I sat on the bed and waited. I was curious more than anything. I could hear the street far below, inviting me back to its more normalized excitements. Perhaps twenty minutes went by, and presently I was sure that I could detect the rumbling sound of McGinnis's laughter emanating from a room lower down the stairs. I was sure it was him, and I considered with relief the possibility that he might have forgotten all about me. My exit might be a little awkward, but it would still be blameless in the eyes of the management.
After what seemed half a lifetime a sound of feet on the stairs roused me. There was a knock on the door, and then two small girls dressed as traffic cops came in, their thick leather belts jangling with handcuffs, whistles, and plastic pistols. They announced their names, and although I was used to the fanciful names of Bangkok working girls—girls called Air, Pinky, Gift, Sand, and Ma—the fact that my teerak were called Bum and Cartoon did not make it any easier. The one called Cartoon strode into the room with a cheeky grin, laid her black accessories box on the bed, and put her hands on her hips.
"You go me!" she shouted in English.
"I what?"
"I go you. You go us."
Bum was close behind. "You go me. We go you."
"I'm going," I said.
Their faces fell and they became stern. Cartoon pointed at the bed, then at the box, from which she withdrew a vibrational instrument of some kind.
"Me go you here, now."
And she took out her manacles as well. Bum followed her lead, and soon they were armed to the teeth.
"You go Cartoon," she said, "then Bum."
It became a curious mime as I edged my way carefully toward the door. Yes, they were smiling and winking, but who knew if a rejection would insult them and make them cry out to the mama-san for farang reparations. I wasn't in the mood, and that was all there was to it. Of course, I could follow in the illustrious footsteps of Miller, Sade, Houellebecq, and make up a scene of riotous clarity, with all the vignettes filled in with detail. But as we danced around each other, and Bum and Cartoon shook their manacles at me menacingly, I felt myself ebbing away. My ruthlessness disintegrated and I began to see all too clearly how this would look to a third eye. Sex depends on secrecy, on only you being the pornographic eye. Whereas suddenly I was being looked at by two cops in drag and I began to feel bored. It was not the fault of the Eden Club, still less of the adorable Bum and Cartoon. It's just that there comes a moment when the whole thing turns on a dime and the wings of desire are clipped by an unknown hand. One fades out. One wants air, sunshine, flight. And so, with a certain sorrow, a feeling of confused regret, I said goodbye to the surprised officers of the law, and fled.
THE IRON PALACE
In my garden house I slept through the rains of summer. And how many summers had I been in this city? Nine, ten—two? August is a month of constant lightning, of afternoons massive with cloud. The city sulks under glooms and sudden monsoons. Downpours, which Thais call fon-tok, and squalls that break the heat for a short while.
I dreamt I was lying with a girl on a river beach, painting her body with a fine calligraphic brush dipped in dark-green paint. It is like the story in the Japanese film Kwaidan, in which the blind boy is painted with spells by a Buddhist monk to protect him from ghosts. I have that image of Buddhism, for some reason: the human body covered with tattoos and spells, with writing. I remembered the addicts in Jet sip rai. I wrote some banalities—I love you so very much—but it didn't matter that they were trite. An intense emotion came with the spelling out of words on a woman's collarbone, unfolding long sentences along the space between her breasts. I recognized the woman, too; she was American. She was someone I had lost. When I woke, the rain slashed the long windows. The gardeners peered at me from under their wide-brimmed hats now serving as little gutters. I thought, "Maybe it's time to leave now. Maybe it's enough."
One day an e-mail came from Farlo, singing the praises of country life. But in it he wrote, "Have you ever been to the Iron Palace?" He said he was coming into town in a few days and that we should meet up there—it was a small temple near the Golden Mount which no one ever went to. Ay, I could hear him tut in his Dundee twang, the Iron Palace: ye've never heard of it, and no has anyone else. Perfect!
One needs reasons to keep on loving something. But one can always go out and find them. I wondered if Farlo had read my mind on this score and thrown out this Iron Palace to me to make me think again. I found it on the more detailed maps, marked by its Thai name, Loha Prasat, from the word loha, or iron. It sat in the middle of a temple complex called Wat Ratchanatdaram, like an optical illusion which shouldn't be there.
