The Last Magazine: A Novel (14 page)

There are occasional complications in the transactions. He learns that whores have feelings too. Who would have thought or known that these girls had feelings? That they are people in their own right, their soft skin a membrane holding blood and organs and brain and keeping the universe outside. He encounters these feelings with a thin nineteen-year-old girl who, after the ritual bathing, starts to blow him and swing her pussy around to his face, to the numeraled position, and though it looks clean and tempting to lick, he doesn’t stick his tongue out. He doesn’t plunge in. A few seconds pass, then fifteen seconds, and the thin nineteen-year-old takes her mouth off his cock and glances over her shoulder, a stern, confused look, and says, “You don’t want me?” No, he did want her. But did she not know that
he couldn’t just lick her where she had snuggled hundreds, if not thousands, of cocks? He can stick his in there, sure, with the Durex for protection, but his mouth? He still has his boundaries. She is pissed. She feels rejected, he knows, and though he fucks her quickly, she isn’t into it. He wants to get out of there—it’s uncomfortable for him. He doesn’t get the chance for conversation—they just walk out of the 250-baht-a-half-hour hotel room in Nana Plaza, and part in the night.

Jilted. He didn’t get his part of the transaction, the talk. He didn’t get the chance to explain how very important and special he was, how very dangerous his job was, what it means, what his emotional state means to him and them after spending all those months running around the streets with Ahmed, and after each dead condom, each encounter, he would say, “I am a writer, I am from Baghdad, it is a war there, it’s now raining car bombs, don’t you see it’s raining car bombs?
Time
magazine!”

He has spoken only to whores and concierges and maids for two weeks now. Conversations, one-sided as was his way, but conversations with people there to serve him. Should he feel bad about that?

A
.E. Peoria steps into the lobby of the Bangkok Mandarin Oriental. It is lit up and white and marble with hundreds of dollars’ worth of white flowers arranged in vases and the soothing light tones of Orientalish music playing:
pong dong ping
. Through the glass windows at the back of the lobby are the hotel’s two pools: one pool, still water, with cabins, shallow, private, more for lounging; and the other pool, for more active swimmers. Even at one a.m., there is a fleet of Thais to greet him as he comes in. Bowing and saying hello as he steps through the first doors, bowing and saying hello as he rounds the corner to wave at the check-in desk, bowing and saying hello as he gets to the entrance to the bar, and, finally, as he takes a seat at the bar, the waitress and bartender both bow and say hello.

At this bar, Peoria thinks, what history. The Oriental: the hotel of Graham Greene and Joseph Conrad and Somerset Maugham and James Michener. Did they, like me, partake in the city’s number-one attraction, the girls? Or wasn’t Maugham homosexual? The boys, then? Hard to know. Greene almost likely did, and had Peoria ever managed to get through volume 2 of his 3,400-page, three-volume autobiography, he’d probably have found the passage about Greene’s
slipping out in the middle of the night to congenially and guiltily cheat on his wife, who refused him a divorce. It is a city of blue-movie possibilities. Conrad, the failed suicide, multitongued linguist, waited—in this very bar, or a version of this bar—for his first commission to captain a vessel. Maugham rode out a nasty bout of malaria in a guest room, near dying. And apparently James Michener, whose books Peoria had never read but had seen on the shelves of his grandmother’s home, in paperback, made a reputation there, too. Such a list of greats who’d stayed and slept and suffered from various tropical maladies and more typical Western guilt on the floors above him!

Would that ever be me, Peoria wonders. Or am I going to be left with that one book, that
Desperation Points West
, and that one story: the night I spent with a Mexican—nay, a Puerto Rican—who got his balls blown off.

What could he say about everything he’d done? Would the sum total of his life be conflict zones plus the peyote eaten in New Mexico plus the rim job from three nineteen-year-olds two days ago? All of it had been research. But to what end?

He had pursued the life of a great writer because he wanted to be a great writer. Isn’t this what they did? Screw whores and get shot at and ingest large quantities of booze and drugs? Isn’t the Oriental—this very bar—proof? These were not lightweights: the Greenes, the Maughams, and the Conrads. These were greats, men of true literary heft. They had passed through here and left with the valued and vaunted experience needed to write. But what is the point of all of it, Peoria thinks, if all his material never comes out, if all of it just stays endlessly circling in his head?

His thoughts are pressing up against his own career irrelevance—he can feel himself slipping off the escalator, getting sucked back toward the emergency stop button, no longer on the fast track.

All he has to do is look at the lives of these writers and he will know.

