The sole tasks of the young were to eat and plead. When they felt the approach of their parents, they made sure to cry even louder. They opened their mouths and waited to feast. When they grew strong enough, they learned to knock over their brothers and sisters when their parents returned, and in turn they felt the slaps of their siblings’ wings.
There were many more younglings in the colony’s other nests. They all watched for their parents, and they also watched for the villains they knew they had to fear. Watching a snake winding up a branch, they cried louder than when they were hungry. They shook with horror when they looked up to see larger birds with humongous wings circling the colony. They quieted when their parents managed to chase away the villain or when some other youngling had been taken to appease the villain’s hunger.
Then they quickly returned to their tasks. High above the ground, they ate to grow larger than the others. They ate to become larger than they were, so their wings could take them through the air. The unlucky ones fell off the tree and lay crying until they no longer cried, or never made it back from those early attempts to explore farther from the colony. Along the high grass, they stalked crickets while being stalked themselves. They didn’t see the pair of eyes floating closer and closer. The unlucky paid dearly.
The rest grew strong enough to join their parents and uncles and aunties in the fields. They waded for their own food, stepping across the shallows silently. Their chests filled, enlarged. Their hearts ballooned with the reach of their white wings.
They now easily took flight on their own, gliding across the green, watery fields. They flew where they thought they could hunt, and an expedition could take them out of sight of the colony. They knew, though, to turn when they neared the hazy, greenless lands. There were no gray behemoths there, only strange, rocky outcrops and small mountains and fast-roving animals that smeared them bloody against hard strips of flat land. This was the territory of the wingless giants. The winged knew to keep away from them. The giants usually didn’t pay attention to the winged—only a small group came to walk the fields for days, their backs bent over—but sometimes the giants revealed stringy shapes that flung fast, piercing rocks skyward. The unlucky dropped out of the air and paid dearly.
The lucky stayed in these fields for as long as they needed. When the air thickened, the hard rain would come. Many in the colony lifted and flew north, where they wouldn’t be battered and awash in the trees. Some stuck around and took their chances. They watched the giants pluck from the fields. They followed the gray behemoths and ate their fill of smaller creatures.
* * *
☐ ☐ ☐
The winged who went north returned after the rains had lessened. They didn’t always come back but usually they did, finding comfort in the familiar squares of watery fields.
Those who had been younglings were now old enough to have younglings of their own. The males danced with their heads and necks and showed off their feathers. They clapped their beaks together amorously to those they were wooing. They pretended to shoo off any who seemed interested, but it was only a ruse, so that they could pretend to be stronger and more attractive than they actually were. Slowly, half convinced by the other’s bluff, they approached and gently picked at each other’s feathers with their beaks. When they finally reached agreement on their relationship status, they built their homes.
They looked for trees like the ones they’d cried from as younglings. If they found an old nest that suited them, they made repairs, and if they found none to their liking, they went into a frenzy of construction. Out across the fields they flew to steal back twigs and strips of hardy grass, and with those pieces they wove the beginnings of their domestic future.
They knew the routine. Once their young arrived, encased in delicate orbs, they stood guard and launched themselves furiously at any encroaching danger—the usual snakes and squirrels and larger birds, but now also new furry animals with pitiless eyes and pointed ears that roamed from the hardlands.
When sunlight felt like fire, they spread their wings to give shade. When it rained, they covered their precious orbs with their bodies, to keep their future warm.
After their young hatched, they took turns gliding out to find food and returning with beakfuls to satisfy the ceaseless, noisy hunger. As they flew, they noticed that the air under their wings felt different from the year before. The winds were heavier and hotter. Their breath vaguely smelled of stone.
They flew farther than their parents did to find enough to feed their young. They speared fewer frogs, and the schools of minnows weren’t as thick. They flew home, tired, with less in their beaks, and then rushed off to find more. There were fewer gray behemoths that they could follow—the ones that were around were old and barely moved.
They kept to their routine. The young—those who lived—grew larger, as they themselves had once grown, and attempted flight, as they had. Those who succeeded left the fields for the north with them when the air began to steam thick in their beaks.
Later, when the wingless giants again began to group in the fields, they weren’t as numerous as in previous times. Yet the hardlands seemed closer than it had been before.
* * *
☐ ☐ ☐
Time after time, the colony left and returned. They found new mates or resorted to old ones. They discovered nests they could repair, or they built a new home for their future young. They hunted. They ate. They mated. They watched over their precious young. They hunted. They fed gaping mouths. They saw the young grow; they saw the young die.
Some didn’t come back to where they’d grown. They stayed at the fields where they’d found refuge, or they chose to fly elsewhere.
Those who did return recognized the colony where it stood—the same tree with widespread branches, the same cluster of spiky grass that surrounded it. The tree, though, stood in a field smaller than it had been in the times before. Old nests, no longer repaired, had fallen from the trees. The leaves didn’t look as green.
They found only a few gray behemoths and couple of wingless giants wandering the fields. The frogs tasted different, and so did the minnows. The hardlands seemed closer than it had been before.
Then they fled again when the air thickened, and the fields began to steam.
