The Fear Artist

10

For five endless days, Rafferty sees the world through the wet windows of a succession of heavily air-conditioned Toyota Corollas, saying good-bye to each weary doctor-nurse team as they clamber out after an eight-hour shift and hello to the bright, fresh ones getting in. Dr. Ratt once told him that the doctors who drive his cars have all had what he described as “a little trouble” in their careers, or else they’d be working in some nice clean hospital that doesn’t go anywhere instead of driving around Bangkok all day. If they get fired from this job, they’ll be pulling the graveyard shift in some twenty-four-hour VD clinic. And they’ve apparently been told that any loose lips about having Rafferty in the car will get them fired. There’s a conspicuous lack of curiosity.

He gets up before it’s light outside and spreads Mrs. Shin’s dark gel over his face and ears and the back of his neck. Last, he does the backs of his hands. He learns accidentally that if the tiny cake of soap supplied by his fifth-rate hotels sits in a little water overnight, it produces a gelatinous mass that he can spread on his comb. Applied to damp hair, it makes it even darker and holds it in place for hours. Dark-skinned, black-haired, center-parted, he walks the four or five blocks to the pickup point and gets into the first of the day’s cars. He’s passed from one team to another until the shift that ends at midnight drops him a few blocks away from the designated depressive fleabag of the evening. The routine has a deadening sameness to it, but still each day has some event to distinguish it.

On day one, Arthit redefines good fortune.

“You’re in luck,” Arthit says on Anand’s cell phone. “The only decent picture they have is the one from your book.”

“Looking for Trouble in Thailand?”

“That’s the one.”

“Why am I in luck? That’s a pretty good picture.”

“Every copy in Bangkok is apparently a bootleg from a photocopy. The contrast is so high that you could be anybody.”

“They’re not using the picture of me with Campbell, or whatever his name is, the one from the video? I guess they still don’t want anyone to see his face.”

“You’re in three-quarters in the video,” Arthit says. “Authority figures like full-face.”

“And I’m not officially a suspect?”

“Not officially, no. But it’s kind of hard not to connect the dots. The bullets the coroner pulled out of Mr. Campbell were supposedly fired by your gun, and the police want to talk to you. It doesn’t sound like they want to name you Farang of the Year.”

“What do they think they’ll get out of this? Why would they take my gun and fire a couple of shots into a dead man?”

“I can think of two things,” Arthit says. “First, they’ve got you hog-tied if they catch you and demand to know what the dead man said. Tell the truth, the line will be, and they’ll make it all go away. Stonewall and you’re in prison for the rest of your life, which probably actually means dead, since they won’t want you talking to anyone else. So that’s one thing: to force you to level with them.”

“I did level with them.”

“Yeah, well. Then there’s the other reason. The country had problems, both political and religious, even before the flooding started. It’s possible the government won’t be allowed to serve its full term. It could get yanked if Bangkok floods badly, although this group had nothing to do with decades of bad or nonexistent flood planning. But even if we don’t get wet, there’s the situation in the south. We’ve got disorganized jihad going on down there, or maybe it’s organized jihad and we’re just clueless about it. And now a foreigner has been murdered, on the fringes of a demonstration over the violence down there. For the image of the country, not to mention the need to protect their own asses, Shen’s guys need to solve that crime, even if one of them committed it himself. You’re one way to solve it, and a way with no political or religious implications, since you’re farang.”

“Yup,” Rafferty says. “I guess you could say I’m in luck.” It’s not time yet for him to meet the car, so he’s gazing through the window of his hotel room, which looks onto a narrow, filthy alley much favored by rats. Sure enough, he sees a big one strolling right down the middle, ignoring the rain, as though it were in his own driveway. Poke envies it. “What would you do in my position?”

Arthit sighs into the mouthpiece. “I’ve been thinking about that for days. I have nothing that might make a real difference, and my instinct is that you shouldn’t do anything at all until we’ve got a better idea. Do your rabbit thing. Keep still and stay out of their line of vision.”

“So if you were me, you wouldn’t go in and try to explain. You know, confront the problem head-on and all that.”

“No,” Arthit says. “If I could get my list of alternative courses of action up to ninety or a hundred, that would still be the one on the bottom.”

After this conversation Arthit stops calling for a few days, which is fine with Rafferty; he’s already as depressed as he can be without losing his ability to think straight.

On day two, waiting in the backseat while the doctor and nurse are tending to someone inside a fancy condominium, he calls Rose’s new phone with his own new phone, just to hear the voice of someone who cares about him.

He says, “I’m lonely.”

“I could send you Miaow. There are worse things than being lonely. What’s going on down there?”

“I’m being nowhere. Riding around in cars all day and sleeping in boom-boom hotels at night. You’d like my new hairstyle.”

“We’re sleeping on folded clothes, half an inch thick. Oh, forget it, I’m sorry. I have no business whining to you about anything. Even Miaow’s worried, during the brief moments when she’s not feeling personally inconvenienced by the weather.”

“Well, worry about me,” he says. “Someone should.”

