Destinations
By
Kevin Acers
It is not so easy as it once was. It is not so very
easy.
The distance from the kitchen to the bathroom is no further
than it ever was, but it is daunting.
Jon remembers his wife's laughing when she used to poke fun
at their old age, describing the incremental stretching of space. "For
every step I take, three more sneak in ahead of me from behind."
He misses those quips and her illuminating laughter. He no
longer remembers what Linda looked like when she was twenty-four unless he
stares at an old photograph, which he rarely does. He knows that he knew her
then, that is all, and her youthful image captured in those pictures is becoming
to him more and more mysterious. By default he recalls her as she was when she
died as if she had always been seventy-nine. Jon is still amazed, confounded,
that he outlived her, and that nearly a dozen years have gone by since she died.
The steps are like miles now. The minutes are as
merciless and indifferent as pain.
***
The route of the river in northeastern Thailand--Nahm
Khong--is mimicked by the road running along its western bank, until the river
diverges into other lands. It veers into upper Laos and Burma further north, and
crosses the lower corner of Laos and through Cambodia in the south.
How many dusty roads had he endured to get to this
particular spot on the river? How many hours of waiting between rides had been
consumed along the way? He hadn't come that far, really, but in rural Thailand
the going is slow.
Jon was in Nakorn Panom town, walking slowly along a wall
near the river's edge, just off the road. He was watching a handful of people
lingering there as they looked not at the water but across it through a fine
film of haze. The low fog was burning off as they watched, a fine lacy steam.
Across, the Laotian mountains rose eerily and with a certain kind of whimsy.
They looked like green, giant camel humps as drawn, exaggerated, by children. Dr.
Suess mountains, he thought with a smile. They stood in delightful contrast
to the dry flatness of Thailand's essan plateau, rising dreamlike beyond
the haze, beyond the far edge of the river, throwing the distant horizon into an
emerald loopiness.
Ahhh, he wryly narrated in silent soliloquy. To
be twenty-four, American, looking at the Mekhong River and those Dr. Suess
mountains in Laos! Ahhh, to stand here, clueless, and realize this may be one of
my better moments!
Occasionally a patrol boat's engine would broadcast its
echo across the river. How far is it to the other side? Some of the boats
ran in the Laotian half of the water, others, closer by, bore flapping Thai
flags. Half a mile?
It looked wide--too wide, say, to swim with ease. But Jon
was neither a swimmer nor a good judge of distance. Gauging a river's span can
be tricky. Still, he observed, even though it was wide, it was not so wide as to
make its function as a political boundary not seem arbitrary and strange.
Borders are surreal.
The thinning haze barely rose above the water line, like
lightly steaming soup. Movement of variously colored specks could be seen on the
road across the river. It didn't look like a very big town on that side,
much smaller than Nakorn Panom. Jon wondered whether the moving specks
were Soviet jeeps.
Gazing at the mystery of an absurdly forbidden life across
the river, he remembered a conversation with his friend Peter, another
volunteer. I was walking along the river with my roommate, Thong, one day.
You know, up at Nongkhai, the Mekhong isn't as wide as it is here. Anyway, we
saw someone on the other side pulling in a fishing net. Thong waved and shouted
at him. The guy in Laos waved back. Thong told me they do this all the time and
said, "He's my cousin."
That conversation was down in Mukdaharn a year ago, Jon
recalled. He and Peter had sat by the river, sharing a loaf of Vietnamese French
bread and some beer. They'd sat under a tree on hard dirt,
enjoying the ease of each other's company. Another lost moment, another
one of those happenstance meetings with friends crossing coincidental,
unpredictable paths…I'll be there again in a day or two.
Just then he heard someone behind him and turned to look. A
rough looking young man, a few years older than him, perhaps twenty-six,
twenty-seven, approached him from the road, hooted at him, for the benefit of
anyone who might be watching, "Ho-ohhh! Look here at the white boy!"
He held aloft a half-empty bottle of beer, and clearly it was not his first of
the afternoon.
Encounters with drunks could be amusing or tedious. They
could be infuriating, or they could even be dangerous…it all depended on your
state of mind, how relaxed you were, or how tired, whether you'd be open in your
attitude or determined to be closed. At this particular juncture, Jon was
feeling tired from traveling, but pretty open. He decided to relax with it--to
engage instead of ignore or walk away.
