Now You See the Sky

by Catharine H. Murray

  On the way to the Bangkok temple that morning, we stopped at the market to buy stews, meats, and sweets to offer the monks. When we arrived and the monks had seated themselves cross-legged on the raised platform at the front of the room, Chan placed the food into the begging bowls lined up before the men, old and young, dressed in dark yellow robes. As we moved down the line on our knees, the monks reached out and touched Chan’s head, smiling encouragement for our sick little boy.

  The monks began chanting, and when it came to the time in the ceremony to bless the water each supplicant had brought, Dtaw helped Chan hold Mei Ya’s special brass pitcher as they poured it into the matching cup. Then everyone went outside to pour the holy water on the roots of the Bodhi Tree, the tree of enlightenment and symbol of the Lord Buddha. It was under this tree in Bodh Gaya, India, that the Buddha, after years of practice and seeking, is said to have achieved enlightenment. The monks believed that the huge tree at the temple was started from a cutting brought from the Buddha’s tree.

  As Chan poured holy water over the tree’s huge tangle of roots, each of us reached out and touched him, as is the custom, gently placing fingertips and palms on his skin, sharing the giving and receiving of blessing that the ceremony signified. Chan smiled, happy to be at the temple, at home, with the family he’d missed.

  * * *

  A few weeks later, Chan was hospitalized when graft-versus-host disease (GVHD) set in. As we’d decreased his immunosuppressant medication and his original marrow began to fight against the donor marrow as a foreign invader, the condition of GVHD arose. This was a good thing because if the donor marrow won the battle, eradicating the cancer-producing marrow, the transplant would be a success. The problem was that GVHD could be not only extremely debilitating and painful, but also, if left to rage for too long, fatal. The doctor said we would be playing “cat and mouse” with the disease until he felt it was too dangerous for Chan, and then he would administer steroids to halt the progression of the fight inside Chan’s body.

  Our hospital room faced east. I should say Chan’s. He reminded me that it was his room, his bed, when I wouldn’t let him do what he wanted, usually watch TV. I should let a dying boy watch cartoons that make him laugh, I thought. I did some of the time, but too much of it seemed only to make him feel worse. I supposed coming back into the pain in his body after the escape into the world of television was overwhelming.

  * * *

  Chan had been in the hospital for two weeks. Because Thailand has universal health care for its uninsured citizens, medical bills were not something we had to worry about. Public hospitals were almost free, and even luxurious private hospitals were a fraction of the cost of US hospitals. Now Chan, thinner than ever before from the havoc that GVHD was wreaking in his gut, lay on his bed in one of Bangkok’s best private hospitals, groaning, “Kow neeyow” (sticky rice), his favorite food. He hadn’t eaten since he’d been checked in.

  Outside the setting sun sent its last brightness across the skyscrapers, lighting up the glass sides against the dark gray backdrop of early night sky beyond. Close enough for me to see figures moving behind each window as electric lights switched on against the night. On balconies, laundry racks shifted left or right as people pulled in shirts and underwear, stiff and warm, at the end of another hot, sunny day. I could not see well into the golden rooms, but I could make out furniture and lamps and kitchen counters and people with their own lives and pain and love. So many cells in the immense tall honeycombs. So much for one flimsy structure of cement and steel to contain.

  But the city night’s soft air warmed my bare arms. From our seventh-floor balcony, where I stood whenever I could escape Chan’s bedside, I surveyed the by-now-familiar nighttime scenes below. A building, half-constructed, supported dozens of workers, like ants busy on a dry mound. In the daytime they were invisible behind the green plastic mesh that shaded them, but at night the glow of a long white fluorescent bulb set the stage for a man working on the bones of the structure behind the green scrim. Below, dwarfed by the first levels of the high-rise, another man bathed behind his once-white cement house, now gray from the exhaust that spewed from cars and trucks all day. In the cool of the darkness, he poured bowls of water over his nearly naked body to wash away the grime of a day’s labor in the smog-shrouded city. Nearby, a television screen flashed incessantly at another man repairing the blue ceramic tiles of his roof. To the right at the construction site, a huge funnel-shaped vat for cement slid on an invisible wire from ten stories up to the street below. The workers’ spotlight threw a finely detailed shadow of the man’s figure across the mesh.

