Vulture Peak, page 5
She was dogged though. She doggedly stood to greet us, doggedly smiled at Chanya as if she loved her, doggedly tried not to be afraid of me when Chanya said, “This is my lover. He’s a cop and a pimp, he multitasks. Now he’s working on a big international case about human organ trafficking—the biggest suspect is a two-woman team.”
Dorothy took this not-so-subtle jibe as a mule takes a whipping: just part of being alive. Now I led us to the buffet area, and one of the waitresses showed us to the table Chanya had reserved. Chanya left Dorothy and me at the table while she went to get hors d’oeuvres for all of us. She wanted me to bond with her supervisor to see what I could discover.
Now Dorothy and I were staring at each other across the stark white tablecloth. Dorothy looked down. I said, “So, how do you like working with Chanya?”
“She’s very bright. Maybe she’s too clever for me. I don’t understand her.”
“How so?”
“All the progress women have made over the past thirty years. She seems to just want to throw it all away.” Dorothy made her blue eyes plead. “How can she accept that any woman would willingly commodify her body?”
“Newton discovered gravity,” I explained. “He didn’t invent it.” Dorothy didn’t get it, so I had to say: “She decided to study sociology because she has a scientific mind. She’s only interested in the truth. It’s important for her. She was on the game herself, she’s interested in an accurate description, not …” I let my voice trail off. Dorothy was looking more miserable than ever, so I didn’t want to say feminist fantasy. I didn’t want to point out that there were women who knew very little about women. If I could have, I would have gone deeper. I would have explained that Chanya was a country girl who left school at fourteen years old with an exclusively Buddhist worldview, which she found beautiful and comforting. She was on the game for nearly ten years and traveled to America, which made no impact on her views—if anything, it confirmed her Buddhist faith. After our son died, she had nothing much to do, so she studied sociology because I told her it was about people and society. She has an excellent brain and was at the top of her classes. The price she paid was that she had to think like a farang. It seemed to her there was something seriously missing in farang logic: it only dealt with measurable things and had no way of incorporating the Unnameable—or even basic human nuance—in its calculations. She let that pass, at considerable cost to her peace of mind and personality—you might say she sold an organ, metaphorically speaking. What she demanded in return was that farang thinking be faithful to its own terms. Things were fine up to her first and second degrees, but when she started working on her thesis, which required personal creative input and direct fieldwork, she began to discover she had been right all along: farang social science was mostly propaganda for farang dominance. In former times, DFR, you used exactly the same double-talk to justify the opium and slave trades. She went back to Buddhism and challenged the Western world from there. Starting from Emptiness, it is not so difficult to see clearly: one has less of a stake in fantasy. When Dorothy arrived on the scene, the English sociologist became her favorite pincushion.
Now Chanya was back with hors d’oeuvres for all of us: a little smoked salmon for me, some somtam for her, and a great pile of potato salad with smoked salmon for Dorothy. For a second I thought Chanya had gone too far with her sarcasm, but Dorothy tucked into the potatoes with gratitude. For the first time since we met, her mood rose above room temperature, and she was almost beaming. We ate in silence. When the time came for the second course, we each went to serve ourselves. When Chanya and I were alone, I repeated what Dorothy had said about a woman commodifying her body. “For Buddha’s sake,” Chanya said, “human beings have been commodifying our bodies since the first tattoos. What are mascara and lipstick if not commodifying agents? What about hair dye? Farang are so far gone, they are blind to the obvious.”
