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traffic from the other brothels and street pickups, making toward the short-time hotels. Simultaneously newly-mets are arriving from the bars farther up Sukhumvit in the Pleonchit area, looking for somewhere air-conditioned where they can get horizontal for an hour or so.
    To me, sitting in back of the cab waiting for the lights to change, the answer to the world economic crisis was obvious: legalize prostitution and tax it. At 15 percent per bang, deficits would shrink overnight. It would be safe to leverage as well. The worse things get, the more people bury their problems in sex. The better things get, the more people celebrate their good fortune with sex. It’s a tax revenue for all seasons, and with ever more sophisticated surveillance coming onstream, it won’t be long before governments will be in a position to tax sex between married couples. Hey, Obama, are you listening?
    Out of boredom the cab driver switched on his radio. One of the chat shows reported that five women had complained separately about a stalker on Sukhumvit. It seemed a man with a grotesquely damaged face had been approaching women and scaring the hell out of them.Two complained to the police, but the police told them there was no law against being ugly. Now a bunch of people called to say they agreed with the police:
What was Thailand coming to when people showed no tolerance for the afflictions of others? We were supposed to be a Buddhist nation, after all
. Then one of the stalked women called in to say, “Have you any idea just how ugly this guy is? We’re talking about extreme mutilation, worse than any horror movie.” The story made me think of Zinna’s lover, whose face was smashed in that car accident; but of course he was in a monastery somewhere in Cambodia, so it couldn’t be him.
    By the time we emerged from the jam, it was nine-thirty. A few more holdups kept me in the cab until we finally arrived at my little
soi
where my little hovel was waiting. I saw from the lights that Chanya was home, working in the corner of the room she calls her office. I called out “Hi,” and she said it back to me, without looking up from her monitor. I tried not to feel lonely, isolated, and rejected. I tried not to think of the nervous little bald guy who’d come into the Lonesome Cowboy a couple of hours before and was probably this minute being initiated into his new world in some upstairs room by those two
katoeys
who would have his money one way or another. I tried not to think of Burmese mothers selling their kidneys and their eyes to keep their babies alive for a few more years, or of all the other Asian women and men who had tried to help their families by selling body parts after the tsunami. It’s a beautiful, global world, so long as you keep your eyes shut.
    The first thing I did when I arrived home was to grab a bunch of incense, light it, and hold it at eye level while I
waied
the electric Buddha we keep on a high shelf in the northeast corner. He’s quite gaudy with purple and red lights, which are kitsch enough to remind me it’s only a symbol I’m bowing at. On The Path, symbols are functional things, DFR; you really don’t want them to seduce you with their charm or resale value.
    So I was practicing a gritted-teeth kind of husbandly tolerance when I went to the other corner of the room, picked up a bottle of red wine, poured her a glass, and set it in front of her keyboard, then poured another for myself. She was not a natural drinker; I’d started toinsist on one glass per night, just to bring her down from that high-stress war with her supervisor whose name, inevitably perhaps, was Dorothy. I knew that if she didn’t have wine, she would hit a wall and slob out in front of the TV to watch her DVDs of
Ice Road Truckers
. You’d think there wouldn’t be much for a slender Thai girl to relate to in a series about great hairy white men driving massive trucks across frozen lakes in Alaska; the attraction of opposites, I