Lovedeath

by Dan Simmons

  When I looked up, the baby was almost finished feeding. I could see its long tongue licking at Mata’s lips and cheeks for any residue of the regurgitated meal.

  Years later I stumbled across a Scientific American article titled “Food Sharing in Vampire Bats,” dealing with reciprocal-altruism in donor bats regurgitating blood for roostmates. Vampire bats, it seemed, starved to death if they did not get a meal consisting of twenty to thirty milliliters of blood within sixty hours. It turned out that after the proper stimulus—the roostmates licking under the donor bat’s wings and on her lips—the donor would regurgitate blood only for those roostmates who would die within twenty-four hours without a blood meal. This reciprocal-exchange system was survival beneficient, said the article’s author, because it allowed the recipient bat another night or two to search for blood, while only drawing twelve hours’ worth of blood from the donor bat’s sixty-hour reservoir.

  But it was that Scientific American drawing of the smaller bat licking its donor’s lips, leathery wings entwined, slash-lipped mouths moving toward each other in the blood-vomit kiss, that made me vomit into my office wastebasket twenty years after that night in Bangkok.

  I remember little of the next few hours of that night. I remember the man in black silk returning to the stage and another Thai—a younger, thinner man in an expensive suit—stepping onto the stage and paying his money. I remember dragging Tres from that place and have vague memories of pressing a roll of baht into the hands of the driver of a long-tailed taxi on the pier outside. I would have swum from that place if I’d had to, leaving Tres behind. I vaguely remember the wind from our passage up the Chao Phraya River reviving me a bit, settling the nausea and inhibiting the surge of hysteria that threatened to engulf me.

  I remember going alone to my room and locking the door that night. Tang, my mia chao, had disappeared, and for that I was grateful.

  I remember staring at the slowly turning fan in the hour before sunrise and giggling as I worked out a simple translation. Unlike Tres, I had never been good at languages, but this translation was suddenly obvious. Phanyaa mahn naga kio. If phanyaa mahn were Mara, the prince of demons, and if naga were the female serpent-demon incarnation of the phanyaa mahn, then kio could only mean one thing; vampire.

  I lay there and giggled and waited for the sun to rise so that I could sleep.

  The city is still burning and I can hear isolated automatic weapons fire from the government troops killing students as the four men take me to Mara.

  There is no torturous trip through back klongs this time. The limousine crosses the river, drives south along the bank opposite the Oriental Hotel, and stops at an unfinished high-rise somewhere near the Tak Sin Road highway bridge. The pockmarked man leads us to an outside construction elevator, throws a switch, and we rumble into the night air. The elevator has no sides and I see the river and the city across the river in dreamlike clarity as we rise thirty stories and more into the thick night air. The river is as empty of traffic as I have ever seen it; only a few ferries fight the dark current downriver. Upriver, toward the Grand Palace and the universities, flames light up the night.

  We rise toward the fortieth floor and a wind ruffles my hair. I am the one nearest the edge of the open, grinding platform. All the pockmarked man has to do is push me from behind and I would tumble to the river four hundred feet below. I wonder idly if falling will feel like my dreams of night-flying in the seconds before I strike.

  We reach one of the top levels and the crude elevator squeals to a stop. A gate slides up and the pockmarked man beckons me out.

  Somewhere above us, a welding torch flashes arc-strobes and drips magnesium-white sparks. Construction does not stop for sleep in modern Bangkok. The building has no sides here, only clear plastic draped from open beams to separate sections of the cement expanse from one another. A hot wind rustles the plastic with a sound not unlike the stirring of leathery wings.

  Trouble lights hang from girders and more lights are visible through walls of plastic to our left. The five of us walk toward the light and sound. At the entrance, a sort of tunnel made from rustling plastic sheets, the three bodyguards stay behind and only the pockmarked man lifts the plastic, beckons me forward, and follows me in.

  There is no stage here, but a dozen or so folding chairs are set up around an open area where an expensive Persian rug has been set on the dusty cement floor. The lamp overhead is shielded so that the space is more in shadow than direct light. Six men, all Thai and all in sleek tuxedos, sit on the folding chairs. Their arms are crossed. Two of them are smoking cigarettes. They watch me as the pockmarked man leads me forward.

