Phantom Lover and Other Thrilling Tales of Thailand

by Jim Algie

  Yves had always been in awe of healers, those doctors and nurses who tend to physical injuries, and those sympathetic souls like Wade who provide emotional healing in times of tragedy.

  Within a matter of minutes, the girl had bounced back and was looking at Wade as if he were a long-lost family member. At the door he said, “All righty, Roz. I’m gonna check up on you again in an hour or so, but what I want you to do is keep looking at that card and thinkin’ about them horses and ski hills. Chin up, sweetheart. Soon as we find your parents we’ll send ‘em over in a jiffy.”

  Wade continued making his rounds. He got the graying Japanese golf pro, uninjured but almost catatonic with grief he could not describe, on his feet to help him improve his swing using a crutch. With the Yugoslavian grandfather, whose English vocabulary was also minimal, Wade did impersonations of Donald Duck and other Disney characters. For the twin teenaged brothers from Finland whose missionary parents had both been killed, he recited Biblical anecdotes and sayings. “Jesus said that who so shall believe in me shall enter the kingdom of heaven and enjoy everlasting life.”

  In between these encounters, he kept throwing challenges at Yves. “C’mon. Get in the game, bud. Nobody cares if you got anything clever or witty to say. I certainly don’t. They just wanna hear some kind words or dumb jokes and have somebody tell ‘em everything is gonna be okay.”

  Part of Yves’s reticence stemmed from the fact that he couldn’t bring himself to admit he had been wrong about Wade, and part of that harsh judgment stemmed from his jealousy of Watermelon’s new fiancé. Their brotherly/sisterly routine had not fooled his wife or Wade.

  His first impressions of Wade had not been favorable. The guy looked like a cartoon of a Canadian redneck on vacation: the loud beach shorts, the Singha Beer singlet, the faded tattoos of hot rods and bare-breasted pinups, and the baseball cap with the Moosehead Beer logo and two yellow antlers sticking out of the crown. He talked louder than anyone else in the bar, and if he liked what someone had said, he’d say, “Now you’re talkin’,” and hold out his hand to offer them a handshake, “Put ‘er here, bud.” Then he slapped them on the back, nice and hard, to show his dominance over the pack as an alpha male. Whenever Yai put on a hard rock song he liked, Wade would start head-banging and playing air guitar. “I love AC/ DC, eh? Right up there with Led Zep as the best band ever I reckon.” He told long rambling stories about getting up at 4 a.m. to clear the latest blizzard with his snowplow, and getting high before hitting the road. “First joint of the day is always the sweetest.” He mimed taking a drag. “Then I step on the gas and give ‘er.” Wade told them, and half the bar who was forced to listen to this loudmouth, how a cougar had chased him when he was mountain-biking in Jasper. “I saw him runnin’ alongside the trail. Every year we lose two or three mountain bikers to those cocksuckers. Usually they hide on top of a rock and pounce when you ride past.”

  Stephan, wearing his sunglasses on his head and a Thai silk scarf around his neck, kept baiting him. “Maybe you can go out and wrestle some water buffalo tonight, uh? Have a Thai rodeo.”

  “Oh, I get it. Hearty fuckin’ har har. The east coast Quebecois liberal who keeps stealin’ all our oil and taxing us up the wazoo for it, now wants to put us down for being salt of the earth. Well, you got another think comin’, buddy.”

  “So now you will take me outside for some rough justice and fisticuffs to prove what a macho man you are. I am not scared of you, my friend. In Quebec we have the Hell’s Angel’s. They are my hashish dealers and I learn many fighting moves from them.”

  Yves told Stephan to shut up in French. Half the other tourists clustered around the bar were staring at them now, while Yai pretended to be washing glasses so he could continue sneaking peeks at a couple of Scandinavian women wearing tie-dyed tops and denim shorts.

  Yves looked out at the dark sea. He looked over at the glass case behind the bar where all the bottles of spirits were illuminated by soft lights, their contents glowing like magic potions in an alchemist’s lab (he gauged his alcohol intake by how fanciful his metaphors became, which meant that by now he was really plastered). He looked around the lounge at all the tourists tanned prawn pink and golden brown happily discussing the highlights of their itineraries.

