PINK MAN, BLUE WOMAN by Catherine Bussinger
At the Chiang Mai train station, hot and sweaty, bien fatigué, but not truly exasperated, not yet truly hating each other, they had looked around and seen, as promised, the one taxi driver dressed like an organ grinder monkey. Look for the driver in the red coat with gold braid and go with him, Aunt Dru had advised them at the reception, she in her French blue silk sheath that hid the colostomy bag, only her shocking reptilian face and hands exposed. It’s the . . . then she had grimaced or grinned, a rictus of pain of what followed – nicest.
In the hotel room, when the girl with the carved wooden comb in her hair threw open the door, the scent was a palpable thing that crawled through the air; one entire wall was filled floor to ceiling by the massive dark armoire, or bureau, or credenza- chiffarobe combo, all bedeviled by half-doors and drawers and a triptych of perforated screens; it loomed, carved and copiously oiled and giving off this distinctive aroma. Crouched beside it like a cultural counterpoint juxtaposed was a small, immaculate, cheerfully humming refrigerator – the familiar self-replenishing mini-bar, this version housing a shrine of five glistening jewel-like bottles of colorful soda pop, each with its own braided string necklace bearing a handwritten price tag: five dallor each, American. To Nora’s frame of mind this seemed a reference not to the type of currency required so much as a stern warning, to her, personally, the American; a rebuking reminder. She was being put on notice of the consequences of her own much-trumpeted, greed and self-indulgence.
It was there in that room that she had become afraid that he was going to say it. That her new husband would choose to employ the dreaded, emblematic phrase again. She was afraid that he would find occasion to say, It’s not rocket science. She was girding herself for this, unprepared for what she might do.
Everywhere they went they had been typical American tourists. They were too big, too robust. Pink-faced and gross. They failed to meld, rearing gracelessly from the sea of darting, pretty, dark and compact, fine-boned people; they were too slow, hulking and massive, lumbering over-burdened by backpacks stuffed with their useless, expensive possessions, clutching plastic water bottles and half-opened packets of foodstuffs that had been deemed “safe.” They had been alternately extravagant or stingy, inadvertently rude or excessively, inappropriately polite. They suffered; were routinely, periodically scorned.
In Singapore, to cheer themselves up, and because Aunt Dru had said they should, because W. Somerset Maugham had, they had dined at the famous Raffles Hotel at shocking cost, and then been berated by the taxi driver for having done so. Many many family, whole family may eat for one year on that dollars! Turning around in his seat to rake them with his scathing glare, and this had affected them both deeply.
In Bangkok they had, therefore, rigorously eschewed all tourist traps. All along had planned to wing it anyway, held no reservations, no set itinerary. Odd then to watch how they were nonetheless continually and unerringly shunted to sites plagued by hordes of American tourists from whom they wished to differentiate themselves. At one point Ian had angrily waved off the eager guide with his half-packed minivan who had pulled to the curb to offer them a sight-seeing expedition to all the hot spots. Looklook? the guide had said hopefully, stirring his finger in the air with an insinuating smile. Smooth move, Sherlock, Ian had muttered. We know all about your little scam. Instead they had joined a growing crowd of locals, were carried through the city by a throng of jubilant Thai teen-agers in platform shoes and designer jeans who were on their way to the opening of a new mall. Found themselves after dark marching back along a dirt road that skirted a froth-filled yellow ditch while motorbikes whizzed by inches away, each bike carrying two young monks, each monk swankly puffing an incongruous cigarette, saffron-colored robes gusting behind like miniature billowing sails. Everyone smoked, even the children; the air was filled with the acrid gases. Holding the neck of her blouse over her mouth and nose against that and the blue exhaust fumes and the toxic dust and the infernal wood smoke, she tripped over something that the stroboscopic headlights would reveal to be the decaying carcass of a dead dog, which stared up at her. It looked like Aunt Dru. That was her primary memory of Bangkok. That and the incident with the post card. That and the scuffle in the taxi.
What goes around comes around. We work hard but we play hard. Bite the bullet. Do the math. Think outside the box. There’s no free lunch. No shit, Sherlock. Hello, what’s wrong with this picture? It’s not rocket science. At some point the realization had crept into her mind unbidden. It had stolen unwelcome into her consciousness. Once there it ballooned to an unmanageable, uncontainable size. At some point it had come to her attention that her husband was a man capable of manufacturing entire conversations from a stored supply of shopworn clichés. “I mean, if you do the math, it’s a no-brainer. It’s not rocket science.” These were the actual words Ian had pronounced to dissuade her from buying, from the bantam old man with the donkey cart, a postcard to send to Aunt Dru. Such postcards would be much more plentiful and cheaper at the train station, Ian was quite certain. The postcard in question cost 12 baht, about thirty cents. A scandalous robbery. Which she would know if she had ever bothered to figure out how to calculate the currency herself. It’s not rocket science. This stale and second-hand litotes, accompanied by Ian’s persnickety presentation – gray eyes held wide and blank, head rocking on the stiffened neck – had struck her as funny: rocket science! – a hilarious anachronism in this donkey-dung, blowfly-infested venue. She had taken a step back in the teeming dust, had taken a playful stance: this might be a new game, the reset button pushed. God knows she was ready for some fun, some clever wordplay, some repartee. She was already busily in the act of cobbling together her own collection of mainstream-ese nonsense, expecting Ian’s face to crack with glee any moment at his own self-mocking caricature – Americanus Platitudinous. Any moment now he would crack. Would chortle and grin. Wait for it. Any second now. Instead Ian had gravely curtained his eyelids with the expression – smug and modest at once – of someone who had just delivered a brilliant and incisive dictum. A certain disconnect occurred: who exactly was this person? He was her husband; a word that in itself seemed rife with potential malicious parody. Maybe it was the oppressive heat; it was certainly getting the best of both of them. That and the pervasive over-powering stench of pungent, oiled and/or burning wood. A small thing, but once recognized, once identified, capable of assuming overwhelming proportions.
On they plunged. Down narrow twisted streets lined with multi-tiered, steeple-roofed, Dr. Seuss-like erectifications; past sidewalk shrines involving mutilated flowers and boiling incense and durian, the bizarre local fruit that smelled like spoiled onion. Everything dyed or stained or painted or upholstered red and gold, and stirring jarring San Francisco ’49ers football rah-rah associations in her mind.
Again, they were too big.
