A description of the Thermae Coffee Shop from the book "A Killing Smile" by Christopher G. Moore

Zeno, Headquarters, HQ, the star Wars Bar on Sukhumvit. You can't miss it. Fake Greek columns in front of a sign that reads Turkish Bath, Barber, Massage, Espresso Coffee Shop. Fritters fried in big pots of palm oil outside the entrance. Beggars, bar girls, diplomats, spies, writers, bums, ex-Nazis, merchants, gangsters, tourists drifting in and out, eating at makeshift sidewalk cafes beside food carts and stalls. Cuttlefish and lottery vendors working the crowds. Like you, they're all looking for shamans and ghosts.

You get a flash that you've seen this room somewhere else. After a couple of years, one night, an ordinary night, you've ordered the usual, ant it hits you, that memory of the very first room like HQ that you entered. You were a kid, and the room was downstairs in your house. HQ was an elaborate replica of that basement; the handyman job performed by your father and a vouple of neighbors back in the '50s. Tongue-and-groove panelling. Your dad got so carried away that he even panelled the support columns with the same shit as he nailed to the walls. He got cute and hid the fluoreshent lights between a gap in the acoustic tiles and the panelling.

Now, close your eyes and throw in a wet bar, stools, tables and chairs, and curved booths with black plastic-covered benches and a television set on a shelf at the far end, a hundred girls, and you're back in time but no matter how hard you try, you can never truly back to the starting blocks. But what if there was a way back? Where everyone's thirteen again, but this time they are flush with money for tits and ass. You don't care what you saw when you looked in the mirror, or the '68 photo album the morning before; and you think about the eggs inside that girl's body last night. One night, someday in the next century, another Noi will walk past the jukebox at the Zeno, and now even though its all compact disks and lasers, you'll hear the golden oldies like 'What a Wonderful Life' playing over the loudspeakers, and you'll eye her. And you go into that trance of yours. Haven't I seen here somewhere before? Your mind is like a dripping faucet, each thought breaking the skin of the surface with a thiny splash.

Before you can say Jack Spratt, there is an hysterical shouting from the toilets, and a cop tell you that another girl took a razor blade to her wrists. All that comes out of her mouth are the words, "Chai, ka. Chai, ka. - Yes, sir. Yes, sir." Time after time, night after night, an echo of sound from this life into the next.