The Bangkok Asset: A novel (13 page)

“That’s okay,” a voice says, “that’s pretty damn good, but we would like to hear the clicks. This is science, right, and sport, it’s not magic. People don’t hear the clicks, they’re going to think you’re cheating. That’s just the way the mind works. The miracles have to be explicable, even when they’re not.”

Suddenly as each ball approaches we hear a series of clicks from the Asset so rapid they are like a single sound. “Great, that’s just great. Is Beijing getting this?”

“Yep,” a voice says.

“Okay, so increase the speed. Keep the clicks audible. Increase the speed steadily, when he starts to miss
do not slow,
keep at that speed until he gets his mojo back.”

There must be a machine hurling the balls at him. The speed increases until he can no longer react fast enough. The cameraman does not need to be told to focus on his face at this point. The struggle there is titanic, filled with rage and madness barely under control. Still the balls keep flying at him, still he keeps missing them. Then little by little he masters his own technology and is able to echolocate each ball at amazing speed. The clicks rise in pitch until they become inaudible, however.

“Okay, that’s great. Look, you can’t click that fast at audible levels, that’s okay, we’ll use a machine to show you are still actually clicking. But this time we’re going to use smaller, more solid objects going faster. Golf balls. Okay?”

“Okay, fire away.”

There is confidence in the tone. He has conquered the new game and is able to accelerate at will. Finally, to show his total mastery, he deflects one of the golf balls back into the audience. “Ouch,” someone says. It is the voice that has been giving the orders. Laughter.

“Okay, cut,” Goldman says and turns on the lights. “That’s it, timed out. I have to get this back to where I borrowed it before the next security shift. Everybody out. Hope you enjoyed the show. You all know where and how to contact me. Good night.”

I
n the cab on the way to Pat Pong with Professor Chu, Chanya and I cannot decide what it was we just saw: a sales pitch, a military demonstration, a game, a home movie show? Somehow the inferior and amateur quality of the video made it convincing. No one does poor photography anymore, we’re all pros these days. It is Krom who sets the tone.

“So, the Asset is definitely close to escape velocity, if the video tonight was genuine.” She looks at Chu.

“I think it was genuine,” Chu says. “I’m convinced. Of course, it could have been a mock-up, but I doubt it. The first thing a serious potential buyer will do is test the echolocation for himself, so there isn’t really a chance to cheat.”

“Goldman must be desperate to break all the rules like that.”

“I think he has clearance,” Chu says. “I don’t think he really ‘borrowed’ that tape surreptitiously.”

“How come?”

“The gap is narrowing,” the Professor says. “The others. The competition.”

Krom turns to us to explain something important that the Professor already understands: “If that echolocation exercise was the real thing, that demonstrates much more than a capacity to catch balls blindfolded. That pretty much demonstrates accelerated learning capacity no one else has yet reached. Anywhere, ever. It’s the grail of the TH community: ALE. That’s why Goldman was willing to take the risk to show it to that ministry.”

“Professor Chu’s ministry?” Chanya wants to know.

“No,” Krom says with an affectionate smile, “another ministry.”

“The other ministry the cameramen come from?”

“No,” Krom says, the smile wearing a little. “Yet another.”

“I don’t get quite why the learning capacity is so important. I mean, on an abstract level, sure, it’s what humans are better at than animals, we learn quicker. But why does it get that kind of respect?”

“Because it’s not just a demonstration of physical coordination of a high order. For him to learn to catch the balls that fast he had to tap into accelerated evolution. It involves not just physical response mechanisms but the intellect as well—and computing capacity. Personality. Everything, but especially personality. That is not a totally human human anymore.”

“What is it then?”

“Is it okay to use the word
spiritual
?”

“You mean he’s become like a Buddha?”

“No. Like a demon. A pre-Christian, pre-Buddhist god. Pagan. Like something out of a Hindu temple, or pre-Roman Europe.” She pauses to think for a moment. “Once you get into this technology all kinds of things start to make sense that didn’t before.”

“You mean this technology is not totally new?”

“They’re starting to think all the great ancient societies had it. It’s what we refer to ignorantly as magic. A superior science that led to catastrophic hubris—all the ancient cultures have that folk memory.”

“So we’re starting back on the road to catastrophe?” Chanya says.

“Personally, I think we’re at the end, on the brink.”

“That’s why we all find the Asset so fascinating,” Chu says as we reach the bars.

“So what is
escape velocity
in this context?” Chanya asks, too late because we are all distracted getting out of the car. Then we are distracted by Chu. We remember the formerly most intriguing question of the night: which way did he swing?

