Sightseeing

by Rattawut Lapcharoensap

Everything’s cheap with imperial monies in hand and they’re too polite to bargain.

“You give them history, temples, pagodas, traditional dance, floating markets, seafood curry, tapioca desserts, silk-weaving cooperatives, but all they really want is to ride some hulking gray beast like a bunch of wildmen and to pant over girls and to lie there half-dead getting skin cancer on the beach during the time in between.”

It’s amazing, I told Lizzie, how small my life looks from such a height.

But we were just children, Anek and I, and when children learn to acknowledge the gravity of their loved ones’ sorrows they’re no longer children.

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.

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.

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.

I would deny Ma the comfort of my body.

For the first time, that name doesn’t sound like my own. So I stand there for a moment before reaching into the urn to receive that generous fate which is mine and mine alone.

Ma and I know that if things were different, if our lives were simply following their ordinary course, we would never have taken the time to notice such sights.

I could wake up blind tomorrow morning. I might never see you again. And you’ll be sorry then, luk. Real sorry. You’ll probably be sorrier than you’ve ever been in your life, knowing that the last time your mother saw you, you were being dreadful.”

There is faith in the way Ma bargains, in the way we started to walk away from the girl. Her faith was substantiated that day. The girl called us back.

She had to shut her eyes for a while before the shattered world rearranged itself—before pieces of brown became a chair, pieces of red became a shirt, pieces of cream became her own reflection in the bathroom mirror.

And I imagine the sunglasses slowly falling, the hornrims and purple rhinestones and the word Armani in tiny gold letters spiraling down the blue-green abyss, searching for a resting place on the soft and sandy seafloor.

open my eyes this time as I rush to the bottom, kicking hard against the surface. I see soft shafts of sunlight slicing through a thick, bleary haze. Clusters of blue, clusters of yellow, clusters of green disperse all around me, moving as if suspended midair, little pellets of color swimming through a depthless tapestry of light.

Perhaps, I think, this is what Ma must feel in the grips of her oncoming blindness. These indistinct visions. These fragmented hues. This weightlessness.

then to bring her back before the tide heaves, before the ocean rises, before this sand becomes the seafloor again.

They’re not as fun, but hey, life isn’t a store, sometimes you don’t get what you pay for.’”

The Cambodians never seemed to say much to each other, and when they did they spoke in hushed tones, as if being refugees also meant being quiet.

Their quiet anxious expressions said they weren’t sure they were coming back. They looked at their dilapidated little world by the railroad tracks as if for the very last time.

In the morning, there’d always be two or three rats, large as small kittens, squealing and moaning, struggling against the glutinous surface like demonic little dinosaurs dying in some tar pit.

To my surprise they seem to understand because they start looking at their half-empty plates like they’ve suddenly cultivated an interest in china.

At least Macklin Johnson isn’t stuck in this tropical jungle of a city wondering how the hell these people—his only living heirs—could be even remotely related to him.

I thought rush hour in Washington was awful, but Bangkok traffic makes downtown D.C. look like a Formula One racetrack.

You grow old thinking you know your kid and then he suddenly starts speaking a foreign language and you never knew him at all.

They’re smiling at each other like there’s so much love between them they don’t know what to do with it.

I can tell by the way they look at her that they think Tida’s some kind of prostitute and suddenly I’m proud of them both for being out there dancing, proud of my boy Jack for holding his wife so close, because their love suddenly seems for the first time like something courageous and worthwhile, and I’m thinking: There he is, Alice. There’s your boy. There’s our little man.

He’d always said there was nothing so important as good manners when other people’s money starts going into your wallet. The gracious cockfighter, he used to tell me, always spares his opponent needless embarrassment and financial ruin.

The cocks flapped in panicked staccatos.

And as I watched my parents bathing in that moonlight, I began to understand for the first time what kind of world we were living in, what men were capable of, and I longed more than anything to take the three of us to someplace safer, far, far away.

“You’d think God invented stupidity the same day he came up with the penis.”

It’s about choosing whether you’re going to let the world run you ragged and scared or whether you’re going to say to the world: ‘Hey, World. Hey, asshole. Yeah, you. That’s right, I’m talking to you. I know you’re scary but you know what, World? I refuse to run. I refuse to let you push me around.

Where did murderous vengeance end and principled righteousness—justice—begin?

But above all I hated seeing Mama bow and stoop before her—hated that submissiveness, that feigned gratitude for a paycheck.

The bike chains ticked between us as the sun elongated our shadows.

They were getting the usual treatment, the kind of impeccable care that—according to Mama—would end a lot of suffering if the town’s women and children were treated the same.

I wondered if Papa would deny me, too, if Little Jui had his way with me.

All human activity suddenly seemed to me composed of such sport: We each chose the game we thought would yield the most for us and our own. We gambled, gambled selfishly, gambled more than we could afford, the odds staggeringly stacked in somebody else’s favor.

Love had the worst odds. The rules were convoluted and mystifying and changing all the time. Even Papa’s sister must’ve known this. The house would always win that bastard game, so I decided at that moment to become its undying enemy forever.

Papa nodded, like a criminal accepting his sentence, and walked out of the house, dragging his slippers across the yard, his head hanging limply from his neck.

Love or no love, the men in this world don’t leave women with much choice sometimes. It’s all we can do to hang on to our dignity.”

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.