Many didn’t return in the season that followed. Those who did joined with those who’d stayed. They went about their business, following the same commands as their ancestors. Where they could find trees, they built nests out of twigs and dried grass and mysterious shapes that let light through. They mated and fed their young. Their young grew. Their young died.
They hunted in new waterways that flowed alongside hot, flat strips of land carrying fast-moving, large-eyed creatures. Many no longer remembered the taste of grasshoppers, once so plentiful. They dissolved away their fondness for field mice. Instead, they hunted fatter, flight-ready versions of the water bugs they’d known. They lunged at micelike creatures with far longer tails—at least, those that had not yet grown as large as they were and could strike back with sharp teeth. If their hunt yielded little, they soared through the sky and landed at fresh rotten mounds and tore away at bouncy white rectangles the giants had left behind, to get at the nourishing bits that remained inside.
Fresh rocky outcroppings rose where there once had been wet fields. Sometimes, mountains spired higher than they could fly.
IMPASSE
Nee had never seen this part of Krungthep so empty. Only sparrows dared to make noise.
Even this far out from the happenings in the old city, few private cars braved the roads. Most of the shops along Petchburi had closed, their metal shutters pulled across or down. Outside the few that had stayed open, shopkeepers sat idle, watching for trouble and probably wondering whether their decision had been wise. The streets otherwise looked the way they did any day, save for the military jeeps guarding major intersections.
All week, the ra
dio stations had been broadcasting either a dead monotone or speeches that might as well not have been made, for the emptiness of their words. Don’t join the rallies. Trust the council in charge. Nee wasn’t surprised when she heard that the men with guns who had taken power last year were now backing away from their promises. For the good of the country, the general’s tenure as PM wouldn’t be temporary, they said. Hundreds of thousands responded by flooding the streets and holding rallies in Sanam Luang, despite warnings for law-abiding citizens to stay home. Nee was one of those who didn’t comply, although she wasn’t headed to the protests. She was going to get to the hospital, because she had promised that she would.
All she had taken with her was a small purse and an umbrella to shield herself from the sun. No buses were running, and any taxi would have asked for more than she could pay. A blister threatened to ripen on one heel; even her good walking sandals had betrayed her. If anyone thought it fine to shoot a middle-aged woman walking in discomfort, let them. It wasn’t her first time staring down rifles.
Still, she shuddered when some shophouse resident slammed window bars shut. A darting stray dog startled her. She felt her arms and legs move in spastic jerks, every muscle electrified. She breathed in quick, shallow gulps, as if the city was fast running out of air.
The hardest to calm was her mind. Her ears hadn’t registered gunfire, but she thought she could hear guns reporting from every direction. The howls and the hurried steps of hundreds sounded out from an invisible place that could only pierce through when the blaring and rumbling of the city fell this silent. She tried her best to ignore a faint voice calling out her name.
She was better steeled by the time she heard the thunderous roar of motorcycle engines behind her. A dozen or more scooters and sport bikes raced past, honking their horns and waving flags, followed by another dozen right behind them. One rider came to a stop at the curb and with an apologetic bow said, “Excuse me, auntie,” before leaping from his motorbike to spray paint STOP THE BARBARISM, YOU DESPICABLE WATER LIZARDS on a wall and then sprint back to rejoin his group.
Although she couldn’t see the man’s face through the helmet, she could tell from the energetic, unconsidered movements of his body that he was young, probably in upper secondary school or the first years of university. She thought she’d glimpsed in him a secreted gentleness that she had known and never found again, and as the faceless, nameless man sped away, she couldn’t help but ask the deities of the land and heavens to keep him safe.
Refreshed terrors from sixteen years ago threatened to flood her mind. Feeling weak at the knees, she staggered for another block before leaning on a telephone booth to regain her breath. Through her blouse, she clutched the monk’s amulet her late mother had given her, and although she couldn’t say she wholly believed it to endow her with a protective halo, she found comfort feeling its triangular shape. She wouldn’t turn back, Nee told herself. She’d fled one too many times.
A low tremor pushed aside the quieted air. The sidewalk trembled under her heels. A giant green beast lumbered at the intersection and then rolled forward. Through its skin of armor, she could see young men’s faces in the shadowy hold of its belly. The muzzle end of rifles swayed in front of them. She wanted to call out and tell those faces to please turn back, they need not stain their better karma, but she kept her mouth shut and kept walking. Nobody shot her.
An hour later, she arrived at the hospital. The pharmacist thankfully on duty at the counter read the physician’s notes inside Khun Pehn’s file and, mistaking Nee for a daughter, said, “Your mother’s canceled her last three appointments. The doctor needs to know whether the medication has been effective. Can you please remind her to come in?”
* * *
☐ ☐ ☐
“Hold on. Coming,” Pehn hollered to the door, as she turned toward the chairback to push herself up. She would have added that rude little buzzer to the list of things to address with management were it not that she sometimes did remove the hearing aid, and a knock wouldn’t register any louder than a sparrow’s sneeze.
