An unexpected face floated before me. It was Winston’s.
How odd, I thought, that he should come into the music room.
“You look terrible, Dr. Stevens,” he said.
He told me he had come back to the mission house after hearing of the reverend’s passing. He took hold of me and sat me up against the wall.
Then, I saw a man and a child step into the room, with clay pots in their hands. The man’s face, dented and flattened at an acute angle on one side, I recognized at once. The boy I could never forget. I believed I had been summoned to the Netherworld.
Bunsahk brought a bowl filled with dark liquid to my lips. His son dipped a rag into it and wrung trickles into my mouth. I swallowed, not knowing what I drank, medicine or poison. I only knew that I was thirsty. With every drop, I drew in the spirit of oxen and snakes. Great jungle beasts ran inside me, growling. I tasted dirt and rubies and thousands of years of rain.
Believe me, brother, I still harbor great skepticism in the Siamese’s treatment methods, so thoroughly devoid of scientific rigor. I do believe, however, that what I actually drank contained more than what was material in that medicine. I’m certain that, by way of it, I was touched by His Spirit, and Mercy and Grace did I receive.
I drifted away from the house that might have been Gransden Hall and back to where a crooked nail had caught me, and there, clinging to it, afraid to let go, I witnessed Winston and the boy scrubbing away the filth encrusted on my skin, and Bunsahk washing me with saline. They held little fear, in spite of the perils present, and it may well be that in their courage and generosity, I have also renewed my own.
I beg that you understand my intended course even if you believe my wits lost. Please do not burden your heart with any concern; my well-being belongs to our Lord. This I know when I hear the last rasping breaths of the dying sing out their wants and fears, when Miss Crawford’s voice settles coolly on the assembly hall as she leads her young charges in prayer, or at twilight when the river shimmers with rippling fire as I’m being rowed out to attend to a patient, for whom I shall feign practical confidence, even as I wander, bewildered in the great mystery of this earthly place, because each poor soul I encounter, I’ve come to know, is also my own. The lifelong accumulation of their hours; their betrayals, blindness, and failings; their genius and heart: mine, too. I shall come to God through their eyes.
We will soon have to leave the mission compound; my funds are insufficient, alone, to continue the reverend’s work. The Siamese landowners have expressed their wish to raze the current edifice so as to build more structures on the property. I will see to it that we keep the wood and whatever other material we can salvage, for construction elsewhere.
Where will I find the necessary means to continue on here, you ask? I have discussed with Winston the formation of a partnership for the export of teak and silks to the West, and the import of European and American goods to Siam. The plan is for me to help manage the trading company at the capital and take the reins when Winston travels to trade in the Siamese countryside or the British Malayan settlements. Whatever time remains to me, though I fear there will be little, I will continue tending to the sick and injured among the populace. I’ve asked Miss Crawford if she will join me, and I anxiously await her answer.
I look with awe and gratitude at the immensity of the work to be done. The sum of it may prove to become my true, lasting mark on this world, more than medicine or faith alone could hope to effect. There are illnesses to remedy, libraries to fill, roads and homes to bring to modernity with the most healthful and uplifting of civilized comforts. In time, I hope that we will have helped the Siamese and her neighbors in this Asiatic region to construct an enduring society that wholly nourishes all its citizenry in body and spirit, and that the means of this well-being will have arrived by the provision of the highest-quality wares within reach of the most common man, which will in turn foster further humane advancements, ad infinitum. I foresee happiness and peace ahead, Our Father’s heaven on this earth if I may be so bold to proclaim, and I am committed to playing my newfound part to the fullest.
A curious happenstance occurred just today, by the way. The customs men at the port, perhaps by the work of mysterious hands or their own repentance, located the trunk lost at my arrival in Siam. On opening it, I found my old shirts. They were barely recognizable to me. Some had been perforated by the nibbling of worms and moths, rendering them unsuitable for public appearances, and some had been yellowed by moisture and rusted iron parts, while others remained intact, as whole as I remember them. These appear to me the strangest of all, like bodily shadows I shed in a past life, if I’m to adopt the Siamese beliefs. They did remind me, fondly, of the trips we made to the city, when Father would take us to old man Barrie’s. You could never stay still while he measured you with his yarn. Do you remember that? Such a troublesome imp you were, and Father so young then, with his gait erect and shoulders wide, like the mainmast of a galleon. What I would do to see him as he was. What I would give to see us then.
UPSTREAM
Yeah, it was probably a nightmare again. Sometimes he feels like he’s woken up to a mind that’s collapsed on him, and he’s still buried in the rubble of a terrible dream. He can count on his bladder to alert him to who and where he is.
“As long as I’m up, might as well go,” Clyde says in his accented Thai, still rusty after all these years. It’s late, and the lights in the room are off. He searches for the shape of the woman in the dark.
She only comes up to his shoulders, but he trusts her broad, solid build. He hooks an arm into hers, and she guides his pitter-patter to the bathroom. She helps pull down his drawstring pants and steps behind him to give him privacy, all the while keeping a loose grip under his arm.
