“Can you do this sort of thing?” she asked. “What I mean is use the idea. Don’t just copy it.”
Munny studied the policeman and the poodle.
“Yeah, I can do that.”
She handed him paper and pen, and Munny drew. He stopped, wadded up the paper and started again and again until he had his own version of the policeman and then the dog. Palm and Fah came up with new words for the image. Oak had the idea of a fake phone number that accessed a junta hotline. He also criticized the policeman’s cap. Munny did another version.
Oak shrugged his shoulders, shaking his head like a man unconvinced. What had started as their personal study group was now expanding. The addition of one person might not seem like much, but that was paying too much attention to the single-digit number and not the role of the new person. Oak fancied himself—and he’d sold himself to Fah and Palm—as Bangkok’s Banksy. When they had hatched the idea of a guerilla street art group, he’d told Fah and Palm that he was the man to make them all proud. He’d gone on about how his private art tutors had always complimented his talent and imagination.
Oak’s face grew and grew with the talk, all before he’d showed them any of his artwork. He had promised to show Fah his portfolio of his award-winning graphic designs, including the hard-hitting stuff he’d bragged about. When the time had come, she’d just flipped through it, thinking the next one had to be better. One after another, the pages were filled with crude cartoons of vampires, dragons and giants showing lots of fangs and long nails, and exploding coffins. She looked for elements of protest. What she found was blood and gore.
“Where’s the Banksy stuff?”
His jaw had tightened, softly grinding his teeth.
“You’re looking at it.”
She had been afraid that would be his answer. As their study group had broken up that day, Fah had remembered seeing a guy with a Banksy tattoo. She’d made it her mission to find this artist who’d used a tattoo needle to channel into human flesh the Banksy urban vision of the powerless caught in a vice of repression. She’d hunted down the farang on Khao San Road who had the Banksy tattoo, and he’d given her Munny’s name and shop address. She’d handed Munny the ten thousand baht and the barbershop card. Then she’d worried he would skip back to Cambodia with the money and kicked herself for giving him so much. Osborne had taught her never to give an employee enough money to do a runner, but what was done was done. To cover the possibility she’d misjudged Munny’s character, she’d said nothing about him to either Oak or Palm.
The soldier and dog had proved Munny could channel Banksy. Fah now grabbed his elbow and guided him to the long table, instructing him to take it to the next step. After that, Munny had no question in his mind about who was calling the shots inside the room. Banksy was the superstar and Fah the coach who believed that a rookie like Munny could play at Banksy’s level. He let himself be led. He wanted to believe her because he wanted to believe in himself.
“Now I want you to draw a Thai soldier, instead of a British policeman, and have him holding a Thai dog on a leash. We need big images, so people will notice them on a wall.”
“What kind of dog?” asked Oak.
Fah thought for a moment.
“A soi dog.” Turning to Munny, she asked, “Can you draw a sad-looking street dog?”
“Come on. He’s probably eaten a dozen soi dogs,” said Oak.
“The Vietnamese eat dogs,” said Munny. “Cambodians don’t eat dog.”
Fah shook her head.
“A soi dog and a Thai soldier. Could you just let him draw?”
Munny used the better part of two hours to sketch out a one-meter tall soldier and life-sized soi dog, right down to a pair of floppy ears. Fah and Palm taped it to the wall and they all stood back, imagining the effect when applied in spray paint on the side of a building. Palm stuck up two fingers in a victory sign.
“Looks good,” he said.
“Thanks,” Munny replied.
“I want the words to go with it,” said Fah. “Have a look at this for the style.”
She handed Munny the Banksy book with the designated text graphic he was to emulate. When he had drawn the text and cut the stencils, Palm’s easy, relaxed smile registered his approval. Munny had won him over. Palm’s thick, black-rimmed glasses magnified his eyes, giving him an owlish look. His neatly trimmed rat’s-tail beard framed each side of his face, dead-ending just short of his jaw. The finely maintained facial hair carried the hint of a medieval duelist, sword in hand, committed to slaying infidels. Palm’s square-shaped head, set off by a curtain of black bangs, added a touch of the mad scientist.
