Her Here

by Amanda Dennis

  Seb came to help carry food to Anthony’s. We used dishrags as potholders. Flashlight beams lit our shoes, patches of earth, and the foil coverings, from which steam was escaping.

  —A veritable caravan! Anthony called from his veranda. How magical!

  His house had filled with people. A young man, tall and delicate, like a feather, stood apart from the group, watching us as we walked up the drive.

  —Lek, Béa called to him, we were just talking about you!

  —Talking about me?

  His voice cracked boyishly.

  Lek bowed as we approached, his long hair falling across his face. He removed his glasses to wipe the lenses. His eyes were large and bright, taking everything in, so much that I felt exposed.

  Later, when the meal had finished and the dancing had begun, Soraya took me aside to show me the krathong she’d made.

  —I cut a banana leaf from a tree and decorated, she said, putting emphasis on the last two syllables, prettily. I thought you would like it. We must release it in the river.

  I was thrilled. Soraya knew how much I wanted to do the real ritual, to release a krathong in the Mae Kok. Béa offered to drive us to town, and Lek and Seb, whom we found smoking in the driveway as we walked to the car, came, too.

  The drive was short. We parked by fairgrounds next to the river. Women on parade floats with sequined dresses and glittering eyes waved abstractly, blinded by floodlights. Soraya said it was the Nopomas Queen contest, to honor the most beautiful woman in Chiang Rai. As we walked, the lights faded and the horizon became a joint between two mirror planes, points of flame reflected in the blackness of the sky and river, a planetarium of sharply magnified stars. The Mae Kok, turbid by day, flowed fast, energized, its surface lit by a crowd of jewels. I linked arms with Soraya, pointing to flying lanterns in the sky. I asked if they were also krathongs.

  —Khom loi, Lek said, stopping at a cart to buy one from a vendor.

  He showed us how to light it, and it whizzed into the night, lighting our faces as it flew.

  Soraya drew her scarves around her shoulders. Her eyes were moist.

  The air was cooler by the water. People gathered in the dimness, families with picnics and half-clad children making forays into the water. People were putting coins in their krathongs.

  —Offerings, Soraya said when I asked. It can be money or something from your body, like hair or clippings from a fingernail. You release a part of yourself to remember that you are greater. You will survive your body.

  Seb snorted. I knew what he was thinking: Body is soul, and nothing survives its death.

  Soraya handed me the krathong she had made. I plucked a hair from my head, intertwined it with the petals of the marigold. Soraya lit the candle. There was a whiff of fire and jasmine.

  —Sebastian, go with Ella, she said. Release it together from the sandbar.

  Removing my sandals, I followed Seb to the water’s edge, my toes sinking in the mud. The reflection of the full moon trembled. Krathongs floated by. Their incense tempered a dried squid smell from the snack stands Then there were the odors from the river, silt and sand, plant and animal.

  The Mae Kok was wide and shallow. I waded in, feet sticking in the silt, skirt hitched to my thighs. There were shouts and children splashing. Cold pockets of mist collected in spaces unlit by the krathongs. Seb was in front of me. The waterline cupped the globes of his calves. Around him, moonlight made sharp sparks of the ripples. An extinguished krathong tangled itself at my ankles, causing me to jump. The candle in my krathong blew out.

  Soraya hurried toward me with a lighter. Her face glowed.

  With one hand protecting the new flame, I walked into the river. Only when I reached the sandbar did I notice Seb had turned back and was rejoining the others on the bank. No matter. I stepped onto the sandbar, wind on wet legs. A child next to me said something in Thai. Wild dark eyes and tangled hair. She ran away. I held my krathong over the water. Candlelight scattered my reflection: hair, nails, sins, coins, flowers. I gripped my krathong as the current rushed under it. Others floated by, tiny funeral pyres. Soraya’s voice in the dark: Life is beautiful even if it is also sad. Muddy fingers relaxed, and the krathong danced swiftly downriver. My body began to tremble, maybe from the cold.

