Phantom Lover and Other Thrilling Tales of Thailand

by Jim Algie

  Kendall jotted down notes with declining enthusiasm. He would not be able to sell this story. Two angles are almost always out of bounds in journalism: any criticism of the media itself, and any attacks on corporate advertisers. He looked up, “Anything else?”

  “We’ve been through a lot down here, like SARS and the bird flu. Both were non-events, but you guys blew ‘em up so big that all the tourists stayed away and I had to lay off half my staff. All I’m asking is don’t punish us again. You guys come down here and shit —it’s like getting hit by a second tsunami.”

  Kendall laughed but the other man did not. “Fair comment. I thought we were supposed to be the fourth estate but maybe we’re just the second tsunami.”

  That guy’s quip turned out to be the most prophetic quote of his short stay down south. He was not surprised by the devastation that he saw in Khao Lak, because he’d prepared himself for that. But he was surprised by the number of media on hand, and the number of tourists who thought they were now “citizen journalists” because they had a digital camera or a smartphone and a website or blog. Beside every ruined resort, behind every overturned car, next to every rescue team with hunting dogs, was somebody taking photos. He couldn’t even frame a shot without another photographer getting in the way.

  Down by the beach, at a makeshift pier the authorities had constructed to drop off bodies, the situation was more extreme. At press conferences and rock concerts, outside courthouses and parliament buildings, Kendall had fought his way through rugby matches of journalists bumping elbows and egos, but this was absurd. This was a travesty of media ethics he hadn’t seen since that near-death experience catapulted him into the Festival of the Hungry Ghosts with those Eurasian vultures shadowing him everywhere and growing out of that poor Vietnamese woman’s feet.

  As the fishermen dragged corpses tied together with ropes behind their long-tail boats to the pier, because they considered it bad luck to bring them onboard, and the authorities fished them out of the water to wrap them in white bandages, a scrum of fifty or sixty photographers all jostled each other as they jockeyed for close ups. Fighting to photograph a murderer or rock star was only a reflection of the public’s voyeurism, but competing to photograph corpses was, in his eyes and viewfinder, like vultures getting in a flap over dead meat.

  When he finally met up with Yves, his old mate and collaborator, at the bar and restaurant down the street from Wat Yanyao in Takuapa, Yves asked him why he wasn’t taking any photos. Kendall said, “It’s the smell.”

  “Of all the bodies?”

  “No, all the photographers.”

  Yves laughed. “I can always count on you to have a sardonic take on the bullshit and conmen in this business.”

  The waitress poured more beer in their glasses and added ice cubes to them from a metal bucket on a stand for beverages at the side of the table.

  “I called up a photo editor in Oz and she told me she’s already got a thousand free images from citizen journalists she can use. The standards have fallen so low now that it doesn’t matter that half of ‘em are crap and the other half are the usual clichés about weeping widows and starving orphans. Your feature in The Australian was the only original story I’ve read so far. Fucking ripper yarn, mate. Good on ya. That old parable about the Sheila whose husband died and she comes to see the Buddha about it is something I never heard. Then that search for the person who put the poster up for that missing woman in the Phuket airport really tied it all together.”

  Kendall had forgotten how uncomfortable Yves looked when anybody asked him about his work or personal life and how he covered it up with a series of mumbled niceties and by ducking for cover under his crow’s nest of black hair. “Uhh, cheers, thanks. I appreciate it. Guess it turned out okay in the end.”

  “What happened in the end? Did they find that woman?”

  Whenever Yves got onto one of his two favorite subjects, spirituality or the macabre, Kendall had noticed how he rose out of himself. His spine straightened. His grey eyes were piercing as nails. He kept gesturing with his cigarette for emphasis and running his hands through his hair. And he buried any of his infrequent, personal confessions in the middle of these spiels. “No, Piri is still missing, but the parable is about someone grieving who should not be left on their own, and her brother, this really morose truck driver, is still searching for her. I had this little old Thai lady for a psychiatrist in Bangkok who was treating me for severe depression. I know more about psychiatry than she ever will, but she was very kind and sympathetic, and she told me that parable, which I then repeated to the Hungarian guy and introduced him to some other people looking for their missing relatives. So they all formed an ad-hoc support network. Only the grieving can understand that level of grief and anxiety. That’s what the Buddha was talking about. The parable is a very shrewd piece of psychology. That’s why he used to insist that Buddhism is more of a science than a religion. But anyway… what’s up with you? Are you gonna do any more photos down here.”

