Brave New Love (40 page)

Pan has told me that it’s not like that in the village where he lived in Thailand. There’s a lot of empty land, even a jungle, and rivers, and lakes, and all the people are farmers,
or fisher-men like his father was. But his father insisted on coming here when he had the chance, thinking he would make more money here, and that Pan would get a better education.

Finally, the motel. It has a garage divided up into separate cubicles, each one with a heavy plastic curtain over the entrance that can be chained shut. This is to prevent anybody passing
by—or spying—to see the makes of cars or the license plates. We’re not the only people who come here in secret to be alone together.

I park, we quickly leave the garage, Pan hurries inside the front door of the motel and I close and lock the curtain, then follow him into the lobby.

The brown carpet, the color of mud, is worn through and unraveled in patches. Bare cement walls are plastered with photographs of young women wearing tiny bikinis, and muscular men squeezed into
tight swimsuits way too small for them. Also illegal, also expensive to pay off the cops. But the hotel management seems to feel that pictures like this will attract paying guests, and get them
into the right mood.

The various people who work alone at the front desk from day to day all recognize us now. Today it’s the bald fat man with the big, white, tobacco-stained mustache that hangs over his
upper lip. An evil smelling cigar smolders in his mouth. I hate the stink of it, but I like being in a place where almost every law can be broken.

The bald fat man turns reluctantly away from the TV on the wall. It’s showing a news report about a crowd of people going to work this morning who were mashed together in an elevator that
crashed from the 93rd floor of the building all the way to the basement. You can hardly tell one body from another—it’s just a bloody mass of arms and legs and faces.

“Hey, boys,” the man says around his cigar, bored. “You can have 398.” He holds out his hand for my credit card.

“I already made a reservation on the phone, and paid,” I tell him. “Doesn’t it say that?”

He peers more closely at his computer. “Oh, yeah, yeah, it says that.” He had been too lazy, and too involved in the TV, to take a good look at the reservations screen. “Here
you go.” He hands me a small dirty envelope with a plastic card in it and turns immediately back to the TV to see the last images of the people crushed in the elevator.

Room 398 is on the third floor. Neither of us really feels like going in an elevator after seeing that news clip, but there are no stairs in this place. Most people never use stairs anyway, so
the owners of the motel saved money by not building stairs. I’ve heard there used to be laws about how you built things. But not here, not for a long time anyway. It’s a fire hazard not
to have stairs, because elevators always zip automatically to the floor where the fire is. Guests trapped in their rooms in a fire don’t even have the suicidal option of jumping out of
windows because the windows are too small, and can’t be opened.

The elevator is just big enough for three people, and we’re the only ones in it. As soon as the doors close we are in each others’ arms, squeezing tightly together. Our fear of
elevators has vanished.

The room has the same moldy brown carpet as the lobby. The bathroom is, as usual, so filthy that it’s unusable. The stink of it is pervasive. The bed’s also dirty, like all the beds
we’ve seen in this motel. There’s one bare florescent strip in the middle of the ceiling. We shed our clothes and drape them over the back of the single chair, which seems to be the
only place in the room that doesn’t have dust and dirt on it. We fall on to the bed.

Even in this disgusting place, it’s wonderful. With Pan it’s always wonderful.

Afterwards, even though we need to leave soon, we lie there talking. My head is cradled by Pan’s smooth chest.

“Make me nervous, what Ms. Van Houten say about kids asking questions. I do not like it,” Pan says. This year he’s learned to use plurals and sometimes even pronounce the final
“s.” He hasn’t got the tenses right yet though—he has told me they don’t have tenses in the Thai language, and they’re hard for even somebody as smart as Pan to
get used to.

“I don’t like what she said either,” I say. “The guys I know have been suspicious ever since I sat with you at lunch last year. And Dezbah!” I shook my head and
sighed. “She may think something’s going on between us, too.”

I feel the muscles tighten in Pan’s arm around my shoulders as he clenches his fists. “I do not know why they cannot just leave us alone!” he says vehemently. “Who we
hurting? Who we make problem for? Not like this in my country. There, men go with men and women go with women if they want. And nobody care, nobody make problem in their life. Nobody say not
normal. I wish I never come here!”

That stings. “But what . . . what about me?”

