Phantom Lover and Other Thrilling Tales of Thailand

by Jim Algie

  It was another surprise to learn that Benz’s major was botany; she took care of all the flowers and creatures herself, and she’d painted all the watercolors of nature scenes on the walls.

  Sitting on top of the terrarium housing the tarantula was an earthenware pot containing a plant with black flowers that Ying had never seen or heard of before. The plant was hemmed in by the red, jagged-edged flowers Thais call “cobra fangs.” This was the present Benz had made for her.

  Holding up the flowerpot, she said, “Look at this beauty. The bat lily is one of the world’s only flowering plant species that has black flowers. They’re really rare. I had to trek about twenty kilometers into a rainforest in southern Thailand to find this one. When I was thinking about what your flower would be, and every woman reminds me of one species or another, I thought the bat lily would be perfect for you. It’s rare and dark, beautiful and very remote.”

  Smiling defensively, Ying said, “Thanks… better to be a bat lily than stinkweed I guess.” She laughed nervously. “Actually, my plant is marijuana.”

  Benz turned to face her and frowned. “I don’t find self-deprecating jokes very funny and I don’t see why you’re so down on yourself and moping around the hallways at school all the time. You have more singing and performing talent than anyone at our university, and I’ve never seen any woman who moves around on-stage like you do.”

  Compliments made Ying shy and skeptical; her self-pitying streak, which was a side effect of her chronic case of depression, automatically downgraded them to the level of empty flattery designed to extort future favors from her. Benz appeared to be sincere. But who could trust an actress?

  Ying sat down on the edge of the bed, close to the door, so she could keep her eyes on the terrarium and make a quick escape if one of the creatures got loose. Resting her back against the headboard, Benz sat cross-legged, surrounded by a dozen teddy bears and other stuffed animals laid out on a florid pink bedspread. Benz typed away on a laptop, refusing to look at her. Ying couldn’t believe that she was this offended by an off-hand remark. Whatever talent she possessed as an actress—and many people thought she had enormous potential—could be rooted in her easily wounded sensitivity.

  “Thanks for the flowers,” Ying said. “The bat lily is really beautiful.”

  Benz did not look up from the laptop. “I have to finish typing up my schedule for tomorrow. I’ll be with you in a minute,” she said, as if Ying was her personal secretary. Here was a woman who held grudges and avenged the slenderest of slights.

  After leaving Ying to stew in her guilt for a few minutes, Benz showed her the spread sheets on the computer, where she accounted for every single minute of her day, even taking lessons in Cantonese from a private tutor in the back of her chauffeur’s car on her way to and from university. Ying knew that her father was an economist and former Minister of Finance, but she hadn’t suspected that Benz had used the template for one of her father’s five-year economic plans and applied it to her modeling and acting career. By comparison, Ying’s list of things she wanted to change about herself looked like the neurotic outpourings of a spoiled teenager.

  Reclining on the headboard again, and pushing her long auburn hair back behind her ears, Benz said, “Everything was going according to the plan, except I didn’t mean to get involved with this film director from Hong Kong. You know what he made me do to audition for the role of a prostitute who gets killed by See Ouey in this new serial cannibal movie? He took me to Chinatown where the cheapest and nastiest hookers prowl the streets and had me walk around in this sleazy little outfit while he watched from the van.”

  Benz leapt to her feet, acting out the whole scene and playing all of the different characters. Watching her was like having a front-row seat at a play. “It was the most embarrassing thing ever. Guys were yelling come-ons at me, ‘Hey, baby,’ some of the other street-walkers were telling me to get off their turf, ‘This is my street corner, bitch,’ an old drunk came up and grabbed my ass.

  “And then, as if things weren’t awful enough already, Jack Wu took me into this short-time hotel, paid for a room for an hour and when we got inside he offered me three hundred baht for sex. Can you believe it? I freaked, started yelling at him, tried to slap his face, threw an ashtray at the wall. And you know what he did? Burst out laughing and said, ‘Okay, you’ve got the part. You finally understand the character. She’s angry, she’s disgraced, she’s violent.’”

