I went down through the gardens to the piers, and crossed to the Oriental in one of the hotel boats. Two thousand baht: I could eat a snack at the Bamboo Bar. Even better, I could avoid the Bamboo Bar altogether and take an eighty-baht cab ride to Sukhumvit Road, where I could eat for twenty-five baht and then walk around—for a change—with some disposable income. It didn't seem like a bad plan, for all its imprecision. But it also struck me, as I sat in the boat, that Ari might call the Peninsula security, and I looked behind me nervously during the crossing. Once on the right bank, I went down the side street alongside the Oriental and got into a taxi. The driver asked me where I wanted to go. We were already speeding down Charung Krung toward the expressway, as if he had decided himself. We came to the corner of Silom, the hospitable glitter of gay bars and the great doomed urban spaces that seem to surround elevated roads and their cement pillars. Blue neon carved out the word Balls. Crowds merged at this corner from several directions, like the feelers of giant snails, bombarded by yellow and blue light.
These crowds poured along wide avenues, unhurried, very unlike the crowds of New York, which are always rushing somewhere. Loitering crowds, slow-paced and inquisitive, as is often the case in hot climates. We rushed down Sathorn, however, and the masses thinned out. The avenue widened, banks and hotels soared up on both sides, and at the entrances to the various complexes stood those characteristic Thai security guards who are always dressed in military uniforms, often white with peaked caps, gold epaulettes, sashes and buttons, and plenty of braid. They stand with the peaks of their caps just above their eyes, hands folded, sometimes holding an illuminated stick to direct traffic. They must think of themselves as the guardians of ebb and flow, the promoters of organic order. And they remind you that it is indeed a hierarchical, orderly society, with Vishnu and the king at the top and rice farmers at the bottom. In the middle of this sleek boulevard, meanwhile, the trees seemed stranded, the remnants of orchards long chopped down, and here and there old buildings flashed by—an old customs house, I think, looking like a ruin as old as Angkor, with cornices smoothed by acid rain.
It is uncanny how quickly things age here. Thais believe that any building that has been inhabited before them is potentially haunted. Rather than accommodate the possibility of ghosts they tear them down in order to build new, unhaunted ones. It isn't just capitalism that has modified and reshaped the old city, therefore—it's also ancient Thai superstition. By the same token, things are built quicker in Bangkok than anywhere in the world. The skyline changes a few inches every night. The construction sites are perpetually active, their arc lamps blazing across the city without a moment's pause. As we swept into Whittayu, I thought that even this street had changed since I had seen it a week earlier. People walked along with transparent umbrellas, through polluted rain. The buildings shone with gold and palm green. Showrooms, atriums, lobbies in the wedding-cake neoclassic style called satai roman, a whole language of newly arrived, triumphant affluence. It is all put together like a series of boxes within boxes, intimately organized so that there is not one inch of idle space. Long streets of dense commercial packing, shop after shop, commodities and seductions crammed into what look like ribbons of precious metals and light displays. I got out at Soi 2.
•
I paced up and down the brightly lit stretch of sidewalk between the gas station at Soi Nana 4 and the corner where the Marriott stands behind a strip of postmodern shrubbery. The Chaerung Pharmacy stands here with cats asleep on its counters and ginseng roots suspended in jars of liquid. The punters come here for their generic Viagra hits, Indian "Kanegra" in four-pill blister packs which they carry off to the Nana Entertainment Complex nearby. Next to the pharmacy, a large pub filled with rentable girls and, a little way down, a sign in cheerfully toxic colors: No-Hands Restaurant. With 1,850 baht in pocket, I wondered about this. It was Ari's money and I couldn't spend it lackadaisically. The door to the No-Hands place was flanked by two girls in silk tunics, in strange hats. They beckoned with fanciful gestures of four hands. Hands, they seemed to be saying, aren't they beautiful things?
I went up to the doors and they parted slightly, four hands shimmering around me. It looked like a normal restaurant, with circular tables and cushion seating close to the floor.
