“Read me another,” Arthit says. He looks like he’s on the verge of a grin.
“Wattana Enterprises,” Rafferty reads. “The note is ‘Souvenirs.’”
“Come on, Poke,” Arthit says. “I know you haven’t slept, but still. The Lilac. Wattana.”
“Wattana,” Rafferty says. “Isn’t he that guy who ran for the senate a year back? The. . the- Oh, good Lord, I must be tired. The massage-parlor king.”
“And the Lilac,” Arthit says, “is a no-hands restaurant. You know the drilclass="underline" You’re seated between two girls and you’re not allowed to use your hands to eat anything while they feed you, but you can do anything else with your hands that might occur to you.”
“They’re on his government-issued credit card,” Rafferty says.
Arthit says, “There’s your edge.”
Rafferty puts everything back into the suitcase except the condoms, the credit-card receipts, and the lube, then goes to the desk. He takes a hotel pen and writes a single word, all caps in large print, on a sheet of stationery, then drops it dead center on top of the stuff in the suitcase. He places the condoms on one side, the lube on the other, and the envelope beneath, so they frame the word.
The word is “HI!”
28
About the same time Rafferty is searching Elson’s suitcase, Arthit’s wife, Noi, is awakened, as she is so often these days, by the pain of her nerves burning away as multiple
sclerosis licks at the sheathing tissue that covers them. She has come to think of the disease as a fire in her body, sometimes banked and sometimes burning out of control, whipped up by something she does not understand. When the disease is raging, especially late at night, it seems there is a third person in the room with her and Arthit, someone who knows how to fan the flames just by staring at her. She feels his emotionless, clinical gaze through the darkness at times when Arthit is sleeping beside her, and on those nights she chews on the corner of her pillowcase to keep from moaning. Noi does not want Arthit to know how fierce the pain has become.
The room is full of light. Of course, it is afternoon. Arthit is off with Poke, making the world-as he likes to say-a more boring place. Her guests will probably be asleep, Rose on the couch and Miaow in the spare bedroom, the one she and Arthit thought would be the nursery until the disease chose their door from all the doors on the block and
knocked.
There is a child in the house, she thinks.
She stretches experimentally, feeling the coals burning in her elbows and fingers-not too bad, a thin layer of ash on them-and explores the weakness in her legs. She has learned in the past few months to test her legs one at a time while she is still in bed, putting one foot atop the other and pushing down, before she tries to stand. On the days when she knows she will be too unsteady to stay upright, she pretends to sleep until Arthit has left the house and then reaches under the mattress on her side of the bed for the aluminum cane he has never seen.
She hopes he has never seen it.
Lately it seems to her that they are playing two different games with similar rules. Noi does not tell Arthit about the progress of the disease because she does not want to burden him. Arthit pretends not to see it because he does not want to injure her pride. So the two of them, each with the other in mind, ignore the thing that has come to occupy the central place in their lives, filling that place with silence.
The place they thought a child would fill.
As she pushes back the covers, she realizes she awoke earlier, dragged up from sleep briefly and then allowed to sink again. It seems to her that the figure who fans the fire was standing at the foot of the bed, looking down at her. The image creates a cold ball of dread in her belly.
Her legs tremble beneath her, but hold, as she bends over the foot of the bed to pick up the robe Arthit bought her for no reason, not even her birthday. She hates the color, a sort of faded, pickled, unripe-banana green, but loves the idea of Arthit shopping for her. She can see those thick fingers picking up one flimsy garment after another as he stands stiff and conspicuously uncomfortable in his uniform in some department store, surrounded by women but unwilling to flee until he finds the one he likes, the one that makes her look as yellow as a wax candle. She slides her arms into the sleeves, pausing as she realizes she is standing exactly where the figure stood the first time she opened her eyes. The dread in her belly solidifies into a gelatinous mass.
Pushing it aside with an enormous effort, Noi limps into the hall. No cane today, not in front of her guests. The thought of the child, Miaow, carries her along.
The door to the spare room is ajar. Noi pushes it open a few inches to find Rose sitting on the bed looking at her, with Miaow asleep at her side, the child’s head pillowed on Rose’s arm. Even in sleep Miaow looks as if she’s in motion; her knees are drawn up like someone doing a cannonball into a swimming pool, and her mouth is half open. Rose smiles and lifts a finger to her lips, then eases her arm out from beneath Miaow. Miaow shifts and emits a syllable of complaint. Rose holds perfectly still until the child seems to be asleep again.
The kitchen is as warm as a hive, rich with the honey-colored afternoon light that slants through the windows and fragrant from the small pots of basil and rosemary Noi grows on the sill. Rose’s hair is a glorious tangle that Noi briefly envies and then forgets, concentrating on moving smoothly. “Coffee or tea?”
Rose gives her a sleepy smile. “Do you have Nescafe?”
“Of course.” Noi slides to the cabinet above the counter, lifting her feet as little as possible-it is the moment when they come back into contact with the floor that gives her the most trouble. She tries to make it look like a preference, perhaps a joke, but she can feel Rose’s eyes on her.
“Poke hates Nescafe,” Rose says. “It’s enough to drive me away.”
“Arthit drinks it by the quart. Hot, cold, lukewarm. He sprinkles it on ice cream.” She unscrews the lid of the jar, smaller and lighter than the ones she used to buy, more expensive but easier to handle. “Arthit’s not happy unless he’s nervous.”
“Poke truly loves Arthit,” Rose says, stretching long arms. “It’s a good thing I’m not jealous. Or very jealous anyway.”
“Life blesses you when you least expect it.” Noi puts the kettle on the burner and listens for the little poof as it ignites; she has a deep-seated dread of the kitchen filling with gas. “Arthit was certain he was through making friends. One thing I don’t understand is why it gets more difficult to make friends as you get older. Remember how many friends you used to have?”
“Thousands,” Rose says. “You said hi to somebody and they were glued to you. And it was impossible to be nosy then. Everybody wanted you to know everything. Nobody had a subconscious. And then one day everybody turned into a box of secrets.”
“It’s not that they got worse,” Noi says. She leans against the stove, feeling the comfortable warmth at her back. “Good people get better, I think, and bad people were already bad. It’s just that people close themselves up. I think of young people as standing like this”-she opens her arms-“and older people like this”-she crosses her arms protectively across her chest.
“Or this,” Rose says, shielding her privates. Noi laughs.
“It’s one reason I’m grateful for this illness,” Noi says. “It brought Poke and Arthit together.” Arthit had originally requested an interview with Rafferty when he learned Poke was writing the book that eventually became Looking for Trouble in Thailand. He went out and bought one of the earlier books in the series, Looking for Trouble in the Philippines, to satisfy himself that the new book wouldn’t fall into the genre of self-improvement for pedophiles, and the two of them had met for the first time over an unreasonable number of Singha beers. During the course of their mutual decline into inebriation, Arthit had told Poke about Noi’s disease, then in its earliest stages, and Rafferty had put him into contact with a doctor in Japan who was working on a promising new treatment. The treatment hadn’t worked, but the friendship had.