Phantom Lover and Other Thrilling Tales of Thailand

by Jim Algie

  He considered this for a few seconds while continuing to stare at the candles. “Maybe to you they did. But I can still feel them all around us. Can’t you?”

  “No, not really. Sure I think about ‘em sometimes, but those could be memories.”

  “No, that’s them contacting you from the next world.”

  “Do you remember what everyone who was in the tsunami said? It was like being spun around in a gigantic washing machine. ‘Cept there ain’t no boulders or boat engines or refrigerators in a washing machine. Something like that could knock a few screws loose…” Wade waited for the realization to sink in. But Yves just sat there staring at the candles. “So all I’m saying, bud, is that you should think about going to a doctor and having a brain scan, EKG, the whole nine yards, and see if anything’s wrong.”

  After a long pause, Yves said, “There are millions of other galaxies out there and universes and planets and alternate universes and wormholes and black holes. The last story I read, cosmologists have now said that our universe is 3.5 billion years old, but they still don’t know what substance makes up about ninety percent of the universe. They call it ‘dark matter.’ And all of that applies to psychology and the human mind too. So it’s difficult to come up with any hard and fast theories about what’s real and what’s not when all these other possibilities exist. I know you won’t believe this, but I’ve become a kind of spirit medium. The dead can speak through me. In fact, the only reason I still exist is to tell their stories. That’s my sole purpose. I am but an empty vessel for the gods, ghosts and demons to inhabit and speak through.”

  Wade grinned. “You got any room in that vessel for a cute gal who’s hot to trot?”

  Yves ignored him. “Look at White Fang crouched on top of the bookcase there. He’s in the same pose as that famous statue of the Sphinx, which is appropriate because the ancient Egyptians first domesticated cats some three thousand years ago, which is still but a second in the history of the universe, estimated to be some 3.45 billion years old. But you look at him and all you see is a mangy cat with fucked up fangs. I look at him and see a living example of a mythical deity. It’s all a matter of perspective, Wade. Your perspective is not mine, but it doesn’t mean I’m right and you’re wrong or that you’re sane and I am not.”

  “I’m not makin’ any accusations at all. But thanks for the lecture, per -fesser. Guess you must really miss teaching, eh?”

  Yves lit another cigarette, ignoring the one in the ashtray. Back and forth he paced the room, obsessively combing his hair with his free hand.

  Two or three minutes went by, but he kept pacing the room and smoking. Wade could not beat around the bush any longer. “No offense, bud, but I’m kinda getting the feeling here that you’ve, uh… lost it.”

  Yves laughed for about thirty seconds. “Yeah, that’s good, man. It’s straightforward, profound in its own simple brutish way. Let’s see if I can repeat that again, ‘No offense, bud, but I’m kinda getting the feeling that you’ve, uh… lost it.’” He was doubled over with laughter. The last time Wade had heard laughter like this it came from a homeless man talking to a telephone pole. “Lost it, excellent. That’s really good. I should hire you to start ghostwriting my stories.” He laughed again. “You think I’ve lost it? Of course I fucking lost it. I lost everything in the tsunami. I lost three of my closest friends, my wife and my marriage and my oldest friend in the tsunami.”

  “C’mon bud, you’re only forty-five or so, around my age. Time to get back on the horse that threw ya.”

  “Yeah, I tried a few times but got trampled under the horse, and now I’m trying to drag myself out of the way of any another runaway mares or train wreck romances. The simple fact is that I don’t have the heart to go through any more betrayals or divorces. And I was never very interested in those wretched, sordid, miserable, demeaning sessions with bargirls, or ‘phantom fucks’ as my old partner in crime called them.”

  “There’s plenty more fish in the sea.”

  “Not for me there isn’t. Zara is irreplaceable. No other woman could possibly possess her abundance and combination of cleverness, talent, artistry, ambition, humor, beauty and sex appeal. She’s got it all.”

  “She’s worried about you, eh? And she still wants to hear from you.”

  Yves yawned and stretched his arms. “Thanks for coming over, man. It was good to see you. But I’m tired now and need to rest.”

