I
There will come a time or two in your life when, contemplating the dusk in solitude as she drapes her somber curtain citywide, you shall witness a great meteor burn across the skies—its fierce tail tapering acutely horizon to horizon—until the dwindling fireball nearly consumes itself in its own flame and plummets into the blackening west. You are certain the terrible immolation must’ve impacted just beyond the tree line while you linger outside a little bit longer, a little awestruck, fruitlessly awaiting signs Lumpini Park has just caught fire…until drowsiness finally overtakes you, and you at last go inside to bed. Only to then learn next morning in the Beacon’s science section that the meteorite had indeed touched down, but instead far off in the Sahara or some other such deserted realm. And the power of last night’s vision will dwindle beneath the pale mundanity of this journalistic tidbit. You will inevitably conclude celestial entities never quite make their way to dense populations like yours. But you will be wrong to assume this. Though you may’ve never heard of such things, there have most undoubtedly been cases, chronicles unpenned yet by any Plutarch or Holinshed, that defy all common report, when the city indeed endured such momentous clashes from heaven upon our earth. Perhaps a little before your time. Logically you’d ask: so what happened exactly, when one of those firedrakes, when one of those tragically banished stars struck smack into the heart of Bangkok…? Does anyone living still recall…?

I will only ask for a drop of patience, young reader. All things in their own time. Oh yes I do remember, youth is so eager to hear and to see and to know.

Of course it’s possible to step back a moment and approach the whole subject more philosophically. All of us, we city people, no matter what our station or lot in life, are in some sense born into these endless twisting streets and alleys by an accidence no less astronomical, let’s say, than the haphazard momentum, course and collision of chunks of rock through outer space—over time, the city makes us all too certain of that. What has been the sole prevailing force governing each moment throughout each single one of our lives if not chance? Aren’t we all then somehow tragic in this sense? How could it be argued against? But pursuing this philosophic train of thought too much would only be to confuse one’s metaphors. There remains the vital distinction between us terrestrials and this former, far rarer race: what do we remember from before the fall? We have but the one life…whatever it is we make of it. These others—the truly fallen—they now have had to suffer it twice.

II
Pak Pao sat in quiet before her oval mirror, studying the image, veiled in cigarette smoke, her thoughts winding and twisting slowly and measuredly across the walls behind her reflection like an escaped serpent left to endlessly explore a dark abandoned room. It was those eyes. For piercing through the unfolding haze, reflected there amid her precise jet irises, much young defiant fire smoldered up to their very brims. Forget that the eyeliner enclosing was now permanently tattooed. And though some few roots of grey hair defied all dye, she was still an undeniably beautiful specimen of woman from head to toe, deceptively small and dainty, her narrow face and chin almost childlike. She looked a grim and solemn sprite in her black laced dress whose stark collar rose high to foil each showy diamond blazing amid the gold piercing her either ear. And yet…whatever idea of timelessness these latter adornments might have suggested, despite the universal emblem of immortality they poured into our world as dazzling light, these jewels were undeniably cold to the touch, a reminder of things once underground, in utter slumber…night the perpetual. Should she go now and dig into the furthest recess of her closet to obsess once again over the sinister object concealed within? Would anything have changed since the last time, since the first time? When she turned the key forever kept inside the box’s lock, when she lifted the stark black gem-encrusted lid, would she find nothing except the same cold pile of ash? If she were to weep, if she could conjure but a single tear, surely that tiny moist and salty globe could wet all the countless weightless grains of ash to keep them from forever floating off with the slightest breath. And she would then swallow that grey bitter humic paste, slowly down her throat until it might at last crystallize secretly in the depths of her stomach, an eternally buried stone.

The motionless face glaring at her in the mirror, as if it had read the thoughts from its own visage, turned ever so pale at the grisly notion. Each deep and shadowy inhalation of acrid cigarette smoke into her bottomless lungs felt like a dying breath resurrected from a long dead moment. The obstinate spell of time, the past alongside her present, with no beginning and no end, seemed to hang and shift like the slowly interweaving sheets of haze enveloping the bedroom. Was there no graspable escape…? She put out her cigarette and the butt crumpled upon itself into the grave of predecessors overflowing the ashtray. As quick as a then imperious snuff into her dainty nostrils, Pak Pao re-attained a certain primal state of emptiness. She was resolved, to outwit this paralyzing curse. To murder the enemy beast still prowling inside…For the first time in over three years now she broke her secret daily ritual. And there was now, well, no time to lose.

And oh yes, that afternoon. She’d promised to meet her brother at the art studio that afternoon.

III
When she found Keng, he was standing with his back against one wall of the small gallery staring across to its not-so-distant opposite end. It wasn’t as if he were studying one of the sculptures in particular, but rather seemed entranced by the section of wall between two seemingly random specimens. Pak Pao walked straight before him, having briskly feigned an indignant surveying of what this cross-town studio was pimping on its meager public, an affectation to which Keng was totally oblivious.

“Little brother, you really ought to come up with some better expression for that face of yours. Especially now that you’re nearly over the surprise of seeing me. Don’t worry, it’s no coincidence.  Did you think I’d stoop to eyeing up such a class of secret haunts as this?” she laughed to her sole amusement. “I knew you’d be here.”

