Khlong Toei

In the Deer Park of Sarnath the Buddha first told, to five companions, of his dharma. I came to India and to Samath after my second departure from Thailand, and under its sacred tree, during the afternoon shower, I spoke with a healer. I stayed with him the length of the afternoon. The dense crown of the Bô tree absorbed the warm drizzle; then the sun returned and vaporized the landscape in white light. He was a man of some fifty years of age, he wore a dhoti and white mantle, his gestures were infrequent but intricate, and he was of a troubling physical beauty.

People came to him suffering of visible wounds or the ravages of visible diseases; for these, he told me, he drew on the Ayurvedic pharmacology of herbal and mold substances, the knowledge of which he had received from his father and his father before him. Men and women came to him also who are not afflicted in some part of their body only, men and women the core of whose existence is disconnected from the tasks of society and the appetites of life. He initiates them into hathayoga; it begins with, and always returns to the savasana , the body laid on the mat with all tension between one muscle set, one limb, and the next disconnected: the posture of the corpse. He leads them through an ordered sequence of asanas in which their bodies learn to maintain for ten minutes, for twenty, for thirty, the equilibrium of a locust, a cobra, an eagle in the sky. Each

time returning to the savasana. He transmits to them the ancient mantras, sacred sounds which they first pronounce outwardly, then only inwardly until those tones without meaning and signaling nothing outside resonate throughout their bodies only. He prescribes to them the most rare and precious substances—bits of gold, of silver, pinches of ground jewels, powdered crystals from remote Himalayan caves—which they are to ingest as food for their bodies, in cycles determined by the conjunctures of their astrological charts.

He did not ask for the coordinates for my chart, and prescribed nothing for me.

"Each one senses the interminable void beyond toward which the breath of his life is buffeted, and is afraid," he said. "Men have been able to elaborate a discourse about the things we successively encounter around the theme of determinism. This discourse can draw the lines of a world and locate the locusts, the cobras, the eagles, and the stars in the darkness ahead that will put out the light of our life."

"Each one finds himself cast forth and in movement, and turns back to see where this movement comes from and senses only the empty immensity before his birth, and is afraid," he said. "Will is what we call a movement we ourselves launch, when we turn back and can see nothing of the movement and path that brought us here. Men have been able to elaborate a discourse about their appetites and tasks around the theme of will."

"But the most important events in our lives," he said, "would have to be spoken of in a discourse which we lack. Is a movement auspicious or inauspicious? Is an itinerary propitious or ill-omened? Whether what we encounter is a chance for us is something that cannot be determined by the discourse

of determinism. Whether what we will is our destiny or our delusion cannot be decided by the discourse of will."

"The region found by luck and the path of destiny," he said, "is the high noon world in which we walk and which is nonetheless dark as the darkness beyond death and that before birth. In this darkness we drift as already dead or stillborn. In this region men hope to encounter healers and guides. The discourse of determinism does not heal and the discourse of will does not guide."

"An encounter with a guide or a healer," he said, "itself belongs to chance."

As the sun set and the darkness covered its path across the skies over Sarnath, we got up to walk, counterclockwise, around the ruins of the Stupa of the Buddha.

The night falls very quickly in these latitudes; we watched the stars being sprinkled overhead. "The stupa is a mountain," he said. "One does not enter it as under a roof. It shows you the stars."

"What is called wisdom," he said, "is understanding the patterns and the movements in the most remote distances. It begins when the night covers over all things close at hand with which practical intelligence concerns itself; the sages were insomniac eyes open to the stars. It was order, regularity, that the Egyptians, the Hittites, the Mayas, and the Vedic seers of the Himalayas saw in the night skies. They declared that the human soul is destined to the contemplation of the law that rules eternally in the most remote heavens. They also thought that the longdistance vision, and not the myopic practical intelligence that knows expediency, penetrates the most intimate spaces, those of our own bodies. They saw

writ large in the astral constellations the diagrams of our own inner constitution; they conceived the saps that move through our tubes and glands, the appetites and the tasks that form, to be regulated by cosmic laws."

"Wisdom is supposed to be very rare," I said. "Why do most people prefer not to go out into the night and see how far one can see?"

"Perhaps it is a recent practice that we have not yet gotten used to," he said.

