The Fear Artist

another.

Things to do: one, two, three, no good. One, two, three, four, no good. Blind alleys everywhere.

He realizes he has one thing going for him: his mother’s Asian genes.

In the bluish light of the tiny, damp bathroom, its grouting black with mold, he looks at himself in the peeling mirror. The hotel’s sole gestures in the direction of amenities are a paper-thin sliver of soap in a plastic sleeve and a black plastic comb in a cellophane envelope. Experimentally, he wets his hair and uses the comb to part it in the middle and to bring it forward over his forehead on either side of the part, a fading hairstyle once favored by about 90 percent of young Thai men. His hair is shorter on the left because of the paint he cut away, but even given that, the new hairstyle helps a little. His black Asian hair won’t draw anyone’s attention, and it’s a natural match with his smooth features and black eyes, heavily influenced by his mother’s Filipina blood. At a glance, from a distance, he could pass for Thai.

Makeup, he thinks. He can darken his skin. The city is jammed with dark-skinned people at the moment, in from the countryside to get away from the flooding up-country. Tens of thousands of them.

Color is a dividing line here, as in so many other places. There are skin tones that make a person almost invisible. And he’s been described as a farang. People won’t be looking at a dark-skinned man, especially with this see-it-everywhere hair.

He can get makeup, he thinks, without even having to go into a store. It’s not much-different hair, a new skin tone. But it lifts his spirits. He’s doing something. He pulls out his cell phone and scrolls through his phone book.

“Hello?” says Mrs. Shin, Miaow’s drama teacher.

“Mrs. Shin, this is Poke Rafferty. How are you?”

“I’m fine. Is something wrong with Mia?”

“No, she’s okay, better than okay. Listen, I’m in a jam. Have you watched television tonight?”

“I never watch television.”

“Well, you’ll probably see it tomorrow in the paper. It’s a big story, and it’s bad, and I’m in the middle of it. I have to ask you to take my word that the whole thing is a setup.”

“What whole thing?”

“Do you trust me?”

A pause, and then she says, “I’ve seen how you are with Mia.”

“Good. Then I need you to trust me that what you’ll hear tomorrow is a lie, and before you hear about it, I need you to go to the school and get some theatrical makeup. Dark, like a heavy tan.”

“Foundation, you mean.”

“Whatever it’s called. Not for Othello but for-I don’t know-Caliban. The stuff the kid who played Caliban wore. A couple of tubes.”

“I can do that. You’re really not going to tell me what this is about?”

“You’ll know soon enough. It’s bad, but it’s not true. And Miaow-Mia-is safe, and so is Rose. When you get the makeup, I need you to leave it in the bushes up in that planter to the right of the door to your apartment house. I’ll pick it up later tonight.”

“How cloak-and-dagger.”

“I’ll tell you all about it when I can.”

“Give me an hour,” Mrs. Shin says.

“When you need something done,” Rafferty says, “Call a Korean.”

His next call is to one of the first friends he made in Bangkok, Dr. Ratt. Dr. Ratt, whose name is a shorter, modernized version of one with ancient royal connections, has founded a small empire by putting uniformed doctors and nurses into automobiles and keeping five or six cars on the move at all times, thereby defeating Bangkok’s epic traffic by ensuring that medical help is usually in the neighborhood. They’re good enough friends that Dr. Ratt listens without questions, although he must have dozens. Half an hour later, six blocks from his hotel and still waiting for Arthit’s call, Rafferty climbs into the backseat of a Toyota Corolla with a doctor and a nurse, in full official regalia, sitting in front. They nod hello but ask him no questions.

After a stop to put three stitches in a patient, they drop him two corners from Mrs. Shin’s apartment and circle the block while he cuts across a couple of sois to get to the building, where he reaches into the bushes and comes out with a brown paper bag. Then they return him to the place where they picked him up. He hikes back to the hotel, calls Dr. Ratt, and arranges to be picked up by another team at 7:00 A.M.

The safest place to be, he figures, is nowhere, and what could be more nowhere than the backseat of a car rolling through Bangkok at random?

Just another dark-skinned guy idling along in the back of a car. While he figures out how to live through all this. Whatever this is.

Part Two

EIGHT STORIES DOWN

10

Up Against the Night

For five endless days, Rafferty sees the world through the wet windows of a succession of heavily air- conditioned Toyota Corollas, saying good-bye to each weary doctor-nurse team as they clamber out after an eight- hour shift and hello to the bright, fresh ones getting in. Dr. Ratt once told him that the doctors who drive his cars have all had what he described as “a little trouble” in their careers, or else they’d be working in some nice clean hospital that doesn’t go anywhere instead of driving around Bangkok all day. If they get fired from this job, they’ll be pulling the graveyard shift in some twenty-four-hour VD clinic. And they’ve apparently been told that any loose lips about having Rafferty in the car will get them fired. There’s a conspicuous lack of curiosity.

He gets up before it’s light outside and spreads Mrs. Shin’s dark gel over his face and ears and the back of his neck. Last, he does the backs of his hands. He learns accidentally that if the tiny cake of soap supplied by his fifth- rate hotels sits in a little water overnight, it produces a gelatinous mass that he can spread on his comb. Applied to damp hair, it makes it even darker and holds it in place for hours. Dark-skinned, black-haired, center-parted, he walks the four or five blocks to the pickup point and gets into the first of the day’s cars. He’s passed from one team to another until the shift that ends at midnight drops him a few blocks away from the designated depressive fleabag of the evening. The routine has a deadening sameness to it, but still each day has some event to distinguish it.

On day one, Arthit redefines good fortune.

“You’re in luck,” Arthit says on Anand’s cell phone. “The only decent picture they have is the one from your book.”

“Looking for Trouble in Thailand?”

“That’s the one.”

“Why am I in luck? That’s a pretty good picture.”

“Every copy in Bangkok is apparently a bootleg from a photocopy. The contrast is so high that you could be anybody.”