THE PHANTOM LOVER

For Joellen Housego

How did Ying wind up in an abortion clinic holding the hand of a woman she didn’t even like? A woman whose legs were splayed open while a doctor in a surgeon’s mask pushed the nozzle of a hose between them.

Benz’s nails dug into the palm of her hand as the vacuum began whirring. The vibrations ran up her fingers and into Ying’s arms, sending her gaze flying around the room like a trapped and frightened bird, glancing off the acoustic tiles on the ceiling, the air-conditioner, the pallid walls, and the baldhead of the doctor, until her eyes alighted on the colored illustration of a female body. The body had no skin. Her eyes darted past the heart and lungs to the intestines and, for a blurry flash, the enlarged illustration of the Female Urogenital System.

Ying blinked and blew back her long, ketchup-colored bangs. She looked at Benz. The model’s face was crumpling like a Styrofoam cup squeezed by an invisible fist. Sucking in a breath through clenched teeth, Ying looked down at the hose sticking out from the sheet covering Benz’s torso and thighs. She knew it was rude, knew it was sick, but her eyes were riveted to that rubber hose. It was like watching a rape and a murder all at once.

Slitting her eyes, she forced herself to look at the blank wall. Gooseflesh pebbled the backs of her upper arms. Oblivious to the nails digging into her hand and the sobs beneath the hum, Ying closed her eyes and clenched her thighs together. The whirring of the machine was drilling into her skull and mining it with migraines.

Ying should not be here. She and Benz barely knew each other. At their university Benz was the leader of the glamorous set of actresses, models and would-be beauty queens, but Ying was part of the indie rock scene. All her friends made scathing jokes about Benz every time she passed by in the hallway with her retinue of male admirers and female flatterers in tow. “She isn’t even a real beauty queen. What did she ever win? Miss Guava?” “No, Miss Durian.”

“You know what I heard? Some guy told me she had a boob job and now she’s got hair all over her nipples.” “That’s disgusting.” Ying did not join in. She was not a group or classroom speaker and, to her ears, the insults sounded too much like expressions of envy.

Because of a family connection, the two of them had to greet each other at the annual Chinese New Year banquet and at weddings and other big social events, when they forced airhostess smiles and repeated the polite putdowns—“Cool shoes. They look really good on you.”—that young Thai women from different social cliques use when they mean to say exactly the opposite.

Yet, there was no intonation of playful ridicule in Benz’s voice when she’d called Ying to say, “I need you to come with me, because I know you don’t gossip like the other girls do and that you’ll keep this a secret. If the tabloids find out, they’ll murder me and my acting career will be finished.”

She was going to get an abortion and all she could think about was her career? That was the real reason Ying disliked her; Benz was too selfish. She always wore her skirts a little shorter and her heels a little higher than the other girls, she told the loudest and dirtiest jokes, “You know me. I can’t keep my mouth shut except if my boyfriend wants a blow job,” and she took up more space on the dance floor than anyone else, because she always had to be the star of every social occasion.

Blaming it all on Benz was too convenient. Ying could have said no, but she was always so eager to appease. So she kept complaining to her boyfriend that all her friends at school took advantage of her, getting her to help them with their papers, sing at their parties, and console them late at night after they’d had arguments with their boyfriends, which gave Ying the selfish privilege of thinking she was more thoughtful and generous than any of her friends.

A nurse came into the room. “Doctor…doctor!” He turned his head. “The police are here to raid the clinic.”

What? The police? If her parents found out she’d been caught by the police in an abortion clinic, she’d have to stay home every weekend for the rest of her undergraduate degree.

The doctor turned off the machine. “Miss, we’re done. Please use the back door and I’ll go and distract the police.” He looked at Ying. “Lock the door behind me and please be quick dressing and getting out of here. I don’t want any of us to go to jail for this.”

Jail? Ying knew abortion was illegal in Thailand, but would they really have to go to court and then get jail terms? As Benz got dressed, Ying riffled through the bills in her wallet. Not enough for a bribe, but she could use her ATM card, except if the police and the hard-line Buddhists wanted to make examples of them. Nailing a couple of young, high-society women—especially when one of them was a rising star in the movie and TV worlds, and the other was the lead singer of the hottest new indie rock band—would be a publicity coup for the anti-abortion lobby.

Benz opened the back door of the clinic and peeped around the corner. “Okay, let’s go.”

Ying put on her sunglasses and walked a few steps behind her, so if the police stopped them she could say they weren’t together. Hyperventilating, Ying stared at the varicose veins in the cracked street. With each step she was becoming smaller and more hunch-backed, but Benz had not lost any of her catwalk poise. Ying kept waiting for her to stumble, to panic, to catch her high heel in a crack, but her strut and self-confidence did not falter.

In Benz’s luxury sedan, painted in the same gleaming white as her skin, they drove down the lane and turned onto a main street. Ying kept glancing in the side-door mirror to see if the police were following them. In anticipation of a siren, her shoulders hunched and her ears pricked up.

Finally exhausted by the dread and stress, Ying sat back in the passenger’s seat, letting the air-conditioning freeze-dry the sweat on her face. Neither of them spoke. Neither of them looked at each other.

At the first red light, Benz opened her window to buy a garland of jasmine from an old woman in a baseball cap walking between the cars, carrying a wooden pole draped with them. Benz hung the garland from the rearview mirror. She bowed her head, closed her eyes, and raised her hands in prayer.

While Benz prayed, Ying looked at her. The poise and self-confidence she’d seen in her strut was misleading. Her mascara had run down her face, so her cheeks were dotted with black teardrops. Benz was in such a state of dismay that she hadn’t even checked her face in any of the mirrors.

Or maybe, Ying thought, she feels so ashamed and guilty that she can’t bear to look at herself.

For the first time in years Ying wanted to pray, too, but that would only make her an accomplice in an incident that had nothing to do with her. While Benz was not looking, Ying popped another anti-depressant. The psychiatrist said she was only supposed to take one a day, but this was her third and it was still the early afternoon.

Beside Benz’s window was a motorcycle carrying an entire family of four. Sitting at the front, between his father’s legs, was a tiny boy. Benz gazed at him through the tinted window. The boy stared back at her.

Turning to face her, Benz said, “Look at the way he’s staring at me, like he knows something. I wonder if somebody… passes away, whether or not they can be reincarnated so quickly?”

This was weird. Benz talked about her career and shopping, she gossiped about whom her friends were sleeping with, she gushed about the latest party or DJ set, but she didn’t talk about spiritual matters.

Ying could not even think of a response, never mind say anything.

Over Benz’s shoulder, the child was staring at her now. Gears gnashing, the public bus in front of them accelerated, spewing exhaust over the motorcycle, so the little boy disappeared as if he’d been vaporized, his spirit rising into the sky, leaving nothing behind but a smudge on her windshield.

Ying spent the rest of the afternoon and early evening cleaning the mirrors in her bedroom and the en-suite bathroom, wiping fingerprints off the windows, polishing the screens of her computer and TV again and again, before writing out detailed instructions for the maid to clean, sweep and dust her entire bedroom without using the vacuum cleaner. Between cleaning sessions, Ying watched the TV news and searched the websites of local dailies to see if there were any breaking stories about the raid on the abortion clinic. She didn’t see any, but it was too soon to tell. If the police had arrested the doctor, they might be checking his records now. Then they would arrest Benz or demand a massive bribe. She didn’t know her well enough to say whether or not she would implicate Ying in the scandal.

She had not realized that abortion was such a serious crime in Thailand. If they enforced the letter of the law, Benz could be imprisoned for up to three years and the doctor for up to five. For a young celebrity like her, from a well-to-do family a jail term was unlikely, but if the tabloid bloodhounds got their teeth into this story, her career would be ravaged.

The Burmese maid did a good job of cleaning, but the room still felt dirty and dusty. Ying didn’t want to be enclosed in a bedroom the size of the backroom in the clinic, but she had to get back to work on a history paper she was writing.

