The plane was cramped, freezing, and boring, the flight longer than long division, and nearly the moment he landed in Bangkok, Claude longed to be back aboard like the time he (well, Poppy) had fallen out of a whale-watching kayak into Puget Sound. On the plane he had personal space, cold soda of which his mother was apparently allowing him an unlimited amount, and a bathroom with toilet paper. And though the plane bathroom smelled like a bathroom, the rest of the plane did not smell like a bathroom. All of Bangkok smelled like a bathroom, none of it had toilet paper, and the temperature had been nice for about sixty seconds while the icicles from the airplane thawed off, and then he became as hot as he had ever been in his life, not hot like when he visited Carmy in Phoenix, hot like wet, like in a bathtub, like one minute he was dry and the next he had sweat shooting out of him in all directions like a spastic sprinkler.
Claude was not remotely ready to rejoin the real world, but fortunately, Bangkok bore little resemblance to it. He tried to keep not caring about anything, but it was hard. The sidewalks were invisible, so full of people he could only guess there were sidewalks underneath them. The cars were all hot pink and gloss turquoise and neon green. The buses were multistory, like squat apartment buildings on wheels. Squadrons of scooters weaved in and out and between and around everyone like a plague of insects. The scooters had whole families piled on board, the dad wearing a helmet, the mom and the kids and the babies bareheaded and sandwiched in and looking unfazed by the heat or the smell or the fact that their dad didn’t care about their heads as much as his. When Claude stared at these sweaty families as they squeezed by his air-conditioned van, the kids would wave and smile at him, the moms and dads too. In fact, it seemed like everyone in Thailand wanted to look right into his eyes and smile at him. They wanted to ask if he was okay and if he was happy and if he needed anything. Yes, he needed extra strength air-conditioning, toilet paper, and some personal space. And helmets maybe for the little kids on the scooters.
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.
One was running a fruit stand. One was making marigold garlands on a plastic table outside a 7-Eleven. One was a waitress in the noodle restaurant where they stopped for lunch. Claude saw them on the sky train going to work in an office or somewhere it was important to wear a suit and heels. Did his mother even notice? He couldn’t tell. But if you looked at them closely, and Claude did—Claude could not keep his eyes off them—you could see that that swallowy bit of their throat was bigger than usual. You could see their hands and feet were bigger too. When they spoke to you, it was with lovely, husky voices, or they wore their makeup a little more thickly than the other women around them, or their eyebrows were more assertive, more certain, more there. They were beautiful, and they were everywhere, and everyone seemed to know their secret, and no one seemed to care, which, Claude guessed, meant it wasn’t really a secret at all.
But just as he was spying, improbably, kindred spirits halfway around the world, Ling announced, with a brave smile neither Claude nor his mother were buying, that it was time to drive the five hundred kilometers north to the clinic, a figure she may as well have expressed in quarks for as much as Claude knew how far five hundred kilometers was. What he did understand were quavering adult smiles: it was going to take all day, and it was going to be excruciating. Their new van had little pieces of paper-thin gold stuck all over the ceiling above the rearview mirror to show it had been blessed by a monk. Unfortunately, it had apparently not been blessed by a mechanic because whatever those springy things are that prevent you from bouncing all around and hitting your head on the ceiling and wanting to puke every time you went over a bump were missing.
“Shocks,” his mother said grimly the millionth time it happened.
“What about them?”
“We could use some.”
“I’m having lots,” said Claude.
His mother got up and moved to the row of seats behind him, lay down across it, and closed her eyes without another word. But tempting though his mother made it look and miserable as he felt, Claude could not sleep. There was too much to see. Outside of Bangkok, Thailand looked like something his father would make up. There was a hospital for elephants. There were hundreds of schoolchildren picking up brush in the trees to prevent forest fires. There were roadside stands selling giant, papery wasp nests to eat with sugar and chili. When they stopped at lights, old women covered head to toe with masks and hats and scarves in the hundred-degree heat would try to sell them sticky rice or salted banana chips. Even the familiar was unfamiliar. Even the things he seemed to know he could not name.
Along the road, he saw tiny miniature houses everywhere, sometimes on the ground, sometimes on posts like elaborate mailboxes. He’d seen them in Bangkok, outside his hotel and the market stalls and the 7-Elevens and the noodle shops. Now, on the road north, he saw them outside of every house, large or small, temple or shack, outside every run-down strip mall and gas station. He could see them in the jungle through the trees and on the tops of mountains. He could see them in the corners of the rice fields and the coconut plantations and where they were reforesting teak. Water buffalo and cows grazed around them under the banana trees. Dogs ignored them all over the country.
“What are those?” It was the first anyone had spoken for miles, and Ling seemed startled to hear from him.
“Spirit house. We put them outside our home and business place, temple, restaurant, everywhere. We have lot of spirits in Thailand. Spirits is mischievous. You know? Naughty. We want them not making trouble in our house or job, so we give them place to make funny business outside. Then we offer treat to keep them happy there. They get what they seek outside so they not come inside.”
“Treats?”
“Offering: Flower. Fruit. Incense. Maybe beer. Maybe cigarette.” She shrugged. “Depend what they like.”
When the road started to climb in earnest, they left the houses, people and spirit, behind. It was a jungle. A real one. What was the difference between forest and jungle? Both had lots of trees. Both hid much you could (worrisomely) hear but not see. This one even had, to Claude’s surprise, long-needle pines, just like at home. But this was jungle for sure. For one thing, it was a million degrees and humider than an indoor pool. For another, there were vines like the trees were being eaten, and in between every two trees, a palm was pushing its way through at odd angles like it had meant to grow someplace else altogether and ended up here only by accident. The whole jungle was wall-to-wall-carpeted with moss and fern and leaf and yet more vine, and there was ceiling between the trees that was green and tangled and, alarmingly, moving as well. Instead of soft rain and low buzzing and birdsong like at home, here the insects and frogs and probably monkeys and possibly tigers screamed and shrieked and hollered, staking their claims for space between the palms, yodeling at the stars. But mostly the difference was this: fairy tales were set in forests, never jungles. The van slogged through enough miles of this wilderness for Claude’s brain to arrive at the reason why: it was because you could get lost in the forest and come out the other side. If you got lost in this jungle, you got lost forever.