The Fear Artist

by Timothy Hallinan

  Spooks.

  HE KNOWS WHAT the apartment will look like, since he’s responsible for its looking that way, but his spirits still plummet as he comes through the door. Everything—couch, glass table, white leather hassock, his weensy cheap desk—has been shoved uselessly into the middle of the room, like mismatched dancers coming together for the fancy steps. The carpet, which he’s wanted to replace for years, is covered by a funereal black drop cloth giving off a sour reek of mold.

  There is literally nowhere to sit.

  Okay, why didn’t he turn the couch around so he could sit on it? What was he thinking?

  He stinks of paint. He’s soaked, even dripping. His elbows are swollen where they hit the pavement. The underside of his left forearm is scraped. One of his favorite T-shirts is ruined.

  He eases out of his wet shoes and leaves them by the door. The noise the door makes when it closes resonates, as though the room were a hollow vault.

  “I’m alone,” he says aloud, listening to the echo chamber. “Deserted. Abandoned. Bleeding.” His voice sounds lower than usual, bouncing off the barren walls.

  His scraped arm sends off a spiteful little telegram of sting, and he shakes his head, blows out a breath he doesn’t remember having drawn, and checks out the scrape, which looks like it’s been disinfected with apricot puree. “Medication,” he says aloud. “And solace.”

  The refrigerator surprises him by opening easily, extending, it seems to him, the first cooperation of the day. Five tall brown Singha soldiers stand at frosty attention, their caps just waiting to be popped. He hefts one and rolls its chill smoothness over his cheeks and forehead, then opens the drawer, pulls out the opener, and flips it into the air, closing his eyes and extending his hand in the precise spot the opener will come down. This trick used to delight Miaow, back when she used to be easily delighted. When he hears it hit the floor, he bends to pick it up, seeing for an instant the implacable eyes of the lean cop. His spirits droop, but the hiss of the beer lifts them a bit.

  He knocks back about a third of the bottle in one icy, heart-slowing pull. With an operatic burp, he underhands the opener into the drawer from five feet away—nothing but net—and goes around the counter to sink onto one of the stools where the members of the family—although rarely at the same time these days—eat breakfast.

  The running crowd, he thinks. He hasn’t seen one of those since the Red Shirts took to the streets to protest the coup that deposed the prime minister they’d voted in by the millions. Now that prime minister’s sister has been elected, the Red Shirts have faded, but Rafferty, like everyone, has heard rumors of isolated, apparently spontaneous crowd incidents since, protesting this or that inequality. The Thai media, which can accurately be characterized as cautious, hasn’t run the stories. He wonders whether the TV crew’s footage will ever make it onto the screen.

  He tilts the beer again and swallows, looking idly through the sliding glass door at the darkening sky above Bangkok. The apartment is eight floors up, and their previously panoramic view has been divided vertically by two new condominium towers, both still skeletal at the upper floors. The sky is still there, although it’s been broken up into rectangles by girders like black fold lines, and he scans it for the halting, zigzag flight of bats. Bats in the city delight him—the preservation of wildness they suggest. Sees a lot of them, random tatters of black against a lowering gray sky.

  To the north the sky grows even darker and the world disappears, as it has for weeks, in a shroud of rain: the worst monsoon season in sixty years, a huge blunt-force weapon a quarter of a country wide, striking wherever it pleases, filling and overfilling dams, swelling rivers, flooding entire towns, heedless of human life, human dreams, human prayers. As random, murderous, and unmalicious as a bolt of lightning.

  And feeding billions of gallons of water into the Chao Phraya River, threatening Bangkok with the worst flood since the 1940s. Rafferty can’t see the river, but, like everyone in the city, he can feel the water level rising, and he’s seen the trucks, loaded with sandbags, splashing toward the city’s low-lying neighborhoods.

  King Taksin established Bangkok in 1767 at the site of a trading center on the floodplain of the Chao Phraya, the River of Kings. The city sprawls across an expanse of ground as flat as the palm of a hand, its low points and high points separated by a matter of a few meters. Its buildings sprout from saturated soil, soil that doesn’t accept much water. The city has always had its feet-dry areas and its feet-wet areas, but the difference in elevation between them is precariously small. Over the centuries Bangkok’s builders formalized some of the river’s small tributaries as canals and dug other canals from scratch to spread the water’s flow over a larger area, trying to avoid the inundation that a significant rise in the river’s level would guarantee. Most years the strategy is successful, although in 1942 the city almost drowned.

