51
Waiting is difficult only for those beset by the delusion of time. Dope helps, of course. Weeks have passed, Jones has called me three times from the States, each time on a Sunday. The loneliness of farangs is a wasting disease for which, the FBI will sooner or later realize, Thailand may be the only cure. The sensation of somehow following in the footsteps of my mother is deeply disturbing to me, but I don’t let it get me down. After all, there is plenty to do. Nong’s bar has already opened unofficially and is doing astonishingly well. There are accounts to check, board meetings to attend, provisions to order. Then the call comes.
Dr. Surichai is taut and formal over the telephone, using neither his bedside manner nor his fashionably sleazy tone. I think this is the voice he uses in directors’ meetings at the hospital, when the nitty-gritty of balance sheets is being discussed. He says very little, indeed I have the feeling he would rather not be making the call at all. At the request of his patient he is inviting me to his home on Soi 30 Sukhumvit, very close to the Emporium shopping mall.
It is a mansion rather than a house, with an electric gate and uniformed security. In addition to the doctor’s own guards, a half dozen well-dressed Chinese men stand around looking sullen and alert. One of them barks out something in what I think is the Chiu Chow dialect when I arrive, no doubt telling the others not to reach for the bulges under their jackets. A maidservant lets me into the house and shows me into a large salon where I sit on a sofa and wait. Surichai emerges from a corridor in a sleeveless canary-yellow cardigan and slacks, with a slight frown on his face, holding a single sheet of paper on which a statement is written in Thai script, with an elegant signature in Western script at the end. I study it carefully, hand it back to him with a nod, not entirely surprised. It seems the contending parties have reached one of those Oriental solutions which would be unthinkable in the option-starved West.
“I was asked to take him in as a patient in my home. Obviously, he doesn’t want to be anywhere public. I’ve had to bring a lot of equipment from the hospital. Now, for some reason he wants to see you. This sort of thing can cause enormous and radical personality changes. He’s decided you might be the only person in the world who understands him. Has he been a close friend of yours?”
Surichai’s brisk manner has irritated me and I don’t bother to answer his question. “He did a deal with Fatima?”
“His friends did. These Chiu Chow who have invaded my house. You’ve no idea how medieval the Chinese mind can be. They’re not modern people at all. The way they see it, the solution to the kind of sex problem their friend Warren has is very simple, even if the cure is somewhat radical and—dare I say—Forbidden City–ish. Fatima put them in a fix. If they let her kill him, it would look bad for them, even suggest they didn’t have the power to protect their man. If they protected him, she would destroy him anyway by broadcasting that tape over the Net, and perhaps setting her Khmer loose. This was a compromise even Warren agreed to, as witnessed by his signature on that bit of paper. Of course, it was that or die. Fatima consented after he’d put more than half his fortune in her name. She must be the richest woman in Thailand. Maybe the wealthiest transsexual in the world. You better come through. I operated yesterday. He’s still very weak, but as I say the main thing is the total personality change. Mentally I’m afraid he’s very unstable. You’ll see.” A pause. “He went into shock immediately after I operated. I had to pump him full of tranquilizers or he would have died. Even then his vital functions were suspended for a couple of minutes.” He examines my face for a moment, checking me for some kind of understanding, but I have no idea what he is hinting at.
Down a corridor surprisingly wide for a private house, on the walls of which I’m impressed to see original oil paintings of nineteenth-century Krung Thep. We take a left turn into what must be a late addition to the building and enter a solarium built of steel and glass, the views of the garden mostly obscured by wall-to-wall curtains. The head on the pillow is almost unrecognizable; not that the features have changed but because the personality inhabiting this body bears almost no resemblance to that of the former tenant. As a student of the Path this transformation is fascinating to me: the new resident has inherited a body and collection of memory cells with which it is unfamiliar, and of which it must try to make sense. A weaker spirit would have had a nervous breakdown, but this one has simply chosen to go haywire.
