Last year this part of town was a sea of red. Red shirts, red headbands, red banners, red pickup trucks and, finally, red blood on the streets. Even Chai came out in his brother’s red Singha beer T-shirt and his reddish motorcycle taxi driver’s vest. He got money every day he showed up. Not a lot, but they were going to bring the government down, he was told. Then there would be much more money for everyone. The old prime minister would return, bringing back “democrazy” with him. Nai Yai — the Big Boss — was the richest man in Thailand, maybe in the world. So everything would be okay again, everyone said. Chai believed them and tries to now, tries to remember the days when everything was okay.
Air-con bus fares have gone up again. Everything is going up. How can a person live in this city, the way things are going? You sit on an ordinary bus, no air, and the bus gets stuck in traffic, not even a breeze. It’s torture. Clouds of exhaust choking you. You haven’t got to work yet and you’re all screwed up, your clothes soaked with sweat. Chai got off the bus three stops early, not wanting to be seen, and he walked the rest of the way to the overpass to meet Dit. You need a car in this city. A motorcycle is faster, but then you’re right down there in the worst of it. Coughing all the time. Chest tight. Eyes sore. Motorcycles aren’t the same as cars. Chai knows he’ll be nobody until he can sit in his own car with his air-conditioner blowing and some music on his stereo. A nice girl beside him. Then it won’t matter how bad the traffic is.
The Mercedes-Benzes and BMWs and Honda Accords roll by. Lots of Mitsubishis and Toyotas and Peugeots and Isuzus. Volvos. One Jaguar. But no butterscotch Benz. Not yet. It’s amazing, with what they cost, the number of Mercedes-Benzes on the streets. When Chai gets his car, he wants smoked-glass windows all around; it looks good. And it keeps the sun out. But then how will people be able to see the nice girl beside him? It will be better if people can see her. He stares hard at the side windows of a passing Volvo, seeing only shadowy presences that could be anybody. No, not anybody. Someone rich. “Mobile Class Members Club,” proclaims a sticker on the back window of one car. Chai has heard how much a single beer, a small beer, costs in a club like that one. The job his brother Vajira has, he doesn’t earn that much in a day. Vajira’s wife, Daeng, she doesn’t make that much in three days, renting out woven mats in the park so people can sit on the grass. At a place like the Mobile Class Members Club the girls are all beautiful and, somebody told Chai, their drinks cost even more than the beer. And you know how much you have to pay to take one of these chickens home for the night? It’s unbelievable.
But they say the Red Shirts are coming out again. And this time there’ll be no stopping them. No more double standards. Everybody will have money. Nice cars. Good whiskey. Dit says all these things will come true. It’s democrazy that does it. And then he laughs, maybe because this makes him happy.
The light is turning, so Chai goes back up the steel stairway to his post.
This job today will buy him a few beers. Beautiful women, too, though not in the Mobile Class. A motorcycle, bigger than his brother’s. And this is only the start. If he does good work this time, there will be more in the future. This is a big chance for him. He’ll be able to buy a car. A Toyota. He’ll drive his brother and his wife to Nonthaburi, to that restaurant by the river. And they will eat big grilled tiger prawns with sweet solid white meat. And cold, cold beer. Even a bottle of Black Label whiskey. Put it on a trolley with a bucket of ice and bottles of cola. The waiters will keep pouring it out, nobody’s glass allowed to go dry; then he’ll call for more Coke and ice. And when the first bottle of Black Label is gone, he’ll send a waiter for another. He’ll buy a Blu-ray DVD player, and the neighbors will come to sit downstairs, on the road outside the house, and watch the Muay Thai boxing. A big color set with a forty-two-inch screen. HD. He’ll buy everybody Mekong whiskey and beer and fried duck and prawns. No. He should buy them Black Label too.
A young woman stops to drop some coins into the legless beggar’s cup. A nice-looking woman in a nice dress. She’s wearing a chunky gold-chain necklace, and Chai sees the look in the beggar’s face as he thanks her. Had the beggar legs to stand on, he would stand to snatch the gold and run like the wind. The woman walks down the steps to the street and towards the intersection. Chai likes the way she moves.
Chai suddenly sags, struck with the gravity of it all. Cars and motorcycles, tuk-tuks and trucks roar and whine and growl, a snarling confusion of sound, a weight of color and movement and want and hate, killing in this heat. Chai hasn’t eaten yet today. It’s too hot. The heat weighs down, threatens to suffocate him. The cityscape shimmers for a moment and then holds still again, intense and hard-edged.
A brown Mercedes-Benz is approaching... It isn’t the one. The man told him to watch for a butterscotch Benz, the same color as the foreign khanom, the candy he gave Chai to taste. Expensive candy. What the foreigners eat, but it doesn’t taste so good. Chai likes Thai food. And with that thought he feels pangs of hunger. He feels faint, dizzy. A dull throb has started in his temples. The butterscotch Benz is a big one, he has been told. An SE class. Chai repeats the license plate number he was given, repeats it over and over like a mantra. He steps to the other side of the bridge, the beggar’s side, and looks towards the intersection to see the changes.
The gigantic mall they burned last year has been rebuilt; it seems bigger than it was before, and more beautiful. Chai has been inside only once. It’s like a temple, but far grander than any temple he has ever seen. Behind the mall and there, on the other corner, they are building more things — who knows what? Chai gazes all around the city horizon and shakes his head to clear the dizziness. The sky burns inside his head. A silent scream, the insect battle cries of building cranes draw together in one long plangent shriek across the hot blue sky, a shrill of anxiety only he can hear. From wherever you stand these days, alien stick-figure monsters loom on the skyline, a tangle of mindless, implacable builders. Destroyers. Sometimes — now — Chai hates this great suppurating city, swollen with people and cars swarming like maggots on a week-old corpse, multiplying like bacteria in a wound till the pressure of pus threatens to burst the tissues.
They kept Chai and his brother awake for ten months, erecting the high-rise condominium where the noodle shop, the best in the neighborhood, and the adjoining ice-house used to stand. They worked twelve-hour shifts around the clock, seven days a week. Nobody could sleep, but it wouldn’t have done any good to complain to the police. They had been paid. Now things are quiet once more, but Chai will never be able to see the sun from the roof of their building again. And now the lane is always choked with cars and delivery trucks. But mai pen rai — it doesn’t matter; soon they will have to move anyway. Another condo is going up and the whole row of old houses, the grocery and the barbershop have to go. Rents are so high these days, though; it’s hard to say where they will move to.
Before they tore down the old wooden ice-house, Sombat the legless boy used to clatter around the neighborhood on his cart delivering baskets of crushed ice. After the ice-house went, the rattle and squeak grew less frequent, slower, somehow less cheerful. For months before he died, Sombat gradually faded away, sometimes sitting for hours on the street doing nothing, just looking, smiling a bit if you said hello.
Black-smoked windshields throw reflections of Chai back up at himself, phantom witnesses to his presence, watching and waiting there this day. And now the moment is moving surely towards him. It approaches with the stuttering river of cars, with the slow storm of color and sparkle in the hot, still air. Reds flare fierce as blood in the sun, blare lust and power. Blues dazzle and pine. Dark greens, cool greens; hot yellows and pinks. Glossy black class — power. The whole of it a hectic crawl, a babble of color, a confusion of grays, whites, maroons, browns, silver and gold, a vast hubbub of sorrow and anger and want and hate. And here it is — a big, long Sclass. The butterscotch Benz is approaching, slick and sweet enough to eat. The inside lane, as well. That’s good. And it isn’t going to make the green light.