"Wah'ngai" Jon said to the
drunk--something like, "How's it going?"
The man's face showed surprise, but not overreaction. He
actually quieted down a bit, realizing the 'white boy' spoke Thai. He approached
quietly, as if trying to solve a riddle he couldn't quite remember, until he and
Jon were standing next to each other. They stood at the cinder block wall that
seemed designed for people lean their elbows on as they faced the river. "Mellika?"
the Thai man asked. His skin was
brown, his hair was wet-black, his body toned like a farmer's or fisherman's. He
seemed harmless enough.
Jon tried to suspend expectations, and just allow the
encounter. On his uninvited companion's right forearm were the faded blue-green
lines of a tattoo--the same arm which terminated in fingers wrapped around the
brown beer bottle's neck. His eyes were bloodshot, his lids a bit heavy. But to
Jon's relief, he appeared to have made the quick transition from a noisy to a
quiet drunk.
The two of them turned to the river, and leaning forward,
rested their arms on the top of the cinderblock wall. A slowly moving
conversation started, the usual small talk, punctuated with an occasional,
incredulous grin as the man realized he was actually speaking with a white man,
a farang, in a mix of clumsy but comprehensible Thai and Lao.
Jon affirmed that he was from Mellika, and added,
"Texas. But now I live in Sakorn, out in Na Gae. I'm a teacher there."
"Na Gae..that's not in Sakorn Nakorn," the man
rebutted with a subtle slur, shaking his head as if in admonition. "That's
here in Nakorn Panom."
"Yeah," Jon explained, "But there's another
one: Ban Na Gae, out in Sakorn, smaller than Na Gae out here. It's out towards
Kalasin. Little place."
They proceeded to alternate between slowly revealing facts about each other and looking at the river in silence. The rhythm of their talk slowed down considerably. The initial, manic tone of the drunk's greeting had evaporated--he was no longer inspired to silliness by the farang. He kept drinking his beer, and he looked the white man in the eye and found him to be, on some level, ordinary.
Jon smiled to himself and shook his head. He'd gotten
questions like this before. It didn't seem to occur to folks that, unlike in
their towns here where the few expats all knew each other, things aren't that
way for Americans at home; it's a big place. Lots of farangs who never
meet."No," Jon said. "I don't think I know Bob." Then he
took a turn at asking questions.
"Ever gone over there?" Jon asked, nodding
towards the Laotian shore. "Ever crossed the Khong?"
The man's bottle by now was empty, and he let it drop to
his feet with a clunk. His expression became dour. "The communists will
shoot you if you cross," he said. "They stole it all, and now we can't
even sit in a fishing boat without getting shot at."
Then he went on a quiet but increasingly intense tirade,
tossing up a strange history with mixed-up facts, a story of Thailand losing
Laos, which once was a province, but the French stole it and the communists
stole it again, and the Thai kings were great but the loss was wrong and the
Thais are going to take it back, and the communists will run away because Thai
soldiers are fierce, fierce like tigers! He used to be a soldier, he said, and he's not afraid of
communists. The source of his great bitterness, though, was that clearly he did,
in fact, fear them and their Soviet guns.
Jon listened, a little cautious, and observed the man
carefully as he spoke. The familiar Thai pride, the nationalistic spin of the
region's history, that was not new, but the man's overt anger about it--fueled
in part, Jon knew, by the booze--was something he didn't often see. He
cautiously nodded. The man had worked himself into a kind of agitation that made
Jon nervous.
Then, uncharacteristically and somewhat unwisely, Jon
decided to push some buttons.
"Are you Lao?" Jon started. "I mean, I know
you're a Thai, but you speak Lao, like everyone else around here, the same as
they speak over there, across the river. You eat the same foods, speak the same
language. Are they Thai? Are you Lao? Do you think they think they're really
Thai, or that maybe Thailand was stolen from Laos just like you think Laos was
taken from Thailand?" The words came a little awkardly, with an edge but
without confidence. Instantly he felt it was a mistake to toss these questions
out.
The man looked at him with piercing, reddened eyes, his
drunkenness tightly pinching the outrage he'd just dug up. He looked angry. He
glared at this white man and clenched his fist.