  What he wanted to avoid looking at was the two bickering drunks.

  Wade tapped him on the shoulder. “Can you help me out here and call this guy off? I mean, what’s this clown yakking about anyway? Last time I had a fight was back in Grade 5 or 6. I’m a pacifist, eh? Even when I’m channel surfing and some violent action movie comes on, I keep flickin’ those channels.”

  In the hospital, Wade continued to surprise him. He possessed a depth of compassion that Yves could not fathom. Like a lot of intellectuals, Yves had a habit of overcomplicating people and over-analyzing situations. Wade was too straight-forward for that kind of character study. He loved being around people. They saw that and responded in kind. It was no more complicated than that.

  But Wade would not be a pacifist for much longer. After the tsunami receded, its undercurrents continued to ripple through the survivors, changing them in ways they could never have foreseen. Those changes began to make themselves felt when the two of them volunteered to be part of the cleanup crew at Khao Lak. After asking the famous forensics expert with the porcupine quills of punk hair, Dr Pornthip Rojanasunan, what they could do to help, she suggested that they use Wade’s camera to take as many photos as possible of the dead. “In this heat, the bodies will not last long. We need photos of tattoos, earrings, watches, scars—anything that family and friends can identify.”

  It was only twelve hours after the waves had hit and nobody knew who was supposed to be in charge. Soldiers, cops, civil servants, nurses, field staff from several Christian NGOs, rescue workers from private Thai firms, and dozens of would-be volunteers, both locals and foreigners, were milling around the trashed town and the beach, strewn with debris. Wade managed to rent a dirt bike from the one rental shop which hadn’t been inundated. His take-charge attitude impressed Yves, who was still in a state of shellshock, like many of the other survivors wandering around, jittery from too much coffee and dazed by too little sleep.

  “Hop on the back. Crisis management is my specialty, eh? At the ski resort, whatever goes wrong, if a blizzard snows in the main road, or a pipe freezes and breaks, or a shitter gets blocked up, if Wade can’t fix it, then it ain’t broke. That’s our motto.”

  It was a good thing that Wade had been a motocross racer in his teens, because the “road” out of town was an obstacle course of uprooted trees, boulders, long-tail boats broken in two, cars laying on their roofs, and bodies—bodies strewn everywhere like fallen soldiers on a battlefield. Wade stopped the bike. “I’m drivin’ and you’re shooting. That’s the deal, bud.”

  The fetid smell of damp and rot, as if the sea had puked up its guts, swam on the breeze. Yves dismounted. He looked at the ocean. It was calm now. The sun was sparkling off those sapphire waves. The water was one hundred meters away. This was as close as Yves could get without panicking. Even so, he could not turn his back on the sea, for fear it would pounce like one of those mountain lions Wade talked about.

  Cautiously, Yves approached the first body, a young boy in a cartoon T-shirt, lying on his back in a crucifixion pose. The boy looked like he was sleeping not dead. Framing that angelic face streaked with mud, Yves pictured him unwrapping his presents and singing “Jingle Bells” and “Silent Night” on Christmas the other day. He put down the camera. This was going to be harder than he’d thought.

  Since he had no experience in this kind of photography, he had to follow the advice of an Australian photographer he sometimes collaborated with. Kendall had told him, “When I was shooting all those corpses in the streets of Bangkok in 1992 I used the camera like a shield. It was a buffer zone between me and the victims. What I do is concentrate on the technical details, the composition, the lighting, etcetera. You can’t think to yourself, �
��Here’s a young Sheila cut down in the prime of life before she even graduated from uni,’ or this job will drive ya bonkers, mate.”