  This year looks like it could be worse than 1942. A city of 12 to 14 million, depending on the time of day, is following the daily rainfall reports with a degree of attention usually reserved for the World Cup.

  Mentally Poke follows the surging water upstream, over an imaginary map, back to the rainy northeast, where his wife and daughter have been for two days now, visiting Rose’s family. He misses them even more than he’d thought he would.

  And once again he thinks about the death, on a wet, apricot-colored sidewalk, of a former soldier.

  2

  The Color of Spring Gone Wrong

  FOUR HOURS LATER the knot of furniture in the living room has been untangled and the big pieces are back in their original places, but two feet from the walls. Rafferty has showered and scrubbed where he got scraped on the pavement, and he’s done a little self-barbering to snip some apricot patches out of his hair. He’s cut his hair shorter on one side than the other, so markedly that it makes him want to tilt his head to compensate. Studying it in the mirror, he thinks Miaow, whose own hair changes on a moment-by-moment basis, would probably approve.

  Except that she’d never notice. She’s developed a selective vision impairment. No one who’s much more than five feet tall is visible to her.

  When someone knocks on the front door, Rafferty’s already on his way toward it, wearing jeans and a Japlish T-shirt he’s liberated from Miaow’s room that says LET’S TOGETHER!! With the paint-splattered clothes rolled up under one arm and one of Rose’s umbrellas in his free hand, he stops, surprised by the twinge of uneasiness the sound causes.

  He confronts the uneasiness head-on by peeking boldly through the peephole in the door. He sees no one, which does not reassure him. With a deep breath, he tosses the bundle of spattered clothes onto the couch and opens the door.

  What he sees is a scrawny Vietnamese kid of twelve or so with a slender neck and a head so big it looks like a golf ball on a tee. He’s too short to have been visible through the peephole. The kid is carefully disreputable in his after-school clothes: a T-shirt that hangs almost to his knees, a pair of jeans about three inches too long for him that have accordioned around his big, clunky running shoes, and a pair of round, crooked, black-rimmed spectacles. His hair, Rafferty realizes with a start, has been dyed precisely the same shade as Miaow’s. He glances up at Rafferty, and his mouth tightens and travels a really remarkable distance toward his left ear, a semaphore of disappointment.

  “Hello, Mr. Rafferty,” Andrew Nguyen says dubiously. He peers around Poke into the room as though he half believes that Rafferty is intentionally concealing something. “Is Miaow home?”

  Rafferty says, “You know she’s not, Andrew.”

  “Oh,” Andrew says. He blinks a couple of times and uses his index fingers to push the big black frames up his almost-nonexistent nose. Since he and Miaow met in a school production of The Tempest, they’ve been inseparable. The incipient romance delights Rose, but Rafferty is conflicted about it, which is a fancy way of saying it makes him crazy.

  Andrew is pretty much occupied with looking at the finger he used t
o adjust his glasses, so Rafferty says, “Was that it, Andrew? Just ‘Oh’?”

  “Well, no,” Andrew says, wiping the fingertip on his jeans. “She hasn’t … umm, she hasn’t phoned me.”

  “She’s only been gone two—”

  “And when I phone her, I get her voice mail.” Andrew blinks again and pushes at the glasses, even though they haven’t moved a fraction of an inch, and in the gesture Rafferty recognizes loneliness.

  “She doesn’t have her phone,” he says, a bit more gently.

  “Whoa,” Andrew says, tilting back. “That’s kind of raw.”

  “It’s not a punishment, Andrew. She’s in a two-buffalo town in the middle of nowhere, and the phone would probably be useless.” He doesn’t add that Rose had insisted on it, saying she wasn’t going to spend the entire visit apologizing to her mother because all Miaow does is text.

  “Huh?” Andrew screws up his eyes. “I thought Mrs. Rafferty’s family had a big estate, with … you know, farms and everything.”

