Rattawant Lapcharoensap - Sightseeing - Stories

“Ladda.” She was whispering into my face. “C’mon, baby. Wake up. We have to go. Your father’s in the hospital.”

XVII

Noon had come to Miss Mayuree’s house that night, pounding on the back door, asking for my mother and me. Mama was still awake when she heard the pounding. She bolted to the door. A few minutes later, the three of us were walking the three kilometers to the hospital in town. Noon didn’t know what had happened. She’d only heard her father say, when he got home from the cockpit, that Papa’d been hurt and was now in the hospital. “It’s a shame” is what her father had said to her mother. “It’s an abomination.”

Mama walked fast. We had trouble keeping up with her, and soon she was far ahead of us, her slippers slapping loudly against the concrete. Noon reached out and took my hand, squeezed it, and I returned the gesture. Mama broke into a light trot then. Without turning around, she told us to meet her at the hospital. I had never seen Mama run before.

When Noon and I arrived at the hospital, I was surprised to find that we were still holding hands. “It’s going to be all right,” Noon said at the door, letting go. It was almost one in the morning; the hospital was empty except for a few orderlies flitting in and out of the hallway. When we got to the front desk, the receptionist looked up and said, “Room 451,” as though she’d been waiting all night for us to arrive.

I panicked. For some reason, the room number made everything intolerably real to me, even as the world suddenly became charged with a strange, dreamlike quality: Colors became impossibly bright, the slightest sound boomed raucously, the air became a thick, coppery substance on my tongue. I felt myself hover about like a ghoul. Inside the elevator, the fluorescents buzzing loudly above us, I felt as if Noon and I were falling quickly through an infinite cavern, though I knew the contraption was taking us up to the fourth floor. Noon was saying something to me, but when I looked at her lips, they moved quickly and soundlessly, like a movie on fast-forward, and I wanted to ask her why she’d want to play tricks on me now.

The door to Room 451 was ajar. It was dark inside. I looked in and saw Papa laid out with bandages wrapped around his temple. A morphine drip ticked at his side, its tubes like the shadow of some gangly tree. Mama sat beside him on the gurney, a hand on his thigh, staring into his sleeping face, which winced intermittently as if he were deep in some strange and painful dream. Mama didn’t look up when we arrived. She just kept staring at Papa’s face, mesmerized by his features. She was still winded from running. I watched her collarbone tilt back and forth beneath her nightgown. I walked into the room. Noon remained in the doorway.

I reached over and turned on the light beside the hospital gurney. Mama put her forearm up to her eyes. In his sleep, Papa stirred as well. Under the light, his face was a pale shade of lavender. He turned over, revealing a thick bandage on the side of his head, drenched purple and black with blood, the cloth matted with the substance. I felt relieved then, as Papa turned away, and even as the stench of the bloodied bandage filled my nostrils. It smelled like that flatbed full of dead chickens, and I thought about how blood was blood no matter if it’s from a chicken or a man. But at least he was alive, and, thinking this, I felt the world become coherent again.

Mama was saying something. For a second, I thought my ears were still playing tricks on me: I heard only garbling and mewing. But then I saw Noon’s face in the doorway and realized from the way she tilted her head that the sounds coming from my mother’s lips were incomprehensible to her as well. “Mama,” I said, and she looked at me stunned, as if she didn’t recognize me, didn’t even know I had been standing there. She squinted and gestured for me to turn off the lamp. The room fell into darkness again. Mama touched Papa’s thigh once more, rubbed it, cinched the fabric of his hospital gown as if she were testing the quality of the material for one of her bras.

“Can you believe it?” Mama said, and from the sound of her voice I could not tell if she was laughing or crying. “Ladda, can you believe it?” I stood there beside her, watched my father’s ribs moving slowly against his hospital gown, his face still wincing every so often. “Can you believe it, Ladda?” Mama asked again, this time in a singsong voice, and I wanted to ask her what I was supposed to be incredulous about, but when I opened my mouth to speak, nothing came out, just a few short, exasperated breaths. As in the elevator a few minutes earlier, I felt like I was falling into a bottomless pit, that the room had been dropped into a chasm, and I wanted desperately to turn on the bedside lamp, for I thought light might put an end to the nausea. I felt weightless even as I felt my limbs weighted with a thousand dumbbells anchored to the floor. The room began to tilt and turn around me. I held on to the gurney rail for balance. “Can you believe it, Ladda?” Mama said once more. This time she cackled as if she’d never understood how funny the question was. “How could they?”

I walked toward Mama, raised my right hand high into the air, and brought it down upon the side of her face. For a split second, before I hit her, Mama jutted her chin out and looked at me as if she wanted — needed — to receive the blow, had been hoping I would do this all along. The impact barely made a noise, nor did it seem to have much of an effect: It only turned her head around, like something strange had caught her attention. She looked disappointed — not because I had hit her, but because I had not hit her hard enough — so I raised my hand and hit her once more, this time with more force, squarely on the bridge of her nose. I wanted her to ward off my blows. I wanted her to fight back. But she just sat there as if she not only had expected my blows, but needed more fury to stir her to life. “Don’t you go crazy on me,” I yelled. “Stop talking like a fucking lunatic. Make some goddamn sense, Mama.”

Noon grabbed me. Mama laughed again, high-pitched and girlish, a light trail of blood trickling from her left nostril. I lunged at her again, but Noon had her arms tight around my body. “Ladda, don’t,” Noon whispered into my ear. “Enough.”

I realized then that Mama wasn’t laughing — she was crying. Her shoulders were not shaking with mad, devilish hilarity; they were trembling with grief. She dabbed at her bleeding nostril with the base of her thumb. When she saw the blood, she got up and walked toward Noon and me. Noon still had me in her arms. Mama’s silhouette seemed surprisingly large before me then. I looked up at her, and seeing her swollen eyes, looked down at my feet. Noon walked out and closed the door behind her.

It was my turn now, I thought, staring at the floor, feeling my mother’s breath on my shoulders. I would let Mama punish me as I had thought I was punishing her. I would jut out my chin to receive her hand. And, that done, I would let her do it again and again and again until she was at long last satisfied. But she didn’t. All she did was tell me they had cut off Papa’s ear. They took everything, she said. Little Jui and his goons. All the lobe and all the cartilage and everything else that goes with an ear. All they’d left was a nub and a hole on the side of his head. Mama dabbed her nostrils with the hem of her blouse and walked out of the room. I listened to her slippers trailing off down the hall. I looked at the gurney. Papa had turned over once more. He stared at me astonished, the white of his eyes like jewels in the dark. And in a dazed, whispering voice that told me he was still very much asleep, swimming in his morphine dream, my father said: “Yes. Yes. Yes. A hundred and a thousand times yes already.”