He’d gotten into a very bad habit, a reading block. He tried to read the classics, but the classics had failed him. Or he had failed the classics. Invariably, he failed at the preface and the introduction, at the author’s biography and timeline. The writing was secondary to the life—the facts and details of what they did and why, where they slept and who they slept with captured his interest. The very fact that he could be reading a book written decades ago held more power than the book itself. The words, the sentences, the language—his mind wouldn’t last past page 10. And so he has great knowledge of the life without knowledge of the art; he can guess at the art, talk intelligently about it, but he will admit that he really hasn’t gotten past Queequeg’s hug of Ishmael—pretty fucking weird, that!—but he does know that Melville worked on a dock in Battery Street in Lower Manhattan, that he’d been penniless, that after
Moby-Dick
he had said he’d never write a novel again (the critics hated it, the critics killed him, the critics said he was a loser, a dope, a maniac, a fool); Peoria found that anecdote comforting after
Desperation Points West
received its cold shoulder. But he was sure that almost every author, if they had the chance, would embrace the Melville example as their own—they’ll be sorry in twenty years when they discover that they missed a masterpiece, that it was sitting right under their noses all these years and they were too stupid and small-minded to see it!

Melville.
Typee
. The South Pacific. Melville had visited Siam—that’s Thailand—for a fortnight. Three nights his vessel had pulled into the kingdom of Siam, en route to Australia. Those savages. According to his description of Bangkok, the city was steaming, low-lying, waterlogged.

Melville, his son’s suicide. Melville and Mount Greylock. Melville
dedicated
Moby-Dick
to Hawthorne—and at the book’s hostile reception, did Melville wonder if Hawthorne was ashamed to have his name associated with it? Did Melville worry that he had embarrassed Hawthorne by putting his name on a book massively considered at the time a piece of shit? Yes, he is sure Melville had those doubts. The personal humiliation of a failed novel, three years of his life, vanquished in a few afternoons of critical thought set in type.

Conrad—who hated Melville’s
Moby-Dick
and who missed Melville in Bangkok by less than a decade—surely nursed a depressed beer right here. Conrad’s life gives him hope—he bucked the mold. He didn’t write anything of genius until he was almost forty, older than Peoria. Greene was something of a prodigy, so fuck him. Maugham, again, the details are blurry, but all of this happened in this hotel. He could feel it, live it, kick it around, be initiated by it, be daunted by it, and think that the task of equaling . . .

A man next to him at the bar taps him on the shoulder.

“There is no pride,” the Frenchman says, “on being the best-looking man in a whorehouse. This is a shame.”

Peoria looks at him.

“Here.”

The Frenchman pushes over a small glass of blue liquid, his fingers brushing the top with a strip of something that looks like sandpaper.

“I’ve seen you at the hotel before. Where’s your wife?”

“She is upstairs right now, in rest.”

The Frenchman is the same height, Peoria guesses, five-foot-seven, with thin brown hair combed over on the front of his skull and dropping back below his ears, his head a few years away from accepting baldness by his early fifties. The kind of haircut that the man had probably had since he was twelve or thirteen.

“Marcel,” he says, making a gesture with his hand that isn’t a shake, just putting it on the bar.

“Peoria,” A.E. says.

“You are here for work?”

“Because of work,” Peoria says.

“We will have a drink and then we will discuss,” Marcel says.

Peoria downs the blue liquid, feeling a lime taste on his lips around the glass where Marcel had rubbed the strip of sandpaper.

“I have spiked your drink,” he says. “But it is a good spike, no?”

“Tastes like lime,” Peoria says.

“We have twenty minutes here before we will go on a walk,” Marcel says.

“That’s great, it’s just great to be able to talk to someone who knows English so well. I haven’t had a full English conversation in three weeks, you know, and I have to say that it gets lonely. You don’t think it would, but it does get lonely traveling alone.”

“Yes, I will comfort you.”

Peoria nods, not listening, already revving up.

“I’ve been to Paris a couple times. I think it really is a beautiful city, and I’ve never really got the sense that they hate Americans there.”

“We do,” Marcel says.

“And it’s like, well, the taxi drivers don’t like it that you can’t speak French, so they can be dicks, but I didn’t think that anyone else was really, you know what I mean? But it’s really nothing compared to when you’re in a place where they really hate Americans, you know? It’s such a relative scale now because you go to places and you’re a target. People really want to kill you.”

“And what places are those?”

“I’m talking right now about Baghdad, that’s where I’ve been, fuck, since March, since the invasion there. I know you guys weren’t happy with the invasion, and you know, shit, you’re right, probably
right, you know, the whole thing was such a fucking stupid debacle, but that’s the way history goes I guess sometimes.”

“Ah, la guerre d’Irak.”

“Yeah, yeah, the Iraq War.”

Peoria launches into his story. The Humvees, the convoy, the boredom, the fear, and the massacre. Seven soldiers killed at one time, the worst incident of that day, and the only survivors were Chipotle and him, in the desert, holding a rag to Chipotle’s groin. The Frenchman listens, shaking his head, looking at his watch.

“Do you know the Jewish author Elie Wiesel?” Marcel asks.

“Yeah, the Nazi hunter,” Peoria says.

