The coffee has gone lukewarm. In the crowd of pedestrians walking toward me, there is the black-eyed man from yesterday. For a second time, there is the oddness of our mutual stare. He slows and looks for a moment as if he might speak. A feather peeks out from a pocket of his trench coat.
I thrust my gaze to the canvas shopping bag and rifle through, pretending to look for something other than the journal, which I finish by retrieving. When I look up again, the man is gone, disappeared into the crowd flowing toward the place de Clichy.
Now that it’s no longer possible, I wish I’d talked to him. If he were a key to a more vivid world—in films, alluring strangers often are—then I missed it, sealing myself more tightly in this one. I run a hand over the beige cover of the journal and open it to the first entry, the beginning:
June 16, 2003
Blood so little of me, what I am. Pure world.
Resolve. It’s transmitted less by her words than by the thick strokes denting the page, bold black ink. She must have just learned about the adoption.
Ella. I imagine her sizing me up with Siobhán’s sharp eyes, shaking her head and telling me firmly but gently that I’m not living well enough. Every day, not enough. I haven’t looked long at the sky, smelled the skins of fruit, touched the wood of tabletops and trees. In another life inside this one, no less concrete than Abbesses with its cafés and crowds, Ella precedes me along a strip of shore, dough-colored sand stretched between two islands. She asks me what day it is and what I’ve done with it. Keep up, Elena, she calls, and slips from view. To find her, I need only step into that space, that slippage.
June 17
Chipped paint on the bathroom ceiling. All my pillows are in the bathtub. It’s the only room in the house with a lock. They’re at the door, trying to break it. They can’t believe the way I’m acting. I’m not myself. (Are we ever who they think we are?) I am no one. A surface of sensations. Sent away across the ocean, planted here so I’d think I was made of this soil. Native nowhere. Belong to no one. I will be I no more. I will be whatever is written here. The rest of me, body-self, vanish it, only lies.
Her emotion is too much—histrionics of the kind you have to shed when you get older. The next entries are even worse: rants against Siobhán, the mother Ella didn’t know and didn’t want to know. They go on, much the same. I skip ahead, eager for Thailand.
September 30
Flights tomorrow (four!): Newark—LA—Seoul—Bangkok—Chiang Rai. Outside my window, a trace moves across the sky. White cuts through sharp blue. A solid line at first. It frays. The sky takes it, unravels it. Then as before, unbroken blue.
My room is still my childhood room. It’s a palimpsest of past selves. To cut through the layers to a younger self, all I have to do is stare into the beady eyes of the clown doll hanging from the rim of my closet—those eyes gave me nightmares when I was little. Photos, newspaper clippings tacked to corkboards, posters taped to walls, old perfume bottles from which the perfume has evaporated. Packing boxes that came back with me from college. Feet dangle out the window—pachysandra visible in the spaces between my toes. Stare at empty sky. I’ll bring nothing with me. As little as possible.
October 1
Paths dissolve in flight. Is this “letting go”? Is this what that means? Leave behind what you once were. Set out. Be larger. Be the air, the walls of the airplane cabin. The man next to me is asleep. Too dark-electric for sleep. Dad drove me to the airport. Purple evening sky. I am too much. He said nothing. I wanted to tell him that I wished I could rest from being. … Awake now over the Pacific. I know why I need to go. Relief from the excess of who I am.
Between the airplane cabin and her second night: nothing. No record of her arrival, no account of what she felt, stepping off the plane.
October 3
Second night and I don’t know how to live here. Is this adventure? This not knowing, this release of control, loosening the bolts that keep things in place? On the surface everything is okay.