Keng had in truth only then identified it as his sister when she’d wrapped up this pointed, albeit rather pointless address. Sooner than her loaded smirk registered in his brain, what clued Keng in was the style and timbre, the melody and rhythm of her voice which, despite all intent, had never resonated anything but pure familiarity. It had, after all, been there all his life. But why should she insist her being there was not coincidence? Would it have mattered in either case? He was hardly the least bit shocked by her sudden appearance or her manner. (Never had been…though in this inarguably alone.) Still the one repeatedly embarrassing aspect was that his sister well knew how ineffective all her slights were with him, a fact quietly understood between the two siblings, which made Pak Pao’s performance come off all the more clumsily. Still she was obliged to play the role. Like a cruel joke you egg along though you are in truth the butt.

“Hello, sister. Things are good?”

“Keng, you’re always teasing. You owe an older sister more respect. You know how things are…! Can you guess why I am here? I have even brought something.”

“How could I possibly guess…? You know what it is. What is it?”

“We will come to that later.”

“I mean, not whatever you brought, but…”

“We will come to that later. What I want to know now is who this unforgivable charlatan of an artist is? Really! This piece looks like a giant lump of prehistoric shit! Why do you continue to fawn over these visionless university dropouts?” This was really as far as Pak Pao had prepared her dialog with her younger brother. This latter remark had been intended as something of a digression to build suspense. It didn’t once strike her as potentially significant she might be underestimating the sculptor. Though he knew she cared a less about whom this charlatan of an artist was, Keng was compelled to offer some form of defense, more for the artist’s sake than his own.

“I don’t know——I think it must be important to extend beyond just him…I mean I think if the artist hadn’t expressed this, no one else would’ve ever been able to sympathize with these specific sorts of thoughts,” Keng offered in a rather petulant tone for one of his temperament. And he’d unwittingly trumped Pak Pao, for his sister had no idea where to start clawing apart such gibberish. She was forced to simply start a fresh attack.

“There, you’re fucking with me again, little brother. Talking to me, of all people, about sympathies! You don’t hate me, do you? You must…otherwise you wouldn’t brush me off so lightly all the time.  I don’t quite understand it…I mean, understand you. Why are you willing to present yourself in any and every shit-can of society, yet never deem it worthwhile, or even honorable, to attend the family functions?”

Was she joking or was she serious? Keng couldn’t read her. First of all, was this really a shit-can? Secondly, when his sister spoke of family, she meant her husband’s family, not her and Keng’s family. And then distorting his and her personal relationship through the prism of the in-laws’ functions was the most bewildering of all. The duplicity of her remarks was too thickly layered to penetrate. Perhaps for his own good, little brother was at a loss. Speechless. Pak Pao hated him when he was like this. But she knew it needed time to sink in, time to stew. It was a strategy she’d studied from their mother.

“Okay, I get it,” finally. “You didn’t come for the art. So what is it then you’ve brought me?”

Pak Pao couldn’t help a vicious grin.

“The number of a girl.”

IV
That next day Nook rose slowly in bed from slumber, the potent light of late morning drawing her body into stark contrast against the pale entwining sheets. Behind some stray black strands of hair, an inexplicable though common smile parted the warm brown skin of her wide face. It was a laugh that’d woke her…herself laughing. She must’ve been dreaming about a joke. But was it one she’d heard somewhere? Or was she coming up with them in her sleep now? Perhaps she’d divined it from a past life. She guessed it was a good one judging from the pleasant tension in the muscles tugging her wide nose even more widely apart. Yet Nook wasn’t really sure she could fully remember the punch line…

Such a holy joy to have returned to that once weekly bliss of a day off! Not only had she been clever enough to save the best of the week’s mangoes for breakfast today, Nook had also managed to wheedle half a tiramisu from dinner last night with the office girls. Having sliced the wet fruit while water boiled for coffee (she’d become addicted to coffee, strong yet very sweet, ever since taking the job for that Israeli boy…really such a genuine soul), she carted the miniature feast outside to the patio where her younger sister eventually joined her. They were the last two of the family still idling around the house. The day was already growing warm.

“Lek, what do you get if you cross a lunatic with a tadpole?” Nook got right at with.

“Good morning to you too, big sister.”

“No, not with a tadpole…with a dragon I mean,” she corrected herself.

“Couldn’t tell you the answer to either.”

“Wait, the dragon becomes a tadpole…”

“Well, then I’ll change my answer. For a dragon is, everyone knows, a reptile. But a frog is an…”

“Don’t, I’m serious…it’s useless. I can’t remember.” Nook frowned ridiculously. She decided not to share the last bite of sweet treat in retribution for her sister’s playful impertinence.

“No worries, I’m sure it’ll be a great one once you work out the wrinkles,” Lek kidded. She sat nearer and looked into her sister’s eyes with a long grin for a moment.  And then, “But if you expect any kisses on your blind date this afternoon, I’d avoid the riddles…and get that dollop of cream wiped from the corner of your lips.”

Nook flushed and her smile vanished. It was not so much being reminded—for in fact it had been in the back of her mind ever since it’d been arranged the night before—but it was more that her little sister had somehow found out and was now teasing her about it which annoyed Nook so.

“Don’t call it that. It’s not a date.”

“Call it what you will. I hear he’s quite handsome. And rich! Though maybe a little odd. Don’t you suppose a little old too…? Do you suppose you will…kiss him?”

“Like I said, since it’s not a date, don’t you think that might make me seem the odd one?”