“My butt’s freezing in this place,” he says. Like many Thai folks, the young woman doesn’t like to give the AC a rest, even if the weather cools down. It’s so cold he thinks he can feel each staple holding his chest closed.
“All right, Ms. Ducky. I’m done.”
“Hey, Khun Clyde. It’s Lucky, same as you forgetting how lucky you are to be alive.”
* * *
☐ ☐ ☐
He doesn’t agree with Lucky’s choice of words on his current state, although technically speaking, she’s right. A few weeks ago, he was on his way to join everyone who’s already gone ahead.
In the middle of a set, his chest tightened as if an invisible assailant was bear-hugging him from behind. He breathed, but it hardly felt like he breathed. A man drowning on nothing. He knelt on his knees, and his bandmates rushed to hold him steady. His vision dimmed outside in, and from the flashes whitening the periphery of his eyes, it seemed like somewhere above him an unannounced fireworks show had started. They’d ended the war, someone said on the radio. He smelled charcoal fire and cooked meat. Top of the fifth, Yankees down two, someone says on the radio.
He woke to a beige ceiling and spent a minute staring at his arms and the tubes and wires they’d stuck on him. On the glass door of a dark, empty room opposite his bed, he spotted his own reflection: a face webbed at the eyes and draped thinly where his skin sagged, but a boyish part of the man has stubbornly hung on so that a younger man might still be seen if he squinted. Every few minutes another patient somewhere behind the curtain moaned, a man, he thought, but he couldn’t be sure. He’d heard cries like that the years he worked the afternoon cleanup shift at a movie house near Times Square—always careful to thoroughly scrub his hands and arms before heading off to his gigs.
The nurse stopped by, a clipboard under her arm.
“Mr. Alston, I’m looking at your forms here. Any next of kin we can contact for you?”
“Nope, not really, not here.”
“You’re not going to be able to do much of anything for a while.”
The surgeons had to open him up to repair his ruptured right ve
ntricular valve. It would take one or two months for him to recover.
“This ain’t nothing. I’ll manage,” he said, gazing at the long strip of bandage down the middle of his chest. He wouldn’t fault them for not knowing the history of Clyde Alston, who’d bounced back from his share of broken ribs and bruised lips and all kinds of other wreckage to play his next show. Still, after discovering himself too weak to hold the TV remote, he asked the nurse to call Bobby Blue Eyes.
It was Bobby who arranged for Lucky, having used the same home health aide placement company after his mother got sick. “I pay,” Bobby said on the phone, and Clyde relented. It was good of the man, who’d made much more on other clients these past few years. Clyde, hoping to make it to 1998 without emptying his savings, had lately even agreed to play at a piano showroom, tinkling out tunes mallgoers might recognize from the movies or the supermarket aisle. He thanked the Buddha and all the heavenly deities that nobody from his night gigs saw him there, but he was sorry when the showroom had shuttered this past month after something or another happened in the unearthly realm of global finance. The Thai baht took a dive, and there were far fewer parents furnishing their kids’ future with an imported baby grand.
“Economy like tom yum goong,” Bobby explained in his accented English. “Soup is hot and spicy. So delicious. People eat too much. Everyone now pay.”
“I guess that makes sense to someone. Thank you, Bobby.”
The next morning, the young woman arrived at the hospital to ride with him in the transport van back to his flat.
* * *
☐ ☐ ☐
Whenever she speaks to him, she smiles. She smiles when she helps him into his layabout clothes and when she gives him his pills and when she asks him to turn on the AC. By the end of their first day, he understood her smile to mean that she’s on duty.
She looks young to him, no more than thirty. Instead of wearing a secondary school or university uniform, she wears dark pants and a knit shirt with the name of the placement company stitched over the chest pocket. He notices that she has at least five sets of the outfit in her rolling suitcase. She washes them in a tin basin that he doesn’t remember owning and then sun dries the wet clothes on his balcony.
They keep to a routine. He wakes early in the morning, and she takes off her headphones and gets up from the foldout cot to help him. He still can’t stand up for long, so she sponge-bathes him in his bed and then takes his blood pressure, jotting the numbers in a small red notebook. Breakfast is rice porridge with maybe pork foo or boiled garlicky fish. She spoon-feeds him, and he feels like a child eating by someone else’s hand, but he doesn’t mind. At least someone’s here while his chest creaks like wood in a decrepit house, each gulp emptier than it should be. A dull pain jabs at him when he least expects.
When he’s done, she clears away the plates and hands him the remote control. They watch a bit of a Thai channel’s midday news—the usual politicians’ interviews outside of parliament, the same kinds of bad accidents and flooding in the far provinces, but these few weeks, the anchors dedicate half the show to the economy. Grim-faced experts fear the baht soon won’t be worth a grain of sand. It’s a relief when the telenovelas come on.
“Remind me what happened last time?”
