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  Chui Chai

  SOMTOW PAPINIAN SUCHARITKUL (S. P. Somtow) was born in Thailand, a grandnephew of the late Queen Indrasakdisachi of Siam and the son of celebrated international jurist and Vice-President of the International Academy of Human Rights, Sompong Sucharitkul. He grew up in Japan and Europe, was educated at Eton and Cambridge, and currently lives in California, where he recently became an American citizen.

  Somtow is a highly regarded post-serialist composer; his work has been performed, broadcast and televised in four continents. He began writing fiction in the late 1970s, winning the 1981 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer and the Locus Award for his first novel, Starship and Haiku. After a number of science fiction and fantasy books such as Mallworld, The Aquiliad, The Shattered Horse, Riverrun and a pair of V novelisations, he has turned to horror in recent years with an acclaimed werewolf novel, Moon Dance, and Valentine, the sequel to his 1984 chiller, Vampire Junction.

  He co-produced, wrote, directed, scored, and starred as the villainous Doctor Um-Tzec, in the 1989 horror film, The Laughing Dead, and is currently developing a new movie, The Glass Pagoda.

  Given this odd meld of cultures and interests, it is perhaps not surprising to discover that “Chui Chai” is a highly individual blend of Frankenstein and Re-Animator, set in the sleazy backstreets of Bangkok.

  THE LIVING DEAD ARE NOT AS you imagine them. There are no dangling innards, no dripping slime. They carry their guts and gore inside them, as do you and I. In the right light they can be beautiful, as when they stand in a doorway caught between cross-shafts of contrasting neon. Fueled by the right fantasy, they become indistinguishable from us. Listen, I know. I’ve touched them.

  In the 80s I used to go to Bangkok a lot. The brokerage I worked for had a lot of business there, some of it shady, some not. The flight of money from Hong Kong had begun and our company, vulture that it was, was staking out its share of the loot. Bangkok was booming like there was no tomorrow. It made Los Angeles seem like Peoria. It was wild and fast and frantic and frustrating. It had temples and buildings shaped like giant robots. Its skyline was a cross between Shangri-La and Manhattan. For a dapper yuppie executive like me there were always meetings to be taken, faxes to fax, traffic to be sat in, credit cards to burn. There was also sex.

  There was Patpong.

  I was addicted. Days, after hours of high-level talks and poring over papers and banquets that lasted from the close of business until midnight, I stalked the crammed alleys of Patpong. The night smelled of sewage and jasmine. The heat seeped into everything. Each step I took was colored by a different neon sign. From half-open nightclub doorways buttocks bounced to jaunty soulless synthrock. Everything was for sale; the women, the boys, the pirated software, the fake Rolexes. Everything sweated. I stalked the streets and sometimes at random took an entrance, took in a live show, women propelling ping-pong balls from their pussies, boys buttfucking on motorbikes. I was addicted. There were other entrances where I sat in waiting rooms, watched women with numbers around their necks through the one-way glass, soft, slender brown women. Picked a number. Fingered the American-made condoms in my pocket. Never buy the local ones, brother, they leak like a sieve.

  I was addicted. I didn’t know what I was looking for. But I knew it wasn’t something you could find in Encino. I was a knight on a quest, but I didn’t know that to find the holy grail is the worst thing that can possibly happen.

  I first got a glimpse of the grail at Club Pagoda, which was near my hotel and which is where we often liked to take our clients. The club was on the very edge of Patpong, but it was respectable—the kind of place that serves up a plastic imitation of The King and I, which is, of course, a plastic imitation of life in ancient Siam . . . artifice imitating artifice, you see. Waiters crawled around in mediaeval uniforms, the guests sat on the floor, except there was a well under the table to accommodate the dangling legs of lumbering white people. The floor show was eminently sober . . . it was all classical Thai dances, women wearing those pagoda-shaped hats moving with painstaking grace and slowness to a tinkling, alien music. A good place to interview prospective grant recipients, because it tended to make them very nervous.

  Dr Frances Stone wasn’t at all nervous, though. She was already there when I arrived. She was preoccupied with picking the peanuts out of her gaeng massaman and arranging them over her rice plate in such a way that they looked like little eyes, a nose, and a mouth.

