Pig foresaw the scene of struggle. How could they guarantee that Woon wouldn’t get hurt in the process? And even if they were able to restrain him, there’d be no hiding his being carried through the hallway and down the elevator and out the lobby. How could she be certain that neighbors wouldn’t talk and that no word would reach Woon’s teachers? She didn’t want to diminish his chances of going to a reputable university in a few years.
“Let me think it over, Doctor,” she said, but she had already decided. If she were patient and supportive, he would come around. He had always been a good son. There would still be a happy life for them both.
“Woon, Woon,” she says to the door, banging with both hands. “Come out just this once. Can you hear me? Please don’t make me come in there to get you.”
By now she should have known not to expect a response, but she can’t help putting her ear against the door. She lays her palm on it as she would her son’s back.
A piece of paper slides through the gap under the door, a page torn from a math textbook. Scrawled on it in pencil: Leave me alone. And a second line: Or this will happen. Then a stick figure under a trail of dots, having plummeted from a square window.
“Okay, Woon, you win. I’m leaving.”
She lets the apartment door close behind her. She thinks of calling Mai to cancel lunch, but what would she do instead? Stand out in the hall for another six or seven hours?
Besides, this isn’t the first time he’s done this, and the other times, nothing happened. She shouldn’t reward his antics by showing him that they have any effect on her.
No, Woon wouldn’t hurt himself. Growing up, he’d always stop on his own at crosswalks, as he’d been told. At the clinic, he’d turn away, eyes closed, when the nurse pricked his arm with a needle. Teenagers like to sound off more than they mean, a normal part of their horrible phases.
The hallway lights flicker on but then go dark again. She doesn’t bother to check if the elevators are working but instead heads straight to the stairwell.
A saying has come into fashion in Krungthep in recent years: No lights, no problem. At first, it seemed to voice a prideful kind of resilience, but lately, whenever a neighbor says it in the dimmed building lobby, she hears only resignation. It doesn’t take much more than ankle-deep water to overwhelm the city’s hydro pump stations. Out goes the usual public alert to affected zones: Due to today’s rising flood levels, electrical shutoffs have been authorized to avoid equipment damage and electrocution. Apologies for any inconvenience.
* * *
☐ ☐ ☐
There are hardly any tables open, but they find one near the cooking stand, where they can watch bowls of noodles being assembled under a blur of hands.
After a few spoonfuls, Pig and Mai conclude that the broth isn’t as fragrant as they remember it. What makes the shop worthwhile is how much of the old one the owners managed to salvage from the floodwater: the same rickety sheet-metal stools and tables, the wrought-iron light fixtures, the wooden ceiling fans from who knows when. Even the view outside looks the same: the parade of buses and motorcycles passing behind sidewalk vendors and brightly colored tarps stretched overhead, replacing the sun and sky.
Rain dimples black pools in the road. Storeowners drag out sandbags, still soggy from the last downpour, to pile across entryways. This afternoon, unlike others, Pig doesn’t mind the prospect of a storm and a power outage.
“Don’t worry. There will be a drier day with working elevators, and we can meet at the apartment like you wanted,” she says, twirling slippery noodles into a ball with her fork. “Believe me, you’ll enjoy not having to walk up twenty-something stories.”
Pig reads in Mai’s half nod and flattened grin her disappointed agreement. How comforting that so many years won’t change someone’s facial cues.
“Phee would complain the whole way, as much as she wants to see where her grandparents lived,” says Mai.
Mai now lives with her daughter in New York, and after her parents passed away, she let the apartment to Pig, pegging the annual rent at the cost of a dozen limes. By then, Pig was no longer in a position to decline Mai’s generosity. It took some time to get used to living in a less spacious place than the house where she had lived with Woon when he was small. She still misses looking out to her long sloping lawn, a reassuring sight in the shadow of packed high-rises.
“I’d be curious about my grandparents, too, especially if I were her. Did I tell you I make offerings to them every year?”
“I didn’t know that. Thanks, Pig.”
“It’s the least I can do. They really were such good people.”
“I’m sure they’re eating way better now than when they were alive.”
The mention of grandparents makes Pig remember her own. As a child, Pig had listened to her grandmother talk about Allied air raids over the city and how sirens sent everyone to pull shut the blackout curtains. Now, nearly a hundred years later, everyone goes to the window to see who else still has light.
“So how are you liking where they’ve put you up this time?”
“It’s another one of those corporate flats that feels too much like a hotel room. I don’t know why I expect it to be any different. There’s at least a pool, but I haven’t been able to take a dip, with my schedule.”
“You used to swim so much. I remember that you took lessons at the building.”
“That’s right. Every weekend. I had a good teacher.”
“Yeah, I remember you told me. Well, maybe you should wake up a little earlier and go for morning swims.”
“I totally do need the exercise.”
“Well, if the power goes out, you’re definitely going to get some, trudging up and down the stairs.”
“The only remarkable thing about the zone where I’m staying is that the elevators always work. I don’t know how I’d make it through the day if they didn’t.”
“Oh, you get used to elevators being out of commission. Haven’t you noticed my amazing calves?”