Today, with Muay (pronounced “Moy”) I traveled to Chiang Khong, a village near the tip of the Golden Triangle. There is nothing for me to do yet at the university, so we went with some of Muay’s colleagues. At lunch, they pointed out Laos across the wide brown river, and I watched the Mekong’s slowness as conversation flowed in rapid Thai. Then visits to houses with looms, where women were weaving. I tried on traditional northern Thai—Lanna—dresses made on the looms. Long narrow skirts like mermaid tails, glittery threads in strong sunlight. There’s a trick to walking in them. Muay said you have to waddle, but you get used to it. She volunteers for an organization that gives advice to the villages, so they can sell crafts directly to tourists, without third-party vendors. Poverty is a big problem in the region. Muay’s English is excellent. She spent a year studying in Minneapolis. She offered to take me to Big C. Flashes of rice paddies, palm trees, colorful fabrics, mountains.
Bravo, Ella. Poverty is a big problem! What was I hoping for—the wisdom of a young sage? As I go to close the notebook, an addendum to the entry stops me:
(later, 4:39 A.M.) I can’t sleep. My heart is racing. What can I write that will make it better? My legs itch, mosquito bites. I should have taken doxycycline. Why didn’t I? It’s too late now if I’ve been infected. Even Larium nightmares would have been better than this. Symptoms of malaria … Insomnia? Fatigue? Sweating, chills? I’m scared. Try to sleep—
With more sympathy, I read on.
October 4
Muay wants me to call her pi-Muay, like an older sister. She teaches me about Thailand. She doesn’t like to find exact equivalents for things and doesn’t like it when I do, either. Kuay teow is not “noodle soup,” but a snack with noodles and broth; Ban Du is not a “suburb,” but a village outside the city. She describes things carefully in a way I can understand mentally. But the thing keeps a little mystery until I actually experience it. Big C for example: it’s a must-have for Chiang Rai expats craving peanut butter and sliced bread, things you can’t get at the market. But Muay’s students go on Saturdays and spend all day there. I was so confused that Muay went against her anticomparative principles and said it was like an American mall. We’re going tomorrow because Muay thinks I need things for my suite at the university. I’ll find out.
October 5
Today was the first Sunday after the rainy season, and the sky is the bluest it will be the whole year, according to Muay. Fresh-washed. Its color reminds me of October orchard trips when I was little—apple picking under a sky the blue of potter’s glaze. We’d arrive home with too many bags and make pies, our fingers interlacing to scallop the dough around the pie pan, my prints smaller than theirs. They don’t grow apples here. Instead, there are pineapple fields and dark green orchards with tangerines winking out like precious stones. There are tea plantations in the hills run by Chinese families. Muay told me her family is Chinese but they came here so long ago no one remembers the language.
Today, on the drive to Big C, Muay stopped the car by the side of the road so I could see what a pineapple plant looked like: pale purple leaves, fruit budding in the center like the eye of a flower. They come in two varieties: one small and sweeter, native to here, and the other saltier, its seed brought from Phuket, a region by the sea. Saparot. Pineapple
Muay teaches me words for things. I want her to teach me writing, too. If I ask her, she’ll write words in Thai script so I can practice copying them:
With effort, I can make my characters as neat as hers, but they still look labored. They don’t mean anything to me yet, just curves and squiggly lines.
The landscape, its villages, and the university are all more beautiful than I’d hoped. I almost want to call home and tell them about the bands of copper curving over the hills and the purple mists rolling in over the valleys at night. But the things Muay loves best—Chiang Rai, Big C—are ugly and depressing. A road called the “superhighway” connects Chiang Rai to the university and dead-ends in the northern border town of Ma
e Sai (Tachileik on the Myanmar side). To get to Big C, we drove south through Chiang Rai, which I’d been dying to see. I’d imagined glittering temples, polished stone streets, gurgling brooks, and moon gates. When I saw the city, I thought, I would feel like I’d really arrived.