The professor, a young Oxford graduate who kept advising his students to “take more chances and to see the past in the present tense,” had lauded her idea to write an essay about the tradition in ancient Siam of branding adulteresses with golden lotuses. In the town square, the male officials used the same branding irons that farmers marked their cattle with to emblazon the women’s shoulders with flowers visible above their sarongs, so they would be subject to scrutiny and public disgrace for the rest of their lives.

But it was difficult to find any information about this brutal tradition. The history of Siam and Thailand mostly consisted of royal chronicles about the good deeds of male monarchs. Most of those records had gone up in smoke when the Burmese sacked and razed Ayuthaya in 1763. To get access to the few palm-leaf manuscripts remaining at the National Library would take months and months, the librarian told her, but she only had another three weeks to finish the paper.

So far, in her first year and a half of university, Ying had already changed majors three times, from Sociology to Computer Science and now Thai History. If she couldn’t even finish her first semester in history she’d be in for another scornful lecture from her mother. “I don’t know what it is with you. You keep changing your major every semester. You rearrange the furniture in your room every two weeks. You change your hairstyle or dye your hair every month. Then you have a new boyfriend every couple of months. What is wrong with you?”

With only a few sentences, her mother, adopting stiff, manly postures and deepening her voice, as she did when addressing company boardrooms and giving lectures at international business conferences, could reduce Ying to a child again. Even Ying’s voice sounded small and infantile. “I don’t know… I guess I’m confused.”

“There’s nothing to be confused about. Pick a subject you really want to study that will lead to a good career. Then you establish yourself in that career before you get married and start a family of your own. What’s so difficult about that? Music is a wonderful hobby and I love hearing you sing at our family karaoke nights at home every Sunday, but it’s not a career and that noise you make with your latest boyfriend doesn’t sound like music at all.”

Ever since her last year of high school, it was the same lecture over and over again. In the same way her mother’s features had hardened from all the cosmetic surgery, her attitude had gotten more rigid too. Decades of competing in the man’s world of high finance, where weakness and indecision were not permissible, had turned her into a CEO on the home front. Ying didn’t bother trying to explain anymore that the life her mother wanted for her was not the life she wanted—except she didn’t know what sort of life she did want.

Ying pulled out the list of things she wanted to change about herself. Right after, “Legs too stumpy, need to diet more,” and, “Must grow hair longer and use makeup to highlight cheekbones, because face too round,” she underlined, “Too uncertain and confused all the time. Must be more self-confident and outgoing.”

In the margin, her current boyfriend had scrawled, “Must have sex with Dee Dee at least two times per day and more often on weekends and Buddhist holidays.” Reading that usually made her laugh and want to call him. Not now. The word “sex” echoed the sucking noise of the hose between Benz’s thighs.

Ying crossed her legs and picked up some of the papers scattered across the bed, next to books on dieting and biographies of dead musicians like Kurt Cobain. On another piece of paper she’d written a few lines, while bored in class, for a new song or poem called “Lonelier Than All the Graves in China,” but she’d better not mention that to Dee Dee or he’d complain again: “You write the saddest and most depressing lyrics I’ve ever heard. At this rate, we’re going to have to call our first album, Songs To Slash Your Wrists To.” Dee Dee thought that was funny. She didn’t. Since she could not explain to him how depressed she usually felt, she had to write lyrics and poems about it.

Ying listened to a few songs on her MP3 player, she wiped a few fingerprints off the screen, she picked out one of her uniforms and some fresh underwear for school tomorrow—she did everything but get back to work on the paper. Getting started was always the hardest part.

Finally, she opened the file with all her notes on the computer. Most of the research she’d done was on Thailand’s most popular folk epic, Khun Chang Khun Paen, about two men who loved the same woman. In high school and at college, whenever they studied excerpts from the epic poem, the teachers always said it was a cautionary tale about a woman who did not conform to society’s norms and met a tragic end. Wanthong refused to choose between the kinder and more sensible Khun Chang, and the dashing womanizer Khun Paen, an adept at the black arts who commanded a magical horse and a baby ghost known as a “golden child.”

Ying frowned. She’d forgotten about the child. Wiping the computer screen again, she shook her head to dislodge the sliver of a memory that was actually a hallucination from the abortion clinic: a frightened swallow crashing into the window over and over again until its beak punctured its brain and it fell to the floor in a spray of feathers.

She looked back at the scene she’d transcribed, when the king told his courtiers: “Go and execute Wanthong immediately! Cleave open her chest with an axe and don’t show her any mercy. Do not let her blood touch my land. Collect it on banana leaves and feed it to the dogs. If it touches the ground, the evil will linger. Execute her for all men and women to see.”

In a current paper she’d found by the eminent historian Chris Baker, he argued that executions were not the typical sentences doled out to those convicted of adultery and bigamy, which usually included caning, fines, and the public mortification of branding the women with golden lotuses. So Wanthong was executed on the same grounds as those guilty of treason. She was a kind of revolutionary, Ying thought, and as Baker had written “a sacrificial lamb.”

Beyond that, Ying only had a few more notes on how the term khun paen was still widely used to describe a Casanova kind of womanizer, which most Thai men took as a compliment, while “golden lotus” (dok bua thong) had been shortened to e dok (flower) as slang for a “bitch” or “slut.”

Ying’s cell phone played a jingle-jangle version of “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” Benz. What did she want? It didn’t take long to find out. “I really need to see you tonight. Some very strange things have been happening.”

“Like what?”

“Remember the little boy on the motorcycle? He’s been following me. I’ve seen him at least four or five times. I don’t think he’s a boy at all. I think he’s a “golden child,” a baby ghost.”

A shiver made Ying’s shoulders spasm. “That’s a strange coincidence. I was just reading about them for this history paper I’m writing about Wanthong.”

“Really? She’s my favorite character from Thai literature and I’d love to play her. So it’s not a coincidence then. Everything happens for a reason or because of karma. This might be a case of ‘rocket kar ma.’ Whatever we did wrong is not coming back in the next life, it’s coming back now.”

“Why are you saying we? It doesn’t have anything to do with me.”

“Because you were there with me and now the golden child is creeping into your life, too.”

“Maybe you’ve acted in too many TV dramas about ghosts.” Ying looked down at the scabbed-over wounds on her wrist left by Benz’s nails. “Have you heard anything about the police raid on the abortion clinic?”

“No, it’s all gone suspiciously quiet. The doctor’s phone is turned off and the clinic is closed too. I just hope that he didn’t write down my real name in his records. But let’s talk about it when you come over.”

Holding the phone against her ear with her shoulder, Ying picked at the scabs. “It’s almost eleven. I have a history paper I’m working on and tomorrow I have a long day of classes then a rehearsal with my band.”

“I’ve got a friend who writes a lot of my papers. I’ll pay him to write yours.”

“That’s cheating. I couldn’t do that.” Under her thumbnail, the scabs peeled off. Droplets of blood welled up in the fingernail-sized trenches.

“That’s not cheating. In business and politics it’s called ‘delegating.’” Nobody laughed louder at her own jokes than Benz did. She was her own biggest fan and best cheerleader. But her laughter was shot through with static by a bad network connection. Or was it something else? For an instant, Ying had heard a baby crying. “I’m joking. I know you wouldn’t do anything like that. Listen, I’ll send my driver to pick you up in thirty minutes, okay?”

Surrounded by servants from a young age, Benz did not make requests; she spoke in commands and rhetorical questions. “I really need to see you tonight. You’re the only one who knows about this and I need your advice. You were so sweet for coming with me that I had to make you something special that I know you’ll really like.”

How could she say no to that?

Ying looked at the list of things she wanted to change about herself, while the wounds on her wrist complained about being exposed to the chill of the air-conditioner. “Too eager to please others. Must learn to be more independent.” She had highlighted and underlined that reminder so many times it was almost illegible.

