The songs return to him, one by one, in snippets, as if he were hearing them on the ferry’s PA speakers. How many times did he play each one? Lying on his bed, his headphones engulfing his ears, he devoured entire albums and then feasted on them again. He played the usual greats, Ellington and Miles and Coltrane, but he was held captive more by musicians few had heard of, like Arturo Watanabe and Emilia Z, whose names were evoked with reverence on online music boards, for deserving reasons. Or the older forgottens—say, Alfie Watkins or Morris Clemens and gang—whose sessions he downloaded from bootleg archives, back when downloading was a thing.
“Stop it, you morons,” a teenage girl in school uniform, unchanged since his own schoolboy days, yells at her two friends for no apparent reason. They giggle and shove each other, paying him no mind.
These schoolkids, coming home from their hyperlearning sessions or whatever, probably have no idea anything exists beyond Nairobi quarto or rup-pup. They’ve probably never known what a piano can do under deft hands, the way a capriccio once swept him up to a state as close as he’s ever gotten to levitation, or how a drum solo can enliven the beat of a troubled heart, for better or worse.
He remembers the moment before he resolved to stay in that apartment and lock out the world outside it. He was listening to a newly discovered bootleg recording with Clemens, Jenkins, and Thompson all going at it one long-ago night, something he’d played at least a dozen times before, when a song suddenly coiled around his entire being, note by note, with the unexpected aggression of a pet boa long thought tame. As songs shuffled to the next album on his list and then another, he grew certain that some musical matter had condensed from the air to become palpable essence filling every crevice of the room. Beyond, the city boiled in immeasurable suffering. Inside his cocoon of sound, there was only undisturbed, perfect communion with miracle after miracle. The dead were alive to sing into his ears. Time flowed in every direction, until there was no such thing as time. He let himself sink, like a prehistoric insect into sap. He couldn’t bear to leave. What was it his father had said about that collection of LPs inherited from his grandfather? A shelf full of songs outweighs all the gold in the world. Probably some quote the man also stole, well before he’d disappeared on Woon and his mother.
The high-speed ferry takes him to the Kanchanaburi suburbs, part of the second resettlement area after the floods. He disembarks at a port built into the first floors of a shopping complex. He walks past brightly lit, white-walled shops in compliance with neatness and signage codes, located along the one corridor so that anyone who has to get to the mainland or other barge colonies won’t be able to avoid them. The sun has dipped under the billowy silhouette of the Tenasserim Mountains, and a lingering stripe of orange sky is fighting for its life. At this hour, the evening rush has thinned. He can actually see the wide, smooth pavement in front of him.
From the transparent trash bins, human street cleaners on work furlough from a detention facility are carting away a day’s worth of drink cartons and lunch kits. He avoids looking at their faces. What were their crimes? Not making a night’s curfew? Shouting too loudly at the market? Each week brings in new orders and codes. He can’t keep up. Perhaps one day he will be stopped and fined, or worse, for wearing brown in the wrong month or parting his hair in the wrong direction.
There was so much desperation for normalcy at the start of the migrations that almost everyone was willing to nod for whatever rules were proposed. Onward. Let the catastrophes of those years sink with the old city. Few liked to talk anymore about the many who didn’t make it—often those who had held off from leaving because they couldn’t afford to—or how much had been lost beyond the buildings and property. He was certainly complicit; he’d let his own children learn of the troubles in whatever way least disturbed their happier future.
He never told them about the time he’d volunteered at a refugee camp. The official order had been to use the word evacuee not refugee, because the former gave some dim hope of return, but few complied in private. They knew by then what they were. He counted himself a refugee, albeit one not as unfortunate as most others. A relative owned an empty condo on higher land, and he and his mother were able to stay there, dry and at least with clean food at prices less flesh-gouging than in the areas closer to sinking Krungthep.
At the nearby camp, he started out as an assistant in the makeshift commissary warehouse, checking inventory mostly and taking note of when they were running low on certain supplies. It was the kind of job a specialized bot would have done faster and more thoroughly, but most of those had long been left behind in the city to rust underwater at their charging stations. A human like him would have to do.
He tried as best he could. Inventory levels proved unpredictable. Some nightshifts, he could climb on top of a pallet of bottled water and leap across a warehouse full of them as he scanned. Other times, there was so little water available, the refugees had to line up with their issued canteen—or more likely, a cup or bucket—to claim their share of a bottle. He stood at the commissary window, measuring out water, until his ankles ached.
One night, while taking a break outside, he heard a cry from one of the nearby tents. He couldn’t make out what the voice was saying. He looked around to see if anyone would respond, but after a minute passed and nobody did, he decided to unzip the tent and climb inside. The shit and urine stink immediately struck his nose, followed by damp rot. He held a hand over his face and turned on a headlamp to find an old woman lying on a pad stained green and brown.
“Is anybody there?” she pleaded. “Hello? Anyone?”
He took her hand and felt a cold web of creased skin slide against his palm.
“Yes, there’s someone,” he said.
