“JACK, CAN YOU hear me?”
It was a man’s voice. Shepherd was pretty sure of that much at least.
“Are you okay, Jack?”
Slowly Shepherd opened his eyes. He struggled to make sense out of the flashing colors and flickering shapes that were all he could see.
“How many fingers?” the voice asked.
What the hell is this guy talking about?
Shepherd closed his eyes and then opened them again. That helped a little, but not much.
Finally a man’s face swam into focus. He was bending over and holding three fingers about a foot in front of Shepherd’s eyes. It took another moment or two, but then Shepherd worked out who the man was. He was a Canadian doctor who drank at the Duke. At least he said he was a doctor. In Bangkok, you could never be absolutely certain about claims like that. Still, to give the guy the benefit of the doubt, everybody called him Dr. Mike.
“How may fingers?” Dr. Mike repeated.
“Three.”
“What day is it?”
“Tuesday.”
“What city are you in?”
“Bangkok.”
“What were those people outside rioting about?”
“I don’t have any idea.”
Dr. Mike snapped his fingers and gave Shepherd a thumbs-up.
“Not a fucking thing wrong with you, boy,” he grinned.
Shepherd sat up gingerly. Looking around, he realized he was sitting on the floor at the Duke of Wellington.
“How did I get here?”
“Two cops carried you in,” Dr. Mike said. “I guess they figured the logical place to take a white guy in Bangkok is to the nearest bar.”
Shepherd would have nodded in agreement, but he couldn’t even imagine moving his head.
“You were lucky,” Dr. Mike added. “I just happened to be here.”
“That’s not luck. Where else would you be?”
Dr. Mike squatted back down and took a closer look at Shepherd.
“The skin’s not broken,” he said. He gently probed at the edges of the swelling. “But you’re going to look like you’ve got an egg stuck to your head for a few weeks.”
Dr. Mike methodically worked his way over the rest of Shepherd’s body checking for other damage. He didn’t find any until he came to Shepherd’s hands. He examined his scraped and battered palms carefully, twisting them first one way and then the other to catch the light.
“What the hell is this?” Dr. Mike asked.
“A swimming injury.”
Dr. Mike just nodded as if that made complete sense to him.
“I could put you in for a neurological work up,” he said, “but the local quacks would drive you crazy doing it and it probably wouldn’t be of much use anyway. Instead, I prescribe two large whiskeys and an hour at Titty Twister A-Go-Go and you’ll be right as rain.”
“Good enough, doc,” Shepherd said. “Help me up, huh?”
Mike stood up and Shepherd took his hands and pulled himself to his feet. A wave of dizziness briefly swept over him, but then the room resumed its customary place beneath his feet and he decided he was going to survive. A waitress rushed out from behind the bar, pushed a chair under him, and held out a large glass filled with what appeared to be whiskey. Shepherd accepted both the chair and the glass. He sat down. The chair was fine, but the glass turned out to be filled with ginger ale. He drank it anyway.
“How bad?” he asked Dr. Mike.
“Scrapes, bruises, and a minor concussion,” Mike said.
That was disappointing to Shepherd. As lousy as he felt, he figured he at least deserved a major concussion. Finding out it was only a minor concussion somehow diminished the worth of his suffering. Still, that wasn’t what he had been asking Mike about.
“I didn’t mean me,” he said and pointed toward Silom Road. “I meant out there. How bad is it out there?”
“Bad,” Dr. Mike said. “Really bad.”
“Casualties?”
“Some. It will be worse next time.”
Shepherd knew Mike was right. He had seen their faces as they tore into each other.
Dr. Mike went to the bar and came back with his own glass filled with amber-colored liquid. Shepherd was pretty certain it wasn’t ginger ale. Mike pulled up a chair and sat down beside him.
“What do you think is going to happen to this place, Jack?”
This time Shepherd did shake his head, although he did it carefully.
“Do you think foreigners are in any danger?”
Shepherd reached up slowly with one hand and pointed to the lump on his head.
“Good point,” Mike nodded. “You think the army will come in?”
“The army is in,” Shepherd said. “They’re just letting the red shirts do their fighting for them. It looks better that way.”
“The army’s killing Muslims in the south. Why not just kill the yellow shirts in Bangkok, too?”
“Because nobody in the whole world gives a shit about the Muslims in the south of Thailand. The army’s been burning and butchering them for years and nobody anywhere has noticed or cared. But if the Thai army starts shooting people in the shopping malls of Bangkok, all of a sudden they’re going to be the lead on CNN and the tourists will get scared and go someplace else.”
