Part One:
Part Two:
Part Three:
Part Four:
I returned to the hotel to catch up on a few hours of sleep, plus I needed a shower to get the feeling of grime off my skin. The sensory excess and moral void of Khaosan road had quickly become nauseating. All those dudebros and lecherous old stoners in their pretty bodies, side by side with the genuinely oppressed strays, and unable to tell them apart. My SD card was full of images of tourists I’d mistaken for strays, right up until they opened their mouths and some Americanism came out.
It was the clones I was here to see, to document the social injustice, to give a voice to the used and discarded underclass. Not to get pictures of some backpacker snorting cocaine off his best bro’s catgirl ass. Those images weren't likely to get me on the cover of National Geographic, if only because the tourists were already prolifically self-published when it came to their antics.
A ruckus below the hotel window woke me after just a few hours, leaving me more exhausted than when I went to sleep. Bleary-eyed, I wandered out into the humid heat of the balcony, peeking over to see police hustling down the street. The smell of smoke hung over the city.
Camera in hand, I ventured out and followed my nose down to the river. The corrugated shanty town was a blackened heap. Crowds of locals were hurling stones and chasing down fleeing strays. A female scrambled into an alley, crouching like a cornered animal as I approached, slowly lifting my camera.
"I'm not going to hurt you. I just want to take your-"
The next thing I knew I was sprawled on the wet concrete with her teeth sunk deep into my forearm. She ripped a good chunk out before fleeing, and I spent the next three hours in a Bangkok hospital, getting the missing mouthful disinfected and stitched, along with a rabies shot.
The nurse stitching me helped explain the riot. The clones were unpopular among locals. A curious alliance had sprung up between hard-line Buddhists, who considered the clones a perversion of samsara, and sex workers, who disliked being undercut. Monks and prostitutes fighting side to drive the clones out. I was gutted at having missed that photo opportunity.
"The animals will hide for a week and be back," the nurse said, snipping off the last thread. "I hope she swallowed."
"I beg your pardon?"
She pointed to the bite. "If she got a piece of you, it could be floating in a vat by now. Hopefully she ate it."
I laughed. "Who'd want to make more of me? There's plenty of prettier people to clone."
"Yes. But there are a lot of weird people in this city," she replied in typical blunt thai fashion. "Who knows what they might want to do with your body. You should be careful who has your cells. There might be people out there eating tourist meat burgers now."
It was hard to feel too anxious about it, or anything else, with the lovely pain killers she'd given me. She gave me a plastic carton of them to take back to the hotel, immediately becoming my favourite person since arriving. I staggered back to my hotel, fell into bed, and finally sank into a deep, undisturbed sleep.