Authors: T. M. Hoy
The dorms were made entirely of reinforced concrete, built by the Japanese in WWII. Each floor had fifteen foot ceilings that captured the rare stray breezes of the tropics, and six heavy wooden propeller fans stirred the thick, humid air. Ten, six foot by two foot rectangular windows marched evenly down the two longest walls of the ward. A double set of pillars supported the roof at ten foot intervals, and marked the spacing of the three rows of beds.
The windows lacked glass, and the sole impediment to the elements were ancient. They were nothing but warped wooden shutters that were only closed for summer storms and during the rainy season. The rusty iron bars embedded in each window prevented escape, but did not hinder the free passage of swarms of insects, or the weather.
To the immediate right of the dorm entrance, two walls enclosed a fifteen by thirty-foot corner room where the blue boys slept that also doubled as the staff and treatment room during the day. This corner room held the original glass-fronted cabinets installed by the Japanese, which continued to store medical implements and drugs. The original teak furniture was also still in use in the office, kept gleaming by the prisoners’ daily polishing.
The hospital beds were also relics of the Occupation; simple iron-frame bedsteads with wooden slats for holding non-existent mattresses. Both floors had a fifty person capacity and the authorities kept the population down to the number of antique beds. It was the only place in the prison with generous sleeping space.
At the back of the wards, a waist-high concrete trough roughly three feet wide by fifteen long held the cooking and bathing water. Facing the trough across the bathroom were three porcelain toilet holes, separated from its neighbor by low concrete dividers a few inches high and wide. The toilet holes were raised two feet off the floor, but waste still slopped down, thanks to the carelessness and indifference of Thai prisoners raised as peasants. The bathroom floor angled slightly in toward a center drain hole. The decrepit
bathroom floor tiles were outlined in black despite daily cleaning; thickly caked with decades of excrement in the grouting.
Double gates of iron bars covered with steel mesh in the back wall acted as doors, and were kept chained and locked, but allowed a welcomed draught to circulate in the room. Near the doors a single small electric hot plate sat on a rough wooden worktable, plugged into a nearby electric outlet. It stayed busy twenty-four hours a day—the only concession by the authorities to ill prisoners. It allowed them to cook decent food and make tea or coffee with boiling water—if they could afford to purchase it.
The denizens of the second-floor ward ran the gamut from a few senile old men unable to care for themselves, to young AIDS patients, with prisoners suffering dozens of other more or less fatal ailments in between. The lepers occupied three beds in a row nearest the bathroom. It was an unspoken segregation—they were outcasts from society’s outcasts, doubly damned.
They shared a single plastic bowl among themselves, inherited from the Reptile Man. The largest of the three: Scabby number 1, reserved the ratty bamboo mat and cheap blanket the Reptile Man left behind for him. A metal-edged ruler (used to scrape off the leprous skin), a child’s hand mirror, and plastic utensils were shared equally between them. Aside from a cheap pad of brown paper and a handful of stubby pencils left in a drawer by some deceased patient, this pathetic list encompassed the worldly goods of the lepers.
Their skin seemed to have been shrink-wrapped around their bones; skeletal from reliance on the prison’s ‘food’ rations. Without any layer of fat, they were perpetually cold. It was odd to see them huddled together shivering on sweltering, muggy nights.
As a rule, Jaruk continued giving the lepers their medicine in spite of their inability to pay for it. It did them little good, only delaying the inevitable appointment with death, but however wretched their existence may have been, they were grateful for its extension.
Their days followed one another monotonously, an endless undifferentiated pattern that was a simulacrum of life—not life itself.
The bar that held the front gate shut was removed at 6:00 or 6:30 AM, and the morning ‘meal’ was brought in at 7:00 or 7:30. There was no rush. The place ran on ‘Thai-time,’ a loose and unhurried attitude. After all, who of us was going anywhere? Shortly after ‘breakfast’ was hauled upstairs in two old beat-up metal garbage cans—one filled with weevil-infested brown unhusked rice, the other containing fishbone-and-fish guts soup, the lepers would drag themselves out of bed.
