Sure enough, that night he comes to me exuding his usual golden glow. We stand together on a high mountain over which clouds are passing at amazing speed. There is a cosmic roar in the background caused by the intense energy of this location. Pichai points to a cloud formation, which immediately takes on the crescent shape of a gigantic beaked fish leaping over a wave. Pichai is urgently trying to tell me something, but his voice is drowned by the roar of the universe…
Next morning I make Chanya stand before me in one of our upstairs humping rooms, stripped to the waist. I do not resist the temptation to handle her left breast, over which that particularly elegant dolphin continuously jumps.
“Where did you get it?”
She shakes her head petulantly. “I’m not telling you.”
I rub her nipple between thumb and forefinger as if it were money, causing it to swell under the dolphin. “The workmanship is fantastic.”
She pushes me away. “Get lost.”
“If I don’t find out who really killed Mitch Turner, those morons will start another war.”
“I said get lost.”
Well, maybe it wasn’t Chanya’s dolphin Pichai had in mind. Maybe it wasn’t a dolphin at all, but it’s the only lead I’ve got.
SIX. Tattoo
33
Bored with Pisit today, I switch to our public radio channel, where the renowned and deeply reverend Phra Titapika is lecturing on Dependent Origination. Not everyone’s cup of chocolate, I agree (this is not the most popular show in Thailand), but the doctrine is at the heart of Buddhism. You see, dear reader (speaking frankly, without any intention to offend), you are a ramshackle collection of coincidences held together by a desperate and irrational clinging, there is no center at all, everything depends on everything else, your body depends on the environment, your thoughts depend on whatever junk floats in from the media, your emotions are largely from the reptilian end of your DNA, your intellect is a chemical computer that can’t add up a zillionth as fast as a pocket calculator, and even your best side is a superficial piece of social programming that will fall apart just as soon as your spouse leaves with the kids and the money in the joint account, or the economy starts to fail and you get the sack, or you get conscripted into some idiot’s war, or they give you the news about your brain tumor. To name this amorphous morass of self-pity, vanity, and despair self is not only the height of hubris, it is also proof (if any were needed) that we are above all a delusional species. (We are in a trance from birth to death.) Prick the balloon, and what do you get? Emptiness. It’s not only us-this radical doctrine applies to the whole of the sentient world. In a bumper sticker: The fear of letting go prevents you from letting go of the fear of letting go. Here’s the good Phra in fine fettle today: “Take a snail, for example. Consider what brooding overweening self-centered passion got it into that state. Can you see the rage of a snail? The frustration of a cockroach? The ego of an ant? If you can, then you are close to enlightenment.”
Like I say, not everyone’s cup of miso. Come to think of it, I do believe I prefer Pisit, but the Phra does have a point: take two steps in the divine art of Buddhist meditation, and you will find yourself on a planet you no longer recognize. Those needs and fears you thought were the very bones of your being turn out to be no more than bugs in your software. (Even the certainty of death gets nuanced.) You’ll find no meaning there. So where? Ah!
Back to the case.
Where does a smart man hide a leaf? the great Sherlock Holmes once asked. In a forest, of course. Where does a smart detective start looking for a talented tattooist with the eye of a Zen watercolorist? Not in Songai Kolok, that’s for sure. Soi 39, Sukhumvit might be a better bet. The clubs are all Japanese. Since we still enjoy freedom of speech over here, the notices on the door make explicit the management policy of not allowing entry to non-Japanese. I dress up in my Sunday best (it is nine-thirty on a Friday night) and stroll down the street until I come to an elaborate Buddha shrine bedecked with marigolds. I raise my hands in a wai and silently ask for guidance.
Trying for maximum emptiness, I stroll up and down the street a few times, then, guided by nothing at all (always the most reliable source), knock on a scarlet front door. A hatch opens, an overdressed Thai mamasan scowls, and I explain why it is in her and her boss’s interest to let me in. She tends to agree.
Within minutes I am in one of those hybrid sets so beloved of the pornography industry: dungeon from de Sade, papier-mâché rock formations (with plastic chains) from Disney, costumes from Geisha (let me be frank, our girls don’t wear them that well-they tend to resent the restrictions), whores from Isaan. I am led discreetly to the back of the club, where I discreetly observe the various states of passionate undress of both customers and girls on the benches all around.
The girl chained to the papier-mâché rock (a dragon lurks in a hole nearby) is quite naked and trying not to look bored while they whip her and drop hot wax onto her breasts. She smiles at me with a face serenely incapable of debauchery (she will sell mangoes from a market stall tomorrow with exactly the same happy smile) and with her eyes asks if I want her. I am about to signal no when I notice the serpent coiled around her navel. The club is gloomy, too gloomy to examine a work of such quality. Confident that I am not the first to make the request, I call for illumination. The mamasan obliges with a flashlight (Hitachi, rechargeable battery). Up close and without the need for a magnifying glass, I confirm my deepest forensic suspicions: this is a very superior snake: emerald green scales of variegated shades, an ink-blue forked tongue ravishing her belly button, brilliantly designed wings. (Not the huge clumsy things you see Saint George grappling with, but the delicate, diaphanous propellants of Oriental myth: I know I’m on to something here.) I demand that the damsel be released from her bonds immediately.
Once I confirm that I am willing to pay, the girl, whose name is Dao, slips out of her chains without need for assistance. She recognizes no social imperative to put any clothes on, so now she and I are sitting on a padded bench at the far end of the club, situated not far from other benches with other bodies in perpetual motion. The mamasan would clearly be happier if I conducted my interrogation while at least going through the motions of seduction, and Dao rescues me from professional restraints by taking my right hand and cupping it over her left breast, where I gently pull off the wax flakes. She checks my cock to see if her body is having the usual commercially desirable effect on my body (no comment), while I whisper my question lyrically into her right ear: Where in Thailand did she get such a marvelous tattoo?
She smiles gratefully, as if I have complimented her on a new dress, and reveals there is another. Kneeling on the bench and turning her back to me, I see that a couple of dragons (lightly done with considerable humor, hardly more substantial than clouds, masterpieces of the body artist’s craft-if I were to have dragons competing for my private parts, I would certainly choose these) are fighting for possession of the dark prize. “Fantastic,” I confirm as she happily straddles me and places my left hand directly on her vagina, which she informs me, in case I hadn’t noticed, is quite wet.
“But the tattoos?”
“Stroke me and tell me what you want me to do. I work much better when I’m horny.”