The Fear Artist

“They’re not using the picture of me with Campbell, or whatever his name is, the one from the video? I guess they still don’t want anyone to see his face.”

“You’re in three-quarters in the video,” Arthit says. “Authority figures like full-face.”

“And I’m not officially a suspect?”

“Not officially, no. But it’s kind of hard not to connect the dots. The bullets the coroner pulled out of Mr. Campbell were supposedly fired by your gun, and the police want to talk to you. It doesn’t sound like they want to name you Farang of the Year.”

“What do they think they’ll get out of this? Why would they take my gun and fire a couple of shots into a dead man?”

“I can think of two things,” Arthit says. “First, they’ve got you hog-tied if they catch you and demand to know what the dead man said. Tell the truth, the line will be, and they’ll make it all go away. Stonewall and you’re in prison for the rest of your life, which probably actually means dead, since they won’t want you talking to anyone else. So that’s one thing: to force you to level with them.”

“I did level with them.”

“Yeah, well. Then there’s the other reason. The country had problems, both political and religious, even before the flooding started. It’s possible the government won’t be allowed to serve its full term. It could get yanked if Bangkok floods badly, although this group had nothing to do with decades of bad or nonexistent flood planning. But even if we don’t get wet, there’s the situation in the south. We’ve got disorganized jihad going on down there, or maybe it’s organized jihad and we’re just clueless about it. And now a foreigner has been murdered, on the fringes of a demonstration over the violence down there. For the image of the country, not to mention the need to protect their own asses, Shen’s guys need to solve that crime, even if one of them committed it himself. You’re one way to solve it, and a way with no political or religious implications, since you’re farang.”

“Yup,” Rafferty says. “I guess you could say I’m in luck.” It’s not time yet for him to meet the car, so he’s gazing through the window of his hotel room, which looks onto a narrow, filthy alley much favored by rats. Sure enough, he sees a big one strolling right down the middle, ignoring the rain, as though it were in his own driveway. Poke envies it. “What would you do in my position?”

Arthit sighs into the mouthpiece. “I’ve been thinking about that for days. I have nothing that might make a real difference, and my instinct is that you shouldn’t do anything at all until we’ve got a better idea. Do your rabbit thing. Keep still and stay out of their line of vision.”

“So if you were me, you wouldn’t go in and try to explain. You know, confront the problem head-on and all that.”

“No,” Arthit says. “If I could get my list of alternative courses of action up to ninety or a hundred, that would still be the one on the bottom.”

After this conversation Arthit stops calling for a few days, which is fine with Rafferty; he’s already as depressed as he can be without losing his ability to think straight.

On day two, waiting in the backseat while the doctor and nurse are tending to someone inside a fancy condominium, he calls Rose’s new phone with his own new phone, just to hear the voice of someone who cares about him.

He says, “I’m lonely.”

“I could send you Miaow. There are worse things than being lonely. What’s going on down there?”

“I’m being nowhere. Riding around in cars all day and sleeping in boom-boom hotels at night. You’d like my new hairstyle.”

“We’re sleeping on folded clothes, half an inch thick. Oh, forget it, I’m sorry. I have no business whining to you about anything. Even Miaow’s worried, during the brief moments when she’s not feeling personally inconvenienced by the weather.”

“Well, worry about me,” he says. “Someone should.”

“I do. And I love you. We’re taking care of ourselves, we’re fine. Forget about us. You just go be nowhere and work your way out of this. Whoops, I have to hang up-it’s my turn for the shower.” She hangs up.

Rafferty says, “You’re the only person in Thailand who wants to get wet,” but he’s talking to dead air. He puts the phone down and sees a streak of light skin on the back of his hands. He’s got to be on guard against sweating or brushing his hands against things. He rubs at the hand until the streak is smoothed out, then leans across the front seat and tilts the rearview mirror until he can see himself. He looks okay except for the end of his nose, which is a little pinkish. With the tips of two fingers, he tries to cover the pink spot, but the gel doesn’t want to spread, so he licks his fingertips. The moisture does the job. He does the best he can to check his ears and the back of his neck, but it isn’t much.

Makeup, he discovers, is more complicated than men think it is.

On day three he realizes that Bangkok is a city of fathers and daughters. He sees them everywhere, at all ages and in all sizes: fathers with infants they hold as though they’ve just been handed a soap bubble; fathers with toddlers, their hand clamped inside their father’s hand as they claim the sidewalk, step by step; fathers with preteens, following obediently three steps behind their daughters in case school friends should happen to see them; fathers with the grim, desperate pride of someone who’s sired a beauty and, unfortunately for his peace of mind, remembers what he was like when he was a boy.

He wonders for a moment how the men would look if he could see them through their daughters’ eyes, then immediately banishes the notion. He gets glimpses of himself, occasionally, reflected in Miaow’s eyes, and what he thinks he sees is the ruin of a statue placed on a pedestal that was too high for it, just chunks of anatomical rubble on a stone platform with recognizable bits and pieces-an eye, a smile, a strong arm-capable of provoking mild affection and somewhat more intense irritation.

And he asks himself, looking at the fathers, how anyone has the courage to embark on that voyage. To accept a child, not knowing the first thing about how much she can be shaped and how much of her character is set in genetic stone, to make the breathtaking assumption that you will always know what’s best for her and are competent to guide her toward it.

Sheer hubris.

Miaow came to him and Rose preshaped by her years on the sidewalk, and in some ways that was probably an advantage. She had learned, within limits, what was necessary to her and what was superfluous, what she would put up with and what she wouldn’t. He hadn’t known then-he didn’t know now, for that matter-whether she’d been abused sexually during those five or six wild-child years. But then, he thinks, every infant comes into the world trailing an infinite cloud of mystery behind it: where she came from, where she’s going, who she really is, what she can do, what she can learn, whether she’ll bring joy or heartbreak, whether there is darkness at her core. What landslide of karma has rolled her into this life.

Miaow is twelve or thirteen now. When they took her in, she was seven or eight. In those five years, he’s tried every parenting approach he can, with little success, he thinks, before abandoning all of them in favor of two governing principles. First, to do no harm. Second, to place no limit on the amount of love he is willing to give. The ideas made sense when they came to him, but in the past year he’s begun to wonder whether there’s a third principle-the most important principle-he hasn’t thought of. Or maybe Rose was right when she said if he wanted something that wouldn’t change, he should have bought a table.

“Do you have children?” he asks the doctor behind the wheel and the nurse in the passenger seat.

The doctor grunts a negative, but the nurse says, “Four.”

“How old?”

“The oldest is twenty-seven. The youngest is nineteen.”

“Did you have principles? About how to raise them, I mean?”

“Yes. Keep them from killing themselves and don’t try to turn them into me.”

Rafferty says, “Those are good.”

The doctor says, “My mother told me before she died that the biggest problem she had with my sisters and me was figuring out whether we had a compass. Two of us always knew what we wanted, my youngest sister and I. The middle kid was a rainbow, different every day.”

“What did your mother do?”

“She gave up. She said it was the most valuable lesson she ever learned, giving up. Our middle sister is the happiest of us all.”