Ying picked up her MP3 player and climbed into the massive wardrobe, which she had soundproofed with cushions and empty egg cartons, so she could practice singing on her own or sing along to the demos they had just recorded for their group, The 11th Hour. She referred to the walk-in closet as “my padded cell in the lunatic asylum of high society.” It reeked of the joints her and Dee Dee smoked in there, along with the incense and air freshener they used as smokescreens. Beneath that was the pungent aroma of their sexual sweat which now reminded her of being trapped in a birth canal.

Ying slid the door open, suddenly hating Benz with a fury that could only be released in a song. That self-obsessed woman and her… decision …was polluting Ying’s music, her thoughts, her relationship, her studies—everything! Tonight she’d have to give her a good telling off and make it clear that they should have nothing more to do with each other.

Already cooling off, Ying’s anger ran out of steam when she saw Benz’s swollen, bloodshot eyes and blotchy skin. She looked like she hadn’t slept in days which, as it turned out, was true. Dressed in a long nightgown with a fluffy pair of slippers shaped like bunnies, Benz had been stripped of her glamorous image. Forever comparing herself to her female peers and often finding herself lacking, Ying felt better now—and guilty because of it—that Benz looked so bad.

Ying had imagined that the actress’s bedroom in her parents’ mansion would be a shrine to her vanity, wallpapered with photos of herself and posters for her films, TV shows and ads. On the contrary, it looked like a botanical garden overgrown with ferns, vines and spider lilies. Terrariums ran down each wall. Benz’s pets were a Malayan pit viper, an iguana, a water dragon, and a bird-eating tarantula. Until now, Ying had thought that one of Benz’s nicknames, “The Horror Queen of Thai TV,” was a marketing gimmick based only on the parts she played.

It was another surprise to learn that Benz’s major was botany; she took care of all the flowers and creatures herself, and she’d painted all the watercolors of nature scenes on the walls.

Sitting on top of the terrarium housing the tarantula was an earthenware pot containing a plant with black flowers that Ying had never seen or heard of before. The plant was hemmed in by the red, jagged-edged flowers Thais call “cobra fangs.” This was the present Benz had made for her.

Holding up the flowerpot, she said, “Look at this beauty. The bat lily is one of the world’s only flowering plant species that has black flowers. They’re really rare. I had to trek about twenty kilometers into a rainforest in southern Thailand to find this one. When I was thinking about what your flower would be, and every woman reminds me of one species or another, I thought the bat lily would be perfect for you. It’s rare and dark, beautiful and very remote.”

Smiling defensively, Ying said, “Thanks… better to be a bat lily than stinkweed I guess.” She laughed nervously. “Actually, my plant is marijuana.”

Benz turned to face her and frowned. “I don’t find self-deprecating jokes very funny and I don’t see why you’re so down on yourself and moping around the hallways at school all the time. You have more singing and performing talent than anyone at our university, and I’ve never seen any woman who moves around on-stage like you do.”

Compliments made Ying shy and skeptical; her self-pitying streak, which was a side effect of her chronic case of depression, automatically downgraded them to the level of empty flattery designed to extort future favors from her. Benz appeared to be sincere. But who could trust an actress?

Ying sat down on the edge of the bed, close to the door, so she could keep her eyes on the terrarium and make a quick escape if one of the creatures got loose. Resting her back against the headboard, Benz sat cross-legged, surrounded by a dozen teddy bears and other stuffed animals laid out on a florid pink bedspread. Benz typed away on a laptop, refusing to look at her. Ying couldn’t believe that she was this offended by an off-hand remark. Whatever talent she possessed as an actress—and many people thought she had enormous potential—could be rooted in her easily wounded sensitivity.

“Thanks for the flowers,” Ying said. “The bat lily is really beautiful.”

Benz did not look up from the laptop. “I have to finish typing up my schedule for tomorrow. I’ll be with you in a minute,” she said, as if Ying was her personal secretary. Here was a woman who held grudges and avenged the slenderest of slights.

After leaving Ying to stew in her guilt for a few minutes, Benz showed her the spread sheets on the computer, where she accounted for every single minute of her day, even taking lessons in Cantonese from a private tutor in the back of her chauffeur’s car on her way to and from university. Ying knew that her father was an economist and former Minister of Finance, but she hadn’t suspected that Benz had used the template for one of her father’s five-year economic plans and applied it to her modeling and acting career. By comparison, Ying’s list of things she wanted to change about herself looked like the neurotic outpourings of a spoiled teenager.

Reclining on the headboard again, and pushing her long auburn hair back behind her ears, Benz said, “Everything was going according to the plan, except I didn’t mean to get involved with this film director from Hong Kong. You know what he made me do to audition for the role of a prostitute who gets killed by See Ouey in this new serial cannibal movie? He took me to Chinatown where the cheapest and nastiest hookers prowl the streets and had me walk around in this sleazy little outfit while he watched from the van.”

Benz leapt to her feet, acting out the whole scene and playing all of the different characters. Watching her was like having a front-row seat at a play. “It was the most embarrassing thing ever. Guys were yelling come-ons at me, ‘Hey, baby,’ some of the other street-walkers were telling me to get off their turf, ‘This is my street corner, bitch,’ an old drunk came up and grabbed my ass.

“And then, as if things weren’t awful enough already, Jack Wu took me into this short-time hotel, paid for a room for an hour and when we got inside he offered me three hundred baht for sex. Can you believe it? I freaked, started yelling at him, tried to slap his face, threw an ashtray at the wall. And you know what he did? Burst out laughing and said, ‘Okay, you’ve got the part. You finally understand the character. She’s angry, she’s disgraced, she’s violent.’”

“Sorry for laughing but, you mean, on your first date he took you to Chinatown and made you act like a hooker?”

Benz laughed. “Well, sort of, but no, our first real date came later in Hong Kong when he invited me to watch him editing the See Ouey movie and we hung out night after night in the editing suite and went out for dinner and drinks afterwards, but he didn’t make any moves, never even made any hints. So after this went on for a few weeks I invited him back to my hotel for a nightcap one evening and you know what he said?” She crossed her legs, folded her arms across her chest in a manner that was both arrogant and defensive, lowered her voice and spoke with the director’s sense of conceited amusement. “You’re not a woman yet, you’re still a girl. You’ve never really been in love with anyone except yourself and you’ve never even had proper sex before. You can always tell when a girl makes that step into womanhood because she loses a lot of the giggly mannerisms and the pouting little girl faces, and starts to exude a lot more self-confidence. Her walk changes too. It’s a subtle change, but she becomes more natural, more comfortable in her own skin and you can see all that in her walk. But the way that you strut around still looks like you’re a model showing off clothes on a catwalk.”

Benz, who had been staring off into the corner of the room, now looked back at Ying. Her deep brown eyes had the glazed look of the stoned or the lovesick. “Can you imagine any of the guys at our university saying anything like that? With these guys, ‘Hey, you’re really cute, do you want to come over and have a private party at my place,’ passes for a witty chat up line. I guess that was the attraction. Jack is almost forty and he kind of became my mentor in movies and sex and relationships.”

“So what happened to him?”

“He wanted us to get married and have the baby. I told him that I’m only twenty-two and I can barely take care of myself. I couldn’t take care of a baby and a husband.”

“How did he take the news?”

“Oh, he’d already told me that if I had the…you know…he wouldn’t ever talk to me again. I’ve tried to call him about a hundred fifty times in the last two days, sent him many text messages and emails, but he won’t respond. He’s one of those tyrants who’s used to always getting his way and calling the shots. When I tried to tell him that having a baby and getting married was going to mean curtains for my career, he said he’d support me and that I didn’t have to work. But I’m too independent and ambitious to settle for becoming a housewife at this point in my life.”

“I always found it strange that if life is supposed to be sacred, then why are women who are menstruating not supposed to go to temples or churches because they’re seen as impure? Did you see that protest on local TV last week? They had all the female protestors rub photographs of the prime minister between their legs to put some kind of curse on him and oust him from power.” Ying was no longer talking to Benz. She was far too self-absorbed to hold a conversation with anyone except her inner selves for more than a few minutes at a time. Now she was advising her academic self who was writing an essay about golden lotuses.