  As the sky darkened, the man on the roof disappeared down a ladder, his TV and tools gathered by the gutter. The construction worker, bareheaded and wearing flip-flops, picked up the glowing rod of light and carried it, cord trailing, to another room beyond my sight. If I could go there, I could find him by its glow, I thought. Through a window frame a hundred feet down and opposite the hospital, the silver ring of a cooking spoon circled in a black wok.

  Back in our room Chan lay on his side, the curve of his hipbone sticking out above the rest of his body. The caricature of a skeleton we saw every day on Scooby-Doo or Popeye was taking over the shape of his once-perfect little-boy body. This was one of the hardest parts for me, this thinness.

  * * *

  Three weeks after waiting out the disease, when the doctor witnessed the pain that tore through Chan’s gut, he decided that the battle inside his body had to be put to an end. He administered the steroids. The healthy donor marrow had been defeated. Chan’s own marrow, producing cells that were multiplying and could gather to kill him, had won.

  However much I begged and pushed and cajoled, Chan would not come out to the balcony to feel the air and see the world. He preferred to hide in the bed he’d occupied for weeks, with the sound and sight of Daffy Duck beaming down from the TV mounted on the ceiling. I asked him one more time to come out and see the view and was refused again. I sighed and gave up. I left him alone and slipped back outside to warmth and darkening sky. Some tiny clouds floated by, ghostly white, undersides lit up by city lights, and I was surprised to see a sprinkling of stars above.

  Leaving Bangkok

  Our house stood quiet, with only the rumble of faraway trucks and airplanes and the whispering of a string of paper Ninja Turtles fluttering at the window. Chan was finally sleeping and Tahn too. I thought of how the night before Chan had had enough pain in his ankle from the infection that if we’d been in the hospital, they would have convinced me that he needed a big IV push of morphine. Then he’d be on a continuous drip by now, sleepy, muddled, and unable to do the work of getting well or at least of fighting his way to feeling better. I didn’t think morphine let your body heal in the best way possible.

  The week before, when I’d told the doctor over the phone that Chan’s eyelid was red and puffy, he had said, “Hmm, sounds like the leukemia has infiltrated the eyelid.” The next day it was fine. Would it have infiltrated and then left? It seemed like whatever symptom I told the doctors about, they interpreted as another section of the downward slide, with no hope of reversal. But Chan was walking on his own after the infection in his foot that had him hospitalized and near death for a week. He’d told me that morning he’d tried running. “I looked like a dog with a broken leg,” he reported. Dtaw told me he had soaked it with ginger compresses in the night. The doctor thought the infection and pain and misery were irreversible. Yet Chan was better. He had been so thin, but I could see more meat on his bones and an insatiable appetite. I had to work so damn hard to keep believing in life, in the ability of the body to heal itself rather than falling so easily prey to the hopeless discouraged attitude of the doctors.

  “We’re not going to cure him. Just give him more morphine. Don’t increase his misery with unnecessary treatment.” This was what the doctor told me when I kept insisting he call in a specialist about the pain in Chan’s foot, the fever, and the swelling. The doc
tor had seen too many parents keep their dying children alive through painful complications of leukemia, and he didn’t want us to do the same to Chan. We had a different outlook.

  I tried to find other doctors who would see things our way. “Oh, he’s post-transplant relapse?” they asked. “Why are you bothering to treat? This is simply another sign of his demise.” They all had the same hopeless attitude. There was no room for the idea that Chan might surprise us all and heal. I couldn’t stand to meet with one more doctor who looked at me as if I were crazy, asking for their help, when clearly my child was terminal. Nothing they could do.

  * * *

  We still wanted to fight, so after six months of working to get Chan well in Bangkok and too many hospital visits for transfusions and treatment of infection, we decided it was time to go. The doctors didn’t want us to leave Bangkok. The allopathic doctor was sure Chan’s blood cells would fail in a matter of days. “Why don’t you just go for a weekend to the countryside to visit his relatives, say goodbye. Then come back here for platelets and red blood cells.”

