Sightseeing

by Rattawut Lapcharoensap

  I reached over and turned on the light beside the hospital gurney. Mama put her forearm up to her eyes. In his sleep, Papa stirred as well. Under the light, his face was a pale shade of lavender. He turned over, revealing a thick bandage on the side of his head, drenched purple and black with blood, the cloth matted with the substance. I felt relieved then, as Papa turned away, and even as the stench of the bloodied bandage filled my nostrils. It smelled like that flatbed full of dead chickens, and I thought about how blood was blood no matter if it’s from a chicken or a man. But at least he was alive, and, thinking this, I felt the world become coherent again.

  Mama was saying something. For a second, I thought my ears were still playing tricks on me: I heard only garbling and mewing. But then I saw Noon’s face in the doorway and realized from the way she tilted her head that the sounds coming from my mother’s lips were incomprehensible to her as well. “Mama,” I said, and she looked at me stunned, as if she didn’t recognize me, didn’t even know I had been standing there. She squinted and gestured for me to turn off the lamp. The room fell into darkness again. Mama touched Papa’s thigh once more, rubbed it, cinched the fabric of his hospital gown as if she were testing the quality of the material for one of her bras.

  “Can you believe it?” Mama said, and from the sound of her voice I could not tell if she was laughing or crying. “Ladda, can you believe it?” I stood there beside her, watched my father’s ribs moving slowly against his hospital gown, his face still wincing every so often. “Can you believe it, Ladda?” Mama asked again, this time in a singsong voice, and I wanted to ask her what I was supposed to be incredulous about, but when I opened my mouth to speak, nothing came out, just a few short, exasperated breaths. As in the elevator a few minutes earlier, I felt like I was falling into a bottomless pit, that the room had been dropped into a chasm, and I wanted desperately to turn on the bedside lamp, for I thought light might put an end to the nausea. I felt weightless even as I felt my limbs weighted with a thousand dumbbells anchored to the floor. The room began to tilt and turn around me. I held on to the gurney rail for balance. “Can you believe it, Ladda?” Mama said once more. This time she cackled as if she’d never understood how funny the question was. “How could they?”

  I walked toward Mama, raised my right hand high into the air, and brought it down upon the side of her face. For a split second, before I hit her, Mama jutted her chin out and looked at me as if she wanted—needed—to receive the blow, had been hoping I would do this all along. The impact barely made a noise, nor did it seem to have much of an effect: It only turned her head around, like something strange had caught her attention. She looked disappointed—not because I had hit her, but because I had not hit her hard enough—so I raised my hand and hit her once more, this time with more force, squarely on the bridge of her nose. I wanted her to ward off my blows. I wanted her to fight back. But she just sat there as if she not only had expected my blows, but needed more fury to stir her to life. “Don’t you go crazy on me,” I yelled. “Stop talking like a fucking lunatic. Make some goddamn sense, Mama.”

  Noon grabbed me. Mama laughed again, high-pitched and girlish, a light trail of blood trickling from her left nostril. I lunged at her again, but Noon had her arms tight around my body. “Ladda, don’t,” Noon whispered into my ear. “Enough.”

  I realized then that Mama wasn’t laughing—she was crying. Her shoulders were not shaking with mad, devilish hilarity; they were trembling with grief. She dabbed at her bleeding nostril with the base of her thumb. When she saw the blood, she got up and walked toward Noon and me. Noon still had me in her arms. Mama’s silhouette seemed surprisingly large before me then. I looked up at her, and seeing her swollen eyes, looked down at my feet. Noon walked out and closed the door behind her.

  It was my turn now, I thought, staring at the floor, feeling my mother’s breath on my shoulders. I would let Mama punish me as I had thought I was punishing her. I would jut out my chin to receive her hand. And, that done, I would let her do it again and again and again until she was at long last satisfied. But she didn’t. All she did was tell me they had cut off Papa’s ear. They took everything, she said. Little Jui and his goons. All the lobe and all the cartilage and everything else that goes with an ear. All they’d left was a nub and a hole on the side of his head. Mama dabbed her nostrils with the hem of her blouse and walked out of the room. I listened to her slippers trailing off down the hall. I looked at the gurney. Papa had turned over once more. He stared at me astonished, the white of his eyes like jewels in the dark. And in a dazed, whispering voice that told me he was still very much asleep, swimming in his morphine dream, my father said: “Yes. Yes. Yes. A hundred and a thousand times yes already.”

