Bangkok Days Page 19

  She came out with me to light the way with her torch, her white hair sticking up like the crest of some strange and sympathetic reptile, and I shook her hot hand. She seemed to suffer in the heat.

  "Be careful going through the forest," she said. "And don't give the addicts any money. Unless they threaten to kill you, of course."

  TIME'S END

  I got a lift with John Purdoe back to Sukhumvit, and in the car he told me why he, too, was exiled in Bangkok, though he had never expected to be. A Jewish boy from Brooklyn working closely with a Catholic priest in a Buddhist slum in Southeast Asia.

  "I just wish sometimes I could talk to someone about Isaac Bashevis Singer. I wish I could talk to someone who's actually heard of Isaac Bashevis Singer. But who can I do this with? There's no literary culture here. It's embryonic. It's the one thing that bothers me. One has to do without that."

  At this very moment, a bike shot by with two Thai girls perched behind the driver. It was lightly raining and they held two banana-colored umbrellas above their identical haircuts. As they glided past his window they shot John a declarative, sultry, all-the-sex-you-want smile. For the scholarly-looking boy from Brooklyn, it was enough.

  "And then that happens. You get that come-hither look. Spontaneous, for no reason, just like that. Woman to man. No, no come-hither looks in Brooklyn. That's what keeps me here, apart from the work with Father Joe. The come-hither look. It makes your day. Perhaps you find that foolish."

  "Not at all. It's like being surrounded by opened doors. You aren't going to walk through them, but they're open all the same."

  "Exactly. It makes you feel alive. Here, you are alive. This is the most alive place on earth. Even if it doesn't have Isaac Bashevis Singer. And even if our women wouldn't understand in a million years."

  Wouldn't they, though? I have met plenty of farang women who love Bangkok precisely because it's the only city in which they are not constantly harassed. No one even looks at them. They can wander the three-a.m. bars with total anonymity, impunity, for once in their lives reduced to the status of sexual ghosts. As for the Gloria Steinem brigade—well, what was the point of even trying? There was no pleasing them about anything. They were not inclined to really consider the question of sex as anything but a problem of crime. And I thought of all those "hard-hitting exposés" you see in Bangkok Airport about the sex business, consisting of interviews, economic analyses, and political laments, and I wondered why I never found this type of enquiry particularly enlightening. Perhaps because it contains so few surprises. Perhaps because we are invited so crudely to disapprove and to wring our hands.

  "And, anyway," John said wearily, "life is elsewhere, and we all know it. There's nothing to be done except live, and that's what we do anyway."

  I replied that it was a sentiment which I always appreciated hearing, because it was unanswerable—that, and subtly optimistic.

  •

  During the spring months, if "spring" is a word that can ever apply to a tropical monsoon climate, I found myself drifting in a wet heat akin to the inside of a bain-marie. I discovered an entirely new color which could be called "tropical monsoon," the seething dark-gray hue of a warm-water seal's coat.

  I often went wandering through the neon of Wireless Road or the electronics market at Pantip Plaza—a fine place to stroll around at night because it retains the energy of daylight hours. I went there to buy CDs and electric razors and gadgets, starting at around seven, when it was already dark. The intensity of the neons stacked around several floors stung the eyes, and the words that they projected meant nothing: Kensington, Epson, Zest Interactive, Hardware House. The plaza (actually a vertical mall in which the floors are stacked on top of one another) is a hip hangout for the young, who flock there at night to see and be seen.

  At the top of the building hang the dismal words it city. I bought a Cyberdict talking translator which could render my thoughts in Vietnamese as well as in clumsy Thai. And so to the sleek black Vaio store and the Data IT store, through aisles of optical mice and modems, through shelves of laptops and Alcott laser paper: a ghost stuck in the future. Even coming from America, wandering through an Asian electronics mart feels like being fast-forwarded years into the future.

