When he looks down, he sees that he’s in his signature blue suit. He’s slapping shoulders and shaking hands like he’s running for mayor of New York City, peace-making between sets and showing everyone what a congenial big man he is. Good thing he doesn’t know what some of them are already whispering. He avoids being pulled into a duel with Batty Eddie, who’s machine-gunning the keys, hands stretched across elevenths with gigantic chords. Of course, he fails.
“You showed Eddie up good. Everyone heard it,” a man says, and then kisses him in a shadowy alley. They’re on their walk home. It’s wintry and cold as the moon. Every shopfront has closed for the night, except for the Chinese restaurant. He looks through the security bars to see the cooks gathered at a table for their own meal, a beer bottle to each. They look up at him, and he sees that they don’t have faces, only pale, featureless swaths looking less like flesh than smudged paint. He looks at the man he’s been walking with. He, too, has become a smear of a figure.
“Morris, what in hell’s going on? What’s happened to you?”
“Hey, Khun Clyde. Are you okay?” asks a young woman, her hand tight on his arm.
He recognizes Lucky. He’s on a bed in a room, his back sweaty even with the chilly air. Outside, metallic clangs welcome him back. Unseen parts of the building tell him that they’ve hit the ground through thuds he can feel up through the floor.
“Probably just a nightmare,” she says.
“Yeah, it probably was,” he says, trying to push himself up so that she’ll help him. “As long as I’m up, might as well go.”
* * *
☐ ☐ ☐
Every two weeks, Lucky takes a Saturday off and stays with a cousin in Nonthaburi. In her place, the agency sends a dour-faced woman who doesn’t have much patience for him, and he submits to being tugged and pulled through the day. With her, he doesn’t practice on his keyboard, choosing instead to turn on the radio and tune in to the VOA jazz show—not the same since Conover left, but better than sitting in silence with the woman.
He sits in his circular rattan chair, too low to make it easy to get up from but worth the comfort he feels sunken in that old and stained yellow cushion, the radio music sealing him in from above. The aide reads celebrity magazines on the sofa next to him, but soon he forgets she’s even there, she’s no different from the furniture.
A curtain of black falls over him. He lays himself on the thinnest skim of perception—no light, no darkness, only solid immateriality. He lets go of the radio music to attend to the hum coming from where his songs have always called to him. It’s occurred to him, after decades of playing, that it’s only the buzzing of a much grander ruckus, muffled, like sound coming from behind a thick wall. Here he is again, as he has been all his life, trying to listen in. He’s spent many years trying to piece together a likeness of that grand but faint noise, feeling its shape note by note, and failing. He thinks he hears it, and then he knows he hasn’t. It’s only the tired dance of his own heart.
* * *
☐ ☐ ☐
When the piano showroom closed down, the manager handed him an envelope, commending him on his friendliness with the customers and wishing him the best. The amount was maybe enough to pay a water bill. He thanked the manager and folded the check into his pocket.
Good thing Bobby found a gig for him: Fridays at an off-Sukhumvit piano bar popular with the jumble of farang expats on ever-extending visas. There, he was all at once in Bangkok and Chicago and Manchester and Frankfurt and Smolensk. He played songs he knew the crowd would like, and they often got up and sang along, raising and swinging their steins of watery beer—Oi and Donut and some stranger farang getting up to do a clumsy cha-cha in front of the stage—and he loved each and every one of them for as long as the songs lasted and he was the center of their leisurely night. Between sets, he and his young Thai bandmates sat around the bar, where they munched on the free cocktail nuts and cheese ball, and where he also fed them stories from his own youth, when everything was so wild and delicious. They lapped up the names he’d played with and the sweaty all-night sessions and the fist-swinging personal antics and the joy of being unafraid. He made sure to frame the stories so that they’d know that those days could never happen now, that they were privileged even to hear about it from someone who’d been there to see it all.