  “You like to play with your food?” I said, taking my shoes off at the edge of our private booth and sliding my legs under the table across from her.

  “No,” she said, “I just prefer them crushed rather than whole. The peanuts, I mean. You must be Mr Leibowitz.”

  “Russell.”

  “The man I’m supposed to charm out of a few million dollars.” She was doing a sort of coquettish pout, not really the sort of thing I expected from someone in medical research. Her face was ravaged, but the way she smiled kindled the memory of youthful beauty. I wondered what had happened to change her so much; according to her dossier, she was only in her mid-forties.

  “Mostly we’re in town to take,” I said, “not to give. R&D is not one of our strengths. You might want to go to Hoechst or Berli Jucker, Frances.”

  “But Russell . . .” She had not touched her curry, but the peanuts on the rice were now formed into a perfect human face, with a few strands of sauce for hair. “This is not exactly R&D. This is a discovery that’s been around for almost a century and a half. My great-grandfather’s paper— ”

  “For which he was booted out of the Austrian Academy? Yes, my dossier is pretty thorough, Dr Stone; I know all about how he fled to America and changed his name.”

  She smiled. “And my dossier on you, Mr Leibowitz, is pretty thorough too,” she said, as she began removing a number of compromising photographs from her purse.

  A gong sounded to announce the next dance. It was a solo. Fog roiled across the stage, and from it a woman emerged. Her clothes glittered with crystal beadwork, but her eyes outshone the yards of cubic zirconia. She looked at me and I felt the pangs of the addiction. She smiled and her lips seemed to glisten with lubricious moisture.

  “You like what you see,” Frances said softly.

  “I— ”

  “The dance is called Chui Chai, the dance of transformation. In every Thai classical drama, there are transformations—a woman transforming herself into a rose, a spirit transforming itself into a human. After the character’s metamorphosis, he performs a Chui Chai dance, exulting in the completeness and beauty of his transformed self.”

  I wasn’t interested, but for some reason she insisted on giving me the entire story behind the dance. “This particular Chui Chai is called Chui Chai Benjakai . . . the demoness Banjakai has been despatched by the demon king, Thotsakanth, to seduce the hero Rama . . . disguised as the beautiful Sita, she will float down the river toward Rama’s camp, trying to convince him that his beloved has died . . . only when she is placed on a funeral pyre, woken from her deathtrance by the flames, will she take on her demonic shape once more and fly away toward the dark kingdom of Lanka. But you’re not listening.”

  How could I listen? She was the kind of woman that existed only in dreams, in poems. Slowly she moved against the tawdry backdrop, a faded painting of a palace with pointed eaves. Her feet barely touched the floor. Her arms undulated. And always her eyes held me. As though she were looking at me alone. Thai women can do things with their eyes that no other women can do. Their eyes have a secret language.

  “Why are you looking at her so much?” said Frances. “She’s just a Patpong bar girl . . . she moonlights here . . . classics in the evening, pussy after midnight.”

  “You know her?” I said.

  “I have had some . . . dealings with her.”

  “Just what is it that you’re doing research into, Dr Stone?”

  “The boundary between life and death,” she said. She pointed to the photographs. Next to the
m was a contract, an R&D grant agreement of some kind. The print was blurry. “Oh, don’t worry, it’s only a couple of million dollars . . . your company won’t even miss it . . . and you’ll own the greatest secret of all . . . the tree of life and death . . . the apples of Eve. Besides, I know your price and I can meet it.” And she looked at the dancing girl. “Her name is Keo. I don’t mind procuring if it’s in the name of science.”

  Suddenly I realized that Dr Stone and I were the only customers in the Club Pagoda. Somehow I had been set up.

  The woman continued to dance, faster now, her hands sweeping through the air in mysterious gestures. She never stopped looking at me. She was the character she was playing, seductive and diabolical. There was darkness in every look, every hand-movement. I downed the rest of my Kloster lager and beckoned for another. An erection strained against my pants.

  The dance ended and she prostrated herself before the audience of two, pressing her palms together in a graceful wai. Her eyes downcast, she left the stage. I had signed the grant papers without even knowing it.

