A Haunting Smile Read online

  PRISES FOR

  A Haunting Smile

  “Courageous ... someone to watch.”

  —Peter Carey

  “A Haunting Smile is disturbing. Moore jars the senses with discordant juxtapositions of his now familiar HQ, an all-night coffee shop where stereotypical ‘hardcore’ (read ‘cured of romance’) farang hang out, indulging in a never-ending cycle of alcohol and sex, with the shattering events of Rachadamnoen Avenue, and what! Virtual reality?”

  —Bangkok Post

  “

  A HAUNTING SMILE

  Christopher G. Moore

  First edition 1993 by White Lotus

  Second edition 1999 by Heaven Lake Press

  Smashword Edition 2009

  A Haunting Smile is published by Heaven Lake Press at Smashwords.

  Copyright © 2004 Christopher G. Moore

  Author’s web site: http://www.cgmoore.com/

  Author’s e-mail: [email protected]

  Cover design: Jae Song

  License Notes

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  To the memory of Rene Magritte

  whose perspective

  provided the needle and thread

  to weave the haunting and the smile

  Special thanks to Timothy Mo,

  with his sure novelist’s eye

  selflessly provided guidance

  pointing out flaws and weaknesses

  that haunted the original text and

  in the process granted that most

  precious of all things:

  A second chance to get it right.

  May 19, 1999

  If the Party could thrust its hand into the past and say of this or that event, it never happened—that, surely, was more terrifying than mere torture and death?

  George Orwell

  Nineteen Eighty-four

  One shall seek nothingness only to find a way out of it and one shall mark the road for everyone.

  Elisa Canetti

  The Conscience of Words & Earwitness

  INTRODUCTION

  Before 1992 I had heard the sound of gunfire in a city. In May 1992, there were days of gunfire and days of bloodshed. Bombed out police kiosk and telephone booths left busted and black. Pickup trucks prowled Sukhumvit Road with armed men in the back. Curfews kept most people off the street. One felt anything could happen. A stray bullet lodged in the roof of my bedroom. Witnessing death marks a man. The images and feelings are one that I still carry forward. Sanam Luang was packed with tens of thousands of people. They came by bus, car, motorcycle, and by foot. They were from all walks of life. What I remember most were the large number of middle class people among the people sitting on the short grass and listening to the speakers and the bands. The middle-class in most places is known for its apathy. Politicians rarely can turn them out in large numbers to vote. Protesting in an open field with the threat of violence, real and present, is a quantum leap beyond exercising the vote. It was mind altering to see eighty thousand people standing up for what they believed was just and right. That took courage and commitment. You have to push hard to get people to leave the comforts of their office and home to gather in a place where they may die. That happened in 1992. I was there and saw it myself.

  In A Haunting Smile, I wanted to capture what most authors covering a battlefield seek to communicate: the chaos, madness, and horror. I also wanted to place the violence in May 1992 onto a larger historical canvass. A lot of recent non-fiction has well-documented the violent nature of a species that is only 13,000 years away from the hunter-gather tribe and bands. Only five thousand years ago we had learned to read and write. We have a much longer history of killing than reading. It seems we’ve been programmed for blood letting. Especially when the “other” is not one of “us”—not a member of our band or tribe.

  In Thailand, the culture embraces ghosts and erects spirit houses as a place to provide offering to appease the spirit of a place. I wanted to bring ghosts from another place and time into the story as a counterpoint. As the events of May 1992 unfold, the ghosts of Cortez and Montezuma patrol Patpong and the battlefields. Harry Purcell, whose family had an ancient history of selling guns—helicopters, tanks, heavy artillery—has a deep understanding of the reasons behind the death and destruction. The generals, politicians and influential people are the buyers.

  Warriors count their women, like heads taken in battle, as another token of power.

  Warfare and prostitution are connected. Each leads to an inevitable personal destruction and creates psychological games to prevent guilt. I was much taken by the games of war and the games of love, the weapons used in both, and the way language makes men and women use different vocabularies for desire, pain, and victims. I threw myself into May 1992 like someone who couldn’t swim, diving into the deep end of a pool. I sought to make a connection between the East and the West. The challenge was to do this within the context of an overall narrative that at heart was fiction.

  There are observations that I believe still hold largely true in A Haunting Smile, as when Harry Purcell wrote, “In Asia the underdog has tank-tire tracks over its back, and was kicked into the gutter with a jackboot. To be an underdog in the East was a sign of weakness, failure, lack of support and at the first sign someone had slipped and fallen, this was not an opportunity for compassion, to offer the helping hand—no—this was the precise time to launch the attack and finish off this animal before it regained its strength…”

  A dozen years later, looking back at these and other observation in A Haunting Smile, and the bloody events of May, I wonder how much anyone has learned? Or if we are capable of learning, whether we can accept our basic nature. Ignoring such knowledge comes with a terrible price. Distorting such knowledge corrupts our language, what and who we are, and how we can live together. From the upstairs skull bars of Patpong to the temples of skulls of the Aztecs, the story remains the only account in fiction to recall the events of bloody May 1992 and to ask the question of what that time said about us and what lessons, if any, we have learnt. Perhaps the answer is that some lessons can’t ever be learnt and that each generation must let blood again because it is our destiny to repeat our mistakes.