“No. But he tells of a story, in a novel. I do not recall the name, but it is fiction. The plot is about a man, the narrator, who has stepped in front of a car to kill himself. An attempt at suicide, yes. He had survived the Holocaust, our narrator. And we are in his coma, seeing his flashbacks. He is on a boat, crossing the Atlantic, and he is looking out over the railing of this boat. He is thinking deep thoughts, profoundly deep thoughts of why. Of why he is going to jump and sink. He longs for the sinking, for the feeling of the boat leaving him in its cruel wake. Another passenger on the boat sees our narrator, and says to him, ‘Do not jump. Do not jump,
monsieur
.’
‘Mon ami,’
our narrator says, ‘you do not know my story, and if you did know my story, you would not be so quick to stop me.’ The other passenger says, ‘There can be no story that would make me say that. I can see in your eyes, in your pain, that you are a victim, and the victim’s story should not end at the bottom of the sea.’ So our narrator, he tells his story to the curious passenger, this would be the Good Samaritan. Of the camps, of seeing his mother and sister for the last time. Of living for three years with shit and death on his plate. All the time, of walking, on the last push, from Buchenwald to—and this is the twist—to Auschwitz. This is where our narrator ends up when he thinks he has
gotten free and it is on this walk, this march. His father, still alive, takes sick in the cold and his father dies. Our narrator catches a fever as well, and somehow he finds a girl, a twelve-year-old girl, who takes his hand, who keeps him walking as the snowflakes fall. A Nazi officer approaches the girl. The Nazi grabs her by the arm and starts to pull her away from him. But the girl will not let go of our narrator’s arm. She is crying hysterically, so the Nazi officer says okay, you can come too, and he brings both of them to a private room, a private house in the northeast corner of Auschwitz, almost a barn—you can visit this private house on tour, I have visited it myself. And in this private room, that is when the shooting starts. Our narrator can hear the shooting through the walls, and he understands that this officer was saving the girl because of this liquidation. The Allies are on the way, of course, the Allies are always on the way, but always too late, no? The Allies are rolling in, but that is still days later. And as our narrator hears this racket, this utter racket, this Nazi jazz jam of bullets and cocked triggers and grenades, wiping the grounds of Gypsies and Jews and Communists and undesirables—while our narrator is hearing this soundtrack, do you know what is in front of his eyes? He is seeing this Nazi pet the girl on her head to keep her calm. This Nazi is a man of strong sexual desires—he can get hard in the middle of a bloodbath. That is sexual potency. To get an erection inspired by liquidation. He starts to kiss the girl and take the girl’s shirt off. If this was Nabokov describing this scene, he would talk about pale raisins on a plain pudding. He would write of the dry well that is more pure than a flooding and somewhat older spring. But our narrator is no Nabokov. He just sees the Nazi’s pants drop, the SS eagle clinking on the floor, and the cot springs going up and down. The girl closes her eyes, and when the girl closes her eyes, our exhausted narrator, he closes his eyes too. Exhausted, no food, eighty pounds
underweight. When he opens his eyes, it is the next day and the officer is gone. He looks around to see the girl and he does see her. She is on the bed, dead now, suffocated, or so it seems. By what? Blunt force trauma to the throat, we assume, though this detail is too horrible to make explicit. And the Nazi officer has left! He has left! Why did he not kill me, our narrator wonders, why did he not kill me then? Must he have thought I was already dead? Our narrator staggers out of the barn and all the Nazis have fled—back to their old cushy jobs in Wiesbaden and Frankfurt, to be sure!—and all the prisoners are all dead. The bodies, even these emaciated bodies have so much blood. He can’t smell anything anymore and can’t feel anything and so he collapses in the pile of cordwood flesh and is only woken up by an American fellow. A black man is tugging on his feet with a bandana over his face from the stench—they gave the Negros this cleanup duty; do your histories tell you that of this liberation?—the sick stench and his eyes open and our narrator is saved. Our narrator is saved. He says these words out loud. The passenger on the boat has listened, without interruption. The passenger would look seasick but anger is a cure for seasickness. Contempt cures seasickness. The Good Samaritan walks away, leaving the narrator alone, or so our narrator says. Our narrator knows why, why even the Good Samaritan is disgusted by such a story. Our narrator concludes: he was affronted by the very fact that the story was told to him.”

“Wow,” A.E. Peoria says.

“It has been twenty minutes. Let us walk. There is a place I’d like to show you.”

A.E. Peoria and Marcel leave the hotel, and the mild hallucinogen laced with amphetamines is taking effect, the Oriental music
ding-dong
ing, sounding like the French song “Frère Jacques” to Peoria. Peoria thinks that’s pretty hilarious, and they are both talking,
fast, talking back and forth and over and under each other, and the blocks pass by like nothing. On Patpong Road there is a Thai teenager with baggy pants and a skateboarding decal on his shirt, handing out flyers, and Marcel approaches the Thai teenager and says they would like to see a show. A.E. Peoria says, Wait a minute, Marcel, the guidebook says never trust the touts, never go with a tout anywhere, and then they are walking up to a second-floor club. Never go up to the second floor of any club on Patpong. Marcel says that is the very reason he has chosen a tout and that he has gone up to the second floor: because the guidebook says no. You must not ever pretend the guidebook has wisdom, Marcel says.