She’s tempted to stay, of course. Some semblance of her could have the pleasure. It’s not as if she hasn’t thought about it.
“The funicular’s out of service,” says Woon, with that dour expression of his. “Mother, can you walk for a bit?”
“I’ll be all right. There wasn’t even one the last time I came.”
She recognizes the visitor center and its multiple flagpoles and the grimy leaf-covered roof, not much changed at all, except for the glass-walled gift shop added at one side. Even here, by the bottommost falls, the continuous rush of water pouring over limestone shelves begs her to speak louder. Strangers’ children call one another’s names across milky turquoise pools. They laugh, gawking at wriggly fish nibbling their feet. Her own grandchildren squat on the rocks, clandestinely dropping crumbs from their snack biscuits onto a mob of gasping mouths.
“Puk, Mint, if we get fined, it comes out of your allowance,” Woon says, and strong-arms them back to the trailhead. Up the wood-planked paths they go, slowly for her sake, she knows. They walk past young children running down the steps in soaked clothes, bathing-suit-clad farangs with translation modules over their ears. Bamboo growths as tall as streetlamps curve overhead, breaking sunlight with thin, feathery leaves. She acquiesces to posing for a 4-D capture in front of an animated sign warning of thieving monkeys.
At each level, the falls grow taller and more powerful. Silky white curtains veil sloping rocks hollowed under the waterline. Their roar deafens. The twins shout at each other, pointing at foamy swirls in the water.
“I see cows. I see horses.”
“Keep up, kids. We still have several levels to go,” calls Woon, up on the next landing.
It’s good that he’s having fun, Pig thinks. When he was young, Woon was always running around, making silly. It’s been too long since she’s seen that boy.
“Your father wants to show that his legs still have it,” says Dao, who’s helping her up the stairs. “Look, you’re impressing nobody! Come down and look after Mother, you hear?”
“ I’m fine on my own,” says Pig. “You can go make sure Puk and Mint don’t run off a ledge.”
“Okay, I’ll be right back,” Dao says. Pig watches her daughter-in-law, arms spread, keeping balanced over moss-nibbled rocks, her pointed, crescent feet slipping yet somehow finding the next step. Not the most graceful woman, but in what Pig once regarded as uncouth she now tries to find some endearing virtue.
Truth is, for some time, Pig didn’t think her son’s marriage would last. She had suspected eventual self-sabotage on Woon’s part, that he would end up doing something stupid one day, just as he’d done as a young man, unable to escape the fantastical impulsiveness she’d once found charming in his father. Yet, there’s something in Dao—her practical head, her calm command when the mood turns tense for others, ever the schoolteacher—that has provided ballast for her son, the woman’s sharp tongue aside. No, she isn’t someone Pig had imagined her son would marry—someone with at least a halfway respectable family name—but what do the elders ever really know? Her own father had been ecstatic when he’d heard that she and Sawahng were going to marry. Sawahng had come from a finance family with a trusted surname in their circles. A most beneficial alliance, was how her father put it. What had all that led to? A case of exorbitant malfeasance and then flight, she and Woon left to bear the shame.
“Grandmother, Grandmother, look at the pretty clothes,” Puk says, leaping up the stairs. “What is this, a fashion show?”
Beside the trail, bright dresses have been left under a large tree—offerings for some wish answered by the mountain spirits. Collarless blouses in magenta and green, edged with golden threads. Knee-length wraparound skirts, like the kind worn by her grandparents’ grandparents. Where on earth did they even find these?
“Be respectful, Puk,” she says. “Watch what you say, or they might come visit you tonight.”
“No, no! Don’t scare us, Grandmother!” Mint says, plugging her ears.
“Serves you right,” Dao says.
“Hey down there,” a voice calls out.
“Father! We see you.”
Woon’s leaning on a bamboo railing at a ledge far above them. If his wife wasn’t here, if he were two decades younger, Pig would have yelled for him to be more careful. One never knows how rusted the nails are or what has devoured the insides of a bamboo rod.
“Woon, don’t put your whole weight on that,” Dao yells up.
This is also true: Pig has realized that, at one point, she not only expected her son’s marriage to fail, she wished for its doom. She had felt guilty for his early troubles, with a wastrel of a father and then fatherless, and with a mother who couldn’t keep up the life he had enjoyed as a young boy. That useless, foolish woman who expected that her life would comply with her sweetest imagination of it. She had thought she’d have a chance to be a better mother and make it up to him. Instead, it’s Woon who has been more than good to her. Not very many in his generation bother to treat their elders with so much reverence or warmth. Yes, she’s been lucky, but does she deserve the luck?
“Grandmother, come, come. We’re going to catch up to Father.”
“Don’t worry about me. I’ve been to these falls so many times. Look, there’s a bench under that tree.”
“Mother, you know we can’t leave you here.”
“I’m okay. You all go ahead; just don’t forget to fetch me on your way down.”
“Dao, what’s going on?” Woon’s voice reaches them from the ledge above.
“Mother wants to stay at this bench,” Dao says.
