This Is How It Always Is

by Laurie Frankel

  All of that turned out to be prelude though. The bugs and the spun sugar and the weird vegetables were the easy part, which he should have guessed because bugs, spun sugar, and weird vegetables do not smell like dry or wet blood. In the next part of the market, all Claude wanted to do was sit down and cry because cages the size of Jupiter’s kennel held piles and piles of shiny black chickens, chickens on top and underneath, chickens squawking at one another for stepping on their heads. At first Claude wondered vaguely if he could hold or at least pet one, but then, woozily, he saw his error because on top of the cage was a giant tray of dead chickens, their skin naked and pale and puckered, their yellow feet reaching out for rescue, but, headless, they were way too late for that. Next door was another even smaller cage with geese inside, fairy-tale geese, snow-white bodies with Halloween-orange feet and beaks. There were far too many for the small space, and they were as wedged in as he was, but at least they all had both feet on the floor. The geese had taken a vow of silence because their cage was also topped with a tray of bodies swaddled in plastic wrap with their price scrawled on in red marker. And next to them the ducks. They couldn’t see their grisly future, but probably they could smell it. Then there were pig faces—not the head, just the empty, saggy face: snout and curling ears and horrible hollows where the eyes had been. At the end of the row, an ancient wrinkle of a woman hunched on a stool scooping tiny jumping shrimps into plastic bags. She squeezed lime over them and sprinkled them with salt, kind of like when Aggie’s cousin was baptized, and the businessman who bought them popped them into his mouth, still jumping, like he was eating popcorn at a movie. Claude understood suddenly what it meant to say the walls were closing in on you. He tried to take deep breaths, but the smell of terrified birds burned his nose and throat and chest.

  There were dead animals everywhere. There was weird food everywhere. It was loud everywhere, like a turned-up-too-high soundtrack of selling and buying and negotiation and sweat. But the other thing Claude saw everywhere in Bangkok, which was the miracle of Bangkok, were people—women—like him. Like Poppy.

  They were beautiful. Their hair was long and black as bad-luck cats and curved just where their necks did, tucking perfectly behind their ears with flowers that had to be fake but weren’t—gorgeous, perfect, amazing hair. They had gorgeous, perfect, amazing ways of moving that hair too, touching it just lightly with their hands, laughing so it lay prettily over their faces or shaking so it danced down their backs like a shampoo commercial. They moved everything just right, in fact. Their hips went back and forth, back and forth when they walked, but concisely, not like sexy women in movies who moved like windshield wipers, more like willow trees in wind. And their clothes—Claude loved everything these women wore: Long embroidered skirts. Tops that hugged their figures, modest but hinting, like a wink but not on purpose. Jeans and T-shirts that looked just like regular jeans and T-shirts except somehow completely feminine. Scarves that seemed to float against their necks like leaves on autumn ponds, and though Claude thought he would liquefy if he wore a scarf in this heat, and though Claude remembered he was being punished and had to be Claude, the scarves enchanted him anyway.

  One was running a fruit stand. One was making marigold garlands on a plastic table outside a 7-Eleven. One was a waitress in the noodle restaurant where they stopped for lunch. Claude saw them on the sky train going to work in an office or somewhere it was important to wear a suit and heels. Did his mother even notice? He couldn’t tell. But if you looked at them closely, and Claude did—Claude could not keep his eyes off them—you could see that that swallowy bit of their throat was bigger than usual. You could see their hands and feet were bigger too. When they spoke to you, it was with lovely, husky voices, or they wore their makeup a little more thickly than the other women around them, or their eyebrows were more assertive, more certain, more there. They were beautiful, and they were everywhere, and everyone seemed to know their secret, and no one seemed to care, which, Claude guessed, meant it wasn’t really a secret at all.

  But just as he was spying, improbably, kindred spirits halfway around the world, Ling announced, with a brave smile neither Claude nor his mother were buying, that it was time to drive the five hundred kilometers north to the clinic, a figure she may as well have expressed in quarks for as much as Claude knew how far five hundred kilometers was. What he did understand were quavering adult smiles: it was going to take all day, and it was going to be excruciating. Their new van had little pieces of paper-thin gold stuck all over the ceiling above the rearview mirror to show it had been blessed by a monk. Unfortunately, it had apparently not been blessed by a mechanic because whatever those springy things are that prevent you from bouncing all around and hitting your head on the ceiling and wanting to puke every time you went over a bump were missing.

  “Shocks,” his mother said grimly the millionth time it happened.

  “What about them?”

  “We could use some.”

  “I’m having lots,” said Claude.

  His mother got up and moved to the row of seats behind him, lay down across it, and closed her eyes without another word. But tempting though his mother made it look and miserable as he felt, Claude could not sleep. There was too much to see. Outside of Bangkok, Thailand looked like something his father would make up. There was a hospital for elephants. There were hundreds of schoolchildren picking up brush in the trees to prevent forest fires. There were roadside stands selling giant, papery wasp nests to eat with sugar and chili. When they stopped at lights, old women covered head to toe with masks and hats and scarves in the hundred-degree heat would try to sell them sticky rice or salted banana chips. Even the familiar was unfamiliar. Even the things he seemed to know he could not name.