  “Sorry for laughing but, you mean, on your first date he took you to Chinatown and made you act like a hooker?”

  Benz laughed. “Well, sort of, but no, our first real date came later in Hong Kong when he invited me to watch him editing the See Ouey movie and we hung out night after night in the editing suite and went out for dinner and drinks afterwards, but he didn’t make any moves, never even made any hints. So after this went on for a few weeks I invited him back to my hotel for a nightcap one evening and you know what he said?” She crossed her legs, folded her arms across her chest in a manner that was both arrogant and defensive, lowered her voice and spoke with the director’s sense of conceited amusement. “You’re not a woman yet, you’re still a girl. You’ve never really been in love with anyone except yourself and you’ve never even had proper sex before. You can always tell when a girl makes that step into womanhood because she loses a lot of the giggly mannerisms and the pouting little girl faces, and starts to exude a lot more self-confidence. Her walk changes too. It’s a subtle change, but she becomes more natural, more comfortable in her own skin and you can see all that in her walk. But the way that you strut around still looks like you’re a model showing off clothes on a catwalk.”

  Benz, who had been staring off into the corner of the room, now looked back at Ying. Her deep brown eyes had the glazed look of the stoned or the lovesick. “Can you imagine any of the guys at our university saying anything like that? With these guys, ‘Hey, you’re really cute, do you want to come over and have a private party at my place,’ passes for a witty chat up line. I guess that was the attraction. Jack is almost forty and he kind of became my mentor in movies and sex and relationships.”

  “So what happened to him?”

  “He wanted us to get married and have the baby. I told him that I’m only twenty-two and I can barely take care of myself. I couldn’t take care of a baby and a husband.”

  “How did he take the news?”

  “Oh, he’d already told me that if I had the…you know…he wouldn’t ever talk to me again. I’ve tried to call him about a hundred fifty times in the last two days, sent him many text messages and emails, but he won’t respond. He’s one of those tyrants who’s used to always getting his way and calling the shots. When I tried to tell him that having a baby and getting married was going to mean curtains for my career, he said he’d support me and that I didn’t have to work. But I’m too independent and ambitious to settle for becoming a housewife at this point in my life.”

  “I always found it strange that if life is supposed to be sacred, then why are women who are menstruating not supposed to go to temples or churches because they’re seen as impure? Did you see that protest on local TV last week? They had all the female protestors rub photographs of the prime minister between their legs to put some kind of curse on him and oust him from power.” Ying was no longer talking to Benz. She was far too self-absorbed to hold a conversation with anyone except her inner selves for more than a few minutes at a time. Now she was advising her academic self who was writing an essay about golden lotuses.

  Benz put her hand on Ying’s. Her eyes were asking a question or making a plea that Ying could not quite decipher. Perhaps it was, can I trust you? “I have something else to tell you and this is not very pleasant at all. So if you don’t want to hear it I think you should go home right now and never talk to me again.”

  Ying’s fingers stiffened. Her spine straightened. “What happened? Was it that bad?”

  “Okay. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.” Benz int
ertwined her fingers with Ying’s. She was staring at the bat lily crowning the terrarium with the bird-eating tarantula inside it. “When I was going to the bathroom last night, I had all these stomach pains and…well, there’s no easy way to say this, but I, but I passed part of the…umm…fetus.”

  “What?” In sympathy, Ying squeezed Benz’s hand.

  Benz nodded slowly. She continued to stare at the bat lily, surrounded by cobra-fang flowers veined with red. “I guess the doctor didn’t have enough time to remove the whole thing.”

  “That’s really…I mean…I don’t know. That’s awful. I’m so sorry.” All of sudden the air-conditioning felt too chilly.