Takes history's twists and turns a little personally, I
guess. "Never mind, Listen, I've got to go. Got some business."
Jon managed a token smile and looked for a reaction, half-expecting some
assertion of obligation, social
obligation to depart only on the local man's leave…but the Thai man was
shaking his head and looking at the river, apparently disgusted at having wasted
time talking to this farang who didn't know shit about how things ought
to be.
***
He can't even tell where it hurts anymore. His hips, his
knees, his lower back…they have fused into one zone of kinetic pain, as if his
nerve endings exist for the sole purpose of skating a dance of electric pin
pricks and frightful stabs. It is difficult to walk, especially in the mornings.
He grips the edge of the kitchen counter and leans on it as
he walks its length in a slow, haphazard gait as if one leg is asleep. The going
is slow, and he allows his right knee to buckle each time he puts his wait on
that side. He feels like a strange, semi-mechanical thing. The brain keeps
sending its impulses every which way, the limbs unsure anymore of how to
respond.
How can I be this old? This decrepit?
As he comes to the end of the counter, he steps towards the
doorway and leans forward, reaching his extended arm towards its wooden frame.
Toppling in its direction, he slams into the door jam with all his weight in the
palm of his out-stretched hand. With a quiet, unconscious groan, he rests
himself there in the doorway, looking with unfocused eyes at the carpeted living
room floor just ahead.
***
In March of
1968 there was an unexpected blizzard. Snow in north Texas--especially in
March--was an unusual thing. Schools closed for two days.
On the third day, schools re-opened, as most of the streets
had been cleared. Jon and his parents lived two blocks from school, which was an
easy walk. But the school grounds were large, and the second grade wing of the
building was on the far side. He had to leave the sidewalk that extended from
the street's edge like a long flat tongue. He'd have to cross the sixth grade
playground, then go past the first graders' area with its teeter totters, around
to the far side of the building and into the enclosed courtyard known as the
Blacktop because it was the only area with asphalt on the ground. Finally, then,
he could enter the second grade door.
Once he stepped from the sidewalk, which had been swept and
treated with salt, he kept falling down. The playground was deserted, so he knew
he was already late--the tardy bell had rung and everyone gone inside for morning classes. He pointed
himself in the right direction--he wasn't lost--but every two or three steps on
the frozen ground he'd lose his footing and wind up down on his knees or bottom.
Falling was scary, and each step forward was unnerving. He
didn't know if he'd fall forward or back, and he didn't like it, the panicky
windmilling of his arms with nothing to grab onto. Finally, he gave up and
decided to crawl. He crawled on the ice and snow, leaving the cement tongue
behind him as it stretched on to the sixth graders' door.
Jon became entranced by what he was seeing as he crawled
along, and his fear disappeared. The brown dirt of the playground, which on dry
warm days always blew in the wind and stung his face, now was encased behind
half an inch of brilliant slick ice which was revealed between patches of
wind-blown snow. The ice had the properties of a magnifying glass, so that the
occasional blade of dead-yellow grass was a fascinating miniature sculpture
unlike anything he'd ever before seen. The ice was perfectly clean and
transparent. The dirt that was under him was sealed and untouchable in its
enlarged mystery.
Even on his hands and knees, it was slow going. Children
inside the classrooms he passed started noticing him. He saw them waving and
laughing at him through their windows, as if they'd always been there in the
safety of the warm school and had been smart enough not to be out where he was
now. He felt embarrassed at first, but then he giggled. He imagined he was in a
cartoon, and he laughed gleefully at himself as he crawled his slippery way
across the school yard. Sometimes he would try to go fast, spinning in place
like he'd seen cars spin their wheels before the roads had cleared. He'd laugh
and watch the vapor of his breath, and keep crawling, slipping now and then and
bumping the icy ground with his elbow as his mittened hand slid too far ahead of
him.
Jon finally made it to the blacktop. Red brick walls and
classroom windows were on all sides of him now as he ventured through the
courtyard over the frozen asphalt, still on his hands and knees. He looked up to
his left and soon his whole second grade class were gathered there at the
windows of his room, laughing and pointing at him and, he could tell, saying out
loud, "Look! Look! It's Jon!" He kept laughing and hamming it up,
sliding and crawling like a cartoon, having a wonderful time, but at the same
time knowing that most of those kids in there would call him names once he made
it inside, and a cross Mrs. Roberts would in her own scary way be mean.
