Death in Bangkok

Fly Back to Asia in the late spring of 1992, leaving one City of Angels, which had just exorcised its evil spirits in an orgy of looting and flame, and arriving in another, where the blood demons are gathering on the horizon like monsoon clouds. My home city of Los Angeles had gone up in flames and insane looting the month before; Bangkok--known locally as Krung Thep, the City of Angels--is preparing to slaughter its children on the streets near the Democracy Monument.

All of this is irrelevant to me. I have my own blood score to settle.

The minute I step outside the air-conditioned vaults of Bangkok 's Don Muang International Airport, it all comes back to me: the heat, over 105°F, humidity as close to liquid air as atmosphere can get, the stink of carbon monoxide and industrial pollution and the open sewage of 10 million people turning the air into a cocktail thick enough to drink. The heat and the humidity and the intense tropical sunlight combine to make breathing a physical effort, like trying to inhale oxygen through a blanket moistened with kerosene. And the airport is 25 klicks from the center of town.

I feel myself stir and harden just to be there.

"Dr. Merrick?" says a Thai in chauffeur's livery.

I nod. A yellow Mercedes from the Oriental Hotel is waiting for me. There is no scenic way into Bangkok today unless one were to ride a sampan upriver into the heart of the city. The commute into the old section of Bangkok now is pure capitalist madness: traffic jams, Asian palaces that are really shopping malls, industrial clutter, new elevated expressways, ferroconcrete apartment towers, billboards hawking Japanese electronics, the roar of motorcycles and the constant arc-flash and jackhammer-thud of new construction. As is the case with all of Asia's new megalopolises, Bangkok is tearing itself down and rebuilding itself daily in a frenzy that makes Western cities such as New York look as permanent as the pyramids.

I catch a glimpse of Silom Road, jammed with people but looking empty and lethargic compared with its usual crush of manic crowds. I glance at my watch. It is eight P.M. on a Friday night Los Angeles time; 11 o'clock Saturday morning here in Bangkok. Silom Road is resting, waiting for the evening excitement that emanates from the Patpong entertainment district like the scent of a bitch in heat--an urgent scent like a subtle blend of exotic perfume and the Clorox tang of semen and the coppery taste of blood.

I hurry through the courteous greetings and the bowed wais and the gracious registerings of the Oriental Hotel, perhaps the world's finest hotel, wanting only to get to my suite and shower and feign sleep, to lie there and stare at the teak-and-plaster ceiling until the sunlight fades and the night begins. Darkness will bring this particular City of Angels alive, or at least stir the corpse of it into slow, erotic motion.

When it is well and truly dark, I rise, dress in my Bangkok street clothes and go out into the night.

•

The first time I saw Bangkok had been 22 years earlier, in May 1970. Tres and I had chosen Bangkok as our destination for the seven days of out-of-country R&R we had coming to us. Actually, I don't know many grunts who called it R&R back then. Many called it I&I: intercourse and intoxication. Married officers used their leave to meet wives in Hawaii, but for the rest of us the Army offered a smorgasbord of destinations ranging from Tokyo to Sydney. A lot of us chose Bangkok for four reasons: (1) it was easy to get to and didn't use up a lot of our time in travel, (2) the cheap sex, (3) the cheap sex and (4) the cheap sex.

To tell the truth, Tres had chosen Bangkok for other reasons, and I followed along trusting in his judgment, much the way I did when we were out on a long-range reconnaissance patrol. Tres--Robert William Tindale III--was only about a year older than I was, but he was taller, stronger, smarter and infinitely better educated. I'd dropped out of my Midwestern college in my junior year and rattled around until the draft sucked me in. Tres had graduated from Kenyon College with honors and then enlisted in the infantry rather than go on to graduate school. His nickname came from the Spanish word for three and was pronounced tray. Most of us had been given nicknames in the platoon--mine was Prick because of the heavy PRC-25 radio I'd carried around during my short stint as a radiotelephone operator--but Tres came to us with his nickname in place.

Tres had a deep interest in Asian cultures and was good at languages. He was the only grunt in the company who could speak any real Vietnamese. Most of us thought that beaucoup was Vietnamese and felt clever to know di di mau and half a dozen other corrupted local phrases. Tres spoke Vietnamese, though he kept that fact from reaching any officer other than our own LTC. "I wouldn't let them make me a typist or officer,'"he used to say to me. "I'll be goddamned if I'll let them turn me into some pissant interrogator."

Tres had never studied the Thai language but he learned quickly.

"Just tell me what the Thai word is for blow job," I'd said to him during the MAC flight from Saigon to Bangkok.

"I don't know," said Tres. "But the phrase for hand job is shak wao."

"No shit," I'd said.

"No shit," said Tres. He was reading a book and didn't look up. "It means 'pulling on the kite string.'"

I thought about that image for a minute. The transport was losing altitude, jouncing through clouds toward Bangkok. "I think I'll hold out for a blow job," I said. I was not quite 20 years old and had experienced oral sex only once, with a college girlfriend who had obviously never tried it before, either. But I was full of hormones and macho posturing I'd picked up from the platoon, not to mention the sheer adrenaline rush of being alive after six months in the boonies. "Definitely a blow job," I said.

Tres had grunted and kept reading. It was a dusty book about Thai customs or mythology or religion or something.

I realize now that if I'd known what he was reading about and why he had chosen Bangkok, I probably wouldn't have stepped off the plane.

•

The floor valet, elevator doorman, concierge and main doormen of the Oriental do not raise eyebrows at my wrinkled chinos and stained photographer's vest. At 350 American dollars a night, their guests can wear whatever they want. The concierge does, however, step out to talk to me before I leave the air-conditioned sanity of the hotel.

"Dr. Merrick," he says softly, "you are aware of the...ah...tensions that exist in Bangkok at the current time?"

I nod. "The student riots? The military crackdown?"

The concierge smiles and bows slightly, obviously grateful for not having to educate the farang in what seems an embarrassing topic to him. "Yes, sir. I mention it only because, while the problems have been concentrated near the university and the Grand Palace, there have been, ah, disturbances on Silom Road."

I nod again. "But there's no curfew yet," I say. "Patpong is still open."

The concierge smiles with no hint of a leer. "Oh, yes, sir. Patpong and the nightclubs are open for business. The city is very much open."

It is not hard to recognize when I get there. The narrow streets connecting Silom and Suriwong roads are awash with cheap neon signs: Marvelous massage, pussy galore, baby a-go-go, super-girl live sex shows, pussy alive! and a score of others. The lanes of Patpong are narrow enough to be pedestrian-only, but the roar of the three-wheeled tuk-tuks in the boulevards beyond provides a constant background to the rock-and-roll music that is blaring from speakers and open doors.

Young men or women--sometimes it is hard to tell in androgynous Thailand--begin plucking at my sleeve and gesturing toward doorways the moment I turn onto the lane called Patpong One.

"Mister, best live sex shows, best pussy shows."

"Hey, Mister, this way prettiest girls, best prices."

"Want to see nicest shave pussy? Meet nice girl?"

"You want girls? No? You want boys?"

I stroll on, ignoring the gentle tugs at my sleeve. The last query had come as I entered the lane called Patpong Two. The night zone is divided into three areas: Patpong One serves straights, Patpong Two offers delights to both straights and gays and Patpong Three is all gay. The majority of the action here on Patpong Two is still for heterosexuals, though most of the bars have smiling boys as well as girls.

I pause in front of a bar called Pussy Delite. A little man with one arm and a face turned blue by the flickering neon steps forward and hands me a long plastic card. "Pussy menu?" he says, his voice the epitome of an upscale maître d's.

I take the grubby plastic card and study it: Pussy bananas, pussy coca-cola, pussy chopsticks, pussy razor blades, pussy smoking.

Nodding, I start into the busy nightclub. The one-armed maître d' hurries forward and retrieves his card.

The club is small and smoky, with four bars set in a square around a crude stage. The girl on the stage--she looks no more than 16 or 17--is arched backward so that the top of her head almost touches the rough wood of the stage, her legs and arms supporting her in a crablike backbend. She is naked; her crotch has been shaved. Colored lights shaft down through the smoke and fall on her like soft lasers. The center of the stage is a turntable, and the girl holds the arched position while her body rotates so that everyone can see her exposed genitals. A lighted cigarette has been set between her labia. As the stage revolves toward each section of the bar, smoke puffs from her vulva as if she is exhaling. Occasionally, one of the drunker patrons applauds.

