I couldn’t help myself. I had to know how many degrees of separation were between me and Jesus of the jungle. “Which school do they go to?”
“City Day, in Greenwich Village.”
Kevin must have been making a killing in this zen center. City Day was one of the most prestigious and most expensive elementary schools south of Fourteenth Street.
Penelope’s kids, Atwood and Updike, went to City Day. There was no doubt that she and Kevin knew one another. Atwood was also eight, and Penelope made a point of knowing all the parents in his class, even as she rasped about them behind their back.
“All these West Village mommies and daddies are into polyamory these days,” she had complained recently. “Open marriages are like the new ‘hashtag’ divorce. I have to constantly keep the other moms from leaping on Edward.”
I found it hard to believe any downtown mommies in their right minds would want to see Edward naked unless they had a latent Keebler Elf fetish.
I didn’t tell Kevin about our close degree of separation. Penelope was the last person I wanted to be associated with here.
“My kids go to Atherton,” I offered. “Two girls.”
Kevin nodded to acknowledge the coincidence but didn’t ask any more.
“You’ve been to your room. Did Buppha share the schedule with you last night?” He pronounced it like Betty Boop. Boop-Ha.
Buppha must have been the old woman sleeping in the closet. I shook my head.
Kevin led me back to the small building with the coffee and pastries. Kasem curiously, or maybe protectively, followed behind me. We passed through a third door that I hadn’t noticed this morning or the night before. This one led to a grand deck overlooking the verdant valley below. Red round cushions dotted the floor. In one corner was a shelf with regular-looking yoga mats and blocks and straps, in the other was a shrine to the Buddha covered in peeled oranges and necklaces of purple orchids. Wise-eyed monkeys lounged on the wooden railings.
“This is the meditation and yoga and dining space,” Kevin said, swatting at the animals. “Make sure to keep the curtains in your room closed. The monkeys will ransack it. They’re sneaky little thieves. Keep anything you don’t want them to take in your suitcase. This whole place runs on solar, but we don’t have outlets in the rooms. Feel free to charge up here.”
I saw a pile of devices stacked on top of a single surge protector all competing for juice.
“My cell doesn’t work here.”
“It won’t. The government just signed a contract with a new carrier and they’re still hashing out the deals with local service providers. You can buy a local cell in the village.”
“Do you have Wi-Fi?”
“Only up here. Not in the rooms. And it comes and goes. Our goal is to get you away from as many of the distractions of your everyday life as we can, but we understand most people can’t go cold turkey and we don’t want to shock your system,” Kevin said. He continued with the logistics. “We usually start the morning meditation here at six thirty, but today we did a walking meditation through the forest instead. We always meet here in silence. Then there’s breakfast. Buppha makes the pastries. They’re not gluten-free. I’ve only had to start saying that recently. Now everyone asks. Humans need a devil. Sugar and gluten serve that purpose, I suppose. Don’t get me started. Anyway, then there’s unstructured time. There’s a yoga class at noon and another at four and a dharma talk at five thirty followed by dinner and the nighttime meditation, which can last anywhere from two hours to four, depending on how you feel. The nearest village is an hour’s drive away. It’s not far, but the road is bad and windy. Did you bring a car?”
I nodded toward Kasem. “I came in a taxi.”
“I have a truck. A few other guests have cars. We’ll probably go into town on Tuesday together.”
I needed a local phone. I couldn’t go much longer without calling Karl and the girls.
But before I could ask if I could borrow his truck today, Kevin pulled his own phone from a pocket hidden in his robe to check the time. “I have to run and check on a few things with Buppha. Feel free to ask her anything you want. She speaks perfect English when she feels like it, but she gets a kick out of pretending she doesn’t. She’s definitely listening to everything you say.” He paused like he wanted to say something else, then looked me directly in the eye in a way that made me feel naked and vulnerable. “It’s great to have you here, Kate.”
