A Killing Smile Read online

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  YOU know when you’ve gone hard-core. One night you’re sitting at a back booth in Zeno’s sucking back a Mekong and soda, and she comes up to your table in a tight-fitting dress and extends her hand, and you’re asking yourself that same question you asked before, that question born of two-in-the-morning doubt. Have I had her before? And you’re deciding to take her back for the night, and she’s sitting on your lap. You close your eyes and touch her cheek, the nape of her neck, her breasts, and work on down to her thighs; nothing registers for certain as familiar.

  In the back of your mind you hear her voice from some indefinite horizon in the past, or is it an illusion of the early morning, and the jukebox, and the buzz of conversations from the tables and booths? The acoustical ceiling tiles gray with age have soaked up a million conversations since ’68, including your own. But you’re not certain what you can retrieve, and agonize in two languages. She sees this hint of a frown around the corner of your mouth and eyes. And if you ask her straight out: she might not tell the truth, because she needs the money for another dress or her mother is leaning on her, a brother is in school and the fees are due, or someone is sick—someone is always sick in the family—and doctor bills and bills for medicine and shots and hospital beds mount on her shoulders and float above her head. Even though you speak fluent Thai she sees you’re one of those with a purple to burn tonight. That is her target, and several times now she’s asked where you work, thinking about how many purples you spent each week at Zeno, Headquarters, HQ, the public commodity exchange where purples change hands on the runway of memory. You’re one of those who has a good heart—there won’t be too much pain or discomfort in your bed where the transaction takes place. And for a very long time you look inside the arms for needle marks, and when you look up in her face, you see eyes grown old with worry. Eyed masked by a finely tuned smile. For a second you look away, distracted by another face, on another girl who has walked over from the jukebox and talk about how the air conditioner in Soi 15 used to break down in the middle of the night, and you feel good. She has punched the memory card from your past.

  And the girl on your lap spits out an English word that is in half of the poems that have ever been penned; but she makes it sound as if it were a curse word—she calls you a butterfly. She crosses her arms together at the forearm and flaps her fingers as if they were wings. Moving from girl to girl like a butterfly dusting flowers. And of course that is the truth, and you are disgusted with yourself. And you’ve been warned about the early signs of going hard-core, and you’ve ignored them because you think you’re different from the rest. That you play by a different set of rules; that your memory is iron-tight; and that no matter what, you have a will to control your own destiny with a true vision of your own past. But everyone felt that. Then you look up at her again in the reflected light from the bar and jukebox, and her face blends in with so many other faces, so many other smiles, and so many other shining black eyes, that you can’t be certain whether you are focusing on the moment, the past, or this is some horror of the future come to warn you. And you decide to take her back, because you—convince yourself that once back into the apartment, your context, with your things, and your music, she will reveal herself in your memory. One way or another. That the confusion is that of a large, busy bar where the true hard-core no longer recognize themselves in the mirrors above the booths. And when you have her home at last, and you watch her undress and that knot swells in the back of your throat. You can’t be certain still. You tell yourself it doesn’t matter. She’s of a type. Wide mouth, flat nose, high-pitched voice. An upcountry girl from a village between Ubon Ratchathani and the Laos border, and you know in the morning her footprints will be on the toilet seat, and you’ll stare at them like a shaman reading the entrails of a dead chicken trying to understand whether this spirit is for good or evil.

  Before she leaves, she comes into the bathroom and watches you looking at her wet footprints. She wants to show you something. She opens her bag and takes out a small photo album from inside and hands it to you. Leaning against the wall, you flip through the photos, pretending to pay attention. Then she says with incredible feeling and pride and love, “Mother . . . me.” And you take a double look at the photo, then take it out of the plastic cover in the album and hold it up to the sunlight. She can’t imagine what you are doing as the light slopes down through the window on her photograph and your hand. You look at the girl, and for a moment freeze as that hydraulic hammer strikes deep into your memory. Twenty-one years ago you had taken her mother. The two small brown moles on the left jaw had gradually grown darker, and the face was older—much older, and you look in the bathroom mirror at yourself. That guillotine of sharp first morning light behind you and you see what generation you fit into; and you refuse to believe it. You tear out of the bathroom and into the locked closet with the photograph albums you’ve kept of the girls. You take out the ’68 volume, squatting on the floor, and her mother’s picture is there. Two brown moles.