Most of the men in the bar are Thai, but there are plenty of farang scattered around: arrogant Germans in khaki with their hair slicked back, beaky Brits paying more attention to their drinks than to the girl on the stage, an occasional frowning Chinese from Hong Kong squinting through glasses and a few fat Americans with untouched drinks and protruding eyes.

I move up to the big bar and take an empty stool. The girl's upside-down face revolves past three feet from me. Her eyes are open but unfocused. Her small breasts seem little more than swellings. I can count her ribs.

A young Thai woman slides close, her left breast touching my bare forearm through her thin cotton tank top. Although she is no older than the girl whose genitals rotate our way, she looks older because of the heavy makeup that glows a necrotic color in the shifting blue light. "My name Nok," she shouts over the rock and roll. "What your name?"

She is so close that I can smell her sweet talcum-and-perspiration scent through the cigarette smoke. Thai are among the cleanest people in the world, bathing several times a day. Ignoring her question, I say, "Nok means bird. Are you a bird, Nok?"

Her eyes widen. "Do you speak Thai?" she asks in Thai.

I show no comprehension. "Are you a bird, Nok?" I ask again.

She sighs and says in English, "Yes, I a thirsty bird. Buy me drink?"

I nod and the bartender is there a fraction of a second later, pouring her the most expensive "whiskey" in the place. It is 98 percent tea, of course.

(continued on page 152)Death in Bangkok(Continued from page 78)

"You from States?" she asks, a bit of animation coming into her dark eyes. "I like States very much."

I brush her long hair out of her eyes and sip my beer. "If you're a bird," I say, "are you a khai long?" The phrase means "little lost chicken" but is often applied to street girls in Bangkok.

Nok pulls her head back and folds her arms as if I have slapped her. She starts to turn away but I grip her thin arm and pull her back against me. "Finish your whiskey," I say.

Nok pouts but sips the tea. We watch her friend on the stage as the girl's hairless vulva rotates our way again. The cigarette has burned down to the exposed labia. Sipping my beer, I marvel--not for the first time--at how human beings can turn the most intimate sights into the most grotesque. At the last second before the cigarette would burn her, the girl reaches down, retrieves it, takes a drag on it with the appropriate lips, tosses it between the stage and the bar and wriggles out of her yoga backbend. Only one or two of the men along the bar applaud. The girl bounces offstage and an older Thai woman, also naked, steps onto the revolving platform, squats and fans four double-edged razor blades for the audience's approval.

I turn back to Nok. "I'm sorry I hurt your feelings," I say. "You are a very pretty bird. Would you like to help me have fun tonight?"

Nok forces a smile. "I love to make you fun tonight." She pretends to frown as if she had just thought of something. "But Mr. Diang"--she nods toward a thin Thai man with dyed red hair who stands in the shadows--"he be very mad at Nok if Nok not work all shift. Him I must pay if I go to make fun."

I nod and take out the thick roll of baht I had changed dollars for at the airport. "I understand," I say, peeling off four 500 baht bills--almost $80. Even the highest-class bar whores in Bangkok used to charge only 200 or 300 baht, but the government ruined that a few years ago by bringing out a 500-baht note. It seemed cheap to ask for change, so now most girls charge 500 for the act, with another 500 to pay their Mr. Diangs.

She glances toward the old man with red hair and he nods ever so slightly. Nok smiles at me. "Yes, I have place for much fun."

I pull the money back. "I thought we might try to find someone to have fun with," I say over the blasting rock and roll. In the corner of my vision I can see the woman onstage inserting the blades.

Nok makes a face. Sharing the evening with other girls will cut down on her profit. "Sakha bue din," she says softly. I smile quizzically and ask, "What does that mean?"

"It means you have enough fun just with Nok, who love you very much," she says, smiling again.

Actually, the phrase is short for a northern village saying that goes "Your cock is on the ground, I tread on it like a snake." I smile my appreciation at her kindness.

"This money would be just for you, of course," I say, setting the 2000 baht closer to her hand. "There would be more if we find exactly the right girl."

Smiling more broadly now, Nok squints at me. "You have girl in mind? Someone you know or someone I find? Good friend who also love you much?"

"Someone I know of," I say, taking a breath. "Have you heard of a woman named Mara? Or perhaps her daughter, Tanha?"

Nok freezes and for an instant she is a bird--a frightened, captured bird. She tries to pull away but I still hold her arm.

"Na!" she cries in a little girl's voice. "Na, na--"

"There's more money," I begin, sliding the baht toward her.

"Na!" cries Nok, tears in her eyes.

Mr. Diang takes a quick step forward and nods to two huge Thai near the door. The men cut through the crowd toward us like sharks through shallow water.

I let go of Nok's arm and she slips away through the crowd. I hold both hands up, palms out, and the bouncers stop five paces from me. The old man with the red hair tilts his head toward the door and I nod my willingness to go.

There are other places on my list. Someone's love of money will be greater than their fear of Mara. Perhaps.

•

Twenty-two years earlier, Patpong had existed but American grunts could not afford it. The Thai government and the U.S. Army had cobbled together a red-light district of cheap bars, cheaper hotels and massage parlors on New Petchburi Road, miles from the more businesslike Patpong.

During the first day and night in Bangkok with Tres, I discovered what a no-hands bar was. The food was lousy and the booze was overpriced, but the novelty of having the girls feed us and lift the glasses to our lips was memorable. Between feeding us bites and sips, they cooed and winked and ran long-nailed fingers up the insides of our thighs. It was hard to reconcile all of this with the fact that 24 hours earlier we had been humping our rucks up the red-clay jungle hillsides of the A Shau Valley.

At any rate, we drank and whored our way through the red-light district for 48 hours. Tres and I had taken separate rooms so that we could bring back girls, and this we did. The cost then for an evening of sexual favors was less than what I would have paid for a case of cold beer from the fire-base PX--and that wasn't much. A T-shirt or a pair of jeans given to our little girls would pay for a week's worth of mia chaos, or "hired wives." They'd not only screw or give head on command but also wash our clothes and tidy up the hotel rooms while we were out looking for other girls.

You have to remember that this was in 1970. AIDS wasn't even dreamed of then. Oh, the Army had made us take rubbers along and watch half a dozen films warning us about venereal diseases, but the biggest threat to our health was Saigon Rose, a tough strain of syphilis brought into the country by GIs. Still and all, our girls were so young and stupid, I realize now, that they didn't even ask us to wear rubbers. Perhaps they thought that having a child by a farang was good luck or would somehow miraculously get them to the States. I don't know. I didn't ask.

But four days into our seven days of R&R, even the attraction of cheap Thai marijuana and cheaper sex was paling a bit. I was doing it because Ties was doing it; following his lead had become a form of survival for me in the boonies.

But Tres wanted something else. And I followed.

"I've found out about something cool," he said early on the evening of our fourth night in the city. "Really cool."

I nodded. Tang, my little mia chao, had been pouting that she wanted to go out to dinner, but I'd ignored her and gone down to meet Tres in the bar when he called.

"It's going to take some money," said Tres. "How much do you have?"

I fumbled in my wallet. Tang and I had been smoking some Thai sticks in the room, and things were a bit luminescent and off-center for me. "Couple hundred baht," I said.

Tres shook his head. "This is going to take dollars," he said. "Maybe four or five hundred."

I goggled at him. We hadn't spent a fraction of that during our entire R&R so far. Nothing in Bangkok cost more than a couple of bucks.

"This is special," he said. "Really special. Didn't you tell me that you were bringing along the three hundred bucks your uncle sent you?"

I nodded dumbly. The money was stuffed in a sneaker in the bottom of my duffel upstairs. "I wanted to buy my ma something special," I said. "Silk or a kimono or something...." I trailed off lamely. Tres smiled. "You'll like this better than a kimono for your mom. Get the money. Hurry."

I hurried. When I got downstairs there was a young Thai man waiting at the door with Tres. "Johnny," Tres said, "this is Maladung. Maladung, this is Johnny Merrick. We call him the Prick in the platoon."

Maladung smirked at me.

Before I could explain that a PRC-25 radio was called a prick-25 and that I'd humped it around for a month and a half before they found a bigger RTO, Maladung had nodded at us and led the way out into the night. We took a tuk-tuk down to the river. Technically, the broad river that flowed all the way from the Himalayas to bisect the heart of old Bangkok was called the Chao Phraya, but all I ever heard the locals call it was Mae Nam, or "the River."

We stepped out onto the darkened pier, and Maladung snapped some words at a man who stood on a long, narrow boat that was a mere shadow beneath the pier. The man answered something and Tres said, "Give me a hundred-baht note, Johnny."

