Mike is high. He looks around the room and is struck, in the self-conscious and lengthy realizations of his synapses, by how ordinary everything is. Mike is beginning to suspect that he is himself as much a cliché as his new reporter friends. But he feels good. He thinks of the girl on the motorcycle with the baby and what she would say if she could open his head with a crow-bar and read his thoughts, which rolled around like so many ball bearings in there. Maybe she would ask him to marry her. Maybe she would rob him. Both appeal to Mike.

“Do you know an Australian named Hardy?” Mike asks Burton. It’s like he can’t help himself.

“Total stoner lech,” says Burton, beginning yet another monologue. “His father was a lawyer but he grew up poor in Sydney because his father was obsessed with the Aboriginal women, wanted to fuck every single one he saw, and so his practice was dedicated to Aboriginal land preservation and he never made any money. Father and son started smoking hash together when he was twelve, which could have been good or bad depending on how you look at lawyers, because young Hardy was himself considering the law until his father was murdered and ritualistically mutilated in the outback by a cuckolded Abo. Poor Hardy, in rage and grief, left his beloved Australia and, not surprisingly, was broke upon arrival in Bangkok. But Bangkok being what it was then, he was able on that first afternoon to get fed, laid, and housed. Good place, he thought, so he stuck around, moved a little dope, just enough to get by. Life was easy and hazy, and mostly he fucked backpackers, boys and girls, because, as he saw it, somebody had to. Now it’s twenty years later and he keeps a crash pad to fuck the backpackers. Been in love with Bridget for years.”

“How do they know each other?”

“Everybody knows everybody here and I think I fancy a soak,” Burton says. “Have you thought about the hot tub? It’s quite lovely. And there’s the quite lovely Bridget sitting in it.”

Mike follows Burton’s gaze to the terrace, where Bridget and Paul are waving to them from the tub.

Mike strips out of his ripped pants to his shorts at the edge of the hot tub. The tub is deceptively large and deep, with submerged benches.

“Will you look at that, Paul?” says Bridget. “Look at Mike.”

Paul looks at Mike and Mike looks down at his own chest, his hand absently scratching.

“He’s in such form!” says Bridget. “Look at his stomach.”

Mike goes red in the face as he lowers himself into the water. So ordinary, it’s like he’s at home. He remembers blushing in other hot tubs. It’s the drugs, Mike suddenly thinks. What kind of asshole feels fucked with because he’s in good shape?