He couldn’t say why he was doing this; it made no sense, but nothing that was going on in Bangkok made any sense. She would more than likely hurl another stone at his head and he’d end up like Montezuma. There was insanity in the air. Like a fever or a dose of crabs, it jumped from person to person, infecting one, then the next, sending them out against men with M-16s with orders to shoot any motherfucker who was out there. Tuttle was not immune to this fear. Daeng could be anywhere; at least, he knew where to find Dee, and, at that moment, she might need him.
Not long after he was in the back sois near the Royal Hotel. He cursed this fever of killing sweeping the city. He watched as some bodies were dragged away and thrown into trucks. On the Nan River the floating stones had been bones; on the streets of Bangkok the dead were fresh and warm. He looked at the sky and watched the tracers overhead. A light show of shooting stars in the middle of the night. He strained looking at the horizon and swore—for a split second—that he saw a ghost.
When he reached Dee’s room, she was sitting on the wooden floor watching TV. She wore a T-shirt which had printed on the back, “If play for money and work for fun, come play at the Rose Bar.” Tuttle put his arm around her shoulders and kissed her on the cheek. She had been a twenty-eight-year old hardcore who had worked in Patpong for twelve years until Tuttle set her up in the room and got her a job in a restaurant. Her face softened as she kissed him back.
“I know you come back,” she said. “I wait you.”
“You don’t hate me?”
She shrugged. “Of course, I hate you. But I love you, too.”
“You eat today?”
She shook her head and her smile vanished. “TV says don’t go outside. Bad people are in the street.” She wrinkled her nose, leaned back on her hands, her long, tapered legs, crossed at the ankles, were stretched out on the floor. It never occurred to her once to ask him about his trip to the Nan River. Where he had been or what he had seen. In terms of time, it might have been as if he had gone outside to buy the fruit he had in his hand. Her sense of time was the eternal now.
He handed her the watermelon he had bought outside HQ and which he had squashed while lying flat on the ground as the soldiers killed the people in front.
“Eat this,” he said.
She opened the plastic bag, dumping the watermelon slices the shape and texture of red brillo pads into a small, white bowl. The watermelon didn’t look like food. They stared at the contents of the bowl for about a minute before Dee reached in and offered him a broken, runny shard. He shook his head. The shooting outside was getting mixed up with the shooting on the TV. Tuttle reached forward on his knees and switched off the TV.
“You can’t believe what’s on TV,” he said.
She shrugged her shoulders. “Farang don’t tell lies?”
She had worked the bars long enough to know no race or nationality had a monopoly on the hustle, the quick scam, the twisted and distorted promises made in the heat of the night. This was part of her attraction. And despite the fact she had worked the bars, most of the time she had worked as a cashier. In status terms this made her less of a whore than the dancers. Dee simply hated dancing. She liked to watch. Patpong cashiers never had much chance to learn English. Dee was no exception. Tuttle always spoke Thai to her; the language of the relationship evolved as that of Thai. Snow had once hit the mark when he said, “Man, you gotta speak only Thai to the girls. Speaking English in bed with a woman only brings on flashbacks of a bad trip.”
Later in the evening, as the gunfire died out and Tuttle had gone to sleep he felt a flame near his face. His eyes opened and Dee was sitting near him on the bed, holding a yellow candle, the kind the Thais use in the ceremony before the house Buddha. He looked up at Dee. She had melted the end of the candle into a beach stone from Koh Samui. Candle light washed over her face, and her large, wide-open eyes.
“You afraid?” Tuttle asked her, thinking the blood she had found on his clothes had frightened her.
She didn’t move her body. Her eyes in that yellow light were intense with purpose. “I’m a tiger,” she said. “You have English in your mouth. English is like food and you must feed me. I want it. Each day I want English. I’m very hungry. You forget to feed me English, I bite your nose, then your cock. Like a wild tiger. I don’t live in the jungle. If this tiger stay in the jungle, then I say never mind. English isn’t important. But I live in the city. I must have English. You understand me? If you don’t feed me, then I pay farang teach me English. I think other farang teach me English. I think better if you help me. But up to you. Tiger wait one, two more weeks. Then attack.”
Then she blew out the candle.