He motions weakly with his hand for me to sit down on a chair near the bed. “Welcome, my dear friend,” he says in Thai. I’m startled almost out of my skin: that was Pichai’s voice. The face smiles. In English: “It’s okay, I’m still in the twilight zone. Your friend says hello. He’s very talented you know. Isn’t reality wonderful?”
All of a sudden he bursts into tears. “Here lies a fool who tried to f*ck the East—d’you know who said that, Detective?”
“No.”
“Kipling—the poet of that other Anglo-Saxon empire. God save us from our blindness.” Weeping. “God save us.” He stretches out a hand to hold mine. “Look, look at my life.” A sweeping gesture. I had not yet taken in the treasures which have been sensitively placed around the room. There is the horse and rider, on an alabaster plinth. There are some priceless pieces from the Warren Collection, including jade jewelry from the Forbidden City. Indeed, jade is everywhere in its incomparable luminescence. Warren—if I may still call him that—presses a switch by his right hand and an electric motor starts to hum. With majestic slowness the curtains open, revealing a stunning garden bursting with hibiscus and bougainvillea, rhododendron, a magnificent bodhi tree with aerial roots and a wooden seat around the bowl, flower beds exploding with color.
“See”—I jump, for it is Pichai again speaking in Thai, using Warren’s vocal cords—“this is his soul: life is all on the outside, on the other side of the glass. Inside there is only stone. This is your farang for you.”
“He cut mine off, so I did the same to him.” It is Fatima’s voice now, hissing through his mouth. My blood runs cold and a horrible tingling passes up and down my spine, but the figure on the bed seems oblivious to his other visitors.
“Know the very last lesson a farang learns who tries to trick the East?” he says in Warren’s American voice. “That he’s been f*cked from the start. From the start. The key is not to tell him until it’s too late.” Gripping my hand. “You have more patience, more history, more cunning, more sorcery—and you get the sun twelve hours before we do. How could we ever win?”
“He wanted to make people like jewelry,” says Fatima. “Now who will buy him?”
“Have compassion,” urges Pichai.
“Balls,” says Fatima.
“Go too deep into the West and you turn to stone yourself,” says Warren. “It’s almost as simple as that. Sooner or later you start trading people, one way or another. And if you’re trading them, why not modify them? Ah, the demonic beauty of the human form! Who can resist working it like the finest jade, once you realize you have the power? You pass that threshold without even noticing. America is the continent of death. This has been known for thousands of years. I have been everything in the Great Cosmic Lottery, women and men, thieves, princes and slaves, and I’ve stayed too long on this earth. The body is a doll, but it corrupts the spirit. You think I’m the only one? This is a devil hard to beat, Detective. Enticing beyond words. I wanted a perfect form to dissolve into, but the forms kept dissolving first. That’s the truth about me, take it or leave it.” A quick check of my face—but who is behind those eyes? “Building designer humans out of throwaway people—d’you think we’ll resist once the American empire has reached adolescence?”
When the door opens and Surichai enters the room I cannot prevent myself from throwing him a glance of utter helplessness. He nods in complete understanding.
“He’s been speaking in Fatima’s voice? Eerie, isn’t it? I couldn’t begin to explain—not in terms of Western science anyway. I’m sure a meditator like you has his own ideas. There’s another voice he’s been using, too, in impeccable Thai, very vernacular, much better than he speaks it himself. Who is that?”
“My dead brother,” I whisper.
A shrug. “No farang would understand—but to us it’s not so totally outlandish, is it? You better leave him now. As I say, he’s very weak. You can come back tomorrow if you want.”
Tears are pouring down Warren’s cheeks as we leave the room.
In the corridor I say: “Is there going to be a next stage, or are you going to leave him like that?”
“Reassignment, you mean? That’s entirely up to Fatima.” To my startled glance: “That was part of the deal. She has the—ah—pieces under controlled conditions in her penthouse.” A glance at his watch. “And she has about six hours left to make up her mind. So far she’s been pretty damn negative and without the material there’s nothing I can do. I think you are closer to Fatima than I am. Does she have Buddhist compassion? Do you have any influence?”