Phantom Lover and Other Thrilling Tales of Thailand

by Jim Algie

  The cat lived in the present. He had no past. He never worried about the future.

  In ancient Siam, these creatures were held sacred. To kill a feline was deemed as heinous as killing a novice monk. That’s why they are still referred to by the nickname of phra noi or “little monk.”

  Those wise men and women of ancient Siam had described that side of him perfectly. Laying there in quiet concentration he was like a monk practicing meditation.

  The cat couldn’t care less about any of the things that I was worrying about: love and work, success and money. As my old mate Mick would have said, were he still alive, “He don’t give a rat’s arse about all that bollocks.”

  Fang watched the female strays walk through the parking lot, but he didn’t chase after them. No amount of coaxing from me, “Put out the love vibe, man. At least one of us should go out and get some pussy,” or insults, “You are the most useless and slothful creature on the planet,” or self-pity, “You and me are about as appealing to females as yeast infections,” made the least bit of difference to him.

  His existence was one of monastic simplicity. How little it takes to sustain life: food, water, shelter, a little companionship. Everything else is superfluous. Everything else, if worse comes to worse, can be eliminated.

  In a divorce, it’s best to purge as much as possible, for even the most basic utensils—the pestle once pressed into service as a makeshift sex toy and the cutlery that was a wedding present from a now deceased relative—have been imprinted with all sorts of personal, and now painful, associations.

  So I threw out boxes and boxes of junk. I had to get back to the animal necessities of life and sharpen my survival instincts like he sharpened his claws every hour or two.

  When a new job came up in Hong Kong, I decided that the cat had to stay. He was another totem of remembrances I longed to forget.

  On the day of my departure, I explained the situation to White Fang in the parking lot. “You’re not really an apartment cat or a domesticated feline. You need your own territory and plenty of room to go roaming at night. So it’s best for you to stay here,” I said in that matter-of-fact tone people always use when they want to break someone else’s heart and let themselves off the hook of guilt. It’s all for your own good. I only want you to be happy. Which is the worst sort of self-serving fraud—tantamount to a denial of any personal liability.

  The cat must have understood all this about as well as I understood any of my wife’s reasons for leaving me, meaning not at all.

  At the front gate, I turned around and called, “Fang.”

  Wouldn’t you know it, but after nine months and a thousand repetitions, the cat finally acknowledged his name.

  IN THE GENTRIFIED fishing village of Sai Kung where I took up residence, I usually saw a few stray cats when I was coming home from work at night. Most of them ran away when I approached. Some of the more feral ones tried to scratch me if I got too close. Only a few stuck around for a couple of pats before they wandered off too.

  Even if I lived with one of the friendlier cats for a year, I couldn’t imagine any of them wanting to sleep with their faces snuggled in my armpit.

  All of them were felines. None of them was White Fang.

  He was as irreplaceable as any friend or spouse.

  When I started missing the cat it was often in concert with The Only Ones’ ballad “Out There in the Night.” For the longest time, I’d thought it was a lament for a lost lover, but when I did an interview with the singer, Peter Perret, he said he’d actually written the song about his cat, who disappeared one night and never came back.

  To improvise a little on the chorus, “Sometimes I think of White Fang out there in the night,” and I worried that he was back in the fluorescent-lit parking lot, lying beside the wheel of a car, the dirt and oil graying his white fur as he waited for a partner who would never return, with no one to give him any more “Eskimo kisses” or show him any affection at all.

  Or has the bitch—sorry, I meant the “little prick”—forgotten all about me and everything I ever did for them?

  That wasn’t fair. I guess it’s possible that the “little monk” with crooked fangs felt more like, and Buddhism insists that all living creatures have feelings: Why was the two-legged animal so kind to me only to abandon me in the end?

  He’ll never know and, all alibis aside, neither will I.

