For Us Surrender Is Out of the Question (27 page)

“If it makes you feel any better,” I told Htan Dah, “Sheh Reh doesn’t actually know that much about animism either. He was telling me how his people consult chicken bones to make decisions and to tell them the truth, and he was saying they put a piece of bamboo through the hole of a chicken bone, and read the bones based on how the wood comes out of the hole, maybe, and then he was like, ‘Okay, I don’t know how it works.’ Eventually he just showed me a PowerPoint presentation.”

Htan Dah thought that was pretty funny. “He made PowerPoint?”

“Yeah. He made it about his customs so he wouldn’t forget them, he said.” I raised my voice over Htan Dah’s laughter. “It was pretty good!”

My cooking partner was in the same place at the table in the dining room/garage with the same chopping knife in hand when I got back from class, around dinnertime. Only now, the room held the darker, oranger light of the setting sun. And I was drunk.

With the drop of attendance in my morning, advanced class, due to those students’ work conflicts, I’d consolidated my efforts into just one afternoon class. The beginners came as always, and any advanced students could attend as their time allowed. Ta Mla had asked me before class that day if I would bring my camera and go up to the lake near Office Two with him when class was over. When it was, and we did, I realized he’d leaked the plans. As we sat on the grassy embankment that gave way to the glinting blue, looking
at perfect rolling hills that turned into dense forest and mountains beyond the farther shore, six of my students rolled up on bikes and motorbikes. They had backpacks and plastic bags full of Chang cans. They passed around my camera and took pictures of us all, or just two of us, or three of us at a time, against the sun that was shining and the sky that was not raining again and the glittering water, and when the beer was gone and we left to go back home for dinner I tipped my head way back on the back of Ta Mla’s motorbike, ours being third in a convoy of motorbikes carrying five refugees and their drunk-ass English teacher with my face to the sun and my hair flying behind me as madly as I grinned at the Thais who were sitting on the porches of their wooden shacks, or standing in small, scrappy fields next to their small, scrappy cows, or hovering knee-deep in rice paddies, until Ta Mla hit a gash between the road’s shoulder and the adjacent mud and we both smashed our flip-flopped feet into the asphalt to keep the vehicle from toppling. I showed my bloody toes to Htan Dah.

“What happened?” he asked. “Where have you been?”

I told him.

“I think maybe it is better you go with me,” he said.

“You didn’t come to class today! I
couldn’t
go with you. And you missed our party at the lake.”

“I had meeting! I am sorry. But Ta Mla is not so steady on motorbike.” He started laughing then, and told me that Ta Mla had just started driving recently, and that once, when he was pulling out of the driveway, he drove straight across the street and straight into the small pond that occupied the vacant lot there. It took several of them to drag the motorbike back out. “I am glad you are not injured,” he said. “Also, Eh Soe is looking for you.”

I turned around and walked into the house. “Yes! My darling! I am here!” I hollered. I found Eh Soe in the computer room.

“I have been looking everywhere for you,” he said. “Can you tell me ten proverbs?”

“What? For what?”

“For my class.” Every day, Eh Soe disappeared from five to seven. He was, I’d eventually found out, at his older brother’s house, tutoring his twelve- and thirteen-year-olds, along with two to four other kids from the neighborhood. The students attended Thai school, but the English instruction there wasn’t up to Eh Soe’s standards. He didn’t get paid for his teaching service, but it was important to him that these kids were well educated. So for two hours each evening, he sat on the floor with them around a little square table in a little rectangular room.

“You’re the one who’s into proverbs,”
⁵⁴
I said. “What’s that shit you said to me the other day? ‘We are born in a day, and live in a day, and die in a day, it seems’?”

“Didn’t you learn proverbs in your education?” he asked.

Probably. “Hold on. I’ll be right back.” I ran out the computer room door, through the living room, through the kitchen and the dining room/garage, where Htan Dah asked me where I was going now and I shouted that I’d be right back, and out the open dining room/garage door and across the driveway and into Abby’s little concrete yard. She was sitting on her little concrete porch.

“I need ten stupid proverbs that they taught us in school,” I said. We were saved from several minutes of wholly impotent brainstorming when we corralled and posed the question to a passing The Blay, who, weirdly, instantly rattled off the sought-after list: Too many cooks spoil the soup. A bird in the hand is better than two in the bush. Many small drops make a mighty ocean. An ounce of prevention is better than a pound of cure. Et cetera.