  20

  ERRATIC SUNLIGHT SPLITS THE GRAY, lighting flower boxes and outdoor tables beneath the café awning. Inside, tourists point to croissants in golden rows. I take a mouthful of coffee, lukewarm. The blue journal ends with Loi Krathong. The yellow journal beckons like a new country, alluring and still strange, but I can’t concentrate on it. I’m drawn to the longest of Ella’s entries, fifty pages composed after her return from I don’t know where, after ten missing days in July. It’s at the end of the black journal. What happened during those missing days? Why doesn’t she say where she was, Ella, who divulges everything in the journals?

  I pay for my coffee and walk back to the flat, so absorbed that I’m slow to notice the man standing with his suitcase on the place Marcel-Aymé, a clean-cut man in his early thirties. My heart stops.

  Z smiles at me sheepishly, pleased at the success of his surprise.

  We stare at each other. His being here feels good but alien, as if he has come from a world I’m beginning to lose. How dare he show up, uninvited, returning me to myself, undoing my slow absorption into Ella’s life. For months, Z has been asking to visit. I kept forgetting to answer. It wasn’t that I didn’t want him here, just that this task demands a necessary suspension of my own life. And there is a different existence emerging here. Life does that—it can’t but emerge, much as I’ve tried to stop it for the sake of finding Ella. Rhythms developed, then rhythms added to rhythms. Exhibitions changed at the Ormeau, and this time I went to the opening, the vernissage. I talked more with Zoë, bright-colored nails, pink lipstick, the force behind Nulle part ailleurs.

  Z and I rent a car and drive to the countryside. When we reach the Loire, we hike. Winter woods, naked trees. Z’s cheeks are pink in the cold. I ask if he is tired, jet-lagged. He says he isn’t. Familiar feel of his gloved hand. He says that Paris seems to agree with me. He asks when I’m coming home.

  Instead of answering, I begin to tell him about the monstrous fifty-page entry, made in one sitting (the same “mood” in her pen strokes) during the monsoons. No mention in so many pages of where she had been the last ten days.

  —You’ll crack the case and come home, Z says, linking my reply to his question.

  He says it lightly, a joke. He goes on:

  —I wasn’t sure you’d be glad to see me. I almost didn’t come … but it’s better to know.

  —Know what? I say, feeling sharper.

  —Are you happy to see me?

  —Of course.

  —Then why didn’t you answer about visiting? It’s been four fucking months, Elena.

  Z is blurry, like a stranger. Part of me knows that four months are significant, our longest separation. Another part isn’t sure what interest this adult, smartly dressed man holds for me.

  —This project is demanding, I say. I just want to focus on it entirely, at least for this year.

  —This right now is distraction? Z says.

  —In the best way, I say, feeling trapped.

  Z looks at me suspiciously. He asks if I can picture the extra room in his apartment, the one with the window onto the courtyard. It could be my study. He asks me to think about it.

  We walk on, leaves crunching under us.

  —Are you sure you’re not becoming too involved? Z asks. What about your work?

  —You mean the dissertation … I say, trailing off, proud of myself for remembering, for being able to have this reasonable conversation with him, as myself, as Elena.

  It feels tedious to explain to him that I can’t go back before finding Ella. I know that she has more to give me, some secret to being alive.

  —And what about us? Z asks.

  I want to be grateful to him for having come so far. T
he ticket, purchased at the last minute, was probably expensive. I know he came to save our relationship. But my mind is stuck on that gap in July.

  On our last night in the countryside, full moon over an unfamiliar landscape, Z breathes beside me in the dark. Awakened by a sense of terror, I go to turn over, stop. Something is wrong. Like her, I don’t want to know. Like her, I am full of dread. The bed is sticky, wet. The smell is too much, a smell of the body, nauseating and intimate. I turn, warmishness spilling. … No physical pain. Just shock. Another wave. Thighs sticky. Top sheet blackening in the moonlight. I try to push myself to a sitting position. Afraid of what’s flowing out of me. I try to stand. Legs not my own. They don’t support my weight.

  —Elena? Z’s eyes are black in the shadows. What’s wrong?

  I show him my hands. I gesture to the blood soaking through the bed.