  Benz patted her hand. She smiled sarcastically. “Oh, don’t worry. It gets worse. I mean, what could I do with the…stuff…floating in the toilet? It almost looked like a little rubber doll. Oh, all the blood and cramping, too. I was in such pain that I was crawling on the floor of the bathroom, trying to staunch the flow of blood with a roll of toilet paper. Before I cleaned it all up, the bathroom looked like a murder scene.”

  From this close, Benz’s bloodshot eyes and peeling skin made it look like the model had aged a couple of years in the last few days. “You know that feeling you have when you’ve been with someone for a while and it’s quite serious, but you dump him or he dumps you, and afterwards you know something has died, but there isn’t any evidence of it outside your own mind or heart? Looking into the toilet last night was the first time I’ve felt, well, here’s the proof. Talk about love and death.”

  The woman who everyone had stereotyped as yet another vacuous beauty possessed a level of eloquence Ying had not thought her capable of. Though everyone was so obsessed with her looks and catwalk legs that they barely listened to anything she said.

  Ying massaged Benz’s shoulder. By degrees, she felt the heat of Benz’s bare thigh flowing into her own leg through the jeans she was wearing. By sitting there like this, holding hands, thigh against thigh, shoulder to shoulder, they were propping each other up. If one of them moved or stood up, Ying thought, they would both collapse. It was too much misery for one person to stand alone.

  “So what happened after that?” Ying asked.

  Benz searched her eyes again, as if looking to confirm or deny her guilt. “What could I do? I couldn’t flush my own…you know… down the toilet, could I? I can’t take it to a temple to have it cremated because the monks would never allow that. So…” Benz gestured with her head towards a small fridge near the wardrobe. “I wrapped it up and put it inside an old purse of mine and left it there.”

  “It’s in the fridge?”

  Slowly and solemnly Benz nodded.

  The conversation ended on that mournful note which resonated like a funereal bell inside Ying as she settled down to sleep in Benz’s bed, wearing one of her nightgowns. She kept thinking about that little boy on the back of the motorcycle, suddenly vaporized in a cloud of smoke, his flesh and spirit rising into a storm cloud that began raining down thousands of tiny fingers. The fingers crawled across the carpet and over the covers of Benz’s bed like slugs, inching their way up Ying’s legs and over her knees.

  She awoke with a series of spasms that jerked her upright to see that the light was on, Benz was not in bed, and the lid on the largest terrarium was dislodged. At the end of the bed were smears of blood. Skeletal legs scurried over them as the bird-eating tarantula ran across the light fixture on the ceiling.

  Ying let out a squeal and bolted for the door. In the hallway all was dark and quiet. Slowly her eyes adjusted to the darkness. Shadows gathered substance and silhouettes appeared: a grandfather clock, a Chinese vase, a rubber plant.

  Her mind tried to comfort her by offering the most humdrum explanations for Benz’s absence. She was hungry. She’d gotten up to get something to eat. Now she was in the kitchen, but she’d come back to bed soon. Everything was fine. There was no need to worry.

  But the longer she stayed there with her back pressed against the wall, trying to merge with the silhouettes and shadows, the stranger the thoughts arising in her mind. The smears of blood at the end of the bed looked like the Thai letters for “mother.” The remains of that fetus had turned into a “golden child” and were trying to get back inside their mother. That was why Benz had leapt out of bed and ran off to hide somewhere. Now the remains that looked like a little rubber doll were crawling across the floor, Ying imagined, leaving a trail of blood and bile, to seek out another womb.

  Ying looked down at the bar of light at the bottom of Benz’s bedroom door. She could go back in there, but the terrarium was open and that spider, the size of a giant’s splayed fingers, was scurrying around searching for prey.

  Keeping her back to the wall, Ying tiptoed towards the living room, where the windows permitted the night to enter in all its sable mystery. On the walls, the shadows of branches waved at the black-and-white, Chinese-style portraits of dead ancestors, making their eyes blink and their lips move.

