Reseated, we two decided to split an extravagantly expensive banana split. We all would also share a couple of coconuts with the
tops sliced open and straws sticking out of them. “Do you guys want to order for us?” I asked.
Htan Dah said, “You can,” while Eh Soe shook his head.
“But you guys speak Thai.”
“They don’t speak English?” Htan Dah asked.
“Yeah, I mean, a little.” Curiosity had driven Abby and me to Khao Mao Khao Fang once before. I’d had a red cocktail that came in a glass shaped like a headless naked lady. “But they definitely speak Thai better. Because they’re Thai. And you guys speak Thai.”
Here Htan Dah and Eh Soe denigrated their ability to speak Thai, as always, and Abby and I chastised them for being overmodest, as we’d both seen them do it plenty well at markets.
“Normally, you would order in English,” Eh Soe said.
“That’s just because we don’t speak Thai! But you do!”
“Not here,” Htan Dah said. “You’re not.”
Abby and I ordered for the table, in English, with plenty of pointing at the items on the menu. The quality of the banana split was middling. The gigantism of the coconuts was daunting. When we’d all had enough, Eh Soe started twisting and turning and looking around the restaurant in his seat.
“Now what?” he asked.
“Now we wait for a bill,” Abby said.
“When is it coming?”
“We have to ask for it,” I said. “They never bring you the bill in Thai restaurants. Whereas in American restaurants, generally you can’t keep a waiter from slapping a bill on your table.”
“Because,” Htan Dah ventured, “time is money?”
I laughed. “That’s right.”
I wanted to go to the lake by Office Two, to go for a ride, to stay out and with my housemates, but Eh Soe complained that it was dark, it was late, he wanted to go home so he could lie down. So we called Eh Soe a princess, called it a night, went back.
And lie down we did. Eh Soe went straight upstairs and took his
place on his bench. Htan Dah sprawled prone on the floor next to it. I got on the floor, too, on my back, propping my feet up on Eh Soe’s legs on the bench and my head on Htan Dah’s butt.
“I was terribly disappointed by the conversation last night,” Eh Soe said, sitting up a little against the wall I’d posted the “No Smoking” sign on to light a cheroot.
“Really?” I asked. “You seemed like you were having a good time.”
“I don’t understand why we have to be talking about democracyyy, human riiights. ...”
“That was like, fifteen minutes’ worth of conversation.”
He shook his head. “I don’t want to talk about this. People are too drunk and talk about it for too long.”
Abby joined us, having checked her email downstairs, sitting down on the edge of Eh Soe’s bench. “What are you guys doing?” she asked.
“This,” I said.
She wiped her forehead. “God. It’s hot in here.”
“Yeah, it’s pretty muggy,” I agreed. It was late for it to be so sticky. “It’s got to still be, what do you think ...” I stopped and turned my face toward Htan Dah, my cheek against his butt cheek. “Do you guys use Fahrenheit or Celsius?”
Silence.
“Do you know what I’m talking about?”
No.
“They’re temperature scales, broken up into degrees. So I could say how hot or cold something is with a number of degrees on the scale.”
“Oh, yes. When we have malaria,” Eh Soe volunteered, “the doctor says, ‘You have one hundred and two fever.’”
“Yeah, right. So that’s your temperature on the Fahrenheit scale. That’s the scale we use in the States. So guess how many degrees it is in here right now.”
Htan Dah shrugged. “Six?”
I rotated my head on his posterior and turned to Abby. “How many degrees is it in here right now?”
“Eighty.”
“Yeah, see, I was going to say seventy-eight. So obviously that’s about what the temperature is.” Abby and I were smiling at each other. “We know that scale well enough to be able to tell the temperatures of things.” We were really impressive.
“Why?” Eh Soe asked.
“Because, if you know what the temperature is, you know, like, what to wear if you’re going outside,” Abby said.
“We have temperatures,” Htan Dah said. “Hot . . . not so hot . . . cold. ...”
“Yeah, but we live in a place with seasons, and we need to know exactly what the temperature is so we know if we need to take a sweater, or a coat.”
