Sightseeing Read online

  “Who said I was upset?”

  “Jack tell me you cry.”

  “That’s a lie,” I say.

  “No lie.” She’s shaking her head. “Jack say you crying like baby in the shower.”

  “That’s ridiculous. I think I would know if I was crying or not, woman.”

  She’s silent for a moment. She shoves her hands into her pockets like she doesn’t know what to do with them. “Well,” she says. “I’m sorry for tonight.”

  “Apology accepted then.”

  “But in the future,” she adds sternly, “if you desire to say something to me you just say it to me, okay? Don’t say to Jack. I speak English. Not so good, but I understand what you say.”

  “Sure,” I say. “You speak English.”

  She stands there a while longer like she’s waiting for me to apologize as well. But I don’t have anything to apologize about. I wasn’t the one infantilizing a helpless old man during dinner. So I say, “Turn up the fan, Tida. I’m melting in here.” For a second, I think she might make another scene, but instead she walks over to the fan and kicks it up a notch. It turns on its axle like some creature shaking its head slowly from side to side.

  “Thanks,” I say, the fan’s cool breeze tickling my face. “That’s better.”

  She walks across the room, stands over the bed, looks down at me for a while. I think she might strangle me, but instead she just pulls the sheets up under my chin.

  “Okay?”

  “Okay,” I say.

  “Tomorrow will be better, Mister Perry.”

  “I doubt it,” I say, closing my eyes. “But let’s hope so.”

  When I open my eyes again the wife’s gone. The hallway light is off. It’s quiet in the house and I’m staring in the dark thinking about the last time I saw Macklin Johnson.

  We had tickets for an Orioles game. The tickets were his going-away present for me. He was coming over to pick me up. Things already weren’t going so good for the two of us by then. I’d had my little episode and Mac was starting to get confused. His memory was starting to deteriorate. We’d been seeing each other less and less, what with Mac’s forgetfulness and me sitting at home lamenting my condition, trying to figure out the fancy wheelchair, doing my damnedest not to get into high-speed collisions with the furniture.

  So I was happy that Mac got the Orioles tickets. It was a nice gesture. It seemed a way to say good-bye. But I was not so happy about having to remind him every other day about why he’d gotten them.

  “So we’re going to a baseball game,” he’d said the week before our date.

  “Yeah,” I replied. “You bought the damn tickets, Mac.”

  “Oh. So why are we going?”

  “Because I’m leaving, remember? I’m going to go live with Jack and his wife.”

  “You’re leaving? Where the hell you going, Perry? You can’t even get to your front porch these days.”

  “Thailand. Bangkok.”

  “That’s a damn shame. I’ll miss you.”

  “Yeah.”

  “What the hell’s Jack doing over there anyway? He get drafted?”

  “Beats me. He’s working in textiles, I think.”

  “Perry, you know I fucking hate baseball. It’s a stupid game. Never understood what the big deal was.”

  So, naturally, I had my doubts about whether Mac would show up on the appointed day. But he did. He was right on time. He rolled up in his old Volkswagen, got out of the van, and it was a beautiful thing to watch him walk up my front steps in one of his old pinstriped suits. He and Patricia—the black nurse who came by every morning—helped me into the van. “Be careful,” Patricia said before we left. “Don’t get into trouble. You drive real slow, you hear, Mister Johnson?”

  As we got on the highway toward Baltimore it seemed like everything might actually be all right. Mac seemed lucid. He was making sense. He nattered on about his own live-in and how much he liked her, how much better she was than the last one, how she was real beautiful and tall, like an African princess, and how irritated she’d gotten that morning when he said she looked like Nefertiti.

  “I don’t get it,” he said. “A man can’t even compliment a beautiful woman these days.” Mac’d always had a thing for black women. He’d married two, the last one, Carmen—a real elegant lady with a wonderful smile—having died two years before from cancer in the head. “I didn’t say she looked like Aunt Jemima, you know,” Mac continued. “I’d understand if she got mad about that. All I said was Nefertiti and, wow, slap me silly and call me an asshole.”

  I nodded along, pulled the old ballcap snug over my head with my good left hand. But then I realized we’d passed up the exit to Camden Yards.

  “Hey,” I said. “There’s Camden Yards, Mac.”

  He looked over at me and smiled. That’s when I got real scared.