  We have moved from year of the Monkey 1992 to the next year of the Monkey 2004. The monkey is agile, tricky and resourceful. An opportunistic creature, one that lives in extended bands with a strict hierarchical system. The distance between them and us is very small. I wait for the right moment twelve years from now, in the next Monkey year, 2016, I’d like to revisit the events of May 1992 and once again explore the issue of missing people and the violence that takes them away into the night. I was on the scene in 1992 and in 2004, and I hope to see where another year of the Monkey takes us next.

  Christopher G. Moore

  Bangkok,

  June 2004

  PART 1

  THE UNEXPECTED ANSWER

  1

  DEE LAY ON her back beneath a ceiling fan which was slowly rotating overhead. The room was small, old, worn and cluttered. The windows were open, and mosquitoes buzzed through. There was no breeze and the air hung heavy with smoke drifting from the coils. Tuttle lay next to her, and he raised his hand, held it, then slapped a mosquito dead against his arm. His hand came up smudged with his own blood splashed from the tangle of wings and legs.

 
“Your blood, Tut?” she asked.

  Holding his wrist she examined his fingers by candle light, licked his fingers clean of the blood.

  “Taste good,” she joked.

  He said nothing as she lay back on the pillow.

  Mosquito coils were at the four corners of the side by side bamboo mats. But the mosquitoes made their way through the smoke for an airborne strike. He touched his hand wet from her tongue against his thigh. They were naked, glistening with sweat from making love, rivulets of sweat dripped from Dee’s belly. Tuttle reached over and felt her wet, smooth hip touching his own. What in the world could ever feel more secure than this moment? That touch, a knowing brush of the fingers? The answer was there was none; no prison could ever more securely hold a man within the four walls than a beautiful, kind, loving woman moments after the act of love-making. A few feet away a slender yellow altar candle melted down on a piece of white coral collected from Koh Samui. The flame danced over her flat belly; illuminating the peach fuzz swirling like a spiraling universe flowing from her navel. Outside there was an odd sound (he knew the sounds of her apartment). Distant laughing voices of children. And some unknown hand had struck the gong in the wat a few doors down. Perhaps it was the children, playing in the night.

  “Why you go, Tut?” asked Dee, her face in the shadows.

  “You’re tired of Dee? You not think I’m young any more. Do I talk a lie? Why you not stay, Tut?”

  He was listening to the gong. A long silence followed. He lay with his hands cupped around the back of his head. Her hand came down, fingers running down his thigh, touching to his knee.

  “I cannot,” he said. This was the night of his prison break; his sprint into freedom. Like all escapes, this one had been planned to the last detail. The rope flung over the high wall of domestic tranquillity was an old one—writing. Writers wrote to launch their escape; the license to invent a life started with destroying oneself. The endless reinvention exhausted Tuttle as he looked ahead, thinking it was like running the hurdles—each a mile high. To stay would have ended not only the escape, but the race to outrun boredom and smuggle lust from youth into middle age and beyond into that unknown territory of the elderly.

  She sensed his uneasiness. But, at the same time, she tried not to sound resentful; they had been through the same discussion for over a week, and no matter what questions had been asked or answers given, neither one felt satisfied the other understood.

  “You say before, you can always do. You decide, then you do. You not say that?”

  He had told Dee that she could choose her fate; that it was up to her to decide what battles she would be willing to fight, when she would go to battle, and what she wished to die for. And now, on his last night in Bangkok, she had proved herself an able, bright student. She had done exactly as he had preached; and he had used an excuse of the kind he had reproached her for using.

  How could Tuttle explain this need to break the bond which held them in peace? Comfort and pleasure ran deep in the blood; relatively few were born free of this weakness. It required courage and in the world the attribute most talked about and least met with was found in this one word—courage. The ultimate courage? Seize the knife and cut the muscle, flesh and bone growing the two naked thighs into one, locking them to the day and night like the small animals turned to rock in the piece of coral at his shoulder. Dee had been born into a world where survival was everything; overcoming discomfort and suffering accounted for the striving, the hunger to succeed, the irresistible force of the day. Here was a divide that neither could cross into a realm of mutual understanding; the gap was too vast, powerful, and the consequences clear—self-destruction in the end. Because it would end, it had to end in a flame as hot as the solitary altar candle. No Asian woman—maybe no woman—could comprehend how a man could abandon her for an ideal. Women were far too practical to throw to chance an ideal of life when life itself was breathing on the mat next to them, attached to the bone, and the bone to the soul.

