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  Then I saw my brother hobbling in his underwear, his blue jeans shackling his feet.

  “Hey!” Anek yelled, staggering, bending down to gather up his jeans. “Hey!” The man stopped, loosened his grip on my body. “Hey!” Anek yelled again, getting closer now. “That’s my little brother, you cocksucker. Put him down.”

  The bartender still had me, his breath hot on my neck. As Anek struggled to pull up his jeans I glimpsed the purple, bulbous head of his penis peeking over the waistband of his underwear. The bartender must’ve seen this too; he began to chuckle obscenely.

  “Get him out of here, Anek,” he said. Anek nodded grimly. The bartender put me down, shoved me lightly toward my brother. “You know I can’t have him up here,” he said.

  “You okay, kid?” Anek asked, breathless, ignoring the bartender, bending down to look me in the eyes. I saw the girl standing in the hallway behind Anek, a towel wrapped loosely around her small body. She waved at me, smiling, and then walked back into the room. The other women disappeared as well. I heard the bartender going downstairs, the steps creaking under his weight. Soon, Anek and I were the only people left in that hallway, and for some reason—despite my attempts to steel myself—I began to cry. I tried to apologize to my brother through the tears.

  “Oh shit,” my brother muttered, pulling me to his chest. “C’mon, kid,” he said. “Let’s just go home.”

  * * *

  We went to the bathroom. I stood sniveling by a urinal while Anek leaned over a sink and dashed water on his face. When we came back out, his steps were no longer unsteady, though his voice still quavered slightly. Beads of water glistened on his face. He lit a cigarette at the door and waved to the bartender and the girls in the corner. I couldn’t look at them now.

  We stepped into the street. His friends were still in the alley, laughing and stumbling, flinging pieces of garbage from the Dumpster at each other. We stood at the mouth of the alley and Anek said, “See you later, boys,” and one of the them yelled back, “Wait, Anek! Wait! I have an idea! Let’s put your kid brother in the dump!” But Anek just put an arm around my shoulder and said, “Maybe next time.”

  We crossed the street. Anek kick-started the motorcycle. It sputtered and wheezed and coughed before settling into a soft, persistent purr. I started to climb onto the back, but Anek said, “What the hell are you doing? Can’t you see I’m in no shape to take us home?”

  “You can’t be serious, Anek.”

  “Serious as our pa is dead, kid.”

  I stood there for a moment, dumbfounded. I climbed onto the front seat.

  “I swear to God, though, you make so much as a dent on my bike and I’ll—”

  But I had already cocked the accelerator and we were on our way. Slowly, of course. I slipped off the seat a little so I could reach the pedal, snapped the clutch with my left hand, and popped the bike into second gear. We sputtered for a while like that along the streets of Minburi, crawling at fifteen kilos, until I made a sharp right onto the bridge that would take us out to the new speedway.

  Years later, I would ask Anek if he remembered this night. He would say that I made it up. He never would’ve taken me to the Café Lovely at such a young age, he’d say, never would’ve let me drive that bike home. He denies it now because he doesn’t want to feel responsible for the way things turned out, for the way we abandoned our mother to that hot and empty house, for the thoughtless, desperate things I would learn to do. Later that same year, my mother would wake me up in the middle of the night. She would be crying. She would ask me to sleep again in her bed. And, for the first time, I would refuse her. I would deny Ma the comfort of my body.

  After Anek moved to an apartment across the river in Thonburi, I gathered my father’s belongings from the back room and pawned them while Ma was at work. I used the money to buy myself a motorcycle. When I got home, my mother was waiting for me. She came at me with a thousand impotent fists, and when she was finished, spent and exhausted, her small body quivering in my arms, she asked me to leave her house. I did. And I did not return to that house again until it was too late, until Anek called to say our mother was ill, that she wanted us by her side to accompany her through her final hours.

  That night, as we rode back from the Café Lovely, I felt my brother’s arms around my waist, his head slumped on my shoulder. I remember thinking then about how I’d never felt the weight of my brother’s head before. His hot, measured breaths warmed my neck. I could still smell the thinner’s faint, sour scent wafting from his face. I suddenly became afraid that Anek had fallen asleep and would tumble off the bike at any moment.

