He lowers his hand and turns to the ordained doctor. “Who was it, Venerable?”
“I’m sorry?” Dr. Narunn seems perplexed.
“Earlier this afternoon. You said there was a visitor in the prayer hall.”
“Oh, yes! No one really. Just as I suspected, a foreigner. Asian, though. Maybe Burmese? Or possibly even Indian—with big, beautiful eyes. In any case, a tourist, who didn’t speak a word of Khmer. Didn’t speak at all actually!” Dr. Narunn runs a hand over his shorn head, as if suddenly conscious of his exposed scalp. “There she was, doing her own walking meditation, and I came up the steps from behind, a bald man in a dress no less, speaking to her in our peculiar temple dialect—‘Would the devotee like to pay homage to Lord Buddha?’ Ridiculous, isn’t it!” The young doctor laughs, his whole face flushed, obviously embarrassed by the memories of the strange encounter and his even stranger greeting. “I could’ve sworn she was Khmer, one of us. But she flew off like a creature from another world, her pralung fleeing ahead, as the rest of her ran to catch up. I think I scared the living spirit out of our visitor! Wouldn’t be surprised if she never set foot at another Khmer temple.”
“What does she look like, Venerable?”
“She was very . . .”
“Lovely.”
“Lost, I was going to say.” The doctor narrows his eyes with amused suspicion. “But yes, lovely too. Very much so. Lovely and lost.”
With his attuned hearing, the Old Musician recognizes the unmistakable tenor of infatuation in Dr. Narunn’s voice, like that of an amorous schoolboy describing a pretty girl he’s caught sight of. But, at the moment, he doesn’t have the peace of mind to probe further into the doctor’s heart, as his own is pounding inside his ears. She was here. He’s absolutely certain of it now. She stood on this ground. She might even have seen him. Suteera. He says her name silently to himself, as if to call her back, then just as suddenly doubts his imagining. Such coincidence borders on madness.
“What did you say?” Dr. Narunn asks.
“Nothing, Venerable.” He swallows, sorrow and hope caught in his throat.
The lok gru achar—the temple officiant—assigned by the abbot to facilitate the ceremony emerges from the gathered throng and, bowing to Dr. Narunn, says, “Everyone is here, Venerable. We are ready to begin.”
The group forms a circle around a banana trunk cut approximately to Makara’s height and placed in a clay pot. The tree is wrapped in raw silk and decorated with its own fruits and leaves as well as cubes of sugarcane on bamboo sticks, treats to entice Makara’s spirit to return. Dr. Narunn, as the presiding monk, the main spiritual presence, walks around the effigy and chants the sutra in Pali that commences every act of worship. Namo tassa bhagavato arahato samma sambuddhassa . . . An homage to the Buddha. But in his usual style, the young doctor follows it with an interpretation in the vernacular, slightly different from the habitually memorized words—“Let us always honor one who is learned, wise, and compassionate . . .” He sprinkles the ground with lotus-scented water from a bronze bowl to consecrate the area and ward off delinquent sprites that might be gathering to watch, especially ones clever enough to assume the traits of the sick boy and enter his body in order to partake of the food. The Old Musician knows that Dr. Narunn does not subscribe to these superstitions, but as a physician, he is willing to aid in any process of healing, be it conventional or fanciful.
Looking at Makara, the Old Musician wishes he possessed Dr. Narunn’s encompassing hopefulness. The teenager resembles a living corpse. Barely able to stand on his own, Makara is propped upright by the elbows, his parents on either side of him. In contrast to his brand-new school uniform of white shirt and black slacks, and recently washed appearance, the twelve-year-old bears all the telltale symptoms, as Dr. Narunn has described, of a meth addict.
In the few short months since the Old Musician last saw him, Makara has suffered great weight loss, rendering him old and skeletal. A few of his front teeth are missing, and those remaining are blackened, decaying against inflamed gums. While it is obvious the Rattanaks have attempted to scrub their son clean for the ceremony, Makara emits not only a nauseating odor from his rotting mouth but the strange musky stench of cat urine from his entire body. What’s more, the boy’s once youthful face is now ravaged by acne and rashes, some bleeding and infected from what appears to be self-inflicted vicious scratching. Yet, the most shocking change is in the boy’s eyes, the way they shift about in apparent paranoia, looking at once vacant and possessed, as if tormented by phantoms only he sees.
If man possessed a monster’s soul, this is what it would look like. A creature peering from within its human frame, terrified by its capacity to destroy not only others but ultimately itself. Once he too was such a creature staring at his murky reflection in the pool of his urine after a prison guard at Slak Daek had beaten him to a pulp. Still, even as he wished more than anything to die, some mysterious part of him fought to stand erect, rise to take another blow, another breath. Why? He didn’t know. He’s not certain if he knows now.
He ponders the ceremony taking place in front him, this tradition based on the belief that a person’s pralung—made up of nineteen different traits, each acting like a unique minor spirit on its own, all sharing a kind of vulnerability—is so fragile that it can be scared into fleeing at the slightest provocation. If so, then what is the force that stands its ground and says to death, Even as I fall, I do not submit to you? Does it have a name at all? Perhaps this force, or spirit, draws strength from its namelessness? He wonders if its invincibility is precisely its unnameable caprice, its alchemy. That ability, when confronted with the end, to transform itself into whatever trait a person needs—be it courage, defiance, or simply stubbornness. Why won’t you die? another prison guard, a former soldier of his, once murmured in privacy. Why are you so pigheaded? There was a hint of compassion in the guard’s hushed, frustrated growl. It was clear the youth believed death was more merciful than that hellhole. Why do you still hang on? Yes, why did he? Why has he hung on still after all these years?
The Old Musician forces his mind back to Makara. Knowing the shantytown where the Rattanaks live, he wonders whether the boy turning to drugs isn’t an attempt to hang on to life in some way, just as he had.