  In another mall where youth collect at night, the Siam Center—which is devoted to the cause of fashion—I noticed that the illumined English ad panels were even more textual. It was as if the present age needed to bring certain thoughts and expressions to the surface, and that these needed to be said in as aphoristic a form as possible. Like the strange assertions that might adorn a temple or church, these were lit up like holy text, and were just as enigmatic, some of them derived seemingly from classic Western literature:

  Fashion is concentration on design but no concern on worrying

  Fashion is black color and long hair

  Fashion is new, different and appealing in any way In everything, creation, lifestyle—The Odyssey

  Norule Noreason

  Underneath two long lines of Thai script: Time's end

  These surrealist screeds excite no surprise whatsoever. It's as if people are willingly predisposed to accept the idea that time and history might suddenly come to an end. Does Buddhism, in any case, much care about our idea of either? Buddhists, ironically, might turn out to be the ideal consumers, if their admirable detachment could be combined with very fat wallets.

  But it was also ironic that these screeds lit up the night in full view of the demonstration by Siam station, where you could say that history was reasserting herself in no uncertain terms. Yet those clean, white labyrinths did possess an unnerving impassivity which made them calm—and I thought of Charcot's chilling phrase "Le beau calme de l'hysterique." The beautiful calm of the hysteric.

  It could be a new kind of modernity. Outwardly derivative of the West's, but different at its core. This was why it seems to consist of pastiche and unconscious parody, misunderstood borrowings and vacuous reproductions. Its reality is somehow hidden.

  Perhaps it's the habit we have of thinking that much of the world is a reproduction of ourselves, of America, when it is obviously nothing of the sort. The West is no longer ascendant. "America persists in identifying modernity throughout the world in relation to itself," the philosopher John Gray has written, "at a time when in East Asia modernization is advancing swiftly by repudiating or ignoring the American model. The very idea of 'the West' may already be archaic—the old polarities of East and West do not capture the diversity of cultures and regimes in the world today." A diversity, he suggests, which makes "the interpenetration of cultures an irreversible global condition."

  •

  I was sitting one night at a café inside the Siam Center called Bluecup Coffee and Tea. I was on the verge of losing my hearing at the hands of pounding techno music as I tried to read a volume of Jerry Hopkins, when I saw a farang whom I thought I knew slip past in the human stream. It was already fairly late, and I was about to leave anyway, so I followed him out into Siam Square. As he cleared the glass doors of the mall, I came up behind him and examined with great interest the lightweight brown overcoat he was wearing, since no one wears an overcoat in Bangkok, however lightweight it might be. He had spiked hair and wore cracked English shoes, quite elegant; he walked like someone who has just broken a plate-glass window with a brick, his head shifting quickly from left to right, shoulders a little hunched, quick paces. From whom would a farang have to hide in the world's most brightly lit commercial plaza? And from where did I recognize those irritable, shy, darting mannerisms? Then, as I noticed a spot of yellow paint on the hemline of his coat, and registered how strangely crumpled it was, I knew that it must be the Spaniard from all those years before at the Primose, in Wang Lang. "I know your name," as Oscar Wilde had it, "but your face completely eludes me." Unsure what to do, I followed him to the road under the Skytrain tracks, where he stopped to hail a cab. I stepped in front of him and said, "Helix?"

  His face was exactly the same
, only hardened a little. But he didn't respond to the name, merely raising his eyebrows.

  "I am Acevedo," he said icily. "Are you a client?"

  "A what?"

  This made him relax a little while he scrutinized my face for signs of familiarity.

  "Do we know each other?"

  His hand was raised, a cab slowed for him.

  "The Primrose," I blurted out. "You're a painter."

  Now his brows tightened. Ah!

  "Felix," I said apologetically. "Isn't that your name?"

  "Then why did you call me Helix?"

  "It was a slip of the tongue. Apologies."

  He looked at me warily. "It's Felix, not Helix. Helix is not a name."

  "Of course not, of course not. Do you remember me?"

  "I think. We used to call you The Transatlantic."

  "The what?"