  The nutritionist frowned and shook his head. “Why? We can continue the megadoses of vitamins here. Stay six more months to build his strength, and then go.”

  But we were determined to take Chan where we thought he would be happier. He spoke every day of living on the mountain with horses Dtaw would bring from Laos. He wanted to see Mei Tong and live in our cabin so high up that eagles flew below us across the valley. We were all tired of Bangkok with the smog and traffic and too many doctor’s appointments and hopeless faces.

  And the doctors didn’t have anything to offer besides transfusions and morphine. We didn’t think Chan was ready for all that yet. We had faith his body could fight. The blood counts the doctors relied on for information didn’t seem to tell us much. Up and down the numbers went each week, so that the predictions I had believed so many times (the blasts are down—he’s getting well; the blasts are up—he’s dying) had become pointless.

  We decided to go where Chan wanted to be, where we hoped that clean air, pure water, and proximity to the healing energy of nature might bring back what manmade toxins and pollutants and radiation had damaged, perhaps beyond repair. We left Bangkok to return to the home on the river where he’d been born, to gather up our things, to find the horses, and to prepare for the move to the mountains.

  Chan was delighted to leave Bangkok. That morning, so early it was still dark, he eagerly got up to get dressed. It was the first day in three weeks of extreme pain in his foot that he was able to run around and play with his brothers. While Dtaw and Cam and I put the final boxes into the waiting truck, Chan and Cody and Tahn laughed loudly as they marched up and down the stairs chanting at the top of their lungs, “You can’t be hard core unless you live hard core!”

  Gathered

  The cool mist rolled down the lane from the river in the early-morning dark as if to welcome us home. We pulled up in front of our house after the all-night journey from Bangkok. With the help of the neighbors, we unloaded the eight-wheeled truck that had followed us with our belongings. Bicycles, furniture, clothes, Champion juicer ordered from America, extra-virgin olive oil purchased from the only health food store in Bangkok—all were carried into the house amid laughter and talk about where we’d been and what we’d missed. No one looked at us with pity or worry. Our friends knew how to stay focused on the present without visible concern for the future or acknowledgment of the problem. Even when Chan was not within earshot, Dtaw’s friends would not bring up his illness until Dtaw did. It was not avoidance. It was generosity. It was tenderness, a willingness to wait, to leave curiosity unfed. It was also a way to be fully in the present without filling it with fears about the future. This skill was one cultivated over a lifetime of small-town life, I imagined. Giving those one lived with space to have their lives, their problems, without being pressed for action or explanation. Dtaw’s friends were experts at this.

  With the women, and especially with his mother, it was different. She was always worrying, asking, insisting on a response. And the less he gave her, the more she probed.

  Dtaw called his oldest friends to meet him at the house that afternoon. One by one, they showed up after lunch until four of them were gathered listening, waiting to hear what he wanted.

  “You need to go find a horse for Chan. A black stallion.”

  His friends waited for more. They did not exchange questioning looks. They did not speak. Their respect for Dtaw ran deep. He had led their gang of friends, more like brothers, since they were children. They would do anything he asked. He went on to explain that Chan wanted a horse—not just any horse, but a black stallion. They knew there were none to be found in this part of the country, so they continued to listen through the frequent long pauses in his speech they knew well from a lifelong friendship.

  “You will need to go to the other side of the river and head north. Searching close to the border of China, you will find horses. They use them instead of buffalo for plowing and pulling carts in some villages there.” There were few roads in Laos, a country of deep jungle and high mountains. Travel and trade was done mostly by boat along the Mekong. But there were some rough dirt roads trucks could rumble slowly over, in and out of deep gullies of mud and dust. The quest would involve patience and endurance.

  After the instructions had been given, the men nodded, knowing that they would not come home until they had found what Chan wanted. Dtaw went back to the kitchen and came out with bottles of beer, an ice bucket, and glasses. Cody and Jew ran to help, Jew lifting the ice cubes, edges smoothed by the heat, with thin aluminum tongs to drop them into the glasses before Cody carefully poured the amber liquid almost to the brim for these men he called Paw, his other daddies. Their talk softened into laughter as they asked Tahn and Cody about life in America. Paw Tum held Chan in his lap, arms wrapped tight around his thin body. “This one I missed the most,” he exclaimed, teasing Tahn and Cody that he didn’t miss them as much. They were too big and tough now to love, he laughed. They laughed too.

