shawn.me

Did this work?

How about this?

Daniel assumed the broken string of lights was another relic of life before the tsunami, but beyond that he couldn’t piece together any specific physical events that would have left it torn and dangling way up in the tree.

He considered it as he waited near the resort’s small swimming pool; it was nearly time for his scheduled massage. He had come from his room to wait in this place because he assumed the spa must be somewhere near the pool, and he wanted to spare the staff the trouble of sending someone so far to fetch him. His “room” was actually a small bungalow on the beachfront, several hundred meters distant from the common area of the resort, down a narrow sandy path, so perhaps he also wanted to save himself a long awkward walk with a staff person. Etiquette at these kinds of places was always a question – do you walk beside the staff, or behind them? Do you attempt conversation?

Maybe the force of the wave had bent the tree over, and some passing debris had snagged itself in the string of lights. Something heavy enough to snap it. Or maybe the torn lights had nothing to do with the tsunami. This part of the world certainly sees its share of typhoons.

Typhoons and tsunamis. He used to conflate the two words in his mind.

No other guests were within sight, and since he had come from his room just for the massage, he didn’t bring a book, magazine, mobile phone or anything else. So he sat staring at the sea, telling himself he enjoyed the idleness – telling himself that indeed he had come here seeking this kind of idleness – when in fact he was wishing for his mobile phone. Specifically his email, or maybe just the sudoku game he liked to play during pauses between moments of his day. The early afternoon sky was overcast, which plus a light breeze made the day pleasantly warm instead of oppressively hot. The breeze carried alternating aromas of chlorine, the sea, freshly cut grass, a variety of flowers, his sunscreen lotion and his all-natural, citrunella-scented insect repellent.

A petit woman who seemed to be everywhere around the resort, day and night, approached him. Her name was Pang, he believed.

“Excuse me sir,” she said in a voice just above a whisper, “You can go for massage now.” This was the way they said everything at places like this. You “can,” as if to suggest that even now at the appointed hour, scheduled a day in advance, he might still opt out.

He smiled to her as he stood, and she led him fifty paces or so along a walkway of flat stones set into the short grass. At the entrance to the spa, two other women waited. They wore brown uniforms with gold trim, similar but not identical to Pang’s. One was older, one younger. Mother and daughter, the man thought then reconsidered. They were not so far apart in age. Maybe ten years. Sisters-in-law then, or cousins, or friends whose husbands worked together somewhere. Husbands lost in the tsunami last year maybe. Instinctively, he scanned their expressions for evidence of trauma, clenched grief.

Pang made a small sweeping gesture with her hands, palms out, as if offering him as a gift to the other women. They nodded to her, then him, and led him into the spa as Pang turned to walk away. As they approached a raised area with drawn curtains, the younger woman turned and went off to the left, while the older one motioned to an ornate wooden chair.

The man sat and she knelt at his feet. The younger woman returned briefly with a tray carrying several small bottles, a plastic pitcher, and some folded towels, then walked off again. The kneeling woman removed the man’s sandals and used a rolled-up towel to bat the sand and dust off his feet. Then she pulled a small trough of water out from under the chair and placed his feet into it. The temperature of the water was nearly identical to that of his feet, so the sensation was not of wetness so much as an oddly uniform and gentle pressure.

She chose one of the bottles from the tray, poured some of its contents into her palm then began to spread it – some kind of oil – onto his lower legs, starting up near his left calf muscle.

“You tell me OK or too pressure,” she said and looked up at him for confirmation.

Daniel nodded.

He watched her small, brown hands as she worked them up and down his left leg, from his calf muscle down to his ankle and back, pressing her fingers in various places. He could see the muscles and tendons in her shoulder rippling faintly through her sleeve. A vein thumped at the base of her neck. A drop of sweat rolled slowly down her temple, and he felt a surge of admiration for her that drifted into thoughts of the distance between them, the utter foreignness of her to him – and vise versa. How much money did she make for this work, he wondered. He was paying 40 dollars for the hour, but how much of that would she receive?

He wondered how many of these massages she gave on a typical day, how much money she made in an average year. Whether her job was a good one by local standards.

He wondered about the other guests she serviced. Did she remember the guests, measure them against each other in some way, against some unknown, foreign criteria? Or did each blur into the next? Did they observe her as closely as he was doing now?

What did her home look like he wondered? How far was it from the sea (did it escape the tsunami)?

What did she think of him? Was she intimidated? Did she feel a degree of reverence, see him as a wealthy man of the world, living a life she could never know but might wish for her children? Or did she see him as an oblivious – even arrogant – foreigner?

Daniel was proud of himself for considering all this. He had a sudden awareness of this fact, and he was proud of that too.

Her hands moved down to his heel, then the arch of his foot, and he was suddenly self-conscious about the softness of his skin. He assumed her feet (and those of everyone she knew) were sturdy and calloused. She pressed her thumbs in different places, making him wince a few times. She moved to his toes, pulling each one quickly, producing snapping sounds. Finally she placed his left foot gently back into the trough of water and picked up his right foot.

In his head, he was speaking to her. An imagined conversation.

The man cleared his throat and she glanced at him. He gave her a small nod and a polite smile. She returned the same then lowered her gaze back to his foot.

“Can I ask you a question?” (he imagined himself saying)

“Sir?” (In his mind, her voice was fearful for some reason, defensive)

“What do  you think about while you are doing that?”

“I’m sorry sir?”

“What do you think about while you are massaging a person’s feet? What are you thinking about now?”

“I don’t understand sir. No thinking sir.” (stereotypical broken English)

“Let me tell you what I imagine you are thinking.”

“Sir?”