Something made me remember a conversation from long ago, with a young student of archeology in the south of France. "I was told," I said, "that in the caves of Lascaux the first researchers who studied the paintings were perplexed by the dichotomy between the graphic realism of the animals depicted and the lack of composition. The animals selected and the numbers seemed to compose neither scenes nor narratives. But they were studying reproductions they had made of the paintings. On them they saw the layout and succession of paintings along the walls and corridors of the caves, and saw groupings that were, however, unintelligible. The cave-dwellers had never seen the walls panoramically; for them the paintings were visible only successively by torchlight. The Sistine Chapel depicts the space seen in omnipresent simultaneity by the Pantocrator; the paintings in the caves of Lascaux are in nomadic space."

"In India," he said, "free-standing monumental buildings do not appear until about two thousand years ago. The invasions of Alexander in the Indian subcontinent left the first sculpture representing the Buddha, in Hellenic robes and gestures, the art of Gandhara. But Alexander's marches did not leave free-standing temples in their wake. The oldest

temples in India are decorated caves, and the first free-standing temples are imitations of caves. In Ellora the Kailasa temple is a monolith. The mountain was not cut into stones and then assembled; the stone of the mountain was cut away to leave the temple."

"I had rediscovered in myself," I said, "what I thought of as the nomadic kind of vision in the savannah of East Africa. My eyes, repelled by the blazing emptiness of the skies, had been kept on the surface. On the surfaces of the savannah extending on all sides without paths or landmarks, all one can keep in sight is a limited segment of the track one has left behind one."

He looked attentively at me, suddenly more interested when I referred to what I had seen.

"I went to see the Olduvai Gorge," I said, "and the caves about Lake Bogoria and Lake Turkana where scientists say the first humans took shelter, where their bones and the bones of the beasts they killed were found. Only bones left in caves; the surface of the land, the hills and the plains, bear no more traces of four million years of human lives than it does the paths of the intercontinental migratory birds. Today Maasai wander the savannah still as the advance of the dry season dries up the ponds, refusing to wound the earth to establish cultivated fields or even to dig wells."

"India is completely covered with paths," he said. "And yet there are wanderers."

"Then," I went on, "four thousand years ago, just north of that trackless savannah, where the Nile descends between the shifting deserts, they built the pyramids. It was the first dynasties of Memphis and Thebes that built them. Their sites and sloping triangular sides answered to astronomical geometry. A bedouin that I met one day said to me, 'Man is afraid

of time, but time is afraid of the pyramids.' I did not understand that, but of all that I heard or read about the pyramids this is the only sentence that has remained with me."

"The pyramids," he said, "locate the stars and the locusts, the vipers, the ibises in the darkness ahead that will have put out the light of our life.

"There were also," he said, "in the shifting wastelands beyond the pyramids, gnostics, who too watched the Egyptian nights. Watched the immense night between and beyond the stars. Their eyes did not see the evidence of sovereign law in the substantial heavenly bodies; they saw that, apart from the infinitesimal girth of the far-scattered stars, almost all is blackness and emptiness."

He moved away a few steps. After awhile he said, "Today advanced telescopes see that the fixed stars, apparently maintaining themselves in the abysses without need of support, are burning themselves out as fast as they can. Electron microscopes see that the cenotaph of our own heart consists, between the infinitesimal cores of material energy in conflagration, of almost all void."

By the time I realized he was gone, the path he had taken was lost in the dark. The rasping of the night insects extended uniformly on all sides. I could barely make out the Stupa of the Buddha. I did not want to tread on the insects in the grass. It occurred to me that millions of them would die this night.

At the gate of the Deer Park I got into a rickshaw to return to the inn, ten kilometers away. The rickshawwallah was a man about my age. There was no moon. If one looked forward, one could barely make out things a few paces ahead; if one looked up one could see things millions upon millions of miles away.

I was not alone; I had entrusted myself to this man for the next hours. Ill-understood, problematical for us as are the bonds of determinism, freedom, or chance that connect us to the things about us and the cosmic spaces in which we are suspended, we are bound to one another with bonds of trust. Even when, in the absence of any common language, we can barely make the other understand our most elementary wants, and certainly cannot understand what he is thinking. Long ago I had come to think that trust is the most widely distributed fact in humankind.

