Bangkok Tattoo

26

Chanya begins her diary thus: There are two Chanyas. Chanya One is noble, pure, and shines like gold. Chanya Two fucks for money. This is why whores go mad.

She refers to herself in the third person, a permissible device in spoken and written Thai and very common in the humbler classes: Chanya has always wanted to go to Saharat Amerika.

I seriously thought about translating the whole thing word for word for you, farang, but the style didn’t fit with the rest of the narrative, and I know how you love congruity (I also got frustrated because I couldn’t stick in any comments of my own), so I’ve opted for an impressionistic rendering of the kind deplored by all true scholars, if that’s okay?

America was a dream that infected her soul via a television screen while she was still a child. Starting with the Empire State Building and the Grand Canyon, her mind had collected a million brilliant images of a nation with a genius for self-promotion. One fine day, when she had saved enough money to keep her parents for a few months, and had paid for her sister’s college fees for that semester, and had bought a piece of land in her village near Surin where she would build her trophy house on her return, and had bought a laptop with Thai word processor, she contacted a gang who had a reputation for honesty and reliability. Their fees were high-nearly fifteen thousand dollars-but they provided the full service, including a genuine Thai passport with a genuine entry visa to the United States, a return air ticket good for one year, a minder who accompanied her as far as Immigration in New York to make sure she did not freak out at the crucial moment and blow the whole operation, and a room and a job in a massage parlor in Texas.

In return for her working in the massage parlor for six months, the gang reduced the fees by five thousand dollars. Of course, she would pay this back by swelling the profits of the massage parlor, which would contribute to the gang’s overheads. She would have to make her own money those first months through tips and by turning tricks on the side, but she knew how to do that and had no illusions. She would use that time to perfect her English, get to know more about American men, and work out which was the best city in which to practice her profession for maximum profit.

The way she saw it, she would be at the top of her game in a country that paid better than any other. When she finished, after a couple of years, she would still be under thirty years old. She would retire to her brand-new house with carport and giant wide-screen TV, decorated internally with photographs of Chanya in Amerika. The whole village would be proud of her and give her face. She would be a queen, and everyone would approve of the way she took care of her family. Maybe she would have a baby? Unlike most of her friends, she had not fallen pregnant to a Thai lover at age eighteen. She was childless and went along with the more recent fashion in that she liked the idea of having a half-farang child, who tended, according to the latest fad anyway, to be more beautiful than Thais and with lighter skin. She had no particular desire to marry, although a Buddhist ceremony was not out of the question. She knew enough about farang men to know that the father of her child was unlikely to stick around. Indeed, the chances were he would disappear the day she told him she was pregnant, which was fine by her. The function of a husband was to provide. If a woman had money, what did she need a husband for? She could satisfy her sexual needs anytime she liked, although she had always practiced Buddhist meditation and expected to become more devout once her working days were over. She would probably give up sex altogether once she retired. It was a very long time since she had enjoyed it or even thought about it other than in a professional sense. Come to think of it, she wasn’t sure she ever had felt any real passion for a man. Sex was boring. It was paytime that made her heart skip a beat.

She has insisted on a window seat in the Thai Airways 747, and her first view of America is the New England coastline. The gang chose for her to fly west, with a short stopover at Heathrow Airport in London, so for most of the journey, there has been only blackness out the window as they fled the sun. Now, though, the sun has caught up, and eight thousand feet below, the New England coast looks as pristine as when the Pilgrims first arrived. She had no idea that America could be breathtaking in its natural beauty, so it’s quite a surprise to behold that aquamarine lazily lapping at a jagged line of rocks that reflect the morning light with the brilliance of diamonds. She has never been out of Thailand before, never seen a northern landscape. It looks so pure and unspoiled.

The big moment comes when she reaches the immigration booth and a tall, stern farang in uniform checks carefully through her passport. The minder from the gang is in a parallel line, watching, ready to jump her if her nerves let her down. (Oh, solly, solly, mister, my sister she very emotional, I take her go sit down over there.)

But her nerves do not fail: Chanya rides this dragon. Chanya owns big pair mighty balls.

Here is the benefit of choosing the right mafiosi and of generally knowing what you are doing. Plenty of girls get caught at this stage because the passport is poorly forged, or there is something wrong with the visa. Not with these guys. Although he seems to try quite hard (when he pierces her with those cold blue eyes, it is obvious he knows what she is, but she keeps her cool and gazes steadily back), the immigration officer cannot find anything wrong with her papers and lets her through. Now customs wants to search her bags because she has arrived from Bangkok. Here again many girls get into serious trouble because the gang has slipped something into their luggage, trying to run two scams at once, but not this group. The only item the customs officer examines closely is her secondhand laptop, which she bought in Bangkok mostly so she could send e-mails to all her friends and family, especially her sister at Chulalongkorn University, but also because part of her American plan is to keep a diary. The officer lets her through, and all of a sudden she’s in the country. There being no Buddha statue to wai to in this pagan land, she places her hands together near her forehead, facing in the direction of Thailand. Translated directly from the Thai: Say good morning to Chanya, Amerika.

She and her minder take one of the shuttle buses to catch the connecting flight to El Paso. He watches her pass to airside, then disappears. Another minder, not Thai but Texan, meets her off the plane in El Paso. He is red-faced and balding with bad skin, and a sour odor seeps from his body, but she can tell he’s a professional by the way he discounts her charms and gets down to business. On the way to the massage parlor he explains that the advantage of jet lag is that she’ll be fresh and alert in the middle of the night, so she’ll start working the graveyard shift in a few hours. Better get some sleep. He lets slip that she is the first Asian woman to work for this particular outfit.

The first Spanish word she learns is coño. It means “cunt,” a word women of her trade employ a lot, including in Thailand, but the Mexican women in the massage parlor use it all the time. It punctuates everything they say and sounds unspeakably filthy. Most of them are bilingual in Spanish and English but prefer to speak in Spanish. They tend to have families on the other side of the border and to know one another from Ciudad Juárez, where they have boyfriends and husbands who work as grunts in the narcotics trade. Chanya has mentally prepared herself for any kind of American man who hires her-she really hadn’t thought that the other women would be a problem. She sees at once it’s a cultural thing but has no idea what to do about it. She was lovingly brought up by poor but devout Buddhists, and she herself never violates any of the strictures except one. The Buddha requires of his followers that they find “right employment.” Chanya made a decision to postpone complying with that one because prostitution offered better money than any other work and made it easy for her to comply with some of the other Buddhist strictures, especially the ones that dealt with showing respect to one’s parents. In the Thai interpretation that meant providing for them if they were too poor or old to provide for themselves. It also meant providing for her siblings until they were old enough to work, an event that could easily be delayed indefinitely. Chanya never steals, hardly ever tells lies, cultivates good thoughts and lovingkindness, never takes drugs, doesn’t drink too much alcohol at this stage in her life, tries to see the best in people-including her customers-and most important of all keeps her mind as free as possible from defilements. All of which, together with her outstanding good looks and fantastic figure, infuriate the hell out of her colleagues, especially when more and more men ask for her services.

After a week she has made her first important decision: Whores here all demons.

In other words, they are impervious to compassion or any Buddhist salvation. When they die, they will return to the hells whence they came and remain there for tens of thousands of years before getting another crack at the human form, which they will probably make a mess of all over again. “Idiot compassion” is a novice stage in Buddhist doctrine. Chanya passed that phase a long time ago. She encloses herself in an impermeable mental shield that translates as aloofness but gains her some respect. The demons had seen her as something frail and pathetic, a tasty morsel dangling at the very end of the food chain. Now they see she is something else, a different animal entirely. Coño. She pays no attention to their religion, which seems important to them but strikes her as a barbaric product of one of the lower hells, full of torment and anguish that lead nowhere: Chanya fucks demons.

