Bangkok 8

43

Despite her impeccable postures, I have a sense that the shell has cracked. Smiles, frowns, hand gestures-fragments of personality-come and go, as if dredged up from memory, whilst something quite different, beyond the human, seems to control her. From time to time I think she is glaring at me, until I realize there is a total blackness behind the eyes when the postures fail.

“We met on a train to Chiang Mai. I probably don’t have to tell you why I was going to Chiang Mai? I was twenty-seven and sick to death of the bar scene in Bangkok. The boys had mostly stopped dying of AIDS by then, but there was no romance left. The clients were mostly just pigs, white pigs. Gay white men on the rampage in Southeast Asia are not always the considerate type. I took the train up to Chiang Mai because the scene up there was supposed to be different. Everyone was so stoned on opium and heroin, so they said, you didn’t really have to work at all. That’s what I was, a bum boy, a creature without self-respect, a poor, skinny, ladylike thing with a dick, one of the world’s lost, just dirt in the road. How could you be anything else, being half black and brought up here? Thais are the most racist people on earth, they despise Negroes. They even look down on pure-blooded Thais if they have dark skin. And look-I’m pretty brown.

“Being that kind of gay, I’d pampered myself and spent everything I had on a first-class ticket in a sleeper that was supposed to be all my own. I’m enjoying a cigarette and contemplating suicide for the thousandth time that year when the door opens and there he was, a magnificent black giant who I would never have taken for a soldier by the way he dressed and moved, except for one of those big round green bags soldiers carry. He looked about forty, which has always been my favorite age in a man, and of course, being black, how could I not make that connection to the father I’ve never met? Super fit. I thought: What a wonderful country America must be, that someone so black can grow up brimming with self-respect, nonchalant, with a sense of belonging, even amongst all those white people. Of course I gave him my most seductive smile, not expecting any result. He smiled back, though, said sorry for disturbing me, he’d booked the compartment next door. I said: ‘That’s okay, love, anytime.’ Just like a whore. I thought that would be it, because he looked so straight, you know? Usually when you talk like that to a straight guy, it turns him off, even disgusts him. He gave me this big smile, though, and asked if he could sit down for a moment. My little heart starts on the big thump-thump-thump.”

An inhalation. “I won’t bore you with the gory details of Chiang Mai. God knows why a man like him was going there at all, except that it’s on the tourist circuit. God knows why he’s with me. He never admitted that I was his first, you know, but I can tell this is not really a gay. Let’s be honest about this, there are all different shades, and men who love sex usually experiment at some stage in their lives. I think he was like that. I think he’d had women all his life and was at that stage of wondering if it’s worth it, you know? Maybe that special something missing could be supplied by a man? I thought, Fair enough, I’m having the time of my life staying in a good hotel with the man of my dreams, when it ends I’ll have nothing but wonderful memories, something to carry me forward into the next disaster. I can see he’s not comfortable with me socially. To tell the truth, we never leave the room together. He would go out for a meal or a drink, I would go out separately. Socially, he’s very very uptight. He’s a marine, after all. He’s going through quite a thing, but to my surprise he didn’t dump me after the first night.

“Then, after five days, he gives me my marching orders. I say: ‘Of course, darling, it’s been wonderful for me, just wonderful, you’re the best thing that ever happened to me. And by the way, can you help me out with ten thousand baht, I’m a little short of the readies?’ We made that sordid little trip to the bank machine together, he hands me the cash in a dark alley and we walk off into our separate futures-or so I thought.

“Two days later, he came looking for me. He’d searched every gay bar in the town, and found me in the end, drowning my sorrows. That’s when I knew something totally appalling was happening to this beautiful man. This giant stood there with tears in his eyes, looking at me across the floor. Of course, I would have done anything for him. Anything at all. If he’d said, Take this knife and cut your throat, I would have done it. You might say that it was a first for me too: love.”

“But he never got used to you being a man?”

“No. Well, put it the other way: he never got used to him being queer. He held himself together for the first few weeks, but I could see it coming. I wondered what he was going to do with my poor body when he really started to break apart. Someone like me sees it all the time, it’s a professional hazard: the middle-aged man who cannot admit what he is turning into, what he’s doing. I wondered if he would have a fit and kill me with those magnificent muscles of his, not that I cared. It was as good a way to go as any. What for him was something squalid and nasty was the high point of my life. He was good to me, when he remembered what a generous-spirited American he was. And I simply adored him. He liked to smoke ganja and I would get some for him. Then the drinking started. I don’t think he drank much before he met me, but soon he could get through a bottle of Mekong in an hour. It’s like the song says: hate myself for loving you.” A sigh. “I think he really did love me, at the beginning. I think I was a kind of liberation, in a way. After all, he’d been chasing pussy all his life and not gotten anything out of it. At least I understood him. I had testosterone of my own in those days, I knew how a man thinks. I’ve sort of lost that now. He never did beat me, though. Not once. Even his sex wasn’t particularly-you know-over the top. He dominated, of course, but it was more like an emperor expecting to be worshiped than a sadist demanding obedience. I hoped that things would work out. After all, he kept talking about retirement, and he wanted to retire in Bangkok, so I thought, Why not come out? What have you got to lose? Spend the rest of your life in love and freedom. With me. I would have looked after him. My god, would I have looked after him. But of course, it never works out that way, does it? There’s always something drags us down, just when we think we’re being saved.”