  “Are you awake, Anek?”

  “Yeah, I’m awake.”

  “Good.”

  “Do me a favor. Eyes on the road.”

  “I’m glad you’re awake, Anek.”

  “Third.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I said third.”

  “You sure?”

  “It’s a onetime offer, little man.”

  I slipped off the seat, accelerated a little, twisted the clutch, and tapped the gear pedal as we hit the speedway. I was so excited we might as well have broken the sound barrier, but the engine jolted us forward just enough that my grip weakened and we went swerving along the empty speedway, weaving wildly back and forth at thirty kilometers an hour.

  “Easy now. Easy. There, there, you have it. Just take a deep breath now. Holy shit, I almost had to break your ass back there. You almost had us kissing the pavement.”

  I could feel the palms of my hands slick against the throttle. Even at thirty kilos, the wind blew hot against our faces.

  “Accelerate,” Anek said.

  “No fucking way.”

  “I said accelerate. This is a speedway, you know, not a slow-way. I’d like to get home before dawn.”

  “You’re out of your mind, Anek. That’s the thinner talking.”

  “Listen, if you won’t do it, I’ll do it myself,” he said, reaching over me for the throttle.

  “Fine,” I said, brushing his hand away. “I’ll do it. Just give me a second.”

  We slowly gathered speed along the empty highway—thirty-five, forty, forty-five—and after a while, the concrete moving swiftly and steadily below our feet, I was beginning to feel a little more comfortable. Anek put his arms around my waist again, his chin still on my shoulder.

  “Good,” he whispered into my ear. “Good, good. You’ve got it. You’re fucking doing it. You’re really coasting now, boy. Welcome to the third gear, my little man.

  “Now,” he said. “Try fourth.”

  I didn’t argue this time. I just twisted the accelerator some more, popped the bike into fourth, sliding smoothly off the seat then quickly back on. This time, to my surprise, our course didn’t even waver. It was an easy transition. We were cruising comfortably now at sixty, sixty-five, seventy, seventy-five, faster and faster and faster still, the engine singing a high note beneath us as we flew along that straight and empty speedway. We didn’t say a word to each other the rest of the way. And nothing seemed lovelier to me than that hot wind howling in my ears, the night blurring around us, the smell of the engine furiously burning gasoline.

  DRAFT DAY

  On a pleasant morning in April I go three doors down to Wichu’s house and we walk to Wat Krathum Sua Pla, the temple where the annual district draft lottery will be held. Wichu has been my best friend all my life. It is hardly sunup, the air thick and cool with dew. We walk silently through our neighborhood. The teashops. The dilapidated playground. The pond with its perpetual scrim of scum. The mangy strays sleeping haphazardly in the streets. The elderly Chinese women gossiping and exercising by the Shinto shrine. The porridge and plantain vendors. The Burmese refugees unloading thick bundles of Thai Rath and Matichon for the newsstand. We walk silently past all that we know like we know our own skins, all that we will remember fondly in our separate ways, though we regard them then as impediments to our youthful, inchoate ambitio
ns. This is a few years before the neighborhood started sinking into the marsh ground upon which it had been built. This is before the floods got worse with every monsoon and the river rats appeared by the thousands and you could hear them plashing and squealing at night. Before those who could afford it fled for higher ground, my mother and my father included among them.

  Wichu and I had been drinking the night before at a small bar in the fresh market. Cane liquor hot in our veins, we’d promised to pray for one another. We weren’t religious—the last time we’d been to temple was to admire the swimsuits at the Miss Jasmine Pageant—but we agreed to pray just in case the gods decided to interest themselves in the Pravet District draft lottery. It couldn’t hurt, we decided. We drank one last dram to seal the agreement, then we went home.