  XVIII

  The days in the hospital were long. I don’t think Mama slept the whole four days. She sat in an armchair beside the gurney, staring back and forth between Papa and the window overlooking the hospital parking lot. I tried to talk to her, but she’d only nod at me or shake her head, as if I’d uttered nothing but questions. She didn’t eat. I would get food from the cafeteria, but she would only nibble at it courteously before setting down the tray. She never mentioned the fact that I’d hit her; after a while, her silence seemed punishment enough. Noon came by to pick me up for school every morning, but I couldn’t bring myself to leave Papa’s side, and Mama didn’t seem to mind.

  Papa woke up every so often. He never said a word. He would look at us, stare at the ceiling, click his morphine drip, and just wait for sleep to come again. We both tried to speak to him, but he’d simply turn over onto his side. Doctors in neatly pressed lab coats would come into the room. The infection was beginning to heal, they said on the second day, which explained the stench at night.

  Nurses came in twice a day to change Papa’s bandage and clean his wound. That was the only time Papa ever made a sound. Mama would stand and look calmly over the nurses’ shoulders. I didn’t want to see the wound; it was enough to see the nurses wince.

  We received some flowers and cards, but nobody came to visit. It was as if people were afraid that they might be putting themselves in harm’s way, as though Papa’s unfortunate fate was a contractible disease.

  On the evening of the second day, Noon came by and we climbed onto the hospital roof. She’d brought iced coffee and cigarettes. The town stretched below us; on the horizon, we could see the hills that separated us from our neighbors to the north. I tried to find our property, but I couldn’t see much beyond the rubber grove on the eastern side of the roof. It occurred to me then that Mama and I had not gone back to the house since we’d left. I wondered if the strays were smart enough to notice our absence. Perhaps they would go to the chicken house first and then, upon finding no sustenance there, move to the house itself.

  Noon told me she’d seen Little Jui around town driving Papa’s Mazda.

  “It’s a crime, Ladda,” Noon said. “It’s an abomination what they did to your father. You should report it to the police.”

  I shook my head. I reminded Noon that the chief of our esteemed police department was Big Jui’s brother-in-law. Given the way things worked in our town, Papa’d get arrested for having his own ear cut off. Papa lost, I reminded Noon. He bet more than he could afford. The police would probably say that an ear was the least Papa could give for a bet he never meant to pay. “Still,” Noon replied, sighing, “that doesn’t make it right, Ladda,” and I said she should know by now that we were living in a world where words like that didn’t mean a thing: right or wrong, left or right, up or down, inside or outside—our people didn’t speak that kind of language.

  We took Papa home on the fourth day. Miss Mayuree sent one of her men over with the sedan and for the first time I did not feel any rancor toward her. Miss Mayuree told Mama that she could keep to her old quota for the time being, eight hundred bras a month. Mama thanked her once again. The nub on Papa’s head had stopped bleeding now, though there remained a large square bandage taped over the side
of his scalp. When we got home, Mama sat Papa on the front porch, cleaned out the wound, changed the bandage. Papa grimaced as she swabbed the wound with alcohol, but still he didn’t say a thing. The doctors had advised vigilance—they said the infection might spread. I couldn’t bear to look at Papa’s wound, so I carried my bags to my bedroom and left Mama and Papa on the porch.

  For the first time in a while, I felt calm. It was as if I’d expended all my anger that first night in the hospital, hitting Mama, screaming at her. Nor did I feel any anguish for what happened to Papa. What happened happened, I decided, and I could see no use in wishing that it didn’t. The doctors told us that Papa would still be able to hear out of both ears—only the cartilage had been taken—which really was the most anybody could hope for, they said. They made Little Jui’s barbarity seem perversely generous.

  At breakfast the next morning, Papa spoke for the first time. Over porridge, he said, “This is delicious,” and Mama and I looked at him astonished, for I think in some ways we’d been preparing for the possibility that he might never speak again.

