Phantom Lover and Other Thrilling Tales of Thailand

by Jim Algie

  “You know what I heard? Some guy told me she had a boob job and now she’s got hair all over her nipples.” “That’s disgusting.” Ying did not join in. She was not a group or classroom speaker and, to her ears, the insults sounded too much like expressions of envy.

  Because of a family connection, the two of them had to greet each other at the annual Chinese New Year banquet and at weddings and other big social events, when they forced airhostess smiles and repeated the polite putdowns—“Cool shoes. They look really good on you.”—that young Thai women from different social cliques use when they mean to say exactly the opposite.

  Yet, there was no intonation of playful ridicule in Benz’s voice when she’d called Ying to say, “I need you to come with me, because I know you don’t gossip like the other girls do and that you’ll keep this a secret. If the tabloids find out, they’ll murder me and my acting career will be finished.”

  She was going to get an abortion and all she could think about was her career? That was the real reason Ying disliked her; Benz was too selfish. She always wore her skirts a little shorter and her heels a little higher than the other girls, she told the loudest and dirtiest jokes, “You know me. I can’t keep my mouth shut except if my boyfriend wants a blow job,” and she took up more space on the dance floor than anyone else, because she always had to be the star of every social occasion.

  Blaming it all on Benz was too convenient. Ying could have said no, but she was always so eager to appease. So she kept complaining to her boyfriend that all her friends at school took advantage of her, getting her to help them with their papers, sing at their parties, and console them late at night after they’d had arguments with their boyfriends, which gave Ying the selfish privilege of thinking she was more thoughtful and generous than any of her friends.

  A nurse came into the room. “Doctor…doctor!” He turned his head. “The police are here to raid the clinic.”

  What? The police? If her parents found out she’d been caught by the police in an abortion clinic, she’d have to stay home every weekend for the rest of her undergraduate degree.

  The doctor turned off the machine. “Miss, we’re done. Please use the back door and I’ll go and distract the police.” He looked at Ying. “Lock the door behind me and please be quick dressing and getting out of here. I don’t want any of us to go to jail for this.”

  Jail? Ying knew abortion was illegal in Thailand, but would they really have to go to court and then get jail terms? As Benz got dressed, Ying riffled through the bills in her wallet. Not enough for a bribe, but she could use her ATM card, except if the police and the hard-line Buddhists wanted to make examples of them. Nailing a couple of young, high-society women—especially when one of them was a rising star in the movie and TV worlds, and the other was the lead singer of the hottest new indie rock band—would be a publicity coup for the anti-abortion lobby.

  Benz opened the back door of the clinic and peeped around the corner. “Okay, let’s go.”

  Ying put on her sunglasses and walked a few steps behind her, so if the police stopped them she could say they weren’t together. Hyperventilating, Ying stared at the varicose veins in the cracked street. With each step she was becoming smaller and more hunch-backed, but Benz had not lost any of her catwalk poise. Ying kept waiting for her to stumble, to panic, to catch her high heel in a crack, but her strut and self-confidence did not falter.

  In Benz’s luxury sedan, painted in the same gleaming white as her skin, they drove down the lane and turned onto a main street. Ying kept glancing in the side-door mirror to see if the police were following them. In anticipation of a siren, her shoulders hunched and her ears pricked up.

  Finally exhausted by the dread and stress, Ying sat back in the passenger’s seat, letting the air-conditioning freeze-dry the sweat on her face. Neither of them spoke. Neither of them looked at each other.

  At the first red light, Benz opened her window to buy a garland of jasmine from an old woman in a baseball cap walking between the cars, carrying a wooden pole draped with them. Benz hung the garland from the rearview mirror. She bowed her head, closed her eyes, and raised her hands in prayer.

  While Benz prayed, Ying looked at her. The poise and self-confidence she’d seen in her strut was misleading. Her mascara had run down her face, so her cheeks were dotted with black teardrops. Benz was in such a state of dismay that she hadn’t even checked her face in any of the mirrors.

  Or maybe, Ying thought, she feels so ashamed and guilty that she can’t bear to look at herself.

