Part 0, Chapter Esque
I smelled bar girls eating oranges and mangoes, or mango-scented bar girls, or a slutty kind of citrus I guess it could be. That over and above the flat chemical rank of the floor cleaner–no no, that was the duct tape over my mouth, which didn’t make any more sense than the driver swatting the display above the vents in time with the thumping of the bass from all the go-go bars around the corner. Everything shot through with cigarettes, which always make sense.
Wait–driver, vents, duct tape . . . I blinked at the apparatus, taking the driver’s pissy abuse with admirable stoicism, and swung my head around. My nose took the petulance of the thug to my left and it all started up again, this being dragged hither and yon between memory and dread, nostalgia and resignation, great taste and less filling and so on.
Painkillers and sleep deprivation, blow and booze, beatings and botulism–all of this aside, it seemed the thing to do was to get my bearings. And so: duct tape. Aha. That would account for this attitude of prayer in which I had been trussed. I was droppe into the car (aha! The vents. Driver. Now we’re cooking with gas.) and jerked back out. Now lolling in traffic and now leaning on a bar, flickering I guess you’d say back to life, if you call this living.
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I’m telling you, if this was my life flashing before my eyes, then “my life” was something entirely different from what I’d thought during the doing.
Upon further review, of course it was.
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The driver took a few more swings at the dashboard display. It had failed, you see, to be in Lao or to warn him of the evening traffic here in fragrant Bangkok.
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Among other things, I was thinking that there had to be a word for this sort of thing, this back-and-forth, the old in-out. Probably dozens in French. They got all kinds of things that they say. It’s the damnedest thing.
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But anyway the point is, somewhere in the vicinity of the hokey-pokey aforementioned everyone went back to their corners. Now: car, duct tape, thugs, traffic. Then: one of the most forgettable of days with my nitroglycerine beloved. The explanation, the whys and wherefores of of my pilgrim’s progress, my turd’s transit, they were skulking about in these parts. My terrifically problematic brain chose the greater of two futilities and, rather than worrying at being thus pickled, puzzled over how it had all come to this.
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That part was easy: I’d fallen in love with Poon and then copped to it.
Well.
Incoherence certainly. In my defense, my friends, there were chemicals aplenty slowly draining out of my bloodstream. Am I incoherent? Very well, then, I am incoherent–I am vast; I contain quaaludes.
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The driver belted and screamed at the display again.
Ass-backwards as I do it, it had been months and months after the recognition of the great catastrophe of Poon–ahh, my combustible beloved, my photonegative . . . it was, as I say, months and months later, gas bubbling turgidly from my extremities as we began our final descent into this garden of street-grilled delights, that the decision had formed a glowing coal below my sternum and I says to myself I says: Enough Fucking Around.
I even believed that was all up to me.
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Sukhumvit Road, of all places. A sign out the window advertised Contemporary Spanish Living and I wondered what Don, The Friend, would make of that, and started missing him. I dozed a little and my neck went slack. Thug Number Two objected to the snuggling; it only took the meaty heel of his palm to hie me thither, back to the pool hall and Phuket and Poon, before she got chocolate in my peanut butter, when she was the bullet that could have been dodged, when she was the burning in my stomach. Then I awoke again and here we were on Sathorn Road, of all places.
Ah, this was my old neighborhood, this the corner where I used to hang out in traffic several times a week. Just over there, the building I’d spent the past few years pitying and resenting, by turns. By day it shadowed the SkyTrain, its frame completed, thirty stories of concrete poured, graffitoed, indifferent to the surrounding sprouting of construction cranes–dozens by the day–sitting there, squatting obscene on this vital real estate, as it had done for years now. Dingy already–but everything here ages before the ink dries on the plans; the glass and neon, like the spices, masking the accelerated decay hereabouts. Squatting obscene, I say again, this building, its preempted luxury a monument to a grandiose promise of comfort scuttled by some cocktail of incompetence, greed and corruption that left everyone scratching their heads a decade after the fact.
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This too: there was no good reason for me to fall in love with Poon. And never had been. There was no accumulation of reasons, either. For all the heat, for the explosions, there was not a critical mass. There was not, in fact, the possibility of such. There was falsifiability. There could not be an X, that is, that =Love. There could be, however, an X that =Not Love. In Flagrante Delicto, for one. Such is love, I suppose. Something in the nature of the thing itself–the ding an sich, I’d say, if I was feeling Lutheran–but also, all and sundry, beside the point right here.
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There were, oh my stars, dozens of reasons not to fall in love with her.
But they never asked me. Ha. How’s that for one hell of a tenacious cliché: Love chose me. Then the air was filled with light and the petals of flowers, etc.
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Christ Sans Culottes do I hate thinking in such a way. But then thinking and this thing that is not fucking (but seems to share its zip code) do not seem to be coterminous, comorbid, cognitious or even, while we’re in this neighborhood of the Oxford ED, colloidal.
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All well and good, Champ, but I’m telling you this is full of Sturm and Daaang, signifying deez nutz, and I sure wish you’d get to the point.
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Oh, hell. Let me start over.
