“Yep. He’s Thai.” He got out his phone and showed me a photo message someone had sent him. It was indeed the shop we were looking at.
Sparks flew from the welder’s tools. He wasn’t wearing a mask. A child sat near him, staring broodily across the road. “Is that the kid?”
Johan shrugged. “Might be. I’ll find out. See you in a sec.”
“OK. I’ll do my best,” I said, turning back to the menu. “But I take no responsibility for what we get.”
He left, laughing. I watched him lope into the shop, unbothered by the strangeness of his surroundings. He crouched to talk to the welding man, who pointed toward the back of the shop, but before he’d even straightened up, a smart young woman appeared. She made straightfor Johan and started talking to him. She was smiling; she briefly put a hand on his arm. Johan smiled back, because his default was always to smile, but he seemed taken aback. For a second his eyes veered across the road in my direction.
The woman said something else, flicking a sleek ponytail over her shoulder. He looked at me again, then back to her. He gestured toward the back of the shop but she shook her head, still smiling, pointing at herself. A hand briefly on his arm again. Even from across the street I could see how immaculate she was, how out of step with the chaotic, cluttered surroundings of the shop.
“Hello?” a voice said behind me, and I turned to the kindly woman at the counter, who helped me order what Johan had said we needed. She spoke English, and she was patient as I buffooned with my wallet of unknown currency.
When I looked for Johan again he was further back in the shop, talking to someone standing under a dim hanging bulb. It didn’t seem to be the woman; she had gone. Out in the street, loud music started from somewhere. I could only see Johan faintly, obscured now and then by passing tuk-tuks and flags and people queuing behind me, but I sensed something wasn’t right.
I wish I could somehow have known, in that moment, what was happening, because it was the beginning of our end. I wish I’d run over and put a stop to it all. But I couldn’t know, didn’t know—and Istilldon’t know, to this day—what took place in that shop.
A moment or two later, he reappeared.
“Everything OK?” I asked. He spotted a couple leaving a table near the counter and steered us over.
“I think so,” he said. “It wasn’t quite the warm welcome my colleague said I’d get. And the kid did not seem bothered by the jaggery balls. I was told he’d be bouncing off the ceiling when I turned up.Nobody makes jaggery balls like the Burmese, apparently.” He shrugged, said something in Swedish that apparently shared some basic DNA withyou win some, you lose some, and I let it go.
The soy milk drinks and patongos were delicious. We explored the nearby shops, filling Johan’s now-empty bag with Chinese lanterns, friendship bracelets, and beads of all colors for his best friend’s kid back in Sweden. We photographed birds’ nests and shark fins and stood for ages in a small temple under hundreds of swaying lanterns, the air oddly silent save for what sounded like a shop-counter bell. We made up a story about Kiri and Bastard, two dogs we’d dreamed up, and had to leave the temple because we were laughing too much. Then we went back to our hotel and slept all afternoon, because the rain had returned and besides, it was too hot to do anything else.
When I woke he was standing by the window, looking out. There was no view to speak of, just a wall a few meters away with rain hurtling past, but I sensed he wasn’t really looking anyway.
“Everything all right?”
“Oh, hey. Yes,” he said, but there was a small pause, and I knew he was lying.
I asked if he was sure, just like we always do when we really mean,I am unsettled by your mood, please tell me what’s happening. And he said he was sure, like we always do, when we are not OK but haven’t yet found the words to explain why.
—
He was still off when we went out that evening. I suggested the night market but he said it would be crawling with tourists, and how about we went to one of the go-go bar districts?
“Really?”
“Why not!”
“I didn’t have you down as a go-go bar kind of a guy,” I said, after a pause.
“I’m not. But do you not find the whole thing quite fascinating? As a cultural phenomenon?”
“Er…Well, no.”
He laughed, but it wasn’t the infectious barrel-roll of sound I’d come to love.
“We don’t have to, if you’re not keen,” he said, coming over to me. I was sitting on the edge of the bed, a towel around my middle. “I’ve just always found these sorts of places fascinating.”
“No, I’ll come…”
“We can call it research,” Johan said.
“What are we researching? Sex? I think we’re very good at that already.”
He smiled. “Me too.” He rubbed his right eye, which, I’d noticed, had been twitching.