I’m sure he told all the guests how happy he was to have them. Still, his words made me feel special. He radiated the kind of charisma usually reserved for politicians and aging British rock stars. I wanted to spend more time with him. I wanted to tell him everything about myself.
Once Kevin was out of earshot, Kasem cleared his throat. “I can drive you to the village,” he offered.
I nearly hugged him. “I’ll pay you,” I said. I picked at one of the welts on my arm until a trickle of blood emerged from the soft white center of the bite.
Kasem pushed my nails off my skin. “You can get something for that in town.”
“Let me run back to my room and get my wallet.”
There was no actual running to the room, more like huffing down the stairs. I sat onto the mattress to catch my breath and gather my thoughts. It finally sank in that Nina wasn’t here, and I knew in my gut that she wasn’t going to show at all.
I looked around the bare little room. When I first saw the room I couldn’t imagine spending another night here, but now it felt perfect—the bed was comfortable, the desk was a sweet place to think and write. And, the view. My god, the view.
Maybe this wouldn’t be the wild girls’ adventure I’d thought it would be. Maybe it would be something else entirely, something I desperately needed—time alone to write.
I pushed the desk toward the very edge of the floor until it felt as though it would teeter off the terrace and into the jungle. Not two feet away a bright green bird with a black head and red crown twisted to stare at me. I knew a few things about birds. In grad school I had read the entire Field Guide to North American Ornithology when I was researching a story about two bird-watchers who got lost and had to survive in the wilderness for ten days. The characters spoke in parables about wood thrushes and scrub jays and evening grosbeaks. The story was told from the point of view of the birds watching the humans as they fell in love and then had fumbling sex in the forest, and in hindsight it was the hubristic failure of a first-term MFA. I didn’t know the name of this particular bird. He was probably a male. The prettiest birds usually were. The females had simpler colors, easily camouflaged in the forest to protect them in the nest. This cocky bird was exotic and curious and refused to break our staring contest.
“I’ll see you later,” I whispered to him.
I rooted around in my purse for my wallet and my hand clasped my notebook, now stuffed with extra pages shoved deep into the margins, including my letter to Karl. I made a mental note to get stamps and envelopes and get it into the mail.
I arranged the notebook and papers neatly on the desk and weighted them down with my useless phone. Then, remembering Kevin’s warning about the monkeys, I packed the papers back into a pile, zipped them into my suitcase, and closed the curtains.
Then I took a long moment to gaze out over the perfect stillness of the jungle. I kept expecting to feel guilty, like I was doing something wrong. When, in fact, everything about this felt right. I was filled with an all-consuming sense of peace, like I had taken my first deep breath in years.
• • •
I slid into the front seat of the taxi instead of getting into the back. As we drove, Kasem told me more about the history of the region. We were on the edge of the Thungyai Naresuan wildlife sanctuary, created to protect the area from international strip mining. As the crow flies we were less than thirty miles from the border with Myanmar, but it could take two or three hours to reach the border by car. The name Thungyai Naresuan means “big field,” referring to the vast savannah
that ran through the center of the sanctuary. A famous Siamese king once based his army here in the late sixteenth century to wage a war against Burma. Since then the border has been in dispute. The local people were called the Karen and they referred to this land as “the place of the knowing sage,” because it had been home to ascetic hermits for centuries. When the modern Thai state was officially recognized at the turn of the twentieth century, both Thailand and Burma began to see the Karen as illegal immigrants. They’d been persecuted, threatened, and relocated on both sides of the border, but the Thai government eventually set up refugee camps for those escaping the worse end of the persecution in Burma, now Myanmar.
“It’s a very beautiful place,” Kasem said. “We are lucky the government decided to protect it. It’s the most protected land in Thailand.”
“It is beautiful,” I agreed, and as if to punctuate the thought a brightly colored butterfly the size of my face flew in front of the car. We were driving maybe fifteen miles an hour on razor-thin switchbacks into the valley. I wished again that the girls could see this and felt a pain that I had no way to share it with them.
