Bangkok Noir

Tew Bunnag

Tew Bunnag was born in Bangkok in 1947 and educated in Cambridge University where he studied Chinese and Economics. In his time he has been a T’ai Chi teacher as well as a volunteer worker in the Klongtoey slums and feels at home in all the stratas of Thai society. His fiction writing deals with the tensions between the traditional and the modern, and the contradictions and anomalies that are evident in present Thai society.

Hansum Man Timothy Hallinan

The room was dark when he opened his eyes. For a moment he was confused; the window was in the wrong place. Had he been sleeping with his head at the foot of the bed? His sleep was thin these days, thinner than the worn sheet that covered him, but he didn’t usually move around that much. Or did he?

Oh.

The new apartment. The one he still couldn’t navigate in the dark without bumping into something. Unlike the shopfront he had lived above for all those years, the two rooms with the woodshuttered windows that you could prop open with a length of doweling. Cool cement floors.

He sat up with a soft grunt and put his feet down. Carpet. Window on the right. Not the shophouse then, the apartment. What had happened to the shophouse?

Now that he knew which room he was in, his hand could find the surprisingly heavy little brass lamp on the bed table. It put out just enough light to show him a heavily shadowed room, almost too small for the bed and the table, with a wide recessed closet yawning open in one corner, one of its sliding doors derailed and leaning at a seasick angle against the wall. His clothes, what remained of them, were hanging any old way, like a mixed crowd of birds pecking seed on a pavement before they lift off and sort themselves into flocks. The air conditioner sat aslant in the window and silent, since he had decided long ago to live with the heat. After all, he’d chosen the heat. The bathroom, over there, through that grimy door. He reminded himself again to take a sponge to the door.

With his sight restored, the world tilted slightly and snapped into place with an almost audible click. The shophouse had been demolished long ago, along with the whole neighborhood, a cluster of two-and-three-story structures of inky, mildewed concrete, spiderwebbed with black electrical wires, built on either side of a soi almost too narrow for cars—paved over one of Bangkok’s lost canals. A neighborhood where people knew each other, talked to each other when they met, laughed good-naturedly at his occasional sallies into Thai. All the buildings gone now, knocked into dust and chunks of cement.

How noisy it had been, the machines growling like big dogs at the buildings before taking bites out of them, some of the people staring dolefully from across the soi, looking like attendees at a cremation.

He got up and launched himself toward the bathroom, feeling a light fizziness in his head. Had he drunk before going to bed? Stupid question. And what time was it, anyway? It had been weeks since he’d been able to find the heavy steel Rolex his father had given him to take to Nam. He’d promised his parents he’d keep it on California time so he’d be with them whenever he looked at it, but that hadn’t lasted. And neither, after all these years, had the Rolex. He’d bought a counterfeit at a sidewalk market, and as he turned on the bathroom light, the watch gleamed at him and informed him it was 10:21. So he’d slept through the day’s heat, and outside, the Bangkok he loved best had blinked into life.

The bathroom mirror showed him the grandfather or great-grandfather of Wallace, never Wally, Palmer, shockingly old. His head of dark, curly hair had been replaced by a few long, iron-gray strands, inexplicably straight, that pasted themselves across his spotted scalp. He’d played a few times with the strands, trying to comb them lower on his forehead to simulate a real hairline, but the last time he’d done it the phrase “turban renewal” had flashed through his mind, and he’d laughed and abandoned the effort. At least his hair didn’t stand up on end and lasso the light, the silver-beech forest of frizziness that haloed the heads of so many old guys.

Old guys.

Wallace said, “Shit,” avoiding looking at the devastation that was his neck, and picked up his toothbrush.

Someone knocked on the door in the living room.

“It’s always something,” Wallace said, although he was aware that, lately, it hadn’t been. He leaned heavily against the sink and waited, hoping whoever it was would go away, but a moment later he heard three knocks, louder this time, and—muffled by the door—a basso profundo voice called, “Vallace? You are in zere, Vallace?”

Leon, Wallace thought with a surge of despair. Leon Hofstedler, the most boring man in Bangkok. So boring, Leon’s friend Ernie had once said, that you’d avoid him if he was the first person you’d seen in a month. What had happened to Ernie? Ernie always made him laugh.

The knocks sounded again, loud as kicks. “Vallace? I need to hear you talking. Everybody in ze bar asks, is Vallace okay?”

Leon wasn’t going away. Leon had nothing better to do with his life than to stand in that hallway, kicking Wallace’s crappy door and singing German opera for everybody in the building to hear. One of Wallace’s life principles floated up toward him like a message in that magic eight-ball everyone used to have, Always move toward trouble, not away from it. In the jungle, don’t turn your back. On the city street, don’t turn your back.

Don’t turn your back on Leon Hofstedler. The idea of Leon being dangerous made Wallace laugh as he went back into the bedroom, heading toward the living room. Wallace had lived with dangerous day and night for three tours of sweating, steaming, leech-ridden, blood-stinking duty. The only thing Leon had ever killed was time. Wallace thought he’d like to say that to Ernie. Ernie always looked surprised before he laughed, as though it startled him that other people were funny.

“Coming, Ernie,” Wallace called. He remembered to look down at himself and was reassured to see that he’d gone to sleep fully dressed.

“Ernie?” Hofstedler bellowed though the door. “Zis is not Ernie. Ernie—mein Gott! —Ernie is a zousand years ago. You should not be alone so much.”

“I’m not alone,” Wallace said, undoing the door’s assortment of locks—a joke, given that the door itself was made of soda cracker. “I’ve got three Balinese girl scouts with me.” He opened the door on the mountain that was Leon Hofstedler.

Hofstedler, his magisterial bulk draped in one of the many-pocketed safari shirts he had made for him a dozen at a time by a Thai seamstress, narrowed his eyes as if trying to see through Wallace to the wall behind him. He said, “Ernie?”

“Been thinking about him,” Wallace said.

Hofstedler continued to study Wallace’s face. After a moment he gave a grudging grunt. “I tell zem you look okay.”

“Of course I’m okay,” Wallace said around the bloom of irritation in his chest. “Why wouldn’t I be okay?”

Hofstedler shrugged. “Zey worry. You not coming, night after night. You know, thinking maybe...” Whatever they were thinking, it was too dire for Hofstedler to voice it.

“Just a little busy,” Wallace said, putting some weight on the door. “You tell them I’m fine and say hello for me, ’kay?” He pushed the door closed on Hofstedler, completing the sentence in his mind, ... whoever they are.

A shower. That was what he needed, a shower and some clean clothes. Jah, it was Jah he wanted to see. Whip thin, tousle-haired Jah, who went with him to Don Muang Airport the first time he flew back home and cried inconsolably at the departure gate. And was there, jumping up and down like a teenager,