Bangkok Noir

Thousand and One Nights Pico Iyer

Dear Susan,

There were people coming at me from every side, more people than I can describe, from every corner of the world. Large Arab men in their smocks and gowns, teams of Japanese businessmen in suits, men who looked like they’d been left over from the Vietnam War and earringed couples who could have been from anywhere — all of them thronging down this lane of lights and looking into the entrances, into red-lit magic caves, all smoke and noise, to see if they could spot a Chinese princess. There’s one area — you wouldn’t believe it (or maybe you would; I suppose the place has become quite a legend now) — where they have whole Arabian palaces on a dark lane, furnished with great chandeliered rooms full of divans and men in gallabeahs smoking hubble-bubbles, while girls of every shape and size move among them, from one dream chamber to the next, looking for a touch of magic, a month’s salary in a night’s adventure.

Anyway, you know all about Bangkok already. And this isn’t the kind of thing one would ordinarily be telling a sister. But since Sarah went away — well, you know how it is. Nobody will listen to me, or if they do, they listen in a way that says they’re only being kind or doing their charity work for the day. You’re the only one who understands. I tell myself that talking to you is like talking to a better version of myself.

So there I was in the Arabian Nights. It sounds mad, I know, but I felt as if I’d fallen into some other kind of world that was waiting beside me the way a shadow might, like those stories Nana used to read us in the nursery. Remember Alice in her rabbit hole, ending up on the underside of the world? Or the little girl who went to sleep and woke up in another place? I suppose it’s what people get when they pop those pills you told me about in the disco, or shoot themselves full of the yaa baa, or “mad medicine,” that the taxi drivers talk about here, but for someone like me — well, it all came as something of a shock.

Plus, of course, I was jet-lagged. Walking and walking through the streets after dark and looking for lunch at 3:00 a.m. Everything took on a different aspect, as if — how can I put it? — well, as if I weren’t seeing the lights, really, only their reflections in a puddle. Everything blurred and shimmery and reflecting. I’d look at my face in the shop windows, and I wouldn’t know who it was looking back at me. As if I’d left my self — my regular daily self — in England and now some kind of outline or facsimile was playing me, off the ground and weightless, in a trance.

The noise from the bars, the boys coming up and trying to pull me into their caves. “Here, sir, very good,” “Come here, no problem, only looking.” I’d turn a corner and end up in a little lane that opened up onto the river, the shining golden pinnacle of a stupa at the other end. And then I’d stumble back, and there were all these signs — Bad Boy, Helicopter, The Alternative — and you could imagine you were in the mind of a magician. Aladdin’s cave, I thought.

So anyway, I walked and walked, all night, it seemed, and at one point I went into this little alleyway — lights, girls in bikinis, people selling elixirs of some kind in bottles — and I stopped off in a trattoria (they have everything here) for lunch. Outside, on the street, there were flocks of girls rather vamping it up: with long hair that swung below their shoulders, long slim legs, high heels, leopard-skin shorts, the lot.

They were cavorting up and down the street, having fun, really, occasionally stepping into a pool hall, red-lit, or one of the open-air bars that look out onto the street; once, one of them came and stood looking at me where I sat, eating on the terrace. Looking at me very directly, half-pout and halfcaress.

“Where you come from, mister? What you need?”

“Nothing. I’m just passing the time, really.” I sounded foolish, I knew, but I didn’t know how to sound here.

“No want la-dee?” The way she said it was itself a sort of insinuation.

“No, thank you. I’m here on business.”

“Same-same,” she said, “business,” and let out a husky laugh. “Business, pleasure, same-same. You show me good heart, I show you good time.”

“I’m sure,” I said. “Maybe tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow,” she said, as if we’d shared an illicit joke.

“You no go with ladee?” said the waiter, as the woman walked away.

“No go,” I said, and then wondered why exactly I was speaking like one of them.

I looked around me, then, and realized I’d never seen so many beautiful women in one place before; then I looked closer and realized why they were so beautiful. They weren’t real. They were real people, of course, just not real girls. And yet not not-real either. Some of them, I thought, just made themselves up as girls. But some were no doubt on the way to becoming real women, in every way. And some of them had completed the transformation and now, reborn, were more girlish than any girl could be. All the excitement of them came from this sense of ambiguity, of mystery, I suppose. I felt almost seasick watching them.

I went back to my hotel then — it was on one of those brightly lit lanes, which in the daytime turns out to be just a rather peeling, derelict back alleyway. But at night it is enchantment. They call this place the “City of Angels,” but I think that’s a kind of spell, a way of saying it’s not a place of djinns. Didn’t Nana tell us, one of those long winter afternoons — Scheherazade in Somerset — that the best devils in the world are the ones who look like angels?