Benz put her hand on Ying’s. Her eyes were asking a question or making a plea that Ying could not quite decipher. Perhaps it was, can I trust you? “I have something else to tell you and this is not very pleasant at all. So if you don’t want to hear it I think you should go home right now and never talk to me again.”

Ying’s fingers stiffened. Her spine straightened. “What happened? Was it that bad?”

“Okay. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.” Benz intertwined her fingers with Ying’s. She was staring at the bat lily crowning the terrarium with the bird-eating tarantula inside it. “When I was going to the bathroom last night, I had all these stomach pains and…well, there’s no easy way to say this, but I, but I passed part of the…umm…fetus.”

“What?” In sympathy, Ying squeezed Benz’s hand.

Benz nodded slowly. She continued to stare at the bat lily, surrounded by cobra-fang flowers veined with red. “I guess the doctor didn’t have enough time to remove the whole thing.”

“That’s really…I mean…I don’t know. That’s awful. I’m so sorry.” All of sudden the air-conditioning felt too chilly.

Benz patted her hand. She smiled sarcastically. “Oh, don’t worry. It gets worse. I mean, what could I do with the…stuff…floating in the toilet? It almost looked like a little rubber doll. Oh, all the blood and cramping, too. I was in such pain that I was crawling on the floor of the bathroom, trying to staunch the flow of blood with a roll of toilet paper. Before I cleaned it all up, the bathroom looked like a murder scene.”

From this close, Benz’s bloodshot eyes and peeling skin made it look like the model had aged a couple of years in the last few days. “You know that feeling you have when you’ve been with someone for a while and it’s quite serious, but you dump him or he dumps you, and afterwards you know something has died, but there isn’t any evidence of it outside your own mind or heart? Looking into the toilet last night was the first time I’ve felt, well, here’s the proof. Talk about love and death.”

The woman who everyone had stereotyped as yet another vacuous beauty possessed a level of eloquence Ying had not thought her capable of. Though everyone was so obsessed with her looks and catwalk legs that they barely listened to anything she said.

Ying massaged Benz’s shoulder. By degrees, she felt the heat of Benz’s bare thigh flowing into her own leg through the jeans she was wearing. By sitting there like this, holding hands, thigh against thigh, shoulder to shoulder, they were propping each other up. If one of them moved or stood up, Ying thought, they would both collapse. It was too much misery for one person to stand alone.

“So what happened after that?” Ying asked.

Benz searched her eyes again, as if looking to confirm or deny her guilt. “What could I do? I couldn’t flush my own…you know… down the toilet, could I? I can’t take it to a temple to have it cremated because the monks would never allow that. So…” Benz gestured with her head towards a small fridge near the wardrobe. “I wrapped it up and put it inside an old purse of mine and left it there.”

“It’s in the fridge?”

Slowly and solemnly Benz nodded.

The conversation ended on that mournful note which resonated like a funereal bell inside Ying as she settled down to sleep in Benz’s bed, wearing one of her nightgowns. She kept thinking about that little boy on the back of the motorcycle, suddenly vaporized in a cloud of smoke, his flesh and spirit rising into a storm cloud that began raining down thousands of tiny fingers. The fingers crawled across the carpet and over the covers of Benz’s bed like slugs, inching their way up Ying’s legs and over her knees.

She awoke with a series of spasms that jerked her upright to see that the light was on, Benz was not in bed, and the lid on the largest terrarium was dislodged. At the end of the bed were smears of blood. Skeletal legs scurried over them as the bird-eating tarantula ran across the light fixture on the ceiling.

Ying let out a squeal and bolted for the door. In the hallway all was dark and quiet. Slowly her eyes adjusted to the darkness. Shadows gathered substance and silhouettes appeared: a grandfather clock, a Chinese vase, a rubber plant.

Her mind tried to comfort her by offering the most humdrum explanations for Benz’s absence. She was hungry. She’d gotten up to get something to eat. Now she was in the kitchen, but she’d come back to bed soon. Everything was fine. There was no need to worry.

But the longer she stayed there with her back pressed against the wall, trying to merge with the silhouettes and shadows, the stranger the thoughts arising in her mind. The smears of blood at the end of the bed looked like the Thai letters for “mother.” The remains of that fetus had turned into a “golden child” and were trying to get back inside their mother. That was why Benz had leapt out of bed and ran off to hide somewhere. Now the remains that looked like a little rubber doll were crawling across the floor, Ying imagined, leaving a trail of blood and bile, to seek out another womb.

Ying looked down at the bar of light at the bottom of Benz’s bedroom door. She could go back in there, but the terrarium was open and that spider, the size of a giant’s splayed fingers, was scurrying around searching for prey.

Keeping her back to the wall, Ying tiptoed towards the living room, where the windows permitted the night to enter in all its sable mystery. On the walls, the shadows of branches waved at the black-and-white, Chinese-style portraits of dead ancestors, making their eyes blink and their lips move.

The front door was wide open. Out in the front yard, standing in the middle of a circle of silvery light, as if caught in a spotlight on center stage, stood Benz with her head tipped back, transfixed by the full moon. No longer the woman that all the other college girls wanted to look like and all the boys wanted to sleep with, she resembled a sleepwalker in a grandmotherly nightgown, clutching a designer handbag that contained the remains of her aborted child and the only proof of a dead love.

Ying sat down cross-legged on the grass behind Benz, afraid to startle her by saying anything because of an old Thai belief that a person’s soul leaves their body when sleeping and if they’re woken suddenly the soul will never come back.

From where she sat, it looked like Benz’s arm shot up through hundreds of thousands of kilometers of black space to touch the moon. But the figure inside the moon did not look like a goddess or a rabbit as Ying’s grandmother had told her. No, it looked more like a fetus curled up in a womb: a silver child with craters for eyes and teeth like a saw.

It was the ugliest and cruelest-looking baby Ying had ever seen. But just as every mother loves her offspring, no matter how sick or deformed, Benz was stroking the infant’s cheek and smiling at him.

Out of nowhere, a creature galloped across the front yard on all fours, snatched the purse in its mouth, snorted and loped off into the shadows, as Benz stood there still as a statue. Though she only saw it in silhouette for a few seconds, and by the time Ying could process it the creature was long gone, but it reminded her of that magical horse, with the legs and genitals of a man, in the epic tale Khun Chang Khun Paen.

YING HAD BEGUN incorporating all sorts of anecdotes about abortion into a section of her history paper, and statistics from Thailand, where an average of one hundred women die of complications every year, and another aside about how the lack of sex education classes had spawned the highest rate of teenage pregnancies in Asia today.

But how was all this supposed to tie in with golden lotuses and Siamese adulteresses? As far as she could see they were two separate papers. But she hadn’t mentioned that to her history professor in their email correspondence about the paper.

She knew that no male teacher, unless he was too old and impotent, was ever going to turn down topics as provocative as these. If anything, the subject matter and her unconventional approach to it flattered his impressions of himself as an iconoclast in his field and followed his advice to his students about “finding the past in the present and bringing history back to life.”

On several occasions, Dee Dee had told her, “You’re the most conniving female I’ve ever met—even worse than my mom used to be.”

Ying’s never-differing response revealed her stubborn and tenacious streak. “Men always say that about women who are smarter than they are.” To spare his feelings and make fun of her pomposity, she’d poke him in the stomach and lick his cheek like a cow before dissolving into falsetto giggles.

Her emails about the paper had generated almost immediate responses and more questions from the professor. “Was Wanthong a victim of a patriarchal society or a victim of her own desire to court the black magician? In my opinion, Khun Paen was the bad boy rock star of his day. As a musician yourself with a musician boyfriend you may want to delve into this a little more deeply.”

