The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror. Fifth Annual Collection
- Автор: Датлоу Эллен, Виндлинг Терри
- Год: 1992
- Язык: английский
- Год: St.Martin’s Press
- Жанр: Ужасы
Электронная книга - «The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror. Fifth Annual Collection». Краткое содержание книги:
I didn’t notice the lumpy mattress or the peeling walls or the way the light bulb jiggled to the music from downstairs. I didn’t notice the cockroaches.
I didn’t notice until morning that I had forgotten to use my condoms.
It was a productive trip but I didn’t go back to Thailand for another two years. I was promoted off the traveling circuit, moved from Encino to Beverly Hills, got myself a newer, late-model wife, packed my kids off to a Swiss boarding school.
I also found a new therapist and a new support group. I smothered the addiction in new addictions. My old therapist had been a strict Freudian. He’d tried to root out the cause from some childhood trauma—molestation, potty training, Oedipal games—he’d never been able to find anything. I’m good at blocking out memories. To the best of my knowledge, I popped into being around age eight or nine. My parents were dead but I had a trust fund.
My best friends in the support group were Janine, who’d had eight husbands, and Mike, a transvestite with a spectacular fro. The clinic was in Malibu so we could do the beach in between bouts of tearing ourselves apart. One day Thailand came up.
Mike said, “I knew this woman in Thailand. I had fun in Thailand, you know? R&R. Lot of transvestites there, hon. I’m not a fag, I just like lingerie. I met this girl.” He rarely stuck to the point because he was always stoned. Our therapist, Glenda, had passed out in the redwood tub. The beach was deserted. “I knew this girl in Thailand, a dancer. She would change when she danced. I mean change. You shoulda seen her skin. Translucent. And she smelled different. Smelled of strange drugs.”
You know I started shaking when he said that because I d tried not to think of her all this time even though she came to me in dreams. Even before I’d start to dream, when I’d just closed my eyes, I’d hear the hollow tinkle of marimbas and see her eyes floating in the darkness.
“Sounds familiar,” I said.
“Nah. There was nobody like this girl, hon, nobody. She danced in a classical dance show and she worked the whorehouses . . . had a day job too, working for a nutty professor woman . . . honky woman, withered face, glasses. Some kind of doctor, I think. Sleazy office in Patpong, gave the girls free V.D. drugs.”
“Dr. Frances Stone.” Was the company paying for a free V.D. clinic? What about the research into the secrets of the universe?
“Hey, how’d you know her name?”
“Did you have sex with her?” Suddenly I was trembling with rage. I don’t know why. I mean, I knew what she did for a living.
“Did you?” Mike said. He was all nervous. He inched away from me, rolling a joint with one hand and scootching along the redwood deck with the other.
“I asked first,” I shouted, thinking, Jesus, I sound like a ten-year-old kid.
Of course not! She had problems, all right? Expensive problems. But she was beautiful, mm-mm, good enough to eat."
I looked wildly around. Mr. Therapist was still dozing—fabulous way to earn a thousand bucks an hour—and the others had broken up into little groups. Janine was sort of listening, but she was more interested in getting her suntan lotion on evenly.
“I want to go back,” I said. “I want to see Keo again."
Totally, like, bullshit, she said, sidling up to me. “You’re just, like, externalizing the interior hurt onto a fantasy-object. Like, you need to be in touch with your child, know what I mean?”
“You’re getting your support groups muddled up, hon," Mike said edgily.
“Hey, Russ, instead of, like, projecting on some past-forgettable female two years back and ten thousand miles away, why don’t you, like, fixate on someone a little closer to home? I mean, I’ve been looking at you. I only joined this support group cause like, support groups are the only place you can find like sensitive guys.”
“Janine, I’m married.”
“So let’s have an affair.”
I liked the idea. My marriage to Trisha had mostly been a joke: I’d needed a fresh ornament for cocktail parties and openings; she needed security. We hadn’t had much sex; how could we? I was hooked on memory. Perhaps this woman would cure me. And I wanted to be cured so badly because Mike’s story had jolted me out of the fantasy that Keo had existed only for me.
By now it was the 90s, so Janine insisted on a blood test before we did anything.
I tested positive. I was scared shitless. Because the only time I’d ever been so careless as to forget to use a condom was. . . that night. And we’d done everything. Plumbed every orifice. Shared every fluid.
It had been a dance of transformation all right.
I had nothing to lose. I divorced my wife and sent my kids to an even more expensive school in Connecticut. I was feeling fine. Maybe I’d never come down with anything. I read all the books and articles about it. I didn’t tell anyone. I packed a couple of suits and some casual clothes and a supply of bootleg AZT. I was feeling fine. Fine, I told myself. Fine.
I took the next flight to Bangkok.
The company was surprised to see me, but I was such a big executive by now they assumed I was doing some kind of internal troubleshooting. They put me up at the Oriental. They gave me a 10,000 baht per diem. In Bangkok you can buy a lot for four hundred bucks. I told them to leave me alone. The investigation didn't concern them. They didn’t know what I was investigating, so they feared the worst.
I went to Silom Road, where Club Pagoda had stood. It was gone. In its stead stood a brand new McDonald’s and an airline ticket office. Perhaps Keo was already dead. Wasn t that what I had smelled on her? The odor of crushed flowers, wilting ... the smell of coming death? And the passion with which she made love I understood it now. It was the passion of the damned. She had reached out to me from a place between life and death. She had sucked the life from me and given me the virus as a gift of love.
I strolled through Patpong. Hustlers tugged at my elbows. Fake Rolexes were flashed in my face. It was useless to ask for Keo. There are a million women named Keo. Keo means jewel. It also means glass. In Thai there are many words that are used indiscriminately for reality and artifice. I didn't have a photograph and Keo’s beauty was hard to describe. And every girl in Patpong is beautiful. Every night, parading before me in the neon labyrinth, a thousand pairs of lips and eyes, sensuous and infinitely giving. The wrong lips, the wrong eyes.
There are only a few city blocks in Patpong, but to trudge up and down them in the searing heat, questioning, observing every face for a trace of the remembered grail ... it can age you. I stopped shaving and took recreational drugs. What did it matter anyway?
But I was still fine, I wasn’t coming down with anything.
I was fine. Fine!
And then, one day, while paying for a Big Mac, I saw her hands. I was looking down at the counter counting out the money. I heard the computer beep of the cash register and then I saw them: proffering the hamburger in both hands, palms up, like an offering to the gods. The fingers arched upwards, just so, with delicacy and hidden strength. God, I knew those hands. Their delicacy as they skimmed my shoulder blades, as they glided across my testicles just a hair’s breadth away from touching. Their strength when she balled up her fist and shoved it into my rectum. Jesus, we’d done everything that night. I dropped my wallet on the counter, I seized those hands and gripped them, burger and all, and I felt the familiar response. Oh, God, I ached.