His drummer, Mickey Plengjai, asked him if he was ever going back to the States, and he told them yes, when he was sick and tired of them asking dumb questions. “You water lizards, I’m going to buy my goddamn ticket tomorrow,” he said, to everyone’s laughter. He didn’t tell them that when he called anyone in New York, the talk started boisterous and ended fast. Cats would say they’d got to help others, like the old days, and then never call back. He imagined them sitting at their card games, pulling the same stories from under the rug over and over, as he was doing. Someone asks what happened to that Clyde. They all grin and shake their heads as an answer.
“I got a big bonus last week. The next round’s on me,” he declared. Joey Wonderboy brought them a whole bottle of SangSom, and Clyde went around the table to give everyone a good splash. It was in the middle of the next set that his chest tightened.
* * *
☐ ☐ ☐
“You hear that?” he asks the substitute aide.
“What? The radio?”
“Nope, listen. Really listen.”
“What are you talking about, Mr. Clyde?”
“Listen. It’s completely quiet out there. They stopped,” he says. With his own strength, he pushes himself up from his chair and walks over to the window. Outside, the construction site has gone dark. He sees no workers on the ground or up on the building’s naked, unfinished floors. The shadow of the crane high above is still.
He motions for the aide to come look out the window. She does, shielding her eyes to look up into the darkness.
“I see nothing,” she says.
“That’s not nothing. That’s tom yum goong.”
* * *
☐ ☐ ☐
When Lucky’s back, Clyde returns to the keyboard.
“What do you want to hear, young lady?”
“Anything you want to play, Khun Clyde.”
He stretches out his arms and starts to play. This one’s a train he hops on, like he did when he’d first listened to the song on his grandma’s record player while she wasn’t around to limit him to songs of worship. Except now he’s the one telling it where to go.
He notices Lucky nodding along with him. He nudges her and flicks his head in the direction of his left hand.
“Here, Ms. Lucky, play with me. Press the keys like this and then this and badeedumdeebumdeebum.”
“Are you sure? I’ve never played before, Khun Clyde.”
“There’s nothing to it. Don’t be afraid. C’mon.”
She presses the keys in the sequence that he’s showed her.
“Yeah, that’s what we call a bass line. Don’t stop now.”
She’s nowhere close to playing it right, but he’s not going to tell her. He hasn’t spent this much time holed up alone with anyone in years, but he knows it doesn’t take much for two loons under the same roof to start to want to claw at each other.
* * *
☐ ☐ ☐
It also doesn’t take much for things to go the other way. One summer, he and Morris stayed at a beach, just the two of them. This was at a seaside town close to the city, no more than a two hours’ drive out on the Long Island Expressway. Lizzie, back before all the mess between them, had made friends with a black couple who owned the beach house, and they needed someone to stay there for the three weeks the couple went to visit family in Maryland. He took her up on it. Said that he was going to stay there with a few friends. Didn’t bring up Morris.
Unlike at the other beaches, nobody here would bother them for being there with reasons other than to clean u
p after white folks. They walked the pebbly beach and chased scurrying crabs at low tide, went for a swim when the sea returned, and lay down on the dock after the bay had chilled them down. No fear of being wrestled away by the crowd or spat on, like what them brave kids had to deal with at the lunch counters, none of that. Still, they kept to themselves, told anyone who asked that they were brothers.
The couple had an upright at the house, and Morris would wake him up to try something different than what they’d tried out earlier. Morris’s face comes back to him as a smudge of eyebrows and lips and not much else, but it’s all right, because he can still hear Morris’s voice. He won’t forget the way the man plays.
“Let the notes float a little longer,” he tells Lucky at the piano.
“Like this?”
“Even softer at the end, like you’re patting a baby’s head.”
Lucky starts playing again, fingers lighter, and so does Morris. The song floats off into the blue surrender of the day’s light. One day it’ll hit back down like a rainstorm.
“Yeah, there you go,” Clyde says to them. “Don’t you stop now.”
