Away
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.