Bangkok, March 20, 2020
In the megalopolis advance the grainy hordes, millions of people each in their own reserve, separated by restraint, by fear, by the phone screen that sucks in the faces.
Thresher-city that unbinds the grains, shakes loose the solidarities of the ears, sends each one rolling into the street, shut hard in its husk.
Inside the skytrain – machine that threshes above the sidewalks – are additions of masks. Bleach white, tender blue, hospital green; patterned, teddy bears, flowers or camouflage; surgeon’s, carpenter’s, PM25 masks with a plastic snout – particle filter.
Above traffic less dense than usual, the trains keep running. Most of the tourists have decamped, but the work doesn’t stop. The bodies move, sit down and stand up again, bustle or wait, in the office towers, the shopping centres, the retail shops, in the cafés and the restaurants. Business as usual: the wheel must be kept turning, the great thresher fed. Impersonal as the machine may be, it falls to each one personally to protect themselves, to mask themselves to glove themselves. The tops of the faces stay naked. On the sidewalks, in the cars, behind the skytrain turnstile, when the guard aims his thermometer-pistol at the foreheads, the eyes often betray the worry.
Under Onnut station, at the level of the street at the level of the grains, they point the same weapon between my eyes. 35 point 5, they tell me, and they let me in. Sort of terrace under the rails and the condominium towers, under the night sky polluted with light; clearing of tables surrounded by food and beer stalls.
Friend Jo is about to leave – he has his plane ticket, he has his bag, and the anxiety of the pandemic that glues his nose to the phone. My flight is tomorrow morning. We have to hurry home. Soon the sky will be without planes.
At the next table are two Englishwomen. In an instant they join us. Together we put away a few bottles of Chang. In the West the world has stopped, the streets are deserted, people are hiding, the rules are tightening. On our return we will have to quarantine. So we live this evening as if it were the last, as if tomorrow every pleasure were to be confiscated from us.
I walk Jo to his suitcases, his departure, then I meet Holly and Lauren (the Englishwomen) at another bar that bears the name of an outlaw: the Ned Kelly. They arrive with two Ukrainians they’ve just met in the street: a beautiful blonde and a snub-nosed man. All together we drink, we make toasts, we laugh, we spray spittle as if the virus didn’t exist. It isn’t serious. In the West we would be judged severely, rightly no doubt. It is good sometimes to be in the wrong. It is good to dance on the disaster in a bar in Bangkok.
Holly asks me my astrological sign.
– Not too fast. We’re not there yet, I tell her.
– Yes, we are.
We have only one night left. Everything must be lived condensed. We play with the Purell. We pour some on the table, into the beer, we pour some on our tongues. Someone shouts:
– It’s my best pandemic ever!
As if it were a thing to say.
Lauren wants to go to sleep and Holly follows her. Meanwhile a tall Thai woman has arrived, Aor, friend of the Ukrainians. Our eyes tease each other, our feet find each other under the table. I pick a quarrel with her. She wriggles on her chair, crosses-uncrosses her legs.
We go dancing at the bar next door. The waves of heat run through us. We hop, we wriggle. The mouths tremble, Aor and the Ukrainian woman kiss. The husks open, the grains throb. Desire bursts like popcorn. Sweat is a salted butter, a lubricant between our bodies. The flesh swells like mushrooms, splays like butterflies. In the sky rise complicated forms, yellow vestiges of explosion. The night is a puffed drive.
At dawn everything will close up again, everything will come apart. Thresher-city will resume its train.