Read Online Sightseeing by Rattawut Lapcharoensap - Free Book Online

and combat training to improve my character in any way. I was a fully formed patriot, he’d told the draft board. A resplendent example for the nation’s youth. A true son of Siam. Which means there’s nothing to worry about, the lieutenant told my father. Everything has been arranged. Just have your son show up at the lottery.
    This was the first and only secret I would keep from Wichu. I prayed for him when I got home from the bar, just as I’d promised.I prayed as I hadn’t prayed since I was a child. I don’t know if Wichu prayed for me, too, but as I lay in bed waiting for sleep I hoped that he’d save all his prayers for himself.
    The next morning I arrive at Wichu’s house at the appointed hour. His mother fusses with his hair and his cuffs at the front door. She’s wearing a phathung pulled over her breasts, her shoulders caked with menthol powder, her hair wet and jet-black from her morning bath. Wichu wears the outfit she bought specifically for the occasion: a neatly pressed white button-down; crisp, black polyester slacks; a new pair of brown Bata loafers, buffed bright with Kiwi shoe polish. She’s even borrowed a gold watch from a friend who hawks them to farangs on Soi Cowboy; it hangs loosely from Wichu’s wrist like a bangle, glinting in the weak morning light. She believes that the less Wichu looks like a day-laborer’s son—something he’d in fact been until the day-laborer died before Wichu could commit him to memory—the less the draft board will be inclined to put a red ticket in his hand when he reaches into the lottery urn. A red ticket means losing her youngest son to two years of duty, just as she lost her eldest, Khamron, who’d been drafted though he drank a whole bottle of fish sauce, who arrived at the lottery violently ill, and who came home eighteen months later from the Burmese border with a vacant look in his eyes, a letter of commendation and honorable discharge, and a flower of shrapnel buried in his right leg slowly poisoning his bloodstream.
    Wichu’s mother eyes me curiously when I arrive. I’m wearing tattered blue jeans, a white T-shirt, rubber slippers. Ihaven’t showered. I haven’t even brushed my teeth. For a moment, I am afraid she will say something, ask about my relaxed appearance. I am afraid she has found me out and will wonder aloud to Wichu. So I look at Wichu instead. He’s clearly hungover, embarrassed by his mother’s fussing.
    Ma, he says. We’ll be late.
    She relents, puts her hands in her lap and looks at them sheepishly, as if afraid they’ll spring to life again on their own. Wichu leans down and kisses his mother on the cheek.
    Gotta go, he says. See you later, Ma.
    His mother kisses him back. And then she kisses me. She is a small woman; she has to grab my forearm, pull me down to her, and teeter on her toes just to peck me on the cheek. This is not the first time she has kissed me as she has kissed her own sons. Years later I will remember her kiss on that draft day morning, the scent of menthol wafting from her shoulders, the way her wet hair sprinkled my cheek, and I will feel like I’m falling from some great and excruciating height and the feeling will refuse to leave me for days.
    You two take care of each other now, she says. I’m taking a half-day, Wichu, so I’ll be along to the temple by noon. Don’t pick without me, you hear? Wait until I get there. Tell them you want your mother there to witness it. Think
black,
Wichu. That’s what we want. Black, black, black, black, black.
    And then she goes back inside the house, as if she cannot bear to watch us leave. My own parents, in the meantime, are sleeping soundly in their beds, three houses away.
    When Wichu and I arrive at the temple, there’s a crowd of boys lined up inside the open-air pavilion. I’d never seen so many boys be so silent together. We join them there, seat ourselves at