Riding Yui’s Western Train with Paul Theroux

She was standing at the vendor's stand on Soi Four, bouncy and excited, in blue jeans and half heels, wearing a gold chain that accentuated her small breasts and drew attention to the sequins on her black frilly blouse. I approached the stand and saw that she was carefully picking among a pile of fried black beetles, stuffing what she liked into a small plastic bag. I began running my eyes over the water bugs, grasshoppers, scorpions and crickets, looking for something new, trying to decide what to buy in addition to the ant mix, silk worms and the large crispy wheat-colored grasshoppers with eyes as prominent as an oversized ring on an old woman's index finger. There were two different kinds of crickets; I couldn't remember which ones I'd tried several days earlier.

Out of the corner of my right eye, I now saw this young woman putting one of the nickel-sized beetles between her full pink lips, and as she did so she smiled at me. As if surprised, taken aback, I surmised, that a farang would be buying insects to eat.

I turned to face her full and returned the smile. I said that I'd tried the beetles and found them tasteless and hard to chew. I prefer the grasshoppers, I said. They're better than French fries. 

She giggled and smiled more generously. Then she came close and, as if instructing, showed me how to remove the beetle exoskeleton to get to what was edible. She put the morsel in her mouth. Teasingly, suggestively. My name is Yui, she said. Like you and he-or me, she added, and returned to chewing her beetles.

She was plain but pretty in a disarming sort of way. I wondered if she had a tattoo.

There was a long pause while Yui played with the gold chain around her neck. She took two beetles from her bag and offered me one. I clumsily tried to remove the exoskeleton, gave up and put the whole thing in my mouth. She gave me another one and said, Try again. It's not that hard.

I took it, reluctantly.

Her sister Ve shouted from down the street. Yui waved and returned to me,  and what she was saying about water bugs. Ve approached and seemed agitated. She pulled on Yui's blouse. Sensing tension between them, wanting to continue my conversation about eating insects, fearful that Ve would take Yui from me, I invited the sisters for a round of beers after they filled the small plastic bags with beetles and whatever else caught their fancy. Buy as much as you want, I said.  I'll pay. Ve looked at me suspiciously, as if she didn't hear me.  Or understand English. Or wanted me to get lost so she could have her sister to herself.

We have no plans for the night, Yui said. Where are we going?

I pointed to the open-air bar down the street. It was half a block away. It was crowded with bargirls and farang-fat ones, skinny ones, bald ones, a few with arms covered in tattoos and scabs, a good half of them in shorts.

We had surprisingly little trouble finding a free table against a wall near the pool tables. Yui took a stool next to me, with her sister to her right. I ordered three Heinekens and asked them if they wanted anything to eat beyond all these very dead insects that we had now placed on the counter. Ve sulked, Yui stared-at me, and smiled. Then she said, Nice meeting you.

Yui began feeding me beetles from her bag and grasshoppers from mine, delicately putting them in my mouth, and at one point wiping the corner of my chin with her finger. Her touch was like that of a caring wife, head canted to one side, pursed lips, love in the clear focused eyes. She followed with the words, Nice meeting you. This time they came more slowly.

I found myself returning the compliment, feeding Yui silk worms and pieces of the quite large grasshoppers that had come apart in the plastic bag. Mostly legs. Then, to my surprise, and to the even greater surprise of Ve-evident in the way she moved her face around to stare at Yui while shaking her head vigorously, Yui put a long black scorpion in her mouth and with her lips on the stinger, the rest of the scorpion extended toward me, she moved close and with a nod invited me to eat the head. I saw no reason not to do so. We both began biting and chewing on the very hard and oily black scorpion, alternately pulling back and laughing and shaking our heads. Then returning to the playfulness. Clamping our teeth onto the scorpion, what earlier Yui said she had never tried before and couldn't imagine eating. Yui was not content to let me take the scorpion in my mouth and eat in on my own. She insisted on keeping her teeth on the stinger.

I put beetles and crickets and water bugs in my mouth and offered them to Yui. She moved her stool closer and draped her small left arm over my shoulder and with eyes wide, she took one insect then another into her pretty mouth. But Yui was careful to pull back at the last second when there was really nothing to eat, to avoid a kiss on the lips.

