Life in Bangkok fits into nice, little compartments. There’s the dolphin show, the twins show and the children’s show, all of which last about an hour. They’re performed in weather worn brick buildings for white businessmen with sweaty rings around their collars. I am one of those men. My name is Jackson. I’m 38 years old and from Tulsa. I’m not here to enjoy the sex acts. I’ve already done that. The clubs are small and dirty and have sticky floors littered with cigarette butts.
    The chicken fried rice and egg rolls I ate earlier make feel nauseous. I can’t get the taste out of my mouth. I stare down at my stiff, rain-soaked shoelaces and realize that my Nikes look too small. I wriggle my toes. They form split second half moons under the ends of my shoes. I should take them off because they’re getting the bed wet. It isn’t my bed, though.
     There’s a dead Asian girl lying next to me.
     I hired her for three hours. She didn’t give me the time to get undressed, which is why I still have my shoes on. For what it’s worth, I didn’t kill her. I fell asleep, she fell asleep. I woke up, she didn’t. I suppose it had something to do with drugs, I don’t know, and I can’t fix it, which makes my lunch sit even less comfortably in my stomach. Foreign police. Questioning. Being detained. Disposing of the body. I swing my legs over the side of the bed and grab my jacket from the bedpost. I’m going for a god damned walk to decide how to handle this. The doors here aren’t made out of pulpy rice paper; they’re wooden, polished. I lock it behind me.
     It’s stopped raining. The streets of Bangkok, at least the tourist part that I’m in, remind me of an embryonic version of Las Vegas. There is glitz and glam, neon lights and whores. They aren’t as pronounced, though, not as spangled and gaudy. Las Vegas feels very carefully put together. Here everything is its own gutter. Here the buildings are not decorated so much to attract people to the red light district, as they are to hide the ugliness of the streets. I walk for two blocks not really looking at the picture as a whole, but its parts. There is a dirty woman standing on the corner. She is obviously older than twenty but is dressed in children’s clothes to appear younger for the more disturbed sexual appetite. In English, she claims she is no more than seven. Everyone in Bangkok can speak English. It’s the language of money. I walk past her.
     On the corner of the next block is an imposing, neon sign that reads “American Restaurant.” This is where I met the prostitute. She was standing outside, the first letter of the sign made a bright red, upside down A over her body. She is very pretty in my memory. Her teeth are straight, white, framed by red lacquer on her lips. Her high heels click impatiently over the cement. She’s holding a Pepsi can and using it as an ashtray. At the time I thought it was weird that she didn’t want to litter the street. American Restaurant, however, power washes the sidewalk in front of the storefront. The inside is brightly painted in red, white and blue. The floor tiles are individual stars and as I walk inside I wonder vaguely if there are 48 or 50 so I can date the place. A picture of Ronald Reagan is hanging on the wall to the right of me, Michael Jackson on the left.
    There’re no other customers in the restaurant and the boy behind the counter is Caucasian, which is vaguely surprising. He has crisp, green eyes and a small mouth.
     “Large coke, fries and a burger,” I say and lay a twenty-dollar bill on the counter.
     “Where you from?” he asks and rings up my order.
     “How many times a day do you ask that?”
     The boy raises an eyebrow and smiles. “I lose count.”
     “You a student or something?”
     I assume that all non-Asians are here on a mission, have a purpose. It doesn’t make much sense to me otherwise. I’m in Bangkok to sell the Asian market Styrofoam, and not just any Styrofoam. It smells like strawberries and will hold a single, solitary strawberry. I’ve worked on the project for two years for a chemical company who makes poisons that pollute the environment and killed children during Vietnam. I am making strawberry smelling containers that will hold strawberries. I did all of this on a computer by making chemical combinations. While on the plane here I contemplated suicide.
     “No, my dad works on a base, you know, military.”
     “Well, it gives you a chance to see the world outside the USA.” I furrow my brows at this comment because I don’t mean a word of it. I say that to make conversation but it ends up making me feel rotten and fake. “Not exactly see it, because there’re a lot of things to see if you just sit in your yard.”
     “Sure. Want ketchup with that?”
     “No… so what’d you do around here? Other than work.”
     “Sleep.”
     “Must be nice.”
     “Sure it is.”
     The boy retreats to the back of the restaurant and I sit at a table next to a window that faces a cell phone store. I’m looking at the store but not thinking about it. I’m thinking about asking the boy to sit and eat with me. He has a nice, universal face and I feel like talking to someone who doesn’t look foreign. He returns a few minutes later with my plate of food, which looks very American but I doubt it will taste like it.
     “You want to take a break?” I ask him.