It was September, and the weather had begun to turn. Looked like there wasn’t going to be a hurricane or some other awful weather that season, so said one of the neighbors, and relief had spread into joy humming all around. Underneath their song, he could hear joy in the sputter of lawn sprinklers outside, the radio drifting from someone’s window, left open without care. He thought he could hear roots spidering underneath the trees, the scratching of worms tunneling through the soil, and they, too, were happy.
He promised Morris this was going to be how it always would be. Easy as that.
“Hell, that was fantastic,” he tells them. “Every last bit.”
“Khun Clyde, you’re going to turn me into a nightclub piano player by the time I leave you.”
That day won’t arrive for another two weeks. She has the day marked on a pocket calendar in her purse. The agency has already assigned her a new placement in Bang Khen, and after that there’ll be another placement and then another.
If they have the awareness, it’s pretty normal for her charges to become saddened by her departure. They ask her not to go, looking at her with pleading eyes, and she smiles and tells them that everything will be all right and keeps on smiling.
“But who will I play with, Ms. Lucky?”
“You’ll be back playing your shows, Khun Clyde. Wouldn’t that be nice?”
“I suppose. I don’t know.”
“Everything will be all right, Khun Clyde.”
He motions her to help him to the bed, and she does, even though she knows he doesn’t need her to get up anymore. They walk arm in arm across the room, and she lifts up the bedcover before he sits on the mattress.
“They’ve stopped construction,” she says, looking up into the dark skeleton of a building outside.
“Indeed, they have. I kind of miss that noise.”
“Yeah, so weird, Khun Clyde. Me, too.”
She helps him recline, and he straightens himself. She unfolds a silk Chinese blanket and lets it billow down to shroud him. She feels a tug on her elbow.
“Ms. Lucky, you mentioned something about that look-up computer machine. Can you remind me what you can do with it?”
* * *
☐ ☐ ☐
It’s another Saturday, and Lucky’s headed not to Muang Nontha but to Fangthon. She’s told everyone at the agency about the cousin in Nonthaburi, so that the extra distance to get there would warrant her having the whole day off. It still takes a good two hours for her to get across the river. She has to take a bus from Khun Clyde’s building in Klong Toey, ride crosstown to get off near Thammasat University, and walk to the pier for a long-tail boat. If traffic’s bad and the bus gets stuck, she hops off to look for a corner with waiting motorcycle cabs and then weave through gauntlets of side mirrors. She wears a medical mask over her nose and mouth. Still, the exhaust fumes get through, and after the ride, when she can pull out a sheet from her pack of tissue, she’ll see a dark gray stain where she’s blown her nose.
She finds a seat toward the front of the boat, so that she doesn’t feel sick. On weekends, the boat doesn’t fill up with students, and she’s glad to have room to put down her rolling bag next to her, instead of having to hug it in her lap. She’s still wearing the health aide company’s shirt. She doesn’t change into her regular clothes in front of Khun Clyde or anyone else. Better to keep consistent, she was instructed at orientation, and best to avoid the substitute ratting her out to the manager. She’s heard of people getting demerits in their postassignment reviews for less.
The trip across the river never lasts more than ten minutes, dock to dock, but it’s the part of the commute that she looks forward to the most. When the ride’s gentle, the river calms her. The boat cuts across the brown and milky water, pushing farther from the shores of Krungthep, with its garbage-lined banks and the music-blaring waterside restaurants perched on stilts and the green islands of entangled hyacinths and, up farther along the banks, tall white buildings looming over their half-built siblings, ghostly and lifeless now, with construction halted, but sooner or later they, too, will be born into Krungthep, the city of angels and yet higher angels and even higher ones.
* * *
☐ ☐ ☐
After she arrives at the flat, she collapses on the bed—how she needs to black out her mind for an hour or two after all that—and wakes when she hears Den’s jangling to unlock the door. Her body jiggles with the mattress when he sits down next to her.
