Mr. Bones

by Paul Theroux

  Siamese Nights

  1

  He knew before he’d been posted to Bangkok that you invented a city, any city, from the little you learned every day by accident. This one you had to make for yourself out of noodles and flowers, a glimpse of the river, an odor of scorched spices, office talk, moisture-thickened air that made you gasp, and neon lights shimmying in puddles—beauty in half an inch of dirty water. Or something you’d seen nowhere else, like the gilded shrines on street corners, flowers and fruit left as offerings, piles of yellow petals, people at prayer, their faces the more soulful for being candlelit in the night.

  Then you flew back home and told people, and that was the whole city for them, what you remembered. In Bangkok, the availability of food, of pleasure, of people, made Boyd Osier a little anxious and giggly. Strangers smiled and seemed to know what was in your mind. Take me! Taxi! Massage! What you want, sir? You could possess such a place, the people were so polite.

  Believing that it was his last assignment, his working life coming to an end, Osier was more attentive in Bangkok than he’d ever been, with the sorrowful clinging gaze of taking a last look. His company had sent him there. It made components for cell phones, the plant in an industrial area outside the city near the old airport, Don Mueang. The work was American; his life alone was something else. Or was he too old for another overseas assignment without his wife?

  Osier’s fear was that retirement meant his life would become a vacancy long before he was dead. If he wished to see where the years had gone, he only had to look at his unusual, carefully kept diaries. Instead of pages of scribbles, they were pictorial, a page of sketches a day. He had a small but reliable gift for caricature. His sketches were a relief from accountancy, though perhaps (he told himself) they were another kind of accounting, evaluating the day by illustrating it, the things he saw, the people he met, putting what they said into balloons. He told Joyce he did it for her, because when he was away she always asked, “What’s it like there?” But he knew he kept the pictorial diary for himself, to test his talent without any risk, and to record the passage of time, in sketching that had the calming effect of autohypnosis.

  Before he left for Bangkok, Joyce had said, “The place I want to live is somewhere I wouldn’t mind dying.” That rang true, because in other overseas posts, those short assignments when he’d been auditing the company’s books, he’d thought, I would hate to die here—Ireland, Holland, Vancouver, the outsource centers they had developed. Something about the damp, the dark weather-pitted gravestones he’d seen under dripping trees, the insistent cheerfulness of people in the wintry gloom, indoors most of the time, so many of them careworn young people, resigned to their captivity. But Bangkok was his first hot country.

  When he arrived, the two other Americans in the company, Larry Wise from Operations and Fred Kegler from Human Services, had befriended him, initiating him with what they’d found out. Their wives, too, were back in the States, so they were sympathetic to him, especially Fred, who cautioned him, telling him how to find a taxi, and a tailor, and what districts to avoid, and good places to eat.

  “Sometimes you get a bowl of boogers or a dish of greasy worms that look like garbage, and you think you’re going to collapse,” Fred said. “But never mind, they’re delicious.”

  Fred had an unembarrassed gape-mouthed way of talking, his visibly thrashing tongue turning “collapse” into clapse.

  “They say they’re not political”—plitical—“but they are. And sometimes someone’s smiling and it’s not a smile. Or they say no and they mean yes.”

  His distracting way with these and certain other words—meer and hoor for “mirror” and “horror”—made Osier mistrust anything Fred said.

  Larry’s line was always how simple it was to go home. “Hey, look how near we are to the States. I talk to my wife three times a day. We have conversations. Back home I talk but we never have conversations. Is this an adventure? I don’t think so.”

  “It seems far to me,” Osier said. “It seems foreign.”

  “Foreign I’ll give you. But not far. You got here by going through a narrow tunnel at the end of the ramp at the airport in New York. And came out the other end.”

  Larry was right: the world was tiny. It was easy to go home.

  They lived in the wholly accessible world, Larry said, the small, wired planet. “That’s why this company’s in profit. Look around. Everybody’s always on the phone.” So Osier never asked how he was going home, he only asked when.

  But if separately Larry and Fred were sympathetic and helpful, together they lost their subtlety and were simplified, encouraging each other—rowdy, noisier, teasing, two guys at large in this city where, because they could so easily have what they wanted, they became greedier.

  “Osier, want to go out for a drink? Get hammered?” Larry said, with Fred by his side.

  “How about it? Do yourself a favor. You don’t have to make a career of it,” Fred said. Creer. This way of speaking also made him seem a mocker.

  He went with them once. Larry and Fred brought him to a bar and supervised him.

  The Thais did not carouse. They served drinks. They offered food. They offered themselves. Osier squirmed, feeling that he had nothing to offer in return. Every evening after that he said he was busy, because the men still asked. He had not dared to tell them that they’d embarrassed themselves.

  Finally they took the hint, believing that Osier was virtuous and a bit dull. They resented him for not joining them, taking it for disapproval, and began to ignore him at work.

  And now, as on those other nights when he’d claimed to be busy, Osier was sitting in the cathedral-like waiting room in Bangkok’s central railway station under the portrait of King Rama V, going nowhere, as he told himself. Weeks of this—a month, maybe.