  TSUNAMI

  For Julia Lazarus, we’ll always have Cadaques, and Ed Bovard, thanks for the homecoming way down south

  Yves looked up from his paperback to see that the tide had gone out by at least fifty meters. That was strange. The last time he’d checked the bay was filled with swimmers scissoring through a sea the color of melted-down sapphires and waders kneeing through foamy waves that fizzed along the sand to scuttle hermit crabs and leave shells in their wake.

  Now tourists were walking around on the seabed and locals, protected from the sun by trousers and long-sleeved shirts, were picking up fish flopping around in the muck and stuffing them into bags and pockets.

  The silence was also odd. A short while ago the air had sparkled with birdsong. Along the shoreline he’d seen herons and kingfishers using their beaks as spears and spades. Now it was quiet and the birds had flown.

  Where were his wife and Stephan? He scanned the seabed and ocean. He looked over each shoulder at the hundreds of sunbathers laying on towels or deck chairs. Many of them had also noticed the sea receding and heard the silence that was like a held breath.

  Yves got to his feet and put on his money belt. Somebody shouted. He looked towards the shore. All the people in the bay were running towards him. Squinting into the sunlight, far out to sea he saw a gigantic wave approaching.

  Yves ran towards the shore to find his wife and oldest friend as tourists clambered out of the muddy bay and ran past him, shouting warnings in a dozen different languages.

  The bay was almost empty now and he couldn’t see Zara or Stephan anywhere. They must be in one of the beachfront restaurants having a coffee or fruit shake.

  He put his hand over his eyes to cut the glare. This was no ordinary wave. It was the size of a waterfall, white as lightning and loud as spring thunder.

  Yves ran towards the line of resorts and restaurants, his sandals slapping against his heels.

  He would be condemned to remember this moment for the rest of his life and feel the guilt nibble at his conscience; the moment he abandoned his wife, and Stephan, and his reason, in favor of a blind terror and survival instinct that overrode everything else.

  WATERMELON KNEW it was a mistake to go out on the jet-ski without paying proper respect to the Water Goddess first, but ever since she’d gotten engaged to Wade she had stopped performing many of the old rituals like that, because he would make fun of her, “What in the heck are you doing now, sweetie?” with that mocking tone in his voice.

  He didn’t understand anything about Mother Nature. It was important to show her respect and treat her with caution. Her moods were unpredictable.

  The Water Goddess was a changeling. She could inhabit millions of different forms: an octopus or a manta ray, a coral reef or a purple sea anemone. All of them were alive and all of them were part of a bigger entity known as the ocean. Calling her a goddess was short hand.

  But Wade had spent too much time in cities to understand any of this. He could not smell the rain minutes before the clouds ruptured. He didn’t know how to see the forecast for an entire rice harvest in a single stalk of rice. He was unable to hear the warning sounds in the number of times a gecko burped or see future prophecies in his dreams.

  Three nights before the tsunami hit she had told him that they should leave the resort, that something bad was going to happen, because in her dream the ocean had spewed up everything it had swallowed: fishing trawlers and sailors’ skeletons, mountains of garbage and plastic, coconuts and battleships, in one great “Churning of the Ocean,” like had once happened in that Buddhist story about the
search for the ambrosia of immortality.

  Wade laughed. “What? Like that sculpture in the Bangkok airport showing how the world was created by all those gods and turtles and serpent kings crawling out of the waves?”

  Watermelon said, “We cannot know for sure. Everything is always changing in Buddhism.”

  Yves, who said he was her older brother and defender, came to her rescue as always, which was both kind and condescending of him. He was always talking about ideas and metaphors that were supposed to be one thing but somehow applied to something else, or substituted one theory for another. “Sounds to me like that Hindu creation myth was a few thousand years ahead of Darwin’s theory of evolution and how life first arose in the sea and only evolved on land later.”

  Yves and Wade would conduct their boring debates for hours. It was like watching a ping pong game except the points were harder to tally. Their arguments went around in circles and never came to any conclusions. That was Buddhism, too, all these wheels within wheels spinning around forever and ending up nowhere.

