She and Sunantha went into a huddle of exchanged observations on the peculiar foibles and general existential ineptitude of Western males, all of it in a hushed and rapid-fire gabble designed to confound my poor command of Thai.
Finally, it came her time. She got to see the same man who’d won over the peasant woman with his pharmaceutical largess. They took her in behind a curtain. A couple of minutes later, the nurse reappeared; she came over to where Ernest and Sunantha and I were sitting and asked which one was the ‘husband’.
Ernest went away with her behind the curtain, and all was calm for a minute or so, before I heard Ernest’s voice raised in contention. You could catch something about “this blasted kid”, and “haven’t you got any real doctors?” Everybody in the waiting area picked right up; this waiting around tended to get somewhat boring, and here we had some fine entertainment brewing. Nothing better than a crazy farang; too bad you couldn’ t understand what he was saying.
A nurse was assigned to Noi to see that she got admitted. If I’d been the doctor, I would’ve prescribed a sedative for Ernest, while I was at it.
Noi appeared to be in control of things, though she looked scared at the same time. “We don’t know, yet,” she told him. “We must be strong; we must wait and see.” But the doctors said she had a kind of brain tumor, no matter how much Ernest said it wasn’t so. No matter how he willed it not to be so.
III.
Ernest’s hands were clenched into tight fists on the table in front of him, and he kept saying “Goddamn” in confused tones of anger and pain.
He didn’t want another beer, he said. Maybe a coffee. “This goddamned rain,” he said. “Isn’t it ever going to stop?”
We had finished dinner, but there wasn’t much point in trying to get a taxi till the rain let up. The rainy season had almost past, but it wanted us to know there was a last hurrah or two yet to enjoy. This downpour had come out of nowhere, following upon a sunset that had been so beautiful it had almost cheered Ernest
Sunantha and I had taken him to our favorite restaurant by the river. We’d gotten ‘our’ table out on the deck, right by the water’s edge, and we’d sampled all manner of tasty snacks and beer as the sun sank down across the river, it’s dying rays scattered into sprays of glittering gems in the rooster tails flung up by the long-tail boats.
Sunantha had once again demonstrated her practically insatiable lust for yam pla dukfoo — fluffed and deep-fried catfish served with chilies, shredded green mango, onions, and lime. Not to mention her most unThai-ladylike appreciation of the way this dish complemented cold beer. It was a small miracle that she’d kept her figure, her fine porcelain skin. How long could it last? I found myself wondering. This creature of vast appetites. This succubus designed mentally and physically to bear child after child till that perfect figure was ruined and her man was lost to himself in fatherhood and ultimate failure as a literary gadabout. The horror.
Ernest had been drinking more than he should have. Just as alcohol enhances conviviality, it exaggerates the darker moods. At one point, I’d seen him cast a sudden wild look at the river. Then he shot another at Thonburi, on the other side, and another at the sky. He was doing a good job of behaving like a man who was completely disorientated, and who considered this an alarming state of affairs.
“That was really funny,” he told us, not looking, not able to look at the water. “I had a funny feeling — a kind of premonition. A black sort of anxiety, if you want to know the truth. And I thought the river was flowing backwards. Funniest damn thing.”
“It is flowing backwards,” I told him. And sure enough, in the lights from the restaurant you could see the water hyacinth and whatnot drifting back upcountry at a rate of knots, the way it should’ve been coming down. But I knew every mood and quirk of this river, what with all ihtyampla dukfoo and beer I’d shared with Sunantha, these past months. “That’s the tide. We’re close enough to the sea that the high tide reverses the current.”
“Oh. Yeah.” You could see Ernest was relieved he could look back at the water, rational order having been restored to this part of his world, at least.
Noi was scheduled for an emergency operation. There was a tumor—a big one. Too soon too say if it was malignant. A delicate business even if it turned out to be benign, or so the specialists had said. Fortunately, there would be a surgeon available in a few days — someone very experienced at just this sort of thing. It should be done immediately.