  And when you glance up, the girl is looking down at the nude picture of her own mother, not recognizing her. Thinking she’s a ringer from HQ. And she calls you a butterfly. But the truth is always more difficult to explain in Thai. You’ve passed that magnetic field where few have ever trod: you’re second generation hard-core, and at best you have one generation left ahead of you before your knees buckle, the food won’t stay down in your stomach, and you can’t get it up. Reality sinks home: you’ve begun to pollinate your last spring of flowers at HQ. Down the road, you dread the inevitable end zone. You’ve become a geriatric, planted in an old folks’ home where young nurses treat you like a dirty old soi dog. Second generation, you repeat to yourself, and give the girl back the picture of her mother. You had been inside her mother when this girl was still an unfertalized egg, and you thought one generation lasted forever.

  And two years down the road, not even the news has really changed—peace talks somewhere are snagged, a plane crashes in a mountain, a madman kills children with an automatic weapon halfway around the world, someone has misappropriated funds, a river floods, a drought causes starvation, disease, and suffering—and you’re back at the same table in Zeno, and this beautiful girl comes up to your table and smiles, and you’re trying to remember if this is the same girl who you thought that night was the same girl as before. Then there is no pulling back, you look up into the mirror at yourself and you repeat by moving your lips but without making a sound. ‘I am hard-core. I will always be hard-core. I’ve gone over that edge. And I can never go back. Not tonight. Not tomorrow.’ And you take the girl back without even asking this time whether she has been inside your apartment before. Because it no longer matters. And in the morning when you stare down at the toilet seat with her tiny footprints on either side, you laugh and piss into the plastic hole and pretend the prints belong to one of Santa’s elves who got lost many Christmases ago.

  You can never really remember again. That part of your life is lost. Bangkok has trapped your memory like it has done with thousands of men, leaving you to wander through the heat, dust, traffic, looking for what has been lost and not knowing what you are exactly looking for. This mental fogging machine that blows that fine mist of forgetting through your mind, tangling every limb and happy face that ever looked up from your bed. And all that is left when you walk out of the Zeno with her on your arm this time is the thought that the tuk-tuk drivers remember you. They call out your address and quote a price like commodity brokers, and you choose one. She slides over the plastic seat and you slip an arm around her waist. Two cars drag-race down Sukhumvit Road. A red Italian sports car and a tan BMW. And you remember every single detail of a car crash in that same spot last year. The dead, blood-soaked Thai faces and hair as black as midnight. The shattered glass and crumpled metal. And you wished life had been tailor-built another way. That our memory of pain, hurt, and violence went numb and vague from one day to the next, and our memory of pleasure was as v
ivid and real forever. In such a world there would be no hard-core.

  You arrived at HQ tonight because you were pulled along by the same forces waiting to meet you in the North. Forces you can’t even give a name to now. HQ is the cargo hold and you have just run up the gangway. And you’re still not certain exactly where you are, who runs this place, how to get out in case a fire breaks out. HQ is like an exit wound from a bullet. You can never find where it entered, how, or the exact course it took before blowing out that hole you’re looking through. So you’ll travel to the North like I did. Like every farang who passes through Bangkok thinking you know what you’re looking for, and you’ll recognize it when you see it. You think that you’ve got some theory, some belief, or piece of poetry that means something, or serves some purpose. I’ve eaten off that same menu. The one where you order the mystical special expecting a blinding flash of insight or faith. And you’ll think the hard-core farang at HQ are lost souls and you’re saved because you’ve found the entry hole for their wound. That you’ve stumbled into a black hole that’s sucked out their memory and made everyone and everything they reached out for break apart, crumble, and disappear.

