by Peter Straub
Didn’t that mean that he lived here? That he was a customer of Patpong Books? The shelf of novels reminded Poole of the “Local Authors” shelf at All Booked, Westerholm’s best bookstore—it was as good as a signed statement that Underhill frequented the shop. And if he did that, would he also be going out and killing people? Poole could almost feel Underhill’s presence near his well-stocked shelf. If he did not come in, would the store stock so many books by a writer so obscure?
It added up, at least to Poole, and once Poole had explained it to him, to Conor too.
When he and Conor left their hotel earlier that day, Poole’s first impression was that Bangkok was Thailand’s Calcutta. Whole families seemed to live and work on the streets, for often Poole saw women crouching on a broken pavement, feeding the children that roiled around them while smashing up concrete with the hammers in their free hands. Down the center of every sidewalk sat a row of women hacking a trench with hammers and picks. Smoke from cook-fires drifted from the vents inside half-constructed buildings in vacant lots. Plaster dust and hard little motes that stung the skin, smoke and grease and exhaust fumes hung in the grey air. Poole felt the permeable membrane of the air settle over his skin like a cobweb.
Here was a great red sign for the HEAVEN MASSAGE PARLOR, and here were rising stairs of concrete painted with blue stars, where a barefoot, spindly woman sat morosely beating a squalling child in the midst of a welter of bags, bottles, and parcels tied with coarse rope. Her hand struck its face, her fist struck its chest. The stairs led up to a wide canopy advertising the HONEYPOT NIGHTCLUB and RESTAURANT. The woman stared through Dr. Poole, and her eyes said: This is my child, this is my dwelling, you are invisible to me.
For a second he felt dizzy; a grey shadowland surrounded him, a world of shifting dimensions and sudden abysses, where reality was no more than just another illusion. Then he remembered seeing a woman in blue tumble down a wet green hillside, and knew that he was flinching away from his own life.
Michael knew about the flinch. Once he had persuaded Judy to come into New York with him to see Tracers, a play written and performed by Vietnam veterans. Michael thought it was a wonderful play. Tracers put you very close to Vietnam, and virtually every minute of it called up pictures and echoes of his time there. He found himself crying and laughing, undone by uncontrollable feelings, as on the bench in Bras Basah Park. (Judy had thought Tracers a sentimental form of therapy for the actors.) At various times in the play, a character named Dinky Dau pointed an M-16 straight at Michael’s head. Dinky Dau probably could not see Michael, who was in the eighth row, and the gun was not loaded, but when the muzzle swung toward him, Michael felt dizzy and faint. Helplessly, he felt himself squeezing as far back in his seat as he could go, holding tightly onto the armrests. He hoped he did not look as frightened as he felt.
Bangkok aroused some of the same feelings in him as Dinky Dau’s gun. At the dedication of the Memorial, fourteen years of his life had just dropped away. He had been a raw nerve, a boy soldier again, invisible inside nice, comfortable, humane Dr. Poole. It seethed that nice comfortable Dr. Poole was only the scaffolding around that raw nerve.
How strange it was to be so invisible, his real self so invisible to others. Michael wished that Conor and Pumo had gone to Tracers with him.
Michael and Conor walked past a dusty window filled with trusses and artificial legs like amputations, bent at the knee. “You know,” Conor said, “I’m homesick. I want to eat a hamburger. I want a beer that doesn’t taste like it was made with stuff they swept up off the street. I want to be able to go to the can again—that shit I got from the doctor closed my asshole so tight it’s just a seam. You know the worst? I even want to pick up my toolchest again. I want to come home from work, clean up, and get down to my good old bar. Don’t you miss stuff like that, Mikey?”
“Not exactly,” Poole said.
“Don’t you miss work?” Conor’s eyebrows lifted. “Don’t you miss getting on your whatsit, your stethoscope, all that? Telling kids it’s only gonna hurt a little bit?”
“I don’t really miss that side of it,” Poole said. “In fact, I haven’t been very happy with my practice lately.”
