Sightseeing (15 page)

But I don't really mind the mongrels. I'm actually dreading the day they have to go back to school. Even if they don't say much to me, it's nice to have them around. They keep me company while Jack's at work. I spend most days sitting in the wheelchair watching them play, lifting that five-pound barbell, dozing in and out of sleep.

My six-year-old grandson adores his older sister to the point of self-annihilation. He does whatever she tells him. He's the most gullible kid I've ever seen. Each day he happily
submits himself to whatever new experiment in misery his sister comes up with. I'd like to teach him a little something about self-respect, but the way things are going right now I can barely communicate to him what time of day it is.

Today the girl's convinced him to be her pet dog for the afternoon. The boy's down on all fours. He's leading his sister around the house and the front yard with a long string of black yarn tied loosely around his neck, barking, sniffing the ground, panting happily at his sister. “Hey,” I say to the girl, “that's not very nice,” but she just blinks at me and says, “He
likes
it,” the boy barking in agreement, so I leave them to it.

An hour later, the boy licks my left leg and the leg jerks back into his face as any man's leg would when he's half-asleep in his wheelchair.

The boy falls back, looks up at me for a moment, and then he starts to cry. The girl laughs, though she crouches down to see if her brother's okay. He's not. He's bleeding lightly from the nose.

“Oh shit,” I say, bending forward in my seat. “You all right, boy?”

But he's already running upstairs to his mother, that string of yarn flying behind him like a kite's tail. The girl stands there shaking her head at me.

“Why?” she asks me in English. “Why Grandfather kick his ass?”

“I didn't kick his ass, girl. I kicked him in the face.” For some reason I'm laughing. “Not funny, Grandfather,” she says. “Ass. Face. Whatever. He
crying.
”

“I know,” I say. “I know. I didn't mean to. I was half-asleep. I didn't know what I was doing. It's your fault he was licking my leg in the first place, you know.”

A few minutes later the wife's looming over me, the boy sniveling at her side. “What happen?” she asks me, frowning, and I try to tell her, but the boy keeps interrupting me, pointing and crying some more in Thai. He's got two humongous wads of toilet paper in his nostrils. She tries to quiet him down, crouches and gathers him in her arms. “You kick him?” she asks me, stroking the boy's head. “Why you kick his face, Mister Perry?”

“It was an accident,” I say. “I was sleeping, Tida. I didn't mean to. They were playing a game and—” The girl interrupts me and says something to the mother in Thai, gesticulating with her arms. For a second I think she's framing me, because the wife looks at me severely. But then the wife smiles, hands the little boy over to his sister, and the children walk hand-in-hand out to the sunny front yard.

“He be okay, Mister Perry,” the wife says. “He just scared.”

“Tell him to come back, Tida,” I say. “Tell him I want to say sorry. I didn't mean to kick him, you know.”

“I know,” she says. “But maybe later, Mister Perry. Right now he just frightened. You say sorry later, okay?”

But the boy avoids me for the rest of the day. He can't even look me in the eye. I try to make amends. I fold a paper airplane with my good left hand. But my hand's too shaky again and it turns out crumpled and lopsided. I do my best to toss it at the kids, but they both ignore the thing as it flops down between us. I even call the boy by his real name to get a laugh. The boy whispers something to his sister, they go get their badminton racquets, and then they both head out to play in the empty afternoon street. I'd like to watch them, but it's sweltering hot today and when I went outside last week I'd puked from the heat. So I just sit for the rest of the afternoon by the front door watching the feather shuttlecock sail up and down, back and forth, beyond the property wall, hoping Jack will come home soon to save me.

When I first arrived Jack and his family thought it would be a good idea to take me around the city. Jack took the week off work and we piled into the Corolla every morning. I'd sit up front in the passenger seat while Tida mediated peace between the children in back.