  “I can’t be fucked taking any more pictures of the tsunami, and I’ll never shoot stock for any online agencies. I have too much pride and I’ve won too many awards for that. Aw it’s like… I don’t know where I fit into journalism anymore. It’s all about free content now or the coverage is by rote. The fucking press applies the same fucking boilerplates to every fucking disaster.”

  The waitress refilled their glasses with more beer. Kendall thanked her in Thai and they exchanged smiles. It was good to be back in Thailand again, the friendliest and most hospitable country he had ever visited, with the prettiest girls.

  After lighting another cigarette from the cherry of his last one, Yves said, “That was impressive, man, three f-bombs in one sentence. You Aussies still have the market on cursing cornered, I‘d have to say. But I know what you mean. All the stories on the news networks and on the wires are predictable. There’s the environmental angle on coral bleaching and coastal erosion and mangrove forests serving as a breakwater against the waves. There’s the business story on all the resorts destroyed and the number of tourist arrivals plummeting. There’s a heartwarming story about the Moken, those sea gypsies, helping to evacuate tourists from another island, and elephants rescuing some other people. But it’s hard to do those human interest stories on TV, because it’s difficult for most people to act natural on camera. So those episodes come off looking a little flat. Oh, here’s tomorrow’s news that everyone will be repeating.” He pointed at the TV screen, where a press conference was taking place. “Looks like the government is announcing that they’re going to build an early warning system which will prevent future disasters.”

  Kendall thought that Yves had his wits about him. He didn’t look any thinner or paler or more or less Goth than ever. On the surface, he didn’t seem to have been adversely affected by the disaster, but he said little about what had actually happened to him. Every time Kendall brought it up, apologizing as a disclaimer, “Sorry to mention it again…” he would shrug it off by saying, “It wasn’t that bad for me. I got off quite lucky in some ways.” He would then lapse into anecdotes about his Khaosan Road days that Kendall hadn’t heard him speak about in ten years. “You know who I’ve been thinking about lately is Mick. You remember him from the Ploy Guesthouse, don’t you?”

  “You mean the hooligan with all the football tattoos of the Man U Red Devils on his arms? That psychopath who used to head-butt blokes in the Thermae all the time.”

  “Mick never gave anybody a Glasgow kiss who didn’t deserve it. He was a thief of honor.”

  “One night me and him were on a bender at the bar in the Hello Guesthouse where those two deaf mute tarts used to work, and we got rotten drunk, completely rat-arsed. On the way back to the Ploy, Mick had to take a slash so we wandered down that alley behind Khaosan, and Mick pissed all over this stray dog sleeping in the soi. What sort of bloke urinates on a dog?”

  Yves laughed for about thirty seconds, well beyond the point of amusement, and c
losing in on the fringes of psychosis. “Oh, that was Mick. He wasn’t serious. He was just taking the piss, so to speak, or taking a piss.” Yves began laughing again.

  The photographer knew a few things about post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). One of the first signs was evading the event which had caused it by refusing to talk. Another warning sign, the doctor had told him, during the months and months of psychotherapy sessions he’d undergone after getting shot in Bangkok, was spending too much time alone brooding over it.

  As another volunteer at the temple, Kendall noticed that Yves was disappearing for days a time. He wouldn’t answer the phone in his room. He wouldn’t come to the door. His only repeated alibi was, “I’m sick. I’ve got some kind of stomach flu.”

  He would not admit to anything else, except once or twice he said, “You know, I have to keep the bathroom door open whenever I take a shower, and I go around constantly making sure all the faucets are turned off, because I have this fear I might drown in my sleep.”