The rickshawwallah was silent, bent on making out the path and the places it forked. Could the Magi have found the stable where the Jewish Messiah was born by following the paths of the stars? I carry guidebooks and maps, but if the map does not make the way clear to me it is futile to show it to anyone to ask help in finding the way. If one can first see the layout of the landscape from above, one locates one's destination and finds one's path to it determined. Like the path to one's death. People who have never been on an airplane, who walk or who pedal rickshaws, cannot read maps. If one is a mammal or a nomad, one traces a path in the night or in wilderness, or one follows the traces of paths others have left in going to their destinations or in going astray. At every bend or fork one has to choose. As in the path from one's birth.

We arrived at the inn in Varanasi where I was staying. The rickshawwallah asked where I was going tomorrow. I had no idea. He said he would take me. He would be there in the morning. "But maybe I will not go anywhere," I said. "I will wait for you in the morning, maybe you will like to go somewhere," he said. From my room I looked out the window; I saw him curled up like an infant in the seat of his

rickshaw. I would have to think of somewhere to go tomorrow. Maybe he would have some idea.

When one goes to sleep one does not depart from the world; one seeks a place in the world where one can be without one's eyes having to scout the environs, without one's hands having to fend off intrusions and disturbances, a place where one can be without going anywhere. The fields and the equipment for a reawakening that will make demands on one anew are confided to the mundane night which harbors them for one. One's sleep rests on a pact of trust made with the surface of things at rest in themselves.

If one were not there. . . . Thinking of what would have happened if one had not been on the job, if one had not been home, gives one a sense of one's significance and responsibility. The world one envisions before one's birth did not require one, was not preparing for one, was not destined for oneself. One is, sometimes, surprised by one's own insight, troubled by one's own impulses, frightened by one's own initiatives. One feels the darkness behind them. And the darkness ahead.

What if you had not been there when those hours or days of my life stretched on, exposed to things and events, to the darkness ahead? What if you had not been born?

"Do you like me?" You approached the bars and with an expressionless face said these words, to me. What kind of question is that? How could the fortuities of nature that produced your body, the Indochinese culture that composed your character, have to answer this morning to my liking? Were you putting your-self under my judgment? Or, more exactly, under

my penchants—for you said your question as soon as you appeared, without giving me any history to judge.

I did say yes and you said something to the trustee, no doubt promising something, and he let you in and locked the door again. "Yesterday," you said, "a Chinese hung himself in this cell. So nobody would stay in it." You explained like reading from a news item in a newspaper. He was a heroin pusher; they had broken him under the question and he had named names. When they brought him back he tore off a leg of his pants and made a noose of it. But you would stay with me, you said.

You asked who I was. I hesitated. Were you asking what one calls me, where I came from, what I was doing out there? I never tell the truth about such things in these latitudes. Being American, one of the five percent of humanity that has appropriated more than half of the planet's resources, being a professor of philosophy, paid to write about values, these are things that have to be dissimulated if there is to be any truth between myself and one of you, if there is to be talk at all. But you knew. The answers I was forced to give the previous night were overheard and passed on back here.

We crouched on our haunches against the wall. Now that you knew my truth would everything you said be dissimulation?

"How did you learn to speak in my language?" I asked.

"I am a student," you said.

"Of what?"

"Of . . . political science," you said.

Was I supposed to like political scientists? Were you studying me here? To whom would you give your report? I slapped at the flies, rubbed their gore into

the sweat of my leg. You waved at the flies about you, keeping them moving.

"Are you a Buddhist?" I asked.

"Everybody is a Buddhist here. The king is a bhikku," you said with finality.

Was I to take this as a piece of your political science? Shoptalk of intellectuals? Monks are called bhikkus —beggars. A monk is someone who each morning leaves the wat when the darkness thins enough for him to see the lines of his hands. He will walk down the road without searching anything or anyone with his eyes. If someone comes with food for him, he will not look at what it is that is offered or at him who offers, for the offering is not made to him in person but to the anatta , the nonself he is supposed to be aspiring to become. He will therefore not answer, not say, for example, any thanks. He must eat whatever is given. King Bhumibol Adulyadej and all the members of the royal court have shaved their heads and lived as bhikkus for at least one rainy season. I read that in some tourist brochure. Were you saying that the king was a saint? Or that he was a beggar before the generals my country's government seated in power during the war with Vietnam? Was I to tell you what I know about factions and intrigues in the embassies, the barracks? Were we to exchange lines from tourist brochures—the exotic Orient, the quaint canals called khlongs , the land of smiles?