It took ninety minutes to reach the village, which was really a single road flanked by tin-roofed shacks and wooden huts on high bamboo stilts. I felt a small measure of relief that there wasn’t a Starbucks, a McDonald’s, or a Dean & DeLuca in sight. Beyond the buildings, green rice fields stretched out toward the rolling mountains. Kasem pulled the taxi onto the side of the road. I stepped out into a massive mud puddle, my foot sinking up to the ankle in thick slop.
“Oh no,” Kasem said. “You have stepped in bull shit.”
I should have been disgusted, but with everything that had gone wrong since I’d arrived, I found the idea of stepping into literal bull shit hilarious. I laughed, a deep laugh that shook my entire core.
Off to the side of the road I saw the actual bulls, lazily gnawing their cud and stupidly staring at me with their giant brown eyes. I dipped the bottom of my shoe into the puddle and tried to scrape the remaining shit off on a sharp rock.
“There will be a shop at the end of the road.” Kasem pointed straight ahead. “You can buy thongs there.”
Thongs? I was surprised at Kaseem’s knowledge of women’s undergarments. The truth was I hated thongs—butt floss, as I called them—even though I wore them every day. Maybe Thailand was a chance to escape thongs too. I could get some nice sensible granny panties. Either way, this wasn’t something I needed to discuss with Kaseem.
“Have you been here before?” I asked, changing the subject.
He shook his head. “No, but there is always a shop at the end of the road. All the villages are the same.”
Just walking down the street I could feel my face already getting red. Sweat dripped off every part of my skin. It had to be at least ninety degrees, maybe even close to a hundred. Higher up at the zen center, with the shade of the canopy, it was much cooler. In the village there was nothing to protect us from the unrelenting midday sun.
We walked side by side, dodging more piles of steaming bull shit. The shacks lining the street looked like they’d topple over if you blew on them with too much enthusiasm. Brightly colored tapestries flapped from clotheslines. Sometimes a curious child would peek around one of the doorframes. A group of boys, probably eight or nine years old, kicked a half-deflated soccer ball next to us as we walked. A family of pigs squealed from under one of the wooden structures, and a baby goat emerged to nuzzle my ankle with her mouth. A pack of filthy monkeys jogged lazily in front of us.
Up ahead, the last wooden house on the left bore a weathered sign for Coca-Cola above the door. Inside, a bored teenaged girl wearing thick eyeliner and a tight yellow Taylor Swift T-shirt manned the counter. Rough wooden shelves reached from floor to ceiling, piled high with canned fruits and vegetables, bottles of shampoo, toothpaste, toothbrushes, and six-packs of soda. I picked out a few basic toiletries.
Kasem pointed me toward a bin of flip-flops wrapped in plastic.
“Thongs,” he said, and pointed to the shoes. He hadn’t been talking about underwear.
A lonely can of OFF! bug repellent teetered on the edge of the shelf, but Kasem directed me toward an unmarked amber bottle on the counter.
“Tea tree oil, thyme and cinnamon, and rubbing alcohol.” He listed its contents. “Trust me.” He made eye contact with the girl and muttered something in Thai.
She nodded and pulled a locked metal box out from beneath the counter. Inside were tiny flip phones.
“You pay for the minutes,” Kasem explained about these old-school flip phones. “You can get an iPhone or an Android in the big cities, but not out here. How many do you want? Two hundred minutes is good?”
“Two hundred should be good,” I agreed.
As Kasem spoke quickly to the girl, she waved her hands and began to look cross. He shook his head and raised his voice and I felt bad for the girl, but she held her own, jutting out her chin and tossing the phones back into the metal bin and slamming it shut. Kasem relented to whatever she was asking for and asked me for the baht equivalent of a hundred dollars.
“I tried to get you a bargain, but you’re very white,” he said, shrugging his shoulders.
“I’m sorry about that.”
“It’s OK. There’s nothing you can do about it.”
“I should probably get sunscreen too,” I added. “On account of my whiteness.”