  I have eyes only for the two women sitting across the open space in heavy rattan chairs. The older woman might be my age or a little older; she has aged well. Her hair is still black, but now swept up in a fashionable arc. Her Asian features are unlined, her cheeks and chin still strong, and only a certain corded look in her neck and hands suggests that she is in her forties. She wears an elegant and obviously expensive gown of black and red silk; a gold-and-diamond pendant hangs across her red vest and stands out against the black silk blouse.

  The younger woman next to her is infinitely more beautiful. Olive-skinned, dark-eyed, with lustrous hair that has been cut short in the newest western style, gifted with a long neck and elegant hands that exude grace even in repose, this young woman is beautiful in a way that no actress or model could ever achieve. It is obvious that she is content in herself, simultaneously aware and oblivious of her own beauty, and that whatever passions rule her, the seeking of admiration or acceptance of others is not one of them.

  I know that I am looking at Mara and her daughter Tanha.

  The pockmarked man steps closer to them, goes to his knees in the way that the Thai do to show deference to royalty, performs an elaborate wai, and then offers Mara my roll of twenty bonds without lifting his bowed head. She speaks softly and he answers respectfully.

  Mara sets the money aside and looks at me. Her eyes catch the yellow gleam of the shielded lamp above.

  The pockmarked man looks up, nods me forward, and reaches to pull me to my knees. I genuflect of my own accord before he can grasp my sleeve. I lower my head and keep my eyes on Mara’s slippered feet.

  In elegant Thai, she says, “You know what you are asking for?”

  “Yes.” I answer in Thai. My voice is firm.

  “And you are willing to pay two hundred thousand American dollars for it?”

  “Yes.”

  Mara purses her lips. “If you know about me,” she says very softly, “then you must know that I no longer perform this…service.”

  “Yes,” I say, head bowed in deference.

  She waits in a silence that I realize is a command to speak. “The Reverend Tanha,” I say at last.

  “Raise your head,” Mara says to me. To her daughter, she murmurs that I have jai ron—the hot heart.

  “Jai bau dee,” says Tanha with a soft smile, suggesting that the farang’s mind is not good.

  “It would cost three hundred thousand to know my daughter,” says Mara. There is no hint of negotiation in her voice; the price is final.

  I nod respectfully, reach into the hidden pocket at the back of my vest, and remove a hundred thousand dollars in cash and bearer’s bonds.

  One of the bodyguards takes the money and Mara nods slightly. “When do you wish this to happen?” she says in liquid tones. Her eyes show neither boredom nor interest.

  “Now,” I say. “Tonight.”

  The older woman looks at her daughter. Tanha’s nod is almost imperceptible but there is something in those lustrous brown eyes: hunger perhaps.

  Mara slaps her palms together and two young Thai women come through the rustling folds of plastic, move to my side, urge me to my feet, and begin to undress me. The pockmarked man nods and his thugs bring another rattan chair forward and set it on the Persian carpet.

  The six men in tuxedos lean forward with bright eyes.


  Tres and I finally saw each other again over breakfast in a cheap place near the river late the next morning. I didn’t really want to talk to him about it, yet I had to.

  Eventually we got to it and I found our tones low, embarrassed, almost like when someone from the platoon got blown away and no one wanted to say his name for a while unless it was in the form of a joke. We didn’t joke about this.

  “Did you see that guy’s cock…after?” Tres said.

  I blinked, shook my head, and looked over my shoulder to make sure that no one was listening. Most of the tables near the river’s edge here were empty. The temperature must have been over a hundred.

  “It had these…lesions,” whispered Tres. “Like marks I saw once when I was a lifeguard on the Cape and this guy swam into a jellyfish…” His voice trailed away.

  I sipped cold coffee and concentrated on not shuddering.

  Tres took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. It looked like he hadn’t slept either. “Johnny, you wanted to be a medic. How much blood does the human body have in it?”

