Bangkok Wakes to Rain

by Pitchaya Sudbanthad

  * * *

  ☐ ☐ ☐

  It doesn’t take more than a thump for Pig’s hand to find the flashlight by the door. She switches it on and shows Mai into the apartment. Standing in the foyer, they nod at each other. Mai’s eyes follow the beam around the living room.

  “Do you want to see the other rooms?” Pig whispers.

  “Maybe some other time. Another week or year, however long you and Woon need.”

  Pig can hear her son snoring in his room. The snores won’t last long; Woon has never been a restful sleeper and will soon flip over and quiet down.

  While she was outside with Mai, he came out for the slice of cake she had left for him. She picks up the empty plate off the floor and carries it to the kitchen sink, where she would normally catch up on the news as she washed dishes. Tonight, she and Mai will be accompanied only by the squeak of her fingers on the wet plate and their bare feet on the kitchen tiles.

  “Are you sure you don’t want me to cross-run a physiological diagnostics module?”

  Pig shakes her head. If anything remains of the son she loves, his face will tell her, and this time she promises to let herself see.

  “When will they get here?”

  “Just listen for the wings.”

  A half hour later, Pig opens the sliding door and steps out to the balcony. Beyond, in the open windows across from them, multitudes of solar lamps eke out light with their remaining charge, and, farther out, the dim glow of inclined towers, lucky for the night to have power, give shape to the skyline. The air is hot and buzzing with mosquitoes. Louder is the whirring of three small rotors. Pig looks to Woon’s windows and wonders if her son is awake.

  The birds power on their scanners, dotting Woon’s windows and the outside of his room with blue light.

  “Avoid looking at reflected beams,” Mai says next to her, and Pig shuts her eyes.

  The city seems to have quieted, as if all the air has suddenly left it. The night crackles. Pig feels her body electrify, every particle seemingly humming. Pinpricks of blue and white pierce through, and quivering constellations bloom inside her lowered eyelids.

  It all seems familiar, but she isn’t sure why. Then a sight returns: a younger Mai, hemmed in by the celebratory crowd, squatting on the last steps of the university pier where it met the river. Mai looked up and handed her a basket made of banana leaves and bright amaranth flowers, purple and orange. “C’mon, make your wish,” Mai said.

  Pig turns to watch thousands of candles bob away in the ebbing tide, each carrying pleas into the dark. She feels Mai’s hand clasp around hers.

  IV

  NETHERWORLD

  The three of us set our alarms to wake us while the stars still cast shadows. We tiptoe outside, careful not to let the screen door slap or to say more than we could with hand signals. It isn’t because we’re mindful of anyone’s sleep. It’s just that it’s more gainful to let the others stay lost in their dreams. The elders talk wistfully of the olden days when the ocean was so bountiful that all they had to do was reach into a wave to hook a catch by its gills, but we only know of times where there are so many perches to claim and not enough in the sea. Out we dive with splashes no louder than minnows breaching the surface. The fastest and earliest of us break for plum spots where the bottom divots and freshwater flows right over the salty currents. We scramble up the rusty poles, our spears and nets on our backs, until we reach the curved end where the old ones say the lights used to shine, and there we hang a few arm’s lengths over the water, depending on the tides. We wait, our grip loose and ready on the bamboo handle, elbows raised in position, eyes searching.

  The fish are smarter than a land person believes. We know the fish know we’re here. They tease us, darting across our shadows, so close we can see the red inside their gills. We miss, cursing. We never hear them laugh, but we know they do. If we get impatient, the morning totally worthless, we leap in after them. We pair up and unwrap our nets across channels in the underwater dunes. We can hold our breaths for five, six, seven minutes. We kick, propelling forward in bursts, hoping at every second that we will have caught more than baitfish, and when our lungs feel like they’ve turned to coral, we make for air.

  This morning our C-Os buzz against our forearm. Forget the fish, our mothers say, we have a visitor.

  We return, the sun-paled wood on the deck darkening where we drip. Our mothers are waiting for us in the lanai with a middle-aged woman, fair-skinned, compared to ours, and already in a wetsuit that looks like her own and not one of our rentals. We clasp our hands and give the woman a wai, before looking again at our mothers.