  For the first time in years Ying wanted to pray, too, but that would only make her an accomplice in an incident that had nothing to do with her. While Benz was not looking, Ying popped another anti-depressant. The psychiatrist said she was only supposed to take one a day, but this was her third and it was still the early afternoon.

  Beside Benz’s window was a motorcycle carrying an entire family of four. Sitting at the front, between his father’s legs, was a tiny boy. Benz gazed at him through the tinted window. The boy stared back at her.

  Turning to face her, Benz said, “Look at the way he’s staring at me, like he knows something. I wonder if somebody… passes away, whether or not they can be reincarnated so quickly?”

  This was weird. Benz talked about her career and shopping, she gossiped about whom her friends were sleeping with, she gushed about the latest party or DJ set, but she didn’t talk about spiritual matters.

  Ying could not even think of a response, never mind say anything.

  Over Benz’s shoulder, the child was staring at her now. Gears gnashing, the public bus in front of them accelerated, spewing exhaust over the motorcycle, so the little boy disappeared as if he’d been vaporized, his spirit rising into the sky, leaving nothing behind but a smudge on her windshield.

  Ying spent the rest of the afternoon and early evening cleaning the mirrors in her bedroom and the en-suite bathroom, wiping fingerprints off the windows, polishing the screens of her computer and TV again and again, before writing out detailed instructions for the maid to clean, sweep and dust her entire bedroom without using the vacuum cleaner. Between cleaning sessions, Ying watched the TV news and searched the websites of local dailies to see if there were any breaking stories about the raid on the abortion clinic. She didn’t see any, but it was too soon to tell. If the police had arrested the doctor, they might be checking his records now. Then they would arrest Benz or demand a massive bribe. She didn’t know her well enough to say whether or not she would implicate Ying in the scandal.

  She had not realized that abortion was such a serious crime in Thailand. If they enforced the letter of the law, Benz could be imprisoned for up to three years and the doctor for up to five. For a young celebrity like her, from a well-to-do family a jail term was unlikely, but if the tabloid bloodhounds got their teeth into this story, her career would be ravaged.

  The Burmese maid did a good job of cleaning, but the room still felt dirty and dusty. Ying didn’t want to be enclosed in a bedroom the size of the backroom in the clinic, but she had to get back to work on a history paper she was writing.

  The professor, a young Oxford graduate who kept advising his students to “take more chances and to see the past in the present tense,” had lauded her idea to write an essay about the tradition in ancient Siam of branding adulteresses with golden lotuses. In the town square, the male officials used the same branding irons that farmers marked their cattle with to emblazon the women’s shoulders with flowers visible above their sarongs, so they would be subject to scrutiny and public disgrace for the rest of their lives.

  But it was difficult to find any information about this brutal tradition. The history of Siam and Thailand mostly consisted of royal chronicles about the good deeds of male monarchs. Most of those records had gone up in smoke when the Burmese sacked and razed Ayuthaya in 1763. To get access to the few palm-leaf manuscripts remaining at the National Library would take months and months, the librarian told her, but she only
had another three weeks to finish the paper.

  So far, in her first year and a half of university, Ying had already changed majors three times, from Sociology to Computer Science and now Thai History. If she couldn’t even finish her first semester in history she’d be in for another scornful lecture from her mother. “I don’t know what it is with you. You keep changing your major every semester. You rearrange the furniture in your room every two weeks. You change your hairstyle or dye your hair every month. Then you have a new boyfriend every couple of months. What is wrong with you?”

  With only a few sentences, her mother, adopting stiff, manly postures and deepening her voice, as she did when addressing company boardrooms and giving lectures at international business conferences, could reduce Ying to a child again. Even Ying’s voice sounded small and infantile. “I don’t know… I guess I’m confused.”

  “There’s nothing to be confused about. Pick a subject you really want to study that will lead to a good career. Then you establish yourself in that career before you get married and start a family of your own. What’s so difficult about that? Music is a wonderful hobby and I love hearing you sing at our family karaoke nights at home every Sunday, but it’s not a career and that noise you make with your latest boyfriend doesn’t sound like music at all.”