Ve began talking rapidly in Thai, and she reached across the narrow table and grabbed Yui's hand and raised her voice. One or both of us had gone too far.

I ordered another round of beers for all of us. I did so even though Ve had indicated that she wanted to leave. Yui was insistent that they stay. The beers came straightaway and Yui immediately took the bottle to her lips, gulping it like a trucker after a long drive.

We were well into our second round of Heinekens, talking mostly about their sewing jobs and low pay and the hard life they had known as children in Isaan, when Yui turned to me and as if asking what country I was from or whether I was a tourist or on business, said, Do you know John Western?

I shook my head and said no.  Why do you ask?  I said.

She picked up her purse, which was sitting on the ground to her right. She pulled out some pages, twice folded, obviously Xeroxed. She opened them and read to herself, from what looked like a letter. She said, I think you do know him. Your name is Korski, right?

Puzzled, taken off guard by a question that meant nothing to me and had not followed from anything we'd thus far talked about, I said, John Western? There might be half a dozen farang wandering these streets tonight with this name. It's probably that common a surname among those who come here, what with all the Australians and Brits. These words were barely out of my mouth when I said, Come to think of it, I do know one person by that name, but he is no one you would ever know or have heard of. I doubt he would come here, and certainly not where we're sitting tonight. My guess is he's pretty straight and would stay away form this part of Bangkok. And by the way, what's that you were reading from?

Yui ignored the question and reached around my beer and inside the small plastic bag that contained what was left of my insect grab bag. She brought a couple of grasshopper legs to her mouth, made a motion toward mine, and then decided that was not such a good idea. She smiled, and though I knew nothing of her Thai traditions I could read that it was a smile of anticipation. She was waiting for me to repeat my question, or tell her more about John Western, a person I had never in fact met.

I told Yui what little I knew of him, that he is a geography professor at Syracuse University. He is, I said-and here I was guessing based on some photos I'd once seen-a rather tall and handsome man with a good head of now gray hair. He is, as far as I knew, a good family man and one well thought of by some of his colleagues. I went on to explain, as best I could-guessing that Yui knew very little about American universities or universities in general-that John Western had once been chair of this department of which he was still a member. I said that he was something of a Francophone. I explained what this meant by way of saying that I had become fondly attached to Thailand and most things Thais.

Ve, by this time, had had enough. As soon as I finished telling Yui what little I knew about John Western and asked if they wanted yet another round of beers, Ve began rapidly talking at Yui in Thai. It was clear that she was the dominant and controlling sister, and though I knew no Thai I gathered from the heated exchanges and the way Yui kept turning to me for some kind of approval that I could not really give that Ve wanted Yui to leave with her straightaway.

Ve stood and brushed off her blouse and remade her ponytail. She said something to Yui, a command to get up and leave, I guessed. I felt helpless, resigned to the fact that shortly Yui would be just another in a very long list of people that I would meet once, then never see again. Such is the nature of travel. Or at least my kind of travel. But travel is always good, and never more so than when you feel caught off guard, in a land and a time you do not know and could not have anticipated. How was it possible, I wondered, that on a night I could have been doing dozens of other things and been almost anywhere in this city of millions, I run into the one person who for reasons I do not know asked me about someone that I have never met and know little about.

Whatever, Yui wrote her cell phone number on a napkin and was about to hand it to me when Ve grabbed Yui's wrist, tore the napkin out of her hand and wrapped her fist around it, and began dragging Yui toward an exit. They went down three or four stairs and turned a corner and disappeared into a crowd before I could gather my senses, left with little more than a picture of the backs of their heads, Ve's ponytail wagging in the wet air, Yui's loose hair that came to a soft V between her shoulder blades doing the same.

Yui and Ve had left me around eight or thereabouts and by nine, still drinking at the very spot where all of this had unfolded, I began to feel considerable self-recrimination for not having had the good sense to put myself between Ve and Yui and get her cell phone number. And then have the option to call her if I needed some answers to this small but disturbing mystery-John Western's name being raised by a perfect strange who knew no more than my name, and not the one that appears on my passport. 

