Marc Zicree - Ghostlands

This wasn’t to say she didn’t recognize her surroundings, however. She knew exactly where she was-or rather, where they wanted her to think she was. The air was musky and thick with humidity, as hard to breathe as if she were trying to inhale syrup. Her skin was instantly sticky with sweat, her clothes beneath the dragon armor plastered to her skin, and yet she felt as cold within as if her insides were tombstone marble.

While it had been daytime only moments before, here it was night (as it was always night in her remembrances) and the garish, ugly street was clogged and raucous with subcompact Toyotas and Nissans belching exhaust; with huge and gaudily decorated trucks over from India blasting their horns as they inched precariously forward; with the brightly colored, three-wheeled taxis known to the locals and farangs alike as tuk-tuks zipping between the swaying, ill-balanced vehicles. The black asphalt of the street was shiny with recently departed rain, and in its reflections the boisterous cacophony of neon signs was rendered double in its seedy enticement, blinking and flashing with images of over-endowed, underdressed woman and smiling, dangerous men; Marlboro Men, to be exact, the American male being the ne plus ultra of invitation, of reckless power and release.

The smell on the air was the same, exactly the same as she remembered it, the fetid stink of sewage, and rotted fruit, and spices in hot cooking oil, of a city of five million left to decay and sink on its foundations slowly back into the marsh and swampland from which it had been dredged and excavated by men long dead, their dreams of glory dead with them.

The street was called Soi Cowboy, and it was the pulsing heart of Bangkok’s red-light district.

Colleen Brooks knew this street well, although the last time she saw it waking was when she was ten, when her Air Force father had been briefly stationed here to perform triage on a squadron of aging, hard-used B-52s left over from the Nam, to render his usual, uncompromising miracles on these gorgeous, terrible death machines. Her mother had flown over from her family’s home in Lacrosse, Texas, to join him, and had brought Colleen along, notwithstanding how she felt about bringing her child into “that kind of environment.” She knew damn well that if Colleen got left behind, there would be hell to pay-long weeks of surly silences, uncooperative sulks, and guilt-inducing looks of raw reproach that could reduce a mother almost to tears.

Colleen, victorious, was just happy to be going somewhere other than Lacrosse, Texas. There wasn’t much to like about Lacrosse in Colleen’s estimation, and flying willy-nilly to Bangkok seemed the height of adventure to a ten-year-old. It was something she would later speak of to schoolmates as if it were merely a weekend trek to the Gulf. (Yeah, we just got back from Thailand. It was okay, I guess. I didn’t see a single horse the whole time.)

Best of all, central to all, they were a family again, at least for a while-reunited with her father.

On this particular night-or the original of it, at least-Daddy had been called upon to locate a young GI who’d escaped into the dark splendors of the city for diversion and return him to his quarters before he was considered AWOL. In the darkness of a foreign hotel room, frigid with over-amped air-conditioning, Colleen had silently eased into T-shirt and jeans and crept out a window to follow and find her father.

After three weary, tear-streaked hours, she located him in a dreary club that was actually fairly innocuous considering the environs, where he was knocking back a few Singha beers with the wayward and depressed young tech sergeant and feeding quarters to Hank Williams on the juke. The boy had just heard from his fiancee back home that she’d determined a mutual friend to be a better marriage candidate (at least more likely to be alive in a year or two) and had cut him loose via a long and rambling Dear John letter.

Colleen remembered the look of grave sympathy on her dad’s face as he watched the younger man spill his pain onto the drink-stained bar.

“Chief,” he told her later, when they were safely back in their hotel room, “all I could think was, ‘There but for the grace of God…’ I wasn’t sure I wanted you and your mom to come to Bangkok. But sitting there listening to that poor kid, I was damn glad you were here.”

“Language,” her mother had said, giving her dad a look that was at once loving and reproachful.

Knowing full well it was not that time, that she was not ten, that she was still in South Dakota no matter how it looked, Colleen still felt that same long-ago fear that scythed her breath into short gasps and made the blood pound in her ears and pulse behind her eyes. She hurried breathlessly along the tawdry street, the seedy tourists and dissolute expats and servicemen on leave not shooting her so much as a glance.

She wondered what awaited her beyond the black-enameled door of that dive at the end of the street-some ghastly recreation of her father consoling the wayward airman like a waxwork tableau in Madame Tussaud’s, that would move and speak despite their utter lack of souls…or something unfathomably worse?

And dammit, in spite of everything she knew, in spite of the fact that she was utterly sure that whatever was behind this fucking charade had no object in mind other than to distract and delude and almost certainly ultimately kill her, she still found herself longing to see her father again-even if it was just some copy of him, some image raided from the vault of her memory. To see his cockeyed smile that made the corners of his eyes crinkle up, see the sandpaper stubble no razor seemed entirely able to subdue. To look into those brown, forgiving eyes, to feel his callused hand with its grease-stained nails ruffling her wild mop of hair and hear his voice.

“How goes it, Chief?”

Just once, once more. To call him back from the grave…

How goes it, Chief? Not fucking well.

Language, Colleen. Language.

But before she could reach that door, unlock its secrets, she found herself snared by another storefront on the vile, raucous street, lured by the lilting music wafting from under its door and around the edges, by the smell of incense curling out on the sultry air.

She felt drawn against her will, beguiled the same as she had been fifteen years back and more. She hadn’t thought of this in a long time, this perplexing dark vision, as alluring and ruined as a poisoned wedding cake.

There was a big window set in the door, and she remembered that her first time round she’d had to stand on tiptoes to see through; this time, she could look right in.

The room was the same, wide but not deep, with glaring, unadorned bulbs casting the room in a harsh, unforgiving light. Staggered wooden tiers stretched the width of the room, like baseball bleachers or a section of Roman amphitheater peering down at gladiatorial blood sports.

There was a birdcage hanging on a hook from the ceiling beside the wooden tiers. Within it perched a shiny black bird with a bright orange bill, chattering along in Thai, and Colleen found herself thinking the same absurd thought she had at ten-

Boy, that’s one smart bird, speaking a foreign language.

Perched sitting on the tiers were rows of fragile young women and pale, delicate boys, some in shorts and tight T-shirts or bathing suits, some in frilly nightwear. Each held a piece of white cardboard before them with a number written on it.

As a child, seeing these pale, underfed women and boys, with their blank, apathetic faces, she had been confounded by what they might be doing there, although even then the frank air of carnality and commerce made something churn in the pit of her stomach.