  —What’s wrong? he repeats.

  —The blood. It’s—

  —Where? Z sits up, alarmed, runs his hands over the mess, pulls back the sheets. Where?

  I shake my head to show that it is everywhere.

  Suddenly wide-awake, he takes my shoulders and pulls my face close to his. His eyes are very wide, serious.

  —Look at me, he says.

  He shakes me.

  —There’s no blood. Do you see? Elena? No blood. Do you see?

  Sensation of falling—a body falling somewhere, not my own.

  In the morning, there is sunlight in the room. I look for traces of the mess and can find none. We have breakfast on the winter porch and drive back to Paris.

  III

  Aurelia: The Hot Season

  21

  THE NEW SEASON BEGAN IN FLUSHES of colorlessness. The Mae Kok turned a thicker brown, the electric greens of the rice fields dulled, and the deep purple hills gave way to lackluster clays, earth tones for the roving eye. In the last days of the cool season, a band of white appeared on the horizon, a tide readying itself to rise. It choked the blue with a sickly gauze, a translucent pane against the sun.

  My skin and mood informed me of these changes, irritability with the temperature’s rise, sensitivity in the linings of my lungs. I felt dry like the landscape, and brittle.

  —The hot season is nearly here, Muay observed one morning as we stared across a windless sky. This is what it will feel like. They will burn the trash.

  —The trash?

  —On the side of the superhighway, they make piles. You cough. They think they are getting rid of it, but it stays in the air. Until the monsoons come. Every year it gets worse. Many teachers—especially foreigners—they go somewhere else.

  —Because of the summer holiday? I asked, distracted and obtuse.

  —Because of bad air, Muay said harshly.

  The hot season brought change—a housemate and a new house away from Muay and the university’s serene sterility. I was desperate to move to Ban Du, more a part of the country, more alive.

  Seb lived there.

  I met Aurelia on the first days of the hot season, and she became its emblem—as much a part of it as the heavy air and parched earth. She came cracking with need.

  The day was hot, white and windless. Classes had been canceled due to an international conference devoted to fostering educational and economic friendship among the countries of the Greater Mekong Subregion. My students, in white and black, transformed into caterers, airport taxi drivers, and tour guides for delegates from Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Vietnam, and Yunnan, China. It was a day of compulsory plenaries in the administration building on top of the hill. I hated sycophantic diplomacy. My face grew tired from smiling. After an hour, I slipped out of the auditorium—overly air-conditioned—and crossed the foyer to a deck overlooking the hills. The dry heat coaxed down my goose bumps as I stood blinking, restless, in bright sun.

  At the far end of the deck, a figure was pacing, hardly visible in the sun glare. She was a Westerner, and she was smoking, exhaling white clouds into the whiteness. Something about her movements, a casualness, told me she lived here—she wasn’t a tourist, nor had she flown in for the conference. She paced with purpose across the deck, intent upon her solitude.

  I retreated to the coolness of the vestibule, taking refuge in the restroom.

  As I was washing my hands in front of the mirror, a stall door opened, and a blond figure appeared, bending over the sink, studying her lips. Our eyes met in the mirror; brown eyes reflected back as if they were mine. I turned to dry my hands, breaking our stare.

  As we walked out of the bathroom, she lit a cigarette, crossed her arms, and looked at me like a shy animal.

  —Aurelia, she said, extending her hand. I’m not Spanish. Most people think I’m Spanish. Because of the name? She shrugged her thin shoulders. I’m not.

  She had slight creases around her eyes, evidence of a life spent in the sun. But she was slight and dressed like the students in a white blouse and black skirt. It was impossible to guess her age. I asked her what she did.

  —Oh, teach some. Like everyone here.

  She brushed a wisp of hair from her face. She had a flippant, raspy way of speaking.

  —I also work for the government? she said, inflecting her voice as if it were a question. The U.S. government? she added, blowing out smoke.

  The Thais who knew us only in passing would often confuse Aurelia and me. The woman selling som tam at Ban Du Market rarely failed to make me believe I’d been there hours earlier.

  —Ah, you! Hungry again?