“And I didn’t goddamn believe her,” said Ernest.
“There’s no point in blaming yourself,” I advised. The tired old cliches seem to impose themselves no matter what you try to say.
”I just wouldn’t believe her. Just superstition, I said. Nothing but hypochondria. Suggestibility. Jesus Christ. And she was dying”
“You don’tknow that,” I told him. “The doctors don’t know how much danger she’s really in. They did say it was lucky they found it when they did.”
They had found a large pituitary tumor — a rare and fascinating thing, a growth on the inside of her skull. It had been growing there year after year till it was pressing on the hypothalamus, on the pituitary gland, and, finally, on the optic nerve. That’s when she’d started to have problems with her vision, though, like the other symptoms, her sight had worsened by imperceptible degrees, and only lately had she suspected something was wrong. Crazy little symptoms, some of them, like for example she ‘d started drinking more and more water—almost enough to do herself harm, finally — this being one consequence of the pressure on her hypothalamus.
They told Ernest they were fairly confident they could remove the tumor without complications, but he had to understand there was always a significant risk in these cases. And it had gone pretty far; it was a big one.
The doctor asked Ernest if he hadn’t realized Noi had been ill.
“But she never told me,” Ernest said. “Nothing. Nothing unusual, anyway —just the usual nonsense about medicines and, this last week, this idea she had AIDS.
“My God; even her sight has been affected. And she didn’t say anything!
“I just laughed at her. Called her a nitwit. ‘What’s a “nitwit”?’ She didn’t know what a nitwit was; and when I explained, she got angry. I don’t blame her. That was just last week. And now she’s got a brain tumor.”
Ernest asked me to understand that he was sorry he’d said the things he had about Noi. I mustn’t think badly of Noi; I had to understand she came from a different background. She had a different way of looking at things, sometimes. But what the hell. We probably all had our little superstitions, when it came right down to it. Did I know what he meant? Our myths, our own little ways of trying to bring sense to our experience. Most people, anyway; or so Ernest told me.
“Why?” The anguish in his voice drew looks from the neighboring tables, and I tried to stare them down, because this was easier than looking at Ernest.
Why? I didn’t know why. Nobody ever did know why, in these circumstances — even those who hadn´t lost their faith at the age of nine.
Ernest went to find a phone. He was going to try to phone Noi at the hospital.
Ernest needed help, Sunantha told me. “He think, think, think too much,” she said. “He loves Noi and wants to help her, but he is too nervous. And this makes it hard for Noi, because now she has to worry about him, too.
“I couldn’t get through,” he said, when he rejoined us. “They wouldn’t let me talk to her.... If there was only something I could do, God damn it.”
When Ernest was a little boy, he told us, he used to pray when he wanted something really badly. To tell the truth, he said, even after he’d reasoned the non-existence of God and Company, he’d prayed sometimes, though he hadn’t had any idea who it was he’d been addressing his prayers to. “It was like I was talking to myself, in a way.”
It had been as though he’d talked to some higher, less vulnerable side of himself: essentially, in some way he didn’t qui
te understand, appealing to himself for reassurance. As he told Sunantha and me these things, Ernest looked shamefaced, the way a guy would if he had admitted to you that he still stayed awake waiting, hoping to catch sight of the Easter Bunny.
“There are no atheists in foxholes, Ernest,” I said, once again seeking my own reassurances in the tried and tired old wisdoms, never mind I didn’t really even believe what I was saying.
“I´ve tried to pray for Noi, you know.” Ernest asked for more coffee. “But it doesn’t work. I can’t take myself seriously. It’s like I don’t deserve to have my prayers answered. I even went into a church yesterday—that place down on Convent Road. But it didn’ t do any good. I was a stranger there. There was nothing I could get hold of. The minister came over and asked me if I needed something, and I asked him when their old book sale was going to be held this year.”
“You should try the Erawan Shrine, maybe,” I suggested, meaning to make a joke, immediately regretting the flippancy.