Pig sits down on the concrete bench and drops her bag on her lap. Her knees thank her. She hadn’t realized how much they ached until she took her weight off them.
“Grandmother, come, hurry. We only have a few more levels to go.”
“You two blink some images of the higher falls for me. It’ll be like I’ve seen them with my own eyes.”
She says it, but she knows it’s not true. It is absolutely not true.
They’re interrupted by a man with spotless white shoes and the telltale optical modification. He first bows a wai toward Dao, and then remembers also to bow to his elders.
“Excuse me, do you mind if we leave my mother with yours? We don’t want her to get overtired.”
“I don’t know. Would you expect my mother-in-law to chase her if she wanders away?” asks Dao.
“Don’t worry, she’ll sit here and won’t move one step. It’s what she does all day, with us.”
“I wouldn’t mind the company,” Pig says before Dao can answer.
A woman wearing an untucked blouse pitter-patters to the bench and gingerly lowers her bottom onto it. The woman, maybe a decade older than her, has a pretty, congenial face that reminds Pig of Caterpillar’s, back when they were all at the university. Whatever happened with Caterpillar? That’s right, gone, like they’re all beginning to go, one by one, each into her own black-and-white photo set on an easel at memorial rituals.
“Are you sure, Mother? Will you be all right?”
“Dao, pretend that I’m not here and take the children up to Woon. I’ll be happy here.”
“Okay. Don’t be shy to tap us if you need us to come down. Come on, children. Let your grandmother rest here with her friend.”
She watches Dao and her grandchildren trudge up the steps and disappear behind a cliff. They reemerge at the ledge above, where Woon stands, puzzled. She sees Dao talking to him, and Woon looking down to the bench where she’s sitting. She waves up at him, and he waves back, along with the twins. They disappear up the next level of steps.
“Isn’t it beautiful? All that water. These trees and rocks,” the woman next to her says, pointing to the falls. “What’s your name? I’m Lucky.”
“My name is Pig, and yes, it is. I’ve always loved these f
alls.”
She gazes up into the canopy, away from the crowd gathered at the rocky shallows. Misty slivers of light shoot through wavering treetops. Long wispy branches trace dark shapes against the bright colorless day. A cool breeze sweeps through, sending dried leaves into lofty, airborne rolls, except those dried leaves are golden-winged butterflies thickly clinging to the edges of branches. They return to perch after a few short spirals, settling and resettling on different parts of the trees, as if visiting old friends and lovers.
She loves it so: to be a woman breathing on this earth.
A tap on a shoulder interrupts her. Her new friend is smiling and pointing to herself.
“What’s your name? I’m Lucky.”
Pig nods. “Yes, I know. . . . My name is . . . ”
Lucky points up at the waterfalls. “Do you hear that? I think it’s raining outside.”
PARTINGS
The wind, always the wind. It carries drier sand from the dunes in prickly waves. It rattles Mai’s sunglasses, and by instinct she squints, without any real need. She walks back toward the ocean and the wet sand. Not far away, a kite—white and dovelike, with a long streaming tail—floats and dives over the family holding its line. Everyone’s looking up at it, including her. She’s afraid the line will snap, all the while knowing that it won’t. The kite, this family of four with their striped shirts and partially wet shorts: they’ve retained their quality of memory, beginnings and ends encapsulated, witnessed as if all at once. A man wearing red track pants is about to jog from the dunes with his golden retriever. Soon, a flock of seabirds will land near the tidal pool ahead. The bluffs above appear golden yellow now, but in the evening, near twilight, they will appear chalkboard gray. A crew of surfers are paddling out on their boards, and she knows that one of them is about to wipe out under a spectacular blue curl, his friends cheering.
“Am I interrupting your swim?” Pig asks her.
“No, I was just walking, drying up.”
“Where are we?”
“Near Cornwall in southwest England.”
“Have you visited here before?”
“No, not before I afterbodied. None of this is mine.”
Every atom on this beach had been scanned at some point by the seeing machines, every subparticle guessed by processing units. Then there are the other details—the gritty sand between toes, the children hunting for seashells along the shore—each a memory someone has deposited in the public map room. Only when a visitor from the other world shifts in does Mai feel it’s anything other than normal.
“How was the water?” asks Pig.
“It’s still too cold for a long swim, although I probably could have tweaked that.”
“Well, why didn’t you?”
“I tend to prefer things the way they were.”
They walk along the curve of the beach to the next outcropping of rocks without saying a word. The wind picks up again. Their clothes flap like sails. The tips of dune grass lean with each gust and then ease back.
“You haven’t told Woon about my visits here, have you?” asks Pig.
“No. It’s been years since I last saw him, the last time probably with you, before he got married.”
“I have a feeling he might seek you out, to convince me.”
“If he does, what do you want me to tell him?”
“Nothing. I don’t want to encourage him.”
“Your son means well, for what that’s worth.”
“A lot of headaches. Good intentions mostly come to that.”
“We’ve grown so cynical.”
“Just a pair of miserable old women grumbling by the ocean.”
“Speak for yourself,” says Mai, conjuring her twenty-year-young self for a second before returning to her usual manifestation. The joke never gets old for her.