Tres paid Maladung, who waved us into the bow of the narrow boat. I know now that these small boats are called "long-tailed taxis" and are for hire by the hundreds. They get their name from the long propeller shaft that has a full-sized automobile engine mounted on it. I noticed that night that the shaft was so well counterbalanced that our driver could lift the prop out of the water with one hand, the heavy engine seemingly weightless in the center.

Bangkok is a city of small canals, or klongs. We headed downriver past the lights of the Oriental Hotel, a place Tres and I had heard of but could never dream of affording, and passed under a busy highway bridge. Our long-tailed taxi darted in front of a huge ferry with a roar of its V6 engine, crossed toward the west bank and then turned into a klong no wider than one of the narrow sois in the Patpong district. The little canal was pitch dark except for the weak glow of lantern light from the tied-up sampans and the overhanging shacks. Our driver had lighted his own red lantern and hung it from a stanchion near the stern, but I had no idea how other boats avoided colliding with us as we roared around blind turns and under low bridges. Sometimes I was sure that the canvas roof of our taxi was going to hit the underside of the sagging bridges, but even as Tres and I ducked we cleared the rotting timbers with inches to spare. The few other water taxis roared past us like noisy wraiths, their wakes slapping across our bow and splashing our knees. I looked at Tres as we passed a dimly lighted sampan, and his eyes were wild. He was grinning broadly.

For half an hour or more we twisted our way through these narrow one-way klongs. The stink of sewage was so strong that my eyes watered. Several times I heard voices coming from the lightless and listing sampans that lined the canal like so many waterlogged wrecks.

"People live in those," I whispered to Tres as we passed a blackened mass where tumbledown shacks and half-sunken sampans had narrowed the klong to the point that our suicidal driver had been forced to slow the boat to a crawl. Tres did not answer.

Just when I was sure that the driver had become lost in the maze of canals, we came into an open area of water bounded by abandoned warehouses on stilts and the backs of burned-out shacks. The effect was of a large floating courtyard hidden from the city's streets and public canals. Several barges and black sampans were tied up in the center of this watery square, and I could see the dim running lanterns of several other long-tailed taxis that were tied up to the nearest sampan.

The driver cut the engine and we glided to the makeshift dock in a silence so sudden that it made my ears ache.

I had just realized that the dock was only a float made of oil drums and planks lashed to the sampan when two men stepped out through a ragged hole in the canvas side of the boat and stood balancing on the planks, watching us bump to a stop. Even in the dark I could tell that they were built like wrestlers or bouncers. The closer of the two barked something at us in Thai.

Maladung answered and one of them took our bowline while the other stood aside to let us climb onto the small space. I stepped off the taxi first, saw a faint glow of lantern light through the ragged opening and was about to step through when one of the men touched my chest with three fingers that seemed stronger than my entire arm.

"Must pay first," hissed Maladung from his place on the taxi.

Pay for what? I wanted to ask, but Tres leaned close and whispered, "Give me your three hundred bucks, Johnny."

My uncle had sent me the money in crisp fifties. I gave them to Tres, who handed two bills to Maladung and the other four to the closest man on the dock.

The men stepped aside and gestured me toward the opening. I had just bent to fit through the low doorway when I was startled by the sound of our boat's engine roaring to life. I straightened up in time to see the red lantern disappearing down a narrow klong.

"Shit," I said. "Now how do we get back?"

Tres's voice was tight with something greater than tension. "We'll worry about that later," he said. "Go on."

I looked at the ragged doorway that seemed to open to a corridor connecting the series of sampans and barges. Strong smells came from it and there was a muted sound like a large animal breathing somewhere at the end of that tunnel.

"Do we really want to do this?" I whispered to Tres. The two Thai men on the dock were as inanimate as those statues of Chinese lion-dogs that guard the entrances to important buildings throughout Asia. "Tres?" I said.

"Yes," he said. "Come on." He pushed past me and squeezed through the opening. Used to following his lead on patrol and night ambush and LRRP, I lowered my head and followed.

•

I am watching a live sex show at Pussy Galore when four Thai men surround me. The sex show is typical for Bangkok: a young couple screwing on twin Harley-Davidsons hanging from wires above the central stage. The two have been engaged in intercourse for more than ten minutes. Their faces show no feigned passion, but their bodies are expert at revealing their coupling to every corner of the bar. The audience seems to find the primary tension not in the fucking but in the chance that the two might fall off the suspended motorcycles.

I am ignoring the show, interrogating a bar girl named Lah, when the Thai shove in around me. Lah fades into the crowd. It is dark in the bar, but the four men wear sunglasses. I take a sip of flat beer and say nothing as they press closer.

"You are named Merrick?" asks the shortest. His face is ax-blade thin and is pockmarked with acne or smallpox scars.

I nod.

The pockmarked man takes a step closer. "You have been asking about a woman named Mara?"

"Yes."

"Come," he says. I make no resistance, and the five of us move out of the bar in a flying wedge. Outside, a gap opens a bit between the burly men on my left, and I can make a run for it if I choose. I do not so choose. A dark limousine is parked at the head of the lane, and the man on my right opens the rear door. As he does, I see the pearl-handled grip of a revolver tucked into his waistband.

I get in the backseat. The two tallest men sit on either side of me. I watch as the pockmarked man moves to the front passenger seat and the man with the revolver settles himself behind the wheel. The limo moves off through side streets. I know that it is sometime after three A.M., but the sois are still strangely empty this close to Patpong. At first I can tell we are moving north, parallel to the river, but then I lose all sense of direction in the maze of narrow side streets. Only the darkened signs in Chinese let me know that we're in the area north of Patpong known as Chinatown.

"Avoid Sanam Luang and Ratchadamnoen Klang," the pockmarked man says to the driver in Thai. "The army is shooting protesters tonight."

I glance to my right and see the orange glow of flames above rooftops. The distant, almost soft rattle and pop of small-arms fire can be heard over the hiss of the car's air conditioner.

We stop in an area of abandoned buildings. There are no streetlights here and only the orange glow of flames reflected from low clouds allows me to see where the street ends in vacant lots and half-demolished warehouses. I can smell the river somewhere out there in the darkness.

The pockmarked man turns and nods. The Thai on my right opens the door and pulls me out by my vest. The driver stays in the car while the other three drag me deep into the shadows near the river.

I start to speak just as the man behind me laces his fingers through my hair and pulls my head sharply back. The third man grabs my arms as the man holding my hair lifts a stiletto blade to my throat. The pockmarked face suddenly looms so close that I can smell fish and beer on the man's breath.

"Why do you ask about a woman named Mara with a daughter named Tanha?" he asks in Thai.

I blink my incomprehension. The blade draws blood just below my Adam's apple. My head is pulled so far back that I find it almost impossible to breathe.

"Why do you ask about a woman named Mara with a daughter named Tanha?" he asks again in English.

My words are little more than a rasping gargle. "I have something for them." I try to free my right hand but the third man restrains my wrist.

"Inside left pocket," I manage.

The pockmarked man hesitates only a second before tearing open my vest and feeling for the hidden pocket there. He brings out 20 bills.

I can smell his breath on my face again as he laughs softly. "Twenty thousand dollars? Mara does not need twenty thousand dollars. There is no Mara," he concludes in English. In Thai, he says to the man with the knife, "Kill him."

They have done this before. The first man bends my head farther back, the other man pulls my arms down sharply while the pockmarked man steps back, fastidiously getting out of the way of the arterial spray that is coming. In that second before the knife slashes my throat, I gasp out two words. "Look again."

I feel the tension increase in the knife wielder's hand and arm as the blade cuts deeper, but the pockmarked man holds up one hand in command. The blade has drawn enough blood to soak the collar of my shirt and vest, but it goes no deeper. The short man holds a bill high, squints at it in the dim light and then flicks a cigarette lighter into flame. He mutters under his breath.

"What?" says the third man in Thai.

The pockmarked man answers in the same language. "It is a ten-thousand-dollar bearer's bond. They are all ten-thousand-dollar bonds. Twenty of them."

The other two hiss their breath.

"There is more," I say in Thai. "Much more. But I must see Mara."

We stand there motionless for at least a full minute before the pockmarked man grunts something, the blade is lowered, my hair is released and we walk back to the waiting limousine.

•

I followed Tres through the tunnel carved through the arched canvas roofs of sampans.

