was an improvement on the “mafia, mafia” chant Michael usually got from the same tout; following his description of the bars as being owned by “mafia-like” networks.
Everything Michael wrote was amplified and then ridiculed as a result of, he assumed, keystroke logging software on his computer.
He gave up trying to eradicate it. He wasn’t computer literate enough or tidy enough in his private life to prevent it from being reinstalled.
In a city like Bangkok there was constant noise, always voices overlapping each other, dizzying plains of noise forming in lines up through to the top of the crane studded skyline.
But now the murmur was aimed at him.
His only option was to use the surveillance as a “two-edged sword”. But Michael was getting too sad, too messy, even to manage that.
His tormentors had, judging from the jeering faces of those around him, done a magnificent job with their propaganda.
Michael ignored the cameras as best he could. They should never have been there in the first place. The world is a vintage debate. Everyone learns from each other. But as far as he was concerned, everyone deserved the privacy of a home.
Hatred cannot be healed with hatred; hatred can only be healed with love. This is an immutable law. So said the Buddha.
Michael wanted peace, a truce. He had already declared, somewhat optimistically, that the assignment, if you could call it that, was over.
The story had found a natural conclusion.
If only.
Instead all some of the locals wanted was to expel a foreign body; to walk off with his assets and move on to a new host.
The harassment escalated as most of the volumes in The Twilight Soi series, which exposed the corruption of some of Bangkok’s go-go bars and their routine rorting of tourists, neared completion.
The perpetrators had been unmasked, the innocents warned.
Or so Michael would like to have thought.
Reality wasn’t quite so neat.
There were no innocents abroad.
Not in Bangkok.
The multi-billion dollar Thai tourist industry was recovering rapidly after the violent riots of 2010, when Red Shirt demonstrators had shut down much of the city’s central shopping and business districts, waving red flags and dying in the shadow of Hermes and Gucci stores and the concrete buttresses of the Sky Train.
By 2013 visitor numbers were expected to exceed 20 million. Nothing could threaten this source of wealth; or expose the reality behind the well known advertising slogan, The Land of Smiles.
That the extreme nature of his own harassment might be a story worth telling to a broader public, even just as a cautionary tale, came to seem unimportant as Michael struggled to survive. He had been forced to return to the damp, tepid heat of the capital against his will after Thai government officials had forced his return from India almost six months before. Now, more than ever, he just wanted gone.
Michael knew he was constantly monitored, swarms of eyes. Spy cameras caught his every move inside the apartment. CTV and security cameras followed his every move outside, from the grim corridors of the ITF Tower, past the ATMS scattered through Bangkok’s streets and into the crowded, futuristic caverns of the city’s Sky Train. “American technology,” one man pointlessly observed. It wasn’t all American, and he didn’t care from whence the evil came.
Not all of the surveillance directed against him was hostile. Watchers watched the watched, the compassionate eyed the vindictive, but whatever their motive, the surveillance was a form of harassment in and of itself.
Like water torture, excessive surveillance drives its victims to the borders of sanity, to the borders of the real.
A sci-fi image flashed across his brain, of camera eyes disengaging from the sequence of bathrooms, bedrooms and hotel rooms through which he had passed and flying back to the fetid red light districts of Bangkok where they had originated. Once again they lodged on the damp, mildew stained walls overlooking the narrow streets jammed with go-go bars and massage parlours, curling up their mechanical tentacles and waiting for their next victim, the next foreigner stupid enough to seek fun and companionship along the Twilight Soi. The next tourist naive enough to protest at being robbed.
But it was not to be.
The surveillance remained.
As did the voices.
“He can’t take care of himself, how can he take care of anyone else?”
“You’re suicidal, please understand,” came another of the voices when he expressed his frustration in more open terms.
“Make fun of the falung, make fun of the falung,” he had chanted all that particular long, long day.
“Not good for Thailand,” one of the police observed.
No, it was not good for Thailand. And Thailand was not good for him. He just wanted out.
“He takes care of everyone but himself,” one of his more caustic critics said.
“That boyfriend of his is dangerous,” yet another noted.
“I think he would have enjoyed his time in Bangkok if he hadn’t been caught up in…”
“He probably would have done alright with any other boyfriend but…”
“He’s all over the place.”
“I feel embarrassed for him.”
"Leave him be,” one of the more humane intelligence officers said. “Let him get his life back together. It's what he says himself. He would like to sue you all for stress. Leave him alone.”
"For him, it's five minutes to midnight," another of the voices, or perhaps it was the same voice, intoned.
“They’re nothing but male prostitutes,” a frustrated officer declared, exasperated at how such a routine incident as a Thai sex worker deceiving and stealing from a foreigner had been blown into a national and international incident.
The warnings just kept on coming: “You are about to have an accident.” Time and time again.
“The police are going to come tumbling through the roof,” said POW, Prisoner of War or Piece of Work, a rent boy who had been with Michael for a time, said. “I’ve been told not to stay with you.”
"He's going down," a man in a nearby discotheque said. "That book."
Later the bad guys:
“I thought you were going to take care of him,” said one of the mafia dons.
Take care as in kill.
“It’s difficult,” protested one of his underlings.
Michael heard them discussing the best way to kill him.
There were so many cameras trained on him from so many different vantage points they had trapped themselves as much as they had trapped him.
Ironically, the surveillance which they themselves initiated was achieving the aim of making him exceedingly uncomfortable, if not unhinged, but was also making the hit more difficult.
There had to be some level of plausible deniability; some way of suggesting that it wasn’t just a spiteful, vindictive Thai Mafia kill but the consequences of Michael’s own much observed, much lamented, entirely imperfect lifestyle.
His pursuers settled on a simulated heart attack.
As they had done for the previous two years, they made their own story.
Despite the stressful circumstances, his blood pressure remained steady.
THE GLUE SNIFFERS OF KATHMANDU
Three