Sightseeing (24 page)

She showed us the back room where we would be sleeping, a small concrete cavern behind the kitchen. A solitary lightbulb hung by a wire from the ceiling. Mold hugged the cracks along the bare gray walls. On one wall, there was a calendar from the lingerie company, a picture of a skinny white woman with eyes closed, slender hands cupping gigantic breasts. “This is where the maids used to sleep before I built them their quarters,” Miss Mayuree said proudly. Mama
thanked her while I stared at the moth-eaten pallet in the center of the room. “Just help around the house when you can, Saiya,” Miss Mayuree said. Mama nodded demurely and thanked her once again.

“Ladda,” Mama said after Miss Mayuree left us. “Manners. She's doing us a favor.”

“I don't care if she wipes my ass, Mama,” I said. “She gives me the creeps.”

“Now, now,” she said. “Now, now.”

We didn't say much to each other the rest of the day. After unpacking, we went to the yard to help trim the hedges. We introduced ourselves to the maids, picked up shears and gloves. As we worked, Mama told them our predicament and they nodded absentmindedly, as if they'd heard the story before. Every so often, a pickup truck would drive by and people would peer out their windows to look at Mama and me working in Miss Mayuree's yard. The rumormongers would have themselves a party today, gabbing about our family.

Miss Mayuree came out and told me she didn't want me doing any work. She said I should rest. “You poor thing,” she said again. “You've been through so much.” She thought she was being kind; it made me want to trim her hedges even more. I snipped my shears enthusiastically, pretended that the branches were the blue-green veins on Miss Mayuree's pale, wrinkled neck. “She's just like her mother,” she said to Mama. “A good worker.”

We worked on the hedges well into the evening. I kept expecting to see Papa pushing his wheelbarrow down the road. I wondered how he was doing at the cockpit today. I wondered if he'd already come home to find the house empty.

As Mama and I lay down side-by-side on the foam pallet that night, I realized I hadn't slept with my mother in a long time. I realized, too, that this was the first time I had slept in a room that was not my own. When I turned in that darkness to face the far wall, I half expected to find a window letting in light from Papa's chicken house; instead, I found the woman cupping her breasts on the lingerie calendar. I listened to Mama's breathing; I could tell from its short, choppy rhythm that she was still awake. I closed my eyes.

I had a dream. I dreamed that Papa and Mama were running a sideshow involving chickens. The show took place in our front yard. People came from all over to watch. Even the strays had stationed themselves on the road in front of our house, howling happily along with the crowd. I watched everything from above. The town and the streets and the rubber trees and our property lay before me like a model train set. All of Papa's chickens were there, alive. Papa made them fly through hoops of fire while Mama stood beside him smiling and gesturing in a glittering pink and lavender bikini. Then Mama stood against a makeshift wall as Papa threw the chickens at her like knives, the chickens gliding gracefully through the air, their sharpened beaks missing Mama's face and body by
inches, the crowd oohing and aahing in anxious delight with each throw. The trick completed, Mama put the chickens into her mouth, slowly swallowing each one whole, their bodies and their feet wriggling between her lips before disappearing into her cavity. The crowd gasped in horror. Papa produced a top hat and pulled out the chickens one by one and everybody, even I standing above it all, laughed and clapped and cheered him loudly. As I did so, I realized that everybody was looking up at me, that all those tiny little people were pointing at me, standing above them in their sky like a god. Somebody screamed. The crowd began to scatter like flies, even Mama and Papa and the chickens. I called out to them, told them in a booming voice to come back. A trembling rage passed through my body. I wanted to reach out and squash them all between my fingers, but as I began to pick one out from that model world below me, I felt a hand touch my shoulder, and I woke up to find Mama peering at me through the darkness.

“Ladda.” She was whispering into my face. “C'mon, baby. Wake up. We have to go. Your father's in the hospital.”

XVII

Noon had come to Miss Mayuree's house that night, pounding on the back door, asking for my mother and me. Mama was still awake when she heard the pounding. She bolted to
the door. A few minutes later, the three of us were walking the three kilometers to the hospital in town. Noon didn't know what had happened. She'd only heard her father say, when he got home from the cockpit, that Papa'd been hurt and was now in the hospital. “It's a shame” is what her father had said to her mother. “It's an abomination.”