“Well, you’re the one giving yourself the title, big sister, not me.”

“Well, as long as neither one of us is beating around the bush, there are a number of things I wouldn’t mind entitling you—one: fool; two: nosey fool; three: impossible fool! Four: foul-minded…”

“Okay now! Let’s not say something you might surprisingly honestly regret…I only bring it up because I have a little ‘experienced’ advice…small words of wisdom from your little sister. Nothing more.”

Nook’s momentary flash of anger had easily subsided and she was already smiling again by the end of Lek’s delicate reconciliation. The truth was she could indeed stand a few insights, however dubious the expert source. Though Nook had always been something of a tomboy, it was only in the safety of a larger group of men, where her wit was as quick and sharp and boisterous as anybody’s, that she ever felt any mastery over the other sex. When it however came to one-on-one, she was reduced to seeming as dumb as a doe. She simply froze and assumed the role of the classic quiet and attentive Thai girl, which was painfully at odds with who she knew she was. Plus the few times she’d actually found herself caught alone with a boy, it only ever seemed like being forced to listen to someone boast endlessly about himself. (At what point in history did men become so vain…?) And the longer Nook avoided trespassing that line into intimacy, into shared-abandonment, the more an awful anxiety loomed over the secretly, deeply wished for moment. Lek, who suspected parts of this, was altogether her big sister’s opposite.

“All I’m saying is that you might want to think about the sorts of things you’ll talk about. You know, come prepared,” Lek encouraged.

“Where’s the fun in that? Honestly, is this the type of thing you truthfully do? Come on, little sister, you must have something more substantial than that. I need better than that.”

“Okay—then none of the jokes. Find something Keng’s interested in instead.”

“You realize they aren’t meant for my benefit alone.”

“I just mean it never hurts to flatter. What does he do for a living?”

“Nothing, I think. I hear he a paints. Or is a poet maybe…I can’t remember,” Nook trailed off. She was beginning to think this was hopeless. Her sister drew nearer.

“I have an idea then. Let’s pretend I’m the boy. What’s the first thing you say?”

Nook set her coffee cup aside and straightened up. She looked at Lek with exaggeratedly adoring eyes and puckered grin and kept acting like she was about to whisper something. When her sister’s guard was adequately disarmed from amusement, Nook leapt on her and pinned her to her chair with a crazed and forceful, cream-smeared kiss. Nook’s hand between their smashed and giggling lips.

V
The air at Charoenkrung National Theater that early afternoon was one of solemn reverence for the musical arts. The renowned visiting soloist was, it seemed, all that anyone had been talking about for onwards of twenty minutes. The senseless recitative of pre-show chatter, the fluttering of programs, the squeaking in seats and sporadic bursts of coughs had all crescendoed in mounting anticipation of her entrance into the mid-sized auditorium. The great grand piano awaited its master below. Its lid full tilt, like a bomb expected to explode any moment.

Mr Nattawong however, who sat back somewhere near the exit, was in a fuss for altogether different reasons. Without question he should not have gulped up so much peanut sauce at lunch. But the gas now building in his belly was not the cause of his greater discomfort. Nor, as he unabashedly rubbed a shoeless foot, was it the balls of his feet which now throbbed from having to hoof it so much to find a scalper. It was not these things alone that ailed him so. For you see, he was sweating terribly in his bunched-up suit exactly like one thinking he’s about to get out of some wholly unpleasant task, but knows it’s too impossibly good to be true. Thinking: Should he finally pick up the watch he’d lain across his plump knee, strap it back on his plump wrist, refit his left shoe and nonchalantly get up to leave? Surely something else had come up. If he left quickly, who would notice…? God the gas pain! Was he even capable of nonchalance…? But here the somewhat self-satisfying scent of one’s own fart lingering in the nostrils was instantly overwhelmed by a rancid reek of cigarette smoke that promptly killed all Mr Nattawong’s wishful, frantic train of thought.

“Khun Nattawong,” Pak Pao hissed in his ear from behind, “please retake your seat. Surely the artist hasn’t cancelled at the last minute. Besides, I hear the finale is worth sticking it out.”

“Khun Pak Pao, good day. I was just about to go look for you in the lobby,” he poorly fibbed, completely unable to mask his utter deflation. He knew this was going to end very badly and very uglily. Fuck, the way she dragged these interrogations out was pure torture. It was horrible enough to have to talk with his neck craned over his shoulder like this. “I see there is some Bach on the program,” he sheepishly proffered.

“Ah yes, yet another variation on the Variations…that aria is so much sentimental trash.”

Surely she was still talking about the music? Nattawong had no clear notion. Still the words’ apparent intelligence summoned a compulsion, more bourgeois at heart than anything, to respond apparently equally intelligently. He hastily dropped, “I’ve heard the composer was a fertile little rabbit in the sack!” Was it a mistake to have asserted…a mistake to have mentioned that? Surely she was over the loss by now…

“That much is most definitely certain,” was all Pak Pao, after a prolonged pause, humored the comment with. And she let him squirm further while she inhaled slowly and deeply into her chest. Mr Nattawong had the bizarre feeling he could at that single moment discern every stupid meaningless word being muttered throughout the small crowd. He pursed his pudgy lips and swallowed an uneasy swallow.

“May I take it from your silence you have only good news to report?” There was something in her expression, in her voice that sounded stiff and rehearsed. And here is where, in purely defensive mode, the expert improvising began, in a rococo-like fashion only Mr Nattawong could achieve.

