As we entered the Muslim neighborhood around the Haroun Mosque, McGinnis told me about the air-conditioning business, which was technically intricate and, like all things intricate for a good reason, fascinating. Refrigeration itself seemed so much more convincing than writing articles for a living. It had a point: it improved people's lives, even though it damaged the ozone layer. It made the world colder, which is never a bad thing.
So when he asked what I was doing, I said, "I'm treading water." Tactfully, he let it go at that because it is understood among the full-time lammers that Bangkok is an asylum for those who have lapsed into dilettantism, as one might lapse into a temporary period of mental instability. The great projects, the ambitious flights of the mind—all trashed. They might revive, but not now.
This idleness enters the movements of the body. One loses electrical fire and nervosity. Even the hands and feet become languid. So we talked instead about sex, in empty Muslim alleys where there was none. Hadn't Buddhist Bangkok quietly accepted its role as the provider of sexual services to the rest of the planet? In a global economy it was inevitable that some place would. But what did that tell you about the rest of the world?
Men can talk for hours about sex, but they don't know what it is exactly they are discussing. It is a lacuna, not a real subject. They edge their way around a slipping vacuum, because they are investigating not sex but women, and women are sometimes a lacuna in their minds where there should be something solid. But when they are in Bangkok, they converse about it with greater intensity, because their own women are no longer present, nor even at the edges of their field of vision. They are in a place where they can behave like gay men, where their masculinity is condensed, intensified.
We inspected the mosque and McGinnis knew all its history, from the time of its founding by an Indonesian immigrant in 1928. It was partially colored like a chocolate egg, and so light in construction that its wood could have been mistaken for paper. Lean and tattered, McGinnis seemed so perfectly adapted to this context that one had to wonder how much of his time he spent nosing around these dead-end streets, history books in hand. There are men like the walking books in Fahrenheit 451 who are content to pass their lives slowly filling up with knowledge which can never be used, and it is the very filling up that gives them a sense of life's pointless sweetness.
"It may be," he said, taking off his glasses and rubbing them with the German-made Brillen-Putztücher wipes he carried with him at all times, "that this is the one building in Bangkok that lasts a thousand years, because nobody will bother with it."
•
We rolled a joint and smoked it with the deliberation of two old men sharing a bottle of wine. I noticed for the first time the fine white scars on McGinnis's cheeks, like the tracks of skates on fresh ice. A childhood disease, a brush with a crocodile or a filariasis worm, a sign from the beyond? It made his square, military head look morbidly dashing, as if they were saber wounds. He had done two years at Sandhurst, after all. He had fencer's hands.
"I have wondered," he drawled, "if we could invent a new word for cock? I have considered Sí Señora, already much used in Latin America. Or Roger the Dodger."
"Then cunt would be Sí Señor?"
"Precisely. But I like 'cunt.' 'Cunt' is a lovely word. A noble word."
It goes back to John Wilmot, he said, and even further, to the Domesday Book, where it wasn't mentioned, to Edward the Confessor, and maybe even to the Venerable Bede.
"The Venerable Bede said 'cunt'?"
"He would have said cynt. That's the Anglo-Saxon. In Chaucer it's pronounced queynte. A word that also meant cunning. The word 'cunt,' in fact, is unfairly vilified. A man who genuinely loves women doesn't trawl the streets at night thinking, 'I wish I could get some vagina tonight.' Not at all, he thinks, I want some cunt. I can't understand why a woman would be with someone who uses the word "vagina" in his internal monologues. It just means 'receptacle' in Latin. The Vagina Monologues? I'd rather have The Cunt Dialogues. 'Cunt' comes from the Indo-European root ku, a word associated with both femininity and knowledge."
"By the way," he added, "have you noticed that whenever you type 'cunt' into a Microsoft Word document it underlines it in red as an unknown word? That's underground power."
We came to windows through which we could see whole families on their bellies gathered around three-inch TV sets, among saucers of cardamom and piles of comics, the thresholds lined with cloth slippers. The houses were yellow and turquoise behind metal screens, with steeply angled gardens packed with fruit trees and shielded by graceful wooden doors painted fir-green and red. Such places are rare in Bangkok, remains of an old city that few can now remember and which are now being plowed under in a prolonged fit of amnesia. In them one's conversation with the past resumes so that one falls silent even in company and walks like a street cat, guided by the night retina.
Along one side of this neighborhood and close to the water stands a square Italian villa decorated with weed trees, decayed into a living ruin: the old Customs House known as Khong Phasi, now the Bang Rak fire station. Within a lunette carved from the façade is a woman's face, turned to one side, smiling like someone waving goodbye from a train window. She is carefully individuated, a face out of the past and delicately set as a blancmange.
From the firehouse an alley called Trok Rong Phasi ran back to the French Embassy, and the shadows of summery trees lay across it. We turned and drank in this fermenting ruin, constructed by an exiled Italian engineer in 1892 as a memory of the ruined street corners of Genoa, which he must have missed.
"That's what I wanted to show you," McGinnis said, nodding at the lunette and the woman's head. "He was clearly inspired by a Della Robbia in Florence, wouldn't you say?"
I went frequently to Trok Rong Phasi by myself after that, learning the way its alleys intersected, and finding that they formed a beautiful pattern like a torn spiderweb. On occasion I got an ice cream and paused by the massive gates of the French Embassy with its twin lamps, looking up at the sweep of a nineteenth-century terrace where women in baking crinolines must once have taken the river air.