Several Thai men glanced at us as we stepped into the covered barge, and then they looked again, obviously surprised that farang were allowed there. But then their attention was drawn back to the makeshift stage in the center of the barge. I stood there blinking, peering through the heavy cloud of cigarette and marijuana smoke. The stage was no more than 6'x4', illuminated only by two hissing lanterns hanging from overhead trusses. It was empty except for two women performing cunnilingus on each other. Crude benches ran four deep around the stage and the 20 or so Thai men there were little more than dark shapes in the haze of smoke.

"What--" I began, but Tres hushed me and led the way to an empty bench to our left. The women on the stage were joined by two thin Thai men, boys, actually, who ignored the females as they caressed each other into an excited state.

I was tired of being hushed. I leaned closer to Tres and said, "Why the hell did we have to pay 300 American dollars for this when we can watch it for a couple of bucks in any bar on New Petchburi Road?"

Tres just shook his head. "This is just the preliminary stuff, Johnny," he whispered. "Warm-up acts. We paid for the main event."

A couple of men in front of us had turned and frowned, as if we were making too much noise in a movie theater. On the stage, the two boys had finished their preparations and had become involved with the young women as well as with each other. The combinations were complicated.

I sat and crossed my legs. We didn't wear underwear in Nam because it caused crotch rot, and like a lot of grunts I'd gotten out of the habit of wearing it even while in civilian clothes on R&R. I wished I'd pulled on some shorts under my light cotton slacks that night. It seemed bad form to have a visible hard-on around all these other men.

The four young people on the stage explored combinations for another ten minutes or so. When they came--almost at once--the women might have faked it, but there was no doubt that the men's orgasms were sincere. One of the Thai girls caught some semen on her breasts, while the other girl spread the second boy's jism on the buttocks of the first boy. The bisexual stuff disturbed me and excited me at the same time. I didn't understand myself well then.

Finished, the four young people simply stood and exited through a tunnel door in the far wall. The patrons did not applaud. The stage was empty for several minutes, but then a short Thai man dressed in a black silk shirt and trousers stepped onto the stage and said something in low, serious tones. I caught the word Mara twice. There was a sudden tension in the room.

"What did he--" I began.

"Shhh," said Tres, his eyes riveted on the stage.

"Fuck that," I said. I'd paid for this crap, I deserved to know what I was getting for my money. "What's a Mara?"

Tres sighed. "Mara is phanyaa mahn, Johnny. The prince of demons. He sent his three daughters--Aradi, discontent; Tanha, desire; and Raka, love--to tempt the Buddha. But the Buddha won."

I squinted through smoke at the empty stage and slowly swinging lantern. "So Mara's a man?"

Tres shook his head. "Not when the spirit of the phanyaa mahn combines with the naga in a demon-human incarnation," he said.

I stared at Tres. We'd each smoked some good shit since we arrived in Bangkok--the Thai stick was almost free here--but Tres had obviously been doing more than was good for him. He noticed my stare and smiled slightly. "Mara's the part of the world that dies, Johnny ... the death principle. The thing we fear more than Charlie when we're out on night patrol. Naga is sort of a snake god that's associated with water. The river. It can take or give life. When the spirit of the naga is given to someone possessed by the power of the phanyaa mahn--Mara--the demon thing can be male or female. But what we paid to see was a female Mara that's supposed to be phanyaa mahn naga kio. That doesn't happen once in ten thousand incarnations."

"What's a kio?" I whispered. I had the sinking feeling that I'd blown 300 bucks on nothing.

"A kio is a ... shhh," hissed Tres, pointing to the stage.

A woman came out onto the stage. She was dressed in traditional Thai silk and was carrying a baby. Her face was sharp, almost masculine, and her hair was a nimbus of tangled black. She was older than the sex performers we had seen earlier but still not much more than 20. The baby mewled and tugged at the silk over the woman's small breasts. I realized that the Thai men in the room were bowing slightly from where they sat. Some were making the traditional palms-together wai of obeisance. It seemed an odd thing to be doing toward a sex performer. I frowned at Tres but he was waiing, too. I shook my head and looked back at the stage. Most of the men had put out their cigarettes, but there was so much smoke in the barge that it was like peering through a fog.

The woman had gone to her knees on the stage. The baby hung limp in her arms. The man in black silk came onto the stage and said something in low, flat tones.

There was a long silence. Finally, a fat Thai in the front row stood, turned to look once at the crowd and then stepped onto the stage. There was a general expulsion of breath, and I could feel the tension in the room shift focus, if not actually lessen.

"What?" I whispered.

Tres shook his head and pointed. The fat man was handing over a thick roll of baht to the man in black silk.

As if on cue, the two young women we'd seen earlier came back out. They were dressed in some sort of ceremonial garb that I associated with a formal Thai dance I'd seen photos of. Each wore a tall, peaked hat, weird shoulders and a blouse and pants of gold silk. I began to wonder if I'd paid $300 to see four people have sex with their clothes on.

The two boys came onto the stage wearing costumes of their own and carrying an ornate chair. I was afraid we were going to get into more of the gay and lesbian stuff, but the boys merely set the chair down and disappeared. The two girls began to undress the fat man while the woman named Mara stared out at nothing, paying no attention to the man, his attendants or the crowd.

Having undressed the patron in an almost ritualistic manner and folded his clothes away, the girls pushed him back into the chair. I could see sweat beading the man's upper lip and chest. His legs appeared to be shaking slightly. If he had paid for some sort of erotic service, he certainly didn't seem to be in the mood for it. The guy's cock was shriveled to almost nothing and his scrotum looked like it had shrunk to walnut size.

The girls bent over and began to work on him with their hands and mouths. It took a while, but they were very good and within a few minutes the fat man's cock was hard and lifted high enough that the glans almost touched his belly. Meanwhile, Mara was still staring out at nothing, the baby wiggling slightly in her arms. The woman seemed disinterested to the point of catatonia.

My heart began to pound. I was afraid that they were going to do something to the baby, and the thought made me physically sick. If Tres had known that there would be an infant involved--

I glanced at him but he was looking at Mara with an expression of what might have been a mixture of fear and scholarly interest. I shook my head. This was weird shit.

The two girls left. The stage was empty except for the seated fat man with his modest erection and the woman with her child. Slowly Mara turned toward him and a trick of the lantern light made her eyes gleam almost yellow. It suddenly seemed too quiet in the barge, as if everyone had stopped breathing.

Mara stood, took three steps toward the man and then went to her knees again. She was far enough away that she had to bend forward just to set her hand on his thigh. I noticed that her fingernails were very red and very long. The fat man's erection began to visibly flag at that point and I could see his balls rising again as if they wanted to hide in the protection of his body.

Mara seemed to smile at the sight. She leaned forward, still cradling the infant, and opened her mouth.

I expected oral sex then, but her head never came closer than 18 inches to the man's genitals. Instead, her tongue slid out from between sharp and perfectly white teeth until it arched to a point where it could touch her own chin. The fat man's eyes were very wide now, and I could see his arms and belly quaking slightly. His erection had returned.

Mara shifted her head, shook it as if loosening her neck, and her tongue continued to glide out. Six inches of it. Then eight. A foot of fleshy tongue sliding out of her open mouth like a pink adder uncoiling from its dark nest.

When 18 or 20 inches of thick tongue had slid into sight, draped across the fat man's thigh, and begun to wrap itself around his cock, I tried to swallow and found I could not. I tried to close my eyes and found that my eyelids refused to close. Mouth open, breathing harshly, I just watched.

Mara's tongue slid around the head of the man's uncircumcised cock, pulling down the foreskin as it went. The lantern light reflected off the pink moistness of that tongue and glistened where it had lubricated the man's erection.

More tongue uncoiled, the tip of it spiraling down and around like the probing head of a wide-bodied serpent. The fat man closed his eyes just as the long tongue completely encircled his shaft, the narrow tip of that fleshy ribbon swaying and bobbing toward his tightened testicles. Mara's lashes were also lowered, but I could see the glimmer of white and yellow under the heavy eyelids as the man's hips began to move.

The sight of that moist tongue in the yellow lantern light was terrible--nauseating--but it was not the worst. The worst was the glimpse I had caught of the lesions on that tongue: openings, oblong slits, in the fleshy inner part of the tongue as if someone had taken a very sharp scalpel and made a series of bloodless, centimeter-long incisions.

But these were not incisions. Even in the weak light I could see the fleshy openings pulse open and close of their own volition, like the feeding mouths of some hungry anemone surging in a soft tidal current. Then the tongue wrapped more tightly around the man's straining penis, and I could see the almost peristaltic contractions as the ribbon of pinkish flesh pulled and tightened, tightened and pulled. Mara closed her lips, pulled her head back like a fisherman with a hook deeply embedded, and the fat man moaned in ecstasy. He gripped the arms of the chair and pumped his hips more wildly, eyes half open but obviously seeing nothing but the red surge of his own pleasure.