Pig extends her leg and turns her foot, flexing. Her legs have retained some youth, she thinks, unlike the rest of her. Mai, though, looks as if she has hardly aged anywhere, her crinkles faint, her frame unrounded—and so casually spirited in an ivory linen suit wrinkled at the right places. Pig wonders if the young civil servants and office clerks at the neighboring tables might mistake the two of them for a mother eating with her adult daughter.
“Pig, come to my project site. I want to show you the work I’m doing.”
“Are you sure? Do you really have the time? I don’t want to bother you.”
If she were a good mother, she would have already said no, using the usual excuses: work deadlines to meet, errands to tick off, everything amazing and busy.
“It’s no bother. I can always move around meetings,” says Mai. “Just nod when I tell people you’re a visiting government honcho.”
“Okay, well, I’ll try my best to look important.”
She tells herself again that Woon wll be fine, and she has to believe it.
Before her parents died, Mai had returned only at the New Year holiday, staying for a week at most before some company’s crisis—a conglomerate’s assembly lines coming to a halt or some telecom giant verging on bankruptcy—demanded her immediate presence elsewhere.
Pig would drive her to the airport, along the way consoling her for having to leave earlier than expected. That was almost two decades ago, when Mai was only an overworked, sleepless fledgling at the consulting firm. The Mai of later years called a car and left early, before light, on her own. This Mai sent one-sentence replies, apologized for the brevity, and then disappeared for months. Five years have passed since Mai last visited. When Pig received the message that she was coming to manage a project in Krungthep, Pig replied that she couldn’t wait for all the time they’d spend together, not quite believing
Mai would find much. But she has, and she’s been quite insistent, making it harder to say no.
“When I last met him, Woon was all into robots and monsters. Call him and see if he can join us.”
“There’s no way he’s going to skip his music rehearsals. I told him not to take on too many extracurriculars, but he couldn’t help himself.”
“That’s too bad, I think he would’ve enjoyed meeting the birds.”
* * *
☐ ☐ ☐
Pig first heard of the birds months ago, from a blurb that interrupted the telenovela playing on her book. “Sleep well! Safety and happiness for all Thais, no worries!” floated in bubbles from bug-eyed cartoon citizens, like those from comics she had read as a kid. “Say hello to the birds! They’re working hard to protect happy days ahead.” Cartoon birds fluttered into the message before disbanding out of view.
In waiting halls at the ferry port, Pig has noticed “SLEEP WELL!” banners hung between pillars. The figure of a young boy, curled in his bed like a newborn puppy, floats above a caption proclaiming, “Knowing he’s safe today, he dreams of his future as an environmental engineer.”
Now Mai is about to give her a private demonstration. They have arrived at a fluorescent-lit lab space where a concrete pillar as tall and formidable as a temple gate giant rises from a platform. Next to it, a row of fist-sized metallic orbs—the birds—rest on tripod stands.
After Mai pushes the button that put the rotors in motion, Pig steps back to let a bird take flight. This bird doesn’t resemble the usual ones she has seen presiding over car-choked intersections during rush hour. Those look like the hatchlings of helicopters, their blades spinning on jutted spidery arms. This bird, with a belt of petal-shaped wings whirling around the middle of its round body, reminds Pig of a pudgy child doing pirouettes in her tutu. With barely a sound, it lifts from the stand to hover eye level in front of them. Mai hands her glasses with darkened lenses.
“I love this next part,” she says, beaming girlishly.
Eyelets that dot the entire bird glow blue on the side facing the pillar. The radiant hue, as if sapphires have emptied their color into the air, sends Pig’s hand over her mouth to cover a sudden gasp.
“It’s like the ball spinning from the ceiling at one of those clubs, remember?” she asks, without specific memory of one. Two decades have dissolved everything so familiar in her university days to vague, fleeting notions.
“Of course. That one with parties where everybody wore 1990s vintage outfits.”
“Le Discotheque. What a terrible place.”
“We were such stupid kids,” says Mai with exaggerated conviction.
Pig nods at the unintended truth of Mai’s joke. Pig, back then, had assumed her own family would take care of whatever was to come after she graduated. How naive of that girl to believe her future lay in stone before her.
“Right behind each of the lenses are thousands of little mirrors taking in more information than we could look at in ten lifetimes,” says Mai, motioning toward the bird with an open hand, a gesture Pig thinks more apt for an audience much larger than a lone childhood friend. It’s how Mai speaks now, she realizes, always with those gently gliding hands in perpetual tai-chi movements.
“What happens to the information?” she asks Mai.
“Scans tell us about the behavior of subparticles as they’re transmitted through a pillar. We quantum-process waveforms they generate in our data to predict what’s underneath. I’m just parroting the engineers, but one of them said the analytics are pretty much listening to and imagining what our world’s like, outside in.”
Mai’s voice lilts, which always happens when she tried to make complex subjects appear so happily simple.
“And then you’d go out and stabilize the buildings?”
“My firm’s just orchestrating first-step evaluation. Then the government officials who hired us will send teams to actually poke at unstable structures and add supporting elements where they can.”