Ian, a towering human monument to the dedicated childhood ingestion of meat and dairy products, invariably the tallest living being in sight, had automatically assumed the burden of shepherding the camera and the currency, safeguarding them around his neck in matching strapped leather pouches, high and away from the clever hands of the city’s industrious pickpockets. Snapping pictures seemingly at random, periodically doling out the colorful banknotes with a tight-guarded fist – this had seemed a necessary expedient. But the incident with the postcard. It irked. Nora had not even a coin to clink in her pocket; she, who of the two, was the primary bread-winner had not one baht to give to a worthy beggar. The resulting perceived dependency, entirely fictional and synthetic, easily soluble, silly, chafed nonetheless. Was this a worthy issue to pursue? No, it was not. To insist, to mention it at all would be petty and small-minded, it would be neurotic. So she, a clinician by nature and profession, entered into a scientific frame of mind: herself and Ian the subjects of an impromptu social experiment having to do with control issues. But it seemed to her that Ian was taking a mean-spirited hoarding revenge, an atavistic, chauvinistic pleasure in exerting his back-logged, back-ordered patriarchal control. He was at risk of becoming before her eyes an ugly cartoon stereotype, lording his dominion over both her and the local population, whom he referred to with increasing glibness as “the natives.” This had started out as a joke. Or she thought it had. His newfound tyrannical penny-pinching insistence that everything was a scam and a rip-off, his highhanded behavior toward the little donkey man – whom Ian had shooed away by regally clapping his hands together the way one would with an obsequious dog – this was a priggish ignoble side of Ian she had not seen. Their pocket travel guide had advised them to bargain hard; to not do so was to inflict a grave disservice on every subsequent traveler as well as an insult to the local craftsmen and merchants who looked forward to honing their bargaining skills as a type of stimulating recreation. This adviso had morphed, in Ian’s mind, after the Raffles Hotel fiasco, into the conviction that the two of them, instantly marked as tourists, were being swindled at every turn. No postcard was bought from the donkey man or, later, at the Bangkok train station, to be sent to Aunt Dru, who, it turned out, was not even a real aunt, but just some far-flung busy-body magpie who had messily attached herself to Ian’s family, and then to Ian, and then to her, who had influenced her unduly, and wrongly, apparently, regarding every aspect of this trip, this honeymoon. Now the very word honeymoon struck her wrong; it was tainted with burlesque, as was the word husband. Backward, quaint and farcical, and faintly menacing.
Hot and cross, dusty, thirsty, already sweating at nine a.m., postcardless, then, they resumed their toilsome journey. The word travel was derived from travail, which meant to toil and suffer. She reflected on this dimly, distantly from under her ponderous backpack, which, lurking just outside her peripheral range of vision, had taken on the aspect of an elk carcass slung across her shoulders, damp and dank and stiffening, the long bony legs channeling into her collarbone, the asymmetrical out-jutting rack of antlers a constant snagging hazard. She leaned forward, gripped the stringy shins and heaved. The carcass peeled away from her back with a wet ripping sound, resettled, nestling cozily, intimately, around her neck. The pendant on her necklace swung out and she tucked it back into her collar before Ian saw. Centered it between her breasts beneath her shirt. Onward. They had decided to head north, by train, to Chiang Mai, were therefore in need of a ride to the station. But when she stepped to the curb to hail a taxi several sailed past in rapid succession, the drivers’ eyes unwavering, their expressions severe and reproachful. When Ian raised his hand a taxi darted instantly to the curb. Well, but this was to be expected in such a country, this was cultural; it was not Ian’s fault. Why then was she secretly so annoyed at him? She had to laugh at herself for this and the way he seemed to be taking this routine preferential treatment for granted, as if it were his proper entitlement. And then, halfway to the station, she saw a young boy, a street vendor standing on a corner, his arms draped with necklaces made from creamy white tuberose blossoms. She had leaned out of the window, beckoned him over while they were stopped at the light. Ian, quick, pass me the camera, she had said. Quick, give it to me, wanting to capture the sultry mixed sensations of the scene. But Ian had balked, he had twisted away – he had actually leaned away from her, pressing against the opposite door like a selfish, sulking child who was refusing to share. He had actually put his hand up as a shield to prevent her from touching the camera, and she had suddenly arisen like a genie, yanked it from around his neck, genuinely angry, turned and snapped the shot. Now give me some money for him. Quick! Just give it to me! she had shouted, grabbing at the leather pouch, but the light had already changed, the taxi was already pulling away, the boy had turned, his bony shoulders rigid under the thin shirt. She sat back, hard, in her seat, was propelled backward into a sitting posture. It’s not rocket science! The boy was gone. They had stolen something from him. They were greedy selfish Americans. They were pigs. They were thieves. Her fingers groped at the thin fabric of her shirt, located the pendant beneath; she pressed it against her breastbone, turned it full around, pressed again.
That taxi driver had been silent; he kept his face turned down and away from them – reprovingly, it had seemed to her. The reproof was due to their stinginess; or because she had, by beckoning the boy over to the window, caused a blip in the traffic, which was perhaps frowned‑upon, even forbidden (in Singapore the chewing of gum was punishable by a $316 fine, failure to flush a toilet cost $150, and these, and other costly crimes, had been clearly posted, in English, for anyone to see; but in Thailand there were no such warnings, no readable cues for proper or improper behavior); or perhaps the reproof was due to the fact that she, an American woman, had screamed at her husband and accosted him, had argued with him and bossed him around in public, she had done this shameful thing. These taxi drivers were like an army of free-floating, watchful, disapproving superegos, a plague of baleful eyes and compressed lips.
The sting of this memory would rob her of the electric surge of retribution she would otherwise have felt when, back in the States, the photos of the trip finally came back – dozens of Ian’s interchangeable, undifferentiable, generic sky-, city-, landscapes; and there like a poison flower, the fresh tawny face of the young boy framed in the cab window, his expression somber and complex, his beautiful, worthless chains of fragrant blossoms like glowing ivory in the moody light; his accusing eyes, his insolent, hungry, accusing eyes.
But of course, this too was a cliché. Of the most vulgar and blatant variety. She recognized that now.
In Chiang Mai the driver dressed like an organ grinder monkey delivered them to the reeking hotel room at dusk. A slavishly-carved, linguistically addled wooden plaque on the door identified their room as the “Honey Moon Sweet”, although they had not requested this, and the girl with the wooden comb protruding from her skull, pointing to the sign, pronounced the words grimly and studiously in a flat, inflectionless voice, with no apparent ironic intent; and then she withdrew, sealing them inside. The aroma of perfumed wood enveloped them. Scent is, in fact, the ingestion of air-born particulate matter; she had read that somewhere, and so envisioned the submicroscopic sawdust sifting down into the moist passages of her airways, her sinuses and alveoli systematically, delicately paved with this insidious stuff. Ian approached and examined the fantastical wooden structure, which bore on its various doors and frontispieces carvings deeply, lovingly, lavishly achieved which depicted scenes of voluptuous naked women with impassive expressions spreading their legs wide to encompass the rotund bodies of massive elephants, meanwhile bearing, on up-stretched arms, platters of round, heavy fruits that rivaled their breasts and buttocks. A handwritten card fixed to the corner of one door extolled the virtues of sandalwood, its wondrous effects, with a particular preening emphasis on its purported ability to Strengthen the Male Sexuality Member; and they had laughed at this, and at the carved quasi-erotica, and at the fact that they had been put in the “Honey Moon Sweet.” They had needed something to laugh at together, being able to do so was proof that things were not so bad after all. Then the pervasive smell drove them out. They fled to the darkening streets where Ian promptly reverted, collaring an ice cream vendor in order to bargain heatedly with him, calling him pal and Sherlock and haughtily advising him on marketing strategies in a booming voice before stalking away with an angry grin of triumph, empty-handed. A young Thai girl in a T‑shirt bearing the slogan No Money No Honey, who had borne witness to the spectacle with solemn eyes while rhythmically extending and adhering her delicate pink tongue to the tip of a glossy red Missile Bar, now glanced quickly up at Nora; the shock of the sudden penetrating eye contact was like an electrical jolt. How ridiculous he is, an inner voice said with quiet gusto in her brain. Her hand went to the pendant beneath her shirt, worried it, kneading it between thumb and forefinger. Some kind of an intervention was clearly in order. But a vile part of the zealous clinician in her morbidly craved to watch, needed to monitor the subject as he tested off the charts in all categories, yearned to see to completion the monstrous metamorphosis in progress.