Ernest chose to take me seriously. “That’s where Noi goes...,” he said, looking thoughtful.
“Oh, Ernest!” The earlier story of lost faith had almost put her into a coma, but now Sunantha came alive. “That’s what you should do! Yes. I will come with you. I can help you. Show you what to do.
“And you must come, too,” she told me. “We will all ask Phra Prom for help together. For Noi.”
For Noi. Right Could it be, I thought, however unkindly, that Sunantha’s proposed expedition might have other, less generous purposes? Who could tell what kind of deals would be made with this ‘spirit’, before all was said and done.
By the time the rain stopped the river was running out to sea again. And Ernest seemed calmer, as we went out to look for a taxi.
IV.
We did all go to the shrine, a couple of days later, and it was a foully wet and gray afternoon, with traffic piled up in great heaps of drowned vehicles everywhere belching and farting their last noxious clouds of hydrocarbons.
Whatever atonements were being made, there on that pilgrimage, it should’ve been enough simply that we’d made the journey. I felt like a total nitwit, and I had a hard time ceasing and desisting from letting Sunantha know exactly how I felt and who I felt was responsible.
“You be quiet,” she told me. “You are making Ernest feel bad. This is for Ernest. And for Noi.”
Despite the rain and the traffic, there were quite a few people there. And there was no shortage of sidewalk hawkers, each more insistent than the one before that we buy their flower garlands. Their joss sticks and candles. Their crudely carved little wooden elephants.
Sunantha finally chose our offerings, and we entered the compound to confront the four-armed, four-faced golden image on its sheltered pedestal. I looked at Ernest, I guess seeking a reciprocal expression of rueful despair. But he was oblivious, away somewhere in a little world of his own.
Sunantha thrust my joss sticks and garland at me and told me to do what she did. We lit the incense and candles and joined a short queue waiting at the base of the image.
“You see what you must do?” Sunantha told us. “You should sit on the ground with your feet pointing back, away from Phra Prom. You hold the incense sticks and flowers this way, and you do this—like you are wailing but you must touch the ground with your head. Your forehead. You see that man?”
I did see him; and he was carrying these maneuvers off with no end of panache. The only thing was, he was a Thai, and he could do this without occasioning undue comment. Ernest and I, however, were/ara/ig, and one just didn’t see Westerners carrying on this way. Not here in Bangkok, anyway, at a Brahman shrine. I was aware of the interest our fellow pilgrims had been showing in us. Amusement seemed to be the most common reaction, though I thought it was resentment I read in some faces. But Ernest remained oblivious. His face was flushed, features set with dark determination.
“Remember,” said Sunantha. “You must make your wish, but then you should promise to do something for Phra Prom in return.”
Sunantha went first. Then Ernest. He prostrated himself with awkward abandon, and he took longer than anyone else had to finish his dealings with the spook that reputedly inhabited this place, this Phra Prom.
My communion was much more perfunctory. I pointed my big Western arse at the people waiting behind, tapped my forehead briefly on the damp concrete, and wondered whether Sunantha would make a fuss if I decided to hit Happy Hour at Boon Doc’s later.
To my own surprise, then, as I started to get up I had second thoughts, and I put my head down once again just long enough to fashion a quick plea on Noi’s behalf. I didn’t know who I was pleading with, mind you — like the prayers Ernest had been telling us about the other night
Sunantha was pleased with me, and her eyes glowed with enough affection to make me uncomfortable. Too late, I thought of other matters I could’ve discussed with Phra Prom, just while he was busy putting in the fix for me anyway, I mean.
We added our flowers to the enormous piles of similar offerings left by what must* ve been hundreds of earlier petitioners. Outside the compound, we encountered a young girl squatting on the pavement under a parasol with a stack of tiny wooden cages, each cage crammed with fluttering, twittering little birds. The idea was, you could gain merit—accumulate good karma — by paying the girl to release a bird. It had always been my thinking that by so doing you were encouraging the practice, and therefore your twenty baht was indirectly responsible for the imprisonment and torture of countless little birds to come. So I’d never bailed one of these unfortunate creatures out.
