Bangkok Knights (20 page)

Ernest had been drinking more than he should have. Just as
alcohol enhances conviviality, it exaggerates the darker moods. At one point,
I’d seen him cast a sudden wild look at the river. Then he shot another at
Thonburi, on the other side, and another at the sky. He was doing a good job of
behaving like a man who was completely disorientated, and who considered this
an alarming state of affairs.

“That was really funny,” he told us, not looking, not able
to look at the water. “I had a funny feeling — a kind of premonition. A black
sort of anxiety, if you want to know the truth. And I thought the river was
flowing backwards. Funniest damn thing.”

“It
is
flowing backwards,” I told him. And sure
enough, in the lights from the restaurant you could see the water hyacinth and
whatnot drifting back upcountry at a rate of knots, the way it should’ve been
coming down. But I knew every mood and quirk of this river, what with all
ihtyampla
dukfoo
and beer I’d shared with Sunantha, these past months. “That’s the
tide. We’re close enough to the sea that the high tide reverses the current.”

“Oh. Yeah.” You could see Ernest was relieved he could
look back at the water, rational order having been restored to this part of his
world, at least.

Noi was scheduled for an emergency operation. There was a
tumor—a big one. Too soon too say if it was malignant. A delicate business even
if it turned out to be benign, or so the specialists had said. Fortunately,
there would be a surgeon available in a few days — someone very experienced at
just this sort of thing. It should be done immediately.

“And I didn’t
goddamn
believe her,” said Ernest.

“There’s no point in blaming yourself,” I advised. The
tired old cliches seem to impose themselves no matter what you try to say.

”I just wouldn’t
believe
her. Just superstition, I
said. Nothing but hypochondria. Suggestibility. Jesus Christ. And she was
dying”

“You don’tknow that,” I told him. “The doctors don’t know
how much danger she’s really in. They did say it was lucky they found it when
they did.”

They had found a large pituitary tumor — a rare and
fascinating thing, a growth on the inside of her skull. It had been growing
there year after year till it was pressing on the hypothalamus, on the
pituitary gland, and, finally, on the optic nerve. That’s when she’d started to
have problems with her vision, though, like the other symptoms, her sight had
worsened by imperceptible degrees, and only lately had she suspected something
was wrong. Crazy little symptoms, some of them, like for example she ‘d started
drinking more and more water—almost enough to do herself harm, finally — this
being one consequence of the pressure on her hypothalamus.

They told Ernest they were fairly confident they could
remove the tumor without complications, but he had to understand there was
always a significant risk in these cases. And it had gone pretty far; it was a
big one.

The doctor asked Ernest if he hadn’t realized Noi had been
ill.

“But she never
told
me,” Ernest said. “Nothing.
Nothing unusual, anyway —just the usual nonsense about medicines and, this last
week, this idea she had AIDS.

“My God; even her
sight
has been affected. And she
didn’t say anything!

“I just laughed at her. Called her a nitwit. ‘What’s a
“nitwit”?’ She didn’t know what a nitwit was; and when I explained, she got
angry. I don’t blame her. That was just last week. And now she’s got a brain
tumor.”

Ernest asked me to understand that he was sorry he’d said
the things he had about Noi. I mustn’t think badly of Noi; I had to understand
she came from a different background. She had a different way of looking at
things, sometimes. But what the hell. We probably all had our little
superstitions, when it came right down to it. Did I know what he meant? Our
myths, our own little ways of trying to bring sense to our experience. Most
people, anyway; or so Ernest told me.

“Why?”
The anguish in his voice drew looks from the
neighboring tables, and I tried to stare them down, because this was easier
than looking at Ernest.

Why? I didn’t know why. Nobody ever did know why, in these
circumstances — even those who
hadn´t
lost their faith at the age of
nine.

Ernest went to find a phone. He was going to try to phone
Noi at the hospital.

Ernest needed help, Sunantha told me. “He think, think,
think too much,” she said. “He loves Noi and wants to help her, but he is too
nervous. And this makes it hard for Noi, because now she has to worry about
him, too.

