Killed at the Whim of a Hat

and the case would explode in the media. Everyone was looking for something exciting to nudge the yuppy rebellion off the front pages. Somehow, Mika Mikata would be punished for her cruelty.

Our resort was quiet. Everyone had gone to bed. The table was littered with bottles and plates and topped by Gogo with sauce around her mouth. The cleanup could wait. I kick-started the motorcycle and rode into Pak Nam to deliver my exclusive. It was a ghost town. The light above the 7-Eleven bathed the street in puddles of red, green and orange. As I passed, I saw the cashier yawn into a magazine. There was another light from the upstairs window of a PVC pipe and pump store, one more at the intersection. It stretched the shadow of a threadbare cat into the shape of a giraffe. But the Internet shop was as dark as Nintendo Kong’s banana cellar, as quiet as Atlantis after the last of the Gorgon invaders had been destroyed.

I took off my shoe and rapped against the shutter. The sound echoed around the town like a lone Pamplona bull charging through the streets, but the only reaction was a faint “What do you want?” from above the cafe.

Seventeen

“ I think we need not only to eliminate the toll-booth to the middle class, I think we should knock down the tollbooth.”

— George W. Bush, Nashua, NH, As Quoted By Gail Collins In The New York Times, February I, 2000

I got an early phone call from Dtor, my friend in Chiang Mai. The urban anarchists were still occupying our Government House. They’d been there for nine days already. They had their fold-up beach chairs and had diverted their magazine subscriptions to their new temporary address. They’d even rented a bank of Portaloos. They’d set up their futons and ordered in pizza while the police stood outside wondering why they had to make do with cold fried rice and a quick wee against the back wall. Anarchy was one of the fastest-growing middle-class hobbies. It had already overtaken Pilates and tai chi. I’d seen the photos: middle-aged women in stretch trousers and sensible tops giving the finger. Let’s see them try that in Burma. Anywhere else and you’d expect them to have been mowed down in a hail of machine-gun fire, beaten with batons, dragged screaming by their orthopedic shoes. This is our Government House, damn it. Our seat of power.

Who do they think they are? I didn’t vote for these people. But when you’ve got friends in high places, you know you aren’t scheduled for a police massacre. You take your best iPod with you without fear it might get bumped in a skirmish. You know the authorities won’t dare hurt you. You have power at your back, influence whose name dare not be spoken. So you settle down to your sudoku and send e-mails on your BlackBerry telling old schoolfriends that you’re on an insurgency at the moment and the reunion might have to be put off for a week or two.

But, of course, Pak Nam cared nothing of all that. It had squid. That was the extent of its concerns. The events at Wat Feuang Fa had blown through my life like a monsoon and when the squall died down, I was still standing, albeit windswept and crusted in salt. After all that had happened, I imagined that the busybodies might have crept back under their rocks and left Abbot Kem and Sister Bia to whatever it was they certainly weren’t doing. But a new complaint was lodged and a second IA abbot was on his way. For my own peace of mind, I needed to know what was motivating this monastic stubborn streak.

When I arrived at the temple, the nun was painting the other side of the wall and all the grass around it. She had a yarmulke of white at the back of her scalp.

“I see incarceration didn’t do a thing for your painting skills,” I said.

She turned to find me in very much the same position as when I’d first met her. She smiled and returned to her task.

“Some people never learn,” she said.

“So I hear.”

“Did Abbot Kem come back?”

“He didn’t ever leave. He has a cave up there, over the crest. He goes there sometimes to consider.”

That made sense. I couldn’t really imagine him charging off to Bangkok to rescue his maiden. The nun put the long buffalo-tail brush in the can. It fell out, splattering her ankles before coming to rest in a white puddle at her feet. She laughed and left it there.

“It has a life of its own,” she said. “How could I ever hope to tame it?”

She started off along the path, stopping briefly once to see if I was following. I hadn’t arrived with a plan, no questionnaire, no tactics. If she didn’t want to talk to me, I was prepared for that. I’d say goodbye and good luck and leave her alone to her secrets. But it was as if she’d been waiting for me. We sat on her porch and looked up at the sky. It was one of those days when you thought perhaps mother nature got her color ideas from looking at upmarket swimming pools.

“If only I could paint like that,” she said. Unexpectedly, she looked me straight in the eye. I felt a peculiar pang of love for her. “The young policeman told me my freedom is largely due to you.”

“There were a few of us, but I don’t mind taking credit on their behalf.”

She nodded, which I took to mean ‘thank you’.

“There was something in his heart,” she leaped in with no preview or warning. “He wasn’t good looking or strong, not even a great scholar. But there was something in his heart that I could feel. I was thirteen or fourteen, passing through all those obstacle courses that teenagers have to suffer, not understanding my place on the planet. I began to ask him questions about life. Not even, ‘Why are we here?’ questions. Just small curiosities. ‘Do you think trees feel pain?”

“Do ants wish they could be independent?’ That silly level. But he always had an answer that made me think, and it always made sense to me. He cheered me up.

“And, as I grew older, I began to depend on him and his answers. We were friends, of course, by then, but he became the type of friend that is a part of you. I can’t call what I felt for him ‘love’, not in a physical sense. It was more like a wonderful peace to have him in my life. Perhaps my spirit was in love with his. Then he entered the monkhood. I wasn’t at all surprised. I knew he needed guidance to help him make sense of all the feelings we’d discussed. When he left I felt so terribly empty, not of the person but of the message. I knew that I was ready to search for myself. I was ready to accept a life of piety and modesty.

“We remained in contact through friends. We didn’t meet for many years but we were in one another’s hearts. I always knew that. And then, to my surprise, I learned that I had a tumor in my brain. It was called a GBM and it was inoperable. It wasn’t devastating news because we will all move along into the next life eventually, but I mentioned it in passing in a letter to Abbot Kem. To my surprise, he invited me here to spend my remaining time with an old friend. So I came. And I wait. It’s started.

You’ve already noticed my wonderful coordination. It won’t be long before my mind follows my painting skill. I won’t know which end of the brush to hold or what color is white.

“He and Abbot Winai spent many hours discussing me. I suppose I should have been flattered to have two such eminent men invest so much time in me. Their final decision, made on the day of the murder, was that I should stay. So, here I am.”

Two? Perhaps three large chunks of wood had become embedded in my chest. I could neither breathe nor cry. I had to saw a way through them with sighs before I could speak. Nothing profound fitted at that moment.

“What was the answer to the ant question?” I asked. “Do they want to be independent? It’s something I think about too.”

She laughed.

“He told me to be patient. Eventually I’d be an ant and I could answer the question for myself.”

The tears came slow as candle wax. I’d become a regular crybaby since my move from Chiang Mai. I was embarrassed for myself and in a hurry to leave. But before I could get away she opened the door to her hut and gestured me inside.

“I was hoping you could do me one more small favor,” she said.