A Friday, I think, in Thailand. Somewhere along a three-day journey beginning on a tropical island and ending at my apartment in Denver (empty and overheated, a bursting peach in the dry snow), time blurs and then disappears. 3 pm Sunday will be 5 am Monday, which is like 8 am Friday equaling 6 pm Thursday, and so on.
At a bus depot in Central Thailand we give green ticket stubs, retrieve green ticket stubs, give them again for good, and are then asked for them repeatedly. We are stickered with a neon orange square that must be worn visibly on the shirtfront, stickered next with a fuschia square - fuschia for Bangkok on Fridays, I guess. An eight year-old boy wheels around the driveway on a Batman bike, trying to impress my brother and the other weary, ripe, sun-worn and beach-weathered tourists from Australia, England, Germany, Holland, France, Canada, America. He rides by with no hands, teeth flashing, his eyelids flipped inside out.
Four hours ago it was afternoon, and the bus depot in Krabi was sweltering, overcrowded, and filthy. Colleen couldn't understand the refuse cluttering the edges of everything - water bottles, candy wrappers, plastic cups and napkins, toilet paper, ticket stubs, square stickers in acid dream shades, junk, garbage, waste. "Depots are always like this," I told her. "Any place where people come and then go, where people don't stay, looks like this." A thin, bony, blondish girl in oversized sunglasses leaned forward from her plastic chair and vomited what looked like kinked yellow noodles at her feet. Thirty minutes after she and her hungover friends were ferried away in the back of a truck, a Thai man sat in the same chair, clipping his fingernails, crescents of which flicked from his clippers into the pile of noodles.
There are dogs. Dogs with fleas, with scars, with gigantic testicles, "showing their lipstick" as one of the girls from Brighton put it, dogs with teats swinging below them, long, impossibly stretched dog tits, dogs trotting, stretching, sleeping, rolling, running, nosing, whining, and scratching, scratching, scratching. You can tell the tourists from the travelers because the tourists sit and scratch the dogs between the ears or pet their matted fur. The travelers sneer, disgusted, and slap mosquitoes with mirthless economy.
On the bus again, I am woken from sleep, probably by the churning of my own mind. After night falls, the squirrels in the works become horses running thunder, and the mental turbines crank out the poisonous product of relentless self-obsession, the agony of a skewed self-awareness, fractals upon fractals of a faulty self, an untidy, unattractive, unsavory, and unsaved self. Over the course of two weeks I have worried that wound like a frayed seam, biting thread after thread as the hem unravels. I worry it still; it requires all my attention, until suddenly my sister stretches her leg forward across the seat of the chair next to me - a seat with the back broken and therefore removed - and rests her foot so that it lightly touches my thigh. The transference is quick; in an instant I am prepared to hitch all of the hate aimed at a fat girl onto the smooth, warm, amphibious curve of a pedicured foot. A pellet of reason within me pipes up against all odds and asks her, nicely, squeaking with niceties, to please move her foot a little to the right so it will not rest on me. Magically, she obliges - and survives.
Later, in the dark, I hear that same sister sniff, and I know without turning that she is rigid against the window in the dark, silently sobbing. An hour later we wait for our bus connection at a terminal, and I ask my mom if Ryan cries for her not-so-nice-after-all ex-boyfriend, though I know well that she could have been crying for the great loss of youth, of innocence, for poverty, for beauty and sorrow and their tiny tangerine dance, for the pink polyester curtains swagged from row to row along the length of the pastel party bus. My mother replies that Ryan was crying for our father, who had died one year before.
That makes me think of our last night on the island, of how we stood in a circle, of how the air was nudged by the gentle lapping of the Andaman Sea. It makes me think of the orchids, the ashes, the ocean, the flame, the pathetic attempt at ceremony, the terrible trial of keeping my mouth shut so as not to hurt others' feelings. It makes me think of how my sister, terrified it would be mistaken for drugs and confiscated, insisted on transporting a tiny portion of my father's ashes halfway around the world in a Burt's Beeswax lip balm tin the size of a quarter. I recall how the ashes ground against each other between the two pieces of metal, sticking them fast so that the tin would not open when it was finally time. I ground my teeth in time with the ash, daring myself to laugh or scream, waiting for the inevitable explosion, some raw impropriety. My mother passed an orchid to each of us, and I observed with clinical surprise that I did not crush it when I took it from her.
In the end the tin was opened and did not explode, and Colleen just reached in and pinched my father between finger and thumb, sprinkling him into her flower. We stared at the actions of the youngest among us, too scared to admit that we didn't have a better idea. I wanted to mention the bones; I wanted to make a joke and describe out loud the rough coarseness, the frank chunkiness of the "ash," but in the end I said nothing. My father was sprinkled into my orchid too, and I walked to the water, muttering apologies under my breath.
"I'm sorry we're doing this; I know how much you would have hated it."
When I put my flower in the water, the first thing it did was turn upside down.
I walked back up the beach to my bungalow and went to bed. The mattress was covered with a fine layer of sand, and my back was sunburnt from persistent snorkeling. I dreamt that night that my legs were coated in sticky beach sand, and I was shaving them, blood pouring out from beneath the blades.
