Sightseeing (6 page)

I hadn't recognized the tune at first—I thought it was just another generic upcountry ballad—but then a woman's falsetto came soaring over the instruments and I remembered that it was an old record of Ma's, something she and Pa used to listen to in the early afternoon, hours before the endlessly growing mass of garbage burned behind our house. Those days curry and fish in tamarind sauce would be cooking on the stove, the aroma wafting into the house, and I swear that right then, listening to that music, I could smell it on the tip of my nose.

Oh beloved, so sad was my departure
…

I looked at Anek and the girl. She couldn't have been more than sixteen years old—younger than my brother—but
it seemed clear to me now that she was the one holding him up, directing his course, leading him. I wondered how many men she had held up tonight, how many more she would hold in the thousands of nights before her. I wondered whether she was already finding the force of their weight unbearable. I wondered whether I would be adding my weight to that mass one day. She held him close now and he, he pulled away, fell out of sync, though they continued to move across the floor as slowly and languorously as the music in the café.

… I
am tired, I am broken, I am lost
…

When the song ended, they pulled away from each other. Anek took the girl by the hand and led her toward the staircase. As they began to mount the stairs, the girl said something to my brother and they both stopped to look back at me. My brother smiled weakly then, raised a hand in my direction. I looked away, pretended not to see the gesture, stirring the ash in the tray with my cigarette. When I looked back they were gone.

The place fell silent. A balding, middle-aged man walked down the stairs. He made for the door, his steps quick and certain, as if he couldn't wait to leave. When he passed by my table, I caught a whiff of him, and his scent lingered on my nostrils for a while. He smelled like okra.

I stood up. I don't know why I walked toward that staircase. Perhaps it was childish curiosity. Or perhaps I wanted to see, once and for all, what secrets, what sins, what comforts
those stairs led one to. Or perhaps I wanted to retrieve Anek before he did whatever it was I thought he might do.

I had imagined darkness and was surprised, when I arrived at the top of the stairs, to find a brightly lit hallway flanked on both sides by closed doors. The corridor smelled sweet, sickly, as if it had been perfumed to cover up some stench. The bare walls gleamed under the buzzing fluorescent fixtures. I heard another song start up downstairs, laughter again from the table of girls. I walked slowly down the hallway; the noises downstairs faded to a murmur. I felt like I had surfaced into another world and left those distant, muffled sounds beneath me, underwater. As I crept along, careful to be silent, I began to hear a chorus of ghostly, guttural groans coming from behind the doors. I heard a man whimper; I heard another cry out incoherently. After a while, those rooms seemed—with their grunting and moaning—like torture chambers in which faceless men suffered untold cruelties. I wondered if my brother was making any of these noises. I thought of the video Anek had borrowed from one of his friends, the women in them cooing and squealing perversely, and how strange it was now that none of the women could be heard. Instead, I could hear only the men, growling away as if in some terrible, solitary animal pain. I imagined the men writhing against the women, and I wondered how these women—those girls sitting downstairs—could possibly endure in such silence.

Just as I turned the corner, a hand grabbed me by the collar, choking me. I was certain, for a moment, that I would now be dragged into one of the rooms and made to join that chorus of howling men.

“Little boy,” a voice hissed in my ear. “Where do you think you're going?”

It was the bartender from downstairs. He looked down at me, brow furrowed, beads of spittle glistening at the corners of his lips. I smelled whiskey on his breath, felt his large, chapped hands on my neck as he pulled me toward him and lifted me off the concrete floor.

“You're in the wrong place,” he whispered into my ear, while I struggled against his grip. “I should kill you for being up here. I should snap your head right off your fucking neck.”

I screamed for Anek then. I sent my brother's name echoing down that empty hallway. I screamed his name over and over again as the bartender lifted me up into his thick, ropy arms. The more I struggled against the bartender, the more dire my predicament seemed, and I cried out for my brother as I had never cried out before. The men seemed to stop their moaning then and, for a moment, I felt as if my cries were the only sound in the world. I saw a few doors open, a couple of women sticking out their heads to look at the commotion. The bartender walked backward with me, toward the staircase, as I kicked and struggled against his suffocating embrace.

Then I saw my brother hobbling in his underwear, his blue jeans shackling his feet.

