Koko

painted with blue stars, where a barefoot, spindly woman sat morosely beating a squalling child in the midst of a welter of bags, bottles, and parcels tied with coarse rope. Her hand struck its face, her fist struck its chest. The stairs led up to a wide canopy advertising the HONEYPOT NIGHTCLUB and RESTAURANT. The woman stared through Dr. Poole, and her eyes said: This is my child, this is my dwelling, you are invisible to me.

For a second he felt dizzy; a grey shadowland surrounded him, a world of shifting dimensions and sudden abysses, where reality was no more than just another illusion. Then he remembered seeing a woman in blue tumble down a wet green hillside, and knew that he was flinching away from his own life.

Michael knew about the flinch. Once he had persuaded Judy to come into New York with him to see Tracers, a play written and performed by Vietnam veterans. Michael thought it was a wonderful play. Tracers put you very close to Vietnam, and virtually every minute of it called up pictures and echoes of his time there. He found himself crying and laughing, undone by uncontrollable feelings, as on the bench in Bras Basah Park. (Judy had thought Tracers a sentimental form of therapy for the actors.) At various times in the play, a character named Dinky Dau pointed an M-16 straight at Michael’s head. Dinky Dau probably could not see Michael, who was in the eighth row, and the gun was not loaded, but when the muzzle swung toward him, Michael felt dizzy and faint. Helplessly, he felt himself squeezing as far back in his seat as he could go, holding tightly onto the armrests. He hoped he did not look as frightened as he felt.

Bangkok aroused some of the same feelings in him as Dinky Dau’s gun. At the dedication of the Memorial, fourteen years of his life had just dropped away. He had been a raw nerve, a boy soldier again, invisible inside nice, comfortable, humane Dr. Poole. It seethed that nice comfortable Dr. Poole was only the scaffolding around that raw nerve.

How strange it was to be so invisible, his real self so invisible to others. Michael wished that Conor and Pumo had gone to Tracers with him.

Michael and Conor walked past a dusty window filled with trusses and artificial legs like amputations, bent at the knee. “You know,” Conor said, “I’m homesick. I want to eat a hamburger. I want a beer that doesn’t taste like it was made with stuff they swept up off the street. I want to be able to go to the can again—that shit I got from the doctor closed my asshole so tight it’s just a seam. You know the worst? I even want to pick up my toolchest again. I want to come home from work, clean up, and get down to my good old bar. Don’t you miss stuff like that, Mikey?”

“Not exactly,” Poole said.

“Don’t you miss work?” Conor’s eyebrows lifted. “Don’t you miss getting on your whatsit, your stethoscope, all that? Telling kids it’s only gonna hurt a little bit?”

“I don’t really miss that side of it,” Poole said. “In fact, I haven’t been very happy with my practice lately.”

“Don’t you miss anything?”

I miss a girl in St. Bart’s hospital, Michael thought, but finally said, “Some of my patients, I guess.”

Conor gave him a suspicious look and suggested they turn around and take a look at Patpat before they caught Black Lung disease. They had come nearly all the way to Charoen Krung Road, the Oriental Hotel, and the river.

“Patpong,” Michael corrected. “Where Dengler was killed.”

“Oh, that Patpong,” Conor said.

If Patpong held an initial surprise, it was that it was no larger than what Poole had seen from his window. The section of Bangkok that attracted male tourists from all over America, Europe, and Asia was only three streets long and one street wide. Poole had imagined that like the St. Pauli section of Hamburg it covered at least a few more blocks. At five in the afternoon, the neon signs blazed above the heads of the crowds of men going in and out of the bars and massage parlors. 123 GIRLS WET. SMOKING. A tout positioned at the bottom of a flight of stairs whistled at Poole and slipped into his hands a brochure listing the specialties of the house.

Beautiful girl hostesses—continuous show!

1 free drink per customer

All languages, international clientele

Ping-Pong balls

Smoking

Magic Marker

Coca Cola

Striptease

Woman-woman

Man-woman

Man-woman-woman

Room for use and observe

As he read this document, a small Thai male interposed himself between Michael and Conor. “You in good time,” he said. “Late is too late. Choose now, you get best.” He took a fat credit-card holder from his jacket pocket, and let it drop down in segments, flipping open as it fell to reveal photographs of perhaps sixty naked girls. “Pick now—late is too late.” He grinned, wonderfully at ease with himself, his product, and his message, and showed bright gold incisors.

He held the ribbon of photographs up to Conor’s face. “All available! Going fast!”

Michael saw Conor’s face turn red, and pulled him down the street, shooing the massage parlor tout away with his other hand.

The tout waggled his photos in the air and made them shimmy.

“Boys, too. Pretty boys, boys all sizes. Later is too late, especially for boys.” From another pocket he withdrew another wad of photographs. These too he let waterfall out of his palm. “Beautiful, hot, suck you, fuck you, smoke you—”

“Telephone,” Poole said, thinking he had read the word on the menu from the sex club.

The tout frowned and shook his head. “No telephone—what you want? You on death trip?” He started to fold and gather his photographs into stacks as he backed away from them. For a moment he regarded them both very shrewdly. “You two guys on real death trip? Real kinky? Must be very, very careful.”

“What’s with this guy?” Conor said. “Show him the picture.”

The little tout was looking nervously from side to side. He had folded his wares into his jacket pockets. Poole held out one of the photographs from the manila envelope. The tout licked his lips with a long colorless tongue. The man stepped backward, grinned emptily at Conor and Michael, and transferred his attentions to a tall white boy in a Twisted Sister T-shirt.

“I don’t know about you,” Conor said, “but I could use a beer.”

Poole nodded, and followed him up the stairs to the Montparnasse Bar. Conor disappeared through a curtain of blue plastic streamers, and Michael followed him into a small, dimly lighted room ringed with chairs. From one wall jutted a tiny bar behind which stood a huge Samoan in a tight red muscle shirt. A small raised wooden stage took up the front of the room. Conor was handing bills to an obese woman seated at a desk just inside the door. “Admission, twenty baht,” she croaked at Poole.

Poole glanced toward the stage, where a chunky Thai girl wearing a bra was doing something that required her to hunch down over her splayed knees. A dozen undressed girls inspected Poole and Conor. The only other man in the room was a drunken Australian bulging out of a sweat-stained tan suit and clutching a tall can of Foster’s Lager. A girl was curled up in his lap, playing with his necktie and whispering into his ear.

“You know what I was trying to think of, out on the street?” Michael asked. “Smoking.”

“I hope they don’t have it,” Conor said.

The girl onstage flashed a broad smile and cupped her hands just below her vagina. A Ping-Pong ball appeared in its folds, then disappeared back up inside her, then finally dropped out onto her palm. Another Ping- Pong ball popped into view.

Four girls had appeared around them, smiling and cooing. Two sat in the chairs on either side of them, and the other two kneeled.

“You very handsome,” said the girl before Poole. She began to stroke his knee. “You be my husban’?”

“Hey,” Conor said, “if these people can do shit like that with Ping-Pong balls …”