Eh Soe left for class, and Htan Dah and I cooked, and the Australian
administrator brought tall, fat bottles of Chang, and we ate and I got increasingly drunk. Htan Dah updated me on the status of my hugless Karenni friend, Sheh Reh: He’d made it to his new post as new staff at a BA office several hours away. He was safe, although he’d taxed the budget when he paid for the ride twice, once to the guy who was supposed to take him and then again to the guy who did take him when the other guy was late and Sheh Reh, alone, identification-less, panicked and bribed someone else to get him there with a hefty amount of BA funds.

I needed more money for Htan Dah.

It weren’t as if I could just stroll up to an ATM and withdraw nearly $2,500 in baht, so I’d been making daily trips to the one where the main, four-lane road dead-ended into a three-way intersection at the mouth to downtown. “Hey, Htoo Moo,” I said, descending on him in the computer room as he worked diligently on something. “If you come for a walk with me, I’ll buy you some ice cream.”

I spent the bulk of the ten-minute stroll explaining to Htoo Moo what the cash machine was and how it worked. When we got there, he watched me put my card in, punch in my PIN, and press a couple of buttons. Though I’d told him in great detail, and repeatedly, what was going to happen, he couldn’t fucking believe it when money came out.

We walked to 7-Eleven, where I picked out an ice cream novelty and Htoo Moo a milk, his first. He sipped it very cautiously and pensively, and I limped a little with the foot I still hadn’t washed the blood off, as we walked back to the house in the warm dark. However often he’d been arrested, Htoo Moo seemed not to be accompanied by the constant, crushing paranoia that followed most of our coworkers around town, and he sauntered casually along the side of the road. I, however, had by now internalized some of their skittishness, and tried to hustle Htoo Moo along by walking fast and keeping the conversation interesting enough that he’d bother to keep up with me. I looked for the source of every nonanimal sound, tensing every time
a passing car slowed or we passed other people walking on the side of the road. I was walking so fast that I was panting.

“In America,” I said—and he said “Yes?” expectantly, every time—“police aren’t allowed to stop you and make you give them money for no reason.”

He smiled wide. “Really?”

“Yeah. And they’re not allowed to arrest you if you aren’t doing anything illegal.”

“I would like to go there,” he said softly, shyly. Htoo Moo made no bones about the fact that he was trying to flee Southeast Asia entirely, where nobody wanted him anyway. He was applying for resettlement in the United States, New Zealand, Norway, anywhere. His brother had bailed to England. So had Sheh Reh’s cousins. Htoo Moo’s parents had died young, of poor health, and he had a sister in Bangkok somewhere but hadn’t seen her in ten years, and he’d been on the run himself in Thailand for sixteen now, and one of his camp classmates had called him recently from the UK and told him that being an actual citizen was just the bee’s knees. When I’d first learned that Htoo Moo was trying to escape, I’d been somewhat surprised. He’d seemed so gung-ho. “I thought you wanted to work for the future generations of your people,” I’d said. To which he’d responded, “Yes. But I’m afraid I will die before we get democracy.”

“Well, I hope you
can
go there,” I said now, because I didn’t know then that he actually
couldn’t
go there, on account of having materially supported terrorists. “You need to keep practicing your English. Even after I leave, you need to keep practicing with Htan Dah and Ta Mla. You’ve gotten much better since I’ve been here, just from having to practice with me, so you have to keep practicing after I’m gone, so you’ll be ready when you move to America.”

A car behind us slowed, then pulled over to the shoulder and stopped. Htoo Moo stopped walking and turned around to check it out easy as pie, but I broke out in a quick sweat and grabbed his arm.

“Let’s go,” I said, tugging on him. I hardly expected anyone to give
me and my almighty blue passport any trouble—though someone could; I certainly wouldn’t be the first American detained in Thailand for consorting with Burmese illegals—but Htoo Moo definitely wasn’t supposed to be out here, and who knew who was in that car? It was possible my presence would protect him, but from someone who had taken the time to pull over? And anyway, either way, it was always possible that it wouldn’t.

Htoo Moo ignored me and stayed firm but breezy where he stood, his face on the car curiously, unconcernedly.