  “It’s that farang,” she said the word, hitting a nasty note of blame. “Addison. He make you crazy. I know. I hear you talking, talking. You think Dee not understand English. But I understand. Addison, he make you feel bad. Why? I don’t know. But I think you should forget him.”

  “It’s more complicated than Addison. There are other things,” said Tuttle.

  “Then tell me this other thing.”

  “Nothing happens which I don’t expect. Someone strikes a gong at the wat. And children at two in the morning laughing. But it’s not enough.” He wished there was a way to make her understand.

  She raised herself up on an elbow, and looked at his face.

  Looking, looking, she thought to herself. Farang looking for what? She had listened carefully to what he said and this is what he meant—nothing but a question with an answer which excluded her. Men looked all their lives for things which were in front of their eyes. Things which women saw. Why were men so blind?

  “The accident. A break in the line of continuity. Then you must choose to repair or abandon the break. To start again. You go or you stay. Run away or call for help. Unbroken continuity is a writer’s death sentence. How can I explain so you can understand?”

  “You think too much. It gives me a headache,” she said in Thai. “Men don’t make sense. I read the Thai newspapers. I know everything happens fast now. I see what the generals say. I see what the politicians say. I think most of them lie. Cheat. But I’m a simple girl. I don’t even speak English. Because you only speak Thai.”

  His kayak and gear were packed in the corner. He was going off alone to Nan Province and the Nan River. Alone. The sluggishness of habit, of routine living had made him a prisoner of his comforts and pleasures. He had stopped thinking, seeing, wondering. Addison had said as much. And as much as he hated this farang who was living with his daughter, he could not deny that Addison had hit the mark. Since Tuttle’s book of short stories had come out, he had fallen into habits which had allowed him to take a great deal for granted. A big mistake, he thought. All that had been alien, strange had come to merge into the ordinary. From one end of the day to the next, he knew each face, sight, sound, and smell of Bangkok. He could have been anywhere in the world. The only difference was without substance—a gong at the wrong time of day, children’s voices—half-singing, half-laughing—at some distant game. Such a marginal difference was not enough. That was the horror of an ordinary life—it swallowed challenge and courage and without them what meaning came from looking from Monday to Tuesday and beyond? What kind of farang voluntarily chose to live in Bangkok? No other city in Asia had such a large contingent of volunteer residents. What had brought them searching in such a city? Many found the ultimate contradiction in their journey—those who had believed Bangkok was one of the few places where a new identity might be forged. They soon discovered the ordinary routines in life didn’t amount to a new person. Their old identity waited in the bars and clubs looking for a chance to reclaim them body and soul. What they rarely admitted was that their way of living had become not much different from the one they had fled in horror and disgust.

  What a human being was required to do, his test, was by his strength to resist the great pull of the ordinary which made the senses stupid, dull, and predictable. There was more lurking to gut the human soul—the terrible, ugly head of sentimentality, all tongues, eyes on sticks, and spitting fire under a tranquil mask of calm. Herding people like cattle by force of appeal to their emotions ranked as a crime against humanity. It was the underlying cause of the great crimes recorded in modern history. Sentimentality was the definition of modern horror. What he wished for was the courage to cast himself back into the disturbances and chaos of living—to cut the lifelines, the safety cables. Break the continuity and restart a story yet to be discovered. You either sink or swim, he thought. At the same time what was he doing? His hand brushing the concave belly; this fertile valley of shadow and light—this landscape which promised itself wholly a
nd forever to his touch. His fingers on her moist pubic hair, he paused. If he delayed his trip one more day, so what? But he knew this trick of the mind; this feeling which ran from his fingers and eyes to his brain. If he stayed, then it would be another life. The existence of a writer caught in his sluggish routine; he could make a living writing advertising copy, magazine articles or TV scripts. He could make a decent living. Buy the life flourishing in the high-rise towers in Bangkok. He withdrew his hand from her stomach. He breathed in deeply.

  “I know,” she said. “You go.”

  “I should go now,” he said.

  “You stay until morning. It’s okay. I wait you.”

  “Don’t wait me,” he said.

  “Never mind. You come back. I know you.”

  He shook his head. She knew his weakness too well. Maybe he would crawl back like a dog, hungry, cold, lost, looking for comfort. Hoped not. He drew himself up and dressed.

  “If I say this hurt me very much, you stay?”

  “No.”

  “I say I kill myself, you stay?”

  “No.”

  She was crying and angry, the reality of separation; the amputation done, nothing was left but to stare with horror at the wound.

  “I hate you. I never want to see you. I hope you die. Not slow. I want you to die. Drown on that fucking river. I go look at your body, and I laugh.” She hurled the piece of coral with the candle still burning at him. It struck the wall with a loud whack, shattering into a hundred fragments.