Non-fiction / Grey Matter
He is a man of science and believes that when we die we are worm food and nothing more. This thought
depresses me, so I roll it around in my consciousness, feeling for the ridges on its surface, trying
to worry it down.
We have been together for two years; some days it feels like a lifetime, and some days it feels
as if we’re strangers haggling for space on a bench. One evening, in a deliciously drunken moment, the
sort that makes it feel like a lifetime, we decided that we would take one major trip every year. So
this year, I chose Thailand .
I’m considering being a Buddhist again. I tried it once in college but lapsed in the midst of
a bout of cynical depression. Now that I am thirty, it seems appropriate to give it another go.
My strange friend has told me repeatedly that he never wants to get married or have children, and I am
wondering if maybe as a Buddhist I won’t mind this so much.
We arrive in Bangkok late on a Saturday night. A driver meets us at customs and places us in a
cab, side by side. I turn my head and kiss his shoulder as we sit in the back of the taxi, weaving through
traffic, surging past horn blasts and the roar of motorbikes. He smells like home. I roll down the window,
inviting the riotous heat of the city to come inside and join us.
We travel well together. Over the last few years we have built a relationship around these journeys:
watching the sun chase an airplane across an ocean, dodging days with a date line. Travel pumps living
blood through the machinery of existence. We have no future but the next destination, and no plans but
of how to leave again.
Our driver shifts through serpentine lanes, flashing past the pink and purple tuk-tuk lights that
decorate downtown. A humid breeze is twirling my hair and wetting my skin with its exhausted tongue.
The gorgeous enormity of ten million people draped in jungle and river water envelopes us, and I slide
my hand across his leg, pressing down to feel his flesh.
I can feel the press of time with each second’s passage, even as I sit in the back of the taxi.
I can hear my life’s measurement, ticking off on the metronome in my head, and I dismiss the sound, over
and over again. Tick, no, tock, no, tick, no, tock, no.
I try and imagine what I must look like to the person in the car next to us—another tourist
perspiring in the back of a taxicab in Bangkok . I listen to our driver speaking Thai into his cell phone,
saying “krup” over and over. If you are a man, you must say this quite often when speaking Thai. For
women the word is “ka,” much more mellifluous in tone, so much more open-ended and agreeable.
Sometimes I wake up at night drenched in sweat. I lie there straining to remember a dream in detail,
hoping that I will be able to trace it back to wherever it came from. I want to draw a map to that place.
I want proof of other worlds, to show to him before he convinces me entirely that this is it. My belief
in things extraordinary shrinks when placed under the lenses of science.
We check into a luxury hotel and shower under glass and marble. The water flows past my lips.
I stick out my tongue, wondering if it will damage me, infect me with some alien life. I haven’t taken
any shots or pills, as many travelers do. Illness is as much a dare as feeling real flesh, or returning
home with just enough money to last the month through.
We make love on a feather bed, enveloped by the hum of air conditioning. The sheets are fresh,
and we spread ourselves on the white surface. Next week we will have to be more careful. I will feel
the twinges in my belly, which signify the presence of the fertile egg.
An hour finds us strolling along Patpong. Beautiful young women and men line the streets, beckoning
any passerby to enter. Promising to relieve any craving, to comfort any longing. They are not sad or
even threatening. They are hosts to this gathering of hungry seekers. They link arms and laugh with one
another. Two women with skin like pressed gold wave to us as we pass. Their legs pour into pointed heels,
stabbing the concrete.
I wonder if they have been working here all of their lives, pleasing tourists, furnishing the
brutal love for which Bangkok is famous. Do they despair in their ancient young hearts, as the sun rises
and the traffic screams; dozing on sweat-stained mattresses, tuk-tuk lights flashing across their closed
lids? Lying through a sweltering afternoon polishing their nails and staring at a flickering TV?
Are these the granddaughters of farmers, or of fishermen, who brought a meal home in the evening?
After a long day’s labor, before the time came when bringing one meal simply wasn’t enough? Are these
beautiful children the progeny of people who lived before mere food ceased to satisfy anyone’s appetite?
My companion links his fingers through mine. His hands are hot, but his attention silences my
head. I practice a meditation of libidinous awareness. He is the now which holds the future at bay, the
dyke to my watery depths. I slip my hand beneath his shirt and feel his skin, covered with soft hair,
and I imagine that we are alone, in some dream that seems real and that I will wake up hungry and focused
on important things.
I meet the stare of a young boy, tilting his body in imitation of a woman, his chest covered in
sequins and shadow. He smiles in a way that is more knowing than questioning. He looks familiar. I watch
as an older man walks over to him, starting up some conversation. He shifts his weight from one hip to
another. He continues to glance over at me.
We take a night train to the north several days later. On the platform, an elderly woman sits
cross-legged, asking for change with hands that motion toward her mouth. I drop a few coins into her
palm, and she looks up at me. She smiles. Suddenly I am very aware of her age. I understand in that moment
that it is she who is doing the favor. The exchange is just a menial task that anyone would do, like
dusting the mantle after returning home from a vacation.
In Chiang Mai we choose more authentic accommodations, and the glitter of Bangkok gives way to
squat toilets and mosquito netting. Muslim women roast chicken along side streets and keep their heads
lowered when we pass. The smell of sewage wafts on the breeze, and flies are guests at every banquet.