"Where do you come from?" I asked.

"Amper Ganuan."

"Where is that?"

"By Khon Kaen."

"You speak Lao?"

"Yes."

"Are you Laotian?"

"Yes."

"You crossed the Mekong and went to Khon Kaen during the war?"

"The animals died in my village."

"You had relatives in Khon Kaen?"

"No."

"You were in a camp?"

"Yes."

You didn't elaborate. What else should we talk about?

"How long were you in the camp?"

"Two years. A man came from Bangkok and gave my father two hundred baht and took me to work in Bangkok. I worked with a Chinese man."

"What kind of work did you do?"

"I worked in a factory to make clothes."

"How old were you?"

"Eight."

It was still raining. The air was immobile; the rain had not cooled it at all. The wall and my body were slimy. The clouds over Bangkok had been saturated with the exhalations of the fetid canals, the gritty smoke of trucks and three-wheeled samlors. The trustee brought the morning's food and handed it through the bars. An aluminum plate of plain rice, and a can of water. I tried to eat the rice with my fingers, of the right hand, for the left is for washing after defecating. One should use the first three fingers only, and the food should touch only to the first joints of the fingers. I was able to lift only big pinches this way, and half of it was dropping back each time onto the plate I held under my chin. I watched your fingers deftly efficient. All the meals of your life had

been prison food. Your stomach was flat and tight, under your ribs sprung broad.

"How many years did you work in the cotton mill?"

"One year," you said. "After one year they put me in a massage house for men."

"Owned also by the Chinese?"

"No. By a colonel."

"A colonel? Did you ever see him?"

"He took me the first night."

"Did you ever see your family again?"

"When I was fourteen."

"Did you stay in Amper Ganuan, with your family?"

"I stole a gun."

"Are there gun shops in Khon Kaen?"

"I went with some boys to wait outside the base at night. We waited for an officer. The second night he chose me." You stopped.

I smiled. "Did he like you?"

"When he was asleep I took his money and his gun. A week later he recognized me in the market and grabbed me. He told the police I snatched his gun in the market. They locked me up in Khon Kaen."

The muscles under the tight skin of your face locked and shifted as you spoke, to operate your jaw and not to interpret your words with expressions. I wanted to disturb this remote anatomical calm. Shouldn't there be some traces on your body of what you reported in these phrases of my language? I tried to think of some question that would trip up your formulas, and felt weariness and nausea in my gut.

"Do you want opium?" you asked.

"No. But I wish I had some dope."

You got up and went to the bars and called; someone tossed you a cigarette. You sat down and very attentively emptied out most of the tobacco into a piece of paper. Then you produced out of your pocket a small package of dope wrapped in a piece of newspaper and crumbled the leaves and dead flowers off the stems. You ground it into powder in the palm of your hand, ground with it some of the tobacco, and poured the mix back into the empty cigarette tube, packing it with a matchstick from time to time, with the patience and deliberation of a jeweler working with precious stones. Finally you handed it to me and lit it. Almost at once the sour mass of my body began to vaporize, and I was overcome with fatigue. I let my head fall back against the wall. Then I opened my eyes and said, "It was an American officer."

It seemed to me that I did not sleep at all; I had only gone through hours in which my mind could not focus on anything. There was from time to time shouting, in the other cells, outside the walls. The horns and backfiring of the traffic filled these sealed walls with harassment and pointless agitation. I opened my eyes a little and saw your hand lying at your side, and saw you were missing a finger of the right hand. I turned away and closed my eyes. Then you were touching me, you had another cigarette. I drew on it and felt nauseous and drowsy and unable to stop the viscous images in my head. During the war the Pathet Lao told young peasants to chop off their trigger fingers to get rejected from induction in the army.