After less than a month the offers of marriage start to come in. It amuses her that the Texan male courts in a way that would be instantly recognizable in the East. He tells you how much money he’s got, shows you around his “spread” just like a bird showing off its plumage, and treats you like a princess in a cage. Some even had the sense to feign humility: “Aw, you know, it’s just a li’l ol’ spread, I ain’t rich exactly-but a’ course any woman takes me on full time is gonna get half sooner or later. I’m getting on a bit, you know.”

The frontier between marriage and prostitution was as hard to pin down in the United States as it was in Thailand, apparently. Some of the spreads were gigantic in the Texan tradition, but she doubted the owner had any real intention to share. As her fame grew, more and more red-faced men from out of the jungle (she is still very Thai; for her, anything that is not city or suburb is jungle) arrived in the massage parlor’s parking lot in big SUVs. Her boss doubled her fees and told her the five thousand dollars would be paid off in three months instead of six, when she would be free to leave. He was an experienced pro and realized she was just too hot to keep. The feds would be around sooner or later to take a more expert look at her passport, maybe check with the ID database in Thailand on which fingerprints were recorded.

Marriage, she now decides, is not out of the question, but she sees through the men. She sees the meanness behind the charm, their assumption of a future of unchallenged dominance that arises from her being Asian, serene, and eager to please. For her part, if she is looking for anything in particular in a man, it is a Thai sense of fun. Money is important, but without fun life simply is not worth living. Although she enjoys a laugh and a joke with some of the customers, she isn’t having a lot of fun, not with the Mexican women developing a homicidal rage toward her. The boss sees it too and hints that she should probably leave as soon as the three months are up-those women have mean connections. Anything can happen in El Paso. Maybe she could leave even sooner-he increases her hourly fee again. Within a record two months of her arrival, she is free to leave.

Vegas is the place to go for a woman like her. She knew this even in Bangkok. When she first sees the town from the Greyhound bus, she recognizes the vibrations. Using her connections within America ’s Thai mafia, she has no difficulty finding a job with the biggest of the city’s agencies. The agency is so well organized, American style, it even holds an induction course. Chanya sits in a seat in a conference room of a large hotel, along with about fifty other young women, most of whom are not Caucasian.

She has often heard prostitution referred to as an industry but has never seen it treated like one before. The platinum blonde who stands facing the new recruits is a masterpiece of modern surgery: tit enhancements, stomach tucks, nosejob, face-lift-the lot. She is over forty, though-way past active service-and has surely been shunted over to the human resources side of the profession. No surgery could do much about her voice, which is sandpaper and steel:

“It’s like this, and in this order. I don’t want to hear about any of you getting the order wrong, so if you have a learning disability or poor English, write it down. I provided paper and pencil on each desk.”

1. The john arrives in Vegas. He has heard about our services and asks the cab driver how he can contact us on his way from the airport.

2. The cab driver has one of our cards like this. [It shows a lurid Asian girl with huge bare breasts on one side, the telephone number on the other.] You will notice that there is a code number on the card. Each individual card has a different one.

3. The john calls the number, and the operator asks for the code on the card. This helps ensure it’s a real john and not a cop. It also means a payoff for the cab driver.

4. The john states his preferences, i.e., race, breast size, height, blow job only, hand job, vaginal intercourse, anal intercourse, special services, all of the above, etc.

5. The operator takes down his hotel details and calls him back in his room to make sure he’s really there.

6. If he is where he says he is, the operator tells him the price and usually adds that the girl will be there in twenty minutes.

7. The operator calls the girl on her cell phone and tells her where to go. She also calls one of the bodyguards to meet her in the lobby of the john’s hotel. This is important. You do not go to the john’s room or even call him until the guard is in place. You tap the guard’s cell number into the autodial feature of your own cell phone. If at any point there is a problem, you press the autodial number, and the guard will be up at the room in double-quick time.

8. You make contact with the guard and then call the john on the hotel phone to come down to meet you. You do not go straight to his room.

9. The john tells you what he is wearing. You and the guard both check the john when he appears, but he will not see the guard. You approach, you will call him either honey or sweetie, you will not use any other term of endearment.

10. The john takes you up to his room. He must now pay you the base fee of two hundred dollars. You do not make a move until you have pocketed the cash.

11. You now tell him to take out his cock. This is important. If he is an undercover cop, he will not take out his cock. If he refuses, then you leave the room. If he is not a cop, he will take out his cock, which you will work on for a few moments.

12. You then tell him to lie on the bed while you strip. After you have stripped and he has ogled you, you explain that the price given by the agency was merely for turning up and stripping. If he wants more, he has to pay. You will have your own scale of fees for services, starting with hand jobs and going all the way up to ass-fucking. What you charge at this stage is up to you-obviously the young and stunning will charge the most. In any case, you are advised not to begin your service until you have got your dough.

13. The rest is up to you and your creativity, but always use a condom for oral, vaginal, and anal sex. From time to time we plant men on you to check for quality control. Any girl who does not roll her own condom on the john will be fired.

14. An elegant exit is always a good idea. Be polite at all times, but a good exit gives the possibility of repeat business. A repeat customer simplifies things, and of course you know by this time he is not a cop.

At first she feels much less isolated than in El Paso. There are plenty of Asian women on the Game here-Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Chinese, Thai, Filipino, Malay, Indian, Pakistani-more or less every Asian race is represented. If they are less popular than blondes, that doesn’t seem to matter, there is plenty of work to go around. Here the men are all tourists from other states-the whole of Nevada is a revolving door, millions are flown and bused in every week. Every customer comes with those bulging, moist, expectant eyes of a man who has escaped from his prison for a week or two-or a day, or an hour.

Almost all the other women are American citizens, though. Many were born there, others have immigrated and stayed long enough to take the oath of allegiance and generally behave exactly like other Americans. Practically every one of them is on drugs. The white women tend to claim, perhaps truthfully, that it was drugs (mostly coke, crack and meth, sometimes heroin) that drove them to the Game in the first place. They needed the big bucks to feed their big habits. The Asians and the blacks often claim it was prostitution that drove them to drugs. Everyone agrees that to survive on the Game in America, you more or less have to be on dope of one kind or another. Pretty soon Chanya understands what they mean. The men hardly trouble to ask her name, there is no repartee, no fun-even less fun than in Texas. To her it makes no sense at all, since imposing a layer of misery has no effect on the popularity of the trade. On the contrary, it may be the puritanical monotony of the working week that drives the men to seek relief in Vegas: not raging bulls, exactly, more like cows waiting to be milked.

She becomes a production-line worker, if a highly paid one. It is exactly what the men expect. They really need to be disappointed-she can see them starting to tell themselves how sorry they are as they put their pants back on, how they will try to live better lives and buy their wives a new dress. Her good looks and superb figure are only minor advantages-generally the men are too rushed and furtive to notice.

She starts to drink regularly, usually a couple of tequilas at the end of a session to keep her head level. She stays more than six months, long enough to save thirty thousand dollars, then takes a bus to Washington. One of her friends from Bangkok has called her. Wan arrived in America soon after Chanya and found work in a Washington, D.C., hotel where the Game is very well controlled. There is a sauna and massage spa attached to the hotel where Chanya can work.