After, it had seemed to Nora that she’d been seeing her husband through the eyes of Missile Bar-girl. Often, throughout her life, it would seem as though she were seeing through those piercing, electric eyes; it would seem to her that she was channeling Missile Bar-girl. That had been the greatest consequence of travel: to never again see anything through only her own eyes.
They found themselves on Chang Khlan Road in Chiang Mai’s famous night market. The bazaar was a jumble of flea market items, a hodgepodge of overlapping goods laid everywhere – bright bolts of iridescent raw silk beside fake Rolexes, bootleg DVD’s – Will Ferrell cavorting in an elf suit – balanced atop a cage filled with plump docile birds; carved wooden craftwork, sinister root and herb remedies, unidentifiable hand tools, opium paraphernalia. Ian stopped stock-still at one stall. He turned to pointedly motion her on. She moved swiftly away, momentarily freed, glad of the reprieve, quickly gliding out of range of his bickering, the stentorian bullying tone. Ian, his voice, faded from her. The night was warm and dark and alive, the bazaar stretching away in all directions, a misty fairyland of tiny innumerable swaying lights. Hill tribe families in fanciful headdresses strolled arm in arm, young lovers twined to press noses and lips together, nibbling satay off the same stick; a shrunken old lady with nubs of teeth stained red by betel nuts was borne giggling on the sturdy arms of chanting children; everyone woven loosely together by the winding blue threads of incense smoke. She became aware of faint music played and momentarily experienced a baroque synesthesia – sight, sound, smell, everything meshing harmoniously. She was caught up in it, she was part of it, following the tune, drawn to it, finally able to identify the source: a small boy sat cross-legged on a blanket, bent over an oddly-shaped stringed wooden box. From this misshapen object had come the magical sound. The boy stopped playing and looked up, held the instrument out to her, smiling merrily; she took it and plucked at the strings, producing a loud discordant twang and he laughed, a short sweet happy burst of amusement. The little boy said something to her, made a motion with his hands like slow waves, encouraging her to continue, and she imitated his motions, strumming lightly, rhythmically. The smooth keening sound traveled up from her fingertips through her arms and shoulders to the base of her skull. I must have this, she thought, this is what has been lacking, this is what I need, I have needed this all along. Thao rai? she asked, handing the instrument back to the child, who seemed to be making a modest eschewing gesture as though urging her keep it – a gift made specifically for her – while she unconsciously patted her pockets, forgetting that she held no currency, all the while inwardly calculating what she would in fact be willing to spend for such an acquisition – fifty?, a hundred? Remember, this would redeem the whole trip, this could be a life-changing possession – and she would quite happily pay double whatever he wanted which was in any event probably less than ten bucks, no bargaining necessary. And then Ian was at her elbow, he was pulling at her, drawing her away, tearing her away with a determined, excited expression on his face. What? she said, What?, puzzled and concerned because he seemed so earnest and needful. Ian had something he wanted to present to her. He held it behind his back as if she were a clamoring child. And then he slowly pulled the thing out, displayed it on his palm. It was a little sandalwood box with a carved top. He had found the perfect souvenir, he explained, to mark this trip, and their honeymoon, their marriage; he had stumbled on it completely by chance, had looked around and there it was. He pressed the box into her hands. She turned it over and over, pretending to examine it with pleasure. The lid sat a little crookedly, it rocked on the base, and she rotated it, but that made it worse; it pinched and she resettled it. Ian leaned in to give her a proprietary kiss. The box was the kind of cheaply manufactured item readily available by the hundreds in any U.S. import store, the lid marked by a shallow machine-carving of a botanically suspect flower. It was a cliché of a box! And there was Ian with that smug, pleased, crooked smile on his face! Having no doubt bargained mean and hard for it. She peered into his eyes, trying to perceive something, to receive some spark or relay, to kindle some kind of snap of connection, a cognition; his eyes were blank and round, the irises a flat frank gray, a non-reflective surface, a nonconductive material – they were discs of cardboard, plastic nubs, galvanized nail heads, pea gravel, shirt buttons, there was no light to them, no depth, no sizzle of current, no completion of the circuit, and after an instant she looked away in a panic. Who was this man? Why it was her husband again, the man to whom she was now yoked. The yokemate with the dead eyes and the trusty maxims with whom she would now be expected to return to an odiferous, misnomered room, one of many rooms over the course of the rest of her life to which she would be required to accompany him – an uncountable, unrelievable number of shared rooms and nights and acts. It sucked the air out of her chest. The instrument. Suddenly remembering, she turned, marching back quickly, searching, retracing her steps, trying to find the stall, trying to identify the little boy. Everyone was packing up, it was close to midnight – everything had changed as if by magic, everything had shifted, half the stalls now empty; she rushed back down along the row. Up and down the street she traipsed, back and forth, increasingly agitated: the little boy, his family, her instrument, had vanished. Neither sight nor sound, hide nor hair to be found; and anyway, Ian said, there would have been the difficulty of transporting such an object home intact, it was no doubt poorly made, of inferior quality, ready to fall apart at the slightest touch. And at any rate they could always come back tomorrow night, he said kindly, reasonably, when he saw that she was bridling; they had one more night before going home, they could find it then and make a decision as to whether it was something worthwhile pursuing, something substantial. His voice was calm and soothing; deliberately so. So much so that she became aware that he was employing his voice as a tool – he was skillfully modulating it as a deliberate means of manipulating her. Why was she so shocked by this? She had done the same thing herself, routinely did so. This then was apparently how they communicated with each other; by way of this crude and second rate, stilted, stunted means of transmission – a series of calculated transactions and strategic transfers of power. Their well-matched powers of persuasion, the spirited, sometimes heated intellectual jousting – this was a thing she had prized, a type of mental foreplay; it now seemed a dismal and inferior, superficial type of commerce – a paltry, second-hand choice, their illusory intimacy nothing but sham and counterfeit. She marveled that she had ever been deceived by that voice, which, reasonable and kind, was merely a ruse, the false benevolence completely at odds with the message in the flat gray eyes – his solicitude an implement to more readily pry her away from whatever it was she had fastened on.
A metallic taste of fatigue filled her mouth and she yanked on the chain at her throat: up popped the pendant out of her collar. She caught it quickly in her fist, surreptitiously brought it to her lips, let her tongue touch it once, held it in her palm to examine the darkened crescent, the intensification of color like a shadow, a partial eclipse her damp tongue had left on the matte face of the stone. When Ian had suggested she leave the necklace at home she had laughed: no one was going to steal her stupid little rock-on-a-chain; it was nothing, it was worthless, a river rock she’d found years ago, pre-Ian, a small oval disc shot with flecks of rust, the same pale gray as her eyes, a hole for a chain where a grain of sand had worried a tunnel next to the rim. It wasn’t a talisman or anything, it wasn’t a charm. It was just something she wore. Why not leave that home, he had said lightly, nodding at it, while they were packing, and she had laughed: funny Ian, always so worried about every little thing, always watching out for her; to placate him she’d agreed to keep it hidden under her shirt, safe. Looking back, she knows there is an alternate, and truer, interpretation of his words: he didn’t like her wearing it; thought it a childish habit she should long have outgrown. Well she would wear it in plain sight if she wanted, she would put it in her mouth if she wanted – a thing he hated, an unsanitary thing – did so now. Let him say something. The flat salt taste of it was soothing, it gradually effaced the coppery tang coating her tongue; the acridness began to ebb.