The restaurant itself was arranged like a saloon. I might have expected elegant Japanese businessmen, but in fact the tables were occupied by Englishmen dressed in the international uniform of Englishmen in the tropics: an Arsenal shirt, camouflage shorts, sneakers, diver watches, and ribbed socks. It's a terrible look, depressing and alarming at the same time. Why do among the wealthiest people in Europe invariably look so shabby, so downtrodden? We know that they do it on purpose, that they are having us on. Are they trying to make everyone miserable? Thais call them "pigeon-shit farangs." The Englishman's reputation for dash, you think mournfully, is now two generations dead, and moreover the English always hang together in a herd so that the effect is magnified and you cannot get away from them. They are good-natured to talk to, but don't expect any refinement. They whine and cajole and complain and tell dirty jokes. At best, they are middle-of-the-road, bland, filled with a cow- like resignation. But at the same time their sense of superiority is without dents, as always—the English proletariat has always thought of itself as immensely superior to all other life-forms. I got a table for myself. As soon as I was reclined, I felt all the guilt and adrenaline shed. I bathed my face in a hot towel.
The format is that you are not allowed to use your hands for any operation. Instead, you are fed by a waitress who kneels beside you and feeds you with a pair of chopsticks. This neatly inverts the usual relationship between diner and server, because although the "service" is greatly increased, so too is the diner's helplessness. The Westerner, in particular, feels quite uncomfortable with this arrangement, because he is naturally inclined to think of service as subservience. Not so in Buddhist Asia. Here, service implies no ignominy at all. It is neutral, light. My server brought me pla-duk, catfish.
She cut it up for me and began parceling it out into my mouth as I lay there on one arm, trying to keep my head straight. The No-Hands experience was clearly surrounded by humor, little eruptions of embarrassment. When I tried to raise a napkin with my left hand, Lek cried, "Ah!" and stopped me. At that moment I thought back to McGinnis's complaints about Rome. Could one imagine a No-Hands Restaurant in Rome, what with spaghetti and pork crackling and so forth? Did they have No-Hands brothels here as well? They almost certainly did. I wondered if they had a No-Hands bank. That would be a better idea.
I began to enjoy it. It was the feeling of interconnectedness, and the first realization that loneliness was not the right word to describe the farang's isolation in Bangkok. The farang is in reality not alone because Buddhists themselves seem not to believe in loneliness.
On the single TV screen, meanwhile, there appeared an image from a different universe: a mosque, in front of which a Thai Muslim stood being interviewed, a look of tense fury in his face. Then a road, a ruined house, burn marks along walls. A Thai army unit strolled through the main street of a village. A suddenly gathering unease in those images, with the sound turned off, the palms of the far south waving in a hurricane wind. Heads had been cut off in revenge attacks, as well as hands.
And there are times, too, when looking into the street you remember how recent all that commercial hedonism is. Bangkok made her fortune with the Vietnam War, for it was that war that made her into a pleasure capital. She was once surrounded by wars, dictatorships, Communist genocides, and she put herself forward as the slutty Cinderella of South Asian cities, the only one where there was order, pleasure, no-hands restaurants, and a capable branch of the CIA. And now there was a new war, but this time it was internal and therefore something of a secret. The Muslims in the South were beginning to stir.
Lek lowered rolls of guaytio noodles toward my lips, and I noticed that each mouthful was carefully watched by the other farangs gathered there. The men in the Arsenal shirts watched this manuever closely, licking their lips. For them, it was a pornography of servitude. They had a whole lexicon for these girls. LBFM, for example. "Little brown fucking machines." It was sometimes difficult to be in the same room as these people, over whom, I thought, these aristocratic women lorded it with a natural, supple superiority. They must have thought of the men as "big white fucking machines," and only the mutual bawdy humor saved them both from a very severe critique. Lek then said something interestingly chauvinistic.
"You European, you always put down your glass like this."
And she slammed down the beer glass at my table.
•
The Buddhist idea of the self is dependent on the doctrine of annata, which means "the absence of self." Nothing in the universe has isolated selfhood because nothing is truly alone. A mind arises only because it is entangled with other beings, and Buddhists call this web of connectedness "dependent arising."
It's a startling idea, that there is no self lodged inside one's nervous system. That there is only a web of things which causes everything to arise. The individual's life is a dream dominated by unconscious chain reactions. A man and a dog are not so different, feeling their ways through sex and thirst, summers and winters, old age and death. They both know suffering, that all-important Buddhist idea known as dukkha. They both have little to hope for.
As the Buddha put it, with his supple and disarming realism: "Look to your own salvation, and with diligence." It is the same prophet who, when asked what he was, answered modestly, and without any reference to a divine lineage, "I am awake."
But there is one objection to Buddhism which we cannot get over. If I do not believe in reincarnation, why struggle to achieve something—freedom from desire and suffering—which will happen anyway when I die? Won't that happen soon enough, and won't the annihilation be total, everlasting, and completely satisfactory? It's strange that no religion can accept the finality of death and plan accordingly—except Taoism.