Phantom Lover and Other Thrilling Tales of Thailand

by Jim Algie

  Ying’s skepticism about the temple and the abbot’s abilities as an exorcist were challenged by the video Benz made, which showed the old abbot, whose arms were covered in sacred tattoos, interviewing a thirty-year-old woman who claimed to be possessed by the spirit of her dead mother. The abbot sat on a dais surrounded by Buddha images and Hindu icons. The woman knelt at his feet, hands raised and palms conjoined in a respectful wai, addressing the holy man as “royal father.” The woman told him, “She won’t leave me alone. She keeps trying to tell me what to do and if I dare to disobey her, then she starts choking me, just like she did when I was a little girl and a teenager or—” The woman began choking. She wrapped her hands around her throat. She rolled across the floor, jerking and twisting and frothing at the mouth as if in the middle of an epileptic seizure. Finally, it took the abbot and three monks to restrain her.

  The scenario did not look staged and the jerky video had not been edited. For Ying the video had an extra layer of plausibility, quite beyond the tiny woman fighting off four much bigger males. Because of her own mother’s dominion over her life, she could easily imagine her, even from beyond the grave, wanting to give Ying lectures, always finding fault with her daughter’s inability to live up to her own impeccably conservative standards of deportment and success in the business world.

  She had to pull herself together for this meeting with professor. What did he want anyway? All she could think was that he wanted to have an uninterrupted half hour with this shy and famous-around-campus singer, who never spoke in class and hid behind a fringe of dyed-violet bangs and the most old-fashioned skirts that came down to the middle of her calves.

  By contrast, the Oxford-educated historian, with his drainpipe jeans and gelled hair, looked more like a pop star than a university professor. In class, he was always dropping the names of alternative bands and art-house directors and new-wave fashion designers. His office, with all the blurry, abstract photos and geometric prints, looked more New York loft than Bangkok collegiate style.

  In his presence she automatically slipped into a superficially more subservient manner by bowing her head and raising her hands together up to her nose for a greeting, by pitching her voice a little higher, by smiling more often; all these mannerisms, performed by rote and reflex, were designed to make herself appear less threatening while showing proper deference to a man of superior social standing.

  The professor sat behind a steel desk uncluttered except for an open laptop and a few framed photos. “This is a very ambitious paper, but it sounds as if you’ve got enough material to write a master’s thesis.”

  Ying stared at her hands. In the frigid air-conditioning, she was alternating sweats with chills, and her mouth was as dry as a textbook. “Maybe. I don’t know. Depends on the editing I guess.”

  “But is the structure really going to be this disjointed? I can’t see how all these pieces are going to fit together.”

  Ying kept looking at her hands, clasping and unclasping them. “The structure is more like a literary novel. I was thinking about The White Hotel by D.M. Thomas and how it mixes together an epic poem, a Freudian case study, letters, postcards and this story about a neurotic opera singer whose phantom pains foretell the Holocaust. At the end all the characters are reunited in some kind of heaven or afterlife. Much of it seems disconnected but the connecting thread in that book is psychological and my paper is the same.”

  Ying stopped talking to her professor and began speaking to her conscience which felt guilty about betraying the confidences of an almost friend. “Because abortion is such a taboo topic, and there’s so little sex education or counseling here and no Freudian tradition, the woman in question can’t find a way to process her grief except through these old archetypes and folkloric figures like the ‘golden child’ which appears in that epic poem with Wanthong.”

  “That sounds reasonable, but speaking of taboos, how explicit is this paper going to be?” There was a leer in his voice that she did not want to look up and see on his face. “As a singer in an alternative rock band I guess you’ve done a lot of first-hand research on the subject.” He chuckled and there was a leer in that too.

  Had he really just said something as rude and tasteless as that? Ying could not quite believe her own ears. Was he coming on to her or just expecting a titillating conversation to fill in some boring office hours? In either case, she had to be careful. Only two months ago one of the older professors at the school had been suspended for trying to extort sexual favors from five different female students in return for good grades.

  She glanced at the framed photo of the woman on his desk. “Oh, is that your wife?”

  Reluctantly, he said, “Yes.”

  “She’s very pretty.”

  Another pause. “Thank you.”

  “Well, I guess I’d better head off to my next class now. Thanks for your time and advice.”

  Since she had artfully dodged his most provocative question, he could not keep a burr of bitterness out of his voice. “Just be careful that the essay doesn’t turn into a feminist polemic from a Women’s Studies’ class.”

  “Sure, except that in this country, and many other parts of Asia, most people think that Women’s Studies means hairdressing and flower arranging.” Still at that age when she was doubtful, and a little ashamed of her own intelligence, Ying smiled shyly while finger-braiding a lock of hair on the back of her head.

  The professor’s amusement and nods of agreement surprised her. “That’s very well said. I won’t disagree with you on that point, and I do appreciate a historian with a sense of humor and satire. If you ask me, the field has been colonized by far too many dullards who rummage around in the past like antique hunters in a flea market.”

  Ying thought it was wise to let him have the last word and regain a little “face.” Before leaving the office, she made the appropriate gestures of deference to restore his superior social standing and uphold the conventions of Thai society, which she was trying to question and subvert in her paper.