Back at the “Honey Moon Sweet,” Ian, exhilarated by his successful procurement, at base price, of the world’s most superb souvenir, goaded by the proclaimed promise of sandalwood-enhanced sexual prowess, stimulated by the watchful eyes of the carved women, visited on her a prolonged and repetitious and awkward kind of sexual congress that somehow, in her swoon of exhaustion and dispirit, seemed to pointedly echo the clumsily – and perfunctorily – carved little sandalwood box with its ill-fitting lid, the two interchangeable halves of which had obviously been separately mass-produced, ill-sorted, and then arbitrarily, ineptly slapped together – what looked like a match was not. It was a crooked and uncomfortable and jarring misfit, a mismate, a crude business of misalignment, and it would be so for all eternity. And now Ian, half-asleep, had thrown his heavy, crudely-carved leg over hers, the sharp, planed bone of his shin set at an angle across hers where it was doomed to lie misaligned until they rotted to dust. To dust! Becoming a little overwrought in this strange bed with this strange man in this strange country, with difficulty she wrenched free. Sat up panting. Her fingers scrabbled, caught the weightless lobe of gray stone; she pressed it to her chest, then cupped it in both palms, cradled it, rocked it. All unbeknownst I have forfeited the most important thing. These portentous words came at her with the ring and clang of a great gonging truth; but what it was exactly that she had forfeited remained elusive and indefinable, and slithered away in the dark before she could see its eyes.
She fell back in exhaustion and it was there on the thin lumpy mattress, stretched as far away from Ian as she could, that she was visited for the first time by what would become a lifelong recurring vision. It was that peculiar couple she had seen at the roadside cafe in Malaysia – it was a spectral manifestation of the pink man and blue woman she had witnessed on the second day of the honeymoon; and in this vision the two strangers were coupling with a wild, writhing, howling animal passion, they were laughing and grinning and gasping while staring hungrily into each other’s eyes, squirming with lustful abandon, their slick pelvises smacking and grinding together with a rhythmic slapping sound that finally transmutated into the little bursting pop Ian’s lips made as he exhaled preliminary to a steady bout of snoring. Finally she slept, only to wake at some dark unknown hour with a splitting headache. God, what was that? That sickening stench? The small sandalwood box lay on the nightstand next to her head, pulsing with scent, crawling with it, and she got up and coiled it tightly in toilet paper like some disgusting, repulsive thing, poked it to the bottom of her backpack.
In the morning, at breakfast, they were cowed and chastened over saucers of dry toast. Green of hue, dehydrated. Ian’s forehead the color and texture of a toadstool; she babied him a bit, regretted her own wondrously bitter spite, her fevered notions. They were orphans. They were changelings, ugly and unwanted. They were all alone together in an inhospitable world; they needed to make the best of it.
Their pocket travel book was useless, they had been amply misled: they were tourists after all. They needed some kind of guide. Just not one of the slickly smiling ginger-haired Australian tour directors bullyingly packing a minivan with pale plump bodies swaddled in L.L. Bean. On the sidewalk a woman with a frizzle of blonde hair was demurring and remonstrating with her mate, a beer-bellied gibbon in safari garb; there was some problem with her large Day-Glo pink canvas purse. A handle was broken, or the hasp would not close satisfactorily to contain all of her bulging belongings. Finally the tour guide managed expertly, dexterously, to coax her, her mate, and the gigantic pink purse into the back seat of his minivan; they zoomed away.
She and Ian trudged past the assemblage as if with some clear purpose in mind. There was a young Thai in a Hawaiian-print shirt walking along the jammed sidewalk in the same direction; she kept coming abreast of him by accident, knocking elbows with him, at which point he turned to smile in a friendly and engaging way, and she fell back shyly, out of step, only to come abreast of him again. Cian was the size of a twelve-year-old boy, had a juvenile bowl-cut head of shiny black hair, an aspect about him of being constantly windblown – something half-crouched that may have had to do with affliction: polio, or rickets, or a crippling deference. It seemed he had been walking beside them for quite some time, remarking on points of interest merely for his own enjoyment, it was just that they hadn’t registered it. His wryly amused smile, the periodic hissing laugh accompanied them in a friendly and familiar manner. He was in on the joke: they were tourists and embarrassed about that, and that was amusing too; in a larger sense they were all tourists in life, every one of them in need of a guide at some point. He shrugged, yawned, wiped tears from his eyes. He gestured to the line of packed minivans – a throw-it-away gesture of disdain, followed by the hissing laugh. You want see real Chiang Mai, he said, nodding, looking into their eyes. You want see hill tribes. See opium flower. Smokesmoke, he said and pinched his thumb and forefinger to his lips, inhaled, exhaled, gave a mischievous high-pitched keening giggle. I show you real Chiang Mai, no problem. Sighed, leaned on the taxi that had materialized at the curb: his friend, friend cousin car. You pay him, no problem, Cian said, negligently, abstractedly, gazing off, turning to light a cigarette, shaking the match out by means of a quick graceful figure eight that hung in the air. In another realm this casual forwardness would have been a red flag warning; but this is not that story, and Ian, for once docile and compliant, pantomimed with the driver, came to an agreement. OK, we go, Cian said, sighing, collapsing listlessly into the front seat. Ian had a concern, voiced it. This was their last day in Thailand and they had yet to see a temple. Cian turned around to smile, nodding rapidly as if he already knew this about them. OK, you see temple. See most famous temple, no problem. Ian persisted: And the elephants. They definitely wanted to see the elephants. Cian was silent for a beat before turning, nodding. You see temple, elephant, everything, he said.
At the sacred temple of Wat Doi Suthup, Cian stroked the throats of the massive, glittering, mirror tile-covered serpents that flanked the stairway before scampering ahead of them up the three hundred steps; they toiled behind. Herds of meek tourists, led by their interchangeable guides, stalled and lost compression, clogging the stairs. She saw the woman with the frizzy blonde hair attempting to pry a reluctant camera from the depths of her bulging pink purse and looked away. At the summit was a marble platform, the golden temple at the center, an oasis of tranquility surrounded by what turned out to be a sort of massive bustling souvenir shop hawking Coca-Cola and over-priced trinkets. The site was poised above a panorama of urban sprawl. Thailand, a study in contrasts, she intoned in nasal voice-over, pointing to a billboard for Pizza Hut. No shit, Sherlock, Ian proclaimed at top volume, and, Hello, what’s wrong with this picture? He wore the expression of a child who knows he has said something ferociously clever and precocious, and she waltzed away from him to a slow beat. Cian apparated beside her. Must go now, he said, hunching to light a cigarette; his hands were trembling very, very slightly. He painted his blue figure eight in the air, coughed once, turned and sprinted at light speed down the stairs. Below, the driver sat waiting in his taxi, loyal and wordless, with damp steady eyes, like a dog that was relieved to see them again but too proud to mention it.
