Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction (557 page)

First published in
Analog Science Fiction and Fact
, April 1986

When my brother Lek and I were children we were only allowed to go to Prasongburi once a week. That was the day our mothers went to the marketplace and went to make merit at the temple. Our grandmother, our mothers’ mother, spent the days chewing betelnut and fashioning intricate mobiles out of dried palm leaves; not just the usual fish-shapes, dozens of tiny baby fish swinging from a big mother fish lacquered in bright red or orange, but also more elaborate shapes: lions and tigers and mythical beasts, nagas that swallowed their own tails. It was our job to sell them to the thaokae who owned the only souvenir shop in the town…the only store with one of those aluminum gratings that you pull shut to lock up at night, just like the ones in Bangkok.

It was always difficult to get him to take the ones that weren’t fish. Once we took in a mobile made entirely of spaceships, which our grandmother had copied from one of the American TV shows. (In view of our later experiences, this proved particularly prophetic.) “Everyone knows,” the thaokae said (that was the time he admitted us to his inner sanctum, where he would smoke opium from an impressive bong and puff it in our faces) “that a plataphien mobile has fish in it. Everyone wants sweet little fishies to hang over their baby’s cradle. I mean, those spaceships are a tribute to your grandmother’s skill at weaving dried palm leaves, but as far as the tourists are concerned, it’s just fiddling for waterbuffaloes.” He meant there was no point in doing such fine work because it would be wasted on his customers.

We ended up with maybe ten baht apiece for my grandmother’s labors, and we’d carefully tuck away two of the little blue banknotes (this was in the year 2504 b.e., long before they debased the baht into a mere coin) so that we could go to the movies. The American ones were funniest—especially the James Bond ones—because the dubbers had the most outrageous ad libs. I remember that in Goldfinger the dubbers kept putting in jokes about the fairy tale of Jao Ngo, which is about a hideous monster who falls into a tank of gold paint and becomes very handsome. The audience became so wild with laughter that they actually stormed the dubbers’ booth and started improvising their own puns. I particularly remember that day because we were waiting for the monsoon to burst, and the heat had been making everyone crazy.

Seconds after we left the theater it came all at once, and the way home was so impassable we had to stay at the village before our village, and then we had to go home by boat, rowing frantically by the side of the drowned road. The fish were so thick you could pull them from the water in handfulls.

That was when my brother Lek said to me, “You know, Noi, I think it would be grand to be a movie dubber.”

“That’s silly, Phii Lek,” I said. “Someone has to herd the waterbuffaloes and sell the mobiles and—”

“That’s what we both should do. So we don’t have to work on the farm anymore.” Our mothers, who were rowing the boat, pricked up their ears at that. Something to report back to our father, perhaps. “We could live in the town. I love that town.”

“It’s not so great,” my mother said.

My senior mother (Phii Lek’s mother) agreed. “We went to Chiangmai once, for the beauty contest. Now there was a town. Streets that wind on and on…and air-conditioning in almost every public building!”

“We didn’t win the beauty contest, though,” my mother said sadly. She didn’t say it, but she implied that that was how they’d both ended up marrying my father. “Our stars were bad. Maybe in my next life—”

“I’m not waiting till my next life,” my brother said. “When I’m grown up they’ll have air-conditioning in Prasongburi, and I’ll be dubbing movies every night.”

The sun was beating down, blinding, sizzling. We threw off our clothes and dived from the boat. The water was cool, mudflecked; we pushed our way through the reeds.

The storm had blown the village’s TV antenna out into the paddy field. We watched
Star Trek
at the headsman’s house, our arms clutching the railings on his porch, our feet dangling, slipping against the stilts that were still soaked with rain. It was fuzzy and the sound was off, so Phii Lek put on a magnificent performance, putting discreet obscenities into the mouths of Kirk and Spock while the old men laughed and the coils of mosquito incense smoked through the humid evening. At night, when we were both tucked in under our mosquito netting, I dreamed about going into space and finding my grandmother’s palm-leaf mobiles hanging from the points of the stars.