  The front door was wide open. Out in the front yard, standing in the middle of a circle of silvery light, as if caught in a spotlight on center stage, stood Benz with her head tipped back, transfixed by the full moon. No longer the woman that all the other college girls wanted to look like and all the boys wanted to sleep with, she resembled a sleepwalker in a grandmotherly nightgown, clutching a designer handbag that contained the remains of her aborted child and the only proof of a dead love.

  Ying sat down cross-legged on the grass behind Benz, afraid to startle her by saying anything because of an old Thai belief that a person’s soul leaves their body when sleeping and if they’re woken suddenly the soul will never come back.

  From where she sat, it looked like Benz’s arm shot up through hundreds of thousands of kilometers of black space to touch the moon. But the figure inside the moon did not look like a goddess or a rabbit as Ying’s grandmother had told her. No, it looked more like a fetus curled up in a womb: a silver child with craters for eyes and teeth like a saw.

  It was the ugliest and cruelest-looking baby Ying had ever seen. But just as every mother loves her offspring, no matter how sick or deformed, Benz was stroking the infant’s cheek and smiling at him.

  Out of nowhere, a creature galloped across the front yard on all fours, snatched the purse in its mouth, snorted and loped off into the shadows, as Benz stood there still as a statue. Though she only saw it in silhouette for a few seconds, and by the time Ying could process it the creature was long gone, but it reminded her of that magical horse, with the legs and genitals of a man, in the epic tale Khun Chang Khun Paen.

  YING HAD BEGUN incorporating all sorts of anecdotes about abortion into a section of her history paper, and statistics from Thailand, where an average of one hundred women die of complications every year, and another aside about how the lack of sex education classes had spawned the highest rate of teenage pregnancies in Asia today.

  But how was all this supposed to tie in with golden lotuses and Siamese adulteresses? As far as she could see they were two separate papers. But she hadn’t mentioned that to her history professor in their email correspondence about the paper.

  She knew that no male teacher, unless he was too old and impotent, was ever going to turn down topics as provocative as these. If anything, the subject matter and her unconventional approach to it flattered his impressions of himself as an iconoclast in his field and followed his advice to his students about “finding the past in the present and bringing history back to life.”

  On several occasions, Dee Dee had told her, “You’re the most conniving female I’ve ever met—even worse than my mom used to be.”

  Ying’s never-differing response revealed her stubborn and tenacious streak. “Men always say that about women who are smarter than they are.” To spare his feelings and make fun of her pomposity, she’d poke him in the stomach and lick his cheek like a cow before dissolving into falsetto giggles.

  Her emails about the paper had generated almost immediate responses
and more questions from the professor. “Was Wanthong a victim of a patriarchal society or a victim of her own desire to court the black magician? In my opinion, Khun Paen was the bad boy rock star of his day. As a musician yourself with a musician boyfriend you may want to delve into this a little more deeply.”

  The professor had been doing his homework on her and that was worrying. Over the course of six or seven email exchanges, the tone of their correspondence had changed from teacher and student to friends and kindred spirits; his interest in her no longer seemed entirely professorial.

  On the afternoon of Ying’s big meeting with the professor, when she was preparing her notes and rehearsing lines in her head, Benz began sending her a series of text messages, emails and photos from Wat Laksi, the most famous Thai temple for getting exorcisms and dealing with paranormal phenomena. Since Benz wanted to rid herself of misfortune and ward off darker forces, the monk had made her a “golden child” by putting a small icon of what looked like a Siamese toddler, whose head was half-shaven and sported a centuries-old topknot, into a jar filled with holy water. From the photo Ying recognized the child. She had seen similar icons on many Buddhist shrines, often with a red soft drink and candies laid out for offerings. Benz texted: “The abbot is giving me directions on how to feed the baby ghost and what sort of toys I should put out for him. If I don’t take good care of him he might run amok and cause a lot of trouble.”

  Ying wanted to write, “That’s ridiculous.” She thought about telling her, “Don’t be silly.” She wanted to share her doubts and be the voice of rationalism, but she knew how distraught the actress was—and who could blame her? She was not in her right mind anymore and the baby ghost had become her surrogate child.