***
He'd found a cheap place to spend the night in Nakorn Panom,
enjoyed an anonymous dinner in a small, off-the-path greasy spoon, and strolled
briefly along the river again after dark--no strange encounters this time, to
his relief--before heading to his room to smoke, read, and think.
The next morning, as planned he set out for T'at Panom, a couple of hours' bus ride away.
Once there, he'd find yet another cheap hotel room for the
night, check in, drop off his small backpack, and read by the river or wander
aimlessly around town, filling the time between meals. After spending the night,
and after a late breakfast, he'd pay his hotel bill and head towards Mukdaharn,
another river town, another 50-baht dump to stow his things in and spend the
night.
But for today, the destination was T'at. He walked up an
alley that left the river road and took him between some old shop-houses into
town. He ignored the stares of the people who noticed him pass by, and when
someone would shout he'd look up at the pale sky, look for the sun as if he were
telling the time, silently walking on. Being innocently hollered at in Thailand
had at this point become normal.
When he got to a main road, he turned left and headed to
where some blue pick-up trucks were waiting, engines idling, while their drivers
talked together on the sidewalk nearby in loud, juncular voices, socializing
between runs. He approached them and they immediately burst into a chorus,
"Bai sai, buksee-ta!"
He quietly asked them where he could get a bus to T'at, and
one of them pointed further up the road, saying, "Poon!" As he
walked away one of the drivers said something he didn't understand and the small
group erupted into laughter behind him.
He saw up ahead where a line of three beat-up, old orange
buses sat by the curb, outside a newspaper stand. The first in line had its
motor running, but no driver, black smoke slowly chugging out its exhaust in the
rear. As he got closer, he saw that the bus was already nearly full, mostly of
village folks, and discovered that the driver was helping an old woman load
stacks of flat egg baskets into the aisle of the bus just inside the rear door.
With the bus this full, they'd probably be leaving soon.
Jon climbed up
the back steps of the bus and found an empty seat next to the window, just in
front of the door. He squeezed past the crates of eggs and noticed, sliding into
the seat, that the cushion was slit and uncomfortable, but the leg-room wasn't
bad. It was stifling in the bus, despite the noisily oscillating fans mounted
above the center aisle. The fans whirred and clanged, but only really helped if
you were standing directly under one. He pinched the small latches on each side
of his window and slid the upper pane down half way before it stuck. Hot air
outside, hot air inside, but it would help once they got moving.
A moment later and he heard someone shout a last call for
passengers, and within seconds the already crowded bus became fuller still with
people crowding into the center aisle. Someone sat next to him, on the aisle,
and he suddenly heard the clamor of chickens squawking and flapping just behind
his head. Then the bus driver hoisted himself into his seat through his own
door, revved the engine, and with a grinding of gears, they were on their way.
His knees pressed slightly into the seat in front of
him--the orange buses that crawl this country's byways were not designed to
accommodate long-legged farangs, even though this one was not as bad as
some. Out of habit he stared out the window at the ever-changing scene below. He
used to look forward to conversations on bus-rides with whoever sat nearby,
enjoying the attention of their curiousity, making use of the chance to learn,
to practice Thai or Lao, to pass the time pleasantly. In a way, that's why he
was here, more than for his official job description as a Peace Corps volunteer:
to interact, to engage with people he'd meet along his way, to participate in
relationships, even simple ones, whenever and wherever the opportunity arose.
It arose often. And after a year and a half, that ideal had
slipped from his personal mission. The curiosity he provoked, after a while,
began to be irritating as he found himself, more and more often, seeing it in
racial terms. Unwanted attention because he was different; conversations that
were sometimes more grueling than pleasant. Some people were well meaning. Some
were timid and uninterested. Others--no so many, but enough to infuse him with a
slightly defensive posture whenever he walked onto a bus--were rude and foolish.
Right now he was enjoying the idea of a quiet ride where he
could lose himself in wandering thoughts without needing to explain or
entertain. He was feeling, tentatively, pleasantly invisible. After his strange
encounter by the river yesterday, invisible would be good. The woman sitting
next to him, to his relief, obliged.