  “Big Sister Juhn here is a seasonal volunteer from the medical corps,” they say. “She’s making a house call in one of the fishery districts. You’ll ready a long-tail boat and take her where she needs to go.”

  We nod and grab Big Sister’s rucksack. This way to the dock, we show with our open hands. As we check the fuel cells and make sure to wipe the seats clean of squid bits, the woman waits, gazing at a faded Skytrain map still enclosed in plastic. It dates back to when this dock used to be the first landing for Mo Chit Station, the name on the one sign that hasn’t been ripped out for scrap.

  It’s unusual that anyone ever comes here during monsoon season. Currents, sped by wash-offs from the mountains, gain enough strength to carry fallen houses far out into the gulf, where the wreckage will join other debris tumbling toward the seafloor. Mosquitoes find quiet puddles of rainwater and lay eggs, spawning black clouds low in the mangroves. The tourist zones with the museums and snorkel-through ruins are closed. The market stalls hawking salvaged knickknacks and seashell-encrusted furniture—the more water warped and stained, the more sought after—have shuttered. No diving shows or feats of underwater endurance scheduled, just silt and rust everywhere, staining everything they touch the red of stingray blood.

  It’s our favorite time, this late in the season. School’s still out, and we can do whatever we like. Best thing, we don’t have to pretend not to have C-Os, or to go around in silly clothing the land people think we still wear, because of some movie or soap opera made about us. It should be like this year-round.

  When the engine revs to life and sends out high, arcing sprays from the driveshaft, we tell Big Sister we’re ready. We cast off and steer from the dock with the lever stick, until we’ve pivoted east toward where she wants us to take her.

  Off we throttle into the brightening day. We dart forward, shifting speed and direction where swirls at the surface warn us of structures beneath, or where the tint in the water changes from brown to green and back, telling of snaggy weeds or shallow runoffs. Mostly, it’s the names that guide us across these waters. Everywhere worth knowing has a name like Uncle Victory, Auntie Rainbow, the Glass Elephant—hundreds of them, each embedded inside our heads by our mothers’ songs, by pointing fingers since when we were babies and could barely say any word at all.

  “We’ll be turning right in a few minutes,” Big Sister says over the roar of the engine. She’s in the middle of the boat, sitting on an upended cooler we usually use to keep shrimp alive. We look to see if she’s using her C-O, but it doesn’t seem so. She’s been here or was from here, we guess. We sometimes get these visitors, too: the returnees.

  “What are your names?” she asks.

  “I’m A, that’s B, and that’s C,” our oldest says, pointing first to herself.

  “Easy enough to remember.”

  We nod. We don’t like to say much to the visitors. Our mothers say that we have to make them happy, because it’s part of our livelihood. Smile, be helpful. Pose for their cameras. We’re sick of it, honestly. We already have our water and our fish and our farmed greens. It’s time us Krung Nak people shrug off the outsiders. We resolve not to smile at her.

  We turn where Big Sister orders us. It’s deeper here, nearly all the two- and three-story shophouses have gone
under, their roofs visible as rectangular tracts of mud through the murky water. Only above four or five stories do buildings remain above water, for who knows how long. Anything has a way of disappearing. Every once in a while, we wake to trembling floorboards accompanied by a horrific sound, like hundreds of food cans being crushed, and in the morning someone will report that Uncle W or Uncle Hilton had toppled over, a few kilometers away.

  The waterway widens into a lagoon where the old ones say people once raced horses. Imagine that, the sound of gallops, the cheers, and not the squawking of thousands of migrant birds.

  We speed up across the open water, the wind batting our faces, before we cross under a raised highway. Traffic gets busier near the Asoke settlements. Larger fishing vessels motor out toward the gulf, their nets still empty, the menfolk not yet drunk. The glass-bottom boats find out-of-season use transporting schoolchildren. The air smells of seafood rice soup simmering in large pots and of fresh laundry drying on clotheslines overhead. It’s a fine morning. Big Sister appears to be enjoying the scenery.