“Don’t you miss anything?”
I miss a girl in St. Bart’s hospital, Michael thought, but finally said, “Some of my patients, I guess.”
Conor gave him a suspicious look and suggested they turn around and take a look at Patpat before they caught Black Lung disease. They had come nearly all the way to Charoen Krung Road, the Oriental Hotel, and the river.
“Patpong,” Michael corrected. “Where Dengler was killed.”
“Oh, that Patpong,” Conor said.
If Patpong held an initial surprise, it was that it was no larger than what Poole had seen from his window. The section of Bangkok that attracted male tourists from all over America, Europe, and Asia was only three streets long and one street wide. Poole had imagined that like the St. Pauli section of Hamburg it covered at least a few more blocks. At five in the afternoon, the neon signs blazed above the heads of the crowds of men going in and out of the bars and massage parlors. 123 GIRLS WET. SMOKING. A tout positioned at the bottom of a flight of stairs whistled at Poole and slipped into his hands a brochure listing the specialties of the house.
Beautiful girl hostesses—continuous show!
1 free drink per customer
All languages, international clientele
Ping-Pong balls
Smoking
Magic Marker
Coca Cola
Striptease
Woman-woman
Man-woman
Man-woman-woman
Room for use and observe
As he read this document, a small Thai male interposed himself between Michael and Conor. “You in good time,” he said. “Late is too late. Choose now, you get best.” He took a fat credit-card holder from his jacket pocket, and let it drop down in segments, flipping open as it fell to reveal photographs of perhaps sixty naked girls. “Pick now—late is too late.” He grinned, wonderfully at ease with himself, his product, and his message, and showed bright gold incisors.
He held the ribbon of photographs up to Conor’s face. “All available! Going fast!”
Michael saw Conor’s face turn red, and pulled him down the street, shooing the massage parlor tout away with his other hand.
The tout waggled his photos in the air and made them shimmy.
“Boys, too. Pretty boys, boys all sizes. Later is too late, especially for boys.” From another pocket he withdrew another wad of photographs. These too he let waterfall out of his palm. “Beautiful, hot, suck you, fuck you, smoke you—”
“Telephone,” Poole said, thinking he had read the word on the menu from the sex club.
The tout frowned and shook his head. “No telephone—what you want? You on death trip?” He started to fold and gather his photographs into stacks as he backed away from them. For a moment he regarded them both very shrewdly. “You two guys on real death trip? Real kinky? Must be very, very careful.”
“What’s with this guy?” Conor said. “Show him the picture.”
The little tout was looking nervously from side to side. He had folded his wares into his jacket pockets. Poole held out one of the photographs from the manila envelope. The tout licked his lips with a long colorless tongue. The man stepped backward, grinned emptily at Conor and Michael, and transferred his attentions to a tall white boy in a Twisted Sister T-shirt.
“I don’t know about you,” Conor said, “but I could use a beer.”
Poole nodded, and followed him up the stairs to the Montparnasse Bar. Conor disappeared through a curtain of blue plastic streamers, and Michael followed him into a small, dimly lighted room ringed with chairs. From one wall jutted a tiny bar behind which stood a huge Samoan in a tight red muscle shirt. A small raised wooden stage took up the front of the room. Conor was handing bills to an obese woman seated at a desk just inside the door. “Admission, twe
nty baht,” she croaked at Poole.
Poole glanced toward the stage, where a chunky Thai girl wearing a bra was doing something that required her to hunch down over her splayed knees. A dozen undressed girls inspected Poole and Conor. The only other man in the room was a drunken Australian bulging out of a sweat-stained tan suit and clutching a tall can of Foster’s Lager. A girl was curled up in his lap, playing with his necktie and whispering into his ear.
“You know what I was trying to think of, out on the street?” Michael asked. “Smoking.”
“I hope they don’t have it,” Conor said.
The girl onstage flashed a broad smile and cupped her hands just below her vagina. A Ping-Pong ball appeared in its folds, then disappeared back up inside her, then finally dropped out onto her palm. Another Ping-Pong ball popped into view.