Standing, she became desperately aware of the messiness of the place. The maids wouldn’t arrive for another few days. She thought she could feel tiny, pebbly specks under her bare feet. Especially around the TV and the stereo speakers, enough dust would soon settle for her to be able to carve a stark line with a pinkie. Not that she should worry about making an impression with Nee, but one ought to have standards, no matter the visitor. A woman your age will benefit from a smaller place with more manageable upkeep, they’d said. But with the house, if a room hadn’t been to her liking she could quickly find refuge in some other, while the offending room was put in order by her live-in maids. Now she had to wait for a crew of three migrant workers and their supervisor to arrive twice a week, as scheduled by the company Nee had helped her hire. Without many of her old things around the house, there was only more bare surface for more dust to colonize.
There was one thing to be thankful for: no great pain shot up her legs as she shuffled across the room. What would she have done without the glucosamine pills her bridge partners had told her about and that she had gotten her son to ship to her from the States? So what if her son had read somewhere that the medical evidence was suspect and initially refused to, in his words, waste her money and his time on pharmaceutical sorcery? It made no difference what the scientists said. How an old woman felt about her physical misery probably never figured into their graphs and charts. All she knew was that her knees felt like they’d been filled with river stones, and moving a few leg muscles, walking across the condo, felt as if she’d resumed some ancient forward trajectory long petrified.
She should be thankful that she still had her wits. For her sharpness at the card tables, someone had anointed her the Invincible Sword, after the popular Hong Kong martial arts series, and the name had stuck for more than a decade now. She made them sweat, for sure. Take out the handkerchief and dab your forehead, ladies. Oh, the look on Gaew or Ploy, when they realized they had to throw away their most valuable cards after a squeeze play she’d run. It was all in good fun, them emptying one another’s purses and donating winnings to charities, or so it was claimed. The last time she went was a month ago. Their numbers had noticeably thinned in recent years, and every reconvening brought her both joy and melancholy. They’d likely soon be seeing one another again at yet another temple, dressed in black and lined up to toss fragrant woods into the pyre. She’d added two new funeral books to her unfortunate collection just this year, and they were only partway through 1992.
“Almost there,” she said, nearer to the door. What a pity, what a shame, she muttered in her head, addressing the universe.
* * *
☐ ☐ ☐
For Nee, stepping into Khun Pehn’s condo always felt like walking into an architectural magazine spread, with the white-and-gray marble floor tiles blindingly bright under the light-colored furnishings, the pillowy chalk-hued sectional sofa and the glass-top coffee table made from ebony, and the pale cowhide spread out in a small mound, as if a gigantic animal had collapsed and sunk into the floor. There were few things on the shelves and fewer on the credenza. The one piece of furniture that somehow breached this sensibility was found in one corner of the living room: a somewhat faded and tattered green velvet chair that seemed to have been left behind from another century. It was where Nee knew Khun Pehn liked to listen to the the traffic and news radio and, judging from the half-full teacup on a side table, also where she had gotten up to answer the door.
Nee clasped her hands into a wai and bowed, the bag dangling against her chest.
“They wanted you to come in, ma’am.”
Khun Pehn didn’t acknowledge the secondhand request. “I hope it wasn’t too bad out there, my dear,” she said.
“The city was just a little quieter, that’s all.”
Khun Pehn was wearing a short-sleeved house dress with tan
floral prints that would have looked dowdy on any other tenant her age. She reached into her dress pocket and retrieved a wedge of folded red bills.
“Here’s something for your trouble.”
“Please, no, Khun Pehn. I was passing through that part of the city anyway.”
“Well, I can’t have you leave empty-handed or empty-stomached. You’ll stay for some sweets and tea, won’t you? Mrs. Reinhardt made a marvelous meringue cake.”
“I really should get back to the office, ma’am. I bet I have a hundred tenant messages waiting for me.”
“Those messages can wait. Rather than get into fisticuffs with an old lady, I suggest you reconsider.”
Nee knew better than to say no again. This was the one unit in the building where she was guaranteed to arrive at least two or three times every week, be it because of slow drains or audacious ants or the occasional promise of a tasty gift brought back from a trip to the provinces. There was the time Nee declined a second tray of coconut custard brought from Hua Hin by one of Khun Pehn’s bushy-haired card shark friends, and Khun Pehn went to the door and locked it, telling Nee that she was not to leave until she agreed to the offer.
“One slice, ma’am,” Nee said now, an index finger raised.
“Wise choice. Wait here.”
As her eyes followed Khun Pehn down the long corridor to the kitchen, past bedrooms once reserved for beloved pets, now empty because Khun Pehn feared new animals would outlive her and have nobody to care for them, Nee thought of her one-room flat, a fraction of the space of this condo. Her windows certainly didn’t give onto a city seemingly constructed in miniature. The neighbors had decided to open a dry-cleaning business, and racks of plastic-shrouded customers’ clothes now crowded half the street in front of her building. There were noises of all kinds: megaphone announcements from vegetable-hawking trucks, other neighbors yelling for their dogs to come back in, engine sputter from the scooters making delivery rounds. The pristine noiselessness in Khun Pehn’s apartment always overwhelmed her.
Bangkok Wakes to Rain Page 13