Comfort Zone

by Christopher G. Moore

  COMFORT ZONE

  A NOVEL

  BY

  CHRISTOPHER G. MOORE

  Published by

  Heaven Lake Press at Smashwords

  Copyright 2010 Christopher G. Moore

  Discover other titles by Christopher G. Moore at Smashwords.com:

  A Killing Smile

  A Bewitching Smile

  A Haunting Smile

  Chairs

  Publisher’s note

  This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  License Notes

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  Man is a rope stretched between the animal and the Superman—a rope over an abyss.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  CHAPTER 1

  THE FOURTH OF JULY PICNIC

  CALVINO HAD A law for Fourth of July which went something like this: no American should be caught dead or alive wearing a safari suit to the Fourth of July picnic in Bangkok. The hardship of concealing a handgun wasn’t a valid exception to the rule. Every year Calvino wore the same all-American outfit of New York Yankees T-shirt, blue jeans, baseball cap, and Reeboks to the Fourth of July picnic in Bangkok. Being the first one to follow his own law, he always left his gun at home. This was also the twentieth year of the liberation of Saigon; or if you were on the losing side, the twentieth year of the fall of Saigon. One of those tiny details which Calvino knew would give the Fourth picnic a certain edge.

  Lt.Col. Prachai Chongwatana—“Pratt” as he was called by Calvino and one or two other close friends—arranged his weekly schedule at the Crime Suppression Department, Royal Thai Police, so he would be free to attend the Fourth of July picnic with Calvino. Pratt slipped into civilian clothes and covered his head with a New York Yankees baseball cap. The annual ritual began with Pratt driving to Vincent Calvino’s apartment in Sukhumvit Road. Like many rituals it was based more on faith in a simpler past before all the construction on Sukhumvit Road made driving like having sex in a bad marriage. But Pratt was too Thai ever to point out this hardship to Calvino, and the test of a friendship was the tolerance for a certain level of discomfort and pain.

  “The Fourth of July comes only once a year,” Pratt told himself as he turned down Soi 27, slowed his new powder gray BMW at the T-intersection in front of the private members club called Pegasus, turned left and a few seconds later pulled into the broken driveway of Calvino’s broken down apartment house. Calvino climbed in, feeling chilled air inside, he smiled, slamming the door.

  Pratt sneezed once, then again. “What are you wearing?”

  “What? You’re allergic to my shirt?” asked Calvino. He lowered his designer sunglasses.

  “What’s that smell?”

  “It’s cologne. Imported.”

  “I’m afraid to ask imported from which hill tribe.” “Paris,” said Calvino.

  “I thought the Fourth of July picnic was for business,” said Pratt.

  “It is,” said Calvino, a little too quickly.

  “Does this cologne mean you are going after a new clientele?”

  “I’ll roll down the window.”

  Pratt shook his head. “The air-conditioner ’s on.”

  A long silence fell like a rope ladder between them, each waiting for the other to volunteer to go first. They sat in a traffic snarl, motorcycles finding the narrow gap between the immobilized cars streaked past on both sides of the car. Pratt was right about the new contact aspect of the picnic. A Bangkok private eye trolled official functions for the walking wounded who stumbled into a party, looking for someone to help them once the fireworks ended and the food was gone and they were back on the streets.

  Their destination was one and a half kilometers to the old International School grounds where the picnic was held every year.

  “There is this possibility, I might meet someone who is not a client. A middle-class woman, someone normal, for instance,” said Calvino, breaking the silence.

  “This is Bangkok,” said Pratt. “There’s always an expectation of a possibility.”

  “Now, who is cynical?” asked Calvino, as the traffic light changed and the cars started to move as in a military convoy.

  “And normal women like this smell?” asked Pratt.

  “For Christsakes, it cost six hundred baht for this tiny bottle. I mean it has to be good,” Calvino said, as they crossed the Asoke intersection.

  “You are only supposed to put on a little,” said Pratt. Calvino didn’t say anything.