  Ever since her last year of high school, it was the same lecture over and over again. In the same way her mother’s features had hardened from all the cosmetic surgery, her attitude had gotten more rigid too. Decades of competing in the man’s world of high finance, where weakness and indecision were not permissible, had turned her into a CEO on the home front. Ying didn’t bother trying to explain anymore that the life her mother wanted for her was not the life she wanted—except she didn’t know what sort of life she did want.

  Ying pulled out the list of things she wanted to change about herself. Right after, “Legs too stumpy, need to diet more,” and, “Must grow hair longer and use makeup to highlight cheekbones, because face too round,” she underlined, “Too uncertain and confused all the time. Must be more self-confident and outgoing.”

  In the margin, her current boyfriend had scrawled, “Must have sex with Dee Dee at least two times per day and more often on weekends and Buddhist holidays.” Reading that usually made her laugh and want to call him. Not now. The word “sex” echoed the sucking noise of the hose between Benz’s thighs.

  Ying crossed her legs and picked up some of the papers scattered across the bed, next to books on dieting and biographies of dead musicians like Kurt Cobain. On another piece of paper she’d written a few lines, while bored in class, for a new song or poem called “Lonelier Than All the Graves in China,” but she’d better not mention that to Dee Dee or he’d complain again: “You write the saddest and most depressing lyrics I’ve ever heard. At this rate, we’re going to have to call our first album, Songs To Slash Your Wrists To.” Dee Dee thought that was funny. She didn’t. Since she could not explain to him how depressed she usually felt, she had to write lyrics and poems about it.

  Ying listened to a few songs on her MP3 player, she wiped a few fingerprints off the screen, she picked out one of her uniforms and some fresh underwear for school tomorrow—she did everything but get back to work on the paper. Getting started was always the hardest part.

  Finally, she opened the file with all her notes on the computer. Most of the research she’d done was on Thailand’s most popular folk epic, Khun Chang Khun Paen, about two men who loved the same woman. In high school and at college, whenever they studied excerpts from the epic poem, the teachers always said it was a cautionary tale about a woman who did not conform to society’s norms and met a tragic end. Wanthong refused to choose between the kinder and more sensible Khun Chang, and the dashing womanizer Khun Paen, an adept at the black arts who commanded a magical horse and a baby ghost known as a “golden child.”

  Ying frowned. She’d forgotten about the child. Wiping the computer screen again, she shook her head to dislodge the sliver of a memory that was actually a hallucination from the abortion clinic: a frightened swallow crashing into the window over and over again until its beak punctured its brain and it fell to the floor in a spray of feathers.

  She looked back at the scene she’d transcribed, when the king told his courtiers: “Go and execute Wanthong immediately! Cleave open her chest with an axe and don’t show her any mercy. Do not let her blood touch my land. Collect it on banana leaves and feed it to the dogs. If it touches the ground, the evil will linger. Execute her for all men and women to see.”

  In a current paper she’d found by the eminent historian Chris Baker, he argued that executions were not the typical sentences doled out to those convicted of adultery and bigamy, which usually included caning, fines, and the public mortification of branding the women with golden lotuses. So Wanthong was executed on the same grounds as those guilty of treason. She was a kind of revolutionary, Ying thought, and as Baker had written “a sacrificial lamb.”

  Beyond that, Ying only had a few more notes on how the term khun paen was still widely used to describe a Casanova kind of womanizer, which most Thai men took as a compliment, while “golden lotus” (dok bua thong) had been shortened to e dok (flower) as slang for a “bitch” or “slut.”

  Ying’s cell phone played a jingle-jangle version of “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” Benz. What did she want? It didn’t take long to find out. “I really need to see you tonight. Some very strange things have been happening.”

  “Like what?”

  “Remember the little boy on the motorcycle? He’s been following me. I’ve seen him at least four or five times. I don’t think he’s a boy at all. I think he’s a “golden child,” a baby ghost.”

