The needle went slowly in. The guy in the camouflage coat bit his lip. Not looking, he said: You get it?
Yeah.
Good.
The blood came out from between the wings of the butterfly in a pretty thread, reproducing those times when traffic becomes a liquid with many red eyes that oozes through tunnels in obedience to horizontal pinball gravity. Just as taxi-lights bleed across the ceilings of tunnels, so the pink vibrations took wing inside his eyelids. The corpuscles were smoking, tottering trucks and weepy-eyed cars rushing like red ants between the ribs of some dead bridge.
Still going, huh?
Yeah, said the doctor. It's a gusher.
That's good, 'cause I never mess with the back one.
He looked down at the floor. Yeah, he went on. I have a positive antibody. I hope I don't have AIDS. I've been feeling terrible lately.
As he sat there leaning forward he jigged his knee and he jigged his fist on his knee. He looked very serious.
The guy in the camouflage coat got a Butterfly Bar vest and a bar number like the girls and went around like some tragic diffusion of evening traffic, saying to them: OK you pay me one baht I sleep you hotel no problem I smoke you my Mama-Papa very poor — and they laughed.
But the slender sad girl whose hair was rubberbanded back in a ponytail said: I no like my job.
Why you work Soi Cowboy then? he said, throwing his jacket off and rolling up his sleeve.
Little money. I send money Mama-Papa.
You have Thai boyfriend?
Before I have. But he send me away. I small small money. He marry big money.
The slender girl never resisted. Her tiny fieldworn hands would always settle on his back, gently caressing. (Before, I work water buffalo, she said.) She had a pale ocher face. She never complained about his not using a rubber.
You want some blood? he said afterward.
No, sir. Why you say give me blood?
I want to do it to you. I did it to you one way, but maybe you still don't have my antibody. I want you to drink my blood. I want to maybe stick you with this needle and squirt my blood into you, OK?
The slender girl wrung her hands. — OK, sir. Up to you.
The guy in the camouflage coat remembered the woman who'd given him the disease. He remembered going to the doctor with her.
Hi, the doctor had said. Are you gonna do this?
Yeah. I guess, said the scared woman, smiling. Then she said quickly: no, I really have to get to work. — She ran away.
She was dead now.
Close your eyes, bitch, he said to the slender girl. I don't want you looking into my eyes while I do this. Don't worry. I'll pay you one thousand baht.* Make a fist. Make a fist, I said. Yeah, that's a good vein. You got such pretty litde veins.
Thank you, sir.
OK, it's going in. Don't move. Don't move. There it goes.
Thank you very much, sir.
What the fuck are you thanking me for? I just murdered you.
Excuse me sir me no no understand you speak.
I apologize, he said. It's just that I've been feeling pretty down lately.
* About U.S. $40 in 1993. About what an all-night girl might expect to receive.
Outside the vast squares of yellow bookstore-light, the panhandlers, longhaired and greasy, held out their palms, asking for their dinners, and two started fighting, while inside people turned the pages of picture-books whose flowers smelled like meadows of fresh ink.
I don't want her around me! a panhandler shouted. I don't need that fucking bitch! I hate that monster.
Inside, everyone pretended that the shouting was silence. A man looked at a book and wanted to buy it, knowing how wonderful it would be to sit in his own house with a drink in his hand looking at this thirty-eight-color picture-book printed on paper as smooth as a virgin's thigh while the sun kept coming in through the leaves—
Outside, somebody screamed.
The man bought the book and went out. He saw a man smashing a woman's head against a window of the bookstore. The glass shattered, and as the woman's livid and half-dead face shot into the yellow light he saw it become beautiful like the planet Saturn ringed by arrowheads of whirling glass that rainbowed her in their cruel prisms and clung to wholeness in that spinning second also ringed by her hair and spattering blood.
The man ran back inside where the woman's mouth lay peaceful. He opened his book and invited her in. Gently he raised her head and pillowed the book beneath. Spangles of blood struck the pages like a misty rain, becoming words which had never existed before. She began to bleed faster and faster. Her hair grew down between the words like grass, underscoring and embellishing them with fragrant flourishes. Her eyes and teeth became punctuation marks. Her skin became pages of bloodless purity. Her flesh kept company with the threads and glue; the plates of her skull broke neatly into cover-armor. Then there was nothing left of her above the raw red throat.
