“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 find 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 and the street noises outside.
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 one another. This was fucking nuts.
I put the pistol down. “I brought some first-aid shit,” I said. “I’ll get it.”
I’d brought the smaller of two first-aid kits that I humped around the boonies in my ruck, not for the bandages but possibly for the penicillin and definitely for the LURP uppers, downers, and painkillers that we were issued for serious missions. The morphine was rationed carefully to medics, but I’d still put away quite a stash of Dexedrine and some Demerol. There were also some sulfa drugs. I took the bandages and pills back to Tres and let him try to take care of himself while I poured some water and brought the pills in.
Tres was sitting up now with the bloodied sheet over him. He took two pills 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 European medical leeches exude the same anticoagulant: hirudin. The bats secrete it in their saliva; the leeches manufacture it in their gut 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 until sunrise.
Tres went to sleep after a while and I sat in the sprung chair near the window, watching the door and holding the useless .38 in my lap. I had thoughts of forcing Maladung to Mara again, and then shooting him and the woman. And the infant, I mentally added.
The thought was not unsupportable. I’d seen enough dead babies in the past five months. And none of the dead gook babies had been lapping up regurgitated blood from their mommies’ lips before being offed. I don’t think I would have hesitated a minute to blow away both mother and child. And then how do you get out of here? came the question from the rational part of my mind. I doubted if the Thais would take kindly to my canceling the ticket of what might be their only resident phanyaa mahn naga kios. They seemed to enjoy the mother’s services too much.
I put that plan out of my mind for now and tried to figure out what to do next. If Tres were still bleeding that evening, I would take him to a MACV Army liaison office that was reported to be somewhere in Bangkok. If that failed to be real, I’d find some MP’s and get them to find some good medical help. If that didn’t work, I’d carry Tres to the nearest Thai hospital and use the .38 to enforce priority aid.
I fell asleep mulling these options. When I awoke it was dark in the room. The fan was still turning in its desultory fashion but the street sounds outside the window had shifted to their nighttime volume. The bedsheets were soaked with fresh blood, there was blood on the floor, the bathroom was littered with bloody towels, but Tres was gone.
I ran out into the hallway and pounded down the steps to the lobby before realizing what a sight I must be: wild-eyed, barefoot and barechested, 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.
Back in the room, I changed into civilian clothes and my loose Hawaiian shirt, tucked the pistol in my belt, and went back out into the night.
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 out 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 fifty 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 drew the pistol and held it uselessly as the taxi bounced across the river, disappeared between 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 nongender-specific to allow the subconscious to relax and enjoy the act. For others, it is the uncontrolled intensity of sensation which causes a flutter of alarm amidst the cascade of pleasure. For many, it is just the unbidden thought of sharp teeth.
I have to concentrate now on not concentrating even to allow an erection to begin. Luckily, the male organ is as simple a stimulus-response mechanism as nature allows anywhere. 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 arc-welder two floors above lights the scene and the interior of my eyelids with magnesium strobes. Mara whispers something and I feel the shock of Tanha’s warm mouth pulling away. There is the shock of cooler air on me for only a second before a different moistness 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 amidst 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, when it comes above the background surge of sliding warmth, 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 curtains 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 surges down the length of me, 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 rhythmic surging of my own pulse. The separate, tiny shocks along my groin have grown together to form a perfect spiral of pleasurable sensation now. 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 almost unbearable sensation.
I ejaculate almost without noticing it, so great is the pressure no
w. From beneath my fluttering eyelids I can see semen dropping like a band of white petals onto 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 releasing me from the building pressures. 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 to me 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 to me just after sunrise that next morning twenty-two 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 dozen or so 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 brown man in the white jacket and 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’ chin, and swiveled the corpse’s head so that I could see the long knife wound that ran from under his left ear to his Adam’s apple.
I resisted the impulse to giggle. “How did you know where to find me?” I asked the policeman.
The white glove went into a pocket and came out with a room key. “The only thing on his person.”
I let out a breath, swayed slightly, and steadied myself against the steel platform. “The knife wound didn’t kill him, Inspector,” I said. “Let me show you something.” I tugged off the sheet, exposing Tres’ naked body.
This time I did giggle. The inspector and the other two policemen narrowed their eyes at me.
There were no stigmata. Tres’ sexual organs had been crudely but completely removed. The effect was rather like a Ken doll that someone had spilled fingernail polish on. I dropped the sheet and took a step away.
The inspector came closer and seized my forearm, whether to steady me or restrain me from running I do not know. “We think that it 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, holding back the sobs or giggles. “Yeah.” I could see the arrest and trial ahead of me. The thoughts that I had kept so private would be spread across newspaper headlines, whispered in barracks and latrines. Would the Thais put me in one of their prisons or ship me back for court-martial?
The inspector released my arm. “We know that you were not there at the time he was murdered, Private Merrick. The boat master 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’ corpse, and took a step 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 tongue 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 very clearly. Tanha’s tongue has not relinquished its grip and I still spasm in her grasp. My heart is straining with the effort. 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 myotoniac 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; he and 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, had noted the gun, and had decided otherwise. By the time others were sent, I had been shipped back to Saigon.
Maladung swore that he had not known about Tres’ 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 happened 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 automatic and said, “I believe you, Maladung. You didn’t know that they’d murder Tres.” Then I lifted the Browning and shot him twice in the head.
That same autumn I began the search for Mara.
I come to 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 women is impossible for 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 had disguised the very real love that I felt for Tres as other things: loyalty to a buddy, admiration, even the kind of masculine love that grunts are supposed to feel for one another in combat. But it was love. I realize that no
w. I have known it since shortly after I returned from the war.
I never came out of the closet. Not publicly. Even 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. 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 woman had disappeared. Only two years ago, in 1990, did she and her daughter 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 that I could never get close to them with a weapon. My San Francisco lover of six years left me after he awakened to me calling him “Tres” while I slept.
Then, only six months ago, certain results were returned and, after a few hours of almost hysterical anger, I saw that the weapon had been put in my hands.
I began to make my plans.
The pockmarked man nods to the others to let me out and I walk from the alley to the hotel. Even at 5 A.M. there are uniformed doormen to greet me with pleasant voices and to hold the door. I manage to nod to them and walk through the old Authors’ Wing to the elevators in the new wing. Another servant appears to hold the door of the elevator.
“Good morning, Dr. Merrick,” says the young Thai, little more than a boy.
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.