For Us Surrender Is Out of the Question (37 page)

“EH SOE!” I tore into the house yelling for my roommate when we got back. I found him lying on his bench. When I flipped on the lights, he looked out at me from behind his mosquito net, groggily alarmed in his underwear.

“When you kiss your girlfriend, do you ever open your mouth?”

Eh Soe relaxed his head back down and tsked. “That’s just Hollywood,” he said.

“That’s not just Hollywood!” I shrieked. “People really do that! All the time!”
⁷¹

“Real?” he asked with mild interest, then rolled back over.

 

“GIVE ME
Karen kisses,” I requested the next day, when Eh Soe was awake. I’d sat down next to him on the reading bench in our room after breakfast.

“Real?”

“Yes!” Though Eh Soe had a girlfriend, Eh Soe was also kind of a racist, so I knew his kissing me would be strictly perfunctory and not a violation of his relationship commitments. Once, he’d come to take a nap on the bench, and I’d already been lying on it. When I’d told him I wasn’t moving but he could lie down with me, he’d jumped down at my side. “Isn’t your girlfriend going to be mad you’re in bed with another woman?” I’d asked. He’d tsked. “You’re a white person. You’re not a
real
woman.”

Eh Soe leaned toward me now and made his mouth closed and lax before placing it and his nose lightly against mine and inhaling. He withdrew a very little, then did it again, and then again to the sides of my mouth, my cheek, breathing in through his nose every time our slack faces made soft contact.
⁷²

“Like that,” he said, pulling away and shrugging.

“Wow.” I shook my head. “So when you said you and your girlfriend make out in the park, that’s what you meant?”

“Yeah, sure.”

“Karen people don’t French,” I announced to Abby next door, after folding my legs beneath me across from where she sat on her chalky concrete floor.

She looked up from her laptop and said “What?” like she hadn’t heard me.

“The guys. They don’t French.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, they think it’s movie make-believe, like the dinosaurs in
Jurassic Park
.”

“
Really
?” she asked, her eyes going wide. “Wait.” She considered for a moment. “What do you mean? So what do they do?”

“Relax your face,” I said. “Don’t—don’t do anything. Just leave your face like that.” I leaned over and mashed my face gently into hers, inhaling every time our features met.

“Wow,” she said when I’d sat back on my haunches. “That’s . . . thoroughly unerotic.”
⁷³

“Apparently they don’t open their mouths for anything, not for kissing, no licking.” I paused dramatically. “No. Oral.”

Abby’s mouth dropped open. “Seriously?”

“Seriously. Although ...” I started laughing. “When I was asking Eh Soe and Htan Dah about it, and described it to them, they were like, ‘Oh, yeah, we’ve seen that in special Internet movies,’ and couldn’t
believe
that it ever happened in real life.”

Abby moved her head in a slow, disbelieving shake.

“Yeah. And no noise!” I suddenly remembered them saying. “They have completely spitless, soundless sex. Which, I guess that makes
sense in a culture where you get married and possibly move into a hut with your mom. But I was totally trying to talk Eh Soe into Frenching his girlfriend, and he just kept laughing and shuddering.”

Like the day before it, that day was simultaneous party recovery and party preparation. It was Office One’s turn for me to throw myself a going-away party for them, and Abby had decided to throw her going-away simultaneously, though she wasn’t leaving for a couple of weeks, and since she wasn’t throwing a separate party for Office One and Office Two, Office Two was also invited, though I’d thrown them a party just several hours before. Abby and I had a lot of work to do before dark. And with the combined purchasing powers of two white girls in Thailand, nothing could stop this party from attaining total awesomeness.