They visited an umbrella factory where hundreds of the type of painted paper parasols found at Cost-Plus lay drying under the sun; they surveilled an orchid nursery; stalked a butterfly farm. Everywhere the same minivans emptied and refilled. Cian ran ahead of them, rushing, hectic, restless and manic, increasingly agitated. See butterfly, see umbrell. Now we see elephant, he said, gasping and sighing, See poor elephant. The huge yellow animal was being led by the ear around a track, a contraption that looked like a Chippendale loveseat anchored to its back, this overflowing with whooping, gyrating tourists. Ian stood by the track with his arms crossed and knees locked, surveying the scene with an air of stupendous satisfaction. Bwana Man. Just look at that, he crowed as the elephant dragged past, The King of the Beasts!
She had most definitely not wanted to see the elephants. Had quite ardently desired, it now seemed, had connived and strategized and finagled all of her life to never see or be reminded of elephants, the suffering they endured just by existing. The poor miserable creatures so large in their misery, doomed to toil under the sheer weight of their own yardage, she didn’t want to see it; their feet hurt, you could see it in their eyes, the tiny eyes perpetually squinted in agony. Her hand went to her necklace, she clutched at her little gray stone, yanked and twisted and sawed the chain against her neck. The big yellow elephant was being tugged by the ear around the ring. A Thai teenager in a DKNY T‑shirt had the ear pinched between thumbnail and forefinger and the rim of the ear was shredded, it was wet with blood, it was ragged and torn and scabbed from a lifetime of tough tugging fingers. She turned away in horror and her eyes collided involuntarily with Cian’s. An instantaneous exchange. His lips were a thin line. Cian turned to light a cigarette, shook out the match with a furious energy. Must to go now, he said to her softly.
Then it was time for lunch; Ian was hungry. Cian spoke a few words and the driver pulled the car to the side of the road where tables had been set beneath an awning. The driver refused to leave his cousin’s taxi, instead unwrapped a foil-covered packet he took from the glove compartment. Cian demurred, had to be begged to sit with them and accept a meal. He watched with something close to revulsion the bowls of food brought to the table, chain smoking in an alarming manner between tiny sips of Coke, leaving his food untouched. His hands shook openly as he lit one cigarette from the butt of the last. Buddha, the original one, had died from eating poison mushrooms; she remembered that from somewhere, examined each forkful, searching Cian’s eyes. Ian ate plate after plate oblivious to Cian’s squirming discomfort. Must go soon, Cian said quietly, with something bordering on despair. Wiped his nose and eyes. But Ian, on his second beer, was waxing expansive, loquacious, American. There’s no free lunch, he proclaimed admonishingly, warming up to his role as reigning king of untranslatable, impenetrable colloquialisms, and, grinning and wagging his finger in the air, declared his intention to pick Cian’s brain; this was becoming a favorite pastime of Ian’s, what he called Getting to know the natives. Time to bite the bullet! he said, wiping his mouth and slapping his thighs, then proceeded to badger Cian, whom he persisted in calling Chang, with a prying manipulative non-stop rapid-fire interrogation. This Buddha guy, what was the deal with him? Didn’t he have, like, fourteen wives, one of them only six years old? No? Well maybe that was Mohammed then. Well so this Buddha fellow, what did he do for the economy? Well at least he brought in a lot of tourists, you had to hand it to him for that! Cian, wan and piqued, bowed his head, shrunken forlornly in his seat. Had Chang himself ever been out of the country? No? Out of Chiang Mai? No? Well why the hell not? Well then, if Chang could travel anywhere in the world where would Chang go?
America numbah one.
And in Chang’s opinion who were the best tourists?
America numbah one.
And how long had Chang been giving people these tours?
Long time.
And how old are you, Chang?
Cian was fifty-two.
There was a silence. The smell of wood and wood by‑products took the opportunity to crowd in around them. She had her stone in her fist. Squeezed it cruelly and without mercy.
Must go now, Cian said. There were beads of sweat on his forehead and upper lip. Gooseflesh on the thin arms. Now we see hill tribe. Hmong best people. My people. Tapped his chest. There was a hollow sound like someone rapping on the door to a flimsy wooden cabinet.
Up, up, the winding mountain road; soon everything grew misty cool. The red and white taxi a brave and biddable beast, a big silent cat, a powerful snow leopard smoothly climbing the grade. By now the car felt like home, littered with Ian’s extra socks, her rumpled green jacket wedged like a pillow, the purple hairbrush jutting from the cup-holder. They pulled off the dirt road, had left the main road far behind. No other vehicles here, no taxis, no minivans. Nothing, no one. Upon deeper inspection, a trailhead, laced by vines. Bits of thatch glimpsed through the trees. Ian crowing with elation, unsheathing the Leica. No camera, Cian said, as they got out. The driver took the camera from Ian, bowing a little in his seat, locked it ceremoniously in the glove compartment. They followed Cian up a steep trail, panting and yawning in the meager air. Came upon a clearing, a sudden bustle of activity, people and animals moving briskly like wind‑up toys. Cian led them quickly across without greeting, tilting crookedly toward a slanting coop-like shed on the far edge, its collapsing roof half-swallowed by vines; the small Hmong people parted around them like a trail of ants diverted, meticulously ignoring them.
The air inside the shed was murky with airborne dust, the velvet dark striped here and there by stark rods of light that shot through the pin-holed roof. Her straining eyes picked out a pile of dust-caked rags: a skeletal corpse collapsed on the dirt floor, dead to the world but for the fleshless digits fondling a small hookah. Cian knelt, spoke, and the pile of bones stirred, coughed thickly, dribbled a glob of pink foam, held the pipe out to him. The feverish eyes, the pink sputum; she had a picture in her mind of what she would see under the microscope – the tiny bright red rod-like bacilli against the blue ground. Wasting disease, White Plague – tuberculosis; a third of the world’s population had it, Cian surely counted among them. The glass tube of the hookah was crusted with tarry resin, blossoms of brown oil floated on the surface of the water; Cian was holding it out to her. Smokesmoke, he said, urging them forward. Good opium. Strong. Best. She shook her head, Ian grinned, waved the pipe away. Cian shrugged and quickly took the pipe himself, lay on his side in the dirt, pulled on it, sucking and puffing, coughing, wincing and cringing, falling back slowly. Ian went to half-crouch, making a show of watching the scene with pleased delectation. He turned to her with raised brows, saying, We’re not in Kansas anymore, Toto, then made as if to frame the shot with an imaginary camera. Cian raised his head. You pay him now, Cian said, pointing to the corpse. Time to pay the piper, Ian murmured, chuckling, loosening his fancy leather pouch. He held a bill out to Cian, who waved it away, gestured again to the other man, and Ian laid the money fastidiously on his chest, not allowing any portion of his hand to make contact. Cian lay back again. Now you go see flower, he told them. See opium field, go outside. See hill tribe peoples, Hmong best peoples. He lay with his shiny black hair fanned out in the dirt. His eyelids fell closed, his mouth dropped open. From this angle she could see a circle of black between his two front teeth, as though someone had pressed a ball of tar against the gum line.