The answer was, with hindsight, inevitable:
katoeys.
I’m afraid the Professor turned quite coy about those bars he most wanted to visit, which led Chanya to put him in her
Total Jerk
file even before he turned giggly. It was amazing. Krom and I finally decided to try him out in one of the tranny bars after seeing no serious spark of desire generated in the gay or the straight bars. In the Love Me Tender, however, the quality of the surgery together with the unnerving beauty of its products was damned impressive. Chu grew a beam on his face that quickly developed into an attitude of gratitude and generosity toward us for bringing him to paradise. He insisted on paying for round after round of drinks, while round after round of exquisite products of the gender reassignment industry came to pay him close attention. By the time he had settled on three that he wanted to take home, Krom had already disappeared to the lesbian bars on the other side of Surawong. Chanya and I caught a cab.

“Krom made a pass at me,” she said to the window in a soft mutter.

“She did? When? In the bathroom at the restaurant?” That was the only time they were alone together, as far as I could remember.

“Yes. It wasn’t aggressive and I’m not even sure she wanted to do it. I mean, something like that could ruin this little partnership she has with you, couldn’t it?”

“So why did she do it?”

“Because she couldn’t help herself.” A pause. “I turned her down, of course.”

I
decide that the evening with Professor Chu definitely constituted work and I am therefore entitled to take the day off. But I have to visit the station that evening to clear the backlog of e-mails, which turn out to be a good few hours’ work. I stroll home and find Chanya still awake and watching an old Thai soap on YouTube.

“Did you switch your phone off?”

I check my phone, see it is switched off. “Yes. Shut it when I was trying to clear the e-mails. Forgot to switch it on again.”

“Uh-huh.”

She wrenches her eyes from the movie. Now I see it is not a soap but a comic version of the Nang Mak ghost story, about a Thai woman so devoted to her husband that she manages to return from the Other Side and serve him as a ghost—until he finds out and she has the kind of destructive tantrum only ghosts can do well (half the village dies from her curse in this version). Chanya pauses the movie in order to speak in a gentle voice. I have a feeling we are about to have a serious conversation about me.

“Sonchai, Krom called earlier.”

“Ah-ha!”

“She said she was looking for you, but maybe she was looking for a chance to talk to me.”

“To chat you up?”

She scowls. “No, to talk about you.”

“What about me?”

“Your mental health.”

“Really.”

She turns from the screen to give me her full attention. “We had quite a talk, but it kept coming down to the same thing. I told her what kind of state you are in. Sonchai, now that you’ve at least come out with your father obsession—we both agreed that’s a good sign, so much better than having it festering away inside—surely you’ve got to see your mother about it? About him?”

“I will. Soon. A good detective doesn’t question the key witness until he has his ducks in a row.”

She grabs my chin and turns it until I’m looking at her. “You’re scared, aren’t you? It’s Psychology 101: people are plagued by two opposing drives—the drive to know and the drive not to know.”

I break away from her to go to the window. On the road all is still under the streetlights. “You spoke to Nong?”

“Yes, after Krom called.”

“And?”

“She said she’d be in her bar tomorrow at about nine in the morning—there’s some inventory she needs to check on. She said you could stop by then, if there’s something you need to say or know.” She lets a couple of beats pass. “Frankly, Sonchai, how likely is it that she doesn’t even know his name?”

“His name’s
Jack,
” I say plaintively.

“C’mon, Sonchai.”

“Are you sure Krom wasn’t using me as an excuse to get close to you? You’re the one said she made a pass at you at the Heaven’s Gate Tower.”

“Maybe I was mistaken. It was ambiguous anyway.”

“Or did you make a pass at her?”

She slaps her desk and glares at me. “Okay, you win. You don’t want to talk about it, that’s fine.” She turns back to her soap. I figure she’s going to watch the movie all through, and I can’t sleep with the light from her screen blazing away, so I decide to smoke a joint—I’m not sure I’m strong enough for more oil just now. I’m pretty mellow when she comes to bed. I assume she is still pissed off with me after our little spat, but instead she curls up beside me and starts to play with my dick.

“I’m not in the mood,” I say.

“So why is it getting bigger?”

“A man lies down to relax, the blood in his head makes its way downwards. Not every erection is a tribute to the love object.”

“Really?” She jiggles a little more at exactly the right calibration of touch and rhythm. We’ve been together a long time, after all.

“Okay, I’m persuadable.”

She disappears under the sheet to go to work on me. When she pops up again she has reverted to manual labor, but very skillful. “Sonchai,” she says in the cozy voice she uses for moments like this.

“Yes?”

