Conor followed one of the men down a long dark corridor into a big low-ceilinged room which had been painted black. Dim red lights burned above rows of camp chairs and red spots pointed at two stages, one directly before the chairs, the other beside a crowded bar. A naked girl danced on each stage, flipping her hair and snapping her fingers. The girls had unsteady breasts, narrow hips, and pubic hair like small black badges. In the red light their lips looked black. Most of the customers in the chairs and standing at the bar were Thai men, but scattered through the crowd were a few drunken white men like himself, and even a few white couples in American clothes. Conor half-sat, half-fell into an empty chair near the back of the room and ordered a beer that cost a hundred baht from a half-naked girl who materialized beside him.
That bastard took my cock out of my pants, he thought. Guess I’m lucky he didn’t cut it off and take it home in a bottle. He drank his beer, then a succession of beers as the girls onstage changed faces and bodies, swapped short hair for long hair, baseball breasts for football breasts, pillowy hips for greyhound hips. They blew out smoke and smiled like girls on dates. Conor decided that he liked these girls. One of them could open Coca-Cola bottles with her vagina—the top came off the bottle with a loud, echoing report. This girl’s face was oddly harsh and wistful, with high precision-engineered cheekbones and gleaming eyes like paper cuts. After she popped open the bottles, she tilted her backside against the wall of the stage, her pretty legs in the air, and inhaled the soda from the bottle. When she stood up, she released the liquid back into the bottle in a hissing jet. As far as Conor knew, there wasn’t a single girl in Donovan’s who could do this trick.
He had reached that ironbound stage of drunkenness, he realized, that could not be affected by a dozen more drinks.
When he looked at the side stage he felt his face turn red, his ears blaze. A slim young creature had shimmied out of her dress to reveal that she had small, pretty breasts and an erect cock. Another slender
“Gimme a whiskey,” Conor told the waitress.
When the dictator’s mistress and the dog left the stage, a short muscular Thai male and a girl with waist- length hair bounded up. Soon they were locked in intercourse, altering their positions, drawing up their knees and revolving as if they were suspended in the air. One of the
Suddenly Conor was unable to tell which of the people onstage were men and which were women. They were men with breasts, women with erections. They had melted together—he saw the flash of a girl’s smile, plump buttocks, a broad thigh. Then all four performers were standing up and bowing like actors, the young woman delicately flushed across the top of her breasts. To Conor, the four people onstage seemed to be encased in the memory of pleasure, as different from those cheering them as Martians, as untouchable as angels.
That’s it! Conor thought. It flashed before him that a moment of total clarity and truth had just passed. Conor saw himself standing before a great wall of dazzling brightness, an impenetrable, unknowable realm where the sexes melted together and language was music and things moved so swiftly and brightly they hurt the eyes.
Then he fell back into cold reason. The performers now draped in robes and shuffling offstage in the emptying club were drug addicts and whores who lived in riverfront shacks, and he was drunk. Tim Underhill was a boozy wreck, just like him. Conor groped for that moment of clarity in order to dismiss it completely, but could find only the memory of sitting in bars and the taxi, of a hunt so fruitless it might have been for a unicorn instead of a man.
He thought that his whole life was a history of not understanding what the hell was going on—a history of not getting it.
Conor wiped his hands on his jeans and dully followed the last of the customers down the dark corridor and outside into the warm night.
A handful of men from the club had drifted toward the parking garage. They were all dressed in smooth- fitting Thai suits and resembled mercenary soldiers on home leave. One of them wore dark glasses. Conor weaved outside the door of the club, sensing that they were waiting for him to leave.
It was suddenly clear to him that what they had seen in the club was only a prelude to the real event of the night. They were not satisfied with what satisfied everyone else. Me too, Conor thought, remembering the feelings he’d had while the performers took their bows. There’s more—there’s one hell of a lot more. And something else made Conor move toward the waiting men. Underhill would have been with them. That was why Cham had brought him here. Whatever the men were awaiting was the real last act of the performance which already had taken Conor so far.
As Conor stepped toward the men, the Thai in dark glasses muttered something to his friends and broke away to approach him. He held up a hand like a policeman halting traffic, then made a sweeping-away gesture. “Performance ovah,” he said. “You must go.”
“I want to see what else you guys got on tap,” Conor said.
“Nothing else. Must leave now.” The man repeated the whisk-broom gesture.
Without appearing to have moved at all, the other men were now much nearer to Conor, who felt a familiar surge of excitement and anticipation at the proximity of danger. Violence hung about these men like a fog.
“Tim Underhill told me to come here,” he said in a loud voice. “You know him, right?”
A buzz of soft talk broke out behind the man in sunglasses. Conor heard what sounded like “Underhill,” followed by suppressed laughter. He relaxed. The man in sunglasses glanced back at him in a wordless command to stand still. The men spoke to each other again, and one of them made what was obviously a joke, and even Sunglasses smiled.
“Let’s see what you guys got goin’ here,” he said.
“Crap crop crap!” one of the men shouted, and the others showed yellow smiles.
Sunglasses walked toward Conor with an officer’s strut. “Do you know where you ah?”
“Bangkok. Jesus, I ain’t that drunk. Bangkok, Thailand. The goddamn kingdom of Siam.”
Big yellow smile, and a shake of the head. “What street you on? What district?”
Conor said, “I don’t even give a shit.”
At least a few of the men must have understood him, for they called out tauntingly to Sunglasses. Conor heard in their tone a cynical, end-of-the-world edge he had heard nowhere in the world in the past fourteen years. They could have been saying either: Kill him and let’s move or Let the asshole American come along.
Sunglasses squinted up at Conor with a look that mingled doubt and amusement. “Twelve hundred baht,” he finally said.
“This show better be four times as good as the other one,” Conor muttered, and pulled his crumpled wad of bills from his pocket. The little group of men had already begun moving toward the towering concrete garage, and Conor stumbled along behind them, trying to keep himself moving in a straight line.
The man in sunglasses moved ahead of the rest and opened a door set beside the garage’s exit ramp. The little group began filing through the door into a dimly lighted stairwell. Sunglasses flapped his hand in the air and hissed, urging Conor to come in.
“Here I am,” Conor said, and hurried after the others.
3
The next day Conor told himself that he could not really be certain about what had happened after he followed the other men down into the lower depths of the garage. He’d had so much to drink that he had been unsteady on his feet. In a sex club he had seen a vision of—what? angels? splendor?—and it had mix-mastered his brain. He had not understood more than one word spoken inside the garage, and he could not even be certain about that word. He had been light-headed enough to have heard unspoken words and seen imaginary things; Conor felt that in some way he had been light-headed since he and Mikey and Beevers had boarded the Singapore Airlines jet in Los Angeles. Since then, reality had bent backwards in on itself in some extraordinary way, putting him into a world where people looked at scenes from hell, where plump little girls blew smoke rings out of their pussies, where men turned into women and women into men. They were getting close to Tim Underhill, Mikey said, and Conor felt that closeness every time he wondered about what happened in the garage. Getting close to Underhill probably meant you were getting into some territory where everything was upside down by nature, where you couldn’t trust your own senses. Underhill liked those places—he had