He squeezes me. “You are wonderful, Eric. Best thing ever happen to me. Only, if we in my village, we have freedom. Do not have to worry what other people think, because they do not think
anything about it. Do not have to worry about getting caught by cops. But here . . .”

It isn’t necessary for him to finish. “But we will still win. I’m
determined
that we will win! Oh. Do you understand ‘determined’?”

He shakes his head sadly.

“It means I will not let anybody or anything stop me from being with you. I will do it no matter what. I hope you’re the same.”

“I feel same way. But different for me,” he says. “I from another country. You American. Your parents rich, my father poor. I get in bigger trouble than you here. Yeah, you
have trouble too. But maybe cops let you go. Not me. Punish me. Lock me up. Not fair here.”

And then it’s just as if his words have been heard by the cruel higher being we’re forced to pretend to believe in. The powerful supernatural being who enforces all the laws made by
the state. (Pan has told me many times that our God is nothing like the Buddha, who is kind and understanding. Not that he can let people know he’s Buddhist. He goes to church and pretends
he’s Christian.) As unreal as we know the American God is, the approaching wail of sirens is not unreal at all. We rush to the small window.

In a moment two cop cars pull up in front of the motel. Cops squeeze out of the cars and move into the lobby. We’re trapped. The lobby is the only way out.

We don’t say anything. We rush to pull our clothes on. Whatever is going to happen will be worse if we’re naked.

And we continue not to talk—if there are no voices coming from this room the cops might think nobody’s in here. Anyway, there’s no need to talk. I can tell by the way Pan has
his eyes fearfully on the door that he has no idea what to do.

Neither do I.

There’s a loud knock on the door, and then a click as the plastic key opens the lock. The man at the desk must have told the cops what room we are in, and given them the key.

There are three cops, as many as will fit in the elevator. At first they just glare at us, one hand squeezing each nose against the stink from the bathroom. It’s a good thing we both got
dressed really fast. With the hand not on their noses, they all pull out their guns. Their uniforms are tight, clinging to their fat bellies. It’s hard to picture all three of them in the
tiny elevator.

“IDs,” one of them says.

We get them out quickly. One cop pulls mine out of my hand, another grabs Pan’s. They study them. “Same names that teacher—Van Houten—gave us,” one of the cops
says. “She got the motel right, too.” They pocket them, their guns still pointed at us.

Van Houten turned us in? But we trusted her! And our IDs . . . we can’t do anything without them. I turn and look briefly at Pan. He doesn’t look back, apparently calm and impassive,
his eyes fixed on nothing, his face a mask.

“Wait a minute,” I dare to say, panicking. “You’ve got to give us our IDs back. What are you going to do with them?”

“We’ll show them to the sergeant when he books you for indecent behavior. After that you won’t need them.”

Does that mean they’re going to lock us up? I look over at Pan again. His face remains completely blank. Unlike me, he shows no emotion at all. Maybe he learned to be like this when he and
his father were questioned at Immigration.

I’m beside myself. I take another big risk. “Can we . . . can we call our parents?”

The cops look at each other. The one who does the talking pushes back his cap, thinking. He turns back to me with an ugly smile. He takes his hand from his nose and flicks his wrist in an
effeminate gesture. “Of course—the homo is a mommy’s boy,” he says in falsetto. The other cops laugh. His voice sinks back to its normal register. “No way, pansy.
We’ll call your parents from the station. Come on, let’s get out of this dump. I can’t stand the smell another minute.”

One of them grabs Pan’s arm, the other grabs mine. They pull us out of the room toward the elevator. At least they’re not putting handcuffs on us. They don’t need to.
They’re bigger than we are, they have guns, and I know there are more of them down in the lobby. I saw at least six of them getting out of the cop cars. We’re way outnumbered.

As we approach the elevator, terrified as I am, I wonder how five people, three of them fat, are going to fit in an elevator designed to hold three people, max. I think of the elevator on the
news, all the mangled bodies crushed together. I’m even more terrified now, my heart racing. Maybe one will ride down with us, and the other two will stay up here until the elevator returns
to this floor.