  “We’re not going to Camden Yards, Perry,” he said, laughing. “You know I fucking hate baseball. Never understood what the big deal was.”

  “Jesus, Macklin,” I said. “C’mon now. Don’t joke around.”

  “What?” he said. “Aren’t we going to Hopkins? Aren’t we going to visit Carmen?”

  “No, Mac. Carmen’s dead. We’re going to an Orioles game.”

  “Oh,” he said, and now he looked not only confused, he also looked ashamed. “That’s why you’re wearing the ballcap.”

  But Mac didn’t turn the car around. We kept on zipping along that highway. “I knew that, you know,” he said. “I knew that about Carmen. You didn’t have to remind me, Perry.”

  “Take me home, Macklin.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I just want to go home now.”

  “You sure?”

  “Yeah. Let’s just go rent some videos.”

  It took us a while to get back to the house, me directing Mac the whole time thinking I was living my last hour on this earth. Patricia was still at the house cleaning. She came out and helped me get out of the van and into the wheelchair. She didn’t seem the least bit surprised to see us back so soon. She didn’t even ask about the game. I told Mac to come inside. While he sat in the living room, I called his son Tyrone out in Bethesda.

  “Jesus,” Tyrone said. “You know he shouldn’t be driving, Mister Perry.”

  “No, I didn’t, son,” I said. “I really thought he was all right.”

  Tyrone arrived by train a few hours later. When I said good-bye to Mac, he suddenly became lucid again. He bent down and hugged me real hard.

  “Hey,” he said. “I’m real sorry about today, Perry. But you come back soon, okay? I’ll make it up to you. The world ain’t seen the last of us yet.”

  He climbed into the Volkswagen with his son and that was the last I ever saw of my friend. That’s the last I’ll probably ever see of him. Because I’m lying here now six weeks later in this bed, in this hot, godforsaken, mosquito-infested country, thousands of miles away from ever seeing another Orioles game, with two grandchildren I can barely talk to, a daughter-in-law who mocks my paralysis during mealtimes, and a son who seems indifferent to my plight, all of them sleeping soundly in this house, dreaming their nice little dreams, and I’m so pissed off I’m making a fist in the dark with my good left hand.

  Alice would know what to do with the mongrel grandchildren. But Alice isn’t here. Alice is long gone. She never even met these kids sitting across from me now playing a game of gin rummy to help their grandfather pass the time. She never had to deal with the little girl being cute, cheating, spying at my hand through the reflection on my bifocals. Alice never got to slap the girl lightly on the head and say, “Hey. Stop that. Don’t set a bad example for your little brother. We aren’t a cheating people.” She never got to see the girl stare at her uncomprehendingly and then lay down her final trick—four jacks—slamming the rummy card facedown, raising her little cheating fists in victory, sticking out a tongue to taunt her half-paralyzed grandfather while her younger brother laughs with unabashed gle
e.

  “I kick Grandfather ass,” the girl says in English, grinning her cheater’s grin.

  “Don’t say that,” I tell her, throwing down my hand in disgust. “Nice girls don’t say ‘ass.’”

  “Ass ass ass,” the little boy hisses, giggling hysterically at the sound of his own voice.

  “But you teach me,” the girl says. “You teach me ‘ass,’ yes?”

  “No, I didn’t. I’d never teach you that.”

  “Yes, you did,” she says. “You teach. You say to me one day, ‘Your father Jack is one ass.’”

  “Well,” I say. “Even if I did, you shouldn’t say it. Only old men like me get to use that word.”

  “Ass ass ass!” the boy continues yapping. He gets up and does a little dance by the table to accompany his refrain. “Shut up,” I tell him. “Sit down, boy.” But he doesn’t listen. He just chants his way to the kitchen to find his mother. “No more play today,” the girl says, getting up from the table to follow her brother. “But maybe tomorrow. Maybe tomorrow Grandfather will win. Maybe tomorrow Grandfather ass will be okay.”

  “And maybe tomorrow,” I mutter, watching her skip happily through the doorway to the kitchen, “you’ll stop being such a goddamn cheat.”