  He liked the thought that because he was a farang no one took any notice of him, that Larry and Fred had no idea he came to the railway station waiting room to catch up on his diary. The diary was his refuge. It was less intrusive than aiming a camera at people, and it made him more observant. The Thais were so slight, so strong, so lovely, even the men and boys. He had learned to draw them in a few strokes, the slim-hipped boys, the slender girls with short hair, the crones who might have been old men. They glided in the muggy air like tropical fish, that same grace and fragility, drifting past him in pairs. The same profile too, some of them, fish-faced with pretty lips.

  Their spirit compensated for the hot paved city, which was not lovely at all, the stinking honking traffic, the ugly office buildings. The river was an exception, a rippling thoroughfare of flotsam and needle-nosed motorboats. The temples, the wats, the shrines, housed fat benevolent Buddhas and joyous carved dragons, bathed in a golden glow. People knelt and bowed to pray for favors. This he understood, and envied them their belief. Why else go to church except to give thanks or ask for help? The rituals were full of emotion, addressing the Buddha obliquely with petitions and prayers: offerings, the gongs, the fruit and flowers, the physicality of it, the flames of small oil lamps, the odors of incense, seeming to celebrate their mortality. This veneration made Osier’s own churchgoing seem like sorcery.

  “How is it there?” Joyce asked from Maine, where she said it was raw. She spoke as though from a mountainside of bare rock and black ice.

  How could he reply to this? They’d spent most of their summers in coastal Maine. Joyce looked forward to his retirement, and to the house they’d recently bought in Owls Head. But the mild summers of sea fog, relieved by the dazzle of marine sunshine, had misled them. Now he knew that the other nine months were winter: days of unforgiving wind that slashed your face, days of frost or freezing rain, a weight of cold that slowed you and lay on the night-like days like a stone slab.

  “Fine,” he said, shivering at her word “raw.”

  He kept to his pictorial diary, the doodles of hats and baskets, the carved finials on temple rooftops, because he had no words to describe the stew of the
city—the heat-thickened air, the muddy river, the clean people, the efficiency, the unprovoked smiles, the signs he couldn’t read, the language he couldn’t speak. And so he asked her how she was, and she always said, “About the same,” which meant her knee was giving her pain. She’d been healthy until her knee began bothering her, and then everything changed. She stopped going for walks, sat more, ate more, got heavy, resigned herself to a life of decline and ill health, and began to resemble her mother, who sat slumped in a nursing home.

  Sketching was his hobby, but his work was numbers. Osier headed the accounting office, a job he loved for the order of its elements and the fact that no locals were involved on the money side—they couldn’t be, company rule, payroll was secret, locals couldn’t know how little they were paid, what profits the company was making, the low overheads. Larry and Fred were not involved either; only he saw the numbers, units shipped, cost per unit; and when the numbers added up he was done. It was forbidden to email any financial information or take any of the data out of the office on CDs. The office, too, was another world.

  After phoning his wife, he improved his sketch of the noble portrait of Rama V, King Chulalongkorn, high up on the station wall.

  He liked the idea that the orderly station was always in motion, a place of arrivals and departures. No one lingered here, no one to observe him. He was touched by the emotion of the travelers—families seeing loved ones onto trains, parents with toddlers, tense separations; and all the luggage they carried, some of them like campers, carrying bags of food and water. He was one of the few loiterers.

  He loved looking at the girls and women—angel-faced, dolled up for their journey, slender, a little nervous, so sweet, waiting for their trains to blink on the departure board. He came to the waiting room twice a week or more, where he was licensed to stare because of his diary. He had a drink, he found food, he called Joyce. It was not a life here, but a refuge and, like most travel he’d known, a suspension of life.

  The Thais were absorbed in their own affairs of travel. That was the beauty of the waiting room. No one was idle; the travelers’ thoughts raced ahead, to the journey. Handling luggage, herding children, checking the clock, they were leaving this place. He knew these people somewhat. He saw them in the plant, at tables, in smocks and gloves, some wearing dust masks. Diligent little people, and when he was among them he felt—was it the business of outsourcing?—that his fate was intertwined with theirs.

  2

  He was sketching, smiling at this irrational thought, the night he noticed the beaky woman coming toward him. He’d seen her there before many times; her nose made her unmissable. She was, like him, another loiterer.

  She was not tall but her features were so enlarged as to seem like distortions—menace in her nose, menace in her tangled hair, defiance in her chin. Among these tidy people she seemed like a freak for being so disheveled. But her shabby clothes seemed to inspire respect, even awe, in the passersby. She was someone from the lower world; she had nothing to lose. She had singled him out. Or was he imagining her menace? From a distance, shuffling, she had seemed so sad.

  Ignoring half a dozen people near him, she scuffed toward him with a clapping of her plastic sandals. She didn’t look like any Thai he had seen. He hoped that she would walk past him. But she stood before him, near enough to assault his nostrils. Her body odor seemed another kind of aggression: a hum of hostility in her smell.

  She began to squawk. The people around him, all Thais, giggled in embarrassment hearing her, yet they were fascinated, too, at the sight of the foreigner being challenged. For those waiting for trains, this was a diversion.