But when we wake the next morning, the city feels comfortable and inviting. Before the heat of the afternoon
there is a delicious calm that fills the air.
Tours advertise treks, to see hill tribes who inhabit the nearby jungle. The famous long-necked
Karens, women who add metal rings to their necks until their collar-bones break and their heads extend
feet above their bodies, smile into photographs posted on the wall of a tour office. I remember seeing
pictures of them in magazines when I was a child. I remember thinking, back then, that they must live
at the other end of the world.
Shopping in the night market, my boyfriend looks through some silks laid out on a table. His fingers
stroke the fabric and I admire them as they move. I am always amazed by his hands. They are so beautiful
and so precise.
There are too many people in the world. We say it all the time. And I hear it in my head again,
the sound of the last time this second will be for me. I snatch for it but catch only the echo.
He looks at me and I smile, but my throat is closing. My eyes avert quickly enough to avoid his
notice. There is no point in talking about it. A strangling pressure is wrapping around my neck.
Then a stranger laughs loudly nearby, and I slip my thoughts into the noise and hide there. We
continue strolling through the vendor stalls holding hands. I suggest that we stop for a drink, and we
wander into a pub. There are Connect Four boards standing on every table and so we play. I remember the
commercial for the game and how the kid always shouts, “pretty sneaky, sis.” I lose twenty games in
a row and order another large Singha.
A woman we pass on the street is selling small basket cages. They are filled with little birds,
and she wants us to purchase one and then set the birds free. It is supposed to assist in the cleansing
of karma.
I buy one and peer in at six birds all clamoring to be let out. On the bottom of the basket, one
small bird lies dead. The others step on its body, pushing their beaks frantically up toward the surface.
I unhook the bands and open the cage. The birds fly immediately over a tall stone wall into the courtyard
of a Buddhist monastery, where they will be fed, then recaptured and sold again.
There were once over 100,000 elephants living in the jungles of Siam. Now only five thousand remain.
Most work in the logging industry, helping to remove the very trees that had formed their forest home.
Some elephants are trained to perform for tourists or to offer joyrides down well-beaten paths. Their
expressions are still peaceful, most of the time. The trainers use big metal hooks to keep their attention.
Tigers are seen predominantly in advertisements nowadays. Most of the tigers left in the wild
live in parks. In The Bangkok Post, I saw a photo of men in small flying machines, searching for
rogue cats. The hunters were sent to appease worried farmers who had found paw prints on their land.
Monkeys work in the south, picking coconuts. I never saw any free in the trees, but was told that
one well-trained male monkey can pick up to one thousand coconuts in a single day.
On the tropical island of Ko Samui, we saw a sign, advertising a monkey show. We stopped there
and entered a fenced area, where monkeys sat in cages perched on posts. These cages looked like the tiny
Buddhist temples people use to bless their homes. Every monkey had a different expression on its face.
Each one was in a different mood.
I stood alongside the cage of a calm, female monkey, and she reached out for my hand. Her eyes
were entreating from behind the bars. She looked up at me, and then down at my arm as if to ask permission
to touch. I let her clasp my finger and then watched as she reached further toward my elbow. I moved
close, pressing my body up against the metal and she began to groom me.
Her eyes grew intent and more animated. Her tiny fingers picked through each strand of hair on
my arm, searching for any impurity, anything needing to be cleansed. She was so gentle as she worked.
It was as if she had been waiting for the chance to care for something. I could see the rings of her
fingerprints when she shifted her hands.
We rented a bungalow on a white sand beach for the equivalent of three dollars a night. The heat
was stifling, and yet as days passed--swimming in the salty sea, drinking beer on the deck by torchlight--
it all became familiar. Our hair tangled in the bleaching sun, and our thoughts were simplified by the
effort it took just to move.
I forgot about being afraid of time. I became fish. I became gecko, watching only flickering shadows
play on the floor of the world, smelling only the parchment of skin that I would trace it on.
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Well, by the looks of it, I guess you will never read this, but I really liked this piece. The only part that confused me was this:
“I understand in that moment
that it is she who is doing the favor. The exchange is just a menial task that anyone would do, like
dusting the mantle after returning home from a vacation.”
You are really talented, thanks for the good read.
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July 14, 2006
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Wow. I love this. Please tell me you will continue writing this piece and expand it into a novel! You might just become my new favorite author. ( that’s a spot currently lived in by the amazing Ted DekKer, and you look like competition) seriously, this is just amazing. I have a couple favorite lines for this that I’d love to put here, because as a writer myself I know how we can sometimes slave over lines or write something that we love and then wonder if anyone really caught it. So here they are- “Their legs pour into pointed heels,
stabbing the concrete.” I love the word “pour” in that sentence, it really gives the reader a clear, defined image.
“Illness is as much a dare as feeling real flesh, or returning
home with just enough money to last the month through.” – that line gives you a feel for the character. she’s outgoing, daring, bold. and finally “I forgot about being afraid of time. I became fish. I became gecko, watching only flickering shadows
play on the floor of the world, smelling only the parchment of skin that I would trace it on.” THE best closure.
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