In Washington it takes Chanya a week to realize she has dropped into a whore’s paradise. The hotel where Wan works owns five stars, which means diplomats, high-rolling secretaries, heads of security, and others stay here. But before Chanya has time to apply for a job, her friend introduces her to a Thai diplomat named Thanee, a light-skinned man in his mid-forties with obvious Chinese genes who belongs to one of maybe a dozen very wealthy families who control Thailand. Chanya has heard of his family, who are often in the news in Bangkok. The patriarch, who is still just about alive, made a lot of money in the opium trade while it was still legal, or semilegal, but his eldest son showed true commercial genius by investing his share of the family fortune first in electronics, then in telecommunications. Thanee is a second grandson who showed no interest in business but demonstrated a flair for diplomacy. With his connections it was inevitable that sooner or later he would land a plum job in Washington. He is part of a permanent lobbying group looking after the interests of the Thai economy-well, the interests of Thai patricians, actually.

The negotiations are very short, and he and Chanya close the deal with hardly more than a smile. Wan finds an excuse to leave them alone after about five minutes. It is such a relief to speak her own language and to be with a man who understands where she is coming from, she almost loses her professionalism.

There is no hurry to get her to bed. He takes her to a Thai restaurant off Chinatown, where he urges her to choose her favorite dishes. He orders a bottle of white wine to go with the raw prawn salad, and a bottle of red for the duck. He makes her laugh with some Thai jokes, but at the same time his sophistication is pretty intimidating. He not only speaks English perfectly; he owns a kind of smoothness that seems to impress, even frighten, the waiters. He is a master of both cultures, something that leaves her almost speechless with admiration. Best of all, they understand each other perfectly: there will be no misplaced passion and no offers of marriage with this guy. They will proceed back to his apartment at a leisurely Thai pace, their private party will begin with her massaging him slowly with aromatic oil, little by little intimacy will develop, he will not force the issue but will wait for her to signal she is ready. She will stay the night, they will breakfast together, perhaps they will have sex one more time before he pays her generously. She will allow herself to fall in love with him in a very controlled way. They are as far apart within the Thai class system as it is possible to be, so neither of them is going to develop unreasonable expectations. On the other hand, both of them will greet each other with affection and a degree of relief at their next assignation. She will almost certainly become one of his mia noi or minor wives in Washington.

Which is exactly how it happens, except that she quickly becomes his favorite mia noi. Indeed, Wan tells her he dumped all the others the same week he met Chanya.

Thanee’s wife number one, Khun Toi, the matriarch herself, spends most of her time in Thailand with their two children and only rarely comes to Washington. Of course, she knows about Thanee’s various mia noi. She would have laughed out loud if anyone had told her he was faithful to her. She herself, having been educated in the West and being as liberated as any woman in her own Thai way, has a regular lover in Bangkok whom Thanee knows all about. It is not out of the question that Thanee will introduce her to Chanya on her next visit. Everyone would know the rules: Chanya would show great deference toward Khun Toi, and Khun Toi in return would develop an affection for Chanya.

Which is exactly how it happens. Khun Toi stays for ten days, she and Chanya get along marvelously and go shopping together. Khun Toi buys Chanya some fine new skirts and dresses with the best designer labels, Chanya carries all their bags to the waiting limo. At the end of the ten days Khun Toi tells her husband how it is to be: Chanya is far too beautiful and valuable to be left to the mercies of the local sex trade. Thanee is to pay her a stipend every month, enough to live and dress well and to accompany Thanee from time to time on those few social functions where Americans will not raise too many eyebrows. Chanya will be invited to Thanee’s Asian-only soirées. They will not live together, and Chanya will be discreet about coming and going from Thanee’s penthouse apartment. Thanee must give her a key so as to make her comings and goings smoother. For her part, Chanya will dedicate herself to Thanee and not take on any other clients. That will take care of the risk of disease, which has been worrying Khun Toi for quite a while. Not that she and Thanee have sex very often these days, but she doesn’t want him to get sick and die.

“Three quarters of my money would go back to my parents,” Thanee explains to Chanya in front of Khun Toi. Everyone laughs, Thai-style.

Chanya thinks maybe Khun Toi gets off on arranging her husband’s naughty fucks. I could smell her when she hugged me tonight. She’s making him screw her while I’m writing this. She’s going to make him tell her what Chanya’s like in bed, what he makes me do. Well, we do everything, honey.

At first Thanee is too canny to give Chanya more than the tiniest glimpse of his professional life, and such glimpses as she is allowed come out of small talk among her new lover and his Thai friends. But although she left school at the age of twelve and has never spent a minute thinking about geopolitics, Chanya catches on fast. She is astonished and even a little dismayed at the unofficial view of this Saharat Amerika she spent so much time and effort to reach. According to Thanee and his Chinese friends, the world’s only superpower and its biggest economy is also old, gridlocked, overtaxed, overgoverned, more overarmored than Tyrannosaurus rex, and too hidebound for any dramatic expansion. Modern China is a young country that began life in 1949. It has only just entered the great period of wild entrepreneurs and robber barons, enjoys just the right balance of corruption and law and order that allows the strongest and most ferocious of its businessmen to cut through the red tape, while lesser citizens are kept under control. It approximates to the golden age of the Rockefellers, Joseph Kennedy, and Al Capone. China is also very close to Thailand. When the present phase of road-building projects in Laos is completed, there will be direct land routes all the way from Beijing and Shanghai to Bangkok. This seems to excite Thanee and his closest associates, both the Chinese and the Thai. China is already dominating the economies of Southeast Asia. Within twenty years it will be the world’s largest economy and the most important country in the world for anyone living in Thailand. With two billion natural capitalists, its potential for expansion is incalculable.

Understanding the subliminal message, Chanya realizes with sadness that she is Thanee’s last Washington luxury. He sees that she has understood. Perhaps he has deliberately allowed her to overhear certain conversations-he’s certainly smart and devious enough for that.

Career moves take planning, though, and with Asians an awful lot of wining and dining. He is out most nights in his tuxedo. The occasions to which he is able to invite her are few, but he buys her three evening gowns just in case. She causes a sensation in her long gowns with her shining black hair plaited and pinned up and the gold necklace he bought her glittering against her brown skin, large single gold-set pearls in her ears. She sees that not a few Chinese and Thai men intend to inherit her after Thanee’s departure. And so they might have done, were it not for a curious move by Thanee himself.

Chanya thinks she will puzzle for the rest of her life about why exactly Thanee introduced her to the farang. For quite a while she will think of the tall, muscular, and rather unattractive man as just that: the farang, probably because since she took on Thanee, she has hardly met any white men at all. Why did Thanee invite her to lunch with the farang at 7 Duck on Massachusetts Avenue (wicker and pillows everywhere, the penne pasta with seafood would have been a lot better with more chiles), on exactly the day that he broke it to her that he had been posted to Beijing and would be leaving in two months? Sometimes she thinks it might have been a kind of malice, not toward her but toward the farang. Perhaps the subtle revenge of an Asian diplomat who has not failed to notice how even his smoothness, charm, intelligence, and perfect English still do not qualify him as an equal of the Americans who believe they run the world? If that is the case, then it is a stroke of malicious genius on Thanee’s part; anyone could have foreseen how hard the farang was likely to fall.

Mitch Turner cannot keep his eyes off her all through the lunch, to the extent that it becomes embarrassing and Thanee makes signs of irritation too subtle for Turner to notice. Chanya has to keep dropping her eyes so as not to lock with the farang’s. Sometimes she slips rather rudely into Thai, in the hope the American will be offended, but he seems not to notice. Those blue eyes simply burn into her skin. He cannot stop staring at her.