I had to apologize for dragging ass and needing a nap (“I’m sorry, Abby. I haven’t changed my clothes or slept or been sober for more than a few hours at a time since Friday, and I’ve mostly just been eating bags of peanuts from 7-Eleven.” “What are you, nineteen?”), but by the time our guests arrived we’d brought a torrent of provisions to bear on the dining room/garage table.
Three
bottles of shitty “Kentucky” vodka. Three more cartons of orange juice, because we had little choice, because there was no cranberry juice for sale in Mae Sot. Eight heaping orders of pad thai. Three chicken-and-potato roti. Six limes. Lemons and sugar—I wasn’t really the kind of girl to do or peddle lemon-drop shooters, but there was ceremony in it! A big bottle of Coke. Ice. Another twenty-four oversize bottles of Chang. Sixteen sweet waffles with corn, from Abby’s favorite street griddle, which Abby wanted to withhold until some of the savory foods had been worked through. A chocolate fucking cake, in a country where you could hardly find a loaf of bread, inscribed with love and our names in red frosting. We managed to spend about eighty bucks, no small feat considering that that was what our big old house cost in monthly rent. There was curry that someone had made for dinner, too, and I tossed a slightly smoked pack of Marlboro Reds into the
midst of the callipygian crew crowding around the table listening to Poe K’Ler Htoo tell a story about Htoo Moo’s sending an inappropriate interoffice email.

Lemon drops with a Chang back for everyone. Eh Soe raced to get wasted, per his preference, per his disregard for the terrible headache he’d complain about the whole next day if he drank on an empty stomach because he wanted to get very drunk very fast. (“I like this feeling.”) “When you get back to the United States,” he was soon asking me, “can you send me some pills to lose weight? I don’t understand why some other people drink beer and don’t exercise and they don’t get fatty. Why isn’t Htan Dah fat?” He jumped to his feet and thrust his hands out and started dancing about in place crazily, excited by the heated debate, when I threw my fist into the table and hollered at several guys for again mocking my insistence against drunk driving.

“This is a democracy,” Walt said, breaking in to settle the fight. “Democracy is essential for human rights. If there is an issue, we will vote.” I lost the right to take away everyone’s keys, but won the English-only initiative. So when Collin asked Poe K’Ler Htoo for a lighter in Karen, Walt informed him that he had to take off his fucking pants, which was a sure sign that Walt had had enough. In response to said request for the lighter, Poe K’Ler Htoo said gravely that he was happy to hand it over, because we should all love each other, very much, which was a sure sign that he’d had enough, too. Collin as well, insistent on more Ohio kisses and telling me I was like the rain, coming to cool things and make things pleasant and then leaving and everything was sweltering again. And Abby
must
have been drunk, because she made eye contact with me across the table, raised her brows, and asked, “Should we break out the W-A-F-F—”

“Dude,” I said. “They’re not dogs. Or retarded.” I started laughing. “Or even illiterate. I think they know how to spell ‘waffles.’”

Ta Mla had been pretty quiet all night. But I wasn’t worried about
him. He’d had a dark day that day before, when he’d come raging into the dining room/garage after his arrest, but today, despite his ever-renewing trauma, he was triumphant again. He’d left the house early to go to church,
⁷⁴
and had returned beaming like the very sunshine. There’d been white people at mass, Irishmen. They’d told Ta Mla they were interested in what was happening to Burma, to him, and that had made him feel “strong.” Now he finally spoke up, having left and then reentered the room with a box wrapped in shiny pink paper.

“We want to thank you,” he said, handing me the box. For my time and skills. It meant a lot to them. In this box was a gesture and though the gesture was small they hoped I would accept it and remember them by it. Everybody smiling and clapping and blushing with booze and heat, and me pretending that this speech and box hadn’t been given a hundred times before. Inside was a Karen shirt, like the guys sometimes wore around the house. I picked up the coarse woven cotton and held it up for everyone to see, mauve with white stitching rimming the short sleeves and V-neck, yellow and violet diamond-shaped detailing across the middle, bottom enringed by thread fringe.

Throughout the night, Htan Dah and I played host, getting up and getting more food, more ice, opening beer bottles from and doing dishes in the kitchen, intermittently sitting down at the table to crash shallow glasses of vodka, take them down, and suck sugared lemon slices, until everyone left or passed out, and suddenly it was quiet and Htan Dah leaned hard against the kitchen wall and said,
“I’m going to throw up.” The only remaining light was the neon overhead in the kitchen and the sliver beneath the bathroom door Htan Dah had closed behind him. I walked further into the house and wandered the living room, on the cool tiles, pacing, carefully, around shadows of bodies strewn on the floor.

