Vikorn was, of course, the big problem. I suppose, farang, you would advise me to turn over a ruthless new leaf, dump the corrupt third-world gangster cop who was my boss, right? Well, I don’t know about the West, but in the East things are never that simple. For a start I owed him gatdanyu, a kind of blood debt that every Thai owes to someone who has saved their life. Vikorn saved mine and that of my soul brother, Pichai (before he died and reincarnated as my son), by giving us jobs after Pichai killed our yaa baa dealer when we were teenagers. In Thailand to fail to honor gatdanyu is the vilest of transgressions, the one that above all others will land you in the lowest hell. And then there was the troubling matter of my certain assassination if I ever betrayed the Colonel in any way. What would my loved ones do then?

After tormenting myself for the three-and-a-half-hour flight back to Bangkok, I decided to take a middle path. I would persuade Vikorn to stop dealing in heroin after this next shipment had given him the means to put General Zinna out of business. Once I’d made that decision, everything was sunny again. I knew I could persuade the Old Man; after all, he was at a time in life when the sane prepare themselves for their next incarnation. I got off the plane with joyful anticipation in my heart.

“What’s wrong with trafficking in heroin?” Vikorn demanded from behind his huge old desk. “Why should the pharmaceutical industry take everything? They want to ban all the fun drugs at the same time as turning every human experience into a treatable disease. Drugs for sleeping, drugs for waking, drugs for peeing, drugs for erections. For them the human body is an oil well of maladies that can be exploited. It’s the biggest fraud in history. You find a perfectly harmless drug like cannabis or opium, which has the disadvantage of being easy to produce, and what do you do? You criminalize it, find a substitute that is impossible to produce outside of a laboratory, take out the patent, and your corporation is good for another hundred years. Meanwhile people die all the time from prescribed drugs-or suffer worse. Ever hear of Vioxx? Ever hear of thalidomide? That wonderful product that produced such spectacular mutations, babies born with fingers growing out of their eyes and faces on the tops of their heads? And what about Seroxat and Prozac, driving people homicidal? More than a hundred thousand people die in the U.S. every year from prescribed drugs. That’s more fatalities in a month than smack kills in a decade. And by the way, what about the killer drug of all killer drugs, alcohol? The breweries and distilleries don’t like us because we sell a superior product that rivals theirs.”

Vikorn stood up so he could walk up and down in front of me. “Sure, there are casualties, but all a sensible citizen who is contemplating shooting smack for the first time needs to know is: Is the ratio of drug to body weight correct, and did I cauterize the needle? That’s why I don’t approve of selling it to kids, who tend to take risks. But what can you do? Kids are on everything. Have you any idea how well Xanax is selling over the counter? And what the hell do you think it is? A heroin substitute, of course, and Prozac is an expensive substitute for marijuana, except that it doesn’t get you high, just vague. All I do is provide the originals for discerning clients. It’s like what you told me about French cheese: Camembert lait cru is illegal in Europe, because of bureaurocratic ignorance. Addicts have to buy the real thing under the counter.”

He wasn’t incandescent with rage. He wasn’t even angry. He wasn’t even disdainful. Buddha help me, he was amused. The old bastard was so delighted with the deal I’d struck with Tietsin, I could have spat on his desk and he would have forgiven me. We were in his office with the bare wooden floorboards and the anticorruption poster above his head. He had sat with uncharacteristic patience while I pleaded with him to stop dealing in heroin after this next shipment. Now he was standing behind me patting me on the shoulder. “Take a day off. Take a week off.”

I blushed and coughed at the same time, my big hope for salvation now a busted balloon that suddenly seemed to belong to a state of mind only available in the Himalayas. The power of the ordinary, the familiar, the inevitably crooked, that non-sacred place where the rubber hits the road, had entirely eclipsed Tietsin and his magic. Obviously, I was some kind of airhead, a space cadet overly susceptible to any little mind gimmick that pointed at the transcendent. “Okay,” I croaked, defeated and depressed. “I’ll take a week. Maybe longer.”

He didn’t seem to like the maybe longer. “Right. Well, take your time, but if it’s not too much trouble, once you’ve squared everything with the Buddha, go see that mule, that Australian tart your Tibetan chum busted for us. Try to find out how he did it. I can’t believe his intelligence about our very own General Zinna is better than ours.”

I have an image of myself leaving his office with shoulders bent, head hanging, although I expect it wasn’t as bad as all that. Out in the heat, everything seemed normal except me. The mom-and-pop cooked-food stalls, the whores hanging out on Soi 7, the designer-fake stalls all along the top of Sukhumvit, the cynical expressions on the faces of the cops, the pollution, the traffic jams: how come I suddenly didn’t seem to fit?

I’m still here, farang, at the Rose Garden. I’ve commuted from the bathroom to the bar, but I’m way too stoned to order alcohol. I’m nursing a nam menau, lime-and-water, sitting at a table in back, watching the business of flesh take place in accordance with rituals I’ve known all my life. Just now a well-dressed, professional-class Englishman in his late twenties canvassed the girls one by one, sotto voce, to see which of them would tolerate anal intercourse, and for what price. Having carefully constructed a short list, he chose the volunteer whom, I assume, he found most attractive. He struck me as one of those metroman types who plans his vacations on a laptop. The decision made and the mouse double-clicked, he escorted his lunchtime bride courteously out the door, no doubt to one of the short-time hotels around here. Now that he’s gone, things are quieter than ever. The other farang are absorbed in their own conversations, or have dropped in for a quick lunch and to read the foreign-language newspapers. They are regulars who treat the place just like any other beer bar, and the girls know to leave them alone. Finally, I manage to rouse myself to go to the Buddha shrine, just like the girls do when they arrive. I wai the tree wrapped in a monk’s robe and ask for the mental strength to take me through the last chapter of my personal flashback. It’s a kind of pain therapy that forces itself on me, this reliving of catastrophe: the more it hurts, the longer I can maintain the trappings of sanity afterward-until the next bout.

• • •

After my interview with Vikorn, which took place immediately after I hit Bangkok that day, I was excited about Chanya and Pichai coming back from deep country in Isaan. I had begun to fantasize about getting enough dough together to retire early-say in five years-and go live the simple rural life up there where the air is cleaner and the grass greener. I liked the idea of a near-silent existence punctuated by visits to the temple, meditation, consultations with monks and abbots concerning my spiritual progress. I yearned for the comfort and cleanness of a life dedicated to the Buddha. When Chanya sent a text message to say they were at the bus station and were on their way, I texted back to say I would be there soon after they arrived at the hovel. I figured it would take more than two hours for them to reach home, because the traffic was so bad on Sukhumvit and Petchburi Road.