Given the city's traffic, we never went to more than a few places each day. I thought rush hour in Washington was awful, but Bangkok traffic makes downtown D.C. look like a Formula One racetrack. I don't remember much about that first week except spending most of my time staring listlessly out the passenger-side window, falling in and out of sleep, the
car moving in tiny fits and starts the whole way. “It's a goddamn parking lot out here,” I said the first day while we were stalled at a traffic light for what seemed like an hour.

Temples, temples, and more temples. That's all we ever went to the first few days. For some reason, Jack and his wife thought it would be useful for me to see them. The children weren't having too good a time and I didn't blame them—children and places of religious worship don't, as a rule, mix very well. They'd be bored to death, wringing their hands in the car, while Jack and the wife wheeled me inside to admire some temple. I wasn't having too good a time either. I would've preferred to sit in the cool, air-conditioned sedan with the kids. While I can certainly learn to appreciate cultural differences, if Tida and the children came to visit me in Washington and I took them on a tour of all the city's churches, I don't think they'd have a very good time either. So on the third morning, I told Jack that there's only so many temples a grown man can look at—no matter how beautiful or colorful or interesting the temples may be—and I told him that this city was just too goddamn hot for a man in my condition anyway. “Jack,” I said, “I'm not some tourist, you know,” and Jack said, “Fine, Father. Let's just stay home then. Let's just sit here and pretend like there isn't a world outside this house.”

Truth be told, I also didn't enjoy the trips because they made me feel self-conscious. Back home in America, a man in my condition may leave his house and encounter the smug, pitying stares of his fellow human beings. It took me a while
to learn to ignore that, but here in Thailand the same problem's compounded by the fact that these people like to
talk
about me. I complained to Jack once and he called me paranoid and narcissistic, but I just said, “Try getting paraded around in a wheelchair, Jack. Try that and see if you don't feel like they're talking about you.”

So for the rest of the week we went to the local mall. Jack and I would go into the Cineplex and watch American action movies while the children accompanied Tida on her jaunts through the mall's various department stores. That wasn't so bad. It actually made me pretty happy. As the lights dimmed and the film started rolling, it felt like being back home for a few hours, especially once I learned to ignore the gaudy yellow subtitles. And it felt like old times between Jack and me. We were just father and son catching a flick together, and it was easy enough then to forget my troubles for a little while. It even seemed on occasion that when we emerged from the theater the world out there might be one we both knew well.

The children are still outside batting around the shuttlecock when Jack gets home. I tell him about kicking the boy. He laughs. He says, “Give it some time, Father. He's just a kid. He's probably already forgotten about it.”

“You should've seen his face,” I say. “He looked at me like I was a monster.”

“Wait,” Jack teases. “You're
not
a monster?”

“Very funny,” I say. “I'm serious, Jack. I feel awful.”

“Don't worry about it,” Jack says. “You can kick him in the face a hundred times and he'd still be your grandson.”

Tida's sitting at the dining room table doing the bills. Jack walks over and bends down to kiss her on the head. They speak to each other in Thai for a little while. It's strange and perplexing to hear Jack speak Thai. You grow old thinking you know your kid and then he suddenly starts speaking a foreign language and you never knew him at all.

I maneuver the wheelchair toward them, the electric engine wheezing beneath me.

“At least talk to him for me,” I say, interrupting their conversation. “Tell him I'm sorry. Tell him I didn't mean to kick him in the face.”

“All right,” Jack says, smiling. “I'll have a little chat with him if it makes you feel better.”

“No worry, Mister Perry,” the wife intones. She puts a hand on my dead right arm. “Sornram okay. He just little boy.”

I blink at the wife. She and Jack start talking again. Jack's telling her some story, maybe something funny about his day, because she laughs every so often at what he's saying. They seem happy with their own company, so I wheel myself over to my room.

It's a small gray room with concrete walls that they'd used as storage space before I got here. Jack said it's temporary. He
said I'd have a room on the second floor once they retrofitted the stairs with some fancy contraption that's supposed to take me up there like a skier in a chairlift. I remember Mac installing one of those things so Carmen could get to the basement, but she'd died without ever getting to use it. Once, before my stroke—a little bored and a little drunk on sherry—Mac and I rode the thing and timed each other to see who could do it the fastest.