The woman didn’t seem to acknowledge him. “Anyone there? Hello?” she went on.
“Yes, someone’s here,” he said. She looked to him to be in her late seventies. She wore a blouse that used to be white, and gold-rimmed glasses. She might once have been a teacher or accountant, he thought.
“Hold on, okay?” he asked her. “Let me radio for someone.”
He let go of her hand, and although she still hadn’t acknowledged him, the pitch of her voice rose as he left. “Is someone there?”
He did as he’d promised. He scanned and sent her tent number. Then he got busy with an onslaught of supply problems. He never saw the old woman again.
Things are different now, they say—siwilai, to use the old-time term. Order brings greater peace and a prosperous future for all, the public service signs declare. For anything else, he’ll have to wait for a better forever.
Home is one of the units in a block of ten-story, multiwinged buildings with a narrow food garden separating each wing from its neighbors. Woon thinks of stopping at the garden to check on the year-old kaffir lime plants he recently replanted into larger racks. The plants haven’t borne any fruit, but he likes to rub their leaves, which make his fingers greenly fragrant.
He appreciates the garden and the pastime it gives him on days off, but he also knows that it’s not wholly for the benefit of the families here. These food gardens are good PR for the officials talking about how the garden harvests are part of the initiative to maximize yield when so much arable land is now underwater. Everyone, though, knows that almost all their food is being imported from a consortium of corporations, with the city’s debt rising every day, but nobody likes to say it in public. Nobody wants to end up sweeping the streets.
Let the rackbot feed the lime plants. When he gets to the elevators, he decides to head up to his flat instead and arrives just in time for dinner.
Dao’s making a pan of pad Thai, a favorite with the children and certainly good enough for his mother, whatever her recollection of the street stall version sold in Old Krungthep. The twins clear and set the table. Puk brings out the glasses, and Mint fills up a pitcher with water. Everyone piles on noodles from the ste
aming pan in the middle. It took Dao years to find a proper pan like that—flat and round and blackened by years of burnt fats, unlike the composite glass in everyone’s kitchen now. They were on their honeymoon in Lisbon, of all places, and there it was, on the wall of an antiques store, hung between an old Dutch beer sign and a sun-faded one-sheet for one of the early-century superhero movies.
His mother is spearing the noodles with her fork, turning them over to judge the color and the doneness of the strands.
“I went to visit Auntie Mai today. Do you remember Auntie Mai, Mother?”
“Who’s she? An old woman forgets. Don’t be smart. Of course I do.”
“I think I’ve met Auntie Mai before,” his wife says. “At our wedding. A very pretty woman for her age.”
“She had some work done,” says his mother.
“So did you, Mother, if I remember correctly.”
“Back in the day when people went to the clinic and still left as humans.”
“I agree with Mother,” Dao says, winking at him. “The word human is going to soon become meaningless. What’s stopping me from taking Mumu to the clinic and turning her into a puffy-tailed girl? Didn’t you always want a cat-daughter, Woon?”
“Yes! Yes! We want a cat-sister,” say the twins, nearly in unison.
“She might as well be, the way your mother treats her,” he says. “I presume she’s enjoying the nice piece of mackerel in her bowl?”
“Only the freshest for Mumu,” says Dao proudly.
They laugh while his mother picks at her plate. She must be enjoying the noodles, at the least, given that she has yet to make a complaint. He’s surprised she hasn’t brought this up: that a well-balanced Thai dinner should bring together a curry soup, a vegetable dish, something meaty, and, of course, properly cooked jasmine rice. There’s no one more cooly viperous than an Old Krungthep matron thinking a meal not up to her standards.
It doesn’t help that she isn’t very enthusiastic about most things that he suggests. Let’s go picnic in the mountains. How about checking out the Loy Krathong festival at the river? His mother says no outright, as the default response to every suggestion. You all go and have fun, she says, waving them away with her words. Sometimes they win her over, sometimes not. It’s a minor feat that they’ve convinced her to go to the waterfalls with them tomorrow.
For his mother, the telenovelas suffice, especially the older ones she calls up from the archives service. Great-Grandmother liked them, she says to the twins, who often watch them with her as the drama unfurls in lavish living rooms likely lost in the sunken city.
He’s thankful for the twins, for many reasons, one of which is that they regularly get his mother out of the house. Every weekday afternoon, while he and his wife are at the office, his mother picks them up at school, taking the three o’clock ferry and returning on the five o’clock, stopping at the market so the kids can help haul back groceries in their backpacks. He has offered to hire someone else to do this. She rebukes him for even thinking of it. He’s worried something will happen, with her being over seventy and not in the best of health.
“How’s homework?” he asks the twins, who’ve finished their papaya slices. “No playtime in the envo until you’re all finished.”
“We’ve done everything except maths.”
“Dao, do you want to help them finish that part?”
“Father thinks logarithms give him migraines.”
“Tell you what. You all can go finish that homework. I’ll take care of the dishes. Mother, will you help me?”
Dao and the children disappear into the living room. He looks at his mother.
“Ready?”