Mara's tongue wrapped in tighter coils and continued to tug and flex. The fat man's face grew redder as he continued to pump his hips. His eyes were still open, but only the whites showed now. The head of his cock, just visible in the lantern light, seemed engorged to the point of bursting. A thick coil of tongue slid across it and around it.

The man went into what I now know are the final stages of ejaculatory response: muscle spasms, loss of voluntary control of facial muscles, respiratory rates exceeding 40 breaths per minute, massive body flush and a frenzied pumping of hips. If someone had taken his pulse, they would have found his heart rate climbing to somewhere between 100 and 175 beats per minute. His systolic pressure would be shooting up by close to 80mm Hg while his diastolic had to be elevated by around 40mm Hg or higher. In those days I just thought of it as coming.

Mara's head lowered as if she were reeling in her extended tongue. Her eyes were open now and very yellow. Eight or more inches of tongue were still wrapped around the man's thrusting cock as Mara lowered her red-lipped mouth to his groin.

The Thai man continued to writhe in the throes of orgasm. There was not a sound from the 20 or so men in the smoke-filled room. The man's groans were the only noise. His orgasm went on and on, far beyond the time it takes for any male to ejaculate. Mara's distended face rose and fell, and each time it rose we could see the tongue wrapped tightly around the man's still-rigid member.

"Jesus Christ," I whispered.

I know now that resolution-phase penile detumescence is rapid and involuntary. Within seconds of expelling seminal fluid, the penis begins a two-stage involution that begins with loss of about 50 percent of the erection in the first 30 seconds. Even when some vasocongestion remains--"keeping a hard-on," I would have called it in my Nam days--it is not, cannot be, a full pre-ejaculatory erection.

This Thai still had a full hard-on. We could see it every time Mara's mouth lifted above her coiled tongue. The Thai seemed to have succumbed to an epileptic fit: His legs and arms thrashed wildly, his eyes had rolled back in his head, his mouth was open and drool ran down his chin and jowls. He kept coming and coming. Minutes passed--five, ten. I rubbed a hand across my face and my palm came away greasy with sweat. Tres was breathing through his mouth and staring with an expression suggesting horror.

Finally, Mara pulled her mouth away. Her tongue unwrapped itself from the Thai's cock and slid back between her lips as if it were on a tension reel. The Thai let out a final groan and slid out of the chair; his erect penis was still thrusting into empty air.

"Christ Almighty," I whispered to myself, relieved that it was over.

It was not over.

Mara's lips looked swollen, her cheeks as puffed out as they had been a second before. I had a momentary image of her mouth and cheeks filled with the huge, coiled tongue and I almost lost my lunch right there in the smoke-filled darkness.

Mara pulled her head back farther and I noticed that her rouged lips seemed to be growing redder, as if she had some how managed to apply a thick layer of glossy lipstick while performing oral sex. Then her mouth opened a bit more and the red slid down off her lips, dribbled across her chin and spilled onto her gold silk blouse.

Blood. I realized that her cheeks and mouth were filled with blood; her obscene tongue was gorged with blood. She choked it back and something like a smile filled her sharp features.

I fought back the nausea, lowered my head and thought: It's over now. It's over.

It was not over.

The baby had been cradled in her left arm during the endless fellatio, hidden from sight by Mara's head and the fat man's thigh. But now the infant was visible as its small arms clawed at Mara's blood-spattered blouse. Even as the woman arched her head farther back, as if sloshing the blood around in her mouth like a fine wine, the baby began pulling itself up her chest with its tiny fists sunken in gold silk, its mewling mouth pursing and opening.

I looked at Tres, found myself unable to speak and looked back at the stage. The Thai boys had carried the still-unconscious fat man off the stage and only Mara and her infant remained in the lantern light. The baby continued climbing until its cheek touched its mother's. I thought of a film I had seen of a tiny kangaroo baby, half-formed and almost embryonic, pulling itself through its mother's fur in the live-or-die trek from the birth canal to the pouch.

The baby began licking its mother's cheek and mouth. I saw how long the baby's tongue was, how it slid like some pink worm across Mara's chin and lips, and I tried to close my eyes or look away. I could not.

Mara seemed to come out of her trance, lifted the baby closer to her face and lowered her mouth to the infant's. I could see the baby girl open her mouth wide, then wider, and I thought of baby birds demanding to be fed.

Mara vomited blood into the baby's open mouth. I could see the infant's cheeks fill and its throat work as it tried to swallow the sudden onslaught of thick liquid. The process was amazingly neat; very little of the heavy blood spilled onto the baby's gold robes or Mara's silk.

Spots danced in my vision and I lowered my head to my hands. The room was suddenly very hot and my vision tunneled to a narrow range. The skin of my forehead felt clammy. Next to me, Tres made a noise but did not look away from the stage.

When I looked up, the baby was almost finished feeding. I could see its long tongue licking at Mara's lips and cheeks for any residue of the regurgitated meal.

Years later I stumbled across a Scientific American article titled "Food Sharing in Vampire Bats" dealing with reciprocal altruism in donor bats" regurgitation of blood for roostmates. Vampire bats, it seems, starve to death if they do not get a meal consisting of 20 to 30 milliliters of blood every 60 hours. It turns out that after the proper stimulus--the roostmates' licking under the donor bat's wings and on its lips--the donor regurgitates blood only for those roostmates who would die within 24 hours without a blood meal. This reciprocal-exchange system is survival beneficent, said the article's author, because it allows the recipient bat another night to search for blood, while drawing only 12 hours' worth of blood from the donor bat's reservoir.

But it was that Scientific American drawing of the smaller bat's licking its donor's lips, leathery wings entwined, slash-lipped mouths moving toward each other in the blood-vomit kiss, that made me vomit into my office wastebasket 20years after that night in Bangkok.

I remember dragging Tres from that place and have vague memories of pressing a roll of baht into the hands of the driver of a long-tailed taxi on the pier outside. I remember going alone to my room and locking the door. Tang, my mia chao, had disappeared, and for that I was grateful. I remember staring at the slowly turning fan in the hour before sunrise and giggling as I worked out a simple translation. Unlike Tres, I had never been good at languages, but this translation was suddenly obvious. Phanyaa mahn raga kio. If phanyaa mahn was Mara, the prince of demons, and if naga was the serpent-demon, then kio could mean only one thing: vampire.

I giggled and waited for the sun to rise so I could sleep.

•

The city is still burning, and I can hear isolated automatic-weapons fire from the government troops killing students as the four men take me to Mara. The limousine crosses the river, moves south along the bank opposite the Oriental Hotel and stops at an unfinished high rise near a highway bridge. The pockmarked man leads us to an outside construction elevator, throws a switch and we rumble up into the night air. The elevator has no sides, and I see the river and the city across the river with dreamlike clarity as we rise 30 stories and more into the thick night air. The river is as empty of traffic as I have ever seen it; only a few ferries fight the dark current downriver. Upriver, toward the Grand Palace and theuniversity, flames light up the night.

We reach one of the top levels and the crude elevator squeals to a stop. A gate slides up and the pockmarked man beckons me out. Somewhere above us a welding torch flashes, strobes and drips sparks. Construction does not stop for sleep in modern Bangkok. The building has no sides, only clear plastic draped from open beams to separate sections of the cement expanse from one another. A hot wind rustles the plastic with a sound not unlike the stirring of leathery wings.

Trouble lights hang from girders and more lights are visible through walls of plastic to our left. The five of us walk toward the light and sound. At the entrance--a sort of tunnel made from rustling plastic sheets--the three bodyguards stay behind while the pockmarked man lifts the plastic, beckons me forward and follows me in.

A dozen or so folding chairs are set up around an open area where an expensive Persian rug has been laid on the dusty cement floor. The lamp overhead is shielded so that the space is more in shadow than direct light. Six men, all Thai and all in sleek tuxedos, sit on the folding chairs, but I have eyes only for the two women sitting across the open space in heavy rattan chairs. The older woman might be my age or a little older; she has aged well. Her hair is still black, but now swept up in a fashionable arc. Her Asian features are unlined, her cheeks and chin still strong, and only a certain corded look in her neck and hands suggests that she is in her 40s. She wears an obviously expensive gown of black and red silk; a gold-and-diamond pendant hangs across her red vest and stands out against the black silk blouse.