  I shrugged. I’d had some half-assed idea about being a medic so I could get into medical school when I got back to the World; despite my lackadaisical approach to school, my folks expected me to finish college and become something when I got home. I never told them that after a week in ’Nam I knew that I’d never get home.

  “I dunno,” I said. I don’t think Tres saw my shrug.

  He set his wire-rimmed glasses back in place. “I think it’s about five or six liters,” he said. “Depending upon someone’s size.”

  I nodded, not able to picture a liter. Years later when they began selling soft drinks in liter bottles, I always imagined five or six of those bottles filled with blood equaling what we carried around in our veins every day.

  “Imagine an orgasm where you’re ejaculating blood,” whispered Tres.

  I looked over my shoulder again. I could feel my cheeks and neck flushing.

  Tres touched my wrist. “No, think about it, Johnny. That guy was still alive when they took him out. These guys wouldn’t pay big bucks for it if they knew it’d kill them.”

  Wouldn’t they? I thought. It was the first time that I realized that someone might fuck even if it meant certain death. In a way, that revelation in 1970 prepared me for life in the eighties and nineties.

  “How much blood could someone lose and still stay alive without a transfusion?” whispered Tres. I knew from his tone that he wasn’t expecting an answer from me, just thinking aloud the way he did when we were planning an ambush site.

  I did not know the answer then, but I’ve had the opportunity to learn it many times since, especially during my residency as an ER intern. A wounded person can lose about a liter of blood volume and recover to make it up themselves. More than about a sixth of blood volume gone, and so is the victim. With transfusions, someone can lose up to 40 percent of their blood volume and hope to recover.

  I didn’t know any of this then and I wasn’t too curious. I was too busy trying to imagine ejaculating blood in an orgasm that went on for long minutes rather than seconds. This time I did shudder.

  Tres waved the waiter over and paid the check. “I’ve got to get going. I need to get a cab over to Western Union.”

  “Why?” I said. I was so sleepy that the hot, thick air seemed to slur my words.

  “I’m getting some money wired from the States,” said Tres.

  I sat straight up, no longer sleepy. “Why?”

  Tres took his glasses off again to polish them. When he looked at me, his pale eyes looked myopic and lost. “I’m going back tonight, Johnny.”

  The young women have undressed me and the creature named Tanha has come closer to caress me when suddenly everything stops. Mara has given a signal.

  “We have forgotten something,” Mara says. It is the first time she has spoken English. She makes a graceful but ironic gesture. “The times now demand extra caution. I am sorry we did not think of it earlier.” She glances at her daughter and I can see the mocking half-smile on both of their faces. “I am afraid that we must wait until tomorrow night so that the proper testing can be done,” sighs Mara, switching back to Thai. I can tell that the two have played this scene many times before. I can only guess that the real reason is to inflame desire through delay, thus driving up the price again.

  I also smile. “For the Health Identity Card?” I say. “For one of the clinics to certify that I am free of the HIV virus this month?” Tanha is sitting gracefully on the Persian carpet near me. Now she shifts in my direction, smiles mockingly, and makes a small moue, “It is regrettable,” she says, her voice as delicate as a crystal wind chime, “but necessary in these terrible times.”

  I nod. I have seen the statistics. The AIDS epidemic has started late in Thailand but in 1997—less than five years from now—150,000 Thais will have died from the disease. Three years later, in the year 2000, five and a half million people out of the fifty-six million Thais will be carrying the disease and at least a million will be dead. After that, the logarithmic progression is relentless. Thailand—with its lethal combination of ubiquitous prostitutes, promiscuous sexual partners, and resistance to condoms—will rival Uganda as a retroviral killing ground.

  “You’ll send me to one of the local clinics that do a thousand slapdash HIV tests a week,” I say calmly, as if I am used to sitting naked between two beautiful, fully dressed women and an audience of strangers in tuxedos.

  Mara opens her slender fingers so that the long, red nails catch the light. “There are few alternatives,” she whispers.