  Kendall was right. He could not allow himself to view these cadavers as people who had, until yesterday, lived, worked, cracked jokes, got married, rode bicycles and made love. So Yves pretended he was a European art photographer taking experimental shots of a tropical beach where nature had mutated into all sorts of strange forms. Those arms and legs scattered across the sand were driftwood, that mane of hair seaweed, the torso a tree trunk, that spray of blood across the deck chair a masterpiece of abstract expressionism, the hook of an anchor sunk into a scalp was based on the Christian symbolism in Moby Dick, those blue eyes were marbles, that hand a tree branch, the woman who looked a little like Watermelon, dismembered and sprawled across the roots of a mangrove tree sticking up out of the sand, was part of a fertility shrine to the Water Goddess.

  It was an exhausting game, worn down by overkill and the thirty-five Celsius heat, which fell apart whenever they met the other beachcombers, usually looking for their families and friends.

  Squatting like a duck in the shade of an orange fishing trawler beached on a sandbar was a Thai-Muslim fisherman who had lost his home and all seventeen of his relatives. All he had left was the shorts, sandals and a chain of amulets he was wearing. A wiry man whose muscles were sailor’s knots and whose skin had been charred by the sun, he pointed at the shoreline where nothing remained except a couple of wooden posts sticking out of the sand. Yves had trouble following the rapid-fire southern dialect, and Wade only knew a few words of survival Thai, but the fisherman seemed to be saying that all fifty of the houses along the shore, including the school, where a few dozen students were in class when the tsunami struck, had been washed away. He kept looking back at the sunlit beach, as if expecting the village to materialize again as quickly as it had been rubbed out by that eraser of water, then he’d repeat the same line, “There used to be a village here, a school, my home and family, a pier, all our fishing boats. Where have they gone?”

  This would be the undertow of almost all the conversations that Yves and Wade would have with their fellow survivors over the next few months: how tenuous life was, how quickly it could all end, and how anything you could possibly build could be destroyed just as easily. Some fell into a black hole of listless despair for months afterwards, like Watermelon. She didn’t want to go out, didn’t want to talk to anybody, didn’t feel like pursuing any of her old passions for making jewelry and shopping for clothes and antiques—because it was all futile. Why bother? If another disaster didn’t destroy all the things she’d accumulated, then an accident like the one that killed her first husband would ruin her love life, and even if those could be averted, old age and death trumped everyone in the end. She was better off staying home to practice meditation and study Buddhism. Only those eternal truths and everyone’s karma, their balance sheet of good and bad deeds, could survive. All else was ephemeral and doomed to pass.

  In the backwash of the catastrophe, Yves would alternate being overly cautious (not jaywalking and even refusing fish because of a fear he would choke to death on the bones) and returning to smoke, drink and party like there was no tomorrow, because maybe there wouldn’t be.

  Before showering, he would leave the bathroom door ajar and then place his clothes, wallet and shoes on the toilet seat. In case of an emergency, he was ready to bail out immediately.

  And there would be many such emergencies in the weeks to come when the aftershocks jolted the survivors out of their beds at two in the morning and someone screamed “Tsunami!” Bolting down hallways and through parking lots did them no good, because they could not outrace the flashbacks that projected themselves on the pavement, across billboards, up the sides of buildings, and turned the sky into a cinema screen where their memories played like drive-in horror movies and the taste of their own sweat tossed them back in the sea to be drowned and revived, and drowned and water-boarded, over and over again.

  WADE KEPT HIMSELF busy making a map for the rescue workers of where the bodies were. He had not yet spoken to anyone about where he’d been on Boxing Day. That morning he had gone on a snorkeling trip via longtail boat, with a young couple from Scotland and a Swedish mother with her three daughters. Wade did not remember anything about them except that one of the three blonde girls had a pink T-shirt that read “I’m Crabby” with an illustration of a crab on it. En route, the diesel engine spewed black fumes, the girls shrieked and giggled, while the adults made the usual traveler talk about where they’d been and what they’d done, what destination was next on the itinerary, and different hotels, bars, restaurants and tours they recommended.

