God's Fool (7 page)

“She was that,” I said, blinking away the tears that had suddenly come to my eyes. “She was that, child. The bravest woman I ever knew.”

We were born with our heads between each other’s legs (and not up our asses, as Gideon once informed us in the heat of an argument) on a hard bamboo mat on a houseboat tied to the shore of the Meklong River in ancient Siam, the exotic Orient, land of tigers and peacocks and little yellow people very much like us. Like little Tom Thumb and Anna Swan and Mr. Nellis, the Armless Wonder, we’d been blessed by God’s inattention, undercooked or too well done, a pinch of dough forgotten or triple what was asked for, a batch half-divided and sent on its way. Unlike them, we had the added blessing of our place of birth to be thankful for, which in the minds of our newly adopted countrymen, as old Phineas Barnum well knew, called up a wonderful hash of pagodas and harems, child kings and barbarian hordes. Ancient Siam, made visible in the cast of our skin and the shape of our eyes, was as far from State Street as you could get. It was sin and opium smoke. It was elephants with diamond collars and dark-eyed beauties with rubies in their navels. Siam was everything unfamiliar, everything our God-drunk countrymen feared and desired, and we were its exotic export, otherness distilled and hyperdistilled. And so they came in droves to stare and poke and prod. And pay. And pay again. We made nothing. We grew nothing. We were like priests, offering absolution for sins we had never known and could barely understand. For six years, like whores in the marketplace, we peddled the wares of God.

It might have been otherwise.

I can see our birth—I was there, after all—the small, tilting room with the bamboo mat, the smell of the water and our mother’s sweat, the women’s excited chatter when we gushed at last into this world, tight as a doubled nut slipping its shell. Twins. And two little buds in the mass of slippery legs and arms. Sons. For the first ten seconds of our lives, we were good fortune. And then the growing silence, the confusion as they attempted first to untangle us, the cries of fear at the band of flesh, suddenly visible, that grew between us like some unnatural plant.

They ran. Ran from a band of skin hardly two fingers wide at the time, ran—these women who had known my mother for years, and who would know her for years to come—as from something unclean. Our mother, as she always had and always would, did what was necessary. Left alone on a mat with a pair of unwashed twins crying between her legs, she pulled herself over to the knife the women had dropped in their rush, cut the twin ends of the blue, ropy cord that bound us to her, then tied off the ugly little tails that remained with a bit of string she found on the floor. Seeing how things were, she carefully untwisted us so we could lie head to head and settled herself to wait for the afterbirth. The rain began, hissing in the palm fronds, turning the shoreline outside the windows a pale, watery gray. By the time my father came home (no one had had the courage to get him), she had washed and suckled us and put us to bed.

I wonder what they talked about that night. From all I know, they took our birth for the fact it was and went on with their lives. They had three children already. Now they had two more. In many ways, the peculiar nature of our birth was like the weather: One might wish it to be different, but typhoons would be born in the Bay of Bengal and the river would flood when the monsoon came whether one wished it or not. Our father, I suspect—though I hardly remember him at all—shook his head over our common bond, noted that we looked healthy and strong, let us grasp a finger each, and returned to his selling table outside our door.

Others were less sanguine. News of our birth reached Bangkok
almost before my father’s boat had bumped against the house that May afternoon, and like any new event, whether celestial or earthly, it had to be worked into the tissue of superstitions that made the people feel secure. The learned men of the royal court put their heads together and lo! there was light. If an unnatural birth was a bad omen, they reasoned, a birth such as ours, of such surpassing strangeness, could only prophesy the end of the world. The sun would turn black in the sky. Rama II himself, the Lord of Life, decreed it: We would have to be separated or put to death.

We were neither.

They came three weeks later in a pouring rain, their sandals slap-slapping in the mud: a group of five men, three holding vermilion umbrellas with gold tassels—a thing never before seen in our village—and two in the yellow robes of the Buddhist priests. They stopped on the shore at the foot of the walk to our house. The gaggle of soaked villagers who had been leading them pointed up the plank and stepped away. “We have come to see the marvel,” said one to my mother, who, all unsuspecting, wordless with astonishment at this august delegation standing before our houseboat, invited them in. My father was out fishing.