* * * *

Ten years later they built a highway from Bangkok to Chiangmai, and there were no more casual tourists in Prasongburi. Some American archaeologists started digging at the site of an old Khmer city nearby. The movie theater never did get air-conditioning, but my grandmother got into faking antiques; it turned out to be infinitely more lucrative than fish mobiles, and when the
thaokae
died, she and my two mothers were actually able to buy the place from his intransigent nephew. The three of them turned it into an “antique” place (fakes in the front, the few genuine pieces carefully hoarded in the air-conditioned back room) and our father set about looking for a third wife as befit his improved station in life.

My family were also able to buy a half-interest in the movie theater, and that was how my brother and I ended up in the dubbing booth after all. Now, the fact of the matter was, sound projection systems in theaters had become prevalent all over the country by then, and Lek and I both knew that live movie dubbing was a dying art. Only the fact that the highway didn’t come anywhere near Prasongburi prevented its citizens from positively demanding talkies. But we were young and, relatively speaking, wealthy; we wanted to have a bit of fun before having the drudgery of marriage and earning a real living thrust upon us. Lek did most of the dubbing—he was astonishingly convincing at female voices as well as male—while I contributed the sound effects and played background music from the library of scratched records we’d inherited from the previous regime.

Since we two were the only purveyors of, well, foreign culture in the town, you’d think we would be the ones best equipped to deal with an alien invasion.

Apparently the aliens thought so too.

Aliens were furthest from my mind the day it happened, though. I was putting in some time at the shop and trying to pacify my three honored parents, who were going at it like cats and dogs in the back.

“If you dare bring that bitch into our house,” Elder Mother was saying, fanning herself feverishly with a plastic fan—for our air-conditioning had broken down, as usual—“I’ll leave.”

“Well,” Younger Mother (my own) said, “I don’t mind as long as you make sure she’s a servant. But if you marry her—”

“Well,
I
mind, I’m telling you!” my other mother shouted. “If the two of us aren’t enough for you, I’ve three more cousins up north, decent, hardworking girls who’ll bring in money, not use it up.”

“Anyway, if you simply
have
to spend money,” Younger Mother said, “what’s wrong with a new pick-up truck?”

“I’m not dealing with that usurious thaokae in Ban Kraduk,” my father said, taking another swig of his Mekong whiskey, and “and there’s no other way of coming up with a down payment…and besides, I happen to be a very horny man.”

“All of you shut up,” my grandmother said from somewhere out back, where she had been meticulously aging some pots into a semblance of twelfth-century Sawankhalok ware. “All this chatter disturbs my work.”

“Yes,
khun mae,”
the three of them chorused back respectfully.

My Elder Mother hissed, “But watch out, my dear husband. I read a story in
Siam Rath
about a woman who castrated her unfaithful husband and fed his eggs to the ducks!”

My father sucked in his breath and took a comforting gulp of whiskey as I went to the front to answer a customer.

She was one of those archaeologists or anthropologists or something. She was tall and smelly, as all
farangs
are (they have very active sweat glands); she wore a sort of safari outfit, and she had long hair, stringy from her digging and the humidity. She was scrutinizing the spaceship mobile my grandmother had made ten years ago—it still had not sold, and we had kept it as a memento of hard times—and muttering to herself words that sounded like, “Warp factor five!”

My brother and I know some English, and I was preparing to embarrass myself by exercising that ungrateful, toneless tongue, when she addressed me in Thai.

“Greetings to you, honored sir,” she said, and brought her palms together in a clumsy but heartfelt
wai.
I couldn’t suppress a laugh. “Why, didn’t I do that right?” she demanded.

“You did it remarkably well,” I said. “But you shouldn’t go to such lengths. I’m only a shopkeeper, and you’re not supposed to
wai
first. But I suppose I should give you ‘E for effort,’” (I said this phrase in her language, having learned it from another archaeologist the previous year) “since few would even try as hard as you.”

“Oh, but I’m doing my Ph.D. in Southeast Asian aesthetics at UCLA,” she said. “By all means, correct me.” She started to pull out a notebook.

I had never, as we say, “arrived” in America, though my sexual adventures had recently included an aging, overwhelmingly odoriferous Frenchwoman and the daughter of the Indian
babu
who sold cloth in the next town, and the prospect suddenly seemed rather inviting. Emboldened, I said, “But to really study our culture, you might consider—” and eyed her with undisguised interest.

