The man Morris is saying that he’s always had a peculiar ear. When the man was a child, his school organized a trip to an American Civil War battleground, now only a hilly field. He can still hear his teacher telling her students what had gone down where they stood: cavalries charging against cannon, rows of men tumbling into pieces, picked off by clouds of bullets. Like the other schoolkids, he stood there as his teacher waved across the field with an open hand, pointing to strategic hills and the long-past carnage all around, but he swore he could hear the screams and the booming explosions, so loud that it amazed him no other kid said a word. He didn’t know then that he’d be spending his whole life hearing things. Toot-de-toot-de-tat. He’d pluck sounds out of the air that he was sure had taken centuries to reach him, and he’d string them up together. Toot-de-toot-de-tat. Does she like it?
Does it hurt to look back to what you and Khun Clyde had? she thinks to ask him. But this song’s not about that, he replies with his trumpet. I want to know, she thinks back. Why does it matter? he asks. Just tell me, she thinks. Fine, here you go, he plays. Wait for it. There. His trumpet comes to a quick halt, and the drums accompanying him rush through to explode inside her head.
She feels herself shatter over one unreal city, sitting by a window in another. A glass of soda fizzles in her hand, as she opens her eyes to see the rain tap darkly on the gray dustiness of the ledge.
* * *
☐ ☐ ☐
“What’s this you’re playing for me?” says Den, leaning from the bathroom door with his wet hair drenching the floor.
“Just music, nothing you’d probably like.”
“I like everything, my love.”
He walks out with a towel wrapped around his head. The rest of him is naked and dripping. He tries to wrap himself around her, and she pushes him away with a foot to the stomach.
“Go put your clothes on,” she says.
“Ow, that wasn’t a soft kick.”
“You of all people should know better.”
He walks over to a pile of clothes and picks out whatever’s on top. She’s afraid that she’s overdone it with the kick, so she gets up to hug him as he wrangles into his T-shirt and shorts.
“What do you want to do today?” she asks.
“There’s a free concert later on. We’d have to hop on a bus and head a few kilometers out. It’s in a condo building the developers abandoned half finished this year. Heard it from Yohn, who probably just wants me to come fawn over some spiky leather jacket he got some dude to buy for him in Germany.”
“We can go if you feel like it.”
“Should be fun but we don’t have to, if you’re feeling lazy.”
The computer’s playing the next song on the album. She hears Morris’s trumpet but she no longer sees him. The screen’s gone dark again. She’s forgotten to turn on the lights, and she and Den are holding each other in a grayed-out dream.
“Look, it’s raining so hard outside,” she says.
HOME
All day, she’s been looking forward to a swim.
Nee doesn’t know how long building staffers will treat her with some reverence, but she’s so far been able to continue teaching swim classes here on weekends. Sometimes she even takes the two bus routes from where she lives to come for a swim on her own. She has more time, now that Roong is away at university and there’s really nobody to take care of but herself. It’s been good to see some familiar faces here, be it the security guards or the receptionists, although she also doesn’t mind the times she can slip in and out without being noticed.
In front of her locker, she undresses, puts on the swimsuit she’s tucked into her ample old-woman’s purse, and then exits barefoot out to the walkway. She rinses herself off at the outdoor shower, respectful of sanitary rules that everyone else ignores, and then steps into the shallows. The incline drops as she wades. Soon, she’s chest-deep, the ripples from her own arms washing over her shoulders.
Middays like this, there’s usually nobody else around, but today at one of the poolside tables, she recognizes a girl who had been one of her swimming students. The name of the girl doesn’t come to her. It’s been a long time, and she taught so many children in this pool. When they get older, they no longer come to the pool. No time for that anymore, a few have told her. Sometimes they don’t even remember their old instructor. This one does. The girl puts her book down to do a wai from her seat and then walks over.
“Teacher, are you getting ready for a class?”
When talking to students, even ones from years ago, Nee can’t help but raise her voice a pitch higher.
“No, it’s only me today, swimming on my own.”
“That’s so great,” says the girl. “I need to come here to swim more. Haven’t done it in a while. Anyways, I’m heading back up, but I just wanted to warn you about the snake.”
