Breathing Water: A Bangkok Thriller

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The boy sees her go, assessing her without even thinking about it: Just got here. Still got mud between her toes. Doesn’t know anything. Looks stunned, like someone hit her in the face with a pole.

The baby’s not hers. Too pale.

He thinks, Another one.

The nervous man behind him slows again. The boy hesitates grudgingly, feeling like he’s trying to lead a cat. For a moment weariness washes over him like warm water. He longs to disappear into the crowd and leave the foreigner to fend for himself, but the others are waiting, and they’re hungry.

“Come on,” he says in English. “Nothing to worry.”

“I don’t know,” the man says.

The boy stops. He draws a deep breath before he speaks; it will not do to show his frustration. “What problem now?”

“It’s not dark enough.”

“When it dark,” the boy says, “they all gone.”

“Just ten minutes,” the man says. He is in his forties, with hair brushed forward over a plump baby’s face that seems to be mostly lower lip. Despite his eagerness not to be noticed, he wears a bright yellow shirt and green knee-length shorts across wide hips. A fanny pack dangling below his belly thoughtfully announces the location of his valuables. To the boy he looks as conspicuous as a neon sign.

“Ten minute too long.” The boy’s eyes, tight-cornered and furious, skitter across the man’s face as though committing the features to some permanent archive, and then he turns away with a shrug.

The man says, “Please. Wait.”

The boy stops. Plays the final card. “Come now. Come now or go away.”

“Okay, okay. But don’t walk so fast.”

The sun is gone now, leaving the sky between the buildings a pale violet through which the evening star has punched a silver hole. The boy sometimes thinks the sky is a hard dome lit inside by the sun and the moon, and peppered with tiny openings. From the outside the dome is bathed in unimaginable brilliance, and that light forces its way through the pinpricks in the sky to create the stars. If the sky dissolved, he thinks, the light from outside would turn the earth all white and pure, and then it would catch fire like paper. But in the dazzling moment before the flames, it would be clean.

“We go slow,” he says. There may not be another man tonight. The crowds on the sidewalk are thinning. The kids are hungry. He drags his feet to prevent the man from falling behind.

The man says, “You’re handsome.”

“No,” the boy says without even turning his head. “Have better than me.”

They turn a corner, into an east- west street. They are walking west, so the sky pales in the sun’s wake until it slams up against a jagged black line of buildings. Before he returned to Bangkok, this city he hates, the boy had grown used to the soft, leaf-dappled skyline of the countryside. The horizon here is as sharp as a razor cut.

“There,” the boy says, indicating with his chin. “The window.”

Across the street, nine impassive children loiter against the plate glass of a store window. They wear the filthy clothing of the street, mismatched and off-size. Three of the five boys are eye-catchingly dirty. The four girls, who look cleaner, range in age from roughly eleven to fourteen. The boys look a year or two younger, but it might just be that girls in their early teens grow faster than boys.

They pay no attention to the man and the boy across the street.

“Keep walking,” the boy says. “Don’t slow down too much, but look at the window, like you’re shopping. When we get around the corner, tell me the sex and the color of the shirt of the one you want. Or take two or three. They don’t cost much.”

The man looks toward the shop windows. “Then what?” he asks.

“Then they come to the hotel,” the boy says.