Phantom Lover and Other Thrilling Tales of Thailand

by Jim Algie

  Twitching and blinking, Ying woke up in the birdsong dawn with those sudden spasms of disorientation that always shook her after waking up in someone else’s bed for the first time in a tangle of limbs, sheets, socks and underwear, their arms and hair still intertwined, not knowing where she ended and her lover began.

  Through the gauze of a hangover only beginning to pulse, she saw that, sitting on top of the terrarium housing the bird-eating tarantula, was Benz’s designer handbag, which doubled as the coffin for her half-aborted fetus, snatched the other night and now returned. Beside it was a shrine for the baby ghost that the abbot-cum-exorcist had given Benz. But the glass looked like it contained blood instead of a red soft drink.

  BENZ TOLD HER that she’d talked to the doctor from the clinic and he’d recommended a temple where they could have the fetus cremated. All she had to do was make a decent donation to the abbot of the temple for “renovations” and he would arrange for the cremation after it was dark and the temple was quiet.

  By the time Ying arrived, after having more arguments with her mother and her boyfriend, she felt more liquid than flesh and bone: a witch’s cauldron of antidepressants, tranquilizers and diet pills laced with amphetamines. She would try to say something but Benz would snap, “What’s that supposed to be? Sanskrit? Could you please get it together? You always fall apart in crisis situations and I need you to be strong right now.” The snotty aristocrat was talking to her like a servant again. Had Benz already forgotten the other night and what they’d done together? Did it not mean anything to her?

  Ying sulked and pouted. She would have to revise her opinion of Benz again; she was a bitch and a narcissist who used people as secondary characters and foils in her little dramas. When they no longer amused her, she banished them to the sidelines.

  Even though Ying was wearing her contacts, the temple, with its colored glass mosaic of the Hindu god Indra riding a three-headed elephant, the golden statues of the bird-woman Kinnaree, the main altar with its jumble of Buddha images (dark now except for the candles), and the whitewashed crematorium with its single smokestack, were as blurry and soft around the edges as if she was not wearing her contacts at all.

  Benz was too distracted to notice Ying’s state of distress. She kept going off on angry tirades, “I made the right decision, but if I’d gotten better medical care, if the doctor hadn’t been distracted by the police, then this never would have happened.” But then she’d look at the tiny white coffin and turn her head away to dab at her eyes with a tissue. The coffin was gilded with decorative swirls and crowned angels in flight as if ready to spirit the dead person’s soul away to its next reincarnation.

  The abbot sat on a dais beside the coffin. As the two women knelt before him with their heads bowed, hands raised and palms pressed together, he intoned baritone blessings in Pali, wishing the infant a safe journey to heaven and a good rebirth as a human being.

  As far as Ying could remember, this was almost exactly like going to a real funeral—except the undertakers did not open the lid so the relatives could crack a coconut and pour the water on the face of the deceased as a purification ritual. Instead they slid the coffin into the oven and invited the two women to drop tiny flowers made of sandal-wood on top of it. Benz shook her head and dabbed at her eyes again.

  Ying could not work out why there was another big white coffin inside the oven and two smaller ones as well. It didn’t matter. The flames were mesmerizing. They were like ballerinas leaping and pirouetting, like red snakes wriggling out of the crematorium’s concrete floor. The snakes bared their fangs. They gnawed on the coffins, so the wood blackened, the angels melted and the serpents mated.

  Something was wrong. The smoke was billowing out because the undertakers could not get the metal door of the crematorium to close. Then the wooden coffins began cracking and splintering.

  As fog enveloped them, the “smoke children” swarmed all over Ying like mosquitoes at nightfall in a malarial jungle. Tiny hands pulled her hair, curled around her throat and pushed against her windpipe as toothless mouths brushed against her blouse and sought out her nipples.

  As the smoke thickened, the smell of burning flesh pierced her nose, a smell so strong and putrid that it lodged in her throat like a bone. Ying coughed up phlegm and hacked with such force that it felt like there was spittle coming out of her eyes too.