Mike nodded and Shepherd could see him thinking about what that might mean to him. He was right in the midst of an upheaval that was beginning to look very much like a civil war, and he wasn’t weighing the great principles of human rights and self-government that the talking heads on TV went on about. Instead, Shepherd figured Mike probably had a bag packed and a route to the airport mapped out, and he was thinking about how much longer he would risk getting his ass shot off before he decided to run.
“I’ve got to get to the hospital,” Dr. Mike said after a while and slugged back the rest of whatever was in his glass. For the sake of his patients, Shepherd really hoped it was ginger ale, but somehow he still doubted it.
“Don’t worry about me, Mike. I’m fine.”
“If the dizziness continues or if you have any feeling of nausea, I want you to call me right away. You hear? You got that?”
Automatically Shepherd started to nod, but he stopped when a wave of pain swept over him.
“Got it,” he murmured instead, keeping his head as still as he could. “Thanks, doc.”
Shepherd stayed in that chair for quite a while after Dr. Mike left, sipping his ginger ale and wondering what it was like out on Silom Road right then. As soon as he was certain he could walk to the door without falling down, he got up and went outside to find out.
In front of the Duke everything looked pretty much like it always looked in front of the Duke. It was as if Shepherd had dreamed everything. Silom Road was open and snarled with traffic as always. The street vendors were back clogging the sidewalks, too, and pedestrians were walking in the street to get around the vendors just as they always did.
The red- and yellow-shirted people were gone. Only a short time before, they had been beating on each other with metal poles, boards, folding chairs, golf clubs and anything else at hand that could be turned into a weapon. Now they had all simply vanished. In their place, office girls hurried back to work from their shopping breaks, tourists squinted at the fake antiques in shop windows, and the first wave of bar trash headed for the go-go bars of Patpong.
For a moment Shepherd felt dizzy again. There had been a riot right here, hadn’t there? It had really happened just like he remembered, hadn’t it? He pushed at the bump on his head and flinched as the pain shot through his scalp. Yes, of course it had.
If the mass of the Thai people has a genius for anything, and that is certainly a fit subject for spirited debate, it is a talent for living day to day no matter what happens around them. It isn’t a show of resilience exactly—at least not in the sense that the Israelis standing up to a barrage of Hezbollah rockets is resilience—it’s more like the repeated invocation of a widespread collective unconsciousness. Thais can turn a blind eye to even the unhappiest of events. The Thais are a people who, after all, mostly managed to ignore World War II. They probably looked at the invading Japanese army as only the latest wave of sex tourists to arrive on their shores, just a bunch of horny guys with money to spend, all of whom happened to be wearing identical outfits.
Shepherd thought back to the faces he had watched not very long ago right on this very street. Thai faces contorted with rage and twisted in hatred. And he wondered if this time it might be different, if this time all the collective unconsciousness in the world might not be enough. But now, standing there and looking at Silom Road and seeing how quickly it had returned to what passed locally for normal, he was starting to believe again that everything would be all right.
Nothing in Thailand ever really changed. Mai pen rai, loosely translated as ‘never mind,’ was practically the Thai national motto. Nothing dented the somnolence of Thais for very long.
***
SHEPHERD WALKED SLOWLY back to the Grand and took a shower. Then he turned on the television and sat on the bed naked and stared at it. There was a replay of a Knicks game on ESPN and he watched that for a while, then he switched over to CNN and let the collected anguish of the day slide past his eyes in an uninterrupted parade of miseries.
The Silom Road riot hadn’t even made the international news. Thailand seldom did, not unless another American pedophile on the lam had been caught there or an elephant polo match was filling out a slow news day. Charlie had been briefly turned into a media star by CNN, of course, but that was because he was a billionaire attacked by terrorists in Dubai, not because he had once been the prime minister of a country most Americans couldn’t find on a map.
About 9:00 P.M. Shepherd swallowed three aspirin, turned off the TV and the lights, and pulled the sheet up to his chin. At least now Charlie’s money was winging its way out of the country and the job he had come to Thailand to do was finished. Tomorrow he could go home to Hong Kong and leave the damned Thais to beat each other senseless if they really wanted to. Whether they did or not, it didn’t have a thing to do with him.
He told himself that over and over until it became a mantra as rhythmic and repetitious as the counting of sheep in a dreamland meadow. It wasn’t true, of course, and no matter how many times he said it he didn’t really believe it, but repeating it over and over did serve at least one beneficial purpose. It put him right to sleep.