This is not entirely surprising. She has been in Washington for five months now and for most of that time she has been kept by Thanee, who is not a man to begrudge a woman when it comes to clothes and cosmetics. She is wearing a fawn Chanel business suit, and her creamy brown skin has benefited from endless visits to upmarket beauticians who also know how to emphasize the mystery in those Oriental eyes, but best of all, her natural poise convinces everyone that she is a young diplomat herself, the product of the best education money can buy. Surely no peasant girl who began her working life by minding water buffalo barefoot in the paddy could possibly know to sit like that? And to be so relaxed it is almost intimidating? That is the word Mitch Turner will use later, when they know each other better. That whole lunch he feels intimidated by her!

On this day at least she is saved by neo-Puritanism. Normally Turner permits himself only half an hour for lunch, and this one has gone on for seventy minutes. When he can take his eyes off her, he gets into a cryptic conversation with Thanee that she cannot follow. Now Turner must get back to the office.

Thanee and Chanya exchange signs of relief undetectable to non-Thais, order champagne as soon as he’s gone (of course Mitch Turner never drinks at lunchtime-and very little at other times), and slowly seduce each other for the thousandth time. When they eventually arrive at Thanee’s apartment, she automatically goes to the bathroom to change into a bathrobe to begin his massage. When she finds him on the sofa, also in a bathrobe, he gives her a box finished in crimson velvet. Inside is a heavy gold chain with a Buddha pendant. When she takes it out, she sees the chain is very chunky and not especially beautiful. It is twenty-three-karat gold and alone worth maybe five thousand dollars. The Buddha pendant is in gold and jade and worth double that. The chain does not really suit her, it is too hefty and ostentatious, but she knows that is not the point. This is Thanee’s Thai way of taking care of her. The gold is her insurance in the United States -or anywhere else, for that matter. If she ever gets herself in serious trouble, she can pawn or sell it. Thanee is saying goodbye, in other words. For the first time in her life, Chanya bursts into tears over a man. She recovers quickly, though; only a stubbornness around the jaw tells how hard she is fighting to control herself.

He comforts her and makes love to her in a way he has never done before. His tenderness says it all. He loves her too, more than she dared hope, but neither of them is so dumb as to suppose they can run off to a desert island somewhere. The rules of the Thai feudal pyramid are etched into both their hearts. He could not possibly take her to Beijing, that would be broadcasting their intimacy in a way that would damage his wife’s face, and in the East nothing is more important than face. This last party of pleasure is the best they can do, and they make the most of it. He forbids her to come to the airport when he leaves. She understands. The news of his assignment to Beijing has got out, and the press will be all over him. The airport will be no place for a mia noi.

We Thais do not set great store by the compulsive amplification of emotion through that distortion of the facial muscles so beloved in the West. When they say goodbye for the last time, it is in the parking lot of Thanee’s apartment building. His chauffeur, a Thai, will take her home. Both are dry-eyed and solemn at the last kiss. Both know they will never meet again.

At exactly the moment when Thanee’s plane takes off, Mitch Turner calls her in her apartment, where she is watching TV.

“Hello,” he says, his voice dry and unnaturally high. “I hope you don’t mind my calling. I guess you didn’t expect to hear from me, but, ah, I did hear over the grapevine that Thanee flew out just now, and I was afraid-ah-you might be feeling a bit down. Maybe you have a lot of other things to do, but if not, I wondered, could I buy you a drink or a bite to eat? I certainly would like that very much.”

“Get lost,” Chanya says, and hangs up. She goes back to watching The Simpsons, the quirky humor of which she has only recently begun to understand.

The farang is certainly stubborn. He does not actually stalk her, he knows better than that, but he carefully chooses moments to simply show up. Thanee told her Mitch Turner is CIA undercover, ostensibly another Washington staffer taking care of lobby groups and visiting dignitaries. She wonders if he might not be abusing his professional privileges, so uncanny are the occasions when they almost bump into each other. A Thai man in that state of towering lust (her word; she doubts Turner would have called it that) would certainly start to make threats sooner or later; Turner could easily check her passport and visa on the CIA database and threaten her with deportation if she didn’t give him what he wanted. She allows him points for doing no such thing. He behaves, in fact, like a gentleman in love. Quietly persistent, from sidewalks, carefully chosen tables in her favorite cafés, the odd telephone call: “Just checking you’re okay, no need to feel threatened. Want me to get lost?”

“No, it’s okay. I’m sorry I said that, it was a bad moment. Thanks for calling.”

“Sometime when you’re over him?”

“Maybe.”

She puts the telephone down with a wan smile. The romantic farang thinks she is moping over Thanee. Well, she is in a way, but there are many ways to mope. When you’ve been brought up by subsistence farmers, lovesickness can be something of a luxury, and Chanya has a problem. Thanee paid three months of her rent on her small apartment and has left her with ten thousand dollars on top of all the gold and expensive clothes. In addition, she still has the thirty thousand dollars she saved in Las Vegas. But when the rent and the money run out, she will be back to ground zero as far as making a fortune in Saharat Amerika is concerned. A week after Thanee leaves, she calls Wan to ask her if there are any places vacant at the sauna of the hotel where she works.

Wan fixes her up with an interview with the boss, a Hong Kong Chinese, who sees her potential instantly. Samson Yip makes sure she understands that this is the United States, not Asia, especially not Thailand: feds are everywhere. They are especially interested in Asian women who work in massage and sauna businesses. Some of the men who come for massages are FBI hoping to sting the joint. The slightest hint of soliciting for work on her part would be a disaster not only for her but for him, Samson Yip, too. Yip is short and fat and does not share her reluctance to sport huge quantities of gold. His own necklace is even chunkier than hers, and a lot uglier. As a Thai, she is familiar with the Chinese mind. He is ruthless and greedy but straight. He will not try to cheat her. In return, she better not try to cheat him if she wants to stay in America. Understood? Good, so this is how it is.

More than half the men who come for massages or to use the sauna baths are foreigners. Some are sophisticated Europeans, especially French and Italian, with whom a certain understanding is possible. Many are Asians, especially Japanese and Chinese, who generally know how to play the game. Samson Yip tells her she can use a certain very limited amount of discretion in such cases. Americans, on the other hand, are strictly off limits unless he personally gives her the go-ahead.

After a week he sees he’s been wasting his breath. Chanya is far too smart to make a false move. Yip tells her never to take a customer back to her apartment. He supplies a room in the hotel. The room changes from day to day, sometimes from hour to hour, so she will not draw too much attention. Of course, certain employees in the hotel know what is going on. Keeping them quiet is part of his overhead.

Within two weeks he has doubled her hourly rate. Within a month she is his star worker. It isn’t merely her good looks and physical charms; those three months with Thanee have polished her natural talents. Diplomats especially appreciate a certain subtlety in her approach, a new charm to her conversation. All the men like the way she makes them feel special. It is almost like not being with hired flesh, more like having found the woman of your dreams waiting for you in a sauna bath.

So when Mitch Turner shows up for a full-body massage, she gets the shock of her life. She’s been so careful, tried to make sure he is not following her when she comes and goes from the hotel. She has only a very limited understanding of the difference between FBI and CIA. She hasn’t heard from him or seen him for more than three weeks, so she assumed his passion was spent and his mind flipped on to some other obsession in the feckless way of American men. But here he is, with a white towel wrapped around his loins, lying on the massage couch, waiting for her.

She makes no sign of recognizing him, simply treats him like any other customer, except that she is especially careful not to do anything that might be misconstrued. Her massage technique has improved somewhat, although to tell the truth she has never exactly been of professional standards. In his case she carefully leaves out upper thighs and buttocks. She has to admit he owns a superb musculature, one that is obviously the product of many hours pumping iron. Neither of them says anything personal or gives any sign they know each other, until half an hour into the massage, when she tells him to turn onto his back and their eyes lock. She turns her face away to speak to the wall.