“Well, Khun Pak Pao, while they say that no news is good news, mine is most definitely not that type of non-news.”

“I trust it is, nonetheless, good news…Come on! You need to be clearer than that!” she snapped at him with. “Do you think, Mr Nattawong, do you think that you could please paint a clearer picture? For my sake at least.”

“Okay…okay, then where should I begin?” Nattawong was getting a feel for how to go about explaining. Maybe, he thought, maybe he could run with this: “At the beginning, I guess. Isn’t that where all stories start?” He even dared a friendly albeit hollow chuckle here, intimating a mutuality that simply was not mutual. “I mean, with the bigger picture of course. All stories have a background for starts. A story-behind-the-story...oh and okay, this one does have a bit of good news in it.”

Can you imagine Pak Pao’s cresting anger?

“For now, let’s just stop the shit,” she growled, “and start with the obvious! Is he dead?” The word, which had escaped her lips almost unconsciously, felt unexpectedly heavy and sour in her throat when she suddenly realized it to be the first instance she’d spoken it in its now most precise context. And the fact she had to stomach, had to fathom such a grave possibility in the presence of this fat, sweaty, gasbag of a man infuriated her all the more. Could it really have come to be? The question seared along every flexing contour of her flesh.

An adequate answer proved similarly vexing to Mr Nattawong.

“Well, yes…someone was definitely killed.” He couldn’t have imagined a worse reply.

“Some-one…? Murdered you mean…!”

“A man, to be exact. Definitely a man. Definitely dead.”

Pak Pao exhaled all the tension in her chest through her teeth fast and hard. Her gaze involuntarily tumbled from Nattawong unto the floor. She could hold back the wrath and bitterness no more, so convulsed by a torrent of confused ideas was she. Strugglingly, she raised her face, to the light again. Her vision illuminated until it grew blinding. This man before her, this idiotic messenger—who was he again? what was his name?—his features, his whole corpulent form dissolved into the background. The walls seemed to slowly tip in upon the concert hall, their stark and massive silhouettes compressing the air into a stifling wall of heat. It felt like the entire audience was drifting away from her, out of their seats and away, downward, down into the piano. And the last of them to vanish, our poor Mr Nattawong—yes that was his name—his receding eyes seemed to sadly entreat her as they faded into the terrible shadow billowing out from the lid of the piano. Why was she the only one…the only one this magical transformation was not affecting…?

Mr Nattawong, who of course was actually still sitting right before Pak Pao with that selfsame stupid look, witnessed none of her hallucination. And yet he nonetheless sort of feared for his life. Better just come out with the worst and then beat a hasty retreat.

“And, uh…Lieutenant X has…has been replaced on the case. Also. By some old fart named Suvichai. Okay? Okay. Are you okay…?”

There. Mr Nattawong had said all that he had been paid to say. It is questionable whether Pak Pao ever caught his closing footnote. For it was instantly engulfed, like the puny rhetorical morsel it was, into a thunderously exploding vortex of applause as the performer took stage.

He was a man…the pianist was a man, not a woman as had been previously and widely thought. He looked nervous, pale. Deathly pale.

…Well was he dead, or wasn’t he? Was her brother dead?

VI
How small the city compared to this question! How small the endless roads that forever arrive nowhere! The thousand small pricks of buildings that never reach heaven! Only the river…only the city’s river offered any possible escape, and that vain hope only into the unthinkably vast and vegetative netherworld of the sea. And while Pak Pao, smoking one cigarette after another, blindly paced each of the countless steps it takes to traverse the length of any given Bangkok avenue before turning down yet another—the late afternoon sun pouring over everything—thus were her thoughts able to surface, like the wavering trail of smoke from a stick of incense, to an utterly separate sphere. The almost involuntary transition though, from the bodily world into a purely contemplative realm, still arduous and painful.

If her brother were alive, that she’d know how deal with. It would require a certain manageable response. For death too, there was an appropriate role to play. But not knowing, how then…oh how overvalued the city’s million souls to this one soul, which floated in her mind, and in her mind alone in its truest form, as in some sort of perpetual field of flux! How inconsequential the city’s whole history of inhabitants whose states of being were so mercilessly well-defined: in the throes of an ordinary daily existence; or rotting and dead as the flowers and fruit upon the family alter! Be you tailor, banker, thief, hooker, general or King Mongkut himself…alive or no…all just nothing! An ominous cloud had blotted them out from Pak Pao, both the living and the dead…

“Keng was hard enough to pin down in real life as it was,” she tried to joke with herself. The fugitive memory came of when, an adolescent girl, she’d dress up in their mother’s jewels and, seeking brother’s compliments, she would finally scorn him to hell for just sitting there blankly, saying nothing. What was it, what was different about the memory now and the idea of that motionless face that twisted and cut so sharply into her gut…?

The terrible March heat must’ve been scorching her very organs as those tiny feet trudged beneath the body’s weight in high heels up and down the innumerable streets. Pak Pao lit her last cigarette. Though the steady sentinel sun glimmered fiercely inside each passing set of eyes, cruelly almost, though its beams brightened down deep as the very bones of their pitiless smiles, soon pale street lamps would flicker feebly to fight against the coming night. The trees would darken. Eventually every last little scattered songbird hopping amid the dusky leaves and stones, chirping against the traffic din, withdraws, like a wan angel, to its cold and tattered nest, unheard. The river will grow dark and flow beyond the end of times, and a black tide envelope all of Bangkok as it did now Keng’s sister.