Nope. All three of them squeeze into the elevator with us. The elevator creaks from the weight. When the door slams shut, the whole thing shudders uneasily. I squeeze my eyes closed as we start
to descend, my stomach cramping, waiting every second for the sensation of falling, for the crash on the bottom floor. The elevator wheezes.

We don’t crash. We edge out into the lobby. The elevator door shuts immediately and I hear it going up.

I’m surprised that there are no other cops in the lobby. Where did they go?

“Keys.” The bald fat man at the desk holds out his hand blandly, as if this nightmare were a daily occurrence for him to watch and gloat. Maybe it is.

I pull the plastic card out of my pocket. One of the cops hands the guy an identical plastic card. The cops start to pull us out of the lobby.

“Wait a second,” the man at the desk says, punching computer keys. “I have to highlight the credit card so nobody else ever lets them in here again.”

One of the cops laughs. “You think they’re ever gonna be able to come here again, after the sentence they get?” But he waits.

And so there is time for us to see three more cops getting out of the elevator, holding onto a middle-aged man and a young woman. Why are they arresting a man who is with a woman? Maybe the man
or woman is married to somebody else. If you’re married, fooling around with anybody else is a punishable crime.

The cops pull at us. “Come on, we’re going to the station.”

“Wait a minute,” I say. “My motorcycle’s locked up in the garage. I can’t just leave it here, since I’m never coming back.”

The cops look at each other again. We’re now far enough away from the desk that the fat man can get the two keys from the other group.

The cop who seems to be the leader of our group, the one who’s done most of the talking so far, nods at one of the other two and says, “Yeah, we need to take possession of that. Used
in a crime, so it’ll be police property.” He winks at the other cops. “Chick, you drive the bike behind us. The homos will go with us in the car. It’ll be good to have
another bike at the station.”

The way the cops are talking makes me feel as if we’re non-persons. But then we’ve been non-persons for a long time, ever since we began to love each other.

They pull us outside. I can see that the traffic is starting to get nasty. It will take a while to get to the station, wherever it is. I don’t know what Pan’s father is going to do,
but my parents could very well disown me, and refuse to help me out of this mess. If they wanted to, they probably could help me, because my mother works for the State. But I have a sinking feeling
they won’t. This is the end of my life, and Pan’s life too.

“Where’s your damn bike?”

“Over here.” I lead them to the numbered cubicle where my bike is parked. It’s far from the cop cars. You can’t see it from the street.

“The key to unlock this place?” The one who’s going to drive—and probably steal—my bike holds out his hand.

I reach into my pocket and feel the key to the parking cubicle there. I pull my hand out, empty. “It’s not here. It must have fallen out of my pocket in the room.”

Pan looks at me. He knows the key didn’t fall out of my pocket in the room.

The cop rolls his eyes. “You dumb pervo!” he says. He turns to the other cops. “Wait here for me to go and get it.” He hurries as fast as his gut will let him toward the
motel entrance.

Pan and I look at each other again. I sense that he knows what I’m about to do. And he’s going to try the same thing.

Suddenly I lunge at the cop who’s holding my arm, hold my leg behind his legs and push, hard. He goes right down; I’m not captain of the wrestling team for nothing. I don’t
have time to look and see what Pan is doing, but I hear the other cop grunting at just about the same time as mine. I throw myself on top of him, feeling his fat gut against my stomach with
disgust. It’s their guts that might save us, though—they make them slow. I lock one arm under his chin, squeezing his neck, and punch his eyes repeatedly with my other hand. He tries to
push me away, but even though he’s taller than me, I’m stronger. While I’m punching his eyes I worry about Pan. He’s smaller than me.

But he’s strong too.

I can see my cop’s eyes bleeding now. It’s reached the point where he’s going to have trouble seeing. I give his windpipe an extra hard squeeze, and he goes limp.

I jump to my feet to help Pan. But his cop is out on the ground too. I don’t know how he did it—it must be some kind of Asian martial arts. But there’s no time for me to
congratulate him. I unlock the chain on the heavy plastic curtain over the entrance to the parking cubicle, push it open. I pull on the helmet, hand the other one to Pan, and jump on my bike. Pan
is right behind me. I rev up and we zoom away from the motel. On the road, we weave in and out of the cars stuck in traffic. We get ahead of them without going over the speed limit. It’s
clear that the cops at the motel will never catch us now.