Outside the coop, a puppy tumbled and rolled in the dust, sparring and feinting with a clutch of nervous piglets that charged and skittered around him on tiny cloven hooves pink and dainty as manicured nails. A goat stared at her appraisingly, then glanced tactfully away. The tiny Hmong, round-headed, broad-faced, moved around them in antic clockwork fashion, all dressed in black cotton stitched with their colorful, intricate embroidery. A line of small children, each topped by a shiny cap of jet hair, stood still and silent, their dark eyes drinking her in, while a parallel line of women tucked into the long baskets on their backs – carrying giant dark leaves, veined and leathery, of what possible use or value she couldn’t guess. Women and children, goats, dogs, pigs. A serene, uncomplicated, unfraught world. No men anywhere in sight, and this cognition provoked something – a rude, unwelcome conceit bubbled up hotly inside her. Oh, put a lid on it; a slipshod conviction unworthy of her. A thing she would publicly deny.
A system of narrow broken trails led up into the hills, winding through the sloping fields. Corn and tomatoes, squash, other vegetables she didn’t recognize grew at random, thinly interspersed with flowers: these sparse and puny blooms were the opium poppies. The thin air, devoid of blaring radios, car horns, engines, electronic chatter, had its own volume, was filled with an eerie booming silence that packed her ears with a pleasant cottony pressure. Ian launched into a diatribe, the din of his voice abruptly breaching the stillness; from a distance she thought she heard faint music, like that of the stringed instrument in the night market and she shushed him; but the sound was gone, had probably been a bird, or the wind. She must remember to return to the night market when they got back to the city. There was an exhilarating warm wind that blew, playful and inquisitive, lifting the hair at her neck and she spun around. Poppies nodded, petals transparent in the thin cold light, the sun a new dime on a tin plate sky.
Look at this, Ian said with disgust, kicking at a rotten split log that had been hollowed out to form a leaking, rudimentary irrigation conduit. These people can’t do anything right! What a Stone Age culture. He stated his case with vigor, speaking in complete paragraphs, each with its topic sentence, evidence, analysis and conclusion, citing the glaring lack of even the most rudimentary agricultural expertise – wind breaks, leach fields, crop rotation, land contouring, proper water management. For an instant she thought she heard the faint tune again.
I mean for God’s sake, Ian brayed, it’s not rocket –
God, Ian, will you please just shut the fuck up?
The poppies swayed feebly in the chill weak breeze; they turned their faces coyly from her.
She had spoken without warning or preamble, either to Ian or herself; she had suddenly said this out loud and with quite a bit of cumulative venom.
To his credit Ian did shut up.
She meandered up through the fields, away from him, turning her head this way and that to listen and watch. The head of a small child appeared from behind a bush, was quickly withdrawn. There were rustlings and gigglings. A short high whistle preceded a flash of small limbs as another darted behind a skimpy stand of cornstalks: she was involved in a game of hide and seek – herself at once the quarry and the seeker. She knelt down, ducking her head below the grass-line; then stood suddenly to look all around – a dozen little heads jerked down and away. Shrill yips and shrieks filled the air as they fled, dropped, peeked back at her. Far below, Ian perched on a stone with his hands clasped together in his lap, a pious, sanctimonious expression forming his features, a self-righteous tilt to his profile. She didn’t care. He could stay that way forever as far as she was concerned, judging everything with his dead-fish eyes, composing his catch-phrase lectures on agribusiness. Far up along the ridge she sat down in the bowl of a grassy meadow. The sun was warmer up here, the yellow grass soft and limp. She lay back for a minute, her plan to sit up suddenly, the better to ambush her small pursuers. The sun sifted down, gently weighted her limbs, her eyelids, and she yielded to it, the ponderous lids drooped; she would close them for just a second, succumb to the irresistible, narcotic pleasure. Tiny furtive sounds began to accumulate along the edges of her consciousness. She struggled to open her eyes, found that she couldn’t. It seemed that she had dozed, she did so again. Someone was playing with her hair, or she dreamed that they were, and she lay very still in order that the necessary and intricate arrangements be made. And then all at once the ground grew stiff and cold, intent on leaching the heat from her body. She struggled to sit up. The children were gone. The dime sun was melting, the bottom edge of the coin fused to the far rim of the plate. The clearing far below was deserted. She stood, weightless and dizzy.
Her pockets were turned inside out.
Her hand shot up to feel for what she knew was gone. Her heart thumped, once. She made her way unsteadily down the hill to where Ian still sat on his stone. The color had drained from even the reddest poppy. They sat, staring around; there was no one in sight. It was bitterly cold; the little poppies had furled their petals tightly against it.
Finally the driver came to get them, an anxious look on his face.
The trip back to the hotel was silent. Cian curled like a leaf in the front seat, sound asleep, his bony knees pinioning his cheek bones, his small hands fitted neatly together under his chin like a complicated wooden puzzle. The car smelled of dead cigarettes, stale breath, boiled vegetables. A school cafeteria smell – repellent, familiar, grossly intimate. She and Ian sat huddled against opposite doors; she pressed her face to the glass, trapped both hands between her thighs to keep from reaching up reflexively. She would not tell Ian; she would not give him the satisfaction. She needed to deprive him of the power it would grant him. When he asked, she would shrug, say the chain must have broken. In fact now that she thought about it she was sure that was what had happened. The chain had broken. Shrug. After a while the driver lit a stick of incense and placed it fastidiously in the slotted sandalwood incense holder at the center of his dash-top shrine. Cian coughed an abrupt phlegmy cough. She pulled the neck of her blouse over her mouth and nose and slept.
It was dark by the time they got back to the city, the streets smeared with lights and traffic. As they pulled up to the hotel Cian suddenly revived, blinking and stretching, lighting a cigarette. Smiling and bobbing, chatty as hell.
OK, he said, we save best for last – now we go to leddy home! He turned to smile angelically back at them – a beatific seraph bursting with joyful mischief, his face was plump with it. Sista work at leddy home! Give private tour! Many nice leddy at leddy home, strong! Give big massage! He pantomimed a back rub, all glinting eyes and rotten teeth, emitted the hissing laugh, a faulty tire with an intermittent leak.
She understood they were to be given another private tour, of something that was supposedly taboo, off-limits to the average tourist. Thailand was famous for its gold-crusted temples, opium, and the sex trade, not necessarily in that order, and now civic-minded Cian apparently wanted to make their tour complete. Best for last!
She begged off, smiling hard, making small absurd bowing motions while backing out of the car, thanking Cian and the driver for the delightful day. Ian made as if to get out with her and she closed the door fast, smiling ferociously, vigorously waving the car away. Ian gave her a pleading, puzzled, embarrassed grin, was whizzed away in the taxi, his head jerking back sharply against the headrest. Rocket science!
She marched purposefully through the grotesque lobby, quickly located the horrid room with its ludicrous, misspelled, ill-conceived plaque and shut herself up inside it. Locked the dreadful door with unnecessary violence, leaned against it.
She was a fool.