Tuttle reached over to the radio on the floor and switched on Radio Bangkok 108.3. “We are still with you, Bangkok. Are you with us?” The DJ’s voice was hoarse, the confidence drained. “I just had a call from a neighbor of mine. His fourteen-year-old son took an M-16 round in the head. The kid was an A student. He played sports at school. He had friends. He was idealistic. What fourteen-year-old isn’t? The kid wanted to be a doctor because he thought it would help his country. I’d like to think I was one of Tom’s friends. Once he came to our house with his father and asked if I could help sponsor him for a scholarship. One of those exchange student things. I said, hey, man, of course, I can. Tom was supposed to go away to school next autumn. Only he ain’t going nowhere. He’s dead. A life blown away. For what?” The DJ’s voice quivered, then broke and he started to sob on the air. “Here’s a song for you.” The DJ put on Tracy Chapman’s Baby Can I Hold You? “Words don’t come easily, like I love you, I love you. You can say baby, baby can I hold you tonight, baby if I hold you forever....”
9
HARRY PURCELL HAD traced the history of weapon transactions through his family’s holding companies from the Spanish conquest of South America and the Japanese conquest of China and Southeast Asia. His father, Charles Purcell, had been chairman of the board during World War II. The Purcell family made a great deal of money selling arms during that war. Charles Purcell had taken a personal interest in Asia. It had been Charles Purcell who had married a Chinese general’s daughter—the one who once claimed to have an implanted silver cock. Harry Purcell was the only son of their marriage. A week after his mother died the household remained in a state of mourning. Monks had come and burnt paper money. He had attended the cremation of his mother and was given the urn of her ashes. He was still a boy.
Charles had been given the Purcell chronicle by his own father and, as was the family tradition since Hawks, had added his own observations about the Japanese during the war.
“War and sex can never be separated,” Harry’s father had told him. “These are the real facts of life. Sex education starts with an understanding of conquest. Men in the field. Men in battle.”
“Supply and demand,” said Harry who was a young boy when he stood at his father’s desk. It was after dinner and a single light cast his father into the shadows.
“Both are big business. The fear business. The intimidation business. Fortunes rest on this connection. Each generation of Purcells has handed down the facts of life to the next. It is your time, Harry. In this envelope is a report which explains everything in clear language that a bright lad like you can understand. If you have any questions, then we can discuss them. Do you have any questions now?”
Harry thought for a couple of minutes as his father rolled a Havana cigar between his fingers. “Did mother’s father in China have a silver cock?”
His father lit the cigar, the expression on his face not changing. “A golden cock, Harry. Pure gold.” The cigar smoke crossed the horizon of light like a haze, a fog from another world. He remembered a kind of melancholy laughter from the darkness where his father sat.
10
CORTEZ’S TEMPLE
by
Harry Purcell
THE IMPERIAL JAPANESE Army deployed Mobile Skull Temples on the front lines—mainly China and Southeast A
sia—before and during the Second World War. Japanese military researchers had closely studied the exploits of the Spanish in the sixteenth century, and as with so many good concepts, the Japanese appropriated the theory to their own use and culture. When groups of Japanese soldiers—they never came alone—walked into one of these Mobile Skull Temples, they found what Cortez had been looking at all along (but edited out from his dispatches for the king and Pope)—female skulls with beautiful, young female faces attached to female bodies. The entire female package had been placed inside the temple for the soldiers’ own private, personal sexual rituals. Rituals which had their own independent morality.
Cortez let himself go once as he described the Aztec women’s choice of dress which placed them in one of two categories: Aztec ladies came either topless or bottomless. Sixteenth-century tits and ass descriptions left a lot to be desired. What did Charles V and the Pope make of that? Soldiers (and their commanders) who notice and record their observations on how local women are not dressed, what is left exposed, are soldiers (and commanders) commenting on more than local fashion, leisure wear. In the Japanese-occupied lands—including China, the local women appeared to come as a perk, a bonus, a payment in kind. Women in Mobile Skull Temples were supplied like ammo, rations, tents, transport, uniforms, boots, and rifles; they were part of what was issued to soldiers who served in the occupying Imperial Japanese Army. But if soldiers (or their commanders) took too much account of local women exposing their breasts and asses outside the Mobile Skull Temple, then the effectiveness of the fighting and occupying forces could be at serious risk from a military point of view.