  "The Transatlantic. It was a nickname."

  Suddenly all was smiles and how-are-you's. But should we embrace even though we had never exchanged a word before?

  "I see," he said, opening the cab door. "So we should talk about old times, no?"

  "Are you busy?"

  "I am just going home to have a drink. I live at the Plaza Athenee."

  "You live at the Plaza Athenee?"

  "I have a deal with a client. A year at the Plaza Athenee. Free."

  I got into the cab after him, and I thought, "The Transatlantic? Is that what those bastards called me behind my back?"

  •

  How strange to re-find the mierda man, who used to hurl glued birds onto his canvases. He had grown up a bit in the intervening years. Embarrassingly, I now had to reckon with the enormous fact that I knew nothing about him at all. In the event, it mattered little since we had a few characters in common and could engage in some affectionate retroactive gossip.

  "Why," I asked in some irritation, "did they call me The Transatlantic?"

  "Well, it was because it was felt you were a bit like an ocean liner which doesn't seem to come from anywhere in particular and doesn't seem to be going anywhere in particular.

  And no one could really nail down your accent. McGinnis said you couldn't be English. He said you sounded like a phony American."

  "That bastard."

  "I'm sure he didn't mean it badly. You were like a mystery to us. A nowhere man, like in the Beatles song."

  "I'm not a nowhere man. And I don't have a transatlantic accent. I'm British to the core. Unfortunately for me."

  "Well, there you are, then. I am Spanish to the core, unfortunately for me."

  It was inconceivable to me how someone could actually live for a year in a suite at the Plaza Athenee, nor what he would have to do to earn this extravagant privilege. It was better not to ask. It's a beautiful hotel, perhaps along with the Peninsula the most beautiful in the city, and on its roof there is a wide pool with a Thai pavilion, luxuriant tropical trees, and some sly, upper-end girls. At this elevation, the city recedes slightly and alters its aspect. You are within a forest of blazing skyscrapers next to the Four Seasons Place, a brutal corporate set piece of "mixed use" intentions, with residential and commercial windows juxtaposed. There is a curious connection here between luxury and elevation, a rising above the city. A connection between height off the ground and social class. Felix ordered us drinks and soon we were almost alone by the pool, with the rasping cicadas that clung to these desperate urban trees. He peeled off his ridiculous overcoat.

  "I come here every night for inspiration."

  He looked a little tired, and more than a little old. A lifer.

  "Are you working on any projects in Bangkok?"

  "I've never worked in Bangkok. I've never done a thing here. I do hotels in Indonesia mostly."

  "You mean you didn't paint the mural of Alexander the Great in the Portofino restaurant in Bumrungrad Hospital?"

  "The what?"

  "Or that thing in the Shangri-La Hotel?"

  "I've never set foot in either place. I did a resort in Lombok. Perhaps you've been there—it was sort of Islamic in inspiration—"

  "Lombok?" I murmured. And all these years—Felix was a total egotist. He had virtually no interest in other human beings except insofar as they either crossed his path or served some immediately useful purpose to him. It is a characteristic of people who have only half succeeded, or who have not succeeded at all. The ego desperate for advantage, for recognition, for air. It can be forgiven in a twenty-five-year-old, or even—at a stretch—in a thirty-year-old. But at thirty-five and up? At that point it hardens into something more rancorous and irremediable. So here was Felix, who had once been "brilliant," who had dabbled in Asia as his career in Europe declined, for of course he could make far more money here than in any European city. Asia is more capitalist, more geared toward fast turnovers. Moreover, here the declining career, the accumulating slights, and the general all-around dead-endness of the artistic life would be virtually invisible. Thais couldn't parse farangs that finely. For men like Felix, it was all a useful subterfuge, but such manipulations could never be mentioned in polite company because, like McGinnis and Dennis, he played a Janus game with his hosts. There were separate cards, names, manners for his Thai patrons and connections. It was schizophrenia as a way of life. But, then again, it was enjoyable, exciting. Every man wants to be a bit of a Felix Krull if he can get away with it. Time's end, indeed.