The professor had been doing his homework on her and that was worrying. Over the course of six or seven email exchanges, the tone of their correspondence had changed from teacher and student to friends and kindred spirits; his interest in her no longer seemed entirely professorial.

On the afternoon of Ying’s big meeting with the professor, when she was preparing her notes and rehearsing lines in her head, Benz began sending her a series of text messages, emails and photos from Wat Laksi, the most famous Thai temple for getting exorcisms and dealing with paranormal phenomena. Since Benz wanted to rid herself of misfortune and ward off darker forces, the monk had made her a “golden child” by putting a small icon of what looked like a Siamese toddler, whose head was half-shaven and sported a centuries-old topknot, into a jar filled with holy water. From the photo Ying recognized the child. She had seen similar icons on many Buddhist shrines, often with a red soft drink and candies laid out for offerings. Benz texted: “The abbot is giving me directions on how to feed the baby ghost and what sort of toys I should put out for him. If I don’t take good care of him he might run amok and cause a lot of trouble.”

Ying wanted to write, “That’s ridiculous.” She thought about telling her, “Don’t be silly.” She wanted to share her doubts and be the voice of rationalism, but she knew how distraught the actress was—and who could blame her? She was not in her right mind anymore and the baby ghost had become her surrogate child.

Ying’s skepticism about the temple and the abbot’s abilities as an exorcist were challenged by the video Benz made, which showed the old abbot, whose arms were covered in sacred tattoos, interviewing a thirty-year-old woman who claimed to be possessed by the spirit of her dead mother. The abbot sat on a dais surrounded by Buddha images and Hindu icons. The woman knelt at his feet, hands raised and palms conjoined in a respectful wai, addressing the holy man as “royal father.” The woman told him, “She won’t leave me alone. She keeps trying to tell me what to do and if I dare to disobey her, then she starts choking me, just like she did when I was a little girl and a teenager or—” The woman began choking. She wrapped her hands around her throat. She rolled across the floor, jerking and twisting and frothing at the mouth as if in the middle of an epileptic seizure. Finally, it took the abbot and three monks to restrain her.

The scenario did not look staged and the jerky video had not been edited. For Ying the video had an extra layer of plausibility, quite beyond the tiny woman fighting off four much bigger males. Because of her own mother’s dominion over her life, she could easily imagine her, even from beyond the grave, wanting to give Ying lectures, always finding fault with her daughter’s inability to live up to her own impeccably conservative standards of deportment and success in the business world.

She had to pull herself together for this meeting with professor. What did he want anyway? All she could think was that he wanted to have an uninterrupted half hour with this shy and famous-around-campus singer, who never spoke in class and hid behind a fringe of dyed-violet bangs and the most old-fashioned skirts that came down to the middle of her calves.

By contrast, the Oxford-educated historian, with his drainpipe jeans and gelled hair, looked more like a pop star than a university professor. In class, he was always dropping the names of alternative bands and art-house directors and new-wave fashion designers. His office, with all the blurry, abstract photos and geometric prints, looked more New York loft than Bangkok collegiate style.

In his presence she automatically slipped into a superficially more subservient manner by bowing her head and raising her hands together up to her nose for a greeting, by pitching her voice a little higher, by smiling more often; all these mannerisms, performed by rote and reflex, were designed to make herself appear less threatening while showing proper deference to a man of superior social standing.

The professor sat behind a steel desk uncluttered except for an open laptop and a few framed photos. “This is a very ambitious paper, but it sounds as if you’ve got enough material to write a master’s thesis.”

Ying stared at her hands. In the frigid air-conditioning, she was alternating sweats with chills, and her mouth was as dry as a textbook. “Maybe. I don’t know. Depends on the editing I guess.”

“But is the structure really going to be this disjointed? I can’t see how all these pieces are going to fit together.”

Ying kept looking at her hands, clasping and unclasping them. “The structure is more like a literary novel. I was thinking about The White Hotel by D.M. Thomas and how it mixes together an epic poem, a Freudian case study, letters, postcards and this story about a neurotic opera singer whose phantom pains foretell the Holocaust. At the end all the characters are reunited in some kind of heaven or afterlife. Much of it seems disconnected but the connecting thread in that book is psychological and my paper is the same.”

Ying stopped talking to her professor and began speaking to her conscience which felt guilty about betraying the confidences of an almost friend. “Because abortion is such a taboo topic, and there’s so little sex education or counseling here and no Freudian tradition, the woman in question can’t find a way to process her grief except through these old archetypes and folkloric figures like the ‘golden child’ which appears in that epic poem with Wanthong.”

“That sounds reasonable, but speaking of taboos, how explicit is this paper going to be?” There was a leer in his voice that she did not want to look up and see on his face. “As a singer in an alternative rock band I guess you’ve done a lot of first-hand research on the subject.” He chuckled and there was a leer in that too.

Had he really just said something as rude and tasteless as that? Ying could not quite believe her own ears. Was he coming on to her or just expecting a titillating conversation to fill in some boring office hours? In either case, she had to be careful. Only two months ago one of the older professors at the school had been suspended for trying to extort sexual favors from five different female students in return for good grades.

She glanced at the framed photo of the woman on his desk. “Oh, is that your wife?”

Reluctantly, he said, “Yes.”

“She’s very pretty.”

Another pause. “Thank you.”

“Well, I guess I’d better head off to my next class now. Thanks for your time and advice.”

Since she had artfully dodged his most provocative question, he could not keep a burr of bitterness out of his voice. “Just be careful that the essay doesn’t turn into a feminist polemic from a Women’s Studies’ class.”

“Sure, except that in this country, and many other parts of Asia, most people think that Women’s Studies means hairdressing and flower arranging.” Still at that age when she was doubtful, and a little ashamed of her own intelligence, Ying smiled shyly while finger-braiding a lock of hair on the back of her head.

The professor’s amusement and nods of agreement surprised her. “That’s very well said. I won’t disagree with you on that point, and I do appreciate a historian with a sense of humor and satire. If you ask me, the field has been colonized by far too many dullards who rummage around in the past like antique hunters in a flea market.”

Ying thought it was wise to let him have the last word and regain a little “face.” Before leaving the office, she made the appropriate gestures of deference to restore his superior social standing and uphold the conventions of Thai society, which she was trying to question and subvert in her paper.

Ying tried to walk off her anger but it kept outpacing her. She was too preoccupied with all the comebacks and barbed quips she could have thrown at him to even notice the running track and the Himalayan cherry trees shedding white blossoms during the warm up for the hot-season meltdown. That reminded her of another line in her list of things she wanted to change about herself. “Must be more outspoken and up front about my feelings.”

He wasn’t interested in her essay—only the titillation factor. It was hard to put her finger on it exactly, but most of her interactions with her male professors had been colored by their condescension. Dee Dee said, “That’s only because you’re too uptight and sensitive. So you think they’re being condescending when they’re not.”

She looked over at the entranceway to the Faculty of Science, the oldest faculty on the campus, remembering how, as a freshman, she was told not to walk up the front stairway because they used to store cadavers for the medical students to dissect there, and the students still told tales of decapitated, one-legged ghouls crawling upstairs in the dark of night to find their other body parts. Past that building stood the Faculty of Architecture where a statue of the Serpent King was supposed to be the luckiest place for students to have their graduation photos taken. Outside another faculty stood the shrine to the Black Tiger God. That was one of the most popular places for students praying for good grades.

There she was in the country’s oldest and largest university, with all the high-tech laboratories, faculties of engineering and architecture, medicine and agriculture, but around every corner was another strange story, another spirit to be worshipped, or curse to be avoided.

Over Benz’s shoulder, the child was staring at her now. Gears gnashing, the red and cream public bus in front of them accelerated, spewing exhaust over the motorcycle, so the little boy disappeared as if he’d been vaporized, his spirit rising into the sky, leaving nothing behind but a smudge on her windshield.

Flying around the room, a swallow, which could see the sky and the trees so near, smashed into the window of the abortion clinic again and again until its beak punctured its brain and it fell to the floor in a spray of feathers.