She laughed.
Farang
women are exceptional, in that one need not make overtures to them subtly, but may approach the matter in a no-nonsense fashion, as a plumber might regard a sewage pipe. “Jesus,” she said in English, “I think he’s asking me for a date!”

“I understood that,” I said.

“Where will we go?” she said in Thai, giggling. “I’ve got the day off. And the night, I might add. Oh, that’s not correct, is it? You should send a go-between to my father, or something.”

“Only if the liaison is intended to be permanent,” I said quickly, lest anthropology get the better of lust. “Well, we could go to a movie.”

“What’s showing?” she said. “Why, this is just like back home, and me a teenager again.” She bent down, anxious to please, and started to deliver a sloppy kiss to my forehead. I recoiled. “Oh, I forgot,” she said. “You people frown on public displays.”

“Star Wars
,”
I said.

“Oh, but I’ve seen that twenty times.”

“Ah, but have you seen it—dubbed
live,
in a provincial Thai theater without air-conditioning? Think of the glorious field notes you could write.”

“You Thai men are all alike,” she said, intimating that she had had a vast experience of them. “Very well. What time? By the way, my name is Mary, Mary Mason.”

* * * *

We were an hour late getting the show started, which was pretty normal, and the audience was getting so restless that some of them had started an impromptu bawdy-rhyming contest in the front rows. My brother and I had manned the booth and were studying the script. He would do all the main characters, and I would do such meaty roles as the Second Stormtrooper.

“Let’s begin,” Phii Lek said. “She won’t come anyway.”

Mary turned up just as we were lowering the house lights. She had bathed (my brother sniffed appreciatingly as she entered the dubbing booth) and wore a clean
sarong,
which did not look too bad on her.

“Can I do Princess Leia?” she said,
wai-
ing
to Phii Lek as though she were already his younger sibling by virtue of her as-yet-unconsummated association with me.

“You can
read
Thai?” Phii Lek said in astonishment.

“I have my Masters’ in Siamese from Michigan U,” she said huffily, “and studied under Bill Gedney.” We shrugged.

“Yes, but you can’t improvise,” my brother said.

She agreed, pulled out her notebook, and sat down in a corner. My brother started to put on a wild performance, while I ran hither and thither putting on records and creating sound effects out of my box of props. We began the opening chase scene with Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto, which kept skipping; at last the needle got stuck and I turned the volume down hastily just as my brother (in the tones of the heroic Princess Leia) was supposed to murmur, “Help me, Obiwan Kenobi. You’re my only hope.” Instead, he began to moan like a harlot in heat, screeching out, “Oh, I need a man, I do, I do! These robots are no good in bed!”

At that point Mary became hysterical with laughter. She fell out of her chair and collided with the shoe rack. I hastened to rescue her from the indignity of having her face next to a stack of filthy flipflops, and could not prevent myself from grabbing her. She put her arms around my waist and indecorously refused to let go, while my brother, warming to the audience reaction, began to ad lib ever more outrageously.

It was only after the movie, when I had put on the 45 of the Royal Anthem and everyone had stood up to pay homage to the Sacred Majesty of the King, that I noticed something wrong with my brother. For one thing, he did not rise in respect, even though he was ordinarily the most devout of people. He sat bunched up in a comer of the dubbing booth, with his eyes darting from side to side like window wipers.

I watched him anxiously but dared not move until the Royal Anthem had finished playing.

Then, tentatively, I tapped him on the shoulder. “Phii Lek,” I said, “it’s time we went home.”

He turned on me and snarled…then he fell on the floor and began dragging himself forward in a very strange manner, propelling himself with his chin and elbows along the woven-rush matting at our feet.

Mary said, “Is
that
something worth reporting on?” and began scribbling wildly in her notebook.

“Phii Lek,” I said to my brother in terms of utmost respect, for I thought he might be punishing me for some imagined grievance, “are you ill?” Suddenly I thought I had it figured out. “If you’re playing ‘putting on the anthropologists,’ Elder Sibling, I don’t think this one’s going to be taken in.”