Chapter Five (The stranger on the other side)

After leaving Suda's place, I went back to the hotel, checked out, grabbed my suitcase. The clerk looked surprised to see me leaving after only two days but he didn't ask questions, just took my key.

I took a taxi back to Suda's building, dragged my suitcase up those creaking stairs, emerged onto the rooftop. The sun was directly overhead now, beating down mercilessly.

I pulled my mattress as far as possible to one corner, under the tarp where there was at least some shade. I set up my few belongings, tried to make the space feel less like I was camping on a roof in the middle of a slum.

It didn't work.

I sat down on the mattress, looked out over the neighborhood. Rooftops stretched in every direction. I could see people going about their lives, hanging laundry, cooking on portable stoves, sitting in the shade. Normal people doing normal things.

None of them were dying.

None of them had flown to a foreign country to trick someone into marriage.

None of them were Vivian Chen pretending to be someone they weren't.

My stomach growled. I realized I'd only eaten crackers yesterday, nothing today. I needed food but I had no idea how to get it without going to a restaurant, which would be expensive, which would defeat the purpose of pretending to be poor.

I stood up, went back downstairs, found Suda in one of the ground floor rooms. She was cooking something over a small stove. It smelled incredible.

"Suda, where can I buy food to cook?"

She looked at me like I'd asked where to find air. "Market. Down street, turn left, walk five minute."

"Thank you."

I followed her directions, found the market which was really just a collection of vendors selling produce, meat, fish, things I didn't recognize.

Everything was shouting, haggling, the smell of raw food in the heat.

I picked up a tomato, turned it over in my hands. I had no idea if it was good or bad or how much it should cost.

I bought rice because I'd seen people eating rice. I bought eggs because those seemed universal. I bought vegetables that looked familiar. The vendor bagged everything, handed it to me.

I walked back to Suda's building carrying bags of food I didn't know how to prepare.

Back on the rooftop I stared at the camping stove, at the food, at my complete lack of knowledge about how any of this worked. I'd never cooked a meal in my life. My chef prepared everything. Before that, my boarding school served meals. Before that, our family cook made whatever I wanted.

I turned on the camping stove after studying it for five minutes. A flame appeared. Good. Progress.

I found a pot among the few items Suda had left up here, filled it with water from a jug, put it on the flame. Water for rice. That seemed right.

Except I had no idea how much rice to use or how long to cook it.

I poured what seemed like a reasonable amount of rice into the pot, watched it float on top of the water. Was that right? Should I stir it?

I stirred it.

The water started boiling. The rice bounced around in the pot. Some of it stuck to the bottom. I tried to scrape it off but that just made it worse.

Fifteen minutes later I had a pot of rice that was somehow both mushy, burned, completely inedible.

I sat on my mattress, stared at my failure, felt tears of frustration burning in my eyes. I couldn't even cook rice. How was I supposed to survive here? How was I supposed to convince anyone I was a normal person when I couldn't handle the most basic task humans had been doing for thousands of years?

I dumped the ruined rice into a trash bag, tried again. This time I used less rice, watched it more carefully, turned off the heat when it looked less like soup.

It came out slightly better. Still not good, but edible.

I ate it plain because I had no idea how to cook the vegetables, sitting on my mattress, watching the sun start to sink toward the horizon. My first meal that I'd prepared myself. It tasted like defeat.

The sound of footsteps on the stairs made me look up.

A man emerged onto the rooftop. He stopped when he saw me, clearly not expecting anyone to be there.

We stared at each other.

He was tall, maybe early thirties, wearing worn jeans, a faded t-shirt, a baseball cap pulled low over his face. He had a backpack slung over one shoulder, a rolling suitcase in his other hand.

"You're renting the rooftop," he said. It wasn't a question.

"Yes. You must be the other person." I heard the ice in my voice, couldn't help it. I was exhausted, hungry, irritated beyond belief.

"Looks like it." He dragged his suitcase to the opposite corner, as far from me as possible. He pulled off his cap, ran a hand through dark hair that was too long, looked around at our shared accommodations with an expression I couldn't read.

"Just so we're clear," I said, standing up. "I'm only here temporarily. I'll stay on my side, you stay on yours. We don't need to interact."

He turned to look at me. His eyes were dark, unreadable. "Fine by me."

"Good."

"Great."

We glared at each other across the rooftop. The tension was thick enough to cut.

Then he turned his back on me, started unpacking his things. The dismissal was clear.

I sat back down on my mattress, turned away from him. I could hear him moving around, setting up his space. The sound of a zipper, fabric rustling, his footsteps on concrete.

This was going to be unbearable.

I lay down, pulled my thin blanket over myself even though it was still hot. I closed my eyes, tried to pretend I was anywhere else. In my apartment with its perfect temperature control, its silence, its privacy.

But I could hear him breathing on the other side of the rooftop. Could sense his presence even with my eyes closed.

I was sharing a rooftop with a complete stranger. I didn't know his name. Didn't know anything about him except that he was apparently poor enough to rent half of Suda's rooftop, arrogant enough to barely acknowledge my existence.

Tomorrow I'd start looking for a husband. Tomorrow I'd figure out my plan. Tomorrow everything would start making sense.

Tonight I just had to survive sharing a rooftop with someone who clearly wanted nothing to do with me.

Which was fine.

Perfect, actually.

Because I wanted nothing to do with him either.

I was almost asleep when I heard it, a sound so quiet I almost missed it, the low murmur of a voice speaking in careful, deliberate English and I opened my eyes and stared at the dark sky and listened.

He was on the phone.

"I told you I'd handle it," he said and his voice was different now, stripped of the flat indifference he'd worn since he arrived, and what replaced it was something harder and colder and entirely at odds with the worn jeans and the battered suitcase and the fifty-dollar rooftop. "No. Nobody knows I'm here."

A pause.

"I said I'd handle it." Another pause, longer this time, and then very quietly, "Just make sure the documents are ready when I need them."

The call ended and the rooftop went silent again and I lay completely still with my heart beating too fast and my eyes open and my mind suddenly, sharply awake.

Nobody knows I'm here.

Make sure the documents are ready.

I stared at the stars overhead and thought about a man who was too composed for someone living on a rooftop in a Bangkok slum and whose eyes gave nothing away and who'd arrived with a single suitcase and no explanation and was apparently waiting for documents that needed to be ready at a moment's notice.

I didn't know his name.

I didn't know where he came from.

I didn't know what he was hiding.

But I was suddenly very certain that whatever brought him to this rooftop had nothing to do with being poor and desperate and everything to do with something I probably didn't want to understand.

And the truly terrifying part, the part that kept me awake long after his breathing had steadied into sleep, was that the exact same thing could be said about me.