Timothy Hallinan: The Fear Artist

“Well, no,” Andrew says, wiping the fingertip on his jeans. “She hasn’t … umm, she hasn’t phoned me.”

“She’s only been gone two-”

“And when I phone her, I get her voice mail.” Andrew blinks again and pushes at the glasses, even though they haven’t moved a fraction of an inch, and in the gesture Rafferty recognizes loneliness.

“She doesn’t have her phone,” he says, a bit more gently.

“Whoa,” Andrew says, tilting back. “That’s kind of raw.”

“It’s not a punishment, Andrew. She’s in a two-buffalo town in the middle of nowhere, and the phone would probably be useless.” He doesn’t add that Rose had insisted on it, saying she wasn’t going to spend the entire visit apologizing to her mother because all Miaow does is text.

“Huh?” Andrew screws up his eyes. “I thought Mrs. Rafferty’s family had a big estate, with … you know, farms and everything.”

Rafferty feels like someone watching a movie in a foreign language at the moment the subtitles disappear. “Right,” he says, his mind on full spin, trying to reconcile the “estate” Miaow has conjured up with the one-room thatched hut in which Rose grew up. “Um, rice paddies and huts for the farmers and a little river.” At least he’s not lying. That’s pretty much everything there is in Rose’s village.

“But no cellular,” Andrew says.

“They’re … they’re older ,” Rafferty improvises, wondering why he’s elaborating on what is clearly a whopper of a lie. “You know, they can’t even work the remote.”

“They’ve got a TV but no cell service?”

“One thing you’re not, Andrew-you’re not dumb.” Rafferty looks over Andrew’s head at the elevator, wishing he could cross the hall and get into it. “That’s a really good point, and the answer is yes. They have TV but no cell service. That’s exactly what they’ve got. And listen, there’s nothing I’d rather do than stand around at my front door and chat with you, but I have places to go, and-”

“Where?”

“A bar , Andrew. I intend to go to a bar. Why? Would you like to come?”

“I’m too young,” Andrew says with perfect seriousness.

“By golly, you are. And I was looking forward to taking you with me. How are you getting home?”

Andrew blinks, so perhaps the question wasn’t as diplomatic as Rafferty hoped it was. “My father’s driver. He’s waiting.”

“Your father’s-”

“Driver.”

“Well,” Rafferty says as the reasons behind Miaow’s lie become apparent. “How nice. Listen, she’ll be back in four or five days, and if Rose calls me-I mean, if she finds a cellular signal somewhere and calls me-I’ll tell her to ask Miaow to call you. Okay?”

“Yeah,” Andrew says. He shuffles his feet from side to side, and Rafferty has a sudden urge to hug him. “That’d be cool.” He takes a step back, although he seems to have chosen the direction at random. He’s clearly lost. “I kind of miss her,” he says.

“Me, too,” Rafferty says. “I miss her a lot.”

“Even though she’s sort of … you know.”

Rafferty says, “Do I ever.”

“She’s got a shirt just like that one.”

“No, she doesn’t,” Rafferty says. “ I’ve got a shirt like this one, and she steals it.”

“Ahh,” Andrew says, and this time he turns around. “Okay, thanks, Mr. Rafferty. Maybe she’ll call me.”

“I’m sure she will. Bye, Andrew.”

He watches the kid cross the hall, the cuffs of the jeans flapping around and threatening to trip him with every step, and in the big head and the narrow shoulders he sees what Miaow may like, or even love, about him.

Andrew needs her.

Rafferty waits until the elevator arrives and the doors have closed behind Andrew before he says, “Well, I need her, too.”

Five minutes later he jams the damp wad of paint-stiff clothes down the trash chute to the basement and pushes the button for the elevator.

As he hits the street and opens Rose’s umbrella, he feels a bit of the old tingle, the little carbonated fizz of anticipation he’d felt all those years ago, when he first arrived, when Bangkok was just one jaw-dropper after another. When he spoke none of the language, when he might as well have been blind for all the sense the signs made to him. When he felt that the odds were fifty-fifty, each time he went down a new street, that it would be dedicated to holiness-temple carvers, amulet makers, gold-leaf hammerers-or hedonism-bars, restaurants, flamboyant neon signifying the falloff edge of his middle-class map of life. Whether the people on the sidewalks would be housewives toting plastic bags full of groceries or children playing tag or transsexual hookers gossiping as they waited for dark. When it felt like the whole city changed every time he went out, as though they knocked it down behind him and built it up in front of him.

Before he met Rose.

It’s only a couple of extremely wet blocks from their apartment to the point at which Patpong 1 empties into Silom and the usual snarl of traffic, slowed by the line of taxis and tuk-tuks waiting for the sweltering hordes and their compensated companions for the evening. Patpong had its best days, if the adjective is applicable, decades ago, but it retains a kind of overstimulated, faintly gangrenous energy, and the street between the bars is jammed, despite the weather, with sex tourists, gawkers of both sexes, and the ever-present 10 percent of hypocrites who pretend they came to browse the junk on sale in the night market that stretches down the center of the street and are shocked- shocked , do you hear? — to discover all these bars full of rowdy, half-naked women who seem unusually friendly. There’s no way, the hypocrites’ body language announces, that they’d have come here if they’d known what a sewer it was.

They’re usually the ones who stay forever.

It’s kind of melancholy, Rafferty thinks as he picks a path between the drunk and distracted and tries to avoid the chill little waterfalls off the plastic sheeting over the stands, that he has so few friends at this point that the best thing he can think to do, on his second evening alone, is to spend time with a bunch of aging sexpats. The family , this totally unexpected and all-consuming planetary cluster of Rose, Miaow, and Poke, has absorbed him so completely that he has almost no relationships outside it.

With a guilty pang, he sees the face of his best friend, Arthit, but Arthit is out of contention these days if what Rafferty wants is some light, meaningless male bonding. Since the death of Arthit’s wife, Noi, his friend’s spirit seems to have dimmed like a candle under a glass. Rafferty worries about him, even though Arthit has apparently put the heavy grief drinking behind him, but, to be brutally honest, a couple of hours tiptoeing around Arthit’s heartbreak isn’t what Poke has in mind tonight, after … after the day he’s had. He’ll see Arthit, he tells himself, tomorrow.

If he were being honest with himself, he thinks, he’s actually afraid to be alone after what happened on that painted sidewalk. A murder in plain daylight, denied-by a cop-before the body cools.

What he needs now is dumb stuff. Guys arguing with complete conviction over things they don’t care about. A few beers to befriend the two he drank at the apartment.

The Expat Bar.

A holdover from the 1970s, when Patpong was full of small bars that actually made most of their money by selling alcohol as opposed to skin, the Expat Bar is jammed between a coffee shop and a big, forever-cursed space that seems to be a disco this week and will probably be empty again next week. The bar staked its narrow claim fifty-plus years ago, and some of its patrons have been sitting at it ever since.