  “You put on the whole bottle,” said Pratt.

  “Half,” said Calvino.

  “But it was tiny.” He gestured with his thumb and forefinger the size of a bottle less than an inch high.

  “You’ve got no sense of smell.”

  “My nose has filtered so much Bangkok air that even bacteria can’t survive inside it.”

  “Then why did you buy the cologne?”

  “The salesgirl recommended it.”

  “She saw you coming.”

  “No, she sold me the foul smelling cologne.”

  “Very funny,” said Pratt.

  As a university student Pratt had gone to New York with the intention of studying business but spent most of his time hanging out at the Pratt Institute, taking art lessons, and keeping his passion a secret from his parents in Bangkok. He had first met Calvino walking through Washington Square on his way to Greenwich Village. At the time, Calvino had been a law student at NYU. Calvino had taken Pratt to his parents’ house in Brooklyn for his first Fourth of July picnic. He had stood on the roof of the building along with fifty or sixty neighbors, kids, women, old people. When the fireworks arc terminated with a burst of light, he saw the faces of these Americans and saw something he had never seen before, something between reverence and awe. The face of a Thai going into a Buddhist temple. This was a sacred moment for them, a ritual of remembering, of hope, of rebirth. It was about the future as much as about the past. Pratt never forgot the faces looking heavenward, illuminated as the fireworks filled the night sky with a flash of white light. Near the end, Calvino’s mother had taken his hand, squeezed it. She looked at him, “Welcome to America, Mr. Pratt.” Calvino had a crooked smile on his face as he watched his friend from Thailand shake hands with his mother and then his father. Pratt never forgot the power of that experience. Years later in Bangkok, Pratt had a number of friends in the American expat community. But none of them went back as far as Vincent Calvino. Calvino had been the one he had shared that first Fourth of July with, twenty years ago, and the memory was as fresh as if it had happened the day before.

  “What’s her name?” asked Pratt.

  “Meow. That means cat in Thai,” said Calvino. “Thanks for the translation.”

  “She’s beautiful, intelligent, able, so Harry says. She’s not from the Zone.”

  Zone was short-hand for Comfort Zone, expat-speak for the vast archipelago of go-go bars, massage parlors, restaurants, barbershops, discos, clubs, cafes clustered like floating icebergs stretching from horizon to horizon in the sea of a Bangkok night.

  “And you believe Harry?”

  “His wife is not, you know, made out of lego bricks. The woman has substance. Meow’s her younger sis
ter.”

  “So the picnic is more than business this year,” said Pratt, rubbing it in, and rolling down his window.

  “You hate the cologne,” said Calvino. “It’s distinctive.”

  “What’s the Thai translation for distinctive?”

  Pratt didn’t miss a beat.

  “Men.” The Thai word of choice for any bad smell like one of those gaseous farts from a patch of badly cooked fish from a street vendor.

  Pratt, who had dressed in a light brown Mao-style shirt buttoned down the front and trousers, received the salute of the two Thai police officers checking people as they walked toward the main gate. This year Calvino had ironed the New York Yankees T-shirt himself, the jeans were fading to a bluish gray. He sported one new accessory: a pair of aviator sunglasses. He looked like a hitman who had taken a wrong turn on a Federal Witness Protection program and ended up on a permanent tropical holiday, thought Pratt.

  There was a security checkpoint, one of those airport doorframes wired to pick up house keys, rings, loose change, and guns. Everyone walked through the frame and waited to see if they set off the alarm bell. Well, almost everyone waited. Thailand ran on the basis of the salute or run theory, meaning if you lack power don’t question those in authority. If you had the power, then no one had authority over you. No one could scan you, make you wait. The guards at the gate had to check out when they could exercise power and when they had to salute. The Americans going to the picnic, they were used to being screened for weapons; it seemed a natural state and there was no constitutional right to get in the way of authority. Bangkok was one of the few places where Americans could control their own people.