  As delicately as possible Kendall would say, “You might want to talk to a doctor about that. After I took that bullet I was spun out and had the wobblies for months, even thought my camera was haunted for a while.”

  “Hey, I appreciate your concern, but I’ll be fine in a few weeks.”

  Kendall did not think it was fair to mention that he had once thought the same thing, too. But he wasn’t fine in a few weeks. PTSD does not work that way. In many cases, it has a haunting, almost supernatural quality. Years after his near-death experience, in a flash, triggered by a black and white photo or a headline that mentioned AIDs or cannibalism or political protests, Kendall would be transported back to that darkroom in his dreams where all of his most disturbing images, the ones he’d shot, and the ones he’d only thought about shooting, turned into ghostly negatives to torment him: the AIDS patient, the kangaroo, the Sumatran headhunter, and the teenager who had almost gotten his head bashed in by the butt of a soldier’s rifle because of his neglect.

  Whatever his other failings, he had made an effort to save the kid. It was more than he had ever achieved as a photographer.

  By volunteering at the temple he could create some more good karma, which also allowed his conscience enough wriggle room to take covert shots of the bodies misted over with dry ice, while going back and forth in an argument with himself… you’re a sick fuck, mate, but people need to see the truth.

  These were the first shots he took down south that he had not seen before. But none of them would ever appear in any daily newspapers. Even the tabloids would not go this far, because the true horror of the aftermath was too unpalatable for most readers and advertisers to stomach.

  When Yves was doing an interview with him about his book of photos, Flashpoints in Asia, Kendall said, “Most of the pictures in this collection were not published in the mainstream media for a very simple reason. The truth hurts. The raw, unPhotoshopped truth about wars, famines, and natural disasters is hideous. It’s grotesque. It’s hard to face. But I reckon nothing will change for the better until we do face up to it.”

  Whatever foolish and naïve hopes he had cherished in his youth of photography as an agent of political and social change had perished years ago, when his first and only book thus far shifted around half of a thousand-copy print run.

  All those images of weeping widows and starving orphans he refused to take appeared again and again in the press yet nobody gave them much more than a sidelong glance. Then the reader flipped the page, or changed the channel, or scrolled down the web-page, to look at ads for new shoes, new gadgets, and new cars with blandly attractive models standing beside them.

  The photos changed nothing, but at least they gave people something to look at between shopping sprees.

  Kendall wished he could find the balding sub-editor who once told him, “We have to keep shoveling the shit and filling those pages,” not to argue with him again, but to commiserate and shout him a beer.

  THE WATER SURGED AROUND and over him, but Yai kept his grip on the knobby trunk of the palm tree. Darts of pain shot up his arms and legs to hit bull’s eye after bull’s eye in his brain. He lost his grip.

  The water was too muddy to see much. He couldn’t tell up from down or right from left as he spun around in a whirlpool until his lungs were ready to burst. Then he saw it, a portal like a ship’s window. It did not have a handle. The only entrance was a cervix-like tear in the middle. He pulled it apart like a pair of curtains and collapsed on the floor in a puddle.

  Once he got his breath back, Yai looked around the room. It resembled a museum. The only difference was that these were exhibits from his own life: the first toothbrush his father had made him from part of a brush and a piece of bamboo, his old school uniforms hanging from a nail in the wall, his first pet, a rabbit named Bugs Bunny, stuffed and mounted in a glass case.

  No one was there. The only human presences were in the photographs of family members, schoolmates on his soccer team, and fading color portraits of girlfriends whose out-of-fashion clothes and out-of-date haircuts gave them a sad air of nostalgia and of youthful dreams unfulfilled.

  Normally those pictures would have set off all sorts of emotional tripwires and inspired other reminiscences. Not now. In this museum of his life, his feelings were dead too.

  Room after room was filled with the junk and the photographic evidence of his life, but there was no life in it. He thought of all the time and money he’d spent (wasted really) accumulating all these possessions that meant so little to him now.

  The romances and fights, the friendships and jokes, all the showing off and drinking – what good was any of it now?

  He tried to call out but could not make a sound. He took a deep breath, but could not smell anything. He listened but heard nothing.