     “Why?” He’s wearing a dirty apron with a grease stain on it that looks like Australia. I glance at it for a second and fully expect him to walk away. Instead the stain squishes and he’s seated in front of me. “Listen, we don’t have to do all of this, you know? It doesn’t have to be awkward.”
     “What’re you talking about?”
     “It’s thirty for a blow and eighty for a fuck. I’ve got a break in an hour.”
     I stare blankly ahead into his oily, tired face. It is the color of bleached hamburger meat, still a bit pink but ultimately lifeless. It reminds me of a painting I saw in Rome; I can’t remember the name and I realize that the kid, whoever he is, has offered me a fuck and I don’t know his name either. It’s beside the point really because I’m not gay. I’m divorced. Twice.
     “Listen, I didn’t mean to give you the wrong idea but…”
     He puts his hand up. “Don’t get all weird about it. I’ll make it seventy. Cool? I’m trying to get this ticket to Singapore and I really need the cash.”
     “What about me made you think I’d want to fuck you? Just out of curiosity.” The boy shrugs and fishes a pack of cigarettes from his apron pocket. I pop a French fry into my mouth. “Well I don’t.”
     “Fifty bucks.”
     “Come on… what’s your name?”
     “Jamie.”
     “Come on, Jamie. I’m serious. If you need the money that bad I’ll give it to you.”
     “What’d you want me to do?”
     “Take your break now and talk to me, that’s it.”
     Jamie laughs and lights his cigarette. His fingernails are dirty half moons that make me want to bathe. “Fine, whatever you say.” What I wanted to say was that I had a dead hooker in my hotel room so he should be careful. But I don’t and pop a few more French fries into my mouth. They taste bland. People here don’t believe in salt. “So… talking. What’d you want to talk about? The fucking weather?” He laughs again and places his elbows on the table. His hair is stringy and brown and falls over his eyes. He brushes it away. “Listen, how long have you been in Bangkok anyway? Are you aware of how much fucking goes on here? It’s like a religion.”
     “No more than anywhere else, I’d imagine.”
     “Imagine different.”
     I’ve offended him by not wanting to pay him for sex. In a way I think it’s funny, but don’t want to boost his ego with compliments and excuses. Instead I ask, “So the prostitutes here, the female ones, do they take a lot of drugs?”
     “Why the hell are you asking me that? Are you a fucking cop?”
     “No. I’m just curious.”
     “I don’t sell, if that’s what you want to know.” He blows a puff of smoke from his nostrils.
     “I was thinking it must be dangerous for the women who work here.”
     Jamie shrugs dramatically and flicks his ashes on the floor. “I don’t know about that. I’ve been here my whole life; that’s why I’ve got to get to Singapore. They’ve got these rivers and shit there, very natural. I want to go live by one of them.”
     “And do what?”
     “Just… live, you know.”
     “What’s wrong with this place? Why do you want to leave so bad?”
     “So I don’t have to sit around here fucking people like you. Do you have any idea how much this place,” he gestures around American Restaurant, “pays? Nothing… barely anything.”
     “For the record, I’m not fucking you.”
     “Same difference. I’ve got to get out. I’m twenty for Christ’s sake.”
     I start to hate the kid and the emphasis he puts on words to make him appear to have a serious point. He is drowning my mood. While it isn’t a pleasant state of mind, considering the whore in hotel room, I am somewhat comfortable. I would prefer to watch Jamie from across the restaurant and make up my own ideas about him. I would imagine him being happy and not using me as a mop for his issues. Jamie is a compartment I’d rather keep locked. He stares vacantly at me, still offended by my lack of interest, and nibbles at his lower lip. I pull a fifty-dollar bill from my wallet and slide it across the table.
     “That’s it?” Jamie asks.
     I’m not sure whether he’s talking about the money or the amount of talking we did. I like to think talking to me for a few minutes is better than sucking off some stranger. I feel good about the exchange. “Good luck,” I tell him. “Have fun in Singapore.” He shoves the money in his pocket and leaves the table taking with him the smell of a day’s worth of grease.
     With his youthful, lascivious face gone I’m able to stare out of the window at the people walking down the street. I envy them in some ways. They appear snug in their coats and hats and dealings with the population. I’m quieted by the idea that I’m not that exotic. My hamburger is sloppily constructed; the bun grips the meat patty loosely and falls over the slim, non-committal slice of cheese, which is sliding over the lettuce.
     When I finish the burger I leave the restaurant feeling vaguely annoyed with the way the conversation had gone, namely, my inability to bring up the subject of the dead whore. Being a whore himself, Jamie might’ve been able to give me advice on what I should do with her. He’s probably flipping burgers now, so I try not to think about the could’ve and should’ve of the exchange.