“I do. And I love you. We’re taking care of ourselves, we’re fine. Forget about us. You just go be nowhere and work your way out of this. Whoops, I have to hang up-it’s my turn for the shower.” She hangs up.

Rafferty says, “You’re the only person in Thailand who wants to get wet,” but he’s talking to dead air. He puts the phone down and sees a streak of light skin on the back of his hands. He’s got to be on guard against sweating or brushing his hands against things. He rubs at the hand until the streak is smoothed out, then leans across the front seat and tilts the rearview mirror until he can see himself. He looks okay except for the end of his nose, which is a little pinkish. With the tips of two fingers, he tries to cover the pink spot, but the gel doesn’t want to spread, so he licks his fingertips. The moisture does the job. He does the best he can to check his ears and the back of his neck, but it isn’t much.

Makeup, he discovers, is more complicated than men think it is.

On day three he realizes that Bangkok is a city of fathers and daughters. He sees them everywhere, at all ages and in all sizes: fathers with infants they hold as though they’ve just been handed a soap bubble; fathers with toddlers, their hand clamped inside their father’s hand as they claim the sidewalk, step by step; fathers with preteens, following obediently three steps behind their daughters in case school friends should happen to see them; fathers with the grim, desperate pride of someone who’s sired a beauty and, unfortunately for his peace of mind, remembers what he was like when he was a boy.

He wonders for a moment how the men would look if he could see them through their daughters’ eyes, then immediately banishes the notion. He gets glimpses of himself, occasionally, reflected in Miaow’s eyes, and what he thinks he sees is the ruin of a statue placed on a pedestal that was too high for it, just chunks of anatomical rubble on a stone platform with recognizable bits and pieces-an eye, a smile, a strong arm-capable of provoking mild affection and somewhat more intense irritation.

And he asks himself, looking at the fathers, how anyone has the courage to embark on that voyage. To accept a child, not knowing the first thing about how much she can be shaped and how much of her character is set in genetic stone, to make the breathtaking assumption that you will always know what’s best for her and are competent to guide her toward it.

Sheer hubris.

Miaow came to him and Rose preshaped by her years on the sidewalk, and in some ways that was probably an advantage. She had learned, within limits, what was necessary to her and what was superfluous, what she would put up with and what she wouldn’t. He hadn’t known then-he didn’t know now, for that matter-whether she’d been abused sexually during those five or six wild-child years. But then, he thinks, every infant comes into the world trailing an infinite cloud of mystery behind it: where she came from, where she’s going, who she really is, what she can do, what she can learn, whether she’ll bring joy or heartbreak, whether there is darkness at her core. What landslide of karma has rolled her into this life.

Miaow is twelve or thirteen now. When they took her in, she was seven or eight. In those five years, he’s tried every parenting approach he can, with little success, he thinks, before abandoning all of them in favor of two governing principles. First, to do no harm. Second, to place no limit on the amount of love he is willing to give. The ideas made sense when they came to him, but in the past year he’s begun to wonder whether there’s a third principle-the most important principle-he hasn’t thought of. Or maybe Rose was right when she said if he wanted something that wouldn’t change, he should have bought a table.

“Do you have children?” he asks the doctor behind the wheel and the nurse in the passenger seat.

The doctor grunts a negative, but the nurse says, “Four.”

“How old?”

“The oldest is twenty-seven. The youngest is nineteen.”

“Did you have principles? About how to raise them, I mean?”

“Yes. Keep them from killing themselves and don’t try to turn them into me.”

Rafferty says, “Those are good.”

The doctor says, “My mother told me before she died that the biggest problem she had with my sisters and me was figuring out whether we had a compass. Two of us always knew what we wanted, my youngest sister and I. The middle kid was a rainbow, different every day.”

“What did your mother do?”

“She gave up. She said it was the most valuable lesson she ever learned, giving up. Our middle sister is the happiest of us all.”

“I guess in the end,” Rafferty says, “happiness is the only thing that matters.”

The nurse says, “That and making sure they live through their teens.”

On day four, two things happen. First, he allows himself to admit how much he hates fast food. When the on-duty doctor and nurse take a meal break, they usually choose an American chain because that’s the fastest, and he winds up with something to go, which he eats out of a bag, sitting on the backseat. His clothes stink of fried food. He’s gaining weight. His knees and hips hurt from being seated for so long. He’s perpetually damp.

He hates all of it. He will never eat another cheeseburger.

Second, he learns he can handle the sidewalk. At 4:00 P.M., in the open-air market mecca of Pratunam, Dr. Ratt pulls the car into a nearby soi and Rafferty ventures out into the crowds for a jittery experimental jaunt. The clouds have parted to allow the sun to drop by for a few hours, and it’s remarkably bright, as though it’s putting out extra effort to make up for a long absence. What’s more, it seems brightest wherever he is. He has the sensation that a spotlight is trained on him, tracking him wherever he goes, as if he were the lead actor in a musical. He doesn’t want to hold anyone’s gaze for a beat too long, but he doesn’t want to release it and miss the spark of recognition either. One girl of eighteen or nineteen locks her eyes on his as his heart rate skyrockets, but then she breaks into a wide Thai smile, lowering her head as she passes, leaving him gasping in her wake. He’s powerless not to turn and make sure he’s all right, and when he does, he catches her looking back at him. She sticks out her lower lip in a pout, shrugs, and goes on her way.

