“It just happened, Wayne. I didn’t choose anything. I’m sorry, I told you already,” Betty says.
“This shriveled Chinese fuckhead bum!” Wayne yells. “I can’t fucking believe it.”
Sammy doesn’t feel compelled to correct Wayne’s ethnic and social assignation.
Little Head straightens his shoulders. Billy Dave follows. His neck tilts like the bough of an old oak.
“Listen, guys,” says Sammy. “I know this stinks, but we can all act like civilized men here.”
“You thought you can be an asshole and do whatever you want and not pay for it,” says Little Head.
“Yes, but I can pay for it. I swear.”
Sammy knows he’s too out of shape to bother running. Betty screams for Wayne and his friends to stop and stay where they are.
It’s now that Sammy looks up to see a guest peering out a window—Mrs. Moore, the retired schoolteacher from Boston—and, for an instant, he worries that she will rate his lodge poorly on the travel sites.
He feels Little Head and Billy Dave grab each of his arms, and suddenly he’s jerked toward Wayne, who’s standing with clenched fists. He keeps an eye on Wayne’s gimp hand and expects it to swerve at him: a pellet blast of loose knuckles against his face. Fine, have his battered body.
Except what he feels next is Little Head and Billy Dave loosening their grip.
They’ve done so because Wayne has dropped to his knees, arms slung to his sides. He’s sobbing, like a boy who has had everything he’s known and cherished stolen from him. Little Head and Billy Dave can do nothing but look in awe.
Sammy figures he should bolt to the car and back it out the road, away from any hurled slurs or objects. He doesn’t. He’s held back by the sight of Wayne breaking apart.
It hits him in the gut: there’s no natural scheme being played out, just his own foul part, all along. He bedded this man’s girlfriend and impregnated her with his dusty sperm.
Wayne’s crying harder. Sammy feels the broken man’s wails batter some part loose inside of him, and all of a sudden, he’s bent over holding his knees. In one ear, he hears Betty screaming his name, because he’s opened his mouth and endowed his gastric contents to this glorious land where his child will crawl and run.
Betty asks again if he’s okay, and, uncertain, he says yes. He wipes his lips with a wrist and straightens up. Wayne hasn’t moved from where he sits crumpled. Little Head and Billy Dave are hunched over him, offering words of courage that they must have picked up from game day sidelines.
Sammy still can’t guess how this all will end: with his devastation or their retreat. Any second now, they could all still pounce on him.
He looks for Mrs. Moore. She’s no longer by the window, and no other guests have come to theirs. He lets himself take in the lodge, its weathered clapboards and carved gables and steep roof. Almost a hundred fifty years ago, tradesmen laid fieldstone on a rectangle of carved earth and hewed and joined milled timbers from the surrounding hills to fashion what would be a rough farmhouse, and then the beginnings of a country inn.
Out in the sloping field, white pitted boulders sleep half buried where long extinct glaciers have rolled them to place. An orange shape scampers across the expanse of meadow fescue and clover, its tail straightened like a rudder. Sammy knows it won’t stop until it’s home.
POSSESSION
Were the pear trees on the hill again verdant and full? Had his father and Andrew taken the rowboat out on Archer’s Pond? Phineas thought of the Smiths and the Pendletons and questioned whether anyone in the valley had asked about him.
Here, bored urchins lit remnant firecrackers at irregular hours. Soon, the Siamese would celebrate their new year, flocking to temples in the morning and gambling dens thereafter.
Whatever jubilation these festivities might bring, however, would be tempered by rampant disease in the capital. The line at the veranda grew longer each day. His patients came after their native medicine had failed, showing him the strange concoctions prescribed to them: pulverized hog jaw and gall of snakes, placed on a clay idol’s hand and then boiled.
Miss Lisle and Miss Crawford assisted him. Fewer children now came to the school. He was glad that he had vaccinated many of the children months before, after learning methods from Dr. Bradley on a rare visit to the other side of the river. Most of the children lived in deplorable conditions, nothing more than huts floating above muddied waters in which they both bathed and secreted their wastes. He was unsure whether the inoculants would guard against whatever it was that was ailing the capital, but he remained hopeful that any effect they had would be beneficial.
In the past months, he had seen a greater part of the city. He had been rowed along brimming canals to the homes of noblemen and merchants, had drunk tea served to him in imported silver pots that cost ten times their European prices. He had also tended to the sick in the nether reaches of opium dens and open-air markets, where vendors laid their fevered children next to mounds of fruits for sale. The city radiated from the river outward, and so did her madness.
It was true that each time he left the house he kept an eye out for Bunsahk and his son. He thought of them often, perhaps more than he should. Not knowing the man’s fate proved worse than knowing himself a cause of his doom.
“What if you find out that he is no more? What then?” Winston asked, after promising to aid in his search.
“Then I’d know that I have fallen short, but my estimations were correct, and everything I know about medicine still holds true.”
“And if you find out that the man lives?”
“I’d still have failed him, but I’d also have an honest test of the substance of my tenets.”
