Would she wake up inside one of these photos tonight, like she often did after watching foreign movies? She had watched many, back when going to a packed movie theater didn’t make her feel feverish with terror. Instead of helping her escape somewhere else, movies trying to scare her or make her laugh only reminded Nee that her life no longer felt real.
By all appearances, it seemed to Nee that she was the only one who had had trouble rejoining the garden of fantastical delights that was Krungthep. Her friends feasted at new restaurants serving sukiyaki and burgers, and followed popular TV serials, and could tell her who sang what on the radio. It didn’t take them as long as it did her to look for work. They still worked as nurses. Most eventually found someone to bring home to their parents. Fewer wedding invitations now arrived to her in the mail, replaced by cards announcing kids’ birthdays or piano recitals. Every reunion or chance meeting became a traveling exhibit of wallet-sized photos of children, and when conversation drifted beyond their school accomplishments and future careers, she saw the panic in her friends’ eyes before their quick turn to familiar shores.
At one of their get-togethers, she complained about never getting enough sleep. “I keep thinking that I’d never wake up because bombs would start falling,” she said. It was a quiet admission meant for a friend she felt she could be honest with, but someone else behind her had overheard.
“That used to happen to me, too,” said the voice that interrupted them. “I would be up until I heard roosters crowing at sunrise, not a wink of peace. Then you know what I did? I gave in and let myself go back to that night, and I’m curled up on the football field at the university again, and I can feel all my friends around me in the dark. That’s where I close my eyes. That’s where I fall asleep.”
The voice belonged to an acquaintance from another class year, an ontology nurse and mother of two who had also been on campus that October day. The woman grinned and nodded, as if to apologize, and then turned back to her own table.
But wait, she wanted to say to the woman. What if someone’s waiting for me at the football field? What do I say to him?
* * *
☐ ☐ ☐
Those pills don’t go down easily, thought Pehn on the way to her bedroom. What a folly, having to swallow so many, three times a day. Perhaps she wasn’t taking them with enough water, but this late, she didn’t want to take in too much for fear of being wakened for so many bathroom trips. She remembered comparing pills with her friends, opening the lids of their partitioned boxes to reveal the pharmacological rainbow within, boasting of how many they took. All dead now, she supposed. She’d outlasted most. Better to be the Invincible Sword, all right.
Earlier in the day, though, she had surprised herself with a moment of envy for her old bridge pal, Gaew, relegated to a corner in her son’s living room, there to be respectfully handled from bed to chair and back in the course of a day, always the sweetest gummy smile on a face questionably aware of the whys and whats of her routine, or anything, really. Lucky Gaew, not having any cognizance of current events, just happily in and out of the world, one hour reanimated by CDs of old dancehall songs the home care nurse played for her, and then the next back to blankness when the songs ended. Maybe that was as good as could be expected of anyone’s last years.
In the bathroom, she plugged the tub drain and turned on the cold water, so that she’d at least have some clean water on hand. The power could go out, and she didn’t trust the generators to last for however long this was going to go on. She sat at the edge of the tub as the water gushed. If she closed her eyes, it could sound like a waterfall. There was that country jaunt, a while ago, before Sammy was born. Which waterfall in what province, she couldn’t remember. Blankets had been laid, and spiced punch was being ladled into tiny glasses with handles, and someone had hooked up a portable turntable to the car, and the most jubilant piano music soon poured out to jiggle legs and feet that had drifted so peacefully in the current. Apirak pulled her hand so they could get up and join the others wriggling away, and for a while she danced with him, but then she loosened his hands away to swing her limbs and bob her head on her own, her eyes half shut in private ecstasy. What a fine afternoon that was. She’d thought there would be many more like it. She would later ask the name of the record. Starry Hour, Clyde Alston, someone said.
It was because of this recollection that she’d taken so long to greet Nee at the door, needing to stop in front of the mirror so as to check whether or not her eyes had noticeably reddened. Tears came too easily, provoked by something or another otherwise dismissible thing, like the few scratchy notes from a song she’d caught playing in her mind. Call her selfish for letting a personal remembrance draw the first drops out of her eyes while her country burst into flames. What tremendously upset her today was what she couldn’t remember anymore: Apirak’s face, which she never saw again after her return to Krungthep, and which, for many years, she would have paid a good deal to forget. But would she really have? For years she relished, as she now realized her son also likely did, the familiar leisure of self-pity. Forgetting would have starved her of it. Forgetting was the thing one was supposed to do after calamity—not realizing the danger of confusion when someday the living would come to feel like ghosts, and the long departed came back to life when they liked anyway.
Outside, a bang sounded loud enough to rattle the windows. Pehn didn’t look up from the hand she’d dipped into the water, to feel it swirling cold between her fingers. She only now realized, having half filled the tub with provisional water, that she had forgotten to take her bedtime bath, a habit from her time in London. A few years back she wouldn’t have hesitated to pull the stopper, so she could refill the tub with warmer water. She wouldn’t do that now. Before reaching her this water had flown and fallen, swirled through veins of enlivened animals, washed away mountains, and drowned the unlucky. Who was she to waste all this good water for an expiring woman’s comforts? A thing inside her chest had stayed her hand from reaching for the stopper, and that thing was instead compelling her to cup a small ocean and raise it to her lips and drink.