  What sort of karmic punishment was this? Was being bored to death his fate? Had he not been evil enough to warrant the torments of hell nor good enough to merit a holiday in heaven? Would he not be reborn at all?

  Anything had to be better than this noiseless, scentless, tasteless, joyless, museum of memories where dust motes were frozen in the air.

  Yai walked back to the entrance—he could no longer even take pleasure in the simple joy of movement—and tried to pull those curtains apart. They barely budged. He could only pry them a little ways apart. But if he pushed his head against the crack, like it was the doorway of a womb, and pushed and pushed, compressing himself as serpents do to squeeze into and out of the smallest spaces, then he could slither through it and back into the turbulent water, reborn again.

  But he was not reborn into a different body or a different time or even a different place. The room in which he woke up on the floor looked like one of those typical old Sino-Portuguese hotel rooms in southern Thailand, a little down at heel, with clunky rose-wood furniture, and a ceiling fan chopping the hot, thick air into cooler and thinner blades that needled his face.

  Hanging from the ceiling fan was a suicide, her black tongue hanging down to her chin.

  Stacked up on the bed like cordwood was a half dozen other bodies. Each of them, he knew without thinking, was another person who had died in this room.

  He had returned from the dead lands with his vision altered. Even the air itself swam with microorganisms flying to and fro. The only experience he could compare this to was looking through a microscope for the first time and seeing all the tiny life forms that existed in a single droplet of water.

  The wall burst open in a spray of splinters and wallpaper, as the Serpent King used his crested head like a bulldozer. In a baritone voice that squeezed Yai’s intestinal track in a cold fist, he intoned, as if chanting a Buddhist sutra, “You are dead and you must stay with us now. We can’t have anyone returning to tell people what the afterlife is really like. Entire religions, philosophies, justice systems, and moral codes would crumble if people knew the truth.”

  Yai would not go back to that museum of lifeless memories. He ran down the hallway, past a b
usinessman whose briefcase was dripping with blood money, past a cleaning lady whose aborted fetus clung to her neck, and past a boy who had his grandfather’s decomposing head growing out of his shoulder, while moths, mites and the skeletons of sparrows filled the air like down from a burst pillow.

  Was there anywhere he could run to that was not contaminated by death and decay?

  KENDALL DID NOT KNOW what to make of these emails that Yves was sending him. Were they supposed to be extracts from a novel? Were they supposed to be real? Were they yet more proof that he was suffering from a severe strain of PTSD?

  The only note accompanying them any of them was, “I’m trying some experiments in ‘automatic writing.’ It’s like going into a trance state. Some people have experienced writing in different languages, becoming possessed by demons or even communicating with the dead.”

  At the temple, in between shifts, Kendall mentioned these emails to Wade, who said, “Things were gettin’ weird even before the waves hit. With Yves and his wife, or ex-wife, those two are quite the fucked up couple, and Watermelon, and their French buddy, something was goin’ on there that didn’t seem right. The stories Yves has been telling about the waves hitting don’t add up either. One minute he’s floating around in his bungalow, the next he’s on the beach walking around? The water didn’t drain that quickly. Frankly, there’s so many holes in his story you could open a whorehouse with it. But I’m gonna get to the bottom of it if it’s the last thing I do.”

  “Fair dinkum, but don’t fuck with him.” Kendall pointed his finger at him like a gun. “He’s an old mate of mine and you fuck with him then you fuck with me.”

  Wade held both of his hands up with the palms facing out. “Hey, chill out, Mr. Hair-Trigger Temper. Nobody’s talkin’ about fucking with anyone else, least of all me.”

  “Good-o. Just so you understand a little more what our connection and history is, journalism is a cutthroat profession full of mercenary arseholes. But he’s by far the most generous fella I’ve met in this business. He helps other people get their stories and photos published. He edits people’s stories for free, writes hundreds of reviews every year of books, exhibitions, albums, you name it, and if it wasn’t for him I wouldn’t have gotten a publishing deal. He helped me get more promo for that book than anyone else. So he’s a good bloke and you better not do the dirty on him is all I’m saying.”