“Suppose I did have a little fling with Krom. Would it upset you very much?”

I freeze for a moment, then relax and scratch my jaw. That’s quite a question. “I’m not sure.”

“It wouldn’t be the same as if I went with a man, would it?”

“Maybe not.”

“I mean, it wouldn’t be like some rival had usurped my womb and thereby threatened the survival of your line, your DNA? The sort of thing male lions get het up about.”

“I guess not.”

“But you would be hurt?”

“I’m not sure.”

The hand goes on strike. “Sonchai, I’m trying to have a mature adult dialogue here. You’re my number one relationship, that’s final. I don’t want to damage us by being selfish.”

“I hate it when you do this soft, liberal, middle-class stuff. It’s so condescending. Like you hold all the cards and aren’t you great for not acting like a fascist bitch.”

Now the hand has relinquished the love object altogether. This has the effect of making me feel lonely. Under the guiding influence of cannabis I grab the hand and put it back. I hold it there in a viselike grip. “Why don’t you admit that was what her call was all about? You discussed having an affair, didn’t you?”

Instead of pulling back, because I won’t let her, she tries to strangle it. “Okay, yes, we did kind of touch on the subject when she called. You were definitely the main point, but then we talked about it.”

“And?”

“I said I would want you to be okay with it.”

“Okay with it? What does that mean?”

She sighs. I release my hand. She relaxes her grip and returns to the traditional up-and-down motion. “It means if I had the fling with Krom would you use it as an excuse?”

“To do what?”

She pauses and grips tight again. “Screw that new girl at your mother’s bar. I’ve seen the way you look at her.”

I honestly hadn’t thought of that. Her name is Katrina, a
leuk kreung
like me with a Russian absentee father, twenty-three, stunning, with everything still firm. Now my dear wife has really given me a hard-on. “You bet,” I murmur.

“Bastard,” she murmurs back. She lets go and withdraws the hand, leaving me desolate and lonely. Then she jumps on me. That’s okay, we don’t have the crime of marital rape over here; basically, you get into bed naked with someone, you take your chances (am I being a tad too robust for you here, R?). Anyway, if she’s channeling Krom, I’m definitely fantasizing that she’s Katrina.

Afterward we are relaxed rather than blissed. The tension is gone. Chanya curls up against me. In the silence and the dark I wonder about my lover. For her the thought of doing anything new and challenging, like sleeping with a woman for the first time, is a welcome cure for an extreme numbness. It could just as well have been base jumping.

Now, in the way of all humans, especially stoned humans, my mind switches to something completely different. A memory that hitherto had no relevance to the present pops up in perfect clarity. It went like this:

I heard the first whisper one hot humid afternoon on Soi Cowboy. The Isaan lingerie vendors were selling bras and panties from their stalls through oral hire purchase agreements, the cooked-food stands were doing a roaring trade, and the motorbike taxi jocks were practicing kung fu while making lewd offers to every female who passed. The
soi
boasted its usual abundance of attractive women under thirty and not a one of them looked more
fatale
than any regular country lass in shorts and T-shirt, yawning, eating, and gossiping al fresco on a sultry day. The sorcery of sex and money would transform them into irresistible succubi at exactly seven p.m., not a minute before.

They all knew me and I knew them, mostly because they all wanted to work for my mother, Nong, at the Old Man’s Club. Mama Nong paid better than all the other bars because Police Colonel Vikorn owned most of the business. She didn’t need to bribe cops so she had a wider profit margin; therefore she could be choosy, and she was. She chose girls like a seasoned wine taster chooses wine. Sometimes she surprised even me, taking on a girl who didn’t come close to a rival in looks and body, but possessed a certain extra something that Nong herself had owned in her day: magic that could turn a poor girl into a rich one overnight. All you needed was the talent to make a man believe with all his soul that he couldn’t live without you, even though you were, well, an article for sale among thousands. That’s all. I understand you call it capitalist democracy, R, over there in the West.

Now O called out from across the street: “Hey, Sonchai, some old man was asking for you last night. Said he saw you on TV.”

As the respectable face of Police Colonel Vikorn’s pharmaceutical empire, I was often on TV, giving the kind of glowing account of our district’s law enforcement record that
farang
like to hear. Naturally, I speak in English. No Thai would believe a word, but I didn’t feel guilty or impure about this particular duty. If the world currency is hype and hypocrisy, then hype and hypocrisy it must be. Survival has always been the guiding fundamental on these shores.

“Really? So, what bar are you working in now?”

“Rawhide.”

“How is it?”

“Oh, it’s okay. Bit quiet. Any room at the Old Man’s?”

