This Is How It Always Is(91)

There were stray dogs everywhere who looked sweet but who his mother absolutely forbade him to touch, and since this was unlike his mother, he listened. There were malls that took up all four corners of the intersections, connected by hamster habitrails over the streets. There were whole restaurants right in the middle of the sidewalk that looked like hot-dog stands except they sold complicated noodle soups or fried bananas wrapped in puffy dough or a whole giant deep-fried fish sprinkled with millions of colorful toppings like a sundae. And there were little tables and seats right there in the middle of the sidewalk too, which made sense since you could eat a hot dog on the way to catch your bus but you couldn’t walk while eating soup or a fish sundae, but it meant you had to somehow weave your way around all the people and all the dogs and all the tables and chairs too.

They spent the night on the nineteenth floor of a fancy hotel Claude was too tired to enjoy. (Like some kind of strange enchantment, two days had passed since they left home, but he hadn’t been to bed yet.) Then first thing the next morning they went with Ling, their guide, to a market to get supplies for the clinic. His mother seemed tired and overwhelmed and trying too hard. She kept fake laughing and making comments like, “Sweetie, look at those tubs of fish,” as if Poppy-the-ichthyologist would be cheered to see them twisting over and around one another, fighting to get under too little water, or “Mmm, smell those spices,” as if Claude-the-child-baker would be cheered by the rounded piles of curry big as basketballs, or “Oh wow! Giant bins of bugs!” as if anyone would be cheered by bins of bugs. As if they were on vacation having the time of their lives instead of running away from home. He let his mother hold his hand though because the market in Bangkok made the sidewalks in Bangkok seem deserted and because beneath his new sandals it was wet and slippery, a surface somewhere between ground and floor. Claude smelled dry blood and wet blood. He smelled sweating people and rotting fruit and mothballs. He smelled diesel because, impossibly, the scooters were allowed to drive right down the middle of aisles narrow as straws. There were pastel strands of sugar like night-fairy hair. There were small plastic bags filled with syrup, ice, and fruit, which people dangled by their handles and sipped through a straw. There were greens of every shade, shape, and size, including one that Ling explained was used to cure heartbreak. Claude wondered what it was about him that suggested he needed it. His mother smiled sadly at him and squeezed his hand but managed not to say anything out loud.

All of that turned out to be prelude though. The bugs and the spun sugar and the weird vegetables were the easy part, which he should have guessed because bugs, spun sugar, and weird vegetables do not smell like dry or wet blood. In the next part of the market, all Claude wanted to do was sit down and cry because cages the size of Jupiter’s kennel held piles and piles of shiny black chickens, chickens on top and underneath, chickens squawking at one another for stepping on their heads. At first Claude wondered vaguely if he could hold or at least pet one, but then, woozily, he saw his error because on top of the cage was a giant tray of dead chickens, their skin naked and pale and puckered, their yellow feet reaching out for rescue, but, headless, they were way too late for that. Next door was another even smaller cage with geese inside, fairy-tale geese, snow-white bodies with Halloween-orange feet and beaks. There were far too many for the small space, and they were as wedged in as he was, but at least they all had both feet on the floor. The geese had taken a vow of silence because their cage was also topped with a tray of bodies swaddled in plastic wrap with their price scrawled on in red marker. And next to them the ducks. They couldn’t see their grisly future, but probably they could smell it. Then there were pig faces—not the head, just the empty, saggy face: snout and curling ears and horrible hollows where the eyes had been. At the end of the row, an ancient wrinkle of a woman hunched on a stool scooping tiny jumping shrimps into plastic bags. She squeezed lime over them and sprinkled them with salt, kind of like when Aggie’s cousin was baptized, and the businessman who bought them popped them into his mouth, still jumping, like he was eating popcorn at a movie. Claude understood suddenly what it meant to say the walls were closing in on you. He tried to take deep breaths, but the smell of terrified birds burned his nose and throat and chest.

There were dead animals everywhere. There was weird food everywhere. It was loud everywhere, like a turned-up-too-high soundtrack of selling and buying and negotiation and sweat. But the other thing Claude saw everywhere in Bangkok, which was the miracle of Bangkok, were people—women—like him. Like Poppy.

They were beautiful. Their hair was long and black as bad-luck cats and curved just where their necks did, tucking perfectly behind their ears with flowers that had to be fake but weren’t—gorgeous, perfect, amazing hair. They had gorgeous, perfect, amazing ways of moving that hair too, touching it just lightly with their hands, laughing so it lay prettily over their faces or shaking so it danced down their backs like a shampoo commercial. They moved everything just right, in fact. Their hips went back and forth, back and forth when they walked, but concisely, not like sexy women in movies who moved like windshield wipers, more like willow trees in wind. And their clothes—Claude loved everything these women wore: Long embroidered skirts. Tops that hugged their figures, modest but hinting, like a wink but not on purpose. Jeans and T-shirts that looked just like regular jeans and T-shirts except somehow completely feminine. Scarves that seemed to float against their necks like leaves on autumn ponds, and though Claude thought he would liquefy if he wore a scarf in this heat, and though Claude remembered he was being punished and had to be Claude, the scarves enchanted him anyway.