  Control you needed in Bangkok. All that heat, broken roads and traffic caused a lot of people to arrive angry, doubled up with swollen bladders and cranky kids. Enough to turn a quiet American into a serial killer claiming at his subsequent trial that the heat, dust, and aggro had turned him loco and mean. Turning off Sukhumvit Road and onto Soi 15 Pratt had found himself bumping along on a twisted, torn strip half-submerged under a foot of muddy water; it was as if some machine had slashed and destroyed the surface of the land, cut it hard, hurt it, made it bleed tons of hot mud that you needed a four-wheel vehicle to get through. Pratt’s car looked like it had been vandalized by the time he entered the parking lot.

  As they walked into the main grounds, the Thai military band struck up—not all at the same time—a big band tune. Jersey Bounce, one of those Benny Goodman songs from World War II. Calvino bought five hundred baht of coupons and headed straight for the beer and hot dogs. He returned a moment later and gave Pratt a beer. Pratt snapped the tab off the can of Bud.

  “Here, take this,” said Calvino, holding out a hot dog for Pratt. Pratt looked at it, wrinkled his nose.

  “Once a year, you can eat a hot dog,” Calvino said. “And don’t tell me you’ve decided to become a vegetarian. You used that line last year.”

  “Afterwards, you will eat fried grasshoppers or red ants. Your choice,” said Pratt. They had driven down Sukhumvit Road past a vendor with a cart with a small mountain of fried grasshoppers, stuffing them in a plastic bag.

  Calvino took back the hot dog. “Head, wings, tail. The whole animal,” he said. This was part of the diet of the girls working inside the Zone.

  “You keep looking at the shirt,” said Calvino taking a bit from the hot dog.

  “It makes you look like...”

  “A tourist,” said Calvino, knowing the outfit had troubled Pratt from the moment he had arrived at his apartment. Farang who dressed like a tourist were an embarrassment to their Thai friends.

  “Relax, Pratt. Everyone looks like a tourist at the Fourth of July picnic. Besides it’s our national dress.”

  Inside the grounds everyone was herded together into one large enclosure. Some of the expat families, kids with mouths open, eyes squinting in the bright sunlight, looked like they had just taken a wrong step out of a shopping mall time-warped video game and walked straight into Bangkok. Blank faces staring at the hot dog in one hand and a can of Bud in the other, wondering how all this had happened. Mormons roamed the grounds in white shirts, black name tags, and black trousers. A group of Hell’s Angels, beards flecked with gray, sweat drenched bandannas, had ridden their Harleys from Korat. They walked into the grounds, their Thai mommas following; the whole group was dressed in black and wore leather cowboy boots. Earnest young men and women watched the Hell’s Angels parade past their “Overseas Americans for Republicans” booth. There was no eye contact. Every nationality and race gathered on the green, lush grass to celebrate a revolutionary war which the Americans had won; no one was talking about Vietnam which they had lost. Near the band was a table of middle-aged expats drinking beer who had come to lurk around the teenaged Amerasian girls.

  A World War II vet, his sunken face creased with age and watery eyes, came up to Pratt and Calvino with a box of red poppy pins for sale. His assistant was a Thai bar girl in cut-off jeans and a T-shirt which read “I like to smoke.” She had teamed up in the name of free enterprise to help the old vet on his rounds with the box of red poppies for sale.

  “Who’s your helper, Ed?” asked Calvino, recognizing the farang from the Washington Square bars.

  “You buying to help disabled vets or not, Calvino?” The old man squinted against the sunlight.

  “How much this year?”

  “Thirty baht,” said the bar girl.

  “Ten baht, or whatever you want to give.”

  There was the difference between a bar girl and a war vet. No bar girl ever left a customer the option of giving what he wanted. This was Comfort Zone pricing rules.

  “What’s her cut, Ed?”

  “Lek has a good heart. She just wants to help.”

  Calvino’s law was that any time a bar girl just wanted to help was the same time you made contingency plans as to where to hide the wallet. He bought two red poppies and gave one to Pratt who pinned it to his shirt.

