Da said, “Oh.” Feeling stupid, feeling naive. Feeling lost. Wishing she were back in the drowsy cluster of wooden shacks at the bend of the river that is now dry, its water stolen. The shacks empty now, knocked off balance by the big machines until they sagged drunkenly sideways. Even the dogs are gone.
The sidewalk that has been given to her is hard and hot and dusty, another kind of dry riverbed, a river of people. The booths from which the vendors sell their wares begin half a block away, while this stretch is given to store windows, small office buildings, foot traffic, and beggars. Da sits exactly where she was put by the man who had driven the van, a thickset tree trunk of a man in a bright blue Hawaiian shirt with brown girls all over it. He had looked at her incredulously when he realized she didn’t have a bowl, and then he’d tightened his mouth and stalked away, down to the booths. When he returned, he tossed a red plastic rice bowl into her lap. It had just missed Peep.
“You owe me eighty baht,” he’d said.
Now she sits there, the bowl upraised, hopelessly fishing the river of people. Most of them push past her, the same way they would sidestep a hole in the pavement. Once in a while, someone-usually a woman-will slow slightly and drop a coin into the bowl, often with a glance at Peep. Every time a coin strikes the bowl, Da feels a wave of shame wash over her.
The noise of the street is deafening.
Everything is in motion, but nothing seems to change: The people flow past, the cars glint cruelly, the sun slams down, the noise hammers her ears. How can the world be this noisy? How can the air smell like this? How can the people who live here endure it? Sweat gathers under Da’s arms and between her breasts and runs down her body. She feels repulsively filthy.
How will she survive this day?
One of the problems is that everything-the noise, the people, the dust, her shame-distracts her. It breaks to pieces her sense of who she is and scatters them unrecognizably at her feet. Where she grew up, silence was always available. There was always someplace she could go to reassemble herself when her grasp on who she was became frayed by distraction or anger, or even love. And now, sitting here, she feels as soulless, as valueless, as a piece of furniture abandoned on the sidewalk.
And she has been this way, she realizes, for days. Since her mother and father slung their packs over their shoulders and took her younger sisters by the hand and said good-bye to her and to their lives together. Since the bulldozer knocked the shacks crooked and made them unlivable. Since the moment she began the long, slow flight to Bangkok.
She has lost herself.
But now that she has recognized it, this is something she knows how to deal with.
She gathers her attention, reeling in the bits of her she left here and there over the days and nights that she was moving, no, running, as blindly and absently as the people who push past her now. She focuses all her attention on the sweat coursing down her skin. Feels the separate drops, feels their faintly cooling progress toward her belly. Feels the reassuring pressure of buttock on sidewalk: There is someone here after all. Slowly she broadens her focus to include her breath. In and out, in and out. An endless cycle with something at the center of it. Something doing the breathing, or perhaps something being breathed through, that she has come to know as Da.
The noise gradually fades.
After an undefinable period of time, she becomes aware that Peep has stopped shifting restlessly in her lap. She looks down to find him gazing at her. His tiny eyebrows are very faintly contracted, as though he is seeing something different when he looks at her. The look that passes between them is a pulse of some sort. A fine thread of connection.
Peep brings up one arm, fingers spread wide, and swings it up and down. It looks to Da as if he is waving at her. The thought breaks her concentration and makes her laugh.
And she feels eyes upon her. Someone is looking fixedly at her. She can feel this kind of thing. It is the dim, warm pressure of a gaze, fainter than the most tentative breeze, as faint as the weight of light falling through an open door. From behind her.
She turns to look, and someone stumbles into her, hard enough to knock her to an elbow and send the bowl into the air, the coins spiraling loose and ringing against the pavement. Hard enough to make her grab Peep so tightly he squeals and then begins to cry.
Someone is gabbling at her in some language-Sorry sorry sorry-it’s English, Da realizes, and she looks up, Peep squalling against her chest, to see a thin farang woman with hair the color of copper, a color that doesn’t even pretend to be real. The woman is waving her hands around, almost in tears, loudly saying the same thing, Sorry sorry sorry. She drops to her knees and begins to pick up the coins that hit the sidewalk.
“Okay,” Da says, embarrassed for the woman, with the sweat dripping off the tip of her long, bony nose. “Me okay. Baby, him okay.”
“I just wasn’t looking,” the woman says. She snatches a coin just inches in advance of a man’s shoe, barely getting her raw-looking knuckles out of the way. “Are you sure he’s all right?” She looks at Peep more closely and says, “Oh, my God, he’s adorable.”
“Him…pretty,” Da says.
“Pretty?” the woman says. She is dropping into the bowl the coins she picked up. “He’s precious, just a real little heartbreaker. How the girls will love him-he is a boy, isn’t he?”
Da says, “Boy.”
“And look at those lashes. Why is it always boys who get those beautiful eyelashes? Although you didn’t exactly get shortchanged in that department either. I feel like Bigfoot,” the woman says, looking around for more coins. “Just hoofed over you like a heffalump. Honey,” she says, putting a red-nailed hand on Da’s arm, “I am so sorry.”
“No problem,” Da says. Peep has stopped crying and is regarding the woman’s hair with wide-eyed uncertainty.
“Look at that little angel,” the woman says. “Just look at him. Couldn’t you just eat him up?”
Da says, “Eat?”
“Oh, you poor thing,” the woman says. “Here I am, gabbing on and on like this. Of course you need to eat. A lot more than you need a bunch of sloppy sympathy. Here.” She unsnaps a big straw purse and pulls out a wad of red five-hundred-baht bills. “You just buy as much food as you can choke down, and get that little angel a new blanket. The one you’ve got needs a couple of hours in a good strong bleach solution.” She puts two of the notes, and then a third, into Da’s bowl.
“Too much,” Da says.
“Nonsense. Plenty more where that comes from.” The eyes on either side of the sunburned nose are a pale, faded blue that Thai people associate with ghosts, but they seem kind. “Look at you,” she says. “Probably never done anything wrong in your sweet little life, and here you are. I have to tell you, honey, with all due respect to your beautiful country and everything, it stinks.”
Da takes the third note out of the bowl and extends it. She says, “Please?”
“Honey, you knock that off. Put that back, or I’ll give you a bunch more.” The woman gets to her feet. “I’m Helen,” she says. She jabs her chest with an index finger. “Helen. Me Helen.” Then she points at Da. “You?”
“My name me, Da.”
“Da,” Helen says. “What a pretty name. And Junior there?”
“Sorry?”
Helen points at Peep. “Name?”
“Name him, Peep.”
“Name him…” Helen says, her voice trailing off. “Oh, oh. His name, his name is Peep. Peep, right?”
Da says, “Peep.”