Chapter Six

Six

Again, he woke in the dark hours before dawn. After failing all attempts at slipping back into unconsciousness he put on his new clothes, already stale after a night in the damp, rank room, and went out into the sticky heat of the pre-dawn morning to 7/11 for coffee. Drunken foreign men and desperate looking hookers worse for the night sat outside the green light of the convenience store at a make shift bar still trying in the last of the darkness to pair up and accomplish what the women had left their family farms and the men had traveled so far from home for. The omnipresent shadow dogs that appeared only in glimpses during daylight, emboldened by the mask of night roamed in packs like skeletal animals from a child’s nightmare.

Lonny bought a cup of hot water with a sachet of instant coffee and then on a whim ordered a foot long hot dog that the girl behind the register nuked in a microwave, bun and all, as if it were the final effort she could make in her life.

Outside, he swept his calling card through the sensor of the international pay phone and punched the numbers in to connect with his mother. The phone rang, he counted six times, and was about to hang up when she picked up silently. ‘Ma. Its Lonny calling, how you doing.’

‘Lonny? That you? You still in Bangkok?’

‘Yea, of course where would I be? I told you I was gonna be here for two weeks. The nurse there? The nurse still comin in?’

‘That nurse, I don’t like him, he watches me, he peeks on me in the shower.’

‘Ma, he ain’t watching you shower, c’mon.’

‘I don’t like him, he follows me around the house.’

‘He’s supposed to, he’s your care giver.’

‘How things there then, what are you doing? I still don’t understand why you went, I mean you work for that company for twenty years and never even go out of New York and now you’re in Taiwan?’

‘I’m in Thailand not Taiwan. I told you it’s just a work thing. I had time, you know? Things are good, having a good time. OK Ma, I gotta go. I wanted to check is all.’

‘Lon wait, wait. The nurse says the only reason guys go to Bangkok is for pussy and drugs, is that what you’re doing?’

‘Jesus Ma.’ Lonny hung up shaking his head.

He ate the sandwich which tasted no different than any of the thousands of dirty water dogs he had consumed in his life and rinsed it down with the sweet, black watery coffee. Though light had yet to break the horizon he returned to the hotel covered in a running sweat that soaked his shirt and soiled his socks.

After a rinsing shower he flicked on the TV and found Hot Asia Movie channel showing the same thirty year old B-comedy he had watched the morning before, picking it up at almost the same spot. He lay back in the wallow of his bed as the dated jokes ran over him thinking about the night before. The cool bar, Pearl’s wild friends who in some ways retained the brazen predatory behavior of young men. Pearl in the cab and the way he felt when she kissed him, abruptly and deep. How that rush of strength had filled him for the first time in so long and he wondered how much further she would have let things go if he would have been bold enough to come to her room.

When the ‘fer-real’ birds began to call from their hidden trees in the distance Lonny shut off the TV, put his clothes back on and headed for the Grill. The two meals of Thai food he had with Pearl were delicious and certainly a great change from his normal meat and potatoes existence, but his bowels weren’t cooperating and he thought another big breakfast of eggs and bacon, as tasteless and casually made as it may be, was what he needed for the shift to occur. Regularity, his mother had always told him, was one of the key ingredients to a long and happy life. His life hadn’t been very happy and not yet particularly long either but he had always been regular as clockwork.

In the ten minutes it took to get to the restaurant the sun had come up in weak strands of light and with it the street erupted with life. Food carts appeared and motorcycles raced through early traffic and people with regular jobs started life as the dirty mirror city of the night closed in on itself and withdrew to sleep for another day.

The staff at the Grill were only just getting prepared for the morning but already three sexagenarians sat with insulated beers on the bar in front of them. Presentable and punctual as they would have been at their jobs they stared up at the TV watching a world series game originally played twenty years earlier. The time which had passed was meaningless inside the preservation capsule of the bar where music, food and topics of conversation were suspended in the same era, decades past.

Lonny ordered coffee and the girl asked him if he wanted the same breakfast as before. He nodded, astonished that she would remember him until he realized it had only been two days.

‘Long two days’, he said to no one as his coffee came with every additive ever conceived of stocked in a wooden basket.

He sat leafing through the English daily paper skipping over the local news to the pages of international bi-lines where thumbnail sketches of the oddest stories from around the world ran.

Filipino bride hangs newlywed husband’s first wife.

Swede wins drunken limb severing contest.

Iowa woman finds long lost child at state fair corn husking contest.