The following afternoon, after a short nap and a shower and an early dinner on the street-which of late had become my custom, and not yet one to my regret, I was lying on my bed in the Grace Hotel, Room 4749, when I got a call. I immediately recognized the voice; it was Yui. She said hello and it was nice to meet you and could you meet me somewhere in an hour?

How did you know I was staying here? I said.

I can't tell you. Then, she said, a friend.

Who? I said.

I can't tell you.

A scorpion, no doubt, I said, laughing. I followed with, Meet me in the coffee shop on the first floor in an hour. Take a taxi to the front entrance and from there it's easy to find. I'll give the doorman 50 baht to pay your fare. Incidentally, what about your sister, Ve?

She thinks I'm going to a disco with a friend.

Good  story.

Are you mad at me? she said, her voice tentative.

Hardly, I said.

I got to the coffee shop about fifteen minutes before Yui was to arrive and found a table as far away as possible from the thirty or so young women who came into view as I got out of the elevator. The Grace Hotel, one of the largest in this part of the city, caters to Middle Easterners. In the eight days I'd been staying at the Grace, I'd discovered that these men are a strange lot of sexual adventurers. While foreigners from the West-known to the Thai as farang-come to Thailand for the young women and take it as a given that they will spend two or three hours with them in a room, and for many all night, these swarthy men in both traditional and Western dress from Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Iran, Yemen, and Syria are the crudest of sexual animals. Rarely, I'd found in my anthropological snooping, do they have a Thai girl in their hotel room for more than fifteen or twenty minutes. And for this it costs them the same amount that farang from the rest of the world pay for hours of sexual pleasure. So the Thai girls who work in the cafe of the Grace Hotel-many of whom are on the heavy side and few of whom are provocatively dressed as is  true on the streets and in the clubs not far away--like these men because they can go with several of them in a night, and make quite good money doing so. But the Thai girls, I was to understand, hate them for their brusqueness, their rough bed manners, their kinky requests, even because of how they smell-an age-old charge against all farang but one now rarely heard except in jest. I had learned all this from a few of the Grace Hotel hookers I had befriended in the cafe, beginning one morning when I had breakfast there and did not fully understand why there were so many of them sitting at tables and talking with one another. In days that followed I made an effort to talk with more of the women who work this Grace Hotel cafe scene. But now I did not want to be seen with any of them, and least of all one of my talky informants who might come to my table with something new to tell me, knowing that if she had good information I'd give her a 500 baht note, roughly half of what she could expect from a disgusting Arab who might want to rough her up before rooting like a starved barnyard donkey. I didn't want Yui to think that I was like other sex-hungry farang. No, this was all about John Western. I wanted to know how Yui had gotten his name, and how she had so conveniently found me. After all, I am a person continually on the move and completely unpredictable as to where I will be at any hour or day of the week. Even those I correspond with frequently by e-mail do not know exactly where I'll be or what I'll be doing in the hours after pushing the send button. They can't know because I don't know. And yet Yui had managed to "conveniently" be at that Soi Four insect vendor's stand just as I approached it, and she knew my cryptic pen name, one I use but rarely among complete strangers when traveling.

Yui was wearing tight faded blue jeans that were tattered around the knees. And as she sat down kitty-corner from me at a table close to the elevators, I noticed that she had four toe rings, two on each foot. Her toenails were painted to match the color of her lipstick. She looked smaller than I'd remembered her, but this I'd often found to be the case on being with a Thai woman for the second time.

Although I'd eaten, I told Yui that I hadn't had much, and I insisted that she have something. She had a bowl of soup with wet noodles and small pieces of pork heavily laced with spices. She spoke little initially, and was even shy, and at one point I feared that the evening would go nowhere and she would say that she preferred to either return home or meet a friend to go to a disco. So before she'd finished eating, I asked her if she would like to go someplace quiet and have a drink or two, or perhaps play pool at a place I knew on Soi Seven. I even suggested that we go bowling at the small alley which was a mere twenty yards or so from where we sat. When she didn't respond to any of these suggestions. I said, There's a nice bar in the Sheraton where they have a Filipino band most nights of the week. They get going at nine, and I think you'll enjoy it.

