But the hard truth of the matter was that the very instant David settled himself nervously into the very last row of the Kamtoey Theater, he forgot his vows altogether.
David sat in the red-velvet seat, his heart racing and his skin prickling with a fine nervous sweat. He had a theoretical knowledge of film from his mother, who had told him that a film was like a photograph the size of a wall that moved, but the whole notion struck him as somewhat incredible. He wondered how he would describe the film to his classmates tomorrow. Maybe he would say, "It was so funny I peed myself," although he was not precisely sure how a moving photograph would be that funny, exactly; or he would say, "It was so scary I almost barfed," although again, the connection was obscure, between a picture which moved and the kind of cold terror he had felt when, pulling up the bucket from the well not long before the family left Eden Valley, he had found a cobra spitting back. That discovery had in fact provoked David to vomit.
The more David thought about barfing, the more he felt just a touch queasy. The Thai don't believe a movie should be a barrier to a decent meal and rightly consider popcorn proper fare only for pigs, so generations of cinemagoers had come into the theater laden down with meat-balls and grilled chicken on skewers, soaked with sweet sticky sauces; salted dried fish from the vendors lined up outside the theater; and bowls of noodles drenched in fish sauce, vinegar, sweet kaffir lime, spicy ginger, lemongrass, and galangal, the whole odoriferous concoction to be slurped down all through the show with the aid of chopsticks, whose click-clack against the ceramic bowls could be heard even at moments of highest cinematic tension. The red carpets and thinly upholstered seats had absorbed forty years of spills. The smell was overpowering, although to a nose not distended by guilt and anxiety, not entirely unpleasant. Later in life, David, wandering through the covered spice market or just passing by a street stall, would be instantly transported by a familiar smell back to the Kamtoey Theater and the sweet, illicit afternoons of his adolescence.
David thought about going home. His butt wasn't stapled to the seat. He figured that he had seen enough of the theater to fake it at school from now on, but not so much as to estrange him from his family. That was the hardest thing to explain to the other kids at school, just why he had never been to the movies. He had only recently begun to suspect that his family, in its enthusiasms and convictions, was different from other families; and, indeed, the Walkers lived more intensely in the service of the Lord now than they had even in Eden Valley, treating Chiang Mai as little more than a mirage offered up by the Deceiver to distract them from what they needed to do.
When they had first come to Chiang Mai and all of them were still living in a two-room house lent them by a wealthy Christian tailor, how admirably flexible in the face of adversity the Walkers proved themselves to be! Raymond and Laura were more than seventy years old, Thomas more than fifty, all of those children, not one Walker speaking a single word of Thai, little money, twenty years spent in the deepest jungle— and the only thing the Walkers knew for sure was that they would not forget the Dyalo!
"This was no accident, our coming here! Oh no! God's planning is coming together, and soon the Day will come. The wind of God had blown us down from China in the north," said Grandpa Raymond.* "And when the storm picks up, don't you worry, the Dyalo will come running in for Shelter. We'll be patient like a seed in the earth."
By giving those old enough to preach a goal, namely the conversion of the Dyalo of Thailand, Raymond distracted them all from the sorrows of exile. And all those old wild wandering Walker impulses, long suppressed in twenty years of jungle domesticity, came out again, to the exclusion of almost all other cares: Thomas, together with Uncle Samuel.
*The grandkids just loved Raymond but, nevertheless, when alone could not always resist the temptation of making fun of his many endearingly dramatic phrases: "the wind of God" blew across "the river of time"; men climbed "the tall mountain of sin," only to fall into "the deep abyss of suffering," in which was heard "the thunder of repentance"; the only deliverance from "the wolves of Satan" was "the sweet honey of Heaven"; "the black night of Eternity" was promised to all who had not been scared by "the fire of the Word," supported by "the solid oak that is His Promise," or touched by "the flames of His Love." Even Norma, when alone with the kids, could not resist laughing when her youngest son, Paul, did his imitation of Grandpa Raymond preaching.
Uncle Jesse, and Uncle Paul, devoted themselves to learning these strange new hills. Talk at the dinner table was of preaching and baptisms, conversions and wavering villages, shamans who fought the work and headmen who—Praise! — were coming close to the Light. The Dyalo in these hills were strange and different, their dialect outlandish, but the Walkers knew them. Even Raymond with his bad hip couldn't keep from going into hills and limping from village to village, as he hadn't done since he himself was a young man, and when the men came down from ten days, two weeks, a month in the mountains, caked in mud, their faces were flushed red because they had felt His power. David didn't even need to ask what his father would think of his decision to see Blacula. If you have time on your hands, son, pray for those folks in Mae Salop. That's what his dad would say.
David had almost convinced himself to leave the theater when the lights went down. He gripped the arm rails of his seat. The roller coaster rolling slowly upward, a plane in heavy turbulence, a doctor probing the genitals, that familiar tightening of the scrotum and cloaca. He wondered: Why had he bothered to lie to his mother? As if God couldn't see him sitting here? As if God couldn't afford a ticket to the movies, God who had made the universe? What had he been thinking?
Why, he wondered, had nobody told him that movies were in the dark?
Then bats. That was the first thing he heard. From up above, the hysterical shrieking of a flock of bats swooping down from above, a flock of idiot bats who nested in the rafters of the old theater. Confused by the unexpected and untimely alternations of light and dark, the bats flapped and dove, as strange lights began to play across the screen, accompanied by loud music, which David recognized from school assemblies as the Royal Anthem. On the screen, the bright colors coalesced into the form of a man, and then a crowd, then dissolved and disappeared just as quickly, before David could quite decide what he was seeing. Then David realized that it was just as his mother said: the screen was all one moving photograph. He saw the king of Thailand on the screen. In his anxiety David had hardly noticed the others in the audience, but now, looking around, he realized that he was the only one still sitting. He stood up.
David knew that when presented for the very first time with a photograph, many Dyalo, particularly the old people, have trouble interpreting it. It would only be colors and lines to them. They would hold it right up close to their eyes and then far away, then upside down or sideways, and would call their wives over, and say, "Do you see anything here?" and David would say, "Don't you see? That's a nose and that's eyes and that's a mouth there." And still the old Dyalo just wouldn't get it, until all of a sudden, like someone examining those optical-illusion puzzles which show either a candlestick or two faces, they'd say, "Ah-hah!" and they'd figure out what was going on — although each new photograph would still require long scrutiny before the "Ah-hah, isn't that clever!" moment.
Now David found himself in the same confused position. There were photographs of the king on the walls of every shop in Chiang Mai, but this—this was another thing entirely. What his mother had never mentioned was that the photograph was constantly changing. The king would appear in one place and then in another, on the left side of the screen and on the right, an older man and a younger man, dressed in a suit and then in the ochre robes of a Buddhist monk, and then in a military uniform, and then in the elaborate royal gowns. David would only begin to figure out who the king was, and then the king would disappear again. Sometimes the king would move, but sometimes the camera rotated and advanced, even gained altitude and perspective, while the king stayed in the same place. There was the king humbly reciprocating the bow of an old peasant lady; then the king in a military jeep. The king was driving, his regal face a study in concentration. Now the king was on elephant-back heading up into the hills. Bats flew across the king's face. The king's jeep was driving toward the camera, and David involuntarily ducked and then a second later stood up straight again, feeling foolish. Then the anthem swelled to its dramatic crescendo and the screen went black. The bats who lived in the rafters of the Kamtoey Theater retreated to their nesting place.