  When Alice died Jack had been a year in Bangkok. He’d become an executive at some Japanese factory. He was still a bachelor. We rarely heard from him. I think my wife died half-convinced our son was a homosexual. When Jack came back for the funeral and told me he was getting married to a Thai woman, I became belligerent. I told him the news might’ve saved his mother’s life. I didn’t really mean it, of course. I was just sad and angry and scared about Alice dying. I was already starting to miss her pretty bad. But I don’t think Jack has ever forgiven me for saying that. Macklin Johnson told me they never forgive you for saying things like that.

  I’ve fallen asleep facedown at the table. They’re waking me up. The wife peels a two of clubs from my cheek and the children laugh. She sits me upright in my chair, clears the cards, sets the table for lunch. “Mister Perry,” she says. “We eat.”

  It’s rice and fried egg today. I don’t really want the wife to feed me, but the last time I insisted on feeding myself I’d poured chicken broth down my shirt collar. In due time, with enough exercise and practice, the doctors say, I’ll regain my dignity. They say I’ll be able to use my good left hand just as I’d been able to use my right. But I’ve been lifting that five-pound barbell for weeks now and the hand still shakes like it’s got a life of its own.

  Fortunately, the wife feeds me in a respectful, close-mouthed way today, dabbing at the corners of my lips with a cloth napkin. Ever since I got here I’ve been having drool-management problems. I’ve been a leaky faucet.

  “You feel better today, Mister Perry?” she asks, and I say, in between bites, sucking back the spittle pooling at my gums, “Yeah. I feel like a million bucks, woman.”

  I’m not that hungry. Halfway through the meal I shake my head and the wife starts eating her own meal. As always, it’s hot as hell. My stomach’s sweating clean through my shirt. For a while I just sit there and stare at the kids spooning clumsily at their fried rice and egg, talking to each other in Thai, the wife nodding now and again at something they say.

  Neither of the children look much like me. I have to look real hard to find any resemblances. They have broad flat noses, long banana-shaped eyes, dark auburn hair, and clear toffee-colored skin. None of them look much like Jack, either, though the boy’s eyes are Jack’s brown-speckled blue and they’ve both inherited my son’s thin lips and strong square jaw. But these are attributes Jack himself inherited from Alice. There’s actually not much of me in Jack so I suppose it makes sense there isn’t much of me in these kids. Still. I have to remind myself sometimes that they’re not adopted, that these children are my own flesh and blood, that somewhere in their little brown bodies some brilliant characteristic of mine might reveal itself in due time, even if I have trouble pronouncing their names and they have trouble pronouncing mine. (My name’s oftentimes a verb on their tongues—Parry—sometimes even an adjective—Purry—like I’m a cat—so I’ve made them call me “Grandfather” instead. I rarely say their names at all. I call the girl “girl” and the boy “boy,” since the few times I tried calling them by their real names, “Ruchira” and “Sornram,” they’d both laughed insensitively at my attempts.)

  Now I’m not saying people shouldn’t mix. The heart will do what the heart needs to do. And Macklin Johnson is my best friend in the whole world. But at least Mac can see himself in Tyrone and the grandchildren. At least he can call them by name. At least they all speak a common language. At least Mac can look at them and say, “Yes, you’re my son, you’re my grandchildren, you all came from my own flesh and my own blood,” though given his condition lately he’s probably starting to confuse them all. At least Macklin Johnson isn’t stuck in this tropical jungle of a city wondering how the hell these people—his only living heirs—could be even remotely related to him.

  But I don’t really mind the mongrels. I’m actually dreading the day they have to go back to school. Even if they don’t say much to me, it’s nice to have them around. They keep me company while Jack’s at work. I spend most days sitting in the wheelchair watching them play, lifting that five-pound barbell, dozing in and out of sleep.

  My six-year-old grandson adores his older sister to the point of self-annihilation. He does whatever she tells him. He’s the most gullible kid I’ve ever seen. Each day he happily submits himself to whatever new experiment in misery his sister comes up with. I’d like to teach him a little something about self-respect, but the way things are going right now I can barely communicate to him what time of day it is.

  Today the girl’s convinced him to be her pet dog for the afternoon. The boy’s down on all fours. He’s leading his sister around the house and the front yard with a long string of black yarn tied loosely around his neck, barking, sniffing the ground, panting happily at his sister. “Hey,” I say to the girl, “that’s not very nice,” but she just blinks at me and says, “He likes it,” the boy barking in agreement, so I leave them to it.