That's good for another night, she said. I want to do something different with you. She let her words hang in the air, and she just smiled at me, as she had the night before.

So what do you want to do? I said.

Do you know Chiang Mai?

I was there last year for three or four days, I said. But mostly I used the city as a jumping off point for getting into tribal areas to the north.

Would you like to go there again?

I was thinking of doing so. But in another week. Or perhaps when I return from Vietnam.

We could go tonight. There's a train that leaves in two hours.

By train? I said, thinking that she already had me on a train, speed and destination unknown. I thought of taking it but you can't see anything at night, I said. On most trains you don't even see that much during the day. As I recall, it's twelve hours or so from Bangkok to Chiang Mai. These are rarely good rides, and a much shorter one a couple of weeks ago going east through Buriram was not a pleasant experience.

You and me, let's go there tonight by train. She sounded determined. The hand I'd felt on my thigh the night before had returned. It was more solid, full of feeling, and not, I thought, free of a hint of promised sex.

Ve will probably kill you, I said. And how do you know that you want to spend that much time with me? We're not lovers, and I'm not even sure we're about to have sex anytime soon.

No, that's right. That really is right. We can be friends. I'm still a virgin.

I didn't believe her. I tried hard to suppress a laugh, but could not. I said, The ticket office in this hotel is still open and with luck we can get some plane tickets to Chiang Mai for tomorrow morning.

Her purse was sitting on her lap.  She pulled out those same Xeroxed sheets I'd seen the night before and read something to herself. And then she said, If we go by train to Chiang Mai, we can really get to know Thailand. If we go by plane we won't know it as well. We can't really know it.

Something strange was going on here, and I didn't know what it was. I thought of reaching out and grabbing what she was reading from. She anticipated such a move and began to push her chair back.

Yui, let's go by plane.  It'll give us so much more time-

--No! she interjected. I want to be a real geographer, like John Western and Paul Theroux. She visibly ground her teeth. Then she read the following lines from one of the pages she was holding.

"Nonlinear journeys I dislike-that mode of instantaneously dropping out of the sky onto Singapore or wherever, a mode I associate with the international businessperson or conferencier. Somehow-is it not a geographer's sensibility?-I naggingly feel I've only really firmly established a hold on, say, Moscow"-Yui smiled and sat tall and grinned and said, or Bangkok or Chiang Mai!-"once I've got there by surface travel from my then home-in Western Europe, or on North America after traveling by boat from England; or on Fort Worth once we've driven there from my adopted Syracuse home. Such is one reason I love train travel, self-evidently a linear mode. Paul Theroux loves it too, as in his The Great Railway Bazaar, the Kingdom by the Sea, and The Imperial Way. Yes, somehow the acerbic, inquisitive, and observant Theroux seems a natural geographer!"

I was laughing before she'd finished. Part of the puzzle had become crystal clear. The author of these lines had to be John Western, and he was as lost as Paul Theroux. And probably as eager as Theroux to spend his train time reading the London Times or Guide to Wines of Southern France and snoozing rather than gazing out the window and actually trying to make small and modest claims, the only ones possible when traveling by train. On the whole, a great waste of time by anyone half serious about really wanting to know what makes a place tick.

Yui, I said. Listen to me. We can party tonight and have a good sleep-in separate beds, of course-and we'll be in Chiang Mai by noon. Fresh and ready to see what you and I have not seen. Sixty dollars for the tickets means nothing to me. It's what I'd pay you if we were going to have some good sex tonight. I smiled, suddenly aware that I was being a little too aggressive, and maybe Yui was a virgin after all and I was being tauntingly mean. But where oh where had she picked up these absolutely nutty words by someone madly in love with a train lover, someone whose idea of truth lies somewhere between raw prejudice and novelistic invention?