  Dr Stone said, “On your way to the upstairs toilet . . . take the second door on the left. She’ll be waiting for you.”

  I drank another beer, and when I looked up she was gone. She hadn’t eaten one bite. But the food on her plate had been sculpted into the face of a beautiful woman. It was so lifelike that . . . but no. It wasn’t alive. It wasn’t breathing.

  She was still in her dancing clothes when I went in. A little girl was carefully taking out the stitches with a seamripper. There was a pile of garments on the floor. In the glare of a naked bulb, the vestments of the goddess had little glamor. “They no have buttons on classical dance clothes,” she said. “They just sew us into them. Cannot go pipi!” She giggled.

  The little girl scooped up the pile and slipped away.

  “You’re . . . very beautiful,” I said. “I don’t understand why . . . I mean, why you need to . . .”

  “I have problem,” she said. “Expensive problem. Dr Stone no tell you?”

  “No.” Her hands were coyly clasped across her bosom. Gently I pried them away.

  “You want I dance for you?”

  “Dance,” I said. She was naked. The way she smelled was different from other women. It was like crushed flowers. Maybe a hint of decay in them. She shook her hair and it coiled across her breasts like a nest of black serpents. When I’d seen her on stage I’d been entertaining some kind of rape fantasy about her, but now I wanted to string it out for as long as I could. God, she was driving me mad.

  “I see big emptiness inside you. Come to me. I fill you. We both empty people. Need filling up.”

  I started to protest. But I knew she had seen me for what I was. I had money coming out my ass, but I was one fucked-up yuppie. That was the root of my addiction.

  Again she danced the dance of transforming, this time for me alone. Really for me alone. I mean, all the girls in Patpong have this way of making you think they love you. It’s what gets you addicted. It’s the only street in the world where you can buy love. But that’s not how she was. When she touched me it was as though she reached out to me across an invisible barrier, an unbreachable gulf. Even when I entered her she was untouchable. We were from different worlds and neither of us ever left our private hells.

  Not that there wasn’t passion. She knew every position in the book. She knew them backwards and forwards. She kept me there all night and each act seemed as though it been freshly invented for the two of us. It was the last time I came that I felt I had glimpsed the grail. Her eyes, staring up into the naked bulb, brimmed with some remembered sadness. I loved her with all my might. Then I was seized with terror. She was a demon. Yellow-eyed, dragon-clawed. She was me, she was my insatiable hunger. I was fucking my own addiction. I think I sobbed. I accused her of lacing my drink with hallucinogens. I cried myself to sleep and then she left me.

  I didn’t notice the lumpy mattress or the peeling walls or the way the light bulb jiggled to the music from downstairs. I didn’t notice the cockroaches.

  I didn’t notice until morning that I had forgotten to use my condoms.

  It was a productive trip but I didn’t go back to Thailand for another two years. I was promoted off the traveling circuit, moved from Encino to Beverly Hills, got myself a newer, late-model wife, packed my kids off to a Swiss boarding school. I also found a new therapist and a new support group. I smothered the addiction in new addictions. My old therapist had been a strict Freudian. He’d tried to root out the cause from some childhood trauma—molestation, potty training, Oedipal games—he’d never been able to find anything. I’m good at blocking out memories. To the best of my knowledge, I popped into being around age eight or nine. My parents were dead but I had a trust fund.

  My best friends in the support group were Janine, who’d had eight husbands, and Mike, a transvestite with a spectacular fro. The clinic was in Malibu so we could do the beach in between bouts of tearing ourselves apart. One day Thailand came up.

  Mike said, “I knew this woman in Thailand. I had fun in Thailand, you know? R&R. Lot of transvestites there, hon. I’m not a fag, I just like lingerie. I met this girl.” He rarely stuck to the point because he was always stoned. Our therapist, Glenda, had passed out in the redwood tub. The beach was deserted. “I knew this girl in Thailand, a dancer. She would change when she danced. I mean change. You shoulda seen her skin. Translucent. And she smelled different. Smelled of strange drugs.”

  You know I started shaking when he said that because I’d tried not to think of her all this time even though she came to me in dreams. Even before I’d start to dream, when I’d just closed my eyes, I’d hear the hollow tinkle of marimbas and see her eyes floating in the darkness.