“Hey, you’re all sweaty,” she says. “Don’t lie down. It’s disgusting.”
“Sorry,” he says. “I’ll hop in the shower.”
She can tell he was out playing takraw with his waiter friends. How many hours was he leaping and kicking out there? He’s going to destroy his ankles one of these days, and she reserves the right to laugh in his face. She’s not going to remind him that he’s supposed to be looking for an electrician job. He’ll only blame the economy, and then they’ll fight again, and nothing different will come of it. When his rent is close to being due, he’ll still come up with some excuse or another and ask her to help cover him—until things get better, he’ll say.
“Den, before you go into the bathroom, can you unlock your computer for me?”
“I thought I told you the password.”
“I don’t know it anymore.”
“It’s BangkokStud2515.”
“How could I have forgotten?”
“Don’t be nosy.”
“Trust me, I won’t go looking for the porn files you downloaded.”
“You sure? That reminds me. I ripped a new CD for you. If you’re nice to me, I’ll let you have it.”
“Is it the same one you made for your other women?”
“There’s only you, my love.”
He shuts the bathroom door, which doesn’t keep his singing to himself. She recognizes the song: a loog-toong number about having to be willing to wait so long when you’re in love with a truck driver. Above the sound of water splashing from a hand bowl, his voice cracks at every start of the chorus.
At the computer, she sighs and types in the password. The screen turns on and she stares into the square of light that has brightened the room. With a few clicks, the computer modem screams a birthing agony before a window tells her that she’s connected. She remembers which one of the squares to click. A web browser opens up, and she searches for a name she wrote in her notebook: Morris Clemens.
There’s not much, she’ll have to tell Khun Clyde. She’s found a lot of names spelled the same way, but only a few results look promising, according to her passable reading of English. The most likely of them is a brief obituary for a Morris who passed away in New York eight years ago. He had been a music teacher at a high school. Former students rem
embered him for his passion and devotion. There’s no photo.
Another result takes her to a music forum. She spots the name again in a thread about obscure jazz albums. She ignores much of the discussion and homes in on where it mentions Morris’s name. At a stoop sale, a user had bought three self-released albums from the 1970s and 1980s and wanted to see what people thought of this guy. She clinks on a link, and a new window pops up to show a WAV file download.
This will take forever, so she gets up to pour herself a soda. It’s warm, having sat out on the table. Den’s fridge is way too small, and he’s already loaded it up with little bottles of energy drinks that slide all over the place. She’s told him that stuff will probably burn through his brain, but that makes him buy even more of them, as he has apparently done.
* * *
☐ ☐ ☐
Static suddenly bursts from the computer speakers when the download auto-plays. As a trumpet begins to blare from the computer speakers, she takes another sip of soda and sits down on a stool by the window. Clouds hang low and dark outside. Sidewalk vendors are bringing out umbrellas and sheets of plastic to cover their goods. The music closes her eyes.
It’s no longer cloudy where she’s arrived. She sees a spiky cluster of metal and glass, thinner in the middle where a long strip of green clears out the buildings. It’s Central Park, if she remembers correctly. She’s seen the view before in farang movies, and now it’s playing for her again, as she floats over a tilework of gray roofs and air-conditioning units and the dark lines of traffic yellow and black far below to hover over a brick apartment building. An old man as dark as Khun Clyde stands in the shade of a water tower. He’s wearing a collared, long-sleeve shirt and wide-legged olive pants, and on his head is a beaten Panama hat with a blue band salted by sweat. The man’s lips are puckered around a trumpet’s mouthpiece. He keeps his elbows high as he fires off note after note, fingers fast on the valves. Below him, people and cars in the street barely look like people or cars, more like the aquatic creatures she’s seen writhing across the ocean sand in the sea-life documentaries that Den likes to watch. She floats closer to him. He doesn’t see her. He’s blowing into his trumpet, but she can hear him speak.
Bangkok Wakes to Rain Page 30