Fah, hands pressing each of the stencils against the wall, taped and secured them. When she was finished, the combined stencils read, THIS WALL IS A DESIGNATED.
“What do you think, Oak?”
“Okay,” he said.
That was the closest to a compliment Oak was willing to give.
“Position it at eye level,” he added.
Appointing himself as spatial consultant was better than being left out in the cold.
Munny, hearing no further objections, leaned over the table and, working freehand, began to cut the next stencil word: HAPPINESS. With the font this size, it took a good eye to navigate the sharp curves of the S’s. Any slippage and it would send the whole eighteen-wheeler tumbling over the side of the mountain, requiring a fresh start.
Luck seemed to be on his side. Fah’s studio was on the third floor over a barbershop. Munny lived on the third floor of the Aquarium. Another three-floor walkup was to become the story of his life. In Bangkok there were hundreds, maybe thousands of buildings with hundreds of stories. Fate was sending him a message: Munny, your place in life is on the third floor. Deal with it. The Eight-Niners are always going to be coming down your staircase asking where there money is.
The floor area beneath the table was littered with wadded paper, throwaways of earlier drafts and discarded acetate stencils. Oak, his hair tied in a ponytail, circled the table in his black T-shirt with the Batman signal against the night sky of Gotham, while his jeans and his white cloth bag on the floor gave away his university student identity. He sported a tiny trail of a moustache above his upper lip. Rather than regret his inflated view of his own graphic art skills, Oak just wouldn’t give up. As they stopped for a coffee break, he talked up his résumé and how he had just about landed a graphic designer’s job with an international company.
“I’ve followed Banksy for years,” he said.
Fah drank her coffee and stared at the stencils on the wall.
“Can I see your work sometime?” asked Munny, in a polite, genuine voice.
“So you can copy it?”
“Only if Fah wants me to.”
“Time to get back to work,” she said.
Beyond a stencil that said, “2 + 2 = 5,” Oak would never master Banksy’s world. Fah knew that and also understood that when discussing Banksy with him, there were limits to what she could say. How could she tell Oak that his images were stillborn, tainted with dull echoes from established brands? She couldn’t. Any more than she could tell Oak that he lacked the talent to stretch his mind into another realm. He also lacked the flare to realize the artistic potential within the existing political state of play, unable to see the paradox. Banksy effortlessly visualized a larger truth. He knew exactly where to position cops and soldiers against the world of innocent children and animals for maximum impact. Like her hero, Christina Tangier, Fah saw that Banksy used art to tell the truth.
Oak still resisted bringing in an outsider, and that meant anyone who wasn’t a classmate. He knew that what they planned to do might get them into serious trouble. Only those very close could be trusted. Had Fah considered the risk of being thrown into a military prison? Sensing his disapproval, she touched his arm, with a look in her eye that said he should trust her judgment. Oak sat looking at her, saying nothing, lost inside his world. Since the coup, he’d changed in subt
le ways.
“What are you going to do with this?” asked Munny, gesturing toward the stencils on the wall.
“It’s for our term project paper,” said Palm.
“That’s how we started,” said Fah, “but it’s time that we’ve moved on.”
She glanced at Oak, who remained in a suspended state of half-acceptance, half-denial.
“You’re studying art?” asked Munny.
“Political science,” said Fah. “The art of governing.”
Munny scratched his chin, wondering what kind of art Fah meant.
Fah then watched as Munny used a knife to cut the image of the soldier and the dog into the surface of a clear sheet of acetate. Earlier, he’d experimented with cutting the image into thick paper and then cardboard. Acetate made the best stencil material, as it could be reused, but it required a sure hand when the image was taped over the surface. The real skill, though, was drawing a design that, when quickly spray-painted on a wall, a bridge or a building , would be immediately recognizable from a distance. The trickiest parts were getting the edges clear and precise, and the contrast and brightness right.
