Planless, Krung Thep sprawled away from the river, its watery network spreading like ant trails through sugar. The house his father took them to fronted on a vegetated street and backed onto a canal served by water taxis and buses. Like every other building in the city, the house bobbed on shallow piles.
The walled compound of his new home contained the same servants' quarters, outdoor laundry, rain jar full of mosquito larvae, and copse of rotting aromatic fruit trees he had grown up knowing. But it had one distinctly local touch. Where the shard-tipped wall adjoined the canal, under a tree of wax-pink, edible Liberty Bells sat a tiny house. Doll-sized, its piers supported a triple-tiered, sharply gabled roof in orange and green ceramic. Flame finials shot out from each apex, gracing the encrusted eaves.
Ricky asked the cook, his confidant, about this tiny domicile. In a patois that became his bootstrap into Free, Som told him it housed all the essences that had been displaced when the big house was built. The boy liked to leave jasmine and burning joss sticks by the diminutive front door, an act between veneration and apology.
The floating city consisted of countless life-size, real-world spirit houses. Banks, arcades, bars, Turkish baths, whorehouses, markets, polo clubs, slums, schools, embassies, and dark mazes of hovel stalls all proliferated unzoned. Yet there was only one decisive industry in the Free capitaclass="underline" propitiation.
The city existed to build monasteries. The bulk of Free will had been channeled into them. There was one just up the street from the compound, and one a hundred meters down the canal. One stood across from Ricky's international school. An enormous temple complex, a walled city within the city, occupied the bow-bend of the river, the kernel of the old town. Most of the three hundred monasteries, from sprawling communities to single sheds, were classical in style: bell-shaped stupas flanked colonnaded halls with terraced roofs flamed in finials and topped with tapering spires.
The city was on a centuries-long project to convert itself into an immense way house for the spirit world's indigent. Even those desperately poor without drinking water — two million Angel inhabitants lived and died by milliliters — contributed to building. A week's income went to replace a roof tile, signed on the underside before being supped into position. Free heaven, the boy learned, was not a place but release from place, an escape of the turns of the Wheel. A celestial New York, a mendicant Tokyo, an incorporeal Paris, the City of Angels constructed itself in an architecture beyond desire.
The neighborhoods forgoing enlightenment ran in two-story, poured concrete shanties. Shops at ground level were topped by a combination office, warehouse, and family living cube. In these shops the boy learned to bargain. Even a hundred grams of candy had a concealed price that had to be discovered jointly by vendor and customer. Ricky could fake shock at suggested retail, feign indifference over an item he burned for more than all the pocket change in existence. He perfected the art of walking away, then turning at the right, world-weary moment to suggest, in the most resigned tonal speech, a compromise. Shopkeepers baited him with inflated prices, just to see this miserable excuse for an albino roll out his repertoire.
His vocabulary grew rapidly. His ear, at thirteen, was still liquid. There were sounds in the massive alphabet that his parents could not distinguish, let alone produce: an intermediate between b and p; a vicious initial ng that came from a place in the back of the throat missing in white adults. Impaired, his parents employed Ricky to negotiate with tradesmen or placate Som's anxieties over the invasion of the evening's pallo by winged hordes.
A barrier more intractable than pronunciation prevented his parents from ever becoming Free speakers. In Free, a word's meaning hinged on a proper deployment of the five tones. His mother, an amateur musician, could hear something wonderful happening in every spoken syllable. But neither she nor Kraft Sr. could hear, let alone enunciate, the difference between "color" and "four."
The boy, on the other hand, knew the tone of a word before he'd even learned it. He knew the tone was the word. Thus he could make, from what sounded to his parents like five equivalent syllables, the brilliant if rhetorical question, "New silk doesn't burn, does it?"
He studied Free at the International Institute of the City of Angels. The school housed the city's foreign children, a monastery complex without the finials. The school mascot — racist joke on all farangs, whatever their melanin — was Hanuman, the white monkey general from the national poetic epic.
Ricky soon studied Free with the oldest, even learning the elaborate script. He learned to name two dozen banana varieties from dealings with the canal boats. Som taught him how to sing in a seven-pitch musical scale, twisting each note with the word's inflection. But his real language lab took place in the streets, where he quickly learned everything from "corner kick" to "bugger your mother."
Time thrived not in the verb but in context. Yesterday it rains. This afternoon, it rains. Cool centuries from now, when you at long last graduate from bodily history, it rains. The subtle colorations of tense-less time seeped deeper into him. He slowly understood it, or, in the Free for "understand," it heart-entered him.
It heart-entered him until he felt nowhere but where he was, a white ghost in an inland port on the Gulf of Free, in a street overrun by pedicabs and tone-haggling merchants, laced with jasmine and temple bells, bells rung by pilgrims' staves in the same intervals as the seven-pitch songs Som taught him. He sang the songs at thirteen, hearing in advance what the pitches would sound like at second hand, when the one place on earth he ever belonged to was reduced to this exotic travelogue, dim cartoon.
His parents were resigned to let him assimilate. He could wander the city at random. For two and a half cents, he took one of the hundred color-coded buses, hanging out the open back door even when crowding did not compel it. He clung to the Sunday Market, where he watched limbs thick with elephantiasis shrink at the application of fluid distilled from rare barks. There too he could buy fish and birds for the merit of releasing them. Fruit could be had that he had seen nowhere else on the planet, tastes that had no equivalent in any other language but this, the one he now tasted in.
The Sunday Market attested to fields and rivers a little more forthcoming than most of the places he had lived. But even this relatively affluent emporium had its extensive subdivisions where the deformed laid out mats, where mothers solicited for their hydrocephalic infants — heads huge, smooth, and shiny as museum vases. Here, the boy invested his bargaining proceeds. At thirteen, he still felt the ludicrous hope of making a dent, although somewhere he already knew that all the coins in the world would never release even an insignificant fraction of the agony locked in this one illusory turn of the Wheel.
The southeast of town was a slum so vast and desperate that no philosophy could reduce it to illusion. Ricky traveled there one day, one of the few city corners he hadn't yet seen. The bus conductor punched his ticket using a six-inch, coiled little fingernail, and asked where the boy thought he has going. Ricky responded, "I live in this city." I live yesterday, now, in another hundred centuries.
But he was not ready to see just where he lived. In Squatter Town, houses for displaced spirits were irrelevant. The living there displaced nothing; they had never taken possession of the lease. Fathers defecated and mothers listlessly washed dishes in the same fetid film where their children still found the energy to swim. The diet here could not even sustain the hope of religious escape. Days were no perpetual Wheel to be ridden until history released the day's residents. There was no passage of days here. Days were an inconceivable luxury for the privileged and already sprung.