  Of course, we take her on a slight detour. We round a corner and glide slowly past the white facades of a former shopping center, now bedecked with last night’s catch. Ocean fish hang from hooks, their guts ripped out. Everybody has on rubber shoes, for all the blood and slime slick on the ground. The sun bears down. The stench becomes inescapable. We struggle to contain our laughter as we watch Big Sister bring her hand to her nose.

  It’s fun to mess with people from the new cities. They want to see how things really are. So we show them.

  “That was unnecessary,” says Big Sister. “You could have gone straight but you didn’t. Why?”

  “It’s a shortcut,” says A. “Better the stink than getting stuck in front of the market.” We all hope Big Sister Juhn has no idea that the market is half a kilometer north.

  “This is not the first time I’ve come around here; you should probably have guessed.”

  “We thank Big Sister for taking care of us sea people.”

  “You don’t mean that, but it’s okay.”

  Big Sister doesn’t say anything further. We don’t either.

  We taxi down a small canal. The house she’s visiting is at the far end. It’s one of the newer houses built from the kits towed in on barges. They no longer look like the shipping containers they once were. They’re stacked on stilts and connected, to open on the inside into a courtyard. They have glass walls, jutting balconies, and gardens on the roof watched over by object-identifying quad-propeller hawks, to scare the all-too-common gulls. The owners paint these kit homes in bright colors. This one is green and yellow. Someday all the Krung Nak houses will probably be like this, instead of the ones built from things we find—the different-colored shingles, the glass blocks, the ancient timber that we managed to nail or weld together. And some of the people will say that it’s for the better. And the rest will agree.

  The woman is lying on a cot in the courtyard. She’s maybe a decade older than us. Big Sister and the woman’s family convene in a corner while we wait on the sofa. There’s lingering odor coming from the woman that no breeze can clear. It’s worse than anything we smelled at the fish station. Big Sister approaches the woman and removes some medical equipment from the backpack. The woman’s husband and the older pair who are probably her parents look on with sad faces.

  “How many times a day did you say she goes?” Big Sister asks.

  “We don’t know. She was constantly in the bathroom. We asked her if she was sick, and she said no. She went to work at the visitors center but had to come back home midday. Now this.”

  Big Sister puts on gloves, and we see her pinching the woman’s skin at an elbow.

  “I’m sorry if I’m causing any discomfort, but I’m going to turn you over,” she says to the woman. The woman groans as she turns on her side, and it’s then, with her dress partially open, that we see the woman is pregnant. Big Sister takes out some kind of clear stick and wipes it on the woman’s exposed buttocks, which have been stained turmeric yellow from her recent shitting.

  “This PCR probe will help me figure out what has infected you.”

  Big Sister inserts the stick into a metal tube that she’s holding up to the light. It’s nearly noon. The sun hangs above us, glowing white behind a veil of clouds.

  There’s not much for us to do. We take out our C-Os. We tap on our friends and tell that we got screwed having to ferry some visitor around. Did anyone hear what happened to Winky? That duck-faced bitch dumped her. What’s the word on Frog? Did you see what she was wearing? Who going to the lake for the temple fair?

  We keep one eye on Big Sister. We watch her take out packets from her bag and ask for warm water from the husband, who looks so pale and bedraggled we thought at first he was going to be her patient.

  “Mix in one of these,” says Big Sister. “The rest you’ll have her drink for the next several days. I’m also going to stick an antibiotic patch on her back. That should do the trick, but if she doesn’t get any better, take her to the closest mediplex right away.”

  “We’re in your debt, Dr. Juhn,” says the husband. “I also must ask, how is our baby girl? Should we be worried?”

  “There’s some risk, because your wife’s experiencing hypovolemia, but I wouldn’t be too concerned. Here, let me connect in and show you.”

  Big Sister flips the woman on her back and glides her specialty C-O over the woman’s protruding stomach.

