“Do you have reason to be skeptical?” Prateep asked.
Unable to muster an immediate response, Tohn smiled to hide his anxiety and looked down, as if the correct answer had dropped on the unfinished floor. “You know, it took longer to lay the foundation and posts to avoid damage to the old house. And now we’re routing materials in a way that’s less than optimal. The extra minutes each day with each truck and worker add up.”
“I thought we discussed this,” Prateep said.
Tohn said nothing. They were standing near enough to the side of the building that he could see the majority of the site. The roof of the old house was missing shingles at one corner, where earthy debris had let saplings take root. He was the one who’d supervised the cutting of the trees that had been here. Three men holding hands couldn’t wrap their arms around some of them. They were the largest, possibly the oldest, trees he’d seen in Krungthep. Under their enormous twisted roots, he imagined a society of snakes coiled coolly in earthy burrows.
At the east side of the house, a circular outline of the old garden could still be seen. After digging out its paved stone slabs, workers piled them not far from the ramp. From this high, they looked like small hills of giants’ teeth.
Prateep sighed. “I know it’s an odd requirement, and I’ve talked to the boss about the additional complications, but the plans won’t change, especially with the partners now thinking that they’ll be able to use the Sino-Colonial architecture of the house to attract foreign tenants.”
The project had had its plague of delays. There were hearings with academics and preservationists, only a handful, but the bad publicity forced them to keep intact much of the original house as part of the lobby, as a concession. Then financing from a Japanese bank fell through, and for many years the site sat soot dusted, fenced by corrugated tin sheets colonized by parliamentary campaign and energy drink posters. It then took another five years for construction to make any real progress.
“You have to believe me, Tohn. I’ve tried my best with the project timeline. Do you think me an unreasonable man?”
Tohn shook his head. He thought of his son, a second-year at a local primary school, and the pride his son showed pointing up to the metal dragons perched at the side of rising towers and saying those were his father’s buildings.
“Of course not, Khun Prateep. You know best.”
* * *
☐ ☐ ☐
Don’t worry. Bamboo’s just as strong as steel. That’s what they said to a new kid stepping onto scaffolding for the first time. This high up, the chances of a rod snapping was the least of anyone’s worries. Sudden wind was more fearsome. So were slick spots purple sheened with machine grease or, worse, someone’s burlap sack heavy with screws, knocked over from many stories up. Posters the managers put up before a site visit by foreign investors showed figures wearing steel-capped boots and harnesses and bright orange hardhats and warned of drinking on the job. It was a wonder how anyone could survive for long in those restrictive conditions, without their bare toes divining their next step or a quick swig to soothe a yearning heart. Greater dangers waited for them in some stray thought of parents back in the village, or of the ivory-skinned girl on the cosmetics billboard across from the site, or of rage smoldering in the gut after harsh words had flown across a ring of dice rollers. All they really needed was a rag they could wrap around their face, so the brute light twenty stories up wouldn’t scorch off their skin and cement powder wouldn’t turn their lungs to stone.
“Faster! A constipated ox would have already made it up here,” Lek yelled to Gai.
With one hand the boy found his grip; with the other he held on to a bucket. It was the boy’s second week on the high floors. With the new deadlines, the workers did double shifts, and anyone older than ten was brought up from the shacks to climb over steel rods and smooth them with wire brushes, or, like the boy here, to deliver cement sloshing inside plastic buckets.
“I’m going fast,” Gai said. “How the hell can anyone can go any faster?”
“All you little ingrates just want to go back down and eat and sleep, none of you worth the rice you’re fed. At least you didn’t spill this one.”
Lek took the bucket from the boy and poured the gray slush over laid rods.
“When I was your age, I could haul up two buckets at a time. What’s with you? You don’t want your day off?”
They had worked for six weeks without a break, with the promise of one to be given if enough floors had risen. Songkran was a few months away, and they couldn’t bear the thought of having to stay behind in Krungthep that holiday week. The managers knew that about them when the extra shifts were announced. What prouder accomplishment could there be than to still be on the payroll and also able to return to one’s home province as the new year’s bearer of a ring for one’s mother or a Walkman for siblings?
Gai grabbed the emptied bucket and clambered down the nailed lattice of bamboo. He lowered his bare feet rung by rung, feeling for the ridges on the next rod, until he felt a steel beam firm underfoot. He balanced himself and stepped heel over toe until he could hop on to the hardened concrete on the floor below.
“Ah Lek giving you shit again?” asked Waen, who lived in the same row of shacks as him and Loong Juk. Gluey and Baby Boy didn’t hold back their laughter.
“No, Ah Lek’s just pouring the slab,” Gai said.
“Don’t lie to me. Do you think I’m blind and can’t see that look on your face?”
The others were only a few years older than Gai but acted as if they were a decade apart. Gai trailed behind them and the other young workers when they went at night to the new multistoried department store, to feel the air-conditioning whisper on their skin and to stand in front of a color TV and watch things blow up in dubbed farang movies.
“You tired? Sleepy? You wish you had some of the good stuff, don’t you?”
“Gluey, he’s too young for that.”