  One man said to him, “She talking you.”

  She was much too close: her dusty toes in the sandals touched his shoes. She wore a tattered wraparound, her lips smeared with lipstick. One cheek was cut cleanly, and though not a serious wound was crusted with dried blackish blood. She whined a little and nodded to get his attention, seeming to peck at him with her fleshy nose.

  The bystander said, “She say, ‘I not myself what you see.’”

  This obscure statement made him look away. Without meeting the woman’s gaze, but feeling disgusted as he brushed past her, Osier walked to a bench where a woman and a man were sitting with luggage.

  Haunting him with her ripe-smelling shadow, the woman followed, legs wide apart, carrying a shoulder bag. Some of the Thai travelers also followed. Osier turned away and pretended to be busy with his notebook, but still he heard the aggrieved voice.

  Someone touched him lightly with a finger. It was the Thai man who had said, “She talking you.”

  The woman was gabbling in her sinuses. The foreign language had a twang of incomprehensible menace in it, too.

  “She want money.”

  At first he resisted, but he got another whiff of her and dug into his pocket. He found a ten-baht note and handed it over.

  The woman handed it back, gabbling.

  “She want three hundred fifty baht.”

  Osier smiled at this precise amount, which wasn’t much, but stopped smiling when he looked up at the woman. She was still talking in her scratchy voice. Her reddened eyes scared him.

  “What is that language?”

  “It Thai, but she kaek, from India. She want talk you.”

  “What about?”

  His question was translated. Everything the woman said sounded like a threat or a protest.

  “She say she special.”

  Osier reacted sharply, as though remembering, and shook his head. He said, “What’s she doing here? I think we should get a policeman.”

  “No, sir.” The man looked frightened. “That make her angry.”

  “Why does she want to speak to me?”

  “You farang. You listen.” The man laughed a little. “Thai people no listen.”

  Osier looked at the woman and said, “Hello.”

  But the woman’s gaze did not soften.

  “She come from far away,” the man said.

  The woman clutched her ragged wrap with heavy sunburned hands and turned her beaky face on Osier. She was chewing something, and then, as she began to shout, showing red teeth and dark gums, she grew devilish.

  “You come from far away too.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “She wanting money. You have money.”

  Osier put his hands in his pockets, to protect his wallet.

  “She say, ‘I not normal.’ She say, ‘God make me different. People treating me in a bad way because I not normal.’”

  The other panhandlers Osier had seen always repeated the same whiny phrases, pleading for food, saying, “No mother, no father.” They made themselves pitiable. But this rough-looking beggar woman was making a speech, becoming angrier, denouncing Thais, proclaiming her abnormality, and, her voice going harsher, all of it seemed threatening.

  “I someone else,” the Thai man said, still translating, but slowly—he could hardly keep up with her. And because Osier did not understand anything she said, he looked closer, scrutinized her, and saw that she was not a woman.

  She was a man in a woman’s clothes, middle-aged, lined, muscled and graceless, clownishly painted with sticky makeup, in a torn wraparound and a dirty blouse, with big filthy feet and swollen hands, a wooden comb jammed in his matted hair, and demanding money, beginning to shriek, showing her green gummy tongue.

  “If you don’t give, sir, she will remove clothes. She will make nuisance and shame.” The Thai man in his panic was clawing in his own pocket for money. “She will show private parts.”

  Seeing Osier counting twenty-baht notes onto his lap, the man (Osier no longer saw him as a woman) became calmer and licked the spittle from his lips. He reached out, his thick hand like a weapon, and snatched the pile of money.

  “That’s more than you asked for.”

  After the man in the wraparound whined his thanks and touched the notes to his forehead, after the Thai translator hurried away, after the cro
wd of onlookers dispersed, Osier got up and flapped his hand at the lingering cloud of stink and walked quickly out of the railway station, feeling banished.

  He thought, Why did he choose me? But the sudden pantomime had been a shattering experience, much worse than being accosted by an aggressive beggar. He’d felt assaulted, and the smell, which was poisonous, wouldn’t easily wash off. Then the unwelcome memory of the man who had provoked thoughts of mutilation and danger gave way to sorrow. It was not the menace he remembered, but the sadness.

  He called Joyce and talked inconsequentially to calm himself. She said, “That’s funny. You called me just a few hours ago and said the same thing.”

  3

  He wanted to go home. He would have gone home, except that his work was not done. The hours to fill, from five to eight or nine at night, hours that were made bearable by his sketching at the station waiting room, he could not endure at the hotel. His room was small and poorly lit by a dim stylish lamp; sitting in the lobby, he felt conspicuous. He couldn’t take the accounts back to his room, and he had to leave the office at five when all the others left. He’d been using a taxi, to avoid the questions in the company shuttle bus. But now he took the shuttle bus.

  He’d turned Fred and Larry down so many times he didn’t think they’d ask him to go with them anymore. He hoped that one of them would say “Drink?” Not because he wanted to carouse but because he wished their protection. He needed to stay as far away as possible from the railway station and the sight of the man-woman who was probably waiting for him.