She had me hold the tube around my penis with both hands while she poured the pink alginate into the triangular hole she had clipped. The mixture was soft, wet, warm. It oozed down the tube, enveloping my cock, and pooled around my balls, then seeped between my legs and down my thighs and dripped onto the plastic sheeting on the floor in clots.
“Can you move around a little?” Jessica asked. “Just a little. Like you’re doing a shimmy. But keep the tube in place. I want to get rid of any air pockets. Otherwise we’ll have to do this again.”
She pulled out a woman’s vibrator from a drawer and turned it on, and I felt a wave of momentary panic, thinking she had nefarious intentions for it, like lodging it into my anus to create an internal shimmy, or purely to attach an evil, twisted subtext to the whole endeavor in the name of art. But she simply held it against the tube in various spots, letting it clatter, plastic to plastic, to rid the alginate of microscopic bubbles. She set the kitchen timer for three minutes. “You’re not losing your erection, are you?” she asked. “Is there something you want me to do?”
I wanted to touch her. I wanted to kiss her. I wanted to make love to her. “I’m okay,” I said.
When the timer dinged, there was an unexpected problem. I couldn’t get out of the tube. Jessica snipped off the rubber cock ring, put her robe back on, turned off the TV, and tucked the magazines away, yet I stayed priapic. “Can’t you get it to go down? Just shrink out of it.”
“It’s not a voluntary thing,” I said. “I can’t mentally switch it on and off.”
“Such a mysterious organ.”
The alginate had gotten cold and firm, and I stood there, holding the tube, my legs cramping, Jessica waiting for me anxiously. At last, after a few minutes, I was limp enough to extricate myself.
“Gently, gently,” Jessica said. She tipped the tube up and looked inside at the mold of my penis and balls.
“I’m not doing this again,” I told her, wiping myself with the towel and the bucket of water she had set aside for me.
“I don’t think you’ll have to. It looks pretty good,” she said. “Here. Rub this on if you start getting itchy the next few days.”
I covered my groin with the towel with my left hand, and with my right I accepted the small tube of cortisone cream.
“You see, that wasn’t so bad, was it?” she said.
Her name was Noklek Praphasirirat. Once she had moved from the couch in the living room to the master bedroom, which had its own bathroom, she was hardly visible. Sometimes I would forget she was staying in the house. She didn’t interact with us at all, never talked to us or ate with us. I never saw her in the kitchen. I didn’t know what she did for meals. She didn’t keep food in the refrigerator. It didn’t seem she used the washing machine or the dryer in the basement, either. She never made a sound. Perhaps she did everything in the dead of night, when we were all asleep.
The only conversation of substance I had with her was in mid-April, when I came home from work just before twilight and, through the sliding glass door, saw her on the back deck. She had gotten her hair chopped off. It was now spiky and streaked, just like Jessica’s. She was also, it appeared, wearing a pair of Jessica’s cargo pants.
She had assembled a shrine on the deck — three small Buddhas, one brass, one stone, one faux-marble, surrounded by candles, incense, two vases of flowers, and framed photos of a Buddha and of a man, woman, and girl. She was kneeling in front of the shrine in a posture of prayer.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to disturb you.”
“You sit?” she said. “You pray with me?”
I knelt down beside her. It seemed disrespectful not to.
“This my father, mother, sister,” she said. “This Gautama.”
Noklek lit the candle on the right side of the Buddhas, then the candle on the left, followed by three incense sticks. She sat stiffly upright, her palms pressed together, then bowed down, forehead on the redwood boards, and I followed suit. She chanted, “Annicaˉ vata sankhaˉraˉ, uppaˉda vaya dhammino. Uuppajjitvaˉ nirujjhanti tesam vuˉpasamo sukho,” and bowed three more times.
She pulled out a folded piece of paper from her pants pocket. “Your mother, father alive?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“You have brother, sister?”
“One older sister.”
“You love sister?”
“I suppose so,” I said, “even though she represents every bourgeois SoCal value that I despise. Southern California — that’s where I’m from originally.”
“My home, very far. Chiang Mai. You know Chiang Mai?”
“In Thailand, right?”
“Yes. Thailand.”
“Do you miss it?”
“Miss, no miss, no different. I no go home. This my home now. My sister dead. My father, mother dead. Everybody dead. This paper, my sister, father, mother name, my family name, ancestor name.”
I wondered how and when everyone had died. In her photograph, her sister was in a school uniform and looked no more than ten years old. The photographs of her parents seemed to have been taken a long time ago, when they were still in their late twenties. No one was smiling. They were rather grim black-and-white portraits, formal head shots, as if for passports. Yet I didn’t ask about the particulars, for without warning Noklek flicked a lighter and lit the corner of the paper with the names of her family and ancestors, holding it over a plate until it was completely enflamed. I was unsettled, assuming there was bitterness in her memories of them, not understanding until later, after I had researched Theravada Buddhist rituals, that this was a tribute to the dead, a passing of merit to their spirits.
She chanted some more, then lifted a bowl of water with flower petals floating on it. Jasmine. I breathed in the sweet scent. Where she had gotten the jasmine, I did not know. I gazed around the backyard. None of the perennials or bulbs that Jessica and I had planted late last summer had bloomed just yet.
Noklek gently sprinkled a bit of the water over the Buddhas and the photo frames, catching the runoff in another glass bowl — the same one, I recognized, in which Jessica had stuck the immersion coil for the alginate mixture. With the collected water, she doused the ashes of the paper. Then she startled me by tipping some water onto my shoulder, down my back.
“Hey!” I said. I was wearing a new button-down, and the water was cold. It was barely fifty degrees outside.
“Luck!” she said. “Songkran! New year!”
This was, I remembered then, a rite of the Songkran festival in Thailand, a three-day new year’s celebration in April. The tradition of pouring cleansing water had degenerated into a national water fight, caravans of celebrants driving down streets with water guns and cannons, drenching bystanders, who would retaliate with buckets and hoses. I had seen videos on the news.
“You water me?” Noklek asked.
I dribbled water onto her shoulder, and she momentarily shuddered from the chill.
She mixed a white powder, maybe chalk, in a small bowl with some water, then dipped her fingers in the white paste and daubed her face — a consecration, vertical lines on her forehead, swirls on her cheeks. She handed me the bowl. “You paint?”
I rubbed the chalk onto my face, mimicking her design pattern.
“Sawatdee pee mai,” she said, pressing her palms together and bowing to me. “Happy New Year.”
“Sawatdee pee mai,” I said, bowing.
“Suk-san wan songkran,” she said.