“Well, worry about me,” he says. “Someone should.”
“I do. And I love you. We’re taking care of ourselves, we’re fine. Forget about us. You just go be nowhere and work your way out of this. Whoops, I have to hang up-it’s my turn for the shower.” She hangs up.
Rafferty says, “You’re the only person in Thailand who wants to get wet,” but he’s talking to dead air. He puts the phone down and sees a streak of light skin on the back of his hands. He’s got to be on guard against sweating or brushing his hands against things. He rubs at the hand until the streak is smoothed out, then leans across the front seat and tilts the rearview mirror until he can see himself. He looks okay except for the end of his nose, which is a little pinkish. With the tips of two fingers, he tries to cover the pink spot, but the gel doesn’t want to spread, so he licks his fingertips. The moisture does the job. He does the best he can to check his ears and the back of his neck, but it isn’t much.
Makeup, he discovers, is more complicated than men think it is.
On day three he realizes that Bangkok is a city of fathers and daughters. He sees them everywhere, at all ages and in all sizes: fathers with infants they hold as though they’ve just been handed a soap bubble; fathers with toddlers, their hand clamped inside their father’s hand as they claim the sidewalk, step by step; fathers with preteens, following obediently three steps behind their daughters in case school friends should happen to see them; fathers with the grim, desperate pride of someone who’s sired a beauty and, unfortunately for his peace of mind, remembers what he was like when he was a boy.
He wonders for a moment how the men would look if he could see them through their daughters’ eyes, then immediately banishes the notion. He gets glimpses of himself, occasionally, reflected in Miaow’s eyes, and what he thinks he sees is the ruin of a statue placed on a pedestal that was too high for it, just chunks of anatomical rubble on a stone platform with recognizable bits and pieces-an eye, a smile, a strong arm-capable of provoking mild affection and somewhat more intense irritation.
And he asks himself, looking at the fathers, how anyone has the courage to embark on that voyage. To accept a child, not knowing the first thing about how much she can be shaped and how much of her character is set in genetic stone, to make the breathtaking assumption that you will always know what’s best for her and are competent to guide her toward it.
Sheer hubris.
Miaow came to him and Rose preshaped by her years on the sidewalk, and in some ways that was probably an advantage. She had learned, within limits, what was necessary to her and what was superfluous, what she would put up with and what she wouldn’t. He hadn’t known then-he didn’t know now, for that matter-whether she’d been abused sexually during those five or six wild-child years. But then, he thinks, every infant comes into the world trailing an infinite cloud of mystery behind it: where she came from, where she’s going, who she really is, what she can do, what she can learn, whether she’ll bring joy or heartbreak, whether there is darkness at her core. What landslide of karma has rolled her into this life.
Miaow is twelve or thirteen now. When they took her in, she was seven or eight. In those five years, he’s tried every parenting approach he can, with little success, he thinks, before abandoning all of them in favor of two governing principles. First, to do no harm. Second, to place no limit on the amount of love he is willing to give. The ideas made sense when they came to him, but in the past year he’s begun to wonder whether there’s a third principle-the most important principle-he hasn’t thought of. Or maybe Rose was right when she said if he wanted something that wouldn’t change, he should have bought a table.
“Do you have children?” he asks the doctor behind the wheel and the nurse in the passenger seat.
The doctor grunts a negative, but the nurse says, “Four.”
“How old?”
“The oldest is twenty-seven. The youngest is nineteen.”
“Did you have principles? About how to raise them, I mean?”
“Yes. Keep them from killing themselves and don’t try to turn them into me.”
Rafferty says, “Those are good.”
The doctor says, “My mother told me before she died that the biggest problem she had with my sisters and me was figuring out whether we had a compass. Two of us always knew what we wanted, my youngest sister and I. The middle kid was a rainbow, different every day.”
“What did your mother do?”
“She gave up. She said it was the most valuable lesson she ever learned, giving up. Our middle sister is the happiest of us all.”
“I guess in the end,” Rafferty says, “happiness is the only thing that matters.”
The nurse says, “That and making sure they live through their teens.”
On day four, two things happen. First, he allows himself to admit how much he hates fast food. When the on-duty doctor and nurse take a meal break, they usually choose an American chain because that’s the fastest, and he winds up with something to go, which he eats out of a bag, sitting on the backseat. His clothes stink of fried food. He’s gaining weight. His knees and hips hurt from being seated for so long. He’s perpetually damp.
He hates all of it. He will never eat another cheeseburger.
Second, he learns he can handle the sidewalk. At 4:00 P.M., in the open-air market mecca of Pratunam, Dr. Ratt pulls the car into a nearby soi and Rafferty ventures out into the crowds for a jittery experimental jaunt. The clouds have parted to allow the sun to drop by for a few hours, and it’s remarkably bright, as though it’s putting out extra effort to make up for a long absence. What’s more, it seems brightest wherever he is. He has the sensation that a spotlight is trained on him, tracking him wherever he goes, as if he were the lead actor in a musical. He doesn’t want to hold anyone’s gaze for a beat too long, but he doesn’t want to release it and miss the spark of recognition either. One girl of eighteen or nineteen locks her eyes on his as his heart rate skyrockets, but then she breaks into a wide Thai smile, lowering her head as she passes, leaving him gasping in her wake. He’s powerless not to turn and make sure he’s all right, and when he does, he catches her looking back at him. She sticks out her lower lip in a pout, shrugs, and goes on her way.
He spends more than an hour being a pedestrian without any alarms going off. He draws an occasional glance because of his height, but the Thais are growing taller at an extraordinary rate. As far as he can tell, no one finds him suspicious or familiar-looking or even interesting. He experiments with retracting his aura as he walks, just keeping his gaze on the middle distance and reeling in his energy. It occurs to him that this is a skill that Janos, the indescribable man at the no-name Bar, has mastered.
When he goes back to the soi, the car is gone. They’re undoubtedly answering a radio call. He kneels beside a parked car long enough to check the makeup, which looks passable, then he heads for a real test. Moving with the crowd, he tries his hand with a couple of the vendors under the tarps, still bellied down beneath the weight of collected rain. Hoping that in the press of shoppers no one will actually pay attention to him, he buys a medium-size shoulder bag in artificial leather that’s so artificial it’s hard to tell what it’s pretending to be. Into it, over the course of stops at several booths, he packs four T-shirts, two long-sleeved shirts, one pair of wash-and-wear slacks to alternate with his jeans, six pairs of socks, a travel bottle of liquid laundry detergent, and a small selection of essential toiletries, including some hair oil. He also buys a big pair of sunglasses, wondering why he hadn’t thought of them earlier.
Finally he chooses a woman’s compact, which is the nearest he can come to a pocket mirror. The vendor who sells it to him gives him an idle glance and says to him, in Thai, that she hopes his girlfriend will like it.