Preternatural Configurations

Silom Soi 4 Courtesy of  http://www.virtualtourist.com/

There wasn't anything left that hadn't reared its ugly head. In the fetid damp of Bangkok's rainy season the rats multiplied. The garbage left in street corners was alive with them; sometimes they scuttled away as he passed, sometimes they ignored him. And with the rats came the cats, who, too, were breeding up in large numbers with the ample food source now available. The locals seemed indifferent. The plagues of London were faraway. "I must have been a traveler in time and space, to be here now," the logo of his Paypal consultant had declared, or something to that effect, as if even business operatives were allowed a little cosmic tilt, here in 2012 when according to the Mayan calender the world had been meant to end.

"I angry lady," an uncharacteristically moody Nick had said as they came through the door to his small apartment.
"Why?" he asked, "What she say?"
The response, he thought, was: "She say, how's your husband? What he think. Secret. He die tomorrow. You not Thai. You not understand."
But what Nick actually said he did not know.
Despite the considerable amount of time he had now spent in Bangkok, his brain was still trying to rewrite the babble of Thai around him into English, and the operation was only confused by the phrases of English which did drift down the corridor or across the ether.

And Nick, suddenly flush with cash and determined to celebrate, lapsed into in-coherency, alternating between a kind of playful aggression and affection, as he had done for the past hour or two.

They had sat in Soi 4 off Silom for several hours, watching the comings and goings of another flock of queens. It had been almost 40 years since he had written his thesis The Glamour and the Grot: Towards an Ethnography of the Gay Bars of Adelaide. How excited his supervisor had been. "It's almost like being there," he declared jubilantly one day after reading a draft.

Trapped in a marriage with two children and Bowie just having declared his bisexuality, Professor Alan Patience was more than champing to explore a new world.

He had been happy to show him around.

But that was another place and another time, perched on the edge of a vast desert and an infinite sea in a the bubble of churches and Anglophilia that was Adelaide.

Back there, back then, the homelands had always been calling.

One thread of his ancestors, surviving in the harsh desert landscapes of outback Australia, had been experts at detecting patterns in complex landscapes, they had to be in order to survive, but in this place the same ability to scan and detect could be both a plus and a minus, feeding paranoia along with justified safety concerns.

"My God that man is hard to kill," he had heard one of his pursuers, the pedophile Tong, had declared in frustration one day.

The go-go boy Aek's mentor, Tong, who had been so determined to off him, was nowhere to be seen, presumed dead. The Cambodians, who did not like people like him and certainly did not like the undue attention he had brought on them and the inter-linkages between Bangkok and Phnom Penh, their blood lust already up, may well have killed him. There was no explanation forthcoming from those who might have known.

Nothing had changed and everything had changed. The sparkling modernity, cash and television lifestyles which had swept across other parts of Bangkok were only now lapping at the shores of Pat Pong, Bangkok's oldest red light district.

It had the air of a sea resort out of season, of Brighton during the recession of the 1980s, of a place that had seen better days.

While all around tower after tower, cranes perched upon their ceilings, sprang up towards the sky.

In a babble of contradictions Nick had declared through the evening: "I supastar here. Everybody love me. I work here one year. I so cute! I butterfly, I not want hurt you. I want you understand me. Sometime customer like me very much. You good luck for me. I wait you all my life. You tell me go make money and customer tip me 1,000 baht. You good luck for me."  


As Nick bought a bottle of whiskey and shouted his friends drink it was obvious more than 1,000 baht had come his way.

In the muffled density of the damp streets and narrow sois his own spirit vaulted above the buildings stained dark with mold.

They would all be skyscrapers soon enough, and the crowded markets swept away.

Nick caught him admiring one of the waiters at The Balcony.

"You not worry about that," Nick declared with a funny little torrent of expressions. "I looking every day, three four times. But I take care you."

He laughed, if that's what it was. Life took many an odd turn.