“What snake? What are you talking about?”
“Look up.”
The girl points up, and Nee cranes to look. A green snake has wrapped itself around a tree branch giving shade to a couple of lounge chairs. It’s not a big one, not much longer than the length of two arms and as thin as a broom branch. The way it’s coiled, she can’t see its tail. When she stayed with Nok in the provinces, her grandmother had warned: all green is good, stay away from the black-tailed.
“What is it doing there, do you know?” asks the girl.
“Probably just hunting for sparrows. I wouldn’t worry too much. It’s probably more scared of us than we are of it.”
“Well, be careful, Teacher,” the girls says before giving another wai and then walking back inside.
After the girl has left, Nee lunges out and sweeps herself forward in the water. The deep calls out to her, as it always has. Her legs begin to kick. Her muscles tighten and stretch. Joints creak between bones. Her arms and legs move like a weight has been cut from a rope pulley, and they’re now put in motion by the turn of wheels and gears releasing forces held back for who knows how long. If she’s sunburned from her walk, the hurt on her skin dissolves away, as if it had only been lathered on.
The pool, though, can only do so much. There are other parts of her that she can’t wash away.
After awful things happen, she’s found that a woman has to make herself appear inviolate, so that she can live the good life expected of her and be a productive, contributing member of the society. If she gives it her amicable face, maybe she’ll also find herself loved, unconditionally if she’s lucky, as her husband has loved her, as her son does, and still there’ll be a lingering ache underneath, made more palpable as her years begin to wear thin. The more terrible memories manifest as more than an ache. She feels them alive and aflame within her, and she can’t just abandon them to oblivion. She must tend to them. She feeds them with her heart.
It’s been so long, almost fifty years now, yet she can still see the day play out like a terrible movie. She can still hear Siripohng mumble to her, the bullets having torn through him, the blood gurgling from his mouth, urging her to get up and run.
Siripohng. Siripohng. Sometimes she wants to believe that if she says a name so many times, anyone can be brought back to life. Siripohng, Siripohng, she’s muttered into clasped hands after giving alms at the temple. By the canal, she poured fish rescued from the monger’s block at the market and followed their fanning dark tails until they disappeared into the murky, brown water. She hoped that they would take to Siripohng whatever merits she’d sent him from this world.
Few remember names like his anymore. Faces have been made ashen. Those October dates swallowed everyone who’d been there into history’s giant unlit belly, and that history into silence. The forgotten return again and again, as new names and faces, and again this city makes new ghosts. Can the dead ever forgive? What do they still remember of their old lives? It’s only a hunch, but she’s come to suspect that nothing true ever
dies. Doesn’t matter that the bullet holes have been filled and the walls painted over. Truth lingers, unseen like phantoms but there to rattle and scream wherever people try hardest to forget.
She thinks of ghosts all the time: Siripohng and her poor late husband up in some heavenly dimension or born again as another good man or woman, and her parents, and others she’s known in this noisy life. She misses Khun Crab saving the best gossip for the visits to her mother’s sundries shop, and the cat that slept on Khun Mahm’s lap as she sold lottery tickets, Uncle Fah stirring a giant pot of broth in his open-air kitchen, and the older monks who used to shuffle barefoot past her house on their morning routes. They’re all here, haunting her mind while she still has a mind, and also drifting in seas where their bones are scattered, and hanging on to the dust of Krungthep and dancing and carousing in lungs, and looking out from old newsprint buried in libraries and landfills and from altars and walls and shelves to watch over the messy business of the living and breathing. Even in this pool, she’s swimming among them.
When she reaches the end of the pool, she flips over to do the backstroke. Glancing up to the tree, she sees that the snake has disappeared from the branch.
Still, she keeps her eyes on the gray-blue sky. Propelled by the hopeful certainty natural to the most stubborn and the most desperate, she pushes on blindly, the pool’s edges invisible to her. She can only hope to swim on and touch the other end of the pool, or maybe her fingertips will stop her at a rock she’s never known to be there—a large, grayish protrusion rising from the water like an emerging moon. When that happens, she’ll recognize that she’s reached the shores of a Krungthep other than the one she’s known.