  The Western men she had met in the different go-go bars where she had once worked all loved to talk about progress. That was their favorite subject: new computers that were faster, new phones that were smarter, new cars that were more energy efficient and new planes that could carry more passengers. She would not be rude and tell them they were mistaken; none of these inventions changed the cycle of life even one little bit. No one could escape from the Buddhist Wheel of the Law and the endless cycle of birth, aging, suffering, death, and rebirth.

  They were so busy analyzing life that they couldn’t enjoy any of it. While they prattled on about politics and buying real esate, she was savoring the delicate combination of flavors in a sour tamarind soup with shrimp. The cook had used flowers from the hummingbird tree, or scarlet wisteria, in his recipe. She and the waitress, who was also a northern girl, and had the soft voice and gentle demeanor that are their genetic birthrights, talked about how the flowers made the flavor linger on the tongue for longer and gave the soup a richer smell.

  As a girl, she had learned the art and the necessity of making herself almost invisible in the company of men. The Western women she talked to, or who used to try and pick her up in the bar, didn’t understand that this invisibility was not negative. It allowed the women to strengthen their ties, because they controlled the family and finances anyway, and it allowed her the time to cultivate her inner life. Like a plant drinking in sunshine, she absorbed all the most pleasant aspects of what was happening around her: the ocean sighing and tossing in its sleep, the breeze fluttering past that caressed the hairs on her forearms, the candlelight burnishing the wooden table, and all the smiling people on holiday dressed in bright colors.

  Yves, who was always asking her all sorts of penetrating questions and borrowing her responses to put in his stories, had once asked her, “Why don’t you get bitter and turn to drugs and drink and despair like so many of the other bargirls do?”

  “Because my inside life is very strong and I must be strong for my daughter. I take care my inside life and plant new seeds like a garden, only beautiful seeds, nothing ugly, nothing violence, only soft lights, nice food and gentle music. A flower looks soft, but it’s very hard. The monsoon rains come and beat the flowers down, but they bend and not break. Maybe it not make sense for farang people, who always get so loud and angry and aggressive, but Thai people understand that you must be very soft to become very strong.”

  In between topping up their drinks, as quietly and unobtrusively as possible, she marveled at the sky. With each passing moment it darkened a little more. In the mountains where she grew up the dusk was never this blue. The only shade she’d ever seen like it was the dye from the indigo plant her mother used to make woven cotton shirts for the men who toiled in the fields.

  Now and then, as a matter of politeness, Yves or Wade would ask for her opinion on some boring political subject, but she’d only repeat that old Thai expression, “Politics is an illusion, but rice and fish are real.” They did not have to know that it was one of her late husband’s favorite expressions. Repeating it aloud was a homing signal for his spirit, so they could find each other again and be reunited in a future life.

  At least he wasn’t as dull as Wade, whose main hobby was traveling around in circles via car, motorcycle, all-terrain vehicle, gokart or jet-ski. To keep him happy, there she was, fully dressed and wearing a balaclava to protect her skin, circling the bay at Khao Lak on a whiny jet-ski that skimmed the waves like a dragonfly. A mist of sea spray dusted her lips with salt.

  Arcing into another turn, sunlight sparkling off the foam-flecked waves, she saw the wall of water approaching, only a few hundred meters away. Watermelon banked the jet-ski towards the shore but another wave sideswiped her, pitching her headfirst into the water. Furiously dogpaddling, she propelled herself towards the jet-ski with saltwater stinging her eyes. Finally she climbed back on the jet-ski, gunned the throttle and pointed it towards the beach.

  Looking over her shoulder, she saw the wave bearing down on her. She took off her Buddhist amulet and held it up in the direction of the water, screaming the same mantra over and over again. But even the Buddha and the Water Goddess must have been deafened by this dragon-loud roar.