“I couldn’t get through,” he said, when he rejoined us. “They
wouldn’t let me talk to her.... If there was only something I could
do,
God
damn
it.”

When Ernest was a little boy, he told us, he used to pray
when he wanted something really badly. To tell the truth, he said, even
after
he’d reasoned the non-existence of God and Company, he’d prayed sometimes,
though he hadn’t had any idea who it was he’d been addressing his prayers to.
“It was like I was talking to myself, in a way.”

It had been as though he’d talked to some higher, less
vulnerable side of himself: essentially, in some way he didn’t quite
understand, appealing to
himself
for reassurance. As he told Sunantha
and me these things, Ernest looked shamefaced, the way a guy would if he had
admitted to you that he still stayed awake waiting, hoping to catch sight of
the Easter Bunny.

“There are no atheists in foxholes, Ernest,” I said, once
again seeking my own reassurances in the tried and tired old wisdoms, never
mind I didn’t really even believe what I was saying.

“I´ve tried to pray for Noi, you know.” Ernest asked for
more coffee. “But it doesn’t work. I can’t take myself seriously. It’s like I
don’t
deserve
to have my prayers answered. I even went into a church
yesterday—that place down on Convent Road. But it didn’ t do any good. I was a
stranger there. There was nothing I could get hold of. The minister came over
and asked me if I needed something, and I asked him when their old book sale
was going to be held this year.”

“You should try the Erawan Shrine, maybe,” I suggested,
meaning to make a joke, immediately regretting the flippancy.

Ernest chose to take me seriously. “That’s where Noi
goes...,” he said, looking thoughtful.

“Oh, Ernest!” The earlier story of lost faith had almost
put her into a coma, but now Sunantha came alive. “That’s what you should do!
Yes. I will come with you. I can help you. Show you what to do.

“And you must come, too,” she told me. “We will all ask
Phra Prom for help together. For Noi.”

For Noi. Right Could it be, I thought, however unkindly,
that Sunantha’s proposed expedition might have other, less generous purposes?
Who could tell what kind of deals would be made with this ‘spirit’, before all
was said and done.

By the time the rain stopped the river was running out to
sea again. And Ernest seemed calmer, as we went out to look for a taxi.

We did all go to the shrine, a couple of days later, and
it was a foully wet and gray afternoon, with traffic piled up in great heaps of
drowned vehicles everywhere belching and farting their last noxious clouds of
hydrocarbons.

Whatever atonements were being made, there on that
pilgrimage, it should’ve been enough simply that we’d made the journey. I felt
like a total nitwit, and I had a hard time ceasing and desisting from letting
Sunantha know exactly how I felt and who I felt was responsible.

“You be quiet,” she told me. “You are making Ernest feel
bad. This is for Ernest. And for Noi.”

Despite the rain and the traffic, there were quite a few
people there. And there was no shortage of sidewalk hawkers, each more
insistent than the one before that we buy their flower garlands. Their joss
sticks and candles. Their crudely carved little wooden elephants.

Sunantha finally chose our offerings, and we entered the
compound to confront the four-armed, four-faced golden image on its sheltered
pedestal. I looked at Ernest, I guess seeking a reciprocal expression of rueful
despair. But he was oblivious, away somewhere in a little world of his own.

Sunantha thrust my joss sticks and garland at me and told
me to do what she did. We lit the incense and candles and joined a short queue
waiting at the base of the image.

“You see what you must do?” Sunantha told us. “You should
sit on the ground with your feet pointing back, away from Phra Prom. You hold
the incense sticks and flowers this way, and you do this—like you are
wailing
but you must touch the ground with your head. Your forehead. You see that
man?”

I did see him; and he was carrying these maneuvers off
with no end of panache. The only thing was, he was a Thai, and he could do this
without occasioning undue comment. Ernest and I, however, were/ara/ig, and one
just didn’t see Westerners carrying on this way. Not here in Bangkok, anyway,
at a Brahman shrine. I was aware of the interest our fellow pilgrims had been
showing in us. Amusement seemed to be the most common reaction, though I
thought it was resentment I read in some faces. But Ernest remained oblivious.
His face was flushed, features set with dark determination.