“Do you have a husband?” (If he really asked her such a question, would she think he was hoping to negotiate a sexual transaction?)

“Yes sir. Married sir.”

“Does your husband work?”

“He fix motorbike sir.” (Perfect. That’s exactly the kind of thing he would do.)

“Yes, that’s perfect. A working man, with dark skin and rough hands no doubt.”

>”Sir?”

“What I imagine you are thinking is, this man is already soft. He does not need a massage. His feet are already as soft as a baby’s.”

He replayed this imagined conversation several times, changing details here and there – the husband was a driver, a fisherman – until the woman startled him by actually speaking. “Sir?”

She gestured to him to stand, and they walked to a massage bed that had been prepared in an adjoining area. The younger woman was there, and she held a sheet up along the length of her arms, like a curtain. “You remove clothes. Lie face down” the older woman said, then joined the younger one on the opposite side of the sheet. They bowed their heads to offer privacy as he disrobed and lay down, and without looking they seemed to know exactly when to step toward him and drop the sheet over the length of his body.

Placed on the floor in front of him – to be seen through the hole in the face rest – was a small bowl of water with a pink flower floating in the center. A nice touch. As the women moved alongside him to massage his shoulders and back, he caught occasional glimpses of their feet, and he watched the water ripple in the bowl from the vibration of their steps. He studied the way each ripple began at the rim of the bowl and made its way to the flower, and how this produced smaller ripples riccocheting out again to the rim. A small speck of something on the surface lurched and bobbed.

Several days ago he’d seen a military boat stabbing out of a rice field like a monument. More than a kilometer from the sea. Their driver had slowed and pointed to it. Two other minibuses were stopped on the side of the road, and their passengers were snapping photos. “This boat was with the king’s nephew.” Their driver said as they passed by the other buses. “The navy guard him while he jet ski. A prince. Very young. Very popular.

“Many boats come far onto the land on that day” the driver continued. He told the story of two of them – one orange, one blue. The Orange Devil and the Blue Angel. An orange fishing boat had swept violently through a village, crashing into houses, destroying buildings and killing people. The other, a large blue ferry boat had drifted serenely through a neighboring village. It missed all the houses, and it had moved so slowly that many people were able to climb aboard and save themselves. Eventually it came to rest by a temple.

He thought about the blue boat. The stunned silence after the waves. The blue boat creaking along. He was bobbing in the water. It was warm. Something grazed his ankle and made him shudder. The blue boat was moving toward him, now towering over him. He scanned its side for a ladder. A rope? Now a hand reaching down. A man suspended from the deck to catch the drowning. He reached up toward the man’s outstretched hand, and it latched on to his arm. Then released him. He strained to catch the hand again and was startled awake. “Sir?” one of the women was saying, and he understood that she had repeated it a few times, each time gently squeezing his wrist.

Donald’s sneakers
on the subway floor
affirming his existence

Another boy
waves at a cockroach

I went with Mom to the funeral home today to pick out a coffin for Grandma, who died of pneumonia last week even though she’d had colon cancer for two years. While Mom looked a second time at the Southwest Sunset with the real Navajo blanket sewn in, I wandered into the viewing room of someone else’s funeral.

There were maybe fifteen people milling about and chatting in small groups. A few others were sitting in simple pews. One person looked at me with a blank expression and then looked away after a second.

The coffin was at the far end of the room, gleaming white and expensive looking. I walked up to it slowly and looked down on the first dead person I’d ever seen. He was maybe sixty, tall. His face was waxy and bronze in color, and he was wearing a brown suit. It was hot in the room. Too hot to be wearing such a suit, and seeing him in it made me suddenly uncomfortable. I glanced at his face again, half-expecting to see beads of sweat forming.

My gaze wandered down his sleeve and stopped at the watch on his right wrist. A modest Seiko model with a dark lizard-skin strap. It was ticking, and when I compared it to my own watch I saw that it showed the correct time.

On the way home, Mom drove faster than she usually does and at one point, as she was accellerating after stopping at a stop sign, I looked out my window and saw a small boy racing us on foot along the sidewalk. He’d sprinted far ahead of his mother, or babysitter. His head was down as he barrelled ahead, and when he finally looked up to see us, we were way down the street, almost out of sight.

It’s been his show all night -
the man who can talk as long as you want
on any subject you choose:

Driving. He laughs inappropriately
telling about the woman killed in her car
by a single falling rock.

He makes me think of the blind man
I know who is happily blind,
who is happily going deaf -

a former lifeguard,
finished with the cries of the drowning,
the grateful embraces of those revived

by strange wet lungfulls of his vocation,
conveyed by something more -
and also less – than a kiss.

Driving home I listen to the DJ making jokes
about the sudden death of the comedian
everyone knows he loved,

whose body stayed behind the wheel,
whose head landed on the golf green.
The jokes are obvious.

Sometimes we laugh because we’ve been pulled
from the swirling darkness
by the very fact that we simply feel

something.

And we greet the suddenness of it
like the grip of the lifeguard’s hand,
like a tired hungry swimmer greets the shore:

laughing.

Sometimes we only feel our way along
picking raspberries by moonlight
and intuition

without a need to see
or understand
why we are suddenly as unmade
as your bed and shadeless lamp.

We reach inside each other in the dark
for fruit, or something permanent.

Sometimes I imagine
your belly stretched -
womb full of twins,
or one held in each arm,
delicate as old photographs.

With similar delicacy
I remove a moth from my hair
and smell my fingers -
the odor of rust
and corruption

my struggle to
connect unconnected
thoughts in
direct contrast to
the stones in your earrings
that are millions of years old

We reach inside each other in the dark;
then in the kitchen’s dim fluorescent light
we try our best to hide our fruit-stained hands.