to get rid
of it; I finally gave it to my brother when he was in town. Noi said the thing
hadp/ui. Ghosts. She said she couldn’t sleep with the thing in the house, and
you could be sure I wasn’t going to get any sleep either, not till that thing
was gone.

“Spooks and spirits. They’re all around us, as far as
she’s concerned. When she’s not trying to getridof one, she’s consulting another.
I hate to think how my parents are going to react after they get to talk to
her. They’re coming out for the wedding, you know? They’re Presbyterians; they
figure the
Catholics
are a bunch of idolaters. How are they going to
handle Noi?”

My parents had met Sunantha. They liked her. She liked
them. And everybody was always reminding me how much everybody liked everybody
else, so why didn’t I do the right thing? When I really thought about it, I
couldn’t come up with a satisfactory answer. I wanted to talk to Ernest about it,
but not just at the moment; he had his own problems.

“Like she once told me,” Ernest was saying, “she’d known
all along we were going to get engaged, because she’d gone to the Erawan Shrine
and put in the fix with Phra Prom. She said she’d gone and offered flowers and
incense and a little wooden elephant to the spirit of the shrine. This Thra
Prom’. Then after we got engaged, she went back and promised that once we were
actually
married,
she’d return to the Erawan and make a really special
gift. She wouldn’ t tell me what she’d promised to give; this was a private
thing between her and this screwy four-armed idol sitting on a busy Bangkok
intersection surrounded by touts and tourists and supplicants bearing gifts.

“This shrine isn’t even Buddhist; I think it’s Hindu, or
something.”

It was, in fact, a Brahman shrine. A particularly potent
one, judging by its popularity with Thais and other Asians. Sunantha had spoken
respectfully of the place.

“You know about this place, don’t you?” Ernest asked me.
“All kinds of people believe in it. Even
educated
people. Didn’t you
hear about that movie star, for example — the one who promised this spirit
she’d dance nude in front of the thing, if she got her wish? I think she hired
the whole joint for awhile, so she could pay up without starting a full-scale
riot Had everybody tossed everybody out, before she did her little number. I
call that cheating. You know the one I mean? Talk about a beauty....

“Oh, yeah — and there was the Chinese businessman who beat
himself up — beat himself unconscious, right there in front of the shrine. Just
to say thank you, or something. This guy was some bigwig in banking.”

The way I’d heard it, the gentleman had banged himself on
the head with a mallet for a while, in fact till his eyes were going all around
and he’d toppled to his knees. Right there in public. I don’t know exactly what
he had told the spirit he was doing or why. Pretty interesting, though.

“People who you think would know better,” Ernest said.
“Unbelievable.”

The laying off of one’s spiritual bets is by no means an
uncommon practice in Thailand. You find all manner of rituals going on at the
same time, with Hindu images on one hand, Buddhas on the other, pre-Buddhist,
pre-Hindu spirit houses in between, and magical Khmer script tattooed all over
the people who’ve come to pay their respects, offering flowers, incense, food,
drink, toys, make-up — whatever they feel the various supernatural agencies
have a hankering for — and asking for health and prosperity and marriage to Ernest
in exchange.

“I’d better go — the rain’s stopped.” Ernest got to his
feet, a little unsteadily. Too late, he saw he was up to his ankles in water.
He sat down again to take off his soggy shoes and socks, cursing softly, and
rolled up his trouser legs before setting off once more. He was becoming a real
Old Bangkok Hand.

“Good luck,” I called after him. “I hope everything’s
okay.”

“Of course it is. It’s all in her head. The blasted
nitwit.” The waitress with the nice smile turned out to be married. I finished
the one last small beer I’d ordered, and waded away towards Boon Doc’s,
estimating I’d be late for Happy Hour.

I saw Ernest again some days later. Ernest had asked me to
meet them at the hospital; Noi had had some more tests, and they were going
back for the results that afternoon. No. No AIDS, but there might be something
else. Could I go along? Something serious? Oh, no; probably not — but the
doctors wanted to be sure. There was a chance Noi would have to stick around
the hospital for a few days for ‘observation’, or something. Could I just meet
them there? Ernest felt he might want some company, if Noi did have to stay.
And Noi had asked if my friend Sunantha could come along, too; it would be
better if Noi had a woman to talk to.

I didn’t tell Ernest that I’d been gently trying to set
Sunantha and myself upon our separate paths to happiness in this life, and
having a hard time of it already—even without people enlisting our services as
a happy couple. But this wasn’t the time to go into all of that; Ernest had
enough to worry about.

In the hospital, endless lines of the sick, the
despondent, the confused and fearful waited at this desk and that one, dumbly
suffering yet one more indignity in this life; it wasn’t enough they were ill,
they also had to be subjected to State hospital procedures in triplicate.

Noi looked lovely, as usual — a slender exemplar of Thai
femininity, big bright eyes in an elfin face, long black hair in cascades. She
wore a simple white dress and enormous hoop earrings. I thought her face showed
strain, though, despite her determinedly cheerful manner.