They would wait patiently as the other prisoners jostled one another, scooping up portions of the slop with dirty hands and bowls. When the hindmost old man or AIDS victim had finished, as the weakest were always last, the lepers hobbled forward. Scraping up the grains of rice, and the dregs of the “soup,” they would share their meager repast.
Along with most of the other ambulatory prisoners, at 8:00 AM, the lepers were herded out by the blue boys to work in the hospital vegetable garden or to occasionally assist in the maintenance of the hospital fish ponds. They were unable to do much more than pantomime work, and the blue boys accepted this. So long as they pretended obedience, they were not abused.
Around 2:00 or 3:00 PM, the afternoon ‘meal’ was served, and was essentially a repeat of ‘breakfast.’ The second meal signaled the end of the working day at the hospital. After the meal and a completion of a head count, prisoners were allowed to bathe and to amuse themselves as best they could.
The lepers were not allowed to sit near anyone. They could not watch TV, which an inmate’s children had brought in for him, that acted as the ward’s TV. The Thais were hopelessly addicted to the television programs, mostly the Hong Kong productions that were loosely based on ancient Chinese melodramas. These garish, bizarre shows featured flying monks, scantily clad princesses, and warrior kings. Gods and goddesses popped out
of cupboards, further complicating the baroque plots. These fantasy shows held the ward captive through the evenings.
The lepers were no different, and presented a pitiful sight, straining to see the eleven inch screen from twenty feet behind the others.
Whenever the blue boys felt like it, the Thais had to retire for the night. Monks chanting in the Buddhist temple situated directly behind the hospital grounds drifted on through the air; a strange but comforting finale to the day.
Rise, eat, work, sleep;
ad infinitum et aeternum
, so it seemed.
Thus, when Scabby number 3 ceased pretending to work, too weak to do anything save eat a few listless bites; it was obvious that his death was near.
There was no wailing or gnashing of teeth; no dramatic gestures. Quietly, number 3 asked Jaruk for a two baht (eight cent) postage stamp to notify his family to pick up his ashes after cremation. Jaruk proved his essential decency by doing so—even writing the letter himself, as number 3 could not read or write.
A week after the letter had been mailed, number 3’s condition worsened, losing control of his bladder and bowels. The first time it happened, the lepers pleaded with the disgusted blue boys that it was just an accident; that they would take care of their comrade. The blue boys—since Jaruk was in a position too far above such concerns to bother interfering, reacted pretty badly.
Although number’s 1 and 2 scrubbed the bed boards until the wood looked raw, the blue boys were still incensed. Conditioned by years of abusing their authority, they used the incident as an excuse to be angry, rather than a cause. Their shouts rang off the walls:
“You filth! You piece of shit! What about the next prisoner using the bed?! You think anyone will touch it now?!”
They left him on the bed, but the next day brought the second time the leper fouled himself, and the blue boys were adamant. They tossed him onto the concrete floor, and berated the unconscious leper.
“Off! Off! No more shit!”
His comrades’ intervention was the only thing that saved him from a beating, caused by the blue boys’ manufactured rage.
Number 3’s condition grew so bad that any liquids or solids passed right through him, and number’s 1 and 2 gave up trying to care for him. The blue boys sluiced off number 3 with cold water twice a day to keep down the flies and ants, after making him lie on the bathroom tiles. Several feet of tiling separated number 3 from the bathroom entrance, and to save their labor, the blue boys insisted he lie there permanently. There was room to take a shower or use the toilets without stepping on him, but he was close enough that he was regularly splashed, and was perpetually damp. He was too far gone to react to the taunts and mockery of fellow prisoners.
Rolled up in a fetal ball, a threadbare throw-rug scavenged from the prison dump draped over his rags, number 3 seemed more dead than alive. His silence and unnatural stillness reinforced this perception to the point that he ceased to be an object of interest. Number 3 had become a low mound of abandoned scraps of cloth, with the odd bone or two jutting out at weird angles.
