Sightseeing

by Rattawut Lapcharoensap

Ma says, “Pussy and elephants. That’s all these people want.”

“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.”

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.

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

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.

Because love was the biggest gamble of them all. Love had the worst odds. The rules were convoluted and mystifying and changing all the time.