Free Sightseeing by Rattawut Lapcharoensap Page B

hear the cards fluttering in there like so many birds.
Black, black, black,
I think. Wichu reaches into the urn, pulls out a card, hands it to the officer.
Red,
the speaker system says, and I can almost see Wichu’s shoulders slump from some invisible weight.
    I look at Wichu’s mother. She is not jiggling her leg any longer, nor is she biting her nails. She merely stares out at Wichu, waves weakly to him. She seems calm. He walks off the stage to get his hair cut at the pagoda, that folder of useless documents still tucked under his arm.
    The rest of the evening is like a dream to me now. I don’t remember much at all. I only remember Wichu arriving at the side of the pavilion to greet his mother with his head shaved. I only remember his mother reaching out to touch his scalp, to pull his head down into her bosom. He hands her his marching orders and she inspects it for a moment before tucking the document into the folder. The boys who’d been with me in the monks’ quarters start to go onstage then, the last of the year’s lottery. They pull out black card after black card after black card, like magicians pulling rabbits out of a hat. Nobody cheers for our black cards.
    The sun has set, a light evening drizzle singing against the pavilion roof. Most of the relatives have gone home. Wichu’s mother, I see, has also gone home. But Wichu stays. He stands there and watches us pull out our black cards from the urn, a blank look on his face, his clean white shirt and crisp new slacks and buffed Bata loafers getting wet in the rain. He never looks at me. I want him to leave. After a while, I can’t look at him anymore.
    They finally call my name. I walk onstage, though it seems they are calling somebody else. For the first time, that name doesn’t sound like my own. So I stand there for a moment before reaching into the urn to receive that generous fate which is mine and mine alone. And when I do, when I hand my black card to the officer and walk off the stage, I look toward the ropes and see that Wichu has finally gone on home without me.

SIGHTSEEING
    We’re on the southbound train, the tracks swift beneath our feet, the windows rattling in their frames. The train crawls slowly down the archipelago, oceans bordering both sides of the tracks. To the east, the Hunan runoff softens the soil, silt spilling into the ocean, turning the Gulf of Thailand brown. Mountains shield the west from the monsoons, leaving the leeward coast barren and dry, the Andaman Sea retaining its crisp cool blue. We’re going through Prachuap Khiri Khan now, where the mountains recede briefly into a flattened plain, the seas pinching the peninsula into a needle. We are going through the slimmest part of the slimmest peninsula in the world, the Indian and the Pacific crashing against both shores. The earth is a tightrope; our train speeds across the flat thin wire. They say that a century from now this will all be gone, that the oceans will rise above this threadbare patch of earth, creating a strait as narrow as Molucca, as fine as Gibraltar, yoking the oceans, severing this nation in two. I can’t quite believe this because I never believe anything I won’t be around to see.
    We’re going to Koh Lukmak, the last in a long chain of Andaman Islands, a tiny fortress of forest and stone. Ma’s boss had a picture of Lukmak on the office bulletin board for years and Ma said she wanted to see what all the fuss was about. The fine sand. The turquoise water. The millions of fishes swimming in the shallow. Her boss had called it paradise, and though I remember Ma telling me as a child that Thailand was only a paradise for fools and farangs, for criminals and foreigners, she’s willing to give it a chance now. If paradise is really out there, so close to home, she might as well go and see for herself.
    It is not an easy trip—twelve hours by train, eight hours by boat—and Lukmak is so small it