Read Online Bangkok Rules by Harlan Wolff - Free Book Online Page B

of twenty-eight units. The entrance to the complex was a high double wooden gate with a security box and sleepy guard. The security guard was another person on Carl’s payroll. Should any unpleasant characters, with or without uniforms, become interested in him the chances were they would befriend and question the security guard. Carl had made sure that he would be told immediately.
     
    On entering the quadrant there was a ground floor visitor’s car park area. Each unit also had space for one car in front of their ground-floor kitchen door. The second floor of the complex had a swimming pool surrounded by gardens accessible from all of the units through their sitting rooms. It was designed to be a community area but most residents kept themselves to themselves so it was mostly unused. The swimming pool was where Carl often went to think.
     
    He changed into swimming shorts and took his new book to the pool area. The sun felt good and he was pondering taking a swim. The light was too bright for reading and hurt his eyes. He was feeling relaxed and at peace with the world. Carl had his eyes closed and his face pointed towards the sky. There was a small cough-like sound beside him that made him open his eyes and look around. Not a good thing to do as his face was pointing at the sun. Carl squinted at the tall man standing over him.
     
    “Hello Carl.”
     
    It was Carl’s favourite neighbour. George Wilde had a habit of sneaking up on him. He had served in a US special forces regiment and had spent his youth in the jungles of Vietnam sneaking up on the Viet Cong and now out of habit, he sneaked up on everybody. He was a big man with incredibly large hands and piercing eyes. He was around sixty but remained as fit as he must have been back in his military days. Carl liked him. He had liked his wife too, but she had died in a motorcycle accident the previous month. It had left George undermined.
     
    “How are you?” Carl asked him.
     
    “For someone living with the bonfire of their dreams, not too bad I suppose,” he said with his soldier’s face.
     
    They sat in silence for a minute. Then he looked at Carl again and Carl saw how haunted his face was when he spoke.
     
    “The trouble with life is we spend all of our time waiting for a wonderful moment. The problem is, when that moment arrives we don’t embrace it. Instead, we take it for granted and get distracted. Then we promise ourselves that we will get it right the next time and appreciate how valuable it is. That is the human condition, what keeps us going. The belief that there’ll always be another chance and this time we won’t fuck it up and forget that all joy is fleeting. What makes us carry on regardless of the fact that all life ends in tragedy is the undying belief in tomorrow and the possibility that everything will be all right and the hope that we will know what to do the next time. That’s why religion sells. Buy it and everything will work out right in the end. That’s their leverage. The hook is that after death everything will somehow get resolved. What nonsense! I am reading a book about archery, Zen and archery actually. It is about staying in the moment, which is an extremely difficult discipline. You should read it.”
     
    “I would like that,” Carl told him, meaning it.
     
    He liked George and for a while they had laughed all the time. After the ten-wheel-truck had run over his wife’s Vespa the laughter had gone and been replaced by dark existentialism. George had lost people during the war but that was different, it had been expected. When he discovered his wife had been squashed by a heavily laden ten-wheel-truck outside an unlicensed construction site not a stone’s throw from where he was opening a bottle of wine for their dinner, he went to pieces. The driver had fled the scene leaving empty whiskey bottles on the passenger seat and little proof of his identity. George hadn’t asked Carl to look for the driver. Revenge