Htan Dah and Eh Soe said nothing, because they were polite, but their faces clearly weren’t buying our assertion that they’d never survive with just an adjectival scale in the West, where total accurate internalization of an established scientific unit of temperature measurement was essential. I couldn’t say, now that I was actually thinking about it, that I was convinced, either. I would have traded that superpower for the one Htan Dah had that told him when an egg was done boiling, or the one that’d enabled him to wake me up in a windowless hotel and say, his voice low and soft and even in the boozy dark, “Dawn is coming,” and be right.
We tacitly agreed to drop it, quiet for a moment. Abby passed the lull by looking over my lounging configuration as though registering it for the first time. “Are you comfortable?” she asked me.
“On this ass?” I tapped the back of my head against its shapely rest. “Absolutely.”
Eh Soe laughed. “If Htan Dah’s wife catches him on the floor like this with a Karen girl,” he said, “she will cut off his . . . rations.” He laughed harder. “His skin rations.” And harder. “The rations at night.”
“We get it, Eh Soe,” I said. “But I’m not an actual girl, right, because I’m
kaw la wah
.”
Eh Soe nodded while he wiped his eyes. “That’s right, that’s right.”
Abby went to bed, and Eh Soe went to go get ready for bed, and just like that, it was time for bed on my last night in the Mae Sot house of BA.
Htan Dah and I sat up, across from each other, cross-legged on the floor.
“Thanks for keeping me fed, and keeping me company,” I said. “Even on the first morning, you kept me company when I had breakfast.”
“Yes. I worried that you will be lonely, or homesick. I didn’t want you to cry.”
“Isn’t it weird that people come to help you and just cry all the time?”
He shrugged. “It is normal.”
“Well, seriously, I’m very grateful to you. Thank you.”
“Thank you!” He smiled. “And, you are welcome!”
We counted the hours back from my morning bus departure to determine what time we’d have to wake up to go to the market. The answer was, really, really early.
“I’ll cook for you,” Htan Dah said. “I can go to the market and cook. You can sleep.”
I shook my head. “I can sleep anytime. I can’t spend time with you anytime.”
“That’s true.”
I climbed under my mosquito net onto my mattress, and he crawled to the foot of it, lay on his back on the floorboards, and went to sleep.
MY ALARM
went off before dawn.
I reached for the dull, subdued beeping and slapped it quiet, pushing myself onto my side. The objects around me began to take
shape—wide mosquito net, tilted window slats, lifeless figure a few feet away. I slid underneath the netting.
“It’s time to get up,” I said, sidling up to where Htan Dah lay with his body rigid against hard wood, exactly as he’d lain down. I pressed the length of my body against his arm. I was still for a moment. “Htan Dah,” I said. I shook him gently. “It’s time to get up.” These refugees were used to packed rooms. They slept like the dead.
Htan Dah breathed in hard when I said his name and shook him again. “You can sleep,” he said, just above a whisper. “I can go to the market alone.”
“Stop it.”
We pulled onto our side street on his motorbike. Mae Sot was silent in the darkness. Out on the main thoroughfare, even the roosters were tranquil. Passengers in Asia may not generally hold on to their drivers, but I wrapped my arms tight around Htan Dah’s waist. We were alone on the road. He drove slowly. I watched stray dogs pass and the stately white municipal building approach from my usual place behind him, his hair catching on the wind we were making. He leaned back and turned his head toward me a little so I could hear him.
“Time is so fast,” he said.
We pulled through the only intersection on the route big enough to have a light, toward the shortcut through the temple grounds strung with lights, and I dug my fingers into him, pressed my face between his shoulder blades, and cried.