I didn’t want to say I wasn’t sure exactly what commodifying meant in this context. Dorothy returned with two plates, one with roast beef and roast potatoes, the other with oysters and prawns from the seafood bar. She ate quickly, putting it all away within about fifteen minutes. I paid the bill and led the way across the bridge to the Skytrain station, then down again to the other side of Sukhumvit and the tunnel that took us to Soi Cowboy. As we approached the soi, we collected more and more participants in the trade, so that now we were in a crowd of middle-aged farang men and working girls aged somewhere between twenty and thirty-five. They were on their way to work in denims and T-shirts. Some arrived on the back of motorbike taxis. When we reached the cooked-food stalls at the entrance to Cowboy, a number of the girls eating at the tables had already changed into their working gear, bar uniforms that emphasized busts and buttocks; they were about as naked as they could get without breaking the law. Dorothy turned gray, as if she’d never seen anything like it before. Chanya claimed that Dorothy had done her thesis on Thai prostitution in a pub in South London.
My mother Nong’s bar, the Old Man’s Club, was about halfway down the street, opposite the Suzie Wong, and when we arrived, the place was hopping. As a former player herself, Nong knew how to pull in the customers. Her advantage over all the other bars was that Colonel Vikorn owned most of the shares, so no cop was ever going to bust her. Consequently she allowed most forms of sexual activity, barring actual intercourse, in the corner of the bar known as the Office. (Johns could call their wives to say they were stuck in the Office and might be late for supper.) My mother’s girls tended to make more money than their rivals in other bars, so they were pretty content. The most attractive came here because we paid more: we were surrounded by beauty at its smartest and most avaricious. Chanya went up to Nong, giving her the high respectful wai due to the mother-in-law. I kissed her and introduced Dorothy.
Nong led us to a table in a dark spot at the back wall, which nevertheless gave unobstructed views of the Office and the rest of the bar. She called one of her serving girls to bring us drinks and resumed her place on a stool at the end of the bar, where she ostentatiously broke the law by chain-smoking Marlboro Reds. She still looked pretty sexy in black leggings and a bright checked cowboy shirt, with plenty of gold jewelry.
Chanya told me in Thai that she was going to call a girl over to talk to Dorothy and asked me which one would be most suitable. I said it would be better to let Dorothy choose the girl—it would look more objective that way. Chanya agreed and was about to speak to Dorothy when two farang men in their early fifties walked in and took up stools at the bar just in front of us. One of them, a blond, owned an Errol Flynn moustache, a flat stomach, and a blazing smile. Immediately two girls in bikinis slipped in between them, but they were quite small, so the farang could continue their conversation over their heads. They seemed to be civil engineers and were discussing a project up in the north, near the border with Laos; they were on leave in Bangkok for a few days.
While they were talking the girls went to work on their flies and scooped out their cocks, taking care not to damage the merchandise on the zips. (How many times in my life have I seen that search-and-seizure operation with half-cupped hand that always finds the love object sooner or later, even if it requires excavating as far as the biceps femoris?) The farang continued talking about the project for a while, each one shielded from the other by his girl and perhaps not wanting his colleague to see what was happening. Then they broke off for a moment and looked down simultaneously, then up again at each other, and burst out laughing. The girls burst out laughing too. My mother grinned sardonically. Chanya and I both checked Dorothy to see if she had seen the humor, but she was looking at Errol Flynn’s erection. Cocks don’t age the way faces do, and this one could have belonged to a much younger man, especially considering its apparent virility; it was even bigger than his smile. The glans appeared and disappeared under the brown girl’s tiny hand. Dorothy’s eyes were like gimlets.
“I guess I better go home and pack,” I said. I nudged Dorothy. “Drinks are on the house.”
But out on the street I asked myself: Do I really want to go to the UAE tonight? I told myself to pause, think about it. The way Vikorn suddenly laid the new case on me, which so far wasn’t a case at all, along with his sudden declaration that he was running for governor of Bangkok, and those three very serious Americans—it was all too unreal. And wasn’t Dubai Muslim? I looked up and down the famous soi. Exterior air-conditioning was making misty rainbows in the tropical night, along with a half mile of neon; near-naked girls with welcoming smiles; unresisting johns: and not a girl, man, or katoey who wouldn’t have qualified for a stoning under Sharia rules. I imagined Mum, Chanya, and me tied to stakes at one end of the street and a gang of yobs in flowing white kanduras at the other taking aim, a builder’s truck laden with Halal crushed rocks behind them. I shrugged. A continuum is a continuum, after all.