The Mobile Skull Temples with their comfort women cleared the soldier’s mind so he could concentrate on the pressing questions of occupying China: What is that coming down the road? Is it an enemy? Do we shoot it? If we kill it, can we eat it? If we let it live, can we fuck it?
MSTs were as popular as raw fish and sprang up like a new religion across China and Korea. Temples had been organized by the Japanese along the lines of Taoist thought—sex happens. But not without an abundant supply of local sex goddesses; Korean, Chinese, and Malay women—hundreds of thousands—were recruited and these forced-labor goddesses were called comfort girls. The Japanese Co-prosperity Zone was dotted with Mobile Skull Temples, serving the line troops like a vast sexual mess hall.
Comfort girls—a strangely accurate description of their function. Comforting a man facing the fear of a violent death; comforting a man who starts to worry he has no future; comforting a man so he will follow the commands of his officers. Sex was comfort. Sex gave courage. Sex gave confidence and inspired commitment to the unit. The mission was comfort and not passion or lust. Women could be conscripted to supply comfort. They were compelled to perform sex for dozens of men. The comfort women were more than sexual objects—they were a lesson in fear. The ordinary soldier for a brief moment over the body of a woman who was made to submit to him had the most precious gift—the gift of command. He forced the woman to submit as he commanded. To command the she-devil allowed the front-line soldier to have a taste of power. He came to know the duty to his commander through his refuge in the body of a comfort woman. And there was more—these woman had an ability to withstand the pain and this was a further lesson—this time, not one of command, but in the endurance of fear and bravery face to face with the enemy.
The women were sent into sexual battle, sending a powerful message to the men—are you less able to serve your commanders than these throw-away women—these worthless beings whose only function is sex and comfort to the soldiers guarding the Coprosperity Zone? Comfort from what evil forces lurking inside the Zone? If the Zone lacked Japanese female sexual partners, why not import them? Was it the usual loss of morals arising from an absence of the normal influences of home, friends, and family? The long periods among a hostile Zone population? Or was the comfort of strangers a welcome diversion from the killing of the locals? The Zone soldiers of the Japanese Imperial Army never appeared to experience discomfort in taking these women. There is no recorded case of one Japanese Imperial Army soldier or officer objecting to the comfort-woman system or forming a one-man rescue effort for a single comfort woman. They all participated; none complained. Why such uniformity in matters of sex?
Command.
Sex on demand.
Sex which is commanded.
Comfort on command.
Passion was for civilians.
An Army which celebrates victory rather than defeat is based on rigid, unquestioning command. There are no politicians who raise issues of detail. An Army which does not provide sex and comfort cannot command its forces to victory. This is a fact of life. And of war. Sex and battle plans require commanders who are hungry with passion. Reason and logic have no place in command or passion. A soldier’s mind is simple: Can we fuck it? Once they crossed the threshold and were inside the MST the questions of will it kill and eat me or can I kill and eat it did not arise. It is not likely you would find one who will ask: Can we rescue this creature so it may have life uninterrupted by pain?
Recruitment procedures in the Zone mandated the presence not of “women” but of young girls. They were not whores—comfort is not found in the arms of whores who choose to make themselves available. Any more than a soldier has a choice to shoot to kill. The illusion of supplying innocence was the key to the MST success inside the Zone; it kept the soldiers from questioning their superiors—fucking a comfort girl was following another order without risk of destruction. Soldiers were kept from going mad, from deserting into the Zone and finding their own girls. The generals understood that the function of gods was the provision of comfort. All religions offered gods who promised release from fear, anxiety, and tension from the human Zone.
Why did a village girl become a comfort girl? Because she could not say “no.” Whispering this word was forbidden. She had no choice. As many soldiers as wanted her had her—four, five, a dozen, a division—comforting each man who pushed himself erect inside her, making him feel as if she were there only for him. The comfort goddess was the religion of the battlefield. And no religion has ever been defeated (except by force of arms) which offered the congregation unlimited, free sex. The Japanese Imperial Army might have stayed forever in the Zone. The soldiers were born again each time they walked into a temple. No one deserted; no one complained; and everyone felt saved. No shelves were crudely lined with thousands of naked skulls. They entered the temple that Cortez had sought but had not found. And they proved beyond any shadow of a doubt that one person’s comfort can translate into another’s pain.