“Your sister’s too young, and nothing’s stopping her from sucking my cock.”
“Shut the hell up! I’ll swallow some good stuff and fuck seven generations of your ancestors.”
Gai knew what the good stuff was supposed to do for the workers. An older kid had said it made him feel like Ultraman, fifty feet tall and able to shoot gamma rays from his arms. Eyes pried awake and muscles surged with elephantine power. All day they could work, stopping only to pee and shit. The designated dispenser, Loong Bood, was allowed to roam freely, floor to floor, hawking cigarettes, hard candies, lottery tickets from a basket. When prompted, he would lift a tin of cough drops to retrieve a small plastic bag with colored pills, often blue, sometimes orange or white. Knowing Loong Juk would come after him with a cleaver, Loong Bood never sold any to Gai.
“Get me some,” Gai said.
Waen shook his head. Gluey and Baby Boy howled laughing.
“Little Gai wants to be a big man. Does the big man have the money?”
“I’ll pay you later, I promise.”
“You show up with some cash, then we can talk. And isn’t that Ah Lek yelling for you?”
Gai heard it, as well: his name shouted from above. He grabbed a filled bucket and ran back to the scaffolds. As he climbed one-handed up the bamboo rods, managing to keep the bucket from slipping out of his other hand, he wondered how soundly Loong Juk would sleep that night.
* * *
☐ ☐ ☐
All the sparrows. Hundreds of their tiny bodies made undulating ribbons in the sky above the cluttered spread of roofs and TV antennas, flecking the vacancy between newly risen buildings with the brown of their feathers and the gray of their shadows. The weary among them alighted at the edge of balconies and, before they swooped again toward flight, took care to leave mementos of their visit.
Finished, the latest building stood twenty-seven stories tall. People in the neighborhood called it the c
orncob, with its sticklike shape ringed by half-moon balconies that jutted out, floor after floor. It had been painted white, but with the traffic always languishing just below, the industrious fires of the city’s coal cookers, and the rains depositing what factories had breathed out, streaks of soot and grime ran soon where rainwater had poured off. Just over a year into its life, like the other buildings that had risen alongside it, this tower was well on its way to looking as if it had been there since the time this city was not a city but a mosquito-breeding marsh, when merchant galleon captains paid the flooded grassland no mind as they floated upriver to reach Ayutthaya, hundreds of years before Burmese soldiers laid torches to it.
What survived even in memory of that glorious former capital, beyond the facts and dates schoolchildren were made to memorize from the history books? Most modern citizens of Krungthep had difficulty recalling events more than months past.
And yet this building was already rumored to be cursed. The empty old colonial-style mansion at the base was said by locals to have been owned by a wealthy family whose members mysteriously disappeared, one by one, until none were left. There had been numerous construction mishaps, with one worker losing an arm and others their minds. Then a young worker had fallen to his death, and TV vans and reporters had shown up in front of the construction site for a week to cover the incident. All of decent Krungthep was appalled. “Safety standards have to come first,” a member of parliament said to cameras. “What happened to this boy mustn’t occur again.”
By the next week, few in Krungthep thought of the boy. The city’s eyes had shifted to fresher news of deaths and mayhem that reminded them again of the mysteries of karma.
Construction resumed after adequate sums changed hands between the right parties. The building rose to completion and so did the enormous billboard outside, enticing passing motorists with a list of features and amenities and, in disproportionally large font, the office number to call to rent or buy.
At one of the balconies of this building, a woman slid open a screen door and stepped out. She puffed mist from a squeeze bottle at trickles hardened by weeks of relentless sunlight and began to scrub with a bristle brush. Potential renters were due to look at the unit in the afternoon.
* * *
☐ ☐ ☐
“All clean, Nee?” Duang asked the office girl returning from the unit.
“Gleaming.”
Duang nodded her approval. A year ago, she had had her hesitations about hiring a graduate from a reputable university for the job. She didn’t want anyone who might think herself above the necessary labors when the housekeeping crew was overwhelmed or the maintenance staff had all gone out on another drunken lunch, or anyone who’d leave as soon as she could find another job. What made this girl stand out from the hospitality industry applicants was her degree in nursing, a profession that Duang knew to require the ability to endure many lifetimes of thanklessness.
“Your CV here says that you worked for a while as a nurse. Are you sure you shouldn’t be applying for a job at a hospital?” she’d asked.
“I only finished the degree because I didn’t want to disappoint my mother,” said Nee. “Then she became sick, and I ran her sundries business at our shophouse so I could take care of her. It took some years after she died for me to realize I’m not meant to take her place. I need to do something else.”
Duang’s own mother had been a nurse. She’d come home exhausted every night and fall asleep on the sleeping mat in her work clothes. When, as a girl, Duang slid over to sleep beside her, she could smell her mother’s work—the lingering chemical scent of sterilizers and medications, the trace stenches from air around the old and ailing.
“Let me tell you. I’ve met with ten other people who can all do the job. I could pick someone younger or with experience in this field. Why do you think I should choose you?” Duang had persisted. She’d expected the girl to talk about having bountiful energy and highly developed problem-solving skills. Instead, Nee went to the window and pointed to the pool.
