Don Lee - The Collective

I wanted to touch her. I wanted to kiss her. I wanted to make love to her. “I’m okay,” I said.

When the timer dinged, there was an unexpected problem. I couldn’t get out of the tube. Jessica snipped off the rubber cock ring, put her robe back on, turned off the TV, and tucked the magazines away, yet I stayed priapic. “Can’t you get it to go down? Just shrink out of it.”

“It’s not a voluntary thing,” I said. “I can’t mentally switch it on and off.”

“Such a mysterious organ.”

The alginate had gotten cold and firm, and I stood there, holding the tube, my legs cramping, Jessica waiting for me anxiously. At last, after a few minutes, I was limp enough to extricate myself.

“Gently, gently,” Jessica said. She tipped the tube up and looked inside at the mold of my penis and balls.

“I’m not doing this again,” I told her, wiping myself with the towel and the bucket of water she had set aside for me.

“I don’t think you’ll have to. It looks pretty good,” she said. “Here. Rub this on if you start getting itchy the next few days.”

I covered my groin with the towel with my left hand, and with my right I accepted the small tube of cortisone cream.

“You see, that wasn’t so bad, was it?” she said.

Her name was Noklek Praphasirirat. Once she had moved from the couch in the living room to the master bedroom, which had its own bathroom, she was hardly visible. Sometimes I would forget she was staying in the house. She didn’t interact with us at all, never talked to us or ate with us. I never saw her in the kitchen. I didn’t know what she did for meals. She didn’t keep food in the refrigerator. It didn’t seem she used the washing machine or the dryer in the basement, either. She never made a sound. Perhaps she did everything in the dead of night, when we were all asleep.

The only conversation of substance I had with her was in mid-April, when I came home from work just before twilight and, through the sliding glass door, saw her on the back deck. She had gotten her hair chopped off. It was now spiky and streaked, just like Jessica’s. She was also, it appeared, wearing a pair of Jessica’s cargo pants.

She had assembled a shrine on the deck — three small Buddhas, one brass, one stone, one faux-marble, surrounded by candles, incense, two vases of flowers, and framed photos of a Buddha and of a man, woman, and girl. She was kneeling in front of the shrine in a posture of prayer.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to disturb you.”

“You sit?” she said. “You pray with me?”

I knelt down beside her. It seemed disrespectful not to.

“This my father, mother, sister,” she said. “This Gautama.”

Noklek lit the candle on the right side of the Buddhas, then the candle on the left, followed by three incense sticks. She sat stiffly upright, her palms pressed together, then bowed down, forehead on the redwood boards, and I followed suit. She chanted, “ Annicaˉ vata sankhaˉraˉ, uppaˉda vaya dhammino. Uuppajjitvaˉ nirujjhanti tesam vuˉpasamo sukho ,” and bowed three more times.

She pulled out a folded piece of paper from her pants pocket. “Your mother, father alive?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“You have brother, sister?”

“One older sister.”

“You love sister?”

“I suppose so,” I said, “even though she represents every bourgeois SoCal value that I despise. Southern California — that’s where I’m from originally.”

“My home, very far. Chiang Mai. You know Chiang Mai?”

“In Thailand, right?”

“Yes. Thailand.”

“Do you miss it?”

“Miss, no miss, no different. I no go home. This my home now. My sister dead. My father, mother dead. Everybody dead. This paper, my sister, father, mother name, my family name, ancestor name.”

I wondered how and when everyone had died. In her photograph, her sister was in a school uniform and looked no more than ten years old. The photographs of her parents seemed to have been taken a long time ago, when they were still in their late twenties. No one was smiling. They were rather grim black-and-white portraits, formal head shots, as if for passports. Yet I didn’t ask about the particulars, for without warning Noklek flicked a lighter and lit the corner of the paper with the names of her family and ancestors, holding it over a plate until it was completely enflamed. I was unsettled, assuming there was bitterness in her memories of them, not understanding until later, after I had researched Theravada Buddhist rituals, that this was a tribute to the dead, a passing of merit to their spirits.

She chanted some more, then lifted a bowl of water with flower petals floating on it. Jasmine. I breathed in the sweet scent. Where she had gotten the jasmine, I did not know. I gazed around the backyard. None of the perennials or bulbs that Jessica and I had planted late last summer had bloomed just yet.

Noklek gently sprinkled a bit of the water over the Buddhas and the photo frames, catching the runoff in another glass bowl — the same one, I recognized, in which Jessica had stuck the immersion coil for the alginate mixture. With the collected water, she doused the ashes of the paper. Then she startled me by tipping some water onto my shoulder, down my back.

“Hey!” I said. I was wearing a new button-down, and the water was cold. It was barely fifty degrees outside.

“Luck!” she said. “Songkran! New year!”

This was, I remembered then, a rite of the Songkran festival in Thailand, a three-day new year’s celebration in April. The tradition of pouring cleansing water had degenerated into a national water fight, caravans of celebrants driving down streets with water guns and cannons, drenching bystanders, who would retaliate with buckets and hoses. I had seen videos on the news.

“You water me?” Noklek asked.

I dribbled water onto her shoulder, and she momentarily shuddered from the chill.

She mixed a white powder, maybe chalk, in a small bowl with some water, then dipped her fingers in the white paste and daubed her face — a consecration, vertical lines on her forehead, swirls on her cheeks. She handed me the bowl. “You paint?”

I rubbed the chalk onto my face, mimicking her design pattern.

“ Sawatdee pee mai ,” she said, pressing her palms together and bowing to me. “Happy New Year.”

“ Sawatdee pee mai ,” I said, bowing.

“ Suk-san wan songkran ,” she said.

“ Suk-san wan songkran ,” I said, bowing again.

When I rose, she squirted my face with a tiny water pistol. “Hee hee hee hee,” she hiccupped in childlike squeaks. It was the first time I’d heard her laugh.

“Now you’re going to get it,” I said, and I jumped up and grabbed the larger of the bowls and whirled around and threw the water at the same time she tossed the contents of a bucket into my face. I had been errant in my aim and missed Noklek completely. I, on the other hand, was soaked. We ran on and off the deck, into the backyard, fighting over the garden hose, filling bowls and buckets and trash cans from the utility shed, screaming and laughing, the chalk smearing and streaking down our faces, until dusk fell and we were exhausted and deluged and shivering, yet blithe.

We never really spoke again. I think of that evening, of Noklek, our abbreviated conversation and gestures of communion, every now and then. I think of the jasmine petals she had spread in the bowls of water. I think of her youth, how alive and joyful she was in those few minutes we had shared — for once, carefree. I think of the Thai Buddhist beliefs of renewal and rebirth, of the Songkran custom of washing away misfortune and receiving the blessing of protection, the making and passing on of merit. I think of the practice of commemorating the dead by writing down their names, and then incinerating them. I think of devoting myself to more acts of kindness and goodness, as you are supposed to do during Songkran, and of dedicating those acts, in part, to Noklek Praphasirirat, wherever she may be now.