Tonight will be spent on a bus, a twelve-hour ride that launches the long journey home. The only activity good for quieting thunder is writing it down, writing it down just as it happened, just as it seemed like it happened. And if I write enough, sometimes the horses will become squirrels again, sometimes the fractals will become single silhouettes, and sometimes sleep will come and stay.
At a bus depot in Central Thailand we give green ticket stubs, retrieve green ticket stubs, give them again for good, and are then asked for them repeatedly. We are stickered with a neon orange square that must be worn visibly on the shirtfront, stickered next with a fuschia square - fuschia for Bangkok on Fridays, I guess. An eight year-old boy wheels around the driveway on a Batman bike, trying to impress my brother and the other weary, ripe, sun-worn and beach-weathered tourists from Australia, England, Germany, Holland, France, Canada, America. He rides by with no hands, teeth flashing, his eyelids flipped inside out.
Four hours ago it was afternoon, and the bus depot in Krabi was sweltering, overcrowded, and filthy. Colleen couldn't understand the refuse cluttering the edges of everything - water bottles, candy wrappers, plastic cups and napkins, toilet paper, ticket stubs, square stickers in acid dream shades, junk, garbage, waste. "Depots are always like this," I told her. "Any place where people come and then go, where people don't stay, looks like this." A thin, bony, blondish girl in oversized sunglasses leaned forward from her plastic chair and vomited what looked like kinked yellow noodles at her feet. Thirty minutes after she and her hungover friends were ferried away in the back of a truck, a Thai man sat in the same chair, clipping his fingernails, crescents of which flicked from his clippers into the pile of noodles.
There are dogs. Dogs with fleas, with scars, with gigantic testicles, "showing their lipstick" as one of the girls from Brighton put it, dogs with teats swinging below them, long, impossibly stretched dog tits, dogs trotting, stretching, sleeping, rolling, running, nosing, whining, and scratching, scratching, scratching. You can tell the tourists from the travelers because the tourists sit and scratch the dogs between the ears or pet their matted fur. The travelers sneer, disgusted, and slap mosquitoes with mirthless economy.
On the bus again, I am woken from sleep, probably by the churning of my own mind. After night falls, the squirrels in the works become horses running thunder, and the mental turbines crank out the poisonous product of relentless self-obsession, the agony of a skewed self-awareness, fractals upon fractals of a faulty self, an untidy, unattractive, unsavory, and unsaved self. Over the course of two weeks I have worried that wound like a frayed seam, biting thread after thread as the hem unravels. I worry it still; it requires all my attention, until suddenly my sister stretches her leg forward across the seat of the chair next to me - a seat with the back broken and therefore removed - and rests her foot so that it lightly touches my thigh. The transference is quick; in an instant I am prepared to hitch all of the hate aimed at a fat girl onto the smooth, warm, amphibious curve of a pedicured foot. A pellet of reason within me pipes up against all odds and asks her, nicely, squeaking with niceties, to please move her foot a little to the right so it will not rest on me. Magically, she obliges - and survives.
Later, in the dark, I hear that same sister sniff, and I know without turning that she is rigid against the window in the dark, silently sobbing. An hour later we wait for our bus connection at a terminal, and I ask my mom if Ryan cries for her not-so-nice-after-all ex-boyfriend, though I know well that she could have been crying for the great loss of youth, of innocence, for poverty, for beauty and sorrow and their tiny tangerine dance, for the pink polyester curtains swagged from row to row along the length of the pastel party bus. My mother replies that Ryan was crying for our father, who had died one year before.
That makes me think of our last night on the island, of how we stood in a circle, of how the air was nudged by the gentle lapping of the Andaman Sea. It makes me think of the orchids, the ashes, the ocean, the flame, the pathetic attempt at ceremony, the terrible trial of keeping my mouth shut so as not to hurt others' feelings. It makes me think of how my sister, terrified it would be mistaken for drugs and confiscated, insisted on transporting a tiny portion of my father's ashes halfway around the world in a Burt's Beeswax lip balm tin the size of a quarter. I recall how the ashes ground against each other between the two pieces of metal, sticking them fast so that the tin would not open when it was finally time. I ground my teeth in time with the ash, daring myself to laugh or scream, waiting for the inevitable explosion, some raw impropriety. My mother passed an orchid to each of us, and I observed with clinical surprise that I did not crush it when I took it from her.
In the end the tin was opened and did not explode, and Colleen just reached in and pinched my father between finger and thumb, sprinkling him into her flower. We stared at the actions of the youngest among us, too scared to admit that we didn't have a better idea. I wanted to mention the bones; I wanted to make a joke and describe out loud the rough coarseness, the frank chunkiness of the "ash," but in the end I said nothing. My father was sprinkled into my orchid too, and I walked to the water, muttering apologies under my breath.
"I'm sorry we're doing this; I know how much you would have hated it."
When I put my flower in the water, the first thing it did was turn upside down.
I walked back up the beach to my bungalow and went to bed. The mattress was covered with a fine layer of sand, and my back was sunburnt from persistent snorkeling. I dreamt that night that my legs were coated in sticky beach sand, and I was shaving them, blood pouring out from beneath the blades.
Tonight will be spent on a bus, a twelve-hour ride that launches the long journey home. The only activity good for quieting thunder is writing it down, writing it down just as it happened, just as it seemed like it happened. And if I write enough, sometimes the horses will become squirrels again, sometimes the fractals will become single silhouettes, and sometimes sleep will come and stay.