  What Wichu didn’t know then was that he needed my prayers more than I needed his. But I didn’t tell him that. I didn’t tell him everything had already been arranged for me. I didn’t tell him that my father’s boss’s older brother—a retired navy lieutenant—had recently received two crates of Johnny Walker Blue and a certificate for his wife to a famous goldsmith in Pomprapsattruphai District. I didn’t tell Wichu that the lieutenant, in turn, had called my father to thank him. He told my father that he’d recommended me to the draft board as an upstanding young citizen, so upstanding I didn’t need the benefits of marching drills and mess hall duty and combat training to improve my character in any way. I was a fully formed patriot, he’d told the draft board. A resplendent example for the nation’s youth. A true son of Siam. Which means there’s nothing to worry about, the lieutenant told my father. Everything has been arranged. Just have your son show up at the lottery.

  This was the first and only secret I would keep from Wichu. I prayed for him when I got home from the bar, just as I’d promised. I prayed as I hadn’t prayed since I was a child. I don’t know if Wichu prayed for me, too, but as I lay in bed waiting for sleep I hoped that he’d save all his prayers for himself.

  The next morning I arrive at Wichu’s house at the appointed hour. His mother fusses with his hair and his cuffs at the front door. She’s wearing a phathung pulled over her breasts, her shoulders caked with menthol powder, her hair wet and jet-black from her morning bath. Wichu wears the outfit she bought specifically for the occasion: a neatly pressed white button-down; crisp, black polyester slacks; a new pair of brown Bata loafers, buffed bright with Kiwi shoe polish. She’s even borrowed a gold watch from a friend who hawks them to farangs on Soi Cowboy; it hangs loosely from Wichu’s wrist like a bangle, glinting in the weak morning light. She believes that the less Wichu looks like a day-laborer’s son—something he’d in fact been until the day-laborer died before Wichu could commit him to memory—the less the draft board will be inclined to put a red ticket in his hand when he reaches into the lottery urn. A red ticket means losing her youngest son to two years of duty, just as she lost her eldest, Khamron, who’d been drafted though he drank a whole bottle of fish sauce, who arrived at the lottery violently ill, and who came home eighteen months later from the Burmese border with a vacant look in his eyes, a letter of commendation and honorable discharge, and a flower of shrapnel buried in his right leg slowly poisoning his bloodstream.

  Wichu’s mother eyes me curiously when I arrive. I’m wearing tattered blue jeans, a white T-shirt, rubber slippers. I haven’t showered. I haven’t even brushed my teeth. For a moment, I am afraid she will say something, ask about my relaxed appearance. I am afraid she has found me out and will wonder aloud to Wichu. So I look at Wichu instead. He’s clearly hungover, embarrassed by his mother’s fussing.

  Ma, he says. We’ll be late.

  She relents, puts her hands in her lap and looks at them sheepishly, as if afraid they’ll spring to life again on their own. Wichu leans down and kisses his mother on the cheek.

  Gotta go, he says. See you later, Ma.

  His mother kisses him back. And then she kisses me. She is a small woman; she has to grab my forearm, pull me down to her, and teeter on her toes just to peck me on the cheek. This is not the first time she has kissed me as she has kissed her own sons. Years later I will remember her kiss on that draft day morning, the scent of menthol wafting from her shoulders, the way her wet hair sprinkled my cheek, and I will feel like I’m falling from some great and excruciating height and the feeling will refuse to leave me for days.

  You two take care of each other now, she says. I’m taking a half-day, Wichu, so I’ll be along to the temple by noon. Don’t pick without me, you hear? Wait until I get there. Tell them you want your mother there to witness it. Think black, Wichu. That’s what we want. Black, black, black, black, black.

  And then she goes back inside the house, as if she cannot bear to watch us leave. My own parents, in the meantime, are sleeping soundly in their beds, three houses away.