“Why are you here?”

“Because I’m obsessed with you.”

“I don’t want you to come here again.”

“How can I stop myself?”

“I’ll leave, go to another city.”

“I’ll find you.”

“I’ll go back to Thailand.”

“I’ll find you.”

“I’ll cut your dick off while you’re sleeping.”

“That’s the most Thai thing I’ve ever heard you say.”

She hadn’t considered he might be familiar with Southeast Asia.

When she’s finished with his massage and he’s left, Samson Yip calls for her to go see him in his office. He asks her about her last client. She tells him truthfully all she knows. Yip looks grim, in a state of shock almost.

“He knew everything. Every damned thing. Even the numbers of the rooms we use. He must be FBI or CIA. He’ll close me down if you don’t do what he wants. It’s up to you-you can run away, or you can see him. He claims he only wants to get to know you better, have dinner a few times, no sex, just give him a chance. He’s weird enough to actually mean what he says. What will you do?”

“Tell him I’ll have dinner with him once. That’s all. No sex. If he wants more, I’ll run away-or he can have me deported if he wants. Up to him.”

Yip nods, his big oval face of many chins concentrated in puzzlement. “Just tell me one thing. He seems like a good, clean-living American with a strong career-the kind of man women like you come to this country to marry. Why do you keep rejecting him?”

Chanya looks into Yip’s face and sees only money, greed, stupidity. “Because I’m a whore.”

Yip nods again. He isn’t so stupid after all. He is just testing to see how smart she is. “You’re right. An American like him could never forget or forgive. Once the first months of passion were over, he would torture you with it for the rest of your life.”

“Worse than that, he would torture himself.”

The Chinese grunts. He’s worked with whores all his life. The way they are able to read men at a glance still astonishes him from time to time.

Mitch Turner takes her to a Thai restaurant in Adams-Morgan, just off Columbia Road. She is impressed that he knows not to take her to an upmarket Thai place, where the chile is diluted and the food virtually tasteless. This one is budget to mid-range and frequented by Thais. The food, although not quite the standard of a Bangkok food stall, is not at all bad. One of the waiters happens to be a young Japanese, and for the duration of the evening she is convinced Mitch Turner brought her here to show off. When she gets to know him better, she will revise that view, but she is impressed. He looks so totally American, the kind that might boast he doesn’t own a passport, but his fluency and obvious familiarity with Japanese manners causes her to revise her estimation upward. What she likes most is his deference to the young waiter’s background, even to the point of bowing. Very few farang can call on such courtesy. She allows him one of her more generous smiles. He is as delighted as a schoolboy. There is no need to sleep with this man to have him in the palm of her hand-he is safely nestled there already.

He hardly drinks at all, which disappoints her a bit. Thanee taught her to enjoy a bottle of wine over dinner, and the tension in the air could certainly do with some help from alcohol. Unfortunately, he seems afraid of it. She settles for a single glass of red wine; Turner drinks mineral water.

Another surprise: he’s not bad at small talk. Not as good as Thanee, of course, who could talk amusingly about soap bubbles-there is a self-consciousness in the way Turner chats about Washington, this and that-but he’s not nearly as heavy as she feared. In return she confides how much she loves The Simpsons, in the enthusiastic tone of a recent convert. He smiles. Giving nothing of his profession away is clearly second nature to him, however. The meal is almost over before he comes to the point.

“I’m sorry I put the heat on Yip. I was desperate. Now you’ve done what I wanted, and you’re having dinner with me. I’m a man of my word-anyone who knows me will tell you that-so I won’t be bothering you again. If you say no next time I ask to see you, I’ll take that as final. Just do one little thing for me. Read this.” He hands over a book-sized package that she has already noticed. “It’s in Thai. If you don’t have a lot of time, just read the New Testament, especially the four gospels.”

She looks at the package in bewilderment.

When he drops her at her apartment building, he says: “I don’t want to sleep with you. Not till we’re married. I just want to see you from time to time.” A painful smile. “I want to court you. I’m very old-fashioned.”

She stares at him, holding the book in one hand, her Chanel handbag in the other. She admits that for a full minute she is seduced by the prospect of a simplified, safe, clean, scrupulously moral existence with a strong, honest, devout man who will never let her down, who will provide for her and their children and generally enable her to live happily ever after. Then she realizes she’s thinking about soap opera, not life. His timing has certainly added to the unreality. Is it part of American culture to virtually propose on the first date?

Her revised opinion is that this is a very dangerous relationship for one of them. As an illegal immigrant, she can only suppose the victim will be her. Nevertheless, she acknowledges that he has won this round. She will not refuse to see him again. But there is one thing he has to understand: “No way am I going to get close to you without sex. Whatever your God thinks about that, you better tell him: no courting a Thai girl without a lot of sex. Tons of it, till it’s coming out your ears.”

She ignores the pained expression on his face as she turns to walk to the lifts. She had decided not to turn again to look or wave at him, and he is quickly obscured by a concrete pillar. When she reaches the lift doors, she stops in her tracks. The voice of Homer Simpson calls out: “Chanya, say Chanya, I got tickets for the Springfield Isotopes game next Saturday, wanna come?” She turns quickly, even tries to search for him in the parking lot, but he is gone. She is gaping in wonder. That was not merely the mimickry of a gifted amateur, that was a perfect, professional-quality imitation, and more than a little eerie.

As she ascends to her apartment, she is thinking:

Chanya catches strange fish this time. Twenty minutes in bed with him, and Chanya will know everything. His face not so bad, but he’s ashamed of it. Wants to be pretty American boy. Something unreal, like movies. In Amerika everyone in the movies. Maybe he can’t get it up?

What a disaster that would be, to marry a man only to find out he’s useless between the sheets. But why has she decided to see him again at all? Financially she’s doing extremely well at the sauna, and she could hook any number of Asian men whom she knows in the diplomatic corps and who are constantly calling her, all of whom would understand her so much better than the farang. Karma is a weather system too complex to analyze.

Once in her apartment, she dumps the Bible on a table, still in its package, and forgets all about it.

So who is Mitch Turner? Chanya would have been surprised to know how many people have asked themselves this question. She realizes after the first supper that he has told her nothing personal about himself at all. Even the Thai translation of the Bible, which could seem a charming and intimate gesture by a pious man, was clearly a contrived event, something not quite what it seemed, as if the piety were all in the acting.

He waits a whole three weeks before asking her out again, this time to the Iron Hearth near Dupont Circle. No chiles here, it’s high-end romantic, with lamb chops in paper garters at finely laid tables around a blazing fire. Did he realize he was setting himself a trap? It is not the kind of restaurant where you can decently not drink wine. He makes a good, knowledgeable choice of a Napa red, which is fine by Chanya, but he hardly takes more than a couple of sips from his glass. Halfway through the meal the bottle is three-quarters empty, and Chanya puts down her glass to stare meaningfully at him. She has done almost all the drinking but is only slightly tipsy. Self-consciously he takes three or four sips, then puts his glass down. She continues to stare. He picks the glass up again to drink a little more. She doesn’t let him off the hook until he has drunk all of it. Apparently satisfied, she allows the waiter to empty the remains of the bottle into her glass.

“Isn’t she the most beautiful goddamned thing you ever saw in the whole of your life?” Mitch Turner, red faced, suddenly demands of the waiter, who shares an astonished glance with Chanya.