I tried to jolt my consciousness and formulate some question. You opened the eyes on your smooth face; they were opaque. It seemed to me you could never have spoken to me. Speaking, about political and economic forces, about causes, about the conditions for and the

forms of militancy, is what I have done for years, in buildings on the other side of the planet. I made out records, marked cards, assigned or refused credits for diplomas for hundreds of names I have forgotten. I had traveled to Indochina and would return to diagram political and economic maps on blackboards; my diagrams about the ways commitments take form in the map of psychic forces look scientific. One day, in front of a desk, I will imagine you and write one set of sentences and then, later, another. I learned, in classrooms years ago, how to select nouns and verbs grammatically marked as concrete from those marked as abstract. The one set short-circuits to an ideal order of universality and law; the other shunts to what reverberates in the nervous system as reality. The proper blend of the two types of words gives an effect of consistency. A little chemical substance can produce a few moments of metaphysics in the brain. It was for a transgression of the rules of the market, done solely out of private interest, that I was put there, and the plastic cards I had at my disposal would release me from your presence. It seemed to me strange that you knew some words from my kind of talk.

The trustee came with aluminum plates of plain rice. I saw that outside it was dark. Mosquitos had drifted in. One does not see them; one hears their whine against one's ears. The bare bulbs remained illuminated. It was now impossible to sleep. I felt too nauseous to smoke any more. The talk in the other cells was louder, querulous. There was shouting back and forth; sometimes you shouted back something. Twice I looked at you and asked if you were all right. You said yes, as though you had no understanding of the menace the hours themselves might be. What is

there in the years of your life I could ask you about?

"Do you have brothers and sisters?"

"Seven."

"Are you the youngest or the oldest?"

"Middle."

"What do your brothers and sisters do?"

"I don't know."

The muddy dawn came, the guards turned off the lights and opened the monkey cages so that we could go to the toilet. Before the sink I studied my yellowing jaundiced abdomen. The mosquitos had left hard brown welts. You came back with Puangkaeow. She was young, her blouse was missing half its buttons. Her black eyes slid in their fluids like primitive marine animals turned unstably on me. She spoke with you and from time to time turned impassively to me. When the trustee brought the aluminum plates of rice, she brought out of a pink plastic bag lumps of colored glutinous rice wrapped in shreds of banana leaves. I watched her fingers, as though animated with programming of their own, break and stir the food. I went through my repertoire of stock expressions in Thai with her. She, very engrossed in this, pointed to the plate, the rice, the bag, the walls, and pronounced for me the Thai words, then pointed to the parts of my body and pronounced the Thai words. They did not stick to my mind, and when we tried it again I could not supply the sounds. She kept a hand in yours, or a leg in contact with yours. I used the chain she wore about her neck as an alibi to touch her; I lifted it and saw it held a coarse blue sapphire. I looked at it closely, and at the slight movements in her throat as she breathed and swallowed. She pulled forth the chain you wore; it had a black star sapphire on it. Then she ran her fingers

lightly over the corridors of the intricate tattoo in blue lines that covered your chest and began to read the ciphers, pronouncing them one by one.

"What did that mean?" I asked.

You did not know how to translate it for me. Perhaps for you they were mantras, and not statements.

"It is for protection," you said.

Her thin fingers opened the paper with the dope, and long and attentively picked out twigs and seeds, leaving the dry leaves and flowers, which she then ground into powder in the palm of one hand. She has, I thought, the fingers of a poisoner. The acrid smoke filled my mouth, and the cramps in my gut subsided, not as though through healing, but as though my glands and organs, bilious and jaundiced, were drifting away into the rain and the slime.

You and she stood to dance. You held your legs hard and bent, as though ready to leap or strike. Your hands and arms formed tense angular patterns and marked rhythms in the horns and backfiring of the traffic outside to which you danced. Your dance was not the courtly Siamese diagrams I had watched in the gardens of tourist restaurants, but dreams of bandit princes in the Shan mountains. The sapphires which you had stolen from the miners of Chantaburi were hurled in your movements. Jewels such as these are not made to be set in the crowns of those who sit on thrones; they are the riches of nomads in the steppes or in the Himalayan passes. They are not cut to hold and distribute facets of light; uncut and unpolished, they gleam about the arm that throws its projectiles, about the limbs that race through the night casting torches into settlements. Flares of light flashed and disappeared in the night of your eyes. Was something being narrated in the sprung

diagrams of your bodies? Was this dance, these stolen jewels, these drugs your truth?