In the car, Muay told me there was another new English teacher, about my age. She said he was a foreigner, both American and not American. She laughed. I never know if Muay is joking, because she’s always laughing. Then she asked if I liked rambutan. When I didn’t know what it was, she laughed harder. Then she pulled the car over in front of a busy market sprawling inward from the superhighway. Under a corrugated metal roof, small peppers, curiously shaped eggplants, curries in aluminum trays, bags of cooked rice, chicken legs (both crispy and not yet plucked) lined long tables, along with silver-sequined shoes, handbags, dresses, cooking supplies, and bottles of fish sauce. The woman at a fruit stall let us taste green-skinned mandarins the size of limes, sweet and sour. Muay showed me a pomelo, which was the size of an infant’s head and tasted like grapefruit, only sweeter. So many fruits I’d never known existed! Muay was right: rambutan was the best. Under magenta skin with rubbery green spines, there’s a globe of translucent flesh, perfectly round, flavored like a lychee but with a firmer texture, less juice dripping, more rugged.
Blurs of rice fields through the windows again as we drove over a bridge and Muay pointed out a statue of King Mengrai, a fourteenth-century ruler of the Lanna Kingdom. Then there were busy streets, nondescript shops, a Pizza Hut, Swenson’s Ice Cream, dingy balconies, trucks, lane markings, telephone wires, and traffic lights. Before I realized we were in Chiang Rai, we were through it, and billboards ushered us on to Big C.
We collected a ticket from a guard in a red plastic booth. The parking lot was crowded with families, teenagers, and motorbikes. Inside the building, we passed stands selling fried rice balls, books, cell phones, and beauty products before an escalator took us to Big C itself: a row of checkout counters under fluorescent lights. Big C lost its exotic charge: it was like a Walmart.
I wasn’t thinking about garbage bags or anything practical, but I did need them. We picked out a teakettle I could take with me when I moved to a more permanent place. As we were waiting to pay, Muay grabbed my arm and pointed beyond the checkout lines. It was the new teacher, about my age. I looked in time to see a white T-shirt and green Big C bag disappear down the escalator.
On the terrace of the café, tables have been set for lunch. Paper napkins stick out of wineglasses. This world—Abbesses—jars after Big C and the countryside. I know how I’ll render Ella: passionate spectator, delighted by newness, idealizer of place names. The innocent banality of the journals makes last night’s suspicions seem like my own paranoia.
—Ça va, mademoiselle?
A waiter hovers, his head backlit by the sun. What must he see? A girl with clenched hands spread across a dirty book. I look up at him, embarrassed.
—Désirez-vous autre chose? he asks.
My table is the only one not set for lunch. He wants me to go. I’m in a strange mood. I order an espresso to keep thinking. A few pages give me the texture of a country to which I’ve never traveled. And Ella’s mystery is starting to feel … interesting, as if solving her case might bring some clarity to something now muddled. I don’t have to find her today. All I have to do now is choose a passage to translate as best I can, transferring the taste of rambutan, which I’ve never experienced, to the page. I stare into the space vacated by the waiter, enjoying the way my imagination, long dormant, stirs in the wake of her words.
A scene struggles into view: I see Muay. Her shiny black hair swings to just below her chin. She wears an ill-fitting skirt suit and speaks with great energy. I hear her voice—her way of phrase making in English. I open my notebook, writing only what I hear and see (no invention):
—There is another one—a foreign teacher. About your age.
Muay studied the steering wheel, her cheeks dropping down with her gaze, then looked up, full of energy, her eyes magnified behind thick lenses.
—American but not American.
—Is that a koan? Ella teased, as if she didn’t care.
But she did care. She wanted to know more, and the force of wanting made her coy.
Muay’s whole body laughed.
Ella frowned.
—How old is he?
—Twenty-four, twenty-five. Not old.
—How old do you think I am?
—You? Yee seep song. Twenty-two. We know. The vice president told us.
—Wrong! I’m twenty-one. I’ll be twenty-two in two weeks.
—Ahh, Muay said, her voice rising, then falling like a song, her head nodding the way the toy cat with a bobbling neck was nodding on her dashboard among other trinkets and amulets.
As they passed a temple, Muay took her hands off the steering wheel to wai.
She’s not religious, I hear her say to Ella, not very much. …
As if emerging from the neat, childish script, Muay appears in focus. She is pleased to have a charge, someone to look after, but she worries that Ella is so young. No older than the students. Ella is fuzzed out, a blurry animation of the photograph Siobhán gave me. It’s harder to hear her voice. I flip to the next entry, hoping to find something that will coax her into definition.