We had two hours before we had to leave for the bus station. Though the time was disappearing fast, consumed by a rash of banal errands, the moments moved weirdly, exquisitely slowly: turning my hips to miss a table corner in a narrow walkway in the market. Palming a head of cauliflower, hard florets against my fingers like braille. Laying a knife on a garlic clove, parallel to the cutting board, and pressing until the skin cracked. Laying my weight on my mattress to push the air out. Considering, as I repacked my bag, how stupid
it was to bring these shoes that I hadn’t worn since the plane, as though I’d have needed an alternative to flip-flops, while Htan Dah watched and speculated that we’d see each other again in 2008—in two years—and I insisted sooner than that. Explaining to Eh Soe that I’d left that shampoo in the bathroom on purpose, so they could use it. Instructing Htoo Moo that these blue bullet-like pills were calcium, good for his bones, he would absorb more of the nutrients if he took them with food. Standing in the driveway in a circle of Eh Soe and Htan Dah and Htan Dah’s friend who’d happened to show up, the three of them debating how to best divide up our bodies and my luggage on motorbikes to get to the bus station, Ta Mla and Htoo Moo ambling around waiting for them to decide so it’d be time for them to officially say goodbye to me and go back in the house and get back to work. Next to the idling bus, I leaned my back against Htan Dah’s chest, and Eh Soe and I stared alternately at each other and the ground. In my bus seat, I watched the two of them watching me through the window and then they were gone. They went home and changed into red and white Karen shirts, respectively, and took Abby, soon on her own way out of Mae Sot, to an annual Karen ceremony on the day of that August full moon, swarming with thousands of migrants and refugees who ate fried yellow beans and banana stem soup together and then rubbed strings on each other’s forearms to call their spirits back to their bodies before binding them together at the wrist with the string. Several days later, the guys slipped into Burma to attend the 56
th
annual commemoration of martyrs of the KNU’s war.
BACK IN
the States, I rolled out of bed late to pull together school clothes and syllabi, passing hot, jet-lagged nights in front of hours of syndicated sitcoms. When I slept, I dreamed that my grade-school best friend and I walked into a small town somewhere in America with our arms slung around each other’s shoulders. She became concerned that this group of guys, buff and in tank tops and following us
a little too closely, was going to start trouble. Maybe they for some reason thought we were transvestites, she speculated, and this wasn’t the type of town that took kindly to that. When they confronted us, forming a half circle in our path that we couldn’t escape, we explained that we weren’t doing anything wrong, that is, that we were biological women, but it didn’t matter. They were there, I knew, to fight us for the ease and the fun. My friend punched one in the face and we ran, and thought we’d lost them, but ultimately their shadows crept over us as we squatted in a lonely patch of grass with the sun at our backs. They chased us into a souvenir shop and cornered us, and I screamed at the two employees who stood watching to call the police, call the police, I was impossibly alert and alarmed, and the employees didn’t move and I knew that there were no police who would help, and the men closed in around us, calmly smiling, and as my hope for getting away died I felt the blood under my electric skin give up and give in, the cells bursting at the realization of predictable and unpreventable horror. When I woke up, I tried to calm myself with gratitude that it wasn’t happening, it’s not happening, look, see, you’re in a bed. Safe girl. Lucky girl. But my brain couldn’t make my body move, paralyzed, still, by my heart’s hard-pounding panic, whatever I told it. It’s not happening, shhhh, safe girl, lucky girl . . .
IN MAE
Sot, Htoo Moo woke up around seven. He opened his eyes to the mosquito net surrounding him, and beyond that, the underside of the overhanging roof. He got up, peed, washed his face, and walked back out onto the balcony, wrapping himself in his gray wool blanket to write in his journal while the early chill pricked his cheeks.
Eh Soe rolled on his bench, groaning, reluctant. In the big room next door, Ta Mla and Gaw Say weren’t sleeping, but they lay still on the hardwood floor. Downstairs, Htan Dah was standing at the sink rinsing six cups of rice. He could hear over the water running into the big metal pot that it was raining, hard; the drops met the tin roof in steady sheets. He looked straight ahead, not looking, as he
scooped up handfuls of the grain and rubbed the granules between his palms.
Soon, Eh Soe plodded downstairs, turned on a computer, and brought the jumpy, metallic notes of the BBC Burmese news stream theme into the room as other staff members came in, still rubbing their eyes, to immediately take their places at the desks. Ta Mla did the dishes from last night, dropped the stone mortar gently on the table, and pestled herbs and peppers into curry paste. The morning had started. Htan Dah pulled himself away from the sink and the soothing swoosh of rice through his fingers and put it on to simmer, grabbed his keys, straddled his motorbike, and got to work, pushing himself out into the driving rain.
It was indeed 2008 the next time I saw Htan Dah.
He was standing on a sidewalk, squinting against the sun at my approach, power lines overhead. We were in the San Francisco Bay Area, where we both lived.