  She had to get out of there before she suffocated to death, but she didn’t know which way to turn. In a matter of minutes, she had been exiled to the cloudy surface of Jupiter, that gaseous giant, which was hostile to all life forms.

  A baby cried, “Mother,” then another echoed that cry. Still others joined in until there was a chorus of howling children. These were not the cries of hunger and thirst she had heard from her niece and nephew as infants. Not the bawling of a baby with wet diapers or teething pains. These were the shrill cries of abandonment reserved for those middle-of-the-night terrors when waking in the crib to find all was dark and baby was all alone.

  It was the most heartrending ballad Ying had ever heard.

  To comfort them, she began humming. The babies kept crying. She hummed a little louder. The smoke children would not stop wailing. “Be quiet, okay? Please be quiet. You’re driving me crazy.” Ying put her hands over her ears. It didn’t help much. The smoke was so thick she could not make out any outlines or shapes and, in the absence of sight, of anything to take her mind off her ears, their bawling was as relentless as a dentist’s drill.

  Ying’s wordless humming turned into the chorus of that song she was working on, “Lonelier Than All the Graves in China,” but it sounded empty without Dee Dee’s guitar. Where was he? Out with Annie A-Bomb again?

  The crying stopped.

  Then they appeared.

  One by one they swirled through the mist, these infantile phantoms, drifting just out of reach, some missing a nose and a leg, others with no arms, some no more than blobs of flesh while a few had eyes that dominated their entire faces. Now that she saw them up close—saw them for the lost and helpless souls that they were—Ying was not frightened, because they were not menacing.

  The most beautiful thing about babies, she felt, was how unlined and uncomplicated their faces were. She had only seen the smoke children for ten seconds and already she knew exactly how they felt and what they wanted:

  They wanted their parents.

  They wanted to be loved.

  They wanted something to eat and drink.

  They wanted to be cuddled, to not be alone.

  More than anything, they wanted to live. Failing that, they wished to die with a measure of dignity so they could be reborn again in a different womb in a better place and another time.

  Her mind tried to comfort her. The smoke children had been given a proper Buddhist funeral. They were at peace now. They would not cause any more problems. They had only come to say goodbye.

  The smoke cleared for just long enough so she could see that the ugly man with all the magic tattoos and Khmer spells etched on his arms and face was standing close enough to her that she could see the tobacco stains on his teeth. This had to be the black magician Benz had hired. Apart from the tattoos and all the amulets of tiger’s teeth around his neck, with his brown skin and flat nose he looked more like a taxi driver from the northeast. That impression was compounded by the look he gave her, envy giving way to resentment before shame won out in the end and he looked away. If he had any real magical powers he would not have backed down so easily, she thought, experiencing one of those rare moments of lucidity that came now and again on every pharmaceutical binge.

  The smoke closed like a curtain between them and Ying backed up in the opposite direction. For defense, she held out her hands, the palms facing up, unconsciously miming the standing sculptures of the Buddha in the so-called “position of subduing the demon Mara.”

  To her right, a tear opened in the sheet of smoke. Benz appeared. Why was she wearing that pagoda-like crown on her head and the o
ld-fashioned sarong and sash glimmering with golden threads? Slowly and sadly she nodded her head, as if weighing the gravity of what she had to say. “I knew my karma was going to be bad, but this is unbelievable. I am the reincarnation of Wanthong.”

  After weeks of madcap behavior—buying love potions, staging black magic rituals and attempting to bribe the gods of love with nine hundred and ninety-nine roses—had she finally lost her mind altogether?

  Even by her drama-queen standards this was over the top, but she had told Ying that Wanthong was her favorite character in Thai literature, and Benz was most herself when playing other people. That’s when her real passions came to life. Only by playing the most tragic of Siamese heroines could she find a role big enough to accommodate the tragedy of losing her child and boyfriend.