The whole world was turned away from her. How had she not known that? It was twisted awry, deliberately averted in such a way that she couldn’t see its eyes. It had always been that way, it’s just she had never noticed. She breathed in and out deeply in a ragged, self-pitying, harried manner.
The fucking smell.
She was instantly smothered in the sickening stench coming off the hideous thing – the chest, or wardrobe affair, or whatever it was – it was trying to suffocate her. She stalked over and threw back the screens, yanked open the useless doors, pried out the balky ill-fitting drawers, up-ending them, trying to find the source; she found the little scrap of paper with the hortatory proclamation and tore it off, tore it in pieces, crumpled these pieces up. She was breathing hard, gasping, sweating, but she had conquered it, it had retreated, cowed by her heroic fury. The smell was already less. We work hard but we play hard.
Tomorrow morning they would leave this weird place; she and Ian would fly back home to the flat they had shared quite contentedly for some time, although how they had managed that she couldn’t now guess. It had to have been through willful, mutual self-deception; a calculated, deliberate minimalization of contact. A hoax effected through subterfuge and trickery. How was it they had come together in the first place? It seemed that they had met up according to some posted time-table, had recognized each other from across the room like siblings meeting by prearrangement at a train station, faintly relieved, but not in the least surprised to find each other there – two practical, efficient believers in regular exercise and the benefits of a low-fat low-sodium diet; designated drivers, universal blood donors, avid recyclers, carbon footprint-reducers, tireless do-gooders with a lot in common, a lot to talk about with their high school Debate Club voices and manners. As if any of that could effect their redemption. They even looked alike with their limp, dishwater hair and pale gray eyes, their frank open faces; they looked like siblings; they looked like a fucking set of salt and pepper shakers; they looked like a perfect match. They were a perfect match; everyone said so.
This was all, she now knew, a monstrous lie of the grandest proportions.
All unbeknownst I have forfeited the most important thing. The quaint words came at her again, but this time she knew what it was she had lost. Sorrowfully lacking was the silent hailing of one kindred spirit to another, cast-off scraps of which she had been hungrily scavenging from random strangers like a starved thing. That instantaneous and involuntary fusion, the ineffable, inimitable connection: she had dismissed and discarded it, had forgotten all about it, forgotten it even existed. The only thing that mattered and it had slipped through her fingers while she clutched at something else, and it was then, in her weakened state, spent by her battle with the monstrous thing, that the image of the strange couple – the pink man and blue woman – attacked and gravely wounded her.
It had been on the second day of their honeymoon that they abruptly found themselves plowing through a maze of unmarked dirt roads in a rickety rented jeep, blinded by lunatic quantities of tropical vegetation, off-course, lost, certainly, in a primitive, bug-infested, unregulated and wholly uncontrollable landscape. The simmering air was like dogs’ breath, it kept licking and slobbering at their stinging skin, buzzing and humming with virulence, and a plague of tiny genius midges, able to navigate backwards while expertly matching their velocity and thrust to that of the jeep, hovered infuriatingly inches from their faces, intent on drinking the fluid from their eyes. Ian had panicked, perceiving the relentless onrush of the pernicious and ignorant geography, and, gripping the steering wheel with one hand, had suddenly begun slapping his pockets with increasing desperation: he had forgotten to take his malaria pill on schedule. The jumbo capsule finally materialized in his shirt pocket and, refusing to stop the car, refusing to wait until a sip of water could be procured, he had swallowed it dry. With the natural result that it stuck at the back of his throat, and, shortly, detonated there.
His antics might have been amusing were he not the one driving. Rearing back, snorting, hacking and spewing up yellow foam, he had jammed his foot down on the accelerator pedal, zigzagging across the gouged-out ruts, snapping canes, blasting through greenwood, mowing down scalloped swaths of solid green. Simultaneously, as though by sleight of hand, a roadside café appeared. The jeep barreled across the clearing and jolted to a stop against the pole of the corrugated tin awning. Ian ran in.
Inside, a solitary woman stood motionless behind a plank counter. A woman the likes of whom Nora had never seen. She stood well over six feet tall, her long sinuous arms arrayed symmetrically, spanning the length of the counter, the formality of her posture ironically serving to showcase her preposterously voluptuous anatomy, which was upholstered in luxurious skin of a velvety navy blue, opaque as the fabric of a cat-suit, and so uniform in texture that even half naked she seemed fully clothed. Over her lofty head had been dropped a tartan plaid jumper, the kind meant to be worn atop layers of thick knitted woolen undergarments by a schoolgirl on a harsh winter’s day in Minnesota; but the woman had donned it like a sundress, wore it sliding and sluicing over her bare blue skin, the hem barely skimming her jutted hips, the low scooped bodice shifting with the rise and swing of her breasts as she began to move skillfully and gracefully about her station. She had the aspect of having waited there motionless behind her plank since the beginning of time, tirelessly and constantly, in canny anticipation of their arrival. The dramatic planes of her astonishing midnight face were set in a moue of happy, knowing mischief; a smile of compressed hilarity played across her lips as she watched unsurprised as Ian seized the pitcher of water she lifted toward him and dashed it over his upturned face, the water crashing violently over his contorted features and cascading down to the rough floorboards, soaking instantly into the parched wood.
Ian, dripping, still snorting, bending and blubbering, rushed out of the hut. This too seemed to please and delight the woman, who laughed tenderly and indulgently the way one would over the antics of a spoiled and beloved child, her great eyes squeezing shut and her split-plum lips parting to show twin rows of gleeful teeth, stark white and flawless. And then the woman yawned hugely, languorously, infusing the mundane act with extraordinary carnality, displaying an oral cavity as bright and pink and wet as a wad of Bubblicious chewing gum, a shock against the indigo foil, graphically suggestive. She resumed her symmetrical stance, straight and strong and silent, and magnificently content within her sphere of intense and secret pleasures.
Finally Ian returned, bearing a stricken, martyred, ill-used look. He sat down at the tiny wobbly table made from a hammered tin lid and finickingly picked at the plate of roti prata the woman had prepared with a swift series of deft and magical motions. He glared hatefully at the harmless little tabletop while reciting a list of half-hearted insults regarding Johor Bahru Province, failed economy of, as evidenced by the crumbling infrastructure, the corruption and greed of a criminally negligent government that apparently saw fit to ignore any need for road maintenance let alone signs, and then, winding himself up, began doggedly laying out their proposed itinerary in what seemed a new, disimproved, unfamiliar and unwelcome voice. A voice amply heard by the woman. It was here in this silent, empty, fly-speck station that Nora really heard his voice for the first time, heard it through the ears of the blue woman, and it was a voice wholly dedicated to the thorough nit-picking nailing down of schedules and flight plans and gas mileage; and exchange rates and frequent flyer miles and baggage claim stubs; all of which had to be enumerated and catalogued in a chronic, frenetic reiteration, the superfluous information all gussied up to a dibby dabby doo with a rancid topping of buzzwords. Bottom line; in the red; out of pocket; bait and switch. Because they really needed to knuckle under and be proactive, they needed to level the playing field, bring their ‘A’ game, and be smarter than the average bear; they needed to step up to the plate and fire on all four cylinders, to dot all their i’s and cross all their t’s, because what they had here was a failure to communicate; they were going off halfcocked, adding fuel to the flames and barking up the wrong tree vis-a-vis the powers that be, and they wouldn’t be out of the woods until the fat lady sang, the sixty-four-thousand dollar question being how to get on the information superhighway from here. It wasn’t rocket science.
