The White Flamingo (4 page)

Lost in his own story
, perhaps?

Happy ending impossible.

“My father doesn’t love me?” A slow thirty-year-old sales clerk once said.

“
Well, what can you do about it?” Taylor responded.

“My father doesn’t love me.”

“Well, if that is a fact, we cannot change it. And what does it matter if he doesn’t love you? How does that fact affect how you are in the present moment?”

“But…”

“Thank him for not loving you. Without it, you are free. You have somewhere to sleep, you have food, and that is the most that any of us can ever need to be happy. Love, is an abstract idea that is not to be recommended,” Taylor smiled. “Love is a disease.”

His years counselling lasted six
.

Until he took it too far.

Jerry, a teenager with abusive foster parents and a paranoid disposition had, following an intense session, disappeared from his clinical practice and vanished from the lives of his friends and family. The incident, while not at all isolated in the profession, had caused Taylor to consider a career change.

A change he took.

Embraced, even.

A change
he implemented with a houseboat, his wife, son, and the dream of writing a book that would sell.

Well, be careful of what you wish for.

The book sold.

He took to writing short stories
at first. His manuscripts grew as his confidence blossomed, and after the tragic loss of his family, he sat down for an intense period of six months and wrote what was to become the best seller of that year.

The Boy in the Window
,
about a child whose mother suffered from a rare mental illness, Munchausen syndrome by proxy, sold six hundred and fifty thousand copies in its first year. The boy’s mother would make him ill in order to garner the sympathy from doctors and health care workers. The child grew up sick and resentful, an outsider, who later became a brilliant thinker.
The Boy in the Window
was based on his own childhood.

The fame brought with it invitations to functions and it brought wealth.
After the death of his family, he attended award functions and champagne brunches until his ego had been overwhelmed. The Story had backfired. The money he used to free himself to the other side of the world where he was to write a novel. A novel that would make him enough money to fly back home again.

Right.

EIGHT

THE DETECTIVE
walked along the seventh road scanning the road for
The
Blue Rose
. The last shot was creeping up his back like a hungry lizard. He would need another shot, not eventually, but within the next few hours. He felt a loss, a tragic, nostalgic loss, the loss of somebody he had yet to meet in a place he had yet to go. Sometimes, he felt that time travel was not only possible in theory, but that it was happening all the time. Nobody was in the present moment, they were busy walking toward somewhere they wanted to be, or painfully living in the past; a past which can only be worth thinking about if the present was considered unbearable.

Everybody needed something.

Even the holy men.

Evening had fallen in Fun City.

Broken.

Timeworn hookers patrolled the streets like zombies in some post-apocalyptic
B-movie; slow, predatory, evil, self-respect abandoned in some short-time hotel torn down in 1994. Only the shell remained. The human being had long since departed. An angry tenant last seen in a rice field upcountry. He walked past a pawnshop and looked inside at all the old belongings of broken lives.

Ghosts rumored to live among the living in Fun
City, the old stories brought down from the villages. A long-limbed flicker in the corner of the Headman’s eye. White blouse with fingernails painted black. Long dank, black hair. Blackened eyes. She haunted the village of her childhood with her stories of easy money and naive foreigners. The hunger for cash broadcasted from her bitter pinched-up streetwise mask. The worn cheetah-skinned leggings, cheap plastic handbags, chunky metal gold-colored bracelets. These were not the packaging for hearts of gold. These were street costumes for Fun City’s eldest entertainers. The whores moving around the block in a final lap of failure before their daughters took over their patches in the next cycle of ecstasy and agony. They would train their daughters how to bleed the buffalo dry. How to lie, cheat, and steal. How to fake love. How to become bitter, cynical shells of anger, and how to keep sending the money to the P.O. How to ‘look for man with good heart.’

How to break it.

The detective was not looking for a maniac. If he were it’d be easy. He knew that they were out there. Thousands of them flocked to the resort. Yes, shit happened. It happened every day. Steroid freaks shot up and went on the rampage. Attacked pedestrians. There were balcony jumps. Suicides a daily occurrence in Fun City. Chicks with dicks. Boys in Brown. Russians. Stabbings. Balloon chasers. Gold hunters. Until this. Nothing came close to this. A dead whore sliced apart on top of a pool table. It was not the work of a maniac. It was the work of dark art and revenge. It was the work of a man with an agenda.

A dark fucking agenda.

The Detective walked on.

It was just how he had remembered it. Hunted men sat everywhere. Outnumbered by the predatory eyes of the bar girls, the lady boys, the zombies, and the cash carriers. Their hands shakily held bottles of beer and lit cigarettes. For some
, it was the end of the dream and for others, it was just the beginning of the nightmare. A man with a long black beard and a body covered with tattoos couldn’t negotiate the distance from his bar stool to a motorcycle taxi. Bar girls helped him. It was both pathetic and beautiful. Living out his dying days in sin. In the next life, he would be reborn to Fun City as a street dog or a souvenir salesman.

An adolescent boy of twelve or thirteen walked past a tattoo parlor with a small leopard on a leash.

Beat that. 

The Detective had studied the books of faith.

Desire demanded conflict. However, desire demanded much more than just that, it required mystery, beauty, money, and the fulfillment of greed. Without desire, only peace remained. Peace, what was that? There was no need for peace here. It was a freak show. Episodes of abuse, unheard silent screams. The bargirl wincing in pain, as she pictured the money at the end of the alcoholic red-faced customer ravaging the only thing she had that was worth buying. Her hands gripped the bedposts as the fat, bald foreigner entered her from behind. What would she spend the money on? The bottle of whiskey for her boyfriend. The boy from the village who drank to medicate. The game of cards, rotgut whiskey, the release from the trap, the motorbike, the abandoned child, the endless wheel of fortune. Or would she spend the money on a brief snatch of cuteness.