•
I arrived early, and from the street I saw it immediately where I had never seen it before: like a gothic chapel in a dimension of its own. Its black cast-iron spires rose in a mood of Edgar Allan Poe, pencil-thin at the tips and dark as graphite. It was Farlo's little joke, and I smiled. Its thirty-seven spires represented the thirty-seven Dharma of Bodhipakkhiya—the thirty-seven virtues required for enlightenment—and it was one of three "metal palaces" in Buddhist lands (the other two, by legend, were in India).
The structure is more Burmese than Thai and consists of five concentric square towers, each taller than the next. Rama III built Ratchanatdaram in 1846 for his niece, Mom Chao Ying, but the finishing touches to the Iron Palace were made only recently. For decades it was hidden behind a movie theater called Chalerm Thai, which was eventually pulled down in 1989, finally making the Loha Prasat visible once more. Now it rises from a corner of what was once the old city, near the Theptida canal.
As soon as you venture inside it, you see that it is a chedi, an abstraction. The door itself is almost hidden within the maze of the larger temple, and there is rarely anyone there. The ground floor is a labyrinth of symmetrical passageways that go nowhere, and so are all the gradually narrowing floors above it. At the end of each passageway is an open arch framing a Buddha, and all of these Buddhas are identical.
It is not clear what mental state such a building is intended to produce. Sameness, symmetricality, repetition:
Are they there to remind the worshiper of life's futility? It is designed to get you lost. In Europe, it would be a "folly," the sort of eccentric maze which a playful landowner would have built in one of his gardens. In the heart of a city, however, the Loha Prasat stands as a stern, relentless rebuke of some kind. There is nothing here but optical effects and a tall corkscrew stairwell planted in the middle of the structure, which soars up to the top floor, where there is a small shrine lost among the iron spires. Until you arrive there, you are bound to be disorientated within a series of patterned puzzles.
I waited for Farlo up there. Because nearly all Thai chedis are white, the black metal of the Loha Prasat is extraordinarily striking. Sitting right at its highest point is like sitting in the masts of a tall ship surrounded by rigging and pirate sails.
Then I saw Farlo striding across the temple courtyard next door. He was in battle fatigues, embarrassingly enough, as if he had just stepped off the bus from Pailin. Really, I thought, he hadn't changed. He had always treated the city like a back door. He sat in that bus for three hours, twiddling his thumbs anxiously, and then he got off at Ekkamai station as if it were a part of the Cambodian jungle. Many is the farang who wanders about Bangkok in this spirit. Half-dressed, as for the beach or the forest. As if the city doesn't really count as a city.
The corridors of the Loha Prasat are filled with sleeping dogs which do not stir as you gingerly step over them. But now I heard them yelp as Farlo came charging into the building. Rain began to spit as he labored up the iron stairwell, whistling, singing, calling my name. Ye little bastard, where are ye?
When he popped his head up and sniffed open air again, his eyes were blue as little fossilized cornflowers and his dark, tanned skin looked so much older that I almost took a step backward. Country living, I thought dismally. We embraced among the soaring metal spires as thunderclouds spawned
themselves over the city below us.
"The best place to be!" he cried. "Look at that view. And no one ever knows ye're here. I like that."
We walked around the open terrace. The dogs inside the building were still barking in outrage. What had he done to them? They had been catatonic with me.
"Can almost see Wang Lang," he said as we sat by the tiny shrine, which contained not an image of Buddha but a miniature chedi. "Those were the days."
"How is Cambodia?" I asked.
"Bloody wonderful. I decided I'm gonna croak there. A wonderful place to croak. Won't be long now, either."
Strange, those men one sees once every two years or so, to whom one is bound by intangible connections not forged out of everyday life. I never quite knew what I liked about this hard, bitter, self-deprecating soldier. Perhaps it was his realism. Realism is a hard thing to achieve—or, rather, it simply comes out of a tough life.