“Well, whatever they say they’re doing, I hope they’ll actually do it.”
Last year, Pig counted three lean-outs in Krungthep proper. With the floods worsening and levees breached daily, concrete foundations and support pillars began to fracture, the ground beneath them more like sponge than stone. For those more fortunate, their buildings at most swayed like tired dancers on windy days. A few hundred less fortunate found that their buildings tipped a few degrees to one side within months. Pig watched live broadcasts of panicked families pointing to their slanted homes, and when it became clear that no tower would collapse suddenly, she went to a temple to make alms for everyone’s well-being, especially Woon’s.
The bird lingering near them lets out a beep and then drifts to its perch.
“Ready to take a peek?” Mai asks with a wink, before pointing to a swarm of pixels on a screen. A three-dimensional rendering of a pillar appears, same as on the platform. With a swiping motion in the air, Mai peels away its stony outer skin to reveal the grid of steel rods underneath. When she swipes to the next layer, she exposes a snaking vein spanning the height of the pillar.
“That long line right there,” says Pig.
Mai pinches her fingers and picks out the entirety of the crack from the surrounding mass of concrete and steel. Rotating on the screen, the shape looks like a bolt of lightning reaching for ground.
“And we would have thought this support pillar was fine. Imagine how many like it are in the city.”
Pig thinks of all the buildings that have gone up over the past few decades. Clusters of towers used to rise only from the main commercial districts, but now the entire skyline brushes against low-hanging clouds.
“Well, honestly, this has been both incredible and scary.”
“You’re not upset, are you?”
“No, I don’t think so. Do the VIPs freak out when they see this?”
“It’s usually a very persuasive demo. Seeing means everything.”
“Thanks for giving it to me. Really, I’m not being sarcastic at all. I’m a nobody, and I’m getting this tour.”
“You’re my friend,” says Mai. “Much more important than any visiting dignitary.”
“You’ve gotten to be such a jokester.”
“I’m serious. And let’s see each other soon. I’ll make sure Phee comes.”
“Can’t wait. She was just a little girl the last time you brought her along.”
“And please bring Woon, if he’s not too busy.”
“We can always hope,” says Pig, and she leaves it at that.
* * *
☐ ☐ ☐
To get back to the apartment, Pig rushes to a ferry that takes her across the flooded area that once was the Klong Toey neighborhood. The boat, a fiberglass long-tail with two huge outboard motors, glides through the canal that used to be Rama IV road, its traffic jam days long over. She passes alongside the second stories of old storefronts. Sometimes, a sliver of signage surfaces just above the boat’s wake, and she can make out the names of former dental offices, tutoring centers, barbershops. Few people now call these buildings home, but Pig glimpses a bare-chested old man squatting on what had been a window ledge to shave, guided by his reflection in shaded water.
There were happy years after, weren’t there? Whenever she feels sadness return, she would think of the good things: those car rides with Mai, her childhood parakeets, New Year’s dinners at the ancient cook-shop restaurant in Silom, Woon as a baby looking up from her cradling arms—those scrunched brows and beady eyes that moved her to tears and promises. They would all come back, as if she were reliving them again. She thinks of how her father, withered nearly to weightlessness, had said the same thing of cherished vacations and favorite pets returning, as he lay dying in his hospital bed.
Her father didn’t say whether the not-so-good things also returned. She doesn’t
want to live again the childhood discovery of her dead puppy, a glass-eyed and fly-swarmed victim of a snake bite in the garden, or the times a certain lecherous professor insisted that she bed him. Most certainly, she didn’t want to find herself again speechless on the phone in her old living room after finding out that Sawahng—a most winsome husband candidate, the fortune-tellers had said—had convinced the family to bet a reckless bulk of their investments on the wrong crop derivatives, not anticipating the first floods and the rice shortages that followed. Before that, she had believed that misfortune only visited people without much luck in the first place. How naive that woman was.
At the southern flood wall, she gets off, walking up a ramp kept afloat by truck tires covered in duckweed. She shields her ears as she goes past the row of discharge pipes, a perpetual waterfall even more deafening than real ones in the mountains. The pumps are working this afternoon, expelling the river that has seeped from underneath them onto the river that threatens to wash over the city.
As far as she knows from elevation maps, the building where they live was built on land at least level with current seas. The parts of the city that used to be marshes and rice fields are sinking the fastest. With clear weather, she can see the unnerving tilt of distant towers, perceptibly angled toward and away from each other like wild shoots of bamboo. People still live there. If she looked through Woon’s old binoculars, she would be able to make out bedsheets and towels drying on balcony clotheslines and, at night, the flickering white of screens. It’s all perfectly safe, a minor lifestyle adjustment, the officials declared.
“Two orders, to go,” she says to the fish maw lady at the market. Woon’s favorites.
She carries the soup in hot bulging cellophane bags that dangle from her fingers all the way to the building, a half-hour walk from the port. She crosses through torrents of people lurching home in the early evening and others stopping at sidewalk stalls to inspect end-of-day bargains. The streets smell of sweet fruits, engine fumes, and fish guts.
Bangkok Wakes to Rain Page 22