I could see that I was about to lose Yui, that at any moment she would burst out crying and charge off and I would never see her again. I was starting to really like her, and virgin or not I wanted to get some other pieces of the puzzle before she got away. Someone back home was having fun and laughing his ass off imaging how all this was going, whether or not Yui was coming through on her part of the bargain, whether she was keeping the careful notes that were part of the agreement. But who? And how had this mischievous person managed to find this innocent young woman from Isaan who, along with her younger and domineering sister, were working in a shirt factory in Bangkok for $150 a  month. One of my adversaries had to be lurking about on the streets of Bangkok, following me around, picking up on the patterns in my apparently random behavior. Someone who had to know that I'd become fascinated with eating insects and could be expected to be at one of the stands near my hotel when the vendors made their evening appearances. Yes, but who?

I went over to Yui and put my arm around her and said, Let's go.  I know a great little outdoor place near the Premier Inn on Soi 20 where we can have a few beers and then catch a cab and listen to the Filipino band. I think you'll like them. We can dance too-if you'd like. 

On the way out of the hotel, I stopped at the ticket office and paid sixty-six dollars for an eight-fifteen flight to Chiang Mai for the two of us. Yui was quiet and seemed to go along. I'd sensed that I'd caught her off guard, with no instructions on what to do if I insisted that we take a plane.

After I bought the tickets we got a taxi and stopped at her apartment where she put together a small bag of clothes and toiletries. Along the way, she had said that she hadn't been honest with me about Ve and the excuse for the evening. Ve had left early in the morning to go home to Korat and might be there for as long as two weeks. She was being courted by a German, and he would be there for this period of time so the parents could look him over and decide if he would be a suitable husband, and if he would be willing to come up with an acceptable bride price. It was vacation time at the shirt factory for both of them, and since it would be desirable that Yui not be present during this time of evaluation, she was going to spend her time with a friend. A friend who very much liked the Bangkok disco scene, Yui said. But because of me and this nutty stuff about John Western and Paul Theroux and someone having fun with me, Yui's friend would have to find someone else to dance with her when, as was the norm, young Thai males were too embarrassed to get out on the dance floor.

I wasn't going to get a separate room for Yui, and there was no need to do so anyway. My room, like all the standard economy rooms at the Grace Hotel, had two double beds. One for sleeping under clean sheets, and one-any amateur anthropologist would conclude--was for doing what people do when naked and coupling and the only rule is to have fun. Before we'd gotten around to this, however, I did say to Yui, Are you sure you want to go to Chiang Mai with me?

Very much, she said.  But could you give me a return ticket?

By train?

Could I come back the same way we go?

I reached inside the small pocket at the belt line of my blue jeans and pulled out a wad of 1,000 and 500 baht notes and gave her nearly forty dollars. There's also enough here for taxi money and something to eat while you're waiting for the plane, I said.

She gave me the wai, then stood on her toes and put her hands behind my head and kissed me on the lips. She whispered, Thank you. It's so nice to know you.

One day we went to the Pearl Farm in the morning and to the Butterfly Farm in the afternoon, and the following day we got a fishing boat that took us out to Ko Man and several small islands where we went snorkeling. On the way back to Hat Nai Harn, Yui caught three tuna between four and five pounds each. She was so excited she made a point of telling the captain and the other three people on the boat that this was the first time in her life she had ever been on a boat, or snorkeling, or had so much fun.

I had wanted to give the fish away to the captain and his chubby eight-year-old son who helped with the riggings and showed Yui how to bring the fish in, but Yui insisted that we return with the fish to the hotel and have them cooked for us in the first-floor restaurant. I won't remember you as well if we don't, she said.

Since the revealing incident about the son she has, I'd said nothing more about the scheme aimed at me that Yui was so central to. I sensed that she too had perhaps had enough of whatever she'd been enticed to do-and surely paid to do. I was reasonably certain that there was more to come on Western and Theroux that she would want me to react to, and that she would take notes on my usually caustic reactions to send back to someone by e-mail-she had told me she had her own yahoo account-but I had had enough. I wanted no more of John Western and Paul Theroux, one a second-rate academic geographer still breathing hard about a book written more than two decades ago and who couldn't think straight or without being pretentious, the other one a purveyor of nasty lies about people everywhere, all in the guise of what Western had called a "natural geographer." Yes, I didn't want the good times I was having with Yui spoiled, anymore than I wanted to now face the fact that this was one of those relationships that however good had no future. None whatsoever. I was already in further than I wanted to be, and though I'd learned a great deal about Yui's family and hardscrabble farming in Isaan, further confirming other stories I'd already collected, it was just one of those cold facts of life that she was simply too young for me. And there were other complications--plenty of them.

