Paul Theroux - Mr. Bones - Twenty Stories

When he arrived, the two other Americans in the company, Larry Wise from Operations and Fred Kegler from Human Services, had befriended him, initiating him with what they’d found out. Their wives, too, were back in the States, so they were sympathetic to him, especially Fred, who cautioned him, telling him how to find a taxi, and a tailor, and what districts to avoid, and good places to eat.

“Sometimes you get a bowl of boogers or a dish of greasy worms that look like garbage, and you think you’re going to collapse,” Fred said. “But never mind, they’re delicious.”

Fred had an unembarrassed gape-mouthed way of talking, his visibly thrashing tongue turning “collapse” into clapse.

“They say they’re not political”— plitical —“but they are. And sometimes someone’s smiling and it’s not a smile. Or they say no and they mean yes.”

His distracting way with these and certain other words— meer and hoor for “mirror” and “horror”—made Osier mistrust anything Fred said.

Larry’s line was always how simple it was to go home. “Hey, look how near we are to the States. I talk to my wife three times a day. We have conversations. Back home I talk but we never have conversations. Is this an adventure? I don’t think so.”

“It seems far to me,” Osier said. “It seems foreign.”

“Foreign I’ll give you. But not far. You got here by going through a narrow tunnel at the end of the ramp at the airport in New York. And came out the other end.”

Larry was right: the world was tiny. It was easy to go home.

They lived in the wholly accessible world, Larry said, the small, wired planet. “That’s why this company’s in profit. Look around. Everybody’s always on the phone.” So Osier never asked how he was going home, he only asked when.

But if separately Larry and Fred were sympathetic and helpful, together they lost their subtlety and were simplified, encouraging each other — rowdy, noisier, teasing, two guys at large in this city where, because they could so easily have what they wanted, they became greedier.

“Osier, want to go out for a drink? Get hammered?” Larry said, with Fred by his side.

“How about it? Do yourself a favor. You don’t have to make a career of it,” Fred said. Creer. This way of speaking also made him seem a mocker.

He went with them once. Larry and Fred brought him to a bar and supervised him.

The Thais did not carouse. They served drinks. They offered food. They offered themselves. Osier squirmed, feeling that he had nothing to offer in return. Every evening after that he said he was busy, because the men still asked. He had not dared to tell them that they’d embarrassed themselves.

Finally they took the hint, believing that Osier was virtuous and a bit dull. They resented him for not joining them, taking it for disapproval, and began to ignore him at work.

And now, as on those other nights when he’d claimed to be busy, Osier was sitting in the cathedral-like waiting room in Bangkok’s central railway station under the portrait of King Rama V, going nowhere, as he told himself. Weeks of this — a month, maybe.

He liked the thought that because he was a farang no one took any notice of him, that Larry and Fred had no idea he came to the railway station waiting room to catch up on his diary. The diary was his refuge. It was less intrusive than aiming a camera at people, and it made him more observant. The Thais were so slight, so strong, so lovely, even the men and boys. He had learned to draw them in a few strokes, the slim-hipped boys, the slender girls with short hair, the crones who might have been old men. They glided in the muggy air like tropical fish, that same grace and fragility, drifting past him in pairs. The same profile too, some of them, fish-faced with pretty lips.

Their spirit compensated for the hot paved city, which was not lovely at all, the stinking honking traffic, the ugly office buildings. The river was an exception, a rippling thoroughfare of flotsam and needle-nosed motorboats. The temples, the wats, the shrines, housed fat benevolent Buddhas and joyous carved dragons, bathed in a golden glow. People knelt and bowed to pray for favors. This he understood, and envied them their belief. Why else go to church except to give thanks or ask for help? The rituals were full of emotion, addressing the Buddha obliquely with petitions and prayers: offerings, the gongs, the fruit and flowers, the physicality of it, the flames of small oil lamps, the odors of incense, seeming to celebrate their mortality. This veneration made Osier’s own churchgoing seem like sorcery.

“How is it there?” Joyce asked from Maine, where she said it was raw. She spoke as though from a mountainside of bare rock and black ice.

How could he reply to this? They’d spent most of their summers in coastal Maine. Joyce looked forward to his retirement, and to the house they’d recently bought in Owls Head. But the mild summers of sea fog, relieved by the dazzle of marine sunshine, had misled them. Now he knew that the other nine months were winter: days of unforgiving wind that slashed your face, days of frost or freezing rain, a weight of cold that slowed you and lay on the night-like days like a stone slab.

“Fine,” he said, shivering at her word “raw.”

He kept to his pictorial diary, the doodles of hats and baskets, the carved finials on temple rooftops, because he had no words to describe the stew of the city — the heat-thickened air, the muddy river, the clean people, the efficiency, the unprovoked smiles, the signs he couldn’t read, the language he couldn’t speak. And so he asked her how she was, and she always said, “About the same,” which meant her knee was giving her pain. She’d been healthy until her knee began bothering her, and then everything changed. She stopped going for walks, sat more, ate more, got heavy, resigned herself to a life of decline and ill health, and began to resemble her mother, who sat slumped in a nursing home.

Sketching was his hobby, but his work was numbers. Osier headed the accounting office, a job he loved for the order of its elements and the fact that no locals were involved on the money side — they couldn’t be, company rule, payroll was secret, locals couldn’t know how little they were paid, what profits the company was making, the low overheads. Larry and Fred were not involved either; only he saw the numbers, units shipped, cost per unit; and when the numbers added up he was done. It was forbidden to email any financial information or take any of the data out of the office on CDs. The office, too, was another world.

After phoning his wife, he improved his sketch of the noble portrait of Rama V, King Chulalongkorn, high up on the station wall.

He liked the idea that the orderly station was always in motion, a place of arrivals and departures. No one lingered here, no one to observe him. He was touched by the emotion of the travelers — families seeing loved ones onto trains, parents with toddlers, tense separations; and all the luggage they carried, some of them like campers, carrying bags of food and water. He was one of the few loiterers.

He loved looking at the girls and women — angel-faced, dolled up for their journey, slender, a little nervous, so sweet, waiting for their trains to blink on the departure board. He came to the waiting room twice a week or more, where he was licensed to stare because of his diary. He had a drink, he found food, he called Joyce. It was not a life here, but a refuge and, like most travel he’d known, a suspension of life.

The Thais were absorbed in their own affairs of travel. That was the beauty of the waiting room. No one was idle; the travelers’ thoughts raced ahead, to the journey. Handling luggage, herding children, checking the clock, they were leaving this place. He knew these people somewhat. He saw them in the plant, at tables, in smocks and gloves, some wearing dust masks. Diligent little people, and when he was among them he felt — was it the business of outsourcing? — that his fate was intertwined with theirs.