  The problem with this mode of exile is self-respect. One has to reconcile many things inside oneself. Bangkok was filled with guys who played in unknown rock bands, ran bars, designed hotel toilets, but among them the fires of genuine ambition were not necessarily extinguished. Because he didn't listen, Felix assumed I was a Bangkok lifer like himself. Therefore he needed to ask me if I thought my talent was being nourished here.

  "I'm not sure I have much talent," I replied, quite truthfully as it happened. "And if I did have some, I wouldn't go around talking about it. I come from New York, where everyone does that, even if they have no talent whatsoever. It makes me want to vomit. I think I came here to escape exactly that."

  "I see, I see."

  But Felix didn't see. Self-deprecation was not his thing.

  He couldn't quite believe in it. A great artist must have a great ego. Olé! Self-deprecation was an admission of inferiority.

  He gulped down his Sex on the Beach, and his lips were very shiny.

  "I feel that no one understands me. I am alone. They nod, they pay, they say nice things. But they don't get it."

  "What don't they get?"

  "They don't get art. They despise it, but they're too bourgeois to admit it."

  "Perhaps," I thought sadly, "they get it all too well."

  "Well, I guess that makes me a nowhere man, too."

  He didn't mean it, but he grimaced. The shadows of bikinied girls moving among the trees consoled him, because, after all, it was the great consolation of this city. I wanted to ask him about the dead birds, because I had thought of it many times over the years, but now I was sure it would needle him. He gestured at the pool meanwhile, at the Thai pavilion and the high-wattage panorama, and sighed: "It's not so bad. I can deal with this." I merely asked what his Indonesian hotel art was like.

  "Birds, mainly. I do seabird motifs, pelicans, parrots, macaws. The tropical species. It works great in bars and lighter-end cafés. Sometimes I do a shop or two. You know, hotel boutiques. It makes them cheerful, lively. Birds have that effect upon us, you know. They cheer us up."

  "Do they?"

  "Oh yes. They make us feel close to nature. You know, movement, chatter, color. Gaiety. They have psychologists studying it for the hotels."

  "Who would have thought it?"

  "One day I am going to do one big fucking mural in Bangkok. The best in the city. All birds. A vast collage of toucans and albatrosses. People will be completely amazed. It'll be in all the guidebooks. I've been talking to the management team of a new hotel owned by a Sikh millionaire. They love my stuff. Felix, they say, you'
ve got the touch. It's like a helix, you see. You know what a helix is? Like a structure that stands by itself, elegant and airy, and it can be full of holes but it still stands up. It's like DNA. That's a helix, too. It's right in the heart of nature, man; it's what nature is all about. Structures, no bullshit."

  "Well," I said, "I should probably get going before I get too drunk."

  "No, no. You got to hear this bird mural idea out. We're already planning it. It's going to be a huge, mysterious beach somewhere in Patagonia. No humans, just a killer whale in the background. They're thinking it'll be rocking for the underground nightclub. On the beach—a moon and a sun, both night and day—"

  His hand swept through an arc, like a little palm-shaped sun. I looked at my watch with as much emphasis as I could muster.

  "—and then on the black sand a great congregation of tanagers and hummingbirds. An ornithologist's dream. Or nightmare. The age when the human race has died out and only the birds remain. You know, like Hitchcock."

  I got up, and he got up as well. Oh dear, I thought.

  "That's a radical vision," he added heatedly. "The Thais will definitely freak out."

  "They will, Felix. I'm very glad to have run into you again. Time does fly, doesn't it?"

  We walked to the elevators.

  "That's another of my metaphors," he said excitedly.

  "What is?"

  "Time flying. On wings. Like albatrosses."

  "I suppose it would be."

  "You should come and see my suite."

  "Leave me your number," I said, hurling myself at the elevators. "It's a small city for us farangs. Everyone knows everyone."