My eyes scummed over. You and Puangkaeow stopped. You laid some papers on the floor and had me lie flat and spread your thin sarong over my head and arms. The nausea of the bile in me I had choked with the smoke dulled me, disintegrated the effort of my mind to focus. I woke grappling at your sleeve, which you pulled back violently. I started to get up, then fell back, wrenching away from myself.

When they turned off the lights we had to rise. They opened the gates and we went to the toilet, and then they brought the aluminum plates of rice and the cans of water. Bobot came back into the cage with you. He is nineteen. He speaks no English. But every muscle, every surface on him speaks. He holds his huge eyes fixed on me; the words shaped by his positions and gestures tell of his childhood on the other side of the Mekong, of the bombings, of the fires, of movements by night in serpent-infested jungle. I understood everything. What a transparency the bare muscles and angles of his lean body are! If I do not yet know what he did between the ages of seven and fifteen, and the succession of events that brought him last year into this cage, that is only a question of the time it will take to tell it, on the agitated fine musculature of his face and lean hands not veiled by the duplicity of signs.

And you—how much you speak now, how easily, about your existence! I say little, and you do not interrogate me about myself. Out of discretion, out of slyness? Lying back, you pick up thread after thread of your life without incitement from me. I hear you answering questions I did not dare ask. Why is there no wariness in you? Militant, bandit—all that you

say to me, a stranger, is risky for you. It's a prostitute's compulsion, I thought. They always talked. About the first orgasm, the first time for money. About the pimps, the way one gets tied up. About the good ones, the insatiable ones, the rich ones, the depraved ones. Even more easily than they slip off their clothes, they tell it. As though that's their real job, delegated representatives of the lower depths, making their reports, their confessions. As though they realize that is what you want, that there is not enough in the coupling of lubricated organs to hold your interest, to make you overcome your spite at not having been able to do that for yourself or for free. The possible but unverifiable truth of what they say is only there to beguile.

I tried to shake together the double track running in my mind, looked into your eyes, and started seeing the lines of your body doubled with equivocation. Its virile shape seemed something made by a mold. Was it youth alone that maintained this shape, despite the lack of solid food, the lack of exercise in these cages for how many years now? I tried to imagine how you would look if middle age made you fat and bald; I tried to imagine you then, as now, bent over me arranging a bed of paper and a sarong for me. There was something missing in this maternal image. Your finger—in what male contest did you lose it?

The trustee came to lock the cages for the night. Puangkaeow went to him and spoke with him; she and Bobot stayed. They prepared another cigarette; the sour smoke churned in my wet body and I felt not the torpor of sleep coming on but only the ebbing away of my forces. I lay back on the paper laid on the wet floor. She bent over me and began to massage my feet and legs, applying hard thumb points of

pressure to stop and release the blood in the veins. Then she worked on my arms. When she turned to my chest, I took her in my hands and pulled her down on me. I was imprisoned under her. I closed my eyes under her damp hair and lay in a black pool of hatred of you.

The next day the vice-consul came, with an interpreter. He gave me a list of lawyers; the first on the list, he said, was intelligent enough to have graduated fifth in her class at Thammassat Law School five years ago. She is married to an inspector of police. He bailed me out to the hospital. Two days later I was sentenced by the court—to pay a fine of two hundred baht, and be expelled from the country within twenty-four hours. I saw the little man with the tense, twisted ears who had planted the dope on me standing at the back of the courtroom; my lawyer said he would receive half the fine. The lawyer accompanied me back to the monkey cages of Khlong Toei to pay the bail; I also bought ten cartons of cigarettes. I stood there, with her, to insist that the guards really pass them through the bars. They saw me. They will think now, I thought hopelessly, that that American was a good guy. They will generalize. But we had all been there because of the Americans.