  Block out the laughing and joking around the jukebox that is playing too loud. Think about last night, or the night before, until you hear the sound of a shower running in the bathroom next door. There is a nagging voice running in the back of your head when she’s washing, cleaning herself in cold water because you don’t have any hot and a candle is burning on the dresser. If your life depended on picking her out of a police line-up, could you do it? At that moment? Without running in and looking at her face? That’s the litmus test. Chances are that you can’t remember who you’ve sent into the shower other than her name is Noi, and you’ve known hundreds of Nois. Generations of Nois. And with each new crop of Nois from a shithole village in the north, your memory becomes more and more foggy until it seems to belong to someone else you once knew but no longer remember where or for how long.

  What frightens you—terrorizes you—is not one chai ka girl, not even one who had some spark of personality, but the one who has left more than an insignificant trace of nitrogen and oxygen smeared across a wall of your own prison of time and space. All those other walls out there that you’ve brushed against with your desires and your heart and your reason—you’ve got it. It’s in the expression on your face as you seek some trace of yourself among the girls working the floor at Zeno’s. You come here to look at the great wall of your life. Those emotional posters you bought and put up deep inside the bulletin board of your night. The Great Wall of China is snaking through a thousand half-lidded eyes against a pillow on which you rest your head; then you are on the wall, you become the wall.

  That’s why I come here night after night— all those years running—because I have no other place. All those heartbeats around the tables, the jukebox, and the bar, each alone with an overnight kit, waiting to be your choice. Anointed for the night in your bed. They climb the outer wall of your memory looking for a trail, afraid of falling to the bottom, and more than anything, they come here to find someone to hold onto. Someone who remembers them; someone they remember. A small spore of remembrance in a cracked mirror, an old lyric of a song, a smile. I can’t find a trace of myself so far tonight. But I’m hopeful, the night’s young. And I know you because we had lunch only yesterday and you asked me about Lahu shamans, burial rituals, marriages, healings, chants, and old beliefs in black magic. We only scratched the surface. The burning of paper money and appeasing the ghost of the dead. I know every waiter in this room, the bartenders, and the cops at the table in the corner smoking cigarettes and talking to those three girls. And they think they know me. But they’re not sure. Farangs are like wallpaper: the Thais see the pattern but the images are open to a thousand interpretations. The girls see farangs not as wallpaper but bearded ones, the ones with hair over the arms and the rest of the body, ready to spring on a human buffet. Now you’ve got me started. Started right where we left off at lunch. You can sleep in tomorrow. The train to Chiang Mai doesn’t leave Bangkok until later.

  Another drink? Pace yourself. It’s gonna be a long night. Have a look . . . over there. The one who just came in the yellow silk blouse and tight black skirt. You know what she used to dream—this going back five, six years? She dreamed of running her own import/export company. She never had any idea exactly what she’d import from abroad—or where abroad was—England, the States, Italy, Middle East, she couldn’t locate them on a map—or what in Thailand she’d export. It didn’t matter. That was her dream. About eighteen months ago, she tried to kill herself. Look at her wrists. She walked into one of the toilet stalls in the back, took out a razor and cut her own wrists. Not very deep. But there was a lot of blood. Another guy and I stopped the bleeding and took her over to Soi 49 to the hospital. The next morning I went back to see her. She looked long and hard as if she didn’t recognize me which she probably didn’t, and I sat on the chair beside her bed, grabbed her right hand, forced her wrist up, and looked at the bandages. Tears welled in her eyes and I couldn’t look her directly in the face. I knew she had her head turned into her pillow, looking away, and that she wanted to die all over again because I had caught her crying. She had lost face and I sat next to her killing off that part of her that she couldn’t let fall away. I kept my eyes on her hand, touching her fingers, and I asked her why she did it. Tears rolled down her cheeks and splashed on the back of my hand. And I watched her tears. Each a perfect droplet caught in the black hair on the edge of my hand. And she said, “The only import/export company I’m ever gonna have is here.”