He would not have the chance to verify whether Winston would make good on his promise of help in the matter. Not a day after their conversation, the reverend found Winston sprawled on one of the pews, without trousers. Less than an hour passed between the reverend’s discovery and his shaking Winston’s hand at the gate with words of farewell. Even Miss Crawford was surprised that the reverend had finally acted.
“I am almost saddened,” she said, her eyes wet.
Winston told Phineas not to worry. “I’ve got a few notions whirling about,” he said, tapping on his temple. “Have faith in me. In yourself, too.”
And so as he ventured out into the forsaken city, he looked out for Winston, as well.
He floated like a black phantom along roads that seemed to darken with his steps, past street dogs backing into alleyways and bare-breasted mothers tugging their children into doorways. He had been warned of the dangers after dark. Foreigners were often found bled from opened throats, pierced by crude bamboo spikes, left to liquefy and ferment in their woolen trousers. His fears, however, seemed to lessen in the empty nighttime streets. The dark cleansed his way forward, leaving only flickering lantern lights from windows, the smells of cooked meals wafting from homes propped on stilts, the sudden light of fireflies and shrill screams of bats. The capital was more comprehensible to him when it was subsumed by night, appearing as if it were but one small village after another. Following a native to where his patients lay, he sometimes came across familiar figures passing in the dark—the robed monks silent and barefoot, the night watchmen with stick and cymbal who nodded knowingly to him, as if he were one of their own.
Times turned dreadful not only for the city but also for the mission. Miss Lisle fell ill. Phineas made her take spoonfuls of laudanum diluted in rice spirits, and peppermint tincture dropped into hot water. She had been blessed with beauty, and it made him tremble to see her skin shrivel and her eyes sink into darkened pits. She lay there, pained, as fluids flushed out of her and thirst consumed her. In the steamy weather, she complained of freezing winds. Cholera was cruel but also quick. She breathed her last before the sun rose on a third day of illness and was interred in the Protestant cemetery by su
ndown. Miss Crawford, who had attended to her day and night, shipped Miss Lisle’s few possessions to her family in Missouri. Phineas prayed that they might find solace in a brush still entangled with strands of her fair hair; her stained, roach-eaten dresses; and a hymnal blotted with the blood of swatted mosquitoes.
He believed himself heartbroken, but he could not mourn.
The Siamese capital was dying. Wailing sounded in the streets as families carried their dead to the body carts. A new mandate had put an end to the custom of tying corpses to stones and heaving them into the river. Now the air reeked of burnt flesh.
Many blamed the disease on demon spirits. Phineas had learned that Buddhist belief hinged on a system of ledgered merits and demerits, and now he saw how, in hopes of gaining the favor of their account in this life, the Siamese sought to manufacture an increase of merits. Market fish escaped the fishmonger’s block and were returned to the river. Butchers and slaughterhouses were emptied, and once-doomed animals went free, while eating halls went without meat. Hens and pigs roamed the roads, nobody daring to disturb them for fear of karmic repercussions. Noontime and midnight, fireworks and the clanging of pots broke the quiet as families tried to scare evil away from the homes of the diseased.
The living came to him, pleading for more life. He was entreated to come into homes encircled by monk-blessed cords to save men, women, infants soon to die or already dead. As he crossed the city, some bowed down before his path. Others trembled at his presence, thinking him a demon wearing the pale skin of a man. Street children who had once ridiculed him now hid behind trees when he neared. He did not dispel the aura of magic. He felt compelled to embrace it in the performance of his duty. If they believed, and he believed, together they might find salvation yet.
His brother sent him letters, one including a sketch of ships in New York Harbor. He had forgotten all about them. In return, he sketched from memory a picture of the music room in Gransden Hall, more for his benefit than for his brother’s. He feared that he might lose the completeness with which he saw that room—his mother’s lacework draped over the piano, the blue sycamore leaves imprinted on the wallpaper. In the letter he attached to the sketch, he did not mention the deplorable state of the city but warned his brother that because of growing demands for his medical duties, he might have little time to spare. He vowed he would write again after circumstances improved.
They did not. The next week, the sickness breached him. The hospital closed, but the afflicted still remained, sleeping on straw mats as they leaked into the earth. He walked among them, hiding his condition, and then returned to his quarter. He lay in his bed, feeling his deterioration advance at every hour. Every now and then, he heard through his window the arrival of a cart, the gates of the compound creaking open.
He warned Miss Crawford to let him be, lest his foul humors take hold of her as well. She refused. He was both disappointed and relieved.
Soon, there was no one else left at the mission but Miss Crawford. The reverend fell ill and did not last a day. With no room left in the cemetery, the cart pushers were forced to deliver him to fire. Immobilized by grief, Miss Crawford stayed at the mission, but Phineas found the strength to accompany the reverend’s body to the designated grounds north of the city, so that he could offer rites of committal at the pyre. Two able-bodied devotees carried the body on bamboo rods borne on their shoulders.
At the cremation grounds, the reverend lay with natives on stacked logs topped with dried palm fronds. The cremator bound the body with rope, so that the reverend would not sit up aflame, and doused it with plant oils from a clay pot. Another cremator brought a branch ignited from a neighboring pyre.