  A shiver made Ying’s shoulders spasm. “That’s a strange coincidence. I was just reading about them for this history paper I’m writing about Wanthong.”

  “Really? She’s my favorite character from Thai literature and I’d love to play her. So it’s not a coincidence then. Everything happens for a reason or because of karma. This might be a case of ‘rocket kar ma.’ Whatever we did wrong is not coming back in the next life, it’s coming back now.”

  “Why are you saying we? It doesn’t have anything to do with me.”

  “Because you were there with me and now the golden child is creeping into your life, too.”

  “Maybe you’ve acted in too many TV dramas about ghosts.” Ying looked down at the scabbed-over wounds on her wrist left by Benz’s nails. “Have you heard anything about the police raid on the abortion clinic?”

  “No, it’s all gone suspiciously quiet. The doctor’s phone is turned off and the clinic is closed too. I just hope that he didn’t write down my real name in his records. But let’s talk about it when you come over.”

  Holding the phone against her ear with her shoulder, Ying picked at the scabs. “It’s almost eleven. I have a history paper I’m working on and tomorrow I have a long day of classes then a rehearsal with my band.”

  “I’ve got a friend who writes a lot of my papers. I’ll pay him to write yours.”

  “That’s cheating. I couldn’t do that.” Under her thumbnail, the scabs peeled off. Droplets of blood welled up in the fingernail-sized trenches.

  “That’s not cheating. In business and politics it’s called ‘delegating.’” Nobody laughed louder at her own jokes than Benz did. She was her own biggest fan and best cheerleader. But her laughter was shot through with static by a bad network connection. Or was it something else? For an instant, Ying had heard a baby crying. “I’m joking. I know you wouldn’t do anything like that. Listen, I’ll send my driver to pick you up in thirty minutes, okay?”

  Surrounded by servants from a young age, Benz did not make requests; she spoke in commands and rhetorical questions. “I really need to see you tonight. You’re the only one who knows about this and I need your advice. You were so sweet for coming with me that I had to make you something special that I know you’ll really like.”

 
; How could she say no to that?

  Ying looked at the list of things she wanted to change about herself, while the wounds on her wrist complained about being exposed to the chill of the air-conditioner. “Too eager to please others. Must learn to be more independent.” She had highlighted and underlined that reminder so many times it was almost illegible.

  Ying picked up her MP3 player and climbed into the massive wardrobe, which she had soundproofed with cushions and empty egg cartons, so she could practice singing on her own or sing along to the demos they had just recorded for their group, The 11th Hour. She referred to the walk-in closet as “my padded cell in the lunatic asylum of high society.” It reeked of the joints her and Dee Dee smoked in there, along with the incense and air freshener they used as smokescreens. Beneath that was the pungent aroma of their sexual sweat which now reminded her of being trapped in a birth canal.

  Ying slid the door open, suddenly hating Benz with a fury that could only be released in a song. That self-obsessed woman and her… decision …was polluting Ying’s music, her thoughts, her relationship, her studies—everything! Tonight she’d have to give her a good telling off and make it clear that they should have nothing more to do with each other.

  Already cooling off, Ying’s anger ran out of steam when she saw Benz’s swollen, bloodshot eyes and blotchy skin. She looked like she hadn’t slept in days which, as it turned out, was true. Dressed in a long nightgown with a fluffy pair of slippers shaped like bunnies, Benz had been stripped of her glamorous image. Forever comparing herself to her female peers and often finding herself lacking, Ying felt better now—and guilty because of it—that Benz looked so bad.

  Ying had imagined that the actress’s bedroom in her parents’ mansion would be a shrine to her vanity, wallpapered with photos of herself and posters for her films, TV shows and ads. On the contrary, it looked like a botanical garden overgrown with ferns, vines and spider lilies. Terrariums ran down each wall. Benz’s pets were a Malayan pit viper, an iguana, a water dragon, and a bird-eating tarantula. Until now, Ying had thought that one of Benz’s nicknames, “The Horror Queen of Thai TV,” was a marketing gimmick based only on the parts she played.