“Hey!” Anek yelled, staggering, bending down to gather up his jeans. “Hey!” The man stopped, loosened his grip on my body. “Hey!” Anek yelled again, getting closer now. “That's my little brother, you cocksucker. Put him down.”

The bartender still had me, his breath hot on my neck. As Anek struggled to pull up his jeans I glimpsed the purple, bulbous head of his penis peeking over the waistband of his underwear. The bartender must've seen this too; he began to chuckle obscenely.

“Get him out of here, Anek,” he said. Anek nodded grimly. The bartender put me down, shoved me lightly toward my brother. “You know I can't have him up here,” he said.

“You okay, kid?” Anek asked, breathless, ignoring the bartender, bending down to look me in the eyes. I saw the girl standing in the hallway behind Anek, a towel wrapped loosely around her small body. She waved at me, smiling, and then walked back into the room. The other women disappeared as well. I heard the bartender going downstairs, the steps creaking under his weight. Soon, Anek and I were the only people left in that hallway, and for some reason—despite my attempts to steel myself—I began to cry. I tried to apologize to my brother through the tears.

“Oh shit,” my brother muttered, pulling me to his chest. “C'mon, kid,” he said. “Let's just go home.”

* * *

We went to the bathroom. I stood sniveling by a urinal while Anek leaned over a sink and dashed water on his face. When we came back out, his steps were no longer unsteady, though his voice still quavered slightly. Beads of water glistened on his face. He lit a cigarette at the door and waved to the bartender and the girls in the corner. I couldn't look at them now.

We stepped into the street. His friends were still in the alley, laughing and stumbling, flinging pieces of garbage from the Dumpster at each other. We stood at the mouth of the alley and Anek said, “See you later, boys,” and one of the them yelled back, “Wait, Anek! Wait! I have an idea! Let's put your kid brother in the dump!” But Anek just put an arm around my shoulder and said, “Maybe next time.”

We crossed the street. Anek kick-started the motorcycle. It sputtered and wheezed and coughed before settling into a soft, persistent purr. I started to climb onto the back, but Anek said, “What the hell are you doing? Can't you see I'm in no shape to take us home?”

“You can't be serious, Anek.”

“Serious as our pa is dead, kid.”

I stood there for a moment, dumbfounded. I climbed onto the front seat.

“I swear to God, though, you make so much as a dent on my bike and I'll—”

But I had already cocked the accelerator and we were on our way. Slowly, of course. I slipped off the seat a little so I
could reach the pedal, snapped the clutch with my left hand, and popped the bike into second gear. We sputtered for a while like that along the streets of Minburi, crawling at fifteen kilos, until I made a sharp right onto the bridge that would take us out to the new speedway.

Years later, I would ask Anek if he remembered this night. He would say that I made it up. He never would've taken me to the Café Lovely at such a young age, he'd say, never would've let me drive that bike home. He denies it now because he doesn't want to feel responsible for the way things turned out, for the way we abandoned our mother to that hot and empty house, for the thoughtless, desperate things I would learn to do. Later that same year, my mother would wake me up in the middle of the night. She would be crying. She would ask me to sleep again in her bed. And, for the first time, I would refuse her. I would deny Ma the comfort of my body.

After Anek moved to an apartment across the river in Thonburi, I gathered my father's belongings from the back room and pawned them while Ma was at work. I used the money to buy myself a motorcycle. When I got home, my mother was waiting for me. She came at me with a thousand impotent fists, and when she was finished, spent and exhausted, her small body quivering in my arms, she asked me to leave her house. I did. And I did not return to that house again until it was too late, until Anek called to say our mother
was ill, that she wanted us by her side to accompany her through her final hours.

That night, as we rode back from the Café Lovely, I felt my brother's arms around my waist, his head slumped on my shoulder. I remember thinking then about how I'd never felt the weight of my brother's head before. His hot, measured breaths warmed my neck. I could still smell the thinner's faint, sour scent wafting from his face. I suddenly became afraid that Anek had fallen asleep and would tumble off the bike at any moment.

“Are you awake, Anek?”

“Yeah, I'm awake.”

“Good.”

“Do me a favor. Eyes on the road.”

“I'm glad you're awake, Anek.”

“Third.”