6
So there I was at the airport in my new Zegna pants (metallic gray with a sheen; they fell from my hips perfectly, as they should have considering the price). I had decided on a black T-shirt under the cream Armani crushed-linen jacket, Bagattos to pamper my feet. I looked the very model of a modern organ trafficker. At check-in I told the girl under the scarf I had only carry-on, and I made sure she recorded my air miles.
She smiled the way she’d been trained to and said, reading from the computer monitor: “Mr. Jitpleecheep, your medical supplies were safely placed in our refrigerated storage facility at four twenty-three this morning. In view of the emergency, they have already been cleared for customs in Dubai. You have no need to pick them up yourself, our staff at Dubai have arranged for a refrigerated truck to collect them and take them to your hotel.” She checked the name of the six-star hotel with me, and although the color had drained from my cheeks, I said: “Yes, thank you.” I did not say, What emergency? What medical supplies?
When I left the check-in area and passed to air-side, I tried to call Vikorn, but he was not answering his mobile or landline. I sent him an SMS: Emergency medical supplies? When I cooled down a little in the CIP lounge, I realized that the medical supplies were just as ambiguous as everything else. Sure, he could have been using me for a piece of personal trading, but equally the medical supplies could have been part of my cover. Or they could have been both and neither. It was quite possible Vikorn hadn’t yet decided whether he was the hammer of organ profiteers or an organ profiteer himself. He liked to keep his options open and maybe he was waiting to see if he would win the election and become governor of Bangkok. This speculation didn’t arrive at a conclusion either: As governor, would he drop all his criminal activities and become squeaky clean, or would he use the office for even more personal gain? Was the either/or dichotomy relevant here? Was it ever?
At Dubai the theme was stars: stars on the stainless-steel handrails, stars on the carpets, stars on the ceiling. I should have understood immediately, but I didn’t. Only after I’d passed through immigration did I remember: desert stars. When I saw a Bedouin in full flowing white kandura, I thought I would have liked to be one such: a life under les belles étoiles, the good clean emptiness of the desert, a wholesome existence dedicated to Allah; but he arrived in a big new four-by-four and wore a lot of gold around his neck and wrists. At the six star I let them take a copy of my black Amex and enjoyed the full six-star treatment; I was reminded of a well-run brothel where, once they’re convinced of your value, they’ll do anything for you, anything at all.
The girl under the scarf told me my box of medical supplies had already arrived and they’d taken the liberty of leaving them in my suite, plugged into an electric socket. She spoke of my mysterious package with respect, as if she’d guessed what it was. I wanted to ask her what she thought was in the box. The six-star made me feel like I’d arrived in the future, as I took the noiseless elevator, which whisked me up to the thirty-first floor in about a second without a jolt, so I was left thinking, How did I get so high so fast? The medical supplies played on my mind; they made me feel hyper-important and hyper-crooked at the same time. Ever feel that way yourself, DFR, like you’re simultaneously winning and losing?
• • •
The suite was all about minimalism and silk: vast with floor-to-ceiling windows that featured sand and sea plus two sailboats with white sails, which had perhaps been hired by the hotel to hang there in the middle of the view. Now the house phone rang: it was the deputy manager; he wanted to know if the suite suited me, or did my taste tend to the more luxurious? He ticked off the names and themes of some of the other suites, and I wondered what this was all about, until I realized someone at reception must have told him about my good friend BlackAm. They probably had a rule: black Amex gets deputy manager treatment. If you were famous and owned the dark card, you’d probably get the manager himself, who was certainly a sheikh; you had to be in that country only an hour to realize everyone at the top of a pyramid was a prince.