He spends more than an hour being a pedestrian without any alarms going off. He draws an occasional glance because of his height, but the Thais are growing taller at an extraordinary rate. As far as he can tell, no one finds him suspicious or familiar-looking or even interesting. He experiments with retracting his aura as he walks, just keeping his gaze on the middle distance and reeling in his energy. It occurs to him that this is a skill that Janos, the indescribable man at the no-name Bar, has mastered.

When he goes back to the soi, the car is gone. They’re undoubtedly answering a radio call. He kneels beside a parked car long enough to check the makeup, which looks passable, then he heads for a real test. Moving with the crowd, he tries his hand with a couple of the vendors under the tarps, still bellied down beneath the weight of collected rain. Hoping that in the press of shoppers no one will actually pay attention to him, he buys a medium-size shoulder bag in artificial leather that’s so artificial it’s hard to tell what it’s pretending to be. Into it, over the course of stops at several booths, he packs four T-shirts, two long-sleeved shirts, one pair of wash-and-wear slacks to alternate with his jeans, six pairs of socks, a travel bottle of liquid laundry detergent, and a small selection of essential toiletries, including some hair oil. He also buys a big pair of sunglasses, wondering why he hadn’t thought of them earlier.

Finally he chooses a woman’s compact, which is the nearest he can come to a pocket mirror. The vendor who sells it to him gives him an idle glance and says to him, in Thai, that she hopes his girlfriend will like it.

After a moment of panic, he answers her in English, with a sort of comic-hall Indian accent that used to make Miaow laugh. She nods and turns to the next customer. To test his new voice, he buys a decent cake of soap and two more disposable razors and strikes up a conversation, sounding to himself like a Taj Mahal tour guide. But the man in the booth answers pleasantly enough. Rafferty is apparently plausible as a sort of pan-Southeast Asian/Indian hybrid. It’s not going to hold up for a second if the police stop him, but that’s not what it’s for; it’s to keep the curious eye from pausing on him long enough for next steps to be taken.

On day five he makes his decision.

Dr. Ratt himself is at the wheel, with his wife and nurse, Nui, sitting regally beside him in one of her many custom-made silk uniforms. At Rafferty’s request, Dr. Ratt drives him down the street where it all began, cruising past the splash of color as Poke tries to visualize where the crowd came from, where Campbell, if that’s really the dead man’s name, might have joined it, and why he might have been in that neighborhood.

How an American ex-soldier got caught up in a riot over the problems in the south. A bunch of farmers and villagers and people trying to run businesses, banding together and coming up to the capital as a group to protest the lack of effective action by the government as Buddhists continue to be shot, bombed, run over, and beheaded on an almost-weekly basis.

As though she’s reading his thoughts, Nui, without turning her head, says, “How long can you keep this up?”

“As long as I have to, or as long as it takes them to figure it out.”

Nui wiggles a little, seeking the next degree of comfort on her infinite scale, but doesn’t honor his remark with a response. Her conversation is peppered with silences, usually indicating disapproval.

“To figure what out?” Dr. Ratt says, probably mostly to be polite.

“Either that they actually don’t want to talk to me because the problem has gone away or that I’m the one behind this stupid disguise and they catch me.”

“It seems to me,” Nui says, “that you’re taking a very passive course of action.”

“That’s occurred to me, too. But it feels like I’m up against the night, you know what I mean? This thing is so unfocused, its edges are so blurred, that I feel like I’m one person who’s been ordered to keep it from getting dark.”

“Or this rain,” Dr. Ratt says. “Same thing. Nowhere to get hold of it.”

“Really,” Nui says.

They drive in silence for a moment, and then Dr. Ratt says, “When she says ‘Really’-”

“I know,” Rafferty says.

“It’s not big and unfocused at all,” Nui says, “even if you think you’re up against the whole War on Terror. Actually, the entire thing comes down to three people, doesn’t it? Whatever is going on, it’s being pointed at you by three people.”

“I suppose it is.”

“This Thai secret policeman with the Hollywood uniform, the little redheaded farang, and that man from the American Secret Service.”

“I don’t think he’s really involved.”

“He was in that room, looking at you,” Dr. Ratt says.

“A while ago he wrote some reports that named me,” Rafferty says. “When he broke the North Korean counterfeit-money ring. My name is linked to his in some government computer. When Shen’s people ran my name through the database after Campbell, or whatever his name is, got killed, Elson’s came up, too. My guess is he was drafted into that observation room.”

“Maybe he’s where you begin,” Nui says.

“Maybe he is,” Rafferty says. “And maybe there’s something to being passive for a while. At least until I can see three or four moves ahead. That’s the rabbit strategy.”

“Rabbits,” Nui says, “usually get-”

Rafferty says, “Everybody tells me that.”

Nui says, “You need to choose one of them and figure out how to make a move.”

“Which one?”

This time she does turn around. “The most dangerous one,” she says.