HEIRLOOM
Sammy could count this as one of his annual trips to Bangkok to visit his mother, but on this trip, he wouldn’t see her. It was his first time in the city after she had passed away, back on his own to sort out what his mother had left him, which was everything.
He had made many trips in the last year. Her death from lung cancer wasn’t sudden. She had known for some time, since the visit to see her doctor for a cough that wouldn’t go away. He rode straight from the airport to the hospital where his mother had had surgery, and slept in a cot by her bed. All other trips, he refused the spare bedroom that his mother had set aside for his visits and stayed at hotels. He gave her the unsatisfactory excuse of needing a separate place to focus on his work and call clients, but the truer reason was that he felt useless and sad watching the home health aides help her bathe and use the restroom and eat puréed foods a half spoonful at a time. He slept in at the hotel during the day and visited his dear mother in the evening, staying long enough that he could usually make an excuse of having to get back to the hotel for a conference call with Los Angeles. A part of him denied how little time his mother had left. He wanted to suspect that she might be playing up her illness so that her son would take pity on his poor mother—exactly as she’d described herself more than a few times.
When her end did come, with all kinds of tubing and apparatuses strapped to that pale, withered body, as if the machines had been the hungry culprit feeding off her, he couldn’t believe that it had actually happened, even as he stood greeting her friends and his relatives who were more strangers than family at the temple pavilion, even as he threw fragrant woods into the fire licking her coffin. She was gone, scorched to gritty powder and then scattered at the mouth of the Chao Phraya, where they used to walk along shaky boardwalks and search the beach for mudfish.
It took him a week of endless sleep at the hotel before he could bring himself to visit the condo unit where she had lived. As rain dripped ceiling to floor in the exposed hallway, a woman stood outside the door waiting for him. An hour had passed since their appointment.
“I’m sorry, Khun Sunee. The street floods, the traffic,” he said, a lie.
“It’s okay. I came up late because I didn’t expect you to be on time. Your mother often talked about you. Please, feel free to call me Nee.”
“Don’t believe everything my mother said.”
Sammy didn’t tell Nee that his mother had talked about her—the hardworking, attentive young woman who helped out with calling repairmen and sometimes even doing the job herself. It was a ploy his mother had tried before with society girls, daughters of friends, and bridge table acquaintances, and long given up. He should meet so-and-so the next time he was in Bangkok.
This one was not as he had imagined her. She looked to be in her midthirties, about fifteen or so years behind him, and rather tall, with long straight hair parted to the right and rounded eyes like portholes on a ship.
The thing that most surprised him, having met other women by way of his mother, was Khun Nee’s skin, a few shades darker than his own. The fact tickled his suspicion. He wondered what his mother had in mind with this reversal, a gambit he was sure.
Dear Mother Pehn had tried many of them from thousands of kilometers away, dangling obvious bribes or casting herself as helpless to nurture his guilt, but he had refused to comply. Part of it had to do with his own ironclad stubbornness, and part of it grew from long-standing resentment—the reason they hadn’t talked for a few years at one point in his forties. This condo unit and the others she rented out were part of the package deal she’d made with the developer for the estate that had been in his family for more than three generations.
Now only the Sino-Colonial facades of the old house remained at the base of the condominium building. The front opened into a marble-floored lobby, and the side wing, where his childhood bedroom had been, now served as entrance to a day spa offering massages in some vaguely Nordic tradition. Along the roofed terrace, strange vinyl-padded furniture lay scattered about in disuse, a sad shadow of the woven rattan chairs where he’d sat with his grandparents, reading or playing chess under the slow whirl of a wooden fan. In the garden, most of the majestic trees had been felled, and worst, the koi pond where he had spent so many afternoon hours gazing at swirls of rippling fins now lay under a driveway to the parking decks.
Sammy had acquiesced to his mother about the sale and then regretted his acquiescence, and out of that regret came a long period of bitterness and blame that he thought was just punishment for them both.
He didn’t know what his mother had told Nee about him. He could only stand by his own story: that he had refused to come back to Bangkok after boarding school in Surrey, where his mother had sent him after his family’s dissolution. At university, he baited her with plans of education and advancement, first in international law, then in architecture, and, finally, photography. He bought expensive medium-format cameras to justify himself. He spent a decade wielding them in London, another in Hong Kong, a few years in Stockholm as a married man, and then in Los Angeles, alone.
Now his mother was gone, and it was a son’s duty to honor the remnants of her. With Nee, he wound through the rooms. Some of the things his mother left behind he would have recognized anywhere: the gold-capped fountain pen dented with the teethmarks of his first dog or the rattly wooden abacus his mother had used to figure out the bills. She had kept them all in perfect order and at their assigned places, leaning in doorways to tell the maid exactly what to put back where.
