Timothy Hallinan - The Queen of Patpong

"Miaow's a kid," Rafferty says.

"What do you think Pim is?" Rose says, just this side of a snap. "And don't say 'Oh, that's different,' because it wouldn't have been, not if you hadn't come along. What do you think Miaow would have been doing at- How old are you, eighteen?"

"Sort of," Pim says.

"What would Miaow have been doing at seventeen or eighteen, do you think?" Rose demands. "Running for office? Look at her, Poke. She even looks a little like Miaow."

Rafferty looks at the girl, and Rose is right. They're both small, brown, and shaped by the distinctive gene pool of the northeast, with rounded features, broad nostrils, and the fine, dark, flyaway hair that Miaow used to part and slick down with water. "A little," he says.

"Miaow is your daughter?" Pim says. "She's prettier than I am."

"It'll change you," Rose continues, as though no one else has spoken. "Now you're a good girl, you're a village girl who's never hurt anybody. Two, three years from now, you'll lie, you'll tell men you love them when you can't stand the sight of them. You'll steal their money when they're in the shower, then tiptoe out of the room. You'll tell your friends to look for them outside the club so you can hide when they come in. You'll drink and smoke and take yaa baa and nobody knows what else. You won't be Pim anymore."

"You haven't changed."

Rose tilts her head back and drains most of the beer in three or four long swallows. "I don't even have my own name," she says. "Now I'm Rose. Before, in my village, my name was Kwan. I came to Bangkok as Kwan, who bathed in the river under a long cloth and washed my hair in rainstorms with all my clothes on. I kept my voice down to be polite. I was a good daughter and granddaughter. I was embarrassed to be so tall. It took about six months before I turned into this person called Rose, who danced nearly naked every night and gave big smiles to men when what she wanted to do was to kick them in the face. I ate yaa baa like candy, and I smoked"-she looks down at the cigarette in her hand-"about as much as I smoke now. I let one of the men rename me. A man gave me the name Rose-you didn't know that, did you, Poke?" She hasn't turned to face him. "He said, this man, he said that Kwan was too hard to remember, even though it's a good name and it means 'spirit,' and that the rose was the queen of flowers and I was the queen of Patpong." She laughs, rough as a cough. "The queen of Patpong. A kingdom of whores and viruses. Death with a smile. Every dick every night, every guy who wants to go bareback, maybe he's the one who'll give it to you. So you visit the temple and you pray and you say no when they don't want to wear one, and they slap you around until you say yes, and then you go to the temple and pray harder, and you're terrified next time you get tested. Except you learn, when you've been here for a while, that all the tests are negative. Even if you're positive, the tests are negative." She inhales the rest of the cigarette as though she'd like to bite into it and spit it out. "Did you know that, Poke? All the tests are negative. Positive tests are too expensive for the bars."

"I don't think that's true anymore," Rafferty says.

Rose backs across the living room, drinking as she goes, still looking at Pim. When she feels her legs touch the couch, she collapses and tosses the almost-extinct cigarette butt into the ashtray. "True or not, who cares? You." She tosses the word toward Pim as if it were a rock. "You want to spend your life worrying about condoms? You want to ride up in elevators with guys who might decide to break your fingers? You want to learn to pee on guys who need that? You want to do three-ways and four-ways and five-ways and whatever way the guy wants? You want guys to put it in your butt?"

There's a moment of dumbfounded silence, and Pim bursts into tears. She puts her right hand on her injured shoulder and cradles it, then reaches down and grabs her ankle and just lets the sobs come. They're big, gulping sobs, minor-key foghorn tones, sobs that lift her back and lets it drop, and they come from someplace very deep.

Rafferty says, "Great. You've cheered her right up."

"I wasn't trying to cheer her up," Rose snaps. "I was trying to- I was trying to… save her. Save her, okay? Is that too dramatic for you? Does all the talk make you uncomfortable? You want to leave it unspoken? What do you want to believe? You want to believe that I lived on the tips from colas? That I turned down guys for all those years, just waiting for you to come in off the street?"

"It's a little late for that," Rafferty says, and he feels an immediate and blood-hot wash of shame.

A door bangs against a wall, and a moment later Miaow stalks into the room. Without looking at either Rose or Rafferty, she goes to Pim and rests a hand on the back of the girl's neck. "Come on," she says. "You can cry in my room. She'll leave you alone in there."

Pim gets up, looking even younger than Miaow, and Miaow puts an arm around her and leads her out of the room. This time she closes the door quietly.

Rafferty stays where he is, listening to the silence reestablish itself in the room. Rose is as still as a mannequin for the space of nine or ten breaths, and then she pulls back her arm and slings the beer bottle, end over end, spewing beer, at the sliding glass door to the balcony. The bottle explodes in a skyrocket of brown sparkles, and the pane of glass in the door cracks from corner to corner. By the time Rafferty has torn his eyes from the damage, Rose is already up and heading for the bedroom, her spine as straight as a bullet's path, her hands balled into fists. She shoves the door aside with her shoulder and kicks it closed behind her. IT TAKES PIM a few minutes to stop crying, or at least to lower the volume to the point at which it's not audible from Miaow's room. There's a single crash of something hard and heavy in the room Rafferty and Rose share. Then there's nothing at all, just the steady sigh of the air conditioner, and the city dark and sparkling behind the crack in the glass door, turning the jagged seam into a long, narrow prism, shining with color like a frozen rainbow.

It seems like a good idea to clean up the broken glass. This is an area in which he can be helpful. He can think of no reason that anyone would get angry at him for cleaning up the broken glass.

He goes into the kitchen and pulls open the door of the narrow pantry, which is next to the stove, tugging it gently to keep the catch from making its snapped-finger sound and opening it only partway so it won't bang against the handle of the oven.

A loud noise right now would, he thinks, break him in pieces.

The dustpan and the broom are exactly where they should be. There's a sort of smugness to them, an implicit criticism of everyone and everything else in an apartment where nothing seems to be where, or the way, it should be. He picks up the items carefully, as if they were made of hundred-year-old crystal, and carries them into the living room, making a detour to the door to slip into his shoes. The shards of brown bottle glass cover a roughly semicircular area of carpet in a radius of about two feet. Some larger pieces glitter even farther away. The neck, widening at its base into a jagged crown, would make a formidable weapon. He picks it up. If he'd broken the soda bottle on John's head, he would have been holding something as lethal as this. It's easy to imagine bringing it up, the neck clenched firmly in his fist, to cut long, deep, bleeding scores in John's flesh. Parallel, like rows in a field, spouting blood wherever the furrow intersected an artery.

On the whole, he decides, looking down at his knuckles, gone white on the bottle's neck, he's glad the soda bottle remained intact. He'd been angry enough to cut John, cut him badly. Instead all he'd done was inflict temporary damage on the man's mucous membranes. And he wasn't happy with himself even about that.