Four girls had appeared around them, smiling and cooing. Two sat in the chairs on either side of them, and the other two kneeled.
“You very handsome,” said the girl before Poole. She began to stroke his knee. “You be my husban’?”
“Hey,” Conor said, “if these people can do shit like that with Ping-Pong balls …”
They ordered drinks for two of the girls, and the others padded across the room. Onstage, the Ping-Pong balls were rotating in and out of sight with the speed of a revolving door.
The girl beside Poole whispered, “You hard yet? I make hard.”
Another strikingly pretty girl emerged through the curtain of streamers beside the stage. She was naked, and to Poole she looked no older than fifteen. The girl smiled at the men and women before her, then displayed a cigarette at the end of her fingers like a tiny baton, and lit it with a pink disposable lighter.
The girl bent backwards with a smooth acrobatic motion, thrusting her slender legs and pubis at the audience, and planted one hand on the floor. With the other she reached between her legs and inserted the cigarette into her vagina.
“This is getting deep,” Conor said.
The tip of the cigarette glowed, and half an inch of ash formed at the tip. The girl reached forward and removed the cigarette. A plume of smoke blew from her vagina. She repeated this performance several times. Poole’s girl began stroking the inside of his thigh and talking to him about growing up in the country.
“My momma poor,” she said. “My village poor-poor. Many many days, no eat. You take me back to America? I be your wife. Be good wife.”
“I already have a wife.”
“Okay, I be number-two wife. Number two be best wife.”
“I wouldn’t be surprised,” he said, looking at the girl’s dimpled face. He drank his beer and felt very tired and comradely.
“In Thailand, many men have number-two wife,” she said.
The teenager onstage blew a perfect smoke ring out of her vagina. “Pussy blow fractals!” the Australian yelled. “Record collectors are fun to go around with, cricketers swing big bats, but mathematicians are in their prime!”
“You have many television sets?” the girl asked Poole.
“Many.”
“You have washer-dryer?”
“Absolutely.”
“Gas or electric?”
Poole considered. “Gas.”
The girl pursed her lips. “You have two cars?”
“Of course.”
“You get extra car for me?”
“In America, everybody gets their own car. Even children get their own car.”
“You have children?”
“No.”
“I give children,” the whore said. “You nice man. Two children, three children, all you want. Give American names. Tommy. Sally.”
“Nice kids,” Poole said. “I miss them already.”
“We have best sex, your whole life long. Even sex with your wife get better.”
“I don’t have sex with my wife,” Poole said, amazing himself.
“Then we have twice as much sex, make up.”
“Pussy smoke cigarette, now pussy talk telephone,” the Australian said. “Pussy call University of Queensland, tell them I’ll be late.”
The nymph onstage sprang upright and bowed. All the girls, the Australian, and Poole applauded loudly. When she walked off, a tall, naked young woman came through the streamers with a big folder of paper and a handful of Magic Markers.
Poole finished his beer and watched the girl onstage plant two Magic Markers in her vagina and hunker over a large sheet of paper to draw a very creditable horse.
“Where do gay men go in Bangkok?” Poole asked. “We’re looking for a friend of ours.”
“Patpong three. Two streets up. Gayboys. You are not a gayboy?”
Poole shook his head.
“Come in back with me. I smoke you.” She threw her arms around his neck. Her skin had a delicious fragrance akin to the smell of apples, oiled leather, and cloves.
Poole and Conor left as the artist onstage was completing a landscape with mountains, a beach and palm trees, sailboats, and a sun with rays.
Just down the block from the Montparnasse were two dun-colored steps leading up to an open door and a sign reading PATPONG BOOKS. While Poole discovered the row of Underhill’s novels, Conor went off to look at magazines. Poole asked both the clerk on duty and the manager if they knew or had ever seen Tim Underhill, but neither man even knew his name. Poole bought the hardcover copy of The Divided Man he had carried up to the register to ask about, then he and Conor went out to have a beer at the Mississippi Queen.
