The Fear Artist

slows, but Rafferty says, “Keep going. Go to the corner and make the turn and wait for me.”

“You get wet,” the cabbie says.

“I’ll get dry again.”

“Here, stop here.” Looking at Ming Li, he points to the ground: Stay here. She gives him a frown, but he lifts his chin toward the driver and mimes him turning the wheel and driving away, and Ming Li makes a face he chooses to take as acquiescence.

When he opens the car door, the rain is a roar. He’s soaked before the door closes again. He realizes that the glue might not hold, that the ink might run, that Murphy might miss it altogether if the rain gets any heavier. He realizes that he never seems to have a backup plan.

The glue doesn’t hold. The plastic slides over the surface of the wet wood as though the glue were grease. But the ink that forms the Vietnamese words Jiang had written is thick and black, from an alcohol-based Sharpie, and it reads dark, hard-edged, and clear. He shoves his single pushpin through the bit of the plastic mask and then through the paper, and pushes the point deeply into the wood of the gate, hammering it once with the heel of his hand, the one he scraped on the pavement when he went down beneath the weight of Billie Joe Sellers.

He backs up, shaking the hand to get rid of the pain, and sprints for the cab. Ming Li pulls away from him when he climbs in, dripping profusely, and the driver makes a tsk-tsk sound as he puts the car in gear.

“It’s up?” Ming Li asks.

“It’s up.”

God turns the rain off, and the sudden silence makes Rafferty’s ears pop. He opens his mouth wide to equalize the pressure.

Ming Li says, “And what exactly is it you think this will accomplish?”

“What do I hope it will accomplish, you mean.”

“Fine. What do you hope it will accomplish?”

“Well,” he says as the cab swings back onto a busy, four-lane boulevard, “I’m hoping it’ll shake the paper.”

24

That Night

That night soldiers and emergency workers slap another hundred thirty thousand sandbags on the dikes in the city’s lower-lying areas. The river rises silently, running fast between its banks. More water is diverted into more canals, and more canals overflow. The national death toll from the flood is estimated at more than three hundred and, like the water, rising.

That night Rose opens her eyes on the thin mat of folded clothes she and Miaow use as a bed and realizes she’s alone. She gets up silently, not wanting to wake Fon’s parents, and tiptoes outside. Through a clearing in the clouds, a half-moon gleams, sharp-edged and pockmarked in the clear night air, and fifteen meters away she sees her daughter, sitting against the town’s biggest tree, with her knees drawn up and her head down, misery in every curve of her body.

Miaow doesn’t look up as Rose sits beside her on the wet earth, but she leans against her mother, and Rose can feel her shoulders shaking. Water drips musically from the tree.

When she’s gotten herself under control, Miaow wipes her nose with her index finger and says, “I’m so sad.”

Rose hugs her a little closer. “I know, baby, but we’ll go home soon.”

Miaow swallows loudly and says, “I want … I want a steak.”

“Well, that’s easy-”

“Why do I have to pretend I’m special all the time? I’m not a vegan. I was just trying to be different, to be … be … be special-”

Rose strokes her hair, something Miaow normally won’t permit. “Everyone tries to be special, Miaow.”

“No they don’t,” Miaow says. “You-”

“Sweetie, Poke and I aren’t any different-”

“Not you and Poke,” Miaow says, and Rose feels her own eyebrows climb. “It’s Andrew. He doesn’t pretend to be anything. He’s just dweeby and weird with his stupid glasses and his … his … his pants too high and his-oh, his hair. He dyed his hair to match mine because it never occurred to him I’d dye mine to match his. Ohhhh,” Miaow wails, throwing her arms around her mother’s neck, “I miss Andrew so much.”

That night Pim’s second customer passes out on top of her, in the middle of saying something. She waits politely for him to finish speaking, and when she realizes he won’t, she rocks him back and forth, using her elbows against the mattress for leverage, until he rolls off, landing on his back on the edge of the bed, his knuckles brushing the carpet.

Pim shakes him twice, saying, “Hello,” because she doesn’t remember his name. He begins to snore.

She gets up and pulls on her clothes, looks around the room, and sees his trousers on the carpet in front of the bathroom door. The wallet is in the right-hand back pocket, and she eases it out, looking for her sixteen hundred baht. What she sees is a stack of American twenties as thick as a comic book. She works two out, and then the nameless man snores again, loudly enough to make her jump, and she takes five more, and then five after that. She jams the money into the back pocket of her jeans and quietly lets herself out.

Thirty minutes later she’s sitting in an alley off Sukhumvit with her back against a fence made of chain-link and big sheets of rippled green plastic, with her legs crossed and a flimsy plastic Ziploc bag in her lap. From the bag she takes an aluminum-foil pipe and a big, crumbly pinch of crushed yaa baa tablets. She pushes the speed into the bowl of the pipe, being careful not to bend the pipe so sharply it’ll crimp the air flow, and then-with the pipe dangling loosely from her mouth-she breaks a wooden match, licks it to get it wet enough that it won’t catch fire, and shoves the sharp end into the jet of a disposable butane lighter. A flick of the wheel shows her that the flame is still fat and yellow and soft, so she turns up the flow and wiggles the splinter of wet wood to close the opening some more, burning her fingertips, until the lighter produces a blue needle of flame. Then she points the needle into the pipe and hits the smoke, and her heart rises eagerly to greet its new friend. This is the first time she’s done it alone. This is the first time she hasn’t had to share.

As she exhales and hits it again, she sees Arthit’s sad, disapproving eyes. She slams her own eyes shut and fills her lungs until they feel like they’ll explode.

In less than a minute, the Earth, with Arthit and her family and everyone else pinned helplessly to its surface, is a thousand feet below her and, all alone in the sky, she can look down on the dark, folded world with cities gleaming in its seams. It’s so beautiful she thinks she might cry.

That night Vladimir uses his teeth to unscrew the cap from his second bottle of vodka. He’s in his same old room but sitting on the new Kirghiz carpet he bought with the money Rafferty paid him.

He reaches for his empty glass, but it dodges at the last moment and he knocks it over. He closes one eye and fixes the glass with a glare until he’s wrapped his fingers around it. As he pours, he asks himself for the thirtieth or fortieth time since he opened the first bottle how much he could earn by telling what he knows-from a safe distance, of course-to Murphy. He asks again the corollary question: Who is more likely to be alive in a few days, Murphy or Rafferty? When this is over, who will he have to share Bangkok with? He gets the same answer he’s been getting all night long. It’s not the answer he wants, but if there’s one thing Vladimir has learned in a lifetime of betraying and being betrayed, it’s that winning is all that matters.

The rain hits the window, hard as a handful of nails.