I wondered why he had insisted we meet here. Kneeling, he looked thoughtfully at one spire after another, as if they could not be figured out.
"It's a hell of a fookin' building," he sighed.
I realized that he must have been coming here for years. That it was his place in the city, though he himself probably could not have said why. Perhaps it had qualities that appealed to him. Austerity, mystery, hardness.
We went down to the street. Next to the temple runs Lot Wat Ratchanatda, a commercial street that crosses the Klong Wat Theptida, one of the oldest canals in the city. By this crossing there is a wide square filled with restaurants where workers from local offices sit under the dripping trees with umbrellas, eating lunch. It was filled with hundreds of young girls dressed in bright-yellow T-shirts. It was a mass fad which had appeared only in the last two years or so, this wearing of yellow shirts on Monday. It's because Monday is the King's Day and yellow is the color of Monday. Did I understand that correctly? For Farlo it was one more proof of the power of collective thinking and manias in Thai society. Everyone starts wearing yellow shirts on Monday in honor of the king and it makes them feel that they belong to a large organism like an ant colony. And meanwhile, he added, the military was preparing to take power from the elected government. As we walked along the footpath on the north side of the Theptida canal with sticks of satay, I noticed him perusing the long whitewashed wall of the temple and the strings of votive toys suspended above the water, forming webs of plastic ray guns, tractors, and dolls' hairbrushes. The far side was a row of houses with shirts on hangers, shaggy mango trees, and parasols. Trees dipped their foliage to the filthy water. Someone had long ago planted dark-green European-style streetlamps here and there, perhaps when people still arrived at the temple's back door by boat, and in the gathering gloom we wondered if they would come on, if they ever came on. The balconies, the shitty awnings, the paraphernalia of family kitchens all elided into a village-like hybrid scene, half forest, half street, in which Farlo's battle gear suddenly camouflaged him very effectively. We came to the road at the canal's far end, and it began to rain heavily. The water bubbled and hissed like something boiling on a stove top. Behind us, visible again, the Iron Temple glistened wet. Farlo gazed up at it and smiled. I had thought that, having bothered to bring me all the way to the Iron Temple, he would now invite me for a drink, or even dinner. But instead, he looked at his watch and said that he had to meet a client for his eco-lodge, a pair of clients actually, who were going to meet him at his hotel, the Dream Hotel on Sukhumvit Soi 19, just around the corner from the Westin. It was going to be goodbye for now.
"The Dream is like all hotels owned by Indian billionaires.
There's a stoofed tiger in the bar, and these funny little chandeliers everywhere. But I have to go. I need the business. What about you?"
"What about you?"
"Ay, what about you? Why are ye still here?"
"In Bangkok?"
"Ay, in this place. I'd thought ye'd foocked off."
"I am hanging around," I said, to make him laugh. "I can't think where else to go."
"Ye'll lose your soul here, lad."
He stuck out a hand for a cab, and there was a series of blinding lightning flashes unconnected to thunder. The air turned jittery and people began to scurry. I wanted to say something further, elicit some explanation, or else give one. But a street on the verge of a thunderstorm is never the place. We shook hands, he winked, slapped my arm, and said, "I'll be in next month, too. I'll take you to dinner at the Dream Hotel. What a bunch of tossers."
"Be careful of that stuffed tiger."
"Ay. I shot at a real one last year. Fooker ran off."
•
I walked to the river, since all the taxis were taken, and rode across to Wang Lang in the rain. Pier 10 was crowded, as it always was, and the water plants sloshed around the corroded piles under the houses. There stood what had been the Primrose, and the Black Canyon café, and a few new places, elegant and chic café-theaters perched over the water with views across to the Grand Palace. I had not been back here in years, and all the surface colors seemed inaccurate, mis-remembered. Clusters of teenage girls in the yellow shirts stood around the gourmet espresso coffee bars in which Wang Lang seems to rejoice, and Indian music poured from stalls specializing in Hindu relics. The flower shops still burst with orchids and lilies, and the cosmetics stores still offered vertical boards of violently painted fingernail extensions. The covered warren of passages glowed under the storm-light falling through the same plastic, see-through ceilings. Under a nest of decayed girders, the same mannequins stood in rows, showing off cheap and sparkling dresses. The souk was alive as always, soft with its own signs, which read Kitto, Adda, Aerosoft, Coffee. I slipped past rows of cheap shoes colored like jungle flowers, those ardent pinks and creams which accord with local taste, and soon I was in the dim spaces, the claustrophobic markets smelling of croissants and boiling meat, where trays of plastic bags filled with blue-and-yellow ices sit under the watchful eyes of old women, and where spherical metal trays of kaeng and wingbean salad await a mouth. One always wants to know if a place has changed faster, or more slowly, than oneself. "Has it been faithful?" one thinks.