John the complainer came in with a burst of sunlight and took the seat next to him. Slapping the bar he produced a bottle of vodka from his bag and snatched the paper from Lonny’s hand.

‘Don’t sully yourself with that rag, if you need to read something stick to erotic German paperbacks, you can just ogle the covers since all they’re good for is masturbating and you can’t read the mater language anyway.’

‘I wanted to see the baseball scores,' Lonny said.

‘They don’t run baseball scores here; you want to know what happened at the Sri Lankan cricket national cup? That we got. Baseball is for these stiffs here. Who’s winning?’ He called out over the bar at the old men already nodding off; who woke, grumbled and sipped at their coddled bottles. ‘Freezing Jesus, what the fuck happened to your face?’ John chortled already fixing himself a drink.

‘I got dry gulched by some kids right after you left the bar the other morning.’

‘Christ’

‘Yeah, and then I got thrown into a car by a guy who looked like a freaking TV wrestler.’

‘When?’

‘That night.’

Lonny’s food came and he tucked into the eggs and sausage that sat in a slick of grease. 

John studied him as he ate. ‘And yet you don’t seem upset.’

Lonny shrugged filling his mouth with greasy food hoping for easement.

John snapped his fingers and pointed at him. ‘It’s the girl, you’ve been banging the ass off her nonstop for the last three days.’

Lonny swallowed his food hurriedly. ‘The girl was with the guys who beat me up. I went to the toilet and when I came out she was sitting with these skin head types and they just kicked the shit out of me as soon as I walked up to them.’

The complainer grimaced as he sucked down his drink. ‘Bad news, well there’s nothing to be done about it, take your lumps I always say.’

‘Fuck you, when was the last time you took a beating?’ Lonny said, pausing, fork half way to his mouth, a runny dollop of yellow hanging from the tines.

‘Never.’ The complainer took his phone from his pocket and aimed the bottom at Lonny’s face.

‘You call the police?’

The complainer touched a button and a fine blue light arced from twin contacts protruding from the speaking edge of the phone to the fork Lonny held and his body seized violently for a second, gripping his fork but spilling his coffee. It was an instant of pain and then he tingled with energy. The complainer nodded and sipped his drink.

Lonny dropped the fork on the plate and took hold of the bar rail waiting for the odd sensation to dissipate before croaking, ‘I ought to punch you in the nose.’

‘You don’t seem very good at that.’

‘What the hell is that thing?’

‘Relax, I didn’t even touch you with it, just a wee nip. No fisty cuffs for me, some asshole starts shit and I stick this in his neck, give him the full jolt. He hits the floor and I pay the check. Little gadget I picked up in Brazil a few months ago, nobody does personal protection like the Brazilians.’

‘Is Brazil dangerous?’

The complainer laughed in Lonny’s face.’ God man you don’t know much do you? Is this your first trip away from home?’

‘No, I been to Canada, once.’

The complainer laughed and then so did Lonny as he loaded in the rest of his breakfast.

The door opened and a little man slipped in through the crack of day. Hunched over and limping he hobbled onto the seat next to John ordering a beer with a raised finger. He fidgeted, twisting on the seat until his beer arrived and then drank half in a single swallow.

It wasn’t yet eight O’clock and though the man was neatly dressed he was terribly composed. He finished the beer off and after giving it a couple of seconds to settle, ordered another. John met Lonny’s eye and darted his glance sideways. Lonny nodded.

The man was half way through his second beer when the door jerked open with a burst of blinding light and a young woman, looking old beyond her years through her heavy make up but dressed like a tween sauntered up to the man who turned on his seat, put his beer bottle down and grinned sickly with trembling lips up at her. Her hands were on her hips, she stomped a furry booted foot on the floor and let loose with an ear shattering accusation that only he understood. ‘But I didn’t take anything darling, I just came down here to have a quiet beer and let you calm down is all.’ His pleading had no placating effect on the woman who lashed out with another barrage of tone defying abuse from which Lonny could make out several English expletive’s.

The man winced and tried to reach for his beer when the girl slapped him across the face with force. Doubled forward he held his cheek, choking a sob in his throat. ‘Stand up open you pocket,’ she demanded and he slowly got to his feet and let the girl turn out his pockets, pulling the lining out and leaving the two white triangles exposed like flags of surrender book ending his crotch. Finding only a small folded wad of Baht which she palmed she screamed at the man ‘my gold!’

‘I don’t have your ring darling.’ He whined.