We spent another two days on the beach, and on the second day I got a taxi to take us to the Aquarium at Laem Panwa, and largely because of Yui's curiosity. She wanted to know the names of the fish that we had seen when snorkeling. The captain of the boat had not been much help. Her curiosity was proving to be so large that I would have taken her almost anywhere, within means, to satisfy her need. This was a trait that I admire as much as I greatly admire.

And so, the trip to and from the aquarium and the time we spent there proved to be another marvelous day with this young Thai woman, someone, I was now reminding myself almost hourly it seemed, who had gotten pregnant at sixteen and been subjected to frequent physical violence and the all-too-familiar pattern of male Thai philandering, and had had to leave home while still a teenager to go to big and brutal and unpredictable Bangkok to support the child and her impoverished parents. And yet, Yui struck me as so innocent and so fresh, and with the single exception of the bad dream about her son that she'd had on the plane there were no obvious emotional scars that I could see. I envied her ability to forget the past, something I was not very good at.

On our fifth day in Phuket, everything changed. Yui had been having such a good time and had gotten so emotionally wrapped up in pleasing me and going wherever I suggested and staying out at night walking the beach front or drinking beer and snacking on peanuts at outdoor cafes that she'd forgotten all about her alibi and how she was keeping it going. She hadn't been in touch with her friend in Bangkok for several days to cover for her time with me and  to know what Ve was asking about when she called and Yui was not around. Worse, perhaps, Yui hadn't been calling home each day to talk with Ve directly, the little sister who for reasons Yui wouldn't reveal to me had such a strong hold on her. Her constant companion, her cell phone, suddenly wasn't as important as me and the small demands to go here and do this or that that I was constantly coming up with.

Everything changed because on the fifth day as we were lying on the beach admiring the tattoos each of us had gotten-me a scorpion on my upper inner right thigh, Yui two black beetles having intercourse at the base of her spine-she called home and got Ve, and Ve immediately began shouting at her. Demanding, as I would soon learn, that she come home immediately, that she knew that she was with me-another no good farang--and in Phuket, and doing what a good country girl from Isaan should not do. She called Yui and me all kinds of vile names and said that she was a whore just like all the thousands of girls from Isaan who were infamous for going to Bangkok and Pattaya and Phuket to become prostitutes. And she threatened Yui, oh did she. She said that if she didn't come home right away she was going to call the police and tell them that I had raped Yui in Bangkok on the night that we met.

Yui was scared, and when she got off the phone she sobbed for the better part of an hour. It was only after I coaxed her into taking a warm shower and eating some food that I'd ordered brought to the room that she settled down. I tried to get her to talk about this hold her sister had on her, but the effort was largely futile. From little things she said, I could only surmise that Ve was blackmailing her for something she had done in Bangkok. What that something was I had no idea, though I was reasonably certain it had nothing to do with this little adventure that had been aimed at me.

By early evening, Yui seemed beyond the trauma of the phone conversation with Ve, and we spent a marvelous night together. I took her to a German restaurant and persuaded her to try Wiener schnitzel and share a bottle of red wine with me. This was her very first taste of German food, and the first time she'd ever had wine. She was surprised how much she liked the heavy food and this peculiarly strong and sour drink that after the second glass had her feeling light-headed and coming forth with what I hadn't heard often from her since leaving Chiang Mai: So nice to meet you. So nice to meet you…said sweetly, with a giggle, and now while squeezing my second and third fingers. 

In the morning I arranged for an afternoon flight that would take her to Korat via Bangkok, and we got several small toys for Sunan. I bought her a new pair of shoes and blue jeans and two flattering blouses. And also one little gold toe ring that she said she would wear on her left foot because I was left-handed. It was how she wanted to remember me.

On the way to the airport, I had the taxi driver stop at an ATM machine and I withdrew six hundred dollars. I planned to give some of this money to Yui, but how much I was going to give her depended on her cooperation with some questions I had. Other than what I had freely given her, she had asked for nothing from me, eager, I think, to make it clear that she was not just another Thai hooker mining a farang for all he was worth.

