In This Part of the World

Silom Road, Central Bangkok 

There were rivers flowing underground and rivers flowing in the sky, and plates of glass piercing his eyes as he walked down the crowded streets.

Which was exactly why the inevitable happened.

In a place like Bangkok.

"Karma comes back quickly in this part of the world," someone had observed to him; and it was true enough.

As the remnant mourners threaded their way in a line through the crowded soils backing on to the Chao Phraya river an American friend of the deceased, Chris, whose memorial service they had just attended, complained: "Why is it so crowded? Why do they have to live on top of each other? Thailand's a big country. There's lots of empty space."

"They're very superstitious," he replied. "They're frightened of ghosts. They like each others company. They like it this way."

The whippet slim man who had had trouble with the Buddhist ceremonies throughout because of his staunch Christian beliefs mumbled further Americanisms, as if everyone should live like them.

So the Buddhists can accept Christ as a spiritual leader, but the Christians can't accept Buddha, he had felt like commenting at some of the balking behaviour, but he kept his views to himself.

And the inevitable did happen one Sunday morning.

He ran into the go-go boy Aek who he had once been so fond of and who had stolen so much money from him. And who had been at the origin of the series of books he was in the throws of completing under the mantle of The Twilight Soi.

The burning down of his house, the constant propaganda and lying about him, the relentless pursuits by the front-women of some of Bangkok's criminal and pedophile networks, had led to a chaotic and frightening time. And the "boy" himself, he was 26 now, had been spiteful throughout.

But there was no use confronting him with the "Kuhn kamoy mak mak" - you steal very much - rave he had once done.

All that had ever achieved was to make him look sadder and stoke the fires of spite even further.

So he smiled and embraced him as if nothing had happened, as if they had been friends forever.

"Kuhn maw," you drunk he observed.

Aek shrugged. "I everything now, whiskey, cigarettes, yabba. Many problems now."

His English had improved to the point where he now knew the pronoun "I" and had stopped talking about himself in the third person.

Aek might have been a duplicitous little bastard, but he had always taken good care of himself. Pretty like a coral snake, he had always thought, beautiful and dangerous.

Aek wasn't beautiful anymore. There was barely a shred left of the happy, handsome, popular young man he had first met.

He looked more like a bloated southern US senator in the making. Sadness, but not regret, seemed to ooze out of him.

And as he had once done when they were living together, in some sort of self-confirmation, he related how many falang, foreigners, had made a pass at him at DJ Station, the gay disco at the bottom of Silom where he had been drinking away the night.  

"But me no want to take care," he shuddered. 

Damaged goods. There had been too many customers, too much trouble, too many thefts, too much shame.

The remnants of the go-go boy he had known declined the offer a coffee; "I go home now, want sleep," painstakingly, drunk to the point where he had little idea what he was doing, Aek too his number and promised to call the next day. He never did. It was just as well. He would have been tempted to answer the call; and the last thing he needed was another raft of lies and thefts.

He saw him into a taxi and said goodbye.

It was a better ending than the last one, when they had run into a club down the road and to Aek's repeated declarations that he wanted to visit him in the "condo" to talk about old times, he had replied: "Fuck off".

But it wasn't a happy ending. The relentless pursuit of someone who had dared to write about what was in front of his face had not been expensive, it had hurt a considerable number of people along the way, not just himself. They said they did it for Thailand. They did it because they were paid; and they did it to discredit him and protect the criminal networks they represented. Sad, sick and obsessive, they had hurt the young man they protested to love so much; and what was left of him, in a land where life is cheap, wasn't worth squabbling over. Good work, he thought to himself in a shrugging ruthfully sad way as he lapped the block; the streets damp in the wet season and the rats scuttling through the garbage.