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?
11
I’m still here, farang, at the Rose Garden. I’ve commuted from the bathroom to the