VII
I will not boast knowing the location of the gentlemen’s club police Lieutenant X liked to frequent. It has no street address per se. You either know where it is or you don’t. Pak Pao did. But before she makes the rest of her way there, let us give the good lieutenant at least a few moment’s peace, if only to study him more carefully at first, like a specimen in its native environment, without the irksome outside stimulus Pak Pao was sure to soon impart.

He was at core a merry cynic, an indefatigable depressive, quite an interesting and contradictory gentleman. If it had been your first time walking into the club, on seeing him you would have asked: “Now just who is that man with those handsome flecks of grey in his hair, sulking over the chessboard by himself so debonairly?” “Oh him?” your companion enthusiastically whispers in return, “That is the celebrated Lieutenant X. Okay. Don’t you know? He has personally overseen hundreds of inmates’ executions. You should feel inclined to introduce yourself…he’s quite amusing and pleasant if you can catch him between games.” And of course you might thus feel inclined.

And as you approach, trying to think of how to embark upon a conversation, you’ll notice him swapping a pawn for the queen which he clutches from the board in a dainty, well-manicured hand that deftly retreats behind its own coat sleeve. But weren’t the two pieces the same color? Too late to ask yourself…those vibrant eyes that outshine all their age and experience have already fixed you in a domineering glare. You’re caught. You’ve been caught obviously not knowing what to say, caught having in effect been spying on him.

“Have a seat. I have just now stolen my victory,” he stops your poor and barely forming explanation with, and then smiles most amiably…and you suddenly sense you’ve entered into the easiest conversation you’ve ever had. Easy not only in its enduring lightheartedness, whatever the degree of scepticism, but more so in the way you feel yourself passively borne upon each swell and steered through every turn of discourse by an unfailingly warm and fatherly hand. The guiding interlocutory rhythm is hypnotic, lulling. And by that late hour of the evening, when you finally return home, you find yourself alone in bed unable to fall asleep, a bit tipsy still, excited by the constantly revisited memory of your totally unforeseen conversation, so charmed by your new companion’s cynical wit, almost lovesick with the idea of how your future camaraderie with the renowned Lieutenant X might henceforth deepen day by day…

Which of course it never does.

Pak Pao was perhaps the only one who’d never fallen under that old devil’s spell. It was not at all difficult for her to see straight through it, and she kept this at the forefront of her mind when bursting into the clubroom.

“——I do not, like yourself, find it in the least bit dramatic the way you’re storming in here smoking your half-smoked cigarette! Even if you are the only woman in the room!” the lieutenant unleashed without hesitation, severe yet mocking, seizing the counteroffensive.

Pak Pao crushed out her cigarette smack in the middle of the chessboard with a faint sizzle. Doubtless she had chosen to counter the counterattack.

“So did you just decide to stay home sick and catch up on all your daytime soaps today? Or has the great Lieutenant X finally been demoted? Because you’ve always led me to believe you’re the genuine shit around the department!”

“Someone’s been distributing stories, as is often the case…I’d offer to find you a chair…” he trailed off here with a skeletal grin for effect, as if to say but obviously you’re in too much of a huff about something to take a seat for a short while.

“It’s quite unfathomable! How you can sit there with such a genuinely self-satisfied smile, when everyone in this room can sense the bloody hole I’m about to tear right through you!”

Those nearby were beginning to take notice. It was, after all, one of those rare opportunities to catch the club’s master of a verbal legerdemain at his best.

The lieutenant did not flinch so much as a single of his ladylike eyelashes.

“Come now, Khun Pak Pao, let’s stop the histrionics. This is hardly the first you’ve threatened me with death. Nor surely will it be the last. Now what is it? I can tell…something’s troubling you. If there’s anyone, you can tell me.”

The lieutenant’s tone was wryly ameliorative, the only approach he’d ever found to work with this particular opponent. His effeminate posturing was too much for Pak Pao to fight off. She became like the abusive husband who wearies of beating his wife already after the very first strike.

“You have an uncanny knack for the obvious,” she responded rather surrenderingly.

“Can’t you see? What’s to worry over?” he continued the sugared assault, “I promise, everything will’ve ended up fine.”

“Your words belie your error…then it is your crime—not mine!—that’s unfinished!”

“No, rest assured. The boy is dead. Word of honor. As we speak.”

Pak Pao paused, disarmed. Why did he call him boy? Then it was true…

“Do I sense a tinge of compunction?” Lieutenant X went in for the kill. “Hasn’t anyone ever told you? We Buddhists—we do not feel the crocodile-toothed bite of guilt like, let’s say, your typical Christian might. With us, what’s done to others is done, and can never be undone. After the fact, all that’s left is for us to decide how we cope with the burden which we alone can feel, which we alone suffer.”

Pak Pao knew this to be unallayed chicanery. After a lengthened glimpse into his softening eyes, “Then who relieved you?”

“You should ask your dog-fucker of a father-in-law that very question…No, why don’t we go do it together? I’d like to hear his answer to that myself. —Then what I wouldn’t give to see your reply!”

Here he winked which tempted an uncontrollable smirk to escape Pak Pao’s lips. Of course in no way would the lieutenant have ever wanted her father-in-law to actually hear any of this.