  The fog drifted in again, sealing them off from each other.

  The king told his courtiers, “Go and execute her 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.”

  Ying tried to call out, to warn her, but she could not. The acrid and hallucinogenic smoke that was smelted of flesh burning, bones melting, and blood boiling had clouded over her mind.

  Panting for breath and swooning, Ying stumbled into a room that was freezing cold and lit by fluorescent tubes of light on the ceiling. For warmth she wrapped her arms around herself. As she looked around at all the freezers, the reality sank in by degrees. This was no ordinary room—it was the temple’s morgue and all the freezers were filled with cadavers.

  At the farthest end of the room, standing with his back to her, she saw the black magician pulling out plastic bags from a long freezer. Each bag was filled with what looked like a little rubber doll or a sexless, shapeless blob.

  Another flash of lucidity; he was stealing the corpses of aborted fetuses in order to make the smoke children and golden kids. He looked at her. Then he grinned and whinnied like a horse. So this was also the charlatan who had worn some sort of costume the other night to impersonate that magical horse from Khun Chang Khun Paen.

  The sound of her own fury, restrained by years of passivity and honed to an amplified shriek on-stage, frightened her; it was the sound of a boat ripping free of its moorings in a monsoon season storm, a guard dog growling, a child waking up alone in the night, a woman warding off a rapist; it was all these sounds she’d heard and stored up and now channeled into one soprano shriek that stabbed his inner ear like an ice pick.

  He cringed and looked around. Each time he took a step towards her Ying shrieked again. He stopped and covered his ears. Soon enough, two monks in saffron robes came running in to see what all the commotion was about. While they confronted the black magician, she slipped out the door, to the left of the crematorium.

  At this point the smoke was starting to subside a little. Here and there rents and tears in the smokescreen revealed that Benz costumed as Wanthong was kneeling and praying to an image of the temple’s founding abbot, when the silver flash of a camera lit up her face and crown.

  Who was that?

  Benz did not even flinch. She remained on her knees, genuflecting at the base of the abbot’s image, as the photographer took photo after photo. Everything about her posture suggested that she was repentant and resigned to her repentance.

  Now another photographer approached. These guys had to be paparazzi. Someone had tipped them off.

  Ying should do something. She should warn her and shoo the photographers away. But she was too scared. It was too risky. Then her photos would end up in the paper and her family would never live down the disgrace.

  Either it was brave or cowardly, independent or traitorous—her memory would rerun these scenes over and over again—but Ying snuck out the back of the temple, where it squatted next to a small forest, one of the many parts of Bangkok where the jungle and the city mate, where creepers climb telephone poles and pythons feed on stray cats.

  This was the only way out. At the front of the temple were three police pick-up trucks. Cops milled around them. Their voices and the static on their walkie-talkies blurred into a babble that was unintelligible except for a single note of urgency. This was no routine bust. This was something special.

  Looking out from behind the trunk of a banana tree, Ying saw a dozen policemen fanning out to infiltrate different parts of the temple. Much as she hoped otherwise, she did not think Benz had gathered enough strength to escape. It was not the police who would arrest her; her grief and guilt had already done that.

  To make her escape, Ying had to navigate an obstacle course of branches that groped her, mud that sucked at her ankles, leeches that clung to her arms, neck, and chest.

  As police flashlights swept the outer limits of the temple, Ying crouched down to creep deeper and deeper into the woods. She had to tread lightly. Almost every footstep crunched a twig or dried out leaf.

  In her mind she was moving farther and farther away from everyone she had ever known. Her mother, her band-mates and her boyfriend could not follow her. This was a path she would have to find and make by herself.

  Already Ying knew she would not be able to see Benz ever again; the actress would have to face the scandal without her. Ying could not help her anymore. It had not been her decision to go to the clinic, it was not her fault that the abortion— there, she’d said it at last— had turned out so badly, and she had not arranged the cremation tonight or tipped off the paparazzi either.

  None of this had anything to do with her.