  Wade checked his watch. “It’s not even eight pm, but never mind. Just thought I’d drop by and tell you that I’m winding things down at the dive shop and then heading for the Caribbean.”

  “Ahh yes, that was where Sophia was born. Martinique, if memory serves.”

  “Damn right. Your memory’s still sharp as a tack.”

  “Yeah, not everything was destroyed. Soon as I finish my latest book I‘m leaving too.”

  “Where ya headed?”

  “Another plane of existence.”

  “Is that with Thai Airways or AirAsia?” The smile lines bracketing Wade’s mouth branched out to his cheeks.

  “Ha ha ha.”

  “Before we bail let’s hook up for a final hurrah and pound back some brewskis.”

  “Definitely. Take care.”

  They shook hands. “Take ‘er easy, bud, or take ‘er any way you can get ‘er.”

  Yves suddenly hugged him. “Thanks for everything, Wade. You’re a good man and I appreciate everything you’ve done for me.”

  Wade was too startled by the sudden show of emotion to register its implications until he was driving down the highway on his dirt bike. He could not shake the impression, no matter how fast he drove, that Yves had bid him a final farewell.

  IT WAS GOOD AND it was sad seeing Wade again. On the good side, it was not just people who were attracted to his kind and easy-going ways. As soon as he’d sat down, White Fang came right over and jumped up in his lap. Wade grinned and looked Yves straight in the eye. “I love cats.” In spite of his losses during and after the tsunami, the failure of his business and NGO, he had not become a hater. Wade still used the word love more often and more openly than any man he had ever met.

  On the sad side, he could never explain to Wade the real nature of his grief. Everything else he’d said tonight was beside the point. The real crux of the matter was that he’d lied about the events of that Boxing Day morning, and those falsehoods were at the epicenter of all his troubles ever since. From there and from then on, the lies had rippled across all their lives. Wade knew it was bullshit. Zara and Stephan would have figured it out at some point. But repeating the lie was easier than admitting to the truth.

  Of all the personal demons that had ever bedeviled him—physically or mentally, in liquid, pill or powder form—his own conscience was the most persistent. It was a shape-shifter, assuming the form of snakes crawling across moonlit windowpanes and impersonating voices of the dead whispering on the wind.

  The only thing that might lay all these demons to rest was if he set the record straight in his book.

  On the morning of that Boxing Day, he had been sleeping off a hangover, after liquidating most of Christmas with Kendall, who was staying next door, when someone began tapping lightly but insistently on the door. At first he thought it was Zara. That she’d forgotten her key.

  He threw on a T-shirt, inside out, and opened the door to knives of sunlight glancing off the waves and stabbing at his eyes. Standing there, clad in a baseball cap, sunglasses and a shawl around her shoulders, was Watermelon. What did he have to do to get rid of her once and for all? Year after year, she kept coming back like a chronic case of herpes. Just when he thought he was cured of her along came another rash of sentiments, another outbreak of longing, and there she was again.

  He covered his eyes. “What is it now? What’s up?”

  “You look sick. No problem. I take care na.” In an instant, she slipped back into her default roles as the dutiful wife and doting mother. She swept past him, poured him a glass of wa
ter and said,

  “You want aspirin?” He nodded. She got him one from the bathroom. Then she made him a cup of coffee, found his cigarettes and brought him the ashtray. “Yes, I remember your number one breakfast: water, aspirin, coffee, cigarette, chai mai?” She put on a brave and smiley face.

  “Thanks, but make this quick. I don’t want Wade or Zara to know you’ve come here.” He sat down on the bed, sipping and smoking. She sat across from him, making a point of crossing her perfect legs very slowly. Over the years she had lost almost all her whorish affectations – the sparkly silver fingernails, the two-sizes-too-small “boob tubes,” the hot pants in day-glo colors, and the rude pidgin English spoken at a volume appropriate for a noisy bar, but her sexual boldness and her ability to home in on a man’s fetishes and use them against him was as sharp as ever.

  “I told Wade we will not get married.”