“So okay, like, the little wife has hired an assassin to go after the major wife, but the major wife has found out and has now hired a witch doctor to attack the little wife with ghost children.”
A delivery person brings them Styrofoam boxes of noodles for lunch. He eats slowly. Even chewing tires him. After the meal, he takes a nap and lets an hour or two dissolve away. He sometimes peeks out to see Lucky reclined on the sofa, wearing headphones attached to the CD player at her hip and nodding to music he can’t hear.
She doesn’t say much about herself. He pieces her together from the details she drops. He knows that she was born in Lampoon Province and came to Bangkok to study and never left. She doesn’t have her own place. Where she works is also where she stays, with a day off here and there. He gathers that her previous charge was a paralyzed lawyer who enjoyed having ghost stories read to him, and sometime before that there was a former TV personality and actress who spent much of the day singing karaoke in the living room. Of course, she’s had to put up with dirty old men and incredibly stingy people, but she doesn’t go into the details.
“You don’t have to worry about that with me, except for maybe the stingy bit,” he says.
“Oh, I know,” she says, and lifts a spoonful of rice porridge to his lips.
“Still hot.”
“It’s warm. You can’t handle it, Khun Clyde?”
“Know what I say to musicians when they’re afraid to get into a song? I tell them to dive into the gator’s mouth. Hit me again.”
She does. He slurps from the spoon and asks for another.
“Good?” she asks.
“Can use more fish sauce and chilies, if you don’t mind me saying.”
* * *
☐ ☐ ☐
He recovers faster than the doctors expected. By their third week, he’s able to walk without much discomfort, Lucky holding him by the elbow and leading him downstairs near evening, after the weather has cooled. They inch their way to the sundries store down the soi and back, for his exercise. He eyes the olieng stand every time but only buys a bottle of Singha soda for himself and a Yakult for her. Back at his flat, they pick up the bag the bento service has hung at the door. She takes his blood pressure again and then plates their meal. They eat. She washes the dishes and afterward takes him to his practice keyboard. To appease the neighbors, he keeps the volume low. She sits next to him as he plays. He asks, “What do you want to hear, young lady?” and she tells him to play whatever he likes.
One night he surprises her with a famous Poompuang loog toong song. She claps and giggles and mumbles the lyrics the whole way through. Good thing she doesn’t want to be a singer.
They sleep at eleven, on the dot. If he doesn’t fall asleep right away, he listens to the music hissing from her headphones. He can’t tell what it is. Just waves after wave of drums and machinelike noises, sometimes human voices, crashing against his ears.
He knocks on the floor to get her attention. She takes off her headphones and props herself up on an elbow.
“I can’t help but overhear a bit of you what you’re listening to,” he says.
“This? I’m so sorry, Khun Clyde. It helps me sleep, what with the construction noise outside, you know. I can turn it down.”
“It’s quite all right. I’m only curious about what it is.”
“Oh, it’s just music. Probably nothing you’d like.”
“Is this what young folks are listening to? I don’t think I’ve heard anything like it.”
“Well, it’s not Thongchai or anything popular. My friends make copies or get songs from the internet and then burn them for me.”
“You’re going to have to help me out here.”
“Did you know you can plug a phone line into the computer and dial up the modem and look for anything?”
“You did what to the phone?”
“I don’t really know how it works. It just happens when you push the right keys, I guess,” she says, and reclines back on the cot.
He doesn’t press further and returns to puddling on the bed. Lucky seems to fall asleep, and he’s left alone with his raspy breathing and the far-off shouts of nightshift construction workers outside. Saws scream their whirling songs to him. He hears hammers, one closer and a few higher and fainter, take turns forcing some steely thing into its final shape. Sometimes a motorcycle roars by, going faster than it ought in a small tributary soi. The dark city hisses at him from every direction, and he folds into himself.
* * *
☐ ☐ ☐
He can’t tell where he is. He could be at Minton’s, or the Lenox, or Nick’s base
ment spot. He thinks he sees the 134th Street crowd in a booth. Max and Eagleface and the gang. Ada and Jeanine.
Also in the room: so many headcutters in one spot. Many in the crowd probably don’t know what’s coming. They’re probably expecting a pleasant jaunt uptown, letting themselves loose clapping and whooping when they see the colored folks do it, so they can tell their friends, and then a speedy cab ride back to well-heeled Bohemia. The evenings always start out tame, never seen cats so well behaved. Light applause and thank-yous all around.
Then someone like Ellis has to go and bring it. Starts double-timing on a number and staring down Mitch Jenkins the whole time, and everyone knows that Mitchy isn’t going to let the young ones think they could lop off one of their elders’ heads. After Mitchy goes, he finds out that he’s only riled up Jimmy George, who can’t stand show-offs and so has to show everyone better himself, and by then, the audience’s confused as all hell about what happened to their night. They probably feel like a knife fight’s going to break out, and they’re not wrong.
Bangkok Wakes to Rain Page 29