“I’ll ask, okay?”

“Thanks, Sonchai.”

Like the bite of a mosquito—how are you supposed to know it’s malarial?

It happened the next afternoon too. This time it wasn’t just hot and humid; the heavens opened when I was halfway between Country Road and Suzy Wong’s, so I dived into the Pink Pussy where I’d misspent much of the sperm of my youth. Some of the girls who really were girls then are still there, mostly as entrepreneurs introducing customers to new arrivals from Buriram (there’s a saying:
Are there any pretty girls left in Buriram?
). “Hey, Sonchai,” Lalita said, “some old man was in here last night asking about you.”

“Really? Did you tell him to look for me at the Old Man’s Club?”

“Of course. He said he knew that.”

I shrugged. “That’s all?”

“He bought me a drink.”

I waited for the punch line. When it didn’t come, I said, “So, did he take you upstairs?”

She smirked. “For an old man he was really cute. Kind in bed and very funny. Very generous, too—we only lasted thirty minutes and he gave me two thousand baht.”

“Anything else about him you noticed?”

“Just the way he was—kind of hard, but knew all about sex. Different. He wasn’t your usual wick-dipper, that’s for sure.”

I didn’t think any more of it until the next day when it happened again. The reportage came from Superbar this time. And then from Blue Balls. It finally dawned on me that he was playing some kind of game, this mysterious old man who claimed to be looking for me, but never looked for me in the Old Man’s Club, where he would surely have found me. Then one evening, at about ten p.m., I was strolling down the
soi
to grab some fresh air, having been on the go at the Old Man’s since five in the evening, when I saw an aging
farang
leaning against a wall at the end of the street, staring at me. What impressed me most was that he was standing under some exterior air-conditioning that split the light into a joyful spectrum of colors, which were raining all over him.

I wondered if this was the old man who had been asking about me—and should I be thinking about personal security? To avoid any kind of problem I deliberately averted my eyes, turned, and walked back to Mama Nong’s bar. Only then I allowed myself to reproduce the image of him in my imagination: he reminded me just a tad of Brando in
Last Tango in Paris.
In Europe or North America he would have been wearing a sweatshirt under a gray raincoat open at the front, disclosing once-impressive musculature—and showing signs of alcoholism. That night he was in long shorts and T-shirt, like me, and drinking from a can of iced lemon tea. An old man, sure, but a dangerous one. And there was something else that only returned to me with hindsight: a look in his eye unmistakable to any cop who has had to do with the desperate and the damned. This man had firsthand experience of what shits the gods can be and, unlike the timid majority, intended to tell them so face-to-face when he met them.

That was it. I never saw him again and there was no reason at all to keep the memory in the foreground—until now. I am quite certain that old man is one of the old men in the hospital ward. On the other hand, throughout my life absolute certainties have turned out to be misleading products of despair, so I’m probably wrong. It would be nice to know, though, for sure.

The memory of the “Rainbow Man” continued to haunt me into the next morning. Nowadays there is a way of finding out who your father is, of course; or, to be more precise, who he is not. For a while I thought about enlisting the skills of the forensic team at the station, but decided it would have been too embarrassing. The news would have spread like a computer virus.

A quick search in YouTube using the key words
DNA Paternity Testing Kit
revealed that there existed a quick, shame-free solution provided at low cost by Know the Father Laboratories Incorporated, based in Kentucky. Part of the sales strategy of Know the Father involved a clip from a reality TV show where a sobbing, torn-apart young woman swears on every holy book she’s heard of that the child is
his
(pointing at the image of a man on a ten-foot video screen beamed in safely from another county), while the putative father on the screen darkly mumbles that he doesn’t believe her and she is a lying whore.

In the video clip the presenter ratchets up the drama and illustrates the power of the product by pushing the distraught mother to her limits: “We need the truth now, Jeanie, if you have any doubts, anything you want to say, honey, that you haven’t said already, any little indiscretion you’ve covered up till now, this is the moment.”

“I swear by Almighty God I’ve been faithful and true, may I be struck by lightning and go to hell if I lie.”

Groans, cheers, and great roars of empathy from the audience. Everyone’s on her side, including me. Cut back to the giant screen where simmers the jealous bastard who is in the process of ruining a perfect marriage and losing a faithful caring wife along with his beautiful bouncing baby through Stone Age possessiveness (it doesn’t help that he’s a three-hundred-pound slob with a black walrus mustache and shaved head): “I’m tellin’ you the kid ain’t mine. That ain’t my nose, it ain’t my chin, and they ain’t my eyes.” Boos and jeers from the indignant audience.