      The Lucky Dragon Sunrise is next door to American Restaurant. There’re souvenirs, plastic dragons, Oriental tea sets, Ben Wa balls and sand gardens cluttered inside the tiny shop. The smell of incense trickles onto the street. I walk inside. The withered, Asian man behind the counter looks up at me from behind a copy of the New York Times. He smiles wide and puts the paper down.
     “Looking for something special?” he asks.
     I tell him I’m not and internally question why I came in here in the first place. Souvenirs. It makes sense somehow. I buy two dragons, a Hard Rock Café: Bangkok t-shirt and a small model of some religious temple. I haven’t seen the temple, but the model will make a good paperweight for my desk at work. I make the block with my bag of souvenirs and try to figure out a way to get rid of the whore. I don’t particularly want to go through the trouble of dumping her body and hiding evidence. Hair follicles. DNA. Drugs. Dirty sheets. No, I don’t want to deal with it at all and yet I’m relieved that I have something to concentrate on.
     “Watch where you’re going.”
     It takes me a moment to realize that I’ve actually run into someone. I look up at the face that the British inflected voice belongs to. It is large and round and in desperate need of a shave. Pupils that look like they’re trying to conceal a bad acid trip pulse up at me. I mumble an apology while the man stares at me waiting for a more repentant gesture. I can only manage a pathetic shrug. I’m mentally threatening him but remain silent because I know the man can probably kick my ass if given the opportunity.
     “Arrogant American fucks,” he says as he walks past me. “Think you can come over here and rule the fucking world.” I turn around and he flips me the bird defending a country that he doesn’t belong to. I continue to watch him. He walks inside American Restaurant.
     I decide to walk with the crowd that pulses forward and keeps their line of sight on their feet. I walk until my legs burn and my feet, still wet, ache and protest. I don’t want to go back to my room, yet I have to because my belongings are there. I’m supposed to be leaving in the morning to tell my boss that the people of Bangkok are going ape shit over strawberry containers that smell like strawberries.
     Around midnight, two hours after I left the room I return to American Restaurant. The lights are being turned out so I stop and watch from across the street. Jamie is locking the front doors. He drops his keys, curses, then feverishly shoves them into the lock. In the streetlamps his hair looks greasier than it did in the restaurant.
     “Hey,” I say from across the street. He whips his head around. I’m waving, but my hand falls to my side when I see that his face has been roughed up; a busted lip and a blackened eye. “I was going to ask you how it was going but it looks like you’ve had a pretty shitty night.”
     “You,” he says. “Back to talk some more?”
     I cross the street. “Not really. What happened to you?”
     Jamie snorts contemptuously and rolls his eyes. “I hope you’re not back here to try and get laid. I’ve had about enough of you fucks for one night.” Even though he’s acting tough, I can tell it’s a façade. If he were really angry he would’ve ignored me. He’s standing two feet away and waiting like a battered puppy for me to take him home.
     “I still don’t want to fuck you, for what it’s worth; but…”
     “Talking. I knew it.” Jamie grabs a cigarette from his pack and lights it in one swift motion as it touches his lips.
     “Fine, I’ll talk.” He’s beginning to sound like a snitch in an FBI movie. This time, however, I don’t want to talk to him any more than he wants to talk to me. “We can’t go to my place, you know, my Dad’s home. Where’re you staying? No, let me guess. The Radisson, right? The fucking Hilton?”
     “How much would you charge to get a dead whore out of my room at the Radisson?”
     Jamie’s face drops and his color waxes, then wanes. He looks almost childlike, but since I know he isn’t the question wasn’t difficult to ask. He clears his throat, takes a deep drag and exhales the smoke through his nose.
     “More than you’re going to pay. What, you kill them or something?”
     “No.”
     He waits for an explanation, but I don’t offer one.
     “Great,” he finally says. Little wisps of smoke roll past his lips as he breathes. “I don’t know what kind of shit you’re into, but…”
      “What about a ticket to Singapore and… three hundred American?”
     “Five.”
     “Sounds fine.”
     A smile spreads over Jamie’s battered face. We stare at each other for a moment, then Jamie says, “Whatever you want, I mean, it’s none of my business anyway.”
     He walks ahead of me. The hem of his pants gets hooked under the back of his shoe. He doesn’t seem nervous at all and I wonder if he’s done this before. It doesn’t make a difference to me either way. For the first time this evening I smile. 500 dollars and a business class ticket to Singapore is a steal. In America it would cost a lot more, at least I think it will. After he cuts up the body or dumps it out of the window or burns it, I don’t really care, I’m going to have a Budweiser then pack to go home. Even death in Bangkok fits into nice, little compartments.
 

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