The bus soon had rolled out of town and the ubiquitous view
of dry, dormant rice fields with scrubby-looking trees growing like weeds
through cracks in a sidewalk, and tan-colored oxen grazing on the grass growing
among the dikes was familiar and comforting. He was on the wrong side of the bus
to see the river, he realized, but he'd make a note of it and, on the next leg
down to Mukdaharn, sit on the other side.
About fifteen kilometers outside Nakorn Panom the bus
pulled to the side of the road. The person sitting next to Jon disappeared out
the back door, and another quickly took her place. He smiled, and Jon nodded in
return, then turned his face back to the window.
As the bus pulled back on the road and resumed the journey,
the man next to Jon started asking the usual questions. So much for invisible.
***
He stumbles slightly as he steps from the kitchen's
linoleum floor to the carpeted living room. Cautiously, he makes his way. His
hand finds the back of the overstuffed, corduroy-upholstered La-Z-Boy recliner.
It rocks like an ocean buoy as he releases it and moves ahead towards the
upright piano against the far wall. His furniture--he rarely considers it
anymore for its original functions: they are built-in rest stops while he walks,
crutches as he makes his way through the small rooms. They are as strategic to
his physical maneuvers as are small juts and finger-holds for climbers on a rock
face.
As he approaches the piano, Jon is blinded momentarily by a
familiar flash of hot white light streaming from the room's east window. It
relentlessly shines into the otherwise cool dullness of the living room during
this time of the day. It hits him like a slap in the face.
***
Heat from the tropical sun quietly warmed his face through
the bus window. His hair felt hot against his head, making him sleepy. The man
beside him had wound down his interview and, apparently content with the
answers, no longer spoke, but sat staring at nothing through his dark,
wire-framed sunglasses.
He had told Jon a bit of his own story, as well, and it was
an interesting one. Jon didn't usually meet people on these bus-rides who
disclosed interesting stories about themselves. Too often the conversations
focused exclusively on him as the anomalous white man.
He said his name was Dtan, and that he was from Laos, a
refugee. He asked Jon if he spoke French, and Jon answered that he only knew a
bit, not enough to carry on a conversation. Immediately proving this point, he
stumbled hopelessly as Dtan switched from broken English to French. Soon Dtan
smiled, and kindly reverted to English. He told his story quietly, but without
any sign of worry over being overheard.
Dtan said that he had been a government official in Laos
prior to the Communist take-over, and as such, his future lay elsewhere. He was
among the earliest waves of refugees--not the poor who fled from the hills, but
the educated urban elite, those whose positions in the government made them
automatic targets under the new regime.
He was not high-ranking, he said, although he knew some who
were, including some of his relatives who'd escaped to Europe. He wound up in a
border camp in Thailand, followed by thousands of peasants who came on his
heels, and who still come. Now he lived, illegally, outside the camp, he said,
with a Thai wife on her farm, not so far from the refugee camp. Jon asked him
how he got away with it, since the refugees were restricted to the camp itself
by the Thai authorities. Dtan patiently grinned, showing perfect white teeth in
contrast to the dark complexion of his handsome face. "Everything
simple," he said, "with the money."
"I have little freedom, but my life it is not so
bad," Dtan summed up. "My options, they are limited. If no, I promise
this not my place to live, my way to live. But here, with no the other choices,
really, it is not so miserable. I have my wife, my sons. I can pretend to be the
Thai man, and I pass. Nobody ask for my identification.
I grow vegetables in the garden near river, I trap the fish, and I wait
for letters from my brother in Paris. I am more freedom here than in Laos, dead
or prison. Someday, perhaps, with
some certain papers, Paris is possibility. But that is not certain, not at all.
So I am here."
He told his story matter of factly, and in such a way that
Jon found it to be believable although unique in his experience.
Dtan looked different--a quick glance at the other jostling passengers
around them in the bus made that clear--but not so much that he would stand out,
like Jon himself did as a white man. And Jon saw that he did have money, as he
pulled out a stack of bills from his pocket, folded in half, from which he
pulled a ten-baht note when the fare collector came by. Dtan had not hidden the
unusual amount of money for a tamada bus passenger to carry, nor did he
flaunt it. He seemed very certain of himself, as if he had some sort of immunity
to others' perceptions.