The girl spun on the heel of her boot and stomped out shaking her ass and calling over her shoulder. ‘Fuck you. Fucking man.’

The three old timers looked on with distaste. The female staff ate huddled together pretending not to notice but John watched the pantomime of shame play out, clearly enjoying himself.

The man collapsed onto his seat, he had been publicly turned out and had no way of escaping humiliation, if he was still capable of any. He was a eunuch, a gelding, a capon. He finished his beer and sat examining the bottle with watering eyes.

‘How’s the missus?’ John asked shattering the silence.

‘She took all me money; I don’t even have enough to pay for these two.' Saying this he seemed to wilt against the brass bar rail.

‘Lend us a couple grand till tomorrow will you mate?’

‘You know I never lend money, cause I never get it back. You’re a dead beat Frank.’ John the complainer tittered.

Frank buried his face in his cupped hands and moaned. There seemed to be no bottom to the depths he could sink to. Even to the point where John no longer enjoyed his pain and flipped his wallet open.

‘Here take this, but go drink it somewhere else.’

Frank took the money and waid in the Thai manner, debasing himself even further by the exaggeration of the gesture and slunk out into the day light.

‘What the hell was that?’ Lonny asked.

‘Frank from Leeds and his lovely young bride, going through a rough patch, for the last eight months or so. She kicks the shit out of him and he comes crawling in here to weep and drown his sorrows and ehh who cares. He’s one of the many thousands, probably hundreds of thousands.’ John finished in exasperation.

‘That’s terrifying.’

‘It’s the norm.’

They went quiet, Lonny ate his breakfast scraping the plate. John drank his vodka.

‘What are you doing now?’ The complainer asked.

‘Nope, no thanks, what I’m doing now is going to get myself a real hotel room where I can sleep, take a long hot shower and relax.’

‘You haven’t changed hotels yet? Jesus, look I’ll do you one better, I’m going to take you for a massage.’

‘No way, I seen these clip joints around here, I don’t want no more trouble.’ Lonny said, wiping up his plate with the last triangle of toast and then folding the yoke and fat soaked bread into his mouth.

‘No-no, a real massage place, a spa. Get a two hour massage, maybe a steam you’ll feel like a new man. It’s on me for leaving you to get beat the other morning.’

‘Tell you what, it sounds to me like you got no friends.’

‘ Friends sure I have friends, lots of em, me and the grumpy old men over there we go and hang out and discuss the price of movies in the thirties. Or I look up all of my close Thai friends and sit around comparing our watches. Course I have no friends, every farang here is lonely. You don’t think you make friends here, with people like that? When everyone is trying to cut each other’s throat over pussy and apartments and gossip. It’s a snake pit. Acquaintances maybe, but more just like drinking partners, that’s all you make in a city like this.’

‘You’re kind makes no friends anywhere.’

‘Pissant’

‘panty waist, he just wants someone new so he can piss in their ear’ the old men chimed in one at a time over the bar.

‘That’s what I have to work with, insults from the Korean war gallery.’ John said.

‘Guess I could go for a massage, never had one before.’

‘Never had one, Christ on a stick, let’s go.’ They stood to go leaving money on the bar. The complainer turned back, ‘Hey guys, you know John Wayne used to fuck his Filipino house boys right? Yup, ol’ Marion sure could accessorize with those scarves he was always wearing.’

The old men grumbled and hurled insults as the complainer laughingly saluted them.

The two left the bar and came into blinding daylight. Both wincing, the complainer popped on his sunglasses as Lonny shaded his eyes with one hand.

‘We’ll get a taxi’

‘Motorcycle thing?’

‘No, Jesus stay off those they’re death machines.’ John stepped to the curb and made the hailing motion at the line of cabs that crept along the curb touting for fares. ‘It’s not far, and then maybe we’ll get a couple of drinks?’

‘We’ll go to the massage and then I’m getting my room.’

‘All right, up to you.’

One of the cabs pulled up and John opened the door and gibbered to the driver. ‘C’mon.’

As Lonny went to follow there was a shout of ‘you, you, you’ coming across the sidewalk.

Two cops bustled through the swelling crowd pointing at Lonny. John tried to step into the car but the cab saw what was going on and started yelling ‘no no no’ over the seat waving his hands.

The police guided the two into the shade of the bars awning and proceeded to search them without a word exchanged. Lonny was panicked; the steady stream of sweat already damping his shirt and waist band became a torrent as one of the cops patted him down.

‘Ask them what’s going on.’ Lonny spoke from the side of his mouth.