“Now please, grab yourself a seat,” he continued the spell, “I was just finishing my game…”

She obliged. What else could she do? She had been offered the irresistible bait of release and had already succumbed. For Pak Pao, in some stupidly infantile way, did in fact find the lieutenant’s sinister magnetism incredibly soothing and gratifying. He knew how to flatter obliquely, which is perhaps the rarest and deadliest form. And what’s moreover, time permitting, once you had the chance to work him, the old man could be quite wickedly good in bed, despite a stubborn crick in his neck.

And by this point the lieutenant had said, with much embellishment, what he too had been paid to say. Not a bad fuck for a barren cunt, the lieutenant thought as he watched Pak Pao dress, straighten her hair and leave his bedroom.

VIII
Her husband on the other hand was a dolt. Pak Pao’s second most critical aim for the rest of the night was to avoid her husband at any cost while trying to receive his father’s next instructions. The latter was political; the former strictly personal.

Unfortunately there was one prescheduled dinner party standing in her way. To which her attendance was implicitly demanded, especially since it was being hosted by her husband’s mother, whose son Pak Pao now completely relied on for livelihood. Indeed it was Pak Pao’s husband’s money that had been used for the hit…which slightly reconciled her with the fact she’d been ordered to front the blood-money on her own. As if the irony alone might absolve her. And this was how cunning her conscience had grown by the time she approached the beckoning lights and confused sounds coming through the front door.

As she walked into the main hall, her husband was the first she spied, lurching there over the piano and shoveling a platter-full of hors d’œuvres into his face. Her focus did not rest long upon that shameful scene. Pak Pao began to scan the other visages, every detail in the room with an instinctual perspicacity.

Frankly she couldn’t in the least recall the occasion for tonight’s soiree. Really she rarely knew. Each and every one seemed to unfold in such a narrow scope of human behavior, of human mores—how could one night’s frivolities possibly stand out from another’s? The whole scene, the whole production—the arc of its plot, its cast of characters, how shallowly their dialogue ventured, the pathos one was meant yet unable to feel—the whole fucking act had quickly become totally predictable to Pak Pao. She’d hardly known anything else. How thoroughly, as a mere child even, she had mastered navigating the social seas with the most guileful of touches. No one had ever seen past the nasty little plots she used to weave as a teen in order for nothing more than the salty-sweet taste of viciousness in her mouth. Manipulating this particular segment of society was second nature anymore, its backdrop like her animal habitat, like a psychological savannah where the reigning lioness, grown anxious by its bounds, now hunts crazed and dangerously…But something, perhaps just one thing though, was askance tonight. What she could not tell. Nothing perceptible beyond a sudden tingle down the hairs of her arm, a faint flash of light in the periphery of her vision…She did not spot her father-in-law anywhere…

For sure the popular color of choice this particular evening was pink. A most delicate hue of that tone overtook the room, at least as far as the women were concerned. Yet there were admittedly to be seen a gentleman or two who dared a dash of thin rosy stripes across his shirt, perhaps a slightly blush handkerchief peeking out a back pocket. The reason was the usual…for you see, in far away cities like Paris and Los Angeles, springtime’s colors were fast approaching and so too the change in fashion, though that latter transformation in palette well in advance of the other. And back then all Bangkok’s elite followed these foreign trends with such passionate zeal. The current mania seemed stubbornly at odds with the miserable heat-wave drenching the streets right outside this enormous air-conditioned room, like an awkwardly fragile hothouse specimen that’d nearly die should it endure even the mildest wilting outdoor draught. The vibrant splashes of pink did nonetheless produce their dose of mirth for Pak Pao, who giggled inside herself mischievously as she tried to imagine the lieutenant dressed in pink blazer and pink pants. No!—pink briefs and socks—with little red hearts on them—and nothing else—unless gagged with a pink silk scarf too…! Quickly discarding this fantasy as patently improbable, she cut a calculated course to one corner of the room, the opposite from her husband, past viscous clumps of guests, through the weave of cavorting staff that nearly outnumbered the guests, to pin down her sister-in-law, who of course was sure to grace the crowd with one or two of her songs at some not too far off timely point. Hopefully Pak Pao could escape before the pathetic exhibitionism.

“Little sister, are you okay? Do you think you feel up to it tonight?” Pak Pao commenced her ploy. Just the simplest seed was all that was needed. Quick and to the point.

“Of course…I mean, how are you? Thank you for coming and for the support. Why do you ask?” The false modesty stank as foully as a dirty dick in Pak Pao’s opinion.

“I’m doing pitch-perfectly, thank you…I don’t know, it’s just you look awfully flush. Like you’ve just crept out of the closet after fiddling with one of these waiters.”

Now her sister-in-law truly did go flush. She darted her eyes about to make sure no one heard Pak Pao’s remark.

“Please, don’t…you know, I am performing soon. It’s something I need to focus on before, alone for a while. Will this be long?”

“Kind of like a shit that way I guess…mother will come to listen this time then?”

Her sister-in-law could not but visibly wince at the analogy.

“…No, I mean of course. Did she say otherwise? I just saw her back in the kitchen. She said she’d be out in just a minute.”

Exquisite. Two birds, one stone. A bit of wicked fun as well as a bit of downright business. As easy as feeding a duck poison crumbs. One step down, two to go: Pak Pao had already ascertained her mother-in-law’s location, which was ever-changing and almost top-secret throughout these types of functions. Yet ferreting this woman out remained indispensible. Her mother-in-law alone could say whether her husband would be attending.

“Break a leg or two,” Pak Pao left her sister-in-law to tangle with awhile as she rudely parted.

In the kitchen was maybe a tad vague. Pak Pao had asked two chefs and the dish boy, checked out the back door and rear driveway, returned inside and looked behind a tall cart of hot trays before she uncovered her mother-in-law inside the walk-in refrigerator intently weighing a cabbage in either hand. The fridge’s chill seeped out the entryway currently silhouetted by Pak Pao.

“My little mouse, have you been here long? Oh, you look so gorgeous in that dress. You are just gorgeous!” the woman greeted Pak Pao with having finally decided upon the better cabbage. No matter how tender and genuine the sentiment, this tone her mother-in-law took with her always stabbed right into Pak Pao’s pride. For though their familial tie through marriage required her to suffer the mothering, this lady standing opposite, with those two ridiculous cabbages of hers, was considerably less than a decade the senior. And the slightest intimated obligation to kowtow simply infuriated Pak Pao. How could her mother-in-law continue this charade, on and on and on, with all sincerity? Without once attempting to command any dignified respect! She hardly even cared after her own appearance! How differently this old wrinkled hag chose to wear her age!

“As are you mother…”

“Did you reach your brother then? Will Keng be coming?”

“I don’t think so.” Was this the tactically correct lie?

“He is such a sweet boy. If I had a son like that…but I needn’t tell you.”

“Your son, he has his good moments.” Pak Pao could not dispel the latest image still twinging in her brain.

“No, I mean your brother, silly girl…because Keng is your brother,” her mother-in-law corrected.

Pak Pao was honestly tripped up and embarrassed by the misunderstanding. Standing in this half-cold, half-hot threshold, her head grew light. It felt as if her body were lifting to a second floor along with the whole outlying kitchen, leaving the walk-in receding below.  Her mother-in-law broke the distracted pause.

“God, doesn’t this chill just make your nipples hard?”

This dumbfounded. How often had those sagging bags suckled the mother’s repellent offspring? Pak Pao’s reply was insipid.

“He’s older than he looks. My brother…”

“It’s a shame he won’t make it. For our sakes.”

“Father…where is he?”

“Now there’s a man with his moments,” her mother-in-law teased friendlily. Did the woman have any idea of her husband’s true monstrous nature?

“Has he been looking for me? I need to ask him something.” Pak Pao grew tense, her anxiety apparent in her wincing eyes and sharp brow. The woman before her unmistakably read and deeply weighed Pak Pao’s pain.

“Don’t fret so, child…I always hate to see you fret so…”

The drawn-out vowel of that final word was tinged with so much warmth and concern, as though it drew from the very lifeblood of the mother’s naturally rich red lips. A faint yet humid fog dissipated before the woman’s mouth. There was a musty smell of mushrooms emanating from the floor of the fridge. Pak Pao withdrew from the cold doorway, turning maladroitly about after a step or two, not another word.

…She made it halfway through the great though now dimmed room when the unexpected sound of the piano—how had it suddenly blocked her path?— brought the room to a startling silence. The crowding listeners hemmed her in. She was too close to the center of everyone’s attention to manouevre another inch. So much personal space did she now irreversibly share with the ensuing performance, Pak Pao could almost sense her sister-in-law’s nervous trembles as the young girl took a guarded step forward, clutched the edge of the piano in her sweaty palm, her head frozen in three-quarter profile, preparing to sing.

What was the piece? Her sister-in-law stood there, tapping out the beats with her toe as the accompanist gently ambled through some unassuming obbligato. It must have been a piano redaction, for the melody sounded timid and colorless compared to the recollection of the original starting to stir in Pak Pao’s mind. And then the singer commenced:

“Chriiiiiii-iste, Christe. Elei-ei-ei-ei-ei-ei-ei-ei-eison…”

Something was wrong. The nascent vocal phrase fell horribly flat. Though the keyboard harmonized in time with every syllable, it only helped to deaden the words. Through no obvious fault of the performers’ though. Nor was the composition to blame—this was indeed the perfectly balanced counterpoint of an undoubted master. Still something integral was missing. For unknown reasons, the vocalist had taken the second vocal line and, with the first brief break of melodic unison in the thirteenth measure, sounded strangely delayed and hesitant in doing so. And with each wavering refrain of the litany, here breaking into contrapuntal parts and then returning to parallel rhythm, Pak Pao felt a hollow pang growing in her gut, as if from a craven hunger. Like when for instance the work modulated in the twenty-second measure from the dominant to its relative minor and the second voice led, with nothing substantial to follow and support its entry.

“…Chriii-iste, Christe-ei-lei…”

The note held and yet wavered, calling out plaintively, floridly to essentially nothing.

“ei…son.”

Another brief instrumental interlude. Then the jarring entry of the sub-dominant…, had she somehow lost count…, were we in the thirty-ninth now? The torturing knitting and stitching of lines, the frantic shifts of keys, measure after measure…

“…ei -eeeeiiii…”

Pak Pao felt her own tongue flex rigidly against the floor of her mouth as she gagged on a bitter swig of acrid spit at the back of her throat. A piercing scratch tore up her nostrils, into her sinuses, blurring the corner of her eyes with instantaneous tears. And yet she fought against the overwhelming compulsion to burst out choking. The music became confused in her dizzying ears. The deeper and deeper she peered into those tightly stretched open lips, a sharp column of air gushing up and billowing the singer’s throat, the more Pak Pao turned pale and clammy, as if the widening mouth might swallow the entire world.

“…eeeii…”

Her vision darkened. Everything utterly silent. Everything, before the final vowel of this unworldly duet…between the one voice heard and the one implacably inaudible…before that final irrational vowel could find a fated closing key. As if time stopped amid a totally haphazard moment…

It was then the face of Keng appeared. The moribund apparition of Keng coming forth appeared to Pak Pao from the depthless shadows. Ghostly as the pale and ashen moon—most full!—transfixed as if suspended magically inside the orison of that frail longed-for tone. That round face. As always in life, now so outside of life. But more horrible…its indifference now an irrational indifference to its own dying. Oblivious unto death itself...

“…eei…”

Suddenly she conceived it!—her father-in-law’s cruel impulse! Emptily meaningless! To ensure she would obey and nothing more! And how she had! Solely because she believed herself already capable!

“I do but dream…Keng? Or you…is it…?”

Yes. But now more. More beautiful than you. More than the box…

“Terrible child, away! Away vengeful spirit! Please no more…” someone next to her almost understood her to feebly plead to the empty air before her face. But what else beside the vision could her rolling eyes see as all light of the living world dropped instantly flat into shadow. A very real silence overtook the whole room, over the abandoned song, long before any sort of saving cadence. The performance struck an abrupt end when Pak Pao fell to the floor unconscious.

All the lights came on with a loud commotion. Her husband was already at her side. And from a quiet corner of the room…from his quiet corner of the room, her father-in-law watched all as it unfolded.

What happened in the park that afternoon
“What planet are you from?” Nook quizzed Keng. “Only old people meet at the park anymore. And they only ever fly kites.”

The two sat near one another upon a removed stretch of grass beneath the expansive trees of Lumpini Park that eclipsed much of the surrounding cityscape. The ample shade gave pleasant solace from the heat. Happy twittering starlings, magpies, sunbirds and kingfishers darted in and out of the myriad of palms wistfully as if they’d discovered and would never depart paradise itself. Nook’s spirit warmed in their eternally shifting, mixed-up song.

“From Earth, I guess.”

“You guess?” Nook laughed. “That’s what I like about you. You take everything I say so seriously, which makes either you or more likely me the total fool. Very sporting.”

“Would you like me to stop taking you seriously?” Keng asked in impossible sincerity. She couldn’t stop a long and mirthful chortle.

“Shall we fly this kite I brought?” she finally broke it with. And here Nook began a ridiculous pantomime wherein she pretended to assemble an invisible kite and tie it to an invisible spool. She then licked her fingertip and held it up into the air. “Okay, I’m ready.”

Keng wasn’t sure what to make of it. Or what to quite make of her. He said nothing, but did smile.

“There isn’t any breeze though,” he finally answered.

“I have a deep respect for irony.”

“I don’t think even that would fly today.”

‘Touché,” Nook thought to herself, “Now you’re getting the feel for this, you perfectly unusual soul.”

“Well, if not even that’ll fly, perhaps something sure to. A joke?”

“I don’t know any,” Keng raised his shoulders.

“Then I do. Though I’ll warn you it’s a bit longwinded…” Would he suffer any more of her terrible puns? “So there was this little girl once,” she commenced nonetheless, “who found a tadpole. Not far from here…just in that pond over there in fact. And when she lifted the tiny creature from the water to her face, it spoke to her: ‘My dear lady! Save me, please! Release me from this wretched cesspool and, in time, when I’ve had a chance to mature, I’ll change and become your prince and whisk you away to my castle in Nepal.’ So the girl put the wiggly little guy safely in her pocket.

“But quickly he grew. And as he did there inside her clothes, he tickled her incessantly and the girl couldn’t help but giggling all the time in class, at the dinner table, etcetera. So she knew she had to find her future husband another home. And when she pulled him out into the light in order to place him in a matchbox she’d carefully prepared, she discovered he’d become a hideous warty toad. He had lied to her! So she poked and crammed him shut inside the box as quick as that, his pudgy lips bulging from its cracks. And she hid him underneath her bed where she didn’t care a less if he should stay forever…”

Keng’s mind began to wander. To something he had once found…

“…But the sinister demon—for this was the true nature of that bloodthirsty, jealous toad—well the fiend took the breakup so poorly, the pangs bled so profusely, his heart began to shrivel, until it was so small and hard, he became a flea. A flea from an old fat rat’s ass. And the flea crawled up into…you’ll forgive me, but this is how the joke goes…into the girl’s pubic hairs. Where the two itched together horribly ever after.”

Nook smiled modestly. Awaited a reaction.

“I don’t get it. It’s not funny”

“Sadly too true,” she confessed. And to put the brief and understandable quiet to rest, Nook cheered the silence, “And I don’t get this one thing. Remind me again. Why did you pick this park—god those birds! Those birds singing to no end are just awful…!” Nook winked at him. “Remind me, if you had two conflicting blind dates, why did you pick me? Why again my name?”

Keng smiled even wider.

“I never even knew the other’s.”