  “What?” Papa said, grinning at us both. “You guys don’t think it’s delicious?”

  We slowly started speaking again. In steady increments, there was talk in the house once more. There was kindness. There was generosity. There was laughing and smiling and even, at times, delight. Mama and Papa decided to plant a garden in the yard—zinnias and azaleas and birds-of-paradise and morning glories. I’d come home from school and see them out there bent over the earth together, the sun casting its long rays, and if it hadn’t been for that square bandage over Papa’s missing ear, you would’ve thought we were as normal as anybody else. The strays would emerge at night to inspect the garden, pause to sniff the budding flowers. And if it hadn’t been for that chicken house, with its empty coops and bags of premium feed lining the mud walls, you never would’ve guessed that my father once fought chickens as though nothing else mattered.

  I’d occasionally see Little Jui in town with his bodyguards and Ramon. I’d walk the other way. He never bothered me again. It was as though he’d decided to move on to other, more entertaining game. I’d heard that many of the men had stopped going to the cockpit after what Little Jui did to my father. It was the end of cockfighting in our town. Dog racing was the new game: Saksri Bualoi had retired undefeated as the welterweight champion of the world and opened up a world-class dog track in his hometown. It was something else, the rumormongers said, to sit there in the stands and eat marinated porkballs and drink fifths of rye and watch those beautiful dogs run.

  XIX

  We went back to the hospital for a checkup later that month. Everything’s fine, the doctor told us, peering sternly into the bandage. No infection. Good progress all around. He recommended a prosthetic for Papa. “It will be easy,” he said. “All we need to do is make a mold of your other ear.” He pulled out a few dummies from a leather suitcase—an ear, a nose, a shin, a hand, a foot, all made from some complicated sounding substance, all tinted the same pinkish hue. The doctor put the artificial ear in Papa’s hand. Papa fingered it and said, “Why, it’s just rubber, Doctor,” and the doctor shrugged as if he couldn’t be bothered to explain again. “I don’t need a rubber ear,” Papa said, laughing, handing the prosthetic back. “Thanks but no thanks. Lots of ugly people in this world, Doctor. And they’re no less ugly for having two ears on their heads.” The doctor nodded, looked at his watch. Before we left, he took off Papa’s bandage. I looked at Papa’s wound for the first time: the bulging, translucent half-moon of scar tissue; the short brown notch which the doctor called the tragus; the small hole that made me think of some flesh-eating creature burrowing itself deep into the side of Papa’s head. Papa walked to the mirror. “It’s not so bad,” I said, and Papa smiled at me appreciatively.

  That night, I went into the chicken house after dinner. I hadn’t been in there since the day I told Papa about Little Jui coming to take the Mazda. It still smelled strongly of chicken shit and stale urine. A few sparrows had made their home in the thatch roof, getting fat off the remaining bags of chicken feed. They fluttered around as I entered the chicken house. I didn’t light the lantern. I just sat down in the dark and listened to the sounds around me: the hum of Mama’s sewing machine on the front porch; Papa watering the garden, long jets of water beating an irregular rhythm against the soil; the sparrows chirping overhead; the cicadas singing in the trees; the strays lifting their voices in turn to join that insect orchestra. I sat there for a long time, until Mama and Papa went inside. Mama turned on the kitchen light and the chicken-house windows cupped its yellow rays. I watched her shadow moving on the chicken-house floor. Soon, she turned off the light and I was in darkness again. I heard my parents murmuring and then I heard their bedroom door shut. I could sense nothing then of my parents, nothing of the house, just the noises the animals made. After a while, even the animals seemed to go to sleep, as though all the world had decided to turn in with my parents for the night, and I held my breath because it seemed the only sound left in the world and all around me then was an extraordinary silence. It made me feel light, that silence, as if I might float to the ceiling, as if I might be able to open my arms, flap them, and fly with the sparrows. I don’t know how long I sat there holding my breath in the dark, but I thought then of how loud the world could be, so much clatter and noise, and of how lovely and rare was a moment like this when one need not listen to anything at all.

