The Schwarzschild Radius (35 page)

Then he came upon the perfect solution.

t was one of more than ten brothels on the street. Fifteen girls sat in plastic chairs outside their rooms waiting for men to pay 110 Baht―about five dollars―for their bodies. Many of the girls were foreigners from South China, Burma, Nepal, and the Philippines who were enticed here with offers of lucrative jobs as barmaids and domestics. Once here, their passports were taken away, their virginities sold for two to three-hundred dollars and their enslavement began.

Some of the girls were sold by their parents for four-hundred dollars. Others were pawned and handed a bundle of cards. Each time they serviced a customer, a card was removed from the bundle. When the bundle was gone, their freedom could be redeemed. Some had a thousand or two thousand cards in their bundles.

Achara didn’t have a bundle. At thirteen, she was adopted by a man who she thought was going to be her father. She was sold to Tong for five-hundred dollars and told to strip and sit in a room for eight hours a day watching porn movies. This was her training. The madam instructed her on special techniques to please men. Her virginity was sold to an Arab. When she refused to have sex, she was dragged into a dark, windowless room and left there without food or water. On the third day, she still refused sex, so Tong knocked her to the ground and slammed her head against the concrete floor until she passed out. When she awoke, she was naked, a rattan cane smeared with pureed red chili peppers shoved into her vagina. She agreed to anything if they would take it out.

As a beautiful fair-skinned girl, she attracted fifteen men a day and was making Tong a lot of money. To pay for the makeup, clothes, and extra rice required to stay attractive, she, like the other girls, borrowed money from the moneylenders at five-hundred percent interest. This money would have to be repaid before she could leave the brothel. Achara was now three-thousand dollars in debt.

At sixteen, she was one of the oldest girls. The customers wanted eleven and twelve-year-olds these days. Still, she serviced eight to ten men a day and did a lot of the chores. Her best job was going to buy beer because it gave her a chance to get out of the brothel for a brief time.

She stood outside her room waiting for them to send her off for beer, so she could pick up the money at Western Union. The WU office wasn’t far from the beer distributor, but it was a lot of money and she was worried they would give her a problem.

Tong, the brothel owner, gave her the sign, thrusting his thumb toward his mouth. He was thirty-seven with his black hair slicked back and four rings on each hand like the rap stars in the USA. He loved jewelry, and several gold chains slapped his bare chest when he moved. The shirts were always open all the way to his stomach as though he had a great body, but he didn’t. Chain smoking had given him yellow fingers and a permanent stench to his breath, even when he wasn’t smoking. The fingernails were meticulously manicured and polished to show the world he didn’t work with his hands. The sunglasses, which he wore almost round the clock, covered the wrinkles of his tired eyes. He didn’t like people seeing him without his sunglasses, and he would turn his back like some girls are shy about their bodies.

Achara got her bamboo pole that she used to balance the two cases of beer for the one-mile round trip. There were closer places to buy beer, but the warehouse was cheaper.

First, she called to confirm that the money had arrived as her sister had told her to do. It had. For ID, she asked if they would accept a copy of her orphanage discharge paper which had her picture, though it was an old one. The lady said yes.

Achara was lucky she wasn’t a foreigner. The foreign girls had all had their passports taken away. The brothel never knew about the orphanage paper. She was going to rip it up last year because she hated it so much, just to cut all ties with her past and begin again. But she kept it.

There, on Nimmanhemin Rd, Soi Fifteen was the Western Union. Her heart began to pound as it had three years ago when she first entered the brothel. If Tong found out about the money, he would kill her for it. Achara passed the entrance and explained that she was there to pick up the money.

“Name?”

She gave it.

The man’s brow furrowed when he looked at the screen. “Thirty-two hundred USD?”

“Yes.”

“Thirty-two hundred?”

“Yes.”

“That’s a lot of money.” He wasn’t making any clerk motions and Achara wished that she had a watch, so she could glance at it now and look important.

“Why so much?”

“Here is my identification.”

“That looks like an old photo.”

“I called a half hour ago and the lady said this was good identification. That’s my money.”

“We don’t take such ID. And you’re underage, I see. You have to be eighteen to redeem money here.”

Achara knew he was looking for a bribe or he would have dismissed her already.

“I need my money,” she said.

“What can we do?” he said like one who has not a care in the world.

“I’ll give you twenty.” He smiled and shook his head as he lit a cigarette.

“How much you want?” she asked.

“Five-hundred.”

If she had a gun, she would have blown his face off.

