“The people on that boat could buy your village with what’s in their pockets. They wouldn’t even have to go to an ATM. But they wouldn’t want your village.” The boat is well upstream by now, and Da can make out some of the men and women gathered at the back of it. Most of them wear white clothes, and many of them look fat. “But you know what some of them would want?”
“What?”
“Peep.”
Da says, “Oh,” and she sees it all. Poor mothers, rich people, and the currency a baby. She holds Peep a little more snugly.
“I didn’t get you away from them because I need your help,” Boo says. “What I want you to do is talk to somebody. About you and Peep.”
“Who? Who would want to know about us?”
Boo shakes his head. “I have no idea whether he’ll want to know. I don’t even know if he’ll let me in. But if he’ll talk to us, he can do something about it.”
“What? What can he do?”
Boo takes her hand in his. Hers is cold, but his is warm and dry. It feels natural to her. He says, “If he wants to, he can tell the world.”
As always lately, the first thing Arthit sees when he comes into the room is Noi’s face in the photograph.
What he really sees is the back of the photograph, since it’s turned toward his swivel chair on the far side of his dented, olive drab steel desk. What he’s actually looking at is a cardboard stiffener with a fold-out triangle to make the frame stand upright. But what he
As he drags himself in, he doesn’t see the window he fought to get, or the dull, industrial, alley-bisected view it looks out onto, or the rattan cricket on the table, or the couch pillows covered in yellow silk that Noi picked out, or the photographs of himself on the wall, standing next to men-of-the-moment, mostly forgotten now but worth pointing a camera at, back whenever. He doesn’t see the rug he hauled in a year ago, grunting under its weight, because he hated the brown linoleum.
Just the photograph. Just his wife’s face.
Of course he
I thought if anything ever happened to one of us, it would happen to me.
Beside the framed photograph, a stack of work waits for him. Papers he needs to review pointlessly, reports he needs to initial pointlessly, a calendar of pointless meetings he’ll drag himself to, just a little late, so he can sit on the periphery, against the wall instead of at the table, and try to look attentive. Try not to look like a man who has just been hit by a train.
He trudges across the room and sits down with a sigh he doesn’t hear. The chair makes its invariable squeak of complaint, something he has meant to take care of for weeks-a squirt of WD-40, what could be easier? It would just take a second. The can is on top of the filing cabinet, put there at his request by one of the secretaries a million years ago. Picking it up would take more strength than he possesses. He thinks briefly about getting up and throwing the chair through the window. That’s something he can visualize doing. Breaking things. For that he could find strength.
He reads the first sentence on the top page of the stack and then reads it again. Halfway through he goes back to see what the memo’s subject is. It’s got something to do with a new copying loop, a list of people who are to be copied automatically on several sorts of documents, very few of which ever cross his desk. He takes the page, rips it lengthwise down the center, and sits there, holding half of the sheet in each hand, looking right through the photograph.
In the three days since he found the pills buried in the flour, Noi has paled and lightened. She seems to walk more weightlessly, to absorb more light, to carry her pain more easily, as though it were a cloak she can lift from her shoulders when the weight becomes too much for her. Today, as she stood at the stove heating the water for his coffee, he had the sense that if he squinted hard enough, he could see the stove through her. That she was some sort of colored projection in the air.
That she was already beginning to fade.
