Rattawant Lapcharoensap - Sightseeing - Stories

“What? What the hell did I do now?”

But my son just throws down his napkin and goes to fetch his Thai wife. Soon it’s just the mongrels and me staring at each other. A mosquito buzzes in my ear. I reach out with my good left hand to swat it. I miss. The only thing I manage to kill in that ear is the hearing. I watch the girl say something to the little boy in Thai. The boy looks at me wide-eyed. “Stop,” I tell them, though neither of my grandchildren speak much English. “You shouldn’t stare. It’s rude.”

To my surprise they seem to understand because they start looking at their half-empty plates like they’ve suddenly cultivated an interest in china. So I sit for a while and look at my foreign grandchildren trying not to look at me. I try to get my hearing back, pick at the assaulted eardrum with my good left hand. I glance over at the bowl of porridge, and suddenly I’m hungrier than I’ve been in a very long time.

* * *

Jack’s washing my back with a coarse sponge. Given the evening’s events, my son’s scrubbing me quite hard tonight. I’m rocking from the brash, rough motion. I feel a little bad about things — the wife never came back to dinner — so I try to keep quiet. But there’s only so much passive-aggressive scrubbing a man can take from his only son.

“Dammit, Jack,” I finally say. “Clean me. Don’t skin me.”

He stops. He comes around and starts wiping down my torso. He doesn’t look me in the eye. Jack hates to look when I bathe. He’s embarrassed by my nakedness. If there’s anybody who should be embarrassed it’s probably me. He’s not the one who can’t bathe himself.

“What’s it going to take, Father?” he says now, directly at my navel, the sponge cold and prickly against the folds of my stomach. “What’s it going to take for you to be happy here?” He squeezes the sponge over my shoulders. Water dribbles down my chest. I wipe at it with my good left hand. “Good question, Jack,” I say. “You always ask good questions.”

He laughs. It’s not a good laugh. It’s a grunting, impatient sound.

“Dying would be good,” I say finally. “Dying would make me pretty happy.”

“Father—”

“I bet it would probably make you all a lot happier too.”

“Christ.”

“Well, maybe not you, Jack, but certainly that wife of yours,” I say. “She’d probably throw a party. That woman hates me. I know she does. Why, Jack? Why does she hate me? I’m just an old man, you know. I’m very fragile.”

“She doesn’t hate you, Father.”

“Of course she does,” I say. “Just look at tonight. All I did was put in an honest request and she makes a scene. I swear, Jack, that woman’s trying to give me another goddamn stroke. She’ll kill me with her hate one of these days.”

“You’re incredible,” Jack says, shaking his head. He mutters something else under his breath, soaps my thighs, wipes at my legs with the sponge. He’s working fast now, like he can’t wait to get the whole thing over with, scrubbing in that rough, unpleasant way again. I stare at the top of his head for a while. It’s all depressing me to no end. I feel like furniture. So I look at the shower walls, search for pictures in the mildew like they’re clouds in the sky. I make out a herd of wild horses galloping across the linoleum. This turns out to be a bad idea because it makes me think of Macklin Johnson back home — that poor, beautiful man — and how we used to sit around and rent old Spaghetti Westerns to pass the time, and suddenly something hot and awful blooms in my chest and my eyes start to well up involuntarily.

“Jesus,” Jack says. “Don’t tell me you’re gonna cry now.”

What can a grown man say to such a thing? My son wipes down my face. He’s helping me into my clothes. He’s carrying me to the electric wheelchair, his arms like tight ropes around my shoulders and legs. I’m still thinking of Mac. I’m still steeling myself against tears. “Jack,” I say, swallowing hard. My son straps me in, positions the lame arm across my lap. “C’mon now,” he says, smiling at me for the first time all evening. “Buck up, old man. Things will get better. Nobody hates you here.”

“Jack,” I say again. “I want to go home. Don’t let me die in this place.”

“You’re not going to die, Father,” my son says. “You’re going to be happy.”

I’m trying to get some sleep, still thinking of old Mac, when the wife peers into my room and scares me so bad I nearly crap my pajamas. She stands in the doorway, her small silhouette dark and ominous, and says in a meek voice, “Mister Perry sleeping?” and I say, “No, woman. Mister Perry’s pole-vaulting. Mister Perry’s running a goddamn marathon. What else do you think Mister Perry’s doing?”

She stands there silently, cocks her head curiously to one side.

“What do you want from me?” I ask after a while.

“I no want nothing.” Her voice is a little louder now. “I just want to say sorry to you. I no mean to make you upset.”

“Who said I was upset?”

“Jack tell me you cry.”

“That’s a lie,” I say.

“No lie.” She’s shaking her head. “Jack say you crying like baby in the shower.”

“That’s ridiculous. I think I would know if I was crying or not, woman.”

She’s silent for a moment. She shoves her hands into her pockets like she doesn’t know what to do with them. “Well,” she says. “I’m sorry for tonight.”

“Apology accepted then.”

“But in the future,” she adds sternly, “if you desire to say something to me you just say it to me, okay? Don’t say to Jack. I speak English. Not so good, but I understand what you say.”

“Sure,” I say. “You speak English.”

She stands there a while longer like she’s waiting for me to apologize as well. But I don’t have anything to apologize about. I wasn’t the one infantilizing a helpless old man during dinner. So I say, “Turn up the fan, Tida. I’m melting in here.” For a second, I think she might make another scene, but instead she walks over to the fan and kicks it up a notch. It turns on its axle like some creature shaking its head slowly from side to side.

“Thanks,” I say, the fan’s cool breeze tickling my face. “That’s better.”

She walks across the room, stands over the bed, looks down at me for a while. I think she might strangle me, but instead she just pulls the sheets up under my chin.

“Okay?”

“Okay,” I say.

“Tomorrow will be better, Mister Perry.”

“I doubt it,” I say, closing my eyes. “But let’s hope so.”

When I open my eyes again the wife’s gone. The hallway light is off. It’s quiet in the house and I’m staring in the dark thinking about the last time I saw Macklin Johnson.

We had tickets for an Orioles game. The tickets were his going-away present for me. He was coming over to pick me up. Things already weren’t going so good for the two of us by then. I’d had my little episode and Mac was starting to get confused. His memory was starting to deteriorate. We’d been seeing each other less and less, what with Mac’s forgetfulness and me sitting at home lamenting my condition, trying to figure out the fancy wheelchair, doing my damnedest not to get into high-speed collisions with the furniture.

So I was happy that Mac got the Orioles tickets. It was a nice gesture. It seemed a way to say good-bye. But I was not so happy about having to remind him every other day about why he’d gotten them.

“So we’re going to a baseball game,” he’d said the week before our date.

“Yeah,” I replied. “You bought the damn tickets, Mac.”

“Oh. So why are we going?”

“Because I’m leaving, remember? I’m going to go live with Jack and his wife.”