She had stared at Ian with veiled shock while he bled out, clinching her pendant between thumb and knuckle. She tortured the little stone heartlessly, pinched and gouged at it with her thumbnail, without, however, ever being able to achieve sufficient force to offset the sensation of the relentless, methodical clockwise tightening of a screw in her chest.
Information is not knowledge. Knowledge is not wisdom. Wisdom is not truth. Truth is not beauty. Beauty is not love. Who had said that? It was Frank Zappa who had spoken these words, and more; and she had wanted to interrupt to tell Ian this. She had wanted to grab his arm and shake him to make him listen. Not so that he might understand, because he never would, but just so that he might stop, just stop bleating because his voice was obliterating everything that was exquisite and significant and exalted in life, everything that was momentary, and therefore invaluable since unrecapturable; but mostly she wanted to make him stop so that the blue woman would see that she herself was not party to this, this pompous display of hollow gibberish; she wanted to distinguish herself from Ian in the woman’s eyes, differentiate herself from this embarrassing man, the American eunuch with the needy voice, the inordinate attention he demanded, the audience he presumed to command, the inanity of what he urgently needed to convey – she was already thoroughly sick of it, and of him. And all the while she knew, too, that her own quote, her precious Frank Zappa quote, along with everything else she had ever said or done or thought in her life, every testimony or belief, any deed that she had ever or would ever perform, and even this little epiphany regarding her own mediocrity was a hackneyed cliché, the kind of self-flagellating, self-loathing indulgence routinely suffered by a certain class of privileged, despised Americans, of which she was one. Their decades-spanning marriage would flow quite naturally from this point, the point at which she began to know that the trip, and the marriage, had been a huge and irreversible mistake. They were two days into it.
As though to illustrate that point, a sun-scorched, scrubby-bearded young man had at that moment roared up to the café in a rusted jeep. He was an Australian probably, or a Canadian, or even another American, some generic Anglo – an unfinished proto-type of the guides they were soon to see everywhere, though dirtier, grubbier, unwashed and ungroomed; completely Gone Native. Unsanitary. He had leapt out of his jeep and stalked into the cafe with a predatory gait, gone straight to the counter where the blue woman stood waiting with that same fixed, mischievous, knowing expression, and his hand was already raised and reaching to seize the fluorescent pink soft drink she was already holding out to him while smiling and jiggling it teasingly in the air the way you would with a toddler. He snatched at the bottle and drank it standing up, tipping his head back to drain the last drop, almost staggering, and as he drank his eyes were only for her, and hers were only for him. A long and intense voiceless communication was taking place over the course of his brief refreshment. His ragged hair and beard were pink with dust, his skin too, caked thickly in the creases of his neck, the knees and elbows, as though dredged in Coty rose-beige dusting powder that had been dabbed over the raw, darker pink of serious sunburn, and his once-khaki pants, now also pinkened, were ripped, the seam split up the back and he should have been embarrassed about that, he would have been if they – she and Ian, sitting stiffly not two feet behind him – had existed at all to him, which they did not, because he couldn’t keep his eyes off the woman in her skimpy dress and rubber thongs – she was an inky-skinned goddess in her ill-fitting cheesily-made jumper – she had the smiling, mocking, knowing eyes, her lips parted in laughter briefly displaying the bright clean pink meat inside as he slammed the empty bottle down on the counter, turned to leave without a word, his face congested, his eyes spinning with all he had absorbed from her.
Not one word had been spoken between them.
There on the lumpy bed in the “Honey Moon Sweet,” squirming with an oblique, unknowable and unsatisfiable longing, she wanted to be the blue woman so much she could taste it.
She was terrifically thirsty.
It had also been there in Malaysia that she had encountered a thing called a Burmese monkey trap – a device whereby a hole is drilled in the shell of a coconut, the coconut then filled with rice and lashed to a tree. The monkey climbs up the tree, sticks its paw into the coconut, and grabs a handful of rice. And then the hunter closes in. The monkey can’t withdraw its rice-filled fist, and it can’t figure out to loosen its grip on the rice. And so it is caught. This device, ingeniously simple, infinitely clever, had come to seem to her a fitting and mocking metaphor for marriage, if not for life in general.
The little sandalwood box that Ian had bought – dormant for decades, lying in wait in an old chest of drawers – once rediscovered and pried open, promptly disinterred a thing long-buried. It was the scent that brought it all back. Flat and sweet and cloying; akin to the smell of scorched dust that rose from the heater every fall after its summer accumulation. How was it that a string of aromatic hydrocarbons could so effortlessly exhume the most skillfully buried of memories? The crudely-carved little box brought back what had been the end of the honeymoon.
How odd to look back and see that on that last night in Thailand she had genuinely expected (so estranged had she begun to feel from this person to whom she was apparently married) that Ian would clearly be using the services of a prostitute – just a hand-job, surely, something sanitary – when, in fact, what had happened instead was simply a brisk and somewhat painful session of back-walking on the floor of a public gymnasium. When he got back to the hotel room Ian had performed his daily exercise routine with the jump rope he kept in his pack, then had embraced her in order to perform that other routine exertion; they had gone to sleep, and then the next morning it was time to take the hotel taxi to the airport.
It was as they were fitting their backpacks into the trunk of the taxi that the girl with the wooden comb in her hair ran out of the hotel calling and waving a room tab. The tab indicated that one of the jewel-like bottles of soda had been found to be missing from the self-replenishing mini-bar in their room, and that therefore five dollars was due before they could leave. Five dallor, American, the girl said, insistently and gravely. Ian had instantly begun to argue with her. Already sitting in the taxi, sorting out their tickets and passports, Nora had turned her face away as though repudiating him. If they didn’t leave now, they would miss their flight. Ian continued to refuse to pay; the girl jutted her chin stubbornly, repeating the charge. Ian turned to appeal to the taxi driver, but the young man raised his hands palm up to indicate in pantomime he could do nothing. It was a stalemate.
Ian, just pay the five bucks for shit’s sake, she had hissed. And Ian had whirled on her.
But it’s a scam, don’t you see that? They’re just ripping us off because we’re tourists!
The girl with the wooden comb stood fast, holding the tab of paper like a book of judgment. Just for an instant something flicked across her eyes, an instantaneous signal aimed at the taxi driver, who, she now saw, under his ridiculous red coat was young and strong, vital and wily and intelligent; something had passed between him and the girl, something tacit and complicit, an intimate and familiar on-going communication, a connection, a meeting of the minds; something she herself had forfeited. It was then that she recalled the instrument. She had forgotten all about it. It was a thing she would never have.
I mean really, you do the math, Ian was insisting, whirling to stare accusingly at each of them in turn – they were colluding somehow, all three of them, conspiring through some means he couldn’t perceive, in order to cheat him out of something – he could see that quite clearly.
I mean, for God’s sake, he said, it’s not rocket science
Catherine Bussinger’s work has appeared in McSweeney’s, Epoch, Beloit Fiction Journal, and Carolina Quarterly.