The hill tribes of the Himalayan foothills, living off slash-and-burn agriculture in the jungle, had always used some of the opium that grows wild there, as Chinese old people used opium, as the aged in Morocco smoke kif. During the war the CIA contacted the remnants of the Kuomintang army which had been in the Golden Triangle in southern Burma and northern Thailand since the flight of Chiang Kai-shek to Taiwan, and contracted them to supply opium to finance recruitment of saboteurs among the monta-

gnards of Vietnam and Laos. The generals of Saigon skimmed off rich profits from this trade, notably Air Marshal Nguyen Cao Key, who controlled the flights. When, in the final days of the war, the American troops were being shipped home, returning to the jobless slums, heroin addiction among them was a matter of serious concern in Washington. It was impossible to intercept heroin in the innumerable lines of shipment; the only alternative was to try to cut off the production at the sources. The Nixon government then arranged a large grant of money and equipment to Thailand to wipe out production of heroin in the Golden Triangle. The funds were transferred to the military junta installed in Bangkok, among whom were those whose attention was devoted less to government or even to defense than to the exploitation of the resources of the country and to swelling bank accounts abroad which they could join when Thailand too fell to advancing Viet armies. The antinarcotics investment then made it necessary to arrest a certain quantity of peddlers and smugglers. Rather than send the ill-paid troops into the mountain strongholds of the heroin warlords, they had the police in Bangkok employ informers, addicts themselves, to entrap novice smugglers. The Thais are a proud people, the only country in south Asia never to have been subjugated by European imperialism; they resent being treated by foreigners as a land of addicts responsible for the drugging of youth in the slums of the richest nation on the planet. To make this point they arrest a certain number of Americans. And I, good guy passing through Khlong Toei, was dissembling what I am with my cigarettes of tobacco.

The flight was at 11: 00, Aeroflot, plane change in Moscow. In Paris my old friend Franck took me to his bank and took out three thousand francs for an airticket. I wired the lawyer five hundred to begin to work for your release. My conviction and expulsion order written in my passport is in Thai; no one but Thais can read it. I went to the embassy and reported it stolen, got a new passport, and boarded the plane for New York. I wired Franck back the six hundred dollars he had advanced me. But at the end of the month when I got my bank statement, I found that the exchange rate had fluctuated, and that when they converted the sum I had sent, Franck had received some four hundred francs less than what he had passed on to me. I wrote him an embarrassed explanation, of the delay the bank operation had required and of how it was impossible for my bank to wire him the money already converted into French francs. "Let us be grateful," he wrote me back, "that the system does not work as well as we had feared."

When my leave began the following winter, I went to Papua New Guinea and Java. When my Indonesian visa ran out, I still had three weeks before I had to return. Looking at brochures at a travel agency, I saw that one could now enter Thailand without a visa if one had a paid airticket for departure within fourteen days. I bought a ticket from Jakarta to Bangkok, continuing on to India fourteen days later. On the plane from Jakarta to Bangkok I had several drinks, and the turmoil below the level of awareness emptied my mind. I got off the plane and got in the line marked Immigration. When the officer handed me back my passport with its stamp, and I took a step beyond, I abruptly realized that that was

it: they did not have all their police and immigration lists computerized; I was admitted. I repeated to myself, happily, Franck's words: "Let us be grateful that the system does not work as well as we had feared."

I had now two weeks to find you. I contacted the lawyer. She had received my wires. She thought Puangkaeow might still be in Bangkok. I got a roomboy from my hotel to go learn all the lawyer knew, and then go search for Puangkaeow. I waited in the hotel. The lawyer had said that if I accompanied the roomboy people would probably tell nothing. After three days he learned that Puangkaeow was working in a textile factory in Thon Buri. The following day I went with the roomboy and the lawyer to the factory. We waited for the end of the work shift. The foreman brought her. She greeted us timidly and formally. We sat down on stools at a soup stall in an alley near the khlong. The alley reverberated with the never-ending racket of motorcycles and samlors coughing their cheap fuel mixes into the air over which heavy clouds hovered. The lawyer perhaps thought that going to a restaurant would intimidate her, and while I thought of first going somewhere quiet, as one would in my country, I was full of nervous impatience to hear her tell where I could find you.

She said you had leaped off a roof to kill yourself. Soon after I had left, on the night of the first full moon. The roof of a two-story building. Her fingers rested by her side; her face was still, her eyes vacant. There are no buildings high enough, as in the cities of my country, for people of Thon Buri to dash themselves into instantaneous death. You had leaped from the roof of two-story building. It had taken three days for you to die.

She had no idea where to find Bobot.