The younger woman next to her is infinitely more beautiful. Olive-skinned, dark-eyed, with lustrous hair that has been cut short in the newest Western style, gifted with a long neck and hands that exude grace even in repose, this young womanis beautiful in a way that no actress or model could ever achieve. It is obvious that she is simultaneously aware of and oblivious to her own beauty.

I know that I am looking at Mara and her daughter, Tanha.

The pockmarked man steps closer to them, goes to his knees in the way that the Thai do to show deference to royalty, performs an elaborate wai and then offers Mara my roll of 20 bonds without lifting his bowed head. She speaks softly and he answers respectfully.

Mara sets the money aside and looks at me. Her eyes catch the yellow gleam of the shielded lamp above.

The pockmarked man looks up, nods me forward and reaches to pull me to my knees. I genuflect of my own accord before he can grasp my sleeve. I lower my head and keep my eyes on Mara's slippered feet.

In elegant Thai, she says, "You know what you are asking for?"

"Yes," I answer in Thai. My voice is firm.

Mara purses her lips. "If you know about me," she says very softly, "then you must know that I no longer perform this...service."

"Yes," I say, head bowed in deference.

She waits in a silence that I realize is a command to speak. "The Reverend Tanha," I say at last.

"Raise your head," Mara says to me. To her daughter she murmurs that I have jai ron--the hot heart.

"Jai bau dee," says Tanha with a soft smile, suggesting that the farang's mind is not good.

"It would cost three hundred thousand to know my daughter," says Mara. There is no hint of negotiation in her voice; the price is final.

I nod respectfully, reach into the hidden pocket at the back of my vest and remove $100,000 in cash and bearer's bonds.

One of the bodyguards takes the money and Mara nods slightly. "When do you wish this to happen?" she says in liquid tones. Her eyes show neither boredom nor interest.

"Now," I say. "Tonight."

The older woman looks at her daughter. Tanha's nod is almost imperceptible, but there is something in those lustrous brown eyes: hunger, perhaps.

The six men in tuxedos lean forward with bright eyes.

•

Tres and I met for breakfast in a cheap place near the river the next morning. Our tones were low, embarrassed, almost like when someone from the platoon got blown away and no one wanted to say his name for a while unless it was in the form of a joke. We didn't joke about this.

"Did you see that guy's cock...after?" Tres whispered. "It had these...lesions. Like marks I saw once when I was a lifeguard on the Cape and this guy swam into a jellyfish."

I sipped cold coffee and concentrated on not shuddering.

Tres took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. It looked like he hadn't slept, either. "Johnny, you wanted to be a medic. How much blood does the human body have in it?"

"I dunno," I said.

He set his wire-rimmed glasses back in place. "I think it's about five or six liters," he said, "depending upon someone's size."

I nodded, not able to picture a liter. Years later when they began selling soft drinks in liter bottles, I always imagined five or six of them filled with blood equaling what we carry around in our veins every day.

"Imagine an orgasm where you're ejaculating blood," whispered Tres.

I closed my eyes.

Tres touched my wrist. "No, think about it, Johnny. That guy was still alive when they took him out. These guys wouldn't pay big bucks for it if they knew it'd kill them."

Wouldn't they? I thought. It was the first time that I realized that someone might fuck even if it meant certain death. In a way, that revelation in 1970 prepared me for life in the Nineties.

"How much blood could someone lose and still stay alive without a transfusion?" whispered Tres. I knew from his tone that he wasn't expecting an answer from me, just thinking aloud the way he always did when we were planning an ambush site.

I did not know the answer then, but I've had the opportunity to learn it many times since, especially during my residency as an ER intern. A wounded person can lose about a liter of blood volume and recover to make it up themselves. With more than about a sixth of blood volume gone, so is the victim. With transfusions, someone can lose up to 40 percent of his blood volume and hope to recover.

I didn't know any of this then, and I wasn't curious. I was busy trying to imagine ejaculating blood in an orgasm that went on for minutes rather than seconds. This time I did shudder.

Tres waved the waiter over and paid the check. "I've got to get going. I need to get a cab over to Western Union."

"Why?" I said. I was so sleepy that the hot, thick air seemed to slur my words.

"I'm getting some money wired from the States," said Tres.

I sat straight up, no longer sleepy. "Why?"

Tres took off his glasses again to polish them. His pale eyes looked myopic and lost. "I'm going back tonight, Johnny. I don't expect you to come along, but I'm going back."

•

The women have finished undressing me and the creature named Tanha has come closer to caress me when suddenly everything stops. Mara has given a signal.

"We have forgotten something," Mara says. It is the first time she has spoken English. She makes a graceful but ironic gesture. "The times now demand extra caution. I am sorry we did not ask for it earlier." She glances at her daughter and I can see the mocking half-smile on both of their faces. "I am afraid that we must wait until tomorrow night so that the proper testing can be done, sighs Mara, switching back to Thai. I can tell that the two have played this scene many times before. I can only guess that the real reason is to inflame desire through delay, thus driving up the price.

I also smile. "For the health identity card?" I say. "For one of the clinics to certify that I am free of HIV?"

Tanha is sitting gracefully on the Persian rug near me. Now she shifts in my direction, smiles mockingly and makes a small moue. "It is regrettable," she says, her voice as delicate as a crystal wind chime, "but necessary in these terrible times."

I nod. I have seen the statistics. The AIDS epidemic started late in Thailand, but in 1997--less than five years from now--150,000 Thai will have died from the disease. Three years later, in the year 2000, 5 million out of the 56 million Thai will be carrying the disease and at least a million will be dead. After that, the logarithmic progression is relentless. Thailand--with its lethal combination of ubiquitous prostitutes, promiscuous sexual partners and resistance to condoms--will rival Uganda as a retroviral killing ground.

"You'll send me to one of the local clinics that do a thousand slapdash HIV tests a week," I say calmly, as if I am used to sitting naked between two beautiful, fully dressed women and an audience of strangers in tuxedos.

Mara opens her slender fingers so that the long red nails catch the light. "There are few alternatives," she whispers.

"Perhaps I can provide one," I say and reach for my vest where it has been folded carefully atop my other clothes. I pull out three documents and hand them to Tanha. The girl frowns prettily at them and gives them to her mother. My guess is that the younger woman cannot read English, perhaps not even Thai.

Mara does look over the documents. They are certificates from two major Los Angeles hospitals and a university medical clinic attesting to the fact that my blood has been repeatedly tested and found free of HIV contamination. Each document is signed by several physicians and carries the seal of the institution. The papers on which they are typed are thick, creamy and expensive. Each document is dated within the past week.

Mara looks at me with narrowed eyes. Her smile shows her small, sharp teeth and only the faintest hint of tongue. "How do we know these are valid?"

I shrug. "I am a doctor. I wish to live. It would be easier to bribe a Thai clinician for a health identity card if I wished to deceive. I have no reason to deceive."

Mara glances back at the papers, smiles and hands them to me. "I will think about this," she says.

I lean forward in my chair. "I am also at risk," I say.

Mara arches an elegant eyebrow. "Oh, how can this be?"

"Gingival blood," I say in English. "Bleeding gums. Any open sore in her mouth."

Mara reacts with a small, mocking smile, as if I have made a tiny joke. Tanha turns her exquisite face toward her mother. "What did he say?" she demands in Thai. "This farang makes no sense."

Mara ignores her. "You have nothing to worry about," she says to me. She nods to her daughter.

Tanha begins caressing me again.

•

It was against regulations to take a weapon with us on R&R, but there were no metal detectors in those days, no airport security to speak of. Quite a few of us took knives or handguns with us 164 when we traveled out of country. I'd brought a long-barreled .38 that I had won in a poker game from a black kid named Newport Johnson three days before he stepped on a Bouncing Betty. When Tres left that second night, I got the .38 out of the bottom of my duffel, checked to make sure it was loaded and sat in my locked room wearing nothing but fatigue pants, drinking scotch and listening to the street noises, watching the slow turning of the fan blades above my head.

Tres returned about four A.M. I listened through the wall to his banging and crashing around in his bathroom for a few minutes and then I went back to my bed and closed my eyes. Perhaps now I could sleep. His scream brought me up and out of bed, the .38 in my hand. I tore down the hall in bare feet, banged once on his door, pushed it open and stepped into the room.

Only the bathroom light was on and it cast a thin strip of fluorescent light across the bare floor and tousled bed. There was blood on the floor and a trail of torn linen that was also soaked in blood. It looked as if Tres had tried to tear up sheets to make bandages. I took a step toward the bathroom, heard a moan on the darkness of the bed and swiveled, still holding the .38 at my side.