  Ying tried to walk off her anger but it kept outpacing her. She was too preoccupied with all the comebacks and barbed quips she could have thrown at him to even notice the running track and the Himalayan cherry trees shedding white blossoms during the warm up for the hot-season meltdown. That reminded her of another line in her list of things she wanted to change about herself. “Must be more outspoken and up front about my feelings.”

  He wasn’t interested in her essay—only the titillation factor. It was hard to put her finger on it exactly, but most of her interactions with her male professors had been colored by their condescension. Dee Dee said, “That’s only because you’re too uptight and sensitive. So you think they’re being condescending when they’re not.”

  She looked over at the entranceway to the Faculty of Science, the oldest faculty on the campus, remembering how, as a freshman, she was told not to walk up the front stairway because they used to store cadavers for the medical students to dissect there, and the students still told tales of decapitated, one-legged ghouls crawling upstairs in the dark of night to find their other body parts. Past that building stood the Faculty of Architecture where a statue of the Serpent King was supposed to be the luckiest place for students to have their graduation photos taken. Outside another faculty stood the shrine to the Black Tiger God. That was one of the most popular places for students praying for good grades.

  There she was in the country’s oldest and largest university, with all the high-tech laboratories, faculties of engineering and architecture, medicine and agriculture, but around every corner was another strange story, another spirit to be worshipped, or curse to be avoided.

  Over Benz’s shoulder, the child was staring at her now. Gears gnashing, the red and cream 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.

  Fly
ing around the room, a swallow, which could see the sky and the trees so near, smashed into the window of the abortion clinic again and again until its beak punctured its brain and it fell to the floor in a spray of feathers.

  Ying blinked and shook her head to dispel those memories. Would she ever stop thinking about that day? No, probably not.

  If Ying was still traumatized think what Benz was going through? Imagine looking into a toilet and seeing…

  Ying pulled out her phone, wiped the screen smudged with her fingerprints and looked at a photo Benz had sent of her new baby ghost. Another text message: “I explained to the abbot about that little boy on the motorcycle who keeps following me. He said it’s probably not a ‘golden child.’ It could be much worse, like one of the ‘smoke children’ from the Khmer occult. They go all the way back to Angkor Wat and are made in much the same way as the Thai baby ghosts, the fetus is grilled and black magicians utter incantations to bring it to life.”

  With her it was one text message and one plea for attention after another. Before the… incident … had she always been this needy and demanding? If so, she must have driven many friends and lovers away.

  One thing about her had not changed recently; she still spoke in rhetorical questions and commands. Which meant Ying was supposed to go and meet her at the most popular after-dark shrine in Bangkok for women—and a smattering of men—in search of lost loves or a new partner.

  The film director in Hong Kong had not answered any of Benz’s emails or text messages or phone calls, so she was resorting to one last desperate gambit: offering nine hundred and ninety-nine roses to Brahma, the Hindu god of creation, for whatever he could do to reanimate this lifeless love.

  The shrine stood at one corner of the CentralWorld Plaza, a mall stocked with all the Western designer brands and fast-food franchises, home décor shops from Europe, and a Cineplex showing all the latest Hollywood films. Puncturing the skyline around it were the illuminated, syringe-shaped towers of office blocks and some of the city’s priciest hotels.

  On the benches near the street, where a night bazaar had colonized most of the sidewalks, sat Ying, watching Benz lighting a candle and incense so she could kneel beside her high heels, among the other lonely hearts, to ask the four-faced effigy of brass for a favor she would promise to return with more elaborate offerings. The god was known to favor wooden elephants and live performances of Thai classical dance.

  Ying was not sure whether any of those praying were communicating with the divine or just talking to themselves: a sort of spiritual schizophrenia. But if it helped them to concentrate on their desires amid the hum of traffic and the hubbub of the crowds she supposed it was a good thing.

  The oppressively warm night and the clouds of sandalwood incense threw a tarp of gloom over the shrine and all the supplicants, many of them university students still wearing their uniforms of black skirts and white blouses.

  Only around shrines and temples is there none of that typical Thai mirth capped with toothsome smiles. Making pleas to the Great Beyond is nothing to be scoffed at or joked about, for that could bring about a reversal of fortunes.

  The gloomy setting, where conspicuous capitalism had relegated religion to a small outpost beside a septic canal, had already inspired Ying to gobble her fourth antidepressant of the day. Now Dee Dee was pissing her off with all these snide text messages asking why she’d become a nun lately?

  Since the afternoon at the clinic two weeks ago, they had not had sex. At first, he’d been okay about it. Some of his text messages were funny enough. “I’m getting so horny that if I have to masturbate people in Bangkok will think there’s a meteor shower raining down on the city.” But each message was less sympathetic than the last and now he was openly taunting her. “I’m having a drink with Annie A-Bomb tonight.”