“What's that?”

“I said third.”

“You sure?”

“It's a onetime offer, little man.”

I slipped off the seat, accelerated a little, twisted the clutch, and tapped the gear pedal as we hit the speedway. I was so excited we might as well have broken the sound barrier, but the engine jolted us forward just enough that my grip weakened and we went swerving along the empty speedway, weaving wildly back and forth at thirty kilometers an hour.

“Easy now. Easy. There, there, you have it. Just take a deep breath now. Holy shit, I almost had to break your ass back there. You almost had us kissing the pavement.”

I could feel the palms of my hands slick against the throttle. Even at thirty kilos, the wind blew hot against our faces.

“Accelerate,” Anek said.

“No fucking way.”

“I said accelerate. This is a speedway, you know, not a slow-way. I'd like to get home before dawn.”

“You're out of your mind, Anek. That's the thinner talking.”

“Listen, if you won't do it, I'll do it myself,” he said, reaching over me for the throttle.

“Fine,” I said, brushing his hand away. “I'll do it. Just give me a second.”

We slowly gathered speed along the empty highway—thirty-five, forty, forty-five—and after a while, the concrete moving swiftly and steadily below our feet, I was beginning to feel a little more comfortable. Anek put his arms around my waist again, his chin still on my shoulder.

“Good,” he whispered into my ear. “Good, good. You've got it. You're fucking doing it. You're really coasting now, boy. Welcome to the third gear, my little man.

“Now,” he said. “Try fourth.”

I didn't argue this time. I just twisted the accelerator some more, popped the bike into fourth, sliding smoothly off the
seat then quickly back on. This time, to my surprise, our course didn't even waver. It was an easy transition. We were cruising comfortably now at sixty, sixty-five, seventy, seventy-five, faster and faster and faster still, the engine singing a high note beneath us as we flew along that straight and empty speedway. We didn't say a word to each other the rest of the way. And nothing seemed lovelier to me than that hot wind howling in my ears, the night blurring around us, the smell of the engine furiously burning gasoline.

On a pleasant morning in April I go three doors down to Wichu's house and we walk to Wat Krathum Sua Pla, the temple where the annual district draft lottery will be held. Wichu has been my best friend all my life. It is hardly sunup, the air thick and cool with dew. We walk silently through our neighborhood. The teashops. The dilapidated playground. The pond with its perpetual scrim of scum. The mangy strays sleeping haphazardly in the streets. The elderly Chinese women gossiping and exercising by the Shinto shrine. The porridge and plantain vendors. The Burmese refugees unloading thick bundles of
Thai Rath
and
Matichon
for the newsstand. We walk silently past all that we know like we know our own skins, all that we will remember fondly in our separate ways, though we regard them then as impediments to our youthful, inchoate ambitions. This is a few years before the neighborhood started sinking into the marsh ground upon which it had been built. This is before the floods got worse with every monsoon and the river rats appeared by the thousands and you could hear them plashing and squealing at night. Before those who could afford it fled for higher ground, my mother and my father included among them.

Wichu and I had been drinking the night before at a small bar in the fresh market. Cane liquor hot in our veins, we'd promised to pray for one another. We weren't religious—the last time we'd been to temple was to admire the swimsuits at the Miss Jasmine Pageant—but we agreed to pray just in case the gods decided to interest themselves in the Pravet District draft lottery. It couldn't hurt, we decided. We drank one last dram to seal the agreement, then we went home.

What Wichu didn't know then was that he needed my prayers more than I needed his. But I didn't tell him that. I didn't tell him everything had already been arranged for me. I didn't tell him that my father's boss's older brother—a retired navy lieutenant—had recently received two crates of Johnny Walker Blue and a certificate for his wife to a famous goldsmith in Pomprapsattruphai District. I didn't tell Wichu that the lieutenant, in turn, had called my father to thank him. He told my father that he'd recommended me to the draft board as an upstanding young citizen, so upstanding I didn't need the benefits of marching drills and mess hall duty and combat training to improve my character in any way. I was a fully formed patriot, he'd told the draft board. A resplendent example for the nation's youth. A true son of Siam. Which means there's nothing to worry about, the lieutenant told my father. Everything has been arranged. Just have your son show up at the lottery.