Unnerved, he uncapped his 35 mm rangefinder and began snapping pictures of the place.
“She spoke very proudly about your photos,” Nee said, recalling him to this world.
“Of course she’d tell you that. I wouldn’t hear any of it, though.”
They paused at a window. Twenty-seven stories down, children splashed back and forth along the edges of a pool. Their laughs and screams barely pierced through the great babble of the city.
“For extra money, I teach weekend swim classes down there,” Nee said.
“I’ve thought about adult swimming lessons, but there’s a chance I’d already float on my own,” he said, patting the spillover flesh at his waist.
When she didn’t laugh, he took it as a reminder that he was supposed to be in mourning. She didn’t understand that he had not bothered with the business of somberness and tears because he wanted to prove to his dead mother that he was no longer a child. Yet when they opened his mother’s bedroom closet and he saw clothes hanging from metal hangers, no thinner than her body in the last year, he snapped a photo and then wept.
In the States, this would be the moment when he’d expect to receive some variation of a consoling embrace. Nee stood there, looking down at her feet, and let him cry. Then with one hand, she patted him for a fraction of a second on his shoulder.
“If you don’t want to keep them, I can give them away,” Nee said, looking at the clothes.
“Please. Thank you,” he said, trying to dry his face with bare fingers.
“Let me know how else I can help. I’m in the management office nearly every day.”
* * *
☐ ☐ ☐
He was touched. He thought of Nee as soon as he left the condo building, wondering what kind of excuses he could make to see her again, and he thought of her again that night, wading in the hotel pool by himself and gazing at his emptied plastic martini glass.
After a few days, he dropped by the office and asked Nee if she would join him for drinks at a hotel bar by the river, half certain she would say no.
That evening—their first rendezvous outside the condo—they sat at a slim windowside table and watched the dim lights of ships float seaward. He hadn’t heard a ship’s horn blast for decades, and he told her that it sounded unreal, like a sound effect in a movie. He talked about old radio serials lost to those born after the ’50s; he was probably part of the last generation to remember sleepless nights, as a child, counting the hourly gongs of night watchmen. She talked about listening to the radio with her father and hearing songs on vinyl records for the first time when she was a university student, but now she only overheard other people’s music. He learned that it had been a little over ten years since her own mother had passed away, and since she didn’t mention any brother or sister, he assumed she was an only child as well. He told her that things might have been easier between him and his mother, had he siblings to share the tension. It felt strangely good not to feel that tension anymore.
The admission felt easy. She was pretty much a stranger, but he noticed that, with her, he wasn’t afraid to open up parts of himself he had long kept sealed. He wasn’t afraid to tell her that he hadn’t had a paying assignment in more than a few years and no longer cared, or that, in the old house where the tower now stood, he once saw at the foot of the bed his grandfather’s ghost, narrow-faced and blued, like in old tintypes.
He was curious why Nee hadn’t married, the usual course for Bangkok women of her age.
“I should ask you the same question,” she said.
“I was married, abroad, but I’ve forgotten so much of it that it feels like I never married.”
“The not-remembering doesn’t really work, does it?”
“No, not really,” he said, without pressing further.
After that night, he didn’t know when he should expect to see Nee again. He called up his travel agency and asked about return flights but, because he was thinking of her, he did not book one.
In matters of romance, all his life he had been able to play up indifference and aloofness to his advantage, as his friends often advised him. When he called the management office, he hung up on hearing an assistant pick up and then ca
lled again a few minutes later to leave a message. When Nee did call him back days later, apologizing for not spotting her assistant’s message slips sooner, he heard, to his chagrin, joyous music in the voice that escaped his mouth.
He asked her what she was doing the next weekend, and she mentioned that she often went on long walks on her days off. Everybody in Krungthep who had the means hopped on air-conditioned buses or drove their cars. Her friends all thought she was crazy for going around on her feet for any purpose of leisure.
“When did you start taking these walks?” he asked.
“Not long after I graduated, I remembered that I used to love going to see the movies. My mother pressed me to go, to get me out of the house. She gave me money, and I went to see a movie by myself. It was some Hollywood action adventure or another, I don’t even remember. I was paying more attention to the crowd. I watched everybody else gasp at the stunts and laugh at the romantic banter, and I decided that I couldn’t bear it anymore. If I stayed, I would become them, and I hated the idea, even though they were probably all fine people out to have a good time. I got up and walked out of the theater. It was a bright afternoon, almost harsh, but I walked many kilometers home. There was something in that walk and my steady step through the city—foot out, foot out, foot out, foot out, foot out, foot out, foot out, foot out—that made me feel less nervous. This was before I was hired at this building and had access to a swimming pool, but I still walk when I can. If I’m not swimming, I walk. If I’m not walking, I long to swim. I love diving into that blue water and dissolving. Does this make any sense?”
“My father swam,” he said, offering no more. “I don’t swim, really, but I’m pretty good at walking. Can I join you on one of these walks?”
Bangkok Wakes to Rain Page 15