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guess.
    She got the message and looked up apologetically. We clinked glasses. I said, “I have a new case.”
    She struggled to emerge from her world into mine. “Really? What?”
    “Vikorn’s decided to abolish illegal organ trafficking worldwide. At least while he’s running for governor.”
    She searched my face for an explanation. I told her all about Vikorn’s election strategy and the latest ploy in his war with Zinna, and the black Amex card, which made her grin. “But isn’t it dangerous? If there’s so much money in that kind of trafficking, someone’s sure to try to kill you.”
    “If I resigned, Vikorn would probably feel he had to bump me off. I know too much, and now that he’s running for governor, the stakes are much higher. Anyway, I’m a cop, how could I refuse a case like this?”
    Talk of my death sobered her. Suddenly the war with Dorothy wasn’t so important. Suddenly she remembered she loved me. She shook her head, then started to caress me. I understood because I felt the same way. The likelihood that one will be hanged in the morning can make you horny as a rattlesnake.
    We were lying naked together now, in the other corner of the room where the bed was. We’d finished talking about how we could get the most out of Vikorn’s credit card before an enraged organ hunter sent an assassin to kill me—half joking, half not—so now it was my turn to listen. But it was not a new story, it was an old one that kept pressing on Chanya’s mind like a thorn. An earnest look appeared on her face that signaled she was about to go intellectual.
    “Dorothy just can’t get it out of her head that all Thai whores are slaves. It’s amazing. The idea that a woman would go on the gamevoluntarily, accept it like a challenge even, test herself that way to show she’s tough enough, beautiful enough, clever enough with men, sometimes even enjoy it—sometimes
really
enjoy it—it’s like it would destroy one half of her worldview. I’ve shown her all the evidence, but she goes blind when she sees anything she doesn’t like. A
farang
like her thinks that a prostitute is some kind of being, an entity in her own right, whereas it doesn’t really occur to the girls that
prostitute
as a word is any more than a nominal convenience—not even a description; what they
are
is women, daughters, mothers, farmers, and members of a rural community—all those things that traditionally form the sense of
being
in the ontological sense.”
    She paused for breath, then continued, “I know of at least thirty girls who had breast transplants during their working lives, then had them removed the day they retired. They hung up their tits, you could say, washed their hands of the whole city, and returned to their home villages as if nothing had happened. Therefore they do not lose their identity when they sell their bodies, so that the profession of prostitution is never more than an economically driven distraction.
Farang
, on the other hand, are unable to see the sale of real biological sex—as opposed to fantasy sex in movies and pornography—as identical in nature to the sale of any other commodity like tomatoes or mangoes. It doesn’t make any sense. If one were to impose any
logical
value system, one would have to say the
farang
position is schizophrenic in that it encourages and exploits an obsession with sex but at the same time denies consummation to anyone who wants the convenience of paying for it with cash. Which is a lot more honest in most cases than pretending the flavor of the month is the lover of a lifetime. But for me the question is, why do
farang
get to live in a science fiction universe while the rest of us have to deal with reality for them? I finally told her she had to spend a night with me sitting in a corner at your mother’s bar. I called your mother, and she said it was okay, so long as Dorothy doesn’t scare off the customers.”
    I said, “What does
ontological
mean?”
    She looked at