“Was he into jade at that time?”

“Oh the jade, the jade. Yes, he was into it. I think one of his retirement dreams had been to go into the gems trade. I think when he was in Yemen and all those other dreadful places, he fantasized about coming to Thailand and exporting gems and jade to the States. Perhaps making his own designs. My god, that’s almost like me fantasizing about becoming a marine. I’m not an expert, but in my little opinion you don’t get near the gems trade out here unless you’re Chinese, or very well connected to the Chinese. I wasn’t going to tell him that, of course. I helped him, with a sense of foreboding I must say.”

“You helped him?”

“He needed an interpreter. He was talking to all sorts of people, including tribespeople from up in the hills and including my own people, the Karen. So I was very useful. I translated into Thai and into Karen and back again into English. I had this bar-boy English at that time, nothing like as good as I speak it now. I have him to thank for that.

“We even got as far as buying a couple of lumps of jade and having them worked into little trinkets by some craftsmen in Chinatown. I had to tell him in the end they were laughing at us. The jade he’d bought was third rate, and his designs were sort of-well, not exactly world class. That penis on the web page was the best thing he did. He modeled it after his own, of course. Even I started wondering where his head was, that he thought starting a web page with a whacking great cock on it was going to change his life. Funnily enough, I think that web page was his way of coming out, his way of finally telling the world what he was: a beautiful, perfectly formed cock.

“Then things started to fall apart. He’d borrowed quite a lot of money to buy the jade and have it worked. I thought he would have borrowed from a bank or something, it didn’t occur to me until it was too late that he’d borrowed from Chiu Chow loan sharks. I mean, how dumb can you get? Did he think he’d get special protection because he was a marine? Did he think the President of the United States would send an aircraft carrier if he got into trouble with the sharks? He had that very naÏve streak, you see. A blind spot, I suppose you would call it. Perhaps it was from being in the Marines all those years, there were things in front of his eyes on the street he just did not see. That’s when his drinking and his ganja smoking started to get out of hand. He had to get a medical certificate a couple of times because he wasn’t fit for work. He was terrified of random drug tests. That’s also when he started into me, telling me I’d destroyed his life, calling me all the names a bum-boy gets called when his man starts to freak. Even then, I have to tell you he never hit me. I don’t think that he was a violent man by nature. Not until someone turned him violent. But I didn’t know that at the time. All I knew was my luck was as bad as ever. Even though it wasn’t my fault, I’d sort of brought bad luck to this man I loved. I made him pray with me. I was Christian, he was brought up a Christian-at first he didn’t understand that someone like me can be a believer. So we prayed and somehow I think that might have made things go from bad to worse.”

“How so?”

“Because he really got into the praying, and bought a Bible and started preaching to me about salvation. He would go on for hours, usually after he’d had a bottle of Mekong, and I used to sit at his feet and murmur adoring approval. It was like those American preachers you see on the TV sometimes, all emotion and intensity and certainty about God’s grace. We Karen are religious groupies, we love everyone’s God, we’ve had more missionaries over the years than you can count: all kinds of Christians, Buddhists, Muslims. We take them all in, believe every word and never bother about the contradictions. So I was a perfect audience for him. We would reach this peak a few times a week, after ganja and whisky, when we were certain that the doors of heaven were about to open and we would walk right in. You have to bear in mind that he was under a lot of pressure. The loan sharks were closing in. They didn’t want to kill him, of course, but they were charging twenty percent a month and at that rate things get on top of you very quickly. He would get these three-in-the-morning telephone calls and the guy’s English would be so bad I’d have to take the phone and have him make his threats in Thai so I could translate. It was the usual stuff, you know, what they would do to his body, his face-especially his face. They’re not stupid, those people, they know a person’s weakness.”

