Free Everything by Kevin Canty

Thai people. I rented this little, really awful concrete bungalow and there was a bookstore on Phuket and all I did was read and lie in the sun, even through the hot parts of the day. I can still remember it when I close my eyes, the feel of the sun and the sand under me. Part of it was about being in my body and just feeling it, and part of it was about not wanting to exist, you know, just obliterating myself. Erasing. I’d go down to the bars at night and drink Scotch whiskey. Then sit in the sun and read
Anna Karenina
. Little lizards all around. That’s where all this came from.
    All this what?
    The melanoma. From the sun on Phi Phi Don. Even then I knew it wasn’t good for me but it was, it felt good. Just to burn something out of me.
    You believe that?
    Yes, I do. I believe in intention. I wanted to erase myself and look: it’s working.
    She grinned at him and sipped her beer. A cold creepy feeling along his spine. She really had no hope at all. Again he felt the Galahad urge to save her, to fetch her back into the world, among the living. He knew he couldn’t, knew he might have to try.
    Betsy said, I met a Thai boy, my age. He was the only one drunker than I was. Everybody else was smoking Thai pot back then and I wish I had some now but then we both just liked to get messed up on Scotch. So we just woke up hungover one morningand decided we had to get out of there, I thought we were just killing ourselves and Ray thought we needed to find a spiritual place. You know, he was a really nice person, Ray was. He could have done anything with me. Nobody was keeping track, and I was just giving myself away to anybody who wanted it. Fucked-up things happened all the time there.
    She stopped, remembering. Then said, A girl ended up, they found her chained to a bed. Canadian girl. But, no, Ray got us on a bus and found some Coca-Cola and aspirin with codeine for the hangovers and we drove all the way two days north to Chiang Mai. I was like, shaking the whole time.
    Ray? RL asked.
    His real name was about a block long, Betsy said. Everybody just called him Ray. He knew people everywhere. We got to Chiang Mai and right away, he had us staying with his cousin in this, like, I don’t know, a garage or something behind his house. I had money, we could have stayed in a hotel, except this seemed like more of an adventure. Also, I don’t know, maybe there weren’t any hotels. People came from everywhere for the water festival. There were elephants in the streets. Just the clothes and colors and everybody smiling and the little kids—you know, they were the first ones who started off throwing water at each other and then it was just water everywhere. I was so stupid, I was wearing a white T-shirt and after five minutes it was like, what do
you
think of my bra? but nobody cared. I don’t even know if they noticed.
    You look pretty.
    What?
    * * *
    Just talking about it, it makes you happy, makes you pretty, RL said.
    Well, I was, she said. I was happy. I was
cool
, Robert. Once in a lifetime, I was in the right place at the right time. But just, I don’t know, being in the crowd with everybody laughing and singing and water everywhere, it was like for just one moment I just kind of dissolved, just an atom with a bunch of other atoms, you know? Instead of
my
problems and my little life, it was like being part of something bigger, like a cell in a body—I don’t know how to explain it. It was beautiful. It was really beautiful.
    It sounds like it.
    But I wonder, now, if I let something into my life that I shouldn’t have. Some little pill that took this long to dissolve.
    You didn’t.
    You don’t know.
    No, RL said. I don’t.

*
    Then came the glory days of fall . The larch turned gold in the high country, gold on green, and the cottonwood leaves drifted down the river in all their colors. Edgar couldn’t stand it anymore, went up to Rock Creek with his cast wrapped in plastic and fished one-handed into a brilliant