The girl made a sound that was half laugh and half snort and handed me a bottle of SPF 30.
“She speaks English,” I said to Kasem.
“I do,” she replied. I blushed and felt like an ignorant ass.
“Most of us speak English,” Kasem explained. “There are so many British and American tourists coming to Thailand. You get the women seeking spiritual enlightenment. They confuse Thailand with Bali half the time. Then there are the men seeking strange sex and the couples looking for the perfect honeymoon, sometimes also seeking strange sex, and the rich people who want to pretend to be poor for a little while. English is taught in schools, even ones as remote as here.”
“Thank you,” I said to the clerk as I paid her and walked back out into the oppressive heat.
The scruffy monkeys had set up camp on top of our car. They seemed to laugh at Kasem as he shooed them away. They leaped back into the road when he started the ignition.
“I can’t thank you enough,” I said to him.
“You don’t have to thank me. You looked like a person who needed help. When a person looks like they need help you have to help them.”
Kasem fiddled around with the radio until he landed on a Thai pop station where the refrain of every song seemed to be baby, baby, baby. I stared out at the window into the dense jungle. I would need to wait a few more hours to call the girls on my new phone. My throat and stomach tightened as I realized how restricted my communication with the outside world had become. My message to Marley notwithstanding, my family had to be worried about me by now.
We exchanged an awkward hug good-bye when Kasem dropped me off. He scribbled his e-mail on a napkin and entered his cell number into my new tiny phone. It felt like the ending of a first date where you both decided you’d be better off as just friends.
“Good luck, Kate,” he said. “Enjoy your time here. You deserve it.”
He was so earnest that I was seized by the sudden urge to confess my earlier lies.
“My husband isn’t coming. He was never coming,” I blurted out.
Kasem’s expression hardly changed. “I know,” he said simply.
“Why didn’t you say anything?”
He looked up to the clouds and flipped both of his palms to the sky. I noticed a small black tattoo in the middle of his left palm, a single word written in Thai. “Sometimes people need to say things. First you were scared. Then it made you feel good to talk about your husband.”
I realized that was true. Talking about Karl, pretending even for a moment that there was the possibility that he
would join me for a second honeymoon here, was a comfort in this strange place.
“I needed a break,” I admitted out loud for the first time. Once I started admitting things, I couldn’t stop. “I’ve been living a life that doesn’t feel like my own. I needed to get away from my family for a little while to figure some things out.”
Kasem took one of my hands in both of his. “You will. Remember what I said before.” He flipped his palm back over and traced the thin black lines on his palm with his index finger. “This means ‘space,’ ” he translated his tattoo. “Time is a blessing. Make the most of it.”
• • •
I went back to my room and counted down the minutes until I could call home.
Once the sun kissed the horizon, I couldn’t wait any longer.
Karl didn’t answer on the first try. I had no idea what kind of weird number was coming up on his phone. I tried over and over.
On the fifth try he answered, his voice groggy. It was only 6:30 a.m. there.
“Katie?”
The second I heard Karl’s voice my best-laid plans went to butter.
I blurted out the first thing that came to mind. “I’m sorry. I needed to get away.”
“Kate, where are you?”
Thailand, I whispered in my head before saying it out loud. It sounded so absurd, even in a mental whisper.
“Thailand.” Yup, it sounded as ridiculous as I had expected.
There was an audible choking sound on the other side of the line.
“You’re in Asia? You flew all the way to Asia?” His voice rose an octave.
“I’m sorry,” I repeated myself. “I came with Nina . . . Well, I’m meeting Nina,” I whispered.
His voice rose another octave. “Nina? Crazy Nina? From Columbia?” Karl had never actually met Nina, only heard stories about her. “The one who almost burned down your grad school apartment? You up and flew to Thailand with her?”
“She just recommended it. She isn’t here. And she didn’t burn it down. Just her mattress. Only her mattress was on fire.”
It was time to attempt to explain myself. I took a deep breath.
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