I can see her running ahead, shame quickly outstripping amazement at the thought of her clothes, the smallness of the rooms. Our poverty, I imagine, must never have been as visible to her as it was in those few moments. The room where we lay sleeping on a mat by the wall, despite the open windows, smelled hot and rank. We had shat ourselves. Quickly drawing the soiled cloth from under us, she wiped us with a clean edge, slipped a fresh cloth under our bottoms and ran out the back door just as the boat gave a telltale heave and the group stepped aboard. Anyone watching from the opposite bank would have seen our mother burst out the side door as though the boat were under pressure, make two quick swipes with the cloth in the river, drop it on the plank in the rain, and rush back in. By the time the men had filed into the main room, led, no doubt, by our screaming (they were prepared for the ill manners of the peasants, and the stunned awe their own appearance could provoke),
she was there to greet them in a fresh skirt, her head bowed low between her raised arms in the
wai
she had been too startled to offer earlier. A bowl of bright red ngáw fruit sat on the table.

They wasted little time. Ignoring the fruit she offered them, they walked over to where we lay crying under the faded yellow cloth we had succeeded in pulling over ourselves. One of them, a small, wizened-looking man with a pointy beard, asked my mother to remove the cloth.

A shocked murmur greeted our appearance. This was ghastly, an evil omen indeed. One of them, bolder than the rest, ran his smooth finger across our bridge, then flipped us over. We screamed. My mother began to step forward—though whether to stop them or help them is unclear—then paused. Consensus was immediate. We would have to be separated. If we lived, a case could be made that the threat had been forestalled; if we died, the king’s decree would have been carried out.

But if the desired end was undebatable, the means by which to achieve it were not. Something of an argument ensued among the three physicians, during which my mother at first stood awkwardly off to the side like a young girl hoping to catch the boys’ attention, and then, perhaps unable to think of anything else to do, went to the fire. One maintained the bond between us was dead flesh, or very nearly so, and therefore susceptible to sawing or burning. The second, reaching for a piece of fruit, disagreed. Sawing through the flesh would be too crude; the ligament, he pointed out, squatting by our side, was of considerable thickness. It might link us more vitally than his colleague assumed. A clean incision was therefore of the utmost importance, and while the idea of burning had some merit, the operation would have to be performed as swiftly as possible. A hot wire applied here and here, he believed, running a long fingernail down the twin bases of our bridge where it attached to our fist-sized chests, would have the greatest chance of success. The monks in their yellow robes had said nothing. The rain had increased.

Nonsense, interrupted the one with the pointy beard. To do as his colleagues suggested they might as well put us in a sack with a good-sized stone and throw us in the river. We were much too young to survive
such extreme measures. No, to have any hope of success the thing would have to be done by degrees. He paused strategically, then pointed at us, still wailing on the mat. Notice how they are of approximately the same size and weight. Hang them over a fine gut cord, one on either side. Take them off only to bathe and feed them. Within a few weeks their weight will force the cord up through the ligament, successfully separating them, but the process will have been so slow that the wound will have had time to …

They turned as one toward the strange, almost inhuman sound coming from the other side of the room. Our mother stood with her back to the fire. In her left hand, hanging by her side, was the blackened stick with which she had been prodding the flames. In her right she held my father’s cleaning knife, its point at her throat. The steel, they could see, had already pierced the skin; a thin, dark stream was winding its way down her throat and into her shirt. She seemed unaware of the sound that came from her—a perfect joining of rage and despair, a monotonous internal whine like the sound one might hear from a child tormented by bullies in some empty schoolyard, tormented beyond fear, beyond tears, past caring for its own preservation. It didn’t stop.

One of the men began to say something, then stopped. Instinctively, faced with this thing, the group began to back away. The sound still coming from her throat, her lips pressed so unnaturally tight she appeared to be straining to keep something from escaping her mouth, my mother began to move toward them. By the time she had passed the mat on which we still lay screaming, her head had tilted back involuntarily and the point of the knife had gone deeper into the soft skin of her throat. The stream had thickened into a dark stem. On her soiled blouse, over her left breast, a dark blossom was opening.