Mama walked fast. We had trouble keeping up with her, and soon she was far ahead of us, her slippers slapping loudly against the concrete. Noon reached out and took my hand, squeezed it, and I returned the gesture. Mama broke into a light trot then. Without turning around, she told us to meet her at the hospital. I had never seen Mama run before.

When Noon and I arrived at the hospital, I was surprised to find that we were still holding hands. “It's going to be all right,” Noon said at the door, letting go. It was almost one in the morning; the hospital was empty except for a few orderlies flitting in and out of the hallway. When we got to the front desk, the receptionist looked up and said, “Room 451,” as though she'd been waiting all night for us to arrive.

I panicked. For some reason, the room number made everything intolerably real to me, even as the world suddenly became charged with a strange, dreamlike quality: Colors became impossibly bright, the slightest sound boomed raucously, the air became a thick, coppery substance on my tongue. I felt myself hover about like a ghoul. Inside the elevator, the fluorescents buzzing loudly above us, I felt as if Noon and I
were falling quickly through an infinite cavern, though I knew the contraption was taking us up to the fourth floor. Noon was saying something to me, but when I looked at her lips, they moved quickly and soundlessly, like a movie on fast-forward, and I wanted to ask her why she'd want to play tricks on me now.

The door to Room 451 was ajar. It was dark inside. I looked in and saw Papa laid out with bandages wrapped around his temple. A morphine drip ticked at his side, its tubes like the shadow of some gangly tree. Mama sat beside him on the gurney, a hand on his thigh, staring into his sleeping face, which winced intermittently as if he were deep in some strange and painful dream. Mama didn't look up when we arrived. She just kept staring at Papa's face, mesmerized by his features. She was still winded from running. I watched her collarbone tilt back and forth beneath her nightgown. I walked into the room. Noon remained in the doorway.

I reached over and turned on the light beside the hospital gurney. Mama put her forearm up to her eyes. In his sleep, Papa stirred as well. Under the light, his face was a pale shade of lavender. He turned over, revealing a thick bandage on the side of his head, drenched purple and black with blood, the cloth matted with the substance. I felt relieved then, as Papa turned away, and even as the stench of the bloodied bandage filled my nostrils. It smelled like that flatbed full of dead chickens, and I thought about how blood was blood no matter if it's from a chicken or a man. But at least he was alive, and, thinking this, I felt the world become coherent again.

Mama was saying something. For a second, I thought my ears were still playing tricks on me: I heard only garbling and mewing. But then I saw Noon's face in the doorway and realized from the way she tilted her head that the sounds coming from my mother's lips were incomprehensible to her as well. “Mama,” I said, and she looked at me stunned, as if she didn't recognize me, didn't even know I had been standing there. She squinted and gestured for me to turn off the lamp. The room fell into darkness again. Mama touched Papa's thigh once more, rubbed it, cinched the fabric of his hospital gown as if she were testing the quality of the material for one of her bras.

“Can you believe it?” Mama said, and from the sound of her voice I could not tell if she was laughing or crying. “Ladda, can you believe it?” I stood there beside her, watched my father's ribs moving slowly against his hospital gown, his face still wincing every so often. “Can you believe it, Ladda?” Mama asked again, this time in a singsong voice, and I wanted to ask her what I was supposed to be incredulous about, but when I opened my mouth to speak, nothing came out, just a few short, exasperated breaths. As in the elevator a few minutes earlier, I felt like I was falling into a bottomless pit, that the room had been dropped into a chasm, and I wanted desperately to turn on the bedside lamp, for I thought light might put an end to the nausea. I felt weightless even as I felt my limbs weighted with a thousand dumbbells anchored to the floor. The room began to tilt and turn around me. I held on to the gurney rail for balance. “Can you believe it, Ladda?”
Mama said once more. This time she cackled as if she'd never understood how funny the question was. “How could they?”

