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∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞
Too many timesto count I had tried to reconstruct the series of events that led me here, to the places I never expected to go, places – literal and figurative – I had so successfully obliterated from my memory that I could not have told anyone for love or money that they ever existed at all. Nao Kao. Laos.
It beggared belief to think it was a straight line from one student looking for a way to study abroad in her family’s ancestral home to Nao Kao Inthavong. No, that would be too simple, and yet, there is no denying that without that request, those six little words,I want to go to Laos, I might yet have continued to exist in blissful ignorance of either Laos or a particular Laotian.
The universe works in mysterious ways, though, and had I dodged the study abroad bullet, I almost assuredly would have still been hit by the one fired at me shortly thereafter, the request to design and teach a course on current events in Southeast Asia. To say nothing of the dusty boxes I hefted from the depths of my closet in the midst of a cleaning binge. I recognized them immediately as the ones I had packed away two decades earlier. Clearly, the universe had determined that certain memories had languished long enough. It was time to dust them off and breathe them back to life.
And so, only days after speaking with the earnest undergrad intent on studying in Laos, a country that had not crossed my mind for going on twenty years, my cleaning frenzy yielded the papers, the textbooks and, yes, the photos that I never expected to see again. A treasure trove by any other name would be as sweet.
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I have alwayshated the wordmuse. Rodin had a muse. Renoir, too. I had seen just what that meant the first time I visited the sun dappled house-cum-museum in Cagnes-sur-mer.
However many pictures Nao Kao might have taken – whichever way he posed me against the gentle slopes of the wave field, or in the crush of late blooms in the Arb, or with my palms pressed tight against the black of the Cube, or, I remembered now, as I held the fading image, mid-cartwheel on Madison, illuminated by the sulphurous orange glow of the streetlights and the shimmering whiteness of the moon, both of us returning to my apartment after a late night printing run to the Fishbowl – yes, however many pictures there were, I was not hismuse.
“The play of the lighting was so good,” he replied immediately when I asked if he remembered all of the photo sessions he had insisted upon. I was momentarily stunned to think the lighting is what he remembered. I shouldn’t have been surprised. He had become a professional photographer, even if only on the side.
It was during one of those “shoots,” as he insisted on terming them even then, that we touched for the first time. It is odd to remember now, when I consider how regular touch is – or used to be. Hands shaken at receptions, a touch on the forearm to garner someone’s attention, a hug with a friend, a stray hair gently brushed from a colleague’s shoulder. Yet Nao Kao and I had never touched, not so much as our fingers brushing.
He asked me to wear a scarf that day. It must have been in May and I remember that the scarf was ridiculous in the warmth of late spring, not to mention that he wanted it to lie just so. The scarf was the color of emeralds, something to offset the masses of red curls that swirled to my shoulders and to accentuate the deep green of my eyes. The scarf had its own ideas about how to lie, and as those ideas were not in harmony with the photographer’s sensibilities, this necessitated regular adjustment on his part. Nao Kao’s fingers lightly brushed against my collar bone each time he set it into place.
“You’ve got a flyaway one,” he had said softly, almost as to himself, brushing my hair into place, his fingers hesitating just a moment to too long. “Can’t let that ruin the shot.”
He adjusted the scarf again and placed his hands on either side of my face tilting my chin just so. I felt like I was having my senior pictures taken again, though I doubt my heart had beaten so hard then.
“Yes,” he said quietly, almost to himself, “I think this will be the best one.”
He waited for a cloud to float into a position where it partially obscured the sun.
“Now look down with your eyes and smile just a little,” he said.
He began clicking away, a small smile illuminating his face.
It was okay. This was my friend Nao Kao. Happily married, and with two darling babies to boot.
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Surely, I hadn’tsat there on the floor of my home office, holding that picture, the wordmuseechoing through the contours of my mind for as long as it felt. At some point in that frozen moment, a little voice from deep within piped up, suggesting enough time had passed, suggesting that I finally do I what I ought to have done years before. Whether it was two minutes or twenty hardly matters.
As I repacked the box a little piece of paper fluttered by, nearly translucent, but the beautiful script was still legible. I had only ever known one person who could write like that, and Nao Kao always did recommend good books. I jotted the title in my notebook before repacking the lot and returning it heavily to the back of the shelf where it had sat, unsuspecting, for all these years.
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At its heart, a code is but a communication designed to be seen and understood only by the parties involved.
I read a book on codebreaking once and was fascinated by the notion that any two people can and do develop codes in how they communicate and that the more intimate the communication, the more encoded it becomes. Messages shrouded in mystery, except to the recipient.
Sometimes, though, even to the recipient.
I thought of how my communication with Nao Kao had evolved in the time since we first reconnected. After nearly two decades, we had plenty of the mundane to recall, so much life lived since we’d last exchanged stories, to say nothing of the universal hue and cry of lives altered by pandemic on either side of the globe.
“Where’s the most interesting place you’ve traveled?” might greet me when I checked my phone in the morning, the hopping off point for a conversation to last the week.
“I’m craving Mexican,” I’d write, and then query, “what’s your favorite food?”
Nao Kao would regale me with stories from his childhood, the miles he walked or rode on his bike, the novelty of the telephone in his father’s office.
Later, I tried to identify exactly when the conversation shifted, but the change was too subtle for me to finger precisely. Extended conversations on philosophy and politics and parenting gave way to a series of images, usually sent in the wee hours while I slept. Stray cats and dogs in a nearby park that he’d quasi-adopted. A field of wildflowers in peak bloom or the gnarled trunk of a towering tree. Monks in saffron, birds in flight. By the time I truly noticed, the transformation was complete; I was left with a paucity of words.