Ying blinked and shook her head to dispel those memories. Would she ever stop thinking about that day? No, probably not.

If Ying was still traumatized think what Benz was going through? Imagine looking into a toilet and seeing…

Ying pulled out her phone, wiped the screen smudged with her fingerprints and looked at a photo Benz had sent of her new baby ghost. Another text message: “I explained to the abbot about that little boy on the motorcycle who keeps following me. He said it’s probably not a ‘golden child.’ It could be much worse, like one of the ‘smoke children’ from the Khmer occult. They go all the way back to Angkor Wat and are made in much the same way as the Thai baby ghosts, the fetus is grilled and black magicians utter incantations to bring it to life.”

With her it was one text message and one plea for attention after another. Before the… incident … had she always been this needy and demanding? If so, she must have driven many friends and lovers away.

One thing about her had not changed recently; she still spoke in rhetorical questions and commands. Which meant Ying was supposed to go and meet her at the most popular after-dark shrine in Bangkok for women—and a smattering of men—in search of lost loves or a new partner.

The film director in Hong Kong had not answered any of Benz’s emails or text messages or phone calls, so she was resorting to one last desperate gambit: offering nine hundred and ninety-nine roses to Brahma, the Hindu god of creation, for whatever he could do to reanimate this lifeless love.

The shrine stood at one corner of the CentralWorld Plaza, a mall stocked with all the Western designer brands and fast-food franchises, home décor shops from Europe, and a Cineplex showing all the latest Hollywood films. Puncturing the skyline around it were the illuminated, syringe-shaped towers of office blocks and some of the city’s priciest hotels.

On the benches near the street, where a night bazaar had colonized most of the sidewalks, sat Ying, watching Benz lighting a candle and incense so she could kneel beside her high heels, among the other lonely hearts, to ask the four-faced effigy of brass for a favor she would promise to return with more elaborate offerings. The god was known to favor wooden elephants and live performances of Thai classical dance.

Ying was not sure whether any of those praying were communicating with the divine or just talking to themselves: a sort of spiritual schizophrenia. But if it helped them to concentrate on their desires amid the hum of traffic and the hubbub of the crowds she supposed it was a good thing.

The oppressively warm night and the clouds of sandalwood incense threw a tarp of gloom over the shrine and all the supplicants, many of them university students still wearing their uniforms of black skirts and white blouses.

Only around shrines and temples is there none of that typical Thai mirth capped with toothsome smiles. Making pleas to the Great Beyond is nothing to be scoffed at or joked about, for that could bring about a reversal of fortunes.

The gloomy setting, where conspicuous capitalism had relegated religion to a small outpost beside a septic canal, had already inspired Ying to gobble her fourth antidepressant of the day. Now Dee Dee was pissing her off with all these snide text messages asking why she’d become a nun lately?

Since the afternoon at the clinic two weeks ago, they had not had sex. At first, he’d been okay about it. Some of his text messages were funny enough. “I’m getting so horny that if I have to masturbate people in Bangkok will think there’s a meteor shower raining down on the city.” But each message was less sympathetic than the last and now he was openly taunting her. “I’m having a drink with Annie A-Bomb tonight.”

Ying’s anger made her dyslexic. She kept making mistake after misspelling after mistake. Going backwards and forwards deleting and retyping characters only made her madder. “Even her stage name is stupid. She can’t sing and she’d fuck a streetlamp if she thought it would get her some gigs and publicity. Annie is such an e dok …” Ying stopped. Now even she was using the shortened form of “golden lotus,”

In the middle of that argument, the band’s producer sent her a message about rerecording some of her lead vocal tracks on the demo tape. Not again! She’d already spent five weekends in a row recording and rerecording all her parts to appease that perfectionist, so she’d begun to hate and doubt all of their songs.

Then she received an email from the perverted professor. “I enjoyed our chat today. Please stop by my office whenever you want.” Ying stifled the urge to send him a sarcastic reply.

Why did all her troubles always come in clusters? Next her mother was on the phone and when Ying refused to pick up, there was a long text message. “Are you out again? I thought you had an essay to write. I hope you’re not thinking about changing your major again already.”

And what if she got an F on her paper? What if she had to drop out of history and disappointed her mother and herself again?

Ying’s grandmother kept telling her, “Your college days are going to be the happiest and most carefree years of your life.” What was she talking about? Ying had never felt so stressed out and inadequate in her whole life.

When Benz came to sit beside her, she took one look at her face and said, “What’s wrong?” Ying started to say something, but all of a sudden everything she was thinking and feeling and worrying about broke like a wave over her head so she was drowning and gasping for breath. Then she started crying and put her arms around Benz’s neck and cried the tears of a little girl overwhelmed by how tiny and helpless she felt. Surrounded by all these office buildings, malls, shrines, and ivory towers, Ying did not feel so big herself right now, and she appreciated that Benz didn’t ask her for any explanations or offer any sound bytes of condescending advice. All she did was sit there hugging her like a mother, but when Benz felt that maternal flush she started crying too because Jack Wu was never coming back to her even if she gave a million roses to all the gods in the world’s pantheon, and every time she saw a little boy she wondered what their baby would look like, and she should never have hired that black magician to pick up the fetus and concoct a love potion that would make Jack forget the abortion, and she apologized for not telling Ying that she’d been conducting a black magic ritual with the spider and the blood offering on the night of a full moon, and only now she realized how useless it all was, but that’s how desperate and heartbroken she’d been, and Ying said with a catch in her throat that it was okay because when she found out that her ex was screwing around on her with three other girls at their university she threatened to have a curse put on him that would make his dick shrivel up and fall off, which made Benz laugh so that tears shimmered on her eyelids.

By the time they were cried out and done hugging they were not sure whose tears belonged to whom and who was wearing whose perfume.

At first, it was supposed to be just a few glasses of wine at Benz’s place, but they both needed to relax, so they kept pouring out more wine, dancing to their favorite songs, taking turns playing the stylist and giving each other different hairstyles and makeup that became more and more outlandish the drunker they got. It was like a two-girl teenage slumber party. Since they didn’t want to sleep alone and Ying was too drunk to go home, they got into bed together and it started off innocently enough, just a few cuddles for comfort like beside the shrine, but the wine was a love potion too and neither of them could stomach the idea of sleeping with a man right now and risk getting pregnant, and who would not be flattered that the sexiest girl in the university was coming on to them? More than that, she was shoving her tongue down Ying’s throat as if she wanted to lick her heart while seesawing her hipbone against Ying’s clit (clearly this was far from the first time that Benz had seduced an -other woman). As aggressive and masculine as she was in bed, Benz was still the sort of generous lover who took her greatest pleasure from pleasuring her partner.

For all the eroticism of their exchanges, it seemed to Ying like an extension of the other night, when they sat shoulder to shoulder on the bed, propping each other up because it was too much misery for one person to stand alone. Since then their wounds had deepened. Only bites, nips and fingernail scratches could cauterize those wounds or at least redirect the pain to other places where it was more bearable.

Did it sound ridiculous, did it sound like sober denial excusing the drunken debauch, Ying asked herself later, to say that she was more aroused artistically than sexually? Aroused by the sleek planes of Benz’s face and the pale marble of her flesh, the breasts and abdomen that shifted like Saharan sand dunes at her touch, the Roman column of her neck, the tiny ridges in her lips, and the Cabernet Sauvigon kisses that stained their mouths and throats with red wine as if they were two vampires feasting on each other’s lifeblood. Ying was no longer sleeping with Benz. Now she was sleeping with an idealized reflection of her fascination with poetry, history, mythology, and geography.

As it turned out, she would never understand Benz’s interest in her, and it would continue to bother her for years. Mostly she would be tempted to see herself, and that night, as one of those typical distractions and sexual experiments of the college years; she was good enough for a quick fuck, but not nearly cool or sexy enough to lavish more time on.