Of course, he does nearly all the work, picking up the stacks of bowls and plates with open palms. His arms bent out as if weighing the dirty dishes, he keeps his balance as he strides like a minor Hindu god into the undersized kitchen.
“I told you I can carry some,” his mother says.
“Don’t worry. It’s nothing. All you have to do is load them into the autoclaver after I do the rinsing.”
He lets her do what she does best: putting things in their assigned place. She has a good eye for what fits where, a real knack for spatial geometry that lets her double the load he normally manages.
“By the way, I’ve got a message from Auntie Mai. Let me play it for you.”
He reaches to tap the wall next to them. She grabs his hand.
“No, you don’t have to. I’ll visit her soon.”
“She said that she hasn’t seen you in quite some time.”
“She’s right. It’s been far too long.”
“I’ll take you anytime you want.”
“No, I can go by myself. I much prefer it if there’s no hidden agenda.”
“Agenda?”
“Look, I know what you’re trying to do, and as your mother, I appreciate the efforts.”
“Then you understand my concern.”
“There are all kinds of reasons that I can say, some I have already, but you won’t listen. You want things your way. You always have. You’re my son.”
“Mother, if not for me, then think of your grandchildren. Don’t you want to see them grow?”
“Of course I do. It’s thoughtless of you to even suggest that I don’t.”
“Then why?”
“Why what?”
“Why won’t you even come to an informational tour with me? Auntie Mai can shift in. It won’t be such a horrific experience, whatever you imagine.”
“We can’t afford it.”
“We’ll find some way.”
“They’ll say anything to have your money, and your children and then their children will get stuck paying for the upgrades. Much cheaper to burn paper money or give alms at the temple, I say.”
“Mother, there are financing options. You have some savings.”
“It’s late, and the dishes aren’t even halfway loaded. Are we done here?”
By the way she enunciates the word done, it’s clear this is as far as she’s going to discuss the matter tonight. Her stances have a way of hardening to stone. He hopes a trickle of dew can break immovable boulders, as they often say in old martial arts movies. He’ll find some other occasion to bring up the topic again. He’ll keep at it; he has to.
“Yes, Mother. We’re done.”
* * *
☐ ☐ ☐
It’s early morning. The whole family boards the special weekend boat crowded with sightseers and migrant workers returning to mountainside towns. They had wanted to avoid the later crush of people, but it seems that everyone else had the same thought. The overburdened boat, a small converted cargo runner, pushes through the water like a hurrying giant turtle. Waves wash out at its sides in long, unbroken ridges to lap at the shore.
At first, they’re surrounded by small craft—fiberglass canoes heavy with entire families under sun-shielding umbrellas, repainted barges that drift together to form a floating bazaar—but not far outside Kanchanaburi settlement proper they find themselves the only boat on the water for long stretches, passing unawakened riverside villages along fingers of the river, until a cargo convoy or another passenger ferry roars past them in the opposite direction. Every once in a while, they spy leaf-darkened orchards behind electric-fencing, the fruits dotting trees like faint stars.
* * *
☐ ☐ ☐
An hour later, having arrived at the national park’s piers and taken a trolley up the mountainside, they come across a gaggle of other sightseers in line to buy tickets or waiting to use the public bathrooms.
The last time Pig was here, she was a university student. The waterfalls were just as crowded then, with tour buses and two-rowed passenger trucks lining the roads to jockey for legal parking. Who did she come with? Mai, most likely, maybe Wiangsuk, whom she had a crush on. Must have
been some kind of departmental trip, part collegial bonding, part excuse to haze the first-years. She remembers the same park insignia she now sees on a trail sign: the three-headed elephant Erawan drawn in a way that makes it seem as if it’s standing tiptoed on an unseen dot of land. Welcome, reads the sign, before warning about littering fines. A garbage can nearby shares its ample harvest with a flock of pigeons and sparrows.
Even with decades of flood, most Thais aren’t shying from water. It feels good having it all around, misting faces even while hiking up the trails. Water means home.
“Listen, keep your eyes on us and stay together,” her son says to the twins. “I don’t want one of you carried off in a tiger’s mouth.”
“We know you’re just saying that,” the twins say back.
“Here, help your grandmother. Walk alongside her to make sure she doesn’t fall,” says Dao.
Pig hates how they sometimes act as if she’s helpless, showing outsized concern for her health and comfort even as they entrust her with the weekday delivery and pickup of the children, which she’s managed for years without as much as a cane in hand. Filial piety serves both young and old. That’s how it works.
How dare Woon tried to take that responsibility from her. She wakes up early and looks forward to seeing Puk and Mint eat breakfast, half in their pajamas and half in their uniforms. On the way to school, she holds them, one in each hand, and lets their little energetic legs pull her forward, up sidewalks and steps. They can very well break free of her and walk at their own true pace, but they don’t—this young, not yet teenagers, and already so considerate, if only to their grandmother. What wonderful adults they’ll become. Her greatest worry: With her weakening body, how much more of them will she get to see?
Bangkok Wakes to Rain Page 26