They backed out of our house into the rain, forgetting, in their haste, the vermilion umbrellas they had left inside the door. When, two years later, no one had returned to claim them, my father quietly sold them for a hundred baht each in the marketplace.

In some ways, hardly a heroic tale.

And yet, nothing if not that. Shy by nature, incapable of even speaking
to these men from the capital who suddenly appeared in her houseboat like divine beings, carrying with them the air of the royal court, my mother could not even begin to conceive of resisting them. They were like gods. We were nothing. They spoke daily with King Rama II, who took his meals and listened to music on an island in the Garden of Night in the Royal Compound. We were a bit of dirt under the fingernails, a scattering of fish scales on the edge of a rack.

His power was unlimited. His blood could not be shed. For the funeral of his father, he had commissioned a golden coach forty feet high and weighing over ten tons. One hundred and sixty men had been required to move it, another one hundred and thirty-five had been needed to act as brakes. No one outside the immediate royal family and his own inner circle was allowed to look at him. His own councillors were not allowed to touch him. His every whim had the gravity of law. Within three days of his succession to the throne, he had had the son of King Taksin, a celestial prince, beaten to death with a scented sandalwood club.

For my mother to act as she did toward the royal physicians therefore must have seemed—to herself as well as to them—not only mad but unimaginable. One might as well attack a typhoon with a candle.

And yet that, in a sense, was precisely what she had done. Leaning into the gale, she had done the only thing she could: She had held the candle to her clothes, watched as the flames paused, then leaped up her sleeves. A gesture born of utter despair. The wind died. The palms righted themselves. On the horizon over Bangkok, a star appeared through a rent in the clouds. Then another.

The king’s physicians never returned. Busy collaborating with the court poets on a translation of the Hindu epic
Ramayana
, King Rama II forgot that he had sentenced us to death to avert the end of the world. An artist by nature, a man who insisted on personally sculpting the decorations for the buildings he commissioned, he lost himself in the adventures of Ramachandra and Sita and let us live.

The world, as is so often the case, did not end. Our mother’s and
father’s fears, like the terror that cramps the heart before dawn but winnows to a joke by breakfast, came to nothing. We lived, we grew, we wrapped our arms around each other and rolled laughing down the hills above the river, the sky and the grass spinning round our heads like the years. In a word, we survived. The sentence of death was extended, the full stop changed, as in most men’s lives, to a comma. The only mark it left on the visible world was a small, dark scar in the skin of our mother’s throat.

II.

Perhaps it comes down to this: our mother squatting before the fire, our brothers laughing from somewhere outside, the taste of rice and fish. Perhaps it’s the number of times our father pulled our ears or touched our faces, or the days (how many weeks or months would they make, added all together?) the three of us spent knee-deep in the sun-warm river, bent over the drying racks. What makes a home? Was it the familiar bump of our father’s boat when he returned in the afternoons? Or the way the floor would tip ever so slightly when he stepped aboard? He would strip his shirt and wash his arms in the basin, then cup his hands and gently pat water on his face and head. Was it the sound of the water raining down into the bowl?

I barely remember those early years now. Our lives were not easy. Even if they had wanted to, my parents could not have made them so, and they showed no signs of wanting to. We were never coddled. We crawled, we walked, we ran. We fought other boys our age and older in the dirt where the market used to be. We learned to swim. With the possible exception of climbing trees, we could do anything anyone else could do, only better, since there were two of us. When the floating theater came to Meklong we went to see it, and though a lifetime has come between that night and this one, though the storytellers we listened to are all long dead, and the tumblers and the jugglers as well, I remember
them all. We watched as a strong young man in fantastic dress fought invisible demons with a flaming sword, thrusting, parrying, the blade streaming sparks against the dark until suddenly, tilting back his head, he raised his arm and in one smooth movement swallowed the burning steel to the hilt. The crowd gasped. A number of women screamed. We had just started to cry when he drew the extinguished blade out of his throat, tossed his hair and plunged it quivering into the wooden stage.