A sharp squeal cut through the calm. Nee’s immediate thought was that Khun Pehn had gotten herself a bird, maybe one of those colorful Amazonian specimens she’d seen on TV, but the sound had come from a small black box with knobs and dials.
“All morning, this voice,” said Khun Pehn, returning with a plated cake in hand. “It very much sums up what’s happening right now, don’t you think?”
* * *
☐ ☐ ☐
Pehn had first learned that there might be something truly wrong the night before when Urai called and told her to stay put in her building the next day. Pehn didn’t think too much of her friend’s warning. Everyone had heard a rumor from someone who had an uncle or brother who was an officer of some sort. Troops were being trucked in from the provinces. There was going to be a crackdown on the protests, some were saying. There was a new coup in the works to upturn last year’s coup, said others. What did it matter? She’d survived more than a handful of national upheavals, and she guessed that, once again, nobody knew anything. It was late, and she had a doctor’s appointment the next day that she was going to cancel.
Then she woke to the sound of children playing in the hallway outside. Even if schools hadn’t announced delays for the opening of the term, parents weren’t going to send their kids out there. But what could be done for an old lady who’d waited too long to refill her prescriptions at the hospital? It wasn’t as if she could go to the pharmacy a few sois over for the kinds of medicine she needed.
Thank the deities for Nee. The least that could be offered to her was this slice of cake and a fresh cup of tea, and perhaps later that small billfold would find its way into Nee’s unwatched purse. Nee would later return it, as she had always done. This back-and-forth had become a ritual of sorts. At this age, a love for repetitive, childlike games returned anew.
“What do you think?” Pehn asked.
“It’s very delicious, ma’am. Mrs. Reinhardt should open a bakery.”
Pehn thought of Mrs. Reinhardt in the hallway late that morning. Pehn had invited her in, but Mrs. Reinhardt needed to watch her grandchild, who was among the children happily kicking a toy ball up and down the length of the floor.
“Would you like cake?” Mrs. Reinhardt had asked her.
“You know I won’t say no to a piece,” Pehn replied.
“No, I mean a whole one, Madame Pehn. I can’t stop baking when I’m nervous, and I’ve already made three cakes since I got up.”
Pehn noticed the anxious terror peeking from behind the woman’s friendly eyes. The farangs scared so easily, Pehn thought, for people who could book themselves a flight tomorrow and leave this all behind. What an exciting episode they’d have to tell their friends, of their near peril in the turbulent East.
Was Sammy like these farangs who flitted about wherever they liked? She used to think her son would tire of all the moving and hopping country to country, and finally come home or at least find a nice place to stay put, but she could still count on every few years receiving in the mail photos he’d taken in a new city, the most perfect place for him, he’d say yet again. Whatever was in his head? For so long, she had thought he stayed away from Krungthep out of anger and resentment toward her and Apirak, inevitable considering the mess they’d made of his youth. She thought she’d given him everything he needed to overcome whatever damage they had inflicted, but he still didn’t have the wherewithal to do better for himself. Instead, he appeared to derive pleasure from fouling up, and it was this sick lust for self-punishment, she had long been certain, that most moved her son. She had thought to offer to pay someone for lifelong sessions of whipping and yelling, if suffering was all he really wanted.
How mistaken she had been. Theirs was no exceptional story, she realized, only the one of so many mothers and sons, where love and affection alternated with distrust and wariness. Why did you abandon me? he seemed to cry, still reaching for her. Why have you abandoned me? she’d respond in her way, grasping for him. Such a lamentable cycle that had cost them both dearly, especially him, her poor boy. She wondered every day if she had done everything she could to extract him from it.
“Have you noticed, Nee, that the photo on that wall is different? My son, Sammy, recently sent it to me, and so into the frame it went, replacing the one he last sent. I don’t know why he only sends me the photos that will trouble me. The prettier, much more pleasant ones he takes for advertisement clients he never shows.”
Her gaze shifted Nee’s to the photo on the wall.
“I haven’t told you very much about him, have I? Well, the next time he’s here, I’ll make sure that you two meet.”
* * *
☐ ☐ ☐
Nee did notice that the photo on the wall had been changed. The previous one had been of a brick building in New York. She recognized that city right away, as if it were a scene from a movie she had seen in her youth. A few of its windowpanes had either broken or fallen off, and the pavement outside was strewn with loose pieces of masonry rubble. In the entrance doorway, up one short flight of the front stairs, a blond-wigged woman who looked to be in her seventies or eighties stood half emerged, draped in a tattered fur coat. Nee couldn’t tell if the woman had meant to express displeasure or surprise on finding herself captured and fixed on film by a stranger ambushing outside the door, or if her scowl had been no more than circumstantial permanence. Nee tried to imagine herself in this strange woman’s head. On a different day, or likely, a different decade, the woman might’ve felt flattered that someone, out of the blue, would want to photograph her. If only the camera could find her when she wasn’t a wrinkly-faced thing hesitant to step out into the street, but what could an old woman do but yell at the young man to scram and slam her door shut, all too late?