“Don’t worry, Ernest,” she told him. “I don’t think it’s
anything bad. I think it’s only a woman’s problem, you know?”

That day it was Ernest who was bothered by specters, by
premonitions and dark shadows on the psyche. Noi was the one being sensible and
reassuring.

We wound up in a big room — the Houston Astrodome of
waiting rooms — with the multitude sitting on folding wooden chairs facing a
thin brave line of doctors at tables, each with a little black bag and a nurse
in attendance. There were a few beds with curtains on ceiling runners, just in
case somebody needed privacy.

I was only thirty-six, but suddenly I felt aged; these
doctors, all of them, were a bunch of
kids.
Were they old enough to have
finished medical school?

“Are these real doctors?” asked Ernest, echoing my
thoughts exactly.

Yet there they were, ministering to the masses with a fair
pass at aplomb, wanting to have us believe this was all routine stuff; no problem,
they’d seen worse every day of their lives. They stroked beards that weren’t
there, and gazed reflectively off across great expanses of worldly experience
they couldn’t possibly have had.

They were doing these things with greater or lesser
degrees of success. The young fellow right out in front of where we were
sitting was having problems. At that moment he was attending to a broad brown
peasant woman of some fifty years. He was frowning in concentration at a card
on his table as he asked questions and jotted notes. The woman looked
incredulous, even indignant, in a stolid kind of way, that her health and
well-being could be in the hands of one so young. She looked at his white coat
— yes, there was that; and she noted the stethoscope dangling from his neck.
Okay, maybe. Then she examined his face again, and you could see she felt
cheated. Couldn’t the government even give her a real doctor?

Finally, he finished his scribbling; his nurse started
handing him little plastic envelopes of pills, and as he took them he wrote
something on each before giving it over to his patient. You could see the
placebo effect taking hold immediately. Earlier doubts dropped away; her
features relaxed and she kept nodding in response, not listening, visibly
hungering for these tangible healing substances. She even glanced approvingly
at him, once, as he handed her the fourth or fifth packet. This was a good
doctor after all — just look at this stuff. She felt better already.

“Will you look at that,” said Ernest. “If that woman eats
all that medicine she really will need medical help, I’ll bet you. These people
are crazy.”

“You don’t know,” Noi accused him with some heat. “Are you
a doctor? You don’t know. These are good doctors.”

She and Sunantha went into a huddle of exchanged
observations on the peculiar foibles and general existential ineptitude of
Western males, all of it in a hushed and rapid-fire gabble designed to confound
my poor command of Thai.

Finally, it came her time. She got to see the same man
who’d won over the peasant woman with his pharmaceutical largess. They took her
in behind a curtain. A couple of minutes later, the nurse reappeared; she came
over to where Ernest and Sunantha and I were sitting and asked which one was
the ‘husband’.

Ernest went away with her behind the curtain, and all was
calm for a minute or so, before I heard Ernest’s voice raised in contention.
You could catch something about “this blasted kid”, and “haven’t you got any
real
doctors?” Everybody in the waiting area picked right up; this waiting
around tended to get somewhat boring, and here we had some fine entertainment
brewing. Nothing better than a
crazy farang;
too bad you couldn’ t
understand what he was saying.

A nurse was assigned to Noi to see that she got admitted.
If I’d been the doctor, I would’ve prescribed a sedative for Ernest, while I
was at it.

Noi appeared to be in control of things, though she looked
scared at the same time. “We don’t know, yet,” she told him. “We must be
strong; we must wait and see.” But the doctors said she had a kind of brain
tumor, no matter how much Ernest said it wasn’t so. No matter how he willed it
not to be so.

Ernest’s hands were clenched into tight fists on the table
in front of him, and he kept saying “Goddamn” in confused tones of anger and
pain.

He didn’t want another beer, he said. Maybe a coffee.
“This goddamned rain,” he said. “Isn’t it ever going to stop?”

We had finished dinner, but there wasn’t much point in
trying to get a taxi till the rain let up. The rainy season had almost past,
but it wanted us to know there was a last hurrah or two yet to enjoy. This
downpour had come out of nowhere, following upon a sunset that had been so
beautiful it had almost cheered Ernest

Sunantha and I had taken him to our favorite restaurant by
the river. We’d gotten ‘our’ table out on the deck, right by the water’s edge,
and we’d sampled all manner of tasty snacks and beer as the sun sank down
across the river, it’s dying rays scattered into sprays of glittering gems in
the rooster tails flung up by the long-tail boats.

Sunantha had once again demonstrated her practically
insatiable lust for yam
pla dukfoo
— fluffed and deep-fried catfish
served with chilies, shredded green mango, onions, and lime. Not to mention her
most unThai-ladylike appreciation of the way this dish complemented cold beer.
It was a small miracle that she’d kept her figure, her fine porcelain skin. How
long could it last? I found myself wondering. This creature of vast appetites.
This succubus designed mentally and physically to bear child after child till
that perfect figure was ruined and her man was lost to himself in fatherhood
and ultimate failure as a literary gadabout. The horror.