to their cohorts in the local Bangkok police and the Royal Thai Tourist Police, on to government officials and the upper echelons of political power.
The reason for their involvement was simple: any go-go bar operating in Bangkok could only do so by paying substantial bribes to the police; a river of money creamed from foreign tourists. Don’t pay, you don’t play. In return for the bundles of cash they handed over on a monthly basis the bar and nightclub operators expected and got the poorly paid Thai Police to act as their private enforcers.
No matter what level of acceptance and forgiveness he achieved from within, in the external world nothing could change what had happened or how the consequences continued to play out.
“Any good boys?” Michael asked as he passed yet again the door of one of the infamous go-go bars on Soi Twilight, catching a glimpse of the scantily clad men parading their wares up on stage.
“No good boys here,” the bouncer shot back.
They both laughed.
It 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