The group then worked together to assemble the stencils on a whitewashed wall. Munny shook a can of black paint spray. He felt their eyes on him as he sprayed over the words cut into the stencils. He stopped to check his work, moving in close, eyeing the density of the paint. Only then did Munny resume the spraying, taking special care with the cutouts of the soldier and the dog.
They let the paint set for a few minutes before Oak and Palm moved in to take down the stencils. The four of them stared at the wall for a minute. No one wanted to be the first to say anything. Finally it was Fah who broke the silence.
“It’s beautiful.” She turned to Munny as if examining him for the first time. “We have a saying in Thai that ‘A bad situation makes a hero out of an ordinary person.’ But I’m getting the feeling you’re no ordinary person, Munny.”
She held out her iPhone and snapped a series of photos. She took a selfie with the wall behind, her head between the soldier and the soi dog on a leash.
THIS WALL IS A DESIGNATED
HAPPINESS AREA
REFORM UNHAPPY PEOPLE
Help Line: 911189
TWELVE
“We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it.”—George Orwell, 1984
CALVINO SCROLLED THROUGH Fah’s tweet timeline from the previous night and found, “Curfew locks my door for the night, no kiss goodnight, my thoughts like a stranger in silence.” Wasn’t she supposed to be a political science major? Apparently she shared her inner thoughts with a couple of thousand people, but Osborne wasn’t one of them. He clicked onto Fah’s Facebook private messages and read the last half dozen, which had been left while he’d been in the Happy Bar.
For the modern private eye, there was no assistant to track the thoughts, movements, plans, desires and craziness of people who could match the data streams of Twitter and Facebook. Fah continually self-reported her location, how long she’d be at that place and her future meeting places and times. It was now hard to believe how difficult it had once been to follow a person in Bangkok in a time before smart phones and social media. The new generation demanded to be followed online. It was in their digital blood. A small investment in a few specialized apps, and not even Sherlock Holmes in his most inspired opium dreams could have imagined the possibilities—such as remotely switching on Fah’s iPhone mic. He listened to voices speaking Thai, young male voices. When Fah spoke, he recognized her voice.
Calvino clicked on another app to turn on her iPhone camera. This one required some analog good luck. The phone had to be at the right angle. If the camera was inside a handbag or next to something blocking the lens, nothing but a black void would come through, as if Alice had fallen down the rabbit hole. A video image of the people behind the voices moved across Calvino’s cell phone screen.
The upper floor of the Chinese-style shophouse was open, loft style. Fah sat cross-legged on the edge of a double bed, using her thumbs to type on her screen keypad. She looked up from the phone and said something inaudible to one of the men. On the chairs near the bed, two Thai university-age men watched as a third man, a bit old for university, studied a large stencil spread flat on the surface of the long table. He held a box cutter in his right hand, and Calvino then saw the three of them, backs to the camera, looking at the wall where the words THIS WALL IS A DESIGNATED HAPPINESS AREA appeared alongside a soldier and a dog.
Palm leaned in closer to examine the word DESIGNATED.
“The word is ‘designated’?” asked Oak, waiting for a translation into Thai.
“It’s perfect,” said Fah, looking at Oak. “It means the official place.”
McPhail lit a cigarette in the back of the taxi as it made a left turn onto one of the many forgettable higher-numbered sois where Sukhumvit Road snaked toward Chon Buri Province. They drove under a flyover bridge for one hundred meters and passed shophouses until the road took a sharp U-turn. As the taxi headed back to the main road, Calvino leaned forward and told the driver to stop. The barbershop was about twenty meters away on the left-hand side. McPhail, cigarette between his lips, climbed out first and stretched as Calvino paid the driver.