  A truck motor rumbled down the road, coughing and sputtering sporadically. I got up and walked out, decided to turn in for the night. But when I walked across the yard, I noticed that it was Papa’s Mazda coming toward the house. I paused, hoping they wouldn’t see me. The truck approached, its headlights throwing wild shadows against the rubber trees. I hoped they’d simply pass me by. They did. But then, just as I stepped onto the front porch, the Mazda stopped. The truck began to back up toward our property. It stopped at the entrance to our driveway.

  The driver got out of the car. He started walking toward me, his shadow growing in size, the gravel crunching beneath his feet. At first, I wanted to go inside the house. But then I thought I might say a thing or two to Little Jui. I thought I might give him a piece of my mind. He was alone; there were three of us here. This was our property. If he gave me any trouble, Mama and Papa would come out. I sat down on the porch steps and waited for him.

  “What do you want?” I shouted, but he didn’t respond, just kept on walking toward me. “Speak up, motherfucker.”

  But, again, no response, only his huffing louder with the closing distance. He was some ten meters away when the moon came out from behind a cloud. By its blue light, I saw that he was not Little Jui at all but that Filipino boy Ramon.

  I was afraid now. I’d expected Little Jui—I’d been prepared to confront him once and for all—but I hadn’t expected Ramon. He must’ve sensed my fear and surprise, because he slowed his pace, held his hands before him as though to say he meant me no harm. I stood up. I could smell his sweat now. I could’ve touched his face. He smiled. I turned to go back inside the house, but Ramon reached out and grabbed my hand.

  “What do you want?” I whispered, turning to face him, struggling against his grip. His hand felt cold, clammy against my skin. “Go away,” I whispered, and when he smiled at me again, I noticed for the first time his swollen right brow, a messy trail of dried blood branching across his cheek in every direction. He let go of my hand, and though I wanted to turn back to the house, I kept staring into his battered face, mesmerized by the ganglia of blood on his cheek. He said something, but it was in another language—Tagalog, perhaps—and I shook my head to tell him I didn’t understand. He said something again, the same guttural phrase, his voice a dim whisper between us. I shook my head again. “I don’t understand,” I said, and for the first time I saw how helpless he actually was—this foreign boy cast into a foreign land to handle other people’s chickens—and I wondered what had happened tonight to produce
those bruises on his face, where he’d been headed in the Mazda before he saw me. He opened his mouth to say something again, but then he took one of my wrists into his hand, as if the gesture might explain what he’d been trying to say. I didn’t resist this time. For a moment, it seemed like Ramon was taking my pulse, his fingers hot against my veins. He reached into the pocket of his jeans. He put something in my hand. He closed my fingers around the object.

  “What is this?” I asked, holding up my fist, my fingers hugging the object’s cold, velvety texture. He shrugged. I already knew what it was. I already knew what he’d given me; I didn’t have to open my fingers to see. I didn’t want it. “What is this?” I asked again, but Ramon turned around and started walking back toward the Mazda. I caught up with him. He stopped.

  “I don’t want it,” I said. I tried to take one of his hands, return the strange token, but he pulled away and shook his head. He said something to me again in that guttural language. I stared at him. The object felt heavy in my hands, like a warm mushroom, and I realized then that I was squeezing it hard. He reached out, put a hand on my cheek, said something once more. He gestured with his chin toward the Mazda. He pointed toward my house. He put a palm over his heart. I shook my head. “I don’t understand,” I said. “I don’t understand what you want.” He repeated the gestures once more—the Mazda, the house, his heart—and this time, for some reason, I thought I understood him.

  He wanted to go home.

  “Help,” he said loudly in Thai, and for a moment I stared at him dumbfounded, Papa’s flesh still hot in my fist. “Help,” he said again. “Me.”

  He walked to the Mazda. He got in the passenger seat. He sat there for a long time staring at me, waiting. I knew then what I needed to do. I crouched down and started digging a small hole through the gravel driveway with one hand, my fingers still wrapped around Papa’s ear in the other. The ground beneath the gravel was hard, and I felt soil collecting in my fingernails. The hardened topsoil soon gave way to softer mulch, and I clawed at it furiously, grabbing fistfuls of dirt. I thought I might be able to sit there digging in that driveway forever.