“Hell, I signed one of those Koko cards myself,” Conor said at the bar.
“I did too,” Poole said. “When was yours?” He had never imagined that only one member of the platoon had cut off ears and written Koko on a regimental card, but Conor’s admission gave him a mixture of surprise and pleasure.
“The day after Ho Chi Minn’s birthday. We had to go out on some damn coordinated patrol with platoon two. Just like on Ho’s birthday. Except that this time the NVA mined the perimeter, and one of the tanks hit a fragmentation mine. Which slowed everything way, way down. Remember crawling out along the road, probing for the rest of the mines? Shoulder to shoulder? Anyhow, after that, Underhill surprised their point man out in the bushes, and we got the rest of ’em in a killing box.”
“Right,” Poole said. He could remember seeing the North Vietnamese soldiers moving like ghosts, like deer, along the road. They had not been boys. They were men in their thirties and forties, lifelong soldiers in a lifelong war. He had wanted very much to kill them.
“So when it was all over, I went back and did the point man.” A tiny girl in a black leather bra and black leather microskirt had taken the stool beside Conor, and was bending over the bar grinning at him to catch his attention. “I mean, I can remember cutting that dude’s ears off,” Conor said. “It was hard to do, man. An ear is all like gristle. You wind up only cutting off the top part, and it doesn’t look like an ear. It was like I wasn’t thinking, like I wasn’t even myself. I had to keep on sawing back and forth. And when I cut through it, his head slapped right down on the mud and I was holding this ear. Then I had to roll him over and do it all over again.”
The girl, who had listened carefully to this speech, pushed herself away from the bar and went across the big room to whisper to another bar girl.
“What did you do with the ear?” Poole asked.
“Threw it into the trees. I’m no pervert.”
“Right,” Poole agreed. “It would be pretty sick to save the ears.”
“Damn straight,” Conor said.
3
The telephone had gone from making a buzzing sound to total dead silence to a high-pitched whistle. Conor looked up from the pictures of naked girls in the magazine he had bought at Patpong Books.
“When did you do yours?” Conor said.
“My what?”
“Koko card.”
“About a month after the court-martials were announced. It was after a patrol in the A Shau Valley.”
; “End of September,” Conor said. “I remember that one. I picked up the bodies.”
“Yes, you did.”
“In the tunnel—where the other big cache was. The rice cache.”
“That’s the one,” Poole said.
“Old Mikey,” Conor said. “You’re an animal, man.”
“I still don’t know how I did it,” Poole said. “Gave me nightmares for years.”
Then the operator cut through the whistling to say, “We are connecting you to your party, sir,” and Michael Poole readied himself to talk to his wife while still holding up before him, fresh from its long internment within him, the memory of using his K-Bar to saw off the ears of a corpse propped up against a fifty-pound bag of rice. And the darker memory of using his knife on the dead man’s eyes.
Victor Spitalny had seen the body first, and had come out of the tunnel bawling Awww Righht!
The silence deepened and changed texture. Two deep thudding clicks came over the line, like firm but complex linkages made in deep space.
Poole looked at his watch. Seven o’clock P.M. in Bangkok, seven in the morning in Westerholm, New York.
After all this time he heard the sound, familiar as a lullaby, of the American dial tone, which abruptly ceased. More deep-space silence, followed by the dim ringing of a telephone.
The telephone ceased ringing with a clunk that meant the answering machine was on. At seven in the morning, Judy was either still in the bedroom or down in the kitchen.
Michael waited through Judy’s message. When the beep came, he said, “Judy? Are you home? This is Michael.”
He waited three, four, five beats. “Judy?” He was about to hang up where he heard a loud click and his wife said, “So it’s you,” in a flat, uninflected voice.
“Hello. I’m glad you answered.”
“I guess I’m glad too. Are the children having fun in the sun?”
“Judy—”
“Are they?”
Poole had a quick, guilty flash of the girl rubbing his crotch. “I suppose you could call it fun. We’re still looking for Tim Underhill.”