I suppose you’ll say all this has something to do with Sarah, and finding myself alone again. A widower is a king exiled from his palace, I tell my friends, and they look at one another and tell themselves I’ve lost it. But it’s true. When you’re suddenly alone again, it’s as if you’ve lost not just your jewels, but yourself, your life. You’ve woken up in a strange place, and there’s no way to find the road back to the castle. Nothing makes sense, and you don’t have any money on you, and whatever past you thought you had is locked up in somebody else’s keeping. I suppose I realized that if everyone was going to misunderstand me in any case, I might as well go full hog and become someone entirely unexpected.

Which brings me to the part that’s going to shock you. I feel strange saying all this to you; I suppose if would be easier to call. But if I could hear your voice, I don’t think I’d be able to say anything at all. And anyway, with you off in Bangalore, I’d probably hear someone else’s voice, or someone pretending to be you. And you’re not who you usually are either, I imagine, in that tropical setting, with all those streets around.

Besides, there is something rather magical about coming into one of these little cafés at 1:00 a.m. — the young girl at the desk curtsies, the kids wait around in chairs, as if waiting to be claimed — and typing these words onto a screen, and then, that very minute, the same words appear on a screen in India, taken there by a genie with STD connections.

So, back to the part where you’ve got to block your eyes (or ears, or both). I asked myself, as I went out for breakfast that second night, what I really wanted here. The streets around me were thronged; they have this night market thing here which is a kind of Oriental bazaar in the dark, so mad with flickering neon and shouted prices that you can hardly walk. People are shooting numbers back and forth, or offering one another calculators on which their bids are typed. Girls are drifting out of the bars in underwear, or even less. People are selling blacklight posters, lanterns, false perfumes and little vials of something strange, bras, luminous green rings to wear around your neck and spices that are said to be love potions. All around, on every corner. And I, walking through the midst of it, thought, “What is it that I could do here that I could never do at home?”

What I’m going to tell you won’t make you very comfortable. But I suppose I was after something that’s the opposite of comfort; if it had been comfort I wanted, I’d have stayed in London. No, I thought; this is a chance — my best chance, maybe my last chance — to become someone different. To say abracadabra and whirl myself around so fast that the person who gets up again is someone other. You know how my reasoning works when there’s no real reason behind it.

People were pushing me, scraping past me as I walked, picking up panties and Rolex watches that cost less than a drink, fingering X-rated videos and bottles of Chanel that looked like colored water, and at last, having fortified myself with a beer, I went up to two girls I’d seen the night before. One of them had short, spiky hair — she was less tall than I was — and a soft, young face, virginal in a way. The other was much taller than both of us, with long hair and a tiger’s face, predatory and strong.

“What magic tricks do you offer?” I said, not meaning anything, I think.

They looked at one another — though I’m sure they’re used to worse — and then the small one, the shy one, said, “What country you come from?”

“England,” I said.

“Same-same, America.”

“Not really, no.”

“Where you stay Bangkok?”

“The Dream Palace. Over near the Golden Temple.”

They looked at one another appraisingly.

“You have ladee, Bangkok?”

“No,” I told the shorter one. “No lady at all.”

Here the taller one grabbed hold of my arm.

“You come with me,” she said.

“No,” said the other. “You come with me. Number one.”

“Same-same,” said the first. “You take us both.”

“I will,” I said, and the whole conversation stopped for a moment. Whatever they were expecting, it wasn’t this. It wasn’t what I was expecting, either. It was the moment speaking, taking me wherever it went.

They looked at me and the tall one said, “You want me and my friend?”

“Of course,” I said. I don’t know why, but I thought at that moment of what I’d read about the women in those poor African countries — São Tomé, the Central African Republic — who support their families by pretending to be other women at phone-sex centers. Purring down the international phone lines, as if they were in Croydon or Atlanta or somewhere, sighing and giving back false names, so they can go home and give their mothers enough money for food.

It’s degrading, people will tell you. It’s just colonialism in another form. It’s a way of keeping the poor poor, and exploiting the fact they’re in need. Maybe it is, but that wasn’t how it seemed just then. The girls were eager; they didn’t want to spend any longer waiting for someone who might be even worse than me. And the next thing I knew, they were leading me, one by each arm, down the little lane, past the booths and the fortune tellers and the girls in briefs, who were running a finger down a man’s shirt or underneath it to his skin. It was like walking through a stranger’s imagination.

We arrived a few minutes later at an unlit staircase and walked up into the dark. At the top we came to this musty aquarium of a place, with a string of lights along the walls. A man — a boy, really — was sitting at a cash register, eating something from a bowl and watching a television set that sat on the floor in a corner. With rabbit-ear antennae and a scratchy old black-and-white film on the small screen.