“On the topic of young people, how’s Phee?” asks Pig, ignoring the joke.
“She’s on what’s supposed to be her sabbatical year, but mostly busy with her ten-year-old. She doesn’t come to the portal as much as she said she would, but I understand that she has her life.”
“Raising kids is so much more complicated and expensive now. I don’t know how my children do it, even with my help.”
“I’m sure they appreciate you being there.”
“I do wonder. I worry. For them, for everyone. I meditate, I pray to my ancestors and whoever else might be listening, and I go back to being anxious. That’s why they shouldn’t waste anything they have on me. I’ve had more than enough.”
“You don’t have to worry. I’m not here to try to change your mind. It has to be you who wants this.”
“I know.”
“I talk to other friends here, and we all seem to agree on that. It has to be an individual, personal decision.”
“I’m happy you’re not lonely here.”
“I’ve told you about Bubbles.”
“Yes, I think so.”
“It amazes me how much closer we’ve gotten. I remember hating her stuck-up guts so much. Now she shifts in almost every week, your timeline, or I go to her vineyard near Lyon and have a nice picnic on a hill.”
“You did tell me this. She spent tons on the amenities upgrades. A Versailles for anyone who can afford it.”
“It’s tastefully done, especially her gardens.”
“That’s right. She’s now a woman of the land, her fingernails stained by earth, if you can even call it that.”
“You’re being unfair again.”
“Sorry. Didn’t mean to make fun of you and your new best friend.”
“Stop it.”
“Okay, okay. Just trying to be funny. Am glad that everything’s great with you all.”
“For the most part.”
“I hope so, for you.”
The beach ends ahead at a bluff, so they follow a trail flanked at first by grassy dunes and then thickets with mustard-colored flowers. On a hill up the beach, Mai spots a large sign warning beachgoers of undertows and rip currents. To sink. To struggle without air. She’s surprised that she fears drowning, even when it no longer threatens her.
“If it pleases you to know,” she says to Pig, “I’ve often thought about the facts of my afterbody and the time right before I went ahead with the procedure. It seemed like a decision of life or death then. Now it doesn’t. I only paid for more time. That’s all. A freak solar phenomenon could happen tomorrow, or another Oslo, and I wouldn’t even know it. I’m relaxing by a clear, blue lake in South America, and then what, that bright light they always say would appear? Will everything then go dark, like it would have before?”
“Not unlike what befalls those of us out here, I guess. Breathing. Breathing. Poof.”
“Aren’t you the least bit afraid? Of not being here in some way?”
“I like to think not. Besides, haven’t you already kind of partway left?”
“I’m still me, and I’m still here, Pig.”
“Are you?”
“Come, I want to show you something. It might help you ease worries you haven’t admitted to, or it might not. In any case, you’ll probably find it fascinating.”
“You’re always wanting to show me something. Why do you always have some surprise up your sleeves?”
“C’mon, shift with me.”
“All right.”
The next step they take isn’t on sand but on sun-heated concrete. Flip-flops appear on their feet, courtesy of Mai. They’re standing on the front steps of a building she trusts Pig will recognize right away. High above the ornate old house is the condo tower with its many curved balconies.
She sees on Pig’s face the startling recognition and, soon after, the disbelief. She has felt the same way. The totality of the capture shouldn’t impress her more than any other place in this world, but it does. How remarkable: the
extent and detail of what is now here, so much that she can forget there’s still a there, in whatever condition time and nature has willed. Here is everything that’s been cataloged of there, within reach like books lined up on a shelf, so that she can step wherever she wants into the old city, busy and smelly and incessant, and feel like she’s never left it. She likes best arriving not directly to the building but to a Skytrain stop a quarter kilometer away and retracing the sidewalk route she used to take coming back near dusk from the university. How wonderful, to move along shadows of people unknown and the familiar strangers she didn’t know by their actual names, but whose storefront or daily commute had installed them in her daily life then, distinct from the faces inserted there by someone else’s recollections or filled in by the processing units. To be back here again and look up fondly at the endless silhouette of telephone and electrical wires entangled above, and the brief, particular shades of gray and pink the dying afternoon has colored the surrounding shophouses. And, with every floating stride, to see the building closer and closer, each of its lit windows shining out a welcoming beacon for her.
“I haven’t thought about this place for a very long time,” says Pig. “Do you shift here a lot?”
“I sometimes keep this experience open, even as I’ve shifted to other places.”
“We haven’t met here.”
“You never asked. I thought you might not want to kick up old history.”
She doesn’t tell Pig that she has never gone beyond the lobby. Never rode the elevator up to the condo, not wanting the possibility—permission’s more like it—of unlocking archive settings to bring back the specters of her parents, reappearing as they were, raised to seeming life from the museum of her mind. Safer to bring them up as still photos that can only draw up brief, vague notions of a person before flowing away like a stream through an open hand. Photos will never bicker with each other or ask about her day or insist that she eat the freshly cut pineapple, bought at the market some afternoon long before it was possible for anyone to avoid the rude interruption of mortality.
Bangkok Wakes to Rain Page 27