When Ying fell asleep her soul left her body and ventured into a morgue where a man with magical tattoos and spells written in ancient Khmer script covering his arms and neck and even the sides of his face—could this be the black magician Benz had hired?—who was cutting open the stomach of a dead woman, pregnant with child, to use the fetus to create a “golden child” and baby ghost like Khun Paen had once done in that old folktale of epic proportions. He then placed the fetus, wet and pink with blood, on a barbecue grill and lit the charcoal…

Twitching and blinking, Ying woke up in the birdsong dawn with those sudden spasms of disorientation that always shook her after waking up in someone else’s bed for the first time in a tangle of limbs, sheets, socks and underwear, their arms and hair still intertwined, not knowing where she ended and her lover began.

Through the gauze of a hangover only beginning to pulse, she saw that, sitting on top of the terrarium housing the bird-eating tarantula, was Benz’s designer handbag, which doubled as the coffin for her half-aborted fetus, snatched the other night and now returned. Beside it was a shrine for the baby ghost that the abbot-cum-exorcist had given Benz. But the glass looked like it contained blood instead of a red soft drink.

BENZ TOLD HER that she’d talked to the doctor from the clinic and he’d recommended a temple where they could have the fetus cremated. All she had to do was make a decent donation to the abbot of the temple for “renovations” and he would arrange for the cremation after it was dark and the temple was quiet.

By the time Ying arrived, after having more arguments with her mother and her boyfriend, she felt more liquid than flesh and bone: a witch’s cauldron of antidepressants, tranquilizers and diet pills laced with amphetamines. She would try to say something but Benz would snap, “What’s that supposed to be? Sanskrit? Could you please get it together? You always fall apart in crisis situations and I need you to be strong right now.” The snotty aristocrat was talking to her like a servant again. Had Benz already forgotten the other night and what they’d done together? Did it not mean anything to her?

Ying sulked and pouted. She would have to revise her opinion of Benz again; she was a bitch and a narcissist who used people as secondary characters and foils in her little dramas. When they no longer amused her, she banished them to the sidelines.

Even though Ying was wearing her contacts, the temple, with its colored glass mosaic of the Hindu god Indra riding a three-headed elephant, the golden statues of the bird-woman Kinnaree, the main altar with its jumble of Buddha images (dark now except for the candles), and the whitewashed crematorium with its single smokestack, were as blurry and soft around the edges as if she was not wearing her contacts at all.

Benz was too distracted to notice Ying’s state of distress. She kept going off on angry tirades, “I made the right decision, but if I’d gotten better medical care, if the doctor hadn’t been distracted by the police, then this never would have happened.” But then she’d look at the tiny white coffin and turn her head away to dab at her eyes with a tissue. The coffin was gilded with decorative swirls and crowned angels in flight as if ready to spirit the dead person’s soul away to its next reincarnation.

The abbot sat on a dais beside the coffin. As the two women knelt before him with their heads bowed, hands raised and palms pressed together, he intoned baritone blessings in Pali, wishing the infant a safe journey to heaven and a good rebirth as a human being.

As far as Ying could remember, this was almost exactly like going to a real funeral—except the undertakers did not open the lid so the relatives could crack a coconut and pour the water on the face of the deceased as a purification ritual. Instead they slid the coffin into the oven and invited the two women to drop tiny flowers made of sandal-wood on top of it. Benz shook her head and dabbed at her eyes again.

Ying could not work out why there was another big white coffin inside the oven and two smaller ones as well. It didn’t matter. The flames were mesmerizing. They were like ballerinas leaping and pirouetting, like red snakes wriggling out of the crematorium’s concrete floor. The snakes bared their fangs. They gnawed on the coffins, so the wood blackened, the angels melted and the serpents mated.

Something was wrong. The smoke was billowing out because the undertakers could not get the metal door of the crematorium to close. Then the wooden coffins began cracking and splintering.

As fog enveloped them, the “smoke children” swarmed all over Ying like mosquitoes at nightfall in a malarial jungle. Tiny hands pulled her hair, curled around her throat and pushed against her windpipe as toothless mouths brushed against her blouse and sought out her nipples.

As the smoke thickened, the smell of burning flesh pierced her nose, a smell so strong and putrid that it lodged in her throat like a bone. Ying coughed up phlegm and hacked with such force that it felt like there was spittle coming out of her eyes too.

She had to get out of there before she suffocated to death, but she didn’t know which way to turn. In a matter of minutes, she had been exiled to the cloudy surface of Jupiter, that gaseous giant, which was hostile to all life forms.

A baby cried, “Mother,” then another echoed that cry. Still others joined in until there was a chorus of howling children. These were not the cries of hunger and thirst she had heard from her niece and nephew as infants. Not the bawling of a baby with wet diapers or teething pains. These were the shrill cries of abandonment reserved for those middle-of-the-night terrors when waking in the crib to find all was dark and baby was all alone.

It was the most heartrending ballad Ying had ever heard.

To comfort them, she began humming. The babies kept crying. She hummed a little louder. The smoke children would not stop wailing. “Be quiet, okay? Please be quiet. You’re driving me crazy.” Ying put her hands over her ears. It didn’t help much. The smoke was so thick she could not make out any outlines or shapes and, in the absence of sight, of anything to take her mind off her ears, their bawling was as relentless as a dentist’s drill.

Ying’s wordless humming turned into the chorus of that song she was working on, “Lonelier Than All the Graves in China,” but it sounded empty without Dee Dee’s guitar. Where was he? Out with Annie A-Bomb again?

The crying stopped.

Then they appeared.

One by one they swirled through the mist, these infantile phantoms, drifting just out of reach, some missing a nose and a leg, others with no arms, some no more than blobs of flesh while a few had eyes that dominated their entire faces. Now that she saw them up close—saw them for the lost and helpless souls that they were—Ying was not frightened, because they were not menacing.

The most beautiful thing about babies, she felt, was how unlined and uncomplicated their faces were. She had only seen the smoke children for ten seconds and already she knew exactly how they felt and what they wanted:

They wanted their parents.

They wanted to be loved.

They wanted something to eat and drink.

They wanted to be cuddled, to not be alone.

More than anything, they wanted to live. Failing that, they wished to die with a measure of dignity so they could be reborn again in a different womb in a better place and another time.

Her mind tried to comfort her. The smoke children had been given a proper Buddhist funeral. They were at peace now. They would not cause any more problems. They had only come to say goodbye.

The smoke cleared for just long enough so she could see that the ugly man with all the magic tattoos and Khmer spells etched on his arms and face was standing close enough to her that she could see the tobacco stains on his teeth. This had to be the black magician Benz had hired. Apart from the tattoos and all the amulets of tiger’s teeth around his neck, with his brown skin and flat nose he looked more like a taxi driver from the northeast. That impression was compounded by the look he gave her, envy giving way to resentment before shame won out in the end and he looked away. If he had any real magical powers he would not have backed down so easily, she thought, experiencing one of those rare moments of lucidity that came now and again on every pharmaceutical binge.

The smoke closed like a curtain between them and Ying backed up in the opposite direction. For defense, she held out her hands, the palms facing up, unconsciously miming the standing sculptures of the Buddha in the so-called “position of subduing the demon Mara.”

To her right, a tear opened in the sheet of smoke. Benz appeared. Why was she wearing that pagoda-like crown on her head and the old-fashioned sarong and sash glimmering with golden threads? Slowly and sadly she nodded her head, as if weighing the gravity of what she had to say. “I knew my karma was going to be bad, but this is unbelievable. I am the reincarnation of Wanthong.”

After weeks of madcap behavior—buying love potions, staging black magic rituals and attempting to bribe the gods of love with nine hundred and ninety-nine roses—had she finally lost her mind altogether?

Even by her drama-queen standards this was over the top, but she had told Ying that Wanthong was her favorite character in Thai literature, and Benz was most herself when playing other people. That’s when her real passions came to life. Only by playing the most tragic of Siamese heroines could she find a role big enough to accommodate the tragedy of losing her child and boyfriend.