I suppose the girls had been here before (I call them girls because I don’t know what else to call them). They collected a key from the boy, and then the three of us walked, or straggled, down the corridor. There were pink lights above every door, no windows at the end. One of them turned the old-fashioned key and we walked into this room of wonders, really; she turned on a light, and we saw a television set, a drinks cabinet, a video player, a karaoke mike. There was a deep bathtub in the middle of the room. The other girl, the smaller one, pushed another button and the room shone red, then blue.

The taller girl went into the bathroom, and the small one began to unbutton her shirt.

“No,” I said, putting a hand on her arm. “Not now.”

She sat on the bed — she looked puzzled, even rejected — and a few seconds later, the taller girl came out, freshly showered, with some exotic perfume newly applied. She’d changed into a bathrobe, but she hadn’t done it up, so she walked across the room like someone from a James Bond film, her robe waiting to fall open.

“A thousand and one nights,” I said, rather foolishly, again, and they looked at one another, a little alarmed. I suppose they were wondering — worried — what would come next.

“You crazy guy,” said the tall one, pushing me onto the bed.

The other one, always more obliging, said, “No, shy. Same-same Japanese.”

“No,” I said. “I know what I want.”

They both looked at me, expectant. All three of us were on the bed now and the red light made us feel like X-rays or something not quite real.

“We tell each other stories. The stories of our lives.”

“You cheap Charlie!” said the tall one, guessing, I suppose, that this was some kind of trick. So I pulled out my red and purple notes and gave them a whole stash in advance.

They relaxed a little, and the smaller one said, “You want, we do.”

“My wish is your command,” I said emptily. The tall one — she was lying between us now, and her legs stretched almost to the end of the bed — said she’d always wanted to be a girl. She’d always felt incomplete somehow — a broken jug, she seemed to gesture — and when she’d been very young, she’d made a promise to herself that if she ever got the chance, she’d follow her dream right through. So she saved her money and came to the city, and made more money here, and — well, now she was what she’d always wanted to be. Her story had a happy ending.

The other one, sweeter — I liked her more — said something about a “Mama” and a child, and her promise to keep them healthy by going to the big city. She’d come here and found that men weren’t very much in demand in the City of Angels. A month’s wages for a construction worker’s job would give her pennies to send home. And she’d thought of her mother waiting, her promise, and then she’d decided to take a gamble.

There was a knock on the door then. I suppose our allotted time was up, and I called back, “We’ll pay for the whole night — tomorrow, too,” and there was the sound of receding footsteps. And the girl said she’d taken her gamble. She’d passed through the mirror, and now her mother had a new house; her daughter was at school.

Then they looked at me, and I told them everything. The things I couldn’t tell my friends, the things it had been hard for me to tell even you. About Sarah, I mean, and what I learned about her after she died. What I learned about myself. What I did in the house alone, what I thought of doing. All of it: everything that had been waiting to come out for nine months — 263 days. I even told them how I’d said to you, that afternoon in the park, “What I really want is a genie,” and you’d said, “You’d better go abroad. They don’t do genies in central London.”

They do, actually, now — they do everything, everywhere — but I thought that sisters know best. And then I told them about my saving my money and coming away from the city, and away from my family, towards what I knew nothing about. I suppose they were bored — it was almost light now, and we could see the colors changing through the little window, which looked out onto a wall — but they looked as if they were interested, and when I was finished, the small one leaned forward and kissed me on the cheek. The other one — Jin, she told me her name was (the smaller one was Nit) — asked me if I had a handkerchief. I gave her mine, and she brushed at her eyes a little. Something in the night had moved her.

We’d overstayed our deposit, of course, but I’m not sure that any of us wanted to go. It was cool in the room, and it was quiet; the lights made everything different. Finally the tall one said, “Go home now,” and we went down to where the street was empty, just overturned tables and rubbish in the thin grey light, and a sort of bulldozer machine that noisily went back and forth, back and forth, collecting all the relics of the night. It was like coming back to something real after a night in a very different country

The girls took me to a tuk-tuk, one of these four-wheeled rickshaws they have here, and bargained on my behalf with the boy in the front seat; they were going to go home on the backs of motorcycle taxis across the street. “You good man,” said Jin. “You want meet again, you call.” And, taking a flyer from a McDonald’s nearby, she scribbled down her number on the back of an advert for a Happy Meal.

“I see you tonight? Same place?” said Nit, and I said, “Who knows? Maybe you will.”

I got into the back of the rickshaw then and sat under the red light, as the boy banged his horn and reeled into the traffic. In daytime the magic of the city was gone, except this time it wasn’t gone at all — only postponed, perhaps. The djiinn was beside me on the seat — the djinn was inside me — and this evening, or tomorrow night, or the evening after that, anything, everything seemed possible. Just telling your story, I thought: could any crime be so secret?