  Yves sat up straight. “Why did you say that? He’ll be a great husband, he’ll get you a visa, you can live together in a nice home in the mountains. You’d love the mountains. Jasper is like Chiang Mai.”

  “But I don’t love Wade. I love you na.”

  “Not this again. We’ve already talked about this a thousand times. Love is not important. I am Mr. Wrong and I’m already married. If Zara finds out about this she’ll kill both of us.”

  “Zara doesn’t love you anymore. She loves Stephan.”

  The caffeine and nicotine were igniting flares in his bloodstream that made muscles in his shoulders, toes and fingers flex and tense. “Huh? You’ve met them twice and spoken to them for like ten minutes and now you’re saying you know them better than I do?”

  Watermelon crossed her perfectly formed legs again. The denim shorts left most of her thighs exposed. But far more arousing to him than her legs or her Chinese-porcelain features was her near-perfect command of English. She had been studying and practicing for years now. She’d done that to impress him and because she didn’t want to teach him any more Thai or he’d flirt with too many local women, she said. “When you stay together a long time with somebody they make you blind. She walks by, he doesn’t see. She says something, he doesn’t hear. After love disappears, people start to disappear from each other too. My mother and father lived together for a long time but they were not together. They were two ghosts in one house. Better to break up or get divorced before that happens.”

  “How did Wade take the news? Did he get angry or violent?”

  “No, he was crying too much.”

  “Crying? God, if there’s one thing that disturbs me more it’s seeing another man cry.” The caffeine and nicotine buzz was already wearing off, replaced by tingles of nervous exhaustion creeping up his back.

  “When a man has a big heart like Wade, he suffers a very big pain na. I was crying too because I love him like an older brother. He taught me so much and he never treated me like a bargirl, you know, fuck and flee. He always treats me like a lady.” She pressed her palms against her eyes to stem the tide of tears.

  Yves had seen enough of her tearful displays; she was the most emotional person he had ever met. He looked out the window of the bungalow. Zara would be back soon. He did not want her to see this. She already suspected the worst.

  “Can you go now please? My wife will be back soon.”

  “No, she’s with Stephan now. So I should stay here.” She smiled while repeating a couple of more expressions he’d taught her. “Fair is fair and what is good for the goose is good for the gander.” With sweet sarcasm, she added, “Thank you, my teacher.”

  “Just forget all the sweet talk and all the little games you like to play to try and manipulate me, and please try to remember that we don’t have, and never will have, anything in common. Our interests are completely different. That is why we broke up and stopped hanging around together.”

  “We have many things in common. We drink water, breathe oxygen, love sunshine, enjoy good food. We like to walk on the beach and see moonlight. We love music and scary ghost movies. We like to…” she looked away and smiled coyly… “make love and do boom boom.”

  How did she do it? This woman who had slept with five hundred men and still retained a sense of girlish innocence. This teenaged bride and mother, who’d become a twenty-year-old widow, yet never turned nasty or self-pitying.

  “We haven’t even slept together in like what? Six months?”

  “Four months, two weeks, five days and…” she glanced at her watch and smiled at him. “About forty-two minutes, more or less na.”

  “You counted?” What other woman had ever done that for him? Even Zara, sweet as she could be, was not that romantic. Nobody was. Not that he’d ever known.

  He had been avoiding the truth for years now. Watermelon was more devoted to him than any other woman he had ever been emotionally entangled with. It was not an intellectual or artistic love like he’d shared with Zara. With her it was religious. Love was her religion, even more so than Buddhism, and she practiced it with a fanatical devotion. All she had ever wanted from life was to be happily in love with her husband, to be a mother, a housewife and lover.

  But his religion was in books and writing. He was not capable of that degree of devotion to a spouse. “I can’t believe you counted. It’s like the end of that Marquez novel, Love in the Time of Cholera.”

  “You always say everything like book, movie, song, but I’m talking about life, real life, not some, I don’t know in English, maya,” she said, using the Thai slang for the entertainment world, which is based on the Sanskrit word for illusion. “But it’s not.”