“Man, I’m hungry,” McPhail said.
“Let’s see if they have tacos.”
At a roadside noodle vendor’s table, the two occupied small plastic stools with a clear view of the barbershop. The noodle vendor stared at them, smiling broadly. Not many foreigners had ever stopped to order a bowl of noodles from his stand. In fact, they were his first farang customers. But his smile collapsed a little when they ordered in Thai, as this immediately limited the price inflation he had in mind. The farangs he’d seen before had all been in the back of taxis that stopped and asked for directions. The tourists were clueless that their driver was giving them the famous roundabout tour of Bangkok to increase his fare.
“Man, this is a rat hole paradise,” said McPhail, looking at the building behind the noodle stand. “An infinite number of drainpipes to run up.”
Just then the head of a large rat emerged from one of the drainpipes. It surveyed the landscape before dropping out and scurrying along the side of the building to another drainpipe.
“Did you see the size of that fucking rat? The size of a cat.”
Calvino looked up from his bowl of noodles.
“Cats never get that big.”
“You gonna eat those noodles?”
“As I missed lunch, yes, I am eating the noodles.”
His attention was on the surveillance app on his cell phone.
“You talking to me or your phone?”
“They’re about to leave. I want some photos of them in the street.”
McPhail pushed his bowl of noodles to the side and lit another cigarette.
“What do you think they’re doing to Noi? The poor bastard.”
“In his condition, there isn’t much more they could do,” said Calvino.
“They’ll let him go, right?” said McPhail, looking for some assurance.
“After they beat his taco recipe out of him.”
“That’s why you brought me here. To punish me for the Happy Bar tacos.”
“Let’s agree this hasn’t been a good food day.”
He listened to Fah’s voice and the voices of her friends coming through his cell phone. They were about to leave but then changed their minds and started to cut another stencil.
“I thought we were leaving the wai kru until tomorrow,” Calvino heard Palm say.
Munny looked up, holding the box cutter.
“I need to go home, too.”
“Soon,” said Fah.
That’s what she’d said an hour earlier. Oak saw an opening.
“Go, Munny. I can finish up.”
Munny looked over at Fah, who was lost inside a social media world where she starred under the handle of ZenMeBot.
“Okay
, let’s pack up,” she said, opening her bag.
Fah walked over to Munny and stuffed three thousand baht in his shirt pocket.
“Tomorrow, same time.”
That left Oak holding the box cutter as the curtain came down.
Calvino looked up from his cell phone.
“McPhail, they’re coming out.”
“Nice neighborhood,” said McPhail, blowing smoke out of his nose.
The local community of lower-income Thais lived and worked in shophouses. The neighborhood was lost, out of time, waiting to be discovered by developers. The unbroken line of shabby tenements, a prison complex of cramped, airless rooms cooled by electric fans, wrapped around the U-turn. No one got into or out of the soi without a hundred eyes watching.
The residents peered out from their pre-Internet world of small shops as the two farangs sat eating bowls of noodles on the pavement. Their version of the social media was the analog world of windows, sidewalks, taxis, cars, motorcycles and people on the street. Through the large glass window of the barbershop, Calvino watched a man getting a haircut. The barber, even at that distance, had a distinctive, round Chinese face. He wore a plastic Panama hat. His stomach, swollen by too many late-night snacks, gave him a sumo wrestler appearance but with a happy Buddha smile. Fah and her friends had a floor in his building.
Calvino had tracked Fah easily. She hadn’t bothered to change her phone setting from the default—Show location. Whatever she was up to, she was carrying on without any awareness that her movements were being tracked. Was it the innocence of digital youth, or was it the new normal for young people not to care? Calvino caught the vendor’s eye and gestured with his hand for the bill.
“Big spender,” said McPhail.
The two bowls of noodles came to sixty baht. The vendor wiped his hands on an oily rag and held out the change from one hundred baht. Calvino waved it off.
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