‘Nothing’s going on its just harassment of the press. I’ve had this before, don’t worry.’ The complainer sounded calm but Lonny could tell by his face that he was enraged behind his dark glasses.

The cops finished their search and they were taken by the arms and frog-marched to the intersection of the main road where they were locked inside a gray metal street side holding cell, a box that at a different time and in another city would be a phone booth.

They stood face to face, their bellies touching so they were compelled to move as little as possible to eliminate any chance of frottage. The sides of the box in the full brunt of the sun were hot enough to sear flesh. With hands at their sides and faces averted at opposite angles they stood dripping. Tiny slits were cut into the sides at eye level and the light shimmered in the super heated air.

Lonny tried to ask the Complainer why they were being tortured but it was too hot to speak, simply concentrating on being seemed impossible inside the box and he felt a dark shroud slipping over his thoughts. I can’t pass out he forced himself to think, can’t let it happen.

‘Oh man, I am not feeling well.’ John the complainer groaned. ‘There’s no air in here.’ Lonny was holding on but the heat of the box made it hard to breathe and he could feel the darkness closing in around him. John lurched, grabbing Lonny by the shoulders and with a quake that shook his torso vomited the two Bloody Mary’s he had for breakfast down the front of them both.

Lonny tried to back away but contact with the walls burnt his bare arms, he couldn’t move and the smell of the regurgitated tomato juice was rising on the cooking air. His mouth filled with saliva and before he could even warn John his breakfast came up in one solid voluminous retch.

The two stood grasping each others arms, reeling and slick with sweat and vomit trying only to stay upright and off the broiling metal. ‘How long will they keep us in here?’ Lonny croaked

‘Until they get a truck to take us away, might be a while.’ The complainer spoke hoarsely, his voice depleted of its usual bravado.

In time, how much was impossible to tell since the first minute seemed like ten and everything after that could have been an hour, the door opened with a rush of cool air and the now four cops blocking it found the two leaning inward against one another for support, soaked in sweat and caked with vomit. The cops began to laugh as one while they helped the two out gently. One repeated the word ‘lone, lone’ to Lonny over and over smiling.

One of the cops disappeared into the nearest seven eleven and came out a minute later with three plastic sealed towels. He popped them open with the ball of his hand and gave one to each prisoner to clean up as best they could while he opened the other and held it to his nose.

On the sidewalk they were hand cuffed. Revived in the cooler air Lonny was conscious of being soaked through from head to foot with his own sweat and when he could focus he saw the complainer was as well. The release from the intense heat was followed by being packed into the back seat of a police pickup truck where the air was icy and both were stricken with sudden stomach cramps and head pain from the violent shift in temperature.

*

The truck lurched into the stalled late morning traffic and instead of blowing its siren to clear a path as any cop in New York would it just went along with it, slowly meandering through lanes of glass and metal that crept like lava in the heat and exhaust.

'Where are they taking us?' Lonny asked with visions of third world prison squalor floating in his pounding head.

‘Police station.’ The complainer replied shortly.

‘Why don’t you talk to them, ask them what this is all about, find out what we’re being charged with?’ Lonny’s head and stomach were clearing of the dizziness and cramps brought on by the temperature shift but now he was shivering in the freezing cab.

‘Pointless, they wouldn’t tell us even if they knew. When we get to the police station they’ll lock us up for a while and then bring us to somebody with some gold on their shoulders and then the bullshit will start. These two are street level ling lao’s, just whiskey monkeys following orders. This is for me; you were just unlucky enough to be there when they picked me up. Don’t worry; this is just about applying pressure and finally of course money.’

‘Don’t worry? How am I not going to worry, I’m in a cop car in Thailand, that makes me worried.’ Lonny protested.

‘Look I’m a member of the press, a working journalist and we’re one of the few ink on paper news corporations left in the world with enough circulation that our advertising is actually worth something. Even if it’s only because people still need something to wrap their fried banana’s in...’ The complainer trailed off.

The truck turned off the main road and down a small street and parked in front of a rundown looking low slung white building with a brownish purple sign that read Klong Toey Police Division in silver letters. The two cops in front let them out and brought them in through the side of the building still cuffed. They led them casually down a cool hall way to a big, gray metal door where an older cop drowsed in a plastic chair. He woke easily and smiling at the foreign prisoners took an ancient looking key ring from the wall and turned the old tumbler lock in the door.

