Bow is driving the scooter. James is sitting on the back, watching the neon blur of the city. Over the hum of the engine and the traffic, she suddenly throws a question over her shoulder:
“If you never meet me, where you be now?”
James forces a light laugh, but the physical space around him instantly compresses. The question strikes like a heavy brass bell, the sound echoing and refusing to fade. As they weave through the humid night air, his brain involuntarily begins constructing the alternate timeline. Maybe he would still be married. Maybe he’d be living in that same freezing, grey city. Maybe he’d have significantly more money in his savings account. Maybe he would be infinitely more miserable. Maybe he would be happier. In his head, this alternate version of himself becomes a tangible ghost, riding in the smog right next to them.
Suddenly, the hallucination shifts. The back of the head in front of him is no longer Bow. It’s Kanya.
Wait. They are on a ferry to Koh Larn. It’s his very first trip to the country. She has been his “girlfriend” for exactly ten days. He knows absolutely nothing about how this world operates, yet he remembers sitting there, earnestly trying to explain to her that she needs to quit the industry. We can build a new life, he had told her. You can live like a normal person. God, what a profound, arrogant idiot he was. He realizes Kanya’s cheap plastic hairpin is still buried at the very bottom of his travel backpack, somehow still holding the phantom scent of her hair.
The memory violently bleeds into Su. Damn it, Su was only a single year older than his own daughter. She radiated a frantic, chaotic energy, so intense that everything ended in a devastating hurricane. He remembers the exact venom in her voice when she called him a pathetic “old goat” before slamming the door. His ego so shattered, he spent the next month haunting Soi 6, systematically sleeping with almost all of her friends just to prove he wasn’t old, to prove she was the one missing out on a great guy.
But Su’s hurricane only mirrored Nancy. During his final, catastrophic fight with his ex-wife Maria, his daughter Nancy had created the exact same hurricane, screaming that she refused to live with an alcoholic mother and a neurotic father before packing her bags and moving to her grandmother’s house.
Then came Phon. A woman so suffocatingly paranoid and jealous she nearly drove him into the very alcoholism his daughter despised.
Then Maprang from the go-go. He couldn’t believe a guy like him had landed a girl with a figure like hers. It took him a full year of wire transfers to realize he was merely a minority shareholder in a highly diversified romantic portfolio.
Then Ni. Who eventually introduced him to her friend Bow over a sizzling Mookata grill.
Then began the sudden, frequent trips to Bangkok, telling Bow he just needed to “sort out some documents at the embassy.”
The scooter abruptly stops at a red light. The girl turns around. His brain misfires, the faces blurring into one continuous loop of history. Ploy turns around.
“Why you quiet?” she asks.
He blinks, pulling himself out of the vortex. Right. Bow. It’s Bow. Of course she is fine.
“I would still be looking for you,” he lies smoothly.
But his mind is already gone again. Another second passes, and mentally, he isn’t on the scooter anymore. He is in a sterile Bangkok hotel room on his last “embassy trip,” burying his face in the neck of a twenty-four-year-old girl named Pen. She is only 147 centimeters tall, but her hair—god, her hair smells exactly like Kanya’s.
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