  Along the road, he saw tiny miniature houses everywhere, sometimes on the ground, sometimes on posts like elaborate mailboxes. He’d seen them in Bangkok, outside his hotel and the market stalls and the 7-Elevens and the noodle shops. Now, on the road north, he saw them outside of every house, large or small, temple or shack, outside every run-down strip mall and gas station. He could see them in the jungle through the trees and on the tops of mountains. He could see them in the corners of the rice fields and the coconut plantations and where they were reforesting teak. Water buffalo and cows grazed around them under the banana trees. Dogs ignored them all over the country.

  “What are those?” It was the first anyone had spoken for miles, and Ling seemed startled to hear from him.

  “Spirit house. We put them outside our home and business place, temple, restaurant, everywhere. We have lot of spirits in Thailand. Spirits is mischievous. You know? Naughty. We want them not making trouble in our house or job, so we give them place to make funny business outside. Then we offer treat to keep them happy there. They get what they seek outside so they not come inside.”

  “Treats?”

  “Offering: Flower. Fruit. Incense. Maybe beer. Maybe cigarette.” She shrugged. “Depend what they like.”

  When the road started to climb in earnest, they left the houses, people and spirit, behind. It was a jungle. A real one. What was the difference between forest and jungle? Both had lots of trees. Both hid much you could (worrisomely) hear but not see. This one even had, to Claude’s surprise, long-needle pines, just like at home. But this was jungle for sure. For one thing, it was a million degrees and humider than an indoor pool. For another, there were vines like the trees were being eaten, and in between every two trees, a palm was pushing its way through at odd angles like it had meant to grow someplace else altogether and ended up here only by accident. The whole jungle was wall-to-wall-carpeted with moss and fern and leaf and yet more vine, and there was ceiling between the trees that was green and tangled and, alarmingly, moving as well. Instead of soft rain and low buzzing and birdsong like at home, here the insects and frogs and probably monkeys and possibly tigers screamed and shrieked and hollered, staking their claims for space between the palms, yodeling at the stars. But mostly
the difference was this: fairy tales were set in forests, never jungles. The van slogged through enough miles of this wilderness for Claude’s brain to arrive at the reason why: it was because you could get lost in the forest and come out the other side. If you got lost in this jungle, you got lost forever.

  Aid Ambiguous

  They heard it before they saw it, their first impression of the clinic, as they biked in the next morning just after sunrise, no overnight cool for the dawn to burn away, the air sodden already. There was the sound of metal on metal, a whine like a train whistle, woesome thunks, and shouts Rosie could not identify as Thai or Burmese but knew for sure were curse words. She guessed someone yelling at cats in battle or maybe heat, though they’d seen only dogs and dogs and more dogs so far, and never in her life had she heard a dog make a sound like that, a high-pitched keening, more screech than scream. Some kind of insect maybe? It would have to be bigger than she was willing to think about so early in the morning. A monkey? An army of frogs? Animal attack? And indeed, when she and Claude arrived at the mouth of the chewed-up dirt drive leading into the clinic, they found soot-caked, mud-stained feet and scratched-up shins kicking desperately at the end of a body otherwise entirely consumed by a voracious, growling maw.

  When it revealed itself, the battle proved age-old but not animal: motion versus stasis, senescence versus youthful tenacity, the maw in question neither beast nor human but mineral: an ancient, heretofore pickup truck. It had a mechanic swearing under its open hood and two small children giggling in its cab, one on the floor using two hands to depress and release (usually all at once) the clutch, one shifting and turning the key (with more tenacity than would have been ideal) as directed.

  “Truck” was a generous term. It was more rust than engine, more dirt than vehicle, and not the kind of dirt you could just wash off with a good scrub either because Rosie had a feeling this dirt was load bearing. The body had once been green and probably lovely. It was one of those pickups from the 1950s with the bubbled hoods and rounded wheel wells that someone at home would have dressed up with whitewall tires, a chrome grill, a thousand hours with a Q-tip and a cloth diaper, and then paraded for the Fourth of July. This one didn’t look like that. Apparently, it didn’t run like that either.

  The filthy truck spit out a filthier mechanic. “You new doctor?”

  “I am. Rosie Walsh. This is my dau … um, son,” she stammered. “Claude.” She glanced at him to see if she could apologize with her eyes, but he was staring at the ground and wouldn’t meet them.

  “You drive?”

  “No, we biked.” She turned back to the mechanic, distracted. “The guesthouse where we’re staying lent us bicycles.”

  “Sorry, my English.” The mechanic tried again. “You can drive? Manual shift car?”

  “Oh. Yes!” Rosie’s own English comprehension was apparently jet-lagged.

  The mechanic shooed the two children out of the cab, performed final ministrations under the hood, and gave Rosie the international sign for “Pray to your gods and hit it again.” The motor turned over like a well-trained seal. There was much rejoicing. Rosie’s first procedure at the clinic was a success. The patient—improbably, it seemed to her—lived.