With a few modifications, the Japanese adapted the comfort-girl religion to peace time and discovered it worked even better than in war. The new Zone emerged in the post-war period. The Japanese Imperial Army had been privatized as business enterprises, and the new soldiers—the business executives—found themselves in the private, Japanese-only salons and clubs. The comfort girls never vanished from the scene; their numbers increased, they wore numbers, and had the illusion of a life beyond the temple walls. Ah, but you say, these girls are exceptionally well paid for their services, the ones who work today have a choice and can leave anytime; they can quit the club and work in a factory, become a maid, return to the rice fields—these girls, some will argue, can say “no.” The modern comfort girl has a choice. She is not a conscript into the temple; she is a volunteer. Any member of the religion of free will would be programed with similar thoughts to agree with your position. A whore decides her own fate; a comfort girl has her fate decided for her by others.
Free will versus determinism. Where in the history of war and sex has such a false division ever been more wrongly placed? And what difference does “peace” bring to women without hope and chance among those who occupy their lands?
The fact remains, nowhere is there a report of a rescue of a single woman working inside these temples. The guns have been silenced but the lessons from the battlefield travels through time.
These are the facts of life. The exact description of the mating ritual from battlefield to marketplace. Know your commanders, their fears, their weapon requirements...and remember that bullets and temples are the same thing looked at in another way, and from another perspective.
11
WHEN THE CREMATORIUM-LIKE gray fog began to clear in the predawn morning over Bangkok, a detachment of Thai soldiers found Weird Bob’s body hunched against the shell of a burnt-out Honda which had been overturned on a back soi. The barbedwire barricade was five hundred meters in the opposite direction. Nervously clutching their rifles, two soldiers checked out the body as ordered. They cautiously approached the slumped over figure.
“Farang bpen kii mao?” asked one of the soldiers. Was this tall farang with an Army like haircut drunk? Wishful thinking.
“Mai chai, farang lap,” replied the other. Was he asleep? More of the same.
What was the condition of the farang in the soi? Was Weird Bob drunk in the street or sleeping in the street during the middle of a bloody revolution?
His large head was tilted to one side, he had a hanged man’s neck, and his eyes were wide open. One of the soldiers leaned down and shook Weird Bob’s shoulder, and the body keeled over on the pavement. The rug on his head had dislodged and covered his eyes, giving the strange impression that hair was growing from the center of his head to the tip of his nose. When the soldiers turned him over, underneath the body they found a dented electric fan with a red ribbon. Nothing that couldn’t be repaired. As a soldier was about to claim the fan as booty, and another Weird Bob’s rug, several young demonstrators came down the soi and threw rocks at the soldiers. The reaction was immediate. Two soldiers aimed and fired over the heads of the youths, who shouted insults—hia—cunt—jai sut—animal heart and threw more rocks. One of the soldiers knelt and fired a burst. One of the young men was winding up, his arm raised over his head like a quarterback but holding a rock. The M-16 rounds pierced the chest of the demonstrator in a neat, tight pattern. The soldiers turned back to Weird Bob’s body and panic set in. Everyone would say—the foreign press were everywhere—that the Thai Army had killed the farang. That would be a black eye, bad for the international image. Weird Bob suddenly looked like in death what he had never seemed in life—an extremely important person: what counts is presentation—the farang in his expensive suit and tie. In Thailand the white shirt, suit and tie was a badge of authority, class, and power. Kreeng jai—a little fear in the heart—was based on lower ranks bowing to the higher ranks. There would be an outcry. Foreigners would blame the Thai Army; the soldiers felt fear that they would be blamed for having killed him. Then a higher ranking officer arrived. This officer, a colonel, surveyed the street and called for reinforcements to secure a forward position. Two armored personnel carriers arrived and pushed forward, scattering more demonstrators. A moment later, soldiers loaded Weird Bob’s body into the back of a van; Weird Bob ended on top of a pile of other dead bodies which had been collected.
A Haunting Smile Page 15