  From this close, it was not her youth and beauty (that flawless complexion, those chestnut eyes, the mane of thick glossy black hair) which touched him. It was her sincerity. It was the way she put her whole heart and all her feelings on the line in one glance. He had always been too timid and too wary to do that, except for one night in an old dance hall in Barcelona called the Dove.

  Screams made his shoulders jump. He looked out the window. It was bedlam out there. Everyone was running and shouting or standing there pointing at the ocean. Yves went out on the verandah. He used his hand as a visor to squint into the sun. In the muddy shallows, locals were stuffing fish in their pockets and satchels, but he could not see anything farther out to sea.

  He went back inside. “Come on. Let’s go. People are running for higher ground.”

  “No, I stay here. You don’t love me anymore.” She put on that pouty teenager’s face she used to hold him to emotional ransom. “Maybe if I die you happy na?”

  “This is no time to be repeating lines from a Thai soap opera.” He went back on the veranda. Someone yelled, “Tsunami,” and he ran down the stairs and across the sand towards the restaurant and the front office of the resort, where a sandy lane led to the main road.

  Whenever he had replayed that moment, examining it over and over again from every possible angle, he could not remember making a conscious decision. He had not decided to abandon her; he had not decided anything. He had not even acted; he had reacted, like an animal. Frightened by a sudden noise, he had bolted in sheer terror. It wasn’t that he suddenly forgot about his wife and Stephan, or that Kendall was asleep next door, for that would also imply an element of choice. He had not forgotten them, because he was no longer capable of thought. As far as he could discern, an instinct for self-preservation had overpowered his reason and nullified all of his other mental processes. Was that it? Or was it more like, driven by fear, he had fled from that which frightened him the most? His own death. Was HP Lovecraft right? “Fear is the oldest and most powerful emotion of mankind.” And death had to be the greatest of all fears.

  Rerunning the events and quibbling over the details was pointless. Whichever way he examined them the conclusion was the same. If he had been more conscious, he could have saved three lives. Whether or not he’d seen Yai running towards the beach to help this little girl while he ran the other way was another point he had debated over and over again.
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br />   Of every dark, rotten thing he’d seen that was connected to the disaster—the looting of corpses, the necrophilia jokes, the media vultures circling and fighting over dead bodies—that moment when he’d lost his head was the worst. He could not live with it. So he’d concocted all these other fraudulent tales to cover up for what he could only conceive of as the most despicable act of cowardice imaginable.

  But maybe he could not have saved Watermelon. She would have resisted him. That was certain. To her, nothing was more romantic than dying for love, like those tragic heroines in Thai pop songs. In a perverse way, she had finally attained her heart’s desire.

  The only thing of hers Yves had been able to find was a pink plastic hairclip with a single strand of her hair. He left it on his altar, sitting atop the bookcase, at the base of a Buddha image showing him protected by the seven hooded heads of the Serpent King.

  Maybe he couldn’t have saved Kendall either. By the time he had pounded and pounded on the door to wake him up the first wave would have engulfed the bungalow and drowned both of them.

  Maybe he’d done the right thing by saving himself.

  Had he really seen Yai in the distance? Or was that some other Asian guy wearing a baseball hat, sunglasses and a long-sleeved shirt?

  In spite of the media playing up the story of how Yai had saved the Swedish girl, and she had depicted him as a saint and Christlike figure in an art therapy session (an easy, heartwarming story that played very well in Christian countries) Yves knew it wasn’t like that. It was not an act of heroism. It was a final act of self-destruction by a man whose sense of inferiority to the rich, white and attractive Westerners he had performed for at the Snake Farm and served in the bar had finally overwhelmed him. Yai was terrified that if he did not make some good karma he would be reincarnated as a snake, as he once feared he was after being bitten by a king cobra. “Imagine explaining the real story to a CNN or BBC producer with a two-minute slot to fill,” Yves had told Wade over espressos at Col’s Coffin Café, which was also not featured on any of the major news networks or in any wire-service stories. “It’s ironic that you can only tell the truth about these extreme stories in fiction not journalism.”