“I can teach swimming,” she said. “Wouldn’t swim classes be an attractive feature for prospective tenants with families?”
Duang hadn’t considered such an idea. That bright blue rectangle of water was only meant to look clean and hypothetically enticing for potential buyers and rental tenants.
Maybe it was the memory of her mother that had compelled Duang to hire Nee over the others, or maybe it was the sense of something kindred in the girl’s desperation, despite business-minded logic telling her to go with someone else. She’d had no reason to regret her choice. Devotion and diligence seemed like words deployed as a matter of course in talking about employees, but with Nee, they were real. She’d watched Nee pick up phones on the first ring and then, call after call, hurry to the service elevator to take care of whatever issue had been communicated. Windows had turned to waterfalls during heavy rain. Red ants had taken over a potted shrub on the courtyard walkway. Garrulous bats were mating over someone’s door, wire-chewing rodents discovered after they’d brought on their own immolation. Showers streamed the red of clay roads, stray dogs slipped into the lobby, and a farang tenant, wearing only a sheet of the morning’s paper around his waist, once knocked on the glass door of their office to say he was locked out.
“Anything new with 12A?” she asked Nee, who was putting away the cleaning supplies.
“Syphilis. A housekeeper saw the medication bottles in a trash bag.”
“Ha! I knew it. Suits that gigolo. And what about 20E—Mrs. O?”
“Still depressed about her cat. Still wearing black.”
“And what’s going on with 25C’s kitchen faucets?”
“No water, still. Just this noise. Like this.”
Her teeth clenched, the girl made a hissing sound.
“Take care of that today. You know who owns that unit.”
“I’ll find a way to tell Kuhn Pehn. The plumbers told me they would fix it last Friday.”
“They’re the worst. I’d fire them if they weren’t cousins of the new director at the mother company. Remember my name for him? Khun Camel Face?”
They let out the laugh of sisters and school friends. Duang would never admit it, but she wanted the girl to like her. Sometimes she felt guilty for having Nee do more work than listed in the original job posting. After all, a decade ago, she had been an office girl herself.
Nee had no idea of her luck, not having a man for a boss. Duang couldn’t shake off the memory of one old boss, and how he’d bend down to ask how her day had been, his shoulder pressed against hers, his breath stinking of tobacco and the grilled pork fermenting between his teeth. There were mornings when she wept on the bus to work and had to steel herself on the way, stopping to face a wall and flipping open her pocket mirror to reconstruct the face that had washed off.
“Khun Duang, your two o’clock’s at the reception desk,” said Nee, hanging up the office phone they shared.
Duang undid the clasp on her purse and took out the mirror, its red plastic shell faded a shade and scratched to dullness by loose coins. A face made of memories returned her gaze. She no longer had the firm, lush skin of the office girl that she had been, with no real need for foundation, as tan as she was. What Duang now had was her title as building manager, and a sickly teenage boy who’d inherited her husband’s most self-defeating genes, and a secondhand Toyota nicked by motor scooter handlebars. On weekends, she crossed the river to Nonthaburi to visit her mother-in-law, and on holy days, she made alms at the temple, so that her next life would be fuller and richer, with maybe a husband possessing soap-opera-star looks and at least an engineer’s dependable mind. If she hit her leasing goals this week, she promised to buy a week’s lunch for the monks, to make up for any wrongs committed.
“Nee, how do I look?”
“As gorgeous as always.”
* * *
☐ ☐
☐
Mohd and Mehta stood in the building’s lobby and stared at the ceiling. Sometime long ago, workers had pressed tin tiles on die shipped from Italy, and up there the patterned flower petals and curled vines remained, an overhead gesture toward an orderly Renaissance garden, warped at the edges by the tropical heat.
“So gorgeous, isn’t it? This was all part of a trading family’s mansion built in the 1910s,” said the woman from the building management office. “I don’t know if you believe in feng shui and all that, but this land, let me tell you, has brought much luck to everyone who has lived on it. Only good, prosperous people have the karmic merits to live here.”
“Khun Duang, there’s a chance I might qualify, but I’m not sure about my wife.”
Mehta nudged Mohd to show that he was joking, and she responded the way she always did, with a shove on his elbow, enough to make him stumble a step.
They had spent a honeymoon week in Florence, where they tried to appreciate the authentic pasta dishes, but by the third day they succumbed to adding a few drops of fish sauce and sprinkling crushed Thai peppers they’d been warned to bring along. The ceiling reminded Mohd of the Florentine architecture that she so loved—the geometric domes and intricate facades of a stony city lit by its own pale glow. It felt strange that she would have any reservation about walking through this lobby and its heavenly ceiling and rarefied wood walls, but then she realized that what unnerved her most was the thought of living in a place who knew how many stories up, like seabirds nesting on the face of a cliff.
“Which floor is the unit on again?” she asked.
“This one’s on”—the woman checked the printout—“floor twenty-five. Now that’s a nice auspicious number, let me tell you. Follow me.”
Bangkok Wakes to Rain Page 10