  Over the next few weeks, as the scandal broke, and Benz was stripped of all her movie, TV and modeling contracts, Ying maintained her silence. This was the modern-day equivalent of Siamese adulteresses being branded with golden lotuses.

  For a final display of penance Benz shaved her head and became a nun for nine days in a temple just outside Bangkok. To wash away some of her bad karma, she cleaned the bathrooms of ninety-nine different temples.

  The two women only saw each other one more time, and that encounter was very brief. Benz was walking down the university hallway with her retinue of high-society friends, who now looked more like bodyguards than admirers, and she glanced at Ying who looked away first. Benz was not even out of sight before Ying’s friends, the other indie rockers, began backbiting her. “You know what I heard? That was actually her third or fourth abortion.”

  Completely out of character, Ying snapped, “Why don’t you shut your fucking mouth for once? You don’t even know her.” She slammed her locker shut and stormed off to class.

  Trailing well behind her, Ying sniffed a micron of her perfume which sparked a memory of a French kiss that tasted like red wine.

  The scandal could have been worse, but it was eclipsed by the finding of more than two thousand fetuses at the temple. For years, abortion clinics from all over Bangkok had been using the temple as a morgue and crematorium.

  Ying never finished the history paper on golden lotuses. It was too dangerous, too controversial. Her mother would read it. The professor or another faculty member might realize it was partly about Benz. Besides, Ying was bored of history already and wanted to change majors again.

  Her silence over the abortion and her friendship with Benz was not broken for another six years, until after she’d graduated with a degree in Library Science and taken a job as a librarian. In between shifts at the library, she worked on a novel called Golden Lotuses and Bat Lilies about a 21st century actress who is a reincarnation of a 15th century adulteress and former concubine in the royal court.

  Towards the end of the book, she wrote: “Trudging through the dark forest, her clothes sodden and heavy with swamp water, her shoes squelching, a cop’s voice garbled and distorted by a megaphone somewhere behind her, Anne could finally identify with Wanthong. In the end, Wanthong was not even allowed the relief of death. She was reborn as an “unhappy spirit” wh
o haunted rainforests and foraged for scraps around town limits. The two of them were sisters now, sisters from centuries apart condemned to a similarly lonely fate: the detested traitor who had not conformed to society’s norms by choosing a proper husband, and the spoiled singer who had been forced to take a vow of silence, to never repeat what had happened over the last few weeks, except under the guise of a supposedly fictitious story. Such was the repressiveness of patriarchal power in her country that women could only turn to prose, poetry, plays and songs to relate their taboo woes.

  “Still sick, still high from the acrid smoke, Anne felt twinges inside her guts. She stopped and put her hands on her stomach. Was it gas or a stomachache? It almost felt like a baby kicking inside her. Now it felt like the baby was scampering up her chest, squeezing her lungs and, hand over tiny hand, crawling up her throat, until it grabbed the corners of her mouth and pulled them apart like curtains, to emerge in a puff of smoke: a toy-sized version of the little boy on the back of that motorcycle, except now he was riding a swallow with a broken beak. Anne began coughing and coughing. She coughed up a notebook of song lyrics, wadded paper balls of her unfinished essay on golden lotuses, an empty wine bottle she had shared with Bee, two roaches of marijuana, a pair of earrings from a backstabbing, ex-friend she would never talk to again, the black petals of a bat lily, a photo of her and another ex smiling on some sunlit beach, a memory stick full of songs which had never been released, and a love letter to Bee she had never dared to send.

  “As they came out of her mouth, each of the abortions dissolved into smoke, like all her big plans, and groups, and love affairs, that came to nothing in the end. On the breeze, her stillborn brainchildren floated away the same as the smoke billowing from the crematorium’s white tower. The smoke came from thousands of fetuses reduced to ashes that dusted leaves and smudged windshields, darkened the eyes of the fetus sleeping inside the moon, and left empty graves no larger than a sigh in their parents’ hearts.”