  Rafferty feels like someone watching a movie in a foreign language at the moment the subtitles disappear. “Right,” he says, his mind on full spin, trying to reconcile the “estate” Miaow has conjured up with the one-room thatched hut in which Rose grew up. “Um, rice paddies and huts for the farmers and a little river.” At least he’s not lying. That’s pretty much everything there is in Rose’s village.

  “But no cellular,” Andrew says.

  “They’re … they’re older,” Rafferty improvises, wondering why he’s elaborating on what is clearly a whopper of a lie. “You know, they can’t even work the remote.”

  “They’ve got a TV but no cell service?”

  “One thing you’re not, Andrew—you’re not dumb.” Rafferty looks over Andrew’s head at the elevator, wishing he could cross the hall and get into it. “That’s a really good point, and the answer is yes. They have TV but no cell service. That’s exactly what they’ve got. And listen, there’s nothing I’d rather do than stand around at my front door and chat with you, but I have places to go, and—”

  “Where?”

  “A bar, Andrew. I intend to go to a bar. Why? Would you like to come?”

  “I’m too young,” Andrew says with perfect seriousness.

  “By golly, you are. And I was looking forward to taking you with me. How are you getting home?”

  Andrew blinks, so perhaps the question wasn’t as diplomatic as Rafferty hoped it was. “My father’s driver. He’s waiting.”

  “Your father’s—”

  “Driver.”

  “Well,” Rafferty says as the reasons behind Miaow’s lie become apparent. “How nice. Listen, she’ll be back in four or five days, and if Rose calls me—I mean, if she finds a cellular signal somewhere and calls me—I’ll tell her to ask Miaow to call you. Okay?”

  “Yeah,” Andrew says. He shuffles his feet from side to side, and Rafferty has a sudden urge to hug him. “That’d be cool.” He takes a step back, although he seems to have chosen the direction at random. He’s clearly lost. “I kind of miss her,” he says.

  “Me, too,” Rafferty says. “I miss her a lot.”

  “Even though she’s sort of … you know.”

  Rafferty says, “Do I ever.”

  “She’s got a shirt just like that one.”

  “No, she doesn’t,” Rafferty says. “I’ve got a shirt like this one, and she steals it.”

  “Ahh,” Andrew says, and this time he turns around. “Okay, thanks, Mr. Rafferty. Maybe she’ll call me.”

  “I’m sure she will. Bye, Andrew.”

  He watches the kid cross the hall, the cuffs of the jeans flapping around and threatening to trip him with every step, and in the big head and the narrow shoulders he sees what Miaow may like, or even love, about him.

  Andrew needs her.

  Rafferty waits until the elevator arrives and the doors have closed behind Andrew before he says, “Well, I need her, too.”

  FIVE MINUTES LATER he jams the damp wad of paint-stiff clothes down the trash chute to the basement and pushes the button for the elevator.

  As he hits the street and opens Rose’s umbrella, he feels a bit of the old tingle, the little carbonated fizz of anticipation he’d felt all those years ago, when he first arrived, when Bangkok was just one jaw-dropper after another. When he spoke none of the language, when he might as well have been blind for all the sense the signs made to him. When he felt that the odds were fifty-fifty, each time he went down a new street, that it would be dedicated to holiness—temple carvers, amulet makers, gold-leaf hammerers—or hedonism—bars, restaurants, flamboyant neon signifying the falloff edge of his middle-class map of life. Whether the people on the sidewalks would be housewives toting plastic bags full of groceries or children playing tag or transsexual hookers gossiping as they waited for dark. When it felt like the whole city changed every time he went out, as though they knocked it down behind him and built it up in front of him.

  Before he met Rose.

  It’s only a couple of extremely wet blocks from their apartment to the point at which Patpong 1 empties into Silom and the usual snarl of traffic, slowed by the line of taxis and tuk-tuks waiting for the sweltering hordes and their compensated companions for the evening. Patpong had its best days, if the adjective is applicable, decades ago, but it retains a kind of overstimulated, faintly gangrenous energy, and the street between the bars is jammed, despite the weather, with sex tourists, gawkers of both sexes, and the ever-present 10 percent of hypocrites who pretend they came to browse the junk on sale in the night market that stretches down the center of the street and are shocked—shocked, do you hear?—to discover all these bars full of rowdy, half-naked women who seem unusually friendly. There’s no way, the hypocrites’ body language announces, that they’d have come here if they’d known what a sewer it was.