  The mechanic was slick with grease from the elbows down, but fortunately, greetings in Thailand involved not shaking hands but pressing your own together in front of your chest and bowing toward one another. “Very glad to meet you. I am K. Do not ask what K stand for. It stand for so much. We happy you here. I show you around. First, meet Sorry Ralph.”

  “The truck is named Ralph?”

  “Sorry Ralph,” K corrected.

  “Why?”

  “He very sorry.”

  “I can see that.”

  “Sorry Ralph is ambulance. Also fetch medicine and supply if there is medicine and supply. Also hearse. Usually sorry though so hope you do not need.”

  Rosie nodded. She was surprised to see that the mechanic was both female and the apparent welcoming committee. K turned and headed off at what appeared to be a saunter, but Rosie and Claude found themselves practically running to keep up. At each turn, their entourage grew, everyone eager to welcome them with pressed hands and a bow and to trot alongside, everyone happy to let the mechanic lead. Claude was whisked away, and Rosie reached for him as if the wreckage they clung to had suddenly split in stormy seas, but he was already too far off, waves of people between them. Rosie felt at once swept along and struggling to keep up. A chorus of voices in a variety of languages informed her what was where and offered helpful hints that were probably important. A shoe tree of fingers pointed in all directions at once.

  There was a building that was clearly obstetrics. At least you could tell obstetrics by looking. There was a workshop from which disembodied limbs hung—legs and feet mostly in various states of doneness, some still being assembled, a band saw, a drill press. There were patients sitting in chairs or wheelchairs whose legs ended before their pants did, so she could see where they belonged too. There was an open-air portico—really just a swept dirt floor under a roof of flattened cardboard boxes tied to the underside of a tarp—littered with plastic lawn chairs, sleeping bags, and blankets in piles where whole families seemed contentedly camped out. Whether they were awaiting treatment or news about someone else receiving treatment or something else altogether, Rosie could see only that they were not bleeding or moaning in pain or about to give birth. There were half-formed, halfhearted lines everywhere. There was an eye chart taped to a cement wall at the end of a rock-strewn dirt path. There were stray dogs wandering lazily in and out of all the buildings, including the one labeled Surgical Department, a building with holes for doors and windows but with no doors or windows filling them. There was a large patch of dirt with lounge-style lawn chairs and then the regular sitting-up kind behind them, and though patients were reclining, openmouthed, on the former, and though there was a medic, lab-coated and rubber-gloved, on the latter, Rosie could not quite believe this was a dentist’s office, but she was wrong.

  The buildings were cinder block with barred windows or patched plaster with grated cutouts like lace. Corrugated metal roofs covered in debris gapped several inches over the tops of the walls. Curling linoleum floors, their patterns worn nearly away, spilled onto dirt or cement spaces out front. Empty, open drains lined all the walkways, auguring a rainy season that must turn all the dirt floors to sopping, sticky, insect-harboring mud. All of it un-air-conditioned, unsterile, unsealed, and undifferentiable. But the entrances, the doorways, the open spaces where doorways should have been, were all heaped with flip-flops and plastic clogs and sandals, a broom made of straw always propped nearby, and so, though the walls and ceilings were grimy with decades of dirt, the floors were miraculously, significantly, clean.

  Her seeming entourage led Rosie to the largest building and ushered her in. It was unlike anything she’d seen before in her life—it was beyond imagining—but she recognized it immediately as home. The rush of the few doctors and nurses at hand, the focus of the medic doing eye-of-the-storm triage amid the rest of the room’s hurricane, the tang of blood and panic, the antiseptic smell augmenting rather than assuaging all the other ones, equivocal spills best avoided, patients unable to ask, afraid to know: an emergency room.

  There were no gurneys, no beds, no curtains, no monitors, no machines. Patients lay on plain wooden platforms covered in scraps of sheets or old, felt-lined tablecloths falling into tatters. Patients lay spooning other patients in a tangle of IVs. They shivered against the walls, trailing blood or vomit or bandages into the corners. They sat on the floor between the wooden platform beds so the staff darted around them like swallows. It was impossible to tell who was waiting for treatment and who was waiting for a loved one, whose mangled and missing limbs were emergent and whose had been that way for decades, whose drawn and pallid faces, damp brows, hollow, shining eyes bespoke fever and whose fear and whose had merely frozen that way after too many years in that sorry state.
There was a small folding snack table just inside the door with a foot-tall stack of papers weighted down by a rock: single-sheet intake forms.

  It was not yet seven a.m.

  Having deposited her where she was clearly meant to be, Rosie’s entourage faded away, back to whatever posts they had temporarily abandoned in order to welcome her. Who had taken Claude, and where? There was no one even to ask.

  “Ready?” A teenager at the folding table nodded encouragingly toward the pile.

  Rosie wasn’t sure what she’d been expecting. A jungle orientation of some sort? An HR tutorial on tax and benefit forms? A lecture from Legal on sexual harassment? Somehow, she’d expected calm assurances regarding her child and what he would do while she worked. Somehow, she’d imagined something between truck repair and meeting patients. But there was nothing.