  An hour later, the boy licks my left leg and the leg jerks back into his face as any man’s leg would when he’s half-asleep in his wheelchair.

  The boy falls back, looks up at me for a moment, and then he starts to cry. The girl laughs, though she crouches down to see if her brother’s okay. He’s not. He’s bleeding lightly from the nose.

  “Oh shit,” I say, bending forward in my seat. “You all right, boy?”

  But he’s already running upstairs to his mother, that string of yarn flying behind him like a kite’s tail. The girl stands there shaking her head at me.

  “Why?” she asks me in English. “Why Grandfather kick his ass?”

  “I didn’t kick his ass, girl. I kicked him in the face.” For some reason I’m laughing. “Not funny, Grandfather,” she says. “Ass. Face. Whatever. He crying.”

  “I know,” I say. “I know. I didn’t mean to. I was half-asleep. I didn’t know what I was doing. It’s your fault he was licking my leg in the first place, you know.”

  A few minutes later the wife’s looming over me, the boy sniveling at her side. “What happen?” she asks me, frowning, and I try to tell her, but the boy keeps interrupting me, pointing and crying some more in Thai. He’s got two humongous wads of toilet paper in his nostrils. She tries to quiet him down, crouches and gathers him in her arms. “You kick him?” she asks me, stroking the boy’s head. “Why you kick his face, Mister Perry?”

  “It was an accident,” I say. “I was sleeping, Tida. I didn’t mean to. They were playing a game and—” The girl interrupts me and says something to the mother in Thai, gesticulating with her arms. For a second I think she’s framing me, because the wife looks at me severely. But then the wife smiles, hands the little boy over to his sister, and the children walk hand-in-hand out to the sunny front yard.

  “
He be okay, Mister Perry,” the wife says. “He just scared.”

  “Tell him to come back, Tida,” I say. “Tell him I want to say sorry. I didn’t mean to kick him, you know.”

  “I know,” she says. “But maybe later, Mister Perry. Right now he just frightened. You say sorry later, okay?”

  But the boy avoids me for the rest of the day. He can’t even look me in the eye. I try to make amends. I fold a paper airplane with my good left hand. But my hand’s too shaky again and it turns out crumpled and lopsided. I do my best to toss it at the kids, but they both ignore the thing as it flops down between us. I even call the boy by his real name to get a laugh. The boy whispers something to his sister, they go get their badminton racquets, and then they both head out to play in the empty afternoon street. I’d like to watch them, but it’s sweltering hot today and when I went outside last week I’d puked from the heat. So I just sit for the rest of the afternoon by the front door watching the feather shuttlecock sail up and down, back and forth, beyond the property wall, hoping Jack will come home soon to save me.

  When I first arrived Jack and his family thought it would be a good idea to take me around the city. Jack took the week off work and we piled into the Corolla every morning. I’d sit up front in the passenger seat while Tida mediated peace between the children in back.

  Given the city’s traffic, we never went to more than a few places each day. I thought rush hour in Washington was awful, but Bangkok traffic makes downtown D.C. look like a Formula One racetrack. I don’t remember much about that first week except spending most of my time staring listlessly out the passenger-side window, falling in and out of sleep, the car moving in tiny fits and starts the whole way. “It’s a goddamn parking lot out here,” I said the first day while we were stalled at a traffic light for what seemed like an hour.

  Temples, temples, and more temples. That’s all we ever went to the first few days. For some reason, Jack and his wife thought it would be useful for me to see them. The children weren’t having too good a time and I didn’t blame them—children and places of religious worship don’t, as a rule, mix very well. They’d be bored to death, wringing their hands in the car, while Jack and the wife wheeled me inside to admire some temple. I wasn’t having too good a time either. I would’ve preferred to sit in the cool, air-conditioned sedan with the kids. While I can certainly learn to appreciate cultural differences, if Tida and the children came to visit me in Washington and I took them on a tour of all the city’s churches, I don’t think they’d have a very good time either. So on the third morning, I told Jack that there’s only so many temples a grown man can look at—no matter how beautiful or colorful or interesting the temples may be—and I told him that this city was just too goddamn hot for a man in my condition anyway. “Jack,” I said, “I’m not some tourist, you know,” and Jack said, “Fine, Father. Let’s just stay home then. Let’s just sit here and pretend like there isn’t a world outside this house.”