“Htoo Moo, what are you doing?” I asked. “Let’s go.” But he shook me off and walked toward the car. One of the doors opened, and fear raced through my tensed torso. But then Htoo Moo started laughing when the driver stepped out, because it was his friend, and they gabbed on and on, and I stood there contemplating throwing up ice cream and beer.

Back at the house, boys and both of the white girls were crowded around a table covered with mugs and more Chang. Even the cat had joined the party. She’d stopped bleeding, apparently, and wound her way around the table legs.

“Eh Soe! You’re back!” I yelled, catching sight of my roommate. He looked up at me, and I looked at my watch. “How long have you been here?”

“Darling, I am already drunk,” he said.

Htoo Moo and I had walked in on another gay-rights conversation, evidently a continuation of the debate that Htan Dah and I had had on Abby’s porch the day before. The Australian administrator was calmly defending gays’ honor, and The Blay was furiously rebutting her. “Those people cannot be leaders. You will never see them in important position,” he was spitting, his voice low, his eyes bright, terrifying. The Australian was holding her ground, and I hated The Blay so much then that I didn’t even care to back her up. Anyway, Eh Soe was lecturing Abby about socialism on the other side of the table, so I sat by them instead.

“You have money in your bag,” he told her, rolling the wrist of his extended arm so that his palm ended face up, in her face, with every phrase, “so you buy groceries.”

“I’m actually buying the groceries,” I reminded him.

“Whatever,” he said, rolling his wrist again, faster this time, dismissive. “If I have money, I buy the food. Somebody that had money bought this beer.”

“Who did buy this beer?”

Eh Soe shook his head and shrugged. “I don’t know.”

It must have been a Karen. When the Australian had walked in with the beer earlier, she’d said, as she dropped it on the table, “I brought beer.” When The Blay had bought beer two nights ago, he’d said, “There is beer.”

“This beer is for everyone,” Eh Soe said. “Htan Dah’s motorbike is for everyone.”

“How
did
Htan Dah buy that motorbike?” I asked.

“He borrowed money from people. And they give it to him because they had some.”

“Our culture isn’t as community minded as yours,” Abby said. “If I wanted something big, I would save up money to buy it myself.”

“When I was at the lake today,” I said, “you know Saw Kaw? He told me I should leave my camera at Office Two. He said that if I left it, many people could use it, but if I took it back to America with me, only one person would be using it.”

“Did you give it to him?” Eh Soe asked.

“No.”

“You should.”

“I probably won’t. Commie.”

By the time all the beer and fight were gone, it was past my bedtime. I drew a picture of happy stick people for Htan Dah, who hadn’t looked very happy when I’d found him in the other room, before brushing my teeth, spitting foamy toothpaste onto the floor of the bathroom. I stripped down and doused myself in cold water, washing
everything down the drain hole in the corner. Upstairs, lying down, my head was dull and swimmy. My bus back to Bangkok was leaving two weeks from tomorrow. Htan Dah was leaving a week from today. I hadn’t had enough time yet, and didn’t have enough time left, and had been staving off the sad panic of a clock running down with my very busy day, but now, with boozy exhaustion enveloping me in the cool silence under my mosquito net and twenty-five thousand baht in my bag, I let it in.

 

THE NEXT
morning, Htoo Moo looked rough. It was Tuesday. My goals for the day were to have a stunningly successful class and to relieve my rapidly diminishing checking account of another fifteen thousand baht. “Eh Soe was talking in his sleep,” Htoo Moo said, groggy, slumping down at the table.

Personally, I’d slept pretty well, since Eh Soe hadn’t been around to keep me up. He told us, laughing, when he joined us for breakfast that he’d drunkenly picked a phone fight with his girlfriend last night because she didn’t invite him to her birthday party. I’d heard Eh Soe’s relationship drama before, without even realizing it: He was talking so low and soft one night that I asked him later if he’d been having phone sex or something. Actually, his girlfriend was sick, and he’d made her cry by teasing her about it, and his sexy-sounding talk was just his talking her down. Last night, apparently, he told her that she cared only about her friends and that he didn’t want to talk to her anymore. She hung up on him. He tried to call her back, but she’d turned off her phone. After that, he must have passed out in the living room, where Htoo Moo slept, and kept his end of the fight going in his sleep.