  ON HIS DAY off from bartending at a five-star resort, Yai would sit on the beach watching all the white women sunbathing and walking around in their bikinis. In his eyes, their semi-nudity was both heroic and blasphemous, as they openly flouted all the rules and taboos of Thai society. Even watching them lying on their beach towels, nipples upturned to the sun, or staring at their hips in the tiniest of thongs bisecting their buttocks as they sashayed across the sand, suggested a degree of freedom that was intoxicating to behold. If one only had the courage to be that brave and open to the elements and all that life offered, what would not be possible?

  He had often heard tourists, especially the American Marines on Cobra Gold, talk about freedom, but this was the only proof he’d ever seen that there was such a thing.

  The statuesque blondes from Scandinavia, California and Australia’s Gold Coast were his favorites. They had the sea in their eyes, the waves in their hips, and their hair looked like it had been woven from sunbeams. On the beach, they looked so natural and at home that they had probably been leopard sharks and manta rays in a previous life.

  At the bar, during his nightly shift, his old friend Yves pestered him. “Stop obsessing over these blondes and go and talk to one.”

  “They not interesting in me. They want only rich, good-looking guys.”

  “Well, they certainly don’t want men with no self-confidence or pride. So I guess you’ll just have settle for porn movies about Swedish air hostesses.”

  “Why I want look some guy with cock same same baseball bat fucking some girl like he’s doing pushups in the gym? Nothing sexy in porno movie. I’m not sure if they want to make love or lose calories. Not my style.”

  “Yes, some men go to an art gallery or a church in search of beauty and transcendence, or they look to politics and human rights for freedom and higher ideals, but Yai goes to the beach and leers at blondes in bikinis.” Yves made fun of him in such a playfully Thai way, constantly grinning in between clauses, that he could not take offense.

  But the former snake-handler’s days off on the beach were also a torment, for he could no longer walk around in nothing but beach shorts and a saucy grin like these lucky white guys did. His arms, chest and legs had been scarred by so many snakebites that he had to cover up as much as possible. And he had to wear a baseball cap too, because his skin was already beer-bottle brown. The sunglasses allowed him to peek in privacy.

  After an hour or two it was like window shopping in a mall where he could not afford to buy anything—more torture than pleasure.

  As Yai came out of the bathroom in the resort, parting a curtain of seashells hanging in strings for a doorway, he heard screams coming from the beach. Out on the sand it was pandemo
nium. Some tourists ran towards the main road, while others stood there pointing out to sea at this massive wave coming in. An old Muslim vendor carrying shoulder poles strung with inflatable cartoon animals scurried past, yelling something in the southern Thai dialect that Yai could only halfway make out: “Run for your lives! It’s the end of the world. Allah is punishing all the sinners in this beach resort.”

  Most of the Thai staff from the resort were right behind him, fearing a natural disaster that forecast a supernatural apocalypse. Yai was not so easily cowed. He jogged towards the shoreline, flipflops sinking into the sand with each step, keeping an eye out for Yves and some of the other hotel guests who were his regulars at the Sea Breeze Cocktail Lounge. Except for some parents frantic with fright as they searched for their children, and friends beach-combing for friends, nobody was walking towards the water.

  From his vantage point, the wave looked to be about a kilometer long and ten to fifteen meters high. The last stragglers, locals carrying buckets of fish and a dozen or so foreign adventurers, were now scrambling through the mucky seabed towards the beach.

  Yai was turning around when he heard a kid cry out for help. Near the shore, dressed in a turquoise bathing suit, a little girl was waving at him. Yai ran over to her. She was limping around on one foot. It looked like she’d twisted an ankle. With her platinum hair and blue eyes, she could have been the daughter of one of those Viking goddesses, and she had the standoffish disposition to match. “My mom told me not to talk to strange men.”

  “I’m not a strange man. I am a superhero, same as Spider-man.” Yai laughed and smiled at her, but this petulant little princess stood there looking at him like he was a waiter or a bellboy.

  “Spider-man isn’t Asian. He’s white.” Even the little Western girls treated him as an inferior.

  “Listen,” he said, an edge of anxiety slicing through the words, “do you see that wave coming? Do you see how close it is?”