“Thirty and I suck your dick.” That seemed to make some inroads. “If no, then I tell them to cancel and send it to my brother. I still get my money. You get nothing.”

The clerk weighed the options. Thirty was a week’s pay plus some free yumyum. He nodded and pointed to the toilet.

“Money first,” she said.

The clerk was either anxious to get to the sex or he had trouble keeping numbers in his head. He had to count the money three times. Then Achara counted it three times.

“Receipt?” she said. He printed out the receipt. After everything was deep in her jeans pockets. She said, “Okay, we go.”

When she exited the Western Union, her biggest problem was hiding the two huge bulges in her pants. She went to get the beer. Time was short.

At the beverage warehouse, she bought a bundle of incense sticks that were held together by two sturdy rubber bands. In a bathroom Achara secured the two bundles of cash to her ankles by first inserting them in her socks. Now she bought a case each of Singha and Leo and was off to the brothel. Along the way, she stopped at the Internet café and sent a message that she had received the money.

When she returned, Tong was beating Bopha, the Cambodian girl. She had hidden ten bhat from him and he was heaping all his fury on her with a rattan cane―the kind the police stations used.

While Tong got drunk on the Singha, Achara waited for her cousin, Luk, to arrive with the passport. She had called her aunt from the Internet café and was told that the passport had arrived from the USA by overnight delivery. Achara learned over the years to not let apparent good luck make her feel good. The disappointment was too much for her. She would believe it when she held the passport in her hands. For now, she had to hide the money before another client arrived.

Her room consisted of an eight-foot by five-foot area with a pink curtain at the entrance. Inside was a mattress and a small table where she kept her Buddha and her vihara, or spirit house. It was only a small plastic spirit house, not a beautiful one made of teak. According to custom, when people finished building their house, they created a guardian spirit house, then invited the holy deity Pra Prom to reside there. One day, Achara was going to build her own house and only then invite Pra Prom to inhabit the vihara. She could not invite him into a brothel.

She pulled the sheet off the mattress. The stains were so large and dark that the mattress looked like an old map. Another girl had just died on this mattress when they gave it to Achara. That had always disgusted her, and she feared the spirit of the dead girl. She never slept well on it. Six weeks ago, in preparation for using the mattress as a hiding place, she cut several seams and taped them so they would look like repairs. Several searches later, Tong didn’t bother un-taping all the seams, having found nothing in the past. She now untaped one of the slits and removed the stuffing. Once she had made enough room, Achara quickly put the money into the opening and refilled it.

Tong was busy drinking now, but Pairat, his assistant, was standing on the porch as always, talking. He was about twenty-two and always wore sunglasses on top of his head. He had an endless supply of friends who came by the brothel in their Vespas, and they also liked to wear their sunglasses on their heads. He enjoyed bossing the girls around and yelling at them even when they weren’t doing anything wrong. He yelled at Achara to get outside and sit in front of her room. She put on her white short-shorts and tube top, and sat in the breeze.

Before long, an old man clambered up the steps. She didn’t look at him, hoping he would pick the new Burmese girl who was younger, or Lin, the Chinese girl who had beautiful white skin. She didn’t want to leave the breeze, but he pointed to her and she had to go with him.

Four men and six hours later and still no Luk. She began to conjure what might have happened. They decided to sell the passport―would a passport be worth anything if it had someone else’s picture in it? They got jealous and threw the passport away―this was the worst scenario. Everyone was jealous. Even if what you had was insignificant, someone around you was jealous of it. Once, one of the girls took her plastic Buddha and kept it for days. Achara kept shouting at Pairat to find out who took the statue. He slapped her and she still shouted that she should have her Buddha returned. Finally, he went around to all the girls’ rooms searching until it turned up in the quarters of a Chinese girl from a hill tribe.

Achara asked her why she had stolen the statue and the girl replied that she was jealous that Achara believed in God while she herself believed in nothing.

At two in the morning, Luk arrived. She hadn’t seen him since he was eleven. Now he was a young man of eighteen and she was suddenly ashamed. She was never ashamed in front of strangers, but this was her blood. He was a cashier in Wal-Mart and respectable. She invited him inside and greeted him with a traditional Thai Wai bow. Smiling, he handed her the passport. She opened it and they both gazed on a face which was hers, but more beautiful than hers. At the top of the first page, it said United States of America and the closeness of those words to her face made her feel that the mythical land was already near. She lit a candle to heat some tea and they sat in glowing silence. Luk said, “You are going to paradise.”