  The glass wall overlooking the canal turns black. The silvery water disappears, replaced by an image of the woman’s massive belly, which then becomes a green domelike shape, which then peels away to reveal the unborn child inside. The child glows green, as if her body has been carved out of emerald. Blue webs run like rivers along her body and limbs. At the center, behind the hook of two little hands, a blue blob diminishes and expands, diminishes and expands.

  We let our C-Os drop to our laps. B almost falls off the sofa, leaning forward from the armrest she has been straddling.

  “She’s not lacking for oxygen,” says Big Sister. “She’s fine.”

  Afterward, the family sees us off at the dock, insisting that Big Sister take homemade sheets of dried squid back with her. We swivel the boat back in the direction from which we came. C straightens up to wave smiley good-byes, as if she had something to do with the family’s relief.

  “What was wrong with the woman?” asks A.

  “An old disease called cholera. Every once in a while it comes back—luckily for us, this time not much changed from what we know of it.”

  When we reach open water, we slow down, almost to a stop.

  “Anywhere else, Big Sister?” asks A.

  “No, that was the only case they assigned for me today. But as long as I’m here, I’d like to take a different route back.”

  When we hear where she wants to go, we ask if she’s sure.

  “I used to live there with my parents. They’re not in any shape to come here. It would be nice to bring back a photo, before I head back to New Krungthep in a few days.”

  We’re familiar with the area: a dense valley of buildings in different stages of decrepitude. Some are leaning, some have crumbled. Wriggly vines often cover them, erasing telltale floors, so that from a distance they look like ancient cliffs risen out of the sea. The light shines strangely there, passing through gouged floors and the remnants of glass facades. Not the most hospitable part of Krung Nak, if you ask us. The only ones who go there are the swifts’ nest harvesters, who are secretive about their sites and not very friendly. They sometimes shoot before warning.

  We tell Big Sister all this. We wait to see if we’ve said enough. Some of it is true.

  She’s hard to read, this Big Sister. She’s like the part of the estuary mouth where the waves look like they wouldn’t wash over a three-year-old, but you know that underneath furious clouds
of sand are being kicked out by the tow.

  “All right, let’s head back your way then.”

  Many thanks to the deities. She doesn’t know it, but we’re doing her a favor. We see them all the time, like we’ve said. The returnees come back here believing they’ll see their old homes, not so different from what they had been. The waterless years weren’t long ago, they like to think. Something must remain. They imagine stepping back to find the marble still shiny, old lightbulbs flickering on for their arrival. Then they find out it’s only the bits in their heads that have endured, and everyone’s sad.

  But what do we know? We’re too young to even know about most of the things they mention. We only nod and smile when they talk and talk. We sell them tissue paper so they can wipe their tears. In truth, we’re sick of them blotting their eyes. Boo hoo, so what. Enough with the crying. Quiet, already.

  Big Sister Juhn’s not going to cry. We’re going to take her another way, past some of our favorite spots. The tide will soon be washing out. The waterline will slowly lower. The golden tips of submerged pagodas will again greet the sun. We’ll pass by tidal flats that will soon be crawling with mudskippers, thousands of spherical eyes poking from puddles on what the old ones say was the roof of a supermarket. Then we will show Big Sister the hollowed-out building where bats have taken over, their screeching noisy even well before the darkening hours, when they’ll pour into the sky like smoke. We’ll visit the windmill with its turret barely above water and its sails now turned by currents. We should pass by a sundries raft, and we’ll tell them to make us iced coffee, to go. The ice will be cold, and we will hardly take a break between sips.

  We will ask Big Sister if she has enjoyed her afternoon. We expect a good tip.

  CROSSINGS

  The building where he works floats ten kilometers west of his neighborhood, anchored to a network of piers in the newly formed sea. Part of its outer structure came from the salvaged national library, and the high-pitched roof over its side entrance is from the archives building on what was Samsen Road. This is the entrance that lets him take a shortcut through the brick-paved courtyard where, among mothballed specimens of Old Krungthep’s subway cars, he often stops at the ancient swing that once towered over the traffic of tuk-tuks and minibuses taking tourists to the golden landmarks of Rattanakosin. For good luck, he likes to knock on its wood, pocked by barnacles and bleached pink by caustic tides.