Talk of my death sobered her. Suddenly the war with Dorothy wasn’t so important. Suddenly she remembered she loved me. She shook her head, then started to caress me. I understood because I felt the same way. The likelihood that one will be hanged in the morning can make you horny as a rattlesnake.
We were lying naked together now, in the other corner of the room where the bed was. We’d finished talking about how we could get the most out of Vikorn’s credit card before an enraged organ hunter sent an assassin to kill me-half joking, half not-so now it was my turn to listen. But it was not a new story, it was an old one that kept pressing on Chanya’s mind like a thorn. An earnest look appeared on her face that signaled she was about to go intellectual.
“Dorothy just can’t get it out of her head that all Thai whores are slaves. It’s amazing. The idea that a woman would go on the game voluntarily, accept it like a challenge even, test herself that way to show she’s tough enough, beautiful enough, clever enough with men, sometimes even enjoy it-sometimes really enjoy it-it’s like it would destroy one half of her worldview. I’ve shown her all the evidence, but she goes blind when she sees anything she doesn’t like. A farang like her thinks that a prostitute is some kind of being, an entity in her own right, whereas it doesn’t really occur to the girls that prostitute as a word is any more than a nominal convenience-not even a description; what they are is women, daughters, mothers, farmers, and members of a rural community-all those things that traditionally form the sense of being in the ontological sense.”
She paused for breath, then continued, “I know of at least thirty girls who had breast transplants during their working lives, then had them removed the day they retired. They hung up their tits, you could say, washed their hands of the whole city, and returned to their home villages as if nothing had happened. Therefore they do not lose their identity when they sell their bodies, so that the profession of prostitution is never more than an economically driven distraction. Farang, on the other hand, are unable to see the sale of real biological sex-as opposed to fantasy sex in movies and pornography-as identical in nature to the sale of any other commodity like tomatoes or mangoes. It doesn’t make any sense. If one were to impose any logical value system, one would have to say the farang position is schizophrenic in that it encourages and exploits an obsession with sex but at the same time denies consummation to anyone who wants the convenience of paying for it with cash. Which is a lot more honest in most cases than pretending the flavor of the month is the lover of a lifetime. But for me the question is, why do farang get to live in a science fiction universe while the rest of us have to deal with reality for them? I finally told her she had to spend a night with me sitting in a corner at your mother’s bar. I called your mother, and she said it was okay, so long as Dorothy doesn’t scare off the customers.”
I said, “What does ontological mean?”
She looked at me, laughed, and said, “Sorry. You didn’t want to hear that mouthful when you’ve just come home.”
She let a couple of beats pass, embarrassed maybe to have intimidated me with her big words, then gave a little jump and said, “Look at what an anonymous admirer sent me today.” We went to her PC, and she clicked on an icon so we were looking at her e-mail window. Then she double-clicked on one of the items. Now we were looking at a screen that was blank save for two naked feet. While we watched, the feet slowly grew legs, then knees, then thighs. Chanya threw me a glance, grinned, and turned back to the screen. A further unscrolling revealed a tan penis and testicles, pubic hair, a mass of highly developed stomach muscles, an impressive hairless chest, terrific pecs, biceps, and triceps-a more perfect figure of a man you could not hope to find in your electronic inbox. But the scrolling stopped at the neck. It was a beautiful body without a head. Now a message in crimson Thai script was slowly spelling its way across the screen where the head should have been: I love you.
I said, “Who’s it from?”
She shrugged and used her mouse to point to the sender’s address, which was a collection of numbers. “Anonymous.”
I said, “I didn’t know they’d started targeting women like that. I get about a hundred a week. Women, I mean.”
“Naked without heads?”
“Nope. They all have heads, as far as I can remember. Some have dicks in their mouths. One two weeks ago had an erection in both ears, and she was holding two others in her hands.”
Before we fell asleep, Chanya said, “Do you care about dying?”
“In some ways yes, in other ways no. How about you?”
“I feel the same. It’s a filthy world. I went to temple today-I think I had a breakthrough.”
“How?”
“I finally understood-but it’s unnamable. Afterward I realized I didn’t mind dying. Even if you weren’t there, I could handle it-I never felt that way before.”
“Sounds like the real thing.”
“But when I came home, I got angry with Dorothy, and the Unreal grabbed me all over again.”
“I know the feeling. Try being a cop.”
“Yes, I thought about that. I thought about how the more you get involved in the world, the lonelier it gets. I understood you a bit more, maybe. Is it like you’re in some underground cave system and only connected to the light by a string that could snap any minute?”
“Exactly like that.”
“And for you I’m that string?” By way of answer, I slipped my hand between her thighs, right up to the top: the origin of life. There was nothing erotic about the gesture, it was too childlike for sex. She responded by holding my cock in the same way. “But if you rely on me too much, then you’ve lost your own center-your whole life will depend on the whim of the unknown, namely me.”
“Did you get all this from a book?”
“That’s what you’re afraid of, isn’t it? That you’ve lost me to books?”
I withdrew my hand. I did not say, Not only books. This was not a good moment to mention the rumors.
5
In the morning I woke to feel the world on my shoulders, which is where it normally sits. I know there are other cops all over the planet who feel the same way. The steady accumulation of human dirt-let’s call it evil-makes it a little harder, day by day, to find the light. On the other hand, I also felt a new thrill: this case was a big one, whatever way you looked at it. Maybe it would be the trump to get me out of the hole forever? Remember that Leonard Cohen song: “The card that is so high and wild he’ll never need to deal another”? For a second I allowed my ego to inflate; I saw my name in headlines: foreign media flashing my mug around the world; the Nobel Prize for law enforcement. I also tried to see the good I might be doing-but that detail eluded me.
Chanya was already up, making coffee called three-in-one: the sugar and creamer are included in the little sachet with the coffee. She handed me a mug while I was still in bed. “I’ve been thinking about your new case. Isn’t it kind of-ah-”
“Morally ambiguous.”
“Yes, that’s the phrase. Isn’t it?”
“A crime without a victim, most of the time. Most of the time the illegal organ sale is voluntary. The real crime is letting people get that poor. The real crime is capitalism, of which this trade is an inevitable product. Yes.”
“I hadn’t gone into it that deeply. I was thinking of the beneficiary-I mean, lives are saved, right?”
“And ruined. There are young men all over the third world, from Manila to Rio de Janeiro, who were conned into selling one kidney for a thousand or so dollars, usually to some Caucasian old person who abused their body in their youth and wasn’t going to live more than another five years anyway. Now those young men have lost their youthful good health, they fall sick easily, suffer from diminished energy, and are unable to do heavy manual work, so they get rejected by their tribes. Girlfriends and others know what the saber-shaped scar on their abdomen means. Shame and a sense of deep self-betrayal dogs their lives. Organs are very personal things. You sell one, it’s the same as saying you don’t really exist except as an economic unit. They become very angry young men.”
Chanya listened with wrinkled brow. “I think Dorothy gave me a paper to read on organ trafficking. It was her second specialization after prostitution in Southeast Asia-they sort of go together in her mind. Maybe we should