They skip dessert, and she has to fend off his advances in the cab all the way back to her apartment. His greedy, strong, needing, famished hands are everywhere. When she threatens to slap him, he giggles. “It’s coming out my ears, Marge,” he whispers in that perfect-and eerie-imitation of Homer.

Once in her flat, she takes him in hand whore-style: a shower together first, when she carefully washes his private parts in cold water, with no effect on his impressive erection. Softly humming to himself, he covers her breasts with liquid soap and tries to write his name in the bubbles. In bed he comes alive in a way she could never have predicted.

In fact, he’s amazing. Twenty-five minutes in, and he’s still pumping away and she is bucking and humping under him, sustained mostly by professional pride. To his very tender “Did you come, darling?” offered in a French accent, she is compelled, as a truthful Buddhist, breathlessly to admit: “Three times.”

“Me too.” He chuckles and goes on humping. By the fourth climax she is reconsidering the Christian Bible. Maybe there’s something in it after all?

Even after he’s finally finished and she’s taken him to the shower again and they are lying side by side, that single glass of wine is still working its magic. He lies there spilling his guts like a schoolboy. After his life story (he went to a strict religious school in Arkansas, Yale, studied in Japan), he starts into Washington gossip of the most virulent kind.

It seems that Mitch Turner was brought up by strict Southern Baptists, and his father was a senator. He has a sister to whom he is very close, and two brothers, both successful businessmen and near billionaires in the telecommunications industry. But it is his strange repertoire of accents and voices that holds her attention and astonishes her with the accuracy of the mimickry. His rendering of the large range of different characters that seem to inhabit his body is so precise, she has to cover her mouth from the sheer weirdness of his theater. When he leaves, she can only shake her head. A strange fish indeed.

In her diary Chanya admits to a certain irresistible callousness concerning Mitch Turner and alcohol. She will see it work over and over again, that most amazing metamorphosis. Turner is thirty-two and loses about half of those years every time he drinks. The mysterious process renders him useless for all social purposes, but in private he’s a big, hyperhorny sixteen-year-old with a dozen different identities and a lot of fun. From now on she always keeps a bottle of red wine at home. The ritual never fails. He enters guilt-laden, tense, serious, taciturn, heavily mysterious, hinting that he doesn’t know how much longer he can go on sinning with her. She gives him a glass of wine, and within minutes he’s peeled off the whole of his adult personality and turned into a big, groping, babbling baby. After sex he invariably unloads, psychologically. The problem, though, is that this unloading involves a number of increasingly contradictory stories. In some variants of his personal history, his beloved sister disappears and is replaced by a lovable but wayward brother whom Mitch is perpetually saving from ruin. Sometimes his mother is a Catholic from Chicago. Quite frequently his father is a wastrel who abandoned the family when Mitch was four years old. (Mitch got to where he is today by dint of brilliance and scholarships.) In yet other variations, his father was a diplomat who was stationed in Tokyo for years; hence Mitch’s fluency in Japanese.

Another woman might have seen danger signals, but experienced prostitutes are used to listening to men tie themselves in knots. She assumes he has a wife and family somewhere and does not credit Chanya with enough intelligence to detect the contradictions. Slightly amused at the extent to which his prejudice has led him to misjudge her, she admits she looks forward to his visits, to witnessing his dramatic personality change, the extraordinary sex, and best of all the funny, wild, infantile babbling-in-many-voices that in her humble opinion makes him a kind of genius. Let’s face it, she’s known one hell of a lot of men, and not a single one ever made her laugh like this. True, it’s the laughter of astonishment, of disbelief, but isn’t that what men in love are supposed to be able to do to a girl? She hasn’t had this kind of fun since she was in Thailand.

The detached Buddhist side of her also notes that his dependence on her is already a little scary. Twice he has admitted that he feels reborn. Or to be accurate, born for the first time. Now that he’s known fun, Thai-style, he can see just how totally fucked up his childhood was (his expletive). Or was this simply American bullshit?

She is fascinated by the extent to which he has underestimated her and likes to trick him into ever more glaring inconsistencies.

“Mitch, tell me the truth now. Was your father really a senator?”

“Dad? Sure, one of the finest on the Hill, a fine upstanding American, the kind you’d trust your fortune to, or your wife.”

She gazes at his glass. Recently she has subtly increased the dosage. She bought two balloon-sized wineglasses that can hold half a bottle each. She has poured maybe a quarter of the Napa red into his, and he has sipped maybe a third of that.

He grins. He knows she is waiting for him to drink some more and go through his metamorphosis. Slightly tipsy already, he sniggers a bit. She smiles. He takes a gulp. Of course, he is thinking about the sex they are about to enjoy-another marathon for sure-while she is waiting with her usual fascination for the personality change. A couple more sips, and here it comes. His face flushes, a new light comes into his eyes.

“So what was he like really?”

“A total shit, a twenty-four-karat asshole,” Homer Simpson says.

She has doubled up on the sofa. It’s the dramatic shift of consciousness, so total and so blatant, coming without warning or apology. To her it’s the most literal illustration of the truth of Buddhist doctrine, which explains that there is not one personality but a million modes of consciousness. Properly understood, an individual can choose any one of them at any time, although the enlightened choose none at all.

“An asshole?” She’s laughing so hard, she can hardly get the word out.

Her laughter-the laughter of a beautiful woman whose charms, to him, have grown to mythic proportions-is highly contagious. She can see this clearly enough. (Whatever else is fake, his obsession for her is authentic, or she really has lost her knack for reading men.) He joins her on the sofa, where she is still laughing from deep in her gut, an abandoned belly laugh. “You know, once he turned the TV off because it was showing two dogs fucking?” That really sets her off. She winds up on the floor helpless for a full five minutes. But is it true? What are they both laughing at, exactly-theater or reality? Perhaps the contradictions are deliberate after all, to see if she would play this game by his strange rules. For a moment she thinks she understands: this is a variant of a kind of sex play common in men who visit whores: her function is to enter into some long-suppressed world of childhood, which is the only place he feels alive. As if to confirm her suspicions, he begins an extraordinary and hilarious five minutes when he mimicks brilliantly every TV personality whom she names.

In the middle of the hilarity, he suddenly stops laughing. She has not seen this before, although it will recur with greater frequency from now on: a hole has suddenly opened up somewhere in his mind, he is swallowing nervously, and his face is racked with some complex emotion, whether guilt or resentment or plain old fear is hard to say, and he gives no explanation. Perhaps he is unaware of his own change of mood? She reaches to his glass on the coffee table and hands it to him. He drinks greedily, finishing the glass. Within seconds the hilarity is back. She steers clear of dangerous themes and lets him undress her. She makes a note never to ask about his parents again.

What exactly is his attraction for her, outside of the belly laughs and the sex marathons? Why does she put up with him when she could get the same money from a hundred other johns? Any whore would understand: this strange man has shared his complexity with her. In a career that has already spanned nearly ten years, all she has known of men is the oversimplified commercial transaction, a pasteurized, time-limited congress uniquely appropriate for the modern West if only they would change their hypocritical laws. The way she sees it, Mitch Turner is her real introduction to Saharat Amerika. Maybe it is love that brings a smile to her face when he stands in front of the mirror, admiring his triceps and worrying that he isn’t going to the gym often enough anymore. In a handsome man this vanity might be embarrassing, but in him it’s a form of charm. Like a woman, he is constantly working on improvements. For a long time he has been planning an epic tattoo on his back but cannot find the right body artist here in the States, where most tats are so lurid. Next time he goes to Japan, he’ll seek out the best. Japanese tattoos-horimonos-are a genuine form of art and can be quite exquisite. Maybe one day he will summon up the courage to spend a month in Japan to undergo a full-body horimono.