We arrived with almost two hours to flight time. Yui was withdrawn, and teary. I think she had expected some kind of commitment from me, with strong words of love and a promise that I would soon be returning to Bangkok so we could meet up and develop our relationship  further. I was promising nothing. I couldn't, for reasons that I'd not broached with her and would not let her pursue the few times she tried.

With only a few minutes for a final boarding call, I asked her how much she'd been paid to pull this prank on me, and who was behind it.

She said she couldn't tell me, that that was a key part of the agreement she'd made. But a couple of seconds later, she said she couldn't remember that the agreement said anything about revealing how much she'd been paid. Now crying, looking at me as if might I slug her as her ex-husband had, she said, Three hundred dollars. That's how much I got.  Three hundred, three hundred…and her voice trailed off and she put her head on my shoulder and asked if I was mad at her.

Why? I said. That's twice what you make in a month sewing shirts. You'd have been crazy not to take the money and play a game with a perfect stranger.

I still wanted to know who was behind this little escapade, even though I almost wanted to thank him, or her, or them-whomever. I'd gotten a detailed Isaan family story. This was a lot more than Theroux travel writers usually get. I'd experienced parts of Chiang Mai and Phuket I might not have seen on my own. And I'd made a friend that I'd never forget. Beyond this, I wouldn't allow my own thoughts to go. But, still, I wanted to know...

For me, I said. Just give me a last name, or even a first name.

I cannot, she insisted. I just cannot!

From my left pocket I took out a large wad of purple 500 and silver 1,000 baht notes and counted out five hundred dollars. She started to turn away, but I grabbed her right hand, now a fist, and forced it open. Please, I said. For me.

She squeezed her hand, and then brought the money to her face. I have done nothing for this and I won't take it, she said. She stared at me and gritted her teeth and added, This was the most important promise I made. I promised I would not give you his name. I cannot.

But then she brought her hands together near her chest, as much as was possible with all the bills she was holding, bowed her head giving me the traditional wai, stuffed the money in her purse, got her toes and kissed me on the lips. It was a lingering kiss full of affection and our good times together, and when she pulled away she whispered something in Thai, words I then could not repeat and cannot now remember. Then, as if she had been thinking about this scenario ever since Ve called and knew this moment would come, she stepped back and dropped her hands and showed me several fingers. She did it again to make sure I got the number right. I said nothing, and she said, He didn't tell me I couldn't show you the number of letters in his last name. That's all I will ever tell you or show you.

Bye, bye, sweet farang, she said as she slowly turned, waving. She picked up her small bag and ran to the attendant taking tickets. And the last thing I remember was Yui running into the alley that led to the plane, her silky black hair flying loose, like that uncommon view seen through field binoculars of an exotic bird of paradise going home to the nest.

I saw no reason to watch the plane lift off, so I went to the coffee shop, ordered a BLT and a Singha, and opened a yellowed, thirty-year-old copy of John Fowles's, The Aristos which I'd been carrying around for nearly two months in my daypack. I read here and there on Christianity, and in a section titled "Death by Numbers." Then, with still an hour to go before my Thai Airways flight to Bangkok and on to Ho Chi Minh City, I sat back and reminded myself who had done this to me, which was easy enough to decipher. I wondered if I would exact revenge. But what kind of revenge? The more I thought about it, the less I cared, and the more absurd and childish the idea seemed. For now, as with so many things that we encounter on this fast run through life, it occurred to me that the whole experience had worked to my advantage. I doubted I would ever see Yui again, but she had left me with some marvelous memories, and I would never forget her.

She lingered in my mind as I sipped on a second beer, lost in reverie. I returned to The Aristos and leafed through the brittle pages until my eyes fell on a section titled "Sexual Freedom." I read a couple of pages, and then these words brought me up short.

"Sexual attraction and the sexual act are in themselves innocent, neither intrinsically moral nor immoral.

I like these lines, I thought. Yui would too.  Or would she?

Korski

© Korski. All rights reserved by the author.

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