Jess Row - Your Face in Mine

Every life takes its own pathways, Tariko says. Right?

Right.

No, Julie-nah says, wrong. She turns to face us, her mask slipped back on, with a block of tofu in one hand and a cleaver in the other. What do you know about every life? Either one of you? What do you know about your own lives, for that matter? Pathways. There aren’t any pathways. Only patterns you don’t recognize yet. If you knew it was a maze, you wouldn’t take the bait, would you?

There’s a certain refractory gleam in her eyes, a light thrown off from another source: the look of a fanatic. The absolute certainty and the oblique carelessness, the gnomic casting away of words. It repels me like a force field. I take another sip of coffee, stand up, and walk the other way, through the hallway and out the open door.

This is morning, I tell myself, for the fourth or fifth time. This is Thailand. The yard is as manicured as every other part of the house: an undulating lawn, close-cut, and enormous, almost comic plants spilling over the neat borders of piled river stones. Thick shrubs with heavy, shiny, waxy leaves, ginkgo, bougainvillea, ferns, camellias. Here and there are enormous ceramic jars, as big as bushel baskets, filled with water, lotuses blooming from lily pads on the surface. I look into one and see tiny goldfish, or what I assume are goldfish, flicking about, some no bigger than my smallest fingernail. Phran stands barefoot at one corner of the garden, near the wall, gathering mangoes with a long two-pronged hook. The mangoes — entirely green — fall into his palm, one by one, and he tosses them easily into a bushel basket. Seeing me, he smiles and raises his free hand in a half wai . How you sleep? he asks. Sleep okay?

Excellent, thanks.

Want anything? Kitchen?

Julie-nah gave me breakfast.

At this he says nothing and returns to his work, peering up into the tree’s canopy for hidden fruit.

There’s something deeply wrong, enormously, intensely wrong, but here, in the sunlight, the smell of the bougainvillea, and the faint rumbling of the city outside, a blast of tinny Thai pop from a car radio, a shouted exchange in the street, two friendly voices singing at each other, it fades, without disappearing. A faint, barely noticeable, smell of rot, an open latrine somewhere on the premises.

It’s been so long, nearly five years, that I’ve forgotten the simple gladness of waking up in Asia. Not at home, not at home, the little song my heart used to sing, every time the plane landed in Beijing, Hong Kong, Tokyo. As if I’d gotten away with something. Of course, I had gotten away with something. I had escaped. I have escaped. Even if only hypothetically. A hypothetical escape from an actual crime. Why did that never enter into it? Why, in all those years, did I never pause to consider myself a fugitive, if only in my own mind? Not once. Because I was so sure that no one knew?

On the far corner of the garden, across the driveway, is the spirit house for the property, a miniature temple, white with a red roof, set on a pedestal, and hung with orchid garlands as offerings. San phra phum : the name comes back to me from the Lonely Planet I read on the plane. Every house in Thailand has to have one, no matter how humble or small. The roof, with its curlicue edges, each side curving toward the sky, always reminds me of flames licking upward. Every house is a house on fire. As the Buddha said in the Fire Sermon. You should regard your own body and everything around you as if it were on fire. Was it the flames of desire, or the flames of impermanence? Or both, or are they one and the same? The result is the same. Every house is a house burning down.

Leave. The word hovers in the air, as if the bushes have breathed it. What would I need? Just a quick trip back upstairs: my passport, my wallet. The envelope of baht Martin handed me in the airport: spare you an ATM charge, he said. Here’s some walking-around money. We’re somewhere out in the suburbs; it might take me an hour or two to find a taxi. But how hard could it be? Twenty U.S. dollars and a universal gesture, the flattened palm rising up to the sky. There are alarm bells ringing across continents in my brain.

Phran touches my sleeve. He’s come up next to me on the grass, silently, and holds out in his palm a dark purplish fruit cut in half. Mang kut, he says. Thai fruit. The inside looks like a peeled head of garlic: little white sections, half-moons, in a woody shell. Gingerly, I take two. They dissolve on the tongue — isn’t that the phrase? — like very soft pineapple, or a lychee, with a chewy, nutlike piece at the center. Amazing, I tell him. He hands me the rest. Eat more, he says, and gestures with the folding knife in his left hand.

Something’s happening, I notice, too late, as I pop the final section into my mouth. A counterreaction, a sour liquid rising in my throat and pooling under my tongue, and at the same moment my knees tremble, a definite, single knock, a jolt, a need to sit down. An allergy? I have no allergies. No intolerances. Not even, when it comes to food, any very strong dislikes. My stomach, now, has woken up, something is happening, it’s beginning to turn. No so much nausea as dizziness, disorientation, as if my blood is being drained and diluted, half-strength.

The gray hour.

And with this thought, as if on cue, Martin’s Mercedes comes rattling through the gate, its mirrored windows glinting, his arm reaching toward me in a lazy wave.

We didn’t bargain on this happening, Martin says, as we pull back out of the driveway, nearly colliding with a vendor pushing a handcart of green coconuts. We thought we vetted her carefully. I mean, as much as we could, in complete confidentiality, without a Korean speaker on staff. Silpa put her through the whole battery of presurgical tests. We read her academic papers. Man, that was hard going. Cyborg Reveries: The Post-Racial Holodeck. Kimchi Tacos and Rhizomic Koreanness. Hired a guy in Seoul to follow her around discreetly for a couple of days. Interviewed her supervisor from her postdoc at Brown. You know she was at Brown? Girl’s got serious credentials. Woman, I should say. Colleague.

Though the driver has the air conditioning running full blast, I’ve rolled down the rear window, wanting the fresh air on my face. The initial dizziness has passed; now there’s just a prickling weak feeling everywhere, and the same sourness on my tongue. Pre-nausea. I need something to grip, tightly: first the door handle, then the handle above the door, the one ordinarily used for hanging dry cleaning.

Kelly, you all right? You look a little green.

I think it’s just jet lag. Usually it hits me the first afternoon. Guess it’s just coming early.

Oh, yeah? I’ve got some pills for that, if you need them to sleep.

This isn’t jet lag, I’m thinking. It’s conceptual lag. We pull around a corner and through another gate, between high stucco walls, emerging into a bright shout of sunlight and a clamoring four-lane road. On the far side there’s a village of shacks with flat corrugated roofs, an outdoor mechanic’s shop, a food cart with plastic tables set out in a long line, inches from the traffic. An elderly woman in another white surgical mask unhooks a chicken and hacks it into pieces, paying no attention to the whining motorbikes and pink taxis nearly brushing her elbow. Above the village, on rusting steel struts, an enormous Pepsi billboard, freshly pasted, with a woman glancing out over her shoulder, her face framed by a dark fringe. It’s Jennifer Love Hewitt, I’m thinking — thin, pale, pouty, obscenely high cheekbones. The text is in Thai, of course, except for one word: Aum. When I look again the eyes stare back at me. Not Jennifer Love Hewitt. Not Jennifer anything.