Paul Theroux - Saint Jack

“I get it,” I said. He could obliterate the curse but not remove it.

“He puts a different tattoo over it, apparently,” said Yates.

“Only the one on the bottom stays the same,” said Frogget.

“It’s better than leaving them like they are,” said Yardley.

The walls of Pinky’s parlor were covered with sample tattoos. Many were the same design in various sizes. Death Before Dishonor , Indian chiefs, skulls, eagles and horses, Sweet-Sour, Cut Here , tigers and crucifixes, Mother , bluebirds, American flags, and Union Jacks. Behind Pinky, on a shelf, were many bottles of antiseptic, Dettol, gauze, aspirin, and rows and rows of needles.

“You’ll have a hard job making those into ships,” said Yates, tapping my blue curses.

“Do you fancy a dagger?” asked Smale. “Or what about the old Stars and Stripes?”

“That’s right,” said Coony. “Jack’s a Yank. He should have an American flag on his arm.”

“Fifty American flags is more like it,” said Smale.

“Hey, Yatesie,” said Coony, pointing to the design reading Mother , “here’s one for you.”

My arms were on Pinky’s table. “Chinese crackter,” he said. “I make into flowers.”

So I agreed. But on each wrist the wide single column— Remove This and Die —was too closely printed to make into separate flowers. Pinky suggested stalks for the blossoms on my forearms. I had a better idea. I selected from the convenient symbology on the wall: a dripping dagger on my left wrist, a crucifix on my right.

I went back to Hing’s. I was thankful to climb onto my stool and pick up where I’d left off: vegetables for the Vidia , stirrup pumps for the Joseph B. Watson , new cargo nets for the Peshawar. It was as if I had never been away. But what counted as an event for the fellers at the Bandung and gave the year I was tattooed the same importance they had attached to the year Ogham left and the year the bees flew through the windows — an importance overshadowing race riots, bombings, Kennedy’s death, and the threat of an Indonesian invasion — went uncommented upon by Hing. Gopi said, “Sorry mister.”

Hing’s lack of interest in anything but his unvarying business made him doubt the remarkable. He refused to be amazed by my survival or by the motley blue pictures that now covered my arms. He did not greet me when I came back. He refused to see me as I passed through the doorway. It was his way of not recognizing my long absence: no explanation was necessary. Though he was my own age, his years were circular, ending where they began. He turned the tissue leaves of a calendar that could have been blank. His was the Chinese mastery of disappointment: he wouldn’t be woken to taste it, he wouldn’t be hurt. Some days I envied him.

I moved into the low sooty semidetached house on Moulmein Green, an uninteresting affair which the washing on the line in front gave the appearance of an old becalmed boat. My aged amah found me and turned up with a bundle of my clothes and two of the cats. She wouldn’t say what happened to the others; she reported that no one had been injured in the fire at Dunroamin. My tattoos intrigued her and when her mahjong partners came over she asked me if they could have a look. My kidnaping and tatoos raised her status in the neighborhood. Now and then, for pleasure I had a flutter at the Turf Club, and it was about this time that I persuaded Gopi to be fitted for the brace, but that came to nothing. I slept much more, and on weekends sometimes slept throughout the day, waking occasionally in a sweat and saying out loud, It’s still Sunday , and then dozing and waking and saying it again.

I did no hustling. Every evening I drank at the Bandung and I became as predictable in my reminiscences as the other fellers; the re-creation of what had gone, a continual rehearsal of the past in anecdotes, old tales sometimes falsified to make the listener relax, made the present bearable. I told delighted strangers about “Kinda hot,” the Richard Everett , Dunroamin, and my tattooing. “And if you don’t believe it, look at this—”

My fortunes were back to zero, but as I have said, it was desolation of this sort that gave me more hope than little spurts of success. However uncongenial poverty was, to my mind it was like the explicit promise of a tremendous ripening. I hadn’t regretted a thing. But there was something that mattered more than this, to which I was the only witness. My stories glamorized the terror and often I brooded over my capture to look for errors or omissions. I had proved my resoluteness by surviving the torment without denying what I had done — my house, my girls — and at no moment had I gone down on my knees and said a prayer. It wasn’t that I didn’t think I ought to be forgiven. Forgiveness wasn’t necessary. I had nothing to live down. The charitable loan shark, pitched overboard by his furious debtors, had swum to shore.

“YOU DON’T know me,” said the foxy voice at the other end of the phone. “But I met a good pal of yours in Honolulu and he — well—”

“What’s the feller’s name?” I asked.

He told me.

“Never heard of him,” I said. “He’s supposed to be a friend of mine?”

“Right. He was in Singapore a few years ago.”

“You don’t say! His name doesn’t ring a bell,” I said. “What business was he in? Where did he live?”

“I can’t talk here,” he said. “I’m in an office. There’s some people.”

“Wait,” I said. “What about this feller that knows me? Did he have a message for me or something like that?” Brace yourself. I’ve got some fantastic news for you. Ready? Here goes … I braced myself.

“Maybe you don’t remember him,” he said. “I guess he was only in Singapore one night.”

“Oh.”

“But that was enough. You know?”

“Look—”

“He, um, recommended you. Highly. You get what I’m driving at?”

“What’s on your mind?”

“I can’t talk here,” he said. “What are you doing for lunch?”

“Sorry. I can’t talk here either,” I said. How did he like it?

“A drink then, around six. Say yes.”

“You’re wasting your time,” I said.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “Let’s have a drink. What do you say?”

“Where are you staying?”

“Something called the Cockpit Hotel.”

“I know where it is,” I said. “I’ll be over at six. For a drink, okay? See you in the bar.”

“How will I recognize you?”

I almost laughed.

“So-and-so told me to look you up.” He was the first of many. He didn’t want much, only to buy me a drink and ask me vulgarly sincere questions: “What’s it really like?” and “Do you think you’ll ever go back?” I used to say anything that came into my head, like “I love lunchmeat,” or “Sell me your shoes.”

“What made you stop pimping?” a feller would ask.

“I ran out of string,” I’d say.

“How long are you going to stay in Singapore?”

“As long as my citronella holds out.”

“What do you do for kicks?”

“That reminds me of a story. Seems there was this feller—”

In previous years the same fellers would have wanted to visit a Chinese massage parlor; now they wanted to see me. The motive had not changed: just for the experience. And evidently stories circulated about me on the tourist grapevine: I had been deported from the States; I was a pederast; I had a wife and kids somewhere; I was working on a book; I was a top-level spy, a hunted man, a rubber planter, an informer, a nut case. The fellers guilelessly confided this gossip and promised they wouldn’t tell a soul. And one feller said he had looked me up because “Let’s face it, Flowers, you’re an institution.”