There were four cells, two on either side. The jailer opened the one on the right nearest the door and the cops who had brought them opened their arms in an invitation to enter. The door was shut gently and re-locked with an old fashioned pad lock and the three cops turned to leave.

The complainer stepped up to the door and quietly with no show of anger or humiliation spoke in an almost pleading tone and again the cops began to laugh. He put his bound hands through a gap in the door’s bars designed specifically for this. The cop nearest produced his key and un-manacled him, speaking in a light jaunty tone.

Lonny stepped forward and did the same, sliding his hands through the bars and meeting the cops eye. The cop slapped himself on the side of the head and said ‘I forget’ laughing. Lonny nodded his head, trying his best to keep his composure as the complainer had.

The cell was a bare wood floor, just long enough for a short man to lie down with a low wall perpendicular to the bars which offered some privacy for using the toilet; a ceramic framed hole in the floor with a five gallon bucket of water next to it. ‘Nothing to do now but wait.’ The complainer said sliding down the wall to a siting position with his legs stretched out before him.

‘Nothing to do?’ Lonny stood with his back against the bars, indignant, less frightened but more angry than ever.

‘Nope, things will happen when they happen. Patience, or lack there of is the white mans down fall in the east.’ The complainer said. His eyes shut, hands folded behind his head.

‘Jesus Christ, you're something. Get me beat up, now dragged to fucking jail and what your gonna' take a nap?’ Lonny said.

‘Yep.’ The complainer said and that spun Lonny around to face out into the other cells with his arms raised in a gesture of hopelessness. One other cell was occupied. Diagonally, a collage of faces were pushed up against the bars, grinning, watching as if the two foreigners were a comedy act brought in for their sole entertainment.

‘What the hell are you looking at?’ Lonny shouted at the mute collection of brown faces. Sweating and red faced, his disheveled clothes damp, stained and speckled with puke. Feeling beaten and humiliated he lowered his arms and leaned against the perpendicular wall, determined to return their silent gaze.

As morning turned to afternoon the old guard who sat outside appeared once with bottles of water and Styrofoam packs of chicken fried rice stacked in his arms. He delivered the bulk to the farthest cell where he chatted amiably with the imprisoned for a moment and then came to Lonny and John and handed the provisions through the same gap they had been un-cuffed through.

Lonny’s first thought was to refuse the food in an act of defiance, to show he didn’t accept what was happening and he made a play at it but John stepped up, nudging him out of the way and spoke to the old man, receiving the food and water gratefully.

They sat uncomfortably on the floor, each chugging from their bottles of water. Lonny opened his Styrofoam shell of rice but the heavy smell of old cooking oil and fish sauce turned his stomach so he set it aside and watched John digging into his own with the small plastic spoon that had been fixed to the top with a rubber band.

The inmates in the diagonal cell were laughing and chatting over their meal and Lonny looked on wondering at their contentment. They were sat in a circle on mats, leaning against wedged shaped pillows. In the center were five or six bowls and a couple of platters with an assortment of tasteless looking soggy vegetables. The prisoners were a mix of men and women and ranged in age from youth to geriatric, but to a person they were smiling and wolfing their rice.

The cell was full of bags and makeshift luggage. It seemed as if they had been locked up carrying everything they owned or had been allowed to gradually bring in all their meager luxuries of home. ‘What’s the story over there?’ He asked.

John looked over and shrugged.

‘I mean they look like a whole family or something, they got all their bags and clothes and shit, what happened?’

‘Could be anything, how do I know? Maybe they were squatters, maybe they’re illegal immigrants without papers.’

‘Illegal immigrants?’ Lonny scoffed.

‘Sure, Cambodian, Laos, Burmese, Indian, Chinese, Bangladeshi you name it they all want to come here and tap into the currency stream.’

‘What are you talking about? This place is a wreck; it’s a shit hole, corrupt third world shit hole.’ He held his hand out at the bars to emphasize his point.

‘Don’t let the filth and heat fool you. This place is full of money, there's street vendors out there pushing carts of fried insects that could buy and sell you, or me for that matter. You want to see poor? Go to Burma.’

‘No thanks, this is bad enough for me.’ Lonny looked across at the huddle of people enjoying their meal again and tried to imagine their plight. What could have happened that was so bad they would seek refuge here, but he couldn’t put a picture to it. Their lives meant nothing to him.

A metal clang sounded and the lock squealed in the old door which opened with a groan of weight and in walked two new cops. These wore different uniforms with more candy colored badges across their chest than the others.