 

THE SUN
was barely up when the laborers resumed their construction across the street for the day. I slept fitfully through the dawn hammering, refusing to move until the light was strong enough to blind me straight through my eyelids. I got up to watch through the window. They were building a hotel, someone had told me. They had erected a long, shallow frame, a tight maze of wood, on top of which twenty men were standing in a line on a narrow support beam. They kept their balance in bare feet as they moved buckets full of something between them along the length of the structure, yelling to each other as they swung the handles from one man to the next. I scowled at them.

Downstairs, Htoo Moo and Htan Dah and Poe K’Ler Htoo occupied the same seats at the picnic table that they had the night before, in the same clothes. The latter two had coffee cups of ice and Chang in front of them.

“Good morning!” Htan Dah said, at the same time that I asked, “Are you fucking kidding me?”

“Do you want some beer?” he asked cheerfully.

“Uh, no.” I sat down on a bench, next to Htoo Moo, who smiled at me. “Hey pal,” I said.

He just smiled some more, and nodded.

“How are you?”

“I am still drunk.”

“Okay.” I turned back to Htan Dah. “When do you want to go to the bus station?”

“Bus station?” Htoo Moo asked.

“Yeah, bus station. I have to go get my ticket to Bangkok. I leave tomorrow.” I turned to Htan Dah again.

“Whenever,” he said, shrugging.

“So, you will leave tomorrow,” Htoo Moo said, looking at no one.

“That’s right.”

He frowned.

I put my arm around him. “Aw, Htoo Moo, are you gonna be sad?”

“Yes,” he said. “Very yes.”

“Do you think you might cry?”

“Yes.” Htan Dah and Poe K’Ler Htoo laughed at him.

“Do you ever cry when volunteers leave?”

“Sometimes.” More laughing from the other drunk guys.

“Really?”

“Yes.” Nod. Smile. “But I go where no one can see me.”

After spending the afternoon with Htan Dah, after getting bus tickets, after dinner was bought, and made, and eaten, and the sun had reset, I was back in the same spot and the same conversation, only with Abby in place of Poe K’Ler Htoo and instead of Htoo Moo, Eh Soe.

“I will be very sad when you leave tomorrow,” my roommate told me.

“Me too,” I said. “I don’t want to go. I’m not ready to go.”

“So you can stay,” Htan Dah said. I looked at him. Earlier, when we’d been alone, I’d asked him what he was thinking about because he was being so quiet. “Nothing,” he’d said, but when I’d pressed him, he’d said, “Tomorrow.”

“That’s right,” Eh Soe said. “You can call Ohio and tell them you will stay here in Thailand.”

“She has to go back to work, you guys.” Abby was being reasonable. Like everyone else in my life was being reasonable. I had, indeed, emailed some of my best friends and my mother and threatened to not leave. Was that really the best use of my time and resources, they wanted to know? Shouldn’t I come back to the States as planned, and then decide if I wanted to—make a
plan
to—go back later? Was
I taking into account that working with refugees and in war zones was emotional crack?

“It’s true. I do have to go back to work. They’re counting on me to teach a bunch of classes this fall.” I sighed. “Let’s go out for ice cream.”

Abby and I jumped on the back of Eh Soe and Htan Dah’s motorbikes, respectively, and headed north, away from town. Our destination: Khao Mao Khao Fang, the fancy open-air restaurant set back from the highway, which was for some reason designed to create the experience of eating in the middle of a very clean jungle. The tables were arranged around a sprawling lake overflowing with plants and trees and waterfalls, and tributaries winding their way under walkways, and real ferns and flora so perfect that it all, frankly, looked fake.

As we walked under the canopy of displaced rainforest, Htan Dah was nervous, I could tell. It was his first restaurant, right on the heels of his first bar, and he was sober, now. We were conspicuous enough, we two leggy white broads out with refugees in public, and I was a storm of fast English and enthusiasm, my excitement raising my voice, which was drawing extra attention to us as we sat down, and when Htan Dah and I had to get back up and walk back through the restaurant to go to the bathroom, he became overwhelmed.

“Wait!” he choked as I turned my back to him, toward the ladies’ room. I turned back around, and could almost see his heart beating too fast. “I don’t know what to do,” he said.

“It’s okay.” I reached out and ran my hand down his forearm, from his elbow to his wrist. “I’m gonna go in here.” I nodded at the door on the right. “You go in there.” I nodded at the door on the left. “Then we’ll meet back either right here, or if you don’t see me when you come out, I’ll meet you back at the table.”