Her father used to like to scare her, back when she was little, with folklore from his native province. He said villagers went into the mountains to make extra money by foraging for honey and trapping creatures they could sell to buyers in Krungthep, and that the elders often warned them to walk away as fast as they could, and quietly, if they should come across anything that shouldn’t be there, like a village in the forest that would look like any of the other villages they’d visited in the mountains—the usual red clay road flanked by wooden homes high on stilts and the chicken pecking unmilled rice outside their coop and the vegetable gardens in rectangular clearings—except that the air would pass into their lungs more thinly and the sky would have a menacing shade, like rain was about to arrive any minute, and they would meet only people who would not look them in the eye or utter a word back to their greetings. Do not eat their food, the elders said. Do not stop to linger in this in-between place, because a day there would turn out to be decades in ours, if it wasn’t already too late to make an escape and avoid the fate of others.
She wonders what might happen if she doesn’t heed the advice of her father and the elders. She imagines her outstretched hand feeling the heft of that gray rock.
She’s pulling herself up from the water and lying down on her back. She’s listening to the waves, as they arrive one after another at the rock, and will go on arriving long after her. When she’s here, she doesn’t feel lost.
Acknowledgments
I am grateful for the kindness and generosity of so many.
Great gratitude goes to Rebecca Saletan, who saw something in this novel beyond its earlier, cruder shape and helped me find its truer expression, and all the astounding people at Riverhead Books—Jynne Dilling Martin, Glory Anne Plata, Michelle Koufopoulos, among many others, as well as Emma Herdman and the team at Sceptre.
I’m very thankful for the reliable brilliance and wisdom of Nicole Aragi. Thank you, as well, to Grace Dietshe and everyone at Aragi, Inc.
This book would not have been possible without thoughtful advice and support from friends in my writing circles, including Jenny Blackman, Julia Fierro, Cheryl Fish, Nathan Ihara, Jessica Francis Kane, Paul Lucas, Mark Prins, Rajesh Parameswaran, David Rogers, Susan Chi Rogers, Jeffrey Rotter, Sujata Shekar, Casey Walker, and Karen Thompson Walker. I am particularly grateful for Alexander Chee and Ted Thompson, who not only helped me find footing in my early attempts at the novel chapters, but also showed how I might be able to proceed with grace as an author.
I’m indebted to these organizations and the people there who do good work: the New York Foundation for the Arts, for awarding me a fellowship that allowed me the time I needed to finish the first draft of my novel; the MacDowell Colony, for providing the concentrated attention I needed to complete the last major edits and re-energize from the process in such inspiring company; and the literary journal StoryQuarterly, for publishing an early version of one of the chapters.
Books and other historical sources that stirred my imagination in writing this novel include: Historical Sketch of the Missions in Siam, revised by the Rev. A. Millaro Coopci; Missionary Sketches: A Concise History of the American Baptist Missionary Union by S.F. Smith; Siam and Laos as Seen by Our American Missionaries by the Trustees of the Presbyterian Board of Publication; Lao Rueng Bahng Gog [Telling Stories of Bangkok] by S. Plainoy; Siam and the League of Nations by Stefan Hall; Addresses by Teddy Spha Palasthira; The World Without Us by Alan Weisman; and the many Tuay Toon Phiset magazines read in my childhood.
I owe my informal literary education to the great independent bookstores of New York City, whose talks and readings I hungrily attended, and, since my earliest days as a young reader, public libraries everywhere that should always be well supported in their work to cultivate and nourish minds.
Other friends have been very supportive throughout various stages of writing this book. My thanks go to: the Blanchard family, the Nagella family, the Shadows, the crew at The Morning News, and various work colleagues who recognized the time and attention I needed for fiction writing.
An infinity of thanks goes to my parents, whose brave striving made so much possible for me, and who, in the course of my childhood, never hesitated to drop me off at a library or bookstore. Many thanks to all of my family, for their stories and love.
About the Author
Pitchaya Sudbanthad grew up in Thailand, Saudi Arabia, and the American South. He's a contributing writer at The Morning News and has received fellowships in fiction writing from the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) and the MacDowell Colony.
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Bangkok Wakes to Rain Page 31