‘Here we go.’ The complainer said, setting aside his food and washing his mouth out with the last of his water. He stood up, straightened his fouled clothing making ready to deal. Lonny remained clutching the bars while the cops discussed something in hushed voices looking the two over. The complainer waited for the threats and bargaining to start but neither paid him any attention.

One came forward pointing at Lonny while the other stepped back to keep an eye on the complainer. ‘You come with us, put out your hands.’ Lonny put his hands back through the gap in the door and was re-cuffed, the cell door unlocked and Lonny stepped through.

John spoke in Thai to them but they ignored it, he repeated himself and the one who had stepped back replied simply in English ‘shut up.’

‘Wait a minute, what about him, I don’t speak no Thai.’ Lonny protested.

‘Never mind, OK.’ The cop said.

‘Jesus, John tell them something.’

‘You haven’t done anything, just pay them what they want, I’ll get it back to you’. The cops book-ended Lonny and escorted him through the door in silence.

Lonny was taken to a windowless room where he was shackled to and sat on one of a row of plastic chairs. The police took his wallet and passport from his pockets, leafed through each, returned his wallet and walked out with his passport. He kept silent, even more or less calm until two men in suits entered the room and stood him up, silently making it clear he was going with them.

He called for a lawyer and then demanded to see John and when they took him out of the station through a rear door and pointed him towards a black sedan with tinted windows he started to automatically resist. One of them back handed him across the face, starting a persistent stream of blood running down the back of his throat and then pointed to his heart saying something like yai yen yen.

In the back of the car with his hands cuffed behind and ankles chained to each other, he, against all of the fight that remained in him, began to weep in fear.

Unlike the pace the police had taken the car he was in now sped through traffic flashing lights and honking, splitting the congestion by using the nonexistent center lane and both shoulders while traveling at break neck speeds.

The abductors chatted incomprehensibly to Lonny in the front seat while the driver cut the car onto an elevated ramp and merged with traffic on a toll highway where their speed picked up again. Lonny watched as the city passed below in a blur realizing this was the most he had seen of Bangkok since he had landed.

The blood trickle from his nose had slowed and congealed in a crooked line from his mouth to the pit of his neck where a small puddle collected. They had run through the city and over a bridge spanning a wide river lined both in glass fronted high rises and teetering shacks along its banks, the sluggish brown water glutted with vegetation and small boat traffic. Now they moved through the industrial outskirts, warehouses and factories, where old trucks spewing black clouds of diesel exhaust blew down half finished roads in clouds of dust.

This was territory Lonny understood, not much different from the cargo areas he had spent most of his adult life navigating, but the familiarity did Lonny’s peace of mind no good.

He’d been hearing about bodies dumped in container yards and stuffed into recycling centers his whole life and now he felt sure he was about to become one of those degraded, ruined corpses he had taken such pleasure in reading about in the Post. It had always seemed like justice for wise guys trying to cut corners, the penalty for wanting the easy life, for taking on others dirty work.

Without meaning to, he began to beg. He heard himself whimpering as if he were outside his own body listening in. His mouth making pathetic, squeaking, mewing noises that meant nothing more to the two men than if he had regained his mental composure and began to rationalize in English. The abductor in the passenger’s seat turned, nodded and grinning tightly delivered another clout to the center of Lonny’s face. He sat back, his eyes flung open breathing through his mouth as his nasal passages filled with blood again and the world blurred through his tears.

They moved through an environment of hurricane fences protecting heavy machinery, metal warehouses, broken down vehicles, dust, oil and heat. But unlike its sister industrial wasteland in Queens this one also housed its workers in shacks built from the cheapest materials available, looking as if they could be leveled for relocation in minutes. There seemed to be no plumbing in these workers quarters since a stand pipe was at the center of each collection of misshapen long-houses and electric was poached by rigs twined into the power lines that provided juice to the plants and factories surrounding them.

In the middle of the day the dirt squares which acted as courtyards seemed deserted but as he looked deeper with his head tilted, pinching the bridge of his nose he could make out the dozing shapes of dogs sleeping in shallow burrows under the shacks and supine bodies suspended in homemade hammocks improvised from knotted sacks.

The car pulled up to a gate built into a high fence made of slotted metal panels that ran as far as he could see in both directions. The driver punched some numbers into his phone as they sat idling on the deserted road. Seconds later the battered metal door rolled back on complaining castors that ran along an I-beam track which bucked the car as they crept through the opening and automatically closed up behind them. All around towers of crushed cars rose from the blend of shattered glass, red dirt and a million hues of paint reduced to powder which made up the ground.

