Chapter 24 - Dance in Thailand 1983

Ali awakes to find himself a seven hundred year-old man with each of his joints and tendons soldered stiff as a board. Blood crawls through his arteries and then hitchhikes back home to the heart by whichever veins can be bothered to take it. Dust has gathered inches thick on his throat, causing him to choke as he tries to swallow saliva. The resulting coughing fit raises some serious doubts as to the integrity of his ramshackle abdomen.

He creaks his back up to almost a right angle with his legs that surely once belonged to him. His neurons struggle to recall the secret words of command that no muscle can disobey. Finally he crawls in the direction of the steps leading to the rooftop and, having reached his hose pipe, he sits under the all-forgiving gush of water to sweep away all the poisons of inertia.

He drips on the concrete and risks a glance at the sky. The sun is a little less severe now and Ali takes the stage with 1000 mikes of acid for a script. This is about eight times the minimum dose but Ali is a hardhead and needs at least twice the amount others require to get off. Or it may just be that it's harder to get high when you're already three inches off the ground.

The afternoons generally see Ali skidding across this rooftop with little conscious attention paid to the low barriers on the sides that stand between him and an ugly descent in each direction. The dance is led by his mental focus that skips its centre of command from place to place around the body. His hands sculpt half-circles in the air and are then dragged backwards by shuffling heels with plans of their own; followed by a hop to the side by order of hips that have already begun the motion.

But mostly his attention is in his hands as he enacts a dance of discovery, wading through unseen psychic jungles in a convoluted and erratic path bound only by gravity. Beginning with slow, calm poses, Ali puts his mind to sleep as best he can, or at least just to leave it as a sideline observer, as he reels into violent flames of movement that are too rapid to be of his own determination. Each motion suggests the next and is performed before his awareness can catch up. His feet hop from tile to tile of a scattered yellow brick road and his entire body becomes merely a vessel for Creation to celebrate itself upon a lonely Bangkok rooftop.

He can only become bore or tired when he allows his own flawed personality to resume control of the reins and he does all he can to sabotage this. When he reaches the peaks of a blissed high he pursues the high for as long as his body can endure, forsaking food and sleep to hold onto the magic for three or four days at a time. Paradise is something he must wrestle into his possession each time anew. The Dance is the vessel that hoists him up to the orchards of Heaven to scrump his revelatory fruit.

Dancing is a mode that he will never exhaust and is a realm which will be on stand-by for all his life, a playground in which he can unwrap the loose ends of his mind. As his soul is confined in a body of flesh, Ali intuits that the spiritual must be intertwined with the physical. He cannot get enough and has almost no time left for anything or anyone outside of his regime.

Even when he does find himself gravitation towards society, he finds little to match the constant entertainment of his self-invented games. Of a morning he might sit at a café table, making a coke last three hours. He looks around and drums his fingers. There are conversations to be had, girls to be approached and… straws in the glass. Within a minute he has become a manic hologram spinning thin tubes of plastic between his fingers and about the table cloth. The waiters glance at him quizzically and the customers cannot concentrate on their coffees.

"Just what the fuck are you doing with those straws, man?"

The nights see his shadow wrestling in games of his own in the middle of Thai clubs where he never so much a buys a drink. Girls perform erotica on pedestals and the bar and dance floor are awash with altogether seedier motives and energies. But Ali clowns his way through it all, enjoying the untasted potential of female flesh and mind games in the dark hours, claiming these venues as his playgrounds. Of course, he's not always entirely welcome and more than once, he's chased out of nightclubs by up to twenty angry men wielding bamboo canes. It doesn't deter him from returning, though.

After the clubs shut he has an apartment to return to where, hanging from the ceilings are all manner of bobbing bits and pieces that he's picked up off the street over the years, hanging on pieces of elastic and string. He creates multi-direction highways of swinging corks and cans, weaving between them like a crazed jaywalker.

Release and respite from all the drudge of the land are still found in the ever-waiting ocean. He has found no other closer dialogue with life than in the depths of blue with rolling horizons to each side. The will to live is claimed stroke by stroke, mirroring the involuntary intake of each breath. Ali loves to roll round in this huge element, only a few drops of which can be held in the hands. There is no other place where he can feel so exposed, so at the mercy of the awe through which he propels himself. Here he must confront his every fear of the dark, every dread of the sea monsters with his name written upon their teeth. Yet so equinanimous has he become with this dimension that there is no place where he feels more secure and supported.

He returns to land only when the sun climbs too high and starts to burn his head. On the return journey to the land the sun is in his eyes and waves slap him in the face. He would like to close his eyes but is hesitant to do so. Every time he does he loses any orientation of where he is or what he's doing, cast adrift into a confusing hyperspace with no constellations by which to be guided. These days he even falls asleep with his eyes half open.

Or sometimes when he closes his eyes he finds a small Shiva-like figure dancing around his third eye, tirelessly cavorting in rapid acrobatics with Ali's sixth chakra as a platform. These phenomena come and go at their own bidding and Ali wonders how they got his address in the first place. It's still all just the one reality of the one God, though and with Allah as the helmsman of his ship, how can Ali be afraid?

It's fortunate for Ali that he's in Asia because, in the West, all this really would be grounds for the all-expenses-paid entrance to the nearest asylum. In Thailand no one could care less, provided he pays his bills. Moreover he sees no problem with being this high and would ignore any rope a rescuing party might care to throw him.

In fact, whilst he's still far out there, he's even of use to others. The syndicate of ex-Vietnam soldiers with who he's associated, see fit to use him as the mule for dope runs of increased risk and minimal planning. In real terms, Ali's cut is nothing more than a joke but, as far as he is concerned, provided he makes enough to continue with his program, it's enough.

Other things are suffering for all this, though. Already he's been dragged to hospital for life-saving surgery upon his cancerous scalp. The only concession he makes to the heat of the sun that attacks his wounded crown without mercy is now to wear a bathing cap when he plans to be out at sea for a long time. His head is an embarrassing testament to his self-regard as it looks like he's been loaning out his scalp as a nuclear test-site. He solves the problem in a stroke. He gets rid of his mirror.

A more pressing concern is the matter of his falling teeth and periodic agony of the gums. He doubts if there could be any other kind of pain quite so immediate and he's obliged to take more drugs as anaesthetic. He spaces out with the pain, learning the intricacies of torture but refuses to let it lead him by the nose. Even if he does conclude that he must go for treatment, by the time the attack has passed, then the urgency of a dental appointment has also faded.

One night, as he howls like a werewolf with cavities in its fangs he receives a rap on the door. He opens up to see his neighbour, a small, round Thai woman with a baby in her arms:

"Please Mister Ahlee, not to scream so loud! You give my children bad dream!"

Sometimes the problem becomes so intense that his gums well up like a hamster. These are the only occasions through all these years in which he's inhibited from going out dancing. Even the freakiest of men have their pride.