ANOTHER DAY OF LOVE
He was a man all alone, but he was not yet a man in the street.
—Georges Simenon
Years ago I lived in a place called Wang Lang, though I had forgotten if that passageway—you could hardly call it a street—onto which the doors of the condo complex opened ever had a name. Of course it did. Everything has a name, but I had never asked. It was just "the street." There is always one street that is so essential that it doesn't need a name.
As the fon-tok came down, I found myself trawling along it now, sniffing in the industrial aromas of the hairdressing salons and the sweetness of fried doughnuts and pork crackling as familiar things that had long ago become a molecular part of me. I passed the cranky little launderette whose machines are half open to the elements, where a drinking-water machine boasts of "reverse osmosis" refreshment. No, I thought, that wasn't there. But the flea-bitten, sleeping dogs surely were. I pushed on, to the Patravadi Theater and the new cafés that open out onto the Chao Phraya. I remembered this part of the street, too. Across the street hung wires dripping with small vines or ivy. Long side streets swept away to infinity; along them, monks walked in couples, with shopping bags. I remembered a large tree flaming with red flowers. A sign hung outside the Patravadi which read:
Remember What You Have Done in 24 Hours?
I had gone over the details of this street in my mind for years, and I had always thought that it dead-ended at a long brick wall which closed off all further peregrinations. It must have been that in the past I had always turned back at the wall, afraid or uneasy perhaps, unwilling to imagine that my compact, contained neighborhood was not severed from the rest of the world after all. But now I saw that none of this was true. The street carried on. All one had to do was turn left at the wall and follow the street's winding thread. I was extremely surprised, b
ecause it is not like me to not follow a street. Streets are like balls of twine. They can be unrolled indefinitely. But this one I had not unwound.
It ran past a considerable whitewashed wall, obviously that of a wat, and was entirely covered in places by old trees. Then the temple's roofs appeared, their red, green, and gold dimmed by violent rain, the gold chofas—"tassles of sky"—soaring upward like curved beaks. The small mauve umbrella I had bought near the pier trembled, and I made a mental note of the blue metal gates and the rickety wood houses leaning slightly on their sides. To one side, a courtyard around which saffron robes hung on lines: the monks' quarters of Wat Rakhang. And I thought, "Rakhang?" I had never heard of it. Above the wall, I could see its dark-green pillars and a balcony with carved rails. The façades had irregular reticulate designs in worn wood.
Then one comes to a scruffy park taken over by vendors crouched under a mass of blue awnings and parasols. To the left is the river; to the right, the chedis and shrines separated from the park by a high railing. The vendors are in fact clustered around a long path that leads from the temple to the river, and they are not vendors in the usual sense: their buckets of water are filled with sea worms, large frogs, catfish, and other forms of sea life which are not on sale to gourmets. They are for the pilgrims to liberate in the river.
In a pavilion set up in front of the main shrine, the devout knelt before tall orange candles and the usual metal Buddhas. Escaping the rain, a few monks sat about, playing board games with bottle tops, watching things move past them with no sense of surprise. A working-class neighborhood temple unused to making itself into a spectacle. But the largest chedi was covered with grass and weeds, making it beautiful, as these strange towers should be. Its concentric, angular forms bore up a tall niche inside which a faded gold Buddha stood with the metallic gravity of an armored knight in a cathedral.
Bangkok Days Page 21