The newer photograph that replaced the photo of the old woman had also been taken in front of a building. This one was of a single-story shopping center somewhere with palm trees in the distance, where the sun shone brightly enough to reach inside smashed windows to reveal a mess of scattered, unpaired shoes and crumpled cardboard boxes on the ground. There were sooty streaks coming from a storefront next door but the photographer had cut off the view, so that he could bring into frame a policeman in a tan uniform, who stood with a rifle rested on his shoulder, guarding the aftermath. She guessed that this must be in an American city. She’d seen buildings like this in Hollywood movies, but not in this kind of shape. What kind of grievous thing had happened for Americans to attack a shoe store? Why must there be so many men with guns, everywhere?
Nee hadn’t kept up with international news. Enough troubles were already making everyone dangerously nervous in Krungthep, and she had avoided looking at the papers, resolving to busy herself with the building. She found repair people for the lobby’s HVAC units and made sure the landscapers did a thorough job with the hedges. She scooped up broken-neck sparrows from the grounds, before any tenant noticed. The times that she did glance at the headlines or when a coworker brought up the latest, her undying rage returned and she’d have to step out, either for a long calming walk or a swim in the pool, to keep herself from catching fire from the inside out.
Nok would love for that to happen, wouldn’t she? If Nee went berserk or had a breakdown somewhere public, it would only confirm Nok’s accusation that she was crazy and unreasonable.
It was unlikely, though, that Nok would ever find out. They hadn’t talked in almost ten years, not since Nee had found out about the colonel. At their mother’s funeral, they barely glanced at each other. Nee chose to sit at one end of the temple hall and never walked by Nok, who stayed at the other end and flew back to Japan right after the cremation. It was probably for the best. They avoided a scene when there were so many relatives around. Their mother sometimes appeared in a dream to lament what she called their senseless, lingering feud, and Nee would tell her to stop meddling in the business of the living. Then she’d wake herself up.
<
br /> Every new year, the phone rang very late at night, and Nee never bothered to get up. It could be one of her friends calling with well wishes, or it could be Nok. It didn’t matter either way, she’d tell herself. She’d let the phone ring and ring and ring, until silence was hers again.
* * *
☐ ☐ ☐
Another squeal crackled from the black box on the end table, followed by a high-pitched voice rapid-firing curse words pertaining to the mother of anyone listening. Static hissed for a moment, before a gruff voice returned equally rich insults, with the threat of bullets.
“I bought the CB set a year ago, after the last round of unrest,” Pehn said to Nee. “As you know, the TV and radio news aren’t going to tell you much of anything. This has a receiver that can pick up most of the police and military channels.”
“And what have they been saying, ma’am?”
“You have it backward, my dear. I’ve found that one can learn so much more from what hasn’t been said. For example, I probably don’t need to say anything now because you’d already know what I heard.”
Worry washed across Nee’s face. Pehn feared she had upset the young woman.
“I’m probably wrong,” Pehn thought to say. “What does an old woman like me know about what they’re really saying?”
“No, ma’am. You’re not wrong. It’s going to get worse. I’ve seen it before.”
For a while, not a word passed between them. Nee remained where she was at the sofa, looking out the window.
Pehn didn’t think it was the scenic skyline that had captured her attention. The young woman was elsewhere, even as she sat here. Nee had said little about herself, and it was only from other staffers that Pehn had learned that Nee had graduated from a famous university in the mid-1970s, which meant there was a good chance she might have taken part in the student protests then. The horrific photos of bodies burned and blackened, bashed and pummeled until their faces seemed like overripe fruits. The young lives extinguished in the grand thoroughfares where they’d gathered.
She remembered great tension and fear all around the country and especially in Krungthep. She wouldn’t deny that she’d felt it, too, as one of the many terrified that these students and their fiery passions would upturn everything for the worse and maybe even destroy the society she’d cherished.
It was bound to end in this violent way, she thought then, and in the years after, those killings became a thing that happened further and further from her. After all, her hands weren’t involved in hurting anyone. She wouldn’t carry any guilt for only having happened to live in a certain city in a particular terrible time. She even felt some vindication when news arrived of the mass killings in Cambodia, only a few hundred kilometers east. Those communists wanted the same fate for her country, she was told.
But was it really vindication when she couldn’t shake away the suspicion that those young people had paid too high a price? Need those kids have been sacrificed the way they were, to a game of musical chairs at the Government House? She remembered feeling so afraid of whatever might disturb her beloved Krungthep that she could feel it justifiable that someone’s grown child was hanged from a tree as a cheery mob beat his lifeless body with a chair. She had let herself forget that they were sons and daughters. They were young people who cared about their future. Many would have become mothers and fathers themselves.
She wasn’t a woman prone to anger and frustration, but one grew old and couldn’t help but remember—it was all one did—and many times these past few months, seeing the country again falling into chaos, she couldn’t help but think of those students from years ago.
They’d died, and the game of musical chairs kept going anyway. Ramwong dancers old and new—with faces powdered, arms outstretched, and hands curled back—went round and round to never-ending cymbal-clanging songs. When she looked out the window at the spread of this city and the grand dance still in motion, she wondered if she wasn’t going mad with shame.