  “Perhaps I can provide one,” I say and reach for my vest where it has been folded carefully atop my other clothes. I unfold the three documents and hand them to Tanha. The girl frowns prettily at them and gives them to her mother. My guess is that the younger woman cannot read English…perhaps not even Thai.

  Mara does look over the documents. They are certificates from two major Los Angeles hospitals and a University medical clinic attesting to the fact that my blood has been repeatedly tested and repeatedly found free of HIV contamination. Each document is signed by several physicians and carries the seal of the institution. The papers on which they are typed are thick, creamy, and expensive. Each document is dated within the past week.

  Mara looks at me with narrowed eyes. Her smile shows her small, sharp teeth and only the faintest hint of tongue. “How do we know these are valid?”

  I shrug. “I am a doctor. I wish to live. It would be easier to bribe a Thai clinician for a Health Identity Card if I wished to deceive. I have no reason to deceive.”

  Mara glanced back at the papers, smiled, and handed them back to me. “I will think about this,” she says.

  I lean forward in my chair. “I am also at risk,” I say.

  Mara arches an elegant eyebrow. “Oh, how can this be?”

  “Gingival blood,” I say in English. “Bleeding gums. Any open sore in your mouth.”

  Mara reacts with a small, mocking smile, as if I have made a tiny joke. Tanha turns her exquisite face toward her mother. “What did he say?” she demands in Thai. “This farang makes no sense.”

  Mara ignores her. “You have nothing to worry about,” she says to me. She nods to her daughter.

  Tanha begins caressing me again.

  We had three days and two nights left of our R&R. Tres did not ask me to go back with him that next night and I did not volunteer.

  It was against regulations to take a weapon with us on R&R, but there were no metal detectors in those days, no airport security to speak of, and quite a few of us took knives or handguns with us when we traveled out of country. I’d brought a long-barreled .38 that I had won in a poker game from a black kid named Newport Johnson three days before he stepped on a Bouncing Betty. Now I got the .38 out of the bottom of my duffel, checked to make sure that it was loaded, and sat in my locked room that evening, wearing nothing but fatigue pants, drinking Scotch and listening to the street noises o
utside and watching the slow turning of the fan blades above my head.

  Tres returned about 4 A.M. I listened through the wall to him banging and crashing around in his bathroom for a few minutes and then I went back to my bed and closed my eyes. Perhaps now I could sleep. His scream brought me up and out of bed, the .38 in my hand. I tore down the hall in bare feet, banged once on his door, pushed it open, and stepped into the room.

  Only the bathroom light was on and it cast a thin strip of fluorescent light across the bare floor and tousled bed. There was blood on the floor and a trail of torn linen that was also soaked in blood. It looked as if Tres had tried to tear up sheets to make bandages. I took a step toward the bathroom, heard a moan on the darkness of the bed, and swiveled, still holding the .38 at my side.

  “Johnny?” His voice was dry, cracked, and listless. I’d heard that tone before. Newport Johnson had sounded like that in the ten minutes or so it took him to die after the Bouncing Betty had filled him with shrapnel from his neck to his knees. I stepped closer and turned on the small lamp near his bed.

  Tres was naked except for his undershirt. He was sprawled on a bloodsoaked mattress, surrounded by bloodsoaked strips of dirty linen. His pants lay on the floor nearby. They were black with dried blood. Tres’ hands were covering his crotch. His fingernails were rimmed with blood.

  “Johnny?” he whispered. “It won’t stop.”

  I stepped closer, set down the .38, and touched his shoulder. Tres moved his hands and I took a step back.

  There’s a leech that breeds in the slow-moving waters of Vietnam that specializes in boring up the urethra of men wading in the water. Once firmly lodged in the penis, the leech begins feeding from the inside until it swells to half the size of a man’s fist. We’d all heard about the goddamn thing. We all thought about it every time we waded a stream or rice paddy, which was about a dozen times a day.

  Tres’ cock looked like that leech had been at it. No, it was worse. Besides being swollen and raw-looking, his penis had a series of small lesions spiraling around it. It looked as if someone had taken a sewing machine with a large needle and stitched a row of stigmata down his privates. The lesions were bleeding freely.