I walked toward Mama, raised my right hand high into the air, and brought it down upon the side of her face. For a split second, before I hit her, Mama jutted her chin out and looked at me as if she wanted—needed—to receive the blow, had been hoping I would do this all along. The impact barely made a noise, nor did it seem to have much of an effect: It only turned her head around, like something strange had caught her attention. She looked disappointed—not because I had hit her, but because I had not hit her hard enough—so I raised my hand and hit her once more, this time with more force, squarely on the bridge of her nose. I wanted her to ward off my blows. I wanted her to fight back. But she just sat there as if she not only had expected my blows, but needed more fury to stir her to life. “Don't you go crazy on me,” I yelled. “Stop talking like a fucking lunatic. Make some goddamn sense, Mama.”

Noon grabbed me. Mama laughed again, high-pitched and girlish, a light trail of blood trickling from her left nostril. I lunged at her again, but Noon had her arms tight around my body. “Ladda, don't,” Noon whispered into my ear. “Enough.”

I realized then that Mama wasn't laughing—she was crying. Her shoulders were not shaking with mad, devilish hilarity; they were trembling with grief. She dabbed at her bleeding nostril with the base of her thumb. When she saw the blood, she got up and walked toward Noon and me. Noon still had
me in her arms. Mama's silhouette seemed surprisingly large before me then. I looked up at her, and seeing her swollen eyes, looked down at my feet. Noon walked out and closed the door behind her.

It was my turn now, I thought, staring at the floor, feeling my mother's breath on my shoulders. I would let Mama punish me as I had thought I was punishing her. I would jut out my chin to receive her hand. And, that done, I would let her do it again and again and again until she was at long last satisfied. But she didn't. All she did was tell me they had cut off Papa's ear. They took everything, she said. Little Jui and his goons. All the lobe and all the cartilage and everything else that goes with an ear. All they'd left was a nub and a hole on the side of his head. Mama dabbed her nostrils with the hem of her blouse and walked out of the room. I listened to her slippers trailing off down the hall. I looked at the gurney. Papa had turned over once more. He stared at me astonished, the white of his eyes like jewels in the dark. And in a dazed, whispering voice that told me he was still very much asleep, swimming in his morphine dream, my father said: “Yes. Yes. Yes. A hundred and a thousand times yes already.”

XVIII

The days in the hospital were long. I don't think Mama slept the whole four days. She sat in an armchair beside the gurney,
staring back and forth between Papa and the window overlooking the hospital parking lot. I tried to talk to her, but she'd only nod at me or shake her head, as if I'd uttered nothing but questions. She didn't eat. I would get food from the cafeteria, but she would only nibble at it courteously before setting down the tray. She never mentioned the fact that I'd hit her; after a while, her silence seemed punishment enough. Noon came by to pick me up for school every morning, but I couldn't bring myself to leave Papa's side, and Mama didn't seem to mind.

Papa woke up every so often. He never said a word. He would look at us, stare at the ceiling, click his morphine drip, and just wait for sleep to come again. We both tried to speak to him, but he'd simply turn over onto his side. Doctors in neatly pressed lab coats would come into the room. The infection was beginning to heal, they said on the second day, which explained the stench at night.

Nurses came in twice a day to change Papa's bandage and clean his wound. That was the only time Papa ever made a sound. Mama would stand and look calmly over the nurses' shoulders. I didn't want to see the wound; it was enough to see the nurses wince.

We received some flowers and cards, but nobody came to visit. It was as if people were afraid that they might be putting themselves in harm's way, as though Papa's unfortunate fate was a contractible disease.

On the evening of the second day, Noon came by and we climbed onto the hospital roof. She'd brought iced coffee
and cigarettes. The town stretched below us; on the horizon, we could see the hills that separated us from our neighbors to the north. I tried to find our property, but I couldn't see much beyond the rubber grove on the eastern side of the roof. It occurred to me then that Mama and I had not gone back to the house since we'd left. I wondered if the strays were smart enough to notice our absence. Perhaps they would go to the chicken house first and then, upon finding no sustenance there, move to the house itself.