“Would you like to try it?” she said to Nee.
“Pardon me, Khun Pehn?”
“I’m talking about the CB. The squealing voice you heard earlier.”
“The voice, ma’am?”
“Yes, they’ve been calling it Sharpy. All you have to do is to heighten your pitch, maybe with a little raspiness, so that you sound something like a jungle gibbon. That’s what I was going after, and then the other CB people were quick to catch on.”
“I’m speechless, ma’am.”
“No, you are not. Go ahead, push this button with your thumb. There are so many others out there doing the same, we won’t be found out. Say anything you want. Like this.”
* * *
☐ ☐ ☐
Squeeeeeeeeeeeeaaaaaaaal! Hello, my pretties! What’s with the commotion all round the city! Are you celebrating your mama’s new lover?
Squeeeeeeeeeeeeaaaaaaaal! Squeeeeeeeeeeeeaaaaaaaal! Sharpy had no idea they could dress up water buffalos and make them like look so convincingly like men! It’s so hard to tell who’s who and what’s what!
Squeeeeeeeeeeeeaaaaaaaal! Sharpy would like to know which witch doctor they’ve hired to help fill up the Capitol! What choice pickings from all the graveyards! It’s a pageant of hell creatures reborn as head-nodding politicians!
Squeeeeeeeeeeeeaaaaaaaal! Sharpy wants some lucky numbers for the lottery! Maybe Sharpy will pray to the water cannons and make rubbings on the armored trucks! Surely they’re there for our good fortune!
Squeeeeeeeeeeeeaaaaaaaal! It’s Sharpy again! Miss me?
“Shut up, Sharpy,” barked a voice over the radio. “We will hunt you down! Whatever it takes! We will drag you out to the streets and slap you bloody in the mouth!”
Squeeeeeeeeeeeeaaaaaaaal! You water lizards!
“You will regret being born, Sharpy! You will regret this day!”
Squeeeeeeeeeeeeaaaaaaaal! Roger that! Sharpy will talk to you later, my dearest water lizards!
* * *
☐ ☐ ☐
Nee put down the handset and joined Khun Pehn in giggling on the sofa.
“It feels better, doesn’t it, Nee?”
“Yes, I think so, ma’am.”
“I never would have guessed you to be so expert with expletives. I must be more careful to avoid your wrath.”
“I grew up near a market, Khun Pehn. What the hawkers could do with insults rivaled the poetry of Sunthorn Phu.”
“And I thought my early schooling at Krungthep’s finest institutions served me well. My classmates and I adored cursing each other, mainly because our parents would be so furious if they ever heard us speak so improperly.”
They shared another round of giggles. Khun Pehn’s laughter reminded Nee of her own mother’s, and she wondered if somehow all the women of that generation had been taught to laugh the same way. Had she inherited it too?
Squeeeeeeeeeeeeaaaaaaaal! Squeeeeeeeeeeeeaaaaaaaal!
The eruption of taunts from the CB radio returned Nee to the condo tower, where Khun Pehn’s eyes had widened. The old woman’s pale lips trembled soundlessly.
“What is it, ma’am? What’s wrong?”
“There.”
Khun Pehn pointed to the window. It was dark out, but enough blue had lingered in the sky for Nee to make out smoke pluming in the distance.
* * *
☐ ☐ ☐
They stood watching at the window, even after it had become too dark to see. More squeals, more taunts from the radio, with little apparent effect on the mayhem. More men spoke on the television, more commands for calm, for good citizens to stay off the streets. More plumes appeared before the darkened night veiled them, and then the skyline again looked the same as any other night: a nighttime sea crowded with fishermen’s lights. Behind window glass, they couldn’t smell smoke. They couldn’t hear sirens or shots. The city lived and died another world
below.
Nee fell asleep on the sofa, and when she woke again, she found Khun Pehn still there on the green chair, awake.
“Nee, please stay the night. It’s too dangerous to try to make it home.”
“I don’t want to trouble you, Khun Pehn.”
“You’ll find a bed as good as any in my spare room. It’s where my son’s supposed to sleep when he visits.”
They waddled together down the hallway and turned on the lights in the bedroom.
“You know where the bathroom is. Towels are in that drawer. If you need anything, knock on my door,” said Khun Pehn.
“Thank you, ma’am. I’m sure I won’t disturb you.”
Now she was alone in this room with more photographs by the son. Aside from ones taken at what looked to be a Thai mountain, the majority of them were of strange people in cities she didn’t recognize, of shadows and silhouettes beautifully cast on languid afternoons alien to her. In one, Nee could see the shape of the son faintly reflected in the rearview mirror of a taxicab, the ancient bearded driver looking back, midshout. A beautiful woman sat smoking on a rooftop with a Persian cat perched on her shoulders. Children spraying graffiti on a wall. Confetti covering an entire police car. A black-and-white forest of legs on a rainy sidewalk.
Bangkok Wakes to Rain Page 14