***
Jon weaves a bit, dizzied by the heat from the window's
slash of light. He shakes his left foot, shakes it as if he were trying to shake
something off it, keeps shaking it for a moment before he realizes he's doing
it. How odd he thinks. Why am I doing that?
As soon as he questions it, his foot stops shaking, like an obedient dog. He isn't sure whether the foot was shaking involuntarily in some bizarre kind of podiatric seizure, or if on some level he was deliberately doing it. He feels a wave of panic suddenly begin to pull at him.
***
"Daddy," she whined at Jon, who couldn't
suppress his amusement at her serious expression. "I've got to have
another car!"
Their daughter Jessica had been harping on this for weeks
now. It didn't surprise him--after all, she was seventeen and in her senior
year. But it was getting old. He frequently muttered the adage to himself,
"This too shall pass," and often, too, he would add a tagline:
"So pass, already."
Jessica was blossoming into a bombshell, which on a daily
basis took him aback. He really could not believe it. He had always been sort of
geeky-looking himself, with sunken cheeks and an overbite. And Linda, while by
all means not unattractive, was one of those women whose features are generally
unremarkable. But through the mysteries of genetics, their mixed brew of
chromosomes produced this once-skinny child who now, as a teenager, looked…and
he couldn't think of any other word, much as he wished that he could…sexual.
As soon as he began recognizing the emergence of his
daughter's delicious beauty, Jon felt doomed. Oh, hell. This will not
be easy, he told himself. Then, half joking, he'd say to his wife Linda,
"This is not what I signed up for."
Jessica had a sweet, pouty face which lit up when she
smiled. She wasn't smiling now, though, and it seemed to Jon he saw her smiles
less and less often. Quite deliberately, he was sure, she reserved her beaming
smiles for a more deserving elite, those ridiculous pimply boys and girlfriends
at school. For him the wrinkled brow, the exasperated grimace, the rolls of the
eyes and whiny pleas.
Linda took it all in stride, better than Jon did. But she
realized that her husband had selective prejudices like everyone else, little
decisions on which he wouldn't budge, and she agreed to go along with him more
often than not.
Jessica was self-conscious about the car they let her
drive. Linda's old Dodge Dart, a dirty copper-color, was her albatross.
"You should be grateful," Jon would predictably counter. "There's
always the bus, you know. Who pays your insurance?"
And it was always, "But Daddy…"
He realized that the Dart was not appealing. He didn't like
it much himself. But it was practical. And the very fact that it did not have
sex appeal made it so much the better--she wouldn't be showing it off, she
wouldn't be asked to take envious friends on frivolous excursions. She would,
perhaps, be inspired to buy fewer trinkets with the money from her part-time job
and start saving towards a car that more befitted her gorgeous new self.
"Listen, kiddo," he had lectured. "You don't
need a hot rod. You need a basic car for basic transportation. Nothing flashy,
just something that will get you from Point A to Point B." Echoes of his
own father's words in dimly remembered arguments.
This was always her least favorite part of Jon's monologue.
In frustration she once reverted to a less sophisticated girl, mocking him in a
nasal chant, "Point A, Point B! Point A, Point B! I can't stand
it!"
Linda would watch for his reaction. He knew this; his wife
was always slyly, wisely watching him during these little debates. He'd usually
do the right thing, or at least the benign thing. He'd look away from his
daughter and make it clear: conversation over. Or he would, occasionally, flash
her a petty, superior grin, signaling the equally clear message: You Can't Win.
But Jon was right. He understood, patiently most of the
time, that for Jessica this wouldn't--couldn't--compute. She did not grasp the
fundamental pragmatics of mobility: a human being is going through each day
plotting a serial course from Here to There.
The individual identifies a Point A and a Point B and
proceeds from one to the other. This is what we do. We choose destinations. Once
at Point B, once the task there is completed, that Point B becomes the new Point
A, its previous designation as Point B absolutely irrelevant as another
destination arises--the new and now all-important Point B.