  Later in the afternoon, when the men had left and the house had quieted down enough for Chan and me to rest together on the cool cement floor, he turned to me and said, “I feel my power all the time. I feel like a tiger or something.”

  “I’m so glad, honey. That’s so important. You need your power.”

  That evening, while Cody and Jew and Dtaw went to the schoolyard to play soccer in the cooling of the day, Chan and I took a walk by the river we had missed so much. As we stood gazing out at the red and orange clouds beneath the violet gray sky of sunset, he looked up at me and said in a quite matter-of-fact way, “I hope I don’t die when I’m a kid.”

  “Why not?” I asked, only to keep him talking.

  “Because I don’t want to die yet.”

  I smiled on the outside.

  * * *

  The next morning, our first back at home, I awoke before the other four, cuddled on the pallet we all slept on. Packed hard with the downy fluff of kapok pods that hung at the tops of tall trees beside the house, it made a good bed for all of us. Carefully disentangling myself from the sweet softness of my three boys’ skinny thighs and warm breath, I pulled the blanket back over them before climbing out from under the mosquito net and standing up to absorb a moment of solitude before my day began. The mist that settled shortly after midnight blurred the light of the waning moon. The crickets’ chirping and roosters’ calls would have made it hard to sleep had I not been used to them. Downstairs the glow from the streetlight shone in slender straight lines through the gaps in the planks of the walls. The bathroom floor tiles were cold but dry under my bare feet.

  Back upstairs I tried to go back to sleep. It felt too early to be up, only a little after four, although all our neighbors had been up for hours readying the goods they made and sold each day in the market. Their preparations began early every afternoon. Whenever I looked out my window into the neighbors’ yard after lunch, I saw the grandfa
ther roasting a pig’s snout, its skin blistering white and black, as the old man sat smoking a fat cigar of rolled-up leaves beside the fire. The snout would become part of the sausages, stuffed and hung, festooning their outdoor kitchen, until taken to sell at the morning market.

  The market was the town’s social center. There every day under the glow of bare lightbulbs strung over outdoor stalls in the morning dark, neighbors met and chatted. Doughnuts floated in vast woks of bubbling oil while buyers waited for them to be scooped out, drained, and rhythmically snatched with long chopsticks and put into plastic bags lined with squares of paper, children’s cut-up worksheets from school. Sausages lay pink and plump coiled on aluminum trays before the fat gregarious women who sold them beside boiling pots of fresh soy milk flavored with bai toey, pandanus leaves, fragrant green blades of what looked to me like dune grass stems. Every morning we walked through, carrying our baskets, laughing and chatting with the many neighbors and cousins we saw, carefully selecting the best vegetables and cuts of meat to cook for our family.

  At this early hour, the monks at the temples had been long awake, chanting together in the dark, then sweeping their long twig-bundle brooms in graceful arcs across the hard-packed dirt of the temple grounds just as the sun began to rise. Before it got above the horizon, they picked up their begging bowls, twisted the free end of their robes into a rope to tug over their shoulders, and set off barefoot to collect their morning meal.

  Whenever we woke early enough, Chan was eager to go to the end of our little lane to be with his grandmother as she put fistfuls of sticky rice into the monks’ bowls as she had done every morning for most of her life. Even his great-grandmother, at ninety-nine years old, still got up before the sun every morning to light her cooking fire and steam rice and packets of meat and vegetables she wrapped in shiny green leaves to offer to the monks. Squatting in front of her house, wrinkled, stick-like legs doubled up under her, she waited. Swathed in white cotton sarong, layered shirts, and bundled in scarves and a yellow knit cap, she watched for the lines of monks to come down the lane, one group from each of the seven temples in the town, and some from outside of the town too, their bare feet silent on the road as they approached. When Dtaw’s grandfather died more than ten years earlier, his wife had shaved her hair close to her head and vowed to wear only white to show that, as a widow, she would faithfully follow the eight precepts taught by the Lord Buddha.