"Johnny?" His voice was dry, cracked and listless. I stepped closer and turned on a small lamp near his bed.

Tres was naked except for his undershirt. He was sprawled on a blood-soaked mattress, surrounded by blood-soaked strips of dirty linen. His pants lay on the floor nearby. They were black with dried blood. Tres' hands were covering his crotch. His fingernails were rimmed with blood.

"Johnny?" he whispered. "It won't stop."

There's a leech that breeds in the slow-moving waters of Vietnam which specializes in boring up the urethras of men wading in the water. Once firmly lodged in the penis, the leech begins feeding from the inside until it swells to half the size of a man's fist. We'd all heard about the goddamn thing. We all thought about it every time we waded a stream or rice paddy, which was about a dozen times a day.

Tres's cock looked like the leech had been at it. No, it was worse. Besides being swollen and raw-looking, his penis had a series of small lesions spiraling around it as if someone had taken a sewing machine with a large needle and stitched a row of stigmata down his privates. The lesions were bleeding freely.

"I can't get it to stop," whispered Tres. His face was pale and clammy with sweat. I'd seen this look on the faces of wounded guys just before they floated away on the tide of shock.

"Come on," I said, getting an arm around him, "we're going to a hospital."

Tres pulled away and fell back on the pillows. "No, no, no. Just get the bleeding to stop." He pulled something from under a pillow and I realized that he was holding the black-bladed KA-bar knife he used on night patrols. I lifted my .38 and for a second there was silence broken only by the rustle of the fan blades.

Finally, I giggled. This was nuts. Here we were hundreds of miles from Vietnam and the war, me with my sidearm and Tres with his commando knife, ready to do each other in. This was fucking nuts.

I put down the pistol. "I brought some first-aid shit," I said. "I'll get it."

Tres was sitting up now with the bloodied sheet over him. I handed him the bandages and wiped the sweat off his face. "I wonder why it won't stop bleeding," he said.

I shook my head. I didn't know then. I know now.

Vampire bats and some leeches exude the same anticoagulant: hirudin. The bats secrete it in their saliva; the leeches manufacture it in their guts and smear it on the surface of the wound. It keeps the wound from closing and keeps the blood flowing freely as long as the bloodsucker wants to feed. Vampire bats will "nurse" from the neck of a horse or cow for hours, often returning with other bats to continue the meal.

Tres went to sleep after a while and I sat in the sprung chair near the window, watching the door and holding the .38 in my lap. I had thoughts of forcing Maladung to take me to Mara again, and then shooting him and the woman. And the baby, I mentally added.

I fell asleep mulling options. When I awoke the room was dark. The fan was still turning in its desultory fashion but the sounds outside the window had shifted to their nighttime volume. The bed-sheets were soaked with fresh blood, there was blood on the floor, the bathroom was littered with bloody towels, but Tres was gone.

I ran into the hallway and pounded down the steps to the lobby before realizing what a sight I must be: wild-eyed, barefoot and bare-chested, my rumpled fatigue pants smeared with blood, the long-barreled .38 in my hand. The Thai whores and their pimps in the lobby barely looked my way.

I almost caught up to Tres. I saw him on the same dock we'd departed from two nights earlier. The shadowy figure with him had to be Maladung. They had just stepped down into the long-tailed taxi as I ran onto the dock. The boat pulled away with a roar.

Tres saw me. He stood up and almost pitched out of the accelerating boat. He raised his arm in my direction, fingers splayed, as if reaching for me across 50 feet of open water. I heard him shout at the driver "Yout! Phuen young mai ma! Yout!"--which I did not understand then but now translate as "Stop! My friend hasn't come yet! Stop!"

I saw Maladung pull him back into the boat. I held the useless pistol as the taxi bounced across the river, disappeared behind a barge going upriver and then reappeared only as a distant lantern before disappearing down a klong on the opposite side of the Chao Phraya.

I knew that I would never see Tres alive again.

•

Mara lowers her gaze as Tanha brings her mouth to my groin. There is no caress of tongue. Not yet. The younger woman uses her mouth to bring me to full erection.

As much as men talk and write about the joys of oral sex, there is always a slight ambiguity in the male response to the act of fellatio. For some, a mouth is too non-gender-specific to allow the subconscious to relax and enjoy the act. For others, it is the uncontrolled intensity of sensation that causes a flutter of alarm amid the cascade of pleasure. For many, it is just the unbidden thought of sharp teeth. Luckily, the male organ is as simple a stimulus-response mechanism as nature allows. Tanha's mouth is soft and well-educated; my excitement follows its inevitable arc of engorgement.

I close my eyes and try not to think about not thinking about the men in tuxedos behind me. Someone has dimmed the overhead light so that only the flash of sparks dribbling from the welder two floors above lights the scene and the interior of my eyelids with magnesium strobes. Mara whispers something and I feel sudden cold as Tanha's warm mouth pulls away. The shock of cooler air is on me for only a second before a different moisture returns.

I open my eyes just enough to see Tanha's tongue sliding from her mouth, curling around me. The flash from the welding sparks makes the mottled flesh of her tongue look more purple than pink. I catch a glimpse of pulsating slits amid the coated texture there, like tiny feeding orifices. I shut off my thoughts before the grasping mouth-guts of leeches and lampreys come to mind. For years I have trained myself to be equal to this moment.

The sensation is more like a small electric shock than the sting of a jellyfish. I gasp and open my eyes. Tanha is watching me through the curtain of her lashes. The shock comes again, riding down the exquisite penile nerve system straight to the base of my spine and then to the pleasure center of my brain. I close my eyes again and groan. My scrotum contracts with pleasure. The spiral of gentle shocks soars through my body and returns to my penis like a gently moving hand gloved in velvet. My hips begin to move without volition.

My heart is pounding so wildly that the pressure from it seems to replace sound as the only noise in the universe. My skull echoes to the rhythm of my own pulse. The separate, tiny shocks along my groin have grown together to form a perfect spiral of pleasurable sensation. It is as if I am fucking the sun. Even as my hips begin to thrust in earnest and my hands grope for Tanha's head to move that warmth closer, a distant part of my mind observes the classic symptoms of the onset of orgasm and wonders about the rate of tachycardia, myotonia and hyperventilation.

A second later any remaining clinical awareness is washed away in a new and stronger surge of pure pleasure. Tanha's tongue is contracting, tugging from the base of my scrotum to the glans of my penis, tightening as it contracts and relaxes, contracts and relaxes. The shocks have become a single closed circuit of nearly unbearable sensation.

I ejaculate almost without noticing it, so great is the pressure now. From beneath my fluttering eyelids I can see semen dropping like a band of white petals on the hair and shoulders of Tanha. Her tongue does not desist for an instant. Her eyes are as yellow as her mother's now. The orgasm passes without release from the building pressure. My heart strains to pump more blood into my distended organ.

Yes! I will it even as my head arches back, my neck strains and my face distorts. Yes! I choose the thing in which I now have no choice.

A second later I come. Blood ejaculates from the tip of my penis and bathes Tanha's face and breasts. Greedily, she lowers her mouth again, unwilling to spill any of it. My hips pound as I continue to pulse. The moment goes on and on.

Mara leans closer.

•

It was the Thai police who came for me just after sunrise that next morning 22 years ago. I thought I would be arrested for wandering the hotel halls until the early hours, shouting at no one and brandishing a cocked .38. Instead of arresting me, they brought me to Tres.

The Bangkok morgue was small and insufficiently cooled. The smell reminded me of an orchard where too much fallen fruit had gone bad in the sun. There were no metal cabinets or sliding stretchers as in the American movies. Tres was on a steel slab just like the other corpses in the small room. They had not covered his face. He looked vulnerable without his glasses.

"He's so ... white," I said to the only policeman who spoke English.

"He was found in the river," said the man in the white jacket and the Sam Browne belt.

"He didn't drown," I said. It was not a question.

The policeman shook his head. "Your friend lost much blood." He tugged his white glove higher, touched Tres's chin and swiveled the corpse's head so that I could see the knife wound that ran from under his left ear to his Adam's apple.

I let out a breath and steadied myself against the steel platform.

"The knife wound did not kill him," said the inspector, tugging off the sheet. Tres's sex organs had been crudely but completely removed. The effect was rather like a Ken doll that someone had spilled fingernail polish on.