The fog drifted in again, sealing them off from each other.

The king told his courtiers, “Go and execute her immediately! Cleave open her chest with an axe and don’t show her any mercy. Do not let her blood touch my land. Collect it on banana leaves and feed it to the dogs. If it touches the ground, the evil will linger. Execute her for all men and women to see.”

Ying tried to call out, to warn her, but she could not. The acrid and hallucinogenic smoke that was smelted of flesh burning, bones melting, and blood boiling had clouded over her mind.

Panting for breath and swooning, Ying stumbled into a room that was freezing cold and lit by fluorescent tubes of light on the ceiling. For warmth she wrapped her arms around herself. As she looked around at all the freezers, the reality sank in by degrees. This was no ordinary room—it was the temple’s morgue and all the freezers were filled with cadavers.

At the farthest end of the room, standing with his back to her, she saw the black magician pulling out plastic bags from a long freezer. Each bag was filled with what looked like a little rubber doll or a sexless, shapeless blob.

Another flash of lucidity; he was stealing the corpses of aborted fetuses in order to make the smoke children and golden kids. He looked at her. Then he grinned and whinnied like a horse. So this was also the charlatan who had worn some sort of costume the other night to impersonate that magical horse from Khun Chang Khun Paen.

The sound of her own fury, restrained by years of passivity and honed to an amplified shriek on-stage, frightened her; it was the sound of a boat ripping free of its moorings in a monsoon season storm, a guard dog growling, a child waking up alone in the night, a woman warding off a rapist; it was all these sounds she’d heard and stored up and now channeled into one soprano shriek that stabbed his inner ear like an ice pick.

He cringed and looked around. Each time he took a step towards her Ying shrieked again. He stopped and covered his ears. Soon enough, two monks in saffron robes came running in to see what all the commotion was about. While they confronted the black magician, she slipped out the door, to the left of the crematorium.

At this point the smoke was starting to subside a little. Here and there rents and tears in the smokescreen revealed that Benz costumed as Wanthong was kneeling and praying to an image of the temple’s founding abbot, when the silver flash of a camera lit up her face and crown.

Who was that?

Benz did not even flinch. She remained on her knees, genuflecting at the base of the abbot’s image, as the photographer took photo after photo. Everything about her posture suggested that she was repentant and resigned to her repentance.

Now another photographer approached. These guys had to be paparazzi. Someone had tipped them off.

Ying should do something. She should warn her and shoo the photographers away. But she was too scared. It was too risky. Then her photos would end up in the paper and her family would never live down the disgrace.

Either it was brave or cowardly, independent or traitorous—her memory would rerun these scenes over and over again—but Ying snuck out the back of the temple, where it squatted next to a small forest, one of the many parts of Bangkok where the jungle and the city mate, where creepers climb telephone poles and pythons feed on stray cats.

This was the only way out. At the front of the temple were three police pick-up trucks. Cops milled around them. Their voices and the static on their walkie-talkies blurred into a babble that was unintelligible except for a single note of urgency. This was no routine bust. This was something special.

Looking out from behind the trunk of a banana tree, Ying saw a dozen policemen fanning out to infiltrate different parts of the temple. Much as she hoped otherwise, she did not think Benz had gathered enough strength to escape. It was not the police who would arrest her; her grief and guilt had already done that.

To make her escape, Ying had to navigate an obstacle course of branches that groped her, mud that sucked at her ankles, leeches that clung to her arms, neck, and chest.

As police flashlights swept the outer limits of the temple, Ying crouched down to creep deeper and deeper into the woods. She had to tread lightly. Almost every footstep crunched a twig or dried out leaf.

In her mind she was moving farther and farther away from everyone she had ever known. Her mother, her band-mates and her boyfriend could not follow her. This was a path she would have to find and make by herself.

Already Ying knew she would not be able to see Benz ever again; the actress would have to face the scandal without her. Ying could not help her anymore. It had not been her decision to go to the clinic, it was not her fault that the abortion— there, she’d said it at last— had turned out so badly, and she had not arranged the cremation tonight or tipped off the paparazzi either.

None of this had anything to do with her.

Over the next few weeks, as the scandal broke, and Benz was stripped of all her movie, TV and modeling contracts, Ying maintained her silence. This was the modern-day equivalent of Siamese adulteresses being branded with golden lotuses.

For a final display of penance Benz shaved her head and became a nun for nine days in a temple just outside Bangkok. To wash away some of her bad karma, she cleaned the bathrooms of ninety-nine different temples.

The two women only saw each other one more time, and that encounter was very brief. Benz was walking down the university hallway with her retinue of high-society friends, who now looked more like bodyguards than admirers, and she glanced at Ying who looked away first. Benz was not even out of sight before Ying’s friends, the other indie rockers, began backbiting her. “You know what I heard? That was actually her third or fourth abortion.”

Completely out of character, Ying snapped, “Why don’t you shut your fucking mouth for once? You don’t even know her.” She slammed her locker shut and stormed off to class.

Trailing well behind her, Ying sniffed a micron of her perfume which sparked a memory of a French kiss that tasted like red wine.

The scandal could have been worse, but it was eclipsed by the finding of more than two thousand fetuses at the temple. For years, abortion clinics from all over Bangkok had been using the temple as a morgue and crematorium.

Ying never finished the history paper on golden lotuses. It was too dangerous, too controversial. Her mother would read it. The professor or another faculty member might realize it was partly about Benz. Besides, Ying was bored of history already and wanted to change majors again.

Her silence over the abortion and her friendship with Benz was not broken for another six years, until after she’d graduated with a degree in Library Science and taken a job as a librarian. In between shifts at the library, she worked on a novel called Golden Lotuses and Bat Lilies about a 21st century actress who is a reincarnation of a 15th century adulteress and former concubine in the royal court.

Towards the end of the book, she wrote: “Trudging through the dark forest, her clothes sodden and heavy with swamp water, her shoes squelching, a cop’s voice garbled and distorted by a megaphone somewhere behind her, Anne could finally identify with Wanthong. In the end, Wanthong was not even allowed the relief of death. She was reborn as an “unhappy spirit” who haunted rainforests and foraged for scraps around town limits. The two of them were sisters now, sisters from centuries apart condemned to a similarly lonely fate: the detested traitor who had not conformed to society’s norms by choosing a proper husband, and the spoiled singer who had been forced to take a vow of silence, to never repeat what had happened over the last few weeks, except under the guise of a supposedly fictitious story. Such was the repressiveness of patriarchal power in her country that women could only turn to prose, poetry, plays and songs to relate their taboo woes.

“Still sick, still high from the acrid smoke, Anne felt twinges inside her guts. She stopped and put her hands on her stomach. Was it gas or a stomachache? It almost felt like a baby kicking inside her. Now it felt like the baby was scampering up her chest, squeezing her lungs and, hand over tiny hand, crawling up her throat, until it grabbed the corners of her mouth and pulled them apart like curtains, to emerge in a puff of smoke: a toy-sized version of the little boy on the back of that motorcycle, except now he was riding a swallow with a broken beak. Anne began coughing and coughing. She coughed up a notebook of song lyrics, wadded paper balls of her unfinished essay on golden lotuses, an empty wine bottle she had shared with Bee, two roaches of marijuana, a pair of earrings from a backstabbing, ex-friend she would never talk to again, the black petals of a bat lily, a photo of her and another ex smiling on some sunlit beach, a memory stick full of songs which had never been released, and a love letter to Bee she had never dared to send.

“As they came out of her mouth, each of the abortions dissolved into smoke, like all her big plans, and groups, and love affairs, that came to nothing in the end. On the breeze, her stillborn brainchildren floated away the same as the smoke billowing from the crematorium’s white tower. The smoke came from thousands of fetuses reduced to ashes that dusted leaves and smudged windshields, darkened the eyes of the fetus sleeping inside the moon, and left empty graves no larger than a sigh in their parents’ hearts.”