“Remember,” said Sunantha. “You must make your wish, but
then you should promise to do something for Phra Prom in return.”

Sunantha went first. Then Ernest. He prostrated himself
with awkward abandon, and he took longer than anyone else had to finish his
dealings with the spook that reputedly inhabited this place, this Phra Prom.

My communion was much more perfunctory. I pointed my big
Western arse at the people waiting behind, tapped my forehead briefly on the
damp concrete, and wondered whether Sunantha would make a fuss if I decided to
hit Happy Hour at Boon Doc’s later.

To my own surprise, then, as I started to get up I had
second thoughts, and I put my head down once again just long enough to fashion
a quick plea on Noi’s behalf. I didn’t know who I was pleading with, mind you —
like the prayers Ernest had been telling us about the other night

Sunantha was pleased with me, and her eyes glowed with
enough affection to make me uncomfortable. Too late, I thought of other matters
I could’ve discussed with Phra Prom, just while he was busy putting in the fix
for me anyway, I mean.

We added our flowers to the enormous piles of similar
offerings left by what must* ve been hundreds of earlier petitioners. Outside
the compound, we encountered a young girl squatting on the pavement under a
parasol with a stack of tiny wooden cages, each cage crammed with fluttering,
twittering little birds. The idea was, you could gain merit—accumulate good
karma — by paying the girl to release a bird. It had always been my thinking
that by so doing you were encouraging the practice, and therefore your twenty
baht
was indirectly responsible for the imprisonment and torture of countless
little birds to come. So I’d never bailed one of these unfortunate creatures out.

Sunantha insisted, however. Ernest let five of them go,
and Sunantha borrowed forty
baht
from me so she could release two more.

In consequence, I suppose some would argue, we got a taxi
immediately we needed one, and he didn’t charge an arm and a leg, despite the
weather, and as I sank back into the seat and we pulled away I felt a strange
and pleasant sense of release.

As things turned out, it was a model operation, and Noi
was a model patient, or so all the hospital staff said.

Ernest, at the same time, had been everything a visitor
shouldn’t ever be. He’d shown a concern bordering on hysteria for the brave
patient. He’d tried to familiarize himself with every detail of her medical
care, fought against the constraints they wanted to impose on his visiting
hours, and kept trying to find doctors older than he was for second opinions.

When he wasn’t at the hospital looking after things,
Ernest spent most of his evenings with myself and Sunantha. His moods swung
from fair optimism, when he’d go on about his plans for after Noi was released,
to black despair and guilt, when he’d tell us again how he’d been such an
unfeeling, narrow-minded bastard, and how he wasn’t going to be able to handle
it if she didn’t pull through okay.

“He is making himself crazy,” Sunantha told me. “He wants
to do something to help, but he is just making things worse.”

It was very nearly the end of the rainy season. The
festival of Loy Krathong had come around yet again, reminding me of how the
years were sliding by; how many years in Thailand was this, anyway?

Sunantha invited Ernest to enjoy Loy Krathong with us. “We
go every year together,” she told him. “To the river.”

We had done it once, certainly; that had been just last
year. But we’d only known each other a little longer than that. What was this
‘every year’ stuff, anyway?

“I wish Noi were here with us,” said Ernest.

We’d had another big feed at our restaurant, and then
walked along the river to the university and then to the Phra Pinklao Bridge to
watch the people launch the little
krathong,
the exotic little boats
fashioned from banana leaves and flower petals (or, more often these days, it
has to be said, from plastic and paper), each with its incense sticks, its
candle, flowers, and coin. The river was covered with candle-lit flotillas,
each and every light carrying someone’s wishes for happiness, all of them
floating towards the sea. Families, lovers, tourists, the whole world was out
to celebrate the festival.

Sunantha had found two of the biggest and most lavishly appointed
krathong
anybody had ever seen, and we took them down to the pier beside
the bridge. I liked Sunantha’s characterization of this ritual’s significance:
“When you make your wish, and float your
krathong,
you float away all
your cares and troubles for that year, and you look with a fresh face to the
next year.”