On her one and only visit to his apartment (his personal sense of security is extreme) she finds that it is exactly a reflection of him. At first glance everything seems to be under control, all items in their proper places, as if his ménage is permanently in a state of combat readiness; then she finds the gigantic terrarium full of big, hairy, and exotic spiders, and his bedroom walls covered with photographs of naked Oriental women elaborately tattooed. The porn doesn’t bother her half as much as the spiders. Is this a normal hobby for a grown farang?

One evening, when she is in a somewhat hostile mood toward men (a spot of trouble at the sauna bath, which drew a reprimand from Samson Yip), she breaks her own rule and confronts him with the most glaring of his contradictions so far:

“Mitch, just level with Chanya for a minute. Your father was a senator, or he left you all when you were young, or he died in a traffic pileup when you were twelve?”

There’s no doubting the speed of his mind: “It’s all true. The man I call my father, the senator, was actually my stepfather, who my mother married after Dad deserted. Dad did abandon us when we were all young, and he did die in a traffic pileup when I was twelve-but none of us had seen him for more than eight years by that time.”

“And your mom: a Baptist from Texas or a Catholic from Chicago?”

“Mom? Well, she was both. She was born a Catholic in Chicago, but when she married the senator she converted. That was the one stipulation he made-after all, he was giving her one big leg up the social ladder by marrying her.”

“And your beloved sister Alice?”

A cloud passes quickly over Turner’s face as he changes the subject. “Want to know about my childhood, really? It was hell, as simple as that. Hell as in the kind of deliberate, planned, petty-minded torture of a concentration camp. Why have you brought this up? You know it upsets me.”

“Okay, okay. Why you study Japanese?”

The question brings another furrow to his brow. He does not answer for quite some time. She thinks he is wrestling with another of his astonishing and very Western demons and waits in anticipation. Finally he says it: “An old World War II vet introduced me to Japanese pornography.” She gasps in astonishment. He explains.

Then as now the Japs were way in advance of the West in this important industry, and by the age of thirteen, thanks to the vet, Mitch Turner was already a connoisseur of the genre. He and his best buddy kept a virtual library of mail-order magazines from all over the world. It took Mitch and his pal a month of intense analytical research to confirm empirically that Japanese quality control won the day, in porn as in so many other industries. You could practically feel the quality of the girls’ flesh, almost hear the moans, just by looking at the magazines. When they got into video, the difference was even more obvious. With their very artistic tattoos, the highly inventive situations so far in advance of the women-in-school-uniform cliché of the Western model, the sheer variety of the S &M, you could see why the Jap economy was doing so well. Turner saw futon after futon occupied by naked and artfully tattooed young women, all the way from Fukuoka to Sapporo.

“So why you join the-ah-thing you joined, the Company?”

Mitch Turner suddenly grins: “They wanted spies who were fluent in Japanese. At the time there was concern the Japs were stealing American industrial secrets in a government-sponsored program. And I’m a genius at passing exams, so I got through the recruitment stuff no problem.” A condescending smile: “I have a photographic memory and an IQ of a hundred sixty-five-genius level.”

“So you can be anyone you want?” She is aware how provocative this question might be and deliberately locks eyes with him, in a kind of challenge. She watches his confusion carefully, until he seems to decide on a new direction. With a thoroughly convincing beam: “You know, I don’t think I could live without you, now that I’ve found you. You’re the only woman in the world who has ever understood me.”

But the alcohol is wearing off, Mitch Turner’s metamorphosis is going into reverse, and soon the guilt and the responsibility will claim him all over again. Chanya thinks there is time for one last innocent question: “So you screwed your brains out while you were in Japan?”

Too late, the chemical reaction has reversed itself, the impermeable Outer Layer is creeping over him like rust, protecting that bizarre inner core from further oxidation. “No, I didn’t.”

“Why not?”

A shrug in which there is more than a little contempt all of a sudden, even revulsion. “There are better things to do during your short time on earth, Chanya. I hope you’ll see that someday. I do wish you would read that Bible I gave you. How much do I owe you for today’s massage?”

She has grown used to it. At the end of every session, even when they have spent the night together, he will suddenly pretend that he hired her for a simple no-sex massage and insist on paying her whatever she asks. She has learned to play up.

“For the massage? Five hundred dollars.” When he has paid up in crisp new bills, which he must get from the bank every time especially for her, she says: “When will I see you again?”

A somber shake of the head. “I don’t know. I’m not sure we should continue with this. It’s wrong. It’s not good for either of us, and I really do need to think about my responsibility to you, about what I’m doing to your soul. I don’t think we’ll be seeing each other again for a while.”

She agrees, making the appropriate expression of regretful acceptance. She knows he’ll call again in a day or so, but does he? How lost between two minds is he?

This is a question she will not be able to answer until it is way too late. She is all alone in a big rough country, after all, and as tough as she is, there are times when a big lonely hole opens in her mind, too. Once, not thinking, she rang him at his office to tell him about that episode from The Simpsons when Marge got breast implants. She had his number because he’d made a point of giving her his business card when he was drunk. (“I want you to call me every hour on the hour, I want to hear your voice, I want to talk dirty with you for hours and hours”: of course she knew better than to use it when he was at work and sober.) Now, suddenly cognizant of what she has done, she holds her breath, not sure how he’ll react. Maybe she’s gone too far and he’ll break it off for real this time? A long pause, then: “Marge didn’t mean to get implants-it was a screwup at the hospital.” A pause. “I’ll take you to lunch. Where do you want to go?”

“Jake’s Chili Bowl?”

“That’s black, not a good idea.”

“Oh yeah, that’s right.”

“Tell you what. Dress up for business, and I’ll take you to Hawk and Dove, up on the Hill. I’ll tell everyone you’re part of the Thai ecology delegation. They’re here for two weeks to try to stop Americans from buying up huge chunks of their nature reserves. Ad lib if anyone comes up to talk to us.”

Chanya has not had a chance to be a real human being since Thanee left. She doesn’t realize how much she’s missed playing the exotic Oriental trade delegate until Turner mentions Hawk and Dove, which Thanee took her to twice. The Thai diplomat bought her a black business suit of American cut (pants, not skirt), which she now wears for Mitch Turner, along with the big chunky gold necklace with Buddha pendant that she has never worn outside her apartment. With her hair pinned up and her mascara cunningly applied in the way taught in the beauty salons, black high heels and a serious expression on her face (Thanee once taught her how to do American Grim, advising that it was the best facial expression for getting things done in the United States), the combination of severe trouser suit with extravagant Oriental gold makes her look not so much part of a lobbying group as a member of the Thai aristocracy.

Context is the most magical of powers. In Hawk and Dove, sitting on a stool next to the very serious Mitch Turner, who never does anything but Grim while on duty, it is clear that staffers who serve the needs of members of Congress assume she is a foreign dignitary of enormous importance and treat her with a respect she didn’t know her soul craved. She decides she loves Hawk and Dove and will extract frequent visits there from Turner as a price he has to pay for the deepening of intimacy, even though at this very minute he is experiencing something of a crisis, not believing he’s had the reckless balls to take her there at all. Surely there are customers of hers among the clientele?

She looks around with a studious expression on her face. Nope, no man whose cock she’s serviced, as far as she can remember. Mitch Turner’s flesh turns gray, and he orders a bottle of wine.

In her diary Chanya tells us no more about this lunch, or by what process they wound up back at her apartment, where they proceeded with the usual ritual. The lunch has had an effect on him, though, that neither anticipated. In bed afterward Turner, still high from his medicine, reflects on the wisdom of introducing her to his parents. She does not ask which set of possibly fictional mothers and fathers he has in mind. Obviously, they are playing a variation of the usual game. The mood is light and careless, and Chanya is caught unawares.

“Not a good idea, Mitch. I’m Thai. Thai women have reputation, you know.”

Pensively: “But you did so well at lunch today. I could always tell them that you’re here on some kind of trade delegation. They won’t know the difference. You’ll have to meet them sooner or later.”

“No, I won’t.”

Watching that hole open up in his mind is more than a little scary. Surely only children experience such lightning mood swings? His face is contorted with fury, quite suddenly, without warning. But what world are they in, exactly? Which parents are they talking about? The senator and the sister disappeared from view weeks ago; in the most recent version he was brought up by an eccentric aunt.

“You’re saying you’re not going to marry me?”

The incredulity in his voice says it all: What, a third-world whore passing up the chance of a lifetime?

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“I want to talk about it. Chanya, I’m sorry to have to say this, but I can’t go on any longer, I really can’t. I don’t think you realize how much I’m compromising here. You haven’t even read anything of that Bible I gave you.”

To shut him up: “Okay, I’ll read the Bible, then we’ll talk.”

She has no idea why her reading the Bible should be a precondition for discussing marriage-after all, he has not shown the slightest interest in Buddhism-but she wants at all costs to do something about his sudden black mood. This is the first time she really admits to herself that alcohol may not have a totally benign effect on this farang.

When he leaves, she makes an effort and reads the four gospels in the Thai translation, then goes to the beginning and reads Genesis before losing concentration. She can truthfully say she has never heard such infantile mumbo jumbo in her entire life. Christianity, it seems, is a miracle religion, with the blind being restored to sight, lame people suddenly walking, the dead raised, and to top it all that enigmatic fellow who talked in riddles managing to resurrect himself and walk around with the holes from the crucifixion still in his body. And what about the God himself, who happens to be male of course, who started it all? What a jerk to plant those two trees in paradise and then tell Adam and Eve not to eat their fruit. In her mind the whole book is a kind of extension of Mitch Turner’s fantasy world. The Simpsons is more compelling.

Fed up with being the recipient of condescension, she gives him her view of the Christian Bible straight, without pulling any punches, and waits for the reaction. Strange expressions pass across his face; his forehead is alive with furrows; then: “Actually, you’re probably right, Christianity is total bullshit. See, I’m going into politics one day, and in this country you need a church to get anywhere in public service. You’ve shown me I have a ways to go. I should thank you for that.”

Frowning, she asks a question that would never have occurred to her prior to exposure to Washington. “You’re going to run for president one day?”

Mitch’s face turns grave, as if she has hit a personal truth too deep for discussion. He makes a tolerant smile but does not reply.

Chanya is not amused this time. This man is simply a tangle of tricks, a lightning-fast but disembodied mind spitting out explanations that change from moment to moment. Maybe politics is the one profession where he really will excel?

Chanya’s diary shows that their relationship began to deteriorate from that moment on. She sees that alcohol is having a negative effect, indeed he begins to be an increasingly nasty drunk, and she stops giving him wine. He, on the other hand, has started drinking at home for the first time in his life (he claims). She seems wearied by the continual conflict and does not trouble to record their arguments except one in which Mitch Turner takes the side of feminism.

Chanya: “So here all the women are men. You have only men in this country. Half have pussies, the other half have dicks, but you are all men. Women walk like men, talk like men, call each other assholes and cunts just like men. In other words, two hundred and eighty million people are looking for something soft to fuck.” She flashes him her most brilliant smile. “No wonder I make so much money.”

He flinches, searching for a way to guide the conversation. (She thinks it is his future political personality he’s airing here.) Quietly and sincerely: “Women gained their independence. Maybe they exaggerate a bit, but the way they see it, they were dominated by men, almost to the point of being slaves.”

“So now they’re slaves of your system. The system doesn’t love them or treat them well, it only fucks them. They have to slave all day in offices, work work work to make somebody rich. After work they’re exhausted, but they go off looking for men. How is that an improvement?”

“But you prostitute yourself for men. So you’re a slave to money.”

“When you say money, you give it farang meaning. When I say it, I give it Thai meaning.”

“What’s the Thai meaning?”

“Freedom. I turn trick lasts maybe an hour, two hours, if I want I can live on the money for the rest of the week. I’m not dominated by man, and I’m not dominated by system. I’m free.”

“You’re still prostituting yourself. You’re still working.”

“Ah, you see you contradict yourself. I’m working just the same as other women, you just said it.”

“But you sell your body. How’s that being a good Buddhist?”

“You don’t understand. I only prostitute part of the body that isn’t important, and nobody suffers except my karma a little bit. I don’t do big harm. You prostitute your mind. Mind is seat of Buddha.” Shaking her finger at him: “What you do is very very bad. You should not use your mind in that way.”

“What way? I use my brain for my work. That’s not prostitution.”

“Thanee told me many times Washington professionals like you don’t agree with the president, the way he’s doing things. He’s very dangerous, could have whole world hating America. You told me he has to divide the world into good and evil because he can only count up to two. But you work for him, let him use your brains for schemes that will bring trouble on whole world. That’s prostitution. Could be very very bad karma for you. Maybe you come back as cockroach.”

Mitch Turner bursts out laughing. He seems to admire the wacky ingenuity of her argument.

Chanya in a fix, don’t know what to do about this guy.

She thinks that probably the affair would have continued to deteriorate in the way of such affairs, they would have gone their separate paths, perhaps she would have had to leave Washington, perhaps she would have gone back to Thailand after a few more months, for she had really done exceptionally well and already had enough money to retire on. But the date of this last conversation was September 10, 2001.

Curiously, it is on this very day that Chanya, feeling depressed and exhausted from their argument, records one of those revelations that come to everyone who spends a long time in a foreign country. On the corner of Pennsylvania and Ninth she is overcome by nostalgia for her homeland. She is experiencing a revolution in attitude.

From the start something very specific has impressed her about Americans, even the humblest: it is the way they walk. Even bag people walk with purpose and energy and with total certainty about the direction they want to go in, which is a lot different to the way Thais walk in Bangkok or Surin, where the need for purpose and direction has not much penetrated the collective mind. Now she has seen quite a lot of the country, and in the process a germ of awareness has slowly grown.

They don’t know where they’re going, they just know how to look as if they do. They walk like that because they’re scared. Some demon is whipping them from inside. Chanya will never walk like that.

For a moment she feels she understands everything about Saharat Amerika; it coincides with a decision to go home to Thailand sooner rather than later. She doesn’t want to marry a frightened man who has perfected the art of going nowhere with such zeal and determination. To admit that you are lost seems closer to enlightenment and a lot more honest. More adult, even.

Mitch Turner calls her around three p.m. the next day, when the whole country is in turmoil. He is playing the impeccable, responsible professional, which is the character he uses for work.

“You’ll have to get out.” He knows, of course, that she is an illegal immigrant, has checked her out on the CIA database, perhaps even checked with his contacts in Thailand. “I don’t know where in hell this is going to lead, but you can bet everyone with a foreign passport from anywhere east of Berlin is going to come under scrutiny. They’re already talking of arrest without trial. You could get caught up in something that could take away years of your life.”

She doesn’t need to be told twice. As soon as the airlines are working again, she gets on a plane. She is back in her home village near Surin on the Cambodian border by the twenty-second of that month. The first luxury item she buys is a Sony flat-screen TV, on which the images of 747s crashing into the twin towers are replayed over and over again, no matter the channel.

That’s the end of Chanya’s diary, farang.