I told him the suite was fine, then even before I checked the medical supplies, which I couldn’t find for a moment, I had a panic attack and called Chanya so I could remember who I was. All I got was the Thai voicemail system, which meant she’d turned off her mobile so she could concentrate on her thesis. Or was she having an affair? Was she glad I was out of the country so she could bang someone she had got the hots for? I didn’t want to believe the rumors that she’d developed a friendship with a handsome young cop; that she’d been seen with him. (Every cop shop in the world is a gossip city.) But did she really need a male nude as a screen saver? Why? Was she trying to tell me something? The psychology behind my paranoia was subtle: I’d been finding other women attractive for quite some time; my wisdom body was maybe pointing out that I was not the only one who might be suffering from seven-year itch. Now I saw the box in a corner of the business lounge area of the suite.
It was not of the dimensions I had in mind. When the check-in clerk first said medical supplies, my imagination had flashed up a discreet box about two feet long by six inches by six inches. I didn’t know where I got the idea that medical supplies would come in boxes like that. I also thought the box would be red or white, or both, with maybe a red cross on it. Then when she talked about a truck, I immediately thought of something huge, maybe the size of a large fridge. Now I had to reprogram: the box was gray with stainless-steel bands and stood about two feet high. It seemed to be a perfect cube with a thick black electrical cable, which emerged at the bottom and was plugged into the wall. When I put my ear to it, I couldn’t hear any whirring. Its lid was locked down with combination locks on all four sides, and wherever you looked, you were affronted by black block capitals that said: HEAT SENSITIVE MEDICAL SUPPLIES, KEEP REFRIGERATED, TO BE OPENED BY AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. There were other block capitals in other languages which I suppose said the same thing.
In my anxiety about Chanya, I’d changed the profile on my cell phone so that on receipt of an SMS or phone call, it gave a huge space-age whoosh and vibrated at the same time. Now the thing went off in my Zegna pocket and vibrated the hell out of my left testicle:
Honey, sorry I’m not answering the phone. Dorothy has been plaguing me all day about last night, and I just can’t listen to her anymore. I have to get on with my work. (Basically she now believes in the re-empowerment of woman through inversion of the public imaginary of the brothel as exclusively male playground. In other words, I seem to be winning, but she’s stealing my idea. Yes, something happened, but I don’t have time to tell you right now.) I’m so glad you arrived safely, have a great trip. C.
Now I felt terrific (except that she didn’t end with love C, and I didn’t know what a public imaginary was); I was ready for the authorized personnel. When nothing happened for an hour, I called Vikorn again, but he was still not receiving calls. I tried out all the sofas and chairs, forced myself to stare at the unreal view, which really existed on the other side of the window (or did it?), and wondered if I should tour Dubai. It occurred to me, though, that this was one place in the world where the tourist DVD might reflect the reality, so I extracted it from the hotel’s welcome package and shoved it into the state-of-the-art Sony player.
Here we go: desert music from Arab pipes by someone in New York; now we’re playing in the sand with a four-wheel bike—ATVs or all-terrain vehicles, according to the commentary, and don’t forget your designer crash helmet. Now it’s the crocodile show with a reptile too doped to remember to shut its mouth when the trainer puts his head in it, even though you really wish it would—hey, let’s take the amphibious bus to the other side of the river, after all, none of the locals do—or maybe golf in the sun for those who want to grow some melanomas? Oh, no, not the monotonous water scooters up and down, round and round the artificial lake—let’s go to the airplane acrobatics with the colored smoke, bet you’ve never seen that before—and to finish, how about the ten-story water slide—don’t worry, the brawny slave with the perfect smile is waiting to catch you at the bottom, it’s all safe and clean here.
Thank Buddha for DVDs—now I didn’t have to do any of that crap. Finally the phone rang. It was reception. “Sorry to trouble you, sir. You have a guest waiting downstairs named Madame Lilly Yip. Do you want to come down to collect her, or shall I have someone bring her up to you?” A cough. “Or shall I tell her you are indisposed?”
Something gaped in the middle of my stomach. I said, “Please bring her up,” and closed the phone.