  She moved my hand between her legs. “Make love with farang. That’s all I can do. Maybe I have another four years and then no one take me. Then what I do, Tuttle? Who gonna look after me then? Who’s gonna remember me? ”

  She’d taken a vertical plunge into her own remembrance and had an insight about laws of life inside HQ. That glimpse of revealed truth that made a girl take the knife and turn inward for pleasure of spilling their own blood.

  She had gone hard-core. All those faces and all those names of farangs and girls she had once known were a secret buried inside herself and she had lost the ability to recall them, bring the images forth inside herself. When she comes into HQ tonight, you’ll look for scar tissue but there are only unhealed wounds on her wrists. A few months later, what remains are the small, raised white lines on her wrists—as if someone had tattooed cocaine lines as a bad joke—and you will wonder about her despair until you reach a stage of nervous exhaustion; and you will try and decode those lines for their pure and full public statement.

  Whatever you decide about them, symbol, allusion, spectacle, you will convince yourself that here is one girl I can never forget. The heat of those old wounds fires off a flare in your mind. That hard, metallic light burns an image deep in the core of memory. Glory is explored inside that space. Because it is the moment you’ve been waiting for so far tonight. That small opening in the wall; the first hint that going hard-core isn’t absolute; some biographical data survives the night, the year, a lifetime. That’s your import/export company dream, otherwise you wouldn’t be going up North to write about shamans and things that go bump in the night.

  Dreams are precious. All that matters in life are your dreams, your intellect, and your health. The rest scatters, folds, dissolves, renews, and is replaceable. Before you put too much faith in those razor marks as memory tracks that will last, ask yourself why they seduce you like the seduction of a prize-fight. You see too many razor marks on the arms of working girls, too many cut left eyes in the ring, and you are back to the solitude of your forgetting; surrounded by blank walls, and the next time you understand the threshold of euphoria is going to demand something more violent, magical, and mad.

  And you come back here and slide into the booth next to me, and together we’ll keep watch through the night. Because what we are looking for might come through the door at any moment, o
rder a drink, push the buttons on the jukebox, someone to crawl into our bed, and show us the way out.

  3

  Tuttle had planned every detail of the evening; each act of the night had been artfully constructed to reveal as much about Lawrence Baring as Bangkok. The beginning, thought Tuttle, was the hardest with someone you hadn’t seen in years; one specific element about Lawrence snapped back into place a few minutes after he had sat down. Lawrence was a formula man. Toothbrush always hung in the same place inside the medicine chest; cap always on the toothpaste; always studied between the hours of eight and eleven every night. Lawrence was a man who had developed a rule for every eventual encounter life might bring to his table, office, car, or bedroom.

  Lawrence naturally walked through the world with the burning desire to engineer handholds for each step along the way, for systematized patterns, for a method of design and organization. Lawrence’s personality, ironically thought Tuttle, was ruled by a fundamental need that was also a basic characteristic of Thai culture. Coming to Bangkok after Sarah’s death may have been the first time in Lawrence’s entire life that he had risked breaking out of his formula. He wouldn’t have come without a reason; without a mission or expectation, thought Tuttle. He came to Bangkok to bury Sarah and, the past they had shared. And Tuttle suspected that he might be, in Lawrence’s mind, the only person on earth who could perform that ceremony.

  “Have you gone to bed with anyone since Sarah died? ” asked Tuttle. Lawrence was slightly startled. It had been a lifetime since he had seen Sarah’s name come from Tuttle’s mouth. The strange feeling that it had been all a dream flooded Lawrence’s mind; they could still be in college, and the year 1968; and Tuttle had created an elaborate opera, a network of strange images and exotic ideas.