  They had not reached the first coral reef when they caught sight of the wave coming towards them. At first the boatman had turned around and tried to outrace it. When the wave began spitting on their necks and bearing down on them like a dam on water-skis, the boatman made a risky move to turn the vessel around and try to ride the wave like a surfer. He got a few meters up the wall of water before gravity took over and the front of the boat reared up and flipped over backwards. The three girls were tossed over Wade’s head. Their mother leapt up to catch them but the boatman’s propeller sliced down and cut off her right arm just above the elbow. From Wade’s perspective, as he dove off the side of the boat, it looked like the sun had spurted a geyser of blood.

  Buffeted by waves, Wade tried to bandage her arm with his T-shirt, but she kept begging him in Swedish, English, and the sobs of a mother who has lost her children and her reason to live, “Don’t waste time on me. I am dead already. You hear me? I am bleeding to death. Please try to save my daughters.”

  Wade tried one free dive to search for the boat and the three girls, but the sea was too deep and far too murky. By the time he surfaced the woman was gone and so was everyone else. Either she’d summoned a last gasp of maternal love to search for her daughters or bled to death and sank along with her final wish.

  Through a turbulent sea, Wade swam five kilometers to shore with what was later diagnosed as a broken collarbone. Shock had numbed it, so the symptoms, even the pain, hibernated for a few days. But the collarbone never mended properly. For the rest of his life, whenever he got in the shower, or the sea, the liquid caress of water set off depth charges under his skin: tiny explosions of pain, each connected to a memory of that fatal odyssey.

  Flares of anger also aggravated it. Nobody had ever pissed him off like the bureaucrats, with their endless requests for more paperwork, who kept turning down his requests for grants. To help the locals keep their heads above water after the disaster had destroyed tourism in the Andaman, and to resuscitate the scuba-diving business, Wade eventually set up a foundation to train locals as dive instructors. He named the foundation after Watermelon, using her real Thai name, Chariya Attapakee.

  “Listen to this one, bud, same as all the others.” His lips moved when he read the email to Yves. “‘We regret to inform you that your proposal does not meet our criteria at the moment.’ Now how do you like that? Here I am, an honest businessman trying to help the local economy and give people jobs, but the fat cats won’t play ball. All these lazy useless fucks from the big aid organizations do is drive through in their SUVs, roll down the window for a minute, look around and they have the nerve to call that an inspection tour. Then they drive back to Phuket to eat in a five-star restaurant and stay in a luxury hotel. I’m on to these guys, eh? What they do is get what’s called ‘preferred provider status’, which means they only have to kick in twenty percent of all the donations they receive. Imagine the millions and millions of dollars being donated right now and eighty percent is going to feed these fat cats and their bureaucratic machines. For crying out loud, Yves, it’s a fuckin’ disgrace.”

  Wade’s constant tirades against bureaucrats were difficult enough to endure; watching him assault a Thai police officer had been much worse. That happened on the third day they were out doing experimental
art photography on the beach. Yves had taken to giving the photographs names that belied their morbid nature: “The semiotics of the sandman”; “Deconstructionism is not humanism”; “Still life with coconut shells”; “Three limbs in search of a body.” The cold nature of highbrow art that bypasses the heart to go straight for the head served as a dyke to keep any of his personal feelings at bay.

  But all the feelings that he and the other volunteers dammed up would burst open like blood blisters in the oddest of places at the most unexpected times. Coming back through the airport at Phuket on a late night flight almost three weeks after the waves hit, Yves looked around at all the posters for missing persons—hundreds of them, pasted to pillars and thumbtacked to notice boards. He pulled out his notebook to jot down a few details.

  At this point, there was no chance that any of the missing were still alive. The faces that stared at him from color photocopies and black-and-white mug shots were all deceased. So the posters, mentioning their names and nationalities, physical descriptions and where they were last seen, read like obituaries in miniature. As a journalist who had spent years crafting the most sensationalistic obituaries for a large American tabloid, this angle appealed to him.

  Through taking notes and photographs, he had worked his way through a cross-section of children and adults of Asian and European ancestry, when he stopped before a poster for a middle-aged Hungarian woman. Her badly photocopied image was washed out, her personal details inked in a shaky hand. By who? Yves wondered. Her child? A husband or sibling? “Piri has a big mole on her neck.”