  —No, that wasn’t me, I would say, doubting myself.

  —Yes, you. Som tam extra spicy. So many chilies for falang! Ped mak maak!

  She would laugh, crushing chilies with her pestle. Aurelia liked her food so spicy, it must have burned her insides—it made her feel full, she said, after eating only a little. This alone made it urgent that I distinguish myself.

  —No. That was Aurelia. Chan bpen Ella. Different person.

  The vice president, who, having studied in Frankfurt, knew German, and, for obscure reasons, a bit of Italian, would ask me, Where’s your doppo-gang?

  It turned out that Aurelia and I had grown up in neighboring towns. We’d shopped at the same chain stores and had similar ways of saying things. She told me she’d been contracted by the government to write a report on the hill tribes. She’d been here a few months but didn’t know many people. Her job required her to attend this conference, but it bored her. Also, she was looking for a house in Ban Du Village. Love affair gone wrong, she said flippantly.

  After three days of knowing each other, Aurelia and I decided to live together in Ban Du, in a house with a wall of glass. It had a veranda and a gravel yard. Mango and papaya trees grew along the gate that separated our property from a dirt track that bordered the rice fields.

  —I’m so happy for you! When can I see your new home? Soraya had been effusive.

  Muay had been nonplussed, unable to understand why I would give up my suite at the university. Béa, who I thought would be delighted to have me as a neighbor, demurred:

  —You’ve only just met this woman, she said. Are you sure you want to live with her?

  I told Béa I was good at reading people. The truth was, I found Aurelia familiar.

  In the house by the rice fields, Aurelia became my mirror. On hot-season evenings, I’d watch her pace our veranda, sucking at cans of sugar-free Pepsi Max with the intensity of a person starved. Or else, having chewed a pack of gum, she would spit out fist-size lumps and stick them back to the packaging. She clung to cigarettes with nervous fingers, shuddering with each inhale, as if she wanted to be filled in a way nothing could. She was insatiable, she told me once, which was why she had to be so careful.

  I’d watch her through the glass wall, her thin body seeming unconnected to the mass of cigarette butts and crushed cans growing on the ledge beside her.

  Aurelia didn’t like the feeling, in general, of being seen. She’d whittled down her flesh, canceling hunger by means of discipline. If discipline
faltered, if the body gave a sign, the craving was silenced with Pepsi Max. It wasn’t that she didn’t feel hunger; she felt it all the time. But if she gave in to it—even once—she’d never be free. After confessing this, she disappeared and returned with a silver pack of peanuts in her outstretched hands.

  —They’re for you.

  —Really?

  —I bought them for you. At the store? The one down the road?

  I found myself accepting the logic of her world, a logic of desire denied.

  —A snack after work. Happy hour, ha-ah!

  This utterance of hers, ha-ah, doesn’t lend itself to writing: a laugh cut in two by a glottal stop and the vowel repeated to affirm the agreement it sought to secure, as if really asking were unbearable.

  I tried to close her hands around the peanuts, but she thrust them at me fearfully. Points of her shoulder blades emerged like rock ledges under her loose tank top.

  Aurelia’s violent vulnerability riveted me day after day. I’d watch her—animal, volatile, at war with herself—legs against the balustrade, regulating, sensitive and proud, closing around her the narrow corridor of her cage.

  On the other side of our wall of glass, I saw her, so different from myself—from who I thought I was—but it took a moment to be sure the image was not my own reflected back at me. Something about Aurelia frightened me. At her core was something feral, volatile. It was in me, too, this thing—maybe in all of us. But I’d been taught to bury it deep beneath the skin. Aurelia didn’t seem to understand this. She had everything inside out.

  22

  THE GERANIUMS IN SIOBHÁN’S FLOWERPOTS will not survive the winter. Petals cling to spidery limbs in the cold. Siobhán has made tea, as usual, but there is something haphazard, less controlled about her. A few tea leaves are stuck to the side of the pot. I wipe them away with my napkin.

  We never mentioned Siobhán’s sudden departure from the restaurant. After her return from Basel, we simply resumed our meetings. Professional. Less personal.