As soon as the car came to a halt the two men were dragging Lonny from the back seat, one by his cuffed hands and one by the back of his shirt. Lonny couldn’t move his feet fast enough to keep pace with his abductors who pulled him along making twin drag marks in the dirt behind as they moved toward the main building which loomed at the center of the compound. It was a penal looking cube of galvanized steel and dull unpainted cement block that sat squat and mean amongst the wreckage in the yard. There were no windows, the only point of ingress being a large, metal roll up door which opened for them with a mechanical whirl.

It was dark and cool inside coming in from the blinding intensity of the days heat and it took Lonny a moment to see the place clearly. He didn’t have to look around though since he had been in a thousand buildings like this one and could almost name everything you would find inside. A series of come-a-longs hanging from the ceiling, maybe a hydraulic lift, welders, torches, perhaps a lathe and many of the larger hand tools needed to disassemble, strip, crush and smash machines. There might be rolling tables and a long counter set with vices and grinders. All of this would be dimly lit by hanging fluorescent lights above a concrete floor chipped and cracked, stained in Rorschach patterns of oil.

His abductors pushed him through the tool strewn work space toward a skeletal metal staircase that led up to a catwalk which disappeared into the dark extremities of the hanger sized building.

Their feet rang against the risers and the drag and skip of the shackle chains echoed off the hard concrete and steel that enclosed them. They marched him into the dim recesses three abreast along the narrow walk to a built out structure that hung over the ground floor like a lobe, the command center Lonny thought, the office. He could picture this grimy room as well; outdated computers and telephones and stacks of shipping orders and manifests held down by mugs of cold coffee, occupied by three middle aged, heavy set women and one old man.

When they approached the door one of his abductors pushed the call button on a key pad set into the wall while the other spoke unintelligibly to Lonny. The words meant nothing to him and hung in the air like a threat until the man nudged Lonny’s foot with his own and pointed with his toe indicating the shoes neatly lined up in front of the door. Shoes Lonny wouldn’t have expected in a place like this, more pink and glitter then he had ever seen in a warehouse before.

He bent over to unlace the knot of his basketball sneakers, but the restrictive shackles and the bulk of his gut made it impossible to balance. With his second reach he tipped forward, over compensated and fell back on his ass, crashing painfully on the grilled steel floor of the catwalk.

He lay feeling wrenched, bound and bloody faced when the door swung open. Standing at the threshold, back-lit by a soft white glow was a young model-esque Thai woman who from Lonny’s worm’s eye point of view towered like a giant.

A wave of chilled air flowed across him and the woman’s hair lifted on the thermal updraft in a slow black wave. She stood arms akimbo; her long toned legs disappeared beneath a short skirt and narrowed to a waspish waist. She wore a sleeveless yellow shirt that read Pussy Power across her chest in fuzzy blue press on letters.

She spoke to the abductors in quick demanding sentences and turned her back on all three never recognizing Lonny’s existence. The abductors knelt to both sides of Lonny and like nannies quickly untied his sneakers and pulled them from his feet. Then, standing him up they unlocked the shackles from his ankles and lowered the chained cuffs in neat tight circles beside his shoes. They book-ended him again guiding him through the door almost politely.

The change in environment was as much of a through-the-looking-glass experience as Lonny ever had. From the gritty working warehouse they had stepped into an immaculate airy loft. The room was almost blindingly white. Walls, ceiling and white oak floor lit from above by two huge sky lights that filtered the harsh outside glare to a diffused soft comfortable glow which fell evenly across the modern design furniture and objects that furnished the room.

The woman had taken a seat behind a large glass and steel table that acted as her desk. An elegantly thin monitor held up by a finger thick stand with a wafer like keyboard sat in front of her. This sparse arrangement was in direct contrast with the jumble of pictures tacked and taped to the wall behind.

A sad faced beagle wearing clown makeup and a dunce’s hat was painted on an easel-sized canvass hung in an ornate, scalloped gold frame making up the center of the assemblage. Fanning out from it were more images of beagles looking despondent in ridiculous circumstances. They were printed on post cards and notebook covers and postage stamps and fixed to the wall with bright red, heart shaped stickers printed with mottoes like ‘love rules you heart’,‘love heart friend’ and ‘trust friend heart’.