  They’re usually the ones who stay forever.

  It’s kind of melancholy, Rafferty thinks as he picks a path between the drunk and distracted and tries to avoid the chill little waterfalls off the plastic sheeting over the stands, that he has so few friends at this point that the best thing he can think to do, on his second evening alone, is to spend time with a bunch of aging sexpats. The family, this totally unexpected and all-consuming planetary cluster of Rose, Miaow, and Poke, has absorbed him so completely that he has almost no relationships outside it.

  With a guilty pang, he sees the face of his best friend, Arthit, but Arthit is out of contention these days if what Rafferty wants is some light, meaningless male bonding. Since the death of Arthit’s wife, Noi, his friend’s spirit seems to have dimmed like a candle under a glass. Rafferty worries about him, even though Arthit has apparently put the heavy grief drinking behind him, but, to be brutally honest, a couple of hours tiptoeing around Arthit’s heartbreak isn’t what Poke has in mind tonight, after … after the day he’s had. He’ll see Arthit, he tells himself, tomorrow.

  If he were being honest with himself, he thinks, he’s actually afraid to be alone after what happened on that painted sidewalk. A murder in plain daylight, denied—by a cop—before the body cools.

  What he needs now is dumb stuff. Guys arguing with complete conviction over things they don’t care about. A few beers to befriend the two he drank at the apartment.

  The Expat Bar.

  A holdover from the 1970s, when Patpong was full of small bars that actually made most of their money by selling alcohol as opposed to skin, the Expat Bar is jammed between a coffee shop and a big, forever-cursed space that seems to be a disco this week and will probably be empty again next week. The bar staked its narrow claim fifty-plus years ago, and some of its patrons have been sitting at it ever since.

  “Zo,” Leon Hofstedler says in Wagnerian English even before Rafferty lets go of the door, “Poke comes. Look, people, look who finds ze key to his cage tonight.”

  “Can I use it to get in?” Bob Campeau asks. Campeau has been a bit edgy with Rafferty ever since he took Rose off the
market, as Campeau puts it, although Rose says she never met him.

  “You could,” Rafferty says. “But you wouldn’t get out alive. Anyway, the birds have flown.”

  Campeau returns to his depressive survey of the bar’s battered surface, every square millimeter of which he could probably draw blindfolded.

  Hofstedler, who’s been a regular for so long that his name is engraved on a brass plate on the back of his stool, swivels to face Poke. “Would it be rude to ask—”

  “Yes, it would,” Rafferty says. “Hi, Toots.”

  The bartender, a cheery, ageless Thai woman whose real name has been lost since before clocks began to run, gives him a smile bright enough to make him blink. “Beer Singha,” she says with the certainty of someone who pulls out a plum every time she puts in her thumb. “Big one.”

  “Zo,” Hofstedler says as Poke climbs onto the only empty stool at the bar. He tilts his stool back so he can swivel into position again without knocking the bar over with his belly. “Ze lovely Rose and ze little one, her name will come to me, zey haff gone”—he puts his fingertips to his temples and closes his eyes—“up north,” he says in a tone of profound mystery. “Yes?”

  “You’re amazing, Leon.” Rafferty takes the bottle, served without a glass, as he used to order it all those years ago, and makes the sign of the cross over Toots. “May your children have children,” he says.

  “Have already,” Toots says. “Many, many.”

  “Why, you’re a child yourself,” Rafferty says.

  “She’s taken,” Campeau says sourly. He’s as gaunt as Hofstedler is fat, the kind of thin that announces he’s never tasted anything he liked.

  Toots wiggles her eyebrows. “Not every night.”

  “I don’t know what you’ve got,” Campeau says to Rafferty, “but I wish you’d lose it.”

  “Miaow,” Hofstedler says triumphantly. His conversational principle is that no discussion actually exists unless he’s a part of it, which makes it impossible for him to interrupt anyone. “I am right, yes?”