“And at this time, you were still…”

“Still a man? Oh yes. My change came later. I would say that we decided I would start to take the estrogen together, it was a family decision which popped up quite casually. We were in bed one night, drunk, and he was caressing me and I asked him if he would like me to have tits. I don’t think it had occurred to him before. He sort of jumped a bit. Maybe he saw it as a solution to at least one of his problems. If he turned me into a woman he could claim not to be queer, couldn’t he? But that wasn’t what I’d had in mind. I was just suggesting the estrogen as a sort of-you know?”

“Sexual adjunct?”

“Exactly. So I got hold of some local stuff and, lo and behold, the tits start to grow. The effect on him was weird. I mean, he started obsessing about making changes to my body. I said, ‘Sweetheart, I’m starting to feel like a lump of jade that’s being worked on.’ He laughed, but it was true. And the funny thing was that at that time, everything seemed to change for the better. He told me he’d been contacted by someone very very big in the gems trade in America and it looked like a little real business would be coming his way. Nothing big to start with, but at least there was light. And this jeweler-he never told me his name in the early days-was going to pay off Bill’s debts. Boy, I mean, it was just like the clouds lifted all at once, all thanks to this big shot from America, this jeweler, who I never met until much later, but who would come to Krung Thep once a month on business and he and Bill would go somewhere-to this guy’s hotel I guess-to talk business all night.”

“All night?”

“That’s right. I had my suspicions. I mean, it’s pretty standard that someone comes from the West or Japan on a business trip and expects to be entertained in the Bangkok tradition when the talking’s over. I didn’t really mind. I even thought it might be healthy in a way. I mean, from what he said this jeweler seemed to like women and I thought if Bill is doing a little pussy-chasing just for form, it’s probably what he needs. He was still pretty freaked out about having a serious affair with a man. Maybe he needed the balance. Anyway, the jeweler had become our number one man and anything he wanted he had to have. At the same time, all kinds of stuff started appearing in our house. Silverware, ceramics, local craft products, things which I thought were priceless in my ignorance of those days, but which turned out to be just leftover junk from the jeweler’s warehouse.”

“They went to the bars together?”

“I don’t know about that. This guy was so big, so rich, I got the feeling they would party with some hired flesh, you know, the most expensive kind, right there in his hotel suite. Bill mentioned a Russian pimp and some Siberian women.”

“How did Bill seem after those sessions?”

“At first he was kind of amused. He would say that this guy, who was so respectable, who met presidents, who knew senators and members of Parliament, was really quite a swinger. He didn’t say more than that to save my feelings. Quite a swinger. Then one time he stayed away three days and when he came back he was a different man.”

“Different?”

Silence.

“Totally different. He’d lost his soul. He even admitted it. He got drunk, smoked some ganja and started tearing up his Bible. He says: ‘I prayed for grace and salvation, but they sent me the devil. So now we work for the devil. Maybe there’s only the devil, maybe all the other nonsense is kid stuff. That’s what the man told me. Kid stuff.’ He looked at me when he said that. He looked at me and carried on tearing up the Bible.”

“And that’s when you started on the estradiol?”

“That’s when my transformation went high tech. Estradiol. Computer programs, medical dictionaries, specialist news groups on the Web.”

“And Dr. Surichai?”

“And after a few months, yes, Dr. Surichai. I’m watching Bill every day playing with this computer stuff with-you know-diagrams, color pictures of the anatomy of a man and a woman, and he can move the bits around, cut off this, add this, and I’m standing behind him adoring him with my arms around his neck saying: ‘Yes, darling, let’s give me tits like that, anything you like. You can have three tits and two pussies if you want, anything, anything.’ ”

“You were being designed?”

“That’s right, I was being designed. What did I care? I was just so flattered, you know, that my man is obsessing about me. Who wouldn’t be? I didn’t care if he’d turned into the devil. What did God ever do for me?” A quick flash of those large black eyes. “What you have to appreciate, darling, is the change in me. It was as if I was born and brought up in hell, then suddenly transported to heaven. I found love, a home, a sense of belonging, for the first time ever. Somehow I think I see in your eyes you know what I’m talking about, no?”

“Yes.”

“And when you experience that kind of transformation, you’re walking on air. You really can’t believe your luck.”

“But you knew you didn’t fit the usual profile of a transsexual? You didn’t believe yourself to be a woman trapped in a man’s body?”

“That crap? That’s what farangs get all hung up on. Here in Krung Thep we already have designer bodies-the boys on the street will cut anything off, add anything on, take any kind of drugs. We are the future, darling. The farangs will catch up. You’ll see, they’ll soon drop all that psychological caring stuff once they see how much money is in it.”

“But you must have thought about it, that at a crucial moment the man with the knife was going to cut everything off?”

A shrug. “Not really. I was doing it for love, darling. You’re a child of the street, you must know what it means to have nothing to lose? And it wasn’t really a loss. He turned me into a goddess.”