The inspector came closer and seized my forearm, whether to steady me or to restrain me from running I do not know. "We think that is--how you say it--a queer thing. A fight between faggots. We have seen this type of injury before. Always it is a type of queer thing. Jealousy."

"A queer thing," I repeated.

The inspector released my arm. "We know that you were not there at the time he was murdered, Private Merrick. The boatmaster at Phulong dock saw you shouting at the boat that carried Corporal Tindale away. The manager at the hotel will testify that you returned only a few minutes later, became drunk and remained visible and audible throughout the night. You could not have been present when the corporal was murdered, but do you have any idea who did this? Your military will demand to know."

I lifted the sheet, draped it across Tres's corpse and then stepped away from the men. "No,"I said. "I have no idea whatsoever."

•

Mara licks the lips of her daughter. Their arms are pulled in to their sides, their hands curled as if palsied. I imagine vampire bats hanging from the cold ceiling of a cave, wings tucked tight, only their lips and their tongues active and engaged.

Tanha arches her head and the heavy red liquid is propelled from her distended lips to the waiting cavity of her mother's mouth. I hear the lapping, gurgling sounds clearly. Tanha's tongue has not relinquished its grip, and I still spasm in her grasp. My heart is straining with theeffort. My vision blackens and I can no longer see their feeding and sharing, only hear the thick liquid sounds of it.

My facial muscles are still locked in the myotonic spasm of an involuntary grimace. I would smile if I could.

•

I found Maladung in the autumn of 1975, not long after I graduated from medical school. The little pimp had retired rich and returned to his northern city of Chiang Mai. I paid off the Thai detective whom I'd hired with the first installment of my inheritance money and spent two days watching Maladung before picking him up. He was married and had two grown sons and a ten-year-old daughter.

He was walking to the small store he ran in the old section of town when I pulled up alongside him in a jeep, showed him the 9mm automatic and told him to get in. I took him into the countryside, to the small house I had rented. I promised him that he would live if he told me everything he knew.

I think he did tell me everything he knew. Mara and her girl child had dropped out of sight and were performing only for the very rich now. Tres had been killed as a simple precaution: Heand I had been the first Americans allowed in Mara's presence, and they feared the consequences if word of the performance got back to the platoon. They had planned to murder me that night, but the two men sent to commit the act had seen me drunk and shouting in the upstairs hallway, noted the gun and decided otherwise. By the time others were sent, I had been shipped back to Saigon.

Maladung swore that he had not known about Tres's murder until after it was carried out. He swore it. Maladung had never dreamed that the phanyaa mahn naga kio had meant to harm the farang beyond the services rendered. I placed the Browning against his forehead and told him to tell me upon pain of death what usually happens to those who received Mara's services.

Maladung was shaking like an old man. "They die," he said in Thai and repeated in English. "First they lose their soul"--khwan hai was the phrase he used, "their butterfly spirit flies away"--"and then their winjan, life spirit, leaks out. They return and return until they die," he said, voice quavering. "But this they choose."

I lowered the gun and said, "I believe you, Maladung. You didn't know that they'd murder Tres." Then I quickly lifted the Browning and shot him twice in the head.

That same autumn I began the search for Mara.

•

I open my eyes and the men in tuxedos are gone, Tanha is sitting above me on the chair next to her mother and the two young women are finishing their chore of cleaning and dressing me. I can feel the bandages under the trousers. It feels as if I am wearing diapers. My groin is moist with blood, but I hardly notice the discomfort because of the lingering pulse of pleasure that fills me like the echo of beautiful music.

"Mr. Noi informs me that you said you have more money," Mara says softly.

I nod, too weak to speak. Any thought of attacking the woman is impossible to me now, even if I did not know that her men were waiting just beyond the wind-fluttered plastic. Mara and Tanha are sources of infinite pleasure. I could never think of hurting them now, of interrupting what is to transpire in the coming nights.

"The limousine will pick you up at midnight tomorrow at your hotel," says Mara. Her fingers move and the four men come in to remove me. I am mildly surprised to find that I cannot walk without assistance.

The streets are empty and tomb-silent. Even the shooting has ended. Orange flames still burn to the north. I close my eyes and savor the fading ecstasy as they drive me back to the Oriental.

•

I don't think that I knew in Vietnam that I was gay. I disguised the love I felt for Tres as other things: loyalty to a buddy, admiration, even the masculine love that grunts are supposed to feel for one another in combat. But it was love.

I never came out of the closet. Not publicly. While in medical school I learned how to troll the most discreet bars, meet the most discreet men and make the most discreet arrangements for temporary liaisons. Later, as my practice and public persona grew. I learned how to keep my prowlings restricted to rare nights in cities far away from my home in L.A. And I dated women. Those who wondered why I never married had only to look at my busy practice to see that I had no time for a domestic life.

And I continued to hunt Mara and Tanha. Twice a year I flew to Thailand, learning the language and the cities, and twice a year I was told by my paid operatives there that the women had disappeared. Only two years ago, in 1990, did they surface again, driven into accepting expensive performances as their need for money was renewed.

There was nothing I could do then. The more I learned of Mara and Tanha and their habits, the more I was certain I could never get close to them with a weapon. Then, only six months ago, certain results were returned and, after a few hours of almost hysterical anger, I saw that themeans had been put into my hands.

I began to make my plans.

•

"Good morning, Dr. Merrick," says the young Thai valet in the lobby. He politely ignores my bloody collar and disheveled appearance.

I smile and wait for the elevator doors to close before grasping the brass rail and struggling to hold myself upright. I can feel the bandages leaking through my trousers. Only the long photographer's vest hides the blood there.

In my room I bathe, treat the lesions with a special salve I have brought, inject myself with a coagulant, bathe again and pull on fresh pajamas before crawling into bed. It will be light in a few minutes. In 14 hours, darkness will fall again and I will return to Mara and her daughter.

•

In Chiang Mai, where the whores are cheap and the young men celebrate entry into manhood by buying a fuck, 72 percent of the city's poorest prostitutes tested positive for HIV in 1989.

In the bars and sex clubs along Patpong, condoms are handed out free by a man in a red, blue and gold superhero suit. His name is Captain Condom and he is employed by the Population and Community Development Association. The PDA is the brainchild of Senator Mechai Viravaidaya, an economist and member of the WHO Global Commission on AIDS. Mechai has spent so much of his own time, energy and money promoting condom use that rubbers are called mechais by everyone in Bangkok. Almost no one uses them. The men refuse to and the women do not force the issue.

One out of every 50 people in Thailand makes his or her living selling sex.

I think that the computer projections for the year 2000 are wrong. I think that far more than 5 million Thai will be infected and many more than 1 million will have died. I think that the corpses will fill the klongs and lie along the gutters of the sois. I think that only the rich and the very, very careful will avoid this plague.

Mara and Tanha were, until recently, very rich. And they have been very careful. Only their need to be very rich again has led them to be careless.

My HIV-negative documents are, of course, falsified. It was not difficult. The lab reports are real; only the dates and name were changed prior to my photocopying them onto official stationery and adding the seals. I serve on the faculty of all three of the institutions whose seals and forms I borrowed.

In the six months since I tested HIV-positive, the plan grew from a scheme to an inevitability.

They are monsters, Mara and her child, but even monsters grow careless. Even monsters can be killed.

•

There is no fan on the ceiling of my expensive air-conditioned suite at the Oriental Hotel. As the first pale gleamings of the dawn creep across the teak-and-plaster ceiling of my room, I content myself with imagining a fan slowly turning and lull myself to sleep with the image.

I smile when I imagine the coming night's activity and the night that will follow this one. I can see the older woman licking the younger woman's lips, and then opening wide her maw for the cascade of blood. My blood. Death's blood.

Before dropping off to sleep, lulled by the medication I have taken and by the final turn of things, I remember the story Tres told me so many years ago about the temptation of the Buddha by Mara's three daughters: Aradi, discontent; Tanha, desire; and Raka, love. And I know now that in my life I have surrendered to all three of these all-too-human demons, but that the only one worthy of our surrender is Raka. Love.

Trying to sleep now, I summon the image that has sustained me through all these years and through these final months.

I imagine Tres removing his glasses and squinting at me, his face as vulnerable as a boy's, his cheek as soft as only a lover's cheek can be. And he says to me, "I'm going back, Johnny. I'm going back tonight."

And I take his hand in mine. And I say, with the absolute certainty of conviction, "I'm going, too."

Smiling now, having found the place I have sought so long to return to, I release myself to sleep and forgiveness.

"Between feeding us bites and sips, they cooed and ran long-nailed fingers up the insides of our thighs.