Phineas stood before the reverend, releasing words to wake him to Glory. The lit branch shook in his unsteady hand.
Then he saw, among the company of bodies waiting their turn for the pyre, the remains of the witch doctor. The man was lain out in white cloth, his hair slicked and combed, his skin touched with ceremonial powder. Phineas would not have recognized him had he not seen the driftwood stick curled in the corpse’s hands. The man had been loved and mourned, as were all who lay there.
He once desired nothing more than to strike this man down. Encountering his former adversary now, Phineas was surprised to feel neither anger nor hate. He considered that he might have become too accustomed to the tragedies around him. He had, at many prior instances, felt thankful that his profession condoned his taking refuge in his role. He could step back from his immediate situation, as if into a different room concurrent with his own life, and watch another man who was he perform procedures in his place. Yet, here at the cremating grounds, he had no patient who would have let him dissolve into his duty, and he could not conjure the revulsion and fury the witch doctor ought to have inspired. He had not arrived at a state of apatheia, as the ancients had countenanced, but its opposite—a multitude of his passions demanded to be heard.
First, panic cried above the din. His memory no longer preserved the man’s face.
Then sorrow sang. Where were the secret chambers and nooks and gardens in which his most tender and truest sentiments dwelled, which he had thought everlasting?
BIRDS
Any day now, the people of Krungthep will celebrate the river leaving the city.
This morning, like many mornings these past few years, Pig tunes out when the news anchors start to discuss the flooding situation. They can say anything they want with their cheery voices—Experts predict . . . powerful pumps . . . relief efforts . . . the government is committed to . . .
But she’s come to know that none of their words matter more than the squawking of gulls and other seabirds that now regularly make a mess of the balcony.
She bends forward in front of the bathroom mirror to dab on foundation, followed by concealer. In front of her, she sees her own face and also the face of someone she doesn’t want to recognize. She will have to lay on another dusting of powder. A face can tell too much, especially to Mai.
Thinking to dress well for their lunch, she has picked out one of her reliables—a gray silk blouse and navy blue pants—but now she realizes that it makes her look matronly.
Better-constructed dams . . . zones affected . . . the prime minister gave encouragement . . .
There isn’t enough time to change. She should have gotten up earlier, but with her worries she’s often unable to sleep until first light begins to erase night from her windows. After a few hours of restless dozing, she usually wakes to recoil from a thought that tires her again: Woon.
She smoothes out creases on her pants, gives herself a reassuring nod in the mirror, and then walks to her son’s room.
* * *
☐ ☐ ☐
She has decided to set a number. She will stop after three knocks, and then pick up her purse from the sofa to leave for the day. As she has for six months, she hopes this will be the time the door opens.
“Woon, my dearest, won’t you come out for lunch with me and Auntie Mai?” she asks the door. “The last time she was here, you and her really got along, remember?”
She judges from the pale slit underneath the door that Woon’s curtains are drawn back. Barely any morning light reaches the hallway, where she stands in near dark, as is the usual case on Tuesdays and Wednesdays when the power in her zone often vanishes without warning. The bulbs overhead flicker out, every appliance humming dead. By now she has learned how to thump across the unlit apartment—L-shaped, with two bedrooms on opposite ends and a high view of the city. Well suited for her and Woon, as Mai has said.
“We’re going to a place you like, the one that makes the tasty dark broth,” she tells the door. “You can order extra meatballs, anything you want.”
A week or two before her son started to lock himself in his room, she had brought him noodles from that very shop. She had prepared the table for the two of them to eat together, their ritual of sorts after
the move to the apartment. But that evening, he took his bowl into his room, to eat by himself, his door closed. He was occupied with homework, she told herself then. Classes had become ever so competitive.
When he refused to leave the room even for school, she screamed and banged on the door. When she used an old five-baht coin to unlock it, and he threw himself against the door as she tried to push through, she could no longer avoid the truth: his door would not open for her, that day or after. After a month of absences, the school stopped calling to ask where he was.
“Fine, you don’t have to come with me if you don’t want to, but let’s not forget your meals.” The bowl of porridge she left outside his door earlier that morning has cooled, untouched.
This is the pattern that saddens her: he only emerged when she wasn’t around. The last time she saw him was two weeks ago, a swift shadow flitting to the bathroom one night, then shuffling back inside his room. She had fallen asleep on the sofa, and if not for the rousing noise her son made patting the wall to feel his way, she wouldn’t have wakened for even that sighting. She stifled the impulse to call out to him. She had promised herself that she would avoid doing anything that might upset him.
“Woon,” she says to the door. “What do you want me to tell Auntie Mai? She asked about you. Please answer, so I can tell her how you are.” She knocks again and again, first with knuckles and then with the bony edge of a fist, how many times she doesn’t care to count anymore. She rests her forehead on the door and listens. Somewhere outside, a growling plane engine churns the sky.
“Do you want to have him committed?” the bespectacled man had asked. This was at the start of Woon’s lock-in, when she made the rounds of psychiatrists. She had brought this one to the apartment to question a door that would refuse to answer.
“It’s an option we can take, with your consent,” the doctor had told her, out in the hallway.
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