  “Sounds familiar,” I said.

  “Nah. There was nobody like this girl, hon, nobody. She danced in a classical dance show and she worked the whorehouses . . . had a day job too, working for a nutty professor woman . . . honky woman, withered face, glasses. Some kind of doctor, I think. Sleazy office in Patpong, gave the girls free V. D. drugs.”

  “Dr Frances Stone.” Was the company paying for a free V. D. clinic? What about the research into the secrets of the universe?

  “Hey, how’d you know her name?”

  “Did you have sex with her?” Suddenly I was trembling with rage. I don’t know why. I mean, I knew what she did for a living.

  “Did you?” Mike said. He was all nervous. He inched away from me, rolling a joint with one hand and scootching along the redwood deck with the other.

  “I asked first,” I shouted, thinking, Jesus, I sound like a ten-year-old kid.

  “Of course not! She had problems, all right? Expensive problems. But she was beautiful, mm-mm, good enough to eat.”

  I looked wildly around. Mr Therapist was still dozing—fabulous way to earn a thousand bucks an hour—and the others had broken up into little groups. Janine was sort of listening, but she was more interested in getting her suntan lotion on evenly.

  “I want to go back,” I said. “I want to see Keo again.”

  “Totally, like, bullshit,” she said, sidling up to me. “You’re just, like, externalizing the interior hurt onto a fantasy-object. Like, you need to be in touch with your child, know what I mean?”

  “You’re getting your support groups muddled up, hon,” Mike said edgily.

  “Hey, Russ, instead of, like, projecting on some past-forgettable female two years back and ten thousand miles away, why don’t you, like, fixate on someone a little closer to home? I mean, I’ve been looking at you. I only joined this support group cause like, support groups are the only place you can find like sensitive guys.”

  “Janine, I’m married.”

  “So let’s have an affair.”

  I liked the idea. My marriage to Trisha had mostly been a joke: I’d needed a fresh ornament for cocktail parties and openings; she needed security. We hadn’t had much sex; how could we? I was hooked on memory. Perhaps th
is woman would cure me. And I wanted to be cured so badly because Mike’s story had jolted me out of the fantasy that Keo had existed only for me.

  By now it was the 90s, so Janine insisted on a blood test before we did anything. I tested positive. I was scared shitless. Because the only time I’d ever been so careless as to forget to use a condom was . . . that night. And we’d done everything. Plumbed every orifice. Shared every fluid.

  It had been a dance of transformation all right.

  I had nothing to lose. I divorced my wife and sent my kids to an even more expensive school in Connecticut. I was feeling fine. Maybe I’d never come down with anything. I read all the books and articles about it. I didn’t tell anyone. I packed a couple of suits and some casual clothes and a supply of bootleg AZT. I was feeling fine. Fine, I told myself. Fine.

  I took the next flight to Bangkok.

  The company was surprised to see me, but I was such a big executive by now they assumed I was doing some kind of internal troubleshooting. They put me up at the Oriental. They gave me a 10,000 baht per diem. In Bangkok you can buy a lot for four hundred bucks. I told them to leave me alone. The investigation didn’t concern them. They didn’t know what I was investigating, so they feared the worst.

  I went to Silom Road, where Club Pagoda had stood. It was gone. In its stead stood a brand new McDonalds and an airline ticket office. Perhaps Keo was already dead. Wasn’t that what I had smelled on her? The odor of crushed flowers, wilting . . . the smell of coming death? And the passion with which she made love. I understood it now. It was the passion of the damned. She had reached out to me from a place between life and death. She had sucked the life from me and given me the virus as a gift of love.

  I strolled through Patpong. Hustlers tugged at my elbows. Fake Rolexes were flashed in my face. It was useless to ask for Keo. There are a million women named Keo. Keo means jewel. It also means glass. In Thai there are many words that are used indiscriminately for reality and artifice. I didn’t have a photograph and Keo’s beauty was hard to describe. And every girl in Patpong is beautiful. Every night, parading before me in the neon labyrinth, a thousand pairs of lips and eyes, sensuous and infinitely giving. The wrong lips, the wrong eyes.