Yeah,

Hello Kitty.

Paul Frank.

Burberry.

A gift for the friendly Norwegian sending two hundred dollars a month.

He had good heart.

Why he no come back?

Because she was a whore.

And always will be

Unless,

It wasn’t worth thinking about.

It was a waste. The human waste dripped down to a reservoir of ruin and relief down the city drains where monitor lizards and awful pythons dwelt amongst the shite, tampons, used condoms: the excesses of Fun City, its center, its soul: a dreamless sludge of spent desire.

Joe glanced at them, wary not to catch their eyes. These men were not shocked. The night market had become home, the place where they drew their pensions and lived out their days wandering the alleyways and avenues of desire. They had seen it all. Old age, depression, illness, sickness, bankruptcy; mistakes too hideous for remonstration or regret. They had not only been around the block, they had built the entire estate and then they had knocked it down. They laughed at the legless beggars on skateboards and the broken-toothed prostitutes patrolling the streets. They had lost houses both here and in the west. Some had lost limbs too. They knew that the mafia looked after the beggars, that the women were not really poor, that the deaf women were not deaf and the blind were not blind. They knew that the crazy men who painted their bodies blue and paraded themselves in the streets for a coin or two were only half-crazy, half of the time, and the blue washed off. They knew that fish swam in the river and fruit fell from the trees. The schools were free and were worth it, the hospitals were somewhere you could go and die free. They knew everything about Fun City, yet, they knew nothing. They knew too much. They had lost children too. No one bought their drinks. No one bought them a new house in their home village. Where was their new 4x4?  Respect was a remote abstract animal in a desert of thieves and whores. Brokers of tailor-made suits, shady tour agents, language schools, marriage brokers, estate agents, swam in the seas of impossible hope. In Fun City, men were reborn condemned. A phoenix from the ashtray. A handsome man. A knight in a crusty white stained singlet vest. With the right girl, they could become a king and build a castle in the country. They knew that was a joke.  No, mister, he was not paying to fuck, he was paying to
be
fucked. And if you are going to
be
fucked, you may as well be fucked properly. Fun City was excellent at this. Yet the receipt of pleasure and the receipt of pain were two sides of the same coin. The answer was to keep distance and keep cool. Be brief, cold, and precise. The answer to a bargirl’s prayer was not the wet-eared Scandinavian with buckets of cash to declare. It was the grizzled old expat sitting in a bar on the seventh road. Grey-skinned, dark-eyed, sat alone in a bar plotting his own demise.    

He wasn’t looking for the bar.

He didn’t find the bar.

The bar found him.

A lump of concrete with half a dozen pairs of brown thighs and a pool table.

A sign above the door.

The Blue Rose.

The Detective walked inside.

She was aged about twenty with features that grabbed at what was left of his heart and tugged. Her hair was cut the way women used to cut their hair in the nineteen sixties: straight fringe with a bob. Full lips. Those lips pouted like a passionate flower. The Detective wanted his mouth on that mouth. Her skin was the color of Belgium coffee. Snake hips, large bust. From the way she carried herself across the bar, the Detective guessed that she hadn’t finished seventh grade education and her father had left home when she was still a kid. She moved with the grace of an animal, barefoot in the jungle, wary of snakes and centipedes, these were her movements, rather than those of a sophisticated woman in the city.

Once she was a baby. Once she was a little girl. One day she would be dead.
Then she would be put in a box and set on fire. She would be dust. Dusted. However, right at that moment, she was a shining star under the Fun City neon city lights. There were no stars in the polluted city sky, the stars were all in the streets and the bars, young women and men selling dreams and weaving spells. She was a bargirl in Fun City, one of thousands. Yet, some shone brighter than others did. She didn’t know it. The Detective couldn’t explain abstract thought to a woman with a grade seven education. Instead, he asked, “How old are you?”

She showed
The Detective her I.D. Twenty-one years old. Female. She was from the poor northeast where they ate toads, rats, insects, and buffalo placenta. She had grown up living from the land, and now she had entered adulthood selling what the land had given her.

“Have I seen you before?” she asked.

“No, I would have remembered,” he replied in the local tongue.

“You speak well,” she said
, not needing to add, “for a foreigner.”  She was beautiful an exotic animal and she was flirting with him. He wanted to stop the game but he couldn’t, so he just sat there and let it evolve. It was the cigarette. The train. He knew she played the same routine with all the Johns and each one thought it was especially for him. The suspension of disbelief, the luring in of the monkey, the game. Softly, softly, slowly, slowly, like a spider on a web.

“One for
me, okay?” She said sitting down on the Detective’s lap. “My name is Kelly. Whiskey coke, please.”

“Sure,” the Detective nodded toward the bar. “Help yourself.”

She stood up and returned moments later with a drink in her hand. “You not drink too?” Her accent was adorable.

“No
, I gave up,” The Detective replied in the local language.

“Really?” she said. She stood up. She tipped her glass upside down and poured the contents onto the floor. “Okay, I give up too.” She smiled. The teeth were almost perfect. Dimples appeared on her cheeks. The volume on the stereo rose. Johnny Cash. Folsom Prison Blues. Kelly stood and began her show. She raised her hands above her head and began to grind her hips in time with the music. The Detective sat and watched. She was dancing in front of him, wanting to be liked, to be loved, to be cured. There was something about this town. He began to understand what it was. He paid the bar a fee to release her. He took her back to his room. He knew it was a mistake, but mistakes were his business. Usually other’s mistakes, but she was different, she was fine, she was twenty-
something and she was dancing in front of him.