  Ying’s anger made her dyslexic. She kept making mistake after misspelling after mistake. Going backwards and forwards deleting and retyping characters only made her madder. “Even her stage name is stupid. She can’t sing and she’d fuck a streetlamp if she thought it would get her some gigs and publicity. Annie is such an e dok …” Ying stopped. Now even she was using the shortened form of “golden lotus,”

  In the middle of that argument, the band’s producer sent her a message about rerecording some of her lead vocal tracks on the demo tape. Not again! She’d already spent five weekends in a row recording and rerecording all her parts to appease that perfectionist, so she’d begun to hate and doubt all of their songs.

  Then she received an email from the perverted professor. “I enjoyed our chat today. Please stop by my office whenever you want.” Ying stifled the urge to send him a sarcastic reply.

  Why did all her troubles always come in clusters? Next her mother was on the phone and when Ying refused to pick up, there was a long text message. “Are you out again? I thought you had an essay to write. I hope you’re not thinking about changing your major again already.”

  And what if she got an F on her paper? What if she had to drop out of history and disappointed her mother and herself again?

  Ying’s grandmother kept telling her, “Your college days are going to be the happiest and most carefree years of your life.” What was she talking about? Ying had never felt so stressed out and inadequate in her whole life.

  When Benz came to sit beside her, she took one look at her face and said, “What’s wrong?” Ying started to say something, but all of a sudden everything she was thinking and feeling and worrying about broke like a wave over her head so she was drowning and gasping for breath. Then she started crying and put her arms around Benz’s neck and cried the tears of a little girl overwhelmed by how tiny and helpless she felt. Surrounded by all these office buildings, malls, shrines, and ivory towers, Ying did not feel so big herself right now, and she appreciated that Benz didn’t ask her for any explanations or offer any sound bytes of condescending advice. All she did was sit there hugging her like a mother, but when Benz felt that maternal flush she started crying too because Jack Wu was never coming back to her even if she gave a million roses to all the gods in the world’s pantheon, and every time she saw a little boy she wondered what their baby would look like, and she should never have hired that black magician to pick up the fetus and concoct a love potion that would make Jack forget the abortion, and she apologized for not telling Ying that she’d been conducting a black magic ritual with the spider and the blood offering on the night of a full moon, and only now she realized how useless it all was, but that’s how desperate and heartbroken she’d been, and Ying said with a catch in her throat that it was okay because when she found out that her ex was screwing around on her with three other girls at their university she threatened to have a curse put on him that would make his dick shrivel up and fall off, which made Benz laugh so that tears shimmered on her eyelids.

  By the time they were cried out and done hugging they were not sure whose tears belonged to whom and who was wearing whose perfume.

  At first, it was supposed to be just a few glasses of wine at Benz’s place, but they both needed to relax, so they kept pouring out more wine, dancing to their favorite songs, taking turns playing the stylist and giving each other different hairstyles and makeup that became more and more outlandish the drunker they got. It was like a two-girl teenage slumber party. Since they didn’t want to sleep alone and Ying was too drunk to go home, they got into bed together and it started off innocently enough, just a few cuddles for comfort like beside the shrine, but the wine was a love potion too and neither of them could stomach the idea of sleeping with a man right now and risk getting pregnant, and who would not be flattered that the sexiest girl in the university was coming on to them? More than that, she was shoving her tongue down Ying’s throat as if she wanted to lick her heart while seesawing her hipbone against Ying’s clit (clearly this was far from the first time that Benz had seduced an -other woman). As aggressive and masculine as she was in bed, Benz was still the sort of generous lover who took her
greatest pleasure from pleasuring her partner.

  For all the eroticism of their exchanges, it seemed to Ying like an extension of the other night, when they sat shoulder to shoulder on the bed, propping each other up because it was too much misery for one person to stand alone. Since then their wounds had deepened. Only bites, nips and fingernail scratches could cauterize those wounds or at least redirect the pain to other places where it was more bearable.

  Did it sound ridiculous, did it sound like sober denial excusing the drunken debauch, Ying asked herself later, to say that she was more aroused artistically than sexually? Aroused by the sleek planes of Benz’s face and the pale marble of her flesh, the breasts and abdomen that shifted like Saharan sand dunes at her touch, the Roman column of her neck, the tiny ridges in her lips, and the Cabernet Sauvigon kisses that stained their mouths and throats with red wine as if they were two vampires feasting on each other’s lifeblood. Ying was no longer sleeping with Benz. Now she was sleeping with an idealized reflection of her fascination with poetry, history, mythology, and geography.

  As it turned out, she would never understand Benz’s interest in her, and it would continue to bother her for years. Mostly she would be tempted to see herself, and that night, as one of those typical distractions and sexual experiments of the college years; she was good enough for a quick fuck, but not nearly cool or sexy enough to lavish more time on.

  When Ying fell asleep her soul left her body and ventured into a morgue where a man with magical tattoos and spells written in ancient Khmer script covering his arms and neck and even the sides of his face—could this be the black magician Benz had hired?—who was cutting open the stomach of a dead woman, pregnant with child, to use the fetus to create a “golden child” and baby ghost like Khun Paen had once done in that old folktale of epic proportions. He then placed the fetus, wet and pink with blood, on a barbecue grill and lit the charcoal…