Some of us get very attached to our definitions of A and B,
we throw tantrums instead of adjusting our course, we like that facile principle
of geometry--the shortest distance between two points is a straight line--and
the straight line in our mindset (even if it's actually meandering) is whatever
course most familiarly leads to our Point B of the moment. Having to diverge,
having to defer that Point B for an abruptly imposed need for an intermediate
one, is sometimes hard to accept.
"This is the car you have to drive until it is no longer safe, or until you can afford to buy your own."
***
"Where you going?"
Jon thought for a moment, then chose to be non-committal.
"Just around." He turned from the man who'd approached him as soon as
he got off the bus and intentionally strode away.
T'at Phanom had been all right, but it had been an
intensely hot day, so he spent most of his time drinking beer in his room and
napping, naked and sweaty, under the rickety ceiling fan. He showered around
four, hopped on a bus and pulled into Mukdaharn in the early evening.
Mukdaharn turned out to be a slight disappointment. Maybe
it was him. He had spent too much time inside his own head the past several
days, and this little trip was feeling rather tedious instead of like a
pleasant, relaxing adventure. Sometimes it went like this, he surmised.
Sometimes a road trip is therapeutic. Sometimes it's a pain in the ass. He
realized that he had been trying to replicate the other trips he'd made along
the river, or elsewhere, when things fell into place somehow, unplanned but
perfect getaways.
The sun was too hot. The buses too slow. The cheap hotel
rooms were too dank and sweaty. The views along the way--the river views which
were why he'd come--were vaguely picturesque, but for some reason uninspiring.
And he was feeling like it might have been better just to hang out back in Na
Gae where at least he didn't always feel like he was a walk-on character in
somebody else's play.
When he'd walked a few minutes into town, towards the guest
house where he'd planned to stay, he decided not get a room but just loiter in
the small restaurant out front with its airy, bamboo walls, drinking iced
coffee, eating French bread, maybe writing some letters. Then he'd walk along
the river one last time to the bus stop where he'd get a ride towards
home--closing the loop as his starting point becomes his destination.
***
When his foot slides he knows immediately he's going to
fall. He knows immediately, although there isn't really time to mull it over,
it's going to be a bad one.
What has it been? Five minutes? Even less? That's how
recently the sleepy but certain thought to go to the bathroom, to plot his usual
course from his place on the creaky kitchen stool across the living room, down
the hallway, and into the bathroom has arisen in his mind. Now here he is, gut
queasy, in a fall.
He can't lift his head, and he realizes that his eyes have
been closed, but he doesn't think any time has passed. Doesn't believe he passed
out, though he might have, he supposes. Now his eyes are open, pointed
befuddledly upwards, but they aren't focused. Can't even see the ceiling he
knows is there, high beyond the blur.
He is aware of the crescendo of pains. His ears are ringing
and his head hurts the familiar hurt of having slammed onto a hard surface. It's
a sensation he doesn't consciously remember, but now that it's upon him he
recognizes it from long ago forgotten falls--on ice, or on cement--childhood
concussions from horseplay.
Hell, he thinks, Some horseplay. Going to
pee.
Then he has a sinking realization that he did pee, he is
wet, and worse than that. The other. He can feel and smell it. He can't lift his
head. Futilely tries to push up with his hips, his elbows, any possible fulcrum.
There's a disconnect between body and thought.
This time when his eyes flutter open he knows he's been
passing out. In and out, his mind feebly manages, in and out.
His mouth tastes sour to him and, he realizes, tinged with
the bitterness of blood's presence. OK. This must be pretty bad.
Again, his eyelids flutter.
In the distance, he hears something he can't identify, but
for some reason it is a reassuring sound. Then it clicks in a moment of clarity:
an indistinct siren somewhere in the city's streets.
He suddenly remembers the emergency device he wears on a
plastic-beaded necklace. Jessica had insisted on it after her husband Doug's
father died of a heart attack. They found the poor guy sprawled face down on the
floor, already a corpse, his phone frantically knocked off its perch on a
hallway table. It had tumbled beyond his reach.
It takes a while. Several exhausting efforts, but his stiff fingers do at last find the plastic button. Jon's thumb pushes it to summon an ambulance.
Point A, he thinks through a creeping, heavy numbness. He waits for another siren's wail, one that will grow ever louder. Point B.