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The sun was very hot and bright as I walked back from the airport to the main tuk tuk ring road. It was a long way, particularly carrying my computer in my backpack. I cried and cried and cried.
My feet rubbed raw against the cheap new flip-flop shoes. I didn’t care. I was accosted by motorcycle drivers and then insulted and cursed when I didn’t want to ride with them. I didn’t care. I cried so much water I could have passed out from the dehydration. I grew a monumental headache, so that I nearly didn’t see the tuk tuk when I finally reached the main road.
I didn’t care.
In the main fishing town I found an email place, inside an electrical repair shop.
I knew he couldn’t have written, he was on the plane. I needed to read what other men had written to me, so that I wouldn’t drown.
I found many letters from men on the alternative lifestyle website: they gave me brutal commands without knowing me, they just wanted a fuck for the night, they felt all women were whores and they needed me to do all sorts of things for them while they themselves weren’t going to do anything for me. They weren’t really quite sure what they wanted. I wasn’t good enough for them anyway.
I sat between the cut-off cable rolls and the conversion plugs and thought of my Nai without panic. Even if I never saw him again, my Nai had given me an experience that was in a different world from men like that. He had been himself. I had had a chance to become myself. More of myself than I ever dreamed of. I would probably never have a relationship again, considering what was usually on offer and expected, but I had been with him. For a whole three precious days. And five hours.
I stopped the internet connection but bought the conversion plug.
It would be nice to put on the fan AND the laptop at the same time when I returned to my hut on the other island.
I remember waiting for a long time on the pier, under a thatch and between sweets stands, never quite sure when the ferry went and if I would be called for the right one and in time, surrounded by blood red dragon boats, and just looking out on the sea.
It was completely calm.
The other island
I had always planned to go to the island, sit in a hut, and write.
And that was what I did.
The hut I ended up in was right on top of a hill, overlooking the South China Sea. It had a view of green, still water in the day and of the same water, black, at night, with a string of huge lights reflected on it. The lights were spooky. They looked as if a big city had settled on the sea at nightfall, or the faraway coastline of the Gulf of Thailand had suddenly closed the gap, but they belonged to the bottom draggers who had already fished the region almost empty. All that was left when you went down to the little beach, dodging the water bottles and broken stones, was empty sand and empty salty sea. The bottom draggers themselves looked like huge spider crabs with bright white eyes at the end of their many feet. They were on the verge of replacing biology. The only animal inhabitants left here were vicious amphibians who could swim and dig through the sand with equal determination and who would cling to human toes and sting.
The only other animal inhabitants were youthful tourists who had been hoping for an authentic experience and ended up staring at the emptiness, consuming various legal and not-so-legal substances and nursing their bitten feet.
Up on the hill there were only a few of us, and our huts were far away from each other. I had a stylish veranda with artistically cut logs that still showed the stumps of their erstwhile branches under elegant veneer where I could sit and write. Thousands of ants used that log railing as a highway to circle the hut in endless ceremony. At night, dog sized lizards heaved themselves onto the veranda to survey and hiss at the scenery. Huge cockroaches and hand sized tiger-pattern spiders raced each other round my mosquito net.
We had electricity for a few hours at night, unless the owner decided to play his special moonlight collection. In that case I had more time to use my laptop but I also had to listen to his music.
I worked on my project, as I had intended, and with great dedication, considering that each night I had to choose between my laptop and the electric fan.
Every few days I climbed onto the owner’s four wheel drive truck and went on the hour-long journey on deep red tracks hacked into the virgin jungle and desperately trying to heal themselves with long green creepers, into the island’s only larger village. There the owner went off to look for visitors coming off the ferry, while other hut inhabitants went for a much needed dose of cheese in the Western café.
I walked down the dusty street and looked for a phone.
There were no internet terminals in the jungle huts, but the dusty boom town street had them.
The first time I came down with the jeep I almost didn’t dare to enter. My Nai hadn’t contacted me, not at all, since I had left on the train, but then there were many possibilities or reasons. One of them was of course that he didn’t want to contact me.
Still, I had proved to myself that I was strong. I had found him. I had realised that he was what I wanted, and more. I had given it my best, I had made it clear to him and to myself. But I had not raised my hopes, and consequently I had not had them dashed.
So I was telling myself when I went into Mr Hong’s world-wide connection shop and sat down at the ancient computer with the encrusted keyboard that did its best to crank itself up to the speeds required by global communication. The lights on its old curvy screen flickered dangerously.
I had many other people to look up of course. I decided to start with those others first, and end with them. Looking for a mail from my Nai would have to be sandwiched in between. Safety insulation.
So many mails never come.
In my journey on that round-the-world trip, the most common mail I got from a Dom was the first.
And still I looked out for my Nai’s mail from the corner of my eye.
What does it matter, the project, the island, the fear, the hope, the lizards on the veranda.
The only thing that counts is his skin touching mine. And knowing that he is, so finally, so simply, so improbably the one who understands me.
He was there.
His mail was already a few days old.
He had tried several times, he said, but there was no getting through on the phone number I had given him. But he had set up a special account, just for us, just for him and me, if I wanted to write to him. Ever. Or now. Or ever.
I ran out into the hot street, startling the dying dogs and Mr Hong who had never seen a tourist leave the shop with minutes of airtime still unpaid. The next time I went there he was cautious, as if he suspected me of not really being a tourist. Or carrying some other dark secret.
He had a good instinct.
I knew I didn’t have a lot of time left. I had to catch the truck before it went back through the wounded jungle.