  When Wichu and I arrive at the temple, there’s a crowd of boys lined up inside the open-air pavilion. I’d never seen so many boys be so silent together. We join them there, seat ourselves at the end of the snaking line. Sparrows skitter in the rafters. The ceiling fans whir above us. A few boys eye us silently before turning their attention back to the stage at the front of the pavilion, where military personnel walk back and forth like stagehands preparing for a play. A banner hangs over the stage in the requisite tricolor: PRAVET DISTRICT DRAFT LOTTERY, it announces in bold script. FOR NATION. FOR RELIGION. FOR MONARCHY. Wichu asks me if I’m nervous. I tell him that I am. Wichu says he’s not nervous at all. It’s strange, he says, I’m feeling calm right now. Relaxed. What will happen will happen.

  The pavilion has been roped off. Relatives station themselves along the ropes on straw mats and blankets, waving and smiling to their sons, their nephews, their boyfriends, their grandsons, their fathers in some cases. They fan themselves with the day’s paper, eat and drink out of tin canteens. Most of the boys do not acknowledge them, though a few send back weak, assuring smiles. Here and there, men in fatigues walk along the lines, ask the boys questions and jot down notes onto their clipboards. Soft upcountry music has been piped into the pavilion. Wichu taps his fingers absentmindedly to the rhythm. He wants to be a drummer. We’ve been planning to start a rock ’n’ roll band.

  When eight o’clock arrives we all stand up and sing the national anthem, followed by the king’s. A monk leads us in prayer. Some of the boys murmur the words. Others furrow their brows intently, close their eyes, and chant loudly along with the monk’s drone, as if the volume of their prayers this morning might matter a great deal. Wichu and I clasp our hands and stare blankly ahead; we’ve already prayed the night before. Afterward, there’s a loud and nervous silence. A middle-aged man in a uniform darker than the others, dozens of colorful insignias pinned to his shoulders and his breast pockets, walks up to the podium. He looks over us as one looks at one’s prized possessions. He’s a four-star general, a promotion away from field marshal. We’ve all seen him on television. He talks into the static-ridden microphone about duty, security, sacrifice, the glory of our great nation, the monarchy’s uncompromising integrity, the freedom we all take for granted. Some of the relatives clap during his speech. Some cheer loudly. Most of us just stare. The papers say the general plans to run for a seat in parliament next year; he waves to the relatives when his speech is over, as if practicing the part, bows to the other military personnel onstage. A younger man walks up to the podium when the general leaves. He informs us that registration will now begin.

  There are hundreds of us, perhaps even a thousand. The sun has risen high above the mango grove at the edge of the temple when Wichu and I finally get to the registration table. There, a young woman in a tight-fitting military uniform asks us questions. We produce the required documents for her: birth certificates, proofs of residency, identification cards, driver’s licenses. Wichu’s mother has prepared a whole dossier of other documents and he hands the folder to the woman now: elementary school report cards, doctors’ notes about his asthma, letters of recommenda
tion from the owners of the houses she cleans, Khamron’s honorable discharge, even his father’s certificate of death from the hospital. Wichu’s mother believes that—if given to the right person—these documents might send Wichu home. I notice Wichu shaking imperceptibly when he hands over the folder. The woman looks over the documents, flipping through them quickly. When she’s done, she looks at Wichu like he’s diseased. What is this? she asks impatiently. Wichu shrugs. The woman hands the folder back to him. She tells us both to seat ourselves at the end of another line for the physical exam.

  We wait a couple more hours in the physical examination line. The pavilion air has become unbearably hot. More relatives arrive, station themselves by the ropes; it is as if they’ve come together for a picnic or a boxing match. Wichu seems shaken by the encounter with the woman. I try to make small talk, but he just nods and smiles at me demurely.

  The boys line up eight at a time at the front of the line. They take off their shirts for the doctors on duty. They look at their feet while the doctors put cold stethoscopes to their chests, examine their ears, teeth, nostrils, check for scoliosis, measure their height, weight, wingspan, waist, chest—their bodies reduced to so many numbers. The doctors’ assistants take notes on their clipboards. Some of the waiting boys jeer and laugh when the fat kids take off their shirts.

  Every so often, a doctor gestures to one of the men in fatigues and a boy is told to put on his shirt and go home. When this happens, there is always a bright burst of cheering and clapping among some of the relatives.