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Authors: Timothy Hallinan
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into the other.
The windows were covered with ragged pieces of sacking that had been glued to the glass. The covered windows frightened Da: Whyshouldn’t they see where they were going? She pointed to the cloth and made a palms-up, questioning gesture to the deaf and dumb woman, who smiled and shook her head: Don’t worry . One of the other women, older than the others, with a skeletal, stunned-looking four- or five-year-old child clinging to her, said, “It’s so nobody can see in. People aren’t supposed to know that we get driven back and forth.”
Da said, “Oh.” Feeling stupid, feeling naive. Feeling lost. Wishing she were back in the drowsy cluster of wooden shacks at the bend of the river that is now dry, its water stolen. The shacks empty now, knocked off balance by the big machines until they sagged drunkenly sideways. Even the dogs are gone.
The sidewalk that has been given to her is hard and hot and dusty, another kind of dry riverbed, a river of people. The booths from which the vendors sell their wares begin half a block away, while this stretch is given to store windows, small office buildings, foot traffic, and beggars. Da sits exactly where she was put by the man who had driven the van, a thickset tree trunk of a man in a bright blue Hawaiian shirt with brown girls all over it. He had looked at her incredulously when he realized she didn’t have a bowl, and then he’d tightened his mouth and stalked away, down to the booths. When he returned, he tossed a red plastic rice bowl into her lap. It had just missed Peep.
“You owe me eighty baht,” he’d said.
Now she sits there, the bowl upraised, hopelessly fishing the river of people. Most of them push past her, the same way they would sidestep a hole in the pavement. Once in a while, someone—usually a woman—will slow slightly and drop a coin into the bowl, often with a glance at Peep. Every time a coin strikes the bowl, Da feels a wave of shame wash over her.
The noise of the street is deafening.
Everything is in motion, but nothing seems to change: The people flow past, the cars glint cruelly, the sun slams down, the noise hammers her ears. How can the world be this noisy? How can the air smell like this? How can the people who live here endure it? Sweat gathers under Da’s arms and between her breasts and runs down her body. She feels repulsively filthy.
How will she survive this day?
One of the problems is that everything—the noise, the people, thedust, her shame—distracts her. It breaks to pieces her sense of who she is and scatters them unrecognizably at her feet. Where she grew up, silence was always available. There was always someplace she could go to reassemble herself when her grasp on who she was became frayed by distraction or anger, or even love. And now, sitting here, she feels as soulless, as valueless, as a piece of furniture abandoned on the sidewalk.
And she has been this way, she realizes, for days. Since her mother and father slung their packs over their shoulders and took her younger sisters by the hand and said good-bye to her and to their lives together. Since the bulldozer knocked the shacks crooked and made them unlivable. Since the moment she began the long, slow flight to Bangkok.
She has lost herself.
But now that she has recognized it, this is something she knows how to deal with.
She gathers her attention, reeling in the bits of her she left here and there over the days and nights that she was moving, no, running , as blindly and absently as the people who push past her now. She focuses all her attention on the sweat coursing down her skin. Feels the separate drops, feels their faintly cooling progress toward her belly. Feels the reassuring pressure of buttock on sidewalk: There is someone here after all. Slowly she broadens her focus to include her breath. In and out, in and out. An endless cycle with something at the center of it. Something doing the breathing, or perhaps something being breathed
The windows were covered with ragged pieces of sacking that had been glued to the glass. The covered windows frightened Da: Whyshouldn’t they see where they were going? She pointed to the cloth and made a palms-up, questioning gesture to the deaf and dumb woman, who smiled and shook her head: Don’t worry . One of the other women, older than the others, with a skeletal, stunned-looking four- or five-year-old child clinging to her, said, “It’s so nobody can see in. People aren’t supposed to know that we get driven back and forth.”
Da said, “Oh.” Feeling stupid, feeling naive. Feeling lost. Wishing she were back in the drowsy cluster of wooden shacks at the bend of the river that is now dry, its water stolen. The shacks empty now, knocked off balance by the big machines until they sagged drunkenly sideways. Even the dogs are gone.
The sidewalk that has been given to her is hard and hot and dusty, another kind of dry riverbed, a river of people. The booths from which the vendors sell their wares begin half a block away, while this stretch is given to store windows, small office buildings, foot traffic, and beggars. Da sits exactly where she was put by the man who had driven the van, a thickset tree trunk of a man in a bright blue Hawaiian shirt with brown girls all over it. He had looked at her incredulously when he realized she didn’t have a bowl, and then he’d tightened his mouth and stalked away, down to the booths. When he returned, he tossed a red plastic rice bowl into her lap. It had just missed Peep.
“You owe me eighty baht,” he’d said.
Now she sits there, the bowl upraised, hopelessly fishing the river of people. Most of them push past her, the same way they would sidestep a hole in the pavement. Once in a while, someone—usually a woman—will slow slightly and drop a coin into the bowl, often with a glance at Peep. Every time a coin strikes the bowl, Da feels a wave of shame wash over her.
The noise of the street is deafening.
Everything is in motion, but nothing seems to change: The people flow past, the cars glint cruelly, the sun slams down, the noise hammers her ears. How can the world be this noisy? How can the air smell like this? How can the people who live here endure it? Sweat gathers under Da’s arms and between her breasts and runs down her body. She feels repulsively filthy.
How will she survive this day?
One of the problems is that everything—the noise, the people, thedust, her shame—distracts her. It breaks to pieces her sense of who she is and scatters them unrecognizably at her feet. Where she grew up, silence was always available. There was always someplace she could go to reassemble herself when her grasp on who she was became frayed by distraction or anger, or even love. And now, sitting here, she feels as soulless, as valueless, as a piece of furniture abandoned on the sidewalk.
And she has been this way, she realizes, for days. Since her mother and father slung their packs over their shoulders and took her younger sisters by the hand and said good-bye to her and to their lives together. Since the bulldozer knocked the shacks crooked and made them unlivable. Since the moment she began the long, slow flight to Bangkok.
She has lost herself.
But now that she has recognized it, this is something she knows how to deal with.
She gathers her attention, reeling in the bits of her she left here and there over the days and nights that she was moving, no, running , as blindly and absently as the people who push past her now. She focuses all her attention on the sweat coursing down her skin. Feels the separate drops, feels their faintly cooling progress toward her belly. Feels the reassuring pressure of buttock on sidewalk: There is someone here after all. Slowly she broadens her focus to include her breath. In and out, in and out. An endless cycle with something at the center of it. Something doing the breathing, or perhaps something being breathed
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