Bangkok Noir

“Of course,” I said. I don’t know why, but I thought at that moment of what I’d read about the women in those poor African countries—São Tomé, the Central African Republic—who support their families by pretending to be other women at phone-sex centers. Purring down the international phone lines, as if they were in Croydon or Atlanta or somewhere, sighing and giving back false names, so they can go home and give their mothers enough money for food.

It’s degrading, people will tell you. It’s just colonialism in another form. It’s a way of keeping the poor poor, and exploiting the fact they’re in need. Maybe it is, but that wasn’t how it seemed just then. The girls were eager; they didn’t want to spend any longer waiting for someone who might be even worse than me. And the next thing I knew, they were leading me, one by each arm, down the little lane, past the booths and the fortune tellers and the girls in briefs, who were running a finger down a man’s shirt or underneath it to his skin. It was like walking through a stranger’s imagination.

We arrived a few minutes later at an unlit staircase and walked up into the dark. At the top we came to this musty aquarium of a place, with a string of lights along the walls. A man—a boy, really—was sitting at a cash register, eating something from a bowl and watching a television set that sat on the floor in a corner. With rabbit-ear antennae and a scratchy old black-and-white film on the small screen.

I suppose the girls had been here before (I call them girls because I don’t know what else to call them). They collected a key from the boy, and then the three of us walked, or straggled, down the corridor. There were pink lights above every door, no windows at the end. One of them turned the old-fashioned key and we walked into this room of wonders, really; she turned on a light, and we saw a television set, a drinks cabinet, a video player, a karaoke mike. There was a deep bathtub in the middle of the room. The other girl, the smaller one, pushed another button and the room shone red, then blue.

The taller girl went into the bathroom, and the small one began to unbutton her shirt.

“No,” I said, putting a hand on her arm. “Not now.”

She sat on the bed—she looked puzzled, even rejected—and a few seconds later, the taller girl came out, freshly showered, with some exotic perfume newly applied. She’d changed into a bathrobe, but she hadn’t done it up, so she walked across the room like someone from a James Bond film, her robe waiting to fall open.

“A thousand and one nights,” I said, rather foolishly, again, and they looked at one another, a little alarmed. I suppose they were wondering—worried—what would come next.

“You crazy guy,” said the tall one, pushing me onto the bed.

The other one, always more obliging, said, “No, shy. Same-same Japanese.”

“No,” I said. “I know what I want.”

They both looked at me, expectant. All three of us were on the bed now and the red light made us feel like X-rays or something not quite real.

“We tell each other stories. The stories of our lives.”

“You cheap Charlie!” said the tall one, guessing, I suppose, that this was some kind of trick. So I pulled out my red and purple notes and gave them a whole stash in advance.

They relaxed a little, and the smaller one said, “You want, we do.”

“My wish is your command,” I said emptily. The tall one—she was lying between us now, and her legs stretched almost to the end of the bed—said she’d always wanted to be a girl. She’d always felt incomplete somehow—a broken jug, she seemed to gesture—and when she’d been very young, she’d made a promise to herself that if she ever got the chance, she’d follow her dream right through. So she saved her money and came to the city, and made more money here, and—well, now she was what she’d always wanted to be. Her story had a happy ending.

The other one, sweeter—I liked her more—said something about a “Mama” and a child, and her promise to keep them healthy by going to the big city. She’d come here and found that men weren’t very much in demand in the City of Angels. A month’s wages for a construction worker’s job would give her pennies to send home. And she’d thought of her mother waiting, her promise, and then she’d decided to take a gamble.

There was a knock on the door then. I suppose our allotted time was up, and I called back, “We’ll pay for the whole night—tomorrow, too,” and there was the sound of receding footsteps. And the girl said she’d taken her gamble. She’d passed through the mirror, and now her mother had a new house; her daughter was at school.