  Calvino watched Ed and the bar girl Lek head for the next group a couple of feet away. “Makes you homesick for Times Square,” he said.

  Before he could finish his sentence someone from the American Embassy ran over and whispered if he might have a private word with Pratt. His name was Fred Harris and he was wearing black Bermuda shorts with yellow stripes. Harris was mid-40s, thinning gray hair, wide shoulders like he had once played football and a gut that hung over the top of his Bermuda shorts like he had retired to the bar.

  “Nice shorts, Mark,” said Calvino.

  “Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee,” said Harris.

  “Until you hit the age when you start to float like a bee and sting like a butterfly,” said Calvino.

  Harris forced a smile. “Calvino, I’d like to borrow the Colonel for a couple of minutes,” he said.

  That meant one thing: an American was in trouble with the authorities. Calvino exchanged a glance with Pratt.

  “I think I’ll get another hot dog. Catch up with you later.”

  “I hope she likes it,” said Pratt.

  Calvino turned around, cocked his head. “You know, that smell,” he added.

  The Fourth of July picnic was supposedly his new start. A week earlier he had been upcountry with a go-go dancer named Daeng. Someone he had been seeing for about two weeks which translated into two years in the Zone. They had gone to Daeng’s village for a few days to unwind, get out of Bangkok, slip free of the Zone. One morning as he lowered his head so as not to bang it on the midget-sized doorway, he watched as Daeng dragged a green hose across the dirt yard, then she filled the concrete trough used for bath water, another concrete pool used for toilet water. After she turned off the hose, she squatted on the dirt floor of the kitchen and tore up a plastic bag and started eating red ants mixed with garlic and onions. She called on him to join her. He walked over and squatted down next to her and watched her use two fingers to pinch a batch of dead ants and pop them into her mouth. She smiled and re
ached back into the bag with thousands of bodies and squeezed her fingers around a man- sized portion for him. At the same time, her younger brother, Haeng, arrived and squatted down holding a grill over the flames of the wood fire; inside the grill was a fried rat. Daeng explained how the rat came from the forest. They were clean rats. Not like the garbage eating rats in Bangkok which no one in Isan would ever stoop so low as to eat. He looked at the squashed, flattened rat body, the head of the rat looked like a child’s drawing, a snaggled tooth, one inky, smudged black eye, as if the brother had taken a hammer and hit the rat until it was thin as the gold leaf someone put onto the back of a wooden elephant at Erawan Shrine. Calvino watched Haeng eating rat and Daeng eating ants for a couple of minutes, got up, walked straight for the road and took a bus back to Bangkok, swearing he was finished with Zone women. He had had enough. He put the word out that he wanted a non-Zone lady. Harry Markle said he would deliver at the picnic. The Fourth of July was a new start, a revolutionary event to be celebrated, an event almost as great as breaking free of the Zone.

  ******

  WITH the overhead sun beating down, Calvino headed in the direction of hundreds of people who huddled around a long row of concession stands with volunteers hawking everything from lotto tickets, hot dogs, hamburgers, to Budweiser beer. Kids rode on the ferris wheel and the merry-go-round. An image of his own daughter, Melody, flashed through his mind, leaving some guilt, some pain as it screamed on through his consciousness. A few feet away, an American Chamber of Commerce guy in baggy shorts and Washington University T-shirt pressed a bullhorn to his mouth and announced that substituting boiled eggs was, once again this year, against the rules. And no rolling of eggs. You had to toss them in the air. This guy was obviously a veteran of a number of Bangkok Fourth of July celebrations. The crowd of Thais and farang dressed in shorts and T-shirts looked relaxed even though they were sweaty, hot and hungry. Behind this superficial informality were the serious players on the local scene, the lawyers, bankers, doctors, embassy types, merchants, journalists, NGOs, preachers, and Peace Corp workers. This was the crew of America’s Starship Enterprise lost in the vastness of Asian space and time.