I switch the recorder off. In my mind echoes Dr. Surichai’s question: What is a transsexual? A medieval eunuch pumped full of estrogen? Did Fatima ask herself that very question now and then, in her down moments? I switch the recorder back on.

“But you didn’t make any connection with the jeweler?”

“No, except that that was where the money was coming from at first. Then Bill used the jeweler’s contacts to get into the yaa baa trade, and that was where the money was supposed to be coming from after that. But you know, there wasn’t much time, suddenly, to worry about anything. I’m taking the drugs, going to see the doctor, Bill’s obsessing about my throat, the Adam’s apple thing and what my voice is going to be like-even the whole devil thing just faded into the background after a while. I think Bill just put it into the back of his mind what he’d agreed with the jeweler.”

“When did you find out?”

“Well, Bill wasn’t doing as well as he expected with his yaa baa. The shipment came about every two months. We would go to the domestic airport to collect it. I went with him just in case there was a problem that needed a translator-his Thai never did get beyond the beginner stage. The stuff was sent by some Burmese army general who paid off everyone on the border, and a local syndicate. All Bill had to do was move it from the airport to the squatters under the bridge. They’re Karen and have strong connections to the people in the jungle on the border. The syndicate didn’t really need Bill except for that one link from the airport to Dao Phrya Bridge. It would have looked strange if a Karen squatter turned up to collect a big shiny steamer trunk every few months, but an American in a Mercedes sort of went with the trunk. But Bill’s contribution was not exactly crucial and he wasn’t indispensable, so he didn’t get paid that well. I didn’t know this until quite recently, that he wasn’t getting that much money out of the yaa baa thing, despite the risk. I mean, if he’d gotten caught they would have put him in Bang Kwan for life, wouldn’t they?”

“Probably. He would have been transferred to the States after five years, but he would have had to do time there as well. He was running a big risk.”

“That’s right, that’s what I told him, a big risk for small bucks. I’m trying to be the good wise wife at this stage. I’m also getting curious. Dr. Surichai and his hospital do not come cheap, and if the yaa baa isn’t paying that well, and the little bits and pieces he’s doing for the jeweler aren’t paying that well either, where’s the money coming from?”

“Did you have suspicions?”

“Not of what was really going on, no. I knew there was a whole side to Bill that I didn’t know about, but I had no idea what that was. For a while I really wondered if he was serious about the jeweler being the devil, or a devil worshiper, you know, if there was some kind of black magic they were into. I even wondered if Bill was blackmailing him. I asked him outright a few times, Where are you getting the money for the medicines, Dr. Surichai, the hospital, all that? He would tell me not to worry about it, the money was there.”

“But you did find out, somehow?”

Silence. She is sitting on a sofa, I’m sitting in a large armchair.

“You think I killed him, darling?”

“I know you did.”

“Little me? How on earth would I manage with all those snakes? Be real, Detective, it would have taken an army of experts.”

Then she stands up, exactly as a woman would, elegantly and with an erotic intonation in the way she twists her buttocks, which really does seem to be unconscious. In the silence I have to admit it’s eerie just how perfectly the operation seems to have worked in her case. No wonder Dr. Surichai is so proud of himself. It is only from this angle, looking almost directly up at her neck, that I can see the tiny scar he talked about. I stand up and she escorts me to the door. The idea of killing her is ridiculous at this moment. I am under her spell and she knows it. She cocks her head slightly. In a whisper: “Not going to kill me today?” The question takes me by surprise because I’m sure she read my thoughts. She leans toward me. “Let me kill the jeweler for you, then you can do what you like with me. What do I care?” Suddenly holding my chin and staring into my eyes. “You’re an arhat, why ruin your karma on a senseless vendetta? The world needs you. Let a devil do your killing.”

I try to move but she holds my shirtsleeve in a hand suddenly turned into a claw. “The first time you saw me, in the shop, you knew, didn’t you? I’m the other half of what you are, darling, if one of us is in the world, so must the other be. I’m your dark side. I think you realize that. Kill me if you like, but then you kill yourself.”

She opens the door and suddenly I’m outside again, between the Chinese door gods. There is no time to ask her about the apartment, which she bought outright in her own name according to the clerk in the Lands Department, or the priceless furnishings. The cost of the penthouse was twenty million baht, or half a million dollars, but the jade collection-on display on a Chinese temple table in polished blackwood-would have been worth more than that. Then there were all the other artifacts from Warren’s shop, artistically placed on pedestals, antique tables, or just left on the floor where one might easily kick them by accident if one were not careful.

I am left thinking how easy it would have been to kill her. The thought that I may have failed Pichai threatens to depress me. It is only counterbalanced by the opposite possibility, that she has charmed him too.