Sunantha insisted, however. Ernest let five of them go, and Sunantha borrowed forty baht from me so she could release two more.
In consequence, I suppose some would argue, we got a taxi immediately we needed one, and he didn’t charge an arm and a leg, despite the weather, and as I sank back into the seat and we pulled away I felt a strange and pleasant sense of release.
V.
As things turned out, it was a model operation, and Noi was a model patient, or so all the hospital staff said.
Ernest, at the same time, had been everything a visitor shouldn’t ever be. He’d shown a concern bordering on hysteria for the brave patient. He’d tried to familiarize himself with every detail of her medical care, fought against the constraints they wanted to impose on his visiting hours, and kept trying to find doctors older than he was for second opinions.
When he wasn’t at the hospital looking after things, Ernest spent most of his evenings with myself and Sunantha. His moods swung from fair optimism, when he’d go on about his plans for after Noi was released, to black despair and guilt, when he’d tell us again how he’d been such an unfeeling, narrow-minded bastard, and how he wasn’t going to be able to handle it if she didn’t pull through okay.
“He is making himself crazy,” Sunantha told me. “He wants to do something to help, but he is just making things worse.”
It was very nearly the end of the rainy season. The festival of Loy Krathong had come around yet again, reminding me of how the years were sliding by; how many years in Thailand was this, anyway?
Sunantha invited Ernest to enjoy Loy Krathong with us. “We go every year together,” she told him. “To the river.”
We had done it once, certainly; that had been just last year. But we’d only known each other a little longer than that. What was this ‘every year’ stuff, anyway?
VI.
“I wish Noi were here with us,” said Ernest.
We’d had another big feed at our restaurant, and then walked along the river to the university and then to the Phra Pinklao Bridge to watch the people launch the little krathong, the exotic little boats fashioned from banana leaves and flower petals (or, more often these days, it has to be said, from plastic and paper), each with its incense sticks, its candle, flowers, and coin. The river was covered with candle-lit flotillas, each and every light carrying someone’s wishes for happiness, all of them floating t
owards the sea. Families, lovers, tourists, the whole world was out to celebrate the festival.
Sunantha had found two of the biggest and most lavishly appointed krathong anybody had ever seen, and we took them down to the pier beside the bridge. I liked Sunantha’s characterization of this ritual’s significance: “When you make your wish, and float your krathong, you float away all your cares and troubles for that year, and you look with a fresh face to the next year.”
I had a camera with 1,000 ASA print film in it, and Sunantha had me take pictures of a circle of kids, all of them about six or seven years old, each with their own krathong. They had the floats on the cement pier, in the center of their circle, loath to float away these beautiful creations just yet, and their eyes danced with wonder and delight in the light of the candles.
“Aren’t they lovely?” she said. Her eyes were lovely in the candlelight, and I felt saddened.
I took pictures of Sunantha with our krathong, and I took pictures of Ernest with his and Noi’ s krathong. Then I took pictures of Sunantha and Ernest with both krathong, and Ernest took Sunantha and me with just ours. And everybody took more pictures of kids.
Ernest didn’t have a one-baht coin, and he put a five-baht piece on his float, instead.
“One baht is enough,” Sunantha told him. “Those boys will only steal it anyway.”
There was a swarm of little urchins in the water, and, under cover of helping all us good citizens launch our krathong, they were making themselves rich. Ernest put the five-baht coin on his anyway, and sure enough, we saw a kid abstract it before the krathong was well underway, popping the coin into his mouth, his cheeks bulging like a miser’s money-bags.
Sunantha reminded me that I mustn’t forget to make my wish, and she wished hard, and we both put coins on board for the river spirits, which looked a lot like urchins with mumps. Chances are the krathong was getting conflicting psychic signals from its two captains, though, because it immediately capsized in the wake of a passing boat.
Bangkok Knights Page 15