Rattawant Lapcharoensap - Sightseeing - Stories

A hush fell over the place, followed by a smattering of giggles.

“Oh, you fucking pussy,” Anek hissed.

“I’m sorry, Anek.”

“You goddamn, motherfucking, monkey-cock-sucking piece of low-class pussy.”

I wiped my lips with my forearm. Anek pulled me to my feet, led me out through the glass double doors, his hand on my collar. I tried to say sorry again, but before I could mouth the words my heart felt like it might explode and — just as we cleared the doors — I sent a stream of gray-green vomit splashing against the hot concrete.

“Oh. My. Fucking. Lord. Why?” Anek moaned, lifting his face to the sky. “Oh why, Lord? Why hast thou forsaken me?” Anek and I had been watching a lot of Christian movies on TV lately.

When we came to a traffic stop an hour later, I was leaning against my brother’s back, still feeling ill, thick traffic smoke whipping around us. Anek turned to me and said: “That’s the first and last time, kid. I can’t believe you. All that money for a bunch of puke. No more fucking hamburgers for you.”

We finished watching the sun set over the neighborhood, a panoply of red and orange and purple and blue. Anek told me that Bangkok sunsets were the most beautiful sunsets in the world. “It’s the pollution,” he said. “Brings out the colors in the sky.” Then after Anek and I smoked the last of the cigarettes, we climbed down from the roof.

At dinner, as usual, we barely said a word to each other. Ma had been saying less and less ever since that crate of toys killed our father. She was all headshakes and nods, headshakes and nods. We picked at our green beans, slathered fish sauce on our rice.

“Thanks for the meal, Ma.”

Ma nodded.

“Yeah, Ma, this is delicious.”

She nodded again.

Besides the silence, Ma’s cooking was also getting worse, but we couldn’t bring ourselves to say anything about it. What’s more, she had perfected the art of moving silently through the house. She seemed an apparition in those days. She’d retreated into herself. She no longer watched over us. She simply watched. I’d be doodling in my book at the kitchen table and all of a sudden Ma would just be sitting there, peering at me with her chin in one hand. Or Anek and I would be horsing around in the outdoor kitchen after dinner, throwing buckets of dirty dishwater on each other, and we’d look over our shoulders to find Ma standing against the crumbling concrete siding of the house. Anek told me she caught him masturbating in the bathroom once. He didn’t even realize she had opened the door until he heard it shut, a loud slam so he could know that she’d seen him. Anek didn’t masturbate for weeks after that and neither did I.

One night I caught Ma staring at the bedroom mirror with an astonished look on her face, as if she no longer recognized her own sallow reflection. It seemed Pa’s death had made our mother a curious spectator of her own life, though when I think of her now I wonder if she was simply waiting for us to notice her grief. But we were just children, Anek and I, and when children learn to acknowledge the gravity of their loved ones’ sorrows they’re no longer children.

“That woman needs help,” Anek said after we washed the dishes that evening.

“She’s just sad, Anek.”

“Listen, kid, I’m sad too, okay? Do you see me walking around like a mute, though? Do you see me sneaking around the house like I’m some fucking ninja?”

I dropped it. I didn’t feel like talking about the state of things that night, not with Anek. I knew he would get angry if we talked about Pa, if we talked about his death, if we talked about what it was doing to Ma. I never knew what to do with my brother’s anger in those days. I simply and desperately needed his love.

I think Anek felt bad about the hamburger incident because he started giving me lessons on the motorcycle, an old 35 °CC Honda our father had ridden to the factory every morning. After Pa died, Ma wanted to sell the bike, but Anek convinced her not to. He told her the bike wasn’t worth much. He claimed it needed too many repairs. But I knew that aside from some superficial damage — chipped paint, an ugly crack in the rear mudguard, rusted-through places in the exhaust pipe — the bike was in fine working condition. Anek wanted the bike for himself. He’d been complaining all year about being the only one among his friends without a bike. We’d spent countless hours at the mall showroom, my brother wandering among the gleaming new bikes while I trailed behind him absentmindedly. And though I thought then that my brother had lied to my mother out of selfishness, I know now that Pa did not leave us much. That Honda was Anek’s inheritance.

He’d kick-start it for me — I didn’t have the strength to do it myself — and I’d hop on in front and ride slowly through the neighborhood with Anek behind me.

“I’ll kill you, you little shit. I’ll kill you if you break my bike,” he’d yell when I approached a turn too fast or when I had trouble steadying the handlebars after coming out of one. “I’m gonna nail you to a fucking cross like Jesus-fucking-Christ.”

My feet barely reached the gear pedal, but I’d learned, within a week, to shift into second by sliding off the seat. I’d accelerate out of first, snap the clutch, slide off the seat just so, then pop the gear into place. We’d putter by the city dump at twenty, twenty-five kilos an hour and some of the dek khaya, the garbage children whose families lived in shanties on the dump, would race alongside us, urging me to go faster, asking Anek if they could ride too.

I began to understand the way Anek had eyed those showroom bikes. I began to get a taste for speed.

“That’s as fast as I’m letting you go,” Anek once said when we got home. “Second gear’s good enough for now.”

“But I can do it, Anek. I can do it.”

“Get taller, kid. Get stronger.”

“C’mon, Anek. Please. Second is so slow. It’s stupid.”

“I’ll tell you what’s stupid, little brother. What’s stupid is you’re eleven years old. What’s stupid is you go into turns like a drunkard. What’s stupid is you can’t even reach the gear pedal. Grow, kid. Give me twenty more centimeters. Then maybe we’ll talk about letting you do third. Maybe.”

“Why can’t I come?”

“Because you can’t, that’s why.”

“But you said last week—”

“I already told you, vomit-boy. I know what I said last week. I said maybe. Which part of that didn’t you understand? I didn’t say, ‘Oh yes! Of course, buddy! I love you so much! You’re my super pal! I’d love to take you out next Saturday!’ now did I?”

“Just this once, Anek. I promise I won’t bother you.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Please?”

“‘Please’ nothing, little brother. Sit at home and watch a soap with Ma or something.”

“But why, Anek? Why can’t I go with you?”

“Because I’m going where grown men go, that’s why. Because last I checked, last time I saw you naked, you were far from being grown.”

“I promise I won’t bother you, Anek. I’ll just sit in a corner or something. Really. I promise. I’ll stay out of your way. Just don’t leave me here with Ma tonight.”

* * *

When we were young, our mother would put on her perfume every evening before Pa came home. She would smell like jasmine, fresh-picked off a tree. Pa, he would smell of the cologne he dabbed on after he got out of the shower. Although I would never smell the ocean until we went out to Pak Nam to scatter his ashes, I knew that my father smelled like the sea. I just knew it. Anek and I would sit between them, watching some soap opera on TV, and I would inhale their scents, the scents of my parents, and imagine millions of tiny white flowers floating on the surface of a wide and green and bottomless ocean.