October 10
Khantoke, Muay told me, is a “footed tray” made of wicker, and food is served from these little trays on the floor. There are containers for sticky rice, pork, chicken, and vegetables. At the Welcome Dinner for New Faculty, we sat on mats on the floor while the vice president made a speech about the university, which was built into a hillside to honor nature—folded into the land. Its buildings are earth-colored because the university is part of the earth, a gem in the hills. Jasmine necklaces smelled like the honeysuckle in our backyard at home. The other Western teachers were there—all except the one supposed to be my age. I like Anthony best. We had Thai iced tea after work, waiting for the event to start. I have the feeling I know him from somewhere, which is impossible. He’s from a town I’ve never heard of in England! He polemicizes against the university—calls it a “superface” with no depth. I’m tired of depth. Sometimes, with others, I’m a comedy of myself—here in this book is the only place I can live honestly, not performing. Quick, don’t think, don’t feel. Only describe as much as possible. Fade out in pure world.
The sun is directly overhead. No shadows. Light prisms the water carafe. An espresso is next to it. It’s hard not to read Ella from the point of view of the future, every line full of her fate. The desire to fade out, disappear—it’s just one of those things people say … I’d rather be her than here. I would know. I want to hold this thought, turn it over in my mind and examine it from all angles. But a landscape is already appearing, faint at first, then gaining solidity. I wait, totally still, not wanting to interrupt it. Abbesses fades. The other world springs up: a university with covered walkways and taupe-colored buildings. Ella, uncomfortable in an A-line skirt, sits on a low wall. She’s eating wasabi peas from a bag, slowly. Parts of her are in focus: wisps of blondish hair, loose to frame the face, forehead drawn in concentration. She notices Anthony, a foreigner like her, neat white hair and collared pink shirt. He is gesturing, bending toward the vice president as they walk.
Ella stood up and straightened her skirt as they approached.
—Anthony, have you met our youngest member of the faculty? the vice president asked. Ella joins us from a prestigious university in the U.S.
Anthony switched his briefcase to his left hand to offer Ella his right. He had thin, luminous skin through which the faint tracing of veins was visible. He looked to be in his early sixties.
—Enchanted, he said. Prestige is very welcome here. It reigns above all else.
Anthony’s thin lips overenunciated, even as he smiled.
The vice president looked at the sky and sighed, then said he looked forward to seeing them again soon at t
he Welcome Dinner for New Faculty. He wai’ed and left them.
—Mai bpen rai, mai bpen rai, muttered Anthony.
—Let it go, Ella said.
She knew the expression, having read a Thai phrase book from cover to cover. Twice.
—Yes, Anthony said. But there’s a problem when it’s always mai bpen rai. Nothing is serious. Serious is the worst adjective you can have attached to you. Always sanuk maak … The vice president has vetoed my course on environmental planning because it makes the government look bad. But mai bpen rai! God forbid anything should be serious.
Ella smiled to herself. She liked intensity in others. It made her feel less strange.
—Don’t misunderstand me, he was saying. It’s nothing against the Thais. I adore the Thais. As long as things appear well, it can go to hell on the inside. Shall we have an iced tea?
Coppery light streaked the tables in the refectory pavilion as they entered, and Anthony informed Ella that the farthest booth had the best selection of drinks.
—Have you sampled the staple beverage of Thailand? he asked.
—Singha?
—Thai iced tea, he said, overenunciating. It’s too sweet. Terrible stuff. We’ll have two, he told the shopkeeper, pointing to a milky orange drink displayed on the counter.
—Ao song, ka, Ella repeated, embarrassed by the impudence of Anthony’s English.
—Yes, but they know what you mean. Kap khun krap. Thank you.
He carried the drinks to a nearby table.
Across the terrace, crowded now for lunch, float smells of roast chicken, potatoes, and quail. I set coins on the table, take the still-empty shopping bag, and start up the hill.
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