The abductors led him to the front of the table where they spoke humbly to the woman who nodded and tapped her long manicured finger nails against the tinted glass top of her table and then shot out another command. One reached over and unlocked Lonny’s wrists and then both receded into the apartment leaving Lonny standing alone. The woman stared into the screen of her computer, touching it softly and responding to the changes she saw with emphatic nods of her head.

Lonny stood with his hands folded in front of him, his head bowed; feeling like a boy brought to the principal’s office to receive punishment, except that this principal was beautiful like a deodorant spokeswomen and the punishment could be death.

One of the abductors brought him a damp, warm towel. Lonny took it and wiped the blood from his nose and mouth and refolded it and wiped down the sweat and grime of the day from his face and the towel came away smeared with a ghost line likeness. Looking down he saw the filth that coated his shirt front, the complainer’s vodka and tomato juice along with particles of his own breakfast and another wave of nausea passed through him.

The woman looked up from the computer as Lonny refolded the towel again and dabbed at the stains.‘Ok good, now you clean you face, I can’t look at the dirty face like you have, yuk. So what you name man?’

‘Look, I aint got much money, I got some but I probably can get more, I don’t know what you want but that’s… I mean I don’t.’ Lonny stammered, not exactly sure how to explain himself under the circumstances.

The woman looked back to the computer screen calling out in Thai. Lonny felt the crippling pain in his lower back before he heard the connection of one of the abductors fists delivering a classic and effective rabbit punch, crushing his kidney. He dropped to his knees gasping and worrying he might retch again across the immaculate floor. ‘I ask you name,’The woman said. Now visible only as a pair of perfect legs from Lonny’s point of view under the table.

He said his name and slowly helped himself up using the edge of the glass top.

‘Ok, that’s more polite, my name is Toy, nice to meet you. Can you say you name again please?’

‘Lonny,’ he said. 

She tried it twice mangling it both times and laughed. ‘Excuse me, I cannot say the L and R perfectly, my English teacher tell me to say R with my throat and L with my tongue. He always say to me you want to eat Rice or Lice?’ She laughed, but Lonny heard the same word and didn’t get the example.

‘OK, never mind. Who you, and why you want to see Tanner?’ The import of the question went over Lonny’s head as he didn’t hear Tanner but tennar, and didn’t know what it was.

He shook his head not wanting to answer, as he had nothing to say, no reason to give and thought that was going to cause him more pain. Toy saw that he didn’t get it.

‘Tanner, my friend and I see you, I see you watch him, and wait for he but he not know you. I see with another man, fat man, who I see watch Tanner already. Then I see you again, I see where you stay, why you stay there? It not nice, Bangkok have many nice place to stay. Why you want to stay so poor?’

He looked at her in amazement, and certain that his face showed it wondered if he could carry it out as innocence.

‘You mean the kid? The young man I met the other night. He’s working for a women’s rights campaign or something, I don’t know him. I met him in a bar. I was having a beer. It was hot. I don’t even know where I was.’

Toy puckered her lips and moved that purse around making a kind of ruminating face that Lonny thought was somewhat of a put on.

‘Emm, Ok you say you not know him, I not sure. He had some bad trouble in New York. He come from New York, and so do you. I see you with the fat man, he American too. He very no good. I don’t know you yet. I know where you stay. You know today?’

Lonny waited for a moment, he didn’t want to interrupt in case she was pausing. Things seemed to have shifted in his favor. But the moment went too long to be a pause and so he said. ‘I know what today?’

‘Today the police take you. You with another American again, he work with the newspaper. The police catch you and give you to me because I tell them to. You understand na?’

‘I’ll be honest, I don’t understand any of this, but I get your point.’

‘You get my point? Ok, that’s good, now you understand.’ she nodded and the abductors approached book-ending him again. ‘My staff will send you back, bye bye.’ Toy smiled and made a childish wave with a hand at the side of her face. Lonny didn’t know if that was a signal or just part of her seemingly scatter shot personality.

The muscle led him back towards the door when Toy called again. ‘Excuse me Lonny, may I ask you a question?’

Lonny turned, waited for her to finish and when he realized it wasn’t rhetorical nodded.

‘Who is the best singer for you Britney or Lady Gaga?’

He had no idea what the answer to that would be. Completely blank he shrugged and mumbled that he didn’t really know new music.

‘You don’t know?’ Toy yelled out in a mockery of shock, rolling her eyes and gesturing wildly.

‘No’, Lonny said.

‘Ok, never mind,’ she waved again but Lonny could see she was amazed, even distressed by his ignorance.