Of course there were no phones. All I could find was a lady in a travel agency who let me use her mobile, at an exorbitant fee.
It rang. It was the wrong number, no it was the right number.
He answered.
I stood in the relentless sun, getting my skull burned.
My ear filled with sweat.
He answered.
What matter the details?
He answered and his voice was small. He didn’t recognise the number, he said. Of course not! It came from jungle island.
‘You are calling,’ he said. Twice. Then he said it again.
‘I tried to ring but they said you weren’t there.’
‘So I went away. Right now I’m – being blessed. At a temple.’
He made a little embarrassed laugh.
‘And now you are calling.’
Of course he could not come to the jungle hut. My lizard would never have allowed him in.
For weeks I stood there in the dusty sun, talking to him on the phone. Yes, there was one. The locals used it and they had made it look as if it was broken. They needed the income from the mobiles.
But I was such a frequent user, I was given access to the proper phone.
Then I went back on the truck, squeezed between water bottles.
‘I’m going to come and meet you,’ he said. ‘On the other island.’
He gave me a time.
I would have gone there straight away. If I ran I could have jumped on the ferry. I could see it from where I stood.
But it seemed he had a schedule that we both had to follow. It would mean a complicated journey and a tremulous wait on the other island where they had an airport.
Just like my life.
I told everyone.
Well, not about the BDSM, but about the meeting.
I told the owner, I told my fellow hut residents, I told the ants and the lizard. When the cockroaches raced across my bed before the swift claws and poison of the tiger spider I smiled benevolently.
I counted the hours, I counted the days.
I drank coconuts at the airport.
I never thought he would really come.
But I saw him, riding on the last cart, wearing an island hat.
Intimate studies
‘Now you want to come,’ he said.
‘No. Well, OK, yes.’
I snuggled into the crook of his arm.
‘I know,’ he said. ‘When you’ve been spanked you want to come.’
I had never thought of it like that. I had thought of spanking, of course! And had been spanked. And I love sex. But never like that, a connection that describes my sexuality.
‘Yes,’ I said, surprised, ‘that’s true.’
‘I’m beginning to know you.’ He was so pleased.
I was pleased too. No, I was thrilled. To be known, so intimately. To be so intimately studied. To lie here, skin to skin, touch to touch, under the pink duvet, with my Nai.
My Nai always travelled with his pink duvet.
And he always turned the aircon to zero.
This was one of the many ways in which he acted like an upper class Thai. Although he was American, he had lived here in Thailand longer than anywhere else. He had grown up in a garden in Bangkok with mango trees and spoke Thai with his nannies while his mother spoke English with princesses.
When I first got to know them I didn’t realise how important names are, to Doms. Every Dom has a very specific desire, and he wants to be called by a specific name.
To me, that was quite alien. My desire to submit didn’t focus on magical names (well, that’s not entirely true, it didn’t focus on magical names for Doms, but there was some word magic elsewhere). But when I understood, I started to find this quite endearing. Adult men with identities had the chance of re-naming themselves, and of naming their passion.
Of course there were quite a few whose imagination wasn’t so original, or who had been powerfully attracted by tradition. They did want me call them ‘master’ or ‘sir’ and at first I just did it to please them, it held no special meaning for me.
Later I met those who had other ideas. Some names emerged from amorous nicknames, some were cryptic and clearly carried a lifelong significance that would or would not be revealed but would resonate with my lover every time I said his name, some were unashamedly the names of impossible daydreams, and some the names encountered in the shadow lands.
And now my lover and Dom had a completely new, unheard-of name.
My Nai.
The two go together.
My Nai.
Like my Lord.
So new then, the word Nai, and what it means to him. Actually, I am still not sure. What it means to him. I know it is a Thai word that means something like ‘lord’ or ‘head of the family’ or ‘someone of high rank’. But to him, I think, it means a lot more.
It means being accepted and recognised in the culture he lives in and grew up in. That may never happen in Thailand, since he is after all a foreigner, tall and pale. The certainty of never belonging.
His servants call him Nai. Oh yes, he has servants. He has a driver, and a cook, and several maids. He has a wing of the house where he lives. And another wing for his estranged wife, when she visits. And a guest wing for parents and American relatives.
I had never been intimate with someone who had servants.
I had never been asked to call anyone Nai.
I didn’t. I called him my Nai.
He smiled.
‘I am the Nai,’ he said. ‘My household knows that. If I change, they have to change with me.’ And he held himself up more proudly and smiled again.
At moments like that he looked so fragile. I could have held him in my palm and broken his wings with a snap of my finger. At moments like that I opened my heart to him. Of course, moments like this would also turn against me. Right now, I was the personification of his freedom. Later on, in his mind, I would join the ones who didn’t let him be, didn’t let him be the Nai.
But at that time, all I could see was a boy who would be Nai. Just as I was a woman who lived her dreams.
I shivered with secret delight, I was me and not me, I was becoming the other person, the person who lived in my dreams. Because I didn’t know her, at least not very well, in many ways I didn’t know how she would react.
In the morning I took my shirts out and we saw a huge spider, more like a scorpion or a tarantula, running with hairy bended knees out of my armhole. All my life I would have been struck with dread and screamed and run, out of the door. But because I was the new person, I didn’t know. I didn’t know how she would react to a monstrous spider creeping out of her armhole. So I stood and looked and said, very calmly, ‘I am afraid of spiders.’
He stood very calm too and said, ‘Yes they are everywhere.’