Day after day, the blue boys would prod with their toes to see if he still lived. Astonishingly, some stubborn instinct to survive overcame every obstacle. The lack of food, the numbingly cold concrete floor, the chilling puddle of dirty water in which he lay. Unlikely as it was, he refused to die. As for medical opinion and treatment, none was rendered or given.
The ‘doctor’ and ‘nurses’ would appear late in the morning, drinking copious amounts of tea from delicate porcelain cups, gossiping amongst themselves throughout the day. After an extended lunch, they would leisurely examine a few outpatient prisoners, convincing most of them that their complaints were psychosomatic, and therefore required no medicine or treatment.
Those prisoners whose illnesses were so serious as to be fatal or disabling might receive a bed on one of the wards and a handful of randomly chosen pills. The Filipina pharmacist had a degree in agriculture, but was woefully ignorant of drugs.
Monday through Thursday, the nurses would walk down one of the aisles between the three rows of beds, never once glancing at the ruined heap of number 3 scrunched up beneath his bed. The doctor would visit the upstairs ward twice a week, and also effortlessly managed to avoid ‘seeing’ number 3.
On Friday, an outside consultant with a real medical degree would come to the hospital. A retired physician, he was paid the fairly decent wage of 500 baht (twenty dollars) per hour, and would usually stay for about two hours. Making the rounds of both wards, he was the closest the place came to providing actual health care.
The waiting room/lobby in the front of the hospital administration building on Friday would be packed with prisoners whose complaints did not render them candidates for a hospital bed, but were still deserving of medicine. Ear and eye infections, skin diseases, broken bones, internal injuries; the list of ailments was long. The consultant was a short old man, thin and spindly, his skin blotted with liver spots. Bald, his eyes as sharp as they were clear, he could be brusque, but he was not unkindly. Many an inmate was spared agony thanks to his ministrations.
After working his way through the miseries of the general prisoner population, the doctor would make the rounds on the wards, attended by the prison doctor, and the two nurses.
The first time the old doctor laid eyes on number 3, he questioned the little group of hospital staff about the reason for this atrocious and inhuman treatment.
In a crisp, precise Thai very different from the smoother language considered polite, he demanded:
“Why is this man on the floor? Who ordered this, this … cruel treatment?”
The nurses were never lacking in imagination, and were quick to invent a story. Without a pause, the meanest nurse, a short, porcine thing with black eyes glittering with malice said:
“He chose to stay there. The concrete is cool. We lift him up, but he always goes back on the floor. He refuses to sleep on the bed. What can we do?”
The near-comatose leper could not refute this bold lie and none of the other prisoners dared to challenge the nurse’s version of events for fear of retaliation.
The next week, the doctor saw number 3 again, but paused only an instant, more a hesitation than an examination. His conscience may have pricked him, but with two dead bodies upstairs and another downstairs requiring he sign off on their death certificates, one more body close to death hardly merited more than a moment’s worth of concern. It was the last time number 3 received even a cursory look from medical personnel.
Without food or water, the leper had ceased to foul himself, and the blue boys had ceased dousing him regularly. No one knew or noticed when he died. His demise was discovered after a small army of ants converged on his head. The insects spilled over the bathroom tiles; enough of them so the Thais delegated to clean the ward had to get rid of the infestation.
The ants had efficiently consumed his eyes and the tender bits of his face before the blue boys hosed him off a final time. They hoisted him onto the bed he did not deserve while living, covered him with a sheet, and awaited the coroner’s squad.
His body lay on the ward for three days, a typical interval, before being bagged up and carted off. But the callous treatment he had received had an impact on the other lepers. As if in sympathy with his friend, scabby number
1 began to fail the day his friend’s corpse was taken to the temple crematorium.
Number 1’s “medical care” was no different from number 3’s, and his circumstances were the same, save that he was not as resilient.
I left the hospital before he had been consigned to the floor, though the blue boys had already made clear to number’s 1 and 2 that they were not going to tolerate any more incontinence—as if the lepers were doing it by choice. When I left, number 1 was still on the hard slats of the bed, with the thin bamboo mat as his mattress.
I saw Jaruk a month or so later and asked him about the fate of the lepers. He was surprised at my interest, but replied: