The Fear Artist

pound of change. This is the second shop to give him coins, and his pants are sagging. Wondering whether it’s some sort of plot to make it impossible for him to run away, he goes two more shops down to buy a can of eggshell-white flat enamel.

Probably four people, he decides as he treks back home, tugging his pants up every few steps. Maybe five. Pretty expensive. And who has that kind of money? Old Uncle Sam, that’s who.

He wants to hold his wife, he wants to see his daughter, he wishes all of this would go away, and he’s certain to the soles of his shoes that it won’t.

When he opens the apartment door, the smell of the paint rolls out at him with an almost liquid impact. He stands there looking at his handiwork and sees where the coat is uneven, where the join with the ceiling is jagged, where he laid it on thick enough to carve graffiti into the paint.

He discovers that he hates apricot.

Breathing the fumes shallowly, he puts the can of white on the floor in the hallway and goes into his bedroom to drain his pockets of change before his jeans fall off.

All year long he puts his coins into a couple of sixteen-ounce cans that originally held tomato sauce. He has no idea why he ever bought tomato sauce, but the cans work as piggy banks. The arrangement is that he empties all his loose change into the cans every night, and on Miaow’s birthday-which they celebrate on Rose’s, since no one knows what Miaow’s birthday actually is-he and she count it together, and the next day he totes it to the bank and gets the equivalent in paper currency and gives it to her.

She hadn’t been particularly eager to count with him on her most recent birthday, but she’d still wanted the bills. He more or less coerced her to join him on the floor, sliding the coins around on the glass-topped table and making countable piles until he announced that she had four hundred thirty baht coming.

Now he dumps handfuls of change on top of the dresser, and as he does it, the anxiety and frustration he feels about his present situation blends into his unhappiness about his relationship with Miaow, and it all becomes a single dark wind blowing on the back of his neck.

Too many of the things he and Miaow used to share with joy are disappearing, being replaced by a kind of weary tolerance on her side and a baffled and apparently useless love on his. More and more it seems to him that she’s on the other side of a thick membrane, permeable to her, allowing her to come through for brief visits, but solid as glass to him. It even-it especially-repels his feelings.

His pockets empty at last, he looks down at the mountain of coins. It’s a sad pile. He opens the drawer and stands there, stupefied.

The tomato cans are empty.

He’s almost meditatively thought-free for a long moment, just registering what he sees. One of the cans had been full and the other about one-third full. Now there are ten or fifteen coins in each can. He picks up the nearer can and rattles it, as though that will prove something.

He turns slowly and surveys the room, as if he expects to see an untidy heap of coins glistening in the center of the bed or on the carpet. Or a path of dropped coins leading to the door.

And then he has a truly terrible notion.

He goes to the bed, slides aside the door in the headboard, and opens the safe. There it is, the oilcloth with the Glock wrapped in it. On the previous evening, he’d jabbed it with his finger, checking its weight.

The moment he wraps his hand around it, his heart plummets.

He pulls it out, takes a corner, lets it fall open, and looks down at the big, doubled Ziploc bag that’s been jammed full of coins and rubber-banded into a semblance of solidity. His gun is gone.

Thinking is preferable to panicking, but harder to do.

It’s early for a beer, only about four-thirty. Given the thorniness of the mental list he’s making, though, he decides to pretend that his watch and the sun are both slow. He sits at the counter with a Singha sweating in front of him, and he draws a crude map, a diagram of his situation. He writes so much that he knows he can accidentally mislead himself with narrative, working instinctively to create plausibility. But he lacks spatial imagination, so diagrams force him to stick to the facts.

In the first rough draft, he puts himself in the center of the horizontal page, with a line leading to the fallen farang. From the farang other lines lead, like spokes, to Major Shen, Richard Elson, the red-haired man, Cheyenne, Helen Eckersley. Whoever or whatever Helen Eckersley might actually be.

He looks at it and pushes it aside. The beer waves at him, so he pays it a little attention.

The second draft puts the farang in the center and transforms Rafferty into one of a planetary system of satellites that include Shen, the red-haired man, Elson, Cheyenne, and a little black circle for Helen Eckersley. Even as he adds the dry-cleaning shop to the little solar system, he realizes that the image is wildly unbalanced in favor of nations other than Thailand. That reminds him of the Growing Younger Man saying that one of the factors in the current political situation is the pressure that comes from other countries-to contain the Muslim situation, to maintain a profitable peace.

He studies his diagram for a moment, assigning countries of origins to its components. Then he crumples it up and takes another sheet of paper.

America, America, America, America: The third diagram presents a situation in which Thailand is almost marginal, represented by Shen and his grand-opera thugs, whom Rafferty suddenly visualizes as hand puppets. Outnumbering them, overwhelming them, possibly providing the hands that animate them, are the fallen farang, Elson, American multinational companies and their governmental and diplomatic shills, Cheyenne, Helen Eckersley, and the kind of organization that mounts a four- or five-person tail. Even Shen has a connecting line to America: years spent there before his return to the kingdom as a sort of semi-indigenous American spook. A hand puppet.

It’s a very American diagram.

And in the center of the third diagram-the diagram he thinks is closest to the truth-he places a malicious caricature, all big belly and flaring, tufted nostrils: the red-haired man.

6

Hiding Behind a Woman

Mrs. Pongsiri is partly made up for her night’s work in the bar she either runs or owns; her hair is pulled back and her face powdered ghost white, awaiting the application of a foundation of some kind. There’s a snowy little sifting of powder on the tip of her nose and on her red T-shirt, and a new scar, a fine reddish line, on the side of her slender neck. A little less than a year ago, she’d been hurt quite badly when she tried to prevent two knife-wielding men, each of whom was probably double her weight, from breaking up Rafferty and Rose’s apartment. Rafferty’s been waiting ever since for a change in attitude, a telltale wince that says she’s become wary of him, and he’s never caught a glimpse of it.

Working in a bar for a few decades is a toughening experience.

Of course Rafferty can use her phone, she says, she says, sorry to come to the door looking like a monster in the movies; you know where the phone is, please excuse me while I turn myself into someone not so scary. Have you heard any more about the flooding?

And would he like a glass of water?

Rafferty declines the water and waits until she’s gone back into the bathroom. Her apartment is pretty much a duplicate of his, although he has no idea what she’s done with the second bedroom-used it as a closet, probably, since she owns an enormous amount of evening wear. The decor is surprisingly unfrilly, open and coolly austere, not too many pieces of furniture to jam up the room. A couple of very good carpets, antique from the look of them, take the curse off the building’s generic wall-to-wall. A robed monk of gilded wood sits, hands raised palms together in worship, knees drawn up beside him, all alone on a table in the corner.

The sliding glass door to her balcony is ajar; she’s on the downwind side of the building, and rain has