I think about writing Mac a letter but when I go to the computer they've set up for me I can't figure out how to turn it on. I also don't really know what to write; I can't see how he'd be interested in hearing about my grandson getting kicked in the face. Besides, I've already written Mac three letters and I've yet to receive a reply. So I close my eyes, thinking I might take a nap before dinner. I feel exhausted. I didn't get much sleep last night. But when I try to rest I keep seeing the boy's little face looking at me like I'd tried to destroy one of his beloved stuffed animals.

I hear the children come in the house at last. They're talking to their father. The girl laughs hysterically at something Jack's doing and the boy's voice sounds like he wants to participate too. The wife is laughing along with them, calling Jack's name in a teasing manner. I don't know what they're saying, I don't know what the hell they're doing out there, but they sound pretty much like a normal family from where I'm sitting and suddenly I'm smiling like some loony alone in his padded room.

I keep a picture of Alice by my bed. I pick it up. It's not a remarkable photo, just my Alice standing at the sink washing dishes, but there's something nice about the late evening light cascading through the vanilla drapes in front of her. Alice never liked having her picture taken. She couldn't see why we needed them.
Perry,
she'd said that day, laughing, when in my boredom I'd brought out the old Leica,
what am I going to do with a picture of myself?
And I remember telling her then that the picture wasn't for her, it was for me, so just shut up and give me your best smile, Alice, look beautiful for me, because when my mind goes I'm gonna need something to remember you by.

I put the picture back on the stand. It's a sauna in here. I feel like fainting. I feel like crying. When I look up, the little boy is standing in the doorway, peering in shyly at me.

“Hello,” he says sheepishly. “How do you do?”

He's always asking me this. He learned a little English in the first grade, but that's the only phrase he seems to remember. He still has wads of toilet paper flaring from both his nostrils.

“How do you do?” he says again, like I hadn't heard him the first time.

“Hey,” I say, turning the chair around. I wave him over. “Come here. Let me take a look at that nose.”

He eyes me curiously, takes slow, cautious steps into my room. I reach out and hold his small chin up to the light with
my good left hand. He looks confused, a little frightened by the gesture.

“You'll be all right,” I say, inspecting his face. “Sorry about that.”

When I let go the kid reaches out and hugs me so hard I almost fall out of the chair. He squeezes me tight around the neck and I can barely breathe. When he's done, he waves at me with both hands, says “Bye-bye,” and then runs out of the room like he can't get away from me fast enough. I sit there listening to his footsteps pattering back to the dining room. A little later Jack pokes his head in the door and says, “Everything all right with the kid? Why are you sitting in the dark, Father?” and I say, “Yeah, Jack. The kid's all right. I think we have an understanding now.”

After dinner, Jack tells me we're going to a temple tonight. When I give him a look, he tells me there's a fair. A carnival. The kids want to go, he says. They've been talking about it all month. The girl's starting to catch some of the conversations between Jack and me. She looks at us while we talk and says, “We have fun, Grandfather. We have good time,” and I say, “All right, girl. Let's go. I suppose I wouldn't mind whupping you at Skee-Ball.”

“Skee-Ball?” the girl asks.

“They don't have Skee-Ball here,” Jack informs me.

“Too bad for you,” I say to the girl. “Your life's diminished.”

She gives her father a confused look. Jack puts a hand on her head, says something to her in Thai, and she bounds up the stairs to get dressed.

“Hey,” Jack says to me as I'm watching the girl. “You're smiling, old man. Don't tell me you're in a good mood.”

“Jack,” I say. “You're pissing me off.”

The temple isn't far; it takes only fifteen minutes. The wife helps me out of the car. After she straps me in, she takes a finger from my dead hand and scratches her own face with it. Everybody thinks it's a gas. The kids laugh, Jack laughs, and the wife's so happy with herself tears stream down her face. She's still holding my dead hand and I can almost feel it shaking with her hilarity.